THE PERFUMES OF ARABIA

By A. Bolina

Summary: One-Shot The Eater of Life had a wife. Where is she now? Chronicles the events leading up to and the night Narcissa Malfoy murders her son's wife. Told from Lucius Malfoy's myopic perspective.

Disclaimer: Characters and the Harry Potter universe are the property of J.K. Rowling and co. Seems there are, rather accidentally, quite a few references to Shakespearean ideas as well. Only the writing is mine.

"The grief that does not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break."

(Macbeth. IV.iii.209-210)

Her steady decline into self-pity and despair was not something I failed to notice. Her meaningless and unfounded state of perpetual languor was repulsive to me. From the very first year of our marriage she made it clear she was unwilling, or perhaps unable, to accept the life of luxury I offered her. Her disdain for fineness, for the role her beauty made her born to play, was unacceptable. At the time when I first demonstrated this, she still had enough passion in her to enable her to respond.

"I am not and have never been a woman to be 'kept,' Lucius," she told me, attempting a dangerous look from under her eyes.

I made it clear to her just how little control or say she had over the matter. We were married, and she was to be my wife until either she wilted away in repugnant self-pity or until her perpetual gloom and anguish sucked from me my will to live. I vowed to not allow the latter to be what finally liberated us from our hateful condition of marital unhappiness.

Shortly after we stopped sharing a bedroom, she took up a strange and discomforting habit. During the night she would leave her chambers and shuffle along the hall. I never saw her, for I had reached the point by now of carefully keeping her blind to any attention I might be forced to bestow upon her, but I could hear her, passing through our vast halls, intermittently stopping for a moment in front of the doorway into my chambers. She never dared come in, though on some occasions I would be certain her hand had hesitated just as she laid a delicate finger on the cool metal of the doorknob.

In the mornings following, she usually descended from her rooms to inflict her presence upon me. On a rare occasion she would not appear, but the house elves would insist she was not in her rooms. I came to understand that she never left the house during these nocturnal escapades but rather simply roamed the halls in a state of discontent.

I had been sitting in my study, going over our accounts and vindictively determining how much of a waste of money she was, despite the fact that she could not have made a significant dent into our, no my fortune even if she had attempted to for a year. I had leaned back in my chair just as one of her spectral hands brushed my neck. Before she could even scream I had her back flush against the drapes behind my desk where she must have been hiding, one hand on her throat and another pointing my wand into her temple.

She was pathetic looking. I knew without a doubt that she had not bothered to comb her hair or change her robes in well over a week. Her breathing was just as ragged in fear as mine was in anger. I could not bring myself to look away from her even when her gaze gave in and lowered under my dominating presence.

I shoved myself off of her and turned away in disgust.

"You are making yourself ridiculous, Narcissa," I all but whispered.

I tensed under the carefully placed touch she bestowed upon my back then.

"Give me a child, Lucius," she pleaded with a degree of deceptive calm in her voice, "At the very least, give me that."

And so I gave her a child. It would have been necessary eventually anyways, and I held a faint hope in my heart that a son, and it would be a son, might distract her from me, might allow me to return to the importance my work carried at that time.

The endeavor produced the desired effect. During her pregnancy and in the months that followed, she ignored me much as I ignored her. Even after the fall of the Dark Lord she paid little to no attention to the events that followed. But it ultimately became necessary for me to cultivate in her some semblance of a proper wife if only to ensure that I put my lifestyle were my money was in the years I would be forced to dedicate towards rebuilding an image thought proper by the wizarding Pure of Blood at the time.

She submitted without complaint, content to know that back at the manor, even as she fostered relationships with the proper ladies at Ministry functions, was her son to whom she dedicated herself in what I can only imagine was some pathetic hope of having at least one person under her despotic and exhausting control.

But when Draco left for Hogwarts, a submission on my part that was a direct result of the dejection mounting behind her cold and increasingly calculating eyes, it became clear she would, with a renewed vigor, dedicate herself towards obstructing my life. She of course continued to care for with disturbing obsession for her son, no matter the distance separating them. I gather she assumed that it gave her control over him, though I knew that it was my withheld, and therefore more valuable, praise he sought rather than her stale devotion.

When the time came, it was all too simple for me to maneuver, through careful hints and perfectly timed bits of advice, Draco into a marriage she would find both tremendously distasteful but equally unobjectionable.

She attended the wedding ceremonies with a false grace that a lifetime of experience in proper society had taught her to portray with ease. She tolerated the relations of her future daughter-in-law though she made it clear to her unhearing son that they were below the Malfoy family. I did not care whom the parents of Draco's fiancée were, as long as they could properly prove their purity.

