Even I Have Pride

**Author’s note: This is a sequel to the story “Come to Me.” If you haven’t read it, I suggest you do so you’ll be all caught up. The song lyrics that will be interspersed through the song are not mine; they belong to Prince (though I have taken out his infamous abbreviations.) The song is “When Doves Cry.” Also, characters aren’t mine. You all knew that. Happy reading!**

Two months went by as though there had been no passage of time at all, and Virginia Weasley could almost swear she’d forgotten what it was like to live simply. She could almost say she had forgotten what it was like to live without lavishness, without money, without a man who worshipped—and watched—her every move.

Almost.

It had taken this long for doubts to arise. The novelty hadn’t even worn off yet; being with a man like Draco Malfoy guaranteed that novelty was a daily occurrence and monotony wasn’t an option. Feelings ranged from contentment to anger, sometimes within the span of seconds, and their lovemaking ran the gamut from worshipful to wild and back again.

But there were doubts.

She’d learned more about him than she’d dared herself to think of—before, he’d been cold, distant, untouchable. Even when she’d first traversed to Boston, she’d seen him as an enigma.

He was many things. He was clever, yes, there had never been doubt of that, and he was still cruel in his own way. But he was also troubled by many things, by his past, by his heritage, by his mother back in London. His mother who recognized no one and had, before he had fled, called her son by his father’s name.

He was troubled, and from his troubles, her doubts arose.

Dig if you will the picture
Of you and I engaged in a kiss
The sweat of your body covers me
Can you my darling
Can you picture this?

“What is it?”

He poised above her, perfect as always, cold eyes in a warm body. His long, strong arms held his hands on either side of her head, his platinum hair falling into his eyes, his lips hovering over hers. He’d been about to kiss her, dipping so close that their labored breaths were mingled, and then he’d stopped and asked her the question.

“What is what?” she asked back, keeping her voice more sassy than sad. But sad was how it felt, and she couldn’t shake it off as she searched his eyes with hers. She’d learned quickly how fragile he was, how quick to spot trouble, and how quick to assume it was his fault.

It wasn’t at all unusual for him to engage her in conversation, in discussion even, when they were in the middle of lovemaking, but his eyes were intense with something other than passion, and his mind wasn’t on his rhythm, on the friction of their bodies rubbing together.

She bit her lip, hitching her lips a little as he paused and lowered his head to hers, the perspiration of their exertions mingling together.

“I’m not a fool,” he bit out, never blinking, never taking those eyes off hers. “You have that look.” Before she could ask what he meant, he shook his head. “That worried look. That look that says Mama Weasley’s coddling over something.” His tone grew snide, as it always did when he spoke of things more emotional—weaker—than he was accustomed to seeing or feeling.

“I’m not coddling,” she insisted, feeling the lie wedge between them. To dispel it, to forget about it, she used the strength in her legs to flip them over, placing her hands on his defined stomach and squeezing her knees into his sides as she rocked him deeper inside her, making them both short of breath.

And because he was short of breath, because the damned witch had always been able to do that to him, even when she was shooting him daggers and wishing him death, Draco let the subject pass.

He came first, his hips jerking up and his head bearing back as he released himself inside her, hot jets of himself, the only temperate part of himself he could allow her.

