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Chapter One
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It was ten minutes into the game against the Wimbourne Wasps, and the star Puddlemere Chaser, Joscelind Wadcock, who was also the team captain, made a spectacular pass to Ian O’Brian, who passed to Ginny Weasley, who scored the first goal of the match. The stands erupted into a deafening flurry of blue and gold.
The Wimbourne Wasps’ Kenny Glathorn was already halfway across the field, but was no match for Ian, who punched the Quaffle out of Glathorn’s grasp and seized it. He weaved between the Wimbourne Chasers, neatly dodged an angry Bludger, and was doing some very fancy flying, much to the delight of the fans.
Ginny, however, noticed that something was amiss. Instead of focusing on Ian, who was in possession of the Quaffle, the Wasps’ Beaters were tailing Joscelind, and the other Chasers were surrounding her. One of the Beaters clubbed a Bludger in the direction of Joscelind’s head. The other launched a Bludger to her stomach.
With a sinking feeling, Ginny realized that the Wasps were trying to get Joscelind out of the game. It was almost unanimously agreed by Quidditch fans everywhere that Joscelind was the best Chaser in all of England, and now the Wasps were trying to do in Puddlemere’s winning card. Without a second thought, Ginny dove straight for the Bludgers.
On the Wasps’ end of the field, Ian threw the Quaffle straight through the center hoop, and was shocked to the point of falling off his broom when he heard a cry of outrage from the Puddlemere stands. Dangling from his broom by only one hand, he desperately wondered what he did wrong, until he turned his head just in time to see two Bludgers smashing into Ginny’s shoulder, throwing her off her broom. The crowd went out of control.
---
Ginny opened her eyes and saw three blue and gold blobs hovering over her. She blinked, trying to focus the figures.
“How are you feeling?” came the concerned, yet sullen voice of Oliver Wood, the team Keeper.
Ginny groaned inwardly. From the tone of Oliver’s voice, it was clear that they had lost. “Fine,” she croaked.
“Oh, Ginny,” cried Joscelind. “You saved my life! I don’t know how to thank you.”
“It’s nothing. The Wasps weren’t going to kill you,” Ginny said modestly.
“No, but they would have killed my career. With an injury like that…” she trailed away.
“I’m injured?” Ginny asked incredulously, and indeed, she felt a sharp pain shoot through her right shoulder. “I’m injured!” she cried.
“Your shoulder was smashed. Sandwiched between the Bludgers,” Ian supplied helpfully, smashing his palms together for unnecessary emphasis. “Nothing too serious “”
“Nothing too serious?!” Joscelind exclaimed. “If Ginny had been a Muggle, she’d still be in the Operations Room!”
“Well, thank Merlin I’m not a Muggle. Where are the others?” Ginny asked, looking around for the rest of her teammates.
“At the party. In fact, now that you’re awake, we should be going too. Ta,” Ian said cheerfully.
“Wait. Party? We won?”
“No,” snapped Oliver.
“I was so shaken by what had happened, and the Wasps kept trying to do me in, and I wasn’t used to playing with the Reserve Chaser. I couldn’t function properly,” Joscelind explained sadly.
“But then, what’s the party for?”
Oliver and Joscelind glanced at each other uncomfortably before Joscelind finally said, “Well, Ginny… I’m really sorry, it’s all my fault, but the Healers said that you shouldn’t play until your shoulder is fully healed. They said it could take up to three months.”
“Three months?” Ginny gasped, utterly horrified.
“So we’re throwing the party for Rosalyn. Being promoted from Reserve and all. Don’t worry, though, Ginny,” Ian added comfortingly. “We all know you’re a better player than her. When you recover, you can petition your way back in. Now get some rest.” Ian waved merrily, and left. Joscelind hesitantly followed, and Oliver waved half-heartedly before dragging his sulking feet out the door.
Ginny was shell-shocked. It was the end of the world! The apocalypse! She, a veteran player who had been Puddlemere’s second-best Chaser since she was fresh out of Hogwarts, was indefinitely put on Reserve! Feeling rather sick, she closed her eyes and moaned, “Noooo!”
