Authors Note: This is a ficlet or "one"shot. There will only be one chapter because to me the story feels complete. Its switchs between Ginny and Draco's point of view. I'm rather proud of this bit of writing, so please review and reassure me my efforts are in vain. Oh and I basically own nothing of this story. It belongs to the wonderfully brilliant JK Rowling who deserves so much credit for so much inspiration.
The First New Dawn
One might say they were a pair so absurd only a hopeless romantic would imagine them. Even then, the fantasy would be far fetched, like a child's dream of finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Fun to think about, but so unrealistic it could never happen.. It would be like Santa Clause, something you wanted to believe in, but in the face of reality found it shattered. Lying by herself, staring intently at the horizon, red hair reflecting the first light of dawn, Ginny Weasley almost believed her motives were that of a naive romantic. Deep inside she'd always been a hopeless romantic, hadn't she? Her ill-fated pursuit of Harry proved evidence enough of her whimsical fancies.
Still, that wasn't the truth. Ginny Weasley was no longer a child chasing the valiant hero who'd brought about Voldemort's downfall. Ginny Weasley was no longer the little girl with red pigtails whose giggles echoed within the safe walls of Hogwarts. She was Ginervra, an adult matured and tormented by a war where no one won. Sure, every war had a technical winner, but who really won with war? The soldiers who actually fought the battles? No, they weren't winners. Maybe they lost the most; their lives, their health, and their innocence. . The civilians, those who sat and patiently waited for their loved ones to return, did they win? No, for everyone lost someone, or felt the ominous pains of living in a dying society. A great Muggle poem once said, "Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." That's how Ginny saw the war. Whether a Death Eater or a "good" guy died fighting, in the end, society died piece by piece.
Maybe that's how this had all come about. Somewhere along the line Ginny had stopped seeing everything in black and white. War had served as a paintbrush, painting the world in various and innumerable shades of gray. Some people were so gray their souls merely bled into the night sky. However, none were quite white enough for Ginny to mistake them for the clouds. Ginny had lost her vision of absolute right and wrong. The only thing she felt sure about in her heart anymore was that Voldemort was evil; everyone else fell somewhere in the mess of grays she found herself drifting aimlessly through.
Everyone thought the war would end with Voldemort's death, as though the world could turn around in a heartbeat. In the end that was false hope; you couldn't turn back the tides of time as though it had all been a terrible nightmare. In fact, nothing changed when he died. The mysterious hand of fate still painted the world with dark charcoal grays. Truth be told, with Voldemort gone, things made even less sense. He disappeared, leaving behind only ash and ideas. Ideas: they were Voldemort's legacy; they were his true power. Years into the war the Death Eaters had stopped fighting for Voldemort and started fighting for "the cause." "The cause" may have been self-serving, but it was transcendent. Nothing could kill an idea. Once released, ideas attached to society as parasites, waiting for their shining moment to take over. The world would never again have complete peace because somewhere on the fringes of civilization the idea would be biding its time: waiting, watching, and planning for its next rebirth.-ooooo-
Everything had changed when they lost the battle. Sure, the winners and losers alike referred to it as "losing the war," but Ginny knew better. Equality and prejudice would always clash. For a time prejudice had won, but as long as the belief in equality burned in the heart of one wizard, the war wasn't over. Forming a relationship that made no sense in the midst of chaos somehow seemed natural. In the beginning Ginny had known exactly what she was doing; she was doing what she had to. With a family all dead or scattered, alone and impoverished, you learned to survive by any means possible.
In a dark bar in a dark war in the aftermath of destruction they met. Ex-enemies once considered opposing white and black, intertwining with individual purposes into the most glorious shades of gray.
Sitting watching the sun rise, Ginny could remember the first words he'd ever said to her after everything changed. "I'm surprised to see a Hogwarts student that survived the war." The words had been uttered coldly, un-affectionately and unsentimentally. Sipping a cold firewhiskey, his words dripped down her spine like ice. Unfortunately Ginny could have uttered the exact same sentence; no one she'd known had survived.
