“Have you seen him?”
“I thought I did, but I didn’t think that was really him.”
“What? Draco Malfoy lives in the castle?”
“Didn’t he let Fenrir Greyback into Hogwarts during the battle?” “I heard he was the one that killed Dumbledore.”
“No, no, Snape killed Dumbledore, but Malfoy helped him. And he was the one that cursed Katie Bell with that necklace and almost killed Ron Weasley with that poisoned mead, remember?”
“Maybe he didn’t have a choice.”
The section of the Gryffindor house table that had been buzzing with gossip fell silent at that last comment. Ginny immediately regretted saying anything at all, and looked down at her plate of biscuits and gravy.
“Ginny, seriously, he didn’t have a choice?” exclaimed Neville from across the table. “He’s been a junior Death Eater in the making ever since he was born; you saw his father yourself when he tried to kill us at the Ministry of Magic! He almost killed your brother!”
She could hear the reason in Neville’s words, but Ginny knew in her heart that something wasn’t right about Malfoy. Her gut feeling being the only fuel to her retaliation, she looked up at Neville without any idea why she was even bothering to stand up for the former Slytherin. He’d never in a million years do the same for her.
“We saw his father try to kill us, and what happened to Ron was obviously an accident, since we now know who Malfoy was really after. All I’m saying is that we don’t know the whole story, and there’s clearly more to it if McGonagall protects him here.” Ginny spoke mostly to Neville, but the words benefited herself as well. Her head was not yet as forgiving of his murky past as her heart.
“McGonagall’s kind of new to the job; she may be a bit quicker to accept an apology and a bit slower to spot a fake one than Dumbledore was,” Seamus Finnigan reasoned from his place next to Neville.
Unable to look at her unappetizing breakfast any longer, and unwilling to talk about the subject further, Ginny gathered her books and left the outraged faces of her friends behind as she left the Great Hall for her first class.
Malfoy had flitted into her thoughts occasionally over the past few weeks, and she had pondered over where his guilt overlapped with his innocence. More than once she had even wondered if he had really turned his back on the Death Eaters as he said, but she never meant to express her thoughts to anyone, especially members of the DA.
One thing was for certain: she needed to seek him out and confront him again to find out what exactly had earned him solace at Hogwarts. The unrest caused by their last altercation had been slowly eating at her curiosity.
Later that night, hidden within the privacy of her bed hangings, she pulled out an old piece of parchment that Harry had given to her while he had been staying at the Burrow. Tapping the parchment with her wand, she whispered, “I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”
Faint black lines began to snake from the middle of the page, forming their way to every corner of the parchment until an entire map of Hogwarts lay before her. She smiled as she remembered Harry’s words when handing it over to her with a mischievous twinkle in his brilliant green eyes. “I won’t need this much where I’m going, but I know that you’ll make good use of it to while I’m gone.”
Her eyes scanned the black dots littering the page, virtually all of them residing in their dormitories. She looked towards the dungeons where she knew the Slytherin common room to exist, and wasn’t surprised not to find Malfoy’s name lingering there. If he had in fact betrayed the Death Eaters, Slytherins would be the last to accept him back into their good graces. She moved on to the areas of the school she was least familiar with, and finally found his dot once again on the deserted third floor of the west wing.
“Mischief managed,” she murmured, with another tap of her wand. She pocketed the now blank parchment, and stole silently out of Gryffindor tower.
The small boy ripped into his present with wild and unrestrained glee. The uncovered box gave a shudder, causing a cascade of silent laughter to erupt from his mother and father as he shoved the heavy box away from him in sudden fright. His father gently put the box back into his son’s small hands, helping him to finally open it. A small, furry head popped out, looking around suspiciously. The boy’s face broke into a grin from ear to ear as the young golden lab fell clumsily out of the box, and jumped into his arms. The mother and father joined into the fray and wrapped their arms around their son.
Draco watched silently as the scene he had witnessed many times before played in front of him. The mirror usually showed him scenes like this, with both of his parents and him, a happy, carefree child, the childhood he had always longed for, free of the pressures and burdens placed upon him for being a Malfoy.
Sometimes he watched birthdays he had never experienced, or Christmases, or family vacations. Now that his real parents were dead, it was easy to find relief in these imaginary, loving people created by the longing for comfort in his heart.
He had been watching the blissful family so intently that he hadn’t noticed a new figure approaching from behind, her fiery red tresses offensively out of place amongst the pale-blonde heads. She looked not at them, but straight ahead at something they were unable to see.
Draco’s eyes finally flitted upwards, narrowing in confusion and irritation. Why is she in here?
“What do you see?” her voice sounded from behind him, causing him to start so violently he fell right out of his chair. Damn it.
