In Cautious Tones

A/N : This is the first chaptered fic I've written in a while, and I've worked long and hard at it- so naturally I'm dying for some constructive criticism. Please be lovely people and provide! This is now provisionally finished, and each chapter will go up as it's Betad. Speaking of which, huge thanks to Alicia, who has been doing an incredible job on the Betaing, for which I am eternally grateful.

Chapter 1

In every heart there is a room,

A sanctuary, safe and strong,

To heal the wounds from lovers past

Until a new one comes along...

"You must be Mr Malfoy," she said, extending her hand. "I'm Kate Gordon-Smythe." He shook her hand mechanically, his breath caught in his throat. Her youthful face was framed by untamed strawberry-blonde hair, her snub nose was peppered with freckles, and her blue eyes shone with a permanent twinkle, as if she was waiting for him to get the joke. She was pleasant-looking, though not exceptional, but it wasn't her beauty which had stalled Draco. There was only a slight physical similarity, but that smile... A smile of innocence and kindness and everything which had always remained unattainable for Draco. A smile which momentarily drowned all of his conscious thoughts in the memories he had so long sought to avoid, memories of her.

Quite frankly, this was the last thing he needed. It had been a long, trying day, and suddenly the past which he had been trying to escape from was popping up everywhere. First Blaise, now this.

"And you have come to my house unannounced because...?" Even though Mrs. Phillips, standing in the doorway, was outside of his field of vision, he knew that his housekeeper was flinching at his rudeness.

"I'll go get some tea, shall I?" she offered, as if trying to make up for her master's lack of social graces. Which showed how much she knew. Draco had plenty of social graces; he just didn't choose to waste them on Muggles. Fortunately she took Draco's silence as agreement, and disappeared out of the door, leaving him alone in the drawing room with the girl. Mrs. Phillips annoyed him immensely, being not only a Muggle, but furthermore a talkative, bustling type of woman of the sort he despised. However, he did not dare be as rude to her as he would have liked, as she also happened to be very good at her job. Few other housekeepers would be so efficient as to permit him to have so little contact with the world. Restraining his temper, having consideration for a Muggle, even, was one of many prices he paid to avoid both magical and Muggle society.

Whatever Mrs Phillips might have feared, his guest sadly did not seem to be particularly discouraged by his words or his tone, and prattled on regardless.

"Well, we've just moved into my great aunt's estate, the one with the grounds backing onto the canal, as sadly she passed away a couple of months ago. I thought I might as well come round to meet our new neighbour while my parents are busy supervising the removal men and so on." She smiled broadly. Draco was unable to share her happiness. New neighbours? He knew the house she meant; its land was adjacent to his own, and the almost bed-ridden state of its previous occupant had been one of the major attractions for Draco in buying his own property. He didn't want to have to deal with anyone prying into his affairs, or wandering onto his land unexpectedly- which was, of course, precisely what this girl had done this afternoon. He would have to discourage her from doing so in the future. Hopefully if he was sufficiently rude, not only would she not come back, but the rest of her family would likewise give him a wide berth.

He paid little attention as she babbled about her family, hoping that this would be hint enough, and that he wouldn't be forced to confront her more directly. He wasn't sure he could bear arguing with someone who reminded him so strangely and forcefully of... Well, he had plenty of other things to consider while she talked. What to do about the Blaise thing, for example. That had been bad enough on its own, without this on top of it.

He had encountered Zabini in Gringotts' foyer that morning on one of his rare visits to Diagon Alley. Sadly there was the occasional piece of business which required his personal attention, and though he might have liked to ignore it, if he did not attend to his estate than he would no longer be able to afford the hermetic lifestyle he had built for himself. It had struck him once again as amazing that the slippery former spy, one of the Dark Lord's moles in the Ministry, hadn't ended up in Azkaban. But Blaise had played every card he had to remain free; turning in other former Death Eaters, using the infamous 'Imperius defence'. In the end, while he had been an active Death Eater, the crimes he had been involved in just weren't the shocking atrocities of some of the others- Blaise had just been ambitious, not a fanatic- and the jury had been helpless to resist his charm and good looks.

