byrightsinhell | Backstory: If in some smothering dreams you too could pace...

Backstory: If in some smothering dreams you too could pace...

November, 1981

Lucius apparated sloppily into his study. He'd been fleeing, and he tore the mask from his face almost before he'd fully materialized. He found it hard to breathe. With a gesture and a muttered word, he locked the door; he didn't want any bloody house elves wandering in and asking him if he required anything.

Everything had come crashing down. 48 hours ago, if somene had told him Voldemort would have lost the war, decisively, he would have been incapable of believing it. And yet.

He fumbled a little for the decanter of wine, pouring a glass and downing it all at once. He should be thinking. He needed to protect his family, to cover his tracks. He'd been careful; even before now, they'd been too much in the public eye for him to afford sloppiness. But, he had to wonder bitterly, had he been careful enough? He'd spent the better part of the past decade doing all manner of things in the Dark Lord's service, if masked and cloaked as he did so. There were suspicions and rumors, he'd little doubt, especially given his in-laws.

Bellatrix would be captured, he had no doubt. If she was taken alive, she could betray him, but he suspected her love for Narcissa, such as it was, might buy them a reprieve. He couldn't be certain, though. There was no certainty, tonight.

He sank into his reading chair, staring into the fire. For the past several years he had told himself, steadily, that whatever was required, it was done for the larger good. He wasn't squeamish, and it was wartime. Aurors knew what they were in for; muggles, mudbloods and blood-traitors deserved what they'd gotten. And if he hadn't personally agreed with every one of the Dark Lord's views, well, that was only to be expected. He was still the only option; Voldemort would win, he should win. Should have won, Lucius mentally corrected. It had been a long and blood-soaked struggle, and yet it all led here.

With a detached emotion not unlike amusement, he noticed his hands were shaking.

He'd known both Longbottoms at school, at least slightly. He'd had potions with Frank in his seventh year. Alice was younger, a round faced little Ravenclaw girl. They'd both been from pure, old families, though the Longbottoms had always entertained hopelessly naive and progressive views on blood heritage that placed them in a slightly different sphere of wizarding society from the Malfoys. And he'd known they were aurors, of course; unlike Death Eaters, aurors didn't wear masks. But there was a great deal he didn't know. For one, he didn't know if Rodolphus had reason to believe they might know what had become of the Dark Lord, of if they'd simply been unlucky enough to be caught at the moment the Lestranges needed a scapegoat.

Merlin knew that, for Bellatrix at least, it had very quickly ceased to be an exercise in gaining information.

Lucius would have killed the Longbottoms himself, without a moment's hesitation, had it been necessary. But any fool could see they'd no more idea of what had become of Voldemort than the Death Eaters had. Whatever had happened in the Potter house, the couple hadn't been privy to it. He thought they'd have to kill the pair, so they wouldn't testify against those who'd unmasked. But that, it turned out, had been eventually rendered moot.

In the quiet of his study, he could hear the faint echo of the screams of a pair of strong, pureblood wizards who'd taken ages to break. Taking care to master his hands, Lucius poured another glass of wine.

It was over now. He was sure he'd escaped without being seen, when the aurors had come to rescue the Longbottoms. And he knew, without a doubt, that whether Voldemort was alive in some form or, as he deemed more likely, dead entirely, the war had ended. No one had the combination of commitment and charisma to keep the Dark Lord's followers united. Many of them didn't even know one another. Zealots like the Lestranges would go to Azkaban or die resisting capture. Moderates like himself, Nott, Snape - they would have to have a combination of wits and luck, but they could, in theory, fade back into their more public personnas. As if none of it had ever been.

Lucius wasn't entirely sure he knew who he was, without the war.

He covered his face with his hands. He had to think. But nothing came, and for a long time, he simply sat there. The fire reflected off the porcelain mask, forgotten on the floor.

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The door of the study is locked, and Lucius has not seen fit to come out. He hasn't notified Narcissa of his return home - but she knows, of course she knows, and she waits.

Narcissa waits for a full hour before she grows sick of waiting, tired and cold and afraid in the stillness left by his absence and subsequent silence. After that hour she slips out of their bed and puts his robe on over her nightgown instead of her own, pulling her hair out from beneath the collar; she's swimming in fabric and it billows behind her on the stairs as she comes down to his study, but it's oddly comforting and admittedly warmer than her own flimsy silk nonsense when she raps sharply on the study door and waits, again.

