Unforgivable

+++

Everything seemed to happen at once.

Ron pulled Ginny off Draco with a single motion, hurling her aside, then coming across the bed, grabbing for the other boy's throat. Ginny catapulted back with such force that she pushed Draco onto the floor. He lay stunned for a few moments, all the breath knocked out of him. She crouched over his chest.

"Get away from him," Ron said, breathing heavily.

"No, Ron, no--"

"He's going to get what he deserves. Finally. Finally." Ron's face was a mask of hatred, rage, near-insane glee. He advanced on the two of them. Draco sprang to his feet, dragging Ginny with him, and they moved backwards and into the corner of the room. In some dim corner of his mind, Draco noted that they were now trapped. They should have made for the exit. But they couldn't, because Ron was between them and the door, which was closed anyway. Ginny screamed, a high, thin, hopeless sound.

"I've put a Silencing charm on this room," Ron said pleasantly, advancing closer still. He gave them both the mirthless grin of a man in the grip of a monomania, at last realized.

"Ron, you don't understand," Ginny said, speaking very rapidly. She was clutching onto Draco's arm so tightly that he faintly realized her nails were biting into his skin, but it didn't seem very important at the moment. "He's--Draco's changed, he's not what he used to be, I've forgiven him, everything's all different now--"

"So that's what you're calling him?" asked Ron, with what might have been no more than mild curiousity. "Draco?"

"I--well-- yes, that is to say--" Ginny floundered, and fell silent.

"It's all right, Ginny," Ron said gently. "He's got you under some sort of spell. I understand."

"No! No. You don't understand at all--"

"Oh, I understand perfectly. Now stand aside." When Ginny did not budge, Ron reached out to drag her away from Draco. But Ginny showed unexpected strength, clinging to Draco's arms with such force that Ron could not move her even a centimeter. Ron glanced up, addressing the other boy directly for the first time.

"Get away from her, you bloody coward." Deliberately, Ron pulled his wand from its scabbard at his waist.

Draco stared back into Ron's mad eyes blankly. I'm in shock, he realized. I don't feel a thing... and what he just said doesn't make the slightest bit of sense...

"It's not like that at all," said Ginny desperately. "Ron, why won't you listen to me--"

The realization came very slowly to Draco, as if squeezed through a tiny space. By holding onto him, Ginny was protecting him. She offered herself up as a human shield. And as long as she was near him, Draco was safe. Her brother had wandered very far into madness, but he was not yet mad enough to harm her... or was he?

Draco had never believed in presentiments, or precognition. But as Ginny opened her mouth, a terrible fear struck him, even before he heard what she had to say.

"I'm with him because I want to be. I'm near him because I want to be. What--what you saw, Ron, when you came into the room--" Ginny took a deep breath. "I wish you hadn't seen it, but I asked Draco to do what he did, this time. And it--I don't expect you to understand this, but it healed me from what happened last time. Maybe that's right, and maybe it's wrong, but it happened tonight because I wanted it to happen."

Time slowed down then.

The last traces of sanity left Ron Weasley's eyes and face and body. Draco saw it happen almost dispassionately. The pale, freckled hand raised his wand. The mouth began to form words. It was shaped a bit like Ginny's mouth, Draco noticed.

"Avada..."

Ginny clung to his arm with renewed force. Ron's wand did not waver. His mouth opened again.

In one of the very few unselfish acts that Draco Malfoy had ever committed, he thrust Ginny away from him with all his strength. He saw out of the corner of his eye that she stumbled, lost her balance, and started to fall. He felt a brief pang of regret that this action would be the last one he ever performed, and that she would have only bruises to remember him by. Then he turned to face her brother, baring his chest to the deadly spell. I've saved her, he thought. I've done one good thing in my life. Maybe only one. But maybe that one will be enough, at the end of all things...

Draco waited for the second word, the one that completed the curse, that would bring everything full circle. My sins could never have been forgiven, he thought in the split second that somehow seemed much longer. I can see that now. She forgave me. But I was a fool to think that would be enough. Some acts cannot be undone, and someone must suffer for them. Strange way to think of it, when I'm the one who's going to suffer. That's what I chose, and--

He never heard the word. But he did hear a sickening crack. The impact of a skull smashing into a stone floor.

