Unofficial Portkey Archive

For my beta Tegan because she ROCKS!

Chapter 11: Breathe

Draco's options were limited and offered nothing that would truly help his mother. Should he use the male-Weasley or scrap the idea and work harder with his Mother's Mediwitches? Each choice was as bad as the other, and so his decision swayed from day to day, hour to hour. He felt it wasn't fair to him. No one else was burdened with such taxing choices, so why should he be left to make such impossible decisions.

He couldn't choose to side with Weasley. How could she have expected him to agree to let her brother, Ronald Weasley, one-third of his eternal bane, know about their project, much less help them with it? Did she not know him at all? Did she not know her own brother? Weasley and Potter would have him thrown into Azkaban before she would have even finished the favor. In Draco's mind the only punishment worse than serving a prison sentence, on a tiny little island in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by soul sucking monsters would be to force him to work beside the speckle faced git.

Was the bint completely mad? Probably.

With his undecided path weighing heavily on his mind, Draco settled himself into the small uncomfortable chair that sat opposite the one person he'd ever sought guidance from, his father.

"Nice set," Draco commented, taking in the new and quite expensive looking chess set.

"Be more specific when you speak, Draco, or people may misread you," Lucius reprimanded. "Now, is it the set we are playing or the chess set we are playing with."

Draco bit hard into the slick skin inside his cheek, looking down at his pieces, and willing his face not to blush. He was a twenty-one year-old man and hated that his deranged father could still shame him into submission.

"You have acquired yourself a very nice chess set, Father. Whoever would bring you such a gift?" he asked, moving his only remaining pawn up a single square.

"Yes, it is nice isn't it," he answered, lazily dragging his bishop over the board to capture Draco's immobile piece. "That so called guard… Michael isn't it?" Draco nodded. "Is quite the simpleton, really. And simpletons are always easily persuaded. I've told you this before."

"I remember," Draco replied honestly, his mind throwing back to one of the many times his father had heaped his wisdom onto him. He could remember being so thrilled to have one of the most influential wizards of the day, his father's attention focused solely on him.

"That's not all he has brought me," he continued, ignoring his son. "Lift my mattress Draco. There's something beneath it that I think you will find quite interesting."

Draco did as his father told him and rose from his chair quickly walking the two strides to his father's small cot. He lifted the light mattress, if one could even call it that, to find a gray Ginny Weasley and a hoard of other Weasleys staring back up at him. It was the week-old copy of the Daily Prophet that had covered the masquerade ball, but what was his father doing with it? He picked it up from its hiding space and brought it back over to the game.

"I also get the paper in the morning," he said, gently placing it face up on the heads of their pieces.

"I wouldn't expect anything less Draco. It's important to keep up with worldly events."

"Worldly events?" Draco scoffed, momentarily forgetting who he was speaking to, "Are you and I reading the same newspaper? That," he looked at the newspaper with disdain, "is nothing more than journalistic trash. I'd get more from a Teen Witch Weekly than the lies I read in there-"

"Hush," Lucius ordered, putting Draco back in his place with a single word.

To distract himself from his anger at being treated like a child, Draco painfully curled his toes inside the leather bounds of his shoes. His father was usually a patient man, but Draco couldn't imagine unleashing his own temper on to him, so he sat silently curling and uncurling his toes as his father continued.

"Journalistic trash? Lies, you say?" he asked and his son nodded. "Then read it to me Draco, starting with, let me paraphrase," he said waving his hand in the air, "The incident that launched the party's disastrous fate..."

Draco felt something rise in his throat as he plucked the newspaper back up. What was his father getting at? He unfolded the paper, briefly glancing at the photo of Ginny. Her bitten lips making him smirk behind it. He had been the one to make her mouth so swollen but he didn't have time to think about what they had done as he began reading aloud: "The incident that launched the party's disastrous fate was the violent confrontation between Draco Malfoy, sole heir of the Malfoy family fortune, and Ronald Weasley, Auror and decorated war veteran."

"Disastrous fate, Draco?" Lucius interrupted.

