Whimsically Ginny

Chapter Four: Lick My Wounds

Only the human being, absolved from kissing and strife

goes on and on and on, without wandering

fixed upon the hub of the ego

going, yet never wandering, fixed, yet in motion,

the kind of hell that is real, grey and awful

sinless and stainless going round and round

the kind of hell grey Dante never saw

but of which he had a bit inside him.

Know thyself, and that thou art mortal.

But know thyself, denying that thou art mortal:

a thing of kisses and strife

a lit-up shaft of rain

a calling column of blood

a rose tree bronzey with thorns

a mixture of yea and nay

a rainbow of love and hate

a wind that blows back and forth

a creature of beautiful peace, like a river

and a creature of conflict, like a cataract:

know thyself, in denial of all these things -

And thou shalt begin to spin round on the hub of the obscene

ego

a grey void thing that goes without wandering

a machine that in itself is nothing

a centre of the evil world.

~Death is Not Evil, Evil is Mechanical, D.H. Lawrence

24^th August 1995

"The remaining heirs of the Order of the Black Rose...together they will reinstate the Heir of Slytherin...or they will fail him..."

Sybill Trelawney was trembling painfully, her long fingers white and taut.

"The last of the Oigthierna..."

Deadly silence around her...

"Born of the winter equinox...he holds the power that the Dark Lord seeks..."

Oigthierna...

Dracognius-Normandy...

Desailly-d'Alessandry...

Zabini...

Malfoy.

~

21^st December 1934

The cold was biting, and seven-year-old Tom Marvolo Riddle stood, in his anonymously coloured, moth-bitten orphanage wear, which had such an aged appearance that it had in itself become ageless: no one knew when it had come about, how it had somehow come to be on the shoulders of the thin, anaemic-looking boy whose dark blue eyes were too large for his face and windswept black hair was almost too strikingly contrasting to his pallor. In his hands, which had been ruthlessly scrubbed only an hour ago, and now already caked with dirt from the hidden corners of Stockwell Orphanage, was a small, open, leather-bound book. He was facing the window that was closest to his bed; the other boys were in the playroom, far down on the east, separated from the infirmary, consequently forming the east end of the quadrangle. Having lived for as long as his short life could permit him to remember in Stockwell Orphanage, Tom had long memorized the entire perimeter of the area, even going so far as to draw up a good many maps, during the Latin classes when the Latin Master had disappeared for his coffee at every half period.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

The winter scene before him was dreary, reflecting the state of his soul: old and neglected, forgotten. On the dark grey pavements of London, black beetles of slow-engined cars coughed their way past each other, past the unpolished, grime-clung green-grey street lamps, past the grey-shawled beggars, past the diminished, pompous form of the neighbourhood constable. All of them were under the uniform grey sky, which, by the whim of heaven, poured down either fickle, annoying drizzles or sulphur-polluted snow, which was more wet and sloppy and more grey than white.

It was pathetic. It was pathetic; all was pathetic in a post-WWI, post-Great Depression Britain, where everything seemed strained and bleached and grey. It was pathetic, thought seven-year-old Tom, but that suited him, because he was as pathetic as they were, the only difference being that he was aware and they weren't.

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck that which is planted;

There was something in him that made him know that he was destined for greater things than this orphanage of supposed opportunity provided and proposed. He knew. He knew that he was different, just as the other boys knew that he was different, somehow, but because they were pathetic, even more so than he was, they just left him alone, save for the occasional jibe and bullying. Adults always oversimplified perceptions of children: in the orphanage, they seemed to see them as only those who were bullied, and those who bullied. They forgot that every boy, in the end, had the same baser mentality of a hare: anything foreign and breathing was to be dealt with the utmost caution. Callousness was an unspoken luxury, but a dangerous one. Tom could see it in the other boys' eyes. His difference induced a fear in them. A fear they tried to hide from him, but then, fear is palpable; it is instinctual and Tom, for all his intellect, was well versed in instinct. He could taste their fear, and in turn their fear would feed an appetite that lies dormant in most.

But recently Tom had begun to sense a kind of fear in himself. There was something that his own sub-conscious knew but was keeping secret from the conscious Tom; teasing his consciousness in the dead of the night.

Tom turned the page in the small leather-bound book.

