For a five year old
I fail at titles. This is for
whoeveryouwant7 , who requested a character study of Narcissa, with her reflecting upon the death of both husband and son. Admittedly, it's become a bit motherhood-oriented, but that may just be because I'm a bit overly maternal *cough*andbecauseneitherarestraight*cough*. Anyhow. I hope that I've done it justice. I don't know where the Rapunzel stuff came from, but I may yet expand on it. And I couldn't resist a Great Gatsby reference, sorry :P (I couldn't find my own copy, either, and had to resort to Google...oh, the horrors of misplacing books...I may have to clean my room properly.)
Also - Corpse Bride mood theme! *g*
Title: For a five year old
Summary: They let her have a room to herself.
Rating: PG-13
Words: 1976
For a five year old
A snail is climbing up the window-sill
Into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see and I explain
That it would be unkind to leave it there:
It might crawl to the floor; we must take care
That no one squashes it. You understand,
And carry it outside, with careful hand,
To eat a daffodil.
I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
Your gentleness is moulded still by words
From me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
From me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
Your closest relatives and who purveyed
The harshest kind of truth to many another,
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
And we are kind to snails.
-- Fleur Adcock
They let her have a room to herself. At the very tip of the spire, whitewashed and bare, apart from a few photos that were spelled to stay still. Her very own ivory tower.
They had sent her to Azkaban at first, and she’d sat there, feeling her bones calcify, and wondering just how long it would take for her to become a fossil, sitting on the damp prison floor until the ants came and carted her away grain by grain.
(An ant’s nest of her, full of nooks and crannies and life scuttling down the crooked corridors of her. She could almost feel the little insects, brainless, moving through her veins and into her brains, carrying her away one piece at a time.)
She was looking forwards to it, really, that gradual oblivion, where she could forget without knowing she’d ever remembered, the same way a long, white, dead beach never remembers that it was soaring cliffs of ravaged stone, singing battle cries to the wind as it fought a perpetual war with the waves pounding angrily, darkly on its face (a Japanese painting, black ink spilt over the page, sharp, curling seas and dark water spinningspinning, catching her and pulling her in, pushing her against the black cliff, crashing and crashing, till the water ran burgundy with her wine.)
(Now, just bones.)
She had looked forwards to it. But then They (always They, that took them) grew a heart and lost a spine, and said it was cruel, she shouldn’t be kept locked away by the sea, in the dark, with the damp, in the stone, where she might languish, forgotten for crimes she didn’t do. It wasn’t right, They said, for her to suffer, when she hadn’t done anything, when she had just been the wife, the mother, and not the Death Eater. Just the mother of a murder(er). No, They said, it wasn’t fair. They couldn’t live with themselves, knowing she was in there - sick and tired of fighting and of dying, They couldn’t even bear to have her cold soul on their conscience.
(Their children had so many nightmares, sleepless twisting hours where they screamed out against terrors half-imagined or far too clearly remembered, like the feel of a cold, clammy finger slowly tracing its way down a face or up a leg, over soft, downy, trembling skin-- Lord, even to her own, even to her own, even to her own - who could blame Them for wanting to sleep more easily at night.)
They’d let her out.
Just a bit.
Kept her on a leash.
And let her keep the photographs.
(When she’d come out of the old cell and into the new one) A room like all the others they gave to the Death-Eaters-who-weren’t-We’re-very-sorry-You’ll-be-well-looked-after (she’d screamed and thrashed against Their arms, and demanded, voice cracking and legs shaking, that they take her back home. They’d thrown her onto the bed, and stood back, wary, scared, unsure, and watched and she sobbed, trying to cry her heart out as her hair fell over her face and stuck to the tears and snot bleeding onto her skin. Her hands had clawed at her chest, nails torn and broken, even as she pulled her knees up to her chin, and turned towards the wall.)
(She’d stayed there for four days.)
