Unforgivable

Later, everyone would remember the autumn and early winter before that day very wistfully. It was not the best of times, and not the worst of times, but it was the last good time. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it was the last ordinary time. Not that anyone knew it then. Still, the day just after the Christmas holidays of Ginny Weasley's fifth year at Hogwarts was the last time that the wizarding world would be as it had been, although no witch or wizard knew it. Only the gods knew, and the gods, of course, weren't telling.

Because one hour after Ginny Weasley had been taken to the infirmary, her world, and the world of everyone she knew and loved, was irreparably shattered.

The Death Eaters struck suddenly, quickly, and, everyone was forced to admit, with great efficiency. They didn't try to storm Hogwarts; that way could have only led to failure. They appeared at about four in the afternoon as Ginny lay in the hospital wing, using the reciprocal Portkeys they had given their children at the Christmas holidays. Then they--and the children, who were mostly but by no means exclusively Slytherins--simply disappeared.

"I'll kill him," Ron said simply. "If it takes me the rest of my life, I'll find whoever did this to you. And I'll kill him." If Ginny had been capable of any emotion at all, she would have shivered with fear at the terrible calm in her brother's voice. But she wasn't, and Hermione's arms around her neck felt irritating rather than soothing. They all went away then, and Madam Pomfrey gave her a sleeping draft. She fell into an uneasy sleep, filled with nightmares of glowing green eyes that kept melding into grey.

*********

Draco Malfoy had been preparing for his position in the upcoming war since the beginning of the previous summer, and he couldn't quite understand why he wasn't more pleased about it. He had been struggling all his young life for Lucius Malfoy's serious regard, for his father's respect, and now he had it. But he could not seem to stop having nightmares. They drove him from sleep night after night, gasping for air, clutching the edges of his bedclothes. Only a dream, only a dream, he told himself over and over again, wiping his forehead of its cold sweat, knowing that sleep would remain a stranger to him that night. He did not feel remorseful about what he had done to Ginny Weasley on the day before he left Hogwarts. The strong manipulated the weak; the clever took advantage of the chinks in others' armor. Besides, he told himself repeatedly, she had liked what he'd done. He'd made sure of that. She had enjoyed his considerable skills. She had moaned and gasped and cried out with pleasure in his arms. She had begged him to stop, but she hadn't really meant it. She couldn't have done.

But her eyes haunted him relentlessly. Sometimes he dreamed that he saw them through fathoms and fathoms of water, sinking below him. Sometimes he dreamed that she was transmuted into a doe that he hunted down ruthlessly with bow and arrow, and the last thing he saw before he brought her down was those eyes, bright brown and gold with flashes of blue. Sometimes he simply dreamed that he had not wrapped her own school tie around her face before he took her, and that those eyes had watched and judged him as he sank within her body. That was the real reason why he had covered them in the first place. One night several weeks after his arrival at Malfoy Manor, Draco finally admitted that fact to himself. It wasn't really to hide his identity, or at least that had been a very small part of the real reason. He had known that he could not do what he did while she watched him. If he did not have to see her eyes, he could let the blind needs of his body drive him forward. The admission changed nothing, and he still was not sorry. But night after night, Draco lay awake in his huge tester bed of dark oak in his sumptuously appointed bedroom, and thought of Ginny's eyes.

*********

All peacetimes are different, but all wars are the same. There would be little to say about the second great wizarding war of the twentieth century that could not have been said about the others, except for one curious fact. It was a fact that changed the entire face of that war, turning it into something that bore a much greater resemblance to a rout.

The endgame of the war that Muggles referred to as World War Two was set once the dark wizard Adolf Hitler failed to capture Stalingrad in 1943, yet the war itself dragged on until nearly the middle of 1945. Similarly, the second wizarding war would likely have continued for quite some time after the capture of Hogwarts, but it would essentially have been won by the dark side. This did not happen, and, as later historians would doubtless have agreed--if there had been any later historians-- the key lay in the inexplicable actions of Draco Malfoy, on whose personality the entire war turned as a tremendous steel door turns on a tiny pivot.

