hp_bito_mod (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hp_bito_mod) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
hp_bunintheoven2021-03-29 08:49 pm
hp_bito_mod) wrote in hp_bunintheoven2021-03-29 08:49 pm
Entry tags:
Fest Entry: New Beginnings (Lucius/Narcissa, PG-13)
Title: New Beginnings
Author/Artist: nightfalltwen
Pairing(s): Lucius/Narcissa
Prompt: H8
Summary: They've just seen the newlyweds off and things get steamy. Surprise! They're now starting over with another new baby on the way.
Word Count: 3000ish
Rating: PG13
Warnings/Contains: None
Notes: I had a lot of fun with this prompt. :D
Disclaimer: Harry Potter characters are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended.
❦❦❦
The candle on the vanity flickered as he walked behind her. Narcissa looked up at Lucius' reflection in the mirror and watched him slowly unbutton his shirt. Reaching for the pot of night cream on the other side of her hairbrush, she undid the top and scooped some out into her hand, rubbing her palms together. She swept her fingers over her brow and cheeks before sliding them over her neck, shivering a little as the air cooled the cream and subsequently her skin.
Beyond the bedroom the house was silent. All the guests had left and they had said their goodbyes to Draco and his new wife. Narcissa had said goodbye to Draco before. Every September at the train station she'd waved goodbye as he was carried off to school, knowing she wouldn't see him for months. This, she told herself, was no different.
And yet it was completely different.
Because he was not coming home this time.
"Galleon for your thoughts, my dear?" Lucius asked, having moved to stand behind her. One by one his fingers searched through her hair and began to remove the pins that held it in place.
"It was a lovely ceremony," she said, tugging the pearl earrings from her ears and leaving them in a dish next to her various creams and potions.
Lucius swept her hair to the side, reaching past her to drop a pin on the vanity. As he did so, he pressed a kiss to the juncture of her neck and shoulder. "It was, but I don't think that's what you had on your mind."
She looked at his reflection in the mirror, meeting his gaze. It was not long ago that his face had been gaunt and sour, his features starved of life and his eyes dull with subservience. After time had passed, the colour had returned to her husband's cheeks and while he might never lose the darker circles under his eyes or the lines that had carved into his face from the stress of it all, she could, once again, see the young man that she had fallen for all those years ago.
Narcissa did not regret the Dark Lord's fall. Not when his destruction had given her back her family
He finished with her hair, letting it slip through his fingertips before pressing another kiss to her neck and his fingers wandered down the curve of her spine. "Darling—"
"We should give up the house," she said, interrupting him and turned on the upholstered stool in order to face him. "The manor is too big for just the two of us. And... I don't like all the unpleasant memories I have of it now."
Lucius opened his mouth, but Narcissa met him with a pleading stare. She knew that he wasn't as attached to the house as one might think. The Malfoy family had not lived in England for its entire history and the home was only acquired in the last century. It was dark and the gloomy pall that remained after the Dark Lord's occupation was overwhelming. He drew in a breath and brushed the backs of his knuckles against her cheek.
"I would have thought you would be insistent in keeping our son's childhood home," he said, a smile ghosting across his face.
"You know as well as I do that Draco hates this house," Narcissa pointed out. "And in three months when they return from France, they'll have the townhouse in London that the Greengrass family gifted them." Catching his hand, Narcissa kissed the back of it and then turned it slightly to kiss his palm. "We've had too many unfavourable things happen in this house. I want new memories. Happier ones."
She watched his face as the thoughts went through his head. Of course this house had been beautiful once and she clearly remembered the day he had carried her across the downstairs threshold. She remembered the galas they'd thrown and how she had followed a toddling Draco through the halls. But those same halls were now dark with disuse. Perhaps a coat of paint would have freshened things up, but beneath it the Dark Lord's presence would still permeate the walls and the memories would float beneath the surface every day.
"I think..." he started and Narcissa felt her hope start to waver. "I think I will do anything in my power to make you happy." A smile she had not seen in a very long time broke out on his face and Lucius touched his forehead to hers. "I have much to make up for," he said.
"You don't owe me..." Narcissa said slowly, her hand moving to rest on his forearm, covering the snake and skull.
The mark would always be there. Unlike the first time it had not faded away to lure them into a false sense of guiltlessness. Perhaps because the Dark Lord was actually dead this time instead of in a state of flux. There was no pain associated with the black mark on his arm, but it would be forever visible to remind them both of what they had been a part of. And it pained her to know that Draco would also bear that reminder and be forced to explain it to his own child one day.
