CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Fathers and Husbands
He Apparated a quarter of a kilometer from the Manor, not trusting himself to get any closer. If he miscalculated, wasn't concentrating, didn't land just right, he'd be no use to either of them. He was running the moment he materialized, his feet carrying him down a road he'd never actually walked on.
He'd always been taken by carriage before.
How had she gotten there, and how would she leave? Draco thought of a funeral carriage and his feet faltered, made him fall to his hands and knees just as the Manor came into view. The pain would have been excruciating if he'd had it in him to feel it.
He looked up, hair falling in his eyes, and he was still trying to move, executing an awkward half-crawl as he tried to regain his feet.
The gate had been left open and he took a lurching step through it-
And fell once more when he saw her hair, all that flame spilling over the steps, her body still, her hands covered in blood, and he felt a scream tearing out, ravaging his throat. It was not grief, not yet, but rage, rage that his father would kill her and dump her on the step like trash. He made it through the yard, nearly sick, and crawled over her, reaching one hand up to the unlatched door and pushing it open.
He wanted to enter, wanted to strike down the first person who came to him, but he could not leave her.
"Oh, no… oh, my baby!" Though she'd not been nearly as fast as Draco, she'd been faster than he'd expected, and Molly took the steps slowly, her feet somehow sure, and she gathered her daughter in her arms.
Draco started to thank her, thank her for staying with the dead while he avenged the dead, but-
"Draco."
Unless his ears had deceived him, he heard his name both from his left-whispered, raw, sick-and from his right-urgent, sharp, terse.
His lover was alive, and his mother was inside.
~~~
Narcissa held her husband's head in her lap, watching with horror as his eyes rolled back in his head and his
breathing grew shallow. A moment, damn it, she just needed a moment to think of where she was, what needed to happen,
what had already happened.
It was easy to remain cool on the outside.
It was not so easy to maintain that on the inside.
The door swung open and she tensed, ready to hex anyone who stepped through the door and threatened her husband. She'd treated the young Weasley woman with more mercy than she'd have allowed anyone else who had done this to Lucius, but who was she to choose between her husband's health and her son's happiness?
One could be restored. The other, if she had killed Ginevra, could not.
Her breath left her in a shudder when she saw her son kneeling just outside the door, his head hanging, his eyes cast behind him at the young woman lying there. She'd not made it off the property, then, Narcissa saw. She'd collapsed, and well she should have.
She'd used enough magic to kill both herself and her enemy and had somehow managed to leave them both standing.
"Draco," she said, running her hands through her husband's hair, her mind now calm, things clicking easily into place.
He stood slowly, his motions reluctant, and he looked behind him once more, his lips tight.
Do not hate her for what she has done, Narcissa thought, looking at him imploringly. A woman will do desperate things if she finds herself in desperate times.
Brisk words had Lucius's inert body floating in the air, and she knew she would have to move quickly. Others would have heard of Avery's death by now, and they would come.
She did not intend to be here when they did.
Her son stepped into the house, his face contorting as he saw the blood spread over his father, and Narcissa knew her son well enough to see the quick, gratified flash that came and went on his face.
She hurt for that, for herself and her son and her husband, and for how little they had ever managed to know about one another.
"Do with this what you will," she said, and it took the place of all the words she had and wanted to say, all the things she had no time for her, all the things that took second place behind the urgency of her husband's injuries and the need for her son and his lover and his lover's Mudblood loving parents to leave before things truly got bad.
She was not fool enough to think things could not get much worse in a short amount of time.
She pressed her hand to her son's, and she could tell he thought, for a moment, she had not given him anything at all, despite her words.
"Go," she said firmly, leaning forward and kissing him at the corner of his mouth, pressing her cheek to his as though it might be the last time. "You will not be able to find us for some time," she whispered, her words insistent in his ear.
It was only after she'd rushed herself and his father out the kitchen entrance did he realize what she had pressed into his palm.
Strands of his father's hair.
~~~
"Did I kill him?" Bloody hands grasped desperately at Molly's shirt, and Ginny hauled herself close to
her mother's face to ask the question she least wanted the answer to.
She could not determine what she wanted that answer to be.
Draco would never forgive her, but she had put herself on his level. Certainly a Death Eater could understand a little murder among enemies.
She burst into tears, using what little strength she had left-Merlin, what had she done to herself? What had she done to him?-and shook her mother. "Did I kill him?"
Arthur laid a large, calloused hand on his daughter's head and watched the tableau play out through the open door of the house. "No," he said quietly, both grieving for and marveling over the actions his daughter had undertaken.
For a moment, they seemed both steeped in the war and separate from it, their lives dovetailing into the war in a notch all their own. There were things bigger than war, Arthur thought, feeling a shimmer of the power that had been released in the house.
Her breath was jerked from her as hands grasped her shoulders, lifted her, and turned her around. Her hands were curled into claws in front of her and she coughed as soon as he'd spun her around, her breath coming back in a whoop.
Would he kill her? Would he avenge his father, only doing to her what she hadn't had the time to do to Lucius?
She waited for the words, fatal words, or even accusatory words, and she wondered if her parents would simply let him kill her.
Part of her hoped they would. She had lost herself, and this time there was no one to blame, no diary to destroy, no chamber to escape.
But no words came, at least not at first.
He shook her once, hard, then pulled her to his chest, what was left of the blood on her hands now on his shirt. When he did speak, his words were muffled by her hair, and when he leaned back, he was chastising her.
"Idiot! Idiot Weasley with your idiot temper!" He put his hands to the sides of her face, perhaps a bit more roughly than he'd intended to, and he kissed her hard, desperate to taste her, to know she was alive.
That she was alive was a miracle.
That it had come to this was folly.
Shocked, Ginny struggled in his arms, trying to get away from him. He was a Death Eater. She had tried to kill his father. If they'd been destined before, they were certainly not destined now.
"Ginny," her mother chastised, simultaneously fascinated by and mystified at the sight of a Malfoy kissing her daughter in front of her.
"I'm not a Death Eater," Draco said, as though it were as simple as that, but he could see his words were not getting through to her. Save for a moment of clarity in her eyes when he'd first turned her to face him, she'd been like a charmed parchment, soaking up what was put to her.
He should have said those words to her before it had come to this.
"This is your father's blood," Ginny said, her voice sounding muted to her. "Your father's blood." She wanted to keep repeating it to him until he understood what she had done.
"I know." He laid his forehead to hers, hoping the contact would help.
"Your father's blood." It was only a whisper this time. She kept her eyes from meeting his, sure it would tear her into a million tiny, bleeding pieces to look at his soul from here. Instead, she looked at his arm, and instead of touching him, instead of using her hands to brace against his chest, she rolled back his sleeve.
What she did not see was like a slap, and she broke from his hold, pressing her now-tacky fingers to her lips.
"I'm sorry," she managed, her ears ringing. "I'm so sorry."
And all he could do was look at her with wide eyes, afraid she'd never come back to him.
"We have to go," he said hoarsely. "Before they come."
There would be time to explain it all to her later.
He needed to believe that.