lavivi | Epilogue to Plew (Reply)

I hadn't quite realized how popular it is to post fics on Livejournal. Well, I'll give it a try here...

Title: epilogue to Put a Light in the Window
Author: Lavinia Lavender
Rating: story is PG-13, this is G, easily. I know, how boring.
Length: 2,848 words
Summary: Takes place a few months after the end of Put a Light in the Window. Ginny has dinner with her parents, and they discuss a few things.

Author notes: This epilogue is dedicated to a man named Stan Campbell. He was MIA as a prisoner of war in the Vietnam War, and I couldn’t stop thinking of him as I wrote parts of this.

~*~

Ginny Malfoy thought to herself that Draco would be pleased – she had progressed in learning how to hide her emotions. Her heart was thumping at a terrible rate, but the view of herself in the mirror across from her looked perfectly composed – hardly recognizable, in fact, when she compared it to what she had seen as a child and young teenager. There was an adult witch in the mirror, sitting straight with her hands folded in her lap, her red hair pulled back very smoothly, wearing a certainly nice set of robes, but nothing flamboyant. She certainly did not want to wear anything that was obviously expensive.

Ginny stood and hoped her smile was warm and did not look aloof as she saw Arthur and Molly Weasley approaching through the panes of glass in the doors.

Her parents looked as though they felt out of place – well, they had never been to this restaurant before, or an equivalent of it. Before they hadn’t been able to afford it, not while her mother’s cooking was more than adequate, and though they were better off now, they simply weren’t used to going to very elegant restaurants.

Their pace slowed when they caught sight of her, but then they came through the doors that swung magically open, and her mother embraced her.

“Oh, Ginny –“

“Hi, Mum.”

Molly pulled back to look her in the face, and Ginny winced inside to see how bright her mother’s eyes were. She had always been so quick to come to tears….

Arthur stepped up to her now, and she felt a twinge of nervousness again. “Hello, Dad,” she said, forcing herself to look him in the face, and he hugged her as well.

Now it felt awkward again. Ginny took a small step back and indicated with a slight wave of her hand the waitress waiting several feet away. “Would you like to get a table now?”

“Oh, yes –“

The waitress led them to a secluded booth. The restaurant had many of them, with curtains on either side if the customers wanted real privacy. Ginny sat across from her parents.

There was more awkward silence as they were left with their menus. As apprehensive as she had been about this meeting, Ginny had prepared a few lines she could use to break the ice, but none of them seemed appropriate now. Finally, it was not her, but her father who spoke.

“I hope that your – er – Draco isn’t going to be – upset with your meeting us tonight.”

Ginny half-choked on the glass of water she had been drinking, and hastily set it down. “Oh, no – he knows. He wouldn’t be upset about this. He’s not…” She trailed off, and smiled ironically down at the table. It was time for the part of the conversation she knew would come, The Explanation, and despite how she had also rehearsed this, she still had to search for the right words now.

“It’s funny how – when you form a prejudice against someone, it becomes so hard to imagine there’s more to them. And I know, I can completely admit that Draco was an utter bastard to Ron and Harry at school, and he deserved a lot of what he got. I’m not going to try to make excuses for what he did – well, not everything, anyway.”

Ginny leaned forward now, looking her parents in the eye, imploring them to understand. “I was in fifth year when it started – I was a prefect, and so was Draco, so we had contact through the prefect meetings and other activities…and – well, even before I saw behind the appearance he put on for Gryffindors, I had to admit he was attractive. He was just something pretty to look at, to watch from a distance but never touch. Then one day I overheard him talking to his friends, and I was surprised by how – normal he could be. How he wasn’t a hundred percent nasty. He had friends, even, friends who liked him.

“And then one day we were assigned to do a few tutoring sessions for first years. We had to work together…Draco’s told me that was the first time he really noticed me. We talked that week, shooting stuff back and forth – I suppose we were practically flirting. Almost, anyway.

“After that, we managed to volunteer to do things together, without anyone quite noticing that we were. We got to know each other a bit more. That was all in the fall. Right before the Christmas holidays, things got more serious – we had both become very interested in each other. There was a moment where he almost kissed me…but Ron called me, and I had to leave.

“And then during the Christmas holidays – you might remember, I got and sent a lot of owls. They were all from Draco, of course.

“Those letters…were sort of a test. It was a sample of what it would be like if we had a relationship – all the secrecy. And that’s what we asked each other in the owls – if we wanted to make this a relationship.”

