**Author's Note: As this series winds it way to a close (not yet, still at least one more chapter) I want to thank people before I forget. Mostly, thanks to the people who read this and who recommend it-this fic series started out as my first ever 'shipping fic, and I hope everyone enjoyed it. It was only supposed to be one story, but see what happens when you start listening to songs with characters in mind? Keep reading, folks, and enjoy-the ride is not yet over.**
CHAPTER TEN
Oh, thieves in the temple tonight
Hurt me
She was just begging for a fight, waiting for someone to pick one with her.
Ginny Weasley was hurt, and when the Weasley women were hurt, their misery just adored company.
She was in a fine mood, indeed, when she stamped into the Burrow, her dark eyes all but shooting hexes around the small, crowded house. The minute she entered, Molly jumped up from the table, her eyes wide and relieved.
"Oh, thank Merlin you're home," she said, the statement nearly rushing itself into a single mishmashed phrase. "I was so-"
"Worried about me?" Ginny said, calling a glass of water and drinking it without taking a breath, needing something, anything to cool the fire raging within her. She slammed the glass down on the table and looked at her mother, breath heaving. "This is lovely," she said flatly. "You're going to lecture me now, aren't you?"
"I-" Molly had no immediate response for her daughter. She'd only known that Harry went after her daughter, and that he'd come by the Burrow without her, saying only that she'd made her own decision.
"Tell me something, Mum," Ginny said, craning her neck to look at all of the things crammed into the kitchen of the Burrow. Muggle contraptions flowed out of every nook and cranny, their wires and gears strewn about like some bizarre otherworldly innards; the drapes were oft-patched, their holes covered over with hand-me-down clothes that couldn't have withstood another wearing. Evidence of a life well-lived but well-worn was in every glance. "Was this the life your parents envisioned for you?"
Molly drew in a sharp breath, making Ginny's eyes focus on her. "I loved your father then, and I love him now," Molly said sternly, her heart aching for the misery she saw in Virginia's eyes.
"Were they happy when their daughter started hanging about that poor Arthur Weasley chap who only excelled in his Muggle Studies classes?" Ginny's voice was losing steam as she spoke, her heart and mind both weary.
The days seemed so long lately, and at the same time, so short.
"It didn't matter what he had," Molly said, standing and taking hold of her daughter's shoulders. "Don't you ever think for a moment that it mattered what your father had. It isn't as though you choose who you love." Only after the words were out of her mouth, smug satisfaction dawning in her daughter's eyes, did Molly realize what she'd said.
"There now, Mum, you've gone and made my point for me."
Molly wondered if it were possible to find happiness and hopelessness in the same small group of words, in the same realization. Her daughter, her youngest, her baby had fallen in love.
Only she'd gone and done it with a Malfoy.
"You didn't tell me you loved him," Molly said cautiously, part of her hoping she'd misunderstood.
But Ginny placed her hands over her mother's and let her eyes drift shut. When was the last time she'd been able to do this? Now she longed to curl up in her mother's lap and sleep the day, week, month away. "You never asked if I did."
~~~
He was still standing in the great hall, eyes drifting from the door where she'd gone to his hands, as though the answer lay in one of the two places. Hadn't she gone out that door? And hadn't he helped to push her out with his own hands, in motions small and large over the last months and especially the last days?
And then the door knocker sent its announcement through the house, making his grey eyes fasten finally, unflinchingly, on the door. Had she come back already when he was so certain she wouldn't?
Hope outweighed reason, and unreasonably he forgot the fear that had driven him for days, jerking open the door with no caution at all.
They crowded in before he could slam the door in their faces, the three of htem so close together they formed an impenetrable wall of filth and madness.
Draco felt his own sanity falter as Pansy Parkinson took the lead of the trio, stretching her arms out to him as he backpedaled, stumbling away from her. When all other thought slipped away for that bare instant, the last rational thought that remained was Oh, Ginny, you got out just in time, just in time…
And then he saw the blood, the sluggish flow of coagulating blood coating Pansy's pale, dirt-streaked arm, and his brain righted itself, the shocking sight acting as effectively as a facial slap on a hysterical person.
"You called us," Pansy cooed, looking over her shoulder at the two nearly-starving young men behind her. "All that lovely pain, see?" She thrust her forearm in his face, and Draco recognized the Dark Mark on her arm, not burned there by a wand or a charm, but somehow carved in her flesh, oozing blood slowly and leaving sticky, thick drops on the floors of the great hall.
They hadn't been called, they'd made themselves suffer just to bring this moment about.
