The Visitor

**Author’s Note: Just a few things about this story I’m about to weave. This is a story that’s stuck in my head and had to be written immediately, so strongly did I feel about it. That rarely happens for me, and I want to do this right, so if updates are slow, you have my sincerest apologies. The format for this story is a bit unusual—for every chapter in third-person, it will be prefaced and post-scripted by Ginny. Originally this story was to be a songfic—who is surprised? But it has outgrown the song which spawned it, and it will stand alone. If you would like recommendations on what to listen to while reading (ha!) I’d be more than happy to give them— hiptoship@yahoo.com. Now, happy reading.**

CHAPTER ONE- The Silence of the Guilty

“I’m guilty, you know.”

These should be the first words you hear from him, as they are the first words I heard from him in this, the real world, the big world beyond school. Beyond safety.

Perhaps those words mean I’m getting ahead of myself—after all, so much happened before I finally got those words, but it’s hard for me to put it all together sometimes. It is, after all, a big story.

It’s huge.

It’s a story of hatred, of prejudice and bigotry, of ridiculous hypocrisy, of the willful ignorance of many. That’s barely the start of it—these are only the faults of the good.

The faults of the damned number much more, and they are much more complex.

Now that we’ve started it the way I want to, perhaps we should start it correctly. I beg of you, before this becomes objectified and analyzed, do not judge too harshly, for judgment is not yours to wield.

~~~

If it had been less tragic, it would have been a scandal. After all, who refuses to speak at their own trial? Who says not a word, only staring fixedly—menacingly, many said—at the floor as he is declared guilty against crimes barely utterable by decent human tongues?

Unspeakable or no, those crimes were whispered in every alleyway and every shop, every place still open after the final death rattle of the war, the final death rattle, it was hoped, of Lord Voldemort, the Dark Lord, the curse over the wizarding people.

“I hard he’s been helping his father since he was seven.”

“I heard ‘e’s been behind it all along, even more than his batty old man!”

Many things were heard, many fabricated and some true, but none were ever confirmed, for the young man on trial kept completely silent, never looking at those who judged him, never showing anger, grief, or even recognition at what was going on.

In all the papers, he was The Mute Murderer, or The Damned Soul, or the Horrible Heir.

He spoke not a word, neither in defense nor atonement, and when they donned him in the bright scarlet robes of the newly refigured Azkaban, he showed no recognition of the change in his life.

Perfect silence. Perfect emotionlessness. Perfect evil, some said. And some said nothing as the young man was taken to the new Azkaban, the pet project of Arthur Weasley. It was the only thing in his long, harried, and unsuccessful life that had truly panned out. In a world where ambition equaled evil more often than not, Arthur Weasley had chosen to remain unerringly good, leaving ambition for those better suited to it. But when the Dementors ran wild, negating all sense of order in the wizarding justice system, hopeful faces turned to Arthur for a remedy, and for once, he did not disappoint.

It gave a delicious sort of justice to the proceedings, this horrible, conscienceless young man being taken into a prison forged by that which he loathed most. It was irony, some said, predatory gleams in their eyes.

In the aftermath of a war, people like to see punishment. They long to point fingers. They yearn to blame and then put the blamed away, for then there is peace of mind.

Then they can sleep at night, knowing insurrection has been put down and nothing like it can ever be replicated.

And so it was in Azkaban, now a strange hybrid of wizard prison and Muggle penitentiary, that they put Draco Malfoy, he who had wounded many, he who had ended the Longbottom line, he whose soul was eternally damned.

Crowds wielding cameras stood outside the gates, longing to get a shot of him, of the man who had nothing to say for himself, so evil were his actions. Pale, pampered skin stood out starkly from cardinal-colored robes; platinum hair fell in twin curves around his downcast face, and picture after picture was shot. In every photo, he moves, he paces, occasionally he glances up through the strands of hair obstructing his vision, but he never speaks, and he never looks the cameras dead-on.

What sorts of actions were these, people wondered. What sort of man was this boy who had once possessed everything?

For now, he was an imprisoned man, trapped what seemed to be three stone walls and one thick glass wall, trapped behind quadruple-thick curses and security borne of goblin skill, his wand broken but his spirit—possibly—still intact.

And he gave nothing away to those who wondered.

~~~

It wasn’t a broken home, precisely—it could never be called that. But since the end of the war, things had been quieter than they’d ever been, only the twins able to act normally. Fred and George Weasley coped better than the rest of their family combined—perhaps because they had one another, or perhaps because they’d always had the soundest coping mechanism. Laughter had carried them through many hard moments, and they wouldn’t depend on anything else now.

Though there was ordinarily some commotion in the household, even a somber household, today things were quiet.

Today he was going to prison, and though no one in the Burrow spoke of him, they were all thinking about him.

The thoughts in the household were varied, but most were grimly victorious. After all, hadn’t the youngest Weasley male suffered hugely at the hands of the bastard? Hadn’t Ron spent the last month in St. Mungo’s, pain still wracking him in great, shuddery waves?

And they’d all seen it happen, every last member of the Weasley family engaged in skirmishes around them, had seen the classmates square off as though attempting to rectify years of wrongs with one last duel. The Dark Prince and the Golden Trio’s Third had been grimly serious at that moment, and the Dark Prince had prevailed.

Now he was paying for his prevalence.

“It’s not enough,” Molly finally burst out, breaking the silence they’d all held over breakfast. “This… humane prison,” she spat the words as though ridding her mouth of a particularly vile poison, small sparks of blame showering over her hapless husband.

It had been his idea, after all, to try something a bit more humane than sucking the souls out of the imprisoned.

Arthur understood her anger, however, as his eyes touched on his youngest son, and he merely covered his wife’s hand with his own. Ron’s face was still pale, his cheeks hollow with the massive weight loss he’d undergone, the normally bright eyes wary. Occasionally he would shiver as though cold, his eyes wincing shut with the remnants of the curse.

“I-It’s not so bad,” he managed, dredging up a shadow of a grin as he extended a shaking hand over the table to snag a piece of bread. “It could be w-worse.”

Ginny glanced up at her brother, and then quickly back down at her plate. Yes, it could be worse, she supposed. Neville Longbottom had gotten the worst of it, immediate death with no hope of reanimation. The last of a great wizarding family, the brave, beautiful boy who had hoped to avenge his parents.

He’d fought well before Draco Malfoy had killed him.

She could see him in her mind’s eye, his platinum hair for once mussed, sticking to his face with sweat and blood that ran from a wound along his hairline, his strange, silvery eyes fierce as he’d clashed with anyone and everyone who’d gotten in his way. It had been a mess, to put it mildly, every witch and wizard who had chosen a side gathered outside Hogwarts, where it had all came to an end. Of course it had all came to an end there—it was the center of it all, where it had all started, where it had all perpetuated year after year until finally coming to a head. In the melee, Virginia had fought as bravely as any other, for once lacking the protection of the six knights of Weasley.

It had been a battlefield full of soldiers with their generals trapped inside—one evil beyond comprehension, the other too good to comprehend any other way, one old and one young, one gleeful with the smell of blood coming through the many windows, the other sickened by the loss.

And when Virginia Weasley had stepped in Draco Malfoy’s way, he had not clashed with her, and what she had seen in his eyes was not battle-readiness.

What she had seen in his eyes was fear and survival, and then he had turned away, wand to wand with another wizard.

And then had come Ron, and then Neville, and then the whole thing ended in a shower of light from the windows of the school, light so bright it had many staggering to their knees, and many of the Death Eaters had fled.

He had not, and now he was caught.

~~~

It wasn’t that clear cut at the time, that morning at the breakfast table. All I really knew absolutely, unequivocally, was that my heart ached for my brother, for the losses he had suffered, for the pain he had endured. I ached for each of the scrapes and scars on the faces of my family.

But underneath that ache, that ever-present, seemingly eternal, seemingly unmatchable ache, were the memories of all I’d seen that day, all those I had known, and I was confused. I was not given the easy convenience of rage.

Perhaps that is because I am not a particularly vengeful woman.

Or perhaps it is because I understand the silence of the guilty.

CHAPTER TWO- The Pace of Life

I had nothing.

You understand, of course, that life goes on. It is not only a Muggle cliché, but a wizarding one, as well. A universal one.

But I had nothing to return to, nothing ‘went on’ for me. For me, life had consisted of the sheltered existence of the Burrow, followed by the—mostly—sheltered existence of Hogwarts, followed by a brief, gleaming stint as a warrior in the battle to end all others, in a battle that broke lives and hearts and even the strongest of men.

After that, what use had I for a sheltered life?

I had been exposed. In exposition, I longed for purpose. I longed for risk.

The greatest risk is knowledge—the greatest risk is setting out to know, to banish your ignorance and deny your bliss.

~~~

The novelty of the situation wore off, as all novelty inevitably does. Life went back to some semblance of normal for those still living, work went on and play went on, and everyone forgot about the people held accountable for those dark years, those darkest times.

Or they told themselves they forgot, and ignored those thoughts that plagued them when the nights were dark, or cold, or long, or lonely.

Of course, nothing is that easy for everyone, and the casualties of any war are never totally immediate or totally obvious.

The Weasleys returned to life as best they could, a hardy family, a family of born survivors. Arthur and Percy returned to the Ministry as Ambassadors to Azkaban; Bill resumed his post at Gringotts. Charlie, intuiting his family needed his presence more than he needed to travel, accepted a position at Hogwarts, where many of the professors had been wounded or worse. The twins enjoyed a resurgence of business twice what they’d had before the height of the war, their business enlivened in those maddened weeks of restoration. How desperately people wanted—needed—to laugh in those weeks.

How desperately to know they still could.

The silent partner of Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes finally stepped forward and claimed some manual responsibility, taking a clerk’s position. After all, what had the Boy Who Lived to do now that the balance of his whole life had shifted? And it gave Harry more time to spend with Ron, who had also joined the twins in a limited capacity. Time with Ron, Harry had realized, was a commodity.

Loss… or near-loss… was yet another reminder of what people possess.

That first day, that day where things returned to “normality,” Ginny remained at the Burrow with Molly. After a few hours, she wondered if the strain, the physical, lethargic weight of inactivity, affected anyone but herself. She wandered around the house, she cleaned everything in sight, and then she went outside to weed the nearly nonexistent garden.

“There were times when you’d all gone off to school,” Molly said without preamble, watching Ginny weed like a madwoman, “When I thought I’d go mad from the quiet, and the boredom, and not having all of my chicks around me.” But she’d had things to do even then—Howlers to write, worrying to do, the long-distance mothering that Molly excelled at. Her daughter, however, hadn’t even started on a life of her own, and already things were different for her, were difficult.

Perhaps they’d been difficult from her first year at Hogwarts, Molly reckoned, when a bad man with a tricky diary had stolen her childhood.

“You’d started some training at school,” Molly reminded Ginny gently, shaking herself from her woolgathering and holding the Daily Prophet out to her daughter.

Mediwitches and wizards needed, the advert read, its words stark and simple.

Of course there were Mediwitches needed, Ginny thought. The whole damned world had been turned upside-down.

Medicine had been the only thing she’d truly considered, and had been considering for quite some time.

She had unlimited visions in her head, unlimited memories from a hovering point of view somewhere outside her body, pictures of her friends petrified and wounded because of something she did, a chamber she opened. With those images in her head, she’d wanted to help.

Now she had her chance.

~~~

“What’s he doing?” Arthur stood behind Kingsley Shacklebolt, his eyes focused warily on the cell in front of him.

Kingsley, an interim Azkaban guard until they could find more suitable wizards and witches to take the positions, crossed his massive arms over his chest and spoke sotto voce to his fellow Order member, both their eyes affixed to the young man in front of them. “Nothing,” he said honestly, his voice rumbling through the stone corridors. There were few, precious few prisoners in the enormous building. So many of the evil had died, so many had fled.

But not this one in front of them.

The young man sat on the small cot he’d been provided, a Muggle contraption down to its last rickety screw, his knees drawn up to his chest under the distinct ruby robes, his eyes cast blankly on the wall opposite him. He had done the same thing for nearly a month. Daily he woke, used the small lavatory in the corner of the cell, then sat on the cot and focused somewhere—inward, outward, no one could tell—until meals came. He ate little as quickly as possible, returning his tray to the southern stone wall, where it would be taken away through the tiny slot provided for it.

Then he returned to his routine, staring, staring, endlessly staring, and never once facing the glass wall that would allow him visual access into the corridor, to his guards, occasionally to fellow prisoners.

He was solitary by nature, and he was solitary by choice.

The damned suffered alone.

“Perhaps he’s thinking about the things he’s done,” Arthur said, but he could not seem to dredge up the fierceness the rest of his family found so easily. He was just tired, so very tired. “See to it that things are done as I asked earlier. I gave a statement to the Daily Prophet, and doubtless people are reading it right now.” He spoke with an authority unfamiliar to his lips, and when he walked down the corridor, it was not the walk of a successful man, but a worn one, and Kingsley couldn’t help but wonder how this was all going to work.

Muggle prison tactics in a wizarding world. It would be a wonder, Kingsley thought, if disasters didn’t start happening soon.

~~~

She wandered through the broad corridors, the sounds of hundreds of voices, some suffering and some comforting, assaulted her ears. Her heart constricted in her chest, one powerful, painful squeeze, and for a moment she wanted to be a coward, wanted to turn tail and run back outside and back home. But things at home were no better, she remembered—only constricting in a different sort of way. Limiting.

What Ginny Weasley wanted were answers, and all she was given at home were more questions.

She followed the signs until they led her to an office of sorts, where several brightly robed Mediwitches snacked on sandwiches and pored, as a group, over one copy of the newspaper.

“Here, see, I told you—Weasley’s gone and implemented a visiting system for the Azkaban prisoners.” One of the witches jabbed at the paper with a plump finger, a satisfied look on her face. “I told you so, that’s precisely how it’s done in the Muggle world. Pay up, Yasmine.” The witch, a pretty woman with a round face and an extraordinary cloud of blonde hair, twitched her fingers impatiently.

Yasmine, a dark-haired witch of dark complexion, grumbled and slapped a few coins into her coworker’s hand. “Bloody Muggle-borns and their stupid bets.”

Ginny stood transfixed in the doorway, her ears still hung up on the conversation’s onset. Her father had given prisoners visiting rights? To what end?

“No one’s goin’ter visit ‘em anyway,” another witch said with finality, standing up and stretching. “Like ‘at one,” she nodded down on the paper. “Who’s goin’ter visit ‘im?”

Yasmine laughed. “’s a point you have there, Lizzie, darlin’. Why is it ‘e’s the only one they ever show?”

Ginny was propelled into motion then, her tongue hot with anger. Her father hadn’t told her—hadn’t told any of them what he was doing. And neither, for that matter, had Mum, and she’d surely known, holding the paper out to her daughter as though not a thing in the world were amiss, all while that article was on the front— that article on the front, that picture of the scarlet-clad Malfoy heir, sitting in his prison cell.

“Perhaps it’s because he’s photogenic,” Ginny said, her chin raising a bit, her ire spilling out, misplaced. “After all, he probably looks a great deal better than the other prisoners in that place. It’s easy to exploit a pretty animal with a broken spirit.”

Eyes sparking, glinting with—sweat? Tears? Surely not the latter. Evil men didn’t cry—body tense with fight, moon-colored hair wild and unruly.

Yes, Ginny was willing to bet he probably looked a great deal better than the other prisoners. Evil didn’t always have an ugly face.

Tom Riddle, after all, had been a handsome young man. Who could have known how black, how infested he was inside?

When she spoke her opinion, the gathered witches turned to look at her, shock written all over their features. Who dared say such a thing? None of them had seen her when she’d entered, so engrossed had they been in their gossip.

Finally, a smaller witch toward the back moved forward, her glossy hair piled into a haphazard bun, her exotic features showing surprise. “Ginny? Ginny Weasley?”

And Ginny smiled weakly at the girl, wondering if the world could possibly get any smaller, or her mouth any bigger. “Hello, Cho.”

~~~

In looking for purpose, I could not have found more.

In looking for knowledge, I’d certainly found a wealth of it.

My actions—my thoughts—in the tearoom at St. Mungo’s are a little blurry, my motivations lost in time passed and actions since taken. Most of this seems a bit muddled in my mind—after all, who among us remembers everything with crystalline clarity? There are only moments so lucid, only small, fragmented pieces of life we remember perfectly, like the smile of your mother, like a hug from your father, like the look of terrible pain on your brother’s face, like finding beauty in the midst of a battle, beauty in the unwavering dearth of light.

Like finding beauty in your worst enemy.

CHAPTER THREE- The Duplicity of Identity

It’s amazing how the human brain—and the human heart—can be so divided. In my youth, everything was straightforward, and whatever captured my attention did so completely.

With age, with experience, I learned, as we all do, to divide myself. To become, as it were, duplicitous in thought and in emotion.

My thoughts that day… how many places they had to go, thoughts of my parents, my brother, my training, the prisoner… My thoughts were so very scattered, you see, and my emotions so raw…

Is it any wonder a few of those thoughts spilled over?

Is it any wonder duplicitous, sneaking, pervasive thoughts can find their way into emotions?

~~~

There was really no small talk to be had in the halls of St. Mungo’s between two women who had each, in her own way, for her own reasons, grown out of girlhood early. They had been called to this place, and so in this place, they were frank.

“I wanted to be out there,” Cho said, walking around the hospital and pointing carious things out to Ginny—on-the-site training was common now, she’d said, now that the demand was so high. “You know, for Cedric. But they needed me here.”

For a moment, Ginny found herself wanting to snap at the Ravenclaw graduate—after all, none of them, least of all Ginny, had actually wanted a bloody, fatal battle. But she understood the girl’s feelings, and so merely nodded.

“They didn’t mean anything by it, about your father,” Cho continued, turning down yet another hall, leading Ginny farther and farther through the labyrinthine hospital. “It’s only that it’s so different—”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Ginny said. “I hadn’t a clue he was doing that.” But how was it any different from Arthur’s experiments of her youth? Dotty Arthur Weasley, constantly playing with Muggle contraptions, squirreling away useless Muggle artifacts. It was just one more mystery to the wizarding world—what the hell was going on in Arthur Weasley’s head?

With a start, Ginny looked around them and realized they were back where they had started, near the front of the large building. “Oh,” she said in a small voice, her face coloring red. “My mind was elsewhere.”

Cho smiled, the lines of her face softening into true beauty, and in that moment Ginny could see, without jealousy, why Harry had been so taken with her. “Listen,” she said, putting a hand to Ginny’s arm. “Come back tomorrow, and we’ll get you started right, training and the like.” She paused for a moment, worrying at her lip. “It’ll be good to have someone around I know.”

Ginny smiled and gave a little wave, then started out the doors, her step hitching with Cho’s quiet afterthought.

