Her salad, ragged and riddled with holes, was beginning to wonder what it had ever done to deserve such a vicious series of stabbings, while Ginny, oblivious to her lunch trying to stage a very limp revolt, continued to poke at it while pretending not to stare across the canteen at the Ministry's newest employee. He was unforgivably handsome, finely chiselled and formed in an alabaster glow by a skilled artist's hands. What made it unforgivable was the miserable disposition that had been tacked on at the end, infusing each slope and vein, as ruinous to the whole effect as if a deranged vandal had come by and doused the masterpiece in tar.
One could learn a lot about another person simply by staring at him, while pretending not to, for the better part of three weeks. By now, to most others in the Ministry, it seemed Draco had already lost his shine, the new toy discarded to the rest of the pile, simply by dint of being a government employee, and, therefore, being totally uninteresting. He was conscientious enough about his work and drew little attention to himself, had not dazzled or charmed or bullied anyone into doing anything unconscionable, nor had he made any overtures to superiors whose boots were considered prime for licking. All these facets of things he had not done combined, for Ginny, into something of a Venn diagram, where the intersecting parts very boldly suggested that he was up to no good.
And so, while the rest of their colleagues accepted him into the fold without fanfare, much as a single stitch gets woven into a swatch of fabric as a matter of course, Ginny instead was struck with the compulsion to keep an eye on him. Surely Malfoys didn't just roll over and get regular, middle-class jobs and actually do their jobs.
This Malfoy also ate the Ministry canteen's hazardous orange ravioli without complaint; Ginny wasn't sure if that bit was him being too preoccupied with plotting to notice he was ingesting something that boasted a colour commonly associated with toxic waste, or if his tastebuds had just surrendered and died his first morning at the Ministry when he'd made the mistake of drinking its coffee.
Watching him was made rather convenient by the fact that, although they worked in different departments on different floors, they seemed to have the same schedule, even when one of their routines went off-kilter. They usually arrived to work within seconds of each other, and once, when she had been running late, he had dashed in just slightly ahead of her, swearing under his breath, from the looks of it. More than once they had shared a lift, after the fun of timing the exact moment to push the button that would close the doors in each other's faces had worn thin. They took lunch at around the same time, sitting in opposite corners of the canteen, and regardless of what time she left her office for the day, knocking off almost always meant seeing him in the Floo area. Neither of them verbally acknowledged this issue once it became clear that running into each other constantly was going to be a recurring problem; once the seal was broken it would mean the precedent for small talk would be set, and they'd end up mired in obligation to speak to one another when all Ginny really wanted to do was occasionally scowl in his direction if she felt that the status quo needed some re-establishing.
Watching him was also made rather easy by the fact that she was usually good at doing it without being seen. Although she had occasionally hogged her fair share of the spotlight as the baby of the family, growing up with six brothers and then hanging about with The Boy Who Lived naturally meant that there were times when there was no alternative but to stand on the sidelines and quietly observe the goings-on. And with said six brothers who sometimes didn't want a girl interrupting their manly playtime, and with the now defunct Order of the Phoenix often having grown-up meetings behind closed doors, Ginny had developed some talent in quiet observation over the years.
The prickly heat on his skin was the first sign that he was being scrutinised. The second was that Weasley, frowning at a spot directly above his right shoulder, had been pushing the contents of her sad lunch around instead of eating it for the past ten minutes. Actually, that in itself hadn't been much to go on, since she seemed to drape herself in bad humour almost every time they crossed paths, but Draco deliberately caught her eye this time, and the frown that deepened as their eyes met indicated that it was she who had been making his skin crawl.
It was a feeling not unfamiliar to him. People often watched him almost everywhere he went, out of curiosity or suspicion, or sometimes just because he was nice to look at. He didn't bother hiding himself here; after all, he needed to establish himself in the wizarding community as, if not an upstanding citizen, then at least a contributing member of society, and he would be doing his public persona no favours if he flew so low under the radar that he was totally undetectable. Besides, attending spy school with Dennis almost every night was so strenuous in its intensity that not having to be a shadow during the day was quite a relief. And if people wanted to waste their time watching him do scandalous things like fill out paperwork and steep cups of tea, then that was their problem.
