A Stone's Throw From the Soul

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: I repeat again: I will not resurrect Draco. There will, however be D/G interaction, believe me. Actually I was very tempted to make this story NC-17. I can still change the rating if I do intend to go that far. I know what I’m going to do with Draco in the end, but I’m a little unsure as to what to do with Ginny, honestly. We’ll see. I just hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoy plotting and writing it.

Chapter 1: Accusations

„Now, Miss Weasley, I know that this is going to be hard, and that it will take great effort from your side, but one day you need to tell me what happened in that chamber,“ the elderly man sitting on the sofa opposite from the redheaded girl that was currently reclining in a comfortable chair, staring out of the window defiantly, said, doing his best to suppress a sigh. He could tell that she was a hard one.

“I’m not a lunatic,” Ginny snapped, her eyes blazing and now directed at him.

“Of course you aren’t,” Dr. Syskovitz replied amicably. “But still it is very important that you tell me what happened. We need to understand what happened,” he said, twirling his quill with his fingers. Oh yes, they did. Today’s headlines had not exactly proven helpful with finding out the truth about what had passed in the 24 hours the distressed girl had been locked in that strange chamber. Because even though he wanted to believe what the daily prophet had declared in screaming letters, the doctor had his doubts. It would be too easy, wouldn’t it? It was so sensible and logical that it lacked sense and logic again. And then there was the fact that she had survived...

“You don’t know anything,” Ginny, who had calmed down again, droned monotonously.

“No, we don’t, that’s right,” he confirmed.

Ginny sighed and played with the stone in her hand. How had she got herself into that mess? She hadn’t asked for any of this when taking a late night stroll on the Hogwarts grounds. She had sought solitude and found... what had she found exactly? A boy – no, a man, really, despite all his quirks and oddities that other people would have chalked up to puberty – who had managed to frighten her to death, to make her think about her values (and even though what he had wanted to do was make her question them, she was even more convinced of them now), who had touched something deep within her, feelings that she had long ago buried never to see them again, feelings she could not give a name to. They were not love, not hate, not elation, nothing she knew other than by feeling them. The best way to describe them was by saying that they were a mixture of acceptance and understanding, even though neither of the two could be called emotions. And then there was the other thing...

Ginny blushed at the thought of that, and even though Dr. Syskovitz had no idea what she was blushing over, he made a mental note to himself to remember that for later.

Nobody had ever told her she could feel like that. Oh, sure, she had heard girls giggling over it, but they had all been to profane and mysterious about it for her to understand what was so grand about it. Not that it had happened anyway. Only very nearly.

It? Oh, come on Ginny, how prudish are you? she thought absently. Call the donkey by its name.

Ginny was not aware that the man in front of her was watching the expressions fleeting across her face with great interest while she was struggling with herself.

Say it! Sex, sex, sex, sex...

Ginny squeaked. Oh Lady, she was thinking about...sex while talking to a doctor. Well, almost-sex, that is. With Draco Malfoy.

And that was when the full force of the thoughts she had been trying to block hit her again, and a sob rose in her throat. She tried to quell it, as much as she tried to quell the thoughts, she really did, but it was too late.

Memories of what had passed in the chamber just before she had left it floated before her eyes, tauntingly, just so far out of reach that she could not brush them aside. He had practically told her to go. Had he gone with her, he would not have died. Had it even been possible for them both to leave the chamber? Had he known what would happen as soon as she left the chamber? Surely he couldn’t have, or else he would have told her to stay. She had not known herself. And still she felt as if she had killed him.

Ginny was not even aware of her own body convulsing with sobs and of her own tears raining down on herself, or the big and hulky medical guard gently carrying her to the room that she had been given for her stay at St. Mungo’s.

She only fleetingly noticed that she was lying on her bed, but could not dwell on this long enough, as other, more persistent thoughts were crashing down on her.

He had kissed her shortly before she’d left. Why had he kissed her? Why had she kissed him back? So many questions unanswered.

