CHAPTER THREE
A hand shook her shoulder, first gently, then urgently. "Ginny, it's nearly noon."
Registering the meaning behind the words but not the words themselves, Ginny rolled over and buried her face in the pillow. "I'll get out of bed when I'm good and ready, Draco," she muttered, smiling slightly into the down-stuffed pillow.
She awoke fully with a gasp as the covers were jerked off her with the tiny flick of one certain, maternal wand. Though her mouth was set in a firm line, Molly Weasley's eyes were pained at the words that had come from her daughter's lips.
"It's time for you to get out of bed," she said tersely, turning on her heel and walking out of the bedroom before Ginny could see her tears.
She'd wanted so much for her daughter, for the only girl she'd had. Though she'd admitted it to no one, Molly Weasley had borne child after child, praying first and foremost for each to be healthy, but praying, too, for a girl.
By the time she'd gotten a little girl, she'd barely known what to do with her, and now, approximately two decades later, Molly could see she'd failed miserably.
Ginny tilted her head back on her pillow, eyes burning with tears that she refused to shed. It seemed no matter how much Draco wanted to protect her, her parents were still going to bear ill will.
And protection or no, Ginny thought, it seemed she was still going to have to go it alone.
She showered quickly, her hands brushing over parts of her body that were tender, well-used by Draco the evening before and that morning. It always seemed as though so much time had passed since they'd touched. Minutes felt like hours, and at the moment, hours felt like years.
And the distance between them felt like an ocean.
The house was blessedly quiet as she trod down the stairs, and Ginny's heart rose a bit. The Burrow would be a great deal easier to digest if her father and brothers were at work or off at their own separate flats.
But she wasn't so fortunate.
The house was so bloody quiet because they were all sitting at the kitchen table, staring at her owlishly as she descended the stairs.
"Oh, for the love of Merlin," she said exasperatedly. "It's not a bloody show I am, is it?"
Arthur had combated his despair in the only way he'd known possible: with Muggle learning. "Ginny, love, this is what Muggles call an 'invertention.'"
"It's intervention," she bit out, annoyed beyond words.
Could none of them see she was trying her damnedest to make herself happy? The more she thought about it, the more being with Draco seemed like a good idea if only for the upside of pissing off her parents.
"I've got a bit of a revelation for all of you," she said, looking at Bill for strength. Rather than staring at her, he was reading a rock music magazine and eating steadily.
Ginny stepped farther down the stairs, pointing at each of her family members as her speech addressed them. "Mum, Dad, you're not satisfied with any of us. Bill, why don't you cut your hair? Why don't you get rid of the earring? Charlie, why must you travel so bloody much? Percy, why did you follow that great bellowing ass at the Ministry rather than trusting your family? Fred, George, why are you such a couple of ever-jesting fools? Ron, why aren't you more like your brothers? And Ginny? Oh, Virginia, why on earth would you do something like this?" She shoved her hair out of her eyes and looked at her speechless family. "Only you never asked me that, did you? You never thought to ask me why."
For the first time in any of the Weasleys' recollections, silence reigned over the Burrow, and no one had so much as a single sarcastic rejoinder to fling at the youngest, at the crown jewel. When a voice finally spoke, it wasn't what Ginny expected.
"I-I think this isn't the proper time for me to be here, eh?" The voice, familiar but not a Weasley's, came uncertainly from one corner of the room, and Ginny's eyes widened with shame.
"Harry!"
Love - if you're there come save me
From all this cold despair
I can hang when you're around
But I'll surely die if you're not there
It was really the last place he needed to be, but sometimes your options were just so scant that you had to do what you knew was wrong.
Draco sat in the Hog's Head, starting on what he strenuously hoped would become a roaring drunk. His bastard of a father had forced inebriation on his son at the age of thirteen, claiming it would teach him to control himself.
"Fat fucking lot of good that did, Daddy," Draco said to himself, glaring down at his first drink and knowing there was no possible way he would finish more than two.
The memories were too strong to let him get that far.
He was halfway through that second drink when the three hooded figures crept up to his small, grimy table, their filth distinguishable even in the squalor of the Hog's Head. They stood before his table unmoving, and Draco eyed them over his glass.
"Move along. It isn't as though I've any money to give you." He snorted then, knocking back the rest of his drink. "Not that I'd give it even if I had."
He stood then and started to push past them, only to be brought short by a ham-sized, dirt-caked hand planted in the middle of his chest.
A cold, calculating smile crept over his features and he nodded nearly imperceptibly. A duel would certainly lighten his spirits a bit, he reckoned.
But the hand was moved immediately and the smallest of the three hooded figures stepped forward and placed small, once-delicate hands on his chest.
"Draco, love, won't you give us a bit of a kiss, just for old time's sake?" The feminine voice filtered through the heavy hood even as she tilted her head back to let the material fall away from a once-round face. Now the curves of her cheeks and pouty mouth had thinned out, leaving only the telltale pug nose and the hard, glittering eyes unchanged. "We're ever so glad you're back."
Draco found himself speechless as Crabbe and Goyle revealed themselves, snuffling mad laughter to themselves, touching each other occasionally as though to assure one another they were still there. Their flesh was pale and doughy even in the gloom of the bar, and all three of them squinted as though unaccustomed to the light.
Friends, or the closest things he'd had to them when all hell had broken loose over his life. The two Slytherin thugs and the resident Slytherin trollop, complete with loose lips and looser legs.
They were remnants of his past, and they stood before him in his present.
"Are you ready for what's next?" Pansy asked, circling him and touching him, his shoulders, his back, his chest, her hands wandering over his buttocks and thighs as though it were the most normal thing in the world to do.
He slapped her hands away, his sneer apparent in his voice. "Get your hands off me, Parkinson, you crazed wench."
"I asked if you were ready?" she said in a screech, her hands leaving him suddenly. "Are you ready, are you devoted, are you committed? You have the power, you are the one. You are Chosen."
You hold the reigns, son, you are the heir. You are the chosen.
His father's voice brought with it a vertiginous sway, and Draco clasped a strong hand on the back of his chair.
How, again, had drinking in the early afternoon been a good idea?
"I heard…" Crabbe broke off in giggles and looked at Goyle to finish the sentence.
Slack folds of skin hung off Goyle's jowls, the weight that had filled his face long gone with time and hiding, and shook as he nodded his head excitedly. "We heard, we heard, we heard… we heard you died and then came back, you came back with that Weasel-"
"With that red-haired whore," Pansy said liltingly, her hands now bare centimeters away from him but not touching. "Our promised one, our chosen one has been making connections."
"Connections like the Dark Lord," Crabbe agreed, and they all hushed immediately in reverence.
Draco sat down hard in his chair and wished fervently to be elsewhere, to be back in his bed, to be back with Ginny, to even be back in Boston.
For the first time since his father had died, Draco was seeing true madness, and he wondered how much of that permeated through him.
This is why I send you away, his thoughts flew to the absent woman he'd pushed away only that morning. This is why I should be alone.
He closed his eyes and had no more than muttered his wishes-"Go away, go away, go away-" than they did just that, sweeping out and away from him as though he had ordered it.
With wide eyes, suddenly more sober than he'd been when he'd walked in, Draco realized that was exactly what he had done. He had made an order, and they had followed it.
The Death Eaters were resurrecting.