He Never Said Goodbye

Ginny's marriage to Seamus had been under enormous strain for the past month and both of them began coming home later than they usually did, just so they could avoid talking to each other. Some nights Seamus didn't even come to bed at all; just rolled into the apartment in the wee hours of the morning, rather drunk, and dropped onto the sofa, where Ginny found him snoring up a storm around midday..

She didn't blame him for it, either. She had a funny feeling that work wasn't the only place he visited nowadays, and was actually somewhat glad that he decided not to come into bed with her. She didn't want to know where he went after work, but she had her suspicions. There were such organisations, she knew, that offered their customers a chance to do whatever they wanted with whoever they wanted: all they needed was a piece of whoever they wanted to have their wicked way with, such a lock of hair. Polyjuice Parlours, she thought they were called.

Ginny didn't especially mind that Seamus was cheating on her with someone else, even if it was someone who looked exactly like her. She knew he deserved better than that, but she was glad that at least someone could give him some of the respite he so desperately seemed to need. Ginny just absorbed herself in her work, so that she was simply too tired to want to do anything sexual when she came home, otherwise she feared she might resort to Seamus's idea.

She and Seamus hadn't had any sort of discussion that lasted for more than five minutes in quite a while, when one morning towards the end of the third month of their marriage, he came out of their bedroom with a pained look on his face. He had just taken a shower and his hair dripped water onto the kitchen floor, where Ginny was making herself a cup of tea. She didn't notice him at first, because her back was to the doorway, but after a couple of minutes she felt his eyes boring into the back of her head and turned around.

"Good morning," she said lightly.

Seamus's eyes followed her as she traipsed around the kitchen, until she turned around to face him once more, exasperated with his staring. "What do you want?"

Seamus's whole body seemed to tighten. "Can't I just watch my wife about her daily duties like any other normal husband?"

"You've been staring at me with that look on your face for about ten minutes now. What have I done?"

Ginny was taken aback when Seamus's face contracted, as though he was trying to fight away tears. "I don't know yet," he mumbled. Then he took a deep breath, plunged his hand into his trouser pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. "What is this? Who's D?"

Ginny took the note from his hand and stared at it; four words and one capital letter stared back at her, and she felt the world crumble underneath her feet. She backed away until she hit the refrigerator and slid down until she was sitting on the floor. "How did you find this?" she croaked.

"It was lying by your bedside drawer," Seamus replied emptily. He had realised that his suspicion was to be duly rewarded, but was feeling doubly worse for it. "Who's D?"

Ginny scrunched up the note in her fist and, putting her head in her hands, began to rock from side to side. The thought that her position was wrongly taken entered her mind, as she hadn't betrayed Seamus physically, and should have been the one to ask him why he was coming home drunk and reeking of cloyingly sweet womens' perfume. But more frightening thoughts pushed this one to the back of her mind; thoughts that made her whimper and clutch her hair as though to tear it out.

"I haven't been unfaithful to you, Seamus," she finally managed to say hoarsely, her own voice grating on her nerves. "This was before we got married."

"But what's it doing by your bedside drawer? Why didn't you throw it out?" said Seamus, flinching slightly at her first comment.

Ginny gave him a blank look. "I told you before we got married that I didn't love you. I still don't, Seamus," she said woodenly.

A great silence spread itself between them, not so much uncomfortable as agonising. Ginny looked up at Seamus, who had stopped glaring at her and was now gazing brokenheartedly at the floor. For some reason, a fountain of rage suddenly started gushing into Ginny, and she laughed shortly. "Don't look so devastated, Seamus," she said brusquely. "It's not as if you've always been completely faithful to me."

Seamus's eyes flew to hers, a mixture of fear and chagrin shining in them. He opened his mouth to explain, but Ginny shook her head. Standing up, she said, "I've known for a long time. I really don't care, Seamus. We never did have a real marriage in the first place."

She was about to walk past him out of the kitchen when he grabbed her forearm, stopping her. "And whose fault is that?" he growled.