Ginny Weasley was walking very slowly down the corridor just outside the entrance to the Gryffindor common room on the way to breakfast one morning in late February. Meals were still served in the Great Hall, although some professors debated the wisdom of it. The castle had been turned into a war camp, yet there was no way of getting the students home safely. So lessons still continued, and they all had the brittle form of ordinary school life, if not the spirit. She passed the entrance to the unused stairs. A deep shiver went over her. She could not have said, herself, what all her emotions were at that moment. As always when she passed that entrance, Ginny hesitated and looked up the stairs. They seemed to beckon to her like a great, empty maw. She sighed, and prepared to turn away.

A figure shimmered on the bottom stair. The silver-blond hair solidified first, then the narrow face with its long nose and grey eyes, then the slender white hands she remembered so well, then the dark robes, tied up to reveal leather boots.

She stood stock still, rooted to the spot, staring at Draco Malfoy.

He stared back at her.

There were no words to say, no words in the English language, no words in the world. They stared, and stared, and stared.

Draco had memorized a list of specific instructions at the meeting the night before, the one held in the deepest dungeon of Malfoy Manor. The one where his father had given him one of his rare smiles, and clapped him on the shoulder. Lucius Malfoy had said he was proud of his son. It was the first time Draco had ever heard those words, or anything like them. He had tingled with excitement, accomplishment, anticipation. He had not dreamed about Ginny Weasley that night. She was shoved to a very dark and obscure corner of his mind. Deep down, he was sure he would never see her again.

And now she stood before him.

He took one step forward, and then another. If only she would stop looking at him! "Don't," he said in a low, harsh voice. "Don't." But she did keep looking, and if her eyes had haunted him in memory, it was nothing at all compared to the effect they had now.

He struggled to remember what he had been told. We're sending you back to Hogwarts by reciprocal Portkey. Then, and only then, will you be able to let the rest of the Death Eater forces into the castle. But you must act quickly, quickly. The slightest delay will destroy our chances.

One more step forward. The gold-brown eyes were devouring him. One more. There was nothing left in the world. And one more...

Draco did not feel himself sinking to the floor in front of her, kneeling, clutching the edge of her robes in an attempt to keep from falling, falling, infinitely falling, through the floor, the tower, the foundations, to the very roots of the world. But that was the position that the Dumbledore's Army forces found him in fifteen minutes later, when Harry raised the alarm after seeing that an internal Portkey had been used in an unexpected part of the castle.

There was some fighting then, but to Ginny the following events would always be utterly confused. She knew that Remus Lupin led some Aurors to Wiltshire, to capture Malfoy Manor, and that a plot to use the astrological powers of Stonehenge was foiled. Lord Voldemort had put the greatest part of his power into that plan, and once it was destroyed they found only a hunched whining thing in filthy rags, hiding in the deepest chamber under the heelstone.

"You cannot escape your fate," the thing had snarled at Dumbledore.

"I know it," the Headmaster serenely replied.

What had once been Lord Voldemort, and before that the schoolboy Tom Riddle, cackled, or attempted to do so. "You pull down your own house when you destroy mine," he said. "And soon, you will know that all too well."

"I know it now, Tom," said Albus Dumbledore, and he reached out his wand.

The Death Eater forces fell apart with astounding rapidity after the destruction of Lord Voldemort. Lucius Malfoy was captured; Carolo Zabini was captured, the senior Crabbe and Goyle were captured after Vincent Crabbe came over to Dumbledore's side and informed on them both. Ginny saw none of it. She was kept safely at Twelve Grimmauld Place. Out of harm's way, as everyone said. Ron brought her scraps of news, sitting on her bed and talking to her by the hour. She spent a great deal of time in bed, staring up at the empty portraits on the walls.

The days went by, and the weeks.

One afternoon, when the worst of the war was over and only mopping-up actions remained, Ron appeared in her bedroom door.

"'Lo, Ginny," he said.

She nodded, unsurprised, even though she hadn't seen him in quite some time. He came in but did not sit down.

"House-elves taking care of you all right?" he asked.

She nodded. The best of the Malfoy house-elves had been commandeered to care for her, with they did with great efficiency.

He smiled. There was something in the smile that made her shiver, but that also touched a deep and very dark chord within her.

