Chapter Eighteen:
Draco was not what one would call a morning person. He’d been able to wake quickly and completely for years. Being a Slytherin surrounded by Slytherins, he’d long ago seen the intelligence in having such an ability. And he certainly hadn’t lost it once he’d fled the Wizarding world. That did not mean he enjoyed mornings. The blond relished the opportunity to sleep in whenever possible, and took advantage of every such opportunity. Unfortunately, since beginning this project, there had been few, if any, mornings when there hadn’t been so much to do that an early wake up had been necessary. It was because of this fact that he once more found himself up, dressed, and eating breakfast at an unpleasantly early hour. The only upside to being awake this morning was that he was able to have his breakfast undisturbed by the annoying chatter that usually accompanied the meal.
Grey eyes flicked casually over the redhead sitting across the table from him. Ginny Weasley did not term herself a morning person either, but she was almost always awake before he was. Perhaps it was a habit she had honed to avoid being vulnerable to the twins she had the misfortune of calling her older brothers. He really didn’t think he wanted to know what such remarkably uncivilized pranksters would be capable of doing to a slumbering victim. Draco shook his head as he continued his meal. At least she had the intelligence to protect herself against such actions, that was something the Slytherin in him could almost admire.
Another thing he could admire was quiet, especially so early in the morning. He took a moment to simply bask in the silence before going back to his food once more. Such a lack of conversation, even if it was one-sided, had become unusual since she had moved in. The Tonks’ usually left for work not long after he woke, so he had always had the house to himself, and since he did not have a habit of talking to himself, and his friends rarely came by before noon, noise in the morning had never been a problem. Until she came. Yet this morning she had deigned to leave him alone for the entirety of their meal thus far.
Draco glanced over at his pale houseguest once again, though his gaze held no true interest what so ever. It certainly didn’t hold any concern. And he didn’t think back to the night before, or the nightmare that she’d had. In Slytherin, no such event was discussed, except to exploit another’s weakness. Of course, the redhead was anything but a Slytherin, and having pieces of the Dark Lord trapped in her head wasn’t exactly a weakness per say. Granted, it did seem to wear her down, and she clearly found it disturbing on multiple levels, but she was taking advantage of the situation, manipulating it – and in a way, the Dark Lord himself – in order to give her side the advantage. Yet again something the snake in him could perhaps admire. If he wanted to. Right now all he wanted to do was enjoy the quiet; the eerily uncharacteristic quiet.
The blond sat for a moment, his gaze trained on the redhead before clearing his throat abruptly. “What is it?”
Brown eyes snapped up at the unexpected noise, blinking several times before her nose scrunched up in a questioning, if preoccupied, expression. “I’m sorry?”
Draco let out a short, gusty sigh. “What is it that’s wrong with you this morning?” he gestured vaguely at the table.
She shrugged halfheartedly. “Nothing.” He simply continued to stare at her and this time it was Ginny who let out a sigh as she continued. “I was just thinking.”
The wizard waited several seconds, then raised a single eyebrow slightly in annoyance when she said nothing else. “About what, exactly?”
“Hmm?” the Gryffindor looked up from her plate, where her attention had drifted after answering his last question. “Oh. Well…”
Draco raised his eyebrows, and though he said nothing, she was under no misconception as she met his eyes that he had any patience left.
“I’m just a little worried, is all. We still don’t know what we’re going to do about the snake. We have to kill it, of course, but we don’t know that that will take care of the Horcrux; in fact, we have good reason to think it won’t. All the other Horcruxes were so difficult to destroy, it took all three of us to figure out how, and they were inanimate objects. We don’t know if Nagini being alive affects the stability or protection of the Horcrux. We may have to kill Nagini and then destroy it. And since Voldemort is connected to Nagini, there’s the possibility that he’ll know something is wrong as soon as we get to Nagini, or at least as soon as we kill her. What if we don’t have time to destroy the Horcrux before he can organize his defenses or even attack the Order? What if he knows when we do finally destroy the Horcrux and can get the Death Eaters together before the Order can attack? There’s so many things that could go wrong.”
The Malfoy heir stared at her in silence as she finally wound down from her surprisingly long tirade. This was not what he had expected when he had asked what she’d been so preoccupied about. The silence stretched out for several seconds before he rolled his eyes and stood.
