A Night the Stars Didn't Shine

Angel Watching Over Me

Ginny loved to paint. She dreamed of becoming a traveling artist, if such an occupation existed. She wished to become one and then travel the muggle and magical worlds, painting the scenes of beauty that she had only heard of.

She especially liked to paint things that she had not seen, things that she could only imagine, particularly angels. `That way,´ she thought ruefully, `no one can tell me what I´m doing wrong.´

Angels, Cherubs, Seraphs, and fallen, decorated the antique cream colored wall of her bedroom. They were painted on her dresser, fighting and flying, and painted stain glass style on her window. She had embroidered several on her bedspread and clothing. Ginny, even though she was a pureblood witch, had always believed that there was always one watching over her, mortal or otherwise.

*****

It was winter vacation of her sixth year already. The first part of the year had gone by so quickly, and Ginny was almost relieved at the break that she had. She had decided to stay at Hogwarts over the break then visit her parents at home. They were traveling to Egypt, again, and she didn´t feel like going a third time. Harry, Ron, and Hermione had all decided to go to Egypt with her parents, so Ginny was left alone at Hogwarts. That´s how she liked it. She was alone and independent, with no one telling her what to do or how to do it. She was free to be herself, whoever that may be.

*****

She pulled the burgundy curtains of her dorm room back and looked outside. The entire ground was white with a thick blanket of snow. The trees in the Forbidden Forest had long since lost their leaves, and the bare branches had snow on top of the naked branches. Snow could be seen on the seats in the Quidditch stadium, and the frozen lake was covered in the icy material. Ginny loved snow; winter was her favorite season.

After a short breakfast of honey ham and scrambled eggs, she went back up to her dormitory and began to pack a bag. She piled some canvas, a portable easel, paints, and several brushes. She walked out into the common room and into the deserted and silent hallways. The students were all on their break, enjoying their families. She zipped up her father´s old jacket and pulled up her patched cloak tighter around her, flipping up the gnarled hood.

The cold wind burned her pale freckled cheeks. It turned her ears bright red. She fumbled clumsily with her brand new dragon hide gloves as she tried to pull them over her fingers before they numbed. Well... the gloves were a year old, a Christmas present from Charlie, which was almost as good as new to her.

She stopped walking and set down her bag of art supplies. She took out her wand and transfigured herself a wooden chair, and began to set up the easel that her grandmother had given her, and assembled the paints on a board. Sitting down in the chair, she closed her eyes and waited for inspiration to come to her.

The wind howled nosily around her, shaking the paints and scattering the brushes. Ginny ignored them. Her dream, she decided, she would paint an image from her dream. Lately, she had been having dreams where she had been walking down a church aisle in a beautiful white wedding dress, down to a vaguely familiar man at the pulpit. In the dream, Ginny was always smiling brightly and she could always feel her heart beat wildly in her chest, but hard as she tried, she could never get a good look at the man she was marrying.

So she took to her paints, colors slashing across the canvas. She painted only what she could remember and what she remembered was vague, the image, fading fast. She painted the man looking at a side angle, staring at some unseen object. She painted his eyes royal blue, but then added some gray for a more steely, mature look. His blonde hair flopped loosely in his face, then she added a white to show the reflecting light. A mis-stroke resulted in almost half of the head becoming a white/blonde, but more white this time than blonde. She ran out of yellow and just left the hair as it was. It didn´t look all that bad, she decided. It sure didn´t have the same effect that the sand blonde had, but in an odd way, it looked better. It made him look mature and a face that she recognized popped into her head. She shook it off almost immediately.

Malfoy. No bloody way. She wasn´t going to marry him, not if she could help it. Not since that incident in the library. Ginny had never paid much attention to him before then; it was generally beneficial to her if she avoided all contact with Draco. But ever since they bumped into each other in the library and Ginny discovered that Draco was sketching her candidly, she couldn´t stop watching him.