Ginny tore her arm out of his grasp and cried furiously, "Don't you dare make it out to be all my fault! I told you I didn't love you, but you told me to let you deal with it! Now I see how well you did that." She stormed out of the kitchen into the living room that doubled as a dining room with Seamus in hot pursuit.

"I tried to make you happy, Ginny," he yelled, "but you never wanted me! You never wanted anything I had to give!"

"I told you that before we got married!" shouted Ginny, equally distraught. "You just didn't want to listen. You thought you could change everything ..." Her voice trailed off to a whisper. "It's not you I want, Seamus."

Seamus breathed in abruptly. "Who is it then? This D fellow? Who is he, anyway?"

Ginny swallowed with some difficulty. "I can't tell you. You'd never forgive me."

"I think I have a right to know who it is, Ginny."

"I know you do. But nobody's going to know, including you."

Seamus's frown deepened. "Why are you so protective of him? What is he, a fugitive of the Ministry of Magic?"

Ginny smiled for the first time that morning. "He might have become one for all I know. He certainly had the potential."

"So, you haven't been seeing him?"

Ginny shot him a hard look. "No, Seamus, I haven't been sleeping in anyone else's bed but my own ... can't say the same thing for you, though, can I?"

Seamus dropped into an armchair and sighed heavily. "I'm sorry, Ginny, I really am. But you never gave me a chance. How do you think it felt when you pushed me away every time I tried to kiss you? You left me no choice."

"Where did you go? The Polyjuice Parlours?"

Seamus blushed to the roots of his hair. "Like I said, you left me no choice," he muttered. "I wanted the real you, but when I couldn't have that I resorted to illusions." He looked up at her pleadingly. "I would have preferred the real you."

Ginny dropped down onto the floor in a corner of the room, away from him, and hugged her knees. She felt as tired as if she'd just spent an entire morning lugging around sacks of concrete on her back. "I wonder what my mum will say when she finds out her youngest child will be the first to get a divorce, " she uttered wearily.

Seamus gave her an appalled look and she rolled her eyes at him. "Surely you don't think that I'd want to stay with you after all this," she sneered. "I'm sure you wouldn't want to burden yourself with that, either."

"We could work it out, Ginny," he said in a small voice. "We could try again."

"And start tearing at each other's throats three months down the track? No thanks, I think I'll pass."

"Well, fine then!" Seamus jumped up and strode over to the door. "If we're no longer to be husband and wife in any sense, don't expect me back here any time soon." And with that, he opened the door, stepped out and slammed it behind him, so that a couple of china figurines from Ginny's collection fell to the floor, but thankfully didn't smash.

Ginny laughed raggedly, but soon started sobbing, the tears pouring freely down her face. She wiped them away angrily at first, but soon stopped and gave in to the torrential downpour, banging her fists on the floor.

And then, she heard it: someone was knocking on her door.


A tall, slim blond stopped outside Ginny's apartment building, seemingly to check with the paper in his hand whether this was the right place or not. Apparently, it was, because he pulled open the door and stepped inside the building. As he ascended the staircase to reach the fourth floor, someone came running down them - a sandy-haired, red-cheeked someone who the blond recognised from his school days, but was thankful that the other man didn't pay him any attention.

The other man burst out of the entrance hall of the apartment building and walked out of the blond's line of vision, trailing a feeling of agitation in his wake. The blond shrugged rather elegantly and continued making his way up the stairs.

When he reached the fourth floor he checked the slip of paper again and knocked on number eleven. A few minutes later, when nobody answered to his first knocks, he tried again. Finally, he heard footsteps and the door opened to reveal a woman with a pale, tear-stained face below a mop of dishevelled auburn hair. Her face paled further and her eyes widened; the blond could see her hands shaking where they held the door open.

Draco Malfoy was standing on Ginny Weasley's doorstep.

