Chapter Text
If it had been some nameless Hufflepuff underclassman taking refuge in the disused greenhouse, and not Ginny Weasley, Draco would have felt no trepidation in simply staying hidden. He’d let the poor soul have their smoke and finish their cry, and hope they never realized that Draco Malfoy witnessed it all from a window seat behind a stack of planters. As it was, Ginny Weasley had the reputation for having some very nasty hexes up her sleeve and a “hex first, ask questions later” approach to using them. Draco didn’t fancy learning how she’d take to being surprised, or worse embarrassed.
Not for the first time in his life, Draco cursed his truly rotten luck. He had really thought the greenhouse-turned-storeroom was an unexpected, and much needed, gift. His eighth year was turning out to be a near constant parade of small humiliations and rather larger fits of guilt and panic. He rarely made it past teatime before desperately needing a place to hide, and, as a rule, it wasn’t a good idea to poke around the Herbology greenhouses after hours. (They were filled with too many unassuming, but nasty specimens and too far away from the heavily trafficked parts of the castle for anyone reliably to hear your cries of distress.) He really had thought he would have the place to himself.
As it was, Draco was now listening to the “Hero of Wizarding World’s” girlfriend have a profanity-laced breakdown, while the window for revealing himself closed rapidly. Stealing the scraps of his courage (and his dignity), Draco stepped from his hiding place.
“Let me leave before you continue this line of thought would you!” Draco shouted coming around the planters.
“Merlin’s saggy tits. Malfoy?!” She had her wand whipped out and aimed at him in a matter of seconds. Her reflexes were as sharp as they’d been dueling in the war. Draco couldn’t stop himself from flinching back, and just barely avoided the embarrassment of toppling into the wall of planters behind him.
Ginny wasn’t actually crying – (Thank Merlin!)– but her face was still red and blotchy beneath her flaming hair. It wasn’t a good look. Draco did his best to save them both some humiliation by studiously looking down at her slippers.
“Well, kindly fuck off!” she said.
“Yes, quite, good night then.”
Draco didn’t bother pointing out that he had been there first. He was almost out the door when curiosity got the better of him. Ginny had stopped her tirade of curses and was now sitting hunched over her knees on a bag of charmed planting soil. She was turned away from him, her long curtain of red hair hiding her face. From the dank citrusy smell she seemed to be trying to light a hand-rolled cigarette of tashi, a magical variant of a popular muggle plant that apparently promised calm and pleasant dreams. It had become very popular in the Slytherin common room during the rise of the Dark Lord, as those who weren’t actively recruited had the privilege of medicating themselves into oblivion.
“You need a cold flame for that. It won’t light otherwise,” said Draco regretting the words the moment they had left his mouth.
“What?” Said Ginny, turning to look at him. Her words landed somewhere between combative and irritated, and desperately vulnerable.
“Here,” Draco said, flicking his wand wordlessly. A pale lavender flame appeared at the end of it. It was a simple incantation, but rarely used beyond dedicated potion makers and tashi smokers.
There was a supremely awkward moment when Draco realized that he would need to walk back into the greenhouse to light Ginny’s tashi cigarette. A task made harder by the way Ginny stared at him with hostile disbelief. By sheer will of commitment – Father had always instilled in him the belief the miscalculations were best met with commitment rather than retreat – Draco managed the choreographed actions with something that almost passed as ease.
The sharper citrus smell of burning tashi erupted into the air, and Ginny took her first sputtering hit. As she blew the soft purple smoke from her mouth, she handed the cigarette to Draco. Draco wanted nothing more than to leave Ginny to her solitary drug use, but mother held strong opinions about refusing social offerings from anyone one was indebted to. Even now he couldn’t find it in him to go against her. So Draco took a inhale from the end of the cigarette and let the familiar taste, heavy and sharp, fill his mouth.
