False Hope is Better Than No Hope at All

Chapter Two - Motivation

Draco leaned his forehead against the cool pane of glass, staring at the people below. From the height of the Wizarding Wireless Network’s tower in Diagon Alley, they looked like colorful ants scurrying around and anthill. He felt somewhat like a king looking down on his subjects – or a god. Dance, dance for me minions, he though to himself mirthlessly as someone interrupted his thoughts.

“Draco?” Millicent asked in her honey-coated voice. He turned to see her seated on a leather chair in the middle of the room, several pieces of parchment on her lap. She was dressed in a particularly hideous pair of dark blue robes which, if chosen in an attempt to make herself look thinner, had failed miserably. Off to the side, squinting in the bright sunlight that flooded through the room’s many windows, sat the scrawny little guy whose name Draco had already forgotten, the magic technician responsible for handling the spells that would broadcast their interview over the wireless.

“You’ve been staring out that window for ten minutes,” Millicent continued, her squashed nose crinkling. “Vulcan’s set everything up already. Are you ready?”

Draco nodded and peeled himself off the rickety plastic chair he was sitting on and sat down across from Millicent in an identical leather one. He gave a mental sigh as he watched the little man fiddle with his wand and clear his throat. Barely home three weeks, and his father was already sending him out to handle his PR. He’d be damned if he even knew what half the questions would be referring to – being in Bulgaria was like solitary confinement as far as news was concerned.

Vulcan muttered something under his breath and swished his wand while simultaneously pointing at Millicent, who cleared her throat. Automatically, Draco reached a hand up to smooth down his hair before remembering that he was on the wireless and no one could see him anyway. “This is Millicent Bulstrode live from the WWN tower in Diagon Alley,” she was saying. “I’m here today with Draco Malfoy, son of Minster of Magic Lucius Malfoy, who has recently returned to us after seven years in Bulgaria. How are you today, Draco?”

“Good, thank you,” answered Draco, bored out of his mind.

“Are you glad to be back in the U.K.?”

“Very much so,” he shamelessly lied. Hey, this was politics. “I’ve missed it.”

“Draco, while you were in Bulgaria you missed quite a lot of significant events,” said Millicent, glancing briefly at her notes. “How does it feel returning to an entirely different home?”

He cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. “Excellent,” he said with what he hoped resembled conviction. “From the beginning of time, magical people have been respected, revered – to put it quite simply, we’re better than muggles. We’re an entirely different species altogether, several notches above them on the evolutionary ladder. We weren’t meant coexist with muggles, even those with limited magical abilities. It’s a pity that we had to go through so many years of war, death and strife to get people to realize that, but now that it’s finally been accomplished, I think the improvement is quite obvious.”

“What about The Resistance?” she prodded, staring straight at him. “After so many years of war, many pure-blooded wizards just want to get on with life and forget the last five years ever happened. Do you see The Resistance as posing a serious threat to the peace we’ve finally achieved?”

Draco gritted his teeth, the words his father has said that morning ringing in his ears. The number of Indifferents is climbing, Draco, he had said, waving a piece of parchment in his face. They could side with The Resistance, or with us. When you go to that interview today, I want you to make us sound like the heroes. We aren’t the evil the brave Harry Potter spent his whole life fighting; we are the crusaders, returning to pureblooded wizards what is rightfully theirs. Pull those damn Indifferents over to our side.

“To be honest,” Draco answered after a pause, “I don’t think The Resistance will be around much longer. While it’s members mainly consist of muggle-borns trying to worm their way back into our world, the brains behind the whole operation are pureblooded wizards, such as ourselves. I believe, as my father does, that in time those pure-bloods will come to see how much better off we are without muggle-borns, and they’ll abandon The Resistance and come back to our world where they will, of course, be welcomed.”

Draco was forced to bite the insides of his cheeks to keep from laughing at that one. Welcomed? Yeah, welcomed to the dungeons at Malfoy Manor, perhaps, if they were lucky.

“Do you believe The Resistance would be able to survive without the support of purebloods?” Millicent asked.

“No, I don’t,” Draco said simply. Millicent raised a furry eyebrow and looked at him pointedly, trying to get him to elaborate, but he kept his mouth shut. He felt like bolting from the room. As it was, he was going to have to spend many hours in The Leaky Cauldron to erase his anger at getting lassoed into doing this whole interview in the first place.