Lucius didn't answer her or argue against her statement. He didn't need to. She knew that he would carry his debt to her for the rest of their years. So rather than an endless string of "you don't owe me" and "yes I do" between them, she let the subject drop.
She started to say something else, but found her words cut off by a kiss, his hands cupping either side of her face. Narcissa smiled and wound her arms around his neck, kissing him back. A long time ago someone told her that once her son was grown and she was older the passion for her husband would fade, but she found this was not the case.
"This house is currently very empty," Lucius said, the low timbre of his voice sending a tremor across her skin.
Narcissa skated a hand over his shoulder and down his chest, tugging at a few buttons. "Are you suggesting I allow you to ravish me on the eve of our son's wedding?"
He laughed and pulled her to her feet, wrapping his arms around her. "Perhaps we might call this a celebration of the decision to take a new step into a renewed life, my dear."
Years ago, Lucius would have swept his arms under her legs and carried her, but that was a time when her thighs were perhaps a little more slender and his arms a bit more muscular. She didn't mind all that much. Her heart still thrummed and her skin still flared with warmth in all the places it ought to as he touched her. She didn't need grand gestures of being swept off her feet and into bed. Especially when the bed was so close and they could just leave a trail of clothing along the floor before they both ended up on their bed.
And it had always been their bed.
Long before she was married when it was just three sisters talking across embraced pillows about their lives once they were finally able to leave school, Narcissa could remember always declaring that she would never sleep in a separate bed from her husband. Bellatrix had always pulled a face and pronounced the very idea of sharing a space with a man was deplorable. Andromeda would speak nothing of the topic and perhaps that had been because of her unknown relationship and plans with the boy who would get her face burned from the Black Family tapestry.
Perhaps she would have sided with Narcissa if she'd contributed to the conversation. Perhaps not.
But in the end it didn't matter what anyone thought because Narcissa enjoyed sleeping with her husband. She enjoyed making love to her husband. She enjoyed all the ways he knew how to make her sigh with delight. And on the flip side of all of that she thoroughly enjoyed all the things that she could do to him. It was their bed. It was an equal partnership. She could touch him and kiss him in all the ways that made him writhe with pleasure just as he could. And when it was over, the air cooling the perspiration on their bodies, she kept her legs around his hips and stroked his back, letting him settle against her. Eventually they would part, her turning in his arms and him curling against her back, but until then she relished in the connection that they formed.
❦❦❦
"Is it true? You've nearly finished liquidating everything in the house?" Moira Parkinson leaned forward on her chair, teacup paused halfway between the saucer and her lips. "What will Draco think when he returns from France?"
Picking the crustless watercress sandwich in front of her, Narcissa felt a frown tug at the corner of her mouth. There was once a time where she had been looking forward to considering Moira her sister through the marriage of their children, but Pansy's outburst at the school had put a wrench into that plan. Since then Narcissa had only started to really notice just how frustratingly annoying the Parkinson matriarch was and Pansy was cut from a similar cloth, the very idea that they had considered uniting the families turned her stomach. She pushed her plate away. The watercress wasn't helping.
"Draco was informed of our decision the morning after we made it," she said lightly. "Other than a few childhood mementos from his early days at school, he has no interest in the contents of the manor."
Moira sniffed and muttered something about new money and the Greengrasses. Narcissa set down her teacup with such force that it could have shattered had it not been spelled to never crack. She stared at the other woman, daring Moira to say something about her son's in-laws. Thankfully the Parkinson matriarch thought it best to keep her mouth shut and instead moved onto comments about decorating, mentioning the new things that they would get to buy to furnish the smaller house in Brighton.
The conversation, unlike the sandwiches, was far more palatable after this.
When she returned to the Manor, Narcissa grumbled at the cluttered array of boxes that were stacked in the entrance way. She had been assured that they would be picked up while she was away for the afternoon and was teetering on the edge of a furious outburst upon seeing that they had not. She marched past the packed things to the sitting room where she found even more boxes. What was the point of hiring someone to take their things away from the manor and to the new house if work was not going to be done properly?!
With an angry noise, she stalked into the room and pulled the lid off of the closest box.
It was more than an hour later when Lucius finally returned home and found her sitting amongst three unpacked boxes, stacks of books and other items piled around her. Narcissa looked up from her spot on the floor huffed out a breath before flipping through an old book of Draco's.
