Five: On the Edge
Ginny held her hand over her mouth as tight as possible, trying to restrain her giggles. Across from her, Malfoy, hiding underneath his bed just as she was hiding under hers, shot her a glare, raising a finger to his lips to command silence. But she couldn't help it! The giggles were a nervous, involuntary tic. Laying on her back, staring up at her own bed springs, she could not only hear her heart beating inside her head, she could feel each of its pulses shooting through her. The silence, the stillness, they made her nervous, and thus... the giggles.
She could tell just by the sounds of their footsteps which Healer's duty it was to administer Ginny and Draco's potions today. The heavy clack-clack-clack of thick-heeled, unattractive shoes announced Healer Unger, a heavy-set woman who walked as if every step crushed something she loathed. Of all their Healers, she was the least likely to laugh at a joke, and probably the exact wrong person to prank.
A Healer-in-Training was tagging along today, and from under his lime green robes, Ginny could see his leather shoes, which seemed to be in need of a good polish. He tread more lightly than Unger, as if afraid to wake the room's occupants.
However, there were no occupants to be seen... unless one looked at ground level.
"They've escaped!" the Healer-in-Training squeaked.
"No," Healer Unger said with certainty, "they couldn’t have.”
"But there's no one here!" the trainee said in a shrill voice that Ginny now realized was his normal tone.
A snort escaped the confines of her hand, and she belatedly pressed her other hand to her mouth to cover it. Both Healers went quiet, and then... clack-clack-clack...clack.
Healer Unger's bulbous nose came into view, and Ginny lost it. She clutched her stomach as the peals of laughter rolled out; not even the Healer's massive frown could deter her shrieking mirth.
Unger waited until Ginny's laughter died down before she called Ginny and Malfoy to reveal themselves. As Ginny stood up and dusted off her back and derriere, she caught both Malfoy's frown and the Healer's disapproval. She felt slightly like a first-year confronting Professor McGonagall for the first time, except she cared very little whether Healer Unger approved of her or not. There was no points system at St. Mungo's for good behavior, and if there was, Ginny and Malfoy would have been well into the negative by now.
She played the part of a serious, apologetic patient as she climbed back into bed and received her potions from the Healers. But when they walked out the door, she turned to Malfoy and found a mischievous grin on his face, and suddenly she felt like she had the most points in all of St. Mungo’s.
"You gave it away too early," Malfoy said in his worst chiding voice. The adrenaline rush from pulling a prank was still too high for him to be anything but amused.
"It was hopeless, this one. It was just our bad luck that we got Unger today. She wouldn't freak out like Gibby would."
"Haven't we terrorized Gibby enough?"
Ginny mock-frowned. "Haven't we been terrorized enough? They'll get a taste of their own medicine and they'll like it!"
"Must admit," Malfoy said, getting comfortable with his hands locked behind his head. "Their medicine tastes better than ours."
Ginny choked on her laughter. "Yeah."
Ugh. Why was she laughing like that? She didn't have to laugh at everything he said. Not all of it was meant to be funny.
"Yeah," she said again, for lack of anything better to say, as she too made herself more comfortable by pulling her sheets up to her chin.
The last two weeks had been the strangest in Ginny's memory. She and Malfoy had become comrades of a sort, uniting over their displeasure for their Healers. At night they planned pranks, and during the day they pulled them off. They'd gone from the most obedient and best-behaved patients to utter nightmares, and they hoped that St. Mungo's would kick them out for all the trouble they caused. Well, Ginny hoped anyway. Malfoy seemed to enjoy the pranks simply as a way to get back at the Healers, and while Ginny felt the same way, she also couldn't completely abandon her optimism. A tiny part of her still believed that her parents would arrive one day to take her home, or, at the very least, tell her what had happened to her. At night, after their scheming, she dreamed up scenarios where she'd been lost, and then, thanks to random circumstances, her parents found her again.
However, that wasn't all she dreamed about.
She glanced over at Malfoy and saw his eyes flutter shut, then shoot open again a few moments later.
When she thought about what she'd told him in the utility closet two weeks ago, her whole body burned in embarrassment. She'd lost control of her emotions, just as she usually did, and told a near stranger, an almost-enemy, her deepest fears. She knew she'd rambled a bit; her bitter anger made her tongue thick and her words run too fast, so she wasn't sure if he'd gathered all that she'd said. But he'd listened to her, and that meant more than he knew. Then there had been a moment when he'd taken her hand, and she'd accepted it. The moment had been interrupted, and they'd never talked of it since, but she'd needed it. How had he known she'd needed it?
