Chapter 3

"Malfoy," Ginny stated tonelessly and without turning. "Why are you here? Haven't you done enough already?"

"I was invited. And now that it seems we have both escaped the festivities," his tone became ironic, "I can at least torment you."

"Malfoy, for once in your life, act like an adult and leave me alone. Go be evil elsewhere."

This was just what she had needed to make this day even more miserable. People had died, nobody seemed to acknowledge that fact, and there was Draco Malfoy present.

"I'll have you know, Ginevra," he sneered, "that I have been officially pardoned by Kingsley and your precious Potter."

"He's not my precious anything," she hissed, bitter tears started to sting in the corners of her eyes.

"Trouble in paradise?" His voice was mocking and sharp.

"Hardly. I haven't seen him in three hundred and sixty-four days. And you, Malfoy, why don't you go have fun with dear Pansy Parkinson behind the greenhouses?"

He scoffed. "If you paid any attention at all, you'd know that she and Dean Thomas are currently in that blasted tent listening to those inane speeches."

"Bother," Ginny murmured. "Dean and Parkinson. They worked it out?"

"Yes, indeed. Surprised, Weasley?"

She shrugged.

"Such a Gryffindor, aren't you? Yet we've been out of school for a while now.I find this a fascinating phenomenon: the ability we have to manipulate ourselves so that the foundation of our beliefs is never shaken. Grow up, Weasley girl."

She sat down heavily on the damp grass and put her head in her hands.

"I left England for that reason, you know?"

Not knowing what to answer, he cautiously settled down next to her. For a while, they both listened to the wind rolling over the green countryside, afraid to break the fragile silent armistice.

"I left England a year ago, the day after the Battle of Hogwarts," Ginny finally explained. " I didn't know where to go. Drifted around for a while. Never stayed long. Until I found myself in southern France working in a vineyard."

The man next to her hummed tunelessly.

"At day, I worked, at night I cried and drank wine," she continued. "It was a silent life, what I needed. I feel serene there. Here, it still feels like an empty wasteland. I couldn't take it – the burials, the people I would never see again, he forlorn faces. It was all too much, and I felt hollow inside, an empty black hole that was completely disconnected from them all." She gestured towards the tent. "When someone that you love dies, it's like fireworks suddenly burning out in the sky and everything going black."

Ginny wasn't sure whether she was talking to Malfoy beside her or to herself.

Until he suddenly nodded. "To be closed from everything, and yet to feel, to think. This is the truth of hell, stripped of its gaudy medievalisms. This loss of contact. The fact I was on the other side of the war doesn't mean I hurt any less, Weasley. Remember, it's the winners who write the history books, and the losers get the leavings."

Ginny pursed her lips.

"So why don't you go and enjoy your hour of newly pardoned fame while it lasts, if you're that eager to be accepted again?"

"Oh," he sneered, his ardent eyes in stark contrast to his milky skin (how strange that she should notice it now), "I'm still the misfit. The odd one out. The Malfoy. We're misfits, all of us, both of us here. Anomalies. Living proof of how grotesque the system is."

She wrapped her arms around her chest. "It hurts," she whispered. "Don't they see?"

Without a word, Draco Malfoy pulled a bottle of wine from his robes. Opening it, he inclined his head in her direction. She accepted his invitation and took the bottle. When she put it down again, a single drop of almost violet liquid rested on her lips.

"Isn't that being grown-up? We're adults. War veterans, and not even twenty yet. We're rebuilding our adult identities, again and again, because the way it's grown after the war is wobbly, ephemeral and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when we're alone in front of the mirror, it tells us the lies you need to believe. Sometimes."

He shrugged, took a drink from the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"I don't mind. We're all broken and tattered. You're no better than I am."

"Sometimes," she murmured, swallowing the last of her wine, "sometimes I hear their shouts in the night. I wake and I see their faces, their eyes. Always their eyes, back to haunt me."

Taking a swig of wine, she continued. "If I hadn't had my sketchpad, I would have turned to the bottle. I wouldn't have stayed sane and sober, I don't think. Even now, I find comfort in wine during those long sleepless nights. The French call them nuits blanches, white nights, did you know that?"

She laughed. "Irony, when I see their eyes burning white hot in the night, when I see them in the black and white of winter nights and mild spring evenings filled with sorrow."

He shook his head. "I..."

"No need to say anything, Malfoy." She grinned suddenly. "You think I am crazy."

"I sometimes think about the wind and the wine, too. And I know there are town yet to be visited, friends in need yet to be discovered, battles yet to be fought," he coughed, "not by me. By someone else, next time. I can't."