Moratorium
by Nyohah

i.

Yeah, these horns know red
And this bull knows best
Not to chase that scarlet cape
As the captive entertainer
Always blood to shed
To escape those crowds that pay
To see Taurus kill the tamer
- Splashdown, "Lost Frontier"

Narcissa dreams that she is empty. She knows that she is dreaming (she always knows when she is dreaming) and wills the dream to change quickly. Any dream that starts with being empty cannot be a good dream. But whatever devices run her subconscious have long since grown strong against her will, and she dreams that she is, very literally, empty. She is hollow, a wonder even in the magical world. If her skin were hard, she would echo. But, oh, how thin she is and not even hungry. People without stomachs cannot be hungry (but she knows she is hungry because she went to bed without eating, and it's quickly approaching afternoon because she can feel warm sun on her face, and she still hasn't quite gotten over being pregnant, much as she has tried, and she's dreaming).

People stand above her bed, each wondering with what they should fill her. Bellatrix thinks they ought to fill her with cyanide to give her a nice almond smell. Bellatrix is a sweet girl.

Lucius raises his hand to silence Bellatrix and places it to his chin carefully in thought. He opens his mouth—

And Narcissa wakes, again, with a gasp. The curtains are opened just enough to blind her left eye with sunlight and illuminate a swath of floating dust particles across the otherwise darkened room. She reaches over to the night stand to grab her wand, misses, rolls onto her stomach, away from the piercing light, and finally catches her wand between her first two fingers. She flicks it at the curtains, accidentally opening them all the way, and she throws her arms in front of her face as though she's a vampire. Another flick, and the curtains swish together, leaving the room in darkness. She throws her wand back in the general direction of her night stand and falls back onto her pillow.

She did not sleep well. She has not slept well for some time. But as strong as the temptation to stay in bed and try to sleep some more is, and as strong as Narcissa's will in getting what she wants is (and at this moment, she wants nothing more than to get some real sleep—the resting sort), after eight nightmares and five times starting awake, she knows, anyone would give up and get up.

Narcissa always knows when she is dreaming. The previous night she had only seven nightmares. The night before that she had nine. On average, she has five dreams per night, ranging from utterly bizarre to nearly real, but no dream has ever fooled her.

She had an aunt once, possibly still did, who the Most Noble and Ancient House of Black denied ever existed. This was not uncommon for the Most Noble and Ancient House of Black. This particular aunt was a squib, or so she was as far as the Most Noble and Ancient House of Black was concerned. She was convinced that she was a bona-fide fortune teller, and, from the looks of her house, she had convinced a good many Muggles that she was. Sirius had taken her and Andromeda there once long ago, all three of them breathless, gasping, terrified that their parents would find out. She had been friends with Sirius once, too, before they grew into their personalities.

Her aunt told her, looking at her palm while Sirius snorted as he tried to contain his laughter, that dreams were the truest path to Knowledge, the purest conduit of the Sight.

Narcissa has never known anything before it happened. She just knows when she is dreaming.

Her bath water is warm, as it always is. Her first nightmare was about being too warm. Perhaps, if she believed in hell, she would have been frightened. But she does not, and she was not, and her nightmares, as persistent as she is, tried a different path. The next and the fourth were about being cold, and she woke shivering, her body unable to believe what her mind knew—she was only dreaming. Her third nightmare was about blood—sticky, fresh, in puddles all over the floor. But she's seen blood, felt it, shed it. Her sixth nightmare was of dried blood, and seeing it dark, flaking, staining, all over everything she owned frightened her more than its spilling.

Her other three nightmares were about being empty. Empty world, empty books, empty body. If she told anyone, she knew, they would pat her hand, chalk it up to her being recently not-pregnant-anymore, and tell her she would be used to it soon, an answer which would make sense had Narcissa ever adjusted to being pregnant in the first place. She was glad to be back to being just her, and the only thing she missed about it was having an honest excuse to explain her few extra pounds.

Empty books frightened her the most. Narcissa doesn't like books. Narcissa likes shoes and coats and jewelry. But as she thinks of the empty books while combing her hair, she begins to tremble again. It is silly to still be afraid of a dream once one knows it was only a dream. It is sillier to be afraid of a dream when one knows it is a dream while dreaming it.

Knowing that the empty books were a dream makes them worse.

Narcissa dresses carefully, as she always does. She doesn't simply dress nicely. Dressing nicely is a part of being Narcissa Malfoy, as it was a part of being Narcissa Black. With a closet like hers, anyone could dress nicely without a thought. Narcissa is not interested simply in dressing nicely. People who dress nicely can be dressed by other people. No one could coordinate an outfit and push it at Narcissa and actually expect her to wear it. She dresses carefully. Before she opens her closet, she considers the hours ahead of her and what she will be doing—what she will choose to do, what she will be required to do, and what she will refuse to do.

Narcissa believes that, loosely, it is as some people say. Clothes do make a person. But unlike most people, she does not believe that clothing is important because it influences the opinions of others. Clothing is important because it influences the person wearing it. Any woman feels beautiful in a beautiful dress. And if she feels beautiful, she acts as though she believes she is beautiful. And from that sense of being beautiful comes a power over others. Narcissa thrives on this power. It is not that she is not beautiful on her own. She is stunning on her own. She is gorgeous. But if she were to wear rags, she would be unable to assert the power her beauty gives her.

But it not simply beauty clothes give. Narcissa firmly believes governmental people can act as though they are important because they wear clothing that makes them feel important. She knows that people will do things without qualm while they are wearing black robes and masks that they could never stomach were they dressed in any other manner. Had she ever doubted the power of clothing before these past few months, she would be a believer now.

