He finds her sitting in the garden, a lonely waif amongst the overgrown blooms. Still larger are the weeds and Draco knows he should pull them away. He has long given up his life of privilege. The life of a wizard is something he only barely recalls.

“You shouldn’t have run away." He remembers not to touch her.

“I want to go home. There are people there who need me.” Draco looks at her dirty fingers and chapped lips.

“Yes,” he agrees, “ but you can’t leave yet.” He sees in her hand a dull greenish chain, for a moment he can’t breath.

“Let me see what you have.” Her eyes narrow; he can see she has turned vicious, but he isn’t bothered by it.

“You can’t have it, I found it. It’s mine.” For a moment he wants to rip it from her hands, but he has long forgone battling over the things that do not matter. Time with her is an endless drip, monotonous and slow, and it has gone on so long that it has begun to offer him comfort.

“I only want to look at it.” But she doesn’t relinquish it and the part of him he hates fills with relief. When he convinces her to come back to the house with him, she has forgotten the chain. He turns to the garden before they go in and sees a glimmer.

He doesn’t go back.

----------

He couldn’t remember a time more hopeless than now. Staying at the Weasleys, no home, no choice, nothing he can remember is as it was. He isn’t friends with them and he is no longer a threat and still he stays. He waits for things he cannot name, because there is nothing else to do.

“You didn’t have to run away.” Her grin is too wide and he can see a small gape in her teeth, but somehow he finds his dry lips turning up in the slightest.

“Too many Weasleys for you?” And he can see laughter in her eyes. He shrugs, because he can’t think of much else to do. There was a time when he could sneer or remark on her, or her family without a second thought. He feels out of his element, he can’t be nice without pretending to be different than who he is and if he sneers he’ll scare away the only thing that has become familiar. She sits besides him and stares into the sky. He doesn’t move or speak; he does the only thing he can.

He waits.

---------------------

“You can’t keep me here forever. I have to go. There are people who…” she pauses and runs her head, “ people…outside…they need me. I have to get to them.” Her eyes grow wide and tears brim.

Draco merely stands and watches. There is nothing he can do for her anymore.

-----------------------

“Some people don’t lie, Draco.”

"But most do. It isn’t even that they have to. Most people simply lie. Even about the most ridiculous things.”

"Not everyone."

--------------------------------

"I know,” she screeches and slams her hands on the table. “I’m not stupid.”

He reassures her that he understands. Draco has always understood her; he knows her better these days than he knows himself. In the beginning, when she threw fits, he would get tense, he found a need to coddle her, to prove that he would never let her down. He needed to prove that loving her was enough.

“I hate you.” She sways and knocks a glass off the table. Her face falls, she is left trembling.

“I didn’t mean it. Please, just, I didn’t mean to.” She drops to her knees and tries to pick up the pieces. He moves to help her.

“It’s okay, it can be fixed.” He pulls back her bloody hands, but she is frantic.

“No, NO!” She tries to free her hands.

His white shirt is stained.

“Hush, hush…Listen.” He pulls her hands away from the glass. “Listen, I’ll fix it. Look at what you’re doing; you're hurting yourself.”

“No,” she shakes and pulls and tries so hard to get free. “Some things that break can never be fixed.” She leans against him and sobs.

-------------------

“You just don’t trust people.”

“Why should I? Syltherins, Death Eaters, they aren‘t exactly the most trustworthy of people.”

“You’re in Slytherin.”

“Yes, but I’m still not trustworthy. Just because I’ve decided not to become a Death Eater, doesn’t mean I’ve stopped being Slytherin. Not all Slytherins are evil. Well, completely evil.”

-------------------

She sobs in ugly undignified ways, while he bandages her hands. When he’s finished he wipes her tears with his handkerchief and he notices the scar that reaches out beyond her hairline. It strikes him that this is the first time in years he’s really looked at her face. He knows that he saw it there before but he can’t remember anything about the way she is that isn’t from the past. He tries to recall the last time he saw her for what she is, but he can’t seem to see anything beyond the hopeless moments when he gave up.

When certain things break, like the human mind, there is nothing to be done but wait. As advanced as wizard medicine is, the mind remains the one thing that they are on equal terms with as the Muggles. She is fragile in a way he hasn’t thought of her since his second year.

He waits for her to come back, even when he wishes she would stay as she is. He can’t bare the thought of her seeing the home she loved; lay empty; cold and barren. Too quiet to be her beloved Burrow.

She lifts her hands to his face and whimpers about broken things. And he fears, he hopes she is right. Some things that break can never be fixed.

----------------

“I think we try and find something that reminds us of why we want to come back home. I’m not afraid to die. I’m afraid of coming back to changed to remember the world as it is.”

“The world as it is? When all things are falling apart? Why would you want to remember that?”

“As it is when all things mean something more because we may never see them again.”

Draco is struck by the sudden urge to kiss her, to steal a little piece of her and make the world a bit more beautiful.

The kiss is short and seems too far away, like a distant memory forming before it even happens. He tries to hold the moment, to keep it still so it won’t fall so quickly to dust.

---------------

Draco has long abandoned sleep. Since the days of war, when there was too much to fight, an overwhelming fear, anticipation of the battle that was yet to come. When he sleeps now, it is moments of time where he is caught in things he thought he could leave behind. Former friends, blood on his hands, a hated instinct to kill or be killed. He sweats and tosses, he fights the urge to throw up, and when he wakes, the truth is sleeping across the hall.

He was foolish to think that when the war ended, he could lie down and rest.

He came back to a place that reeks of death, a once robust place that has fallen to despair. Mangled boards and a loose cupboard door, are pictures he can’t forget. Like smoke streaming out of the attic, he could picture the redheaded swarms that once made the place alive. His place of refuge was turned into a graveyard and he hates that he had come to care enough to weep at all that had been lost.

If the Ministry of Magic hadn’t contacted him about her, he doesn’t know where he would have ended up. There are times he wishes she hadn’t made it through, that she hadn’t been found in the Deatheater camp. That he could have just wasted away. That all things that had been beautiful once had stayed the way he remembered.

His eyes are heavy and he’s too restless to keep up this pace. He hears her cry out during the night like somehow she can remember the way the world is beyond the house. He sits outside her door and listens and waits for an answer.

---------------------

“What are you doing? You’re getting your hands dirty.”

“Yes, I know but I want to bury something.”

“Bury, what? Wait no, why?” He truly doesn’t understand her. She is odd and bright and her ways make him uncomfortable.

“I read something in a muggle book once. About burying something precious, in every place you’ve been happy. So that when you’re old and gray you can dig it up and remember.” She places the chain of her necklace in the hole and covers it up. She smiles at him and he feels as though things might be changing for the better.

She leaned towards him and lets her lips rest warmly on his.

“You make me feel alive.” Barely a whisper in his ear, but he tells himself he will keep it fresh for as long as he can remember her face.

“But Ginny, what should I do if you are the place I am happy and the only precious thing I have left?” She touches his face but says nothing.

He holds her hand as they make their way back to the house. And for a moment hope seems to hang in the air.