Why had they been there in the first place? Who had put them in that situation? Did she even care? She had killed another human being. Somebody whom she had felt strongly for, nonetheless. Granted, it was hate that she had felt for him, even as he had kissed her she had kissed him back with every ounce of hate in her, and she was sure he had felt the same, but hate was stronger, more important than the emptiness of indifference, in her opinion.

And still, despite their mutual feelings of detestation for each other, they had shared moments with each other that were more intimate than moments she had shared with people she loved. It had bean weariness that had made them retract their verbal and physical claws, and weariness that had made them see the other for what they were when stripped down to their very bones. Christian Muggles believed that to their God, they were all naked. Ginny did not believe in any kind of religion, for she knew what moved the world, but she did believe that at some point, Draco Malfoy had been something like God to her, and vice versa. Somebody to see them as what they were when not influenced by the outside world, by harsh reality.

Although she was not at all happy with most of what she had seen then, Ginny had discovered the one thing that had redeemed Draco in her eyes – he was human. He was not the evil, malicious entity of bad faith as she had always pictured him before getting to see underneath his carefully applied layers of pretense, no. He was a bastard, a lying, sneering, obnoxious, malicious human git.

Or had been. Now, all he was was a never-ending series of thoughts that plagued her, and Ginny found it slightly ironic that he would continue with his favourite pastime, namely tormenting people, even after he was dead.

It was then that she realized that her body had calmed down again and that her breathing was slowing down to normal. Sighing she rolled over so she was lying on her back and silently bemoaned her situation once again.

She didn’t need stupid St. Mungo’s, and much less did she need Dr. Syskovitz whose only purpose in life seemed to be to invade other people’s privacy. Probably hasn’t got a life of his own, she thought a little meanly.

“Hello Gin,” a cheery voice interrupted her thoughts, making her sigh for the millionth time that day. Oh, great, just what she needed. Or rather, who.

“Hey, Ron,” she greeted her brother, trying not to squirm as he enveloped her in a bear hug. She didn’t really feel comfortable with touching other people at the moment. It distressed her, but Ginny didn’t have the heart to tell Ron that, as he was always so happy to see her.

She had heard that he had thrown fit after fit while she had still been lying in the Hospital Wing, and it touched her that he had been so concerned about her.

“I brought you some chocolate.” Ron smilingly handed her a box of chocolate frogs. “Perhaps you’ll find one with Oliver Wood on it,” he added with a twinkle in his eye, that made Ginny’s heart constrict. She had, at one point, collected chocolate frog cards with the Quidditch player on it like other people collected stamps, but somehow she didn’t want to think about Oliver now. He’d been just one of her many silly schoolgirl crushes, nothing real, nothing tangible.

Ginny made room on her bed for Ron to sit down and started listening to his banter, making the odd comment this and then. He was really trying his best to cheer her up, and she could see that it was not easy on him. There was one subject he never touched, not even came close to, but she could see that he desperately wanted to know what had happened.

“Fred and George blew up half of our living room yesterday. Mum was in a right state, I tell you,” Ron continued his tale of what was happening in the casa Weasley, making Ginny smile against her will.

She knew she was being foolish and childish, but somehow Ginny did not want to smile, and it always made her feel guilty when she did, these days. Not that she had much to smile about. Ron’s daily visits that were occasionally accompanied by Harry or Hermione, or sometimes even both were about the only happy spots in the dreary and depressing time she’d spent at St. Mungo’s.

Of course her parents visited her too, but she had the sickening feeling of being coddled by them, as if she were being locked in – which, in some way, she was, as she was not allowed to leave the tract she was in at St. Mungo’s – a feeling that she had never been able to tolerate, and was even more sensitive to lately.

When Ron finally left, Ginny wandered about in her room for some time, crossing it again and again and again without purpose.

If she could just do something to get her mind off things.

On one side, she could not stand company at the moment, on the other she feared being alone, because that was when the thoughts that she did not want to face would come back and torture her until she either fell asleep from exhaustion or managed to get a hold on herself after some time.