“We need all the good we can get around here.”

~~~

Where to go?

There were too many questions she had, too many things to say, to ask, to think, to feel. Ginny made her way to Diagon Alley, instinctively seeking out family, the lighter side of the Weasleys; Fred and George, unbeknownst to anyone on the outside, had been bearing the greater burdens of their family for years, all with a pair of charmingly identical, wickedly crooked smiles.

When she walked into Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes, Ginny breathed a sigh of relief; George and Fred stood at the counter, no Harry or Ron in sight.

“Gin!” George looked up from the order he was tallying and winked broadly. “Be with you in a bit, love,” he spoke to Ginny first, then addressed the teenaged wizard in front of him. “Twenty Dungbombs, there y’are. Never go wrong with a classic, mate.” He wrapped up the boy’s package and handed it to him, and the twins both stared at Ginny, waiting for the boy to leave, feeling her uncertainty.

The moment was tense, strangely suspended as the baby-faced mischief maker gathered his purchases and left the store. Ginny stood precisely where she was until the door shut firmly, and then she and both her brothers resumed movement. George hopped up to have a seat on the counter, Fred propped his elbows on the glass counter, studying Ginny intently, and the youngest Weasley herself leaned on the counter and took comfort in the presence of the court jesters, they who took the kingdom’s mind off war and famine and entrapment and evil.

“Some Dungbombs for ya, Gin?” George asked, breaking the silence and ruffling his sister’s hair, enjoying the way her nose wrinkled, the way she looked younger for just a moment.

“You can go visit Malfoy, throw a few in his cell as presents,” Fred sniggered, and though it was mostly good-natured, uneasiness lurked under the laughter.

“Speaking of,” George picked up easily, “Y’think they’d let us in?”

Ginny’s eyes shot sharply to George’s and she leaned back, letting his hand slide from her head. “Certainly, now that Dad’s decided the whole world can visit whomever they please.”

The twins exchanged an uneasy look. “Why so upset, love?” Fred asked carefully.

“Where’s Ron?” Ginny asked, craning her neck to look around the store. She wasn’t quite certain she wanted to discuss the topic of her father’s latest Muggle-inspired action in front of him.

“Out with Harry and a few girls. You’d be amazed at how much attention of the feminine type you can get from being a ‘hero,’” Fred said. He buffed his nails on his shirt and looked over at George, who struck a ridiculous pose.

“We, of course, never needed that distinction.”

Impatient for once with the bantering, Ginny shook her head tersely. “Does Ron know? About Dad’s visitation policy?”

Another distinctly uncomfortable look passed between the twins.

“Ah… yes?” George said, deciding it would be safest to restrict himself to as few words as possible.

“Ron knows,” she stated. “And neither of you seem too perturbed about the idea.” An idea, unpleasant but certain, crept into Ginny’s mind. “You all already knew. Dad told you?”

She hadn’t any particular reason for being so upset about the prospect of Malfoy receiving visitors—it was only that it was so soon, and how was there any way to tell what would happen? If he would be helped to escape?

Somehow it seemed to Ginny that it wasn’t quite safe to hold someone like him behind bars and then place people in front of him.

Could you really cage a dragon?

“Dad told us,” Fred stated. Arthur had told—Fred thought—all of them a few nights before.

Apparently that was not the case, and Fred hadn’t the slightest idea of how to break it to his baby sister.

“Though you knew, love,” George added cheerfully.

“Everyone knows,” she stated flatly.

“Well, yeah,” Fred said. “You know, Da told Bill and Charlie because… well, because they’re Bill and Charlie. And of course Percy knew—”

“Because Percy’s a know-it-all,” George chimed in.

“And they told us because everyone tells us everything so we can make a joke of it. And of course they told Ron, because—”

This time, it was Ginny who finished the sentence, her voice flat and distant. “Because Ron’s a victim. And no one told me, because I’m not the protector, I’m not the bureaucrat, I’m not the jokester and I’m not the victim. So, no one told me because I’m… what? Nothing?”

For once, the twins were speechless, merely blinking in the face of their sister’s brutal—and somehow true—statement.

“I’m going to go speak to Dad,” she said, her voice trembling on the edge of something—hurt, anger, confusion. They were all too closely twined to be separated. When she left the store, slamming the door with a flick of her wand, the twins looked at each other, and Fred grimaced.

“I have the feeling, dear brother, that we didn’t handle that as well as we could have.”

~~~

Nothing.

I had nothing.

I was nothing.

I’d be a liar, as well as a fool, if I said I was surprised at that particular implication. I had spent my entire life under someone else’s protection, in someone else’s shadow, and predominately wearing the names of others. I was a Weasley, not Ginny. I was a Gryffindor, not Virginia.

But even those who bore the same names forced upon me had seen me as nothing.

You must understand this, this mindset—if you are nothing, how can you do wrong? If even your family looks past you rather than at you, then what opportunity have you to disappoint them?

I was too old to want attention from my parents.

I was not too old to want attention.

CHAPTER FOUR- The Intentions of the Overlooked

Perhaps it was intentional, somewhere in the maze of thoughts and emotions. All I knew then—and all I really know now—is that, at the time, in my brain, I did not intend for what happened to happen.

In my heart, I do not know. I have already told you about such duplicity, about the separate coexistence of the parts of a person. On the surface, I was driven by anger, by need.

Deeper, I was driven by need, as well, but… more.

All speculation, you see, speculation after the fact, because regardless of what I intended, paving my own road to hell, certain things happened.

I don’t believe in accidents.

~~~

He heard her before he saw her.

Kingsley Shacklebolt laid down that day’s copy of the Daily Prophet—just as well, he thought, since the reporting was shoddy, as always—and stood from his post outside the single corridor of occupied cells. Doors slamming wasn’t necessarily an odd occurrence at Azkaban, but on a day like today, with the announcement in the paper, the Auror was a bit concerned.

The last thing they needed, he reckoned, was a lynch mob coming in to “visit.”

And then he looked through the door’s window and saw her, compact body moving at a fast clip down the hallway, red hair bannering out behind her, the other guards and staffers nodding politely, greeting her as she went past. After all, she was more or less the boss’s daughter.

The enormous ebony-skinned guard opened the door as she approached, afraid for a moment that she’d not open it herself but merely break through the thick oaken door. “Virginia!” he boomed heartily, shooting an uneasy look over his shoulder at the cell where Malfoy sat, staring at the wall like a halfwit. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Ginny kept her eyes on Kingsley’s, though her curiosity, ever straining at the boundaries of reason, was trying to pull her eyes farther down the corridor, to the first cell on the right.

His cell.

“I wish to speak with my father, Kingsley,” she said, widening her eyes in a show of concentration. She would not look elsewhere.

Kingsley’s brow furrowed and he shifted his considerable weight from one foot to another, not wishing to anger the young miss. With all that fire and all that anger snapping in her eyes, he could easily see where, once upon a time, Molly Weasley had taken Arthur down without so much as batting an eyelash. The Weasley women were beautiful in the grip of their emotions.

They were also, Kingsley suspected, dangerous.

“Ah… Arthur is gone for the day, I’m afraid. You may try him back at the Ministry.”

She cursed softly under her breath. Of course he was already gone. And how should she know where he was at what time?

It was just one more thing about her family she didn’t know.

“What do you know about this?” She snatched up the guard’s copy of the Daily Prophet off the desk where he sat and waved it under his nose. “This?” To further make her point—as though it were the slightest bit unclear—she jabbed her finger at the picture of Draco. As though in response, the photo prisoner shuffled slightly, making his way to the outside edges of the photograph, and though it was against her better judgment, Ginny reflexively looked up at the real prisoner and saw that he, unlike his pictorial counterpart, was completely still.

The paper drooped slightly in her hands as she stared intently into the cell, at the juxtaposition of the whitest of whites and the reddest of reds, his skin healed from the hours of battle, translucent against the ridiculous brightness of the robes he was forced to wear. His hair drooped slightly into his face, his eyes fixed on—something, nothing. As though burned, she jerked and looked back at Kingsley.

“I don’t know anything about it,” he said honestly. “Ginny, you can go ask your father at the—”

“Save it,” she said, her voice far away, her eyes drawn back.

Whatever was he looking at?

Did he deserve to be so peaceful?

Still holding the paper, she took a few steps toward the glass front of the cell, her head tilting slightly.

“Who’s goin’ter visit ‘im?” The Mediwitch’s voice careened in the corners of Ginny’s mind and she stepped even closer, wondering if he’d notice, or if his concentration was so great that he would not stir. Hadn’t she seen him once in a moment of such concentration? Hadn’t he killed Neville and nearly killed Ron in such concentration?

There were questions, she realized, thousands of them circling through her head in a maddening and maddened whirl. She’d came with queries for her father, and now that she was here, they seemed inconsequential compared to the questions she had for this man.

She could ask why, that much she knew. She knew also, however, that there would be no answer. As he had given no answer to those deciding his fate, he would give no answer to her. She could ask what he felt, if he felt guilty, if he felt just and right sitting behind those spells and that glass, but again she knew there would be no answer.

A man such as this had no answers for the righteous—he never had. He’d never had to justify himself, and she didn’t see why he would start with the biggest wrongdoings of his life.

But no matter how many questions she had for him, still the biggest question in her mind wasn’t even her own.

Who was going to visit him? Who visited the damned?

“I-I’m sorry,” Ginny said suddenly, turning away from the glass and raising wide, panicked eyes to Kingsley’s narrowed ones. “I’ve made a mistake,” she stuttered, wondering what, precisely, had taken hold of her for that instant. Thrusting the rattling paper into the Auror’s hands, she left the way she came, her steps twice as fast.

And behind the glass, two silver eyes shot to the corridor, watching the fire recede.

~~~

“She’s not come out of her room since she Apparated up there,” Molly said, looking at Arthur worriedly. “I told her supper was ready, and not a word. I know she’s in there. I’ll bloody well blow the door down,” she said, ready to pull out her wand.

But Arthur stayed her with a touch on her shoulder, his own shoulders slumped a bit. It had been his mistake, he knew, that had sent his daughter running to the prison. He’d gotten owl after owl at the Ministry when she’d left, first from the perimeter guards, then from the interior, and finally from Kingsley himself.

She’d been, he’d read, in a bit of a snit.

After talking with the twins, it wasn’t hard to put together why.

It had seemed so fortuitous, this job, this wonderful chance to rebuild, reshape, rehabilitate after the world. Too good to be true, Arthur should have known. There were always hidden responsibilities, hidden prices to pay. But any price was worth it, and he’d told Dumbledore the same before accepting the job. Any price to repair the wizarding world of the scars and wounds it still bore.

Any price, including the further suffering of his own family. Including, of course, his own suffering.

“We didn’t tell Gin, Molly. We told all of the boys what I planned to do—what I planned to allow—and we never thought to tell her. It seems a small thing…” He trailed off and shook his head, rubbing his grainy eyes wearily. “No, it doesn’t. It involved all of us, and we didn’t tell her.”

For once, Molly had nothing to say.

She simply hadn’t thought of it—and that thoughtlessness was galling.

They were both still standing at the foot of the stairs, hopelessly staring up as though waiting for the answer—or Ginny—to come down. Eventually, the latter happened, her face still and perfectly composed, the questions of earlier gone with a complacency she hadn’t known she possessed.

Arthur had meant to broach the topic gently, to ease into the matter, but unsurprisingly, Molly did it for him.

“You were at the prison?” she asked, hands on hips.

“I was.” Ginny didn’t look at Molly but instead kept her eyes on her father. “Wicked accomplishment you’ve made out there, Da.”

“Ginny, love—”

She pushed past them then, needing to not see that look in her father’s eyes, that lost, hurt look. What she needed was that anger she’d kept so well up until the moment she’d stepped into that last corridor at Azkaban. What she needed was that anger to sweep away this confusion.

“Do you think anyone will visit them, then? Do you think anyone will visit him? I read in one of the Ministry papers—one you wrote, as a matter of fact—” she said, sitting down at the table and keeping her eyes on her water glass. “—That in the Muggle world, prisoners’ rights help them to… what did you call it? Rehabilitate. Rejoin the ranks of ‘productive society.’” She met eyes with him then, her usually warm brown eyes hard with puzzlement. “You think he’ll ever rejoin society?”

“No!” Arthur burst out, coming around the table. “There are other prisoners than him, Ginny. Think of the time Hagrid spent, of Sirius.”

“Oh, so it’s all right for some but not for others. We believe in recuperation for some—say, Severus Snape? But not for others.” She gasped then, putting her hand to her mouth. Where, precisely, had that nasty little tidbit come from? That defensive, subversive little thought?

What part of her was standing up for the deplorable evil behind that glass?

“Virginia!” Molly placed a hand to her chest, well and truly shocked by her daughter’s words.

“My entire life you’ve told me to do what I think is right,” Ginny spoke earnestly. “And now you tell me nothing. Well, I’m telling you this—I think if it’s right to make a rule so outlandish that everyone in the wizarding world questions it, it should be right for you to stand behind it.”

She pushed her chair away from the table, feeling ill, feeling dizzy, feeling as though she were pulled in a hundred different directions. Now more than ever, she needed her family.

It only seemed as if they had no need for her.

~~~

It all begins so, with misunderstandings, with the hatred and bigotry I spoke of.

We are all good people, somewhere in us. We have only to use what we see fit to use, and when we see fit to use it.

Cast out into my own morality, what choices had I to make? Cast out alone for what was surely the first time in my life, what had I to lose?

And what had I to gain?

Moreover, what did I have to give?

**Author’s Note: First, I’d like to wish everyone a belated happy holidays—it’s always nice to have a bit of a vacation, yes? And I’ve been taking advantage of mine, hence the delay in a chapter posting. A few things and then I wish you all happy reading: the first is that if there are things you feel you are missing, spots that need clarifying, my first suggestion is to read carefully. I don’t often tend to spell things out. If that doesn’t work, throw me an email at hiptoship@yahoo.com. I love discussions with readers. The second—and last—thing before waving you along is that this story is traveling at a particular pace that not even I, as the writer, have any control over. So, my sincerest apologies on that. Now… go! Read!**

CHAPTER FIVE- The Faces of the Helpless

An act of rebellion, you say. It’s nothing I’ve not heard before, nothing I’ll not hear again. But if you said that, you’d be wrong. At that point in my life, I had seen what petty revenge, what simple rebellion, could lead to, how it could harm. So—you would be wrong.

Stupid? Perhaps. Impulsive? Certainly. A mistake? No.

More than anything, I wanted to help in any—in every—way I could. The challenge intrigued me; after coming from a family of people—a whole Hogwarts house of people—who had all made indelible marks on the world around them, all I wanted to do was help.

That’s what I keep reminding myself.

~~~

The next morning, Ginny felt as she usually did after a row with her parents: embarrassed, ill-at-ease, and more than a little miserable. And, as is the custom with teenaged girls both wizard and Muggle, she came to the table the next morning as though nothing had happened, wondering silently as to what, exactly, had been so urgent, so worth fighting over the night before.

Neither Molly nor Arthur spoke of it at the table the next morning, shooting glances between their two remaining children, their youngest boy and girl, clearly glad of the opportunity to act as though nothing had happened. They ate silently, Ron relishing his food for the first time in a long while. The prospect of work with the twins and added time with Harry had lent to his appetite, and his surety; the tremors were fewer and far between, much to everyone’s relief.

“Oh!” Molly exclaimed suddenly, breaking the silence and jumping up from the table. “Ginny, love, I’ve something for your first day at St. Mungo’s.” At the innocent proclamation, Arthur blew out an imperceptible breath of relief.

“It’s a paper gown with the arse out,” Ron stated without hesitation, clearly having picked up a bit of the twins’ comedic timing. What he had not yet gained, however, was their lack of shame; when Ginny burst into laughter and Molly and Arthur gaped, his face turned a brilliant shade of red.

“Sorry, Mum,” he muttered. “I… ah… best get to the shop.” In an uncharacteristic display of affection, he leaned over and planted a quick kiss on the top of his sister’s head. “G’luck, today, Gin.”

Arthur, Molly, and Ginny all watched Ron fondly as he stepped into the fireplace, Flooing himself to Diagon Alley and the twins’ shop. After he had gone and the fire had settled, Molly turned to Ginny and clapped her hands briskly.

“All right then, love,” she said, pulling out a clothier’s box. “Your father and I ordered these before…” A shadow crossed her face and she shook it away as though it were a physical malady. “Well, no matter. We bought them for you, and we think you could use them now.” With a small flourish, she presented the box to her daughter, covertly conjuring a bright bow to top it as Ginny grasped it.

It was a small gesture, trivial, but Ginny knew it for what it was—a bit of an apology, an effort to make things right. And she wanted that, more than she’d known, and the girl who had rarely gotten anything new in her life tore into the box with the fervor of one much younger.

The lime green of the cloth inside brought a small laugh to her lips, and she took out the Mediwitch robes with a smile. “They’re wonderful,” she said genuinely, standing and holding the thick material up next to her, cloaking herself with this new meaning, this new purpose.

Green for life, for the shoots of new life, green for the numerous potions and remedies brewed daily.

Red for the blood of the innocents taken, red for the shame and the flush of guilt…

But it was easy, this morning, to push those thoughts away. “Thank you, Mother. Dad.” And the kisses she bestowed to each of their cheeks were not dutiful, but affectionate, and when she left to go to St. Mungo’s, everyone had nearly forgotten about the episode of the day before.

