Into his study of imagination,
And every lovely organ of her life,
Shall come apparell’d in more precious habit,
More moving-delicate and full of life
Into the eye and prospect of his soul.
-- William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
“Have you ever been on a flying carpet?”
“Pardon me?”
Ginny Weasley looks up from her strange Indian breakfast—chapati bread, vegetable curry, and some sweet-tasting diamond-shaped things called kaju burfi—and glances at Adriana Wilcox, forehead creased in confusion and surprise.
“I said,” says Adriana with a laugh, “have you ever been on a flying carpet?”
“No,” says Ginny, wide-eyed. “I thought those were illegal!”
Adriana laughs again, and Ginny feels grateful for the younger girl’s presence at the otherwise empty breakfast table. Regina and Alistair Wilcox are attending to business regarding the estate, and Draco, as soon as he saw Ginny’s face at the table, returned to his room and refused to come out.
Adriana has been nothing but sweet, however, and this mention of flying carpets intrigues Ginny, who has not been in the air, on broomstick or otherwise, in a very long time.
“They certainly aren’t here!” Adriana assures her. “We have six of our own, in varying sizes. Would you like to take a ride with me? I can show you the entire estate from the air.”
Ginny smiles broadly, and nods in agreement. “Absolutely!” she says, pushing the practically untouched plate of foreign food away from her. “Let’s go at once!”
Adriana eyes Ginny’s uneaten plate and makes a mental note to coax the house-elves into cooking some proper English food. Draco, when he first arrived, had had no trouble adjusting to Indian cuisine—but he was a boy of seventeen, and Adriana, remembering her brother Roderick, knows that boys that age—or, really, men of any age—will eat whatever is put in front of them, strange to their taste or not.
Adriana leads Ginny to her bedroom, which Ginny cannot help but admire. The ceilings are high, the furniture decorated in soft lavenders and pale pinks, and there is a small piano in the corner, as though Adriana cannot bear to leave the presence of the instrument even during sleep.
Adriana walks briskly past the piano this time, however, and heads straight to the wardrobe. She helps Ginny pick out clothes appropriate for flying—robes, she says, would never do, and neither would the dresses Adriana usually wears. She explains to Ginny that Muggles who live in Calcutta, the nearest city, have mostly adapted to Western styles of clothing, but Indian witches and wizards stick strictly to traditional dress, and therefore the Wilcoxes try to do so as well, when in public, so as not to seem entirely like outsiders.
Ginny nods and slips into loose pants apparently called salwars, which Adriana hands to her casually as she pulls out a pair for herself. Ginny then pulls the tunic-like kameez over her head. She tightens the drawstring on the bottoms, and looks down at the teal-and-white striped fabric, feeling very far from home and her mother’s Weasley sweaters. These clothes are designed for heat and easy movement; she feels as though she could safely turn cartwheels dressed like this, something she’d never attempt in robes.
Then the two young women troop down to the closet where the flying carpets are kept. Adriana eyes the neatly rolled rugs, and then selects one of medium size. She and Ginny drag it outside the house onto the expansive lawn, unroll it, and then Adriana sits herself in the middle, crossing her legs neatly.
Ginny eyes the carpet warily, but Adriana smiles and pats the spot beside her.
“Don’t be afraid—it’s no harder than flying a broomstick, according to Draco!” she assures her new friend, and Ginny hesitantly sits down, ready for the carpet to rear up and fling her off at any second.
“What do you hold on to?” asks Ginny, bewildered.
“You don’t,” says Adriana. “You use your sense of balance.” She smiles again, and then, before Ginny is even remotely prepared to go shooting off in the sky, asks, “Are you ready?”
“Not really,” Ginny begins to say, but Adriana has already clapped her hands three times, and the carpet lifts itself into the air, going higher and higher, the tassels blowing in the wind.
Ginny expected the carpet to behave like a broomstick—traveling at extreme speeds, making sharp turns and even flipping over—only without a person manning the controls, so to speak. Instead, the ride turns out to be far more relaxing than she expected. The carpet glides smoothly through the air, lazily dipping and swaying on the breeze. When Adriana points out the sugarcane fields, her and Draco’s favorite banyan tree, the Damodar river, the way the house looks from above—like a wedding cake, Ginny decides, causing Adriana to giggle pointedly—the carpet flies towards whatever Adriana is indicating as smoothly as butter.
They are in the sky for hours, but Ginny hardly speaks. Adriana, shy with almost everyone she meets, senses in Ginny a friend, and chatters for the entirety of their journey through the sky.
She talks of the tutors she had until this past year, when she came of age, because she, unlike Roderick, had not wanted to go away to school, and how she regrets it, sometimes, because she never made many friends. She devotes an entire hour to the piano, to Mozart, Bach, Chopin and the great wizarding composer Edwina Vertude. Without even realizing it, Adriana slips into a long monologue on her cousin.
