Devils and Dust

CHAPTER NINE

The potion didn’t take very long at all to start having an effect on her. It seemed that it had only been a few minutes and already a pleasant fog had woven itself sinuously around her mind.

She canceled the wards around her bed after a few giggly attempts and parted her curtains. The room was empty and she wondered vaugely where her roomates were, but the thought slid away and another slid seamlessly in its place.

A walk would be a fine thing wouldn’t it? The cool night breeze brushing against her skin.

Yes, a fine idea, she decided as she walked slowly to the door and down the staircase.

The commonroom was inhabited by several students, doing homework and chattering about their days, but silence quickly reigned as her prescence was noted and several pairs of eyes covertly glanced her way.

The silence and the stares didn’t bother her, not even those of her brother and his friends.
Nothing could bother her now.

As she made her way to the door, she saw her brother half raise as if to follow her but he seemed to decide against it and settled back into the couch, despair plain on his face for anyone to see.

Some emotion trickled through her at his expression, but it was no match for the fog and she turned away.

She did not see or hear Harry whisper to her brother and gesture to their room upstairs. And even if she had been able to hear their whispered words she would not have made the connection between the words ‘my dad’s cloak’ and ‘I’ll keep her safe’.

The fog made it hard to concentrate on one thought for too long and it was several minutes after her exit from the common room that she remembered that she had intended to go outside.

As she made her way to the entrance hall she gave no thought to the rules against students leaving the castle afterhours and she opened the door and walked into the night thinking only of the cool breeze.

She was so distracted by the play of the moonlight against the trees that she didn’t notice that the door closed behind her more slowly than it should have.

The sparkle of the lake drew her attention away from the trees and she made her way toward it.

She was several yards away when she spotted the figure sitting at the foot of the tree that faced the lake. The sight of white blond hair stopped her in her tracks and a small gasp escaped her as a stab of panic broke through the fog. For a moment she had really thought it was him, before her momentarily clear mind noted the length of the hair and the Hogwarts robes.

Relief swept through her and as the panic faded the fog crept back into place although it was weaker and thinner than before.


Draco had been sitting under the tree for several hours, finishing off his bottle of firewhiskey his mind returning again and again to the look of wild panic in Ginny’s eyes when the Hufflepuff had asked a seemingly harmless question.

It hadn’t even occured to him until that moment that she could have been hurt by anyone other than his father, as if that weren’t bad enough.

And all he had been able to think about for hours were all the things that could have happened to her. He had been horrified enough by the knowledge of what his father had done to her, but he was coming to realize that it was just the tip of the iceberg. She’d been there for two months. Two months.

Now, added to the knowledge of what his father had done to her, he knew that something horrible and painful had also happened to her at the hands of a student. A schoolmate that she had no doubt trusted, who had been if not a good friend at least a friend of her brother’s.

And worse, a Hufflepuff. A house everyone thought of as harmless and loyal. It would be a wonder if she ever trusted anyone again.

Draco’s head whipped around at the sound of a gasp.

And suddenly there she was, the girl that had been haunting his thoughts for hours. There she was, in the middle of the night, all alone and outside of the protection of the castle.

He would have thought being snatched from her bed would have given her some amount of fear or at least caution.

His sympathy for her quickly turned to an anger that he couldn’t even begin to understand. Perhaps if his mind hadn’t been clouded by fire-whiskey, he would have remembered that he shouldn’t yell at her, shouldn’t touch her. She’s been through enough.

But anger at her recklessness flooded his mind leaving no room for logic and he rose quickly to his feet stumbling a little as he reached out and grabbed her arm.

“What on earth are you doing out here alone in the middle of the night? Don’t you have any sense? It’s dangerous!”

She merely sighed and shook her head. “Draco, what on earth are you doing out here alone in the middle of the night? Don’t you have any sense? It’s dangerous!”, she repeated in a mocking tone of voice and then laughed at her own cleverness.