Nearly.

~~~

It was hectic, it was mad, it was restless, and she was fairly certain she loved it. A Weasley thrived on chaos—nearly had to, really—and chaotic was a mild word to describe most of the parts of St. Mungo’s. There was an urgency about the place that brought Ginny’s novice blood roaring in her body, the facts she was learning swimming right into that rushing flow of adrenaline and pounding themselves extra firmly into her brain. The white band on her arm told everyone she was in training, but more than a few caught the efficiency in her moves, the calming manner of her speech, the cool face presented to even the strangest of maladies.

Ginny Weasley had been born for this sort of work.

“Virginia Weasley!” Glennys Gylfoyle, the Healer training Ginny, looked sharply at her clipboard and back at the redheaded scrap of a girl in front of her. She was a Weasley, to be certain, with all the features and fire of a Weasley, her body slight and quick, her eyes flashing with the energy that surrounded them.

She was already on her way to being good, Glennys thought, if she could keep it up. Now it was time to check the girl’s objectivity.

A good Mediwitch or a good Healer—just as a good nurse or doctor in the Muggle world, Glennys knew—had to keep calm even in the face of their own mortality, the mortality of the ones they loved. It was time, then, to test a little of Ginny Weasley’s objectivity.

“We’re going to move around a bit, Ms. Weasley, and go over the organization of patients.” Glennys, a large woman with an incredible head of white hair, walked briskly, with sure, long strides that had Ginny nearly running to keep up. “In the case of magical injuries, where harm has been inflicted by wand, we tend to group patients together by the type of wand they were harmed by rather than the type of difficulty they display. This helps us in reversing whatever damage we may see.” She gestured around her, talking just as quickly as she walked. “On your left is the Hillis family, all stricken by one wand, which the youngest—it’s that small boy there with the incredible amount of grass sprouting out his nostrils—was playing with while the mother wasn’t looking.” Each of the family seemed to be growing parts and things that didn’t belong, and every one of them looked miserable.

Ginny stayed silent, soaking up every word the Healer said.

“And beyond the Hillises we have a bit of an assorted group.” Glennys watched Ginny’s face carefully as the young woman surveyed the knot of ten to fifteen people. They were all familiar faces, down to the last of them. Tonks was bedded to one side of the group, the entirety of her head swollen, bruised, and purple; Luna Lovegood sat in a chair beside her, rocking and talking aimlessly to herself, her eyes wide and frightened like a jackrabbit. Every few seconds she uttered a piercing scream, then fell perfectly silent once again. There were others, too many others, but Ginny kept her face hard and stoic, feeling her stomach turn over with Glennys’s words.

“This is the Malfoy group, so called because they were harmed by a Malfoy wand—which one, we’re not quite certain. Similar wands chose similar owners, and since one wand is missing and the other broken, we’ve no way of determining for certain.”

The explanation itself was unnecessary; Ginny knew as well as any other what section of the ward this was, whose wands had done the harming. In point of fact, Ginny was fairly certain she could call up from memory which warriors had been stricken by which wand, but in the flood of pictures and sounds—

Tonks screaming at the top of her lungs, her true face streaked with her own blood, her battle cry representing the rage, the fear, the hope in all of them…

Bill striking down a particularly hesitant Death Eater, his wand expelling a spell that was not fatal, but instead debilitating… do as little harm as possible, he’d said, his eyes both kind and grim before everything had begun…

Ron wading through people, stepping over bodies and worse, parts of bodies as he made his way to the center of the clot of people, to the Dark Prince…

In the flood and pictures of sounds, Ginny was biting her tongue hard enough to make it bleed. When she finally managed to move her mouth and unclench her teeth, her words sounded slightly slurred. “What can we do? What does it take to aid them?”

“Patience,” Glennys said, impressed by the girl’s candor and spine. “And a bit of knowledge about the wizard who cast them here. The latter comes, as I’m sure you know, awfully dear these days.”

“For he doesn’t speak,” Ginny finished. Was it fortunate, to be among the remaining capable, the able-bodied and strong-minded? Or was it simply another form of hell in which you had to stand by, helpless, as those who deserved better were eaten alive by someone else’s greed? “Have you his wand?” The words seemed to come from another place, from another mouth, from another mind.

Perhaps, she thought, the same mind that had sent her speaking against her parents the previous evening, for her thoughts were once again scattered, though she showed the Healer no signs of this weakness.

“We have not,” Glennys said curiously, her strange amber eyes flashing as she regarded the youngest Weasley. “Though, broken or not, it’d likely be of some aid to our more creative Healers here.”

Ginny nodded silently, and her next words didn’t surprise Glennys Gyfloyle at all.

“I believe I’ll be taking off a bit early today.”

~~~

Knowledge.

We’ve spoken of it before, yes? It seems we have, though I keep losing my place, coming back to those words, those first words.

“I’m guilty, you know.”

It is there I am heading, have no doubt of it. But I beg of you, just as I begged you not to judge, do not rush me, for there are things I’d have right about this story, and things I’d have true.

I set out, once again, for knowledge, fully intending to keep myself safe from the snake who had proved his venom time and time again, the lovely shattered youth, with his lovely, unshattered face, sitting behind cold, unshatterable glass.

Selfish, isn’t it? Even in setting out to help those who needed the help, I set out to protect myself.

I think I protected the wrong parts of me, and no one protected any parts of him.

There are many lessons here.

The helpless take many forms.

CHAPTER SIX- The First of the Visits

And here is the hinging point, where things could have gone a different way. But really, it feels more like a hub than a hinge; many things could have happened to me at that point, had I acted differently, had I decided differently, had I chosen something else to do, to say, to be.

There are days when I am overwhelmed with joy and I think things had to happen the way they did. There are also days when I am overwhelmed with less desirable feelings, and I think the idea of fate, of kismet, if you will, is a load of bollocks.

What is the difference between fate and free will?

When it’s free will, it’s your fault. When it’s fate, it’s someone else’s.

~~~

“Miss Weasley, really, your father asked us to—” The thin, nervous-looking Ministry appointee sitting at the entrance of Azkaban jumped up from his post, started to follow her, then eyed his desk. Follow or stay? He settled the matter by snagging her by the arm and edging back toward his desk. “Just a moment, Miss, your father asked that we not let you—”

Her immediate reaction—no surprise—was to jerk her arm away and tell the man what to do with her father’s requests. It had nothing to do with him, really, or even to do with her father, but was just a Weasley reflex. Instead, she patted his hand and smiled dazzlingly. “I’m here on business, Mr. Ottley. From St. Mungo’s?” As though to prove her point, she waved a voluminous green sleeve in front of his eyes.

Ottley’s watery blue eyes widened and he released her, rubbing a hand over his thinning dark hair. “Beggin’ your pardon, Miss,” he said humbly. “On’y next time let me know before you go bargin’ in, eh?”

“Agreed.” She barely managed to turn her back to him before rolling her eyes.

Her feet carried her down the corridors as surely as they had yesterday, taking the proper turns toward the prisoners’ area of the fortress. This time no one stopped her, and no one owled Arthur. Official business, she thought, had its perks.

“Kingsley,” she said warmly, noticing his eyes narrow in a wary flinch. “I’m here on directive from the hospital.” It seemed true to her, unwaveringly so; she was there to accomplish something and then she could leave.

Subversive thoughts, subversive intentions.

He’d had more than his fair share of mind-work in his years as an Auror, and Kingsley saw something—a flash, a glint, a twist—in the young woman’s brown eyes that gave him pause. He had no reason to doubt her, really, but it was almost as though she were telling a lie unknowingly. He spoke slowly, choosing his words with care. “What is it you’re needing, Ginny?”

And as she told him what she needed, Kingsley saw the flash-glint-twist in Ginny’s eyes grow stronger, and with it grew his worry.

~~~

She hadn’t actually expected the disciplinarians at the prison to just give her the parts of Draco Malfoy’s wand, but what else had they to do with it? It was unusable in its shattered state, thrice-charmed and thrice-cursed against any sort of repair, and she was Arthur Weasley’s daughter. If she could give the wand to someone who could use it for good, the no one saw any harm in the matter.

She could have left once she had the pieces of the wand, once powerful, now pitiful, but Glennys had said one other thing…

A bit of knowledge about the wizard who cast them here…

“I need to speak with him, Kingsley,” she said, placing a hand on his sleeve as he prepared to walk her straight past the prisoners’ corridor and out to the front. “It’s imperative.”

And as soon as she spoke the words, it really was imperative. All the questions she’d not bothered to ask the day before seemed urgent when paired with the shattered wood in her pocket, when viewed as a whole with the injured at St. Mungo’s.

Muscles clenched and fluttered in Kingsley’s massive jaw, and for a moment, a bare moment, he tried to probe her mind, to find out exactly what the Weasley pauper princess was trying to do. As soon as he tried to touch minds with her, however, she turned hot brown eyes, sparking with indignation, up to his.

“I beg your pardon,” she said coolly. Hadn’t she felt that before? Hadn’t someone else done that, leading her around Hogwarts, sending her places she shouldn’t be with actions she shouldn’t take? “I’ll thank you never to do that again, Mr. Shacklebolt. Let me in, and then I’ll be on my way.”

His dark skin flushing, he muttered a few words, conjuring the chair and newspaper that Arthur had established as a standard for visitors, and then ushered her in. He was tempted to give her a time limit—it was within his authority—but in a rare instance, Kingsley was reluctant to do as he pleased.

Truth be known, Kingsley was a bit frightened of the Weasley girl.

She took her place against the wall opposite Draco’s cell, and everything else seemed to fall away. His pose was identical to the one of the day before: straight posture, intent gaze, hands folded over his lap. The blanket on the cot seemed untouched, and nothing had been added or moved in the cell.

“Why did you do it?” she spoke finally, crossing her arms over her chest to ward off a sudden chill. There was no movement, no recognition that he’d heard her, but she knew he had to have. He simply continued staring at the wall, blinking only occasionally.

Ginny’s temper was already peaked by Kingsley’s completely uncalled for (and uncouth) mental display, and being ignored by the fallen elite in front of her did nothing to assuage that boil.

“You’re already damned,” she said between clenched teeth, stepping forward and striking a fist ineffectually against the glass. “You may as well help those who remain.” She opened her mouth to speak more, to tell him precisely what she thought, or perhaps even to plead, but her mouth dropped open in a sharp gasp.

The pocketed wand pieces were thrumming, sending mild jolts up and down her hip and thigh.

Where her words had failed, the call of his wand succeeded, and two dazed silver eyes shot to the front of the cell and focused on her midsection.

He could feel it, so close.

So far away.

Ginny stumbled back, her hand involuntarily wrapping around the chair Kingsley had conjured, and she dragged it back with her one step, two, and then her knees buckled, spilling her into it, the combined power of the wand and the gaze rendering her incapable of solid stance.

Her reflection shimmered in the glass in front of her, suspended between them, as he turned his attention back to the stones of the wall. She met her own eyes in her mirror image and felt her breathing run shallow.

She in green outside the cell, he in red inside, her robes a brighter, more garish shade of Slytherin, his a more searing shade of Gryffindor.

Her eyes crossed with the effort of focusing on the transparent image of herself and she felt momentarily sick.

Was it right? she wondered. Was it just for him to be in there, staring so bloody peacefully at absolutely nothing while she sat out and suffered in her ignorance?

“You don’t deserve the peace you have,” she said in a low, disgusted tone, and spat where the glass met the floor. “And I don’t intend to let you have it.” No longer trembling, she snatched up the newspaper she’d unwittingly landed on and painstakingly ignored the damnable emissions of energy coming from his power long past.

Taking a deep breath, Ginny cast an amplification charm on herself and began to read.

She figured if he’d not answer her, then he’d at least be forced to listen to her.

If she’d not learned anything else from the twins, she’d at least learned how to be an annoyance.

~~~

She read for two hours, until dusk began to fall, her voice, though strong, growing hoarse. She’d read each article at least twice, and guards had stopped by now and again to watch her vengeful vigil.

Somewhere at the end of the first hour, though, the heat had left her, and her eyes had started to stray from the type to the cell in front of her, looking for a reaction, any reaction. But still he sat, unmoving and unmoved, unspeaking.

Though it would have shamed her to admit it, and she’d never do so out loud, Ginny was forced to give up; however, she did so with grace, folding the Daily Prophet as it had been and placing it square back in the chair, standing now on steady legs.

“This isn’t finished,” she stated, but her voice was rough around the edges, the threat ineffectual. She turned and walked down the corridor, robes billowing out behind her, chin held high.

The guards turned and watched her go, and all were silent for the exit of Azkaban’s first and only visitor.

And the imprisoned whom she had visited, in her wake, glanced at the chair she’d vacated, unnoticed by those around him.

~~~

An exercise in futility.

I clearly remember trying to fight Charlie as a little girl, my tiny fists flying, my tangled mess of hair clouding my vision, and oh, how he laughed and laughed and laughed. He would stand just a bit away from me, holding out his hands and good-naturedly tugging on the ends of my hair, laughing as I swung high, higher, and as high as I could reach, but never touching him.

Never even grazing him.

They teased me about that for years to come, little Ginny with so much fight in her and nowhere to put it.

I was no stranger to futility.

But there came a day when, even in good-natured playing, I was able to reach my older brothers.

Futility only has power against those who allow it.

But oh, I never understood how some things can make you feel so useless, so pointless. There are things so big you cannot reach them.

They reach you, and they never stop reaching you no matter how far you run.

CHAPTER SEVEN- The Words of the Mute

Gryffindors are, by definition, brave.

Bravery is, by definition, a lack of fear.

I suppose that makes me brave in some ways, for in the grand scheme of things, from the very beginning, I’d never been scared of Draco Malfoy. Of his father, perhaps. Of what they both stood for, perhaps. But never of the boy himself, the sneering, coiffed, flawless, icy boy. All I’d felt for him was a supercilious sort of pity, and later a healthy dose of scorn.

Even after seeing what he was capable of, I felt no fear, only disappointment and anger and confusion and a sort of relentless guilt.

In a school, in adolescence, in any sort of community, we each forge one another. Every action we take molds someone else.

So what had been done to forge this particular monster? What had been done to make this beauty barbaric?

And why in Merlin’s name did I give a damn?

Not because I was brave, but because I was too stupid to fear him, and too stupid to fear what could happen.

~~~

They were proud of her, of all things. It boggled the mind, really, how a few small details could completely change a situation. Go to Azkaban to prove a point to your father and you were being foolish—do it for a job and you were being courageous.

“It was very brave of you, darling, to go on behalf of those who can’t,” Molly said, heaping an extra portion of trifle into Ginny’s bowl. “Perhaps it can do some good.”

Ginny smiled wanly, her hand slipping down to her side to brush over her hip, where the phantom traces of his wand’s energy heated her skin. The wand was long since removed, stowed for the night in a small wooden box in her father’s “study.” In reality, it was only a desk crammed with papers, but he loved it.

The only problem was, it was in plain sight of the table, and Ginny could hardly keep her eyes from it.

“Anything to help,” she said finally, turning curved lips to her parents and feeling ten kinds of a fool. She’d acted horribly at the prison, shamefully. It hadn’t occurred to her at the time, with the wand warbling in her pocket and the wand’s owner sitting catatonic before her. All she’d wanted—all she’d needed—was a reaction, any sort of reaction. If he truly was in a sort of walking comatose state, then guilt would be beyond him.

But if he could react, then she knew he had to know something, had to feel something, no matter how cold-hearted of a bastard he was.

So she’d had a bit of an outburst, what of it?

She didn’t give a tinker’s damn what Draco Malfoy thought of her or her infantile outbursts.

Bearing that in mind, Ginny finished her dessert quickly, not tasting a bit of it, and excused herself from the table. At least if she were in her room she could be away from reminders of her day’s errand. But even in her room, in the silent comfort of that which had always been hers, the thoughts swarmed and nagged, and Ginny fell asleep thinking of four inescapable walls and the prospect of eternity.

Things could have been similar for her, she knew, if people hadn’t been so understanding. After all, she’d done more damage on her own that year than all the Death Eaters combined. Damage wrought by her own small, slim hands, perhaps, but damage also wrought by a cruel, icy man who carried an ornate walking stick, with a son who mimicked his every move.

Damage wrought by a cruelly handsome wizard who was weak in the present but strong in the past.

It was she who had been weak in the present.

“Not anymore,” she said definitely, her mouth set. It was just what Voldemort did, even in his death. He sowed doubt and fear and guilt and hatred, and fed off it all. But she wouldn’t feel it anymore. Tom Riddle was what he’d always been—a shadow, a phantom, no more than a blot of ink on a page.

She was real, and she’d make enough of a difference to prove it.

She’d undo part of what she’d unwittingly helped along.

~~~

The next morning, she was received with gratitude at St. Mungo’s, effusive praise in long supply for the little Mediwitch-in-training. Though the beast’s wand could well turn out to be no help at all, it was a fantastic gesture, everyone said. A meaningful gesture.

Only Glennys Gylfoyle saw the forlorn look in Ginny’s eyes, however, when she went on rounds that day, when an incoherent Luna Lovegood grabbed the young Weasley’s arm and began to speak.

“It’s in the dog,” she said earnestly, even a bit urgently. “Moon deep on a split pudding.”

Ginny could feel the grief, wailing inside her, scouring the back of her throat like a handful of nails “All right, Luna, love,” Ginny said, patting the ethereal blonde’s hand comfortingly. “I’ll be sure to look for it.” The Ravenclaw had been so kind, and she’d stood truer than most, had done so repeatedly.

Ginny worked without pause for the rest of the day, taking on the small, odd jobs she was allowed, learning more about those tasks that were yet beyond her, and the more she worked, the more solid her purpose became.

Once Ginny Weasley had made up her mind, there was no swaying it.

~~~

She shouldered off the coat she wore over her green robes, handing it to the guard at the front. “Visitor for Malfoy,” she said tersely. She would go through the proper channels this late afternoon, would do things as regulated by the Ministry, as regulated by her father.

She highly doubted he’d meant these regulations for her. She also highly doubted he’d understand her insistence on returning. But no matter anyone’s understanding, the guard, thin-lipped and suspicious-eyed, was obligated to check her wand at the door and send her on her way. Her chair and paper were already in place when she approached the long corridor of chambers, her hands icy and her mind suddenly blank.

“Good evening, miss,” the chamber guard said politely. He’d been given instructions—very specific ones—from Kingsley.

“Treat the girl well, Paternoster, treat her well and watch her as you would one of your own.”

Kingsley hadn’t really known what had compelled him to give such an order. He believed she meant well, but somewhere in those beautiful bronze-brown eyes, under all that flame-red hair, the girl was in trouble, and if she wasn’t now, she would be. Of that, Kingsley was certain.

He didn’t want that trouble coming to a head on his watch—or at the prison at all, really. Kingsley Shacklebolt didn’t want to break any sort of news to the weary elder wizard Weasley.

She made her way down the hall, first cell on the right, and immediately made as though to sit in the chair provided her.

Why so comfortable, Virginia? she asked herself, more than a little snidely. Why so natural? It wasn’t a natural, a comfortable setup, to be certain— “That’s how it has to be,” her father had said offhandedly that morning. “The more times the wards on the glass are taken down and re-erected, the weaker they become.”

And so here she perched, slightly stooped, readying herself to sit, her eyes once again riveted to the prisoner before her.

Was it lowering, then, to have had everything, to have lived lavishly, only to have it all replaced by one robe, cold walls, and a rickety cot the whole world could peek in on? And was it even more lowering that Azkaban no longer presented an air of noble suffering? That he wasn’t treated as a threat, but as a common criminal?

And as these thoughts flew threw her mind, the words left her mouth from the clamor of her mind before she could regulate them.

“I’m sorry,” her cold lips stammered, and even as her eyes widened with shock, his blinked once, rapidly. Because she felt a fool, a betrayer, Ginny rushed to qualify with the only rationale her scattered brain could manage. “For yesterday. For acting like a child.”

That got her nothing, no reaction, which was very nearly a relief. A Weasley apologizing to a Malfoy?

Talk about being a blood traitor.

She may as well keep up appearances while she was here, she thought; if not for him, then for herself. So, as she sat, she quietly asked “Why?”

She did not wait for an answer and did not expect one, so she immediately sat and started reading the Daily Prophet.

~~~

Before much longer, it became a habit, a pattern. Each afternoon signaled the end of her shift at St. Mungo’s, and she in her blazing green robes made her way to the once-dreaded Azkaban, the same one Lucius Malfoy and all his ilk had escaped from.

The same one his son would likely never escape from.

And as the days wore into one week, then two, Ginny could feel the tension mounting in the Burrow, the long, telling glances at the “clock” which indicated her daily presence at work and at the prison.

But there were no questions in those first days, not just yet. For now, the Weasleys comforted themselves with the knowledge that their princess, their jewel, was doing right by her job at St. Mungo’s. Surely, they thought, that was the reason for her daily voyages to the stark halls of the wizard prison.

