A Stone's Throw From The Soul
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
Summary: Sequel to Rest In Pieces. After the events in the chamber, Ginny is locked up for her own good in St. Mungo's. But when Draco gets accused of being responsible for everything, she runs away to find the truth herself, with unexpected help.
Author's Notes: Tadaa, here is chapter two. Hope it is to your liking, people. And I have laid the foundations for future D/G interaction in this chapter, although I doubt that any of you will pick up on it. For once in my life, I managed to be subtle, I think.
The chapter title is the title of a song that has nothing to do with my story whatsoever. It just sounded purdy. Song's by the Counting Crows, in case anyone's interested.
Chapter 2: The Ghost In You
"I'd recommend doing something about that hair of yours. It's horrible," a familiar, cold voice drawled from behind her.
Ginny turned around, and when she saw the owner of the voice, she dropped the stone in shock. It could not be possible, surely?
"But - you - how?" she stammered, sounding less than eloquent.
"What's up Weasley? You look as if you've seen a ghost," the figure that was currently leaning against the most shadowy wall in her room drawled. Well, trying to lean against the wall, that is. Ginny noticed that he was leaning against thin air, an inch away from the actual wall.
"Well, yeah," she said lamely gesturing vaguely in the direction of his back. "You, ah, missed the wall," she added helplessly.
He swore. "This isn't so easy, you know?" Moving his shimmering form, he glared at her.
"What are you doing here?" Ginny was silently thankful that she had not lost the ability to form coherent sentences.
"Trying to lean against your fucking wall, what does it look like I'm doing?" he snapped angrily. "It's not easy doing that when one has no tangible form, no muscles to control and no nothing!" Ginny flinched at his obvious distress - it didn't suit him, not at all.
"Listen, Malfoy, you're dead." Ginny sighed.
"Well, thank you for that little tidbit of information, I hadn't noticed," Draco replied sarcastically, cocking his head - or at least what looked like a holographic picture of his head - to the side.
"I mean, how did you get here?" Ginny asked in exasperation. Seeing him was not at all what she needed now. What she needed now was a shower, some decent clothes and a plan on how to escape St. Mungo's, and not the ghost of a snotty little bastard who was occupying most of her thoughts anyway without him turning up in her room.
"Aren't ghosts bound to the walls they died in?" she pried, trying to ignore the feeling that she herself was responsible for his turning up in her room. That some part of her had wished for him to come. Of course she hadn't known that he was a ghost, but she'd had her suspicions. The whole affair had just screamed unfinished business, and while most ghosts did not have the opportunity to finish unfinished business, and usually accepted their fate, she had the inkling suspicion that this particular ghost would not do so, and that he had, in fact, found a possibility to finish said unfinished business, thanks to her.
"You know exactly how I got here, Weasley," Draco's silky voice interrupted her thoughts. "How sweet you look when you're crying my name in your sleep," he added maliciously.
"I most certainly do not!" she cried in outrage.
"Oh, believe me, you do! I cannot resist to look when people call me, lest of all you." Oh, if she could only wipe that damn smirk off his face...
"Just bugger off," she snapped and sat down on her bed, sighing.
Draco sauntered over to the bed, sitting down on it, this time almost managing to make it look real, with only his left butt cheek being swallowed by her comforter, which made Ginny produce a little smirk of her own.
"The stone, right?" she asked, waiting for him to confirm her suspicion.
"No, your underwear. Of course it's the stone," he snapped impatiently.
"Can you please go and pester somebody else with your post-mortal syndrome, Malfoy?" Ginny said testily, chuckling when she realized that he was acting a lot like she was prone to when suffering her kind of PMS.
"Stuff it, Weasley," he grumbled, and his eyes clouded over with some unidentifiable emotion, just for a second, and Ginny was not altogether sure whether she had imagined it or not.
"I'm sorry," she said anyway, being the good little girl her mother had brought her up to be.
"Are you?" Draco asked, turning his mysterious eyes on her, his voice now void of mockery, but filled with seriousness.