Draco cocked an eyebrow at Ginny, a challenge he knew she wouldn't pick up. They seemed to have an unspoken understanding that speaking to one another would only cause trouble that neither of them had the time or inclination to deal with; as far as he could remember, they had managed to have a civil conversation approximately once. She was tiresome when she thought she had the upper hand, and when she knew she had the upper hand, as had once been the case during his fifth year at school, she was just plain violent.
From the corner of his eye he registered her departure as she got up, deposited the remnants of her lunch at the tray return area and left the canteen. Draco took a leisurely swig of his juice and checked his watch, opting to wait a full three minutes before heading back down to his office as well, so there would be less chance of running into her in the Atrium lobby and having to fight their natural inclinations to, well, fight.
As he rounded the corner out of the canteen and towards the lifts, Ginny emerged from the ladies' bathroom, and Draco heaved a quiet sigh to himself, their gazes catching and turning into barely concealed eye-rolls. Whether he intentionally tried to avoid her or not, she always seemed to turn up anyway to breathe his air and occupy his sight and space. And the way she looked at him suggested it was he who had the cheek to exist in the same hemisphere as she did.
The best laid plans of mice and men, Draco thought idly as he pushed the 'down' button for the lifts, often go to shit.
He let her enter first, because he was a gentleman and because he knew it made her uneasy. Behind them, an airborne memo swooped in like a bird of prey, and hovered, jittery, a few inches from the ceiling of the car.
The lift's smooth descent was interrupted suddenly by a deep, sinister creaking. They only had a second to worry about the sound, as it was quickly succeeded by the lift juddering to a halt. The lights flickered for a moment, but, to Ginny and Draco's good fortune, opted to stay on. Above their heads, the paper airplane, charmed to be time-sensitive, panicked.
Ginny, taking her cue from the memo, began a low chant that consisted of a string of 'No's', and scrabbled at the wall with one hand, while the other drew her wand out of her robes, as she wondered how well it would stand up to prying the doors apart.
"Calm down, Weasley," said Draco, trying to keep a stranglehold on his own composure. "You're just making things worse."
Prodding the red panic button at the bottom of the front panel, Draco had the wild suspicion that the universe, the grand high master overseeing the chess game of life, was enjoying itself at their expense.
"Why's it stopped? It runs on bloody magic, for Merlin's sake!" Ginny exclaimed.
"Yes, because all spells last forever," Draco rejoined sarcastically. "We don't have a Maintenance department for nothing, you know. Just like that dilapidated shack you call a home would collapse in a grubby heap if no one were there to mind its upkeep. What's it called again? The Rathole, isn't it?"
"You know perfectly well it isn't," Ginny snapped, and elbowed him aside to push repeatedly at the help button.
"Whossat?" asked a sticky voice.
"We're stuck in the lift," Ginny called out.
"Which one?"
"The one that's stopped working!"
"Six," supplied Draco, indicating with a casual tip of his head the lift number on the side of the entrance framework. From the opposite corner of the lift, he crossed his arms over his chest and radiated smugness.
"Six," hissed Ginny.
"Nothing doing, then," said the voice, which had developed a rather happy pitch to it. "That there is Reggie's department, an' Reg is unavoidably detained at the mo," it explained, carefully enunciating the polysyllabic words with puffy importance.
"And when might Reg un-detain himself?" Ginny demanded in a tone that might have frosted the Sahara over.
"Dunno," said the voice, oblivious. The body attached to the voice probably would have shrugged if they could see it. "Whenever he finishes eating, I suppose. I'll tell 'im you called." There was a soft click, and the voice spoke no more.
Ginny jammed her fist against the help button.
"All Maintenance lines are busy at the moment. Please try again later," said a soothing voice, which produced quite the opposite effect.
Ginny made a sound that couldn't decide if it wanted to meet the world as a grunt or a wail, and cast her eyes wildly about the enclosure in the hopes that an escape hatch would suddenly and miraculously materialise. It didn't.
