Learning to Breathe

She’d never been a big fan of the Slytherins, so to speak, but she was smart enough to realize that the school needed them. The school needed the cunning (and sometimes evil) students to balance out the other three houses, and now they were gone. She’d been especially chagrined at the losses of Malfoy and his goons, as much as she’d disliked them. Malfoy had remained unchanged until the end, still insulting those he deemed lower than himself, and generally looking down his pointy nose at everyone.

She has never been able to recall the incidents in which she wrote on the wall with any amount of clarity; at best they are foggy recollections that only show her how weak willed she once was. She is not like that anymore, and sometimes she wishes she could have thanked Tom for that.

“You look like hell,” he murmurs, not looking up from his desk. She narrows her eyes at him and scowls.

“Thank you.” Such simple words, but he has to force them past his lips. When she gives him a tight-lipped smile, he realizes why he’s never been able to say the words properly. He’s never meant them before, and no one that he’s ever said them to has believed him.

“There are some things that they just wouldn’t understand.” He nods at this. He understands this feeling; the feeling that no matter how close you can get to someone, they will never really know you.

He turns these things over in his mind, and a funny feeling starts in the pit of his stomach. He knows that he should just stop thinking about them, but he can’t, and he doesn’t want to. She has already given him hope when he shouldn’t have it. He knows that he doesn’t deserve even her friendship, so how could he dare to ask for more?

He resolves to talk to her tomorrow about the way he feels; he can’t stand another day of being near to her without being close to her.

A thrill runs through him at the sound of his name from her lips. She has said it before, and she will say it again, but he’s beginning to think that the sensation it causes will never fade.

This seems very fitting to her, this give-and-take, even if she knows that he’s mostly interested in the taking part right now.

Blaise understands this change – he went through it when he met Susan. He knows how one person can become your entire reason for living.

“Who do you think you are, dismissing me like this?” he asks angrily. “I’ve done nothing wrong to you to make you treat me this way.”

“I don’t know what I am anymore,” he says, frowning. She blinks. “I’m the only one in the entire school who still wears Slytherin robes. Zabini wears Gryffindor, Bulstrode wears Hufflepuff, and Davis wears Ravenclaw. I’m the only Slytherin left.”

“I’m not trying to dissect it, Ginny. I’m just trying to understand it.”

“Draco speaks nonstop about you, you know.”

Draco and Ron have locked eyes, and Ginny isn’t entirely sure that she’s comfortable with this, considering that Ron has inherited the same Weasley temper that she has.

If anyone had told him that the road he’d chosen would lead him here, he would never have believed them. Love was the stuff of fairy tales, and he was a murderer. Murderers do not get happy endings, because they don’t deserve them.