Harry Potter - Series Fan Fiction ❯ Silver ❯ Times ( Chapter 1 )

Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to JKRowling, Warner Brothers, and anyone else who has rights to it, but not me. /sigh/

 

A/N: Well, this fic kinda came at me out of the blue the other day... Draco/Ginny, of course, but will be quite a bit darker than what I usually write... o.o;

 

Erm... I didn't really know what to call this, and right now it is titled `Silver' - but that will just be the title of chapter 1 if I think of a better title for the overall fic... (I seem to be doing that a lot lately... -.-;)

 

Thanks to my sisters for beta-ing this for me! n_n

 

Listening to: Starry Starry Night by Don McLean (I dunno... I was listening to it, and it fit... /shrug/)

 

 

“Silver”

by Jezunya

 

Chapter 1 - Times

 

 

It was a strange place to meet the love of your life. Not that she would have called it love then. He probably wouldn't have called it anything at all. There was no relationship, no connection, nothing. They just happened to have cells across from each other. Nothing significant about that.

 

He was already there when she was sentenced. His trial had been much quicker, more cut-and-dry. There were no questions of whether his actions had been voluntary or not, unlike hers, and he'd had no family or friends to drag his trial out, to fight the sentencing tooth and nail - unlike her.

 

She had been terrified and horrified when she'd been brought in, but mostly she'd been resigned. That was perhaps what helped her most to keep her sanity during those long two years - she had resigned herself to her fate, and to the fact that, no matter how her family and friends tried to fight it, she was, indeed, a Death Eater.

 

She didn't try to fight as the dementors slowly drained her of all the joy she'd ever known. There wasn't much left in her by that point, anyway. They took her memories - oh, they were still there, but they were devoid of any color, of any emotion. They became just meaningless events in the long, winding path that had led her to her dank little cell in Azkaban.

 

She didn't try to hold on to anything; just let the dementors do what they did best. That was what saved her sanity. That and his eyes.

 

She often wondered if he managed to keep a hold of his own sanity. She thought so, but sometimes she wasn't sure. Sometimes, she would wake in the middle of the night to find him staring at her through the bars of his cell. He had looked most insane at those times, with the moonlight glinting in his silvery hair and eyes, giving him a kind of other-worldly glow. Another time, the sight would have terrified her. But sitting there in the pits of the dreaded wizard's prison, she didn't feel much fear. So she just stared back, because there was nothing else to do.

 

It was several months into her sentence - the better part of which had been spent simply sitting and blinking owlishly at each other - when he suddenly opened his mouth, and spoke.

 

“What are you doing here?”

 

There was the barest hint of the old sneer in his voice, but mostly it just sounded hollow and raspy.

 

She'd watched him for a while longer, before answering him with a question of her own.

 

“Why are you here?”

 

The sound of her own voice surprised her more than his speaking had. He, on the other hand, just lowered his eyelids, the silver eyes darkening to a stormcloud grey.

 

“I meant to kill you.”

 

She nodded, sighing. “I know.” She'd thought it was him when the attack came, and hearing it from his own lips convinced her more fully than any Ministry verdict ever would have.

 

He raised a pale eyebrow, his face twisting into something that was almost a glare. “You didn't answer my question.”

 

She half-nodded again, drawing a deep breath as her eyes fell closed. The prison air was frigid in her lungs.

 

He had tried to kill her.

 

She opened her eyes, staring at him again.

 

“You know why I'm here.”

 

 

888

 

 

Ginny snapped awake, her body barely even twitching and her breathing remaining in the deep, even breaths of sleep. After a few moments she let her eyes slide open.

 

The wall in front of her was grey, but not the same grey that she had come to expect when waking. This was simply a darkened blue, a shadow of the paint adorning her bedroom walls. Not really grey at all.

 

She squeezed her eyes shut, grimacing to herself and forcing her body to relax. Or rather, forcing it to wake up - there was no need for the instinctive fake-sleep here, just as there was no need for her to expect to see grey all around her when she opened her eyes. That part of her life was over, had been over for the last two years. No, three years now. Her eyes found the calendar above her desk, the number in the box for today's date circled in plane black pen, without any sort of explanation. She didn't need an explanation to remind her - she knew all too well what today was.

 

Five years ago today, she'd started her term in Azkaban, and just two years after that she'd been released.

 

She felt her eyebrows settling into a glower as she stared at the innocent black mark on the calendar. She wouldn't get any peace today, she knew, because everyone assumed that she `shouldn't be alone at a time like this' as her Mum always put it. No one ever thought that maybe, just maybe, she wanted to be alone for a time like this.

 

She didn't know if she could handle having her family walking on egg-shells around her again this year. They seemed to think that she was made of glass, that one false word would break her to pieces. She smiled humorlessly to herself as she sat up, the covers falling off from around her shoulders. Prison didn't make you softer or more delicate. It made you harder - you had to be stronger, or you would break. And if she hadn't broken in Azkaban, then nothing her family said or did would break her now.

 

She dressed in the dark, as always reluctant to turn on any sort of light or lamp, and kept her back studiously turned to the calendar over her desk, where the black circle around the date watched her like some great, accusing eye. Of course, having her back to the desk had its drawbacks as well, namely in the form of the window on the opposite wall.

 

She felt her hands slow on the buttons of her blouse as she watched the silvery morning light filtering in onto her bedspread, bringing with it her dream from the previous night. It hadn't really been a dream per se, but a memory, most likely brought on by the coming anniversary of her sentencing and subsequent release. She frowned at the silver light, determinedly going back to dressing. She would not think about him. She would not.

 

Still, even thinking that she would not think about him brought her thoughts back round to him. Everything in there had been grey, varying from the pale grey of the dementors' rotting flesh to the dark, almost black grey of the other inmates' hair or clothes. But everything had been grey, in one form or another.

 

Everything except him.

 

He wasn't grey. Oh, his skin had the same ashy pallor as the rest of them soon enough, and his eyes and cheeks became sunken and drawn like all the rest, but there was always something... something silvery about him, rather than plain grey. Like some kind of light or life that would not disappear, even in the face of the dementors' wrath. Something that would not let him fall into despair, would not let him simply forget who he was and how he had gotten there, like so many prisoners of Azkaban did.

 

She realized then that her hands had stopped brushing her hair and that she had begun to stare off into space again. Growling angrily at herself, she wrenched the brush through her coppery mane, determined not to think about him. She had just thrown her coat onto her shoulders and pulled her front door open to step out onto the porch in front of her first-floor flat, when her resolution to get through the day without thinking about him was, once again, shattered.

 

She could only stare down at the headline on the newspaper, sitting innocently on her doorstep where the owl must have dropped it, and at his picture glaring out at her as he was jostled on either side by security wizards from Azkaban.

 

She felt her face pale, her heart rate quickening as she scanned the words written in bold on the front page.

 

“DRACO MALFOY UP FOR PAROLE.”

 

8-888-8

 

A/N: Um... review..?