Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me.
One
"Defiance is beautiful. The defiance of power, especially great or overwhelming power, exalts and glorifies the rebel."
—Robert Frost
Ginny stared down at the lightly gleaming tip of her wand in stunned silence, unable to grasp what the hazy green glow meant. Here, crouched in a grubby alley, certainly wasn't the moment to be shocked into inaction, listening to the sounds of fighting right around the corner. She hadn't been able to resist the bizarre urge to use the spell before she hurtled into battle on the heels of her comrades, but now she wished she hadn't even heard of the blasted spell.
"Finite Incantatem," she murmured, watching the green light disappear and leave her in darkness once more. She shifted on her heels, ignoring the protesting ache of her slowly cramping muscles as she cast the spell again and watched the sickly green light that reminded her so much of the Killing Curse ignite the inky blackness once more.
She couldn't bring the right thoughts to her mind that could describe the confusing depths of her feelings. That green light should have been a happy sign: something to rejoice about with her family, not loathe on the edge of a battle with similar green lights zooming in front of her hiding place with oh-so-different meanings.
Ginny cast the spell again, hoping it was a mistake and she'd soon see the crimson glow of a light like the Cruciatus Curse. Instead, that green light turned her shaking, white hands into alien limbs: pale bones dipped in viridian.
A cry rent the darkness, spurring Ginny into action. Green light or no, she was needed for a far more important cause. She pushed herself to her feet, swiping back greasy red locks and flexing life back into her protesting limbs. She shot a disdainful look at the weak green glow and dismissed it with a shake of her wand before darting out of the alleyway and into the main street.
It took less than a second for her to adjust to the chaotic scene that met her eyes. Multicolored spells electrified the still night air with sharp bursts of syllables that twisted themselves into indiscernible spells. The streetlamps offered a more reliable source of light, giving her a view of a narrow street, far narrower than a modern one, with cobbled stones and tiny apartments squashed together like crooked teeth. Excluding the spells, the scene was painted almost monochromatically: sickly yellow, withered grey, and devouring black.
A quick sweep identified familiar dark shapes dancing around looming unfamiliar ones, and she used that knowledge to sling her first incapacitating curse at her victim, a tall man with flowing robes and a mask the color of ivory. He hadn't noticed her arrival and had been preparing to sling a curse at a luminescent figure with long strands of moonlight-white hair.
"Stupefy!" she uttered quietly, moving on to her next target as soon as she saw the first collapsing to the ground.
Sometimes she hated that her morals prevented her from using Darker curses, knowing that the Death Eaters she'd use them on would more than deserve it. They certainly didn't have such scruples when it came to attacking them. She knew the spells, because knowledge is power and she'd heard them enough to be able to use them in her sleep, but something always stopped her. Sometimes she thought that "something" was the only thing that separated her from them.
Ginny saw a shorter Death Eater turn towards her, and she dove to the ground in a roll, anticipating the jet of brilliant green light fired from his wand, before leaping up to return with a vicious "Duro!"
It was one of the spells she used the most often, simply because it was easier to say than most of the other spells that had more than two syllables. Many of the Order members frowned on her usage of it, protesting that turning the Death Eaters to stone was too harsh of a punishment, despite the fact it could be reversed. Ginny refused to quit using it for the efficiency of the unexpected grey light that startled Death Eaters who were used to the red beams of stunners.
Ginny considered it a test in restraint: as long as she could resist the urge to blast a statue into a million tiny pieces, she knew she wasn't that far gone.
She found herself back-to-back with a much taller figure, and used the sturdy presence to push forward in a sudden burst to leap at an unsuspecting Death Eater. Dependency on wands was a weakness she'd quickly learned to utilize, having no qualms with dealing a literally below-the-belt kick to bring a man to his knees. The Stupefy was dreadfully easy to accomplish when he was so occupied.
Ginny spun to the side, knowing she was vulnerable to attack with her back to the fight. Turning back around, stringy red hair whipping across her smudged cheeks, she was glad to note that this time, at least, they had the upper hand. They had expected this: their patrol group of five matched the number of Death Eaters, but the disparity in experience levels was painfully obvious.
