**Author's Note: Now's a good time to recommend songs. The song that got this whole story started, unbelievably, was an instrumental song called "Explosive" by a group called Bond. Check them out.**
CHAPTER TWELVE - Driven Away
Draco drummed his fingers on the table and glanced at his pocketwatch, his levity slipping away with the minutes.
"Are you tardy for something, my dear?" She'd been more than a little lost in her own thoughts, trying to determine with whom Draco was keeping secrets. But it hardly mattered now, as the bright-eyes young man who had come to have tea with her had fled, replaced in a matter of moments by the shifty-eyed, anxious being in front of her.
"I've a meeting," he said, throwing her a mere shade of his usual lopsided grin.
"On a holiday?" Narcissa folded her napkin in her lap and purposefully
"It's not a holiday," Draco snapped more forcefully than he'd intended to. "It's the Ministry cowing, once again, before things they will never comprehend."
Narcissa simply nodded, a stiff incline of her head, then reached out and gripped his forearm. Though her grip was brutal, she kept her voice soft. "Being your mother-and a woman-does not exclude me from your games, and it does not exclude me from your euphemisms. If your woman is worthy of you, she will not be excluded, either. She will know." It was a risk, she knew, to be so openly stating what she had no certain knowledge of, but this was not a certain time. This was not a safe time.
She had never, and would never, openly disapprove of her husband's "hobby," but she despised being treated as an ornament. Even a stupid Muggle hack had recognized Lady Macbeth and the power of a woman's ambition, which was more than she could say for her husband.
Draco thought he was going to be sick.
Later, he couldn't remember if he had kissed her or not as he had raced out the door with her words ringing in his ears.
She will know.
~~~
The triple threat, they called themselves before dispersing. Bloody idiots, she'd have said, though she couldn't help but think of them fondly. It was good to see her brothers unified, to have Percy back among them, but for how long? With all of them patrolling, standing watch in various points throughout the city-the twins paired together just west of Grimmauld Place, Percy and Charlie to the east of St. Mungo's, and Bill and Ron trying to hold down the entirety of south London-she wondered what the likelihood was that they'd all come out unscathed.
She wanted to fight, wanted to take up a position and put Weasleys at the cardinal points of the compass. Moreover, there was a draw to Apparating to another part of the city, simply heading east and then… maybe just continuing to head east until she hit ocean. Or perhaps she just wanted to hide herself among the Muggles, plug her ears and play pretend until her side-or his-had won.
She had never expected him to fight against his father, she knew that in her head. After all, he had never expected her to fight against hers. But in her heart, she had deceived herself into believing she would never have to fight against him, either, and that the tragedy of their farce of a union had existed only for romanticism.
Fool.
She had been a fool about many things.
She lay on the sofa in her empty flat, wishing for him to be there, even sleeping, only sleeping while she watched, and she put her head in her hands and asked herself the questions he'd wanted to ask him so many times.
"What if there is no right and no wrong, only habits? Only traditions that no longer matter and ties passed on by those we love?
And her own question, the one she wanted only for herself.
What if there was no Voldemort, only a sick young man without the capacity to love himself and to love what he was?
Ginny stretched out on her side, her eyes following the dance of flames, thinking of him appearing there and beckoning her to meet him. He wouldn't do it twice in a week, she knew that.
But was it fair for him to take all the risks?
She cursed herself for a fool again. He'd arranged the tête-à-tête in the bookstore, and he'd drawn her out among Muggles just to be with her, and she had waited to follow his lead.
She hoped he hadn't closed the Floo off.
She scrambled off the sofa, casting one glance behind her, hoping there were be no need of her within the Order, at least not for an hour or so. She only needed to see him. Just for a moment.
A handful of powder, the steady statement-"Draco Malfoy's flat"-and she was swept away, no barrier, no block, and before she even fully landed, her heart swelled with relief and joy.
He hadn't closed it off.
She wiped a smudged hand over her face as she stepped in, wondering how on earth he always managed to look so damned impeccable no matter what mode of transportation he used. Out of habit long formed, she Scourgified the ash from her shoes and stepped onto the big Turkish rug that stretched from side to side in front of the hearth, all blacks and greens and dark, supple grays.
"Draco?" She was nervous suddenly, and almost sick with it. Could his father be there? Could Lucius walk in any minute?
Could someone else?
She drew her plain black robes around her and lowered her voice this time, hating herself for the tremor in her whisper but unable to keep it from coming through. "Draco?"
A rattle at the door had her frozen, one foot in front of the other in the middle of the big, lush rug Draco's own mother had chosen for him, and she wondered if there was time to rush back in, time to get back to her own flat.
