CHAPTER NINE- The Shades of Gray
How long had he been formulating those words? How long had he stewed in silence, weighed his options, weighted by his guilt?
At the time, I didn't think of it, only thought of the words, of the moment, of being the confidante to a man much hated by everyone else.
In the Muggle world, confessions hold a place their own in life, in law, even in spirit. In the Muggle world, my father tells, confessions lessen a punishment. Admissions of guilt make easier the way of the guilty. And confessions unburden a soul.
Perhaps that is not true only in the Muggle world. Perhaps confessions unburden a soul in any realm.
~~~
He had done what he did best for weeks: watch. And though his pride would not allow him to admit it, Draco had not only watched, but anticipated his one and only visitor. He knew her routines, her patterns, as well as his own; every day, weekends excluded, she walked down the corridor after exchanging pleasantries with the guard, striding purposefully with an air of distracted grace he'd never noticed at Hogwarts. She would stand before his cell and utter her one word, the lines of her race arranged with a look of hope.
All that optimism made Draco a bit ill.
His guilt weighed on him, an onus of invisible stones that grew daily, and with the repeated appearances of his visitor, Draco began to let himself think about the outside, about the past, about the war. About his family-and especially, about his father.
Lucius Malfoy, the madman for whom his son had killed.
He hadn't even stood his ground long enough to see his son imprisoned.
Acts and actions, grown impossibly heavier, impossibly more important, with time, ate at Draco's soul, at his mind, and he knew that long periods of solitude with his own mind would be just as surely maddening as the Dementors would have been.
And then she began to come, day after day, and he knew he would talk or go mad, and madness would have been a mercy he did not deserve.
"I was an ungrateful, spoiled brat," he started that day, and he saw the amusement flicker just behind her eyes, quickly dampened. "I had everything in the world and appreciated none of it." He turned his eyes away from her then, not wishing to watch her as he spoke what was really important. "And what you would undoubtedly term 'love-'" he spat the word as though it were filthy-"Well, let us just say I had none of that."
She leaned forward, curious beyond telling, and lost herself in his story.
He wove a picture of a childhood too short for reckoning, a small, pale boy longing for the love he now claimed didn't exist, with a mother too cowed to give it to him and a father too cruel to comprehend his family's wants. He wove a picture of long nights filled with masked men, congregations of the maddest of the wizarding world, the most evil of the British Isles, the disillusioned and the power-hungry, and the small boy trapped in his bedroom, breathing through his mouth so as not to be heard as the group of them lamented their thwarted leader and cursed a boy no older than Draco himself.
And he had understood that they would kill the little boy they cursed with every breath, and it frightened him.
Fear had come to him at an early age, and had stayed with him.
"You want to know the difference between a Gryffindor and a Slytherin, little one?" Draco stood now, meeting her eyes after nearly an hour of talking, stretching his long limbs and shaking off the remnants of the small boy he'd once been. "Fear. We both do what we feel we need to, only Gryffindors are stupid enough to do it when it's most foolish." He turned his back on her and took a deep breath.
It wasn't enough. He still felt, quite frankly, like shite.
"Go," he said, keeping his red-clad back to her. He would not look at her, did not wish to see the pity on her face. He didn't need her pity, didn't need prettily shed tears.
He needed salvation.
When he didn't hear her move, he turned on her, eyes blazing. "What in Merlin's name are you waiting for?" he roared. "I'm done talking, now go!"
Ginny felt she couldn't have moved even if she'd been put under an Imperius curse, so rooted was she to the chair, her newspaper dangling from her fingers, tears trying to work their way to the surface.
Don't you cry in front of him, she thought. Not even for him. Especially not for him. But had she known? Had any of them stopped to think what it must have been like? How completely hopeless-how utterly with a chance-it had been for the children of the Death Eaters?
She thought the answer to that was most certainly a resounding "no."
And now he was shouting at her, his silver eyes molten, his hair disheveled with the rake of his hands, his voice powerful even through barriers.
She stood suddenly as though shocked, sent into motion not by his words but by the movement of the guard down the hall. "Stop," she said in a pleading tone, her eyes meeting his. "Stop it!"
"Leave now," he said, his breath labored as he slapped both long hands against the glass between them. Anything to get her to go-anything to get that pitying, sad face away from the other side of the glass.
"Is there a problem here?" Paternoster approached with caution, wand at the ready.
"No," Ginny said shakily, her glance shifting between the guard and the prisoner. "No, there's no problem."
Though it was against his better judgment, Paternoster nodded carefully and headed back down the corridor.
Ginny turned hot eyes to the man she'd come to visit and took a step, quick and sure to the glass, and watched him flinch back.
