It was balmy and lonely, and yet, Ginny loved it. There was a calming silence to this solitude that came as a welcome contrast to the seemingly endless cacophony of a nine-person household, a hectic boarding school, and finally, the discordant crashing of war. While the Wizarding community of England began to salve its wounds and restore order, Ginny had escaped the smoking wreckage of her society and flown south for the winter. She’d found she was rather taken with Australia; it was so very alien to her that she could ignore the raw wounds, or deal with them as she saw fit. Having grown up with an interfering, if well meaning family, she revelled in the anonymity, coming to appreciate Percy’s thirst for striking out on his own and achieving based on his own merits. By the time the war shuddered to a halt, she’d had more than enough of being coddled; though it had taken a trans-hemispheric migration for certain people around her to recognise and respect her need for independence.

She smiled, continuing her slow, barefoot stroll, ankle-deep in the lapping coolness of the Indian Ocean, trying not to notice how the deep blue colour of the water brought to mind piercing eyes and the rustling of ink-stained pages. I’ll be home before Easter, she thought with a silent, decisive nod. It’s not as if they can be annoyed at me for missing Christmas, we’ve spent loads of them apart, what with school and Bill and Charlie working abroad. Comfortably assured by this reasoning, she made her way back up the beach, across the grass and the searing bitumen of the road to the beach house she’d rented. Distracted by the happy ghosts of Christmases past and intent on a cool drink and a trashy romance novel with which to while away the afternoon, she never noticed the hooded, silver eyes watching her.

He’d always been drawn to her. It could’ve been the claret colour of her hair, the paradox of disciplined fury she displayed on the quidditch pitch, or the shadows that never quite left her eyes after her first year; he’d stopped bothering to analyse her magnetism long ago, silently bowing to the hold she had over him, a magic all its own. While he’d never acknowledged it to anyone, never spoken her name unless someone else had deigned to bring her up in conversation, he’d gone out of his way to ensure she’d survived, and kept tabs on her whereabouts. Silent, subtle charms had woven them together, though she’d never known. A boy many had thought devoid of emotion, he’d vicariously experienced the riot of loud, colourful feelings she exerted; a technicolour montage that played against his eyelids long after they’d closed. The reactions he’d had to clamp down in his bid to remain in the Dark Lord’s good books had been compensated for by the surges of exuberance and sorrow the war had brought out of her. Unbeknownst to her, Ginny Weasley had been his conduit, his confidant; his only anchor to true humanity, after his mother became a casualty of Lucius’ ambition, legendary even among Slytherins.

He’d followed the pull of her all the way to a godforsaken, sunburnt country, amazed at how the red earth echoed the richness of her hair. The beauty and terror of each reflected and refracted by the other. Today, the jewel sea had been the perfect blue backdrop to her contentedness, the darker hues of the cold water on the ocean floor the unacknowledged but ever-present current of unease the Dark Lord’s younger self had left her with. It was perhaps this stunning contrast that pulled Draco closer to her than he’d ever dared be. At once both wholesome and yet so broken, he found he finally had to grasp what he’d only ever observed.

The delightfully trashy bodice-ripper was just starting to get juicy when Ginny found herself pinned to her chair by a man she’d assumed dead, silently transfixed by a gaze that, while a dull pewter to Tom’s brilliant sapphire, held the same shadows and secrets she’d never escaped. Weaving his fingers deep into the captivating red tresses, he pulled her face close to his. “Merry Christmas, Weasley”, he muttered, and Ginny felt the low words brush her lips an instant before his mouth met hers.


~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The cascade of emotions crashed through and over them both, like the twin falls at Kakadu she’d been so very enamoured of. He smiled, settling in above her and continuing the dance of lips tongue and teeth, while beneath him her very distracted brain flitted from thought to thought like the Blue Wrens that nested in the bushes nearby. It was wrong, he was wrong, and he was evil, but he was Tom and Not Tom all at once and he felt so good and warm even when he should have been evil and cold.

Finally unearthing his own feelings of happiness and satisfaction amongst the confusion and conflict she threatened to smother him with, Draco pushed himself closer, attempting to share his feelings through the magical connection he’d forged, reciprocating where she’d unknowingly given so often. It was then, in the intense heat of an Australian Christmas, that he truly believed it could be better to give than receive.