The effect was immediate. (According to one of the half-blood Slytherins this was an improvement on the muggle variety.) Draco felt slightly floaty and, while not exactly happy, no longer particularly bothered by either the awkwardness of sitting next to Ginny, or the general awkwardness of his existence.
As he handed the cigarette back to Ginny, he wondered idly if Ginny really was on the list of people he owed something too. Harry Potter, most definitely was; he owed his life and freedom to the twat. The rest of the Golden Trio – as they were ridiculously named by the Prophet--he probably owed them too: Granger, for keeping Potter alive long enough to end the war and save Draco’s neck; and Weasley, though had never done anything Draco could see to make him worthy of being the Golden Boy’s best friend, because Draco had almost killed him. He felt rather bad about that. It was good of Weasley to let that little episode go unremarked upon during his hearing. And, of course Weasley had saved Gregory. Draco and Gregory could hardly stand being in the same room together these days, but Draco still felt better knowing he was alive, and remarkably seemed happy living in probational exile somewhere in Essex.
Thinking about Goyle came with a sick feeling of guilt and the ghost of Crabbe and a much more fearful mix of emotions Draco couldn’t even bring himself to look at. Blessedly, the tashi made it all feel a little farther away and, as Draco took another drag from the cigarette held out to him, he was able to bring his mind back to the matter of Ginny.
What did someone like Draco owe, someone like Ginny? Draco had of course been on the losing side of the war, and even he could admit, the more psychopathic side. Draco had felt incredible relief when he saw Aunt Bella and Voldemort fall, even as he realized how well and truly fucked his family would be by it all. But none of that answered the problem of Ginny. He supposed that as the girlfriend of Harry Potter, she might simply sit under the umbrella of his unending debt to the Boy-Who-Lived. It was an unpleasant thought, even as the tashi made the tips of toes buzz in a comfortable manner.
“This is really strong, isn’t it?”
“Hmmm yeah,” replied Draco. A distant part of his brain reminded him that he should leave, but he couldn’t find the will to do so. A pleasant sort of warm hum had set into his very bones.
He took another hit of tashi when Ginny passed the cigarette back to him.
She looked pitiful, he noticed.
Now that he was sitting closer to her, he could see the sadness in her face. What he’d thought had been combativeness early, seemed more like lack of sleep. It was like looking in the mirror.
Distantly, Draco wondered when pitying someone started feeling like kinship rather than an opportunity.
Was this the personal growth his court appointed therapist had been talking about? Or merely trauma? Or an effect of the tashi which really did seem stronger than he remembered.
“Where did you get this?”
“Neville. It’s his personal strain.”
“Hmmm. It is said he is rather good at herbology.”
Even through the haze of tashi, Draco felt rather embarrassed to have paid Neville such an unequivocal compliment.
“You know if you are going to smoke tashi in here you really ought to ward the doors. Merlin knows who might find you.”
“You mean I might find myself sharing a cigarette with Draco fucking Malfoy,” said Ginny, giving him a wry smile.
“I meant that being the famous girlfriend of the Twat-Who-Saved-Us-All, you might want to be a bit more careful. Profuse cursing and smoking tashi isn’t the best look.”
“Fuck off then. I’m grieving.”
She meant it too. Draco could see Ginny’s misery focusing inward. She’d already dismissed him from her attention, and it was the only reason he gave her the next bit of advice.
“Sure,” he said, “But the headline won’t be ‘Chosen One’s Girlfriend has Fairly Normal if Alarming Reaction to Grief,’ it will be ‘War-Hero’s Girlfriend Unhinged Drug Addict?”
Ginny was startled into looking at him. There was something steely in her gaze even with the tashi making me her posture relaxed and her words slow.
“You wouldn’t dare. I know a hex that will make your fingernails grow inward.”
“I wouldn’t dare. But considering we both found ourselves in this seemingly perfect hiding spot, it’s obviously not the secret we thought it was.”
“No one at Hogwarts would be so cruel.”
