Wiping the sweat off his face with his sleeve, he stood from his painful, stooped position, his back cracking loudly.

The cottage sat on its hill off in the distance, but for all intents and purposes, Draco was alone. After breakfast, Lucy had explained his chores and then pushed him off into Jimmy's care, much to both men's horror. Draco had become a master at hiding his expression while he had stared blankly at the walls in Azkaban, but Jimmy was not as practiced. In fact, he was quite terrible at hiding his emotions. It had been no secret, even to Draco, that he was upset by Lucy's charge. He remedied his problem by leading Draco as far away from the cottage as they could go without losing sight of it, handing him a spray bottle and a small cauldron of fertilizing potion, and then retreating to safer distances.

Point and spray, Jimmy had said. So that's what Draco did.

Planted next to the begonia patch was a large square of sunflowers as tall as he was. Draco stared one of them down, imagining a grumpy face within the florets, but the flower refused to give in. He squirted it in the face with the potion, holding that it had deserved it for looking at him with such a challenging stare.

The work quickly became routine and thus mind-numbingly dull. Point and spray here. Point and spray there. For the little effort he was actually putting into the endeavor, he was sweating what he thought was an unhealthy amount. Soon he was going to shrivel up like a raisin, and his body would be lost among the sunflowers. Any moment now it was going to happen. Point and spray.

An hour passed, maybe more, when he spotted Ginny wading through the flowers toward him, her hair the spitting image of an out of control campfire. By this time, Draco was so bored with himself, so exhausted from the heat and so dead on his feet, that even her perpetually frowning face was a sight for his sore eyes.

No, he wasn't being fair. She knew how to smile—at anyone other than Draco, that is. He'd witnessed it at breakfast when he'd walked into the kitchen and seen her laughing at something Lucy had said, but a moment later, her mouth had turned down in an angry frown and had remained that way for the rest of the meal.

He wondered—and he was sure it was dehydration talking—what it would take for him to make her smile at him as sincerely as she scowled. Or maybe he wanted to make her scowl more. Draco wasn't quite sure what he wanted because at that moment he didn't particularly care. He was so parched, he had created a mental list of things he'd give for a simple goblet of water and right at the top of it was Ginny's soul. He figured they were of about equal value, though he might have been mistaken. Certainly the water would be worth more than a Weasley's soul.

“Not trying to run away, are you?” she asked in a tone of voice Draco recognized but couldn't comprehend.

Draco stared at her like one of his sunflowers. The sun gave her some color, made her skin appear rosy and warm. It was quite unfortunate that she was squinting so hard, because he couldn't tell if she was attractive or not with all of those creases in her brow—and the ever-existing scowl.

When Draco stared at her blankly, his mouth hanging open slightly, she snapped her fingers in front of his face, causing him to totter back on his heels and nearly fall to the ground.

“Dammit. I hadn't thought of it until now,” he answered, glaring at the spray bottle in his hand as he would have glared at a leash tying him to a tree.

Even if he had run and kept running, he knew it would have been pointless. There was no end to the hills or the flowers as far as he could see, and with the sun blazing above him, sucking him dry of energy as well as moisture, Draco was sure he would have died before ever reaching a town. He would have been caught wandering the fields and then chucked back into Azkaban.

He knew a good thing when he saw it, and it was worth it to cooperate with the Whites, while tolerating Ginny Weasley, to stay out of prison. The fact that she thought he'd try to escape a good thing irked him. His finger itched to spray that glower right off her freckled face.

She opened her mouth to retort, but he cut her off.

“Do I bother you?” he asked savagely, glorifying in the dumbfounded look on her face as she comprehended his words.

“What kind of a question is that?” she yelled.

The way she clenched her fists at her sides and the way her eyes widened made Draco believe that he had shocked her into raising her voice. It was clear that she had never intended to lose her cool; the agitated biting of her lips and wrinkling of her brow attested to that.

