THE FURIES ▸ Draco Malfoy

Chapter Seventeen: PENTHOS

His hands tightened on her cheeks in emphasis at every pause. She watched with blurry eyes as his face gleamed with desperation, praying that she would take the weight of his words and understand them to be true. Draco searched for any retaliation in her brown eyes, flickering back and forth across her face as he adjusted his hands so that they were just barely curling around the nape of her neck. With a torn expression, he finally met her gaze once again to see the tears that were threatening to fall down her face. He sucked in a deep breath as he continued.

"Snape may not have made a vow to protect you, but I have," he said, thickly. "Whether it is bound by some spell or not, we made an Unbreakable Vow ourselves, Andromeda. To each other. You are the only person that I have, Romy, and I'll be damned if I lose you to anyone simply because they want to see us fail." 

Mia shook her head in protest, the action making his hands fall to his sides weakly. She reached up to wipe away the tear that was threatening to fall. "You can't protect me from him, Draco. If he even for a second believes that you and I are dependent upon each other, he won't hesitate to kill one of us just for the fun of it. He knows exactly what he is doing, asking us to come here and preform these tasks. By completing them―by sending the others into Hogwarts, by deceiving Slughorn, by killing Dumbledore―I am becoming him. If we fail...if I fail...then that means I am too much like my father. I die. You die." 

"So what then?" he asked, exasperated. "You complete these missions and automatically believe that you are just the same as he is? Romy, we are in this together. If you believe what we are doing here will turn you into him, stop it. That could never happen. You aren't the only one carrying this weight―and you are not the only one who will be changed because of it."

"But you have a chance. A chance that you deserve so much more than I do. If I'm the one who kills Dumbledore, you don't have to live with the guilt―"

"And let you live with it instead?" he snarled, scoffing as he pulled away. "Let you die instead? Stop being a martyr, Mia. It isn't a good look on you. Stop acting like you dying is something that the world would not bat an eyelash at. You talk like I am so much better than you are, like I have so much more to live for, but you forget that we are the same. What, you think I deserve death any less than you do? That my life is worth enough to trade yours for? It isn't, Andromeda. I'm not."

She shook her head again, lips pursing tightly. "You are."

"No," he denied. His eyes were cold, but not in any loss of emotion. They were only defeated. "I'm not. You gave two options. The third is simple. An ultimatum―what we have been saying since this began: we finish this together, and we live with what comes after. Together." 

"Why won't you just let me do this?" 

"Because you are asking me to be all right with losing you!"

Draco raising his voice shuttered the quietness of the conversation, turning a discussion into something more. Neither one of them spoke for a few moments. The creaking of the room lulled them into a state of thought, trying to cope with the information that they had just talked about. Draco could not look away from Mia, his chest finally calming from its angry heaves as he began to see how riled up he had become. She kept her eyes on her hands once again, trying to get rid of the tightening in her heart that just kept squeezing harder. The tears had passed, but the sting of their presence was starting to burn in the eyes of both of them now. 

Finally, Mia swallowed hard and cleared her throat of the lump forming. She looked up, meeting his heavy stare, and it only added to the weight she felt. The frown deepening on both of their faces, she carefully leaned in so that she could press a gentle kiss to the flushed cheek of her friend. It burned her lips, the adrenaline from the argument rushing to his face and stinging as she pulled away. Giving him one, final exhausted glance, she reached for his hand and squeezed it to convey every emotion she was not saying.