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Copacetic	By : alecto Category: Harry Potter > Het - Male/Female > Lucius/Ginny Views: 8449 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I make no money off of Harry Potter

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Weasley—

Malfoy has contacted me directly. Can you meet him at the Manor tomorrow at 4 o’clock?

The note from her boss was short and sweet. Ginny liked how it was requestedthat she meet Lucius, when she really knew that it was a command.

Fine.

That was her reply. She would leave it to Amorin to pass the message on to Malfoy.

Fine.

“Oh good god,” Ginny murmured, pressing the meat of the palms of her hands into her eye sockets, trying to wring out the dull pain that was there behind the jelly of her eyeballs.

She felt like she was holding onto a constant hangover. Living alone was a different kind of draining. Ginny quite liked coming home to an empty apartment—no-one there to pester her, to ask her to make dinner, to awkwardly kiss her neck—but it was that fact that made her feel like a bad wife and mother. If she so relished her freedom, had she ever been a proper spouse and parent?

It was too much to think about.

The second note came later on that day.

Weasley—

Malfoy has sent me a Portkey that I am now forwarding on to you. Apparently it will activate at ten to four tomorrow. Make sure that you are holding that damn Portkey at that time, or I’m sure that he will have my head—and yours.

Ginny stared at the wrought iron key that she held in her hands. Only Lucius Malfoy would send a Portkey in the form of an actual key.

She snorted for a moment. She had absolutely no idea if the Portkey would actually bring her to Malfoy Manor, or would deposit her elsewhere—Ginny trusted Lucius Malfoy about as far as she could throw him, and a mysterious Portkey wasn’t helping his case. Unfortunately, Amorin had explained to her that there was no possible way that she could Apparate to the Manor, and that Lucius had actually closed all of the Floo points.

“Why,” she had asked, “did he do that?”

Amorin had told her that it seemed as though Lucius was becoming slightly reclusive and only trusted custom-made Portkeys.

“Good grief.”

Ginny held the key in her hand. It was large and ornate, in an old and gothic way, heavily made of cast-iron, blackened with age. It was truly beautiful, and frightening at the same time.

She kept it in her purse, beside the clipping of Lucius as a young man.

-

For the twenty minutes before the activation was slated to happen, Ginny sat and thought about what she was about to do.

There had been many years since she had last truly interacted with the Malfoy patriarch. In fact, there had been many years since anyonehad last truly interacted with the Malfoy patriarch. He had become somewhat of a hermit. And everybody had been all right with that, because it seemed an appropriate sort of tithe for Lucius Mafloy—to not be seen, not be heard. She wondered if he felt as though he was performing a sort of penance, or if he genuinely hated the public eye.

This was an interesting situation for her. Nobody was aware that Lucius and she had a past—for lack of a better term. He knew that he had been the one to slip her the notebook, and she knew that he had been the one, but the fact wasn’t otherwise well known. That had been twenty-seven years ago. And she had not forgotten it, but she had forgiven it. She had learned all too quickly that holding on to too much rage—it devoured.

There. That was what she was most ashamed about. The Ginny Weasley of twenty years ago—of even longer ago—would have not bent like that. She would have kept her rage, simmering and perfect and violet, and would have used it like a sharpened knife, exacting and delicate. The Ginny Weasley of the past would have spat in Lucius Malfoy’s face, and would have fought with nail and tooth.

The Ginny Weasley of the present merely felt tired. Excited about the somewhat convoluted opportunity presented to her, yes, but also very tired.

It was time. Ginny sighed and brought the key out of her purse. She only hoped that Lucius Malfoy wasn’t too much of a fucking arsehole. She was notin the mood.

-

She had always hated the feeling of the Portkey—some frenzied, twisting travel, sucked through time and space, like going down that rabbit hole that she had read about in Muggle literature when she had been a younger girl. God only knew where she was about to be taken.

-

The gates of Malfoy Manor were formidable, but being an adult as opposed to a young girl, Ginny could appreciate the gothic beauty of the place—of the wrought iron and the house beyond. Of the history. The very bad history, but the history nonetheless—stories dappled with blood and family and wealth.

She had never been here before.

Ginny had heard about it from Hermione and Ron and Harry—had heard all about their harrowing experiences here, the torture, the drawing room, and now those memories were flooding back, making her feel vaguely sick to her stomach.

