Lucius's cane was remade with a new wand by a lesser wandmaker who was willing to make a house call. He actually needed it to walk, and was thankful for all the years prior he had spent making it a part of his accepted image. The wand was good enough – maybe Ollivander's reputation had long been overstated – although he had little use for it in his new daily life. At first he returned home with a complicated dosing schedule of potions and salves, and the order to continue resting. After some time passed and he was able to walk in the garden on Narcissa's arm again, and sit with her around the Manor as she did her best to reorganize it into the home it had once been, the Ministry also reorganized itself enough to hold his trial, and when it was over he was confined, officially, to a year of house arrest.
There was a fine too, large enough to actually dent the Malfoy bank account, and set aside to cover most of the damage done to Hogwarts, and there were perpetual payments to be made to Luna and Ollivander. He was not to ever make any attempt to remove the remnants of his Dark Mark; they would have him shamed somehow. No one was ever to use the reverent "Dark Lord" to refer to Voldemort again. Narcissa and Draco sat in private inquiries, detailing a calendar of events and relating, with honesty that pained them, what Lucius had actually done behind closed doors. To his family the confessions were terrible, and it frightened them to think what would come of it, but really, there was not much worse than cowardice at the foot of a wicked master. He had been a soldier, given money, let his house be used as a prison, planned many foiled attempts at some insurrection, but there were no casualties to attribute to him. No victims interviewed recalled him being a participating party in torture. His entire record, the council agreed when deliberating, remained as infuriatingly slippery and vague as ever.
Draco, everyone agreed, had been punished enough by the misfortune of his birth, although that did not necessarily translate into a warm reception in society. Narcissa's reputation remained of divided public opinion. Yes, she had married her Death Eater a long time ago, seemingly happily, and stayed – but, pundits would point out in her favor, it had been arranged by her zealous parents, who at that time were under scrutiny for erecting a showy memorial to Bellatrix in their garden. Maybe she had never understood to what she was binding herself, and could never escape. 15 years prior she had sworn they hardly knew one another. She hadn't even attended his trial. But then, everyone remembered, they immediately began being seen together again. They had never lived separately; rumors about them, as a couple, no matter how briefly widespread they became, had always obviously been false. And there was no reason why she should have to stay with him now, with their son grown and having suffered so much from his father's choices.
But she had won them the war. That was not a secret, and it was not easy for her critics to talk around it, although they could rightly point out that it was hardly a coordinated, intentional plot. In the end, the motivations didn't matter. Harry Potter stood firm when pressed; she had been standing on the cusp of everything she was ever supposed to want, and she let him through the door instead.
After the final day of their trials, on their escorted way out of the Ministry, Lucius regarded the then shrouded sculpture in the center of the atrium. "For Merlin's sake," he muttered, "let's pay to have that monstrosity taken away."
It was finally decided, with much handwringing, that it would be proper to bury Severus alongside Dumbledore. Unlike his predecessor, his coffin would go into the earth and the grass would be allowed to grow back over it, and there would be a modest black-on-black granite marker, selected by Narcissa, barely raised above the ground. The gathering was modest, too; only the Malfoys, the professors he had spent his life with, Kingsley Shacklebolt, Aberforth Dumbledore, and Harry. Surely there were at least a few others who would have joined, but no attempt was made to advertise the service when so many were still entrenched in their own grief. The primary speaker was McGonagall, who seemed to have pleasant enough memories of Severus, now that the truth was revealed and she had processed it, to remain calm and complementary. It gave Narcissa some comfort to hear that the two of them had spent years of late nights together in the staff room, seriously discussing teaching and their difficult students.
There was no comfort, though, in watching him be lowered down. Narcissa had to turn her entire face into Lucius's shoulder to stop herself from crying out, begging for more time. How could he be going at the moment when she needed so much help?
"I made the mistake of reading the newspaper today," he said to her on a day when he was finding it difficult to do more than lie on the sofa. "35% of those polled say you should divorce me."
"That wasn't in The Daily Prophet!"
"It was." He gestured to the discarded paper on the coffee table. "Apparently your story is only so sympathetic."
The author was editorializing on the revelations in the documents from Lucius's first trial that some whistleblower had turned out to the public, primarily the fact that Narcissa had sworn over and over that her marriage to him was a complete façade. If so, shouldn't she make a better show of it all now that she had proved a bit of herself, and leave him to his shame? The poll was nothing to take seriously – the fact that they had published that part was truly unbecoming of journalism – but it was true that she had obviously lied repeatedly at the time, and that they had obviously backslid into their loyalty without even an attempt to ask for help. Lucius could not have been under the Imperius Curse again when he determined he would seek out his reborn master, and indeed this time around he had made no claim of such a thing.
"Well?" he asked as she read it and then read it again. "Will you leave me? You might even make a career out of it. Speaking engagements, or a book." She clicked her tongue and threw the paper at him.
"I'm a kept woman," she said with a roll of her eyes. "If they know that as well as they claim, then they must understand there's nothing to be done. Let me sit with you."
The resettled together, now with his head in her lap, and she spent a moment tracing her finger over the lines on his face.
"I do wish they would leave you out of it," he said, his voice quieter. "I do think sometimes that it would be better if you moved on. None of it was your doing."
"I agreed to it a long time ago, Lucius. Maybe I was never fighting, or carrying secret messages, but it was all in my house. It was within my power to try to do something. And I guess I just – maybe there is a flaw in me that I never cared very much. Anna scolded me over it once…and Merlin, I never saw her again."
"You were by my side. You were always so adamant that you would support me, and I abused it."
"No, Lucius. It's what we both wanted. It was always the basis of all of our pride. Striving for it together, that was everything to me."
He nodded slowly. "I always knew I would marry you."
"I know. I wanted it too. We were stupid to go along with it all instead of saying something."