“I was just wondering why you feel the need to antagonize me,” he spat.

Dumbfounded once again, she wrestled with words until something coherent and condescending came out. “Why did you ever leave Azkaban? You should have rotted there! You don't deserve to breathe the same air as people like Jimmy or the Whites!”

“Or you, you mean to say?” His grip on the spray bottle tightened, sending a mist of potion onto a patch of chrysanthemums.

Her arm slashed through the air. “You are a murderer and a coward, and I hate looking at your smug face!”

The force of her words was so strong that Draco released his breath and took a step back, as if he'd been winded. Behind him, a sunflower peered over his shoulder.

He'd never murdered anyone, despite his weak attempts, and, even then, he'd only tried to kill two people. The others had gotten in the way. Collateral damage. But they had survived.

He'd been trapped back then: his future only going in one direction—the same direction as his father's—but his foolishness in his youth had convinced him that what he had been doing was important. He had wanted so badly to do better than his father, to seize glory for himself in the wake of Lucius's failures in the Dark Lord's service.

The folly of his youth. Certainly she had her own regrets herself? And smug... he couldn't remember the last time he had felt smug, let alone looked it.

The sun suddenly seemed to feel hotter to Draco. His hair clung uncomfortably to his neck, sweat dripping from the too-long strands. A rebuttal was on the tip of his tongue, or maybe it was an insult, but Draco couldn't get his mouth to work.

The last thing he remembered was his eyesight going black.

Draco rolled over onto his side to escape the accusing expression that he imagined reflected in its one cold marble eye, and instead met the cool gaze of Ginny, who was sitting in a chair by his bed. He was starting to think that she was stalking him.

When she'd seen that he had awoken, she cleared her throat in a gesture of awkwardness, shifting so that she was sitting on the edge of her seat. Draco waited expectantly for her to speak, but she seemed at a loss for words, or unwilling to breech the silence.

So Draco shattered it for her. “What are you doing here?” he asked in a hard voice. Like she had any right to come into his room uninvited and watch him sleep when just earlier she had been calling him names!

Her eyes lowered to her lap, where her fingers worried the material of her robes. “Lucy said I was to take care of you,” she mumbled.

“I don't need your care, so you may leave.” He flopped back over onto his other side, where he could see the bear sitting in an awkward handstand against the wall. He closed his eyes against it, trying to block everything out, trying to recreate the bubble of silence he had lived in while at Azkaban. But the bubble had been irrevocably popped. He couldn't stop sound or pause life any better than he could kill a defenseless old man.

A cold wet cloth plopped unceremoniously on the side of Draco's face, startling him into a sitting position and nearly making him fall out of the bed.

“What are you doing?”

“You're dehydrated. Put that on your fat head and drink this!” Ginny shoved a massive tankard of water into Draco's hands, sloshing it all over his bedclothes in the process. “If you don't want my care, then I won't give it!”

She stomped to the door, but his voice stopped her before she could leave.

“Wait! Wait. I wouldn't want the maid to be punished for not following orders. You can care for me.”

He laid back down gently, his head spinning from all of his moving around. He cradled the tankard carefully, trying not to spill any more water onto himself.

Ginny turned around, her jaw set stubbornly and her brows wrinkled in a V shape, sloping down to the bridge of her nose. He suppressed the smirk that longed to come out of hiding, but knowing her temper and seeing how angry she was already, Draco decided it was best not to push her any further.

She grabbed the wash cloth from where it had fallen on the mattress and gently patted Draco's face with it. He closed his eyes, ready with a quip about servitude and her rightful place in the world, but he quite forgot it as she wiped the cloth along his neck. Something strange happened, something he never expected. Not with her, anyway. Not here. Not now. A tremor shot through his body as the muscles in his stomach clenched oddly, making his breath catch in his throat. His eyes flew open to see what Ginny was doing, but she was glaring at the cloth and muttering angrily under her breath, quite oblivious to his body's reaction to her ministrations.

