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Chapter 26: The End of the Reign
What a fantastic turn her morning had taken. Feeling her anger slowly build inside her, she was walking at a very brisk pace, hoping to exorcise a great deal of her rage through the physical exertion of trying to escape an enraged Weasley.
“…And after all the warnings I gave you, I see you here, traipsing around in the SNOW, half-naked, with HIM! What were you thinking, Ginny? Have you forgotten he’s a Malfoy?” Ron demanded, his anger having pushed past the convenient stuttering stage, and seemingly seemed to be stuck in ‘continuous rant’ mode. With a seething glare at her brother, Ginny reasoned with herself the stuttering was the better of the two by far.
“Ron, my dear, dear brother, don’t take this the wrong way, but SOD OFF,” she yelled back, before continuing her storming down the corridor. Having unexpectedly been greeted at the door by her brother and his two closest friends had been a rather awkward moment, but awkward had become near disaster by the way he kept carrying on.
“Virginia, I am not finished with you! If you think that you’re getting off that easy…I arrive here, and find my baby sister – snogging – that bastard Malfoy, and you expect me to take ‘sod off’ as an answer?” Ron hollered after her, running to keep up. Glancing down the hall, she realized that she was heading in the wrong direction, and made a quick about turn, catching her brother roughly by the arm on her way by.
“Need I remind you that you are a guest in this family’s home? And that no matter what your feelings towards him may be, you should be slightly more polite than hollering out that all Malfoys are bastards!” Ginny hissed through her teeth. Ron yanked his arm away.
“What has happened to you, Ginny? Have you forgotten what kind of person he is, what kind of person his father was? Do you remember what his father did to you in your first year?” Ron asked, his anger dissipating and now, instead of enraged, he simply looked confused.
“Ron, need I remind you that I have a job to do? That I am here for one very important purpose? Malfoy is key to getting that bloody Act signed, and if I don’t have his support on it, then two years of my life have been completely wasted! His family is very wary of anyone from the Ministry, so I’ve been posing as his girlfriend in order to get around that. It’s just business,” she hissed, swatting her brother’s hand away from her shoulder.
“Whatever little political game you are playing, Ginny, fine, but at the very least, think of Mum and put some clothes on,” Ron yelled back at her. Letting out a roar that she struggled to bite back as much as possible, she stormed away. She finally realized that they were in the corridor where her bedroom was located and opened the door.
“Ron, I don’t interfere with your job. Show me the same respect and stay out of mine before you ruin everything!” Ginny said, glaring coldly at him, attempting to freeze him with her eyes. There was a pause as Ron met her icy gaze, staring solidly back. But then he grimaced, and his eyes moved away, losing the silent standoff. With a pointed look, she spun around triumphantly, and slammed the door the bedroom shut. Ron stared at the closed door for a second, blinking.
“Put some bloody clothes on!” he yelled, determined to get the last word in.
* * * * *
“Potter, what are you doing here?” Draco asked, his voice full of disdain born from the years of enmity between them. Some things could never be remedied over time. The tension in the room had driven away most of his family, leaving him, Harry and Gabrielle alone in the library. Hermione had left hurriedly after Ron, who hadn’t been seen since he tore out the room, seeking to confront his sister.
“Full moon, Malfoy. I warned you that if you didn’t have things under control by now, I’d be here,” Harry answered, the slight edge in his voice causing Gabrielle’s head to snap away from the window, and look to her fiancé. Seeing the serious gleam in his eyes, she felt her heart stop.
“What is going on? What do the two of you know that I don’t?” she asked, her voice carefully modulated to betray nothing – that she knew very well what Draco knew.
“Well, as is the fashion with Aurors, you seem to always a little slow on the uptake. The problem was solved last night,” Draco said, ignoring his cousin. Harry frowned, unwilling to trust what he was saying.
“But?” Harry asked pointedly.
“We have a new problem,” Draco said solemnly.
“We? What are you talking about, Draco? Harry? Will someone please tell me what is going on?” Gabrielle demanded.
“They no longer want the unicorns,” Harry stated, the idea spontaneously dawning on him. “They’ve found something else to target?”
“Not something else, something more. I’m not entirely sure, but the attack last night ended rather abruptly…I think that they may be forming some other type of attack,” he said with a sigh.
“You are just being paranoid, Draco! The reason the attack last night stopped was because of Gin—” Gabrielle’s words were cut off as Draco shot her an icy glare that stopped her immediately.
“What about Ginny?” Harry demanded. He was attempting to stare Draco down, when it seemed that an idea suddenly entered his mind, and his attention focused. “Gabrielle, do you know about all of this?”
Draco watched as his cousin’s face paled significantly, and she seemed frozen to the spot, unable to speak. She looked pleadingly at Draco, desperate for any help in trying to conceal the truth.
“Gabrielle, he already knows. Just tell him,” Draco said forcefully, for once in his life completely drained of all the lies and games that seemed to encompass his family. Even lies that were not his own had become such a large part of his life, and he wanted nothing more than to be rid of them.
“Harry…I…Oh, I can’t do this!” Gabrielle exclaimed tearfully before dashing from the room. Harry looked startled by her actions, and was about to follow her out of the room – all thoughts about the issue at hand erased, and all questions about Ginny seemingly forgotten – but the taller frame of his best friend, Ron Weasley, blocked his way as he stormed in.
“Malfoy, you bastard, what the hell do you think you’re doing with my sister?” he raged, his face bright red with his (as yet) unleashed anger. Seeing an opportunity that, despite his maturity and the years that had passed since Hogwarts, he was unable to resist, his lips twisted in a lazy smirk, and one eyebrow rose.
