Dream if you can a courtyard
An ocean of violets in bloom
Animals strike curious poses
They feel the heat
The heat between me and you
She hit the ground in England with one hand outstretched, perfectly confident of the place she was Apparating to. She'd heard enough about it, seen it from afar, been given every detail from a lover's lips to her ears.
When her hand brushed a solid stone wall, Ginny was not surprised.
Keeping her eyes closed, she walked along the empty corridor, letting her fingers trail the damp stones, listening to her feet trod over the abandoned tile floors. When she opened her eyes, she felt her stomach knot.
The Malfoy mansion had been left empty for years, for fear of bad luck, for fear of black magic and the unsettled dead.
Ginny stopped walking, her breath trapped in her lungs with sobs yet unvoiced. She'd been near to tears when she'd walked out of the front door of Draco's house in Boston, near to tears at all the things she couldn't tell him, all the things he didn't seem to realize about himself.
Ginny tilted her head back against the wall, feeling the coolness of foliage and stone creeping into her scalp. Throwing both hands wide, she dug her fingers into the cracks in the interior walls and thought of him, of his flat, emotionless voice as he'd related his last moments in his childhood home to her. She saw more than she wanted to, saw more clearly than he'd ever told her.
The boy strides down the shadowed hallway, owning the house as much as the father ever had, his head held high, though he knows things are about to change. He knows the war is about to be over, and he's certain he's not quite on the right side of it all.
He senses it in the air.
He hears her first, the mother, her voice urgent and fearful as she pleads with the father, her husband.
Go, she says, go and run and I'll take our son-
It is the most she has dared to say to the father in a long while, so consuming has his madness become, so stifling his ambition.
And when the knocks begin on the heavy wooden door, the boy steps back instinctively, his eyes wide and metallic in the poorly lit hall.
They come for him, for the father, for the madman who has been living in this house for years, imposing his madness on the mother and the boy, imposing his madness on any who dare to cross his pass.
Now that they have come for him, his eyes glow maniacally and he grins, a smile so ghastly that the boy pales even more than usual.
"Hello, gentlemen," the father drawls to men the boy cannot see, and in a move so swift the boy will never forget it, the father grabs the mother-
Grabs her by the wrist so hard the boy hears something snap, and drags her in front of him just as shouted spells echo through the house.
Four spells, all meant to stun, but each different, hit his mother, and her body goes first stiff, and then limp, her eyes wide and unreadable as her husband tosses her aside and tries to flee.
The father makes it two steps toward the boy, and then he is felled by spells he'd never hesitated to use for pleasure, for sport.
Satisfied they have done their job, the men, the vigilantes, leave the mansion, and the boy walks out from his hiding place, no longer a boy.
The mother is alive, blank-eyed and breathing shallowly, and she extends a hand to her son, a hand supported by a broken wrist, and when the mother looks at him, she speaks a name in a voice so hopeful it sickens her son.
"Lucius?"
Ginny let out a pained gasp and ran out of the house, into the expansive yard behind it, stumbling to her knees in the snow. It was cold there, colder than it had been in Boston, and dead flowers struggled long-necked out of the white dusting that surrounded them, reaching for sunlight that no longer reaches them.
It had been, she knew, his mother's garden.
He spoke of it in his dreams with more feeling than he commanded in his waking moments.
~~~
She was usually back by now.
It wasn't the first time they'd argued, and he had been certain it wouldn't have been the last. After all, they were enemies somewhere deep down, weren't they?
"She's gone."
The voice was snickering, sibilant, winding nastily through the big bedroom where Draco sat up, waiting for the Ginny's room.
Draco closed his eyes, sick of the turns his thought always took in the unsure moments, sick of the voice he could never quite shake.
"So sad. How low have we come, my son, when you can't even get a dirt-poor Weasley to stay in your house?"
Grating his teeth, Draco spoke to his father, his long-dead father whose voice still ruled the shaky confidence of his son with the insults that he'd plied so well in life.
