**Author's Note: This is the final chapter of "House Unity: Lessons". It is not, however, the final chapter in the story started here. Keep your eyes peeled for the second story in the trilogy, "House Unity: Questions", which will follow Ron Weasley and Luna Lovegood through their tenure at Holforth, and "House Unity: United", which will feature Draco, Ginny, and all their supporting characters… of course. Now… go read!**
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Returning to Hogwarts
"You know, Hermione, there is a… thing going on down in the Great Hall." For the life of him, Harry couldn't think of the word, but he had thought Hermione would rather be down there, dressed in her prim, somehow enticing dress robes, dancing among the other students. But instead, she was in the Astronomy Tower once more, her bowls of water set before her, that magnificent brain trying once more to hammer at the unsolvable puzzle of their friends' absence.
"I've almost got it," she answered him absently. "It just seems as though this whole thing has a pattern, you know, something so easy I'm looking straight past it."
Harry leaned to look at the bowls over Hermione's shoulder, his jade eyes hooded when he saw that no matter how much water Hermione added, it always dropped down to the same level, so low in the bowl it was barely there.
"If these are people," Hermione said, pointing out the chips, "Then this is a place." She swept her hand in a circle around the bowl, indicating the water. "And a place, by its very nature, can't be unstable."
"Clearly a person can," Harry groused. Besides, he'd rather come to enjoy that haughty half-scowl on Hermione's face when her theories were called into question.
"Unless," she said firmly, arching her eyebrow in a so there! expression. "It's not really a place at all."
Harry lowered his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, then nervously scrubbed a hand through his hair, that unconscious part of James peeking through. "I'm really bad at riddles, 'Mione."
"'They are safe,'" Hermione quoted Dumbledore, wonder slowly dawning over her features. "'They are safe, and all things willing, they will return much improved.'" Her eyes shining, she jumped to her feet and faced Harry. "He knows, Harry, for a fact they're safe. How can he know that unless he sent them there? And if the water-the place-isn't real-"
"Then he made it," Harry finished. "Like a glamour. But if it's unstable…"
"They're coming back!" Hermione grabbed his hand, excitement bringing a flush over her cheeks. "Harry, they'll really be back! Where's Professor Dumbledore?" She narrowed her eyes, searched back in her mind. "Did you say something was going on tonight?"
Part of him regretted her conclusion, regretted the implication that their time together would end soon, interrupted by the arrival of friends, the drama of return. But part of him-a very large part-yearned for his friends, for Ron and even for the sometimes enigmatic Ginny. And a tiny, tiny part of him even wished for the enmity of Draco back.
So he wrapped his fingers into hers, tugged her to him, and said, "Middle-of-term ball. Let's go."
~~~
Dumbledore sat in his customary seat in the Great Hall, and though his head drooped tiredly and his staff wavered
occasionally, he was smiling. No matter what other results his experiment had or had not yielded, he could see the
shortage of students had forced a bit of unity where there otherwise would have been none.
Devoid of their leader and his overbearing ways, Crabbe and Goyle had somehow ended up at the ball with one Hufflepuff each. Pansy Parkinson was somewhat awkwardly trying to work her wiles on a Ravenclaw second-year, and even the Gryffindors had swallowed their pride enough to mingle.
Things were going well.
In this sort of circumstance, Albus did not mind as much the forced abandonment of his foray into otherworldliness.
He'd gotten some house unity, one way or the other.
There were pairs dancing awkwardly in the center of the floor of the Great Hall, some off to the side drinking punch or staring longingly toward the middle as though wanting to join in. There were those mingling in groups, gossiping and chattering, and the occasional, inevitable loner.
But all eyes turned to one point when Harry and Hermione came running through the Great Hall hand in hand, hair flying, eyes manic, common robes unsuited to the middle-of-semester formal.
The two of them were considered odd even by their closest peers, so it surprised no one when The Boy Who Lived and his brainy girlfriend thundered straight up to the headmaster's table, breathing heavily and finally speaking in unison.
"They're coming back, aren't they?"