She hadn’t told anybody about this, as she was ashamed of her own fickleness, and besides she had a feeling that Dr. Syskovitz would want to know more about it, and would implore her to tell him about what was on her mind. She did not want to tell him what was on her mind. They were her thoughts, hers alone. They were her memories of Draco Malfoy, and nobody had a right to make her share them.

Tired of her incessant walking in circles, Ginny decided to treat herself to a cup of hot chocolate. She grabbed her baby blue robe to wear it over the ducky print PJ’s she had been running around in all day, pulled her slippers out from under her bed, slipping them on and left the room making her way to the patient cafeteria.

“Hello Ginny dear,” an old witch at one of the tables to her right said, flashing Ginny a nearly toothless grin.

“Hello Mrs. Mellowcombe,” Ginny shouted, having picked up on the quirks and problems of all the patients on her ward already. It was hard not to, after spending two weeks in little other company than them, really.

“There’s a picture of you in my book,” Mrs. Mellowcombe, who had to be one of the oldest people Ginny knew, said, in her strange way of speaking that emphasized the ‘i’, ‘u’ and ‘oo’ in the sentence by, for lack of a better word, almost spitting them out.

“What book?” Ginny asked, frowning.

“Who did?” Mrs. Mellowcombe asked confusedly.

Ginny blinked and shook her head. “I asked: ‘What book’,” she then repeated, more slowly and loudly, plopping down in a chair gracelessly.

A few seconds later she was very grateful that she had done so, for she was sure she would have lost footage when she saw what Mrs. Mellowcombe was holding in her thin, sinewy hand.

There she was, smiling down at herself from the first page of the Daily Prophet. Her first thought was Gods, why did I wear the bunny sweater for the yearbook photo? but after a few seconds her mind kicked back in.

What was she doing on the front page of the Daily Prophet?

“May I?” she asked and reached for the paper with shaking hands.

And even a warning would not have prepared her for what the article was proclaiming in big, brazen letters.

Hogwarts scandal revealed: the full story on the kidnapping of Ginevra Weasley

Death Eater offspring kidnaps and rapes girl from his school

Hogsmeade – Draco Malfoy, son of convicted Death Eater Lucius Malfoy is strongly suspected to be responsible for the kidnapping and raping of a fellow student under the nose of Headmaster Albus Dumbledore.

This happened over two weeks ago, and it is probable that Albus Dumbledore wanted to conceal the goings-on in his school for prestige reasons. He, as well as Ministry officials refuse to comment this matter, but the Daily Prophet has been informed by a reliable source that Saturday before last, Ginevra Weasley (16) a Gryffindor, was found missing, as well as Draco Malfoy (17), Slytherin.

The next day the girl was found unconscious and naked next to a burning pyre. It is confirmed that the girl was raped and beaten multiple times by Draco Malfoy. Aurors suspect that the boy, after abusing the girl for about 24 hours on end, burned himself on the pyre in a fit of madness.

The whereabouts of Ginevra are unclear at the moment, although rumour has it that she is still lying in a coma in Hogwarts.

Investigation in this case is therefore very hard, as the prime suspect is dead and the victim in a state that she cannot confirm the gruesome suspicions, but accounts of Draco Malfoy’s personality from many Hogwarts students indicate that he was an unstable and fanatic boy.

Ginny gently put the paper down on the table. She had never, in her whole life, read such a pile of rubbish. Raped? Beaten? Coma? Pyre?

Slowly she could feel the anger rising in her. They were accusing Draco of everything that had happened. She could not tolerate that. But neither could she tell anybody what had really transpired. That was a closed book that only she was allowed to look at.

But on the other hand, she couldn’t let whoever had written that crap get away with it. And much less, the person who had really done all this to her.

Forgetting all about the hot chocolate, Ginny violently pushed her chair back, stood up and stalked back to her room, shoving her hand into her pocket to feel the safe calmness that the stone always created in her whenever she touched it.

