It was sickening to watch. His beautiful mother, who had coped alone with their wrecked world for an entire year, had immediately fallen back into simpering over his father. Lucius was returned amongst a crowd of his compatriots, and in the rush and noise, Draco stayed away to watch. Narcissa ran into her husband's open arms, and buried her face in ragged robes. They swayed together for a long moment, and then his head dipped to whisper to her. She looked up with wet eyes, smoothed back her husband's hair, kissed his dirty forehead. Then their eyes broke away to search the room, and Draco's chest tightened. He tried to step aside behind a column, but the movement made his mother notice him, and she beckoned. He could tell that her eyes had hardened, however slightly, at his obvious intentional avoidance.

They opened their arms to him while not releasing each other, and it was his turn to hide his face against his father while trying to think of something to say. He had grown, and Lucius had wasted away, and the familiar heaviness of the hug was gone.

"I am so glad to see you, Draco."

"Me too."

"I did read your letters," he said down to Narcissa, "even though I had no way to return them. I know you did so many admirable things, Draco."

"I guess."

"No. I am proud of you." He glanced around the room. The Dark Lord actually wasn't there for this event, although Bellatrix, who had been involved in the jailbreak, was surveying the room with a critical eye. Her husband was sitting close to her and nursing a drink, and the escaped prisoners who had no family to greet them were wearily eating a meal. Severus was already gone. "Let's go upstairs now."

Lucius showered away the first layer of grime while she drew him a bath, and then she sat on the floor beside him as he tried to soak through down to his very center. His hand lay limp on the edge of the tub; he let her lace her fingers through it, but he wasn't really holding on.

"You know I'll be tired tonight," he said, and she laughed a little.

"I know it's not going to be the way it was the first time, Lucius. I don't need that either." That got a little squeeze out of him.

"I wish it could be. I wish I came back to you strong and young."

"I knew who was coming back."

"Draco is not well."

"No." She didn't have anything else she could add to that. Their son was luminously pale and hardly spoke.

"It'll be over soon," Lucius said. "I hope."

She read his meaning there. They were both now secretly waiting for the end of their master, blind obedience turning to blind hope.

"But when – won't we be punished? Not Draco, but certainly you and I." Their voices had dropped to almost nothing.

"If there is a chance to make a concession, or to show goodwill, we must take it. Do you agree?" She nodded, and bowed her head over his hand, her lips pressed against it. "Don't speak of it any more, then. I know I hardly need to warn you of such things anymore, but…"

"Yes. But shouldn't we tell Draco? Give him some comfort for his future?"

"I would not have him dragged any further into this. He will understand from our behavior with him, and he will remain blameless if the worst should come. Please, we have to stop this now. That's really too much said already."

"Will you come to bed soon?"

"Yes, I'll come. Leave me one moment, and I'll come."

They lost further control of the Manor, of the guest rooms Narcissa had tried to protect and of the sanctity of all but their bedrooms and one family sitting room, into which they moved a dining table and piles of books and rolled parchment. Draco moved from his own hallway with his bedroom and old playroom back into the room that had been his nursery, directly next to his parents. The Death Eaters who had nowhere to go weren't particularly noisy houseguests, overworked as they were, but it made him nervous to hear thick-soled boots coming and going all throughout the night. The Dark Lord made no request for a bedroom, but as soon as Lucius had returned he mysteriously became in need of a study for the first time, and would not let Lucius retake his own formidable desk. He stayed there most of the day, unless he had to leave the Manor, only a few doors down from where Narcissa and Draco tried to spend their days reading and ignoring the things happening around them. And then of course there was the awful mess with his wand.

Lucius's cane had come into their life early in their marriage when they were both teenagers trying to act 35. She had laughed at him at first, but he was serious about it, and eventually she grew to love the sight of her tall husband in his severe robes, wand conspicuously held at his side, sign of their family in his hand. It had stood by their bedside in its usual place for a year, waiting for its master, and she had touched the snake head every morning as she slipped into her dressing gown. Being reunited with it had immediately restored some of his dignity, even as his hair fell limp around a hollow face. Maybe the Dark Lord had noticed that too.

As soon as Narcissa heard the demand, she knew it would be too much. How much could one man take? And in front of everyone? She felt him tense, and she knew him well enough that she felt like she could hear the words forming his head. He moved, slightly, as if he meant to push his chair back. All she could do was grab him and hope she heard him exhale. When the heavy snake head hit the table, she felt his body go slack in submission, and she could breathe again.

That mention of Nymphadora, and Bellatrix's denial of her, stabbed her. They, Andromeda's chosen family, were not sitting in this stuffy room, afraid to move their eyes. Yes, surely they had their own problems and share of night terrors, but a summer wedding among friends…

Then…murder. In her dining room. When would it end? There was a clock just outside her periphery, with no way to turn her head towards it. He would see it, and she would be the next target. She wished she was sitting between Draco and Lucius; one seat was too far away from her son.

