Credit must go to Aegle for an idea from Contemplation (which was fab); the title was swiped from my good friend Purrr. Michael Ondaatje is a constant inspiration, as are rainy-day buses.
J.K. gives us characters and we must dutifully match plots to them.
--
Ginny found, now that the war was over, that she didn't have much to say. She found herself chain-smoking instead of working, sitting out on the fire escape, and drinking alone. She found her head turning at every flash of red that caught her eye; she was learning to stamp out the disappointment before it started, thinking Percy, Percy. Trying to be thankful instead of angry.
But then her head turned at every black, and brown, and oh Christ blond-haired stranger in the street, and she found herself hating Percy even more for refusing to fight, so that now he was just fine. His blindness to reality had served him well.
She was going to meet him for lunch like she always did after her psychotherapy sessions. She was headed there now, where her counsellor would try for the ninety-sixth time to convince her that it wasn't her fault she had survived with a mere scratch. The cut was almost healed, she caught a glimpse of the scar across her face in shop windows from time to time. There were no mirrors in her house now, they would show her the twins' eyes, Ron's nose, Harry's ring. Good thing she found herself thinking so rarely, because when it all came back to her it was with a recollection of why she tried so hard to forget.
She slid onto the squishy couch across from her counsellor and sat with wide, empty eyes, looking over his left shoulder. He started to talk and the words were like oil, dripping off her duck-feather skin. She giggled at the thought.
There was a brief silence. "Ginny?"
"Hm?"
"Are you alright?"
"The Ministry doesn't seem to think so," she said. They had assigned every 'soldier', and what was left of Hogwarts' Lost Generation, to three years of psychotherapy. Only sixty hours to go, she told herself, digging her fingernails into her palms.
"Yes," Mitchell said with a sigh, "but Ginny, what do you think?"
"I think it's bullshit," she said, looking straight at him. "And that you talk a lot."
"What do you think about yourself?"
"I'm friendly," she threw out at random. He cocked a listening ear at her very first mention of anything personal, but she didn't elaborate.
"Why do you think that is?" he prompted.
"I dunno… habit, I guess."
"You learned it from your parents?"
"Isn't that where you learn everything you know?"
He cleared his throat. "To an extent. Everything that happens to you is an influence on your personality."
"I wouldn't say my personality is friendly. I just act that way."
"Where did you learn how to act?" he asked, sitting back in his chair. She opened her mouth, closed it, and decided to lie.
"My parents."
--
Ginny is crammed into the back of a meeting hall, feeling slightly sick from the heavy perfumes hanging in the air around her. She tries to edge her way toward a window and fails miserably. Slumping onto a bench, she sighs and turns to the man next to her, determined to entertain herself.
"What a rotten place they've found."
"You'd think as prestigious a group as the Order could afford better accommodations," he drawls, glancing over. Her mouth drops open.
"Malfoy?" she hisses. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Reporting for duty." He raises his hand in a lazy salute.
"What happened to being daddy's boy? Did you let him down one too many times?" She's surprised and it's making her lash out. He doesn't even blink.
"I'd say this is the best thing I could do to live up to him," he says. "Save my sorry ass at whatever cost, right?"
He watches her struggle for words, and laughs. "I'm joking."
She snaps her teeth together. "I see," she says, looking away before she has a chance to spot anything in his face that she doesn't like.
The first thing she thinks is Harry is going to have a fit
--
Ginny slid into the booth across from Percy. "Sorry I'm late."
He waved her apology away. "How was your session?"
"It was alright."
"Same same?" He smiled at his sister.
"He talked to me a bit more," she said, cautious.
"Rather than… what?"
"My deaf, bored ears." She took a perfunctory look at the menu before saying to the waitress, "Veg sandwich and coffee, please."
"I've ordered already," Percy told her, resting his elbows on the table. "So, Ginny. How are you?"
"Good. How are you?"
"Great. How's work?"