And then came the day when habit was overturned, the pattern disturbed and worlds thrown off their axes. She had entered the prison, checked her wand, and entered the corridor. She had spoken her usual desultory greeting of “Why?”, still not expecting an answer, and started to sit down; when the glitch, the interruption came, she was almost comically frozen in a half-sitting position—(“Pop a squat!” Fred’s voice cried gleefully in her mind’s ear—) and he spoke.

“I’m guilty, you know.” He did not move, did not bother to face her with his words. His voice was surprisingly strong for having been months unused, but he kept his volume low.

It was a suspended moment, each millisecond passing like an hour as Ginny straightened, as a rare prisoner down the hall gasped, as Paternoster at his desk dropped his paper and half-stood, as the silent prisoner, the stoic captive, the mute murderer of Cell One broke his silence.

“I know,” Ginny responded, her own voice a whisper as she stepped closer to the glass.

“Miss, step away from there,” Paternoster cautioned, starting forward. Ginny stayed him with a shake of her head, keeping her eyes on the cell and its contents.

“I killed him,” Draco said in a contemplative voice. The words had been shaping on his tongue for weeks, but though he’d crafted them as honed, they were dull, rounded as he spoke. He had meant to wound her, and yet she stepped closer.

“I know,” she said again, her eyes frankly curious, and that garnered his attention, his odd eyes flashing to hers, his face twisted in an ugly grimace.

“Don’t you have any wits, Weasley? Don’t you have any good, healthy fear?” He spat the words as he stood. There was the sharpness he’d so desired.

“I don’t see anything to be afraid of,” she said honestly. “What I see is a misguided man behind several inches of glass and too many curses to count… or break.”

When he moved, his speed was serpentine, eerily smooth steps carrying her toward the glass and reflexively, Ginny stepped back as he stepped forward. A slow, smug, somehow melancholy smile flitted over his lips, and she cursed herself inwardly.

She’d be damned if she backed down so easily, and so she stepped toward the glass once more.

At her movement, he sketched a mocking bow, stepping back and then raising his eyes to hers.

“Now we’re dancing,” he said in a lilting, cultured voice. Her breath backed up in her lungs and he broke the bow. “Go home, little one. I never asked to dance with you.” And as he turned to return to his cot, the proud angle of his shoulders softened marginally. “I killed the only one who asked… remember?”

And it was those words, that jarring reference to the Yule Ball—(how had he even noticed that Neville took me?!?)—that had her moving, propelled toward the exit.

Draco Malfoy, after more than a month in prison, had spoken.

~~~

Ah… now we’re all caught up with his words and my words, and the somehow elegant inception of our dance.

Another set of spokes, another hub, this time his instead of mine, one of those elegant, long-fingered hands reaching up to start the wheel and its hub and its spokes turning, turning so you can not see the spokes, only a blur. The only thing you see is the hub.

All those spokes end up at the same place.

All those hinges swing the same door.

All the decisions lead to the same conclusion.

Destiny?

I only wish I knew.

**Author’s note: All my apologies for the delay in posting; I just want to express there are so many more pleasant things in this world than having to reformat your entire hard drive. The whole thing. Zap. Instead of thinking about the travesty that is technology, I present to you… story. Happy reading!**

CHAPTER EIGHT- The Statement of the Obvious

I could have stopped then.

Laying aside the question of destiny for the moment, I tell you I could have stopped then, said I’d tried my best, and moved on, shaken but for the most part unchanged.

But the fact of the matter is, everything I am—everything I was then—did not allow me to cease at that point. I had made him speak, and in that there was a kind of magic all its own, a fierce magic of no wands. The thrill of moving something—or in this case, someone—into action, of being the first, of discovery.

Oh, we are competitive creatures, and our competition is in no way dimmed by fear, or lack of understanding, or uncertainty.

And our curiosity, too, drives us, for what else causes people to wake up day after day? If you love and have a love, then it is your love who wakes you up, who calls you to them. If you are alone, however, it is that stunning, shining, mysterious prospect of “What now?”

From his words, both piercing and provocative, mysterious and maddening, I knew one thing.

I was not loved, but hated. No big surprise there.

So… what now?

~~~

In some ways, the wizarding world, broadened by its knowledge of the true nature of things, is also smaller than the outlying world of the blissfully unaware. It is an entire network oh-so-compressed by the things taken for granted, by the circles in which its people move.

And as one looks over this world both broad and narrow, where a troubled young wizard has troubled a young witch, we can see the owls begin to fly, the fireplaces flare with the news that one has spoken.

They do not have telephones, these witches and wizards, but they have there ways, and gossip is ever-popular. This is human nature.

When she let herself into the Burrow that evening, shaking remnant jitters off the way a woman might scatter rain, Ginny knew certainly that any private thinking time she may have had in the matter of one Draco Malfoy was over.

Just as well, she thought, taking the time to shed her Mediwitch robes and scourgify them. Her private thinking time had garnered her no explanations, no conclusions at all, but only a persistent curiosity that had not yet been sated. If anything, his words had only made it deeper and more determined.

She steeled herself for the worst, listening for her mother, father, and brother—

— And was promptly knocked arse-over-teakettle.

“Dad?” she managed, untangling herself from the mass of shambling limbs and shabby clothes which had nearly flattened her.

Whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t this—Arthur laid two rough-palmed hands to his daughter’s cheeks and laid a giant, smacking, awkward kiss on her forehead.

“You’re brilliant, love. What did he say? Anything important? Anything helpful?” His eyes were shining with that curious glee that always accompanied his fascinations, and he didn’t wait for a response before releasing her and Disapparating.

Though she knew well where he’d gone, Ginny looked up at the clock on the wall and watched the hand for her father move to “Azkaban.”

Before she could prevent it, a slow, sneaking stiletto of envy pierced through Ginny. He talked to me, she thought. Me. But would he talk to just anyone? And did it really matter?

She looked around the empty kitchen, stricken momentarily motionless by her train of thought.

“Well, love, what did he say?” her mother’s voice, notably less enthusiastic than her husband’s, jarred Ginny from her thoughts, and she felt the half-truth, selfish and clinging, rise in her throat and flow casually from her mouth.

“Just that he was guilty,” she said. “That’s all.”

Molly tilted her head as though she saw deeper, and as a mother, as a woman, she did. Her daughter’s eyes were troubled, shifting, and a simple admission from a murdering whelp should not—could not—have done so much to unsettle the steadiness of the youngest Weasley. Swamped with worry and love for her only girl, Molly put gentle hands on her daughter’s shoulders.

“Did he hurt you somehow?” she asked, her eyes intent. The query was ridiculous, she knew, but she had to ask.

And her daughter, with the eyes of a woman instead of a girl—When did that happen? Molly wondered—patted her mother’s hands with love.

“I’m not hurt, Mom,” she said, and then finally spoke a truth that was intact. “It’s good to be home for the night.”

~~~

The hospital was abuzz the next day, and Ginny felt the starts of a headache nestling in her head before she’d even made it through the main lobby. Everyone was talking about her, but no one to her. People glanced sidelong at the petite redhead, but none of them actually made eye contact with her.

She’d seen those looks before, of course, the sliding, suspicious, strange, curious looks that spoke of volumes of gossip that had come before and would continue long after she’d disappeared down the corridor.

This time, she didn’t care. This time, she’d not done anything wrong, unwittingly or otherwise. She wouldn’t hang her head because people were curious.

Ginny held to that ideal, keeping her chin in the air to the point she hardly saw anything around her; when she nearly walked past Glennys, the older woman snagged her by the arm.

“Miss Weasley,” Glennys said, her face sober but her eyes dancing. “A bit of pride is a good thing, but let us not allow it to hinder our steps, shall we?” When Ginny’s cheeks burned red under her freckles, the Healer shook her head with a cluck of the tongue so like Molly’s it made the blush recede. “I only wanted to tell you that the wand you brought to us several weeks ago is helping some.” If it were possible for the stout women to look uncomfortable, she did so now. “And perhaps, too, would information. It’s only that—”

Ginny shook her head not knowing what was coming next, not wanting to know. She didn’t want qualifiers, she didn’t want rules, and deep down, where she was intimidated by what was happening both inside and out, she knew that the more she was told ‘no,’ the more she would persist.

It was the Weasley way.

“I’m just helping,” she said with a smile, and somewhere inside, she trembled.

~~~

She’d gone to St. Mungo’s that morning with every intention of going home straight after, but as the day wore on, the glances grew longer and the voices grew louder in the corridors of the hospital.

“Little kiss-up, you know, running right out there to try and please Gargoyle Gylfoyle and get attention for her daddy’s pet project.”

“I heard there was an incident with You-Know-Who in her official records, so Merlin only knows what she has to talk to Malfoy about.”

Don’t you have any good, healthy fear?

That last voice, in her memories only, made Ginny cringe.

Plenty, she thought in response to the last evening’s jibe from Draco. Plenty of fear, but not of you, and not of what people think.

Her surety wavered hours later when she Apparated to Azkaban only to find she’d popped up in the midst of a nearly crushing throng of reporters from the British wizarding press.

Her mind still astir from the Apparation, Ginny blinked owlishly as a young wizard with a horrifying amount of bushy blond hair thrust a notebook and quill in her face, his watery blue eyes avid. “Miss Weasley, Johnny Droner from the Daily Prophet. What can you tell us about the prisoner? Any quotes? Any thoughts?”

Yes, her mind supplied in a chipper tone matching the reporter’s. I think your teeth are incredibly large and your hair is deplorable.

But she was unable to speak before another reporter shoved a quill in her face, and then another, and another.

“No comment.” The voice was huge, as was the man speaking, and Kingsley Shacklebolt’s passing cut a wide path through the reporters. In an instant, he had Ginny tucked under one unbelievably massive arm, sheltering her as he led her back to the prison entrance, slamming the huge iron door in the faces of the masses.

When he was sure they were out of earshot, he released her. “You shouldn’t have come,” he said sternly, but he went no further than that. Sometimes, Kingsley knew, there were things that would happen no matter what you said or did.

“I know,” she said simply, and went through the visitation protocol with the ease of habit.

~~~

Though he’d not spoken to anyone since her departure the day before, he was ready for her and speaking before she even sat down; for a few moments, he’d thought she wasn’t coming at all.

“And here, little Weasley, I thought you’d enough sense not to go where you’re not wanted.” She met his eyes and saw him tilt his bright head as though thinking. “Though were that the case, I don’t suppose you’d have tailed Potter so closely for so long.” His eyes narrowed as his lips perked into a smirk, and Ginny sat down, her face placid as she shook out the newspaper.

“Well, Malfoy, I’m shocked that you thought of me at all,” she said, still inwardly shaken from the melee outside. This was a piece of cake compared to the reporters; she’d been dealing with the snotty spoiled brat for years. She sat down and opened her paper, but before she could start to read, he spoke again, his voice entirely different.

“I was an ungrateful, spoiled brat,” he said contemplatively, as though the thought had just occurred to him, but he’d been thinking on it a while. Whether or not those words left his mouth depended entirely on one thing: whether or not she’d have shown up after he explicitly told her to go.

Here she was, and so he spoke.

~~~

I wanted to laugh.

Knowing now all the things I know, the laughter is still there, but it’s hidden and hard to find. But hearing him say it—that he was a spoiled brat—so soon after I’d thought it… well, it struck me as funny. But there are times when you can sense the urgency of a situation, even if it is only a murderer standing before you, stating the obvious with a nearly indiscernible tremor in his voice.

What he spoke was obvious, but he spoke the truth, and it was just the beginning.

As he spoke the truth about himself, I heard the truth about me.

No one else heard anything but… what do Muggles call it?

They all heard static, and that’s all he let them hear.

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.

CHAPTER TEN- The Curses of the Father

Why?

It is a big question, requiring big answers, and it took me quite some time to realize my “why” was being answered, and quite neatly, by the glassed-in prisoner of Cell 1 in Azkaban.

The only trouble with my “why” was the number of implications of it. I had started out asking because I wanted to know his motivations, his thoughts, his actions. I had, on the surface, wanted information to take back to my colleagues at the hospital.

At what point did my “why” become more for me than for him? At what point was I asking myself why I went, asking why I was drawn to him?

And how many times since then have I asked myself why? How many times have I asked myself and him and faceless powers?

Countless times.

There are countless answers in this world to the question of “why”.

You just have to learn to listen to all of them, whether you like them or not.

~~~

Two twins worked with their brother in a shop made for the joy of others, but there was little joy to be had on the particular day in question, the Third Day of Speech, as one of the twins called it in mocking tones of false hilarity.

A father and son worked side by side in a place so vast and all-encompassing neither of them would ever truly know its bounds; their duties to the Ministry would end before they’d even covered half of what the Ministry really meant.

A mother wandered Diagon Alley, picking up supplies and looking worriedly at her own reflection in storefronts, the face so like her daughter’s but advanced by age.

And as these redheads and others, much known and much-loved by a great many of the British wizarding world, worried and fretted, the object of their worry made her way from home to work to prison, ever her last stop of the day.

There were no reporters this day, and though Ginny had no way of knowing it, her father had been responsible for that small miracle. The Ministry had put forth an official decree at his direction, and reporters were banned from the prison grounds. Though Arthur had made a good show of things, spouting off numerous reasons why Azkaban should be free of reporters, he hadn’t quite managed to fool himself.

He didn’t want his little girl gracing the front pages of the papers, peeking furtively through her fingers, ducking quickly behind the arms of Kingsley Shacklebolt. And was there, underneath that well-meaning, fumbling demeanor, perhaps a bit of shame? A bit of hesitance because his daughter appeared to be growing chummy with an established enemy?

If there was shame, Arthur would have had a hard time unearthing it from the mounds of guilt he felt. Wasn’t it he who had established visitation?

Wasn’t it his fault his daughter had the capability to visit the enemy?

Of course it was, just as it had been his fault his lovely, loving daughter had been forced to purchase used books back in school.

Would she not have noticed a worn diary in a cauldron full of new books?

In such days, it was easy to point fingers, even at one’s self.

~~~

His memory was long and seemingly flawless.

He did not remember things such as his first flight on a broomstick, the first time he’d seen someone Apparate, the first butterbeer he’d ever had. If he remembered them, he did not relate them.

Instead, he remembered the first time he’d seen his father curse his mother, the first time that silver-topped cane had come down on a fine-boned wrist, the first time he’d been forced, as an adolescent, to stand before Lord Voldemort simply for Lucius’s amusement and the Dark Lord’s approval.

He’d had nightmares ever since, and the boy he had been had cried himself to sleep for two weeks hence, casting feeble silencing charms around his room to save himself from whatever punishment a weakness such as tears would merit.

In a heart where fear is a necessity, where it overflows and makes the blood shiver, love leaves to make more room for the fear.

Draco could see the flat disbelief in her eyes, the joint horror at his tale and disagreement at his assessment.

“You think me wrong,” he said on that third day of speech, when he’d only gotten so far as to tell her a few of the things he remembered most about his beloved father. “You think love exists, Weasley, and you’re just itching to tell me so.”

Her face flushed under the myriad freckles and Draco smirked, eyes narrowed into amalgam slits. “Don’t like when I’m right, Weasley? You’d best get used to it.”

“You’re not right,” she burst back, shocked at herself for speaking so. Wasn’t she just here to do the right thing? To help? “There’s love, and plenty of it. I can hardly explain it to someone who doesn’t want to believe it. You’re like a Muggle watching a witch fly; you’ll make up any excuse to disbelieve.”

“And you’re like a child listening to overblown legends,” he shot back. “You’ll make up any excuse to believe.”

The two sat in silence for a long, stretched moment, eyes combative, bodies tense with the rigors of their convictions.

And then he broke his stance, letting his head droop and his eyes shift away. “Read,” he said, lazily lifting his fingers at the paper.

“I’ll not take commands from you,” Ginny insisted, but she knew her claim was belated; after all, he’d been commanding her from the very start. He just hadn’t been doing it with words.

“Read,” he repeated, and he kept his eyes away from hers. Talking about it—talking about his father—had proven to be too much for him at this particular junction. He could do no more that evening, with she who had undoubtedly been coddled and loved sitting before him and trying to lecture him on something so alien as love.

“You’re not finished with what you were saying,” she said, and then he was up and at her, standing so close to the glass he was nearly touching, but no hands this time, no palms resting futilely against the barrier.

“Read, damn it all!” he shouted, grating his teeth together. “I’ll finish talking when I’m ready, and right now, I just want…” He shook his head then, started to turn away from her, and thought better of it. He pointed then, a long, slim finger directed at her accusingly. “You… it must be so easy for you to be right, to know you’re right. You’ve never had anyone tell you otherwise, have you? You’ve always been right, and good, and loved, and saved.”

“And what of it?” Ginny asked, chin jutting proudly into the air.

“Just read your bloody newspaper,” Draco said, and sat on his cot.

He was done talking for the day.

~~~

She was exhausted, wrung out, by the time she got back to the Burrow. If she only scratched the surface of her honesty, the barest parts of her true feelings, she would say she didn’t want to know how he felt, didn’t want to feel sorry for him, to sympathize.

But if she were wholly honest, she was too empathetic a person not to want to know at least a little bit. He was suffering—she hadn’t allowed herself to see it before, and likely would be able to shunt that particular realization back if she tried hard enough, but it was the truth. Somehow, he who had caused suffering for many was suffering himself. And wasn’t that the point of imprisonment? Wasn’t that the price of getting caught?

Even the innocent suffered mightily throughout their lifetime, so it was only fair the wicked should suffer, as well.

But as Ginny let herself in, she knew he’d suffered lifetimes, as well.

And what of it? she asked herself insistently.

“Gin?” The voice, thrown somewhere from the deepening shadows of the kitchen, startled her, and the green robes she’d been holding on her fingertips, ready to hang up, slipped off and puddled on the floor.

“Ron!” she responded in a gasp, picking up the robe and crouching down beside him beside the fireplace. “What are you doing?”

He smiled up at her then, the badly guttering fire sending red-gold glints from his hair to her eyes, the good humor that had so long been missing restored. “Trying to get this ruddy fire started,” he said. “Mum and Dad are out, and…” he trailed off, poking his wand gingerly at the fire, making it spark weakly. “Well, I’ve never quite gotten the hang of the fire.”

Keeping her eyes on his, Ginny pointed her wand casually and sent the hearth ablaze easily. “It’s all in the wrist,” she said loftily, suddenly fiercely glad for the easy moment of camaraderie.

“You sound like Hermione,” Ron grumbled, and stood. He was actually proud of that one small feat—it had been months since he’d been able to move without groaning. He knew where she’d been—it was all his parents could talk about, and the twins weren’t much better—but at the moment, it was hard to care.

Life was getting back to normal, and Ronald Weasley wasn’t precisely willing to shake things back up.

“Tell me you can fix some supper,” he said pleadingly, sitting down at the table and tilting his head back. “I’ll waste away if you don’t.”

Ginny edged around the table, laughing but cautious. What was it her father had asked her? If she thought about Ron? “You’re a man grown,” she teased. “Surely you can manage a bit of supper.” She put a pot on the stove by hand, never having caught Molly’s knack for magical cooking, and as she turned away from the warming stovetop, her face was serious.

“Ron…” What was she supposed to say? Sorry months of your life were torturous hell, but I’m trying to do something with mine? “Do you… do you want to talk? About things?”

Ron kicked back in his chair and regarded his sister with bunched brows. He’d been nudged, hinted at, pushed and petted, all regarding this one thing.

At the moment, with an empty stomach and a comfortable moment with the young woman who had, for all intents and purposes, been his best friend growing up, Ron most certainly didn’t want to talk about Draco Malfoy.

Things had not always been easy for the Weasleys, but things had worked out. Charlie and Bill, so close in age, had been fast friends and quick competitors. Percy was the solitary type, and the twins were basically one person. So that had left the two youngest siblings to either fend for themselves or come to a wary truce.

Ron had no urge to break that truce, not just yet.

“No, I don’t want to talk,” he finally said. “Talking’s for girls.” But his eyes grew faraway. “Maybe some other time.”

“Maybe,” Ginny responded, and in her heart of hearts, she wondered how things would have been if she and Ron hadn’t had one another, if Arthur or Molly had been bad instead of good.

Would they have had the chance to be who they were now?

Would they have known the differences they so needed to know?

As she sat down and ate supper with her brother, Ginny tried not to know. Ginny tried not to care.

And across from her, Ron saw her fail miserably in her attempt at carelessness.