"Hi", said Draco, the same unfathomable grey eyes of ten years ago drilling holes in Ginny's horrified brown ones.

Without further ado, Ginny slammed the door in his face and leaned her back against it, sliding down until she hit the floor, hyperventilating. And when he started speaking again, Ginny thought her heart would give out.

"Ginny, open the door," he said, and, though his voice was somewhat muffled by the door, Ginny could hear every syllable as clearly as though he was right next to her. "Ginny, please open the door. Otherwise I'm going to count to three and do it myself ..."

Ginny wiped the sweat off her forehead with the sleeve of her shirt and noticed for the first time what she was wearing: an old T-shirt fraying at the cuffs and hem and ugly grey sweatpants. She distinctly heard Draco count to three and suddenly saw him leaning over her where she lay on her back at his feet; the door seemed to have disappeared entirely.

"Oh," was all she managed to let out before Draco lifted her as though she weighed no more than a feather and carried her to the sofa, then sat down in an armchair opposite her. Her front door reappeared without any further effort from him.

His skin was still alabaster pale and his hair white-blond, but he wore it much looser than Ginny had ever seen him wear it. It fell over part of his forehead in a way that was very becoming to him. His lips were still a soft pink and tender-looking, his fingers were still long and thin - he had 'piano hands', as Ginny called them - and his physique still lithe and athletic, though he now had a look of restrained strength, like that of a panther.

It was in his eyes that a change was most pronounced, though. They were colder and harder than they had been before and entirely inscrutable. Ginny felt that he had put up a barrier between the real world and the Draco inside of him that he didn't seem to want anyone to know about ...

"Well?" He stared at her expectantly, the beginnings of a smirk on his face.

Ginny swallowed heavily and wiped her sweaty palms on her clothes. "What are you doing here?" she choked out. She was still having trouble believing that he wasn't some sort of apparition her brain had concocted, but the warmth of his touch on her back and under her knees proved her brain innocent of all charges.

Draco raised one pale eyebrow. "Is that all I get after ten years' absence?"

"Well, what did you expect?" Ginny snapped. "That I'd fall into your arms and swear my undying love?"

"That wouldn't have been too bad, I suppose."

"This isn't a fairy-tale, Draco." Ginny felt the beginnings of a headache coming on and set her elbow on her knee, resting her forehead on her hand. "Just because you thought you could make the last ten years disappear simply by turning up on my doorstep, doesn't mean it's going to happen."

"Why not?" Draco sounded more like a spoiled child who was not getting what it wanted rather than a grown man.

"Because you ruined my life, Draco!" cried Ginny, angrily hitting the sofa with her fists. "Waiting for you to get back from wherever it is you went took up ten years of my life! Ten years, moreover, that I could have spent doing much better things. I could've had a family by now! I could've been happy!"

"I wasn't stopping you," retorted Draco peevishly.

"My promise to you was," Ginny snarled back. "Maybe you don't remember asking me to wait for you, but I certainly do. And I'm not the kind of person who breaks promises, Draco. Maybe you should have thought about that before you went gallivanting off to who-knows-where without a reasonable explanation."

"I told you that I needed to figure out who I am and where I stand!" Draco shot back furiously.

"And that took ten years?" Ginny's mouth twisted into an ugly grimace. "Would've taken me ten seconds. Because you're nothing but an insensitive bastard, who doesn't give a flying fuck about other peoples' feelings. How does that feel, then?"

"How do you think? There's nothing that I enjoy better than being told I'm basically a waste of space." Draco's expression was dark and his hands were balled up into fists in the pockets of his jacket. "It feels like shit, Ginny. Happy, now?"

"I just wish I could make you feel what I've gone through this past decade," said Ginny coldly. "A decade, Draco. A whole, fucking decade."

"I'm sorry," Draco said quietly, staring at the floor.

"Do you know what other people have achieved in a decade?" Ginny continued vociferously, ignoring Draco's apology.

"Look, I said I was sorry! How about considering my emotions for a change?"

