The Serenity crew seemed to be getting along with Order members, even if they were somewhat confused by the purpose they would serve. Draco watched them at mealtimes and impromptu meetings, and there didn't seem to be a strange one amongst the bunch beside River. She kept by Ginny's side mostly, and the two were whispering between themselves. He couldn't get close enough to hear, and any spell would have been obvious.
Malfoys didn't stalk girls. They didn't have to... shouldn't have to.
Draco left the main hall angrily. This was ridiculous. The slip of a girl shouldn't have affected him this way. He was a Malfoy. He was better than this indecision. The corridors shifted as he walked through them, and he cursed himself for his stupidity. This was one more indignity that he didn't want to suffer.
He ran into Ginny. Literally.
She was standing beneath a window built into the magical hallway, charmed to let in light from some Equatorial place so it wouldn't seem so wintry and depressing in the base. The sunlight set her hair on fire, all the lit golden threads forming a halo around her pale face. Her eyes were wide and luminous, comfortable places he could have fallen into.
"Oh," she said faintly, her hands coming together in a nervous action. Draco watched her clench her fingers together.
"Where's your shadow?" Draco asked, and could have kicked himself for the rude tone he used.
"River's speaking with Pro–" She broke herself off with a faint embarrassed smile. "With Minerva McGonagall. She wanted to discuss some things."
"Where are you going?" Draco asked in a kinder tone.
"I was looking for my mum. Fleur wasn't feeling well..." She stopped herself and gave him another one of her faintly embarrassed smiles. Draco wished he could touch her, something to make her more at ease with herself around him again. When had he done this? When had he set her down this path? "I'm sure you don't want to hear it."
"I can go with you."
Her wide eyes were full of surprise. He could still throw her off kilter; he idly wondered if this was a good thing or not. "Sure. I was going to my room to write her a letter."
Ginny took Draco's proffered arm. His heart sang at the contact. All wasn't lost yet, then. There was still hope if he wanted to go that route.
"What happened exactly?" Draco found himself asking. "No one would tell me, and I couldn't ask anyone about it."
No, that would have been telling. By unspoken agreement, neither had spoken of the other during the entire awkward dance of looks and stolen kisses and longing. Ginny had kept it as a jealously guarded secret, something real she could hold onto when it seemed as though her world shifted around on its axis. It was emotion, it was feeling, it was living. It was more than she seemed to be doing before the war spiraled out of control.
"I was having those nightmares," Ginny murmured. "The ones I told you about..."
"No more bad dreams tonight, promise me," Draco responded automatically, glancing at her intensely. He could see the circles beneath her eyes, not dark yet. She had only recently stopped sleeping due to worry, then.
She smiled at him then, the same smile she used to give him before he had driven her away. His stomach dropped to his toes even as his heart caught in his throat. Merlin, she looked beautiful when she smiled at him like that.
"It was a while ago. I couldn't let the nightmares win. I had to do something, anything they'd allow me to do. I couldn't be locked up and not do something to help if I could. So I agreed to go to the future to find the information we needed to win now." Ginny shrugged helplessly. "But it didn't work that way. I went five hundred years in the future. If not for River... I would have died. I would have drowned. I didn't know... It's so different there. There's planets they live on, creatures at the edge of space that scare them. There's worries and problems and battles and war. Even the future isn't perfect and wonderful. Everyone here seems to think that it'll get better with time, but it's all the same even as it's different. Nothing changes, really, not how it counts."
Draco wanted to ask her what really counted, how things could stay the same even as everything changed. But he thought he could understand what she meant. She was an emotional creature, someone that felt instead of thought, someone who was guided by instinct as much as knowledge. It had attracted and repulsed him when they had first met after his defection from the Death Eaters. She was vibrant in a way no Death Eater ever was. She was different, but the strength of her beliefs was the same. She comforted even as she terrified. Draco suspected that he inspired the same kind of reaction in her.
She was smiling at him, the comfortable smile she used with River or her other friends. "I don't know what happened with the spell, but it doesn't matter. Magic didn't really survive well, but it doesn't matter. You know I used to be so afraid I was going to crumble without my family? I'm not going to make that mistake again."
"Why is it a mistake? I thought your devotion was to your family."
"It's not about them. It was never about them. I did just fine in the future once I let myself be myself. I was there for three weeks, running around with them. They were almost like a family, but they trusted that you'd do your own thing without mucking it up. You know, I couldn't do that here, not once. I had to check in with everyone. I can't go anywhere without letting people know. They're all afraid something will happen again."