They told her that she would able to go through the gates almost as though she were smoke. They told her that there were ghostly peacocks sitting coyly around the grounds. They told her that the house was beautiful, and terrifying, and was one of the last true strongholds of the Pureblood patriarchy that existed in the modern wizarding world.

The iron key was heavy in her hands, and she looked down at it, recognising it as matching the wrought iron gates that were in front of her. She felt, suddenly, tempted to try it in the gate’s lock, but instead stepped forward once and then once more, and then she was slicing through the gate, blinking rapidly as she was suddenly on the other side of the iron, standing on the front walkway, lined with hedges, looking forward to the Manor.

She swallowed the scream that was incubating in the back of her throat, and started the walk up to the front door.

Ginny knew what peacock cries sounded like. She had taken her children to zoos and menageries when they were children, and they had stood, open-mouthed, at the haunting sounds.

It was completely different when she was standing on the doorstep of Malfoy Manor and the eerie two-beat caw of the birds was echoing all around her. She stood with her back to the door for a moment, looking out onto the fog-filled gardens, trying to identify where the calls were coming from. If she squinted her eyes, she thought that she could see a few blurs of white down by the fountain, but she couldn’t be sure.

“Their calls are disquieting.”

The voice came from behind her, deep and low and cultured, and Ginny praised her ability to keep from jumping as she stood, back to the door for another moment more, taking a deep breath, before she turned slowly. The door had been opened so carefully and so quietly that she hadn’t heard it.

He stood in the doorway, arms across his chest.

“Lucius Malfoy.” Ginny spoke the words and then almost winced as she realised what she had said, that she sounded inane.

He didn’t mock her.

Instead, he was staring at her.

It had been years since they had last seen each other. Lucius tended to stay away from the English wizarding community. She had heard that he had been working in Scotland and Wales, and had seriously expanded his mining companies in Eastern Europe. Rumour was that he had been living in Russia, Ireland, and Romania on and off for the past ten years.

When was the last time they had seen each other?

She couldn’t remember.

He looked interesting. Ginny had always liked to people-watch, and Lucius Malfoy was a person that was fascinating to the eye. His hair was longer than she remembered—almost halfway down his back, a few cords of it calling forward over his shoulder—and it was nearly all white and bright silver, no longer the golden colour it had been when he was in his forties. Perhaps that was the most physically telling thing about his age—the hair.

Yes, it had definitely been at least ten years since they had seen each other in the flesh. A Ministry function back when she was still in her twenties—yes? She remembered it—the last time she had seen him. He had been quiet, sharp looking, hawkish, dressed far more elaborately than now.

Now, he wore a simple pair of black trousers and a white button up shirt with a black waistcoat overtop.

Ginny had never been a particularly tall woman, but most of the men she worked with were closer to her height. Lucius was tall. She found herself having to look up to meet his eyes, held, as they were, over harshly slanted cheekbones.

His fingers were tapping against the door.

She wondered if he was impatient with her visual cataloguing of his person, but then she decided that she didn’t care, didn’t care a whit about what the elder Malfoy thought—she may have been slightly cowed by him as a child, frightened of him as an adolescent, but she was not—wasnot—going to be ploughed over by him as an adult.

Lucius, for his part, was busy cataloguing her, even if she hadn’t realised it yet.

He noticed that she had softened up slightly in her looks. But then again, he had heard that she now had three children with Potter, and he knew that would change a body so. When he had seen her so long ago, she had been hard and slender and voracious, her mouth large and grinning and almost frightening. She still had that voracious look to her eyes, but her breasts were bigger, her body smoother. But she was—what? Almost forty now. Still, she looked good. Aging slowed down in their world, but still, for all that she been through, the Weasley girl—woman?—was still as striking as she had been before—same lush mouth, same deepened eyes, same knife-sharp cheekbones.

Not beautiful. Not really. Ginny Weasley was not to be characterised as beautiful, but she had a look that dragged the eye to her, snapped the pupil to her mouth, her red hair.

It was too bad about her traitorous blood.

Lucius sighed.

Ginny seemed to rouse herself. She then spoke the first words to Lucius Malfoy in over ten years.

“Why did you request me?” Her question was very much spat out at him.

Lucius blinked. Any admiration of her mouth or her cheekbones or her hair was shattered with her venomous tone.

“Because you’re the best at what you do. I don’t want any of the other idiotswho work for the Prophet to be bumbling around my Manor, misquoting me.” His voice was very, very disdainful, matching her cynical tone.