---
A few hours later, Ginny was awoken from her fitful sleep by a strange clinking noise. She opened her eyes to see the door swing open and admit Oliver Wood, his arms laden with bottles of Butterbeer. “You’re up,” he said, placing the bottles on her bedside table. “Butterbeer?”
Ginny nodded and sat up slowly, trying not to aggravate her injured shoulder. “Why aren’t you at the party?” she asked.
Oliver scowled. “Rosalyn Lancaster is not one of my favorite people,” he said moodily.
It was true. Rosalyn was adored by most of her male fans, but the people that actually knew her weren’t very fond of her. Oliver especially had a reason to dislike her. With his boyishly good looks, he was the face of Puddlemere United. He was featured on all the posters that weren’t of the entire team, and was the star of many media events. But Quidditch had more male fans than female, and the men would definitely prefer a blonde beauty to a burly Scotsman who their wives and girlfriends kept swooning over.
Rosalyn was the very image of a Quidditch player. In fact, she had started her Quidditch career as a model for Quidditch uniforms. Her lithe and athletic frame, naturally highlighted blonde hair, sun-kissed skin, and eyes the very color of the sky made her the ideal Quidditch representative. It only helped that her dazzling cloud-white smile rivaled the brightness of the sun. She turned heads, and she knew it. She was spoiled, stuck-up, and never backed down in an argument. Rosalyn was like a bad combination of Pansy Parkinson and Ginny Weasley herself.
“We’re on the same boat,” Oliver said, popping the cap off a bottle. “You’re the Reserve Chaser, and I’m the Reserve face.”
Ginny snorted. “At least your face isn’t broken. A Chaser with a messed-up shoulder. It’s fabulous.”
“Yeah. Fabulous.” He handed her a Butterbeer.
“A toast to the Puddlemere Reserves,” Ginny said.
“Cheers,” said Oliver in a voice that was about as cheerful as Snape singing the Funeral March.
---
“No, no, bloody no! You’re doing it all wrong!” Ginny bellowed from her unhappy position in the stands. “You’re throwing a Quaffle into a hoop, not an owl out of a window!”
Rosalyn paid her no attention. It wasn’t until the coach told her the same thing that she finally changed her throwing technique.
Ginny smashed her face into her hand and fumed. Three months was just too far away.
She was no Trelawney, but Ginny could see that Puddlemere’s future was at the bottom of a ditch “ a ditch at the bottom of a very steep hill. Joscelind and Ian were having a hard time adjusting to Rosalyn as a Chaser. Well, Joscelind was having a hard time, until the English National Team whisked her away to train for the next year’s World Cup. This left Puddlemere United with an even bigger problem, because at the very same time that Joscelind left, the other Reserve Chaser left too, in order to pursue a career as a professional demon-charmer. No one asked questions about that.
With only two Chasers left and a game in less than a month, situations got so desperate that Coach Deverill released an announcement in the Daily Prophet. Much to Oliver’s dismay, the advertisement featured a pouting Rosalyn and the words, “I can’t play Quidditch without a fellow Chaser… Do you want to play with me?” And thus, the tryouts began.
Hundreds of people flocked to Puddlemere Stadium, and Oliver and the Reserve Keeper were working overtime, testing out the skills of each contestant. Some were fairly decent, while others were downright terrible. One teenage boy named Timothy Brightwell was none too bright; after Oliver blocked ten out of ten of his throws, he flew himself into the goal, knocking Oliver off his broom in the process. Oliver was furious. The coach was mildly impressed, but crossed Brightwell off the list before Oliver had an apoplexy.
After trying out close to three hundred people, Coach Deverill and Oliver, the new team captain, decided on the finalists. Katie Bell, the old Gryffindor Chaser, a quiet man named Arthur Donovan, and the small but spirited Carson Allen were admitted as the new Reserves. Oliver was commenting on Katie’s excellent offensive maneuver when a Quaffle flew right into his face.
“Some Keeper you are, Wood. I caught you right off guard,” said a familiar, drawling voice. “So, am I late for tryouts?”
Oliver stared dumbly at the man who had just tried to murder him with a Quaffle.
