Chapter Five
The End of the Beginning
September 1995.
Well, the book should be ended. It should have ended when I lit that small candle, but it didn’t… Pray continue on to the next chapter to discover what happened next. Or you can quit now, if you like. You may come to wish that you had.
--Lestat speaks near the end of The Tale of the Body Thief, by Anne Rice, saying something very apropos to the last chapter of TBBC.
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Eee…eeeee…
The whistle reverberated over and over as Ginny walked down the corridor of the moving train, sounding oddly distant and faraway. Or maybe it was just that her heart was beating loudly enough to drown out any other sound, at least in her own ears.
She’d been waiting for this opportunity all through the train ride towards home for the Christmas hols, keeping a tense eye on the passage outside the compartment where she sat with Luna and Neville. Harry and Hermione and Ron were somewhere else; she didn’t know where, they hadn’t told her and she hadn’t asked.
That had been the general pattern for everything that had happened that summer. At times, she had wondered if she could have gotten away with doing certain things, since everyone seemed to be ignoring her—secret things, forbidden things. A regular exchange of letters by owl, for instance. Or even furtive meetings in the village. There were nights when she dreamed that she awoke to see the Malfoys’ white and silver eagle owl, hovering at the window with a parchment in its claws for her. But if she ever really did see an owl there, it was Hedwig. Harry sent her little notes sometimes in early July, before he was allowed to leave the Dursleys’ house and come to the Burrow-- and then Grimmauld Place-- for the rest of the summer. How happy those few scribbled words would have made her, once. There were days, too, when she would see a blond head held at a certain angle across the street, and her breath would catch for an instant, waiting for the person to turn around. But it was never the one she wished, or feared, to see.
Dean Thomas had heard of Ginny’s expressed interest in him at the end of term, and had begun sending her notes that summer as well. Laying them side by side with Harry’s rather unexpressive missives, Ginny fully understood the difference between friendship and deeper, more subtle overtures. She didn’t know how to tell him that she’d thrown out his name at random in an attempt to distract her brother from his ghastly foray into matchmaking. Besides, she liked his keen intelligence, and his flashing grin, and the way his skin looked like smooth rich coffee with real cream in it, so unlike her freckled self. So she met him at the house in Grimmauld Place a few times over that summer. Her brothers looked at him gimlet-eyed, tried and failed to fracture his skull during “friendly” Quidditch pick-up games, and finally decided he was acceptable. But Ginny did not. She gave Dean a sister’s kiss and sent him home one sunny August afternoon. Then she walked around the pond in the little park near the house, deep in thought. Once she was sure she was alone, she sat on a large rock under a weeping willow tree at the edge of the water and unfolded a parchment from her pocket. She looked at the portrait of herself for a long time. Her fingers traced the initials in the corner over and over.
D.L.M.
Ginny wasn’t sure what she’d thought would change once she returned to school. But in September, with the start of term, nothing had changed. It was her fifth year. She had already begun to study for her O.W.L.’s, which at least brought some distant smiles of approval from Hermione as the older girl hurried from classes to meals to the library to the stands where she sat to cheer for the first Quidditch games, her brow always puckered in an abstracted frown as if her mind were very far away. Everyone seemed to be in a tremendous hurry that autumn. Harry, Ron, and Hermione were always rushing from one place to the next, pausing to whisper to each other while they clustered together in the Gryffindor common room late at night, or to exchange mysterious nods and hand signals in the corridors. They were forever disappearing into unused classrooms or private nooks in the library, or going for long walks around the lake on rainy days when nobody else was outside. Neville was often included as well, but Ginny, never. It drove her mad. There were still Dumbledore’s Army meetings—there was no need to keep it secret anymore, now that Umbridge was long gone and a thoroughly cowed Fudge had sent no-one to replace her—but Ginny was more and more convinced that the real secrets were being discussed elsewhere.
She saw Draco Malfoy’s bright head hurrying away from her at the other end of a corridor or the opposite edge of the Quidditch pitch, occasionally. She was a Chaser that year, but Gryffindor would not play Slytherin until after the winter hols. Harry was incredibly tense and jumpy that entire autumn, snapping at everyone who spoke to him, nibbling on his nails until the tips of his fingers were constantly bleeding and Hermione cast Healing charms on them, an exasperated look on her face. Every time Harry was in the same room with Draco, he watched the Slytherin boy like a hawk, one hand never more than a few inches from his wand. But Draco ignored him utterly. He never came to the Gryffindor practices anymore, but he made no special effort to avoid Harry.
It took Ginny months to figure out that Draco was avoiding her.
She didn’t know what to do about it, and knew that there was nothing she should even think about doing. So she redoubled her efforts to spy on Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Neville. Ginny began dating the latter. She tried not to think that the primary reason might be his knowledge of her friends’ plans. She never learned anything from him, anyway. Ginny frequently thought that Neville might very well tell her what she wanted to know if she asked him in the right way, but the thought of using her charms on him so coldly made her feel faintly ill. He was shy and nervous and appealing, his hands always a bit damp, his eyes always a little too anxious when they looked into hers. They kissed many times, but never anywhere that Ron had the slightest chance of catching them. He seemed afraid to go any further with her.
One rainy night the week before, after Draco Malfoy had actually bumped into her on the way to Divination and picked himself up without so much as an apology, his eyes utterly remote, Ginny had gone up to Neville’s room, her heart beating fast. He had a free hour now, she knew. He answered her tap on the door and looked at her almost fearfully.
“What is it?” he asked. “Has anything happened? Is Harry all right—and Hermione-“
A bolt of irritation shot through her at that. “They’re fine as far as I know,” she said tartly. “But I would think you’d know more than I would about that!”
Neville had flushed pink then, his mouse-brown hair seeming to stick more tenaciously to his forehead the longer she watched him.
“Are you going to keep me standing here all day?” she asked.
“No, no—of course not, come in-“ He opened the door for her. She glanced around quickly. His roommates were gone. Without a word, she walked to his bed and sat on it. He scampered to keep up with her. “What is it?” he whispered, sitting down next to her.
“Draw the curtains,” said Ginny.
He obeyed. She wondered in a detached sort of way if he would jump out of the large picture window on the far side of the wall next, if she asked. He reached out to tap the witchlight at the bedside.
“Don’t,” she said, putting a hand on his arm.
“All right.”
They sat in the darkness for a few moments. Ginny had been trying to think up some sort of pretext for coming to Neville’s room for several minutes now, but nothing sprang to mind. It wasn’t necessary, anyway. She felt his hand moving towards hers, tentatively.
A flash of lightning illuminated the room for a split second, followed by a low roll of thunder. Without thinking, Ginny threw herself into his arms. Neville gave a startled yelp. Then, slowly, he began to stroke her hair.
“I hate storms,” she said, shivering. “They make me feel so afraid… so lost… like there’s nothing solid I could ever grab onto again…”
“Shh,” said Neville, his voice very steady now.
She pulled back and looked at him. “Make me forget,” she said in a low, desperate voice.
He did not ask what she meant. Maybe he was afraid to find out, she thought later. So he kissed her passionately, his hands moving over her face and neck and shoulders as if trying to memorize them. Ginny could feel how much he wanted to please her, and knew that even in his inexperience, he was concentrating on her pleasure, not his own. Surely, surely, that must count for something. This isn’t a bit like… well, other things, mad things that I need to forget, that shouldn’t ever have happened at all…
Neville’s hands went under her robes. He looked at her questioningly. There was just enough light peeping in from one carelessly drawn bedcurtain for her to see his face. She nodded. His fingers undid the buttons of her blouse, one by one. If Ginny closed her eyes, she could almost pretend that those fingers belonged to someone else. They roamed across her breasts and squeezed the nipples, very gently. The feeling was a good one. She pressed her chest up to his hands, and he moaned into her mouth.
“Oh, Ginny,” he said.
“Shh,” she said. The voice was too high and thin, too distinctly his; her mind couldn’t make it over into a low honeyed drawl. Neville fell silent and began fumbling with the catch of her brassiere in back.
If she said nothing, Ginny decided, this thing would simply happen. She would lose her virginity to Neville Longbottom on a rainy December afternoon. He would be fumbling and awkward and utterly lacking in finesse; she doubted she’d get much pleasure out of the act. But he would also be gentle and careful and inexpressibly grateful.
And she could forget. If only for a brief space of time, Draco Malfoy would be wiped from her mind.
For an instant, the scenario played itself out in her mind with such force that it almost seemed real. She saw herself lying in his arms, afterwards. A dull pain throbbed between her legs, and an unsatisfied feeling curled in her belly. Or perhaps that last wasn’t entirely fair to Neville. He would make sure that she felt pleasure too. No, the restlessness and the wrongness would be in her mind. That was worse. Neville turned her face to his and kissed her. His expression was smeary with bliss. “I love you,” he said.
“Stop!” Ginny wrenched Neville’s hand away from her waist as the fantasy came to an abrupt end.
“Wh—what?” He blinked at her.
She sat up, pulling her clothes back around her. “We can’t do this,” she said.
“But—you’re the one who came to my room! I never would’ve—I mean, I never thought--“
It was too late. Ginny had already fled, slamming the door behind her. The last thing she saw was Neville’s befuddled face.
She stalked the third-floor corridors for half an hour, waiting for Charms class to begin, glaring at everyone who passed her. She hated herself a little for what she had just done. The worst part was that she could never really explain to Neville why she had stopped him. There was no way for her to say that she truly liked him, perhaps in a very small way even loved him because he loved her, and that she wished he would find someone who was not so torn as herself, because he deserved better than what she could have given him. Ginny paced and paced.
God, but how she wished she’d run into someone she really hated right now—Pansy Parkinson, for instance, or the dark, arrogant Blaise Zabini, or maybe Millicent Bulstrode. Although, to be fair, Millicent seemed to be scarcely speaking to any of the other Slytherins anymore. Or Draco Malfoy. She’d teach him to practically knock her down in the corridors and then ignore her! She’d smash his sneering face in. She’d pull out his silvery hair by the handfuls. She’d—
Ginny paused in a small alcove, breathing heavily. She pulled out the little parchment from her pocket and tapped it with her wand. If Filch caught her using magic between classes, even for something like this, she’d get into trouble. But that would be nothing compared to what would happen if someone caught her with this portrait of herself, and knew who’d drawn it for her. She didn’t care. She stared at it for a long time. Her hands gripped either side of it, ready to tear. But they refused to obey her, and at last she shrank it again, and put it back in her pocket.
So time had flowed on towards this day, this grey afternoon near the winter solstice, this last secret hour on the Hogwarts Express before reaching King’s Cross. Ginny had thought her options over methodically, for a long time. She was determined not to miss her opportunity now. So she had watched, tensely, and when she had at last seen Draco Malfoy walking down the corridor, not even pausing to glance at their compartment, she had leaped to her feet.
“Back in a minute,” she had said.
Luna had given her a strange look, but said nothing. Ginny started walking down the corridor as calmly as she could, trying to stay just the right distance from Draco, waiting until he turned the corner. He didn’t seem to even be aware she was behind him. If he suddenly decided to turn back or found the door he was looking for, she didn’t know what she’d do. She really didn’t dare to speak to him until they’d passed all the students. Ginny glanced through the window of one of the doors, and thought she saw Anthony Summerby getting up from a seat. Ugh. She hurried on. As if he realized that she was following him—and, of course, perhaps he did—Draco quickened his own pace. Finally they had both entered the section of the train that had the luggage compartments, and it was safe to speak. He walked all the way to the end and through the last door, and she followed him.
“Malfoy,” she said.
He turned. As soon as she saw his face, expressionless as it was, she knew that he’d known she’d trailed him there. Well, it wasn’t as if she’d really thought she would fool him.
“Weasley,” he said in an utterly neutral voice.
They stood looking at each other. The silence stretched on and on. There were deep, dark circles under his impassive eyes, Ginny saw.
“Here,” she blurted, pressing the little shrunk square of parchment into his hand. She hadn’t even been sure that she would give it back, not until she’d seen him.
He nodded.
She stood looking at him for another moment. You’ve changed were the words that wanted to leap to her lips, although she kept silent. She didn’t know how, but he had. It was the change she had seen truly begin after that last time they’d met on the Quidditch pitch, that early evening at the end of May. It had been progressing all through the autumn. And when he’d first turned to her and she’d seen his face, she’d finally known for sure that she would return the gift he had made for her.
“You shouldn’t have given this to me,” Ginny said in a rush.
“I shouldn’t have,” he agreed, his voice mild.
“Surely you must see that I can’t keep it.”
“Yes,” he said. “Surely I must.”
She wondered if he would ask why she’d waited so long to return it, but he did not. He tucked it into a pocket of his robes without another word, and turned to leave. Ginny stayed where she was. She let her robes fall over her wrists so that her hands were concealed, and clenched her fists. She had never felt such a sense of anticlimax, of words left unsaid, actions left untaken, things left unresolved. This can’t be all! But it had to be all; all there ever was, or ever could be, between them.
“Malfoy,” she said, when he had almost reached the end of the corridor. He turned back.
“Yes?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.”
He looked at her for another instant, and then the door fell shut behind him, its action strangely delayed. She looked at the closed door for a very long time.
It wasn’t until she tried its handle that she realized he had locked her in.
He still stood motionless at the end of the corridor, near to the door that led to the passenger compartments, his back to her. “Malfoy!” she yelled, pounding on the pane of glass set in the door. “What do you think you’re doing? Let me out of here! Now!” But Draco ignored her pleas, attempts at reason, and vile and empty threats. He behaved exactly as if he couldn’t hear her at all.
There was a train car between herself and the students’ compartments. Nobody heard her shouts for help. No spell that she tried would open the door. After she’d pestered Fred and George so much last summer, they had taught her a few Opening spells more esoteric than a simple Alohamora, but none of them had any effect. Ginny pushed and pulled on the door, stuck a pin from her hair in the lock and jiggled it, and finally, in frustration, kicked it hard, bruising her toe. She sank to the floor, holding her injured foot in one hand. Then, still moving down, she felt a tremendous jolt, lost her balance, and sprawled headlong on the floor of the corridor, stopping herself with her hands on the opposite wall. The train had skidded to a halt.
Ginny’s breath had been knocked out of her and she fought to get it back for several long moments. Something was trickling down her cheek. The ankle that was broken in the Department of Mysteries had healed quickly, but the wound where Pansy scratched her months before had a bad habit of re-opening if it was bumped, and her head had been hit in the fall. What… happened? We can’t be at school yet. And even if we were, surely the train wouldn’t have ground to a halt that way. Something’s wrong… very wrong… And as she lay on the floor, dazed and bleeding, she began to hear the screams.
Ginny thought later that in some ways, the next few minutes were the most nightmarish of the entire ordeal. She could see a little, and hear a little. She knew that something terrible had happened, indeed was happening. But she had no clear idea what, not yet.
Faint shouts and screams came from the outer corridors, muffled by distance. They grew in volume and intensity. Ginny heard the sound of running feet, then loud thumps and crashes. They were definitely coming from the section of the students’ compartments, or they would have been too far away to hear at all. She began pounding on the glass again and shouting at Draco, who still stood with his back turned away, and still ignored her. His hair was tousled in back, as if he, too, had fallen when the train ground to a halt, and had picked himself up again. A voice raised itself above the confusing, muffled babble.
“Where is she? If you’ve got her—if you’ve done anything to my sister-“
It was Ron, yelling at the top of his lungs so that she could just distinguish the words. He was cut off as swiftly as if he’d been broadcast over the Wizarding Wireless Network and someone had changed the channel.
“Let me out!” shrieked Ginny. “Malfoy, for the love of God, let me out, my brother’s in trouble—hurt—something, I don’t know what, and he’s calling for me!”
Draco flinched a little, but still did not turn. At last, Ginny knew that he did hear her voice.
She didn’t begin to scream in earnest until the fighting reached the corridor just past the luggage compartment.
Antonin Dolohov crossed her field of vision on the other side of the windowed door at the far end of the corridor, chasing someone or something with wand upraised, his long, pale face twisted with anger. The wizard who murdered the Prewetts, her mind automatically catalogued. And the one who hit Hermione with that curse in the Department of Mysteries, the one that we all thought had killed her, at first. The one who was locked up in Azkaban, and who escaped. But he was recaptured! What can he be doing here?
Then she saw Rookwood and Mulciber moving back and forth, back and forth, shafts of red and silver light shooting from their wands. She heard the regular, sickening thuds of bodies hitting the ground. One girl faltered and fell right in front of the door, and Ginny saw her face and braid of dark hair clearly. Parvati. It couldn’t be Padma. Padma Patil had always worn her hair up in a net of turquoise that year, so she could be easily distinguished from her sister. But those Death Eaters are back in Azkaban as well, her mind insisted numbly, trying to take in what it saw.
An enormous black cloak swirled in front of the window, blocking Ginny’s field of vision. She could see nothing for several precious seconds. When the obscuring darkness cleared, Vincent Crabbe stood in front of the door across from his father, who was advancing on him.
“Can’t do a damn thing right, can you?” snorted the elder Crabbe. He was enormously bloated and bulky, a sinister man-mountain who made his son look almost dainty. “Find Draco Malfoy. That’s all you had to do. Bring him here. He’s the one we really want. I spelled it out to you, you fool. Couldn’t even do that. By Merlin, you’ll take what’s coming to you now. Take your medicine, boy-“
He moved in front of the door again, blocking every hint of what happened next, but Ginny heard what sounded like a stampede coming down the corridor and a cacophony of confused shouts and screams. The noise was raised to fever pitch but she could still see nothing. Her voice was almost gone from all the screaming she herself had done earlier, and she could make no further sound above a hoarse peep. There was some sort of Confundus charm on the door as well as a Locking spell, she realized. Maybe on the door at the far end of the corridor too, since otherwise Ginny could not believe that no-one would have seen Draco through its window, or thought to try opening it—if they really were looking for him. But why would they be… and who were “they”? Death Eaters, her mind answered instantly. And more than that. The particular Death Eaters who had been locked in Azkaban with Lucius Malfoy in June. Ginny leaned against the door, feeling the cool glass against her fevered head. They escaped. And now they’ve come here, to the Hogwarts train.
Still Draco stood, watching everything that happened on the other side of that door, making no move. It took him a moment to react when one of the doors lining the corridor opened and Ron jumped through, his wand at the ready.
I’m here, Ron, right here! The cry formed on Ginny’s lips, and she raised her hand to pound at the door. Then a thought struck her, and she gasped. She slid all the way down the door and peeked up so she could still see what was going on, taking care to keep her head down.
“I knew it. I knew it!” said Ron, breathing heavily, his face red. “I knew you were hiding back here like the stinking coward you are, Malfoy.”
Then, slowly, Draco did turn. “Weasley,” he said in a faraway voice. He sounded as disinterested as if the two of them had been introduced to one another at a particularly dull garden party.
“Why the hell weren’t you out there?” Ron said scornfully. “They’re looking for you. They won’t leave until they’ve found you! That’s why they’re here! They came to get you—but you probably knew that, didn’t you, probably had a hand in their escape--”
Draco raised an eyebrow. “Which am I, Weasley? An evil Death Eater in training, or a stinking coward?”
“You won’t be anything after I’m through with you!”
“So why haven’t you killed me already?” Draco asked in the same almost-idle tone of voice. “Although your Defense Against the Dark Arts work always was subpar, as I recall. I doubt you could cast a decent Killing curse against an ant.”
Ron’s wand wavered at the insult, and Ginny wondered if he would try one after all. Then he took a deep breath, visibly calming himself, and walked forward until the wand’s tip was an inch from Draco’s chest. Draco didn’t move.
“Where’s my sister?” asked Ron, his voice deadly calm.
Draco shrugged. “What would make you think I’ve done anything with your miserable peasant of a sister?”
“She’s gone. Gone, and we can’t find her. And you know where she is—I know you do—“
Ron’s voice began to waver, although the wand did not, and his eyes were still fixed on Draco’s. Ginny bit her lip until she could feel it start to bleed in order to keep from crying out. What had occurred to her almost too late was that the spell on her door was most likely keyed to whoever tried to find her, as these types of Confundus charms tended to be. Anyone who had ill intent towards her would never be able to see or hear her. But someone who loved her as her brother loved her would certainly know she was there. If she said nothing, Ron might go away again, looking for her elsewhere. It was dangerous for him to be in this corridor, near Draco Malfoy. Ginny could never have said how she knew this, but she did.
Draco looked at Ron, his grey eyes unreadable. “I don’t know where she is and I don’t care. Now get the hell out, Weasley. Leave me alone.”