“Th-that's alright. I was only joking. You can go,” he stuttered gruffly, shoving her hands away.

“Make up your mind already, will you?” She sighed in exasperation, leaving the damp cloth on the bed as she stood. Before she left the room, she turned back to him, still looking annoyed but dutiful. “Don't drink that water all at once, just a little at a time. You've been instructed not to leave bed. And if you need anything please hesitate to ask.”

She slammed the door behind her.

Draco released a breath of relief, his muscles relaxing now that she had gone. He carefully rolled to the edge of the bed, reaching for the poor bear, knowing he was still too far away, and yet a burst of magic summoned the beaten toy to him. Panting and weak from the effort, Draco took a sip of water and then curled up on his side, his knees nearly touching his chest, the teddy bear clutched tightly in his arms.

He tried to drift back to sleep, but he couldn't stop thinking about Ginny's touch.

He'd been surprised to learn that the Whites were the main suppliers of flower shops all over the United Kingdom and the continent. Their magically enhanced garden grew the largest, brightest, longest-lasting flowers in all of Europe, and they were often sought by shops and private buyers. The land that the flowers grew on had been passed down from previous generations of Mr. White's family. Lucy had training as a Healer, specializing in medicine that resembled what Muggles called psychiatry, which hadn't been useful to her as it wasn't a very popular branch of Healing. She and Mr. White had opened The Cottage as a place for each one to explore and combine their passions, rehabilitating patients through work in the immense garden.

Draco supposed it was a nice thought, a nice ideal sort of life for them, but as the sun glared down on his back, he couldn't help but wish that the Whites had inherited an ice cube company instead. Besides Ginny, Jimmy, and himself, they employed nearly fifty workers to cut flowers. Draco saw them from time to time, depending on which section of flowers he'd been assigned to harvest or fertilize.

In the evenings, he sat in the sitting room, usually with a book, sometimes writing letters he would never send, that would never be read: letters to his parents, telling them about the dullness of the day-to-day; letters to Professor Snape, apologizing for refusing his help in Draco's sixth year—wondering how things would have been different if he had let Snape help him with his mission, wondering whether Snape would have survived. He wrote letters to people that he would never admit writing to: the people whose hands he had sneered at when they had offered help; the people with whom he had always shared a feeling of disgust; the people who he had hurt in his quest for glory. (Crabbe's letter had been a particularly difficult one to write. Draco couldn't stomach rereading it, and so he hid it underneath his mattress, where it sometimes called to him in his nightmares.)

But Draco had kept himself occupied, despite his nightmares and his letters and his chores. He'd taken up the hobby of people-watching, specializing in the observation of Ginny Weasley.

Some nights, he didn't have nightmares but vague dreams filled with tremors and touches and a pale, freckled face surrounded by a mass of flaming red hair—red like tiger lilies, flaming like the sun. Ginny's antagonism decreased as the days passed, but she still spoke kinder to Jimmy than she did to Draco. Usually, she avoided having to endure his presence for any length of time. She poked her head into the sitting room to see if he was there and then left when she spotted him. In the mornings, she ate her breakfast as quickly as possible in order to leave the table and his presence.

Even so, Draco watched her and occasionally spoke to her. He made sneering comments about her freckles and her hair, about the way she dressed and how she worked. He might not have realized it, but his insults were childish. Safe. They were always about her and never about her family and certainly never about the war.

He'd spotted her cutting tiger lilies one morning, and he'd changed his path so that he had to walk past her, even though the foxgloves he'd been assigned to that day were in the complete opposite direction.

“Oh, Ginny. Didn't see you there. With that hair of yours, I thought you were part of the scenery,” he said to her, feigning surprise.

She'd looked up at him from her crouched position, annoyance and loathing in her eyes, a smudge of dirt smeared across her cheek. The cutters she had been holding flashed in the light of the sun, making the dark orange lilies around her look like the bloody scene of a homicide.