“Don’t you think about anything else?” he asked as he picked up his breakfast dishes and carried them to the sink, pointedly ignoring the fact that if bits of Tom Riddle were living in his head, the problem would be on his mind quite a lot too. Ginny glared at his back, but refrained from commenting as she watched him rinse his dishes and set them in the dishwasher with exaggerated care, as though if he did anything else he might throw the bowl against the wall. When he’d closed the door of the dishwasher, he turned to face her once more, his tone exasperated. “I told you, I’ll come up with something to take care of the snake, I’ve got a few ideas and as soon as I have something I think has a good chance of working, we’ll figure out the rest.”
He didn’t give her the chance to say anything else as he headed for the living room at the sound of the doorbell, brushing off the strange, almost injured, feeling in his stomach at the thought that she didn’t think he could handle his part of the arrangement.
She watched him leave the room in a huff, before standing and making her own way to the sink. Ginny knew he took the problem and their task seriously, but it wasn’t her fault if the idea of not having a plan yet made her feel distinctly nauseous. She couldn’t help feeling as though they were running out of time. Not only could Voldemort go further on the offensive at any moment, but the trio could only be controlled for so long. Harry, Hermione, and her brother could at any time figure out a way around the measures being used to keep them at the school, and the longer she was gone, the more likely it was they would start to question her absence.
They had been told she’d been moved ‘somewhere safe’ because she’d wanted to help as both a way to keep them from wondering where she was and as a subtle threat, implying that if they tried to go off on their own to ‘help’ that they could be placed ‘somewhere safe’ as well. Even so, if the trio felt they were being intentionally kept busy and out of the action at the school, there might be no stopping them from running off and getting themselves killed anyway. Ginny leaned back against the dishwasher as she put away her dishes and closed it back up, one freckled hand rising to rub at her aching temples. Her weariness turned abruptly to panic as the sound of a shout reached her from the front room.
The witch was halfway to the front door, her heart in her throat and her hand clenched tightly around her still transfigured wand before the sounds of several echoing shouts and accompanying laughter broke through her fear and slowed her pace. She was glad she had checked her all-out sprint before she reached her destination as it allowed her the time and room to watch Draco Malfoy, a large and distinct wet patch covering his jumper, lunge at Aaron with a hearty curse.
Ginny couldn’t suppress a laugh of her own as Blake and Carren jumped into the fray, the four of them tumbling to the porch yelling and laughing. She wasn’t quite sure what they were doing, even after they’d regained their feet and began chasing each other around the Tonks’ front lawn holding large brightly colored objects that were apparently designed to squirt large jets of water. She rolled her eyes at the teens’ antics as they continued to scream and laugh and douse one another with water. A halfhearted attempt was made intermittently to hide behind trees or bushes, but they all mostly seemed to be more interested in getting someone else wet than in keeping themselves dry.
As it was nearly March and hardly what one would call warm out, the redhead was firmly convinced they were all completely nutters. Yet where watching her brothers do such a thing would have caused her to merely shake her head in annoyance at the obvious stupidity of the actions, she found herself unaccountably amused by the shrieking boys running around like maniacs with no regard for their own health. The game was decidedly lighthearted and playful, two things she would never have associated with the blond she’d known at school.
That wasn’t to say that Draco Malfoy took the game lightly. He attacked his friends with a single-minded determination she recognized from the Quidditch pitch, but which lacked the aggression she was used to seeing from him. Much of how he acted, impatience and snide comments aside, lacked the familiar venom and self-possessed ego she was used to. The difference was perhaps more evident when he was interacting with the three Muggle teens he had befriended, if only because she’d never seen him smile and laugh and appear so comfortable with his pureblood housemates as he was with Aaron, Blake, and Carren. Even so, there were times that the foursome would have fit right in at the Slytherin table, as rich and snobby as they obviously were.
She took a moment to picture them in the great hall at Hogwarts, but was distracted by an earsplitting howl as Draco was ambushed by the other three, all at once, leaving the blond completely drenched. She could hear his enthusiastic curses from the doorway, but she could also see the smile fighting through his glare as the three ceased their attack and ran off in different directions in an attempt to escape retaliation. Where the Malfoy she remembered would have hexed anyone who attacked him, light heartedly or not, the Draco she was coming to know joined in the playful roughhousing without hesitation.
