CHAPTER NINE
Baby, don't you know I'm holding on the best that I can
Love - please help me be the better man
Better than the thieves in the temple tonight
He'd barely pulled her away from the railing when she turned on him, spitting and clawing like some sort of damned cat, oblivious to the fact that she was nearly naked.
Disgusted with herself just as much as him, Ginny shoved away from Draco, standing and tossing her head to clear her eyes of the tears and the masses of hair that had fallen into them. "What the hell was that?" she hissed, reaching out one slim, freckled arm to snag her robe off the floor, never taking her eyes off of Draco.
His eyes were clouded with tears of his own, and mystification so deep he could barely even fathom it. What the hell had that been? Guilt warred with the jealousy of moments before, and reflexively he reached a hand to her. "Ginny, I-"
"Don't touch me," she said coldly, but her insides were trembling. If you touch me, it won't matter, if you touch me, I'll forget. "And don't you dare apologize. I don't want your words right now."
"There's another man in my house, looking for you," Draco retorted, at a loss for the words she didn't want. "What would you have me do?"
"Not that," Ginny said, searching his eyes for something, anything that would tell her how to handle this-how to handle him. She should have seen it coming, that much she knew. After all, how erratic do a man's actions have to be before you start guessing he'll do something drastic?
She raised her chin but did not seem to be looking down on him-she'd come to feel too much for that-but in that lifted chin, a shift occurred, and though both of them felt it, neither could identify it.
Taking her in haste, taking her humiliatingly, Draco had done the one thing he'd not been able to accomplish with tenderness.
He'd given Ginny Weasley her pride back.
She turned away from him then and headed for the stairs.
"Harry," Ginny called, sweeping both hands through her hair to smooth it as she tripped down the stairs, carefully making her face blank. "What are you doing here?"
Harry's eyebrows drew together in a thoughtful scowl. What had she been doing, to make her hesitate so long before answering him? He met her eyes again, trying on a sheepish smile that felt horribly facetious. "I just came by to see how you were, since you left so abruptly."
He sounded like one of those charmed toys, Ginny thought, that said the same thing over and over with no inflection, the tone only changing when the spell started to wear off. It was rote, she knew, something he'd told himself over and over again. "You came to Malfoy Mansion to see how I was?" she asked, the disbelief evident in her voice.
"Ah…" Harry glanced up the stairs and back at her. "Yes and no. Ginny, you must come with me," he said, pitching his voice low in deference to the enemy of his youth; Harry knew Draco was around there somewhere.
The question was, where?
"Well, if it isn't the famous Potter." Draco descended the stairs with the ease of overconfidence, never once looking down to assure his footfalls would match the stairs. His hair was mussed, and as he met eyes with Harry, he deliberately straightened first his hair, then his robes. "Sorry we didn't immediately hear you." The words, though layered thickly with his usual sarcasm and superciliousness, felt like so many stones dropping from his lips. He didn't want the intrusion, didn't want to know that the wizarding world's most celebrated prodigy was once again traipsing his, Draco's, territory.
Most of all, he wanted a few minutes alone with Ginny to try and rectify the maddened moments that had passed between them.
Harry flushed, immediately discerning the meaning in Draco's small actions, and he turned vivid green eyes back to Ginny. "This is a bad idea," he told her honestly.
"You should go, Harry," Ginny said wearily, wondering when her life would be her own to do with as she pleased.
Why, he's come to prove I'm a monster, Draco thought, slightly bemused at the realization, but then a glimmer of something completely alien sparked in his imagination-hope.
If the wizarding world's prodigy wanted so badly to fight monsters, he could certainly take a few off Draco's hands.
"If you've so much spare time, Potter," Draco spat the surname in his customary manner, "Then I've a suggestion for you. It's always good to take up an old hobby, yeah?" When his suddenly jovial turn earned him a shocked look from Harry, he continued. "You can hunt Death Eaters again, starting with a few old acquaintances that are lurking around, trying to rally the old bunch. You know, Pansy, Crabbe, Goyle."
Ginny started to scold him for speaking so flippantly, but Draco's eyes were locked with Harry's, and both men were grave.
She knew the truth when she heard it from her lover's lips, even when it was a truth she didn't wish to hear.
"They've been around, haven't they?" she asked, looking at Draco, grasping at his arm. "They've been around." Harry touched her arm and she shrugged it off, glaring at him with a fiery expression. "Don't touch me, Harry. Leave."
"I've done all I can do," Harry said, more to himself than to the two standing together in the center of the mansion's great hall, waged in their own battle of wills.
"I'd say the same for you, Ginny," Draco said, recognizing the moment for what it was. He hadn't even told the whole truth and already she was wheeling away from him, reeling from the single tidbit he'd given her.
What if he told her the rest?
"You lied to me." Her voice was low and deadly in the expanse of the mansion, and she turned eyes to him that were not hateful, but hurtful.
"No more than you did," he retorted, but he could feel the twisting in his stomach. This was why he had not told her-now the despising would come, the hatred.
"Oh, yes, lies by omission." Ginny swept a hand through her hair and tried to keep the bile from rising in her throat, sick at the thought of his past, his father's past, coming back to taint him, coming back to taint them. His anger was one thing, but his past was quite another. "I lied by omission just as surely as you did, and what was your response to that? 'You're mine,' you said, like a possession." Tears glinted in her brown eyes, but there was still no hate.
The enormity of the phrase he'd thrown at her, the actions he'd claimed her with, hit her, and she let her emotions rule her, shoving him away from her with all the might she could muster.
"'You're mine,'" she repeated, her voice rising in volume and growing ragged. "And what about you, Draco? Are you not mine, as well?" He did not answer but watched her with guarded eyes, eyes waiting for the end. "Are you not mine as well?" she screamed with all her might, her voice bouncing off the stone walls and ceilings with the cacophony of one who was scared and scarred.
"That's enough, Ginny," he said, his voice dangerously level in the face of her ire. If he could push her away, now was the time to do so. He'd already come so close today, so close to hurting her.
"Is it? I betrayed my family for you, I betrayed my friends for you. I gave up my life, disdainful though you found it. I lied, and I stood beside you against them, and now you tell me that's enough?"
"I never asked you to do that," he said, feeling his palms itch to touch her, but in violence or comfort, he could not discern which.
"No, you wouldn't, would you? Because asking that would mean I was more than a means to an end. I'm little more than your right hand on a hot night, aren't I? Means to a fucking end. I'm sorry I ever had the poor fortune to believe I was anything more than your whore."
Your queen.
"Stop being so bloody crass, Weasley," he interjected finally, advancing only a half step before stopping himself, his body trembling with the effort it took.
"Fuck you, Draco!" She was still screaming in prime Virginia Weasley force, and her face was red with tears and hurt and anger, but still there was no hate. "I've tried to find out what's the matter with you because I wanted to help, but there's too many of you. You know which one you really are, but you're too much of a coward to be him. There are so many bloody different Draco Malfoys, I don't know how I'm supposed to save them."
She started to leave then but stopped with her hand resting lightly on the handle to the door, her fine-boned frame shaking with rage, grief, disgust, fear, too many emotions to be let out and too many to be kept in.
"I beg your pardon," she said softly, not turning to face him but tilting her head back to let the tears well in her eyes and stay off her cheeks. "I forgot… I'm yours. A possession. So maybe what I should have said wasn't that I didn't know how to save them. I don't know how I'm supposed to serve them."
And this time, when Ginny walked out the door, Draco was certain she wouldn't be back, and he wondered why he didn't feel the relief he'd expected to feel.