Finding Color
Part Eight
By Mell8
---------------------
Draco woke slowly and opened his eyes. He felt his eyelids and lashes brush against some sort of bandage, but he knew that the soft gauze didn’t cause the blackness he saw.
He remembered Voldemort and the spell appearing out of thin air. He remembered Ginny screaming at him, and he vaguely remembered magic pouring into his body as Ginny cried tears over his bleeding eyes.
Ginny’s hand tightened in his, but Draco could tell it was only a reaction from something in her sleep. He could feel her exhaustion beating on the link between them, a link built of Ginny’s magic and his, created when she tried to heal him.
Ginny had expended all her magic on trying to heal him. He could breathe through his nose, so somehow she had managed to reconstruct the sliced flesh, cartilage, and bone destroyed when the upper part of his nose was blasted away. He had eyelids and eyelashes to blink with and he could feel his eyeballs moving inside eye sockets, so Ginny had reconstructed all of the mangled flesh ruined by Voldemort’s cruel spell.
But Ginny couldn’t see, so how could she give someone back something she herself didn’t have?
Draco felt that the loss of his sight was a small price to pay to be able to be at Ginny’s side, alive, right now. Besides, Ginny had lost her sight and she had gotten so much power in return.
The adage that losing one sense made all the others stronger was clearly true, and Draco could feel his magical sense growing as he fought to see.
Ginny had showed him how she saw the world that one day in his study. Draco had known then that he could do that sort of magic himself, if he had to. Now he had no choice; his magic was flowing outside of his body at its own behest.
Slowly a picture of the room appeared. It was colorless and almost formless, but magic took up the shape of whatever it resided in, so it wasn’t long before he could distinguish a chair from a desk or Ginny’s body from the bedspread she was tucked under.
When the door opened he was prepared.
*******
“Hello, Draco,” Bellatrix hissed. “Or should I say traitor?”
“Hello, Aunt Bella,” Draco said as he turned his bandaged head towards his Aunt.
“You destroyed everything!” she snarled. “Don’t call me family ever again.”
He saw her wand as she raised it to point right at him. He saw her magic swirling inside her body in a mixture of rage and insanity. Draco saw everything his Aunt was just by looking at her magic, and was glad he had made the decision to join Ginny’s spying.
His Aunt’s madness was partly related to her time in Azkaban, but most of it was caused by all of her time spent in the company of the maddest wizard of them all: Lord Voldemort. Draco could have become like her, crazy, angry, and vengeful, with no thought in his head beyond serving the one who owned him. He was glad he had escaped that horrible fate; a fate that had been waiting for him all his life until one little blind girl spoke to him.
Ginny had saved him from all that, but nothing would save Bellatrix now. He could see her intent to destroy Ginny first, and Draco would not allow that.
Draco concentrated on her wand. The magic inside of it was dark and hateful because of all the horrible curses it had been forced to create. Draco gathered up that magic and forced it to change into cleansing fire.
Bella shrieked as her wand erupted into black flames that coldly ate up the wood of the wand and then continued to eat up the hand that was holding the wand. Black fire crawled up Bella’s arm, to her shoulder, and then began moving down her torso to her equally black heart.
Once the darkness was destroyed, Draco saw a flash of light as the cleaned magic left to become something wonderful.
****************
Lucius Malfoy entered his son’s room just as the fire encompassing his wife’s sister killed her. Draco was sitting up in bed, looking at the burned husk that had been his Aunt with eyes that couldn’t see.
“Draco?” Lucius asked.
“She was going to hurt Ginny,” Draco whispered, as tears gathered in his eyes and began to wet the gauze covering his face. “I’ve never killed anyone before,” Draco added, when his father didn’t say anything.
“You cleaned up the magic,” Ginny’s soft voice said from where she was lying at his side. “Fire kills, but it also cleans and renews. Her magic can go to someone else who needs it now, rather than continuing to create something awful.” Ginny slowly sat up and Draco felt her open her eyes. “You didn’t kill her, you saved her.”