Ginny shrugged. "Same same."
Percy waited for her to ask him how his work was, but she wasn't obliging. Okay, she didn't want to hear it. He'd let her pick the topic.
He didn't want to talk, that was obvious. She could sit in silence, she had it down to an art.
The waitress approached.
"Your sandwich, Gin, and I put cream in your coffee. Good?"
Ginny smiled. "Perfect, Sarah. Thank you."
--
Ginny had found the café by accident several years before. She had just gotten off duty and was blood-soaked and exhausted. The cracked, filthy sandwich-board out front announced good coffee and ambience.
Ginny, though exhausted, always tried to put forward a warm face to the service industry. This night in particular she was glad for the distraction that came with it; Sarah immediately cleaned Ginny up in the bathroom, keeping her busy with idle chatter. Ginny started going in after every shift, eager to hear Sarah's gentle voice and often amusing stories. Before long she was bringing her friends, Harry and Ron and Hermione, Hannah and Oliver, Bill, Charlie, Fred and George…
She stopped going before the war ended.
When Percy approached her at their parents' funeral, she felt she was rightly disgusted. However, she also felt she ought to put a good face forward for their extended family, and as the only remaining children they should be civil. He offered his condolences, his money, and his phone number so that they could 'get together'.
She took to adopting certain mannerisms when around him, and certain techniques for tuning him out. She liked to think that she was emotionally dead by the time he decided to bring her out for coffee. She saw the old sandwich-board without any jolt to her stomach, or care in remembrance. She went in, made idle conversation with Sarah, and went out. They met there every Wednesday.
--
Two weeks later she was sitting back in her therapy session, waiting for Mitchell to wrap up his latest attempt at breaking through her walls. She knew he wouldn't manage it. They had been constructed with great care, to be withstood by any trial. She was by now a cold, hard bitch.
It took a few more minutes before she was wrapping her raincoat around herself, standing in the street and wishing for an umbrella. A blond passed in front of her and she watched him without any real expectation.
He darted into traffic, his long strides carrying him away from her fast. She squinted, not believing her eyes.
"DRACO!" she screamed suddenly. She saw his step falter, but only for a moment, and then he was walking again, maybe a bit faster. She took off after him. "Draco!"
He paused, and half-turned. She splashed through one last puddle before stopping in front of him, gasping for air. He reached out an arm to steady her.
"You're not in very good shape, are you."
"That's - all – you can say?" She tried to straighten her back, panting and slopping wet hair out of her eyes. He lifted his shoulders.
"Just surprised. I didn't think you'd have lost your edge."
She glared. "Why didn't you stop?"
"I didn't hear you," he said. She knew better than to believe him, and more importantly, to contradict.
"Where have you been?"
"Since…?"
She glared.
"Italy," he conceded.
"What are you doing?"
He raised his eyebrows. "Standing in the pouring rain."
She grabbed his arm and hauled him down the block, to the nearest awning. Then she fixed him with a look.
"Well, now I'm talking to a very pretty girl."
She couldn't stop her snort. "Am I pretty?"
"I'm sure you know even better than I."
"Hmph."
"Despite your unfortunate disfigurement."
"I have somewhere I need to be," she said. She was starting to remember why she hadn't wanted to see him.
"I thought you weren't doing anything with your life."
"Why would you think that?" She narrowed her eyes. "You've been watching me."
"Keeping in touch with an old friend," he corrected, "as closely as she would allow."
"I've been very busy," she said stiffly, ignoring his pointed remark.
"Meeting Percy?"
"Yes." She watched him, careful now. "And then?"
"This is your day off," he told her, a shadow of a smile around his mouth. "So you'll head back to your unfortunate flat and sit around drinking and pretending to read until bedtime."
"You've used unfortunate to describe me at least twice."
"What are you going to do about that?"
"Are you trying to challenge me? You know it won't work."
