**Author's Note: Thank you all for the wonderful reviews and support you've given me. While this was all supposed to end with the first story, it has been inspiring. Thusly, the series that started with "Come to Me" and continued with "Even I Have Pride" will have one more song fic that will pick up exactly where this, the last chapter of "Even I Have Pride" leaves off. Happy reading, and be on the lookout for the last installment of the series, titled "Stolen."**
How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in a world that's so cold?
Maybe I'm just too demanding
Maybe I'm just like my father too bold
He pressed his hands to the stones of the wall he'd had her pinned against, his breath coming in the short, punctuated gusts of one trying to hold in temper tears.
Did she hate him so much? There had been passion in her kiss, and passion he recognized in the slant of her body against his, the feel of her molding to his hands and yielding to his lips.
And then she'd been gone, with words as cryptic as her disappearance.
When it came to you, I never had any pride.
Had he been so callous? Had he overlooked something?
Letting his preternaturally long fingers press into the mortar cracks of the wall, he laid his forehead between his hands and shuddered as memories flooded him.
Him manhandling her roughly, slamming her head into hard wood and taking her without letting her see who he was. Taking her without spoken consent, taking what he wanted as his father always had.
Taking her whenever he wanted her, never asking and almost never letting her initiate things.
Pride which he had in abundance, pride which he'd neglected to foster in her.
Pridelessness that echoed so strongly of another relationship, his own parents' relationship, that it made Draco ill.
Self-doubt, is it? He could all but feel the walking stick descend on his shoulder with the words, with the disappointed cluck of the tongue. Self-doubt in a Malfoy, and over some cunny and no more. Surely you can get your pleasures elsewhere.
"Not just that," Draco said insistently, taking his hands from the wall and pressing them to his eyes hard enough to bring black spots behind his eyelids. "It's not just that!"
Growling low in his throat, he withdrew his wand. "Lumos," he muttered through clenched teeth. When the point of light at the tip of his wand grew in intensity, he stared into it, calling up images of her, the smell, the sight, the taste of her, and recalled a trick his father had used on his enemies more than once. He'd been loath to use it, to use anything from his father.
But now, he was desperate.
Now, it would be used for something less ominous.
"Reperio," he said breathlessly. "Find my crown jewel."
Maybe you're just like my mother
She's never satisfied
"It's just absolutely wonderful you're here," the woman said brightly, pressing an urgent hand to Ginny's elbow as she led the young witch through the corridors. "Though I must admit, miss, it's peaked my curiosity a great lot. Why are you here, exactly?"
Ginny smiled enigmatically, hoping it wasn't too rude to keep her compulsions to herself. When she was left alone at her destination without any further questioning, she breathed a sigh of relief.
As she looked around, she wondered what it all meant, how it had come to this.
What did the woman lying in the bed mean to Draco? And what did she mean to Ginny?
For that matter, what did Draco himself mean to Ginny?
With a gentle hand, Ginny brushed the long, blonde hair away from Narcissa's sleeping face and couldn't help the sad smile that wavered her own lips. Draco may have looked a great deal like Lucius when he was awake, but he looked a great deal like his mother when he slept.
"He dreams of you," Ginny said, sitting down next to the bed and heaving a sigh. "I dream of him, and he dreams of you. So I came here. I don't know what I'm supposed to do." At a loss for words, even for words that seemed very one-sided, Ginny drew her knees to her chest and closed her eyes. How many tears could be cried over one person? Over one man, one man whom she thought she'd met on equal ground in a relationship with fire but no warmth.
Lust and no love.
But when you watched a man as he slept and ached every time he moaned in misery, there was more than just lust.
"Help me understand your son," Ginny whispered to the woman on the bed. "Help me help him."
Why do we scream at each other
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry
He paid little attention to exactly where he was going, instead keeping himself
focused on the small, bobbing light wending its way through crowds and alleys, out of the magical world and into London, the light dimming itself so only he could see it.
He'd be damned if he would lose her again, especially when she was touching
him, in his arms. She'd been crying in his arms, the tears more than evident. How many times had she hid tears from him?
Those tears made his stomach twist in a way he didn't care to explore any
further.
The light began to slow down, dancing back and forth as though trying to make up its mind. Draco wasn't in any mood to be patient.
"Ginny!" he yelled, turning in a circle and looking all around him. "Damn it, Ginny!" Though a few Muggles threw him startled looks, none of them paid him much mind.
The light dove at his face, making him draw back quickly. It hesitated, hovering in front of his eyes for a few moments, then seemed to disappear into an empty storefront.
Draco's breath caught in his throat as he saw the mannequin standing in the window of the abandoned store.
