[Wednesday one-shots]: Narcissa Triumphant, Lucius/Narcissa, H/D, PG-13, 7.10/7

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Nine.

Part One.

Title: Narcissa Triumphant (10/13)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco, Lucius/Narcissa
Content Notes: Angst, violence, minor character deaths, gore, torture, crack AU (Narcissa is an assassin)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Narcissa has a war on two fronts to fight, with Voldemort and with the Ministry. But when winning such wars is necessary to avenge her family and keep them safe, her enemies are the ones who will regret their actions.
Author’s Notes: Welcome to the seventh and final fic in the Narcissa series, the AU of DH. This really won’t make any sense at all if you haven’t read the other fics in the series, so do that first.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Ten—History of the Gaunts

“Professor Malfoy, did you have something to do with the mess in the papers?”

Narcissa smiled at Ernie Macmillan, who was watching her with big eyes, and said, “I’m afraid I can’t answer that as it’s not related to Astronomy, Mr. Macmillan. Next question? Does everyone clearly understand why Muggles have managed to make such important discoveries in Astronomy despite not having magic?”

“But you’ve answered questions that aren’t about Astronomy in class before!”

“That’s true, Miss Abbott, but I choose not to do it now.”

The poor girl was unattractive when she pouted, Narcissa thought, but there was nothing she could do about that. She was here to teach Astronomy, not deportment or overcoming natural disadvantages. Luckily, the class turned its attention to Muggle inventions like satellites after that, and Narcissa took some delight in explaining how her own mind had been changed from thinking that Muggles had nothing useful to teach wizards to realizing they did.

“It’s all due to my having adopted a son who grew up with Muggles. I wouldn’t have looked further afield than our world otherwise, and that would have been a mistake.”

“Harry Potter really grew up with Muggles?”

It was Macmillan, again. Narcissa considered what she knew of their family tree, and wanted to sigh. The poor darling must not have ancestors who had bred out enough in the previous few generations. She ignored the question and continued, “So we know that Muggles have set foot on the moon. If we were going to do the same thing, but with magic and not technology guiding us, what challenges would we face? What would we have to do?”

Luckily, that caught enough of their attention that they spent the rest of class discussing what kind of spells would be able to protect them from the void of space and the lack of air. Narcissa still wasn’t surprised to turn around at the end of class and find Macmillan and Abbott waiting for her. “Yes?”

“Harry Potter really grew up with Muggles?” Macmillan blurted.

“Unless you plan to accuse your professor of lying, Mr. Macmillan, then you should trust me when I say that he did.”

Macmillan blushed and hurriedly scooted back, but Abbott was made of sterner stuff. She stepped up to Narcissa, and she was a tall girl, so she almost managed to look Narcissa in the eye. “Some people are saying that you betrayed your political allies and set up the stories to leak to the Prophet, Professor Malfoy.”

“Use your judgment, Miss Abbott, not that of ‘some people.’ I have found that those people tend to be uncomfortably undefined when they are needed.”

“But if you did that, it’s a horrible thing to do.”

Narcissa smiled at the girl, impressed with her courage. Most people in Hufflepuff would only stand up like this for their friends, not for an abstract principle that mattered to them, and few to a professor. “I’d like you to write an essay for me, Miss Abbott. In your essay, summarize the evidence that you believe you have for me being the one behind these scandals and losses of Ministry jobs, explain what you think the person responsible should have done instead, and explain why exposing these crimes is worse than committing them in the first place.”

Miss Abbott had started out looking pleased, but her face rapidly turned red. “Professor Malfoy! These weren’t crimes!”

“Stealing? Committing bestiality? Arresting criminals the Auror presumably thought were guilty and then letting them go?” Narcissa shook her head as she placed a few late essays in a folder she frequently carried. “I’m afraid that I would have to disagree.”

“Not adultery!”

“There are laws that disagree, depending on what the adulterer is trying to do with family money that belongs to the husband or wife, and whether or not they were passing a lover’s child off as a spouse’s.” Narcissa cocked her head. “The research experience will be good for you, Miss Abbott. I look forward to seeing what you say about it.”

*

“You have a lead, darling?”

Narcissa reached back and found her hand resting in precisely the right place to cup her husband’s cheek. She tilted her head back and kissed him, then nodded and faced the parchment in front of her again. “Yes. The Gaunts named their children names beginning with M often, and one of the last of them was named Marvolo.”

