Two More Romantic Reunions

Severus took the long way back to the Hospital Wing, dragging his feet across the flagstones, and wondering what Madam Pomfrey remembered about the fire that had killed her parents.

And how often did she remember it? When she yelled at her patients, was it to distract herself from the sight of the flames? Whenever she saw students hurl fireballs at each other, or light up a cigarette, was it really their disregard for their own health that was making her wince?

It didn't matter exactly. It didn't give you the right to shout at people, and generally be a cantankerous old crone. But he was beginning to realize that Madam Pomfrey had more justification for her idiocy than a lot of the idiots he'd met.  

Severus plunged his hands deep into his pockets and dragged his feet forwards. He could hardly lift them. His shoes were just scraping along the flagstones. In fact, some of the portraits he passed were starting to tut meaningfully at the noise. He wondered vaguely if your body could mutiny. If you deprived it of food and sleep for long enough, could it throw you out, and go on a rampage of self-gratification? If it started doing that, he was fairly sure the first thing he would do – before he raided the kitchens for sticky toffee pudding – was punch Dumbledore in the face.

But there was the memory of the garden of Eden to keep his body quiet. Really, his body had never been treated so well. Food and sleep had always been secondary to Lily.

So he continued to shuffle along the corridor, as though he had weights tied to his feet. But the shackles dropped off him when he got to the door of the hospital wing. Walking into a room that contained Lily was like being splashed in the face with cold water. And then the water trickled down the collar of your shirt, and made you clammy, and uncomfortably aware of your whole body. But, even with all that excruciating consciousness you would still rather be in that room than anywhere else in the world.

Two things immediately assaulted his attention. Her bandaged hands, and her conspiratorial smile. The sight of the bandages was still painful, but the smile was like calamine lotion. She didn't smile like someone who was wounded or depressed. She smiled like an Amazon Queen who had sustained minor injuries while wiping her enemies off the face of the earth.

He probably shouldn't tell her that, though. One of the hardest lessons he'd learned in his years of volatile friendship with Lily was that something which might be a compliment to a Slytherin was often a deadly insult to a Gryffindor.

She drew a finger up to her lips and motioned towards a bed across the ward, which was surrounded by flower-patterned screens. Severus felt his spirits sink immediately.

"Who is it?" he murmured, perching on the edge of her bed.

"Claudia Kitson."

He wrinkled his forehead with the effort of remembering. "The bakery girl? What did she do? Eat one too many bakewell tarts?"

Lily frowned and smiled at the same time. She was the only person he knew who could do that. And she was the only person on earth who could do it and still look pretty.

"It's a collapsed lung," she murmured. "She… uh… well, it's quite serious, actually, although I know you'll just raise your eyebrows and tell me she was stupid."

"I can do that right now and get it over with, if you like. I'm fairly confident it's the correct assumption."  

She sighed. "It was a breast engorgement charm that just… kept on going. It was just supposed to be for the evening, but she didn't do the counter charm properly, and so they kept on growing while she was asleep, and they…"

"Suffocated her," said Severus, with a completely straight face.

"Well, not quite. I mean, we helped her in time. It was lucky Meg and Mary were here when she came in. They put an anti-gravity charm on her chest, so that she can get some sleep while she…"

"Deflates?"

"Be nice," Lily warned, lowering her eyes to hide her smile.

"What have I said that wasn't nice?" he protested.

"It's a big problem, really. Girls are taught to use engorgement charms on a daily basis, and they're also taught that they need to look like supermodels, so it's ten to one they'll put two and two together."

"What a nice numerical mixed metaphor."

Lily bit her lip. She was blushing adorably, and Severus was suddenly seized by the desire to kiss her. Well, seized up would be a more accurate description. He would have thought he would be too tired for butterflies in his stomach. And they were boyfriend and girlfriend now, after all. Weren't they supposed to kiss on sight? Wasn't that the usual method of greeting? But he couldn't do it. For all the weariness – for all the intimacy they now shared – he couldn't grab hold of her. He didn't understand why anyone would want him to.

They were silent for a while, and she gave him one of her conspiratorial smiles. It was like a coded message.  It said: we know something nobody else knows. They had always been secret friends, and now they were secret lovers.

Those smiles meant her thoughts were lingering on the events of that morning as much as his were. And suddenly, it seemed possible, not only that she was thinking about it, but that she was thinking about it with pleasure. The idea filled him with reckless joy – and that, in turn, filled him with a sense of foreboding.

