A/N: No profit is being made from this work of fiction, nor is malice intended. All characters copyright J.K. Rowling, distributers, and Warner Brothers Studios as well as all others legally entitled to a slice of the juicy Hogwarts pie.
Story focuses on the Malfoys. Narcissa is probably non-cannon, but we know little enough about her to allow this to conceivably count as her true history. This may be expanded, but for now it's just a one-shot until I figure out how to incorporate more of my favorite HP family.
Introduction
My mother stood beside my father many years after he had turned and walked away from her. Such things a gentle woman bears: children, diamonds, and loneliness. She drank sometimes to take the sting out of it, but mostly she drank to stop her questioning, to stop the buzzing hypotheticals coursing through her brain.
It had been her grand-father that showed her how to drink covertly, and her mother had taught her resignation, but who it was that taught her redemption, I did not learn as a child. And when I did, I sometimes wished I hadn't. She played the piano as if speaking to a lover far away. Her fingers danced, pounded out rhythms like a Morse Code, and strange music, music never exactly like anything ever played, emanated through that old back parlor. There were three pianos in the house. The majestic black one that lorded over the sitting room and entertained guests with moderately paced diddies. There was the one in the Music Room, a more modest brown baby grand upon which generations of Malfoys had labored at, accompanying the juvenile efforts of their siblings on violin or harp. But the one my mother loved had been her mother's, and sometimes I could swear I smelled magnolias and salt seeping out of the ancient shuddering wood. That Back Parlor was her domain, always, and it was there that she bled herself out upon the keys, desperate to find some release. And when at last she found the emotions too grave for her alone to shoulder, she turned to me, taught me to play.
In the piano I found that same emotion that she left. The chipped ivory keys loaned me all the shades of experience- and I could hardly fathom them. I flung them spitefully back at her.
Despite my virtuosity, I was a difficult pupil. I felt over my mother a faint scent of resignation, and like my father, I grew to hate her for that weakness. Her presence enraged me in some completely irrational way. She was worthless, and yet she persisted to associate with me! She was all but dead, but she continued walking about and speaking. Why couldn't she just give up the fight and lie down?
She would often ask herself the same question, and my attempts at bringing her any closer to a glorious defeat were a miserable failure. Looking back, I see that my mother was never really as broken as she wanted to be. She was merely a decent woman, the type of person my father hated. She bled to be noble, respectable, and calm. Inside she remained a wild bare-footed Southern girl, too dirty to be beautiful, too beautiful to shut out the world. She failed to gain my father's affection, and she knew that inside she was not and never would be a goddess that he might respect. So she tried to hide from herself.
She cloaked herself in perfume and fake accents, and on her piano tried to drain that evil inside, blunt her thoughts and desires. My abuses were not the type she wanted; they raised her pique and drowned her in alcohol. I only served to elevate her musical zealotry.
My music lessons stopped when she became too sick to fight. She had no energy left to play, or laugh, or love, or even to hate. The sickness draped our windows in sterilized black linen, shut out the constant movement of daylight. That summer, all I could hear was silence in our cold white house, and the sounds in my own head.
I was stuck with half of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor circling through my head, my pudgy 7-year-old fingers unable to puzzle out the next notes. I repeated the pieces I knew ceaselessly, caught by the feelings of abandonment my mother knew so well. Sometimes, I felt as if I was channeling her spirit, that the piano had somehow taken on a life of its own and changed me into a conduit of its tortured history. I would have sold my sold to the devil to deafen the sounds in my head, had my soul not already been sold long ago by the sleight of my father's ego.
So I was forced to the truth in that dark back-parlor. I always found it impossible to lie to myself, because HE refused to grant me that respite. HE saw our pain, our soft inequities, and our blustering ego that we tried to cloak ourselves in. The dark lord drew my father's ego to his will and wound it about his eyes so that he was left to run head-long along the path of his master's will, all along believing himself to have no master. My mother's softness was split, and parts of her soul ossified while others were forced beneath to slumber while she created in his words the meaning she craved. But to me, He offered no respite. In nightmare's I hear his slight laugh, I feel his eyes reach out towards me to share in the hidden joke he planted above the head of his minions.
I played my music because I knew of nothing else to do. Somehow, though I desired her destruction, I was more desperate without her. I told myself that I had ought to practice my playing, that if I did not she would be angry. Somewhere along the way, it became a bargain or a prayer of sorts, in which I told myself that if I continued my art, she would return to me, that the light would once again invade our empty house, that we would find the tongues we had lost so long ago.
I looked for honesty amongst the rooms of our manor. I looked for honesty amongst the music of so many masters. But I could not have recognized it anyway. All I knew was my own world. And all I heard was my music, a symphony of frightened notes crushed out between my ever-constricting polarities, that tune known as The Fire of the House of Malfoy.