He had become surprisingly good at such things during his stay in the Muggle world, she thought when he took off in hot pursuit of the nearest boy, who happened to be a very unlucky Carren. He had not, however, become very good at utilizing common sense, the redhead decided several minutes later, when he refilled his weapon at the hose and then immediately went back to soaking and being soaked despite the light rainfall misting the yard and everyone in it. Ginny finally retreated back into the house with a shiver, leaving the boys to their cold, wet fate.
None of the combatants noticed the door close behind her. For his part, Draco was too focused on soaking Blake from his spot behind the corner of the house where his current victim couldn’t even see him, let alone hit him with a return blast. A second later, Aaron hit Blake from the other side while he was rubbing at the spot on his chest that Draco had hit. The sandy haired teen was felled like an elephant by the close range hit to the back of his head. The wizard’s grin froze on his face, though not from his dropping body temperature as his houseguest would have suspected had she been able to see him in that moment.
He had dismissed a gun as a realistic option for taking care of Nagini for some of the very reasons Ginny had been worrying about over breakfast. They couldn’t just kill the snake and then hope that Voldemort didn’t notice, or that they would have time to make sure the Horcrux was taken care of before the Death Eaters went after the Order. That was why he’d been trying to come up with a way that they could somehow incapacitate the snake, buying them time to transport it somewhere for the Horcrux to be destroyed. Hopefully without the snake or Voldemort realizing something had happened.
In the instant that Blake had hit the ground, however, a scene from some wildlife show he’d once watched on late night telly flashed before his grey eyes. What was it the annoying man narrating the show had said the vets used to put the large animal to sleep? Whatever it was had kept the animal knocked out long enough for them to look it over and give it other shots. It hadn’t stayed out for long, but that was only because they were being careful of its health. If that wasn’t top priority and if the subsequent shot contained something to keep the snake asleep, maybe…
Draco was jolted from his train of thought by a cold shock of water coming from Carren’s water gun and the blond raised his own, taking off in hot pursuit. He could figure out the specifics later, he had a good idea now of what to do, and at that moment, what he needed most was revenge. Carren never saw what hit him, and the normally polite young man let out a loud curse at the cold water Draco aimed at his back.
End Chapter Eighteen
Draco was not what one would call a morning person. He’d been able to wake quickly and completely for years. Being a Slytherin surrounded by Slytherins, he’d long ago seen the intelligence in having such an ability. And he certainly hadn’t lost it once he’d fled the Wizarding world. That did not mean he enjoyed mornings. The blond relished the opportunity to sleep in whenever possible, and took advantage of every such opportunity. Unfortunately, since beginning this project, there had been few, if any, mornings when there hadn’t been so much to do that an early wake up had been necessary. It was because of this fact that he once more found himself up, dressed, and eating breakfast at an unpleasantly early hour. The only upside to being awake this morning was that he was able to have his breakfast undisturbed by the annoying chatter that usually accompanied the meal.
Grey eyes flicked casually over the redhead sitting across the table from him. Ginny Weasley did not term herself a morning person either, but she was almost always awake before he was. Perhaps it was a habit she had honed to avoid being vulnerable to the twins she had the misfortune of calling her older brothers. He really didn’t think he wanted to know what such remarkably uncivilized pranksters would be capable of doing to a slumbering victim. Draco shook his head as he continued his meal. At least she had the intelligence to protect herself against such actions, that was something the Slytherin in him could almost admire.
Another thing he could admire was quiet, especially so early in the morning. He took a moment to simply bask in the silence before going back to his food once more. Such a lack of conversation, even if it was one-sided, had become unusual since she had moved in. The Tonks’ usually left for work not long after he woke, so he had always had the house to himself, and since he did not have a habit of talking to himself, and his friends rarely came by before noon, noise in the morning had never been a problem. Until she came. Yet this morning she had deigned to leave him alone for the entirety of their meal thus far.
Draco glanced over at his pale houseguest once again, though his gaze held no true interest what so ever. It certainly didn’t hold any concern. And he didn’t think back to the night before, or the nightmare that she’d had. In Slytherin, no such event was discussed, except to exploit another’s weakness. Of course, the redhead was anything but a Slytherin, and having pieces of the Dark Lord trapped in her head wasn’t exactly a weakness per say. Granted, it did seem to wear her down, and she clearly found it disturbing on multiple levels, but she was taking advantage of the situation, manipulating it – and in a way, the Dark Lord himself – in order to give her side the advantage. Yet again something the snake in him could perhaps admire. If he wanted to. Right now all he wanted to do was enjoy the quiet; the eerily uncharacteristic quiet.