Ron seemed about to explode. “Didn’t you just hear what I said? The Death Eaters came here for you and they’re not leaving until they’ve found you, and they’re going to keep fighting us and—and—“ His voice faltered. “And killing until they do find you. Parvati’s dead, Malfoy.”
Draco leaned against the wall as if bored by the entire proceedings. “What do you propose that I should do about it?”
“You don’t give a damn, do you? Well, I didn’t think you would. You’ve got my sister here,” snarled Ron. “I know it. I can feel it. And if you won’t show me where she is, I’ll—I’ll get you out of the way. I’ll give the Death Eaters something to find, all right. You don’t have to be alive for that. And then I’ll find Ginny—if I have to go through you to find her, that’s just what I’ll do-- Expelliarmus! ” Ron’s voice rose suddenly, and his wand went up. But Draco snapped to sudden attention and performed a Deflecting charm, his idle demeanour gone.
The two duelled for several minutes as Ginny watched in terror. Ron was moving like lightning, faster than she had ever seen him; Draco was repelling her brother’s offensive strategy in a way that looked almost lazy, but she could tell how much skill it really took. He was preserving his energy, not wearing himself out as Ron was doing. But he also wasn’t attacking, as he so easily could have done. Ron backed Draco up the far end of the corridor, almost up against Ginny’s door, and she crouched down as far as she could. If Ron saw her now, it would break his concentration and he would lose. She couldn’t understand why Draco hadn’t really tried to hurt her brother, but surely any moment now he would. Perhaps he was simply making his own job easier by waiting until Ron was too exhausted to fight back effectively against an attack.
Then Draco glanced up, over Ron’s shoulder. “Weasley,” he said. “Get out of here. Now. ”
“I—won’t—show you any mercy, Malfoy, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Ron panted. “Ginny’s here—she’s here, I can feel it, I’m getting closer—“
And he was. He was nearly to Ginny’s door, and she curled into a small ball on the carpet, wondering if he could somehow tell that she was there anyway, in spite of her attempts to hide herself.
Draco’s hand clenched his wand more tightly. “For the love of Merlin, Weasley,” he said, a hint of desperation entering his voice for the first time, “will you forget your sister, drop the idiotic Gryffindor bravery act for once, and get the hell out?”
“Consistere, ” said Ron, aiming the wand at Draco’s heart. Ginny leaped up and gasped, propelling herself against the glass of the door and hitting it with a smack. She could not help it. She might as well have tried not to breathe. The sound was very loud in the still air of the corridor. Ron’s eyes went wide. “I knew it!” he said as he saw his sister. He turned towards her, his arms reaching out.
“Stupefacius, ” said Draco, and he took careful aim. The Stunning spell hit Ron squarely in the back. He staggered forward and dropped to the floor, slumping against the door.
The door on the left side of the corridor banged open. Anthony Summerby raced in, his own wand out. “Ron!” he yelled. “Ron, where are you—I know I saw you go this way, they sent me to find you, we need you—“ He skidded to a halt when he saw Ron lying unconscious on the floor, and Draco Malfoy standing over him with his wand drawn. Draco’s head jerked up. Without hesitation, he barked, “Deicio! ” But Summerby was still in motion, and the jet of silver light from Draco’s wand sent him off on a wild trajectory. Time itself seemed to be slowed then, each motion taking an agonizingly long time. The Hufflepuff Seeker flew uncontrollably through the air, his arms and legs flailing. He smashed against the opposite wall. His head cracked open like a rotten melon on impact, and he slid to the floor, twitching and jerking.
Ginny realized that she was wrong. She’d thought that the change in Draco Malfoy, whatever it was, had been completed that summer. But it had not. It was finishing itself now, one way or the other. His face remained as immobile as carved marble, but she somehow knew that an unimaginable process of choice and decision was going on beneath its surface. Summerby clutched spasmodically at the carpet on the floor of the corridor. He tried to move his head, and Ginny was sure for a horrible moment that the next thing she would see would be his brains spilling out of the enormous wound. The blood gushed down his jaw and shoulder and arm and was absorbed into the grey material of the carpet, turning it a dark, rusty brown.
There was horror in Draco’s eyes. Ginny was sure of that. And if there was not precisely compassion, there was the raw animal pity that any halfway normal human being feels in the presence of suffering and death.
Summerby seemed to be trying to say something. A bubble of blood formed at his lips.
The door on one side of the corridor banged open, and Lucius Malfoy came striding in. Ginny saw him with no sense of surprise. She wasn’t sure if it was because she had expected him to show up all along, or because she was in such shock that nothing could have really surprised her at this point. So that was what Draco saw when he looked over Ron’s shoulder, she thought. His father, coming down one of the side corridors to find him. I should have known. I think I did know.
He paused and stood motionless when he saw his son at the other end of the corridor with his own wand out, and for just a moment the four figures formed a frozen tableau.
“Dead?” Lucius asked, nodding towards Anthony Summerby on the floor.
Draco took a long time to answer. “Dying,” he finally said, still staring at the Hufflepuff in his pool of blood.
“Ah.”
Still, Draco stood and stared, as if so mesmerized by the rush of oncoming tragedy that he was powerless to alter its course in any way.
“We’ve no time to waste. Enough of it has already been spent in looking for you,” Lucius said, and, without ceremony he passed his wand over Anthony Summerby. “Suffocare, ” he said impatiently.
Summerby didn’t show much of a reaction. He was too far gone for that; probably already deep in coma, Ginny realized much later. His body stiffened. His breath caught in his throat with a rattle as the Garroting curse closed off his windpipe. His fingers relaxed and let go the carpet they had been clutching, and he died.
“All right then,” said Lucius, pocketing his wand. “What about Weasley… the boy… Ronald? Reginald? I saw him heading this way.”
Ginny stuffed her fist in her mouth and bit down, struggling to stay silent. As far as she could tell, the fact that Ron was so close to the protected area was protecting him, too. He was all right. He must be all right. He had only been Stunned. The phrases kept repeating themselves idiotically in her head for several precious seconds. Then Ginny shook herself free of them. She didn’t know how much longer the magical protection of the Concealing Spell would last. If she made the slightest sound and the spell was beginning to wear thin, she could give her brother away. Herself as well, but she couldn’t really seem to care about that.
Draco said nothing. He was looking in her direction without giving the slightest indication that he saw her, but she knew that he did. She brought her hands up and clasped them together in a praying motion, her eyes pleading desperately.
“Well?” Lucius glanced around the corridor. He actually looked directly at Ron for a second, but clearly did not see him. “I suppose it doesn’t matter at the moment,” he said at last. “Where’s the Weasley girl, Gwenhyfar, the one they call Ginny; do you have her?”
“No,” said Draco distantly. “Dolohov does. I saw him Disapparate with her.”
Ginny clenched onto the molding of the door until her fingers hurt to keep from crying out in surprise. Lucius Malfoy wanted to take her with them! But were the Death Eaters taking everyone… or just her? Why would they want her? How had Lucius known her full name was Gwenhyfar, when most people assumed it was Virginia? And why, why had Draco Malfoy lied?
Lucius turned back to Draco, who was looking down at Summerby again. From the angle where she stood, Ginny could not see his face.
“All you all right?” Lucius asked.
“Yes,” Draco replied, without looking up.
“I understand,” Lucius said quietly. “Believe it or not, I do. The first time you see death… or have a hand in it, however accidentally it may have come about… well… I’m sorry that it had to happen to you this way, Draco. But maybe it’s better. Yes. Maybe this makes it easier, the first time.”
Draco moistened his lips, and seemed about to say something.
Lucius Malfoy put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Come, Draco,” he said.
Ginny began beating on the glass with her fists, forgetting all her caution of a few moments earlier, knowing that Lucius could not hear her, but that Draco could. But even though the blond boy flinched with each thud of her hands, he did not turn around. The two Malfoys Disapparated, leaving only the faintest shimmer in the air where they had been. She continued to pound on the glass. It was enchanted to be unbreakable. Her flesh was not.
By the time Millicent Bulstrode stumbled into the corridor and revived Ron, Ginny’s blood was trickling down the door in little streams.
Ginny remembered almost nothing very clearly after that. She fell into her brother’s arms, weeping with relief, babbling that he was alive, alive, oh, she’d been so frightened, trying to hug him, and seeing the horror on his face. She left great smears of blood all over his robes. He whipped out his wand and said incantation after incantation over her in a choked voice, his face white, but the blood kept flowing. Much later, she learned that it had been too long since she had first begun to injure herself for the simple Healing spells to work, and anyway they were never very effective when the subject was in a highly agitated state. He yelled for help; she heard that faintly, and others came, a ring of their white faces pressed together over her. There was a great deal of noise, and she closed her eyes. Someone lifted her up and she was carried outside, into the open air. She heard the faint voices of a large group around her.
She must have blacked out briefly then, because the next thing Ginny remembered was opening her eyes to see enormous winged forms circling down to the ground, sinister, batlike, horribly graceful. One settled in for a landing and pressed close to her, its scaly, lizard-like head bobbing forward. It was impossible to tell if it was looking at her with its blank white-pupiled eyes, but it sniffed at her hands, and a bumpy black tongue shot suddenly out of its mouth. Ginny screamed, or tried to. She managed a rusty croak.
“You’ve attracted them,” said Luna’s wispy voice behind her. Her friend was paler than ever, Ginny saw, and her right arm dangled at an odd angle. Broken, Ginny thought automatically. But at least Luna was alive. There were so many voices around her, crossing and recrossing, that Ginny knew many other students must have survived as well. But she couldn’t summon enough energy to lift up her head and see. “They smelled the blood, and they came,” Luna continued. “Nobody else is bleeding as much as you. It’s lucky really, in a way.” Her voice sounded vaguer than ever.
“What are they?” whispered Ginny. They looked like Bat-Bogeys, that was it. Like giant Bat-Bogeys.
“Thestrals,” said Luna. “You’ve never seen them before, I suppose?”
“No...”
“There’s no reason why you would have done. But they’ve been at Hogwarts all along, you know.”
Hermione was directing groups of people onto the backs of the animals, Ginny saw now. A deep cut ran the entire length of her face and neck, blood congealing on its ragged edges, but she was still standing. She came closer and shouted something at Ron. He beckoned to Millicent Bulstrode, who was, incredibly, part of their group. Ginny’s eyes widened in alarm when she saw the Slytherin girl. Her family had been in at least as deep with the Death Eaters as any other. But before Ginny could even begin to protest, Millicent and Ron had lifted her onto a thestral, Luna behind her. “Keep her on,” said Hermione, shooting Millicent a cold glare of dislike. “No, Ron! You can’t go with your sister. We’ve got to get the rest—some of them are even worse off—and some are—are—“ Her voice caught, and she turned away.
“I don’t understand,” said Ginny, clutching onto the leathery skin, feeling the tendons of the bat-like wings under her fingers. Blood dripped onto the thestral’s head, running down its face. The animal stuck its tongue out to lick up every drop, purring as contentedly as a cat with a bowl of milk. A wave of sickness went over her. “I don’t understand,” she repeated. “I’m sure I never saw them before.”
“I’ve always seen them,” said Luna. “Since the day I came to Hogwarts. Hold on now.”
The thestral gave a tremendous leap into the air, and Ginny squeezed her eyes shut and grasped onto the folds of skin as hard as she could. The wings flapped and flapped, each gust of air incredibly cold. That brought her back to herself a little. She chanced a peek down at the ground. It was very far away, much further than she had ever seen when flying on her broomstick. A network of miniature brown and grey patches with little blue lines ran across the flatlands, punctuated by doll-sized trees, and moving white dots that must have been sheep. The other thestrals soared just above and below and to either side of hers, and just watching each stroke of their enormous black wings made her dizzy. I’ve got to keep it together. I’ve absolutely got to. If I faint, I’ll fall off, and I’ll die. I can’t die… I can’t do that to Ron…
“So,” she shouted back at Luna, turning her head to her friend, as the thestral seemed to know where it was going perfectly well without any input from her, “so, I still don’t understand. Why is it that I’m seeing them, when I couldn’t before?”
Luna turned her enormous silvery-blue eyes on Ginny. “Well,” she said quietly, “we can all see them now.”
And, remembering Hagrid’s lesson on thestrals last year, Ginny understood. She leaned her head against the scaly neck, numbly.
It was a long journey back to the southern part of Scotland, even by the routes the thestrals took, and her grasp on consciousness slipped a little further with each moment that passed. At last, the only thing anchoring her to reality seemed to be her sense of hearing. The last thing to go when you die, she thought dreamily. That’s what I’ve always heard. I wonder if I’m dying. Dumbledore once called it the next great adventure. I heard that too. Can’t remember where. But all the way to Hogwarts, Ginny heard the slurp, slurp, slurp of the thestral licking at her blood, and she knew that she still lived.
There was a sharp downward-pulling sensation in the pit of her stomach. She felt the thud of landing. At last she could let her grasp slip, and she slid towards the ground. Strong arms caught her, and, smelling the apple-cinnamon scent of her brother, she knew that Ron had her safely now. She closed her eyes and let darkness roll over her.
***********************************************************************
White. Everything around her was white. She was looking at a slightly nubbly white expanse of ceiling, and sheets of coarser white material were hung around her on all sides. Slowly she looked down. Her hands were resting on a white coverlet. She examined them curiously, as if they belonged to someone else. They were thinner, but looked healed. A very faint tracery of scars formed a network on them. Ginny tried to sit up. The sheets surrounding her bed moved, and Hermione came through them. She looked thinner, more tired, and somehow older than she had done before—how many days before, Ginny wondered. But her face lit up when she saw her friend.
“You’re awake!” she said delightedly.
“How—how long have I been here? And where-“ Ginny’s voice felt rusty, as if she hadn’t used it in a long time.
“The hospital wing,” Hermione replied, sitting on a small chair next to the bed.
“Oh. Bit thick of me not to guess that right away,” Ginny croaked.
Hermione laid a finger on her friend’s lips. “Don’t try to talk. And it’s not thick at all. We almost didn’t make it here.”
“We?”
“The students who were on the Hogwarts train. In the- the attack—“ Hermione hesitated. “Ginny, how much do you remember?” The bedcurtains parted again to admit Ron. His eyes widened when he saw his sister sitting up.
“Ginny!” he said, and then he was kneeling by the side of the bed and she was in her arms; he crushed her to him and buried his face in her hair with long, shuddering breaths. “You’re all right,” he kept whispering. “You’re all right.”
“Of course she’s all right!” snapped Hermione. “But she won’t be if you squash her to death. Honestly, Ron. She was unconscious for three days.”
“Three days?” asked Ginny. “But what—who-“
“You’re one to talk,” Ron replied to Hermione. “Don’t ask her questions right now, for Merlin’s sake!”
Ginny held up a hand between her brother and her friend, who had begun to glare at each other over the bed. “Please, don’t argue,” she said faintly. “Only I have to know what’s been going on. Do tell me.”
“Ron’s right,” sighed Hermione, as if she loathed to admit the fact. “We should both go away and let you rest.”
“But-“ Ginny protested, attempting to sit up further. With a hand, Ron pushed her back down.
“Madam Pomfrey had a job of it, healing your hands,” he said. “She—she said you’d always have the scars, Ginny. You can’t overdo things now.”
“But I need to know-“
“You need to rest,” Hermione said firmly.
“But if I don’t know, I won’t do anything but think and worry,” argued Ginny. “I won’t get a bit more sleep. Come on. Please.” She looked from one to the other. Hermione gave a deep sigh.
“All right. I do see your point, I suppose. We’ll tell you a bit if you promise to go to sleep after that.”
Ginny nodded.
Hermione settled herself more comfortably in the chair, Ron at her side on the floor. She took a deep breath. “There was a Death Eater attack on the Hogwarts train,” she said without preamble. “No warning at all. The first thing we all knew was that the train ground to a halt very suddenly, so everybody figured out that something was wrong right away.”
“Everybody? Who was ‘everybody’?” asked Ginny. Incredibly, a bit of resentment flared up in her.
“Well, the DA members. We were all in one compartment, discussing some plans for the autumn. But at first I thought there’d been an accident, or something--“
“Why weren’t we there? Neville, and Luna, and me?” Ginny could not help asking.
“Neville was there. He left to check on the pair of you. Luna—well, she’s not called Loony Lovegood for nothing, you know,” Hermione said primly. “We didn’t want her in on this particular discussion.”
“And me? What about me; why wasn’t I included?”
Hermione and Ron exchanged glances. “We thought it was better that way,” Hermione finally said. “It might have been dangerous for you to know.”
“Who decided this?” retorted Ginny, swinging on her brother. “You? Or you did say ‘we;’ maybe it was all of you. That was it, wasn’t it, Ron?”
“She’s becoming agitated,” Hermione said. “We’d better leave.”
Ginny plucked at Ron’s arm as he got up to go. “Don’t you dare!” she hissed. “You’re telling me exactly what happened! If you’d only told me at the time—“ She stopped. She would not say the words that had leapt to her lips. If you’d told me at the time, I would have been in that compartment with the rest of you. I wouldn’t have gone out to find Malfoy to give him back the parchment. And then—and then— Anthony Summerby’s sightless eyes looked up at her from memory, accusingly.
“All right,” Hermione said soothingly, sitting back down. “Don’t upset yourself, Ginny, please, or we really will go. We were only discussing defensive tactics for next term, that’s all. We didn’t really understand why Voldemort—dry up, Ron—and the Death Eaters hadn’t made any overt moves yet. I suppose we all thought they might soon, but we weren’t expecting anything like—well, what happened.”
And you thought I couldn’t handle a discussion like that. Ginny pressed her lips tightly shut. She would not say another word that might jeopardize her chances of finding out the truth.
“Anyway,” Hermione continued, “we all thought at first that it had only been an accident. Zach Smith was just getting up from the floor, I remember, and talking about seeing if people in the other cars were all right, when we saw—we saw-“ Her voice caught.
“Death Eaters coming down the corridor,” Ron continued grimly. “Lucius Malfoy first. I thought it was Draco Malfoy for a second; they look almost exactly the same, but then I recognized Rookwood behind him, and Avery—Dolohov too, and all the rest. The ones who’d been in Azkaban. They broke out.”
“How did it happen?” whispered Ginny.
“Nobody’s completely sure,” said Ron. “But they think Lucius Malfoy was behind it. He’d left some sort of automatic Summoning charm at Malfoy Manor before he left for the Department of Mysteries on that—that night, in June. I don’t really understand how it works, but-“
“It creates a link between the wizard or witch who originally creates the spell, and the location in which it was cast,” Hermione interrupted. “No Summoning charm can break the Azkaban wards on its own, of course. But with a bit of outside help at the right time, theirs did, and—“
“I was going to explain properly,” said Ron, his voice sulky, “if you’d given me one more second, Hermione. Anyway, the point is that Lucius Malfoy escaped, and took all the others with him. The train’s the first place they all went. Personally, I think they laid spells that gave them control over its magic, or they couldn’t have Apparated so easily.” Ron gave Hermione a smug little smile, as if to say that he, too, could figure out these important points.
“But—but what were they there to do? Just to terrorize everyone, or—“
“I’m getting to that.” Ron’s face sobered. “They fought us, all right. In all the confusion, nobody even had time to think about why, at first, or what was really going on. But they had a purpose. We didn’t find out all about it until we got back to Hogwarts, and counted who was with us, living or—or dead, and who had gone with the Death Eaters.”
“Dead?” asked Ginny.
Ron closed his eyes. “Not now, Ginny. Not right now. Let me finish the story first.”
“I saw the fighting as well, Ron,” Hermione pointed out. “We were running down the corridors, in and out of students’ compartments—oh, there was so much confusion, Ginny. It looked as if we were winning, for a while. But then I saw why there were fewer Death Eaters every minute. They were Disapparating with students, rounding them up and taking several at a time.” She dropped her chin in her hands. “Some of the students, that is.”
A chill struck Ginny. “Let me guess. All Death Eaters’ children, weren’t they?”
Hermione nodded. “Mostly Slytherins, but not all. And they all went without fighting as far as I could see. Except Bulstrode, Millicent Bulstrode—she struggled and wouldn’t go, and they finally left her. Surprising, isn’t it?”
“She fought beside us, too. I couldn’t have gone to find Ginny if she hadn’t covered for me. Not a bad sort, for a Slytherin,” Ron said grudgingly. Ginny thought that he also seemed to trying to hide a little smile, however. “But don’t forget the most important point, Hermione! The Death Eaters seemed to be still-“
“Looking for someone, yes. I was getting to that,” Hermione said. “We figured out that it had to be Malfoy. Draco Malfoy, I mean. And that they weren’t leaving until they found him. Oh, they took everyone else who was the child of a Death Eater—clever idea to do it that way, really, since the Hogwarts train travels through places that aren’t exactly real, and there’s no chance of any sort of normal help arriving. But Malfoy was the prize. And they weren’t leaving until they had him. So they kept fighting us, and then—and then-”
“Parvati died,” Ron said flatly to Ginny. “She was the first. Not the last, though. There were still more than enough Death Eaters left, and Mulciber went a bit mad after that, started hitting everybody with curses. The rest followed his lead. I think they started to think we were hiding Malfoy and wouldn’t bring him out for them to take. As if.” He turned to Hermione. “Let me tell the rest. Let me finish the story. The rest of it’s mine anyway. You didn’t see it.”