She felt the bitter disappoint rising in her chest as she watched the rest of her group easily take down the last Death Eater. It wasn't supposed to be this easy. They had been given intel that Antonin Dolohov was supposed to be on this patrol, but all they had encountered was a bunch of greenhorns. A waste of a night.
"Bloody fuck," a tall figure cursed as he took a swing at one of the Death Eaters on the ground.
A woman with straggly blonde hair placed a restraining hand on his arm, but Ginny could see the twist of her mouth that revealed that she was just as frustrated as they all were.
"I'm fucking tired of all these red herrings!" he continued on, glaring down at the lumpy figure.
"Control yourself, Finnigan," came the cool voice of Adrian Pucey, one of the only ex-Slytherins to defect to the Order of the Phoenix. His cool blue eyes gazed down a thin aquiline nose to meet the shorter man's defiant glare.
"Seamus," Luna Lovegood murmured, pulling slightly on his arm.
He cast a dismissive glance at the blonde woman, before looking back with a softened gaze. "Sorry," he apologized grudgingly.
Ginny exchanged a knowing look with Luna, whose large blue eyes looked haunted. Sooner or later, he was going to wind up dead because of that temper.
"Help me with these wankers, would you?" Terry Boot growled as he rolled a comatose Death Eater closer to the stone one.
Seamus and Adrian began to tow the bodies into a relatively large pile, while Ginny strode closer to the taller blonde woman. Luna was already fiddling with a copy of today's Daily Prophet, wand brandished as Ginny kept a wary eye on their perimeter. The paper was all but useless nowadays; the Prophet had been the first to fall to Voldemort, with the Ministry of Magic quickly following into the cesspool of corruption that had befallen most legal avenues. It was surprising they still even printed the rag.
Wordlessly, Luna handed the newly turned Portkey to Ginny. The redhead spared a glance at the headline—ORDER CAUSES MORE CHAOS—before sneering in disgust and looking away. It had been a long time since the Order of the Phoenix was looked upon with any kind of respect or hope.
"I'll take these back," Adrian informed them as he gestured towards the pile of Death Eaters, verbalizing a routine that was so ingrained in the group that it was only wasted breath.
The Death Eaters were bound tightly with lengths of rope to the granite façade of the stone Death Eater, their wands successfully secured in Adrian's hand. Ginny handed him the Portkey, and he placed it on the closest Death Eater while keeping a hand on it himself. The Portkey activated a moment later, vanishing the pile of Death Eaters to the designated receiving bay in headquarters. Seamus and Terry Disapparated away with twin pops a second later. Ginny and Luna waited half a moment longer before Disapparating to a couple of streets away from their hideout in the slums.
It was routine. Adrian took the Death Eaters back while the rest of them split into pairs and Disapparated to various locations around headquarters, each pair returning at different times to prevent any sort of attention being drawn to them. She and Luna were always the last to leave and had to walk the farthest to return to headquarters. Seamus and Adrian had usually finished the debriefing by the time they returned.
Luna was silent as they returned to headquarters. Neither felt the need to talk, and the words that had been exchanged earlier between the group were unorthodox and a result of long nights spent hunting and being hunted in a cruel dance that wreaked havoc on everyone's sanity.
Ginny didn't remember the last full night of sleep she had. Sometimes, she wondered if her insomnia was even a reality. When she did sleep, her dreams were so lucid, so vivid and bloody, that she had to confirm with Luna in a ragged, broken voice that the monstrosities she had just seen weren't real. It was impossible to discern reality from fantasy, and that more than anything frightened Ginny. She didn't want to sleep for fear that she'd wake up in an even greater nightmare.
"Ginny," Luna said softly, startling her out of her reverie.
She had to force herself to unclasp her wand that she'd so unconsciously grabbed, half-drawn from her pocket already.
"Sorry," Ginny muttered, realizing that the reason Luna had spoken was because they were there. "There" being a half-buried door that you needed permission from their Secret Keeper to see, crammed between a basement window and a pile of garbage.