The circumstances of Draco's marriage were eventually accepted, but as the Dark Lord rose in power, it became necessary for Draco to take on a more prominent role in the Malfoy family, and I brought him back to Malfoy Manor in order to prepare him for the responsibilities that would one day become his. With him came his wife, that girl so fated to receive and reciprocate my wife's hatred for her, herself, and the control she had over Draco, which was minimal at best, but still far more than that which my wife presently possessed.

Caught up in the events of my life, and decidedly disinterested in my wife's affairs, I could not bring myself to care as her hatred for her son's wife grew until she was often left in states of blind rage and hopeless oblivion every time she was so much in the same room as her son's wife.

I did, however, note one night with a resurgence of the loathing I had for my wife that she was indulging in a recurrence of the lunacy that had plagued her in our early days of marriage. I heard the hateful sound of her slippered feet shuffling past my door and down the hall once more.

Refusing to run the risk of her disgracing the Malfoy name by sneaking about and turning up unanticipated and undignified in front of any of the many guests that now frequented Malfoy Manor, I got out of bed and put on a dressing gown before stalking after her in the halls.

I found her in the Gallery Room, examining a portrait drawn in the weeks leading up to our wedding. It was of her and her sister. The frown that disfigured her countenance as she looked on turned her face into a horrifying parody of the eternalized version of herself from some twenty-five years earlier. I crept into the room and moved to a strategic position on the opposite wall. I raised my wand, ready to stun her and leave her there to wake in confusion and shame the next morning, but a sudden sound caused her to look sharply towards the doorframe from where I had recently moved.

Draco's wife was in a room down and across the hall from the Gallery Room. Draco's wife was using the room as a nursery where she insisted on staying with the child herself until the infant was capable of sleeping through the night. The sharp keel of the baby crying dimmed as its mother undoubtedly rose to calm the baby, and this lapse in noise seemed to awaken in my wife some knowledge of purpose. She ran to the door and out of it before I could strike her with any spell. I crept after her, unobserved and discomforted.

My wife was standing in front of the room were Draco's wife slept. Even from across the hall I could see my wife reach into her dressing gown and pull out something long and curved that glistened strangely in the moonlight flowing into the hallway from the high gothic windows that adorned it at either end. My wife forced the door of the nursery open even as I moved at my quickened pace towards her.

She entered the room and before I could round the corner into it myself, and a blood chilling scream rang out for inside. The baby began crying again, but the scream that had come from a grown woman desisted with a pitiful whimper.

A single candelabra shed light on the sight inside the room that was now nothing more than a pool of blood and a scene of death. Without hesitation I cast a spell in the direction of the screaming child to both prevent my wife from nearing the future heir to the Malfoy fortune and to drown out the incessant howling of the child.

I entered the room, observing the soft whimpers of my wife as she continued to mutilate with her knife the lifeless body before her while I listening to the frantic thumps of her son running down to the nursery from the floor above. I sat down in a chair near the doorway and far from my wife before pulling my dressing gown tighter around myself and placing my wand on my knee, pointing it decidedly towards her.

I heard the sound of two feet pounding down the large staircase that ornamented one end of the lengthy hallway that had proven too long to save Draco's wife's life. I knew he would arrive soon upon the scene, and I had no wish to speak to my wife again once her true self was revealed. I drew her attention to me by standing to my full height directly behind her. She stopped her actions and her hand quaked before dropping her murderous blade beside the body before her. Shaking and letting out a single dry sob, she turned towards me with too much fear to do anything but stare desolately at my knees.

"Once again, Narcissa," I whispered, knowing she'd hear even from her lowly position, "You have made yourself ridiculous."

I turned from her then just as Draco clutched the doorframe to take in the deadly scene in front of him. I walked towards the door with dignity and purpose. Draco's eyes were large with disbelief, pain, and shock. I stopped next to him and leaned in towards his head.

"The murderess of your wife lies covered in blood before her. Do with her what you will," I whispered in his ears. His eyes never left the sight of my wife, clutching her head while she rocked back and forth with complete abandonment. I left then, moving to my study to arrange for two distinct funerals.

AN: Whew…. If you're looking for a good time, I categorically suggest you don't look for it inside the head of Lucius Malfoy. If you're inclined to drop a review, there is, above all the others, one question I would have: How well did I portray the complex characters of Lucius and Narcissa by relation to one another and individually?

The title along with the part of the summary reading "The Eater of Life had a wife. Where is she now?" are either directly from or are the products of my gross manipulation of lines from the play Macbeth, respectively. The "perfumes of Arabia" are what Lady Macbeth claims will never "sweeten" the stench of blood off her guilty hands. The real line that I retarded to suit my purposes was, "The Thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now?" (Mac.V.i.45-46)

Thank-you for reading.