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Narcissa Militant	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 17885 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am not making any money from this story.

Chapter List
- 21
- 22
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Part Two
“What are you doing, Cissy?”
Narcissa smiled a little at Sirius as she laid down the carved wooden claw in front of her. It resembled a dragon’s claw, but only superficially. Narcissa had spent hours carefully scraping at it, assembling it so that it bore the delicate tracery of scales and the talons were slender enough to look like the real thing.
Sirius was staring very hard at her. Narcissa spread her hands with an innocent expression.
“That looks like a phoenix’s foot.”
“It is.”
“Tell me that you didn’t kill a real phoenix to get the model.”
Narcissa laughed. “No. I was in close enough quarters with a phoenix at one point to get a good look, and I used the Pensieve memory as the model.” She turned the foot around and spotted an imperfection on the side. She bent down and carefully shaved a fragment off.
“I didn’t know you could carve like this.” Sirius was looking back and forth between her and the foot, his eyes narrowed.
“There are a lot of things you don’t know about me, Sirius.” Narcissa said it lightly enough as she put her carving tools away, but that only made Sirius glare. He leaned back against the wall of the drawing room and looked around as if to make sure that none of the Malfoy portraits were close enough to overhear them—although none of them would have reported Narcissa to the Aurors anyway. They were too thrilled to have someone proper in the family, as they had told Narcissa more than once.
“You killed Dumbledore.”
“Five points to Gryffindor. How many years did it take of you knowing me after prison before you figured that out?”
“I suppose I knew it before. I just didn’t want to acknowledge it. He was a good man, Cissy.”
“He would have manipulated Harry straight to his death. Did Harry ever tell you what he and his little Gryffindor friends did their first year?”
Sirius frowned as if struggling to recall it. He might be it, Narcissa knew. While he was taking potions and meeting with private, Dark Healers to get himself back to health, Azkaban had stolen more than his youth. “Something about a stone and they had to protect it. Honestly, I don’t think I was paying attention at the time.”
Narcissa nodded. “Dumbledore hid the Philosopher’s Stone in Hogwarts, as bait for Voldemort. He knew that the Dark Lord wanted to regain his youth and body. So he put it there and waited for him to come after it.”
Sirius was staring at her in horrified astonishment. “But to put that kind of thing in a school full of children—it’s—”
“Mad?” Narcissa lifted her shoulders in a delicate shrug. “I know that Dumbledore had a reputation for both strangeness and great shrewdness. I think the shrewdness was honestly exaggerated during his declining years.”
“So—you think he wanted Harry to what? Stop Voldemort? But how could he know Harry would?”
“The traps that Harry told me about were supposed to stop a grown wizard. A trio of first-years got through them. And anyway, it’s no longer my guess, Sirius. Minerva found papers in his office which confirmed it. He knew Harry was a Horcrux. He planned to have him die defeating Voldemort, to break Voldemort’s hold on the world if nothing else.”
Sirius’s face turned so grim that Narcissa thought it was a lucky thing for Dumbledore that he was already dead. “He was insane.”
“Too blinded by his plans.”
“It doesn’t matter. He was going to put my godson at risk. After he didn’t stand up for me to get a trial…”
Narcissa had no wish to lose Sirius to his brooding. She said briskly, “I have things I have to do this morning. Would you please make sure that Harry and Draco are occupied? There’s going to be Dark magic upstairs and I’d rather they not come near it right now. It would upset them.”
“Even Harry? I thought he was all right with Dark magic!”
“There’s a large difference between the ritual we did to free him of the Horcrux and the one I’m about to begin.” Narcissa picked up the carved wooden phoenix’s foot. “I don’t often ask things of you, Sirius. Please do this one.”
After a moment, Sirius paused, then nodded jerkily and turned away. Narcissa watched him go with faint pity. She mourned what Sirius could have been if he didn’t go to Azkaban.
As she mourned what Lucius could have been if he had not decided to take the Dark Mark.
At least it made him accustomed to obedience, she thought as she shaved a few more careful pieces of wood off the phoenix’s foot and then started up the stairs towards their bedroom. That will be a useful habit now.
*
“How can you be sure that the Dark Lord won’t stop you?”
“What did I tell you about calling him the Dark Lord, Lucius?”
Lucius flinched and lowered his eyes as he began to take off his shirt. “Not to,” he muttered, sounding sulkier than Draco could be sometimes.
“Exactly.” Narcissa gestured for him to remove his trousers when he would have paused after his shirt. “This is going to be bloody. Unless you want to ruin that particularly nice set of clothes…”
Lucius winced and pulled them the rest of the way off. Narcissa circled him, admiring him serenely. He was indeed a handsome man. Part of her had chosen wisely.
And the choice was about to become even more wise, as she began the ritual that would free Lucius of the Dark Mark. Or the first stage of it. It would be necessary to do this more than once, and perhaps to vary it as Voldemort figured out what she was doing.
