Disclaimer: I don't own the characters save for Timothy Groan, who is admittedly largely inspired of the character Steerpike from Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy.
With love and thanks to all previous reviewers ; thanks for the encouragement. :)
Chapter Three: A Question of Need
2nd June
A tall, slender figure has managed to catch Ginny just as she keels forwards; stepping forward into the light as he does so, the figure reveals himself to be Timothy Groan.
‘What did you do to her?’ demands Ron, horrified, as Ginny’s head lolls backwards against Groan’s chest.
Something, almost an expression, flits past Groan’s clear, nondescript face like a light ripple on a still pond. ‘I didn’t do anything. That,’ he says, motioning to a relatively small but nevertheless heavy oak photo frame which lay, until then forgotten, on the floor, ‘was what hit Ginny on the head, and it seems she has been knocked unconscious because of it. I’ll just bring her to Mrs.…’
‘Very timely so,’ Hermione suddenly interrupts, and narrows her eyes at the younger boy.
Groan merely raises his eyebrows, and does not say anything.
‘Ron, Hermione, we’ve got to…’ Harry begins, and then stops, turning back at Groan, peering suspiciously at the boy through the dim light.
‘Go?’ suggests Groan, and nonchalantly he checks his wristwatch. ‘The last train leaving Ottery St. Catchpole leaves in well, fifteen minutes. I would recommend you hurry,’ he continues, in a tone of voice which would have been taken as helpful, if not for the fact that his eyes are unerringly unblinking.
‘But Ginny…’ begins Harry, his brow furrowing.
‘How do you know we’re leaving?’ asks Ron brusquely, addressing Groan. He has had a good impression of Groan all the while; this, however, disappears in the light of his inexplicable appearance just as Ginny passed out. But he remembers, of course, what Groan has done for him, and restrains himself.
‘You’re dressed and carrying bags at this hour about the house,’ replies Groan in the same calm, nearly pleasant tone. His neutral, sand-coloured hair looks almost translucent in the pale light.
‘You’re a snake, that’s what you are,’ explodes Hermione abruptly, ‘how can we possibly trust that once we leave you wouldn’t tell on us, and that you won’t do anything…’ she struggles for a suitable word, ‘untoward to Ginny?’
‘Because I don’t care for any one of you, except by way of accident,’ he pauses, glancing for some reason at Ron, ‘and because I’ve had plenty of opportunities to do untoward things to Ginny and I haven’t,’ he finishes, his words clipping against each other, and punctuates the statement with a strange, sideward smile. Yet there seems to be something missing about him: Hermione frowns, realizing that the usual perfect façade of pleasant politeness is revealing chinks in its armour. She stares at him, at the light shadows about his eyes.
So this is what Groan is when he’s tired.
But Hermione remembers Groan dancing with Ginny at the wedding, his body respectfully apart from hers, and Groan brushing something off Ginny’s hair, seemingly distractedly, and she remembers what they – Harry, Ron and herself – have to do.
‘Fine then,’ she says, shortly, and turns to Harry and Ron. ‘Come on, we’ve got no time for this. Ginny will be safe enough here,’ she pauses, and casts one final purposeful glance at Groan. ‘He wouldn’t try to do anything to her within the Burrow; it’s too well-protected against aggressive spells, and anyway the others would hear him easily.’
‘But of course,’ agrees Groan, expression unchanged. He shifts Ginny’s body, so that she is facing him, her head falling onto his shoulder and resting against his neck. Ron looks worried; Harry looks away.
‘Goodbye then,’ Ron finally manages, ‘And make sure you get Mum to look after Ginny as soon as possible.’
‘I will,’ Groan nods, and turns away, half-carrying, half-pulling Ginny along with him, her white dress brushing against the corridor.
‘And Groan,’ continues Ron, looking almost as if he were choking on his own words. Groan stops, but does not turn around. ‘Thank you for everything. Well, you know.’
Groan gives a curt, sharp nod, and rounding the corner, his short neat hair even more so that indecisive, quite indefinable colour against the rich red of Ginny’s, his footsteps fade away slowly.
Ignoring Harry’s questioning look, Ron turns away, very suddenly pale.
~
The dark-haired boy sweeps a finger along the jaw line; it is clean and very delicately sharp, and it pleases him. He very much likes the rich red of the hair, too, and the wide amber eyes and the small, perfect mouth. Altogether all these things are beautiful; he likes it like the way he likes all of those other things that he collected from other people, really a lifetime ago – half a century – but so very near the tips of his fingers, only one or two or six or seven years ago from his own very real youth.
