Narcissa, perhaps unsurprisingly, was very interested in learning what my life had been like up until my being whisked away (or back, perhaps) to the wizarding world. She began her gentle - but thorough - interrogation on our way to the parlour, and continued it after she'd ordered tea and toast from a house elf.
She seemed very distressed that I'd been 'raised by muggles', despite my protests that magic was fiction in my world and the distinction was a lot less relevant. "I shall have to discuss the matter with Mr Marlow," she said softly, "he assured us that you'd be properly taken care of."
I was suddenly but acutely aware that Marlow was very lucky he'd already left. She seemed birdlike, dainty and genteel, but I was reminded that this was a woman who'd looked straight at the dark lord and lied to his face for her son.
Yeah, there would be no underestimating Narcissa.
"Well," I said carefully, again, "there's no 'wizarding' or 'muggle' there. They just... are. They do all right," I added at her dissatisfied facial expression. "I mean, we have... I have - had - a little device, small enough to fit in my pocket, and I could use it to access shops, information, to order food brought to the door, to control lights in my house-" okay, so I didn't do those things, not most of them, but some people did. "We could talk face-to-face with people on the other side of the planet no matter where we were," I added.
Narcissa evidently thought I was putting a brave face on things somehow, because she reached out and touched my hand. I tensed automatically and then made an effort to relax. My mother was touching my hand, that wasn't that weird. It wasn't. Calm thoughts. "My poor darling girl," she said with every appearance of sincerity. "I'm so sorry."
I floundered, incapable of responding meaningfully to that. "We really didn't do too badly," I protested weakly.
"They, my dear," she corrected.
"What? - Er, I mean, pardon me?"
"They, not we," she said, while I jumped at the sudden appearance of a tea pot, two cups and saucers, and a baffling array of cutlery and crockery. "Have some tea," suggested Narcissa.
Magic. Right.
And there were probably so many bits and pieces because the Malfoys were too rich for their own good. Our own good.
That would... take some getting used to.
Still, the tea had been good.
I peered at the table for a second. "Earlier, you said I used the wrong spoon for my tea," I hedged. Now that I looked at the setting, there were several possible spoons and one of them was smaller, out to the right of my place setting. My hand lingered over the slightly larger one, but...
"Oh, yes. The correct cup, but you did use the demitasse spoon; the tea spoon is the next on the right."
I frowned. "But there's no demitasse?" In the moment, felt pretty darn clever for even knowing what the hell a demitasse was. Back home, we'd have called it an 'espresso cup' and left it at that.
Narcissa tilted her head. "There would be, were your grandfather to join us. I'm afraid this setting belonged to his late wife, and it rather likes him." She touched the rim of her saucer with one fingertip. "I'm yet to convince it that any of the cutlery is unnecessary, no matter how small or informal a meal."
The setting liked him. The -
Wait.
"Grandfather?" I repeated blankly.
"Of course," she said. "Your father and I weren't just made of unicorn horns and stardust, you know," she teased. "We had parents as well."
"Of - of course. I..." Christ, Abraxas Malfoy was still alive. Wasn't he supposed to be dead of dragon pox? Oh, but that wasn't brought up until... He must die sometime in the next five years, then. I licked my lips. "Sorry, it didn't occur to me," I said, trying to look less anxious about that than I felt.
Briefly, I wondered if I should check the HP Wiki for Abraxas Malfoy's actual date of death - and then I remembered that even though the Internet did, presumably, exist, there would be no chance of my accessing it from Malfoy bloody Manor and certainly no HP Wiki. That thought was briefly but intensely disturbing.
What year was it? Ninety one?
RAM was still measured in megabytes. Hell, hard drives were still measured in megabytes.
I swallowed, and then I realised Narcissa had been watching me, and no doubt had noticed every last expression crossing my face. Unlike mine, her face was pale, still and blank.
I offered her tea before I poured my own, and made very certain that there was no clinking or clattering as I used the correct spoon to stir in my milk.
"You must have questions," she said, quite neutrally, while I nervously made sure the handle of my tea cup was parallel to the edge of the table.
