A/N: The credit of the Harry Potter plot and characters belongs solely to J.K. Rowling. I own nothing of it but my own words.

Cold: In Defense of Narcissa Malfoy

It's funny, how things happen in patterns.

Two years after the Battle of Hogwarts, Narcissa Malfoy was released from Azkaban, thanks to the forgiving testimony of one Harry Potter, who hadn't forgotten the woman who saved his life to save her son's. Her husband would be serving for another eighteen years. Two weeks later, Andromeda Tonks received an invitation to tea. She ripped it up and went back to feeding her grandson.

Two months after that, she received another, and she accepted.

Malfoy Manner was just as dark and foreboding as she had always imagined. After all, it was not as though she'd ever been before. As she walked the pristine walls, her sensible trainers barely making a sound, she thought she could hear Hermione's screams, Ron's agony. She was convinced she saw Dobby's blood on that far wall, and Charity Burbage's bones in the corner. If she had gone down to the dungeons, she would have imagined a too-skinny blonde girl comforting a shivering frail old man, and the boy and goblin who had been with her dead husband in his last moments. But she didn't dare venture down there.

"Hello, Andromeda," spoke a voice from down the hall, poised and emotionless as ever. Cissy, of course, looked dangerously stunning in her afternoon gown, the kind of beautiful that left you feeling haunted.

"What are we doing here?" demanded Andy, exhausted and having no patience for her theatrics. She had left Teddy with Harry, and it's not as though she didn't trust him, the Boy Who Lived, but he had made a bit of a habit out of nearly dying, and she just wanted to go home.

Narcissa didn't even blink. "Making amends," she said.

At age 13, Narcissa watched Andromeda Black as it was burned off the family tapestry, and she understood. No, Narcissa was many things, but she was never stupid. Andy had fallen in love with a Mudblood, and she had chosen this price to pay. Maybe, once upon a time, Narcissa might have done the same, maybe she would have looked at Ethan Thomas and smiled back, but she knew which way the tides were changing and she was too good at surviving to be reckless.

She hadn't grown up in a house full of love. It wasn't smart and it wasn't becoming, especially of a young woman such as herself. Women who showed emotion were weak, and Narcissa was anything but. Andy had been stupid enough to marry for love, and Narcissa only wished life was that simple. No, she married for safety, and she married for status. She married to survive, to survive this war that was coming that everyone seemed so excited about. To Narcissa, it seemed a good way to die. But she wouldn't be caught dead on the wrong side of it. So she nodded when things were said to her and sat quietly out of the way, and she did exactly what was required of her, nothing more and nothing less, but she didn't take the Dark Mark. It didn't seem prudent. It wasn't.

"Why do you care?" remarked Andromeda snidely. She could be almost as frigid as Cissy when she wanted to. "Why now? Why now — because my Mudblood husband is dead? Because my werewolf son-in-law and my half-blood daughter — because they're gone too? Why not all those years ago, when every single one of you turned your back on me, and I had no place to go? Why not after you saved Harry's life or before you watched my daughter and her husband die? Bella killed her, you know." She was shaking now.

"I know," said Cissy. "I was waiting for the right moment."

"Right," agreed Andromeda hotly, "because it's all about your timing, isn't it? Your needs, your machinations. God, you're so manipulative."

"Perhaps," sniffed Cissy, "but I find it's preferable to being tactless."

Andromeda scoffed. "I see you've developed Mother's self-righteousness. How you people can live with yourselves, I'll never know. Bella went insane, Narcissa, but you just went cold."

She left.

She left. Narcissa lay awake some nights, thinking about that. "It was her choice," Mother said. "She left. She betrayed us." Bella wouldn't even talk about her. "We don't have another sister," she'd snarl. "It's just us, Cissy. We're family, and family doesn't hurt family."

Narcissa was the forgettable sister, she'd always felt. She had neither Bella's conviction not Andy's grace. But she had the best memory of any of them.

She remembered crying and Bella's screaming, Andy's hugs and Mother's tea, awful pureblood functions that she'd attend all her life and Father's threats. She remembered that Andy had the best hugs, the ones that fully enveloped you and made everything seem okay.

She remembered the day that Andy came home different. Distant. Bella was haughty as ever, but it was almost like she wouldn't talk to them anymore. Andy holed herself up in her room and study, but sometimes Cissy saw owls flying in and out of her window.

They said Andy left the day they found out she betrayed them, but Narcissa knew the truth. Andy had left long before that.

Narcissa remembered Bella always being off with her mean but socially respectable friends, Andy in her room. She drank bitter tea alone with Mother. Father would come home and get drunk, but she was the only one downstairs then. She moved her fingers along it, even now, that jagged scar from the time he got mean drunk. But he was always mean. Andy was still there when that happened, up in her room, but Bella was out, and Mother's beauty sleep was not to be disturbed. She could have healed it, but something told her to remember that feeling, that pain, and to never let go of it.