"I've got something for you," he said. His voice was filled with barely suppressed excitement. "Or someone, I should say." He rose and began pacing restlessly around the room, as if too filled with anticipation to sit still. "I know this will be difficult for you, at first. Believe me, I know--nobody knows better than I do. But I think you'll be very glad. I'll go get him now." He left the room.

Ginny wondered in an incurious way who Ron had brought with him. She hoped it wasn't Harry. She didn't want to see Harry in the least. Or Sirius Black. He didn't live at Twelve Grimmauld Place now, since there was no need for him to hide anymore. But he frequently returned in attempts to visit her. She always refused to speak to him, turning her face to the wall until he left the room, sighing.

"This was hard to pull off, Ginny, very hard," Ron called from the corridor. "We're not supposed to have him, of course. He's supposed to be kept with the official prisoners. And you know, I don't even think they'd do that, to be honest. He was such a coward during the war that he never actually fought, and so thick that he led us right to his father and the rest of them, although they're calling it 'changing sides.' Ha!" His laugh was hollow and awful-sounding. "We know better, don't we, Ginny? Oh, yes, we know better!"

The door opened. Ron shoved in a tall, thin figure dressed in ragged black robes, his face smudged with dirt, his hands bony and covered with scars. He stumbled, then fell to the floor on his hands and knees. Ginny looked at her brother's face, looking down at his captive. It was filled with a strange and terrible expression somewhere between rage and glee.

"Moody used to say that leopards don't change their spots," said Ron. "And he was right--he was right." His mirthless grin widened. He looked at his sister, then down again, as if inviting her to share in something horribly delicious, forbidden, and dark. "I've been waiting for this," he croons. "Waiting for months. Since that night we took you to the infirmary. Since I knew what he'd done to you."

Ginny drew her breath in sharply. "But we didn't know who--"

"I know now," said Ron. "I figured it out. I questioned Hermione--oh, making very sure to keep my questions sounding innocent, so she'd never suspect. Some other people, as well, and I pieced it all together. And I learned the truth. I still don't know why Malfoy was there, that day, but that doesn't matter now. I don't think he expected you or anybody else to find him in that abandoned wing near Gryffindor Tower, but when you did, he..." Ron swallowed. "And he thought he'd got away with it I'm sure. But he hasn't." He aimed a kick at Draco Malfoy's ribs. "Thought I'd tell the Ministry, did you? Thought I'd get you sent to Azkaban? No. You're for me to take care of, Malfoy... Oh, I've been waiting, Ginny. And I knew my chance would come. But you had to see it--you had to be there. And now--now--we'll get our revenge." Slowly, deliberately, Ron pulled out his wand and pointed it at the dull silvery head of Draco Malfoy.

"No!" The word was torn out of Ginny before she even knew she had said it. She leapt out of bed. The unaccustomed effort made her dizzy, but she struggled to keep her feet and made her way to her brother's side.

Ron did not lower his wand. "D'you honestly mean to tell me you don't think he deserves the Killing Curse?" he demanded.

"No, I don't think he does," she said, ignoring Ron's indrawn breath.

"How can you say--after what he did to you--" her brother began.

Ginny raised her head. As if drawn by an invisible force, Draco did as well, and he did not look down again. He could not look away from her eyes. There was an unholy light in them now.

"Killing's too good for him," she said softly.

Ron's grin widened even further.

Ginny had never cast an Unforgivable curse before. Deep in her mind, she wondered if she could do so now, even to Malfoy. Her wand wavered. He dredged up a sneer and pasted it on his face.

"Can't do it to me, can you, Weasley?" he asked in a hoarse, cracked voice. "Haven't got the guts?"

"Don't say that to me," she said, her voice trembling. She expected to hear Ron's angry voice, but strangely she did not. He stared at his sister as if he had never seen her before.

"Go ahead." Malfoy sat up, turning his chest deliberately to her. "I dare you."

"Don't talk to me like that!"

"You haven't got the courage, have you?"

Such a silly little girl... I became quite bored with having to listen to an eleven-year-old girl's silly little problems...

"Don't say another word!"

