And I am alone, so don't speak

I find war, and I find peace
I find no heat, no love in me

And I am low and unwell
This is love, this is hell
This sweet plague that follows me.

Flesh And Bone – Keaton Henson

/x/x/x/x/x/

Ginny feels tacky. This is nothing new, actually, because feeling tacky is something she has become used to very quickly, mores the pity. Tacky is a useful word, it covers a variety of meanings. She often feels emotionally tacky because of her disreputable profession, and then there are the times she knows she looks tacky because of the gaudy clothes she must wear. There are other nuances, but today Ginny feels a very specific kind of physically tacky. It is the tackiness of semi-congealed semen that has trickled down her thighs, drawing the skin tight. Every time she shifts in the creaking, four poster bed, the fruits of her labour cause her thighs to momentarily gel together before they reluctantly part again.

Is this a metaphor? she wonders. A metaphor for telling me to keep my legs shut?

It's a funny thought, and an empty giggle escapes her mouth before she instinctively presses her lips together to stifle the sound. She glances at the clock on the opposite wall, noting with vague surprise that almost twenty minutes has passed since her last client left. The Madam will be sending her another in ten minutes, she can put off rising and cleaning herself no longer.

It seems harder than usual to crawl out of the musty sheets and to tread the worn floorboards towards the miniscule en suite. She turns the taps on and strips off the scanty bra she had somehow managed to keep on, waiting for the water to stop sputtering out of the showerhead before she steps under it. She has only time for a quick scrub down, a mere freshener to remove the salt from her skin; sweat and semen. She is careful to keep her brassy curls out from under the spray and washes between her legs with the brisk efficiency of the Working Girl.

She is out of the shower in less than five minutes, and in three more she has donned a fresh set of cheap, skimpy underwear. She refreshes her makeup and pulls the rumpled sheets a little straighter, then reclines against the pillows expectantly. Thirty seconds later her door creaks open. A middle aged man, verging on portly, steps hesitantly into the dim light, nervous perspiration beading on his forehead. A first timer then, with a wedding ring to boot.

"Scarlet, is it?" he asks, a faint quiver to his voice. Ginny reads everything she needs to about her client in a few seconds and kneels up on the bed. This one wants to be told.

"Come here," she orders him, not bothering to soften her tone. He visibly wilts in relief and submits to her authorative tone. As his bulk settles down next to her in the bed, she idly wonders what her mother would say if she could see her now.

/x/x/x/x/x/

"I thought you were quitting."

Ginny takes another draw from her cigarette, inhaling deeply before letting the smoke curl leisurely out of her nose and mouth.

"I am," she replies eventually, offering Jazz her pack. The younger girl smiles ruefully and takes a fag, slumping down onto the worn divan next to Ginny.

"Cutting back, is that it?" she says with an ironic twist of her lips. Ginny smiles.

"Something like that."

She likes Jazz. The pretty brunette is a native Londoner with big eyes and bigger breasts. The Madame coined her Jazz because she can sing like nobody's business and, if life were kinder, would surely be singing sultry blues numbers in the popular, trendy London clubs.

They smoke in silence and Ginny wonders why she's wasting her weekly day of freedom. She should go out, wander London. Instead she's slumped in the room the Girls collectively call the Lounge, due to the fact that it has a few decrepit divans and is closed to visiting clientele. She tells herself it's because the wind is brisk, and she can't afford to catch a cold and miss work – who wants to fuck someone who's coughing and sneezing, after all? – but the real reason, of course, is that she lives in fear of bumping into somebody from her past, even in Muggle London. She's safe here though. Nobody would ever, ever think to look for her in a rundown brothel in White Chapel.

Eventually Jazz sighs and stubs her cigarette out in the over flowing ashtray perched precariously on the edge of the coffee table. "I should go, I told Mel I'd cover her clients tonight. She's not feeling well."

"I thought you were going to that audition down by Spittalfields tonight?" Ginny asks, frowning. "You can't miss that, Jazz. This could be your chance to get out of here, you'd be an idiot to miss it."

