Stolen

**Author’s Note: This is a sequel occurring after “Come to Me” and “Even I Have Pride.” My beta has me turned on to Prince lately, and so to close out the trilogy I started with “Come to Me,” I chose another song I felt resonated closely with the story taking place in my head—“Thieves in the Temple” by Prince. I thank everyone who has taken the time to read these stories, and I hope you enjoy this last one. This first chapter contains no song lyrics, as it’s only a prologue. Happy reading!**

She’d come there to understand him, come there to, in her own way, help.

Now that they were helping him, she wanted them to stop. After all, the Healers wouldn’t let her in the room while they evaluated him, and the act of being apart from him while she knew he was suffering was killing her.

Ginny walked back and forth outside the door of the examining room, chewing on a thumbnail as her steps carried her away from the doorway, back to it, and away again.

“They’ll take good care of him, you know.” Narcissa’s voice was quietly chastising as she watched Ginny maul her fingernails. “I… well, if they hadn’t taken care of me, it doesn’t seem as though I’d be addressing you at all, does it?” Unconsciously, she rubbed her wrist, easing a phantom pain that still plagued her from time to time. Yes, they had healed her, but there were scars that would never be healed.

She suspected the same was true for her beleaguered son.

Ginny spared Narcissa only a glance, feeling more than a little guilty. How long had she been waiting for her son to come? How long had she been waiting, prescient and aware and alone?

“It doesn’t seem so,” Ginny finally said, but she turned on her heel to continue her circuit of the floor.

“Virginia Weasley!” Molly’s voice echoed down the corridor, and Ginny stopped without turning around, her back stiff. If they’d found her here, then it meant they knew more than she’d told them.

“Mum,” she answered, turning with her chin held high. She wouldn’t be ashamed of her associations, especially not to her family. “You didn’t have to come.” And, indeed, the whole crowd of them had came, each of them looking angrier than the last. Bill stood in the back, his expression mild, and she felt her heart swell.

“It’s good and well I know that, missy. I didn’t have to come, that’s true, but it’s unlikely I’d be letting my only daughter make such a grave error of being here.” She reached out as though to make a grab at Ginny, but her daughter stepped back.

They’d gone back to the Burrow after seeing Draco, their suspicions running high and their confusion limitless; they had found it in a shambles, torn wallpaper, torn hangings, curtains in pieces, holes blasted in the walls. And there was no doubt in Molly Weasley’s mind who had done it.

Molly Weasley’s mum hadn’t raised any fools.

“I’m not leaving,” Ginny said through clenched teeth. “I know you’re burned because I didn’t tell you, but can’t you just trust me on this?”

“It’d be a hell of a lot easier if you hadn’t been consorting with the enemy,” Charlie put in, glancing worriedly at Arthur. The Weasley patriarch looked pale, his face drawn with worry.

“She was only trying to help,” Narcissa said, standing from the seat a Healer had conjured for her.

The Weasley family all stopped talking at once to look at the woman, eyes narrowed. Even Fred and George seemed at a loss for words, their eyes darkened with unfamiliar worry.

“Narcissa, my wife and I would appreciate it if you would not try and teach us how to parent,” Arthur said, his voice strangely different from his usual excited tone. He felt as though something in him had shifted off-kilter. His little girl… he winced, stopping the thought before it fully formed. He turned shadowed eyes to his daughter then. “It pains me to think you had to lie to us,” he said stiffly, and for Ginny, it was Percy all over again, Percy’s betrayal and Percy’s denial and the brief alienation Percy had spent from his family.

She was the stupid git they’d all be cursing about now.

But Bill spoke where none of the others could. “You’ll come home, won’t you, Gin?” His eyes implored her, and both of them knew the choice she made was crucial.

Though she was hardly aware she did it, Ginny glanced at Narcissa, and seeing the woman nod slightly, she nodded at her family. “I’ll come home tonight,” she said, feeling her heart sink.

It would be the first full night she had spent away from Draco.

~~~

“I don’t want to.”

His jaw was set firmly and his eyes were cool on the pair of Healers standing in front of him.

The young witch, a Healer-in-Training, looked anxiously at her mentor and back at Draco. “You know, there have been progressive steps taken in Pensieve therapy, and it isn’t as though you’ll even realize—”

“Are you not listening to me?” he asked in a near-roar, watching Ginny’s shadow pass back and forth through the tinted glass. “I don’t bloody well want you to take my memories and scrub them clean.” They were his only guidepost—his only way to know when, exactly, he was crossing the line, and they were telling him those same memories made him sick.

They were the only way to know when he was being his father’s son.

“I want to go,” he said thickly. “If I want help, I’ll bloody well ask for it.” He stood and pushed past them, his broad shoulders forcing them to move out of the way. He jerked open the door hard enough to have it bouncing against the wall, and then immediately wished he hadn’t come out.

The entire Weasley family stood glaring at him, his mother, and Ginny, and Draco once again entered the world he’d been so desperate to escape.

CHAPTER ONE

Love - come quick

Love - come in a hurry

There are thieves in the temple tonight

His recollections of the day were spotty, skipping like a stone over water. He remembered waking up wanting her, waking up without her. After that, all he possessed were impressions, fleeting shots of a house that had to have been the Burrow, Arthur Weasley’s face levered close to his own, Ginny in an alleyway, tears streaming down her cheeks.

And then it all focused to a point, crystal clear and painfully bright, of Ginny with his mother and his own hand grasped crushingly around her fine-boned wrist. He remembered sliding to the floor, his arms around her waist, starkly relieved at her presence.

And then the Healers had come, coaxing him into a room, and for Ginny’s sake, he had gone. He had gone to alleviate that wide-eyed look of fear in her eyes.

But now all the eyes were on him, accusatory and narrow. Though he longed to step to Ginny’s side, he instead stepped back, away from her.

Ginny turned her head to look at him, her eyes wide. In that single moment, her family didn’t matter; she stepped toe-to-toe with him, her voice low and concerned. “What did they say?” she asked, lifting a hand as though to touch his face.

He withdrew, his gray eyes jerking to her family, and gave a nearly imperceptible shake of his head. “You should go,” he said flatly, refusing to look at her. She’d left him once, less than twenty-four hours ago. Surely it wouldn’t be hard for her to do it again.

“At least the dotty bastard shows some sense,” George opined loudly. “Come on, Gin, he doesn’t want you here.”

She kept her eyes on his, hot and insistent, until he was forced to look at her. In the brief meeting of eyes, she saw shame, confusion, need, and most of all, truth—a different truth than the words he was speaking.

“Fine, then,” she finally said, jerking her arm away from his. “I’m about as likely to stay where I’m unwanted as I am to stay in a room that’s on fire.”

She could feel his eyes on the back of her head as she walked away, and knew she’d given her own truth to him as best she could.

~~~
They Disapparated home together, the Weasleys together again like one big, happy family.

“I should have socked the bloody little bastard when I had the chance,” Charlie ruminated, flexing and relaxing his fist while staring at a wall in the Burrow and imagining Draco’s sour face.

“You know, we knew he was a clever little git—” George started, his train immediately picked up by Fred.

“—Though not as clever as us—”

“—But we never thought he’d get the better of a Weasley. What’s the matter with you, Gin?”

“It’s really quite irrational,” self-righteous Percy put in, pushing up his glasses.

At her wit’s end, Molly sat down in front of her silent daughter. “Virginia, darling,” she said gently, trying another tactic. “It isn’t as though he loves you.” That got Ginny’s attention, and she turned large, shocked eyes on her mother.

She was speechless; she had no real retort to that.

It really wasn’t as though he loved her. That particular emotion and concept had never become part of the vocabulary of their relationship. They vacillated between heat and hate and occasionally need, but love?

Absurd.

“I’m going to fix up the house and go to bed,” she said, wondering why it felt as though the pit of her stomach were hollowed out.

Her family watched with confusion and sadness in their eyes as she trudged up the stairs, her wand pointing here and there and patching up the damage Draco had done. From his place in the corner of the room, Ron watched her go with futile anger smoldering in his eyes.

~~~

“It’s a load of shite, ‘swhat it is,” he burst out, pacing the floor. “Y’know, I don’t remember him as ever being particularly useful in any other time. Would anyone really look crossways at us if I turned him into a toad?”

Hermione felt her back molars grind together as she prayed for patience. “Ronald, with your magical aptitude, I think that’s unwise.”

“I have to go back to work on Monday, you know. How’m I supposed to go back to calling Quidditch games when that—” at a loss for words, Ron shuddered theatrically. “He touched my sister, Hermione. She never said that, but I know. I’m not ignorant.”

“I’m hard pressed to judge that particular matter,” she said, laying her head on her kitchen table.

“I just wish there were something I could do,” he said, thumping his fist on the table and making his girlfriend jump. Futility was very nearly an ingrained part of Ron Weasley’s nature. With five “perfect” older siblings, The Boy Who Lived for a best friend and a genius for a girlfriend, it was hard to feel particularly effective at anything.

“If I give you something to do to fix this, will you stop talking about it?” Hermione finally asked acidly, focusing a jaundiced eye on Ron. Lately it seemed more and more unlikely that she’d been in her right mind when agreeing to date such an oaf.

“No offense, Hermione, but not even you can fix everything.”

“You’d be surprised,” she said absently, already working on a plan.

~~~

They stood close together, arms brushing, eyes wide as they stared at the behemoth of a mansion they’d once called home.

He spoke first, swallowing hard and making his Adam’s apple bob. He hadn’t expected to feel anything—did he ever?—but what he felt was nervous, scared, and more than a little sick. “I’ve money back in Boston,” he said, looking at his mother desperately. “I can get it, we won’t have to stay here.”

But Narcissa was calm, her head tilted assessingly. She took his arm, tugging him forward through dried, dead grass and leggy, straggly weeds that whispered in the breeze as though emboldened by years of abandon.

“Money’s not the reason we have to stay here,” she said firmly, tightening her fingers on his arm as she felt him tense. “It’s time for you to make this mansion your own, Draco.” Once in the doorway, she turned and looked at him, her eyes tired but gentle. They’d always been gentle, even in her worst moments, even when the gentility was hidden under other things. “It’s time for you to make your own memories. With her.” The last two words had been a bit of a long shot—she’d been thinking of young Virginia since they’d left St. Mungo’s.

“She’s not coming,” Draco said, jerking his arm from his mother’s grip and storming through the doorway into the dark mansion. His eyes scraped up the walls and to the second floor balconies and overhangs, and then up to the ceiling, where owls from the top floor owlery flitted to and fro. “You heard her.”

“I heard,” she agreed, watching her son prowl with long, sliding steps, so unlike the commanding cane-aided gait of his father. She had also heard more than just words pass between them, but who was she to judge?

She was a sick woman, or so everyone had told her.