Ginny couldn’t help but feel a tiny roil of pride at his words. Lucius Malfoy was an arse, and a maybe-supremacist, and quite the ponce, but he was notoriously intelligent, voracious, well read—an extreme perfectionist. The fact that he had picked her out of the line-up of her colleagues pleased her.

Ginny looked at him sharply, and then nodded once—a jagged thing of a nod.

“Are you going to let me in, or are we going to do this bloody interview on your front stoop? Charming of you, by the way, to make me knock on your front door. You could have opened a Floo to me.”

Lucius moved out of his doorway, sardonically flourishing behind him. “Well, you area treat, aren’t you? Please, come into my humble abode.”

Ginny shoved past him.

She moved so quickly that she missed his slightly shocked look. He was surprised at her audacity. The youngest Weasley had always been a little more insane than the rest of her siblings—in a different way than the buffoonish twins or the inane dragon-hunter. She was subtly deranged, and he hadn’t been expecting her to place both her long-fingered hands in the centre of his chest and push him out of his doorway—not hard enough to hurt, mind, but firm enough to get her message across.

Ginny rolled her shoulders back, taking in the beauty of the Malfoy foyer. She had been right—becoming an adult had dulled her fear of him. Lucius did nothing to her as she moved him forcibly out of the way, barreling her way into his house, taking off her cloak and slinging it over the closest banister.

He raised his eyebrows at that. Ginny pursed her lips.

There was a moment of quiet.

“Well?” Her voice was flat. “Are you planning to do any talking, or do you want to stand and stare at each other for the whole two hours?”

“We can do that—if you want.” Lucius was leaning against the wall, his feet crossed at the ankles, his arms crossed over his chest. She wasn’t sure if the comment was supposed to be some stunted form of innuendo, or just plain reticence. She resisted the urge to growl.

Instead, Ginny rolled her eyes. “I like libraries. Take me to your favourite one. We’ll work there.”

“What makes you assume that I have a favourite library? Or more than one, for that matter?” Lucius’ voice was amused.

“I assumed that a man as well-read as you would have a good book collection.” Ginny was shuffling through her bag, her voice distracted. “You obviously have more than one library. Don’t be annoying.”

If anyone had told her, a few years ago, that she was going to be speaking to the Malfoy patriarch in such a way, she would have laughed in his or her face.

“Good god, these next few months are going to be pleasant, I see.”

“Few months?” Ginny’s head came up.

“Well, you want the whole story, yes? I can only meet once a week for a few hours at most. It will probably span over a few months.” Lucius expected her to rail at him, but she only thought for a moment and then shrugged.

“Fine. That’s fine,” Ginny said.

“No fight left in you, Weasley?”

Lucius had always been birdlike in his observation skills. He had sharp eyes. Narcissa had always said that the light grey of the irises had reminded her of lizard eyes—that, and the way that Lucius could sit still and yet also absorb everything around him. That was one of the reasons why he had risen so rapidly in the ranks of the Death Eaters. He was whip-smart and observant, and he had a photographic memory, able to catalogue lists of things and recall them on command. He now noticed two things. Firstly, Ginny didn’t correct him about the use of her maiden name. Secondly, she didn’t rise to his barbs.

She had an odd look on her face.

“Mr Malfoy. I’ve been dealing with men my entire life—my brothers, my friends, my boyfriends, my coworkers. I thought—” here she paused “—that I would be more intimidated by you, but I’m not. I guess I’ve had a lot of practice. I am nearly forty, after all. And you—you are approaching old age. So—if you please. Stop acting like my brother George circa 1995 and please show me to your library where we can start.”

She didn’t expect him to laugh, but he did.

“You area treat,” he repeated and Ginny frowned deeply at him, her eyebrows arching down in angry shapes. His voice had changed from earlier when he had said the exact same thing. While before he had sounded derisive, now he sounded almost charmed. Truthfully, secretly, she felt as though she had just passed a test of sorts, but she didn’t let any sort of relief show on her face.

“Lovely,” she said stoically. “Library, please?”

“Library,” he repeated, cocking his head at her. “You’ll have to follow me, though.”

Ginny sighed. It seemed as though every interaction with him was going to either be some sort of test or some odd show of machismo. “That’s fine.”

Lucius watched her for another moment and then made an abrupt movement, turning and starting to walk in long strides. Ginny wasted no time, kept up with him recklessly, felt a need to match his steps and his pace.

