Rest In Pieces

Chapter 3: The grotesquenesses of life

What she wouldn't give for a clock. She didn't even mind if it was a candy-pink one with horse design, as long as it showed the time. She'd never had a watch, since she didn't actually think she needed one. Having time attached to your wrist just made you watch it every minute or your life, and really, she didn't want to be a slave of time. Funny she'd have to end up like this, knowing that, when a certain amount of time had passed, she'd be dead by a fifty-fifty chance. Malfoy would probably call it poetic justice. Ginny thought it'd be poetic justice if Malfoy were raped by a flobberworm and then trodden upon by a gigantic Neville Longbottom.

Upon thinking this, all further thoughts vanished for a moment. Had she really just wished somebody else sexually abused and then killed? Granted, it had been by a flobberworm and Neville, the least dangerous creatures walking this goddamn earth, although Neville could be a killer when dancing.

How had she gotten that far? Only yesterday she had been nice little Ginny Weasley who had a tendency to look at life and everything else a little cynically, but she'd never said anything out loud. She hadn't said anything out loud this time either, but she'd never wished anybody dead, never, not even him, not even him...

"God, Weasley, please, stop it, I can't bear it. It's so plainly obvious that you're talking to yourself, you should see the way your face's screwed up. It'll freeze that way if you don't relax soon. Imagine, the last glimpse your family will get of you tomorrow will be like that. We wouldn't want that, would we?" At this point Malfoy's face showed the ugliest sneer Ginny had ever seen in her life.

"Because then the Weasley King would see his usual expression for the first time, and he'd run away screaming and get himself killed, and thus began the saga of how the whole Weasley clan got extinguished within a week without any exter-"

"You bastard!" Ginny screeched and forgot all about barriers or strangulation attempts, at least from his part, and lunged herself at the blond boy, hitting him blindly with both of her hands, which would have caused him barely any pain, had he not been injured already. As it was, each slap or whatever you might call what she was doing to him in her blind fury stung like a thousand needles being driven inside his skull and chest.

"You're," she hit him in the head, hard, while sobbing with each painful breath she drew, "by far," by this point he was trying to pry her off him, but not succeeding in anything because he simply lacked the strength to do it and so he attempted to block off her blows "the most obnoxious," had they not been fighting more or less brutally their position would have caused Ron to have apoplexy from shock "and vicious creature I've ever known!" and with that she suddenly collapsed on him, sobbing hysterically into his shoulder.

To say that Draco was shocked would be the understatement of the year. Not only did he never deal with sobbing girls, she was also causing him quite a lot of pain. If his father would be able to see him right now he'd have him disowned without a second thought.

"Weasley, get h-off me," he snapped, not at all contended with the panting sound that came out of his mouth. He figured he had a broken rib that was puncturing his lungs. Just perfect. And breathing wasn't getting any easier with her half lying on top of is semi-sitting form. "Weasley, you n-heed to get off m-he, h-I can't brea-hthe," he managed to say while trying to pry her off of himself.

Upon realizing that she was sobbing on Draco Malfoy's shoulder, and that he wasn't really breathing in the conventional sense of the word, Ginny slid to the ground next to him, not able to stop the sobs emerging from her throat, while he was desperately trying to get something out of his throat at all.

"Weasley," he finally managed to say and grabbed her shoulder, shaking her as forcibly as he was able to.

Ginny, deciding that perhaps she should really look what was wrong with him, noticed that he seemed kind of bluish if seen through a thick veil of tears. When she hastily wiped them away as well as she could, and he still looked blue, especially his lips, and that he didn't appear to be moving any more, her brain began trying to tell her that perhaps this was the opportune moment to panic. To really panic. Luckily, at least for Draco, she had always been a person to rather follow her heart, and not her brain, the former telling her that she really couldn't let anybody die, she simply couldn't.

"Come on Malfoy, what's wrong with you?" she asked in a voice that came really close to despair, but not quite. She forced his mouth open to look whether he had something in his throat while simultaneously grabbing her wand. When she found nothing, she ran a quick scanning spell, which was kind of the wizard equivalent for an X-ray over him to check for injuries, and upon seeing the deflated right wing of his lungs and the broken rib that was sticking in its direction nearly screamed out loud. That was by far the grossest thing she'd ever seen, and that meant something after the incident with Ron and his questionable underwear last summer. What was she supposed to do? She had a mad idea of how to fix it, but that plan was relying very much on her luck and magical possibilities in this room. And of course her stomach. She took one deep breath and checked for his pulse which was, though existent, almost gone.