“Who’s up for a spot of housecleaning?” she asked then, and was pleased to see the starts of a smile, albeit a wry one, flit over her son’s features.

~~~

She Apparated blindly, from the dark of her room to the dark of the mansion, not wanting to risk the light of a simple lumos. Hope coursed against reason as she crept through the expansive halls of the newly-cleaned mansion, her eyes trying to adjust with the help of candles placed here and there along the hallways.

Ginny let her feet carry her where her heart led, the feel of him somehow permeating thick stone walls and directing her through the labyrinth that was his home. She entered on cat’s feet, silent and yearning, and when she disrobed slid into the expansive bed beside him, his arms were open for her.

There were no words between them, no spiteful words and no whispered sweetness, only her hands brushing desperately at his hair, her lips lighting lightly over the planes of his face. He stretched along the bed as she straddled atop him, his hands spanning her waist easily, a thin sliver of cold brushing above her hip as his ever-present silver ring made contact with her skin.

As his fingertips brushed together, he marveled at her slight size. His need was so great, and she was so small. It seemed unreasonable, he thought as he arched up to press lips and tongue in the hollow between her breasts, his teeth nipping at skin he’d woken up wanting that morning.

A single tear slid down Ginny’s cheek as she leaned over him, pressing her hands to either side of his head, her tongue darting out to lick his lips.

“I came,” she said, pulling his lip between her teeth and snaking a hand between them to slide over taut abdominal muscles, sharp hipbones, and the heavy heat of his arousal. His response was a quick jerk of the hips, a primal groan tearing from his lips as he buried his hands in her hair.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he managed, his fingers digging into her sides as she sank down onto him, her slickness enveloping him perfectly and completely. She withdrew from him then to sit up, knees balanced precariously on either side of him.

“I don’t need orders from anyone else,” she said fiercely, digging finely shaped fingernails into the skin of his fluttering stomach, her rhythm smooth and rocking as she took him deeper and drew away, impaled herself again, and drew away.

The fire of her hair brushed his chest as she let her head hang, intent on the movement, intent on the friction building between them. As she felt herself near climax and felt the tightening of his entire body, she raised up on her knees, keeping only the tip of him inside her.

Poised in that precarious position, Ginny drew her head back and looked her lover square in the eye, searching for words she knew she would not receive.

Draco watched the mystery pass through the eyes he’d come to well know, watched the need that surpassed the hasty physicality between them, and hadn’t the slightest idea how to assuage it. His body responded for him, pistoning up and into her as he grated out the only words he had.

“I need you, Weasley. Don’t forget that.”

As the heat speared up and into her, Ginny dropped her head, her forehead resting above his beating heart. How could she forget it?

It was all she had.

**Author’s Note: Just a few small editorial comments to make before I make with the Draco/Ginny love. First is that this story is very likely to be longer than the other two, and the song lyrics more sparsely placed throughout. I’m sure you can all live with that. Second is this: While I’m ordinarily a Ron/Hermione ‘shipper, I’m not intending to ‘ship with this story. In fact, by the time this story is over, I intend to be hinting at relationships more closely following the rules of the site. HOWEVER—if R/Hr bother you, I ask patience… they’re a bit rocky right now, but their relationship, no matter how rocky, is a major plot device at the moment. Thanks for the patience, and… HAPPY READING!**

CHAPTER TWO

They don't care where they kick

Just as long as they hurt you

There are thieves in the temple tonight

They had been underground, living in extensive tunnels and networks used by their parents years ago, networks used by Death Eaters long past. Their eyes became accustomed to perpetual dark, their ears accustomed to whispers fed to them from above. They saw nothing and heard everything.

“He’s back,” one of them hissed to another, voice androgynous in the damp. “He has been returned to us.”

“Just like the Dark Lord,” another voice agreed eagerly.

“Contact can be made soon,” the last voice joined, a bit more intelligently than the others. “Surely he knows his destiny.”

And in the dark, the three bowed their heads, wands at the ready.

All things come full circle.

~~~
She was awakened by the feel of his lips brushing over her earlobe, his voice sliding low and silky through her dreams and into her consciousness.

Just as well, she thought, she’d been dreaming of him anyway.

“You should go home, Ginny,” he said, but his hands slid over the black satin of his sheets to brush over the smoothness of her shoulders, her breasts, her hips. She had fallen asleep facing him, as she usually did, one leg snaked cozily between his.

“It’s still dark,” she answered, gasping as his hands sought various places in the total lightlessness of the room. Stretching one hand above her head, she wrapped her small fingers around the wrought iron headboard, arching her back to push herself flush against the long lines of his body.

He was already hard and had wakened so, the smell of her permeating his sleep and tweaking him into arousal, the warm, spicy sent of her constantly covering him. But rather than answering the demand she gave with her body, he untangled his legs from hers, cupping his hands to her face.

How long had it been since he’d taken any time at all with her?

Had he ever?

He dipped his head low, kissing her with his lips only, drawing back when she sought him with her tongue. Without answering her wordless pleas, he moved down slightly to flick his tongue along the most vulnerable part of her throat, feeling her pulse jitter under his tongue and pausing to let his match hers. Once his heartbeat raced along with hers, he offered up a tiny little bite and moved still farther down, his hands covering inch by inch.

He grazed his left hand down in the darkness of the room to slide over her, stopping to flick the pad of his thumb over a spot he knew well by memory, where a beauty mark nestled just below her breast.

“Right there,” he whispered, ducking to press his lips chastely to the remembered mark. He could feel confusion coming off her in waves, and so caging her ribs with his hand, he drew a slick, hot line up the sensitive underside of her firm breast with his tongue, covering the tautness of her nipple with his lips when he reached it. With his right hand he mimicked the movements of his mouth, skimming up her breast and then cupping it.

Her body was moving in tight circles beneath him, drawn tight like a bow as she pulled against the iron of his bed.

“Draco,” she managed the word though every second she lost more breath.

“Shh,” he hushed her insistently, letting the smooth warmth of her slip from his mouth.

Every inch of him felt as though it were throbbing, the deep ache centering at his arousal, pounding through him like a primal drum, and still he ignored what he wanted, what he needed. He took a deep breath, resting his head between her breasts to focus himself, trying to keep himself from ending the encounter before it really began.

Ginny’s hand slid weakly from the posts of the headboard as he trailed his tongue with excruciating slowness down her body, stopping to flutter lightly, stopping to do things she couldn’t see but could certainly feel. He’d gone mad, she thought, and was determined to take her with him. But in the total, encompassing dark of the room, the madness felt good, and she was more than ready to welcome it. Sex for them had always been a bit of a race, even occasionally a game of torture, but it had never been leisurely.

So what had changed?

His teeth closed gently over her hipbone without warning and she clutched the sheets in her hands, reflexively spreading her legs to their ultimate width, opening herself to him as she had many times before.

But Draco ignored what he was offered in the dark, though the smell of her own arousal, dark and heady, told him exactly what she wanted from him. Instead he moved himself to the foot of the giant bed, gently cupping her right calf, pressing a kiss to her knee and sliding his tongue around to the sensitive, ticklish backside of it. She jerked in his hands and moaned, the long sound of desperation marked with tiny giggles as he laved the back of the joint with his tongue. He repeated the movement on her other leg, then settled himself between her knees with a smirk on his face.

He moved both hands back up, to the tops of her thighs, letting his long thumbs brush the already damp insides of them as he kneaded soft skin and jumping muscles, being sure to brush the backs of his hands over the apex of her, feeling the heat, warmth, and dampness sliding over his long fingers. With every “accidental” brush, she strained closer and closer to him, but he evaded her.

She was sweating, beads rolling off her forehead and trickling into her hairline as she pressed her head into the pillow, her eyes rolling back as he played his fingers over the tight curls at the juncture of her thighs. Both hands clutched the pillow behind her head, though if she’d had the strength, Ginny was fairly certain she’d have boxed the game-playing little cretin in the ear and had her way with him.

And then he was gone, his weight still on the bed, but his hands gone from her body, her flesh absent of his touch. She started to sit up, cursing the burdensome dark, and then his mouth slid over her, his tongue finding her tight center unerringly with the first stroke, and a shocked sob burst out of her as she came, unwinding the tension even as it started to ravel itself up again.

“Oh, Merlin,” she said, though her voice was nearly inaudible through the gasps and groans that escaped her.

She was bloody well going to kill him when he was done… only she definitely wanted him to finish first.

He rose from her with a self-satisfied grin on his face, knowing she’d never leave him as long as he made her need him. He placed a hand on either side of her head, the muscles of his arms bunching as he lowered himself to kiss her, letting her taste herself on his lips.

“Now,” he finally said, sliding into her and feeling her muscles contract and relax around him.

Now.

~~~

He laid atop her, unable to move for long moments after their simultaneous climax. Upon catching his breath, he laid one kiss upon her brow and finally rolled over, his arms still around her, the room lightening rapidly with the near daybreak.

“Time to get along, Ginny,” he said reluctantly, taking in the sheer peace on her face. It had been a marvel to him for the months they’d been together—no matter what was going on, no matter how vehemently they’d fought or voraciously he’d taken her, she always looked peaceful afterwards.

For the first time in his life, Draco loathed to disturb the peace.

She propped herself up on her elbow, her hair spilling over her arm and across her chest. “I’m not going home.”

His face clouded immediately at her insurrection and he let her go, standing from the bed completely unclothed, unembarrassed by his nudity. “Go you bloody well will,” he spat, shoving a hand through the disheveled mass of platinum atop his head.

It was her turn to stand then, but she dragged the sheet with her, tucking it around her with her arms and mirroring his gesture by shoving her hand through her fiery hair. It was unclear who, exactly, had picked up the gesture from whom, but it was one they now shared.

“I won’t hide this!” she proclaimed, her voice strenuous. “It isn’t as though everyone hasn’t figured it out already, you sodding idiot!”

He was at her side with only a few strides, his hands gripping her shoulders even as part of him protested the movement.

“I know what it’s like to have a parent who hates you. You don’t want that. Now go home.” He gave her a little shake for emphasis then released her, stooping to pick up her robes and tossing them to her.

She caught them reflexively, dropping the sheet and tugging the robe over her head in a few furious jerks. She grabbed her wand, prepared herself to Disapparate, then pointed the tip of it at Draco’s nose.

“I’ve hexed you before, you pale git. Don’t think I won’t do it again.” And before he could respond to her threat, she Disapparated.

And in her wake, he smiled at her audacity.

~~~

She was home before anyone else was up, but she was far from satisfied with it. She didn’t particularly want to be home in a houseful of resentment, a houseful of people who wouldn’t even listen to her. She Apparated straightaway back into her bed, resenting the coolness of the sheets, the simple cotton she lay on, and wishing for more.

Wishing for him.

With a yearning sigh, she closed her eyes and dreamed of what she could not have.

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.

CHAPTER FOUR

The grounds were more familiar to him than his own “home” back at Privet Drive, a place he hadn’t seen since the death of Voldemort. The Burrow had always been his home, from the moment he’d seen it, and Harry felt no differently now than he had all those years before.

There were many other things that had changed since then, however.

Harry was lonely, sometimes excruciatingly so, sharing his memories and his regrets only with Remus. Though Ron was still a close friend, there were things Harry felt he could not tell the Quidditch official who had once been his school chum. There were things he had seen, had done, had felt.

Most of all, there was Hermione.

Though resentment was something Harry had long grappled with, he’d never quite mastered it, and always, always, Hermione made that resentment so much easier to bear and so much harder to beat.

Once upon a time, Harry thought, Ginny would have killed to be walking around the Burrow with her arm linked through his. And once upon a time, Harry reckoned he would have nearly killed to have Ginny just where she was.

But now his little Ginny, Harry’s very first admirer, was with someone else, and in his heart, Harry was with someone else.

So when Harry’s someone else had come to him, asking him to help, how could he have said no?

His answer to Hermione was always, always yes, no matter what he rationally knew was right.

“You’ve changed,” he said matter-of-factly, glancing down at the slim, softly curved woman at his side. It was more than physical changes, though Harry would objectively admit Ginny Weasley had grown into more of a woman than any of them had expected. Her eyes were older, and held both more pain and more pleasure than they had before, and for a brief moment, Harry was forced to wonder if perhaps Draco was actually good for Ginny.

It was no more than a moment, however, and the cold, murderous voice of Lucius Malfoy slithered through Harry’s memories, a voice behind a cold, dead mask.

Draco Malfoy couldn’t be good for anyone.

“I suppose I have,” Ginny said, glancing up at Harry. It didn’t take much; he’d never quite grown as tall as his comrades, staying slight and thin even throughout years of strenuous Quidditch practices. She was stricken by differences, not in Harry himself, but between Harry and Draco. Here was the man she’d wanted, and he was so different from the man she’d gotten. Light and dark, tall and short, temperamental and calm. “Though you’re the only once who’s noticed,” she finished her thought hurriedly, her mental comparisons embarrassing her.

“Apparently not,” he said before he could stop himself, the words followed by a grimace. “I’m sorry, Ginny, that was completely uncalled for.”