Turning, she matched his coldness with fire. "I'm surprised to see a Malfoy survive the war."
"Bitter that you lost?" Draco slid onto the stood next to her.
"Bitter that you did?" Ginny muttered honestly.
"I didn't lose," Draco stated defensively. The Death Eaters had overrun society now, as Draco had once threateningly predicted, they had won. Ginny could remember the day he announced to everyone they'd chosen the losing side. She'd been so confident sitting on her safe little bench on the Hogwarts Express. The memory sent chills through her blood; she'd been wrong, they'd all been wrong.
"Shows how much you know." Ginny took a long sip from her whiskey bottle. Everyone had lost; if Draco didn't understand that he was more idiotic than she'd ever imagined.
"At least I know enough to choose the winning side." Ginny shook her head, and examined the boy sitting before her. Draco Malfoy the man was taller and thinner than the boy she remembered. If it was even possible, his skin was paler; white as a corpse. His pointed features hadn't softened with war; in fact, his chin seemed sharper than ever and his eyes were ice. However, seeing Draco and hearing his insulting tone she remembered so clearly from childhood felt comfortably uncomfortable. Though their memories together were unpleasant insult wars, they had memories - a past. Ginny couldn't remember the last time she'd seen someone who'd reminded her of the past and the time before war.
"Draco, who actually won?" The change in Ginny painstakingly shone through. Parts of her had died; other pieces had grown, creating a new and intriguing person. She stood, almost like a symbol of the war's results, changed, damaged and heartbreaking.
The red haired woman had destroyed the young man's gloating. He seemed at a loss for words. Shifting uncomfortably on the stool, the man looked away from the girl. Her dark words hit home closer to home than she would have imagined. His demeanor changed and he asked, "Ginny, where are you living now?"
"Where ever. Changes every night. Last night it was a Muggle backpacker's lodge Ginny gave him a sardonic smile. "As for tonight, until you came around I was hoping to find someone here." Home had died a long time ago. Every night meant somewhere different, hopefully warm, but Ginny's only real requirement was a dry place to sleep.
"You mean you're a..." Draco looked shocked and fascinated at the same time.
"No," Ginny corrected him. "I'm just a survivor. It's not that I sleep with them. I've just learned that if guys get you drunk enough he's willing to offer you a couch for the night."
For a moment Draco had thought, no actually hoped Ginny Weasley had turned into prostitute; and strangely not for the sick pleasure of seeing her as a miscreant of society. He'd seen enough lives destroyed. Looking across the bar at the person Ginny had become, he knew he'd already seen her at her lowest, whoring herself in a completely different way. "Then let me buy you a beer," Draco offered. "It's the least I can do for an old enemy."
"Draco, I may be desperate, but no thank you." Ginny couldn't help but think about what her brothers would say. If they were alive... There was always the chance that somewhere in the ruins of the wizarding world a familiar face or even a family member had survived. Unfortunately Ginny had run across lots of tombstones with friend's names but no survivors yet.
"I thought this was about surviving, Weasley?" Draco said it like a proposition, throwing in her last name like a childhood insult. "I didn't just survive the war, Weasley. Actually, I thrived." It was a bold-faced lie. Sure, financially he thrived, but emotionally he was barely alive. He walked, breathed, and drank (oh did he drink) but he knew he that wasn't living. Life required being a person, existing as an individual entity; instead he simply floated disincarnate, part of the mass of confusion but not an actual person.
"In the name of caution I'm going to ask why." The girl accepted the beer and it was then everything started, the phrase changed Ginny's life.
