Malfoy stowed Harry’s wand inside his robes and left the room smirking.
--The scene in Umbridge’s office when Draco goes to get Snape, OotP.

It’s because of me Malfoy’s stuck back in Umbridge’s office with giant flying bogeys attacking him.
--Ginny to Harry in the forest, a little later in OotP.

There were several long scratches running the length of Ginny’s cheek.
-- Same scene as above.


Did anyone else think there were a lot of unanswered questions between those two scenes in OotP? What REALLY happened after Harry and Hermione left? How exactly did Ron get all the wands back—or was it someone else? Who scratched Ginny, and why? Why did Ginny hex Draco when we’re clearly told that someone else was guarding her? And how exactly did Umbridge find out so fast that Harry was in her office in the first place? And skipping ahead a tad, why didn’t anyone seem to notice that Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle were hexed within an inch of their lives when the Hogwarts Express stopped at King’s Cross at the end of term? Why didn’t the Malfoys notice last year? Well, as so often happens, a horde of plot kittens escaped from the plates on the walls of Umbridge’s office and have been mewing piteously at me ever since (they’re worse than the bunnies, believe me.) The result was this fic. The sequel is Heavenly Creatures, and the third of the trilogy is Man In Black, the highly NC-17 one.

BTW, Ginny remembers the lyrics to Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Wave. Hey! I actually wrote about Quidditch! Never thought I’d see the day.

Part One: The Quidditch Pitch



Begin as you mean to go on, Molly Weasley had always said.

Ginny’s mother had a host of homely sayings—a stitch in time saves nine, look before you leap, least said, soonest mended. But that was her favorite. “Begin as you mean to go on,” she’d told her eleven-year-old daughter as she stood on Platform 9 and ¾ on September first four years ago, her pointed little face clean-scrubbed, her heart pounding with the nervous excitement of going away to school for the first time. Her robes were second-hand, patched and darned and taken up at the hem, and the far-from new leather of her shoes kept threatening to peep through the Anti-Scuff charms placed on them. “You’ll do all right,” her mother had added briskly. Just put your best foot forward, and always remember that you’re a Weasley. As good as anyone else, and a sight better, too.”

Her mother knew what had happened a few days earlier, when Ginny had stood outside the entrance of Flourish and Blotts with her grubby used cauldron and her shining new schoolbooks, waiting for Harry Potter. She hadn’t been there when Draco Malfoy had sneered at her daughter and insulted Harry, or when Lucius had first started an undignified fistfight with Arthur Weasley, but she had heard about it all. Ginny’s entire family had showed a subtle, unspoken shift in sympathy for her, a closing-of-the-ranks, and, indeed a recognition of shared experience. She’d run the Malfoy gauntlet, now, and in one form or another, her parents and brothers had as well. But something about it had been different, for her, and when she replayed that first meeting in her head, as she sometimes did in the years that followed, she was more and more sure of it.

Draco Malfoy had stopped walking past the bookshop, simply stopped in his tracks and looked at her for a moment before Harry had appeared. It was a look so strange that she’d had no frame of reference in which to place it, at the time. He’d been a child and so was she, and it wasn’t until Ginny was fourteen and a half years old and being kissed by Michael Corner in a deserted Charms classroom that she understood what that look might have meant. There was something more to that look as well, and it was something she’d yet to understand, that winter that was halfway through her fourth year at Hogwarts. But of course the memory of that day in front of Flourish and Blotts had been colored by everything that came after it.

Begin as you mean to go on. The Malfoys, father and son, had certainly both done that, with her.

But then in December of her fourth year, it all began to suffer a sea change, into something rich and decidedly strange, and when Ginny tried to trace back the tangled threads of how it had all begun, she always ended up at the same place. That sparkling clear winter morning on the Quidditch pitch. Much later, long after she had walked a dark and dangerous road from her schooldays, she would wonder if anything she could have said, or done, or left undone, could have changed the final outcome. But she doubted it.

It was so early in the morning that the first lemon-pale rays of sun were just starting to filter over the horizon. It would be another bright, windy, chilly day, Ginny could tell. A yawn threatened to split her face in half. Dear Goddess, but she was out of her mind to be up this early on a Saturday. But it was the only time she could be sure that the Quidditch pitch would be deserted.

And the tryouts were less than a week away.

Her heart thumped in her chest as she pulled her broom up to cruising height, partly from the exercise, partly from nervousness at the sheer gall it took to even try this. They were going to laugh, all of them, Angelina and Alicia and Katie and… whoever else showed up. The Slytherins. They’d been at every practice so far and this was their triumph, after all. Malfoy’s triumph. Everyone knew that he’d engineered all the events that had led up to these new tryouts, from “Weasley Is Our King” to the mysterious incident at the Slytherin-Gryffindor game that had ended with Harry, Fred, and George kicked off the team and banned from playing Quidditch. Ginny had never been able to learn exactly what happened, but she’d picked up enough.

She didn’t know who the figure on the other broom was at first; they were at a height so much greater than hers that it was impossible to see any features clearly, just a vague outline, and the glint of sun on blond hair. He was holding something… a parchment, perhaps? Yes, he was scribbling something on it with a silver quill; the sun was glinting on that as well. She thought it might be Zacharias Smith at first. A bolt of irritation went through her at that. She’d never liked him much anyway, and the first game after the re-formation of the team would be against Hufflepuff. Who was their keeper; Summerby… that was it. But Smith might have turned up simply to make her nervous and to take notes on her performance. She wouldn’t put it past him. She grimly practiced her moves, zooming from one end of the pitch to the other, banking hard at each turn, controlling her broom with little presses of her thighs, showing off a little when she saw that he still hovered motionless above her. She’d give him something to spy on, if he liked. He ought to come to practice more often. My flying usually isn’t this good. Then, still holding his position, the other flyer dropped in altitude until he grew to human size.

By the time she realized that it wasn’t Zacharias Smith at all, it was too late to call back her last thought.

A pang of actual, physical illness went all through her when she recognized Draco Malfoy. It was mingled with hatred, and with a heat that spread to every part of her body, setting her fingers and toes tingling; she lost control of her broom momentarily and nearly fell off, swinging round in a circle. “You!” she hissed.

His eyes raked her, up and down. “Keeping your seat all right, Weasley?” he asked in a voice that sounded almost kindly.

“Don’t talk to me!” Ginny pulled her broom up closer to him, sticking a finger almost in his face to emphasize her words. The Comet bucked under her nervously and she fought to stay on it once more.

“Pity,” Malfoy drawled. “And you were doing so well. For a Weasley, that is.”

She didn’t trust herself to say anything more. His mocking laughter followed her all the way off the Quidditch pitch.

Afterwards, Ginny was furious with herself. She’d allowed that prat to scare her away from practice; she wouldn’t let it happen again. She drove herself much harder in the next week than she otherwise might have done, and almost hoped that he’d show up for the tryouts. But he didn’t. Neither did any of the other Slytherins. Ginny still felt the anger that had surged through her when she’d looked up and seen him on the pitch, however, and it seemed to lend new speed to all her movements. She saw Angelina’s eyes widen when she caught the Snitch ahead of everyone else, and knew even before the announcement came that afternoon that she had accomplished what she had hardly even dared to dream was possible. She was on the team.

“If Fred and George were still with us,” said Angelina the next morning at breakfast, with a sort of resolute, do-or-die cheerfulness, “we’d be close to an all-Weasley team, now wouldn’t we?” Ginny cut her eyes at their empty seats, and hers were not the only pair that did, but nobody said a word. They rarely made it to breakfast these days.

“Yes, well, if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be the Knight Bus and we could ride in her, now couldn’t we?” Ron rhetorically asked his scrambled eggs in a gloomy fashion.

“You don’t want your little sister on the team at all, is that it?” Ginny asked waspishly. Ever since the tryouts, she had felt oddly snappish. No, if truth be told, her unsettled mood had begun before that. She didn’t want to think about exactly when.

“You know that’s not it.” Ron nibbled at a piece of toast and put it down again, as if chewing and swallowing just represented too much effort for him to make at the moment.

“So what is it then?” Ginny poked viciously at her sliced apple.

“I don’t know. But something’s odd.” Ginny’s brother turned and looked at her very directly. “I’ve never seen you fly like that, Ginny.”

“You never really paid much attention before, now did you?”

“Suppose I haven’t.” Ron sighed, running a hand over his face. “Hermione told me about the way you used to practice with our brooms by stealing them out of the broom shed at home… but it’s more than that. You had something at practice I’ve never seen from you before. A kind of determination… almost an anger. That’s what got you through. And I wonder, Ginny. Where did it come from?”

Ginny ducked her head, in case the inner blush she felt really was rising on her cheeks. “Rubbish.”

Ginny knew she was no natural Seeker, not like Harry. She didn’t really have the grace and coordination. She’d make a much better Keeper, she realized. Sometimes she thought that what she liked most about Quidditch was the comforting rules of the game. They were so straight, so clear, so black and white. So unlike life. There was more of Percy of her than she realized, she thought with a shudder as she headed for the pitch one early morning. She wanted some additional practice on her own. But she hadn’t been practicing long when she saw him again.

I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me fall off my broom, she thought. And she did not; she drove herself hard and kept herself under control, and her flying was better than it had nearly ever been. Every moment, Ginny expected him to swoop down closer to her, to hear his nasty drawling voice spitting out insults, to see his pale pointed face suddenly looking into hers. But he stayed just close enough for her to see clearly who he was, and never came closer. He continued to write something on a parchment the entire time, and that piqued her curiousity more than anything else. Ginny had enchanted a rubber ball to serve as a mock Snitch, and as she swooped and dove after it, she wondered what on earth he could be writing. Maybe he was taking notes on her flying style in case Gryffindor did end up playing Slytherin in the final match. If her team beat Hufflepuff and then Hufflepuff didn’t win against Slytherin, that was what would happen, after all. But if that was the case, then why didn’t Malfoy show up at the Gryffindor practices anymore?

Ginny didn’t realize she was staring at Malfoy until it was too late, and he looked up and smirked. Then he raised one hand and waved at her, slowly, almost lazily. Maybe he was busy doing something nastier. Writing new verses of Weasley Is Our King just for her, for instance. At the thought, Ginny’s anger exploded all over again. Unfortunately, she was crouching on the end of her Comet and reaching for the Snitch at the time. She overbalanced, and grabbed wildy at the broomstick with one hand, barely catching it, pulling herself out of her tumbling freefall only after she’d dropped some distance. He did fly up to her now, with an easy, pantherlike grace she knew she could never match.

“All the Weasleys have the same weakness, don’t they?” he asked once he was close enough for her to hear him.

She glared at him, still catching her breath.

“Temper,” he continued. “Let me give you a tip, oh littlest Weasley spawn. When you lose it, you give your opponents a weapon measured to their hands.”

Her face whitened, and she turned and fled without answering. Once again, his laughter followed her much further than she really thought it should have done.

But in the darkest part of the night, when she stared at the maroon canopy of her bed in the Gryffindor dormitory, unable to sleep, she knew that he was right.


“You’re good,” Anthony Summerby said in a sneery sort of voice as she jostled him during the third quarter of the Hufflepuff-Slytherin game. “For a girl.”

She did not answer him. She had been tracking him for the first half of the game, since Angelina had decided that might be a strategy that would work, letting him find the Snitch. She was quicker than he was, and it wasn’t a very fast Snitch. But he wasn’t very good at finding it, either, so she had switched to scanning for it on her own, and he had begun to track her, flying so close that she was sure more than once that at least one of them was going to end up falling to the ground.

“I don’t expect much from girls, usually,” he continued with a leer. “But in your case, I might be willing to make an exception.” Hufflepuffs could be every bit as nasty as Slytherins, Ginny thought. But they weren’t as creative about it.

“Shut up,” she said shortly. Hufflepuff was up by one hundred and fifty points, so she didn’t dare to catch the Snitch yet even if she did see it. This was going to be a long and irritating vigil.

He pushed closer. “Oh, c’mon Weasley, just a little feel. Remember what the Sorting Hat said? Isn’t it time for a bit of Inter-House cooperation? And don’t pretend you don’t know what it’s all about. You’ve been shagging a Ravenclaw for months now; why not spread the goods around? I’m sure you’re not so shy with Corner—“ He reached towards her. She hauled back and slapped him.

“And—wait, wait a moment, something rather interesting’s going on at the other side of the pitch,” announced Lee Jordan. “Looks like a very personal foul on Weasley—no, wait, on Summerby—it’s a bit hard to tell, isn’t it? Looks to me like one cancels out the other—“

And as Summerby gave a choked cry and nearly fell off his broom, Ginny leaned forward, her eyes snapping golden fire. “Try that again!” she said. “Just try it!” But from her new position, she saw a flash of real gold, hovering at his ankle. The Snitch. Without thinking, she eased over her broom in a backwards roll and grabbed it, holding the little ball so hard in her anger that its wings fluttered frantically against her palm.

“And Ginny Weasley’s got the Snitch! Oh, good show, Weasley! Of course—“ Lee continued a bit awkwardly. “Since Hufflepuff’s up by a hundred and sixty points, they win the match, don’t they?”

Oh dear. Ginny didn’t even see Summerby’s gloating face as she descended slowly to the ground, still clutching the Snitch in her hand. The stadium erupted in a confusing mixture of cheers and jeers, mingled with a surprisingly faint strand of that awful song. She’d have thought that this would be the ideal situation to sing it with gusto. Unconsciously, her eyes sought out and found a dazzlingly blond head as she trudged past the Slytherin stands. He was sitting on a lower level, and she could see his expression. She fully expected it to be gloating, but it was utterly blank, and it did not change when he saw her. She felt oddly chastened. Malfoy told me days ago what I was doing wrong, she thought. How strange, that he actually should have helped me—or might have done, if I hadn’t lost my temper with that idiot Summerby.



“You know what’s really odd, though?” piped up Jack Sloper as the team trailed back to the changing rooms.

“What?” Angelina asked wearily. “The way you managed to hit me in the mouth with your bat?”

“Er—no. I was thinking something more along of the lines of how the Slytherins are still singing Weasley Is Our King, but their hearts just don’t seem to be in it the way they were before. And Malfoy hasn’t written a song about Ginny.”

“That is odd,” said Katie, her brow puckering. “You’d think he would have done. Or come up with new verses for her at least. Wonder why he didn’t?”

Everyone glanced at Ron, who looked much the same as he did after every game, and every practice—as if he had conjured up his own personal storm cloud, which he was carrying with him everywhere he went. “Did someone ask me something?” he mumbled.

“No,” said Alicia, hurriedly.

“We were just wondering why Malfoy wasn’t leading all the Slytherins in a chorus of a new song about Ginny,” said Andrew Kirke. “Perhaps something about, ‘two are down, and two to go, a plague of Weasleys—‘ what rhymes with ‘go’? Snow? Slow? Impetigo?”

“Andrew,” said Angelina, “have you thought about your future career? Only I really hope you aren’t planning to go into diplomatic relations. What about training security trolls?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Ron gloomily. “Malfoy figures it would be a waste of his time to write anything new, I expect. Why beat a dead hippogriff?”

“No, it really is strange,” said Katie thoughtfully. “What d’you think?”

She was looking straight at Ginny when she asked the question. Ginny mumbled something and walked faster.


Whenever Ginny practiced by herself in the early mornings after that, she kept an eye out for Malfoy. I won’t let him sneak up on me ever, ever again, she thought. But he never came. In fact, all of the Slytherins had stopped coming to the Gryffindor practices entirely, even Pansy Parkinson, who was the last holdout. “Why would they bother?” Ron had a way of asking, in a resigned tone of voice that would have made the happiest person on earth head for the nearest bridge and find a good vantage point from which to jump. Ginny told herself that she was relieved. She spent a great deal of time figuring the odds of Gryffindor playing Slytherin in the final match of the year.

She also had a long conference with Hermione, during which the other girl advised against Ginny telling her brother what Anthony Summerby had done.

“Not that he doesn’t deserve to get in trouble,” Hermione said. “But Ron would go after him, and you know what our position is with Umbridge. She’s just waiting for an excuse. He’d get expelled, even if it wasn’t his fault.” She bit her lip. “I wish you could report it to the proper authorities. I hate that it happened to you, but—well, if Ron heard about it—“

“Umbridge wouldn’t need to come up with an excuse,” Ginny said grumpily. “Ron would kill Summerby with his bare hands and get sentenced to life in Azkaban, and that’d pretty much take care of it.”

“You’re right.” Hermione sighed.

“Isn’t there anything we can do? Something that couldn’t be traced back to us? Something that didn’t need wands or even magic, maybe?”

The other girl’s eyes crinkled in mischief, and she glanced around the common room to make sure they were alone. “Well,” she said quietly, “I’ve heard that Muggles get good results from putting saltpeter in food.”

The two girls found it surprisingly easy to spike Summerby’s pumpkin juice the next day. And according to gossip they overheard from some Hufflepuff girls, their efforts were quite, quite successful.

“Let’s never tell the boys about this,” gasped Hermione after they had rolled on Ginny’s bed laughing for several minutes that afternoon.

“Never,” agreed Ginny, reaching up to her bed for a pillow to muffle her giggles.

Hermione leaned against the foot of the bed, pulling herself to a sitting position. She propped her head in one hand and looked at Ginny searchingly. “I’m glad to see you so happy,” she said.

“I’m always happy,” said Ginny, turning away a little.

Hermione shook her head. “No, you’re not. Oh Ginny, you can’t fool me! Harry and Ron—well, I’m never quite sure which of them is more emotionally immature. Ron in particular… he sees exactly what he wants to see, and that’s the beginning and the end of it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Ginny made as if to get up. Hermione took her wrist.

“They think you’re happy because you don’t talk about what’s happened to you. You put up a good front, Ginny—and you have for a long time.”

“What business is it of—“

“Because I’m your friend,” Hermione said firmly.

“I’m dealing with everything all right,” Ginny said in a surly voice. “What do you expect me to do, mope about all the time?”

“No, of course not. But—“ Hermione hesitated. “These past few months, you’ve been—different. It started right before you made the Quidditch team, actually.”

Ginny swallowed. “Different in what way?”

“I don’t know. Not unhappier, maybe. But more unsettled. More irritated, but also more—well, more alive. Sometimes it’s actually as if you have a purpose you didn’t have before… and I wonder, Ginny, what it is.”

Ginny loosened her friend’s fingers from her wrist and stood up, hoping her face showed nothing of what she felt. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Hermione.”


She and Michael Corner lay next to each other on his bed in the Ravenclaw dormitory later the same night, during one of the rare hours when they could count on his roommates being gone. She had been able to sneak out of Gryffindor. He had been nuzzling at her neck and she had been letting him do it, staring up at the ceiling, but abruptly he stopped.

“Your heart doesn’t seem to be in it tonight, Ginny,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

She sat up. “What have you been telling everybody about what we’ve been doing?”

“What are you talking about? I don’t tell anybody anything.”

“Oh really? That’s not what Summerby said. According to him, you’re bragging to everyone that we’ve been shagging up a storm.”

“I didn’t tell Anthony Summerby anything at all! Why would I talk to him? And anyway—“ he turned away from her slightly. “It isn’t as if there’s anything to tell.” His voice was petulant.

“Right,” she snapped, pushing him further away from her. She didn’t even know where all this irritation with Michael had come from, but she seemed to be drawing from a bottomless well of it now. “There’s nothing that gets a girl in the mood better than knowing your idiot roommates could come galumphing through that door any second—“

“It’s not just that, Ginny!” he said hotly. “You never let me get anywhere with you; why not? I’ve never really touched you or seen you naked or anything! When we first started going out, you seemed so—well, so different to the way you do now. Much more interested in me.”

Ginny remembered the letters they’d exchanged all summer, and the lovely hot snogging sessions in nooks and corners that autumn, once they’d both returned to school. She knew he was right. “Maybe I don’t want to go that far yet with anyone,” she said, avoiding his gaze. “I’m only fourth year, do I really have to—“

“And loads of fourth-years have started sleeping with their boyfriends already,” he said doggedly. “You’re fifteen now, and I’m sixteen... We could.”

“Except that I don’t want to!” blurted Ginny.

There was a long moment of silence.

“So that’s it then,” said Michael.

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“No. You did.” He felt around for his socks.

“Please don’t be angry.”

He sighed. “I’m not.”

Michael walked her to back to the portrait hole of her dormitory and kissed her once before letting her go. She knew from the feel of his lips that things were not quite over between them, not yet, but that they soon would be. She tried to feel sorrow at the knowledge, but she could not.


Then Slytherin was beaten by Hufflepuff, and Angelina was visibly relieved. “Not that they won’t still be there singing that horrible song,” she confided to Ginny, “but—well—it won’t be as bad—don’t you think?” Ginny had merely nodded. Whether you agreed or disagreed with Angelina, it was best simply to nod. She knew that she would never see Malfoy alone again. Whatever strange reason he’d had for coming in those early mornings on the Quidditch pitch, it was over now. Whatever indefinable thing had been between them, that was finished as well, stillborn before it ever had a chance to breathe air.

But she was wrong.

One early morning when dawn had just stained the sky, when Ginny was practicing by herself for the final match against Ravenclaw, she saw Malfoy again. He hovered above her, not exactly close but not as far away as he had been that first time either, scratching on a parchment with a silver quill. She watched him for a long time without saying anything. The same emotions as before had coursed through her at first sight of him—hatred, anger, a grim determination to show him what she could do on a broom—but now a new one was mastering all the rest. Curiosity.

Hatred was all she should really be feeling. She knew that he was behind the breakup of the DA meetings. Well, perhaps not precisely behind it—Umbridge had been that—but Ginny certainly knew that Malfoy was the one who’d tipped off that hideous toad of a woman several weeks before, and had also been the one who’d caught Harry that night. But there was still that lingering curiosity, and Ginny found that she needed it satisfied. She felt more genuinely confused than anything else, because she realized that she no longer had any idea why he was coming out to watch her. There was no point in learning the Gryffindor strategy; Slytherin had no chance of playing them that year. He hadn’t been writing new verses of Weasley Is Our King, as the Slytherins had never sung them. So why was he here? She pulled up next to him, her broom hovering parallel with his.

“Malfoy,” she said briefly.

He touched two fingers to his forehead, as if in salute. “Weasley,” he said. His voice was low, drawling, almost intimate. Her hackles rose at the sound of it. Whatever it is he’s planning, I’m not going to let him get away with it.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she asked without preamble.

He shook his head, the faint smile still on his face. “Manners, Weasley, manners. You skip breakfast for these practices of yours, don’t you? Biscuit?” He offered her a tin from his robes. It was Mummy Mabel’s Magical Shortbread—Lemon, Orange, Citron, Butterscotch, Treacle, and Chocolate Flavor in Each Bite! Her favorite. Her mouth watered. She shook her head, keeping her eyes on him.

“Pity. It’s very good.” Malfoy took one himself, and the delicious smell wafted up to her nose as he bit into it. His teeth were very white and very sharp. “Ready for the match?” he asked in conversational tones.

He was being civil. She hadn’t even realized he was capable of it. It put her on her guard more than anything else could have done. “Yes,” she said.

“No, you’re not.”

Ginny glared at him. “So you’ve come to insult me. I should have known. You probably poisoned the shortbread, too. Now if you’ll kindly get out of my—“

Malfoy popped another piece in his mouth. “Yes, that’s right, Weasley. That’s why I’m eating it. I’m going to kill myself on the Quidditch pitch for unrequited love. I’ve admired you from afar for a long time, you see, and—“

Ginny had heard enough. She turned and spurred her broom away from him with a violent motion. He tracked her without the faintest effort.

“—knowing that as a Weasley, you’re infinitely and unfathomably beneath me, I’m sorry to say, our love must always remain forbidden—because unfortunately you’re from the branch of the family that so recently began to wear shoes—“

Ginny pulled up so sharply that she was sure he would run right into her, but he did not. “You know about that?” she demanded, shocked. “That we’re related?” She had known ever since that summer at Grimmauld Place because Sirius Black had once showed her the family tapestry, but she hadn’t dreamed that Malfoy would know.

“Of course I know, my little third-cousin-once-removed. But back to the point. Lately my feelings for you have ripened, rather like your brother’s Quidditch uniform—does he ever wash it? He may not realize that the house-elves will do, if you leave it in the laundry pile, which I suppose comes from there never having been any at your house. At any rate, my refined sensibilities have thankfully taken a much finer, purer route, into something rather like—dare I call it--”

Ginny gave him a savage push. He moved backwards a few feet but regained his balance without difficulty. She was hurled towards him by forward momentum and was spared falling fifty feet to the ground only by the fact that he stopped her. He was very lithe and taut under the black robes he wore; more finely woven and softer than the standard issue school robes, she was sure, and she could feel his sinewy muscles moving and contracting to hold her up.

“Let go of me,” she said once she could speak again.

Malfoy raised an eyebrow. “No word of thanks for saving you from falling to your death?”

“I wouldn’t have fallen if you hadn’t gotten me so angry in the first place!”

He looked at her, and when he spoke again, all mockery was suddenly gone from his voice.

“That’s why you’re not ready for the match, Weasley.”

She hovered where she was for a long time after he left, looking after him.

Malfoy’s words echoed in Ginny’s head all during the final match, no matter how hard she tried to block them out. And she didn’t want to remember thing said. She wanted to feel nothing at all but hatred when she thought of him. Because undoubtedly he was getting worse. She knew that he was behind the breakup of the DA meetings. Well, perhaps not precisely behind it—Umbridge had been that—but Ginny certainly knew that Malfoy was the one who’d tipped off that hideous toad of a woman several weeks before, and had also been the one who’d caught Harry that night. Yet she remembered and remembered those steady, oddly sober last words of his. That’s why you’re not ready for the match, Weasley. That’s why you’re not ready for the match. That’s why you’re not—

“Stop it,” she actually mumbled to herself more than once.

Time seemed compressed, and so did space. There was only a blur of differently colored sections waving from the stands; the figures of the other players moving above and below and around her in streaks of red and gold or yellow and blue; the nervous presence of her brother she always sensed somewhere behind her, hovering at the goalposts, and the one thought in her mind. That Snitch, that stupid Snitch. I’m not going to let anyone or anything distract me from it. Nothing’s going to upset me, or make me angry. I’m just going to focus on finding that Snitch. She even managed to drown out Lee Jordan’s voice, which seemed to be sounding increasingly agitated.

“And Davies takes the Quaffle immediately, Ravenclaw Captain Davies with the Quaffle, he dodges Johnson, he dodges Bell, he dodges Spinnet as well… He’s going straight for goal! He’s going to shoot—and—and—“ Lee swore very loudly. “And he’s scored.”

Ginny kept circling the pitch in slow, looping movements, doing her best to block out Cho Chang, who was trailing her, looking for the elusive flash of gold. More than once she heard a vast groan of disappointment from the Gryffindor section of the stands, interspersed with a chorus of jeering that she supposed must have come from the Slytherins. Without turning around, she knew that Ron had let in another goal. She did her best to ignore it all. When there was an extended tussle at the Ravenclaw end that involved Katie getting knocked off her broom to be narrowly rescued by Angelina, Ginny swooped over to Ron, hovering in front of the centre goal post.

“You’ve simply got to keep your temper better, Ron,” she said.

“I don’t need advice from you,” he replied, running a hand through his hair so that every strand stood on end, as if he’d stuck his finger into one of the electric wall sockets Arthur Weasley was forever experimenting with in the garage at home.

“That’s the only reason you’re letting those goals in,” Ginny persisted. “You get nervous and flustered and then-“

“D’you think I don’t know that? I’m about one second from throwing up all over the goalposts,” Ron said tersely. “I am using all my energy to not spew, and if I have to waste any of it talking to you—“

Ginny gave up. Well, she thought glumly, I tried.

She had no trouble keeping her own temper, at least; she felt as cool and collected on this warm spring day as if she were encased in a block of ice. Everything seemed very far away and remote—the colorful figures in the stadium far below, the blurred forms of her teammates, the spacious sky she kept scanning for the Snitch. Several times she thought she saw it, and once went into a precipitous dive she pulled out of just in time to avoid smashing into the ground. Cho Chang was tracking her, but her movements were oddly sluggish. When they flew more closely together, Ginny saw that the other girl looked tired and dispirited, her normally glossy black hair lank and dull, her dark eyes veiled. Cho wasn’t flying at all well. She gave Ginny’s temper nothing to feed on, but Ginny rather thought that all her anger at the Ravenclaw girl had long burnt itself out, anyway. Strange, how much I used to hate her once… now, I feel rather sorry for her, I think.

It was shaping up to be a goalkeeper’s game. Some of them turned out like that; the Snitch simply never showed itself long enough to be caught, and whatever the Seekers did ended up being almost unimportant. None of the Ravenclaws even bothered to try to foul Ginny, and her team was likewise ignoring Cho. They had more than enough to keep them busy.

Davies had obviously figured out what sort of game they were playing, and during a time-out he held a hasty, whispered conference with his team. After that, they zoomed back to the pitch and pursued the new strategy. Ginny kept seeing its results out of the corner of her eye as she wove in and out, and she groaned inwardly.

Katie, who was usually the strong linchpin of the Chasers, seemed to still be weak from her earlier accident. She was barely hanging onto her broom, her face pale and sweaty. The Ravenclaw Chasers outmaneuvered her with ease, and Angelina and Alicia couldn’t keep up.

“And it’s Brooks with the Quaffle,” Lee said in a monotone. “Passing it to Bradley… who passes it back to Brooks… passes it on to Chambers… come on, Bell! Buck up a bit! And Chambers shoots—and he scores. And if the Gryffindor Beater’s really in a coma, someone ought to take him to the hospital wing. Wake up, Sloper!”

Jack hadn’t actually hit anyone on his own team in the mouth with his bat yet this game, Ginny thought, but other than that, he hadn’t improved. Andrew wasn’t much better. Again and again, Ravenclaw scored, taking advantage of the unravelling Gryffindor team. But the central weak spot was Ron, and Ginny knew it. During a brief break in play, Angelina beckoned Ginny over to her.

“We’re dying out here and it’s your brother’s fault,” she said without preamble.

Ginny nodded. There hardly seemed any point in trying to deny it.