The grey paint on the building was in scattered, flaky patches that did little to disguise the visible mold and mildew made even more prominent by the flickering of the lonely streetlight. Luna needed Ginny's help to even access their headquarters. The wards would only let two people in at a time, and it was organized so that neither knew the entire password and spell combination to enter the base. Ginny, however, knew both halves, although she made sure that no one else was aware of that fact. The Order was just oh-so-wary of traitors after—
"Loquacious crimson craters," Ginny uttered, the password of the day slipping from her lips in a near whisper that Luna wouldn't have been able to decipher even if she wanted to.
There was the sound of locks undoing themselves—a paltry defense—before the door swung open and they darted inside like the half-drowned rats they appeared to be, following the slope of the floor as it took them beneath the apartments above. Ginny didn't bother to survey the familiar foyer for differences. It was the same as it had been for the past three years that this building—if it could be called such—had been their headquarters.
"Ginny, in the kitchen," Seamus called to her.
She gave a nod to Luna and left the blonde, unraveling the raggedy scarf from her neck as she went. Luna was content to know less rather than more, so she had requested to be excluded from knowing all but pertinent information. Ginny, on the other hand, probably knew more than half of the Order combined.
The bright lights momentarily stunned her as she entered the kitchen before her eyes refocused with a speed that was learned rather than natural. Half-ringed around the table were the current leaders of the Order, with Seamus and Adrian on either side. It was remarkable to see the change in the three who had all but taken control of the Order with the death of Mad-Eye Moody and Remus Lupin: the Golden Trio were quite a bit more tarnished than they had been nine years ago when the war had really started in earnest with Dumbledore's death.
The Boy Who Lived was known better now as the Boy Who Barely Lived. Ginny met his murky green eyes, deep-set and surrounded by bruised shadows in a haggard face, and had to look away. Long gone was the boy that she had longed for with the innocence of youth. In his place was a broken man, one who had died too many times with each successive failure and death of Order members.
It was harder to look at the lanky redhead at his side. Ginny tried not to, but she couldn't resist the compulsion that she felt and the ache in her chest that threatened to consume her when she caught sight of the subtle arm wrapped around his waist, a visible sign that Hermione Granger was the only thing preventing him from collapsing to the floor.
Two years in Azkaban after the regulations against torture were dropped can do that to a person. Ron Weasley had died long ago. Ginny hadn't heard his voice in years, and sometimes when he looked at her, she wondered if he even truly existed on any level. Those dead, unseeing eyes reminded Ginny more of a corpse than many of the dead that she'd actually seen.
Out of the three, it seemed like Hermione Granger was the one who had retained the most humanity over the years. Her bushy hair was a dim memory; Ginny couldn't remember the last time she'd seen those long locks. A Death Eater had sliced them off, and Hermione maintained it as a fluffy halo around her head.
Ginny understood Hermione's reasoning for keeping her hair, once such a large part of the older girl's identity, shorn. The wicked, jagged scar that stretched across her throat like a macabre second smile had been a gift to her from Yaxley, and it was only quick thinking that had saved Hermione from losing her head. Now it served as a visible reminder for everyone just what they risked for fighting on the side of the Order.
"Ginny, Seamus just informed us that Dolohov wasn't on the patrol you detained," Hermione said, her voice as flat as her expression.
Ginny forced herself not to recoil in the face of such lack of emotion. Sometimes she was afraid she looked exactly the same.
"Yes," Ginny confirmed. "Are you sure the tip-off was sound?"
Hermione nodded mechanically, her eyes fixed on a curious pile of necklaces in the center of the table that Ginny's hadn't previously noticed. "You know that despite his numerous faults, Pritchard is loyal."
Ginny did know that. She had worked with Graham herself to prepare him for the rigors of being a double agent. He, too, was one of the few ex-Slytherins they had attracted.
"What are those?" Ginny asked casually while leaning forward against the table.
She had an inkling that she knew exactly what the innocent-looking pile was. They were the source of her current green light problems. Well, maybe not the source, but they had certainly started it.
"We found them on the Death Eaters. They seem to be some kind of amulets," Adrian answered.
Ginny watched Hermione nod distractedly as she eyed the pile with a vague sort of interest that Ginny recognized as some of the old Hermione peeking through. She reached out to touch one, and Ginny's instincts got the better of her.