"No, if your therapist's comments are at all accurate you are 'a force to be reckoned with'."
"Those are private!" she said, starting to get a little riled. He stepped back, she thought in fear; but it was to take a seat on the low wall behind him.
"Well, you have to admit there wasn't much for him to comment on."
"There could have been!"
"Yes, Ginny." His eyes were on the pavement but she felt as though he were watching her. "What do you think of this - ?"
"It's a horrible idea," she said, starting to walk away.
"Come on, Gin, don't run off. Why don't you take a day off from Percy? I know you don't enjoy it."
"Yes I do!"
"No. You don't. You resent and blame him. Let's go pick up lunch – actually, let's go to this lounge I've found, and you can pour out your heart."
"I don't have a heart, you should know that from Mitchell's confidential files."
"Well, darling, you have to admit the security in that place is dreadful. Perhaps you'd like me to find you a slightly more exclusive joint?"
"Don't patronize me!"
"Don't walk away from me." He didn't say it as a threat, it was a counter-argument. She chanced a look back at him. He was leaning back on his hands, feet braced on the concrete.
"Leave me the hell alone," she said.
"I hate to remind you, but you followed me here."
"You tricked me into it." The idea had just occurred to her and she waited for him to respond, deny it, something. Finally she threw up her hands. "I don't like you," she said flatly. When he still didn't say anything she trudged away, somehow wishing him to shout after her, so that she could take it all out on him.
Habit, she reminded herself. Not a good one.
"You're late," Percy told her when she finally arrived. "Did something happen?"
"No," she said. "There was a long line for cigarettes."
--
Draco was sitting on the curb the next day, in front of the Ministry. They were alone in the street but she pretended not to see him.
"Ginny," he called after her, and she could hear his shoes clicking professionally even on the weedy, dirty concrete. Goddamn businessmen. "Gin, wait up." He fell into step beside her.
"I told you to quit," she said.
"I miss you," he said. "I want my friend back."
"Liar. Why are you following me?"
"I was hired."
She slowed to a stop, and looked at him for a long time. "Liar. Why are you following me?"
"I want to talk."
"Are you being honest this time?"
"Yes."
"Can't tell," she said, and started walking again, fast. He jogged several steps to catch up.
"You know what, Gin?" he said, his voice pleasant. "You're going to talk to me sooner or later. Volente o nolente."
Then he dropped back and let her walk on. When she turned the corner she broke into a run.
--
Ginny loved opera. She talked to her more cultured friends about it constantly, though she hid the fact like an illicit lover when she was with the punk crowd who hung around her flat all the time.
She listened to it for hours, sometimes concentrating on the words, sometimes not. That was how she learned Italian, with the help of an Italian-English dictionary she had picked up in secret, in the dead of night. She never told anyone.
Volente o nolente, Draco had said to her, in that sunlit London street. Willing or unwilling.
She dangled her legs between the bars of the fire escape and stared at the ground, eleven stories below. Her cigarette dangled idly between her fingers; she hadn't taken a drag in minutes, so it wasn't exactly smoking anymore. She glared at it.
How had he known?
He must have a reason to be following her. It creeped her out, though if she was honest with herself it was flattering. A bit. Unless he really had been hired.
She lit another cigarette.
Perhaps he really cared. Perhaps a small part of him, a part he would never admit to, hadn't let go of the past, and thought she wouldn't have either.
Well, he was wrong.
She glared at the rain drizzling against the window across from her, and, for good measure, at the woman who saw her through it and glared back. She had let go of the past so thoroughly, that she accepted a job with the only department in the Ministry she didn't hold a grudge against. It happened to pay very little. She was in an unfortunate neighbourhood and just then she hated it.
Or at least didn't like it. She didn't feel enough to hate.
She blew a ring of smoke and, suddenly determined to enjoy herself, admired her handiwork. George had taught her that. And Fred… She scrunched up her eyes, concentrating very hard, and blew two identical rings from her nostrils. She grinned. A flash of blond crossed her vision.
