That night marked a change in their relationship, Marilyn would later note to herself. Okay, it wasn't miraculous, and nor had she been struck down by a sudden case of amnesia. They'd just moved on from whatever strange Cold War re-enactment they'd been embroiled in before, to...well, something that was still somewhat awkward, but with less chance of nukes getting involved, which was always a glowing plus.
Marilyn had not forgotten. She hadn't forgotten anything, and she knew that she never would. But that night had shown her two things - Draco's willingness to be there for her, and his willingness to talk. Sure, some may have argued that his presence alone showed a willingness to be there for her, but there was a big difference between being there, and being there. While she didn't delude herself into thinking he'd be staying with her if he had a better option available, she also had to face the fact that if he was only present for purely opportunistic reasons, he could (and would) have very easily feigned sleep that night and left her to cry it out on her own.
The willingness to talk was the big one, though. If there was to be moving forward - which was still difficult for her to see, encased in fog as she was, like she was the main character in a fucking Silent Hill game - particularly between the two of them, they would have to talk. Buttoning one's lips and pretending that nothing had ever happened might have been the great British national pastime, but that was only good for hot-tempered comments and that one family member with a drug habit. Not for something like this.
When they'd awoken the next morning it was only just starting to get light outside, and they were curled up against each other, neither one of them daring to speak on the off-chance that it would herald a resumption of the awkwardness between them. They dared move even less - like moving would break the spell of the small amount of comfort they were clinging to. Sometime during the night they'd shifted to lie in the bed properly, holding onto one another as though in need of the reminder that the other was still there. Marilyn had waited patiently for him to mutter some excuse. For him to disentangle himself, get up, and leave. And then she'd decided fuck that, sod leaving the ball in his court, and instead she asked the first thing that came to her mind.
"When did you know?"
Above her head, she felt his own head turn, his chin brushing against her hair.
"Know what?" He murmured, voice rough from sleep.
"That you'd picked the wrong side."
He was silent for a moment.
"I don't know."
A brush off - or so she'd thought. Until he continued once he'd had a chance to think.
"There wasn't any one incident. There were…troubles. And over time they accumulated. Some were worse than others, but they just sort of punctuated the issue already at hand. It was a steady build-up of dread, and before I really knew it I found myself dreading the prospect of winning the war more than I did the prospect of losing. Being around him was terrible as it was, and that was before he had the absolute power he sought. No matter how bad things got, the fact that he hadn't even won yet was a staunch reminder that they were sure to get worse."
It wasn't the sort of answer she'd expected - not the one they had in all of the movies, where the hero has a moment of epiphany that turns their entire life around.
"One of the worst times, though…" he paused, like he was debating on whether he was going to continue at all or not "When the war really hit its stride - when nobody could deny that there would be a war any longer - he made my home his base of operations."
"As what, a mark of trust?"
"No, no we'd displeased him - failed him - far too many times by then to receive any such token of esteem. His most ardent supporters rarely received much approval as it was. We lived the most comfortably out of any of our fellow Death Eaters, which was no doubt a motivating factor, but I think it was more than that. He knew that simply by his being there, our house was no longer our home. It was more than a bit of discomfort, there was no relaxing...no exhaling. You always knew that at any moment he could walk in and torture you, or kill you merely because he wanted to. Not that such wasn't always the case, but it was more ever-present that way."
"I have trouble enough knowing there are people like that in the country, never mind the house," she muttered.
"It wasn't just that, though. During one of our meetings, he brought out a hostage. An old teacher of mine - Muggle Studies."
"Muggle Studies?" She echoed disbelievingly.
"It was brought in after the first war, with the aim of improving Wizarding attitudes towards Muggles. It was a joke at best to my lot, and a disgrace at worst. Every year droves of us arrived for the school year toting letters demanding that we should be allowed to opt out of the class, but our headmaster wouldn't hear of it."
"I'm guessing you were among them, then," she did everything she could to keep the judgement from her tone.
"On the contrary, I was one of the few from our circles who didn't protest it at all. My father insisted we did things intelligently. The rest could kick up a fuss on pure principle to display what good Purebloods they were, but Malfoys had no need for such things. Turning up with one such letter all but invited the teachers not of a similar mindset to poke their noses into our business with no real gain to be had. It was the one lesson I was permitted to fail, and I spent it either napping, or doing homework for other classes in the back row before dropping the class entirely the moment I was able."
