The Day the World Changed

Chapter 1 - A Bird and Fish In Love

[July 14, 1998]

It was only months before the final confrontation. Despite it being before dawn, Harry was already wide awake and running an emergency meeting with the Order in an attempt to put together a plan to sabotage an attack set to strike the train station housing platform 9 3/4. The news of the attack had reached them much later than usual. Their informant was coming under grave suspicion by many of the higher-ranking Death Eaters and thus their security measures had been tightened and only a select few were given direct access to plans and orders. He had had to break half a dozen enchantments in order to get what little information he had managed to spirit away from Malfoy Manor with.

Draco Malfoy stood in the briefing room in his usual cocky and self-assured manner, and only someone as familiar with him as Harry Potter would see that beneath that vain and cold exterior was a young man desperate to break away from the dark shadows his father had tried to cloak him in since birth. The recent scrutiny he'd undergone by his "fellow" death eaters had him on edge and nervous for multiple reasons. He'd been leaking the Order information from the beginning of his initiation into the Death Eaters, at first only through secretive owled messages and clandestine meetings, and then, as he felt more and more responsibility to right the wrongs his family was committing, as a double agent.

For those things he knew he faced death at every moment, and yet what worried him even more was the risk he forced another to take. Knowing the dangers that he was going to face, he had tried to push his feelings away--tried to push her away, but it was no use. She had set her sights on the boy who was deeper than he seemed, and she wasn't about to let him stand in her way. Whatever Ginny Weasley wanted, she got.

Initially it had just been about curiosity. It was the beginning of Ginny's sixth year, and she needed her own mystery to solve as much to drown out the real horrors that were going on around her as anything else. She wanted to know this boy everyone in her family and her house had deemed unacceptable. Something about the dark had always fascinated her, and there wasn't much darker than a Malfoy and his morals. What had begun as something akin to a research project quickly turned to something else entirely. She couldn't fight the attraction to someone who was so much more than what everyone expected. At moments when she was sure she would receive his mockery or scathing commentary, he would instead choose to indulge her. He would tell her humorous stories about the antics of the pureblood upper crust. If he knew she was hankering for a particular sweet from Honeydukes, it would often find its way onto her desk. And when her thick hair threatened to tumble into one of Snape's potions assignments, a green ribbon would inevitably find its way into her pocket.

As much a curiosity as he was to her she also was to him. She was the good to his bad, the sweet to his sour, and every other oxymoron he could list in his head. She was everything pure and clean he had never had in his tainted childhood, and in time she became more to him. At times Ginny acted almost as his confessor, and Draco took comfort in her presence, a balm to some ache he hadn't realized he had. And the more he discovered he needed her the more he started to push away. There had been a period of time when he avoided her every moment he could, until the ache of her absence proved too much even for his time-honored Malfoy determination.

He had pulled her to a secluded and much forgotten tower and told her how he felt and all the reasons it was wrong. He confided in her what he'd been doing for the Order. He explained that even if the confused feelings he was having were real, that it could never work between them. It could never ever work between them. And then he had kissed her until he thought his heart was going to pound out of his chest.

Things continued in that manner until the summer after his seventh year. He would tell her that they could never be and then kiss her until they were both senseless. They were quiet and careful and fighting what Draco would not allow himself the luxury of believing was love.

The only one who had known about them was Hermione. Up late researching a potion, she had wandered into the wrong section of shelves and caught them snogging. Ginny didn't notice her presence, but Draco locked eyes with her immediately. When he broke the kiss and Ginny burrowed her head into his shoulder, his eyes silently pleaded with Hermione not to say anything--to let him keep this one good thing for himself, no matter how unwise caring for someone might prove to be. For whatever reasons, Hermione had merely stared at the pair intensely for a few moments and then silently backed away. For that Draco would be forever grateful, for even if he and Ginny were together on borrowed time, every night he prayed to the God he had never before had a use for to give him just a few more days with her.