Lucius studied the parchment in front of her. “I don’t recognize the part of Britain this is a map of.”

“Well, you would have better taste than to set foot there.”

Lucius smiled. “But you think you’ve found the place they went once they fell from grace?”

“Yes. It’s on the outskirts of the Muggle village Little Hangleton. I should have sought near there before now, considering the location of the graveyard where Voldemort brought himself back to life.”

“Just because his Muggle father is buried there is no reason for you to think that his wizarding family would be nearby,” Lucius murmured at once. Narcissa let her hand briefly rest on his shoulder. She did enjoy it when he defended her, as little as she usually needed it. “Are you going alone?”

Narcissa laughed. “No. I thought I’d take Sirius.”

There was a long moment of silence behind her that was probably meant to be disapproval. Narcissa ignored it as she studied the map one more time. Yes, she would recognize it well enough to Apparate there.

“Why him? Why not one of the boys?”

“Because they are students approaching their NEWTS. And I’m taking Sirius because he grew up in the same family environment that I did, and that makes him more sensitive to Dark magic. We’ll sense it long before you do. And I’m intending to go during one of the daytime periods when you have classes, my love, so as much as I would appreciate your company, I can’t have it. I want everyone to assume that I am merely in my quarters asleep, including any spies Voldemort has in the school.”

Lucius tensed without moving. Narcissa knew it was only because she had seen him tense in so many situations, including with his hands tied to the bed, that she noticed at all. “How many do you think he has?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps not many. And it might be that he’s too busy starving to death to pay attention to their reports even if they are sending him valuable information.” Narcissa smiled each time she thought about how successful her starvation curse had been. If not for the Horcrux that remained, she doubted Voldemort would have survived this long. “But I won’t take a chance when we’re this close to defeating him.”

“All right. I simply don’t like it. There were so many years when I didn’t help you at all, and now…”

“You do more than your fair share now.” Narcissa leaned over to murmur into his ear. “But if you would like to do more, then you can serve me later tonight.”

That left Lucius with wide eyes, which was the proper way for a wife to depart her husband. Narcissa patted his cheek and left to Floo Sirius.

*

“Is this really where You-Know-Who grew up? What a pile of rubbish.”

Narcissa nodded as she examined the shack in front of her. Or rather, the broken-down remains of a house. Calling it a shack was an insult to competently-built hovels everywhere. “Well, from what I could find of the Gaunts, they’d turned to inbreeding long before the Blacks thought of it. Nothing mattered to them more than their precious purity of blood, not even where they lived.”

“So Voldemort decided to protect this by making no one think there was anything worthwhile here, huh?” Sirius proved that her decision to bring him had been justified by not starting forwards at once despite his words. He gave the broken-down place another look, and then a deep sniff that Narcissa reckoned was a legacy of his Animagus form. “But that’s not all. There’s spells woven three deep on the door.”

Narcissa nodded. “And on the windows. But if you concentrate enough, you can pick up the weaknesses.”

“I’m not the trained assassin you are.” Still, Sirius kept studying the little house instead of looking away, and then he made a sharp noise that was almost a bark and snapped his fingers. “There are ends of spells sticking out all over the place!”

“Yes. Instead of triple-protecting everything and wrapping the ends of the spells around each other at least in places where they would be difficult to reach, he left certain places triple-protected and certain places full of dangling magic.”

“Stupid bastard.” Sirius grinned and drew his wand. “So are you going to take the door and I’m going to take the windows?”

“If you like, cousin. Or we can hit it as hard as we can, with everything we have.”

Sirius bark-laughed again. “Subtlety was never my strong point, you know, as a Gryffindor.” He lifted his wand, and Narcissa stepped up beside him to do the same thing. She spent a moment letting her strength build and the red glow deepen on the end of her wand, and was pleased to see that Sirius did the same thing. He might not have the discipline she did, but he had benefited from the lessons the Black family taught.

“Three?” Sirius asked. “Or some other number?”

“Why disrupt tradition?” Narcissa braced herself. “Three will do well enough.”

“One,” Sirius said, voice bubbling up in a growl. “Two. Three!”

He seemed surprised when Narcissa shouted it at the same time he did, but he gave her a crazy grin as their spells blasted into the house and hit the weak points they’d both identified, especially the corners of windows and the edge of the door where Voldemort seemed to have run out of patience with his own layering of defenses.