"I know, but…" Jazz trails off, a dark blush staining her cheeks. "It's stupid, getting nervous about a singing audition, when I do this for a job. But… I'm so scared I'm going to get up on that stage and they'll just know I'm a whore, or there'll be somebody there who's fucked me before, or…"

"Stop it," Ginny says sternly. "You're going to that audition, I'll cover Mel's shifts tonight. I haven't got anything better to do." Jazz looks a cross between touched, elated and terrified. "I'll also do your hair for you, before you go," Ginny adds, cajolingly. It's no secret in the house that Ginny can work magic with hair.

Jazz graces Ginny with a beaming smile and bestows a quick kiss on her freckled cheek. "I owe you big time, Scarlet!" she exclaims, before bounding up to presumably return to her room and get clean. Ginny finds herself smiling gently in response to the other woman's excitement. She closes her eyes and allows herself to bask in the warmth of it for just a moment, before reality kicks back in again.

/x/x/x/x/x/

It is five-thirty am, the streets of White Chapel are quiet, and Ginny cannot sleep. Her last client of the night has just left and she knows that she should wash, that she's just asking for a water infection if she goes to sleep with the remnants of a nameless mans' pleasure inside of her. But she's so tired. No, not tired – weary. She's only twenty-one, but the very marrow of her bones seems to throb, a thrumming pulse that surely she shouldn't be afflicted with for another thirty years at the very least. She stays sprawled limply upon the stained sheets, staring blankly at the faded red canopy above her head. Eventually she realizes that tears are tracking down her cheeks, though sluggishly, as if the effort of escaping her eyes has exhausted them of their potency. She feels no relief, only a hollow echo in her chest that nothing can fill.

How am I here? How did this happen? Why me? Why, why, WHY?

The same questions trudge unendingly through her head; in the beginning they would race, round and round and round, until she fell into an exhausted slumber. Now it is just an exercise in futility, a habit she can't break. She stifles the sob that is pressing against the back of her throat and roles out of the bed, an involuntary moan of discomfort escaping. She aches, the intimate parts of her body protesting against the rough overuse that they are subjected to. Ginny stumbles to the bathroom and swallows down paracetemol and ibobrufen dry, despite the fact that she exceeded the daily dosage limit earlier in the night. She has been living off of painkillers since she fell into prostitution and if she's very lucky the overuse will give her a stomach ulcer and put an end to her misery.

Ginny isn't sure if it's her womb or her cervix that is aching so acutely, perhaps it is both, but she is finding it difficult to stand up straight. She sits in the bottom of the tub and turns the shower on, enduring the sputtering bursts of icy water before the warm comes through. She rests her head on her bruised knees and lets the tepid water fall over her. She fancies that if she stays there long enough the water will wash out the red from her hair and freckles from her skin; the last remnants of Ginny Weasley will go gurgling down the plughole, and she can fully embrace being the scarlet whore.

And if she finally allows herself to weep beneath the spray, then who is to know? She weeps for her family, for magic, for the war, for her poor choices, for the pain and humiliation she endures every day; but mostly she weeps for little, naïve Ginny Weasley who was lost to the world long ago.

/x/x/x/x/x/

The year has somehow slipped by again, it is almost Christmas. Ginny hates Christmas most of all. She remembers happy chaos; sumptuous food, laughter, bickering, gaudy decorations and the warmth that seems to permeate the atmosphere when her family is gathered in one, small space. Nowadays she has the day off, to relax. And then night time falls and the family men come crawling out of the woodwork, still smelling of the cheap perfume they bought their wives for Christmas, with bits of tinsel stuck to their clothes, the smell of a turkey dinner still on their breath as they paw and thrust away the stress of hosting the in-laws for the day.

Ginny goes to the distant place within her mind where they can't touch her and imagines all sorts of things as they slam into her repetitively. She thinks of obscure things as her legs reflexively wrap around hips of varying widths, her body gyrating and acting out its role without any need for her to direct it.

There's a couple of her regulars that visit her this time, and both wish her a happy Christmas as they leave; one awkwardly hovers in the doorway for a long moment and then drops a bent, red envelope on the bedside table before he hurries away. Ginny stares at the object in horror and fascination. Slowly she picks it up, withdrawing the cheap card bearing a cartoon picture of a Santa stuck in the top of a chimney. Inside is simply written 'Happy Christmas, John', alongside a five pound note. Ginny laughs with incredulity and chucks it in the top drawer next to the KY Jelly and the painkillers.