"Okay, Gin, you can do this," she told herself and opened his bloodstained shirt, definitely not admiring his well-sculpted chest, because firstly that would be really macabre and secondly this was Draco Malfoy.

Grabbing her wand and putting it about half an inch higher than where the rib punctuated the lung she whispered "Severitus", cutting his flesh with practiced ease. Truth to be told, she'd never cut any flesh with the spell, only clothes from her brothers which were simply too large for her petite form.

She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that it actually worked, since she hadn't thought that she'd be able to do so here.

She made a cut of about one inch and a half in length and then quickly cast a spell that would stop the blood from flowing in the area of the cut. Noting with some satisfaction that she had made a nice, clean cut straight through the ribs, just deep enough she pried them apart with her fingers, not too worried about hygiene at the moment, since she could clean everything afterwards with magic anyway. She flinched when she got to see the deflated lung in natura, and then gently lifted the crooked rib and fixed it momentarily, so that it wouldn't be in her way and also couldn't do any harm to the lung any more. Then she used a healing spell on the damaged tissue of the lung and after a moment of contemplation thought of a way to restore the hypotension that should be between the outer and inner layer of the lungs. She decided to make another cut and to just drain a bit of the air in there and then fix the cut again. And to her utter delight it worked, and the lung blew itself up in an instant. She then fixed the broken ribs with a flick of her wand and then mended the tissue where she had made the cut. Done. There was only one problem left now. He still wasn't breathing, and now his heart had stopped beating too.

She wouldn't swear, she wouldn't swear, she wouldn't, but then why the hell shouldn't she fucking not swear when they hadn't done any resuscitation spells in Magical Healing class for gods sake!!!!

"Just breathe, please!" she said faintly. "Don't die on me right now, I don't want to have seen your fucking intestines for nothing."

There was really nothing she could do anymore. Well, actually there was one thing she could do, but she really, really didn't want to. She would not cross that line. She just wouldn't. She'd just forget that she thought of it and have a clear conscience. But she didn't. She knew there was still this Muggle thing.

Sighing, Ginny gave up pretending and made sure that he was lying on solid ground, then pulled his head back towards his neck so that his trachea wouldn't be barred by his tongue. Then she felt for his breastbone and at approximately it's middle she turned her hands a little to her right and his left, and started applying powerful pressure on where his heart hopefully was, 15 strokes that would perhaps crush another two of his ribs, but he'd have a heartbeat then which would be the lesser evil that having your ribs in perfect condition and being dead. When she was finished she prepared herself for the grosser part of this whole act. She pulled his head back a little further and pinched his nose closed with one hand and held his chin with the other, while taking a deep breath and, sealing her lips over his, exhaling as powerfully as she could, watching from the corner of her eye as his torso expanded like a balloon and then deflated a little again, another breath, then further 15 strokes to the heart, then another two lungfuls of air, always checking for a pulse or breathing activities in between. She was just about to give up when she felt the lightest brush of air on her ear when checking for breath once again, and her hand also detected faint movement of his chest, which was rising and falling slightly, but regularly by now.

She fell back with a contended and relieved sigh. He was unconscious, but alive. She had not let him die. He wouldn't have deserved it, even though he was Draco Malfoy.

Pulling herself to her knees again, Ginny started putting Draco into a position where he wouldn't be able to suffer suffocation because of his tongue and which was relatively safe, checking his breathing (regular) and his pulse (growing stronger by the minute) again.

She was almost relieved when he stirred after a couple of minutes. Just now, she felt like a heroine, even though she knew that it was highly probable that she'd never any credit for saving Draco Malfoy's life, not even from himself.

While hanging in her dreamworld and getting a Hogwarts badge of honor or something for saving another student's life, said student groaned and rolled onto his back.

"Fuck, Weasley, what did you do to me. My chest feels like you played jump-the-Malfoy with a herd of elephants. Shit," he sucked his breath in sharply when doing a particularly painful movement.

