[Wednesday one-shots]: Narcissa Triumphant, Lucius/Narcissa, H/D, PG-13, 7.5/7
Chapter Four.
Part One.
Title: Narcissa Triumphant (5/11)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco, Lucius/Narcissa
Content Notes: Angst, violence, minor character deaths, gore, torture, crack AU (Narcissa is an assassin)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Narcissa has a war on two fronts to fight, with Voldemort and with the Ministry. But when winning such wars is necessary to avenge her family and keep them safe, her enemies are the ones who will regret their actions.
Author’s Notes: Welcome to the seventh and final fic in the Narcissa series, the AU of DH. This really won’t make any sense at all if you haven’t read the other fics in the series, so do that first.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Five-A Response
“And if you could detail what you witnessed?”
Dean Thomas nodded strongly and started writing, his jaw set. “It’s not right, what he’s trying to imply about Harry,” he muttered as he scribbled down some of his observations of Moody’s class. “I don’t care if he is a professor, Harry’s saved us all a lot, and then Moody tries to come in and imply that he’s Dark just because he got himself adopted by you? That’s ridiculous.”
Narcissa smiled. “I entirely agree, Mr. Thomas.” Harry was Dark because he followed the discipline and had learned some Dark spells, not because he had been adopted.
Thomas stepped back, and Longbottom came forwards. Narcissa watched him with her eyebrows slightly raised. Draco had been all but certain that Longbottom wouldn’t join their protest against Moody because of his parents’ past during the war and Narcissa’s relationship with Bellatrix Lestrange, although Harry had been less certain.
“Yes. Mr. Longbottom?”
“I-I think the same thing as Dean,” Longbottom whispered, glancing around her quarters. Narcissa was collecting the responses from students that proved Moody an unworthy teacher here, rather than in her office, on the slight chance that Moody might try to use her legal status as a professor with power over students against her. Students had to actually seek out her quarters and confirm that they weren’t bargaining for a better mark if they wanted to put their observations down. “Moody spends way too much time talking about the past war and not the current one.”
Narcissa nodded. Harry had been right, then. Longbottom was marked by that previous war, but that was all the more reason that he didn’t want to waste time dwelling on it. “Very well, Mr. Longbottom. Please write down everything you have a solid memory of and would be willing to testify about.”
Longbottom’s hand stopped reaching for the quill. “Te-testify?”
Narcissa shrugged. “Professor Moody is popular in the Ministry among certain people. I want to make sure we have the weight of voices against him we need.”
She did think for a moment that Longbottom would leave without adding his name and observations, but a second later he took a deep breath, seized the quill, and began to write.
Narcissa smiled.
*
Narcissa slipped like a shadow out of Trelawney’s Tower, a faint smile on her face and her hands clutched around a blue quartz globe. Her institution that the worthless professor might possess some useful Divination objects inherited from her predecessors had been correct.
Not that there wasn’t some risk to using this globe, not least the risk that she might go mad. But Narcissa was used to worse.
She sought a secluded room on the fourth floor that she had identified a week back, one that had a powerful spell remnant lingering around it which managed to make everyone who came near it feel uneasy and find an excuse to back away. It had taken her an hour of meditation to make sure that it was only residue and not an actual indication of danger’s presence. She took her seat on the chair she’d conjured earlier and laid the globe in the hollow of a table she’d filched from the junk room where she and Idunna had found the diadem.
“Speak to me,” she murmured.
The globe slowly warmed up beneath her hands. Narcissa kept them in place and closed her eyes. The globe was an aid to Sight, but as Trelawney should have remembered, it was the Inner Eye that it stimulated. Gazing into crystal did nothing except for the very rare people who were talented with that material.
The blue glow that Narcissa saw behind her eyelids swirled like the smoke in Trelawney’s room, and the sense of an alien, questioning mind touched hers.
“Hufflepuff’s cup,” Narcissa whispered. She was all but certain the cup was a Horcrux. But she had come no nearer being certain where it was held. She doubted it would conveniently appear, the way the locket had, in some other cabinet in the Black properties.
The blue swirl turned a slow, poisonous green. Narcissa remained calm and alert. It was entirely possible that the truth would appear to her in symbols instead of a true vision. She knew how tricky prophecy was, and an artifact that activated the Sight might be even more so.
The world around them glittered and seemed to bounce. Narcissa found herself falling down as from a height towards a shining, square white block, which might be meant to stand for a building. And then she blew through a door like a wind, and found herself hearing a distant voice sing a scrap of verse.
Of finding more than treasure there…
In the final moment of the vision, she seemed to flip and land on her feet the way she would if she had turned a fall into a somersault, and a huge crest rose in front of her. It blazed clearly for only a moment before she slammed into it and the vision ceased.
Narcissa opened her eyes and found herself sitting in front of the globe. She traced the top of it with a thoughtful hand while she slowly smiled.
