Chapter Text
“What are you thinking of, Anne?” asked Gilbert, coming down the walk. He had left his horse and buggy out at the road.
“Of Miss Lavendar and Mr. Irving,” answered Anne dreamily. “Isn’t it beautiful to think how everything has turned out . . . how they have come together again after all the years of separation and misunderstanding?”
“Yes, it’s beautiful,” said Gilbert, looking steadily down into Anne’s uplifted face, “but wouldn’t it have been more beautiful still, Anne, if there had been NO separation or misunderstanding . . . if they had come hand in hand all the way through life, with no memories behind them but those which belonged to each other?”
For a moment Anne’s heart fluttered queerly and for the first time her eyes faltered under Gilbert’s gaze and a rosy flush stained the paleness of her face. It was as if a veil that had hung before her inner consciousness had been lifted, giving to her view a revelation of unsuspected feelings and realities. Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music, perhaps . . . perhaps . . . love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath.
L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea
Lucius was slumped in a hard chair at a study table in the common room, alone as the fire died and he tried to come to terms with the fact that he was likely going to fail tomorrow's (today's?) Ancient Runes quiz. The symbols were swimming across the parchment, and his practice translation was so scribbled over with corrections and apprehensive guesses that he could barely read it. There was no use in it, he thought. Maybe next year he would be allowed to drop the class – perhaps he could work up a plan for some sort of double load in Advanced Potions, or an independent study with a Ministry official…
He sat upright with a jolt when he heard steps coming down from the girls' dormitory, and wiped his face with his sleeve and brushed back his hair. But it was just Narcissa Black. She smiled at him, took the other chair at the table, and reached out a hand to look over the papers strewn before her.
"Oh dear," she tutted. "This doesn't look very good at all, Lucius."
"It's not. And there's nothing to be done about it now."
She seemed to agree as she tried to decipher his frantic notes, and eventually she put everything back and just looked at him, sympathetic but bemused. They were old friends, the oldest, and she would not baby him for the world.
"Why are you up?" he asked her.
"No reason. I just woke up." Narcissa was in her dressing gown, a long, perfect, quilted thing with matching slippers, and her pale hair was brushed and held neatly with a headband to hang down her back. Lucius didn't see how perfectly lovely she was, and she didn't think much of how handsome he remained even in the 21st hour of his day. They had seen each other in the same circumstances, and in worse ones, a thousand times in their lives.
"I hope this won't impact your ability to play Quidditch," she said. "Maybe you should refocus on preparing for that."
"I'm planning on going straight to sleep after class, and hopefully staying that way for a good long time. Maybe when I wake up I'll have forgotten."
Narcissa stood up again and stretched broadly, and then wandered over to the glass looking into the lake. "You would think there would be more nocturnal creatures out there," she said.
"I don't think they come close."
"Mmm."
Another moment passed, and then more steps could be heard coming down, this time from the boys' side. Maxwell Nott appeared, and because of where she had put herself he saw Narcissa before Lucius, and went to her immediately, smiling and reaching out to touch her waist. She smiled too, but her eyes flared slightly and she nodded her head towards Lucius. The hand pulled away, and Max cleared his throat.
"Oh, I see," Lucius laughed. "Very cool of you, Cissy, to start alluding to my Quidditch performance to push me off to bed. Well, I'll go. Good night."
The couple muttered embarrassed, laughing good nights back, and Lucius saw them move towards the sofas as he disappeared.
When Lucius and Narcissa were alone for longer stretches, over the holidays, she never said much of anything that made her seem particularly fond of Maxwell Nott. She didn't seem to think of him at all. They kept in touch, and had once or twice shared family vacations, but Lucius's attempts to tease her over the relationship fell flat. It was nothing to her. Meanwhile, any mention from her of his many dalliances with literally every Slytherin girl in their year, and in some others, and some even from other houses, made him immediately flush and change the subject, usually without success as her gleeful torment continued.
Their mothers had had some idea, when they found out their luck to be having a boy and a girl of nearly the exact same age, that it would be a good thing to pair them up. It only seemed more perfect in their toddlerhood, when Lucius and Narcissa looked so alike and perfect together while her sisters were so dark, and each temperamental in their own difficult way. The children did grow together. But it seemed that their mothers had overshot it, and only succeeded in creating siblings who could spend hours together both at home and at school and never arouse the slightest suspicion of any romance. On more than one occasion Druella discovered them asleep in bed together, and even as they became teenagers she could only roll her eyes and leave the door open, knowing there was nothing to catch them in.