The blond sat for a moment, his gaze trained on the redhead before clearing his throat abruptly. “What is it?”
Brown eyes snapped up at the unexpected noise, blinking several times before her nose scrunched up in a questioning, if preoccupied, expression. “I’m sorry?”
Draco let out a short, gusty sigh. “What is it that’s wrong with you this morning?” he gestured vaguely at the table.
She shrugged halfheartedly. “Nothing.” He simply continued to stare at her and this time it was Ginny who let out a sigh as she continued. “I was just thinking.”
The wizard waited several seconds, then raised a single eyebrow slightly in annoyance when she said nothing else. “About what, exactly?”
“Hmm?” the Gryffindor looked up from her plate, where her attention had drifted after answering his last question. “Oh. Well…”
Draco raised his eyebrows, and though he said nothing, she was under no misconception as she met his eyes that he had any patience left.
“I’m just a little worried, is all. We still don’t know what we’re going to do about the snake. We have to kill it, of course, but we don’t know that that will take care of the Horcrux; in fact, we have good reason to think it won’t. All the other Horcruxes were so difficult to destroy, it took all three of us to figure out how, and they were inanimate objects. We don’t know if Nagini being alive affects the stability or protection of the Horcrux. We may have to kill Nagini and then destroy it. And since Voldemort is connected to Nagini, there’s the possibility that he’ll know something is wrong as soon as we get to Nagini, or at least as soon as we kill her. What if we don’t have time to destroy the Horcrux before he can organize his defenses or even attack the Order? What if he knows when we do finally destroy the Horcrux and can get the Death Eaters together before the Order can attack? There’s so many things that could go wrong.”
The Malfoy heir stared at her in silence as she finally wound down from her surprisingly long tirade. This was not what he had expected when he had asked what she’d been so preoccupied about. The silence stretched out for several seconds before he rolled his eyes and stood.
“Don’t you think about anything else?” he asked as he picked up his breakfast dishes and carried them to the sink, pointedly ignoring the fact that if bits of Tom Riddle were living in his head, the problem would be on his mind quite a lot too. Ginny glared at his back, but refrained from commenting as she watched him rinse his dishes and set them in the dishwasher with exaggerated care, as though if he did anything else he might throw the bowl against the wall. When he’d closed the door of the dishwasher, he turned to face her once more, his tone exasperated. “I told you, I’ll come up with something to take care of the snake, I’ve got a few ideas and as soon as I have something I think has a good chance of working, we’ll figure out the rest.”
He didn’t give her the chance to say anything else as he headed for the living room at the sound of the doorbell, brushing off the strange, almost injured, feeling in his stomach at the thought that she didn’t think he could handle his part of the arrangement.
She watched him leave the room in a huff, before standing and making her own way to the sink. Ginny knew he took the problem and their task seriously, but it wasn’t her fault if the idea of not having a plan yet made her feel distinctly nauseous. She couldn’t help feeling as though they were running out of time. Not only could Voldemort go further on the offensive at any moment, but the trio could only be controlled for so long. Harry, Hermione, and her brother could at any time figure out a way around the measures being used to keep them at the school, and the longer she was gone, the more likely it was they would start to question her absence.
They had been told she’d been moved ‘somewhere safe’ because she’d wanted to help as both a way to keep them from wondering where she was and as a subtle threat, implying that if they tried to go off on their own to ‘help’ that they could be placed ‘somewhere safe’ as well. Even so, if the trio felt they were being intentionally kept busy and out of the action at the school, there might be no stopping them from running off and getting themselves killed anyway. Ginny leaned back against the dishwasher as she put away her dishes and closed it back up, one freckled hand rising to rub at her aching temples. Her weariness turned abruptly to panic as the sound of a shout reached her from the front room.
The witch was halfway to the front door, her heart in her throat and her hand clenched tightly around her still transfigured wand before the sounds of several echoing shouts and accompanying laughter broke through her fear and slowed her pace. She was glad she had checked her all-out sprint before she reached her destination as it allowed her the time and room to watch Draco Malfoy, a large and distinct wet patch covering his jumper, lunge at Aaron with a hearty curse.