"Don't touch them!" she said sharply, freezing Hermione in her motions. At her side, Harry raised an eyebrow, the first sign of life Ginny had seen from him since she'd entered.
"Ginny?" Seamus questioned, looking at her as if she was about to have a breakdown.
She forced a laugh to her lips that sounded more like a barking cough. "Years of not touching Fred and George's experiments have conditioned me well."
The excuse fell flat. Ginny was hoping they'd only assume it was because she was replacing "dangerous Dark objects found on Death Eaters' bodies" with "Fred and George's experiments" and not outright lying to them. Which she was.
"Right," Seamus said with an uneasy chuckle of his own that died quickly.
Ginny took that moment to examine the pile on the pitted table. Each amulet was strung on a chain of fine silver, and, although Ginny couldn't actually tell the type of metal used for the necklaces, she was quite positive they'd be real silver. Each one was about the size of an egg and roughly octagonal in shape. They weren't flat, either: they seemed to be somewhat convex, which Ginny found interesting. There was a chunk of stone embedded in each one, unpolished, rough, and slightly reddish in color.
"Are you going to Fred and George's?" Harry asked her, startling her out of her examination with his gravelly voice. He sounded as if he'd swallowed coals, which probably would have been preferable to what had actually happened.
"Of course," Ginny replied, shying away from the memories that threatened to envelop her like a gaping maw.
"Can you take the amulets to them to determine what exactly they are supposed to be used for?"
Ginny nodded absently, withdrawing her wand and Vanishing them easily. She had a bone or two to pick with her dearest older brothers, anyway.
Ginny Apparated to the middle of the deserted street on the outskirts of Edinburgh, the distant sounds of the city reaching her straining ears almost instantly. She had already drawn her hood over her straggly red hair, and she distractedly pushed a few stray strands back as she hurriedly began down the lane, eager to pick up a spare hair tie at Fred and George's. The Ministry had cut off water to certain parts of the slums in an attempt to flush out the Order, but the only thing that had accomplished was a lessened dedication to personal hygiene.
She always looked forward to her visits to Fred and George's because of the chance to take a luxuriating bath. The sad state of her hair was due to of a rough two weeks or so without a good washing. She usually limited her bath time to cleaning her body instead of her long hair (her only remaining vanity) because her apartment was in part of the city where the Ministry had cut off water.
The end of the road was landmarked with a squalid hut surrounded by dead grass and bits of trash. The sky was as clear as it could be a fair distance away from the light pollution cast by the city, and the glittering cascade of stars made the scene almost surreal. She headed straight past the decrepit building, pausing only to tap a tiny stone at the base of the left wall twice with her wand before pacing out into the packed dirt yard. She counted her steps in her head: nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen.
There was nothing unique about the patch of dry earth she had stopped before. A few persistent weeds had found their way through the surface to sway lightly in the breeze, silvery white and nearly swallowed by shadows in the dark night. It looked like every other bit of land in the deserted lot, and that was exactly what it was meant to look like. If you didn't know what was there, you'd have no hope of finding it.
Ginny crouched, using her wand to trace symbols into the dry earth. One was a wavy line with a round head that resembled a snake and the other was a curved half-circle topped by a thicker line. These she put beside each other. Another two symbols were a circle with a line drawn through it and what appeared to be the letter "F" without the second dash. The final two symbols, completing the triangle, were a sort of cup shape with one side of the cup bisecting in a downward line and a symbol that looked like a lowercase "Y."
Ridiculous, just like Fred and George. Each pair of symbols were letters—Egyptian hieroglyphics, Cyrillic, Greek—that translated to "F" and "G". Ginny watched an unseen wind swirl the light dust until the symbols were no more, and then she heard the slight "snick" that indicated the door had opened. Standing, she briefly observed the changes in the landscape.
A mere inches in front of her stood a doorway, a yawning inky oblivion that appeared more like a pit than a welcoming entrance. It was difficult to discern the rectangle in the pitch of night, but the complete lack of light within the doorway made it obvious because she was so close. It was the reason no one visited them during the day: a large block of ebony would be ever so obvious under the golden sun.
