♥ elentari13 wrote "Harder to Breathe" for paradise_loved ♥
Title: Harder to Breathe
Rating:PG-13
Summary:Everything he did, he did for her. Every breath he took, he took it for her, and now she's gone so he has trouble breathing.
Author's Note: A big thanks to Lyndsie for the quick beta and the mods for allowing me to have an extension. I'm not sure how much I stuck to the prompt (especially about the snark and banter part), the characters just got a life of their own and I strayed from the original idea for a bit, but I hope that the person who came up with such a great prompt will like it.
Harder to Breathe
1.
Everything he did, he did it for her. For Ginny.
Every time he raised his wand he did it not in hope that his side would win, not in firm, unquenchable belief that he did the right thing, but praying to whatever force might be up there that he got to see her alluring lips one more time. The sides of the war were unimportant to him, meaningless, and the line between them scrupulously blurred. To all of them, the good as much as the evil, he was only a necessity. Someone they'd gladly kill if they could afford the loss in times of war. Someone they would kill the moment he lost his purpose. Whoever won, death lay at the end of his path with its skeletal arms spread wide open for him.
He lived for her. Every breath he took, he took it for her; the main purpose of his life was to keep her heart beating until the end of the war. He killed and tortured with frightening apathy; the blood of his victims was oddly reminiscent of her hair on his sheets and, somehow, in some twisted way, that memory of her justified everything he had done so far. He liked to think of it as homage to her beauty, homage to her precious life.
He didn't believe in justice; he didn't believe in equality of all or pureblood supremacy; he believed in her.
And after every battle he came back to her, and didn't tell her a thing of what he'd done, and she knew every time. Her wide, brown eyes seemed to replay every second of it, every scream and every bloodstain and every ounce of pity squashed somewhere deep inside his heart. And she never said a word about it.
He lived through every battle for that one moment, the moment her deceitful lips will tell him that she's sorry, and that she loves him, and that, really, he should just leave her for she is nothing but baggage to him.
He didn't believe a thing she said.
Every night, she told him that she didn't deserve him, and pressed her lips against his. He didn't believe a word and they knew it.
He didn't deserve her; both of them were painfully aware of it. She wanted her hero, her saviour of the world, her noble and dauntless Potter. That's why she married Potter, not him, and that's why she stuck to Potter to watch the slow but sure fall of the Order. No matter how much Draco begged to let him pull her out of the mud, she stuck to her family. They were her life, and she was Draco's life, and Draco was a temporary amusement to her.
She knew her side would lose eventually; there was a mad and desperate gleam in her eyes every time she talked about the end of the war. She liked talking about it, building castles in the air and imagining a better future. She knew it would never happen. Yet she recklessly risked everything, even her own life, for it.
Her actions were senseless, contrasting one another and contrasting everything she ever said, and, to him, she was impossible to decipher. She'd spread her arms and close her eyes in the middle of the battle, the wind toying with the tendrils of her hair, and the only things Draco would hear as he danced around her, shielding her from curses, were hot blood pounding in his ears and her tinkling laugh, delicate and ladylike but always veering on the edge of insanity.
The next time he would see her, he'd yell until every inch of his body shook and he felt as if he was going to crumble to cinders, as if his heart was made of glass and she just kicked at it, leaving him crawling and picking up the shards. The thought of losing her would make the thin threads of madness wrap further around him, cling at him, claim him for that irrational hour when he'd bare all of his fears to her.
And she'd laugh again.
She talked of freedom when she explained it. She talked of the need to feel the cool air brushing her face, to sense the adrenaline rush, to be free, to be able to breathe freely for one time in her life. She was suffocating, she said, the air was pressing down on her and the walls were slowly closing, crushing her (her eyes widened, her lower lip trembling).
And he shattered to pieces all over again each time she said it.
She was mad, mad and dangerous, and so was he, and he loved her very, very much.
He begged her to join his Lord (although, technically, it wasn’t his lord at all, not to her; to her he was the Order’s spy, he was the spy of the Dark Lord only to the old family friends and acquaintances, and, honestly, he was terribly confused and wasn’t sure who he worked for anymore).
She begged him to leave her and go his own way.
She'd rather die then betray her beliefs.
He'd never let her go.
---
Everyone deemed it sure that the Dark Lord would win. The Order was almost destroyed, the despair of its dwindling members almost tangible. It had suffered some severe damage in the last few battles, lost a staggering amount of worthy people. Death Eaters suffered their losses, too, but Death Eaters didn't care. Death Eaters were pawns to the Dark Lord, pawns to each other, completely worthless and one hundred percent replaceable.
People of the Order stuck together, lived together, had families, friends, children, pets, favourite books, memories, futures, lives. They were close-knit, with deep bonds of compassion and shared memories tearing them to pieces when they'd lose one of their own.
The Death Eaters had nothing to lose; the Order had everything.
Draco had only Ginny to lose.
He swore he wouldn't, he swore he'd never let her go. He made frantic, barely coherent plans on what to do after the Dark Lord's victory. He'd listen to her even breathing and play different scenarios over and over in his head - completely different each time or different variations on a theme, it didn't matter. He imagined a bolder version of himself, a dazzling, dauntless Draco Malfoy who was as heroic as Harry Potter. He imagined standing up to the Dark Lord for her. He imagined hiding her, protecting her, saving her.
Ginny stuck to her memories, to her towers in the air, to her desperate make-believe of everything will be fine.. They wouldn't let her battle anymore, so she'd stay at Grimmauld Place and Draco would find her on the bed, squeezing her chest and drawing deep breaths. He thought it better for her to stay (the first thing in his life he agreed on with Potter) but after he voiced that she wouldn't tell him that she loved him anymore; she'd yell at him, screaming about the walls getting closer, closer, closer, closing down on her, screaming about her lungs getting emptier, emptier, emptier. She would say she's trying to breathe - trying, and trying, and trying so hard - but she can't, there's no air and it hurts, and she's going to suffocate, and she's going to die.
And then the next day she'd smile and say: "Of course we're going to win. Silly Draco, don't be such a pessimist. Oh, hello, Harry, how're things going?" And she'd kiss her husband soundly, leaving Draco to pick up the pieces of his heart with a dismal look on his face.
She didn't believe it, and it pained him that she kept the mask up for him, too - most of the time - even though he prided himself as the only person she was ever remotely honest with after Tom. Maybe she wasn't being honest with anyone, even herself; maybe she would truly go insane and suffocate to death if she let herself realize that the Order was walking into impending doom.
---
Potter won.
Draco thought of it as one of Fate's more cruel twists.
His heart should've stopped her the moment he saw her kissing Potter after the battle (her long lashes fluttered against his cheek; she seemed light-hearted and oblivious to the rain that drizzled around them). He hated it for continuing to beat; he hated it because he knew it was beating for her, the traitorous wrench with her alluring lips and porcelain skin with freckles dusted across her cheeks.
She didn't stop with breaking him to pieces this time - she was stepping on the shards and twisting her foot until she crushed him into fine, diamond-like dust.
Draco wasn't sure what compelled him to come to them; probably some inborn masochism that forced him to fall in love with her in the first place, the masochism that made him play the double-triple-and-so-on spy until he lost the last clue on whom he worked for, the masochism that made the idea of sticking to her and giving his life for her seem so tantalizing.
He grabbed her cold wrist and yanked her out of Potter's arms.
She laughed her tinkling laugh, only the insanity was now permanently etched in it, spoiling it and making it more beautiful at once. She sounded the way he felt, she laughed for him and at him and instead of him, barring all of the crushed emotions, the scorned ones, the ones he tried to push back to some desolate part of his heart.
"What are you doing, Malfoy?" Potter snapped (Ginny laughed again).
Draco didn't answer - couldn't answer; words scrambled at the back of his throat but his voice has vanished somewhere - he just cackled like Aunt Bella did before Ginny had killed her a month ago (like she’d killed his heart a second ago, like she killed him in every sense that mattered). He remembered how hard Ginny had laughed then; he remembered Aunt Bella's face tainted crimson like Ginny's hair.
He wanted to do to Potter what Ginny had tone to Aunt Bella.
"Leave my wife alone, Malfoy!"
The words knocked the air out of him.
And it wouldn't come back.
Now, he knew how it felt to suffocate. He knew how it felt to lose everything that mattered, to lose the will to breathe.
Ginny stood with her arms spread: her right one intertwined with Potter's, Draco's fingers grasping the left one as if it was the only thing stopping the ground from opening and letting him fall down to nothingness. Raindrops glided down her face.
It felt like she had stabbed a knife in his chest and twisted it again and again and again and again. He wouldn't let go of her because the pain at least marked him alive, at least it left him with something other but lack of air and lack of any emotion but irrational love for her.
She laughed and laughed and laughed until the sound reached its crescendo.
And when it did, their fingers burned a hundred degrees and the metaphorical wound in his chest was huge and lethal, bleeding him to death. He needed to let her go; his body edged away from her, praying for the pain to stop. He listened to it - his brain was dizzy from the lack of air and didn't have much say in what Draco did (according to his father, it never did, not even under normal circumstances, but his father was a bastard and Draco would never admit he was right).
So he let her wrist go. He knew it was the right thing to do - if he had stuck to her for a moment longer, he'd never be able to leave. Her arm dropped to her side and she fell silent.
He regretted doing it a second after - he tried to breathe, but there was no air again, not even that small dose. Nothing. He didn't have Ginny, so it meant he had nothing.
Draco forced himself to go through the motions, forced his lips to open and draw in a lungful to air he barely felt, forced his legs to back away from them, scrambling.
By the time the rain stopped, he was already running, drenched. Aurors wanted to stop him several times, but someone would tell them that, yes, everything is okay, and, yes, the Malfoy boy is on their side, the poor kid's just a little traumatized, aren't we all?
He thought insane was more like it.