It's only eleven pm, still time for a Christmas miracle. The thought invokes a cocktail of derision and cynical amusement in Ginny. She lights a cigarette and awaits… something. Anything.

When it happens, it's both Something and Anything, all at the same time. She's only half way down the cigarette when there's a polite tap on her door before it swings open. Nobody comes through, however, and she realizes they're waiting to be invited. Well, she thinks, that's definitely something. She calls for him to enter, and a thoroughly attractive man – slender, tall, broad in the shoulders and narrow in the hips – steps into her line of vision. He's very handsome, too handsome to need to pay for sex, but that observation is nothing more than a fleeting thought. He shuts the door gently, mercurial grey eyes remaining fixed on her prone form as she stares at his hair. She's hasn't seen hair that particular shade of vanilla platinum since she left the Wizarding world. She wants to react outwardly in the same way she is reacting inwardly, but nothing happens.

"I was waiting for anything," she informs him, taking a protracted draw of her cigarette. "You being here is a bit more than anything, I think."

Draco Malfoy stares at her with an inscrutable expression and doesn't deign to answer.

/x/x/x/x/x/

Ginny and Draco stare at each other for a few minutes in hollow silence. His expression is blank, his body language betraying nothing. He is stood with the correct posture etiquette lessons and a privileged upbringing procure you, and there is no tension in him that she can see. Ginny is admittedly bemused. She wants to feel ashamed, horrified that the boy she was raised to loathe is seeing her sprawled out naked in the hovel of her work environment. Unfortunately she's too tired, too numb, for any of that to do more than flit through her mind like a bumbling moth. As she can feel nothing, she says nothing. He continues to watch her and, a few minutes later, she has finished her cigarette.

"So? What can I do for you Malfoy?" she asks eventually, flicking the fag end into the far corner of the room. "A pretty thing like you doesn't require the services of a whore."

His eyebrows raise infinitesimally, the first hint of emotion that she has seen, and she sighs with exasperation; he obviously intends to be difficult and she really would just like a shower and some much needed sleep. The old Ginny, the girl who played Quidditch and cast a wicked Bat Bogey Hex, would have been frothing at the mouth with curiosity, asking questions – a dozen a minute. Scarlet simply lies in her fog of apathy and waits with indifference to see if he'll tell her.

"Miss Weasley," he says eventually, with the air of embarking on an unpleasant task.

"Ginny Weasley doesn't exist," Ginny snaps, cutting him off midway. A feeling like fire flashes through her and for a single, glorious moment she feels painfully, beautifully alive. "Ginny Weasley died two years ago."

"Oh for the sake of Merlin," Draco groans with a role of his eyes. "Do spare me the melodrama, Weasley."

Ginny gapes dumbly at him for a long moment. She isn't sure whether to be furious that he is running roughshod over the tatters of her self-esteem, or embarrassed because he's really quite right about the melodrama. He sighs and steps over to sit on the edge of her bed where he perches, an expression of acute repulsion on his face as the musty smell of stale sex reaches his delicate, well bred nostrils.

"Miss Weasley, if you could restrain yourself from interrupting for a few moments we can proceed. You are aware, naturally, of who I am, but not the capacity in which I am here. I am in the business of private investigation and your missing persons case was subcontracted out to me four months ago by the Ministry of Magic." He is staring down his aquiline nose at her and Ginny isn't sure what to make of the well-articulated noises coming out of his mouth. She lights another cigarette.

"I'm not entirely sure why they struggled so hard to find you, but then they are hopeless incompetents," he continues, lips curling up into the familiar smirk. "So, as I've now found you all I must do to fulfil my contract is to return you to your family."

He finishes his business like discourse with a self-satisfied smirk and a brisk nod of the head, indicating a job well done. Ginny takes a fortifying inhale of her cigarette.

"I'm not going back."

Draco's expression falters then, surprise and consternation rippling across the surface before all is calm once more.

"Don't be absurd Weasley,' he says, frowning. "Why on earth would you choose the life of a whore when you could go back to the loving fold of the family home that your lot value so highly?"

