A/N: I am very sorry to those of you who have been following Draco and Breseis for a long time that it has been SO long since I last updated. We're getting near the end now, and I hope this chapter is enough to win your forgiveness. Enjoy, X

Chapter Thirty-One

The night that changed everything started much like any other night. It was a warm, early summer evening, and so the fireplaces in the Slytherin common room lay bare and empty. It was invitingly cool in the secret reserve of the dungeons after a day in the sweltering heat of above. The common-room was empty save a few students squinting over revision notes, desperately cramming until their eyes could no longer stay open, and two people huddled in a dark corner, whispering furiously to each other.

This sight was not unusual. It had started not long after the term began. Draco Malfoy and Breseis Lestrange seemed merged as one entity. Every morning when people began to appear from their dorms for breakfast, they were already sitting together, deep in whispered discussion. They went to classes together, to secret meetings with senior members of staff together, to not-so-secret meetings where they snapped orders at the Inquisitorial Squad together. They ate together, although that was a seemingly infrequent occurrence; the rumour was that they slept in Draco's bed together. Together they got paler, together they got thinner. Together they appeared to be wasting away.

"She's toxic," Pansy had sneered with disgust earlier in the evening, "She's like some sort of contagious disease."

"Ooo, what do you think she has?" Millicent asked, her eyes lit up at the malicious gossip.

"I didn't say she had a disease, I said she IS the disease," Pansy threw a disgusted look at her friend, "I can't even bare to look at them anymore. They make-me-sick."

It was only about 8 o' clock in the evening at that point, but Pansy stomped off to bed anyway.

Currently, Breseis sat with her head in her hands. Draco was speaking, but she wasn't listening. She didn't have to anymore. He had been saying the same thing for days. Or was it weeks? She didn't remember, but she knew his speech by heart now. She still wasn't sure. She knew what happened to them- the deserters. She had heard what happened to Igor Karkaroff, her onetime head master, and she knew of the fates of the others.

Her mother had a box of newspaper clippings that she hid in the very back of her wardrobe- and her wardrobe was about the size of the Great Hall. Breseis had found them when she was playing dress up one day, and they hadn't meant much to her then. Horrible stories about evil wizards being found killed, maimed, only parts of them remaining. Horror stories. It was only after she began to find out about her father, that the box of clippings began to be important. They were memories, she realised, her mother's memories. People she had known from her time at Hogwarts, people she had been friends with. For, after all, her mother had married Rabastan, married a Death Eater, it should only follow that she be close with the people he was close to. That her friends be followers of Voldemort.

What slowly dawned on Breseis was that these newspaper clippings weren't about people who were killed in battle; they were about people who had been assassinated. They were deserters. So enamoured with the idea of being a Death Eater, of being a part of the dark glamour, was Breseis that the stories her mother had kept of her slaughtered friends sparked disgust inside of her, and not pity. She, Breseis , would never, ever consider deserting, she thought, she would never throw away a chance of being a part of something so spectacular. The revolution.

Foolishness, that was what she thought now, she had been foolish. But she didn't think she was brave enough to join the ranks of those who had run. She didn't want to be another clipping in the sad, dusty box her mother hid in the back of her wardrobe. She wanted to be back outside the door of her dorm at Durmstrang, listening to Anya's excrutiating laugh, and to turn and go back down the stairs and never see what she had seen, and to marry not murder Paris and to never have come to England and never have become a part of any of this.

And then she looked at Draco. He looked scared and drawn and was trying to plan an escape that would ensure both his safety and hers. And suddenly she couldn't regret any of her decisions, because they were what had brought them together. She reached out and took his hand.

"Once we get out of the castle, we'll be fine, Breseis. We'll apparate as far as we can, and then apparate again and again until we get to Dover and we can safely get to France. Vlad will help us, I know he will. Or your mother's family. We'll be safe. We're not important enough that they'll endlessly search us out. Eventually they will give up and we'll be able to live our lives as if none of this ever, ever happened." Draco looked at her with the most sincere expression to ever cross his pointed face.

"Okay," Breseis replied, with one brief nod of her head.

"Okay?" he looked bewildered.

"We'll go tomorrow, as soon as Curfew is over."

"Tomorrow?"

"I can't help feeling like time is running out," she sighed, dropping his hand and leaning back in her chair, "It's like there's this knot in my chest and everything around us is moving really quickly. It's all disintegrating out there, Draco, if we don't move now, and everything falls apart, we'll both be locked up in Azkaban for the rest of our lives before we even realise what's happening."

"But until about 30 seconds ago you were completely against this idea! I'm just...surprised about how quickly you've changed your mind," Draco replied, eyeing her cautiously.

"I wasn't against the idea, I was scared. But I'm scared to stay as well. We're fucked either way Draco, so we might as well do the thing that we want to do, instead of staying here miserable and afraid," she furrowed her eyebrows, "it might even work out okay. Look at the school, that Dumbledore's Army are running circles around us, around the Carrows, even around Snape. And they're school kids. Imagine if there was an uprising, imagine if the outside world decided to revolt. If we run now, we might even be able to come back eventually. If we stay, we're going to be miserable whatever happens. We maybe don't deserve a chance at being happy, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't grasp it with both hands while there's still time."

Draco smiled at her, not a full smile but a small, loving one. "So, tomorrow then?" She nodded, finally feeling the sense of peace that comes when a difficult decision has been made.