And when she tottered over the edge, squeezing him inside her as she bent her arms and brushed her lips over his, he never felt her tears mix with the sweat on his face.

~~~

It was when he slept that she worried most, that the sadness overwhelmed her. In his sleep, the Young Master was more like a child, the scowl softening into something very close to a pout, the insecurities that hid themselves during the day showed themselves in occasional murmurs and fitful dreams.

In his dreams, he called out for his mother.

This night, his pleas were wordless, and those reached into her heart the most firmly, for she could have no idea what he needed or wanted.

She slipped out of bed as quietly as she could, sliding into the black satin robe she’d never quite been able to give back to him after her first night there. Moonlight shone cool and silvery through the large window, and she hugged her arms to herself and felt the measure of self-loathing she’d built up grow a little stronger.

She was allowing him to use her, and in doing so, was using him.

He needed help, and what he had was someone who only aided in his hiding, aided in the delusions he’d built around his own life.

With her back to the bed, to him, she never heard him stir, jerked alert by the darkness of his own dreams, shaken awake by the fierceness of his need. His eyes reflected the moonlight as he stared at her, watched her shoulders rise and fall with the hitching breaths he knew accompanied tears.

“Liar,” he said tersely, propping himself up on one elbow and watching as her back stiffened. He’d known her mind was elsewhere, known she was distracted. And now she sat at the God damned window, crying without telling him, without waking him.

Crying just like his mother always had.

She made sure to compose herself before turning to him. What fool faced a Malfoy with their weak side showing? Even as she thought it, though, guilt streaked through her.

What fool insisted on seeing him as the one thing that troubled him most?

She started to speak but found herself speechless. And would he always do that to her? The sight of him in moonlight, shocks of pale hair in his eyes, his carelessly glaring eyes, his skin pale and smooth, made her ache even more for what she knew she had to do. “That’s certainly the pot calling the kettle, isn’t it?”

He got out of the bed in one smooth motion, his long body well-muscled but sorely in need of a game, one good game of Quidditch.

“What is it, crown jewel, missing home? Missing the Burrow already, and all of your wonderful, weasely Weasleys?” He put his hands to her shoulders, his eyes hot on hers, desperate to find what was making her cry.

Why couldn’t she just be satisfied with him?

She was calm in the face of his insults, however. Nary a week didn’t go by without fights, huge ones between the two of them. What was great passion without great anger? And so she shrugged his hands from her and shook her head, the pain in her welling by the second.

Mother… his voice whispered painfully in her head, the voice of many nights’ tortured sleep.

“What’s it to you if I am, Draco? Haven’t we been over this before? If I say I’m homesick, you torture me mercilessly about it and poke fun at me, and if I say I’m not, you accuse me of lying.”

“You’re not happy here with me,” he accused, then scoffed. “Isn’t that rich? All the things in the world, and the Weasley still wants to go home.”

All the things in the world and me, and Ginny still can’t bear to stay.

And then he said the same words he always said, the ones she’d been waiting to hear, the ones she’d been dreading.

“It isn’t as though I’m keeping you prisoner,” he said, feeling suddenly as though he’d been trapped into saying it, maneuvered neatly into his part.
“I’m going for a walk,” Ginny responded woodenly, wondering why she couldn’t just reach out and touch him.

Because he only touches you when he wants you, Ginny. Because when he truly needs, he cries out and stays alone, but when he wants you he’ll touch you.

And because he needed something she couldn’t give him, Ginny walked out the doors of his big Boston home as she had a thousand times before.

Only this time, in mid-stride, the Young Mistress disappeared.

Dream if you can a courtyard
An ocean of violets in bloom

Animals strike curious poses
They feel the heat
The heat between me and you

She hit the ground in England with one hand outstretched, perfectly confident of the place she was Apparating to. She’d heard enough about it, seen it from afar, been given every detail from a lover’s lips to her ears.

When her hand brushed a solid stone wall, Ginny was not surprised.

Keeping her eyes closed, she walked along the empty corridor, letting her fingers trail the damp stones, listening to her feet trod over the abandoned tile floors. When she opened her eyes, she felt her stomach knot.

The Malfoy mansion had been left empty for years, for fear of bad luck, for fear of black magic and the unsettled dead.

Ginny stopped walking, her breath trapped in her lungs with sobs yet unvoiced. She’d been near to tears when she’d walked out of the front door of Draco’s house in Boston, near to tears at all the things she couldn’t tell him, all the things he didn’t seem to realize about himself.

Ginny tilted her head back against the wall, feeling the coolness of foliage and stone creeping into her scalp. Throwing both hands wide, she dug her fingers into the cracks in the interior walls and thought of him, of his flat, emotionless voice as he’d related his last moments in his childhood home to her. She saw more than she wanted to, saw more clearly than he’d ever told her.

The boy strides down the shadowed hallway, owning the house as much as the father ever had, his head held high, though he knows things are about to change. He knows the war is about to be over, and he’s certain he’s not quite on the right side of it all.

He senses it in the air.

He hears her first, the mother, her voice urgent and fearful as she pleads with the father, her husband.

Go, she says, go and run and I’ll take our son—

It is the most she has dared to say to the father in a long while, so consuming has his madness become, so stifling his ambition.

And when the knocks begin on the heavy wooden door, the boy steps back instinctively, his eyes wide and metallic in the poorly lit hall.

They come for him, for the father, for the madman who has been living in this house for years, imposing his madness on the mother and the boy, imposing his madness on any who dare to cross his pass.

Now that they have come for him, his eyes glow maniacally and he grins, a smile so ghastly that the boy pales even more than usual.

“Hello, gentlemen,” the father drawls to men the boy cannot see, and in a move so swift the boy will never forget it, the father grabs the mother—

Grabs her 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, all meant to stun, but each different, hit his mother, and her body goes first stiff, and then limp, her eyes wide and unreadable as her husband tosses her aside and tries to flee.

The father makes it two steps toward the boy, and then he is felled by spells he’d never hesitated to use for pleasure, for sport.

Satisfied they have done their job, the men, the vigilantes, leave the mansion, and the boy walks out from his hiding place, no longer a boy.

The mother is alive, blank-eyed and breathing shallowly, and she extends a hand to her son, a hand supported by a broken wrist, and when the mother looks at him, she speaks a name in a voice so hopeful it sickens her son.

“Lucius?”

Ginny let out a pained gasp and ran out of the house, into the expansive yard behind it, stumbling to her knees in the snow. It was cold there, colder than it had been in Boston, and dead flowers struggled long-necked out of the white dusting that surrounded them, reaching for sunlight that no longer reaches them.

It had been, she knew, his mother’s garden.

He spoke of it in his dreams with more feeling than he commanded in his waking moments.