Perhaps, if she somehow manages to survive this – he doubts it, smiling almost disappointedly, like a cat which finds its mouse dead instead of alive – he could keep her in a special glass room, and watch her grow into something even more beautiful. He would like that. She would be so perfectly untouched, and the red and the white and the gold would be so pure. So perfectly ready to be defiled, just behind a thin glass; he could watch behind and press his fingers against its surface and smile to himself.
He himself is young. Only sixteen.
Leaning forward, he presses his finger against her lips, and feels the life within her ebb away.
~
Only sixteen and wanting to stop a grief only more acute in isolation, Draco Malfoy thinks of the girl who had woken him up this morning, the girl whom he had followed with his eyes, half-lazily, across the backyard of the Burrow, on the other side of the window to his left, the girl whose room he can see into through the forgotten hole in the wall.
Clenching his fist, the back of his hand laced with silvery wounds, and ignoring the words across his arm, he tries to remember the first time he had seen her, at the bookshop in the summer before his second year, but a strange lurching sensation in his stomach makes him know rather than recall that something isn’t right. He doesn’t remember something, for some reason. Something is at the tips of his memory, but isn’t within its reach.
It disturbs him, and distracts him enough.
Finally, as the minutes tick by and sleep slowly claims him, a finger is swept along a jaw line somewhere and in some time, and he smiles, unseeing.
~
Moving quickly and silently in his strange half-walking, half-running gait, he returns to the corridor, stopping at the fallen frame.
Slipping his hand into a black glove, he carefully and slowly pulls a single long, hooked wire from the back of the frame, strong but thin and almost invisible from a distance. Freed, the wire springs magically into a compact, thin coil, slightly smaller than a gumdrop. He pockets the wire, and then, with the same hand, lifts the heavy frame with some difficulty and returns it to its original position on the wall. He stands back for a moment, staring into the photograph of a picturesque Romanian countryside, and, deciding something, he nods, more to himself than anything, and leaves for his room.
He will have to clear away the others later.
Picking up the gold-handled wand from the desk at the corner of the room, he bends over her, having left her on the bed only moments ago, and mutters a spell, before slipping the wand into the folds of his robes which he had thrown onto his bed, as he waits for her to regain consciousness.
‘Ginny,’ Timothy Groan smiles as she blinks, staring up at him, ‘you’re alright. I suppose I wouldn’t need to awaken your mother, then.’
~
‘Why would you need to do this, Tom?’
The tone is light, and he turns around and looks the younger boy in the eye; not for the first time, he wonders wryly how such weak-coloured hair, incongruently dark eyes and pale skin could altogether make such a strangely compelling face. There is beauty, possibly, in Titus, the seventy-seventh Heir to the House of Groan, but not of a kind that settles well on a fifteen-year-old; the boy wears his looks like it were an overlarge robe he is patiently waiting to grow into.
‘You ask so much, Titus,’ he replies easily, smiling at him, a complacent, intimate smile he dispenses without thought.
The boy only stares back at him; abruptly, he leans back, and something passes over his face that looks dangerously like mutiny.
‘You don’t care for what I do, don’t you, Titus?’ he whispers, leaning closer to the boy, close enough to feel his breath against his own skin. ‘Strange how you don’t seem to love anything.’
Titus only turns away, although he doesn’t pull back from him. Tom Riddle, in his Hogwarts robes with his long fingers smudged with ink and blood, waits.
Finally he responds.
‘You don’t love anything either, Tom,’ Titus Groan says, looking him in the eye, and slowly backs away, moving into the darkness of the corridor.
~
‘So he can’t use magic any more?’
Minerva McGonagall chooses not to turn around; the voice is balanced on a knife point. Her humiliation is enough, and McGonagall knows enough of the Malfoys not to turn around and be party of it.
‘It was a very old spell You-Know-Who used on him,’ McGonagall replies softly, feeling the faint points of red at her own cheeks; having known the person so long ago, she still cannot erase the shame at not being able to say his name. ‘Unless…’
‘Unless what, Professor McGonagall?’
The woman’s tone is desperate, and McGonagall almost winces, hating that she should address her in this way, because it almost makes Narcissa Malfoy nee Black so young and so vulnerable again, and makes their relationship seem somehow more intimate. Resolutely keeping her back to her, she tries to keep her tone calm and steady, unable to stop herself from feeling intensely ashamed, as if somehow she has failed this girl – this woman, all these twenty years.