You wanted to take the risk, so take it.
She pressed herself flat against the wall next to the fireplace, growing warm from the heat of it, sweat dewing in the small of her back as she cut her eyes to the door.
The door opened and her eyes could not take it all in at once, only a shock of pale hair, a line of black cloth, a pale, long-fingered hand holding-
A mask.
No light reflected from this mask, it eyes no more than two cruel gashes, the chin a wicked point, strange talon-like curves sweeping around at the temples.
She couldn't breathe. She felt as though she were being pressed into two dimensions, her lungs flattened, her head compressed. Her blood roared in her ears, and if she could move, Ginny thought she would fall.
And then he pushed the door all the way open, and her breath came back, rushing into her in a noisy gasp and out of her in a ragged moan.
It didn't matter what she'd feared. It did not matter what she had suspected.
She had not been prepared to see the man she loved holding a mask that swore allegiance to the one being she most hated.
~~~
He didn't know how much more he could take.
His father had, for many years, saved the strongest part of his contempt for those who refused to choose one side or the other. He would rather, he had claimed more than once, be stuck in a world full of Muggles and Mudbloods than spines wizards with no conviction. At the time, it had made sense to Draco. Even when he grew to detest and mistrust his father, it had made sense. What good was someone who couldn't choose between two sides when the world was coming down around them?
But now, with the world shuddering on its moorings, a very weary Draco thought he could understand the attraction of putting his head down, of crawling into bed and letting the war rage around him. A man who willingly chose war was a madman, he was starting to think.
He certainly felt mad.
He unlocked his door, letting his mask fall from his sleeve, no longer able to stand the feel of it pressed against the vulnerable underside of his wrist, no longer able to stand the point of the chin digging in where his pulse beat, at turns sluggish and swift.
He simply was not cut out to live separate lives, a life by day and one by night, a worker and a warrior, the facets he allowed his family to see and those he allowed her to see.
More than once, he had hated Dumbledore for the complications that had come along as a result of halfhearted house unity.
The noise drew his attention before anything else, a raw-throated moan, a sob, and the mask fell unheeded from his fingers, the points scarring the hardwood entryway floor with a dull clank like a barred door slamming shut.
She stood by his fireplace, smudged from head to toe, and his heart reached back, back for the ash-stained little girl who had shown him no weakness in a provincial little bookshop-
But her eyes were not fierce now as they had been then. They were wide and wounded and incredulous, soaking up every ounce of darkness in his flat.
And they were not focused on his face, but on the face he had dropped, the impenetrable face that lay on the floor.
"Gin…" What more could he say? There were too many places to start, too many things to say. "It's not-"
She started to tremble at the top of her head, her ears felt as though they were burning, her eyes could not hold steady. Her lips started to shake with the force of the scream behind them, traveling down into her arms, her fingertips, and by the time the tremors reached her knees, she had to hold onto the mantelpiece to keep from falling onto the carpet, that beloved fucking carpet. She knocked the urn of Floo powder off the mantel, sending it to the floor--
Dropped it, she thought. Just like he dropped that mask.
"It's not what?" she managed, the scream imploding into a whisper that scored her throat. "Not what it looks like? Give me some credit."
She will know, his mother insisted.
Of course.
"Not a surprise?" she tried, putting her hand over her eyes. It wasn't a surprise. She just couldn't look at it. She couldn't stand it.
She couldn't pretend when he had taken her pretense away.
"Listen to me," he said, his own voice loud enough for the both of them. Anger was good, he thought. Anger could carry them through this, and could perhaps hold her there.
How much to tell her?
How much could he trust her with?
How much could he trust himself with?
"No!" she exclaimed, turning her face away from him. "You've changed my mind about so many things, what do you want me to say? That I've changed it about this, as well?"
"You don't have to say that, you don't have to say anything, just listen to me." Her stubbornness, something he'd certainly loved before, was going to break them.
Bend a little please, just for thirty seconds, he thought.
He took one step forward and finally, she found her voice.
"No!" she screamed, the ashes standing out starkly from her pallor. "I want to kill them all, do you understand me? I want to kill them all for doing this to you and I would rather see you dead than a puppet!" She didn't know where the words came from. "I would like to see them all dead, but I can't do that. I cannot fight against you," she finished at a full scream. "Not against you."
When he stepped forward, she acted on instinct, shooting an Expelliarmus at him and knocking him backward with the force of it.
Draco's back slammed into the door and he coughed, his breath escaping him, and through dazed eyes, he watched her desperately scrape Floo powder off the floor.
His head lolled back against the door and he strained to hear her destination, but-
She was gone, and he closed his eyes.