"Now who's dancing?" she asked through clenched teeth. "If you're trying to convince yourself that you should be sympathized with, perhaps you should try first convincing yourself that you're any different than everyone thinks."
There, he thought, sliding his hands from the glass and letting his lips quirk. We know this place, we know this feeling, we know this interaction. Anger from the Weasley princess, that I can deal with.
"Tsk, tsk," he said softly, shaking his head but keeping his eyes on hers. "Let's not be cross, Weasley." And as though he couldn't stop them, the words kept coming. "You have to be good enough for both of us, you know." And then he turned his back to her for the final time that day, and as his next words carried to her, she shivered. "Now you're my salvation."
~~~
She was late and she knew it. Though time may have seemed altered as Draco lightened his damned soul, Ginny knew it hadn't been. It was well past twilight-well past suppertime-and she wondered what her parents would say.
But when she came into the Burrow on cat's feet, she was greeted with an empty kitchen and a silent house, a tiny cauldron of what smelled like stew sitting on the table with a fire charmed under it.
She sat down to eat, wary of the quietude, and was nearly done with the stew when her father sat across from her.
"Dad." She spoke first, knowing it would take forever for him to get around to anything. A loving and imaginative man was Arthur, but also a bit meek when it came to the women of his family.
"We've a bit of a problem, love." He sounded chagrined and couldn't keep his eyes still, and the combination of nerves and fidgets was familiar to Ginny; her father was looking either for escape or for his wife to come and finish his lecture for him. But he was unaided in this particular battle, and no help came.
"Trouble?" Ginny put down her spoon and eyed her father with no surprise. Brown eyes met faded blue over the table and held steadily.
"He speaks to you, Gin. Only you. You came home last night, told your mother he said nothing of importance, but darling…" Arthur spread his hands, and the tone fell into the steadiness that had earned him his position. "Important or no, he spoke to no one else, and you came home late tonight…"
Ginny kept her voice level despite her heart leaping into her throat. Her. He'd spoken only to her. "I'm afraid I don't understand."
Arthur stood-had to, really, to give the fidgets somewhere to go. "There are those who think you've befriended him. It's not being said outright, but-"
"He's spoken to me twice!" Ginny cried out. "You can't possibly be serious!" When Arthur stroked a gentle hand over the firefall of her hair and said nothing, she knew he was serious.
"I'll not stop," she said flatly, tilting her head so her cheek lay in her father's palm. "It seems the right thing to do, and so I'll continue to."
"I rather thought you'd say that," Arthur said, and though his tone was chary, it was also proud. "Would you think of Ron, then?"
Ginny pushed her chair back, letting her father's hand slide off her hair, and regarded him with the forthright gaze of an adult. "And Ron? What does Ron think?" Why doesn't Ron speak for himself? she wondered silently.
Arthur's unruly eyebrows drew into a frown, and with a slight "harrumph," he shoved his hands into the pockets of his oft-patched vest. "Well, now, I don't really know. Your mother and I just assumed-"
"I will speak to Ron," Ginny said, waving her hand to motion him to stop. "But, Dad, if there's something you're afraid of, I'd rather you came out and said it than tell me half-truths and play us both the fool."
Arthur's face flushed a mottled red and he cleared his throat. "Virginia, this isn't a game. Things of the past aren't necessarily rooted only in the past."
"And this little girl's been fooled before," Ginny finished with a sigh. How was it any different, though? Had she a right to be offended at his suggestion? A bad man with a checkered past telling her all his secrets through a barrier of-glass this time instead of paper, but what was the difference, really? And so all she could really say, she said. "I know it isn't a game," she said softly, and her mind reeled with the possibilities.
He didn't want a game, she thought, but a dance.
Salvation.
And so she held the whispered declaration of her role as savior close to her heart and wondered how on earth she'd managed to mix herself back in again.
~~~
I thought he wanted me to help him escape, and I guarded myself against that carefully.
Now I see there are many forms of escape; mental, spiritual, emotional. The least of the was of escape is physical, but I did not see that then. Though our world is so big in so many ways, we limit ourselves severely. We have not to act on blind faith, for even the most fantastical things, the most imaginary of things can be seen in the world of magic. Who needs blind faith when they've seen a unicorn, touched a dragon, flown on a broom?
Who needs to think beyond the boundaries, to shield themselves from the unknown?
And so I tell you this-nothing is impossible, and there are so many shades of gray, you would never be able to comprehend them all.
And there is a shade of gray that is impossible to recreate, indescribable in its complexity. It is the gray of the eyes of the damned.
It is the gray of the eyes of the hopeless.
It is the gray of the eyes of one waiting to be saved.