And when she uncurled, like a silverfish cautiously venturing out from a stack of old, yellow books, she’d seen the photographs, like, squatting, grinning toads. Perhaps it had been some well-meaning fool, trying to make the place more homely. But Narcissa was sure it was not. She could feel it, in the way they watched her, in the spaces of white between the charmed paper that she couldn’t quite sink into (put together tight enough that one could jump to the other, could take a flying leap across brick and paint and empty air full of dust, and land on the shiny ground right next to him); she was sure it wasn’t some kind soul who’d racked up pictures of the dead around her.
When she sat quietly (there wasn’t much else to do, apart from the embroidery They left her, and it left bright red spots all over Their clean upholstery), she could almost feel the crazed breathing of the no-more-a-mother who’d held the photographs, run her damp fingers over the faces of her son and husband; could almost touch her as she walked back and forth across the room, putting the birthday right here and the tender moment right up in that corner there; could almost smell the old chemicals left on her hands from leafing through boxes and boxes of the things.
She could hear her crying at night, and cursing; Narcissa could taste the bile that rose up in her throat each morning when she woke, and knew again (andagainandagainandagain, a broken chain banging against the ground).
And her husband too.
Within a few days of each other.
One could say it was fate - two mirror images of each other, linked in life as in death. As if some crone, busily spinning wool that wound off into the dark, foggy distance, had wound together two fibres and hadn’t bothered to pull them apart, so that the older, ivory was wound about and through the newer gold-tinted white, in a stranglehold that kept firm till the metaphysical scissors were put to good, sharp use.
Narcissa, when she followed that particular metaphor further than perhaps was healthy, liked to think that the gold came from her - a brighter, more sun-filled type of pale, perhaps. She allowed herself that small vanity - that while Lucius had been all silver and hard, she was the gold. Soft. Malleable. Useless, apart from decorative purposes. Unless one was a vengeful God with an irritating, regal thorn in the side (she always liked to think the king had actually died).
And what did that make her son? White gold? Or maybe some kind of brittle alloy that, when dropped onto flagstones from a window high up, would shatter, pieces flying off into the shrubbery, into the cracks in the ground, or under the feet of bored passer-bys so that it was ground into only so much dust.
If she could, she would lie on those flagstones, feeling the heartbeats of ants, and rub that dust into herself, so deep into her pores that it would never wash out; lick the last bitter traces of it and feel it settle into the grooves of her teeth; and walk proudly, knowing that she carried her son’s grime beneath her skin.
She had a window. She sat at it, hair let out and wafting in the breeze, and remembered the witch who’d kept another blonde in her tower, and even climbed up each day to kiss her sourly on the lips (the Muggles got a different version).When the prince came tried to steal her precious girl away, she’d been so heartbroken that she’d cast the girl out. And the girl, having no other option, married the prince, and got fat with his children, even as she dreamed of long, grey hair wound around her, and sharp fingers tracing over her skin and between her legs. Her great-grandmother had whispered it to her when she was young, and explained in greater detail when she was older, just as her great-grandmother had done to her, a chain tracing back to that first blonde.
She’d never have a great-granddaughter now, and she thought that was rather a good thing, all things considered. After all, when one had started having conversations with teapots, it did suggest that the care of children was somewhat beyond one’s capabilities.
She’d turn it into a regular tea party, soon, and include the cups and saucers, so they didn’t feel excluded. Maybe the milk jug, as well, although it did tend to be horrendously rude; and when she smashed it down as she did at the end of each talk, the white shards snuck into every corner of the room, the soggy milk scurrying after it.
As she plumped the pillows one day, in some attempt to be the housewife she’d never had the chance to be, she remembered what it had felt like to hold a cushion over a man’s face. It was embroidered with patterns of autumn leaves, picked out in gold, and she’d watched the fabric shift and twist as he writhed under it, flailing against the spell’s binding, so that it looked as if the leaves were falling through a curling wind. At the end, as he lay blue, bloated and still, she’d turned the cushion over, only to throw it away in disgust when she saw how the underside had been ruined and rent by gnashing teeth, and screams.
