England’s sickle moon reaps many seasons. The one this man is waiting for is the cold of winter. Summer tugs first at the hip of memory, long drowsy afternoons and stuffy warmth clinging to skin and hair. Then the exhale of autumn, lovers’ quarrels tenderly enfolded in colours and loss, and then spring. Winter, he thinks, is forever. He lifts his head from the manor’s balcony, turns his face to the chill air that moves in across the hills, and tastes its sharp sting on his lip. Far out where the land dips and deepens, water kicks up, gathers, then collects in dams; and this, even as he watches, will continue for seasons whether he is here or not to see it. That is what he understands.

The Dark Lord is asleep in the room down the hallway, but the moans persist pitilessly from the cellars, prisoners screaming with dirt in their mouths. It is now a thing he is used to, like servitude, like the scratch of the rain or the wind bleeding through cracks in the windows. With enough wine in his system, he finds that he minds it little. War has taught him that life is awfully simple: he often thinks that if he had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing above him but the sky flowering open, he would, little by little, grow used to that too. He retreats from the window, closes it, and drinks wine. 

Hours pass by, and then, through great depths and his vertigo, he becomes aware of someone knocking on his door. 

It is Narcissa. But she is different – in his drunken haze, his body reeling and mind half-drugged, she appears no longer her usual tired self but a hazy and ineffably tender apparition. Her hair ghost-white, eyes an indiscernibly pale colour that has attained a somewhat milky quality startling even him.

Her voice is doe-like when she speaks. “All you ever do now is sleep.” she breathes, cupping his cheek in one hand, touch so soft he can barely feel it. She is so close to him that he can smell her new perfume, geranium and bergamot and crisp wintergreen, a favourite in her youth but one she no longer wears. “Why is it that you are always sleeping when I come to you?”

He drinks in the sight of her, traces the contours of her jaw with his gaze, and wishes nothing more than to hold her and kiss her, on the place at her temple where her skin melts into silken hair. Sometimes, he thinks she is the only thing left of his old world, but whenever he reaches out to touch her, he remembers the serpent sleeping beneath his roof and the countless ways it might hurt her to punish him, should it ever know how much love still simmers between them. And God, they no longer have the time for many displays of love anyway. Sometimes, he looks at the frown lines on her face, her crow’s feet, her clumps of hair in the sink, and thinks of the shine of decades fading, thinks that it is all his fault.

Narcissa looks at him for a long time.

“Are you sick?” she whispers, but he doesn’t know what to tell her, that he is not sick in the physical sense but sick of war, sick with loss, sick with love for her that he never knows where to put. 

The gleam of her gold bracelet in the dark.

She steps back at his silence, an impersonal ghost. “Alright then. I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” says she, “I’d better go. I was going to ask if you wanted to go on a walk.”

“What?”

“A walk in the gardens. But it’s alright, darling. Some other time.”

“No,” he pushes, a desperate man suddenly – but how odd of a request and in how odd of a time. “I want to, Narcissa. Just give me a moment to find my coat.”

He feels sort of marvelous. With his fur coat around his shoulders and his wife in his arms, and with that narcotic heaviness still clinging deliciously to his limbs, he feels empty of violence as he has never before. They begin to wander, drowsy, hypnotised, down the stairs to the sprawling garden, the fading light, the snow. But how to describe this feeling? Everything is so silent suddenly. The screeching of his prisoners sounds like something happening behind a thick glass pane, transfused into a faraway trill that reminds him absurdly of Yule bells. Narcissa’s arm loops through his more firmly, and he welcomes the feeling. Her perfume is bewitching. Geranium and bergamot and crisp wintergreen.

“I missed you, Lucius,” she smiles, such a pure thing that doesn’t look like it belongs anywhere in war, but this whole scene doesn’t feel much like war to him anymore.

“I miss you. More than you will ever know.”

“Oh, I know alright, darling,” laughs Narcissa, “But things are different now. It’s so peaceful here.”

“Yes, but it doesn’t feel right, with all that’s happening,” he admits.