Draco almost felt sorry for her, but he was saving his sorry for himself; he wasn't much for small spaces either, caged and trapped indefinitely at someone else's whim, be it a biased legal council or an indolent repairman. But there was no sense in the both of them losing their heads over something neither of them could control. Besides, he figured that between Weasley and the memo overhead, which was currently molting confetti, his share of panicking was well covered.
"I spy with my little eye," he said slowly, "something that needs to get itself together and calm the hell down before I have to Stun it for the sake of my own sanity."
"Well, you'll have to forgive me if I don't enjoy being trapped underground for god knows how long with morally ambiguous men!" Ginny shot back.
"Morally ambiguous?" Draco repeated thoughtfully. "I'm shocked, Weasley. Aren't I completely depraved after all?"
She frowned. "I misspoke. I don't know what I was thinking, speaking so highly of you like that."
"Just so we're on the same page."
"You were probably off drowning kittens when they handed out compassion and empathy," she muttered.
"Well, what with you and the rest of the Weasley spawn crowding the trough..."
"Compare me to a farm animal again and I guarantee this wand goes so far up one orifice it'll come out another."
"Right, right, I forgot who I was talking to for a second there. Silly me," said Draco, wondering where his sense of self-preservation had gone off to, and whether it intended to come back for him. He forged on without it, the benefits of the distraction of sparring with Ginny outweighing that of standing in silence and going mad from claustrophobia. "Well, you know what they say. Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
"What? Who says that?" she interjected, and realised belatedly, and with dissatisfaction, that the time for objecting to being called incompetent had passed in her haste to make him warrant his claims.
Draco shrugged. "Muggle fellow. Wrote weird books," he said. At her increasingly suspicious look, he added, "I had a lot of time on my hands in prison."
"Oh, prison," Ginny said. "You know, you're living proof that the penal system doesn't work. You came out as awful as you went in."
"To be fair, I was removed from the premises prematurely, by you, no less. Who knows what kind of great philanthropist I might have become but for your untimely intervention? One might say this is partially your fault."
Ginny scoffed. "Please. If I'd had the choice, I would have definitely not been the one to let you out."
"Oh, there's always a choice," Draco said airily, tilting his head upwards, his gaze following the dejected trail of the paper airplane, which had given itself over to a bout of depression.
She shot him an impudent look. "I don't remember that being your defence in court."
"I chose to save my parents. Although with one now living out the rest of his life in jail, the other still struggling to mend a broken spirit and me trying to rebuild some semblance of a normal life as an ex-convict, perhaps I should have refused to obey the Dark Lord's orders. Of course, we'd all be dead, but it wouldn't have been a bad deal, in all, when you come right down to it," he mused.
Ginny blinked and gaped at him as his words sunk in. "Are you saying you'd rather have left your parents to die at Voldemort's hands?"
"No," he said evenly. "Which is why I didn't. But perhaps now you appreciate the complexity of that little dilemma. The choice is always there, though sometimes you end up losing everything no matter what you do." His mouth twisted in a frown. He ought to have felt the thrill of scoring a direct hit against her rigid ethical code, as she looked more than a little perturbed, but he hadn't allowed himself to dwell on that memory, and its resurfacing now brought with it a pain that still felt distressingly raw.
The tinny melody of a Warbeck classic wafted through once more as the lift staggered and sputtered to life, giving Ginny no chance to respond, though she would have been at a loss for words anyway, and giving Draco no need to backtrack to surer footing. Ascending a couple of floors, the lift opened its doors to reveal the Atrium lobby they had just left before getting stuck.
"Well," said Draco, trying for nonchalance. "I guess Reg came off his lunch break."
They both exited the lift hastily, neither really wanting to take their chances again at the moment with that particular contraption. They stood side by side for a moment, feeling unsure of the next step; something had shifted during their entrapment -- a marker gradually and reluctantly pushed along the spectrum of love and hate, one notch away from abhorrence and towards neutrality. Much of their forced time together had been spent being rude to each other, but they both recognised the welcome distraction the other provided against their own fears of confinement, even if it was in the form of insults; being grateful didn't seem an appropriate thing to do, not without revealing more of themselves to each other, but it didn't feel right to just leave it hanging in the air, either.