Narcissa scattered a circle of powdered obsidian around her husband, as black as the Dark Mark itself. Then she took out the wooden claw and handed it over to Lucius. “Scratch it over a small part of the Mark,” she said. “No more than a fifth.”
“How am I supposed to estimate a fifth of it when it curves the way it does?” Lucius whined, but he quieted at the look she gave him. He took the claw and considered for a second, then carefully scratched across the blackened skin at the head of the snake. Narcissa nodded when he stopped.
“It’s better to have too little than too much.” She took the claw back and touched the blood that had smeared on the talons to her tongue. Then she threw it from her, because she could already feel the magic from her husband’s blood thrumming through her, connected to their marriage vows and the obsidian on the carpet.
“Kneel down.”
At least he was used to doing that without complaint, and he did, his eyes fixed on her. Narcissa spread her hands. Sparks of dark red glowed at her fingertips, so brilliant that it was hard to focus on them. She could feel the light spreading out around her body, edging her almost in an aura. She turned, and the scarlet trailed her like a cloak. She put down her foot and felt power trembling through it.
“Frangere,” she said, and she kept her voice utterly calm, her mind focused on the end result. “Frangere. Frangere. Frangere. Liberare!”
Her voice rose into the shout, and she heard Lucius scream. Narcissa turned around slowly. If she overloaded him with power, then she might end up cooking his arm.
Lucius was staring at his arm, where some of the darkened skin had broken and flaked off. He gingerly traced a finger up it, and then rubbed his fingers together. The blackness turned to nothingness and drifted away, to be absorbed by the sullenly shining obsidian.
Narcissa sank to her knees on the carpet. She knew this would be the hardest time, unless Voldemort figured out what they were doing and took some kind of measure to safeguard the Dark Mark. Now that she had broken one hold of the bond on Lucius, the others would begin to unwind slowly, like the snapped links of a chain. The rituals would merely speed them up.
“How do you feel?” she managed to ask, lifting her head and staring towards her husband with an effort.
“Better than I have in years,” Lucius whispered in a shocked little voice. “I didn’t—Narcissa, I didn’t know how much that was weighing me down.” He looked as if he would have lunged out of the circle and kissed her, but he was wise enough to keep still when the light from the obsidian began to rise.
Narcissa held out her hands. She had discharged the power of the blood with her incantation, but the obsidian’s magic had to go somewhere. She accepted it as it flowed back into her, and grimaced when it stung her fingers. That would be the last remnant of Voldemort’s sullenness and hatred, then.
At least, in that portion of the Dark Mark. Narcissa was wise enough to know there would be other struggles with the remaining pieces of Lucius’s Mark.
When she curled her fingers into her palms, Voldemort’s magic sparked out. Narcissa looked at Lucius and waited. He immediately rose to his feet and crossed the circle of inert dust, his eyes fixed on her.
It had been some time since Lucius had pleased her, with the oppressive magic clinging to him and Narcissa busy with other matters. Now, she lay back on the bed and spread her legs and let him show her what she could do.
Let him renew her memory of some of the reasons she had chosen him in the first place.
*
“I want to help.”
Narcissa looked at Draco’s face and tapped her quill slowly against the parchment she’d been working on, a list of other potential Horcrux locations. “What do you think there is to help with, Draco?”
“I know that you freed Harry. I wanted to be part of that, but Harry told me to stay out of it.”
“And rightly. The ritual is dangerous to magic that hasn’t settled yet, the way it usually hasn’t in underage wizards.”
“But Harry—”
“Had to be part of the ritual as it was meant to remove the Horcrux inside him. Otherwise, I never would have allowed him near it.” Narcissa softened her voice as she saw how shaken and small Draco looked, standing there in the great dining room under the gaze of his ancestral portraits. “What is it, Draco?”
“I want to do something—and you keep hiding it from me and not letting me help—”
Narcissa stood up and came forwards to clasp his hands. “You’re worried about Harry, I know. You want him safe, and you want to know exactly what’s happening with his magic and what he’s learning from me. Is that it?”
Draco paused. Then he said, in a softened tone that was much more mature than she would have heard from him a year ago, “I want to know, but I don’t want to practice it. I know your arts and your discipline are necessary, Mother, I would never be so stupid as to say they’re not. But I don’t want to use them.”
Narcissa smiled. “You don’t have to. Not everyone is born to that kind of hardship.”
“But—you wish I had been, right? You wish you could train me the way you’re training Harry?”
Narcissa blinked at him. “Why would I? I have Harry to train.”
“I mean, if you didn’t have Harry to train.” Draco’s face was a brilliant red, and he turned abruptly away from her and paced towards the far end of the great dining table. “You would have wanted someone to follow in your footsteps, and I can’t do that. But you would have wanted me to.”
