Moratorium
by Nyohah
ii.
And we write with ink that stains our hands
And we learn from the things that we can't understand
- Symbion Project, "Lacrymosa"
This was not the surrender she had hoped for. She doesn't even know what he means.
"All great writers agree that you should use words of Anglo-Saxon origin rather than unnecessarily complicated Latin-based words," she flails.
He looks at her for a moment. "How can you not have enough experience with Latin?"
"I was only informing you of the generally accepted truth. Clearly, I would much rather be associated with a great civilization like the Romans than dirty barbaric hordes."
"It means...a temporary truce?" He looks further away from her, back toward the bookshelf, almost over his shoulder and mutters, "I think it was more of a Greek thing anyway."
"Clearly not the word," she snaps. He is either trying not to laugh at her or completely repulsed. Neither is any progress. "A break," she says amiably (she hopes), "to chat between old friends."
Now he does laugh, but it's a laugh of disbelief. "We've never been friends."
She almost flinches at his effortless dismissal. "Well, if we weren't friends, then it was your fault."
He finally looks up at her more than in passing. "All shall love you and despair, huh?"
He is making fun of her. Her nostrils flare.
"You never made friends with anyone outside your little clique."
"I never did, did I?"
He says it with such a lack of tone that she cannot tell whether he is being sarcastic or realizing it is the truth. And she doesn't know whether she was lying or not.
When she doesn't reply immediately, he takes the initiative away from her.
"We're not friends because you're scary."
What?
"Manticores are scary. Dragons are scary. Taxes are scary."
He smiles at this. She is proud that she continues without pause.
"I am not scary."
"I think there are a great many people," he says, "who would disagree with that."
"Well, fine," she snaps. "I'm scary. Would you mind telling me why?"
He waves an arm down and back up at her clothing. "Did you look at yourself this morning? Scary."
Uch.
"I'll have you know most of the magical world—and probably the Muggles if they have any sense—would die to have my wardrobe. I have to fight off Witch Weekly's never-ending requests to 'do a piece' on whatever I happen to be wearing when one of them stumbles into me." On last year's shoes.
"Well, you're not exactly low-profile, are you? Mrs. Malfoy?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
He sighs. "If you didn't want to be well-known, perhaps you shouldn't have married someone so well-known?"
"Honestly," she says, "Have you seen my shoes?"
He blinks—twice—and says nothing.
She feels some small triumph at knocking him off-balance, but mostly, she is annoyed. "It's not nice to stare," she says. "If you have nothing to say, you can at least say, 'um.'"
"Narcissa." He sounds tired. "Don't you have enough to do what with the whole plan to take over the world that you shouldn't be wasting any of your time teaching me your idea of manners?"
The day before, she would have had to bristle and earnestly deny any such thing. Now she stares at him. He doesn't know that anything is different. He honestly doesn't know. Not about Voldemort, not about the Potters. Not who did it. Certainly not who would be blamed.
(But what use is a Secret Keeper if everyone knows the secret?)
Of course he doesn't know, she berates herself. If he knew, he wouldn't have come. He is just waiting for his next instructions, for an owl or a casually passed note or possibly even a face-to-face meeting with someone carrying word of whatever the powers have decided he can do to hinder the 'whole plan to take over the world'. No one has bothered to tell him a thing, and she wonders how long he has been waiting. It wouldn't have happened like this at school. He hadn't been out of the loop then. He had, in fact, been very firmly held in place by both James Potter and Sirius Black.
But, really, if he would step outside and look around, he would find out pretty quickly. She supposes he doesn't go out much. Most people dislike a werewolf. The fewer people who know he exists, the fewer people who can find out what he is. And she wonders if that's the only reason he has fallen entirely off everyone's priority lists. It hadn't seemed to affect much of anything in school, but he had managed to keep it secret somehow. She does not know how.
(Except that she does know how. Even the nosiest of the students were much too engrossed in themselves to care about someone they barely knew existed.)
Narcissa hadn't found out until two months earlier when Lucius had been informed of the fact and promptly tried to use the fact to kill him. And he probably would have died if he hadn't had help. From his friends? No. Lucius had blamed the whole group of do-gooders, as had most everyone else, but Narcissa knew what had happened (they were not friends—they had never been friends).
No chance of help now.
