A/N: WARNING: This contains subtle hints of slash. If you don't like it, click the back button. There's no reason I should be subjected to your complaints if you brought it on yourself. The T rating is for violence and darkness, not slash.

Besides that, hello! It seems to be a while since I've been on this site.

If you follow my main story, When Lines Divide Us, please know I have NOT abandoned it and have no intentions of doing so. Same goes for New Monsters. I am simply at a time when I cannot bring myself to write another chapter and hope that it passes soon so I can continue with both stories and eventually finish them.

This is part one of a two-shot. The second part will be up soon.

It kinda just popped into my head and here it is now. Enjoy, and, once again, if you don't like slash, please go read something else. Thoughts are welcome!

Disclaimer: I, quite unfortunately, do not own Harry Potter. Some genius invented it before me.

Broken

He has been broken for a long time — six years, as a matter of fact. And then she decides that six years is far too long to be broken. Especially when they broke him when he was just a boy. Just a boy. Just sixteen. Just sixteen when they branded him with that terrible tattoo and forced him into a task no other boy should ever face.

Far too long, she thinks, when she suspects he'd been shattered for a while before he even turned sixteen.

His father and his friends forced the coldness into her son long before that.

After the war, his father went to prison for three years. Even though the Boy-Who-Lived stood up for him when he had no obligation, no reason to. The sentence in Azkaban had been shortened from a lifespan to three years because the elderly wizards could not object to the clear and painful fire in those green, bespectacled eyes.

His mother was on house arrest for a year. She'd lied straight in the Dark Lord's face to protect her own son, and despite her selfish reasons, was seen as a hero.

Now, the three of them are reunited, living in a house that holds nothing but bad memories. Father, mother, son. He hates it. All that is here for him are the memories. Of a witch, the brightest of her age, being tortured by his craze-driven aunt right there on that carpet. Of the boy with the striking green eyes that held too much burden and knowledge and wisdom for his age being shoved, his face swollen from the curse and his wand taken from him, in that dungeon right down there to listen helplessly as his friend's arm was cut into with that cursed blade, spilling her blood on that carpet right there.

Of the screams she let out as that blood seeped into the floor, looking much brighter and clearer than he'd been taught to believe it would be. Not dirty at all, her blood, but cleaner than his. Of the redhead's tortured screams in the dungeon right down there as he listened to her agony helplessly and yelled in a way that he'd've thought the redhead himself was being tortured instead.

Of how, later, he'd cheered and wept for them in secret, in his head, because they were strong enough to escape when he wasn't, couldn't, couldn't because he was a goddamn coward and we wasn't strong enough and he would kill his family if he left.

Of how he'd cheered despite himself, left wandless, because he didn't care anymore how much of a disgrace he was to his family, his House, his Lord, when he saw the power that burned through those emerald eyes as they'd escaped, and it had a name — hope.

His mother and father do not complain when he leaves them to their house stained with memories, smelling of the violence that has been long since wiped away by magic.

They still, of course, insist he try to find a respectable life. A respectable spouse, wife. Of blood like his. They don't want their name to be ruined by their only son, as it's the only thing they have left. But a while later, sick and scarred from their pure-blooded bigotry, he stops trying. Stops speaking to them entirely.

And that's when Narcissa Malfoy decides that six years, more likely twenty-one, is far, far too long to be broken and scarred from the inside out.

She hears things while he's gone. Hears that he's left the potions apothecary he started himself to become a teacher when he's barely on the brink of turning twenty-five. Well, good. Maybe he can make an impact on someone else. A positive one at that.

She hears that the wizarding world is not yet ready to forgive him for his actions, actions he'd been forced into in his teenage years, when he was far too young to understand. She understands. The world may never be ready to forgive him, and it will be a blessing if it ever decides to. Her family name is disgraced as it is. Hopefully he can build himself a new, better reputation. Hopefully, he has more luck than his family before him.

Luck certainly seems to be in his favor a couple years later, when she hears he's one of the best Potions teachers Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft has ever seen, not that there was much competition in years past. Hears that he has established tentative but healthy relations with the rest of the staff, including the similarly young but experienced new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher and Herbology professor.

And she hopes that somehow, someone has managed to fix him. Fix her broken son.

So when, six years later, he shows up at the doorstep of his old home again, grey eyes shining brighter than she's ever seen them, she does not frown or complain about whose hand is locked within his own.

If there is someone who can fix her broken son, she doesn't care who it is.

If is has to be a messy-haired man with those same green bespectacled eyes and a scar that shows just how broken he is as well, if it is him that puts the sparkle and light back in her son's eye, and if it is him that will care for him and fix him no matter how dark a mark has been pushed into his arm, then she won't care at all.