She stepped inside the doorway and felt the whoosh of air as it closed behind her, leaving her momentarily blind. The ground underneath her feet gave a jolt of movement, almost reminiscent of an elevator, before it stumbled to a halt and a light flickered on.
The hanging bulb illuminated an empty room, bare of anything save a lonely wooden door on the opposite wall. Ginny didn't have to turn around or look up to know that there'd be no sign of her entry point, and she strode unhesitatingly to the far door. The next room looked only slightly more lived in, Spartan in its adornments. The couch looked ratty and well-loved, as did the battered coffee table with a smudged glass filled with an unidentifiable liquid inside. There was no determining its age.
There were two doorways branching out of this room. One was a closed door on the far wall, and a little to the left was an empty doorway that led to the kitchen. Ginny went there first, pausing at the refrigerator to find something to drink. Fred and George had been unsuccessful in their attempts to harness the Muggle eckeltricity in their home, and had, instead, simply used magic in its place, a usage that she wasn't quite sure had been used anywhere else.
Inside the refrigerator she found a few beers, a bottle of Firewhiskey, and a hunk of cheese. Such items were worth a small fortune to those connected to the Order because of how impossible it had become to venture into the public, but Ginny had no desire for the alcohol. She couldn't risk losing control of herself in such precarious times. She snagged a glass from the cupboard and got some water from the tap, and then headed lazily over to the closed door that led to the living room. Her brothers rarely ventured outside of their workroom-cum-bedroom anyway, so she'd have to go to them.
The light was almost blinding inside, a drastic difference from the dim lighting of the earlier rooms. Balls of witchlight floated unhindered against the ceiling, illuminating every wooden shelf in the room. It looked like a library, minus the books. This was their storeroom: goods of every kind were stacked in boxes—or not in boxes, as the case was for a few—with hastily scribbled words on them that gave insight as to what they contained. Ginny had spent a large amount of time going through their inventions, so she knew much of what was contained in these boxes.
She also knew that she had never seen a small percentage of her brothers' inventions. It was necessary, for her safety and theirs—without hard evidence, she wouldn't be able to reveal to any Death Eaters if she was captured that she knew her brothers were double agents. Plausible deniability. She suspected, but she had never received confirmation from them. Nor would she. What her brothers did was outside the sanctioning of the Order of the Phoenix, and they preferred it that way. Ginny was one of the few that ever saw them.
She strode through the dark wooden shelves to the next room, which was a bit homier than the previous one. Two twin beds were jammed into a corner, unmade, and a bureau was pressed equally close. Grinning, waving pictures peered at her cheerfully in neat rows on the bureau, still trapped in a world where one could actually be happy. The walls were painted a dark green color and more witchlights floated near the ceiling. On the right wall was a door leading to a bathroom and a large workbench. Another workbench was directly to the left of the door and it was here that she found Fred.
Her stocky older brother wasn't that stocky anymore, and the only thing distinguishing him from her other older brothers was his lack of height. He certainly wasn't short by any means, but he didn't tower over her like the rest of her siblings did. He turned his head towards her briefly when she walked in before he went back to fiddling with the small black box he had on his workbench. His hair was long and stringy with grease, matching Ginny's. That reminded her to draw down her hood, and she frowned at him.
"You haven't been taking care of yourself," she accused, knowing how hypocritical that sounded coming from her. Coming from any of them.
Fred shrugged in response. "Haven't had the time," he dismissed lowly.
She didn't want to ask what he was working on for fear of not receiving an answer, so she didn't comment and placed her glass down on his bureau before pulling off her cloak and tossing it on the closest bed.
"George?"
"He's at work," Fred replied to the implied question.
Ginny fought the frown, but didn't succeed. George had a "normal" job, and that alone signaled that he was working for the Death Eaters. She knew without asking what they worked on for the Ministry. She wished she didn't.
It was George's job, with Fred's help, that had sucked the cheer out of her older brothers' golden brown eyes, a darker color than her amber ones. She could easily guess the things they created to keep the Ministry satisfied. She wondered how they could cope with the gripping, carnivorous guilt that must eat at them every time they created a new product for the Ministry, and she knew it was only made better by the fact that they had each other.