“Ron’s so much better than this—you know what I’m talking about; we’ve both seen him pull off some amazing saves in practice. He can do it, I know he can.”

“Ye-e-es,” Ginny admitted, “but it’s a question of drawing it out of him. I’ve seen him like this before—he’s gotten down so far that he can’t easily dig his way out again.”

There’s got to be something we can do,” hissed Angelina.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know! You’re his sister! Isn’t there some secret motivational Weasley thing handed down from generation to generation?”

“Well, Dad has this pair of hand-knitted socks--

Angelina actually drew back her lips from her teeth. “Think of it. Do it. Succeed at it. That’s an order.” There was no more time to talk; Jack had swung his bat in Jeffery Brooks’ direction with such wild and inaccurate abandon that it actually had hit Andrew this time.

“The last time a personal foul was committed on a member of one’s own team at Hogwarts before this season,” Lee said tiredly, “the Norman Invasion was yet to come. Good show, Sloper; you’ve now made history twice.”

Lee Jordan was getting sarcastic, Ginny realized. Definitely not a good sign. When Angelina banked her broom sharply and whirled round to glare at Jack, Chambers tried to score on Gryffindor again. But this time, nobody was looking at Ron; the rest of the Ravenclaw team was too busy snickering at what Lee had said. And Ron reached up almost effortlessly to block the Quaffle.

The stink of defeat was still palpable in the air, but now there seemed a thread of hope as well... maybe… Ginny glanced over at the goalposts and saw her brother hovering between the second and third hoops, his face set rigidly, his hands gripping his broomstick, his mouth working. Attention had now focussed back on him as the Ravenclaw team swiftly reorganized, and Ron let another goal in. Oh God. A confused murmur of jeers and groans and spiteful cheers filled the stadium, along with a faint, disorganized thread of song from the Slytherin section.

Weasley cannot save a thing,
He cannot block a single ring…

But she couldn’t afford to worry about how her brother felt right now, or to get indignant on his behalf. They were so far behind. The balance had now tipped just enough so that if Ravenclaw scored one more goal, even if she did see the Snitch now, and caught it, Gryffindor would still lose. She pulled her broom up to a near-standstill, trying to think. Amazing how well one’s mind worked when it wasn’t clouded by rage. It was simply a huge puzzle, all of it—her team members, and the Ravenclaw players, and her own brother only the pieces. How to fit them together, that was the question. What was it that had caused Ron to calm down, to remember how well he really was capable of playing? A moment’s distraction. But how to create another one? And then, as she was looking up into the sky, thinking, she saw it.

A flash of gold, glinting near the third goalpost.

Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion then. Cho hadn’t seen the Snitch. She was still staring at the far end of the pitch. But any second she surely would, and then it might be all over… and Brooks and Bradley were both zooming towards Ron with a Quaffle speeding between them, the ball headed towards the right goalpost, each boy grinning maliciously at Ron. Andrew was screeching something as Jack hit a Bludger at him. Ginny spurred her broom into a dive between her two teammates and reached for the Snitch. But not too fast, I can’t grab it quite yet, not until-- The Bludger was coming at her and coming at her and then it hit her full in the stomach and the world went dim against the awful pain; a thousand startled faces in the stadium turned up to stare at her.

“And Ginny Weasley takes a Bludger to the stomach!” said Lee in a horrified voice. “Oh, this doesn’t look good—and Bradley shoots—“

She barely heard his voice; she was using all her dwindling energy to focus on her brother, and on the Quaffle that sped towards the goal hoop, feinted towards the right, then slammed to the left. Bradley whipped his head round to stare at her, his concentration broken for just a moment. He’d already released the ball; it was too late to change anything about that. But the Ravenclaw Chasers weren’t focusing all their attention on Ron anymore. In fact, even if just for a second or two, nobody was. Let it be enough, thought Ginny. Please, please let it be enough.

And it was. Ron gathered himself up, swung round his broom in a perfect barrel roll, and caught the Quaffle in his right hand, hanging upside-down. At the same instant, Ginny felt her own fingers close around the tiny, fluttering Snitch.

Everything was a blur, after that. The stadium exploded in cheering and Lee was yelling something but she barely heard any of it; the world was going dark and she was clinging to her broom, sliding further and further down, about to fall…

…and then strong arms caught her and she smelled the familiar cinnamon-apple scent of her brother, and somehow they had gotten to the ground and he was carrying her; no, someone else was carrying both of them, they were in the middle of a jostling, screaming, wildly cheering crowd.

“Ginny, Ginny, are you all right?” Ron was shouting. But then a mass of Gryffindors was lifting him and he was being carried high on a sea of shoulders; they surged past the others, yelling happily.

“Here, take her to the hospital wing, she needs to go—“ That was Angelina, Ginny thought. She felt Jack’s clumsy hands on her and winced.

“Don’t grab her around the middle, you idiot!” snapped Katie, who still looked pale. “Here, Ginny—can you stand?”

Ginny blinked and rubbed her eyes. “I’m all right,” she said. “Just—let me catch my breath a bit, okay?”

“You sure?” Katie asked anxiously. “That was a pretty hard hit you took.”

“Really, I’m fine. Give me a minute, that’s all.” Ginny leaned against the wall. Somehow she had ended up on the lower edge of the stadium, the part that backed up against the fields on the edge of the Forbidden Forest. The joyful throng was surging past her, carrying Ron high and singing.

Weasley can save anything,
He never leaves a single ring,
That’s why Gryffindors all sing:
Weasley is our King…

Katie seemed about to say something more, but she was swept up in a fresh wave of first-years and disappeared. The voices grew louder and louder until Ginny clamped her hands over her ears and sank against the wall. Another wave of dizziness overcame her, and when she looked up again, everyone was gone. In their excitement over Ron, the Gryffindors had left the other Weasley behind.

The spring air suddenly felt cold. She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering.

Ginny crept behind a little overhang where she could see but not be seen, and sat down on the smoothed dirt path. A few Hufflepuff fourth-year girls passed her, giggling about her brother; a couple of Ravenclaw boys plodded past, snarling something at each other. Almost nobody except the players used this particular exit, which went past the broom shed. Then she sensed rather than saw someone standing over her, a large body blocking the sun, shifting uncomfortably. She thought of a boy who wasn’t really very tall, who had the lithe, taut, deceptively slight build of a Seeker, who moved like a dancer. And she knew without even glancing up that whoever had come to her, it wasn’t the person she’d feared, or hoped, to see. She raised her head and looked warily at Vincent Crabbe. God, but he gets taller every single year. Although he’s stopped growing from side to side at least. I wonder where he finds a school uniform big enough? Maybe it has to be custom-made. Maybe—

He cleared his throat. “You all right, Weasley?” he asked.

She gaped at him. Of all the possible sentiments she had expected him to express, concern for her welfare had not been high on the list.

He shuffled his feet. “You t-t-took that Bludger pretty hard.”

“I’m all right,” Ginny managed to say.

“Where’s your t-t-team?”

“They, um, left.” She fought down a ridiculous urge to cry. He extended a ham-like hand, and after a moment’s hesitation, she took it. He helped her to her feet. She swayed so badly that without his help, she knew she would have fallen. Maybe I really should go to the hospital wing. But the thought was dreary beyond belief, and she felt much better after standing up.

“Just wondered,” he said awkwardly. “Well-“ He shrugged, stuck his hands in his pockets, and ambled down the path. Ginny let him get ahead of her and then started walking very slowly, her mind whirling. She had a mad impulse to call Crabbe back and start asking questions. And the very first—in fact, the only one that mattered—would be, Did someone send you to me? And did he order you to find out if I was all right? Was he watching the game, and did he clench his teeth to keep from crying out when I fell? You were sitting next to him, so you must know—did he want to go to me? Did he hold himself back, and did his face show whatever emotion he might have felt? Or does he ever feel anything at all? But that was more than one question. And, knowing that question leads on to question, and that nothing good could come from any of them, Ginny lagged behind Crabbe. She waited until long after his lumbering form had disappeared down a curve in the path, and then, moving very slowly, she made her way to the Gryffindor dormitory.

As she passed under one of the big willow trees that lined the path, thinking about what had happened, Hermione stepped into her path, her face furrowed with concern.

“Ginny! I just heard that you’d been left behind, and I came back to find you; are you all right? I’ll take you to the hospital wing if you like—“

Ginny shook her head. “I’m perfectly fine. I just need to get back to my room so I can lie down and rest a bit.”

Hermione took Ginny’s arm and began guiding her back towards the castle, making little tsk-tsk sounds with her tongue. “That’s what comes of putting so much emphasis on a stupid game. I heard all about what happened. It’s horribly dangerous really. Think of all the injuries Harry’s had-“

“Heard? What do you mean, heard? You were there; didn’t you see it?”

“Well, in point of fact we didn’t.”

“We?”

“Harry and I were—ah—somewhere else.”

“What do you mean? Where’s Harry?”

“Back in the Gryffindor boys’s dormitory. He’s awfully tired and he’s asleep. Anyway, whatever made you get between Jack and Andrew like that?”

“Well, I thought—“

“Oh, don’t tell me, I already know! You wanted to create a distraction so that Ron could block Bradley’s goal. Or are you going to tell me that you can see a Snitch four hundred metres away, but you can’t see a Bludger coming at you?”

Ginny squirmed uncomfortably under her friend’s all-too-shrewd gaze.

“Honestly,” Hermione continued. “Sometimes I think the main requirement to play Quidditch must be a complete lack of common sense. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I just saw something—well, rather odd, and I was hoping you could explain what it meant.”

“Oh?” Ginny did her best to sound unconcerned, aware that she was failing miserably.

“Yes. You see--” Hermione broke off, glancing down the path towards some third-year Hufflepuffs coming towards them. “Later,” she said in an undertone.


The common room was loud and bright and made Ginny’s head ache. She gritted her teeth at the sound of all the laughing and screeching, and allowed Hermione to propel her along the wall that led to the girls’ dormitory.

“Ginny!” yelped Jack, looking up from the sofa where he was part of a large group clustered around Ron.

“We were so worried about you—“ began Katie, bustling up to her.

“Not now,” said Hermione in her bossiest voice, pulling Ginny along.

“Are you all right, though?” asked Angelina, at Katie’s side.

“She’s fine,” answered Hermione. “She just needs to rest.”

Ginny saw her brother’s head snap up when he caught sight of her, and he exclaimed, “There you are! Come on, come and sit by me—“ He started to get up and move towards her, but it was rather a difficult task with every member of Gryffindor House gathered at his feet, and Hermione waved a dismissive hand at him.

“You can see her tomorrow, Ron! Let me get her up to bed.”

Nothing had ever sounded so good to Ginny. A vision of her own bed loomed up before her, dear and infinitely desirable. She would snuggle into the fluffy coverlet and sink her head into a feather pillow and draw the gold and maroon curtains around her to shut out the world. It would be soft, warm, and oh so private, especially since every other Gryffindor was toasting Ron with pumpkin juice and singing Weasley Is Our King over and over again.

Hermione helped Ginny to remove her Quidditch uniform and put on a loose, comfortable t-shirt; all her muscles felt horribly stiff and sore suddenly, and she could hardly move. Then Ginny let herself be tucked into bed and lay back with a long sigh. Now, of course, Hermione would go. But she didn’t. The bed creaked from her weight from she sat down. Ginny cracked one eyelid to glare at her.

“I’m dreadfully sorry I can’t leave you alone just yet,” Hermione said firmly. “But I’ve got to know something first. Whatever were you doing talking to Vincent Crabbe?”

“I didn’t exactly have any choice,” Ginny mumbled. “He came up to me, you know.”

”What did he say? Did he insult you, or threaten you, or anything like that?”

“No, not at all. He asked if I was all right, and he helped me up. He asked me where my team went, as well—something I rather wondered about myself.” Ginny couldn’t keep the hurt out of her voice at the last part of the sentence.

Hermione sighed. “I know. They didn’t mean anything by it, and I honestly don’t think they meant to leave you behind like that. But, well, it sounds like all anybody really noticed was that spectacular save Ron made. I don’t think anyone realized what you were trying to do, but I figured it out without even seeing it.”

“I don’t understand; where were—“

“You’re the real reason that game was won, you know,” Hermione said hurriedly.

Ginny gritted her teeth and decided to drop the subject for now. “But it meant so much to Ron,” she said. “He’s struggled all season, you know that, and Quidditch is so much more important to him than it is to me in the first place.”

“Yes, I suppose so.” Hermione got a rather faraway look in her eyes for a moment. “I just worry about him sometimes—there’s something so fragile about Ron, I’ve often thought, and I wonder where that weakness might lead him—I hope nothing ever-- “ She shook herself. “The point is, I thought that maybe Malfoy had sent that gorilla, Crabbe, to threaten you or something, since he wouldn’t dare to try it himself. But you say he didn’t?”

“No,” replied Ginny. “And who’s to say Malfoy sent him anyway?”

Hermione laughed. “Do you honestly think Crabbe and Goyle ever do anything on their own? Including going to the boys’ lav?”

Ginny shrugged in a noncommittal way. That was a hard argument to dismiss. She tried to think of something else to say. “You know,” she began weakly, “maybe Malfoy isn’t really as bad as all of you seem to think.”

Hermione raised her eyebrows until they almost hit her hairline. Ginny was suddenly afraid she’d made an irrevocable mistake. “I mean,” she hastened to add, “I know he’s done some awful things this term, but I don’t see how we can say any of them are evil. There’s a big difference between being evil and acting like a spoiled brat.”

Hermione rested her chin in her hands and seemed to be considering the question seriously. “It is true that when he taunted Harry and Fred and George that time on the Quidditch pitch last winter, they didn’t have to respond the way they did. I wasn’t going to say it to Harry, of course, but he didn’t need to start punching Malfoy in the stomach over a few stupid childish insults. Harry should’ve known better, should’ve realized that Umbridge was just aching for an excuse to do what she did afterwards. Then, well, I doubt the DA would’ve been broken up if it wasn’t for Malfoy, but when you get right down to it he was just trying to get in good with Umbridge because that’s what she wanted. That’s a bit different from being an evil Death Eater, but—“ She looked at Ginny. “That’s exactly what his father is, after all. You know that.”

Ginny cleared her throat. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that his son will go the same way.”

“The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, unto the tenth generation,” murmured Hermione.

“What?”

“Nothing. I used to go to Sunday School before I ever got my Hogwarts letter, did you know? No? Well, it’s not important.” Hermione sighed and leaned back against the headboard of Ginny’s bed. “It’s strange, though.”

“What’s strange?” Ginny closed her eyes. Exhaustion had suddenly fallen on her like a weight. She really hoped that Hermione was almost done finding out whatever it was she had wanted to learn.

“Sometimes Harry talks about Malfoy the same way, these days. Oh, he still hates him, nothing’s changed about that. But I almost think Harry thinks he’s outgrown him, or that compared to everything else he faces, Malfoy is pretty insignificant.”

“Maybe that’s true,” said Ginny.

“Maybe.” Hermione shifted on the bed. “But I don’t really think so.”

“So what do you think?” Ginny decided that it would be better to find out and get it over with, and then maybe, maybe, Hermione would go away and let her sleep as she so desperately wanted to do.

“I think that in the past, Malfoy probably really was nothing more than a snarky brat. But now—“ Hermione shivered, even though the room was toasty warm. “Strange things are starting to happen, Ginny. Things are changing. And they’re going to change even more. It’s as if a darkness is rising, and something evil is coming this way, getting ready to claim its own. Do you honestly think Malfoy would fight that?”

Ginny did not answer.

Hermione rose from the bed. “Well, I didn’t mean to talk about all of this now. You really should get some sleep, Ginny.”

But after the other girl left, Ginny did not sleep for a long time.


Ron avoided her for the next several days. At last, when she was sitting by the lake and throwing scraps of bread to the giant squid, she heard his familiar footsteps, and the deep, slow intake and exhale of breath that was so uniquely his. He sounded exactly the same way he had after the time she’d caught him using her favorite doll as a Quaffle when she was eight years old and he was nine. It had taken him weeks to apologize.

“Can I sit next to you?” he mumbled.

“It’s a free country,” said Ginny.

He settled on the ground next to her, fingering the stitching on his bookbag as if it were the most interesting piece of embroidery he had ever seen.

“They told me you got hit by a Bludger, but that you wouldn’t go to the hospital wing,” he said.

“What do you mean, they told you? You were there, weren’t you? Only I wondered for the first nine-tenths of the match,” Ginny said, with a sarcasm she could not seem to keep out of her voice.

“Actually I sort of wasn’t,” he said quietly. “It was like—like all I saw was my own embarrassment. That doesn’t even make sense, does it? I mean, embarrassment’s a feeling isn’t it? It’s not as if you can really see it. But I think I did. And then, when Bradley and Chambers tried to score, and I could concentrate, just for a moment, the Quaffle was all I saw. They told me later what you did. I really didn’t see it at all.”

“Oh.” Ginny wasn’t at all sure how to respond to that.

“But I see it now,” Ron persisted. He had been staring out over the placid surface of the lake, and he turned to face her. His eyes were tense and afraid. “You won that game, Ginny. I didn’t. It took me days to realize it. Can’t believe how much time I spent bragging to everyone before I did. I think I talked Harry and Hermione’s ears off about it. But you—you were the one they should have carried on their shoulders, not me.”

Ginny sighed. This was a side of Ron that she knew he never showed to anyone else. With all the other students, he would continue to boast and brag; only to her would he reveal this vulnerable inner self. It made her oddly sad. “You did well, Ron. Don’t denigrate that. And it just didn’t matter as much to me.”

“But-“ He closed his eyes for a moment. “We left you there, and you were injured and alone—anything could have happened.”

Without needing to be told, Ginny knew that Hermione hadn’t revealed what she’d seen to Ron. Her brother didn’t know that Vincent Crabbe had so mysteriously spoken to her, and he mustn’t know, either. She would have to keep it from him, even as the other girl had done. “But I’m all right now,” she whispered. She laid her head on her brother’s shoulder, and felt the warm wind play with her hair. Ron didn’t speak for a long time.

“Remember when that bully pushed you off the merry-go-round at the playground, when you were five?” he said. “And you cried, and cried, and tried to hit me. Your face was covered with dirt, I remember, and you’d knocked a tooth out…”

“It was already loose,” said Ginny. Ron ignored her.

“And I understood, Ginny. I understood why. It was because I hadn’t protected you. I was your big brother, and I was supposed to, and I hadn’t. You wouldn’t let me touch you or take you home, and it was like you’d ripped a hole in my chest. I started to cry, too.”

“And then you just flew at that bully,” Ginny remembered. “I’d forgotten about that. I think he broke one of your arms, didn’t he?”

Ron nodded. “Mum fixed it. Fixed your face, as well. But I never forgot, Ginny, that all you kept saying, over and over again, was, ‘Why’d you let him hurt me, Ron? You weren’t supposed to let anybody hurt me.’ You sounded so bewildered, so lost. I’ve always remembered it.”

Once again, Ginny was unsure of how to respond. She settled for smoothing her brother’s hair down where the wind was whirling it into crimson cowlicks, and he closed his eyes and leaned against her. Both of them were silent for a long time.

“I’ve always tried to protect you, Ginny,” he finally murmured. “Always. And I always will.”


History of Magic went on as usual.

The class was perhaps three percent awake, although Colin Creevey’s snoring grew louder with each passing moment and continued to bring the average down. The late afternoon sun was glinting through an open window in streaks of peach and gold, and a subtly scented breeze brought in spring flowers. Ginny played with a strand of her hair, turning it this way and that so that the sun’s rays set it afire. Professor Binns was droning on and on, as he would probably continue to do through flood, fire, and rains of frogs. The monotonous sound would have been enough to send anyone to sleep all by itself. Even if the subject matter had been interesting, which, Ginny decided, it definitely was not. She might have fallen asleep herself—she hadn’t been sleeping particularly well lately—but something about the warm June air was keeping her awake, and oddly alert. Nothing to concentrate on but Binns’ voice, though, and it was so like a droning gadfly.

“In the case of worldwide megalithic developments,” the professor was saying in a grey voice that, as always, sounded as if it had been unearthed from a tomb, “one must consider their common threads. Far flung as it may seem to run a comparative analysis of Stonehenge, the Pyramids of Gaza, Anghkor Wat and Anghkor Thom, and the Mammoth cave system of Kentucky and Tennessee, such comparisons can profitably be made.”

The Pyramids of Gaza… Ginny’s attention was caught for a moment. She remembered the time her family had visited Egypt, the summer before her second year at Hogwarts. She’d been so ill almost the entire time, getting dragged out only for the family pictures. The mediwizards there had said that she was unusually sensitive to the lines of force running between Khufre and the Sphinx. Professor Binns started droning about new geological theories related to water-weathering, however, and her attention began to wander again. She looked out the window at the Quidditch pitch, which she could just glimpse from here. Maybe she’d take a broom out after dinner and fly a little. During these June days, the sunlight lingered for a long time, and nobody was ever there now that the season was over. She might be alone. Or she might see-

"--Draco,” said the dull, dusty voice. Professor Binns looked up, and his insubstantial eyebrows raised slightly at the crashing noise Ginny had made. “Miss, er, Weasmont? Is there a problem?”

“Dropped a quill, Professor,” Ginny gasped.

“Hum.” The ghost cleared his throat, or at least made a gesture that amounted to the same thing, and then continued. “As I was saying, the ancient Cambodian megalithic cities of Anghkor Wat and Anghkor Thom are built in such a way as to mimic the constellation Draco. But the truly interesting thing from a scholar’s point of view is that all megaliths appear to have been built in the same manner, even those located across the earth from Cambodia. Most commonly, they mirror the star systems of Leo and Draco. Although many Muggles are aware of the fact that the heelstone at Stonehenge is aligned with the sun at both its winter and summer solstices, only wizards know that those two constellations are also of great significance to this megalithic site in Wiltshire. But the truly curious point is that of timing. However, I’m afraid that we will need to skip over this aspect, and move on to—“

“Please, sir,” Ginny interrupted.

“Yes?” Professor Binns looked utterly befuddled, as if he had just now realized that there were actually several dozen students sitting in front of him and one of them had dared to speak.

“I’d like to hear about the—uh- timing you mentioned. What is it that’s timed? Why is it important? It’d be interesting to know.”

“Interesting.” The ghost teacher repeated the unfamiliar word. “Very well. I suppose a few minutes might be spared. Five thousand years ago, the brightest star in the Draco constellation occupied the same position in the sky that Stella Polaris—the so-called North Star—does today. In precisely four and a half years, at the winter equinox, such will again be the case. Caput Draconis will point to magnetic north. This most likely has no meaning for either magical folk or Muggles, but there are a number of strange legends regarding an unimaginable concentration of power that might—with the proper ritual, and in the proper megalithic location—be released at that moment.” Professor Binns rustled the papers at his desk. “Now I believe we’ve wasted enough words on myth today; it is past time to return to the world of unassailable fact. We have covered goblin rebellions in England, France, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Greece, Lichtenstein, Siberia, Vatican City, and Monaco, but many gaps remain in our understanding—dear, dear, I’d hoped to be further along by this point in the year. Open your books to page two thousand, three hundred and fifty-five as we begin to examine the history of goblins in Outer Mongolia. In the year 567 A.D, the hobgoblin Attaturk Og entered trade negotiations with—“

Ginny walked out of class slowly, her mind whirling, chasing down dozens of separate scraps of information that seemed to be blowing away from her in a high wind. Draco. She should have known that he’d been named after the constellation; from Sirius to Andromeda to Regulus, the Black family loved those names. But what could it possibly mean that all these megalithic sites of great power were patterned after that same constellation? Or that the opposing group of stars that also formed their structure was Leo, the lion of Gryffindor? And there was something else, too, some other, more specific connection between the Malfoys and everything she had just heard. Something she could almost think of, almost remember, and something that she was sure she knew. But cudgel her brain as she might, it would not come to her.

Ginny didn’t realize that her steps were leading towards the Quidditch pitch until she looked up and saw the broom shed to one side of the path. Ron had specifically said that he wanted her back for dinner, as she’d been missing too many meals. Well, if he didn’t like it, he could lump it. She desperately needed the freedom of flying for a bit. Ginny picked out an old Shooting Star and kicked it into the air. The sun sunk low in the blue, blue sky, and she swooped and dove with abandon.

She had just finished weaving in and out of the goalposts when she saw him. Without the faintest sense of surprise, she pulled her broom up close to his. They looked at each other without speaking for several long moments.

Draco Malfoy had his back to the sun, and the orange light touched his silvery hair with gold. His face was cast into shadow. Not that Ginny fooled herself into believing that she could have figured out whatever he was thinking anyway.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Flying,” he answered. He moved his broom aside a little, and light spilled onto his face. Ginny caught her breath. He looked desperately weary. There was purple shadows under his eyes, and his cheekbones were more prominent than before, as if he’d lost weight in the last weeks. But his expression was as closed as ever. She knew she’d get nothing more out of him.

He threw something up in the air, something golden with whirring silver wings. “Want to play?”

“That’s a Snitch, isn’t it?” Ginny asked.

“Ah, ten points to Weasley. Good thing, too. You’ll need the head start.” His smile mocked her, as it always had. “A little pick-up game. If you’ve got the guts.”

An unwilling smile touched her own lips. “You’re on.”

Malfoy was a better Seeker than anyone she’d ever seen, except maybe Harry. And he wasn’t playing to his full capacity, or the game would have been over in about fifteen seconds. Ginny figured both of these points out rather quickly. She raced after the Snitch, feinted and blocked, went into sudden dives and leveled out, and did every acrobatic trick she had ever learned or practiced. He shadowed her every move with almost insulting ease, that half-smile always on his lips. He always held back at the last second, when he could have so easily caught the golden ball they were both pursuing.

“It’s more sporting that way,” he explained idly, during a brief break.

Ginny was trying to catch her breath. “That’s what I think too,” she gasped as sweetly as she could. “Considering that I’m still going to beat you.”

“Now, now, Weasley,” he said, wagging a finger at her. “We’re talking about what’s going to happen in this universe, not an alternate one… several million light years away… where the earth is ruled by mentally deficient amoebas…and your family actually has money and class…”

She grabbed at the Snitch too soon and her hands closed on air; she went into a barrel roll around her broom and barely caught herself.

“Temper, temper,” he chided, and zoomed towards the elusive flash of gold.

They played until the last lights faded from the sky. As soon as Ginny began to grow dizzy and tired, and to think longingly of the standing rib roast and mashed potatoes that she had missed at the Gryffindor table that night, Malfoy ended it. She had been sailing towards one of the goalposts, sure she saw the Snitch about to go through the left hoop. Her hands had been extended and she’d been crouching on the end of her broom; she almost had it… almost… Until, with apparent ease, Malfoy came out of nowhere and made a three-sixty turn around her, laughing, hovering upside down at her eye level. Except that his face hadn’t been the part of him that was right in front of her nose. And his school robes were hanging down, and his light summer trousers were very tight and tailored in back. While she was blinking at this unexpectedly interesting part of his anatomy, his hand flashed out and grabbed something that had been buzzing above her head. He turned back around so that he was right-side up to show her the Snitch fluttering in his left hand.

“Not very observant today, are we?” Malfoy said.

“You—ooh!”

“Or did you have something more interesting to look at?” His smile—and yes, for once, it was a smile, not a smirk—became positively devilish. Then he threw the Snitch up in the air in a lightning-quick motion and caught it again. And Ginny’s breath caught in her throat, because the last rays of the setting sun were directly behind him and he was all gold, a laughing golden boy hovering before her on a summer’s night when the air was warm and scented with flowers and anything, absolutely anything, might happen. His face came closer. His lips opened.

“Race you to the broom shed,” Malfoy said.

“Oooh!” Ginny clenched her hands into fists and spurred her broom.

She actually did win that race. She wasn’t at all sure how that had happened, but perhaps her temper lent her pokey broom wings. Ginny was restacking her Shooting Star at the back of the shed when the door opened again, then creaked closed. Footsteps came towards her in the darkness.

“I won, you know,” she said, her voice sounding very loud in the shed. There was nobody in it except for them, of course.

“I know you did,” said Malfoy. It was almost completely dark, only a faint shaft of light coming in under the closed door, and his disembodied voice made her jump. “Do you want your prize?”

“Light a light, Malfoy,” said Ginny, wishing that her voice didn’t tremble so.

“Of course, if you like. Lumos.” His wand flared, illuminating the shed with a soft glow. “Now, do you want your prize?” He advanced towards her.

Ginny forced herself to stand her ground. “What is it?” she asked in a voice that wavered only a little.

Malfoy pulled an apple from a pocket of his robes. “Sorry this isn’t a three-course meal. But it’ll have to do.”

“Oh.” Ginny stepped forward and took it from his hand. “Thanks,” she added awkwardly. She sat down on a bench and bit deeply into the apple’s rosy-red side. The sweet tangy juice gushed out over her lips. It was delicious.

He sat next to her and began eating as well. His apple was golden and smelled more tart, a little more astringent. His sharp white teeth tore into it, biting away large chunks. Ginny wished she could stop looking at Malfoy’s mouth, especially when he glanced up and caught her at it.

“Want a bite?”

“Oh, no—no, that’s all right, mine was fine.”

“This one was bigger than yours. I suppose as the winner you should have gotten it, really.”

“I already know how selfish you are, Malfoy,” Ginny said tartly.

One corner of his mouth went up. “Sure you don’t want a bit more?”

Actually, she did, and her mouth watered. He edged the apple closer to her face. She could see the indentations left by his teeth in its ivory-white flesh. The sweet lemony smell came closer and closer. “Maybe just one bite…” she said slowly. He pushed it into her mouth and she bit, her tongue running over the place where his mouth had marked it.

“One more…” Ginny wasn’t even sure if he, or she, had said those words. She bit again.
Then again. Then she found that she was licking at his fingers. She had bitten through the apple core. She tried to jerk back. The wand flickered low and went almost dark. Somehow Malfoy’s hand had gotten around her waist and was pulling her even closer to him. His mouth smelled like the apple, tart and sweet all at once, and it was coming so close to hers that she could hear each of his breaths. She knew that she should back away, but she did not. Her eyes went wide, and she looked at him almost pleadingly. Then they closed. There was only smell and touch left to her out of all the sensations, and the warmth of his lips coming closer and closer and closer.

