Accidents of Circumstance

Chapter 12: Giving up the Ghost

The following Monday, the students in Alternative Magic were excited. Regina was back, she was looking great at dinner over the weekend, if a little tired. She sat in her usual seat between McGonagall and Flitwick, who were both extremely solicitous. Perhaps they felt guilty, and wanted to make up for it. Regina wore thick black cardigans, picked at her food, and seemed to be utterly exhausted. The students were elated that she was conscious and walking, and that Dumbledore had apparently spoken to her already. They were sure that she would be back with her flip teaching style, and that everything would be back to normal.

Except that she wasn't there on time.

Students began grumbling when she was five minutes late, and there was outright worry at ten minutes. Harry quickly took it upon himself to go hunt down Regina, making sure she wasn't still in her room.

Regina was not only in her room, she was still asleep. Harry gently shook her shoulder, trying not to stare at the web of silvery scars marring her skin. She opened her eyes and looked at him blearily. "Harry? Wha happen?"

"You're late for class. By fifteen minutes now."

"Fuck."

Regina hauled herself onto her hands and knees, trying to will herself awake. The blankets fell away, and Harry could see that she had worn a black tank top and black shorts to bed. All of the exposed skin had silvery tracings, the scars from various slices and stab wounds. Harry bit back a cry of shock and merely stood there. "Do you need my help?" he asked instead.

"Uh... I need to get up..."

Harry helped her move sideways, and then onto her feet. Without asking, he guided her to the bathroom and let her stumble inside. "I'll wait in the sitting room," he said.

He poked through her books, looking at the remnants of Draco's studies, reading over various passages in Neo-Pictish. He was startled when Regina tapped his shoulder. She was still bleary eyed, but she had washed her face, brushed her teeth, and had pulled on a black turtleneck sweater and black jeans. Harry found her pale face even more pale as a result, but didn't say anything at all. He merely walked at her side to the classroom, halfway through.

The class was unsettled by her slumped shoulders and tangled hair. She had seemed so alive to them over the weekend, and now she seemed more like a broken doll hastily glued back together. They hadn't wanted to see the signs present, and now they were confronted with it.

Regina sat there for a full minute before she took in a deep breath. "I won't be able to teach you the second half of the course. I'm sorry. I can't..."

Some of the students were dimly aware that it should have been blood magic. Those who remembered suddenly looked very uncomfortable.

"I'll try to come in at least, make this like a study hall... It's..." Regina took in another deep breath, looking as though she had to compose herself. "I'm not completely healed yet, even though I walk and talk and look like I'm still alive somehow."

Don't say it, don't say it, Ginny prayed silently, sitting in the center of the classroom, somewhere midway between her brother and Draco.

"I'm sorry. But I'll have to cancel the rest of the class."

There was nothing but stunned silence in response.

"I'll put up a silence charm around my desk, if you want to still talk about stuff," she was saying tiredly, rubbing at the side of her face. She suddenly looked very old and very tired, even with the youthful face. "I just... won't teach. I can't do it at this point."

When she was greeted with no response, Regina put up the silencing charm. It was at some obvious cost, since she looked even more tired. She all but collapsed into the chair behind the desk, hands on top of the wood. Silver marks stood out over the skin over the backs of her hands, all over her face. At first some of the students had thought of them as wrinkles, but they could now see that they were scars. The ones on the backs of her hands were irregular, criss-crossing at odd intervals, and a large oval in the center. She was staring at them, at the wooden grain in front of her. With her head bowed, some of her tangled hair fell and obscured the scarring on the side of her face.

Draco was the first to stand, jaw set. He marched to the front of the room, into the bubble of silence. "He hurt you, didn't he? My father?"

Regina looked up, eyes hollow and empty. "What do you want me to tell you?"

"The truth."

"Then yes, he did. And he enjoyed it very much."

Draco sucked in a breath and seemed to collapse against the desk. "I was hoping..."

"Your mother knows. She approved mightily."

He thought of his mother, her cool regal poise, and couldn't reconcile the image with how Regina had looked when she first appeared. "My mother hates blood."

