Crepúsculo

Crepúsculo

Chapter Nine:

The Riddle

Of course, the one time Ginny really, truly needed to see Draco, he was nowhere to be found. She knew his schedule, knew he was free between Potions in the morning and Ancient Runes an hour later. Usually they put that hour to good use, but this morning she hadn't been able to wait the two hours until after class, and so they'd met before she went to Charms. It hadn't seemed so pressing to meet immediately afterwards as well -- she had enough self-restraint to resist that -- but now she wished she hadn't had that attitude, because if she hadn't, she would know exactly where to find him now: in the old Muggle Studies classroom on the third floor. It was always deserted, and had become their usual meeting place on Fridays before lunch and on Tuesday afternoons. She went there now, just in case he'd gone there anyway -- but no, he hadn't. She hadn't really expected him to be there, but she'd hoped . . . It didn't matter. She'd find him sooner or later.

But throughout the rest of the day it was as if Draco knew she was looking for him and why, and was purposefully avoiding her. She couldn't remember the last time she'd gone so long without seeing him; not since a month ago, at the very least. She hadn't realized until just now how much she had come to measure time in terms of her encounters with Draco, but now she saw clearly that her days were divided by the blocks of time: how long until she would meet with him, how long until she would get to meet with him again. It was disconcerting, both to realize this and to be alone for so long.

Draco wasn't at dinner. It was Friday, so he wouldn't be doing homework in the North Tower afterwards, as he often did during the week. It had always been so easy to find him before, strangely so, now that she thought about it . . . but maybe that had been part of the spell on that necklace, making it easy for her to find him. She hadn't a clue how to go about contacting him. She could owl him, she supposed, but the message wouldn't reach him till breakfast and she didn't want to have to wait that long. But what could she possibly do that would be faster? She couldn't exactly just walk to the Slytherin Common Room and knock on the door, but short of that she didn't know what she could do.

After dinner she wandered around the castle slowly, without purpose. She still needed to see Draco, but she was beginning to think: wouldn't it maybe be better to just send him an owl, assume he'd get it at breakfast and deal with everything in the morning? This whole thing wasn't actually as pressing as she'd been making it out to be. She'd taken the necklace off; that was the most important thing. She would find Draco and confirm what she knew in the morning, and in the meantime she would go back to the Common Room and read or talk to Cora or do something else, something normal. Wandering around the castle like this wasn't doing any good.

She was a long way from the Common Room right now, though, and only heading further in the wrong direction. Abruptly she stopped and turned to head back towards Gryffindor -- and there, poking his head out of a door, so unexpectedly that Ginny at first thought she must have imagined it, was Draco.

He motioned to her and she followed him into the room, a classroom on a wing she'd so seldom frequented that she didn't even know what subject it was used for. Clearly it hadn't been used for much of anything recently; the desks and chairs were all shoved to the back of the room and everything was coated with a thick layer of dust. It was equally as cold as it was in the hallway, lending further credence to her theory that it was out of use: all the regular classrooms were at least a bit warmer, albeit not significantly so.

She didn't actually care what the classroom was like. She was just avoiding looking at Draco.

"Where have you been all day?" she asked, careful to keep her tone neutral.

"Busy," he said. "I've an essay for Snape; it's due on Monday and I wanted to be free this weekend for other things."

She could feel his eyes on her; she knew perfectly well what "other things" he was referring to. Still she did not look at him. The library! Why hadn't she thought to look for him there?

Because she herself never went to the library, and as he'd never mentioned going there she'd somehow thought that he didn't, either. But that was stupid; of course he must get all those books he was constantly reading in the North Tower from somewhere.

The weight of his gaze on her finally became too much to bear. Ginny turned, bracing herself for some revelation, some sign that the charm wasn't acting on her any longer, opened her eyes on him, and -- she felt nothing. Nothing was different. She saw Draco before her and the only thing she felt was how much she wanted him -- more than ever, if that was even possible.

She needed to find a way to get him to reveal that he had given her the necklace -- but how could she do that? She tried to think of ways to start a conversation that could be steered in that direction, but every thought she had seemed clumsy and transparent. She wasn't nearly adept enough for this sort of interrogation. She moved closer to him. Closer -- too close. He reached out and touched her.

She jerked away as if burned.

"What is it?" Draco asked.

"Nothing," she said. She might have better said, Nothing has changed. The way her wrist tingled where he'd grasped it, the flipping of her stomach -- surely if all of this were based on some charm, some curse, it would have changed now that the curse was gone. It would be gone now. She would go back to feeling what you would ordinarily feel when your worst enemy touched you: repulsion, disgust, certainly not this. Objectively speaking, Draco Malfoy wasn't a very attractive boy. He was pale and too angular and over bred, and yet she wanted him so much that it made him attractive.