"I think I'm going to take the stairs," Ginny managed finally, and walked off uncertainly.
"Good," said Draco quickly, just to have something to say and to have the last word to close the conversation.
He looked around the Atrium, noting, not for the first time, that aside from the visitor's entrance, the only points of entry and egress in the Ministry were the Floos; Apparation was heavily regulated within the building now for security reasons, and not wanting to have to explain himself to thick-headed guards, Draco made his way to the visitor's telephone box, gathering the remains of the calm he hadn't spent in the lift from trying to maintain a stiff upper lip and figuring he had enough left to endure a short stint in the small box that would take him outside.
Draco pushed out of the telephone box as soon as it clicked into place on the Muggle pavement and took a great gulp of air. It was cold and had the perpetual tinge of petrol fumes and cigarette smoke that hung like drapes in the middle of the crowded city, but it felt fresher than any air he would have breathed underground inside the Ministry. He usually didn't mind being inside the building, as the weather scenes charmed outside the windows by Ministry Maintenance tricked his brain into believing he wasn't working several floors below street level -- six feet under, his mind now interjected helpfully. However, after prison, he had not only developed a very healthy appreciation for the outdoors, but also a strong dislike of staying too long in small, enclosed spaces; getting trapped in the lift only brought that discomfort further to the forefront of his mind, and trotting back down to his underground office like everything was all right was not something he could successfully process just now.
Instead, he leant gingerly against a wall that had been tagged so many times with all manner of paint, torn posters and dried glue it was beginning to look like a giant, carefully fashioned mosaic, and watched the Muggles go about their business; they paid no attention to him, mostly because he didn't want them to.
He heard the quiet rumble of the telephone box bringing someone else up, and didn't bother to work up the feeling of surprise when he saw Ginny step out.
"What are you doing here?" she asked, spotting him right away.
Draco looked at her wearily. "Don't let's start this again."
She let a few beats pass. "I just needed some air," she explained, though he didn't see why she felt the need to, and came to stand against the wall as well, an arm's length away from him.
The musical cacophony of Muggle city life was enough to fill the silence that loomed between them as they each willed their anxieties away on the drifting wind. In that moment they had more in common with each other than they had ever done in their entire lives, and Draco felt oddly glad for her presence, even if she was a Weasley.
One could learn a lot about another person simply by staring at him, while pretending not to, for the better part of three weeks. By now, to most others in the Ministry, it seemed Draco had already lost his shine, the new toy discarded to the rest of the pile, simply by dint of being a government employee, and, therefore, being totally uninteresting. He was conscientious enough about his work and drew little attention to himself, had not dazzled or charmed or bullied anyone into doing anything unconscionable, nor had he made any overtures to superiors whose boots were considered prime for licking. All these facets of things he had not done combined, for Ginny, into something of a Venn diagram, where the intersecting parts very boldly suggested that he was up to no good.
And so, while the rest of their colleagues accepted him into the fold without fanfare, much as a single stitch gets woven into a swatch of fabric as a matter of course, Ginny instead was struck with the compulsion to keep an eye on him. Surely Malfoys didn't just roll over and get regular, middle-class jobs and actually do their jobs.
This Malfoy also ate the Ministry canteen's hazardous orange ravioli without complaint; Ginny wasn't sure if that bit was him being too preoccupied with plotting to notice he was ingesting something that boasted a colour commonly associated with toxic waste, or if his tastebuds had just surrendered and died his first morning at the Ministry when he'd made the mistake of drinking its coffee.
Watching him was made rather convenient by the fact that, although they worked in different departments on different floors, they seemed to have the same schedule, even when one of their routines went off-kilter. They usually arrived to work within seconds of each other, and once, when she had been running late, he had dashed in just slightly ahead of her, swearing under his breath, from the looks of it. More than once they had shared a lift, after the fun of timing the exact moment to push the button that would close the doors in each other's faces had worn thin. They took lunch at around the same time, sitting in opposite corners of the canteen, and regardless of what time she left her office for the day, knocking off almost always meant seeing him in the Floo area. Neither of them verbally acknowledged this issue once it became clear that running into each other constantly was going to be a recurring problem; once the seal was broken it would mean the precedent for small talk would be set, and they'd end up mired in obligation to speak to one another when all Ginny really wanted to do was occasionally scowl in his direction if she felt that the status quo needed some re-establishing.