If Malfoy made any reply to her then, Ginny did not hear it. The remembered cold voice of Tom Riddle drowned out any sound the present could make, just as it did nearly every night in her dreams.

All things ripen in time... all things ripen in time... in time... in time...

"Crucio!"

She barely recognized her own voice. It sounded stronger than it had done in months. A hot, tigerish joy filled her. It was the first emotion she had felt in such a long time that she could no longer remember what the last one had been. Yes, she did. It was the feeling she'd had when Malfoy took her in the abandoned room, the mingled pain and anger and shame and... pleasure. Her brother was laughing, a sound rich with satisfaction and menace. Draco Malfoy was writhing on the floor in front of her, his face contorted in agony. Her lips drew back from her teeth. Pleasure.

"Ginny." The word was torn out of him, so hoarse and rough that she almost failed to recognize it as her name.

"You expect mercy from me?" she snarled.

"Ginny..." It was not a plea, she realized. She did not know what it was that Draco Malfoy was saying to her, or asking of her.

But she did know that there had been pleasure, that afternoon all those months before. She had not wanted to feel it. She had tried to forget it. She had only succeeded in tamping it down in a little corner of her mind. The power of her fury shot through her wand.

Then suddenly someone was lifting her from behind, pinning her arms to her sides, forcing her to drop her wand. She fought blindly, wildly.

"Ginny!" a voice was saying, urgently. "Ginny, you've got to stop!"

"No," she shrieked. "No, I can't, I'm going to give him what he deserves, I'm going to destroy him--"

"But you'll destroy yourself as well," Sirius Black said. She recognized his voice at last. Remus Lupin was behind him, Ginny saw now, and she vaguely recognized Tonks, Moody, Kingsley Shacklebolt... I wonder how they found me... how they knew...

She heard a gasping, choking sound. Malfoy had rolled over onto his side and was retching weakly on the floor. He was alive. She had failed. Failed. Her eyes closed, and she let Sirius lead her away. Halfway through the first step she took, Ginny fell to the floor. His strong arms held her up. Don't, she wanted to say. I'm not worth saving. There's nothing left to save.

+++

Ginny's eyes fluttered open. Where am I? She looked from side to side of the little narrow room with its steep walls, and its one window set up very high. Crystal balls filled with a subdued light clustered near the ceiling. In a hospital. Must be. I've seen this sort of room before... It's St. Mungo's. She pushed the bedcovers down and sat up. I don't feel sick... With that fleeting thought, she remembered everything that had happened. She thought of her months of dull dead listlessness, Ron's appearance at Twelve Grimmauld Place, the half-mad look on his face, and her attack on Draco Malfoy. She thought of these things curiously, as if the memories were a piece of china to pick up and handle before putting down again. She got up and stood by the window, breathing in the fresh, cool air of early morning. How do I feel?

Different, came to her after a long time of standing. Not like I did before. But not like I used to feel, either, when I was the old Ginny. The innocent Ginny. Kind of... empty. New. Unfilled. She thought about what she'd done. It was all like looking at a moving wizard photograph of another girl. No connection with her.

But most of all, she remembered the lancing, cleansing rage, blowing though her like a great destructive wind. It had blown out the paralyzed gray dead dullness she'd felt. It had blown her clean. She had done a terrible thing, whatever Malfoy had done to her first, but she could not seem to summon up any of the emotions she ought to have felt. Not anger at him, not regret for her attempt at revenge. Perhaps, she thought, one canceled out the other. Now, she might have been a piece of the pale blue sky she saw, or one of the hyacinths peeking through a garden bed far below. She was not anyone. She was waiting to become someone.

She turned to see Albus Dumbledore standing next to her. His kind eyes, nearly hidden in radiating laugh lines, twinkled at her. His long white beard was filled with the new, fresh, clean sunlight from the window. "Ginevra," was all he said. It was as if he said everything. By calling her name, he called her back to life.

"I did something unforgivable," she said a little later, sitting next to him in one of the two little chairs near the window.