She was torn between being too embarrassed to envision what might have happened next and.... Well, she supposed she was just too embarrassed to think about any other emotions he might have stirred up within her.
It was all silly, and she knew she was making a big deal out of nothing, but after Harry, who hadn't listened to her in the entire time they'd spent together, she felt weak for attention. She hadn't noticed she'd been missing it until Malfoy had paid her some, but now she saw where it had been lacking in the last several years.
As Muggles said, hindsight was 20/40.
Now that they were allies, Ginny could envision them as something even more. It was absurd, completely absurd, but sometimes she imagined what it would have been like if she’d dated Malfoy for all those years instead of Harry. She envisioned Malfoy in Harry’s place in memories of kisses, dates, quiet nights at her flat, and family dinners. No, family dinners wouldn’t work, but she tried to make them. She changed the history of her family’s interactions with all of the Malfoys, and suddenly Draco Malfoy became a welcome guest at the Burrow. It was ridiculous. That wasn’t reality. But Ginny still imagined.
“What’s wrong with you now?” Malfoy asked, breaking Ginny from her reverie. How long had he been watching her? He'd been falling asleep moments ago.
“Nothing! Does something seem wrong?”
“Just the look on your face. I don’t need Legilimency to know how you’re feeling.”
“Y-you don’t?” Ginny’s face was suddenly flaming. She pulled her sheets up closer to her chest in a futile attempt to hide from him.
“Look, if it’s about two weeks ago—” How did he know? “—we can try again.”
Wait. What? “Try what again?” Ginny asked, confused.
“Escaping. It’s been entertaining planning out pranks and whatnot, but we shouldn’t give up just yet.”
"Oh... that. I know. You're right. We need to do something. We have to get out of here."
Malfoy smirked, and Ginny's heart palpitated like an idiot.
"I think I have another plan."
.
.
Part of their new plan was their old plan. When the Healers came in to deliver potions or meals, Ginny and Malfoy completely ignored each other and them. To execute their new plan, they had to rid the air of hostility and replace it with an impassive blankness. It was hard for Ginny, who obviously couldn't control her emotions like Malfoy could, but she focused on her desire to be out of St. Mungo's to ground her. The anger was easy to cover when she wasn't currently being violated. The laughter was more difficult to suppress.
At night, Malfoy continued with his promise to teach her Occlumency, and even though he couldn't penetrate her mind for unknown reasons, he still had her practice some techniques he'd used when he was learning. Ginny couldn't tell whether they were effective or whether St. Mungo's was finally wearing her down. She might not have been mad when she woke up in the hospital over a month ago, but perhaps the confinement—or the potions?—were making her mental. Either way, the longer they enacted their plan, the more unraveled Ginny became.
"I hear someone coming!" she said as she stood near the door, listening.
"I'm... almost... finished," Malfoy grunted in reply, each word followed by a metallic scraping sound.
Ginny glanced back, and then ran to help him push the last bed into position. Then they jumped into two random beds and stared unseeingly up at the ceiling as they waited for their breakfasts.
When the Healer opened the door, he paused, just staring at the chaos of the room, his mouth hanging open in horror. Ginny and Malfoy did not react. They continued to stare at the ceiling uncomprehendingly, and only out of the corners of their eyes could they see what Healer Marco was doing. Weeks ago, Ginny wouldn't have been able to contain her snickers, but now she was as silent as the grave and as serious as a funeral.
Healer Marco stepped into the room carefully, though he couldn't move far. Ginny and Malfoy had awoken at dawn to rearrange the furniture, and now it looked like someone had picked up the room and shaken it. The beds, once lined nice and orderly down opposite walls, were now turned onto their sides, their ends, positioned haphazardly around the ward. There was no way to navigate through the room. One would have to crawl under or over the beds, wriggle around the obstacles.
"What have you done?" he asked Ginny and Malfoy, finally turning his eyes to them.
Ginny was in a bed on the right hand side of the room near the door and Malfoy was in the back left corner, in a bed turned to face the wall. Neither of them responded, just continued to stare at nothing.
Marco left, and even though Ginny's body was itching with restlessness, she kept up her act. She currently envied Malfoy's location. With his back turned to the door, he could at least rest his face for a few moments and no one would notice the change in his expression—not that he needed the reprieve with his skill in Occlumency.
