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looking glass face
The noble and most ancient house of Black had never much gone in for windows - Narcissa was well aware of that. Even though Number 12 Grimmauld Place had wide, high transoms, they were cloaked with heavy drapes and on her visits there, the house elves scolded her when they found her peering out onto the square. The elves yanked the curtains closed with fierce determination, glaring fiercely at her before they scurried back to the kitchen. Narcissa craved the sunlight. Everything about her family argued against this tendency, but she was sure that it was in her nature. It was obvious, when you looked at her, she thought. Blond and delicate in a family of raven hair and stormy features; light to their dark, flighty and silly to their heavy, weighted moodiness. At least, that's what Narcissa thought, what she saw when she looked out of windows. If the sunlight caught the glass the right way, she could see her reflection - she knew she didn't look like Bella, or like Andromeda, or like her cousins Sirius or Regulus; Sirius and Bella were good looking in the same dark and heavy lidded way that made people stop and stare on the street. Whereas Narcissa looked like she'd been adopted into the family whenever someone caught her, startled, in a family photo, surrounded by her relatives. She knew that her features were too sharp, too fine, to ever be considered really pretty. But she liked what she saw in her reflection in the windows, and she liked the way the sunlight caught her hair in ways it never shone in Bella's, and there were not windows where she came from. When Narcissa arrived at Hogwarts, she was not surprised to be sorted into Slytherin - after all, it was the very Black thing to do, even if you didn't look like a Black - but she was sorry that there weren't windows in their dormitories. Windows that were curtained were better than no windows at all. So she took to lingering in the hallways between classes, peering out onto the grounds and the Quidditch pitch and the Forbidden Forest, soaking in the sunlight that streamed through the carefully cut panes of glass. She lingered from the first day of her first year at Hogwarts, as soon as she realized that there were windows in the world to look out of. Narcissa never looked for her own reflection in that glass, but sometimes she caught a glimpse of it all the same. From the moment Narcissa got to Hogwarts, she tried to fade into the shadows of the dungeons and disappear into the nooks and crannies of the stairwells and hallways, tried to make herself as invisible as the glass she so carefully peered through. She was the baby of the family, what could they expect of her? Bella strolled haughtily wherever she pleased, trailing toadies and stooges and that awful LeStrange boy, and Andromeda was no help, giggling in Gryffindor with Sirius and the Potter boy. Narcissa was a Black; she was supposed to stand up for pure-bloods and all that was good and right in the wizarding world. She knew that much from listening to the adults who crowded into the parlor at Grimmauld Place. "There's a lot to be said for a name," Bella told her in her third year, when she found Cissa hiding in an alcove, watching the Hufflepuff Quidditch team practice outside the window. "Don't forget who you are, Narcissa," Bella said, and yanked so hard on her arm that Narcissa had five bruises in the shapes of Bella's fingers for a week afterwards. Narcissa decided, after that, that maybe it was easier to watch other people and not yourself. She stopped staring out of windows, stopped trying to find the answers in her own reflection. She'd never be a leader like Bella, never be well loved like Andromeda, but she didn't have to be a shadow, she supposed. When Narcissa stopped staring at glass and started staring at other people, she realized that someone was staring back at her. She knew Lucius Malfoy; he hadn't exactly trailed along after Bella but he certainly ran with her crowd. He was almost as popular as her sisters and no brooding darkness surrounded him, like Bella's veiled face or Sirius' volatile, unpredictable rages in the Great Hall. Lucius Malfoy was all moonlight and pale, clear eyes, and when Narcissa accidentally caught his eyes in the Slytherin common room, the look in them unsettled her. In her fourth year, Narcissa quickly learned that it was stranger to see your own reflection in someone else's face than it was to not see it in the faces of your sisters, or in your own face caught in glass and sunlight. But the familiar is a comfort, and she was not upset when Lucius, two years older than she was and from a family wealthier than the Blacks if not more powerful, began keeping company with her and not with Bella. Bella would have been a more suitable match for Lucius, or even Andromeda, but Rodolphus LeStrange had been in the picture for years and Sirius' mother had already burnt Narcissa's other sister off the tapestry. The baby of the family was all that's left for Lucius. When Lucius walked beside her in the hallways, guiding her from class to class even though his schedule should have sent him in the opposite direction, she knew that heads turned to look at them. Narcissa knew that Bella, finishing her seventh year and getting ready to disappear into a life that Cissa couldn't understand, squashed most of the rumors that floated around the Slytherin common room. It was sudden and strange, Narcissa thought; to look up from years of self-reflection and find that everyone was watching you as closely as you'd watched yourself. Lucius watched her closest of all, and there was nothing Bella could do to stop that, because by Narcissa's 7th year, Bella was gone and the noble and most ancient house of Black had decided that the oldest son from the house of Malfoy was a perfectly acceptable marriage for their youngest daughter. When Narcissa looked into Lucius' eyes, she wasn't sure that she saw love, but she saw familiarity. Lucius' pale, thin features were a match for what she saw in the mirror in the mornings. When Narcissa looked across the common room, seeing Lucius was like seeing herself, a mirror image, a doppelganger, a twin. Familiarity breeds contempt, they say, but Narcissa found the familiarity of Lucius' face a comfort, not something to be frightened of. He was an open book to her, and she to him; this was how it felt to Cissa. Lucius looked like her entire future spilling out before her eyes. He would finish at Hogwarts and go to work at the Ministry, or maybe just live off the Malfoy estate. She would finish at Hogwarts two years later and they would marry. They would live in Malfoy Manor; they would raise a noisy, undignified family of blond haired, grey eyed, delicate featured children together. Lucius would never frighten her with midnight meetings and mysterious disappearances, not like Bella's husband or her parents' friends. With Lucius, Narcissa knew that she would always know. His face was a mirror to hers. What she read in her own heart she truly believes that she could read in his. They were twins, they were matched, they were supposed to be together. Two weeks after she finished at Hogwarts, Narcissa Black, of the noble and most ancient house of Black, married Lucius Malfoy, of the noble but slightly less ancient house of Malfoy. Two weeks later, she sent her mother an owl. She was pregnant. Two weeks after that, Lucius disappeared after dinner. When he returned home at sunrise, his robes were stained with blood. Over breakfast, Lucius asks for the Daily Prophet and Narcissa hands it to him silently, because she doesn't know what else to do. Her husband's face is suddenly written in Chinese, Russian, Latin, and she cannot read it. She returns to keeping counsel in her own features as the baby grows; there are enough windows in the Manor to last a lifetime.
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