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The red-haired girl walked through Hogsmeade, feeling strange in more ways than one. Firstly, she didn’t recognize any of the students in sight, which was odd considering she could have sworn she recognized nearly every face in Hogwarts. Secondly, the main street seemed different than when she had entered the musty old shop down the alley, though she couldn’t quite place how.
Deciding that she was best off going back to the Three Broomsticks to meet up with her brother, she took a right down the alleyway. She hadn’t gone very far when she took note of a figuring coming her way from the other side of the street. She stopped where she was in shock, and her mouth dropped open. She blinked her eyes, trying to erase the image from her sight, but it persisted. Rubbing her eyes didn’t work either. She knew she had to be imagining things, because she thought she saw Lucius Malfoy walking down the street. But that was impossible—he’d been locked in Azkaban for nearly three years now. Fear seized her. Maybe he had escaped!
Ginny, you dolt, she told herself. If he’d escaped from prison he wouldn’t be walking down the street in Hogsmeade in the middle of the day!
The man entered into the Three Broomsticks, and it only took a second before she rushed in after him.
Selecting a table near to where he sat, she waited for a few minutes until an unfamiliar boy about her own age came and embraced the man before sitting down. Out of the corner of her eye she saw that he had dark blonde hair and wore a Hufflepuff scarf around his neck. She frowned. Why would he be meeting with a student? What was he doing here in the first place? None of it mad sense. Ginny scrutinized the man surreptitiously. He looked very much like Lucius Malfoy, but now that she saw him closer she saw that his hair was much shorter—though he could have cut it, she reasoned—and that his chin was much more pointed than she remembered the older Malfoy’s having been. The more she looked at him, the more she thought she had been wrong.
At least up until the waitress came to his table.
“Hello, Mr. Malfoy. It’s a pleasure. What will you have?” The woman addressed him with a friendly tone. Vaguely Ginny wondered where Madam Rosmerta was.
“I’ll have pumpkin juice, please.” His tone was politely friendly back, and Ginny thought his voice wasn’t quite right either. Though, she admitted to herself, she’d never heard Lucius Malfoy ever speak to anyone in a genuinely polite tone, so that could explain it.
“And for the young sir?” the witch asked, directing the question to the boy. He put in his order for a butterbeer and Ginny tried not to gape. The scene was so incredibly odd that she thought she might just be feverish.
Something very odd was happening. Looking around the pub, she again noted that she didn’t recognize anyone in the entire room… until her glance settled into a corner where a bright shock of red hair stood out against the dark uniforms of the students congregated there. George! she thought with excitement, not stopping to think why her brother would be there as she rushed towards the table.
She stopped dead again about halfway there when she realized that the boy was much too young to be her brother. As she looked at him, she noticed that he looked an awful lot like her brother and that he had identical hair to the twins, but he couldn’t possibly be one of her relatives. Panic welled inside her and she felt tears pressing against her eyelids. It reminded her of a Muggle television show she had watched with her father where the protagonist had woken up in a world that was eerily similar to his own but where everything was different. But this was reality; she couldn’t possibly be stuck in a Twilight Zone.
“Oy, Weasley!” a voice shouted and her heart rose. She spun around, only to find that the unfamiliar boy who had shouted was looking over at the crowded table. Even worse, the boy she had mistaken for her brother rose up and greeted him.
It wasn’t possible. It just wasn’t. That boy couldn’t be a Weasley, just like the other couldn’t be a Malfoy. A powerful panic seized her, and she dashed out the door.
She found herself sitting on the bench in front of the post office—which she hadn’t remembered ever seeing there before—drying her tears with the cuff of her sleeve. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, willing calm. Determination seized her. This all had to have been some crazed figment of her imagination. She was going to go back to the Three Broomsticks and find Ron and everything would be normal again. This just wasn’t possible.
But before she had even stood up a voice sounded from next to her. She started and then stared.
“Hello,” said the boy. “Are you alright? You look lost.” It was the boy that had been sitting with the Lucius Malfoy-look alike. He was looking at her with friendly interest. Another girl she didn’t recognize at all was standing next to him.
“No, I’m not lost…I just…I don’t know, I need to get back to Gryffindor Tower and take a nap, I think,” she responded. That is what her mother would have told her to do, anyway. The other girl looked at her with a confused look, but said nothing.
The boy was scrutinizing her now, as though trying to place her. “You look familiar, but I could swear I’ve never seen you at Hogwarts before,” he said.
“Nor I,” put in the other girl. “Are you a new student?” Ginny shook her head adamantly.
“No, I’ve been at Hogwarts for the last six years now.” The girl exchanged an odd look with the boy, and then they looked back at her.
