The camisole had slipped down, off Narcissa's shoulder, but she rolled it lithely and only sighed a little. In the front, it sagged down to reveal the puckered, darkened flesh of one nipple, standing out starkly in comparison to her pale breasts and arm.
"Now," she said, and her lips, painted a perfect red, curled into a small pout as she frowned in concentration, eyes flickering under dark shadow and manicured brows. "Now."
Draco watched her. She sat erect, her back perfectly straight, her cape hanging off one arm and camisole on the other, breast and dark eyeshadow and pursed red lips. With one hand she drew back the lacy edge of the camisole, revealing the skin of one thigh, which immediately turned to gooseflesh in the cool air. This skin was not so porcelain as her breasts or her arm – it was frightened-looking, if skin could be frightened, and mottled with red below the surface, as a man who gradually gets angrier and angrier or drunker and drunker. Her neck was bent at an odd angle, perpendicular to the slope of her spine, as she concentrated upon the revealed patch of flesh. Her brow did not furrow, preserving her beauty and poise.
"It doesn't have to hurt always, darling," she said, a little too wantonly, and with the other hand she cocked the thick syringe, running her crimson nails up and down its steel length and coiling around its wide girth.
Draco leaned a bit over, watched sullenly, his blond locks tumbling into his eyes - one of which was blackened. He rubbed at it thoughtlessly as he watched, and with the other hand stroked the parapet behind Narcissa's buttocks, his small fingers sometimes brushing against her barely clothed flesh, at which she shivered and said, too sharply, "Draco, attend to me."
He attended, watching as the double needles turned the skin of her thigh down, like a sour mouth, and how two pinpricks of red swelled up where they were poised to enter. Narcissa hesitated only minutely, and then she pressed them in, her whole body expanding as she breathed in, moving towards the inward motion of the needles, and then pressing the end of the syringe, swiftly and hard. He licked his tiny lips, which were dry, and his eyes followed the slow glug and gurgle of the transparent fluid through the tips of the needles into his mother's leg.
Finally, after what seemed like ages, Narcissa delicately drew back the syringe. The two red spots remained, however, and a green, oozy substance was leaking from them. Narcissa's eyes widened just perceptibly, and she addressed Draco in a slightly slurred voice:
"Hurry, darling, before it wastes."
Draco leaned forward more, his chest to his mother's bare leg, and with one finger traced away at the pinprick holes, lifting his finger to his mouth and then back to her leg several times until the green substance was gone and even the blood, too, had stopped welling up. At the bare base of his throat he could feel his mother's skin through the thin camisole, and smell her sadness. The mixture of fluids on her thigh left him with a metallic tinge in his mouth, a fuzzy tongue and a slight headache, but he sat up and pushed at his hair and looked to his mother for approval.
The door adjacent to his mother's chambers creaked open, and without looking (which was not permitted) Draco knew it was his father, and he knew that now Lucius was stepping noiselessly across the polished cherrywood floors, almost gliding in his satiny black robes, and then there was a breath on the back of his neck, and a presence.
Narcissa's head did not move, either, but she said,
"Darling, go and clean up your father's mess, and then you may go to the nursery."
Draco rose, tripping over his own feet, and bowed messily to Lucius, whose face he did not see but could imagine; it was grave and vaguely approving, with just the slightest flush of arousal in the white stone cheeks. He followed the glossy floors out of his mother's chambers and knelt in her private bath, where his father had stood by the door and spilled his seed – off-white on creamy marble. For a minute, with the potion swirling in his head, he dropped to his knees, but some of it soaked through the fabric covering his knees and he winced at the coldness and went to the cabinet to fetch solvent and a towel.
Once the floor was clean, Draco waved the lights off and crept back into the bedroom to leave by the other door. His father lay on the bed, still clothed, and his mother was suspended in the air above him, feet crossed as if crucifed, her hands folded in front of her lap. She was still wearing the camisole, and underneath it, her skin glowed a very light shade of green.
***
Back in the nursery, sometime later, a house-elf approached him.
"Master Draco," it squeaked, "your mother said you required company, and Dobby - "
But Draco lashed out at the snivelling thing, flinging a reddened little fist in its general direction, and flopped back down on his luxurious bed to brood, blond locks tumbling in their own little tantrum over his tear-streaked cheeks.