What's that sound? Why is Ron Weasley staring at me, not speaking, not moving? How--Draco glanced down.

Ginny lay motionless on the floor, blood trickling across the smooth-laid stones from the terrible wound in her head.

Draco didn't remember sinking to his knees beside her and cradling her head in his arms, but he must have done so, because her blood was all over his hands and arms. Blood. So much blood.

"Ginny!" a voice was shouting. It wasn't Ron Weasley's voice, because he was standing in the middle of the floor as if turned into stone, just like the blood-soaked stones under his sister. It must be mine, thought Draco. "Ginny, Ginny, Ginny..."

Then other voices joined his own, shouting Ginny's name, Ron's name, other half-intelligible orders and exclamations and commands. The room was filled with people--Aurors in their swirling dark robes and heavy boots, Healers in white linen, orderlies. A sea of faces floating in the air like white balloons.

Ron was flanked by a small woman with spiky pink hair and a tall dark wizard with a very grim face that looked as if it had been carved out of ebony, and Draco saw him being dragged away out of the corner of his eye. He thought that he might have wanted to do something about that, or think something about it, except that there was no room or time to do anything but hang onto Ginny Weasley as hard as he could, because as long as she was in his arms she surely couldn't slip away. He wouldn't let her. But then someone was pulling at him, and a mediwitch was taking her pulse, and someone else was trying to wrap up her head... why won't they just leave us be?

They were trying to take her away from him. Draco snarled at the sea of faces and clutched Ginny to him harder. "Don't," a low, gravelly voice was saying now, urgently, from somewhere to his left. "It's too late. She can't be saved, all of you just said she can't be saved. Another moment won't make any difference! Let him say goodbye to her."

A very wise voice, Draco thought gratefully. Although the words it said didn't make any sense. They slipped past his ears like birds falling from the sky. Who is that speaking, anyway? He looked up into the half-familiar face of Sirius Black, kneeling over him, and over Ginny. Draco recognized his cousin because he'd seen him once or twice before, although never closely, and he'd certainly seen the Azkaban pictures back in third year. But for the first time he also realized that he was looking into a very blurred and distorted mirror. The older man's coloring was all different, of course, dark rather than light, but his grey eyes were the same, and the long lines of the face, the peculiar shape of the nose, the arched eyebrows, the shape of the mouth. Sirius Black looks like me. How strange. Not the way my father did, but still, he looks like me... or I look like him...

Ginny was utterly still. Draco bent his ear down to her lips. There was not the slightest sound. She stared up at him, but there was no meaning in her eyes now. Her spirit had fled. A terrible knowledge was pressing in upon his mind like an avalanche that begins with the fall of a single stone. Still he listened for the words that would never come, that he could never hear from her.

"Draco," Sirius said gently. He touched the boy's shoulder. "Come away now, Draco. Her family is here... her mother... her father, her brothers..."

Man plans. God laughs, thought Draco.

Someone was laughing, a high, eerie, eldritch sound that seemed a lot closer to screaming. He couldn't think who it was.

Molly Weasley's face thrust itself down towards his, transformed by fury into something alarming. "Get him away from her," Ginny's mother snarled. "He's laughing! Laughing!"

"No," said Sirius, "no, no, Molly, it's not what you think, no."

I'm the one laughing, Draco realized slowly. Then his breath came in great gasping sobs, and he realized with horror that at any second he would begin crying. No! I won't, I won't. Malfoys don't cry...

But Malfoys weren't supposed to love, either. So it was already too late.

"You're hysterical, Draco," said Sirius in his gravelly voice. "Come on, now. Get up. You can't do anything more for her. We can get you a Calming draft."

"I don't need it. I'm calm. I'm calm now. See? See how calm I am? So wait. One more moment," Draco said.