Watching him was also made rather easy by the fact that she was usually good at doing it without being seen. Although she had occasionally hogged her fair share of the spotlight as the baby of the family, growing up with six brothers and then hanging about with The Boy Who Lived naturally meant that there were times when there was no alternative but to stand on the sidelines and quietly observe the goings-on. And with said six brothers who sometimes didn't want a girl interrupting their manly playtime, and with the now defunct Order of the Phoenix often having grown-up meetings behind closed doors, Ginny had developed some talent in quiet observation over the years.
The prickly heat on his skin was the first sign that he was being scrutinised. The second was that Weasley, frowning at a spot directly above his right shoulder, had been pushing the contents of her sad lunch around instead of eating it for the past ten minutes. Actually, that in itself hadn't been much to go on, since she seemed to drape herself in bad humour almost every time they crossed paths, but Draco deliberately caught her eye this time, and the frown that deepened as their eyes met indicated that it was she who had been making his skin crawl.
It was a feeling not unfamiliar to him. People often watched him almost everywhere he went, out of curiosity or suspicion, or sometimes just because he was nice to look at. He didn't bother hiding himself here; after all, he needed to establish himself in the wizarding community as, if not an upstanding citizen, then at least a contributing member of society, and he would be doing his public persona no favours if he flew so low under the radar that he was totally undetectable. Besides, attending spy school with Dennis almost every night was so strenuous in its intensity that not having to be a shadow during the day was quite a relief. And if people wanted to waste their time watching him do scandalous things like fill out paperwork and steep cups of tea, then that was their problem.
Draco cocked an eyebrow at Ginny, a challenge he knew she wouldn't pick up. They seemed to have an unspoken understanding that speaking to one another would only cause trouble that neither of them had the time or inclination to deal with; as far as he could remember, they had managed to have a civil conversation approximately once. She was tiresome when she thought she had the upper hand, and when she knew she had the upper hand, as had once been the case during his fifth year at school, she was just plain violent.
From the corner of his eye he registered her departure as she got up, deposited the remnants of her lunch at the tray return area and left the canteen. Draco took a leisurely swig of his juice and checked his watch, opting to wait a full three minutes before heading back down to his office as well, so there would be less chance of running into her in the Atrium lobby and having to fight their natural inclinations to, well, fight.
As he rounded the corner out of the canteen and towards the lifts, Ginny emerged from the ladies' bathroom, and Draco heaved a quiet sigh to himself, their gazes catching and turning into barely concealed eye-rolls. Whether he intentionally tried to avoid her or not, she always seemed to turn up anyway to breathe his air and occupy his sight and space. And the way she looked at him suggested it was he who had the cheek to exist in the same hemisphere as she did.
The best laid plans of mice and men, Draco thought idly as he pushed the 'down' button for the lifts, often go to shit.
He let her enter first, because he was a gentleman and because he knew it made her uneasy. Behind them, an airborne memo swooped in like a bird of prey, and hovered, jittery, a few inches from the ceiling of the car.
The lift's smooth descent was interrupted suddenly by a deep, sinister creaking. They only had a second to worry about the sound, as it was quickly succeeded by the lift juddering to a halt. The lights flickered for a moment, but, to Ginny and Draco's good fortune, opted to stay on. Above their heads, the paper airplane, charmed to be time-sensitive, panicked.
Ginny, taking her cue from the memo, began a low chant that consisted of a string of 'No's', and scrabbled at the wall with one hand, while the other drew her wand out of her robes, as she wondered how well it would stand up to prying the doors apart.
"Calm down, Weasley," said Draco, trying to keep a stranglehold on his own composure. "You're just making things worse."
Prodding the red panic button at the bottom of the front panel, Draco had the wild suspicion that the universe, the grand high master overseeing the chess game of life, was enjoying itself at their expense.
"Why's it stopped? It runs on bloody magic, for Merlin's sake!" Ginny exclaimed.
