Among the Narcissi
Spry, wry, and grey as these March sticks,
Percy bows, in his blue peajacket, among the narcissi.
He is recuperating from something on the lung.
He studies her, a wash of a woman in the bright silver light of a stony day. Every afternoon they walk the yards to acquire a chill, and then adjourn to the house for a cup of weak tea (orange pekoe; a watered-down sunshine) in the library. Already her bare arms have the mottled flush of cold, but the fine blonde hairs there have yet to prick up with shivering. Another few minutes, he thinks, before he can suggest they retire. She becomes vexed if he speaks too soon.
He is more anxious than vexed at her habitual reluctance, more eager than annoyed. It is early spring, and while the faint warmth (hesitant) beginning to leak into the air is preferable to the recent enfolding ice of winter (her frozen wolfish den), the weakest borias is sufficient to stir in the marrow of his bones a flutter, an echo of pain stemming a shudder of revulsion and memory.
He wonders, tries to remember, when family ceased to matter.
The narcissi, too, are bowing to some big thing :
It rattles their stars on the green hill where Percy
Nurses the hardship of his stitches, and walks and walks.
She crouches at a patch of flowers, small and, by him, mistaken at first for the remnants of snow. In a second glance, it could be a grave - the sort of an ancient king, buried before stone came into grim fashion, and death was marked by life. This white widow has lost a husband, a son, a sister; the air of the family sepulchre is still fresh from mourning, and the imprints of her pallid knees remain in the unsettled earth. He thinks of her salt taste, grief-flavoured mouth and flesh that makes him both grimace and thirst. It is remarkable she has had only one child - or perhaps, within her saline womb, precious little can survive.
He knows she loved them dearly, her mate and her boy-child, her eldest sibling, and yet he cannot envision her as the nurturing matron, bestowing flurries of kisses upon sight of a skinned elbow; or mending a fractured ego with a supportive (well-manicured) hand, with soft (but firm) opposition to the offender of her spouse's pride.
It could be, he tells himself, circumstantial blindness.
There is dignity to this; there is a formality-
The flowers vivid as bandages, and the man mending.
They bow and stand : they suffer such attacks!
He thinks he recalls her (distinct, distorted, through thick glass) identically, although he knows (with vague, incontestible certainty) that the war must have changed her, must have slightly, solemnly buckled the marble pillar her tall form so resembles. Milky and fragile with heartbreak, others swan illness has befallen a once imperial queen; but she has never been his sovereign, and has always been sick. She is ignoble by no malady, pallid by no pestilent sorrow, but dirtied with colours so as to seem, by their misleading mixture, pristine. A monarch, no, she is not.
Were she a queen, he would not be here at this moment. Were she a queen, he would not have fain approached her ("Weatherby, ma'am," and she had nearly smiled) to offer his assistance to the dowager of an illustrious ministry whip. After all, family (his own: two dead; all lost) had long (de)ceased to matter by then. He had chosen his side, and it had coincided with hers, in the ruins of his beloved order.
In this ambiguous third party, third-person-perspective, unfortunately, disallows insight.
And the octogenarian loves the little flocks.
He is quite blue; the terrible wind tries his breathing.
The narcissi look up like children, quickly and whitely.
He has been too wicked once, and has been disowned. He has been too virtuous, and has been tortured (the shudder again; his bones are frost). Legitimate employ under an acquitted coconspirator; iniquitous labour beneath a woman found innocent. Percy Weasley is fundamentally guilty as uncharged.
It has not been long, but his brittle constitution is no match for the frigid spring today. He risks a hand upon her shoulder, and is almost surprised by the organic warmth of her. She inclines her head questioningly - not, he notices with some relief, accusingly, and is already rising when he prompts, "Inside, Narcissa?" (She can no longer stand 'Mrs. Malfoy'.)
(But against so much filthy white, the merit of Black can be seen. If he sees nothing else, he sees this. Family has ceased to matter.)