At meal times in the Great Hall, she sat alone and watched him. He sat apart from the rest of the Slytherins, which was something new to her, unattached and silent. He pretty much ate, drank and sketched the entire time. It seemed to be a tremendous passion of his, even more so than hers. Once in a while, he would attempt to sketch her, and she would look away, disgusted. Then he would characteristically smirk at her, teasing and mocking her, when she looked back at him. Ginny would always pretend that the smirk didn´t bother her.

But it did.

But he had gotten the message, and turned his gaze to Blaise, someone else who sat alone. He studied her form intensely, the black-tressed girl oblivious of him. Her violet eyes stared bored into the Slytherin tapestry as she raised her dull gold drinking goblet to her mauve colored lips. She would make an interesting subject for Draco to draw; she would keep him busy. Whatever was in the goblet didn´t appear to be poison, but the girl´s face showed a fierce distaste for it when she drank it. But as quickly as it had come upon her face, it disappeared into a look of blankness and resumed staring at the wall again.

Ginny glanced at Draco. For once, his gray eyes weren´t on her; they were on Blaise, then on his paper, then back on the young woman, never glancing up at Ginny. Ginny narrowed her eyes at him; suddenly enraged that he was not looking at her. No, it wasn´t rage that filled her.

It was jealously.

Finding out that someone, even Malfoy, had sketched her when she wasn´t looking had flattered Ginny greatly. Her first emotion was that of fear, that he had been stalking her, but when she had taken a closer look the sketch, she realized that Malfoy had taken great care to make sure that the picture was accurate. It made her envious of Blaise.

Ginny angrily shook off the events of the past. She needed to paint, and thoughts of Draco were sure to just ruin the soon-to-be masterpiece. The `man of her dream´ looked empty and lonely, if a picture could do that, alone in its sea of creamy beige. She selected a small detail brush and began painted angels along the sides and the top and bottom. They danced around what she hoped to be her future husband. The angels had ribbons of pink and pearl framing him. They were happy, enclosing the handsome, young man.

The cold wind dried the paint quickly as it passed. The paint cracked a little, but held, before Ginny could put a finishing spell on it. And then it cracked no more.

Ginny put on all the caps of the paint, and packed away her brushes. Slinging the bag over her right shoulder, she carefully picked up the drying canvas. It was sized relatively small, 15" by 18", and fit uncomfortably in between her arms. Her bag banged against the canvas and her arm, making it hard to walk normally. She looked as if she had a limp.

A small detail brush poked her in her side. It sent a small jolt of pain through her hip and she grimaced slightly. She propelled the bag back with an elbow behind her and continued walking. It hit her again.

"Grr you," she muttered incoherently to her bag. She said it softly, even though the wind carried it away, moaning loudly over her whispering. That´s just what she would need if someone had heard her, a lone Gryffindor who walks to inanimate objects. She put everything down and rummaged for the paintbrush. She found it and put it with the other ones, and picked up her things again. She walked forward about two steps and then ran head-long into...

Of all the people that she could have bumped into, she chose the one holding the leather-bound book. Her bag slid off and fell, the brushes bouncing on the floor and rolled away nosily on the cement. But Ginny didn´t bend down and pick them up, and certainly Draco didn´t.

They just stood there, under the shelter of the cement awning, looking at one another. Draco looked at Ginny lazily and smirked; Ginny glared at Draco angrily, her cheeks flushed and ears bright red.

"You meant to do that!" she accused him. He shrugged casually. "You bumped into me first. It was my turn," he reasoned. Ginny opened her mouth to retort, but closed it. He was talking about the Library incident.

Draco nodded at Ginny´s canvas. "Nice picture," he commented. She narrowed her eyes at him, slightly confused about his comment. He leaned over and tilted his head to the left side to get a better look at the painting. "Nice coloring, nice facial expressions and basic drawing..." he said, trailing his finger over the surface of the painting.

"Oh yes, the Great Draco Malfoy should know," she said sarcastically. "You said it, not me," he said, shrugging. She gave him a frustrated glare, jerking the painting out of his reach. He looked up with raised eyebrows, slightly hurt and surprised.