"You're dead," Draco said to the room at large. "You're dead, and I'm not."
"You may as well be." The voice was as clear as if Lucius Malfoy stood in the room, as clear as if his lips were next to Draco's ear. "You may as well be."
~~~
She knew where she had to go next, where she needed to go. She'd seen what an unhappy family could do, had seen
what isolation had done to Draco, and she needed to see her family.
But she couldn't be where she was without leaving word. She couldn't leave him back in that big house, that big house in America that had details identical to the mansion in England. So, trudging up the winding staircase of the Malfoy mansion, she put one foot in front of the other until she was in the highest point of the house, surrounded by owls that had long since gone wild. Without much hope, she extended her arm, pleasantly surprised when a small, soft gray one alit there.
Thinking of the boy who had grown into a man-my man, she thought before she could stop herself-she let the tears come full force as she attached the three-word message to the owl's leg and sent it away.
The wind blew her tear-streaked face dry as she headed by foot for Diagon Alley.
How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in a world that's so cold?
He'd fallen asleep sitting up in the large, black chair that was poised in the corner, his head tilted uncomfortably to one side, his hands clasped loosely to his ears as though to ward off the phantom voices that were most easily granted entrance in the night.
He had slept alone, cold and alone and waiting, and sometime during the night, the voice of his father had given way to the brief scream of his mother, and her voice whispering the wrong name in the twilight.
The wakened man would not admit that the sleeping boy had been crying in the night.
She wasn't back, and he felt his stomach churn with anger and some other, deeper, unidentifiable feeling.
What if something happened to her? What if someone took her…
But he was sure he would have known if something had happened to her. He would have felt it if his obsession-if his possession-had left the earth.
It took only a moment for his sleep-addled eyes to clear, and he was out of the chair with a grace inherited from both his father and his mother, his hand outstretched to the small gray bird in the window.
He remembered everything, had a keen mind for small details, and he remembered this owl.
With trembling fingers he loosed its message, fear striking to the core of him as he wondered who in England would use a Malfoy owl, and who would know where he was.
The three words, scripted in her handwriting, her affected, feminine handwriting, struck him motionless, and the parchment floated to the floor as his fingers grew stiff.
I am sorry.
Thoughtlessly, he let the rage, the hurt run through him unchecked, and when the scream tore from his throat, the paper on the floor burst into green flames, only to disappear into ashes.
Gone.
The thoughtless bitch had really gone, and Draco Malfoy was once again left alone.
~~~
She wandered, though she hadn't meant to. She'd meant to go home, back to the Burrow, or back to the twins' shop immediately, but her feet carried her a bit farther and when she ended up in Gringotts, it was with little surprise.
Sometimes, Ginny thought, you just needed a rock to lean on.
"Bill Weasley," she requested at the front desk, dismayed at how thin and tired her voice sounded. What had taken so much out of her, she wondered? Draco, or her absence from Draco?
He was pulling back his hair when he saw her, tying back the thick mass of it with a bit of leather he'd found, and the long, auburn strands slipped from his fingers to fall about his face when he saw his little sister.
She'd become a woman in the months she'd gone, her face thinned out, her eyes eerily old. She was hurting, and Bill was fairly certain she didn't know it, for the hurt was layered over with worry, with concern, and with a few other things he couldn't put his finger on.
"Bill!" She threw her arms around his neck as he neared her, burying her face in the broad chest for just a moment, allowing herself that one small thing before she stepped back and composed herself. "I missed you."
He nodded in return, and she wondered at his silence. The Weasleys weren't a quiet lot, by any means, and Bill was often the first to speak his mind.
And then, just as she was sure he wasn't going to say anything, he made her blood run cold.
"Where is he?" Bill asked softly, his eyes kind and impossibly understanding for the question he posed.
"You knew."
He drew her outside with him and prepared himself to listen long and listen well. "I knew," he agreed, sitting her down on one of the public benches. "So now tell me the things I don't know."