‘Unless your son has a secret store of backbone, or unless the magic in his blood is more potent than any of us had thought,’ she replies.
‘Unless that’s the case, Narcissa, I’m sorry.’
Finally she leaves the room, never once looking at the younger woman as she does so, feeling as if her last words applied in so many more ways than one.
~
The next morning, when her parents find out about Harry, Ron and Hermione, Ginny stares unflinchingly into her bowl of cornflakes, Timothy’s hand warm and dry around hers.
She feels, oddly enough, Fleur’s eyes on her, but refuses the acknowledge her sister-in-law; Ginny would never admit it, but Fleur knows, maddeningly enough so, more than everyone ever thinks she does, and Ginny has always never liked to be on the receiving end of the thought processes of such characters of her ilk.
And Ginny, gripping her spoon with her other hand, is almost white with anger.
‘They’ve already sent a team of Aurors to Godric’s Hollow, Molly,’ her father is saying, a Ministry owl having landed on the kitchen table fifteen minutes before with a note addressed to him. ‘Shacklebolt’s going to bring them back; they’ll be safe.’
Her mother’s expression clearly shows that she thinks otherwise. Her father reaches towards her, and places a placating hand on her shoulder.
And then her mother turns towards her.
‘Ginny,’ she starts, ‘did any of them – Harry – did they…’
‘No.’
Her mother seems taken aback at the answer; her father’s mouth is opened slightly, his lips forming a rather ridiculous-looking ‘o’.
She stares at them unflinchingly. Her mother’s eyes soften.
She hates this.
‘Well, Ginny, I’m sure…’
‘I don’t care, Mum,’ Ginny replies, and turns back to her cornflakes, her left hand still in Timothy’s right, and begins to eat, tasting only the numbing cold of the milk and nothing else.
She knows rather than sees her parents look at each other uncertainly, and suddenly a wave of disappointment washes over her; couldn’t they be more sensitive, couldn’t they solve everything? Aren’t they supposed to be her parents?
Abruptly, there is a loud thump from the living room, just beyond the threshold of the kitchen; before anyone actually responds, a figure staggers in.
‘Molly, Arthur,’ rasps Remus Lupin, his face ashen. ‘We’ve got them, but we’re going to need your help…’
~
‘There were Dementors everywhere,’ he hears a voice saying, as he slowly gains consciousness, the tips of his fingers feeling cold and numb.
‘Ginny,’ he whispers, then more strongly so, as the room and its characters swim into view, ‘Where’s Ginny?’
Silently, the girl steps up from behind Lupin, nearing the bed, and the room is suddenly quiet, watching the two of them, but he doesn’t care.
‘I, Ginny…’ he falters, reaching towards her.
Her face is still white and hard and angry, but she seems to understand, though. Without speaking, she bends down, and shifts so that he can embrace her.
He buries his face into her long red hair; holding her like a lover would, Harry Potter begins to weep.
~
The room holds its breath as he steps into it; the wards McGonagall had put up around his bed had been removed, because, well, there is nothing he has that can warrant its need anymore. And they know he wouldn’t be leaving this house.
Weasley and Granger, both pale, sitting side-by-side to each other facing the bed, with Weasley holding a half-eaten chocolate bar in his hand.
Lupin, and the Aurors, Kingsley Shacklebolt and Moody and his cousin Nymphadora Tonks, and the other male Weasleys and their parents, who are arranged in their twos and threes and ones about the small room, faces stiff with helpless concern.
They pull back when they see him, not wanting to touch him.
Finally, Potter, who is half-reclined on the bed, holding on desperately to Ginny Weasley, pliant body almost glowing white in the full sunlight that filters in from the windows.
‘I need you,’ Potter chokes, and Ginny Weasley nods, never making a sound despite of how cruelly he holds her, and suddenly something catches in Draco’s chest.
Angry, alone, and blind, he turns away, only knowing that he has to get away from her, and this room, this house.
~
The sunlight burns into his eyes when he steps out, but he half-runs, half-staggers into the backyard, through its gate, and into the meadows, directly before the forest; he slips and cuts himself – his bare feet bleeding, he can hardly see the blood before he continues, in his mad dash away from somewhere into anywhere, the colours bright about him, too bright for him to see.
He runs and he runs, and when he finally realizes that the darkness receives him, hurtling him downwards into his misery and unconsciousness, he almost forgets that he wants to cry.