Something occurred to her: the Charms book had said that Slytherin had used the necklace to make Ravenclaw fall in love with him, but it had never said that that was the charm's only use. She'd just assumed it had been used to make her fall in love with Draco, and that Draco must have given it to her. But surely she wouldn't still feel like this if the necklace had been causing these feelings. Which gave rise to another thought: Draco must not have given her the necklace. She was in love with him because -- well, because she was. She'd been foolish before, thinking that there must have been some impetus to make her fall in love with him. She'd been thinking of falling in love as if it were like breaking a leg. You broke your leg because you jumped out of a tree when you were five and George told you it was possible to fly without a broom. There was a cause to it, and an effect, and it could be traced logically. But what was falling in love if not the most random of acts? She'd fallen in love with Draco because she had; that was all there was to know.

Which gave rise to a scary thought: if Draco hadn't given the necklace to her, then who had?

"Are you all right?" Draco said.

Ginny realized she'd been silent too long. She looked at him steadily, took him in. "Yes," she said, leaning into him. "Yes." She kissed his mouth, his neck, and as she did something became clear: she might not know who had given her the necklace or why, but she would figure it out. In the meantime, this -- Draco, her love for him -- this she could trust.

-----

Draco had wanted to keep the weekend free so he could be with her, Ginny knew, but on Saturday morning Jeremy cornered her. "I feel like I haven't seen you in days, Ginny. What have you been doing?"

"Homework," she blurted out, although she couldn't remember the last time she'd spent more than a few minutes scribbling something down the night before it was due or in the morning on the way to class. She'd gotten rather good at levitating a scroll of parchment while she walked and wrote on it, as of late.

Jeremy knew her ways a bit too well to accept homework as an explanation, she saw immediately from his expression. "You're right, I don't do homework," she amended. "I've just been distracted lately, is all."

Jeremy at first looked like he wasn't going to be satisfied with that, but then he smiled at her and said, "At least you're here now." And then he was kissing her and curling his hand along the back of her neck and she was trying not to think.

-----

As soon as it began Ginny knew she'd had this dream before. She was on the hill overlooking the castle grounds, beneath the great oak tree. In the tree were a raven and a snake. She recognized them instantly as the familiars of Ravenclaw and Slytherin. She also knew where she'd seen them before: in the tapestry in the secret room Cora had taken her to. She looked at the tree more closely and realized it wasn't a real tree at all; it was the tree in the tapestry. She was in that hidden room, and the doors at the top of the stairs were locked; she was trapped . . .

As soon as she realized this, the dream shifted. She was in Trelawney's class, looking into a crystal ball. The air in the room was as thick and perfumed as ever -- anyone could think they were seeing things in this tower -- and when she looked into the crystal ball the images were murky: figures in black, cloaked and hooded; the glint of a knife; leaves on the ground; a burning tree . . . She'd seen these images before, that day in Trelawney's class two months ago -- but she wasn't in class right now. The room was empty, but she had a powerful sensation of being watched. She was filled with fear, but more than that, a familiar sort of dread . . . And as this feeling overtook her she realized that she recognized the burning tree in the crystal ball: it was the oak on the hill . . . And she realized that she recognized the fear, and its source --

Ginny awoke drenched in sweat. She'd had this dream every night for a week, and every time she woke up before she leaned what was causing her such fear. She wished she knew why she was dreaming about this. She was fairly certain she'd imagined the images in the crystal ball the first time in Trelawney's class, so why she was still thinking about them, she didn't know. Even if she hadn't imagined it the first time, why in the world would she believe something she'd seen in a crystal ball?

And yet in the dream she always recognized the source of her fear. That hadn't happened in Trelawney's class the first day. That first day she'd felt a chill, but terror? She hadn't so much as felt it, let alone recognized its source.

But then one morning Ginny woke up and knew exactly what was familiar about her terror. It was the same fear she'd felt her first year at Hogwarts, when she'd found blood on her hands and hadn't known how it had gotten there; when she'd awoken in the middle of the night to find him sitting on the edge of her bed, watching her. "Hello, Ginny," he'd said, reaching out to trace a line down her cheek . . . There was little of it she was awake for towards the end, but she remembered the way her skin had felt thin, transparent, the way she felt, even when she was aware of herself, that she wasn't entirely there . . .

