Just a random Narcissafic I wrote for a friend some time back. Decided to post it. Hope it is all right :)

Disclaimer: No, I have yet to take over the world. Working on it.

~*~

She'd always found it strange that she was named after a flower.

Her sisters were both stars. Diamond-bright eyes, dark heavens. Both were fallen angels, in different ways. Andromeda and Bellatrix, the outcast of heaven and the spirit of hell.

Narcissa was always dressed in pastels.

The blue of a cloudless sky and the pink of summer roses and the wishy-washy green of mint ice. Lace and innocence and the emulation of angel. And she'd be jokingly referred to as a changeling.

Never had a Black been so... fair. It didn't really make sense, especially not to her.

Mother's friends would stroke her carefully pinned and ringletted flaxen hair, almost as if wondering if it were actually a wig, and pat her cheeks. Vivienne Malfoy and Regan Lestrange and that over-perfumed, overweight Patrice Crabbe... all would laugh their brittle little laughs and flutter their lace fans in the pale little flower's face, wafting the scent of face powder (so they could have complexions like her) and the roses and ambergris of perfume at her like so many fragile and artificial zephyrs...

And they would always make the same flat, gushing compliments. "Geraldine, darling," they would say to her mother, "The little girl is as beautiful as Andromeda and Bellatrix, but... so DIFFERENT. She looks like a little VEELA!"

And there would be good-natured laughs at the joke, torn ragged like unraveled lace by so many forked tongues. And the angelic girl would smile a porcelain doll's bland smile and flutter about the opulent rooms of the cold, cold mansion. In her pastel gowns and white shoes and glassy-eyed veela perfection. She was the perfect daughter.

And as the years went by, and she grew up to be tall and fair and retain her veela beauty, her dark sisters, the fallen angels, drifted out of her life, to hells of their own, and she married a man as fair as she and gave birth to a boy whose pale face looked as perfect as if it were carved out of alabaster or marble or wax.

With the same nobility and the same hauteur and the same PURITY... pale and clean and fair... as her, or her husband. She taught him the proper way to behave, and she was sure that her husband gave him a few lessons, not quite the same as hers. But she was obedient, docile like a golden-haired angel, and his way was the law.

She idly wondered sometime if she'd have grandchildren someday that weren't blonde.

And when her son was growing up, already starting to become tall, they went to the Quidditch World Cup, and it was Ireland against Bulgaria.

They sat in good seats with the Minister, and the teams' mascots rose into the air. Leprechauns for the Irish, of course... and for the Bulgarians, it was...

Veela.

Pale blonde beauties with shimmering hair and perfectly angelic features, in light, flowing raiment. The menfolk in the stadium, bewitched, started almost as one in more and more ridiculous efforts to impress the fair beauties.

And yet, when the combination of Irish victory and leprechaun harassment angered the veela, they sprang forward and attacked, eyes blazing, long nails bared outward, flame and destruction and fury and passion in their path. They were no longer beautiful, and they didn't have to be.

And for a misty, vague moment, Narcissa almost wished that she were really a veela. Feral and fierce, not beautiful.