"I don't give a shit!" yelled Ginny shrilly, her voice breaking suddenly and tears rolling down her face, which she furiously wiped away. "You never cared about what I thought or felt ... you never even noticed that, did you? I bet you never even thought of me during these ten years you were away!"

"That's a lost bet, then, because I did - "

"THEN WHY DIDN'T YOU WRITE TO ME?!" Ginny howled, her face screwed up with rage and sorrow, not even bothering to wipe away the tears that freely splashed down onto her front. "Why didn't you ever pick up a quill and write me note? Something that would let me know that you're all right, that you're coming back? Not even once, Draco!" She put her face into her hands, barely managing to choke out, "You sodding bastard, look what you've done to me ..."

"I'm sorry, Ginny," Draco repeated. He stared at Ginny's shaking form and wondered why he'd even come here at all. If this was all he was going to get from the only woman he'd ever wanted for entirely pure motives, he was sure he'd get better results from a whore on the street who'd never seen him before.

As though reading his thoughts, Ginny looked up at him balefully, her eyes red and puffy. "Your filthy apologies don't cover anything anymore," she said contemptuously. "Get out of here. I don't want to see your revolting face ever again."

But Draco didn't budge an inch. Suddenly, he realised that there was not one woman in the world like the one sitting in front of him, and that he'd much rather eat dirt than walk out of her life forever.

Ginny, however, had other ideas. She jumped up, grabbed a small figurine from the coffee table in front of the sofa, and launched it at the wall above Draco's head. The figurine smashed, the wall received a scratch and pieces of china lay crumbled on the floor behind Draco's armchair. Undeterred, Ginny picked up another ornament, weighing it warningly in her hand. "If you don't get out of here this minute, I'm going to throw this one as well!"

Draco shrugged nonchalantly. "It's your trinket, not mine."

Ginny made a face like there was something unpleasant under her nose. "Oh, that's right," she hissed, "I'd almost forgotten that you don't have a shred of decency in you." She slammed the ornament back onto the coffee table so forcefully it smashed to pieces as well. "Oh, just clear off, will you?! Nobody asked you to come in here and ruin my life again!"

"I didn't know you had much of a life to ruin nowadays."

"I'm married, Draco."

"Ah, so that's what Finnigan was doing here." Draco didn't seem at all perturbed. "Marriage is no more than a misfortune that, I am thankful to say, is quite rectifiable."

"We were living a perfectly good life before you pranced in here - "

"Then why did he storm out of the building looking like you'd planted a hundred unfounded accusations on him?" Draco smirked.

"We'd had a disagreement, is all," replied Ginny mulishly. "All couples have them."

"We didn't have many," Draco said simply, "and the ones we did have were never that bad."

"That's your opinion." Ginny slumped back onto the sofa, no longer crying, but feeling quite worn out. "I hate you, Draco," she said wearily. "I hate you for ruining my life once and I hate you for having the gall to come back to me and do it again. Why did you even think you had to do this?"

"I did what I had to do and thought I'd come home," Draco shrugged.

"Since when do you identify me with your home, Draco?"

He shot Ginny a look full of venom that made her recoil against the sofa, shocked. "You think it's all been fun and games for me, do you?" he hissed, suddenly as full of fury as Ginny had been. "You seem to be so caught up in yourself, as you suggest I am, that you've forgotten one little detail: you never asked me exactly what I've been doing for the past ten years."

Ginny gaped at him. She had expected his sarcasm and bluntness, but she was caught unaware by his anger. However, her curiosity overpowered other emotions, so she crossed her arms and scowled at him. "All right, then. Tell me. What've you been doing with yourself that's so much more important than saving a relationship?"

"Our relationship was doomed from the start," said Draco, ignoring her question and avoiding her eyes.

"Draco, stop it," Ginny snapped. "I asked you a question. Answer it."

Draco merely looked at her blankly for a few seconds before taking a deep breath and asking, "Have you heard from Potter lately?"