[Wednesday one-shots]: Narcissa Protective, PG-13, H/D preslash, Lucius/Narcissa, 3.2/7
Chapter One.
Title: Narcissa Protective (2/3)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Narcissa/Lucius, Harry/Draco pre-slash
Content Notes: Angst, violence, manipulation, AU, crack
Rating: PG-13
Summary: As Harry and Draco head into their third year, Narcissa finds more and more varied uses for her skills than she ever knew she could. And if that includes intimidating Severus Snape, a werewolf, Sirius Black, and a rat…it’s not like this is this weirdest year she has ever had.
Author’s Notes: The AU of third year for the Narcissa series! This one is going to be a three-parter, most likely.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Two
Narcissa walked lightly into the hospital wing, eyes fixed on Harry lying on the bed nearest the door. Draco stood next to him, his face pale. He looked up at her and his eyes closed briefly, even though Narcissa wore the brown hair and glasses of her disguise and the boring, dusty robes required of an apprentice in Astronomy.
I am glad that he still trusts me to make everything all right. Narcissa hadn’t been able to keep the Dementors away from the train. But she would make sure that they didn’t bother her boys in the future.
“What happened?” she asked softly. “Mr. Malfoy? Did the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher drive them away?” That was what some of the rumors she had heard as she came up the stairs said.
While Draco described Harry’s intense reaction to the Dementors, Narcissa studied his still face. He hadn’t had an easy life, and that might be one of the reasons he had fainted.
No matter what the reason was, however, she would end it.
“Excuse me, who are you?”
Narcissa glanced up. The amber-eyed man in the door of the hospital wing was probably Remus Lupin. She smiled and stood, holding out her hand. “I’m sorry, you wouldn’t have had the chance to meet me yet, of course. My name is Lilith Smithson. I’m an apprentice in Astronomy to Professor Sinistra. I have a hope of teaching it someday.”
The man’s nostrils flared delicately as he shook her hand, but Narcissa hadn’t met him before, so her scent would tell him nothing. And she was wearing glamours that would disperse her scent anyway. “Do you know Harry?”
Better than you, who has done nothing to claim the right to use his first name. But Narcissa only smiled a little and said, “Oh, I was at Hogwarts in my first year when his parents were in their seventh. I admired them from afar, you know. The way one does. And when I realized that Harry Potter was in the hospital wing…”
“He’s going to be fine. He’ll wake up and eat some chocolate, and that will be enough.” Lupin shouldered past her as he went to the bed. He was patting Harry’s hand and saying, “Harry? I mean, Mr. Potter?”
Draco glanced up at her in swelling indignation. Narcissa patted his hand in turn to subdue him. Yes, Lupin was ridiculous, and it seemed that he didn’t even intend to call Harry by his first name when he was awake.
But Narcissa was here to prevent danger to her boys, and right now, she didn’t think Lupin was an immediate danger. The Dementors were obviously worse.
And Cousin Sirius.
That was a conundrum she hadn’t yet solved.
*
Narcissa’s eyes flicked open. She had felt one of the wards she had placed around the edges of the grounds triggered. It meant someone of Black blood was nearby and neatly captured, and since she didn’t expect Regulus to come back to life or Bellatrix to fight her way out of Azkaban or Andromeda to show up apologizing any time soon…
She rolled smoothly out of bed and padded up the stairs just outside her door. Sinistra had seemed bewildered when Narcissa had wanted the quarters right at the top of the Astronomy Tower, even though it was the traditional place for apprentices to sleep, but she had obviously never looked over the grounds at night, only at the stars. From here, Narcissa could see everything.
Narcissa lifted a telescope to her eye. No one would consider it unusual for an Astronomy apprentice to have a telescope, of course. No one else would realize that she’d modified it to see her wards triggered instead of the stars, either, but that was their problem.
There. The bright white ground-star flared against the dark edge of the Forbidden Forest. It had been nearly a month since term started. Narcissa was a little surprised that Sirius hadn’t tried to sneak into Hogwarts before this.
