And on the Eighth Day?

Chapter Six

Thursday

He brought the broomstick down slowly. Knowing her temper, and the manner of her leaving, he wasn't sure if she would be pleased to see him. As he landed he could see that she had been crying. Red-rimmed eyes stared back at him and in them he saw the same haunted look he recognised only too well.

"So, you found me then?" She folded her arms and raised her chin, but the arrogance was gone from her. He managed a smile.

"It looks that way, doesn't it?"

She nodded up in the direction he had come.

"And what about the rest of the Light Brigade, are they following on to arrest me?"

"Not that I'm aware of."

He almost asked her if she wanted to be found by them. Perhaps it was part of the game that she had been playing out over her six years at school; pushing against authority until it pushed back. But now it appeared that the game was over and she had no more mettle left for the fight.

"Aren't you worried that they'll track you here? After all, I thought I'd done a good job hiding my trail."

He offered a reassuring smile, wishing that he could do more to protect her against everything that was at warring against her from the outside as well as the inside.

"No one else knows the charm I used, apart from Hermione, and she's not going to be chasing you, is she?"

She ignored his remark. "Come inside, Harry, I'm getting cold standing out here."

She led him through the open door into a meagre kitchen. In the centre of the room was a rickety wooden table with two wobbly chairs. He pulled one out and took a seat. She took the kettle from the tiny range that occupied the left wall and poured the water into the teapot. He watched the steam rise to the peeling ceiling and he wondered how she'd found this place.

"Are you going to tell me what is going on?"

"Do you want to know?"

"I think I have a right to know."

"One thing I've found, Harry, is that no one has a right to know anything, especially you and me. And, anyway, do you really want to know?"

He stood up and kissed her. Her lips yielded to his and he drew her to him. Gone was the strong young woman whose athletic body had radiated so much energy that it frightened him. Instead she clung to him with such desperate need that it brought tears to his eyes.

"I want to know," he whispered gently.

She took a step back and raised herself to her full height.

"It's true, what they say."

"What about?" he asked, knowing that there could be only one answer.

"About me." She looked away from him and wiped at a tear that had begun to form.

"So you were a Death Eater then?"

"No, I wasn't."

He closed his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. He had hoped that he was right, but he was pleased to hear it from her own lips. Her gaze returned to meet his.

"I nearly was, though."

"So why didn't you become one then?"

"Dumbledore."

"Oh."

He had many reasons to dislike, or even hate, Albus Dumbledore; he had manipulated Harry and kept key facts hidden from him time and again. But towards the end of his life, Harry had begun to appreciate the impossible task the former Headmaster had been given. He knew that Dumbledore's life was filled with more regrets than any man should have to bear. Although he had never truly forgiven him, they had reached an understanding before the old wizard had died. And in one word, Ginny had filled him with regret that he hadn't had the grace to forgive him fully.

"And what made you want to become one in the first place?"

"You did."

"Me?"

"Yes, you did, Harry, you started me along the road to becoming a Death Eater."

Her words struck at the heart of who he was and a myriad of emotions raged within. Anger, fear, regret, dismay and disbelief all struggled for supremacy.

"What did I do?" What slight, what injury, had he committed that had led a young girl down such a destructive path?

"Nothing," was her simple reply.

Anger rose within him. She was blaming him, it was his fault and what had he done?

"Nothing? Nothing? How the bloody hell can me doing nothing make you want to be a Death Eater?"

"It's called unrequited love, Harry," she replied, meeting his choler with equally strong bitterness. "I may have been sorted into Slytherin, but it didn't mean that I wasn't a fan of the Boy-Who-Lived."

She spoke with the tone of voice that women used when talking to men who have failed to grasp the gist of anything.

"Do you know how hard it is to have a crush on someone, and yet be so completely ignored? Every summer, when you came to The Burrow you, Ron and Hermione were so wrapped up in your own little world that I was pushed out of the picture."

She was right, he'd never noticed her. Oh, he'd known she was there, but in the same way you know that there is air to breathe and that the sun would rise each day.

"And sharing a room with Granger and her 'Harry this and Harry that'. Merlin, it's a wonder I didn't kill her. And when I sent you a Valentine, all you did was show it to everyone and laugh at it."

"I didn't know you'd sent it," he said defensively. "And anyway I was thirteen; boys of that age don't know how to deal with that sort of thing."

"And twelve-year-old girls can cope with being laughed at? And the final straw was the Yule ball."

He racked his brain, trying to remember back that far.

"What did I do then?" he asked, dreading the reply.

"You were without a partner right up until the last minute and, despite all the hanging around I did, you never so much as looked at me."

Images of the weeks leading up to the ball flashed through his mind. He remembered her plaguing him, always asking him whether he'd got a partner yet. He'd thought she was just taking the mick, laughing at the famous but partner-less Harry Potter.

"And when you went with Granger of all people, I hated you."