Draco felt her hands at his head as she slowly began to unwind the bandage covering his eyes.
Draco didn’t know why he felt expectant, but as one loop of gauze came off and the blackness didn’t move he felt his heart drop.
The second loop of bandage coming off made his eyes twitch in his head, as if they should be seeing something, but weren’t, and were confused by the mixed signals.
The third and last loop came off and Ginny’s hands gently covered his eyes.
“Draco, look at me,” she said softly.
“I can’t, Ginny,” he whispered. “You tried, but nothing can give me my sight back.”
“How about a kiss? Would that work?” she said cheekily.
He grumbled at her. “This isn’t a fairy tale.”
“Trust me,” Ginny giggled. She bent forward and touched her lips to his in a chaste kiss that was made all the more sweet by the fact that Draco was supposed to be dead right now.
He expected to feel her magic coursing into him at the contact, but Ginny was still drained and exhausted. All she sent down their newly established link was her love.
Her hands slowly moved from his eyes, caressing down his cheeks and neck until she left them resting comfortably on his shoulders.
Draco opened his eyes and the first color he saw was red.
Red: the brilliant, wonderful, lovely color of her hair.
Draco decided right then that he loved the color red.
They pulled away and Draco studied Ginny just as she studied him. Her eyes were the same milky shade of white with the black pupil in the center that appeared whenever she was around him. Her skin was still magically bleached white too. But her hair was back to its vibrant red shade that he detested in her brothers but loved so much on her. All the magical bleach had been wiped out when she drained her magic to heal him.
She was beautiful and she was his.
************
Ginny studied Draco too. He didn’t look any different from her memories, his hair was still pale blond, his skin still pale peach, but she hesitated to look at his eyes for fear of what she would see.
She found the courage somewhere and looked up at his eyes where a great big, bleeding red slash had been the last time she was able to see.
There was no scar and no disfigurement. His flesh was healed. It was his eyes, though, that made Ginny gasp in wonder.
Before this disaster his eyes had been a deep blue-gray sort of color, but all that was gone now. Her attempt to restore his eyes had failed in such a way that the silvery color of his eyes had taken over even the white until all that was left were two mercury pools gently looking at her.
“I guess this is a fairy tale,” Draco said softly as his hand moved to caress her red hair.
A pop behind them signaled that Lucius had left and the lack of a burnt smell let them know that he had taken Bellatrix’s remains with him.
Draco and Ginny hardly noticed as they stared at each other in wonder.
Draco slowly bent forward and captured her lips even as Ginny’s body molded itself to his. Their eyes closed, because sight is superfluous when all that is needed is touch.
III
Lucius Malfoy reappeared at the Burrow barely five minutes after he left. Moody was still getting yelled at for letting Malfoy get away with his wand, the Weasleys were still panicking, and there were still people running about as if they were chickens with their heads cut off.
Lucius couldn’t help wondering just how a group of such idiots had managed to plan such a strong offensive that they defeated Voldemort in his own Headquarters.
“He’s back!” one of the Weasley creatures yelled.
Suddenly it was silent as everyone turned to focus on the invader in their midst.
Lucius walked up to Moody and handed him the wand that was levitating what was left of Bellatrix Lestrange.
“Autopsy will say that her magic decided to burn her alive,” Lucius said loudly enough for everyone to hear.
“Oh?” Moody said sardonically. “Her magic just decided to erupt and start burning?”
“She was like that when I got there,” Lucius shrugged.
“But what about Ginny?” Molly snapped. “You said she was dying.”
“I may have overreacted…” Lucius mumbled. “It’s a father’s right to overreact when his children are in danger,” he added to justify himself. He hated the fact that Arthur Weasley smiled at this comment.
“So Ginny’s alright then?” Arthur asked with a small, questioning smile on his face as he moved to calm his wife with a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“Yes,” Lucius answered. “I’m sure they’ll be along…” he grimaced as he thought of the scene he had just left and of how much Narcissa was going to yell when she found out “…eventually,” he finished.