It was Draco Malfoy, back from the dead.
---
To say that the Puddlemere players were surprised would be quite an understatement. When Draco Malfoy walked onto the pitch, Rosalyn emitted a terrified squeal, and fainted dead away. Many fled for cover, while the Beaters defensively clutched their bats.
Finally, Coach Deverill, who remembered rumors of Malfoys generally being good at Quidditch, calmed the rest of the Puddlemere team down and sent them to the stands. From there, they watched their Keeper go one-on-one with a man who should have been catching Snitches in the afterworld, instead of throwing Quaffles in the mortal realm.
They were all whispering to each other about what could have happened to the Malfoy heir, then stopped and gasped collectively as Oliver did a particularly dangerous backflip to stop one of Draco’s merciless Quaffles. Wherever he had been for the past seven years (which obviously hadn’t been in his grave), he had apparently learned how to throw.
Ginny’s initial shock at seeing the blond-haired ferret alive and kicking “ and throwing “ had worn off enough for her to want to hex him back into the grave he belonged in. But the Healers had insisted that she not do unnecessary wand-waving, so she scowled and resorted to making a fist and groaning as a lightning-fast Quaffle blazed its way through the right hoop, barely grazing Oliver’s outstretched fingers. The whistle blew.
“Eight out of ten. Against Wood,” Coach Deverill muttered to himself, rubbing his chin in thought. “Not bad. Not bad at all.” Deverill turned to Oliver. “Let’s put everyone on the field and see which Reserve works best with the entire team.”
Ginny could only sulk and fervently wish that Draco Malfoy would fall off his broom. But from the way he easily flipped and looped through the air, there wasn’t much chance of that.
Ginny didn’t even know where to start thinking. As far as she was concerned, all of the Malfoys had been wiped from the surface of the Earth. She had seen Lucius die with her own eyes. He had tried to ambush her during the war, but Tonks had appeared, and in the resulting fight, had finished him off. Narcissa had been killed by Antonin Dolohov, fellow Death Eater. The vile man had wanted Narcissa to marry him after the death of Lucius, and when Narcissa rejected him, he had killed her. It had been all over the papers.
Now that she thought about it, Draco’s death had never actually been proven. There were no pictures, and the only witnesses to it were Lupin and Harry, who had claimed to have killed the youngest Malfoy himself. Either Harry had miserably failed, or lied. Ginny didn’t know which was worse. If Harry had lied, she couldn’t understand why he would have done so. Malfoy was his nemesis. Who wanted to keep their nemesis alive and throwing Quaffles for Puddlemere United? Or was this some kind of twisted revenge where Malfoy would be kept enticingly close to the Snitch, but not be in the position to grab it? She would never understand Harry. Perhaps that was why she had never rekindled her relationship with him. Now he was happily married to Hermione. Well, as happy as one could be when his redheaded best friend kept sticking pins into a cornhusk doll that he had affectionately named Parry Hotter.
Ginny had been in the middle of sticking an imaginary pin into an imaginary cornhusk doll christened Maco Dralfoy when the whistle blew.
“Excellent game!” Coach Deverill was yelling, enthusiastically clapping everyone’s shoulders until little Carson Allen took the blow and fell face-forward onto the pitch. “You four,” Deverill continued, gesturing at the new Reserves, “sit over there with Weasley while the rest of the team and I decide who we’re going to play with.”
Ginny’s look of horror at being anywhere even remotely close to the slimy Slytherin went completely unnoticed by the coach.
“Now remember, even if you don’t get picked, don’t despair, because as recent events show, our Reserves are very important to us.” Deverill ushered his team into the locker rooms, and the door banged shut.
Ginny thanked Merlin and all the other heavenly deities when Katie Bell came over to talk with her, and Draco stayed in the air, lazily floating on his broom, and doing a few occasional fancy loops. For one alarming moment, she could have sworn that Draco had just winked at her, but she passed it off as the light playing tricks with her eyes, and listened to what Katie was saying.
