Chapter 5: Tempers
From the time Draco had brought Ginny back home, the manor had become iceberg city to say the least. Even the house elves were scared of this recent event. Draco had never been more himself to the house elves as he was when he was a kid. Ginny, however, had changed that once she had moved in. But now since things were a bit off, Draco tended to revert to his old ways out of habit and out of rebellion. It was as if he was a child again, she thought. The weather outside, the snow and ice, only seemed to make the iceberg city in the Manor worse. The coldness of the manor was Draco's way of getting her to speak to him. He knew she couldn't last forever with the coldness of the manor.
She could remember the conversation they had as if it had happened just yesterday. It was the worst one she could have ever thought might have happened, perhaps even worse; it was a complete nightmare and she only wished for it to end soon.
"Want to tell me why you've jumped all over creation?" he asked with those sharp steel eyes of his that only harvested nothing but pure coldness. It hurt her to see him like this; it was as if he had shut herself off from him completely. Not that she blamed him, of course, but it was deathly scary as well. Stubbornly, she refused to look at him anymore as well as speak, which only seemed to set him off even worse. "Ginevra, look at me!" Draco ordered.
She looked up into his dark soulless eyes with her own eyes full of fear and sadness. "What?" she sobbed.
"Don't `what' me! I am your husband! I deserve to be treated better! I demand--" Draco could only go so far before he received a well earned slap in the face from Ginny. His face burned from her hand and he stared coldly into her soft and hurt eyes. "Ginev-," he sneered.
"No, Draco, don't you `Ginevra' me. Don't you dare even try to demand things of me to do. I may be your wife but I am not your property!" Ginny yelled. She rarely yelled but when she did, it was definitely a scary thing.
"You should have thought about that before you ruined our daughter's evening during the Christmas ball at Hogwarts!"
"Ruined? RUINED? Are you fucking kidding? Excuse me for fainting then! Next time I'll try to stay out of everyone's way next time I see a ghost!"
"A ghost? You saw a ghost?!"
"Well what other bloody reason would I faint for? For the bloody Christmas ghost of the fucking future? Gee, there's a thought, can't wait to see where and what they would take me to see on that one!"
"GINEVRA!"
"DRACO!"
They yelled back and forth at each other for several minutes, that seemed like hours, that never ended.
"GINNY!" he said, this time grabbing her arms and shaking her.
"Draco, please! You're hurting me!" She was trembling. This was all way too familiar of her days in her first year at Hogwarts in the Chamber. She could sense a panic attack coming on and this one, she knew, would not be good.
She had to get away. She had to have space. She just had to be on her own. She needed to breathe properly. Draco still had a hold of her when she was beginning to enter into her freak out mode. The better hold he had of her, the worse she got.
She began screaming and, like in a normal panic attack, she was no longer in her body. She was trapped on the inside from the outside, if one could possibly understand that. It would be a fellow person who had experienced this before as what she was going through now.
"Ginny, please stop screaming!"
Those words were all of what she could hear before she completely blacked out. But before she did, her eyes went from her beautiful mysterious green eyes to a series of panic that flashed in her eyes to him. He could barely register what was happening until he saw her eyes glaze over to the other side, the side of complete darkness. It was simply a miracle that he had caught her before she hit the floor.
"Oh shit! Ginny! Please don't die on me, please!" She became completely limp in his arms after that. "Oh fuck, love, darling, please don't leave me. I love you. I need you to survive. I can't survive without you."
Since then, after Draco almost lost her and their child within, he was definitely a changed man. It was now a month later and Ginny was in the sitting room just outside of hers and Draco's room. This room would eventually become the baby's nursery, she had decided, trying to pick paint colors. She hadn't yet decided if she wanted to manually have the paint applied to the walls or if she wanted it applied to the walls magically.