And then the common room door was flung open. Breseis and Draco turned to see Professor Slughorn in his nightdress gasping for breath. He looked hastily around the room, a sort of manic urgency in his eye. He stopped when his gaze reached the two unhappy Death Eaters, his mouth twisting as if he wanted to say something. But he turned away from them and stepped through properly into the room, closing the door behind him. Draco looked at Breseis, confused by the presence of their head of house, but she was still staring at Slughorn, her lips pressed together in a perfectly straight line and a completely dead expression in her eyes.

Professor Slughorn pulled out his wand and flicked it in the air. Almost instantly a sharp, shrill alarm began to sound through the common room. Draco flinched and covered his ears, much like the few other students still in the common room. Breseis didn't seem to hear, her eyes following Slughorn's step to the middle of the room. The alarm was clearly sounding loudly throughout the dormitories as baffled and sleepy looking students began to come through from their beds. The common room was soon full of people shouting to each other to hear over the noise of the alarm, clambering to get a look at Slughorn, who had climbed on top of a coffee table in the middle of the room.

Suddenly the alarm went silent. The students followed suit.

"I'm sorry to wake you all, but I assure you this is quite important," Slughorn began, looking quite troubled, "We must all proceed to the Great Hall immediately for...ah...an emergency assembly...Follow me in an orderly fashion."

Slughorn turned to leave, ignoring the multiple cries of "But, sir! Why?" Draco turned to Breseis to see if she had acknowledged anything that had just happened, but half expecting to see her still staring ahead with those scary, dead looking eyes (and in all fairness, experience was on his side, there.) She did not have her usual dead expression in place however, and instead looked up at Draco in complete and utter terror. The room around them was moving, and quickly; the air was alive with excitement and fear. Draco pulled Breseis to her feet. She grabbed him by the hair and pulled him close, before whispering in his ear in panic, "I think we're too late."

Her terrified expression was now mirrored on his. "What will we do?" he asked.

Breseis bit her lip and looked around as the last students filed out the common room. She took Draco's hand and marched forward. Draco began to really panic: she was shaking like a leaf.

In the Great Hall Professor McGonagall was addressing the school. By the time she announced that the school was to be evacuated, Breseis had already surmised the reasons.

"Snape is gone," she whispered to Draco.

"So are the Carrows," he replied, and then looked around the Hall again, "and Potter is here."

"There's going to be a fight, isn't there?"

Draco nodded. "What will we do?"

Breseis looked around the Hall, taking in all the exits, the crowd. Every eye was on Professor McGonagall. There was a collective gasp as she announced that the Death Eaters and Voldemort himself would be at the school very soon and that it was now unsafe. Breseis and Draco stood at the very end of the Slytherin table, behind a small group of other senior students. She took his hand and gently tugged and they slipped through the entry way to the hall, and once outside began to run down the stairs and back to the dungeons.

"What now?" Draco asked.

"I don't know, this is as far as I've thought it through really. We need to find a way to-"

She was cut off by a voice echoing throughout the school. A voice that she and Draco knew well by now. The voice of the Dark Lord.

"I know you are preparing to fight. Your efforts are futile. You cannot fight me. I do not want to kill you. I have great respect for the teachers of Hogwarts. I do not want to spill magical blood. Give me Harry Potter and none shall be harmed. Give me Harry Potter and the school will remain untouched. Give me Harry Potter and you shall be rewarded. You have until midnight."

"Rewarded?" said Draco, picking up on his master's words, "is that our best shot?"

"No," she said, "If this prophecy is true, if Potter is chosen to kill the Dark Lord, then he is our only hope, as much as he is the Mudbloods' and the other...creatures," she couldn't quite hide her distaste.

"I don't really want to be rewarded by him anymore anyway," Draco sighed, "It's lost its appeal. But what else are we going to do. If we fight with the school we'll be considered blood traitors as well as deserters and if we somehow manage to survive and the school lose, we'll be killed. If we fight with the Death Eaters and they lose, then we'll end up in Azkaban. If they win, well we're in the same sorry situation we're in now. If the school wins...and we're fighting with them..."

"We have to be sneaky," Breseis said.

"We always do."

"They can't think we are deserters, but we have to help Potter..."

"You can't imagine how hard it is for me to say this," Draco gritted his teeth, "But you're right. I think we could manage it. He'll assume the worst if he sees me anyway."

Breseis grabbed Draco's hands.

"We can do this," she looked straight into his eyes with sheer determination, "I can do anything as long as you are by my side."

Footsteps began hurtling down the stairs to the dungeon corridor. Breseis and Draco turned in horror, simultaneously pulling out their wands. Crabbe and Goyle appeared in their line of vision, sneers adorning their repulsive faces.

"Thought you two might have been hiding down here," Crabbe said, pulling up his sleeves and cracking his knuckles in what could only be described as a generic thuggish gesture. "What's the plan?"

"The plan?" Breseis asked, accidently letting her inner hostility lace her speech.

"Well I take it we're going to fight?" Goyle replied, looking at her like she was stupid.

Draco turned to Breseis and she nodded.

"Obviously," he snapped, "Don't be thick. Breseis?"

"Find Potter, follow him...Be discreet. And if the opportunity arises, get in the way of what he's doing," she locked eyes with Draco. "But don't kill him. He belongs to the Dark Lord...Well, what are you waiting for? Go!"

Crabbe and Goyle made a move.

"What about you?" Draco whispered.

"I'll be fine. Don't worry about me, I'm good at this stuff," she reached a hand up to his face, "I'll find you. Be careful."

"I love you," Draco breathed, kissing her softly on the cheek, "I won't let you down. I promise."

And with that he turned and ran after his boyhood friends, leaving Breseis alone in the dungeon, and completely unsure of what to do