There was silence for a long moment, and then an expanding roar and rush of magic and color accelerating towards them. Sirius ducked, swearing. Narcissa was the one who grabbed the edge of his cloak and pulled him down behind a hastily-raised shield.

“Were you just going to stand there and take it?” she muttered to him.

“I ducked! That’s what you’re supposed to do!”

“Not with spells as powerful as these,” Narcissa said, and nodded beyond him. The earth had literally been cooked, and the stones collapsing in slumping puddles on the ground barely held their original shape anymore.

Sirius stared for a second, then looked at her. “Remind me never to duel you.”

“As long as you never represent a danger to my family, I would never need to do so,” Narcissa murmured, and conjured a hovering bridge of wood that had more than once led her safely over such a destroyed landscape. Sirius followed her, still eyeing everything as if he expected it to rise up and attack him.

“What a dismal place,” Sirius said in disgust once they were in the house.

Narcissa didn’t respond; she was too busy unpicking the spells that glowed even in here, activated only when something living entered. They were spells for poisonous air and to choke the breathing. “He is paranoid,” she murmured as the last one ended in a flare of purple smoke that managed to look resentful.

“Horcruxes do that to you. Or so I’ve heard.”

Narcissa cast another spell that should find the Horcrux that was here. However, it faded and died. Narcissa tilted her head. Precautions against that kind of finding charm, or simply too much magic soaked into the air from her and Sirius’s recent casting to break through it?

“Are you okay, Cissy?”

After a moment, Narcissa nodded. “Yes, but the Horcrux is hiding better than I expected.”

“I don’t know why.” Sirius gave her a confused look. “I can smell the foulness of it, right over there.” He gestured towards the floorboards in one corner of the shack.

“Were you going to tell me you could do that?”

Although Narcissa had meant only to express curiosity, Sirius seemed to take it as a threat. He drew himself up and glared at her. “It’s not exactly something I get to use all the time! Being in my Animagus form so often seems to have made me able to smell Dark magic. There was a lot of it in the Forbidden Forest. And I thought I didn’t have to mention it because I thought you could detect it better than me!”

Narcissa felt her lips twitch. Occasionally there was a downfall to seeming supremely competent. “I don’t. blame you, Sirius. I only wanted to know.”

“Now you do.”

“Now I do,” Narcissa echoed, and created another floating plank of wood to take her across the shack’s floor to
the space of boards. This close, she could indeed feel the Dark pulse underneath them, but it had faded into the
general background chaos before. She used her wand and the Scalping Charm to move the top board back.

“You think that’s necessary?” Sirius began, and then froze, staring into the hollow space revealed under the board.

“Sirius?” Narcissa sighed when her cousin took a long, entranced step forwards, and then repeated his name. When he only gave her a snarl that was rather more like a dog’s than something even a Black should muster, she carefully Stunned him and stepped forwards to gaze into the space herself.

The wisps of enchantments brushed past her, ones that were meant to grasp at the corners of her mind and bend fascination into obsession. Narcissa brushed them away. Both her Occlumency and what it took for a piece of jewelry to impress her were stronger than the average.

What lay in the space under the floorboards was a heavy, chunky golden man’s ring, with a black stone attached to it that seemed to pulse with more magic than the fascination spells. Narcissa arched an eyebrow. For once, Voldemort had been clever with his protections. The fascination would include a compulsion to put the ring on, which would enable the poison waiting in it to pump up someone’s arm and head towards the heart.

And it was definitely a Horcrux. This close, the slimy feeling of the magic couldn’t hide from Narcissa.

“I will not be picking you up, and I will not be putting you on,” Narcissa said cheerfully as she Levitated the ring into the air. “But your stone is rather interesting, and I do plan to examine it later as soon as possible.”

A snap of black power coiled towards her from the ring. Narcissa avoided it easily and slammed the side of the band into the wall of the shack in retaliation. “Bad Horcrux.”

She got the distinct sense of sulking. Narcissa shrugged. The hurt feelings of a Horcrux mattered less to her than what the ground looked outside.

She wrapped the ring in a black box that would curtail the enchantments and awoke Sirius. His narrative, maintained all through the rest of the way home, that he would have resisted the ring just fine, made amusing listening.

*

“You’ll let me do this, Mother?”

“Yes, I will.”

