Easter Eggs, Part 7
Twelve down, seven to go. This one is for anaid_rabbit, who wanted Lucius and Narcissa playing with child! Draco. Honestly, this story mutated a long way from the fluffy piece that it should have been.
Title: The Way of the Blacks
Rating: PG
Characters: Lucius, Narcissa, Child! Draco, mentions of assorted Blacks and other purebloods
Word Count: 963
Summary: Blacks are experts at feeling fierce, all-consuming love for one person or one cause. What they can't do is talk about it--or change their minds.
Warning: Narcissa is unabashedly prejudiced, at least within the confines of her mind.
Disclaimer: I just like to play with JKR's characters. They're not mine, I'm not profiting from this, and I mean no harm.
***
Narcissa does not know how to play with the baby.
Lucius does. He kneels on the floor--wrinkling his elegant robes, but he doesn't seem to care--building crystal palaces out of blocks. Then he obligingly knocks the palaces over, to make little Draco laugh. He conjures stones into shoulder-dragons hardly larger than Draco himself, and smiles with pleasure as the child crows rapturously at the sight of flame-breath and iridescent scales. He tells the child tales of a wise and powerful prince and the evil, envious, low-born wizards and witches who seek to overthrow him. Even though Draco is little more than six months old, he still seems enthralled by the stories.
Narcissa, however, is baffled by the baby. She loves him fiercely, the more so because she knows that she is unlikely to bear any others. Something her pure Black blood lacks makes it unlikely that she'll ever carry another child to term.
But she doesn't know what to do with him. She's tried carrying him, and rocking him, and singing to him, but all he does is stare at her with those large grey eyes that are so typical of Malfoys and Blacks. She imagines, sometimes, that he can see right through her frenetic attempts at displaying love and is thinking, "What is the matter with that poor soul?"
Blacks are not good at love. Or perhaps, Narcissa thinks, we're too good at it. We love too much, we suffer too much, we are too much.
She remembers the whispers when Andromeda ran off with her Mudblood Teddy-boy. Despite the shame and revulsion Narcissa still feels at her sister's decision (imagine being touched by one of them!), she knows that Andromeda, who gave up wealth, power, influence, prestige and family to marry him, acted completely like a Black.
All of them are like that: Bellatrix, who loves sex, power and causes with equal fervour; Sirius, who fled his parents' house and his position as son and heir over an affair with a homosexual halfblood; Regulus, who simultaneously adores and loathes his brother with passionate confusion.
Sometimes she sees it as well in other purebloods, the Blacks' somewhat-more-distant kin. The Potter boy, for example, mad about the Mudblood who passes for his wife--though "wife" she will never be in the eyes of true wizards. It is a morganatic marriage at best, and a perversion at worst. As far as those like Narcissa are concerned--those with actual standards--Potter might as well have wed and bred a German shepherd bitch. But he stands by her, all the blazing fire and fervour of a Black gone hopelessly wrong present in his bearing and his eyes. She sees it in their quiet, intense cousin Rodolphus, who vibrates silently to each word Bellatrix speaks.
And of course she sees it in Lucius. Lucius, who is drunk on the dreams of the Dark Lord, who yearns for power and authority as more ordinary men yearn for food or shelter or air.
Strange how he does not realise that calling another man 'master' means that you deem yourself a slave.
But even if she said so, it wouldn't matter. He would speak to her patiently of service in a conqueror's army or in a glorious cause, and she would smile and nod and agree that of course not, it was nothing like the menial servitude of a house-elf. And then they would kiss and make up.
And the marriage, though it endured for decades, would be dead forever, for he would never trust her again. How could he, once she had derided the entity and the purpose to which he had given the majority of his faith and love? Lucius is a Malfoy through and through…which means that he has a strain of Black in his ancestry, of course.
So she cannot say anything. Yet the notion of her son as well as her husband becoming enslaved troubles her.
She would not mind Lucius serving him if the Dark Lord were more circumspect, more pragmatic. But he's reckless, drawing far too much attention to himself and to his followers. There is no real point in killing a few Muggles here and a few Mudbloods there--there are millions more. Avada-ing one by one would take too long. And the naïve, the cowardly and the sentimental have such primitive notions about appropriate pest control.
Careful, considered manipulation of politics and economics would take longer, but it would be a more certain win for their side. After all, killing the opposition accomplishes nothing but terror and rage and the creation of martyrs. To truly destroy one's enemies, you must manipulate them into willingly becoming what they hate…into someone exactly like you.
She glances over at Lucius, who is kneeling on the floor and jouncing a partially-Leviosa'ed baby in his arms. Draco reaches out and tugs hard on his father's nose, much to Lucius's evident discomfiture.
How, Narcissa wonders, is she supposed to teach this child--this infant who cares for nothing but toys and games and pulling noses--how to survive in Voldemort's world? To survive this foolish, foolish war the Dark Lord started through his spite and wounded vanity?
She doesn't have much time, she realises, cold terror washing through her. Only ten years…and that's barely any time in the life of a wizard--or a war. So little time to teach the boy to listen to his mind, as well as the emotions that will rule him.
And she doesn't know how to tell any of this to Draco…least of all, in a way that the baby will understand.
