Standard Disclaimer applies: I own nothing save for the character of Timothy Groan, and even then he is largely inspired by the character Steerpike (my mistake from the previous disclaimer) from Mervyn Peake's brilliant Gormenghast trilogy.
With love and thanks to my reviewers from the last chapter, Anise and Lili Montegue. Do hope you'll like this chapter. :)
Chapter Two: No One Answers
For moments everyone is still: standing here, having arrived in a fireplace which has been closed off from the main Floo network since the night before, is a boy grown Aurors have been searching high and low for.
And then Ginny rushes forward, pushing past her father, and throws her arms about the slender, pale figure, a gurgle of words that trips over themselves coming out of her mouth. The gist of her outburst, however, is finally made clear, as extricating himself slowly from her, the boy smiles and promises in his clear intimate voice that he will tell her everything.
‘Ginny,’ comes a wondering voice, ‘who is this?’
Right hand still linking the boy’s left, Ginny turns around, as if released from a trance. Finally, she says in a voice rushed with a bubbling kind of ecstasy, ‘This is Timothy; he has told you already. Timothy Groan, mum, from school, and one of my best friends,’ she pauses, smilingly, and then continues, ‘I promised him he could come and stay.’
Blindly, as she says this, she does not notice Harry Potter turning away, suddenly unable to take the sight of her.
~
Upstairs, Draco Malfoy frowns as he slips a long, slender finger into a small crevice in the wall behind the low backless shelf located directly (and rather unwisely, he had thought previously, wondering how many times Percy Weasley could have banged his head against its cheap pine) above the bed frame, almost diagonally across from the penciled words. He almost imagines that he can see, from this height, a thin sliver of weak light from the hole, aborted abruptly by the row of books – but he is not certain if it is really that deep enough to reach the other side.
Finally he pulls his finger out again, and shifting his body against the bed frame, he uses his legs and body weight to somehow straddle the bed forward slightly, making sure not to trigger the wards, which are, as he has enquired of McGonagall this morning, within a half metre of the sides of the bed. His arm, reaching upwards onto the shelf, hurts, despite it being in a less uncomfortable position now, but he ignores it, clamping down on the pain and the memories and the terrible future, and taking the books down carefully and placing them onto the bed, he finally manages to be eye level with the hole, his body half on the bed and half upright.
A whorl of dust and light greets him, and behind the small crevice, at an awkward angle and almost half a floor above, stretches the room which he had awoken in the day before.
Ginny Weasley’s room.
~
Outside, Harry Potter can still hear Timothy Groan’s soft insinuating voice and the reactions of the Weasleys to his words. A fluid action beside him allows for a slender, womanly frame to drop onto the steps facing the Weasley backyard. Fleur Delacour is next to him, her hair like faery strands of ivory-coloured silk in the growing darkness.
‘You like Ginny?’ she says rather than asks without preamble, her words curling and thick just as Groan’s are thin, even as they are as pregnant.
Harry frowns. ‘If you’ve been in this house for so long, I’m sure you would have heard about this by now,’ he replies, not bothering to keep the irritation from showing itself.
Fleur turns around, and fixes her gaze on him, cat-like and bright, but strangely unseeing. ‘Not ‘heverything is about you, ‘arry,’ she whispers, almost in a sing-song voice. ‘Ginny is a lot of things, and you’re…’ she pauses here, smiling lightly and almost to herself, ‘you’re just one of those things.’
‘You think she’s forgotten about me?’ Harry asks, sharply.
Fleur clicks her tongue, and her mouth twists into a deeper, wider inflection. ‘You’re still asking the wrong questions, ‘arry,’ she replies cryptically, ‘You’ve got to – ‘ow do you say it? – change the subjects of your question about,’ she ends, and helpfully pats his knee.
‘So I’m supposed to ask if I’ve forgotten about her?’ he demands heatedly. ‘What in the world do you mean by that, Fleur?’