"Well sorry Malfoy, I think I should have done just that instead of playing around with your intestines, trying to get your lung, which was as useless for breathing as a vacuum cleaner is for Quidditch at that moment, in case you didn't know, to inflate again and mending quite a number of ribs in the process. I could have really spared myself the sight of that ugly reddish gray mess in there, you know!" she snapped, hacked off that he couldn't give it a rest even if she had just saved his life. It never occurred to her that he couldn't know what she had done.

"You...you had your hands inside me, like really, I mean, ugh," he sputtered, really angry with himself for not being able to string the words together eloquently, "and besides, there is nothing ugly on and in my body whatsoever," he added indignantly.

Ginny just snorted. "Yeah, right, oh Mr. Handsomest Guy In This Chamber, that's a good one. Scolding me for what I did. I just saved your life, man, you could've died! Well, but then, I didn't really expect a halfway decent thank you, so I'm really not that surprised" she said bitterly.

"Just how dense are you?" he asked while rolling his eyes melodramatically, and stopping abruptly when he remembered that Draco Malfoy never rolled his eyes. That was just so childish! "I couldn't have died, since some guy wants us both alive until the last fecking moment in here. I don't believe it, do I have to tattoo it on your forehead or do you think you can remember without such a drastic measure?" Draco attempted to sigh impatiently, but what came out of his mouth was rather a crossover between a cough and something not entirely human due to the harsh treatment his lungs had suffered recently.

"Oh yeah, that's just the best idea you've ever had, tattoo it to my forehead when we haven't even got a mirror in here!" she retorted testily. "And besides, should I have let you lie there, all blue in the face, dying?"

"Yes, that's exactly what you should have done. You should have sat aside and waited until he showed up you thick little wench," he gritted out between his teeth, his patience, which was really short by nature anyway, stretched further than this guy from the Guinness book of records could stretch his ears.

"Tut, tut, but where would have been the fun in that. Personally, I think she did just the right thing. And you do look like a wastepaper basket for what even the butcher's dog won't eat in there, by the way, Malfoy," the now familiar voice said in it's usual sing song. Ginny and Draco both turned their heads so that they could see him standing in the corner and leaning against the wall. Although she couldn't see his face, Ginny was quite sure that he was smirking. Hell, his whole posture was screaming "big, bad smirk". Unconsciously, she also wondered why he was able to lean against the wall if he wasn't even physically there.

"Just how long have you been standing there watching my attempts to save this, this -him," Ginny asked angrily while piercing the black clad guy with a forceful glare, which didn't seem to impress him in the least, while ignoring the voice in the back of her mind that was saying Smooth, Gin, real smooth. Oh my, I can't stop admiring your eloquence.

"I can't give you the exact time I arrived, but let's just say that what I saw was better than - well not really better than sex, but at least better than bad sex, I suppose," he mused, rather than said.

"Ew, please, spare my virginal ears the fate of listening to your dirty little orgies, please, we already figured you were the shackles and a whip type, no need to tell us," Ginny said half-mockingly, with her face screwed up so much that she looked four times her age, meaning that she rather resembled a dried and wrinkled apple than even remotely human.

"As you wish," the black guy replied almost huffily and vanished without a banging noise, which startled the two remaining occupants of the room quite a bit.

After having regained his wits a little Draco cleared his throat and then remembered something Ginny had said earlier. "Er, Weasley, just a question concerning the comment you just made: are you telling me that you're still a virgin, or did you just mean that nobody's ever fucked your ear properly yet?" he asked, fighting hard to control the gleeful smirk that was trying to struggle it's way to the surface of his until now blank expression.

"Just curious..." he added, trailing off when he saw the glare he'd witnessed earlier now directed at him. She somehow seemed quite eerie when looking like that.

Draco turned around, facing the wall so he couldn't see the Cheshire cat grin that had now settled on his features. Who would have thought? Welli-well, this could be fun, he thought to himself and to his utter contempt he even couldn't suppress a snicker from emerging from his mistreated throat. Apart from that particular sound making his whole breathing apparatus burn like hell, he was sure that Draco Malfoy does not snicker, because only evil and mad wizards snicker. And he, Draco Malfoy was neither evil nor mad. He was a sadistic bastard, granted, and he had crossed the border of mental sanity at the age of two and a half years, and perhaps was the third most wicked raving lunatic (quite close to 2^nd place, Lucius Malfoy, but still quite some inanities away from their mufti, Lord Voldemort) ever to have walked this world after the invention of extra-soft and lavender scented toilet paper.

