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A Summer to Remember
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*Part One, chronologically, of what will most certainly have a sequel and probably be a trilogy. I'll tell you now that you'll really be able to start with part one or part two (which will be called A Summer Forgotten), but as I haven't written part two yet this is what you're stuck with. Part three, I'm afraid, you'll just have to read last, but that's when I'll post it, so it'll all work out. This story, suffice to say, is elaborately planned out…and I've even written *gasp* a PLOT OUTLINE! Not my usual style, but it sure makes writing a whole heck of a lot easier, I've found. This seems to be coming along quite quickly; I'm very proud of it. Other chapters are in the works, and progressing quite rapidly. So far. When school comes back, that might not be the case…so please don't freak out at me or something if a chapter isn't up as soon as you'd like.
A bit about the story: it's D/G, as you probably should have already figured out. I'm sure I'll manage to throw some minor R/Hr in here (but if that's not your cup of tea, don't worry, it'll only be a mentions of if at all, so I'll edit it out for the story I post on portkey.org), and there will be at least mentions somewhere within this trilogy of SS/OC (who has basis in canon). This part, here, takes place two weeks after the beginning of the summer holidays up until the last day…Draco will be in his sixth year and Ginny her fifth upon their return to Hogwarts. And that, I think, is all you really need to know…so on with the story!
Oh, and in the future, I promise to keep my A/Ns shorter…sorry…
Disclaimer: I renounce all ownership of everything except the plot. We all know the rest belongs to J.K.
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From Bad to Worse
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Ginny Weasley carefully unthreaded the only remaining button on one of her - well, one of Percy's, really - old shirts. Buttonless, the plaid, threadbare rag hung loosely on her petite frame. It gaped open in the front without anything to hold it together. Ginny thought this was rather unbecoming, as it revealed the giant hole near the hem of the t-shirt she was wearing. So Ginny stuck the button between her teeth, twisted the two ends of the t-shirt into a knot, and decided that even though the bottom of it didn't pass her bellybutton, her outfit was less of an eyesore now than when that awful tear was visible.
Of course, her outfit wasn't exactly her top priority at the moment. Flickering her eyes upward, Ginny directed her gaze toward the kitchen, where she was sure a meeting was being held. The only question was whether or not the Extendable Ears would be of any use to her. She doubted it; her mum had been very consistent with her use of an Imperturbable Charm to prevent her from eavesdropping. Ginny was getting quite fed up with it. It wasn't as if keeping information from her qualified as protecting her!
`Not that I need that,' Ginny thought furiously. All she needed were answers, and Ginny felt that she deserved them. Hadn't she been right there with everyone else in the Ministry that night, too? She'd seen enough, been through enough that she should be entitled to a share of knowledge, too. Not to mention that besides all that, she'd had to deal with all that business in first year, too…Ginny shuddered, abruptly tearing her thoughts from a place she tried very hard not to let them drift.
But here she was, leaning over the hallway banister, alone, the baby, while they were all allowed - albeit reluctantly - to know every little thing. And no matter how much she prodded them (Ron, Hermione, and even Harry, who had been there for a week already), they wouldn't say a word about what went on in the meetings. "Don't you remember how you felt last summer?" Ginny had screamed, red-faced and exasperated, at Harry.
"Look, I don't really want to talk about it…too much depressing stuff," he'd told her tiredly, shaking his head. "You don't want to hear it, anyway, trust me; you think you do, but you don't. C'mon, forget about it - you want to play chess or something?" He gave her a little lopsided grin, and she supposed it was meant to be encouraging or something, but it only made her all the more irritated.
No, thank you very much, she did not want to play chess. She wanted to know something, anything, no matter how depressing. So every day, like clockwork, she bent over the balustrade, Extendable Ear at the ready, and tested for an Imperturbable Charm.
Ginny removed the button from her mouth, wiped it off a bit on her pant leg, and, holding it up to the light, gave it a long look. "Too bad I'm out of Dungbombs…they worked so much better," she muttered. Then, with a flick of her wrist, she sent the button flying toward the kitchen door. It arched upwards and began to fall, slowly, towards the ground…
…But every day, like clockwork, whatever she threw was deflected, and she knew her test was positive.
"Urrrggggg!" Ginny groaned in frustration, letting out all the breath she'd been holding. It wasn't as if she'd been expecting her mother to forget to do the Charm, but it still angered her to no end. Why did they insist on babying her? She felt so utterly worthless…a war was going on, and the only thing they would let her do was get the doxies out of the curtains! In the two weeks she'd been there she'd spent just about every waking hour snooping about and pumping anyone she ran into for information, and the only thing she had was "Snape, mumble mumble, real problem, mumble, a Death Eater in the house!" And though this was suspicious, it wasn't a whole lot to show for her relentless search for information.
