The Malfoy Project

𝙽𝚊𝚛𝚌𝚒𝚜𝚜𝚊 #𝟾 - 𝚆𝚛𝚊𝚝𝚑

✼¹

     Despite these undercurrents, lessons in Hogwarts carried on as usual. In June, when the summer term ended, I travelled back home while Bas, Lucius, and Bella stayed behind to take their N.E.W.T.s. Then N.E.W.T.s came and went, and both Bas and Lucius finally finished school, leaving me to complete the rest of my Sixth Year alone.

     At this time, there was also a noticeable change in the behaviour of the professors and staff. There seemed to always be a chaperone in the Slytherin Common Room now, and when Filch did his nightly rounds, he opened every closed door and peeped around every corner. Eventually, we decided that the smartest thing to do would be to halt our meetings entirely.

     If it had been lonely with Bas's departure, it was now even lonelier. I maintained my old friends from before, like Emily Selwyn, and had even made some new ones through the meetings. But there was always some invisible wall between us, an unspoken distance they seemed to want to keep from me. Without the meetings to unite us, it didn't seem like there was much left to talk about. Or perhaps they simply hadn't wanted to talk to me.

     I suspected two reasons: They knew of my affair with Lucius, and because they were afraid of him, were afraid of me too; or it was because Voldemort rarely singled out someone to speak to during meetings as he had done with me last Christmas — so they had heard —, and where they might have once had the capacity to ridicule me, they now saw me as someone to be respected, maybe even feared.

     But there was one good thing, and that was that I didn't have to worry about hiding anything from Bas, because there was nothing to hide anymore. Lucius had gone back to the comfort of Malfoy Manor, and Bas had been accepted into the Auror programme once they learned the Malfoys had disowned him. He then bought a cottage in Oxfordshire with the money he'd saved over the years.  

     His work kept him busy, but he wrote to me frequently, telling me about its old, ivy-covered stone walls and climbing rose bushes that arched over a little white door and sprouted the most wonderful-smelling blooms in the fading summer months. I was to visit at the end of the year, and he had a surprise he couldn't wait to give me.

     I never heard from Lucius during these months.

     August, I received a letter from Ronnie telling me she had married Ted Tonks in a quiet ceremony and was now living somewhere in the South, rather near London where Bas worked.

     We hope you'll have the chance to come visit us when you're finished with school next year, she had written. I know with all the horrible things going on in the country that you must be worried sick, but I hope you won't be, because we're both safe, and as happy as happy can be. Words cannot describe how happy I am, my dearest Cissy! Teddy is unimaginably kind to me, and I can only wish and hope with all my heart that one day you will find the same; a person who sees your star as much as you see theirs.

     I marveled at how certain Ronnie was about Ted, how infinitely sure she was in her judgement of someone. I could never form and stick with one opinion on Bas or Lucius; it was always changing, a nebulous living thing that morphed from one form to another in a matter of days or hours.

     Bas was magic and wonderment, a walking embodiment of an unachievable dream, and other times he was stubborn and head-strong, refusing to listen to anyone but himself. His brother, on the other hand, was sly and silver-tongued, but yet there were moments when he was attentive, tender, and thoughtful.

     And in the hours of my aloneness, I finally had the time to allow the guilt to flood back in. I thought and thought about my betrayal to Bas — it was all I ever thought of. I thought of the very moment of disintegration: that cursed Christmas meeting I had stumbled into because I had gone snuffling my nose where I shouldn't have.