~~~

She was usually back by now.

It wasn’t the first time they’d argued, and he had been certain it wouldn’t have been the last. After all, they were enemies somewhere deep down, weren’t they?

“She’s gone.”

The voice was snickering, sibilant, winding nastily through the big bedroom where Draco sat up, waiting for the Ginny’s room.

Draco closed his eyes, sick of the turns his thought always took in the unsure moments, sick of the voice he could never quite shake.

“So sad. How low have we come, my son, when you can’t even get a dirt-poor Weasley to stay in your house?”

Grating his teeth, Draco spoke to his father, his long-dead father whose voice still ruled the shaky confidence of his son with the insults that he’d plied so well in life.

“You’re dead,” Draco said to the room at large. “You’re dead, and I’m not.”

“You may as well be.” The voice was as clear as if Lucius Malfoy stood in the room, as clear as if his lips were next to Draco’s ear. “You may as well be.”

~~~
She knew where she had to go next, where she needed to go. She’d seen what an unhappy family could do, had seen what isolation had done to Draco, and she needed to see her family.

But she couldn’t be where she was without leaving word. She couldn’t leave him back in that big house, that big house in America that had details identical to the mansion in England. So, trudging up the winding staircase of the Malfoy mansion, she put one foot in front of the other until she was in the highest point of the house, surrounded by owls that had long since gone wild. Without much hope, she extended her arm, pleasantly surprised when a small, soft gray one alit there.

Thinking of the boy who had grown into a man—my man, she thought before she could stop herself—she let the tears come full force as she attached the three-word message to the owl’s leg and sent it away.

The wind blew her tear-streaked face dry as she headed by foot for Diagon Alley.

How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in a world that's so cold?

He’d fallen asleep sitting up in the large, black chair that was poised in the corner, his head tilted uncomfortably to one side, his hands clasped loosely to his ears as though to ward off the phantom voices that were most easily granted entrance in the night.

He had slept alone, cold and alone and waiting, and sometime during the night, the voice of his father had given way to the brief scream of his mother, and her voice whispering the wrong name in the twilight.

The wakened man would not admit that the sleeping boy had been crying in the night.

She wasn’t back, and he felt his stomach churn with anger and some other, deeper, unidentifiable feeling.

What if something happened to her? What if someone took her…

But he was sure he would have known if something had happened to her. He would have felt it if his obsession—if his possession—had left the earth.

It took only a moment for his sleep-addled eyes to clear, and he was out of the chair with a grace inherited from both his father and his mother, his hand outstretched to the small gray bird in the window.

He remembered everything, had a keen mind for small details, and he remembered this owl.

With trembling fingers he loosed its message, fear striking to the core of him as he wondered who in England would use a Malfoy owl, and who would know where he was.

The three words, scripted in her handwriting, her affected, feminine handwriting, struck him motionless, and the parchment floated to the floor as his fingers grew stiff.

I am sorry.

Thoughtlessly, he let the rage, the hurt run through him unchecked, and when the scream tore from his throat, the paper on the floor burst into green flames, only to disappear into ashes.

Gone.

The thoughtless bitch had really gone, and Draco Malfoy was once again left alone.

