Chapter Text
Narcissa Black Malfoy had not dared leave her bedroom for five days, not since Lucius’s quick, noisy trial for that debacle at the Department of Mysteries had found him guilty and imprisoned him at Azkaban.
“Stay in the manor,” he had told her as he had embraced her for the last time in the courtroom, Draco standing trembling between them. “You shall always be a Malfoy by marriage, my darling, and that will be enough to command the protection of every wall and nail and fibre of the house. Stay there, and wait for me.”
These were simple instructions. But Lucius ought to have known that, with the Dark Lord, nothing is simple.
“Flee the manor,” Bellatrix had said the night before, when she’d convinced Narcissa to allow her to come wandless into her room. She had stood on Narcissa’s bed, pacing along the mattress between the white lace of the bed curtains. “Make the house an offering to our Lord. Leave it to him.”
“He has already taken possession of it,” Narcissa had answered, dispassionate. “It ought to make no difference to him that a prison-widow keeps to herself quietly in an upper room here.”
Bella sank to her knees, scrabbling to the head of the bed where Narcissa sat propped in a heap of pillows. She leaned close to whisper. “What if it did make a difference? What if he took it from you by force? He has that power. Whatever enchantments the better Malfoy wizards who went before Lucius cast on the old place, they are nothing to the power of our Lord.”
“That may well be,” Narcissa allowed, patting Bellatrix’s hand where it clawed the bedspread. “But if I were to flee, the manor would still belong to Draco. He would be its master. That would make him the Dark Lord’s rival for control of the manor. No, it is too dangerous. He is still too young, too vulnerable to bear such things.”
Bellatrix pulled at her own hair. “Drace is not unprotected. You made an unbreakable vow. Yes, it was with that worm, Severus Snape, but…” She had no confidence in her own words and let them trail into emptiness.
Narcissa squared her shoulders. “I will not leave. I am no threat to our Lord. I will depend on his grace.”
But the Dark Lord had no grace, and on this night, Narcissa would know that for certain.
The thud of a heavy silver hand beat against her bedroom door. “Madam Malfoy,” came Peter Pettigrew’s voice from the corridor outside, “My Lord demands your presence.”
Narcissa rose from where she had been slumped on a chaise. “I am indeed honored,” she called through the door, cinching the cord of her dressing gown more tightly around her waist. “But do send him my regrets. I’m still doing poorly and cannot attend to him tonight. Tomorrow morning–”
“Will be too late,” Pettigrew blustered over her excuses. There was something different in his voice tonight. He always sounded afraid and whinging, but there was a strange new depth to his tone tonight. Something like grief in it–like sorrow. “He demands you meet him in the kitchen immediately, or else he shall summon your son through the Mark, and not to the safety of the manor.”
Narcissa swore under her breath. She hadn’t been sure the Death Eaters knew about the safety members of the family enjoyed in the house. Now she knew they did. Had Bella told them? Had Lucius himself–
“Now, Madam Malfoy!” Pettigrew clamoured. “Shall we fetch your son, or…”
“I’m here,” Narcissa said, opening the door, keeping to her ruse of illness by remaining in her nightdress and dressing gown. “Out of my way, Wormtail.”
Sounds of screams and shouting and an awful laughter grew louder as they approached the kitchen. At the foot of the stairs, Narcissa and Pettigrew stopped as if they’d been hit with leglock jinxes. There was a sound like a loud, snarling howl.
“What have they brought into my house?” Narcissa said.
“What? How about who?” Pettigrew said, his fingers working, picking at the air, as if it was all he could do to keep from transforming into a rat and scuttling away.
The sight of the Dark Lord holding court in the kitchen beneath racks of family cookware was beyond absurd. The elves were nowhere to be seen. The door to the cellar stood open, a black space barred by an inner iron gate padlocked shut and guarded by Crabbe and Goyle Senior. As Narcissa approached, two clawed hands gripped the iron bars and shook the door, wrenching at them. Crabbe slashed at them with his wand until they withdrew. Nothing but the hands and the arms had been visible within the dark of the doorway, but Narcissa didn’t need to see any more of the creature to know it.
A werewolf. The Dark Lord had trapped a werewolf in her cellar.
“Ah, Ms. Black,” the Dark Lord greeted her. She had never heard her unmarried name sound so ominous. “Come, the paperwork is ready.”