Ginny sits beside the young woman and listens to her descriptions of Draco Malfoy, to stories of their escapades in the marketplaces, of the duets they play together, of that time they snuck into Calcutta at night, using a flying carpet, and were almost spotted by Muggles.
“It was the most terrifying night of my entire life!” Adriana giggles, before she interrupts her story to show Ginny where their estate ends and the village begins—the marketplace is crowded, and Ginny is captivated by the sights and sounds of life bustling on below them.
“But luckily Draco can Apparate,” Adriana continues, “so he just scooped up the carpet, grabbed me, and whisked us back home at once. It was the first time I ever Apparated—very unpleasant, but at least the Muggles didn’t catch us!”
“Has he changed a lot since he first arrived?” asks Ginny, thoughtfully, brushing her fingers across the carpet, back and forth, watching the fine little hairs go from light to dark depending on the direction she pushes them.
“He used to be very sullen,” Adriana admits. “When he first came to live with us, he hardly spoke two words. He was the skinniest boy I ever saw, and his eyes were practically hollow. He looked as though he’d been tortured for a year.”
“He had been,” notes Ginny softly, but Adriana doesn’t hear her over the roar of the wind around them.
“Pardon?”
“Never mind,” says Ginny.
Adriana shrugs, and then spots her parents walking up the path to the house, and suggests they end their ride.
“All right,” agrees Ginny, and Adriana flashes her an endearing smile and claps her hands three times again. The carpet drops slowly towards the ground, and when the girls step off, it shakes off the dust and then rolls itself back up as neatly as before.
From his bedroom window, Draco watches Adriana and Ginny carry the carpet back inside, smiling and chattering. He is boiling with anger at the sight of his favorite cousin laughing so easily with that Muggle-loving Weasley; the smile on her face is one usually only he can coax out of her.
He glowers at Ginny Weasley’s redheaded figure. She is striking in her Indian ensemble, the blue going well with her hair, but there is no denying that she is a Weasley through and through—if Draco squints and peers hard enough, he can practically see the freckles marring her pale skin.
He cannot understand why he still harbors this hatred for her and her family. He has let go of almost everything from his past—let go of his need to please his father, his need to prove himself, his need to have his mother’s love as armor against the world. He has forgotten his friends, and forgotten his enemies.
All except Potter.
Draco cannot forget Potter. He runs a thumb across the scar that winds down the side of his face, and realizes that he was wrong in thinking his hatred for Potter had left him. It thumps in his veins like a poison; the thought of those green eyes and that black hair, that skinny, lithe frame not unlike Draco’s own, at the time—they bring out a rage in him he no longer realized he possessed.
It had died down, over the past five years. He had been able to tuck Potter and his friends into a shadowy corner of his mind and live life to the fullest here in India, embracing a land of sun and warmth and colors of every shade and hue.
But the arrival of Ginny Weasley, with hair the red-orange of an Indian sunset and a face so vividly attached to Draco’s memories of Potter, has brought the full force of his hatred for The Boy Who Lived back to life.
He watches his cousin lead Ginny into the house, and can hear their laughter downstairs, once they enter. He winces at the sound of Ginny’s voice, as she talks animatedly with Regina Wilcox. It is so similar to her brother’s—the same inflections, the same accent, the same slurring of don’t know into dunno and suppose into s’pose, only with a girlish tinge that removes the sense of stupidity the phrases bore when Ron used them.
He collapses onto the bed, arms spread wide, legs draping off the side, and stares at the ceiling. He has the cracks in the paint memorized from years before, when he was unable to sleep at night, and instead learned the map of his own personal sky. That winding crack just there, the large splotch chipped off in the far corner, the spot where a spell must have gone wrong and left that oddly-shaped blue-green mark…
He barely notices when the black-feathered owl makes its third appearance, fluttering through the open window and dropping the letter it bears onto Draco’s chest, then perching on the windowsill.
It wants a response.
Draco sits up with a groan, the springs of the bed joining him as he shifts his weight, and breaks the seal hastily. It is from his mother; she will tell him that he is to send Ginny home as soon as possible, that she wasn’t thinking prudently, that of course he cannot be expected to marry this woman of inferior birth—
But the handwriting is not his mother’s. It is in a cramped, old-fashioned script, with elaborate capitals and scribbled lowercase letters.
Draco’s eyes widen as he begins to read. The letter is a whole front and back of a two-foot scroll of parchment, and the writing is minute. His head begins to ache from reading so carefully almost as soon as he begins.
You are a fool, wrote Arwydd Morcant. You have for your taking a woman of courage and determination, of wit and intelligence, not to mention beauty—the one we believe the perfect match for you. Do you doubt our talents, young man? For months we labored over your marriage—we worked well into the night, exhausting ourselves over your future and the future of the Malfoy line, though all you families are alike to us.
Do not underestimate Ginevra Weasley—her talents, her intelligence, or her worth. She was willing to give you a chance, and you threw it at her feet.
