LOVE ON EARTH

Summary: This dark, romantic tale asks whether it is possible to survive a love that consumes you. The answers that Ginny Weasley discovers are heartbreaking and wise, as complex as they are devastating. For in our dreams, love is simple and glorious but it is something absolutely different here on earth. (Based on Alice Hoffman's novel Here on Earth)

DSCLAIMER: NOTHING is mine…

Bright light stripping wood

Glancing off luminous metal

Like rays straight from the sun itself.

So goes the expounding, expanding heat

Filtering into the heavy head

Lost in its pure thoughts of loneliness.

She lies in her own blood

Without the other half.

He wanders through it all

Ignorant as to why

That missing rib still missing.

A foot without the other is not feet

So goes eyes, ears, hands, and legs.

In pairs the world is created

The sweet sanctimony of twos

One makes up for what the other lacks.

The duality of nature

In its birth and its death

Pounding through the soul of the universe.

EPILOGUE

"You did not make him earn it." Luna had told her the next day.

"No, I thought he deserved it." Ginny spoke, referring to her love for Draco.

"That's presumptuous." Luna had said.

"That's love for you…I thought he was so right for me." She muttered, staring out through the window.

That was how she spent those listless days, half hoping he would come for her and half hoping he never had come into her life. She never returned to work as a healer, spending her time penning poems filled with angst and longing. She spent so much time by that window, before she knew it the pane of glass had become her universe, the empty road her fate.

After almost a year, she no longer recognised herself when she looked in the mirror. She had cut off most of her waist long red hair which Draco loved so that it was as short as a boy's and though she had intended it to make herself look ugly, she ended up revealing her pretty neck that gave Oliver a shivery feeling under his skin, making him feel overheated when he first saw her like that.

Oliver had visited her during that year when she had been attempting to get over Draco. She never thought much of it. Besides, he was her colleague and obviously wanted her back on the team at St. Mungo's. So it made perfect sense for him to call on Ginny, bring candy, books or fresh ink and parchment for her writing, as if getting over Draco was not unlike recuperating from some horrible illness.

Ginny might never have noticed that Oliver was courting her, in his own mild way, if not for the night of Luna and Terry's wedding. The wedding was held on New Year's Eve, the year Ginny turned twenty five.

On the night of the wedding, Ginny was alive enough to overhear many of the guests whisper their opinion of her. What a sorry thing she was, that was what they were saying. Wasting away, growing old before her time. Only twenty-five and so pretty too, behaving little more than a ghost. Look, at the way her hands had begun to shake.

To console herself, Ginny drank five glasses of Mrs. Boot's firewhiskey laced cranberry punch, then gave in and danced with Oliver.

Oliver was so tall that Ginny could not look him in the eye as they danced and perhaps that was best, since she would have been extremely surprised to discover how ardent his expression had become. She had always thought pity and friendly concern were Oliver's motivation but the way he held his arms around her and the slow sound of his breathing informed her otherwise. Still she was not sure.

Until she stood by Luna, resplendent in her cream peach wedding gown, waiting for their photo to be taken.

Oliver walked by then, and he glanced over at them, smiling. Ginny had smiled back.

Luna shook her head to herself. Some people did not see what was right there in front of them, even if they had twenty twenty vision. Some people needed to be led by their hands or they would miss the important facts of their own lives. "That's one man who's been in love with you since forever." Luna had informed Ginny.

Even then Ginny was not sure. She did not want to risk it all over again. She had realised, through the past year that true love should not hurt when you fall, and she had hurt herself so bad when she fell for Draco. She never wanted to get hurt that much again.

After the wedding, Oliver began to appear several times a week at The Burrow, where Ginny had moved back in since Luna had vacated their flat and Ginny did not desire to reside alone.

He bought her boxes of apricots and books on poetry. He presented her with potted tulips from Holland and fancy Vermont Maple Syrup. He stopped coaxing her to come back to work but instead started convincing her to publish her poems. Often, when he came over in the evenings he insisted on helping to cook dinner. He would act as Mrs. Weasley's assistant, dicing carrots and peppers.

Ginny confided in him much more than she would have imagined, and revealed herself in many ways, even telling him that she often awoke from sleep with tears in her eyes, or that she sometimes heard Draco's voice inside her own head. He always listened to her during those times, taking her hands in his.

Ginny watched Oliver sometimes as he sat in their living room and read from one of his healing research textbooks, and he looked so familiar and comfortable she felt like weeping. At the same time, whenever she saw him coming up the gravel pathway to the house, or when the hand of the clock moved towards five in the evening, she felt his impending presence like a heat on the line of her skin and a certain light headedness enveloped her.

Could it be she never noticed the way he looked at her, that he had been following her? Love was not like that, was it? Just sitting there in the back drawer for all those years like a shirt you had never bothered to try on but which was still there, neat and pressed and ready to wear at a moment's notice.

