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He would have done anything to save her; he would have crawled and begged.
It was simply that he was not given the chance. Not even that.
They presented him with her cold body within minutes of breaking him from Azkaban. The body that had once been slim and postured, now twisted and utterly still; he clutched her to him, he may have whimpered when he felt how cold she was, how stiff, how irrevocably she was lost.
Severus explained later on, while he sat and stared dully into an untouched glass of wine. Listening to words so weightless they seemed to take years to drift down to his conscious mind.
A plan. Draco chosen. Narcissa, failing to persuade the Dark Lord and paying for it. He saw the events unfold as if in a crystal ball in his mind, saw them from every glittering angle, saw so clearly how every step he had ever taken had led them all to this.
When he finally spoke, his voice was flat. He told Severus the only thought that still meant anything, a newly acquired understanding.
He told Severus the reason he, Severus, had betrayed the Dark Lord.
***
"Crucio." says a flat, dead voice, and Voldemort screams chokingly, red eyes rolling madly, veins bulging and flickering in the pale, translucent skin while his neck twists like a snake, the only part of him that could move.
A full minute of twisting and writhing, then the torturer lowers his wand and his hood.
"Lucius." the former Dark Lord pants, bloody, trembling mouth widening into a leer.
"I always wondered if you would scream." says the blond man under the hood, looking curiously down at the magically bound form of his former master, pale grey eyes as dead as his voice.
Red eyes are fixed unblinkingly on the grey. "You see it, don't you, Lucius? You see it. You were always weak - clever, but full of weaknesses. I cut away the greatest of them all, the one thing blinding you, and you see now, don't you, that in this world, there is only pow-"
"Avada Kedavera."
Voldemort is silenced permanently by a flash of green.
Then the blond man that had been Lucius Malfoy stoops and picks something up from the ground. Fourteen inches of elder. Gives it a twirl.
"Oh yes. My Lord. I do see."