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

Flashes of the same copper-touched red hair, a laughing, brilliant smile expanded from a shy one, brown eyes morphing into amber, hazel, gold. A faery, Tom was certain, a ridiculous, mythical creature from the illustrated books of the Reading Master, that had infiltrated his memory.

But Tom knew, once again instinctively, that it was not such a simple explanation. So everyday when the other boys were in the playroom, Tom, not accounted for anyway, stood by the window, staring down, his eyes combing the sight before him for a the lively colour that was denied on the streets of London. All the time his heart froze from the grey, the bitterness in the fact that he knew he had been an abandoned child - he had heard so, the gossip vines of the orphanage being just as delicately but well-constructed as the lines of the London telephone operators, growing.

They say that abandonment is the greatest wrong.

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

The dinner bell rang. Tom took one last, almost pleading look through the window, then closed the pages on Ecclesiastes 3, his light steps following the raucous noise of the other boys.

~

24^th August 1995

Virginia Isabel Weasley had the kind of look on her face that could have been a carbon copy of those stuck permanently on Fred and George Weasley's faces.

"Gin..." hissed Charlie, "What the hell did Fred and George tell you this time?"

"Charlie?" asked Audrey, who looked slightly bemused.

Ginny grinned, then moved out from Charlie towards Audrey. "Hi, you must be Audrey...I'm Ginny, Charlie's -"

"Only sister?" Audrey completed, smiling down at Ginny. "Charlie's told me a lot about you."

"None of it good, I would expect," said Ginny dryly, and the left corner of Audrey's lips lifted into a lopsided grin.

"Anyway, Audrey's here to visit some of her relatives," said Charlie, cutting in. He gave Ginny a significant look before turning back to Audrey, "You must pardon my sister, her tongue gets a bit farther than her small brain when she meets new people."

"Hey!" expostulated Ginny, trying to sock Charlie, and Audrey and Charlie both laughed as Charlie caught Ginny around the waist.

"Lemme go!"

"Never," retorted Charlie, and Audrey shook her head before saying, "Well, it's nice meeting you, Ginny, but I must be on my way now...the Changs will be meeting me at the Leaky Cauldron. Bye, Charlie, Ginny."

"The Changs?" asked Ginny, surprised.

"Yup," said Audrey, as she picked up her bags - a light blue backpack and a tattered looking white plastic carrier with a red rose and the word "Takashimaya" emblazoned across - "They're my relatives. I believe Cho is in the seventh year in Hogwarts? That's your school too, isn't it, Ginny?"

"Er...yes. And I do know Cho," replied Ginny, before adding for politeness' sake, "She's quite nice. And very pretty."

Audrey nodded slightly in agreement, smiling. "Well, I'll best be going now."

"Have a nice stay in England!" cried Ginny as Audrey made her way through the Gringotts doors. Audrey gave a wave over her shoulder, nodding again.

As soon as Audrey was out of earshot, Ginny turned to Charlie, who had by now released her but was still staring in the general direction where Audrey had disappeared.

"You like her, don't you?" asked Ginny, more softly than teasingly.

"I'm that obvious, aren't I?" replied Charlie, smiling ruefully, before ruffling Ginny's hair again. "Actually, I had half a mind to ask her over for the holidays...but then I found out that she was going to the Changs...so..."

"You did the next best thing and escorted her over yourself." finished Ginny. "But why were you guys in Gringotts, then?"

"Aud wanted to make some withdrawals," said Charlie, turning around to scan the crowd. "And where's old Bill? My luggage's been sent to the Burrow; I suppose you guys might be going to Grimmauld Place, though?"

"So it's Aud, now, eh?" remarked Ginny, before continuing, "Anyway...I have no idea where Bill is now, so we might as well wait here for him; there's no other way out of Gringotts, so far as I know. And yes, we will be going down to Grimmauld Place. Lupin has to sort out some of Sirius's legal things with Harry...and of course, there're Order of the Phoenix meetings for those of age..."

Ginny stopped, as Charlie was looking at her in a way that made her know that he had something to say...the something being something most likely to be of the likes of a lecture. Sighing inwardly, Ginny asked, "What?"

"How are things between you and Harry, Gin?" Charlie asked, softly. His frank blue eyes were sincere in their concern, but that only irked Ginny, hating the pity that she could feel from them - still, she brushed aside her irritation, and replied brusquely.