“A final question, Draco, before we answer owls from out listeners,” Millicent continued after a moment, and he almost sighed out loud with relief.  “You supporting the New Ministry, what would you say to all the members of our audience who are Indifferents?”

Draco slipped into automated mode. “No one identifies with the Indifferents more that I do,” he began, reciting the answer he had prepared that morning before apparating to the tower. “I grew up listening to stories of the war, then from my fourth year onwards I found myself in the middle of it. Only in these last six years of my life have I experienced anything remotely resembling peace. Yet our new world, though vastly improved, is far from perfect. I completely understand how tempting it is just to sit back and enjoy the peace we have now, but just think of this – if we ignore the problems facing us now, they’re just going to get bigger and bigger, until they get to a point where peace in something that only exists in fairy tales. Now that we’re on the road back to the life we were meant to have, we have to continue walking, or else we’ll never reach out destination.”

Millicent wasn’t paying one bit of attention to him. The first couple owls had already arrived and were dropping envelopes and pieces of parchment into a box at her side, where she was shifting through them looking for an appropriate question.

“Thank you, Draco,” she said, not lifting her head. “And now for our first question…”

***

Draco finally left the WNN tower forty-five minutes later, tired and annoyed. After the twelfth “Are you currently seeing anyone, Draco?” message and two howlers from anonymous Resistance supporters, Millicent had finally displayed some mercy and ended her show. Stepping out into Diagon Alley for the first time in years and taking a deep breath of the sweet summer air, Draco was suddenly hit by the urge to do some exploring. But first things first – he was dying for a drink.

He turned left and carefully wound his way through the street, careful to avoid groups of chattery witches zig-zagging from store to store searching for the best prices. He was nearly trampled outside of Quality Quidditch Supplies as a hoard of children, high on the thought of finally being let out of school for the summer, flocked to the display window and pressed their noses against the glass, trying to get a glimpse of the year’s latest broom. Sighing, he brushed a smudge of dirt – was it in the shape of a footprint? – from his black robes and decided to continue walking to The Leaky Cauldron with his head down, bulldozing through whatever crowds he found himself enveloped in.  A much more effective way of walking – he soon found himself walking through the weathered door and into the darkened pub.

Nice to see some things haven’t changed, thought Draco as he recognized the familiar bald, toothless form of Tom the innkeeper behind the bar, pushing three drinks towards a group of giggly young witches who were twirling their hair through their hands and eyeing a wizard in the corner flirtatiously. Draco walked up to the bar and took a seat directly across from Tom.

“Hello, sir,” greeted Tom. Draco was slightly shocked. Tom had always addressed him as ‘young Mister Malfoy.’ Amnesia, perhaps? “And would you be looking for a room, a drink, or a comely young witch today?” He nodded in the direction of the three witches, who were now eyeing Draco. Ah, love. How fickle.

“Just a drink, please,” said Draco. And the sooner, the better. He tossed a few sickles on the counter. “Ogden’s Old Firewhisky – a double.”

Tom raised his eyebrows slightly at this. “It’s not even noon, Mr Malfoy,” he said, but nevertheless got him the drink. Aha. So Tom did recognize him. Draco tilted his head back and took a deep gulp. Hmm. Not as intoxicating as Bulgarian alcohol, but it would do the job.  He sat the mug down on the table, only to see Tom still staring at him.

“I caught a bit of your interview over the wireless this morning,” he said neutrally, running an old rag around the rim of what appeared to be a perfectly clean glass. “We didn’t know if you’d ever be coming back from Bulgaria.”

Draco shrugged. “There was much to take care of,” he answered cryptically. He took another swallow of his drink.

Tom set the glass down. “I expect you’d have a lot of interviews to do in the coming weeks. Everyone seems to be trying to grab a piece of you.” A tinkle sounded behind them, signaling the arrival of another customer. “Speaking of which…hello, Ginny!” Tom called out, flashing her a toothless smile.

Draco turned his head over his shoulder to see Virginia Weasley walk over to the bar and take the seat next to him. “Hello, Tom,” she said cheerfully. She was dressed in a modest black skirt and pale blue short-sleeved top. Leaning over the bar, she asked, “Could I just get my usual, Tom?” He nodded passed her a glass of elderflower wine. “Ta.”