She turned away from him as if overwhelmed by the feelings she'd kept buried for so long.

"But surely you didn't hate me enough to want Voldemort to win?"

For a while she didn't reply. She continued with her back to him, lost in her thoughts.

"No," she said finally turning back, "but it was a start. When he returned, Slytherin became a difficult house to be in if you weren't from a Dark wizard's family. Especially when everyone knew that my family were fighting against Voldemort. At the beginning, it was easy to go along with the crowd. I was pureblood and I had a grudge against you, so it was easy to do what was needed to fit in."

"But I imagine once things hotted up, people demanded that you did more than just call me names."

She nodded.

"After Lucius was captured, the older students were all warned that if they didn't help Voldemort in some way, they would be in trouble. Some, like Pansy, were fine because their family was giving Voldemort lots of money, others like Crabbe and Goyle were only too eager to take the Dark Mark."

"And you?"

"My family had no money, so even if they weren't fighting for the Order, they wouldn't have been able to help. No, it was the Dark Mark or bye, bye Ginny Weasley."

"Why didn't you ask Ron for help? The Order could've protected you."

"The Order was falling apart at the seams, Harry. Dumbledore knew that, that was why he started spending so much time with you. He also knew that he was dying from the injury he'd received destroying the diary and he was desperate to pass on all he knew.

"But he did know that you were in trouble."

"He'd overheard two of the younger would-be Death Eaters talking about the initiation ceremony that was due to take place that night. Rather than trust the Order to disrupt it, he arranged for me to be given a detention that evening, thus delaying my induction. He sat me in his office and told me that he knew what was going on and wanted to help. I was so desperate to avoid joining Tom's merry band that I would have agreed to anything."

"Did he ask you to spy for him?"

"No, that would have necessitated my getting more deeply involved and we both wanted to avoid that. He asked me to help you in whichever way I could."

She allowed herself a small laugh and smiled at him. He returned her smile, seeing the irony in what she'd said.

"I must have been desperate because my hatred for you knew no bounds by then. Another induction was arranged, this time just for me and Draco, but for some reason it never went ahead."

"So what did you do?"

"He asked me if I knew what you three were up to. I thought he was trying to find out was going on in the Slytherin common room but I think he had a fairly good idea already. I told him I knew that you were hunting for something but I didn't know what. I'd over heard Ron talking about Horcruxes the previous summer but I didn't know what they were. "

As she spoke Harry began to understand the role that Ginny had played in the last year of the war. He remembered the weeks of frustration that Hermione had gone through trying to do any research into Horcruxes followed by a sudden breakthrough that enabled them to find the next one. There could be only one explanation.

"So were you the one who found out where the second and third Horcruxes were?"

He could've added and not Hermione, but it seemed implicit in what she was telling him. So Dumbledore or someone had fed the information to Hermione and she'd taken the credit. No wonder Ginny hated her.

"Yes. None of the Slytherins knew what Horcruxes were, but based on what I'd heard from Ron and what Dumbledore had told me I began to piece together what I was getting by listening to conversations in the common room. There was no attempt at secrecy there; everyone seemed only too eager to boast about what their family was doing. And Black only seemed to be interested in the latest slattern that was occupying his bed."

"Did you use the library at all? Hermione said she couldn't find anything useful in there at all, said she'd found it all in books she'd rescued from various places the Order had been based."

"She wouldn't, I'd removed it all. The last thing I wanted was that bossy cow being the one to sort it out for you."

But you were forced to let her take the credit anyway. Merlin, what a mess.

"Didn't you say that you hated me?"

"I did, but I'd also come to realise that you were my only hope. Everyone, even those on Voldemort's side, knew that you were the only one who could defeat him, and until he was defeated I was trapped in a hell of mine and the Sorting Hat's making."

"So how did Hermione find out?"

"A couple of people in Slytherin were becoming suspicious of me, so I put the books back in the library. Granger must have spotted me doing it - do you know that she practically lives in that place? During the last Hogsmeade visit, she cornered me in Honeydukes, demanding to know what was going on. She accused me of trying to sabotage what you three were trying to do, and before I could stop her, she'd run off to Dumbledore and told him."

"But he already knew, didn't he?"

"Yes, there wasn't much that went on that Dumbledore didn't know about."

"And he swore her to secrecy?"

"Yes, even asked her to work with me to find the location of the final Horcrux."

"And did you?"

"No. My cover was about to be blown by then. Only sleeping with Draco would have saved me, and I would've died rather than let that creep get any where near me."

"So what saved you?"

"You did."

"Me? What did I do?"

"Do you remember the attack on Hagrid's hut?"

"How could I forget it? It was lucky that me and Ron were down there, otherwise Hagrid wouldn't have stood a chance."

"And do you remember the one causality of that junior Death Eater raid?"

"Daphne Greengrass, struck by an unidentified charm by persons unknown. The Ministry were never able to work out how she'd been killed. Are you telling me that you did it?"