“That’s impossible,” said the girl with a curious accent. “We would have seen you before now. I’m a Gryffindor sixth year, and I’ve never met you.”
It felt like a heavy weight had settled down on her making it impossible to see or hear. She was going mad. They were going to ship her off to St. Mungo’s like Gilderoy Lockhart.
“What is happening to me?” she cried out before thinking. “Where’s Ron? Hermione was supposed to meet me too! And how come there’s a boy that looks like George and who’s a Weasley but I’ve never met him?”
“Are you talking about Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger?” the dark-haired girl asked, but Ginny wasn’t paying any attention. She put her head in her hands.
“And I could have sworn that you were just sitting with Lucius Malfoy, but that’s impossible too.”
“It certainly is impossible, seeing as he died sixteen years ago,” put in another voice, and Ginny jumped up from her seat, looking into the face of the older Malfoy-who-wasn’t-Lucius. He held the Hufflepuff scarf in his hand. “I’m afraid you’re confusing me with my father,” he said with aplomb. She looked at him with wide eyes.
“Then you’re…Draco?” she asked faintly. The man only nodded. He was giving her a penetrating gaze, as though he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. Ginny resisted the urge to laugh. She had to be dreaming or hallucinating or anything but this couldn’t be real.
“And you are…?”
“Ginny Weasley,” she responded before thinking. The man’s eyebrows raised and he went slightly pale. The three other people just looked at her blankly for a moment.
“I’m afraid that’s also impossible,” said the other girl after a heavy pause. “Because she also died sixteen years ago.”
“No!” she shouted. “You’re all lying! I’m Ginny Weasley! I am a sixth year student at Hogwarts, and I play chaser for the house team, and…and…” They were still all looking at her as though she was some kind of lunatic, and she was getting frustrated.
“Look, I don’t understand what’s going on more than you, but I swear that’s who I am, please believe me!” She looked at them desperately, and the man claiming to be Draco Malfoy shifted his weight uneasily.
“Can you prove it?” he asked her in a calm voice. “If you really are Ginny Weasley then there are some things that you would know that no one else would. Tell us.”
She sighed; her mind running on overdrive. “Like what?” she asked with frustration. He thought for a moment, rubbing his chin slowly.
“What curse did you use against me in Professor Umbridge’s office?” he asked at last, and Ginny laughed.
“I’ve never cursed you in my entire life! I’ve never even met you!” she cried, feeling tears well up again. The man sighed.
“Alright then, what curse did you use against Draco Malfoy in Umbridge’s office?”
She looked at him as though she thought he was playing a joke on her, but responded, “The Bat-Bogey Hex.”
“She’s right,” he responded.
“But everyone knows that!” He sighed, thinking again. He looked at her steadily for a moment before saying anything.
“What year are you?” he asked.
“It’s fall of my sixth year,” she responded, growing even more frustrated. Whatever this dream was, she wanted to wake up from it. His grey eyes were staring at her in a disconcerting way. The eyes themselves reminded her very much of those of Draco Malfoy, although they were looking at her in a way that she had never seen before. He was feeling many turbulent emotions, all related to the past. Most of them were directed at her; there was pain there, lots of pain. Blinking, she snapped out of her trance-like state. He had been saying something, but the words died on his lips and he looked at her curiously.
“You were reading me, weren’t you?” he asked faintly. Her eyes grew wide and her fists balled. No one was meant to know about her gift. How was it that he had guessed what she was doing? Maybe he hadn’t; maybe he was talking about something else entirely, her panicked mind thought. He turned to the two students, handing the boy the Hufflepuff scarf. “I think you two had better get back up to the castle.” He turned to the other girl. “Esperanza, would you be as kind as to ask your head of house to meet me at my home here in Hogsmeade?”
“But I want to know what is going on, you can’t just tell us to leave now!” the boy cried. Draco lanced him a commanding glare, and he sighed with frustration. “Right, the Malfoy glare. Will you at least tell me what this is all about later?”
“I’ll speak with you later, don’t doubt that,” the man replied, and Ginny thought the way he spoke to the other boy was a bit odd. With last curious looks, the two headed off quickly in the direction of the Hogwarts Castle. Ginny felt panic well up, and thought she might be sick. She was now alone with an adult Draco Malfoy, and he seemed to know things about her that he shouldn’t.
“Listen, Malfoy, I don’t know what’s going on but I’d appreciate it if you told me how you know about my gift,” she spat out, as though it was a sixteen year old Draco standing in front of her. His mouth twisted in a slight smirk which she recognized well.
“I know you’re confused, and I’ll admit that I am too. But you’re smart enough to realize that I can’t tell you anything about your future.” He sat down heavily on the bench, looking at his shoes. Ginny battled between running away and her curiosity about his behavior. In the end, curiosity won out.