The other girl nodded. Her face was beginning to look a bit pale.
Ron took Ginny’s hand, very gently, and traced her fingers. “Nobody knew where you were,” he said quietly. “You’d disappeared. It took us some time to realize it, Ginny. But when I did, I knew I had to find you. And I had the oddest feeling that I could, that I might not know where you were, but I’d be drawn to you. As if you were a magnet, and I was metal. So—I started off down the side corridors.” He raised his head to Hermione. “And I don’t need to hear again how I left all of you in the lurch,” he said, an edge to his voice. “I had to find Ginny.”
Hermione bent her head without a word.
“Everything’d been happening in the students’ compartments,” Ron continued. “But I felt that you weren’t anywhere near there, so I began looking in the next car, where the luggage was. And that’s when I found Malfoy.” His face took on an ugly look. “The slimy cowardly little bastard was hiding. At the time I didn’t know if he realized his father and the Death Eaters were looking for him and lost his nerve, or what—well, I suppose you can’t lose what you never had, but anyway, there he was in the back luggage car, not giving a damn that they were tearing the train apart trying to find him. And I somehow knew, Ginny, that he knew where you were. But he wouldn’t tell me. So we dueled. I would’ve been happy to kill him by then; if he wasn’t going to tell me, I’d find you on my own. Gods, but I wish I had killed him.” Ron rubbed his closed eyes with his fingertips. “But then I heard your voice, Ginny, coming from behind me. I turned and saw you behind the door to the luggage compartment. And that’s when Malfoy hit me in the back with a Stunning spell.”
“You—you said that you didn’t know at the time what he was doing there,” Ginny said in a hoarse whisper.
“Well, we found out a few things afterwards.” Ron’s eyes went cold. “As near as Dumbledore can tell, Malfoy—Draco Malfoy, I mean, although it hardly seems as if we need to even try to tell those two apart anymore-- set up a final link for the Summoning spell at their manor in Wiltshire. That’s why his father and all the other Death Eaters were finally able to escape Azkaban. So he must have known that they were coming. We still don’t know why he was hiding in the luggage compartment instead of welcoming them with open arms, but it doesn’t matter now.”
Ginny looked down at her scarred hands and was silent. Hermione picked up the story.
“My guess is that Lucius Malfoy found his son after that, and Disapparated with him, because that was when all the Death Eaters disappeared. We—the ones who were still able to move, I mean—found you and Ron on the floor of the luggage car. And Summerby, of course, but it was too late for him, too late to help. You were—“ She swallowed. “You were bleeding all over Ron, Ginny. Oh, you’d lost so much blood. I didn’t—I didn’t think you were going to make it. Luckily, the thestrals came.” Hermione gave a shaky laugh. “None of us had any trouble seeing them, that’s for sure. And they took us to Hogwarts. Madam Pomfrey didn’t know what hit her. Almost everybody had to come to the hospital wing for treatment, and—and then there were the dead.”
All three of them were silent for a moment. Ginny did not want to ask who had died. She’d find out soon enough.
“Everyone’s pretty much well now, who was here with you,” Hermione said in a forced, bright tone. “You were about the last one, Ginny. Dumbledore’s speaking to us all tomorrow morning, do you think you’ll be up for that?”
“Yes,” Ginny murmured, staring at the blowing white curtains around the bed.
“All the teachers are here,” Hermione continued. “Thank God they don’t take the train. So that’s one good thing at least.”
“We could’ve stood to lose Snape,” said Ron.
“Honestly, Ron! We can’t afford to lose anyone else.”
“Even when they’re traitors?” Ron retorted.
“He hasn’t done anything traitorous at all. He’s spied for our side at great personal risk to himself and he’s gotten us out of trouble and danger loads of times. You’re just prejudiced because Harry hates him so much. God knows why, since he’s saved Harry’s life more than—“
“Leopards don’t change their spots, or don’t you remember hearing that?” Ron shot back.
“I certainly do. Barty Crouch said it when he was masquerading as Professor Moody . Really trustworthy source—“
“Don’t you remember what Millicent told us?” Ron shouted back. “Snape’s in deep with the Malfoys and always has been. Even deeper than we thought! When Sirius said Snape was Lucius Malfoy’s lapdog, he didn’t tell us the half of it. Although I’ll bet he knew.”
“Try to be reasonable, Ron,” snapped Hermione. “Or at least make an effort! All right, so maybe Snape was in love with Draco Malfoy’s mother almost twenty years ago, when they were both at Hogwarts. Doesn’t that prove a whole bloody lot. Let’s all listen to stories from Millicent Bulstrode, the girl you used to refer to as an evil Slytherin cow and the one you’re now calling by her first name—“
“I trust Milla,” Ron yelled at Hermione, clenching his hands into fists, “because she could’ve gone with the Death Eaters and saved her own skin very easily, and she didn’t. She came with us!”
“Oh, so it’s Milla now, is it?”
“The Sorting Hat wanted to put her in Hufflepuff anyway—she told me,” Ron continued doggedly. “She’s sorry for what she did to you that day in Umbridge’s office. She’s apologized and apologized; she was just following orders from Parkinson, you know. And she’s a pureblood; she’s Snape’s cousin and Malfoy’s, my cousin too, if it comes to that, so she’s heard things, and she knows what she’s talking about—“
“But you won’t apply the same sort of logic to Snape,” Hermione yelled back. “Oh, I forgot! The word logic isn’t in your vocabulary at all, is it?”
The two stood glaring at each other, chests heaving, as Ginny tried to process everything they had said. She gave a little moan of frustration and fell back to the coverlet. It was suddenly too much for her. At that slight sound, Ron and Hermione glanced down, breaking their furious stare.
“That’s enough,” said Hermione. Her face was blotchy and her eyes bright with unshed tears. “It’s more than enough. Go to sleep now, Ginny.”
Ginny was too exhausted to muster even the semblance of an argument. Her eyes closed and her head fell back on the pillow. Hermione and Ron kept whispering furiously at each other just outside the drapes around her bed, and finally Hermione’s shoes tapped down the corridor, each click very distinct, the way her walk always sounded when she was angry. Ginny raised her head.
“Ron,” she whispered.
Her brother’s head popped in between the white curtains. “You shouldn’t still be awake! D’you need a Sleeping draft? I’ll get Madam Pomfrey-”
“No—no.” Ginny took a deep breath. “Come here, Ron, please.”
He walked back towards her and sat at her bedside. “I suppose you heard us arguing, Ginny. Well, it’s nothing to worry about; it’s just that Hermione is the most impossible—“
“I don’t care about that,” sighed Ginny. “I need to tell you something else. It’s about what happened on the train.”
Ron sucked in his breath. “I knew it. I knew there was more. Ginny, did Malfoy lure you into the luggage compartment? Did he hurt you? Did he—“
“No, Ron, no.” Strictly speaking, that was true. “It’s about something Lucius Malfoy said.”
“Tell me.”
Ginny looked down at her interlaced fingers. She still wasn’t sure if she should tell Ron or not. In years to come, she was to wonder if it had really been such a good idea. But she didn’t see how she could avoid the telling, when this piece of information might be important to the fight that was coming. “He asked his son if he had me, because the Death Eaters wanted to take me with them.”
“So that slimy little piece of shite did lure you there! I can’t wait until we get ahold of him. I’m going to cut his balls off and feed them to a Crumple-Horned Snorck—“
“Will you please listen to me, Ron! I’m not done!” Ginny’s voice caught, and she went into a fit of coughing.
“Sorry,” said Ron in an abashed voice, scrambling to his feet. When he returned to her bedside with a glass of water, he seemed calmer.
“Draco Malfoy told his father that Dolohov already Disapparated with me,” said Ginny, between sips. “Then both of them left.”
Ron stared at her. “Malfoy must not have seen you,” he finally said. “That’s the only explanation.”
“I’m sure you’re right.” Ginny decided not to tell her brother anything more.
“I wonder where that spell came from though, the one that locked you into the luggage compartment…” mumbled Ron. “I suppose it was some leftover magic or other. That train’s a queer place. Well, it’s not important now. It kept you safe and that’s the only thing that matters. I wish I knew who cast it originally, though. Wish I could thank him.”
No, you don’t, thought Ginny.
He leaned down to her, hugging her awkwardly, avoiding her hands. “But I’m going to protect you from now on, Ginny. Always. I’ll never leave your safety to chance again. I swear it. I swear by—by everything.”
She closed her eyes again, and did not respond. The last sound she heard was her brother tiptoeing out of the room.
The enchanted sky over the Great Hall of Hogwarts was a flat, bright grey the next morning. It would rain hard that day, and was already drizzling. Breakfast was being served, although nobody seemed to eat much. Ginny looked down the Gryffindor table. Hermione was picking up her spoon, trailing it through her oatmeal, and letting it fall again, over and over. Harry had been chewing on the same rasher of bacon for twenty minutes. Ron swirled his pumpkin juice around in a cup without tasting it. There were so many empty spots at their table, and the survivors were trying not to notice them. But then, there was no lack of gaping holes at any of the tables. Ginny could not stop looking at them, and she was not the only one. It took her several minutes to realize that Dumbledore had begun to speak.
“—and so, since the founding of this school, it has been our custom to hold a welcoming feast, for students new and old,” he said. There was a brief pause when the Headmaster scanned the tables of weary and frightened-looking students. They stared back at him as if hoping for a miraculous deus ex machina. A soothing proclamation that everything was going to be all right, that the adults would take care of it all, that they could be carefree children once more, and that horrible responsibilities were not about to be thrust upon them. The expressions on the faces of the teachers at the staff table were not promising in this regard. Scanning them, looking for she knew not what, Ginny caught Snape’s eye briefly. He looked back at her, inscrutable as always. But she had seen a flash of something, for just a moment. She shivered.
“Circumstances prevented us from doing so, as all of you know,” continued Dumbledore. “This morning is the first time we have all been able to gather in one place. You were fortunate enough to be brought safely back to Hogwarts. We are all fortunate that it is our place of refuge. But we will not be permitted to long hide from the outside world in it, and we must be prepared. Our world has changed, and all of us know why. Lord Voldemort—oh, yes, let the name be said—“ and he seemed not to notice the collective shudder that swept the room “—has gathered together all his followers at last, and is ready to strike. Indeed, he has already begun to do so. Now, we must stand together—“ his faded blue eyes scanned the decimated tables “—or we will fall, separately. For that reason, the Sorting Hat has decided on an action this year that has never occurred before. It has announced that in the future, it will no longer Sort incoming students into different houses.” A surprised murmur went around the tables. “And,” Dumbledore continued, “it requests that all of us, Slytherins, Gryffindors, Hufflepuffs, Ravenclaws, staff and teachers alike, seat ourselves at one great table, to signify that what unites us is far, far more important than the petty differences which divide us.”
Students looked at each other, uncertainly, and made no move to get up. The hat opened its tear near the brim and beckoned impatiently. Ernie MacMillan rose first and began awkwardly pushing tables together by himself. Several of his fellow Hufflepuffs helped him, and soon eight or nine of the tables had been made into a sort of circle. The Ravenclaws began taking the new seats next. The Gryffindors and the Slytherins—what remained of that house, anyway—glared at each other from opposite sides of the room. Then Ron got up and held his hand out to Millicent Bulstrode. They walked over to one of the tables and sat down next to each other. Hermione gave an exasperated sigh, but shrugged and followed them after a few more minutes, and many more Gryffindors followed her. Harry was actually the last holdout, but eventually even he came, watching the Slytherins distrustfully. Everyone toyed with their full plates of cold food a little more. Dumbledore waited until the students had settled down before speaking again.
“We have lost many of those near and dear to us in this great tragedy, and it will be the first of many such. It is not easy to go on after this, and knowing this, but we must. Yet what we have held to in light, we must hold to in darkness. We must trust that we will have the strength do so, even as they had the strength to fight and die for the sake of us all,” Dumbledore said quietly. “But hope remains, as it always does, and we must never forget it.”
The hall absorbed his words, silently. He snapped his fingers and a black parchment shining with a list of names in pearly white ink appeared from thin air. Dumbledore let it float down into one of his gnarled old hands. How frail they looked, Ginny thought suddenly.
“I ask you to join with me in a moment of silence for each of our beloved dead.” He cleared his throat, and began reading from the parchment.
“Zacharias Smith.”
The Hufflepuff who had so distrusted Harry, and who the twins had always teased. He had defended them all in the end, though, and put his DA training to use. That was why he had died. She’d heard that it had happened when everyone was desperately trying to deflect the deadly curses bouncing around the compartment, and he’d dove in front of one of them to protect the other students. And now he was gone.
“Frances Grey.”
A nervous little second-year Ravenclaw with a habit of chewing on the ends of her lank brown hair, Ginny remembered. She’d been unfortunate enough to get in the way when Dolohov had been chasing Hermione and Ernie MacMillan down a corridor on the train.
“Jack Sloper.”
Nobody knew if it was clumsiness that had killed him, or simply reflexes that were less than lightning-quick. Either way, he’d been hit with a Killing Curse that Harry had ducked. Ginny knew that the dead face of Cedric Diggory haunted Harry’s dreams still, and now Jack’s would join it. Ginny glanced at Harry across the table from her, staring down into his plate, his eyes blank and unfocussed. She had been emotionally numb since all of this had happened, unable to feel her own pain. But at the thought of his, her mind threatened to buckle.
“Parvati Patil.”
The names began to blur in Ginny’s ears. So many. Too many. She couldn’t hold onto them, and she reacted only to a few that she knew well, rising like drowned bodies from the sea of darkness that shrouded her now.
“Alicia Spinnet.”
Alicia, with her flashing blue eyes and ready smile, her halo of golden hair that swung round her in a circle at Quidditch practice until she would impatiently tie it up. She was dead. Nobody knew exactly how. Her body had simply been found in the wreckage of the train when the Ministry sent Aurors to investigate the next day.
“Cho Chang.”
She had been found next to Alicia.
“Anthony Summerby.”
She had hated him. In a moment of impatience that afternoon in the corridor when she was trying to keep students from walking past Umbridge’s office, she had actually wished him dead. And now he was. I thought I knew all about guilt, and grief, and loss, after what happened to me in the Chamber of Secrets. But I had no idea.
At last the terribly gentle voice stopped, and Ginny thought that this, at least, was over. But Dumbledore had not finished speaking. “I would ask only one other thing of you, as difficult as this may seem. Those we have just remembered, those we will always remember, died because they chose rightly between what was right and what was easy. But we must also grieve for those who chose… otherwise.”
An angry murmur came up from the tables as the students realized what he meant. Ron’s face turned red, and he seemed about to jump up from his seat. “Grieve for them!” he said under his breath. “I wish I could Transfigure them into mice and throw them into a roomful of cats. Except Malfoy. That’s too good for him. I’d like to shave his skin off inch by inch with a—“
“Ron!” Hermione whispered, her face appalled.
“He’s right,” Harry said roughly. “Why didn’t we kill Malfoy this spring on the train, when we had the chance? None of this would’ve happened!”
Dumbledore raised a hand for silence, and grudgingly, it fell. “I do not ask you to understand what they did, the students who went with their Death Eater parents,” he said. “I do not ask you to sympathize with them, or pity them. But I do ask you to think, and think sincerely, about how much of your energy you can afford to waste on hate. All of us are going to have very little to spare in such a manner, in the days to come. And a very wise Muggle once said that hate cannot cast out hate. Only love can do that.”
Ron made a gagging motion, and Harry snickered, his eyes cold. Only love can do that… Ginny’s eyes burned with tears, and she stared fixedly down into her plate.
No names were read, not now. But there was a long moment of silence in the Great Hall, and many tight lips, and furious white faces, as the students remembered those who had chosen otherwise. So, in her mind only, Ginny read out a name.
Draco Malfoy.
The happy, eager Draco who had tossed a Snitch up in the air on the Quidditch pitch at sunset only months before, smiling at her. The golden boy with the promise of life and life and life ahead of him. He was dead, too. No, he had never really lived, so he couldn’t very well die. He had been a mental mirage. A ghost of what could never now be. Malfoy had chosen to walk a path that led inexorably away from that potential boy. So now Ginny had to burn him out of her memory, cauterize him out. Surely all that she had just heard would be enough?
“Draco Malfoy,” Ron said in her ear, very low. She jumped, afraid for a second that she’d spoken his name aloud.
“What about Malfoy?” Ginny asked carefully.
“All of this is his fault. Every bit of it.”
“Well, he didn’t actually kill anybody—“ Ginny shut her mouth too late. Besides, she supposed that her statement really wasn’t the truth. Lucius might have administered the final, fatal curse, but Anthony Summerby had died because of Draco Malfoy. And me. Oh, yes, and me.
“None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for him.” Ron didn’t appear to be listening to her at all. Ginny wondered if he even knew she was there. But then he turned to her, and there was a deadly light in his eyes.
“I don’t know when, and I don’t know how,” Ron said. “But someday, I’m going to make him pay for what he’s done. Someday, Ginny, I’m going to get him.”
Ginny did not reply. She looked at a former Slytherin table, the one she had so furtively peered at this spring, now across from her and to her right. As if by consensus, nobody sat in Draco Malfoy’s old chair.
She looked at the empty chair and thought of what had been, and what now could never be. She couldn’t begin to guess at what had really existed between them, amorphous and unformed as it was. She certainly didn’t know what it might have become, in some impossible world where the ties and loyalties that separately bound them both had no meaning. It was as if there’d been a faint silver thread somehow connecting him and her, one that was spun in a realm beyond good and evil. But now, that thread was severed forever.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione talked to each other as they walked down the corridor after breakfast. They formed a tight little group of three, with no possible room for anybody else. Ginny passed by without the slightest interest in joining them, even if it had been possible. She overheard just one scrap of conversation.
“We have to do something about student morale,” said Hermione.
“Good luck,” snorted Ron.
“Well, we do,” Hermione insisted. “Everybody seems to think we’re all doomed, and this is the end.”
“Oh, it’s not,” Harry said dully.
“No,” said Hermione. “It’s not even the beginning of the end. But it is, I think, the end of the beginning.”
Once they reached the Gryffindor common room, the three retreated to a sofa by the fire for a long, whispered conference. Ginny was surprised to find that she really had no interest in whatever it was they were talking about. Everybody else seemed to be going to their rooms, lying on their beds, and staring at the ceiling, so she did too. After a few minutes of this activity, the restlessness in Ginny took control of her. She slipped on her shoes and a warm outer cloak, and stole down the back stairs.
Ginny wandered out to the Quidditch pitch and sat on a bench near the broom shed, where she could see the ruffled grey surface of the lake. She stared and stared at it. The freezing wind lashed her face.
She knew that they were at war after today, although nobody had said the words out loud as yet. She believed she understood at last what she had seen in Malfoy’s face when he had taken the parchment from her on the train. He had been teetering on the edge of an abyss, and now he had fallen. Had chosen to fall. Had chosen his part in what was to come, and in that choice, and that fall, he was damned. Yet he had lied to his father in order to keep her from being taken with the Death Eaters, and that was the one thing Ginny could not understand. Not that it mattered now.
I pray that nobody will ever find out what was between us this spring-- whatever that was, and I suppose I’ll never know. I think they’d kill me. And I might deserve it. But Ginny had an odd inner conviction that nobody ever would find out; that her punishment for opening a bit of herself to the fallen Draco Malfoy would be other than that. Would not be as simple as that.
She sighed, and lifted her head. Something shimmered in the air, at the very corner of her field of vision. Instinctively, she turned to look at it.
Draco Malfoy was coming towards her.
Her heart gave a great leap, even as she was frozen to the spot. He couldn’t be there. It was impossible. The wards around Hogwarts had been reset to specifically exclude any of the Malfoys, along with all the other known Death Eaters. He came closer and closer to her and then stopped several paces away.
“What – what do you want?” she asked in a quavering voice.
He didn’t reply.
“Why are you here? How’d you get in?”
He only looked at her.