~~~

She wandered, though she hadn’t meant to. She’d meant to go home, back to the Burrow, or back to the twins’ shop immediately, but her feet carried her a bit farther and when she ended up in Gringotts, it was with little surprise.

Sometimes, Ginny thought, you just needed a rock to lean on.

“Bill Weasley,” she requested at the front desk, dismayed at how thin and tired her voice sounded. What had taken so much out of her, she wondered? Draco, or her absence from Draco?

He was pulling back his hair when he saw her, tying back the thick mass of it with a bit of leather he’d found, and the long, auburn strands slipped from his fingers to fall about his face when he saw his little sister.

She’d become a woman in the months she’d gone, her face thinned out, her eyes eerily old. She was hurting, and Bill was fairly certain she didn’t know it, for the hurt was layered over with worry, with concern, and with a few other things he couldn’t put his finger on.

“Bill!” She threw her arms around his neck as he neared her, burying her face in the broad chest for just a moment, allowing herself that one small thing before she stepped back and composed herself. “I missed you.”

He nodded in return, and she wondered at his silence. The Weasleys weren’t a quiet lot, by any means, and Bill was often the first to speak his mind.

And then, just as she was sure he wasn’t going to say anything, he made her blood run cold.

“Where is he?” Bill asked softly, his eyes kind and impossibly understanding for the question he posed.

“You knew.”

He drew her outside with him and prepared himself to listen long and listen well. “I knew,” he agreed, sitting her down on one of the public benches. “So now tell me the things I don’t know.”

Maybe I'm just too demanding
Maybe I'm just like my father too bold

“Forgive me for saying so, Young Master, but I’m nearly certain it wouldn’t be wise for you to—”

Draco turned on his heel, causing his Squib butler to run straight into him. Not stepping back and not flinching, Draco looked down his nose at the servant. “You’re not forgiven, and I’ve no use for your certainty, Malcolm.” He turned away and walked into his bedroom, throwing the ebony wardrobe open wide and selecting a few things.

He began to undress, completely unabashed by the presence of the older butler. It had been common enough to go about whatever business was necessary in front of house elves; why should it be any different with servants? Draco pulled a tight, cable-knit black sweater over his head and decided the black slacks he wore would suffice.

There was no time to muddle over dressing.

When he turned to retrieve his wand from the nightstand, he ran into Malcolm again.

“They think you dead, you know,” the servant said mildly, somehow managing to look down on the long-bodied Draco.

The words made Draco wince, and he once again found himself fighting the voice of his father, the ever-present, drawling, horrible voice.

“Oh, yes, my son, they thought you died with me like a loyal boy instead of the cowardly, traitorous brat that you are.”

“It doesn’t matter!” Draco burst out, causing Malcolm to raise an eyebrow.

“Will the Young Master need his robes for his journey?”

“I don’t need my fucking robes!” Draco shouted, shoving his hands through his pale hair and making it stand in all directions. “The only thing I need is in bloody fucking England!”

“If everything the Young Master needs is in England, then I presume he won’t need his wand.” Malcolm kept his face blank, perversely pleased with being difficult. It was hard to spend so many years magicless and not be at least a little bitter.

“Of course I need my fucking wand, you troublesome old fuck!” So saying, Draco snatched the wand off the nightstand and clasped it in his fingers nearly hard enough to break it.

He felt the anger surge through him, and with it a wave of despair. He was acting like his father all over again, the madness, the incomprehensible urges.

The overwhelming desire for one end goal.

“Maybe that’s why she left, you ungrateful brat.”

“Fine,” Draco shouted. “Fine,” he said in a calmer, colder tone, his teeth bared in a predatory smile. “If that’s how it’s going to be, then let it. A Malfoy lets nothing stand in his way.”

The young man Disapparated with a pop, leaving Malcolm gaping.