`I'd make a lousy spy,' Ginny thought as she kicked the railing. They always shut her out of those meetings, and covered every base to keep her from knowing what went on in them. Naturally, the more she thought about it, the more infuriated she became, and it threw her into a towering rage. It was the same situation with every meeting. Normally Ginny went somewhere quiet to fume, but today she felt like making a scene.
Down the staircase she pounded, giving each individual step a good, solid thump. The banister even shook as Ginny made her noisy descent. She didn't say anything, though; she'd spent all summer screaming, and had only just recovered her voice. Instead, she marched over to Mrs. Black's portrait, yanked the curtains open, and satisfied herself by kicking everything in sight.
The commotion Ginny was making did not go unnoticed by Mrs. Black, and it provoked the portrait into adding to the racket. She broke into an ear-splitting diatribe about how her house had been defiled, and Ginny hoped it was loud enough that the members of the Order couldn't even hear themselves think.
Violence was one of the best outlets for anger, Ginny thought, as she shattered a vase. She was sure she'd be in loads of trouble later, but Ginny didn't care…she was a true redhead: hotheaded and impulse driven. The consequences of her actions were the furthest thing from her mind at the moment. Right now, Ginny just needed to vent.
Her foot connected with an elaborately decorated bucket filled with, among other things, sinister looking umbrellas. The container flew across the room and hit the wall with a metallic clunk, spilling its contents onto the floor. One of the umbrellas had a handle that looked disturbingly like a dead bowtruckle, while another had been intricately carved into a very lifelike image of a snake. Ginny promptly smashed its head, and it splintered into thousands of tiny fragments.
But the scattered pieces did not stay scattered for long. As if drawn together by some invisible force, the bits of wood pulled back together to reform the serpent. Restored to its previous malevolent glory, the snake bore no mark of its recent encounter with the bottom of Ginny's shoe. Its eyes seemed to gleam wickedly (this Ginny probably imagined; she hated snakes, and to her even the shoe button eyes of a stuffed one would seem to be gleaming wickedly) out of its wooden head. Ginny took this look as a challenge, and crushed it again.
Time and time again the snake magically repaired itself, but Ginny, who was taking pleasure in her brutality, continued to pummel it. After awhile it quit resembling a serpent to her, as she began to picture her mother and all the other members of the order in its place. They positively enraged her! They absolutely overwhelmed her with fury! She could stand having to spend her summer in a moldering old house filled with dark objects, she could put up with her decontamination responsibilities, but it couldn't get any worse than the not knowing!
She was livid, and as her mood grew darker, so did the corridor. But the shadow that loomed over her was not just a byproduct of her rage.
Ginny had become so engrossed in beating the snake to a wooden pulp that she hadn't noticed that someone had entered Grimmauld Place. Suddenly aware of their overbearing presence, she froze mid-stomp, and slowly raised her eyes.
Of course. Of all the people who could have caught her wrecking the hallway, it had to be Professor Snape. Ginny stared at him wide-eyed in disbelief. How could her luck be this bad?
"Miss Weasley," he drawled, looking down his greasy nose at her with his surliest expression on his face. "Determined as you seem to be to destroy that umbrella, I must inform you that your efforts are wasted. Perhaps you are blinded by your irrepressible stubbornness, but you have clearly failed to notice that there is a very strong anti-breaking charm on the object beneath your shoe," he said silkily. "If you could call that tattered thing on your foot a shoe," he amended, giving her - well, George's really - sneaker a disdainful look.
Realizing that she hadn't moved a muscle since she first noticed Snape, Ginny quickly switched to a normal standing position. "You'd be incorrect in that assumption. I was perfectly well aware that there was an anti-breaking charm on it," she answered primly, completely ignoring his last remark.
Looking unconvinced, he merely raised an eyebrow.
Ginny threw up her hands. "Look, obviously I tore up the room. But, contrary to what it might look like, my primary objective wasn't to break everything in sight." Ginny surveyed the wreckage around her. She grimaced; it looked like a niffler had been let loose in there. Ginny briefly considered asking Snape to magic the mess away for her, but then thought better of it.
"Could have fooled me," he muttered, turning away from her and heading back towards the door he had entered in. For some reason, he always let her off the hook after only a couple gibes. Ginny figured he probably held some sort of grudging respect for her because she was exceptional at potion making.