Two weeks before, he had finally come clean to Harry about his relationship with Ginny. They were meeting in muggle London in a slightly seedy alleyway as they had taken to doing since the middle of their sixth year. Harry had done nothing except pin him with his green eyes that saw far too much. For a moment, Draco thought he saw what could only be considered remorse flicker by and then nothing.

"It's good you told me. If things are honestly getting hedgy with your higher ups in the Death Eaters, we'd better keep someone with her at all times. If they really suspect you're our informant, then they'll use whatever means they have to get to you, and God knows just how much they actually know about you." Harry didn't need to say anything more. They both knew what had to come next.

As Draco watched the young man he'd come to see as ally walk away from him, he felt yet another piece of himself falling away. Just before Harry turned to exit the alleyway, he asked over his shoulder, "Was it worth it?"

Without hesitation Draco shouted back one word. "Yes."

And then he was gone.

******

As Draco stood in the briefing room with Harry, Hermione, Dumbledore, and the rest of the gathered Order, he knew that his time was up. Somehow his father knew that he was the informant, and somehow the bastard knew about Ginny. While he had every reason to believe the former, his worry about Ginny was purely based on instinct.

Harry and Remus were pouring over the sheaf of papers he had delivered to them, when he interrupted them. "I think it's a trap."

Remus looked up and cocked his head to the side. "Why would you say that, Draco? This is exactly what we've been expecting for months."

"But it was just a little too clean--a little too simple," he protested. When Harry started to say that getting the files had not, in fact, been easy, he stopped him abruptly and explained, "It wasn't easy in the sense that I just waltzed into my father's study and grabbed some papers, but think about it. If he honestly didn't want the informant to be able to get a hold of these, he would have either placed far stronger wards on them or simply moved them somewhere else. He knows about me, Harry. I just know it."

"All right," Harry said, "then what do you want to do? What do you think this is?"

"I think it some sort of red herring. I think they're hitting somewhere else, and they want us to be at the station so we have no way of stopping them," he managed. "I think I know exactly what they're targeting, and I suggest we get there as soon as humanly possible."

He was terribly calm through the next hour as people scrambled to make arrangements. They needed to set up a large crew of aurors to go to the station and at least make it appear that that was their primary focus. Harry had immediately sent an owl to the Burrow telling Ron and the other aurors stationed there to strengthen all the wards that had already been set up as precautions and to be on the look out for anything unusual. It was too late to pull Ginny and Molly out of the house as they were unable to apparate away for a radius of about 5 miles all around, but the spells that had been cast were strong. If the Death Eaters wanted to break through, then moving them wasn't going to help.

Just as the core of the Order gathered their brooms and readied themselves to apparate to the closest possible point to the burrow, Hermione turned to Draco and said in a voice that did little to conceal her disgust, "You're awfully calm and cool about this whole thing, Malfoy."

He simply looked away before their locale began to wrinkle and change and responded, "I do what I have to, Granger, just as we all do."

Chapter 2 - Consequences

Before she could even make sense of her physical surroundings, she could smell the smoke. She only vaguely connected the voice to Harry when from beside her she heard a barely audible voice whisper, "Oh, dear God."

There was smoke everywhere, so thick you could barely see. Around her almost everyone was insensate because of it. From the corner of her eye, though, she could make out Malfoy and he was anything but incapacitated. Taking hold of his broom, he immediately turned to jet away in the direction of what she could only assume was the burrow. Feeling her arm being tugged upon, she turned to her left to see Harry frantically gesturing with his own broom. The two of them locked eyes and it was all she could do to keep from reaching out to him for some small sign of comfort.

They were all starting to come out of their smoke-induced haze and were turning their brooms in the direction in which they had just seen Malfoy speed away.

Being significantly less skilled than either Harry or Draco with flying, she arrived at the Burrow out of breath and shortly after the two men. As she shook her head to clear it she saw a carnage that was enough to send her to her knees. Though she knew all of her realizations of what was going on around her could only have taken a few seconds, everything felt as if it were moving in slow motion and as if someone had muted all the sound. Surrounding the Burrow was what could only be described as a plexi-glass cage. Some bizarre spell kept the smoke from blocking the view of the house itself, instead depositing it elsewhere which would explain the abundance of smoke so far from the site. And while watching the flames lick at the walls she had often stayed within herself was painful enough, looking at the images on the glass itself was an evil altogether indescribable.