Draco smirked at her as she raised the glass to her lips and took a sip. “Well, fancy running into you again. Are you stalking me, Miss Virginia?”

She set her glass down on the table and rolled her eyes. “Stalking you? Please. Chasing is more like it. I followed you here through half of Diagon Alley, shouting your name the whole time, and you never even turned around.”

“You followed me here?” he asked, confused. “How long were you following me for?”

She laughed and smiled at him with an evil twinkle in her eye. “If you’re asking if I saw you nearly get tossed through the Quality Quidditch Supplies window by a mob of first years, the answer is yes.”

“I could have taken them,” he retorted, draining his mug. “What were you chasing me for, anyway?”

“You know that interview with you I scheduled through your mother for next Friday?” he nodded, even though he had no clue what she was talking about. “Apparently, it’s off. I got an owl from your father this morning saying that in my upcoming piece about the Manor, the only occupant I was to concentrate solely on was himself.”

Draco sighed with relief. “Thank you, father, for that unintended blessing,” he said, raising his empty mug in a mock-toast. Watching him from the end of the bar, Tom apparently thought he was asking for a refill, as he brought him a fresh mug. Well, no complaints from Draco.

“Believe me, I’m not crying over it either,” said Ginny, taking another sip of her wine. “If only your father would go ahead and cancel the whole thing,” she added wistfully.

“What – does my father control everything that’s written in the Prophet?”

Ginny snorted and looked at him as if he was stupid. “Where is your mind, Malfoy? I always suspected you possessed one that didn’t quite work properly, but now I’m beginning to doubt its existence at all. Of course your father controls the Prophet! He controls everything. He may shun the title of Dark Lord in the public eye, but everyone with two working brain cells knows your father is nothing version two of You-Know-Who.”

Draco put down his mug, interested. Now they were delving deeper into the mystery that was Virginia Weasley. “Spoken like a true Indifferent,” he said to her sarcastically. “Tell me the truth, Virginia – where do your loyalties lie?”

She glared at him, not speaking. A minute of silence passed. “I do not have to justify myself to you,” she said finally in a polite but controlled tone. “I might identify more with one group’s principals than the other, but that does not mean I support either of them. You and your bloody suspicions can fuck off.” Throwing him one last death glare, she left her half full glass on the bar and stalked out of the hotel, nose in the air.

Draco hadn’t realized he had been staring at her retreating figure until the door of The Leaky Cauldron slammed shut. Sighing, he turned and glanced over his other shoulder, only to see every other customer staring at him. They hastily averted their eyes.

Tom came up again and, with a sigh, removed Ginny’s glass. “I’m sorry, Tom,” said Draco, suddenly realizing that Ginny has stormed out without paying for her drink. He reached into the pocket of his robes and pulled out a Galleon. “I’ll pay for our drinks.”

Tom ignored the coin, staring at the door as if he could somehow still see Ginny through it. “Lover’s quarrel?” he asked Draco casually.

Draco almost fell off his chair. “What? Us? No! What makes you say that?”

Tom ignored his question, looking thoughtful. “That one has always been a fighter. Good to see she’s getting some of her spirit back,” he said, almost to himself.

An idea suddenly struck Draco. If Virginia was going to be as closed-mouth as a clam over this whole deal, why not pump Tom for information? After all, he had probably known her for her entire life.

“Tom,” he said in a near whisper, leaning across the bar, “Why isn’t Ginny underground supporting The Resistance? Granted, she’s a pureblood and all, but the Weasleys are pro-muggleborns. They’re notorious for it. Not to mention that Harry Potter is practically their adopted son.”

Tom shook his head slowly. “Indeed. It’s a sad deal, Mr Malfoy. I’d imagine she would be supporting The Resistance, had things turned out differently at the Last Battle. Some things are just meant to happen, I guess.”

Draco was literally dying of curiosity now. He leant forward further until he was practically sprawled out over the bar. “Did something happen to her at the Last Battle?” he asked.