That had been the first man she’d killed, when she was 17, and the stupid mudblood had come for revenge against her father. The old man hadn’t been home, but it had been the work of a moment to flick her wand and watch him flick back against the sofa. She’d let him struggle and plea with her for a few minutes; but when he started to appeal to her better nature (he was sure that one had to lie somewhere beneath the soft hair and dress and hard grey eyes) she’d become irritated, and had shut him up with the cushion.
She regretted it later - the autumn leaves had been her favourite.
Leaves, leaves, falling leaves…leaving. Left. The leaf left. The left leaf. The leaf on the left stays, but the right leaf leaves. It leaves, all the leaves leave, one by one and say goodbye to the sun, the colour of autumn leaves as it sets.
Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense…it sounded good in a song, when she sang it to Draco, and he’d laughed, and tried to grab the hair falling into his face. He hadn’t grown much yet, and he thought it a splendid toy, especially when the hairy person got an angry look on their face, as Lucius always did.
Lucius had loved him, and her, and he did want the best for them all…but the best for them all invariably meant a much larger all, one that wanted to ensure that only they, a special They, were left…but times changed, and her own side (her own blood) fell like so many autumn leaves, stomped into the muddy as winter rains fell, while a different They stood the test of time.
They even gave her her own room.
There was a painting of a mouse above the desk, a Muggle thing, without any twitch in its nose or sickening wriggle of its tail. Her son, aged five, had unquestionably picked one out of a trap and followed her outside to set it out in the garden; but two years later, she had been left without an answer when Draco had asked why one had to be kind to mice, when Daddy used mice bits in potions. Narcissa had let him do what he wanted with the creature, and only when she later found the small, limp corpse that she had felt something break inside of her, like a snapped string smashing back against smooth, polished amber wood (it was never the same).
Narcissa sat in the chair, by the desk, and took up the quill in her hand (more than feather light, she could see it in her head, even if she couldn’t feel it). And there, on the solid wood, she wrote in spider-tracery the story, this way and that: of a sentimental time here and a Christmas there; of trying to draw one back and not the let the other go; of childhood falling back with a bruised knee while the pretend-grown up stretched his arms towards a bright, green light; of failing that which should come most naturally.
whoeveryouwant7 , who requested a character study of Narcissa, with her reflecting upon the death of both husband and son. Admittedly, it's become a bit motherhood-oriented, but that may just be because I'm a bit overly maternal *cough*andbecauseneitherarestraight*cough*. Anyhow. I hope that I've done it justice. I don't know where the Rapunzel stuff came from, but I may yet expand on it. And I couldn't resist a Great Gatsby reference, sorry :P (I couldn't find my own copy, either, and had to resort to Google...oh, the horrors of misplacing books...I may have to clean my room properly.)
Also - Corpse Bride mood theme! *g*
Title: For a five year old
Summary: They let her have a room to herself.
Rating: PG-13
Words: 1976
For a five year old
A snail is climbing up the window-sill
Into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see and I explain
That it would be unkind to leave it there:
It might crawl to the floor; we must take care
That no one squashes it. You understand,
And carry it outside, with careful hand,
To eat a daffodil.
I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
Your gentleness is moulded still by words
From me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
From me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
Your closest relatives and who purveyed
The harshest kind of truth to many another,
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
And we are kind to snails.
-- Fleur Adcock
They let her have a room to herself. At the very tip of the spire, whitewashed and bare, apart from a few photos that were spelled to stay still. Her very own ivory tower.
They had sent her to Azkaban at first, and she’d sat there, feeling her bones calcify, and wondering just how long it would take for her to become a fossil, sitting on the damp prison floor until the ants came and carted her away grain by grain.
(An ant’s nest of her, full of nooks and crannies and life scuttling down the crooked corridors of her. She could almost feel the little insects, brainless, moving through her veins and into her brains, carrying her away one piece at a time.)
She was looking forwards to it, really, that gradual oblivion, where she could forget without knowing she’d ever remembered, the same way a long, white, dead beach never remembers that it was soaring cliffs of ravaged stone, singing battle cries to the wind as it fought a perpetual war with the waves pounding angrily, darkly on its face (a Japanese painting, black ink spilt over the page, sharp, curling seas and dark water spinningspinning, catching her and pulling her in, pushing her against the black cliff, crashing and crashing, till the water ran burgundy with her wine.)