Draco was only vaguely aware that something bad had happened to Ginny as a child, something involving dark magic that had scarred her. "So you're not afraid?"
"I can stand on my own two feet. I can make my own decisions. I don't have to be afraid of making a wrong choice or falling under someone's spell. I'm not as weak as they think I am." She smiled at him warmly. "Or you."
"What?" He blinked. "That... thing I said?"
She touched his face briefly. They were outside of her room now, and she would never invite him inside. "It's all right. I forgive you now."
Something vile and ugly sprang up inside of Draco. "Forgive me?"
"I'm not something to hide away and shelter, so I've forgiven you for that."
Draco pushed Ginny up against her door as she was opening it. They both tumbled inside, and Draco kicked the door shut. "You..." he sputtered, too angry to form thoughts. How could she be so calm when he was in such turmoil? How could she smile as if it had all meant nothing? How could her own friend think she had been in love with him if she could move on so quickly? He didn't mean anything at all to her, not if she was like this.
"You've never been at a loss for words before," Ginny said coolly, eyeing him strangely. "Whatever's the matter with you?"
For once in his life, he acted rather than thought first. He grasped her face in his hands and kissed her. It was like their last kiss, desperate and longing, hoping to convey all the emotions he couldn't name. He didn't know how to say what needed to be said, he didn't have the language for it that she did. He had to be controlled and masterful, and she undid all his reserves with a single glance. She didn't know it, couldn't have known it, but that didn't make it any less true. He had thought for hours on end before their last parting. He had known he was bad for her, that she deserved someone better.
Draco broke the kiss. Ginny was initially silent, eyes wide and curiously blank.
Panicked, Draco began to speak. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you cry. If you did, I mean. I tried to lie, I tried to make you run. I didn't want to be the one that was important. I'm sorry you know me at all. I'm sorry you've ever loved me. I know you deserve better. I can't be who you want me to be. I can't do this. I can't be worthy of your love, not the way you want. They will kill me if they see me again. I'm a dead man, Ginny, I can't be there for you. I want to be, but I can't, I can't. I'm sorry I started this. I'm sorry I hurt you. I'm sorry."
Ginny closed her eyes in relief and sagged against the wall. "Oh."
Draco pulled away from her. He was an idiot. He was a Stonehenge-sized idiot, an he would have to memory charm her to wipe the indignity away.
She grinned at him suddenly, and threw her arms around his shoulders. "You're barking mad, but I love you anyway."
He stilled within her embrace. "Haven't you hard a blasted thing I've said, you daft bint?"
She pressed her face against his neck, and he could feel her smile against his skin. Reluctantly, he put his arms around her as well. "I heard everything you didn't say, Draco. It's more important than what you did say, but that's important, too." She pressed a kiss against his neck, and Draco could feel himself settle into some kind of calm at her touch. "You love me, but you can't say it out loud. That's okay. As long as I know it, as long as there's something there to fight for, it's worth it. It'll work if we want it to."
Draco dropped his head so that his face was pressed into the crook of her neck as well. He had missed the scent of her. "I don't know if we should."
"It's worth saving," Ginny murmured. "Love is always worth saving."
"I don't know." Draco held her tightly, a fierce feeling threatening to burst through him. It felt almost like terror, but not quite.
"I do. I can know it for the both of us."
Draco breathed in deeply, and could almost believe it, too.
"What you propose, young lady, is dangerous and quite foolish."
River smiled at Minera McGonagall easily, hands around her warm mug of tea. She liked this woman. The prickly demeanor was laced with concern and caring, hope and love. She is the mother I should have had, she thought with a startling moment of clarity. The thought sobered her, and the smile faded.
"Nobody sees what's right before them. They see the shine and sparkle, they don't look up. They see only what they want to see. It's easy to hide in plain sight, it's easy to malign your own first impression to nefarious purpose." River thought of Jayne then, the startling depth he was capable of at times. He had even instructed her on such things during their shopping trip in Persephone nearly two weeks ago. River looked down at the tea cup. It was filled with fragrant jasmine at her request, which had caused McGonagall's eyebrow to hitch up splendidly. "It's easy to be a mask where there is nothing beneath it to hide."
Something in the older woman's gaze softened at the last comment. "You're still a child, whatever else you may believe about yourself."
River looked up with possibly the most haunted gaze McGonagall had ever seen. Even Harry's despair at Dumbledore's death paled in comparison. "They stripped me to bone and sinew, laid every secret bare and cut to their heart's content. They are the descendants of your Death Eaters, the dead risen up for another turn. There will always be Eaters of the Dead, those that fear death and revere it at once. There will always be darkness and light, yin and yang. Happiness can only be recognized in absence of misery and pain. There is always a duality to the universe, and there will always be balance. I was meant to upset that balance, to become a weapon of untold misery and destruction had they set me loose upon the 'verse."