"What the bloody hell happened here?" a familiar voice asked as the door shut behind him. Ginny immediately turned her attention to the doorway, which framed the most terrible addition to her nightmare thus far.
Draco Malfoy! What the bloody hell happened here, indeed.
Then something clicked into place in her brain. Snape, who was leading a Malfoy right into their headquarters, was obviously the Death Eater she'd heard mentioned. She turned on the greasy git.
"You are a complete idiot!" she snarled. "This is Malfoy! He supports You-Know-Who! And you, you just led him right into our headquarters! You've betrayed our secrets to the enemy! You've - AAAGH!" Ginny cried as Snape grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, not hard, but enough to get her to cease her fanatical prattling, her accusatory finger still poking his chest.
"Calm down, you blithering ninny," he instructed, releasing his grip on her shoulders.
Ginny made only a mild attempt to do so. Still breathing heavily, she gritted out, "Explain. Yourself."
"You are aware that my role in the Order requires me to associate with the…opposition, are you not, Miss Weasley?"
"I wasn't aware that it required you to invite them over to our base of operations!" Ginny snapped.
"It does if I don't want to betray myself as a double agent," Snape responded coolly. "Narcissa Malfoy expressly asked me to take Draco off her hands for the summer…"
For the summer? As in the whole summer? As in the entire month and a half left before they returned to Hogwarts? "What?" Ginny shrieked, horrified.
"Yes, I'm afraid that Mr. Malfoy will staying here for the remainder of the summer," Snape affirmed, and Ginny felt a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.
"As I was saying, Mrs. Malfoy apparently has some `big plans,'" Snape continued contemptuously, "and felt she needed Draco out of the way to get on with them. You can see my predicament, of course," he explained. "If I refused to aid a…fellow…Death Eater it would arouse suspicion, but young Mr. Malfoy would surely figure out my secret if he were to stay with me. I discussed the situation with Dumbledore, and the old man told me to bring the boy here, where many close eyes will be kept on him. Naturally, Malfoy's memory will have to be modified at the end of his stay. Undesirable as it is, it's the only solution."
Ginny glanced over at Malfoy, who looked like he had a Blast-Ended Skrewt up his arse about the whole thing. Well, of course he did: his mum had kicked him out of what was probably some Death Eater convention and unknowingly sent him to spend a month with the enemy! She supposed he himself must not be a Death Eater yet, but she realized: "Moody must have been talking about him when I overheard him say there'd be a Death Eater here!"
"Have you been eavesdropping?" Snape sneered.
Well, she'd been trying. "Not as effectively as I would have liked!" Ginny answered.
"Not as effectively as you would have liked?" Snape repeated.
"It's really hard to listen in on conversations in this place. That's the only thing I've actually managed to overhear," Ginny admitted, bitterly. And if that wasn't bad enough, her miserable summer had worsened severely in just the past ten minutes. She didn't dare think that it couldn't get any worse than this, though, for fear that it would.
Eying Malfoy distastefully, Ginny realized that maybe he was worse off than she. He was being denied all the information he wanted, too. His father was in Azkaban, his mother was busy plotting and preventing him from joining in on any of the fun, and he had to live with the Order of the Phoenix…things couldn't get much worse than that.
If you were evil.
As if he sensed her look, Draco glanced toward Ginny, and met her gaze with his hooded one. His gray eyes were cold and spiteful, and she was fairly certain she saw his nostrils twitch in fear (she doubted he would ever forgive her for the Bat-Bogey Curse she'd hit him with at the end of the year). Just for good measure, he looked her up and down, slowly, in a way that would have unsettled any other girl.
And bless him, as displeased with his current position as he must have been, Draco Malfoy could still smirk.
Ginny rolled her eyes and turned back to Snape, fixing him with a pointed look. "Well?" she asked, folding her arms and bracing herself for a cutting comment about her lackluster spying skills.
If that's what she was expecting, Snape would end up disappointing her. "Well, Miss Weasley, if you'll excuse me, I have a meeting to attend. Why don't I leave you two here to…catch up?" he drawled.
Catch up? Now that was certainly an unattractive prospect.
"Oh, and why don't you give Mr. Malfoy the tour? After all, he will be staying here for quite a while…"
And with that, Professor Snape turned on his heal and strode out of the hallway, his cloak billowing behind him. The door swung closed after him with an audible click that echoed through the corridor, leaving Draco and Ginny very much alone.
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Fin de capitulo uno. Please review, I love feedback! And I can't believe I actually put a Bierce reference in here…anybody catch that?
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