𝐃𝐑𝐀𝐑𝐑𝐘 𝐀𝐍𝐈𝐌𝐀𝐆𝐔𝐒 2008

Running Up That Hill (1/2)

Author: hazel_wand
Title: Running Up That Hill (Part 1 of 2)
Pairing(s): Harry/Draco, (Ron/Hermione, Ginny/OFC)
Rating: R (for language and suggestion)
Summary: Harry had spent the first years after the war waiting and trying to fall in love with Ginny and had been unable to. It had turned out all right, sort of. Ginny had settled down with the Harpies’ Seeker and Harry, well, Harry had Draco. Sometimes.
Warnings (if any): EWE – if that counts as a warning!
Total word count: 11,372

Running Up That Hill Part 1 of 2

~ Love is like a mountain,
hard to climb,
but once you get to the top
the view is beautiful. ~

Daniel Monroe Tuttle ~

“Let me tell you a story,” the young man says.

Her fingers itch. She could write about his tone, his voice. He drawls lazily, indulgently. He does not need to be here. He does not need to be anywhere, and all places are graced with his presence. She could write about the way he lounges on the pastel pink chair and the way his long slim fingers idly stroke the fabric of the fuchsia cushions.

She is an author. She could write reams – poetry – about this man. What stories she could tell! She knows all his secrets. He comes here to tell her them, to brag. She can guess at why he comes. She speculates; she knows. She can weave his life in words, and the public would sigh or laugh or mock – whatever she wanted them to do. She could take the morsels of his life and offer them up to be feasted upon.

“Would you like to hear my story?” the young man asks. Lips curved. He knows she wants to hear. She knows that he will tell it anyway.

He speaks. She leans forward, hands greedy for a quill. She could start a newspaper here, she tells him. She knows many secrets. She knows what the house-elves do in the kitchens when no one is looking. She knows what has happened to Madam Grigson in the next bed down.

And then the thoughts drift out of her head, washed away like letters formed in sand. She clutches on to the last tendrils of meaning, but they too trickle from between her fingers and she is left with the sudden sense that a blade of grass is enormous, feels the tickle of wings at her back, the clacking sound of pincers.

The young man leaves. What had he been saying? Settling back into her day chair in the Janus Thickey ward, Rita Skeeter frowns. She does not know.

*

The Auror department was in mourning.

They should be used to it, Harry thought. Two months ago Dawlish, the Head of Department, had been killed, and Harry had to suppress a shudder as he remembered the body and the letters scrawled in blood. It made him think of the opening of the Chamber of Secrets. Blindly, he reached for Ginny’s hand and held her fingers tightly between his for a moment.

She squeezed back, and he glanced over at her. Her hair was scraped back into a functional bun, and she wore her red Auror robes with her chin thrust forward, as though she were going into battle – much the same way, in fact, as she had worn her Holyhead Harpie kit before she’d swapped careers. Now her focus was on the patch of bare earth before them; a tear was making its slow path down her cheek, crossing a patch of skin still shiny pink from the morning’s skirmish. She wiped the tear away with her free hand.