"I thought we were letting Draco decide what to do with all of his old school things," he said, draping his coat over an imposing wingback chair that had already been sold to the Bullstrode family, but hadn't yet been picked up.
"He's not going to want to sort though everything and since the movers didn't come today, I fail to see why we need to send it all to him. Half of what's here is things from his childhood. Why on earth is he going to need all these old textbooks from his first years at school? It's not as if they can be passed down. They've all been replaced by new editions." She looked up from the second year potion's text.
"Didn't we already go through all of these?"
"It doesn't hurt to go through them again," she sniffed, running a finger over the little notes in the margins that Draco had made. His handwriting had been so precise and exact. And she couldn't help but chuckle at the silly little drawings he'd made of Potter and his friends. Granger and her enormous hair was especially ridiculous.
Narcissa looked up finally, her tone shifting to annoyance. "And why wasn't anything else picked up? Did we not pay the movers enough?"
Lucius glanced at her from the roll of parchment he'd snagged, an old essay about the uses of dragon's blood. "I left a note on the table," he said, turning to point at a little side table by the door, the note he'd written pinned down by the ink bottle he'd used. "They wanted us to both be here to supervise what things were to be taken now and what were to be left behind." Lucius pulled a pocket watch from his waistcoat. "They're meant to be here just after supper."
Narcissa pulled a face at the idea of food and she pressed her hand to her stomach. "I think there was something off at tea. You will have to find something on your own."
"Perhaps we ought to see someone at St Mungo's," Lucius said, moving closer to her and placing a cool hand against her forehead. It didn't feel overly heated. "You haven't been eating well for a few days now, my dear."
"It's probably all the dust. This house has not had a proper clean since we lost..." She paused, not wanting to think too much on the house elf that had been taken from them through trickery. She sighed. "Everything smells terrible and turns my stomach. I just don't feel like eating things that don't smell or taste good."
Lucius couldn't stop the chuckle in the back of his throat as he leaned down to drop the potion's essay into one of the boxes. "You used to say that a lot when you were expecting—" His voice trailed off and he looked at his wife.
The book that Narcissa had been holding fell from her fingers with a very obtrusive thump and she pressed a few of her fingers to her mouth. Then she waved her hand. No, that sort of thing couldn't be possible. Not when Draco was grown and married. No, it was more likely the change and she was just out of sorts because of that. Her reactions so smells and foods couldn't possibly be anything but the onset of her elder years. Not that she was elderly; she was far from it, as most witches her age usually were and suddenly her thoughts were trailing back to the nights over the last few months. Passionate embraces and lovemaking with her husband without a thought to any sort of contraceptive charms. Because they were adults. They were adults with a grown son. That sort of thing just didn't happen!
"No... no it isn't possible," she said, repeating her thought.
❦❦❦
"Oh, but it is possible," said the healer in his annoyingly nauseating lime green robes as they sat in a little room at St Mungo's the next morning. "You're still quite healthy and you might see another decade or so of fertile years yet."
Narcissa exchanged a look with her husband, pressing a hand to her lower abdomen. She watched as Lucius spoke with the healer, but there was a roar in her ears that drowned out both of their voices. Sucking a breath she looked down at herself. A baby? After all this time? They'd never talked of expanding their family. Draco had been the only one they had ever really wanted or needed and now there was another possibility.
She felt a hand on her shoulder, but said nothing in response. She didn't even realise that the healer had left the room until Lucius held out her cloak.
"Are you disappointed?" he asked after they had exited the Floo from St Mungo's back to the manor.
"I am... shocked," Narcissa decided. She looked at him and wondered if her own face was as pale and drawn as his. "We never talked about this."
Rubbing the back of his neck, Lucius tilted his head. "Can we do this? Raise another?"
Narcissa sat down on a chair that had not been collected by one of the movers and cradled her head in her hands for a moment before looking back at her husband. "We successfully managed the first time. This one wouldn't have the threat of the Dark Lord looming over our future. I think we would do well a second time."
Lucius managed a wan smile before reaching out his hand to her.
❦❦❦
"Do you find it strange?" Theodore asked, nudging Draco with his elbow and holding out a glass of brandy.
"That my mother and my wife are pregnant at the same time?" Draco asked, hiding a small grimace behind the drink as he looked across the garden at the two women in his life both glowing with the promise of new life. "Exponentially so. And partially horrified at the thought that this..." He waved his hand at his parents. "Happened while I was still on honeymoon."
Theodore chuckled at his friend's expression and downed his drink, reaching to snag another from the passing tray.