“So,” Moody called when it looked like Molly was about to start yelling again. “We have to decide what our next move is.”
“What do you mean?” Lupin asked. “We’ve killed Voldemort and the Ministry is busy being fixed now that Shacklebolt’s interim Minister. What’s left to do?”
“Well, what do we do with Malfoy, for starters?” Moody said, as he gestured towards Lucius. “He brought us Bellatrix Lestrange and he says that he saved Ginny and kept her safe throughout the war.”
“I also helped her spy,” Lucius added. “Most of the information you have is from me.”
“He’s still a Death Eater,” Fred grumbled.
“And he still killed people,” George echoed.
“I say we keep him here until his story can be proven,” Lupin said slowly. “If he’s the main source of our information, then he’s the reason we won the war. I don’t think it would be right of us to condemn a man for doing a good deed.”
“Like the Ministry did with Sirius,” Harry added, although he couldn’t believe he was sticking up for a Malfoy.
“So we wait for Ginny before we decide if we’re going to toss him in jail with his wife?” Moody asked.
Lucius watched as a democratic vote went around the Order members who were in the yard and smiled. This is what had been missing with Voldemort: sanity and organization. Lucius thought he might like this new world the Order was going to create… at least, he would like it, if it included him living and not being behind bars for the rest of his life.
“Agreed,” Moody said. “We wait for Ginny.” Moody herded them towards the house and watched as Molly immediately went to her kitchen to start tea and cookies.
Lucius was brought to the shabby sitting room and given an armchair to himself. Moody took another armchair while Lupin and two Weasleys took the couch.
“My wife wasn’t a Death Eater,” Lucius said to Moody. “She just made a mistake.”
“She’s an interesting case,” Moody said. “I won’t talk about it until we hear from Ginny.”
“Well, I guess it’s good that we’re here then,” Ginny’s voice said as she and Draco slowly materialized, hand in hand, in the middle of the sitting room.
Just as Moody had guessed, the wards didn’t go off. It was only when Bill yelled that the rest of the Order came running.
Part Eight
By Mell8
---------------------
Draco woke slowly and opened his eyes. He felt his eyelids and lashes brush against some sort of bandage, but he knew that the soft gauze didn’t cause the blackness he saw.
He remembered Voldemort and the spell appearing out of thin air. He remembered Ginny screaming at him, and he vaguely remembered magic pouring into his body as Ginny cried tears over his bleeding eyes.
Ginny’s hand tightened in his, but Draco could tell it was only a reaction from something in her sleep. He could feel her exhaustion beating on the link between them, a link built of Ginny’s magic and his, created when she tried to heal him.
Ginny had expended all her magic on trying to heal him. He could breathe through his nose, so somehow she had managed to reconstruct the sliced flesh, cartilage, and bone destroyed when the upper part of his nose was blasted away. He had eyelids and eyelashes to blink with and he could feel his eyeballs moving inside eye sockets, so Ginny had reconstructed all of the mangled flesh ruined by Voldemort’s cruel spell.
But Ginny couldn’t see, so how could she give someone back something she herself didn’t have?
Draco felt that the loss of his sight was a small price to pay to be able to be at Ginny’s side, alive, right now. Besides, Ginny had lost her sight and she had gotten so much power in return.
The adage that losing one sense made all the others stronger was clearly true, and Draco could feel his magical sense growing as he fought to see.
Ginny had showed him how she saw the world that one day in his study. Draco had known then that he could do that sort of magic himself, if he had to. Now he had no choice; his magic was flowing outside of his body at its own behest.
Slowly a picture of the room appeared. It was colorless and almost formless, but magic took up the shape of whatever it resided in, so it wasn’t long before he could distinguish a chair from a desk or Ginny’s body from the bedspread she was tucked under.
When the door opened he was prepared.
*******
“Hello, Draco,” Bellatrix hissed. “Or should I say traitor?”
“Hello, Aunt Bella,” Draco said as he turned his bandaged head towards his Aunt.
“You destroyed everything!” she snarled. “Don’t call me family ever again.”