"She thinks you're bringing them back-"
"When? Is it happening now?"
But he did not seem to be paying attention to them, his eyes intense and focused elsewhere, something akin to a smile playing about his bearded mouth. Finally, when their shouting became too much, he swept a hand out to them. "Silence!" he said, his unamplified, joyous voice carrying over the assemblage.
Professor Snape jerked in his seat at the headmaster's side, the dark, inky liquid he was drinking spilling over his hand and his robes. That was the loudest and strongest he'd heard the man he considered himself indebted to speak in weeks. He half-stood, barking his thighs against the table, and Dumbledore stayed him with a flap of his hand.
Hermione felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up, gooseflesh prickle up and down her arms, and a smell she immediately associated with electricity and burned fuses stung her nostrils. She turned, feeling as though she were hindered by something, this rending of one world to accommodate another, letting her hand slip from Harry's and her jaw drop open in a shocked gape.
The middle of the floor had cleared, and the air, the very substance of the room they stood in shimmered and pulsed, iridescent and weirdly alive, allowing Hermione a glimpse of something-
Students, just like us, perhaps watching the exact same thing, but from where?
Their faces didn't look quite real, and she couldn't focus on them, didn't need to, because before she could fully comprehend that, or fully comprehend Harry pulling her back and closer to his body to shield her, two figures came sharply into focus, superfocused for a moment, sharper than the world around them, then softened back into normality.
"I'll eat Merlin's hat," Snape said from behind her, and later, when she was more coherent, Hermione would insist fervently to herself that she'd only imagined the completely bizarre, atypical comment coming from the Potions master's mouth, even though it was followed by the sharp, acidic addition of, "A Weasley?!"
Hermione felt her knees buckle entirely as she saw Ginny Weasley in Draco Malfoy's arms.
"House unity," Dumbledore said as his other world, and sat heavily back in his chair.
His world was dissolving, that other world shaped as a wizard would shape a glamour, but with far more detail, and rules only he knew.
The houses divided, sent into a foreign land with foreign lives and foreign memories, would stay in that world until he was no longer able to cast the elaborate and tricky glamours and memory spells which held the houses in their places.
They would stay until he was no longer able, or until they had shown unity in a public and undeniable way.
In his mind, Albus Dumbledore saw the snake and lion, coexisting, perhaps not peacefully, but certainly productively. The first of the houses had united.
~~~
He buried his face in her hair, shaking with the relief and the sheer awe her words had sent through him.
Maybe it would be okay, as long as she could say things like that.
The tremors passed and he parted his lips to whisper to her, to reciprocate her phrase, to say the words he'd never bothered to say, words that had never once been spoken in his house, but as he spoke her name-
"Genevieve…"
Ginny?
Draco Malfoy reared back, silver eyes wide and staring as he looked at the redhead in his arms, the beautiful, teary-eyed, silver-clad…
Weasley.
Ginny's lips parted in a soundless shout, and she felt the duality, felt two halves of herself as clearly as if-
As if she'd done things in a trance without even realizing it.
"No," she managed, her voice a rusty, pallid squeak as she tried to reconcile love and hate in her mind and her heart, tried to puzzle out what she'd done this time, how she'd done it, who had been controlling her this time.
And remarkably, he held onto her, his hands grasping her bare shoulders, her mask and tiara dangling from the fingertips of one hand, his eyes slicing straight to the heart of the matter, desperate and crazy and so completely Slytherin that she started to pull away despite herself, started to pull away even though she knew this was the man, the very same, who had touched every inch of her body and not harmed her, spoken her name-not your name, Ginny, someone else's-in lust, in passion.
She started to pull away because he was Draco Malfoy, and because she was not Genevieve Wesley.
He remembered it all, and did not doubt any of it. Not for a moment did he cast aspersions on those memories. He knew precisely who he was, and he knew precisely who he had been.
Malfoys did not have hysterics, and they did not hallucinate.
Malfoys did not lose control.
And most of all, Malfoys did not make mistakes.
He remembered what he'd done to his father, another wave of relief, this one entirely different, breaking over him.