"There's nothing between me and Harry. We're friends...acquaintances, that's all. He treats me like a sister."

"And you're okay with that?"

"Even if I wasn't what can I do about it?" Ginny's voice was low now, and like Ron that was the signal that she wanted to close off the conversation. "He has always seen me that way; nothing's going to change it. And I don't feel anything of that sort towards him any more."

Charlie was still looking at Ginny, and Ginny glanced away, before he could open his mouth to speak. "Maybe we should look for Bill - he's been taking ages, we won't be able to get back to the Leaky Cauldron by twelve."

And with that, Ginny walked away, leaving Charlie with no other option other than to follow her.

~

"Sybill, Sybill!" Minerva McGonagall cried, as the woman keeled forward, falling into the mahogany table.

"Minerva, calm down, I am sure Sybill will be fine in a while," came the voice of Albus Dumbledore. His white brows were drawn, and again he looked old, the lines in his face marked. Behind him was the ashen face of Remus Lupin, his eyes seeming to be light amber in the pale strains of sunlight coming in from the long Venetian windows of Sybill Trelawney's small room in Grimmauld Place.

"What...what do you think her words meant?" asked McGonagall, her voice strained, her sharp eyes anxious.

"The Order of the Black Rose..." said Lupin, his own voice cracked. "Isn't that -?"

"The alliance of families from the Oigthierna line," confirmed Dumbledore. His expression was grim, as it had been many times -- too many times, thought Lupin - throughout the past year. "The line directly descended from Salazar Slytherin."

"There were five of them, weren't there?" said McGonagall. "Oigthierna itself, then Dracognius-Normandy, Desailly-d'Alessandry..."

"Zabini and Malfoy," completed Lupin. There was a moment of silence. Then, Lupin cleared his throat before continuing, "But the last Oigthierna was a girl...she died, didn't she, when she was eighteen...that was in 1927, wasn't it? And the last Dracognius-Normandy is a girl too, merging into the Yong family line...a Yong Shu Han, am I right, Minerva?" At McGonagall's affirmative nod, Lupin added, "And the last Desailly-d'Alessandry was also a girl, merging into the Zabini line...the mother of Blaise Zabini. It was quite publicised, her wedding..."

"Then the last male heirs of the Order of the Black Rose would be of Zabini and Malfoy lineage respectively," concluded Dumbledore. Lupin and McGonagall both did not speak. McGonagall's lips were pursed into a thin, tensed line.

"Blaise Zabini, and Draco Malfoy."

~

1^st September 1987

It was in the clove of seasons, the summer was dead but autumn had not yet been born, and the rain was impacting the earth and the roses glowed, almost, blood red, surrealistic, vampire's tears. They engulfed one's attention, pulling one to ignore the dead and dying around them: the fallen leaves of the heavy maple trees, the rotting tender flesh of the wild daisies that had previously dared to roam into the borders of the deceptively tamed gardens. They were now a soiled white, no longer pure, and somehow more indecent then the sinful lush colour of the roses.

The patter of feet, fast, swift; Blaise was running, uncharacteristic to his normal self, but then it gave him an addictive, almost painful euphoria. The beating raindrops was rhythmic in a tempo only heaven knew, and Blaise, only seven and unable to articulate the overpowering emotion, his tailored pants wet and slicked to his long legs, only ran faster, forgetting to heed the voice who was calling for him, behind him.

"Brother, Brother, don't leave me! Don't leave me!" Xander's cries were hopelessly loud in his own ears, his heart jolting, but to Blaise's they were shuffling whispers, vapours in the wind, which flew at him, with him.

The rain both caressed and punished the roses; the roses continued to revel in their own luxuriant, ostentatious beauty in a singular infuriating act of defiance.

Blaise, flying with vanity, thinly veiled freedom, unconsciously allowed that streak of cruelty of him to rule his body: he did not stop. It was beauty, perfection, something unspeakable, indescribable. Blaise drank in this cocktail of mysteries, his head ruled by them, blurred and relieved of any semblance of himself.

Then the vapours disappeared, like mist, leaving the wind.

But the roses could not hold their vain heads for long: soon they yielded to the rain's uncompromising determination, drooping their crowns. Crowns that were, in reality, as soft and tender and as fallible as the daisies'. The petals shivered tightly; the buds bent and closed slightly...