A glimpse into the strategic cunning of the Malfoy clan was not entirely welcome at that moment.
"But yes, the teacher - Professor Burbage. It was her stance that Wizarding folk weren't so different from Muggles. That magic, while a large difference in our day-to-day lives, was the only significant one, and not so significant as some might argue. Those were crimes enough in the eyes of the Dark Lord, but then…" inhaling sharply, he glared at the ceiling like it might transport him away from the conversation - or perhaps the memory "...Then she wrote an article for the Daily Prophet all about her views, and insisting that if we were to move forward, Purebloods would have to start reproducing outside of our own kind. With mud-Muggleborns, even with all-out Muggles."
"And your leader didn't like that."
"No," he gave a laugh utterly devoid of humour "No, he didn't. He murdered her personally, in front of all of us - the inner circle. In my family's dining room."
"...Fuck."
"Things had been spiralling from 'bad' to 'utterly fucking terrible' for a long time before that. Years. He'd done worse, and he'd specifically targeted my family for displeasing him for a while beforehand, but that...that was the point where any will I had to pretend that things would be better when the war was won - that this was just the bad one had to go through in order to earn the good - was entirely snuffed out. We'd been following him out of fear more than loyalty for a long while before that, but that was the day I accepted that nothing good could come from victory."
"Surely you all could've run? Could've left? Escaped?"
"If you think that, then you don't understand a single thing I've told you about him."
The hand that had been resting on her waist ever since they'd awoken dropped down onto the mattress instead.
"I'm trying, Draco," she replied "I want to understand. I need to understand. I'm not asking questions for my own amusement, and I'm not doubting your honesty either, I'm just...confused. I'm trying to wrap my mind around it."
Which was the understatement of the millennium. His annoyance lost some of its edge then, but not all of it.
"Imagine you didn't even know my world existed," she fought to keep her voice low so that only he would be able to hear her, on the off-chance that one of her housemates was lurking around "And then out of nowhere one of my old school buddies kidnapped you. You'd want to understand just as much as I do."
Sighing, he nodded and regained some of his willingness to cooperate - if how his hand returned to its place on her waist was anything to go by.
"If that was what he did to a woman who held a different opinion from his - killed her and fed her to his pet snake - what do you imagine he'd do to traitors?"
Annoyance laced his voice and words both, but Marilyn let it go uncommented on. She knew well enough now that annoyance was the way Draco handled discomfort. That he was willing to push past it in order to explain to her was enough...and she knew that if she stopped to nag over something like his tone, she knew she'd soon be lucky if she could get a grunt or a nod in response to yes or no questions, nevermind the answers she truly sought.
He continued "Not just to dissuade others from taking the same path, but out of revenge. He was a fucking sadist. It was...that television show you showed me - the one about the criminals?"
It took her a moment to switch gears and understand what he was asking, and then another to answer it "You mean The Sopranos?"
"That one. We could no more leave the Death Eaters than they could leave their organisation. If we had...well, the consequences would've made what happened to you look like a relaxing holiday."
When she didn't argue, he finally looked at her as though he expected to see disbelief, or at least a healthy sort of skepticism on her face. When he didn't find it, the surprise was blatant - his eyes widening just slightly as his eyebrows raised. Then he exhaled heavily and quickly masked it all behind a careful blank mask, resting his head back against the pillow again.
"So...there was one war, which your parents were part of, and then there was a second one during your generation?"
"That is a very long story."
Marilyn was torn, her chest tight with her own indecision. The words were on the tip of her tongue - the ones she'd usually say in this situation. You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to. And she wanted to say them...partially. She truly did have no desire to needle him into relieving experiences that were bound to be traumatic - the most traumatic that memories could be. He'd lived through being on the frontlines of a war, for Christ's sake. But they'd spent the entire course of their relationship, however it may be defined, not talking about it.
She knew bits and pieces. What she'd gleaned from Harry and Hermione, what she could deduce from the articles in that strange newspaper, but she didn't know Draco's account. Not fully. The desire to know and to understand where he was coming from wasn't born of some sort of morbid curiosity, like a true crime junkie harassing somebody who survived an encounter with an infamous serial killer. She'd been dragged into this. She'd been tortured because of this. Her whole view of the world would never be the same because of this. And she still felt like she understood so little - and that she deserved to understand more. Deserved to know the man she'd brought in her bed, both literally and euphemistically. It felt shitty forcing his hand, but it felt downright weak to give him an easy out.
"We have nothing but time," she pointed out in the end.