Draco didn't dignify such an idiotic response with an answer, because of course there were Hogwarts students who would sell such a story to the Prophet. And they wouldn’t think it was cruel. They wouldn’t even be Slytherins who’d see such a story as the cash payout that it was. The lives of Potter, the Golden Trio, and now Ginny by association were part of the public domain. They’d see it as their right, maybe their duty. He thought Ginny knew this too, and if she didn’t now, she’d figure it out soon enough. It wasn't on him to save teenage girls from their own naivety.
“I just don’t get it,” She said, her voice cracking a little.
“That you’re famous now?”
“No. I just don’t get how all of them are able to be so normal -- ‘life goes on, forgive and get back to it’ – even if I could go back to the way things were, I wouldn’t want to. I don’t want my life back without him in it.”
Ginny’s voice is so filled with anguish it takes Draco a moment to even process the words, and another moment to realize she is talking about her brother who died in the battle for Hogwarts, one of the twins.
The tashi betrays him then, and Draco is swamped with such an intense visceral feeling of grief and regret that he feels like he is choking on it.
“I know what you mean,” Draco said, because if he didn’t let something out of his body, he’s was pretty sure he was going to stop breathing.
“How? Your side were death eaters?” replied Ginny.
She’s genuinely confused. Her sentiment so casually cruel, it startles him out of his panic attack with a laugh.
“Fuck! Sorry. I know” said Ginny, catching herself a moment later. “I know you lost people too. Your friend Crabbe. He was a death eater but like a human being, not like some of the others, you probably miss him.”
Draco doesn’t correct her to say that Crabbe’s not the only one he lost. That he lost his godfather; and for all intents and purposes he’ll likely lose his father to Azkaban, and whatever trust he had in his mother, and his whole goddamn life and everything he ever imagined for it. Though it is probably selfish to compare losing his future prospects to losing an actual person. In fact, he’d happily lose just about anything to have Severus back, and she’s absolutely right, in his heart of hearts he wouldn’t really want his old life back without either Severus or Crabbe in it. Not because he was particularly close with Serverus at the end, and it had been years since Crabbe really felt like a companion, but they had still been life-long presences in his own personal landscape. They had still been full people, constellations of a thousand minute traits and experiences, that you didn’t realize were so full and big until they were just gone.
Draco doesn’t tell Ginny any of this, instead he just says:
“That might be the most honest thing anyone has said to me since the war ended.”
He was being unbelievably gracious, giving her an out for her unpardonable cruelty. It felt good. And Ginny accepted it, wordlessly handing him the tail end of their tashi cigarette.
A thousand questions drifted through Draco’s mind: Is the Gryffindor Common room like the Slytherin dorms, quieter and sadder than it was or do they party at night, victors of the war? What’s it like to be Potter’s girlfriend – the Chosen One’s chosen one – (Ha!)? Does Professor McGonagall give Ginny those long pitying looks? Or is it only him, because Draco is pitiful? Is Potter as bad a kisser as Draco has always suspected? Does she have to teach Potter how to kiss as Draco, in his weaker and more ridiculous moments, fantasized doing himself? Would Neville sell tashi to a Slytherin? To Draco?
Does Potter ever mention him? Not that Draco really thinks Potter would. Potter might have swooped in and changed the course of Draco’ life again and again but that hasn’t really been mutual. Isn’t that the thing about heroes? They are always playing a starring role in your life while you are hardly more than a prop. What is it like to actually have the attention of someone like Harry Potter?
Draco doesn’t ask any of these questions. They sit in silence instead, each taking a last hit.
After a while, Ginny got up brushing a little dirt from the back of her bathrobe.
“Well, that was weird,” she remarked. She made her way out the dark greenhouse, leaving Draco reeling in his own high.
Another half an hour later, when Draco had stopped levitating a centimeter above the ground and he was confident that every step he took would make solid contact with the earth, Draco pulled himself together and made the long quiet walk back to the castle.