He shot her a sidelong glance from across his nose.

“Brave of you to come into the den of the devil, hm?” Lucius had such a smug voice.

Ginny clicked her teeth in frustration. “You’re hardly the devil. Don’t flatter yourself.”

-

When he let her into the library, she couldn’t help but laugh out loud in sheer delight.

“This is the second library. The first one is larger, but I prefer to stay in here,” he said, not even glancing back at her as he made for what she assumed was his favourite chair—a large wingback to the right of the fireplace. The hearth was warm, containing dying embers glowing orange and deep red.

Ginny stood for a moment, staring up at the circular room, the coils of shelves lined with books. She could smell the scent of old pages, that part-dusty, part-moldering smell that ignited her senses like the smell of a fresh Quidditch field did.

She was aware that Lucius was sitting down, watching her interestedly.

“What—did you think that all Weasleys were moronic?” Her voice wasn’t particularly nasty, just distracted as she walked up to the closest shelf and ran her fingers across the spines, smiling softly to herself.

“Yes,” he said plainly, and Ginny turned around to glare at him. Lucius barked out a laugh, twirling a black velvet ribbon between his fingers. “Well, not the eldest one. He always struck me as somewhat logical. But the rest of you snuffling brood—yes.”

He meant Bill, she realised. That was odd for him to say, and she wondered if he had just let that slip without thinking. An insight into his crazy mind. Before she could speak, Lucius laughed again, and slid the ribbon between his lips. She watched as his straight, wet teeth clamped down on the material of the tie, and then he raised his arms, pulling his hair back severely. With expert motions, he transferred the weight of the silver hair to one palm, took the ribbon out of his mouth, bound it all back with calculated hand movements.

Ginny was quiet, mentally cataloguing the scene.

He sat back, his arms down by his sides.

They looked at each other for a moment.

“Do you plan to start?”

She responded by shrugging with one shoulder, sitting heavily down on the sofa nearest to her. “I’m just trying to get my first sense of you,” Ginny said.

His eyebrows went up. “Really? And what is your sense so far?”

“I’m not sure.” She cocked her head at him, and he was taken aback at the flint that was in her eyes. There was no questioning that she was going to do her job well. “Physically, you look very different and then completely the same.”

“How so?” His curiosity got the best of him.

She beckoned roughly with her hand. “The hair.”

“What about it?”

“It’s a different colour. Silver.” He frowned. She continued. “But your face is almost the same as it was when I was younger. Just a few more lines. I would hesitate to call them laugh lines.” She trailed off, shuffling in her bag.

She missed his odd expression.

Ginny pulled her writing pad and her pen out of her bag.

His eyebrows rose farther. “A pen?”

“Quills are ridiculously finicky,” Ginny said. She clicked the plastic of the pen between her teeth, staring at him, as though she were daring him to retort.

“Interesting,” Lucius said, shifting slightly forward in the chair so that his legs slung open. He looked comfortable, at ease, the top button of his shirt undone. Ginny realised that she had never seen him look so relaxed—that all throughout her childhood, in pictures in the papers, at the odd function he had always been buttoned up in harsh and well-made dress robes.

“All right. I’m starting now,” Ginny said, mimicking his earlier actions and pulling the large mass of her hair back. He watched her as she twisted it around itself, tucking the ends in, creating a bun without even using a tie. The thickness of her hair allowed her to do that. A few red waves had escaped, were tucked behind her ear. She held the pen lightly between her fingers, tapped it on the paper, watched Lucius.

She could start with the basics.

“How old are you?”

“I’m sixty-five,” he answered.

“Sixty-five,” she repeated slowly, writing it down. Hadn’t it been just yesterday when she had been fourteen and he had been so much younger, his hair so much more golden? She was lost, suddenly, in the days gone by.

“How old are you?”

Ginny balked at the question but forced herself to answer. “Thirty-eight.”

“Really,” he murmured, leaning forward.

Ginny scowled at him.

“Yes, really.”

“I always remember you as an eleven-year old girl,” he said.

“That’s odd. And a bit pervy, really,” Ginny answered. She preferred not to remember what she was like at age eleven. The entire year had been awful for her, and he was partially to blame. Was he dredging up the past on purpose? She had heard, once, that Lucius Malfoy never did anything by accident. Every single word, motion, action, gesture, sentence—it was all planned, premeditated.