"I suppose it could be worse," he said, lifting a delicate brow. "It could have happened on your wedding night."
Draco turned and gave a not-so-playful punch to Theodore's upper arm. "I really hope that wasn't the case. I really hope it wasn't."
Author/Artist: nightfalltwen
Pairing(s): Lucius/Narcissa
Prompt: H8
Summary: They've just seen the newlyweds off and things get steamy. Surprise! They're now starting over with another new baby on the way.
Word Count: 3000ish
Rating: PG13
Warnings/Contains: None
Notes: I had a lot of fun with this prompt. :D
Disclaimer: Harry Potter characters are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended.
The candle on the vanity flickered as he walked behind her. Narcissa looked up at Lucius' reflection in the mirror and watched him slowly unbutton his shirt. Reaching for the pot of night cream on the other side of her hairbrush, she undid the top and scooped some out into her hand, rubbing her palms together. She swept her fingers over her brow and cheeks before sliding them over her neck, shivering a little as the air cooled the cream and subsequently her skin.
Beyond the bedroom the house was silent. All the guests had left and they had said their goodbyes to Draco and his new wife. Narcissa had said goodbye to Draco before. Every September at the train station she'd waved goodbye as he was carried off to school, knowing she wouldn't see him for months. This, she told herself, was no different.
And yet it was completely different.
Because he was not coming home this time.
"Galleon for your thoughts, my dear?" Lucius asked, having moved to stand behind her. One by one his fingers searched through her hair and began to remove the pins that held it in place.
"It was a lovely ceremony," she said, tugging the pearl earrings from her ears and leaving them in a dish next to her various creams and potions.
Lucius swept her hair to the side, reaching past her to drop a pin on the vanity. As he did so, he pressed a kiss to the juncture of her neck and shoulder. "It was, but I don't think that's what you had on your mind."
She looked at his reflection in the mirror, meeting his gaze. It was not long ago that his face had been gaunt and sour, his features starved of life and his eyes dull with subservience. After time had passed, the colour had returned to her husband's cheeks and while he might never lose the darker circles under his eyes or the lines that had carved into his face from the stress of it all, she could, once again, see the young man that she had fallen for all those years ago.
Narcissa did not regret the Dark Lord's fall. Not when his destruction had given her back her family
He finished with her hair, letting it slip through his fingertips before pressing another kiss to her neck and his fingers wandered down the curve of her spine. "Darling—"
"We should give up the house," she said, interrupting him and turned on the upholstered stool in order to face him. "The manor is too big for just the two of us. And... I don't like all the unpleasant memories I have of it now."
Lucius opened his mouth, but Narcissa met him with a pleading stare. She knew that he wasn't as attached to the house as one might think. The Malfoy family had not lived in England for its entire history and the home was only acquired in the last century. It was dark and the gloomy pall that remained after the Dark Lord's occupation was overwhelming. He drew in a breath and brushed the backs of his knuckles against her cheek.
"I would have thought you would be insistent in keeping our son's childhood home," he said, a smile ghosting across his face.
"You know as well as I do that Draco hates this house," Narcissa pointed out. "And in three months when they return from France, they'll have the townhouse in London that the Greengrass family gifted them." Catching his hand, Narcissa kissed the back of it and then turned it slightly to kiss his palm. "We've had too many unfavourable things happen in this house. I want new memories. Happier ones."
She watched his face as the thoughts went through his head. Of course this house had been beautiful once and she clearly remembered the day he had carried her across the downstairs threshold. She remembered the galas they'd thrown and how she had followed a toddling Draco through the halls. But those same halls were now dark with disuse. Perhaps a coat of paint would have freshened things up, but beneath it the Dark Lord's presence would still permeate the walls and the memories would float beneath the surface every day.
"I think..." he started and Narcissa felt her hope start to waver. "I think I will do anything in my power to make you happy." A smile she had not seen in a very long time broke out on his face and Lucius touched his forehead to hers. "I have much to make up for," he said.
"You don't owe me..." Narcissa said slowly, her hand moving to rest on his forearm, covering the snake and skull.
The mark would always be there. Unlike the first time it had not faded away to lure them into a false sense of guiltlessness. Perhaps because the Dark Lord was actually dead this time instead of in a state of flux. There was no pain associated with the black mark on his arm, but it would be forever visible to remind them both of what they had been a part of. And it pained her to know that Draco would also bear that reminder and be forced to explain it to his own child one day.