"No, Narcissa. I knew I was going to get you. I knew for a long time that Andromeda wasn't going to make it to the wedding."
"What do you mean?" His tone had changed, and she found herself sitting up straighter, growing stiff. "You told me before that you thought she was unhappy –"
"I knew she was unhappy, because I caught her and Ted Tonks in the library at the end of my 7th year."
"Lucius! Why – why didn't you ever tell me that before?"
"I'm not very proud of everything that happened, although I suppose we know each other well enough now that I can confess. But for years it just seemed like I had manipulated everything and barely gotten away with it. I was afraid to say anything that might make it go away."
"'Know each other well enough'! What on earth could you have done?"
"Perhaps it's not so bad. I don't know. Of course Andromeda was afraid I would cause a fuss, that she'd have to marry me straightaway instead of finishing school. But I didn't want that. Who wants a wife who doesn't want them from the very first day? And I knew – I was pretty sure, and she thought so too, that I could have you."
"So you…"
"I just helped her. I helped her move things out of your house like they were going to the Manor, and I pretended like I was taking her on dates and I'd leave her with Ted. It wasn't a particularly daring escape on her part, but I made sure it would be a day when everyone was fretting over wedding seating charts or some such thing. But I've never liked it, any of it. I manipulated the entire thing while you thought it was an act of fate."
"But she didn't want me to marry you. She wrote me a letter. Why would she do all that when she knew that's how it would end up?"
"I suppose we all make our choices, don't we? She's not perfect, and she knows it. She had to choose between you and herself. I think she knew you would be happy, regardless of what she thought about it."
It was a stunning revelation, but it was also true enough that so much time had passed that it hardly seemed worth worrying over. Lucius was struggling to sit up at her side while she just stared into the cold fireplace, and when he was finally upright and pressed against her, he took her hand.
"Should I have left the illusion?"
"I don't see why." Her thoughts were churning slowly over the undeniable facts of the matter. "I guess – she would have gone either way, wouldn't she?"
"Yes."
"And you would have had me either way?"
"I wasn't going to accept anyone else."
"And I wanted you. I was so…I never really imagined anything else for myself. I just imagined being Andromeda. I thought that was normal, to envy your sister. To never think about boys. But I was thinking about you."
"I should have told you the first day. She swore me to secrecy until it was done, but once she was gone I could have been honest with you. But I was overwhelmed with my luck."
She shook her head and rolled her eyes slightly, smiling, and inclined her head slightly away from him; he knew the cue to place his lips under her ear.
"How long has it been since we've done this?" he whispered.
"A hundred years," she sighed. "And I don't care about anything else."
In July Draco received a letter informing him that all 1997-1998 seventh year students were invited to return for another year of instruction "more appropriately tailored to preparation for N.E.W.T. examinations". Narcissa found it slightly crumpled and discarded in the dining room when she arrived for her own breakfast, and put it in her pocket. Later she silently showed it to Lucius, sitting at his desk, and he glanced up at her with a shared understanding.
"What did he say about it?"
"We haven't spoken. I found this next to his dirty breakfast plate like a piece of trash."
"You'll have to talk to him about it. He barely speaks to me."
"He won't want to go."
"I know. But we can try."
Draco was equally dividing his time between his room and somewhere outside of the house that Narcissa could never pin down. She asked after his friends, and the answers were so vague that she had to believe he never saw them. He ate alone, sometimes on a tray in his room, and the circles under his eyes were not improving.
"You won't consider it?"
Draco shook his head, blinking quickly and looking into the distance. She had managed to nab him when he emerged from his room with an empty lunch tray to place in the hallway for the elves, and draw him down to the terrace railing where they could stand and not look at one another. "You know I can't go back there with all of them."
"What about your friends? Pansy and Gregory? Blaise?"
"Blaise is all right, but the rest of them…it's embarrassing. They expect me to still be someone I'm not." He bent his head down between his arms. "And all the things that happened there…"
"It'll be different this year. Everything was so dark for so many years, and the Triwizard Tournament before that, and –"
"It won't be different, Mum, and you know it. I said I'll take the N.E.W.T.s. I did actually learn some things last year, and you know I can study alone."
"I know you can do anything you set out to do. We just wanted to encourage you to try to go back to normalcy."
"I don't want to. And I don't…I'm sorry, Mum, but I want to move out. It's the same way here, with the memories, and it's so quiet."
Narcissa tried not to falter as she felt a bit of her footing fall out from under her. "Of course, that's only natural. You can stay at the beach, or we'll help you find a flat –"
"No, Mother. I can't stay in this country, with these newspaper articles and the people looking at me."
Now Narcissa was gripping the railing hard and wishing she and Lucius had just endeavored to do this together. "Leave the country?"
"You remember Blaise's mother's old boyfriend, Toby. He lives in Morocco now, has a family and everything, and he's the head of the bank there. I wrote to him and he says I can stay with them, and he'll set me up with some work. I'll come back for exams, and Christmas, I promise."
"Draco, we can get you a job –"
"You could, but not the same as you could 5 years ago. I don't want to start on that foot."
"Morocco is so far away…"
"Not really. I was hoping to get to Australia, but I'll accept that I have to take it in bits." He was teasing her, she saw out of the corner of her eye, and she reached out a hand to squeeze his arm as tears began to prick her eyes.
"I can't make you stay, or do anything, although I do wish you would consider staying closer to us for a bit longer. But I won't continue to be your intermediary with your father. Go tell him yourself. Today, if you're really serious about this. Who knows, maybe he'll have some manly advice for you."
"I am serious, Mother. It's not about either of you but I can't – maybe you just can't imagine what it would feel like for me to go back there."
"I probably can't," she agreed, running a hand over his styled hair. "And I do wish it was different."