A small chuckle warms her breath. She hasn’t laughed in so long. It surprises him completely. “Everything is always happening. Peace comes when it wants to.”

He considers this seriously. “Then it never stays for very long.”

“No,” Narcissa agrees, “but everything insists on leaving eventually. Sometimes we are so self-absorbed that we think the hole in the world, caused by the emission of our grief, is so deep that it can never be rectified.” She glances up at him through a curtain of lashes. “But it does, and it will. Don’t you think I understand you, Lucius? You and I, we are just the same. We get used to things we believed would break us. We learn how to breathe and we learn how to put one foot before the other until we get there.”

He looks at her strangely. The snow has taken on a bizarre, misty quality. “What do you mean, Narcissa? What are you talking about?”

“I am speaking plainly,” says Narcissa in a strange voice, “You must understand me.” She stops and stares at him. Behind them trails one single pair of footprints. “Lucius, you must understand me. Even when everything goes away, when the snow flies backward, you must understand me. This war will end someday, people will die. There will be some things she does that surprise you, but it will save your life. It will save your son’s life. There is nothing that matters more than survival, Lucius. Nothing is more beautiful than life. Do you understand me now?”

He looks up. The sky flowers open. It runs for miles and miles ahead. Rolling hills. Water kicks up and meets the dam at the joint, the kiss of life.

From the shadows of a rosebush comes a running figure. It stops at the fountain and glares to life. It is Draco. “Father, you’re out late.”

Narcissa runs forward, pulls him into her arms. “Oh, wear your cloak, will you? You’ll catch a cold,” she says fondly, “now did you finish your homework?”

Draco nods earnestly, but his eyes are fixed somewhere above them. “Yes, Mother. Professor Snape says I am improving.”

Lucius blinks. A coldness climbs up his spine like ivy. “Snape isn’t teaching you anymore. He’s Headmaster.”

“Isn’t he?”

Draco says it with such mild certainty that for a moment he wonders if he misheard. The boy’s face is younger than it should be, rounder at the cheeks, the softness of childhood not disfigured by war. Snow settles in his hair without melting. His breath makes no cloud in the cold.

“No,” Lucius repeats, the word like a sore on his tongue. “No, Draco. He – he hasn’t taught you for a long time.”

His son looks up at him, solemn and owlish, eyes tinted yellow but then again maybe that is because of the light. “It’s late,” smiles Draco comfortingly, “Mother, we should bring him up to bed.”

“Yes,” Narcissa murmurs, “You must be very cold, Lucius.”

Cold. Yes. The cold is beginning to bite now, real cold, not the muffled dream-chill that had carried him down the stairs. He feels it in his lungs, a bronzed rib of exhaustion thinned out against the night. He looks around.

The snow is falling backward. He watches it rise from the ground like fog. The sky above him shakes, flowers open in reverse, colours draining, no earthly sense.

“Cissa,” he croaks, “what is this?”

She looks over at him and he reels back at the distant grief in her clear blue eyes. Memories collect at those shimmering piers. “This is winter,” she says, “The truest kind.” Her gaze falls to his palms, “there is blood on your hands, darling.”

He doesn’t understand. “You said people will die. Who? What did you mean? What are you trying to tell me?”

She smiles and folds her fingers over his. “That you must wake up.”

Her face is very close to his. It blurs, returns, blurs again. Her fingers brush his cheek. He smells her perfume. 

“You are sleeping by the window, Lucius,” she says softly, “and you are very cold.” 

The snow is so strong, so bright like an ache. It streams upwards, swallows the garden, the manor, the sky. He staggers backwards from her touch – jolts upward –

The wine tipped on its side on his desk. He heaves, standing up so that the chair scrapes harshly against the mahogany floor. His hands are clean.

“Narcissa?” he calls. There is no returning echo and there is no apparition. A dream, he thinks, it has only been a dream. Alcoholism is a vice that leaves disorienting consequences.

He sinks back into the chair and lets his head fall into his arms, but there is something in the air. It takes him a few heartbeats to discern it. 

Geranium. Bergamot. Crisp wintergreen.