"Because you were right, Ginevra. I lost." He didn't say what he'd lost. He didn't mention that his father had been destroyed, kissed by a dementor. His soul, as dark and worthless as it may have been, had still been his father's soul. Watching the shell sit and waste oxygen had been too much for the young man. With a simple incantation he'd released his father's body from the hellishly pointless existence it'd been trapped in. No longer did he exist in limbo, he simply had quit existing. Draco's mother had perished too in the war. One of the so-called "good guys" had brutally raped and murdered her. Apparently being the wife of a Death Eater made one less than human--so much for equality. More than anything, Draco had lost himself; his very soul had disappeared into the mass of confusion and anarchy following the war. No longer was he Draco Malfoy, he was a member of the masses, another victim of war and circumstance. Even seeing an enemy like Ginny Weasley changed everything. The red-haired Gryffindor glided into his life, a ghost from a past bursting with broken dreams.
"Everyone lost, Draco. Everyone." The sentence was gracefully simple. She spoke to him like another human being, no longer an enemy, just another lost soul suffering due to the damned war. "Do not ask for whom the bell tolls." Ginny repeated the motto of loss she'd began to repeat everyday as she read obituaries in the newspaper. "It tolls for thee." Draco felt flabbergasted. The war had viciously sucked all semblances of innocence from Ginny's soul. Standing in place of the wide-eyed innocence was a surprisingly philosophical wisdom and depth that entranced Draco. The only survivors of the war Draco had encountered were idiots. The intelligent, with their high ideas and values, had died fighting for their beliefs. The cowardly and stupid had somehow hidden in holes and survived. It was unfortunate for a society in a constant state of upheaval that the wise had sacrificed themselves on the altar of idealism. However, an intriguing specimen of wit and intelligence had survived, though obviously not without scars. The echoes of unknown battles reverberated in her eyes and told stories similar to what those Draco himself had suffered. Finishing her drink, Ginny picked up her backpack and looked at Draco. "Let's go. There's no point in feigning drunkenness if I don't have to."
"You don't even really get drunk for them?" Draco laughed at the dark revelation. Ginny had learned to use people as a means for an end. A trait many Slytherins had perfected. Thinking back to Slytherin made Draco remember all his friends and goons, and everything he'd once thought important. Seemed ironic how naive all the Slytherins had been, thinking money and power could save them from every woe.
"I just do what I have to." Ginny looked at her enemy. It seemed so strange to lay old loyalties aside, but so much had changed; apparently the Weasley/Malfoy grudge just happened to be next in line for a makeover. "I've seen so much dying and my plan is to keep on living." She didn't mention that she'd sworn to keep on living. It had been the last time she spoke to Ron before he'd disappeared. He'd stroked her fire-red hair and kissed her forehead and begged her to live. Somehow, maybe by the magical surpassing love of her family or maybe by a strange twist of fate, Ginny had lived. "If you can call this living," she said to herself.
Somewhere, Ginny had once heard that the night was always the darkest right before the dawn. Leaving the bar with Draco that night looked like her darkest moment. Looking through the imaginary eyes of her brothers, she saw herself spinning downward. Seeing it from the perspective of a good Gryffindor, she saw herself committing the ultimate betrayal. However, looking through the hollow brown eyes of Ginny Weasley, she merely saw Draco as another guy helping her for the night. The others hadn't survived the war; they didn't live in the brave new world she found herself dog-paddling through.
-ooooo-
Like the Burrow, Malfoy Manor no longer stood. Newer and modern mansions had been raised for the well-off, as if anyone was really "well-off." But if anyone could be called "well-off," Ginny supposed Draco could. Warmer, carpeted mansions had replaced the mortar and stone houses. Sitting next to Draco, eating a four-course meal on his living room floor, Ginny felt at home for the first time since the war. The fireplace gave unnecessary heat; the house had every amenity including central heating, but it created an atmosphere that reminded Ginny of her Hogwarts common room. No matter how relaxed the dinner supposedly was, Draco refused to lower his guard. Coldly curious, he asked without flourishes, "What did you lose?" Such a simple question, such vast implications.
"What didn't I lose?" Ginny curiously eyed Draco, trying to understand the man sitting next to her.
"Your family?" Draco asked, as though it were a casual question. His calm tone of voice didn't give away the fact that secretly he hoped some other Weasley had survived. He wanted a piece of that past; that boyhood rivalry preserved. In a strange way he wanted that piece of himself back.