“I’m surprised you haven’t yelled at me yet,” he said suddenly, a hint of a smile traced around the corners of his mouth.

“For what?” Her voice was mild—she was absentmindedly jotting a few notes down—but she knew what he was referring to. She wanted him to say it.

“For everything,” he said, tilting his head as he watched her, the sharpness of his Adam’s apple revealed in the stretch of his throat.

“No use,” she retorted. “You have changed all that you can, and even now I don’t know if that is anything at all. I’m not going to be able to do anything about it. Besides, I’m not scared of you anymore. You’re considered elderly.”

Lucius’ lips pursed, twitched slightly. Ginny met his eyes.

“Sixty-five,” she repeated again.

“Yes,” he replied after a moment of silence.

Ginny watched him, interested. Despite his bravado, he had seemed uncomfortable saying his age to her, as though it was embarrassing for him. She looked him over pointedly. He looked appropriate for his age, as odd as that sounded. As she had noted before, his hair was the most telling feature, still long as ever—if not longer—and pure silver and white. It looked good on him, though. She could concede that. It gave him more of a light than the blond ever had. And his eyes, when seen at a closer distance, were lined, and there was a furrow between his eyebrows, and brackets around his mouth, but they didn’t detract from his patrician looks in any way. Ginny was no fool—she may have hated the man at some point, but she was and always had been quite aware that he was symmetrically and glowingly attractive. At one point that had just fueled her hatred for him. Now, it made her survey him with an all the more scrutinizing eye.

And there were things that didn’t betray his age at all—his posture, and his smooth hands, and the fullness of his mouth.

He shifted under her stare.

“What?” His voice was ornery.

“You have a grandson,” Ginny said suddenly. She knew of Scorpius, of course, but brought him up as a conversation changer.

“Yes,” Lucius said, looking more comfortable with the new direction.

“And he’s—”

“Thirteen years old.”

“The difficult age,” Ginny murmured before she could stop herself. She bit her lip and looked up at him, but instead of mocking he was nodding, looking thoughtful.

“He’s a hellion,” Lucius said, still nodding. “The other day he tried to dye my peacocks red and yellow.”

“Red and yellow?”

“He figured that the combination would upset me the most,” he continued. “Although his father caught him before he could execute the plan, and yelled most convincingly at him.”

“You didn’t discipline him?” She couldn’t help but ask the question.

Lucius looked slightly uncomfortable. “No. No—I leave that to Draco. It’s true that the Malfoy generations have always been involved in each other’s lives—enmeshed, really—but I don’t—I can’t let anything happen to Scorpius. The way that Draco was—affected—by my influence.” He looked away, over her shoulder.

Ginny stared at him for a moment and then nodded once, writing again. “How is Draco?”

“My son?”

“No, the otherDracoswe know.” She shot him a withering glare.

“I didn’t realise that you were on a first-name basis with him,” Lucius replied, glaring back.

Ginny was silent, and stared at him until he cocked his head.

“He’s quite good, actually.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. He’s a lawyer. I couldn’t have predicted that but somehow, despite my best efforts, Draco became a well-balanced young man. He’s married to Asteria.”

“I know,” she murmured, still writing.

“Of course you do.”

“Where are Narcissa and Draco? All signs point to you staying alone, here.”

His brow creased. “How do you figure that?”

Ginny pointed her pen at the mantle. “Your wedding photo has been taken down. There are still pictures of Draco but I didn’t see any cloaks beside your own in the closet. These books are all yours—there is nothing here that Draco would read.”

“How do you know what my son would read?” Maybe she was imagining it, but his voice seemed tighter.

“I watched him in school,” she murmured as she wrote, her head bent down to the paper.

“Why?”

“I’m supposed to be asking the questions, but I’ll humour you to establish a rapport,” Ginny continued, still writing. “I liked him. And I felt sorry for him. And I didn’t like how people treated him half the time.” She looked up. “The other half of the time, I thought he got what he deserved.” Ginny stood up, walking to the shelves, and Lucius watched her. “There are books on potions here, which could apply to both you and your son. Both of you have seriously misused talent in that subject. He was shite in sixth year, from what I’ve heard, but I think there were—other stresses during that time.” She met Lucius’ eyes, and saw a tension there. “There is nothing on Occlumency here, nothing on Quidditch. All of those would point towards Draco. Instead,” she continued, tracing her palm over book titles, “I see books on charms, on duelling, and on arithmancy. Draco hatedarithmancy. I’m curious to know why you like it, though.” She sat back down.

