After the battle, you sit on a long table in the Great Hall at Hogwarts, Narcissa on your left, Draco on hers, and you are entirely at a loss what to do, now, or really, ever again.
You have been staring sideways with fixed attention at the table, not knowing where otherwise to look that would not offend someone; not wanting to see the offence reflected in others' eyes and, most of all, not in your wife's.
Now you steal a glance at her. She does not return it. Her attention is absorbed by the scene unfolding before you — the grief, the wounded, the exhausted, numb relief that Voldemort has gone. She leans forward slightly from her seat perched on the table, watching everything, and you can tell that she is less with you than with the activity in the hall, less with you than she is with herself. And why not? She is splendid.
She is splendid; and you are, too late, you fear, unreservedly in love.
She has always been beautiful. As a stupid, Slytherin youth, betrothed to a girl you had not chosen for yourself, you liked to joke that you loved two things about Narcissa: her beauty, and that she was not her insane sister Bellatrix.
Once married, she had a role. She performed it well. She looked enchanting on your arm; she obliged your with an heir. She asked no questions about your business, politics, the other women you serially amused yourself with.
By twenty-five, you were steered only by dark magic and false power, blood on your hands, flaunting and taking pride in your degradation. She was discreet, patient, even kind. Pregnant with Draco, a twenty-four-year-old girl with the weight of lineages on her shoulders, she had tried to love you. To envelop you in the world of tenderness, of soft, enfolding affection she was learning to inhabit with her . . . with your unborn child. But you were lost, the right-hand man of the Dark Lord, too much caught up in keeping his favour to realise the infinite value that was hers.
(And, anyway, affection had not come easily to you since the day, at ten years old, you stood before your father and learned, without ceremony, that your mother had died.)
Once you thought yourself (how arrogant and blind you were) the epitome of shine and glory. But Voldemort broke you like he broke the silver snakehead on your wand. Narcissa, though, became tempered like fine steel. Fired in despair, she emerged with the power to save her son, to help to change the world by that act; and now it is she who shines, she who is glorious.
She moves her head slightly. Your senses, fractured and highly strung, are so keen you are able to avert your eyes again, before she can complete the movement, and your eyes do not meet, your attention is not revealed, and your need does not get in her way.
But you feel her, all the more intimately as she disengages. She is making a decision; she sighs, smoothes her skirts, stands and walks away.
(As soon as she has gone, Draco gets up too and wanders off.)
You lift your head and watch her straight, elegant back as she passes into the crowded hall. You stare as she approaches Minerva McGonagall, words are exchanged, McGonagall points towards a group of students. At first, Narcissa looks unsure, then she walks towards them, finds medical supplies, kneels down and starts to clean and bandage a wound. She is awkward, but she tries.
You want to go with her, but you don't know how. You don't know how to change your outer self to meet what is rising up inside. You want to go back to every time you failed her. To dismantle every distorted feeling, misplaced word, half-attentive touch, your lack of proper love, and put them back together in the form they should have been.
But, then, what right do you have now to hold her back?
Time passes. Perhaps you dozed; you are very tired, after all. Perhaps you only lost yourself in longing and regret and hope. You only know that she is back, seated again on the table next to you.
"Lucius," she says. Your name seems more important when she says it.
"Narcissa." Her name seems luminous on your lips. You love her, even as you wait for her to say goodbye.
And then you think, why wait? Can you not try, even if you fail? Even now? You have failed at tasks which once seemed greater, and now seem insignificant compared with this.
Words will not do.
Over the years, with her, your eloquence has only served as an obstacle — to everything, and often intentionally so. And, anyway, now all your words are gone, have lost their power and their point. So you do not speak. But you take her hand in both of yours, lift it to your lips and plant a slow kiss infused with everything you cannot say.
She sighs softly, but does not withdraw her hand from yours. "It is all right, Lucius," she says. Her voice is tired, sad, resigned, perhaps, but it is as though she understands beneath the surface. "We will start again."
A feeling comes in your chest, an opening that you allow, that has a purpose now. She moves closer to you, her body lightly touching yours, so you can feel her breathe, and there she stays.
She stays, and you will start again.