The laugh was what did it, what sobered him up enough to forget his anger and really think. Ginny didn’t laugh like that, or at all really. And she didn’t let people touch her he realized as he looked down at his hand still on her arm.

He quickly removed it, but stepped closer to her, inspecting her eyes and recognizing that there was an unnatural sheen to them.

“What have you taken,” he asked quietly.

“Why Malfoy, I have nooo idea what you could be talking about,” she said with a mischievous grin. “I was just getting a little fresh air,” she glanced down at the bottle of fire whiskey leaning against the tree a few feet away from them and raised an eyebrow.

“But it seems you on the other hand, are out here breaking school rules. Alcohol isn’t good for you you know,” she said with mock severity, shaking her head.

“It’s not funny Ginny,” he practically yelled running his hand through his hair in exasperation. “You have to tell me what you’ve taken, you have no idea what some potions will do to you.”

Suddenly the fog in her mind turned chilly and a searing bolt of anger snapped into her mind. And she could control it no more than she could control her giddyness. “Oh, of course not. Why would I? I’m just a stupid helpless little girl. I couldn’t possibly have researched the side effects. That would be beyond someone like me.”

Startled by the swift change in her demeanor he simply stared at her for a few seconds.

“Ginny, I didn’t...,” he started to say but she quickly cut him off.

“No, that’s what you think of me, isn’t it? That I’m just some stupid, weak little girl who can’t do anything right. Someone who needs to be told what to do. Look at poor Ginny, can’t even make it through the school week without drugging herself because she’s too weak to handle it.”

She closed the distance between them and grasped his robes in her hands, pulling their faces close. “That’s what Lucius thought too, that I was a weak girl to be molded to his fancy. But I proved him wrong in the end. And I doubt he was thinking I was weak when

his blood was pouring out his throat and I was holding the knife.”

She released him and stepped back. “I guess you two are more alike than I thought,” she spat at him, voice filled with disgust.

He tried to keep his mind rational, she was hurt and drugged and lashing out. She didn’t really mean what she was saying. But the whiskey made him hear nothing but her words and feel nothing but anger and hurt that she could say such things to him after what he’d done for her.

“Funny,” he said in a soft icy voice. “I was just thinking the same thing about you.”

She gasped at the thought that she could be anything like the man who she despised so much. And the thought of it was like a splash of cold water running through the fog in her mind and slowly wearing it away.

He ignored her gasp and stepped toward her. “It’s seems that neither of you can see what’s right in front of you. You only see what you want to see. I stopped trying to change myself into someone my father would approve of a long time ago, and I’ll be damned if I’ll do it for anyone else. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s high time I went inside. The wind out here is getting a little bitter,” he finished harshly, brushing past her and making his way toward the castle.


She stood, frozen and unable to move for several minutes after he’d left. The pain his words had caused was shredding through the fog and she couldn’t believe what she’d said to him. He wasn’t anything like his father. It was the potion that had made her so angry when she really had no reason to be, just like it had made her happy when she certaintly didn’t have anything to be happy about.

She wanted to run after him, to explain, but she couldn’t, no more than she could just forget everything that had happened to her and go back to her carefree life.

She couldn’t apologize to him. It would put her in his power, at his mercy. And even though she knew that he was nothing like his father, she couldn’t make herself vulnurable to him, or to anyone. Lucius had seen to that.

Which was why she couldn’t forgive her brother. His love, just like Draco’s friendship, would give him power over her if she returned it. And she couldn’t risk being powerless again.

She didn’t know what she’d been thinking trying to be friends with Draco. If she wanted to survive it would have to be on her own.

The risk of letting others in was too great, she could not allow herself to be broken again. Because this time, she knew, there would be no coming back.

Her resolution made, she walked slowly to the tree Draco had been sitting under and bringing his abandoned bottle of firewhiskey to her lips she drank deeply. And she stood there, staring up at the bright solitary moon surrounded by millions of shining stars for many hours into the night.