“Haven’t you done enough damage already?” she asked, forcing the words through her icy lips. “I know what happened. Parvati and Alicia and all the rest are dead because of you. And Summerby—“ A hook of guilt caught in her throat at that name. “Get out. Get out or I’ll—“ Ginny rose from her seat and advanced on Draco threateningly, her wand raised. Still he stood where he was. And as she got closer, she saw the shape of the broom shed through his transparent form. She gasped, scrambling back to the bench..
Ginny was never to know what it was that she had really seen that day. It wasn’t a dream, since she knew that she hadn’t fallen asleep. And if it was a vision, it was truly a miracle without meaning. At first she thought that she saw a Sending, and what stood before her and looked at her was Draco’s fetch, his death-double. But she didn’t really believe it even at the time. And later, of course, she learned that he was not dead, although many of her friends were to pray for that event nightly and she could not blame them.
He was dressed all in black, from head to toe. That was another way she later knew that the vision had been true. The members of the resistance all heard that he never was seen to wear anything else, in the years that followed.
The Hogwarts school robes had always been black, of course. But these were somehow blacker than black, the shade of an open grave, and his fair face and shining hair rose startlingly from the darkness. Her mouth fell open, but she did not speak. He looked at her long and soberly, making no move. Just when she had gotten up all her nerve to scream, Draco raised one hand to her, as if in salute. It looked bloodless and almost skeletal against the black he wore. There was no time for her to respond before he faded, and was gone. She sat looking at the spot where he had been for a long time. I don’t know what that really was, she thought after a while, each word coming to her mind very slowly. And yet, I do. It was the ghost of my golden boy. He came back for a last farewell. And now he is gone forever.
The wind, now mixed with freezing rain, blew harshly around her ears. Her fingers and toes began to grow numb. Ginny gave a start when she felt the presence of someone behind her, and turned with a little cry. It was Professor Snape. He sat on the bench next to her.
“Miss Granger believed I’d find you here,” he said.
Ginny nodded. Why on earth did they sendSnape to find me? she wondered. Or did he come on his own? And why would he? She was a decent and methodical Potions student, not at the top of her class nor at its bottom. He ignored her presence for the most part. He didn’t favour her as he did Malfoy and the Slytherins, of course, but neither did he torment her the way he did Harry or Neville. She couldn’t understand why he’d be here now.
He cleared his throat. “Are you quite well, Miss Weasley?” he asked.
“Er, yes,” said Ginny. “Much better, anyway. My hands are still a bit sore.”
“You were in the hospital wing for quite some time, or so I heard.”
“Well, yes, I was.” This conversation was getting more surreal by the minute. Maybe she was imagining the entire thing, and that explained the vision of Malfoy. “My hands were badly injured by what happened on the train, you see, and—“
“I understand that you were locked in the baggage compartment,” Snape said abruptly, with a certain lack of his usual aplomb. He seemed almost… nervous, thought Ginny. Hasty. A little jumpy. She looked at him, sidelong, wondering how much he really understood.
“I was,” she said. “I couldn’t get out for ages—that’s how I hurt my hands, by pounding on the door. Dumbledore thinks that there was some sort of complicated Locking spell on it, but nobody knows why, or how, it was cast.”
“Ah.”
Ginny looked down at her interlocked hands. She was about to confess something that she had not told to anyone. She had no idea why this confession was fighting its way to the surface in the presence of Professor Snape while they sat together on a bench near the broom shed, but such was the case. The entire scene had the otherworldly quality of a dream, where anything might happen, no matter how unlikely its occurrence in waking life. She spoke hesitantly. “I—I sometimes think that if I hadn’t been locked in there, I could’ve-“
“Gotten yourself killed?” Snape interrupted, dryly.
“What I mean is,” she continued in a near whisper, “if I hadn’t been there, away from everyone else, the entire thing might not have happened. Not the fact that the Death Eaters showed up on the train, or that Lucius Malfoy came for his son; I don’t mean that. I mean—the deaths. Or—well—I don’t know exactly what I mean.”
“Miss Weasley,” said Snape, “one of two possibilities occur to me. Either you rate your own importance rather higher than it deserves-- which undoubtedly tends to be a Gryffindor trait-- or else you know something you’re not telling me.”
She did not reply. But he nodded as though she had.
“I believe,” Snape said after a short silence, “that we most regret the things we have left undone, whether the failure was through our own fault or not. Perhaps it’s even worse to know that we’ve tried as hard as we could, and all our effort went for nothing.”
Snape no longer sounded as if he was responding to anything she’d said—or it least it wouldn’t have sounded that way to anyone who was listening—but Ginny knew that he was indeed. Once again, she wondered how much he really knew. Draco Malfoy had been his favourite student, after all.
Snape stared out over the lake at the edge of the field, and a faint breeze ruffled a fringe of his dark hair, tucked under the hood of his cloak. “Did you know, Miss Weasley, that we are in the one place at Hogwarts where we are safe from being overheard?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t. But I’ve always liked to come here; it’s always felt—safe.”
He nodded. “It has some very curious magical properties that come from its location between the Quidditch pitch and the lake. Students are generally not informed of this fact, of course.”
Ginny waited. She could not believe that he would have told her such a secret without reason.
“Do you remember the last time I saw you?” he asked. There was a shift in his manner of speaking that was too subtle to be defined. All Ginny could really be sure of was that Snape had become a tad less formal, just a bit less stiff in his words and posture and gestures. He pushed his hood back a little, still not looking at her. She wondered what on earth was going to come next.
“Yes,” she said, since he seemed to be waiting for her to reply before he would continue. “It was—well, if you don’t count the Department of Mysteries, I suppose it was that day in Umbridge’s office, because after that I was in the hospital wing, and I didn’t go back to classes.”
“So it was.” Then he did turn and look at her, and his eyes were dark and penetrating. “I saw you in the same room with Draco Malfoy. I saw the way that he looked at you. I saw the way that you looked at him. I saw what passed between the two of you—“he held up a hand to forestall her protests “—although perhaps you yourself did not see it.”
Ginny stared at him. The world truly was turned upside down now; a Death Eater attack on the Hogwarts train seemed no less incredible than the words she heard coming out of her Potion Master’s mouth. Snape paused before continuing.
“I am going to tell you something now, Miss Weasley, that I have never told to another living being. I trust you will not repeat it?”
“Of—of course not,” she said, falteringly.
“And after we have spoken of it today, we will never refer to it again.” The wind blew cold, and she waited.
“All of the Gryffindors have always thought that I’ve favoured members of my house above all others,” he said, biting off the ends of the words as if trying not to let them get too far away from him. “But none so much as Draco Malfoy.”
“Oh.” Ginny didn’t have the faintest idea how to respond to that. “Well, I suppose so. Yes. It always has seemed to be true. Harry and Ron always have thought that it’s rather, well, unfair. Sir. I mean, Slytherins are rather… well, everyone else knows that you can’t trust them and--” She fell silent, too late.
Snape smiled, without humour. “The prejudice against Slytherin House at this school never ceases to amaze me. It isn’t made up of junior Death Eaters who are all irretrievably evil at the age of eleven, you know. Not all of the Death Eaters’ children were Slytherins, and not all Slytherins are Death Eaters in the making. You know the choice that Miss Bulstrode made, for instance. But that’s not the point, not now. The connection between us, between young Malfoy and myself, is… well, it isn’t necessary to go into details. I made a vow to someone I knew well, many years ago. Someone to whom I had… obligations. I promised to protect Draco Malfoy as best I could. To watch over him as I would over one of my own. That, I have done, or tried to do.”
Ginny’s mind whirled as she put the pieces together. I made a vow… Someone to whom I had obligations. Clearly, this mysterious someone had cared enough about Draco Malfoy to try to win protection for him during his years at Hogwarts. She remembered her brother’s words. Snape had been in love with Narcissa Malfoy, or so Millicent Bulstrode had said. Back in their schooldays, when she was still Narcissa Black. Had Snape made the connection originally with her, that strange, silent woman married to Lucius Malfoy? And Snape had said as if he were my own. Draco had been born six months before Harry, when Narcissa was barely out of Hogwarts… and a year after that, Snape became Potions Master. He had been a seventh-year when Narcissa was a fifth-year. Could he possibly have been hinting that… dear God, what a thought… that Draco might even be his son? But as quickly as the mad idea had come, Ginny had to reject it. Draco was Lucius in miniature; there hardly seemed to be any admixture of the blond Narcissa, let alone a hint of darker parentage. It wasn’t possible, and she was surprised to find herself sorry that it was so. As if he had read her mind, Snape shook his head.
“No,” he said, and his voice was very sad. “There are many things, Miss Weasley, that might have been, should have been, but aren’t. Perhaps you are familiar with this fact already? Yes? I rather thought so.”
Ginny remembered the one long kiss from her lost golden boy, now claimed by darkness. She turned her head aside so that Snape would not see her face. He knew, of course; he always seemed to know everything. But he allowed her the courtesy of not showing that he knew what she was feeling, although she was now sure that there was no living being at Hogwarts now who understood what she felt half so well as he.
“But there are battles that cannot be won,” Snape continued. “There are facts that cannot be changed. And there are… those people who cannot be saved.” The Potions Master could not have been forty, Ginny knew. But how old he looked, suddenly, with the marks of real grief on his face. She still did not speak. “Do you know what I am saying to you?” he asked abruptly. “Can you know it?”
“I think so,” she replied.
They sat next to each other in silence. Then he collected himself, and stood up, briskly.
“Miss Weasley, we will not atone for our separate sins of omission—whatever they may be—by staying out in the freezing September rain without waterproofs or an umbrella until we contract pneumonia. There have been enough deaths without adding ours to the number, and there will be more. Come with me now.” His brusque tone was not comforting, but she couldn’t have endured comfort, just then. She rose from the stone seat, very slowly, and Snape helped her up by an elbow, carefully avoiding her hands. Together, they began to walk back towards the Great Hall.
“There’s something that I’ve never told anyone, sir,” she said as they made their way across the fields. He gave her a short, keen look.
“Is it something that you ought not to tell me outside the bounds of the one place we cannot be overheard?”
“No—no, it’s not like that. It’s just that some things—well, feel as if they shouldn’t be told.” She looked up. “But I’ll tell you. ” Ginny wasn’t the least bit sure why she had said that last. Snape nodded.
“It’s about something that happened on the morning that Umbridge caught Harry trying to reach Sirius Black in her office,” she continued. Snape grimaced at the dead wizard’s name, but said nothing.
“Well, what is it?” he asked.
“Malfoy received an owl from his father at the breakfast table,” she said quickly, seeing how close they were getting to the castle. “I don’t know what was in it. But he seemed very shaken after he got it. And I always wondered, well, if it had anything to do with what happened later. Umbridge, or the Department of Mysteries, or anything else that day—and after that day, I suppose, as well. I thought that maybe that’s when Lucius Malfoy told him about what the Death Eaters were going to do later on, after they’d lured Harry to the Ministry. And also about the Summoning charm at Malfoy Manor, the one Draco Malfoy modified later so that the Death Eaters could escape from Azkaban.”
“I don’t know…” muttered Snape. “I can’t be sure about the Summoning charm—it easily could have been set up months ago, and the Death Eaters might well have brought the Malfoy heir in on that. It’s exactly the sort of thing they would do, you see, as preparation for initiating him fully into their order. You may have heard that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, Miss Weasley, but a little power is far deadlier, if only because it inevitably induces the thirst for more. Death Eaters know that. They don’t have their acolytes simply start throwing the Killing Curse at people one fine morning, you see. They don’t let them cut their teeth on rape and torture, either. No, they start with rituals that seem innocuous and work their way up. What I would really like to know, however…” He tapped a finger against his chin, and his next words clearly showed that he was engaged in the process of thinking out loud. Ginny held her breath, hardly daring to make a sound for fear she’d remind him that he really shouldn’t speak about these things in front of her. This unusual talkativeness of his must stem from the utter disruption of their world, but in this instance, at least, she would take advantage of it as long as she could.
“I wish I knew what happened at the Winter Solstice last year,” Snape said under his breath, so quietly that Ginny could barely catch the words. “And I wish I knew what they have planned for this year. It falls on Draco Malfoy’s birthday. I suppose you didn’t know that. Stonehenge is a part of Malfoy Manor… or rather, it’s the other way around. And the heelstone is aligned to the pointing star of Draco… yes… “
Ginny could not repress a gasp. The memory of Professor Binns’s lecture that spring about megaliths and constellations came flooding back to her. But Professor Snape kept speaking, and she thought at first that he hadn’t even noticed her reaction.
“No-one can ever make me believe that they didn’t involve the Malfoy heir in some sort of ritual of power on that day, a year ago. But what was it?” Abruptly, he turned to Ginny. They were crossing the fields that led up to the back of the castle, and he put a hand on her arm, halting her in the shadow of a weeping willow tree.
“Miss Weasley, I apologize in advance for asking you what I must ask. But you do not know how important it is that I receive truthful answers to my questions.”
Heat rose in Ginny’s cheeks, and she looked at the ground. She didn’t even know yet exactly what Professor Snape would ask, and she already wished herself a million miles away. But she had to answer him. Maybe this was her penance. “All right,” she mumbled.
“Did Draco Malfoy receive the Dark Mark?” he asked. “Did he have it, by the end of term?”
“How—how would I know?” Ginny replied. She had meant to snap the words back at him, but they came out sounding shaky and tentative.
“If he-“ Snape cleared his throat “- touched you—in any intimate way, I mean- you would have known. Did he do so?”
She traced a pattern in the ground with the toe of her shoe. “Yes,” she whispered.
“And do you think he bore the Mark?”
A tightness gathered in Ginny’s throat when she remembered that fevered touch in the luggage rack of the train. His hands roaming over her so briefly, but burning themselves into her soul forever. Forever. “No,” she said. “I’m sure he didn’t.”
“Ah. I see. Miss Weasley—“ Snape looked almost embarrassed, but still utterly straightlaced. A gurgle of hideously inappropriate laughter threatened to escape Ginny at the look on his face. “Please believe me when I say that I ask this next question out of no… prurient interest. If you answer in the negative, then the subject is entirely closed and need never be brought up again. But a certain balance of magical power might hinge on this very point, and—er—anyway, I’m afraid I really must ask this.”
“Please do,” said Ginny softly, hoping that her assent would put her unexpectedly prissy Potions Master out of his misery.
“Did you, ah… did you allow Draco Malfoy further intimacies with you?”
“You mean…” Ginny stared blankly at Snape for a moment. Then realization dawned on her. “Oh! No. No, we didn’t—I mean, he didn’t—he just kissed me on the Hogwarts train. That was all.” Her face was surely glowing red in the darkness.
Snape sighed with palpably evident relief. “Ah. Good. Very good.”
He clearly wanted to drop the entire subject now that he had the answer he wanted. But Ginny felt a painful curiousity rising in her. “Professor,” she asked, “what difference would it make if we—well, if we had done what you asked?”
“There’s no need to speak about it anymore. The situation will never arise again, so it is not important.” Snape walked faster.
“But what sort of magical power might have hinged on whether or not we—“
“As I was saying earlier,” Snape said, just a trifle too loudly, “Lucius Malfoy certainly told his son about the Summoning charm. And I rather think the younger Malfoy was informed about the planned attack at the Department of Mysteries, as well. I suppose he must have been. But there’s still one problem with the idea that Lucius sent the parchment, and it’s an insurmountable one as far as I can see.”
“Sir?” asked Ginny, deciding to drop her other line of questioning. They were very close to the back stairs of Hogwarts now, and Snape’s face was quite implacable.
“The very last thing Lucius would have told Draco Malfoy to do was to keep all of you safely at the school, even if you were with Umbridge. He wanted you lured out of it.”
“Oh.” Ginny felt more mystified than ever.
Snape tapped a finger against the side of his nose. “What sort of owl was it?”
“Big.” Ginny struggled to remember clearly. “An eagle owl.”
“Black?”
“No, no. White and silver, with barred wings.”
“Hmm.” Snape seemed deep in thought as they walked.
“So, er—what do you suppose was in the letter, sir?”
“I have no idea.” They were turning up the lane that led to the back entrance now. “But one thing I do know,” said Snape. “Whatever was on that parchment, Lucius Malfoy didn’t write it.”
“What!” Ginny stared at him. “How on earth can you know that, Professor?”
“Because the white and silver owl is Domitia, and she belongs to Narcissa Malfoy. Has done, since her first year at Hogwarts. And eagle owls carry messages for no-one but their owners. If Lucius had tried to tie a parchment around Domitia’s leg, he wouldn’t have got all his fingers back…no, he would have known better than to try. So the message wasn’t his…” Snape’s words trailed off as they reached the back stairs.
“There’s one more thing,” said Ginny. “I’ve only told my brother. I don’t know if he’s told anyone else, although I suppose he will tell Dumbledore. But I think you should know. Lucius Malfoy wanted to take me back with the Death Eaters. I heard him say so on the train, during the attack.”
“Did he.” Snape sounded oddly unsurprised, as if a point in doubt had simply been confirmed. Ginny wondered what was going on in his head. “So why wasn’t he able to do so?”
“Because—“ Ginny faltered. “I haven’t told this to anyone else at all, but—because Draco Malfoy lied to his father, and said Dolohov had already taken me back to wherever they were all going.”
Snape sucked in his breath sharply, and for an instant there was an odd, almost hopeful light in his eyes. “And you’re quite sure it was a lie? Couldn’t it be that he honestly believed what he said?”
“No, I’m sure. He knew where I was.”
“Indeed.” Had the faintest smile touched Snape’s thin lips, for just an instant? Ginny studied him closely. No, she decided. That was impossible. Suddenly, she felt immensely tired.
“I think I want to go back to my room and lie down,” she whispered.
“As you wish.” He escorted her to the Gryffindor stairs, and then left, his black cloak billowing behind him. Ginny watched him go. She turned and began walking up the staircase, very slowly. It stayed quietly where it was rather than shifting to a new location. She was grateful.
Rain drummed on the roof above her. At last, the storm had broken.
She trudged up the steps into the darkness of the hall above. There were several little groups in the common room, and she passed them by. She walked into her silent and barren bedroom and lay down on her maroon-curtained bed. None of her roommates were there. Ginny couldn’t remember if any of them had died in the attack, or if they had simply been among the silent groups of students clustered around the Gryffindor fireplace, staring blankly into the flames. She pulled the curtains tight and placed a Silencing charm on them, and then turned so that her head was buried in the pillow. All day long there had been an awful tightness in her throat, and she’d thought that once she was alone in her bed, she would cry and cry until there were no tears left in her. But her eyes remained dry. Ginny rolled over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling.
Slowly, she ran a hand over her brow, her cheek, her neck, her breasts, her stomach, feeling the firm smoothness of her body, the pulse that beat at her throat and wrists and chest. Alive, she thought idiotically. I’m alive. I do have that, at least.
What difference would it make if we—well, if we had done what you asked?
Ginny’s hand strayed lower. She did not try to stop her fingers moving over her aching flesh. She was trying not to think at all, to keep her mind an utter blank. The physical sensations beat back the awful fear and loneliness, at least a little bit.
So what do you want, Malfoy?
The sensory image of Draco’s long, strong fingers flooded her brain. She allowed it to happen. His fingers were between her legs now, not her own.
To finish it.
Behind the lids of her closed eyes, she saw his face bent over hers as she had seen it in the luggage compartment of the train. The image replicated itself into a host of new ones that she had never seen in life. His grey eyes grew hooded, half-lidded, as pleasure spread colour over his narrow pale face. The stray strands of his gilt hair fell over her breasts. The tendons in his lean, strong arms flexed and corded as he lowered himself upon her, and between her spread legs that tensed against the feather mattress, and into her.
And then there were no words to remember, or to say, as she cried out and writhed against the hand she pretended was his body.
Afterwards, her breathing slowing to normal, Ginny curled up on her side. One hand traced the other, absently. Her scars glowed red, and she felt the pain in them now that she had not felt earlier. She felt no guilt at all. Perhaps I should. But there was really no need for that. She would never do this again, or permit herself to think about him in that way again, or to remember what they had done again. Those few moments were a final farewell.
The situation will never arise again, so it is not important.
Snape had said it all.
Ginny reached over to her bedside table and tapped the witchlight, casting the canopied bedspace into darkness. Yes, it’s over, she thought. Whatever he was, whatever he now is, and whatever he may yet be, I will never see him again. And each word was like the peal of a great bell that tolled doom to come.
Sometimes, in later years, Ginny thought that all the suffering and misery and war and death of the time that lay ahead had been prophesied in those few words. As they formed in her mind before she fell into exhausted sleep, however, all Ginny knew was that she had never felt so right about anything. I will never see Draco Malfoy again.
But she was wrong.
~end~
The End of the Beginning
September 1995.
Well, the book should be ended. It should have ended when I lit that small candle, but it didn’t… Pray continue on to the next chapter to discover what happened next. Or you can quit now, if you like. You may come to wish that you had.
