Disclaimer: If you recognise it, it's not mine.
AN: I'm updating! Finally!
In Amber.
Potter brought the covers up snugly around her, as if he thought she'd know or care. Draco had once heard that blue was the colour of mourning for a child, but she didn't look remotely like a child under that Ravenclaw blue.
She'd left the book she'd been reading that morning open and upside down on the floor by her chair.
"How long?" Potter asked. His back was to Draco.
"Six or seven hours. If it's twelve now – shit, it's twelve now. You'd better get down to lunch before you're missed."
"I don't care."
"She cares; you know how weird it's going to look if all three of us are mysteriously absent at the same times?"
He caught Potter's sickened look in the mirror, and couldn't agree more. "Fine," Potter said heavily. "But send Dobby for me if anything happens. I don't care how it looks. And get some light in here, for God's sake."
But when Potter had gone the light didn't offer much relief, not for Draco at least. It pushed back the gloomy noon outside and the skittering raindrops on the long window, glowing in Ginny's red hair and pooling in the hollows under her eyes. He picked up the book on the floor. But it wasn't a book.
She'd had it open to a photograph of her family, some three years old, the six Weasley boys already towering over their mother and sister. Ginny had an arm around a brother's waist, laughing as she pinched his horn-rimmed glasses and balanced them precariously on the tip of her nose. Draco flicked through the thick pages; photo after photo showing the Weasley family caught in different moments in time. Here a tiny Ginny was hitting her twin brothers with a plastic spade – here a young couple Draco didn't recognise smiled and waved out of the frame. One of the older brothers posed sheepishly in his Quidditch uniform, facing a photograph of a surprisingly voluptuous Granger brushing her hair in her pyjamas, drowsily unaware of the camera or the camisole strap falling loose down one shoulder.
Ouch, Granger, he thought, reluctantly impressed. The sudden sound of a door banging shut made him start guiltily, and he quickly turned the page.
On one side Ginny and Granger were posed, smiling, in front of an apple tree, aged maybe thirteen and fourteen, sunlight dappling down on them between the branches.
The photo on the facing page must have been taken this summer, not that long after the war had ended. Potter was sprawled lazily on a squashy, comfortable-looking old couch that Draco thought must belong in the Weasley house. Ginny was curled up cat-like beside him, one sandal dangling off her foot, over the edge of the couch. They were looking at some kind of newspaper, possibly the Quibbler, and Ginny was shaking her head and laughing as she pointed things out to him. Another candid snap. Ginny was wearing an absurdly small pair of denim shorts and a faded red t-shirt with a flaking Gryffindor lion on the front. The bruises on her tanned legs and arms were still visible. She leaned over Potter to stab a finger emphatically at a picture Draco couldn't see, and Potter coloured and grinned at her.
Ridiculous Gryffindors. He flicked irritably through the pages, pausing here and there at a random shot – Potter and the Weasel king playing chess – one of the twins wearing a sombrero and a huge fake moustache – Ginny aged eleven, wearing her uniform for the first time. A shot of Percy Weasley looking tired and drawn, his hand loosely clasped in a pretty brunette girl's. The girl smiled nervously and waved a little. They were sitting in front of a small café drinking wine. The girl wore long sleeves despite what was clearly a warm day. Draco edged the photograph out of its place and flipped it over – Percy and Penny, Rouen 1996 was written on the back in Ginny's untidy hand. He remembered her now, Penelope Clearwater, right. He looked at the front of the picture again, frowning; she didn't look much like she had as Head Girl. She was thin and pale, nothing like the glowing, bouncy-curled prefect who'd filled out her Ravenclaw uniform very nicely indeed in Draco's third year. He'd even contributed to the obscene graffiti in the Slytherin boys' bathroom; a thorough exploration of the range of dirty puns one could form around the phrase 'Head Girl'. The elves cleaned it every night. The boys refreshed it every day.
That was a pretty fucking rude thing to do to that girl, his conscience pricked in the voice of Hermione Granger. Tell that to a bunch of thirteen year old boys, Draco thought. Besides which, she never saw it. Besides which, some of those things weren't even physically possible. Besides which . . .
He replaced the photograph of the café in Rouen and flicked back to the picture of Granger. He thought of the graffiti. He watched Granger lazily brushing her hair. And then, because it was all bloody hopeless anyway, Draco laughed.