Ginny, despite her intentions, envied them for the unalienable support they had from each other. She could only be so lucky.
She didn't bother announcing to her brother that she was going to take a shower, and strode over to the small bathroom. She stripped quickly, folding her clothes to put on top of the toilet, and then jumped into the shower, using their precious little hot water to clean the stickiness out of her hair. It was a quick shower because she didn't have much time to waste, but outside of the shower she hesitated, feeling too large for the tiny bathroom and fixated on a single object.
The fog had obscured the mirror, and she had avoided looking at it as she stepped into the bathroom. With her left hand holding the thin towel up, she used her right hand to swipe clear a section of the mirror to reveal her reflection.
At first she didn't notice the difference between the alabaster wall behind her and her skin, but the faint pink tinge gave her flesh away, scrubbed raw by a worn hand towel. Her eyes looked too big for her face, and her cheekbones stood out starkly, reminding her that she hadn't eaten since that morning. She sometimes forgot to eat, just like she sometimes forgot to do other normal day-to-day things that she knew she should remember.
Sometimes she wondered if it'd be easier if she forgot to breathe.
Her lips were cracked from biting them too often, and she could see the faintest glimmer of an ivory scar curling its way through the edge of her left eyebrow and down an inch across her temple. She'd nearly died from that wound, sliced at the temple and steadily pumping out ruby liquid with the beats of her slowing heart in the depths of London.
Ginny realized with an uncomfortable jolt that she couldn't remember who had saved her that time. Adrian? Terry? Countless other injuries blurred together in her mind, and Ginny felt a pang of loss for something she might never attain again.
Her rapidly drying scarlet hair was her single concession to pride. It fell to her mid-back in long, wavy strands. She usually kept it bound tight and away because she knew that keeping it so long was a serious vulnerability, but sometimes the tie would rip out and she'd be left with it swirling in riotous knots down her back.
Ginny pursed her lips at the woman in the mirror before looking away and getting dressed in the clothes she'd worn before.
Fred was still at his workbench when she emerged from the bathroom, cleaner than she'd been in weeks and marginally more affable. He sensed that she was ready to talk and placed the cube gingerly down as he turned around, bracing his arms on his workbench and gazing at her levelly.
Ginny unflinchingly met his gaze, another reminder of the effects of the war. Although she was looking at him, he wasn't looking at her.
"Come to chat, sister dear? Or is there something more pressing that hasn't been seen to yet?"
She wanted to hate him for his cruelty, but she couldn't. His humor was more twisted. Dark. And it frequently contained mentions of sight.
As if anyone could ever forget.
"Hello, Fred," she said softly, moving closer and making sure to scuff her feet against the floor so he'd hear.
His unseeing, perfect eyes tracked her across the room until she was standing in front of him. His gaze was on her nose, missing hers by mere inches. He sighed, the barest release of breath that slumped his shoulders into a position of defeat.
"Ginny," he said with finality.
She wanted to rant and rave, throw things around, break precious glass, do something to show that she still could be angered, but was unable to in front of her brother. She simply couldn't muster up the will.
"The amulets," she eventually said, watching his face twitch with recognition. He was easier to read now that he didn't have to think about hiding emotions. Ginny wondered if it was because he had truly forgotten what they looked like on other people or if he simply didn't care.
"Did you find some of them?"
"One on each of the Death Eaters from a patrol we jumped tonight. Doubtless the other patrols will have similar results." Ginny un-Vanished the amulets onto his desk, and he turned when he heard the click as they hit the hard surface. While he was distracted, she reached over and grabbed a spare hair tie off the bureau, tying her hair up into a still-wet bun.
"Have you touched them?" he asked urgently, grabbing his wand and waving it over the pile unerringly.
Ginny shook her head before she remembered he couldn't see the movement.
"No. I didn't want to risk it."
She watched him perform a few tests on the amulets as he mumbled to himself with words she didn't catch. She gave him a few minutes to stew on the new mystery she had provided him with before jumping to her point.
"Fred, I need to know where Draco Malfoy currently is."