“No, it wasn’t,” she said softly, a womanly smile playing about her lips. “It was no more than the truth, and I’ll not be ashamed of as much as that.”

Harry had never noticed her in time, always too late, and it seemed no different this time. But what had made him come to her at this particular moment in her life?

“Harry… I hope you’ll not think me rude… but why are you really here?”

Harry flinched imperceptibly, the stern, wise voice of Hermione playing its way out.

She’s always adored you, Harry, and it would be nice for you to get back in touch, wouldn’t it? Couldn’t harm a thing.

And he’d nodded, nodded, nodded, like a broken idiot toy.

Damn Hermione. What must it be like to always be right?

“Because it’s been too long, Ginny,” Harry said, and felt the truth of the statement warm him a bit. He glanced up at the house, smiled a little, and stooped only centimeters to brush his lips over her cheek.

She closed her eyes, trying to feel something more than despair as the famous Harry Potter kissed her right there, at the corner of her mouth. But the dark was too dark, no fair-haired boy to be seen in the Boy Who Lived, and she felt her heart sink even lower as she realized what Harry was doing .

He was doing what Draco never had.

Harry Potter was courting her.

Love - come quick

Love - come in a hurry

There are thieves in the temple tonight

He slammed the heavy door on his way in, the thundering sound it sent through the mansion very nearly matching the thunderous roar of blood in his ears. He felt as though he needed a long, scalding shower to take away the crawling sensation creeping over his skin.

Draco had thought them dead, and had given little more thought to it, but his Slytherin house still remained.

His father had been fanatical about the Dark Lord, preaching power and prestige to a small boy too young to understand it, a boy who still laughed and a boy who loved playtime with his mother and the glamours she cast for their amusement. It had taken Draco, always a bright boy, little time to figure out what he thought of the Dark Lord.

Envious.

Not envious of the power, or envious of the prestige, but Draco Malfoy learned at an early age that green was his color.

He was jealous of the time his father spent on a man who was not a man, a wizard who no longer deserved that title, and so he’d tried hard to be interested in the Death Eaters. They were just one more source of resentment for Draco Malfoy, the boy who boasted loyalty to his father all while praying for a little loyalty in return.

Are you ready, are you devoted, are you committed?

He didn’t want to face the implications of her inquisition, Pansy’s reedy voice digging into his brain like the broken shards of a wand.

It’s me, he thought feverishly, cold sweat breaking out over his face as he wandered from room to room in the big house his father had once commanded with a heavy hand and a black mind.

He fell to his knees at the loo just in time, the two drinks he’d had pouring up and out of him with twice as much force with which they were downed. His long fingers scrabbled on the marble floor of the bathroom, searching for his wand to clean up the mess, but his vision was doubled and the voices careened around his head in a mad cacophony.

Connections like the Dark Lord.

The chosen one.

The red-haired whore.

The stab at Ginny registered, the fact they knew of her, they knew she was his, and Draco pulled his knees to his chest.

If they knew she was his, they could find where she was.

“Scourgify,” his mother’s voice said from the doorway, her long-unused wand vanishing the mess he’d made with surprising ease. Though her eyes held mild disapproval, she did not raise her voice.

There had been enough of that in the Malfoy household to last several lifetimes.

“You’ve been drinking,” she stated. “And don’t bother lying, we’re both too old for that.”

Was her voice real, or was it just one more to add to the ones constantly replaying in his head, constantly moving like pictures and constantly breathing like snakes?

“Get up off the floor, Draco, that’s no place for you.” Narcissa bent then, swatting at his back gently.

Real, then, he decided, struggling to his feet, locks of thick blond hair dropping into his grey eyes. His mother’s voice was real and attached to a real mother he’d tried to learn to live without. Part of him longed to tell her, longed to beg her to leave, but he couldn’t force the words up and out of his mouth.

First the husband, then the son?

He wouldn’t put her through it.

“Just giving myself a welcome-home fete,” he said steadily, wiping his hand over the back of his mouth and arching an eyebrow smoothly at his mother, feeling the transformation come over him easily, the thin layer of confidence sliding over him like a well-worn cloak.

And though the concern flashed and went in her eyes, Narcissa banked it and put a comforting hand on her son’s back.

He would tell her what ailed him, in his own time, and if he didn’t, she would know.

A smart woman never repeated her mistakes.

~~~

She’d thought of a thousand ways to gently discourage him, to send him on his way feeling none worse for the wear, but none of the thoughtful phrases seemed to make their way to her voice.

The weight of her family, the guilt of her obligations, weighed down on Ginny, and so she said nothing as Harry took her back up to the Burrow, the face of her mother appearing briefly behind the worn kitchen drapes before disappearing into the house.

She said nothing because she had nothing to say, only disappointment that she couldn’t seem to be what was expected of her. Where gentle hands and quiet words had done nothing to spark her in the childhood crush she’d had, she longed for rougher hands and honesty, and she wondered how Draco was faring without her.

Most of all, she knew keenly that if she’d only been more patient—if she’d only stayed put in Boston, where he’d asked her to be—none of this would be happening.

CHAPTER FIVE

She let Harry walk her as far as the Burrow’s front door, then sent him away with no more than a press of cheek-to-cheek, shooting to kindle in him the brotherly feeling he’d had for her all along.

Ginny stood outside until he’d Disapparated back to Hogwarts, then carefully composed her face before going back into the house.

“Mum,” she said, nodding her head slightly. Her brothers and her father had thankfully scattered to their jobs, leaving her alone with the only other woman in the family.

“Did you have a nice visit with Harry, dear?” Molly asked, keeping her voice light. It had been promising to see her youngest with a man like Harry, a man who had proven himself time and again to be steady, dependable, thoughtful. A man who at least had the decency to come to the Burrow rather than spiriting Ginny away to another country so he could corrupt her mind.

But Molly knew that wasn’t the truth of the matter. She’d seen time and time again the evidence of her own strength in her daughter, her own obstreperousness, her backbone in her daughter. Ginny had ended up a great deal more like Molly than any of them would ever have guessed, and now that she was faced with her own greatest qualities, Molly hadn’t the slightest idea of how to beat them.

“I did have a nice visit,” Ginny said, calm washing over her as she thought of what she was about to do, what she should have done in the first place. “And now I’m going to go have a nice visit with Draco.”

Harry had lent her his calm, his strength, his stability. He had faced far worse than a misunderstanding family, and Ginny couldn’t possibly see why she couldn’t do the same. If she wanted to prove to her parents she was adult enough to make her own decisions, then she thought now was the time and place to display it.

Molly’s face blanched, then flushed, and she opened her mouth to say something, only moments later shutting it when she found herself speechless.

What sort of answer did one give to such forthrightness?

“Take an example from Bill, Mother. He sees that I’m happy—or I was before I made the mistake of coming back here.” It was as though someone else were speaking, someone else’s voice coming out of her mouth. But the pained wince on her mother’s face brought the words back to her, gave the responsibility generously back to Ginny.

Things changed, but they would never change enough for her to tolerate her family in pain. Trying to be brave, she stepped forward and put a hand to her mother’s trembling arm. “It wasn’t a mistake to see you. It was my mistake for not being honest. But I’m being honest now, and all I want is some patience in return. Some faith.”

“Faith?” The word came on the tail of a trembling little laugh from Molly’s lips as she raised her hand to touch the wet corners of her eyes. “Faith in you isn’t the problem, Ginny, love. It’s faith in him we don’t have. Faith in the son of a Death Eater who has done nothing upon his return to prove he’s any different from the man who spawned him.” Molly’s chin rose in the air. “I’d not lie to you to tell you I trusted him.”

“Do you trust me?” Ginny retorted quickly, and she only needed the split-second hesitation to discern her mother’s truest answer.

Why should they trust her? After all, it had been she who had nearly brought them all down, she who had opened the Chamber and she who had brought forth the darkest wizard the world had ever seen.

What place had trust with a girl such as that?

“I’m going,” Ginny said, letting go of her mother’s arm. “You’ll just have to trust that I’ll come back.”

As Ginny walked out of the door with her head held high, Molly couldn’t decide whether to feel proud or crushed.

I feel like they're looking for my soul

Like a poor man looking for gold

There are thieves in the temple tonight

She wanted to walk to clear her head, but her eagerness wouldn’t allow it, her feeling of liberation, no matter how small her triumph had been, causing her haste. She Disapparated once she was out of sight of the Burrow and Apparated at the front door of the Malfoy domicile.

She’d not gotten a good look at the newly inhabited mansion upon her entrance the night before or her exit early that morning, but the change was unmistakable. A smile tugged at Ginny’s lips as she lifted the new doorknocker, a plain, hammered silver ring that replaced the once-garish snake’s head that had previously adorned the door.

Ginny sincerely hoped Lucius Malfoy was rolling over in his grave, or at the very least, laboring extra hard in hell.

Her cocksure smile faltered when she saw that the blonde who opened the door was neither tall nor male, but was delicate and very female.

“Ah… Mrs. Malfoy,” Ginny said awkwardly, cursing her fair skin as she felt it burn in a blush. “I…”

“You came by to see Draco,” Narcissa finished. If things were left up to the youth of the world, they would never get done. Pride, sheer pigheaded pride, had held too many people apart for too long.

Having no pride left to speak of, Narcissa hadn’t the slightest problem sticking her nose where it didn’t belong. She cast her eyes up the stairs, to the banks of rooms lining the open hallway. “He’s lying down.” It did her heart good to see the girl’s brow beetle in worry, and the young Weasley all but pushed past Narcissa to get into the house.

“What’s the matter?” she demanded, her eyes burning as she looked at Narcissa. “Is it…?” She left the words unsaid, but her heart twisted viciously as she thought of her lover on his knees.

I am my father’s son. I am my father’s son.

“He’s just tired,” Narcissa said, biting the inside of her cheek and arching a finely shaped eyebrow as she thought of the pops she’d heard late into the night and early into the morning, the telltale sounds of displaced air. “I think perhaps last evening was a bit restless for him.” She was rewarded with Ginny’s face turning more or less the color of her hair.

After what seemed like an eternity of squirming, uncomfortable silence, Narcissa gestured upstairs. “Go. He needs you.” Her second reward in moments was the thinning of Ginny’s lips and the exasperated expression that replaced embarrassment.

Narcissa knew what it was like to be needed, and knew what it was like to want more.

~~~
He smelled her before he fully registered she was in the room, the smell that haunted him, made him want even when the wanting made him crazy. He did not turn, but kept his face to the wall, his long legs stretched out over the expansive bed.

“Are you not feeling well, then?” Ginny sat on the edge of the bed and reached out a hand to touch, tentatively, the bright hair atop his head. The casual touching was something she’d longed for and had yet to really grow accustomed to. In Boston, there had been a boy, a shying, retreating boy who mistrusted any hand that reached out without obvious reasons.

Now, though much of the mistrust had been shunted back, he jerked his head away from her touch and kept his eyes on the stones, counting one after the other in the wall to keep the sickness at bay, to keep the fears from devouring him and moving onto her.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, his voice bitingly cool.

Ginny’s fingers curled into the palm of her hand and she steeled herself with the same resolve she’d shown her mother. “I’m seeing you, aren’t I, ungrateful prat that you are.”

His speed, the sheer lithe rapidity with which he sometimes moved, should have ceased to surprise her. He’d bested her more than once simply by moving so quickly he shocked her into paralysis, and this time was no different.

Draco drew his knees up as he turned to face her, his hands on each side of her face, the long fingers tangling roughly into her thick, wavy hair. His eyes were urgent as they bore into hers and he forced her to stare straight at him.

“Why did you come here?” he asked, leaning into her. “Did you tell anyone you were coming?”

She winced in pain and covered his hands with her own, attempting to lever his fingers out of her hair; her scalp burned in several spots where tendrils were tugged too harshly. “Draco, stop.”

“Did you tell anyone?” he shouted, rising to his knees and looking down on her.

