A/N: God, FINALLY I can get on and upload this. Fucking site had a "glitch" that would supposedly get fixed within a few minutes. But no, it had to take three fucking days. Damn, incompetent tech people...

I would bore you with a rant about how much I hate my life and how big of a Dipshit my English professor is, but I don't think you want to hear that. I think what you really want is to finish this story, so here you go, have fun.

Chapter 9------Until the Day I Die

Roxanna stirred without opening her eyes. She heard people talking around her but did not pay too much attention to what they were saying. She felt a stinging pain in her right arm and grunted from the sore skin.

Something or someone pushed down on the edge of the bed she lay in. Wait, a bed? Yup, these were definitely sheets draped across her. Roxanna squeezed her eyes shut, then blinked several times before all the people around her came into focus.

Hermione was leaning close to her, her hand pressed into the mattress next to Roxanna's right hip. "What?" the red-head asked, absolutely baffled as to what was going on. "Where am I?"

"St. Mungo's," Ron replied. He was leaning against the wall next to his wife in the cramped hospital room. "You wouldn't believe how bad visitor's service is here!"

"Ron!" Hermione scolded. "Don't insult Roxanna's work right in front of her!" Ron merely shrugged and made a face that said "Well, it's true!"

Roxanna glanced around the room. Harry and Ginny were also there, a few cuts and scrapes on their faces and arms. They were sitting in two chairs at the end of her bed, their hands linked across the armrests. Luna sat on the window sill, mindlessly fingering the flowers that sat in a vase next to her as she smiled happily at her friend in the hospital bed and to Roxanna's great surprise, Neville was there as well. He stood next to Luna, his arms crossed, leaning against the wall. He still had his teacher's robes on indicating that he must have come directly from Hogwarts to see her.

The Irish girl looked at the open doorway in search of the one person she wanted to see and who appeared not to be there. She only saw a robed shoulder just passed her line of sight and she sighed, easing back into her pillows.

"What happened?" she asked no one in particular.

Everyone in the room froze at the sound of her question. Hermione bit her lip and looked back at her husband and best friend. They both shrugged and she turned back to the red-head leaning against the pillows. "Well, you almost died," she said, sounding a bit nervous. "You're lucky we came when we did, otherwise you would have been."

"No," Roxanna interjected. "I mean what happened? How did you get me out of there?"

No one spoke for quite some time until the person who Roxanna had seen in the hallway entered the room. Draco Malfoy leaned against the door frame, his arm in a sling with many bandages all across his body, and spoke up for the first time since he had been in St. Mungo's.

"You were the one who helped us," he stated, no emotion showing on his face.

Roxanna cocked her head to the side. What was he talking about?

"If it weren't for your patronus, we may never have found you." So that was it, the patronus. She should have known.

"It's Malfoy we should all be thanking," Harry chimed in. The red-head knitted her eyebrows together in confusion. "Without him, we would have never made it to that graveyard at all."

"What the hell are you talking about, Harry?" Roxanna asked.

"He means that Malfoy was the one who aparated us all there because he was the only one of us who knew what the place looked like." Ginny spoke without any expression on her face but she nodded towards Malfoy when she mentioned his name.

Roxanna looked back up at the man she loved. Was this true? Did he really work together with her friends? The people he hated most of all? Malfoy was not looking at her but staring gloomily, almost guiltily, at his toes.

"Malfoy was hysterical when you passed out again," Luna said in her dreamy voice. The blonde in question almost raised his head and sneered at Luna for her comment but held himself back, not wanting to cause any strife in the cramped room. "He was screaming at his doctor trying to find out what happened to you when I came in."

Malfoy was quiet the whole time Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny relayed their story to Roxanna; from the time they found Malfoy passed out in the red-head's living room to the time she herself had woken up in her bed. They told her how the people who had kidnapped her were post-war radicals and Roxanna was reminded strongly of the American Ku Klux Klan who were originally made up of former Confederate soldiers that were angry at the outcome of the Civil War.