Lucius didn't answer her or argue against her statement. He didn't need to. She knew that he would carry his debt to her for the rest of their years. So rather than an endless string of "you don't owe me" and "yes I do" between them, she let the subject drop.
She started to say something else, but found her words cut off by a kiss, his hands cupping either side of her face. Narcissa smiled and wound her arms around his neck, kissing him back. A long time ago someone told her that once her son was grown and she was older the passion for her husband would fade, but she found this was not the case.
"This house is currently very empty," Lucius said, the low timbre of his voice sending a tremor across her skin.
Narcissa skated a hand over his shoulder and down his chest, tugging at a few buttons. "Are you suggesting I allow you to ravish me on the eve of our son's wedding?"
He laughed and pulled her to her feet, wrapping his arms around her. "Perhaps we might call this a celebration of the decision to take a new step into a renewed life, my dear."
Years ago, Lucius would have swept his arms under her legs and carried her, but that was a time when her thighs were perhaps a little more slender and his arms a bit more muscular. She didn't mind all that much. Her heart still thrummed and her skin still flared with warmth in all the places it ought to as he touched her. She didn't need grand gestures of being swept off her feet and into bed. Especially when the bed was so close and they could just leave a trail of clothing along the floor before they both ended up on their bed.
And it had always been their bed.
Long before she was married when it was just three sisters talking across embraced pillows about their lives once they were finally able to leave school, Narcissa could remember always declaring that she would never sleep in a separate bed from her husband. Bellatrix had always pulled a face and pronounced the very idea of sharing a space with a man was deplorable. Andromeda would speak nothing of the topic and perhaps that had been because of her unknown relationship and plans with the boy who would get her face burned from the Black Family tapestry.
Perhaps she would have sided with Narcissa if she'd contributed to the conversation. Perhaps not.
But in the end it didn't matter what anyone thought because Narcissa enjoyed sleeping with her husband. She enjoyed making love to her husband. She enjoyed all the ways he knew how to make her sigh with delight. And on the flip side of all of that she thoroughly enjoyed all the things that she could do to him. It was their bed. It was an equal partnership. She could touch him and kiss him in all the ways that made him writhe with pleasure just as he could. And when it was over, the air cooling the perspiration on their bodies, she kept her legs around his hips and stroked his back, letting him settle against her. Eventually they would part, her turning in his arms and him curling against her back, but until then she relished in the connection that they formed.
"Is it true? You've nearly finished liquidating everything in the house?" Moira Parkinson leaned forward on her chair, teacup paused halfway between the saucer and her lips. "What will Draco think when he returns from France?"
Picking the crustless watercress sandwich in front of her, Narcissa felt a frown tug at the corner of her mouth. There was once a time where she had been looking forward to considering Moira her sister through the marriage of their children, but Pansy's outburst at the school had put a wrench into that plan. Since then Narcissa had only started to really notice just how frustratingly annoying the Parkinson matriarch was and Pansy was cut from a similar cloth, the very idea that they had considered uniting the families turned her stomach. She pushed her plate away. The watercress wasn't helping.
"Draco was informed of our decision the morning after we made it," she said lightly. "Other than a few childhood mementos from his early days at school, he has no interest in the contents of the manor."
Moira sniffed and muttered something about new money and the Greengrasses. Narcissa set down her teacup with such force that it could have shattered had it not been spelled to never crack. She stared at the other woman, daring Moira to say something about her son's in-laws. Thankfully the Parkinson matriarch thought it best to keep her mouth shut and instead moved onto comments about decorating, mentioning the new things that they would get to buy to furnish the smaller house in Brighton.
The conversation, unlike the sandwiches, was far more palatable after this.
When she returned to the Manor, Narcissa grumbled at the cluttered array of boxes that were stacked in the entrance way. She had been assured that they would be picked up while she was away for the afternoon and was teetering on the edge of a furious outburst upon seeing that they had not. She marched past the packed things to the sitting room where she found even more boxes. What was the point of hiring someone to take their things away from the manor and to the new house if work was not going to be done properly?!
With an angry noise, she stalked into the room and pulled the lid off of the closest box.
It was more than an hour later when Lucius finally returned home and found her sitting amongst three unpacked boxes, stacks of books and other items piled around her. Narcissa looked up from her spot on the floor huffed out a breath before flipping through an old book of Draco's.
"I thought we were letting Draco decide what to do with all of his old school things," he said, draping his coat over an imposing wingback chair that had already been sold to the Bullstrode family, but hadn't yet been picked up.