Ginny smiled, remembering those cryptic but emotional letters. She had kept hers; he had had to burn his. But he could still quote them to her.

“So we went back to school and began meeting in secret, for the rest of the year and all of the next – until the very end. That was the hardest part. He was leaving, and he couldn’t refuse his father. Neither of us wanted to break up, but with what he was almost undoubtedly leaving to do…it wasn’t possible. So we agreed to break it off entirely once he left school, until the war was over.”

Ginny drew designs in the water around her glass with her finger. Two terrible years…the worst years of her life, when she felt torn and hated herself for it, hated herself because she couldn’t stop loving him. When she heard rumors, some true and some not, about what he was doing. Two years of it…there had been so many times when she swore to herself she would not go find him when it was all over, that she would find someone else and erase her memory of what they had had…and there had been nothing, nothing to remind her or encourage her that someday they could reunite and love each other as they once had….

Ginny came back to where she was, and realized she had written Harry’s name in the water. Brusquely, she wiped it away.

They decided on their dinners, informed their plates, and the food arrived. There was silence for several minutes as they ate, then Ginny lowered her fork and continued, “After it was over, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to find him, and wasn’t sure I wanted to. I didn’t know what could have happened to him, how he could have changed. But then I heard about his parents’ cremation, and I decided to take a risk and go to that. And I could see him from a distance, and see how he was…so I did, and after everyone else had left I went up to him and asked if he remembered what he had told me before he had left school. He said he did.”

She leaned back and looked from her mother to her father. “And that was it. You know the rest.”

Molly was looking at her, her expression rather distressed – Ginny could imagine what it was: her mother was upset that she had had to go through all of that alone. Arthur was also frowning slightly in sympathy.

Ginny sighed and ate a few more bites. “It’s difficult right now. He’s very much scarred. The war hurt both sides, Dad.” She rested her elbows on the table and laced her fingers together, pressing her chin to them and more thinking aloud to herself, now. “He doesn’t like who he’s become. I’m trying to help him all I can…and it matters to him a lot that I still love him now.”

“He’s kind to you?” Molly asked gently, but as though personally wanting reassurance. Ginny nodded.

“Oh yes. Right now, he’s not keen on hurting anyone – me most of all – not even to make himself feel better. And in school – no, he’s not as perpetually cruel and sadistic as some people think. When we argued, there were times when he said cruel things, and when he was hurt, he did mean to hurt me back. But it was never anything terrible, he never hit me. And afterward, he was sorry. He wouldn’t say it outright –“ – Ginny smiled to herself – “but he showed it in his own way.”

Arthur now pointed to the ring on her left hand. “So,” he said smiling slightly, “when did you get that?”

Overcome for a moment by a feeling of guilt, Ginny instinctively covered it with her right hand, but then held it out to her parents as she turned and dug in her small handbag with her other hand. “Only a few days after I moved in, actually…no one was there, only a priest and one witness, Draco’s friend Blaise –“ Finding what she was looking for, she slid a photograph across the table to them. Her parents leaned forward together to see it.

She knew what they were seeing – a wide room with windows that almost filled the entire back wall, the curtains pulled away from them so that the early morning light filling the sky was visible. In front of the windows she stood, dressed in relatively simple white robes facing Draco, who wore the same color. They were looking steadily at each other’s face, even though the photograph was developed magically. Behind them stood a man in light blue robes, the priest, who was evidently talking, occasionally gesturing with his hand. On Draco’s other side stood Blaise Zabini, who matched Draco’s white and had a small purple flower pinned to his front.

“Just to get away from the everyday surroundings, we went to France for a honeymoon – just for a couple of weeks. It wasn’t anything special, but I think it did Draco some good.”

Arthur and Molly peered at the small photo a moment longer, then her father pushed it back to her, with visible reluctance. Ginny shook her head. “No, you can keep it, please. We have copies….”

“Oh, thank you.” Her mother picked it up again.

They finished the rest of their dinner in silence. When they were done, the dirty plates evaporated, but their drinks were refilled, as they weren’t quite ready to leave yet. Ginny felt that her parents had something else to say or ask, so she waited patiently.