They had one sincere moment together, alone in the dungeons again the night before they would leave Hogwarts forever. This time they snuck out of the common room as people were saying loud goodbyes, and went down even lower into the castle before they found a bit of stone jutting out of a wall to sit on. Within a few days Lucius would have a Dark Mark burned into his pale flesh, and Narcissa seemed to find this neither shocking nor particularly interesting. She had already seen Bellatrix's. She reassured him, as he sat there with his sleeve rolled up and stared at his blank forearm, that it would look nice. She didn't say anything about how it would feel.
"But I guess…" she finally said as the conversation began to slow down. "We won't really be seeing each other the same way now."
"You could get work at the Ministry too, I'm sure of that. Come on. You're not going to send me off to the salt mines alone, are you?"
"You and I both know you're not likely to be there mining salt with any real frequency, Lucius." It was a role his father had set up for him, and that the Dark Lord approved of as appropriately flexible for Lucius's other responsibilities.
"Then it won't be so different either," he said. "I'll come see you. You'll come to me. That's all."
"No," Narcissa said firmly, much quieter. "It's going to be different."
Lucius's mother had died rather young, and then he lost his father within a year of leaving school. He rattled around alone in the Manor, and found that he needed something to distract himself from it. The girls from school transitioned into women no one from his real life knew, including Muggles he met on nights out at bars. They were so irresistibly easy to enchant, not with anything illicit but simply by being himself, imbued with some power they would never understand. He took them to beautiful hotels and spared no expense, oftentimes turning one night into a long weekend, but never into anything further.
Narcissa's family began to crumble into pieces. Andromeda married first, leaving them overnight and depriving Narcissa of her one true confidant. Bellatrix married as well, but it was a strange thing, so obviously loveless and wrong that it was unsettling to visit their home, which was gloomy and badly cared for. Bellatrix herself, always predisposed to mania, turned bitterly cruel, a caricature of a storybook witch.
Narcissa had never planned much of a career for herself. She was always bright, but after leaving school she didn't find much in the world that interested her more than her society life and time spent with her parents – clinging to them, honestly, as they clung to her as a last piece of what they used to have. Years began to pass without her noticing. Maxwell Nott dropped out of her life as soon as it was no longer convenient to see one another, and although she had really had very little affection for him, it did sting when his engagement announcement appeared in the paper. Things were feeling small, and unchangeable.
Lucius was called to visit her one early summer afternoon. She was terribly sick, her father reported, not dangerously so but not getting better either. She needed company.
He found her at her bedroom window, sitting in a stiff chair and clutching a blanket in her lap. She turned and smiled when he came in, but there wasn't much behind it. There was another chair there, ready for a rotation of visitors, and he fell into it easily.
"Why didn't you tell me you were like this?"
"I haven't been up to writing much. And I don't like to bother."
"So what's wrong with you?"
She shrugged. "Flu, something like that. I had a fever for a week. I'm exhausted now."
"Merlin, that's a long time. I really wish I had known."
"You must be busy if you never tried to drop in."
Lucius thought, his neck burning, of the several lost days he had just spent in a hotel room with a Muggle girl. He stared out the window considering this, unsure of how much to imply to her.
"Do you feel like we're getting old?" Narcissa broke into his thoughts. Lucius was troubled by how hollow her eyes looked, and by the pallor of her skin. "I know logically we aren't, but everyone else seems to be starting their families."
"I think they're doing it too young," he replied. "We're not halfway through our twenties."
"You're right." But her voice was choked.
"Do you want children?" he asked her. She had hardly ever spoken of such a thing, but she immediately nodded.
"But this war…and I already know every man I'm ever likely to meet…"
"The war will end, Cissy."
"And the men?"
He barely acknowledged – barely felt – the pang inside himself. "I see an Italian count in your future. I'm surprised it hasn't been arranged already."
He expected her to roll her eyes, or even punch him. But instead something hardened even further in her eyes. "We were supposed to be arranged. Do you ever think about that?"
"I don't know, Cissy. I think that was just talk between our mothers. It was hardly even mentioned."
"But don't you think – why should they give up? We really became so unmarriagable that it couldn't even be considered?"
"Because they realized arranged marriage is draconian, and because neither of our fathers were going to go along with any exchange of money over something as workaday as a marriage. It's not a fault in you, if that's what you're after."
She adjusted the blanket in her lap fitfully, letting it fall all the way over her legs and then bundling her arms inside it as well. He almost thought he saw her trembling.
"I don't think you're sick, Cissy. I think you're in here driving yourself mad with these ideas. I'm going to come get you tomorrow and take you on a walk. It's hot enough outside, if you're really this cold. Wear something that won't shock the Muggles and we'll see the whole city."