The fear she felt now wasn't exactly the same. Five years ago she'd known something was strange; she'd known it and tried to stop it. She'd tried to get rid of the diary, and she might have succeeded if Harry hadn't found it. She hadn't dared let Harry keep it. She'd been incapable of stopping herself from going after it, then. When she'd written in it again, he hadn't been mad at her. He'd been amused. "You thought you could rid yourself of me, didn't you, Ginny? You cannot rid yourself of me. I'll never be gone." But Harry had destroyed the diary, had brought her back, and he was gone; it had taken Ginny the better part of two years to be sure of it, but he was.

And yet she had never been afraid of anything else in this particular way, this seizing-up of her guts. He was gone, he was -- but the creature he had grown into was not. That didn't make sense, though. Why would she be dreaming about You-Know-Who?

In the darker hours of the night, Ginny half-entertained such theories as that it was indeed the Dark Lord she was afraid of. He was the one who'd set fire to the great oak in her dream. Probably he was the one who'd given her the necklace, too, come to think of it. Who else would have access to a thousand-year-old Dark artifact? You-Know-Who was really the only explanation. As for how he'd gotten the necklace to her, that was obvious: he'd been hiding in one of the bushes outside the Burrow, and had slipped the necklace into her pocket as she was leaving for Kings Cross on September first. Maybe he'd even Transfigured himself into a bush. With arms.

When she looked at things this way it was easy to dismiss her fears as ridiculous. But the fact remained that she was waking up in the middle of the night with that same fear she'd lived in five years and ridiculous or no, it was making her nervous.

Maybe the fear had nothing to do with Tom Riddle. Maybe fear always felt like this. It was just that she'd never feared anything or anyone nearly as much as she'd feared what was happening to her during first year --and then, after she'd discovered why it was happening to her, feared him.

She told herself that this was a separate fear, not a fear of him at all. She told herself that she was being ridiculous. But that didn't stop her from waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, sheets tangled on the floor.

-----

The cold still hadn't broken. It was December now, but the temperatures were still far colder than normal. Stranger still: other than a few half-hearted flurries, it had yet to snow. The first snow should have come a month ago at least. By early December the Hogwarts grounds were always covered with snow. Waking up every morning to see nothing but brown grass outside their windows was making people nervous, and the rumors that this was an unnatural cold were flying faster than ever.

To make things worse, everyone opened the Daily Prophet on December sixth to see that a witch had gone missing in Hogsmeade. Details were scarce, but it seemed she had been visiting family in the area. When the family woke up on the morning of the fifth, she was gone --she hadn't even taken her wand off the nightstand. The relatives were terrified to think what had happened to her . . .

The Prophet reported on the morning of the seventh that the witch hadn't actually been missing at all. She'd met her boyfriend at the Hog's Head and spent the night with him; she'd simply forgotten to take her wand along or to tell her relatives where she was going. But by then the damage was done. Nervous students had owled home already and their parents had owled Hogwarts; supposedly a Hufflepuff third year's parents had even gone so far as to pull her out of school, take her home where she would be safe . . .

Hogwarts was meant to be the safest place in wizarding Britain, or at least that was what Ginny had grown up hearing. There was quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, and not just that putting hundreds of kids together in one castle was a disaster waiting to happen: there had been the diary during first year; Sirius Black second year; the Triwizard Tournament third year . . . But since then Hogwarts had been fairly safe, hadn't it? As safe as anywhere else, at any rate.

But there was a strange air in the castle recently, and people's level of panic over the missing witch reflected that. It was the cold, but more than that. There was an urgency, almost --a sense that something was coming, and soon. When Ginny thought about it, it made her shiver in a way that was entirely separate from the cold.

-----

After the discovery that Draco hadn't given her the necklace, Ginny was spending more time with him than ever. But cautiously: a week after the Charms lesson in which she'd learned about the necklace, Cora was in the Common Room as she was leaving to meet with Draco in one of the third floor classrooms.

"Where are you going?" Cora said.

"To meet Jeremy," Ginny said.

Cora looked at her quizzically. "Jeremy's got detention with Snape tonight," she said. "For blowing up his cauldron. He told us about it at lunch."

"Oh, right," Ginny said lamely. "I'd forgotten. I guess I'll just hang out here, then." And there had been nothing for it but to stay in the Common Room with Cora.

Draco found the whole thing amusing when she told him why she hadn't been there the night before. "You've got to learn to keep your story straight," he said with a smirk that threatened to turn into a smile.

"I can keep my story straight just fine," Ginny said. "It's not my fault Jeremy went and got himself a detention."

Draco's expression did turn into a smile. "I'm sure you can."

She lashed out at him in jest, and within moments they were kissing . . . Wasn't that how it had always been between them, fighting as another form of wanting each other? It had taken her a long time to realize it, but it was true.

