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II: Broken


Somewhere—somewhen—Ginny knew that they'd broken away from the rest of the world. It didn't happen overnight. But she did wake up one morning and suddenly realized, We've changed.

That in itself wasn't much of a surprise. "Change" and "inevitable" could be relied upon to always follow within a word of each other. But this realization was different.

Maybe it was when she'd woken up, sticky with someone else's blood and only been disgusted by the fact that she'd ruined yet another pair of emerald robes. "Draco," she'd whined. "We forgot to bathe again."

From her stomach he'd looked up, long blond hair sticking to her stomach and streaked rusty. He'd licked his lips.

"I don't mind. You taste better in the mornings, anyway."

She'd hit him, but the idle thought that maybe this wasn't normal danced through her mind as she pulled him up her body by that hair to meet his lips. She certainly didn't recall waking in blood back in her Hogwarts days, or when she'd been a stalwart member of the Order.

Thinking more on it, she'd come to a sort of awareness about their relationship and how they functioned. Something with them was . . . wrong. Different from everyone else. What had changed?

It required a fair amount of self-perception to become cognizant that somewhere their sanities had first fractured and then shattered irrevocably. They'd been left behind as the rest of the world continued, forever locked in a perpetual moment where they'd never again change.

Maybe that was what insanity meant. Knowing that you'd never change and would watch everyone else live and grow and evolve while you were halted at a single moment, frozen with crystal clarity.

It had scared her. Ginny Weasley wasn't supposed to be insane. She wasn't supposed to be broken. She was supposed to marry Harry Potter and become one half of a golden couple. She'd visited her parents, ignoring the cadaverous white that nearly overwhelmed their eyes that were wide, wide, wide.

"What happened?" she'd asked.

"Ginny, oh, Gin-bug . . ." her mum had cried.

"Answer me!" she'd yelled, and sensing her anger, maybe even knowing it would end at that anyway, Draco Apparated into the Burrow.

"Come on, love," he'd told her.

Sometimes she didn't mind that they were broken. Draco always did manage to remind her why it didn't matter.


Total words: 397.


A/N: Hi again! For once in my life, something's going to be updated fairly regularly. I don't have a long note tonight because I have a killer headache and I'm just going to go to sleep. It feels like tiny gnomes are dry humping my brain. :|

Review replies aren't entirely done, but I'll finish them tomorrow. I'm posting this now without doing them because I'm hoping your reviews in the morning will make any lingering effects of the gnomes go away. :)

And obviously I'm not going to be sticking to any strict genres, as this one is about as far as you can get from the first one without necrophilia.

Roma

P.S. If the A/N is weird, blame it on the gnomes.