The vision had been as ambiguous as it could be, but she still knew what it meant. The scrap of verse came from the warning to thieves engraved on the doors of Gringotts. And the crest had been a great capital letter L draped with vines and with two ravens soaring overhead.
The cup was in Gringotts, in the Lestrange vault.
“So he entrusted it to you, sweet sister,” Narcissa whispered.
*
Narcissa stood tall in the prow of the boat and watched the island grow nearer. The mist billowed and stirred around her, rather the way the blue smoke had in the vision the globe had given her. The world shivered with despair as the Dementors of Azkaban sensed them and began to press closer.
Narcissa flicked her wand, and the grizzly Patronus that appeared to prowl next to her drove them cowering away.
“That’s remarkable,” said the Auror sitting next to her, and nodded to her. “Did you know that the form your Patronus takes shows what Animagus form you would have if you could achieve it?”
“Fascinating,” Narcissa murmured.
She stepped out of the boat the minute it touched the shore. The grey walls ahead shone with grime and dripping water, ice and broken stone. Narcissa walked from Auror to Auror, down the chain, speaking the right words while looking ahead all the while. She had only had to say that she suspected Bella of paying money for an attempt on Harry’s life, and they had brought her right away. The public had decided that it adored Harry again after Voldemort’s attempt to make him seem responsible for Amelia Bones’s death.
Narcissa had little patience for the public, but occasionally even they served a purpose.
She knew she was close to the right cell when she heard the sound of mad cackling. Narcissa sighed and shook her head. She liked to think that she would keep up standards even if she was the imprisoned one-such as laughing, not cackling.
“Don’t know if you’re going to get much out of her, Mrs. Malfoy. She’s like this all the time. Truly mad.”
“That may be the case, but I need to speak with her anyway.”
The Auror nodded and stepped back. They always allowed the family members who came to see the prisoners a modicum of privacy. Narcissa could understand that, approve of it in this case, and still think basic eavesdropping charms a necessity.
Then again, she was not in charge of Azkaban any more than she was a prisoner there. She stepped closer to the bars and studied the tangle of black hair in front of her, so thick that it covered any trace of robes or hands. “Bella?”
The tangle of black hair trembled, and then spun around. It was like watching an ambling bush, sad and shaggy. “Cissy,” said the whisper from the middle of the bush, and then a hand did appear after all, rising to clutch the bars. “Have you come to get me out? Did our Lord send you to get me out?”
Narcissa sighed. That was probably the deepest manifestation of Bella’s madness, that she thought Narcissa would bow to a pathetic creature like Voldemort.
“He wants you out,” she said, bending down near Bella’s ear and speaking softly. “But he needs for just one thing to happen first. He needs to be assured that you never abandoned your loyalty to him while you spent time in prison.”
“I never did! I swear, I swear, I swear-”
Narcissa cut off the rising shriek that might well have carried to the Auror’s ears. “Listen to me. He needs to know. I need to know. That means that you have to pass a test, and give permission for me to retrieve the treasure he once entrusted to you.”
“You know about the treasure. You know.”
Narcissa nodded even though it hadn’t been phrased as a question. She couldn’t expect her sister to have retained a basic sense of courtesy, given her other delusions. “I do. But the security on it means that I can’t simply go and retrieve it myself-and the Dark Lord doesn’t want me to, in any case. I need to know if you will prove your loyalty and allow someone else to enter your vault.”
There was only a moment of silence before Bella chuckled, hard and watery and long. “Yes. You need me to enter the vault-I need to be there, or Rodolphus needs to be there. But it never said the whole of us. It never said the whole, eh?” She abruptly clenched her hand into a fist, except for the middle finger she left sticking out. “Cut it off and bring it with you. By the laws of Gringotts, it counts as permission.”
Narcissa had known that, and had intended to remove a hand from Rodolphus or Rabastan if she needed to, but it was better for the magic and her chances of walking away with the cup to have the flesh offered freely. She still made a show of reluctance as she drew her wand. “You’re sure?”
“The Dark Lord has all my loyalty! All!”
Her shrieks might have brought the guard back again, so Narcissa acted quickly, two spells cast together as she’d done in the past. One of them severed Bellatrix’s finger, and the other cauterized the wound. Bella never even flinched. Narcissa frowned as she cast another charm that would numb the finger and prevent any pain from touching her sister. A Black would make a sacrifice like that, without screaming, for a worthy cause. It was only a pity that her sister’s definition of “worthy cause” and her own differed so wildly.
“You’ll take care of it,” Bella whispered. “You’ll serve him.”
Narcissa knelt down so that her eyes were level with her sister’s, and their wild gleam behind that thicket of hair. “I swear, Bella, I’m going to give the Dark Lord exactly what he deserves from me.”
Bella was a Legilimens and could have detected lies, but technically nothing Narcissa said had been a lie. Bella exhaled now and reached out a wavering hand to touch Narcissa’s hair, not seeming to notice that she only had four fingers on that hand. “Good, sister. Good.”