~
With love and thanks to all previous reviewers ; thanks for the encouragement. :)
Chapter Three: A Question of Need
2nd June
A tall, slender figure has managed to catch Ginny just as she keels forwards; stepping forward into the light as he does so, the figure reveals himself to be Timothy Groan.
‘What did you do to her?’ demands Ron, horrified, as Ginny’s head lolls backwards against Groan’s chest.
Something, almost an expression, flits past Groan’s clear, nondescript face like a light ripple on a still pond. ‘I didn’t do anything. That,’ he says, motioning to a relatively small but nevertheless heavy oak photo frame which lay, until then forgotten, on the floor, ‘was what hit Ginny on the head, and it seems she has been knocked unconscious because of it. I’ll just bring her to Mrs.…’
‘Very timely so,’ Hermione suddenly interrupts, and narrows her eyes at the younger boy.
Groan merely raises his eyebrows, and does not say anything.
‘Ron, Hermione, we’ve got to…’ Harry begins, and then stops, turning back at Groan, peering suspiciously at the boy through the dim light.
‘Go?’ suggests Groan, and nonchalantly he checks his wristwatch. ‘The last train leaving Ottery St. Catchpole leaves in well, fifteen minutes. I would recommend you hurry,’ he continues, in a tone of voice which would have been taken as helpful, if not for the fact that his eyes are unerringly unblinking.
‘But Ginny…’ begins Harry, his brow furrowing.
‘How do you know we’re leaving?’ asks Ron brusquely, addressing Groan. He has had a good impression of Groan all the while; this, however, disappears in the light of his inexplicable appearance just as Ginny passed out. But he remembers, of course, what Groan has done for him, and restrains himself.
‘You’re dressed and carrying bags at this hour about the house,’ replies Groan in the same calm, nearly pleasant tone. His neutral, sand-coloured hair looks almost translucent in the pale light.
‘You’re a snake, that’s what you are,’ explodes Hermione abruptly, ‘how can we possibly trust that once we leave you wouldn’t tell on us, and that you won’t do anything…’ she struggles for a suitable word, ‘untoward to Ginny?’
‘Because I don’t care for any one of you, except by way of accident,’ he pauses, glancing for some reason at Ron, ‘and because I’ve had plenty of opportunities to do untoward things to Ginny and I haven’t,’ he finishes, his words clipping against each other, and punctuates the statement with a strange, sideward smile. Yet there seems to be something missing about him: Hermione frowns, realizing that the usual perfect façade of pleasant politeness is revealing chinks in its armour. She stares at him, at the light shadows about his eyes.
So this is what Groan is when he’s tired.
But Hermione remembers Groan dancing with Ginny at the wedding, his body respectfully apart from hers, and Groan brushing something off Ginny’s hair, seemingly distractedly, and she remembers what they – Harry, Ron and herself – have to do.
‘Fine then,’ she says, shortly, and turns to Harry and Ron. ‘Come on, we’ve got no time for this. Ginny will be safe enough here,’ she pauses, and casts one final purposeful glance at Groan. ‘He wouldn’t try to do anything to her within the Burrow; it’s too well-protected against aggressive spells, and anyway the others would hear him easily.’
‘But of course,’ agrees Groan, expression unchanged. He shifts Ginny’s body, so that she is facing him, her head falling onto his shoulder and resting against his neck. Ron looks worried; Harry looks away.
‘Goodbye then,’ Ron finally manages, ‘And make sure you get Mum to look after Ginny as soon as possible.’
‘I will,’ Groan nods, and turns away, half-carrying, half-pulling Ginny along with him, her white dress brushing against the corridor.
‘And Groan,’ continues Ron, looking almost as if he were choking on his own words. Groan stops, but does not turn around. ‘Thank you for everything. Well, you know.’
Groan gives a curt, sharp nod, and rounding the corner, his short neat hair even more so that indecisive, quite indefinable colour against the rich red of Ginny’s, his footsteps fade away slowly.
Ignoring Harry’s questioning look, Ron turns away, very suddenly pale.
~
The dark-haired boy sweeps a finger along the jaw line; it is clean and very delicately sharp, and it pleases him. He very much likes the rich red of the hair, too, and the wide amber eyes and the small, perfect mouth. Altogether all these things are beautiful; he likes it like the way he likes all of those other things that he collected from other people, really a lifetime ago – half a century – but so very near the tips of his fingers, only one or two or six or seven years ago from his own very real youth.