“Bugger off, Malfoy! You've got work to do.”

He'd found it amusing that he had compared her appearance to flowers, and she'd still taken offense.

“Ah, ah! Watch your language. Wouldn't want to hurt poor Jimmy's feelings would you?”

She shot up from the ground, the cutters much more threatening now that she was standing.

“You leave Jimmy alone! You don't know anything about him!”

It wasn't entirely true, though Draco wasn't going to admit to having eavesdropped on her helping Jimmy back to bed his first night at The Cottage.

“How sweet of you to defend him from me. Don't let Potter catch wind of your love affair. It would break his heart.”

He'd left her seething in the lilies at that remark, while he had snickered to himself.

But Ginny had shown him, hadn't she? Apparently, she no longer thought of Potter at all. She was too busy running off with one of the younger men who came at the end of the day to pick up the flowers they had cut for distribution to shops. Draco didn't know him personally, but he'd seen him around—seen how his eyes had followed Ginny as she unloaded the flowers she had cut that day, watched him elbow his fellow deliverymen and nod appreciatively in Ginny's direction. He was the complete opposite of Potter: tan-skinned where Potter was fair, blond-haired where Potter was dark. No glasses. No scars. Just the ever-lasting expression of a prat on his face.

He didn't just look like a prat—he acted like one, too. June was a hot month, and Draco had taken precautions to keep from fainting again, carrying a canteen of water that Lucy had given him and wearing robes made of a thinner material. But Draco remained draped in his robes the entire day, no matter how sweltering the sun was. Ginny's deliveryman showed up with the others around five o'clock, before the sun had set but at that time of day when it was starting to cool off, and just to show off, he liked to unbutton his robes about halfway through the job, showing off tanned skin and rippling muscles that Draco certainly did not have, rotting in Azkaban as he had for five years.

Draco had gained some weight since arriving at The Cottage, but he was still dangerously thin, especially when his slight frame was compared to the deliveryman's broad physique. Draco had never thought of himself as short, but that man made him look shorter. And certainly Draco was a prat, snobbish and rude with a superiority complex, but a greater prat existed in Ginny's lover, which disgusted Draco because he thought she could do better. No, he thought she would have done better, never mind what she could have done or deserved.

The blond hair was the only thing that Draco and the deliveryman had in common, and even that feature was different. Draco's hair nearly shone white in the light of the sun, a blinding platinum color that was cold and harsh. The deliveryman's blond hair was gold and warm. It seemed to absorb heat and reflect it back out as light. Their hair matched their characters, made Draco less approachable and the deliveryman more inviting.

For some reason, this irked Draco. Maybe because he almost fancied that Ginny had chosen her deliveryman exactly because he looked nothing like Draco or Potter. But he'd be flattering himself if he thought Ginny Weasley thought high enough of him to try to forget him with a man who was his opposite.

Now, rocking in a chair on the porch, Draco's eyes followed Ginny as she flew past gardenias and gladiolas, tulips and roses, hand in hand with her deliveryman.

As they disappeared over a hill, racing away from the setting sun, he thought about his suggestion of her love affair, and wondered why seeing her with that man made his stomach clench uncomfortably and his hands form into tight fists. Nearly every day he watched them as they sneaked off together, and there was nothing he could do about it because he meant nothing to her, and she wasn't supposed to mean anything to him.

She didn't. Honestly. But that damn wash cloth and his blasted dreams made him imagine things he shouldn't ever be imagining. Like Ginny running off into the hills with Draco, to do whatever it was that she and that deliveryman did together.

She always came back in time for dinner, and Draco put his observational skills to the test by studying her over the table while she avoided conversing or even looking at him. Her countenance never revealed any of her secrets, leading him to wonder if she had learned Occlumency and utilized her skill with it now.

And at night when he went to bed, his stomach lurched almost painfully as he thought of the day and of her. He wondered what she had been looking for that she had found in that man, and also why he felt as if he had missed out on something important.