Okay, so I am actually on a roll here. This is a very good sign.

Note 1: Someone asked for a translation of the French in the last chapter. Admittedly, my French is a tad rusty, but basically translated the conversation goes like this;

"Ah, Mr. Malfoy, it's magnificent to see you here again. And, these lovely ladies are your family?"

"Good evening Benoit, it's nice to be here again. This is my girlfriend, Ginny Weasley, and her daughter Samantha."

"Has my mother arrived?"

"Yes, sir. Please, follow me."

Note 2: I have not read Deathly Hallows. I am not in possession of spoilers and I do not wish to be. I think though, after Half Blood Prince, we can safely say that this has become AU.

Disclaimer: Got nothing.

Chapter 29

"Your mother certainly has a flair for the dramatic." Ginny told Draco as she stripped out of her dress and found the hanger it came from. She looked at him over her shoulder, but he missed the smile she was sending him because he was staring fixedly at a point on the opposite wall.

"Yes, I'm sorry about that."

"Do you do this every year? Go out and celebrate your father's death at a five star French restaurant?" She fished around her closet for the nightgown she knew she had thrown in there that morning and, finding it, tugged it over her head.

"Well...not at a five star restaurant, we do something different each year, something that my father would have forbidden. The Chateau was special this year because Mother wanted you and Sam to be there."

She froze in the midst of picking up her hairbrush from her vanity and stared at him.

"Why would your mother want Sam and I to be there to celebrate your father's death?"

It seemed to her that he was taking longer than necessary to answer the question. She couldn't see all of his face, but she could see a his jaw clench ever so slightly, something she had only seen him do when he was stressed. She crawled across her bed and laid a hand on his shoulder lightly.

"Draco?" She asked, and he finally turned to look at her.

"She wanted you there because she doesn't know that you don't know all of what happened during the war." He said. Ginny frowned at him, not understanding.

"How much do you know about the final battle, Ginny?" He asked her, the tone of his voice was sombre, causing her memory to trip back five years, hearing the screams of the cursed and wounded in her ears and the desire to ease their pain if only for a moment washing through her.

"I know that it was the worst of them all. We were still treating the wounded months later, when the relief efforts began. Besides knowing that we won, and that Harry killed Voldemort, I don't know any of the particulars." He reached for her hand and began to play with her fingers.

"We were camped out in the marshes, for weeks it felt like, though I suppose it was only a couple of days. We were tired, so tired. We'd chosen the marshes because they were last place any sensible army would make camp, and there was a damn good reason for it. Without proper incantations, you could die of a bacterial infection in your sleep."

A haunted look passed through his eyes, and she wondered how many people he had seen die like that, people that she'd never even known of. Being stuck in the castle had been no picnic, but it was luxury compared to the places that the Army had been forced to hide in.

"Eventually, Voldemort figured out where we were. The Death Eaters laid seige to the area, it didn't take us long to realize that if we didn't end it soon, we were all going to die there. We didn't win the war because of some elaborately thought out plan, we won because of a desperate bid to save ourselves from the indignity of dying in a swamp."

"Desperation is a good, if dangerous ally to have. There's only a small window of time before an act of desperation leads to unpleasant consequences." Ginny mused, more to herself than anything, but Draco agreed with her.

"That's what Granger said. I agreed with her. Voldemort was expecting to wait us out, thinking we would try to avoid needless deaths by attempting to wait out his seige, but we would eventually come crawling out, too weak to oppose him. Potter suggested an all out attack. It had...I believe his exact words were 'the element of surprise'. Nobody argued with him." He was staring off into the distance, and Ginny could tell that he wasn't seeing her bedroom wall anymore, he was back in that marsh.

"Voldemort wants us to wither away in here. If we're going to die, I'd rather do it fighting." Neville Longbottom of all people spoke up after the long silence after Harry's suggestion.

"It's not going to be as easy as just leaping out of the bushes and catching them unawares. Even if we're using as you put it, Potter, 'the element of surprise' I think we need something of a plan." Draco pointed out, to many murmurs of agreement.

"We haven't been able to get close enough to Voldemort to cause him any harm, the Death Eaters are too strong a defense. If we're going to end this, we need to neutralize them. Or distract them enough to be able to take them out of the equation so Harry can get close to Voldemort." Hermione said.

"I think I have an idea." Draco said, his mind working through all of the pros and cons of his plan in seconds. The odds were bad, but not impossible. Harry glanced at him, frowning.

"What is it?" He asked, but Draco shook his head.

"I can't tell you, one of them could pull it from any one of your heads easily. That's what the problem is, you see. They know what you're doing before you even do it. If you want to win this, you'll have to trust me." He said. For only the briefest of moments, doubt flickered across the other man's face, but then Hermione laid a hand on his arm, and nodded at Draco.

"We trust you, Malfoy. What do you want us to do?" He looked around at them then, their ragtag little army. He could see the exhaustion on their faces, behind the layers of grime that not one of them could avoid in the marshes. But there was determination in their eyes, and more than a little bit of hope. He was sure that the same sentiments were in his own. One way or another, the War ended here.

"It was your plan? Your plan that won the War?"

"If you call losing a good third of an already dwindling Army winning, then yes. But we had all agreed, it didn't matter how many died, after that day, there wasn't going to be any more." He was looking at her again, and even though he was brushing his fingertips along her jawline, she wasn't sure he was actually seeing her.

"I wasn't lying you know, that bat bogey hex did start all of this off." He waved around absently, she knew what 'this' meant. "I watched you a lot after that. I'd always thought you were the quiet sort, but that hex showed me that there was more to you than there was to see. And after a while, I guess I realized that if you could change, then so could I. I just had to find out what it was that I really wanted. That was when the War started, and I didn't want to be on my father's side anymore. I was never more glad of that decision than I was after I found out what he'd helped do to you."

"You mean the diary." She said, supressing the shiver that crept up her spine at the memory. She'd come out of that ordeal stronger than she was before, but it still terrified her to think of how close to death she had come.

"I always knew he was a cruel man. But I had thought that he drew the line somewhere. He had never raised a hand to Mother, to my knowledge. If he did, she does not speak of it. I never would have thought he would put a child in such danger, no matter what he thought about her family. I think if I'd known about that sooner, it wouldn't have taken me so long to realize how wrong he was."

"People are rarely who we expect them to be. The greatest disappointments in life are realizing that the people you put up on a pedestal are just as human as you are. They make just as many mistakes, just as many errors in judgement, it's their willingness to atone for those errors that decides whether they really deserve that pedestal."

"He never atoned for anything. He didn't deserve anything. And I knew that if he survived the War, I could never be free of him. And neither could you."

Ginny twisted to look at him, stunned.

"Are you saying what I think you're saying?"

He wasn't looking at her anymore, the shadows playing out in his eyes told her that he'd gone back to that battle again. She wondered how often he went back there. He'd scolded her once about her attitude toward the past, but she wasn't so sure that his own was any better.

Note 3: So, that was a heavier chapter. And there's still more to come, he's not quite finished explaining the veiled mystery that everyone's been tantalizing Ginny with. I hope this is making sense to you all. In my head it sounds fine, but I could be wrong. With luck I'll be able to finish this rather sooner than later.