After that, though, Ginny was careful about using Jeremy as her alibi. She began claiming that she was going to the library instead. She took her schoolbooks with her to the North Tower to add credence to her cover story. It was really too bad that she wasn't actually going to the library, looking at things from a purely academic standpoint. Her grades had been slipping steadily all semester; they could certainly use the help. It was a good thing her grades had been excellent to begin with, so she still had a while before it was going to be a real issue. As it was, well, a few As never hurt anyone.

Well. They might, in the form of her mother's wrath, but grades didn't really count until after finals, and finals weren't till June. That was a long way away. She would definitely pull her grades back up before then. Right now it just seemed silly to waste time that could be spent with Draco on getting a few extra points on a paper.

-----

Jeremy found her again that Monday, and went with her to a classroom so out of use that all of the desks were shoved to the back of the room. "Where have you been?" Jeremy said.

"Busy," she said. Busy didn't really begin to cover what she'd been doing with Draco -- what he was to her -- but it would have to suffice. It wasn't like she could tell Jeremy about it. "I'm sorry," she added, because no, busy didn't really suffice, she could tell from the way Jeremy was looking at her. "I know I haven't been around all that much lately," she said. "I really am sorry."

She wasn't lying -- she'd never meant to hurt Jeremy. Wasn't that why she hadn't broken up with him, to keep from hurting him?

Jeremy exhaled and pulled her to him. "Oh, Ginny," he said, "I've missed you."

She wrapped her arms around him and said, "I know."

When he drew back and kissed her, she did her best not to think. She kissed back, of course, but something about the kiss felt wrong. Not that Jeremy wasn't a good kisser, because he was -- but something about the whole thing just wasn't right. The placement of his hands on her back, maybe, the feel of him pressed hard against her . . .

She opened her eyes slowly. There was Jeremy's face against hers. Did his face always look so strange up close, the proportions all wrong? She saw a flicker of flight out of the corner of her eye: a mirror. The classroom they were in held a full-length mirror with strange markings around the edges in some language Ginny didn't understand. She saw herself and Jeremy in the mirror, kissing as they were -- and then the image changed. Ginny still saw herself kissing a boy, but it wasn't Jeremy anymore; it was Draco. Even as she continued to kiss Jeremy, she watched the image of herself kissing Draco . . .

And then Jeremy moaned and Ginny looked back at him. His eyes were still closed; he always kissed with his eyes closed. When she looked back at the mirror, it was Jeremy in the glass again.

She must have imagined the scene in the mirror, and yet what she had seen there was the only thing she wanted, was for Jeremy not to be here right now, but for it to be Draco instead. There was no reason to wonder why the kiss had felt wrong before: she'd been wishing for Jeremy to be Draco. Kissing Draco made want pool low in her belly, but lately kissing Jeremy just made her wish she were somewhere else. It wasn't that Jeremy's kisses had changed, that anything about him had changed, but something about her had, and she only now realized it: at the beginning she had felt guilty for cheating on Jeremy with Draco, but for some time now she had instead felt guilty for cheating on Draco with Jeremy.

If this were Draco she was kissing, she wouldn't be able to think at all, she knew -- but since it was Jeremy, she found that her thoughts were clearer than they'd been in a long time. She couldn't keep doing this with Jeremy, she just couldn't. She hadn't wanted to break up with him before because she hadn't wanted to make him unhappy; at least, that was what she'd told herself. But that wasn't really why she hadn't broken up with him. She hadn't done it because she'd thought it would be easier to just continue doing things as they'd been doing them. And -- in the interests of honesty -- because she'd been using him as her alibi. She wasn't in the Common Room until well after curfew? She'd been with Jeremy, of course. It was convenient, having an out-of-house boyfriend as an alibi . . . It was terrible of her, and she knew it, but it was true.

And the worst thing was that she would have been perfectly willing to let it continue indefinitely, too. Would have, had she not realized she was in love with Draco. She was in love with Draco, and because of it she couldn't continue doing this with Jeremy. She'd been staying with Jeremy for all sorts of self-serving reasons, and she was a terrible person for it -- and it had to stop now, it had to.

Ginny had completely forgotten she was still kissing him. She pulled back; Jeremy moved to follow her, to pull her in for another kiss, but she held out her hands. "Stop," she said. "I can't do this."

Jeremy looked at her strangely. "Can't do what?"

"This," she gestured. "This whole thing. I can't do it anymore, Jeremy."

His expression became even more confused. "I don't understand what you're talking about," he said, and she saw that she was going to have to spell it out for him. Maybe she would even tell him the whole truth. Didn't she owe him that much, at least? She owed him a lot more than that, honestly, but the truth was all she could give him.

Ginny squared her shoulders and looked him straight in the eye. "I'm in love with someone else," she said.

And then the castle exploded.