Ginny couldn’t suppress a laugh of her own as Blake and Carren jumped into the fray, the four of them tumbling to the porch yelling and laughing. She wasn’t quite sure what they were doing, even after they’d regained their feet and began chasing each other around the Tonks’ front lawn holding large brightly colored objects that were apparently designed to squirt large jets of water. She rolled her eyes at the teens’ antics as they continued to scream and laugh and douse one another with water. A halfhearted attempt was made intermittently to hide behind trees or bushes, but they all mostly seemed to be more interested in getting someone else wet than in keeping themselves dry.
As it was nearly March and hardly what one would call warm out, the redhead was firmly convinced they were all completely nutters. Yet where watching her brothers do such a thing would have caused her to merely shake her head in annoyance at the obvious stupidity of the actions, she found herself unaccountably amused by the shrieking boys running around like maniacs with no regard for their own health. The game was decidedly lighthearted and playful, two things she would never have associated with the blond she’d known at school.
That wasn’t to say that Draco Malfoy took the game lightly. He attacked his friends with a single-minded determination she recognized from the Quidditch pitch, but which lacked the aggression she was used to seeing from him. Much of how he acted, impatience and snide comments aside, lacked the familiar venom and self-possessed ego she was used to. The difference was perhaps more evident when he was interacting with the three Muggle teens he had befriended, if only because she’d never seen him smile and laugh and appear so comfortable with his pureblood housemates as he was with Aaron, Blake, and Carren. Even so, there were times that the foursome would have fit right in at the Slytherin table, as rich and snobby as they obviously were.
She took a moment to picture them in the great hall at Hogwarts, but was distracted by an earsplitting howl as Draco was ambushed by the other three, all at once, leaving the blond completely drenched. She could hear his enthusiastic curses from the doorway, but she could also see the smile fighting through his glare as the three ceased their attack and ran off in different directions in an attempt to escape retaliation. Where the Malfoy she remembered would have hexed anyone who attacked him, light heartedly or not, the Draco she was coming to know joined in the playful roughhousing without hesitation.
He had become surprisingly good at such things during his stay in the Muggle world, she thought when he took off in hot pursuit of the nearest boy, who happened to be a very unlucky Carren. He had not, however, become very good at utilizing common sense, the redhead decided several minutes later, when he refilled his weapon at the hose and then immediately went back to soaking and being soaked despite the light rainfall misting the yard and everyone in it. Ginny finally retreated back into the house with a shiver, leaving the boys to their cold, wet fate.
None of the combatants noticed the door close behind her. For his part, Draco was too focused on soaking Blake from his spot behind the corner of the house where his current victim couldn’t even see him, let alone hit him with a return blast. A second later, Aaron hit Blake from the other side while he was rubbing at the spot on his chest that Draco had hit. The sandy haired teen was felled like an elephant by the close range hit to the back of his head. The wizard’s grin froze on his face, though not from his dropping body temperature as his houseguest would have suspected had she been able to see him in that moment.
He had dismissed a gun as a realistic option for taking care of Nagini for some of the very reasons Ginny had been worrying about over breakfast. They couldn’t just kill the snake and then hope that Voldemort didn’t notice, or that they would have time to make sure the Horcrux was taken care of before the Death Eaters went after the Order. That was why he’d been trying to come up with a way that they could somehow incapacitate the snake, buying them time to transport it somewhere for the Horcrux to be destroyed. Hopefully without the snake or Voldemort realizing something had happened.
In the instant that Blake had hit the ground, however, a scene from some wildlife show he’d once watched on late night telly flashed before his grey eyes. What was it the annoying man narrating the show had said the vets used to put the large animal to sleep? Whatever it was had kept the animal knocked out long enough for them to look it over and give it other shots. It hadn’t stayed out for long, but that was only because they were being careful of its health. If that wasn’t top priority and if the subsequent shot contained something to keep the snake asleep, maybe…
Draco was jolted from his train of thought by a cold shock of water coming from Carren’s water gun and the blond raised his own, taking off in hot pursuit. He could figure out the specifics later, he had a good idea now of what to do, and at that moment, what he needed most was revenge. Carren never saw what hit him, and the normally polite young man let out a loud curse at the cold water Draco aimed at his back.
End Chapter Eighteen
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