Another invitation, stranger this time.

I'll be cleaning at Grimmauld Place on Tuesday. There are some things you might like to have, if you come for tea.

H. Potter

Narcissa went, trying not to overdress herself and not to set the expectations for the conversation too high. Perhaps he really did only want to pawn off overwrought old Black family treasures. She was ready to leave an hour before the allotted time, and had to bear the indignity of Lucius teasing her over her anxiety for her "date".

Kreacher was beside himself when he answered the door. His beloved Miss Cissy back at last.

"But Miss Bella is gone," he said sadly as he took her hat.

"Yes, Kreacher, but look at what I've brought you." She had had to be careful with this choice. Not clothing, of course, or god forbid a picture of Bellatrix that he could tote around and torment everyone with. "Here's the last pen nib she used, lovely shiny brass. You can keep it with you all the time. You could even put on a bit of string."

"Kreacher has the perfect thread. Master Harry said just the other day Kreacher could have a tassel that fell off the tapestry…" The elf was already hurrying away as he spoke, and Harry emerged from the stairwell.

"I hope that's all right," Narcissa said as she took his offered hand. She lowered her voice. "I found it in a clutter of things in a pen I think she used."

"If he's happy, I'm happy," Harry shrugged. "It's been very weird for me to get used to having him."

"I suppose – oh, I shouldn't start with something bad." The thought had struck her as she considered advice to offer for owning elves. "But I suppose Dobby did die."

"Yeah, he did."

"He was a very good little elf, really. Even if he was so remarkably silly."

"I don't know any other kind." In the awkward pause, each of them took a moment to consider how they had always considered the elf theirs, even as he had been so entrenched in the other. "I guess I don't need to show you around the house," Harry said as redirection. "Until Andromeda was here I never really thought of you knowing it too."

"No, but tell me where you want to go."

"Most of the stuff is in the drawing room." He gestured down the dark hallway. "Sorry it's a little bleak in here."

"It's not that different from how it used to feel," she said as she followed. "Or how it seemed to a little girl."

"Were you here a lot growing up?"

"Enough. But most things were at our house, the real Black house as my father always likes to emphasize, although I don't who decided that, if it was anyone besides him."

In the drawing room she paused at the tapestry on the wall, tracing over her own line and then putting a finger in the hole where Andromeda's face was supposed to be and frowning.

"That was the first thing I wanted to offer," Harry said. "I don't think anyone will want it more than you."

"I don't know that I want it, exactly, but it should be preserved. Maybe we can put some of these poor people back…can Kreacher bring it? We can send our elves to help."

"I don't think you could give him a better present than that. Although he would probably rather have it here, the amount of times I've found him in here staring at it..."

There was a pile of other things, photo albums and monogrammed china and a heavy book of family history with scrawling all over the flyleaves.

"I'll take it all, if you really don't want it," she said as they bent over the stack. "But I do feel that some of it goes with the house, and the house is yours. I don't care if you want to keep things here."

"No. And you should go look upstairs before you go, and see the jewelry."

"I assume Andromeda has already turned all of this down."

"Yeah, but it was nice to see her laugh when I asked her about it."

They were served tea by Kreacher using his most impeccable manner and reminding Miss Cissy of the provenance of each piece of the tea service. Apparently she had given her aunt and uncle the sugar bowl and creamer for a wedding anniversary, a thing of which she had no memory.

"Tell me you aren't living here alone" she said to Harry, trying to sound like she was more concerned with his welfare than the state of the house. It did seem like it had been recently cleaned, in a way, but it was painfully dank and the furniture was all the exact same as it had been in her childhood, and was now mostly covered with sheets.

"I'm not living here at all, although I might someday if we get it straightened out. Right now I'm just trying to get it respectable enough for a few friends to crash here. But I'm living with the Weasleys."

"I'm surprised you're not at school."

He shrugged, his eyes shifting. "Draco isn't there either from what I hear. It just wasn't going to be the same for some us. And it's nice to just be quiet, to be alone with Arthur and Molly. I've never – nothing was ever like that for me."

"No."

There was a long silence as the two sat, perched on the edge of a settee, taking deliberately small sips of tea to make it last longer. Narcissa was already beginning to imagine a polite escape, although she couldn't quite piece together how to bring up that she really did want to see her aunt's jewelry without sounding shrewd. If he didn't broach it again, she might have to just excuse herself without it; it didn't matter anyway, she had already gone all those years without it…

"I know something about Regulus," Harry finally said into the silence, snapping her to immediate attention. "I'm assuming none of you ever knew what happened to him."

"You do?" That was a wound she had long since let harden, and even though she was in his house it was a shock to hear his name. "No, we didn't know. We just sat there and…one day his mother decided he was dead. And Sirius was gone and…other things weren't right. It was all terrible."

"He changed his mind about his loyalty, and he wanted to destroy a Horcrux. Voldemort used Kreacher to test the defenses…I won't make Kreacher retell it to you, but that's how Regulus found out where it was. He and Kreacher went back to where it was hidden, and Regulus died there. Kreacher wasn't supposed to tell anyone."

"He was very loyal with that, then, because I saw him several times when he would have sold Sirius for a knut. Or a pen nib."

"I'm surprised Kreacher is still sane at all after the whole thing," Harry said in a lowered voice. "I mean I've been to where it happened, and it's not…it was worse than any defense he ever put on any of the rest of them."

"Poor Regulus. He was the baby of all of us, and he did so admire Lucius, I think. He was far too young when he started. It upset me."

"I told Andromeda about it, but I guess she wasn't around when it happened either. Of course she cares now, but it wasn't a big deal to her. Sirius seemed like he just accepted it, too."