‘Exactly what I mean,’ she replies, except this time, abruptly, there is nothing cat-like to her eyes, and nothing remotely detached in her tone. Suddenly Harry feels cold, and Fleur’s face seems almost to be made of sharp shafts and angular plains in the dim light. ‘You must realize who Ginny is, Harry Potter, since you seem to have always forgotten about that.’
And with these words Fleur gets up, leaving him in the gathering darkness, and it is a long time before Harry realizes that she has not mispronounced his name.
~
Inside, Timothy Groan does not seem to have any answers. He has had a private, one-way and one-trip Floo connection to the Weasleys’ (with personal permission from Ginny, in blood an owner of the Burrow), and he has disabled it since, well, he has obviously just used it. But he does not say why or when or where; politely, he addresses Mrs. Weasley’s question – she has already warmed to him, with his quiet measured voice. No, he did not know about the attacks then – but he lightly laughs, in an endearingly self-deprecating manner, and jokes about something about clairvoyance, and constant vigilance.
Hermione Granger wonders if he is about to say something about being a snake. Narrow-eyed, she studies how closely Groan is sitting next to Ginny as he addresses each Weasley in turn, and wonders why Ron has not protested. Ron is watching Groan with a frank interest that is distinctly lacking in hostility. The twins laugh; Hermione turns away, knowing sickeningly that Harry isn’t around.
Fleur slides noiselessly into the room, and shakes her magnificent head at Hermione. It is a testimony to how much Timothy Groan has his audience in thrall, as no one, not even Ron, notices this. Hermione winces, almost: Harry being Harry, she already knows what he must be thinking.
Poor Harry.
Hermione frowns, to herself, because that last thought leads to a train of other thoughts, as is often the case with her; yet this train is so dense and convoluted in structure even Hermione begins to feel the foetal stirrings of helplessness somewhere within her consciousness.
She cannot understand why, after all that she has done, Ginny would decide to treat Harry this way. She never did understand why Ginny should ever have protested against it, but finally she had gone along…but now, even as everything seems to fall apart, Ginny seems to be insisting on heading in that direction.
She suddenly wonders how much she knows about Ginny, sliding a glance towards her from the corner of her eye, and watching her seated so easily by Groan’s side.
Timothy Groan. Hermione frowns again, this time almost forgetting her previous entanglement of thoughts, rolling his name slowly and carefully in her mouth. A fifth-year Slytherin Prefect, quiet and adroit of movement; Hermione once overheard the Head Girl saying, in a sharp, violent voice quite opposite to her usual mild tones, that she hated him, hated him. Hermione remembers the quick, horrid quirk to the older girl’s lips, grotesque with such a foreign exertion.
She wonders, suddenly almost afraid, why Ginny has never mentioned him to her.
~
Far away from the Burrow, what is left of Tom Riddle holds court.
‘Severus,’ he says, in a thin, keening voice, ‘why is it that the rest of the wizarding world has not heard about the sacrificial lamb that is Lucius’s son?’
The last words in his question are slow, and the eyes, red in its core but with a strange graduation of dark blue spreading from its centre, tilt towards a bowed head, its light hair silver in the dim light. There is no movement from the Death Eater, and a languid, terrible smile stretches Voldemort’s lips.
In some hell, his mother might weep.
Then the smile slides from the face, and he returns his gaze to Snape, similarly bowed before him.
‘McGonagall, I would suppose, milord, does not want to give us a reaction,’ replies Snape, and there is nothing in his voice.
‘He is crippled, then? Crippled to an extent that he can never wield magic again?’
‘Yes, milord,’ Snape answers, mechanically, then abruptly, almost in a show of some form of life within him, lifts his head calmly and continues, ‘However, it seems Poppy Pomfrey has been made to watch over him; the Weasleys, it seems, are to nurse him back to health, at the least. He should survive.’
Voldemort nods at this, lightly and almost distractedly; his quick eyes have returned to Lucius’s form; there is nothing in the clean, well-cut frame.
