Margarita pulled on the tie of her robe, and let it slide alongside her arms and back, before approaching and embracing Abraxas, soundless in her movements. Her hands wrapped around his neck and her legs struggled to wrap around his waist as he still sat on his chair, and he found himself helping her coil her leg around him, resting his chin against her shoulder. Her mouth pressed lightly against his ear. Her voice when singing now was thinner, lighter, and the short, erotic verses captured his attention and interest as she slithered her body against his.

"Such vulgarities are unbecoming of your tongue." Abraxas pulled his head back amused, and jokingly chastised the verses she sang.

She did not dignify him with a worded response, and instead threw out her tongue from between her lips towards him, dignifying Abraxas instead with an even greater vulgarity.

"You remind me of a man." Margot finally spoke, leaning herself back, until her spine touched his desk. She pulled her robe back on her shoulders and pulled her hair out from underneath it, as if speaking of another man required the chaste gesture, before leaning her elbows against the desk.

"A real man, or a man of odes, of poems? A wizard altogether, I hope."

"A man of wizarding stories, a wizard who had seven hundred mistresses. And each night-"

"He turned his Timeturner twice, to enjoy two a night before his sleep. And that was the only way he could close his eyes and fall into deep slumber. I know that story well." A grim children's story. He hadn't read, or even thought of it since he was a young teenager, and slowly recited what he could remember, thoughtfully chewing on each word he spoke as he pondered on the next.

"Slowly, his mistresses came to know one another, and over the course of years, plotted to tear him piece by piece, and each fashioned gold necklaces of his flesh through alchemy, for one of his mistresses created the Philosopher's stone for just this one purpose. And she had his heart fashioned into a necklace like a breastplate. Do I seem to you like the kind of man who would bother himself with matters of the flesh to such an extent?"

"You are a man, my love, after all, but that was not what I meant." she whispered, getting up from his lap.

He furrowed his brows, knowing now what she must have been referring to. He leaned his elbows against the desk, and looked at his wife. Ever since she had given birth, her hair had somehow straightened, giving her the appearance of an aristocratic elegance that reminded him of Aurora. In that moment, her face lit by moonlight, her eyes betraying her worry for him, it was as if there were two women speaking through her, both of them women he referred to lovingly as his wife.

"You remember, in the beginning of the story, how it goes in great detail over his inability to sleep, how he writhes in bed, how he agonises from dusk until dawn, how he almost pulls his hair out each sleepless night."

"I do remember."

"You do, don't you?" Margot said amused, tapping her nail against a nearby clock. "Well then, I shall return to bed. Whether you join me or wish to continue agonising by yourself here, perhaps build yourself a Time Turner… Well, that is your decision, Abraxas."

He watched her adjust her robe and tie as it were, and tapped his fingers against his desk as he watched her leave his office.

Two months had passed between that night and when Abraxas Malfoy took his last breath.

If it were after him, he would have still lived on - after all, it's not every day that one reads in the Daily Prophet that a prisoner escaped from Azkaban.

His daughter was still young and impressionable, and Abraxas was aware how his death would change her life. In his desire to impart as much knowledge and to mould her into the Malfoy wizard that he wished Lucius could have been, he worried now that he had made her attached to him, in spite of all his attempts to detach himself emotionally from her. But Mykew Gregorovitch was right, and daughters were loved differently than sons, and as much as he would have shed his own blood for Lucius, he looked at Claudia with softer eyes.

After all, Lucius was the future of the Malfoy family and name. The stakes for him were different - they always had been, since his birth, since the death of Aurora. Lucius would become a version of him, of his father, whether he liked it or not. But Claudia… She could become like her namesake, and live the bohemian life that Abraxas's mother never lived. After all, she had Margot as an example.

Nevertheless, when it came to Claudia, worried for her sake and for the person that she would become after his death, Abraxas had made a late modification to his will, to allow her to live as a Malfoy far sooner than he and Lucius had originally planned to. At least in that way, he knew that Lucretia and Joachim would have a much bigger say in Claudia's life, and that Lucius could not discard her.

He needed to have Claudia involved in the life of Lucius, Narcissa, and especially Draco. Abraxas was not sure what Margot's plans were after his death, and she seemed disinterested in the subject each time he'd approach it. What worried him was that his grandson seemed to be taking a lot after his father, no matter how many times Abraxas had tried to get Draco to France, to learn something from Lucretia and Joachim, or had him visit and stay at his own home, under pretenses of Draco and Claudia getting to know each other better as cousins.

The children barely talked to one another, and Abraxas learnt that in the two years they studied at Hogwarts together, save for being in the same House, they were effectively strangers.

Yet the potions no longer held as much as they used to. The green tinge of Dragon Pox was starting to move from his wrists to the inside of his palms, and the pox was starting to damage his internal organs. Movement was starting to bring with it sharp pains that would last for hours. He could barely sleep more than two hours a night, which he knew Margot had started to notice. By then, he had held his own life in his cheek, behind his teeth. It was small, ruby-coloured and round, resembling a piece of candy. Yet inside it was a quick-acting and fast-releasing poison that Margot had obtained - how, he was not sure, as he had been made aware that St. Mungo's had denied his request of Mori in Valetudo. Yet he did not question her, not when she placed a kiss upon his lips and he felt the small capsule between his teeth, not when he took the capsule out in the middle of the night and saw it flashing in the moonlight.

"What if this was the night I decided to die?" he suddenly asked Margot as she appeared to slowly fall into slumber, only to hear her quickly answer, without as much as opening her eyes.

"Tonight? Why, I don't think you would."

"And why is that?"

"You promised Claudia you would not die without her at your side, and she's not coming back until December. And you said you wanted to hear those old songs before you die… you made me promise you that."