“So how old are you now?” she asked. He looked up at her startled, as though he had forgotten she was there. The smirk laced his lips again.
“I’m not going to tell you that, Ginny. It doesn’t do to have one know when they’re going to die.” He watched as a solemn look crossed her face.
“I’m going to die young,” she responded, testing out the thought for herself. She looked disturbed by the idea. After a moment of heavy silence, she plopped down on the bench next to him. “Was it the war?” she asked. He said nothing. “It was.”
He closed his eyes as though to block out her words. She was reading him like a book even at this age, and he had to stop her.
“You should know better than to steal the answers like that. My Occlumancy skills have long been unused, and I can’t keep you out.” He leaned back against the bench, looking at her oddly. “Not that I ever could.”
She felt that pain again, and wondered what it meant. There was a boiling pit of anger and the need for secrecy was surfacing ever stronger within him. Though he’d said he was out of practice, he certainly was making it work for her to read him. She prodded at a grey area with her mind, and when it suddenly gave way she wasn’t prepared for what she found. Her hands flew to her mouth as the images flashed by.
A Draco older than the one she knew facing down his father in a battle that raged furiously across a gilded entrance hall… the end of a Quidditch match, Gryffindor versus Slytherin, and a frustrated Draco watching her walk off with her brother and Harry… black-robed figures in the semi-darkness but a shock of red hair standing out… blood dripping from pale skin… pain unimaginable tearing through his body… Harry refusing to help him, Ron looking murderous… a rush of complete release and the smell of peach shampoo… the taste and feel of soft skin and smooth sheets; a hot pleasure and a cool touch…
Ginny blinked repeatedly, tears standing out on her lashes. It had been the last, strongest image that had jolted her back to reality, such as it was:
A woman lay on a wooden floor with her arms splayed out, something round and smooth gripped in her left hand. She was wearing a cotton dress with her long red hair fanned out around her. A bright trickle of fresh blood, the only colour besides her hair, made its way from her mouth to her chin and a man was hunched over her. “I didn’t mean it,” Ron cried as though his soul was being torn from him. “I didn’t mean it Ginny, please come back.”
With a rasp she sucked in a long overdue breath. Draco was looking at his shoes again. “I told you it was a bad idea to prod into my thoughts,” he said a voice edged with a note of panic. He looked towards her tentatively. “What did you see?” His voice was gentle and it was the impetus she needed to jump up from the bench.
“You cared about me,” she accused. He just looked at her. She knew he was trying to blank out his mind. “Why, Malfoy, what happened?” He stood, reaching out a hand.
“Look, you need to come with me so that we can sort this out.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you!” she cried, turning and running as hard as she could.
She didn’t even know where she was running until she burst into the shop she had last been in. Taking refuge in one of the back aisles full of junk and old musty books, she sank to the ground, sobs racking her. When no more tears would come and she realized that she had not been followed, she stood. There was nothing left to do but to go back out and face what was happening to her, no matter if it meant she had to trust Draco Malfoy.
She exited the shop in rush, and walked straight into Hermione.
“There you are,” cried the seventeen-year-old. “We’ve been looking all over for you!”
“As though she’s hard to find,” drawled a haughty voice from behind them, and they spun around. “Bloody Weasleys stand out a mile away. It’s the hair. But I must say, it’s a sight better than yours, Mudblood.” Draco Malfoy, flanked by Crabbe and Goyle, was scarcely a few steps away, and although Hermione went red with fury, Ginny just laughed. Then she did something that no one expected, which probably explained why she got away with it.
She stepped forward and kissed him on the cheek. Winking at him, she spun around, grabbed Hermione by the arm, and marched off.
The door to the shop slammed in Draco’s face just after the out-of-place Ginny Weasley. He entered right after her, only to be confounded. The shop owner swore no one fitting Ginny’s description had been in the store all day, and that the only other exit to the building was locked and the key in his pocket. He spent the rest of the afternoon looking, but found absolutely no trace of the girl.
Silent tears rolled down her cheeks as she lay safely in her bed in Gryffindor Tower. Sleep wouldn’t come. The image of a prone figure in a black, white, and red nightmare was graven into her memory. Yet even more powerful than the sight of her own dead body was the knowledge that sometime in the future, Draco Malfoy would be witness to this scene and feel that the world was crashing down around him.
The End.
Lyndsie is the author of 10 other stories.
This story is a favorite of 3 members. Members who liked Troop of Echoes also liked 253 other stories.
This story is a favorite of 3 members. Members who liked Troop of Echoes also liked 253 other stories.
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