No video, no moving pictures of him with Gen… Ginny.
He put his lips to her ear and spoke quietly, in tones so dulcet no one would have believed it if they'd heard it.
"Stop fighting me and follow me," he said, for he would not allow this to become a public spectacle, and he would not allow her to leave him.
And though a great portion of that was because women did not leave Malfoy men, an equally great portion was because he had given up everything for her in one world.
He would not change his mind.
Ginny looked around, shocked, speechless, her wide eyes taking everything in and giving it a weird, panicked, canted angle. She felt as though she were looking at everything through a large glass ball: Hermione's pallid face, Harry's thinned lips clamped together, Dumbledore's approving smile and nod, Snape's sneering, enigmatic expression.
And she wanted to get away.
So she twined her fingers with his, taking one stilted look over her shoulder as he dragged her down the hallway, glad, fiercely glad no one wanted to follow them.
How long? How long were we other people?
She couldn't seem to get a good handle on time, as she'd memories enough to suit two people, or at least one and a half, the most vivid of those memories centering around this young man, this fair-haired young man and the gamut of feelings he'd run her through.
"We need somewhere to talk," she said, and still her voice was rusty. She wanted her wand, her robes. She wanted things familiar to her, not this enemy, not his odd mannerisms and his fierce looks.
But those, too, were familiar to her, and then some. They were more familiar, and somehow hauntingly more welcome than her friends would have been at that moment.
He clasped her fingers almost to the point of pain, and with his other hand held onto the tiara and mask. Silly little things, really, but he wasn't about to let them go. He needed it to prove to himself-or moreover, to her-that the whole thing had been real.
"Somewhere to talk," he repeated, marveling a bit at the protective urges coursing through him. There were large, dark shadows under her eyes, and her skin had paled several shades lighter than usual.
Since when have you been that conversant with the Weaselette's skin?
"Oh, bugger off," he told that voice in undertones too low for her to hear, and concentrating, he reached out and grasped a doorknob where there had been only a wall moments before.
They needed a place to talk, and here was their place to talk.
They'd stepped from the ancient halls of Hogwarts outdoors somehow, the tiny, cramped spot of grass that had stretched along the front of the Wesley home back in that weird Muggle world.
And parked on the street was that sleek, green Jaguar.
"Best part of being a Muggle," Draco smirked, running his hand over the side of the auto and feeling a sharp pang of longing and regret. It had its charms, he thought, not altogether unlike a sleek, sinuous broom, or a fiery, unmanageable woman.
He'd miss the car, but he wasn't about to give up on the woman.
"I don't know what's more unbelievable, that I lived as a Muggle or that I shagged Ginny Weasley." He carefully arranged both mask and tiara on the top of the car, spots of silver on that dark, glossy green, completing the Slytherin colors.
"It wasn't me," she said through clenched teeth, but the homey feel of the small yard, the smell of that nighttime air, only faintly tinged with auto exhaust, all but proved her wrong. It had been her, and willingly so.
And she'd be willing to bet every yard of her beautiful dress that this moment they'd stepped into was the same moment just before she'd sent him home, with a kiss at the corner of his mouth and the indubitable feeling of love rioting through her chest.
And the damnable truth of it was, that feeling was still there.
His hair was mussed from the hat he'd worn, his eyes both guarded and sharp, but something played about his mouth-worry, she labeled it, and knew she was right.
She knew this man inside and out, even if she hadn't known him before they'd gone Muggle.
By way of response, he leaned against the car, deceptively casual, then covered one satin-clad hip with his wool-gloved hand and yanked, sending her stumbling into him, pressed chest-to-chest and hip-to-hip, and his breath, already rapid, sent tendrils of hair dancing about her face.
"Not you, then? It certainly felt like you." He couldn't help it, didn't want to. It had been too long since he'd touched her, too long since he'd felt that fire, felt that heat of her skin against his skin, saw that mixture of warning, wariness, and worship in her eyes. "Remember?" He kissed her, and for the first time, he fully understood what that odd feeling, that past feeling that always seemed to stand between them had been.