“To her, no,” Tom whispered in a conspirators tone. “She was on the site, as it was her graduation day, but the Order of the Phoenix used a mass relocation spell to remove the students from the immediate area just as the fighting started. It was her family. Every male in the Weasley clan was wiped out that day. Her mother died a few days later, a broken heart if I ever saw one. After that, she shut down. She left went to live in the muggle world for a year, and when she returned your father ordered a full investigation of her under the suspicion that she was a spy for The Resistance. Everything came up clear, though. She took a job at the Daily Prophet and has become something of a leader for the Indifferents. No one wants to forget the past more than Virginia Weasley.”

***

Ginny apparated into the study in her Hogsmeade flat with a loud pop. “ARUGH!” she screamed at the top of her lungs, seething with anger at yet another unpleasant encounter with Draco Malfoy. She swung her wand around her head, banishing a shelf full of books and papers to the other side of the room, where they slammed into wall and crashed to the ground. With another swish of her wand, all the parchment, quills, books and picture frames were swept off her desk…and right out the adjacent open window.

“Damn,” Ginny muttered, running to the window and sticking her head out of it. “Wingardium Leviosa!” The papers halted and began to rise up to her window. Ginny expertly directed the mass of paper back through her window, where she let it fall back on the floor.

Ginny sighed, and tossed her wand onto her now empty desktop. She looked around her. She had totally destroyed her study. She hadn’t lost her grip on her emotions like that since…well, for a long time. Ginny moved to kick the pile of papers on the floor in frustration, but ended up kicking something solid. Her eyes widened in realization as she heard the tinkle of glass breaking. Reaching down, she brushed several pieces of parchment and a paperback muggle book aside to reveal the familiar picture of her brothers, enclosed in it’s broken frame.

Careful not to cut herself, Ginny pulled the photograph out and, dropping the ruined frame on the floor, made her way over to her favorite overstuffed red chair in the corner. Leaning back in it, she raised the picture to her face. Percy, looking extremely peeved, was picking what Ginny assumed to be shards of glass out of Bill’s ponytail, while the twins were shaking their own heads and giving Ginny nasty looks.

“Sorry,” Ginny said, “it’s not like I did it on purpose.” She fell quiet, continuing to stare at the photograph without really seeing it. Thoughts of Draco Malfoy invaded her mind instead. She thought of how he looked sitting in The Leaky Cauldron at 11:30 in the morning, slouched over the bar and drinking that firewhisky as if it were the first water he’d had since returning from a three-day trek across the Sahara. What right did he have to sit there like that, looking like he was drowning in misery? The git didn’t even know the meaning of the word suffering. If anyone should be sitting in that pub 24/7, it was Ginny herself.

She sighed and shifted, throwing her legs over the arm of the chair, as she pictured in her mind the way Draco had looked that night at the party while he was talking to Blaise Zabini. He looked so animated, so…handsome. A far cry from the “Tortured Soul” Draco, which was the only side of him he had shown her so far. Closing her eyes, she pictured his face in her mind…his trademark smirk, his cool grey eyes and white-blonde hair…

Ginny sighed and pulled herself out of the chair. She was wasting her time fantasizing about Draco Malfoy. While he himself was gorgeous, his personality was something else, not to mention all the crap he had put her brother through while they were at school.

Picking up her wand, she abandoned her trashed study and headed down the hall to her bedroom. Simply decorated with white and peach, her room was her sanctuary. Ginny flopped onto her bed and amongst the gentle poofing of her down blanket raised her wand and pointed it towards the closet. “Accio shoebox!” she called.

A tattered cardboard box flew out of the top shelf in Ginny’s closet and placed itself in her hands. She sat herself up and tossed the lid off to the side. Inside, the box was crammed full of envelopes – letters, sent to her through the muggle post. All by the same person

Harry Potter – The Boy Who Lived.

She picked out an envelope, took out the paper inside, and began to re-read the familiar writing.

Dearest Ginny –

Tomorrow it will be five months since I last saw you. Nearly half a year. For the past seven years, I have never gone this long without seeing you.

Tomorrow also marks the five-month anniversary of the Last Battle. Ginny, I’m worried about you. You can’t possibly go through this on your own. You can’t escape your past by running to the Muggle world.

Hermione and I don’t go a day without talking about you, and all the other members of The Resistance are hoping you will finally come to your senses and join us. You belong here with us Ginny, fighting to uphold the beliefs and morals your family died trying to defend. Please, contact me. I can only take so many unanswered letters. Look for owls with a red thread around their left foot – these are The Resistance owls. Send a letter with any one of them and it’ll reach me. Please, Ginny. I miss you.