One corner of his mouth twisted into a grim imitation of a smirk. Marilyn waited. She didn't needle him, but nor did she give him an out. And just when she thought that he was going to try to escape the conversation by not answering at all, he sighed and began to talk.
And so he told her everything. Well, perhaps not everything, she soon realised just how extensive the whole subject was. If he was to give her a day by day, step by step rundown of exactly what happened, they'd have been there for weeks - or until his voice went hoarse, whichever came first. But he gave her the major bullet-points, the Wikipedia-style summary.
Alright, he didn't rattle everything off like he was giving her a history lesson (although he did tell her to get in contact with Granger if she wanted a real history book...or fifty). No, instead he did something far worse - he explained it all in terms of how it related to him. How he grew up hearing about the glory days, and how much better things would be if the Dark Lord had won, before being confronted with the grim reality of it all when he returned. How there was precious little that he could do with that realisation because they were already in too deep. His father being sent to prison, the task of murder that was given to his sixteen year old self, knowing that the penalty for failure would be death, and all of this only being the tip of the iceberg...or the wand, or whatever idioms magical folk had.
By the time he was finished speaking, she found herself feeling sympathetic. Damn him, the utter bastard. But who wouldn't? It would require a heart of stone not to. Any one of the trials he described contained hardships that she would balk at being put through as an adult, but as a teenager? Shit, being a teenager was difficult enough as it was. She'd thought that the additional challenges provided by ballet rehearsals and recitals, along with her own parents (who were questionable in their own way, although perhaps not as severely as Draco's, she would begrudgingly admit), had made her general teenagehood combined with exams near-unbearable. Now she was scoffing at her former self.
Oh, she was still angry. Still furious. For how he'd known the true cause of her 'collapse' but sat beside her in that hospital pretending to know nothing - while she'd sobbed and spoken of terminal illness, no less. For all that he'd kept from her while allowing things to keep inching further and further forward. 'Let's play it by ear', her arse. But for the war? For the crime of simply being born to the wrong people? For believing what they raised him to believe? She couldn't hate him for that any more than she could hate children born into cults.
When he'd admitted to being on the wrong side of the war, her head had been immediately filled with terrors. Images of him torturing and murdering people like her for the crime of, well, being like her, and enjoying every second of it. What he told her now, though, painted a rather different picture. If anything it cast him in a favourable life, that he dared to think differently when presented with evidence to the contrary. To act on that doubt was commendable. How many of their fellow Death Eaters might have had the same doubts but did not act on them at all out of fear or self-preservation? Less than she might hope, for sure, but it was possible that they also numbered more than she might think.
She wasn't about to kid herself that he and his family did so out of anything other than self-interest. In fact, she strongly suspected that - as far as his parents were concerned, at least - if their lives under this Dark Lord had been more comfortable, they'd have never acted against him to begin with. From what she could glean from Draco's account, he was the one bothered by the cruelty when it wasn't directed at the Malfoy clan themselves. Okay, it wasn't much. The bare minimum expected from any decent person, really. No medals were about to handed out to those who couldn't watch torture and cruelty without feeling something.
But it gave her hope. For what, she didn't know. That she hadn't been harbouring her generation's version of Ted Bundy without realising it? That was a good start. In these times, she had to focus on the good - however incremental. Take any kid and tell them they're inherently better than others solely through existing, and the great majority of them would run with it. Would his parents still believe what they did if that belief didn't rather conveniently put them right at the top of the pecking order? Somehow, she doubted it. If anything, it spoke well of Draco that he'd turned his back on it while they did not...even if he hadn't fully turned his back on it. Turned his shoulder on it? Maybe. But he'd subverted the cause during the war, and he was with her now. He might not have fully shunned his parents, but doing so was a big ask. It went against basic human instinct, perhaps even more-so for families of that sort.
It also cast recent events in a much more favourable light. At least post-kidnapping. While she struggled to find much desire to fall to her knees and praise him for doing the right thing, and in response to something he'd brought about and offered no warning over no less, she had to recognise that in doing the right thing, he'd also done the difficult thing.
Once he was done - after he had described how Harry Potter, the fabled war hero who had visited her in her hospital bed, defeated the Dark Lord, and how society limped out of the war slowly but surely working towards a brighter future - she didn't rush to speak. Speaking for the sake of filling the silence was often worse than the silence it was meant to fill. He glanced towards her after a minute or so, perhaps suspicious that she'd fallen asleep, but when she met his gaze levelly (if not a little sadly) he looked away again, adopting that bored expression that he so often clung to. Only once she was finished gathering her thoughts and schooling them into coherency did she speak.