When he turned back, Potter had both of Ginny's hands in his. He pressed them to his lips.
Draco swore he'd never turn back again.
2.
He moved to the family mansion in France.
The place hasn't been cleaned since the house elf that took care of the house has died - years, maybe even decades ago. His mother had always hated it, always complained about the stifling atmosphere and the old-fashioned furniture that belonged to Father's parents (Father felt too attached to it to throw it away), about the lack of light and the closeness of the hideous Muggle city under the hill. She refused to go there and, with time, the house was forgotten.
A thick layer of dust covered the precious furniture. Spiders had spun elaborate cobwebs across the family portraits and the house creaked and rattled with every step he made as if the very walls protested against him.
Draco lacked the patience necessary to clean the old house and lacked the will to get himself a new elf - he had to do something with his hands while his mind reeled with anger, with betrayal.
The wound in his chest was spreading, and as he threw the priceless junk into the rooms he didn't intend to use, he recalled the greatest moments he and Ginny had shared, purposefully inflicting the pain that came with remembering her to make sure he was alive. Soon, he was out of glorious moments and he moved to less significant memories, then to every day he had spent with her that he could recall, taking every moment and dissecting its tiny details until the pain was sharp like glass, like the ornamental dagger his father used instead of a paperweight.
By the end of the year, he was done with ten rooms (which left some forty untouched); he deliberately picked ten brightest ones as a tribute to his mother and furnished it with Lucius's most prized objects.
By the end of the year, he was done with all of their memories and his anger was burned out - he had never realized how short they'd been together until then - the wound healed around the edges, leaving a wide gap where his heart used to be, and the pain slowly soothed, leaving only numbness behind.
And then his idle brain started replaying other scenes - the maddening ones he used to suppress with thoughts of Ginny, the ones he used to justify with protecting Ginny. The ones with rows of bodies he had killed, soaked in blood and wrapped in white cloth; only the blood didn't resemble the colour of her hair anymore, it resembled the colour of guilt, the colour of a long lost conscience returned to haunt him.
The screams of the long gone pierced his ears - unwillingly, he screamed with them - he heard their pleas, their futile bargains with him, with their gods, with the fates; he heard them shrieking out promises they could keep, only if he kept them alive, only if he showed mercy.
He had never appreciated Ginny that much before, never realized that she kept the nightmares at bay, that she justified everything, that protecting her life justified everything.
Now that he had lost her all those lives seemed thrown away for nothing - and the sane, conscious part of him said he didn't care but the subconscious, the conscience, the silent voices in the dark said yes you do, yes you do, yes you do.
In his dreams, they reached for him with their thin, bloodied fingers; they looked at him with empty, glassy eyes, they begged and they accused until, after months and months of it, he was capable of doing nothing but sitting in his bed with his arms curled around his legs and his forehead pressed against his knees, as the house stopped creaking and rattling and fell back to slumber, dust and cobwebs returning to it.
---
He wasn't sure who he was or where he was when Pansy Apparated, wrinkling her upturned nose at the state of the house.
"You're a mess," she said blandly, wiping the dust off her robes as if she was afraid she'd get ill from all the dirt. "And you left me all alone out there, in Britain, to deal with the post-war wizarding elite made of heroic war heroes and their innocent little wives."
"I'm sure you handled it well," Draco rasped.
"Oh, no, I'm crushed." Pansy touched a hand to her heart in mock-sadness. "My third husband just died and I'm grieving." She gestured to her black, fashionably cut robes. "Someone poisoned him, you know. I wonder who it was," she added innocently.
Draco wanted to laugh at her little remark; to say that she hadn't changed at all, but his lips had forgotten how to laugh, his muscles had gone slack and refused to move properly.
"And you weren't there to help me through the hard periods of my life. Like when my previous two husbands died."
Pansy was all about herself, he thought. Me, me, me. .
"But, a great friend that I am, I came here to help you through the hard period of your life. Or I will, as soon as you tell me what the fuck is wrong with you."
"Leave me alone, Pansy. Just… just leave me alone."
"Okay, I might not have come immediately., but, Draco," she twirled around, her robes dragging across the dust, casting silent cleaning charms all over the place, "I had my own issues and I'm not a silly sixteen-year-old anymore, running after you like a frenzied puppy."
He decided he loved Pansy - in a completely unromantic way, of course - he loved how she made him feel less insane, less lost and numb, and more himself, more like the old Draco from the past, the Draco who flirted with pretty girls and cared only about Quidditch and what Snape would say and how to be better than Potter. That thought made him realize that he never managed to do that last thing; he realized that Potter had bested him in everything, leaving just a shell of the person he used to be.
Potter took her away, he took his life away, he took his sanity away - suddenly the old flame of anger was rekindled and everything was suddenly Potter's fault, not his, not the Dark Lord's.
Suddenly he wanted to continue living, he wanted to best Potter just this one time, he wanted to extract revenge.
"And what are you doing now, if you're not running after me?" he found the strength to sneer.
"Saving you, like a noble, model citizen of post-war wizarding England should." She let her hand drop to her side. "Just because I dedicated some time to myself doesn't mean I gave up on you, Draco. It doesn't mean I stopped loving you."
"Just because you got married - three times, - doesn't mean you gave up on me." He said just to taunt her. He wasn't jealous, at least not in that way.
"For money, darling, for money." The bed squeaked when she sat next to him. "My family's dead, my money's confiscated and given to some dirt-poor blood-traitors like the Weasleys and-"
"Leave the Weasleys alone." His voice quavered at her last name.
He didn't know what compelled him to stand up for the family he had spent years scorning and humiliating. Maybe it had something to do with the memory of Ginny laughing in the rain suddenly springing to his mind, chasing away all the ghosts of his victims but re-opening the old wound, making it sore around the edges.
"Draco, darling, you're ill!" She put a warm hand on his forehead. "And you're so skinny, I'm sure you haven't eaten anything in days. What's going on?"
"You don't know what it's like," he shook his head, "when they come back to haunt you. All the Mudbloods, and the blood-traitors, and the Death Eaters, you don't what it's like know when they come back, bent on sending you round the twist. And their eyes, they just… they just…." His voice cracked.
She scooped him up, cradling his upper torso on the enormous bed, pulled out her wand and Disapparated them both with an almost inaudible cracking sound.
---
Pansy got him into shape, shaved the stubble off his face and cut his hair to a reasonable length, threading through it and gluing it back like his mother used to do. She stayed in the Manor and nursed him back to health with the patience only a person as obsessed with him as she was could have.
He always thought her a little mad, a little psychopathic and a little too dramatic (but weren't they all, after the war, and how was he better than her with his old ghosts and his fixation on Ginny Potter?), never grew to appreciate her friendship and support like he did in those couple of weeks when he saw how devastated, pillaged and ravaged the Manor was.
Most of the Manor's furniture was pushed against the walls or piled up in the corners - Pansy said the Ministry was looking for dark artefacts. Some precious things that reminded him of childhood were broken and ruined; memories of the house he loved so much, of the house he grew up in, were spoiled and distorted by the image of an abandoned Manor.
The wound opened up again, the pain throbbing inside him with the thought of how close Ginny was, how close he was to having everything he needed. He imagined that if he took a walk and walked long enough, he'd find her somewhere, in her tattered robes, laughing like a lunatic, laughing like she meant it.
He was just tired, tired to his bones and he needed her, needed her invigorating presence to breathe life into him.
3.
Ginny sent an invitation.
It was a party invitation, with swirling gold letters printed on thick, expensive parchment, the kind of invitation shallow trophy wives and slaves of society and good name send to each other, making sure that the invitation matches the décor of the party.
In the corner she - or someone else, he couldn't recall how her handwriting looked, but he liked to believe it was her, he liked to believe she added a personal touch to it - had scrawled the name D. Malfoy. He saw another name, Ginevra Molly Weasley-Potter printed somewhere in the middle, ready to jump at him from the parchment while all the other letters bunched around it, blurring together into one big indistinguishable mess.
He decided he wasn't going to go. Of course he wasn't. He wasn't going to torture himself any further.
One particular word, Potter, screamed from the page and made him want to scream in return.
---
The old, ungainly habits kicked in and he decided to come for her, for Ginny, like he'd always done everything for her.
As he had guessed, the large ballroom of her new house (it had belonged to the Notts once, he recalled, and how did it end up in the hands of Saint Potter and his wretched wife, anyway?) was decorated in gold, lots and lots of gold fabric covered the furniture, was draped artistically over the walls and pulled over the tall Gothic windows. Some music - it sounded final and ominous to him, like a death march - played from one of the corners, the instruments enchanted for the sound to carry through the room.
Despite the cosy temperature, the house felt cold and lifeless, the chill seeping under his skin and making hairs rise at the back of his neck.
None of the other guests seemed to notice - the gentlemen were deep into conversation, the ladies laughed their perfectly practiced laughs, playing coy, and the young couples swirled on the polished dance floor in clouds of expensive, flowing robes.
He made one step, then another one and suddenly this was a bad, bad idea, and he chastised himself for coming in the first place. She was going to be there any time now, with Potter, and he should've at least taken a pretty, shallow girl with him because Merlin knew that, despite his family's fall from grace, the girls still saw him as a good opportunity for marriage.
They didn't care if he was insane, they didn't care if he was suffocating all the time, if he was a walking dead man, as long as he had money. From some odd reason, he appreciated them for that.
He turned to leave.
Someone put a hand on his shoulder, and the gentle, familiar touch sent a rush through his body.
"Draco Malfoy! I haven't seen you in ages!"
He turned, forcing his face to twist into a perfectly pleasant mask, only he knew it contained much more pain and contempt than he wanted it to.
Ginny. Ginny Potter.