I did. I had so many questions, but none were the kinds of questions I was supposed to ask - I wasn't supposed to know enough to ask them. I rubbed my left wrist. "Do I have any other close relatives?"
She smiled, as though this was somehow a clever or pleasing question. I didn't quite get it, but gamely I smiled back. Doubtless mine was a fleeting and uncertain smile, but the effort counted for something.
After a moment, her smile faded. "There was a time when I could have given you lists upon lists of close relatives, but I'm afraid that the war had a-" she paused. Then she looked speculatively toward me. "It isn't something anybody enjoys discussing, but I suppose I can't have you ignorant."
Even having said this, it took Narcissa some time to build up to actually explaining. Her eyes were distant when she finally started speaking again. "Only ten years ago we were in the middle of a civil war. Several of our family were.. involved," she said delicately.
That seemed like a pretty diplomatic way to put it... to say the least. "Oh," I said slowly.
"You have two aunts, I suppose, one with whom I'm not on speaking terms. The other has been imprisoned for war crimes. Otherwise, you'll find that you're distantly related to a great many of the purebloods in our social circles. It's an advantage in some ways," she noted, "but it's also an obligation."
I nodded. I was from a sprawling family myself and I knew well both the advantages and disadvantages of being stuck with a bunch of aunts, uncles and cousins. "I can understand that. Does Lucius - sorry, Father. Does he not have other relatives?"
"A second cousin in Lyons. Sangclaire, neƩ Malfoy. Otherwise, no. His father's cousin was lost during the war, and the main line of the family has had one heir for several generations - until you and Draco, of course."
I nodded slowly. A grandfather and a second cousin once removed in France. I could deal with that - and on the other side, only Bellatrix and Andromeda, and-
Oh my god, Tonks was my cousin.
And Sirius, technically. Sirius was my cousin once removed. How absolutely fucking bizarre.
"I..." I paused, then sighed softly. "I don't really know enough to know what to ask. You said the tea setting was - fond? Of my grandfather. How does an inanimate object become fond?"
"Ambient magic," Narcissa responded, which surprised me. I had thought that a lot of these explanations would fall under 'dunno, magic?' but it sounded like people had actually done research, at least on some points. "Witches and wizards generate magic, whether or not we are actively using it, and over time it's possible for that magic to imbue objects, particularly objects about which we have strong feelings."
"Does that mean that intense emotions are part of what makes magic work?" I ran my fingertip around the rim of my saucer thoughtfully. If Abraxas's feelings for his wife were spilt over into the things that reminded him of her after her death, that actually made a weird kind of sense.
"Some magic," she said, with a pleased smile. "Some magic requires a strict adherence to rules and structures but other kinds are... intuitive, I suppose. Do you have any hobbies?"
I blinked. That question had seemed to come out of nowhere, but after a moment I realised we were engaged in a quid pro quo interrogation here. Ah. Of course we were. Malfoys, I thought, torn between fondness and resentment.
I contemplated trying to explain the concept of fanfiction to a fictional character for about a third of a second before discarding it. Too difficult. Too weird. "I like reading and sketching," I said, hedging my bets on what sorts of hobbies would be acceptable to a person like Narcissa.
She seemed to find those to be proper hobbies, although she did express some dissatisfaction that I was terrible at music, and clicked her tongue, slightly disappointed.
Our conversation went on in this terribly stilted way: a question for a question, carefully constructed answers.
The only real interruption came when a house elf sent my toast up, and I just about passed out from sheer excitement.
"My dear, are you sure you don't want anything on the toast?" Narcissa queried, a bit surprised, but clearly pleased with my delight.
"It tastes like wheat," I said rapturously, which was basically an answer in and of itself.
"I should certainly hope so." She took a delicate sip from her tea cup.
"Delicious lightly burned wheat. I can't even." It was amazing. "I haven't had wheat, in, like, a decade." The craving for grains with gluten - wheat, rye, barley and oats, basically - never went away. It never even really dissipated. There was a part of the supermarket that smelled like bread and bread alone, and there had been days when I'd walked through, inhaled, and just... stopped, frozen in the face of overwhelming temptation.