As Katie talked about her job at Gringotts, Ginny found herself glancing at Draco. He didn’t look a day over eighteen, when he was supposed to have been killed. A horrible thought occurred to Ginny. Maybe he was eighteen. Maybe he was an Inferius! Hadn’t Pansy Parkinson worshiped him? Maybe she somehow escaped Azkaban, and brought him back from the dead!
“I’m sorry!” Katie exclaimed, looking slightly panicked. “I didn’t know you hated Knuts so much!”
“What?”
“I didn’t know you hated Knuts so much.”
Ginny blinked, utterly perplexed. “But I don’t hate Knuts. They’re money. And I’m a Weasley. Of course I like Knuts.”
“But, well, when I asked you if you wanted to know how Knuts were made, you looked terrified.”
“Oh. No. Not at all. I thought “” I thought that Malfoy was an Inferius. That sounded crazy, even to her own ears. “I thought I saw a spider on your shoulder, but that was just the light.”
“Oh. Okay,” said Katie, and proceeded to explain how the little pieces of copper were charmed in a top-secret way so they could be set apart from counterfeits.
Another thought occurred to Ginny. Perhaps the Malfoys were so rich because one of their ancestors had worked at Gringotts and had stolen the top-secret counterfeit charm!
“I would love to tell you how the coins are charmed, but I can’t, because as soon as I try to divulge that information, I’ll get warts all over my face and the goblins will feed me to a manticore.”
“Oh.”
Ginny was spared from further talks of Gringotts by the locker room door banging open. Deverill looked rather pleased with himself, but most of the team members, Oliver especially, looked as if they had been coerced into a disagreeable agreement.
“Party at Wood’s house!” the Coach boomed. “To welcome our newest official Chaser, Draco Malfoy!”
Something was very wrong with the world, Ginny thought. A former Death Eater, being welcomed into England’s best Quidditch team “ to replace her as Chaser. Something was very wrong indeed.
“Well, at least I don’t have to be playing with him,” Katie said with a shudder. “Did you know that I haven’t worn any jewelry since seventh year? Ginny? Ginny? Did you see another spider?”
---
“Going home?” Oliver asked Ginny, who was busily searching the floor for her purse.
“Yeah. The sooner I get away from him, the better. I swear to Merlin, he’s creeping me out.”
Indeed, he was. Once everyone had a glass of Firewhisky in them, most forgot that their newest recruit was the infamous Draco Malfoy, and treated him as they would any other Quidditch player. And Draco played along, acting as if he were almost normal, except that he kept looking at her and smirking in his own special way “ the way that made Ginny want to slap the look off his ferrety face.
“I’d like to walk you home, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave my house with these guys over here,” Oliver said, jerking a disapproving thumb at the group of Quidditch players who appeared to have had many more glasses of Firewhisky than they could handle.
“I can go alone. Have you seen my purse?”
“Looking for this, Weasley?”
Ginny blanched. It was the same voice that had teased her for most of her childhood, and she thought it was best that she get away from it, lest she broke her knuckles on the pathetic pointy face that belonged to the voice. It really wouldn’t do to have her left knuckles broken when her right shoulder had barely been patched back together. Ginny gritted her teeth, plastered on a smile, and spun around to face the source of her current grief. “Yes. Thank you, fellow teammate,” she said as kindly as she could, and politely grabbed her purse. Then she turned back around, wiped the smile off her face, and fled.
To her complete and utter horror, Draco Malfoy followed, the awful smirk not once leaving his face. “Your face was really something,” he said as he ran to catch up with the flame-haired Chaser. “You looked like you ate a whole box of U-No-Poo. Did anyone ever tell you that you look cute when you’re constipated? Because anyone who told you that was lying.”
Draco Malfoy was talking to her. Draco Malfoy was talking to her. Draco bloody Malfoy was talking to her as if she were an old friend and not one of his many mortal enemies who could not comprehend in the slightest how he was alive and why he was talking to her. It was enough to make her head spin. With her shoulder the way it was, Ginny didn’t think it would be wise to Apparate, but the pain-in-her-freckled-bum was talking nonstop about her unbecoming facial features, so she whipped out her wand, spun on the spot, and interrupted Draco’s sentence with a loud pop of displaced air.