He recognizes her knock; no one else in the house could knock with such authority. Running a hand through his hair in a futile attempt at making himself look more presentable, he mutters, "Alohomora," before saying a little more audibly, "Come in."

The fact Lucius is a wreck will not escape her- but in a moment, when she takes the time to look at him more closely. As soon as the door is unlocked and almost before he's finished telling her she can come in, Narcissa is through it and shutting it behind her before she launches herself across the room (it is a miracle, at this point, that she doesn't trip on the too-big robe) and into his lap. Instead of examining him for injuries, she simply buries her face in the side of his throat and stays there, in silent protest of having locked the door.

He can't do much more, for the moment, than wrap his arms around her and hold her close. The chair doesn't give them much more room, for one, but he's also unexpectedly overwhelmed at having her there, initially.

Finally, he says, quietly, "What have you heard?"

"Hardly anything." The difference in their size is particularly stark when she's so swamped by fabric, tucked up against him with her feet hanging over the other side of the chair's arm. She doesn't lift her head to speak, pressing her palm over his heart to feel it beat with her breath against his throat. "Just enough to be worried- why didn't you come to me at once?"

"I couldn't, right away. I - I had to think what we were going to do." That's clearly not the reason, and they both know it; whatever they're going to do, they're going to need to discuss it, and it's certainly not going to be his decision alone.

"The war is over," he says, a moment later, very quiet.

Narcissa knows without bothering to ask that it didn't end in their favour; she can hear the shape of the words he doesn't say by their very silence, and she is dimly surprised to find herself shocked. She'd always been just a little wary and a part of her had always shied away from some of his promises, but they'd come so close to being fulfilled that she is shocked and for an instant that, that is what she hates most.

(She hates most that she'd had any faith at all to break.)

"Lucius," she says, helplessly.

He kisses her hair. "We'll be alright." He knows it's a foolish thing to promise, but if he wills it enough, he hopes to make it true. "I've been careful, and the Ministry knows people were under the Imperius, sometimes for years. I should stand up to scrutiny reasonably well, if we're cautious. We'll give to the right people, shake the right hands, and ride this out."

In this moment, he can't think about his own misplaced hopes or what losing the war means in the wider scope. He has to cling to practicalities, for his sanity's sake.

"We'll have to move quickly," she says, in a distracted voice- quickly doesn't mean that she feels like moving now, evidently, not when neither of them are steady yet.

"Yes," he says. "The earlier, the more credible. I still have some clout with Fudge, and Crouch owes me a favor or two." He knows what it will mean if he's wrong, about his ability to fix this with lies, charm and money. But he can't afford to doubt their success.

"What news is leaking out?"

"That he's- that he's gone, that we're desperate." Narcissa tilts her head back against his shoulder and stares at the edge of Lucius's jaw instead of his eyes, contemplating how often they've solved their problems with just that (lies, charm and money) and how much harder it will be this time.

In her mind she's already rehearsing the part she'll have to play.

"There's not much more information that's certain. It wasn't anything the aurors had planned." Lucius sounds very certain of this. "But something happened, with the Potters."

He feels like he's aged a decade in the past day. But he needs to be strong, for her and Draco. Self-pity won't get any of them any place they'd like to go.

"Does it truly matter?" she asks - bitter in a way she'd rarely show to anyone other than Lucius, thinking of Draco in the nursery upstairs and how so much has changed for them so quickly. "It all means the same thing in the end, doesn't it?"

"I don't suppose so. Not right now." James Potter had married a mudblooded girl and had, in Lucius' experience, had always been a cruel boy who pretended to be a humanitarian. In all honesty, Lucius couldn't say he would lose a good deal of sleep over that particular death.

The truth was, he didn't know what else to say. And now that Narcissa was with him, he felt he needed to say or do something.

Narcissa stays there with him like that a while, quiet, and then she exhales and pushes herself up, swinging her feet down to the floor. "Come upstairs," she says, firmly. "I'll have a bath drawn. You'll change your clothes and we'll- do something with that," her eyes fall on the mask before the fire, but she doesn't linger.

He nods. "There... there's an off chance that He isn't dead," he says, quietly. Which makes the whole situation that much more fraught, of course. But it doesn't make the war any less over.

He'd expected the end of the war to be a champagne occasion, even if it had been bittersweet. So much for expectations.

"Narcissa..." He stops. "It will be alright," he finally returns to, which is rather clearly not what he started out to stay.