He saw her wand as she raised it to point right at him. He saw her magic swirling inside her body in a mixture of rage and insanity. Draco saw everything his Aunt was just by looking at her magic, and was glad he had made the decision to join Ginny’s spying.
His Aunt’s madness was partly related to her time in Azkaban, but most of it was caused by all of her time spent in the company of the maddest wizard of them all: Lord Voldemort. Draco could have become like her, crazy, angry, and vengeful, with no thought in his head beyond serving the one who owned him. He was glad he had escaped that horrible fate; a fate that had been waiting for him all his life until one little blind girl spoke to him.
Ginny had saved him from all that, but nothing would save Bellatrix now. He could see her intent to destroy Ginny first, and Draco would not allow that.
Draco concentrated on her wand. The magic inside of it was dark and hateful because of all the horrible curses it had been forced to create. Draco gathered up that magic and forced it to change into cleansing fire.
Bella shrieked as her wand erupted into black flames that coldly ate up the wood of the wand and then continued to eat up the hand that was holding the wand. Black fire crawled up Bella’s arm, to her shoulder, and then began moving down her torso to her equally black heart.
Once the darkness was destroyed, Draco saw a flash of light as the cleaned magic left to become something wonderful.
****************
Lucius Malfoy entered his son’s room just as the fire encompassing his wife’s sister killed her. Draco was sitting up in bed, looking at the burned husk that had been his Aunt with eyes that couldn’t see.
“Draco?” Lucius asked.
“She was going to hurt Ginny,” Draco whispered, as tears gathered in his eyes and began to wet the gauze covering his face. “I’ve never killed anyone before,” Draco added, when his father didn’t say anything.
“You cleaned up the magic,” Ginny’s soft voice said from where she was lying at his side. “Fire kills, but it also cleans and renews. Her magic can go to someone else who needs it now, rather than continuing to create something awful.” Ginny slowly sat up and Draco felt her open her eyes. “You didn’t kill her, you saved her.”
Draco felt her hands at his head as she slowly began to unwind the bandage covering his eyes.
Draco didn’t know why he felt expectant, but as one loop of gauze came off and the blackness didn’t move he felt his heart drop.
The second loop of bandage coming off made his eyes twitch in his head, as if they should be seeing something, but weren’t, and were confused by the mixed signals.
The third and last loop came off and Ginny’s hands gently covered his eyes.
“Draco, look at me,” she said softly.
“I can’t, Ginny,” he whispered. “You tried, but nothing can give me my sight back.”
“How about a kiss? Would that work?” she said cheekily.
He grumbled at her. “This isn’t a fairy tale.”
“Trust me,” Ginny giggled. She bent forward and touched her lips to his in a chaste kiss that was made all the more sweet by the fact that Draco was supposed to be dead right now.
He expected to feel her magic coursing into him at the contact, but Ginny was still drained and exhausted. All she sent down their newly established link was her love.
Her hands slowly moved from his eyes, caressing down his cheeks and neck until she left them resting comfortably on his shoulders.
Draco opened his eyes and the first color he saw was red.
Red: the brilliant, wonderful, lovely color of her hair.
Draco decided right then that he loved the color red.
They pulled away and Draco studied Ginny just as she studied him. Her eyes were the same milky shade of white with the black pupil in the center that appeared whenever she was around him. Her skin was still magically bleached white too. But her hair was back to its vibrant red shade that he detested in her brothers but loved so much on her. All the magical bleach had been wiped out when she drained her magic to heal him.
She was beautiful and she was his.
************
Ginny studied Draco too. He didn’t look any different from her memories, his hair was still pale blond, his skin still pale peach, but she hesitated to look at his eyes for fear of what she would see.
She found the courage somewhere and looked up at his eyes where a great big, bleeding red slash had been the last time she was able to see.
There was no scar and no disfigurement. His flesh was healed. It was his eyes, though, that made Ginny gasp in wonder.