And both her hands were still in Potter's, only now they were covered with silk gloves (the colour of pale gold, to match her robes and the invitations and the decorations and the colour of Potter's chivalrous heart). She wasn't the fickle trollop anymore, possibly annoying at times but definitely precious and addictive; now she was the unflappable hostess, the wife of a war hero.
His demons started nibbling at the edge of the old wound, tearing it apart with long, skeletal fingers.
For the first time in months he could thoroughly enjoy the air he breathed, feel its substance and rich texture, but the price was the tearing pain in his chest and it wouldn't stop, no matter how much he tried to shut it out.
"I'm so glad you came," she said, taking his hand in her own and covering it with another. Her palms were warm like he had remembered them and it brought relief, a smudge of hope that things might go back to how they were.
Her lips twitched upwards and Draco's heart quickened its pace; a rush of masochistic pleasure coursed through his body and mixed with the pain as he prepared to hear her laugh, to have her bring him back to life.
But she just smiled. She smiled with the tranquillity Ginny Weasley had never had, a serene smile Draco would have never imagined on her face.
"I'm glad I came, too," he said - he wasn't sure if it was a lie or not - and was surprised at how normal his voice sounded.
"It's nice to see you again, Malfoy," Potter said gruffly, contempt blazing in his stupid, heroic green eyes. "Ginny was looking forward to seeing you."
Draco felt an underlying thickness to his words, and although he'd usually probe and poke and try to uncover their true meaning and use it to his ends, he was too consumed iby Ginny to focus on irrelevant people like Potter.
She had changed.
She had cut her hair so it only reached her chin, and not very precisely at that; Draco could see the few uneven tendrils sticking out, longer then the rest of it. He’d loved running his fingers through her hair; he’d loved watching it drape over his hand and slither back down like silk, and it hurt, it hurt so much to see it gone, like a great part of her personality had gone with it. Like the part of her that belonged to him had gone with it.
The wound tore itself further apart.
"What'd you do with your hair?" he asked, sounding like a petulant child.
He tried to school his features into submission, tried to straighten up his spine and draw back his shoulders instead of bending over and screaming in pain and frustration. He crossed his arms over his chest as if it would shut the hole and searched her eyes desperately, coaxing them to see what he'd been through.
Only she couldn't see, not anymore.
The silence stretched on and he drew a deep breath, relishing every ounce of air that reached his lungs.
"What do you think I've done?" she asked, toying with the dainty edge of her sleeve.
He didn't answer.
The silence stretched.
"I'm going to greet Dean and Luna," Potter whispered to her ear.
She dropped Draco's hand and put a finger under Potter's chin, turning his head until they were face to face. She kissed him before letting him go, and when he turned to leave she stretched her arm, and he stretched his, so their fingers could touch one last time.
Draco gritted his teeth.
The song (the one he thought sounded like a death march) ended on a high note and the orchestra started playing a new, softer melody.
He extended his hand towards her, palm up, and she put her smaller one in it, letting him lead her to the dance floor.
"You've ruined it," he breathed as she placed a tentative hand on his shoulder.
"I've cut it," she said with an air of finality. "It was unnecessary."
"You shouldn't have."
"It was awful. I like it better this way."
"It's worse now."
Draco's mind reeled; suddenly he wasn't sure if they were talking about them, or about her hair, or about something completely irrelevant.
"No, it's not."
"I hate it. How could you do it?"
"Oh, how dare I have the audacity to cut my own hair off without asking you first? Really, Malfoy, I knew you were self-centred, but this is just too much."
He opened his mouth to tell her something along the lines of Well, there're some other things you shouldn't have done without asking me first, but he hated to breach some unspoken arrangement between them, the one that said that the past was dead and was not to be mentioned.
"It's ill fitting of a lady. They should have long hair." He turned the conversation to safer waters.
"Well, I'm not a lady."
"No?"
"Well, I thought you of all people would know that." Bitterness crept into her voice. "You even used to flaunt the knowledge around so everyone could hear: 'Your house is a bin, Weasley,' 'Your mother is a fat cow, Weasley, and you're going to be as fat as she is in a couple of years,' 'If you can't afford proper clothing, you should walk naked instead of wearing something you've found in a trash bin.' "
"Maybe I meant it in an affectionate sort of way."
He'd hate it if she thought he hated her.
"Maybe the Dark Lord killed all the Muggle-borns in an affectionate sort of way," she snorted.
"You've changed." It was a statement, an accusation, a question and a cry of despair; he wasn't sure what he meant with it and he left it to her to figure out the meaning.
"Everyone's changed."
"I hate it. I hate your short hair and your expensive robes and your stupid smile."
"So you hate me. What's new in that?"
"I don't hate you, I hate what you've become, Weasley. It's not you," he blurted out.
"It's Potter, ok?" she snapped and disentangled her body from his, lifting the skirts of her robes and rushing back to her precious husband.
---
He spent the rest of the night standing in the corner, looking haughtily bored and observing her from the corner of his eye.
She spent most of the night with Potter, dancing and being the real social butterfly, fluttering from one group of people to the next and looking pleasant and inviting.
She was more beautiful than ever before. It was then that he realized how ragged and sad and wasted and haggard his Ginny (the one he loved, the one who laughed like a madwoman, the one who craved the invigorating rush of wind on her face) was compared to Potter's Ginny (this girl in expensive silk robes who never laughs, just smiles). He noted how more beautiful Potter's Ginny was compared to Draco's, how tantalizing she was, how serene she looked. She wasn't the restless girl whose fingers always twitched when she heard a loud sound outside, no, she was a lady. A lady who didn't see anything when she looked him in the eye. Or couldn't.
Or wouldn't.
It was like an epiphany; a sudden, startling realization that this new Ginny wasn't what he was looking for, what he longed for, after all.
With that, he felt his lungs slowly getting drained out of air until the last drop was gone and there was only pain, dwindled to a numb ache in the stomach of a man who wasn't quite alive but wasn't entirely dead, either.
He pushed himself off the wall and twisted the door open.
This time, he didn't look back and there was no one to place a hand on his shoulder and coax him into staying.
4.
Pansy's latest victim came in the form of a rich Wizengamot member, thirty and then some years older than her. He fell in love with her vivaciousness and youthful face, and she fell in love with his Gringotts account and the beautiful, bright mansion near her old one.
He always held her hand, never moved away from her side when they were together, and she seemed eager for his presence and thrilled that she would marry him.
Draco still saw the contempt glimmering in her eyes, the tenseness of the muscles on her face when she twisted her lips into a smile - a perfect, gracious, ladylike, entirely fake smile - and the little jerk of retreat she'd unwillingly make every time his hands touched her body.
"He's the last one, I swear," she told Draco later, when they were alone.
Of course she still frequented the Manor, out of loyalty and out of fear that he'd fall back to his dark, insane moods, the ones they never talked of. Of course she always ended up in his bedroom, where he liked to imagine that her short hair - just like Ginny's - was red, not black.
"As if I care."
"Because you know I love only one man, and you know who it is."
"I don't."
She pouted her lips. "It's clearly-"
"Don't tell me." He waved his hand, the old smirk playing on his lips. "Let me guess. Is he similar to you?"
"Of course." She twisted a lock of her hair. "We share all the traits that make both of us truly Slytherin."
"Is it the Dark Lord, then? Snape? Gilderoy Lockhart? No, wait, you've gone lesbian and fell in love with Umbridge?"
He liked taunting her; her frustrated huffs and the stomping of her foot - like spoiled little four-year-olds have a habit of doing when they smear chocolate over their favourite pink, frilly robes - grated his ears like finest music.
"I hate you, Draco."
"I hate you too, Pans."
---
Wedged between Pansy and Daphne Greengrass, he hungrily sucked every ounce of air around him, trying to force it down to his lungs, trying not to choke on it. Daphne was smoking a cigarette and the smoke curled around them, polluting the air with a sickly, bittersweet scent he'd never felt before.
Daphne was saying something but he didn't pay attention; he let her voice mix and blur with the cacophony of Pansy's engagement party, with the soft melody and the excited chatter of the guests.
Ginny didn't laugh.
He had watched her all night; she wore an off-white set of robes that exposed her cleavage and made her look like a beautiful, porcelain china doll dusted with cinnamon freckles, freckles he used to count when the nights drew long.
And then he noticed the cracks in her porcelain mask of the perfect young lady, and suddenly she looked less like an alluring angel and more like one with her wings clipped off, broken and lifeless and cold and forever stuck with the same expression chalked across her face, like a true porcelain doll.
Her freckles disclosed her low-class origin. The strands of her hair that peeked out from the pixie cut, longer than the rest of them, made her look like a sanatorium escapee. Her smile screamed fake, and Draco wished he could scream with it. Sometimes she'd slip out of her role and make a rather graceless move, and she always seemed to balance on the thin line between being unnaturally stiff and committing a faux pas. She stared at her feet when she danced.
He loved her so much.
She hated people surrounding her from all sides - her breathing would quicken, she'd put a hand to her chest (as if she's suffocating, Draco thought incredulously) and then excuse herself to the ladies' room. She had troubles with words like love and lost and freedom; her fingers would regain their old nervous twitch and she'd close her eyes with a sigh.
A rush of air coursed through his lungs - there was still hope. She was going to save him, she was going to love him back, she was going to keep him sane.
The wound was eating his body away, burning, burning, burning with desire to touch her, to feel the old electricity rushing through him with her touch. His body forced himself to stand up against the frantic, ungainly orders of the small, rational part of him. His knees shook and he couldn't focus on anything but her; he pushed through the gasping ladies and the annoyed gentlemen and saw only her, his angel, his salvation; he could almost see the feathery wings attached to her back.
He felt someone tugging at the sleeve of his robes, slipping her small hand in his. Pansy.
"She's the one? She's the one you love? Instead of me?" she asked as realization dawned on her. It was almost a wail, the familiar last shrieks of a crushed heart that were all too familiar to him.