Roxanna could visually imagine the entire battle in her head as Hermione explained how they followed her footprints through the snowy forest, then aparated to the graveyard and found her broken body. When she began explaining the battle after they had run into Lucius, Malfoy seemed to seclude himself even more. He seemed angry. No, he looked depressed. Why? What could possibly cause him to feel this way? That explanation was soon to come. Hermione had difficulty describing what happened after the battle had broken out. What she could relay was short on detail of anyone but her and Ginny. She did manage to tell who had taken out whom. She had an air of pride in her as she told of how Ron had taken out the leader of the group, a man named Ben, but when she got to Malfoy's duel with his father, her voice became grave.

Malfoy was no longer looking in the room, but staring out in the hallway with a look of great remorse. Lucius had been imperiused, forced against his will to attack his son and kill Roxanna. It turned out that right before he died, the man who had held Lucius under the curse was killed, thus breaking the bond between wand wielder and victim. Lucius had only a split second of revelation before he was hit by the killing curse from his son. Draco had not known what had transpired until it was too late.

Roxanna was feeling oddly woozy from all the information she was now collecting in her head. She turned her head to the side and saw how charred and ugly her right arm was. She felt no remorse for those men and women who had done that do her. But when she looked up at Malfoy, who stood idly by, his face glazed over with a mask of shame, she felt a twinge of sorrow for the man. He had murdered his father under false pretences and was now feeling the guilt tug at his heart. She could feel it radiate off him; the more she stared at him, she felt more and more of the grief and guilt he felt. A single tear slid down the side of her face, one tear for all the pain and suffering he had been through.

One tear for one broken man.

XX0XX0XX0XX

Roxanna woke up with a start. She had fallen asleep without realizing it almost immediately after she had listened to Hermione explain everything that had happened to her. She looked around the room. It was dark, nighttime by the looks of things, and everyone that had been there when she had woken up before was gone; all except one. Malfoy sat in the chair Harry had occupied earlier that day, his head drooped to the side, eyes closed and fast asleep.

The red-head smiled. He was still there, even after he had hurt himself emotionally beyond repair, he still insisted on remaining behind to stay with her.

Her mouth was dry, she was thirsty. Turning her head to her right, she located the console on the bedside table that would call for the nurses. She clenched her teeth, knowing that it would hurt tremendously when she reached for it. She tried with her right hand first but a searing pain shot through her whole arm and let it fall back to her side. She then tried with her left hand and discovered that rolling over worked better and did not hurt as much.

"Come. On." The consol was just out of her reach, lying on the table tauntingly. "Almost there…" She could touch it with her finger tips now. Roxanna let out grunts of frustration as she accidentally pushed the consol a bit farther away from her. Flopping back down on the bed to where she was before, she decided to just go all or nothing. Taking a deep breath, she heaved herself back up and quickly reached out one more time for the consol.

Crash!

She had made a big sweeping motion with her hand and accidentally hit passed the consol to the lamp on the table, sweeping the lamp, the consol, and an empty food tray off the table and onto the floor.

Roxanna looked over to where Malfoy had sat, sound asleep. He was now wide awake, startled, and looking around the room in complete surprise. The corner of her mouth twitched as he looked at her, completely baffled. She was frozen stiff, her arm still over the bedside table and she stared at Malfoy like a deer in the headlights.

"Um…" she began, at a loss for words. "I was just…uh…"

He raised one blonde eyebrow, a small smirk on his lips. "Acting strange?" he finished for her. Her mouth twitched one more time before she slumped back on her pillows and pouted. "Did you want something?" he asked her.

"Yeah," she said, her voice sounding suspiciously sarcastic. "I'd like one large dose of instant cure!" His other eyebrow rose at her comment. "And while you're at it, why don't you grab me a bottle of racist eradication."

Malfoy's eyebrows returned to normal as he brushed off Roxanna's sarcastic comments and bent down to pick up the lamp, consol, and food tray off the floor. "What were you trying to get?" he asked.

"The consol," she replied. "I want water."

Malfoy picked everything up off the floor and returned them to the bedside table. "You should have just woken me," he began. "I'll get you some."

