Lucius breathes evenly as he moves throughout the kitchen. Neatly tied over the fabric of his under robe, his sleeves rolled up to the elbow, is a black apron. Over the years, Lucius has seen a dozen enchantments for the household cook terrified of getting flour upon the fabric of their clothes, but he has always felt that an apron offers more than enough protection without the distraction of such little spells.
It is nearing three o'clock in the afternoon, so says the clock ticking over the counter, and before Lucius is a thick mound of dough. Dappled over his hands and his forearms are pieces of clinging flour and small flecks of the pastry dough before him, which he kneads with a silent and concentrated focus.
The only sound in the room is that of Lucius' own breaths, the hiss of air as he kneads it into the mixture, and loudest of all is the tick of the clock on the wall.
And then is the sound of fabric running against fabric behind him, from the doorway of the kitchen, and Lucius sighs.
Taking up a rolling pin, he dusts flour over its surface, and then he begins to roll out the short dough before him. The black marble of the counter's surface shows every instance of flour upon its clean, smooth sheen, and Lucius is aware that before he, Narcissa and Draco were forced out of their own home, it likely hadn't seen such attentions for one hundred years.
The Blacks, for the longest time, had retained the beautiful power of their bloodline, their magic, and even their remarkable fashion sense, but no house elf cooks with the artful focus a person can. They don't even taste the same way wizards do, Lucius has long known.
"Can I help you?" Lucius asks stiffly, setting the rolling pin neatly aside. With a well-sharpened knife, Lucius cuts out a perfect circle from the dough spread on the counter, and he places it into a pie dish that has been waiting, greased, for a few minutes on the kitchen side.
"I didn't realize you actually cooked," says the soothingly deep voice from the doorway, and Lucius presses his lips thinly together: it is hardly proper for a wizard of standing to roll his eyes in mixed company, and he will retain control over himself. "I suppose I ought have realized the veracity of such claims after so many years of hearing them."
"Lindon," Lucius murmurs, and although his voice is quiet, I can be heard very clearly within the perfect acoustic chamber of the kitchen at Grimmauld Place. "Have I ever so much as delicately implied any remote wish for your company?" Sartorius laughs, and Lucius hears him move into the room, taking a seat at the raised island in the middle of the room.
The kitchen in Malfoy Manor is far bigger than the one here, but it is homely and warm, and even with the fire crackling pleasantly at the edge of the room, the Black kitchen retains a dark and foreboding air.
"Where is your over-affectionate second?" Lucius asks. He has no wish to truly speak with Sartorius, but he would rather the conversation be dominated by Lucius' questions rather than the historian's.
"Spending some private time with Nymphadora Tonks," Lindon purrs, voice dripping with his usual salacious filth, and Lucius glares at the black tiles before him, making use of the rest of the pastry and cutting it into smaller circles for pies. One hardly ought waste such excess, after all, when good food might still be made. "So I thought I might spend some private time of my own with the…" Sartorius coughs, doing his best to mimic the delicacy and grace of a debutante. "With the master of the house, as it were." Lucius curls his lip, distaste pulling at him from within, and he turns to look at the younger man.
Sartorius sits at the counter in a set of the most ridiculous robes Lucius has ever seen on a man, slits baring the marble-pale flesh of Sartorius' hairless thighs beneath the fabric. The robes are cinched at the waist, intended to create the figure of an hourglass, and Sartorius' black dragonhide boots go up to his knee.
"Going out on the town, are we?" Lucius asks dryly, and he sets his pie casings upon the island so that he can look directly at the other man as he works. Sartorius is an arrogant man, but he does not dare disturb Lucius' work, and he places his hands neatly in his lap, watching Lucius' hands with an undisguised and unsettling fascination. Lucius ignores the way Sartorius' tongue darts from his mouth to wet his lips, and he takes his stewed fruit mix to pack within the pie casements.
"Maybe I'm dressed up all for you," Sartorius responds, his tones saccharine.
"What do you want?" Lucius asks, coldly, and Sartorius looks up at him. His grey eyes lose their sultry act, and when they do he merely looks intensely solemn, looking sadly out of his own skull like a wizard looking out of an unenchanted portrait. "You must be truly desperate to attempt a seduction of me, Lindon. We've established this pattern over so many years."
Sartorius taps his fingers upon the counter's edge, and he looks across the room, his expression painted with a melancholy of sorts. Lucius recalls the first time Sartorius had attempted his playful, perverted games, coming upon him in a deserted corridor of the sixth floor and baring his neck, whispering promises as if he could ever be of interest to a man like Lucius Malfoy. He had pouted, then, but it was not like this.
