Draco fairly skipped on his way home from the courthouse. Nothing in the world could bother him just now. The money would be transferred to his vault later this day, and he was filthy stinking rich again. He wandered through Diagon Alley, ready to spend some of his newly acquired cash. Nothing was out of his reach anymore. He passed by the Markson's Fine Jewelry and looked in the window where some gold earrings were displayed. Markson's was a little hole-in-the-wall shop in a slightly seedy part of Diagon Alley, but Draco knew they had a famed 'back room' where Markson kept his really expensive and often slightly illegal jewels.
He would buy something for his mother, he decided. He knew she hadn't had new jewelry in years, his father simply hadn't been able to afford it. Draco smiled. He would get her something ludicrously expensive. Still smiling, he strode into the shop.
Mr. Markson, a small, balding, entirely unremarkable man, looked up from a bracelet he was repairing and smiled – a nailed on, please-don't-curse-my-family sort of smile. "Young Mr. Malfoy…how good to see you again," he said, sounding as if seeing young Mr. Malfoy again was anything but good.
Draco gave him a scorching glare. "I'm looking for something for my mother," he said coldly. "A necklace, perhaps."
"We have some lovely things here." Markson gestured to a case of jewelry hopefully.
"Not that rubbish," Draco said sneeringly. "Proper jewels."
"Ahh, of course, of course, how silly of me," Markson smiled, and bent down and pulled out a tray from underneath the counter. "Here we go. I keep these in reserve for my…select customers. You know what I mean."
Draco knew exactly what he meant. The jewelry on the tray was only marginally better than that in the cases. His 'select' customers were the ones whom Markson knew would be buying on credit and never paying, but whom he couldn't afford to offend – like his father. The man had surely been a Slytherin. Draco decided he would never get into the back room this way. "I will, of course, be paying cash."
Markson's smile suddenly became much more genuine, and he surreptitiously rubbed his hands together. He silently took the tray off the counter and put it away. "In that case, Mr. Malfoy, will you follow me please."
The back room, at first appearance, was nothing more than a cobwebby unused store room. Markson tapped gently on the wall with his wand in a sequence Draco couldn't quite follow, and the walls melted away to reveal the real 'Back Room'.
The jewelry here made the other in the front room look like children's dress-up beads. Jewels of every size, shape, and color were all exquisitely set in the finest gold or silver. There were no price tags, and Draco felt a smug surge of satisfaction that it didn't matter.
Draco browsed a bit, marveling at the selection. Many pieces featured jewels he'd never seen before. He settled on a necklace, as planned. Glowing emeralds and diamonds of various sizes winked at him from a platinum setting that seemed to have a living glow of its own. Draco couldn't think whether it reminded him of a vine, or a snake, or just an abstract design. Just when he had decided, it seemed to take on another form entirely. It was perfect.
"This one," he told Markson, who had been watching him closely.
"Ah, you have excellent taste, sir, a personal favorite of mine, that one is." Markson picked it up lovingly and closed the case. "Shall I have it sent to you, or will you be carrying it?"
"Carrying it," Draco told him absently, still fascinated by the rest of the jewelry. A bracelet on the other side of the room caught his eye, and he went over to look. Markson stood silently and watched. The bracelet was in an entirely different style from the necklace. Amethysts and pale emeralds set in white gold, it was subtle and understated, whereas the necklace was ever so slightly ostentatious and clearly expensive. It wasn't til you looked at the bracelet closely that you saw that it was something decidedly out of the ordinary. For some reason it reminded him of Ginny Weasley. Ginny Malfoy, now.
"This one, too," he said, before he could change his mind.
A week or so later, the Malfoy family was sitting down to dinner together, their first in awhile since Lucius Malfoy was frequently away on 'business'. The three Malfoys sat in spacious dining room, with Lucius and Narcissa on either end of a very long table, and Draco in the middle. There was enough food on the table for twenty or thirty people at least, all of the dishes fantastically elaborate, but Lucius Malfoy expected nothing less. Nobody said much, conversation perhaps hindered by the great distance between the diners, but then, perhaps there just wasn't much to say. Either way, it was a typical family dinner for Draco, and he noticed neither the quantity of food nor the silence. He still hadn't told them about the inheritance, and was wondering if this was the time.
Narcissa began the topic for him. "I noticed there were workmen repairing the roof on the east wing," she said pleasantly.
"Workmen?" Lucius Malfoy was startled. "I didn't hire workmen for anything." He rose from his chair, alarmed.
"No, I ordered them, Father," Draco interjected, trying hard not to look too smug.
"What do you mean 'I ordered them', you insolent brat!" Lucius demanded. "What the hell do you think you're doing, ordering repairs? I hope you intend to pay for them, too," Lucius sneered, thinking he had won his point.
Draco delicately wiped his mouth and reached for a nearby dish of foi gras. "I do, as it happens."
"And where, might one ask, do you intend to get the money? Perhaps you found it growing on a tree?" his father was coldly sarcastic.
"Do you remember old Thestius Black?"
"He died recently, didn't he?" Narcissa interrupted.
Draco nodded. "And left quite a bit of money. To me."
"Black died months ago," Lucius said curtly. "You're telling me not only did you inherit his entire fortune, but you've had it all these months, too?" he asked suspiciously.