There were so many things he had to think about if he wanted to keep feeling the bite of that joy. And, if he was thinking them, he could never let the joy bite very deep.

That was why her conspiratorial smiles had always flooded him with endorphins: they were a gesture of understanding. Even if it was just the illusion of understanding – because she could never know, when she flashed him an exasperated smile in the midst of Potter's boasts, just how many ways of killing him were passing through Snape's mind. She thought she understood how he was feeling – but, if she did, it was a drastically cleaned-up version.

She took his hand, and lined his finger-tips up with hers, just as she'd done in Madam Pomfrey's office, that first time.

"They say Regulus is ill," she mumbled.

"I shouldn't wonder," said Snape, with some satisfaction. "Dilys Derwent says it's magical overdose. Have you heard of that? Your magic was obviously too much for him."

"Will it hurt him?"

"We can only hope."   

Lily cleared her throat. "I don't want him to die," she mumbled.  

"Oh, really?" he whispered teasingly.

She looked at him with fond horror, as though he had always been whispering these devilish suggestions in her ears, but she'd been able to tune him out, until now. It made his guts writhe with foreboding. Or excitement. He couldn't tell the difference anymore.

"Yes, really," she said, in a wounded voice.  

"But he stole from us."

"Not from us, Severus."

"Oh, have it your way," he muttered with exasperation.  

"And he's obviously a good person, underneath. He got so annoyed, at that door, when you were saying nice things about him."

Severus frowned. "OK, that's pretty nonsensical, even for you."

She giggled, and drew her knees up to her chest. "You don't understand," she protested. And she was warming to her theme now – her cheeks had started to glow in a way that made him even more clammy and uncomfortable. "He knew he was just about to do something cruel, so it bothered him when you were nice about him."

"Obviously not enough."

Lily stared at the flower-patterned screen blocking Claudia Kitson from view.

"Bruiser's coming up to the castle to collect me tomorrow," she mumbled. "In his Porsche."

Severus groaned.

"I know," she said, blushing. "I told him 'inconspicuous'."

"He doesn't know the meaning of the word 'inconspicuous'."

"Will you come and visit me?" she asked shyly.

Severus kept his face determinedly expressionless. "What do you think?"

They were silent again, while she blushed, and he enjoyed the idea that he was making her just as uncomfortable as she was making him. He felt a sudden throb of longing, and cursed Claudia Kitson and her engorged breasts. He had never thought he would feel such animosity towards engorged breasts, but they were in the way of his Lily.  

Severus sat down on the bed beside hers, trying not to show that his aching muscles were screaming with protest.  

He wanted to ask her how she was – what her friends had said – why she'd decided to tell them – but he was too tired to bring up the subject of Meg Valance, and steer away from all the temptations to insult her. And he would only get angry if he thought about Lily's depression again. He wanted to believe that he'd solved it – that, every time she was tempted to despair, she would think about the tropical garden in the Room of Requirement. But he knew from experience that a truly despairing mind could gloss over the consolations.

He had so much work to do. He had to go back to sleep, so that he could watch over Madam Pomfrey in her claustrophobic post-war nightmare. Elsa Valance would already be tucked up in bed with her china dolls, wandering through other people's dreams, and kicking her heels with impatience.

But it was so tempting to just stay up with Lily, and let her chatter wash over him, like a warm tide. For once, sleep didn't seem like the most relaxing option.

She was lying on her side, propped up on one elbow, with her hair tucked behind her ears, and he was strongly reminded of sleep-overs at her house in Manchester. He could never relax there, either, of course – there was always the threat of that horse-faced sister bursting in – but it was peace tinged with dread, just like the feeling that was stealing through his limbs at the moment. Severus knew that feeling so well; it accompanied every stolen moment of peace or pleasure he'd ever experienced, because he was always counting the seconds before it was snatched away.  

Oh, he was going to suffer for this kind of soppy, sentimental thinking, he could feel it. He was starting to relax – all his wound-up nerves were starting to uncoil. His exasperated energy was turning into jubilation, and he had literally no idea what it was going to do. This had never happened before. And Severus didn't like being in unchartered territory – he didn't like facing events he couldn't plan for.

He shouldn't have let his defences down. His little Lily could turn out to be a Trojan Horse full of trouble. All these stolen moments of joy were going to cost him.