"GET THE FUCK AWAY! I'LL KILL YOU!" she screamed, flinging her cigarette butt into the alley below. There was a terrified squeak and a patter of feet. The woman disappeared. Ginny felt a little bad.
But also a little relieved.
She took another drag.
--
She's running her hands through pale hair, sweat-slick bodies in a dark alley or on the floor of a copy room, and Harry she moans, rising to meet him. Harry
--
There was a man next to Draco when she came out of her therapy session the next week. She expected to see Draco. She hadn't thought of the man with him for a long time, so she didn't recognize him right away.
She approached them at once, knowing he would follow her if she didn't. Stopping in front of them, she fixed her eyes on Draco. The other man's fixed on her.
He was the one to break the silence. "Don't remember me, Ginny?"
Her eyes flickered over. "N- Oh."
"Hello," he said, smiling.
"Hello." She stood awkwardly now, not sure what to do.
"Shall we try that lounge, then?" Draco said. He got up and linked arms with her. "That's a nice ring you've got on." He massaged her fingers. She tried snatching her arm away but found his grip was tighter than she had thought. "You took this sort of thing in that course, didn't you – what was it called? With the rocks?"
"Geology," she gritted out, knowing that he knew. He let out a breath.
"Yes, that's the one. What kind of rock is this, Ginny?"
She tried again to pull away, and this time he let her. She crossed her arms over her stomach to hide the diamond on her hand. "Why did you bring Harry," she said under her breath.
"I thought you'd like to see him," Draco said, his tone surprised. "Step up, Potter. What have you been doing with yourself?"
"Fighting evil," he said, "as always. How 'bout you, Gin?"
"I think you already know that."
"Tell me again."
"I work in the Department of Forestry at the Ministry of Magic here in London," she recited. "I live in a rather crummy apartment just north of here. I spend time with my few living friends and with Percy." Here she glanced over to see his reaction, but he was smiling at a little girl passing on her bike. "I go to therapy sessions every Wednesday, according to Ministry Decree number eight thousand and something. When do you go?" she said, some inflection in her voice with this last. She was curious.
"Oh, I'm an exception to that rule," he said. "The moral victory gave me enough satisfaction that all my problems were magically solved."
"Were they? I've never heard of that kind of magic."
"There isn't such a thing." He ruffled his hair. "Did I tell you I have a little girl?"
"No. I haven't talked to you since you broke off our engagement."
"Right," he said, unperturbed. "Well, she's nearly two and her name is Amelia Lily."
"Sweet girl," Draco said. "You'd love her, Ginny, I know you always wanted kids."
Ginny's brain wasn't quite caught up yet; it was stumbling over the math surrounding two. "You were having an affair," she said suddenly.
"And so we come to the crux of the matter," Draco said, his expression pleased. He held the door for them, and waited until the maitre'd had seated them before continuing. "You see, Potter came to me some time ago with an interesting… discovery he had made."
Ginny's face went blank. She didn't want to know.
"His fiancé was sleeping with his – may I say best – informant."
Draco waited for her to speak. She didn't have anything to say.
"He wanted to avoid the political issues surrounding the matter. You must admit it's a delicate subject, and not one people at war should have to think about."
"What, love?" she said, before she could stop herself. Harry laughed.
"You could call it that."
"Well, needless to say I did everything in my power to right things. Broke it off, left the country, etc etc. I kept an eye on her because, for reasons we don't understand, Potter still cared." Draco fixed his face in a sappy smile. Ginny, who was desperately craving a cigarette and a glass of Firewhiskey, forced herself not to move.
"Ginny?" Harry said at last.
"What was your wife's name again?" Ginny said.
"Susan."
"Bones?"
"Yes."
"I see."