If his desire to kill Harry was sincere. Which she had to admit she doubted. Imprisoned Death Eaters, including her own dear sister, were mostly loyal fanatics who wouldn’t have cared about timing or overwhelming odds. They would simply have busted in.
Of course, Sirius might have inherited more of her own discipline and intelligence than Bellatrix’s madness. But running away to live with the Potters didn’t argue it.
Narcissa charmed her clothes the dark grey that would slide in and out of shadows best, and then reached down and drew up one of the almost invisible ropes that hung down the side of the Tower. In seconds she was climbing down, sliding when she could, but always holding her heels clear of the stones. The last thing she wanted was for someone to wake up now to investigate suspicious scrapes or rustles.
Once she reached the grounds, it was a swift stroll to where Sirius thrashed in her ward. She did pause when she realized she had caught a large black dog, and not a human being at all. Then she smiled.
“It’s nice to see that the Animagus form of someone in the family was useful,” she said, and unwound the glamours that covered her. They were anchored to a brooch on her cloak so that she could put them back on merely by twisting the brooch. “Hello, Cousin Sirius. It’s interesting that you want to kill Harry, but I’m afraid I can’t allow it.”
The dog stared at her and snarled. Narcissa listened for a moment, but so far only the snarls filled the night, not the whispers she always associated with Dementor cloaks. She shook her head and ended one of the coils of the ward so that Sirius could sit comfortably on his haunches instead of dangling in the air by all four legs.
“On the other hand, your behavior is hardly typical of a Death Eater. So, do you want to change back and tell me all about it? Or do I have to force you out of your Animagus form?”
Sirius snarled at her again. Narcissa shook her head. “Perhaps you have succumbed to the Black madness after all. Twelve years in Azkaban might do that.” She waved her wand and intoned the charm that would disrupt the Transfiguration Sirius had worked on himself, forcing him to return to human form.
Sirius yowled in indignation as he turned. Narcissa smiled. “Maybe you should have been a cat instead.”
“It’s freezing and I’m naked!”
“Maybe you should have thought of that before sneaking into the school.”
“What are you doing here, Narcissa?”
“I’m here to protect my son. And Harry, since he’s become a close friend of Draco’s and one of my children.”
Sirius stared at her, and then burst out laughing. Narcissa studied him in cool silence. It went on and on, and she nodded a little. Yes, Sirius was decidedly not as sane as he’d been before Azkaban.
“Merlin,” Sirius finally said, when Narcissa went on watching him and not moving. “You’re serious. No, wait, that’s me,” he said quickly, before Narcissa could say anything. “And even if Harry is your ward, you can’t mean anything good for him.”
“I do wonder why not.”
“Be-because!” Sirius hiccoughed a little, and Narcissa wondered if he’d got drunk before he came to make this easier for him. “Because your husband is a Death Eater and you’re a Death Eater’s wife.”
They were getting nowhere with this. Narcissa sighed. “I want to know what you’re doing here, Sirius. I want to know what you think you can do now, by bringing Harry down. Your master is years gone.”
“I’m not a Death Eater!”
Narcissa winced a little at that screech, which meant Sirius had told not only her but most of the inhabitants of the Forbidden Forest, and said, “Oh, really? Even though you’re cousin to a Death Eater’s wife?”
Sirius’s glare showed that he’d lost his sense of humor in Azkaban, too. He yanked his left sleeve up and showed his bare arm. Narcissa waved a hand. “Why don’t you try answering my question, instead of making proclamations?”
“Peter Pettigrew is alive. He’s the real traitor. He’s here. I saw his picture in the paper. I’m going to kill him.”
Narcissa turned her head. The Dementors were coming, as she knew from the gathering chill in the air around her shoulders. Tiresome. She didn’t feel like interrupting her interrogation of Sirius to assuage their qualms about their ugliness.