Then the door banged open, and they jumped apart. Ginny looked up.

Pansy Parkinson stood in the doorway of the broom shed.

Ginny never knew how she got back to her dormitory. Nor did she ever remember what Parkinson said, or what Malfoy did. She only knew that somehow she was lying in her bed and staring up at the ceiling, her mind utterly blank. Except for one thought. Don’t let Ron find out. Don’t let Ron find out. Oh, dear Merlin, don’t let Ron ever, ever find out.

She slept long and dreamlessly that night, and when she awoke, the entire incident had already taken on a dreamlike quality. As the next days passed and Malfoy’s cold grey eyes glanced over her in the halls as if she were a piece of furniture, it began to seem like a thing that had never happened. And she was sure that she would never speak to him again, nor he to her.

Ginny was glad that Ron and Harry and Hermione were completely obsessed with the coming O.W.L’s, or at least one of them would have noticed that something was wrong with her. She slept little and ate less; her robes hung loose on her body, and she asked Madam Pomfrey for a sleeping draught after a week of tossing and turning in bed at night. But she only woke up groggy and grumpy after taking it, and she poured the rest of it down the sink. She’d get through. It was only a question of forgetting, now. It wasn’t as if anything more was ever going to happen between her and Draco Malfoy, after all.

Much later, Ginny could only be grateful that she had not known what lay ahead.

Chapter Three: Umbridge’s Office
June 1995

When she looked back on the events of that June day in years to come, Ginny could see so clearly that she should have known how they would end. They had all led to an inevitable conclusion. But she was never sure how it had all begun, and that fact made her head spin. Everyone else knew. Or thought they knew. But in some secret part of her, Ginny kept an unspoken knowledge to herself. The true beginning had come on the morning of that day. And it had happened so uneventfully, in the midst of another dull, desultory breakfast while the enchanted ceiling shone down with the flat bright greyness of sun behind a bank of clouds, and tired murmurs crossed and recrossed among the tables that were partially filled with students.

Fewer and fewer people were bothering to come down to the Great Hall in the mornings. The O.W.L.’s were over, and only a couple of weeks of school remained anyway. But the term seemed generally exhausted for its own reasons, as if it were barely limping towards a finish line and perhaps wasn’t even going to make it over. It was a bright, oddly chilly, windy Friday outside—too bright, thought Ginny. Ideal for flying. But she didn’t want to fly anymore. She glanced around as she spooned oatmeal into her mouth, then toast with marmalade. It was all fairly tasteless. She forced herself to chew and swallow. A group of Hufflepuffs was peeling oranges for each other at their table, clustered together at one end. Almost all the Ravenclaws were still in bed. There were more Gryffindors, but nobody from fifth year, as far as she could see, and few fourth years either. Colin and Dennis Creevey were there, but Colin fell asleep in his eggs as she watched. And the Slytherins… Ginny let her gaze slide over their table. She almost succeeded in making it look like a casual glance. One entire end of the table was empty except for Malfoy, who was moodily chewing on a rasher of bacon.

She was sitting in an odd place at the table, nowhere near her normal one, but there were so few Gryffindors at breakfast that it hardly mattered. Her chair was partially behind a pillar. She moved the chair further back, edging its legs over the uneven floor so that it made no scraping sound. She could now see without being seen, and she looked her fill.

His hair was smoothed into perfect place as always, and his robes were as beautifully cut as ever. But Ginny could tell that he was thinner beneath them, the bones of his wrists finely etched in sharp relief, and his skin seemed fragile and paler than usual. The dark circles under his eyes stood out against it in smears of lavender and grey. Ginny wondered if he had lain wakeful night after night after night, even as she had done. It gave her a strange feeling in her chest to think about that.

The movements of his hands were graceful and precise as he picked up food, brought it to his mouth, chewed and swallowed. Ginny wondered if he ever did anything clumsy or awkward. Was his every movement a performance, calculated to impress those who might be watching? Except that he couldn’t think anyone would be watching him now. He couldn’t see her, surely. Ginny shrank back a bit more behind the pillar. It wasn’t safe to keep looking at him. Anybody from Gryffindor could come down to breakfast at any moment, and they might see her—and tell Ron. She had to stop. What good could it do to watch him anyway? The sight of Malfoy only made her more restless and unhappy the longer she watched him if she were trying to quench a burning thirst by drinking sea water. Yet she could not look away quite yet.

The owls were delivering mail now, and a rain of envelopes and parchments showered down on the tables. Good. That might divert everyone’s attention for a few minutes, and in that time surely she’d be able to stop looking at him. She had been trying to do just that ever since the last evening on the Quidditch pitch.

The beautiful Malfoy eagle owl swooped down to the Slytherin table. Ginny lost herself for a moment in watching the sleek silver bird land. Malfoy raised his head and saw it too, and Ginny watched the minute stiffening along his entire body. He passed a hand over his eyes, closing them briefly, and then took the parchment tied to the owl’s leg. He unrolled it. He scanned it. The little color in his pale face simply drained away.

The sound of his chair rasping over the flagstones of the floor was shockingly loud, or perhaps it only seemed that way to Ginny. Malfoy pushed himself back from the table almost violently and left the hall. He passed by the Gryffindor table as he went, and she quickly lowered her eyes, studying her plate of cold, leathery toast. She saw, out of the corner of one eye, that his face was set and still.

But she never told anyone about what she had seen, and everyone else thought they knew exactly how it had all begun. In years to come, most people argued that the true trigger to the war had come that day when Harry Potter was shown a false vision of Sirius Black and lured to the Department of Mysteries. And if this was so, then the events of that afternoon at Hogwarts had been like the tiny fulcrum on which a massive door turns, and had sparked everything that had come after them. Ginny always nodded when these discussions began, and said nothing. After all, she never had found out exactly what had been in that parchment delivered to Draco Malfoy by his father’s owl, and she was sure she never would. She kept what she had seen that morning in her heart, and long pondered it, but she accepted the official story. According to that, the true beginning had come a few hours later, and she had been present for that as well.

It was early afternoon. Ginny and Luna both had a free hour, and, as if by mutual agreement, were tiredly heading to the library. There was a little cubbyhole in the back of the restricted section, just behind the ninety-nine volume set of The Encyclopaedia of Exraordinarily Dangerous Enchantments, where the two girls liked to go. They would sit up against an unused bookshelf and talk quietly about unimportant things. Luna would tell Ginny stories about the favourite haunts of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks in the fjords of Norway, or the mermaids that lived off the coasts of Denmark, and Ginny would nod and half-listen, her eyes closed. Luna liked to braid her hair, and Ginny would let the other girl’s words wash over her as she felt Luna’s slender fingers weaving the strands together. It all seemed like a very pleasant idea today. They were walking down a little-used first floor hallway when they heard a raised voice from what was supposed to be an empty classroom.

“If you think I’m just going to act like I haven’t seen—“

It was Harry, and she’d never heard him sound so angry. Ginny put out a hand, stopping Luna and then raising a finger to her lips for silence.

Hermione’s voice answered in furious, yet oddly pleading tones. “Sirius told you there was nothing more important than learning to close your mind!”

The two girls looked at one another and then crept to the doorjamb. Ginny peered around it.

Harry towered over Hermione, who stood up to him, looking afraid but determined. Ginny hadn’t realized just how much he’d grown this year until this very moment. His face was red and he was advancing on her, backing her into a corner, his hands clenched into fists. Ginny felt a quiver of alarm as he raised a hand to Hermione. But he only ran it through his hair and then began shouting at her friend again, each word a bellow.

“Well, I expect he’d say something different if he knew what I’d just—“

Ginny reached for the doorknob without a pause. Hermione, I’ve got to help Hermione raced through her mind on wings of fear. That was an utterly silly thing to think; surely it was… Harry would never hurt anyone; of course not. And anyway Ron was there… but… She pushed the classroom door open.

They all whipped their heads round towards her and Luna, and when Ginny saw Harry’s face, she could not help blanching back. His green eyes were blazing in a way that genuinely frightened her. The anger in them wasn’t directed towards her, but in a way it was worse that it was so impersonal, so unfocussed. His emotion was like a forest fire that might destroy anything in its path.

“Hi,” she said, hoping her voice showed none of her ridiculous sudden fear. “We—we recognized Harry’s voice; what are you yelling about?”

“Never you mind,” he said roughly. The thing in his eyes turned itself on her, and she trembled.

Ginny sternly took hold of herself. This was only Harry, the boy she had known since she was ten years old, who’d eaten breakfast at the kitchen table in his pyjamas at the Burrow a hundred times, who’d been her brother’s best friend since the day they both began at Hogwarts, whom she’d loved without hope, and let go without rancour. She saw nothing in his eyes that she hadn’t seen there before. She was being absurd.

“There’s no need to take that tone with me,” she said coolly. “I was only wondering whether I could help.”

“Well, you can’t.”

“You’re being rather rude, you know,” Luna said serenely.

Harry swore and turned away, and Ginny could not help being glad. He was no longer looking at them.

She could never clearly remember what happened next, or exactly what was said. The look on Harry’s face kept replaying itself in her mind, over and over and over. She could not stop trying to recast her memory of it into a more appealing shape. Something that did not frighten her so much. She did not succeed.

Ginny did gather that something awful was happening to Sirius Black, or at least that Harry thought there was. He wanted to go to the Department of Mysteries right away, and even in her badly confused state, Ginny knew that couldn’t possibly be a good idea. Hermione was desperately trying to be the voice of reason. “We’ll have to use Umbridge’s fire and see if we can contact him,” she said, and even as Ginny struggled for understanding, she immediately said, “Yeah, we’ll do it,” with an instinct so automatic that she didn’t even think about it. She had to help Harry, as she knew that she would always have to help Harry, no matter what he felt, or thought, or did.

“Luna and I can stand at either end of the corridor,” she said, “and warn people not to go down there because someone’s let off a load of Garroting Gas.” Hermione looked surprised at how readily she’d come up with that idea. “Fred and George were planning to do it before they left,” Ginny added quickly. It was true.

Besides, she wanted nothing more than to get out of that room.

She and Luna began moving down the corridor. Ginny wondered if Luna noticed how fast she was walking in the opposite direction from Harry. But it didn’t matter, anyway. Even if Luna guessed what was wrong—and she was far more perceptive than most people believed—she’d never say a word. At the end of the corridor, she halted, putting a hand on Luna’s arm so that she did the same.

“You can’t come down here!” Ginny called to the crowd. “No, sorry, you’re going to have to go around by the swiveling staircase, someone’s let off Garroting Gas just along here—“

Anthony Summerby was at the very head of the group of Hufflepuffs, she saw now, and he took several more steps until he was almost nose to nose with her. “I don’t see any gas,” he said in a surly sneer, his eyes raking her up and down.

“That’s because it’s colourless,” said Ginny, “but if you want to walk through it, carry on; then we’ll have your body as proof for the next idiot that didn’t believe us.” She glared at him coldly. Oh, I wish there really was Garroting Gas down that hallway… and I just wish he’d walk through it, it’d serve him right… But something in her eyes must have convinced him, because he turned and headed in the other direction, the rest of the students following him in ragged groups.

When the crowd had thinned, Harry and Hermione walked quickly down the corridor and past her. “Good one, don’t forget the signal,” Hermione whispered. Ginny nodded, her eyes fixed on Harry. His mouth was tightly set, and his face was utterly without expression. Ginny shivered again. Looking at him now was like picking at a scab that would not heal. Again and again, she was confronted with the memory of what she had seen in that deserted classroom. The look on his face. The rage. The unquenchable fury. An anger beyond all forgiveness, all healing. She tried and tried to follow back the tangled threads of how these things had sprouted in Harry Potter, for surely they must have had a beginning. Surely they hadn’t sprung up like choking and poisonous weeds in one afternoon. Luna looked down the hall, whistling vaguely, and Ginny thought and thought.

Perhaps when the DA was broken up? No, before that. The awful scene after the last Quidditch game he’d played in, when he’d attacked Malfoy after the Slytherin boy had said all those terrible things? No. Things had been worse after that, no doubt, but they’d been bad enough before. Ginny sometimes wondered if something had happened a bit earlier that she didn’t know about. Harry had gone so strange and stiff late that autumn, around the time he was getting all those detentions from Umbridge. He’d seemed a little thinner and paler after each one. Ginny’s heart gave an odd painful twist, thinking of how silent he’d become during that time, and how he’d avoided everyone’s eyes.

There was a rustling at the end of the hall and she glanced up quickly, worried that too much time had passed while she was thinking about Harry and now they were about to be caught, but it was only Luna braiding her hair into plaits. This really is dreadfully dangerous, what we’re doing. I have to remember that and keep watch. It’s like walking a precipice—one wrong move and you might fall off. She fell back into thought.

She did not love him anymore. She wasn’t exactly sure when the last embers of that hopeless, painful feeling had gone to ash. At some point that year it had simply happened. Yet even without love, she cared for him still. Everyone Ginny had ever loved, she would always love a little. Harry was no exception. So she would do whatever she could for him.

But she did wonder why she had stopped loving him. Michael Corner’s kisses and clumsy touches hadn’t made her forget Harry. Nearly a year of his ignoring her even more than he had in the past hadn’t done it, either. When did it start? In the spring? No… earlier than that… It’s as if other things just crowded it out of my mind, but they certainly never had that effect before. Well, what other things? Irritation, she answered herself. Anger. A determination to show Malfoy what she could do on a broom. Her mind sharpening every time she crossed wits with him, like a knife held to steel. A feeling that her blood and body had come to life after being half-asleep for a long while, and were tingling, tingling all the time… Oh, God! No!

And Ginny’s mind was caught in the horror of that thought. She groaned inwardly; she tried to suppress it; she clenched her teeth against it, and with all her inner turmoil, several precious moments passed before she realized that Luna had begun to sing.

Weasley can save anything,
He never leaves a single ring,
That’s why Gryffindors all sing:
Weasley is our King…

Ginny was confused for only an instant, but it was enough. The song was the signal, she remembered too late.

A hard arm went around her throat, almost choking her. She struggled against it and tried to kick whoever was holding her. She didn’t see her captor’s face clearly, only a lot of flying brown hair, but when she looked up she saw Pansy Parkinson standing a little distance away.

“Hold her, Veda,” the Slytherin girl said coldly. “I’ve got Lovegood.”

And indeed Pansy had grabbed Luna’s arm and was twisting it behind her; Luna looked at her in a puzzled way, as if she couldn’t see why all this fuss was necessary. Neville was trying to haul the Slytherin Veda Pierce away from Ginny; he must have been passing in the corridor, and Ginny wished with all her might that he hadn’t been. “Go,” she gasped. “Neville, hurry! Go and warn—“ A hand clapped over her mouth. She bit it. Veda gave a gasp of pain.

“Oh, so you want to play it like that, do you?” Pansy asked silkily. Ginny was struggling and wriggling like mad, but between them Veda and Pansy got a gag around her mouth, and she could only make muffled sounds. “Better do them all,” Pansy added. Ginny saw out of the corner of one eye that Crabbe was holding Neville. She tried to catch the Slytherin boy’s eye. He looked stolidly past her. Malfoy, she thought in a panicked way. Where is he? If he’s not here, that means he didn’t have anything to do with this! Maybe—maybe—But she could think about that no more, because she saw Ron. Warrington had her brother’s arms behind him and was frog-marching him down the corridor. Veda shoved Ginny, and she stumbled forward along with the rest. She felt herself being pushed through a door, and turned, trying to kick Veda’s shins. They were in Umbridge’s office, and the professor stood panting in the middle of the floor like a swollen, triumphant toad.

“Got ‘em all,” said Warrington with a kind of fatuous pride in his voice, shoving Ron forward roughly into the room. “That one,” he added, pointing at Neville, “tried to stop me taking her, so I brought him along as well.”

Poor Neville.

Umbridge watched Ginny with glittering, unpleasant eyes. “Good, good.”

Ginny felt as if her knees were melting and her bones losing all their strength, but she forced herself to stand upright, even though Veda was jamming her arms behind her back and she could already feel the bruises rising. She glanced around the room. Harry was sprawled against the desk, clutching his head. Hermione was pinned against the wall by Millicent Bulstrode. Her gaze slid over Umbridge. Standing next to the professor was Draco Malfoy. Ginny’s heart leapt and sank at the same time when she saw him. He was a part of this. He had known. But he hadn’t been a part of the group of Slytherins who had captured her and the others. Did that mean anything?

Look at me, she prayed silently. Turn your head and look at me.

And then he did, and his eyes skipped over her like cold grey pebbles across a pond.

“Well, it looks as though Hogwarts will shortly be a Weasley-free zone, doesn’t it?” said Umbridge.

Malfoy hesitated for just the briefest moment. Ginny wondered if anyone besides her had even noticed it. Then he laughed loudly and sycophantically. Far too loudly.

Everything was a blur to Ginny for several minutes after that. Malfoy kept laughing at everything Umbridge said, and the sound seemed to get into her mind and splinter it, making it impossible for her to hold onto anything that was happening. He left the room with Harry’s wand, she did see that. Ron’s lip was bleeding onto the carpet as Warrington held him down in a half nelson; the trickle of blood was strangely vivid against the muted greys that suddenly were filling the room. She kept trying to stamp on Veda’s feet in a mechanical way, and she could feel her upper arms going numb where the other girl had gripped them. Snape showed up in the office and said something, and Harry yelled something else. Ginny knew that she really should pay attention to what was going on.

“What does he mean, Snape?” Umbridge was asking eagerly.

Ginny fought to catch at what had been said, but the words fluttered past her like birds. Harry had said something about Padfoot… yes, that was it. He’s got Padfoot at the place where it’s hidden. She knew what Harry was trying to do, but she was suddenly afraid that warning Snape would only make matters worse. She’d never trusted the Potions Master an inch, for all that he was a member of the Order of the Phoenix. Or he’s supposed to be one, anyway! How do we really know?

“I have no idea,” Snape was replying coldly. “Potter, when I want nonsense shouted at me, I shall give you a Babbling Beverage. And Crabbe, loosen your hold a little. If Longbottom suffocates it will mean a lot of tedious paperwork, and I am afraid I shall have to mention it on your reference if ever you apply for a job.”

The door closed behind Snape, and Ginny swivelled her head towards Neville. If anything happens to him I’ll never forgive myself. He’s only here because of me really… oh, I wish I could feel something for him besides friendship, but I can’t.

Then she saw something strange. Because of her position against the wall where Veda Pierce had trapped her, she could clearly see the way Crabbe was holding Neville. He wasn’t strangling the smaller boy at all; the Slytherin had only angled his arm so that it looked that way to the rest of the room. Ginny’s brow furrowed. But then she saw that Umbridge had pulled her wand out of her robes, and that took up all her attention.

“You are forcing me, Potter,” said Umbridge, moving restlessly from foot to foot, her scanty mouse-brown hair sticking to her forehead in wisps. She looked slightly crazed. “I do not want to, but sometimes circumstances justify the use… I am sure the Minister will understand that I had no choice…”

Ron gave a gasp. There was hatred on his face when he looked up from his prone position on the floor. But strangely, it was not directed towards Umbridge, but at Malfoy, who stood motionless at the professor’s side. The blond boy’s expression had been impassive, but he turned his head as if Ron’s murderous look had weight. Malfoy let a sneer spread over his face, deliberately, slowly. Ginny struggled to understand what was going on, and then, in a flash, she did. She tried to wrest her arms away from Veda, to no avail. The taller, bulkier girl simply pressed her further against the wall, and Ginny’s furious words were muffled by the gag biting cruelly into her mouth. She saw that Harry, too, shifted his eyes to Malfoy, and she watched this exchange of looks fearfully.

It seemed to take forever, the subtlety of the message that Malfoy conveyed to Harry and Ron with just an expression of the face and eyes, yet it could have lasted no longer than a moment. There was malice in it, and triumph, but more than anything else a sadistic glee at the thought of what was to come. A hunger to see Harry’s pain, Ron’s pain, anyone’s pain. That look would be no different if Umbridge’s wand were about to be turned on me, Ginny thought. And for the first time since this horror had begun, she wanted to cry.

“The Cruciatus Curse ought to loosen your tongue,” Umbridge said quietly to Harry

Ginny turned her face to the wall. Voices rose and fell around her, panting, screaming, shouting. Hermione was yelling that they were going to have to tell Umbridge something. Ginny turned back to stare blearily at her friend. Gradually it permeated her consciousness that Hermione was talking about something quite other than what had really been going on; that she’d made up some sort of story about Harry trying to reach Dumbledore to find out how to use a secret weapon. She was going to get Umbridge to take her and Harry out of the office, into the forest. And we’ll still be trapped here… oh, I’ve got to make myself pay attention, I have to figure out what to do next!

Veda was listening eagerly and not looking in her captive’s direction. Ginny worked at the gag with her teeth and managed to get it out of her mouth, shrugging her shoulders at the edge of it until it fell off her chin. She rotated her jaw, feeling the soreness in it. When she moved her head, she saw Malfoy looking at her for just an instant with an unreadable expression on his face. She glared back. If looks could kill, he would have left the office on a stretcher. He flinched slightly.

“Professor Umbridge,” he said, “I think some of the squad should come with you to look after—“

“I am a fully qualified Ministry official, Malfoy, do you really think I cannot manage two wandless teenagers alone?” asked Umbridge sharply. “In any case, it does not sound as if this weapon is something that schoolchildren should see. You will remain here until I return and make sure none of these—“ she gestured around at Ron, Ginny, Neville, and Luna—“escape.”

“All right,” said Malfoy with a grimace. To everyone else, his face probably looked sulky and disappointed, but Ginny saw something different. When his eyes flicked ever so briefly to hers, there was something like grief in them.

Umbridge ushered out Harry and Hermione, keeping her wand trained on their backs. Veda pulled up so hard on Ginny’s arms that she was sure her shoulders were about to be dislocated. The Slytherin girl dragged Ginny over to where Pansy Parkinson and the two had a long, whispered conference. Ginny’s face had gotten pressed against the wall and she didn’t see anything that happened next very clearly, but out of the corner of one eye she saw Warrington hauling her brother off somewhere, and Crabbe opened a little door on the far side of the room and walked through it, Neville in tow.

At last, everyone else disappeared, and Ginny was left with Veda Pierce and Pansy Parkinson. The room was silent, and dust motes danced in the shafts of sunlight spilling in from the high windows. Veda was looking at her captive dully, as if she were an uninteresting piece of furniture. Pansy stepped forward and her housemate moved aside to make room for her. Her breathing sounded very loud and excited in the still air.

“A weapon,” said Pansy. “So that’s it.”

Ginny did not reply.

“You know something about it, don’t you?” asked Pansy, pushing her narrow face very close to Ginny’s, her black-cherry eyes glistening with unhealthy excitement.

Ginny lowered her head slightly so that she was looking at the exquisitely subtle green embroidery on the chest of Pansy’s robes. Maybe Pansy would think she had her cowed. Afraid. Maybe that would buy her a few moments of precious time. She chanced a quick, darting glance out of the corners of her eyes from side to side. The fog that had seemed to overlay everything after she’d heard Malfoy laugh was gone now, and all her senses were on the alert.

She had never actually been in this office since Umbridge had taken it over, but she remembered the way it had looked when Professor Lupin had been their Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. Nobody had ever known the little second-year secret Ginny hugged jealously to herself, but she had crept up here, after hours, for many talks. Professor Lupin had never said much, but he knew how to listen. And the office had always had a kindly, homelike air that reminded her weirdly of Molly Weasley’s kitchen, only with far more fanged water animals lurking in tanks. She’d overheard snatches of conversation between her brother and Harry about the way it had looked last year, when Professor Moody had lived and worked here. The false Professor Moody. They’d never told her that, either. Ginny had many ways of learning what she wasn’t supposed to know.

But surely the office had never seemed so sinister, even then. The frilly lace doilies on every surface and the saccharine kittens snoozing on the hideously painted plates fixed onto the walls only emphasized how dark its corners were, and how long the shadows of the late afternoon sunlight streaming through the curtained windows. Surely the office couldn’t have had so many nooks and crannies before, or so many little hallways leading off to side closets. Umbridge must have put some Expanding charms on it. Probably provided more space to interrogate people.

The silence had gone on too long, Ginny realized. She had to speak. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you mean,” she said, truthfully. “So I certainly don’t know if I know anything.”

“About that weapon, you idiot,” hissed Pansy. “The one Granger was talking about.” She trod on Veda’s foot, and the other girl gave a little squeak and dropped Ginny’s wrists. “Dry up, Veda,” Pansy said impatiently without even bothering to turn round. “Go and watch Lovegood. I’ll take over from here.” Veda scurried off.

“I don’t know anything,” repeated Ginny, feeling the butterflies begin in her stomach as Pansy moved closer still.

“Oh, I think you do. And I could make you tell me,” Pansy said in a low voice, her lips curving upwards, as if the thought afforded her much pleasure.

Everyone had gone; Veda must have taken Luna somewhere, and there was no sign of where any of the other Slytherins had gone with their captives. Malfoy had gone as well. Irrelevantly, Ginny wondered where he was. They were alone, the two of them, she and Pansy. The dust motes kept dancing in the spill of amber sunlight. The room was utterly still.

“I’d like to see you try it,” said Ginny. Apparently, her mouth was moving ahead of her brain, which informed her too late that it might not be a good idea to fire off snarky comments at anybody holding a wand one millimetre from her nose, as Pansy Parkinson was now doing. She watched it, mesmerized. She didn’t have her own wand. Dear God, where was it? She struggled to think, to remember. Malfoy had it, along with all the rest. He’d gathered up all their wands and taken them. She thought she’d seen him tuck them under his robes.

“Do you think I’d be too afraid to do what Umbridge was going to do?” Pansy asked, very softly.

Ginny swallowed hard, and did not answer. She wondered suddenly if Pansy Parkinson was quite sane. If she used an Unforgivable curse she’d end up in Azkaban; surely she must know that. Unless… unless the Slytherin girl knew something that Ginny didn’t.

There was a fly buzzing somewhere in the room. The noise grew ridiculously louder and louder.

“And she had to talk herself into it.” Pansy shook her head. Ginny watched the other girl’s long, perfectly straight hair move like dark water. “Silly bitch. I wouldn’t have any such trouble, I assure you…” The wand moved back a bit, as if coiling for a spring. “I’ve never liked any of the Weasleys,” Pansy continued, almost pleasantly. “But you… little Miss Ginny, little Miss Innocent… Don’t stare at the floor. Look at me.”

Ginny’s head went up without her volition and she looked into the other girl’s eyes, glistening with hatred, with venom. And she knew what she had been trying not to know, as if not thinking of it might protect her from it. Just as she’d heard Occlumency lessons were supposed to do, in the snatches of conversation she’d gleaned from the furious whispers between Hermione and Ron…

But it would do no good. She knew, now, that Pansy remembered the last time they’d been nearly so close to each other just as well as she herself did. That golden afternoon a few weeks before, when Draco Malfoy had been leaning in to kiss Ginny with the scent of apples on his breath, and the door to the broom shed had banged open to interrupt them. Pansy was many things, thought Ginny, but she was no fool. And the vicious hatred in the other girl’s eyes had been the same then.

Oh, we never covered this in the DA meetings. Wonder if we would have done. But there is no defence against this; what could Harry have told us, or taught us? Would it do any good to… brace myself? Or should I relax? Maybe if I tried to cast a Protection charm… The frantic, disconnected thoughts chased each other around Ginny’s head for a moment, but then she looked into Pansy’s eyes, and a strange calm came over her. She suddenly knew that the curse would fail before Pansy even opened her mouth. Pansy was gesturing too widely, and waving her wand too frantically, as if exaggerated motion would make up for the fact that she didn’t have the power she needed to put behind her malice. But the real clue was in her eyes, her wavering, unsure eyes, so at variance with the cold sleek surface covering the rest of her. So Pansy Parkinson is vulnerable, too, Ginny thought.

Not that Ginny could hold herself together entirely. It still gave her a frantic jolt to hear the other girl cry “Crucio!” Her heart leaped nauseatingly in her chest. This is real, this is not a game. Maybe I can’t handle it. Maybe I really can’t, she thought despairingly, and indeed a weak wave of pain prickled over her skin, gone almost as quickly as it had come. But Ginny was able to keep her face stolid, and even forced a laugh.

“You couldn’t give me a toothache, Parkinson!”

Pansy’s face crumpled like wet parchment.

How strange, thought Ginny. All that beauty drained out of her in a moment and became ugliness. How quickly things can change.

The door to the corridor opened. There was someone coming up behind Pansy, Ginny saw out of the corner of her eye. A quick, light way of moving, a flash of silvery hair—She looked up, distracted, and in that moment, Pansy reached up and raked her nails down Ginny’s face.

For an instant it didn’t even hurt, and Ginny stood staring stupidly, feeling something wet trickle down her forehead and cheeks, into her eyes, along her jaw, her mouth-- She licked at her upper lip and tasted something coppery.

Light, quick footsteps came towards her. Hands came forward to grab Pansy and swing her away, in the other direction.

“What the hell have you done?” demanded the furious voice of Draco Malfoy.

“I—I only thought—“ stammered Pansy.

“You’d tear Weasley’s face to shreds? You idiot. And where’s everyone else? I can’t leave any of you alone for two minutes—you haven’t got a brain cell shared among the five of you.”

Ginny put a hand up to her face. It came away red. She blinked at it stupidly. Her eyes stung. Something salty was dripping down into them. She saw Malfoy’s pale pointy face bending down to hers, icy with fury, through the red haze that was washing over her field of vision. He murmured a few Healing spells, still glaring at Pansy.

“Damn. These aren’t going to do any good at all. What do you have beneath your fingernails, Parkinson—cobra venom?”

“I was only trying to find out a few things,” whined Pansy. “To get some information. She knows more about that weapon than she’s telling, I’m sure she does, I’m sure they all do—“

“So that’s where everyone else went,” said Malfoy. “A pack of rabid hyenas would be more trustworthy than you lot.” He chuckled mirthlessly, studying Ginny’s face but still speaking to Pansy. His expression was utterly blank. There was nothing Ginny could grab onto, not the faintest clue of his feelings. Perhaps he didn’t have any. She’d thought that more than once before. “You don’t know how to cause pain without leaving scars, do you, Parkinson?” he continued, shaking his head. “No finesse. No subtlety. You never had that.” He grasped Ginny’s arm in one of his hands and began walking her across the room.