Perhaps, if she somehow manages to survive this – he doubts it, smiling almost disappointedly, like a cat which finds its mouse dead instead of alive – he could keep her in a special glass room, and watch her grow into something even more beautiful. He would like that. She would be so perfectly untouched, and the red and the white and the gold would be so pure. So perfectly ready to be defiled, just behind a thin glass; he could watch behind and press his fingers against its surface and smile to himself.
He himself is young. Only sixteen.
Leaning forward, he presses his finger against her lips, and feels the life within her ebb away.
~
Only sixteen and wanting to stop a grief only more acute in isolation, Draco Malfoy thinks of the girl who had woken him up this morning, the girl whom he had followed with his eyes, half-lazily, across the backyard of the Burrow, on the other side of the window to his left, the girl whose room he can see into through the forgotten hole in the wall.
Clenching his fist, the back of his hand laced with silvery wounds, and ignoring the words across his arm, he tries to remember the first time he had seen her, at the bookshop in the summer before his second year, but a strange lurching sensation in his stomach makes him know rather than recall that something isn’t right. He doesn’t remember something, for some reason. Something is at the tips of his memory, but isn’t within its reach.
It disturbs him, and distracts him enough.
Finally, as the minutes tick by and sleep slowly claims him, a finger is swept along a jaw line somewhere and in some time, and he smiles, unseeing.
~
Moving quickly and silently in his strange half-walking, half-running gait, he returns to the corridor, stopping at the fallen frame.
Slipping his hand into a black glove, he carefully and slowly pulls a single long, hooked wire from the back of the frame, strong but thin and almost invisible from a distance. Freed, the wire springs magically into a compact, thin coil, slightly smaller than a gumdrop. He pockets the wire, and then, with the same hand, lifts the heavy frame with some difficulty and returns it to its original position on the wall. He stands back for a moment, staring into the photograph of a picturesque Romanian countryside, and, deciding something, he nods, more to himself than anything, and leaves for his room.
He will have to clear away the others later.
Picking up the gold-handled wand from the desk at the corner of the room, he bends over her, having left her on the bed only moments ago, and mutters a spell, before slipping the wand into the folds of his robes which he had thrown onto his bed, as he waits for her to regain consciousness.
‘Ginny,’ Timothy Groan smiles as she blinks, staring up at him, ‘you’re alright. I suppose I wouldn’t need to awaken your mother, then.’
~
‘Why would you need to do this, Tom?’
The tone is light, and he turns around and looks the younger boy in the eye; not for the first time, he wonders wryly how such weak-coloured hair, incongruently dark eyes and pale skin could altogether make such a strangely compelling face. There is beauty, possibly, in Titus, the seventy-seventh Heir to the House of Groan, but not of a kind that settles well on a fifteen-year-old; the boy wears his looks like it were an overlarge robe he is patiently waiting to grow into.
‘You ask so much, Titus,’ he replies easily, smiling at him, a complacent, intimate smile he dispenses without thought.
The boy only stares back at him; abruptly, he leans back, and something passes over his face that looks dangerously like mutiny.
‘You don’t care for what I do, don’t you, Titus?’ he whispers, leaning closer to the boy, close enough to feel his breath against his own skin. ‘Strange how you don’t seem to love anything.’
Titus only turns away, although he doesn’t pull back from him. Tom Riddle, in his Hogwarts robes with his long fingers smudged with ink and blood, waits.
Finally he responds.
‘You don’t love anything either, Tom,’ Titus Groan says, looking him in the eye, and slowly backs away, moving into the darkness of the corridor.
~
‘So he can’t use magic any more?’
Minerva McGonagall chooses not to turn around; the voice is balanced on a knife point. Her humiliation is enough, and McGonagall knows enough of the Malfoys not to turn around and be party of it.
‘It was a very old spell You-Know-Who used on him,’ McGonagall replies softly, feeling the faint points of red at her own cheeks; having known the person so long ago, she still cannot erase the shame at not being able to say his name. ‘Unless…’
‘Unless what, Professor McGonagall?’
The woman’s tone is desperate, and McGonagall almost winces, hating that she should address her in this way, because it almost makes Narcissa Malfoy nee Black so young and so vulnerable again, and makes their relationship seem somehow more intimate. Resolutely keeping her back to her, she tries to keep her tone calm and steady, unable to stop herself from feeling intensely ashamed, as if somehow she has failed this girl – this woman, all these twenty years.