"But you are not," McGonagall said, voice as crisp as ever. The accent washed over River, and she shut her eyes. Concern flowed through her, the maternal care she had never received before leaving for the Academy.
"I could have been," River murmured. "I would wish to serve a better purpose."
McGonagall sighed. "Miss Tam. I have been a teacher for many years. And while I have never had a child of my own, every child that came through Hogwarts' doors was my responsibility. So I was mother to thousands, after a sense. Do you really believe you are any different from any lost soul who had sought my help?"
River looked up, worry creasing her features. "Yes?"
"And you would be most incorrect. You're a girl," McGonagall said, voice softening. She patted River's hand gently. "A beautiful, talented, lost little girl. You're like my students. You come here searching for answers and find that there are none. You're cast adrift, searching for some kind of anchor. The best ones are those found within yourself. They stay the steadiest, the strongest. Everyone else's outside of you are so fleeting."
River caught a flash of stern gray eyes in a loving face framed by unruly red hair steering a boat in the Scottish Highlands. "Your father."
McGonagall withdrew her hand rather hastily, disconcerted. "Well, now, we're not here to discuss me, are we?"
"He loved you very much," River murmured. "There's an anchor. I don't have that."
"Nonsense. Whatever else they might have done to lead you to your predicament, hold fast to the idea that at one time, they held you in affection." River looked up, blinking in surprise. "No parent could refrain from loving their child, at least a little. Maybe they schooled themselves to not show it any longer. Maybe they knew what was to happen, maybe not. But as even you said, it's easiest not to see what you don't want to. They didn't want you to be in danger, so you weren't. It wasn't some outrageous thing. They wanted you to be safe, so you were. They wanted you to be content, so you were."
"They didn't see me."
"They didn't know you. Parents rarely do."
He didn't have magic, River realized. Her father was a Squib, and could see the potential. And he had the heart to let her go.
"But that is neither here nor there. Your plan, such as it is, is still foolish."
"But it will work," River insisted.
"I cannot allow this," McGonagall said, shaking her head firmly. "There's already been too many losses. Harry's field report stated clearly that there are three camps within easy distance of the castle. He's doing what he can, the dear boy, but there's really only so much he can do. He and his friends are very near the breaking point."
"I don't expect that we would walk away unscathed, with skin or soul intact. It is too much to wish for. But I have seen the field. I know what we can do. I have been observant and have weighted the evidences accordingly."
"I told you. A fool's errand. You don't know what their forces are capable of."
The skin of uncertainty fell from River. McGonagall was startled by the abrupt change in her demeanor. "I see the field. I see the principles. I know the hows and whys and happenstance, can see the statistics. I have seen the power they wield. They don't know of any other, and that will be their downfall, the same it was in my time."
"River..."
"He was human once. He is therefore subject to human weakness of will. He is afflicted with pride and vanity. He is now flesh and blood and bone, he can be tracked and hunted. He will rouse to the open if given sufficient bait. You have lacked a tactician of military caliber and dispassionate heart. Take the one with us. He led an army against impossible odds and survived to wield a bitter heart. His first officer is as equally skilled, concern shattered from her shell and left in pieces. Tools are to be used wisely, if used at all."
"Humans are not tools!" McGonagall shouted. "That's what I've been telling you."
"But he believes them to be." River's reply was soft, almost missed. "He tells his followers he isn't human, but he is still very human, however altered he may be. There is no meaning if he isn't human. There's no point to proving us all failures. He believes wizards and humans to be different species, but they are lost genes and sequences, difficult to replicate. He believes mortals are tools to manipulate and wield. He would show the world he isn't a mere mortal, he isn't someone to be pushed aside or ignored. He would achieve immortality and rule a world of his own making, where he is King and all conforms to his wishes." River looked up with a small smile. "Is this not an Alliance as we've dealt with?"
McGonagall sighed. "It's not that simple."
"The theory is the same. The tools, altered. But mechanics are mechanics and the structure flows by the same set of rules. They cut me in my time, formed a creature of untold skill. He would do the same with magic here. Form and function intertwine, and you cannot have one without the other." River paused. Jayne had said to keep things simple to communicate, and she had been trying so hard to do so. It seemed to be working, but it was so much effort. "We can help. It can work, because it plays to everyone's strengths and weaknesses. How better to topple a giant than to use his own weight against him?"