“I don’t quite know, Weasel. You saw, why don’t you tell me?” he asked, unable to keep the obnoxious tone from his voice. If Potter hadn’t been there to keeping the enraged brother from lunging forward, Draco was certain that there would have been quite the fight right there in the library.
“I’m going to tear you apart, Malfoy!” Ron hollered, struggling against the grip that Harry had on him. “Get off, Harry!”
Draco watched as Ron physically tried to move his friend out of the way, and he mused over the differences between Ron’s display of anger, and Ginny’s. Despite the fact that they were brother and sister, and had the genetic red hair and freckles, that was where their similarities ended. Ron had always been a short fuse – his temper boiling always just below the surface, ready to explode at any second. Ginny had many more levels then that. Most of the time, she was containing her anger, smothering it in a thick layer of ice. It was a cool anger, never burning unless she was really angry. And then, all ice was gone, and she was a burning ball of rage. It took quite a lot for her to loose control, Draco had noted, although it seemed that lately, her control was breaking more and more. Perhaps the reign of the Ice Queen is coming to an end, Draco mused. This thought shattered his amusement, and the thought of her reaction to discovering that he had purposely antagonized her brother caused him to try to smooth things over.
“Look, Weasel, use your head. Malfoys aren’t exactly enamored of Ministry officials, especially those that work directly for Fudge. It’s a way to keep her safe, because if everyone thinks that she’s shagging me, they won’t dare bother her,” Draco, causing Ron’s face to become even more red, which by that point, Draco hadn’t thought was possible.
“I’m going to kill you!” he hollered.
“Didn’t you just hear what he said, Ron? It’s all a lie!” Harry said, desperate to calm his friend down.
“It’s a game we’ve been playing since we got here. The only thing going on between your sister and me is an agreement to keep up this charade until she changes the Bulgarian stipulations in the Act, and I get it signed. Nothing more than politics, Weasel,” Draco said. Ron stopped lunging for his throat as he digested that information. Slowly the red in his face receded and he seemed to become a rational human being once again.
“There’s nothing actually going on?” he asked, suspiciously.
“Nothing other than politics. We’re just using each other to reach our goals,” Draco lied flawlessly, knowing full well in the back of his mind that there was a lot more between him and Ginny than he wanted Ron to know.
* * * * *
After a refreshingly scalding shower, and changing into proper clothes, Ginny felt rejuvenated. The effects of the lack of sleep she’d been suffering for over a week seemed to have disappeared. As she brushed out her hair, she found herself humming softly – something that she hadn’t done in quite awhile. Smiling to herself as she realized how silly she was acting, she reached for her hair tie to bind her hair in the knot she always wore. Pausing for a moment, remembering the feeling of his fingers brushing through her loose hair, she decided to forgo the knot and allow her hair to fall nicely down her back.
She pulled a piece of parchment out of her suitcase – a copy of the Act that it was so important that Bulgaria signed. Flipping through the pages of it, she zeroed in on one of the stipulations that would affect Bulgaria the most, and circled in. On another piece of parchment, she scrawled out the changes that needed to be made, along with a quick note to Fudge explaining the changes, and a request for him to have a copy of the changed Act, already signed by him, sent to her, so she could secure the signature of Bulgaria’s Minister without delay. Sighing softly, she realized for the first time how handy it was for her to hold so much influence over Minister Fudge – he’d probably not even really notice the vital changes she had made, and sign the document without thinking, trusting his youngest diplomat do know what was important.
She reflected for a moment about how much she’d been changed in such a short time. Hardly a fortnight ago, she would have scoffed at the merest suggestion of changing the Act to make it more lenient on “dark magic” in Bulgaria. But know, she understood the differences between what “dark magic” and true Dark Magic, and many of the prejudices she’d had against anything different from what she’d been taught had faded away, now less important.
Shaking her head to clear those heavy thoughts away, she picked up the sealed envelope and headed off to find the Malfoy owls. After being pointed in five different directions by five different portraits, she finally found one, and sent it off with the letter. A giddy sort of excitement filled her, and she realized just how close she was coming to fulfilling a task that had taken up almost two years of her life: the successful adoption of the International Cooperation Act for the Removal of All Dark Arts was about to occur!
She figured that Draco was probably still being interrogated by Ron or Harry, so she headed to the library, a bounce in her steps borne of excitement and relief, as well as the promise of seeing Draco again. Banishing that last thought to the far reaches of her mind because she was far too unsure about exactly what on Earth the two of them were to each other, she couldn’t help smiling as she rounded the corner, and could hear his voice from the half-opened door.
“I’m going to tear you apart, Malfoy! Get off, Harry!” Ginny paused before entering the room, hearing her brother yell.
“Look, Weasel, use your head. Malfoys aren’t exactly enamored of Ministry officials, especially those that work directly for Fudge. It’s a way to keep her safe, because if everyone thinks that she’s shagging me, they won’t dare bother her,” the cool voice of Draco was saying. Ginny felt her smile disappear from her face as she took in his words.
“I’m going to kill you!” Ron yelled
“Didn’t you just hear what he said, Ron? It’s all a lie!” Harry was saying, always trying to control the famous Weasley temper.
“It’s a game we’ve been playing since we got here. The only thing going on between your sister and me is an agreement to keep up this charade until she changes the Bulgarian stipulations in the Act, and I get it signed. Nothing more than politics, Weasel,” Draco said. Ginny felt like she’d been punched in the stomach.
“There’s nothing actually going on?” she heard Ron ask, suspicion evident in his voice.
“Nothing other than politics. We’re just using each other to reach our goals.” These last words from Draco caused Ginny to flinch as though she’d been struck. The air seemed to grow stale, and she felt as though she was suffocating. Turning quickly from the door, she ran down the hall, desperate to put as much distance between herself and Draco Malfoy as possible.
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