~~~

There is a saying in the wizarding world, and when I tell it, you’ll likely recognize it—most people have their own form of it. Curses of the father, it’s called, the idea that the collection of horrible things someone has accrued in their life can be passed on to others around them.

To children.

To the innocents.

And this makes sense to me, that this can happen, and we can never truly be innocent. For our judgments are colored each day, with each breath, by the days and breaths of those around us.

Curses of the father, yes, but also of the mother, and curses of the neighbor and classmate. Curses of the beloved and the hated.

My judgment has been so colored by those around me, so colored by those I care about—so colored by him whom I was unable not to care about—that it’s a wonder my judgment isn’t black.

Or is it?

**Author’s note: A bit of a longer chapter following. It’s been hard to get chapters out, as I’m really getting into the crux of things, and I appreciate the faithful reviews I’ve been getting. You don’t know how much it means to get good feedback on work. Happy reading!**

CHAPTER ELEVEN- The Needs of the Compelled

The most momentous events of your life are the ones which most often go unnoticed in their time. Most people never realize the moment they fall in love, the moment they find their calling, the moment they find themselves.

Most people never realize the moment in which life as they know it begins to fall apart.

Our lives are like buildings, built carefully brick by brick until we’re familiar with the shape, familiar with the structure. It is as well-known as one’s own house, every angle, corner and wall both loving and loved. And then things happen, and you are forced to change the plans of the house, forced to move the bricks, forced to catch pieces of the house as they fall.

We are constantly rebuilding, and sometimes we never realize it.

I was re-laying my life brick by brick in an entirely different pattern, rebuilding my life in a structure that encompassed things I never meant to encompass.

And so when my life began to fall apart—when my life began to change—I was already knee-deep in mortar and too busy with my bricks to notice.

~~~

She’d been expecting it for weeks. After all, this was where the girl had been heading, theoretically, though Glynnis Gylfoyle would have counted herself the world’s biggest fool if she believed Ginny Weasley’s intentions were singular in nature.

Now the girl sat in Glynnis’s office, her eyes forthright above the dark shadows of sleeplessness that marred her skin.

“Well, Miss Weasley, you’ve something to tell me?” And plenty you won’t tell me, Glynnis remarked internally.

Ginny nodded and leaned across the desk, intent on seeing out the task she had started.

She had sought information, and information she would give.

“I don’t know if any of this will help,” she said, thinking of Luna and Tonks and the dozens of others stricken in the wards. “But anything which was done by Draco Malfoy’s wand was done because of his father.”

It was a leap she’d made blindly, an assumption she’d made after three days of listening to him talk. He was miserable; any fool could see that. And what was his tie to the Dark Lord, to the wrong side of the last war?

His father.

“He acted from a warped childhood, a loveless childhood. I am convinced he hardly knew any better than to act as he did. If a curse with marks of guilt, a curse with marks of happenstance, bears any difference from a fully-intended curse, then—” She shrugged and looked pleadingly at Glynnis.

What she wanted to hear was that the victims in the Malfoy section could be healed, that the majority of what Draco had done could be reversed. She wanted a lessening of the crimes of Draco Malfoy, whether she realized that or not.

And even if Ginny didn’t realize it, Glynnis Gylfoyle did. “Are you telling me this to aid a healing or to ease his conscience?”

Hearing the truth uttered so casually shook Ginny, but she didn’t show it. Instead, she folded one hand over the other and kept her eye contact unwavering. “If one happens to coincide with the other, what possible difference does that make?”

Clever girl, Glynnis thought. “Not a whit.”

But Ginny thought of Glynnis’s question—and the mystery of the real answer, shrouded somewhere in her own heart and mind—all day as she went about her rounds.

She slipped into the long-term ward to check on things, fluff pillows, check on any potions that may have been administered, offer what comfort she could. As she did so, she felt her mouth dry when she saw who was there.

Though in her first days at St. Mungo’s it had taken several tries to enter Frank and Alice Longbottom’s section of the ward, Ginny had started to see them as something entirely apart from her job—a pilgrimage of sorts to the people who had made such a wonderful boy.

But in all the times Ginny had visited, Neville’s grandmother had never been there.

“H’lo, Mrs. Longbottom,” Ginny said, waving her wand to refill the pitcher on the bedside table and to freshen the ever-present vase of flowers, feeling the acute need to keep herself busy.

Neville’s gran peered at Ginny through small, unreadable eyes. A lovely girl, she thought, with a good, strong family. But…

“You’re the one who’s been visiting my grandson’s murderer,” she stated, her voice betraying no particular emotion.

For the briefest—and most painful—of moments, a picture of Neville’s sweet, smiling face slashed into Ginny’s mind, and she put out a hand to steady herself, small fingers grasping the edge of the bedside table. “Yes, ma’am.”

Sometimes there was nothing to say but the truth.

Mrs. Longbottom lifted herself out of the chair as though hefting the weight of her many years and her many grievances; Ginny supposed she was, in a way—what must it be like to outlive not only your children, but your grandchild, as well? When she’d pulled herself to her full height, ghastly hat and all, she stared Ginny in the eye.

“My grandson was too young to die, and a boy too young to die is a boy too young to kill.” Without waiting for an answer, she nodded her head, sending the innumerable plumes and knickknacks of her hat waving, and then exited.

The cryptic nature of the statement puzzled Ginny, but as she looked at the two people lying side-by-side in the beds they would forever be doomed to, Ginny thought she understood.

No one their age—Neville’s age, Ginny’s age, Draco’s age, even—had any business mixed up in a war.

No business dealing in life and death.

All the same, Ginny couldn’t fight the feeling of sickness that swamped her, and she sat down in the chair Gran Longbottom had vacated, putting her hands over her face and weeping to the accompaniment of the labored breathing of two martyrs of the first war.

~~~

It would have been easier, ever so much easier, to just pretend it wasn’t an issue, pretend it wasn’t happening. He’d been good enough at that once upon a time, playing “ignorance is bliss” right to the hilt. Daily dalliances with the twins kept that particular brand of bliss sharp, but with the close of the war, Ron had changed. No matter how hard he tried to ignore that, it was the truth.

This day, as he worked side by side with the friend who had become a brother to him, Ron could no more ignore that truth than he could ignore his best friend.

“I’m going to go up there,” he said, turning a can of exploding sardines so the label faced front and center.

Harry made a noncommittal noise and made a tick next to the sardines on the inventory list. Even if he’d been a fool—which he’d been at some points in his life, surely, but not now—he’d have noticed Ron’s silence of late, the long periods of completely uncharacteristic pensiveness, the scowls into space.

Harry hadn’t seen Ron so perplexed since he’d started trying to figure out the puzzle that was Luna Lovegood in sixth year.

So it was with no surprise that Harry took in Ron’s declaration. Of course he was going up to Azkaban.

Harry just hadn’t figured out why yet.

“Mum and Dad want me to tell Ginny I want her to stop goin’,” he said, busily arranging tins and boxes with his long, slender fingers, his features pulling into an expression that was uniquely Ron.

That, too, was no particular shock for Harry; the twins had made no secret of the family wish for cessation of visitation. But something about the reluctant way Ron said it did serve to shock Harry, and the slender, serious brunet stopped taking inventory to regard Ron.

“What?” Ron asked peevishly, stacking a box with slightly more force than necessary and igniting something inside.

“Nox,” Harry said patiently, extinguishing the small lightshow that had erupted from the box. “Well, out with it, then,” he said, leaning on the counter. “I’d hate to see what the twins would devise if we’d not finished inventory by the time they got back.”

“Until I went to Hogwarts, Gin was my best friend. I’m not tellin’ her to do somethin’ like a bloody idiot tattletale.” And that, really, was the gist of the matter. If people didn’t want her to do something, they could tell her so himself.

It felt just a mite degrading to be used for your status as a victim.

Good for you, mate, Harry thought. It didn’t take a genius—or the Boy Who Lived—to realize that Ron had spent far too much of his life doing as others had told him, living in the shadows and commands of others.

If he wanted to stand up now, Harry thought it was a fine time to do so.

~~~

She was late.

When each day was identical and there were no outlets to the world outside, there were also no reference points. Time took on an entirely different quality, shifty and inimical, sneaky and changeable.

Meals, though they came three times a day, were barely noticed. Minutes stretched into hours while days were over in a snap.

She was his only reference.

In a stretch of day barren and dark, she was the only way to differentiate time. She was noon, straight overhead, unmistakable and scorching.

Time for the prisoner in the first cell on the right had boiled down to two things: the time when she was there, and the times when she was not.

And as Draco sat in his cell, he knew—he felt—that it was supposed to be the former but had somehow become the latter.

He was edgy but forced himself to stay still, his hands folded together in the perfect composition of calm, his eyes trained on the wall. He’d done it for weeks before she had come, and he could do it now.

Damn her for spoiling a routine, for spoiling the quiet.

He breathed rhythmically, in through his nose, out through his mouth, practicing in the cell—roughly seven paces by seven paces—the techniques he’d practiced while huddled under thick silk and velvet covers as his father did one more crazy thing, then another, then another, one more abusive, horrible, frightening thing.

He had made it through much worse than the absence of one of the good ones of the world.

Had his world shrunk so small that even the absence of a Weasley would affect him so?

In through the nose, out through the mouth.

Seventy-three breathing cycles had passed since she should have been there.

At a hundred and eleven, he heard the heavy thump of the iron door being unlatched, his only sign of recognition the slow unfolding of his long fingers, the quickening of his breathing.

But the steps were not hers, that much he could tell immediately. The chair summoned was different, bigger, the sounds of the footsteps longer and heavier, but more hesitant. There was none of that fast, graceful clip to be had here. This person was about to stumble over his own fear, and Draco could all but smell it.

He fought his curiosity with his apathy, the apathy winning out easily even though he saw the flash of orangey scarlet that meant a Weasley was in the vicinity.

Ron stood on the other side of the glass, his gaze momentarily fixed on the plush tweed chair before him.

Now what, exactly, was he supposed to do with that?

He sure as Merlin’s hat wasn’t going to sit in it, if that’s what they wanted. He was here to ask a question and leave. Though he wasn’t about to condemn Ginny for it, Ron couldn’t understand for the life of him how she could sit here and look at that git for extended periods of time.

He wasn’t good with words, he’d never been particularly clever in that area. That, at the very least, had been Hermione’s forte. Ron had been a good tactician, good at seeing the picture in the long haul, the chess board from above.

Now he saw only one move he could make, only one counter he needed to know.

And though he’d never particularly credited himself with bravery, either, Ron did what he had to do. Taking a deep breath, regarding the man he knew could hear him, Ron asked the only question he had to ask.

“Would you hurt her, then? If you had the chance, like you hurt me?”

Seconds spun by, five cycles of breathing, breathing so fast it made Draco’s head spin.

What the bloody hell kind of question was that, anyway?

Muttering a swear, Ron kicked absently at the leg of the horrid chair that had been summoned for him and turned to walk away. “I’ll take your silence for consent then, you feckin’ bastard,” he said weakly. Had he really expected anything else?

And as he turned back for one last look, a hint of an answer reached Ron’s ears.

Silver eyes met his as they had one day on a battlefield months past, though the heat was long since past. There was no wand, only an equal looking at an equal, and on an exhalation, his lips formed the whisper of a word, more a breath than a vocalization as his mouth shaped the rounded syllable that carried his feelings. In the tomb-like silence, the puff of air seemed emphatic, commanding.

His answer was no.

And though Ron’s assessment of his own mental faculties was somewhat bleak—he had to be nutters to believe Malfoy—he walked away from Azkaban with the only answer he needed, leaving the man who had nearly killed him sitting on a cell in a small stone room, breathing in and out in wait for her.

~~~

Four hundred and seventy four breathing cycles went by before the iron door sounded again, and this time the steps were fast and even, light and sure, familiar as his own pattern of breathing.

He turned to face her, his high noon, and eyed her with the gaze of an ingrate.

I was an ungrateful, spoiled brat…

And he still was, and he knew it. But it was hard to be grateful for being turned into a dependent.

Draco was fairly certain having his soul sucked out would be more merciful.

It was on the tip of his tongue to say something nasty about her punctuality problems, but that would only accentuate his desperation more, his neediness for this saving grace, this daily visit, so he kept his mouth shut but turned to regard her.

She’d been crying.

“I’m going to read the newspaper, and I’m going to leave,” she said, her voice steady though her hands rattled the paper she held. It had been a bad day, filled with thoughts of Neville and his parents, filled with those last few moments, the sight of Neville falling, the sound, impossibly loud over the clash of other warriors, traveling to her ears so she could replay it for years to come.

Perhaps she hadn’t replayed it enough, she thought as she shook out the first page of the paper.

After all, she was here, and now that she was here, it was impossible to see only Neville’s face. She saw, as well, Draco’s, then and now, the fierceness of the warrior and the weariness of the prisoner. Since when had that aristocratic beauty been weary? Since when had he looked so edgy? As she’d approached, his eyes had been fixed on the wall, as was his habit, but they lacked the blankness that was his trademark. No, this time he’d been staring at the wall as though that state of catatonia was just too hard to reach today.

Her wonderment of why only served to make her angry at herself.

The sight of the red streaks of grief layered over the light dusting of freckles did what should have been impossible: thwarted Draco’s urge to speak for the night.

His story could wait, now that he had the power of her presence, and so he listened to her story, told between the lines of the newsprint, told between the shifting colors of the moving pictures.

He listened to her grief, and he concentrated on his salvation.

~~~

Do we ever truly know what we need? Or do we just know what we want, and do we want it so badly we don’t bother to find the root of that want?

There are people in this world who always seem to know what they need. I, unfortunately, was not one of them.

I needed that sight of Neville in my mind, needed to remember him, needed to keep that at hand.

Or perhaps I just wanted it.

What I really needed, I found inside Azkaban, inside cold walls and glass rooms, inside that which I could leave, whereas others were trapped.

But at the time, I knew, absolutely knew with certainty that I didn’t need to be there.

I just wanted it.

I wanted it like a prisoner wants freedom, like the guilty want salvation.

And now I realize that is need.

CHAPTER TWELVE- The Actions of a Friend

It is truly amazing how much can be said in the absence of words. In truth, it seems as though we say more to one another when we’re not talking, for in muteness, there is no dishonesty. There is no farce.

He said much to me that day, eloquently unspoken as I read out loud the words of the paper, in awe of my own ability to focus on the words that seemed ever-moving, ever-changing. He said much with those guarded silver eyes, eyes that watched me turn pages and watched me hurt.

That night… those moments… perhaps those were the only ones I really realized for what they were while they were happening.

In those moments, in his attentive silence, he began to apologize for the wrongs he’d committed.

Perhaps I should have found that strange, or wrong. Perhaps I should have seen more than just a sorrowful gaze. After all, since when did the great Draco Malfoy apologize, if only with those strange starshine eyes?

And is it so hard to understand why I did not want to speak that day, why I was so filled with self-doubt and even some self-loathing?

For whether he intended to apologize or not, I had already started to accept his apology, this man who had killed a friend, harmed countless others, and had almost torn my family apart.

I had already started to forgive him.

~~~

Ginny was, as ever, true to her word. Once she’d finished reading the newspaper in wounded, raw tones that were somehow dulcet, she’d folded it, risen, and walked out, leaving the man behind the glass to try and solve the enigma of the words she’d not spoken and the words she’d not allowed him to speak.

She Apparated home, having no patience for the walk and no wish to tolerate her own company.

Being in her own company only presented her with the opportunity to question herself, and with more questions only arose more doubts.

She Apparated in the yard, hands tucked in the sleeves of her robe. She’d taken to giving herself these moments, small moments of pretense where she could gather her thoughts and present herself to her family looking ordered and calm.

She used these moments to recoup her sanity.

Her sanity nearly flew the Owlery this night, however, when a hand descended on her shoulder, sending her heart rate thundering and her breath whooshing out of her.

“Oi, little sis, take it easy,” Ron said, stepping back and holding both hands up. “Never one to fight, you know.”

“You scared me nearly to Petrification, Ron,” she responded, taking a swing at his shoulder. What had she expected, really? What was there to fear in these days of good, in these days of justice? “What are you doing?”

In the wavering, cloud-stippled light of the early night, Ginny saw Ron shrug his shoulders, and though his gesture was typically vague and somehow careless, she knew what was on his mind.

He’d said he didn’t want to talk, and that had surely been a lie.

“I wanted…” Ron trailed off, uncertain of how to handle this. He’d originally intended to get it out in the open in front of everyone—everyone, of course, meaning Molly and Arthur—but somehow, it just didn’t seem right to do that to her.

This was a matter between the two of them, and he’d settle it as such.

Besides, if people thought a Howler from Molly Weasley was bad, they’d never been a firsthand victim of one of her rants. Just thinking of it made Ron shudder.

“I wanted to see how you were,” he said honestly. “And ask you a question.”

Moving in unison, attuned in their own version of the twins’ eerie synchronization, Ron and Ginny sat on the sinking stoop of the Burrow, knee to knee.

“Well, Ron, we all know how good you are at opening that great gaping gob of yours,” Ginny said lightly, but her voice sounded vacant in the shadow of her anticipation. “Let’s get it done, then, eh?”

“If I asked you to stop visiting him, would you?” It had been the other half of his puzzle, the one other gambit on the board. He had needed one answer from each of them, and he’d gotten it already from Malfoy. Now he just needed one word from his sister, this young woman who had looked so much like him as a child, this young woman who had grown to be beautiful in her own right.

Thunderstruck, Ginny opened her mouth, closed it, then blew out a breath. “Yes,” she said honestly, but the single syllable was drawn out, reluctant. She’d meant to say it tersely, to tell the truth and get it over with. Before responding, she hadn’t realized she even had any hesitance on the matter.