Gluten free bread really didn't cut it.
But this? It was so beautiful I could almost cry.
In that golden moment, I was absolutely sure of my decision to remain in the wizarding world, despite Narcissa's furrowed brows and increasingly bemused expression.
"Oh my god that's amazing," I informed her, peering at my plate and wondering if she'd let me get away with picking up the crumbs with my fingers. Probably not.
I looked up, finally, to find Narcissa holding her wand loosely, taping it with one fingertip as she eyed me. There was no way to discern her thoughts or feelings from the expression on her face.
I froze. "...Mother?"
Something flinched behind her eyes when I said that, but when she spoke her voice was very calm.
"I'm not entirely certain you should be calling me that, my dear," she said softly. "I'm not quite sure what you are, but I know you certainly aren't a twelve year old girl."
Shit.
"The markings are the same, the spells recognise your blood..." she looked at me - but also past me, eyes distant, face closed off. "So it must be what's inside."
And then she had her wand trained upon me, casually, so casually. "Incarcerous."
"Um," I said, tugging on the thin cords that saw me tied immediately to the chair. "If you could put your wand down, I'd be happy to explain."
"I believe I shall keep my wand as it is, and you will explain anyway," she told me pleasantly.
I was surprised, but I supposed I oughtn't have been, when she pulled a tiny flask from - somewhere. Whatever was inside it was glittering blue with a golden sheen.
"Um," I said, staring at it in consternation.
You know, when I'd first woken and faced my disappointing breakfast, I hadn't thought at all that my day might land me tied up to a chair in one of the Malfoys' parlours, staring down the barrel of an unrecognisable potion.
My heart was racing so fast.
Was she going to poison me? Or-
"It's a simple truth potion, my dear - it cannot force you to speak, but it ensures that whatever you say is true. Surely you don't think I'd poison my own daughter?"
I eyed her, because while I didn't think she'd poison her own daughter it was also pretty clear that she didn't think I necessarily was her daughter. And I absolutely believed in her willingness to poison a stranger.
Of course, the idea that I had any choice but to drink it was an illusion at best: a soft moue of her pretty mouth, a little flick of her wand, and I was forced to swallow down whatever it was in her hand.
It burned cold going down, and left me lightheaded. It tasted faintly of liquorice.
Narcissa banished the bottle and settled regally back into her seat, apparently waiting for something to happen - although whether that was giving me time for the potion to kick in and force me to be truthful, or giving me time to froth at the mouth and go black in the face, I couldn't tell.
I imagined - or I hope I imagined - that I could feel the potion in my belly, bubbling and burning. Everything was heightened with the onset of acute anxiety: my heart was fast, my skin was sweating. I was breathing more heavily than I ought to have been, and my head was beginning to ache something fierce. I wanted nothing more than to run. Or to punch Narcissa. But mostly to run.
I couldn't.
Her ropes held tightly.
"Whenever you're ready, dear," she said finally, sipping her own tea. "I'd like to have an explanation from you."
Wait. It was a truth potion?
I frowned.
I could tell right away that I didn't have to say anything. I could sit here, in silence, for as long as I liked.
She'd probably have to dose me again, and I was betting that a truth potion like that one was much easier to get than, say, Veritaserum - so she could afford to be patient. Me? Eventually I'd need to piss, if nothing else.
I opened my mouth to say when Marlow brought me here this morning I wasn't certain I'd be able to stay, but what actually came out was: "So... When Marlow brought me here this morning I was pretty sure I wasn't going to want to stay."
She said nothing.
"Right. So... Wow, this is embarrassing. For him. Lucius asked me," I paused when I saw her fingers tighten on her wand. What did that mean? I didn't know enough about these people, despite my extensive reading. I didn't know nearly enough. "Um, Lucius asked me to... not let on to my actual age. The... realms? Apparently move at different speeds?"
A pause.
"I was told a similar thing some years ago," she allowed.