He saw the rise and fall of Ginny's chest quickening as they came closer, completing the little circle formed around her and her husband.
She looked around frantically, like a hapless deer flashed by the light of a wand, her face suddenly pale like she was about to faint.
"Mr. Potter, Mrs. Potter," Pansy said. "It's always a pleasure to see the people who brought freedom to our secluded little world."
Ginny's smile froze in place; Draco could almost hear her gritting her teeth. The wound was killing him; her pain was his pain and he just wanted to make Pansy stop talking, he just wanted to scream shut up, shut up, shut up, can't you see you're hurting my angel, you wrench? He masked a pained gasp with a polite cough.
"It's always a pleasure to know that, after all the losses, there's still happiness and a place for blossoming lovers like Aaron and I to exist."
"Oh, dear, I think I need some water. Could you call one of your elves for me and tell him to get me some water, Miss Parkinson?" Ginny slapped a hand over her forehead, palm up. "I'm not feeling very well."
"For you I'd rather call an undertaker, Mrs. Potter," Pansy said tartly, forgetting all pretence of politeness and ladylike behaviour.
Potter opened his mouth to defend her honour like every good hero would, but she cut him off.
"You don't have to be so… so malicious," Ginny squeaked, near tears. Draco could sense the false ring to her voice but Pansy looked ridiculously pleased. She pretended to recover as Pansy snapped her fingers, summoning an elf. "I'm guessing you know all the good undertakers, though. You must be their best customer."
"What?"
"After having buried so many husbands, and clearly intending to bury some more, you'd have some experience with funerals."
"What makes you guess I'll bury more?"
"You need to justify your reputation as the new Seraphina Zabini, of course."
"Blinkey is sorry to interrupt, but did the mistresses want something?" The elf tugged at the hem of Pansy's robes.
"Oh, it's okay, I think I need to go to the ladies' room to freshen up, anyway."
Ginny turned on her heel and walked out of the room. Draco made a step towards her, following, but Pansy's hand closed around his wrist.
"Where are you going? To follow the stupid bint? She's making a fool out of you, Draco dearest."
"I want to know what's wrong with her. Haven't you seen how she-"
"Of course I've seen, a long time ago. She thinks she's fooling someone with her bravado - ha!"
He didn't want to yank the arm away and cause a scene that would be retold for months in the wizarding high society. The knuckles of Pansy's other hand turned white as she strengthened her grasp on her wand.
"Let go of me," he hissed.
"I don't know what you see in her," she said cattily. "See, I'm way more beautiful."
In her green robes, she was reminiscent of a giant snake out to poison everyone, sent by Satan himself to roam the world and spoil and corrupt. Her girlish voice was coated with venom and malice glimmered in her cerulean eyes - when she'd turn her head and let light fall in the right direction, Draco thought he saw a glimmer of crimson red, like the Dark Lord's eyes, like the glimmer Aunt Bella's eyes started to gain before she died.
He suddenly hated her, suddenly wanted to grab her neck and snap it until she was just another one of those bodies, covered in blood, killed for Ginny and in Ginny's name.
"Don't be a bitch, Pansy." He extracted his hand from hers, removing her grasp finger by finger. "Don't be a bitch who fell in love with her own reflection."
"At least I'm sane."
Draco wasn't sure if she was implying that Ginny wasn't, or if she meant him after all.
---
He found her in a secluded hallway, doubled over and curled up like a wounded cat. A tantalizing angel with her wings cut, with lips in crimson lipstick, with unevenly cut damask hair falling over her eyes, she murmured indistinguishable things into the fabric of her robes.
"Ginny?" he said, clinging to she sight of her like a drowning man would cling to the surface, to the last drops of air.
She laughed.
Her laugh sounded like freedom, sounded like happiness and love and life and death and insanity. She sounded like Aunt Bellatrix, but with the undertone of his mother's soft tinkle when she'd lull him to sleep. It felt like the very essence of life was caught in that laugh, raising him back from the dead, healing the wound as if it was never there, sucking out the venom of his pain from his blood.
"It won't happen," she said, still laughing. Her voice was hollow, hollow like his chest used to be. "It won't happen again. I love you, Draco, I love you so much, so much, so much, but it won't happen again, I swear I won't return to you. I think I'm going insane."
He just stared at her, unable to make sense of her words. He swore he wasn't going to let her kick the air - the life - out of him again, and he expected it would require a fight, but his ears were filled with her tinkling laugh, with the insanity threaded through it, and he knew that, as long as she was there, next to him, he'd be fine.
"Well, what are you waiting for? Get out of my fucking life!"
She stood up, tears gliding down her face (like rain used to on that day when he first left) and smearing her mascara, creating streaks of black down her cheeks. He could see she was confused, so confused, so desperate, not sure what to do and what to say and how to, for the first time in her life, make those two not contradict.
This was the girl he loved, the reckless one, the mad one, the dangerous one.
Her exhilarating presence pressed at him from all sides, her laugh echoed in her ears.
"Why?"
"Because, if you stay, if you stay with me and if I keep loving you, I'll go mad. I'll go fucking mad, Draco, and what would that do to my family? What would that do to Harry? What would that do to you? Would you still love me if I were mad? Would you-" Her voice cracked.
Half of her face was black from the mascara and the tears, and the other half was deathly white. She bit on her lower lip until she cut it and crimson blood started prickling from the wound.
"When I'm with you, I can breathe. I'm happy, Draco, I'm alive, but I guess I'm not meant to be alive, I'm not meant to be happy because, when I am, I can't keep my sanity. I'm born for tragedy. And when you're gone, it all goes numb. Why does it all go numb, Draco, why do I feel dead? Why do I feel stifled and bound and chained and why am I constantly suffocating, why are the walls pressing against me? Without you, I can be sane but it's not me. This doesn’t make any sense, any sense at all. Does it make sense to you? Because I barely know what I’m talking about."
She dropped to her knees, her robes shuffling.
"And I can't get away from you. I need you so much."
She looked like one of the ghosts that haunted him, broken and ragged and torn it half, a shadow, a fallen angel, but to him, she was still the little trollop, she was still the little girl that kept him sane, the girl that could read the pain in his eyes.
Maybe she never could, he thought as he slid to the floor next to her, wrapping his arms around his beautiful girl's shoulders and cradling her like a small child. Maybe it was her pain all along, he thought, her insanity; maybe he was the one reading her.
"Why are the walls closing down, Draco?" she whispered. "Why is all the air gone?"
She grasped for his hands and laced her fingers with his. She was trembling.
Suddenly she twisted her head towards him and searched for his lips. He obliged, and it felt like he was reborn, like she was teaching him to live all over again.
She pressed her forehead to his.
"Is it better to be dead or insane?" she breathed.
"Whatever keeps me closer to you."
He pressed soft butterfly kisses to her lips, her face, her neck, indulging in her body like a starving man would indulge in food. He counted the freckles all over again.
"Madness, then," she breathed. "You should stay away from me, Draco, I'm not worth it."
"Staying away kills me. I'm not a masochist. Not that much, at least."
She laughed again. "You're insane, too."
He couldn't agree more with her evaluation.
Suddenly, his whole body felt elated, every muscle tense like a spring pressed to hard, right before something would release it. He wanted to run and jump, he wanted to scream and laugh, and still he wanted to stay in that place forever, clinging to her, kissing her face, salty from tears.
"Let run," he grinned.
"What?"
"I dare you. I dare you to live, I dare you to breathe. Let's get away from this wretched place and go somewhere, together. Let's be insane together."
"Draco, I-"
His heart broke into thousands of little shards all over again. "I knew it. You don't love me."
"Draco-"
"You love Potter."
"Draco-"
"You wanted your hero all along."
"Draco, I think that's a great idea. To run, that is."
And just like that his heart was healed, like someone had flicked an omnipotent wand and whispered a Reparo, and just like that they were back to laughing.
"When?"
"Now."
She laughed as he rose from the floor and helped her to her feet. She tripped on the hem of her robe and he caught her. She pressed her head against his chest and he kissed the crown of her hair. Her laugh filled the hallway, louder than the music that came from the ballroom, more beautiful, more honest, more real than any music could ever be.
He hugged her with one arm (she laughed and laughed and laughed) and pulled out his wand from the pocket of his dress robes.
“Will you love me even though I’m insane?”
“I’ll love you always.”
The ominous crack that followed, the sound of them Disapparating, marked the beginning of a new life.
6.
Ginny Malfoy spun around in that same manor on the French countryside, flicking and swishing her wand to all directions. The edges of her robes lifted the old dust from the floor, the only remnants of Draco's demons, as she cast spell after spell. It twirled with her and around her, completely harmless, barely noticeable.
She laughed like a madwoman, her long, damask hair flying in all directions, her arms spread. Sunshine lit her face, made the freckles scattered across her skin all the more prominent.
With each spell a large chunk of the Manor's ancient walls blew up, bringing more light into the dreary place. Her tinkling laugh muffled the sound of bricks crumbling and falling to the ground, several floors down, and the gasps of several shocked Muggles that happened to pass by.
"I love you," she told him with a giggle.
And this time, he believed her.
ORIGINAL REQUEST:
What would you like to receive?
The tone/mood of the fic: Something dark and other-worldly, but I still definitely want some good snark and banter. I want something that'll make me think and laugh.
An element/line of dialogue/object you would like in your fic: There's a really great quote from The Scarlet Letter that is: "It was as if a window were thrown open, admitting a freer atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where his life was wasting itself away, amid lamplight, or obstructed day-beams, and the musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral, that exhales from books. But the air was too fresh and chill to be long breathed for comfort." Obviously that quote shouldn't be in the fic, but I would love the idea of it to be incorporated if you can.
Preferred rating of the the fic you want: Soft R at the highest, but I think I'd rather it be played safe with a PG-13.
Canon or AU? Author's preference.