‘The Weasleys – their youngest son, Ronald, I remember, being Potter’s best friend; and their youngest daughter…’
Tom Riddle, his face ageless and cruelly smooth, smiles, and this time Snape, his face being the only one tilted up towards him, sees it, and almost flinches.
‘I remember the girl.’
~
In the room in the left corner of the fifth landing of the Burrow, just below the attic, a boy awakes, panting, just as Snape finally turns away from Tom Riddle’s face.
Blimey, a strange dream that one was. Ginny talking, and talking, her eyes staring straight in front of her, and figures and figures walking around and around her and him being unable to push past them towards her. Another voice, thin and reed-like and almost soft, saying that he – it was a male voice, he is sure – remembers someone, a girl.
He blinks, shakes his head, and looks over towards his clock, at the far end of the room where Harry’s bed is…
He bolts out of bed, knowing already that something has gone wrong, and not just because Harry is not in his bed.
~
Almost ten minutes before Ron wakes up, Ginny slips out of her room, drawing her arms about herself as she shivers; the air is strangely cold for June.
Before she can turn, however, her fingers barely having left the knob of her door, someone moves out of the shadows and speaks.
‘What are you doing out so late, Ginny?’
‘Harry,’ she breathes, after recovering her composure, ‘what are you doing here?’
‘Standing,’ he replies, and there is something hard in his tone, something indefinable. ‘I suppose you’re about to go looking for someone. Groan, maybe?’
Ginny lets out a quick, frustrated sound, before whispering back, ‘We’re not together anymore, Harry James Potter.’
‘So you and Groan, one of your best friends, are what I think you were?’
‘Harry, don’t think,’ she retorts sharply, ‘it doesn’t become you.’ She moves forward, meaning to sidestep him.
‘What exactly is it with you and Slytherin Prefects, Ginny?’ he hisses, low and harsh, and she stops, staring at him; something passes between them and suddenly everything has changed, to Ginny at least.
‘I’m going now, Potter,’ she says, slowly and deliberately, and he reels as if he has been slapped. Before she has had the chance to move, he has reached out and gripped her arm, pushing her against the corridor wall in one swift movement. There is something broken in his expression; she cannot pause to care.
‘Ginny, I’m not going to be here for long,’ he says, the words quick and desperate, ‘and please, I just...you’ve got to listen to me, you can’t be like this…’
‘Timothy is one of my best friends,’ replies Ginny, softly, looking directly at him, ‘and I don’t need to explain myself to you.’
‘Ginny, I…’
‘When you find out about everything, in the end, Harry, you’ll think differently. I’m tired now; just let me go,’ she interjects, and as the grip loosens, as he stares at her, lost and upset, she slips beneath his arm and walks off into the darkness, and doesn’t turn back.
~
When Ginny is in his arms, back against the couch at the end of Charlie’s room, she falls asleep quickly and doesn’t whisper or scream.
At the window, his eagle owl in its cage gives a low, melancholic hoot; in the morning, Mr. Weasley will banish it (‘Let it out,’ were his precise words, but Timothy is an unflinching boy) into the nearby woods along with the rest of the family owls for the rest of the summer: it has already been established to him that he is not to owl, because no word is to be expressed about the state of things – people – within the Burrow.
Timothy Groan smiles to himself and he reaches around her towards the thin archaic reed pipe, the stuff of another pale, slender Groan before him; balancing it between his long fingers, he begins to play.
It is a low hypnotizing tune, and only the night knows how beautifully he plays, and only the night can despair of a thing he cannot do.
Beside him, Ginny Weasley sleeps, tangled red hair over her white face.
~
‘Harry,’ says Ron, immediately after the two boys almost collide into each other in the stairway just midway above the third landing where Ginny’s room is, ‘something’s going to happen to Ginny.’
When the words tumble out of his mouth, half breathless, he doesn’t even know where they came from. He doesn’t even think to ask why Harry is out of bed at this hour in the first place.