"Right, and... I agreed because.. I thought I'd only have to pretend for an hour or so."
She narrowed her eyes, but her posture relaxed a little bit. "Because you'd be leaving."
"Well, yeah. I mean, this world's all bullshit, really, isn't it?"
Her eyebrows rose. "And how old are you, Victoria?"
"Twenty-six."
She sighed. "Darling, I don't know why you didn't just say that. You aren't a good enough actor to maintain that pretence for long. Your vocabulary is too large and your syntax is too polished - and just now you admitted that you hadn't eaten wheat in ten years. An awfully good memory, then, for a two year old child."
"Anything else you've been lying about?"
I opened my mouth to say no, of course not, but the potion redirected my tongue with an alarming ease. "Yes," I said automatically, and flinched. "Shit," I added emphatically. I ground my teeth. "Not big things. My hobbies are sketching and reading. Also writing porn and cooking and sleeping and c-no nope no, not that -" I saw her mouth the word 'porn' with some uncertainty, as though she didn't quite believe what she'd heard, "- and I told Lucius I'd reconsider marrying and having kids but I thought I was leaving so I didn't -"
A faintly bemused expression crossed her face, and Narcissa held up her hand.
I jammed my jaw shut painfully. "Mmm-whnnnnfg," I said, through my teeth, glaring.
It took her much less time to administer the antidote to her potion, because I was singularly cooperative.
Then she petted my hair gently. "There, see," she cooed, "we're all better off when we get these little misunderstandings out of the way early on."
And with a flick of her wand, my bindings dissolved.
It had been a remarkably efficient, and horrifyingly effective interrogation - and it had taken her all of ten minutes.
"It wasn't anything personal," she said, making her way back around our little table and settling back into her seat. "You must understand, my whole family resides here. If there was a chance you weren't what you seemed..." she lifted one deceptively delicate shoulder in a shrug. "And you weren't, were you?" she sighed gently. "Although not in the way I'd anticipated. Really, Lucius..." her voice came out soft and breathy, exasperated but almost unbearably fond.
"I get it," I muttered, pouring myself another cup of tea just to get the taste out of my mouth. The potion hadn't been bad, but the antidote was horrible.
"You do, do you?" she asked. There was almost a little nervousness in her expression.
"Intellectually, it makes sense," I offered. It was the best I could do, because honestly telling her that I didn't mind would have been complete bullshit of the highest order.
"I am sorry, my dear. Lucius does like to believe I'm frail and terribly delicate, but it was quite unfair of him to draw you into his little games."
In that moment, I could not have imagined anybody less frail. "Well that's not very clever of him," I muttered.
Her mouth curved. "People see what they want to a lot of the time."
"Right," I said unhappily.
"Now, finish your cup of tea, dear, and we'll see about getting you some clothing. I'm afraid Hogwarts is going to be dreadfully boring for you, but you will need to learn magic at some point..." She stood, and then paused, tapping her lip with one finger. "Oh, yes. I must remember to send the owl off to the Ministry. Now that I know you'll be staying, it would be remiss to leave your paperwork in the owlery."
I paused. "You hadn't... I thought that was already sent?"
"Certainly not," she said. "Elizabeth was watching, of course, so it had to go with the owl, but it would be quite a lot of work to remove the file from the Ministry records department once they'd processed it. I might be stuck with legal records of a daughter who didn't exist. Merlin, imagine the scandal if anybody found out." She shook her golden head and gestured for me to follow her. "Come along, then, we'll send that off now..."
Yeah, Narcissa Malfoy?
Actually terrifying.
"So, you write pornography?" She asked, just as I was getting up.
I stumbled over my chair.
"Um," I said.
"How... unique."
"Um."
"Do keep up, dear."
We travelled as a group to Diagon Alley. Narcissa never once let on anything that had passed between us, and Draco was clearly oblivious to any changed tensions. Lucius, on the other hand, peered at me once and quickly attributed my manner to nervousness.
"There's nothing to concern yourself with," he assured me, taking Draco's arm to Side-Along Apparate him while Narcissa took mine.
