The Mystery Wife

Draco Malfoy wasn't used to being ignored. Hated, certainly, but not ignored. But as he and his family sat huddled at their table in the Great Hall of Hogwarts, hour after hour while everyone around them celebrated the death of the Dark Lord, it became obvious that the Malfoys, the greatest, richest pureblood family in England, were simply being ignored.

They had managed, narrowly, to squeeze themselves in on the side of the proverbial angels in the final battle, to take up the wands of fallen Wizards and cast in their lot with the defenders of Hogwarts. And it had won them survival, and this odd, awkward and undoubtedly temporary reprieve.

"What are we doing, father?" Draco asked in a bored sort of way, etching little furrows in the wooden table with his nails.

"Waiting," Lucius replied, one shoulder rippling in an insouciant sort of shrug.

"For what?"

"Most probably to be arrested."

Draco glanced at his father in alarm. "And why are we waiting for that, exactly?"

"Because it is entirely possible that if I go along quietly, I can ensure that you and your mother are spared. You were both victims in all this. If my arrest can be made to satisfy the inevitable backlash against our family..."

"On the other hand, if we go now, we can get away, we can hide. I like hiding. And I'm singularly fond of getting away."

"I have had quite enough of running. And hiding. And I want you and your mother to have something approaching a normal life."

Draco snorted. "Too late."

"I agree with Draco," said Narcissa quietly. "We're a family, Lucius. If we need to go into hiding together, then we will. Even in the Muggle world, if we have to."

"Never that," Lucius growled softly. "No Malfoy will ever sink that low. Narcissa, if we want to hold on to the money, the house and what tattered remnants of our pride remain to us, we must not flee. Whatever awaits us, we will face it squarely and without running from it."

"But, Lucius, surely..."

"No," he cut her off firmly, lacing his fingers through hers to soften it. She looked as if she badly wanted to argue with him, but she held her silence after that.

There didn't seem to be anything more to say.

They remained like that for hour after hour, waiting for the Aurors, waiting for the inevitable arrest and interrogation. And as the afternoon waxed into a hazy evening, and they had not been arrested, nor fed, nor spoken to, Narcissa finally broke the silence.

"I don't think anyone is coming for us," she said, confusion tinged with a little cautious hope.

"Indeed," Lucius sniffed, seeming almost offended not to have been chucked immediately into Azkaban.

"Do you think...should we just go home?"

"I suppose so," he muttered, for the lack of anything better to say, or to do. "If they want to arrest me, they'll have to do it there. I've given them all the opportunity I intend to, here."

They headed out to Disapparate beyond the grounds, three beautiful if battered silver-golden living ghosts, and no one stopped them.

It was as if the world had simply ceased to acknowledge them.