Even as Muggles, there had been some magic there, strong and undeniable between them.
He stroked his tongue over hers and heard that low, familiar moan; he could have devoured her then, starting with swallowing that feline little noise right between his lips and down his throat.
Ginny wanted to fight him but found she couldn't, and that didn't surprise her at all. The dance, the car, the fevered, freakish evening at his house. It had all been inevitable, and had it all led up to this?
She thought it had.
And also the hexes, the insults, the snide remarks he'd lobbed about her and Harry. Here, in this world, those had all led up to this.
She pressed her hands into his sides, hard enough to hurt, reassuring herself he was real, and then she stepped away, tears in her eyes.
For reality meant more than one thing, and here, in her life and his, reality meant warring families.
"You hate me," she said, shaking her head. "You and your family hate me and my family. Why do you think your father hated me so, Draco? Because he hated me here. He tried to kill me." She stepped back, holding one hand out to keep him at bay. "I won't subject myself to that again." Fire snapped into her eyes and she raised her chin. "My father." Draco laughed, rubbing a hand over his face. Had it come to this, then? Revealing secrets to a woman he'd hated his entire life without even knowing her?
And a woman who, once he'd known her, he'd been incapable of hating?
"Remember, Weasley, you're supposed to be the smart one. If my father hated you there because he hated you here, then what on earth does that say about me? I hated my father there because I hate my father here." He spread his arms wide, mocking himself. "Here it seems I am still the ungrateful brat. Would, you said, that you had half my problems.
"Slytherins aren't fickle, Weasley, we get what we want and we don't look back once we've gotten it."
It was all so incredibly unfair. Ginny ran her hands up her cheeks, trying desperately to stem her tears before they even fell.
You'll ruin your makeup, she told herself, but she just didn't want him to see her cry.
The man she loved, her worst enemy.
"Is that what you've done, then?" she asked bitterly, hearing herself in her head, hearing her voice claim her love for him with no return. "Gotten me?"
He slid the tiara off the car and approached her, situating it once again in those red curls, deciding he rather liked it there. She looked the part, the faerie princess. "You said you loved me, Weasley. Is your Gryffindor loyalty so weak, then, that it doesn't still hold true?" He held her head in an attempt to keep those brown eyes on him, in an attempt to fire her anger and get rid of her tears. She wouldn't love him as long as she was crying, but she might love him as long as she was clawing at him.
She couldn't bear to look at him when he looked at her like that, softness and cynicism coexisting, so she closed her eyes and kept her voice low and level, speaking haughtily through her teeth. "I said I loved you. I'm not a liar, and I'm not fickle."
He surprised her by pressing a single kiss to the center of her forehead, a gesture his mother had shared with him on more than one occasion, both Narcissa and Natasha. If he knew love, there was his only source. "I have to have you-I have to be with you," he said, and found that was the closest he could come to echoing her sentiment. When her eyes flew to his, angry and hurt and disbelieving, he shrugged. "I guess that means I love you."
And though she'd thought that would be all she needed to hear, Ginny felt a soft, painful squeeze around her heart at his words.
It saddened and sickened her to know he wasn't certain-not for her sake, but for his, the boy who'd never had any example by which to know what love truly was.
He laid his cheek to hers, caressing the back of her neck and listening to her breath even as she listened to his, the closeness an oddity for the two of them, the silence even rarer.
Then she spoke.
"Well," she said with an enormous sigh, rubbing the smooth skin of her cheek over his stubbled one in a way that made him wince (she'd certainly have red marks among those freckles after that), "I suppose this means I won't be able to hex you any more."
He was worried about many things, about his family and his life, her life and the lives they'd stepped back into, but as he slid large hands from her neck down her sides to caress and cover the slightness of her ribs, the softness of her breasts, he hid his worry well. And much, much later as they lay together, cramped but comfortable in the backseat of the slightly out-of-place automobile the room had conjured for them, he pressed his lips where her neck and shoulder met and whispered to her.
"You're supposed to be the smart one, Weasley. Surely you can figure out how to make this work."