If only she could tell him through the games and silliness that he so adores.
But Narcissa does not know how to play with the baby.
Title: The Way of the Blacks
Rating: PG
Characters: Lucius, Narcissa, Child! Draco, mentions of assorted Blacks and other purebloods
Word Count: 963
Summary: Blacks are experts at feeling fierce, all-consuming love for one person or one cause. What they can't do is talk about it--or change their minds.
Warning: Narcissa is unabashedly prejudiced, at least within the confines of her mind.
Disclaimer: I just like to play with JKR's characters. They're not mine, I'm not profiting from this, and I mean no harm.
***
Narcissa does not know how to play with the baby.
Lucius does. He kneels on the floor--wrinkling his elegant robes, but he doesn't seem to care--building crystal palaces out of blocks. Then he obligingly knocks the palaces over, to make little Draco laugh. He conjures stones into shoulder-dragons hardly larger than Draco himself, and smiles with pleasure as the child crows rapturously at the sight of flame-breath and iridescent scales. He tells the child tales of a wise and powerful prince and the evil, envious, low-born wizards and witches who seek to overthrow him. Even though Draco is little more than six months old, he still seems enthralled by the stories.
Narcissa, however, is baffled by the baby. She loves him fiercely, the more so because she knows that she is unlikely to bear any others. Something her pure Black blood lacks makes it unlikely that she'll ever carry another child to term.
But she doesn't know what to do with him. She's tried carrying him, and rocking him, and singing to him, but all he does is stare at her with those large grey eyes that are so typical of Malfoys and Blacks. She imagines, sometimes, that he can see right through her frenetic attempts at displaying love and is thinking, "What is the matter with that poor soul?"
Blacks are not good at love. Or perhaps, Narcissa thinks, we're too good at it. We love too much, we suffer too much, we are too much.
She remembers the whispers when Andromeda ran off with her Mudblood Teddy-boy. Despite the shame and revulsion Narcissa still feels at her sister's decision (imagine being touched by one of them!), she knows that Andromeda, who gave up wealth, power, influence, prestige and family to marry him, acted completely like a Black.
All of them are like that: Bellatrix, who loves sex, power and causes with equal fervour; Sirius, who fled his parents' house and his position as son and heir over an affair with a homosexual halfblood; Regulus, who simultaneously adores and loathes his brother with passionate confusion.
Sometimes she sees it as well in other purebloods, the Blacks' somewhat-more-distant kin. The Potter boy, for example, mad about the Mudblood who passes for his wife--though "wife" she will never be in the eyes of true wizards. It is a morganatic marriage at best, and a perversion at worst. As far as those like Narcissa are concerned--those with actual standards--Potter might as well have wed and bred a German shepherd bitch. But he stands by her, all the blazing fire and fervour of a Black gone hopelessly wrong present in his bearing and his eyes. She sees it in their quiet, intense cousin Rodolphus, who vibrates silently to each word Bellatrix speaks.
And of course she sees it in Lucius. Lucius, who is drunk on the dreams of the Dark Lord, who yearns for power and authority as more ordinary men yearn for food or shelter or air.
Strange how he does not realise that calling another man 'master' means that you deem yourself a slave.
But even if she said so, it wouldn't matter. He would speak to her patiently of service in a conqueror's army or in a glorious cause, and she would smile and nod and agree that of course not, it was nothing like the menial servitude of a house-elf. And then they would kiss and make up.
And the marriage, though it endured for decades, would be dead forever, for he would never trust her again. How could he, once she had derided the entity and the purpose to which he had given the majority of his faith and love? Lucius is a Malfoy through and through…which means that he has a strain of Black in his ancestry, of course.
So she cannot say anything. Yet the notion of her son as well as her husband becoming enslaved troubles her.
She would not mind Lucius serving him if the Dark Lord were more circumspect, more pragmatic. But he's reckless, drawing far too much attention to himself and to his followers. There is no real point in killing a few Muggles here and a few Mudbloods there--there are millions more. Avada-ing one by one would take too long. And the naïve, the cowardly and the sentimental have such primitive notions about appropriate pest control.
Careful, considered manipulation of politics and economics would take longer, but it would be a more certain win for their side. After all, killing the opposition accomplishes nothing but terror and rage and the creation of martyrs. To truly destroy one's enemies, you must manipulate them into willingly becoming what they hate…into someone exactly like you.
She glances over at Lucius, who is kneeling on the floor and jouncing a partially-Leviosa'ed baby in his arms. Draco reaches out and tugs hard on his father's nose, much to Lucius's evident discomfiture.
How, Narcissa wonders, is she supposed to teach this child--this infant who cares for nothing but toys and games and pulling noses--how to survive in Voldemort's world? To survive this foolish, foolish war the Dark Lord started through his spite and wounded vanity?
She doesn't have much time, she realises, cold terror washing through her. Only ten years…and that's barely any time in the life of a wizard--or a war. So little time to teach the boy to listen to his mind, as well as the emotions that will rule him.
And she doesn't know how to tell any of this to Draco…least of all, in a way that the baby will understand.
If only she could tell him through the games and silliness that he so adores.
But Narcissa does not know how to play with the baby.