I'll show them how a Malfoy behaves, he thought, rather incoherently. But--but whom will I show? The people in this room, staring at Ginny, and fussing over her, and trying to take her away from me? I couldn't care less about them. So who, then?

Man plans. God laughs.

Let them laugh, Draco thought. Let all the gods laugh. I'll show them what I'm made of. I am the last Malfoy, and if I can do nothing else, I will do that.

He cradled her to him, finding a brief, blessed moment of forgetfulness, for the last time, in the arms of Ginny Weasley. Then he reached out, and, with a flick of his fingertips, he gently closed her eyes.

Draco rose to his feet very very slowly, feeling immensely old and tired. He kept his teeth tightly clenched, and his face impassive, as he followed his cousin Sirius Black out into the hall. Arthur Weasley tried to grasp his arm as he walked by, but Draco did not feel it. Molly Weasley tried to get his attention, but he did not see her. George Weasley tried to say something, but Draco did not hear him. He only walked away from Ginny, and towards the long long life that stretched out before him, beyond hers.

+++

There is a camera move in the language of film that utilizes what is called the "god's eye view," and perhaps the best way to imagine what happened next is to picture this common end to an American film. It pulls us away from the action and the characters, and also causes them to become remote from us, or more precisely, to put them and us in our proper places, respective to each other. We are the godlike viewers, and this camera move reminds us of that fact as our point of view moves up and back, and the scene below us becomes smaller and smaller.

The grief of Draco Malfoy receded as he shrank, until finally only two ant-sized figures walking next to each other could be seen, a dark head pressed next to a fair one as its owner stumbled down the corridor. Then the gods'-eye-view moved up and up, through the walls of St. Mungo's and towards the sky, until London itself was only a jumble of doll's buildings on a green and brown earth. Then it soared higher and higher, through clouds, through air, through stratosphere, until it left that reality entirely. There were only two beings gazing down at a little glass ball that had contained this world. The one holding the ball gave it a shake, and it went dark.

And then Draco was proved wrong. The gods weren't laughing at all, although only one of the two could actually be called by that name. Loki, the Norse god of liars, tricksters, and card cheats, gave a long, heavy sigh, still staring at the ball.

"Oh dear," he said, tapping his cigarette against an ashtray that materialized from thin air and then disappeared again. "This one didn't end well, either."

Lord Morpheus gazed at his cousin Loki with his unfathomable eyes, which seemed to hold galaxies in their depths. He was the Lord of Dreams, but, strictly speaking, not a god. He was one of the continuum of the Endless, those who were before the first star or the first sentient being, and older than any god. For some say that humanity called the gods into being, and when the last human dies, so will the last god. But this is a mystery beyond human knowledge.

Carefully, Loki walked over to the stone wall. It was covered with embedded glass balls, all of which had gone dark. He fitted the one he now held into its own little niche. Then he stepped back and looked at them all, a contemplative expression on his handsome face. "None of these universes seem to be working," he said in petulant tones. "I keep trying different variables, and it doesn't make any difference at all." Dream stepped close to his side, and ran one dead-white hand over the surface of the little glass ball that had just been put into the wall.

"Don't ruin it!" said Loki. "I might want to look at it again. Maybe I can figure out what went wrong. "

"I want to see its end, cousin," said Dream, in a voice like the dark matter at the heart of galaxies.

The little ball lit up, showing tiny, colorful scenes in frenetic forward motion. Loki looked into it pensively.

"Huh," he said. "I see now how the Healers and Aurors found them, at St. Mungo's. I didn't really get that the first time I saw it. "

Dream looked at his cousin impassively, but then Dream never showed any curiousity about anything, although Loki knew that he had it. "Ron Weasley said that he put a Silencing charm on the room," he elaborated. "And he thought he did, but only staff members can use magic on hospital grounds. So everyone heard Ginny scream."

"So the Killing curse would not have worked, either," said Dream thoughtfully.

"Bingo," said Loki.

"It was all for nothing," said Dream, with the perfect detachment which only immortal beings can ever really carry off. "What Ginny did, thinking she saved him. What he did, thinking he saved her."