“Where are you going?” asked Pansy, her voice sounding afraid.

“That’s my lookout.” His fingers around her wrist were like iron bands, Ginny thought. “But if you must know, I’m going to accomplish what you couldn’t, Parkinson.”

Her footsteps scampered across the wooden floor towards him. “Let me come with you. Let me help you.” Pansy’s voice had the eagerness of a whipped puppy begging for a treat.

“No,” he said, opening a small door set into the wall and pulling Ginny through it. The door slammed behind them.

They were in a little janitor’s closet lit by a single witchlight glowing in a sconce in the wall. There was a large double sink that took up most of the space in the room. Ginny stood very still as Malfoy ran the cold water tap, pulled an embroidered linen handkerchief from a pocket of his robes, and soaked it. She felt the numbing chill as he pressed it against the right side of her face. His hands were careful and precise. If it had been anybody other than Draco Malfoy touching her, she might have called them gentle. His eyes were like the thin grey ice that formed at the surface of the pond in Ottery-St. Catchpole, concealing treacherous waters. Once Ginny had skated over that ice when she was very small. She had fallen under and nearly drowned.

Neither of them said a word.

The handkerchief had Soothing charms woven into it, and was impregnated with essence of murtlap, Ginny could tell. She had seen those for sale in Diagon Alley, but they were several galleons per dozen, far too expensive for her family to afford. The throbbing sting in her cheek began to dull.

He leaned against the far wall, still standing very close to her, looking at her, his eyes still expressionless, still silent. There was something about the way Draco Malfoy didn’t talk that made Ginny more nervous than anything else had done. They had not been anywhere so close to one another since that last day in the broom shed. He had not looked at her once in the days since then, and she had certainly not tried to speak to him. Every time she’d looked at him, she kept trying to find the golden boy of that last long afternoon on the Quidditch pitch, and she never could. Not then, not now.

“I’m all right,” she said, awkwardly. “Here, you can have this back, Malfoy—“ She stretched out her hand as if to return the handkerchief to him. He shook his head. It was covered with streaks and spots of her blood, she saw, and she blushed. “Sorry, I—“ she stammered.

He had dozens and dozens, she was sure. Of course he wouldn’t want one returned to him that had her blood all over it. She pressed it to her cheek again. His initials were embroidered on one corner in twisting black-letter script. D.L.M. Ginny wondered what the L stood for, and her mind ran after the ridiculous thought for a minute. Something very refined and upper-class, no doubt. Lambert, Limnel, Lemuel… surely not Larry… A bubble of hysterical giggling threatened to break the surface, to spill over into panic.

“Something amusing, Weasley?” Malfoy asked, raising his eyebrows slightly.

Ginny shook her head, fighting for control of her emotions. No. There was nothing amusing about the situation all of them were in now. Harry and Hermione were out there in the forest, trapped with Umbridge, leading her towards a weapon that did not exist. Soon that horrible woman would know it, if she didn’t already. Then her friends would be defenseless against her. And they had no wands… wands… Malfoy had those. Had Ginny’s own, as well. Could she steal them back? The idea seemed insane. She didn’t even know what the two of them were really doing in that janitor’s closet. Why had he taken her in here? If it was only to heal her face, why hadn’t he dragged her back out again as soon as the scratches faded?

He still watched Ginny with the inscrutable attention of a cat at a mouse hole, and the silence dragged on and on, pulling her nerves to the snapping point. “Look,” she finally said in desperation. “I don’t know anything about that weapon. I know what Pansy Parkinson said, but she was only fishing; I’ve never even heard anything about it.“

He nodded, as if a point had been confirmed.

Ginny knew that it would probably be smarter to keep her mouth shut. Unfortunately, discretion was not a Weasley trait by birth, and had not been developed by inclination or early training. Spying on her friends and family when they wouldn’t tell her anything, yes; discretion, no.

“Then why’d you bring me here?” she demanded.

He stepped closer to her. The room was so small. So hot. Why hadn’t she noticed it before? He stopped when he was only a few inches from her. She could feel his breath against her skin, which seemed more sensitive than usual. It tingled with each light puff of air. He smelled of mint. He still said nothing.

“Why don’t you just let me go?” Ginny blurted.

His look was more appraising now, as if he were actually considering it. She took a deep breath and plunged on. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, after all.

“Malfoy, surely you’ve got to see that Umbridge overstepped her bounds. She couldn’t have hoped to get away with using the Cruciatus curse on a student. And taking Harry and Hermione into the Forbidden Forest—even Fudge’s influence can’t keep her out of trouble over this one. So why don’t you just let us all go? That way, you can distance yourself from what Umbridge did.”

He hadn’t interrupted her. She decided that that had to be a good sign.

“You don’t want to get dragged down with her,” she said, as coaxingly as she could. “I won’t tell anyone what happened, I promise. I’ll get everybody else to keep their mouths shut as well. Or I’ll say you tried to talk Umbridge out of what she planned to do, or—I’ll say whatever you want me to say,” Ginny finished, lamely.

Malfoy chuckled. “You sound like a Slytherin,” he said.

Well, at least she’d finally gotten him talking.

“But-- can’t you see how much better it would be for you if you could keep your hands clean? I mean—“

“Your solicitude for my welfare is touching, Weasley.” He turned so that his back was against the side wall, and she saw his profile, chin and brow touched with light from the one sconce.

“I only thought—“

“That you wanted to help?” He tapped one finger against his forehead in an exaggerated attitude of deep thought. “Have I missed an important holiday? Is it Be-Kind-to-Malfoys Week?”

She looked at the floor. “So you’re not going to let me out.”

“I’d have to be convinced,” he mused. “Thoroughly convinced. You see, I might have my own reasons for keeping you here.”

“Other than the fact that you’d hex yourself in the foot before you’d let me help Harry?” Ginny retorted, then bit her tongue. But he only laughed.

“Temper, temper. How much do you really want to get out of this office?” His eyes mocked her, even as his silky voice seemed to eddy within her mind and caress it.

“I—I want to. Very much.”

“Yes, but how much? What would you do, for example, to be allowed to leave?”

Ginny had stepped towards him without even realizing it. “What would you ask of me in return, Malfoy?” she whispered. “You never give anything for free.”

“No, I don’t,” he murmured. “Not to someone like you. Could you pay my price, though?”

Her chin was cupped in one of his big hands; how had that happened so fast? And the fingers of his other hand were trailing down the uninjured side of her face. She’d thought that his touch would be cold, like the wet handkerchief had been cold. Like a snake’s skin. But it was not.

“Name it,” she said, in a voice that did not seem to be her own. “And then I’ll know.”

“We were interrupted last time, weren’t we?” he said, as if only a few moments had passed since their last meeting in the broom shed. “We were left with… unfinished business.”

“So what do you want now?” Ginny croaked. Her throat had gone completely dry.

Malfoy’s hands went around her waist. She jumped slightly, but his grasp only became firmer, and he pulled her towards him until she was nearly, very nearly touching his body at every point, chest and stomach and thigh and knee. He undid a silver clasp at his throat and his cloak dropped open, then fell lightly around both of them.

“To finish it,” he said. And then his head was bending down towards hers and her eyes closed but it only made the sensations she was feeling more powerful; Malfoy seemed to radiate something indefinable, a heat, a need, a hunger, and it wrapped itself around her body far more tightly than his cloak had done. Ginny’s own head fell back and a dark roaring shrouded her inner eyes and ears. She was falling and only the circle of his arms held her up; he was going to take something from her and she couldn’t stop him if she tried, but she didn’t want to try; the warmth of his mouth came closer, closer, closer—

The door crashed open and banged against the opposite wall. Pansy Parkinson stood framed in the doorway, her face white as chalk against her ink-black hair.

“I knew it!” she said shrilly. “I knew it all along. Since I saw the pair of you in the broom shed. You said it didn’t mean anything but it was a lie, wasn’t it--how long has this been going on-- you—and her—“ She swung round to face Ginny. “Bitch,” she hissed, and then she was coming at Ginny with her wand outstretched, and there was such rage on her face that Ginny knew Pansy could have produced a Cruciatus now, if she tried.

Malfoy flicked his own wand up almost lazily. “Petrificus Totalus,” he said, and Pansy froze in mid-air, crashing to the ground. He stepped back and drew his robes away from her head as she rolled and hit the floor, her eyes closed, her lashes shocking streaks of darkness against her pale skin. Ginny stuffed her fist in her mouth to keep from screaming.

“She’ll tell everyone,” she said numbly.

He shook his head. “She won’t. I’ll modify her memory, and she won’t remember a bloody thing after she scratched you.”

Ginny hated Pansy. Always had done. But the sight of her enemy unconscious on the floor before her gave her stomach a queasy feeling. “Is she all right?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” said Malfoy. He sighed. “What a dreadful sense of timing she’s always had.”

“Let me out,” Ginny whispered. A wave of awful sickness washed over her and she leaned against the wall, struggling for her bearings. “Just let me out, Malfoy.”

He shook his head again.

“I won’t go to the forest—I swear—just out of this room, out—“

Her hands were beginning to flail. He took them in his. She tried to jerk them away, but he held them tighter, until she could feel her cheap rings biting into her fingers.

“Let go of me,” she gasped. “I hate you! Let me go!”

Malfoy pushed his face even closer to hers. “No,” he said.

Ginny moaned with despair when she felt his hands running up her spine; he pressed against her tightly and she felt something hard and blunt digging into her upper thigh. For a panicked second, she thought she knew exactly what it was she felt. That thing’s got to be over ten inches long! Oh, dear Goddess. I’ve heard the rumours but I never thought-- But wait—there’s more than one of them, I’d swear there is, and they’re bunched in a group—I don’t think even Draco Malfoy can manage that trick—why, I think they’re—

The wands. That was what she felt.

Her arms crept under his robes and her hands smoothed down his chest. He drew in his breath, harshly. They lingered at his waist. They began to journey down his thighs, slowly. “Ginny,” he said through gritted teeth, squeezing his eyes tightly shut, leaning into her, pressing her against the wall.

Then his eyes flew open wide. Ginny jammed her hand into the pocket of his trousers and yanked out all the wands in one swift motion. In a fraction of a second, she had grabbed hers and was pointing it at his nose. He blinked at her.

“Back away, Malfoy,” she said. “Slowly. Hands up.”

He made no move to do as she had ordered. “Listen to me,” he said instead. “Listen, Weasley. Listen.”

His voice sounded so different from all the other times and ways she had ever heard him speak, so free of the normal sneering, drawling, and icy contempt, that Ginny was taken aback. But only for a moment. This was obviously some trick, some attempt to throw her off her guard and get all the wands back from her.

“Nice try, Malfoy,” she said, with the best sneer she could muster. “Don’t trip over Parkinson, now.”

Slowly, he raised his hands, but he made no other move. “You don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “Let me explain—“

“Oh, now that there’s a wand pointed at your head, you want to explain?” asked Ginny. “What a slimy little coward you are.” She had to whip up honest hatred for him, but it was proving difficult. He was looking at her so strangely.

“There’s so much you don’t know,” he said.

“I don’t want to hear anything you’d have to say. I wouldn’t trust it anyway. I’m sure you’d do anything to save your own skin, now.”

“I’m not leaving this room until you’ve heard me out,” said Draco.

“I don’t want to hex you,” said Ginny, “but I will. Don’t think I won’t.”

Yet her wand wavered. He was breathing hard, and his silvery hair had come a little loose and fell over his flushed forehead; his eyes were wide and troubled, and he took a stumbling step towards her as she hesitated. It was the first uncontrolled action she’d ever seen him take.

“All right. Say what you’ve got to say,” she finally said.

Malfoy gulped once, clenched his hands into fists, and then started speaking very fast, in an agitated voice, as if terrified that someone would overhear him.

“Don’t go into the forest. Don’t go to rescue Potter and Granger. They can take care of themselves. But don’t you leave, Ginny Weasley. Don’t get mixed up in--“ He stopped. “Don’t follow them,” he continued in a whisper. “Let Longbottom and Lovegood and your brother go, if they want. But don’t you go.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Ginny, baffled. “Why not?”

But Malfoy’s mouth snapped shut, and he was silent. A shiver passed over him.

“What?”

He collected himself, clearly with great effort. When he lifted his head again, the mask was back in place. But she had seen it drop—she had seen it, and heard it too. Or had she? The last few minutes already seemed too bizarre to have actually happened. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

When she edged toward the door, Malfoy made no move to stop her. His face was calm, faintly sardonic.

“Aren’t you going to stop me?” Ginny asked, her hand on the doorknob.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Go on, Weasley.”

There was a distinct sense of anticlimax. Or maybe that really wasn’t the correct word for what she was feeling, thought Ginny, but she didn’t know what was. “You’re not going to do anything,” she said, staring at him. “You’re going to let me leave.”

He checked his watch. “Yes… I’m going to let you leave.”

“Well—“ said Ginny awkwardly. There was such a sense of something rudely cut off, unfinished. Not to mention that she didn’t trust him an inch.

“There’s only one thing,” Malfoy said, cutting into her thoughts. “If you stroll out there and leave me in a closet, it’ll look odd, won’t it?”

“They’ll wonder how I got away from you.”

“Won’t look good for me, either.” There was an agitation in his voice that it seemed as if he could not quite control.

“It won’t,” Ginny agreed.

“Hex me,” he said. “Quick.”

“Something showy, but harmless,” she said, raising her wand. “Bat-Bogey all right?”

“Ugh.” He grimaced. “Let’s get on with it, then.”

He opened the door for Ginny and she stepped out of the closet; he followed her, and made a rather ostentatious throat-clearing noise. The other Slytherins had returned with their captives, and they were bunched in the middle of the room. Everybody turned at the sound, and Ron’s face went white.

“Ginny!” he yelled.

“You’ll never get me, you filthy blood traitor,” Malfoy snarled at Ginny, sweeping his cloak over one eye like the villain in a vampire melodrama.

“That’s what you think, Malfoy,” said Ginny in a hurt, yet sweetly brave voice, and then she hexed him.

She meant to throw the curse as gently as she could. She really did. But once she had her wand in her hand, a tremor went through her, and in the casting of the spell was contained all her anger at Malfoy for laughing when Umbridge had said that Hogwarts would shortly be a Weasley-free zone, and for sneering at her brother as Ron lay bleeding on the floor, and for letting malicious joy spread over his face when he’d thought that Harry was going to put under the Cruciatus curse. Then, too, Ginny was livid at Umbridge for triggering all of these awful things. She was angry at Harry, just a little, for putting them all in this position in the first place. And she was furious with herself for letting Malfoy come within a hair’s breadth of kissing her twice. All those things went into the Bat-Bogey spell; without her volition, perhaps, but they formed a part of it still, and gave it strength.

Ginny saw the curse heading for Malfoy, spreading out into the cawing, flying bat-bogeys, and then they hit him and he staggered back with a cry of pain. He picked himself up and started running blindly, and they flew after him in attack formation. A pang went through her at the thought that she might have hurt him. But there was no time to feel that, or anything else.

“Catch!” Ginny yelled, throwing the wands to Ron. In the confusion, nobody stopped her in time.

*****************************************************************

“Come on. Faster!” Ron pulled at her arm; Luna was on her other side, Neville hurrying to keep up, and they all clattered down the back stairs to the edge of the Forbidden Forest.

“You all right?” Ron asked once they were safely away from the castle and skirting the massive trees in search of the path.

Ginny nodded.

“Are you sure? Say…” He glanced at her face, which still showed the faint tracks of the scratches. “How’d you get those? That Slytherin cow Pierce who was guarding you, did she do it? Did Malfoy do that? I’ll tear him limb from limb if he did, the little—“

“It’s nothing. And d’you think I couldn’t handle Malfoy?” Ginny asked impatiently.

Ron looked at his sister, and she glanced down at the snowy forest floor, glad that Neville and Luna were ahead a little. There was something very shrewd in his look. Her brother had been having more and more of these shrewd moments all year, and they made Ginny very nervous. She decided that he was safer when oblivious.

“What did you do to get our wands back, Ginny?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “Stole them, that’s all.” Then she scampered ahead to catch up with Neville and Luna. She had been right not to tell any of them about the way Malfoy had tried to keep her in Umbridge’s office, she decided. The way he’d warned her not to follow Harry and Hermione. Who knew why he’d done it, but, being who and what he was, it couldn’t have been for any good reason.

She was sure that it wasn’t important, anyway.

Late June 1995

The Hogwarts train sped through the bleak lands that lay in the southern part of Scotland and Northumberland on its way to central London. Many of the hills and dells and lochs did not exist in the real world. But then, that train did not precisely travel through the real world on its journey back to King’s Cross, Ginny thought. How appropriate. She sat staring out the window, taking in none of the passing scenery. All the sights and sounds around her seemed to be reaching her through a muffling layer of cloth, faint and dim. Ron and Hermione were talking about Cho, now. I was once so jealous of her, Ginny thought. And then I was meanly glad, I remember, when I stole the Snitch out from under her nose during the last match… Even that feeling seemed a thousand years and a thousand leagues distant, and as if it had happened to another person entirely. The Ginny who had gone through the Department of Mysteries was not the petty girl who had triumphed over Cho Chang. . Just as the Ginny who had first entered Hogwarts was not the same Ginny as the one who had lain dying in the Chamber of Secrets, knowing that she had betrayed her friends, knowing it was all her fault. Ginny wondered drearily if she had ever really known who she was at all.

“I—er—heard she’s going out with someone else now,” Hermione said tentatively. Yes, they were still talking about Cho.

“You’re well out of it, mate,” said Ron forcefully. “I mean, she’s quite good-looking and all that, but you want someone a bit more cheerful.”

Ginny wondered if she was the only one who really knew what lay beneath that dogged cheerfulness her brother showed the world now. Were they all playing a part? She wondered about that too. Harry was, she could tell. His body was present, but his spirit seemed far, far away. His every response was oddly out of sync with whatever question had precipitated it, like a sluggish caboose following a brisk train.

“She’s probably cheerful enough with someone else,” said Harry, shrugging.

“Who’s she with now, anyway?” Ron asked Hermione.

“Michael Corner,” Ginny answered without thinking. She could have bitten her tongue off the second the words came out of her mouth.

“Michael—but—“ Ron craned around in his seat to stare at her. That stare was far too penetrating, and Ginny had the uncomfortable feeling that her brother saw much too much. “But you were going out with him!”

Ginny swallowed. “Not anymore,” she said dully. She had tried for a bright, unconcerned tone, but it all came out sounding rather as if she were speaking through gritted teeth. Resolute, at best. She began an explanation about Quidditch and house jealousy and Michael running off to comfort Cho, hoping that her story didn’t sound nearly as disjointed and rambling as it felt, and ended abruptly by scratching her nose with her quill and turning The Quibbler upside down.

Unfortunately, she saw that Ron looked delighted. “Well, I always thought he was a bit of an idiot,” he said happily, prodding his queen forward towards Harry’s quivering castle. “Good for you. Just choose someone—better—next time.” Ginny’s heart sank when Ron gave Harry what was supposed to be a furtive look. As usual, it had all the subtlety of a charging cockatrice.

Think, Ginny, think! Hurry!

She took a deep breath, pulled a name at random from the male population of Gryffindors above fourth year, and tried for the most matter-of-fact tone she could manage. It sounded rather vague. “Well, I’ve chosen Dean Thomas, would you say he’s better?”

“WHAT!” shouted Ron, upending the chessboard. Crookshanks went plunging after the pieces and Hedwig and Pigwidgeon twittered and hooted angrily from overhead. Harry kept staring blankly at the space where the board had been, which was, as far as Ginny could see, the one saving grace in the whole situation.

“Honestly, Ron!” Hermione glared at him. There had been a great many glares exchanged between her and Ron during the past half hour. Ron had spent rather a suspicious amount of time going to the boys’ lav during an early part of the train trip, and Hermione had looked out the window set into the door of the compartment and gasped. She’d gestured to Ginny, and both girls had peeped into the corridor to see Ron talking to Millicent Bulstrode, who had lost a great deal of weight that year. After Ron had returned and seen Hermione’s face, which had taken on a distinct resemblance to a thundercloud, he’d protested his innocence at length.

“I was only trying to see if I could find out anything from her! Secrets of the other side, and that sort of thing,” he’d insisted.

“I suppose that’s why you were holding her hand,” Hermione had said.

“I was doing no such thing! She was showing me the scar where Parkinson twisted her arm that day. You know, the day in Umbridge’s office. I really think Bulstrode isn’t all bad. She didn’t actually want to—“

“Shut it, Ron.” Hermione had clearly still remained unconvinced.

Ginny now raised the Quibbler until it covered her entire face. Ron scrambled for the pieces of the chess game, his face turning at least as red as his hair. “Sorry,” he mumbled. Harry nodded without looking at him. She waited a few minutes, until they were engrossed in another game, Hermione had returned to reading the Prophet, and Neville was softly singing something to his Mimbulus mimbletonia. Then Ginny slipped out of the compartment.

She had never meant to end up where she did, but her feet seemed to carry her to the destination on their own. And she realized, then, that she could have gone nowhere else.

A few hours before, Ginny had come upon the scene in the corridor that led to the lavs in the aftermath of what had happened, when Ron and Seamus were dragging Goyle into the luggage compartment by his grotesquely swollen feet, taking special care to knock his head on every trunk. “What—what happened?” she’d asked, staring at the silent, bloated, almost unrecognizable body.

“They tried to ambush Harry. We took care of them. Nothing for you to worry about,” Ron said with some satisfaction.

“Them? I don’t see anybody but Goyle, and—oh, wait, there’s Crabbe, I suppose--” Ginny craned her neck to see over the mounds of luggage.

“Malfoy’s back there somewhere,” Ron said carelessly. “Under Neville’s trunk, I hope—that’s the one with all the rock samples in it.” He’d taken her arm then and propelled her back towards the compartment where they were all sitting, and she’d had no choice but to go.

Now, she slipped into the luggage compartment as silently as she could, pulling the door shut behind her with great care. Crabbe and Goyle were easy to spot, but she searched for a long time before she found Malfoy. At last, she saw him stuck in the back of the lowest luggage rack, and her hand flew to her mouth to stifle a cry. Whether it was of horror or hilarity, she couldn’t be quite sure. He glared back at her, or at least he seemed to be doing so. Although it was rather hard to tell, considering what had become of his head.

“Mmmpher,” he said, in a way that was obviously meant to be threatening.

Ginny giggled. She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t believe that she was still capable of such a thing, after the last few weeks, but the little laugh flew out of her parted lips as merrily as a bird.

Malfoy’s—face?— well, it had to be, since there was blond hair on that end of him—reddened in a remarkably unattractive way. “Mmph oo,” he sputtered.

Ginny had to turn to the wall and muffle her laughter in her cupped palms. She laughed for a very long time, and when she had finished, she realized that a bit of the dead dull feeling that had been haunting her had simply been blown away, like mist under the sun. Turning back to him, she sobered.

“My brother and the others told me what they’d done to you,” Ginny said quietly. “I didn’t see it happen, though… didn’t know it was this bad…” Then she took out her wand, and got to work.

She removed the Mouthbinding curse next to last. Malfoy spat and sputtered a little, then reached up with a hand and rubbed his mouth. He did not look at her.

“Are you all right, then?” asked Ginny. “Did I get them all?” She believed she had. Certainly, Draco Malfoy no longer resembled a gigantic slug. It had not been as attractive as his usual look, true, but her mouth twitched as she remembered. She rather wished she’d had Colin Creevey’s camera.

“Yes. Now sod off,” he said in a surly voice.

Ginny shook her head and sat down on the floor of the baggage compartment, her legs crossed comfortably.

He swore at her violently. She smiled. “D’you honestly think I haven’t heard worse before, Malfoy? Growing up with Fred and George?”

He tried to get up. The effort was less than successful. “Don’t you know why I left the Leg Locker curse till last?” Ginny asked pleasantly.

“No,” he growled. “And if I could get at my wand, I’d—“

“Tut, tut,” said Ginny. “That’s not a very nice way to behave towards someone who just took a very large number of hexes off of you.”

“What? What about that Bat-Bogey? I’ve still got bruises all over my neck where they started sucking on me before Crabbe managed to get them off that day.”

Against her will, Ginny imagined the bruises, cruelly purple and black against his pale skin. A little tremor of weakness passed through her. She tried to ignore it. “I really think that what I just did more than makes up for one little curse,” she said primly.

“Oh, so you want me in your debt?” sneered Malfoy. “What’s your price, Weasley? Would you like to hold a galleon, for once in your life? How about new robes that don’t look like they were dragged through a mud puddle by pigs? Or shoes of your very own that weren’t passed down through all six of your brothers first?”

“Nope,” she said. “Just some answers.” He was at his very worst, and she found it oddly comforting. The horrible oppressive feeling that had lingered over her like a dark cloud for the past few weeks had lifted, inexplicably. How odd that she should have Draco Malfoy to thank for that.

He was silent for a moment, looking at her. Then he turned his face to the wall, pressing his lips together, obviously determined not to speak.

Ginny continued, undaunted. “Or I could tell you what I’ve figured out since the last time we talked. How would you like that, Malfoy?”

No response.

“All right, then. The first thing I’ve learned,” said Ginny, “is that you were the one who originally tipped off Filch that Peeves was really smearing ink all over the lenses of the telescopes in the Astronomy Tower.”

“What?” exclaimed Malfoy. “How did you ever find out—“ He stopped too late.

“It seems someone is in a talking mood after all,” said Ginny sweetly.

He scowled at her.

“You knew he’d tell Umbridge, of course,” Ginny continued. “And that’s why you weren’t with the Slytherins who captured us in the corridor, wasn’t it? You were talking to Filch.”

Malfoy paused. “Yes,” he finally said.

“And you knew Ron had just finished telling Umbridge that Peeves was in the Transfiguration classroom, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did.”

“However did you learn that so fast?” Ginny asked curiously.

A smile curved Malfoy’s thin lips. The bottom one was much fuller than the top, Ginny noticed. Rather… pink and pouty. She remembered what it felt like, having those lips a hair’s breadth from hers. She remembered the minty smell of his mouth, millimetres from her own. The memories possessed her against her will, and yet not quite. Perhaps she only wanted to believe that they did. Very much as it had been when he had backed her against a wall and grabbed her waist between his hands and come so very close to kissing her the second time, in that broom cupboard in Umbridge’s office.

“That’s for me to know,” he said, “and you to never find out.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

“Oh, I would.” Malfoy wriggled around so that he lay on his stomach in the luggage rack, propping his chin in his hands. He looked up at her.

“But that’s not all, is it? The only way you could have actually been with Umbridge when she went there to catch Harry in her office—as you were—was if you warned her right after you warned Filch. You didn’t wait for Filch to come back and tell her; you couldn’t have done. I think you must have told Parkinson and the rest to round us up on your way back to Umbridge… Otherwise, you couldn’t have possibly gotten there so fast, and the Inquisitorial Squad wouldn’t have known to go looking for us, either, because she wouldn’t have had time to tell them and then also get to Harry as quickly as she did,” Ginny said, thinking it out as she spoke. “That point’s bothered me ever since it all happened. But that’s the explanation, isn’t it?”

"How much longer are you going to keep me under the Leg Locker curse, Weasley?” he asked. “It’s really dreadfully uncomfortable.”

She threw him a pillow from an upper rack. “Until you’ve answered my questions.”

He tapped one long, elegant finger against his cheekbone. “I suppose that’s fair enough,” he finally said. “I do owe you something for removing the curses. Malfoys always pay their debts. But I’ll ask you a question first, then; something I’ve always wondered about.” Draco grinned, but there was no humor in his eyes. “Didn’t Potter or Granger or any of your brothers ever wonder why my parents didn’t raise holy hell at the end of term last year, after I’d been hit with every curse under the sun and then rolled out into the corridor of the train? Or Crabbe and Goyle’s parents, either?”

“You were the one who took the curses off Crabbe and Goyle,” Ginny pointed out.

“And I’ll have to do it again,” sighed Draco. “After we’ve finished speaking though, I rather think. I don’t want them conscious now. But it was you who removed the hexes from me, Ginny Weasley, now wasn’t it?”

“You know very well I did,” said Ginny grudgingly. “I’ve regretted it ever since. If you have a question, Malfoy, please get to it.”

He looked up at her, his silvery eyes bright. “Why’d you do it? Last year, I mean.”

She was tempted to fire his own answer back at him. That’s for me to know, and you never, never to find out. “I was wandering around the corridor,” Ginny said instead. “I just happened to stumble across you. I just—you looked so awful. And I didn’t even know it was you at first, under all those jelly-tentacle things,” she lied. “I already told you that, Malfoy. But if I’d known all the horrible things you’d said to Harry and Hermione and my brother, about Cedric and all the rest of it, I wouldn’t have done.”

There was a short silence.

“Yes,” he said without inflection. “They were rather horrible things, weren’t they?”

“Seemed that you were rather declaring what side you were on, Malfoy.”

He shrugged.

“But then there’s something I don’t understand,” said Ginny. She leaned forward, looking at him intently. He might have moved his face away, but he did not. “You’re the one who got Umbridge to her office that day. Now, she’s horrible. And she’s evil. I don’t feel any sorrier for her because she’s landed herself in the mental ward at St. Mungo’s now, either. But if she’d kept Harry and Hermione and the rest of us in her office, we’d never have gone to the Department of Mysteries. A lot of terrible things wouldn’t have happened. And—“ her voice caught, no matter how hard she tried to keep it steady “—Sirius Black would still be alive.” And you tried to keep me away from all of it. Maybe. I suppose I’ll never know if that’s what you really meant to do. But I didn’t listen, and I went. What I saw there is forever burned into me, and what I heard… what I heard…Take the little girl, Bellatrix Lestrange said to Harry. He can watch. How much did you know, Draco Malfoy? And why, why did you try to warn me? But she didn’t say any of that.

His face did not change, as she had known it would not. Silently, he nodded.