Narcissa feels like she is about to topple out of her shoes. She can tell him. She may even break an expression onto his face. He won't cry though. She made him cry once in their first year at Hogwarts. She knows she will never manage it again. He made her cry in their seventh year, although he never realized it. Such is the way with Remus Lupin. The balances of power have tipped entirely in his favor, and he continues to present himself as an easy target. Whether out of obliviousness, habit, or intention, she doesn't know. She only knows it doesn't matter if he appears to be fragile; he isn't. He has depths of strength where most people have shells, and he will not be broken.
She cannot delay any longer, so she takes three steps forward and hugs him so tightly she can feel her heart racing. He doesn't seem to react at all.
And Narcissa has forgotten to draw her knife.
Narcissa shifts so she can let go with one arm, laying her head against his neck. He is considerably less calm than she initially thought. She finds the hilt of her knife and pulls it out of the sheath on her back just as he grabs her by the shoulders and pushes her away.
He blinks at the knife, and says, "Umm..."
They are standing too close. If anyone were to see them, false assumptions would be made. Narcissa presses the side of the knife's blade against her thigh, trying to hide it, not from Lupin—he's seen it; the damage is done—but from anyone who might see them. As if the knife would be the first thing noticed. As if anyone would be coming.
She watches him, and she can see him calm. In a few seconds, his breathing is slower, and he is more relaxed than he has been since she arrived. The part of her that has a brain begins to worry that this is Lupin preparing for a fight, and she has blown it all because she's a daft, silly girl, while the other half is bitterly screaming that of course, being killed is less scary than she is.
"May I ask what you intend to do with that?" he says.
"I'm going to put it in your stomach," she says.
"Ah," he says. Then, "If I were a Freudian, I think I'd be worried by that."
She wants to hit him, and although she doesn't know what he means, she's heard just enough about Freud to know she should probably slap him. But she has a knife in her right hand, and it's shaking so badly that if her next movement isn't to use it, she's going to drop it.
"Did you make it your annoying life priority to know everything?" she snaps instead. "Well, I hope you've gotten as far as you intended."
He looks down and a little away from her. She thinks he looks almost sorry. The screaming half of her demands to know why it is he feels he has the right to be sorry for anything, and then all the emotion she has been holding onto escapes. He isn't looking at her—he has dropped his guard—and she is crying angrily against her will as she steps forward and stabs him.
He coughs plaintively beside her ear, and then the knife's curse—Lucius Malfoy owns no un-cursed weapons—takes hold, and he slumps forward into her. She pulls out the knife and steps backward. She had no idea anyone could bleed so much so quickly.
She wipes her face with her left hand. She needs fresh air, but she has no choice but to apparate home. Her entire right side ranges from being splotched to being slicked in blood. She has Remus Lupin's blood trickling down her leg.
Her shoes tap frantically as she hurries up the stairs to her home. Inside, she has to force herself not to keep hurrying. She needs to get rid of the knife—it is still dripping all over the waxed tile of the entryway—and clean herself up as soon as possible. The blood is beginning to dry in places. It's not just becoming sticky; it's truly drying and beginning to flake off on her wrist, and she feels she might be sick. But if she hurries, her distress might attract Lucius.
She holds the knife in front of her as she walks to the dining room. It is dark, the curtains closed. The candelabras along the wall light in response to her entrance. She walks straight over the fireplace just inside the door, slides the knife back into its hilt, and places it in its holder on the wall above the mantle.
"I trust you didn't clean that," says Lucius.
Narcissa jumps. He is sitting at the head of the table, at the far end of the room, and he is calm, but she can still the hear anger in his voice.
"Of course not," she says quickly. Too quickly.
"Why are you upset?" he asks, cold and not concerned about her.
She breathes twice, deeply, quickly, and loudly, and with a final gasp sticks out her right foot. The blood that ran down her leg puddled unseen inside her boot, but plenty of blood dripped onto the crown of her foot and took various paths down the side to the ground.
"Look at my shoes!" she whines. She slaps her foot back onto the ground and lets the motion lead her to stomp her way upstairs to her room in what she hopes is a convincing fit. She pulls off her soiled clothing and throws it haphazardly into a pile against the wall for the house elves to fetch, hoping to add to the effect. Then she locks herself in the bathroom, slumps on the floor, and cries with her fist in her mouth. All the blood on her skin has dried by the time she turns the bath water on.