"He's not going to want to sort though everything and since the movers didn't come today, I fail to see why we need to send it all to him. Half of what's here is things from his childhood. Why on earth is he going to need all these old textbooks from his first years at school? It's not as if they can be passed down. They've all been replaced by new editions." She looked up from the second year potion's text.
"Didn't we already go through all of these?"
"It doesn't hurt to go through them again," she sniffed, running a finger over the little notes in the margins that Draco had made. His handwriting had been so precise and exact. And she couldn't help but chuckle at the silly little drawings he'd made of Potter and his friends. Granger and her enormous hair was especially ridiculous.
Narcissa looked up finally, her tone shifting to annoyance. "And why wasn't anything else picked up? Did we not pay the movers enough?"
Lucius glanced at her from the roll of parchment he'd snagged, an old essay about the uses of dragon's blood. "I left a note on the table," he said, turning to point at a little side table by the door, the note he'd written pinned down by the ink bottle he'd used. "They wanted us to both be here to supervise what things were to be taken now and what were to be left behind." Lucius pulled a pocket watch from his waistcoat. "They're meant to be here just after supper."
Narcissa pulled a face at the idea of food and she pressed her hand to her stomach. "I think there was something off at tea. You will have to find something on your own."
"Perhaps we ought to see someone at St Mungo's," Lucius said, moving closer to her and placing a cool hand against her forehead. It didn't feel overly heated. "You haven't been eating well for a few days now, my dear."
"It's probably all the dust. This house has not had a proper clean since we lost..." She paused, not wanting to think too much on the house elf that had been taken from them through trickery. She sighed. "Everything smells terrible and turns my stomach. I just don't feel like eating things that don't smell or taste good."
Lucius couldn't stop the chuckle in the back of his throat as he leaned down to drop the potion's essay into one of the boxes. "You used to say that a lot when you were expecting—" His voice trailed off and he looked at his wife.
The book that Narcissa had been holding fell from her fingers with a very obtrusive thump and she pressed a few of her fingers to her mouth. Then she waved her hand. No, that sort of thing couldn't be possible. Not when Draco was grown and married. No, it was more likely the change and she was just out of sorts because of that. Her reactions so smells and foods couldn't possibly be anything but the onset of her elder years. Not that she was elderly; she was far from it, as most witches her age usually were and suddenly her thoughts were trailing back to the nights over the last few months. Passionate embraces and lovemaking with her husband without a thought to any sort of contraceptive charms. Because they were adults. They were adults with a grown son. That sort of thing just didn't happen!
"No... no it isn't possible," she said, repeating her thought.
"Oh, but it is possible," said the healer in his annoyingly nauseating lime green robes as they sat in a little room at St Mungo's the next morning. "You're still quite healthy and you might see another decade or so of fertile years yet."
Narcissa exchanged a look with her husband, pressing a hand to her lower abdomen. She watched as Lucius spoke with the healer, but there was a roar in her ears that drowned out both of their voices. Sucking a breath she looked down at herself. A baby? After all this time? They'd never talked of expanding their family. Draco had been the only one they had ever really wanted or needed and now there was another possibility.
She felt a hand on her shoulder, but said nothing in response. She didn't even realise that the healer had left the room until Lucius held out her cloak.
"Are you disappointed?" he asked after they had exited the Floo from St Mungo's back to the manor.
"I am... shocked," Narcissa decided. She looked at him and wondered if her own face was as pale and drawn as his. "We never talked about this."
Rubbing the back of his neck, Lucius tilted his head. "Can we do this? Raise another?"
Narcissa sat down on a chair that had not been collected by one of the movers and cradled her head in her hands for a moment before looking back at her husband. "We successfully managed the first time. This one wouldn't have the threat of the Dark Lord looming over our future. I think we would do well a second time."
Lucius managed a wan smile before reaching out his hand to her.
"Do you find it strange?" Theodore asked, nudging Draco with his elbow and holding out a glass of brandy.
"That my mother and my wife are pregnant at the same time?" Draco asked, hiding a small grimace behind the drink as he looked across the garden at the two women in his life both glowing with the promise of new life. "Exponentially so. And partially horrified at the thought that this..." He waved his hand at his parents. "Happened while I was still on honeymoon."
Theodore chuckled at his friend's expression and downed his drink, reaching to snag another from the passing tray.
"I suppose it could be worse," he said, lifting a delicate brow. "It could have happened on your wedding night."
Draco turned and gave a not-so-playful punch to Theodore's upper arm. "I really hope that wasn't the case. I really hope it wasn't."