"Do you remember what I said back in London?" The trip which was barely even a full week in the past now, but felt like it was decades behind them "About rebuilding yourself from the ground up? How it's to be commended?"
"You weren't aware of just how much demolition was required beforehand," he huffed.
He rolled his eyes as he said it, like he thought he was getting to the punch before she could.
"I also wasn't aware of how fitting the words were," she said.
He relaxed. She felt him relax, like his entire body exhaled beneath her. While she felt the change, though, very little of it showed on his face. A lifetime of concealing his true thoughts, indeed. But while his lips pressed into a thin line as though he was annoyed, she knew him well enough to know it was with the purpose of pulling back any show of what he truly felt.
"I know a thing or two about poor parenting…" she said slowly.
"They weren't poor parents," he said immediately - strongly.
Marilyn gave him a deadpan look "They raised you into a cult."
"Their sole shortcoming."
"It's a pretty fucking big shortcoming, Draco."
"And it was how their parents raised them, and their parents before them, all the way back through every damned ancestor I may lay claim to," he pointed out impatiently "If you're to extend your sympathy to me, you must acknowledge that the same sympathy applies to them."
"They didn't make the decision to break the cycle like you did, though."
"If you think that, then you weren't listening. My mother saved Potter's life, and all three of us left with just as much haste during the battle the moment we could. If your baseline for being good parents lies in black and white morality and that alone, then yes, you can have your misguided view that they are automatically bad parents, but they gave me whatever I needed and what they thought best. They were good parents in the ways that they knew how to be so."
His speech sped up and grew slightly louder as he spoke, agitation returning.
"Then why are you here, hiding from them?" She asked impatiently, pinching the bridge of her nose.
His jaw twitched as he clenched it, grinding his teeth together. She regretted the question the moment she asked it - she'd forgotten the very good rule of thumb for arguments of not saying things that felt good to say. As things stood, she would forgive herself for it. But the regret must've shown on her face, for she had a feeling it was the only thing stopping that comment from escalating things into a full-blown argument.
"I don't go to them now because I know what they'll say."
She looked at him questioningly.
"Father will rail and scream and make a great display of his rage. Mostly because of my staying away, truth be told. My absence lends credence to the stories. Mother will sit silently, scandalised, until she decides he's ranted and raved for quite long enough and insist that we start on damage control," he spoke as though speaking facts rather than speculation, and she was inclined to believe him "After that, I'll receive my orders. We will announce some sort of cover story - that I did have a hand in your rescue, but that there is no real link between us. They'll come up with some excuse as to how I had the information I did, and frame my sharing it with Potter as pure altruism to the public, and as a calculated move to improve our standing in the press to our social circles."
He grimaced and then continued "After that, they'll demand that I never see you again - with some thinly veiled threats on my father's part, before marrying me off to the most suitable woman of their choosing before the year is out to dispel any speculation once and for all."
Marilyn said nothing. What could she say? She didn't know his parents well enough (or at all) in order to argue with his hypothesis, and even if she did - she didn't care to, for she suspected he was right. Anyway, he seemed to find it easier to speak, to open up, in response to silence than he did in response to words, questions, or even pleas to do so. It wasn't out of a desire to avoid an awkward silence, no, he was the master of awkward silences when he wanted to be, but something about her silent patience just had the effect of drawing the words out of him. It was easy to see how it was a beloved technique of many a good therapist.
"After that," he pushed on with a sigh "A honeymoon. A long honeymoon - abroad, to dull any temptation that I might have to return to see you, and likely with strict instructions not to return until my new bride is pregnant and showing. A new chapter, designed solely to bury this one."
He'd told her once that he suspected he could wring out six or so more years of freedom before his parents really started pushing him to secure the bloodline. Now she had the distinct feeling that he'd be lucky if he got six months. What somehow made it all the worse was how resigned he seemed to it, eyes devoid of emotion and lips pressed together as he stared at her ceiling - or through it, rather, for there was nothing seeing about his gaze. Whether that resignation was because he had accepted it, or because he had no intention of going along with it, she couldn't tell. In truth, she wasn't even sure she wanted to know. If yet another thing to think about was stuffed into her mind, her skull was sure to crack with the pressure.
"Thank you," she said, and with great difficulty.