Draco swallowed and focused on the ring, where it lay in the middle of the circle of grass and stone on the edge of the Forbidden Forest. Narcissa had judged this far enough from the school that it shouldn’t attract attention when they cast one of the Darkest spells on it. The ring was still in the box, because Sirius had insisted on attending.

“You said you wanted to remove the stone?” Lucius murmured into her ear from where he stood behind her, outside the circle.

“If I’m right about what it is, then the fire won’t harm it. I’m only going to remove the ring from the box when the Horcrux is gone.”

“But what do you think the stone is?”

Narcissa smiled at him. “My dear, is not anticipation the greatest part of any mystery?”

Lucius’s expression didn’t indicate that he agreed, but just then, Draco lifted his wand and spoke the incantation for Fiendfyre, and that rather attracted everyone’s attention.

The fire spread out and then splashed back, constrained by the edges of the circle. It was one reason Narcissa had been willing to let Draco be the one to destroy this Horcrux. Draco shot her a narrow glance, but Narcissa only nodded back to the Fiendfyre. Even she wouldn’t be foolish enough to divert her attention when trying to control it.

Draco did spin hastily back and lift his wand when the flames coiled around and dived at him in the shape of a chimera. Harry put a hand on the dagger that Narcissa knew lay hidden in his belt. Narcissa caught his eye but said nothing. Harry was wise and would know that he had to let Draco face this on his own.

Sirius whistled as Draco slashed his wand and forced the chimera to turn its attention to the box with the ring in it. “Good at Dark Arts, is he?” he murmured to Narcissa.

“He is, cousin. Whether you intend that as a compliment or not.”

Sirius’s retort vanished in the sound of the scream as the Fiendfyre found the Horcrux. Narcissa saw another coil of dark power struggling to escape, but the flames pounced joyfully on it and drove it back inside the box. When a voice started to speak what could have been curses or words of power, the flames reared up even higher and drowned them.

Sirius, at her side, took what seemed to be a single possessed step forwards. Narcissa grabbed his arm, and Sirius laughed. “Kidding, Cissy, kidding.”

Narcissa gave him a disabling pinch that earned her a wounded look, and raised her eyebrows a little as she watched the gold of the ring simply vanish into air and steam, accompanied by the wailing shard of soul. As she had thought would happen, the round stone from the top of the ring lay untouched in the center of the fire.

Frowning, Draco poured more power into the spell and nearly melted the earth with it before Narcissa shook her head. “Enough, Draco. I don’t know if Merlin himself could harm that stone.”

“What is it?” Lucius murmured insistently in her ear as Draco forced the Fiendfyre to depart. Narcissa eyed the stone a moment longer, but it didn’t seem to have preserved any heat. She dismissed the power in the circle and reached for it.

“If I’m right...” Narcissa turned the stone over, but did it only once. She nodded when she saw the small circle scratched into the bottom of the stone.

“Well?”

Narcissa shifted away from her husband in a way that should make him wise, and said, “I think this is the Resurrection Stone. One of the Deathly Hallows.”

“What? It can’t be. They’re not real,” Draco said, wide-eyed, while Sirius was saying at the same time, “So you can’t blame me for being fascinated with it.”

“Yes, I can,” Narcissa told Sirius. “The spells were on the ring, not on the stone. Voldemort and his Gaunt ancestors had no idea what they had.” She held the stone up so that Harry, who was still a little shorter than everyone else, could see it as well. “I thought this might be the Resurrection Stone when I felt the throb of the power around it.”

“What, did your discipline in our dear family include the means to feel things like the Deathly Hallows?” Sirius demanded.

“Of course it did.” Narcissa frowned at him. “I know you didn’t follow the same discipline, but there’s no reason to disparage mine.”

For some reason, Sirius looked like he wanted to complain, but Lucius was the one who interrupted, his voice husky with the kind of desire that Narcissa knew wasn’t for her but had drawn her to him in the first place. “What are we going to do with it? That’s the more interesting question.”

“Play pranks?” Sirius suggested.

“Use it to destroy our enemies?” Draco asked.

Harry kept silent, but Narcissa saw his bright gaze in her direction, and knew that her adopted son would trust in her discretion to make the best decision.

“No,” Narcissa said slowly, gazing at the stone, still careful not to turn it over the three times that legend spoke of. “I have a better idea.” Though, she had to admit to herself, more related to Draco’s idea than Sirius’s.