Think Ginny, think, she told herself.

“Gods, what am I gonna do?” she murmured to herself.

“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?

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.

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: If you choose to comment on Draco’s odd behaviour in this chapter, please bear in mind that he is not OOC. Not really. What I mean by that will be revealed in a later chapter. Also, this chapter bodes. Don’t ask how it bodes, it just does. Let’s just hope I’m not being too confusing. Have fun reading!

Chapter 3: Trevor

“Who are you talking to, Ginny?” a concerned voice from the doorway startled her to a point where she nearly screamed.

“Oh, it’s you Trevor,” the redheaded girl said, trying to think of a possible way to answer his question.

“I thought I heard voices,” the young man in the white cotton clothes with the St. Mungo’s mediwizard crest on the left breast pocket said, rubbing the hair at the back of his head awkwardly when he noticed that Ginny was alone.

“I was...talking to myself,” she said hastily, silently thankful that Draco had gone to wherever he had come from. She caught herself hoping that it was a fiery hellhole with lots of little demons with pitchforks and thumbscrews, and immediately felt bad for it again.

“Gah,” she screamed, not aware that Trevor was eyeing her curiously. How could her own mind be so damn fickle when she herself didn’t want it to be?

“Ginny?” Trevor said hesitantly, stepping closer to her and finally sitting down beside her on the bed. “I know you’re having a hard time,” he began and put an arm around her shoulders, drawing her close.

Ginny immediately stiffened at the unwanted contact and shook his arm off, not feeling bad for it even when she saw his slightly hurt expression. What was it about that guy? She was a patient.

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” she mumbled, grabbing her pillow and hugging it to herself.

“I’m here to help you Ginny,” he said, sighing.

“I don’t need help,” she said stubbornly. “What I need is some freedom, my peace and my wand.”

“You know as well as I do that you’re not allowed to leave the ward, and I can’t change anything about that,” Trevor said exasperatedly while looking at her with his faded blue eyes apologetically. “Peace? We can’t leave you all to yourself, Ginny, you need help. And I can’t hand you your wand. Only healers and mediwizards and –witches are allowed their wands in here. Safety is important, surely you understand that?”

No, she did not, not in her case at least. What would she do with her wand, after all, that would hurt anybody? She fully understood these precautions when it came to Peepin’ Pat two doors down the corridor, who would probably – nah, she didn’t even want to imagine it.

“I just want to be alone, Trevor. Please?” Nobody had ever been able to resist Ginny when she turned the puppy dog eyes on, and Trevor was no exception, as he nodded reluctantly after a moment and left, giving her a last, almost longing look before he closed the door behind him.

“I’m here to help you Ginny, oooooh, look at me in gay little nightshirt with the stupid crest on it, ooooh, won’t you fuck me Ginny,” the familiar, mocking voice of Draco Malfoy reached her ears as soon as the mediwizard had left the room.

Ginny just rolled her eyes and let her head fall on the pillow she was still holding and then drew her knees up to her body in order for the position to be a little more comfortable.

“Who does he think he is?” she heard Draco fume from the other end of the room and chose not to comment. She really didn’t know what had come over him to behave like this. It was childish, stupid and unnecessary.

“You’re a patient,” the ghost ranted on, and when Ginny finally lifted her head to look at him she noted that he must be really agitated about this, for he forgot to stay in one and the same place for long, always appearing and disappearing again. She got the distinct impression that the world looked a little different for a ghost. Or perhaps it didn’t, but as ghosts lacked a distinct shape and things that kept them together, they had to consciously remind themselves where they were and what they should look like all the time. At least that’s what it looked like with Draco, at the moment. Give it another 50 years and he’ll be used to it, she thought cynically.

“So what?” she finally snapped, getting a headache from watching him fleeting around the room. “And stand still, for God’s sake. I really don’t know why you’re making such a fuss,” she added exasperatedly. “Trevor’s a nice man.”