Ginny is caught in an impossible conflict of feeling. She wants to shrug nonchalantly, blow a cloud of devil-may-care smoke into his haughty face and say 'I'm not one of them anymore. They couldn't understand.' On the other hand a part of her, deeply buried for so long, is railing against the confines of her ribcage, snarling and spitting with indignation at his cavalier attitude towards the warm, loving people who raised her. She compromises by blowing the smoke in his face with a degree of hostility.

"I must admit my confusion, Weasley," Draco continues. "In a thousand years I would never have thought to find you in a brothel. Not the Golden Girl of Gryffindor. What happened?"

"That's none of your fucking business," Ginny says with equanimity. "Now get out before I scream for help. George can be rough with uninvited, non-paying guests."

Draco stands, a steely glint to his eye. She sees his long, pianist fingers trace the faint outline of his wand in his trouser pocket and laughs. "Don't even try to grab me and apparate. It won't work, nothing works anymore."

He is staring openly at her, the frown lines marring the smooth plane of his pale forehead and for a wild, absurd moment Ginny wants to apologise for her churlish behaviour and let him take her home.

Home.

But they would never understand.

"Fuck off, Draco," is what she says instead. He hesitates for a split second, and then leaves quietly through the door.

/x/x/x/x/x/

"Back again I see," Ginny comments from where she is plucking her eyebrows in the warped bathroom mirror. Draco's tall, masculine form wavers in the mirror as he walks up to the en suite door. This is the fifth time he has visited since Christmas, though he hasn't tried to convince her to go home again. He arrives unannounced, stays for an hour or two, and then departs after banal conversations. He talks mostly about himself, mainly due to the fact that when he asks Ginny a question about her life she falls back onto the tried and tested method of chain smoking in silence.

She isn't entirely sure what his game plan is, or why he keeps coming back, but she is reluctantly coming to anticipate his visits with pleasure. She greedily eats up his dull, everyday stories of his life in the Wizarding world, fancying that if she closes her eyes and focuses only on his clipped Wiltshire tones, she can almost smell the cauldron smoke and taste the butterbeer. She hates him for this, but craves these fixes he gives her all at the same time.

"How's business?" he asks laconically, leading his long frame against the doorframe.

"As it ever is," Ginny says with a careful shrug, plucking one last hair before cooling the skin with cold water. "A brothel is a very predictable place to work. Most of the clients are regulars, most of the regulars have their favourite whores… very little changes."

Draco doesn't say anything, but she can sense the discomfort in him. To his credit he doesn't pass comment or judgement on her profession, not since those cavalier comments he made during his first visit. She brushes passed him into the bedroom and smiles cheerfully. "Tea?"

Draco smirks softly and conjures up a little tea set that sits precariously on the small, bedside table. Ginny ignores the delight that flutters around her stomach at the display of simple magic and simply sits down on her bed to pour a cup.

Once they are both sipping their tea she gathers her courage.

"Why do you keep coming back?"

Draco doesn't look surprised at the question. In fact, he almost looks relieved that she has asked.

"Curiosity," he replies bluntly. "Technically I did fulfil my contract, by finding you. However, you've proven to be nothing like what I expected, and I enjoy solving puzzles."

"Having any luck yet?" Ginny asks with a small smile, knowing the answer.

"Not a damned thing. I can't for the life of me figure out why you would rather sell your body for a half-life, than return to the people and the world you know and love."

His words are matter of fact, non-judgemental. The supercilious edge he first bore has softened into an endearing sort of haughty kindness. Ginny sits in silence for a long time, sipping her tea, internally warring with herself. Draco Malfoy should be the last person in the world she contemplates sharing her darkest secrets with, but then again she is no longer the Ginny Weasley who hated him on principle.

"I got cursed, in the Last Battle," she says suddenly, staring hard into the china teacup in her hands. She senses Draco go very still at the end of the bed. "I didn't realise what was happening, at first. For the next year my magic started going haywire. Sometimes a simple Lumos would fail to produce more than a flicker, other times it would almost set the house on fire."

Draco says nothing, just stares at her intently, his tea forgotten. Ginny feels old tears clogging her throat and tries to swallow them back down.

"Then one day I just couldn't do anything. I couldn't even get my broomstick to fly. Magic seemed to have just… left me."