She flicked her wand and touched the amulet around her wrist that she had spent the past month preparing. It worked by feeding off the light of the moon and stars. Sometimes, pretending to be an Astronomy apprentice was worth it after all. When the amulet responded with a white spark much like the one that had showed on the grounds when Sirius fell into her trap, she took it off and laid it on the ground.
“We’ll have to see if that’s true,” she told Sirius, and cast a series of rapid spells that tightened the ward around him, trussing his arms and legs behind his back, and gagged his mouth. “We’ll return to the school and have a talk, and in the morning you can point Pettigrew out to me.”
Sirius thrashed and raged, but Narcissa didn’t intend to listen. She turned and waited for the first Dementor to come within range of her trap.
Although she could feel there were probably a good fifty approaching through the Forest, only one came close to the amulet. It was pushing its cloak back with its filthy hands as it did so, and although it glanced at her, its attention was fastened on the man she held prisoner.
Luckily, the presence of the Dementor made Sirius slump in his bonds. Narcissa glanced at him. She could do without the drool, but one couldn’t have everything.
“What are you waiting for?” Narcissa asked softly, looking back at the Dementor. She hoped the one who had made Harry faint was here. Or, if not, that word would get back to it soon, through whatever methods the Dementors used to communicate.
After long moments of hesitation, the lone Dementor in the front came towards Sirius. Its mouth was visible now, a sucking thing working in and out of the darkness.
It passed over her amulet.
In a second, silvery light erupted from the amulet and grabbed the Dementor and tugged it into a whirl of motion. Narcissa watched, smiling, as the lanky black form of the Dementor grew thinner and thinner, turning into a shadow that spun down into the amulet like water going down a drain.
She looked up to find the rest of them staring at her.
“It’s a simple matter of trapping a Patronus and binding it to an amulet,” she told the Dementors. “By now, your companion has been annihilated.”
Very carefully, a few of them edged behind the nearest trees.
“It will happen again if you come near me,” Narcissa told them softly. “Or if you come near Harry Potter or Draco Malfoy. I know that you can recognize individual humans.” They couldn’t negotiate with the Ministry or distinguish between Azkaban guards and prisoners otherwise. “Leave them alone.”
A few more Dementors edged between the trees as Narcissa picked up the amulet and tucked it back into a pocket. Then she gathered Sirius and made him float behind her as she strode once more towards the Astronomy Tower.
The Dementors drifted carefully out of her way. Some of them were watching her back. Narcissa simply kept walking.
Like natural animals, they sensed fear. Narcissa would die in shame before they could suck out her soul if that was actually the case.
And she had no bad memories for them to feed on. She had never done anything that wasn’t perfectly justified, or made a mistake that she hadn’t made up for later.
*
“Have you decided that you want to talk yet?”
The black dog turned its head in the other direction and sulked.
Narcissa shrugged, slid a bowl of food through the low door of the cage she was keeping him in, and then left to attend the Wednesday night Astronomy class, the one that both Draco and Harry were in this year.
*
“Out with it.”
“What?” Harry’s head jerked up. He’d been punching the target in front of him with a steel glove that Narcissa had made for him over his hand. He blinked at her and pushed his glasses up his nose. “What are you talking about?”
“You’ve been acting differently in the past few training sessions.” Narcissa leaned back on the floor and flexed her leg above her head, wriggling and kicking her foot when it was at its fullest extension. She’d had to hold it in an odd position on most of her climb down the Tower, and now she was paying the price for that. Of course, she would have had to pay a much greater price if she hadn’t been in good shape. “Your breathing quickens, and you turn away any questions I ask you about Lupin or Professor Snape or if you’ve been wandering around the corridors at night.” She flipped herself over with a sinuous twist of her body and looked at him across the mat that she’d laid on the floor of her office. “Out with it.”
“How can you tell that much just from the way I breathe?”
Harry sounded aggravated. Narcissa smiled. “Because of my training. The same training that I’m giving you now.” She nodded at the glove he was sliding off. “Weapons are only a part of it, and you know it. The much more important training is using your head.”
