Chapter 18

I threw various personal effects into my trunk, struggling to keep it together. It had been three weeks since my parents had been murdered, and I was still buried under the weight of grief.

I grabbed a picture off the nightstand and stroked it lovingly, tracing my fingers along the silver frame. Three tear drops fell onto the transparent glass and I hastily wiped them away before I placed it carefully into my trunk. It was a picture of my entire family on my fifteenth birthday. To think that this picture had been taken only a year ago, on June 22. It seemed like years ago now I was this happy.

I rolled my trunk out into the main hall and passed by Draco Malfoy, whose face was indifferent as I choked back tears.

With my parents gone, I knew that there was just one thing I could do: I had to step up to the plate, take care of my siblings, and struggle to pick up the pieces.

1 month later.

Draco Malfoy endlessly adjusted his black jacket and tie while he waited for Rose to arrive. He had finally plucked up the courage to send her an owl after she moved in with the Weaselys – one of the reasons why he'd taken so long to send her said owl – and invited her to have dinner with him and his mother so that he could try and explain things. With his father in prison and hers dead, they had more in common than the year before, and he hoped that he'd sowed a seed of forgiveness in her heart by saving her life. Of course, that was not the only reason he'd rescued her from his father.

She was hurt and empty without her parents. She had a hole in her heart that seemed to cause her to gravitate toward his mother, the only other woman who was like a mother to her. Coincidentally, she sought comfort in the loving embrace of his mother only when he was absent.

His heart fell when he realized this, but he'd known perfectly well that if he'd happened to run into her that he would have shied away from her or gotten a frog in his throat, too cowardly to speak with her after what happened in the Department of Mysteries. He regretted not being quicker and getting her out of there sooner. Coupled with the tragedy of losing her parents, seeing them pass through the veil had caused her to lose her precarious control over her gift, and now it was likely that the Dark Lord knew about it.

Draco couldn't even imagine what the snake-like man would do to her. He shuddered at the thought as his mother walked into his room, her elegant black and maroon dinner gown setting off her white-blond hair. She walked steadily up to her son as he fiddled with his black tie for the twenty seventh time. She replaced his hands and skillfully tied it, sensing his uneasiness. She refrained from saying anything, a woman of few words, and let her eyes do the talking.

Narcissa felt someone apparate into the house, and left Draco to investigate as he looked in the mirror one last time. His tie was perfect, his suit immaculate, but his hair had gone into disarray. He picked up a comb and carefully styled his white-blond locks back into place. "Who is it Mother?" he called down.

No one answered him. His eyebrows crept upwards and he grabbed for the black wand on his dresser. "Mother?" he called again, a faint edge to his voice. Again, nothing came, and he crept out of his room and down the stairs, gluing himself against the wall with his wand at the ready.

He heard voices coming from the great room; his mother's and an other that he found vaguely remembered. "Surely you don't mean that, your Grace? He's just a boy." his mother argued in soft tones to their unexpected guest.

"Your husband should have retrieved the Prophecy. What is this I hear of your Goddaughter?" their guest shot back harshly.

"Please do not drag her into this, Your Grace."

By now Draco had a pretty good idea of who the intruder was and stealthily hid in the shadows until he could emerge and protect his mother from the Dark Lord. "It's clear to me that you are not here for my father. What do you want?" Draco snapped, taking position in front of his mother, protecting her, as he brandished his wand in front of the black robed man.

His mother intervened before he could do anything rash. "Don't be rude, Draco. His Grace is our honored guest."

Draco glanced behind him and the look in his eye told her exactly what she knew he would think. Our only guest should be Rose.

Draco slowly lowered his wand, but kept on the alert, poised to attack at a moment's notice if the Dark Lord dared to harm his mother.

The Dark Lord's words were refined and eloquent, unusual for a man like him. He tsked at the young boy. "So testy young Draco. Dumbledore is the only one besides Potter who stands in my way. I need you to take care of him for me."

Draco's instincts screamed at him to say "no", he did not want blood on his hands, he hadn't sunk that low; but he knew that no was not an option. The Dark Lord would kill him and his mother. His jaw hardened but he kept it shut, raising his wand again.

The Dark Lord sighed, waving his hand and causing a Gothic style mirror to appear in the middle of the floor. Black smoke swirled on the reflective surface of the mirror as he spoke. "Let me put this another way, Draco Malfoy. You will do this deed for me..."

Draco cut him off, having heard enough. "Or you'll kill me."

The Dark Lord shook his bald head. "Oh no Draco, you are of no use to me dead."

The smoke on the mirror finally cleared and Draco swallowed hard as an image of Rose in a pink dress standing at their front door materialized. A loud ring filled the house, and Draco realized that the picture was current. "I'll kill her."

Rose POV

Draco was surprisingly distant at dinner. There were several times when I was tempted to wave my hand in front of his face to bring him back to reality, but I refrained from such blasphemy. Narcissa Malfoy sat at the head of the table by Draco. The gentle woman was like a mother to me, kind and graceful, always capable of bestowing a soothing word when it was needed. I was so thankful to my parents for choosing her as my godmother.

"Draco?" I prompted. He finally glanced towards me, breaking out of his trance. "You invited me here to talk to me." I pointed out, carefully slicing my roast beef and putting a small piece into my mouth after I'd finished speaking.