"Funny, isn't it?" One of Loki's smoke rings morphed into a fish. The Immortal created a shark that snapped it up in one bite and then vanished into nothingness. "Or ironic, anyway. There was a poet once who said that each man kills the thing he loves... I can't remember who it was, though. Help me out, Dream. Tennyson? Wordsworth?"

"I have not followed mortal poets since the eleventh century," said Dream.

"Did Draco Malfoy kill Ronald Weasley?"

Loki hid a smile. His cousin was far more interested than he would ever be willing to admit. "Nope," said Loki, peering into the ball again. "He tried when he saw him again in the hallway, but Sirius Black pulled them apart. Ginny's brother went completely mad, of course, once he realized what had happened. Spent the rest of his life in Azkaban. Harry Potter and Hemione Granger both argued for him to be committed to St. Jude's Asylum for the Criminally Insane, but Ron didn't want it--wouldn't go. He kept staging idiotic escape attempts until Arthur Weasley was finally forced to order administration of the Dementor's Kiss. Talk about dysfunctional family dynamics. If you think Darth Vader screwed his chances for a Father's Day card..."

Dream ran his fingers over the ball. "The evidence points to a different conclusion, my cousin. The last sane words Ronald Weasley ever spoke, before the Kiss, were 'Thank you, Father.'"

"There's no situation so dreary that you can't make it a lit-tle more depressing," said Loki.

"I cannot see into the ball as clearly as you," said Lord Morpheus, "since you created this world."

Loki took this as a hint to continue, as indeed it was. "Let's see... what else... Draco was brought to trial before the Wizengamot, but Albus Dumbledore spoke for him, so he was convicted of no crime. He became a Healer, and spent the remainder of his mortal life working among the inmates of St. Mungo's, and St. Jude's. Oh! This part's so sweet. He never forgot Ginny Weasley. He never loved another living being, and he died bitter, and alone. His last thought was... hmmm... I loved, and I was loved... if only for a moment, some other human being loved me... and then never again. Never again. Well, it's sort of sweet, anyway."

"What did the evil being known as Voldemort mean," asked Dream, "when he said that Dumbledore had pulled down his own house, and that soon he would know it?"

"Oh, that." Loki shook the ball back and forth slightly. "The entire thing really only gets more and more depressing, to tell you the truth. The British wizarding world simply faded away less than a hundred years after this. It's as if it ran out of steam after the second war... Muggleborns and purebloods alike started losing their powers, and nearly all the new babies were squibs. It was the same all over Europe, actually. The only wizarding communities left were the indigenous ones, and they had to draw apart from the Muggle world completely. The aborigines of Australia retreated further into the Dreamtime, the Navajo Nation sealed their borders, the Inuits closed off Nunavut. That wasn't a very successful alternate reality at all, was it?" he sighed.

"Were any of them worse?" asked Dream.

Loki fingered some of the glass balls set into the wall, and they lit briefly. "Oh, yes. Here's one where Draco killed Ginny, preserved her body, and kept it in his room for two and a half years. Ick. Then he brought her back to life, and--you know, I don't even want to look at the end of that one."

"Shall you continue to make these worlds, my cousin?" asked Dream.

"I have to." Loki's face grew suddenly serious. "It's my only chance to ever be set free. One of them's got to work. Maybe I'll try another one where Sirius Black goes through the veil. Or there's one I was working on that had that half-blood prince idea. That might work."

"I doubt it," said Dream.

"But I won't give up," said Loki. "The devil never gives up, didn't you know that?"

"I know it," said Dream. "Your time grows short, cousin. You must return soon."

"Yes," said Loki, a faraway look in his silvery eyes. "You know the funniest part of this whole thing, though? It's hilarious. There's this woman in the British isles who exists in all of the realities I've ever made, and in each of them, she writes a series of books about my universe. And she thinks that she's coming up with the plotlines!" He chuckled softly.

"Human creativity is a very mysterious thing," said Dream. "Some mortals believe that it comes from dreams. Homer said so, as I recall."