(Now, just bones.)
She had looked forwards to it. But then They (always They, that took them) grew a heart and lost a spine, and said it was cruel, she shouldn’t be kept locked away by the sea, in the dark, with the damp, in the stone, where she might languish, forgotten for crimes she didn’t do. It wasn’t right, They said, for her to suffer, when she hadn’t done anything, when she had just been the wife, the mother, and not the Death Eater. Just the mother of a murder(er). No, They said, it wasn’t fair. They couldn’t live with themselves, knowing she was in there - sick and tired of fighting and of dying, They couldn’t even bear to have her cold soul on their conscience.
(Their children had so many nightmares, sleepless twisting hours where they screamed out against terrors half-imagined or far too clearly remembered, like the feel of a cold, clammy finger slowly tracing its way down a face or up a leg, over soft, downy, trembling skin-- Lord, even to her own, even to her own, even to her own - who could blame Them for wanting to sleep more easily at night.)
They’d let her out.
Just a bit.
Kept her on a leash.
And let her keep the photographs.
(When she’d come out of the old cell and into the new one) A room like all the others they gave to the Death-Eaters-who-weren’t-We’re-very-sorry-You’ll-be-well-looked-after (she’d screamed and thrashed against Their arms, and demanded, voice cracking and legs shaking, that they take her back home. They’d thrown her onto the bed, and stood back, wary, scared, unsure, and watched and she sobbed, trying to cry her heart out as her hair fell over her face and stuck to the tears and snot bleeding onto her skin. Her hands had clawed at her chest, nails torn and broken, even as she pulled her knees up to her chin, and turned towards the wall.)
(She’d stayed there for four days.)
And when she uncurled, like a silverfish cautiously venturing out from a stack of old, yellow books, she’d seen the photographs, like, squatting, grinning toads. Perhaps it had been some well-meaning fool, trying to make the place more homely. But Narcissa was sure it was not. She could feel it, in the way they watched her, in the spaces of white between the charmed paper that she couldn’t quite sink into (put together tight enough that one could jump to the other, could take a flying leap across brick and paint and empty air full of dust, and land on the shiny ground right next to him); she was sure it wasn’t some kind soul who’d racked up pictures of the dead around her.
When she sat quietly (there wasn’t much else to do, apart from the embroidery They left her, and it left bright red spots all over Their clean upholstery), she could almost feel the crazed breathing of the no-more-a-mother who’d held the photographs, run her damp fingers over the faces of her son and husband; could almost touch her as she walked back and forth across the room, putting the birthday right here and the tender moment right up in that corner there; could almost smell the old chemicals left on her hands from leafing through boxes and boxes of the things.
She could hear her crying at night, and cursing; Narcissa could taste the bile that rose up in her throat each morning when she woke, and knew again (andagainandagainandagain, a broken chain banging against the ground).
And her husband too.
Within a few days of each other.
One could say it was fate - two mirror images of each other, linked in life as in death. As if some crone, busily spinning wool that wound off into the dark, foggy distance, had wound together two fibres and hadn’t bothered to pull them apart, so that the older, ivory was wound about and through the newer gold-tinted white, in a stranglehold that kept firm till the metaphysical scissors were put to good, sharp use.
Narcissa, when she followed that particular metaphor further than perhaps was healthy, liked to think that the gold came from her - a brighter, more sun-filled type of pale, perhaps. She allowed herself that small vanity - that while Lucius had been all silver and hard, she was the gold. Soft. Malleable. Useless, apart from decorative purposes. Unless one was a vengeful God with an irritating, regal thorn in the side (she always liked to think the king had actually died).
And what did that make her son? White gold? Or maybe some kind of brittle alloy that, when dropped onto flagstones from a window high up, would shatter, pieces flying off into the shrubbery, into the cracks in the ground, or under the feet of bored passer-bys so that it was ground into only so much dust.