Draco had been dropping hints off left and right about what he wanted. He wanted to paint the room as if they were surrounded by a quidditch stadium, as if a game of quidditch was going on but yet, not really. He even wanted the walls to make noises occasionally as if a game were truly going on but out of Ginny's fears of the noises waking the baby up too much made her put her foot down on that one. She had discovered with both Lizzie and Adrian as babies that neither one liked having noise around them as they slept. It was as if you were to be wishing for death if you had noise going on around the babies when they slept.
She was between many colors and, at times, she thought she was never going to be able to choose. She had theories for each color possibility. Red, for the theory, of a constant love that would blanket the child. Blue, for a deep sense of calm to help ease the baby into sleep easier and tended to keep the emotions at bay as well. Yellow she refused. Just for the theory that having the walls yellow only represented the emotion of anger. It was too happy go lucky in her opinion. Gold, of course, was sort of a god like complex she considered and, last she checked, she didn't really want to let her baby think he or she had a god complex about them. Not like Draco did when they were in school. She hated and despised that with all her being. Or, of course, there was always the choice of a solid green, the color of Slytherin. Granted, she didn't dare want to admit it at times, she often considered that she was sorted into the wrong house all those years ago at the beginning of her first year at Hogwarts. Not to mention the color was a beautiful color.
It was beginning to be very hard to pick a color. There were so many to choose from but only one color got to be the winner. Well, unless she decided to change the design of the room into a striped pattern or a completely modern pattern or anything else imaginable. She thought of a very cruel joke to play towards Draco. Of course she would never actually pull through with it but just the thought of it made her happy to her heart's desire.
Grey.
That was the color. No way would her baby's room ever be grey, if she had anything to do with it, but just the thought of telling Draco it would be grey would just be thrilling enough just to see the look on his face. That would sure be a dispute waiting to happen, she thought again. A voice from another room interrupted her evil thoughts.
"Ginny?"
"In here!" Ginny called out in return.
"Where is here?"
"In my room!" she replied.
Soon the visitor had made their way to her. "What are you doing, Ginny?" he asked, wondering why all of the paint samples were surrounding his sister on the little rocking chair and ottoman.
"What does it look like, Fred?" Ginny asked. How thick could her brothers get? "Trying to pick out a color for the baby's room."
"Oh," he replied. "I vote for pink."
"I vote for blue," the other twin replied.
"Pink and blue? My dear brothers, where did you get that idea?"
"Isn't that the standard colors for a girl or a boy?"
"Yes, but how about a more neutral color?"
"Grey?"
Ginny only laughed, which they didn't quite understand but she continued. "Sorry, but no. I'd rather not like the color of Draco's eyes all over the place in the nursery."
"Well, alright, it's your choice."
"So, what brings you here? What are you up to?" Ginny asked.
He looked down at his feet and started to get a guilty look to his face. Oh no, she knew this look. It was the look that said, "I'm sorry but I've done something." Almost like as if when they did something, they almost always cowered in front of her until she literally said she forgave them. It was the only way they considered themselves safe.
"Fred? What did you and George do?" she asked timidly.
"Well…"
"Fred," she warned.
"Well… you see, we…uh…" Fred stuttered, afraid of her actions.
"Fred, spit it out! Whatever it is, tell me!" Her patience was beginning to wane and it wasn't great when that happened.
"We kind of knocked out your husband," Fred said, refusing to look his baby sister in the eye. She had a powerful punch and he sure as hell didn't want to revisit that again.
"You did what?" Ginny screamed at him. She was the only one allowed to do that and here they were, doing it for her!
"Now sis-"
"Don't you `sis' me Fred, you conniving little bat, pitiful older brother of you! What happened and where is my husband?" Ginny continued to scream at him in rage.
Oh crap, Fred thought. I'm in for it now. Someone please help me from her!
"Fred!" another voice called out.
"You are so dead, dear brother! You will only wish to be able to see daylight tomorrow once I'm done with you!" Ginny continued screaming as George walked into the room.
This time, when George walked in, Ginny wasn't just yelling and screaming, she was throwing anything she could get her hands on at the moment. Lucky for Fred and George, she wasn't in the kitchen. Who knows what might have been thrown?