The desperation in his voice frightened her and tears rose to her eyes. “No… yes. Draco, I can’t think when you’re—”

“Who did you tell?” Do they already know you’re here? Are they following? Are they ready to see if I’m ready? Are you ready to run?

And then one thought cut through the panic, making him loosen his fingers slightly.

I will not use you as a shield, but would shield you instead.

Not his father’s son.

“Ginny, who did you tell?” he asked, shifting his weight and still holding her head.

“My Mum!” She twisted away from him and scrambled off the bed, scrubbing her hands up her cheeks to allay her panic and stem her tears. When would she ever learn? There was no predicting such a man.

Such a man couldn’t even predict himself.

Anger boiled up in him, rage at the knowledge that her simple carelessness—naïve Weasley that she was—could end up harming her, and he slid off the bed, prowling the room, stalking her in the chamber of marble, stone, and satin.

“And what did she tell you, Ginny? Not to come?” He didn’t need her answer to know it was the truth. “Did you ever stop to think she might be right?”

What the hell was going on? Ginny wondered. Was this the same man who’d taken so much time with her this morning?

So much time, only moments before kicking her out.

“No.”

“You’re too fucking trusting, Weasley!” His voice rose to a near-shout and he aimed a kick at the unlit candelabra in the corner. “Too trusting. You don’t know me,” his voice dropped to a dangerous whisper. “You don’t know me, Ginny.”

You don’t know the Chosen One. Merlin, what am I going to do?

And when he stepped to her, his face occluded with the confusion, the wrath, the anxiety, he hoped she would step away.

But instead she stepped into him and drove her fist into his stomach.

As though he didn’t have enough fucking problems.

He doubled over, unprepared for the blow, and as he opened his mouth to shout at her again, she clenched her own fingers in his hair, yanking mercilessly and making his eyes widen.

“I don’t know… what the bloody hell… has gotten into everyone… but they can just get bent,” Ginny said through clenched teeth, frustrated into action by everyone around her.

It would be quite some time, she reckoned, before anyone else treated her like a child. That, at least, was a courtesy Harry had given her—treating her as an equal.

Draco’s mouth gaped open as he tried to catch his breath and she covered it with her own, stroking her tongue over his teeth and his tongue, the hunger and heat and anger melting away as she concentrated on him. Not his father, not his past, not the structure of stones they stood in, and for a moment it all fell away.

“I’ll come back tonight,” she said, breaking the kiss off with no finesse at all. “Since you need me so fucking much.” Brutal honesty had a place and time, and this was it.

“Ginny—” Draco started, not knowing where he was going to go with that particular plea. But she cast him one look over her shoulder, rolling her eyes, and was gone.

Half-mad with memories of the past, voices of his peers, possible heir to the most undesirable throne he could think of, besotted with a Weasley, and socked in the gut. Not for the first time, Draco Malfoy was certain he’d died and gone to hell.

CHAPTER SIX

His petulance would have better suited a ten-year-old, and she didn’t hesitate to tell him as such.

After all, she’d given birth to him. It was her right to tell him when he was being unreasonable, and Narcissa Malfoy feared she’d not exercised that right nearly enough when her boy had been smaller. But they’d both been under the long, elegant, cruel and sick thumb of Lucius at the time.

Who needed discipline when they barely had room to breathe?

Now that her son sat before her, however, head hanging and eyes downcast, his usually eloquent response pared down to one-word rejoinders and grunts, Narcissa found the patience she’d gained in St. Mungo’s wearing thin.

“You could have asked her to stay,” she persisted, trying to catch a glimpse of his telltale silver eyes. Those eyes showed everything in their range of color, from flint to steel to the purest sterling, but he was hiding them from her.

"I could have, had I wanted to," he responded, picking at the supper before him. "You know how it is with those Weasleys, mother, you feed them and they'll keep coming back." He did raise his eyes then, the sarcastic sheen in them failing to affect her.

"If you're so determined not to be like your father," she said, stressing the last two words, "Then I'll make a suggestion. Don't push at her only to pull her back in, if you truly want her gone."

With a harried sigh, he scourgified the nearly-full plate and sent it winging back into the antique cupboard that sat behind him. When he finally spoke, his voice was both weary and wounded and intending to wound. "Don't compare me to him, Mother. In case you haven't noticed, you've been gone for the past several years, so I hardly trust your basis for comparison."

It marked the first time her son had ever spoken against her. But it was encouraging to Narcissa-- it meant she'd stricken a nerve, and an exposed one at that.

"Well, I know what it was like to have my entire life become someone else's 'necessity,'" she said. "Don't think she can't be needed elsewhere." Loftily, she scourgified her own plate and thought of how liberating it was to be here, now. Free of her husband and, after recuperation lengthy enough to drive a saint mad, free of usual manners.

Now that Lucius was gone, who gave a damn what everyone thought?

But Draco didn't notice her smug smile or her studying eyes. Her last words were sticking in his brain, and he wondered if they were true.

Could Ginny be needed elsewhere? And what was more, would she let herself be needed elsewhere?

The Weasley crown jewel had come to him of her own accord, yes, but she'd left him of her own accord, as well. She'd known no one else in America, but knew everyone back here in England.

What if, now that he needed her, she didn’t need him at all?

“I’m going out,” he said, pushing back from the table. After summoning his cloak, he was out the door and into the cool night air, tilting his head back as the cold air lifted and stirred the hair that fell to either side of his face.

He doubted, and just as everything was with Draco Malfoy, the doubts consumed him. In consumption, he lost his certainty.

This whole thing had started with being consumed, he knew, being consumed by her, by the witless Weasley who’d never had the sense to fear him, to respect him, and now she hadn’t the sense to stay the hell away from him when he was nothing but bad news.

He needed her with him now, more than ever, but consumption didn’t mean stupidity.

He would have her tonight, but he would have her somewhere safe.

It took little time to send her an owl, a simply stated message he was sure she would understand.

Draco was not, however, sure she would come.

He stood in the ground that had once held his mother’s pride and joy, her extensive gardens, the only living things she’d been allowed to see to. Now that ground was barren as though waiting for her touch, and though unbidden, an image of Ginny in these gardens came to him, Ginny with the ends of her magnificent hair teased out by the wind, her mouth laughing for once.

It struck him then—he’d never once seen her laugh.

The stirring of wings caught his attention, and annoyed, he tore his attention away from the image his yearning mind had created and shot a glance at the owl.

“Lost already, you stupid bird?” The words were hardly out of his mouth before he saw it wasn’t the same owl at all, but a bedraggled, public owl with bare patches along its too-thin body, its beak chipped and wickedly hooked.

A little disgusted by the filthy creature, Draco unburdened the beast of its message and sent it on its way as he unrolled the greasy-feeling piece of parchment.

You must call us if you want us—call us as He would have, with glorious burning pain.

We are ready to serve, but you must prove yourself first.

The rightful will rise and the wrong will fall.

The writing was jerky and blotched, signed with the mark of the Death Eaters, and in his mind’s eye, Draco could see the painfully thin, overeager hand that wrote the message, shaking uncontrollably with—what? Hunger? Rage? Insanity?

“Incendio,” he muttered, and the horrifying message went up as though it were nothing more than tallow. Was this, then, what his father had given his life for? What he’d nearly taken Narcissa’s life for? A handful of power-maddened masochists who would stop at nothing to see their feverish nightmares made whole?

Belatedly, he wished to call his own owl back, to negate the message he had sent along to Ginny. It was already sent, however, and he’d be damned—more than he already was, that is—if he would let her wander about alone.

Voices from the sky

Say rely on your best friend to pull you through

But even if I wanted to I couldn't really truly

‘Cause my only friend is you

If Molly was surprised at how quickly her daughter came back to the Burrow, she didn’t show it. Instead, she set the one place at the table that she hadn’t set in a very long time and went back about preparing dinner.

In moments, Ginny was beside her, performing actions both manual and magical, trying to set her mind—and her mother—at ease.

There was something lurking under the surface of—well, of everything, Ginny reckoned, effortlessly peeling a potato. Though Draco wasn’t precisely what Ginny would have ever called predictable, or rational, or even stable, of late he seemed—

Tormented. That had been the problem in the first place, though, the one that had sent her running back to England, back to familiarity.

No, she corrected herself mentally, smiling up at her mother as their potatoes bumped in midair. You left because you couldn’t stand that his mind wasn’t on you. You left because you’d sacrificed every bit of your pride and he let you do it.

He’d let her do it and had never sacrificed any of his in return, saving those sacrifices for his vulnerable moments of sleep.

But the methodical, heartless element of planning that Draco always exuded seemed to have been extinguished, his behavior becoming erratic, panicked. What was he so scared of?

“Harry’s coming over for dinner,” Molly finally said, breaking the silence between them.

And though the smile Ginny gave her mother was thin, absentminded as she thought of other things, Molly was heartened.

Things could still turn out for the best.

~~~

He scoured every nook, every building with his eyes, keeping himself concealed in shadows as he stealthily made his way through Knockturn Alley and Diagon Alley. If there was trouble to be had tonight, he would draw it upon himself. He had chosen the evening’s meeting place urgently, out of a need for safety, and so he would see to it that it was safe.

He crept in corners and listened with sharp ears as he visited each of his father’s old haunts, and for all his care—for all his constant vigilance—not once did Draco feel the eyes upon him, one still and penetrating, the other rotating and all-seeing.

~~~
She had nearly finished eating when the owl came to the window, and Ginny Weasley couldn’t think of a time in her life where a distraction was more welcome. Harry was sitting across the table from her, grinning like a colossal idiot—a look that would have been far better suited to Ron, who was back on the job, thankfully miles and miles away. It looked as though someone had slipped Harry some sort of mentally debilitating potion through the course of the meal, and if the twins had been there, Ginny wouldn’t have doubted it for a moment. But they, too, were back to work, no doubt entertaining a few good-humored ladies in their flat above the shop.

As a result, what Ginny had been forced to endure was an uncomfortably intimate meal with only her parents and Harry.

Torture.

When the black owl came to the window, Ginny started so violently she nearly choked on her food. “I think I need a glass of water,” she said, hearing the odd, stilted pitch of her voice but unable to stop it. It took only a moment to nudge open the window and unclasp the sterling clip on the black owl’s leg.

“Need a hand, Gin, darling?” Arthur asked cheerfully as Ginny started to return to the table with an empty glass.

Now who looked like the dolt, she wondered. “Ah… no, you know, I think I’ll just slip into the loo—”

“Don’t say loo in front of guests,” Molly corrected automatically, all the world as though Ginny hadn’t been gone a single day. She would have been offended, only Molly still corrected the adults of the family in the same manner.

No wonder they’re all so bloody shocked about Draco, Ginny said as she ran up the stairs, We’ve none of us grown up in this family, only been mothered our entire lives.

She slipped into the brightly-tiled, mismatched bathroom and laid her back against the cool wall, her fingers trembling slightly as she unfolded the message.

It was easy to expect the worse when you didn’t know precisely what to expect. He’d shoved her away, after all, and she’d given him one of her best punches, saved up from years as a beleaguered little sister.

Where words were first exchanged, when nightfall comes.

She burned the note, though it bothered her to do so, and clattered down the stairs. With a single, wide-eyed glance at Harry, she momentarily cast them all back into a moment years before.

But this time, Ginny Weasley wasn’t starstruck, she wasn’t even thinking about the famous Harry Potter.

“I beg your pardon, I just remembered—there was something I needed at Flourish and Blotts.” She rushed past the table and bent down to brush an absent kiss over Molly’s cheek. “Be back later.”

She was gone before any of them really realized it, Harry’s offer to go along with her dying on his lips.

“So,” Molly said with forced cheer. “Who’s up for dessert?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

She Apparated to Diagon Alley, taking the last few steps to Flourish and Blotts at a run. Dusk was just beginning to fall, though the hour was still considerably early, and the streetlamps were just starting to ignite themselves in tiny bursts of incandescent flame, throwing shimmering circles onto the cobblestones below.