“What are you doing here, Weasley?” he yelled as he whirled around to face her, not bothering to hide his anger. He had already told her once not to come back here.
The pair stood face-to-face, hands hovering above their concealed wands.
She relaxed first, apparently not wanting another duel. She disregarded his question and looked directly into the mirror again. Draco cringed, feeling as if she were stealing his friend away from him.
“Get away from that,” he snarled at her, moving forward to push her out of the way.
“What do you see?” she repeated. He stopped short at the tone of her voice. It shook with sadness, making him instantly uncomfortable. Draco felt a tug in his chest as he watched a silent tear fall from her magnificent chocolate eyes and land with a soundless splash on the cool, stone floor. He realised he couldn’t stand to watch her cry. As beautiful as she was when she was miserable, he would much rather see her furious, anything else but this.
“What do you see, your precious hero saving the day?” Her eyes clouded over with anger at once and narrowed as she turned in his direction. That’s much better, he thought with a smirk.
“Not that you can understand worrying about anyone but yourself, you coward,” Ginny spat at him with her hands positioned resolutely on her hips, her fire lit to its usual flare.
Now she was just starting to annoy him. Nice as it was to have someone to talk to other than the professors, her uninvited welcome was expiring, especially now.
“If you’re not going to tell me what it is you keep bothering me about, then leave me the bloody hell–” He was cut off by the chiming of the bell tower as it struck midnight.
The sudden falter in his speech and the spark of sadness in his face at the sound of the chiming bell now had Ginny’s full curiosity. It was a new day, a day important to him.
“What is today?” she questioned, taking a softer tone of voice.
His stony eyes, cold as the stone beneath their feet, flashed with irritation at the query. He turned his back to her and looked instead out of the window onto the moonlit grounds, bracing an arm on either side of the windowsill. “That’s none of your business,” he replied in a low growl, failing to mask a slight shake to his voice.
Seeing through his impulsive resistance, she started to understand the differences she had noticed in him the last time they had met. He had no friends, he was an outcast even to the Slytherins, and why wasn’t he with his parents? Shouldn’t they be protecting him, or have they cast him out of their presence? Did he rat them out? Did he refuse the Dark Mark? All of these questions flooded her mind, and she felt a sudden responsibility for him, that he had no one else to care.
Taking a deep breath and going against every voice in her head screaming that she was better off to just leave him be, she took a step closer to him. “Seeing as how you spend your time alone here, I don’t suppose you have anyone else to talk to. You can talk to me… Draco,” Ginny forced his name across her lips, in an effort to make a gesture of peace. She needed answers, and it looked as though he needed someone to unload on, if nothing else.
His blond head slumped out of sight below his shoulders in an exhausted response of defeat at the sound of his name. Unsure how to proceed with her offer, she waited patiently for a further reaction.
Staring intently at the white marble of the windowsill was keeping him calm. So simple, so flawless, the swirling faint lines of a light white encased by the solid, off-white stone. His eyes followed a particular eddy towards the edge of the sill, disappearing within a deep and defined crack, jaggedly leading toward the corner of the pristine pane of glass separating him from a world that had rejected him.
It was easy for him to hate this atrocious crack, ruining something that used to be so beautiful. It wasn’t so easy for him to hate the girl standing behind him, a feeling that should be natural to him.
“Today…” he finally croaked, his voice cracking under the pressure of desperately wanting someone, anyone, to confide in, “was my Mum’s birthday. The Dark Lord, he... he killed her. He killed her right in front of me. She… she saved me, that’s why she died… just to save me.”
He let out a shaky breath, willing with all his being that the prickle in his eyes would subside so that he wouldn’t have to face this humiliation. Try as he might, it was coming; a pent-up wave of emotion comparable to a violent storm. He had refused to cry, refused to feel after that night, but the wall he had worked so hard to build around his heart had sprung a leak, and there was no stopping the swell of pain he could never be ready for.
His vision blurred as tear after tear spilt from his eyes, creating small, salty rivers within the whirls of marble. His knees gave out and he slid down the window until he sat, rocking back and forth on the cold, unforgiving floor, shoulders shaking with silent sobs, hands covering his face from the shame of her judging eyes.
What he couldn’t see through his grief was the tracks of tears running down her face. What he couldn’t understand was the overwhelming capacity of her heart, and the absolute compassion that she was able to feel for others.
And then she was there, kneeling on the floor next to him, her arms wrapped around his trembling shoulders. He refused his every instinct and went with his aching heart, hiding his wet face in her sweet-smelling hair as he surrendered to her embrace, and finally received what he had desperately needed but would never admit to a soul: some comfort.
Author notes:
Every girl secretly loves broken bad boys, there's just something about them. :-) Please R&R!
Next chapter: Another Door Shut
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