--Lestat speaks near the end of The Tale of the Body Thief, by Anne Rice, saying something very apropos to the last chapter of TBBC.
***********************************************************************
Eee…eeeee…
The whistle reverberated over and over as Ginny walked down the corridor of the moving train, sounding oddly distant and faraway. Or maybe it was just that her heart was beating loudly enough to drown out any other sound, at least in her own ears.
She’d been waiting for this opportunity all through the train ride towards home for the Christmas hols, keeping a tense eye on the passage outside the compartment where she sat with Luna and Neville. Harry and Hermione and Ron were somewhere else; she didn’t know where, they hadn’t told her and she hadn’t asked.
That had been the general pattern for everything that had happened that summer. At times, she had wondered if she could have gotten away with doing certain things, since everyone seemed to be ignoring her—secret things, forbidden things. A regular exchange of letters by owl, for instance. Or even furtive meetings in the village. There were nights when she dreamed that she awoke to see the Malfoys’ white and silver eagle owl, hovering at the window with a parchment in its claws for her. But if she ever really did see an owl there, it was Hedwig. Harry sent her little notes sometimes in early July, before he was allowed to leave the Dursleys’ house and come to the Burrow-- and then Grimmauld Place-- for the rest of the summer. How happy those few scribbled words would have made her, once. There were days, too, when she would see a blond head held at a certain angle across the street, and her breath would catch for an instant, waiting for the person to turn around. But it was never the one she wished, or feared, to see.
Dean Thomas had heard of Ginny’s expressed interest in him at the end of term, and had begun sending her notes that summer as well. Laying them side by side with Harry’s rather unexpressive missives, Ginny fully understood the difference between friendship and deeper, more subtle overtures. She didn’t know how to tell him that she’d thrown out his name at random in an attempt to distract her brother from his ghastly foray into matchmaking. Besides, she liked his keen intelligence, and his flashing grin, and the way his skin looked like smooth rich coffee with real cream in it, so unlike her freckled self. So she met him at the house in Grimmauld Place a few times over that summer. Her brothers looked at him gimlet-eyed, tried and failed to fracture his skull during “friendly” Quidditch pick-up games, and finally decided he was acceptable. But Ginny did not. She gave Dean a sister’s kiss and sent him home one sunny August afternoon. Then she walked around the pond in the little park near the house, deep in thought. Once she was sure she was alone, she sat on a large rock under a weeping willow tree at the edge of the water and unfolded a parchment from her pocket. She looked at the portrait of herself for a long time. Her fingers traced the initials in the corner over and over.
D.L.M.
Ginny wasn’t sure what she’d thought would change once she returned to school. But in September, with the start of term, nothing had changed. It was her fifth year. She had already begun to study for her O.W.L.’s, which at least brought some distant smiles of approval from Hermione as the older girl hurried from classes to meals to the library to the stands where she sat to cheer for the first Quidditch games, her brow always puckered in an abstracted frown as if her mind were very far away. Everyone seemed to be in a tremendous hurry that autumn. Harry, Ron, and Hermione were always rushing from one place to the next, pausing to whisper to each other while they clustered together in the Gryffindor common room late at night, or to exchange mysterious nods and hand signals in the corridors. They were forever disappearing into unused classrooms or private nooks in the library, or going for long walks around the lake on rainy days when nobody else was outside. Neville was often included as well, but Ginny, never. It drove her mad. There were still Dumbledore’s Army meetings—there was no need to keep it secret anymore, now that Umbridge was long gone and a thoroughly cowed Fudge had sent no-one to replace her—but Ginny was more and more convinced that the real secrets were being discussed elsewhere.
She saw Draco Malfoy’s bright head hurrying away from her at the other end of a corridor or the opposite edge of the Quidditch pitch, occasionally. She was a Chaser that year, but Gryffindor would not play Slytherin until after the winter hols. Harry was incredibly tense and jumpy that entire autumn, snapping at everyone who spoke to him, nibbling on his nails until the tips of his fingers were constantly bleeding and Hermione cast Healing charms on them, an exasperated look on her face. Every time Harry was in the same room with Draco, he watched the Slytherin boy like a hawk, one hand never more than a few inches from his wand. But Draco ignored him utterly. He never came to the Gryffindor practices anymore, but he made no special effort to avoid Harry.
It took Ginny months to figure out that Draco was avoiding her.
She didn’t know what to do about it, and knew that there was nothing she should even think about doing. So she redoubled her efforts to spy on Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Neville. Ginny began dating the latter. She tried not to think that the primary reason might be his knowledge of her friends’ plans. She never learned anything from him, anyway. Ginny frequently thought that Neville might very well tell her what she wanted to know if she asked him in the right way, but the thought of using her charms on him so coldly made her feel faintly ill. He was shy and nervous and appealing, his hands always a bit damp, his eyes always a little too anxious when they looked into hers. They kissed many times, but never anywhere that Ron had the slightest chance of catching them. He seemed afraid to go any further with her.
One rainy night the week before, after Draco Malfoy had actually bumped into her on the way to Divination and picked himself up without so much as an apology, his eyes utterly remote, Ginny had gone up to Neville’s room, her heart beating fast. He had a free hour now, she knew. He answered her tap on the door and looked at her almost fearfully.
“What is it?” he asked. “Has anything happened? Is Harry all right—and Hermione-“
A bolt of irritation shot through her at that. “They’re fine as far as I know,” she said tartly. “But I would think you’d know more than I would about that!”
Neville had flushed pink then, his mouse-brown hair seeming to stick more tenaciously to his forehead the longer she watched him.
“Are you going to keep me standing here all day?” she asked.
“No, no—of course not, come in-“ He opened the door for her. She glanced around quickly. His roommates were gone. Without a word, she walked to his bed and sat on it. He scampered to keep up with her. “What is it?” he whispered, sitting down next to her.
“Draw the curtains,” said Ginny.
He obeyed. She wondered in a detached sort of way if he would jump out of the large picture window on the far side of the wall next, if she asked. He reached out to tap the witchlight at the bedside.
“Don’t,” she said, putting a hand on his arm.
“All right.”
They sat in the darkness for a few moments. Ginny had been trying to think up some sort of pretext for coming to Neville’s room for several minutes now, but nothing sprang to mind. It wasn’t necessary, anyway. She felt his hand moving towards hers, tentatively.
A flash of lightning illuminated the room for a split second, followed by a low roll of thunder. Without thinking, Ginny threw herself into his arms. Neville gave a startled yelp. Then, slowly, he began to stroke her hair.
“I hate storms,” she said, shivering. “They make me feel so afraid… so lost… like there’s nothing solid I could ever grab onto again…”
“Shh,” said Neville, his voice very steady now.
She pulled back and looked at him. “Make me forget,” she said in a low, desperate voice.
He did not ask what she meant. Maybe he was afraid to find out, she thought later. So he kissed her passionately, his hands moving over her face and neck and shoulders as if trying to memorize them. Ginny could feel how much he wanted to please her, and knew that even in his inexperience, he was concentrating on her pleasure, not his own. Surely, surely, that must count for something. This isn’t a bit like… well, other things, mad things that I need to forget, that shouldn’t ever have happened at all…
Neville’s hands went under her robes. He looked at her questioningly. There was just enough light peeping in from one carelessly drawn bedcurtain for her to see his face. She nodded. His fingers undid the buttons of her blouse, one by one. If Ginny closed her eyes, she could almost pretend that those fingers belonged to someone else. They roamed across her breasts and squeezed the nipples, very gently. The feeling was a good one. She pressed her chest up to his hands, and he moaned into her mouth.
“Oh, Ginny,” he said.
“Shh,” she said. The voice was too high and thin, too distinctly his; her mind couldn’t make it over into a low honeyed drawl. Neville fell silent and began fumbling with the catch of her brassiere in back.
If she said nothing, Ginny decided, this thing would simply happen. She would lose her virginity to Neville Longbottom on a rainy December afternoon. He would be fumbling and awkward and utterly lacking in finesse; she doubted she’d get much pleasure out of the act. But he would also be gentle and careful and inexpressibly grateful.
And she could forget. If only for a brief space of time, Draco Malfoy would be wiped from her mind.
For an instant, the scenario played itself out in her mind with such force that it almost seemed real. She saw herself lying in his arms, afterwards. A dull pain throbbed between her legs, and an unsatisfied feeling curled in her belly. Or perhaps that last wasn’t entirely fair to Neville. He would make sure that she felt pleasure too. No, the restlessness and the wrongness would be in her mind. That was worse. Neville turned her face to his and kissed her. His expression was smeary with bliss. “I love you,” he said.
“Stop!” Ginny wrenched Neville’s hand away from her waist as the fantasy came to an abrupt end.
“Wh—what?” He blinked at her.
She sat up, pulling her clothes back around her. “We can’t do this,” she said.
“But—you’re the one who came to my room! I never would’ve—I mean, I never thought--“
It was too late. Ginny had already fled, slamming the door behind her. The last thing she saw was Neville’s befuddled face.
She stalked the third-floor corridors for half an hour, waiting for Charms class to begin, glaring at everyone who passed her. She hated herself a little for what she had just done. The worst part was that she could never really explain to Neville why she had stopped him. There was no way for her to say that she truly liked him, perhaps in a very small way even loved him because he loved her, and that she wished he would find someone who was not so torn as herself, because he deserved better than what she could have given him. Ginny paced and paced.
God, but how she wished she’d run into someone she really hated right now—Pansy Parkinson, for instance, or the dark, arrogant Blaise Zabini, or maybe Millicent Bulstrode. Although, to be fair, Millicent seemed to be scarcely speaking to any of the other Slytherins anymore. Or Draco Malfoy. She’d teach him to practically knock her down in the corridors and then ignore her! She’d smash his sneering face in. She’d pull out his silvery hair by the handfuls. She’d—
Ginny paused in a small alcove, breathing heavily. She pulled out the little parchment from her pocket and tapped it with her wand. If Filch caught her using magic between classes, even for something like this, she’d get into trouble. But that would be nothing compared to what would happen if someone caught her with this portrait of herself, and knew who’d drawn it for her. She didn’t care. She stared at it for a long time. Her hands gripped either side of it, ready to tear. But they refused to obey her, and at last she shrank it again, and put it back in her pocket.
So time had flowed on towards this day, this grey afternoon near the winter solstice, this last secret hour on the Hogwarts Express before reaching King’s Cross. Ginny had thought her options over methodically, for a long time. She was determined not to miss her opportunity now. So she had watched, tensely, and when she had at last seen Draco Malfoy walking down the corridor, not even pausing to glance at their compartment, she had leaped to her feet.
“Back in a minute,” she had said.
Luna had given her a strange look, but said nothing. Ginny started walking down the corridor as calmly as she could, trying to stay just the right distance from Draco, waiting until he turned the corner. He didn’t seem to even be aware she was behind him. If he suddenly decided to turn back or found the door he was looking for, she didn’t know what she’d do. She really didn’t dare to speak to him until they’d passed all the students. Ginny glanced through the window of one of the doors, and thought she saw Anthony Summerby getting up from a seat. Ugh. She hurried on. As if he realized that she was following him—and, of course, perhaps he did—Draco quickened his own pace. Finally they had both entered the section of the train that had the luggage compartments, and it was safe to speak. He walked all the way to the end and through the last door, and she followed him.
“Malfoy,” she said.
He turned. As soon as she saw his face, expressionless as it was, she knew that he’d known she’d trailed him there. Well, it wasn’t as if she’d really thought she would fool him.
“Weasley,” he said in an utterly neutral voice.
They stood looking at each other. The silence stretched on and on. There were deep, dark circles under his impassive eyes, Ginny saw.
“Here,” she blurted, pressing the little shrunk square of parchment into his hand. She hadn’t even been sure that she would give it back, not until she’d seen him.
He nodded.
She stood looking at him for another moment. You’ve changed were the words that wanted to leap to her lips, although she kept silent. She didn’t know how, but he had. It was the change she had seen truly begin after that last time they’d met on the Quidditch pitch, that early evening at the end of May. It had been progressing all through the autumn. And when he’d first turned to her and she’d seen his face, she’d finally known for sure that she would return the gift he had made for her.
“You shouldn’t have given this to me,” Ginny said in a rush.
“I shouldn’t have,” he agreed, his voice mild.
“Surely you must see that I can’t keep it.”
“Yes,” he said. “Surely I must.”
She wondered if he would ask why she’d waited so long to return it, but he did not. He tucked it into a pocket of his robes without another word, and turned to leave. Ginny stayed where she was. She let her robes fall over her wrists so that her hands were concealed, and clenched her fists. She had never felt such a sense of anticlimax, of words left unsaid, actions left untaken, things left unresolved. This can’t be all! But it had to be all; all there ever was, or ever could be, between them.
“Malfoy,” she said, when he had almost reached the end of the corridor. He turned back.
“Yes?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.”
He looked at her for another instant, and then the door fell shut behind him, its action strangely delayed. She looked at the closed door for a very long time.
It wasn’t until she tried its handle that she realized he had locked her in.
He still stood motionless at the end of the corridor, near to the door that led to the passenger compartments, his back to her. “Malfoy!” she yelled, pounding on the pane of glass set in the door. “What do you think you’re doing? Let me out of here! Now!” But Draco ignored her pleas, attempts at reason, and vile and empty threats. He behaved exactly as if he couldn’t hear her at all.
There was a train car between herself and the students’ compartments. Nobody heard her shouts for help. No spell that she tried would open the door. After she’d pestered Fred and George so much last summer, they had taught her a few Opening spells more esoteric than a simple Alohamora, but none of them had any effect. Ginny pushed and pulled on the door, stuck a pin from her hair in the lock and jiggled it, and finally, in frustration, kicked it hard, bruising her toe. She sank to the floor, holding her injured foot in one hand. Then, still moving down, she felt a tremendous jolt, lost her balance, and sprawled headlong on the floor of the corridor, stopping herself with her hands on the opposite wall. The train had skidded to a halt.
Ginny’s breath had been knocked out of her and she fought to get it back for several long moments. Something was trickling down her cheek. The ankle that was broken in the Department of Mysteries had healed quickly, but the wound where Pansy scratched her months before had a bad habit of re-opening if it was bumped, and her head had been hit in the fall. What… happened? We can’t be at school yet. And even if we were, surely the train wouldn’t have ground to a halt that way. Something’s wrong… very wrong… And as she lay on the floor, dazed and bleeding, she began to hear the screams.
Ginny thought later that in some ways, the next few minutes were the most nightmarish of the entire ordeal. She could see a little, and hear a little. She knew that something terrible had happened, indeed was happening. But she had no clear idea what, not yet.
Faint shouts and screams came from the outer corridors, muffled by distance. They grew in volume and intensity. Ginny heard the sound of running feet, then loud thumps and crashes. They were definitely coming from the section of the students’ compartments, or they would have been too far away to hear at all. She began pounding on the glass again and shouting at Draco, who still stood with his back turned away, and still ignored her. His hair was tousled in back, as if he, too, had fallen when the train ground to a halt, and had picked himself up again. A voice raised itself above the confusing, muffled babble.
“Where is she? If you’ve got her—if you’ve done anything to my sister-“
It was Ron, yelling at the top of his lungs so that she could just distinguish the words. He was cut off as swiftly as if he’d been broadcast over the Wizarding Wireless Network and someone had changed the channel.
“Let me out!” shrieked Ginny. “Malfoy, for the love of God, let me out, my brother’s in trouble—hurt—something, I don’t know what, and he’s calling for me!”
Draco flinched a little, but still did not turn. At last, Ginny knew that he did hear her voice.
She didn’t begin to scream in earnest until the fighting reached the corridor just past the luggage compartment.
Antonin Dolohov crossed her field of vision on the other side of the windowed door at the far end of the corridor, chasing someone or something with wand upraised, his long, pale face twisted with anger. The wizard who murdered the Prewetts, her mind automatically catalogued. And the one who hit Hermione with that curse in the Department of Mysteries, the one that we all thought had killed her, at first. The one who was locked up in Azkaban, and who escaped. But he was recaptured! What can he be doing here?
Then she saw Rookwood and Mulciber moving back and forth, back and forth, shafts of red and silver light shooting from their wands. She heard the regular, sickening thuds of bodies hitting the ground. One girl faltered and fell right in front of the door, and Ginny saw her face and braid of dark hair clearly. Parvati. It couldn’t be Padma. Padma Patil had always worn her hair up in a net of turquoise that year, so she could be easily distinguished from her sister. But those Death Eaters are back in Azkaban as well, her mind insisted numbly, trying to take in what it saw.
An enormous black cloak swirled in front of the window, blocking Ginny’s field of vision. She could see nothing for several precious seconds. When the obscuring darkness cleared, Vincent Crabbe stood in front of the door across from his father, who was advancing on him.
“Can’t do a damn thing right, can you?” snorted the elder Crabbe. He was enormously bloated and bulky, a sinister man-mountain who made his son look almost dainty. “Find Draco Malfoy. That’s all you had to do. Bring him here. He’s the one we really want. I spelled it out to you, you fool. Couldn’t even do that. By Merlin, you’ll take what’s coming to you now. Take your medicine, boy-“
He moved in front of the door again, blocking every hint of what happened next, but Ginny heard what sounded like a stampede coming down the corridor and a cacophony of confused shouts and screams. The noise was raised to fever pitch but she could still see nothing. Her voice was almost gone from all the screaming she herself had done earlier, and she could make no further sound above a hoarse peep. There was some sort of Confundus charm on the door as well as a Locking spell, she realized. Maybe on the door at the far end of the corridor too, since otherwise Ginny could not believe that no-one would have seen Draco through its window, or thought to try opening it—if they really were looking for him. But why would they be… and who were “they”? Death Eaters, her mind answered instantly. And more than that. The particular Death Eaters who had been locked in Azkaban with Lucius Malfoy in June. Ginny leaned against the door, feeling the cool glass against her fevered head. They escaped. And now they’ve come here, to the Hogwarts train.
Still Draco stood, watching everything that happened on the other side of that door, making no move. It took him a moment to react when one of the doors lining the corridor opened and Ron jumped through, his wand at the ready.
I’m here, Ron, right here! The cry formed on Ginny’s lips, and she raised her hand to pound at the door. Then a thought struck her, and she gasped. She slid all the way down the door and peeked up so she could still see what was going on, taking care to keep her head down.
“I knew it. I knew it!” said Ron, breathing heavily, his face red. “I knew you were hiding back here like the stinking coward you are, Malfoy.”
Then, slowly, Draco did turn. “Weasley,” he said in a faraway voice. He sounded as disinterested as if the two of them had been introduced to one another at a particularly dull garden party.
“Why the hell weren’t you out there?” Ron said scornfully. “They’re looking for you. They won’t leave until they’ve found you! That’s why they’re here! They came to get you—but you probably knew that, didn’t you, probably had a hand in their escape--”
Draco raised an eyebrow. “Which am I, Weasley? An evil Death Eater in training, or a stinking coward?”
“You won’t be anything after I’m through with you!”
“So why haven’t you killed me already?” Draco asked in the same almost-idle tone of voice. “Although your Defense Against the Dark Arts work always was subpar, as I recall. I doubt you could cast a decent Killing curse against an ant.”
Ron’s wand wavered at the insult, and Ginny wondered if he would try one after all. Then he took a deep breath, visibly calming himself, and walked forward until the wand’s tip was an inch from Draco’s chest. Draco didn’t move.
“Where’s my sister?” asked Ron, his voice deadly calm.
Draco shrugged. “What would make you think I’ve done anything with your miserable peasant of a sister?”
“She’s gone. Gone, and we can’t find her. And you know where she is—I know you do—“
Ron’s voice began to waver, although the wand did not, and his eyes were still fixed on Draco’s. Ginny bit her lip until she could feel it start to bleed in order to keep from crying out. What had occurred to her almost too late was that the spell on her door was most likely keyed to whoever tried to find her, as these types of Confundus charms tended to be. Anyone who had ill intent towards her would never be able to see or hear her. But someone who loved her as her brother loved her would certainly know she was there. If she said nothing, Ron might go away again, looking for her elsewhere. It was dangerous for him to be in this corridor, near Draco Malfoy. Ginny could never have said how she knew this, but she did.
Draco looked at Ron, his grey eyes unreadable. “I don’t know where she is and I don’t care. Now get the hell out, Weasley. Leave me alone.”
Ron seemed about to explode. “Didn’t you just hear what I said? The Death Eaters came here for you and they’re not leaving until they’ve found you, and they’re going to keep fighting us and—and—“ His voice faltered. “And killing until they do find you. Parvati’s dead, Malfoy.”