Somehow, they always did seem stolen. They belonged by right to other people – probably to spoilt brats like Potter, who always had praise and prosperity dropped in his lap – and Severus would be punished for borrowing them. It would be something like the punishment of Prometheus, when he stole fire from the gods, to give to mankind. Poor Prometheus was tied to a rock in the Caucasus mountains, where, each day, an eagle pecked out his liver, while each night, it was magically replenished, for the torture to begin again. That was how it was going to feel when Lily was snatched away. Grief and regret would be eating at him forever.

But even Prometheus's gruesome fate had its consolations. From his vantage-point on the mountain, he could look down at the camp-fires of civilization, as they spread relentlessly across the plains below, and smile.

That was how Severus felt. The eagle could tear out his liver, but it couldn't tear out his memories. Those moments with Lily had already changed the constitution of his soul. He could never be forced to give back what he'd stolen. He felt different, even when he was aching with tiredness, even when he was suffering from hunger or cramp. The pain wasn't lessened, but it had a different texture. It tasted of experience.  

Lily had been speaking all this time. She seldom needed a response – she was used to his quiet moods, and mainly found his silence therapeutic – but he still tried to rein-in his wandering thoughts to listen to her. He got so melodramatic when he was tired.

"And Narcissa was wearing this frankly pornographic dress to dinner. It looked like it had been painted on."

"It probably was."

Lily giggled. "I can just see a team of fifty House Elves dabbing away at her with paintbrushes while she gazes longingly into the mirror."

"She's getting desperate," said Severus, with some satisfaction.

"What do you mean?"

He leaned back, and sighed with vindictive happiness. "Nobody is looking at her anymore," he said.  



She was choosing darker, more emphatic, colours these days. Heatherberry lipstick and dusky blushers. She'd always had to paint a trail of emotion across her expressionless face but, these days, the trail was beginning to seem like the only thing there was.

It wasn't that she was getting paler – that would have been impossible. And, anyway, in Narcissa's world of heavy drapes and dark corners, pallor only made you stand out more. No, she wasn't growing pale, but colourless, as though she was made of water; a figure that bent light but didn't stop it.

When she put on her lipstick in front of the mirror, she had to feel her lips in order to be sure where they began.  The contours of her face had to be dusted with powder, like finger-prints, before they could be clearly made out. And, looking at her chest – which she had crammed into an emerald-green bodice tonight – she could clearly see the outline of the antique armoire behind her, even though she knew she should have been blocking it from view. Its shape was intruding itself between her collar-bones. And that was very ungrateful of it, because she knew for a fact that the armoire had been donated to Slytherin House by her great, great grandmother. Not even furniture respected pure blood anymore.

She was thinking at random, and it wasn't like her. She hadn't felt this way since… well, since Malfoy had shattered all her schemes by being so reckless and adorable in the wreckage of the Hanged Man.

Snape's curse was even preventing her thoughts from achieving solidity. But he wouldn't win. He didn't have the resources – he didn't have the pedigree – she had. It was simply impossible that he could be allowed to beat her.

That was the oddest thing – she couldn't accept that his curse was destroying her. She knew he was a formidably powerful wizard; she knew he had an encyclopedic knowledge of curses and an inexhaustible supply of hatred to back them up. But he was a half-blood. It wasn't right.   

Narcissa's mind was still trying to catch up to her situation. She felt as though she was treading water. But, ten minutes before, she'd been at a glittering party on the deck of the Titanic and, even though she had been dumped unceremoniously into the water, her mind was still full of the debutantes and romantic intrigues, the eligible bachelors in their tuxedoes. Soon, it would cross her mind that she was freezing cold and she couldn't swim. Soon, she would realize that the waves were lapping up to her chin, and she was going to sink without trace. That was the worst part. Without trace.

But it couldn't be true that she'd been knocked completely out of one world and into another. All her hard work on the decks – all the people she'd charmed and the connections she'd made – they would come to her aid somehow.

And then, just as she was standing in front of the mirror, dusting her face into visibility, they did.  

Jen Morgan burst in, pink-faced from exertion. And Narcissa only half-listened to the words she was gasping out, because she already had a gloomy presentiment of what the girl was going to say.

"Malfoy's here," Jen panted.  

It still made her stomach tighen. She realized, with a slow, spreading shudder, that she would rather disappear without trace than ask Lucius Malfoy for help.

"You will tell Mr. Malfoy that I am indisposed."