Harry paused, tense, for a long second, and then sat down. “I know.”
Narcissa waited, using the moment to calculate angles from which she could throw knives into the walls. He stayed quiet for almost five minutes. But in the end, Harry wasn’t nearly as stubborn as Cousin Sirius.
“I got a map,” he said softly. “A map that shows the school corridors. They-I mean, someone gave it to me.”
Just as someone gave you the Invisibility Cloak for your Christmas present two years ago. But Narcissa kept herself calm and relaxed. The Cloak had almost certainly come from Dumbledore. He could not possibly be the source for the map. “Would you like to tell me their names?”
“Just someone I know. They-I mean, he said I might need it.”
“Mm-hmm.” Narcissa lowered her head a little. “Harry, as far as I know there is no artifact capable of showing all the corridors of Hogwarts. I assume that you mean it includes the secret passages?”
“Yeah.” Harry was studying his fingers raptly.
“Then I don’t understand why you told me the map exists, and even what it does, but you won’t tell me the names of the people who gave it to you. One is incredibly important, dangerous information. The other is-what? What do you think is going to happen?” Narcissa listened to the way his breathing sped up, and then thought she understood. “Or what do you think I am going to do?”
Harry’s head flew up. His eyes were bright and frantic.
“Tell me,” Narcissa said, and at the moment she didn’t care if she sounded most like a mother or most like a professor or most like a mentor in assassination techniques. What mattered was that she knew this was the tone that would make Harry tell her the truth.
And Harry did. “I saw on the map that you were keeping Sirius Black a prisoner in your rooms,” he whispered. “Why? What did he do? And if it’s just that he was a threat to me, what are you going to do to anyone else you think is a threat to me?”
Narcissa moved forwards and hugged him. Harry sat stiff and trembling in her arms for a long minute, and then he relaxed enough to duck his head against her chest and hang on as though someone was trying to tear him from his iron grip on her.
“I’m sorry,” Narcissa said softly. “I should have told you. If I’d brought you to him earlier, then maybe he would even have told me what he meant about Peter Pettigrew being the real murderer.”
Harry blinked at her. Narcissa pushed his glasses up for him and smiled. “I caught Sirius in a trap ward I set out on the grounds when I first came here. It was meant to catch someone of Black blood. He told me that he didn’t really betray your parents, that it was Peter Pettigrew, the wizard he supposedly killed. I wanted to hear more about that. But he can turn into a dog, and he’s been a dog since that night. He refuses to talk to me. I think he believes me to be a Death Eater.”
“So-he’s in your quarters because you don’t want anyone else to know you have him?”
Narcissa inclined her head. “And because, if he’s right and Pettigrew is somewhere in the castle, I don’t want word to get out that Sirius is here, too. Pettigrew might flee and hide better than he already has.”
“Okay.” Harry nodded against her. “I can accept that. But let’s go talk to Sirius now. I’m sure that he’ll want to talk when he sees me.”
*
“You keep him in a cage?”
“He is a dog,” Narcissa said mildly, and shut the door behind Harry. “Not a natural one, but one guided by human intelligence. If I left him free, I am absolutely sure he would cause a mess in my quarters and chew up everything he could get his jaws on. Yes, I keep him in a cage.”
Harry just looked at her, and then sighed. “Point.”
Sirius had changed back the instant he saw Harry, although he crouched over on his hands and knees so that he wasn’t exposing his nakedness to his godson-something Narcissa appreciated. His voice was low and urgent. “Harry, she’s a Death Eater. You need to get out of here as soon as you possibly can. Find Dumbledore and-”
“She’s training me, Sirius. She’s my foster mother. And Dumbledore died about a year and a half ago.”
Sirius looked no wiser with his mouth open all the way, Narcissa thought. She shook her head a little. It would be easier to know how intelligent Sirius was, or how mad Azkaban had driven him, if he would act the same way for five minutes in a row.