Blaise hadn't run too far into the heart of the Zabini gardens before he became tired, the intangible flood of glamour and capricious cruelty evanesced as well. He stopped, and then his mind came into focus again, waiting for Xander. The sound of the rain was everywhere, but now the wind had died, falling parallel to the earth like loosed strands of silk made invisible. Blaise waited, peering into the downpour, into the direction he had came from, but no one came.

Finally something compelled Blaise to go back, and he did: he found Xander, huddled in the midst of the alcove of rose bushes, which formed a forbidding arc over Xander, whose face was buried in his arms, which were resting on his drawn-up knees, the way they always did when Blaise ignored him. His heart, weak, frail, but beating, would pound in a ridiculously toiling manner against his thigh: Blaise always watched, discreetly intrigued, how Xander's chest seemed to pump forwards and backwards in that alien way.

"Let's go, Xander," Blaise said.

Xander didn't answer, so Blaise placed his hand on his forehead and lifted his head. Limply, he fell backwards onto the earth. He had been bleeding from the mouth, and his neck and the front of his dove white shirt was stained a brilliant red.

Closed slightly...almost as if mourning a boy's death, in the saddest of disappointments, the most sorrowful resignation...

"Xander! Xander!" Blaise cried, painfully boyish, painfully childish, painfully useless. There was no answer, only the unforgiving, damning rain. Xander lay awkwardly, gracelessly, with his head thrown back, his porcelain neck as mythically virginal as a unicorn's alarming white coat. His legs, long like Blaise's, bent sharply at the knees, never looked more delicate, more brittle, more breakable.

Blaise began to weep, too much like the child that he was, and the tear-blurred vision in red before him plunged its way into the tender sinews of his heart. He screamed, but it was a vicious sound, a snake's hiss amplified to its full unpleasantness. Then, without thinking, Blaise fell against Xander's body.

Sheltering his body of innocence, raped by abandonment.

The most sorrowful resignation of abandonment.

Abandonment.

Something broke inside Blaise.

Abruptly, Blaise dropped Xander, his hands burning from the memory of his dead brother; Blaise's black-lashed eyelids drooped, covering the tear-reddened eyes beneath. Blaise stood up, slowly, and then walked, his back turned to Xander, down the same path he had once ran and would never again run. He walked, the same controlled, pressurized manner that he had always walked, the rain still falling, penetrating his clothes and licking his flesh, like the hard tongues of a thousand tiny snakes.

Blaise would make his way back to the Zabini fortress, remembering to take a bath and burn his soaked clothes, but neglecting to tell anyone about Xander.

Xander would later be found, almost six hours later, his body at peace, the blood having darkened and withered like dead roses, into soulless black.

~

24^th June 1941

Fourteen-year-old Tom Marvolo Riddle knew that it was a dream.

Everything around him felt strangely real, so much so that it was surreal. He was staring down the broken, abandoned labyrinth of stairs of the East Tower, and below him he saw her.

The faery, of course.

The faery was looking up at him, her face cocked to the side, half-teasingly, her wild red hair, glinting copper and fire in the pale moonlight. Even from his height, he could tell that her eyes were brown, glowing amber. Her fair skin was translucent, vampires' skin.

But what burned into the reaches of his mind like cold fire was her familiarity.

Tom could feel his wand in his inner robe pocket, mouth dry. The faery was toying with him, surely: it was the first time he had seen her with such clarity, in such a complete form, and she was in a Hogwarts uniform, with the Gryffindor crest on it.

The absurdity of it was almost laughable. Almost.

"Who are you?" He finally asked.

The faery smiled, a sad smile. "You don't remember, do you, Tom?"

Tom. The word, his name, seemed to reverberate in his mind. The intimacy of her tone was plain, surely, surely...

The faery took a step up, then another, sidestepping the trick steps, all the time gazing steadily at Tom. Tom did not move, waiting.

"Are you hungry, Tom?" She had reached him, and now another smile, a distinctively playful one, was flirting on the corners of her elfin lips, which befitted her elfin stature. Tom still did not move. She stretched out her left arm. It was her wand arm, Tom knew, for some inexplicable reason. But why would a faery have a wand? But still Tom stared at her, not moving. In her palm was a small blackberry, and Tom, as if on reflex, retrieved it from her, and before his mind could stop himself, ate the tiny fruit.