What would it be like, then? To just stop visiting him, to never see him again, to relieve herself of that burden? To deprive him of his savior?

It was beyond her imagining.

But her family was her life, and so she knew she would stop her visits to the prison if she were asked to.

But Ron had said “if,” and she was leaning mightily on those two little letters. And so she listened to him breathe the cool night air in and out, but she kept her eyes on the stars above them, not wishing to see his expression.

She did not wish to see his forbiddance.

Satisfied with Ginny’s answer, no matter how diffident it had been, Ron looked at his parents. “Well, that settles it.” A cold coil of fear slinked through Ginny’s stomach at his words; its iciness doubled when she realized she truly was afraid to stop visiting.

“Settles what?” she managed to ask, feeling the muscles in her shoulders and back stiffen with dread expectation.

“I won’t ask you to stop going,” Ron said, slinging his arm companionably over Ginny’s shoulders, feeling them slump and tremble with relief. “And because I see you’re going to ask why, it’s because I think he’s harmless.” And, in truth, because Draco Malfoy had stood more honorably than any of his cohorts in those last moments of the war, had stood face-to-face with him and fought honestly.

Draco had done what no one else, including Ron’s own closest friends, had; he had treated Ron as an equal.

Ron grinned a boyish grin, completely at odds with the seriousness of the situation. Everything inside him, however, trembled in time with his sibling’s shoulders as he recognized the sheer depth of her emotions.

What, he wondered, would she have done if he’d decided she shouldn’t go?

~~~

If she’d been distraught the day before, tear-streaked and shaken, today he thought she looked calm, remarkably more so than she had on any of his visits. Her steps down the corridor were leisurely, so much so he nearly didn’t recognize the sound of them.

She sat down in the large velvet chair provided her, crossing her long legs under the horrible green robes she wore. He was, he reckoned, getting nearly as sick of that sickly green as he was of his own scarlet.

She made no move to touch the newspaper, only crossed her hands in her lap and regarded him. It was something she hadn’t done much lately, choosing instead to look at her own reflection in the glass, choosing to try and solve her own mysteries.

Now, however, it was as though her brother had lifted a bit of a weight from her. He’d always tried to do that for her, had always been a spectacular older brother. For once, his help had been welcomed by Ginny. The small gesture had amounted to his acceptance, and acceptance was what she’d so badly needed.

He looked thinner to her, but somehow stronger, the angles of his cheekbones more prominent, his eyes larger, more dominating in the cell that was so little but held so much.

The cell was, of course, the same size it had been nearly a month ago, but it seemed smaller to Ginny, more pitiful. The bright robe, which would be unmistakable to anyone and everyone should the prisoner wearing it escape, seemed contrived in the dreary space, as misplaced as a unicorn at a deathday party.

The small cot he sat on sagged more, and in her mind’s eye, she could clearly see him spending sleepless nights on that cot, hands laced neatly over his chest, slate eyes focused on the ceiling.

Now those slate eyes were focused on her, and she gave him the same courtesy.

If she was going to listen, she wasn’t going to do it halfway.

He wanted to ask her what had happened between yesterday and today, but didn’t dare do so. It broke the pattern of things, broke the rhythm.

Would you hurt her, then?

She was his salvation, wasn’t she? And he had to make sure that was intact, that was all.

That was all, and so he forced himself away from the issue of her feelings and plowed on with his own.

“I had… have… no friends,” Draco began, watching her intently, watching the range of emotions shift over her face. He nearly rolled his eyes, so clearly could he anticipate her next words.

“That’s not true,” Ginny retorted, thinking of the past tense—had—and of his constant companions in the days of yore.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Weasley, were you about to volunteer?” Draco asked, arching an eyebrow at her interruption and aching at the simple truth behind his own statement.

“No,” she snapped back, embarrassed at the telling look he’d given her, ashamed of her own presumption. “I only assumed—”

“How many friends had you then, Weasley?” Though his tone was snide, the curiosity was authentic, his eyes frank and straightforward.

For a moment, she merely gaped at him. He’d not once invited her participation during his yarning, and that had been best. After all, what part did she have in his confessions?

And since when had the confessions lapsed into conversations?

“Just a handful,” she answered, embarrassed and wanting to downplay the whole thing, let him get back to talking, back to the rhythm of things.

He looked pointedly at her slim fingers resting lightly on the arms of her chair and his expression was one of cool amusement.

“I believe, then, that this glass must make your hands look much smaller than they are.”

At a loss for any other kind of response, Ginny laughed, and behind the glass, something akin to a smile ghosted across Draco’s face.

Down the hall, Kingsley Shacklebolt closed his eyes and tried to ignore the feeling, the hunch, the sneaking feeling of bad that coursed through him at the sound and feel of the odd amity.

Things were amiss at Azkaban, and Kingsley wondered how wrong they could possibly get before things turned completely upside-down.

~~~

Is it possible, you ask, to form a friendship under circumstances like that? Is it possible for the friendless to finally find a friend when he cannot even touch the grass or breathe fresh air?

I would say no.

Friendship is too ordinary a word, too commonplace and too simple to be had in a prison, in a chamber of the entrapment of the mind, the entrapment of the soul, the entrapment of the body.

Forming a friendship loomed as an impossibility, but being a friend seemed viable enough.

Merlin knows we needed viability, life and the living, and how badly we needed it in those days.

How badly we all need to live.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN- The Sound of a Sigh

Relief is a freeing emotion. There are things to do, things to say, things to be, and in the relief of pardon, these things can be done with ease.

The greatest thing a witch or wizard can learn is that there are many magical things in this world that have nothing to do with wands or spells or charms.

There are magical things in this world that are universal—Muggle or Magic, man or woman, witch or wizard.

We, in our own world, in our own way, are not superior. Magic is not the sole property of those who can levitate a feather or change their appearance at will.

Magic is the sole property of the heart.

~~~

She hadn’t been there for months, hadn’t even dared to walk near the grounds, to look upon it from afar, hadn’t even allowed herself to think of it.

Thinking of it should have brought Ginny at least a few good memories; it was there she’d had her first boyfriend, her first kiss, gained her first real friend outside of the family. She’d also spent her first year at this school in torment, in fear, in long moments of blank forgetfulness.

But even though Tom Riddle’s influence had scarred her deeply and scared her badly, he was not the reason she could not bear to look upon Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

As she gingerly stepped on the grounds, her hands shoved deep in the pockets of her robes, she closed her eyes and let the memories gather behind her eyes, painting a picture as detailed and unmerciful as the reality had been.

Charlie and Bill had been just there, fighting side by side, eyes blazing, mouths grim.

Her Mum and Dad had split up, and the look that had passed between them had been so intimate, so full, that even in the preparation for battle, Ginny had felt her cheeks flush in pleased embarrassment.

Percy had followed Arthur as though determined to right the wrongs he’d long since incurred, and the twins had gone with Molly, their jests dried up, their humor momentarily banked in the cold breezes of war.

And then there had been Ron, Ron as part of the trio, the triumvirate of the gifted of Hogwarts. Ron and Hermione had provided cover for Harry, bright, hectic spots of color burning their cheeks, and the sick, sure knowledge they might not make it burning in their eyes.

And then Harry had been all but swallowed up by the castle, and the remaining two were left to fight.

And as she walked forward, Ginny stood in the center of it all, where her brother had faced the man she had unwittingly bound herself to save.

It had also been in this spot, as Ron had lain writhing on the ground, where Neville had fallen for the final time.

And this time, when she saw Draco’s face in her mind’s eye, she saw desperation in those warrior’s eyes, the look of a man who not knows he has lost—he knows he is lost.

Scrubbing the heels of her hands up her cheeks to stem the tears that had yet to fall, Ginny blinked the memories from her eyes and stepped through the front doors of Hogwarts.

The castle was as it had always been, and yet it had changed—as it always had. The building, Ginny thought, had long since developed a mind of its own, and though she, like all the students, had trained herself not to look up at the sound, she could hear stairways far above her shifting, changing the architecture of the building yet one more time.

Only a few students milled about in the hallways, the peace of the Saturday morning yet to be disturbed by Quidditch games and Hogsmeade trips. Splashes of color flicked to her eyes, the house colors, the pride of each house, and as a sharp-eyed young girl in a green jumper passed her, Ginny felt her heart reach out in pity.

In these days just after war, how misunderstood was a young Slytherin likely to be?

And were there even very many of them to be had?

“Excuse me, miss, can I…” The voice was familiar despite the months of separation, and Ginny raised her eyes to greet the new Potions Master.

“Hello, ‘Mione.”

Her hair was drawn up tightly, making her look more than a bit like Professor McGonagall, but the comely features were unchanged, the uncertain smile Hermione had always seemed to carry, so less sure was she of her personality than of her intelligence. Though her smile was shy, her actions were sure, and she enveloped her friend in a hug.

“Ginny,” she said simply, holding tightly to the girl who had all but been her sister before everything had gone so horrible awry. “I’ve missed you,” she said, and when she drew back, her eyes were shining. Intuiting as she always had that Ginny had something on her mind, the young teacher grabbed Ginny’s hand and took her at a half-run through the halls, bringing back images of two girls, still naïve, still quite happy, running through the halls after a boy with green eyes and a boy with a face full of freckles.

Instead of leading Ginny to the dungeon where the Potions Master’s quarters had once been, Hermione came to a room on an upper level that was only adequately furnished—save for the bookshelves lining every inch of the walls.

Hermione sat, knowing Ginny would sit in her own time. It was almost hard to look at her old friend, hard to look at the changes, the age that had crept into the brown eyes, the thinness of the gold-freckled cheeks, the slight tenseness around the mouth. She’d wanted to seek her out—needed to, needed a friend as badly as she ever had—but Harry and Ron had both warned her away.

Give her time, they’d said of Ginny, and Hermione couldn’t be certain they’d given her the right advice.

“I wish you’d come sooner,” she said matter-of-factly, but when Ginny’s eyes widened, Hermione waved her hand. “It isn’t as though it matters now. Generally speaking, time past is time past, and there’s no use holding regrets.”

“Or grudges,” Ginny said slowly, easing herself onto the edge of the burgundy-covered bed. “I shouldn’t have stayed away so long.”

“Well,” Hermione said, “You’re here now, aren’t you? Let’s do some catching up.”

It should have taken hours to catch up, should have taken hours for the friends to tell one another about the changes in their lives. But the most complex of situations can often be boiled down to the bare necessities, stark feelings.

When Ginny left Hogwarts, it was barely an hour after she’d arrived. She walked out the doors and headed straight to Azkaban.

~~~

She was more than a little ashamed of herself as she walked in the doors of the prison, checking her wand at the front. Ginny had never dreamed of how much she’d let slip past her while she’d started her habit—a habit Hermione gently informed her could have been seen as an obsession.

She’d missed Hermione getting hired at Hogwarts, and she’d definitely missed the relationship that had apparently been burgeoning between Harry and Hermione for the past months.

And worst of all, Ginny mused as she strode down the hall, somewhere along the line she’d completely missed the mark on Ron. Ron, it seemed, was doing his level best to make time with one of her coworkers—Cho Chang.

It had felt good to catch up with the harmless, normal gossip, to hear usual words and commonplace facts.

But the whole while, she’d had a yen to be here, with him.

There was still so much of his life she hadn’t heard yet, and she still hadn’t a clue how she was supposed to live up to the responsibility he’d bestowed upon her.

When she approached the cell, her heart jammed in her throat, her breath backed up in her lungs on a short, amazed gasp.

She’d never seen him do anything but sit up, impeccably postured and seemingly stiff, staring either at the wall, the floor, or her.

Today, though, on the first weekend visit she’d ever made, Draco Malfoy was sleeping.

She would have expected him to sleep rigidly, to appear in repose as he did in his waking moments. But he sprawled on the narrow cot as though paused in the middle of a fitful nap, one arm lying above his head, the other stretched along his side, palm turned up as though seeking something. Shocks of pale hair fell across his brow, obscuring his closed eyes and lending him a tousled, youthful look.

Stepping forward, transfixed, Ginny extended one hand, palm toward the glass, her palm toward the resting man, her breath finally slipping out in a catchy sigh as she pressed her fingertips to the glass.

Whether it was the impossibly quiet sound of her sigh or the infinitesimal change of pressure her fingers caused, Draco woke with a start, going from the prone position to his familiar sitting position instantly, his eyes focusing clearly on hers, silver to brown through the glass.

She’d never been there on a weekend. He could think of little else as he studied her eyes, studied the pale ovals of her fingers on the glass, the soft look in those brown eyes, the mouth that had sighed to him in the depths of his sleep.

Her arrival had skewed his sense of time, so attuned was he to her arrivals. Five arrivals a week, each on a weekday, each occurring at the same time.

He stood and crossed the cell, his actions swayed by the oddity of her arrival, and sat down on the floor only inches from the glass.

“Trying to be unpredictable, Weasley?” he said negligently, as though their rhythm had not been disturbed, as though their behaviors—and the emotions that motivated those behaviors—had not somehow changed, shifted. “Did you need something?”

“I heard something today,” she said, sitting down in her chair, bringing her face closer to his despite the ever-present barrier. “And I thought you should hear it. Time past is time past.”

“How very obvious of you,” he said mockingly, but the sobriety in her eyes kept him quiet, filed down the edge of his words.

“And there’s no use holding regrets,” she added as though he’d said nothing. “Let’s do some catching up.”

~~~

What is trust?

Strictly speaking, I suppose it’s just the knowledge, the faith, that someone or something is right, that they are true and honest. Trust is the knowledge of predictability and protection, strictly speaking.

But in reality, when the trust you’re seeking is more than just black on white, ink on a parchment, trust is about risk.

Trust is about opening yourself up to the most horrible things in the world, to all the things you fear in the dark and all the things you worry about in the light, and then casting those fears and worries away because you know, in this instance, they will not come to you.

Trust is all about hurt, and daring to let that hurt happen.

What a trusting fool I was.

What a trusting fool I am.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN- The Marks of Those You Pass

Life has many marks.

The first time Dad came home full of Muggle phrases and Muggle oddities, he’d given us the idiomatic gem of “making your mark on the world.” How the twins had giggled over that one, how they’d laughed and started dreaming up ways to literally brand this earth we lived on.

If anyone could do it, it would certainly be them.

But then Harry came back to us, came back to the magic world with his reputation, his history, and the mark on his forehead, and suddenly the idea of making or leaving one’s mark didn’t seem quite as funny.

We pass one another in this life; we pass and we touch, we meet, we speak or we do not speak, we act or we do not act. Think for a moment of how many people you know. Think for a moment how many people you’ve ever met.

Each of us changes each person we meet, whether that change is good or bad, big or small. We make marks, indelible, unwavering marks that in some instances can be just as visible as a scar, or just as visible as a patch of freckles.

Those marks stay with us for as long as we live, telling the story of not only our lives, but of the lives of those who have touched us.

Draco Malfoy had been much marked before we began our etchings on one another.

So had I.

~~~

It had a different feel to it, this Saturday visit. Gone were Ginny’s ever-present green robes, replaced with a set of soft, dove gray, ashes to the fire of her unbound hair. This visit wasn’t to be as much a confession, but a bit like conversation, and the difference was apparent in the first moments he awoke.

Sitting on the floor in front of her, the irony escaped neither of them; once upon a time, she had been peasant to his king, and he had looked down on her.

Now, he was allowing the reverse to happen, his eyes wide and frank on hers, his head tilted back proudly even from his position on the cold stone.

Ginny laid the newspaper on the floor, never taking her eyes from him, and then poised her hands lightly on the arms of the chair, waiting for him to begin that day’s tale.

But because nothing else that day had been ordinary, he did not start a story. Instead, he asked her a question.

“Did Professor Snape survive?” The words were uninflected, bland, but Ginny could see the hope in his eyes, and the despair that rode closely on its heels.

She hadn’t the skill or the reflexes to hide her reaction; her mouth dropped open in a wordless gape and her stare turned to one of surprise. Why, she wondered, had she assumed he would know these things already?

Because she didn’t immediately answer, he kept talking. If he did not fill the silence, the answer he least wanted to hear would come, he knew. And so he spoke.

“Professor Snape was the closest thing I had to a friend,” he said, and though his voice was decisive, it was a recent revelation for him. He had, as a student, always assumed the Potions Master favored him because of Lucius. He could never have guessed that he had been favored by a man who hated his father enough to deceive him.

Listening, Ginny let her eyes drift shut and envisioned the tall man, the black-clad, sour-faced professor who had not paused to strike down those whose sides he had stood by for many years. He struck down foes whom he had once called friends, and it had been he who had delivered the blow that had forced Lucius Malfoy to retreat, and more likely that not, to death.

Watching her eyes shut, Draco feared the worst, and he kept talking, speaking to fill the void he knew he had helped to create.

“That’s what I should have been,” he said fiercely. “Only I was too scared. He had us all fooled, you know. He had everyone fooled, and we all thought he was the most loyal of the Death Eaters,” he spat hatefully. “But he was more than that, and that’s what I couldn’t do.”

“You didn’t know,” Ginny said, opening shining eyes to look at him. It seemed a poor response, a weak one, but he answered nonetheless.

“Would it have mattered had I known? Do you honestly think, Weasley, that knowing his true nature would have changed mine?” What he wanted to hear from her at that moment was a rousing, certain “yes.” He wanted her to tell him what he himself didn’t believe.

But instead she only gave him a small smile, a sad smile, followed by the news he hadn’t really expected to hear.

A chronically unhappy boy had grown into a chronically hopeless man, and so he hadn’t expected to hear that his professor, his Head of House, had lived.

“Professor Snape is now Headmaster Snape,” Ginny said, forming the words carefully. It was something she’d only heard in hearsay, and something Hermione had spoke of at length earlier. “Professor Dumbledore retired after… after everything.” He’d retired, he had claimed, because he’d finally seen righted what had been wronged so many years ago under his tutelage. He had felt more than a little responsible for the rogue wizard, Tom Riddle.

It was his turn to be shocked, and Ginny watched with a mixture of pleasure and pity as the amazement washed over his face. He scrubbed a hand over his features, some of the tiredness lifting from them.

And then the bitterness, the hardness, set in again. It was almost as though a door had slammed shut, so firmly it made Ginny flinch. His face closed down and his mouth set in a firm line.

“What a disappointment to him I turned out to be, then, eh?” And the eyes he lifted to hers were so cold she shivered, sleet on glass, snow on stone. “Just like I was to my dear da.”

“Draco,” his name slipped from her lips pleadingly, and she reached a hand to the glass once more; this time he turned his face away in a quick, denying movement.

It was the first time she had called him by his name. He did not respond to it—found he could not. When had he last heard his name spoken so?

And why must it be spoken here, in the midst of solid walls, unbreakable wards and broken laws?

Why from those lips he’d sworn to despise, from the one whom he’d held in inherited contempt? She whose visits he now depended on, whose very virtue held his own by gossamer strands of habit and obligation?

