She's doing it again. She's opened another of those muggle boxes and is pulling out those funny yellow pictures that never move. I wonder what she sees in them? She's always silent as she does it. She'll be silent for days afterwards if the war allows it. She'll sit and stare at the Black tapestry or the portraits in the hall. Her eyes will follow Draco as he sneers at the Weasley's or brushes imagined lint of that ridiculous robe he refuses to stop wearing, even though the silk is starting to fade and the embroidery is half gone. It's the last of his Pureblood trappings I suppose. Something I never had the opportunity as a child to grow accustomed too so the loss is less of a concern. The Granger girl watches him with the same expression, the same tilted head and misty eyes she sports when she goes through her boxes. They are alike in her mind, her faded pictures and my godson. Does she suppose him faded too?

In a way he is. His world is dying around him. All the things his parents taught him were important are in their death throws. Pureblood etiquette, how I struggled with it in my early years. My brutish muggle father had never bothered to instill anything approaching civility. Lucius took me under his wing, me a half-blood, and taught me the graces of the Purebloods. He taught me the gliding effortless walk. The impeccable manners and grooming – even though my hair refuses to obey. He taught me all that I needed to know to be accepted into their pretty little society.

I was his pet. I see that now. I was his little experiment. Could a worthless half-blood, born and raised in the muggle world, be taught to be a proper Pureblood? Oh, I should have seen it then. I was his Eliza Doolittle. They all tutored and primped and groomed and molded until I was the outer image of one of them. They made me believe in the world as they saw it. They made me believe that one day I could belong in the parlors and the ballrooms and at their dinning tables.

Ironically, now I do belong. The pet is now one of the last hold-outs. Draco and I glide about the Order Headquarters, two of the last members of a soon to be extinct animal – a Pureblood. We're trapped here with the mudbloods, unable to leave without risking death. Blood-traitors and mudbloods all trapped together in this molding mansion. Granger should watch him, watch me, watch the last of us. She's the mind to memorize our ways and record them so that in a hundred years when we are dead and rotted something will live on.

Perhaps that is the purpose of her boxes then. She's collected trappings of other lives like she now intends to collect us.

I wonder if I should leave my things to her should I not survive this endless useless war? I think perhaps it would be pleasant to know, in the afterlife, that I too have boxes so well cared for and hands so gentle and mind that cares to disturb their slumber on occasion.

I think I would like that –to know another mourns for me, for us. It is ironic it should be her. The little mudblood. She fights to kill our ways and yet she catalogues them so carefully.

I think I will add to her collection. Another box, another faded collection of days long since lived. I do not mind the idea of eternity as a box. A box is far better than a grave.