Ginny flung the hood of her cloak back as she entered the store, trying to look casual as her eyes darted around, looking for just a glimpse of the one she’d come for. Turning in a circle, ignoring the few wizards and witches still in the shop at this hour, Ginny closed her eyes and let a half-smile ghost over her lips.

She could see him, nose-to-nose with Harry, defensive posture intact, the giant, bombastic ego too large for his small frame, sneering at the Boy Who Lived.

And she’d jumped forward to defend Harry, but also—

Also to see if she could garner a bit of that single-minded attention. And why not? With six brothers, a little attitude wasn’t likely to faze her, and he was good-looking.

“Potter, you’ve got yourself a girlfriend.” The voice wasn’t a recollection, but a reality, and Ginny’s brown eyes snapped open.

How was it she could always forget the anger, always forget what had come before, the second she saw him? It was wizardry without words and wands, only the chemistry between them making her forget past transgressions. Perhaps it was that he, once the object of her more covert fascinations, had simply disappeared one day, leaving her aimless.

“But he didn’t,” she said plaintively, closing the distance between them. “Potter didn’t have himself a girlfriend.” And doesn’t now, she wanted to add, but there was still anger in this bright and beautiful boy, wrath she wasn’t about to incur.

“Come on,” he said, jerking his head and tangling his fingers with hers. He’d seen no one, found no one in Diagon Alley and no one in Knockturn Alley, but he wanted her out of sight as soon as possible. No need to stand around in the open and ogle at each other when they could do it in private.

This she recognized, Ginny thought as she took a skipping step to keep up with him. The haste, the heat. Yes, she recognized this. This was comfortable, no matter how much she yearned for more.

He weaved through the stacks with surprising ease—though Draco hadn’t stricken her as the type to spend long hours frequenting bookstores, she knew him to be well-read; it stood to reason much of his reading had been done within these ceiling-scraping towers of books. With a clandestine glance to each side and a wicked grin tossed at her, he tugged her into a drapery-closed room in the back of the shop.

“I didn’t know this was here,” she said, looking around curiously. Her gaze landed on a few titles and her jaw dropped open, her face burning a bright, bright red.

Madame Moonlight’s Many Magical Mischiefs was displayed prominently, a scantily-clad witch gracing the front of the book, her impossibly large lips pouted as she rubbed her hands over the sides of her body. As Ginny hurriedly averted her eyes, Madame Moonlight (presumably) tipped a salacious wink at Ginny.

“Draco, we’re in the—”

“Adult book section. You’ve six brothers, Gin, let’s not pretend you’ve not seen at least a few of these titles.” Her shock was genuine, and to Draco, genuinely funny. After all, he was willing to bet he and Ginny had done things that would have made Madame Moonlight blush.

As she had no ready response for his point, he set his hands at her waist, feeling the heat of her skin through the thin robes she had reverted to upon coming back home to her poor family and the dilapidated Burrow. Though there was nothing Draco could do about it at the moment, he closed his hands possessively over her hips, wishing things were different.

By way of a distraction, for the both of them, he dipped his head and rubbed his lips over hers, refusing to part his lips and refusing to close his eyes. The light friction between them had Ginny putting her arms around him, her fingers playing in the silky hair that rode above the nape of his neck.

“Someone’s going to see us,” she said, but she planted a tiny, nibbling kiss at the corner of his lips.

“It’s a rotating room,” he said, lifting his chin to brush kisses over her eyelids, over her forehead. “No one’s ever in the same place at the same time. Who wants to have a look at these things in the company of others?”

“Not me,” Ginny said, sliding her hands down to grasp his ears, making him wince and take in a hiss of air. Once he was in that decidedly vulnerable position, he kissed her fully, savoring the taste of her, that taste that spoke of Ginny only and no one else.

Draco had no way of knowing that he had added to that taste, and that if anyone else were to kiss her, it would be as much him they were experiencing as her. They’d tailored one another without ever realizing it.

He stooped then, bending to his knees in front of her, looking up at her with an expression of supplication. Uncertain of what he was doing, Ginny kept one hand on top of his head, fingers stroking restlessly through the spun silk of his moonlight-bright hair, at once relaxed and tense in his presence. Staying stooped before her, Draco ran his hands up her thighs, barely restraining a curse as he felt the coolness of her thighs beneath the thin cloak and robe she’d worn.

She shouldn’t have been so cold. He should have been able to at least give her that.

Is this the way the future Dark Lord treats his queen? It was like a slap in the face with a cold, clammy hand, his father’s voice intruding in such a space as this, such an intimate situation, and Draco’s head dropped forward as he took a single, gasping indrawn breath.

“What is it?” she asked, his queen, his Ginny, his sanity, and he turned eyes gleaming with tears and desperation to hers.

He could not tell her. He could not tell her the one thing that could save her and could not tell her the one thing that would send her away from him for good.

He was a Malfoy after all, a model Slytherin. He was too damned selfish to send her away.

Draco did not answer but leaned his head back, sending her light hand sliding from his head to dangle in front of him; he took each of her fingertips between his teeth, nipping lightly and trying to concentrate on her only, to push away his madness.

As he drew her index finger between his lips, suckling it lightly, his fingers found the part of her that was warm against the chill. Crossing his first and middle finger, he moved aside her knickers, sliding the crossed digits into her and pressing his thumb to the tiny bundle of nerves at her center. She gasped as he curled his fingers in a come-hither gesture, and all her questions were forgotten as she drove her hips forward and back, her finger sliding from his mouth with a pop.

“Look at me,” he commanded her in a harsh voice. If there was anything he needed to see, it was what he did for her, it was the one good thing he could do for her.

“This isn’t—” She couldn’t finish her thought, but the flush stayed on her cheeks. She was ashamed at her wantonness, ashamed at the fact that he knelt before her as though serving her, ashamed that she had been so immediately ready, so unbearably common. But she kept her eyes on his as he slid slowly in and out of her, the long fingers doing both more and less for her than had been done before.

The power arced between them like lightning, eyes locked to eyes and need warring with need, and she was sobbing as she came, grasping his hand with her own wildly shaking fingers.

He withdrew his fingers even as her muscles were still fluttering around him, and when he rose to her, she grasped his shoulders, ready to draw him to her, into her, but he shook his head, instead leaning his head to her shoulder and letting his breath come in hard and even gusts as he tried to control himself.

“Let me—” She slid her hands down, seeking him, but he shook his head, his lips rubbing over her neck.

“No,” he said, sliding his own hands down to cover hers, to still them. He knew it would torture him for the rest of the night if he didn’t allow himself release, but now was not the time. He drew back, placing his lips to her ears, and said “Only you tonight, okay?”

“I don’t understand,” Ginny said, jerking her hands away from him, stung by what she saw as his rejection.

But all she got in return was an enigmatic smile, and he pinned her in her place with nothing more than that, a look so incongruous to his usual character that she could do naught but gape at him. “Do all you bloody Gryffindors have to be so selfless? Be selfish for once, Ginny.” He lowered his forehead to hers, letting their breaths mix, and said “Be a bit of a Slytherin for me. Have a little pride.”

That’s the thing… when it came to you, I never had any. Her voice filled them both in memories, and she let out a small sob, touching a hand to his face.

“I’m scared,” she admitted, though the admission shocked her. Scared of what? Or of whom?

Scared of everything, because everything was forcing them apart, forcing them into roles they’d left and had no wish to resume.

“Go now,” he said, kissing her quickly and wishing he could do more, take more, have more. But this was what they needed, and Draco knew what he could give her.

He knew he could make her need him just as surely as he needed her, and as she fled Flourish and Blotts confused, aroused, and mussed, he cried out in anguish he refused to admit to her.

Is this how you would treat your queen?

“Oh, Merlin,” Draco ground out, letting his knees buckle and spill him to the thick carpeting in the small room of the bookshop. “Help me.”

~~~

She came into the house with trudging steps, having walked nearly all the way home in the cold. It was the best alternative to a cold shower she could think of, and if she was shivering, she couldn’t cry.

Oh, how she desperately wanted to cry.

Life had never been simple for her—though the Weasley family thrived on the simplest of joys, she had always been confused. The only girl in such a large family, she had issues to deal with and no one to truly confide in, and moving onto Hogwarts hadn’t been much better—she’d stepped from a world filled with men into a world where she was surrounded by other females constantly.

And then Tom had come along.

Draco, however, was a new challenge altogether, because for the first time, Ginny’s confusion stemmed not from circumstance, not from happenstance, but from her own choices.

She’d chosen to go to him, chosen to stay with him, chosen to stand by him as best she could.

She hadn’t, however, chosen to love him.

“Well, he didn’t choose to love you, either,” she said through chattering teeth as she climbed her way up the steps to the Burrow.

And wasn’t that the problem?

As she fell into the well-worn bed upstairs, she prayed for some sort of guidance.

There are thieves in the temple tonight

Kicking me in my heart

Tearing me all apart

“It can’t be true.” Her words were borne more of habit than true belief—it most certainly could be true, and most probably was, considering her source.

Hermione Granger simply did not want to believe the prospect of yet another war, especially at the hands of Ginny Weasley’s lover.

“He’s no longer a classmate, girl, you can’t be thinking of him as such.” Mad-Eye Moody thumped around the room, shaking his fist now and again to punctuate his words. “He’s a bloody Death Eater, and they must be watched.” He lowered his face to hers and shouted “Constant vigilance!”

He’d seen the boy, the boy who looked so much like his demon of a father, creeping around Knockturn Alley. And no sooner than the silver-haired young wizard had left, three more crept in his wake, eyes gleaming with peculiar madness, with fanaticism found in few. Mad-Eye Moody had seen it too many times before to misidentify it, and it was a perfect training opportunity for this young woman.

Hermione thought fleetingly that if being an Auror was likely to drive her as batty as Mad-Eye, then perhaps she’d made the wrong career decision. But she straightened her spine and looked the old Auror in the eye.

“He’s no longer a classmate,” she said stalwartly. “In fact, the odds that he’s hurting a friend are fairly good.” She took a deep breath and wished, for a moment, that things could be easier, that they could be back at Hogwarts, bickering over lessons and Ron’s big mouth, and Harry’s touchiness.

But they weren’t; the trio was split up and they had no one to depend on but themselves.

“We’re keeping an eye on him, Granger,” Mad-Eye said bracingly. “But we don’t move until we’re certain.”

Hermione was already certain—something would have to be done, and soon. So she found herself nodding and doing what she did best—more plotting, more planning. Hermione Granger could outsmart Draco Malfoy any day.

CHAPTER EIGHT

She didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to her before.

Ginny had fallen asleep with the fervent wish for guidance burning through her mind like a mantra, and when she’d arisen the next morning, inspiration had hit her like the Muggles’ proverbial ton of bricks.

Whatever that meant.

If there was anyone in the world other than Ginny herself who understood Draco, who knew what preyed on him even though he’d been given back the one thing he’d thought he lost, it was his mother. Narcissa, the one thing Draco had truly wanted back, was bound to understand at least a few of her son’s inconsistencies.

She ate breakfast quickly, giving her mother no excuse and no indication where she was going when she left; when she was walking through the gate and up to the steps of Malfoy Mansion, however, Ginny was forced to admit she hadn’t quite thought the matter through.

After all, what was she going to say? “Excuse me, ma’am, but your son wouldn’t have sex with me yesterday.”

Somehow, Ginny didn’t think that was the proper approach. So, as she used the doorknocker to announce her arrival at the mansion, she tried to formulate the words in her mind.

Any words she’d compiled flew from her mind when Draco answered the door. He was impeccably groomed, as always, his robes in place, a smile fixed on his face.

“Virginia,” he said in a purr, lounging against the doorjamb in a pose that looked negligent but was, she knew, carefully choreographed.

So why did it make her feel like her heart was in her throat?

He took her hand and tugged her into the house, wondering how she’d come to be there at exactly the moment he’d wished for her. Ruminating on it for a moment as he pulled her to him and breathed in the scent of her hair, he figured it wasn’t that big of a miracle.

Draco wished for her nearly every minute of the day, it seemed.

He kept the smile on his face as he set her back from him so he could look at her, but he knew it didn’t touch his eyes, and he wondered if the glamour spell he’d cast on himself only moments ago was amply hiding the dark shadows that had started to nestle under his eyes.

He’d not slept at all upon coming home from Flourish and Blotts, but had instead sat straight up in bed, eyes wide, listening for the voice of his father. Sleep meant vulnerability, and in vulnerability, the whispers started.

He could not—and would not—stand to hear the sibilant suggestions about ‘the queen.’

His father had no right to speak of Ginny. He’d been dead long before she came to his son, and dead he should have stayed.

“I wanted you,” he said finally, drawing her back into his arms and finally kissing her properly, tongue flitting over tongue, teeth nipping at lips. “I came home wanting you, and the damnable itch looks as though it hasn’t abated.”

She winced inwardly at the harshness of his words, but brushed the sting aside. “No fault but your own,” Ginny said, putting her hands to his chest and wondering fleetingly where Narcissa was. No matter how enjoyable this interlude was undoubtedly going to be, it wasn’t what she’d come for.

But perhaps there wasn’t any harm in asking—at the very least, he’d never lied to her.

“I was worried about you last night,” she said, feeling his arms stiffen defensively around her. “What’s going on?”

Here’s what happened, Ginny, I came home and these lunatics—you went to school with them, too, surely you remember them—concluded I was their new leader. Completely cracked, eh?

For a moment he could hear himself saying it, confessing it all to her in a relieved, lighthearted spill of idiotic words, and if he were someone else, if the people who had come to him with lunacy in their eyes and darkness in their hearts were not so dangerous, they would laugh at the whole thing later.

But he was Draco Malfoy, son of the most loyal of the Death Eaters, most hated among his classmates, and there would be no laughter about a topic such as this.

‘Cause me and you could have been a work of art

Thieves in the temple

“I don’t think this is a matter for me to get involved with.” Harry felt a cold, clammy sweat over his brow and found himself wondering about all those prophecies lined up in a room, gleaming, dusty balls with eerie, portentous words trapped inside. Was there one for Harry and Draco? Could they, too, only co-exist in war and impossibility?

Hermione took his hand impulsively. “Harry, listen. It’s everything we—everything you­—fought so hard against. What if they came back, and so soon? It’s not even been three years, Harry.”

“She’s tons of brothers, ‘Mione. They can all help her just as well as I can. She’d be daft to believe I was only after her for my own personal feelings.” Especially considering I don’t know how to properly show interest in a girl other than the one standing right in front of me, he thought. “Why don’t you ask Ron?” he asked, feeling the green tendrils of jealousy gripping his insides none too gently.

“Because when it comes down to it, there are things in this world I wouldn’t ever depend on Ron to do!” Hermione burst out, then clapped a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry. Forget I said that.”

On the contrary, I found that quite heartening, Harry thought to himself. Fuck me silly. “I’ll go,” he finally said. “But I’ve no guarantees, Hermione.”

To both of their surprise, she leaned over and gave him an overly enthusiastic kiss that landed more at the corner of his mouth than his cheek. “Brilliant,” she said with a fierce whisper, the starts of her first victory already tasting sweet in her mouth. “Molly says she’s likely at Malfoy Mansion now.”

