This was all getting out of hand, it had become too much. It seemed like all in the blink of an eye, The Dark Lord had risen once more from what seemed to be nothing but shadows of the past and suddenly had taken over every aspect of her life. Her sister had been broken out of prison and returned to her, later causing the death of their cousin Sirius. Within the same night, events had played out that led to the arrest of her beloved Lucius, a day that haunted her mind almost every moment of his imprisonment. When he had come back to her it was as if he were nothing more than a shell of his former self, a husk of a man she had once loved. It broke her heart to know that her family was being torn down one member at a time because of Voldemort, that they had once been such a proud clan but now stood like rocks reduced to rubble at the bottom of the heap. They had become a disgrace.
But what had thrown things over the edge, had truly begun to cause her world to crumble, was when that darkness came for her son. Her baby, her sweet Draco, had been marked as a Death Eater. She had never felt such sorrow, such guilt. She thought perhaps she was a good mother, that she had been a better parent than her own. Her father was a monster, something she feared more than even The Dark Lord himself. While other little girls feared monsters under their beds and in their closets, she feared the one that slept down the hall with the bitter scent of fire whiskey on his breath. She had faced her monster, in the end, to defend her little dragon-but no one knew it, not even Bella. She would face him a thousand times over to save Draco again, knowing what he would have done if she hadn’t stopped him. But even now, she couldn’t truly save her son.
She didn’t know how to save him this time, there wasn’t a way she saw how. She would have given anything to save him from this fate, would have given up everything she owned and even her own life, to save him from this. But she had failed, she had failed as a mother. And as she sat in bed and stared at a moving picture of herself and her son, one of him so small and fragile in her arms the day she and Lucius had brought him home, she began to think of her own mother.
Druella Black was nothing, if not what a model pure blooded witch of society should have been, that much she remembered. She was beautiful, absolutely stunning, where she got her looks from the most as far as she could tell. She had been polite and poised, graceful and classy, she did her duty and was praised for it. Narcissa had spent so long trying to emulate her mother, to be as much a goddess as she was, but she never seemed to do her justice. She could never be beautiful enough, could never be smart enough, could never have as many children. She didn’t know why she had done so much to try and be like her mother, since the two of them had never exactly had a loving relationship. If you asked her if her mother loved her, she would have told you no. And if you asked her if she had loved her mother, she wouldn’t have said anything at all.
Thinking so heavily of her mother made her put the framed photo of herself and Draco on the bedside table, glancing over her shoulder at Lucius who was sleeping deeply beside her. She moved onto her side and tucked her hair back a bit so it wouldn’t tickle his face and wake him, leaning down to softly kiss his cheek before moving out of the bed, picking up her wand from her beside table and making her way out into the hall, closing the door quietly. Her bare feet padded softly down the hall so as not to wake up her son or her sister, assuming both were sleeping soundly in the middle of the night, unlike herself.
Within the blink of an eye she found herself in front of the room at the very end of the hall in the East wing, a room she refused to enter for years now, on account of the painting that hung on the wall inside. She wondered if Bella even knew this painting was in here, and if she might lose her mind if she knew. She looked down at her wand in her hand, stomach turning as she tested the theory of just going back into her room and sleeping her worries away. “Lumos,” she said, firmly but quietly, watching the tip of her wand glow. She tightly gripped the studded handle, feeling the tiny slightly-sharpened pieces on the handle dig into her flesh. She could do this.
She pushed open the door to the unused bedroom that could be considered either a guest room or a room for storage, looking up to see the painting across the room, one that the house elves had obviously kept clean just like the rest of the room. “Mother,” she said, meaning it to sound like a stern greeting but finding that seeing her mother’s portrait knocked almost all breath from her lungs.