Draco leaned against the wall as if bored by the entire proceedings. “What do you propose that I should do about it?”
“You don’t give a damn, do you? Well, I didn’t think you would. You’ve got my sister here,” snarled Ron. “I know it. I can feel it. And if you won’t show me where she is, I’ll—I’ll get you out of the way. I’ll give the Death Eaters something to find, all right. You don’t have to be alive for that. And then I’ll find Ginny—if I have to go through you to find her, that’s just what I’ll do-- Expelliarmus! ” Ron’s voice rose suddenly, and his wand went up. But Draco snapped to sudden attention and performed a Deflecting charm, his idle demeanour gone.
The two duelled for several minutes as Ginny watched in terror. Ron was moving like lightning, faster than she had ever seen him; Draco was repelling her brother’s offensive strategy in a way that looked almost lazy, but she could tell how much skill it really took. He was preserving his energy, not wearing himself out as Ron was doing. But he also wasn’t attacking, as he so easily could have done. Ron backed Draco up the far end of the corridor, almost up against Ginny’s door, and she crouched down as far as she could. If Ron saw her now, it would break his concentration and he would lose. She couldn’t understand why Draco hadn’t really tried to hurt her brother, but surely any moment now he would. Perhaps he was simply making his own job easier by waiting until Ron was too exhausted to fight back effectively against an attack.
Then Draco glanced up, over Ron’s shoulder. “Weasley,” he said. “Get out of here. Now. ”
“I—won’t—show you any mercy, Malfoy, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Ron panted. “Ginny’s here—she’s here, I can feel it, I’m getting closer—“
And he was. He was nearly to Ginny’s door, and she curled into a small ball on the carpet, wondering if he could somehow tell that she was there anyway, in spite of her attempts to hide herself.
Draco’s hand clenched his wand more tightly. “For the love of Merlin, Weasley,” he said, a hint of desperation entering his voice for the first time, “will you forget your sister, drop the idiotic Gryffindor bravery act for once, and get the hell out?”
“Consistere, ” said Ron, aiming the wand at Draco’s heart. Ginny leaped up and gasped, propelling herself against the glass of the door and hitting it with a smack. She could not help it. She might as well have tried not to breathe. The sound was very loud in the still air of the corridor. Ron’s eyes went wide. “I knew it!” he said as he saw his sister. He turned towards her, his arms reaching out.
“Stupefacius, ” said Draco, and he took careful aim. The Stunning spell hit Ron squarely in the back. He staggered forward and dropped to the floor, slumping against the door.
The door on the left side of the corridor banged open. Anthony Summerby raced in, his own wand out. “Ron!” he yelled. “Ron, where are you—I know I saw you go this way, they sent me to find you, we need you—“ He skidded to a halt when he saw Ron lying unconscious on the floor, and Draco Malfoy standing over him with his wand drawn. Draco’s head jerked up. Without hesitation, he barked, “Deicio! ” But Summerby was still in motion, and the jet of silver light from Draco’s wand sent him off on a wild trajectory. Time itself seemed to be slowed then, each motion taking an agonizingly long time. The Hufflepuff Seeker flew uncontrollably through the air, his arms and legs flailing. He smashed against the opposite wall. His head cracked open like a rotten melon on impact, and he slid to the floor, twitching and jerking.
Ginny realized that she was wrong. She’d thought that the change in Draco Malfoy, whatever it was, had been completed that summer. But it had not. It was finishing itself now, one way or the other. His face remained as immobile as carved marble, but she somehow knew that an unimaginable process of choice and decision was going on beneath its surface. Summerby clutched spasmodically at the carpet on the floor of the corridor. He tried to move his head, and Ginny was sure for a horrible moment that the next thing she would see would be his brains spilling out of the enormous wound. The blood gushed down his jaw and shoulder and arm and was absorbed into the grey material of the carpet, turning it a dark, rusty brown.
There was horror in Draco’s eyes. Ginny was sure of that. And if there was not precisely compassion, there was the raw animal pity that any halfway normal human being feels in the presence of suffering and death.
Summerby seemed to be trying to say something. A bubble of blood formed at his lips.
The door on one side of the corridor banged open, and Lucius Malfoy came striding in. Ginny saw him with no sense of surprise. She wasn’t sure if it was because she had expected him to show up all along, or because she was in such shock that nothing could have really surprised her at this point. So that was what Draco saw when he looked over Ron’s shoulder, she thought. His father, coming down one of the side corridors to find him. I should have known. I think I did know.
He paused and stood motionless when he saw his son at the other end of the corridor with his own wand out, and for just a moment the four figures formed a frozen tableau.
“Dead?” Lucius asked, nodding towards Anthony Summerby on the floor.
Draco took a long time to answer. “Dying,” he finally said, still staring at the Hufflepuff in his pool of blood.
“Ah.”
Still, Draco stood and stared, as if so mesmerized by the rush of oncoming tragedy that he was powerless to alter its course in any way.
“We’ve no time to waste. Enough of it has already been spent in looking for you,” Lucius said, and, without ceremony he passed his wand over Anthony Summerby. “Suffocare, ” he said impatiently.
Summerby didn’t show much of a reaction. He was too far gone for that; probably already deep in coma, Ginny realized much later. His body stiffened. His breath caught in his throat with a rattle as the Garroting curse closed off his windpipe. His fingers relaxed and let go the carpet they had been clutching, and he died.
“All right then,” said Lucius, pocketing his wand. “What about Weasley… the boy… Ronald? Reginald? I saw him heading this way.”
Ginny stuffed her fist in her mouth and bit down, struggling to stay silent. As far as she could tell, the fact that Ron was so close to the protected area was protecting him, too. He was all right. He must be all right. He had only been Stunned. The phrases kept repeating themselves idiotically in her head for several precious seconds. Then Ginny shook herself free of them. She didn’t know how much longer the magical protection of the Concealing Spell would last. If she made the slightest sound and the spell was beginning to wear thin, she could give her brother away. Herself as well, but she couldn’t really seem to care about that.
Draco said nothing. He was looking in her direction without giving the slightest indication that he saw her, but she knew that he did. She brought her hands up and clasped them together in a praying motion, her eyes pleading desperately.
“Well?” Lucius glanced around the corridor. He actually looked directly at Ron for a second, but clearly did not see him. “I suppose it doesn’t matter at the moment,” he said at last. “Where’s the Weasley girl, Gwenhyfar, the one they call Ginny; do you have her?”
“No,” said Draco distantly. “Dolohov does. I saw him Disapparate with her.”
Ginny clenched onto the molding of the door until her fingers hurt to keep from crying out in surprise. Lucius Malfoy wanted to take her with them! But were the Death Eaters taking everyone… or just her? Why would they want her? How had Lucius known her full name was Gwenhyfar, when most people assumed it was Virginia? And why, why had Draco Malfoy lied?
Lucius turned back to Draco, who was looking down at Summerby again. From the angle where she stood, Ginny could not see his face.
“All you all right?” Lucius asked.
“Yes,” Draco replied, without looking up.
“I understand,” Lucius said quietly. “Believe it or not, I do. The first time you see death… or have a hand in it, however accidentally it may have come about… well… I’m sorry that it had to happen to you this way, Draco. But maybe it’s better. Yes. Maybe this makes it easier, the first time.”
Draco moistened his lips, and seemed about to say something.
Lucius Malfoy put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Come, Draco,” he said.
Ginny began beating on the glass with her fists, forgetting all her caution of a few moments earlier, knowing that Lucius could not hear her, but that Draco could. But even though the blond boy flinched with each thud of her hands, he did not turn around. The two Malfoys Disapparated, leaving only the faintest shimmer in the air where they had been. She continued to pound on the glass. It was enchanted to be unbreakable. Her flesh was not.
By the time Millicent Bulstrode stumbled into the corridor and revived Ron, Ginny’s blood was trickling down the door in little streams.
Ginny remembered almost nothing very clearly after that. She fell into her brother’s arms, weeping with relief, babbling that he was alive, alive, oh, she’d been so frightened, trying to hug him, and seeing the horror on his face. She left great smears of blood all over his robes. He whipped out his wand and said incantation after incantation over her in a choked voice, his face white, but the blood kept flowing. Much later, she learned that it had been too long since she had first begun to injure herself for the simple Healing spells to work, and anyway they were never very effective when the subject was in a highly agitated state. He yelled for help; she heard that faintly, and others came, a ring of their white faces pressed together over her. There was a great deal of noise, and she closed her eyes. Someone lifted her up and she was carried outside, into the open air. She heard the faint voices of a large group around her.
She must have blacked out briefly then, because the next thing Ginny remembered was opening her eyes to see enormous winged forms circling down to the ground, sinister, batlike, horribly graceful. One settled in for a landing and pressed close to her, its scaly, lizard-like head bobbing forward. It was impossible to tell if it was looking at her with its blank white-pupiled eyes, but it sniffed at her hands, and a bumpy black tongue shot suddenly out of its mouth. Ginny screamed, or tried to. She managed a rusty croak.
“You’ve attracted them,” said Luna’s wispy voice behind her. Her friend was paler than ever, Ginny saw, and her right arm dangled at an odd angle. Broken, Ginny thought automatically. But at least Luna was alive. There were so many voices around her, crossing and recrossing, that Ginny knew many other students must have survived as well. But she couldn’t summon enough energy to lift up her head and see. “They smelled the blood, and they came,” Luna continued. “Nobody else is bleeding as much as you. It’s lucky really, in a way.” Her voice sounded vaguer than ever.
“What are they?” whispered Ginny. They looked like Bat-Bogeys, that was it. Like giant Bat-Bogeys.
“Thestrals,” said Luna. “You’ve never seen them before, I suppose?”
“No...”
“There’s no reason why you would have done. But they’ve been at Hogwarts all along, you know.”
Hermione was directing groups of people onto the backs of the animals, Ginny saw now. A deep cut ran the entire length of her face and neck, blood congealing on its ragged edges, but she was still standing. She came closer and shouted something at Ron. He beckoned to Millicent Bulstrode, who was, incredibly, part of their group. Ginny’s eyes widened in alarm when she saw the Slytherin girl. Her family had been in at least as deep with the Death Eaters as any other. But before Ginny could even begin to protest, Millicent and Ron had lifted her onto a thestral, Luna behind her. “Keep her on,” said Hermione, shooting Millicent a cold glare of dislike. “No, Ron! You can’t go with your sister. We’ve got to get the rest—some of them are even worse off—and some are—are—“ Her voice caught, and she turned away.
“I don’t understand,” said Ginny, clutching onto the leathery skin, feeling the tendons of the bat-like wings under her fingers. Blood dripped onto the thestral’s head, running down its face. The animal stuck its tongue out to lick up every drop, purring as contentedly as a cat with a bowl of milk. A wave of sickness went over her. “I don’t understand,” she repeated. “I’m sure I never saw them before.”
“I’ve always seen them,” said Luna. “Since the day I came to Hogwarts. Hold on now.”
The thestral gave a tremendous leap into the air, and Ginny squeezed her eyes shut and grasped onto the folds of skin as hard as she could. The wings flapped and flapped, each gust of air incredibly cold. That brought her back to herself a little. She chanced a peek down at the ground. It was very far away, much further than she had ever seen when flying on her broomstick. A network of miniature brown and grey patches with little blue lines ran across the flatlands, punctuated by doll-sized trees, and moving white dots that must have been sheep. The other thestrals soared just above and below and to either side of hers, and just watching each stroke of their enormous black wings made her dizzy. I’ve got to keep it together. I’ve absolutely got to. If I faint, I’ll fall off, and I’ll die. I can’t die… I can’t do that to Ron…
“So,” she shouted back at Luna, turning her head to her friend, as the thestral seemed to know where it was going perfectly well without any input from her, “so, I still don’t understand. Why is it that I’m seeing them, when I couldn’t before?”
Luna turned her enormous silvery-blue eyes on Ginny. “Well,” she said quietly, “we can all see them now.”
And, remembering Hagrid’s lesson on thestrals last year, Ginny understood. She leaned her head against the scaly neck, numbly.
It was a long journey back to the southern part of Scotland, even by the routes the thestrals took, and her grasp on consciousness slipped a little further with each moment that passed. At last, the only thing anchoring her to reality seemed to be her sense of hearing. The last thing to go when you die, she thought dreamily. That’s what I’ve always heard. I wonder if I’m dying. Dumbledore once called it the next great adventure. I heard that too. Can’t remember where. But all the way to Hogwarts, Ginny heard the slurp, slurp, slurp of the thestral licking at her blood, and she knew that she still lived.
There was a sharp downward-pulling sensation in the pit of her stomach. She felt the thud of landing. At last she could let her grasp slip, and she slid towards the ground. Strong arms caught her, and, smelling the apple-cinnamon scent of her brother, she knew that Ron had her safely now. She closed her eyes and let darkness roll over her.
***********************************************************************
White. Everything around her was white. She was looking at a slightly nubbly white expanse of ceiling, and sheets of coarser white material were hung around her on all sides. Slowly she looked down. Her hands were resting on a white coverlet. She examined them curiously, as if they belonged to someone else. They were thinner, but looked healed. A very faint tracery of scars formed a network on them. Ginny tried to sit up. The sheets surrounding her bed moved, and Hermione came through them. She looked thinner, more tired, and somehow older than she had done before—how many days before, Ginny wondered. But her face lit up when she saw her friend.
“You’re awake!” she said delightedly.
“How—how long have I been here? And where-“ Ginny’s voice felt rusty, as if she hadn’t used it in a long time.
“The hospital wing,” Hermione replied, sitting on a small chair next to the bed.
“Oh. Bit thick of me not to guess that right away,” Ginny croaked.
Hermione laid a finger on her friend’s lips. “Don’t try to talk. And it’s not thick at all. We almost didn’t make it here.”
“We?”
“The students who were on the Hogwarts train. In the- the attack—“ Hermione hesitated. “Ginny, how much do you remember?” The bedcurtains parted again to admit Ron. His eyes widened when he saw his sister sitting up.
“Ginny!” he said, and then he was kneeling by the side of the bed and she was in her arms; he crushed her to him and buried his face in her hair with long, shuddering breaths. “You’re all right,” he kept whispering. “You’re all right.”
“Of course she’s all right!” snapped Hermione. “But she won’t be if you squash her to death. Honestly, Ron. She was unconscious for three days.”
“Three days?” asked Ginny. “But what—who-“
“You’re one to talk,” Ron replied to Hermione. “Don’t ask her questions right now, for Merlin’s sake!”
Ginny held up a hand between her brother and her friend, who had begun to glare at each other over the bed. “Please, don’t argue,” she said faintly. “Only I have to know what’s been going on. Do tell me.”
“Ron’s right,” sighed Hermione, as if she loathed to admit the fact. “We should both go away and let you rest.”
“But-“ Ginny protested, attempting to sit up further. With a hand, Ron pushed her back down.
“Madam Pomfrey had a job of it, healing your hands,” he said. “She—she said you’d always have the scars, Ginny. You can’t overdo things now.”
“But I need to know-“
“You need to rest,” Hermione said firmly.
“But if I don’t know, I won’t do anything but think and worry,” argued Ginny. “I won’t get a bit more sleep. Come on. Please.” She looked from one to the other. Hermione gave a deep sigh.
“All right. I do see your point, I suppose. We’ll tell you a bit if you promise to go to sleep after that.”
Ginny nodded.
Hermione settled herself more comfortably in the chair, Ron at her side on the floor. She took a deep breath. “There was a Death Eater attack on the Hogwarts train,” she said without preamble. “No warning at all. The first thing we all knew was that the train ground to a halt very suddenly, so everybody figured out that something was wrong right away.”
“Everybody? Who was ‘everybody’?” asked Ginny. Incredibly, a bit of resentment flared up in her.
“Well, the DA members. We were all in one compartment, discussing some plans for the autumn. But at first I thought there’d been an accident, or something--“
“Why weren’t we there? Neville, and Luna, and me?” Ginny could not help asking.
“Neville was there. He left to check on the pair of you. Luna—well, she’s not called Loony Lovegood for nothing, you know,” Hermione said primly. “We didn’t want her in on this particular discussion.”
“And me? What about me; why wasn’t I included?”
Hermione and Ron exchanged glances. “We thought it was better that way,” Hermione finally said. “It might have been dangerous for you to know.”
“Who decided this?” retorted Ginny, swinging on her brother. “You? Or you did say ‘we;’ maybe it was all of you. That was it, wasn’t it, Ron?”
“She’s becoming agitated,” Hermione said. “We’d better leave.”
Ginny plucked at Ron’s arm as he got up to go. “Don’t you dare!” she hissed. “You’re telling me exactly what happened! If you’d only told me at the time—“ She stopped. She would not say the words that had leapt to her lips. If you’d told me at the time, I would have been in that compartment with the rest of you. I wouldn’t have gone out to find Malfoy to give him back the parchment. And then—and then— Anthony Summerby’s sightless eyes looked up at her from memory, accusingly.
“All right,” Hermione said soothingly, sitting back down. “Don’t upset yourself, Ginny, please, or we really will go. We were only discussing defensive tactics for next term, that’s all. We didn’t really understand why Voldemort—dry up, Ron—and the Death Eaters hadn’t made any overt moves yet. I suppose we all thought they might soon, but we weren’t expecting anything like—well, what happened.”
And you thought I couldn’t handle a discussion like that. Ginny pressed her lips tightly shut. She would not say another word that might jeopardize her chances of finding out the truth.
“Anyway,” Hermione continued, “we all thought at first that it had only been an accident. Zach Smith was just getting up from the floor, I remember, and talking about seeing if people in the other cars were all right, when we saw—we saw-“ Her voice caught.
“Death Eaters coming down the corridor,” Ron continued grimly. “Lucius Malfoy first. I thought it was Draco Malfoy for a second; they look almost exactly the same, but then I recognized Rookwood behind him, and Avery—Dolohov too, and all the rest. The ones who’d been in Azkaban. They broke out.”
“How did it happen?” whispered Ginny.
“Nobody’s completely sure,” said Ron. “But they think Lucius Malfoy was behind it. He’d left some sort of automatic Summoning charm at Malfoy Manor before he left for the Department of Mysteries on that—that night, in June. I don’t really understand how it works, but-“
“It creates a link between the wizard or witch who originally creates the spell, and the location in which it was cast,” Hermione interrupted. “No Summoning charm can break the Azkaban wards on its own, of course. But with a bit of outside help at the right time, theirs did, and—“
“I was going to explain properly,” said Ron, his voice sulky, “if you’d given me one more second, Hermione. Anyway, the point is that Lucius Malfoy escaped, and took all the others with him. The train’s the first place they all went. Personally, I think they laid spells that gave them control over its magic, or they couldn’t have Apparated so easily.” Ron gave Hermione a smug little smile, as if to say that he, too, could figure out these important points.
“But—but what were they there to do? Just to terrorize everyone, or—“
“I’m getting to that.” Ron’s face sobered. “They fought us, all right. In all the confusion, nobody even had time to think about why, at first, or what was really going on. But they had a purpose. We didn’t find out all about it until we got back to Hogwarts, and counted who was with us, living or—or dead, and who had gone with the Death Eaters.”
“Dead?” asked Ginny.
Ron closed his eyes. “Not now, Ginny. Not right now. Let me finish the story first.”
“I saw the fighting as well, Ron,” Hermione pointed out. “We were running down the corridors, in and out of students’ compartments—oh, there was so much confusion, Ginny. It looked as if we were winning, for a while. But then I saw why there were fewer Death Eaters every minute. They were Disapparating with students, rounding them up and taking several at a time.” She dropped her chin in her hands. “Some of the students, that is.”
A chill struck Ginny. “Let me guess. All Death Eaters’ children, weren’t they?”
Hermione nodded. “Mostly Slytherins, but not all. And they all went without fighting as far as I could see. Except Bulstrode, Millicent Bulstrode—she struggled and wouldn’t go, and they finally left her. Surprising, isn’t it?”
“She fought beside us, too. I couldn’t have gone to find Ginny if she hadn’t covered for me. Not a bad sort, for a Slytherin,” Ron said grudgingly. Ginny thought that he also seemed to trying to hide a little smile, however. “But don’t forget the most important point, Hermione! The Death Eaters seemed to be still-“
“Looking for someone, yes. I was getting to that,” Hermione said. “We figured out that it had to be Malfoy. Draco Malfoy, I mean. And that they weren’t leaving until they found him. Oh, they took everyone else who was the child of a Death Eater—clever idea to do it that way, really, since the Hogwarts train travels through places that aren’t exactly real, and there’s no chance of any sort of normal help arriving. But Malfoy was the prize. And they weren’t leaving until they had him. So they kept fighting us, and then—and then-”
“Parvati died,” Ron said flatly to Ginny. “She was the first. Not the last, though. There were still more than enough Death Eaters left, and Mulciber went a bit mad after that, started hitting everybody with curses. The rest followed his lead. I think they started to think we were hiding Malfoy and wouldn’t bring him out for them to take. As if.” He turned to Hermione. “Let me tell the rest. Let me finish the story. The rest of it’s mine anyway. You didn’t see it.”