“Yes,” she continued, “I was pretty sure you already knew about everything that happened there, Malfoy. No point in my keeping it a secret from you. So even though Umbridge was the one who caught us in her office, it was your fine hand that led her there, wasn’t it? And I want to know why.” Her voice kept breaking, no matter how hard she tried to control it. “Why? Whose side are you on, Draco?”

Ginny didn’t realize that she’d called him by his first name until it was too late. She waited almost fearfully for his reaction. It was a long time coming, or at least it felt so to her, in these strange secret moments between them in the baggage compartment, in the train speeding towards King’s Cross. It had grown late. The last shaft of late afternoon sunlight fell through the small high window and illuminated his face. It was almost expressionless, but there was a hint of some emotion around the mouth, or perhaps at the corner of those silvery-grey eyes, something subtle and refined, even devious, that Ginny could never have defined. He lifted one hand and caressed her cheek. The gesture was so unexpected that Ginny’s eyes went wide and she simply lay frozen where she was, her face close to his, her breathing quick and light and frightened as a trapped animal’s. Draco’s touch was so light and gentle that she could barely feel his fingers skimming the length of her face, but each fine peach-fuzz hair dusting the line of her cheek stiffened, and her pulse beat frantically in her throat. At last, the hand came to rest on her collarbone, and reached upwards to tilt her chin towards his, so that Ginny was staring directly into those crystal-like eyes.

“The side I’m always on,” he said, his voice as soft, and gentle, and inexorable as his touch. “Mine.”

Ginny simply closed her eyes for a moment. He was far too distracting, this close to her, in this strangely intimate setting. So she deliberately tried to conjure up the sight of his smirking face and the sound of his drawling, contemptuous voice all that year. All the words to Weasley Is Our King echoed in her head. She remembered the rumours she’d heard of the vicious things he’d said about her brothers, her father, her mother, and the Burrow that infamous day on the Quidditch pitch when Fred, George, and Harry had all been banned from playing. The way he’d strutted around the halls that spring with that ridiculous silver Inquisitorial Squad badge pinned to his robes. The triumph in his eyes every time he used his prefect’s power to play the bully. The fleeting look of sadistic pleasure on his face when Umbridge had been readying herself to cast the Cruciatus curse on Harry. How much easier all this would be if she could only hate Draco Malfoy, and there were so many good reasons. Surely, surely there were enough reasons…

Yet there weren’t, not enough to make her feel the hatred she should have felt. And if it was her moral failing, she couldn’t help it.

“I heard about what happened the last day of term,” she whispered, looking at the carpeted floor. “After-- everything else happened, in the Department of Mysteries, I mean. How you swore you’d get revenge on Harry. For—for your father—“ she swallowed hard, past a sudden awful lump in her throat. The bitterness, the rage, and the impotent fear she always felt when she thought of Lucius Malfoy rose in her again. God, how she hated the feeling, and how she hated him! “Going to Azkaban,” she continued. “Is that true?”

“Which part?” Draco asked. His voice was utterly even. “That my father’s in Azkaban now? That’s true.”

“No, that’s not what I meant. The—the other. Did you swear you’d get revenge on Harry?”

Draco laughed softly. It was not a pleasant laugh. “That’s what he said, is it?”

“That’s what I… heard.”

“You seem to be a font of information, Weasley.”

Ginny looked down even further, playing with her interlaced fingers. “I have ways of finding out things.”

“I’ll bet.”

She could feel his eyes on her, even though she wasn’t looking at her. “You can deny it if you like, Malfoy,” Ginny said. “But I know it’s true.” She couldn’t stop herself from thinking of him as Draco now, but she wasn’t going to call him by his first name again.

“Really?” asked Draco. “And how can you be so sure?”

“Because I know Harry.”

“Really?” Draco repeated, but the word was full of unpleasant insinuation, this time. “Just how well do you know Potter?”

“We’re friends,” she said.

“Really,” said Draco for a third time, and now the word was silky, as smooth as the skin of a snake. “It’s always nice to have… friends.” He paused. “Well, Weasley, you think you’ll get answers from me? No. I neither confirm what you’ve heard, nor deny it.”

“But I do know it’s true,” insisted Ginny. “I just wanted to know why.”

“Hmm. Want must be your master then, I’m afraid.”

“But why?” Ginny persisted. She had inherited the Weasley gift, and curse, of persistence in full measure. “It wasn’t Harry’s fault, what happened to your father.” It was Lucius Malfoy’s own fault and he deserved worse, she nearly said. For what he did to me, and others… For the diary, for the Chamber of Secrets, for that horrible night in the Department of Mysteries when he helped to lead into a trap. When he led the Death Eaters who tried to kill us all.

Draco’s mouth twisted up into a smirk that distorted his features cruelly. If he didn’t look that way so often, he might be handsome, she thought stupidly. When he spoke, his words were icy and controlled. “Do you think this is about faults, Weasley? About fairness?”

“I only thought—“

“You thought,” he said, and his words turned into a hiss, although it seemed that he was trying hard to control them. “You thought. You think this entire thing is like the village nursery school you undoubtedly went to, I suppose? You think the world’s run according to your stupid Gryffindor ideals, fair play and sharing and good citizenship—let’s all play nice and share our toys, and it’ll all come right in the end—“ Draco broke off, breathing heavily. Spots of bright red colour stained his ivory cheeks. She could see his fingers digging into his palms, the knuckles of his hands going white. His struggle to get himself under control was visible, and she watched, fascinated. She realized that he would probably hate her even more than before for seeing him this way, but she could not stop looking at this thing she had never dreamed she would see but was now seeing for the second time, this strange nakedness of Draco Malfoy.

“It’s not like that,” he finally said, his voice calmer, more distant. “Strange that you could still think that, after everything that’s happened to you. Stranger still that I should be the one to tell you. But you couldn’t have remained an innocent forever. We all pay, all the time, even for things we didn’t do. There is no justice. No fairness. In the end, we all swing, Ginny Weasley.”

She met his eyes. “Do you think I don’t know that?” she asked.

Draco looked back at her. She had a sudden, wild impulse to cry out questions. Do you know about the diary your father gave me when I was only eleven years old? Do you know what was done to me? How I was possessed, stolen from myself, torn apart so I thought I’d never be whole again? But he would not tell her the truth about that, either.

“I’m not the innocent you think I am, Draco Malfoy,” she said, instead.

“Aren’t you,” he said. “Aren’t you, indeed.”

And then the implications of what she had said struck her, and Ginny knew she was blushing. Merlin’s beard, she hadn’t meant it that way.

“I—I didn’t—I don’t—“ she began, before realizing that it sounded even worse to try to explain what she had said.

In answer, Draco’s arm shot out and dragged her forward, into the lower level of the luggage racks where she’d placed him, half-hauling her into the darkness under the rows of trunks.

“What—“ she sputtered.

“Someone’s coming,” he said, and then she heard the footsteps in the corridor.

“Where d’you reckon you heard it, Hermione? In here?” her brother’s voice asked.

There was no time for thought. Frantically, Ginny started wriggling into the cramped lower rack, the only hiding place in the room. There was almost no space left; it wasn’t large enough for one person let alone two, and she couldn’t quite make it all the way in.

“Unlock my legs,” said Draco, her lips at her ear. “Hurry.”

“Finite,” whispered Ginny, waving her wand frantically at him.

He braced his feet against the far wall of the train and used the leverage to pull her completely under the rack and towards him. Ginny scrambled back as far as she could and huddled against Draco’s chest as the door opened.

“Ginny?” Hermione’s voice called. “Are you in here?”

Ron walked over to the luggage rack. Ginny couldn’t see him, but his footsteps were instantly recognizable. She’d been hearing them all her life. She lay as still as she could, hardly daring to breathe. Don’t look down, she prayed, don’t look down…

“Ugh. I honestly think Crabbe and Goyle look worse than they did two hours ago,” said Hermione.

“Doesn’t really wear off, does it?” chortled Ron. Ginny chanced a quick peek upwards and saw him poking their sluglike forms with his wand. She certainly didn’t like Crabbe or Goyle—they’d never given her a reason to do anything but dislike them, unless you counted that one encounter with Crabbe on the Quidditch pitch—but the expression on her brother’s face was making her very uncomfortable. It was a sort of sadistic glee. She remembered that fleeting expression on Draco’s face when they’d all thought that the next second, they were going to see Harry start writhing in agony on the floor of Umbridge’s office. The way Ron looked now really wasn’t any different. Maybe it was even worse.

The thought was like an eddy of poison seeping through her mind.

“Of course it doesn’t wear off,” Hermione said impatiently. “Honestly, Ron, did you use those curses without even knowing their effects?”

“They worked, that’s all that matters,” said Ron. “Funny, they look exactly like those big slugs that would always crawl out onto the walk in front of the Burrow after a long rain. We all used to love stepping on those. Except for Ginny. She never would… Shame one of us didn’t think of using a Shrinking charm today, really…”

“Ron!” said Hermione, her voice uncomfortable. “That’s enough. Er, where’s Malfoy? I don’t see him.”

“Rolled somewhere behind Crabbe and Goyle, I expect,” said Ron indifferently. “D’you really want to check? We’d have to touch them.”

“Good point,” sighed Hermione. “But, Ron—“ She hesitated. “We haven’t been able to find Ginny yet, and it’s been half an hour at least, and I just thought…”

There was a moment of silence. Ginny could almost hear the wheels in her brother’s head whirring. “What?” he said at last, in a soft, deadly voice. “What did you think, Hermione?”

“Nothing,” she said hurriedly. “Look, Ron! I think I—uh—just saw someone out in the corridor!”

“Oh,”said Ron. “Say, you’re right! It’s Millicent Bulstrode. I mean, uh, that evil Slytherin cow.”

Hermione gave an unmistakable snort.

Their footsteps clattered out the door again, and it slammed behind them. Ginny gave a shuddering sigh of relief, and then remembered that she was still wedged into the bottom of a luggage rack with Draco Malfoy.

She could have screamed. She could have cried out. She could have called her brother’s name. And they would have been found, and she would have had no trouble at all in getting Ron to believe that Malfoy had dragged her there by force and was about to do something horrible to her. She wouldn’t have had to even open her mouth to convince Ron of that. Minor details such as how Draco had done any such thing when he was under about twenty different curses wouldn’t have been very important next to her brother’s pressing urge to kill.

And Ginny had done nothing.

Draco bent his head down and towards her and she twisted around to face him as best she could.

“I didn’t want to get Ron in trouble,” she said in a rush. “He would have gone mad if he’d seen us, and I don’t know what he might have tried to do.”

“Oh, your brother’s a paragon of mental stability,” said Draco in her left ear. “Anybody ever tell you that?”

She could not think of any reply.

“What really strikes me about this,” he continued, “is the astounding bravery of the Gryffindors. Let’s see. It would have been three against one, wouldn’t it, between you, your brother, and Granger?”

There seemed to be nothing to say.

“And yet you didn’t make a sound,” Draco said musingly.

Now he was sure to ask her why not. Ginny prayed for the floor of the train to open up and swallow her before that happened. But there was only a silence that stretched on and on.

“Ron hates you,” she blurted. “Always has.” She had meant it to be some sort of explanation, but she was aware that it sounded a lot more like a confession.

Draco looked at her quizzically.

“All my brothers hate you.”

“I’m quite sure they do.”

“My entire family hates you.”

“Ah. No surprises in that direction, either.”

The next words came before she could think to stop them.

“I don’t hate you,” she said. Then she looked down, so she did not have to meet his eyes.

They were both silent, and in the silence between them something seemed to whisper through the air. Then Draco looked up, and she knew, somehow, that the conversation they’d been having before they heard the footsteps in the corridor would now continue as if nothing had interrupted it.

“Are you still an innocent, Ginny Weasley? After everything that’s happened to you, and everything you’ve seen?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Well, yes—in some ways, I mean—“ Ginny blushed; she really couldn’t help it.

“Some ways?” Draco cocked one dark-blond eyebrow. “Well, well, Weasley. What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” she mumbled.

“Poor Michael Corner.”

“He’s not my—we aren’t-- we’re not together anymore,” said Ginny, not at all sure why she felt it was so important to clarify this point.

“Aren’t you?”

“He told me I always seemed to be thinking about someone else.”

“Were you?”

Ginny cleared her throat and decided to change the subject. “I’m not innocent in the ways that really matter.”

“I see.” The train chugged on. Neither of them spoke. She was pressed so close to Draco that she could hear his steady heartbeat beneath his fine linen shirt, and the sound lulled her so much that she was surprised to hear him suddenly ask, “You love your parents, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Ginny. “Very much.” She thought fleetingly of how horribly disjointed their conversation would sound to anyone listening. “And you…?”

Draco sighed, and when he spoke again, his voice sounded oddly remote. “I know my mother will be waiting for me at King’s Cross, as she’s always waited for me. And I know that seeing her, it’ll be like it always has been… like a kind of peace has come over the world, and nothing could ever really be bad, or wrong, if I can see my mother’s face.”

“And…” Ginny could not bring herself to say Lucius Malfoy’s name.

Draco laughed shortly, a harsh sound. It reminded her weirdly of Sirius Black’s short sharp bark of a laugh. Or maybe it wasn’t so odd. He’d been Draco’s cousin, after all. “Do you know what it is, Ginny Weasley,” whispered Draco, “to be torn between love and hate? So torn that you yourself can’t tell the difference between them, and you think perhaps there isn’t any?”

Yes, she knew.

Ginny remembered Draco’s face when he had asked her to stay with him in Umbridge’s office a few weeks earlier. To let Harry and Hermione wander around in the forest; to let Neville and Ron and Luna follow them, if they must, but to stay. He had looked the same then as he did now, she realized. It had been almost like a prayer, his wish for her to stay; an impossible hope, like a dream of heaven. She remembered how she had thought for an instant that he was not himself; that this could not be Draco Malfoy, that some imposter had briefly slipped into his place.

She thought that she owed him some thanks for that. Or at least, the truth in return for what truth he had told her.

“I think maybe I do,” she replied. “Or at least, I know what it’s like to be torn.”

He let out a long, shuddering breath. “Do you?”

Ginny wasn’t sure if what she would have said in reply, or even if he really expected a response. But she had no chance. There were other footsteps sounding in the hall, lighter and quicker, a general faint murmur that was growing closer. The train was starting to slow down.

The evening was far advanced, and even this long June night was drawing towards dusk. A dusky orange ray of the setting sun spilled in through the window and limned Draco with gold; every peach-fuzz hair on his narrow face glowed, and Ginny, feeling the warmth on her own cheeks, knew that she was glowing too. There was perhaps a minute left in which they could still be sure of remaining undiscovered. She knew that, and looking into Draco’s eyes, she knew he did as well. He mumbled something under his breath; she was never sure what, but she doubted, afterwards, that it had consisted of coherent words. And he closed the last gap of space between them.

Ginny was to think later that she could have at least tried to squirm away from him, could have attempted to kick and scratch and bite. She certainly could have kneed him in the groin, since her knee was in a very strategic position at the time. But she did not. Draco actually hesitated for an instant after lowering his head, as if asking permission. And, without speaking, Ginny gave it.

So close your eyes… for that’s a lovely way to be… aware of things your heart alone was meant to see… A Muggle song she’d heard once, sweet and melancholy. It flashed through her mind. Her eyes closed. She relaxed into Draco’s chest. The space that had seemed impossibly small and cramped suddenly contracted to its heart, and could not have been a bit larger. And at last, he kissed her.

Ginny had been kissed before. Neville had followed her around the rose gardens at the Yule Ball a year and a half ago, her hands growing sweatier and sweatier and his mouse-brown hair sticking to his forehead from nervous perspiration. She’d known what he was trying to do. At last, she’d given up and stood still under a sprig of mistletoe, and sighed softly when she felt his rubbery lips on hers. Colin Creevey had given her a few wet, slobbery smacks that spring. She’d had her little snogging sessions with Michael Corner, sometimes pleasant, especially in the beginning, but always rushed, always unsatisfactory.

And of course there was that summer night at Grimmauld Place last year, the night before Harry came to that house, the one she had tried so hard to forget, as Sirius Black had said they must. The drunken kisses, her narrow bed, the mingled fear and desire that drove them both to a place they never should have gone… Yet Sirius had stopped them in time, as Ginny knew that she herself that she would have not been able to do, on the rare occasions when she could not quite keep herself from remembering. And she’d never gone further than that, with anyone. She somehow knew, when Draco kissed her, that he had. With Pansy, no doubt. But even that thought could not stop what she was feeling. It was so very different from anything she might have expected, being kissed by him. His mouth ravaged hers without finesse, without restraint. He was greedy. Hungry, starving even. Desperate. She had never imagined that he was capable of such desperation. But then, so was she, and she would never have believed that, either.

She made a low sound deep in her throat. So did he. The kiss deepened and deepened. It seemed impossible that he could press her any closer to him, but he did, and she tried, awkwardly, to do the same. He edged one of her legs over his and pressed between them a little and, oh Goddess, she felt something against her upper thigh through the layers of cloth and it wasn’t a wand, not this time. She whimpered nervously and he said, “Shh… shh…”

She was floating in the soft ragged sound of his voice murmuring things she couldn’t quite hear, and the feel of his mouth on her lips, her jaw, her throat, the part of her upper chest that he’d bared by pushing down her blouse as much as he could. Draco was trying to get his hands around to the front and her breath gave a dizzying leap when she realized what he wanted to do. What he wanted to touch. The realization almost brought her back to herself. But then he surged forward, trying to get at her, wedging her even further against the back of the luggage rack, and the long, blind, fearfully wild kisses went on and on and on. There was no room for rational thought.

At last their frantic wriggling allowed Draco to pull his hands around, and they slid up her stomach and beneath her cotton blouse to cup her breasts. Ginny caught her breath. She still had all her clothes on but was far more vulnerable to him than if she’d been stripped naked; she was completely trapped against the rack and couldn’t move a muscle. She might as well have been in a full body-bind curse. His face studied hers. Ginny gave an incoherent little moan, and her head moved up and down in a nod.

Then she bit her lip to keep from crying out when his thumbs rubbed her covered nipples, gently. Gently. Ginny sobbed with frustration, trying to move her own hands, to touch him, but one was stuck behind her and one was pulled over her head. She tried to straighten the rest of her body so that it touched his more closely, but she couldn’t do that, either. They were so close to each other, and yet they couldn’t do anything but this. They couldn’t move from the luggage rack; they’d be found if they did. The seconds were ticking down to the one when she’d have to leave, or they’d be found anyway.

The torture was exquisite.

Ginny found that she could bend her head down the slightest bit, and her lips brushed his fingertips; as he clearly realized what she was trying to do, he moved his palms up a little further, trapped between their bodies. She pulled his fingers into her mouth and sucked and nipped at them, inexpertly, eagerly; he shivered and so did she, in mutual pleasure. She had allowed Draco to put his hands on her, but she realized then that it was the first time she’d willingly touched him.

“Ginny—“ he began in a choked voice, and then stopped. She was to spend a good deal of time afterwards wondering what Draco would have said if he had been able to continue speaking, then. But there was a loud rumbling, a shuddering pulling to a halt, and he was thrown against her. For a fleeting instant, they touched each other at every point, from forehead to foot, and she felt him yearning towards her, and her to him, in a desperate wordless cry. One last frantic, devastating kiss. Then he was shoving her out of the luggage rack, out onto the floor.

There were footsteps in the hall, coming closer. She could hear students’ voices. They were all headed towards the baggage compartment. Ginny lay on the floor, her hands propped against the carpet, utterly dazed.

“Get out,” Draco said from behind her. “Hurry. Don’t look back at me. Go!” And he pushed her towards the door.

Ginny scrambled to her feet and ran out of the room, her heart pounding as if it would burst out of her chest.


She caught up with Harry, Ron, and Hermione just as they were walking through the magical barrier between Platforms Nine and Ten, and let them go ahead of her, leaning against a pillar for a moment, closing her eyes. Then the ticket inspector waved her on, and she went as sedately as she could. Her family was waiting to greet them on the platform, along with Moody, Tonks, and Remus Lupin. Ginny wondered briefly what they were doing there.

“Ron! Ginny!” called her mother, hurrying forward and embracing her daughter. “Oh, and Harry dear—how are you?” Ginny stepped away gratefully when Molly Weasley pulled Harry into a hug. She felt… tainted. As if everything that had happened only a few minutes before was somehow written on her face in the language of lust. Ron looked at her strangely. Then he was distracted by the lurid green jackets that Fred and George were wearing, and Ginny shrank back, grateful. But the respite didn’t last long. Harry’s relatives were standing on the platform, she saw now, all looking as if they would have given a great deal to be somewhere else—Antarctica, perhaps—and the members of the Order were talking to them rather loudly. Under cover of the far from amicable conversation, Ron turned back to his sister.

“Where were you?” he asked under his breath.

“Oh!” said Ginny. “I, er, went to find the food trolley.”

“After all those Cauldron Cakes you ate? What, do you have a hollow leg?”

It hadn’t been a good lie. “I felt a bit ill, suddenly,” she said.

“So you were in the girls’ lav.”

“Yes,” Ginny said eagerly. “Yes, that’s exactly where I was the whole time.”

“Funny then,” said Ron, “that Hermione went looking for you ten minutes after you left and didn’t see you there.”

“I expect I’d, uh, started down the corridor by then.”

“And yet we didn’t see you for the next hour, either.”

Ginny looked down at her feet. “I needed to be alone,” she said, putting an edge on her voice. “Can’t you understand that, Ron?”

He looked abashed. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I can. That’s all it was, though?”

“That’s all it was,” she said firmly. She couldn’t bear her brother’s eyes on her another moment. Ron didn’t look quite satisfied. But he finally turned back to the rest of the group, following the argument with fascination.

“Yeah, if we get any hint that Potter’s been mistreated in any way, you’ll have us to answer to,” Moody was saying, as Harry’s purple-faced uncle swelled ominously.

Ginny slipped away from her family a little, leaning against the nearest stone pillar. She rested her cheek against the marble, desperately trying to cool the heat in her head a bit. She felt as if she had been plunged through some sort of madness, like a rushing fever dream. It had nothing to do with daily life, ordinary life. She must simply forget it. She leaned even further against the marble until she was sitting on the opposite side, dully watching the stream of people hurrying by. A lot of Muggles, of course. But there was Hannah Abbott… Susan Bones… Pansy Parkinson’s horrible little sister, Ivy…

Draco Malfoy.

He sat down very close to her but turned the other way at the opposite base of the stone pillar. For an instant she almost thought he was looking in her direction, but she quickly decided she was wrong about that. His fair head was bent over something in his lap, and by scrunching down a little and peering to one side without moving her neck, Ginny saw that it was a parchment. The same one Draco had always had earlier in the year when she saw him on the Quidditch pitch, she’d swear. He was writing something on it with a quill pen. Then he tapped it with his wand and it shrank to the size of a small coin.

His face was expressionless, scanning the crowd. As she watched, he caught sight of something, and following his line of vision she saw his mother, Narcissa Malfoy, dressed in expensive Muggle clothing. Ginny’s eyes widened in surprise when she saw that. The older woman’s perfect face was expressionless as well, but as she saw Draco and began to walk purposefully in their direction, Ginny could see that there were deep violet shadows under her eyes, not quite covered by makeup. Ginny recognized them as the smudges left by night after night of wakefulness. Narcissa looked very weary. But her face lit up as she drew closer to her son, and Ginny felt a strange, not quite painful pang, watching the two of them. Draco’s face relaxed, and he rose to his feet, starting towards his mother. He did not glance at Ginny. But when he walked by her, his hand brushed hers, as if by accident. His fingers pressed something into her palm.

“Ginny!” Molly Weasley stood over her, looking down at her with concern in her face. “There you are, dear—you’ve just missed Harry. We tried to find you before he left so you could say good-bye, but it’s so dreadfully crowded here—“ She waved a vague hand at the bustle of King’s Cross. “Are you all right, dear?”

Ginny forced herself to smile. The flat little thing Draco had pressed into her palm felt like a burning brand. “Yes, Mum. Of course I’m all right. Sorry I missed Harry.”

The family piled into a sleek silver car outside the train station.

“S’pose they’ll lend Dad any car he wants at this point,” Fred was chortling. “Should’ve asked for a Jag.”

“As usual, Fred, you go for ostentation over true style,” sighed George. “Give me a Thunderbird convertible, every time.”

“Ministry’s eating their words now, are they?” asked Ron happily. “Dad, ask for an office with a proper window next—“

They chattered on and on, and Ginny prayed for the journey to be over soon. She kept fingering the little square in her pocket, not daring to return the thing to its original size and look at it until she was somewhere more private.


She sat on the bed of her little girl’s room and pulled the pink lacy curtains. Her old dolls stared glassily down at her from their shelf. Her stuffed lion’s unravelled ear drooped into her hair as she moved as far back behind the curtains as she could. She wondered if they’d really hide what she was doing if anyone came into the room. They weren’t made for privacy. When they had first been put up, she’d been nine years old, with nothing to hide. Now, she had plenty.

Ginny tapped the tiny square with her wand. “Engorgio,” she whispered. It unfolded smoothly into a large sheet of parchment. Slowly, her hands lowered it to the bed, and her eyes closed.

She didn’t know what she expected to see when she opened them. Detailed notes about her worst performances at Quidditch practice, maybe. All fourteen lost verses of Weasley Is Our King. A list of every insult Draco had ever hurled at her family, friends, and house over the years.

Or perhaps—just perhaps—some sort of explanation. Something that revealed the reasons for everything, everything; every look, every gesture, every touch, and above all else, that long consuming kiss on the train that had burned through her like a wildfire and left her heart covered in ashes. Ginny, I pour out my soul to you, as I could never do in speech… She cringed at her own imagined words. And Draco Malfoy probably didn’t have a soul.

She forced her eyes to open.

She was looking at a portrait of herself, done in coloured pen. He’d captured the shades of red and gold and copper in her hair, perfectly, and the layers of bronze and brown in her eyes, and the pink in her cheeks. The image of Ginny looked out of the parchment inscrutably, tendrils of her hair blowing back in an unseen breeze. Her lips were parted, as if about to speak. She blinked at her other self, and then she turned her head away. Ginny turned the parchment over, but the other side was blank

But as she stroked her fingers over the surface of the parchment as she couldn’t seem to stop herself from doing, words appeared, swimming up as if from a great depth. And her heart leapt ridiculously in her chest. She held her breath until the words became clear.

I give back to you the image I made of you. Because even this I cannot keep. Be well, Ginny, and hold fast to whatever you believe, in the darkness that is rising.

There was a little more writing in the corner, in that elegant, stark script of his. That was what he must have been doing when she’d seen him with the parchment at King’s Cross. But it was only his initials, she saw now. D.L.M.

She’d never even found out what the L stood for.

Ginny sat on her bed with the parchment clasped in her hand until she heard her mother calling her down to dinner. She rolled it into a neat package, placed it at the very back of the highest shelf, and went downstairs. Ron looked at her oddly as she slipped into her chair.

Then she picked up her fork and began to eat, as she had done every day of her life up to now, and knew she would have to do every day afterwards.

“The garden gnomes are absolutely dreadful, the worst infestation I’ve ever seen,” said Molly Weasley. “You’ll all have to get started right after dinner, there’s enough work for the entire—“

Ron groaned. “Way to welcome back the conquering Quidditch hero, Mum.”

“Oh, suck it up, Ronniekins,” said Fred, around the most enormous bite of Yorkshire pudding that Ginny had ever seen.

“We’re prepared to do our degnoming duty,” added George. Hermione, sitting between him and Ron, smiled vaguely but said nothing. She was very pale, and not yet truly recovered from Dolohov’s curse in the Department of Mysteries. Ginny wondered suddenly what her Muggle parents thought of all this, or if they even knew what their daughter had become mixed up in. She wondered if they ever would have allowed Hermione near Hogwarts, if they had really understood what was in store for her.

Ginny looked around the room as the voices of her family rose and fell. The kitchen was as close and cosy as ever, the checked tablecloth as shabby. The warm pools of rushlight touched the edges of the battered old wooden table in exactly the same way. The garden just outside the windows was as overgrown as it had been all her life, a profusion of tomatoes and squash and zucchini spilling over onto the front walk. Her parents were the same. Her brothers were the same. The very village of Ottery-St. Catchpole was the same.

Normal life, everyday life. Ordinary life.

Nothing has changed, thought Ginny. But I—I have changed. And there is no going back.

“Are you all right, Gin?” Ron asked in a low voice. “You look so pale. So—strange.”

“Yes,” said Ginny. “I’m all right.”

It wasn’t true yet. But it would have to become so. Perhaps in the two months before term started, she could put the scattered pieces of herself back together. Perhaps.

She went up to bed early that night, claiming a headache. No, she didn’t want any Naproxis powders. No, no herb tea. No, she just needed a good night’s sleep. Ginny was more than half afraid she’d spend the wakeful hours staring up at the canopy of her bed. But she dropped off to sleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, and tumbled into dream as if it had been lying in wait for her.

The sky was dark; the horizon distant. She was standing on an island in a rising sea of blood, the dark, clotted blood that seeps from old wounds. Her family and friends stood about her on smaller islands of their own, and the blood-ocean was already rising to their knees. She called out in horror, in desperation, but they only looked at her, and she saw them disappear under the crimson tide. Great sinister flying creatures circled in the sky far above her, things that looked something like birds and something like bats, the tendons of their wings flexing under leathery skin, their eyes white and blank. They’re a bit like Bat-Bogeys gone horribly wrong…but I’ve never seen them before, I’m sure I haven’t… And Ginny understood that all there was that saved her was her slightly larger island, and if the sea rose high enough, it would drown her too. Although it was an island, it was also the body of her brother Ron, or perhaps she was standing on his shoulders—as is often the case with dreams, the details were never clear. She understood that she would survive because he would not, that his death would preserve her life, and it filled her with a new horror. “Swim to shore,” she begged her brother. “Save yourself.” But he only smiled and shook his head, hair swirling around his head, its colour dimmed by the deeper redness of the blood. “I’ll hold you up, Ginny,” he said. “I’ll hold you up.”