Deal Breakers (what don't you want?): OOC-ness, and I'd rather this one not be like a romantic comedy.
Rating:PG-13
Summary:Everything he did, he did for her. Every breath he took, he took it for her, and now she's gone so he has trouble breathing.
Author's Note: A big thanks to Lyndsie for the quick beta and the mods for allowing me to have an extension. I'm not sure how much I stuck to the prompt (especially about the snark and banter part), the characters just got a life of their own and I strayed from the original idea for a bit, but I hope that the person who came up with such a great prompt will like it.
Harder to Breathe
1.
Everything he did, he did it for her. For Ginny.
Every time he raised his wand he did it not in hope that his side would win, not in firm, unquenchable belief that he did the right thing, but praying to whatever force might be up there that he got to see her alluring lips one more time. The sides of the war were unimportant to him, meaningless, and the line between them scrupulously blurred. To all of them, the good as much as the evil, he was only a necessity. Someone they'd gladly kill if they could afford the loss in times of war. Someone they would kill the moment he lost his purpose. Whoever won, death lay at the end of his path with its skeletal arms spread wide open for him.
He lived for her. Every breath he took, he took it for her; the main purpose of his life was to keep her heart beating until the end of the war. He killed and tortured with frightening apathy; the blood of his victims was oddly reminiscent of her hair on his sheets and, somehow, in some twisted way, that memory of her justified everything he had done so far. He liked to think of it as homage to her beauty, homage to her precious life.
He didn't believe in justice; he didn't believe in equality of all or pureblood supremacy; he believed in her.
And after every battle he came back to her, and didn't tell her a thing of what he'd done, and she knew every time. Her wide, brown eyes seemed to replay every second of it, every scream and every bloodstain and every ounce of pity squashed somewhere deep inside his heart. And she never said a word about it.
He lived through every battle for that one moment, the moment her deceitful lips will tell him that she's sorry, and that she loves him, and that, really, he should just leave her for she is nothing but baggage to him.
He didn't believe a thing she said.
Every night, she told him that she didn't deserve him, and pressed her lips against his. He didn't believe a word and they knew it.
He didn't deserve her; both of them were painfully aware of it. She wanted her hero, her saviour of the world, her noble and dauntless Potter. That's why she married Potter, not him, and that's why she stuck to Potter to watch the slow but sure fall of the Order. No matter how much Draco begged to let him pull her out of the mud, she stuck to her family. They were her life, and she was Draco's life, and Draco was a temporary amusement to her.
She knew her side would lose eventually; there was a mad and desperate gleam in her eyes every time she talked about the end of the war. She liked talking about it, building castles in the air and imagining a better future. She knew it would never happen. Yet she recklessly risked everything, even her own life, for it.
Her actions were senseless, contrasting one another and contrasting everything she ever said, and, to him, she was impossible to decipher. She'd spread her arms and close her eyes in the middle of the battle, the wind toying with the tendrils of her hair, and the only things Draco would hear as he danced around her, shielding her from curses, were hot blood pounding in his ears and her tinkling laugh, delicate and ladylike but always veering on the edge of insanity.
The next time he would see her, he'd yell until every inch of his body shook and he felt as if he was going to crumble to cinders, as if his heart was made of glass and she just kicked at it, leaving him crawling and picking up the shards. The thought of losing her would make the thin threads of madness wrap further around him, cling at him, claim him for that irrational hour when he'd bare all of his fears to her.
And she'd laugh again.
She talked of freedom when she explained it. She talked of the need to feel the cool air brushing her face, to sense the adrenaline rush, to be free, to be able to breathe freely for one time in her life. She was suffocating, she said, the air was pressing down on her and the walls were slowly closing, crushing her (her eyes widened, her lower lip trembling).
And he shattered to pieces all over again each time she said it.
She was mad, mad and dangerous, and so was he, and he loved her very, very much.
He begged her to join his Lord (although, technically, it wasn’t his lord at all, not to her; to her he was the Order’s spy, he was the spy of the Dark Lord only to the old family friends and acquaintances, and, honestly, he was terribly confused and wasn’t sure who he worked for anymore).
She begged him to leave her and go his own way.
She'd rather die then betray her beliefs.
He'd never let her go.
---
Everyone deemed it sure that the Dark Lord would win. The Order was almost destroyed, the despair of its dwindling members almost tangible. It had suffered some severe damage in the last few battles, lost a staggering amount of worthy people. Death Eaters suffered their losses, too, but Death Eaters didn't care. Death Eaters were pawns to the Dark Lord, pawns to each other, completely worthless and one hundred percent replaceable.
People of the Order stuck together, lived together, had families, friends, children, pets, favourite books, memories, futures, lives. They were close-knit, with deep bonds of compassion and shared memories tearing them to pieces when they'd lose one of their own.
The Death Eaters had nothing to lose; the Order had everything.
Draco had only Ginny to lose.
He swore he wouldn't, he swore he'd never let her go. He made frantic, barely coherent plans on what to do after the Dark Lord's victory. He'd listen to her even breathing and play different scenarios over and over in his head - completely different each time or different variations on a theme, it didn't matter. He imagined a bolder version of himself, a dazzling, dauntless Draco Malfoy who was as heroic as Harry Potter. He imagined standing up to the Dark Lord for her. He imagined hiding her, protecting her, saving her.
Ginny stuck to her memories, to her towers in the air, to her desperate make-believe of everything will be fine.. They wouldn't let her battle anymore, so she'd stay at Grimmauld Place and Draco would find her on the bed, squeezing her chest and drawing deep breaths. He thought it better for her to stay (the first thing in his life he agreed on with Potter) but after he voiced that she wouldn't tell him that she loved him anymore; she'd yell at him, screaming about the walls getting closer, closer, closer, closing down on her, screaming about her lungs getting emptier, emptier, emptier. She would say she's trying to breathe - trying, and trying, and trying so hard - but she can't, there's no air and it hurts, and she's going to suffocate, and she's going to die.
And then the next day she'd smile and say: "Of course we're going to win. Silly Draco, don't be such a pessimist. Oh, hello, Harry, how're things going?" And she'd kiss her husband soundly, leaving Draco to pick up the pieces of his heart with a dismal look on his face.
She didn't believe it, and it pained him that she kept the mask up for him, too - most of the time - even though he prided himself as the only person she was ever remotely honest with after Tom. Maybe she wasn't being honest with anyone, even herself; maybe she would truly go insane and suffocate to death if she let herself realize that the Order was walking into impending doom.
---
Potter won.
Draco thought of it as one of Fate's more cruel twists.
His heart should've stopped her the moment he saw her kissing Potter after the battle (her long lashes fluttered against his cheek; she seemed light-hearted and oblivious to the rain that drizzled around them). He hated it for continuing to beat; he hated it because he knew it was beating for her, the traitorous wrench with her alluring lips and porcelain skin with freckles dusted across her cheeks.
She didn't stop with breaking him to pieces this time - she was stepping on the shards and twisting her foot until she crushed him into fine, diamond-like dust.
Draco wasn't sure what compelled him to come to them; probably some inborn masochism that forced him to fall in love with her in the first place, the masochism that made him play the double-triple-and-so-on spy until he lost the last clue on whom he worked for, the masochism that made the idea of sticking to her and giving his life for her seem so tantalizing.
He grabbed her cold wrist and yanked her out of Potter's arms.
She laughed her tinkling laugh, only the insanity was now permanently etched in it, spoiling it and making it more beautiful at once. She sounded the way he felt, she laughed for him and at him and instead of him, barring all of the crushed emotions, the scorned ones, the ones he tried to push back to some desolate part of his heart.
"What are you doing, Malfoy?" Potter snapped (Ginny laughed again).
Draco didn't answer - couldn't answer; words scrambled at the back of his throat but his voice has vanished somewhere - he just cackled like Aunt Bella did before Ginny had killed her a month ago (like she’d killed his heart a second ago, like she killed him in every sense that mattered). He remembered how hard Ginny had laughed then; he remembered Aunt Bella's face tainted crimson like Ginny's hair.
He wanted to do to Potter what Ginny had tone to Aunt Bella.
"Leave my wife alone, Malfoy!"
The words knocked the air out of him.
And it wouldn't come back.
Now, he knew how it felt to suffocate. He knew how it felt to lose everything that mattered, to lose the will to breathe.
Ginny stood with her arms spread: her right one intertwined with Potter's, Draco's fingers grasping the left one as if it was the only thing stopping the ground from opening and letting him fall down to nothingness. Raindrops glided down her face.
It felt like she had stabbed a knife in his chest and twisted it again and again and again and again. He wouldn't let go of her because the pain at least marked him alive, at least it left him with something other but lack of air and lack of any emotion but irrational love for her.
She laughed and laughed and laughed until the sound reached its crescendo.
And when it did, their fingers burned a hundred degrees and the metaphorical wound in his chest was huge and lethal, bleeding him to death. He needed to let her go; his body edged away from her, praying for the pain to stop. He listened to it - his brain was dizzy from the lack of air and didn't have much say in what Draco did (according to his father, it never did, not even under normal circumstances, but his father was a bastard and Draco would never admit he was right).
So he let her wrist go. He knew it was the right thing to do - if he had stuck to her for a moment longer, he'd never be able to leave. Her arm dropped to her side and she fell silent.
He regretted doing it a second after - he tried to breathe, but there was no air again, not even that small dose. Nothing. He didn't have Ginny, so it meant he had nothing.
Draco forced himself to go through the motions, forced his lips to open and draw in a lungful to air he barely felt, forced his legs to back away from them, scrambling.
By the time the rain stopped, he was already running, drenched. Aurors wanted to stop him several times, but someone would tell them that, yes, everything is okay, and, yes, the Malfoy boy is on their side, the poor kid's just a little traumatized, aren't we all?
He thought insane was more like it.
When he turned back, Potter had both of Ginny's hands in his. He pressed them to his lips.