It was full of such painful sweetness and want, that when Tom felt the last juices fade away, he felt emptier than he ever had been.

The faery had walked closer to him all this time, and now she was so close, Tom could feel her gentle heartbeat near his chest. Her head was down, and Tom hesitantly yet defiantly lifted up her face in a swift moment, his trembling fingers sliding against the soft skin. The faery was crying.

And then - suddenly Tom knew that he did know her. She was not a faery, just a girl: a girl named Virginia. Ginny. Gin.

"Ginny?" He abhorred the tentative question in his voice.

The girl smiled, for the third time, and it was the sad smile again, as she collapsed against him, her pliable, delicate frame folding into his. He held her, long fingers finding the small of her back, and somehow the years of question seemed to close its overlarge gap.

"I don't understand," Tom whispered, not understanding his own question.

"You only have one soul," Ginny replied, "You gave half of it to me, and took half of mine. You sold the rest, Tom. Don't you remember?" she repeated. "A soul cannot be destroyed, Tom, unless by the Creator himself. You told me."

She looked up again, her face near. Her eyes were dark, gold-embraced along the irises. Then she kissed him, a chaste kiss, but the aching beauty of it was in how her tender lips graced his, and the effect of its damning purity was irrevocable.

Everything was frozen in that still in time: Tom was in no position to resist.

Then suddenly - suddenly, Ginny seemed to dissolve against him, as if her body had disintegrated to a million pieces, shrivelling into oblivion, like the dying petals of a wilted rose. Nothing came out of Tom's caught tongue. Mutely, he stumbled back.

For a moment nothing happened. Then there was a shimmering, and she reappeared again, but she was different. Tom could sense it. Through a passage of time, her once long hair had been cut short, framing her face, and the colour had darkened to a burnished copper. She had grown, and was taller. Her Hogwarts uniform had transformed into a pair of dark grey trousers, too long for her, fastened to her narrow waist with a long, slim belt, and her upper body was lost in an overlarge black sweater, the sleeves enveloping the tips of her slender fingers. But she did not seem to see him, and walked, turning towards the darkened end of the East Tower.

Except the East Tower was no longer the East Tower, Tom realised. It was the Slytherin dormitory.

Ginny had disappeared behind the curtain of a bed.

Tom followed, quietly slipping in after her. She was lying, her eyes closed, her body curled inwards, against a boy. Tom did not recognize the boy, but the boy was looking at Ginny in a way that made Tom know him.

It was a thousand impossible emotions that captured the Ginny's form in the boy's silver eyes, hooded by his heavy lashes.

But there was one of those emotions that Tom knew, and understood.

Possession.

~

24^th August 1995

"Harry - Harry, come on, speak to me," pleaded Ron, immediately hating the pleading tone in his voice. He hated such situations; he knew he was far from perceptive: Hermione herself had said that he had the emotional capacity of a teaspoon.

Personally, Ron saw no problems in having the emotional capacity of a hairpin...being emotional only seemed to cause a lot more discomfort than being 'blissfully unaware' - again, another descriptor Hermione regularly used on him, especially in the past year with Harry going all ballistic at every other prompt.

The volatility of the fifth year had taken its toil on him - Ron had returned to the Burrow much more spent than ever before. Even Ginny had taken to trying to cheer him up, and she was the one always vanishing by herself in the afternoons, not returning for hours on end, until once Molly had gotten so high-strung about it that she had threatened to lock Ginny in her room, to prevent her from taking off.

Ron privately guessed that Molly would have had a much more difficult time keeping Ginny in than that.

"Harry..." repeated Ron, rather half-heartedly, as he finally caught up with Harry around the corner of Ollivander's. "Hey, it would help if you stopped walking off and started talking instead, you know."

"Since when did I say I wanted to talk? Nothing's wrong with me."

"Yes, and normal people just say really curt things in front of their best friend, and then up for no apparent reason."

Harry did not answer, but at least he had stopped walking.

"I'm still here, in case you forgot," said Ron.

Harry let out a sigh, as if Ron was someone extremely dense. Ron tried to reign in his mounting annoyance.

"Just to inform you, there are other people around you other than Sirius who need you, Harry."

Harry whipped around, facing Ron, the expression on his face as thunderous as the one he had when Hermione had said that he had a saving people complex. Ron winced unconsciously; abruptly, however, Harry turned on his heel and walked off in the direction they had come from, roughly brushing past Ron.