Her mother finally came around to it. “Are you…are you happy with him, Ginny? I don’t mean to be repetitive, but –“

“It’s all right, Mum.” She paused a moment. “Yes, I am. I always have been, from the beginning back in school. I can’t really explain why I am so happy with him…I suppose it’s love, isn’t it? When you’re so happy to be with a person, when they don’t have any spectacular traits that would make you so happy, but it’s just – everything about them you love, for no reason at all. That’s the way it is with Draco – in school I loved so much more than his looks, I loved his wit, his sarcasm, his jealousy, his silly pride – even his selfishness, though I would hate it at the same time. But it was part of him, and he wouldn’t be him without it, and I wouldn’t have changed him for anything…and now, I love him for himself all the more now, though it hurts me to see how he’s changed. I wish I could bring him back, the boy he was in school – he was so much more innocent then, in a way.” She smiled, suddenly embarrassed at her choice of words to describe him. “But anyway – I do love him, as much as I think I could possibly love anyone, and I know he loves me the same way.”

Molly swallowed visibly. She was near to tears again, Ginny realized. “As long as you’re in love, Ginny…I couldn’t wish more for you.”

Sincerely moved, Ginny leaned forward to squeeze her mother’s hand. “Thank you, Mum.”

Arthur took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Do you think…that Draco feels the same way about you?”

Ginny nodded. “Especially now. He likes having me near. He’ll just sit there for hours sometimes, and just watch me, whatever I’m doing. Back in school, oh, he used to get ferociously jealous. No one knew I had a boyfriend, of course, and it would kill him that he couldn’t stand up for me in public. So while he can’t put it into words…I know. I can tell.”

There were several moments of quiet, then Molly let out a small sob, and fished a handkerchief out of her robes.

“Oh, Mum…”

“I’m sorry, Ginny,” Molly said, dabbing her eyes, “I do mean what I said, as long as you’re happy…but I – always had hopes that you would find a nice boy – not that Draco…but someone who, who we know and your brothers like and can get along with, someone we don’t have to worry about his past, someone like, like –“

“Like Harry,” said Ginny dully.

Molly cried a little harder, nodding slowly and unhappily. Arthur put his arm around her shoulders. Ginny rubbed her glass in her hands, feeling depressed now as well. When Molly was composed Ginny spoke slowly.

“I think I always loved Harry, in different ways. When I was eleven, I loved him as much as anyone could at that age. But it changed…after the end of my first year. I still loved him, in a small way that hadn’t changed, but I wasn’t in love with him anymore. I felt –“ She swallowed and laced her fingers around the glass, gripping it tightly. “In a lot of ways, I felt empty after – Tom’s diary was destroyed. It was like a lot of what made me, was missing, like I had forgotten what I liked and what I hated. And I just couldn’t feel the same about Harry anymore. I lost my passion about him – not only him, but everything. It was a long time before I really felt excited, exhilarated by something…it wasn’t until Draco, actually, that I felt the strong emotion of really being in love.”

Ginny rubbed her forehead, aware that what she was saying was much more than an explanation for her parents. “Loving Draco felt so right. I was comfortable, happy like I hadn’t been since I was little. I dated Dean Thomas, a dormmate of Harry’s for a while, before Draco. And that – it never worked. I always felt like I was trying too hard, like I was somewhere I didn’t belong, like I was always faking how I felt. I felt that way a lot, actually, not just around Dean. I just felt like I didn’t fit anymore around Harry and Hermione and all the other Gryffindors. But with Draco – I didn’t have to worry about any of that. He was on my level. I didn’t have to pretend to be someone I wasn’t when I was with him.”

She opened her eyes and looked back to her parents. “I’m happy now, Mum. I really am. I can’t imagine anywhere, or anyone I could be with that would make me happier.”

~*~

Ginny walked upstairs to the library, where she knew she would probably find Draco. There he was, sitting on the end of a sofa. He had something in his hands – it was a bracelet of hers, she realized – a simple one, just made out of silver links. In his lap sat a small, open box, and she could see tiny golden ornaments in it. He was holding one now that was shaped like a sparrow, and he had his wand in his left hand. He said an incantation too low for her to hear, and the golden sparrow flashed and glittered, spinning from the small link he held in his fingertips. As soon as it stopped, he lifted it to the bracelet and attached it with his wand. He was making her a charm bracelet. She stopped in the doorway, watching him.

Without looking away from the next charm he picked up from the box, he asked, “How did it go?”

“Well. We talked about love, and you and me, a bit about Tom, and then more about you. I’m glad to see you found a hobby, so I won’t tell you that they make those specially.”

The next charm glinted, catching her attention away from his face. “This way I won’t worry about them being substandard.” Draco looked at her at last, lowering the bracelet in his hands. His expression might seem closed to anyone else, but she read in it everything it said.

Ginny walked to him, bent down and kissed his cheek.

Final credits: The mention of the charm bracelet goes to Cassandra Claire.