**Announcement: I know you've seen it all over the place, but Portkey is holding its Readers' Choice Awards, and D/G is making a weak showing, as are R/Lu and J/L. Please, readers, there are TONS of unbelievable writers out there!!! Certainly there is a story out there you've read that knocks your socks off-I can think of several myself-so go nominate your favorite, complete non-H/Hr stories! Fandom solidarity… it's a beautiful thing. And what better holiday presents for the authors you love than to nominate their fics? And no, I don't mean me, lest people think I'm trolling… this story isn't complete and therefore isn't eligible. But be thinking of ones that are!!!!**
CHAPTER SEVEN - The Motions of Fear
Narcissa heard the door slam and stilled with her cup halfway to her mouth. Either Lucius had forgotten something-somewhat likely-or he'd realized how foolish he was being.
Very unlikely.
"Lucius?" she called out, setting her cup down and standing. He'd been gone for nearly a quarter of an hour, leaving the house silent and her thoughts clamoring. But he did not respond, if it was him at all.
She stepped into the foyer, ready to chastise a house elf if they'd been slamming the doors-and it wasn't as though it would be the first time they'd engaged in that particular game, for reasons she could never fathom-and she felt her breath catch.
"Draco," she said, stepping forward with her hands out.
He looked terrible. He should have looked impeccable as usual, for his clothes and his hair were neat, not a bit out of place, but his shoulders were slumped, his eyes desolate.
She'd told him he was preoccupied, distracted, and today he looked positively absent. It frightened her, that empty look, and she put her hands to her son's shoulders and gave a like shake. "Draco, what are you doing?"
He wanted to lay his head to her shoulder. It was stupid, he knew, but he wanted the only person who had ever told him everything would work out for the best to tell him that again. He wanted to hear it from her.
He was tired of being tired, and he was tired of hiding things, both from his family and from his lover.
Not that they were really much of lovers these days, he thought bitterly, sliding his mother's hands from his shoulders and holding them in his own hands, amazed at how small his mother was. If she could handle things, surely he could.
It simply didn't feel like it.
"I need you to tell me something," he said at last, looking down at her, searching her eyes for an answer, for the precise amount of information he could get away with telling her.
Nearly none, he knew. If he did not want to endanger Ginny, or endanger himself, he could tell her nearly nothing.
You should be at work, Narcissa wanted to say, the panic that came solely to mothers clutching sharp claws into the soft tissue of her stomach. "Tell you what?" she asked instead.
When had he become a man? When had it no longer been guaranteed her son would be safe based on his age, based on his status as a child?
"You will love me no matter what happens in my life, won't you?" He'd been thinking about it, and thinking about it too much. "Won't you?" he repeated, holding her hands up and pressing his forehead to the backs of them. "No matter what I do, no matter whom I fall in with."
She thought of the Dark Mark, sometimes dormant and sometimes livid on her husband's flesh, of Lucius stumbling home one night smelling of firewhisky and burned flesh, and she closed her eyes. "Yes," she said. "You know I will."
She was ready to gather him in her arms, to pretend, if only for a moment, that he was still a child, and that things really would turn out all right, but the door swung open, letting in a brisk wind that slammed the knob back into the wall.
"Get back to the Ministry," Lucius said in a low, controlled voice.
"Lucius-"
He cut her off. "Get back to the Ministry!" he shouted at Draco, pointing his cane toward the door.
Draco felt his stomach turn, his face go clammy, and for a moment, he was certain his father knew. "What has happened?"
Lucius did not waste time. He crossed to his son and grabbed him by a fistful of robes. "Cullen Mulciber has been killed. Poison, his wand stolen, just as Flint. Now quit whatever whinging you'd come to do and get back to the Ministry now."
Was it wrong to be relieved? He wasn't certain he cared if it was. With a last glance at his mother, he was out the door, Disapparating before his father could say anything more to him.
"What was it?" Lucius asked Narcissa, his voice low. He was, for the first time in a long time, perplexed, even anxious. He did not like being played the fool, but with two of his companions dead, he had no choice but to think that was precisely what was happening.
Someone was targeting Death Eaters. He had no fear for himself; he wasn't fool enough to be poisoned by some vigilante Muggle-lover, after all. But he had a wife, and a son, neither of whom he trusted to keep themselves alive.