She rematerialized in the comfort of her Puddlemere flat, with a distinctly uncomfortable shoulder. “Great Merlin’s socks,” she hissed, grasping her injured shoulder, but that only hurt it more. “Fuck,” she swore, but that didn’t make her feel better either. She just hoped her mum wasn’t around with the dreaded bar of stinging nettle soap.
---
It was two in the morning when enthusiastic and boisterous knocking woke her up. The only person who dared to knock down her door at this time of hour was Oliver Wood, who, as the new captain, was probably trying to recruit the members for a training session “ two hours after the end of a party involving Firewhisky. How typical of him.
“Look, Oliver, this really isn’t “” she stopped as she yanked open her door and came face-to-face with what looked like a ghost and was ten times creepier. She screamed.
“Merlin, Weasley!” yelled Ginny’s most unwelcome visitor, clapping his hands over his ears. “You should try out for the lead singer of the Bitchy Banshees group. I’m sure you’d get the position.”
Ginny screamed again, just to annoy him, and slammed the door in his face. Except that it didn’t slam.
“Are you having an enjoyable time crushing my foot in the doorjamb? Because I certainly am not.”
Ginny pushed on the door with all of her might, but it didn’t budge.
“You have a strange way of keeping yourself entertained, Weasley.”
The door started to push back.
“No wonder you don’t have many friends. Do you crush random body parts of theirs too? Merlin, I wouldn’t want to know which part of your boyfriend you’d try to crush “ provided that you have one, of course, and it’s no surprise that you don’t. No. It’s better for my health to not know.”
Draco successfully pushed his way in the door, and closed it behind him, locking up properly. “Are those the only locks you have on your door? Why, Weasley, what if some evil bloke decided to break in and have his wicked way with you?” He expertly threw more locking charms at the door. “Or is that your master plan to murder those pockmarked carrots you call brothers? To give them a heart attack when they find out their baby sister lost her virginity before they did?”
Draco certainly seemed to have a lot to say. Ginny, on the other hand, couldn’t form a single coherent sentence, because her head was too occupied thinking about how a former Death Eater was in her flat, locking it up so no one else could get in, talking about wicked ways and virginity, and her wand was back in her bedroom, which was all the way across the sitting room.
Ginny furtively glanced at said sitting room, and began to formulate a plan. All she had to do was quickly move to the table, grab the breadbasket, and throw it in his face, effectively distracting him. She would then drop and roll under the safety of her kitchen table, then push that over so it would “ hopefully “ crush the intruder’s foot. She would then jump over the loveseat, dive under the coffee table, then somersault her way into her room, where her wand was. Excellent. The plan was set, and she took a step to her right, towards the breadbasket.
Then everything went wrong.
She was having difficulty picking up a Quaffle. She didn’t know how she was going to throw an entire breadbasket, stuffed to bursting with her mum’s famously rich and dense blueberry scones. If she wanted to pick it up with her left hand, she would have to turn in a way that would make it impossible for her to roll under the table without breaking her back. The plan was ruined.
Grabbing Draco’s wand wasn’t an option either, because it was now safely tucked into his robes, and there was no way on magical Earth that she was going to reach in there. “Ah, fuck it,” she said, and gave Draco a mighty shove.
Had Ginny shoved him with both hands, she may have sufficiently given him enough of a push to knock him clean off his feet. But her wretched right shoulder wasn’t cooperating, and Draco ended up losing his balance, which simultaneously caused him to reach out and grab whatever was nearest, which, to Ginny’s great misfortune, was her. The next thing she knew, Draco was on the floor, she was on the floor on top of him, and, due to her flailing, a dozen blueberry scones were also on the floor.
“Why, Weasley,” said Draco, sounding a bit constricted from Ginny’s weight across his chest, “if I had known that simply arriving at your door would have caused you to fall for me, I would have done it ages ago. Of course, I would have had to charm my nose off my face first, so I wouldn’t be forced to smell the filth of that lopsided birthday cake you called a home “”
“Stuff it, Malfoy,” Ginny spat, and jammed a blueberry scone into his mouth.