"Looks like me," he commented, straightening up and studied her caramel eyes, waiting for a reaction. Her wished that he could just sketch her eyes, their depth and coloring was angelic. She defiantly stared up into his gray ones, showing him that she was not afraid or intimidated by him. Something very odd then happened.

Her heart flipped.

She shook it off, bewildered. "It is not you!" she said, insulted. She tried to turn the painting in her arms to face her. When she realized that she couldn´t turn it, she shoved it into an amused Draco´s arms, the painted side facing her. "No, this isn´t you, Malfoy. It´s the man in my dreams."

"So flattered that you´d dream of me," Draco said, smirking cockily and suggestively at her. Ginny gave him a withering stare. "Someone had PMS," he muttered sarcastically. She ignored that particular comment and continued.

"He has blue and gray eyes and blonde hair," she said.

"It´s white here," he observed bluntly from the top of it. "Yeah, well, that´s because I added too much white," she explained.

"I´m sure," he nodded his head, obviously unconvinced. She took the painting out of his arms as roughly as she had put it there. "Look, Malfoy, I don´t even know why I´m talking to you like a normal human being," Ginny said angrily, suddenly mad at him. Her face was bright red and her cheeks radiated heat off their hot surface.

Draco wasn´t sure if they were hot because of him or the cold. He felt something inside him burst and fade away as he looked at her. His interior quickly became as cold and frigid as the environment surrounding them. The angel had just said that he wasn´t human. Much as he hated to admit it, she was most likely right; if she said that he wasn´t human, then he probably wasn´t.

"You´re a Malfoy," she sneered as well as she could, holding the painting close to her body; the painted side facing her. She had the upper hand now, she was on the offense, she was calling all the shots.

Malfoy flinched slightly at the rebuke, his free hand, clenched in a fist. The other held the leather sketchbook. She regarded it with a weary eye, semi-wondering what might be in it. He felt was disappointed and enraged, but not particularly surprised. This was nothing that he didn´t deserve, it just hurt him that she said it to him in the way that she had. What little hope for a happily-ever-after future disappeared in a snap. Before he could do anything that would hurt him or Ginny, and would therefore regret doing when he looked back in hindsight, he stepped aside and brushed past her, not even bothering to take one last look at her, fearing what he might do. She turned around and watched his retreating figure as he walked a little ways and turned down the corner. She did not pursue him, but instead stood alone and reflected on what she had just done.

It was obvious, really, what she had done. She had hurt him.

Normally, hurting Malfoy´s feeling, whatever feelings he did have, would´ve made her feel great. God knows she deserved to do it every once in a while. But maybe it was the weather, or the environment she was in, but today was different somehow. The way that he had carried himself, with great dignity, grace, elegance, and self-respect, as he walked away from her made her feel...

Well... it made her feel bad. She felt ashamed and dirty, like she had just witnessed the murder of a puppy and done nothing to prevent it. Except worse, she was the killer. It was a strange feeling and for sure Ginny didn´t feel exactly comfortable with it. It made her feel like a bully.

She shook her head. These odd feelings, not to mention the heart flipping, had to go. They would be her ruin for sure.

She walked down the cement sidewalk, her footsteps echoing with every step, and back to her lifeless dorm room. Leaning her painting down on the side of her bed, she sat on the edge of the scarlet mattress. Tears began to well up in her chocolate eyes, and she broke down in uncontrollable sobs, crying for some reason she could not fathom.

She hunched her back low, hands over her face in a vain attempt to hold back the mysterious sobs. They seeped through her fingers trailing down her hands and falling, splashing on the carpet below her.

One tear, however, landed by accident on her painting. It touched the man´s eye and continued down, leaving a trail of water behind it as it made its way to the ground. Had Ginny noticed the lone tear, she would´ve assumed that the man had been crying.

And he was crying. Her guardian angel, on the other side of the castle, wept mortal´s tears for her.