Ginny pondered his cryptic question for a moment. Was she? For what, anyway? For being the one who survived - No, she was not sorry, on one side. It was the basic, egotistical, human thing not to be sorry, and besides, she it had spared the world the existence of another Death Eater, and had spared him the inevitable decision of becoming one, of becoming a ruthless murderer. On the other hand, it was also painfully human to feel worthless of the life she was living, and she knew that it was not her place to judge who had a right to live and who did not have that right. She could not bear the thought of having been responsible for another person's death, and therefore thought it would have been more than just had she died, because she knew that he would not have the doubts she was confronted with, that he would have just got on with his life.
Was she sorry for what she had said? - Certainly, because it was the polite thing to be sorry for it, and because it had been a low jibe, way below belt line. It was something that he would have said, and that made her uncomfortable - was he rubbing off on her? But then again, what right did he think he had to invade in her privacy like that, only giving all her problems and nightmares more fuel to feed on?
"I don't know," Ginny finally answered truthfully, not looking at him.
"I know you don't," Draco replied, a lot more amicably now. Not that that said much when dealing with a Malfoy, Ginny mused. It only meant that he was not trying to glare her into a state equal his own.
"So the stone thing really works?" she asked awkwardly, at a loss on how to deal with him.
"Seems like it," he answered, trying to dangle his legs realistically. Somehow Ginny did not enjoy seeing her enemy in a state like this - unused to what he was, trying to get accustomed to the idea that he had to really think about where to put his limbs, because that's what it looked like to her.
Ron would have feasted on the sight, but she knew that she could not do that. Somehow she liked him a lot better when he was his cool, suave and collected self, when she knew he was her superior. Ginny did not know what to do with him, now that he was clearly handicapped, when it came to certain things. It was so un-Malfoyish, and she guessed it was degrading for him.
So she cast her eyes away, giving him time to sort out the mess that was time and space.
"Where are you when you're not showing yourself to me? In that stone?" she finally asked, breaking the awkward silence.
"Not really," he answered, giving the question some thought. "Well, perhaps I am, but not in the genie in a bottle sort of way," he amended his prior statement. "I kind of am that stone, when I'm not here," Draco tried to explain. "And all the other stones too. I'm bound to them, you know?"
Ginny shook her head, not quite understanding where he was going, and a little unsettled because he was being civil.
"I can leave them, and when I do, I look like this," he gestured at his transparent form at this point. "But only in a, say, ten foot radius of the stone."
She began to understand a little of what he was saying now. "So you could not stand in that corner over there while the stone is in my pocket?" Ginny asked, the little wheels that were spinning behind her eyes visible to everyone who bothered to watch, which, at this time, was only Draco Malfoy.
"Probably not," he said, nodding.
"Why are you here, though, Malfoy?" she asked, losing her patience with him. Ginny fervently wished that he would include an insult in his answer. It would make her feel like she had some control over the situation, because it would be what she expected him to do. She did not like Malfoy when he was trying to be nice, or at least civil. Except for that one special situation they'd had, where she would have preferred...
No, stop it! No skipping down memory lane, Ginny, she told herself, willing the blush she could feel rising in her neck to go back to where it belonged.
"Why do you want me to be here, Weasley?" he asked back. Ginny hated people who answered her questions with questions of their own, and it greatly satisfied her to hear him do just that.
"I don't want you to be here," she snapped, finding it strange that she felt a lot more contended to snap at him than to talk to him like a normal person.
He smirked and lifted his hand, trailing his fingers along her jawline. Ginny shuddered and drew back a little, involuntarily. Although he could not touch her in the normal sense of the word, she had felt an icy chill on her cheek where it had looked to her eyes like he'd touched her, a chill that had sent shivers down her spine, shivers of the non-pleasant sort.
"I don't want you to be here," she repeated weakly, regarding him warily, as if to jump should he lift his hand again.
"Then why do you keep the stone?" Draco asked, leaning in again, and Ginny scrambled backwards to the head of the bed, which elicited a small chuckle from him. She ignored it and reached into her pocket to get the stone.
She held it up and regarded it, in deep thought. Why did she keep it indeed? Why had she taken it in the first place?