"It's no use now," she says; her voice is brisk and the plea is all in her eyes. Tonight there's little they can do but wait to see which way the wind is blowing in the morning, and prepare themselves the best that they can for that - tonight they have to catch their breath, breathe deep, because tomorrow will be a long, long day. "Come upstairs and let me take care of you, Lucius."

He chuckles, low but rather mirthlessly. "Aren't I supposed to be taking care of you, dearest?" And he will. He intends to.

But he presses a kiss to her forehead. "Let's go up."

"You can wash my hair, if you like, I have no intention of leaving you out of my sight for a while." But she is going to make him take a bath and let her look at any injuries he may have acquired, and Narcissa is never above distracting her husband with her own skin to get her way.

She smiles, gamely, but it only lasts a moment and then she turns away to go upstairs.

He follows a moment later, after picking up the mask and setting it next to the decanter of wine. He actually is a little injured, but hasn't registered it yet - he's in a mild form of shock, at the moment, but it will wear off soon.

He does take a moment to poke his head in on Draco, watching the child sleep (he's no longer quite a baby, though Lucius still thinks of him that way). But then he moves for the bathroom in the master suite, where he presumes Narcissa is setting up.

The robe of his that she borrowed is pooled on the floor of their bedroom and Narcissa is through in the bathroom as expected, kneeling next to the deep bath as it fills and opening or closing glass bottles as she decides what, if anything, to add to the hot water. The lights in here are often quite bright - the mirror itself is specifically lit, to no one's surprise - but she's turned them down lower in a concession to how awful he must be feeling.

The peace and comfort of home seem a bit surreal, after everything, but he's not going to complain. He sheds his outer robes, his shoes, vest and shirt before coming into the bathroom in his trousers. His left shoulder is bruised, and there's a slight scorch mark across his right bicep, though it's not serious.

"You're a vision," he says, managing a small if tired smile.

"I know, dear," she says, with a matching and similarly brittle smile over her shoulder, "but you look as though you'd best sit down and let me fetch the burn paste."

The bruise, she thinks, can be left as long as there's nothing otherwise wrong with his shoulder; she carefully balances taking care of Lucius with letting him have his pride, letting some things go so he doesn't have to feel coddled.

"If you must." But he does sit on the edge of the tub; he's too tired to fight about much of anything, but he will appreciate it if she manages not to hover too much.

He is going to be sore as hell in the morning, though, and he knows it.

Lucius also knows he should probably bring up Bellatrix eventually, but he can't face doing so just yet; instead, he sits and lets her attend to his arm.

The healing aids that Narcissa keeps never used to be either so extensive or kept in the bathroom vanity on the shelf underneath her bubble bath and cosmetics, but this war has changed a hundred small things about the way they live their lives - so at least it doesn't take her very long to find the paste. She leans past Lucius (her perfume, Narcisse Noir, still hangs in the air around her) to shut the taps off before she stands in front of him, her gentle fingertips and the paste on his upper arm.

"Don't put it in the water for a bit," she instructs, when she's done. It's one thing to worry about him and another to use that worry as a means of not focusing on anything else going on - but there it is.

"Yes, love." Lucius hopes letting her do something constructive will help, at least a little. He gets up, so he can finish undressing. After all, no sense in letting the bath get cold.

The bruise on his left hip is much worse than the one on his shoulder; it's a deep purple, almost brownish, with yellow edge. It looks like someone threw him into a wall, when taken with the other injury to his left side.

Her eyes fall on his hip and she bites the inside of her cheek - imagining how it could've happened with an uncomfortable degree of accuracy. Narcissa's healing skills were much more rudimentary before the war, but...well, not any more. She turns her gaze away instead of fussing further, though, loosening the laces on the front of her nightdress and discarding it on the marble tile to step into the water.

He joins her in the bath, careful of the arm with the burn paste, as instructed. The hot water feels amazingly good, as tense as his muscles are, though it does garner protests from his hip and shoulder. Still, he arranges himself into a position allowing for a reasonable amount of comfort, exhaling slowly as he tries to come within shouting distance of relaxing.

Narcissa sits on her knees in the water, piling her hair atop her head and shoving a clasp through it to keep it out of her way; loose waving curls stay close to her neck, but most of it will stay dry and she slides lower under the water, her feet coming out from underneath her, with a sigh.

"I think I need a drink," she murmurs, after a period of silence.

He laughs, half a small groan. "That is the best idea I've heard in hours. Too bad I shut the door, or we could just accio the tray in."