"She apparently hates me more."

"I don't understand..."

"I'm a Mudblood."

Draco felt the air whoosh out of his lungs painfully. "What?" he asked, voice faint.

Regina was very still, and hadn't moved from her original position. "You never asked. But my mother was a witch, a very powerful one, a good one. She had great talent. She was of the Reven family."

"They've died out..."

"I'm the last of the Reven."

Draco absorbed this, and suddenly everything seemed to make sense. What he knew of the Reven family was that the maternal line bred mage-class witches, every one of them capable of great magic, each of them with a particular gift. But since they also tended to be in the middle of maelstroms, few of them survived past their first century. The men of the line tended to die tragic deaths as well, regardless of their family of origin.

"And your father?" Draco prompted.

"George Vial, entrepreneur. Muggle to the core, never had a drop of witchcraft in his family, not even a Wiccan. I'm technically not Mudblooded, but that's what they called me."

Draco absorbed this too, and nodded. Her love of Muggle artifacts wasn't just because she lived and worked with Mudbloods, but because she was nearly one. And tradition held that Malfoy purebloods could only respect other purebloods. He closed his eyes, fully aware of his mother's cold presence to Mudbloods.

"This doesn't change who you are," Draco said suddenly. "I know that now."

"I pity your parents, that they can't see what you're becoming."

Draco's eyes flew open at the quiet statement. "What?"

"I'm proud of you, Draco." Her eyes were soft and sad now. "Your father thinks of you as something to mold, something to march in line with his vision. You aren't a person in his eyes, just another possession. Your mother... I've seen plenty enough that act like her that I can guess at what she's like. She doesn't believe in demonstrative affection, and believes everything should run in her way. She can't take pride in your accomplishments now because you're not hers anymore. If you're not what she wants you to be, if you're not what she planned, you're dismissed. Maybe she has some capacity for love, but it's not something she can control. Everything must have the same perfection."

Draco wished he could deny it. He wished he could say that he hadn't seen her assess the household with careful precision, address her husband with perfectly chosen words that would ultimately lead him in the direction she wanted him to go. After twenty years of marriage, and the understanding of marriage between them for nearly ten years before that, Narcissa knew exactly what strings to pull to make Lucius jump without him even knowing that she was doing it. Draco wished he could say that she had been a perfectly loving mother, but the love had only been forthcoming if he had followed her directions.

Regina finally moved, reaching out to touch Draco's arm. "It's not necessarily wrong, you know. It's just her way. It's probably the way she was raised, so she doesn't know any different. How was she supposed to know you'd need to know you were loved?"

Draco could only stare, could only feel his throat close. "What did they do to you? How did they make you pay for my choices?"

Regina shook her head. "You don't want to know."

"I'm old enough to take it."

"It's bad enough you're changed. I don't want to shatter every last illusion you had."

Draco took a deep breath and stared her down. "I can take it."

"Their wands didn't work, so they couldn't Crucio me. It took them a while to figure out what happened. So they got out their ceremonial knives. Your father made the first incision, just over my throat, but he didn't go deep. He was the one to suggest whipping, and branding, and he was also the first to rape me."

Draco felt his heart stop and his knees buckled. "No."

"Your mother watched."

It was painful to swallow past the lump in his throat, and his chest was contracting around his stopped heart. That had to be it, that had to be the pain he was feeling, he couldn't have loved them, not if they were capable of that.

"The Lestranges were broken out of Azkaban some time ago, apparently. I was under the impression they were jailed. But they were there, and they like blood work. They like cutting and ripping and impaling. They nailed me to the floor, palms and ankles, a parody of a cross. Did you know that when Voldemort was Tom Riddle, he was raised in Catholic orphanages? He likes to parody religion now."

Draco thought he was going to throw up. He now knew what the scars on her hands were for, why it was so large and circular.

"Crabbe and Goyle? Their fathers like to beat things, you know. With clubs, boards with nails. They couldn't use magic on me, they didn't know what I knew that protected me that way, so they had to physically beat me."