"Yes, because all spells last forever," Draco rejoined sarcastically. "We don't have a Maintenance department for nothing, you know. Just like that dilapidated shack you call a home would collapse in a grubby heap if no one were there to mind its upkeep. What's it called again? The Rathole, isn't it?"
"You know perfectly well it isn't," Ginny snapped, and elbowed him aside to push repeatedly at the help button.
"Whossat?" asked a sticky voice.
"We're stuck in the lift," Ginny called out.
"Which one?"
"The one that's stopped working!"
"Six," supplied Draco, indicating with a casual tip of his head the lift number on the side of the entrance framework. From the opposite corner of the lift, he crossed his arms over his chest and radiated smugness.
"Six," hissed Ginny.
"Nothing doing, then," said the voice, which had developed a rather happy pitch to it. "That there is Reggie's department, an' Reg is unavoidably detained at the mo," it explained, carefully enunciating the polysyllabic words with puffy importance.
"And when might Reg un-detain himself?" Ginny demanded in a tone that might have frosted the Sahara over.
"Dunno," said the voice, oblivious. The body attached to the voice probably would have shrugged if they could see it. "Whenever he finishes eating, I suppose. I'll tell 'im you called." There was a soft click, and the voice spoke no more.
Ginny jammed her fist against the help button.
"All Maintenance lines are busy at the moment. Please try again later," said a soothing voice, which produced quite the opposite effect.
Ginny made a sound that couldn't decide if it wanted to meet the world as a grunt or a wail, and cast her eyes wildly about the enclosure in the hopes that an escape hatch would suddenly and miraculously materialise. It didn't.
Draco almost felt sorry for her, but he was saving his sorry for himself; he wasn't much for small spaces either, caged and trapped indefinitely at someone else's whim, be it a biased legal council or an indolent repairman. But there was no sense in the both of them losing their heads over something neither of them could control. Besides, he figured that between Weasley and the memo overhead, which was currently molting confetti, his share of panicking was well covered.
"I spy with my little eye," he said slowly, "something that needs to get itself together and calm the hell down before I have to Stun it for the sake of my own sanity."
"Well, you'll have to forgive me if I don't enjoy being trapped underground for god knows how long with morally ambiguous men!" Ginny shot back.
"Morally ambiguous?" Draco repeated thoughtfully. "I'm shocked, Weasley. Aren't I completely depraved after all?"
She frowned. "I misspoke. I don't know what I was thinking, speaking so highly of you like that."
"Just so we're on the same page."
"You were probably off drowning kittens when they handed out compassion and empathy," she muttered.
"Well, what with you and the rest of the Weasley spawn crowding the trough..."
"Compare me to a farm animal again and I guarantee this wand goes so far up one orifice it'll come out another."
"Right, right, I forgot who I was talking to for a second there. Silly me," said Draco, wondering where his sense of self-preservation had gone off to, and whether it intended to come back for him. He forged on without it, the benefits of the distraction of sparring with Ginny outweighing that of standing in silence and going mad from claustrophobia. "Well, you know what they say. Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
"What? Who says that?" she interjected, and realised belatedly, and with dissatisfaction, that the time for objecting to being called incompetent had passed in her haste to make him warrant his claims.
Draco shrugged. "Muggle fellow. Wrote weird books," he said. At her increasingly suspicious look, he added, "I had a lot of time on my hands in prison."
"Oh, prison," Ginny said. "You know, you're living proof that the penal system doesn't work. You came out as awful as you went in."
"To be fair, I was removed from the premises prematurely, by you, no less. Who knows what kind of great philanthropist I might have become but for your untimely intervention? One might say this is partially your fault."
Ginny scoffed. "Please. If I'd had the choice, I would have definitely not been the one to let you out."
"Oh, there's always a choice," Draco said airily, tilting his head upwards, his gaze following the dejected trail of the paper airplane, which had given itself over to a bout of depression.
She shot him an impudent look. "I don't remember that being your defence in court."