It was Ron's turn to sigh inwardly as he followed Harry again.

"Harry...where the hell are you going?"

"To the river."

"What bloody river?" asked Ron automatically without thinking.

"Thames."

"What in the world for?"

"TO MAKE A HOLE IN IT!" roared Harry suddenly, and he stopped again, his heated stare boring into Ron. "Why the hell can't you leave me alone, for heaven's sake! I'm alright, aren't I? I'm breathing, aren't I? SO WHY DO YOU BLOODY CARE WHERE I GO? SINCE WHEN DID YOU BLOODY CARE ANYWAY? YOU DIDN"T CARE THAT MUCH IN YOUR LETTERS, DID YOU? ALL YOU EVER TALK ABOUT IS STUPID THINGS LIKE QUIDDITCH AND HERMIONE!"

There was a yawning silence. Then Ron said, "Hermione's not stupid."

Harry glared at Ron, before saying, "That's not the point."

"Well, whatever the point was, she's not stupid."

"Well, fine, Ron, I get the point!"

"Well, Quidditch's not stupid, either. The Harry I knew wouldn't have thought that Quidditch was stupid. The Harry I knew - "

"WELL, MAYBE I'M NOT THE HARRY YOU KNEW THEN!"

"Yeah, of course you aren't, because the Harry I knew would know that he has friends who do care for him! The Harry -- the Harry I knew would know that Sirius wouldn't want him to act like this. The Harry I know would know that who he has around him is important to him. Because he sure as hell was - is - important to us."

Ron was breathing heavily, and he could tell that for once in a long time, his words had hit Harry hard. Harry's brilliant green eyes were liquid, and even Ron could see the turmoil of emotions in them. Ron sighed, out loud this time.

"What do you want, Harry?"

There was another short period of silence.

Then, "I don't know any more, Ron. All I want..." Harry's voice broke, trailing off.

"Yes?" prompted Ron, more hopefully.

"All I want...is for everything to end. I just want, you know, everyone - all of you - to be with me at the end of this. This mess that, well..."

"That Vol - Voldemort created." Ron said, willing himself to say the name, knowing that it would mean something to Harry, wanting almost to desperation that it would.

Harry was looking at him straight in the eye again, but it was differently.

Ron forged on. "But we'll...we'll be there, you know, with you, mate...Merlin, this sounds so clichéd..."

Harry suddenly chuckled, a surprising amusement in his eyes.

"What?" asked Ron, half relieved, half shocked.

"It's just...you would never have used a word like 'clichéd'...I'll say Hermione got you into that, didn't she?" said Harry.

"Er...yeah, I guess...I reckon it's got to do with sticking around with her so much..."

"Your ears are going red, Ron..." grinned Harry.

"No...well...they can't be..." stammered Ron, feeling full well the burning through the sides of his face to the back of his neck.

Harry stood back slightly, studying Ron with a mischievous look in his eyes, his previous anger seeming to have completely dissipated. "You know, Ron...I can't believe I was so thick I never noticed this before...but you and Hermione actually quite fit each other..."

"We do?" said Ron, in a strangled voice, his face as red as his hair now. "I mean, we don't. Of course. Hermione's my friend, Harry...just like she's yours..."

Harry looked away, but Ron could swear he was snorting. "Well, anyway," said Ron, clearing his throat and desperately trying to gain back his composure, "we're not talking about me, we're talking about you."

"What's more to talk about me?" Harry sounded tired again. "I'm sorry for acting like a bloody - "

"No, Harry...what I wanted to say was..." Ron took a deep breath. "No matter what happens, I want you to know that all of us chose and will choose to be on your side. So it's not your bloody fault, whatever has happened and whatever will happen."

"So I suppose I should blame your thick skulls?" said Harry, still sounding diminished, but a spark of his old buoyancy was back.

"Yeah, I guess...Snape would say we were thick Gryffindor fools..."

"But Luna's in Ravenclaw."

"Well...she's a bit off her rocker, isn't she?"

"A bit, Ron? Would say she has the hots for you," said Harry, grinning fully now at Ron, who had started to glow red again.

"Harry, if you weren't my mate, I would've said you're a nosey old matchmaker," retorted Ron. "Anyway, it's not as if you haven't got your share of admirers..."

