Malfoys are rich, are proud, are powerful, but Blacks are old, standing strong throughout the centuries, and it is to this she clings in the twilight, the only driftwood keeping her from drowning, the only lifeline, the only way. He stands in the clearing, back straight, nose lifted, as she would have done before. Not now.
He pulls her down. He pulls her with him along a road which leads to folly, a road which leads to death, and she spreads her fingers across her belly and she is terrified.
The gathering is small, but not small enough, and every hooded man in the woods seems a threat to her, to her and to her unborn child. Her eyes flicker from mask to mask, never seeing faces. She can guess who is behind them, but she can not know.
Lucius kneels before it, it, the thing, the Dark Lord, the unnamed. Narcissa feels dizzy. His hair is glinting in the moonlight, she notices, as if from far away. Silver-gold, glinting in the moonlight as it glinted in the candlelight the first time she saw him, but frazzled, not the perfect slick crown it had been at eleven.
Eleven is so long ago. Worlds ago, lives ago, before this war and this Dark Lord consumed her hope and her family and her future. Bellatrix, who sat laughing beside Lucius and winking at Narcissa as she waited eagerly to join them at the Slytherin table, stands laughing beside it and winking at Lucius, face lined but determined, and Narcissa is not waiting eagerly anymore.
His face shone then, bright with mirth at her sister's jokes and his housemates' idiocy, and she fell in love like a pebble through water, quick and silent and never resurfacing. Blacks stand strong, but Malfoys enchant, and Narcissa was under Lucius' spell from the moment she entered the Great Hall, under the spell of his hair, his face, under the spell of the man he became through the following years. With every day, she fell in love again, deeper, never resurfacing.
But this hair is different and this face is different and this man is different. Narcissa hugs herself and barely breathes. She presses her lips together and dreads as sleeves are rolled, wands are pointed, curses are whispers. Ink unfurls on her husband's arm, slithering when it shouldn't, and her throat constricts, and her baby kicks. What have you done? she thinks. Oh, what have you done to us?
After, at home, he pulls her close, cradles her neck, whispers into her ear. It's all for us, he whispers. So we'll come through, the Malfoys and the Blacks. The little one. For us. He palms her budding stomach. It's all for us.
The bile rises, and Narcissa wonders when her enchanting Malfoy became a fool. Riches, and pride, and power, but he has no understanding, Lucius, and she alone knows that they will fall because of what he has done this night. She knows with a certainty, but what's done is done, and now it is only forward. Fear threatens to consume her.
Blacks stand strong, she thinks, and lets him hold her.