“But-I would have heard about that.”
“You said that Pettigrew’s alive and that he’s the real traitor,” Harry told him. Sirius eagerly nodded along. “But you never broke out of Azkaban for twelve years? Why not, if you knew he was alive?”
“I didn’t know until I saw a picture of those friends of yours on their holiday.”
Harry looked just as mystified as Narcissa for a minute. Then he snapped his fingers and said, “That’s right, the Weasleys went to Egypt this summer, and there was a picture about it in the papers. But what are you talking about? I’ve met almost all the Weasleys. Pettigrew’s not a Weasley.”
But, Narcissa thought, and shifted a little to arrange her legs more comfortably beneath her, I would wager that the ones who gave you that map are. Because I saw the way you looked at me from the corner of your eye when you said it. And your breathing sped up again.
“Peter learned how to be an Animagus, too. Just like me and James.” Sirius’s face was heartbroken. “His form was a rat.”
“Scabbers?”
“Who is Scabbers?” Narcissa asked quietly. Cousin Sirius was still looking at her dubiously, but at least Harry would talk to her.
“Ron’s pet rat.” Harry was shaking his head a little. “I can’t believe it. So you knew that he wasn’t dead, and you broke out of Azkaban and came here to-what? Force him to transform back so that you can turn him in?”
“No. I was going to kill him.”
Narcissa sighed. Poor Cousin Sirius. He isn’t a professional, so I suppose I can’t really expect him to have any idea of professional ethics. But it’s so sloppy.
“But why?” Harry looked the very picture of bewilderment, which meant he had picked up on more of Narcissa’s lessons than she had thought he had so far. “Why would you do that, when you need him alive to prove that you’re innocent?”
Sirius laughed, and it was wild, with a howl at the end of it. Spending so long as a dog might have had an effect on him even if Azkaban hadn’t, Narcissa judged. “I never even got a trial, Harry. If I took Peter to the Ministry, someone would just make him disappear. Probably in embarrassment. Nothing’s going to change unless I kill him. And that will give me a lot of satisfaction, and avenge James and Lily-he was their Secret-Keeper, not me, I persuaded them to switch at the last minute, I killed them!”
His sudden scream made Narcissa glad of Silencing Charms she had spent hours building into the walls of her quarters. Really, some people had no sense of decorum.
Justice obliged her to admit that she wouldn’t, either, if she had spent twelve years in Azkaban for something she didn’t do. But then, the point was that she would never have been captured in the first place.
So sloppy.
“But now you have us,” Harry said eagerly. “That means we can help capture Pettigrew, and then you can take him to the Ministry, and-”
Sirius was shaking his head. “There’s the same problem of someone making him disappear. Besides.” He was watching Narcissa warily. “I know that she can’t be planning to kill you right away or she would have done it before I was here to stop her, but she’s still a Death Eater. What is it, Narcissa? You’re keeping him to turn him to the Dark?”
“No. I’m keeping him because I’m his foster mother, and he’s my ward, and I love him.”
Harry beamed up at her. Sirius noticed it, and his face contorted. “So. You’re not just keeping him so that you can turn him to the Dark, you’re doing that and tricking him at the same time!”
“She’s not tricking me,” Harry tried to argue, but Narcissa, watching Sirius’s face, put her hand on his shoulder. She doubted her cousin was stable enough right now to listen to anything Harry said, especially if he had decided it was all a Death Eater plot.
“I’m not loyal to the Dark Lord any more than you are, Sirius,” she said, and pulled back her sleeve as he’d done, so that he could see her bare arm.
Sirius sneered. “That means nothing. Some of the worst people I ever knew weren’t the Marked ones, because You-Know-Who wouldn’t have allowed them into his inner circle.”
“You must make up your mind, Sirius. Either I am a trusted Death Eater raising Harry like a lamb for slaughter, or I am an unmarked supporter who has no reason to feel that much loyalty to the Dark Lord.”
