Ginny scowled at the table, barely noticing as the tea was placed in front of her. She gave an apologetic murmur of thanks to the waitress as she picked up the tiny tongs, plopping two neat cubes of sugar into the cup. Why was she here? It wasn’t as if she had some great bond or friendship with Malfoy; more like a stinging sense of bitterness and distaste. But the way he had looked through her, so pale and panicked… she knew that look. She wore it in her sleep, more often than she’d ever care to admit.
That was the truth of it, really. That look was one she’d never wish her worst enemy to experience, and so when she saw exactly that happening, she knew she had to help. God knew no one else would, not in this shit hole, not this early… and especially not for this man. She reached for the spoon, metal clinking against ceramic as she watched the granules dissolve into the steaming liquid. It looked as if they had disappeared completely, but if she tasted, she knew the sweetness would still be there. Plenty of things were like that, hiding just out of sight, popping up every time you let yourself forget they had ever been there. Feelings, for example.
“I can go, if you like.” She stared at him, challenging him to say something. To tell her to go, or ask her to stay, or to go back to the boy who made fun of everyone who wore hand-me-down boots that were three sizes too big. His words tumbled out–not the carefully crafted, sharp-tongued insults she’d learned to dodge at the age of eleven, but heavy, soft, clunking words. They weren’t warm, by any means, but they also weren’t cold or crude. They washed over her, falling and landing on her in random succession like the few raindrops that caught on your skin before the skies opened up and poured.
He had cared. Cared that she’d been tied up and had an apple stuck in her mouth and been presented to You-Know-Who on a silver platter. Cared that she’d been possessed by an entity she’d never supported or asked for or wanted. Cared that his own father had seen her as a fit sacrifice for his own twisted, half-thought-out plan.
“Yeah, well, the snake didn’t possess you, did it?”
She could hear the chill in her voice, but she didn’t care. Here was the Draco she knew, comparing his own woes to that of her own, as if it would make her feel better that he’d lived with one. Ginny had been consumed by it. Giant blocks of time were missing, and even after loads of offers for memory spellwork and therapy, she didn’t know if she even wanted it back. Her grades had gone down the toilet, and her own brothers–who were there with her–hadn’t even noticed she was acting different.
The thought of Nagini instantly triggered a memory of Neville slicing through the snake. He was lucky. He got to destroy one. She hadn’t gotten the opportunity, but she would have loved to put a Basilisk fang right through that wretched diary herself. Instead, she’d been left a fucking damsel in distress, sleeping in her castle, waiting for some prince to slay her demons for her.
Sighing, she took a sip of the tea, her eyes locking on her companion’s face. “I promise you’re not the only one who wants to punch him, Malfoy.”
“If you think I’m going to play the game of who was more traumatized, you’re delusional,” Draco commented without a second thought, a rarity. No, he obviously had not been possessed by the snake, as she put it. But that was the sheer irony, the dark humour of it all. It was Lucius who put her through that; Lucius Malfoy, who swore he was not cut out to have kids, who didn’t dare hold Draco when he was first born because he was afraid he would screw up. Lucius would never intentionally hurt Draco. And therein lie the irony, because it was all due to his father that Draco almost landed in Azkaban and that he was put through all that he had been put through.
Surely, she was possessed by the basilisk. But the way she said it annoyed Draco. He knew that tone. It was the you lost the war, your losses don’t mean anything tone. It was the implication that what he had been put through - by the Dark Lord, by Bella, by stupidly sacrificing himself over and over again - was somehow less valid, less real, because he didn’t do it for the right cause. But didn’t he? His cause was saving the two people that loved the most, the people that raised him, the people that tried. It was a cause that almost anyone could relate to, because who didn’t love their parents? Yet it hard to acknowledge for people, because Draco Malfoy had the Dark Mark and sided with the Dark Lord. And he didn’t regret anything he did.
He was starting to regret this conversation, though.
The words Yea, well, you didn’t have to live with the Dark Lord,did you? were burning on his tongue. It was a comeback from the seventeen year old boy he had been when the war ended and who so desperately needed some sort of validation that what he did was right; because if it wasn’t after what he had been put through? He couldn’t live like that. Some nights he still couldn’t, regardless. But Ginny would never understand the implications of the words. Joke though he may, about what the Dark Lord had for breakfast - shocker: He was not a morning person - and about his obsession with his pet snake - truthfully, he hated that Pansy thought it was a fun thing to have - he hated it and he couldn’t express it.
“I can hardly apologize for my father,” Draco pointed out. “So if that’s why you came after me? You can go.” And neither would Lucius apologize, Draco suspected. They were surprisingly similar in that respect; stupidly stubborn and then some. “Or did you want me to share my trauma so you can feel better about doing the right thing by going after me? Trust me, you don’t want to hear about how I had become nearly resistant to the first two Unforgivables and how I cried myself to sleep every night because I couldn’t do it any more.”
Sometimes he did that; he dropped some facts about the war casually, as though matter of fact, in the hopes that people would just stop talking about it because he gave them something. This time he knew it wouldn’t work,since Ginny would probably feel like this was a competition and be like yes, but I and then fill something in she thought was worse. People were pathetic that way. Victors of the war, supposedly, were pathetic that way. But for Draco, it had never been about that. Said victors were unsurprisingly unperceptive.
Finally, he looked back at her, tea long forgotten about. “So, what did you want when you went after me? Because if you want to be vile, if you want to tell me that you suffered so much because of my family, don’t bother. I already heard it all.” People crying at trials, curses hurled at him because he was one of the few Death Eaters not in Azkaban and people needed to take their anger and grief out on someone, the Malfoy name getting scandalized in the papers week after week, people trying to find their manor - there was nothing they wouldn’t do.