This is hard, painful and Ginny almost stops before she is too far into the story to stop. But Draco's expression is intense and his molten, glorious eyes are looking into the deepest, as yet unsullied parts of her and she desperately wants him to know that she's still worth something.

"I went to the Healers, but all they could tell me is that a curse had been sapping my magical reservoir for some time, slowly eating it away. By the time I sought help, I had less magical ability than a Squib. It was worse, no one else's magic could touch me. It's like I nullified it."

A tear slips down her cheek and she angrily dashes it away. Draco looks pale, which is stupendous because surely he couldn't possibly go any paler than his natural colour?

"I panicked, I couldn't bear the pain of living surrounded by magic, unable to access it. I changed what money I had to muggle currency and just… disappeared. I got by with what I had for a little while, but then I had nothing left and I didn't know what to do. I tried to go home but when I looked for the entry to the Leaky Cauldron I couldn't find it, it wouldn't appear for me." Ginny stops to glance at Draco's face and winces at his frozen expression of horror. "I owed some people some money and my body was all I had to sell. I thought if I just did it for as long as it took to pay that money back I could escape, find a way to get home, but… but that was two years ago."

Ginny falls silent, exhausted. She was hoping to feel lighter, shouldn't sharing her pain help? She doesn't want to look at Draco's face again, to see his revulsion at her truly Muggle state. To him that must be worse than her being a whore. She can feel the hot, insistent press of tears against the back of her eyes and reaches up to cover her face, to hide away the raw emotion that she's hidden from everybody since her world fell apart.

"Ginevra…" Draco begins and Ginny stills, because that is the first time anybody has called her by her name in a very, very long time. "I had no idea. There is nothing in your hospital records, there was nothing to suggest…"

Ginny knows he is thinking with embarrassment of the way he spoke to her the first time he came, as though this was a silly choice she had made.

"I asked them to seal my records, I didn't want my family to know," she explains quietly. She is trembling, like a fragile autumn leaf, one more emotion away from falling away to the ground. Her eyes blur as she stares hard at the empty teacup in her hands and she knows she is moments away from howling her regrets to the walls of her prison.

"Please leave," she whispers. "Please."

Draco stands and Ginny thinks he's really going, but then the bed is dipping again and his arms are pulling her into his chest. She fights, because this is wrong and he shouldn't be the person to comfort her; this is all backwards and upside down, wrongwrongwrong. But his arms are strong around her frail torso and soon her angry protests have somehow turned into heaving sobs of anguish and he is rocking her gently, so gently, and the faint smell of sandalwood that clings to him is now clinging to her and she's not alone.

"I'm going to take you home Ginny," he whispers into her hair.

"I can't, I can't, I can't," she sobs into his chest, again and again, her shame and self-revulsion rising to swamp her. "I can't face them again, they can't know. It would kill my mother, it would kill her."

Draco isn't saying anything, no platitudes or promises. Nothing. A little time passes and Ginny's sobs subside to gentle hiccups. It's quiet in the dim light except for the sound of rain pattering softly against the windows.

"My parents disowned me, after the War," Draco says suddenly, his words reverberating through his chest and against Ginny's head. "It's a long story, but… well, Father and I didn't see eye to eye and I was invited to leave the family post-haste."

Ginny sits up properly, wiping her cheeks and sniffing loudly. Draco's face is distant, his eyes far away. She draws away from him, a trifle reluctantly, picks up her teacup and holds it out to him wordlessly. He smirks gently and rolls his eyes before replenishing their tea.

"I went to America," he continues. "My views on life were given a rough overhaul and eventually I fell into the business of solving puzzles."

Ginny shakes her head in disbelief. "I just can't reconcile my memories of you at school with… you, now."

"One might say the sentiment is returned," he murmurs with a wry twist of his lips.

"Oh, touché," Ginny groans, a weak smile pulling at her lips. They sit in silence for a few minutes more before Draco sighs, running a long fingered hand through his hair before banishing the tea set.

"You need to leave with me, Ginny," he says quietly, emphatically. "This place is killing you."

"Why do you care?" she asks. "You did your job, you found me, and you've solved your puzzle. What else is left?"

"Do you remember your fifth year, before everything went completely arse up?"

Ginny frowns, casting her mind back to memories she has buried deeply for the longest time.