Draco must have ordered in advance, because plates of food were being set around the table. The waiter set a glass of Firewhiskey in front of her. "We've charmed this section, ma'am, you're free to smoke," he said, indicating the cigarettes he had placed next to her plate. Her very brand. She tried to smile her thanks but imagined it came out as more of a grimace.
Draco was cutting into his salmon, apparently ready to let them hash it out between themselves. Ginny cleared her throat.
"And… you're still with her?"
Harry was frowning. "Yes, of course. Why?"
"It sounds as if Draco was having an affair with her."
His eyes snapped for the first time. "You must have misunderstood."
"Your child was conceived during the time that Draco was your informant," Ginny said. Harry's frown deepened.
"Ginny," he said, "you were my fiancé then. Remember?"
"No, I don't," she said slowly. "I don't remember you being a part of my life then."
"I was fighting Voldemort."
"Yes," she said, "and having an affair, apparently. Why are you bringing all this up? I haven't thought about it in years, I was quite over it. Are you trying to make me care for you?"
"I have a loving wife," he said. "I just want to understand why you did it."
"Preferably before his loving wife leaves him," Draco said, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin. "She's upset with him for hiring me to follow you around."
Harry glared. Draco shrugged. "Stalk one, stalk all," he said.
Harry chose to ignore this. "Why did you cheat on me, Gin? Was it because of Ron? I should have been there for you, that was wrong of me."
"I didn't cheat on you," she said. "I missed you and I wanted someone to hold after my brothers were killed, but I would never do something like that." She kept her face bland, innocent. Maybe a little hurt.
"Draco confessed," Harry said.
"Draco lies."
Draco shrugged. "Draco lies," he mouthed to his plate, agreeing with her. Harry looked over in pure loathing.
"Why would you tell me that?"
"Something to do," Draco said. "I was bored. The idle rich and all that."
"You almost ruined my life."
"Yes," he said.
"I'm sorry, Ginny," Harry said, standing up. He kissed her cheek. "I should never have doubted you. Please know that Susan and I – I never would have – if Draco hadn't told me –"
Ginny, too, glared at Draco. "I hate you," she said.
"I'm glad we've progressed from dislike," Draco replied. "Mitchell would be proud at this deep show of emotion."
"If things were different," Harry started, but thought better of it. "I'm sorry. If I can do anything to help… Oh, Christ, I have to get out of here."
She nodded mutely, and watched him leave. She traced a circle around her plate, then another. "You jealous prig," she said finally, all other words having deserted her.
"I couldn't stand hearing his name while we fucked," Draco said. "It was indecent."
"I love him," she said, "and I hate you."
"How nice for you," Draco said politely.
"Why would you do something so stupid?" she burst out. "It can't have been for the gold."
"It wouldn't be my smartest plan to get rich." Draco stretched an arm across the booth behind him. "I can't say it paid well. And I certainly didn't expect Potter to hire me, of all people."
"Nobody knows what to expect from Harry," she muttered. "It's very presumptious to think you, of all people, would."
"I'm happy to say that I have no idea what goes on in his mind. Would you like some of this lobster tail? It's been particularly good lately."
She jerked her plate away. "Answer my question."
He raised his eyebrows. She swallowed, not knowing how best to rephrase it.
"Why'd you give up?" she said, without thinking.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Why did you let Harry believe me, that I didn't cheat on him? What were you trying to prove?"
"It wasn't my business to stop you from lying." She couldn't help but notice the flash of pride, no doubt at the skill with which she had manoeuvred her way around Harry's accusations. He was gloating. "You had the right to protect yourself."
"Then why bother telling him?"
"I've answered that question, Ginny. I don't share."
"So what, you make sure he can't have me if you can't?"
"You could say that. And… I wondered." He paused, then shrugged, as though deciding he didn't care whether she knew. "I thought I might have a chance, but apparently not."
"So that's it?" she said, flabbergasted. He mulled her words over. Finally he said,
"You haven't tried the fois gras."
Ginny got up and went home.
--
FIN.