The other girl nodded. Her face was beginning to look a bit pale.
Ron took Ginny’s hand, very gently, and traced her fingers. “Nobody knew where you were,” he said quietly. “You’d disappeared. It took us some time to realize it, Ginny. But when I did, I knew I had to find you. And I had the oddest feeling that I could, that I might not know where you were, but I’d be drawn to you. As if you were a magnet, and I was metal. So—I started off down the side corridors.” He raised his head to Hermione. “And I don’t need to hear again how I left all of you in the lurch,” he said, an edge to his voice. “I had to find Ginny.”
Hermione bent her head without a word.
“Everything’d been happening in the students’ compartments,” Ron continued. “But I felt that you weren’t anywhere near there, so I began looking in the next car, where the luggage was. And that’s when I found Malfoy.” His face took on an ugly look. “The slimy cowardly little bastard was hiding. At the time I didn’t know if he realized his father and the Death Eaters were looking for him and lost his nerve, or what—well, I suppose you can’t lose what you never had, but anyway, there he was in the back luggage car, not giving a damn that they were tearing the train apart trying to find him. And I somehow knew, Ginny, that he knew where you were. But he wouldn’t tell me. So we dueled. I would’ve been happy to kill him by then; if he wasn’t going to tell me, I’d find you on my own. Gods, but I wish I had killed him.” Ron rubbed his closed eyes with his fingertips. “But then I heard your voice, Ginny, coming from behind me. I turned and saw you behind the door to the luggage compartment. And that’s when Malfoy hit me in the back with a Stunning spell.”
“You—you said that you didn’t know at the time what he was doing there,” Ginny said in a hoarse whisper.
“Well, we found out a few things afterwards.” Ron’s eyes went cold. “As near as Dumbledore can tell, Malfoy—Draco Malfoy, I mean, although it hardly seems as if we need to even try to tell those two apart anymore-- set up a final link for the Summoning spell at their manor in Wiltshire. That’s why his father and all the other Death Eaters were finally able to escape Azkaban. So he must have known that they were coming. We still don’t know why he was hiding in the luggage compartment instead of welcoming them with open arms, but it doesn’t matter now.”
Ginny looked down at her scarred hands and was silent. Hermione picked up the story.
“My guess is that Lucius Malfoy found his son after that, and Disapparated with him, because that was when all the Death Eaters disappeared. We—the ones who were still able to move, I mean—found you and Ron on the floor of the luggage car. And Summerby, of course, but it was too late for him, too late to help. You were—“ She swallowed. “You were bleeding all over Ron, Ginny. Oh, you’d lost so much blood. I didn’t—I didn’t think you were going to make it. Luckily, the thestrals came.” Hermione gave a shaky laugh. “None of us had any trouble seeing them, that’s for sure. And they took us to Hogwarts. Madam Pomfrey didn’t know what hit her. Almost everybody had to come to the hospital wing for treatment, and—and then there were the dead.”
All three of them were silent for a moment. Ginny did not want to ask who had died. She’d find out soon enough.
“Everyone’s pretty much well now, who was here with you,” Hermione said in a forced, bright tone. “You were about the last one, Ginny. Dumbledore’s speaking to us all tomorrow morning, do you think you’ll be up for that?”
“Yes,” Ginny murmured, staring at the blowing white curtains around the bed.
“All the teachers are here,” Hermione continued. “Thank God they don’t take the train. So that’s one good thing at least.”
“We could’ve stood to lose Snape,” said Ron.
“Honestly, Ron! We can’t afford to lose anyone else.”
“Even when they’re traitors?” Ron retorted.
“He hasn’t done anything traitorous at all. He’s spied for our side at great personal risk to himself and he’s gotten us out of trouble and danger loads of times. You’re just prejudiced because Harry hates him so much. God knows why, since he’s saved Harry’s life more than—“
“Leopards don’t change their spots, or don’t you remember hearing that?” Ron shot back.
“I certainly do. Barty Crouch said it when he was masquerading as Professor Moody . Really trustworthy source—“
“Don’t you remember what Millicent told us?” Ron shouted back. “Snape’s in deep with the Malfoys and always has been. Even deeper than we thought! When Sirius said Snape was Lucius Malfoy’s lapdog, he didn’t tell us the half of it. Although I’ll bet he knew.”
“Try to be reasonable, Ron,” snapped Hermione. “Or at least make an effort! All right, so maybe Snape was in love with Draco Malfoy’s mother almost twenty years ago, when they were both at Hogwarts. Doesn’t that prove a whole bloody lot. Let’s all listen to stories from Millicent Bulstrode, the girl you used to refer to as an evil Slytherin cow and the one you’re now calling by her first name—“
“I trust Milla,” Ron yelled at Hermione, clenching his hands into fists, “because she could’ve gone with the Death Eaters and saved her own skin very easily, and she didn’t. She came with us!”
“Oh, so it’s Milla now, is it?”
“The Sorting Hat wanted to put her in Hufflepuff anyway—she told me,” Ron continued doggedly. “She’s sorry for what she did to you that day in Umbridge’s office. She’s apologized and apologized; she was just following orders from Parkinson, you know. And she’s a pureblood; she’s Snape’s cousin and Malfoy’s, my cousin too, if it comes to that, so she’s heard things, and she knows what she’s talking about—“
“But you won’t apply the same sort of logic to Snape,” Hermione yelled back. “Oh, I forgot! The word logic isn’t in your vocabulary at all, is it?”
The two stood glaring at each other, chests heaving, as Ginny tried to process everything they had said. She gave a little moan of frustration and fell back to the coverlet. It was suddenly too much for her. At that slight sound, Ron and Hermione glanced down, breaking their furious stare.
“That’s enough,” said Hermione. Her face was blotchy and her eyes bright with unshed tears. “It’s more than enough. Go to sleep now, Ginny.”
Ginny was too exhausted to muster even the semblance of an argument. Her eyes closed and her head fell back on the pillow. Hermione and Ron kept whispering furiously at each other just outside the drapes around her bed, and finally Hermione’s shoes tapped down the corridor, each click very distinct, the way her walk always sounded when she was angry. Ginny raised her head.
“Ron,” she whispered.
Her brother’s head popped in between the white curtains. “You shouldn’t still be awake! D’you need a Sleeping draft? I’ll get Madam Pomfrey-”
“No—no.” Ginny took a deep breath. “Come here, Ron, please.”
He walked back towards her and sat at her bedside. “I suppose you heard us arguing, Ginny. Well, it’s nothing to worry about; it’s just that Hermione is the most impossible—“
“I don’t care about that,” sighed Ginny. “I need to tell you something else. It’s about what happened on the train.”
Ron sucked in his breath. “I knew it. I knew there was more. Ginny, did Malfoy lure you into the luggage compartment? Did he hurt you? Did he—“
“No, Ron, no.” Strictly speaking, that was true. “It’s about something Lucius Malfoy said.”
“Tell me.”
Ginny looked down at her interlaced fingers. She still wasn’t sure if she should tell Ron or not. In years to come, she was to wonder if it had really been such a good idea. But she didn’t see how she could avoid the telling, when this piece of information might be important to the fight that was coming. “He asked his son if he had me, because the Death Eaters wanted to take me with them.”
“So that slimy little piece of shite did lure you there! I can’t wait until we get ahold of him. I’m going to cut his balls off and feed them to a Crumple-Horned Snorck—“
“Will you please listen to me, Ron! I’m not done!” Ginny’s voice caught, and she went into a fit of coughing.
“Sorry,” said Ron in an abashed voice, scrambling to his feet. When he returned to her bedside with a glass of water, he seemed calmer.
“Draco Malfoy told his father that Dolohov already Disapparated with me,” said Ginny, between sips. “Then both of them left.”
Ron stared at her. “Malfoy must not have seen you,” he finally said. “That’s the only explanation.”
“I’m sure you’re right.” Ginny decided not to tell her brother anything more.
“I wonder where that spell came from though, the one that locked you into the luggage compartment…” mumbled Ron. “I suppose it was some leftover magic or other. That train’s a queer place. Well, it’s not important now. It kept you safe and that’s the only thing that matters. I wish I knew who cast it originally, though. Wish I could thank him.”
No, you don’t, thought Ginny.
He leaned down to her, hugging her awkwardly, avoiding her hands. “But I’m going to protect you from now on, Ginny. Always. I’ll never leave your safety to chance again. I swear it. I swear by—by everything.”
She closed her eyes again, and did not respond. The last sound she heard was her brother tiptoeing out of the room.
The enchanted sky over the Great Hall of Hogwarts was a flat, bright grey the next morning. It would rain hard that day, and was already drizzling. Breakfast was being served, although nobody seemed to eat much. Ginny looked down the Gryffindor table. Hermione was picking up her spoon, trailing it through her oatmeal, and letting it fall again, over and over. Harry had been chewing on the same rasher of bacon for twenty minutes. Ron swirled his pumpkin juice around in a cup without tasting it. There were so many empty spots at their table, and the survivors were trying not to notice them. But then, there was no lack of gaping holes at any of the tables. Ginny could not stop looking at them, and she was not the only one. It took her several minutes to realize that Dumbledore had begun to speak.
“—and so, since the founding of this school, it has been our custom to hold a welcoming feast, for students new and old,” he said. There was a brief pause when the Headmaster scanned the tables of weary and frightened-looking students. They stared back at him as if hoping for a miraculous deus ex machina. A soothing proclamation that everything was going to be all right, that the adults would take care of it all, that they could be carefree children once more, and that horrible responsibilities were not about to be thrust upon them. The expressions on the faces of the teachers at the staff table were not promising in this regard. Scanning them, looking for she knew not what, Ginny caught Snape’s eye briefly. He looked back at her, inscrutable as always. But she had seen a flash of something, for just a moment. She shivered.
“Circumstances prevented us from doing so, as all of you know,” continued Dumbledore. “This morning is the first time we have all been able to gather in one place. You were fortunate enough to be brought safely back to Hogwarts. We are all fortunate that it is our place of refuge. But we will not be permitted to long hide from the outside world in it, and we must be prepared. Our world has changed, and all of us know why. Lord Voldemort—oh, yes, let the name be said—“ and he seemed not to notice the collective shudder that swept the room “—has gathered together all his followers at last, and is ready to strike. Indeed, he has already begun to do so. Now, we must stand together—“ his faded blue eyes scanned the decimated tables “—or we will fall, separately. For that reason, the Sorting Hat has decided on an action this year that has never occurred before. It has announced that in the future, it will no longer Sort incoming students into different houses.” A surprised murmur went around the tables. “And,” Dumbledore continued, “it requests that all of us, Slytherins, Gryffindors, Hufflepuffs, Ravenclaws, staff and teachers alike, seat ourselves at one great table, to signify that what unites us is far, far more important than the petty differences which divide us.”
Students looked at each other, uncertainly, and made no move to get up. The hat opened its tear near the brim and beckoned impatiently. Ernie MacMillan rose first and began awkwardly pushing tables together by himself. Several of his fellow Hufflepuffs helped him, and soon eight or nine of the tables had been made into a sort of circle. The Ravenclaws began taking the new seats next. The Gryffindors and the Slytherins—what remained of that house, anyway—glared at each other from opposite sides of the room. Then Ron got up and held his hand out to Millicent Bulstrode. They walked over to one of the tables and sat down next to each other. Hermione gave an exasperated sigh, but shrugged and followed them after a few more minutes, and many more Gryffindors followed her. Harry was actually the last holdout, but eventually even he came, watching the Slytherins distrustfully. Everyone toyed with their full plates of cold food a little more. Dumbledore waited until the students had settled down before speaking again.
“We have lost many of those near and dear to us in this great tragedy, and it will be the first of many such. It is not easy to go on after this, and knowing this, but we must. Yet what we have held to in light, we must hold to in darkness. We must trust that we will have the strength do so, even as they had the strength to fight and die for the sake of us all,” Dumbledore said quietly. “But hope remains, as it always does, and we must never forget it.”
The hall absorbed his words, silently. He snapped his fingers and a black parchment shining with a list of names in pearly white ink appeared from thin air. Dumbledore let it float down into one of his gnarled old hands. How frail they looked, Ginny thought suddenly.
“I ask you to join with me in a moment of silence for each of our beloved dead.” He cleared his throat, and began reading from the parchment.
“Zacharias Smith.”
The Hufflepuff who had so distrusted Harry, and who the twins had always teased. He had defended them all in the end, though, and put his DA training to use. That was why he had died. She’d heard that it had happened when everyone was desperately trying to deflect the deadly curses bouncing around the compartment, and he’d dove in front of one of them to protect the other students. And now he was gone.
“Frances Grey.”
A nervous little second-year Ravenclaw with a habit of chewing on the ends of her lank brown hair, Ginny remembered. She’d been unfortunate enough to get in the way when Dolohov had been chasing Hermione and Ernie MacMillan down a corridor on the train.
“Jack Sloper.”
Nobody knew if it was clumsiness that had killed him, or simply reflexes that were less than lightning-quick. Either way, he’d been hit with a Killing Curse that Harry had ducked. Ginny knew that the dead face of Cedric Diggory haunted Harry’s dreams still, and now Jack’s would join it. Ginny glanced at Harry across the table from her, staring down into his plate, his eyes blank and unfocussed. She had been emotionally numb since all of this had happened, unable to feel her own pain. But at the thought of his, her mind threatened to buckle.
“Parvati Patil.”
The names began to blur in Ginny’s ears. So many. Too many. She couldn’t hold onto them, and she reacted only to a few that she knew well, rising like drowned bodies from the sea of darkness that shrouded her now.
“Alicia Spinnet.”
Alicia, with her flashing blue eyes and ready smile, her halo of golden hair that swung round her in a circle at Quidditch practice until she would impatiently tie it up. She was dead. Nobody knew exactly how. Her body had simply been found in the wreckage of the train when the Ministry sent Aurors to investigate the next day.
“Cho Chang.”
She had been found next to Alicia.
“Anthony Summerby.”
She had hated him. In a moment of impatience that afternoon in the corridor when she was trying to keep students from walking past Umbridge’s office, she had actually wished him dead. And now he was. I thought I knew all about guilt, and grief, and loss, after what happened to me in the Chamber of Secrets. But I had no idea.
At last the terribly gentle voice stopped, and Ginny thought that this, at least, was over. But Dumbledore had not finished speaking. “I would ask only one other thing of you, as difficult as this may seem. Those we have just remembered, those we will always remember, died because they chose rightly between what was right and what was easy. But we must also grieve for those who chose… otherwise.”
An angry murmur came up from the tables as the students realized what he meant. Ron’s face turned red, and he seemed about to jump up from his seat. “Grieve for them!” he said under his breath. “I wish I could Transfigure them into mice and throw them into a roomful of cats. Except Malfoy. That’s too good for him. I’d like to shave his skin off inch by inch with a—“
“Ron!” Hermione whispered, her face appalled.
“He’s right,” Harry said roughly. “Why didn’t we kill Malfoy this spring on the train, when we had the chance? None of this would’ve happened!”
Dumbledore raised a hand for silence, and grudgingly, it fell. “I do not ask you to understand what they did, the students who went with their Death Eater parents,” he said. “I do not ask you to sympathize with them, or pity them. But I do ask you to think, and think sincerely, about how much of your energy you can afford to waste on hate. All of us are going to have very little to spare in such a manner, in the days to come. And a very wise Muggle once said that hate cannot cast out hate. Only love can do that.”
Ron made a gagging motion, and Harry snickered, his eyes cold. Only love can do that… Ginny’s eyes burned with tears, and she stared fixedly down into her plate.
No names were read, not now. But there was a long moment of silence in the Great Hall, and many tight lips, and furious white faces, as the students remembered those who had chosen otherwise. So, in her mind only, Ginny read out a name.
Draco Malfoy.
The happy, eager Draco who had tossed a Snitch up in the air on the Quidditch pitch at sunset only months before, smiling at her. The golden boy with the promise of life and life and life ahead of him. He was dead, too. No, he had never really lived, so he couldn’t very well die. He had been a mental mirage. A ghost of what could never now be. Malfoy had chosen to walk a path that led inexorably away from that potential boy. So now Ginny had to burn him out of her memory, cauterize him out. Surely all that she had just heard would be enough?
“Draco Malfoy,” Ron said in her ear, very low. She jumped, afraid for a second that she’d spoken his name aloud.
“What about Malfoy?” Ginny asked carefully.
“All of this is his fault. Every bit of it.”
“Well, he didn’t actually kill anybody—“ Ginny shut her mouth too late. Besides, she supposed that her statement really wasn’t the truth. Lucius might have administered the final, fatal curse, but Anthony Summerby had died because of Draco Malfoy. And me. Oh, yes, and me.
“None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for him.” Ron didn’t appear to be listening to her at all. Ginny wondered if he even knew she was there. But then he turned to her, and there was a deadly light in his eyes.
“I don’t know when, and I don’t know how,” Ron said. “But someday, I’m going to make him pay for what he’s done. Someday, Ginny, I’m going to get him.”
Ginny did not reply. She looked at a former Slytherin table, the one she had so furtively peered at this spring, now across from her and to her right. As if by consensus, nobody sat in Draco Malfoy’s old chair.
She looked at the empty chair and thought of what had been, and what now could never be. She couldn’t begin to guess at what had really existed between them, amorphous and unformed as it was. She certainly didn’t know what it might have become, in some impossible world where the ties and loyalties that separately bound them both had no meaning. It was as if there’d been a faint silver thread somehow connecting him and her, one that was spun in a realm beyond good and evil. But now, that thread was severed forever.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione talked to each other as they walked down the corridor after breakfast. They formed a tight little group of three, with no possible room for anybody else. Ginny passed by without the slightest interest in joining them, even if it had been possible. She overheard just one scrap of conversation.
“We have to do something about student morale,” said Hermione.
“Good luck,” snorted Ron.
“Well, we do,” Hermione insisted. “Everybody seems to think we’re all doomed, and this is the end.”
“Oh, it’s not,” Harry said dully.
“No,” said Hermione. “It’s not even the beginning of the end. But it is, I think, the end of the beginning.”
Once they reached the Gryffindor common room, the three retreated to a sofa by the fire for a long, whispered conference. Ginny was surprised to find that she really had no interest in whatever it was they were talking about. Everybody else seemed to be going to their rooms, lying on their beds, and staring at the ceiling, so she did too. After a few minutes of this activity, the restlessness in Ginny took control of her. She slipped on her shoes and a warm outer cloak, and stole down the back stairs.
Ginny wandered out to the Quidditch pitch and sat on a bench near the broom shed, where she could see the ruffled grey surface of the lake. She stared and stared at it. The freezing wind lashed her face.
She knew that they were at war after today, although nobody had said the words out loud as yet. She believed she understood at last what she had seen in Malfoy’s face when he had taken the parchment from her on the train. He had been teetering on the edge of an abyss, and now he had fallen. Had chosen to fall. Had chosen his part in what was to come, and in that choice, and that fall, he was damned. Yet he had lied to his father in order to keep her from being taken with the Death Eaters, and that was the one thing Ginny could not understand. Not that it mattered now.
I pray that nobody will ever find out what was between us this spring-- whatever that was, and I suppose I’ll never know. I think they’d kill me. And I might deserve it. But Ginny had an odd inner conviction that nobody ever would find out; that her punishment for opening a bit of herself to the fallen Draco Malfoy would be other than that. Would not be as simple as that.
She sighed, and lifted her head. Something shimmered in the air, at the very corner of her field of vision. Instinctively, she turned to look at it.
Draco Malfoy was coming towards her.
Her heart gave a great leap, even as she was frozen to the spot. He couldn’t be there. It was impossible. The wards around Hogwarts had been reset to specifically exclude any of the Malfoys, along with all the other known Death Eaters. He came closer and closer to her and then stopped several paces away.
“What – what do you want?” she asked in a quavering voice.
He didn’t reply.
“Why are you here? How’d you get in?”
He only looked at her.
“Haven’t you done enough damage already?” she asked, forcing the words through her icy lips. “I know what happened. Parvati and Alicia and all the rest are dead because of you. And Summerby—“ A hook of guilt caught in her throat at that name. “Get out. Get out or I’ll—“ Ginny rose from her seat and advanced on Draco threateningly, her wand raised. Still he stood where he was. And as she got closer, she saw the shape of the broom shed through his transparent form. She gasped, scrambling back to the bench..