~~~

He was trying to think of something—anything to say in response to her heartfelt query, and a knock on the door made them both jump.

His eyes went wide, and molten silver fastened on tawny chocolate as he fixed her with his frightened gaze.

They’re here, he thought inexplicably. Of course they would come when his mother was gone to therapy at St. Mungo’s, preferring their secrecy and their games as they always had, and their parents before them had.

“Upstairs,” he hissed, shoving her with enough force to make her trip. He wanted her away from them, away from the door, away from him, even, but for now that could not happen. They stumbled up the stairs together, and Ginny asked no questions.

They stood together at the railing of the second floor, looking down, down, down along the tall walls at the now ominous front door. His fear was so tangible that it had leaped into Ginny herself, her heart was in her throat and she dreaded the person—or monster—on the other side for reasons she could not comprehend; so tightly were his emotions bound to hers that she felt no need for reason at this point.

The door creaked open and Ginny’s breath left her in a small whimper. Draco put his hand over her mouth, his panic wiping away the idea of a Silencing Charm.

We’ve come to see our lord and his queen, the voices bounced around in his head, and involuntarily, he took his hand away from Ginny’s face and put both hands over his ears, shaking his head.

And then Harry Potter came through the front door.

“Gin?” he called out hesitantly, not quite stepping into the mansion. He’d never been here, never wanted to be.

Damn you, Hermione, he thought, but the oath lacked heat. He stepped into the mansion, letting the weighty door swing shut behind him. He’d heard voices—specifically, Draco’s and Ginny’s—only moments before he’d knocked.

Draco had thought for a moment his eyes were playing tricks on him, when the bloody Boy Who Lived walked through the door. But then he’d called out for Ginny—my Ginny, Draco thought—and Draco had turned now-cool grey eyes to his lover.

Ginny was half-leaning over the railing, her eyes flicking from Harry to Draco and back again, as though she could not rationalize the existence of the two in this same place.

“I just came by to see how you were, Ginny, after you left so suddenly last night…” Harry’s eyes swept left, right, but never up.

He never thought to look up.

Ginny’s cheeks burned with two high, heated spots of color, Harry’s words damning her just as surely as any sin, and she could feel those accusing silver eyes on her as bloody Harry nattered on about how she’d run out of dinner, and how he’d wanted to speak with her, to expand upon their conversation from before.

He moved suddenly, his specialty, and before she could even offer up an apology or call out to Harry to leave, Draco was behind her, his arms caging her, his breath hot and heavy on the back of her neck.

He’d been expecting the end lying behind his front door, and what he’d gotten was worse. Draco had gotten the bloody lion behind his front door, the bloody hero.

The bloody thief, and she’d never said a fucking word.

How was he ever supposed to change if everyone kept provoking him?

“What is he doing here, Ginny?” His whisper was low and sliding, smooth and misleadingly quiet. His lips brushed her ear, and his voice did not reach Harry directly below them.

Ginny shivered and turned her head slightly, ducking it as she did so, bringing her mouth close to his. “Draco, I’m sorry. It’s nothing—”

“I will not compete with him anymore. Not now. Not for you.” His hands snaked around her and she forced herself to still the indrawn breath that wanted to hiss through her teeth. His hands slipped inside her robe, spilling the thin fabric first off one shoulder, then the other.

“Draco, not here,” she whispered pleadingly, her eyes flicking back to the dark-haired man walking around the first floor as though lost.

“Keep your eyes on him, Ginny,” Draco said ruthlessly, his anger channeling into lust, his rage making him more cunning, cleverer, more creative. This brain was like his father’s, manipulative and keen, finding any way to make a point.

He certainly had a point to make, Draco thought as his long-fingered, calloused hands found her breasts and kneaded them roughly. “Best keep quiet, my Ginny, or you’ll alert dear Harry as to our whereabouts,” Draco whispered nastily.

Twin tears slid down Ginny’s cheeks as his hands slid down her stomach possessively, bringing a flock of butterflies floating up to his fingertips, the quivering sensation quaking the length of her abdomen and to the center of her.

Not here, not now, she thought, but when had it ever made any difference, to him, or even to her, in her deepest places?

It never had, for he held the magic in his hands, the tenuous magic that danced between them every time they were close.

“You never told me,” Draco said, and suddenly the rage had left him, replaced by desperation so sick it made him shake.

Had she let herself be needed elsewhere?

“It’s nothing,” she repeated, but her voice was hitching in tiny little gasps as his fingers pressed points of mixed pleasure and pain along her abdomen, her thighs. Hands slid around to caress her buttocks, squeezing and pinching and stroking away any pain that may have been incurred, and slowly Draco pulled the remainder of her robes away, leaving her in a bra that had seen better days and a pair of black panties so brief they may as well not have existed.

“It’s everything,” Draco said, feeling tears wet his own eyes. How could he have let this happen? “You’re everything,” he said, leaning forward and wrapping his arms around her in a strange hug that didn’t seem out of place in the least.

In this madhouse, everything could fit.

“Now shhh,” Draco said, slipping one finger to the aching bundle of nerves at her core and thrusting into her from behind. She arched back, the tears sliding toward her hairline as he slid his length in and out of her, their breaths silenced by their secret, the young man on the floor below needing only to look up to find his quarry.

Draco matched his short, fast thrusts with the stroking of his finger, feeling her body tense and relax with every motion forth and back. She was close; they both were, and he bent her over a little farther, forcing her to grasp the railing for support, her hands slapping limply on the dark wood, her entire torso now displayed for anyone to see—

But still Harry did not look up.

Draco stilled his hands and stilled his thrusts, staying buried deep within her as he leaned forward, covering her hands with his, his voice shaking with grief and fear and self-loathing.

What had he done?

What was he doing?

“You’re mine,” he said at length, and with one final thrust and one final stroke, sent them both into silent, spiraling climax as his own tears coursed their way down the unmarked skin of his cheeks. Biting his lips to stifle a sob—What son of mine cries while taking a woman?—he drew her back, away from the edge.

And on the ground floor, upon hearing a single, shaky gasp, Harry looked up in time to see only a flash of red hair.

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.

**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.

**Author’s Notes: All right, so in the previous chapter I said perhaps one more chapter would have us finished. I lied. This chapter plus one more will bring my unintentional epic to a close. Don’t forget to participate in Portkey’s Reader’s Choice Awards! http://talk.portkey.org/index.php?showforum=26 Now… happy reading, and more to come soon…**

CHAPTER ELEVEN

They’d surrounded him like dogs on a bone, muttering under their breaths, and in an instant, they’d all been apparated elsewhere. As they dislodged themselves from him, thankfully separating their dank, malodorous bodies from him, Draco risked a glance around him. The rounded, cavernous walls dripping with constant condensation and the rats scuttling along told him all he needed to know.

Couldn’t they have chosen somewhere less typical, he wondered idly, trying to keep his mind occupied and the panic at bay.

“Expelliarmus!” Pansy shouted, and his wand, barely under the touch of his worrying fingertips, flew from his pocket and into her hand. As she wrapped her grubby fingers tightly around the pristine wand, Draco winced. Her fingernails had each been filed to a razor point, and her index finger was liberally streaked with blood.

He hadn’t really wanted to know how they’d fashioned their Dark Marks.

“I hardly think there’s any need to disarm me, Parkinson, unless you have no trust for me.” He tried for the regality that was so often effortless, the commanding tone that seemed second nature. But now, here, knowing that all he cared about lay above ground and all he dreaded below, it was hard to keep his voice from shaking.

All she had in the way of an answer was a binding spell, sending thin, chainlike silver cords from the end of her wand, strapping him up against the grimy, curving wall, the ends of the confines disappearing into darkness.

“The Dark Lord endured much pain,” Pansy drawled, tilting her head back and regarding him speculatively. “And still he persevered, until the interfering, Muggle-loving fiend came along.”

“Pain!” Crabbe said enthusiastically, rooting around in the muck behind Pansy for Merlin knew what. On the other side of him, Goyle rubbed his hands together anxiously and shot occasional glances at Pansy, as though confirming what to do next.

All that had changed from school years was the leader, Draco thought. The intelligence clearly hadn’t even increased a mite.

Pansy extended her arms out to her sides, her torn, bedraggled black robes looking for all the world like wings, and she opened her palms. Crabbe straightened and slapped a large, mud-streaked shard of glass into his mistress’s right hand just as Goyle placed a long, thick branch in her other.