"It was nothing," Narcissa responded finally, pressing the backs of her hands to her cheek and feeling how cold, how cold Draco had left them. "He only came to say hello."
Please, she thought, looking up at her husband. Please don't let them take my son with the same lies in their mouths that stole my husband.
"Just to say hello," she repeated faintly, and for Lucius, that was enough. There were too many things to worry about, too many problems. Too many questions.
"Stay inside," he said stiffly, giving her the first indication in a great long while that he'd any concern for her at all.
And once he was gone, Narcissa wondered what her son had been so afraid of.
~~~
Draco Apparated outside the Ministry, pulling out his silver watch fumbling it as he tried to gain entrance. The polished silver chain seemed to come to life in his hands, sliding through his fingers and sending the watch tumbling down his side, jerking back and forth on the links that held it.
"Bloody fucking…"
He needed to see her, and he needed to catch her before she left. She had to know, and he should have thought of that, should have thought to tell her to be careful when they'd separated earlier, but he'd forgotten. He'd been too stubborn to tell her to be careful, or that he loved her.
He hadn't told her he loved her.
His father had been livid, and what was more, he'd been shaken.
There would be hell to pay tonight, and he didn't want her to have to pay it.
The timepiece clicked open and he repeated his entrance words impatiently, watching the seconds tick by. Unless she'd left early, she would still be there.
~~~
She'd gotten nothing accomplished all afternoon, her mind endlessly circling back to his remark that he didn't want things to touch her.
She was fragile, apparently, she thought, slamming her filing drawer just to hear it bang. Liking the noise, she did it again.
Bang!
"Miss Weasley, if you please, is there something in your files that needs to be exterminated?" Her boss's sniff was audible and Ginny slunk in her seat, seething.
And aching. Oh, Merlin, how she ached for all this to be over. She ached not to feel selfish, not to feel as though her life were more important to the war that was ready to burst forth at any moment, but each night without him took her farther and farther away from her convictions.
Each time he kept a secret from her, or she from him, she resented the factions more. There were times, she thought, though she would never admit it to anyone else, that she hated the Order just as much as she hated the Death Eaters.
And there were times when she wished her biggest problem was a prattish Muggle boy with an automobile far too dangerous for him.
Thinking thoughts like that made her loathe herself, made her wish she could loathe him.
There were murmurs on the other side of the wall, her boss mumbling to someone in that odd voice of hers, croaky and never quite managing to be a whisper. Ginny's brows drew down as she heard her name, and she strained to hear, but there was nothing, only an indeterminate whisper. Finally, her boss's voice came, so loudly Ginny sat back in her chair with wide, shocked eyes.
"Fine, then. But she can't do anything about it today. She'll not stay after working on some other department's overflow."
"That's perfectly acceptable." Draco's voice reached her ears just a moment before the sight of him reached her eyes, and with a single glance back, he knelt down beside her chair.
"What are you doing?" Ginny hissed, turning panicked eyes to the wall, to the corridor. "Someone could-"
He put a finger to her lips, shaking his head. "Things will be bad tonight," he said, knowing each word could seal his fate, one piled on top of the other like stones sinking him into a lake. But for now, it didn't matter. "I want you to be careful." I want you to stay in tonight.
What about you? She didn't ask, knew he wouldn't answer. Every single question she wanted to ask would yield no response, well she knew.
"I love you," he mouthed, feeling it more clearly than if he'd actually voiced it, the silence of the statement making it more powerful. He kissed his fingertips and stood just as the clocks all clicked to five, and just before the rush of witches and wizards eager to leave their posts for the day, he brushed them over her forehead.
And then he was gone, swept up in the flood of the departing Ministry employees, and Ginny wondered why it felt so much like goodbye.
She gave herself only a moment, replaying his words in her head. Things will be bad tonight. She wanted every word, every syllable, every pause and hesitation, to be hers and hers alone. She wanted to hoard his thoughts and steal his speech. But she was a member of the Order. She left the Ministry and went straight to Grimmauld Place, where she sounded the warning.
"Battles tonight," she told the few members loitering about the kitchen, and she pushed her sense of self away. "I'm going to gather the others."