It turned out, keeping her expression blank required a lot of concentration, so as Healer Marco returned with Unger, Gibby, and several trainees to put the room back to rights, she kept her thoughts focused on anything else. Fortunately, her mood was black enough that any thought she had contributed to her impassive facade.
She thought about Harry, which inevitably took her to thoughts of the war, which invariably led to reliving every horrible moment in her life. There weren't many, which was good. Before Hogwarts, there had been the day her Grandfather Weasley had passed away. Then her disastrous first year of school, which had led to her possession by a haunted diary. After that—not that that hadn't been traumatic enough—her life had been normal until her sixth year of school. Even her fourth and fifth years, serving under Umbridge's tyrannical rule and the fear of Voldemort's first strike, had been relatively carefree, despite the circumstances.
She hadn't suffered. She hadn't struggled to survive. Not until her sixth year of school. Not until Snape and the Carrows took control of Hogwarts. Maybe she wouldn't have suffered so much if she'd just kept her head down, but how could she have? She'd thought she was alone. She'd thought Harry had abandoned them and that all hope was lost, and while she'd still had breath in her lungs, she had vowed to fight the way no one else would.
And what had she received for her suffering? A tongue lashing from her parents and disregard from Harry. And he wondered why she'd broken up with him! He should have been wondering why it had taken her so long. She knew now that she never should have dated him again after the war, but she hadn't felt safe then, and who could keep her safer than Harry Potter?
Years of her life wasted on a dream that hadn't lived up to the reality. Maybe she really was mad. What sane person wasted her life on someone she felt a simmering, bitter anger for?
She didn't even notice when the beds were moved back to their original positions (with magic this time, which was infinitely easier and faster than manual labor). She didn't notice when her breakfast tray was placed in her lap, and it was only Malfoy calling her name that brought her out of her dark thoughts.
"I think this plan will work," Malfoy said, digging into his well-deserved oatmeal and toast. "If we keep this up, they'll see that we're really mental in no time."
Ginny's appetite was gone. If they kept this plan up, she'd probably really go mental in no time.
.
.
A few days later, they enacted the next part of their plan.
Healer Gibby and two Healers-in-Training delivered Ginny and Malfoy's daily potions. When they entered the room, they were encountered with Ginny muttering against a wall and Malfoy clapping his hands while staring at something only he could see.
Gibby seemed happier than she had been lately, only too thrilled that Ginny and Malfoy were so compliant. She administered their potions, and they didn't fight her. Then she left the room, chattering away at the two trainees as if Ginny and Malfoy weren't behaving any differently than usual.
Another few days later, both Ginny and Malfoy pretended to mistake the Healers delivering lunch for their mothers. They feigned confusion and distress (only partially faked, the latter), but instead of putting them to sleep, as the Healers had when Ginny had first awakened nearly two months ago, they left Ginny and Malfoy to their anguish. When they were gone, Ginny wasn't the only one who maintained her silence, and Malfoy couldn't hide the disturbed expression on his face.
"Is it just me," he said moments later, "or do they treat us like we're mad when we act sane, and treat us like we're sane when we act mad?"
Ginny didn't answer, but she'd noticed too.
They kept up their plan, acting particularly deranged every few days, and then sped it up a little. The days between their pranks shrank, until they pulled a stunt at least once a day. The time they spent talking after curfew dwindled until their days were nothing but silence. By this point, they didn't need to make plans. They were both lost in their own isolated world, and for Ginny, her world was not a happy place. It was bitter and hateful. There was some regret, but she turned every sad feeling she had into anger, and the anger burned her until she became numb.
On the plus side, the Healers' guards lowered around their two troublesome patients. Wands weren't held as protectively as they used to be, and Healers didn't enter their ward in pairs or groups anymore. But by the time their plan fulfilled their goals, both Ginny and Malfoy no longer cared about it.
Ginny was convinced that she was mad. That was why Harry and her family had treated her torture at school as if she'd exaggerated it. The truth was that she had. There was no possible way that she had co-led Dumbledore's Army in a rebellion against the administration. No way that she'd been tortured with Unforgivables in detention. There was no way that her actions had been of any significance during the war. Now she realized she'd made it all up, and knowing that actually brought her comfort. She'd been wrong about Harry all those years, and now she had the knowledge to make things right with him.
She oscillated back and forth between peace and bitterness, and she supposed she was in St. Mungo's to find the balance between them. If it meant ridding herself of her painful, self-inflicted anger, then Ginny didn't want to leave until that goal had been accomplished.
In a few short weeks, her dreams of escaping the hospital had vanished.
.
.
Leave a Review