A/N – Now revised and generally tidied up.

Disclaimer – I don't own any of the canon characters or situations. Don't sue me.

CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTIONS

In. Out.

In. Out.

A dream. Only a dream.

He was safe in his bed, far away from Wales, from the land his House had controlled for millennia, and away from Voldemort, who had been defeated some ten years ago. But not far enough from his memories, or from the pain… He laughed bitterly, almost desperately. His first kill, the first time he had ever taken a human life, and it had been his father. He'd only been fifteen.

And now, exactly twelve years later, to the very day, he knew that he would not have been prepared no matter how old he was. He'd loved his father, hero-worshipped him, idolized everything he did, but he'd had to kill him, because his Dark Mark had started to corrupt the Covenant – the bond between the Lord and the land he ruled – and once the Covenant was corrupted, the land was ripe for destruction.

The Dark Lord had been all too ready to be the destroyer, so Lucius had had to die to allow a new, unmarked Lord to take his place... No one had ever foreseen that Draco would be the one to kill him.

His uncle said it had all been for the greater good. His people said it was for the best. His friends - his true friends - said it was necessary. His intellect, trained and shaped from birth to think as a Slytherin aristocratic Lord, said it had been unfortunate but, in the long run, better for all involved.

His heart and his conscience called it murder.

Oh, Lady, Lady, Lady...

He rolled out of bed and padded into the bathroom, splashing water on his face to wake himself up, needing the sudden cold to shock himself back to reality. Turning on the harsh, unforgiving overhead lights, he looked at himself, truly looked at who he had become in the mirror. White blonde hair. Silver eyes. Pale skin made even paler by the shock and the faint dark shadows beneath his eyes. Sharp, aristocratic features - a perfect face, really, but that was of no consequence. He looked beneath the surface, through the normally unreadable eyes and into Caius Draconis Malfoy.

Intelligence, sharp and incisive and painfully objective. Determination - a strong, ruthless will and a core of hard, resilient steel forged in battle and grief and pain. A slightly skewed sense of honour, according to conventional norms - a personal moral code based on the ancient laws and traditions of the High Clans, the oldest aristocratic families in wizarding society. And there, beneath everything else, beneath the mind and the will and the heart, lay a foul dark stain that he saw every time he looked himself in the eye, a stain so strong it should be visible, accusing him for all the world too see, marking him for what he truly was.

Patricide.

In a sudden, reckless burst of rage he smashed his fist into the mirror, shattering it into a thousand silver shards, destroying his reflection and the sight of his unmarked face. He had worn an emotional mask for so long that it had become second nature, now. He knew better than to imagine that evil somehow marked its servants for all to see and beware, and yet...and yet, something in him believed that his one, unforgivable sin should have left a tangible mark on him somehow, somewhere.

The fact that it hadn't only made him feel worse.

She had grown tired of hearing that, over the years - had it really been fifteen years? Tired of hearing their platitudes and their comforting murmurs, of seeing their sincere concern and their faith in goodness, in right. Tired of hearing that she had been innocent, and therefore should not hold herself to blame. Little Ginny Weasley, innocent and sweet, had unknowingly been the pawn of an evil plot - never mind that had she had the courage to actually make friends in her first year, she would not have needed to pour her heart out to an enchanted diary...

No one blamed her for anything. And no one blamed her for her subsequent actions - for her withdrawal, for her painful shyness and timidity, for her helpless longing for heroic Harry Potter, whom she could love from afar without his ever actually noticing her romantically. For the way her fear and cowardice had put Harry at risk, when he should have been concentrating on the last and final battle.

She'd almost destroyed everything, and still, they told her that it wasn't her fault. By now, she'd realized that it meant they thought her spineless and ineffectual, that she couldn't control her life or any of the events that went on in it. She couldn't take any action to prevent the bad things happening, and therefore it wasn't her fault.

She was tired of being a blameless martyr. She wanted to be blamed for something - nothing too dangerous or too threatening – but something that would destroy the image of poor, innocent Ginny Weasley, the victim, the martyr.

But she was afraid it wasn't going to be quite that easy.

Looking at herself in the mirror, she saw a pale, almost ghostly woman - dark red hair and white, white skin, whose brown eyes were wide and...innocent, but still wary. Dressed in baggy, enveloping clothes, not a hint of her true shape was revealed, just as her face concealed her true nature. She looked innocent and almost fragile. But underneath - underneath was a simmering anger and frustration at herself, at her cosseting family and friends, and at everyone who had assumed her to be helpless and hopeless.

She was twenty-six years old, she wore horrible clothes and she worked in a bookshop. She had never had any real dates not screened by her brothers and father first, and she was still, incredibly, a virgin. She wasn't a real person, an individual - she was a cliché. And not a very good one, either. If she didn't do something about it now, she would never break free.