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Lightning lit up the pitch black gardens of the manor while thunder nearly shook the floor beneath her feet, rain pounding against the grounds outside. Narcissa didn’t move from the window, though, instead catching her countenance illuminated by the flashes of lightning every few seconds. Lucius was locked away in his private study, working on Ministry matters, and Draco was sleeping in his crib just across the hall from her, his room soundproofed to the storm raging outside.
Her mind drifted at the thought of her son, and her throat tightened at where it landed: another boy, only a month or so younger than her own, without his mother to tend to him. She still remembered the last time she and Alice had met, sequestered in a corner booth in a hole-in-the-wall establishment that lent itself to confidential gatherings. Even so, Narcissa had placed a glamour on her facial features so that everyone but Alice wouldn’t know who she was.
“Don’t tell me you don’t wish our sons could grow up together properly,” Alice had said, hooking one of her pinkie fingers around Narcissa’s on top of the table sitting between them. Alice’s hazel eyes plaintively pierced Narcissa, and she shut her own as Alice’s finger stroked her skin. When she opened them again, she worried her lip as traitorous images of Draco and Neville as playmates entered her mind.
Officially, she and Alice were on different sides of this conflict. Or rather, better put, war. Alice was a bloody Auror, or rather had been before taking an indefinite leave to give birth and tend to her newborn son. Meanwhile, Narcissa was bloody well married to a literal Death Eater. She shouldn’t even meet with Alice at all, yet letters scrambled with magic still passed between the Malfoy and Longbottom homes, and Narcissa had yet to toss any correspondence from Alice into a lit fireplace like she knew she should. Nor had she had the heart or willpower to turn down this particular invite to see Alice in person again.
In a different world, perhaps they could have raised their sons together. Yet would that have been enough to satiate the both of them? To stay married to their husbands and continue an illicit affair? Or at least illicit on Narcissa’s side, as Lucius knew not a thing of her continued interactions with an Order member. Alice had told her that Frank was all for “bringing another Black sister onto the right side of things,” even going so far as being accepting to the reality of an open marriage.
It was a fool’s dream, and Narcissa had finally tugged her pinkie away from Alice and told her as such.
“You and Frank may gallivant around in this fool’s dreamscape as much as you like, but I cannot join you.”
Alice’s face had fallen a little at the biting words, but she’d continued to hold Narcissa’s gaze, asking, “Cannot or will not?”
Unable to hide her grimace completely, Narcissa had turned her head away so quickly that she almost strained a muscle. Hard rain fell onto the cobblestone street outside of the establishment they’d met in, and after masking her emotions, she’d looked back at Alice with a made-up excuse for leaving. Alice, someone who had never even tried to hide her emotions—instead openly choosing to wear them on her sleeve like the almost Gryffindor-Hufflepuff hatstall she’d been—had caught Narcissa’s wrist as she stood from their table, the din of other muffled conversations around them transforming into a muted buzz as Alice got to her feet as well and pulled Narcissa to her, one hand grasping the back of Narcissa’s head, fingers entangled in locks of honeyed blonde.
It was a shock to her system, Alice’s lips on hers for the first time in months. For a moment, Narcissa almost forgot where they were, a whimper bleeding into Alice’s mouth, but as soon as her mind caught up to their surroundings, her fingers stiffened up, curled almost like claws, and she wrenched herself away. She couldn’t—they couldn’t—
“Please don’t,” was all she managed to say before she left. Ran out into the rain to disapparate, more like. Because that’s what she was good at. Running away.
Narcissa’s vision blurred as she stared out of the window of Malfoy Manor unblinkingly. Her fingers ghosted over her bottom lip, recalling the passion that Alice had poured into that last kiss. A tiny whimper, not unlike the one that she’d vocalised at that establishment months ago, escaped her, and she wondered if she’d ever cease to associate rain with fleeing from the only woman she had ever once seen a future with.
Gallivanting around in a fool’s dreamscape… Narcissa laughed, a hollow and forlorn sound. She had denied the truth of the matter for too long: she had, in fact, always been a fool when it came to Alice Longbottom, née Fawley. She would simply need to learn to completely shut it all away, because in this new world—a world in which the Potters’ son had recently vanquished the Dark Lord, a world in which Alice and Frank were tortured into insanity by a group of Death Eaters including her sister—such foolishness had no place.