"There's nothing wrong with being a virgin, you know?" a sullen-sounding Ginny interrupted his thoughts by saying.

This time he couldn't stop himself. This was fucking hilarious!

***

She was sure she was going to die of embarrassment. It wasn't as if it were something to be ashamed of, being a virgin, but still...you didn't talk about that. Well her peers anyway. Hell, she was sixteen, not twenty, or 25, or whenever you started having sex. She really had no idea. And she'd lived quite happily without it, up until now, thank you very much. And she'd have gladly continued like that, but nooooo, he just had to bring it up. It was so like him. At least she suspected it was so just like him. After all, she only knew what everybody knew about him, that he was a sick and twisted bastard, delighted in torturing other people and small fluffy animals (well, nobody knew that for sure, except for Blaise Zabini, who, being the only thing close to a friend he had, wouldn't affirm their suspicions) and that approaching him before he had his daily dose of caffeine was plain suicide, and even if somebody really had enough of his life he'd most likely prefer just jumping out of a window than to confronting Malfoy at two-minutes-to-coffee am, because, seriously, being suicidal really didn't imply one wanted to extinguish everybody who was so unfortunate as to be in a twenty feet radius of Mr. Personality.

Ginny was getting a little queasy after realizing that she had been abducted somewhere in the wee hours of the morning, which meant that the last breakfast he'd had was probably quite some time in the past. She pushed the thought of what might happen when he was finished smirking at the wall to the back of her head and tried to think about something more pleasant, like, say, a fit of diarrhoe during a Quidditch match. Poor Ron.

She was startled out of her reflections by a movement to her left. She turned and found herself staring into a pair of steel gray eyes that seemed to pierce right through her. Somehow, she felt transparent at his intense gaze, and the sensation made her shudder. He didn't even seem to notice, and just continued to fix her with his chillingly beautiful eyes, and Ginny started fiddling with her sweater nervously, confused and delighted at the attention she was getting. Somehow the silence in the room seemed too much for her to bear, so she decided to break it.

"What's wrong Malfoy? There a spot on my nose?" she asked, laughing uncertainly.

He took his time with answering, and when he did it was just a laconic "Thanks". He didn't even blink once.

"Wha?" Ginny asked stupidly, not quite comprehending his sudden change of behavior.

Finally he stopped his visual assault and dropped his gaze to the floor, the word "thanks" flowing from his lips again, but this time it was more of a whisper.

"Did you just thank me for something? Did Draco Malfoy just say thanks?" Ginny asked incredulously, eyeing him questioningly. "Thanks as in 'Thanks for saving my life'?" she added tentatively.

He looked up again and just said, "Yeah, appreciate it"

She cocked an eyebrow in a very Draco-like fashion. "You do, do you now? You know, perhaps there is some kind of decent person, buried deep within all that dry ice that is Draco Malfoy..." she mused amusedly.

He snorted in response. "Oh, come off it, I just said thanks. No big deal," he snapped when she dared to smirk at him, him! The nerve of that woman!

"To me it is," she said quietly, her eyes turning serious at his nonchalant words. "And you're really not that evil as everybody makes you out to be," she added, and he wasn't entirely sure if it was just to vex him or because she really meant it. He dearly hoped the latter was not the case. Because that would mean he'd be trapped with a madwoman.

"Excuse me, but did you notice I tried to kill you not thirty minutes ago?" he asked tersely, narrowing his eyes at the penetrating gaze she was fixing him with at the moment.

"Kind of hard not to," she replied, rubbing her neck absentmindedly, "but I don't think you did that because you wanted to be evil!" The way she said the word 'evil' nearly made him flinch. It sounded ridiculing, judging and condemning at once.

"You, Draco Malfoy, are nothing but a scared little boy deep inside, who hasn't been allowed to express his feelings, his fears from the beginning and knows no other way to cope with them than to make others suffer the same pain, the same fear that you are experiencing," she said, advancing on him slowly, her voice getting more quiet with every word that left her lips, lips that would have seemed apalling to him yesterday, but somehow, despite her harsh words, he couldn't help but stare at them with fascination, watching their every move, the way she bit them when she seemed nervous, which she clearly was right now.

Draco pulled his gaze away from her lips, or rather focused on her whole face when he realized she was looking at him imploringly.