Ginny sighed, and placed the letter back in its envelope. That was one of the first letters Harry had sent her. Putting the envelope back in the shoebox, she picked reached for a more recent one.

Ginny –

Our numbers are steadily growing. Every day, more Indifferents are coming over to our side – when will you be one of them?

We have scored some minor victories against the Death Eaters lately. I don’t know if the Daily Prophet would have received any reports of them – everyone knows Lucius controls every magical institution, and most likely he’d want to keep this under wraps. We are planning a major assault, though, one that will not be so easy to cover up.

Hermione sends her love. Please reconsider. We need you. I need you.

Ginny folded the paper lifted her eyes to the ceiling, trying to ignore the tears that were threatening to fall. That letter, received three years ago, had been one of the last letters Harry had sent regularly. Not long after that, she had contacted him using one of The Resistance owls, asking him not to involve in Resistance work anymore. Now she only heard from him a couple times a year, usually on the anniversary of the Last Battle.

Which, by the way, was coming up. The five-year anniversary.

Ginny pressed her hands to her forehead in an attempt to quash a headache she already felt coming and let out a groan. Today was the ninth of June. The anniversary was on the fifteenth. The letters would start to come soon. A letter from Harry. A letter from the Memorial Society, inviting her to speak at the ceremony at Hogwarts, which she declined every year. Letters from old friends, who wrote to her without fail at this time every year to offer her kind words, but who otherwise never contacted her. 

Why wouldn’t they just leave her alone? She didn’t want to be the spokesperson for the Indifferents, a crusader for The Resistance, or a pureblood icon for the “New Ministry.” Everything and everyone important to her had been lost through war; she didn’t care if it was still going on. She was going to continue living her life as if everything was normal.

Ginny pulled herself out of her reverie. She regretted her tantrum before; her interview with Lucius Malfoy was tomorrow at the family’s manor, and her notes were now floating around god-knows-where under a mountain of spare parchment and books. With a huff, she dragged herself to her study, with a flick of her wand, turned on the wireless. Finding a bare spot on the floor, she settled herself on the blue carpet and started to shift through the mess, humming along to Celestina Warbeck.

Ginny had always enjoyed Celestina’s songs, and she soon slipped into a state of deep concentration. Ron had always snorted at her when he caught her singing along to the radio. “Celestina Warbeck is a singer for old folk, like mum and dad!” he always said as he’d wrestle with her to switch off the radio. “Honestly, Gin, when are you going to start listening to normal groups, like the Weird Sisters?” Then they’d both fight for the dial on the radio, Ginny’s attempts to explain that she did listen to the Weird Sisters sometimes muffled by Ron’s shoves, and eventually her mother would come storming into the room shouting, ‘Ronald! Virginia!’

“Virginia!”

Ginny gave a little scream and jumped, whipping her head around to see where the voice had come from. There, floating in her fireplace, was the smirking face of Draco Malfoy. God, twice in one day. Who had cursed her? Probably that pervy little photographer down at the Prophet, what was his name again….

Draco’s disembodied head laughed at having scared her. “God, you’re an odd sort of woman, Virginia,” he said through his chuckles. “You hardly make a sound when someone leaps out at you and pressed a wand to your throat, yet you scream and get all jittery when someone says your name.”

“I wouldn’t have been startled if you had just said my name like a normal person instead of screeching it like a banshee,” she snapped.

“And I wouldn’t have been screeching like a banshee if you had just answered me when I called you in a normal tone of voice the first fifty times,” he retorted easily.

Ginny’s fingers itched to snatch her wand and lock off her fireplace, which would leave him with a nasty headache and send him sprawling across his manor’s expensive marble floor. With her luck, however, he would crash straight into Lucius and that would be the end of her journalism career.

“I’d had enough of you for one day, Malfoy,” she said instead. “Tell me what you came to then get out of my fireplace.”

“Father’s throwing a party at the manor tomorrow to celebrate the anniversary of the Redemption,” he explained easily. “You’re invited, which of course means that he expects you to be there. Be at the Manor at five p.m. tomorrow.”

He started to fade out. “Wait!” Ginny cried, and he came back into focus. “What do you mean, five o’clock tomorrow? I have an interview with you father at five-thirty!”