This branch of the Blacks had a uniquely situated home in London, passed down through so many generations that it sat on a large, verdant property. Of course the Muggles didn't think of it being there, blended as it was into a row of trees in the front and hidden by elevation in the back. The scene Lucius and Narcissa stepped out into, though, was not quite so residential as it would seem from inside the charmed garden walls, and they walked for ten minutes down a busy commercial road before being able to turn back up a narrower street leading to the park.
"This isn't exactly a tour of London," she said as they approached the park entrance. "I've seen it before, you know."
"Would you like to go down to Covent Garden, then? See a tourist or a thousand? Get hit by a bus?"
He extended his arm and she took it, resigned to her fate, and they wandered deeper into the cool green.
"What's got you so worked up about all this, Cissy? I've never known you to be so sensitive about romance like that."
"It's not romance, Lucius. It's everything. This adult life that they all have. And what was I – too good? Too quiet? I don't think anyone has noticed I'm not following the path. I don't know how."
"If the metric is marriage, Narcissa, you still have me in your group. Not likely to leave it anytime soon, either."
"It's not…you do have things I don't. All those…flings."
A little shock seemed to hit him at her mentioning this. They only ever talked about what he did in his free time in the most oblique way.
"Don't measure yourself up against my bad decisions."
They took a few more steps in silence, but then she shocked him again by letting out a stifled scream of sorts, held back behind her lips but still a sign of real frustration.
"You have things I want," she started. "You've…Lucius, I've never…."
He glanced over at her. She was blushing. He finally understood it.
"Well that's certainly…that doesn’t matter, Narcissa."
"It matters to me! It matters to me that I'm still so childlike in every single way!"
He steered her to a bench, and they sat while he withdrew a handkerchief for her to blot the few hot tears that had fallen from her eyes in frustration.
"It's not just that," she said more quietly. "It's everything. My future seems so blank and I don't understand it. I don't understand how I came from all this and still there's nothing for me."
"I'm surprised…" His voice trailed away. Why should he pursue it? But she had brought it up… "I would have thought with Max…"
"You really thought I'd lower myself to have sex on the common room sofa?"
"Not at all. But surely there were other opportunities."
She just shook her head, seemingly unwilling to explain more. "It's nice that he didn't spread it around. Although I guess that would be more embarrassing for him than anything."
She slouched down and leaned her head against the back of the bench, and then she started to cry again, although thankfully it was quiet enough that the few other pedestrians didn't seem to notice her.
"This is embarrassing," she said.
"Next time I should bring you to the Manor," he suggested. "Not that this will happen again. But we can really talk privately, if want to."
He had to work unusually demanding hours the following week, and the week after that he was relieved of it somewhat, but the Dark Lord had other plans. It had nearly been three weeks before he had Narcissa back with him, and by then she had recovered her poise, and most of her strength, and it seemed almost foolish to fulfill his promise of privacy at the Manor. But the garden was in bloom, which was an excuse enough, and besides that, Lucius had decided he needed to see her somewhat urgently. When she arrived, he spent a few minutes doing his best to coax the conversation they had left off in the park out of her again, but she gave only yes or no answers to his questions, and generally seemed to have put up a brick wall around any idea of him getting that deep into her heart again. He switched some drawn out stories about the Ministry as they made a loop of the outer perimeter of the hedgerows, but by the time they were nearing the house again that too seemed to be losing her interest.
"I wanted to ask you something, Cissy," he finally dug up the courage to announce.
"Hopefully on a different subject than you tried earlier."
"Well…it's different enough. Sort of. Come sit beside me."
They settled on a stone bench, and he had the overwhelming urge to reach for her hand. If it was as it should be, that would have been the most natural thing to do. But of course they had never held hands in their lives, except for perhaps during childhood games.
"Narcissa, I think it's silly…I think we have spent years denying ourselves of something. I think we are both in miserable situations turning to one another for comfort because it is the best thing for us to be together. I've stopped everything but work these past few weeks to consider this and I swear I'm not being hasty. I would really like you to consider marrying me."
He had a ring. It would have been too wicked to do it without one, to test the waters without showing her his willingness to spend money on her. He reached into his cloak and took out the box and opened it, and she stared down at the glittering thing, silent but seemingly not speechless. He nudged it over to her, pressing her to take it away from him.
"I don't know what's right in this situation," he went on. "Maybe we're still too young to resort to this. But we do love each other, don't we? We could keep one another happy. I know that much. And I'd like to…we both want children. I can give you children, and a place to raise them and plenty of money for it. I'd like to never be far from you."
"A marriage of convenience." She didn't sound thrilled.