"Huh?" he asked confusedly when he noticed two things: firstly, that she must have asked him something by the way she was looking, and secondly, that her nose was barely an inch away from his, and somehow, although he knew he really shouldn't, he wasn't resenting the feeling of her so close to him. He was certain that, had he not nearly died ten minutes ago he'd be able to think a little more straightforward, and he'd push her away and make a scathing remark, but he couldn't. He couldn't, and he was hating himself for it. He couldn't, and he wouldn't. Not here, where no-one but her was watching, not now, when he was feeling so uncharacteristically weak, not when she seemed like she was the only female figure he'd see during the next hours, and perhaps the last. The implication of that thought seemed to weigh heavier than lead in his stomach, and all the while he was staring at her, and she was staring at him, waiting, waiting for him to break her gaze, or to say something, and he felt so weak, so unbearably weak. And still all this was such a sweet sensation.

"Malfoy," she whispered, and he turned to look into her eyes, realizing for the first time, that they were of a rich hazel color, "Am I right, Malfoy?" she continued, never turning her gaze away from him. "You can tell me here. Nobody will ever know what happened in here, you know. You can tell me, because only one of us will leave this room, erect that is. And if it is me, I sure as hell am not going to tell everybody about your last moments, last hours, because they are yours. And if it should be me who won't be around to tell there'll be no problem, will there? But I need you to tell me. You're afraid, aren't you? You don't want to die, right? I don't want to die, and I'm afraid, but are you?"

He wanted to close his eyes, but he couldn't. He'd never felt so torn in his life. He knew what he should say, should do, but he couldn't, because she was right, because for once in his life, he felt like he could do what he wanted to do, and he wouldn't know about it, ever.

And so he opened his mouth to speak, for once, the truth, but it was so hard to speak when your voice was so very hoarse. But he managed, eventually, to rather breathe than speak his answer. "Yes."

Ginny who had, up until now, regarded him as intently as he had her cracked at his simple statement, and with a choked cry tears started spilling from her eyes, and sobs from her throat. She rested her head against his neck and fisted her hands into his shirt, her whole body wracking from her crying.

He was overcome by a lot of unknown sensations that very moment, like their closeness, her whole body that was pressed up against his made him feeling slightly ill at ease and still so very comfortable that his head started to spin, and the fact that she seemed so fragile this moment and he wasn't trying to break her was greatly disturbing in his eyes. What was he doing? What was she doing to him? He didn't even take the time to think that perhaps he was just as breakable as she was that very instant, and that she could have easily snapped him in half, mentally, but she didn't. And he was afraid, oh, so afraid. He wasn't even sure what he was more afraid of: dying here, in this sombre room, or her letting go right now, leaving him alone even though she was still there.

At this moment, there really wasn't anything that he wanted more than for her to calm down, and so he started to draw slow circles on her back with his hand, which after a few minutes seemed to pay off, since her sobs were getting less violent and her breathing seemed to go a lot easier than earlier. And he was relieved that her pain seemed to subside, and he hated her for it. But again, he didn't. He was so tired, he felt like he couldn't keep his head any longer, so he let it fall so that it was now enveloped in her soft, red hair, and some distant part of his brain registered that she smelled of honeysuckle, a smell that reminded him of happier times somehow, but he couldn't quite pinpoint the feeling. So he just buried his nose deep in her neck and let himself flow in the sensation. She started a bit at first at the contact, but then relaxed against him, and they stood like this until she lifted her head to his ear and murmured his name as to get him out of his trance-like stance. It took a while until he realized that she'd called him Draco, and not Malfoy. He looked up in wonder and tried to ignore the stiffness in his neck from having his head in one and the same position for a long time.

And again, he found himself staring down into the eyes of Virginia Weasley, the girl he hated and wanted most at the same time, and felt an unfamiliar clenching in his stomach, which he couldn't quite place. They stood like this for what seemed like an eternity, staring at each other. He never knew what made him do it, not even with what would be his last breath, he just knew that he did it, and that was all there was to be said about it in his opinion. Although no other living soul except for him and her would ever know, of course. But that minute, in that spartanically furnished room in all it's gloomy lighted glory, he, Draco Malfoy, inclined his head just a little, so that their lips were touching ever so lightly, and he was thanking the fates for every square millimeter of her skin that he was able to touch.

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