He had stayed on the right side of the law in recent years, as far as Draco knew, although he hadn't been in close enough contact with any wizards- or indeed with anyone at all- to know for sure. However now, with the war and all its horrors already receding in the public memory, it seemed that Blaise had judged that the time was right to embark on a new scheme. And he wanted it to be financed by Malfoy money.

Draco wasn't exactly enthusiastic about the idea. He wanted to remain as far removed from the wizarding world as possible, for one thing, but even if that weren't the case, he still wouldn't be desperate to join in with some ex-Death Eater's hare-brained plot to regain power and prestige. Draco hadn't been told the details of the plan, but he knew Death Eaters, and he knew Zabini. And he knew it would most likely involve killing somebody. If there was one thing which Draco knew with more certainty than anything else, it was that he didn't want any more blood on his hands. He had hoped that those days were long gone, and that by preserving his isolation he had ensured that they wouldn't return. It seemed he had thought wrong.

But Draco had rarely been permitted to make his own choices, and it seemed that this was to be no exception. Blaise had foreseen, given Draco's complete withdrawal from magical society, that the Malfoy heir wouldn't be easily persuaded into helping. And to someone like Blaise that left only one option: coercion. Blaise was threatening to reveal the role Draco had played in the ambush and murder of Ginevra Weasley, one of the most horrific- and, more importantly, headline-grabbing- atrocities of the whole war.

He could still remember the photo splashed across the Daily Prophet the next day; her slight form splayed at odd angles across the ground, her face still beautiful despite the mutilation caused by various hexes, her red hair muted in the black and white photo. Defiantly not moving, a curious stillness uncommon on the front page of the Prophet. It had caught the public's imagination, this attractive, innocent young girl, beloved of the great Harry Potter, caught up in a devastating war which had cut her life's course tragically and unnecessarily short. There was nothing for it, Draco reasoned. He would have to go along with Zabini, at least for a little while. There could surely be no harm in just going along to the meeting Blaise had told him about, just to hear what this plan actually was. He didn't have to go any further with it.

This girl was almost more unsettling than the Blaise thing. She was still talking, though starting to falter a little now in the face of Draco's continued silence. He had taken in a few of the details despite himself- Fine Arts student, Oxford University, only child, parents lawyers in London, though don't actually practise so much these days, have a few small business ventures... It all sounded too neat to Draco, too perfect: after the war he was used to broken families and shattered ambitions, not polite, well-off parents with a lovely daughter attending a good university. But her normalcy, while entirely foreign to Draco, wasn't what troubled him. Rather it was the things which were familiar- something in her manner, her smile, her voice. In spite of himself, despite long years of trying to forget, he couldn't prevent his thoughts from slipping back, turning inevitably back to her...

She was sitting on the bench when he arrived, as usual. They tried to vary their meeting points, but this was the one they used most frequently, because of its excellent position. The high wall behind the bench, with its climbing roses softening the harsh stone, meant no-one could watch them from behind. The lack of trees and bushes in the nearby area meant there were few hiding places; nowhere anyone observing either of them could conceal themselves. Draco knew that the Death Eaters possessed no Invisibility Cloaks which were not currently required elsewhere, for more important tasks than tailing a possible mole. The distance from the pathway which idled through the park meant that it was unlikely anyone who happened to be passing by would notice them.

And of course, she used various glamours to disguise herself each time; an imperative, given her striking red hair. This time her hair and eyes were dark, and she wore baggy clothes which partially disguised her build. The only thing which remained constant between each encounter, Draco had come to realise, was her smile, and the pure, innocent joy which sparkled in her white teeth when it appeared. Its emergences were woefully rare- their meetings were serious and fraught with tension, and as the war raged around them, nobody had much time for smiling any more.