"Harry would never shy away from sacrifice, were it to bring about the end of the Dark Lord," Lindon says, and Lucius quietly sighs his understanding. He lays a lid upon the largest pie, neatly sealing the casement and carving a decoration in perfect symmetry in the dough, making the pattern on the surface of the peach pie. "He wouldn't, Lucius, you know-"
"You despised Divination at school, did you not, Lindon? Why place such significance in prophecy now?" Lucius does not speak of his own worries or his own anxieties: as a child, he studied the histories of every magic available for study at Hogwarts, Beauxbatons and Durmstrang, and he has known for the longest time that even the most plainly worded prophecy hides a thousand meanings.
Such knowledge did not stop him reading through the two prophecies involving Harry a dozen times over, until Narcissa had lit the paper aflame to stop him.
"I like the boy," Sartorius says, and Lucius feels some amusement in the utter puzzlement that weights his words. "Lucius-" He ceases to speak, and he looks down at the tray before him as Lucius places his creations upon it. "Hard times are coming for us all. I don't wish for them to sail in on the back of that boy's corpse." Lucius opens the oven, sliding two trays within, and then he neatly closes it again, taking up his wand and sweeping away the mess on the counters with a silent ease.
"Don't think on it," Lucius instructs, and Sartorius sets his mouth.
"Perhaps not as easy as it might sound," he says.
"Indeed not," Lucius agrees. "But one does what must be done." He loosens the tie at the back of his apron, drawing the black loop from around his neck and folding the cloth, setting it on a shelf in the island.
"Did Severus buy that for you? The apron?"
"Must you sabotage such a pleasant truce?" Lucius asks, arching an eyebrow at the decades-old bitterness, and Sartorius does pout, now. Lucius recalls the first time they'd met on the Hogwarts Express, how Sartorius had struck him as of perfect etiquette, so much more polite and controlled than their peers, but friendship can hardly be built on poise alone.
"Just a question," Sartorius says softly.
"A pointed one, at that." Lucius steps around the island in the centre of the kitchen and he looks down at Sartorius, his expression thoughtful. He reaches out, and when he touches the other man's face the historian encourages it, leaning into the brush of Lucius' thumb on his cheek. "My friendship with Severus is hardly your concern. Jealousy is unbecoming, Lindon. Particularly for an individual of your age."
"You're barely a month older than me."
"So you've always repeated." Sartorius leans his head into the cup of Lucius' palm, and when Lucius draws his hand away flour clings to his marble-pale features, until he wipes it away with a handkerchief conjured seemingly from nowhere. Merlin knows Sartorius can't fit anything into those ridiculously fashionable, tight sleeves. "You were joking, I hope, about Ms Tonks? She might be allowed numerous discrepancies, but to stoop to the sexual attentions of not only a witch, but a Mu-"
"Which of us, pray tell, is the one sabotaging our truce now?" Lucius chuckles, amused, and he takes a few steps back. Lindon Sartorius had never been an excellent wizard, but even now, spending his days with his nose always in books or dusty tombs, he retains a truly magical wit. "You don't truly think it's so terrible. What she and I do- we both know you're no different to Cecilia and I." When Lindon Sartorius approaches Lucius in private, it always leads back to one simple matter, and Lucius resents the urge in him to spit.
"On the contrary, Lindon, I have a wife and a child," Lucius says, stiffening his voice. "And at your age, you ought have the same."
"I would wager you never say things like that to Severus."
"You would lose your bet, Lindon. I say such things to Severus all the time." Lucius takes the knife he'd used to the cut the pastry, wiping it with a clean cloth. "And moreover, Severus is almost seven years our junior, as you well know. He has more time than you to find himself a wife." Lindon scoffs.
"I would no more be happy with a wife, Lucius, than I might be marrying a Dementor." Lucius slams his hand down, hard, on the counter top, and the sound rings loudly through the room, jolting Sartorius in his seat. The man's eyes go comically wide for a few moments, and his breaths speed some. Lucius' calculated movement to split the air had precisely the effect he'd wanted, and now he has Sartorius' full – if sulky – attention.
"When will you understand, Lindon, that the world has not been created to cater to your happiness? You truly think that if you're sarcastic enough in the presence of enough ministerial employees that they might allow you to flounce away with any man you like and make a husband of him?" He reaches out, drawing a well-manicured index finger down the centre of Lucius' chest, stopping in the centre of Lucius' sternum and moving ever so slightly to the left. The pad of Sartorius' index finger settles directly over Lucius' heart, and Lucius arches an eyebrow.