Crabbe and Goyle rolled up their sleeves, taking a moment to touch their own wounds together, eyes wide and uncomprehending as they shuffled forward once more, jostling Pansy and smearing more blood on her already soiled robes.
"You called us, Lord, and so you are ready to be tested," Pansy said with wide-eyed fascination. "Let us begin."
Ominously, the clock in the great hall struck the hour. Narcissa would be home soon, and Draco didn't intend to keep the wolves in the house just so she could be devoured alive.
"Not here," he said commandingly, eyeing the three of them and fingering his own wand. If there was a way, any way, he could take all three of them at once, he would. But even strong magic, smart magic, was no match for three as devoted as these. And so he commanded them to the best of his ability, wanting only to get them out of the house and away.
When they all looked at him skeptically, heads tilted like dogs, he raised his chin. "This is the house of my father. I will not be tested here."
"Lucius Malfoy," Crabbe said reverently, his voice hushed.
"He was one of the greatest Death Eaters," Goyle said in a grunt, his beady eyes narrowed to small pinpricks in his once-fleshy face.
"I am not a Death Eater," Draco roared, feeling his stomach roil thickly as another trio of blood droplets pattered to the floor, PansyCrabbeGoyle, dripdripdrip. "I am the new incarnation of the Dark Lord and I do not wish to be tested in the house of an inferior."
Draco sincerely hoped he'd live long enough to relish calling his father an inferior.
"Well-said," Pansy whispered, pouting her mouth in a way she undoubtedly thought was enticing. "Come, my Lord. Let us see what you are made of and show you what you can be."
Draco followed as though eager, and as the three processed out the door in front of him, tittering to themselves, he pried the ring off his finger and cast it back to the floor of the mansion.
~~~
There were no words between them as they sat down to a cup of tea, Molly's all-purpose remedy for all things amiss.
For Ginny, it was the quiet she'd needed all along-the peace that never seemed to come in the Weasley household, and any moments of peace found with Draco were too ethereal to hold onto.
For Molly, it was the silence of two women-not a mother and a daughter, for once, but two women who had, at least for the time being, trod upon the same ground in their life.
Now they just had to figure out what that meant.
Ginny was taking a sip of her mother's peculiarly strong tea when all hell broke loose.
A horrible ratcheting noise came from the fireplace, making Ginny choke and spill tea down the front of her robes. Molly, by now used to the many noises and freaksome occurrences at the Burrow, sat perfectly still with one eyebrow arched beneath her flyaway hair, waiting for someone, perhaps her twins, to come hurtling through the grate.
But instead what she got was a tall, slender woman whose ordinarily flawless blond hair was matted and streaked with soot, the translucent skin of her hands and face dirty and shock-pale beneath the muss.
Narcissa Malfoy had come to the Burrow.
"Well, I'll be switched!" Molly gasped, slamming her cup of tea down. Her first thought was We'll need more tea, followed closely by Oh no, my house is a mess. When she was able to vocalize, the simplest of all the thoughts came shuttling out of her mouth. "What on earth are you doing here?"
There was no time for animosity now, Narcissa thought, her pale eyes wide in her face as she sought Ginny, not Molly. "He's gone," she said in a gasp, coughing out a tiny cloud of ashes. "They've taken Draco."
"Who has?" Molly asked, looking first at Narcissa, then at Ginny. "How do you know he's been taken?"
Narcissa's hands fluttered wildly and briefly she wished for the simplicity of blankness, of long hour spent in quiet captivity, with Healers and mediwitches tending her every need.
How could she not know who had done it? After all, hadn't Narcissa Black been asleep in Lucius Malfoy's arms all those years before, their implicit rendezvous at the Malfoy Mansion broken when he was taken by three robed figures?
Hadn't they taken enough from her already?
"I don't know what they want with him, but they can't have him," Narcissa pleaded. "There was blood, and his ring-"
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 replayed the moment in her mind, the stark severity of Draco's words as he'd told Harry the truth, part of him completely in earnest.
And thinking back, Ginny saw what had been so out-of-place about that moment.
Harry had not been surprised.
"Will Da help us, Mum?" Ginny asked quietly, the tremor in her voice making her words nearly inaudible. What if she'd made the last words between them angry?
What if the words she'd said were the last words she'd say to him?
And for once, Molly didn't feel the need to dissuade her daughter, because there was no choice in love, and she knew that all too well.
"Your father will always help you," she said, looking first at Ginny, then at Narcissa. "I hope you find him," she said, and this time, her words were sincere, mother to mother.
"We will." And even as the words were spoken in unison by a mother and a lover, the two disappeared to find the one they loved most in the world.