Flower Petals

-36-

Narcissa was never present in her body.

Growing up she was the pride and joy of the Black family. Regulus had just dissapeared, Sirius was a Gryffindor and an outcast, Bellatrix was all too liberal with curses to be considered lady-like and Andromedia was galavanting around corners with a mud-blood.

The Balck's were on the verge of dismantaling another pure-blood legacy. The under belly of Voldemort's army was in a heat and the pure-blood movement needed fuel in the fire.

Narcissa was a gem. She was beautiful and a prefect even at her young age. She was talanted in charms and beautiful beyond any woman most people had ever scene. She was platinum blonde and her face was a slender heart, she had rosey cheeks on pale skin and foggy blue eyes which hypnotized people who ran along her path. At school she was perfect in every way and gorgeous, and at home she was talented and obedient. She was the youngest chld, forced to live up to her older sisters expectations and she manifested that pain into drive. She did all of her chores and obeyed her father's commands. She was forced to be an open book to the world, the face of pure-blood sucess.

Behind closed doors she enjoyed one thing that the world could not see. The piano. She was talented, and while her father aimed to market it as another one of her attriubtable skills she kept him silent on just this thing.

It was a way to express what words could not, the feeling of being trapped and confined. She was too quiet, too muted because that was the room that she was given. Her enviroment didn't allow her to grow, and to be truthful, her parents poisoned the soil.

They suffocated her and Lucius was the rope.

She was 16 when her father introduced them, and she was 16 when they were married.

"The pure-bloods are your family, and your duty is to your family only." her father said.

She was 18 when she had Draco, and it wasn't for a lack of trying. It had gotten to the point that every night sex with Lucius was a chore and a procedre. Her body didn't want children, and every time she felt a glimmer of hope it was ripped from her by miscarriage after miscarriage. Their job was to have as many beautiful-blooded children as possible, and Narcissa was failing.

Lucius grew from a power hungry child into an angry and dissapointed man who couldn't be pleased by anything. Narcissa grew number and number, she'd been reduced to a factory who couldn't produce, and when she looked into the mirror at her bruised face and broken lip, she wondered who she'd become.

Her life was just, this.

She was beautiful, intelligent, wanted. Now she hobbled through life, just another dud from the Black's.

And then Draco was born. It was a miracle she'd carried him full term. She prayed for a girl because a girl would be abused and beat down, but a boy would be a soldier, he would be Lucius.

Draco grew, and as he became more like his father, Narcissa grew further away from him until her miracle child became like a secuirty gaurd keeping her in her prison.

And then Draco found a room, on one of the highest floors with pointing windows and a chess-board tiled floor, and the wall piano. Suddenly Narcissa was awakened, when Draco played his mother was Narcissa again, vibrant and witty, ambitious and intelligent. She taught him symphonies that lay memorized in her fingers and her mind. Draco watched his mom smile an float of of her seat, freedom finally.

Draco learned that piano was an esacpe, and that room upstairs became suddenly a place where he was happy unlike the cold and dampness of the rest of the manor. He moved all of his stuff up to that room, and when his father ordered all of his toys and clothes to be brought up, Draco threw them into the adjoining room, he didn't want to feel anchored by material things that his father bribed him with, he just needed the piano in the vaulted room and his mother.