Abraxas cocked an eyebrow as he listened to her.

"And is that something you are holding hostage until you deem it be an auspicious time for my own death?"

Margarita stood in place as Abraxas questioned her with nothing but ice in his voice. She slowly got up, and raised herself above him, pulling a few strands of hair from her forehead. His eyes, usually inscrutable, were now wide open to her, and she saw in him a wounded animal, for that was what he had been for weeks. And a wounded animal cannot be tamed.

Without another word, Margot got up from their bed, her eyes locked onto him as she slowly took out her violin and bow. She circled the bed and took a seat by its edge and his feet, prostrating herself as if she were readying herself before something sacred. Slowly, she put the bow down on her lap, and pulled on one of the hairs of the bow before tying it to one of the cords of the violin. Content, she placed the violin back against her shoulder and turned to Abraxas with a haunted express, fingers in position. To his surprise however, instead of taking the bow back from her lap, she pulled on the string, slowly, and played the violin by pulling onto the Thestral hair.

What followed was a harrowing performance, of songs he had read about or knew from Bogdan, but that not even he knew what they sounded like. Abraxas slowly realised that all the time Margot had claimed they had been lost or had feigned ignorance, she had known them all along, and laid them bare to him, a torrent of heart-wrenching odes and elegies poured not from her throat, but from deep within her being.

He raised his eyes to the ceiling and pressed a palm against his eyes, until he could no longer see a thing. He wondered how long she had sang for - it could have been five minutes, but it could have been hours and hours. He did not know, for he felt transported into the past, into the future - he felt as if he were a young man. He could see, almost smell Aurora by his side, and he thought of her, of her floral perfume, of how he'd wrap an arm around her from behind and drag her around when they were both young and unmarried and barely out of Hogwarts, and how he knew that he would want to spend the rest of his - or rather, her- life with her. How he wanted to marry her, and have a child, and treat his child so much better than his father had treated him and his wife, but she died.

But she died, and then his mother, a soul just as good, just as loving, followed, and he had lost the two guiding stars in his life, and ended up with a son that he was afraid to mistreat, to such a point that he saw no other recourse than to treat him like an acquaintance and keep him at an arm's length, lest he copied his own father.

For the first time, in many, many years, he thought about his own father, and wondered how different his life would have turned out if Damocles Rowle - because he was never, and would never be a Malfoy - would have had any other name, and would have been any other man. He thought about Lucius as a child, as a baby, and how much he looked like Draco. But how much happier of a child Draco was, how he looked at his father not with fear, not with disdain, but with what he had wanted to cultivate between Lucius and himself, and how he had failed.

He thought about Aurora's funeral, and how Lucretia, who had handled the funeral details of both her and his mother, had hired the wizarding musicians to accompany the funeral, and how amongst them, was this child not much older than Lucius. He thought about how that young man would soon become one of the most accomplished wizarding musical theorists and his own good friend, and how that young man would introduce him to the witch that seemed to play his own funeral, right in front of him, right at that instant. He thought about his daughter, how she wanted him to teach her how to dance, how she wanted to be there, present, at the moment of his death - how that child that did not bear his name, and not his own son, asked for this.

Slowly, Abraxas raised himself as he realised he could no longer hear the music, and watched Margot as she placed her violin and bow back in their place. Since the birth of Claudia, her hair had become straight, bearing no more curls, and in the light peeking through the curtains, she looked like a beautiful, striking specter ready to take his soul to the next stage. And in some ways, she had indeed, just as he had taken her, for about fifteen years, body and soul, into his own hands.

"That took the sleep right out of me." she laughed, turning towards him. "Well then, task me with something else, my love. How about I make that orange blossom cake? The one I made for Clau's birthday this year."

A few seconds later, he started hearing the unmistakable noises of Margot trying to pretend that she was a homemaker and that she knew where everything was in the kitchen. He chuckled to himself, knowing all too well that the House Elf must have been trying to put whatever she needed in reach, which would only serve to confuse Margot more.

Margarita did enjoy baking at times - very rare times, when a certain memory of a flavour or scent from back home would hit her, and suddenly she simply had to make a certain cake, usually citrus ones, full of lemon zest and honey and orange, which would spring memories of breezy summers and winters spent watching her mother bake cake after cake for her father's apprentices.

She took her time baking, with a small glass of rum by her side, and only when it rested in the oven did she leave the kitchen, having charmed a whisk and bowl to keep spinning and make a whipping cream while she'd stretch her legs.

Overcome with something, something indecipherable and hidden, perhaps a sudden pang of intimacy, perhaps something else, Margarita decided to follow the sound of an opened shower, and entered the master bathroom only to embrace Abraxas, still in her night robe. She held onto him, tightly and wordlessly as he laughed, before pressing his lips against her nose, against her eyelids, against her ears, and against her forehead.

She left back to mind her cake, and hummed an old Turkish song as she arranged the figs on top of it, snug in between layers of whipped cream. The cake, in spite of its small size, made the entire manor smell of orange blossom and warmth, and she couldn't help but take a slice for herself as soon as she had placed the final fig, slowly biting into it.

"Abraxas?"

It was delicious, and warm, and filled a spot that not many things, people, or even songs could fill, no matter what Abraxas's opinions on the matter were.

"Abraxas?"

With a trembling hand, Margarita finished the slice of cake, before making her way back to the bedroom. Lit by the moon and stars, she could make out the figure of Abraxas under the bed covers, and from the door, she called for his name a third time, this time in a whisper, before taking a seat at the edge of the bed and slowly leaning back, closing her eyes and falling asleep, ignoring her trembling jaw, ignoring the tears forming from between her closed lids.

As the sun rose, she woke up with it, alone in the manor for the first time, and wrote a letter to Lucius, announcing him of his father's death.