He nodded. "And so they are called Unforgivable curses. There is a reason for that name, Ginny, and it is not only because of the effects they have on their victims. An Unforgivable frequently boomerangs on an inexperienced user. By the time the Aurors traced your brother back to Twelve Grimmauld Place, Mr. Malfoy was severely affected. But as you have undoubtedly guessed by this point, you were, as well." He looked at her. "You must have had a very powerful reason to cast such a curse. I wonder what it was."

She shrugged. She did not understand why she was failing to take this golden opportunity to tell the truth about what Malfoy had done to her. He was probably still in custody somewhere, and she held his fate in her hands. But she did not want to exercise the power she had, and until she knew why, she would not tell anyone.

"Where's Ron?" she asked. "Where's my brother?"

Dumbledore shook his head sadly. "No-one knows. "

Ginny went outside for the first time two days later, resting several times along the way. She sat at a picnic table under a huge weeping willow tree. Its untrimmed branches swayed back and forth in the spring wind. There was another figure seated at the other end of the table. He turned towards her, very slowly, and stiffened incredibly. She recognized Draco Malfoy.

"Hello," she said.

He seemed to turn potential replies over and over in his mind. He was very thin, she saw, and there were lines on his face that had not been there before. They looked like the scars experience leaves behind when it heals. "Hello," he finally said.

Ginny glanced at the orderlies strolling near the entrance to the hospital. One nodded at her, smiling pleasantly.

"I'm surprised they're letting me within a hundred metres of you," she said.

"Patients can't perform magic here, nor visitors either," he said. "It's all under strict control of the Healers."

"I know." She raised her eyes to the impossibly blue sky above them. "But still... you'd think... I mean, that they wouldn't allow us to sit at the same table, anyway..."

He raised his eyebrows. "Because you cast an Unforgivable on me, I suppose?"

"Well--yes."

"True, that's not generally very well thought of at St. Mungo's..." He stared into the distance, his words trailing off. "But nobody here knows that you were the one who did it. I don't believe anybody knows except the Aurors, and of course Dumbledore."

"He spoke to me," she said. "When I first woke up."

"To me as well," said Draco.

They sat in silence for a bit longer. She thought of how very different Malfoy's appearance was now, compared to the way he'd looked when he was at school. Yet it had been less than a year before.

"I'm surprised you're not throwing yourself on me and trying to finish what you started less than two weeks ago," he finally said. There was no particular ire in his voice.

"Perhaps I'm surprised too." Ginny looked down at her thin white hands. "But all the hatred I had for you feels used up. I've worn it out, I think."

"Did you hate me very much?" Draco's question sounded as if it might have held no more than simple curiousity.

"I had nightmares about Tom Riddle in the Chamber of Secrets," said Ginny. "Every night, when I was at Twelve Grimmauld Place. I suppose it might have been partly the house. But his face kept turning into yours. I knew it was you that day in the abandoned room, even before I really knew."

"I had nightmares about your eyes," said Draco. "Every single night. I've slept more in the past two weeks than I have since I left Hogwarts."

"You don't have them anymore?"

"No."

"Me neither."

The spring wind played through their hair, red-gold and silver-blond. They did not speak again, but sat across from each other for a very long time.

Ginny went down to the hospital cafeteria for lunch the next day. The food was rather better than that which turned up on the trays orderlies brought to the rooms, and she felt an appetite for the first time in months. She was digging into a bowl of lamb stew with relish when Draco Malfoy sat down next to her.

"May I?" He was perched on the edge of his seat, as if ready to take flight at any moment.

"Yes," she said.

They ate in a companionable silence.

Later that night, Molly Weasley came to visit her daughter as Ginny sat in the activity room on the fourth floor. She brought armfuls of new white nightgowns, puzzles and games, home-baked applesauce cookies, and several stuffed animals that stared at them both with vacant glass eyes. "You'll let me know if you hear anything from Ron?" Ginny asked.

"Of course, sweetheart. Of course." She hugged Ginny close before she left, and her arms pried themselves from around the girl's neck reluctantly.

Draco watched the entire thing from a corner of the room. He was partially hidden from their view by a large potted plant, and he thought that Molly Weasley, at least, most likely had not known he was there. But Ginny knew. He was strangely sure of that. When her mother had put her arms about her neck, a painful little dart had gone through his chest. He wondered what it would be like to hold Ginny Weasley in his arms because she wanted him to do so, had perhaps asked him for the embrace. He wondered what it would feel like if her arms went around him. The activity room felt suddenly chilly in the early summer evening, and Draco had lost a great deal of weight. He shivered and wrapped his own thin arms around his chest.