Fred's movement stilled above the amulets. He half-turned towards her, brow furrowing into a frown.
"Why? We don't need you to go see him; we have the amulets now."
Ginny gritted her teeth. She didn't want to tell him about the green light. Her mind raced, crafting possible lies and discarding them with brutal efficiency. In the end, however, she decided to avoid lying altogether.
"I need his location, Fred."
The silence stretched between them, thick and heavy with unspoken words. Words like No and I have to and Be careful. They both knew they had secrets, and Ginny was hoping that this knowledge would prompt Fred to give her Malfoy's location out of respect for her secrets.
"Will you come back later to talk to George?"
Fred's voice was deceptively calm, a soft inquiry tinged with pleasantness. Ginny instantly saw through it: he was going to give her the address, and that was his way of asking for her to check back with them to confirm that she hadn't been killed in the process of whatever foolhardy errand she was going on.
"Of course," she agreed amicably.
It would be easier to confront them about the amulets with George there. The guilt was always diminished when George was there to draw her gaze, preventing her from dwelling on Fred's beautiful, beautiful eyes. Beautiful eyes that would never again see because the optic nerves had been forcibly removed.
"We've got his current place of dwelling on the northern side of London, nearby the Liriope Theatre."
Ginny's brow wrinkled at the unfamiliar name.
"Liriope?" she questioned, and Fred shrugged.
"You'll find it," he answered dismissively, turning back to the amulets. Ginny noticed that he didn't continue to experiment on them.
"Alright," she said finally. "Thank you."
"No problem," her older brother said, hand white-knuckled on his wand. "Just remember to come back for George."
Don't get yourself killed, please.
"I won't," Ginny promised, throat tight, not realizing she had answered his unspoken words before she slipped back out of the room.
Tracking back to the first room, she used her wand to tap the far wall three times—two fast, one long—and then waited for the room to drop back into darkness before she could exit. Once she was outside in the still dark, she contemplated her actions.
Ginny could either go hunting for Malfoy now or later, and right now seemed the best bet. She knew he was a nocturnal being, so if she waited until morning there would be a better chance that'd he'd Avada her first and sneer later. So tonight it would be, even though that would give him an advantage, especially since she'd be literally walking right into his hands.
Well, better go now before I lose my nerve, she told herself with a twisted grin, knowing that such a possibility was little to none because she was Ginny Weasley and Ginny Weasley hadn't ever lost her nerve. She Disapparated away and appeared in a deserted street in London, using the stars to guide her north. Luckily, it didn't take her long to get to her destination, but, unluckily, she realized it might not be that much help.
The Liriope Theatre was closed and looked like it had been for the entirety of Ginny's existence. She squinted up at the crumbling façade, trying not to frown at the empty street. She didn't really know what she had been expecting—maybe a sign saying DRACO MALFOY LIVES HERE would have been nice—but this dead end in the heart of London with no one in sight certainly wasn't it. There were no signs of life in the bare street, dimly lit by orange street lamps.
Had she really expected to just stumble upon Draco Malfoy? It was a laughable thought, at best, but she knew that she hadn't given it much consideration. Perhaps she should have—
Ginny suddenly stilled, her heart rate tripling as her breath all but froze in her lungs. She was all-too-aware of the delicate pressure of a thin piece of wood against her temple. A dark chuckle nearly made her jerk in surprise, an action that would have been deadly if she startled her captor.
"Well, well, well," came the velvety purr, fluttering the hairs on Ginny's neck. "What's a little weasel doing waltzing into a dragon's den?"
A/N: So . . . wow. Hmm. I don't want to pollute this with too many thoughts yet, so I'll leave it at that. Beta'd by the lovely Boogum, and thanks in addition to imadoodlenoodle, starlit-skyes, Lovers-Love-Liars-Lie (but with periods instead of dashes), and Phrontist for all the feedback and help in crafting this idea and first chapter.
Notes:
-the "crooked teeth" image rightfully belongs to the band Death Cab for Cutie from the song of that same name
-the idea of cutting off the water supply to the slums to "flush out the resistance" is taken from the video game Jak II
Thank you for reading!
Roma