“So bring your notebook,” he said, unfeelingly. “See you tomorrow.”

Then he disappeared with a pop.

Mentally cursing the Malfoys, Ginny gratefully looked around her already destroyed study. If it hadn’t already been trashed, she surely would have set fire to it then.

***

With a sigh, Draco dipped his quill in his bottle of Artic Ocean Squid Ink and drew a line through Ginny’s name on the parchment in front of him. Finished, he though irritably. Honestly, when Father told me to come home to commence my duties as his heir, I wasn’t aware that the word ‘heir’ had become a synonym for ‘secretary.’ He tossed the scroll of parchment into the fire behind him. Everyone who needed to be invited to the Redemption party tomorrow had been.

He left the library and went in search of his father. He had been trying to talk to him ever since he arrived home that afternoon, but the minute he apparated into the front hall his mother had directed him to library. “You’re father just has something he needs you to help him with, dear – it should only take a minute,” she had said before pushing him through the wooden doors and shutting them with a bang, leaving him trapped with a mountain of paperwork.

In a way, however, Draco was grateful for the mindless task- it allowed him to get some time to himself to think before he went barging off to his father. There were many things he had learnt since his arrival back home that had shocked him, but none had impacted him as much as the news of the Weasleys’s deaths. Sure, he couldn’t stand them, but he didn’t want them dead…well, Ron maybe. And perhaps those pain-in-the-ass twins as well, and that stuffy git who had been Head Boy in his third year…but never mind.

After thinking about it, he decided that the reason why the revelation that there was now only one surviving Weasley had shocked him so was because all through his tumultuous life, the Weasley family was the only thing that could be counted on to remain the same. The Weasley family was always huge, they were always poor, they all loved muggles…now there was only one and she had turned her back on everything her family had stood for. If there were one sign that would have told him that the world he had returned to was entirely changed from the one he had left, that would have been it. Yet there was still something clinging to his mind…just the tiniest shred of doubt…

Draco burst into what felt like the hundredth room he had tried, quickly scanning it with his eyes. The library. There, finally, was his father, standing besides one of the many bookshelves and talking to Narcissa in a low voice about tomorrow’s party. They both looked up as they heard the door bang open.

“There you are, dear,” Narcissa began. “Your father and I were just discussing the party. You will be wearing the new robes to the ball tomorrow, won’t you?”

“Naturally,” he said automatically. Then he remembered his purpose for storming in here. “Could I talk to father for a moment, mother?” he asked politely, glancing at his father as he did. Lucius nodded slightly.

“Of course,” obliged Narcissa, smiling although it was obvious she was annoyed at having her party planning interrupted. “I’ll just be in the kitchens giving the house elves the menu.” With that, she exited the room in a streak of dark red, her heeled shoes barely making a sound on the thick green carpeting.

Lucius settled himself into a plush red chair by one of the room’s many tall windows. “So, Draco,” he said as the heavy oak doors clicked shut. “What was it you wanted to talk about?”

“Father,” he said “I just heard about the Weasleys today…”

“Ah, yes, the Weasleys,” Lucius interrupted. “Very sad, really. They were one of the largest pureblooded families around, with a lineage that could be traced right back to the times of Salazar Slytherin himself. Oh well, that’s what happens when you choose the losing side.” Lucius looked at Draco curiously. “Why do you ask about them?”

Draco chose his words carefully. “I was just wondering, father,” he began, “if all the Weasleys are truly dead.”

“Of course not, boy,” Lucius snapped. “You know quite well the girl is still alive. I had you invite her to the party earlier this afternoon, didn’t I?”

Draco chose another path. “What I meant, father,” he clarified, “was to ask if all the Weasleys who are supposed to be dead are actually dead, and not merely…hidden.” Draco knew firsthand how extensive the dungeons beneath Malfoy Manor were, and had no doubt that they now contained their fair share of Phoenix prisoners from the war. All he wanted to know was if the Weasleys were now among some of its occupants.

Getting his meaning, Lucius huffed and stood from his chair. “Don’t be stupid, Draco,” he said as he made his way to the door. “With the exception of Virginia, all the Weasleys are definitely dead.”

Draco remained staring at the door, the sound of it slamming and his father’s words echoing in his ears.