“You don’t belong here, Weasley,” he said, unable to dredge up the nastiness she undoubtedly expected from him. “And you don’t have to bother soiling that pretty mouth with my name.”

His face still turned from hers, he sat once more on the increasingly rickety cot and stared at the stones he’d counted numerous times before, waiting for her to leave.

Waiting for her to release herself from him.

And so he sat, counting and thinking as she read the paper from front to back. When she finished, Ginny folded it neatly, laid it over the arm of the chair, and stood in front of his cell where she knew he could see her from the corner of his eye.

“You say I don’t belong here,” she said slowly, watching for any change in his eyes, in his posture. “But your saying it doesn’t make it so.”

As she walked down the corridor away from him, her voice wafted back. “Perhaps it is you who doesn’t belong here.”

~~~

It didn’t get any easier.

It should have, considering all the work she’d put into making it easier for herself and for others, but it was still difficult to walk the wards of the wounded. It was difficult to walk those wards and know none of her efforts were doing any good.

Sometimes it hurt Ginny a great deal to know she’d used these patients as an excuse to see him.

“Hello, Luna, love,” Ginny greeted the girl cheerfully, brushing the thick, silky blond hair back from her face before securing it with a bit of ribbon. As Glennys had allowed, Ginny chanted a slow, mellifluous countercurse, waving her wand over Luna in long, gentle sweeps.

“The stones have secrets,” Luna said conversationally, tilting her head back to look at Ginny. “Top to bottom, one hundred and eighty eight.”

Ginny bit her lip and continued the countercurse, feeling helpless and hopeless and altogether flummoxed.

Nothing seemed to help, no matter how well she knew him, no matter how well she’d known Luna. Even Ginny’s want, driving and bone-deep, didn’t make a cure. The hauntingly lovely young woman continued to spout nonsense day after day.

“He stares at the stones and sees his sins,” she lilted, rocking lightly from side to side. “The cobbles call for him to count his curses and find his faults.”

Ginny’s hand faltered, making the tip of her wand shiver in the air, but she shook off the sudden chill that had coursed through her and started the last stanza of the lengthy blessing.

“Poor boy,” Luna said in a sigh. “Poor boy.” And then, remarkably, she turned those wide, pale eyes to Ginny’s. “Look! I see… love for the boy and stones and sins!” She nodded her head so emphatically, Ginny glanced around for help, afraid Luna would hurt herself.

“All right, darling,” Ginny said, equally afraid of the young woman’s words as she was of her actions.

They’re only words, Gin, only nonsense, she insisted, helping Luna to lie down.

But the blonde waved one hand frantically in the air, her eyes casting about as though seeking a listener. “Love! Here! Love!”

Cho and another young Mediwitch came running over, eyes wide and alarmed.

“What happened?” Cho asked, using an immobility charm to keep Luna from struggling. But the patient didn’t seem to be in any sort of discomfort; rather, she had the air of one who has discovered something.

“The bird in the cage,” Luna said to Cho, smiling beatifically. “Love, how nice for him.”

Face ashen, Ginny backed away from the bed, stuttering her apologies. She turned away, one hand pressed to her fluttering stomach, and Glennys Gylfoyle stood just beyond her, eyes wide with a mix of shock and suspicion.

The marks were becoming evident.

~~~

It isn’t that I was unobservant, or even careless. It wasn’t that I didn’t know my own heart, or that I was in denial.

But the fact of the matter is, in those moments of frantic shouting, Luna Lovegood was growing better, sounder in her mind. She spoke the first whispers of sense since she had bravely faced the Death Eaters, and she spoke them in the same, true, honest tone she’d always had.

Sensing the connection between the man who had wounded her and the woman who was trying to heal her, Luna began to grow stronger.

And she told me things I had not realized.

You can run so fast the things around you blur, and if you push just a little harder, run just a little faster, you cannot see what lies directly in front of you.

You cannot see what lies directly in front of you, even if it is dangerous.

CHAPTER 15- The Memoirs of the Visitor

The hunger we feel on a daily basis is rarely ever acknowledged, the basic need for companionship, the basic need for the affirmation of our own self-worth. It is so deep-seated we do not recognize it unless we are completely deprived, and when this hunger is fed, it gives us a kind of euphoria.

In this euphoria, we are blind.

I asked once, at the onset of this, for you not to judge too harshly. Perhaps it is really myself I was reminding.

Fool that I was.

Fool that I still am.

~~~

He had made a promise.

He had, from her first visit, begun formulating a plan of action, the plan of his own salvation. Slytherins took no chances, and in that regard, this was no different than every other endeavor he’d ever undertaken in his life.

But overall, there was a difference.

This time, it was his life he was fighting for. His soul.

And the woman on the other side of the glass was his warrior.

He had made his promise, and as each day passed and each visit with it, Draco knew it would be impossible to keep.

Would you hurt her?

One hundred and eighty-eight stones, and for each one, a sin. Each one but the last.

He had one sin left to commit.

Day by day, he’d felt his dependence grow, and with it, his desperation. Time seemed both longer and shorter without her, the moments of a day stretching by, but the days of eternity spinning in the breath of a second.

Eternity was of great concern to a man whose eternity was possessed by others and damned by all.

In the week since her surprise weekend visit, he’d spoken almost exclusively of Quidditch, and in a sort of self-imposed torture, he had relived the moments of his life when he’d been most free.

Had Lucius Malfoy known his son so loved the sport, he would never have encouraged it, to be sure. But encourage it he had, in the name of power, and so a young man who had known no happiness got his first taste of it, and in tasting it, realized how bitter the rest of his life truly was.

And now that bitterness was doubled, made more pungent by the taste of the friendship he’d gotten in his days there.

Strengthened, he knew, by the taste of her, the very one he had promised not to hurt.

As he’d replayed those moments, he could see her mind had been elsewhere, and he’d seen more and more of that look in her eyes, that one he didn’t want to see.

The one that meant he would never be able to keep his promise.

He had yet to finish his confession, but when he did, his need for his warrior would be sated, and his plan of salvation would be finished. The weight would be lifted. He had only to finish it, to tell one last big tale, and then he could stop seeing that look through the glass.

After that final story, he could try to keep his promise.

One hundred and eighty-eight.

~~~

In a small, silent home miles away, a home which had seen seven births and countless laughs, tears, and arguments, a home which held thousands of gadgets between its walls, Ginny Weasley approached two people who had months ago begun to suspect—and fear—that she had become a stranger to them.

Her father was bent over a bewitched Muggle radio, the pieces hopelessly strewn about before him, the wires occasionally trying to tie themselves around the tools he’d used to take it apart. A pair of glasses perched precariously on the tip of his nose and his eyebrows were hiked to maximum altitude as he took one last poke at the beleaguered object before him.

Molly was knitting, having moved from jumpers to knit key fobs. She had been, of late, very vocally opinionated in the matter of her children (including Hermione and Harry) being immediately able to find and identify the keys to their flats.

No one had bothered to point out their abilities to unlock their doors with their wands.

But both tinkering and knitting stopped cold when the woman who had only recently been a girl stepped into their midst, hands clasped behind her, eyes wide and grave. Words trembled unformed in the air, three red heads poised to hear what the others had to say.

She’d thought for many days, weeks, on how to start this, how to begin her own confession to the people she’d loved her whole life. She’d pondered every angle, tried out every combination of words, and still she’d not come up with anything eloquent enough to describe her anguish at the split that had somehow happened in her life.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” she stated simply, the unplanned, whispered statement as effective as a shout might have been.

Molly laid her knitting needles along side one another, clasping her fingers around them tightly enough to turn her knuckles white, and she regarded her daughter with a mixture of compassion or confusion. “We’re hardly the ones to explain to you what we don’t know ourselves,” she said sternly, unaccustomed to speaking any other way.

But Arthur stayed silent, his own understanding far greater than his wife’s or daughter’s. He’d heard the reports, even seen some of the guards’ recollections, and he knew what had happened.

His daughter had come to care for a prisoner. His little girl had befriended a man who might very well not have possessed a single redeeming quality.

And underneath his own particular brand of muddled anguish, Arthur Weasley felt some pride, for his daughter had shown the compassion he’d tried to instill in her. He was only human, however—it was only natural for him to wish she’d shown her compassion elsewhere.

“Why don’t you try to explain it to us,” he said softly, sending his wife an imploring look. He wanted very much to hear her words for what had passed.

For what even a blind man could see was still passing.

The words were surprisingly easy, telling the stories as they had been related to her, in some places word for word, and before Ginny was even halfway done, her voice was faltering with the emotions behind it, and a strong, work-roughened hand clasped hers, lending her the strength to finish it, at least as far as she knew how.

In the flickering firelight of the Weasley Burrow, Arthur Weasley watched his wife and daughter link hands and listened to the tale he’d never even thought to guess at.

~~~

He was waiting for her.

It struck her, that waiting. In the twenty-four hours that had passed since she’d seen him last, much had happened. She had told her parents everything—or almost everything; she had watched a classmate of Bill’s, wounded by the wand of Lucius Malfoy, respond more than favorably to a treatment; she had sat by Luna Lovegood’s side and waited for something, anything to come from the young woman’s mouth, but nothing did on this day.

Ginny had been left with her own thoughts and more importantly, her feelings, and in the past day, she had come to terms with nearly all of them.

But seeing him wait for her nearly had her undone, her heart rising in her throat, her stomach knotting with… expectation? Surprise?

Dread.

For she had become accustomed to a certain way of things, accustomed to the unique rhythm they’d found and bound between them, and changes at this point, no matter how small, set within her deep unease.

She opened her mouth to greet him as she sat down, a simple ‘hello,’ or a ‘good evening,’ the niceties they’d never bothered with, niceties her heart insisted on.

But he wouldn’t allow her to bother with it this time, either.

“I’m ready to finish this,” he said, his voice deceptively negligent as he crossed to sit near to the glass. She wasn’t the only one who had spent countless hours formulating words and sentences, paragraphs and entire stories. He had internally practiced his tone, his inflection, his expression.

He had stared at the one hundred and eighty-eight stones, and to them he had practiced the words he would give her.

“What?” Ginny leaned forward in her chair, sure she’d misheard him, her heart skipping slightly at the proclamation. So close was she to the glass that her knees touched it, the green cloth of her robes pressing flat against the partition.

His eyes snapped to hers, insistent and hot, the silver now molten. “You asked me ‘why,’ Weasley, and now I’m trying to answer you.”

He had meant to look elsewhere for this last bit, had meant all along to keep himself separate, detached. But his eyes locked on hers, and he clutched onto the color that had become familiar to him, the only warmth he’d been given in an eternity of iciness.

If he could hold onto that, he could finish this.

“I fought because I didn’t have a choice,” he said, wondering if she could possibly understand that. “I followed the man who had shown me nothing but hate, and I liked the idea of it.” He saw her flinch, just a bit, and he nodded matter-of-factly. “I liked the idea of war, Weasley, because I thought you… all you… warriors for good… would know better.”

He paused here, and she wished avidly for something to say, for something to slow down this rush of words. She had wanted this, had wanted this story for so long, she didn’t remember why she had so yearned for it in the first place.

“I thought you’d know to kill us.”

He stepped onto the flat expanse of ground with his father, unmasked in the sea of the masked, one of the few who had not donned any sort of disguise.

He felt his stomach turn as he watched his father curse his first victim, a short, round-faced woman whom Draco had never before seen.

And then things broke apart, spinning around him and in him and through his head with a fervor he couldn’t deny but couldn’t keep up with, and he spoke words he’d been taught long before, words that had, until now, been just that—words. But paired with the wand, and paired with the sea of ready victims, his words became weapons, and he began to strike them down.

And very soon, he began to see clearly why he had no mask, why he had wanted no mask.

This was his freedom.

This was his way out.

“I thought,” he told her in a choked voice, “The more I did, the more I cursed, the more guaranteed it was.” He balled his hand into a fist and struck his thigh, wincing with the renewed frustration of the moment.

“I thought one of you could do it. One of you who were so sure, so right.”

And though she’d have given anything for ignorance at that moment, it evaded Ginny, and she understood.

“You thought one of us would kill you,” she said dully, feeling her heart cry out for him, for the horrifying want he must have had, for the glint she’d seen in his eyes that day.

That glint which had been ready for the end.

His father’s voice pounded through his brain, the hatred that surrounded one little boy, one green-eyed little boy who had managed to harm one of their own, and with that voice, he found the abandon to stride into battle.

With that voice, he understood the ruthlessness of a person fighting for their cause, and in that ruthlessness, he saw his own exit.

He harmed wizard upon witch upon wizard, and still no one had moved to strike back.
And then he saw her.

“I knew you wouldn’t do it, Weasley,” he said, his eyes still fast on hers, the smirk now flitting over his lips, counterfeit smugness, a mask all its own. “After all, you’d had the opportunity plenty of times before.”

“I never would have,” she whispered, her eyes welling with tears. Was this what she’d waited so long to hear? That their worthy opponent had been looking not for battle, but for a sick sort of mercy?

“Are you admitting I’m right?” he asked, his voice infused with surprise. He was grateful for the moment, light and personal, and it heartened him enough to go on. “But I thought for certain one of your family would, and when your brother crossed wands with me…”

He’d grown tall in his final days at Hogwarts, his body lean and muscled, his once-awkward freckled face now sculpted into a determined scowl.

Ron Weasley wasn’t the easy mark he’d once been, and for that, Draco was thankful. If no one else could finish it, perhaps Weasley could, with all the years of animosity and hatred spanning between them.

But there had been hesitation in Ronald Weasley’s eyes, and that hesitation had let through the curse Draco had never intended to use.

Draco’s voice had dropped to a whisper, and a silvery-blond head bent close to a coppery red one so she would not have to strain to hear him. “Is this the answer to your ‘why’?” he asked, his voice throaty and raw. “Is this what you were asking me?”

Ginny’s eyes overfilled, the tears slipping down her cheeks, and as she let them fall, she shook her head. She didn’t know anymore what she had wanted from him. She only knew she’d gotten much more than she’d asked for, and she’d never get what she’d truly ended up wanting.

At the sight of her tears, Draco’s hands curled into fists behind the glass, his fingernails pressing aching crescents into his palms as he willed it over, as he willed her gone.

As he willed it all to be finished, down to the last stone.

“I cursed him good, didn’t I?” he asked, self-loathing and fury now evident in the fierce whisper. “As well as I knew how, and still it wasn’t enough.”

“Don’t do this,” Ginny answered, leaning forward so quickly she rapped her knees into the glass, making them both wince.

“I’m going to finish this,” he said firmly, his voice skipping back up to a higher volume, a hard, conversational tone. “Don’t interrupt me.” Please don’t cry, he thought, watching those tears. Just a few more minutes.

“I thought it would be one of your brothers who would come to finish it, come to avenge Ron,” he said, the name sounding stilted in that cultured voice, stilted coming from those lips that had only used surnames before. “But it was Longbottom who did it, stupid Squibbish git.” His voice hitched unsteadily with the insult, and a horrified expression shifted over his granite countenance. “And that was my last chance, I knew, to make it count. So I killed him.”

He swallowed hard, trying to void the lump in his throat, suddenly parched with the expulsion of the ineloquent, terse phrase. He’d needed to get it out, needed to say it, needed to get it over with. But it wasn’t quite done.

“And no one would do the same for me,” he said accusatorily, eyes pleading and wide on hers.

And he found he had nothing else to say.

The silence yawned between them, gaping despite their closeness, widening the bare inches between them, and he saw her eyes soften, her head tilt slightly as she regarded him with emotions he refused to identify, refused to acknowledge.

Emotions he had claimed didn’t exist, neither in her nor himself.

“Don’t look at me like that, Weasley,” he said, a panicked note slipping into his voice. “Don’t give me that look.”

How was it possible to ache so much for a man who had no one else? To care so much for someone whom no one else had seen fit to care for?

How was it possible to love someone who had harmed so many, to grieve for one who had caused so much grieving?

Unable to look at him in any other way, Ginny finally broke the strange lock their eyes had been held in, dropping her gaze to her lap where her tears had darkened her robe in spots.

Strands of her hair fell in her eyes unheeded as she tried to control her emotions, and as they did, Draco’s body betrayed his mind.

From behind the glass, one hand, once pampered, raised to brush the hair out of her eyes, his reflexive actions betraying his callous attitude, his face unreasonably hopeful.

So convinced was he of their proximity, so conflicted within himself, his fingers encountered the glass with enough force to jar them painfully, causing him to cry out.

Her eyes flew to his again, her mouth slightly agape.

Ginny Weasley had perhaps done many foolish things, but she was no fool, and she recognized the moment for what it was.

Something—she—had moved Draco Malfoy enough to make him want to touch her. To reach out.

Before she could speak, he threw hasty words at the glass, the panic now open and evident in his eyes.

One more promise to keep, please…

“Go, little one,” he said in a near-shout, cradling his throbbing hand with the other, his feet carrying him back, away from her. “Get out of here.” The confused hurt that passed over her face made his stomach turn, but he knew it was only the beginning of how much hurt he could inflict. “I’m finished, Weasley. My confession is over.” He searched his brain for something, anything to drive her out. “I’m finished with you.”

“No,” Ginny said flatly, shaking her head. “That’s not it.”

He laughed, a sharp, incredulous bark of air that sounded less like mirth than misery. “What, Weasley, is this your story now? It’s mine, and that’s it. It’s over.” His eyes saw every detail as she pulled her lip between her teeth, trying to control the tremble that coursed through her mouth, the tremor of additional tears, and he pushed just a little harder. “Did you hope to teach me something, then? Perhaps that renewed, idiot notion of love?”

His smirk, following on the heels of his farcical question, broke her composure, and with swift steps, she was at the glass, the soft, cutely pretty face mottled with moroseness and anger. Her breath coming in gusts, she slapped her hands against the obstruction of glass, her palms facing into him, and for a moment she could feel the magic of the wards shivering into her hands.

“Stop this!” she shouted. “Stop being such a buggering prat! Must you be so stubborn? I can try to help you!”

And this time when he stepped to her, she did not step back. Something in the tilt of his head, the sudden flash of uncharacteristic softness in his eyes, rooted her on the spot as he raised his own hands, placing them delicately just opposite hers.

“This dance is over, Ginny,” he breathed, tilting his head just a bit farther, completing the illusion of a couple standing together, unhindered. Their breaths feathered and fogged the glass between them, and he added one more word. “Go.”

She removed her hands first, curling her fingers into her palms as though to capture the feeling. “I’m coming back,” she said, an idea forming in her mind. He shook his head once in a negative gesture, but she shook her own back. “No. I don’t care what you say. I’m coming back.”

Her steps as she retreated were quicker than usual, lighter than they should have been, and he knew she’d not spoken lightly. A wounded, pained roar tore from the man behind the glass, a man whose soul should have been lightened by his confessions but had instead been weighted by his confessor.

The cry left him gasping, weakened, and Draco raised his eyes, now unguarded and haunted, to the stones, counting them to calm himself.

He had business to attend to.