Jen leaned forward anxiously. She couldn't always hear Narcissa these days. It wasn't that she was speaking quietly – just that her voice was infused with distance. It had a dampened, echoey quality, and the syllables didn't always join up. Understanding her was like playing a puzzle in your head. And Jen Morgan had never been very good with puzzles.

"I will – what, sorry?"

Narcissa drew herself up to her full height. "You will tell him I am indisposed."

"Do you really think that will work?" said Jen doubtfully. "He might just sneak into the castle and kidnap you again."

Narcissa narrowed her eyes. "It will be the worse for him if he tries."

"I'm sorry?"

"Oh, forget it," she snapped.

Narcissa turned her eyes back to the mirror. She could see the glow of the lamp behind her, filtering in weird, watery ways through her skin. "Very well," she said at last. "Tell him I will be with him soon."  

And, summoning up all her composure, she painted a Heatherberry pout across the void that would ordinarily have been her face, and went out.



Her perfume was the first thing to announce her presence. Lucius felt a predatory lurch of excitement whenever he caught her scent on the air. The fact that this perfume had poisoned him on at least one previous occasion only heightened the sensation. He wouldn't have wanted a woman who was easy to get close to.

And so it wasn't just self-preservation, and the iron school-gates, that prevented him from kissing her when she wandered over. Lucius kissed her sparingly. He didn't want to get tired of her, the way he had got tired of every other woman in his life. He wanted her to last.

The rays of the setting sun were at her back when she reached the gates. She was so slight, she hardly seemed to block out the light at all, and there was no shadow at her feet. That was for sturdy, heavy-set girls, Lucius supposed. Bellatrix was all shadow. But Narcissa floated above the ground like a fine mist.

"Mr. Malfoy," she said coolly, giving him a barely-perceptible nod.

Lucius nodded back, and continued to gaze at her greedily. He hadn't seen her in days. Not since he'd come to Hogwarts to explain that he'd been placed under the Imperius Curse and forced to break up with her.

It had been hard for him to recover his dignity after that. Of course, it wasn't his fault. The mudblood had cursed him while his back was turned. And he'd been close to breaking free of her Imperius Curse when Snape captured her.  

It was difficult to explain that to Narcissa. The fact that he'd been manipulated by a woman – and, loath as they both were to admit it, an attractive woman – made his misfortune close to a betrayal. She knew – because he'd taken the Unbreakable Vow to be faithful to her for the rest of his life – that nothing untoward had gone on. Malfoy, in love with somebody else, and a firm believer that mudbloods really did have mud coursing through their veins, would have been sick to contemplate the idea, but clearly Narcissa had contemplated the idea, whether it made her sick or not.

She hadn't slapped him or sulked with him; she hadn't even been aloof – well, no more than usual, anyway. She had told him it was alright.

Of all the things he'd done that rankled with him – of all the distasteful memories – that was the worst. He had slept with bar-wenches, Veela and Metamorphmagi; he had even slept with muggles – holding his nose the entire time, of course; he had tried every form of illicit potion known to wizard-kind; he had performed the Cruciatus Curse and the Rapturus Charm at the same time – often on the same people (well, that was Bellatrix for you – she never could make up her mind). But nothing made his guts writhe with nausea like the memory of Narcissa, with her sagging shoulders and her downcast eyes, telling him it was alright.

She hadn't been angry; she had been disappointed. She had expected better of him. Nobody had ever expected better of Lucius Malfoy. To everyone else, what he did was automatically the right thing to do, because he was Lucius Malfoy. The few people who weren't charmed by his looks and his pure-blood celebrity status – like Dumbledore – never expected him to behave better than he did.

But Narcissa was somewhere in-between the sycophants and the enemies. She didn't expect him to be good, but she expected him to be strong.

She looked as though he could have passed his hand straight through her, like smoke. When she wrapped her fingers around the bars of the school-gates, he let his hands hover close to them, trying to feel the heat that she radiated, but she snatched them away abruptly.

That was the first thing he really registered as strange. She had never shied away from teasing him before.

"I wanted you to know that I've reclaimed my property from Borgin," he told her. "He didn't even try to get his money back."

Narcissa looked up hopefully, but he forestalled her. "The coronet," he added swiftly, "was stolen from Borgin's warehouse. It will take me a few days to track it down, but it will be returned to us."

"I'm sure you're right," said Narcissa listlessly. Her voice seemed to be coming from very far away, as though she was shouting up to him from the bottom of a well.