Loki shrugged. "Perhaps. Well, anyway, time's a-wastin', cousin, and I have to get back to my rock. Ciao." He blew one final smoke ring in the shape of a figure eight on its side, the symbol for infinity. It wound itself around him, and he vanished. He reappeared chained to the rock of torment below the serpent Nidhogg, who drips venom on his face and body until Ragnarok, the fall of gods and men. It is his punishment for killing Baldur with a sprig of mistletoe, although Loki always claims that the true story is much more complicated, and anyway, he was framed. But these are matters that do not enter into this story.

The Lord of Dreams continued to stare into the glass ball, as he always did after Loki had finished showing him one of the universes he created for Draco Malfoy and Ginny Weasley. Its interior whirled milky white, and the face of the sleeping Draco Malfoy drifted in and out of focus.

"Awake," whispered the Lord of Dreams, as he always did. The ball went dark. And Draco Malfoy awoke.

He sat bolt upright, breathing like a scared animal, staring wildly into the darkness that pressed in upon him like a living thing. By degrees, he realized where he was. The bedcurtains were familiar, and the oak bedposts, and the spectral shape of the bedside table. He rubbed his face, trying to clear away the shreds of nightmare that still seemed to cling to his skin. For he was sure he'd had a nightmare. Its subject remained obscure, however.

An image of red hair and a pointed, freckled little face drifted through his mind. Ginny Weasley? No. He shook his head. Surely he hadn't been dreaming about her. Unless that was the nightmare, and it involved an encounter with all the Weasley spawn. He snickered. Then he lay back down, running a hand over his face, pushing back sweaty strands of hair from his forehead, trying to remember, and trying even harder to forget. In the vulnerable small hours just before dawn, that was sometimes hard to do.

Because every night, Draco dreamed a world. He relived his years at Hogwarts again and again and again, each time slightly different, and yet each time all too much the same. He suffered and rejoiced; he laughed and lusted and seduced; he fell in love with Ginny Weasley in a thousand thousand different ways. Sometimes he was her lover, and sometimes he was not; sometimes she loved him, and sometimes she hated him; sometimes he chose good, and sometimes evil. But somehow, somewhere, something always went wrong. And when he awoke, he never remembered.

Sometimes, just before Draco dropped off to a troubled sleep again, he had a strange feeling that he was circling some inevitable conclusion, when all things would come together. I am drawing closer and closer to a final reckoning, he thought, not knowing what he meant. And it may indeed be that he knew he must someday hit upon the world that finally worked, and that he must at last meet Loki, the god and the devil who had spun so many webs of reality for him. But this is a mystery, and its answer has been vouchsafed to no man.

All we can know is this. When he dreamed, he knew the world that Loki created. When he woke, he knew the world in which he lived. The moment between sleeping and waking was the only one in which he grasped both realities in his mind at once. And it was only then, on this particular night, that Draco remembered what he had lost. I loved her, drifted through his mind like a sad ghost. She died. Then I died as well, many years later, still haunted by her, and by the love she never knew I had for her. Yet the knowledge simply passed through him and was gone without a trace, as knowledge often does in dreams.

But he did not sleep well. He could not seem to get the image of Ginny Weasley's eyes out of his head. And Draco knew that he must sleep, because soon he would be receiving important news from his father Soon, the reciprocal Portkeys would be used, and he would return to Malfoy Manor to participate in the planned invasion of Hogwarts.

When Draco awoke the next morning and looked into the bathroom mirror, he saw the marks of dried tearstains on his face, and only scowled at them. He asked Madam Pomfrey for a Dreamless sleeping potion later that day, and he took it faithfully from then on, although it never worked very well. And if the eyes of Ginny Weasley haunted Draco Malfoy forever after, all through the broken and barren life he had foreseen that night in dreams, and then forgotten... well, surely that is a matter of no importance.

Dream touched the little glass ball, and it went dark once more. He knew that Loki would appear in his realm again with a new one, and that the entire drama would be played out again. And so it would go, until the mystery was at last unlocked.

"Better luck next time, Draco Lukas Malfoy," he said, and then he turned away.

~end~