Sirius only gave her a look of unanswerable loathing and turned his back, flopping over so that he rested with his head pointing towards the far end of the cage. A second of stomach-twisting power, and he was a dog again.
“So you won’t let us tell anyone about Pettigrew?” Harry asked. “You won’t tell people that you’re innocent even if we capture him?”
Sirius shook his head to each question, and let out a loud Woof at the last one, as if to tell Harry to give up.
Harry gave Narcissa a helpless look. Narcissa bent down and kissed his hair. “Don’t worry, Harry. What do I always tell Draco?”
Harry relaxed. He knew she would take care of it when she put it like that. He hugged her and left the room.
Narcissa could tell that Sirius was on the verge of peering over his shoulder at her. She raised her eyebrows. “Well? Is there something you’d like to say?”
He uttered a sound that might have been either another bark or a whoof of air, and turned around again.
Narcissa sat down and studied his back. She either had to come up with a way to persuade Sirius that she didn’t follow the Dark Lord, or she had to come up with a way to cleanse the Ministry sufficiently that they would accept Pettigrew and believe what had happened even without Sirius’s willing testimony.
She wasn’t sure which one was the more worthy challenge of her skills.
*
“Miss Smithson, can I talk to you?”
Narcissa had been away most of the day, on Lilith Smithson’s “personal business,” which was actually doing some shopping in Diagon Alley, checking on the house-elves at Malfoy Manor, and making sure Lucius hadn’t had any ideas since she last saw him. She stepped back now and let Draco into her office, smiling down at him. “What can I do for you, Mr. Malfoy?”
Draco stood there, stiff and tall, with his hands clasped behind him, until she got the door shut. Then he exhaled and whispered, “Can you take the glamour off, Mum? Please.”
Narcissa nodded and twisted the brooch to remove it. Then she led Draco over to a comfortable chair near the fire and began to make hot tea and bread with butter. It was obvious he needed it. “What’s the matter, darling?”
“I-got a letter from Father today,” Draco said. His face was averted. “You know that I only got an Exceeds Expectations on my last essay from McGonagall.”
“Yes, I know,” Narcissa said. “You told me that you forgot to mention one obvious conclusion from the chapter that would have supported what you were saying better.” She had trained Draco not to make such mistakes, but of course they would still happen. She was more interested in making sure they did not happen again.
Draco nodded, staring at his hands. “The thing is-Father thinks it should have been an Outstanding. He told me that. I’m glad I was alone when I opened the letter. I-it was almost a Howler.”
Narcissa sighed. It seemed Lucius had got ideas, after all, and she would have to take care of that when she returned home. “I’m sorry, Draco. You know that Father and I sometimes disagree on the way we’re raising you?”
Draco blinked up at her. “But I thought both of you agreed on how important manners and marks and all the other good things are.”
“Yes, but not always how you achieve them. I know that next time, you’ll write the conclusion into your essay.” Narcissa reached out and gently touched his cheek. “Lucius thinks you should go back and change the past.”
“But I couldn’t even do that if I had a Time-Turner.” Draco’s brow was furrowed. “It’s too long ago now.”
“I know. Your father is not always rational.”
Draco abruptly relaxed. “Does that mean that you’re going to take care of it and see that this doesn’t happen again, Mother?”
“It does.”
Draco stood and kissed her, something he hadn’t done since last summer when he declared he was too adult for that kind of thing. He would still accept the ones she had initiated, but they weren’t as important to Narcissa as this kind were. She resisted the impulse to touch her cheek as he stepped away. “Thank you, Mother.”
“Yes, dear. If your apology from your father hasn’t arrived by tomorrow, please let me know.”
Draco smiled at her and slipped out of her office. Narcissa peacefully sipped her tea and watched the fire, and thought of all the people she needed to intimidate.
Honestly, the list was getting long, which was a sign of her own sloppiness. Ah, well. In the morning she, like Draco, would make sure that the mistake would not happen again.
Chapter Three.
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