Whatever it was, on her twenty eighth birthday, on the equinox day of March, when lambs were said to be able to lie beside lions, when the spring fever was so thick in the air that all the Weasley grandchildren were running wild everywhere, Ginny Weasley married Oliver Wood.

Ginny had realised that this was the kind of love that was for her – the quieter kind of love that looked boring on the surface, that was there whether it was a bad day or a good day; the kind of love when you knew that this was someone you could be yourself around and they would love you anyway, sometimes not in spite of your worse characteristics but because of them, the kind of lover you knew would stay with you through thick and thin and make you feel valued always, the kind of love that survived on earth.

Lately, Draco has begun to have those dreams about those men, lying awake in their sleep, those awful dreams that wakes him in the middle of the night and leaves him out of breath and sweaty and ready to run.

He supposes that you cannot really kill a man in his sleep. That was something not even animals did. You kill a man asleep, just as you would a cow or a sheep but somehow it was not the same. It was uglier. It gives you nightmares, year in and year out and maybe even for the rest of your life.

If you are going to do it, Draco knows, do it speedily and in the dark. Plan it out carefully, and be aware of what hours the guards keep. Make certain to get half your money up front because this was after a deal with the Dark Lord himself. Make sure it was a great deal of money because the Dark Lord had a lot to gain out of it. That was why the Dark Lord even forfeited giving him the deatheater mark.

All Draco had to realise was a single indelible fact: just because you walk away after you have been paid does not mean you will not be dreaming about it afterwards, when you were no longer as hungry or as young.

Here was the thing about killing a sleeping man – the final gasp of air was so muted, so silent it was worse than the screams produced by a man during battle. Use a silencing charm, work fast; be sure you were done and over the enemy lines before they even realised they were dead and not just sleeping.

It was a lot of money for someone with no heart, no option and burdened by responsibilities that were not even his own. It was a small fortune, if you could stand the way they sounded, like a baby's whimper, when you slit their throat, piercing the jugular vein with a knife you spent the entire day sharpening.

These men continue to follow Draco while he sleeps, plaguing him with guilt and grief. Kill something and it's yours forever. At night, you will be at your victim's mercy, but that is only temporary.

Dreams are after all, worthless things – Draco knows that. They cannot reach you on the street where you walk; they can only torment a man with a conscience, anyone who allows it.

Now that those dreams are back, Draco often gets out of bed in the dark. He slams through the front door and stands at the porch, appreciating what is around him. He has always favoured October, with its gloomy, cold core and he can never get enough of looking over his land. Why should he not appreciate all that he owns? He gave up everything for this land, so he might as well stand here and feel that it was his.

But why does he still feel so poor? Why is he waiting for Ginny to appear at his porch, her red hair midway down her back, her brown eyes shining with emotion for him?

That was when he would recall his other dream, a dream he had often and was as bad as the dreams of the men he killed.

In this dream, Ginny walks through his door, kneels by his bed and waits for him to wake up. When he does, she smiles and whispers the words he wants to hear - I'm back, Draco. She places one hand on his shoulder and when he wakes up, the memory of her touch makes him feel like weeping. But he does not.

He is not capable of crying. People said that when his mother died – Look at him, has he once cried? Well, maybe he has no tear ducts, or maybe he was not human.

Instead, Draco feels so sick inside. If he was having a stroke, then it was a suitable penance for all the ruin he has brought upon his tired body. If it was a broken heart, he deserves that too.

On nights like those, he would slip out the yellowed bit of parchment, the only thing Ginny had left behind and he would read the words in the parchment.

Difficult or easy, pleasant or bitter, you are the same you. I cannot live without you. I cannot live with you.

And he would continue waiting, as much as he told himself not to, as much as he kept moving on.

Then he would go back to sleep in the master bedroom of the Malfoy Manor.

In the morning while Ginerva Wood brushed her red hair, which now grazed her shoulders, Draco would drink the black coffee the house elves brought him.

As Oliver tackled her from behind, messing up her hair and kissing her on the nape of her neck, Draco would begin the chores he does routinely – paying the bills, speaking with his legal advisors, making certain rents are collected and money given.

At noon, when Ginny finds out that she is three months pregnant with Oliver's child, he will walk the boundaries of his property to make certain none of the shields are down and no one has trespassed.

He will do this as he does every single day and he will not stop until he was completely exhausted, knowing full well that if he ever did stop, if he ever looked around him, every single acre of this land he owned would remind him of all that went wrong in his life.

It was freezing in Ginny's dream on the morning when it happened, that first bright day of the year. She was dreaming about a tree of ice – leaves, trunk, and branches – when she heard a cry. In her dreams, the tree fell to pieces, shards of crystals that cut like knives.