“No!” she screamed, and with that scream she woke. Her heart beat so loudly that it felt as if would jump out of her chest. She clutched the covers to herself, looking wildly around the room until at last it slowed. It was only her bedroom; her dear, familiar bedroom. There was nothing to be afraid of.

The door opened, and then closed. “Ginny? Are you all right? I heard a yell—“ The shadowy form of her brother stepped into the room.

“Ron,” she said in a choked voice. Somehow, she did not feel relief, and she wasn’t sure why. “Oh, light a light, please.”

He tapped the bedside lamp and sat down on her bed. She rubbed her eyes. “What time is it?”

“Close to four.”

“Did I wake up anyone else?”

“Don’t think so.”

But even as Ron spoke, the door creaked open again, and Hermione’s head poked in. “What happened?” she asked, her voice oddly alert considering that it was so close to dawn. She held a witchlight aloft in her hand.

“It’s nothing,” said Ron dismissively.

“But—“ Hermione hesitated.

“Go back to bed.”

She stood for another moment. “Okay,” she finally said, and turned away.

“I wouldn’tve minded if Hermione came in,” said Ginny, a bit nettled. “I think you hurt her feelings.”

Ron ran a hand through his hair, making it all stand on end. He was wearing his old pyjamas with the cowboys on them, the ones that had been handed down from Charlie. They were grotesquely too short for him. “I can’t worry about that sort of thing right now.”

“Oh, that’s nice. Don’t you care about her at all?”

To Ginny’s surprise, Ron hesitated a long time before answering. “Of course I do,” he said. “Why’d you scream, Ginny?”

“Nightmare,” she said shortly.

He nodded, seeming unsurprised. “Thought so. I’ve been having those too. Almost every night.”

“When did they start?”

“I’m not exactly sure. Since I got out of the Hogwarts hospital wing, I think… no, a bit before that.”

“Oh.” A chill struck Ginny’s chest. She remembered what had happened to her brother that night in the Ministry of Magic, and against her will, the image replayed itself. The brains, rising from the tank of dark water. The tentacles wrapped around his head. The sound of that strange, terrible laughter from his throat. Ha.. ha… aha, ha ha…

Ron wrapped his arms around his knees and stared into the darkness. “Harry said he’s been having nightmares as well. Not the same as the ones he had all year, the ones about the chamber in the Department of Mysteries. New ones.”

“What do you dream about, Ron?” she whispered.

“Oh—different things. But it’s always the same as well. I’ll be at Hogwarts, or sometimes at the Burrow, or maybe at Hogsmeade walking down the street. Different places. You’ll always be with me.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad so far.”

One corner of his mouth went up in a grim smile. It stretched his young features into a painful shape. “It gets worse. The thing is, Ginny, that we’re always running, running and hiding. That’s all we ever do in these dreams. I never quite see who it is that’s chasing us, but I know it’s some powerful evil force—Death Eaters I suppose really. We just run and run until we’re fit to burst; sometimes we take trains, sometimes we fly on brooms, sometimes we drive in Muggle cars; we never get away and we’re never caught. But I’m always sure that next time, we will be.” He leaned closer to her, and his face was cast into an odd little pool of darkness as the orange light of the lamp shone on the top of his head, turning it to flame. “Is that what you dream about, Ginny?”

“No,” she said. “But that’s close enough.”

Ron gave a long sigh and propped his back up against the headboard of her bed. He took her hand and played with her fingers a little. Ginny was surprised although she didn’t say anything; it had been a long time—since they were little children, really—that he’d expressed his affection physically, with handholding or hugs. “How much do you know about what’s coming, Ginny?”

“Not very much,” she admitted. Nobody ever tells me anything, and I have to learn from listening at doors, she would have liked to add. On reflection, though, she didn’t want to take the chance of breaking this strange mood of confidence that had arisen between them.

“That’s as it should be,” said Ron. “You’re better off that way, believe me.”

Ginny bit her tongue. It seemed that he was about to say something more, and she wanted to hear it, whatever it was.

“I’m going to tell you something,” he said. “Maybe I shouldn’t. I’m sure I shouldn’t. But it’s the kind of thing that seems a little more right to tell, in the darkest part of the night… and I’m going to anyway… because I have to tell someone. If I tried to tell Harry, I’d only add to the burdens he has already, and he doesn’t need that. And if I tried to tell Hermione—“ Ron stopped, and gave a short laugh. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, let’s just say that. It’s about something that happened on the train.”

Ginny’s heart gave a frantic leap and lodged in her throat. She was sure that next she was going to hear, I was wandering through compartments and looking for you, and I thought I saw the strangest thing. You were wedged into a luggage rack with Malfoy and kissing him, and letting him put his hands on you. But that couldn’t possibly have happened. Could it? Surely I imagined it. Didn’t I? Please, please tell me that I did.

But that wasn’t what her brother said at all, and after she’d heard what it really was, Ginny almost wished that it had been what she feared.

“You know that Malfoy and those goons of his tried to attack Harry.”

She nodded.

“And you know that they decided to do it right outside of a compartment filled with DA members, and we let them have it.”

“Yes,” she said carefully. “You told me a bit about that, and I heard the rest.”

“Well, we rolled them into a luggage rack in the baggage compartment. You saw it. And when you were—gone—for so long during the last part of the train ride, Hermione and I went and looked for you absolutely everywhere. At least I’d thought we’d looked everywhere, until she thought of the baggage compartment. You weren’t there, of course. No reason why you would have been. But Crabbe and Goyle and Malfoy still were. And—when I saw them—“ Ron swallowed hard. “All I could feel was hate.”

“For—for all of them?”

“I don’t really care much about Crabbe and Goyle one way or the other. They can’t find their backsides with two hands and a wand.”

Ginny said nothing. She was beginning to wonder if that was as true as everyone thought, at least when it came to Vincent Crabbe.

“I mean Malfoy,” Ron continued. “I couldn’t even see him. He was rolled behind those two gorillas. But it didn’t matter. I just felt a sort of sheet of burning rage. Everything seemed to go red. And—I know that Harry and Hermione are both better at spells than I am, but I think, I really think, that if I’d had my wand out and pointed at Malfoy in that instant, I could’ve cast a really good Killing Curse. If Hermione hadn’t been there, I honestly think I might’ve tried. I’m still not sure I’m glad she was there. And the strangest thing of all is that I really don’t know where the anger came from—it’s like it just popped up in me, full-grown. I hate him, of course, and he’s been worse than ever this year, but it was like this was for a specific reason. Something that I knew without knowing what it was. That’s rather mad, isn’t it?”

Ginny could feel herself going cold. As her brother had stood over her and felt the killing rage, she had been tightly held in Draco Malfoy’s arms not a metre away from him. Less than a minute later, she had been kissing the boy her brother had wanted to murder, kissing him as if her life depended on it. No, you weren’t mad at all, Ron. But I—I-

Ron was taking her other hand, and still talking. She forced herself to focus on him.
“Things are changing, Ginny. I hope you never have to know how much. But I’m afraid. Not for myself, not so much, but for you. Sometimes I feel like we’re on a little island of light in a sea of darkness-- what is it? Why did you start like that?”

“No reason.”

“Well, anyway—the darkness is rising, Ginny, rising. Soon—it may cover our world, the whole world we know—“ He tried to laugh. “It’s so late and I’m so hideously tired. I’m sure I’m not making any sense at all. I’m probably spouting a lot of dreadful rubbish and scaring you. Just ignore me, sis; it’s easier.”

Before he left, he bent to press a kiss on her brow. “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,” he said.

“You haven’t said that to me in years.”

“No—not since we were little kids. But I like the sound of it, tonight. It sounds-- safe.”

His words reverberated in her ears for a long time after the door had closed behind him. She listened to the settling sounds of the old house; the snoring of her brothers and father that she could hear through the thin walls, the faint, far-off sigh of the spring wind. They were the same sounds that had wrapped her in a cocoon of safety all her life.

The darkness is rising. Each in his own way, her brother and Malfoy had said it. Harry’s haunted face had said it the last time she saw him at King’s Cross. Hermione had said it without words as well, when Ginny had seen the other girl’s frightened face stuck through the doorjamb. And perhaps her father and mother… and her other brothers as well… and surely it was stamped on every line of Dumbledore’s face now, the face that looked so much older than it had done only one year before, and the dark inscrutable eyes of Professor Snape, and the lined and seamed and scarred visage of Alistair Moody… They knew, they all knew, and now she did too, and was forever condemned to that knowledge…

The darkness is rising.

Only one last time, she thought tiredly as the dawn stained the sky she at last fell back into sleep. One last time, let me feel safe.

And for the last time in a very, very long time, she did.

Chapter Five
The End of the Beginning
September 1995.


Well, the book should be ended. It should have ended when I lit that small candle, but it didn’t… Pray continue on to the next chapter to discover what happened next. Or you can quit now, if you like. You may come to wish that you had.

--Lestat speaks near the end of The Tale of the Body Thief, by Anne Rice, saying something very apropos to the last chapter of TBBC.

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Eee…eeeee…


The whistle reverberated over and over as Ginny walked down the corridor of the moving train, sounding oddly distant and faraway. Or maybe it was just that her heart was beating loudly enough to drown out any other sound, at least in her own ears.

She’d been waiting for this opportunity all through the train ride towards home for the Christmas hols, keeping a tense eye on the passage outside the compartment where she sat with Luna and Neville. Harry and Hermione and Ron were somewhere else; she didn’t know where, they hadn’t told her and she hadn’t asked.

That had been the general pattern for everything that had happened that summer. At times, she had wondered if she could have gotten away with doing certain things, since everyone seemed to be ignoring her—secret things, forbidden things. A regular exchange of letters by owl, for instance. Or even furtive meetings in the village. There were nights when she dreamed that she awoke to see the Malfoys’ white and silver eagle owl, hovering at the window with a parchment in its claws for her. But if she ever really did see an owl there, it was Hedwig. Harry sent her little notes sometimes in early July, before he was allowed to leave the Dursleys’ house and come to the Burrow-- and then Grimmauld Place-- for the rest of the summer. How happy those few scribbled words would have made her, once. There were days, too, when she would see a blond head held at a certain angle across the street, and her breath would catch for an instant, waiting for the person to turn around. But it was never the one she wished, or feared, to see.

Dean Thomas had heard of Ginny’s expressed interest in him at the end of term, and had begun sending her notes that summer as well. Laying them side by side with Harry’s rather unexpressive missives, Ginny fully understood the difference between friendship and deeper, more subtle overtures. She didn’t know how to tell him that she’d thrown out his name at random in an attempt to distract her brother from his ghastly foray into matchmaking. Besides, she liked his keen intelligence, and his flashing grin, and the way his skin looked like smooth rich coffee with real cream in it, so unlike her freckled self. So she met him at the house in Grimmauld Place a few times over that summer. Her brothers looked at him gimlet-eyed, tried and failed to fracture his skull during “friendly” Quidditch pick-up games, and finally decided he was acceptable. But Ginny did not. She gave Dean a sister’s kiss and sent him home one sunny August afternoon. Then she walked around the pond in the little park near the house, deep in thought. Once she was sure she was alone, she sat on a large rock under a weeping willow tree at the edge of the water and unfolded a parchment from her pocket. She looked at the portrait of herself for a long time. Her fingers traced the initials in the corner over and over.

D.L.M.

Ginny wasn’t sure what she’d thought would change once she returned to school. But in September, with the start of term, nothing had changed. It was her fifth year. She had already begun to study for her O.W.L.’s, which at least brought some distant smiles of approval from Hermione as the older girl hurried from classes to meals to the library to the stands where she sat to cheer for the first Quidditch games, her brow always puckered in an abstracted frown as if her mind were very far away. Everyone seemed to be in a tremendous hurry that autumn. Harry, Ron, and Hermione were always rushing from one place to the next, pausing to whisper to each other while they clustered together in the Gryffindor common room late at night, or to exchange mysterious nods and hand signals in the corridors. They were forever disappearing into unused classrooms or private nooks in the library, or going for long walks around the lake on rainy days when nobody else was outside. Neville was often included as well, but Ginny, never. It drove her mad. There were still Dumbledore’s Army meetings—there was no need to keep it secret anymore, now that Umbridge was long gone and a thoroughly cowed Fudge had sent no-one to replace her—but Ginny was more and more convinced that the real secrets were being discussed elsewhere.

She saw Draco Malfoy’s bright head hurrying away from her at the other end of a corridor or the opposite edge of the Quidditch pitch, occasionally. She was a Chaser that year, but Gryffindor would not play Slytherin until after the winter hols. Harry was incredibly tense and jumpy that entire autumn, snapping at everyone who spoke to him, nibbling on his nails until the tips of his fingers were constantly bleeding and Hermione cast Healing charms on them, an exasperated look on her face. Every time Harry was in the same room with Draco, he watched the Slytherin boy like a hawk, one hand never more than a few inches from his wand. But Draco ignored him utterly. He never came to the Gryffindor practices anymore, but he made no special effort to avoid Harry.

It took Ginny months to figure out that Draco was avoiding her.

She didn’t know what to do about it, and knew that there was nothing she should even think about doing. So she redoubled her efforts to spy on Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Neville. Ginny began dating the latter. She tried not to think that the primary reason might be his knowledge of her friends’ plans. She never learned anything from him, anyway. Ginny frequently thought that Neville might very well tell her what she wanted to know if she asked him in the right way, but the thought of using her charms on him so coldly made her feel faintly ill. He was shy and nervous and appealing, his hands always a bit damp, his eyes always a little too anxious when they looked into hers. They kissed many times, but never anywhere that Ron had the slightest chance of catching them. He seemed afraid to go any further with her.

One rainy night the week before, after Draco Malfoy had actually bumped into her on the way to Divination and picked himself up without so much as an apology, his eyes utterly remote, Ginny had gone up to Neville’s room, her heart beating fast. He had a free hour now, she knew. He answered her tap on the door and looked at her almost fearfully.

“What is it?” he asked. “Has anything happened? Is Harry all right—and Hermione-“

A bolt of irritation shot through her at that. “They’re fine as far as I know,” she said tartly. “But I would think you’d know more than I would about that!”

Neville had flushed pink then, his mouse-brown hair seeming to stick more tenaciously to his forehead the longer she watched him.

“Are you going to keep me standing here all day?” she asked.

“No, no—of course not, come in-“ He opened the door for her. She glanced around quickly. His roommates were gone. Without a word, she walked to his bed and sat on it. He scampered to keep up with her. “What is it?” he whispered, sitting down next to her.

“Draw the curtains,” said Ginny.

He obeyed. She wondered in a detached sort of way if he would jump out of the large picture window on the far side of the wall next, if she asked. He reached out to tap the witchlight at the bedside.

“Don’t,” she said, putting a hand on his arm.

“All right.”

They sat in the darkness for a few moments. Ginny had been trying to think up some sort of pretext for coming to Neville’s room for several minutes now, but nothing sprang to mind. It wasn’t necessary, anyway. She felt his hand moving towards hers, tentatively.

A flash of lightning illuminated the room for a split second, followed by a low roll of thunder. Without thinking, Ginny threw herself into his arms. Neville gave a startled yelp. Then, slowly, he began to stroke her hair.

“I hate storms,” she said, shivering. “They make me feel so afraid… so lost… like there’s nothing solid I could ever grab onto again…”

“Shh,” said Neville, his voice very steady now.

She pulled back and looked at him. “Make me forget,” she said in a low, desperate voice.

He did not ask what she meant. Maybe he was afraid to find out, she thought later. So he kissed her passionately, his hands moving over her face and neck and shoulders as if trying to memorize them. Ginny could feel how much he wanted to please her, and knew that even in his inexperience, he was concentrating on her pleasure, not his own. Surely, surely, that must count for something. This isn’t a bit like… well, other things, mad things that I need to forget, that shouldn’t ever have happened at all…

Neville’s hands went under her robes. He looked at her questioningly. There was just enough light peeping in from one carelessly drawn bedcurtain for her to see his face. She nodded. His fingers undid the buttons of her blouse, one by one. If Ginny closed her eyes, she could almost pretend that those fingers belonged to someone else. They roamed across her breasts and squeezed the nipples, very gently. The feeling was a good one. She pressed her chest up to his hands, and he moaned into her mouth.

“Oh, Ginny,” he said.

“Shh,” she said. The voice was too high and thin, too distinctly his; her mind couldn’t make it over into a low honeyed drawl. Neville fell silent and began fumbling with the catch of her brassiere in back.

If she said nothing, Ginny decided, this thing would simply happen. She would lose her virginity to Neville Longbottom on a rainy December afternoon. He would be fumbling and awkward and utterly lacking in finesse; she doubted she’d get much pleasure out of the act. But he would also be gentle and careful and inexpressibly grateful.

And she could forget. If only for a brief space of time, Draco Malfoy would be wiped from her mind.

For an instant, the scenario played itself out in her mind with such force that it almost seemed real. She saw herself lying in his arms, afterwards. A dull pain throbbed between her legs, and an unsatisfied feeling curled in her belly. Or perhaps that last wasn’t entirely fair to Neville. He would make sure that she felt pleasure too. No, the restlessness and the wrongness would be in her mind. That was worse. Neville turned her face to his and kissed her. His expression was smeary with bliss. “I love you,” he said.

“Stop!” Ginny wrenched Neville’s hand away from her waist as the fantasy came to an abrupt end.

“Wh—what?” He blinked at her.

She sat up, pulling her clothes back around her. “We can’t do this,” she said.

“But—you’re the one who came to my room! I never would’ve—I mean, I never thought--“

It was too late. Ginny had already fled, slamming the door behind her. The last thing she saw was Neville’s befuddled face.

She stalked the third-floor corridors for half an hour, waiting for Charms class to begin, glaring at everyone who passed her. She hated herself a little for what she had just done. The worst part was that she could never really explain to Neville why she had stopped him. There was no way for her to say that she truly liked him, perhaps in a very small way even loved him because he loved her, and that she wished he would find someone who was not so torn as herself, because he deserved better than what she could have given him. Ginny paced and paced.

God, but how she wished she’d run into someone she really hated right now—Pansy Parkinson, for instance, or the dark, arrogant Blaise Zabini, or maybe Millicent Bulstrode. Although, to be fair, Millicent seemed to be scarcely speaking to any of the other Slytherins anymore. Or Draco Malfoy. She’d teach him to practically knock her down in the corridors and then ignore her! She’d smash his sneering face in. She’d pull out his silvery hair by the handfuls. She’d—

Ginny paused in a small alcove, breathing heavily. She pulled out the little parchment from her pocket and tapped it with her wand. If Filch caught her using magic between classes, even for something like this, she’d get into trouble. But that would be nothing compared to what would happen if someone caught her with this portrait of herself, and knew who’d drawn it for her. She didn’t care. She stared at it for a long time. Her hands gripped either side of it, ready to tear. But they refused to obey her, and at last she shrank it again, and put it back in her pocket.



So time had flowed on towards this day, this grey afternoon near the winter solstice, this last secret hour on the Hogwarts Express before reaching King’s Cross. Ginny had thought her options over methodically, for a long time. She was determined not to miss her opportunity now. So she had watched, tensely, and when she had at last seen Draco Malfoy walking down the corridor, not even pausing to glance at their compartment, she had leaped to her feet.

“Back in a minute,” she had said.

Luna had given her a strange look, but said nothing. Ginny started walking down the corridor as calmly as she could, trying to stay just the right distance from Draco, waiting until he turned the corner. He didn’t seem to even be aware she was behind him. If he suddenly decided to turn back or found the door he was looking for, she didn’t know what she’d do. She really didn’t dare to speak to him until they’d passed all the students. Ginny glanced through the window of one of the doors, and thought she saw Anthony Summerby getting up from a seat. Ugh. She hurried on. As if he realized that she was following him—and, of course, perhaps he did—Draco quickened his own pace. Finally they had both entered the section of the train that had the luggage compartments, and it was safe to speak. He walked all the way to the end and through the last door, and she followed him.

“Malfoy,” she said.

He turned. As soon as she saw his face, expressionless as it was, she knew that he’d known she’d trailed him there. Well, it wasn’t as if she’d really thought she would fool him.

“Weasley,” he said in an utterly neutral voice.

They stood looking at each other. The silence stretched on and on. There were deep, dark circles under his impassive eyes, Ginny saw.

“Here,” she blurted, pressing the little shrunk square of parchment into his hand. She hadn’t even been sure that she would give it back, not until she’d seen him.

He nodded.

She stood looking at him for another moment. You’ve changed were the words that wanted to leap to her lips, although she kept silent. She didn’t know how, but he had. It was the change she had seen truly begin after that last time they’d met on the Quidditch pitch, that early evening at the end of May. It had been progressing all through the autumn. And when he’d first turned to her and she’d seen his face, she’d finally known for sure that she would return the gift he had made for her.

“You shouldn’t have given this to me,” Ginny said in a rush.

“I shouldn’t have,” he agreed, his voice mild.

“Surely you must see that I can’t keep it.”

“Yes,” he said. “Surely I must.”

She wondered if he would ask why she’d waited so long to return it, but he did not. He tucked it into a pocket of his robes without another word, and turned to leave. Ginny stayed where she was. She let her robes fall over her wrists so that her hands were concealed, and clenched her fists. She had never felt such a sense of anticlimax, of words left unsaid, actions left untaken, things left unresolved. This can’t be all! But it had to be all; all there ever was, or ever could be, between them.

“Malfoy,” she said, when he had almost reached the end of the corridor. He turned back.

“Yes?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.”

He looked at her for another instant, and then the door fell shut behind him, its action strangely delayed. She looked at the closed door for a very long time.

It wasn’t until she tried its handle that she realized he had locked her in.

He still stood motionless at the end of the corridor, near to the door that led to the passenger compartments, his back to her. “Malfoy!” she yelled, pounding on the pane of glass set in the door. “What do you think you’re doing? Let me out of here! Now!” But Draco ignored her pleas, attempts at reason, and vile and empty threats. He behaved exactly as if he couldn’t hear her at all.

There was a train car between herself and the students’ compartments. Nobody heard her shouts for help. No spell that she tried would open the door. After she’d pestered Fred and George so much last summer, they had taught her a few Opening spells more esoteric than a simple Alohamora, but none of them had any effect. Ginny pushed and pulled on the door, stuck a pin from her hair in the lock and jiggled it, and finally, in frustration, kicked it hard, bruising her toe. She sank to the floor, holding her injured foot in one hand. Then, still moving down, she felt a tremendous jolt, lost her balance, and sprawled headlong on the floor of the corridor, stopping herself with her hands on the opposite wall. The train had skidded to a halt.

Ginny’s breath had been knocked out of her and she fought to get it back for several long moments. Something was trickling down her cheek. The ankle that was broken in the Department of Mysteries had healed quickly, but the wound where Pansy scratched her months before had a bad habit of re-opening if it was bumped, and her head had been hit in the fall. What… happened? We can’t be at school yet. And even if we were, surely the train wouldn’t have ground to a halt that way. Something’s wrong… very wrong… And as she lay on the floor, dazed and bleeding, she began to hear the screams.

Ginny thought later that in some ways, the next few minutes were the most nightmarish of the entire ordeal. She could see a little, and hear a little. She knew that something terrible had happened, indeed was happening. But she had no clear idea what, not yet.

Faint shouts and screams came from the outer corridors, muffled by distance. They grew in volume and intensity. Ginny heard the sound of running feet, then loud thumps and crashes. They were definitely coming from the section of the students’ compartments, or they would have been too far away to hear at all. She began pounding on the glass again and shouting at Draco, who still stood with his back turned away, and still ignored her. His hair was tousled in back, as if he, too, had fallen when the train ground to a halt, and had picked himself up again. A voice raised itself above the confusing, muffled babble.

“Where is she? If you’ve got her—if you’ve done anything to my sister-“

It was Ron, yelling at the top of his lungs so that she could just distinguish the words. He was cut off as swiftly as if he’d been broadcast over the Wizarding Wireless Network and someone had changed the channel.

“Let me out!” shrieked Ginny. “Malfoy, for the love of God, let me out, my brother’s in trouble—hurt—something, I don’t know what, and he’s calling for me!”

Draco flinched a little, but still did not turn. At last, Ginny knew that he did hear her voice.

She didn’t begin to scream in earnest until the fighting reached the corridor just past the luggage compartment.

Antonin Dolohov crossed her field of vision on the other side of the windowed door at the far end of the corridor, chasing someone or something with wand upraised, his long, pale face twisted with anger. The wizard who murdered the Prewetts, her mind automatically catalogued. And the one who hit Hermione with that curse in the Department of Mysteries, the one that we all thought had killed her, at first. The one who was locked up in Azkaban, and who escaped. But he was recaptured! What can he be doing here?

Then she saw Rookwood and Mulciber moving back and forth, back and forth, shafts of red and silver light shooting from their wands. She heard the regular, sickening thuds of bodies hitting the ground. One girl faltered and fell right in front of the door, and Ginny saw her face and braid of dark hair clearly. Parvati. It couldn’t be Padma. Padma Patil had always worn her hair up in a net of turquoise that year, so she could be easily distinguished from her sister. But those Death Eaters are back in Azkaban as well, her mind insisted numbly, trying to take in what it saw.

An enormous black cloak swirled in front of the window, blocking Ginny’s field of vision. She could see nothing for several precious seconds. When the obscuring darkness cleared, Vincent Crabbe stood in front of the door across from his father, who was advancing on him.

“Can’t do a damn thing right, can you?” snorted the elder Crabbe. He was enormously bloated and bulky, a sinister man-mountain who made his son look almost dainty. “Find Draco Malfoy. That’s all you had to do. Bring him here. He’s the one we really want. I spelled it out to you, you fool. Couldn’t even do that. By Merlin, you’ll take what’s coming to you now. Take your medicine, boy-“

He moved in front of the door again, blocking every hint of what happened next, but Ginny heard what sounded like a stampede coming down the corridor and a cacophony of confused shouts and screams. The noise was raised to fever pitch but she could still see nothing. Her voice was almost gone from all the screaming she herself had done earlier, and she could make no further sound above a hoarse peep. There was some sort of Confundus charm on the door as well as a Locking spell, she realized. Maybe on the door at the far end of the corridor too, since otherwise Ginny could not believe that no-one would have seen Draco through its window, or thought to try opening it—if they really were looking for him. But why would they be… and who were “they”? Death Eaters, her mind answered instantly. And more than that. The particular Death Eaters who had been locked in Azkaban with Lucius Malfoy in June. Ginny leaned against the door, feeling the cool glass against her fevered head. They escaped. And now they’ve come here, to the Hogwarts train.

Still Draco stood, watching everything that happened on the other side of that door, making no move. It took him a moment to react when one of the doors lining the corridor opened and Ron jumped through, his wand at the ready.

I’m here, Ron, right here! The cry formed on Ginny’s lips, and she raised her hand to pound at the door. Then a thought struck her, and she gasped. She slid all the way down the door and peeked up so she could still see what was going on, taking care to keep her head down.

“I knew it. I knew it!” said Ron, breathing heavily, his face red. “I knew you were hiding back here like the stinking coward you are, Malfoy.”

Then, slowly, Draco did turn. “Weasley,” he said in a faraway voice. He sounded as disinterested as if the two of them had been introduced to one another at a particularly dull garden party.

“Why the hell weren’t you out there?” Ron said scornfully. “They’re looking for you. They won’t leave until they’ve found you! That’s why they’re here! They came to get you—but you probably knew that, didn’t you, probably had a hand in their escape--”

Draco raised an eyebrow. “Which am I, Weasley? An evil Death Eater in training, or a stinking coward?”

“You won’t be anything after I’m through with you!”

“So why haven’t you killed me already?” Draco asked in the same almost-idle tone of voice. “Although your Defense Against the Dark Arts work always was subpar, as I recall. I doubt you could cast a decent Killing curse against an ant.”

Ron’s wand wavered at the insult, and Ginny wondered if he would try one after all. Then he took a deep breath, visibly calming himself, and walked forward until the wand’s tip was an inch from Draco’s chest. Draco didn’t move.

“Where’s my sister?” asked Ron, his voice deadly calm.

Draco shrugged. “What would make you think I’ve done anything with your miserable peasant of a sister?”

“She’s gone. Gone, and we can’t find her. And you know where she is—I know you do—“
Ron’s voice began to waver, although the wand did not, and his eyes were still fixed on Draco’s. Ginny bit her lip until she could feel it start to bleed in order to keep from crying out. What had occurred to her almost too late was that the spell on her door was most likely keyed to whoever tried to find her, as these types of Confundus charms tended to be. Anyone who had ill intent towards her would never be able to see or hear her. But someone who loved her as her brother loved her would certainly know she was there. If she said nothing, Ron might go away again, looking for her elsewhere. It was dangerous for him to be in this corridor, near Draco Malfoy. Ginny could never have said how she knew this, but she did.

Draco looked at Ron, his grey eyes unreadable. “I don’t know where she is and I don’t care. Now get the hell out, Weasley. Leave me alone.”

Ron seemed about to explode. “Didn’t you just hear what I said? The Death Eaters came here for you and they’re not leaving until they’ve found you, and they’re going to keep fighting us and—and—“ His voice faltered. “And killing until they do find you. Parvati’s dead, Malfoy.”

Draco leaned against the wall as if bored by the entire proceedings. “What do you propose that I should do about it?”

“You don’t give a damn, do you? Well, I didn’t think you would. You’ve got my sister here,” snarled Ron. “I know it. I can feel it. And if you won’t show me where she is, I’ll—I’ll get you out of the way. I’ll give the Death Eaters something to find, all right. You don’t have to be alive for that. And then I’ll find Ginny—if I have to go through you to find her, that’s just what I’ll do-- Expelliarmus! ” Ron’s voice rose suddenly, and his wand went up. But Draco snapped to sudden attention and performed a Deflecting charm, his idle demeanour gone.

The two duelled for several minutes as Ginny watched in terror. Ron was moving like lightning, faster than she had ever seen him; Draco was repelling her brother’s offensive strategy in a way that looked almost lazy, but she could tell how much skill it really took. He was preserving his energy, not wearing himself out as Ron was doing. But he also wasn’t attacking, as he so easily could have done. Ron backed Draco up the far end of the corridor, almost up against Ginny’s door, and she crouched down as far as she could. If Ron saw her now, it would break his concentration and he would lose. She couldn’t understand why Draco hadn’t really tried to hurt her brother, but surely any moment now he would. Perhaps he was simply making his own job easier by waiting until Ron was too exhausted to fight back effectively against an attack.

