Thanks to all readers, reviewers, and favorite-ers! I really like this chapter… we start to find out what's really going on at the Burrow, and so does Draco.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The Rejection

A blast of cold wind eddied through the hall. Ginny shivered, and Draco wished that he could put his arms around her. He gauged the mood of the room and decided that it wouldn't be the best idea. Molly Weasley was chatting pleasantly enough with Ron and Cho at the moment, but there was still an odd quality to her careful politeness, one he could not quite define. Her pleasant smiles and laughing voice seemed stretched, somehow, like a precarious bridge that might break at any moment. And she doesn't even know that Pansy is here yet, he thought uncomfortably.

The door opened, and two men took off their coats and then started walking down the hall. One was Fred, and other was a rather tired-looking man with slightly thinning red hair.

"Dad!" Ginny hugged her father when he reached them. "You finally got Fred out of the shed, I see. I'm glad."

"I could still go back there at any time," mumbled Fred, in a voice that was just low enough to allow everyone to pretend that they hadn't heard him.

If Malfoys ever did anything as tacky as squirming uncomfortably under the penetrating gaze of a girlfriend's father, then Draco knew that he would have been doing so. Since no Malfoy had likely ever done such a thing, however, he was quite sure that he couldn't possibly be doing it now.

"Mr. Weasley," he said. "I'm, er, very glad to meet you."

Ginny's father studied him, and Draco realized that he had underestimated both of her parents before he ever met them. This man was not the bumbling fool that Lucius Malfoy had always scornfully labeled him. Now that Draco was closer to Mr. Weasley than he had ever been in his life, he could see the intelligence in the older man's eyes. They saw far more than he would have liked, perhaps even saw things that he himself would rather have kept secret, and the knowledge was not comfortable.

"Draco," he said. "I'm happy to meet you as well. Welcome to our home."

Draco realized something else. Although he did not have the least idea why, Arthur Weasley meant what he said to a far greater degree than his wife did. In spite of the years of animosity between Ginny's father and his own, this man did not seem to harbor that emotion towards Draco himself.

Watching them, Molly Weasley's eyes narrowed. Draco didn't need to use Legilimency to see that her husband's more positive feelings in his own direction were not pleasing to her. He wondered if that came purely from what was going on in the moment, or if it was colored by a past he knew nothing about.

"Well," Ginny's mother said briskly. "Dinner will be served soon. I don't know where George has got to, but we may as well all go into the dining room." She began to usher them all out of the vestibule and towards the half-open door, where Draco could see a large room with a long table. For the first time, he noticed something a bit odd. The edge of the vestibule was clearly marked with a sort of threshold a few feet in front of the door, a long, narrow tile inlay with twisting blue geometric designs. He instantly recognized them as written spells, although he was not sure of exactly what they meant. Protection, perhaps? Binding? Excluding? What an odd place for them to be located. Now that he thought of it, he believed that he remembered seeing a tile like this one at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the first floor of the house, too, and the memory made him a bit uneasy. I'm sure that it's only a decoration. At any rate, there's no time to worry about it now. He began to walk the few steps towards the door, still holding Ginny's hand.

"Wait a moment, Mum!" George called from the other end of the hall. "Don't go in yet. The Hiding mint's almost worn off, and then I want you to meet-"

At that moment, Draco started to step over the tile, and everything seemed to happen at once.

A wall snapped up in front of him, shooting up from the tile, invisible but solid. He bounced against it and staggered back. The air around him shimmered with spells. Ginny gave a cry of alarm and grabbed at his arm, but the wall seemed to dissolve when he touched its surface, and she lost her balance and nearly fell. Her father, only a step behind, lunged forward to catch her, and he too moved through the wall. But when Draco tried to move through the shimmering air, to get to Ginny, the wall snapped into existence again and sent a crackling shock through his hands.

"I'm all right," said Ginny as Fred and her father lifted her up from the floor. "But Draco—" Her brow furrowed. "Can't you get through?"

He tried pressing at the wall again, and received another painful shock at the attempt. "No," he said through gritted teeth. "I can't." Whatever this wall might be, it was a barrier to himself and nobody else.

Draco raised his head to meet Molly Weasley's eyes; she had somehow ended up on the other side as well. Her expression held no surprise at all. I don't understand a single thing about what's going on here, but Molly Weasley does, he realized. And she knew that this would happen.

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