Lucius tilted his head to look at her. Then he focused his eyes on the bars she had wrapped her fingers around a moment ago. There were finger-marks of white powder on them. Now that he looked closely, her hands, her face, her neck – every visible part of her – had been dusted with powder. And she was shivering – or shaking – in the evening breeze.

Lucius felt a surge of protectiveness towards her. He had always been puzzled by how such a tiny, delicate girl not only kept herself alive but radiated power like a cold furnace. But now, it seemed, she was faltering. She was so prickly and proud, but she needed him.

"Is everything alright, Narcissa?"



She had done her best to make herself visible. She had jabbed scarlet-and-silver hairpins into her elegantly-drawn-back hair. She had dusted her eyelids with that shimmery eye-shadow made of powdered dragon scales. If she sparkled enough, it might confuse him. He might assume that the light shining through her was just glancing off her.

She was wearing a tight-bodiced emerald gown that blossomed outwards at her hips, so that folds of silk arced out and poured down to her feet like a one-coloured rainbow. Narcissa refused to wear school-uniform in the evenings. What was the point in living if you couldn't put on evening-dress for dinner, and then rustle around the Slytherin common-room in fabrics that were designed to glow subtly in the candlelight?  

But he had noticed something. Perhaps it was because she couldn't keep her hands steady. It was the reality of the situation – the reality of what she was losing – suddenly dawning on her. She might never see Lucius again. And he would certainly not be able to see her.

He repeated the question. Is everything alright, Narcissa? And she wanted to laugh out loud at it. She wanted to scream: no, everything is not alright. You let a mudblood induce you to forget me. That shouldn't even be possible! And now I'm never going to see you again. How can you ask me if everything's alright?

But that would have been indecorous. Narcissa had been well-bred, which meant that the more annoyed she was, the more chillingly polite she got.

"Quite alright, thank you," she replied.

He didn't believe her, but it took a while for him to come up with a tactful way of telling her so. She watched his struggles for a few moments, and it made her feel suddenly tired.  She felt as though all the energy had been leeched out of her. She felt as though a vampire had fastened its fangs around her ankles and drained her dry while her mind was elsewhere. There was probably even room to hide a vampire under the skirts of this dress.  

"I am quite well, Lucius," she interrupted, in a softened voice. "Please don't concern yourself. It has been a long day, that's all. You've heard Regulus is ill? Some form of magical fever. I've been researching his cure, and Professor Slughorn is demanding my potions project - ,"

"Would you like me to speak with him?" Lucius interrupted.

Her eyes narrowed for a moment, and then, with a return of the chilly politeness, she answered: "I'm quite capable of dealing with him."

"If you're sure - ,"

"And now I'd better see to Regulus. Goodnight, Lucius."  

Narcissa saw the lust in his eyes. It was fighting, as usual, with the breathless reverence that her presence seemed to induce in him. But there was something else… something proprietorial – even pitying – about the way he looked at her. It rankled with Narcissa. Her pure-blood hackles sat up and screamed.

He didn't own her yet. And he would never own her will. She had hidden her thoughts from the Dark Lord. She had been by his side when he raided Azkaban. She didn't need the help of someone who had sold the coronet of the Malfoy matriarchs for eight sickles.

"Was there anything else, Mr. Malfoy?"



Malfoy didn't push her, because he knew her well enough to realize that it never worked. But he took a detour before going back to Malfoy Manor. He Apparated onto the cobblestones outside Aloysius Black's townhouse, and knocked at the door.

He was greeted by the House-Elf, closely followed by the anxious, eager, and discomfortingly pretty face of Oblivia Black. She led him into the sitting-room and absent-mindedly fluffed a few pillows.

"I'm afraid Aloysius is having drinks with the Minister," she mumbled. It was the longest sentence he'd ever heard from her.

"Thank you," said Malfoy, "but I was actually hoping to speak with Claudia Black's portrait."

With an apologetic smile, Oblivia motioned towards the blank stretch of canvas that was hanging above the fireplace. "I'm afraid she's in even more rarely than Aloysius these days."

Malfoy tried desperately to stop himself from analyzing that sentence. He needed to stay away from Oblivia Black. She was so eager to please him, and women who were eager to please him always woke his demons up.  

"She'll come when I call her," he said firmly. "If I could speak with her in private…?"

"Of course," said Oblivia. She looked horrified that a guest in her house had had to ask for something, instead of being offered it. "I'll join you with tea and scones in half an hour."