---
Ginny sat at her kitchen table, arms crossed and scowling menacingly. “Get out of my house, Malfoy, you miserable prat.”
“Nice place you have here,” he said in what could almost be considered a friendly tone. “Homely, messy, and positively reeking of blueberry scones. I like it.”
“What do you want, Malfoy?”
“Dinner.”
Ginny rolled her eyes and sighed in frustration. The insufferable boy “ man, she corrected herself “ hadn’t changed much. Actually, no, that was wrong. He had changed, several times.
He had first changed during her fifth year, his sixth. He had gone from being a snot-nosed bad boy to a terrified young man who had taken a step too far in the wrong direction. He changed again during the war, tearfully running into the arms of the Order, and had fought against the Death Eaters in three separate battles. The next time he tried to play hero, however, he was kidnapped. The next time anyone saw him, he had turned into something like his father “ cold and cruel. Then, he died. Or at least, he was rumored to be.
And now he was back, and he had changed again, back into the snot-nosed brat he had been until he was sixteen. The way he was acting, it was as if the war had never happened at all.
“So, did you buy your way back into society?” Ginny finally asked the man rifling through her food cabinet.
“Don’t be daft, Weasley,” Draco replied conversationally. “My entire family were wanted Death Eaters. Do you really think the Ministry would have let me keep a Knut of the Malfoy funds? Yes, Weasley, I’m dirt poor. You can wipe that look off your face,” he added, without looking back at her.
Ginny rearranged her facial features into one that did not so resemble a suffocating goldfish.
“Aha! A green apple. Wonderful.” Draco took a large bite out of the fruit and strolled out of her kitchen. “Crisp, and tart, and just a bit sweet. You know, green apples are rather a lot like me “”
“Malfoy! Get the hell out of my house, you stinking rotten apple!”
“I can’t,” Draco explained with a casual shrug. “Where would I go?”
“You mean…”
“Yes. Ever since Malfoy Manor became the Museum of Modern War, I have become homeless.”
“So what you really mean to say is…”
“I’ll be staying right here. With you.” He grinned winningly before plopping onto her couch in the most un-Malfoyish fashion. “So, I’m in the mood for a hearty goulash. How about you?”
---
Growing up with Molly Weasley for a mother meant that it went against every one of Ginny’s beliefs to let anyone “ anyone “ go hungry. As a result, Ginny found herself standing in her kitchen at two-fifteen in the morning, stirring a pot of beef and chopped vegetables, for no one other than her greatest enemy that ever lived “ or died, then lived again.
To her left, Draco was happily chopping carrots, though rather violently, as if they were all miniature Weasleys. Draco Malfoy was chopping carrots, and if it wasn’t for the stabbing pain of her constantly aching shoulder, Ginny would’ve thought that she was in some sort of bizarre dream.
“Mighty nice of you to make me food, Weasley. I’ll pay for your groceries the next time I get my paycheck.”
The newly impoverished Draco Malfoy was offering to pay for her groceries. It just wasn’t right. “All right!” she yelled, brandishing her spoon threateningly in his face. “What are you up to? What kind of scheme is this? Why are you in my house, why am I making you soup, and why are you being civil to me?”
Draco snatched away the spoon and put on a look of mock hurt. “Why shouldn’t I be civil to you, Weasley? My days of treating you as scum are over.” He almost looked sincere. “I’m as poor as you are. Poorer, actually, seeing as I don’t have a home. So, we’re equals now.”
“No, Malfoy, we’re not equals. I am so much better than you!”
“I know. That’s why you’re making me dinner, and letting me live in your flat.”
There was, Ginny decided, no point in arguing with something so preposterous. “Malfoy,” she began slowly, running her good hand through her scraggly red hair. “I am really confused right now. First of all, I don’t even know how you’re alive, or why you’ve suddenly decided to show up as a Quidditch player after years of being presumed dead, or why you’re here with me, of all people. Care to explain?”
“Sure. After dinner.”
---
“You mean to say,” Ginny said incredulously, slowly chewing through the story that she had just been presented with, “that you have no recollection of anything that happened after your third year?”