Ginny sat staring down at her hands for a long time after her mother left the room. Then she raised her head. "I know you're there, Malfoy."

"I thought you did," he said, coming out from behind the plant and sitting across the table from her.

She toyed with the edge of one of the boxes her mother had brought. "Today's my birthday, you know."

"Oh. Happy birthday, Weasley," he said awkwardly. "Didn't you want a cake?"

"No. Not really." Ginny shrugged. "When was yours?"

The simple question caught him so off guard that he had trouble remembering the answer. "Back in June. The fifth."

Ginny raised her eyebrows. "Ah. So you're a Gemini, Malfoy. What would Trelawney say?"

The ghost of a smile flitted across his face. "Oh, that I was destined to be creative, and deceitful, and two-faced, I think. The other five hundred million people who share the same star sign and I, that is. Load of rubbish, if you ask me."

A hitching cough caught in her throat. After a moment's thought, Draco realized that it was probably supposed to be a giggle. Or at least, once--before all of these things had happened to Ginny Weasley--it would have been.

"Do you know how to play Scrabble?" she asked.

"Not a clue."

"I'll teach you."

They played Scrabble for the rest of the evening, until the white-clad orderly came to tell them that the activity room would close in ten minutes. Ginny gathered up the board, and stacked the rest of the presents in a neat pile. "You can make yourself useful by carrying these up to my room, Malfoy," she said.

His heart leapt strangely at her words. "All right."

He followed her with the boxes and irregularly shaped packages, the plate of cookies and the stuffed animals teetering dangerously in his arms, dumping them on her little bed with a sigh of relief. "I don't have my strength back yet," he admitted.

"Neither do I," said Ginny. "But I suppose we both will soon."

"I suppose we will." He stacked the games in one pile, and the folded nightgowns in another. He brushed against the lace trimming that edged the neckline. His fingers lingered on its softness, as if it were her hair, or her skin.

"Don't touch my nightgowns, Malfoy," Ginny said.

He struggled to think of the sort of biting response he would have made before the war. Something about how he would never lower himself to touch any of the raggedy possessions of a poverty-stricken Weasley. He'd just washed his hands, and he didn't want any of her filth on them, perhaps... That sort of thing had been always on the tip of his tongue, in the old days. That Draco Malfoy seemed impossibly distant from him now, as if a thousand thousand years separated them, and not six months. But then, what am I now? What am I, if not what I have always been? In the end, he said nothing. Ginny shrugged.

"Then we'll leave, once we're really well..." She picked up a cookie and bit into it, absently. "But it's odd," she added after a pause. "It's so hard to believe that I'll ever get out of here--that I'll ever go back to the way I used to be."

Draco nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.

She put one hand on the windowsill, chewing on the cookie. "Sometimes I feel as if there never really will be anything, or anyplace, outside of this hospital. Or if there is, I'll never get to see it." She tried to laugh. "I suppose that sounds perfectly mad, to you."

"No," said Draco, moving to stand beside her at the window. "I know exactly what you mean. Because I've thought the same thing. If you're mad, then so am I."

She turned slightly, facing him obliquely. He caught a flash of her great brown-gold eyes studying his. But they weren't the terrible eyes of his dreams. They were very wide and a little troubled, but they held no judgment, no accusations. He felt a sudden impulse to touch her cheek, to feel if it was as soft as it looked, and to move his head forward until his lips touched her parted pink ones. If he had never done what he did to her all those months before, he thought that perhaps he really could kiss her now, a soft, chaste, gentle kiss. He turned away.

"I need to get back to my room," Draco said.

+++

"Do you know where your brother is?" Draco Malfoy asked Ginny during their walk around the grounds of St. Mungo's two days later.

Ginny didn't ask which brother he meant. "No," she said. The word seemed to carry a faint unease. "No," she repeated, as if trying to decide what part of the syllable had disturbed her.

"Oh."