It was the first time the Young Master had ever admitted his identity.

~~~

It had been easy, too easy, for Bill to figure out where his sister had gone and who she’d been with. After all, nothing in the world was more telling than money, and all it took was a few clever, numbers-savvy goblins to help Bill keep track of large exchanges going on, magical money to American money.

A pattern started to appear with the largest exchanges in Boston, many Galleons exchanged along with British pounds, and Bill couldn’t help but wonder about the rumors that had flown of a missing Malfoy corpse and missing Malfoy millions.

But he’d kept his mouth shut, because he loved his little sister, and he’d seen she was unhappy. In that way, his family could be terribly blind. So much did they want everyone to be safe and happy that they often didn’t notice when people weren’t.

But as she sat and told him her story in abbreviated bits and pieces, Bill started to see that America had changed nothing.

Ginny was still unhappy, and what was more, she was confused.

“He needs help, Bill. And he doesn’t care about me, so it can only harm him for me to hang about. Who needs an enemy, eh?” She said it rationally, so rationally that it made Bill’s heart wrench.

“There’s a fine line between love and hate, Ginny.” When had his sister grown up, his baby sister gotten big enough to speak of love with? “I think you already know that.”

But she turned her face away from him, a denial, and looked to the sky. “It’s getting late. What say we gather the family?” Ginny looked down at him, a lock of thick hair falling in her face.

Bill wondered if she could feel it in the air, the crackling, the electricity, the tension coming to a head. “Sure, love,” he said absently, casting his own eyes to the sky.

Maybe you're just like my mother
She's never satisfied

He landed in the middle of a pile of clothing, and he strongly suspected it was all in dire need of scourgifying.

He’d never seen the place, so his idea of where to Apparate had been of the vaguest ilk; he’d been imagining a slovenly den, and so that’s precisely what he landed in: the twins’ bedroom.

Draco knew immediately that he was alone in the house, and more specifically, that Ginny was not there.

He could not smell her, he could not hear her, and he could not feel her in the room.

“A son of mine, in the Weasley Burrow?”

“I’m no son of yours,” Draco answered the persistent voice, wondering how many years it would take for the damnable man to fade from memory.

So far, time had shown no effects on the cruel bastard’s grip over his son.

With a howl like a wounded animal, Draco sent dual handfuls of clothes flying, his outstretched wand blowing holes in walls, tearing upholstery and drapery as he dashed through the house, longing for a taste of her, a glimpse of her.

He was not rewarded, and when he burst out of the front doors of the Burrow, his breath was coming in great gulps, his hunger unabated, his thirst unslaked.

“I thought you’d have learned something about women by now, with that whore you had for a mother.”

Draco felt his throat constrict, the tears prick the backs of his eyelids, and he forced himself not to listen to his father, not to think of his mother, to think only of Ginny, of what was rightfully his, of what had been wrongfully lost.

“Come back,” he whispered hoarsely, Disapparating with a pop.

~~~

It should have been pleasant. It should have felt like a homecoming.

Instead, it felt crowded and forced, and most of all, deceitful.

Little secrets grew big with time, and with big secrets came big responsibilities. As the falsehoods trickled from her mouth, Ginny kept her lips bent in a smile.

Boston was fun.

Muggles were interesting.

I learned a great deal.

Her heart ached for the family she’d missed, and ached even more for the family she was lying to with every breath. But how could she tell them? How could she tell them what had sent her to Boston, what had kept her there?

And how could she tell them what had sent her back?

Even as she nodded and smiled, listening to updates from each member of the family, she wondered if she’d done the right thing. Had she been magnanimous or had she just been jealous?

And therein lay the problem. She hadn’t left out of sheer nobility, but out of the knowledge that the man she had come very much to need didn’t need her back. She’d gone miles to be with him and found the one thing she didn’t even know she wanted, and still he was the same.

He remained unchanged by her presence, and each day he grew harder, more troubled.

Now she was back in England, and she thought she could feel the distance spanning between them.

Across from the table, watching the glittering tears behind the pretty smile, Bill wondered if she knew.

A man would come for what he wanted, and he would follow when he was walked away from.

Why do we scream at each other
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry

“Would you all be terribly angry if I excused myself?” Ginny asked, trying to keep the weariness out of her voice. It would be so much easier if she could just tell them and have done with it, listen to them call her the names she called herself daily, to hear them tell her what a mistake she’d made, how stupid she’d been.