*
“It is most irregular to allow you to access the Lestrange vault.”
Narcissa smiled slightly. She had been seated in an uncomfortable goblin office for the past three hours, while they waited for her to leave. The waiting game was one the goblins played more often than most people realized. She leaned forwards to address the small goblin who stood scowling at her from near the door. “I know that the vault opens to the hand of one of the authorized people. You saw what I carry. And you know from the magic you passed over it that it was given to me willingly.”
The scowl deepened on the goblin’s face to the point that he looked as if he might bite. Then he shook his head and muttered, “What are people coming to, cutting off their fingers? In my day it was a whole hand or nothing,” and spun around to march out. Narcissa followed, since this time they’d left the door open.
The cart ride down led them past a dragon, whom Narcissa ignored. The poor thing was hardly a match for the ones she had sent to sleep when she sought to prevent Harry from having to compete in the Tournament. She stepped out near the Lestrange vault and leaned forwards, Bellatrix’s finger touching the door.
It vanished like spilled water. The goblin watched with narrowed eyes as she stepped into the vault and looked around.
Rodolphus and Rabastan, like most rich wizards, liked to flaunt their wealth, and Bella certainly would have done nothing to stop them when she married Rodolphus. Gold coins sprawled across the floor and leaned against the walls in bulky stacks. Crowns and scepters and pendants and forms of jewelry that Narcissa would have found too vulgar to wear to a costume party dangled and dripped from shelves. There were surprisingly few books; the ones that stood there appeared to have been kept solely for their gaudy, glittering covers.
It took Narcissa perhaps three minutes to locate Hufflepuff’s cup, which made her think she should resume her own training soon. She made sure that Bellatrix’s finger was the first to touch the cup, and the shimmer of the curses guarding it popped like a soap bubble. Narcissa then wrapped her own hand in silk to gather it up.
“What is that?” The goblin was on point like a dog when Narcissa turned around, holding the cup.
“An artifact,” Narcissa said, in a sweet enough voice that the goblin nodded along for a moment before realizing it and glaring at her.
“I insist that you tell me.”
“I have.” The goblins held strictly to legal niceties, one reason they had an edge over wizards who would expect to play by the spirit and not the letter of the law. Narcissa, on the other hand, had no expectation of either.
The goblin muttered and kicked the side of the vault doorway and said impolite things in Gobbledegook all the way back to the surface. Narcissa, the layer of silk separating her from the Horcrux that was trying to burn her hands and her lap, didn’t care.
*
“I thought you might want to destroy this Horcrux yourself.”
Harry’s eyes were wide as they locked on the glittering, badger-decorated cup sitting in the middle of the table in Narcissa’s quarters. “You’d let me? I mean, I just thought you were going to take care of all of them.”
Narcissa smiled and sipped from the cup of mulled wine that she’d rewarded herself with after her successful return from Gringotts. “You’re seventeen now, dear, and you no longer have the vulnerability of the Horcrux in your head that might interact with this one. The only person that you’ve been able to take vengeance on directly was Umbridge. I wanted to offer you this one.”
Harry nodded slowly, eyes locked on the cup. “You think I can control Fiendfyre well enough to do the job?”
“Yes.” Narcissa did have contingent wards that would go up around the table, just in case, but she thought that Harry had enough self-discipline, strength of will, and command of Dark magic to do this job without the extra reassurance.
Harry nodded again. A hint of a tooth was showing as he began to smile, which reminded Narcissa of a dragon slowly baring its fangs. He drew his wand and paced over to stand opposite the cup.
The thing apparently had more sentience than Narcissa had given it credit for, because a subtle glow promptly surrounded it. And then a voice sighed out as though it was coming from several different directions. “Harry.”
Harry didn’t flinch or move from his battle-ready stance. Neither did Narcissa. She had told Harry he could handle this, and she still believed that. She would intervene only if it was absolutely required.
“Harry. I could give you your parents back. I could make you the most powerful wizard in the world. All you have to do is tell me what you want.” The badger on the side of the cup twisted and warped, the thick neck slimming down and sticking out so that it looked more like a snake. A floating pair of crimson eyes locked onto Harry. “Give me your desires, and I will give them back to you. In return, you need only keep me intact.”
“I already have a mother who’s taught me to be powerful,” Harry said, and launched the Fiendfyre.
The cup shrieked as it burned. Harry watched with a pitiless expression, and as Narcissa had thought, the flames never even came close to getting out of control. When they writhed towards the edges of the wards, Harry brought them back with a lash of will that needed no corresponding movement from his wand.
They did not even scorch the table, and they faded the minute Harry jerked his head. Narcissa smiled as he turned towards her and held out her hand. Harry grabbed it and gently lifted her hand to kiss the back of it.
“And I have two sons,” Narcissa said softly, “both very dear to me.”
Harry proved that, hardened warrior or not, he could still blush.
Chapter Six.
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