"Ouch!" Fred exclaimed as he tried to hide from their baby sister who was currently about to murder them. Ginny was truly the only one who held power over her brothers, Fred and George. If any of the others had trouble with them, for revenge, they sent Ginny after them.
"Take cover!" George said after seeing Fred being hit with a frying pan. So much for the thought of being thankful they weren't in the kitchen! She could accio anything she wanted. He only hoped that she didn't go for the knives next. They would be murdered and not thought about once ever again if she chose that route.
They hid behind the door of her closet. It wasn't the best they could do but at a little moment's notice, it seemed to be the best cover they could have ever thought of in trying to save their skins from Ginny. "Ginny, please," they both begged for mercy as she continued to take years off of their lives every minute.
"Please what, you knuckle heads?" Ginny replied, forgetting all about the paint samples and the hard decisions to make for the baby's room. She loved the baby, of course, (and usually it came first before anything else) but Fred and George setting her off was usually what made her forget about anything else in this world.
"Please, stop this attack!" Fred cried, praying to see the next day or at least the next few hours. "We didn't do anything!"
"Oh, you didn't, did you?" Ginny asked. "What was that you told me earlier? Knocking out my husband?" She continued to throw pots and pans at their precious heads. Somehow, magically, the pans kept reappearing.
"Well, we did do that," George said calmly dodging an omelet pan but then in a quick manner said, "but it was an accident!"
"Oh, I bet it was, you idiot," Ginny said, not believing a word being said to her. She continued throwing every object imaginable.
"Hello?" another voice called out, ducking from the path of a stew pot. "What's with all the pots and pans being in your room? What's going on?" The voice belonged to Charlie. Charlie took a look at the scene and knew exactly what was going on. "Oh," Charlie snickered, "what did you do now, Fred and George?"
Even Charlie knew that, once in a while, the only rational answer to why their house was amuck was because his brothers, Fred and George, had done something recently to either upset or really make their sister furious. They must have gone beyond furious this time. She was about to start throwing knives at the poor blokes.
"Sis!" Charlie said, grabbing her arms and preventing her from throwing the knife in Fred's direction. "I know you'd like to personally pulverize these two for whatever they did but let's not have Dad suddenly bail you out of Azkaban anytime soon."
"Oh, I wouldn't go to Azkaban for this," Ginny said evilly. "Besides, I would hide their bodies before they could ever connect the dots."
"Ginny, come on, your scaring the poor blokes!" Charlie argued.
Fred and George feared for their lives. "You really think she would do that?"
At this point, Ginny would have done almost anything, especially with her magic a little out of whack, what with combining her magic mixed in with the baby's magic as well. George looked at Fred in fear. "I don't think I want to find out."
"We should have listened to Percy's warning, shouldn't we?"
"We don't usually, but perhaps we definitely should have this time," George said. "This has gone way beyond usual!"
"Ok, so what did you two do this time?" Charlie asked after now having gotten his sister to at least sit on the bed without throwing anything towards her brothers.
"We kind of accidentally knocked Draco out cold and Gin sort of just went ballistic on us," George explained.
"Kind of?" Charlie laughed. "No wonder she was about to murder you two pour souls."
"Bro, this is not a matter to be laughed at," Ginny scolded.
"Sorry, Sis," Charlie said, straightening up for his own good. He may have gotten her to stop clobbering Fred and George but what was to say she might turn on him and take a few shots at him as well. That would sure be fun, especially since he taught her everything he knew.
"Back to my earlier question," Ginny said with her eyes narrowed. "Where is he?"
"We left him at the shop," Fred said cowardly and quickly. Ginny rolled her eyes and apparated away to the shop. "Damn! Gin is scary!" Fred claimed.
"I'll say! She's worse than dear old Mum! What a dreadful fortune!" George replied.
"Well, you should have thought about that before you knocked Draco out. You better leave," Charlie said.
Charlie apparated to the back of the shop to see his sister desperately trying to get Draco to wake up. "Draco, come on please," Ginny pleaded. "Wake up, darling." Ginny continued to stroke his face, moving his hair out of his eyes and sobbing quietly. Draco seemed not to wake up at all.