When she had waken up on that fateful night, she had been disorientated at first. She had looked at the Hogwarts grounds, eerie yet comforting in their nightly piece. And then her gaze had fallen upon the pile of stones, and she had recognized the texture of the stones as the one that had kept them captive. She'd picked the one she was still holding in her hands now up, just to feel whether it was real. Ginny had prayed for it all to have been a nightmare, but when her fingers had closed around the smooth material, she had known that prayers would not help her a bit there. And she had screamed.
When she had woken up hours later, recollection of what had happened had almost hit instantly. And she'd looked at the stone in her hands, and remembered something her mother had once told her. Every child knew that a ghost was bound to the place they died in, and people usually defined place as a geographical location. Something that you could find on a map. But her mother had once told her a story, and even though she knew that it had only been a fairytale, Ginny had stopped to think that perhaps place could not only be defined as location, but surroundings, after hearing it. And while a location could not change, surroundings could. The stone that she was now holding in her hand was proof for that.
She was aware that he was looking at her expectantly, waiting for her answer. "Sentimental value?" she half said, half asked, shrugging.
"Sentimental value? Oh, let's keep a piece of a place another person was killed in brutally," he mocked in a sing-song voice.
"Do lets," Ginny echoed monotonously.
"Cut the crap, Weasley," Draco snapped angrily. "You knew I'd come, eventually."
"I didn't know shit," she replied testily, angry that she had half hoped for it to be true, deep down, and even angrier that he could read her like that.
"The true sign of a Weasley." Ginny fumed. How dare he insult her like that? But she mustn't lose her composure, not now. She had other, more important things to do than wasting her time with some grumpy ghost. She graciously ignored the fact that he was not just some ghost.
"I take it you watch me at night? How sweet," she retorted instead.
"I haven't got anything better to do now, have I?" Draco shot back.
"Where's the rest of the chamber?" Ginny asked abruptly, satisfied when she saw that he was a little startled at her non-sequitur.
"Ministry of Magic, Department of Mysteries," he replied automatically.
"Great, then I'm going to throw this stone here into some lake, and you can spend the rest of your days with Aurors and fish, for all I care," she snapped, getting up.
"Wait, Weasley, no!" And suddenly he was floating right in front of her, when she knew that he'd been behind her not a millisecond ago. This whole ghost business was strange...
"Wait, no?" she asked, raising an eyebrow. "No I really think I want to do that. You're getting on my nerves."
"I need your help!" Draco suddenly burst out, making her stop in mid-step.
"My help?" Ginny asked unbelievingly.
"I want to find that bastard, and make sure that he gets what he deserves. I swore an oath that I would hunt whoever is responsible for all this," a wild gesture from his part startled her out of her stupour at this point, "shit. I don't intend to stay a ghost forever. And you do want to find him yourself, don't you?" he asked, almost pleadingly.
Ginny guessed she knew why it had taken him two weeks to approach her with this now. He must have spent hours talking himself into this.
"Well, according to the Daily Prophet, justice already stroke when you died," she said cryptically, not sure why she didn't tell him that she was going to do so anyway.
"Huh?" was his less than smooth answer.
"I meant that apparently some halfwit thinks that you are responsible for kidnapping us. Did you know that you beat and raped me and then burned yourself on a pyre, by the way? I don't really know how I can talk to you anyway, as, allegedly, I am in a coma," she explained, watching in amusement as he narrowed his eyes.
"That has got to be the biggest-"
"-pile of rubbish you've ever heard, yes," she completed his sentence, turning her back to him and sitting down on her bed again.
"So what do we do?" he asked briskly, taking his old place just an inch above her bed.
"We?" she raised an eyebrow. "I believe I'm the only one here who can do something that is not walking through walls," Ginny said sarcastically.
"Oh, there is one thing I can do, Ginny Weasley," Draco said and adjusted his position so that the picture of his nose was almost touching hers. "But that'd be totally useless to our cause," he added when he saw her eyes widen, and then floated away again.
Ginny cleared her throat. He was dead, for God's sake, why on earth was her heart beating as fast as it did right now?
"Right, uh," she said, fishing for anything to say. "I need to get out of here."
"Really?" Draco asked, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
"If you've got nothing better to say than that, shut up," Ginny snapped, knowing full well that he didn't give a shit about what she just said.
Oh, this was going to be harder than she had thought.