Then Draco glanced up, over Ron’s shoulder. “Weasley,” he said. “Get out of here. Now. ”

“I—won’t—show you any mercy, Malfoy, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Ron panted. “Ginny’s here—she’s here, I can feel it, I’m getting closer—“

And he was. He was nearly to Ginny’s door, and she curled into a small ball on the carpet, wondering if he could somehow tell that she was there anyway, in spite of her attempts to hide herself.

Draco’s hand clenched his wand more tightly. “For the love of Merlin, Weasley,” he said, a hint of desperation entering his voice for the first time, “will you forget your sister, drop the idiotic Gryffindor bravery act for once, and get the hell out?”

“Consistere, ” said Ron, aiming the wand at Draco’s heart. Ginny leaped up and gasped, propelling herself against the glass of the door and hitting it with a smack. She could not help it. She might as well have tried not to breathe. The sound was very loud in the still air of the corridor. Ron’s eyes went wide. “I knew it!” he said as he saw his sister. He turned towards her, his arms reaching out.

“Stupefacius, ” said Draco, and he took careful aim. The Stunning spell hit Ron squarely in the back. He staggered forward and dropped to the floor, slumping against the door.

The door on the left side of the corridor banged open. Anthony Summerby raced in, his own wand out. “Ron!” he yelled. “Ron, where are you—I know I saw you go this way, they sent me to find you, we need you—“ He skidded to a halt when he saw Ron lying unconscious on the floor, and Draco Malfoy standing over him with his wand drawn. Draco’s head jerked up. Without hesitation, he barked, “Deicio! ” But Summerby was still in motion, and the jet of silver light from Draco’s wand sent him off on a wild trajectory. Time itself seemed to be slowed then, each motion taking an agonizingly long time. The Hufflepuff Seeker flew uncontrollably through the air, his arms and legs flailing. He smashed against the opposite wall. His head cracked open like a rotten melon on impact, and he slid to the floor, twitching and jerking.

Ginny realized that she was wrong. She’d thought that the change in Draco Malfoy, whatever it was, had been completed that summer. But it had not. It was finishing itself now, one way or the other. His face remained as immobile as carved marble, but she somehow knew that an unimaginable process of choice and decision was going on beneath its surface. Summerby clutched spasmodically at the carpet on the floor of the corridor. He tried to move his head, and Ginny was sure for a horrible moment that the next thing she would see would be his brains spilling out of the enormous wound. The blood gushed down his jaw and shoulder and arm and was absorbed into the grey material of the carpet, turning it a dark, rusty brown.

There was horror in Draco’s eyes. Ginny was sure of that. And if there was not precisely compassion, there was the raw animal pity that any halfway normal human being feels in the presence of suffering and death.

Summerby seemed to be trying to say something. A bubble of blood formed at his lips.

The door on one side of the corridor banged open, and Lucius Malfoy came striding in. Ginny saw him with no sense of surprise. She wasn’t sure if it was because she had expected him to show up all along, or because she was in such shock that nothing could have really surprised her at this point. So that was what Draco saw when he looked over Ron’s shoulder, she thought. His father, coming down one of the side corridors to find him. I should have known. I think I did know.

He paused and stood motionless when he saw his son at the other end of the corridor with his own wand out, and for just a moment the four figures formed a frozen tableau.

“Dead?” Lucius asked, nodding towards Anthony Summerby on the floor.

Draco took a long time to answer. “Dying,” he finally said, still staring at the Hufflepuff in his pool of blood.

“Ah.”

Still, Draco stood and stared, as if so mesmerized by the rush of oncoming tragedy that he was powerless to alter its course in any way.

“We’ve no time to waste. Enough of it has already been spent in looking for you,” Lucius said, and, without ceremony he passed his wand over Anthony Summerby. “Suffocare, ” he said impatiently.

Summerby didn’t show much of a reaction. He was too far gone for that; probably already deep in coma, Ginny realized much later. His body stiffened. His breath caught in his throat with a rattle as the Garroting curse closed off his windpipe. His fingers relaxed and let go the carpet they had been clutching, and he died.

“All right then,” said Lucius, pocketing his wand. “What about Weasley… the boy… Ronald? Reginald? I saw him heading this way.”

Ginny stuffed her fist in her mouth and bit down, struggling to stay silent. As far as she could tell, the fact that Ron was so close to the protected area was protecting him, too. He was all right. He must be all right. He had only been Stunned. The phrases kept repeating themselves idiotically in her head for several precious seconds. Then Ginny shook herself free of them. She didn’t know how much longer the magical protection of the Concealing Spell would last. If she made the slightest sound and the spell was beginning to wear thin, she could give her brother away. Herself as well, but she couldn’t really seem to care about that.

Draco said nothing. He was looking in her direction without giving the slightest indication that he saw her, but she knew that he did. She brought her hands up and clasped them together in a praying motion, her eyes pleading desperately.

“Well?” Lucius glanced around the corridor. He actually looked directly at Ron for a second, but clearly did not see him. “I suppose it doesn’t matter at the moment,” he said at last. “Where’s the Weasley girl, Gwenhyfar, the one they call Ginny; do you have her?”

“No,” said Draco distantly. “Dolohov does. I saw him Disapparate with her.”

Ginny clenched onto the molding of the door until her fingers hurt to keep from crying out in surprise. Lucius Malfoy wanted to take her with them! But were the Death Eaters taking everyone… or just her? Why would they want her? How had Lucius known her full name was Gwenhyfar, when most people assumed it was Virginia? And why, why had Draco Malfoy lied?

Lucius turned back to Draco, who was looking down at Summerby again. From the angle where she stood, Ginny could not see his face.

“All you all right?” Lucius asked.

“Yes,” Draco replied, without looking up.

“I understand,” Lucius said quietly. “Believe it or not, I do. The first time you see death… or have a hand in it, however accidentally it may have come about… well… I’m sorry that it had to happen to you this way, Draco. But maybe it’s better. Yes. Maybe this makes it easier, the first time.”

Draco moistened his lips, and seemed about to say something.

Lucius Malfoy put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Come, Draco,” he said.

Ginny began beating on the glass with her fists, forgetting all her caution of a few moments earlier, knowing that Lucius could not hear her, but that Draco could. But even though the blond boy flinched with each thud of her hands, he did not turn around. The two Malfoys Disapparated, leaving only the faintest shimmer in the air where they had been. She continued to pound on the glass. It was enchanted to be unbreakable. Her flesh was not.

By the time Millicent Bulstrode stumbled into the corridor and revived Ron, Ginny’s blood was trickling down the door in little streams.

Ginny remembered almost nothing very clearly after that. She fell into her brother’s arms, weeping with relief, babbling that he was alive, alive, oh, she’d been so frightened, trying to hug him, and seeing the horror on his face. She left great smears of blood all over his robes. He whipped out his wand and said incantation after incantation over her in a choked voice, his face white, but the blood kept flowing. Much later, she learned that it had been too long since she had first begun to injure herself for the simple Healing spells to work, and anyway they were never very effective when the subject was in a highly agitated state. He yelled for help; she heard that faintly, and others came, a ring of their white faces pressed together over her. There was a great deal of noise, and she closed her eyes. Someone lifted her up and she was carried outside, into the open air. She heard the faint voices of a large group around her.

She must have blacked out briefly then, because the next thing Ginny remembered was opening her eyes to see enormous winged forms circling down to the ground, sinister, batlike, horribly graceful. One settled in for a landing and pressed close to her, its scaly, lizard-like head bobbing forward. It was impossible to tell if it was looking at her with its blank white-pupiled eyes, but it sniffed at her hands, and a bumpy black tongue shot suddenly out of its mouth. Ginny screamed, or tried to. She managed a rusty croak.

“You’ve attracted them,” said Luna’s wispy voice behind her. Her friend was paler than ever, Ginny saw, and her right arm dangled at an odd angle. Broken, Ginny thought automatically. But at least Luna was alive. There were so many voices around her, crossing and recrossing, that Ginny knew many other students must have survived as well. But she couldn’t summon enough energy to lift up her head and see. “They smelled the blood, and they came,” Luna continued. “Nobody else is bleeding as much as you. It’s lucky really, in a way.” Her voice sounded vaguer than ever.

“What are they?” whispered Ginny. They looked like Bat-Bogeys, that was it. Like giant Bat-Bogeys.

“Thestrals,” said Luna. “You’ve never seen them before, I suppose?”

“No...”

“There’s no reason why you would have done. But they’ve been at Hogwarts all along, you know.”

Hermione was directing groups of people onto the backs of the animals, Ginny saw now. A deep cut ran the entire length of her face and neck, blood congealing on its ragged edges, but she was still standing. She came closer and shouted something at Ron. He beckoned to Millicent Bulstrode, who was, incredibly, part of their group. Ginny’s eyes widened in alarm when she saw the Slytherin girl. Her family had been in at least as deep with the Death Eaters as any other. But before Ginny could even begin to protest, Millicent and Ron had lifted her onto a thestral, Luna behind her. “Keep her on,” said Hermione, shooting Millicent a cold glare of dislike. “No, Ron! You can’t go with your sister. We’ve got to get the rest—some of them are even worse off—and some are—are—“ Her voice caught, and she turned away.

“I don’t understand,” said Ginny, clutching onto the leathery skin, feeling the tendons of the bat-like wings under her fingers. Blood dripped onto the thestral’s head, running down its face. The animal stuck its tongue out to lick up every drop, purring as contentedly as a cat with a bowl of milk. A wave of sickness went over her. “I don’t understand,” she repeated. “I’m sure I never saw them before.”

“I’ve always seen them,” said Luna. “Since the day I came to Hogwarts. Hold on now.”

The thestral gave a tremendous leap into the air, and Ginny squeezed her eyes shut and grasped onto the folds of skin as hard as she could. The wings flapped and flapped, each gust of air incredibly cold. That brought her back to herself a little. She chanced a peek down at the ground. It was very far away, much further than she had ever seen when flying on her broomstick. A network of miniature brown and grey patches with little blue lines ran across the flatlands, punctuated by doll-sized trees, and moving white dots that must have been sheep. The other thestrals soared just above and below and to either side of hers, and just watching each stroke of their enormous black wings made her dizzy. I’ve got to keep it together. I’ve absolutely got to. If I faint, I’ll fall off, and I’ll die. I can’t die… I can’t do that to Ron…

“So,” she shouted back at Luna, turning her head to her friend, as the thestral seemed to know where it was going perfectly well without any input from her, “so, I still don’t understand. Why is it that I’m seeing them, when I couldn’t before?”

Luna turned her enormous silvery-blue eyes on Ginny. “Well,” she said quietly, “we can all see them now.”

And, remembering Hagrid’s lesson on thestrals last year, Ginny understood. She leaned her head against the scaly neck, numbly.

It was a long journey back to the southern part of Scotland, even by the routes the thestrals took, and her grasp on consciousness slipped a little further with each moment that passed. At last, the only thing anchoring her to reality seemed to be her sense of hearing. The last thing to go when you die, she thought dreamily. That’s what I’ve always heard. I wonder if I’m dying. Dumbledore once called it the next great adventure. I heard that too. Can’t remember where. But all the way to Hogwarts, Ginny heard the slurp, slurp, slurp of the thestral licking at her blood, and she knew that she still lived.

There was a sharp downward-pulling sensation in the pit of her stomach. She felt the thud of landing. At last she could let her grasp slip, and she slid towards the ground. Strong arms caught her, and, smelling the apple-cinnamon scent of her brother, she knew that Ron had her safely now. She closed her eyes and let darkness roll over her.

***********************************************************************

White. Everything around her was white. She was looking at a slightly nubbly white expanse of ceiling, and sheets of coarser white material were hung around her on all sides. Slowly she looked down. Her hands were resting on a white coverlet. She examined them curiously, as if they belonged to someone else. They were thinner, but looked healed. A very faint tracery of scars formed a network on them. Ginny tried to sit up. The sheets surrounding her bed moved, and Hermione came through them. She looked thinner, more tired, and somehow older than she had done before—how many days before, Ginny wondered. But her face lit up when she saw her friend.

“You’re awake!” she said delightedly.

“How—how long have I been here? And where-“ Ginny’s voice felt rusty, as if she hadn’t used it in a long time.

“The hospital wing,” Hermione replied, sitting on a small chair next to the bed.

“Oh. Bit thick of me not to guess that right away,” Ginny croaked.

Hermione laid a finger on her friend’s lips. “Don’t try to talk. And it’s not thick at all. We almost didn’t make it here.”

“We?”

“The students who were on the Hogwarts train. In the- the attack—“ Hermione hesitated. “Ginny, how much do you remember?” The bedcurtains parted again to admit Ron. His eyes widened when he saw his sister sitting up.

“Ginny!” he said, and then he was kneeling by the side of the bed and she was in her arms; he crushed her to him and buried his face in her hair with long, shuddering breaths. “You’re all right,” he kept whispering. “You’re all right.”

“Of course she’s all right!” snapped Hermione. “But she won’t be if you squash her to death. Honestly, Ron. She was unconscious for three days.”

“Three days?” asked Ginny. “But what—who-“

“You’re one to talk,” Ron replied to Hermione. “Don’t ask her questions right now, for Merlin’s sake!”

Ginny held up a hand between her brother and her friend, who had begun to glare at each other over the bed. “Please, don’t argue,” she said faintly. “Only I have to know what’s been going on. Do tell me.”

“Ron’s right,” sighed Hermione, as if she loathed to admit the fact. “We should both go away and let you rest.”

“But-“ Ginny protested, attempting to sit up further. With a hand, Ron pushed her back down.

“Madam Pomfrey had a job of it, healing your hands,” he said. “She—she said you’d always have the scars, Ginny. You can’t overdo things now.”

“But I need to know-“

“You need to rest,” Hermione said firmly.

“But if I don’t know, I won’t do anything but think and worry,” argued Ginny. “I won’t get a bit more sleep. Come on. Please.” She looked from one to the other. Hermione gave a deep sigh.

“All right. I do see your point, I suppose. We’ll tell you a bit if you promise to go to sleep after that.”

Ginny nodded.

Hermione settled herself more comfortably in the chair, Ron at her side on the floor. She took a deep breath. “There was a Death Eater attack on the Hogwarts train,” she said without preamble. “No warning at all. The first thing we all knew was that the train ground to a halt very suddenly, so everybody figured out that something was wrong right away.”

“Everybody? Who was ‘everybody’?” asked Ginny. Incredibly, a bit of resentment flared up in her.

“Well, the DA members. We were all in one compartment, discussing some plans for the autumn. But at first I thought there’d been an accident, or something--“

“Why weren’t we there? Neville, and Luna, and me?” Ginny could not help asking.

“Neville was there. He left to check on the pair of you. Luna—well, she’s not called Loony Lovegood for nothing, you know,” Hermione said primly. “We didn’t want her in on this particular discussion.”

“And me? What about me; why wasn’t I included?”

Hermione and Ron exchanged glances. “We thought it was better that way,” Hermione finally said. “It might have been dangerous for you to know.”

“Who decided this?” retorted Ginny, swinging on her brother. “You? Or you did say ‘we;’ maybe it was all of you. That was it, wasn’t it, Ron?”

“She’s becoming agitated,” Hermione said. “We’d better leave.”

Ginny plucked at Ron’s arm as he got up to go. “Don’t you dare!” she hissed. “You’re telling me exactly what happened! If you’d only told me at the time—“ She stopped. She would not say the words that had leapt to her lips. If you’d told me at the time, I would have been in that compartment with the rest of you. I wouldn’t have gone out to find Malfoy to give him back the parchment. And then—and then— Anthony Summerby’s sightless eyes looked up at her from memory, accusingly.

“All right,” Hermione said soothingly, sitting back down. “Don’t upset yourself, Ginny, please, or we really will go. We were only discussing defensive tactics for next term, that’s all. We didn’t really understand why Voldemort—dry up, Ron—and the Death Eaters hadn’t made any overt moves yet. I suppose we all thought they might soon, but we weren’t expecting anything like—well, what happened.”

And you thought I couldn’t handle a discussion like that. Ginny pressed her lips tightly shut. She would not say another word that might jeopardize her chances of finding out the truth.

“Anyway,” Hermione continued, “we all thought at first that it had only been an accident. Zach Smith was just getting up from the floor, I remember, and talking about seeing if people in the other cars were all right, when we saw—we saw-“ Her voice caught.

“Death Eaters coming down the corridor,” Ron continued grimly. “Lucius Malfoy first. I thought it was Draco Malfoy for a second; they look almost exactly the same, but then I recognized Rookwood behind him, and Avery—Dolohov too, and all the rest. The ones who’d been in Azkaban. They broke out.”

“How did it happen?” whispered Ginny.

“Nobody’s completely sure,” said Ron. “But they think Lucius Malfoy was behind it. He’d left some sort of automatic Summoning charm at Malfoy Manor before he left for the Department of Mysteries on that—that night, in June. I don’t really understand how it works, but-“

“It creates a link between the wizard or witch who originally creates the spell, and the location in which it was cast,” Hermione interrupted. “No Summoning charm can break the Azkaban wards on its own, of course. But with a bit of outside help at the right time, theirs did, and—“

“I was going to explain properly,” said Ron, his voice sulky, “if you’d given me one more second, Hermione. Anyway, the point is that Lucius Malfoy escaped, and took all the others with him. The train’s the first place they all went. Personally, I think they laid spells that gave them control over its magic, or they couldn’t have Apparated so easily.” Ron gave Hermione a smug little smile, as if to say that he, too, could figure out these important points.

“But—but what were they there to do? Just to terrorize everyone, or—“

“I’m getting to that.” Ron’s face sobered. “They fought us, all right. In all the confusion, nobody even had time to think about why, at first, or what was really going on. But they had a purpose. We didn’t find out all about it until we got back to Hogwarts, and counted who was with us, living or—or dead, and who had gone with the Death Eaters.”

“Dead?” asked Ginny.

Ron closed his eyes. “Not now, Ginny. Not right now. Let me finish the story first.”

“I saw the fighting as well, Ron,” Hermione pointed out. “We were running down the corridors, in and out of students’ compartments—oh, there was so much confusion, Ginny. It looked as if we were winning, for a while. But then I saw why there were fewer Death Eaters every minute. They were Disapparating with students, rounding them up and taking several at a time.” She dropped her chin in her hands. “Some of the students, that is.”

A chill struck Ginny. “Let me guess. All Death Eaters’ children, weren’t they?”

Hermione nodded. “Mostly Slytherins, but not all. And they all went without fighting as far as I could see. Except Bulstrode, Millicent Bulstrode—she struggled and wouldn’t go, and they finally left her. Surprising, isn’t it?”

“She fought beside us, too. I couldn’t have gone to find Ginny if she hadn’t covered for me. Not a bad sort, for a Slytherin,” Ron said grudgingly. Ginny thought that he also seemed to trying to hide a little smile, however. “But don’t forget the most important point, Hermione! The Death Eaters seemed to be still-“

“Looking for someone, yes. I was getting to that,” Hermione said. “We figured out that it had to be Malfoy. Draco Malfoy, I mean. And that they weren’t leaving until they found him. Oh, they took everyone else who was the child of a Death Eater—clever idea to do it that way, really, since the Hogwarts train travels through places that aren’t exactly real, and there’s no chance of any sort of normal help arriving. But Malfoy was the prize. And they weren’t leaving until they had him. So they kept fighting us, and then—and then-”

“Parvati died,” Ron said flatly to Ginny. “She was the first. Not the last, though. There were still more than enough Death Eaters left, and Mulciber went a bit mad after that, started hitting everybody with curses. The rest followed his lead. I think they started to think we were hiding Malfoy and wouldn’t bring him out for them to take. As if.” He turned to Hermione. “Let me tell the rest. Let me finish the story. The rest of it’s mine anyway. You didn’t see it.”

The other girl nodded. Her face was beginning to look a bit pale.

Ron took Ginny’s hand, very gently, and traced her fingers. “Nobody knew where you were,” he said quietly. “You’d disappeared. It took us some time to realize it, Ginny. But when I did, I knew I had to find you. And I had the oddest feeling that I could, that I might not know where you were, but I’d be drawn to you. As if you were a magnet, and I was metal. So—I started off down the side corridors.” He raised his head to Hermione. “And I don’t need to hear again how I left all of you in the lurch,” he said, an edge to his voice. “I had to find Ginny.”

Hermione bent her head without a word.

“Everything’d been happening in the students’ compartments,” Ron continued. “But I felt that you weren’t anywhere near there, so I began looking in the next car, where the luggage was. And that’s when I found Malfoy.” His face took on an ugly look. “The slimy cowardly little bastard was hiding. At the time I didn’t know if he realized his father and the Death Eaters were looking for him and lost his nerve, or what—well, I suppose you can’t lose what you never had, but anyway, there he was in the back luggage car, not giving a damn that they were tearing the train apart trying to find him. And I somehow knew, Ginny, that he knew where you were. But he wouldn’t tell me. So we dueled. I would’ve been happy to kill him by then; if he wasn’t going to tell me, I’d find you on my own. Gods, but I wish I had killed him.” Ron rubbed his closed eyes with his fingertips. “But then I heard your voice, Ginny, coming from behind me. I turned and saw you behind the door to the luggage compartment. And that’s when Malfoy hit me in the back with a Stunning spell.”

“You—you said that you didn’t know at the time what he was doing there,” Ginny said in a hoarse whisper.

“Well, we found out a few things afterwards.” Ron’s eyes went cold. “As near as Dumbledore can tell, Malfoy—Draco Malfoy, I mean, although it hardly seems as if we need to even try to tell those two apart anymore-- set up a final link for the Summoning spell at their manor in Wiltshire. That’s why his father and all the other Death Eaters were finally able to escape Azkaban. So he must have known that they were coming. We still don’t know why he was hiding in the luggage compartment instead of welcoming them with open arms, but it doesn’t matter now.”

Ginny looked down at her scarred hands and was silent. Hermione picked up the story.

“My guess is that Lucius Malfoy found his son after that, and Disapparated with him, because that was when all the Death Eaters disappeared. We—the ones who were still able to move, I mean—found you and Ron on the floor of the luggage car. And Summerby, of course, but it was too late for him, too late to help. You were—“ She swallowed. “You were bleeding all over Ron, Ginny. Oh, you’d lost so much blood. I didn’t—I didn’t think you were going to make it. Luckily, the thestrals came.” Hermione gave a shaky laugh. “None of us had any trouble seeing them, that’s for sure. And they took us to Hogwarts. Madam Pomfrey didn’t know what hit her. Almost everybody had to come to the hospital wing for treatment, and—and then there were the dead.”

All three of them were silent for a moment. Ginny did not want to ask who had died. She’d find out soon enough.

“Everyone’s pretty much well now, who was here with you,” Hermione said in a forced, bright tone. “You were about the last one, Ginny. Dumbledore’s speaking to us all tomorrow morning, do you think you’ll be up for that?”

“Yes,” Ginny murmured, staring at the blowing white curtains around the bed.

“All the teachers are here,” Hermione continued. “Thank God they don’t take the train. So that’s one good thing at least.”

“We could’ve stood to lose Snape,” said Ron.

“Honestly, Ron! We can’t afford to lose anyone else.”

“Even when they’re traitors?” Ron retorted.

“He hasn’t done anything traitorous at all. He’s spied for our side at great personal risk to himself and he’s gotten us out of trouble and danger loads of times. You’re just prejudiced because Harry hates him so much. God knows why, since he’s saved Harry’s life more than—“

“Leopards don’t change their spots, or don’t you remember hearing that?” Ron shot back.

“I certainly do. Barty Crouch said it when he was masquerading as Professor Moody . Really trustworthy source—“

“Don’t you remember what Millicent told us?” Ron shouted back. “Snape’s in deep with the Malfoys and always has been. Even deeper than we thought! When Sirius said Snape was Lucius Malfoy’s lapdog, he didn’t tell us the half of it. Although I’ll bet he knew.”

“Try to be reasonable, Ron,” snapped Hermione. “Or at least make an effort! All right, so maybe Snape was in love with Draco Malfoy’s mother almost twenty years ago, when they were both at Hogwarts. Doesn’t that prove a whole bloody lot. Let’s all listen to stories from Millicent Bulstrode, the girl you used to refer to as an evil Slytherin cow and the one you’re now calling by her first name—“

“I trust Milla,” Ron yelled at Hermione, clenching his hands into fists, “because she could’ve gone with the Death Eaters and saved her own skin very easily, and she didn’t. She came with us!”

“Oh, so it’s Milla now, is it?”

“The Sorting Hat wanted to put her in Hufflepuff anyway—she told me,” Ron continued doggedly. “She’s sorry for what she did to you that day in Umbridge’s office. She’s apologized and apologized; she was just following orders from Parkinson, you know. And she’s a pureblood; she’s Snape’s cousin and Malfoy’s, my cousin too, if it comes to that, so she’s heard things, and she knows what she’s talking about—“

“But you won’t apply the same sort of logic to Snape,” Hermione yelled back. “Oh, I forgot! The word logic isn’t in your vocabulary at all, is it?”

The two stood glaring at each other, chests heaving, as Ginny tried to process everything they had said. She gave a little moan of frustration and fell back to the coverlet. It was suddenly too much for her. At that slight sound, Ron and Hermione glanced down, breaking their furious stare.

“That’s enough,” said Hermione. Her face was blotchy and her eyes bright with unshed tears. “It’s more than enough. Go to sleep now, Ginny.”

Ginny was too exhausted to muster even the semblance of an argument. Her eyes closed and her head fell back on the pillow. Hermione and Ron kept whispering furiously at each other just outside the drapes around her bed, and finally Hermione’s shoes tapped down the corridor, each click very distinct, the way her walk always sounded when she was angry. Ginny raised her head.

“Ron,” she whispered.

Her brother’s head popped in between the white curtains. “You shouldn’t still be awake! D’you need a Sleeping draft? I’ll get Madam Pomfrey-”

“No—no.” Ginny took a deep breath. “Come here, Ron, please.”

He walked back towards her and sat at her bedside. “I suppose you heard us arguing, Ginny. Well, it’s nothing to worry about; it’s just that Hermione is the most impossible—“

“I don’t care about that,” sighed Ginny. “I need to tell you something else. It’s about what happened on the train.”

Ron sucked in his breath. “I knew it. I knew there was more. Ginny, did Malfoy lure you into the luggage compartment? Did he hurt you? Did he—“

“No, Ron, no.” Strictly speaking, that was true. “It’s about something Lucius Malfoy said.”

“Tell me.”

Ginny looked down at her interlaced fingers. She still wasn’t sure if she should tell Ron or not. In years to come, she was to wonder if it had really been such a good idea. But she didn’t see how she could avoid the telling, when this piece of information might be important to the fight that was coming. “He asked his son if he had me, because the Death Eaters wanted to take me with them.”

“So that slimy little piece of shite did lure you there! I can’t wait until we get ahold of him. I’m going to cut his balls off and feed them to a Crumple-Horned Snorck—“

“Will you please listen to me, Ron! I’m not done!” Ginny’s voice caught, and she went into a fit of coughing.

“Sorry,” said Ron in an abashed voice, scrambling to his feet. When he returned to her bedside with a glass of water, he seemed calmer.

“Draco Malfoy told his father that Dolohov already Disapparated with me,” said Ginny, between sips. “Then both of them left.”

Ron stared at her. “Malfoy must not have seen you,” he finally said. “That’s the only explanation.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” Ginny decided not to tell her brother anything more.

“I wonder where that spell came from though, the one that locked you into the luggage compartment…” mumbled Ron. “I suppose it was some leftover magic or other. That train’s a queer place. Well, it’s not important now. It kept you safe and that’s the only thing that matters. I wish I knew who cast it originally, though. Wish I could thank him.”

No, you don’t, thought Ginny.

He leaned down to her, hugging her awkwardly, avoiding her hands. “But I’m going to protect you from now on, Ginny. Always. I’ll never leave your safety to chance again. I swear it. I swear by—by everything.”

She closed her eyes again, and did not respond. The last sound she heard was her brother tiptoeing out of the room.



The enchanted sky over the Great Hall of Hogwarts was a flat, bright grey the next morning. It would rain hard that day, and was already drizzling. Breakfast was being served, although nobody seemed to eat much. Ginny looked down the Gryffindor table. Hermione was picking up her spoon, trailing it through her oatmeal, and letting it fall again, over and over. Harry had been chewing on the same rasher of bacon for twenty minutes. Ron swirled his pumpkin juice around in a cup without tasting it. There were so many empty spots at their table, and the survivors were trying not to notice them. But then, there was no lack of gaping holes at any of the tables. Ginny could not stop looking at them, and she was not the only one. It took her several minutes to realize that Dumbledore had begun to speak.

“—and so, since the founding of this school, it has been our custom to hold a welcoming feast, for students new and old,” he said. There was a brief pause when the Headmaster scanned the tables of weary and frightened-looking students. They stared back at him as if hoping for a miraculous deus ex machina. A soothing proclamation that everything was going to be all right, that the adults would take care of it all, that they could be carefree children once more, and that horrible responsibilities were not about to be thrust upon them. The expressions on the faces of the teachers at the staff table were not promising in this regard. Scanning them, looking for she knew not what, Ginny caught Snape’s eye briefly. He looked back at her, inscrutable as always. But she had seen a flash of something, for just a moment. She shivered.

“Circumstances prevented us from doing so, as all of you know,” continued Dumbledore. “This morning is the first time we have all been able to gather in one place. You were fortunate enough to be brought safely back to Hogwarts. We are all fortunate that it is our place of refuge. But we will not be permitted to long hide from the outside world in it, and we must be prepared. Our world has changed, and all of us know why. Lord Voldemort—oh, yes, let the name be said—“ and he seemed not to notice the collective shudder that swept the room “—has gathered together all his followers at last, and is ready to strike. Indeed, he has already begun to do so. Now, we must stand together—“ his faded blue eyes scanned the decimated tables “—or we will fall, separately. For that reason, the Sorting Hat has decided on an action this year that has never occurred before. It has announced that in the future, it will no longer Sort incoming students into different houses.” A surprised murmur went around the tables. “And,” Dumbledore continued, “it requests that all of us, Slytherins, Gryffindors, Hufflepuffs, Ravenclaws, staff and teachers alike, seat ourselves at one great table, to signify that what unites us is far, far more important than the petty differences which divide us.”