Draco gave me a haughty, superior look.
Boy, I thought, you have no fucking idea.
I wasn't sure how much I liked Narcissa touching me, to be honest. I twitched under the pressure of her hand. It wasn't conscious, but she gripped all the tighter for it. Then there was an ugly wrench in my stomach, the hot and sickly feeling of being turned inside out, and then - outdoor air, loud voices, hawkers. I blinked my eyes open.
I had expected that to be much worse than it was.
Honestly, I panicked myself into more intense nausea than this twice before breakfast. Huh.
Narcissa released my arm with a pleased pat upon my shoulder. "Very good," she murmured, and then she consulted a floating list - which, if I peeked at it from around her, looked very much like the Hogwarts supply list.
Lucius leaned in and tapped it with his wand, creating a perfect duplicate. "If you want to get the ingredients and stocks, I'll take the books. You'll have more time to take with Victoria's clothing, then, and we can regroup at Malkin's so Draco can get his robes for school... and some new dress robes, I think. The charms have almost worn through on his last set."
Draco gave his father a look of thinly-disguised despair. Lucius gave him a deeply unimpressed face right back. He looked at his toes instead, and then Lucius swept him away toward the book shop.
"I think we'll see about a regular wardrobe first," Narcissa said, glancing at me. "I'm sorry to say it, but you look quite sick in green. Twilfitt and Tattings, then, that's down the south side. Come," she held out her arm.
I took it, despite my misgivings about proximity to Narcissa. I was glad for it a moment later, because I was small and the crowd in Diagon Alley was large. The variety of people was insane, too: a man with all stone teeth, a woman with birds nesting cheerfully in her hair, a hook-nosed, vicious looking little person I soon realised was a goblin - there was a man on stilts and a woman zipping by on a broom. A flock of paper cranes folded from all different colours of paper zoomed past, darting and weaving through the crowd.
And, of course, school children.
There were so very many school children. Sticky-fingered, yelling, running thoughtlessly between adults in the crushing river of people making their way down the alley.
"This is mad," I said, once Narcissa drew us a bit out of the flow and toward a discreet, very highly polished wooden door.
"It always is, before the start of the school year," she said with a sigh. "It will calm down later in the year, you'll see."
She waved the door open and a silver bell jingled, soft and pleasant, above our heads. As the door slid closed the noise from outside dimmed. There was nothing but the quiet of the shop, broken only by a murmured conversation somewhere deeper inside.
The shop itself was decidedly not like a muggle clothing store. Off-the-rack was evidently not in the Malfoys' vocabulary, and the store reflected that. Grand and sweeping designs were shown off on mannequins, which batted their eyelashes over empty sockets and cheerfully paced the length of the display window. One of them was missing his head, which seemed not to trouble him.
The rest of the store had many one-of-a-kind pieces, presented more like art work than like clothing, and was lined with what looked like endless rolls of fabric. There was a display in the centre of the room, a thin wooden platform atop which a mannequin lounged, dressed in a silky grass green robe.
Narcissa was already examining colours next to my skin, gently drawing me around the edges of the shop and peering at my face beside each new colour. "No yellows, either, I see," she mused. "Or pinks, Merlin..."
By the time the store assistant escorted a dour, hatched-faced lady in a pointed golden hat from the store and apologised for leaving Mrs Malfoy to wait, she had already decided on her short list, and the next few minutes of discussion consisted of this grey, that violet - not heather, lavender, yes - wine and mulberry, not too red - charcoal, yes, lovely - chocolate brown, perhaps.
The assistant, a man in his early thirties with a pencil-thin moustache and long, delicate fingers, nodded and agreed with everything Narcissa said, apparently incapable of doing otherwise.
A few times I was tempted to interrupt just to remind her that I was an actual person and could in fact be trusted to look to my own clothing, but honestly she was picking at least all the same colours I'd have picked - and I knew nothing at all about wizarding clothes, except that they wore a great deal of fabric.