If she could, she would lie on those flagstones, feeling the heartbeats of ants, and rub that dust into herself, so deep into her pores that it would never wash out; lick the last bitter traces of it and feel it settle into the grooves of her teeth; and walk proudly, knowing that she carried her son’s grime beneath her skin.
She had a window. She sat at it, hair let out and wafting in the breeze, and remembered the witch who’d kept another blonde in her tower, and even climbed up each day to kiss her sourly on the lips (the Muggles got a different version).When the prince came tried to steal her precious girl away, she’d been so heartbroken that she’d cast the girl out. And the girl, having no other option, married the prince, and got fat with his children, even as she dreamed of long, grey hair wound around her, and sharp fingers tracing over her skin and between her legs. Her great-grandmother had whispered it to her when she was young, and explained in greater detail when she was older, just as her great-grandmother had done to her, a chain tracing back to that first blonde.
She’d never have a great-granddaughter now, and she thought that was rather a good thing, all things considered. After all, when one had started having conversations with teapots, it did suggest that the care of children was somewhat beyond one’s capabilities.
She’d turn it into a regular tea party, soon, and include the cups and saucers, so they didn’t feel excluded. Maybe the milk jug, as well, although it did tend to be horrendously rude; and when she smashed it down as she did at the end of each talk, the white shards snuck into every corner of the room, the soggy milk scurrying after it.
As she plumped the pillows one day, in some attempt to be the housewife she’d never had the chance to be, she remembered what it had felt like to hold a cushion over a man’s face. It was embroidered with patterns of autumn leaves, picked out in gold, and she’d watched the fabric shift and twist as he writhed under it, flailing against the spell’s binding, so that it looked as if the leaves were falling through a curling wind. At the end, as he lay blue, bloated and still, she’d turned the cushion over, only to throw it away in disgust when she saw how the underside had been ruined and rent by gnashing teeth, and screams.
That had been the first man she’d killed, when she was 17, and the stupid mudblood had come for revenge against her father. The old man hadn’t been home, but it had been the work of a moment to flick her wand and watch him flick back against the sofa. She’d let him struggle and plea with her for a few minutes; but when he started to appeal to her better nature (he was sure that one had to lie somewhere beneath the soft hair and dress and hard grey eyes) she’d become irritated, and had shut him up with the cushion.
She regretted it later - the autumn leaves had been her favourite.
Leaves, leaves, falling leaves…leaving. Left. The leaf left. The left leaf. The leaf on the left stays, but the right leaf leaves. It leaves, all the leaves leave, one by one and say goodbye to the sun, the colour of autumn leaves as it sets.
Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense…it sounded good in a song, when she sang it to Draco, and he’d laughed, and tried to grab the hair falling into his face. He hadn’t grown much yet, and he thought it a splendid toy, especially when the hairy person got an angry look on their face, as Lucius always did.
Lucius had loved him, and her, and he did want the best for them all…but the best for them all invariably meant a much larger all, one that wanted to ensure that only they, a special They, were left…but times changed, and her own side (her own blood) fell like so many autumn leaves, stomped into the muddy as winter rains fell, while a different They stood the test of time.
They even gave her her own room.
There was a painting of a mouse above the desk, a Muggle thing, without any twitch in its nose or sickening wriggle of its tail. Her son, aged five, had unquestionably picked one out of a trap and followed her outside to set it out in the garden; but two years later, she had been left without an answer when Draco had asked why one had to be kind to mice, when Daddy used mice bits in potions. Narcissa had let him do what he wanted with the creature, and only when she later found the small, limp corpse that she had felt something break inside of her, like a snapped string smashing back against smooth, polished amber wood (it was never the same).
Narcissa sat in the chair, by the desk, and took up the quill in her hand (more than feather light, she could see it in her head, even if she couldn’t feel it). And there, on the solid wood, she wrote in spider-tracery the story, this way and that: of a sentimental time here and a Christmas there; of trying to draw one back and not the let the other go; of childhood falling back with a bruised knee while the pretend-grown up stretched his arms towards a bright, green light; of failing that which should come most naturally.