"Yes, I suppose so. Why?"

"I had this… absurd fascination with you. I hated you so much for it, but I couldn't stop myself thinking about you. I loved to watch you fly."

"I never realised," Ginny whispers, thinking back to that time with a fresh perspective.

"Well, teenage hormones and all that," Draco mutters with a faint flush to his complexion. "Anyway, when I came back to England and the Ministry offered me your case, well… all of my old fascination came back. I entertained this little idea that I'd find you on some windswept rock somewhere just waiting to be rescued."

"Sorry to disappoint you."

"I should have known, you're a Weasley after all," he says with a lofty sigh, though the soft curve of his lips belies the lack of heat in his words.

"Who could ever have predicted the way we ended up?" Ginny asks him sadly.

"Nobody at all, I expect," he says matter of factly.

Ginny smiles half heartedly before getting up to stand by the window. She feels bare under the intensity of Draco's gaze, a completely different sort of nakedness to what she is used to. It's somewhat uncomfortable, but at the same time strangely thrilling.

"I'm going to take you home now, Ginny."

She jumps slightly and turns to find him stood behind her, an expression of immutable determination on his face.

"Don't tell me you can't. Just… just come with me. It'll work out."

For the first time in years something is blooming in her chest, a sense of weightlessness, lightness. Is this hope? she wonders.

"Can we go for tea sometimes?" Ginny says, which is nothing like the declarations of undying gratitude and eternal friendship she wants to say. Draco seems to understand the unspoken sentiments because he smirks softly and peers down his nose at her.

"Nowhere shabby though, Weasley. I have a reputation to maintain, you know."

Ginny rolls her eyes and he sneers down at her and it's a perfect mockery of their school days, because there's no acidity or heat in their actions, just the familiar role play of the people they used to be.

"Okay," she whispers after a long moment, and she knows he understands because the frown lines clear from his brow and a cool, calloused hand is grasping her elbow gently.

"Mungos first, I think," Draco says briskly, though if Ginny didn't know better she would think he is choking up. "And then we'll figure it out."

"Okay," Ginny says again, because that's all she can say right now. But it's doesn't matter, because Draco hears the thousand words hiding behind it and he gets it, at least a little bit, and he's not one for verbosity anyway.

"Okay," he mouths, drawing her closer and pulling out a Portkey.

The old, familiar sensation of something hooking her sharply behind her navel startles a delighted sob out of Ginny. The ride is wild, disorientating and wonderful. The rush and tingle of magic dances across her skin and when they materialise in the waiting room of St Mungos she is crying and laughing and thanking Merlin all at the same time. Draco's hand is the only thing anchoring her to the moment and she clings to him with a desperate fierceness.

"Name?" asks the bored receptionist at the desk, rolling her cheap quill between ink stained fingers.

Ginny stares up at Draco, her heart thumping wildly in her chest, the plea for something, anything, shining through her brown eyes. His lips curve up into that soft, half smirk she has come to know so well and he nods. She draws in a ragged breath and turns to meet the impatient, curious gaze of the woman in front of her.

"Ginny," she says faintly, and then; "Ginny Weasley. I'm Ginevra Molly Weasley."

Somebody is laughing and the room is spinning and then she realises; the laughter is hers and Draco is swinging her round, and round and round and it's over. It's finally over.

"I'm Ginny Weasley!" she's yelling over the thrum of blood in her ears. "I'm Ginny Fucking Weasley!"

Ginny swears her feet have left the ground and she's flying, soaring away from years of misery and shame. She looks into Draco's eyes, molten silver and cloudy grey, and smiles. She's home.

/x/x/x/x/x/

A/N: This fic was written for Ky (writerdragonfly) as part of the DG Forum Winter Fic Exchange 2015. I was very honoured to win Best Oneshot Overall and Best Prose. All of the submissions were marvellous and I would highly recommend heading over to the DG Forum to check them out should you be on the hunt for some good DG fiction.

Prompt: The brothel was a seedy little place in Muggle London, flush with '80s décor and the smell of old cigarettes. When Ginny signed her life away to it, she wasn't ever expecting to see Draco Malfoy walk in.

Must Haves: Angst, humour, and a happy ending.

No-no's: Character bashing.