"We'll have to all meet, River. I still think there are flaws to your plan."
"Perhaps. But it is still solid."
McGonagall sipped her tea, a good strong English blend. "My dear, please remember you're still human, too."
River thought of the axe sliding through a Reaver's chest. She thought of the indeterminate hate and hunger coursing through them all. She thought of the paralyzing fear that had slid away at the thought of Simon or Kaylee in danger. Reavers took no prisoners. They showed no mercy, and dealt with damage, rage, mutilation and humiliation. There was no grace, no forgiveness, no rationalization, no bargaining. There was the wall between them, and there was no bridging it to find a middle ground. Us or Them.
"Every monster was, once," River murmured. "Especially me."
"Oh, hells no. In every possible language, no," Mal roared. The entire meeting room was stunned by the vehemence of his tone.
"We need a general to help direct us," McGonagall said evenly. She looked down the bridge of her nose as if he were an errant schoolboy. "You are definitely qualified."
"I lost enough already. We all did. And we didn't ask to get involved in no war, and this ain't our fight to fight." Mal's chin was stubbornly set in that way that Zoe recognized. It would take a minor miracle to change his mind.
"We have all lost enough. We've all lost more than anyone has any right to ask of us. And still we fight. We fight because we can't do anything else. We can't let them win, we can't let them think they're right when we know how fatally wrong they are. They seek to impose their will and their beliefs upon us and upon those without magic. They are vile, and think nothing of torture, starvation and manipulating the minds of those they consider weaker. People like you, Mr. Reynolds. Perhaps you are not from this time, but evils such as this are timeless. They are always wrong, and they must always be fought."
Mal turned to McGonagall. "Lady, you're good."
"I have to be, to keep us all alive," she said with a rueful smile. "But I'm not so good that I don't think we need help wherever we can get it. I'm asking you to help us. Not necessarily to fight with us, but to help us. Yours is a tactician's mind. As was recently pointed out, we have been sorely lacking in battle tactics. We need help."
The simple words worked better than lofty flattery. "Lemme see that map."
The small owl flew under cover of dark and made its way into the spelled camp. It flew until it found the intended recipient of the small letter attached to its leg.
The young man in question was thin from lack of food, but he ignored things like that easily. He knew how to deal with hunger. His companions grumbled often, but they weren't used to things like that. It was almost comical, the way they were amazed at how well he could function without magic. They sometimes forgot that he didn't grow up with such things, and that he didn't take it as much for granted as they did.
He had to fix things. Somehow the world he had come to love had come undone, and he was perpetually at the center of it. It wasn't anyone's fault, really, but it was still left up to him to save the Wizarding World. Those who sought to protect him suffered in the process, but these few currently with him refused to be pushed away. Truthfully, he was thankful for that, even as he sometimes resented it. His friends had thrown everything away to wander all through England on his quest, which had taken longer than anyone could have suspected. It had been a dangerous two years, and he could feel every one of his nerves hum with anticipation. The others didn't understand how he could function, how could stay on alert at all times. But they didn't realize the enormity of their sacrifice. They were vulnerable and could be used against him. They were all pawns in Voldemort's game, and he knew only too well how carelessly the self-styled Dark Lord threw away lives.
What aren't you telling me? We're supposed to help you, but keep pushing us to arm's length all the time. It's not helping, you know. We're in this to stay, all of us, Hermione had said with a firm nod. You can't stop us from helping you.
The owl flew off once Harry Potter retrieved Minerva McGonagall's message.
"Reinforcements have arrived. Will move in three days."
"What?" Ron sat up abruptly from where he had been trying to nap. He had only just found the camp a few hours before, narrowly missing a Death Eater attack. Still, it had been worth it to see for himself that Ginny was all right. "Move where?"
Harry crinkled the parchment that the spare note had been written on. They had previously decided on a code dependent on paper types as much as what the note said. Harry knew this kind of parchment well. The parchment was thick and not of particularly good quality. It was from a student's roll, hastily ripped off to begin writing an essay.
He smiled at Ron. "Hogwarts."
"What? But there's nothing left for them there. They've all but blasted it to the ground."
Harry shrugged. "There's enough left for something. McGonagall would never have us move there without a purpose."
"Luna's sure she knows where the last one is. If she can just figure out the riddles..."
"Let's go get Hermione, Neville and Luna. I know we're close, but we've got to act on this. We'll have to wait on finding that last horcrux. It's time we took back what's ours."
***
Leave a Review