Harry narrows his eyes. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know, it’s just…’ Helplessly, Ron sweeps his tousled hair up with a hand. ‘Harry, I know this is going to sound mental, and I’m not quite sure myself what exactly is going on and how I somehow know that I’m right, but you’ve got to hear me out…’
~
His heart clenches to fit in this new toy, the tiny hole just slightly higher than halfway above the room; it should feel very empty, actually, what with his father’s death and his mother’s disappearance and Tom Riddle’s words, but years and inertia doesn’t an efficient compartmentalization and updated profile of one’s heart make.
He remembers as he falls asleep, vaguely from somewhere, a pale face and some words, but he can no longer remember what exactly is real and what exactly is from dreams or waking dreams; sometimes in the rush everything had seemed to meld into one another, in this past year.
Draco remembers, when he was young, to have seen someone seated at the second floor of the Malfoy library, leg crooked at an angle and back against the Louis XIV, someone smiling and pale, but something cold had gripped him and he had run past ahead instead of stopping to look at the person; years later, he can never know whether the person had been a person, real and breathing hollow breath in the thick stifling air of June, or whether the person had only been a figment of his imagination.
He remembers another pale face, and a shock of hair that is so neutral in its colour it is impossible to define; he remembers whispered words, the cold serpentine smile in each syllable as a voice said, ‘Please allow me to introduce myself: I am a man of wealth and taste.’
He remembers, and he remembers, and then a hand pulls at him –
And he wakes up, screaming, and stares into Ginny Weasley’s pale face.
~
He is panting; it is half past five in the morning of Bill’s wedding. She had woken up earlier to get back to her room before Hermione wakes up, when she had heard the screaming.
Sightlessly screaming, he had clawed at her before the wide gray eyes had finally snapped open, and now she watches him carefully, knowing not to speak.
‘Weasley,’ he finally manages. He looks away. A long silence follows.
‘I know it’ll be useless to tell you that everything will be alright,’ Ginny finally says, ‘So I figure I’ll just remind you it’s morning.’
Malfoy finally turns back to her, his expression inscrutable. Eventually he says, ‘I know, Weasley,’ and she recognizes the familiar thread of condescension in it.
She turns to return to her room at this point; from the far corner of her eye, she almost imagines that something changes in his countenance at this point.
Closing the door, she feels his eyes on her.
~
That night, Ginny’s dress still white about herself and the celebratory Butterbeer still coursing through her system, she stops, shocked, as she watches Harry, Ron and Hermione move carefully along the corridor just as she is entering the bathroom.
They stop at the sound of her gasp.
‘You’re going,’ Ginny says, the words sounding limp and useless; ‘you’re going off to face Tom, aren’t you?’ And then, suddenly with greater conviction, ‘Without me, and without telling Mum and Dad.’
‘Ginny,’ coaxes Ron, stepping forward, ‘We need to go now…we can’t possibly…’
‘Bring me along because I’m too young?’ finishes Ginny in a deceptively soft voice. ‘You’re going to find the Horcruxes without my help?’
‘Ginny, please…’ begins Harry, and suddenly she hates the way he calls her name, softly and politely; it reminds her very much of Tom. She flinches, backing away from him.
She turns on Hermione, a blind anger surging through her.
‘And why does Hermione deserve to go with you, and not me?’
‘This has nothing to do with Hermione…’
‘Really?’ A wide quirk comes upon Ginny’s lips, stretching her mouth into an ugly sneer. ‘Would you like to hear what Hermione has done this past term, Harry?’ Her words are sharp and fierce, and Hermione blanches.
‘Ginny, what are you doing?’ Hermione hisses, eyes wide, but the strange contortion of Ginny’s lips deepens.
‘What’s Hermione done, Ginny?’ Ron blurts in, but there is something fearful in his eyes, and that is enough to make Ginny hesitate.
Her hesitation only lasts a moment, but within this moment something at her side slips, and then everything goes black.