“Well, not exactly. I remember making those ‘Potter Stinks’ badges for the Tournament, which was in my fourth year, but that’s about it. Say, I never got a chance to find out. Who won? It can’t have been Potter.”
“It was Potter. No, I mean Harry.”
“Bloody hell. What was the Goblet of Fire thinking, letting that scar-headed dolt into the Tournament?”
Ginny was about to say that it was Voldemort’s evil doing, but thought better of it. Her mind was reeling. That explained Draco’s childish, almost carefree behavior. He didn’t remember the war. As far as he was concerned, he was simply a pampered boy who liked to make fun of Harry Potter and his friends. “So, where have you been these past seven years? What did you do?”
“Aunt Andy took me to live in a small wizarding community in the Swiss Alps. She said I had been injured in the war, hence the amnesia, and she was the only relative I had left.”
“Aunt Andy?”
“Andromeda Tonks, nee Black. I didn’t like her very much “ after all, she did marry a Muggle “ but I figured she was better than the war. When I wasn’t making fun of the boys from the village, I played Quidditch with them, and realized that I had natural talent as a Chaser. Maybe that’s why I never beat Potter to the Snitch. I was meant to be a Chaser, not a Seeker.”
“Why didn’t you come back after the war was over?”
“Why would I? Aunt Andy told me that I was a wanted Death Eater, too. I still have the Mark, you know. And besides, my parents were dead, my friends were dead, and Malfoy Manor and the family fortunes were taken by the Ministry. I thought that if I returned then, I would end up killing them all for ruining my life, so I just stayed in the Alps. It was peaceful. The war never quite affected Switzerland.”
“So why’d you come back now?”
“My Aunt died, and I didn’t want to stay there anymore. I knew my name was cleared, so I decided, why not?”
Ginny couldn’t decide if Draco’s expression should have been described as indifferent, or as sort of sad. She didn’t know if he was capable of the emotion.
“She was happy, during her last moments,” Draco continued, frowning slightly. “Said she could finally join her daughter and husband.”
A pang of sadness shot through Ginny. Tonks had once saved her life from Lucius Malfoy, but during the Final Battle, Tonks had lost her life at the hands of Bellatrix Lestrange.
“And do you know what else she told me?” he asked, looking directly into Ginny’s eyes. “She told me to keep my head down and go find a Weasley for help.” He snorted. “I didn’t, for the two or so months I’ve been back. Did keep my head down, though, because I suspected there were people who’d want to kill me for this.” Draco roughly pulled up his left sleeve to expose the hideous tattoo on his forearm. “Then I ran out of what little money Aunt Andy had given me, saw an ad in the paper looking for a Chaser, found out that a Weasley was on the team, and decided that it was fate leading me to a hearty bowl of homemade goulash.”
“Fate?” Ginny scoffed. “I thought Malfoys don’t believe in fate.”
“We didn’t. But that was when we had money to manipulate fate with. And it isn’t Malfoys anymore. It’s just Malfoy. Only one. Unless you want to use your famous Weasley fertility to help me out,” he said, waggling his eyebrows suggestively.
“No way, you bastard!” Ginny screeched, highly affronted.
Draco frowned seriously. “No. No child of mine will be a bastard. Would you like me to buy you a ring first? I’ll do that as soon as I get my paycheck.”
“Filthy bastard!” Ginny screamed again, pelting him with blueberry scones.
“To get my paycheck,” Draco yelled while ducking to avoid a flying scone, “I’ll need to practice Quidditch, and to practice Quidditch, I’ll need to get some sleep.”
Ginny watched in detached horror as Malfoy neatly dodged her scone and jogged into her bedroom. It took a moment for her to process the horrifying information, and another to respond. “Malfoy! Get your bloody arse out of my bed!”
---
To be continued…
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Quaffles and Quarrels by sheriden
Chapter Notes: Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. The rest belongs to the genius of J.K. Rowling.
A/N: What started out as a one-shot strictly revolving around Quidditch grew a mystery plot all on its own… How that happened is a mystery itself.
This story was written before Deathly Hallows, and the entire book will be disregarded. Contains spoilers up to Half-Blood Prince.