A/N: ok! hello everybody! yes! im still working on this! yeah...nothing much to say. pleez no suing J.K! thank u to steph for the wonderful ideas! hugs!

Chapter Four: Slits of Red and Gray

"Hello, Ginevra."

"Hello, Draco," she responded. The master of the house got up from his seat and sauntered over to her. He took her hand and laid a delicate, gentleman-like kiss on it. It was supposed to make her feel welcome, but all she felt was cold and unwanted.

"Welcome to my humble abode," he drawled. His eyes of cold stoney gray grew into slits as the passed over Ginny's silent and solemn face and onto Rose's tired and quiet one. Her carmel colored eyes silent and far-off inside a universe of their own.

"Draco, this is Rose. My daughter," Ginny introduced. His focus was diverted between Ginny and the baby who still stared within him with those protuberant, brown eyes.

"Yes. Yes, of course she is..." he trailed off as he got lost in an image, a face, he hadn't seen for almost a year. He grunted and stood straight like a proper host and looked the mother and child over again with a seemingly, critical eye. "Chives, please escort this dear lady to her room. I hope you and your daughter will find your room most...accomodating, Ms.Potter."
"Ms.Weasley, please." He looked taken aback by her words. He raised an eyebrow and poofed away in a cloud of green sparks.

"Oh! What a...lovely room," Ginny sighed breathlessly as she twirled around on her feet and landed with a plop and a giggle onto her new four-poster bed.

"Yes, ahem. Well," Chives muttered and then continued, "This may seem quite a bit...um...well private to you, but...how do you know Mr.Malfoy...exactly?"

"We went to school together," she answered, her voice taking on a metallic quality in that short phrase. "Chives, can you tell me where Draco-I mean Mr.Malfoy's room is?"

"He's just behind that door." Chives noded his head in the direction of a mahogany door on the other side of the room, paralell to the four-poster bed. "My master wished that in order to insure your safety he made you two have adjoining rooms. Very odd really. I never would of thought of it myself." He chuckled to himself and shook his semi-transparent head. "Ms. Weasley, your daughter will be in your room. I will order the House-elves to set up the crib for her."

"Thank you, Chives," Ginny muttered as she fingered with the zipper on her hoodie.

"Also, before you arrived Mr.Malfoy requested that you would join him for dinner tonight. He would like to properly welcome you as many of his former guests."

"Thank you." Chives grumbled to himself and melted away into the next room beyond the door. Ginny twisted locks of her hair into clean, red plaits. Her brown eyes watched the door curiously. She tilted her head to the side like a child confused. Rose was asleep on her bed, her pink thumb shoved in her mouth as always.

'Curiousity never killed the cat,' she thought as a small devil grin crept up the corners of her lips, 'Or did it?' The doorknob felt icy under her firm and warm grip. She gasped in pain as a shock went through her whole body in a searing pain. She touchd it again with the tip of her index finger and another smaller shock passed through her again. Wincing in pain, Ginny sucked her finger as if it had just been severely burned. She gave the door a death glare, expecting it to come alive and glare right back.

Knowing when she had been beaten, Ginny fell haphazardly onto her bed next to Rose and wrapped a loving arm around her daughter and kissed her forehead expecting some kind of reaction of some sort. Some acknowledgement that her daughter knew she was there. There was none. Not a stir of her sleep, not a mumble, not a movement of her body except her small, steady breathing.

Something about that serene and silent face made her eyelids flutter and begin to get heavy. She felt like jumping in the Black Lake at Hogwarts and just sink to the bottom. Let the mermaids sing a distant tune about gaining legs and singing above the water's murky surface. The seaweed's carresing tendrils wrap her body into a delicious cucoon that sucks her into the sandy bottom below. Let the lullaby sink into her open ears...

"Ms.Weasel...miss. Please, wake up..."

"Go away," Ginny grumbled in her subconcious state, swatting a hand in the air.

"Miss..." A crinkly and weathered hand shook her body awake. The first thing she saw was the wide, blue, bulging eyes of a house elf. A scream escaped her mouth. Rose awakened.

"Miss...I'm very sorry. My master is growing angrier. Oh please don't scream again miss," the house elf pleaded. Ginny was about to screech louder but stopped when she noticed how much the little elf looked like poor, old, Dobby. Dobby, the persistent house elf that used to worship the ground Harry walked on. She still remembered getting crudely written Christmas letters from Dobby when Harry was still alive.

"Miss...my master is very angry, miss. He demands that you come to dinner with him. Complains about how he ordered that a feast be prepared..."

"If he is THAT angry, I will go. Now leave me alone. I must get ready." She stood up and looked down at the house elf as it shook in her shadow. It disapparated in a cloud of smoke. With a sigh, she flopped down on the bed again and rested an extra five minutes.

She skipped the meal. Even when hordes of house-elves were sent to her room to fetch her, she would not budge. She stayed in her room and slept with the covers over her head. Three square meals were delivered to her room everyday for the past week.

She didn't want to go out. She was afraid.
Afraid of those slits of gray.