“It’s objective. There is a right and a wrong.” He looked at her. “That was almost impressive.”

“You’re not the only observant one, Mr. Malfoy.”

“What makes you think I’m also observant?” His voice was slightly amused.

“You called me by my maiden name,” she answered with a mild voice, and because her head was down to the paper, she missed his look. “So—where are they?”

“You’re very blunt,” he replied. “Surely you read about the divorce in the papers.”

“I don’t troll the papers for news on you,” Ginny said firmly.

“Oh, I see,” Lucius said, amusement clear in his voice. “But you just happened to know all of my magical strengths. You are not as good of a liar as you think you are.”

Ginny resisted the urge to redden, and instead busied herself writing.

“You researched me before you came here.” He stood and looked down at her.

“I’m a good journalist,” she said, lifting her head, her chin to a defiant angle.

Lucius moved closer to her, standing a few feet in front of her chair. She tensed her throat muscles, squaring off her shoulders to try and contain the shudder of revulsion that threatened to rumble through her at his proximity. As fascinating as he was to watch, he still disgusted her on a very visceral level.

He squatted down, balancing on his haunches, and rested his elbows on his knees, looking at her with an expression of mock curiosity on his face.

“Why do you want to know about my wife, Ginevra?”

Her name sounded odd and foreign on his tongue, but there was something sweet about it, viscous and honey-like in the way he pronounced it, drawling out the syllables.

“I’m more interested in your son, Lucius,” she retorted snappily, and laughed out loud at the peculiar look that flitted across his eyes. “Go back to your seat. You don’t intimidate me.”

He reached out and grabbed her hand, yanking her elbow out straight so sharply that it popped. She didn’t flinch, and instead watched as he placed a dry kiss on the top of her hand, almost as though he were a courtier. Ginny only raised her eyebrows, sighed impatiently, yanked her hand back from his. He rose gracefully, walked back to his wingback and sat down, crossing his legs at the knee. On any other man the pose might have looked effeminate or out of place, but it only added to his odd demeanour.

“Have you gone insane in your old age?”

Lucius laughed out loud at that comment. “I appreciate that you’re not scared of me.”

“Not completely,” Ginny said, the odd mood broken with his laugh. “I can be civil to you because of the way your wife—ex-wife—acted during the war, and because I have a feeling that Voldemort broke you in ways that the public never sees—” here Lucius’ eyes flashed “—but a layer of me is still repulsed by you and what you stood for.”

“Which layer?”

“Tell me about your wife,” Ginny said strongly, diverting the discussion.

Lucius sighed, once, and then settled back into his chair. “She left me.”

The bald admission made Ginny look up at him. “Really?”

“No, I merely said that for laughs.” His tone was terse. “I could tell you it was mutual, and in some ways it was, but she was the one to leave.”

“Why are you telling me this? The paper—why are you telling this paper this, I mean. Why?” Ginny was amazed that someone as private as Lucius Malfoy would be spilling his guts to the most highly publicised paper in all of the British wizarding world.

He tilted his head to the right. “Sometimes, Ms. Weasley, it is just easier to tell all. In my old age—as you put so succinctly—I find myself wanting to confess, as it were.”

“I don’t believe that for a second,” Ginny said without thinking. When she met his eyes, she saw that he was smiling a little.

“That’s your opinion.”

“I know. Why did the two of you split up?”

Lucius shifted in his chair, and she saw a flit of discomfort in his posture. “It was just time to end the marriage.”

“But divorces are so rare in our community, especially in the Pureblood sector. There had to be something more to it.”

“There wasn’t.”

“Mr. Malfoy, you stated that you wanted to tell—”

Lucius stood abruptly. “Perhaps you can come back next week. The time had flown, and I find myself late for another engagement. The house elves can show you out. I take my leave now.”

Before Ginny could blink, he had left the room.

-

Later on, back in her one-bedroom apartment, Ginny mulled over the events of the day, fingering through her notes distractedly. As she thought, she jotted things down, ran a hand through her hair, dislodged her makeshift bun, let the tangled waves of red fall about her face as she scratched at her scalp.

There was nothing of note that she could really use yet. Lucius had been open, and then closed, and that meant that next week she would have to go back in with a vengeance.

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