"It is strange," she finally said after considering it longer. "He had the wrong people mourning him all this time. He should have been blasted off the tapestry for that."

"I was surprised she never put Sirius back. I thought everyone thought he was in Voldemort's pocket all along."

"She believed that, for a time. But no one who really knew…Voldemort…thought it made sense. I think the idea of it helped her save face with her friends a bit, but he had already been disloyal to her for so long, and she surely noticed that no one else – no one who ever was in his pocket, I mean –" she said with bitter smile, "ever bought into the idea. I never saw him again after my wedding."

"I'm surprised he even went to that."

"Under duress, I believe. We hadn't been particularly close for some time. There were some…differences of opinion at school."

"About Professor Snape."

"Mostly that, yes, although we had both chosen our sides anyway."

"He was awful to Snape. And he didn't really stop when they were grown up."

"Severus was a difficult person too."

"But not to you."

"Well, no." This was the door she had told herself not to hope he would open, and she felt her shoulders relax slightly at the prospect of someone wanting to listen. "Maybe this is an old-fashioned thing to say, but I think he needed a woman in his life. He let me mother him, and then he would escort me to parties and things if Lucius couldn't go. And I believe he liked it when I asked him for help. Maybe you know this, but I asked him to make an Unbreakable Vow to protect Draco, to do what Voldemort asked of him if he couldn't, and I think it pleased him to be asked. I know now that there was more to it than anyone knew, but he did try to help Draco. He was always watching him, and I think he was doing it for me, specifically, because he saw how I worried."

Harry considered this. "It bothers me that the "good guys", my dad and his friends, couldn't see that he was so…sad. I mean, he was kind of like me. If everyone wasn't so interested in me already, I could have gotten to Hogwarts exactly like him, dressed wrong and skinny and awkward. And maybe my only friends would have been Death Eaters, and they'd blame me for it when I was just trying to fit in."

He was still lonely, Narcissa thought. Thankfully he had a home full of people who loved him now, and he would never be friendless or indeed anything less than a hero in his life, but nothing had ever been stable before now. Draco's life, however awful it had come to be, had at least always spun on the axis of someone eagerly waiting at the train station to take him back to the same house where he had grown up as a prince. Harry would always feel, intrinsically, a sore kinship with the unwanted boys.

"I'm sure your parents, and Sirius, and everyone, regretted it in later life. It was schoolboy teasing. It was ugly, but that doesn't change the paths we all took later. It doesn't make – it doesn't mean we were better. Severus was one person, compared to everything that…" She had to trail off at that. No point in relitigating the terrible crimes.

"I know. But it was hard to see that when I had never liked him either, and he died for me. He spent 7 years doing everything he could just because – did he really love my mother that much?"

"I think he loved her a great deal more than he would ever let anyone see. I probably shouldn't tell you this, but he was very upset when he found out she was pregnant with you. I never saw him unmoored the way he was that day, before or after. And I never even heard of him seeking out another woman, much less saw it happen. I don't know if it was the most rational or becoming behavior, but that was how much he cared."

It was getting dim outside, and the clutter in the room and dirt on the windows was making darkness advance even more quickly. Harry stared into his tea leaves as Narcissa fiddled in her handbag for a handkerchief, and then he seemed to shake away his thoughts and change his tone.

"You've probably been here longer than you thought you would be. I'll show you where I put the jewelry. It's all in your aunt's room."

They went back into the hall, Narcissa leading the way now, but as they turned to the stairs an imperious voice rang out.

"Stop, stop! Narcissa, dear, come here. How could you come without speaking to me?" Walburga's portrait had thrown off its curtains again as they went by. "Narcissa," she went on without waiting for a reply. "Can't you do something about this awful state of things? Surely there has to be something, some law, that will let you get this house back into the rightful hands of the Blacks."

Narcissa stopped, not removing her hand from the newel post, and turned to observe the portrait. It was a likeness true to the very end of her life, when her men had all left her and she had rarely come away from the very house where they stood then. Portrait magic had always made Narcissa uneasy, and she had always been grateful that it had never been much of a tradition amongst the Malfoys. Still, she found a scrap of daring to speak up.

"Well, Auntie, I do think it will be all sorted out in the end. I'm sure Harry plans to give the house to his godson as it was given to him, don't you Harry?"

"Yeah." A wide grin spread across his face. "The sooner he wants it the better."

"Then that settles it. Wait a few years and it'll be with Andromeda's grandson. That's your great-great-nephew. He's a Metamorphmagus, and whatever it is you are when your father is a werewolf. Very strong magical blood overall, I think."

And they breezed upstairs.


Two things: this Narcissa may be slightly OOC (and maybe the idea of this happening at all is naïve), but I had fun writing it, and I'm just trying to write it at this point. Also I actually love writing Harry too and he's not often in my stories. I'll talk more about characterization in a note when the story is all said and done. Secondly, it's embarrassing to say that I wrote all of the rest of this story assuming that the Black sisters and the Black brothers were cousins because their fathers were brothers. But no no no. Cygnus and Walburga are siblings, and Orion was their second cousin! Now, this is a marriage practice that is still barely dying out amongst irl nobility, so I shouldn't be surprised these blood purists were into it, but I was really shocked to learn that (or at least, I think I just learned it. Maybe I always knew and forgot).

Also, if you really start thinking about all the little connections between Harry and the Malfoys and the Blacks it'll just knock the wind right out of you. I just felt like it had to get at least partially acknowledged somewhere! And they didn't even talk about Bellatrix the cousin killer...