Students looked at each other, uncertainly, and made no move to get up. The hat opened its tear near the brim and beckoned impatiently. Ernie MacMillan rose first and began awkwardly pushing tables together by himself. Several of his fellow Hufflepuffs helped him, and soon eight or nine of the tables had been made into a sort of circle. The Ravenclaws began taking the new seats next. The Gryffindors and the Slytherins—what remained of that house, anyway—glared at each other from opposite sides of the room. Then Ron got up and held his hand out to Millicent Bulstrode. They walked over to one of the tables and sat down next to each other. Hermione gave an exasperated sigh, but shrugged and followed them after a few more minutes, and many more Gryffindors followed her. Harry was actually the last holdout, but eventually even he came, watching the Slytherins distrustfully. Everyone toyed with their full plates of cold food a little more. Dumbledore waited until the students had settled down before speaking again.

“We have lost many of those near and dear to us in this great tragedy, and it will be the first of many such. It is not easy to go on after this, and knowing this, but we must. Yet what we have held to in light, we must hold to in darkness. We must trust that we will have the strength do so, even as they had the strength to fight and die for the sake of us all,” Dumbledore said quietly. “But hope remains, as it always does, and we must never forget it.”

The hall absorbed his words, silently. He snapped his fingers and a black parchment shining with a list of names in pearly white ink appeared from thin air. Dumbledore let it float down into one of his gnarled old hands. How frail they looked, Ginny thought suddenly.

“I ask you to join with me in a moment of silence for each of our beloved dead.” He cleared his throat, and began reading from the parchment.

“Zacharias Smith.”

The Hufflepuff who had so distrusted Harry, and who the twins had always teased. He had defended them all in the end, though, and put his DA training to use. That was why he had died. She’d heard that it had happened when everyone was desperately trying to deflect the deadly curses bouncing around the compartment, and he’d dove in front of one of them to protect the other students. And now he was gone.

“Frances Grey.”

A nervous little second-year Ravenclaw with a habit of chewing on the ends of her lank brown hair, Ginny remembered. She’d been unfortunate enough to get in the way when Dolohov had been chasing Hermione and Ernie MacMillan down a corridor on the train.

“Jack Sloper.”

Nobody knew if it was clumsiness that had killed him, or simply reflexes that were less than lightning-quick. Either way, he’d been hit with a Killing Curse that Harry had ducked. Ginny knew that the dead face of Cedric Diggory haunted Harry’s dreams still, and now Jack’s would join it. Ginny glanced at Harry across the table from her, staring down into his plate, his eyes blank and unfocussed. She had been emotionally numb since all of this had happened, unable to feel her own pain. But at the thought of his, her mind threatened to buckle.

“Parvati Patil.”

The names began to blur in Ginny’s ears. So many. Too many. She couldn’t hold onto them, and she reacted only to a few that she knew well, rising like drowned bodies from the sea of darkness that shrouded her now.

“Alicia Spinnet.”

Alicia, with her flashing blue eyes and ready smile, her halo of golden hair that swung round her in a circle at Quidditch practice until she would impatiently tie it up. She was dead. Nobody knew exactly how. Her body had simply been found in the wreckage of the train when the Ministry sent Aurors to investigate the next day.

“Cho Chang.”

She had been found next to Alicia.

“Anthony Summerby.”

She had hated him. In a moment of impatience that afternoon in the corridor when she was trying to keep students from walking past Umbridge’s office, she had actually wished him dead. And now he was. I thought I knew all about guilt, and grief, and loss, after what happened to me in the Chamber of Secrets. But I had no idea.

At last the terribly gentle voice stopped, and Ginny thought that this, at least, was over. But Dumbledore had not finished speaking. “I would ask only one other thing of you, as difficult as this may seem. Those we have just remembered, those we will always remember, died because they chose rightly between what was right and what was easy. But we must also grieve for those who chose… otherwise.”

An angry murmur came up from the tables as the students realized what he meant. Ron’s face turned red, and he seemed about to jump up from his seat. “Grieve for them!” he said under his breath. “I wish I could Transfigure them into mice and throw them into a roomful of cats. Except Malfoy. That’s too good for him. I’d like to shave his skin off inch by inch with a—“

“Ron!” Hermione whispered, her face appalled.

“He’s right,” Harry said roughly. “Why didn’t we kill Malfoy this spring on the train, when we had the chance? None of this would’ve happened!”

Dumbledore raised a hand for silence, and grudgingly, it fell. “I do not ask you to understand what they did, the students who went with their Death Eater parents,” he said. “I do not ask you to sympathize with them, or pity them. But I do ask you to think, and think sincerely, about how much of your energy you can afford to waste on hate. All of us are going to have very little to spare in such a manner, in the days to come. And a very wise Muggle once said that hate cannot cast out hate. Only love can do that.”

Ron made a gagging motion, and Harry snickered, his eyes cold. Only love can do that… Ginny’s eyes burned with tears, and she stared fixedly down into her plate.

No names were read, not now. But there was a long moment of silence in the Great Hall, and many tight lips, and furious white faces, as the students remembered those who had chosen otherwise. So, in her mind only, Ginny read out a name.

Draco Malfoy.

The happy, eager Draco who had tossed a Snitch up in the air on the Quidditch pitch at sunset only months before, smiling at her. The golden boy with the promise of life and life and life ahead of him. He was dead, too. No, he had never really lived, so he couldn’t very well die. He had been a mental mirage. A ghost of what could never now be. Malfoy had chosen to walk a path that led inexorably away from that potential boy. So now Ginny had to burn him out of her memory, cauterize him out. Surely all that she had just heard would be enough?

“Draco Malfoy,” Ron said in her ear, very low. She jumped, afraid for a second that she’d spoken his name aloud.

“What about Malfoy?” Ginny asked carefully.

“All of this is his fault. Every bit of it.”

“Well, he didn’t actually kill anybody—“ Ginny shut her mouth too late. Besides, she supposed that her statement really wasn’t the truth. Lucius might have administered the final, fatal curse, but Anthony Summerby had died because of Draco Malfoy. And me. Oh, yes, and me.

“None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for him.” Ron didn’t appear to be listening to her at all. Ginny wondered if he even knew she was there. But then he turned to her, and there was a deadly light in his eyes.

“I don’t know when, and I don’t know how,” Ron said. “But someday, I’m going to make him pay for what he’s done. Someday, Ginny, I’m going to get him.”

Ginny did not reply. She looked at a former Slytherin table, the one she had so furtively peered at this spring, now across from her and to her right. As if by consensus, nobody sat in Draco Malfoy’s old chair.

She looked at the empty chair and thought of what had been, and what now could never be. She couldn’t begin to guess at what had really existed between them, amorphous and unformed as it was. She certainly didn’t know what it might have become, in some impossible world where the ties and loyalties that separately bound them both had no meaning. It was as if there’d been a faint silver thread somehow connecting him and her, one that was spun in a realm beyond good and evil. But now, that thread was severed forever.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione talked to each other as they walked down the corridor after breakfast. They formed a tight little group of three, with no possible room for anybody else. Ginny passed by without the slightest interest in joining them, even if it had been possible. She overheard just one scrap of conversation.

“We have to do something about student morale,” said Hermione.

“Good luck,” snorted Ron.

“Well, we do,” Hermione insisted. “Everybody seems to think we’re all doomed, and this is the end.”

“Oh, it’s not,” Harry said dully.

“No,” said Hermione. “It’s not even the beginning of the end. But it is, I think, the end of the beginning.”

Once they reached the Gryffindor common room, the three retreated to a sofa by the fire for a long, whispered conference. Ginny was surprised to find that she really had no interest in whatever it was they were talking about. Everybody else seemed to be going to their rooms, lying on their beds, and staring at the ceiling, so she did too. After a few minutes of this activity, the restlessness in Ginny took control of her. She slipped on her shoes and a warm outer cloak, and stole down the back stairs.

Ginny wandered out to the Quidditch pitch and sat on a bench near the broom shed, where she could see the ruffled grey surface of the lake. She stared and stared at it. The freezing wind lashed her face.

She knew that they were at war after today, although nobody had said the words out loud as yet. She believed she understood at last what she had seen in Malfoy’s face when he had taken the parchment from her on the train. He had been teetering on the edge of an abyss, and now he had fallen. Had chosen to fall. Had chosen his part in what was to come, and in that choice, and that fall, he was damned. Yet he had lied to his father in order to keep her from being taken with the Death Eaters, and that was the one thing Ginny could not understand. Not that it mattered now.

I pray that nobody will ever find out what was between us this spring-- whatever that was, and I suppose I’ll never know. I think they’d kill me. And I might deserve it. But Ginny had an odd inner conviction that nobody ever would find out; that her punishment for opening a bit of herself to the fallen Draco Malfoy would be other than that. Would not be as simple as that.

She sighed, and lifted her head. Something shimmered in the air, at the very corner of her field of vision. Instinctively, she turned to look at it.

Draco Malfoy was coming towards her.

Her heart gave a great leap, even as she was frozen to the spot. He couldn’t be there. It was impossible. The wards around Hogwarts had been reset to specifically exclude any of the Malfoys, along with all the other known Death Eaters. He came closer and closer to her and then stopped several paces away.

“What – what do you want?” she asked in a quavering voice.

He didn’t reply.

“Why are you here? How’d you get in?”

He only looked at her.

“Haven’t you done enough damage already?” she asked, forcing the words through her icy lips. “I know what happened. Parvati and Alicia and all the rest are dead because of you. And Summerby—“ A hook of guilt caught in her throat at that name. “Get out. Get out or I’ll—“ Ginny rose from her seat and advanced on Draco threateningly, her wand raised. Still he stood where he was. And as she got closer, she saw the shape of the broom shed through his transparent form. She gasped, scrambling back to the bench..

Ginny was never to know what it was that she had really seen that day. It wasn’t a dream, since she knew that she hadn’t fallen asleep. And if it was a vision, it was truly a miracle without meaning. At first she thought that she saw a Sending, and what stood before her and looked at her was Draco’s fetch, his death-double. But she didn’t really believe it even at the time. And later, of course, she learned that he was not dead, although many of her friends were to pray for that event nightly and she could not blame them.

He was dressed all in black, from head to toe. That was another way she later knew that the vision had been true. The members of the resistance all heard that he never was seen to wear anything else, in the years that followed.

The Hogwarts school robes had always been black, of course. But these were somehow blacker than black, the shade of an open grave, and his fair face and shining hair rose startlingly from the darkness. Her mouth fell open, but she did not speak. He looked at her long and soberly, making no move. Just when she had gotten up all her nerve to scream, Draco raised one hand to her, as if in salute. It looked bloodless and almost skeletal against the black he wore. There was no time for her to respond before he faded, and was gone. She sat looking at the spot where he had been for a long time. I don’t know what that really was, she thought after a while, each word coming to her mind very slowly. And yet, I do. It was the ghost of my golden boy. He came back for a last farewell. And now he is gone forever.

The wind, now mixed with freezing rain, blew harshly around her ears. Her fingers and toes began to grow numb. Ginny gave a start when she felt the presence of someone behind her, and turned with a little cry. It was Professor Snape. He sat on the bench next to her.

“Miss Granger believed I’d find you here,” he said.

Ginny nodded. Why on earth did they sendSnape to find me? she wondered. Or did he come on his own? And why would he? She was a decent and methodical Potions student, not at the top of her class nor at its bottom. He ignored her presence for the most part. He didn’t favour her as he did Malfoy and the Slytherins, of course, but neither did he torment her the way he did Harry or Neville. She couldn’t understand why he’d be here now.

He cleared his throat. “Are you quite well, Miss Weasley?” he asked.

“Er, yes,” said Ginny. “Much better, anyway. My hands are still a bit sore.”

“You were in the hospital wing for quite some time, or so I heard.”

“Well, yes, I was.” This conversation was getting more surreal by the minute. Maybe she was imagining the entire thing, and that explained the vision of Malfoy. “My hands were badly injured by what happened on the train, you see, and—“

“I understand that you were locked in the baggage compartment,” Snape said abruptly, with a certain lack of his usual aplomb. He seemed almost… nervous, thought Ginny. Hasty. A little jumpy. She looked at him, sidelong, wondering how much he really understood.

“I was,” she said. “I couldn’t get out for ages—that’s how I hurt my hands, by pounding on the door. Dumbledore thinks that there was some sort of complicated Locking spell on it, but nobody knows why, or how, it was cast.”

“Ah.”

Ginny looked down at her interlocked hands. She was about to confess something that she had not told to anyone. She had no idea why this confession was fighting its way to the surface in the presence of Professor Snape while they sat together on a bench near the broom shed, but such was the case. The entire scene had the otherworldly quality of a dream, where anything might happen, no matter how unlikely its occurrence in waking life. She spoke hesitantly. “I—I sometimes think that if I hadn’t been locked in there, I could’ve-“

“Gotten yourself killed?” Snape interrupted, dryly.

“What I mean is,” she continued in a near whisper, “if I hadn’t been there, away from everyone else, the entire thing might not have happened. Not the fact that the Death Eaters showed up on the train, or that Lucius Malfoy came for his son; I don’t mean that. I mean—the deaths. Or—well—I don’t know exactly what I mean.”

“Miss Weasley,” said Snape, “one of two possibilities occur to me. Either you rate your own importance rather higher than it deserves-- which undoubtedly tends to be a Gryffindor trait-- or else you know something you’re not telling me.”

She did not reply. But he nodded as though she had.

“I believe,” Snape said after a short silence, “that we most regret the things we have left undone, whether the failure was through our own fault or not. Perhaps it’s even worse to know that we’ve tried as hard as we could, and all our effort went for nothing.”

Snape no longer sounded as if he was responding to anything she’d said—or it least it wouldn’t have sounded that way to anyone who was listening—but Ginny knew that he was indeed. Once again, she wondered how much he really knew. Draco Malfoy had been his favourite student, after all.

Snape stared out over the lake at the edge of the field, and a faint breeze ruffled a fringe of his dark hair, tucked under the hood of his cloak. “Did you know, Miss Weasley, that we are in the one place at Hogwarts where we are safe from being overheard?”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t. But I’ve always liked to come here; it’s always felt—safe.”

He nodded. “It has some very curious magical properties that come from its location between the Quidditch pitch and the lake. Students are generally not informed of this fact, of course.”

Ginny waited. She could not believe that he would have told her such a secret without reason.

“Do you remember the last time I saw you?” he asked. There was a shift in his manner of speaking that was too subtle to be defined. All Ginny could really be sure of was that Snape had become a tad less formal, just a bit less stiff in his words and posture and gestures. He pushed his hood back a little, still not looking at her. She wondered what on earth was going to come next.

“Yes,” she said, since he seemed to be waiting for her to reply before he would continue. “It was—well, if you don’t count the Department of Mysteries, I suppose it was that day in Umbridge’s office, because after that I was in the hospital wing, and I didn’t go back to classes.”

“So it was.” Then he did turn and look at her, and his eyes were dark and penetrating. “I saw you in the same room with Draco Malfoy. I saw the way that he looked at you. I saw the way that you looked at him. I saw what passed between the two of you—“he held up a hand to forestall her protests “—although perhaps you yourself did not see it.”

Ginny stared at him. The world truly was turned upside down now; a Death Eater attack on the Hogwarts train seemed no less incredible than the words she heard coming out of her Potion Master’s mouth. Snape paused before continuing.

“I am going to tell you something now, Miss Weasley, that I have never told to another living being. I trust you will not repeat it?”

“Of—of course not,” she said, falteringly.

“And after we have spoken of it today, we will never refer to it again.” The wind blew cold, and she waited.

“All of the Gryffindors have always thought that I’ve favoured members of my house above all others,” he said, biting off the ends of the words as if trying not to let them get too far away from him. “But none so much as Draco Malfoy.”

“Oh.” Ginny didn’t have the faintest idea how to respond to that. “Well, I suppose so. Yes. It always has seemed to be true. Harry and Ron always have thought that it’s rather, well, unfair. Sir. I mean, Slytherins are rather… well, everyone else knows that you can’t trust them and--” She fell silent, too late.

Snape smiled, without humour. “The prejudice against Slytherin House at this school never ceases to amaze me. It isn’t made up of junior Death Eaters who are all irretrievably evil at the age of eleven, you know. Not all of the Death Eaters’ children were Slytherins, and not all Slytherins are Death Eaters in the making. You know the choice that Miss Bulstrode made, for instance. But that’s not the point, not now. The connection between us, between young Malfoy and myself, is… well, it isn’t necessary to go into details. I made a vow to someone I knew well, many years ago. Someone to whom I had… obligations. I promised to protect Draco Malfoy as best I could. To watch over him as I would over one of my own. That, I have done, or tried to do.”

Ginny’s mind whirled as she put the pieces together. I made a vow… Someone to whom I had obligations. Clearly, this mysterious someone had cared enough about Draco Malfoy to try to win protection for him during his years at Hogwarts. She remembered her brother’s words. Snape had been in love with Narcissa Malfoy, or so Millicent Bulstrode had said. Back in their schooldays, when she was still Narcissa Black. Had Snape made the connection originally with her, that strange, silent woman married to Lucius Malfoy? And Snape had said as if he were my own. Draco had been born six months before Harry, when Narcissa was barely out of Hogwarts… and a year after that, Snape became Potions Master. He had been a seventh-year when Narcissa was a fifth-year. Could he possibly have been hinting that… dear God, what a thought… that Draco might even be his son? But as quickly as the mad idea had come, Ginny had to reject it. Draco was Lucius in miniature; there hardly seemed to be any admixture of the blond Narcissa, let alone a hint of darker parentage. It wasn’t possible, and she was surprised to find herself sorry that it was so. As if he had read her mind, Snape shook his head.

“No,” he said, and his voice was very sad. “There are many things, Miss Weasley, that might have been, should have been, but aren’t. Perhaps you are familiar with this fact already? Yes? I rather thought so.”

Ginny remembered the one long kiss from her lost golden boy, now claimed by darkness. She turned her head aside so that Snape would not see her face. He knew, of course; he always seemed to know everything. But he allowed her the courtesy of not showing that he knew what she was feeling, although she was now sure that there was no living being at Hogwarts now who understood what she felt half so well as he.

“But there are battles that cannot be won,” Snape continued. “There are facts that cannot be changed. And there are… those people who cannot be saved.” The Potions Master could not have been forty, Ginny knew. But how old he looked, suddenly, with the marks of real grief on his face. She still did not speak. “Do you know what I am saying to you?” he asked abruptly. “Can you know it?”

“I think so,” she replied.

They sat next to each other in silence. Then he collected himself, and stood up, briskly.

“Miss Weasley, we will not atone for our separate sins of omission—whatever they may be—by staying out in the freezing September rain without waterproofs or an umbrella until we contract pneumonia. There have been enough deaths without adding ours to the number, and there will be more. Come with me now.” His brusque tone was not comforting, but she couldn’t have endured comfort, just then. She rose from the stone seat, very slowly, and Snape helped her up by an elbow, carefully avoiding her hands. Together, they began to walk back towards the Great Hall.

“There’s something that I’ve never told anyone, sir,” she said as they made their way across the fields. He gave her a short, keen look.

“Is it something that you ought not to tell me outside the bounds of the one place we cannot be overheard?”

“No—no, it’s not like that. It’s just that some things—well, feel as if they shouldn’t be told.” She looked up. “But I’ll tell you. ” Ginny wasn’t the least bit sure why she had said that last. Snape nodded.

“It’s about something that happened on the morning that Umbridge caught Harry trying to reach Sirius Black in her office,” she continued. Snape grimaced at the dead wizard’s name, but said nothing.

“Well, what is it?” he asked.

“Malfoy received an owl from his father at the breakfast table,” she said quickly, seeing how close they were getting to the castle. “I don’t know what was in it. But he seemed very shaken after he got it. And I always wondered, well, if it had anything to do with what happened later. Umbridge, or the Department of Mysteries, or anything else that day—and after that day, I suppose, as well. I thought that maybe that’s when Lucius Malfoy told him about what the Death Eaters were going to do later on, after they’d lured Harry to the Ministry. And also about the Summoning charm at Malfoy Manor, the one Draco Malfoy modified later so that the Death Eaters could escape from Azkaban.”

“I don’t know…” muttered Snape. “I can’t be sure about the Summoning charm—it easily could have been set up months ago, and the Death Eaters might well have brought the Malfoy heir in on that. It’s exactly the sort of thing they would do, you see, as preparation for initiating him fully into their order. You may have heard that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, Miss Weasley, but a little power is far deadlier, if only because it inevitably induces the thirst for more. Death Eaters know that. They don’t have their acolytes simply start throwing the Killing Curse at people one fine morning, you see. They don’t let them cut their teeth on rape and torture, either. No, they start with rituals that seem innocuous and work their way up. What I would really like to know, however…” He tapped a finger against his chin, and his next words clearly showed that he was engaged in the process of thinking out loud. Ginny held her breath, hardly daring to make a sound for fear she’d remind him that he really shouldn’t speak about these things in front of her. This unusual talkativeness of his must stem from the utter disruption of their world, but in this instance, at least, she would take advantage of it as long as she could.

“I wish I knew what happened at the Winter Solstice last year,” Snape said under his breath, so quietly that Ginny could barely catch the words. “And I wish I knew what they have planned for this year. It falls on Draco Malfoy’s birthday. I suppose you didn’t know that. Stonehenge is a part of Malfoy Manor… or rather, it’s the other way around. And the heelstone is aligned to the pointing star of Draco… yes… “

Ginny could not repress a gasp. The memory of Professor Binns’s lecture that spring about megaliths and constellations came flooding back to her. But Professor Snape kept speaking, and she thought at first that he hadn’t even noticed her reaction.

“No-one can ever make me believe that they didn’t involve the Malfoy heir in some sort of ritual of power on that day, a year ago. But what was it?” Abruptly, he turned to Ginny. They were crossing the fields that led up to the back of the castle, and he put a hand on her arm, halting her in the shadow of a weeping willow tree.

“Miss Weasley, I apologize in advance for asking you what I must ask. But you do not know how important it is that I receive truthful answers to my questions.”

Heat rose in Ginny’s cheeks, and she looked at the ground. She didn’t even know yet exactly what Professor Snape would ask, and she already wished herself a million miles away. But she had to answer him. Maybe this was her penance. “All right,” she mumbled.

“Did Draco Malfoy receive the Dark Mark?” he asked. “Did he have it, by the end of term?”

“How—how would I know?” Ginny replied. She had meant to snap the words back at him, but they came out sounding shaky and tentative.

“If he-“ Snape cleared his throat “- touched you—in any intimate way, I mean- you would have known. Did he do so?”

She traced a pattern in the ground with the toe of her shoe. “Yes,” she whispered.

“And do you think he bore the Mark?”

A tightness gathered in Ginny’s throat when she remembered that fevered touch in the luggage rack of the train. His hands roaming over her so briefly, but burning themselves into her soul forever. Forever. “No,” she said. “I’m sure he didn’t.”

“Ah. I see. Miss Weasley—“ Snape looked almost embarrassed, but still utterly straightlaced. A gurgle of hideously inappropriate laughter threatened to escape Ginny at the look on his face. “Please believe me when I say that I ask this next question out of no… prurient interest. If you answer in the negative, then the subject is entirely closed and need never be brought up again. But a certain balance of magical power might hinge on this very point, and—er—anyway, I’m afraid I really must ask this.”

“Please do,” said Ginny softly, hoping that her assent would put her unexpectedly prissy Potions Master out of his misery.

“Did you, ah… did you allow Draco Malfoy further intimacies with you?”

“You mean…” Ginny stared blankly at Snape for a moment. Then realization dawned on her. “Oh! No. No, we didn’t—I mean, he didn’t—he just kissed me on the Hogwarts train. That was all.” Her face was surely glowing red in the darkness.

Snape sighed with palpably evident relief. “Ah. Good. Very good.”

He clearly wanted to drop the entire subject now that he had the answer he wanted. But Ginny felt a painful curiousity rising in her. “Professor,” she asked, “what difference would it make if we—well, if we had done what you asked?”

“There’s no need to speak about it anymore. The situation will never arise again, so it is not important.” Snape walked faster.

“But what sort of magical power might have hinged on whether or not we—“

“As I was saying earlier,” Snape said, just a trifle too loudly, “Lucius Malfoy certainly told his son about the Summoning charm. And I rather think the younger Malfoy was informed about the planned attack at the Department of Mysteries, as well. I suppose he must have been. But there’s still one problem with the idea that Lucius sent the parchment, and it’s an insurmountable one as far as I can see.”

“Sir?” asked Ginny, deciding to drop her other line of questioning. They were very close to the back stairs of Hogwarts now, and Snape’s face was quite implacable.

“The very last thing Lucius would have told Draco Malfoy to do was to keep all of you safely at the school, even if you were with Umbridge. He wanted you lured out of it.”

“Oh.” Ginny felt more mystified than ever.

Snape tapped a finger against the side of his nose. “What sort of owl was it?”

“Big.” Ginny struggled to remember clearly. “An eagle owl.”

“Black?”

“No, no. White and silver, with barred wings.”

“Hmm.” Snape seemed deep in thought as they walked.

“So, er—what do you suppose was in the letter, sir?”

“I have no idea.” They were turning up the lane that led to the back entrance now. “But one thing I do know,” said Snape. “Whatever was on that parchment, Lucius Malfoy didn’t write it.”

“What!” Ginny stared at him. “How on earth can you know that, Professor?”

“Because the white and silver owl is Domitia, and she belongs to Narcissa Malfoy. Has done, since her first year at Hogwarts. And eagle owls carry messages for no-one but their owners. If Lucius had tried to tie a parchment around Domitia’s leg, he wouldn’t have got all his fingers back…no, he would have known better than to try. So the message wasn’t his…” Snape’s words trailed off as they reached the back stairs.

“There’s one more thing,” said Ginny. “I’ve only told my brother. I don’t know if he’s told anyone else, although I suppose he will tell Dumbledore. But I think you should know. Lucius Malfoy wanted to take me back with the Death Eaters. I heard him say so on the train, during the attack.”

“Did he.” Snape sounded oddly unsurprised, as if a point in doubt had simply been confirmed. Ginny wondered what was going on in his head. “So why wasn’t he able to do so?”

“Because—“ Ginny faltered. “I haven’t told this to anyone else at all, but—because Draco Malfoy lied to his father, and said Dolohov had already taken me back to wherever they were all going.”

Snape sucked in his breath sharply, and for an instant there was an odd, almost hopeful light in his eyes. “And you’re quite sure it was a lie? Couldn’t it be that he honestly believed what he said?”

“No, I’m sure. He knew where I was.”

“Indeed.” Had the faintest smile touched Snape’s thin lips, for just an instant? Ginny studied him closely. No, she decided. That was impossible. Suddenly, she felt immensely tired.

“I think I want to go back to my room and lie down,” she whispered.

“As you wish.” He escorted her to the Gryffindor stairs, and then left, his black cloak billowing behind him. Ginny watched him go. She turned and began walking up the staircase, very slowly. It stayed quietly where it was rather than shifting to a new location. She was grateful.


Rain drummed on the roof above her. At last, the storm had broken.

She trudged up the steps into the darkness of the hall above. There were several little groups in the common room, and she passed them by. She walked into her silent and barren bedroom and lay down on her maroon-curtained bed. None of her roommates were there. Ginny couldn’t remember if any of them had died in the attack, or if they had simply been among the silent groups of students clustered around the Gryffindor fireplace, staring blankly into the flames. She pulled the curtains tight and placed a Silencing charm on them, and then turned so that her head was buried in the pillow. All day long there had been an awful tightness in her throat, and she’d thought that once she was alone in her bed, she would cry and cry until there were no tears left in her. But her eyes remained dry. Ginny rolled over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling.

Slowly, she ran a hand over her brow, her cheek, her neck, her breasts, her stomach, feeling the firm smoothness of her body, the pulse that beat at her throat and wrists and chest. Alive, she thought idiotically. I’m alive. I do have that, at least.

What difference would it make if we—well, if we had done what you asked?

Ginny’s hand strayed lower. She did not try to stop her fingers moving over her aching flesh. She was trying not to think at all, to keep her mind an utter blank. The physical sensations beat back the awful fear and loneliness, at least a little bit.

So what do you want, Malfoy?

The sensory image of Draco’s long, strong fingers flooded her brain. She allowed it to happen. His fingers were between her legs now, not her own.

To finish it.

Behind the lids of her closed eyes, she saw his face bent over hers as she had seen it in the luggage compartment of the train. The image replicated itself into a host of new ones that she had never seen in life. His grey eyes grew hooded, half-lidded, as pleasure spread colour over his narrow pale face. The stray strands of his gilt hair fell over her breasts. The tendons in his lean, strong arms flexed and corded as he lowered himself upon her, and between her spread legs that tensed against the feather mattress, and into her.

And then there were no words to remember, or to say, as she cried out and writhed against the hand she pretended was his body.

Afterwards, her breathing slowing to normal, Ginny curled up on her side. One hand traced the other, absently. Her scars glowed red, and she felt the pain in them now that she had not felt earlier. She felt no guilt at all. Perhaps I should. But there was really no need for that. She would never do this again, or permit herself to think about him in that way again, or to remember what they had done again. Those few moments were a final farewell.

The situation will never arise again, so it is not important.

Snape had said it all.

Ginny reached over to her bedside table and tapped the witchlight, casting the canopied bedspace into darkness. Yes, it’s over, she thought. Whatever he was, whatever he now is, and whatever he may yet be, I will never see him again. And each word was like the peal of a great bell that tolled doom to come.

Sometimes, in later years, Ginny thought that all the suffering and misery and war and death of the time that lay ahead had been prophesied in those few words. As they formed in her mind before she fell into exhausted sleep, however, all Ginny knew was that she had never felt so right about anything. I will never see Draco Malfoy again.

But she was wrong.

~end~