Before this disaster his eyes had been a deep blue-gray sort of color, but all that was gone now. Her attempt to restore his eyes had failed in such a way that the silvery color of his eyes had taken over even the white until all that was left were two mercury pools gently looking at her.
“I guess this is a fairy tale,” Draco said softly as his hand moved to caress her red hair.
A pop behind them signaled that Lucius had left and the lack of a burnt smell let them know that he had taken Bellatrix’s remains with him.
Draco and Ginny hardly noticed as they stared at each other in wonder.
Draco slowly bent forward and captured her lips even as Ginny’s body molded itself to his. Their eyes closed, because sight is superfluous when all that is needed is touch.
III
Lucius Malfoy reappeared at the Burrow barely five minutes after he left. Moody was still getting yelled at for letting Malfoy get away with his wand, the Weasleys were still panicking, and there were still people running about as if they were chickens with their heads cut off.
Lucius couldn’t help wondering just how a group of such idiots had managed to plan such a strong offensive that they defeated Voldemort in his own Headquarters.
“He’s back!” one of the Weasley creatures yelled.
Suddenly it was silent as everyone turned to focus on the invader in their midst.
Lucius walked up to Moody and handed him the wand that was levitating what was left of Bellatrix Lestrange.
“Autopsy will say that her magic decided to burn her alive,” Lucius said loudly enough for everyone to hear.
“Oh?” Moody said sardonically. “Her magic just decided to erupt and start burning?”
“She was like that when I got there,” Lucius shrugged.
“But what about Ginny?” Molly snapped. “You said she was dying.”
“I may have overreacted…” Lucius mumbled. “It’s a father’s right to overreact when his children are in danger,” he added to justify himself. He hated the fact that Arthur Weasley smiled at this comment.
“So Ginny’s alright then?” Arthur asked with a small, questioning smile on his face as he moved to calm his wife with a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“Yes,” Lucius answered. “I’m sure they’ll be along…” he grimaced as he thought of the scene he had just left and of how much Narcissa was going to yell when she found out “…eventually,” he finished.
“So,” Moody called when it looked like Molly was about to start yelling again. “We have to decide what our next move is.”
“What do you mean?” Lupin asked. “We’ve killed Voldemort and the Ministry is busy being fixed now that Shacklebolt’s interim Minister. What’s left to do?”
“Well, what do we do with Malfoy, for starters?” Moody said, as he gestured towards Lucius. “He brought us Bellatrix Lestrange and he says that he saved Ginny and kept her safe throughout the war.”
“I also helped her spy,” Lucius added. “Most of the information you have is from me.”
“He’s still a Death Eater,” Fred grumbled.
“And he still killed people,” George echoed.
“I say we keep him here until his story can be proven,” Lupin said slowly. “If he’s the main source of our information, then he’s the reason we won the war. I don’t think it would be right of us to condemn a man for doing a good deed.”
“Like the Ministry did with Sirius,” Harry added, although he couldn’t believe he was sticking up for a Malfoy.
“So we wait for Ginny before we decide if we’re going to toss him in jail with his wife?” Moody asked.
Lucius watched as a democratic vote went around the Order members who were in the yard and smiled. This is what had been missing with Voldemort: sanity and organization. Lucius thought he might like this new world the Order was going to create… at least, he would like it, if it included him living and not being behind bars for the rest of his life.
“Agreed,” Moody said. “We wait for Ginny.” Moody herded them towards the house and watched as Molly immediately went to her kitchen to start tea and cookies.
Lucius was brought to the shabby sitting room and given an armchair to himself. Moody took another armchair while Lupin and two Weasleys took the couch.
“My wife wasn’t a Death Eater,” Lucius said to Moody. “She just made a mistake.”
“She’s an interesting case,” Moody said. “I won’t talk about it until we hear from Ginny.”
“Well, I guess it’s good that we’re here then,” Ginny’s voice said as she and Draco slowly materialized, hand in hand, in the middle of the sitting room.
Just as Moody had guessed, the wards didn’t go off. It was only when Bill yelled that the rest of the Order came running.
Leave a Review