“Who wants nice men these days?” Draco asked, finally stilling his motions, standing in front of her. Ginny noticed what he was wearing for the first time that moment: the clothes he had worn in the chamber, minus his robe, but strangely enough his tie was loose, the first two buttons undone and his collar was all wrong. He was completely disshelved, something that Ginny did not usually associate with Draco Malfoy. Neither did she associate such an appearance with ghosts.

“Is that what you’ve been telling yourself all these years?” she asked, eyeing him coolly. He was getting on her nerves with the way he was acting like a drama queen. The veins were standing out on his forehead, for God’s sake! He was dead, he was a ghost, and ghosts didn’t even have veins, as they distinctly lacked blood. What was wrong with him?

The exact same question was running through his mind at that time? What was wrong with him? He was acting like her bloody brother, the way he was pacing, screaming and doing things in general. He needed to stop this nonsense, fast. Now if only if that was so easy...

He couldn’t help but rant and get all worked up over nothing, and it made him feel angry at himself. So what if the stupid, ugly bloke had a crush on Weasley? She deserved a moron like him. He didn’t care, really, as long as the two restrained themselves when he was around. But that blatant parading it about in front of his eyes was uncalled for. As if he hadn’t been there! Bloody sickening behaviour, that was.

Doing his best to compose himself he glared at her one last time before retreating to the sanctuary of his stone to have a nice, long sulk.

“Yeah, that’s it Malfoy, very mature,” she murmured, glaring at the grey piece of rock on the table.

She rolled her eyes when she got no answer, but guessed that he could not hear her when he was in there. After all he would have known about the story in the paper if he were able to hear or see things in his little hidey-hole.

Clinging to that thought she dropped her robe, got out of her pajamas and underwear and went into the bathroom to take a nice, hot shower to take her mind off things, and to have some time to think.

Ginny Weasley was officially lost in her own thoughts a couple of minutes later, and she could not find a map that would point her in a direction she should go. Guilt always hung over her head like the sword of Damocles, and Draco Malfoy was the only thing that held it up. Every time he left it crashed down on her full force, making her think of everything that she had rid him of, everything that he would never experience or see because she had been the one to survive the stupid chamber incident. But she should have known, really. It had not been the first time for her to be locked in a chamber by some madman, after all. Only the last time she had been, her saviour had had green eyes and unruly black hair, and he had come in form of an angel of life, saving her and taking her to a safe, warm place, telling her everything would be okay.

With this particular chamber incident, her saviour, if you could call him that, had been a fair skinned, fair eyed, and fair haired boy – sometimes he even seemed like a man already, despite his age, and sometimes the boy in him shone through – that had not assured her of anything, and he’d been the unwilling sacrifice for her life, leaving her to a cold, dark and lonely place that held nothing in life that she wanted for her. Nothing that she wanted now, that is.

He hadn’t known who of them would survive. He had not said anything about the matter until now, and she was glad for it. Ginny did not really want to talk to him about it, as she knew that she would regret what she would say to him later on, when she was alone again, much like she was now.

Because every time she talked to him, the guilt would be washed away by something else, by something that was so him that she just had to hate it. He made her angry, he drove her mad, he got on her nerves. She still hated him, and he still hated her, but they were once again thrown together into a situation they’d both much rather not be in.

But it was too late to complain now, as nothing could be done about that. As soon one of them would start talking to the other, her defenses went up, and she could not even to bring herself to apologize for everything she had done to him, albeit inadvertently so, could not speak a kind word, even if she tried.

It was all his fault, she reckoned. He was a ruthless, unscrupulous arsehole with an aura that just screamed ‘You know you hate me’, at least to her. And she, nice, little Ginny Weasley felt like it screamed even more. It screamed ‘Kick me’, it screamed ‘Hex me’, and sometimes, and those were the moments she hated most, it screamed ‘Throw your clothes away and accept that you want me’. Because even though his behaviour often indicated that he just thought that, that was not what she meant right now. Oh no, what she meant were the reactions that he created in her.