As Draco reads on, he can practically hear the creaky voice of the wisewoman. He feels shame creep up on him, the hairs on his neck tingling with humiliation, but the scathing remarks Arwydd makes about his intelligence, his ambitions (or lack thereof) and his accomplishments (similarly belittled) anger him.
Would that I could tell you exactly what we saw ahead in your threads! But we do not reveal the future to anyone, no matter the circumstances. You, young man, must learn to trust. You must learn to trust our judgment, our talents and our wisdom—and to trust the girl we sent to you!
These last few lines frustrate Draco to the core, and he crumples the parchment in anger, flinging it out the window and onto the lawn below.
He will have to marry her. He sees this, now.
Draco leaves the room, slamming the door behind him with a bang to rival any thunderclap, and descends for dinner, glowering, his fringe flapping in front of his eyes. When the black owl follows him, pecking at his head for a response, he swats it away until it finally abandons its cause and flies away.
At dinner he sits opposite Ginny again, but tonight she is not silent—she instead tells Regina and Adriana—and even Alistair!—stories of her childhood at the Burrow. She recounts playing Quidditch with her brothers, hide-and-seek in Hogwarts castle over Christmas holidays, of the time she visited Charlie in Romania and saw hundreds of dragons, including a little baby one that could only snort steam through its nostrils.
She has Adriana in stitches when she talks about Harry, Ron and Hermione. She describes Ron’s horrid dress robes at the Yule Ball her third year, and Hermione’s belief that the library held the answers to everything. She even manages to tell about her little nieces and nephews, though Draco notices she has to swallow hard when she talks of her brother Bill’s son, Alexander. He must be the one who was killed, Draco thinks, and he is surprised by the wave of nausea that follows that thought. His father’s friends—his father, even—could have been responsible for that little death, and he feels sick at the thought. Who could murder a little boy? Draco knows he never could.
He shakes his head to clear it, and raises his eyes from his plate, to see Ginny looking at him from the other side of the table. Caught staring, she turns a violent crimson and ducks her head, seizing her bottom lip between her teeth and then hurriedly shoveling mashed potatoes into her mouth.
Intrigued, Draco cannot help but watch her as well. She refuses to look his way, now, her cheeks still very red, and Draco uses the opportunity to look her over as objectively as he can. Disregarding that she is a Weasley, he can appreciate her good looks. If he was partial to red hair, he’d have loved her from the moment he met her—her shoulder-length locks are a beautiful hue, not a bland strawberry blonde nor a common, ordinary orange, but fully red, with hints of gold and copper highlights when she turns her head.
Her eyes, he notes, are large for her face, and framed by long lashes that appear to curl upwards on their own—though he was never adept at detecting beauty charms. Her freckles are a mere sprinkling across nose and cheekbones (though she has enough on her shoulders and arms to muster a small army) and she has a lovely mouth, with dimples at the corners of her lips that appear when she laughs or smiles.
He’s watching me, Ginny thinks, as she eats another forkful of the ordinary English food Adriana managed to procure for dinner tonight. She blushes at the thought, and continues to gaze at him from beneath her lashes—a trick she learned and mastered from years of watching Harry from only across the kitchen table at the Burrow, or the Gryffindor table at school.
She finds herself looking him over as carefully as he appears to be analyzing her. She had noticed—objectively, of course—when she first arrived, that he had turned into a handsome man. As a boy he’d been underfed and too pale, with skinny limbs and a pointy face. As a man who blossomed under the Indian sun, he is tan and his hair has grown out of the ugly schoolboy style he sported years ago to a longer length. It falls in straight lines, and she can see it would be soft and fine to the touch—nothing like Harry’s thick, tangled mane—and he has a fringe that falls in his eyes in a surprisingly becoming way, though she is almost certain he must keep it that way out of laziness. He does not seem to have retained his boyhood vanity.
His eyes have not changed though—they are still the same grey as a Scottish sky before a storm, almond-shaped, and his eyebrows are so pale she would never have noticed them were they not oddly thick for a man with such delicate features. His shoulders are broad, his hands large, with long, tapering fingers she knows from Adriana that he puts to good use at the piano—he has a ten-key span, Adriana told her, with admiration and some jealousy in her voice. His cheekbones are high, his lips thin but aristocratic, and he has a nose she would pay Galleons for—small, slightly pointed and upturned—a little boy’s adorable nose in the middle of a man’s face.
At the other end of the table, Adriana Wilcox and her parents look on as Draco and Ginny sneak glances at each other, appraising each other’s worth. Regina nods in maternal approval, Alistair’s eyes twinkle, and Adriana sighs a delicate, happy, little sigh that draws the attention of everyone at the table, as their heads all swivel in her direction.
“What is it?” Draco asks—his first words since he sat down at the table.
“Nothing,” says Adriana simply, and she smiles.
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