"It's more than that, Cissy. Come on. Surely it's something more."
"How? To ask me to marry you so I can have a place to live? We've never even kissed."
"It's not about a place to live. I just said – I wanted you to understand how I want it to be. I want it to be about you having the life you deserve."
"But what about you? Why would you offer me this? I can't think of a reason beyond you recently realizing I was a thing to be pitied."
"I did not realize that. That is not how I feel. I realized I would like you to be happy, and that we are happy when we're together. Aren't we? And do you think I don't want someone here? That I could gain nothing from your companionship? We're perfectly matched for this."
He could no longer resist taking her hand, and when he did he found it was yielding enough. He didn't wait for another cue; Lucius pulled the ring out of the box she was still holding and placed it on her finger.
"You can take it off if you like," he told her. "But I need you to see it on. I need you to think about this."
"Why don't you…" her voice was faint as she stared at her hand. "Could you kiss me?"
He tried first by leaning towards her as they sat, and gently pulling her hand, still in his, up to his chest. He could only really reach her cheek at an awkward angle. It wouldn't have convinced anyone of anything.
"Stand up with me," he said, and he pulled her up gently with both of her hands in his. He stepped closer and twisted their entwined fingers together between their chests. "How much of a kiss do you want?" he whispered.
"If you want to marry me," she said hesitantly, "I guess you should kiss me like you'd kiss your wife."
An image flashed in his mind of her in dress robes and covered with jewels, pressed against a wall in some dark corridor at a party. Of a kiss that would not let itself stop at mere kissing. Involuntarily, his hips pressed forward slightly. She didn't step back. He unwound one hand to fall gently against her neck as he leaned in. She did not flinch. He was not much taller than her, but as his head dipped down, she rose up without thinking.
She went home in a daze, Apparating to her usual hidden spot down the street and then wandering through the front garden feeling like she had died and was seeing it all from a perspective high above. Her parents were together in the sitting room, dinner long since over, and she presented herself in front of them. They looked at her placidly, expecting nothing but an average report from an afternoon with Lucius.
"Lucius and I are going to get married," she announced. "I know it may sound sudden, but we think it's the right thing to do."
There was an empty silence for a moment, but her mother soon broke through it, stifling something between a sob and a gasp as she got up to hug her daughter. Over her shoulder, Narcissa saw her father remain still.
"You two have always been a pretty pair," her mother said. "It makes sense, perfect sense. It's wonderful."
Cygnus rose too, and came to kiss Narcissa on her cheek as her mother's grasp on her remained firm.
"Will you be happy?" he asked her.
"I've always been happy when I'm with him," she answered, telling the truth.
The only person at Lucius's house to tell about it was Severus Snape, who was living in a guest room and had nearly an entire wing of the Manor to himself. Lucius sought him out only after a night's sleep that was all but sleepless, mostly spent staring at the ceiling and imagining Narcissa's soft breathing and warm body next to his.
"I asked Narcissa Black to marry me yesterday, and she said yes." Lucius had walked into the room where Severus was eating breakfast and spit this out before he could think yet another time of how foolish it was beginning to sound.
Severus nodded his head slowly as he chewed. "So should I find somewhere else to live?"
"Is that all you can think of?"
"Did you think I would be shocked?"
The elves were letting someone in the front door, and he could tell by the tone of their voices that it was someone important he should go to go meet. He made an exasperated gesture at Severus and hurried downstairs to find his perhaps fiancée there, very stoic and very polite as the elves tripped around her feet welcoming her and asking to take her cloak. She had come to refuse him, surely. His heart was beating fast.
"I thought we should talk about our wedding," she said instead when their eyes met. "I don't see why two people in our situation should drag it out."
"Ok."
The elves were clearing away and she was still standing there, many feet away from him as he stayed frozen on the last stair.
"And I think if we're going to get married you should take me on a date. Soon."
"Yes."
Still neither of them moved.
"So may I come in? And discuss those things?"
He wanted very much to kiss her, but it was unclear to him, even though it had been his own idea, if they were supposed to. If she really wanted him in any way, or if it was all an arrangement. How would it be that they could conceive a child like this? he somehow thought as they still stood in their places. Because this was Narcissa, his best friend, and if it had been a random match made, some foolish but well-bred girl chosen for him, he could be emotionless about it, but with her he wanted to make it right –
"I suppose I'll go upstairs," she said into the silence. "I brought my calendar."
As she passed him, he was able to reach out and grab her hand. The ring was still there. She was wearing his ring, even though it was unannounced. Even though she didn't have to.
"You really think it's the right thing?" he managed to ask. She smiled at him.
"I think it'll be a very good thing."