The store assistant asked me to hop up on a stool so he could take my measurements, which "he" did by means of an enchanted tape measure. The numbers wrote themselves down, too. Magic certainly seemed handy.
Narcissa did deign to consult me once or twice, and my answers were predictable: skin-covering and tight, no loose fluttering cloth to make a mess of. She didn't seem terribly enthused, and she didn't actually take very many of my responses on board - which made me wonder why she'd asked.
"Very good, very good. Superb taste as always. Now, if that will be all?"
"Unless Twilfitt and Tattings has begun selling Hogwarts robes..?"
"Alas, no," mourned the store assistant. His moustache turned down with his mouth, mourning with him. I stifled a soft snort. "That harridan still has her agreement with the school, and the children may go to no other store to be fitted for their robes." He made it sound very dramatic, but given how much money Narcissa was about to blow here it hardly seemed likely to bankrupt them.
Still. Interesting. "Do they have some kind of exclusive agreement with Hogwarts?" I asked cautiously.
The store assistant blinked down at me like he'd just been made aware that I could actually talk to him all on my own. "Yes, little miss. It's a travesty. The businessman's blood that runs in my veins boils to see free enterprise stifled in -"
This was, evidently, a topic upon which he was capable of expounding at length.
I looked sideways at Narcissa, who gave him a moment or two more out of politeness.
"Thank you," she said sharply then, and tempered her tone with a smile. "We're in something of a rush," she admitted. "I'll need several of these dropped off this evening," she added.
By the time we were done with Twilfitt and Tattings I was seriously tired. The day had been extraordinarily long, between dimensional travel and medical magic and Narcissa holding me at wandpoint. Between all these things, the last thing I needed was a drawn out shopping trip.
Luckily, there was little enough to be going on with: a trip to the apothecary, a stop at Malkin's and a very important ending at Olivander's.
The apothecary was a dim, dank place with an ugly smell: something woody and old, something mouldering, something neck-ruffling and dry that made me want to scratch. They sold standard potions kits for first years, which Narcissa disdained in favour of assembling her own. It contained all the same ingredients, but she was adamant about selecting them by hand.
She pointed out some of what she was doing to me, and in several cases explained how to pick certain ingredients and let me do it myself.
"If you're not careful about these things," she informed me loftily, while watching as I picked through an assortment of tiny black carapaces, selecting the whole and shiny ones, "they'll foist the lowest standard of their product upon you."
"Upon you, Mrs Malfoy?" called the storekeeper, who seemed to know everybody who'd come in, and treated them with equal good cheer, "never!"
"So you say," she murmured in response.
Despite her criticism, the apothecary was more than happy to chatter cheerfully as he bagged, boxed and otherwise packaged our oddly-shaped purchases. "Another one for Slytherin, is it?" he asked, peering at me with a smile.
"It seems likely," I said, although privately I doubted it. I was not what you'd call ambitious.
Narcissa smiled indulgently, miniaturised our purchases and put them away. Then we took ourselves out of the store and back into the seething throng of shoppers - and off toward Madam Malkin's Robes For All Occasions.
I could see immediately why it wasn't the Malfoys' favourite haunt - it was filled with cheerful but unpretentious staff, along with Madam Malkin herself, and the business all seemed to revolve around bespoke fittings of clothing pulled from the rack. It was clearly a brisk and efficient trade, but not very personal.
"Now, then, another for Hogwarts, is it?"
It was clearly a rhetorical question, because I found myself shoved onto a stool and propped up by the threat of an aggressively invested tape measure. Even as still and careful as I was, its investigation seemed a trifle too thorough.
Several moments later, Draco appeared, looking a little wrung out, on the stool next to me.
He may not have liked me much, but at that point in time we shared a glance and had a moment of intensely agreeable communication: this was deeply unpleasant and we wanted to leave.
It's the little things.
Of course, I, like an absolute moron, had forgotten about what was meant to happen when Draco stepped into Madam Malkin's. So I was completely blindsided when a tiny boy with shaggy dark hair was shoved onto the stool next to me.
This was how I met Harry.
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