Additional disclaimer -
'Please allow me to introduce myself: I am a man of wealth and taste' are lyrics from the song 'Sympathy for the Devil', and belong to the Rolling Stones.
With love and thanks to my reviewers from the last chapter, Anise and Lili Montegue. Do hope you'll like this chapter. :)
Chapter Two: No One Answers
For moments everyone is still: standing here, having arrived in a fireplace which has been closed off from the main Floo network since the night before, is a boy grown Aurors have been searching high and low for.
And then Ginny rushes forward, pushing past her father, and throws her arms about the slender, pale figure, a gurgle of words that trips over themselves coming out of her mouth. The gist of her outburst, however, is finally made clear, as extricating himself slowly from her, the boy smiles and promises in his clear intimate voice that he will tell her everything.
‘Ginny,’ comes a wondering voice, ‘who is this?’
Right hand still linking the boy’s left, Ginny turns around, as if released from a trance. Finally, she says in a voice rushed with a bubbling kind of ecstasy, ‘This is Timothy; he has told you already. Timothy Groan, mum, from school, and one of my best friends,’ she pauses, smilingly, and then continues, ‘I promised him he could come and stay.’
Blindly, as she says this, she does not notice Harry Potter turning away, suddenly unable to take the sight of her.
~
Upstairs, Draco Malfoy frowns as he slips a long, slender finger into a small crevice in the wall behind the low backless shelf located directly (and rather unwisely, he had thought previously, wondering how many times Percy Weasley could have banged his head against its cheap pine) above the bed frame, almost diagonally across from the penciled words. He almost imagines that he can see, from this height, a thin sliver of weak light from the hole, aborted abruptly by the row of books – but he is not certain if it is really that deep enough to reach the other side.
Finally he pulls his finger out again, and shifting his body against the bed frame, he uses his legs and body weight to somehow straddle the bed forward slightly, making sure not to trigger the wards, which are, as he has enquired of McGonagall this morning, within a half metre of the sides of the bed. His arm, reaching upwards onto the shelf, hurts, despite it being in a less uncomfortable position now, but he ignores it, clamping down on the pain and the memories and the terrible future, and taking the books down carefully and placing them onto the bed, he finally manages to be eye level with the hole, his body half on the bed and half upright.
A whorl of dust and light greets him, and behind the small crevice, at an awkward angle and almost half a floor above, stretches the room which he had awoken in the day before.
Ginny Weasley’s room.
~
Outside, Harry Potter can still hear Timothy Groan’s soft insinuating voice and the reactions of the Weasleys to his words. A fluid action beside him allows for a slender, womanly frame to drop onto the steps facing the Weasley backyard. Fleur Delacour is next to him, her hair like faery strands of ivory-coloured silk in the growing darkness.
‘You like Ginny?’ she says rather than asks without preamble, her words curling and thick just as Groan’s are thin, even as they are as pregnant.
Harry frowns. ‘If you’ve been in this house for so long, I’m sure you would have heard about this by now,’ he replies, not bothering to keep the irritation from showing itself.
Fleur turns around, and fixes her gaze on him, cat-like and bright, but strangely unseeing. ‘Not ‘heverything is about you, ‘arry,’ she whispers, almost in a sing-song voice. ‘Ginny is a lot of things, and you’re…’ she pauses here, smiling lightly and almost to herself, ‘you’re just one of those things.’
‘You think she’s forgotten about me?’ Harry asks, sharply.
Fleur clicks her tongue, and her mouth twists into a deeper, wider inflection. ‘You’re still asking the wrong questions, ‘arry,’ she replies cryptically, ‘You’ve got to – ‘ow do you say it? – change the subjects of your question about,’ she ends, and helpfully pats his knee.
‘So I’m supposed to ask if I’ve forgotten about her?’ he demands heatedly. ‘What in the world do you mean by that, Fleur?’