“I wish for you to be exactly as you are, Draco. Nothing more and nothing else.”
“You would be disappointed. What—what you have done if Harry didn’t show up?” Draco rushed on, before Narcissa could refute that she would be disappointed. “What if he didn’t have the skills or he wasn’t here? You would have to find someone to follow you, wouldn’t you?”
“Not exactly. It’s not as if this is a business that has holdings and property that need to be taken over, Draco. I would probably have looked for an apprentice once you were grown and had children. I could have used someone else to protect my grandchildren in that case.”
“I—might not have grandchildren now.”
“Oh, I expect Harry will arrange for some by some method. He wants a large family, I know.”
Draco flushed and stood there staring at her as if she had done something extraordinary instead of what she always did. Narcissa raised her eyebrows at him. She wondered if something had happened to make her son question his place in her heart. Of course she loved Lucius and Harry too, but he would always be special to her.
“I—never knew you were like that, Mother.”
“Why would I not be?”
“I mean, I knew you could kill and you were a deadly assassin and you would die for me. But I thought you would care a lot about having grandchildren and you’d be upset that I was with a man instead of a woman.”
“I see that you have mistaken me for your father, dear,” Narcissa said gravely, and watched Draco’s frown turn to light.
But, of course, he started frowning again just a few seconds later. “Father isn’t going to take this well, is he?”
“Lucius shall do exactly what I tell him.”
“But then he would only be taking it well because you told him to. I want Father to take it well of his own free will.”
“When your father is left to his own free will, my dear, he makes stupid decisions like taking Voldemort’s Mark.”
Draco still flinched at the name, but he managed to control himself after that single moment. “I suppose you’re right.”
“Haven’t you learned by now?” Narcissa came over to smooth his hair back and kiss his forehead as she had when he was much younger. He allowed it, staring trustfully up at her with his hands on her arms. “I am always right.”
*
Narcissa opened her eyes, and then opened them further. She had last gone to sleep in the Manor beside Lucius, but this was none of the rooms in the Manor, not even the sealed dungeons that Lucius fondly imagined she didn’t know about. Narcissa walked further into the draped, velvety darkness of this room, studying the tapestries with threads of silver worked into them and the shining ebony furniture.
“This is your prison.”
“You seem to have constructed it more with luxury than imprisonment in mind,” Narcissa said, turning to face the specter of Voldemort in front of her.
He sneered at her. Narcissa considered him dispassionately. He should have taken lessons. He couldn’t twist his lips the right way. “Did you think that my acquiring your blood for the ritual would have no consequences?”
“No.”
That seemed to have interrupted Voldemort’s planned speech, so he scowled at her. “It does.”
“And I said I thought it would.”
“You cannot—”
“I can do anything that I wish.” Narcissa had been watching the black tapestries twitch in an unseen breeze that hadn’t been there until Voldemort appeared in the room, and she wanted to try something. “For example, this.”
Her mind twitched and lashed, and the tapestries lashed with them. Then the room was lit with a miniature sun hanging near the ceiling, and Narcissa lifted her arms and found a lower ceiling a few centimeters from her fingers.
“You cannot manipulate this space! This is mine alone!”
“You need to learn how to guard your mind better.” Narcissa smiled at him and whirled her Legilimency faster and faster. The tapestries blew off the walls in response and began to form a dark wall around her, made of flowing cloth and tassels. “The nature of our connection isn’t like the one you share with Harry. You invited me into a shared space, and I can affect it as much as you can.”
Voldemort snarled, an inhuman sound, and crushing force came down on her, throwing the tapestries back towards the walls and stilling the wind and raising the ceiling. Narcissa fought back, and while she couldn’t make the room assume the exact proportions she liked, the tapestries came back and the ceiling lowered again.
“This is not possible! I am Lord Voldemort!”
“You’re a child having a tantrum.”
He hurled a bolt of magic at her, but this was an imagined physical space, and that meant Narcissa could imagine using any of the techniques of her discipline. She disappeared the way she would if she’d Apparated through wards and appeared behind him, then slapped the back of his head.
This time he turned towards her with a hiss of Parseltongue that Harry might have understood—though perhaps not, with the Horcrux removed—and gestured another bolt into existence. This one boiled towards her to strike her in the heart.
Or, at least, that was probably the intended effect. Narcissa interposed a tapestry between them, and it blew apart into floating, charred threads.
“As pleasant as this interlude has been,” Narcissa said, “I must go home now. An assassin needs her beauty sleep.”
She vanished through a hole that she opened in one of the walls, and raised her Occlumency shields high enough that Voldemort would be blocked if he tried to reach her mind again. Then she sighed and returned to regular sleep.
Voldemort would need to be dealt with sooner than she had thought he might.
- 21
- 22
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Narcissa Militant