The Malfoy Project

𝙻𝚞𝚌𝚒𝚞𝚜 #𝟻 - 𝙾𝚗𝚎 𝙼𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚔𝚎 + 𝙰 𝙻𝚒𝚊𝚋𝚒𝚕𝚒𝚝𝚢

     One year later, Cissy still never stopped coming to the Death Eater meetings. 

     In the day time, she would stay home and keep house for him. She liked doing that, having that kind of freedom and time to do nothing. Bas's Auror salary was just enough to tide them over month by month. In the countryside, there wasn't much to want. People were kind, the land was abundant with affordable fresh produce, and being surrounded by nature resurfaced the wildling in her that her peers used to adore.  

     At night, she would sneak out and Disapparate to Black Manor, where we would convene in our ever-growing numbers. There was always something to discuss: riots to instigate, Mudbloods to kidnap and torture, Ministry members to manipulate. Cissy was never highly-involved in these conversations — it was always the more boorish and unrefined like Bellatrix, or Nott, or Goyle, who were vocal in their malice — but there was something that drew her back to that place.

     I supposed she thought herself rather clever, having pulled off this shuttling back and forth in the middle of the night all while being engaged to an Auror, and perhaps to a certain degree I admitted she was. It was either that or Bas was thick as troll snot, but we all knew he wasn't.

     By then I had lost all contact with him. We had no need for him — I had no need for him. Father would bring me around to his meetings with various ministry officials, and sometimes when they came over, I was allowed to join them in the study, where they discussed confidential things I was not allowed to repeat outside those walls.

     It was disconcerting how quickly my family seemed to have forgotten my brother, how swiftly anyone could be axed from centuries-old legacies in our Pure-blood world. Father spoke to his friends as if he had only one son, and Mother stopped speaking of him at all — at least not to me. 

     Sometimes, it felt as if I had forgotten him too. But then there would be a day when Father lost his temper at us, or when the Dark Lord sent me to complete a particularly difficult task, and I would find myself thinking about the promise we made on the first day of school in the train, and be overcome with a short, sharp anger.

     Eight years had done nothing to stamp out the words he had used: It's us against the world. He and I had always always at loggerheads, but this time it seemed as if life had found a way to separate us forever, and I dreaded the day when the barricade between us would fall and I would have to charge at him from the opposite side. There would be no turning back then.

     There were times I craved him. Not him as a person, but his presence. There was something oddly comforting about having your own blood by your side, not talking or doing anything, but just being. Bas had been an indelible part of my life, and leaving him behind meant leaving a part of me as well. I often wondered if he was thinking the same of me.

     Every time I slept with Cissy, it would be ruined by a dull pang of guilt that struck itself against my organs, twanging on them like instruments. I was hurting Bas. He may not have known it yet but I was hurting him. And I knew that everything else I had done and was about to do would not compare.

     It was a still-living humanity that had no place at Voldemort's table, and I knew that if he found it out — which he will, he always does — I would be dead, though not immediately. The Dark Lord will fashion it into a weapon, a sword with which he would strike me down when the time is right, just as I had tried to do with Cissy.

     I blamed Bas for this: for placing in me this incorrigible tenderness that I couldn't seem to get rid of. In the shower I would scrub at myself till my skin was raw as a flayed animal, and once or twice I bent my body over the toilet, heaving and retching, trying to expel this hateful, undesirable, unbearable grain of emotion that simply wouldn't dislodge itself from my insides.. Nothing worked.