Draco Veritas

Epilogue, Part One: The Rag-and-Bone Shop of the Heart

I thought my dear must her own soul destroy

- Yeats

***

Slowly, Ginny closed her copy of Trousers, Arise! and set it down on the windowsill beside her bed. It was the last of the three books in the Trousers series that Draco had given her for Christmas. She'd stretched out reading them as long as she could, but it was May now and she'd just turned the last page of the last book. That's all there is, she thought, bringing her knees up to her chest and hugging them with her arms. She felt indistinctly morose, unsettled even, as she often did when she'd finished a favorite novel. Even when the ending was happy, it was like a death or at least a going-away for a long time, this having to say goodbye to characters she'd come to know and love.

In fact, she wasn't sure if the happy ending didn't simply make her feel worse. It was the sort of happy ending that tied up everything neatly and never actually turned up in real life, where endings, if they happened at all, were messy, and love wasn't always rewarded or punished: sometimes it just faded away into the background, part of the great clamoring mass of unanswered questions that eventually you just had to learn to live with if you wanted to grow up.

Feeling sad and perhaps a trifle wise, Ginny leaned a little way out the window: it was a gorgeous early summer day, cool and breezy, the sky like a hollowed bowl of blue porcelain. Students were out on the lawns, lying on blankets spread out over the grass, savoring the first warm days of the year. She could see figures down by the lake, the black-clad silhouettes of strolling students, mostly boys and girls walking together, hand in hand. She hadn't been down to the lake herself since the winter; it brought up too many memories that were better avoided.

A knock on the door brought her out of her reverie, and she hopped off the sill, catching a brief glimpse of herself in the mirror hanging next to her bed. Her hair had grown since the winter—she hadn't had it cut at all—and now hung to her waist, curling red tendrils escaping from unruly plaits. "Yes?"

"You decent?" A head popped around the door; it was her roommate, Elizabeth. "Someone's waiting to see you down at the portrait hole."

"Oh? Who?"

Elizabeth grinned. "A certain Slytherin," she said.

"Must you grin like that?" Ginny pulled on a cardigan and buttoned it up. She'd gained back some of the weight she'd lost over the winter, she was pleased to note, and the cardigan strained a bit across the chest. "All right, I'm coming."

The windows of the common room were thrown open, and breezy May air spilled in, carrying with it the smells of new grass, upturned earth, and budding flowers. Neville Longbottom sat ensconced in one of the plush armchairs, engaged in a game of Floating Scrabble with his toad, Trevor the Second.

He waved as Ginny crossed the room and ducked out through the portrait, ignoring the Fat Lady's desultory mutterings about the shortness of her skirt and the tightness of her sweater. "Oh, hello," she said, straightening up as the portrait shut behind her with a bang. "I rather hoped it would be you."

"Of course you did," said Blaise. Ginny wondered if the Fat Lady had had a go at her—her pleated skirt was shorter than Snape's temper, and the V of her sweater showed the lace edgings on her bra cups. She'd cut off most of her hair at some point in April, and the soft waves of it cupped her chin and curled at her temples in fiery strands. "Look, do you want to walk down to the lake with me? I need to talk."

"Not the lake," Ginny said quickly.

Blaise raised an eyebrow. "The rose garden then?"

"No! Not that either." Seeing Blaise's surprised expression, Ginny cast about for an alternative. "The Quidditch pitch? I doubt anyone will be there now."