Draco swore he'd never turn back again.
2.
He moved to the family mansion in France.
The place hasn't been cleaned since the house elf that took care of the house has died - years, maybe even decades ago. His mother had always hated it, always complained about the stifling atmosphere and the old-fashioned furniture that belonged to Father's parents (Father felt too attached to it to throw it away), about the lack of light and the closeness of the hideous Muggle city under the hill. She refused to go there and, with time, the house was forgotten.
A thick layer of dust covered the precious furniture. Spiders had spun elaborate cobwebs across the family portraits and the house creaked and rattled with every step he made as if the very walls protested against him.
Draco lacked the patience necessary to clean the old house and lacked the will to get himself a new elf - he had to do something with his hands while his mind reeled with anger, with betrayal.
The wound in his chest was spreading, and as he threw the priceless junk into the rooms he didn't intend to use, he recalled the greatest moments he and Ginny had shared, purposefully inflicting the pain that came with remembering her to make sure he was alive. Soon, he was out of glorious moments and he moved to less significant memories, then to every day he had spent with her that he could recall, taking every moment and dissecting its tiny details until the pain was sharp like glass, like the ornamental dagger his father used instead of a paperweight.
By the end of the year, he was done with ten rooms (which left some forty untouched); he deliberately picked ten brightest ones as a tribute to his mother and furnished it with Lucius's most prized objects.
By the end of the year, he was done with all of their memories and his anger was burned out - he had never realized how short they'd been together until then - the wound healed around the edges, leaving a wide gap where his heart used to be, and the pain slowly soothed, leaving only numbness behind.
And then his idle brain started replaying other scenes - the maddening ones he used to suppress with thoughts of Ginny, the ones he used to justify with protecting Ginny. The ones with rows of bodies he had killed, soaked in blood and wrapped in white cloth; only the blood didn't resemble the colour of her hair anymore, it resembled the colour of guilt, the colour of a long lost conscience returned to haunt him.
The screams of the long gone pierced his ears - unwillingly, he screamed with them - he heard their pleas, their futile bargains with him, with their gods, with the fates; he heard them shrieking out promises they could keep, only if he kept them alive, only if he showed mercy.
He had never appreciated Ginny that much before, never realized that she kept the nightmares at bay, that she justified everything, that protecting her life justified everything.
Now that he had lost her all those lives seemed thrown away for nothing - and the sane, conscious part of him said he didn't care but the subconscious, the conscience, the silent voices in the dark said yes you do, yes you do, yes you do.
In his dreams, they reached for him with their thin, bloodied fingers; they looked at him with empty, glassy eyes, they begged and they accused until, after months and months of it, he was capable of doing nothing but sitting in his bed with his arms curled around his legs and his forehead pressed against his knees, as the house stopped creaking and rattling and fell back to slumber, dust and cobwebs returning to it.
---
He wasn't sure who he was or where he was when Pansy Apparated, wrinkling her upturned nose at the state of the house.
"You're a mess," she said blandly, wiping the dust off her robes as if she was afraid she'd get ill from all the dirt. "And you left me all alone out there, in Britain, to deal with the post-war wizarding elite made of heroic war heroes and their innocent little wives."
"I'm sure you handled it well," Draco rasped.
"Oh, no, I'm crushed." Pansy touched a hand to her heart in mock-sadness. "My third husband just died and I'm grieving." She gestured to her black, fashionably cut robes. "Someone poisoned him, you know. I wonder who it was," she added innocently.
Draco wanted to laugh at her little remark; to say that she hadn't changed at all, but his lips had forgotten how to laugh, his muscles had gone slack and refused to move properly.
"And you weren't there to help me through the hard periods of my life. Like when my previous two husbands died."
Pansy was all about herself, he thought. Me, me, me. .
"But, a great friend that I am, I came here to help you through the hard period of your life. Or I will, as soon as you tell me what the fuck is wrong with you."
"Leave me alone, Pansy. Just… just leave me alone."
"Okay, I might not have come immediately., but, Draco," she twirled around, her robes dragging across the dust, casting silent cleaning charms all over the place, "I had my own issues and I'm not a silly sixteen-year-old anymore, running after you like a frenzied puppy."
He decided he loved Pansy - in a completely unromantic way, of course - he loved how she made him feel less insane, less lost and numb, and more himself, more like the old Draco from the past, the Draco who flirted with pretty girls and cared only about Quidditch and what Snape would say and how to be better than Potter. That thought made him realize that he never managed to do that last thing; he realized that Potter had bested him in everything, leaving just a shell of the person he used to be.
Potter took her away, he took his life away, he took his sanity away - suddenly the old flame of anger was rekindled and everything was suddenly Potter's fault, not his, not the Dark Lord's.
Suddenly he wanted to continue living, he wanted to best Potter just this one time, he wanted to extract revenge.
"And what are you doing now, if you're not running after me?" he found the strength to sneer.
"Saving you, like a noble, model citizen of post-war wizarding England should." She let her hand drop to her side. "Just because I dedicated some time to myself doesn't mean I gave up on you, Draco. It doesn't mean I stopped loving you."
"Just because you got married - three times, - doesn't mean you gave up on me." He said just to taunt her. He wasn't jealous, at least not in that way.
"For money, darling, for money." The bed squeaked when she sat next to him. "My family's dead, my money's confiscated and given to some dirt-poor blood-traitors like the Weasleys and-"
"Leave the Weasleys alone." His voice quavered at her last name.
He didn't know what compelled him to stand up for the family he had spent years scorning and humiliating. Maybe it had something to do with the memory of Ginny laughing in the rain suddenly springing to his mind, chasing away all the ghosts of his victims but re-opening the old wound, making it sore around the edges.
"Draco, darling, you're ill!" She put a warm hand on his forehead. "And you're so skinny, I'm sure you haven't eaten anything in days. What's going on?"
"You don't know what it's like," he shook his head, "when they come back to haunt you. All the Mudbloods, and the blood-traitors, and the Death Eaters, you don't what it's like know when they come back, bent on sending you round the twist. And their eyes, they just… they just…." His voice cracked.
She scooped him up, cradling his upper torso on the enormous bed, pulled out her wand and Disapparated them both with an almost inaudible cracking sound.
---
Pansy got him into shape, shaved the stubble off his face and cut his hair to a reasonable length, threading through it and gluing it back like his mother used to do. She stayed in the Manor and nursed him back to health with the patience only a person as obsessed with him as she was could have.
He always thought her a little mad, a little psychopathic and a little too dramatic (but weren't they all, after the war, and how was he better than her with his old ghosts and his fixation on Ginny Potter?), never grew to appreciate her friendship and support like he did in those couple of weeks when he saw how devastated, pillaged and ravaged the Manor was.
Most of the Manor's furniture was pushed against the walls or piled up in the corners - Pansy said the Ministry was looking for dark artefacts. Some precious things that reminded him of childhood were broken and ruined; memories of the house he loved so much, of the house he grew up in, were spoiled and distorted by the image of an abandoned Manor.
The wound opened up again, the pain throbbing inside him with the thought of how close Ginny was, how close he was to having everything he needed. He imagined that if he took a walk and walked long enough, he'd find her somewhere, in her tattered robes, laughing like a lunatic, laughing like she meant it.
He was just tired, tired to his bones and he needed her, needed her invigorating presence to breathe life into him.
3.
Ginny sent an invitation.
It was a party invitation, with swirling gold letters printed on thick, expensive parchment, the kind of invitation shallow trophy wives and slaves of society and good name send to each other, making sure that the invitation matches the décor of the party.
In the corner she - or someone else, he couldn't recall how her handwriting looked, but he liked to believe it was her, he liked to believe she added a personal touch to it - had scrawled the name D. Malfoy. He saw another name, Ginevra Molly Weasley-Potter printed somewhere in the middle, ready to jump at him from the parchment while all the other letters bunched around it, blurring together into one big indistinguishable mess.
He decided he wasn't going to go. Of course he wasn't. He wasn't going to torture himself any further.
One particular word, Potter, screamed from the page and made him want to scream in return.
---
The old, ungainly habits kicked in and he decided to come for her, for Ginny, like he'd always done everything for her.
As he had guessed, the large ballroom of her new house (it had belonged to the Notts once, he recalled, and how did it end up in the hands of Saint Potter and his wretched wife, anyway?) was decorated in gold, lots and lots of gold fabric covered the furniture, was draped artistically over the walls and pulled over the tall Gothic windows. Some music - it sounded final and ominous to him, like a death march - played from one of the corners, the instruments enchanted for the sound to carry through the room.
Despite the cosy temperature, the house felt cold and lifeless, the chill seeping under his skin and making hairs rise at the back of his neck.
None of the other guests seemed to notice - the gentlemen were deep into conversation, the ladies laughed their perfectly practiced laughs, playing coy, and the young couples swirled on the polished dance floor in clouds of expensive, flowing robes.
He made one step, then another one and suddenly this was a bad, bad idea, and he chastised himself for coming in the first place. She was going to be there any time now, with Potter, and he should've at least taken a pretty, shallow girl with him because Merlin knew that, despite his family's fall from grace, the girls still saw him as a good opportunity for marriage.
They didn't care if he was insane, they didn't care if he was suffocating all the time, if he was a walking dead man, as long as he had money. From some odd reason, he appreciated them for that.
He turned to leave.
Someone put a hand on his shoulder, and the gentle, familiar touch sent a rush through his body.
"Draco Malfoy! I haven't seen you in ages!"
He turned, forcing his face to twist into a perfectly pleasant mask, only he knew it contained much more pain and contempt than he wanted it to.
Ginny. Ginny Potter.
And both her hands were still in Potter's, only now they were covered with silk gloves (the colour of pale gold, to match her robes and the invitations and the decorations and the colour of Potter's chivalrous heart). She wasn't the fickle trollop anymore, possibly annoying at times but definitely precious and addictive; now she was the unflappable hostess, the wife of a war hero.
