𝐃𝐀𝐌𝐍𝐄𝐃¹ - 𝐀 𝐑𝐞𝐟𝐮𝐠𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐋𝐢𝐞𝐬 // 𝐆.𝐖. - 𝐃.𝐌.

- 𝐄𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 -

𝑫𝑬𝑨𝑻𝑯𝑬𝑨𝑻𝑬𝑹 𝑩𝑼𝑻 𝑾𝑰𝑻𝑯𝑶𝑼𝑻 𝑴𝑨𝑹𝑲.

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It was at times like these that Marie's mind felt like it went haywire. She didn't know what to do, she didn't know how to react. Part of her was telling her to do one thing, the other part telling her to do another. She could feel the weight of her head becoming too heavy for her poor shoulders, thoughts accumulating in a shapeless heap inside every drawer in her mind. She felt them tremble, oh she felt them. She felt the familiar warning of something about to give way, the balance of something, perhaps the quiet that Marie was trying to keep oppressed within the walls of her skull to keep her from dispersing beyond it. She felt her legs shaking, her arms as well, but she couldn't let go. She could not let go of that grip that made her palms sweat or the drawers would lose their balance, yielding one after the other, smashing under the strong impact and breaking the quiet that Marie had kept over time. That stillness that helped her not to let the emotions flow from within herself, to draw them deeply every time they threatened to go out.

Get your arm out.

That sentence stayed with her like an echo echoing in her head. She had no idea what to do: whether to obey him and raise her sleeve up to the elbow or refuse and run away. What did he want to do with her arm? What would have happened if she refused? A thousand questions made their way like snakes into every part of her mind, clouding her senses and demolishing the order that occlumancy helped her to maintain.

She turned her eyes to her mother, letting her irises sink into her, in the slightest hope of finding even a small trace of comfort in her. But it was all so dark and cold, her pupils so dark they seemed deep as a bottomless pit. Deep as to seem to her two infinite holes, shrouded in darkness to conceal her most intimate secrets, to conceal any kind of feeling that could betray her face. It was no longer her now, no longer the mother she had imagined in all those years in his absence. Absorbed by that tangle of looks, she didn't know if once she was the different person from what she was now, if once she was not so cold as to extinguish even the lava itself. She could not stop that game of looks, her eyes busy digging into her pupils to look for even a single positive crumb that could change the opinions she had about her. But at the bottom of that well she found no water but only ice. A very compact shape that prevented her from digging even deeper, a slab so thick and stainless that it prevented her from even bumping into it or leaning her forehead to see what lay beneath it.It was cold. Even looking into that well alone made her skin horrified; the bones go numb as soon as that cold crept into them greedily, chewing it to the marrow.It was as if Bellatrix, closing the doors of her heart, had wrapped her in ice. An ice impossible to peel off, so cold that it extinguished that flame that over time did not seem to want to return. That almost pleasant warmth that warmed her blood to make it flow softly in her veins and of which now there was no more left.The slab embedded in the depths of that pit seemed to have razed every inch of that flame to the ground. Not leaving even a trace. Not a drop.

"No!" Narcissa intervened, ending Marie's trance state. Everything around them became motionless, not even a portrait dared to move. "We made a deal, Bellatrix."

Mrs. Malfoy was standing now, with her husband towering behind her with the lump not making up his mind to come down. Marie's eyes turned away from her irises, and she turned them around her, peering at the men seated around the table and the pale being a few steps away from her. The whole room seemed to have lost its breath, sucked all the air into the lungs so as not to overpower the silence making it come out. "We had decided to offer Draco, not her. You promised it." Lucius intervened pulling Marie to him with a shocking speed. Her back pressing hard against his chest.