“You’re quite certain?” Luna asked, peering at her friend from across the room.

Ginny nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Her face was tear-stained and dirty from walking along the streets. Her dress lay on the floor where she had taken it off, and she was now curled up under the blankets in her most comfortable pajamas.

Luna crossed the room and sat down at Ginny’s bed. She rubbed the other woman’s back, looking down at her with concern. “If you really want to stay longer, I can stay with you.”

Ginny shook her head against the pillow. “No,” she whispered, her throat burning with tears. “No, you have your wedding to plan.”

Luna nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. But that could always wait.”

Ginny shook her head. “You go home. I have some things to take care of here.”

Luna rubbed her back again, and Ginny smiled. “What did Kael say?”

Luna laughed lightly, her eyes lighting up beautifully. “His note said that I just had to come home right away, and he couldn’t spend another three days without me. Silly bugger. I expect a Dorffule Snauz has gotten a hold of his heart. Or perhaps he really does miss me.”

Ginny laughed. “I bet it’s the latter.”

Luna beamed at her. “I hope so.”

Ginny lay awake under the covers for a long time, peering out of them like an animal in a burrow. She tried to clear her mind of all thoughts and simply watch Luna pack up the few things she had bothered to unpack, but her mind kept turning back to Draco.

What was Draco doing in Prague? What were the chances that they both would have ended up here of all places? It was one thing to catch a glimpse of him on Platform 9¾, but this was almost unfair in its bizarreness.

Tears trickled with agonizing slowness down her cheeks and into the sweet-smelling blankets, and Ginny squeezed them shut. Her mind whirred violently, refusing to stop at a single thought. She saw flashes of them in Paris pasted over the image of him drowning his sorrows in a bottle at The Dragon. She hated to see him that way: cold and bitter and malicious, as if she herself had turned him back to his Hogwarts persona.

She thought of his eyes, cold and gray, shocked into blank staring. Why had she told him? Her entire soul had ached and throbbed to tell him, to make him understand. But he flattened her with that unreadable stare, and her heart, unable to bear another second of it, forced her to run away. Her soul would just have to suffer.

She thought of Lily, and understood with complete agony why she had latched on to the girl so tightly in the past ten years. Lily was her extension of Draco. Lily was how she had gotten through it. Those perfect, flawless days of Paris had been captured and packaged into her daughter, her Lily flower.

The softly fluttering hand of her friend was upon Ginny’s back once more, and she shivered slightly at the touch. She blinked to clear her eyes of the salty tears.

“Ginny,” Luna crooned softly. “I just thought you might like to know…the aura that Draco Malfoy radiates…it’s the same as your daughter’s.”

Ginny’s heart lurched again. She nodded into the pillow.

Luna hummed softly. “I thought so.” She paused. “He was giving off something else very powerful, but it was too overwhelming for me to touch. It was too big and intimate for me to discern it. Do you know what it might be?”

Ginny shook her head beneath her shelter of warmth.

“No, I thought not,” Luna said. She hummed for a little while more, and then bent down and kissed Ginny’s temple. “For courage, my friend.”

Ginny had told Luna that she had things to take care of, but she really didn’t know what they might be. Despite her heart’s abandon of The Dragon the previous evening, her soul was still churning with unbelievable strength.

It almost seemed to her as though some indisputable force had drawn her to Prague, and whatever it was she was meant to discover was still hidden somewhere in the beautiful, aged city.

Since that fated month in Paris, Ginny had ceased to like fall. The golden leaves and spicy smells had once added up to her favorite season, but Ginny had cringed each previous autumn. Just thinking about Paris made her die a little bit inside.

But as she strolled down the winding streets of Prague and breathed in the crisp air, Ginny felt her love of the season blossoming back inside her. Her mind flashed to those days in Paris, rolling around in the leaves, and fresh tears pricked her eyes.

She remembered, with a fresh wave of realization washing over her, the day Lily was born. She had looked down at the baby put into her arms. The fine tufts of hair had been so translucent a shade of red that they had almost looked blonde, and those eyes had opened and fixed such a breathtaking look upon their mother.

Ginny remembered staring back down at her daughter’s eyes in wonder, because they took her in with a look of such complete understanding that she doubted for an incoherent moment that she was looking into the face of a newborn.

She had handed her newborn daughter to Harry, and he had looked at her with a joy short of Ginny’s marveling. Ginny hadn’t been able to understand it.

With an ironic sense of bitterness, Ginny remembered Apparating back to England under the assumption that she was taking a child back to its father, when in reality she was taking the child away from her father.

How could she have never noticed how similar Lily was to Draco? Now that she knew, she realized another resemblance between them each second. She finally understood the nagging feeling that Harry had never been as close to Lily as he had been to the boys. She had often pegged it to the fact that Lily was a girl, but she could still fly and joke as well as either of her brothers. What if Lily had noticed it too? What if she had denied Lily the love of a true father?

A lone tear escaped and began to slide down her cheek, but Ginny wiped it away impatiently.

Why? Why am I here? What good could come from it? She cursed the hand of fate that had delivered Draco Malfoy back into her life.