And then she bowed out of the room. She was already tying on her apron. Malfoy breathed a sigh that was half-exasperation and half-relief, but it had barely passed his lips when a shrill female voice rang out across the sitting-room.

"I was expecting you yesterday," it said.  

He turned, with a sense of foreboding in his stomach, to face the voice's owner – the most brilliant witch since Rowena Ravenclaw, and the most terrifying portrait since Dorian Gray's. She had inky black hair and rather bulbous eyes. She was not attractive, but she had somehow managed to marry fifteen times – and her ex-husbands were amongst the most illustrious wizards of the age. She had poisoned most of them, but one was still living – if you could call it that – in a glass coffin at the bottom of the garden. He had spent most of their married life in a coma, which was perhaps why he appeared to be her favourite.

"You want to know what's happening to Narcissa," she said breezily. "Well, hurry up and sit down, because the domestic goddess will be back soon. Think it takes her half an hour to make a batch of scones? Hah! She's spent her whole life making them. She'll be listening at the door inside of five minutes, I guarantee it."

Malfoy was half-way into a chair before he realized that he didn't have to do everything this woman said. It was hard to resist the note of authority in her voice.

"What is happening to Narcissa?" he demanded, remaining resolutely on his feet.

"She's been cursed," said Caludia Black. "She's fading away – becoming invisible, inaudible and insubstantial. It's actually quite a brilliant piece of magic - ,"

"Who cursed her?" he interrupted angrily.

Claudia Black rolled her eyes. "That's men all over," she sighed. "Always more concerned with retribution than solutions. My grand-daughter is disappearing, and all you can think about is throttling the person who hasn't even succeeded in killing her yet."

"It seems all that you can think about is the academic complexity of the curse," Malfoy replied stiffly. "Who is responsible?"  

Claudia Black sniffed. "That Snape boy, if you must know."

"Snape is behind this?"

"Narcissa turned his mudblood into a muggle. She damaged his property."

Malfoy raised his eyebrows. "The shame of fraternizing with a muggle is scarcely less than the shame of fraternizing with a mudblood."

"Small amounts of shame, like small amounts of money, become more important the further you slide down the social scale."

"He cannot be trusted where that mudblood is concerned."

Claudia Black brushed away the objection. "He's useful. He doesn't have to be trustworthy. Let him have his vices. I believe you had a few of your own not so long ago."

Malfoy, most uncharacteristically, blushed. He was ashamed of the hedonism of his youth, even though he never failed to blame other people for it.

"I was led astray by - ,"

"Yes, yes," Claudia Black interrupted impatiently. "Unwholesome influences. Lewd company. I'm not interested. Concentrate on curing Narcissa and Regulus. The Black line must continue, and they are the only hope I see for it. Neither of them are the brightest individuals, but at least they're not blood-traitors or lunatics."

Malfoy scowled. "Narcissa is neither. But I'd take a closer look at Regulus, if I were you."

Claudia Black smiled complacently. "The little king has power you couldn't imagine. And Narcissa has pragmatism you couldn't imagine. She survives, and she takes care of her own. Not because she likes them, but because they're hers. She'll ensure the blood continues, even if she has to make other people's blood pour out."

She gave him an appraising look. "You would not have been my first choice for my grand-daughter's husband. Personally, I prefer original minds, but yours is of a cast that has been reasonably successful before. Narcissa has chosen you, and now you need to make yourself useful. The curse destroying her is personal, and so must the remedy be. A symbolic act to confer consequence upon her, in her own eyes. Your job is to engineer it. Rather stupidly, she seems to care for you, so your actions will count for more in her eyes."

"I think I know," said Malfoy slowly.

"Malfoys don't think they know; they know they know!" she snapped. "God, the pure-blood youth of this country is being corrupted! Your father would have known what to do. And anyone who tried to stop him would have been hanging upside-down over a pit of half-starved werewolves by now."

Malfoy was starting to wish Oblivia would come back with the scones. She wouldn't represent any temptation to him now. He had a plan. The fanatical part of his mind was racing. It had always been impossible to give Narcissa something she didn't already have. She was rich, cunning and beautiful. Even with the dizzying wealth of the Malfoy family at his disposal, Lucius had never been able to delude himself that he was necessary to her. The only things she had ever wanted from him were his touch, and the coronet. And he had foolishly denied her both.

His touch, and the coronet. And she would be hard and luminous as steel again. Malfoy declined the scones, when Oblivia came back in, and hurried out into the night. He couldn't understand how he'd ever been fanatical about anything else.