His demons started nibbling at the edge of the old wound, tearing it apart with long, skeletal fingers.
For the first time in months he could thoroughly enjoy the air he breathed, feel its substance and rich texture, but the price was the tearing pain in his chest and it wouldn't stop, no matter how much he tried to shut it out.
"I'm so glad you came," she said, taking his hand in her own and covering it with another. Her palms were warm like he had remembered them and it brought relief, a smudge of hope that things might go back to how they were.
Her lips twitched upwards and Draco's heart quickened its pace; a rush of masochistic pleasure coursed through his body and mixed with the pain as he prepared to hear her laugh, to have her bring him back to life.
But she just smiled. She smiled with the tranquillity Ginny Weasley had never had, a serene smile Draco would have never imagined on her face.
"I'm glad I came, too," he said - he wasn't sure if it was a lie or not - and was surprised at how normal his voice sounded.
"It's nice to see you again, Malfoy," Potter said gruffly, contempt blazing in his stupid, heroic green eyes. "Ginny was looking forward to seeing you."
Draco felt an underlying thickness to his words, and although he'd usually probe and poke and try to uncover their true meaning and use it to his ends, he was too consumed iby Ginny to focus on irrelevant people like Potter.
She had changed.
She had cut her hair so it only reached her chin, and not very precisely at that; Draco could see the few uneven tendrils sticking out, longer then the rest of it. He’d loved running his fingers through her hair; he’d loved watching it drape over his hand and slither back down like silk, and it hurt, it hurt so much to see it gone, like a great part of her personality had gone with it. Like the part of her that belonged to him had gone with it.
The wound tore itself further apart.
"What'd you do with your hair?" he asked, sounding like a petulant child.
He tried to school his features into submission, tried to straighten up his spine and draw back his shoulders instead of bending over and screaming in pain and frustration. He crossed his arms over his chest as if it would shut the hole and searched her eyes desperately, coaxing them to see what he'd been through.
Only she couldn't see, not anymore.
The silence stretched on and he drew a deep breath, relishing every ounce of air that reached his lungs.
"What do you think I've done?" she asked, toying with the dainty edge of her sleeve.
He didn't answer.
The silence stretched.
"I'm going to greet Dean and Luna," Potter whispered to her ear.
She dropped Draco's hand and put a finger under Potter's chin, turning his head until they were face to face. She kissed him before letting him go, and when he turned to leave she stretched her arm, and he stretched his, so their fingers could touch one last time.
Draco gritted his teeth.
The song (the one he thought sounded like a death march) ended on a high note and the orchestra started playing a new, softer melody.
He extended his hand towards her, palm up, and she put her smaller one in it, letting him lead her to the dance floor.
"You've ruined it," he breathed as she placed a tentative hand on his shoulder.
"I've cut it," she said with an air of finality. "It was unnecessary."
"You shouldn't have."
"It was awful. I like it better this way."
"It's worse now."
Draco's mind reeled; suddenly he wasn't sure if they were talking about them, or about her hair, or about something completely irrelevant.
"No, it's not."
"I hate it. How could you do it?"
"Oh, how dare I have the audacity to cut my own hair off without asking you first? Really, Malfoy, I knew you were self-centred, but this is just too much."
He opened his mouth to tell her something along the lines of Well, there're some other things you shouldn't have done without asking me first, but he hated to breach some unspoken arrangement between them, the one that said that the past was dead and was not to be mentioned.
"It's ill fitting of a lady. They should have long hair." He turned the conversation to safer waters.
"Well, I'm not a lady."
"No?"
"Well, I thought you of all people would know that." Bitterness crept into her voice. "You even used to flaunt the knowledge around so everyone could hear: 'Your house is a bin, Weasley,' 'Your mother is a fat cow, Weasley, and you're going to be as fat as she is in a couple of years,' 'If you can't afford proper clothing, you should walk naked instead of wearing something you've found in a trash bin.' "
"Maybe I meant it in an affectionate sort of way."
He'd hate it if she thought he hated her.
"Maybe the Dark Lord killed all the Muggle-borns in an affectionate sort of way," she snorted.
"You've changed." It was a statement, an accusation, a question and a cry of despair; he wasn't sure what he meant with it and he left it to her to figure out the meaning.
"Everyone's changed."
"I hate it. I hate your short hair and your expensive robes and your stupid smile."
"So you hate me. What's new in that?"
"I don't hate you, I hate what you've become, Weasley. It's not you," he blurted out.
"It's Potter, ok?" she snapped and disentangled her body from his, lifting the skirts of her robes and rushing back to her precious husband.
---
He spent the rest of the night standing in the corner, looking haughtily bored and observing her from the corner of his eye.
She spent most of the night with Potter, dancing and being the real social butterfly, fluttering from one group of people to the next and looking pleasant and inviting.
She was more beautiful than ever before. It was then that he realized how ragged and sad and wasted and haggard his Ginny (the one he loved, the one who laughed like a madwoman, the one who craved the invigorating rush of wind on her face) was compared to Potter's Ginny (this girl in expensive silk robes who never laughs, just smiles). He noted how more beautiful Potter's Ginny was compared to Draco's, how tantalizing she was, how serene she looked. She wasn't the restless girl whose fingers always twitched when she heard a loud sound outside, no, she was a lady. A lady who didn't see anything when she looked him in the eye. Or couldn't.
Or wouldn't.
It was like an epiphany; a sudden, startling realization that this new Ginny wasn't what he was looking for, what he longed for, after all.
With that, he felt his lungs slowly getting drained out of air until the last drop was gone and there was only pain, dwindled to a numb ache in the stomach of a man who wasn't quite alive but wasn't entirely dead, either.
He pushed himself off the wall and twisted the door open.
This time, he didn't look back and there was no one to place a hand on his shoulder and coax him into staying.
4.
Pansy's latest victim came in the form of a rich Wizengamot member, thirty and then some years older than her. He fell in love with her vivaciousness and youthful face, and she fell in love with his Gringotts account and the beautiful, bright mansion near her old one.
He always held her hand, never moved away from her side when they were together, and she seemed eager for his presence and thrilled that she would marry him.
Draco still saw the contempt glimmering in her eyes, the tenseness of the muscles on her face when she twisted her lips into a smile - a perfect, gracious, ladylike, entirely fake smile - and the little jerk of retreat she'd unwillingly make every time his hands touched her body.
"He's the last one, I swear," she told Draco later, when they were alone.
Of course she still frequented the Manor, out of loyalty and out of fear that he'd fall back to his dark, insane moods, the ones they never talked of. Of course she always ended up in his bedroom, where he liked to imagine that her short hair - just like Ginny's - was red, not black.
"As if I care."
"Because you know I love only one man, and you know who it is."
"I don't."
She pouted her lips. "It's clearly-"
"Don't tell me." He waved his hand, the old smirk playing on his lips. "Let me guess. Is he similar to you?"
"Of course." She twisted a lock of her hair. "We share all the traits that make both of us truly Slytherin."
"Is it the Dark Lord, then? Snape? Gilderoy Lockhart? No, wait, you've gone lesbian and fell in love with Umbridge?"
He liked taunting her; her frustrated huffs and the stomping of her foot - like spoiled little four-year-olds have a habit of doing when they smear chocolate over their favourite pink, frilly robes - grated his ears like finest music.
"I hate you, Draco."
"I hate you too, Pans."
---
Wedged between Pansy and Daphne Greengrass, he hungrily sucked every ounce of air around him, trying to force it down to his lungs, trying not to choke on it. Daphne was smoking a cigarette and the smoke curled around them, polluting the air with a sickly, bittersweet scent he'd never felt before.
Daphne was saying something but he didn't pay attention; he let her voice mix and blur with the cacophony of Pansy's engagement party, with the soft melody and the excited chatter of the guests.
Ginny didn't laugh.
He had watched her all night; she wore an off-white set of robes that exposed her cleavage and made her look like a beautiful, porcelain china doll dusted with cinnamon freckles, freckles he used to count when the nights drew long.
And then he noticed the cracks in her porcelain mask of the perfect young lady, and suddenly she looked less like an alluring angel and more like one with her wings clipped off, broken and lifeless and cold and forever stuck with the same expression chalked across her face, like a true porcelain doll.
Her freckles disclosed her low-class origin. The strands of her hair that peeked out from the pixie cut, longer than the rest of them, made her look like a sanatorium escapee. Her smile screamed fake, and Draco wished he could scream with it. Sometimes she'd slip out of her role and make a rather graceless move, and she always seemed to balance on the thin line between being unnaturally stiff and committing a faux pas. She stared at her feet when she danced.
He loved her so much.
She hated people surrounding her from all sides - her breathing would quicken, she'd put a hand to her chest (as if she's suffocating, Draco thought incredulously) and then excuse herself to the ladies' room. She had troubles with words like love and lost and freedom; her fingers would regain their old nervous twitch and she'd close her eyes with a sigh.
A rush of air coursed through his lungs - there was still hope. She was going to save him, she was going to love him back, she was going to keep him sane.
The wound was eating his body away, burning, burning, burning with desire to touch her, to feel the old electricity rushing through him with her touch. His body forced himself to stand up against the frantic, ungainly orders of the small, rational part of him. His knees shook and he couldn't focus on anything but her; he pushed through the gasping ladies and the annoyed gentlemen and saw only her, his angel, his salvation; he could almost see the feathery wings attached to her back.
He felt someone tugging at the sleeve of his robes, slipping her small hand in his. Pansy.
"She's the one? She's the one you love? Instead of me?" she asked as realization dawned on her. It was almost a wail, the familiar last shrieks of a crushed heart that were all too familiar to him.
He saw the rise and fall of Ginny's chest quickening as they came closer, completing the little circle formed around her and her husband.