Also, there was the fact that when she looked at him, the light seemed to be even more diffuse than it already was, lately, because she could not see straight. Of course she could see every contour of his form, when he was in the mood to be in one shape, that is, but in her mind, his picture was hazy. The way he had just behaved. If she hadn’t known better, she would have guessed he was jealous. But of course she did know better.

She only didn’t knew what she knew better, but that would surely come with time. It would, wouldn’t it?

With a start Ginny realized that she had just spent twenty minutes in the shower doing nothing. She hastily bent down to pick up the bottle of shampoo and started lavishing her hair, massaging her scalp and enjoying the way her wet tresses slid through her fingers. Oh yes, despite everything people might say about it, Ginny loved the feel of her own hair. It was silky to the touch, and darker than her brothers’.

Grateful for the distraction she had provided herself, the girl treated her auburn tresses to some hair conditioner and then started to scrub herself with soap, using generous amounts of the nice-smelling substance. She loved the smell of soap.

When she had been younger she had loved it so much she would constantly wash her hands. Her brothers had teased her about it mercilessly and her mother had once taken her to see a doctor because she feared that her little girl was a neurotic. The old man had just smiled at her after talking to her a little and stated that she was apparently going through a phase of extreme sensitivity of senses, especially that of smell, and not to worry about it. Ron still teased her about it sometimes, and the thought of Ron made her smile.

With a sudden sting to her heart she realized that she wanted nothing more than to go home right now. She wanted to smell the all the scents that were so typical of the Weasley household – her mum’s cooking, the leathery smell of the old but comfortable chairs in the living room mixed with the mostly sulfurous odours that crept out under Fred and George’s door sometimes, the woodsy smell of the old, creaking stairs.

Silent tears were starting to form in her eyes and run down her cheeks, but she was grateful for the water running down her face, as it concealed the tears from the world. Even though she was aware that no-one could see her anyway now, she didn’t even want to know about it herself.

Ginny had a feeling that, although they loved her, her family would not believe her even if she tried to convince them that Draco Malfoy was innocent, and that she needed to find out the truth. Should she ever manage to escape from St. Mungo’s, which she fervently hoped, she would have to take a longer absence from seeing her kin.

They would not understand, could not understand why she felt obligated to clear his name. His name, of all. He was their enemy, had been from the moment on he had been old enough to make choices of his own. Perhaps even before then, as he had been raised to hate them, as much as she had been raised to hate him.

Ginny shook her head and turned off the water, willing her thoughts there were running rampant to calm down, and grabbed a towel, rubbing herself dry.

When she finally stepped out of the bathroom, cheeks red from the hot water, clad only in a huge towel wrapped around her body, Draco was sitting on her bed again, regarding her calculatingly, and he was obviously more composed than he had been before she’d taken her shower.

While Ginny rummaged in her closet to find some clothes, she could feel his eyes on her back, and she knew that he’d say something soon.

“Do you always take that long in the shower?” she finally heard him say as she found a pair of socks that looked like she would not hate to wear it.

“Sometimes,” she replied, not looking at him, and waddled back to the bathroom, trying her best to balance the pile of clothes in her arms while not dropping the darn towel that was dangerously loose.

When she finally re-emerged, her long hair still damp and hanging down her back, she was wearing a pair of muggle jeans, plain black socks, a blue T-shirt that was a little too tight at the chest and a beige hoodie that hung open at the front, and that’s hood was slowly getting soaked with water from her tousled hair.

Looking at her rosy cheeks wistfully, Draco almost sighed, but was able to quell the impulse. He’d never look like that again.

When he was finally able to tear his eyes away from her, he looked out of the window and announced what he had cooked up in the past hour.

“I have a plan...,” he began, and then proceeded to lay his thoughts out to her.

Author’s Notes #2: Actually I hadn’t planned on anything in this chapter. I had planned to skip straight to the point of Ginny’s escape, but then I decided I should do some character development and introduce Trevor before I could let Ginny try to get away from St. Mungo’s. You’ll see about it in the next chapter, though.