While Ginny was pleading Draco to wake, Fred and George took this opportunity to speak to Charlie a little bit more secluded like.
"Hey Charlie? Got a minute?"
He glanced over towards Ginny and then looked at Fred and George, "What is it?"
"We didn't really knock Draco out…"
"WHAT?"
"Ssshh!" the twins cried, "we don't want Ginny to hear!"
"You don't want me to hear what exactly?"
Well fuck, Fred thought, here goes a smooth moment!
"We didn't knock him out." They both muttered as they stared at their shoes.
"Excuse me?"
"Uh…"
"Who did then?"
"Now Gin, remember that we love you and we always love our fellow brothers."
"Who did it?"
"Percy."
"Gin?" Charlie said coming from behind her, noticing her face beginning to drain of any color that might have once been there before.
"Charlie," Ginny said softly. "Help me get him back to the Manor."
She couldn't discuss this now, she couldn't deal with the stress of all this. Sure she was definitely going to murder her older brother but she knew Percy wasn't smart for nothing. She knew by now, he had securely hidden himself away from the rest of the Weasley clan.
"Sure, sis, I'll help you." Charlie agreed knowing Ginny could only hold onto her patience for so long. He picked Draco up and apparated to the master bedroom.
Ginny wasn't too far behind Charlie. She began to realize just how nice her house was, or at least what it once was before she went a tad bit touchy. "I did make quite a mess, didn't I?" she asked deciding to try to avoid the true questions she really wanted to ask but out of fear of scaring little Adrian, she kept herself together.
"Indeed you did," Charlie said knowing it may be a long night for her but, at least, she would have Draco back. "Would you mind to clear the bed please?"
Ginny quickly scooped up her card samples of paint for the baby's room. She put them into a pile to be sorted through later. Ginny quickly retrieved a wet cloth to start patting on Draco's forehead. She didn't do this quickly, or rather taking the cloth and patting it on his forehead, but she knew perfection was always close to the best thing in the world. Everything was clean and ready for anybody. Perhaps she was just a neat freak as well. "Draco, please wake up," Ginny continued to plead while trying to help him.
"Gin, he might not wake up for a little while," Charlie said, not wanting to have to go murder two of his brothers because of the turn of events.
"Don't say that," Ginny sobbed.
"Ginevra, just realize he might not for a few hours. It may even take a day," Charlie said. Charlie never said her real name unless it was a time of danger or being completely serious.
"Please leave," Ginny said solemnly.
"Ginny," Charlie started to say, hoping she would change her mind at a second's notice.
"No. You said what you thought you needed to say and now I'm telling you to get out," Ginny said firmly.
"All right, my dear sister," Charlie whispered. "I will do as you wish." He kissed her forehead but before he left a little voice interrupted them.
"Mummy?" Adrian was very sleepy and lately was often watched by the nanny. Ginny had originally decided she didn't need a nanny but she caved in after a while of Draco's persistent nagging about it.
There Adrian stood before her, dressed in his red little pajamas clutching his worn out teddy bear and staring into his mother's eyes with tears running down his little cheeks.
Ginny lowered herself down to Adrian's level and began speaking to him.
"What's the matter my sweet boy?" she ran her fingers on his tears wiping them away.
"What's wrong with Daddy?" he bawled seeing Draco knocked out on their bed.
Her heart broke at that moment, "Oh my sweet," she said gathering him into her arms, "your daddy is just in a long nap. He will wake up soon, I promise." She hoped at least.
"Mummy I want Daddy!" he continued to cry as she held him.
Charlie stayed a little while until Adrian had finally cried himself to sleep and then held Ginny later after she had put him to bed, while she herself finally let her guard down to cry over her husband.
A week had passed and still Draco had remained unconscious. Every day that Draco had not awoken, it only made Ginny agitated at her brothers even more, especially Percy. Not to mention, she had to rock Adrian to sleep every night while he cried for Draco.
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