‘Exactly what I mean,’ she replies, except this time, abruptly, there is nothing cat-like to her eyes, and nothing remotely detached in her tone. Suddenly Harry feels cold, and Fleur’s face seems almost to be made of sharp shafts and angular plains in the dim light. ‘You must realize who Ginny is, Harry Potter, since you seem to have always forgotten about that.’
And with these words Fleur gets up, leaving him in the gathering darkness, and it is a long time before Harry realizes that she has not mispronounced his name.
~
Inside, Timothy Groan does not seem to have any answers. He has had a private, one-way and one-trip Floo connection to the Weasleys’ (with personal permission from Ginny, in blood an owner of the Burrow), and he has disabled it since, well, he has obviously just used it. But he does not say why or when or where; politely, he addresses Mrs. Weasley’s question – she has already warmed to him, with his quiet measured voice. No, he did not know about the attacks then – but he lightly laughs, in an endearingly self-deprecating manner, and jokes about something about clairvoyance, and constant vigilance.
Hermione Granger wonders if he is about to say something about being a snake. Narrow-eyed, she studies how closely Groan is sitting next to Ginny as he addresses each Weasley in turn, and wonders why Ron has not protested. Ron is watching Groan with a frank interest that is distinctly lacking in hostility. The twins laugh; Hermione turns away, knowing sickeningly that Harry isn’t around.
Fleur slides noiselessly into the room, and shakes her magnificent head at Hermione. It is a testimony to how much Timothy Groan has his audience in thrall, as no one, not even Ron, notices this. Hermione winces, almost: Harry being Harry, she already knows what he must be thinking.
Poor Harry.
Hermione frowns, to herself, because that last thought leads to a train of other thoughts, as is often the case with her; yet this train is so dense and convoluted in structure even Hermione begins to feel the foetal stirrings of helplessness somewhere within her consciousness.
She cannot understand why, after all that she has done, Ginny would decide to treat Harry this way. She never did understand why Ginny should ever have protested against it, but finally she had gone along…but now, even as everything seems to fall apart, Ginny seems to be insisting on heading in that direction.
She suddenly wonders how much she knows about Ginny, sliding a glance towards her from the corner of her eye, and watching her seated so easily by Groan’s side.
Timothy Groan. Hermione frowns again, this time almost forgetting her previous entanglement of thoughts, rolling his name slowly and carefully in her mouth. A fifth-year Slytherin Prefect, quiet and adroit of movement; Hermione once overheard the Head Girl saying, in a sharp, violent voice quite opposite to her usual mild tones, that she hated him, hated him. Hermione remembers the quick, horrid quirk to the older girl’s lips, grotesque with such a foreign exertion.
She wonders, suddenly almost afraid, why Ginny has never mentioned him to her.
~
Far away from the Burrow, what is left of Tom Riddle holds court.
‘Severus,’ he says, in a thin, keening voice, ‘why is it that the rest of the wizarding world has not heard about the sacrificial lamb that is Lucius’s son?’
The last words in his question are slow, and the eyes, red in its core but with a strange graduation of dark blue spreading from its centre, tilt towards a bowed head, its light hair silver in the dim light. There is no movement from the Death Eater, and a languid, terrible smile stretches Voldemort’s lips.
In some hell, his mother might weep.
Then the smile slides from the face, and he returns his gaze to Snape, similarly bowed before him.
‘McGonagall, I would suppose, milord, does not want to give us a reaction,’ replies Snape, and there is nothing in his voice.
‘He is crippled, then? Crippled to an extent that he can never wield magic again?’
‘Yes, milord,’ Snape answers, mechanically, then abruptly, almost in a show of some form of life within him, lifts his head calmly and continues, ‘However, it seems Poppy Pomfrey has been made to watch over him; the Weasleys, it seems, are to nurse him back to health, at the least. He should survive.’
Voldemort nods at this, lightly and almost distractedly; his quick eyes have returned to Lucius’s form; there is nothing in the clean, well-cut frame.
‘The Weasleys – their youngest son, Ronald, I remember, being Potter’s best friend; and their youngest daughter…’
Tom Riddle, his face ageless and cruelly smooth, smiles, and this time Snape, his face being the only one tilted up towards him, sees it, and almost flinches.