What would become of her once Lily went to Hogwarts? The thought had crossed her mind on more than one occasion, but it frightened her so much that she pushed it out the way it came. But here, staring down a fork in the road and unsure where either one led, Ginny was forced to consider the reality.

What is the fork? What are my two choices? There weren’t black and white options here. There weren’t clear-cut sides, good versus evil. How could she make a decision?

If she stayed – which didn’t even seem like an option to her – she would be leaving behind her family and the life that she had settled into for nearly twenty years. She wasn’t the girl she had been ten years ago. She wasn’t reckless and carefree and in love. Ginny’s spinning mind paused briefly at the thought. Love? But then, she couldn’t have been in love ten years ago. She came to a stop in her stride as the word plagued her. Love. That had never been the way she thought of it.

Shaking her head, Ginny started walking again. Love. She had never said such a thing.

As her gait picked up speed again, her mind returned to its humming track. But if she returned, and Lily went off to Hogwarts, and she and Harry continued living like strangers under the same roof and in the same bed, could her heart and soul survive it?

At what cost would she pursue happiness? And where did it truly lie?

The sun had finally sunk behind the high-reaching buildings, and for the first time in ten years, Ginny turned off her swirling, melancholic thoughts and let her heart carry her feet where they may go.

It was far too late to be out when she finally found the place. The doors were shut, but not locked, and only the upstairs lights were on. Her heart was in her throat as her fingers grasped the handle of the door, but she didn’t pull it open immediately.

Thoughts raced in her head unheeded. She had disconnected that part of her brain. She didn’t know what she hoped to gain from approaching The Dragon again, but the doubting half of her brain wasn’t going to have a say in the matter. It had once before ruined her shot at happiness.

What had Luna said? For courage, my friend. Yes. She would have courage.

With a trembling hand she pulled at the door. The air inside the bar was heavier than the crisp night breeze. She inhaled, letting the weighted air settle in her chest before pushing through it toward the staircase and beginning what felt like a very long climb.

The door at the top of the stairs was ajar, and before she could stop herself she reached out a hand and pushed it open.

He sat at the desk, staring down at something with tears in his eyes. She felt her own tears rush in with the force of a flood as he looked up at her standing in the doorway. She shifted her gaze to the parchment on the desk, which she recognized even through her tears as the painting from by the river in Paris. A sob slipped from her lips, strangled by the courage she tried to hold in her heart.

He stood up from the chair at the sound of her cries, and she couldn’t stop herself from rushing across the room and burying her face in his chest. He wrapped his arms around her, tucked his head into her neck and held her. She pulled herself closer to him and breathed in, crying like she hadn’t since that last day in Paris.

He kissed her temple and shushed her softly, almost carrying her over to the bed and sitting her down. She pulled back and looked at his face, slightly more lined than the last occasion she had taken the time to drink it in, and more reserved for certain, but still the same Draco Malfoy that she needed like the air she breathed.

She leaned forward and kissed him, tasting the salt of his tears across his lips. He melted into her, drawing her dizzyingly close and moaning in the back of his throat. When she reached for the top button of his shirt, he made no move to stop her.

It was as they lay together on his bed afterwards that they spoke for the first time. He was brushing hair back from her face when he whispered in her ear, “What’s she like?”

Ginny didn’t have to ask whom he was inquiring about. “She’s just like you. I just took so long to see it. She has your smirk and your eyes and your whole demeanor. She’s been my world these past ten years.”

His mouth twitched tentatively. “What’s her name?”

“Lily,” Ginny breathed.

He smiled down at her, kissing her shoulder blades as he had in Paris a decade before. “What’s her favorite color?”

Ginny smirked at him. “Green. Naturally.”

“Her birthday?”

“Twenty-seventh of June.”

“Does she have your hair?” he whispered as he ran his fingers through it.

Ginny nodded tearfully. “But there’s a little blonde in there too.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t know from the start.”

“I should have,” Ginny admitted. “Even as a baby, she had this stuffed green dragon she carried with her everywhere. George gave it to her as a joke, but she loved it.”

Draco let out a full and happy laugh, as if he were picturing his daughter toting around a toy dragon. “What’s her middle name?”

Ginny paused, turning to look up at him as he ran a finger down her spine. “Kaida,” she replied softly.

Draco’s eyes darkened as he stared down at her. “In Japanese, that – that means…”

“Little dragon, I know,” Ginny told him, her eyes tearing again. “Before I knew she was yours, I just wanted a permanent way to leave you in my life. No one understood why I chose that name.”

Draco shook his head, letting the tears fall down his cheeks as they had when he had talked about Celia in the French restaurant. “Is she as beautiful as you are?”

Ginny laughed softly. “She’s more beautiful.”

Draco shook his head. “Impossible.”

“Not for our daughter.”

They lay together for a long while in silence, Ginny unbelievably content to lie in his arms and forget the world. Her one true shot at happiness. It had almost been handed to her.

She shivered slightly as his fingers continued to explore her body, followed closely by his lips. Something dangerously familiar was swelling in her chest, something that she had undeniably felt ten years ago, but had never expressed. Even as she lay in his arms, it seemed too unreal to be true, but she understood it now. She knew that this was genuine.

“I love you.”

Author notes: Please leave a review.