But she didn’t want to hear that, and she wasn’t going to tell them.

“Gone for two months and already itching to leave again,” Molly said, shaking her head. She shot an accusing glare at Charlie, pointing her fork for added emphasis. “It’s your fault.”

Fred and George snickered, glad for once to have the blame somewhere else—no matter what it was for.

“My fault?” Charlie repeated.

“Oh, you with your traveling bug, all over the world.” But Molly was smiling a little bit, proud despite her complaint.

“I’ll remind you,” Charlie said, “That Da’s the one who loves Muggles so much. His fault on that count.”

Ginny watched them with a small smile, knowing her request had already been forgotten in the melee. It was both strange and comforting to think that she’d changed so much, her world so severely altered, and yet she could come home to this—to the same people, the same family, the same arguments. The same love.

And what would it have been like not to have that? It wasn’t the first time she’d wondered it, thinking of a lot boy with a loveless family, a lost boy with a cold father and a confused mother.

What would it be like to have it all taken away?

“I’m going to go,” she said loudly, more insistent this time. When the table full of Weasleys stopped talking, she shrugged sheepishly. “Sorry. I told Colin I’d look him up, you know, just as soon as I Apparated home.”

The argument picked back up after the goodbyes, and Ginny had been gone for several minutes before Ron’s brain made all the connections.

“Say,” he said suspiciously, throwing a glance over his shoulder at the door.

“Isn’t Creevey off in the tropics, photographing for Loony Lovegood’s father?”

“Wouldn’t know, mate, Loony’s your girly and all,” Fred said, snorting into his glass of butterbeer.

“She’s not my—oh, bugger it,” Ron said, his face growing red. “I’ll not rise to that one again, eh? Last time I did, you somehow got me so turned around that I said she was and Hermione didn’t speak to me for days.”

