One more additional scene... Thanks to Catmint and avapouhi for reviewing!



***


Narcissa entered her husband's study. "Yes?"


She realized immediately that something was off about Lucius. He was sitting very stiffly in his chair, staring at the fire with reddish eyes. A small scrap of paper was burning away.


"Draco is dead," Lucius said without preamble.


Narcissa blinked. How had he found out? They had searched for years for their wayward son, spending thousands on investigators and on unsavory characters that Lucius knew through associates to hunt Draco down. None had been successful, and now Lucius was saying that her only child was dead.


"Are you sure?"


"How the fuck could I be sure?" Lucius snapped. Narcissa almost jumped, but steadied herself in time. No good would come out of acting the coward tonight. Lucius was on edge, she could tell for certain.


"I was just curious as to how you found out," she said. Professional and disassociated was the best way to deal with personal tragedy.


"I got a letter. He was living in the Muggle world," Lucius said. Narcissa raised her hand to politely cover her slightly gaping mouth. Her son living with those savages?


She began to voice her thoughts, but Lucius spoke again. "He was living in some squalid apartment, completely dependant on a Muggle drug. It killed him."


Again, she moved to speak, but Lucius wasn't finished. "There was a request in the letter to go and officially identify him, and make burial arrangements."


"Officially identify?"


"There was identification that showed him to be Draco, but his appearance had changed enough that they wanted someone to appear in person to confirm his identity."


"Oh." A pause. "Should we go?"


"Probably, so that we may truthfully tell the Dark Lord of his demise."


Narcissa, for the first time in a very long time, felt the urge to slap her husband. Their child was dead. Died in one of the most horrible manners she could imagine- at the hands of a Muggle invention. The beautiful baby she had coddled, the toddler she had chastised, the young boy she had shooed away, the teenager she had tried to form into a likeness of his father was dead. And all that Lucius cared about was appearances.


"Let's go, then."


They went the next day, and Narcissa felt nervous as they stood in a green tiled room, staring at a bank of small steel doors along one wall, waiting on a man dressed in Muggle medical clothing to open one and reveal the son she had dreamed would return home for years.


When the drawer was slid open and the bag unzipped, Narcissa gasped and stepped back. Lucius stood stoic, staring down at the corpse with horror masquerading as disdain.


Narcissa almost said that this wasn't her child, but she recognized the death paled of the Dark Mark on the numerously punctured skin of the arm. She recognized shades of her son in the ratty platinum tangles, the point of his chin, though the break of the nose was unfamiliar, as was the stubble that was nearly beard across his jaw.


"That's my son," she said, not bothering to mask her sadness. Grief was appropriate to display.


Lucius and the Muggle stepped to one side, making arrangements. Narcissa touched one of her son's aristocratic hands, roughened and cracked, cold and veined. She remembered a time when the hand had latched around one of her fingers, tiny and intrigued by the concept of grasp. She remembered smacking away this hand, annoyed that her son would try and steal a treat from the table.


A tear escaped her, and she bit down on her cheek.


She heard Lucius tell the man that Draco would be interred in the family crypt, and the thought comforted her. No one would know how Draco had ended up. There would be no shame on the family. She kissed her son's cheek, ignoring the clamminess of the flesh and the chemical stench that permeated everything in this cold morgue, and stood at her husband's side.


At the very least, Draco had died on his own terms, not trying desperately to fulfill her expectations. He really had never been suited for any of the things she had pushed on him, Lucius had pushed on him. He had strove to be the perfect son, but had always failed miserably.


She took Lucius' hand in her own, aloof appearance forgotten. She had niggling thoughts that she had failed miserably at being a mother, and that Draco's death somehow proved that. She was a bad mother, and she could not change the past.


But she could always try again.


***


fin.