Projected onto the clear walls surrounding the burning house were moving scenes dedicated to each of the Weasleys who had been living within the walls. Seeing them sprawled upon one another in a helpless jumble, Hermione quickly looked away from the image of Arthur and Molly. Their wands within their robe holsters, never having been drawn implying that they had been attacked by surprise. She was familiar with the sight of dead loved ones, and the anguish that washed over her body reminded her of the anguish she had felt just a few months before at her own parent's death. She set the pain away from her for a moment only to look at the next projection.

For a moment the image didn't make sense to her. Harry was in it. As for an instant Hermione felt a fear that she hadn't known existed. Harry! she panicked. Just as she was about to run up to the glass, a tiny bit of the fear-induced haze that had invaded her mind lifted. Harry was rocking back and forth shuddering in silent gasps. He was taking up the entire shot, but she knew he couldn't be inside the cage. It was at that moment that his body rocked up and away that she saw he was cradling Ron's bleeding and gasping body. He had been stabbed right below the heart and as the red dyed his cream colored jumper a sickly blackish-crimson, she read the elegantly penned note that had been stuck right below Ron's collar with a jeweled pin.

"You can die with the rest of your muggle-loving filth. This is only the beginning.

~Father"

The bombardment of images was finally hitting her, and Hermione began to bend and gag. She fell to her knees on the soft green grass and tried to keep the world from spinning. Instinctively she turned her head to the side to get away from the images on the glass only to come face to face with the tableau she had just left behind. Harry was clutching Ron to him as if by his own sheer will he could anchor his soul to earth. Just as she forced her legs to carry her towards the two most important men in her life, a cry of pure agony woke her from her trance and flooded her world with sound.

She jerked her body in the direction of the cry only to see Draco with his hands desperately trying break through the glass. No longer the cold and calculated double agent she had spoken with at the office, Draco was wild with fury and fear. The image directly in front of him was of Ginny, but Hermione could see that Lucius had set this projection up especially for his wayward son. Instead of just showing him a one way video feed of his lover, the projection acted like a video com minus the audio. Ginny could see the outside world just as Draco could see in. After a moment Hermione could make out that Ginny was locked in her childhood bedroom. It all looked just as it had for years. The clean, though somewhat tatty covers on the bed. The discarded dolls along the windowsill. The places where the wallpaper had come off after Ginny had finally ripped down the posters of the Boy Who Lived.

The image from the video feed was so clear that Hermione instantly knew what was about to happen. There was no smoke inside the room, and the walls had clearly been enchanted to burn extra slowly. Lucius had wanted Draco to witness this.

Hermione saw the moment Draco, slowly realized what was about to happen, and she watched as he could only stare into the image of the youngest Weasley, hoping to burn the last images of her into his mind. He was still half-heartedly beating against the glass, when Ginny put her hand against whatever was letting her see him. He paused and watched as she shook her head at him. He drew his fisted hand down to match hers on the projection, almost as if the two of them could touch each other through the enchanted portal. He slowed his breathing to match hers and gazed into her eyes. She looked scared, and she looked resignedly sad, but she also looked totally aware as if some sort of transcendence had touched her. She gave him a small smile and Hermione's heart stopped for a moment as she saw her young friend mouth the words, "I love you," to the boy she had once caught Ginny kissing in the shelves of Madam Pince's library. Before Draco could mouth the words back, Ginny jerked her head away from his gaze and looked around her with a look of momentary panic. She took a deep breath then and glanced back at Draco mouthing a word Hermione only guess at. Just before the screen blanked out, and in the distance a portion of the Weasley house collapsed in upon itself, she thought she saw Ginny mouth the word "Live."

It took a moment for Draco to connect the collapse of the house with the image's disappearance, but the moment he did, Draco let out a cry that would haunt Hermione for years.