He wished he could have denied it all, but he knew the families well enough through dinner parties at the manor that his mother had thrown. Fine bone china, silverware etched with the Malfoy crest, crystal that had been passed down through every generation of Malfoy for fifteen hundred generations; it was all a polished veneer for what really happened. He remembered the hunts on the grounds, when the foxes and deer weren't enough, and they would buy an orphan to hunt in the forest. No orphan ever survived past a week.

"This is your heritage, Draco," Regina said sadly. "This is what you have to overcome."

His breath was hitching. "What if I try? What if?"

"Can you? Can you do it without feeling like you're betraying yourself?"

"I don't know."

"She's worth the effort," Regina said softly. "Don't do what I did, and let what you want slip away. Don't give up when you think it's impossible."

Draco looked up at her eyes. Pain was there, pain and a faint longing. "How then?"

"I can't give you any answers. But if it's worth it, and it is, then it's worth fighting for."

"How do you know?"

"I could hear you, on some level, you know. You breathe too loud." Draco looked surprised at that statement. "And I see her eyes on your back, worried, but not allowing herself to do or say anything to let it show."

Draco swallowed painfully. "How do you go on like this? How can you keep on living?"

"There was an intervention twelve years ago. And now I can't die, not simply, and certainly not by my own hand. It's a consequence of belonging to the Fates."

"And the Reven never die simply."

"No, we don't."

"Does anyone know?"

"What? What happened to me? Yes. That I'm the last of the Reven? Yes."

"Dumbledore."

"Of course. Part of the reason he hired me, I think. He wants to keep an eye on me."

Draco bit his lip. "What do I do now?"

"The same thing you did before: live."

"What if I don't want to?"

"Then you're a bigger fool than your parents think you are." Her voice was harsh. "I was wrong to want to kill myself twelve years ago. It's been hell on earth for me ever since when I think about it, but there's too much to do here. I don't intend on being the kind of Reven that barely makes it past a hundred."

"They'll get you... They'll come find you and finish the job."

"Of that I have no doubt. But they'll have to know I'm missing first."

"What do you mean?"

"The sisters sent me sideways not just through space, but time. I was really gone for more than three days. I was gone for three weeks."

***

"You talked to her the entire time. What was that all about?" Ron asked once everyone left Alternative Magic.

Draco's jaw set. "It had nothing to do with you."

"Just the gist of it, come on."

"Listen, Weasley, just because we teamed up to bring back Regina doesn't make us friends. It doesn't mean I like you, and it doesn't mean I want to talk to you."

Ron's jaw set in that angry stance, and Hermione knew Ron was a second away from saying something they would all regret. She stepped slightly in front of Ron, into Draco's field of vision. "Draco, did she say what happened to her? Anything at all?"

Draco's shuttered look told her everything she needed to know.

"Your father was involved, wasn't he?" Harry asked, voice pitched low. No one outside of their little circle could hear.

A muscle in Draco's jaw jumped as he clenched his teeth together. But there was no malice in Harry's tone, no pity. Just a simple curiosity.

He made a decision that he was sure to regret later. "No, Potter, you're wrong. It wasn't just my father. My mother was there, too. She told him what to do."

Draco left with brisk and uneven strides, leaving the three stunned Gryffindors behind him.

***

"They seemed awful chummy, Draco," Pansy said accusingly. "Are you leaving us?"

Draco placed the full force of his glare onto Pansy, and she nearly quailed in fear. "No, Pansy. Don't be stupid."

The Parkinsons had been friends with the Malfoys for years, and she recognized Lucius' deadly calm in Draco's voice. "Then what did they want?"

"They want what the rest of you want. They want to know what I talked to her about."

"Well?"

"It's none of your fucking business."

Goyle looked up from the snack he had stolen from the kitchens. "You're still sweet on that teacher, aren't you? My father thought that was silly, but you are, aren't you?"

Now the force of Draco's glare fell on Goyle. "What did you tell your father?"

