Swinging into Pure Mud
By dented-sky
Category: Angst
Warnings: sexual connotations and the 'f' word.
Pairings: Narcissa/Lily, Lucius/James
Word count: 1320
March Slash Club Challenge: Write a fic that involves one of the members of the Black family and mentions dirt.
Summary: Can pure-blood be tainted by some things, such as homosexuality and adultery? Or is Pure always pure, no matter how much mud is thrown at it?
Author's notes: Feminism again. Oops. And I actually really hate these pairings, but the plot bilby wouldn't leave me alone. (Yes, 'bilby' not 'bunny'.)
Disclaimer: Characters are Rowling's, lyrics are The Beatle's.
Swinging into Pure Mud
By dented-sky
Eventually Lucius Malfoy will think about going and talking to Lily, and tell her smugly that pure-blood always wins.
And then he will predict what she will say, and it will have a lot to do with, Yes Lucius, you were right, as always.
The almost Lady Malfoy walks up the isle and there is music in the background, a foggy wailing that Narcissa has dreamed of hearing since she was a little girl, but now she hates the sound, and the murmurings, and the faces as they push in to see the new bride.
Her tight glass high-heels dig into her feet like shackles, and her petticoat and layers of the white dress crowd her legs as if she is bridled, along with that thing strapped to her head that was ‘something borrowed’ from her mother. She slowly glides towards the altar, feeling like a prize horse and that she should be racing to get there so she can get it over and done with. For once she hates the attention given to her in the breath of, “Oh, isn’t she beautiful?”
Then she steps up, grinding her teeth to fairy dust to suppress the pain that is more than physical.
There were wires that crawled through Lily’s apartment like snakes, and Narcissa felt like one, slithering around this Muggle place.
“No, I want to stay in my own place until I get married,” Lily answered shyly to Narcissa’s question of are you are you areyou going to move in with him?
“Independence, you know,” Lily added as she fiddled with some large mechanical fake-wood contraption.
Narcissa did not really know, but she pretended she did.
There was a flat, cardboard object in Lily’s hand, and she pulled out a large black disc from it, and put it on the wooden thing. Then she moved her hand to do something else, and suddenly music was playing at a low volume.
“Yesterday,” it sung, “all my troubles seem so far away…”
Lily turned to her in a swish of red hair and grinned. “I love this song,” she told Narcissa, “it’s so sad. The Beatles, you know.”
“Yes,” Narcissa lied, and clasped her hands awkwardly in front of herself across the room.
“Come here,” Lily beckoned softly.
Narcissa did, striding forward in pretence of confidence. When she stopped she leaned forward and kissed Lily softly.
They were both the same height, but that was all they really had in common. Lily was wearing a boring muggle tee with denim trousers, while Narcissa was in her Victorian royal blue dress, with the bodice wound tight and the layers of skirt fanning out.
Lily moved around her to undo the ribbons delicately. “Is this what you want to do?” Lily asked.
“Yes,” Narcissa breathed as she closed her eyes, and felt Lily move blonde hair away from Narcissa’s neck so she could kiss it.
It was forgetting that Narcissa liked best. It was turning in the other’s arms and kissing her memories away, of exploring the soft red and white contours like an adventurer and running, riding, gliding far, far away. It was falling onto the couch like falling from the sky, and removing clothes from the other like unfolding the petals of a flower. Over the hot desert skin she went, and sinking into those curves, then barrowing deep into a dark forest and finding the cave wet and soft, and, even after all this time, being surprised it was not dry and unwelcome.
Lily’s couch was dirty and second-hand, but they lay on it, and somehow the rawness of such a flat allowed her into another world that had nothing to do with her family, nor any other wizard families that owned too much and gave too little.
“Yesterday,” the record continued, “yesterday.”
And on Narcissa swam through that river, and licked at a pebble just below the surface. She held her breath and went under, doused in forgetting and wanting desperately to remember it all over again.
Ice fire eyes and silver hair, a sweet mouth, naked strong shoulders, and a trail of gold weaving its way down to the real beauty often hid behind elegant clothes.
Lucius turned away from the mirror.
“Do you think,” he prophesized to James Potter, who was sitting up in bed across the room, reading a magazine, “that what we have just done could have tainted us, made us less pure?”
Potter shifted his naked body from under the sheets lazily, not looking up from where he was reading. “Um, no, probably not.”
“Does our blood get thinner every time we –“
“Oh Merlin,” Potter interrupted, “I can’t believe Bagman got the place! He’s shite, what were they thinking?” He lifted his eyes to Lucius finally and reached out to give him the magazine. “Read it! It’s bloody thick!”
Lucius waved it away. “I don’t think –“
“I can’t believe it,” Potter repeated.
“They say sodomy is the behaviour of the savage,” Lucius continued, more to himself now that Potter had gone back to reading and not listening, “does that mean I’m not a pure-blood anymore?
“Has it swum through us and killed our magic?” He was panicking now. “Because I read that somewhere.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Potter said in a bored tone, “don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not stupid. And would do you know?”
Potter sighed and put his reading material down, then looked at Lucius more forcefully this time. “Because we fucked but we’re not sodomites, so get over yourself.”
In other words, he meant: We’re only doing this because our fiancés are sleeping together, and we’re men and we don’t let women get the better of us, so therefore, we’re not lovers.
He got up and looked around for his clothes while Lucius watched him.
Lucius knew that Narcissa got goodbye kisses and cuddles from Lily Evans, but Lucius got no such thing from Potter. The sound of the door behind Potter only slammed him into more angry thoughts of Evans being slaughtered by a wolf, a lion, or scratched to death by his own sharp fingernails.
Cold, Lucius sat down on his bed and wrapped the blankets around him. The only time he had seen the two women together, he had come home early from work. Looking for Narcissa, he had found her in the Manor gardens. Instead of tending to the rose garden she was growing flower by flower for him, he had found her naked with a companion, playing in the mound of mud so happily that for a moment Lucius thought they were wrestling in chocolate.
Later she had come to him, still incrusted in dirt, but with some clothes thrown on at least, and she appeared to him as if the mudblood had killed all her pureness in a single afternoon.
Flower by flower, the rose garden died.
The priest is talking: “And do you, Narcissa, take Lucius, in sickness and in health…”
They hold each other’s hands, and their fingers are cold where they should be sweaty, and their expressions are hard where they should be smiling, and the audience is crying tears of joy where they should just shut the fuck up and die.
“Yesterday, yesterday,” the record sings in her head as if it were broken, “she wouldn’t say, she wouldn’t say.”
Narcissa looks into dull grey eyes and pretends they are gleeful green. “I do,” she whispers.
I win, he will think, I slept with both your lovers.
Eventually Lucius Malfoy will think about going and talking to Lily, and tell her smugly that pure-blood always wins.
And then he will predict what she will say, and it will have a lot to do with, Yes Lucius, you were right, as always.
But by then it will be the end of 1981, and he will not get the chance to say any of those things.
-fin-