‘Unless your son has a secret store of backbone, or unless the magic in his blood is more potent than any of us had thought,’ she replies.
‘Unless that’s the case, Narcissa, I’m sorry.’
Finally she leaves the room, never once looking at the younger woman as she does so, feeling as if her last words applied in so many more ways than one.
~
The next morning, when her parents find out about Harry, Ron and Hermione, Ginny stares unflinchingly into her bowl of cornflakes, Timothy’s hand warm and dry around hers.
She feels, oddly enough, Fleur’s eyes on her, but refuses the acknowledge her sister-in-law; Ginny would never admit it, but Fleur knows, maddeningly enough so, more than everyone ever thinks she does, and Ginny has always never liked to be on the receiving end of the thought processes of such characters of her ilk.
And Ginny, gripping her spoon with her other hand, is almost white with anger.
‘They’ve already sent a team of Aurors to Godric’s Hollow, Molly,’ her father is saying, a Ministry owl having landed on the kitchen table fifteen minutes before with a note addressed to him. ‘Shacklebolt’s going to bring them back; they’ll be safe.’
Her mother’s expression clearly shows that she thinks otherwise. Her father reaches towards her, and places a placating hand on her shoulder.
And then her mother turns towards her.
‘Ginny,’ she starts, ‘did any of them – Harry – did they…’
‘No.’
Her mother seems taken aback at the answer; her father’s mouth is opened slightly, his lips forming a rather ridiculous-looking ‘o’.
She stares at them unflinchingly. Her mother’s eyes soften.
She hates this.
‘Well, Ginny, I’m sure…’
‘I don’t care, Mum,’ Ginny replies, and turns back to her cornflakes, her left hand still in Timothy’s right, and begins to eat, tasting only the numbing cold of the milk and nothing else.
She knows rather than sees her parents look at each other uncertainly, and suddenly a wave of disappointment washes over her; couldn’t they be more sensitive, couldn’t they solve everything? Aren’t they supposed to be her parents?
Abruptly, there is a loud thump from the living room, just beyond the threshold of the kitchen; before anyone actually responds, a figure staggers in.
‘Molly, Arthur,’ rasps Remus Lupin, his face ashen. ‘We’ve got them, but we’re going to need your help…’
~
‘There were Dementors everywhere,’ he hears a voice saying, as he slowly gains consciousness, the tips of his fingers feeling cold and numb.
‘Ginny,’ he whispers, then more strongly so, as the room and its characters swim into view, ‘Where’s Ginny?’
Silently, the girl steps up from behind Lupin, nearing the bed, and the room is suddenly quiet, watching the two of them, but he doesn’t care.
‘I, Ginny…’ he falters, reaching towards her.
Her face is still white and hard and angry, but she seems to understand, though. Without speaking, she bends down, and shifts so that he can embrace her.
He buries his face into her long red hair; holding her like a lover would, Harry Potter begins to weep.
~
The room holds its breath as he steps into it; the wards McGonagall had put up around his bed had been removed, because, well, there is nothing he has that can warrant its need anymore. And they know he wouldn’t be leaving this house.
Weasley and Granger, both pale, sitting side-by-side to each other facing the bed, with Weasley holding a half-eaten chocolate bar in his hand.
Lupin, and the Aurors, Kingsley Shacklebolt and Moody and his cousin Nymphadora Tonks, and the other male Weasleys and their parents, who are arranged in their twos and threes and ones about the small room, faces stiff with helpless concern.
They pull back when they see him, not wanting to touch him.
Finally, Potter, who is half-reclined on the bed, holding on desperately to Ginny Weasley, pliant body almost glowing white in the full sunlight that filters in from the windows.
‘I need you,’ Potter chokes, and Ginny Weasley nods, never making a sound despite of how cruelly he holds her, and suddenly something catches in Draco’s chest.
Angry, alone, and blind, he turns away, only knowing that he has to get away from her, and this room, this house.
~
The sunlight burns into his eyes when he steps out, but he half-runs, half-staggers into the backyard, through its gate, and into the meadows, directly before the forest; he slips and cuts himself – his bare feet bleeding, he can hardly see the blood before he continues, in his mad dash away from somewhere into anywhere, the colours bright about him, too bright for him to see.
He runs and he runs, and when he finally realizes that the darkness receives him, hurtling him downwards into his misery and unconsciousness, he almost forgets that he wants to cry.
~
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