“Let us begin,” Pansy said, and stared directly into Draco’s eyes. “My lord.”

~~~

“I’m afraid I don’t really understand,” Arthur said, huffing to keep up with his daughter, who was walking through the Ministry hallways as though she owned them, her hair bannering out behind her like a handful of flames. “Ahh… if he’s run away with Death Eaters, Ginny, love, how am I supposed to help?”

He’d barely spoken three words to her since her return to England, not knowing what to say to this woman who had once been his little girl. He’d been fretful and furious in turns and finally settled on passive, his wide eyes taking in everything and betraying nothing.

But now his little girl was asking him for help, and he’d not deny her that, even if he didn’t have the slightest clue as to what she was nattering on about, referring now and again to the filthy wraith that had once been Narcissa Malfoy. All in all, Arthur Weasley judged, waving jauntily at a fellow Ministry employee who was blinking in surprise at the trio, it was the strangest situation he’d ever had chance to see.

“Taken, Ginny said demandingly. “He didn’t run away with them. Father, I only need you to tell me where the Aurors are.” She stopped, making Narcissa jerk to a halt, Arthur plowing into the back of her gracelessly.

“Beg y’pardon,” he said mechanically, looking down at Ginny with a frown. “The Aurors?” he repeated.

“If there’s anyone who knows where bad things are happening, bad people are gathering, it’s them, isn’t it?”

“We don’t have time for this,” Narcissa put in, thinking of masks and robes and nights spent away from home, ever-consuming obsessions and lies upon lies.

“This way,” Arthur said, squeezing his eyes shut momentarily.

He wondered what Molly would say if he lost his job.

Thieves in the temple

Love - come quick

Love - come in a hurry

Thieves in the temple tonight

“I asked you specifically to wait,” Mad-Eye thundered, looking down at Hermione and letting his magical eye swerve to pin Harry, as well. “And you, boy, you’re the one who decided not to go into the field. You’ve no right to be tryin’ now.” The three of them were crowded into Hermione’s cubical, the two friends looking glum and more than a little ashamed of themselves as Mad-Eye’s voice carried over the whole of the floor, to surrounding cubicles and offices.

“Harry was only trying to help,” Hermione said gently. “Don’t blame him. He wasn’t trying to do any of our work, as it were, he was just trying to get Ginny out of harm’s way.”

It had all seemed like such a good idea when she’d thought of it. After all, Ron would stop complaining about Malfoy, Ginny would stop moping around, and Harry wouldn’t be so lonely anymore.

But Ron wasn’t ever home, anyway, Ginny moped around without Draco, and Harry—

Well, Hermione thought, she didn’t really want Harry to be with Ginny.

“That’s not the point,” Harry broke in, shooting a sharp glance at Hermione. “The point is, he told me about Pansy Parkinson and the other two. Pardon me for being so forward, but if he were in league with them, I hardly think he’d be trumpeting it to the world.”

“You think those Death Eaters care about one another?” Mad-Eye asked, expectorating on the floor to punctuate his phrase. “Bollocks!” he roared, making both Hermione and Harry jump. “They only care about themselves, and he got you to look the other way, didn’t he? Constant vigilance!”

“I’m sorry I asked you to go,” Hermione said, looking at Harry imploringly. “I think it’s best you leave. I’ll take responsibility for all this.”

“Lovely to see someone’s going to,” Ginny said, stepping up with her father and Narcissa in tow. Her anger warred with her worry now, as she’d overheard the bulk of the exchange among Harry and the two Aurors. “Hermione, darling, were you ever going to bother mentioning to me that you’d decided to interfere in my life?” But worst of all was Harry, who’d pretended so strenuously to care, and why?

All because Hermione had asked him to.

It seemed, Ginny thought, as if some things never changed.

“You knew,” she said accusatorily to Harry. “And so if you knew about the Death Eaters, you knew as well,” she addressed Hermione. “So now I’ve a bit of news for you. They’ve taken Draco, and you’re going to tell me to where they’ve done so.” The quaver in her voice had subsided, leaving only the surety of one who knows she is in the right.

“Ha!” Mad-Eye exploded. “You think anyone here’s going to tell you, little missy, so you can help him?”

“He’s not done anything wrong!” Narcissa pleaded. She could see that the boy, the green-eyed copy of James Potter himself, believed her, and her heart turned over. “Harry, please…”

“Hush, woman!” Mad-Eye roared, and Arthur shifted nervously, wondering at what point it would be prudent to step in and have a word or two.

Fed up with the hesitation and the bureaucracy, Ginny utilized a trick she’d learned from Draco, moving decisively, quickly, and unpredictably. Not even Mad-Eye saw it coming, and before any of them could stop her, Ginny Weasley had her wand pointed directly between Harry’s eyes.

“Tell me what you know,” she said quietly. “And do it now.”

**Author’s Note: This is the longest chapter I’ve ever posted. Why? Because I said one chapter would finish this, my epic. There will not be a sequel, no matter what ‘open ends’ may be discerned from this pile of words. I would like to take a moment to explain my goal in these three pieces, and so if you’d like, you can skip along to the story. These three stories, “Come to Me,” “Even I Have Pride,” and “Stolen,” represent to me the three stages of a volatile but lasting relationship: lust, need, and love. I hope I’ve accomplished at least a little of that. Small warning—there is violence ahead, and so be warned. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these stories, I know I’ve enjoyed writing them immensely. Once you finish, I highly suggest cranking up “When Doves Cry,” by Prince. It’s my all-time favorite song to think of our fair-haired boy to. Happy reading.**

CHAPTER TWELVE

Draco’s chin tilted into the air and, remarkably, he gave his ‘followers’ a bit of a smirk, the façade made complete by the single, trademark cocked eyebrow. He stayed silent as Pansy approached him, her head tilted thoughtfully. She looked, he thought, rather like a woman trying to decide between two different sets of robes.

She was slow to strike, first walking back and forth in front of him, talking in a high, dreamy voice about the trials and tribulations they’d decided he must go through. An instant before she struck, he saw her bloodstained fingers tighten around the thumb’s-width branch she held and he steeled himself for the blow. It came, predictably, to the side of his head, and Draco’s vision doubled and trebled with the strike, then cleared quickly.

A snake’s-head walking stick could do so much more damage, he thought, staring coolly at the mere girl in front of him, backed by the two ogres who once had protected his every stride, shadowed his every move. They stared vacantly at him, silvery lines of drool escaping from their lips as they tittered, tittered, tittered to themselves like a couple of rats.

Pansy, however, seemed to take his lack of reaction personally and swung the branch again, backhanded this time, swiping him across his cool, unmarked expanse of cheek and splitting it open.

Draco let his head hang only for an instant, thick strands of platinum hair dangling in his eyes and sticking to the blood that was now flowing freely down his left cheek. Then he looked up at Pansy through long, pale eyelashes.

It hurt, of course, but there was a part of Draco, behind the gritted teeth and the resolute gaze, that welcomed the pain. The part of him that had stood back, horrified, and watched as he’d taken Ginny in anger now stood back and smugly thought You deserve this.

So he met his torturer’s gaze forthrightly, determined to make the most of his trial. In pain, there were no voices, none of the smooth, sliding timbre of his father’s vocalizations. There was only clarity, and the knowledge that he’d surely brought himself to this point, and the knowledge that at that moment, he wanted Ginny very badly.

“You’re not even crying out,” Pansy whispered, letting the branch clatter from her fingers as she neared him, her starvation-diminished lips turning into a parody of a pout. Her words reached only his ears, escaping those of the lackeys behind her, and she stood on tiptoe to search his face with her faded, murky eyes.

“You don’t want me to, do you?” Draco asked, his breaths running deep but even. “A dark lord does not show his followers weakness.” But those eyes that were fastened on him were not quite as mad as he’d first thought. Angry, perhaps, but a great deal saner than he’d estimated, which made him wonder—what the hell was she playing at?

She raised the hand holding the piece of glass, floating it almost as though it were levitating, and never took her eyes from his. “Weakness? I already know about your weakness.” And she moved then, cutting away his robes with a minimal amount of fuss, never glancing away, never releasing him.

She’d been more vacant back at Hogwarts, less intent. It had been, he remembered, one of the many things he’d thrown in her face. Slytherins weren’t supposed to be so absent.

They were supposed to be focused, exactly as she was now.

Exactly as he was.

He was bare-chested in a matter of minutes, Crabbe and Goyle laughing uproariously at his near nakedness. He wore only a pair of black boxers by the time Pansy was done, and even then she hovered over the waistband.

“Very regal,” she hissed, bringing her lips close to his ear. “You whoring, weaselly, bastard.” She thrust the glass into his side, and Draco’s lips opened in a silent pant of pain.

“I’m not a follower at all,” she said, dragging her lips from his ear and through the blood on his cheek, flicking her eyes back to the entranced Crabbe and Goyle. “Darling, I’m a leader.”

His eyes watering from the pain, Draco lashed his head from side to side, his teeth bared as he tried to catch her, any part of her, that he could tear into.

By way of an answer, she withdrew her head like a snake, slipping her hand between them to dig sharpened nails into mauled flesh.

“Cry out, won’t you, my darling?” she asked, twisting her fingers and feeling blood-slick tissue give and tear. “Cry out for her.”

She always comes just when I wish for her most, Draco thought desperately, his helpless fingers clenching and relaxing around the phantom feel of her hair sliding through his fingers. Grimly, knowing he would cry out for her, call her to him, if given any more incentive, hating himself—

Think of what you’ve done to her, and know that you belong here—

—Draco reared his head back, slamming it into the dirt-encrusted wall behind him and sending himself into blessed darkness.

~~~

“I—I don’t know,” Harry said, his jade eyes crossing to follow the tip of the wand.

“Virginia!” Arthur gasped, but there was a touch—just a touch, he wouldn’t admit to more—of pride in that shocked vocalization.

“I’m not asking you, Harry,” Ginny said calmly, forcing her hand to be still. Keeping her wand pressed into his skin, she skipped her eyes to Mad-Eye. “Tell me.”

But Mad-Eye said nothing, only grunted and shrugged. He’d die himself before he’d let the secret go.

But not Hermione.

Faced with the choice of possibly losing her job or endangering Harry—even though her rational, logical, unfailingly Hermione mind told her Ginny wouldn’t do it—Hermione broke down.

“Stop Ginny, stop it!” she said, her voice rising into octaves of panic never before reached by the level-headed young woman. “Professor Moody!” she said pleadingly, unthinkingly reverting to the title he’d never even used. But her mentor remained unbending, and she turned back to her best friend. “They’ve been tracked underground before, near the sewers between Knockturn and Diagon Alleys, but never with him. He’s never been with them before, so I can’t honestly say if that’s where they are now. I can show you, just please—stop. Don’t harm Harry.” She spoke in a rush, and Mad-Eye’s face grew harder and harder by the second.

Ginny heard the desperation in Hermione’s voice, heard how closely it matched the desperation in her own, and for a moment she felt very, very sick. Her brother, miles away, traveling with the Quidditch games.

Did he know all that time Hermione was looking elsewhere?

“You’re both pathetic,” Ginny said angrily, whisking her wand away from Harry’s face and stowing it in her sleeve. She had to curb the urge to draw it out again when Hermione’s hands fluttered to Harry’s face, her long fingers tracing the small indentation Ginny’s wand had made between his eyebrows.

But then her mother’s words came back to her. It isn’t as though you choose who you love.

“Inconvenient time to think of that,” Ginny said under her breath. “Not too harsh on Ron, Hermione? Please.” When all she got was a wide-eyed nod from Hermione, she looked at her father. “Do you know where they are?”

Arthur winced, looking from Alastor back to his daughter. “I know where they’re talking of,” he said, clearing his throat.

Ginny needed no more encouragement than that.