This morning as she stands in front of her closet, she trembles. Today she must be darkly beautiful. (Beautiful and terrible as the sea...stronger than the foundations of the earth...was that how it went? Remus Lupin would know, which really did not make her problem less.) Serene and untouchable. A Greek statue, back before they began to lose limbs and heads. She does not need to make it through hundreds of years. She has only this one day.

She has clothes to suit exactly her needs on this day (she has clothes to suit exactly her needs on any day, really, no matter what it entails), but wearing them gives her little sense of power. She has dressed for what she must do after she leaves her house. Leaving is a more immediate problem, but as it lies between her closet and the rest of the events of the day, Narcissa has no choice but to dress for the larger problem that lies outside.

Thus the way her stomach has begun to flip into her throat.

Lucius Malfoy does not rage often. He has more subtle, more productive ways of applying his anger. She has only seen him rage once before (not at her, for which she is grateful), but nothing that gets in his path (which is bound to lie somewhere between her closet and the door) is safe.

She supposes he has good reason to rage now. Voldemort is dead. He has been for some twelve hours. Thus far, Narcissa doesn't like the results. Her plans for the day have not changed, but now her husband's anger, an obstacle that she does not wish to face, has been thrown between where she now stands and where she must go to do what she must do. As she creeps downstairs, however, she realizes that something has tipped in her favor. She makes it to the dining room to fetch what she needs for the day without encountering her husband at all, and when she finally does step into a room while he is in it—the entryway—he simply watches her leave. He is, perhaps, a little dangerously calm, but nothing is thrown, whether object or curse, and for that she is grateful.

It is a long walk, but she doesn't feel she can trust herself enough to apparate. True, she has passed the situation for which she was not dressed, but although the click of her heels on the pavement is as reassuring as ever, her discomfort has not passed.

She has never actually seen the used book store to which she is heading, but in her mind, she cannot expect much. It is a store that sells books; it is a store that sells used things; and it is owned by a Muggle. When she finally arrives—a little late, but no more than is acceptable—she finds that even her low expectations are a little high. The shop occupies the ground floor of one of the many five-storey buildings that line the streets. The building is completely unremarkable—no different than those on either side, or all the way down the block. That doesn't save it from the fact that it is more than a little plain, ugly, and rundown.

The door rings a loud, annoying bell hanging from a string on the doorjamb. No one is inside. She takes two steps inside and stops, overwhelmed by the musty smell. The click of her boots is ruined by the creak of the wooden floor. A second of silence passes, then two, and then she hears a stumping and creaking like the entire building is about to collapse around her. The sound is coming from the stairs, and shortly a rounding man in a plaid jumper stumbles down into sight long enough to inquire whether she needs any help. She shakes her head very slightly, her lip curling a little, and he shrugs and starts back up, saying something she presumes was meant for her to hear, but saying it to the stairway ahead of him, his voice completely overpowered by the return of the house-falling-down sound. When that sound ceases, Narcissa stands in silence, staring at the shelves around her and trying not to cough. In a few moments her ears adjust to the quiet, and she begins to make out some tinny sound from upstairs—voices that sound nothing like the shopkeeper's, but she hears no one moving around. She can only stand in place and muse on sounds she can barely hear for so long, so she takes another step forward, creaking instead of clicking.

Directly ahead of Narcissa, past the stairs and between shelves that reach to the ceiling, is an open door. She starts moving toward it and seems unable to stop until she reaches the doorway. The door leads to a smaller, rectangular room, with shelves to the ceiling on all walls and big, flat-looking pillows on the ground. Curled up in one pillow is a ginger cat. Narcissa can smell the cat. Every breath she takes seems full less of air and more of dust and smell. Book-dust, book-smell, cat-dust, cat-smell.

Crouched, flipping through a book, is Remus Lupin, his faded coat and washed-out complexion giving the illusion that he is as covered in dust as everything else. His back is to the door, but she knows he knows she's there. She breathes deeply as slowly and silently as she can manage and steps further into the room. One step takes her to the middle. Two steps more and she would be standing on top of Lupin. He ignores her. She turns to her right and walks to the bookshelf (it takes her six steps), where she pulls off the first book she sees. She opens to the middle and is bombarded by a figure of two coils near each other but not touching, both emitting lines. She looks up quickly. Lupin has moved, and is now standing across from her, with another book open to the first page. She never heard him move. She looks back down at the figure. The label says, Air-core transformer.

Narcissa slaps the book shut. On the wake of the echo, her tongue betrays her, and she is the first to speak.

"You can't ignore me," she says, and before she has even finished speaking, she has begun to click her nails against the hard cover of the book she is still holding, now clutched in front of her and close to her chest.

He glances sideways at her without looking up from the book, as if to say that clearly he can ignore her, but he eases the book shut and slides it back into place, taking an extra second to ensure it lines up evenly with the other books on the shelf. He looks back at her momentarily, then back to the ground, slightly shaking his head.

"I always figured you were the type who would play her cards close to her chest, so to speak," he said, "but I would have never imagined a book on alternating current would be so precious to you."

She feels the temperature of her face begin to rise and spins back around, slamming the book onto the shelf. In the process, she knocks all the others out of alignment, and she is not even sure she returned the book to its rightful place. But without another second's delay, she spins back around to glare at Remus Lupin. Her skirt swishes back and forth and then settles into the paralysis of everything else in the room. Barely ten seconds pass before Lupin relents.

"I think we need to call a moratorium," he sighs.