Andromeda didn't answer her invitations again for a long time. But the next time she came, Draco was home.

"Wow," she stuttered, "you look so much like him."

But she didn't mean Lucius. Everyone else meant Lucius, but Andromeda saw what Narcissa saw. She meant Father. Narcissa saw it in the way he stood, the shape of his nose, everything but his eyes. Those were Draco's alone.

Sometimes Narcissa looked at him and almost — almost — felt that familiar twinge of fear. He looked so much like him, and he could be cruel, sometimes. She remembered the dread she felt watching him receive the Dark Mark. But then, he was Draco. Her Draco, who she'd do anything for. Even choose to not survive.

Draco, now, was a shell of who he was before. Scared. Haunted. The Mother in her would tell him to push away that emotion, to tamp it down, to keep up appearances and to never let anyone see your struggle. But the mother in her wanted to comfort him, to take him in her arms and give him an Andy-like hug, to tell him that it's okay to fall off the face of the earth every once in a while, so long as he always gets back up. Narcissa settled for neither, for saying and doing nothing. She was a Black, you see, and he a Malfoy.

But Andromeda, hard-hearted as she might be toward Narcissa, noticed as well. His haunted eyes reminded her of her own. Hers, though, were from loss. His were from taking. And she realized what Narcissa had, in her own way, been trying to do all along.

"Making amends," she'd said. Bridging this gap, she meant, between victim and perpetrator, hero and villain. They were all human, and they had all tried their hardest to survive. They just went vastly different ways. She saw the way Narcissa looked with pride and the slightest glimmer of love at her son just as she'd seen it in herself and Nymphadora. And she knew that Narcissa was not extending an olive branch for her sake; she'd never admit that she needed her sister. But Narcissa knew that Draco needed his aunt, to do what she couldn't because she had never truly learned it. The importance of vulnerability, compassion, love. How to survive in this new world where even the "nobility" must be better.

Narcissa thought herself to be a lost cause, but she would do anything for Draco.

Andromeda remembered packing Ted's bags for him so he could run faster, lying to the Ministry about where he'd gone. She remembered collapsing on their bed in tears but knowing she'd do it all again in a heartbeat. Anything for the ones you love.

She remembered pleading with Nymphadora not to go. "Just one fight," she'd begged. "You can miss one fight." Her daughter had smiled. "Not this one, Mum." She remembered taking Teddy from her and promising to keep him safe. "Make them sorry they ever hurt your father," she'd told her, because Andromeda was never the quick to forgive type. And she'd sent her daughter marching towards death.

She remembered Harry, exhausted but at ease, finally, in mourning but free, pulling her aside after Nymphadora's funeral the night of May 4, 1998. "Your sister, Draco's mum — Narcissa," he'd rambled. "She saved my life that night. I, er, I thought you ought to know. She did it for her son, so obviously her intentions weren't completely altruistic, but she — she could've chosen not to, not to have done. So, er, yeah. I thought you should know that she wasn't . . . hopeless, I reckon. She's not a lost cause."

Oh, how wrong he was. Narcissa was anything but redeemable, deep-rooted in her pride and prejudice — not in a Jane Austen sort of way, either — and callously indifferent, but there were two things over the course of her life that she had internalized: pain is inevitable and survival at all costs. How sad that she had learned both those things, both those priorities, from her family, the family which Andromeda had gotten to escape. Though, to be accurate, Andy had been thrown out.

Andromeda thought about these things as she took in Draco, his once-arrogant air, his proper posture, his aristocratic features, his haunted eyes, and she re-evaluated. She stepped forward, and she took his hand in hers, and she looked Cissy squarely in the eyes before fully addressing Draco and saying, "It's nice to formally meet you. Do you like tea? I'm sure no one's ever made it to you the way I make it."

Because if there's anything life has taught Andy, it's that family is family, and some you choose but others you're born with, but if you're lucky, they're your chosen family too. Two years before, she'd had three spindly, skinny teenagers living with her because she refused to let them stay in horrible Aunt Walburga's dump with a crotchety old house-elf, and they refused to be separated, and Ron wasn't ready to go home quite yet, and sure, maybe she needed to not be alone in her creaking house with a crying baby. But at the moment, here she was, in a house still echoing with screams of the innocent, the broken sitting down among the breakers and enjoying a cuppa, and surely she must be insane. Surely her sister shouldn't be forgiven this easily, not when Andromeda's lost so damn much, but things happen in patterns, don't they?

Two years after Andromeda lost everything, she gained her sister (back) and a nephew.