Bill watched out the door with growing interest, wondering himself where she’d gone.

~~~

He walked down the middle of the street, a sneer twisting his lips as the people parted for him, scurried to one side or the other, looking at him with wide eyes and gaping mouths.

He saw none of them, only her in his mind’s eye, her walking away from him, that banner of red hair floating behind her in the wind as she ran.

And why shouldn’t she? he wondered, placing one foot in front of the other in long, measured strides that ate up the length of the street. Why shouldn’t she have run away from a Malfoy? A Weasley’s worst enemy, a loathsome, black magicking family of fiends and liars and monsters.

“You came to me once, you can’t undo that.” He spoke aloud, turning his head from side to side, looking for her in every shop, in every corner.

A glimpse of red caught his eye and his steps faltered, quickened into something like a run.

The whole damned lot of them, the whole ruddy bunch of redheaded fools. He walked into the group of them, not seeing Ron’s eyes pop wide in his face, not seeing the twins’ identical expressions of disbelief. His eyes flitted over each of them without really seeing, seeking the one that wasn’t there.

Seeking the crown jewel.

“Where is she?” he asked, raising wild eyes to Arthur’s wary ones. When all he got in return was a goggle-eyed stare, he grabbed the older man by the lapels and dragged him to his toes. “Where is Ginny? Where is she?”

Rage warred with desperation in his mind, and he shook his head, ducking it slightly as he loosened his grip, panting. “Tell me…”

“I don’t know what business a long-lost Death Eater would have with my sister, but you’d best forget it, mate,” Charlie said threateningly, stepping toe-to-toe with Draco and shouldering his father out of the way.

And in the back of the crowd, Bill watched silently.

In reality, Bill thought the only person she wanted to see was standing right in front of him. So he stared the silver-eyed boy down until his stare was returned, and turned his head to look down the street in the direction she’d gone.

Draco met eyes with Ginny’s older brother and, seeing all he needed to see, turned and bolted down the street, leaving a gaggle of Weasleys staring bewilderedly after him.

Charlie was the first on his toes, ready to give chase to the long-absent Malfoy heir. But he got no farther than a step and a half when he was brought up short by someone grasping a handful of his robe. “Cut it out, Fred, George, the bloody git can’t—” his mouth kept moving soundlessly when he saw which brother, exactly, had held him at bay.

“Let him go,” Bill said quietly, turning his family’s attention to him and away from the retreating Draco.

“I’d like to know the meaning of all this, William Weasley,” Molly said decisively, swatting her hands about until both brothers separated. “You think I haven’t eyes in my head to know there’s something wrong with your sister? Hmm? And you know what it is, only you didn’t tell me. Stop me at any time if I’m incorrect.” Her voice was reaching a headache-inducing pitch, and all six of the Weasley boys looked uncomfortable.

Arthur, as per usual, was in his own little world, worrying about his little girl and muttering to himself. “I can’t see that Malfoy’s boy would have been studying Muggles, too, but that seems to be the only explanation. Perhaps they ran into one another in America, had a bit of a row.”

“He could kill her,” Charlie said through clenched teeth when his mother stopped to take a breath. “He could bloody well kill her, look how his father was.”

“Not all sons turn out like their fathers,” Percy said, pointedly looking at the addle-brained Arthur.

His eyes fierce, Bill looked down the street and saw that Draco had disappeared into the crowds of witches and wizards. Mildly, he turned back to his family. “Now that he’s gotten away, shall we take this argument home?”

Touch if you will my stomach
Feel how it trembles inside
You've got the butterflies all tied up
Don't make me chase you
Even doves have pride

She could have Apparated to get where she was going, could have done it without even thinking about it. But she needed the time to think, time to collect herself before she made this one last trip before she attempted to settle back into the life she’d left two months before.

All I need is to understand, she told herself, repeating it with the rhythm of her steps.

So intent was she on the rhythm of her steps, on her insistent mantra, that she never heard the gasps behind her, the pounding feet and the occasional exclamation from people gathered on the street.

He ran full out toward her, seeing that head of hair like a beacon in the crowd, like a siren. She’d always been that siren, calling his name until he was forced to call hers back.

He slowed himself just a bit before reaching her, checking his movement before stretching out an arm, whipping her around and into him, his arms clamped around her securely even as he struggled for breath.

He’d taken them in a circle and landed them both in an alley between buildings, his breath short from exertion and hers from fear.

He was like a bloody cat, she thought, like a great, bloody black cat, so little noise had he made coming up behind her.

Her heart rose in her throat so that she nearly choked on it, seeing him there just in front of her, his eyes blazing with fury, his nostrils flared. His hair was falling unheeded into his eyes, and she couldn’t resist the urge to raise a hand to it, to clear those magnificent argent eyes. Her hand shook so badly that he caught it with his own, closing his fingers around it.

“You followed me,” she said matter-of-factly, but it made her stomach twist.

She hadn’t truly thought he would, hadn’t dared to hope he would.

He said nothing to her, only squeezed her hand hard enough to make her wince, then brought his lips to hers, sealing his mouth over hers with a ferocity that made her gasp, taking in his breath as she did so. His body pressed urgently to hers, forcing her to feel the urgent need he’d felt ever since he’d seen her, and she moaned under his lips.

This was what she had run from, this instantaneous flash-fire that could do neither of them any good.

“Stop,” she finally said, rearing her head back to separate herself from him, if only for a moment. “Stop, this isn’t right.”

He kept his eyes on hers, his head slightly lowered, his hair falling into shadowed, troubled eyes.

The boy watched her from afar, laughing with friends, surrounded by people she knew and people she loved, people who loved her back.

The boy sat with people who feared him and watched her casual contact with those around her, the contact of one secure in herself. The same eyes that had spit hatred at him more than once now glowed, and he felt a pull in his stomach.

The boy watched her at the train station, saying goodbye to a buoyant family as he stood with his own deflated mother and soul-defeating father.

He watched her, and he wanted.

“You were supposed to teach me how to be happy,” he said, brushing his lips over her cheeks, her forehead, her eyelids. He ducked his head then, taking his eyes away from hers for the moment he made his confession. “You weren’t supposed to make me need you for it.” So saying, he pressed his tongue to the side of her neck, his eyes triumphant as he felt her arch against him.

He brought his lips to hers again, murmuring around kisses. “Don’t make me beg, Virginia. Would you have me swallow my pride?”

She leaned her head back as he kissed her throat, letting the tears slide back and into her hairline as she threaded shaky hands through his silken hair.

“That’s the thing, Draco,” she said, letting the sob in her voice be heard. “When it came to you, I never had any pride.”

When she Disapparated, he was left holding nothing but cold air and the pride she’d given him long ago.

**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.