"Well... Crabbe and me... Mum asked us what was going on with school! And Father said you'd never be silly to like a Mudblood, and I wrote back saying that she was pretty and smart, and you were prob'ly just trying to fuck her, and he said it still wasn't okay to play with one, and I shouldn't do it."

Fuckers. That's how they knew about the trip. That's how they caught her.

And that was why his father had been particularly vicious. This beautiful Mudblood dared to corrupt his pureblood son.

Fuckers, one and all.

Draco left the Slytherin common room without a backward glance, headed for Snape's office at the other end of the dungeons. He heard Pansy say "Well, she is pretty, and she is funny... and I guess that's his type...."

What if they knew the truth? That he was wishing that Regina had been his mother? That he could openly walk the halls with Ginny? The Slytherins would start a riot and have his head on a pike if they knew.

Peeves took one look at Draco's face and turned in the other direction. Draco didn't even register that, and opened the door to Snape's office. He didn't trust anyone else in all of Slytherin house, and the only reason why he trusted Snape now was because he still loved Regina. If not for that night last week when they shared drinks, Draco would never have thought to go to Snape in order to escape his classmates.

"Do you know what my parents did to her?" he asked, voice low and quiet.

Snape looked up from the potions article he had been pretending to read for the past hour. Something about belladonna. Nodding slowly, he gestured for the chair in front of him. "There was a meeting with Dumbledore. They made a pensieve."

Draco sat. "Can I see it?"

"The Ministry has it, even if you could."

"Father's influence is still strong there. He'll change it."

"It doesn't matter even if it's true. They'll never act on it."

"She was there for three weeks."

Snape shut the journal with a snap. "I know."

Both of them, simmering with rage. "What can I do? You have to hate him for what he's done to her."

"Why do you care? Haven't you resolved things by now?" Snape asked back, malicious.

"I can still love her. It doesn't have to be just you." Draco knew he sounded like a sullen, spoiled brat, but couldn't help it. "Do you know she's the first to say she was proud of me? That she thought I had innate ability? That I could do whatever I wanted after I get out of here? She assumes I can make choices. Why can't I love her for that?"

Snape was very still in his chair, looking at Draco. "She's not your mother. She's not anyone's mother."

"And why does that matter?"

"She can't shield you from Narcissa. She's not blood, the protection charms won't save you from Narcissa. Do you know what you're saying?"

Draco nodded slowly. "I think... I know I can't go home. I know what I've done looks like I'm just spoiled, but I made the decision. I know what I'm doing. I'm planning for it, I'm trying to protect myself. I bought different things to make the charms, to do the potions. I'm doing what I can."

"You can't stay here forever."

"I wanted to ask you if I could Apprentice."

Snape made a choking sound. "Malfoy..."

"It keeps me here, it's what I would have asked for if I had any choices."

"There are always choices."

"I've narrowed mine, then, haven't I?"

Snape sighed. "Yes, you have."

"Er... Professor. Please promise me what I say next won't leave this room."

Snape's expression was one of concern, but he nodded without saying a word.

"I've narrowed my choices even further. I'm in love with Ginny Weasley."

The silence stretched out for a long moment. "You'll be disowned within the hour if your parents every find out."

"I know."

"Her family will be less than thrilled, you know," Snape said dryly. "Malfoys are certainly not their favorite kind of people."

"We understand that. But it's... We're the same inside. We're hiding who we really are because of what our parents expect of us, and no one else really understands what we're going through with it. And besides that... something in me is home."

Draco watched in morbid fascination as Snape's face melted from one of horror to understanding. "You can't let that go, even if she is a Gryffindor."

"Regina said it's worth fighting for."

Snape nodded. "It is. Don't give it up."

"Then what about you?" Snape stilled, eyes boring into Draco's face. "You can't give up on Regina, then. You can't let her go."

"That's different. Things ended badly between us."

"But you don't understand... When she arrived, she was looking for a safe place to heal, and she showed up in your classroom, next to you. You. She was safe with you."

"It's not something her mind has caught up with yet, then," he replied dryly.

"She still loves you."