"There were legal complications that had to be…taken care of," Draco explained, hoping his parents caught his implications of remarkably clever and mostly illegal manipulations. For some reason he shuddered at the idea of telling them about Ginny – his wife. He didn't think his parents would object to the marriage, money covered a multitude of sins, but all the same… "But yes, Black's fortune is mine now."
"How much?" Greed shone in Lucius' eyes.
"Enough." Draco was firm. No need to let him know the exact amount.
Lucius hesitated, trying to decide if he wanted to push the issue. He decided not to. He nodded at his son respectfully. "Well done, I must say."
To anyone else it wouldn't have seemed like much of an acknowledgement, but to Draco it was all the world.
There was something about the day that kept nagging at the back of Ginny's mind, some reason why it was important, but she couldn't think what. It was an ordinary Wednesday, some quick work in the shop in the morning, out on her rounds in the afternoon. Her mum would have let her know by now if she'd missed anything important, like a birthday, she decided, and ignoring the nagging feeling that persisted in spite of her best efforts, she continued carefully chopping the dried knotgrass for later sale.
"Going out this afternoon, again?" Mr. Miscere, the shop's owner, inquired, looking worried.
"Mmm, yes, I think so." Ginny reached for more of the grass. "If that's ok, that is."
"Oh…oh yes of course. Just…be careful will you?"
Ginny agreed, and smiled sadly to herself. Mr. Miscere always seemed rather puzzled by the war, as if he still couldn't quite bring himself to believe it had started again, in spite of that fact that 90 of their work was for St. Mungo's now. He knew Ginny was out doing war work, more than that he didn't want to know. He never asked what she did, and he certainly never asked what side she was on, for which Ginny was glad. She wasn't quite sure herself.
Healing those injured by the Order was most of her work now, but she couldn't bring herself to stop. These weren't the truly evil Deatheaters she treated. They had proper healers of their own. The really clever ones from Knockturn Alley had long been promoted, and the stupid ones were dead. The ones left now were mostly the young. Young men and women only a little bit younger than Ginny herself, led to believe their cause was just and glorious. They were sent in ahead of the real Deatheaters, to shake things up a bit and take the worst of the first hit. They were expendable. What had her father said? Ah yes. Cannon fodder. Though she had only a vague idea of what a cannon was, it still seemed an apt description.
Ginny clenched her teeth as the young man screamed out in pain again. It couldn't be that bad. She'd given him all the pain spells she knew and he was still making that half sobbing half screaming sound that grated so on her nerves. But then, she'd never seen this type of injury before – all the bones in his legs had crumbled into tiny sharp shards. It was entirely possible the pain spells were having no effect. And here she thought the Deatheaters were the only ones using dark magic… She prodded his left leg a bit, trying to decide what to do for him, and he cried out again. His mother joined in with a loud, hopeless moan, and Ginny herself felt she wanted to scream. She felt so incredibly, hopelessly inadequate. How the hell did she get herself into this mess? It was on days like this that she began to wish she'd done as her mother said and stayed home like a good little girl.
Ginny finally gave the boy some sedative and he quickly drifted off into an uneasy forced sleep.
"He's dead!" his mother screamed from the corner where she was watching the proceedings in horror. "My baby boy, my only child, and he's dead!" She broke down into choking sobs.
Ginny patted her awkwardly on the back. "He's not dead, see, he's breathing. He's just asleep. I put him to sleep, that's all."
After his mother had collected herself sufficiently, Ginny made some flimsy excuse to his mother and stepped outside into the sun to gather her thoughts. The sun beat down on her face, and she began to feel more in control. Six months it came to her suddenly. She'd been married all of six months, and she hadn't seen or heard from her husband since the day they were married. The money she got from the deal made her work possible. She wasn't sorry, she decided. She wasn't.
She ducked back into the cottage, as much to avoid her thoughts as to help the boy. Ginny studied his face as he slept. Fifteen, she decided. Possibly even sixteen, but certainly no older. An indescribable sadness filled her. He ought to be at Hogwarts, worrying about the next Quidditch match or something like that.
Ginny shook her head and focused only on healing him. She'd long since learned to keep her heart out of these matters, to concentrate only on the problem, not on the people. Otherwise she'd go insane with sorrow. She couldn't understand how she'd slipped out of that mode, today of all days.
Gritting her teeth, she cast the spell which would remove, she hoped, all of the shards of bone from his leg. Ordinary breaks were no problem, but this…she didn't quite dare try. It worked, although the sight of her son's boneless legs upset his mother even more, and she collapsed into a corner to cry some more. Ignoring her, Ginny gave the boy the Skelegrow that would regenerate his bones. Painful, but there was nothing else she could do.
Straightening up, she looked around for a reasonably competent person to give instructions to, and finally settled on his little sister, a sturdy looking girl of about ten who had been watching Ginny and her brother silently from a shadowed corner. Leaving the child with more sedative, instructions, and a promise to come back later, Ginny made her way to the next cottage.
A/N: Thanks to everyone who's reviewed. Hopefully I'll be able to update regularly, but don't expect new chapters at this rate. Next chapter they'll start to deal with the consequences of what they've done.
Disclaimer: None of this is mine, don't sue.