‘I remember the girl.’
~
In the room in the left corner of the fifth landing of the Burrow, just below the attic, a boy awakes, panting, just as Snape finally turns away from Tom Riddle’s face.
Blimey, a strange dream that one was. Ginny talking, and talking, her eyes staring straight in front of her, and figures and figures walking around and around her and him being unable to push past them towards her. Another voice, thin and reed-like and almost soft, saying that he – it was a male voice, he is sure – remembers someone, a girl.
He blinks, shakes his head, and looks over towards his clock, at the far end of the room where Harry’s bed is…
He bolts out of bed, knowing already that something has gone wrong, and not just because Harry is not in his bed.
~
Almost ten minutes before Ron wakes up, Ginny slips out of her room, drawing her arms about herself as she shivers; the air is strangely cold for June.
Before she can turn, however, her fingers barely having left the knob of her door, someone moves out of the shadows and speaks.
‘What are you doing out so late, Ginny?’
‘Harry,’ she breathes, after recovering her composure, ‘what are you doing here?’
‘Standing,’ he replies, and there is something hard in his tone, something indefinable. ‘I suppose you’re about to go looking for someone. Groan, maybe?’
Ginny lets out a quick, frustrated sound, before whispering back, ‘We’re not together anymore, Harry James Potter.’
‘So you and Groan, one of your best friends, are what I think you were?’
‘Harry, don’t think,’ she retorts sharply, ‘it doesn’t become you.’ She moves forward, meaning to sidestep him.
‘What exactly is it with you and Slytherin Prefects, Ginny?’ he hisses, low and harsh, and she stops, staring at him; something passes between them and suddenly everything has changed, to Ginny at least.
‘I’m going now, Potter,’ she says, slowly and deliberately, and he reels as if he has been slapped. Before she has had the chance to move, he has reached out and gripped her arm, pushing her against the corridor wall in one swift movement. There is something broken in his expression; she cannot pause to care.
‘Ginny, I’m not going to be here for long,’ he says, the words quick and desperate, ‘and please, I just...you’ve got to listen to me, you can’t be like this…’
‘Timothy is one of my best friends,’ replies Ginny, softly, looking directly at him, ‘and I don’t need to explain myself to you.’
‘Ginny, I…’
‘When you find out about everything, in the end, Harry, you’ll think differently. I’m tired now; just let me go,’ she interjects, and as the grip loosens, as he stares at her, lost and upset, she slips beneath his arm and walks off into the darkness, and doesn’t turn back.
~
When Ginny is in his arms, back against the couch at the end of Charlie’s room, she falls asleep quickly and doesn’t whisper or scream.
At the window, his eagle owl in its cage gives a low, melancholic hoot; in the morning, Mr. Weasley will banish it (‘Let it out,’ were his precise words, but Timothy is an unflinching boy) into the nearby woods along with the rest of the family owls for the rest of the summer: it has already been established to him that he is not to owl, because no word is to be expressed about the state of things – people – within the Burrow.
Timothy Groan smiles to himself and he reaches around her towards the thin archaic reed pipe, the stuff of another pale, slender Groan before him; balancing it between his long fingers, he begins to play.
It is a low hypnotizing tune, and only the night knows how beautifully he plays, and only the night can despair of a thing he cannot do.
Beside him, Ginny Weasley sleeps, tangled red hair over her white face.
~
‘Harry,’ says Ron, immediately after the two boys almost collide into each other in the stairway just midway above the third landing where Ginny’s room is, ‘something’s going to happen to Ginny.’
When the words tumble out of his mouth, half breathless, he doesn’t even know where they came from. He doesn’t even think to ask why Harry is out of bed at this hour in the first place.