At this, the werewolf flung itself against the locked gate, its brown pelt bristling through the bars. Bella screamed, clapping her hands.
“Yaxley will act as solicitor,” the Dark Lord continued. “Lucius Malfoy, as you will see, has already signed. Write your name here, below his, and that will be that.”
Narcissa blinked rather furiously. “What shall be what, my Lord?”
“The divorce,” he said. “Sign your name and your marital bond to the House of Malfoy will be ended.”
So this was their ploy to get control of the house. Bella was still grinning. She had never liked Lucius. Well, Narcissa would give them what they wanted. She could always remarry Lucius once all of this was over, and being free of the house would allow her to go to Draco, to spare him from that ludicrous suicide mission with the Hogwarts Vanishing Cabinet. They would run away and wait for Lucius somewhere secret and safe. Nothing in this house mattered as much as that.
The parchment nearly tore with the force of her signature. With a flourish of Yaxley’s wand, the parchment was stamped, folded, and winged away by a ghastly owl that looked more like a buzzard.
Feeling fortunate to have been let off so easily, so reversibly, Narcissa dropped a small curtsy and turned to go back to her room to pack, her eyes stinging with tears.
“But where are you going, Ms. Black?” the Dark Lord called after her as Yaxley blocked her path. “The divorce is only the first act of tonight’s romantic drama. Act Two is your remarriage, your bona fide revocation of any claim to the House of Malfoy.”
She glared up at Yaxley, her lip curling with revulsion.
Behind her, the Dark Lord laughed. “No, Mr. Yaxley is a married man, Miss Black. Most of my closest lieutenants are. No, for you, we took care to find a particularly stunning bachelor. And I must say we’ve outdone ourselves with this groom.”
The werewolf. The Dark Lord meant to marry her to the werewolf in the cellar.
Narcissa bowed her head to plead. “My Lord, I assure you, I shall make no claim on this house. Never. Please–”
“It is not a matter of control over this house,” he shouted over her. “I am all-powerful and do not depend on promises from Malfoys in order to use that power. I do, however, need to openly punish you for all the ways you and your ex-husband and, someday, your son will fail me. Yaxley!” he called. “The marriage contract.”
The single sheet of parchment lay on the table where the bill of divorcement had been just moments before. It was tattered and mangled, flecked with fresh red blood, nearly illegible in places.
“As you see, Madam, the werewolf has already–erm, signed,” Yaxley said. “Add your own name here and Goyle and Crabbe shall witness it.”
“The werewolf?” she said. “How can a creature sign its name? Does it even have a name?”
“It is perfectly legal for an illiterate groom to leave a mark rather than a full signature on a marriage contract,” Yaxley said, pointing to a smear of blood that looked as if it had been wiped along an open cut rather than voluntarily drawn. “And as for the name, I inked it in myself.”
As Yaxley pried her fingers open to close them around a quill, Narcissa read the untransformed human name of the creature: Remus Lupin. Yes, she knew him. He’d been at school with her, a year or two younger, notable for always making an ass of himself with James Potter. And he’d taught Draco at Hogwarts in third year. He was at the Ministry the day Lucius was arrested–the day Bella had killed their cousin Sirius.
“Will you sign it, Madam, or shall I summon your son to persuade you?”
At last, she spun to face the Dark Lord. “Don’t hurt Draco. He’s a child, my Lord. He wants nothing but to please you. He won’t oppose you.”
“Of course he won’t,” was the Dark Lord’s answer. “You needn’t delay this marriage on his account. I have need of Draco within Hogwarts, as you well know. Until then, his safety is assured. Now sign.”
Then it was a bizarre act of humiliation, this marriage of a witch to a werewolf. Narcissa would submit and be done with it. Again, she signed.
“Very good,” the Dark Lord intoned as Yaxley whisked the second document off the register at the Ministry. “Now for Act Three: your honeymoon.”
With that, the cellar’s iron gate shrieked open.
Pettigrew’s terror overcame him and he twisted into a ball of scraggly grey hair scurrying beneath the stove.
Bella wailed. “My Lord, you promised no honeymoon! Please! She’s the only sister I have left.”
He raised a hand to silence her. “Quickly, you brutes,” he ordered Goyle and Crabbe. They took Narcissa by each of her arms and shoved her into the cellar even as the creature could be heard bounding, snarling across the stone floor, making for the stairs.