That night, Lucius started to drink. He brought a decanter into their bedroom, and sat in the armchair as she fell asleep, counting how many times she heard the stopper clink back into place.

"Please don't make me go. Not this year."

"Draco, you have to go. You don't have to do anything this year other than focus on your studies."

"It's not going to be the same."

"Your friends will all be there. Severus will be there."

"Everyone knows what I did–"

"No, they don't. None of them understand anything the way we do."

"Let me skip a year. Please. The Dark Lord will want my help, won't he?"

Narcissa sighed. They were sitting on his bed beside a half-filled trunk, with all of the detritus of the year before scattered around them on the floor. She lowered her voice. "I know you don't mean that. I know you're afraid of going back, but you don't want to stay here and watch this play out, and be dragged into search and destroy missions. And I know you will never go back if you don't just finish it now."

She was touched when his head fell onto her shoulder, and wetness seeped through the fabric of her dress. "Is Father going to be ok?" he whispered.

"Of course he is. I'll be here with him. He's just having trouble decompressing after Azkaban."

"Did he have trouble with that before?"

She held her breath for a moment before answering. "He was younger before, and he didn't stay as long. And the world was very different. We could go out and do things."

"And the Dark Lord was dead."

"Stop it," she hissed. "Draco, don't start saying things you will regret." She pulled him closer as she said it, hoping to confer the reality of how she felt with the warning she had to issue.

"Did anything interesting happen on the train?" Narcissa asked in a falsely cheerful voice when she retrieved him for the Christmas holiday.

"Please, Mother. They wanted everyone to see, as I'm sure you know. And I bet I know where she is now, too."

Narcissa wasn't sure how she had thought she was going to buy any time on the topic. She had been struggling for over a year to block out the thought of the elderly, innocent man in her cellar, and adding a teenage girl to the mix had not settled her stomach. It hadn't been an hour before she had to leave for the train station that the strange, dreamy girl had been delivered to the Manor, hardly protesting at all as one would expect. Her unblinking eyes had just searched Narcissa knowingly, and then she had disappeared down the stairs.

"Father isn't here," Draco interrupted her thoughts. She sucked her lips between her teeth.

"Draco, your father is…you may expect him to look better than he does."

"I think you've overestimated my expectations of this holiday."

Between Draco's comings and goings, life was amazingly blank. Without his wand, Lucius could do nothing, and was starting to even be excluded from meetings. Narcissa was occasionally sent on menial errands, although somehow the Dark Lord seemed to still respect the agreement they had made years before that she would not fight for him. They saw Severus almost never, and Bellatrix far too often.

There was a complete set of 20 inane romance novels collected by Lucius's mother on a bottom shelf of the library, and Narcissa made herself read them much more slowly than she was capable of, and then when she finished them all, she hardly blinked before starting from the beginning again. The only other thing in her life that could remotely be called relaxing was walking in the garden with Lucius, when he would come out of his fog and agree to it, and even that was not as it had once been. The clouds were low, and the plants were not growing.

Of course the three of them knew it was Harry. Voldemort's militia of feral Snatchers had spent no time in his presence, had not made a life's study of him in hopes of something great and unexpected happening. They would not know his height compared to Draco's or the exact color of his eyes. But the Malfoys would. Anywhere. There was some unspoken thing between them, urging the other to be the one to tell the truth, or to finalize the lie. Narcissa trying to settle her husband with the tone of her voice alone while he, excited as he was, was still slow to roll up his sleeve. But then the frenzy in the room began to grow as Lucius realized he had perhaps found one last stroke of his unending luck, and Draco tried, for what reason he couldn't understand, to temper his father. Maybe, after it all…

Bellatrix's terror over the sword broke the spell, and later that evening, those involved could hardly pick out a discrete series of events from what followed. The girl's screams sent Narcissa's mind away from her body, and after that all she could do was track Draco around the room, and try to keep a hand on him. It took her hours to come to terms with the fact that Dobby had not been an apparition, and that the little elf who had once carefully handed her her treasured list of baby names was now likely dead at Bellatrix's hand, and only because he had thwarted her from killing him herself.

After the vortex of light sucked all the air and noise out of the drawing room, she had only a moment to stem her son's bleeding and revive her stunned husband before the Dark Lord arrived. Then there was a fury that seemed like the end of the world. Lucius was struck across the face, not with magic but with a piece of the chandelier Voldemort had hoisted above his head. Then with an untethered, primal hex, his body was thrown across the room, his head snapping back against a stone windowsill. Narcissa thought in that moment that he must be dead; it would have been naïve to assume otherwise. Scabior was actually killed, brutally, and then Voldemort held Bellatrix against the wall by her neck for an extended, ear splitting dressing down. Narcissa and Draco were left huddled together on a rug stuck all over with glass shards, Draco sobbing while trying to cover his bloodied mouth, hoping to avoid notice.