Now he looked at her - and he didn't bother disguising the way his brow furrowed in surprise as he stared at her like she'd entirely lost her mind. Marilyn took it as a good sign. It was better than the look it had replaced, the one that would fit a man in line for the gallows.
"For doing what you had to do in order to save me," she continued, looking away "I have a better idea of what it took now. It must've been a difficult decision to make."
"More than I'd like to admit," he muttered, hesitated, and then continued "...But likely less than you may suspect."
Marilyn did not argue. It was difficult to do so. Part of her was tempted to, there was no denying that. The Draco she knew was a right snobby little bastard at the best of times, but fundamentally he was good. However...the Draco she knew was not the Draco that his world seemed to know. Which left her with a question, and a good one at that. Which one was the real one?
Oh, everybody showed different facets of themselves under different circumstances. The Marilyn her students knew was not the one her housemates did, and neither of those were the ones her fellow dancers had known. But that was different - entirely different. Those were just that; facets. This was...night and day. Hot and cold. Light and dark.
She knew what instinct told her, of course - that he was a complicated person (more than most were, even), who had the misfortune of being set on a bad path but with a willingness to forge a new one. The latter part being the most important thing for her to remember. After all, he could not control who his parents were. Instinct, however, had also told her that he didn't lead a secret double-life as a wizard. A good thing, too, for if it had she'd have regarded it as some sort of bizarre sudden-onset psychosis. But her instinct had also failed to give her any warning when she'd been seconds away from kidnap - no heart-sinking, no internal alarm bells ringing, no nothing. It was no longer something she felt truly able to rely on.
"You think I have a very low opinion of you," she murmured.
"Don't you?" He challenged "You're well within your rights to despise me."
"I wish I could," she replied "You make it very difficult."
He snorted. It probably wasn't something he heard often. Not from people who didn't have something to gain through being his friend. That just made her sadder. She was sick of being sad.
The arm around her waist wrapped around her more tightly now, more confidently.
"You do the same. Were you anybody else, I'd resent you for having the gall to get kidnapped and disrupt things as they have been," he replied drily "I told you I realised that the plan for Muggles and Muggleborns was wrong when I was a teenager, and I was being truthful. But while I didn't think they deserved murder, nor torture or subjugation, I never thought they were the same as us. I thought they were...the housecats to our tigers, and that's the most flattering of the analogies."
She noted without comment that he kept saying 'they', not 'you'. Like in his own mind he still didn't fully accept that she was 'they'.
"But then I met you, and I had to confront the fact that I mistook you for a witch so easily. It's been a long process of slowly realising exactly how wrong we were," he quickly elaborated "Not just you, but your friends, all of them. The way you are around each other is no different to how countless others I attended school with were. It make me realise that if you lined up a group of my kind and a group of yours, mixed them together, dressed them the same, and asked anybody to identify them on sight alone, it would be an impossible task. You and your friends made me see that."
Had he just told her in a roundabout way that they behaved like a group of teenagers? She had to stifle a tired smile. He wasn't exactly wrong.
Whether it was her silence that gave him the urge to continue, or if this was just what he'd been building up to all along, he finally added ruefully "...But mostly you."
They were the words of a confession, but they didn't hold the tone of one. If anything, he sounded thoroughly inconvenienced by the revelation. And Marilyn? Well, Marilyn could not blame him because she was saddled with very similar feelings.
Her anger was in no danger of disappearing, but for now it had lost its burn, and in doing so it was giving way to sadness and fatigue. She was exhausted. The way forward was still a mystery to her, but she couldn't ignore the fact that the only thing that seemed to break them through this damnable fog, this purgatory, was when they talked. When they worked together. Perhaps it was a sign as to where the way forward lay, but it was a sign she bloody well did not want.
Still, it only added to her reluctance to cut him out of her life entirely, which was what her anger always demanded when it reared its head. Another thing she didn't want to think about, really. It added to the reluctance. It was not the source of it. Whatever that source was, she was in no mood to address it. It was pointless doing so anyway - completely pointless until he worked out what he was going to do next, and possibly still thereafter, whatever his decision ended up being.
A/N: Full transparency, this chapter fought me every step of the way. I swear however much the characters have trouble expressing themselves, the trouble I have with the chapter matches it every time. Hopefully it does not show, but if it does then apologies! Narcissa and Lucius are on the horizon, though, which should be fun - for us. Maybe not Draco. Or Marilyn, either, for that matter.