"Playing the matchmaker?"

Draco watched helplessly as Snape retreated into sarcasm. He now recognized it as a shield to hide behind, and not just the main facet of his personality. "If she tells me that love is worth fighting for, and that I shouldn't repeat the mistake of letting it go, don't you think that maybe it's because she still loves you?"

Snape leaned back in his chair at Draco's quiet tone. "I deliberately hurt her, Malfoy. It's not something easily forgiven."

"Isn't it something worth fighting for?"

There was a long, painful silence as Snape brooded. "Children should never grow up."

"But we do."

"You've gotten close to her. You know her best now, don't you?"

"She's... There's something about her that just makes you comfortable. Talking to her is easy. She lets me talk, she lets me figure things out in my own time. And she never makes fun of me if I don't understand how I'm feeling."

"And you feel this with the Weasley girl as well, don't you?" Draco only nodded slowly, not trusting himself to speak. "Very well then."

Draco watched as Snape took out a sheet of parchment, quill and ink and began to write. "What are you doing?"

Snape looked up. "You can't very well go to her common room or bring her to yours."

"There's the library."

"Too public."

"There's always deserted classrooms."

"No need. Here. Bring this to the girl." Snape handed Draco a letter. "You're giving up your heritage, Malfoy. I hope you know what you're doing."

Draco fingered the letter, Ginny Weasley's name on top. "I do."

***

Draco had found it easy to extract Ginny from Gryffindor tower. Snape wanted to see her, a few well-placed jabs at Ron, and the other two of the Triumvirate were too busy restraining him to prevent Ginny from leaving.

"You should be nicer to him," Ginny began conversationally.

"Why? I don't like him."

"He's my brother. My older brother. Which means he's going to try and fight you if he finds out about us. He'll think you coerced me." Draco snorted, which Ginny appreciated. "Well, he will. I didn't say he was right. But if he gets the others involved..."

"He should then keep his mouth shut."

"This is Ron we're talking about. He's always been that way."

They walked in silence for a bit, then Ginny lofted another volley. "Snape knows, doesn't he? That's what this is about? He'll give me detention for daring to kiss a Slytherin?"

Draco smiled at her, one of his condescending specials. "Of course not. He's helping us."

"But why?"

"Deep down, he still loves Regina. And he doesn't want us to make their mistake."

Ginny took hold of his free hand. "She's given up on him." She rolled her thumb over the back of his hand, back and forth. He was looking at her with wide eyes. "She's given up on a lot of things, you know. All the ghosts she carries aren't big enough a shield to protect her. She has to give them up, too, and then maybe she could start over."

"How do you know these things?"

"Draco..." Ginny stopped, and she looked a little fearful for a moment. "I called up a ghost when Regina woke. I gave her the things she coughed up, and she looked at me like I was crazy and told me to keep them for a while. But I called up the ghost of her father that night. He said I had to help protect her."

He was staring at her. "How?"

"I was playing with the lighter. He said I wasn't strong enough yet to really keep him here all that long, though. When I thought about it later, it scared me. I don't know how I did it, I just did it. And I can't tell anyone how scared it made me..."

Draco pulled her into a hug and kissed her forehead as he rubbed her back. "We'll be all right, you said so yourself."

"Yes, but... it still scared me after. What else can I do?"

"How about this... you give up invoking ghosts for a while. We'll need to do research about this."

"In the library?"

"Or with Regina. It was her father, after all."

Ginny brightened at that comment. "And he did say that if Regina couldn't help me, she'd know who could." She kissed Draco on the cheek on impulse. "Thank you."

Draco looked into her face, happily smiling up to his, and felt his heart clench. Dammit, he would fight for her. He wouldn't just let her go. "Now about that paper Snape wants to talk to you about..." Draco leered at her. "Something about a love potion..."

Ginny laughed and began to run down the hallway. "Try and catch me!"

He broke out into a run after her, knowing with one part of his mind that it was beneath the dignity of a Malfoy. The rest of him didn't care, and laughed along with Ginny.

***

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