They could summon a house elf, but she doesn't feel inclined to bother with one and instead she rises onto her knees, balancing her hands on the side of the claw-footed bath. "I'll fetch it," she decides, leaning forward and kissing him - once, and then again and then she pulls herself up out of the bath.

Narcissa is as offensively regal when utterly naked and sopping wet as she is walking fully dressed in heels, as a note.

He watches her go appreciatively, in all senses of the word. It occurs to him how hard it would be if he had to face what was ahead alone. How much worse, if he had to face it with a wife who couldn't help, or who he couldn't trust.

Though Lucius Malfoy's opinion of himself is nearly boundless, he's exhausted and cracked open enough to entertain the brief, fleeting thought that he doesn't deserve her. But he doesn't hold on to it. He has her, and he will do everything in his power to keep in that way.

(Not to mention that Azkaban is the stuff of a young wizard's nightmares. If he were single, he'd almost rather die resisting capture, but he isn't, and he wouldn't do that to Narcissa.)

Whether Lucius deserves Narcissa or not, he does have her and she does love him so very, very much; it still catches her by surprise sometimes and leaves her trying to catch her breath. She hadn't been among his many admirers, and she hadn't imagined herself as his wife, but here they are and she is so deathly afraid of losing that.

She waits until her fingers stop trembling to pick up the glasses and the wine bottle and return.

As she comes back in, he says, "You are an angel. Merlin, if this isn't a night for a drink, there never was one." He sits up a little more; he'd slipped down to lie against the tub's edge initially.

He thinks of all the celebrations the other side must be having right now. All the muggles with no inkling how profoundly their lives had just changed. And their side, frantically trying to decide what to do next, no longer a force but a handful of individuals.

It was a night no wizard on either side would soon forget, that much was certain.

"Nor ever will be again, I hope," Narcissa murmurs, perching on the edge of the tub and pouring the wine to pass his glass down to him. Before she pours her own, she kisses him again, sweetly; as pleasant as it is to do, the ever-poised Mrs Malfoy simply finds it more comfortable to kiss him than to simply press her hands to his skin and admit she feels this pressing need to reassure herself of him over and over and over again.

He returns it, and it's an echo of hers; it's about a need for contact, for something solid to hold on to before he spirals out into an uncertain future without handholds. As such, he lets it extend for a long moment, reluctant to break away from her.

He remembers the night she first knew he was a Death Eater. If you die, Lucius Malfoy... How much have they done since they sat together in that garden? They'd get through, like they always had.

He keeps telling himself this in the hope that he will shortly start to believe it with more conviction.

Eventually she draws away for the simple reason that it's cold outside the bath, so she brings her wineglass back in with her and sighs at the heat. Rather than resettling at the opposite end, she insinuates herself between Lucius's thighs and leans back against his chest, her free hand resting on his wrist.

"I know- I know that it will be so hard now," she says, looking up at the ceiling above them, "but my darling, a part of me is so grateful that it's ending."

The war.

He nods, sipping his wine as she settles herself against him. "I know. I'm not yet, but... I suppose there is something to be said for the fact it's over." Or will be; there will be weeks of the Ministry wrapping things up neatly, filing them, trials and manhunts. But it's cleanup.

"I almost don't remember what it's like, life without it."

"Did we really ever live without it?" she asks, almost wistfully; in retrospect the hints of what would come had pervaded so much of her life that Narcissa finds she genuinely can't think of anything as somehow untouched.

"No. Not entirely." He'd felt so much a man at 16; he'd been such a boy in so many ways.

Now that he's past the very first shock, his more relaxed if in a bit more pain, physical and otherwise. After a bit, he says, "I don't know if you'll be able to speak with your sister, before they catch up to her." His voice is quiet, but even.

"I imagine not," Narcissa says, exhaling after a long, long pause. She tries to summon up some kind of affront or surprise, but finds only a resigned grief that feels as though it were only waiting to well up.

He kisses the back of her neck. The truth is, they might have Bellatrix already, considering, and if they didn't, the Lestranges weren't going to be any sort of temperate influence on her. He's an only child, and can't know exactly what she's going through, but he knows Bellatrix has been a source of worry and grief for Narcissa for some time now.

(His own influence on her worry and grief is something that he is aware of, but doesn't think about much; he tries to minimize what he can, but he is who he is.)

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Backstory: If in some smothering dreams you too could pace...

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