Ginny was never to know what it was that she had really seen that day. It wasn’t a dream, since she knew that she hadn’t fallen asleep. And if it was a vision, it was truly a miracle without meaning. At first she thought that she saw a Sending, and what stood before her and looked at her was Draco’s fetch, his death-double. But she didn’t really believe it even at the time. And later, of course, she learned that he was not dead, although many of her friends were to pray for that event nightly and she could not blame them.
He was dressed all in black, from head to toe. That was another way she later knew that the vision had been true. The members of the resistance all heard that he never was seen to wear anything else, in the years that followed.
The Hogwarts school robes had always been black, of course. But these were somehow blacker than black, the shade of an open grave, and his fair face and shining hair rose startlingly from the darkness. Her mouth fell open, but she did not speak. He looked at her long and soberly, making no move. Just when she had gotten up all her nerve to scream, Draco raised one hand to her, as if in salute. It looked bloodless and almost skeletal against the black he wore. There was no time for her to respond before he faded, and was gone. She sat looking at the spot where he had been for a long time. I don’t know what that really was, she thought after a while, each word coming to her mind very slowly. And yet, I do. It was the ghost of my golden boy. He came back for a last farewell. And now he is gone forever.
The wind, now mixed with freezing rain, blew harshly around her ears. Her fingers and toes began to grow numb. Ginny gave a start when she felt the presence of someone behind her, and turned with a little cry. It was Professor Snape. He sat on the bench next to her.
“Miss Granger believed I’d find you here,” he said.
Ginny nodded. Why on earth did they sendSnape to find me? she wondered. Or did he come on his own? And why would he? She was a decent and methodical Potions student, not at the top of her class nor at its bottom. He ignored her presence for the most part. He didn’t favour her as he did Malfoy and the Slytherins, of course, but neither did he torment her the way he did Harry or Neville. She couldn’t understand why he’d be here now.
He cleared his throat. “Are you quite well, Miss Weasley?” he asked.
“Er, yes,” said Ginny. “Much better, anyway. My hands are still a bit sore.”
“You were in the hospital wing for quite some time, or so I heard.”
“Well, yes, I was.” This conversation was getting more surreal by the minute. Maybe she was imagining the entire thing, and that explained the vision of Malfoy. “My hands were badly injured by what happened on the train, you see, and—“
“I understand that you were locked in the baggage compartment,” Snape said abruptly, with a certain lack of his usual aplomb. He seemed almost… nervous, thought Ginny. Hasty. A little jumpy. She looked at him, sidelong, wondering how much he really understood.
“I was,” she said. “I couldn’t get out for ages—that’s how I hurt my hands, by pounding on the door. Dumbledore thinks that there was some sort of complicated Locking spell on it, but nobody knows why, or how, it was cast.”
“Ah.”
Ginny looked down at her interlocked hands. She was about to confess something that she had not told to anyone. She had no idea why this confession was fighting its way to the surface in the presence of Professor Snape while they sat together on a bench near the broom shed, but such was the case. The entire scene had the otherworldly quality of a dream, where anything might happen, no matter how unlikely its occurrence in waking life. She spoke hesitantly. “I—I sometimes think that if I hadn’t been locked in there, I could’ve-“
“Gotten yourself killed?” Snape interrupted, dryly.
“What I mean is,” she continued in a near whisper, “if I hadn’t been there, away from everyone else, the entire thing might not have happened. Not the fact that the Death Eaters showed up on the train, or that Lucius Malfoy came for his son; I don’t mean that. I mean—the deaths. Or—well—I don’t know exactly what I mean.”
“Miss Weasley,” said Snape, “one of two possibilities occur to me. Either you rate your own importance rather higher than it deserves-- which undoubtedly tends to be a Gryffindor trait-- or else you know something you’re not telling me.”
She did not reply. But he nodded as though she had.
“I believe,” Snape said after a short silence, “that we most regret the things we have left undone, whether the failure was through our own fault or not. Perhaps it’s even worse to know that we’ve tried as hard as we could, and all our effort went for nothing.”
Snape no longer sounded as if he was responding to anything she’d said—or it least it wouldn’t have sounded that way to anyone who was listening—but Ginny knew that he was indeed. Once again, she wondered how much he really knew. Draco Malfoy had been his favourite student, after all.
Snape stared out over the lake at the edge of the field, and a faint breeze ruffled a fringe of his dark hair, tucked under the hood of his cloak. “Did you know, Miss Weasley, that we are in the one place at Hogwarts where we are safe from being overheard?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t. But I’ve always liked to come here; it’s always felt—safe.”
He nodded. “It has some very curious magical properties that come from its location between the Quidditch pitch and the lake. Students are generally not informed of this fact, of course.”
Ginny waited. She could not believe that he would have told her such a secret without reason.
“Do you remember the last time I saw you?” he asked. There was a shift in his manner of speaking that was too subtle to be defined. All Ginny could really be sure of was that Snape had become a tad less formal, just a bit less stiff in his words and posture and gestures. He pushed his hood back a little, still not looking at her. She wondered what on earth was going to come next.
“Yes,” she said, since he seemed to be waiting for her to reply before he would continue. “It was—well, if you don’t count the Department of Mysteries, I suppose it was that day in Umbridge’s office, because after that I was in the hospital wing, and I didn’t go back to classes.”
“So it was.” Then he did turn and look at her, and his eyes were dark and penetrating. “I saw you in the same room with Draco Malfoy. I saw the way that he looked at you. I saw the way that you looked at him. I saw what passed between the two of you—“he held up a hand to forestall her protests “—although perhaps you yourself did not see it.”
Ginny stared at him. The world truly was turned upside down now; a Death Eater attack on the Hogwarts train seemed no less incredible than the words she heard coming out of her Potion Master’s mouth. Snape paused before continuing.
“I am going to tell you something now, Miss Weasley, that I have never told to another living being. I trust you will not repeat it?”
“Of—of course not,” she said, falteringly.
“And after we have spoken of it today, we will never refer to it again.” The wind blew cold, and she waited.
“All of the Gryffindors have always thought that I’ve favoured members of my house above all others,” he said, biting off the ends of the words as if trying not to let them get too far away from him. “But none so much as Draco Malfoy.”
“Oh.” Ginny didn’t have the faintest idea how to respond to that. “Well, I suppose so. Yes. It always has seemed to be true. Harry and Ron always have thought that it’s rather, well, unfair. Sir. I mean, Slytherins are rather… well, everyone else knows that you can’t trust them and--” She fell silent, too late.
Snape smiled, without humour. “The prejudice against Slytherin House at this school never ceases to amaze me. It isn’t made up of junior Death Eaters who are all irretrievably evil at the age of eleven, you know. Not all of the Death Eaters’ children were Slytherins, and not all Slytherins are Death Eaters in the making. You know the choice that Miss Bulstrode made, for instance. But that’s not the point, not now. The connection between us, between young Malfoy and myself, is… well, it isn’t necessary to go into details. I made a vow to someone I knew well, many years ago. Someone to whom I had… obligations. I promised to protect Draco Malfoy as best I could. To watch over him as I would over one of my own. That, I have done, or tried to do.”
Ginny’s mind whirled as she put the pieces together. I made a vow… Someone to whom I had obligations. Clearly, this mysterious someone had cared enough about Draco Malfoy to try to win protection for him during his years at Hogwarts. She remembered her brother’s words. Snape had been in love with Narcissa Malfoy, or so Millicent Bulstrode had said. Back in their schooldays, when she was still Narcissa Black. Had Snape made the connection originally with her, that strange, silent woman married to Lucius Malfoy? And Snape had said as if he were my own. Draco had been born six months before Harry, when Narcissa was barely out of Hogwarts… and a year after that, Snape became Potions Master. He had been a seventh-year when Narcissa was a fifth-year. Could he possibly have been hinting that… dear God, what a thought… that Draco might even be his son? But as quickly as the mad idea had come, Ginny had to reject it. Draco was Lucius in miniature; there hardly seemed to be any admixture of the blond Narcissa, let alone a hint of darker parentage. It wasn’t possible, and she was surprised to find herself sorry that it was so. As if he had read her mind, Snape shook his head.
“No,” he said, and his voice was very sad. “There are many things, Miss Weasley, that might have been, should have been, but aren’t. Perhaps you are familiar with this fact already? Yes? I rather thought so.”
Ginny remembered the one long kiss from her lost golden boy, now claimed by darkness. She turned her head aside so that Snape would not see her face. He knew, of course; he always seemed to know everything. But he allowed her the courtesy of not showing that he knew what she was feeling, although she was now sure that there was no living being at Hogwarts now who understood what she felt half so well as he.
“But there are battles that cannot be won,” Snape continued. “There are facts that cannot be changed. And there are… those people who cannot be saved.” The Potions Master could not have been forty, Ginny knew. But how old he looked, suddenly, with the marks of real grief on his face. She still did not speak. “Do you know what I am saying to you?” he asked abruptly. “Can you know it?”
“I think so,” she replied.
They sat next to each other in silence. Then he collected himself, and stood up, briskly.
“Miss Weasley, we will not atone for our separate sins of omission—whatever they may be—by staying out in the freezing September rain without waterproofs or an umbrella until we contract pneumonia. There have been enough deaths without adding ours to the number, and there will be more. Come with me now.” His brusque tone was not comforting, but she couldn’t have endured comfort, just then. She rose from the stone seat, very slowly, and Snape helped her up by an elbow, carefully avoiding her hands. Together, they began to walk back towards the Great Hall.
“There’s something that I’ve never told anyone, sir,” she said as they made their way across the fields. He gave her a short, keen look.
“Is it something that you ought not to tell me outside the bounds of the one place we cannot be overheard?”
“No—no, it’s not like that. It’s just that some things—well, feel as if they shouldn’t be told.” She looked up. “But I’ll tell you. ” Ginny wasn’t the least bit sure why she had said that last. Snape nodded.
“It’s about something that happened on the morning that Umbridge caught Harry trying to reach Sirius Black in her office,” she continued. Snape grimaced at the dead wizard’s name, but said nothing.
“Well, what is it?” he asked.
“Malfoy received an owl from his father at the breakfast table,” she said quickly, seeing how close they were getting to the castle. “I don’t know what was in it. But he seemed very shaken after he got it. And I always wondered, well, if it had anything to do with what happened later. Umbridge, or the Department of Mysteries, or anything else that day—and after that day, I suppose, as well. I thought that maybe that’s when Lucius Malfoy told him about what the Death Eaters were going to do later on, after they’d lured Harry to the Ministry. And also about the Summoning charm at Malfoy Manor, the one Draco Malfoy modified later so that the Death Eaters could escape from Azkaban.”
“I don’t know…” muttered Snape. “I can’t be sure about the Summoning charm—it easily could have been set up months ago, and the Death Eaters might well have brought the Malfoy heir in on that. It’s exactly the sort of thing they would do, you see, as preparation for initiating him fully into their order. You may have heard that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, Miss Weasley, but a little power is far deadlier, if only because it inevitably induces the thirst for more. Death Eaters know that. They don’t have their acolytes simply start throwing the Killing Curse at people one fine morning, you see. They don’t let them cut their teeth on rape and torture, either. No, they start with rituals that seem innocuous and work their way up. What I would really like to know, however…” He tapped a finger against his chin, and his next words clearly showed that he was engaged in the process of thinking out loud. Ginny held her breath, hardly daring to make a sound for fear she’d remind him that he really shouldn’t speak about these things in front of her. This unusual talkativeness of his must stem from the utter disruption of their world, but in this instance, at least, she would take advantage of it as long as she could.
“I wish I knew what happened at the Winter Solstice last year,” Snape said under his breath, so quietly that Ginny could barely catch the words. “And I wish I knew what they have planned for this year. It falls on Draco Malfoy’s birthday. I suppose you didn’t know that. Stonehenge is a part of Malfoy Manor… or rather, it’s the other way around. And the heelstone is aligned to the pointing star of Draco… yes… “
Ginny could not repress a gasp. The memory of Professor Binns’s lecture that spring about megaliths and constellations came flooding back to her. But Professor Snape kept speaking, and she thought at first that he hadn’t even noticed her reaction.
“No-one can ever make me believe that they didn’t involve the Malfoy heir in some sort of ritual of power on that day, a year ago. But what was it?” Abruptly, he turned to Ginny. They were crossing the fields that led up to the back of the castle, and he put a hand on her arm, halting her in the shadow of a weeping willow tree.
“Miss Weasley, I apologize in advance for asking you what I must ask. But you do not know how important it is that I receive truthful answers to my questions.”
Heat rose in Ginny’s cheeks, and she looked at the ground. She didn’t even know yet exactly what Professor Snape would ask, and she already wished herself a million miles away. But she had to answer him. Maybe this was her penance. “All right,” she mumbled.
“Did Draco Malfoy receive the Dark Mark?” he asked. “Did he have it, by the end of term?”
“How—how would I know?” Ginny replied. She had meant to snap the words back at him, but they came out sounding shaky and tentative.
“If he-“ Snape cleared his throat “- touched you—in any intimate way, I mean- you would have known. Did he do so?”
She traced a pattern in the ground with the toe of her shoe. “Yes,” she whispered.
“And do you think he bore the Mark?”
A tightness gathered in Ginny’s throat when she remembered that fevered touch in the luggage rack of the train. His hands roaming over her so briefly, but burning themselves into her soul forever. Forever. “No,” she said. “I’m sure he didn’t.”
“Ah. I see. Miss Weasley—“ Snape looked almost embarrassed, but still utterly straightlaced. A gurgle of hideously inappropriate laughter threatened to escape Ginny at the look on his face. “Please believe me when I say that I ask this next question out of no… prurient interest. If you answer in the negative, then the subject is entirely closed and need never be brought up again. But a certain balance of magical power might hinge on this very point, and—er—anyway, I’m afraid I really must ask this.”
“Please do,” said Ginny softly, hoping that her assent would put her unexpectedly prissy Potions Master out of his misery.
“Did you, ah… did you allow Draco Malfoy further intimacies with you?”
“You mean…” Ginny stared blankly at Snape for a moment. Then realization dawned on her. “Oh! No. No, we didn’t—I mean, he didn’t—he just kissed me on the Hogwarts train. That was all.” Her face was surely glowing red in the darkness.
Snape sighed with palpably evident relief. “Ah. Good. Very good.”
He clearly wanted to drop the entire subject now that he had the answer he wanted. But Ginny felt a painful curiousity rising in her. “Professor,” she asked, “what difference would it make if we—well, if we had done what you asked?”
“There’s no need to speak about it anymore. The situation will never arise again, so it is not important.” Snape walked faster.
“But what sort of magical power might have hinged on whether or not we—“
“As I was saying earlier,” Snape said, just a trifle too loudly, “Lucius Malfoy certainly told his son about the Summoning charm. And I rather think the younger Malfoy was informed about the planned attack at the Department of Mysteries, as well. I suppose he must have been. But there’s still one problem with the idea that Lucius sent the parchment, and it’s an insurmountable one as far as I can see.”
“Sir?” asked Ginny, deciding to drop her other line of questioning. They were very close to the back stairs of Hogwarts now, and Snape’s face was quite implacable.
“The very last thing Lucius would have told Draco Malfoy to do was to keep all of you safely at the school, even if you were with Umbridge. He wanted you lured out of it.”
“Oh.” Ginny felt more mystified than ever.
Snape tapped a finger against the side of his nose. “What sort of owl was it?”
“Big.” Ginny struggled to remember clearly. “An eagle owl.”
“Black?”
“No, no. White and silver, with barred wings.”
“Hmm.” Snape seemed deep in thought as they walked.
“So, er—what do you suppose was in the letter, sir?”
“I have no idea.” They were turning up the lane that led to the back entrance now. “But one thing I do know,” said Snape. “Whatever was on that parchment, Lucius Malfoy didn’t write it.”
“What!” Ginny stared at him. “How on earth can you know that, Professor?”
“Because the white and silver owl is Domitia, and she belongs to Narcissa Malfoy. Has done, since her first year at Hogwarts. And eagle owls carry messages for no-one but their owners. If Lucius had tried to tie a parchment around Domitia’s leg, he wouldn’t have got all his fingers back…no, he would have known better than to try. So the message wasn’t his…” Snape’s words trailed off as they reached the back stairs.
“There’s one more thing,” said Ginny. “I’ve only told my brother. I don’t know if he’s told anyone else, although I suppose he will tell Dumbledore. But I think you should know. Lucius Malfoy wanted to take me back with the Death Eaters. I heard him say so on the train, during the attack.”
“Did he.” Snape sounded oddly unsurprised, as if a point in doubt had simply been confirmed. Ginny wondered what was going on in his head. “So why wasn’t he able to do so?”
“Because—“ Ginny faltered. “I haven’t told this to anyone else at all, but—because Draco Malfoy lied to his father, and said Dolohov had already taken me back to wherever they were all going.”
Snape sucked in his breath sharply, and for an instant there was an odd, almost hopeful light in his eyes. “And you’re quite sure it was a lie? Couldn’t it be that he honestly believed what he said?”
“No, I’m sure. He knew where I was.”
“Indeed.” Had the faintest smile touched Snape’s thin lips, for just an instant? Ginny studied him closely. No, she decided. That was impossible. Suddenly, she felt immensely tired.
“I think I want to go back to my room and lie down,” she whispered.
“As you wish.” He escorted her to the Gryffindor stairs, and then left, his black cloak billowing behind him. Ginny watched him go. She turned and began walking up the staircase, very slowly. It stayed quietly where it was rather than shifting to a new location. She was grateful.
Rain drummed on the roof above her. At last, the storm had broken.
She trudged up the steps into the darkness of the hall above. There were several little groups in the common room, and she passed them by. She walked into her silent and barren bedroom and lay down on her maroon-curtained bed. None of her roommates were there. Ginny couldn’t remember if any of them had died in the attack, or if they had simply been among the silent groups of students clustered around the Gryffindor fireplace, staring blankly into the flames. She pulled the curtains tight and placed a Silencing charm on them, and then turned so that her head was buried in the pillow. All day long there had been an awful tightness in her throat, and she’d thought that once she was alone in her bed, she would cry and cry until there were no tears left in her. But her eyes remained dry. Ginny rolled over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling.
Slowly, she ran a hand over her brow, her cheek, her neck, her breasts, her stomach, feeling the firm smoothness of her body, the pulse that beat at her throat and wrists and chest. Alive, she thought idiotically. I’m alive. I do have that, at least.
What difference would it make if we—well, if we had done what you asked?
Ginny’s hand strayed lower. She did not try to stop her fingers moving over her aching flesh. She was trying not to think at all, to keep her mind an utter blank. The physical sensations beat back the awful fear and loneliness, at least a little bit.
So what do you want, Malfoy?
The sensory image of Draco’s long, strong fingers flooded her brain. She allowed it to happen. His fingers were between her legs now, not her own.
To finish it.
Behind the lids of her closed eyes, she saw his face bent over hers as she had seen it in the luggage compartment of the train. The image replicated itself into a host of new ones that she had never seen in life. His grey eyes grew hooded, half-lidded, as pleasure spread colour over his narrow pale face. The stray strands of his gilt hair fell over her breasts. The tendons in his lean, strong arms flexed and corded as he lowered himself upon her, and between her spread legs that tensed against the feather mattress, and into her.
And then there were no words to remember, or to say, as she cried out and writhed against the hand she pretended was his body.
Afterwards, her breathing slowing to normal, Ginny curled up on her side. One hand traced the other, absently. Her scars glowed red, and she felt the pain in them now that she had not felt earlier. She felt no guilt at all. Perhaps I should. But there was really no need for that. She would never do this again, or permit herself to think about him in that way again, or to remember what they had done again. Those few moments were a final farewell.
The situation will never arise again, so it is not important.
Snape had said it all.
Ginny reached over to her bedside table and tapped the witchlight, casting the canopied bedspace into darkness. Yes, it’s over, she thought. Whatever he was, whatever he now is, and whatever he may yet be, I will never see him again. And each word was like the peal of a great bell that tolled doom to come.
Sometimes, in later years, Ginny thought that all the suffering and misery and war and death of the time that lay ahead had been prophesied in those few words. As they formed in her mind before she fell into exhausted sleep, however, all Ginny knew was that she had never felt so right about anything. I will never see Draco Malfoy again.
But she was wrong.
~end~
The End.
Anise is the author of 56 other stories.
This story is a favorite of 81 members. Members who liked The Bat-Bogeys Cometh also liked 1592 other stories.
This story is a favorite of 81 members. Members who liked The Bat-Bogeys Cometh also liked 1592 other stories.
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