First things first, he thinks. He is standing in the foyer and has done as many cloaking and invisibility spells as he knows, over and over, until he is somewhat confident, though he is still standing in a ring of darkness near a wall. He doesn't need to stand anywhere else in order to do this; he knows in his mind exactly where he will stand, exactly where she will stand, when they come rushing down the main staircase, and he knows the angle will work. Must work.

He allows himself a few minutes to breath in, to look around him. The portrait is still hanging over the mantelpiece, where it hasn't been for years, ever since he took it off the wall, burned it, and sent her the ashes as some sort of last statement. It's by Dean Thomas, and if he were to sell it on the market, its value would be virtually limitless—an oil, Muggle-style portrait during Thomas's famous blue phase just after the ending of the war and before the Wasting curse finally killed him. In it, Ginny's red hair is so dark that it is almost black, and her profile is pale and fragile in the moonlight. Her eyes are wide and haunted, and there is a streak of blood slithering across her cheek, and still Thomas managed to capture that fire, that spirit, the way she hurts so exquisitely and holds herself together so perfectly.

Now the door is slamming open, and he is storming down the stairs, and he permits his lips to curl over the sight of himself, younger and angry and storming and helplessly in love. His robes are a flawless black velvet that swirls heavily about his ankles. The robes are still in his closet, but he hasn't worn them since.

And then she is there at the top of the staircase, and she is perfect. Her dressing gown is half open, and her eyes are sooty and glossy from tears, and just the edges of her toes peak out from beneath the gown as she somehow manages, given her girth, to run down half the long, long flight of stairs to where his younger self is standing.

"Draco. Draco, please, I didn't mean…"

"Didn't mean what?" he sneers, and God, he remembers the feeling of that, being ripped out of his throat the way she has just ripped his heart out.

The tears are falling freely down her face. "You're not like him, Draco, you're not. I know you aren't. Please, just come back upstairs, and we'll talk about this, and—"

"There's nothing to talk about."

"There is!"

"I am—nothing—like him," but he is turning away already, and the Draco down the stairs tenses and readies himself, wand out. He is going to do this properly.

Ginny cries out, "Draco, please wait," and there, just there, right now, she is running down the stairs after him, loose hair streaming behind her, and her fingers latch onto the edge of his sleeve and hold, but he makes a violent shrugging motion, and the fabric slips out of her fingers as the forward momentum pulls her farther down the stairs and makes her feet lose balance from under her, and now she is falling, falling—

And Draco whispers a spell to change the course of her direction just slightly, so that when she spreads her hands out to stop herself, one of them reaches his shoulder and grabs desperately, and her cry of alarm is enough to make his younger self turn around and steady her with more fear than impatience, and he looks at the panicky way his hands clutch her waist to keep her from tumbling, and he thinks, good.

So he fumbles for the leather thong around his neck and takes the timeturner, ignoring the way the Ginny in his head is still banging down the staircase like a limp rag doll, and the way her head rests in his lap as he strokes his hands down her temples and wonders how to breath, and the way the mediwitches levitate her off of the ground, and one white hand trails closer to the ground than the other, and the way that a week later, the blood will stain everything red, because right now, there on the staircase, he has one arm around her, and her head is buried against his neck.