"You're to make the drop on Dorset Street; there's an old Muggle post box that's no longer in use. It's just after the corner as you come from Sycamore Avenue, which should shield the drop itself from anyone who might be following you. It's not too far outside the magical quarter of London, so it shouldn't arouse suspicion for you to be heading that way."

"Will the slot be large enough to fit the package in?" Draco asked, trying to recall the size and shape of Muggle post boxes. "Scrolls are thicker than that flat stuff Muggles use." Draco marvelled a little that he now knew even this much about Muggle affairs, but his time with the Order had taught him many things, and they were constantly trying to find new ways of communicating with their spy, sometimes utilising Muggle means. None of this was anything like the future he would have predicted for himself, he reflected, watching Ginny's lips twist in thought.

"I'll have someone go down there a couple of days beforehand to enlarge the slot and place a glamour on it so that it still looks right- not that any Death Eater tailing you would know the difference."

"Is that everything?" Draco asked, half-hoping for a reason for her to stay a few minutes longer. But no; that was the sole objective of this meeting- the only reason they met at all, ever- and he watched her leave with a strange resignation burning dully inside him.

It was certainly a strange course, the one life had led him down- entirely contrary to everyone's expectations, his own most of all. But everything had changed that long ago night on the Astronomy Tower. He had known that he didn't want to kill anyone, ever, and by extension, that he didn't want to become a Death Eater. But by that time it was too late for that; he had come so far down that path that his instinct for self-preservation had informed him that not becoming one of them could only mean joining the other side as a spy among the Death Eaters.

And once that was the case, there could be no more question of not killing anyone. Yes, he avoided it when he could, but among the Death Eaters it was kill or be killed- kill the victims, or be killed by your master- and as much as Draco was repulsed by the act of murder, his will to survive was stronger. At least by working with the Order he could comfort himself with the idea that he was saving lives even while he ended them. This seemed poor recompense, though, as the lives he saved were anonymous and far away, and the lives he ended were the wide-eyed, panicking human beings right in front of him...

Somehow, in making that one choice on the Astronomy Tower that fateful evening, he had deprived himself of any further choice in this war. From that moment on there had only been one path open to him. Although at first he had occasionally felt bitter, he was resigned to it by now- content that within the context of this war there were no easy paths to tread. His choice had led him as safely as he could have wished- even more so, in some ways, than many others; despite the constant danger of discovery, for as long as his cover was not blown he was in no danger from either side.

And in the same way, he had resigned himself to the lack of choice which the Fates seemed to have alloted him in matters of the heart, and he trusted that this path would lead him as surely as the others. He had resisted the idea at first, of course, just as he had the proposal that he should turn traitor to the Dark Lord. But it had been impossible to avoid feeling something for her; not when he saw her week after week, full of life and hope and innocence, throwing herself into her work with the Order as if it was all she had.

At first it had seemed so strange to see her participating in such tough, dirty, underhanded work, and it had taken Draco some time observing her during their rendezvous before he could work out why. He had long known that she was tough- if there was one thing Weasleys were, it was resilient- and from what the Order members had told him before she became his contact, duplicity certainly wasn't entirely unknown to her. It was just a subtle, slight feeling- not that she couldn't do what she did, but rather that she shouldn't have to. Draco realised that he wanted to protect her, wanted to protect that innocence which was so far from everything he had always known, from anything his cynical nature had even accepted could exist.

He hadn't wanted to admit it. She was a Weasley, after all, the lowest of the low, and he couldn't speak to a single one of her brothers without feeling an almost uncontrollable desire to punch them very hard, right in their inanely grinning mouth. But he couldn't help it- perhaps, he reasoned, all Weasley women were infinitely more amenable than the menfolk, or perhaps she was just an anomaly. Whatever it was, in Draco's eyes, she was perfect, and she was possibly the only person other than himself he had ever wanted to protect: proof, as far as Draco was concerned, that this must be love. And he had no choice about what he had to do next, he realised, watching her return to the pale gravel path, that day in the park. He had to tell her how he felt, because if trying not to admit it to himself had been a weight on his heart, that was nothing compared to staying silent now...