She'd led him the one place he'd never allowed himself to go.
Ginny had led him to St. Mungo's.
Images bombarded him, swarming through his head. His mother, wide-eyed and shallow-breathed, laying on the floor next to her dead husband. Ginny harmed, bleeding and broken from some magical deviance or another.
It was that thought, that startlingly clear visual that had him moving, speaking to the glass in front of the mannequin.
"I'm here…" He stopped, clearing his throat to move the lump that seemed to have formed. "I'm here to see Virginia Weasley."
But the mannequin did not move, and he let out a sound perilously close to a sob of relief, but the relief was short-lived. Ginny may not have been hurt, but the words he needed to say were painful, were long overdue.
"I'm here to see Narcissa Malfoy. I'm here to see my mother."
Don't cry
Darling don't cry
He ran through the building, ignoring the indignant Healers who tried to stop him, the amazed patients who gaped at the missing Malfoy with frank curiosity and shock in their eyes, ignored the cries of "Ghost!" that echoed about him.
The smell of the place made his stomach churn. It was the smell of hopelessness, of grief and lost souls, of magic gone bad and good magic working to make things right.
He heard her before he saw her, her voice raw from tears, talking to his mother about him, about how she was worried about him. He came to a stumbling halt outside the door, listening to that voice, the same voice that had screamed at him, whispered in his ear, growled suggestions in the height of passion.
Now it was full of emotion, full of care and worry that had no place in that voice, no place addressing a man like Draco Malfoy.
Looky, looky, the two bints in one room. It's almost poetically just.
Draco could almost see his father standing in the doorway, sneer affixed to his face as he looked at the two women in the room, one bedridden and the other heartsick. For a moment, he could hear her through his father's ears, see her through his father's eyes, and the sudden rage propelled him into the room.
He clasped one hand to her wrist, hauling her up off the bed and eye-to-eye with him, shaking her once roughly, her bright hair bouncing around her head.
The father grabs the mother by the wrist so hard the boy hears something snap, and drags her in front of him just as shouted spells echo through the house.
Four spells hit his mother and her body goes first stiff, and then limp, her eyes wide and unreadable as her husband tosses her aside.
Her bones felt small and fragile beneath his fingers and his eyes widened on hers as the past caught up with the present.
"No," he whispered, releasing her wrist and falling to his knees as he shook his head, trying to shake his father out of it, trying to shake his heredity out of it. His wide silver eyes sheened with tears, he wrapped his arms around Ginny's waist and pressed his forehead to her stomach.
She raised her hands as though in slow motion and pressed them to his head, tears rising in her own eyes. She'd wanted him to follow her, wanted him to be in this place, but the rough movement had shocked her.
Would it always be so between them? Fire and anger and violence? She'd had no time to think that before he'd sunk to his knees and wrapped his arms tight around her, his voice muffled by the sweater she wore.
"I am my father's son," he said, letting out a shuddering breath. "I am my father's son." How many times had he hurt her?
How many times had he acted like his father?
"Don't cry," Ginny said desperately, threading her fingers through his hair. Why had she left? At this point, ignorance would have been bliss.
She'd never dreamed that his pain would pain her so deeply.
"Draco."
The voice was faint, but pretty as it had been once upon a time, years before in her Hogwart days.
Narcissa Malfoy sat up in the bed, watching her son with a young woman who had to be a Weasley, a stunning girl with a head full of flame-red hair wreathing her shoulders. She had waited and healed, waited and watched, waited and remembered.
She had waited for the son who had disappeared, hoping against hope that he was not dead, and hoping against hope that someday he would return for her. She had grown stronger in body and mind, but weaker in spirit as days and months and years went by.
And now he was here, in her room, clinging to a woman as once he'd clung to her, cursing the name of his long-dead father.
"He never cried," Narcissa said, and though both Draco and Ginny were startled to hear her speak, there was no doubt who she meant. "He's crying all his tears in hell. You're not like him," she said, wondering if she were hallucinating. The nights had been terrible, filled with her screaming son and her mocking husband, lonely and yet accompanied with many people who should never have been there.
"Draco," Ginny whispered wonderingly, clasping his face gently between her hands as she saw something flash in his eyes. She knew he was hearing his father's name on his mother's lips so many years ago, called out in desperation.
As she leaned down and pressed her lips to his forehead, he gripped her hands almost painfully, reassuring himself she was really there. He kept his eyes on his mother's, and when he spoke, he directed it to the room at large.
"Don't ever leave me again," he said, his eyes fierce, and when the two women looked at each other, a tacit agreement passed between them.
No one disobeyed a Malfoy.