"I should like someone," Sartorius says, "like your Narcissa. Clever, attractive, proficient…"
"Female?"
"One must draw the line somewhere." Sartorius adjusts his position in his seat, crossing and uncrossing his legs, and then he says in the quietest voice Lucius has ever heard from him, "Would it truly be so awful, were I permitted peace with a man?"
"Your peace cannot overrule that of society's, Lindon," Lucius says, as if explaining a fact to a child – and in some ways, he knows that he is. "Why not concentrate on the boy? Channel your ridiculous particulars into his safety, his well-being, rather than your own. He is orphaned, alone, with the Dark Lord ready to take his life and others clamouring for his demise, and you whinge and groan because you can't kiss a man in Diagon Alley." Lindon's hand drops from Lucius' chest back to his own lap, and when Lucius draws away to remove the two trays from the stove and set them to cool on the counter top, he hears the quiet clack of heels on the kitchen floor.
"You oughtn't wear those, Nymphadora," Lucius says. "Young ladies oughtn't wear such things."
"I've never been called a young lady before," Tonks replies, apparently keeping her snarl as to her given name to herself.
"And moreover," Lucius continues, turning to regard her sternly, "You are clumsy enough when allowed the use of your own feet, without adding several inches to your heel. You ought return them to Ms Hayworth." Hayworth is barefoot and wearing a bath robe Lucius recognizes as belonging to Sartorius, tight enough on her modest chest that she seems almost well-endowed.
"Nah," Tonks says. "I like 'em." Scarcely a moment later, Tonks stumbles, and Sartorius catches her by the waist and places her upright once more. "What are you two chuckleheads talking about?"
"Pie," Sartorius replies, and when he reaches out to pluck one of the small fruit pies from the tray, Lucius doesn't slap his hand away. He breaks it in half between his fingers, a quiet cssh sounding from the breaking pastry, and as is his wont, he passes half of it to Hayworth. Lucius offers the tray to Tonks, who hesitates, seeming surprised, but then she does take one of the small pies and takes a bite from it.
Lucius looks at the glossy sheen of sweat still clinging to Hayworth's cheeks and the top of her chest, and although Tonks lacks the same obvious signs of exertion, she seems slightly out of breath. Disgusted, Lucius turns away from them to wash his hands, and when he looks back Hayworth is slightly smug, the amusement showing on her features. Lucius desperately wishes he could cast her from this hellhole he is forced to occupy.
"You cooking anything else?" Tonks asks.
"No," Lucius replies, and he takes out a plate for the patterned pie and its pretty, golden-brown surface. When he sweeps from the kitchen and into the dining room, Narcissa is just entering, and he lays his hand upon her waist, kissing her soundly on the lips. "Peach pie, my dearest. Your favourite."
"I could hear the two of them," she says distastefully, "Until I shut the door."
"I despise this place, these people."
"As do I."
"They're incessant."
"Incompetent."
"Depraved."
"Hypocrite," Narcissa murmurs playfully, touching her thumb to Lucius' mouth, and he chuckles, leaning to kiss her again. "Will you cut me a slice?"
"For you? Always." He sets the plate upon the table, and he takes Narcissa's hand in his own, thumbing over the pretty skin of her palm. They stand together for the longest time before he leaves to retrieve a knife, holding her to him and feeling her weight against him.
"Are you quite well?" Narcissa asks, spreading her hand over Lucius' chest, and she hums quietly, tapping his sternum with her thumb. "You don't seem it."
"I heard Sartorius' perversions, and then Hayworth and Tonks'. It's rather a lot for one afternoon." Narcissa sighs, leaning forwards and putting her forehead against his chest, her hands on Lucius' hips and holding him tightly. "Might I read to you, Narcissa?" Lucius allows his thumb to play through an errant curl on her head, pulling it away from her fringe. "A short story from that awful publication you subscribe to."
"Featherfuls is not an awful publication," Narcissa chides, but her tone is light and airy. "Or you would not ask, my love, to read from it so often. Come, let us to the library. The fire is lit." Lucius smiles, and he follows her lead towards the doorway, but then he freezes, still holding her hand. "Lucius?" Narcissa prompts.
Lucius reaches out, taking the plate from the table, and Narcissa giggles like a girl as he follows her forth.