#( no icons simply bc i'm lazy and tbh pretty emotional atm )

[toujoursfleurea]

✉ ➟ @faultyconscience sent:

∟     “ what’s holding you back in life ?”

 a c c e p t i n g  ✓ ✓ ✓   DRUNKEN CONFESSION TIME

╳                          His question causes her to pause, brows furrowing as she stares down at her own murky reflection in the drink she holds between her pale hands. For all intents and purposes, she was a woman who had nothing that she felt she could justifiably complain about. She had wealth, fine things, and - most important of all - a beautiful, brilliant son whom she would move heaven and earth for with only minimal prompting. As a Malfoy there was nothing that she couldn’t buy if she wanted it; as a Black, there was nothing that could frighten her or stand in her way.

But what about Narcissa?

❝ I don’t like this line of questioning, ❞ she warns before finishing her drink, the fire quickly coating her throat as she stands to get a little movement - something, anything - going to fight the anxious, pent-up feeling suddenly plaguing her. Oh, but it was easier to live her life without too much introspection or deep diving into the closet of monsters, ghosts, and old bones that kept her awake at night! Had it been anyone asking she might have simply scoffed and walked away without so much as a by your leave - a drink or two before or a drink or two more and she might have hexed him. 

She holds up her left-hand wordlessly as she paces about like a caged animal, Lucius Malfoy’s ring a lovely little shackle on her finger. It was as good a symbol of her captivity as any; of her past, the things and people she had lost along the way. ( Bellatrix had been the greater loss...even before her sister, her cousin, and her husband were locked away in Azkaban, a piece of herself - her very soul - lost to madness and mania just as Andromeda had been lost to her through stupid pride. ) Without her son - even without the unlikely companionship she’d built with Remus - Narcissa was alone and mostly isolated from the rest of the world. 

Not that she cared about other people, not at all. But it certainly did limit the scope of things she could do on her own when she was constantly being defined by sins and actions that were not wholly her own. Narcissa was constantly allowing her past and the past of her family to cloud the future.

This was the curse of the Most Ancient and Noble House of Black - they were all of them stupid, mad, incredibly cruel and remarkably self-sabotaging! 

❝ I don’t - ❞ The confession is right there on the tip of her tongue and she stops her pacing long enough to look Remus in the eye. For a brief moment - a small glimmer in time - she allows herself not to be some pillar of strength or some unfeeling marble creature chiseled by the hands of others. A sigh escapes her as she rolls her shoulders helplessly. ❝ I don’t know how to do anything for myself. ❞ 

And she didn’t mean that she wasn’t capable of living on her own or making it in the great wide world. That was absurd and she most certainly was better at surviving than the average witch or wizard. She meant that she’d spent so much of her life living for others that she didn’t know - she couldn’t fathom - what it meant to do something solely, selfishly for herself anymore.