"Who? I'm not with Cho any more...I'm pretty sure she should be happy with Michael...he doesn't have any female friends to be jealous that I know of..."

"Ginny, Harry," said Ron.

"Ginny?" said Harry, put off balance by Ron's sudden mention of the youngest Weasley. "But I thought - Hermione said that she's given up on me...and isn't she and Dean -"

"Well, don't trust Ginny. She's my sister, but her mind works along the lines of Fred and George," said Ron wryly, "She lies as easily as it is for Malfoy to be the snarky prat that he is."

"I'll tell you...she does care a lot for you...and she's more like you than any of those girls at Hogwarts."

~

2^nd November 1988

It was finally dawn.

The Borzois stood, side-by-side and silent, their proud narrow heads held high and straight, at right angles to their slim necks. Their white-fawn fur rippled in the icy Russian winter wind: silky and supple, forming sickled curls across the length of their lean bodies.

The wide Russian steppes were endless in their rolling continuation.

"The best hunting estates are situated to the south of Moscow, where the country is open and marshes infrequent in the provinces of Tula and Tambov," The Malfoys' guide, a feral-faced man of a contradicting large build, had said. Obviously he hadn't been eloquent enough to explain that it was in fact direly widespread.

Across from Draco was the entourage of another wizarding family: the Zabinis. Draco had never heard Father speak of them before; he assumed that they were never important enough. But the Zabinis' carriage was as grand as the Malfoys': the polished silver handles and sides and the black velvet lining were not second to that of the Malfoy carriage. The haughty black Arabian horses, kept warm by grey and black wolf furs, were as cultivated in breed, as far as Draco could see, as the Malfoys' own sleek silver-white Arabian horses, protected with smooth otter coats. The Zabinis' own Borzois were as aloof and elegant in their white and black as the Malfoys'.

The Zabini carriage opened, and Draco spied a tall, thin boy stepping out. The boy was good-looking, Draco grudgingly observed. His white skin was aristocratic, as were his precise cheekbones: quite the mirrors of Draco's own features in those departments. His black hair was cut short and neat, falling lightly over his eyes, which were long and sloping, again not too far in similarity from Draco's own. Face tilted, Draco sauntered forward, and decided to deign to speak to him.

"I am Draco Lucius Isengrim Licinius Xavier Blanc Oigthierna Black Malfoy," said Draco, appraisingly, "and you are?"

"Blaise Absalom Valerian Timothy Bres Laurent Desailly-d'Alessandry Zabini," replied the boy, turning slightly to glance at Draco. His eyes were metallic grey, depthless.

Draco smirked. "Blaise? And what kind of name is that?"

The boy turned fully now, giving Draco a detached, dispassionate stare before replying, in a well-modulated, calm voice, "The kind of name that someone named Draco Lucius Isengrim Licinius Xavier Blanc Oigthierna Black Malfoy is in no position to question."

Draco blinked, if reluctantly.

The boy turned away, his attention now on one of the Zabini horses, which angled its head towards him, a large black eye taking him and Draco in. Blaise stroked the horse, and whispered something Draco could not hear to it. Draco, in response to Blaise's actions, snorted quietly, then said, "And how old are you, Blaise?"

"Eight last September, Draco."

Draco's lip curled slightly in irritation. His own eighth birthday was only in December. He opened his mouth to speak, but Blaise was faster.

"I would suppose you are eight as well, Draco?"

Draco sensed a thread of mocking in his tone, and immediately replied, "Of course."

Blaise turned back toward Draco again; a slender brow arched slightly, his expression inscrutable, but did not say anything. Then abruptly he turned back again, and reaching into a deep pocket from his black dragonhide trousers he pulled out a cut piece of apple, offering it to the horse.

"I would suppose that you are going for the hunt in half an hour's time?" asked Draco, disliking Blaise's lack of interest.

"Yes," replied Blaise, not turning back.

"And I suppose that this is your umpteenth time going to hunt?" said Draco, voice sarcastic.

"The first. Like you," said Blaise, finally finished with feeding the horse, and again facing Draco.

"How would you know that?"

The corners of Blaise's mouth lifted ever so slightly. "I have my ways, Draco Malfoy.

Draco narrowed his eyes, and then jerked away, walking back to the Malfoy carriage without another word.

Obviously Father had the right reasons for never mentioning the Zabinis.

~