~~~

Her approach on this day, on this evening, was not hesitant as it had been before. On this day, there were no memories of those wounded and those past. There were only thoughts of the future, fueled by the righteous indignation to which Ginny clung tightly. Tell her not to come back again, would he?

She’d come back, and when she did, she’d have answers for him. Answers and hopes and possibilities.

She’d show him an “idiot notion” or two.

But her heart was in her throat as she raised a hand to open the big doors. It should have been no surprise—and no threat—to her when the door opened before she could do it herself, but a thin shriek flew from her lips as a dark shape shifted from the interior of the dimly lit monolithic castle.

“Pity the fool who dubbed Gryffindors courageous,” a voice drawled from within the gloom. “Though I don’t suppose it’s diplomatic to persist in playing favorites.”

Ginny would never in a million years have dreamed she’d be warmed at the voice of Severus Snape, but the drawl was so like Draco’s, the condescension so familiar to her by now, it heartened her.

Besides, slimy git or not, this was the man she wanted to see.

“Pity the fool who dubbed Slytherins cunning,” she retorted, stepping inside and shaking back her hair, looking her former professor in the eye. “I know one who managed, despite all his cleverness, to land himself in prison.”

That remark, she noticed, got quite a reaction. She wasn’t particularly proud of the passing look of regret she saw in the new headmaster’s eyes, but she was encouraged by it.

If he still felt that much for his captive house alumnus, he could help her. More importantly, he would help her.

And seeing that sadness pass through his eyes, Ginny did something that sent the twins’ voices jeering in her mind.

She reached out to the man who had done more than enough to earn her trust and the trust of her family. Laying her hand on his shoulder, she looked at him imploringly, wondering if he could even be moved underneath the stoic, sarcastic exterior.

“He’s the reason I’m here,” she said. “You have to help me.” Taking a deep breath, she tried to infuse her voice with confidence as she spoke from her heart. “You have to help us.”

He glanced at her hand on his shoulder, his eyebrow arching into the dark masses of hair that had fallen over his forehead, and she felt her stomach turn over nervously.

“I know that, Weasley. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have opened these doors for you.”

With a swift turn, his robes flitting as dramatically as they ever had, he turned and walked away from her, one pale hand beckoning impatiently for her to follow.

She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until she let it out.

He didn’t say a word as he led her to the headmaster’s offices, only kept his pace quick enough to have her nearly running in his wake. Once she was there, he pointed negligently at a chair and tried to ignore his own unease.

Here was the one person in the world who knew now how his favored student was. Here was the person who could tell him what he wanted to know.

But he would not ask her; if Severus Snape knew anything about the Weasleys, it was that they would begin to talk (unceasingly, more often than not) if left to their own devices.

This one was more contemplative than most, he thought.

After a few moments, however, the silence unnerved Ginny. She wasn’t certain how to begin, but she’d be pelted with Dungbombs before she’d waste any more time with silence.

Silence had cost too many too much in this world.

“Ah… how are things?” she asked lamely, wanting only to warm up to her topic. “How do you like being headmaster?”

Snape templed his fingers and regarded her coldly over the elegantly shaped fingertips. “Let us dispense with the idle conversation, Weasley. Even a… what was it? ‘Greasy git?’ Yes, even a greasy git knows the urgency of the situation. The formalities are not only unnecessary but taxing to my patience.” When he saw her face flush a horrified red, he felt a little bad.

Only a little, though. Her thoughts had been clear enough when she’d stood before him in the doorway.

But her embarrassment was passing, replaced quickly by hauteur. “If you know the urgency of the situation, why is it you’ve done nothing about it? Why is it you’ve not visited, you’ve not inquired? Don’t you think it’s a bit strange, Headmaster, for me to be his only visitor when he considered you his only friend?” The words were out before she could stop them, tumbling one over the other in a rush of emotion.

Though she might regret them later, she wasn’t about to do so now.

He was stricken by her proclamation, his eyes widening almost imperceptibly at her words. Friend? His only friend?

Because he could not bring himself to think overly much on that particular topic, he addressed her accusation.

“In case you weren’t paying attention all your years at Hogwarts, Miss Weasley—” He paused and raised an eyebrow in a manner suggesting she hadn’t paid attention—“Draco Malfoy was part of my responsibility, one I clearly did not live up to. And in case you were somehow unaware of what happened in the final battle, I was the last—and only—person to strike Lucius Malfoy. I hardly knew how I would be received by a young man I’d failed and possibly orphaned.”

It was the most she’d ever heard him say outside of a classroom, and Ginny’s gape was completely involuntary.

Who knew he had a heart under all that black?

“I find it completely reprehensible a witch of your background can’t even keep her thoughts mildly shielded,” he said with an exasperated sneer.

A heart he had, and an aching one, at that.

“What is it you suggest I do? I’m afraid I’m not cursed with the overly idealistic nature and outrageous imagination that Gryffindors seem to treasure.” But he was cursed with a strange sense of hope. The determination in the young Weasley’s eyes bore thinking on, and her father had enough influence to help her if anything…

He shoved back his thoughts, reminding himself of his lack of imagination, and regarded her coolly.

“Whether you like it or not, Professor, you’ve become a bit of a hero. You can shut yourself away up here and ignore it, but the fact is, you played both sides successfully and came out on our side.” She’d prepared the speech in a pinch, and now her voice was starting to waver in the face of his unblinking stare. “All I want is your advice. Your expertise. You know him better than almost anyone…” But not better than me, she thought. “And the people believe you. Surely he can stand trial before the Wizengamot again, this time tell his story. Surely you… we… can make that happen.”

And as two unlikely allies discussed, argued, and debated, miles away a prisoner who had broken his silence for her broke his silence to another, speaking in tones that were commanding though hushed in the confines of his cell.

If the guard listening to Draco Malfoy’s commands felt anything amiss, anything wrong, he did not show it.

He did not realize it.

~~~

The sun had almost completely set by the time she made it out of Hogwarts, and though it was Ginny’s first instinct to run—to skip—all the way to Azkaban, she forced herself to think calmly, coolly.

She forced herself to think as an adult, for the decisions which had led her to this point were very adult, indeed. She would need to be strong in the coming months, to not only convince the man behind the glass of his chances at freedom, but also to convince everyone outside the glass—especially those who loved her—of his right to that freedom.

But for an evening, she thought, for one evening, she could be frivolous.

Severus’s agreement to help her called for celebration, and there was only one person in the world to celebrate it with.

On a whim, her breaths shallow with suppressed joy, suppressed hope, Ginny Apparated to Diagon Alley first, swinging into the twins’ shop, her cheeks flushed and eyes bright.

“Hello, loves,” she said, browsing through the things on the shelves and throwing a wink at her brothers.

Things could be right.

Things could be normal.

Mustn’t jinx it, Gin, she scolded herself lightheartedly, plucking a packet of WeaselyWeed Seeds from the shelf before her and tossing it onto the counter.

Surely he couldn’t say no to her, couldn’t tell her to leave, when she held hope for him.

She held love for him.

Fred and George exchanged a look over the counter at one another, eyebrows identically quirked. When was the last time she’d been so happy? Though neither of them spoke the query, the answer sent a sigh of sadness through the normally joyous faces.

It had been far too long since she’d been so giddy. It had been far too long since she’d looked as carefree as she should have.

“What gives with the Weeds, Gin?” Fred asked, bagging them without taking any payment. The flower seeds, an original invention by the twins, had the ability to sprout wherever they landed—and stay indefinitely.

“You know they’re the very devil to get up, Gin,” George said. “We should know—”

“Since they were under our bed for a year,” Fred finished.

Ginny drummed her fingers on the counter restlessly, a smile plucking at her lips. “I know. But it’s the closest I can come to giving him flowers.” Seeing the confusion pass over their faces, she shook her head and leaned over the counter, planting kisses soundly on each of their foreheads. “I’ll explain later. Give Ron a holler in the back and give him my love, will you?”

And with that, she’d skirted her way out of the shop, leaving both a void and a mass of awkwardness.

“Ah… think we should have told her Ron’s not here?” George asked, the note of cheer in his voice suddenly sounding false.

“No, mate,” Fred said just as tinnily. “I think she’ll find him.”

~~~

He counted the stones on the walls again, this time focusing on the last one, the bottom right corner.

He was done speaking with the guard, certain his request had been followed.

Timing now was crucial, and he only hoped that idiot Weasley would arrive in enough time to be there for her.

She would need him.

Time—and timing—were of great concern to a man whose soul was eternally damned.

~~~

As Ron Weasley stepped through the gates of Azkaban, Ginny walked light-footed along the cobbles of Diagon Alley, trying to puzzle out what she would say. She’d told him she would be back, so he’d hardly be surprised at that, but…

But there was a chance, and a good one, he could be saved. A chance he could be released, and then he would know.

Then he would know what she hadn’t the courage to tell him, would know what he hadn’t the courage to believe in.

With a shaky, indrawn breath, Ginny withdrew the package of WeasleyWeed Seeds and slit it open with a thumbail, peeking inside at the contents—

And her breath tore out of her in a sharp gasp, her eyes suddenly flung to the sky, and everything in her seized onto a single, gibbering train of thought.

Wrong, wrong, something wrong…

The bird in the cage, love for the bird in the cage, the cage…

The packet jerked in her hands, spilling seeds and flowers over Diagon Alley in a riot of color around her feet.

She stood in that position, mouth open in a silent, gasping scream, eyes rolled up, her body completely beyond her control for a moment.

She can feel the power from man to wand and back again, despite the glass, maybe even because of it, the power arcing between him and her in waves almost tangible…

His hands heat the glass as hers do the same from her side, and a shiver passes through both of them, not from the wards, but from them, from the bond his sins have forged between them, the power that words have made without wands…

The packet fell from her fingers, the scream finally releasing itself from her throat, and she Apparated blindly to the prison.

~~~

He felt it before he heard it, that shiver in his long bones that always made him ill. How many times before had he felt it in his life?

Wasn’t that why he’d become an Auror? For that feeling?

Kingsley Shacklebolt had never hated that knowing as much as he did at this moment, when his strides carried him to a corridor already filled with shouts and screams.

~~~

She Apparated at the front doors out of habit, her hand already in her wand to check it at the desk, the pattern long since established in her mind.

This had become her place, and she had become part of it. She knew the rules as well as the ones of her home, but this night, now full on dusk, with her breath coming in sharp gasps and her mind a jumbled whirl, she saw there was no one at the desk, only a heavy parchment laid there, freshly sealed.

Ginny paid it no mind, her panic driving her forward, her mind confused but her heart knowing, knowing so surely…

The corridor was filled with people, and unthinkingly, she raised a green-clad arm to push through the men who had gathered there—

You don’t belong here, this isn’t your place—he doesn’t want to see you, this is only for me—

“It’s a Mediwitch, let her through,” someone said, and the crowd parted for her as easily as if she’d uttered a spell.

Her eyes could not focus on the scene before her, her progress suddenly thickened, slowed to an unimaginably sluggish pace. There were men in the cell with him, people in the small cell, their backs to the wall he’d spent so much time focused on.

There couldn’t be that many people in there, she thought. There just wasn’t enough room.

“No, no, no,” she chanted under her breath, putting up both hands to press on the glass—

And this time there was no glass, there were no wards, and she spilled forward with a shocked gasp, seeing him lying on the floor, his robes bright and unmistakable on the damp stones of the floor—

On her knees, Ginny looked up through the curtains of her hair, unable to comprehend what she saw before her, the men gathered so closely around him, so still, so unmoving.

“Oh, gods,” Kingsley said from behind her, trying to move forward to grab her, to take her, to get her away from it, but she had already crawled to his side, unheeded by those trying to aid the wizard too late to aid.

She couldn’t see, at first, what they were working at, what they were all doing to him, to the man she’d come to save. All she saw was his robes, those horribly beautiful red robes.

But the air was tinged with something, its odor not that of damp stones or constant confines. Bright and metallic, coppery and somehow foreign in this world where so much harm came bloodlessly.

Those red robes which so effectively masked the blood that soaked them, and the single object that had penetrated his heart.

Those who had not seen her enter the cell heard the howl, the scream so basal it made the hair on their necks stand up, made their eyes water with the sheer pain of it, and then in the midst of their hands were her hands, small and freckled, shaking but competent.

She grabbed the long, straight piece of metal, her fingers slipping over it, sliding on the slickness of his blood, and the sharp edges sliced into her hands, bringing forth her blood to mingle with his.

He was still.

He was so still.

For the first time since she’d entered the cell, Ginny looked at his face—

“This dance is over, Ginny.”

—and realized what he’d done. His lips were pale, barely standing out against the pallor of his skin, and the silvery-blond wings of his hair had fallen haphazardly across his forehead.

There was silence from the guards who had failed the watch him, silence from the guards and Aurors now gathered to see their mistake as Ginny pressed her hands to his chest, feeling nothing left to spark, nothing left to charm, nothing left to kindle, and let her blood mix with his.

She made one last, futile effort to pull the wickedly sharpened cot leg from the body of he who had spoken to her, her hands wet with their combined blood; finding the task impossible, she lifted the hem of his ruby-colored robes and brought it down on the metal, tearing the roughly-woven cloth.

With shaking hands, she tore a strip off the robes and balled it in her hands, letting it soak up the signs of her efforts and his.

And when a pair of strong hands grabbed her and turned her, she stood and turned into them, letting her brother hold her.

~~~

That which had been unimaginable only seconds, minutes, hours before fell into a place with a minimal amount of fuss.

It wasn’t too hard to figure out what had happened to the troubled young man in Cell 1 of Azkaban, even though none of them had ever seen anything like it before. They had never thought such a thing was possible in this world, in their world. In this world, all the harm you could do came from a slim stick of wood and a few magic words. In this world, the common only became the uncommon when enchanted.

But now it was clear: common circumstances could turn quite uncommon under the pressure of desperation and great emotion.

Though it was clear what had happened, it was not clear why.

Ginny was led away from the cell easily enough, and those present concluded her shock gave her that resigned, detached behavior. But it was not shock which prompted Ginny to follow her brother away from the cell, away from the throng, but knowledge.

There was more of Draco in the cloth she clung to than in the shell of his body, and so she clung to the scarlet scrap with the strength she had left to muster, already digging in her mind for a moment, a hint, an indication of his actions. She was already searching inside herself for the fault.

Arthur stood at the front doors of the prison, his hand on Paternoster’s shoulder, his presence silent but reassuring as he tried to comfort the man on whose watch Draco Malfoy had done the unthinkable. His face long and tired, Arthur watched his two youngest walk out of the impossibly long corridor, their own faces shock-pale in the moon-washed entryway.

“He told me not to let you in,” Paternoster said shakily, his eyes fixing on Ginny’s. “That on the desk, there—I wrote it down for him. He left it.”

Arthur watched her eyes, owlishly huge, skitter to the parchment on the desk, and for a moment, he felt like crying himself.

Was there no limit to the losses? No end to the suffering?

A notion of Arthur Weasley’s had failed yet again, and this time it had cost his daughter a great deal. He would have reached out for her, would have comforted his little girl, the princess he had doted on, but he knew his son could do a far better job. He satisfied himself by picking up the letter that bore her name, testing its weight by bouncing it in his hand, and handing it to his daughter.

He’d not trusted her judgment before, but he would trust it now. If she wanted to open it, to read it, she could.

It was her instinct to be silent, to nurse the throat which was already aching and raw from the range of the day’s emotions, but she thought better of it.

Silence had been their enemy, silence and time.

“Thank you,” she spoke simply, wincing with the force of the words. Not waiting for privacy, she slid her finger under the seal—

And for a moment envisioned flowers spilling over her feet, flowers that had been meant for him.

The first of the sobs came now, dry and coughing, tearless but intense, and Ron stroked a hand down her hair, at a dead loss.

He’d been summoned just minutes before the chaos had broken out, an urgent Ministry owl dispatched to the twins’ shop on hasty wings, its message simple enough.

Draco Malfoy requests your presence.

And now, Ron supposed, he could see why. Why wouldn’t he want to be present for the last actions of his torturer? So Ron’s torturer had… invited him.

Ginny unfolded the letter, letting the moonlight strike fully on the harsh black letters, so few of them, so few to explain what had happened, too few to tell her what she wanted to hear, too few to tell her how to bring him back, how she could have fixed things.

Too few, by far, but the few words rent her heart all over again.

I told you not to come back, but of course I knew you would.

You told me it existed, and I rolled my eyes. For this, little one, is not the place I would have liked to first witness it. It’s unfair to find out a Weasley is right about something—

It’s unfair to know it exists but not be able to experience it.

You’re free from your obligations.

Tell your brother my word was my promise, and I kept it as best I could.

Forgive me this last sin.

I am obliged for the dance.

~~~

How long ago?

How long ago in my life has it been since I heard those first words from his lips, since I read those last words he had spoken, not to me, but to someone else?

It doesn’t matter. Four days passed the same as four years, and forty would do the same.

He thought he was doing me a favor, of this much I am sure—you’re free from your obligations—for that is what he thought it was, an obligation, a weight, a burden. And it would have been my burden and my pleasure, for as many years as he was imprisoned.

But he freed me with a promise I’ve never heard, with a word I’d known nothing of.

In the time that has passed, I’ve made knowledge my comfort; I have found many cultures and many beliefs, both Muggle and magical, about the afterlife, about what happens to us when we leave this world.

It had never seemed important to me before, but nothing seems more important now.

Of all the things I’ve read and seen, the most beautiful—and the most fitting for him—is the idea of the Elysium fields, those lush, vibrant, fertile fields where warriors seek their reward when their battle is done.

And where else would he be, when his whole life was but a battle?

And I?

I fight my own battles as well as the ones he left.

One of us has to be the salvation.

One of us has to be good enough for both of us.

And I’m trying, Draco.

I’m trying.

~~~

She has long since become a living legend, a Healer in all black, her green robes forsaken for the darker colors of mourning.

Around her arm she wears a ragged red band, and she is not known as the Healer.

She is known as the visitor.

~~~

Author’s Notes:

I can’t begin to thank my faithful readers enough for reading this—this chapter was a monster to write, and I can’t tell you how much it drained me. Before you send me flames regarding the ending, please consider this: I knew from the moment I started this story how it had to end, and every time I thought of it, it tore me apart. I cried more tears over this story than I’ve ever cried for anything else I’ve written, original or fanfic, and I tell you honestly I tried everything within my power to change the ending.

I couldn’t.

Sometimes these characters get inside you and tell their story, and you are just the keyboard. As a writer, I learned to accept that long ago. Hell… I even made my betas weepy. So—many thanks to sugarbear_1269 and Violet Jersey, who held my hand through this thing. You guys are the greatest.

As follows is a sort of “soundtrack” to my journey through this story, and I wanted to share it with all of you. Click on the song titles for lyrics.

The song that started it all: Josh Groban, “My Confession”

Other songs:

Josh Groban, “Si Volvieras a Mi”

Jane Siberry, “It Can’t Rain All the Time”

Evanescence, “Even in Death” (Thanks, Joan!)

Evanescence, “My Immortal”

Michelle Branch, “One of These Days”