Draco read steadfast as he felt his father's indifferent gaze studying him, "Mr. Malfoy was dancing with his beautiful young partner when an unprovoked Mr. Weasley attacked him. Mr. Malfoy, being obviously more mature, did not strike back. The childish squabble was ended when Mr. Weasley was restrained by his fellow partygoer and long time best friend, Harry Potter. What invoked the violent outburst? Envy? Jealously? Apparently not. Mr. Malfoy's dance partner was identified as Virginia Weasley, the youngest and only sister of the famous Weasley brothers-" Lucius lifted his hand to signal Draco to stop, "I've heard my fill Draco."

Not knowing how to reply, Draco sat silent in his seat before folding the paper in three and laying it atop the chess pieces again.

"At twenty-one years my son has seen to it to publicly humiliate himself. Now what am I to say to that?" Lucius asked, accenting his question with a single lifted brow.

Yes, cause I was never embarrassed when you and Arthur Weasley scuffled, he sarcastically thought, remembering his father's violent encounter with the eldest Weasley.

"I was attacked," Draco retorted. "And I did as you said. I didn't retaliate...what does it matter anyhow he's just a Weasley."

"Just a Weasley? It seems as if that girl was a bit more than 'just a Weasley.'"

Draco always refused to entertain the fear he had that his father could read minds, but now he felt himself trying to build a wall around his thoughts, including his panic. "We were just dancing, exchanging information, nothing more."

"From this picture," he replied lightly tapping the edge of the newspaper. "She's grown into quite the young woman hasn't she?"

"If you're attracted to that sort."

"Are you?"

Without needing to think, Draco delivered the answer he knew was expected of him, "Absolutely not. Besides even if I was-which I can assure you I'm not- what would a Weasley want with a Malfoy?"

"The Malfoys are attractive people, Draco. There's no denying that we have good breeding. You also can not deny the fact that you've exploited this on many an occasion-"

"Sorry, Father but my time here is short and valuable. Could we please suspend the lessons and the theatrics?"

Draco regretted his statement as he saw the completely impassive expression his father wore. His long body was in complete relaxation, as he studied every visible inch of Draco, tactlessly, skimming from the style Draco wore his hair to the center of his chest where the black buttons of his shirt lay before coming back and forcing Draco to look him squarely in his eyes.

"Since when did my son, my heir, develop such an embarrassingly excess disrespect and forget himself. Maybe I should worry about this Miss Weasley."

Draco could feel his jaw twitching and feared the leather laces of his shoes might break from the pressure of him curling his toes. What was Father's sudden obsession with linking him to Ginny?

"Whatever your plans may be for that girl, I suggest you bin them, Draco. She has much better uses than your bed."

"And the Male-Weasley? What might my uses be for him?"

Pushing his long frosty locks behind his white shoulders, Lucius's thin lips parted in a smile that Draco hadn't seen from his father since he had been free. It was smile a man wore when he was completely in control of a situation, a smile of smugness.

"If I'm not mistaken isn't it Auror Weasley?"

"Well, that is how that idiot Ministry insists on identifying him." Draco replied, correctly anticipating that his father would ignore his answer.

"On your last visit you spoke of traveling to Luxor and Thebes with Miss Parkinson in tow, did you not?" Lucius asked.

"Yes, sir."

"I think we've established that you read the paper, Draco. So why did you find it necessary to sabotage a very key point in your plotting?"

Draco looked at his father; gray eyes so much like his own, stared back stoically. What was the man talking about? How had he sabotaged a key point? And what did Weasley have to do with any of it?

"Sorry, Father but I'm not following," he admitted.

"It's quite obvious to me now that my son's only been reading the Agony Hag column or he would've been aware that at the moment Egypt's wizard and witches happen to be under our Ministry's Law," he answered, in the same excited voice Draco had heard him use before right before...

Fearing the oncoming seizure of hysteria from his father, Draco felt the bricks of his mental wall split and a sting of sympathy for the man that sat across from him seep through. He had seen him suffer it before, the markings of recovery and then the sudden relapse into a psychosis and it wasn't something Draco desired or intended to relive. So when he spoke his voice was soft, "I don't understand, how's that even possible?"

"Must I simplify everything with you," Lucius snapped, before giving into an exaggerated sigh, that let Draco know that his father was indeed not regressing. "After your visit to Cairo last month, Egypt found itself in quite the little bind and as an act of charity our Minister Fudge offered them his assistance-"

Half-listening to his father's smooth but callous voice, Draco tried to appear interested in his explanation, but his mind was too busy searching through t