And while Mad-Eye roared and ranted and tried to rally up enough Ministry members to go after the Weasleys and stop them, Harry closed his fingers over Hermione’s and said nothing.

~~~

They were in Boston.

She sat on top of the dining room table, legs dangling over the edge, and eyed him with frank curiosity. Though she was more the oddity—her red hair tousled around her bare shoulders, falling into wide, sleepy eyes as she snuggled farther into his bathrobe and sat on the damned table like an urchin—she watched him as though she’d never seen anyone eat before.

“I realize in your family, it’s rare to see anyone use silverware, but must you stare?” The Young Master ate another bite, secretly self-conscious under her gaze.

What was she seeing when she looked at him?

“Relax, Mal—” In those days, those early days in Boston, it was so hard not to revert to old habits, to call him by the name he most despised. “Draco. I just…” She shrugged, not knowing how to finish her sentence without feeling the fool.

A corner of his mouth winged up and he pushed his plate aside, suddenly not hungry for his food. “Fancy watching me eat, then?”

“I was just watching,” Ginny said crossly, cheeks burning. She placed palms flat on the table, ready to push off and leave—she was growing particularly fond of the house’s mammoth library—when he slid his chair over, placed his hands on the tops of her thighs, and grinned up at her maniacally.

“Going somewhere, Virginia?” he asked, ducking his head to press a kiss to the spot high on her thigh where the robe had slipped open.

“I’m going to leave you to eat in peace, you bloody tyrant,” Ginny said, raising her chin in the air but watching down her nose interestedly at his progress. Those long fingers encircled her thighs and he closed his teeth over the smooth skin he found above her knee, sending long, shuddering waves of shock up the long muscles in her thighs and straight to her center.

“I’m done eating,” he said simply. “My food, at least.”

Shocked at her own reaction, embarrassed by his reference, she tried to twist away, only to have him yank on her thighs, sending the oversized robe bunching around her waist as she tumbled gracelessly into his lap.

He released one of her thighs to unfasten the slacks he wore, only to find her hands already there, fumbling with the catch as her lips raced over his face, his lips, his throat, and it seemed she couldn’t have him fast enough, to get him into her and out of her system, knowing she’d only find him there again next time she looked up, next time she blinked, next time she breathed.

And as he entered her, his name slipped from her lips, still new in those days of America, but as sweet as she’d ever been…

“Draco, love…”

But that was wrong—Ginny had never called him “love,” and the word jarred Draco’s memory, jolted the reality he’d let himself regress into.

“Draco, love, it’s not time to sleep yet,” the voice came again, not the sometimes soft, sometimes salty voice of Ginny, but the harsh, jealousy-ridden voice of an old school chum.

When he didn’t respond to her, she jammed her handy wooden staff into his ribs, sending his eyes wide and a sharp pain shooting through his lungs.

Draco emitted a single, sharp cough, regretting it greatly, and stared at her balefully through an eye clouded by blood and sweat, the other eye swollen nearly shut. While he’d been out, Pansy had apparently been a busy little bitch.

“No rest for the wicked, eh, Parkinson?” Draco lipped, the small chortle of black mirth he indulged himself in sending more spasms of pain through his lungs and filling the back of his throat with the terrible, clinging, metallic tang of blood.

He would die here in this filthy hole with this rotten bint and her crazy beasts, and no one would ever know, because he’d lied, lied, lied, and sent them all away.

But he wouldn’t do it idly. “Well, come on then,” he said, rolling his eyes as best he could in the confines of injury. “You’re certainly not a good conversationalist, Parkinson, and you’re not dropping your knickers for me, so you’d best do something before I bloody well die of boredom.” The defiant sentence ended on a wheeze, however, and as black spots swarmed at the edges of his vision, his whole being yearned to talk to Ginny.

“I have a present for you, my lord,” Pansy said, making certain to pitch her voice loudly for the benefit of Crabbe and Goyle, who stood on the balls of their toes, waiting for her beck and call. One of them produced the shabby owl he’d seen once before, and the other a quill and parchment.

“You can write for help,” she said sweetly. Crabbe sent the owl to perch on Draco’s shoulder with a flick of his wrist, and Pansy took the quill and filthy parchment to Draco herself. “You can write to her for help,” she said, eyes widened in mock innocence. “Maybe she’ll come and turn you into a cowardly fool who runs away from his obligations and his loyalties. Oh… wait, that’s already happened.” She thrust the parchment in front of him, hovering it near his hand, and then jammed the sharpened end of the quill into his side, wetting it with fresh gouts of dark, clotting blood.

She held it up in front of him, his gore matting the feather together and dripping down her arm. Using her wand to loosen the cords binding his hand, she thrust the quill into it.

“Go on, write her a love letter.” When he cast the quill back at her, she ‘tsked’ at him lightly, casting the quill back at him as she aimed her wand. “Imperio!”

His fingers snapped shut like a trap over the quill, and Draco jerked his head away from the parchment as the quill scratched over it slowly, etching letters in his own blood. After a few moments, the quill fell from his fingers. Pleased, Pansy snatched the parchment from thin air and gasped.

Fuck you, it read in scrawled writing, and when she turned surprised eyes back to her prey, Draco spit a mouthful of blood into her face.

“You think that’s not the first thing my father taught me to fight?” Draco asked, his strength ebbing away in leaps and bounds. “I’d not drag Ginny into this stupid, immature game of yours if it was the last thing I did.” He could feel the last of his blood trickling out of the wound in his side and the gashes on his face, one particularly bad slice to his head dripping steadily into his eye; every breath was blocked with thick blood. He reeked of death, and the three people staring at him stunk of madness, each a different brand.

He would die knowing he’d made the right decision, though; he’d left Ginny in peace as he died, because he loved her too much to use her as a shield.

Furious with the fact that he’d thwarted her, even in the tiniest of ways, and angry that her pretty puppet wasn’t performing as she wanted him to—as she’d wanted him to for many, many years—Pansy reclaimed the long shard of glass she’d started out with and, with grim concentration, began carving the Dark Mark on his chest.

“You will die with the mark of the ones you betrayed,” Pansy said. “Running off like a castrated dog to rut with a poor, filthy, breeder of a Gryffindor.”

“Thirty times… the woman… you ever were…” Draco responded, unable to conjure up more than a wheeze as she jammed the glass into his chest harder.

“Bloody stupid sewer grates!” The voice was irritated and hesitant, and if Draco had retained consciousness for a few more seconds, it would have been familiar. “Alohomora,” Arthur Weasley said, and was promptly knocked aside by Narcissa and Ginny.

Pansy had turned reluctantly from her work at the sound of Arthur’s voice, her hand still clasped possessively around the glass. Crabbe and Goyle stood staring incomprehensibly at the intruders.

“Bloody do something!” she shrieked, watching with the motionlessness of one who truly believes they cannot be harmed. She had a vision, and a mission, and it was all coming to a head, with that Weasley harlot standing in front of her.

“Stupefy!” Arthur and Narcissa were of a mind on that particular spell, stopping the already slow, lumbering young men that were advancing toward them with wands drawn and brows furrowed.

Ginny had moved no farther than the entrance, her eyes fixed on Draco. He was barely recognizable, the pallid stretch of muscular white chest disfigured with more than half of the Dark Mark, myriad bruises stretching from one side to another. A cavernous wound spanned one side of his body, and his face was little more than a bloody mass.

“Doesn’t look so good now, does he?” Pansy said, eyes narrowed catlike as she regarded this, her great challenger, her idiot savant of a competitor. This was what had kept their most promising heir away, what had kept Pansy’s lifetime of want in America.

This redheaded, freckled, dirt-poor, good-for-nothing Weasley.

As Ginny watched, Pansy kept eye contact with her and made a single downward stroke, completing the Dark Mark.

It was just enough to propel Ginny out of shock and into action, and she thrust her wand with magical fervor she hadn’t felt since the end of the war. Her actions were mechanical, calling upon training she’d refused to use for years, fueled by pure, dogged emotion. “Wingardium leviosa,” she chanted, yanking the glass from Pansy’s hand, opening a single diagonal slash across the young woman’s palm as she did so. That broke the Slytherin’s concentration, and she looked down at her spilled blood with the gasp of a wronged child.

“Look at me,” Ginny commanded, her voice thick as she noted a fresh trail of blood snake its way from her lover’s—her love’s—mouth, down his chin to join the other blood running down his chest. When Pansy complied, reaching for her own wand, Ginny reacted, slashing her wand horizontally, eyes already hot with the tears of the guilty as the piece of glass zinged in a straight line, cutting Pansy’s throat.

As she watched the destruction her wand had wrought, a single, harsh sob tore from Ginny and she let her wand splash into the cloudy water flowing beneath her feet. She took one, two steps toward Draco, her knees buckling and sending her sprawling into the mud.

Is he even still alive? She saw no rise and fall of his chest, no sign that he was breathing, only the blood flowing sluggishly down skin that was marble-pale. She reached up to the lowest of his constraints, thin silver chains binding his ankles, and pried at them fruitlessly, her brain refusing to work properly, to command her to get her wand. Ginny wrapped her hands around his feet, feeling for the pulse of life, anything, and then slid her arms around his ankles, tears streaking her face as she pulled herself up, feeling along his body to assure herself that he was there—trying to assure herself that he was alive.

If she’d stayed, if she’d only stayed with him instead of storming out in anger, then she could have saved him.

She could have saved every last one of him.

“Ginny,” her father said from behind her, his own voice thick with tears. In all his years of living, he thought this was the one thing he’d least wanted to see. He’d seen wizards and witches ravaged by war, but none of them so brutally as this, so manually.

None of them had made his little girl look so bleak, so blank in the eyes.

He’d watched his little girl, his baby, kill a woman, and all for this man—a man who might not even be alive.

Narcissa slumped against the far wall, her legs drawn up to her chest, cast back into a stupor she’d abandoned long ago at the sight of her son.

They’d reached him too late, she thought, and had sat down on the cold, wet ground.

“I’m sorry,” Ginny said, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry,” she repeated as her father released the Binding Spell, her hands pressed against the marks on Draco’s chest, her tears salting the open wounds. And who was she apologizing to, after all? The man she loved or the woman she’d killed?

Or was it herself?

And then he coughed, turning his head aside and sending blood along the ground, mingling with the pints he’d already shed, mingling with the blood of his torturer.

“Draco!” Ginny’s voice came out in a thin scream, bouncing off the cavelike walls, echoing back to her in a maddened, frantic rhythm.

“Leave,” he said, his voice little more than a single expulsion of breath, answered by a single indrawn breath on Ginny’s part, a sharp gasp. “Leave before she… kills us both. You weren’t supposed to come.” The more he talked, the more blood, impossible amounts of it, left his mouth, and Ginny pressed her hands against his lips, trying to still his words.

“Dad,” Ginny said helplessly, her face contorted by confusion and grief. “Dad, help him.”

He opened the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut, expending great effort to stay her with the steady, grey gaze. “I didn’t need you,” he said at length, sure he was dead.

Why else was she there?

“Don’t be stubborn just now, okay? Have a little nobility,” Ginny choked out, watching as her father ran to the end of the tunnel and sent out a wand flare for mediwizards. “Be a bit of a Gryffindor.”

He smiled then, his lips curving under her fingers, under the thick coat of blood. “I am. Don’t you see? I loved you too much to need you.” He shut his eyes then, and Ginny hoped against hope that they would come soon, come and help him.

She didn’t know how anymore, and any help she’d ever given him had been too wrong and too late.

“I’m not my father’s son,” he said, and Ginny laid her forehead to his, feeling her blood wet his face.

“I love you,” she said, wondering what the point was of saying the words now, when he’d needed them long before.

His needs, she knew now, were many.

EPILOGUE

“The Wizengamot, Wizards High Court, hereby finds Virginia Weasley, daughter of Arthur and Molly Weasley of the Burrow, cleared of any and all charges relating to the rescue of Draco Malfoy and the capture or elimination of three fledgling New Order Death Eaters.”

Amelia Bones smiled down at the young witch in front of her; the smile on the young woman’s face had been there even before the charges were cleared, and Amelia thought it possible Virginia Weasley would have kept on smiling even if she’d been sent to Azkaban.

As far as Ginny was concerned, it was reprieve enough that Draco was alive, albeit trapped in St. Mungo’s, along with his mother, for a good long while yet, disallowed his bad attitude, his chronic snitting, and conjugal visits.

He was especially vocal about that last rule.