"I chose to save my parents. Although with one now living out the rest of his life in jail, the other still struggling to mend a broken spirit and me trying to rebuild some semblance of a normal life as an ex-convict, perhaps I should have refused to obey the Dark Lord's orders. Of course, we'd all be dead, but it wouldn't have been a bad deal, in all, when you come right down to it," he mused.
Ginny blinked and gaped at him as his words sunk in. "Are you saying you'd rather have left your parents to die at Voldemort's hands?"
"No," he said evenly. "Which is why I didn't. But perhaps now you appreciate the complexity of that little dilemma. The choice is always there, though sometimes you end up losing everything no matter what you do." His mouth twisted in a frown. He ought to have felt the thrill of scoring a direct hit against her rigid ethical code, as she looked more than a little perturbed, but he hadn't allowed himself to dwell on that memory, and its resurfacing now brought with it a pain that still felt distressingly raw.
The tinny melody of a Warbeck classic wafted through once more as the lift staggered and sputtered to life, giving Ginny no chance to respond, though she would have been at a loss for words anyway, and giving Draco no need to backtrack to surer footing. Ascending a couple of floors, the lift opened its doors to reveal the Atrium lobby they had just left before getting stuck.
"Well," said Draco, trying for nonchalance. "I guess Reg came off his lunch break."
They both exited the lift hastily, neither really wanting to take their chances again at the moment with that particular contraption. They stood side by side for a moment, feeling unsure of the next step; something had shifted during their entrapment -- a marker gradually and reluctantly pushed along the spectrum of love and hate, one notch away from abhorrence and towards neutrality. Much of their forced time together had been spent being rude to each other, but they both recognised the welcome distraction the other provided against their own fears of confinement, even if it was in the form of insults; being grateful didn't seem an appropriate thing to do, not without revealing more of themselves to each other, but it didn't feel right to just leave it hanging in the air, either.
"I think I'm going to take the stairs," Ginny managed finally, and walked off uncertainly.
"Good," said Draco quickly, just to have something to say and to have the last word to close the conversation.
He looked around the Atrium, noting, not for the first time, that aside from the visitor's entrance, the only points of entry and egress in the Ministry were the Floos; Apparation was heavily regulated within the building now for security reasons, and not wanting to have to explain himself to thick-headed guards, Draco made his way to the visitor's telephone box, gathering the remains of the calm he hadn't spent in the lift from trying to maintain a stiff upper lip and figuring he had enough left to endure a short stint in the small box that would take him outside.
Draco pushed out of the telephone box as soon as it clicked into place on the Muggle pavement and took a great gulp of air. It was cold and had the perpetual tinge of petrol fumes and cigarette smoke that hung like drapes in the middle of the crowded city, but it felt fresher than any air he would have breathed underground inside the Ministry. He usually didn't mind being inside the building, as the weather scenes charmed outside the windows by Ministry Maintenance tricked his brain into believing he wasn't working several floors below street level -- six feet under, his mind now interjected helpfully. However, after prison, he had not only developed a very healthy appreciation for the outdoors, but also a strong dislike of staying too long in small, enclosed spaces; getting trapped in the lift only brought that discomfort further to the forefront of his mind, and trotting back down to his underground office like everything was all right was not something he could successfully process just now.
Instead, he leant gingerly against a wall that had been tagged so many times with all manner of paint, torn posters and dried glue it was beginning to look like a giant, carefully fashioned mosaic, and watched the Muggles go about their business; they paid no attention to him, mostly because he didn't want them to.
He heard the quiet rumble of the telephone box bringing someone else up, and didn't bother to work up the feeling of surprise when he saw Ginny step out.
"What are you doing here?" she asked, spotting him right away.
Draco looked at her wearily. "Don't let's start this again."
She let a few beats pass. "I just needed some air," she explained, though he didn't see why she felt the need to, and came to stand against the wall as well, an arm's length away from him.
The musical cacophony of Muggle city life was enough to fill the silence that loomed between them as they each willed their anxieties away on the drifting wind. In that moment they had more in common with each other than they had ever done in their entire lives, and Draco felt oddly glad for her presence, even if she was a Weasley.
Author notes: "Violence is the refuge of the incompetent" is attributed to Isaac Asimov.
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