Notes: Short drabble about the wrong things you learn as kids.

Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to JKR.

Prompt: Shooting stars

Narcissa remembers a night she saw lights dashing across the forbidding sky. Muggles called them shooting stars, and loved them, but they weren't really stars at all. Father said they were but mudbloods – drunk and shooting on broomsticks, loud and crass and flashy as usual – said they were like that, feeling special enough to flaunt their abnormalities, letting the world that wasn't theirs clean up after their bouts of foolishness.

You mustn't admire them, Mother had said. But, at eleven, Narcissa still had the tolerance that came from bright imagination, where paupers and becomes princesses and frogs be dragon-kings, and she saw that they were bright and beautiful and made her believe in magic that cannot be stuffed into wands.

Years later, as Lucius traces the graceful symmetry of her face and tells her to

- live, I will bring Draco back alive, I will –

Something streaks through the green-corrupted sky – couldn't be muggleborns, they're all dead or locked up – Narcissa remembers that kind of magic which muggles call miracles, and hope springs in her heart like a flower after a long dead winter.

She tells the Dark Lord that Harry Potter is dead.

End.