He looked away from me again, apparently attempting to gather his thoughts in an articulated manner. I hoped that he was going to apologize for all that had happened during our last few years at Hogwarts. I'd already made amends for my part, and made my feelings known, although it broke my heart to do it. I knew that hoping he'd apologize was far too much to ask for, but a girl could dream. I had accepted the dinner invitation strictly out of courtesy.

I dropped my fork when what fell from his perfect lips reached my stunned ears. "I wanted to apologize. I was wrong to treat the way I have been and ignored the way it was hurting you. I am genuinely sorry that I hurt you, and I want to make it up to you in any way that I can."

My mouth gapped like a fish as the words failed to register in my mind. Draco Malfoy was apologizing just as I'd hoped. I thought that Merlin would walk through the Great Hall before I heard those words coming from the blond. I smiled courteously at him as I gracefully picked my fork back up. "Your apology was a good start." I said sincerely.

He smiled then, and I nearly melted at the sight of it. He had a perfect beautiful smile that I was sure could charm just about any being of the feminine persuasion, and I almost felt a little jealous.

Harry would die if he knew what I was doing right now, but in my heart of hearts I wanted my friendship with my former best friend to mend and get back on track. I knew that it would never go back to the way it was; Draco and I had both changed since our pre-Hogwarts days, but there was hope for its repair with Draco's seeming willingness to make it work. I just hoped at the back of my mind that he really was willing to change and free himself from the bridle of Slytherin prejudice to be my friend again. I wouldn't ask him to trade his Slytherin friends – namely Crabbe and Goyle – for me. I wasn't the kind of friend who wanted complete and solitary fealty, demanding that I be the only person he talked to outside of family. That wasn't to assume that I approved of all of his cronies, however Pansy and Blaize were my friends too, even if we'd drifted apart over the years.

Surrounding Draco and his mother that night was a fog of fear that permeated the room in a suffocating blanket, smothering all that it touched. Something had seriously scared them recently, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I had something to do with it.

For my part I desperately hoped that Voldemort hadn't learned of my gift from Bellatrix or one of the other Death-Eaters that undoubtedly escaped that night at the Ministry. My gift – with its ability to injure, grievously, as well as heal – made it very dangerous if in the wrong hands. Voldemort would stop at nothing to get a hold of me and my powerful gift and use me as a powerful weapon to be wielded against my friends and the ones I loved. Perhaps I was giving him too much credit. He was obviously much more interested in my friend than he was in me, a bookish and insignificant healer in the grand scheme of things.

I was no longer afraid to use his name openly. Harry's reckless courage and utter fearlessness seemed to have rubbed off over the years. I still wasn't ready to take on a whole drove of Death-Eaters single-handedly on account of my dueling skills being something to be desired. I was very apprehensive to ask the best duelist I knew to tutor me, but luckily I had been studying dueling strategies when I wasn't reading up for this year or reading my healing encyclopedia.

The rest of the night was uneventful, and after I returned to the Burrow I hi-tailed it to my attic room that I shared with Hazel. Since the Burrow had expanded by about seven, it quickly ran out of space, even with the twins moving out to start their joke shop Weasely's Wizard Weases in Diagon Alley. My twin sisters got their old room, since it was already outfitted for two, while Hazel and I shared the room up here. Briar got the small room that I believe once belonged to Percy.

After I stripped out of my fancy dress and set it out to air, getting into a pair of red and gold plaid pajamas, I made my way over to the trunk of my parents personal effects that I was still going through. Actually, it had been laid out as a sort of hope-chest for me to open once I turned sixteen. Now that it was early to mid July, the ninth to be exact, and I'd been sixteen for just over two weeks, I'd been steadily sorting through the old trunk, and was nearing the bottom; or, what would be the bottom if my parents had placed an extension charm on it. I still had a slew of things to go through, although I had stumbled upon a large collection of rare coins; my mother's old Hogwarts robes, showing she'd been in Ravenclaw; and my father's baring the familiar silver and green; a long dead mandrake, placed within the chest for some reason unbeknownst to me; a Snitch that my father caught when he was Slytherin's seeker, undoubtedly playing against Harry's father; and an old photo album that I had casually flipped through when I found it just to gauge its contents. I'd hoped that it was my parent's wedding album - I'd seen so few pictures of their wedding - but it turned out to just be an old collection of family pictures, most taken when a new member of the Braddock family was born. Few featured my cousins in any aspect, and one featured people whom I'd never laid eyes on, although thay resembled Harry's aunt and uncle as he'd once described to me with distaste.

I decided to open the trunk and sift through its various contents for that photo album, wanting to examine it further. It gingerly laid on top of the rest of the chest's contents, its brown tooled leather cover beckoning me. I picked up the heavy book and carefully closed the lid of the trunk, moving to and placing my behind on the foot of my bed. Carefully I flipped pages, trying to identify the people in the various photographs as they crowded around countless happy parents holding their new additions.

I casually flipped through it, abruptly turning back to a page I'd skimmed over, my eyes widening when I recognized the people in the photograph. After further examination and reading the caption, I felt the album slip from my hands, sliding to the floor as I froze in utter bewilderment, before I cried.