She looked around frantically, like a hapless deer flashed by the light of a wand, her face suddenly pale like she was about to faint.
"Mr. Potter, Mrs. Potter," Pansy said. "It's always a pleasure to see the people who brought freedom to our secluded little world."
Ginny's smile froze in place; Draco could almost hear her gritting her teeth. The wound was killing him; her pain was his pain and he just wanted to make Pansy stop talking, he just wanted to scream shut up, shut up, shut up, can't you see you're hurting my angel, you wrench? He masked a pained gasp with a polite cough.
"It's always a pleasure to know that, after all the losses, there's still happiness and a place for blossoming lovers like Aaron and I to exist."
"Oh, dear, I think I need some water. Could you call one of your elves for me and tell him to get me some water, Miss Parkinson?" Ginny slapped a hand over her forehead, palm up. "I'm not feeling very well."
"For you I'd rather call an undertaker, Mrs. Potter," Pansy said tartly, forgetting all pretence of politeness and ladylike behaviour.
Potter opened his mouth to defend her honour like every good hero would, but she cut him off.
"You don't have to be so… so malicious," Ginny squeaked, near tears. Draco could sense the false ring to her voice but Pansy looked ridiculously pleased. She pretended to recover as Pansy snapped her fingers, summoning an elf. "I'm guessing you know all the good undertakers, though. You must be their best customer."
"What?"
"After having buried so many husbands, and clearly intending to bury some more, you'd have some experience with funerals."
"What makes you guess I'll bury more?"
"You need to justify your reputation as the new Seraphina Zabini, of course."
"Blinkey is sorry to interrupt, but did the mistresses want something?" The elf tugged at the hem of Pansy's robes.
"Oh, it's okay, I think I need to go to the ladies' room to freshen up, anyway."
Ginny turned on her heel and walked out of the room. Draco made a step towards her, following, but Pansy's hand closed around his wrist.
"Where are you going? To follow the stupid bint? She's making a fool out of you, Draco dearest."
"I want to know what's wrong with her. Haven't you seen how she-"
"Of course I've seen, a long time ago. She thinks she's fooling someone with her bravado - ha!"
He didn't want to yank the arm away and cause a scene that would be retold for months in the wizarding high society. The knuckles of Pansy's other hand turned white as she strengthened her grasp on her wand.
"Let go of me," he hissed.
"I don't know what you see in her," she said cattily. "See, I'm way more beautiful."
In her green robes, she was reminiscent of a giant snake out to poison everyone, sent by Satan himself to roam the world and spoil and corrupt. Her girlish voice was coated with venom and malice glimmered in her cerulean eyes - when she'd turn her head and let light fall in the right direction, Draco thought he saw a glimmer of crimson red, like the Dark Lord's eyes, like the glimmer Aunt Bella's eyes started to gain before she died.
He suddenly hated her, suddenly wanted to grab her neck and snap it until she was just another one of those bodies, covered in blood, killed for Ginny and in Ginny's name.
"Don't be a bitch, Pansy." He extracted his hand from hers, removing her grasp finger by finger. "Don't be a bitch who fell in love with her own reflection."
"At least I'm sane."
Draco wasn't sure if she was implying that Ginny wasn't, or if she meant him after all.
---
He found her in a secluded hallway, doubled over and curled up like a wounded cat. A tantalizing angel with her wings cut, with lips in crimson lipstick, with unevenly cut damask hair falling over her eyes, she murmured indistinguishable things into the fabric of her robes.
"Ginny?" he said, clinging to she sight of her like a drowning man would cling to the surface, to the last drops of air.
She laughed.
Her laugh sounded like freedom, sounded like happiness and love and life and death and insanity. She sounded like Aunt Bellatrix, but with the undertone of his mother's soft tinkle when she'd lull him to sleep. It felt like the very essence of life was caught in that laugh, raising him back from the dead, healing the wound as if it was never there, sucking out the venom of his pain from his blood.
"It won't happen," she said, still laughing. Her voice was hollow, hollow like his chest used to be. "It won't happen again. I love you, Draco, I love you so much, so much, so much, but it won't happen again, I swear I won't return to you. I think I'm going insane."
He just stared at her, unable to make sense of her words. He swore he wasn't going to let her kick the air - the life - out of him again, and he expected it would require a fight, but his ears were filled with her tinkling laugh, with the insanity threaded through it, and he knew that, as long as she was there, next to him, he'd be fine.
"Well, what are you waiting for? Get out of my fucking life!"
She stood up, tears gliding down her face (like rain used to on that day when he first left) and smearing her mascara, creating streaks of black down her cheeks. He could see she was confused, so confused, so desperate, not sure what to do and what to say and how to, for the first time in her life, make those two not contradict.
This was the girl he loved, the reckless one, the mad one, the dangerous one.
Her exhilarating presence pressed at him from all sides, her laugh echoed in her ears.
"Why?"
"Because, if you stay, if you stay with me and if I keep loving you, I'll go mad. I'll go fucking mad, Draco, and what would that do to my family? What would that do to Harry? What would that do to you? Would you still love me if I were mad? Would you-" Her voice cracked.
Half of her face was black from the mascara and the tears, and the other half was deathly white. She bit on her lower lip until she cut it and crimson blood started prickling from the wound.
"When I'm with you, I can breathe. I'm happy, Draco, I'm alive, but I guess I'm not meant to be alive, I'm not meant to be happy because, when I am, I can't keep my sanity. I'm born for tragedy. And when you're gone, it all goes numb. Why does it all go numb, Draco, why do I feel dead? Why do I feel stifled and bound and chained and why am I constantly suffocating, why are the walls pressing against me? Without you, I can be sane but it's not me. This doesn’t make any sense, any sense at all. Does it make sense to you? Because I barely know what I’m talking about."
She dropped to her knees, her robes shuffling.
"And I can't get away from you. I need you so much."
She looked like one of the ghosts that haunted him, broken and ragged and torn it half, a shadow, a fallen angel, but to him, she was still the little trollop, she was still the little girl that kept him sane, the girl that could read the pain in his eyes.
Maybe she never could, he thought as he slid to the floor next to her, wrapping his arms around his beautiful girl's shoulders and cradling her like a small child. Maybe it was her pain all along, he thought, her insanity; maybe he was the one reading her.
"Why are the walls closing down, Draco?" she whispered. "Why is all the air gone?"
She grasped for his hands and laced her fingers with his. She was trembling.
Suddenly she twisted her head towards him and searched for his lips. He obliged, and it felt like he was reborn, like she was teaching him to live all over again.
She pressed her forehead to his.
"Is it better to be dead or insane?" she breathed.
"Whatever keeps me closer to you."
He pressed soft butterfly kisses to her lips, her face, her neck, indulging in her body like a starving man would indulge in food. He counted the freckles all over again.
"Madness, then," she breathed. "You should stay away from me, Draco, I'm not worth it."
"Staying away kills me. I'm not a masochist. Not that much, at least."
She laughed again. "You're insane, too."
He couldn't agree more with her evaluation.
Suddenly, his whole body felt elated, every muscle tense like a spring pressed to hard, right before something would release it. He wanted to run and jump, he wanted to scream and laugh, and still he wanted to stay in that place forever, clinging to her, kissing her face, salty from tears.
"Let run," he grinned.
"What?"
"I dare you. I dare you to live, I dare you to breathe. Let's get away from this wretched place and go somewhere, together. Let's be insane together."
"Draco, I-"
His heart broke into thousands of little shards all over again. "I knew it. You don't love me."
"Draco-"
"You love Potter."
"Draco-"
"You wanted your hero all along."
"Draco, I think that's a great idea. To run, that is."
And just like that his heart was healed, like someone had flicked an omnipotent wand and whispered a Reparo, and just like that they were back to laughing.
"When?"
"Now."
She laughed as he rose from the floor and helped her to her feet. She tripped on the hem of her robe and he caught her. She pressed her head against his chest and he kissed the crown of her hair. Her laugh filled the hallway, louder than the music that came from the ballroom, more beautiful, more honest, more real than any music could ever be.
He hugged her with one arm (she laughed and laughed and laughed) and pulled out his wand from the pocket of his dress robes.
“Will you love me even though I’m insane?”
“I’ll love you always.”
The ominous crack that followed, the sound of them Disapparating, marked the beginning of a new life.
6.
Ginny Malfoy spun around in that same manor on the French countryside, flicking and swishing her wand to all directions. The edges of her robes lifted the old dust from the floor, the only remnants of Draco's demons, as she cast spell after spell. It twirled with her and around her, completely harmless, barely noticeable.
She laughed like a madwoman, her long, damask hair flying in all directions, her arms spread. Sunshine lit her face, made the freckles scattered across her skin all the more prominent.
With each spell a large chunk of the Manor's ancient walls blew up, bringing more light into the dreary place. Her tinkling laugh muffled the sound of bricks crumbling and falling to the ground, several floors down, and the gasps of several shocked Muggles that happened to pass by.
"I love you," she told him with a giggle.
And this time, he believed her.
ORIGINAL REQUEST:
What would you like to receive?
The tone/mood of the fic: Something dark and other-worldly, but I still definitely want some good snark and banter. I want something that'll make me think and laugh.
An element/line of dialogue/object you would like in your fic: There's a really great quote from The Scarlet Letter that is: "It was as if a window were thrown open, admitting a freer atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where his life was wasting itself away, amid lamplight, or obstructed day-beams, and the musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral, that exhales from books. But the air was too fresh and chill to be long breathed for comfort." Obviously that quote shouldn't be in the fic, but I would love the idea of it to be incorporated if you can.
Preferred rating of the the fic you want: Soft R at the highest, but I think I'd rather it be played safe with a PG-13.
Canon or AU? Author's preference.
Deal Breakers (what don't you want?): OOC-ness, and I'd rather this one not be like a romantic comedy.