She nodded slowly.

"I followed them down there under my Invisibility Cloak. Their job was to make sure that Hagrid was distracted so that the main attack could go ahead without anyone being warned. With you and Ron being there, they were bound to fail. You had years fighting for real, but all they'd done was torture a few Muggles and bully a few first-years."

"She was the one who was about to expose you?"

"Yes. She'd worked out that I was helping you and was gathering her evidence to present to Voldemort. I'd broken into her trunk the previous day and it was pretty damning stuff."

"So you killed her?"

"Yes, Harry, I killed her. I killed her before I was tortured to death. Of course they would have made sure I'd revealed everything I knew before I died. And I would have probably condemned a few others to death into the bargain. I'm not proud of what I did, Harry, but I did what I needed to do to stay alive. As the Sorting Hat say, 'Those cunning folk use any means to achieve their ends'."

So this was her full confession; that she'd killed a fellow student. Not in the heat of battle, not fighting for her life, but in cold blood and from behind. She was looking at him in silence, waiting for his response, to judge or forgive. And who was he to do either, he who had led his friends into ambushes, been the cause of umpteen other deaths and had taken life himself?

"But you're not a Death Eater."

"No, Harry. Not a Death Eater, just a murderer."

There was no emotion left in her voice. It had been dulled by the tide of revelation that she had unleashed upon him. Her anger, her bitterness, all the forces that had driven her along this path and had threatened to consume her were gone. The hurricane had finally blown itself out, leaving only the wreckage of her life in its wake.

He was numbed by it too; shocked that he'd help to fuel it all, but glad that he was here to help her pick up the pieces. She was another victim of the chaos that Riddle had unleashed as surely as Cedric Diggory had been.

"Join the club, Ginny."

"I don't think so, Harry. Taking on the most evil wizard ever and saving the world hardly compares with killing a seventeen-year-old girl."

How he longed to pull her to him and tell her that it would be all right.

"Ginny," he said softly, "has anyone ever spoken to you about the final confrontation with Voldemort?"

She shook her head.

"No, Ron probably doesn't want to rub my nose in it that my side lost."

He invited her to sit down, which she did.

"He wasn't there right at the end, so let me fill you in where your brother has been unable to. Three Death Eaters tried to stop me getting to Voldemort. One was Avery; a nasty piece of work who used every trick in the book to stop me. The other two were students at Hogwarts; both younger than you. I killed all three of them. Do you know that one of them was so scared he wet himself?"

"But they were Death Eaters, Harry," she insisted, "Greengrass was just-"

"A Death Eater. You killed one person, Ginny, I killed three and I would have killed a fourth if needed. Avery I have no problem with, and Voldemort, well, I wouldn't have had a choice, but Baddock and Pritchard hadn't even taken their OWLs. Greengrass was an adult, they were just boys."

She rose from her chair and lowered herself gently onto his lap, her arm resting on his shoulder. She took hold of his hand and began to stroke it.

"Does anyone else know this?"

He shook his head.

"No. It's not something you really want to broadcast, is it?"

"I suppose you wouldn't, would you?"

He lifted their hands and kissed hers before letting her fingers interlace with his. As he gazed at her he saw a new emotion - gone was the hopelessness. Instead, he saw hunger. Hunger for reassurance, hunger for love, hunger for forgiveness.

"So I take it that Hermione doesn't know the truth about you?"

Her hand slipped out of his and slid down his chest, fingering the buttons of his shirt as she did so.

"No, she just thinks that I was one of Dumbledore's little projects -a Death Eater whom he might be able to redeem. She never knew that I'd been the one to actually identify and locate the Horcruxes. She only found the last one because I'd left some of my notes inside one of the books."

He leaned into her and planted a soft kiss on the top of her head.

"So what now? Are you going back to Hogwarts?"

She allowed her head to rest on his chest, and he wrapped his arms around her. She snuggled into him as if accepting his protection.

"That depends on you, doesn't it? I mean, as things stand I'm persona non grata. Not exactly Head Girl material, am I? But if the famous and noble Harry Potter brings me back..."

"... you might be accepted back after the requisite amount of grovelling."

"Something like that."

They both laughed, their voices strangely loud in the small kitchen.

"You don't strike me as the sort of person to grovel to anyone. So what are you going to do?"

She took his face in her hands and kissed him. Her tongue sought entrance and he surrendered willingly, inviting her in deeper, losing himself to the passion that rose up inside him. Her hands strayed across his body, enjoying his response, seeking more intimate contact.

"Not here," he panted, his hand fingering the tops of her stockings.

"Where?" Her breath was quickening and she moved to allow him better access.

"I can't tell you, but I can take you there."

She let out a gasp has his fingers found what they were looking for.

"Fidelius Charm?"

He nodded.

"But not yet, Harry, let us..."

Her words were lost in groan as her body told him than it couldn't wait any longer.