"I don't know." Tears actually welled up in her eyes. Apparently the Ginny Weasley capable of feeling emotion hadn't completely died in the war. "My parents died when the Burrow was destroyed. Everyone knows that Percy was murdered at the ministry. I watched Fred and George get tortured and murdered. I just hid and couldn't do a damned thing about it." That day burned in Ginny's memory. The three of them had been living in the backroom of the shop, waiting for news from someone in their family. One day the Death Eaters had come and Fred and George had practically shoved an invisibility treat down her throat before facing the throngs of men in dark cloaks. Helplessly, Ginny had stood in a corner of the shop while her brothers had died.
"I heard about that." Draco sipped his wine, not pretending to comfort Ginny. "I didn't know you were there."
"Fred and George's final prank. I just happened to be invisible when the Death Eaters came," Ginny had no qualms about Draco's uncaring attitude. They had no reason to pretend they were a couple trying to impress each other on the date. Circumstance had thrown them together. In a sense they both needed each other, not because they cared, but because they echoed of a past long gone.
"What about Ron?" Something in his tone of voice registered as hope in Ginny's mind.
"He's missing." Ginny didn't add "presumed dead"; instead she looked quixotically at Draco. "You wish he were alive, don't you?"
"No I don't." For all his practice lying, Draco's talent failed.
"Isn't this the strangest situation? We're all that's left," Ginny understood why Draco hoped Ron was alive. Ron Weasley was part of who Draco Malfoy was; it was one less thing Draco wanted to lose.
"Ginevra Weasley and Draco Malfoy, the only known Hogwarts survivors," Draco raised his glass. "I'll drink to that."
"School reunions will be a breeze." Ginny laughed darkly. An actual smile, not a fake smile of a desperate woman flirting her way to a couch, crept across her face. Smiling felt unnatural, much like everything else from Ginny's previous life. Then something unimaginable, unbelievable, inconceivable happened. Draco's cold gray eyes locked intensely on her sadden brown eyes. Leaning across the silver platters that contained dinner, Draco pressed his lips against Ginny's in a soft kiss. Connecting with another human being for a moment, just one moment, brought everything back. The kiss awoke life inside Draco, for the first time in 5 years he actually felt someone, he connected with someone whose name he knew, not some whore in a brothel. The experience for Ginny paralleled Draco's. Something rose within her, familiarity, life, and suddenly she wasn't quite as sure what she was doing anymore.
Two years later Ginny was a different person. No longer the school girl, no longer the bitter woman she'd evolved into someone she could only hope her parents would be proud of. Her world had turned upside down in that bar. Through some unpredictable twist of fate Ginny Weasley had ended up with Draco Malfoy. Not because of shared allegiance, or shared beliefs. A joint history and joint experience, even if from opposite sides, brought the two together. Whenever Ginny looked into Draco's slate cold eyes she saw the girl she had once been and the woman she had dreamed of becoming. For Ginny it was still about survival, but she no longer just existed on a physical plain. By returning her past he'd given her new life. Draco also found solace in another grieving soul. Even if they were Gryffindor and Slytherin, they'd lost the same thing. War, with its vicious indiscriminate teeth, had ripped apart their childhood and inadvertently stolen their futures. Together their shreds almost made a whole.
-ooooo-
The dew felt cold under Draco's bare feet. He'd heard the door close as Ginny went outside. For a split second he'd fear she would run away, but Ginny Weasley had nowhere left to run. He'd followed her outside, laying his head down next to hers on the grass, and together they stared up as the darkness disappeared and the first hopeful light of dawn slowly made its way across the sky. It was a new day in a new world, and thankfully two enemies found new life in one another. "Draco, we're going to have a baby." Ginny didn't even look at Draco when making her announcement. In the midst of destruction and tragedy, the unlikeliest pair had created something entirely new. A new baby, a new beginning, new hope. As the sun blazed across the horizon a new day dawned. Eventually the sun painted the sky red, with gloriously bright orange streaks. The colors were so vivid...so alive; truly a new day had begun.