[I tend to write these things without thought or planning. It just happens. And it usually involves Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange. Wheee! Read and review, if you please.
Copyrights are the usual. Story and idea mine, characters are JK's.]
If you finally got the world, what would you do with it?
Thus was the musing of Lucius. When he was younger, when he was foolish – and in a way, he still is – he had wanted the world. He was not different from many other young men in this case, really, but after awhile he actually thought about it.
His friend Bellatrix had brought it up.
"What would you do with it once you got it, Lucius?" she'd asked, drinking her drink of ice-cold pomegranate juice, her eyes shadowed by a frayed straw hat. She'd looked very normal. "If you had the world in your hands, what would you do?"
"I don't know," he'd said.
"I mean," said Bella, dipping her finger in the glass and pushing all the ice cubes around and making them clink, her long black hair soaking up the sunrays, "there's not a lot of fun, owning the world. Because then that would mean you'd own everywhere, and when you own everywhere, you can't go anyplace relevant, because all anyone wants to do these days is leave what they have. Silly, huh?"
"Yes."
"And, it's an awful lot of responsibility, owning the world. You'd have to take care of everything. Do you still want the world, Lucius?"
He'd tugged thoughtfully at his hair, "I don't know."
"I think," said Bella, taking off her hat and fanning herself with it. Around her summer crickets chirped, and dried grass rustled in a never-been-there wind about the blanket they sat upon, "that before saying you want the world, you should define what a world is."
He'd laughed at her, "And why is that?"
"Because every world is different," she stated, wisely. She put her hat on his head and basked in the sunlight, "I guess if you wanted the world, that'd be okay, but maybe it'd be best if you didn't want a big world. Just a small one. Maybe everyone gets the world, because it's their world. Do you want your world, or that and everyone else's?"
He'd told her, again, that he didn't know.
Not many people know what they want when they're younger. Lucius didn't, and Bellatrix certainly didn't know either. They just thought they knew, which was sort of the same thing, but really, it wasn't, in the end.
Lucius has the world now. In a sense. He has a wife he doesn't love – not really. He loves Narcissa, but never in the way he loved Bellatrix, all those years ago, with the passion that never was and the heartbreak that never was either. He loves Narcissa in the way someone loves a best friend, and she loves him back the same way.
And they have a son. Lucius is very proud of his son, because he, too, wants the world everyone else has – he doesn't need it, but wants it. Lucius loves this about Draco, because the world isn't something you can give to another, or something you can really own, or anything like that.
The world is just you, and life. And Draco will learn that, and Lucius will be happy.
Bellatrix doesn't have a world. She used to. But not anymore.
Her world was taken, and this is saddening; because Bella did have an awfully nice world.
Now she just has the dark, and her thoughts. And a cell that's always cold, even in the summer; even in summers where in the past she'd sit on a blanket and drink pomegranate juice.