nothing i wont do anymore

the only love i've ever known

After the war.

Narcissa sat quietly in the drawing room of Malfoy Manor. Her home. Their home. But the brown banisters and deep green couches seemed so foreign to her. So much of her girlhood identity had been tied up in the threads beneath her fingers. How she had agonised over them in her girlhood- what could possibly tie her to Lucius further?

Their time at school, of course. Hence the green, you see? Their families so devoted to the purity of their blood, their houses, determined by a piece of fabric seemed to make up the core of their identity since she was only eleven years old. Fear bubbling in her stomach, shoulders weighed down by sleepless nights before the journey to Hogwarts. To allow her future to be decided by an artefact who knew nothing about her at all. So proud, her family has been when she sent them a letter sealed in green and silver, akin to her older sisters. But this pride, this devotion her family had to one another. That was not love.

She had thought she had shared a love with her sisters. The girls whom she had shared clothes with, beds with. Stories and secrets. Blood and bruises. But she had decided many moons ago that Bellatrix was incapable of love. The real kind. She had been there when her eldest sister was laid in the ground. It seemed polite, she supposed. Her sisterly duty to the woman who had tried to protect her in her own delusional way.

Andromeda was different. Narcissa remembered the many nights she had crept down the corridors of her family's home to slip into the bed beside her sister. She had made up countless stories of ghouls or werewolves she had seen in the shadows only so she could curl up beside Andy and listen to her quiet stories and have her run her fingers through Narcissa's blonde curls. That must have been love.

Dinner. 1972. Narcissa could have been a ghost that night, floating between the ceiling and her own body as her sister fled from the stone steps with that boy from school. Narcissa pressed her face to the cool glass and watched them disappear from the driveway. She clawed and screamed for her sister, but she couldn't even spare a glance back to the girl she had already forgotten. Her mother shook her harshly and her father shouted fiercely. She could never turn out like her sister. And Narcissa decided that what she thought she had shared with Andromeda was not love either. You don't leave those who you love in a house like that. Not ever.

She had first really come across Lucius in Third Year. Of course everyone knew a Malfoy when they saw one (not that The Black Sisters went unnoticed either). He was tall, athletic, and most importantly to Narcissa, a match her father would approve.

They grew closer over the years, and she waited. Waited for him to shout or leave or hurt her. But whatever she was bracing herself for at school never came. His fingers were soft as they trailed over her jaw, his kisses light. He listened to her, whatever it was that she was talking about. He cared not for Divination or Herbology, but he listened to her when she spoke about them. When she was afraid or got that familiar pang in her chest, he could be easily found and always had time for her. This was it, she thought. This is what love is.

She wanted to escape with him as soon as she could. Get away from her mother and father, escape her sister and the memories of those she could no longer name. Lucius had a waiting hand and a family name. Without hesitation she took it.

And then they were one. And he continued to adore her. And she adored him. There was nothing she wanted more than to be with him. He agonised throughout the days when he was not at home with her. Nothing could fill that void. Nothing but him.