Harry narrows his eyes. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know, it’s just…’ Helplessly, Ron sweeps his tousled hair up with a hand. ‘Harry, I know this is going to sound mental, and I’m not quite sure myself what exactly is going on and how I somehow know that I’m right, but you’ve got to hear me out…’
~
His heart clenches to fit in this new toy, the tiny hole just slightly higher than halfway above the room; it should feel very empty, actually, what with his father’s death and his mother’s disappearance and Tom Riddle’s words, but years and inertia doesn’t an efficient compartmentalization and updated profile of one’s heart make.
He remembers as he falls asleep, vaguely from somewhere, a pale face and some words, but he can no longer remember what exactly is real and what exactly is from dreams or waking dreams; sometimes in the rush everything had seemed to meld into one another, in this past year.
Draco remembers, when he was young, to have seen someone seated at the second floor of the Malfoy library, leg crooked at an angle and back against the Louis XIV, someone smiling and pale, but something cold had gripped him and he had run past ahead instead of stopping to look at the person; years later, he can never know whether the person had been a person, real and breathing hollow breath in the thick stifling air of June, or whether the person had only been a figment of his imagination.
He remembers another pale face, and a shock of hair that is so neutral in its colour it is impossible to define; he remembers whispered words, the cold serpentine smile in each syllable as a voice said, ‘Please allow me to introduce myself: I am a man of wealth and taste.’
He remembers, and he remembers, and then a hand pulls at him –
And he wakes up, screaming, and stares into Ginny Weasley’s pale face.
~
He is panting; it is half past five in the morning of Bill’s wedding. She had woken up earlier to get back to her room before Hermione wakes up, when she had heard the screaming.
Sightlessly screaming, he had clawed at her before the wide gray eyes had finally snapped open, and now she watches him carefully, knowing not to speak.
‘Weasley,’ he finally manages. He looks away. A long silence follows.
‘I know it’ll be useless to tell you that everything will be alright,’ Ginny finally says, ‘So I figure I’ll just remind you it’s morning.’
Malfoy finally turns back to her, his expression inscrutable. Eventually he says, ‘I know, Weasley,’ and she recognizes the familiar thread of condescension in it.
She turns to return to her room at this point; from the far corner of her eye, she almost imagines that something changes in his countenance at this point.
Closing the door, she feels his eyes on her.
~
That night, Ginny’s dress still white about herself and the celebratory Butterbeer still coursing through her system, she stops, shocked, as she watches Harry, Ron and Hermione move carefully along the corridor just as she is entering the bathroom.
They stop at the sound of her gasp.
‘You’re going,’ Ginny says, the words sounding limp and useless; ‘you’re going off to face Tom, aren’t you?’ And then, suddenly with greater conviction, ‘Without me, and without telling Mum and Dad.’
‘Ginny,’ coaxes Ron, stepping forward, ‘We need to go now…we can’t possibly…’
‘Bring me along because I’m too young?’ finishes Ginny in a deceptively soft voice. ‘You’re going to find the Horcruxes without my help?’
‘Ginny, please…’ begins Harry, and suddenly she hates the way he calls her name, softly and politely; it reminds her very much of Tom. She flinches, backing away from him.
She turns on Hermione, a blind anger surging through her.
‘And why does Hermione deserve to go with you, and not me?’
‘This has nothing to do with Hermione…’
‘Really?’ A wide quirk comes upon Ginny’s lips, stretching her mouth into an ugly sneer. ‘Would you like to hear what Hermione has done this past term, Harry?’ Her words are sharp and fierce, and Hermione blanches.
‘Ginny, what are you doing?’ Hermione hisses, eyes wide, but the strange contortion of Ginny’s lips deepens.
‘What’s Hermione done, Ginny?’ Ron blurts in, but there is something fearful in his eyes, and that is enough to make Ginny hesitate.
Her hesitation only lasts a moment, but within this moment something at her side slips, and then everything goes black.
Additional disclaimer -
'Please allow me to introduce myself: I am a man of wealth and taste' are lyrics from the song 'Sympathy for the Devil', and belong to the Rolling Stones.
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