Roxanna began to protest but he was out the door before she could get any sound out of her mouth. She waited in silence for only a few minutes before he returned with a Styrofoam cup filled with water. He helped her sit up and prop herself against the pillows and she eagerly took the cup from him with one and chugged the entire cup full of water. Smacking her lips, she smiled as she crunched the cup in her hand and tossed it in the trash can across the room. It made it in and she threw her fist in the air, crying out in celebration.

Malfoy just rolled his eyes and pulled the chair he had been sitting in up next to Roxanna's hospital bed. She stared at him, her smile still on her face but it was apparent that she had no idea what he was doing.

"Roxanna," he began. Her smile faltered at his tone. "I wanted to ask you something, but," he paused. "I haven't spoken with Potter or Weasley about it because I wanted you to make the decision for yourself. However, I'm not sure if Potter will react too kindly towards this."

Roxanna tilted her head to the side, unable to comprehend what Malfoy was talking about. She decided to just wait and see what he had to say.

"I talked to your healer and he said that they will be releasing you back to your home in a few days." He stopped here and the red-head was now thoroughly confused. "If there was one thing this whole mess had told me," he continued. "Is that you deserve someone a lot better than me, but I love you, Roxanna and after the deal in the graveyard, I've discovered that I cannot stand life without you." This was sweet; all fine and dandy, but what was he getting at? "What I'm trying to say is that you've become my whole life. You are the only thing that is keeping my life together, the only thing that is keeping me from killing myself from the guilt of murdering my own father." He fell silent, obviously nervous about something. His head fell, then, as if a sudden feeling of courage seized him, he picked his head up and looker the red-head strait in the eyes.

"Roxanna Porter, I want you to be my wife."

Roxanna could only gape stupidly at the man staring quite seriously back at her. She felt oddly like a fish after several seconds that felt like hours of not finding anything to say in return. Was he serious? Did he really want to marry her? Had to be; the look on his face was a dead give-away.

Finally, after a few minutes of yelling at her brain to say something, she closed her mouth, took a big breath, and answered him.

"I would love to."

Malfoy must have been holding his breath because as she had spoken, he let out a great amount of air from his lungs and sighed in relief. Hi hands were shaking as he reached into his pocket and pulled out something small and shiny. He held it out to her in his uninjured arm and showed her a silver ring with a light blue aquamarine fitted into the metal.

"I remember how you said you hated diamonds so I got you a gemstone instead."

Roxanna took the ring from his hand with her good hand and held it up to the light. She turned it around several times to examine it from all sides before placing it on her finger with great difficulty seeing as she could only used her left hand. Once she finally got it on her finger, she held it up one more time before reaching over and pulling Malfoy down to her level, placing a long, romantic kiss on his lips.

XX0XX0XX0XX

Roxanna was released from St. Mungo's three days later and the first thing she did when her arm was healed was go straight back to her parent's home to beg for her father's forgiveness. This time, she brought along Hermione instead of Malfoy. Patrick Porter was less intimidated with another girl that was just like his own daughter there instead of Malfoy. It was a lot easier to talk to him this time than I had been before and it took a while (several hours in fact) but she was able to get him to agree on a fair compromise. Roxanna would not expose any magic to him, not even bring her wand or talk about anything from the magical world in exchange for letting her back into their lives. He even agreed to give her away at her wedding.

Malfoy went back to his father's home, accompanied by Roxanna, and explained everything to his mother; even the terrible fact that he had killed his own father. Narcissa was angry and refused to talk to either one of them for several weeks. However, after almost a month of not being able to live at his home, Narcissa sent her son an owl asking for his forgiveness and an invitation to the wedding saying that she had thought over Draco's story several times and had come to the conclusion that he had no choice in the matter of killing Lucius. He did not mean to but it had to be done. She understood and asked her son if he would return home.

A month after family issues had been sorted out, the wedding took place.

A/N: (bursts into random song) "I'll spill my heart for you! For you!" Sorry, I had to, I just love this song too much. X) Annnyway, while I was waiting for the damn glitch to fix itself, I ended up finishing this story (Yay! I know) and starting my Oliver Wood story. I can't wait to get through that one, my OC kicks ass! Woohoo! Just like me! X) (yeah, I wrote all this instead of doing my homework, now I'm wishing that I hadn't. I'm a douch! =.=')