Bellatrix’s voice rose into the shrillest scream yet as the gate slammed shut with Narcissa on the other side of it, lost in the dark.
“Out!” the Dark Lord called over the ruckus. “All of you, get out! Leave the hairy devil to its bride.”
___________________
In the blackness of the stairway of what had once been her own cellar, Narcissa stood pressed to the wall, silent and shaking, feeling for her wand. Had they left it with her? Yes, it was here, still in the pocket of her dressing gown. Perhaps they didn’t intend for her to die this way. This truly was an act of revenge driven by the desire to humiliate and debase. But there was no time to puzzle over it. She had her wand but that was not the same as surviving this evil.
At the foot of the stairs, low growls rumbled over the rush of quick sniffing of the air. The werewolf didn’t need to see her to find her. She had nothing to lose in raising her wand and lighting it.
In the blue glow, the growling seemed to escalate, prickling the hair on her arms and neck. The creature was massive across its shoulders, tall and twitching. If Yaxley hadn’t named the creature, she might have killed it at once. But though the human cursed within the creature was not someone she liked, it was someone–someone who had not chosen this. For his connection to Harry Potter, Lupin was hated by the Dark Lord, and perhaps she had been sent into this cellar as an executioner.
But she would never serve the Dark Lord ever again. She raised a hand not to kill but to still the beast. She shushed. “Please. I can let you out,” she told the creature, as if it understood. “If you let me, I can use this wand to open the door and then you can–do what you like.”
The growling flared into a bark, louder than human shouting. Narcissa jerked, the light pulsing, but she did not drop the wand. She shushed again. “Easy now. I’m going to step aside and open the door. Please–please just pass me by. Have your freedom but leave me my life.”
Alohomora was such a simple spell but it required a quick flick that might spur the creature to attack. She had to risk it. Wand raised toward the locked door, she cast the spell.
Claws scraped on the stone steps, the creature rushing forward, upward. In an instant it would either be racing past her or sinking its teeth into her throat. Narcissa crossed her arms over her chest, her hands and wand raised to protect her neck. The creature came.
And then it stopped.
They stood together in the stairway, beast and wife. Its snout was level with her nose as it cocked its head one way and then the other, unsatisfied with only smelling her, wanting to see her as well, examining her face as best it could by the light of the wand she clutched.
Its breath was hot, rank with licking at the blood of its own wounds. This close, she could see the creature had been viciously beaten, its face cut, one eye nearly swollen shut. Narcissa had been told that werewolves’ eyes were green, like the flare of a curse. But by the light of her wand, this one’s eyes looked icy blue, like Draco’s, like her own.
It turned the scream in her throat into speech. “Please go. We won’t hurt each other. Never.”
In a burst of movement, the beast thrust both of its clawed hands against the cellar wall, one on either side of Narcissa’s head. Its posture was more human than animal and somehow far more terrifying. Narcissa had no more words, not a sound as she waited for the creature’s teeth.
And then it was gone. Two great bounds and the werewolf had sprung from the cellar and into the kitchen. She watched its back framed in the doorway above. It turned its head to the passage to the rest of the house, where its torturers had gone. Instead of the revenge it might have had catching them unaware, it bolted in the other direction. Glass shattered as it vaulted through the window.
Narcissa swore and ran after it. The windows were heavily warded. A wizard would not have survived a crash through one of them. Perhaps the Dark Lord had the execution he wanted after all. She followed the werewolf’s path, up over the sink.
There it lay on the ground, stunned and even more beaten than before, its chest heaving, still alive. She watched it, waiting. And as she did, the manor grounds, which had been luminous with moonlight that night, grew darker rather than lighter.
“The moon,” Narcissa said. The moon had set, and the creature stirring and suffering on the grass was transforming. As its pelt receded she saw the narrowing shoulders were bare. The rings of the curtains over the sink snapped as she hauled them down, climbing out the window herself now that it and its spells were broken.
She draped the curtain over Remus Lupin.
He sighed his thanks as he gathered it close. “Wand?”
“Yes. Here,” she said, the wand still in her hand.
“Good. We’ll be off.”
“We?”
He had closed his hand over hers, commandeering the wand and initiating an Apparition, his magic conducted through her flesh and into the wood. Eyes wide, she watched her life at the manor as Madam Malfoy twisted away, vanishing into the darkest hour of this dangerous night.