Eventually Bellatrix was dragged away by her hair, and Narcissa stumbled over to Lucius, gasping out and finally starting to cry herself when she felt his chest moving. She and Draco straightened his body carefully and levitated him to bed, where he made them both bend close to him to hear groggy apologies of an undetermined scope – it seemed, Narcissa thought, like he hoped to receive forgiveness for the course of his entire life.

Severus came that evening and sat beside their bed, observing Lucius as Narcissa stood over Draco in the bathroom making sure each cut on his face was free of debris and liberally dosed with ditany.

"Is it bad?" Narcissa asked him once Draco was sent to bed with a vial of Dreamless Sleep, and although she had asked she was startled that he seemed to pause and consider his words.

"It was a very hard blow," he began.

"Severus –"

"He's all right, mentally. I mean he knows where he is and how to add, and he remembers what happened. But he seems incredibly dazed, and I couldn't get him up to walk around."

"What do you mean? You mean he can't walk?"

"I think he can, but it may not be – he may not –"

"You think he can't."

"Tomorrow will tell. I can spend the night here. I think he's just…he's been hit very hard."

Had she ever heard Severus stumble like this before?

There was no reason left to preserve the bridge. Narcissa found Bellatrix sulking alone in the crime scene that was the drawing room and did not wait to begin.

"Don't you feel anything, Bella? Do you feel any sympathy for a girl dragged into a war?"

"A girl?" Bellatrix could barely piece together her meaning. "You mean the Mudblood? Surely that's not your worry now."

"Yes, I do. I mean the child you tortured today. Of course it was all obscene, but none of it unpredictable, except for you."

"Child! She's older than Draco."

"Oh, barely. And Draco is still entirely a child."

"Oh no, Cissy. You can't be starting down this path. You should be asking me why I didn't just kill them all before it was all so muddled up by–"

"I don't care about paths anymore," Narcissa hissed. "I'm sick of seeing my son exposed to an ongoing litany of horrors inflicted upon people he used to lived amongst. I'm sick of watching you behave like a lunatic. I'm sick of my husband so battered and broken he can hardly speak."

"So what? What will you do?"

Narcissa could only roll her eyes as her sister, as a threat that was obviously intended to be understood, toyed with the left sleeve of her dress. "Don't bully me with that, Bella. If you do it, I'll take it. But he loves this house too much, and Lucius's money. He loves having a loyal, terrified student inside Hogwarts. And it's not as if he'll be pleased to hear from you again tonight. All I've done is told you what he already knows about me. That I was the one who couldn't take his Mark."

She turned on her heel and left. Besides all that, she knew her sister would never do it to her.

Severus came into their bedroom unannounced the next morning and found Lucius sitting up, however slightly, with an arm draped over a sleeping Narcissa, curled up tightly against him.

"Have you gotten up yet?"

"No."

"Do you think you can?"

"I didn't expect to be this elderly this early," Lucius said instead of answering.

"It's not because you're elderly, Lucius. He could have killed you."

"If you help me," he admitted. Severus stood by with an outstretched arm as Lucius eased himself away from his wife, who barely stirred, and rose to his feet with an intense grimace. Severus was relieved to see that he could stand firmly, and shuffle forward, even as slowly as it was. One shoulder stayed up higher than the other.

"I won't make you come in," Lucius tried to laugh at the bathroom door. "But maybe...wait for me."

Severus was surprised that Narcissa had slept through this, but a closer look at her face explained it. She was as pale as he remembered seeing her when she had her miscarriage, and the circles under her eyes looked drawn on with ink.

A latch clicked behind him, and he swiveled to the open doorway, more startled than he would ever admit. But it was just Draco leaving his room, fully dressed as if prepared for a day of visiting or shopping.

"What's wrong?" he asked immediately as his eyes traced the scene. "Is she ok?"

"She's asleep. Your father is in the bathroom. Your mother would probably have me try to hide it from you, but there's no point. You saw how he was hurt yesterday, and in his...current state, it may be a long recovery. I think it's his back, and he's likely concussed. I'm not going to be able to stay. I know you'll be coming back to school next week, but in the meantime you have to help him. She's not strong enough, or big enough."

Draco just nodded, resigned to it. Why not? "That doesn't sound like he should be drinking."

"No. I'll tell him."

"Good luck." Draco turned down the hall, and disappeared into the sitting room.