That was when she sat up with a jolt; glancing at her husband who lay beside her, sound asleep. Shifting his arm off her hip, she slipped on her dressing gown and hurriedly padded down the hallway towards her daughter's room.

Amelia, her star, her life, the light of their entire lives. Ginny never forgot the feeling of utmost love that flooded her when Oliver had placed their baby daughter in her hands.

She pushed the door of her daughter's room and stopped, breathless with anxiety. She was fine, as sound asleep as her father was. Ginny walked forward and knelt beside her daughter's bed, watching her chest rise and fall with each breath.

At seven, Amelia or Mia as they called her, was precocious and full of a joy and happiness nether Oliver nor Ginny had ever possessed. She was their sun child, born an hour after the break of dawn.

Dark brown hair that she had inherited from her father fanned out around her head like a halo as she slept, her tiny fingers curled around the stuffed kneazle Harry and Susan had given her for her fifth birthday.

Everyone she said she looked like the splitting image of Ginny herself. Ginny disagreed. She never had the light that shone around Mia, or that laughter which rang like fairy bells.

"Ginny?"

She turned around, at the hushed whisper of her name uttered with tender familiarity typical of wives and husbands.

She stood up and walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.

"What's the matter, sweetheart?" Oliver asked, her his hair mussed and eyes bleary from sleep.

She shook her head, smiling wearily. "Just a strange dream."

He did not probe knowing that she would tell him when she wanted to.

"An owl dropped an envelope for you. That's what woke me up."

He held out a thick brown envelope and as Ginny took it, she felt its weight, its burden and something in her sank to her stomach. Her name was scrawled on it, in an unintelligible scrawl.

She followed Oliver to the kitchen. As he fixed pancakes and coffee for the both of them, she sat at the kitchen table, opened the envelope and pulled out the thick parchments in it.

She read it all, one by one, without ever pausing, her face a blank mask. Oliver sat beside her, waiting and watching.

There were times before when he feared she would leave him to go back to Malfoy. He had lived with that fear for so long it had become a part of him, of his relationship with her. It was not that he did not trust her. He just never trusted the hold and control Malfoy had over her. But Mia had changed all that. Where Ginny might have been capable of leaving him, she would never leave Mia, not for anything in the world.

Once Ginny finished reading everything, she reached across for Oliver, burying her face in his shoulder, surprisingly dry-eyed.

She went for the service. Oliver had not stopped her. He knew she needed some sort of closure so he took Mia with him to visit his parents in Scotland for the weekend so that Ginny would have the time and space to get things done.

Besides, who was he to stand in judgement of another man? Who was he to measure another man's lifetime of sorrow? He knew what could happen to man who would not give up things impossible to hold onto. He knew what could happen to a man who could not let go of his pain.

Ginny was surprised she was not the only mourner, considering how people felt about Malfoy. But several other women attend the service, each come in by herself and unless Ginny was mistaken, some are crying. The coffin was now closed, as Draco would have wished.

Ginny had seen him, before they closed the coffin. He was clad in pale gray dress robes, black boots hand polished. Draco's legal advisor, Edward, had chosen the coffin, the most expensive one available, fashioned of cherry wood and brass. He was the one who had contacted Ginny. He was waiting at the other end of the room, to speak with Ginny.

Ginny stared down at Draco and observed how withered he looked, how gaunt and thin he had become, his skin an ashy pale colour. He had drunk himself to death was what the coronary report had written - a fitting ending for a man who hurt others as much as himself.

After the service was over, Ginny stood on the step of the funeral parlour, Edward beside her. She told him what her decisions were, since Malfoy had left everything in her name. A final slap on her face, his way of holding on to her and making her feel his presence always. He always had to have the final say. That was just his way. She did not hold it against him.

Now that he was dead, Draco seemed much sweeter. Ginny remembered how scorching his kisses were and the memory alone could turn her inside out after all these years. He could burn her up alive; he could do it in a minute flat and that was not so easy to forget. But she had forgotten most of it, giving priority to memories that mattered so much more to her – Oliver's smile, his touch, Mia's hair in her face and her precious hugs.

That was why Ginny was planning on giving all of Malfoy's wealth away. She wanted nothing of his. She wanted the land donated back to the town it was in, a trust to be drawn up. The income from Malfoy properties in Wales would pay for the upkeep of the land and maintenance of the house elves. The trust would underwrite the Ministry of Magic library, the War Victims Funds, Daigon Alley Restoration funds and whatever charitable organisations they deemed worthy.

Ginny even arranged for Draco to be buried right in front of his house, on his land, in the exact spot where the roses refused to grow. Years from now, girls would point to the miraculously overgrown bush of red roses that had spilled all over the garden and whisper that if you kissed the boy you loved beneath the Malfoy Manor roses, he would be yours forever whether he wanted to be or not.

But Ginny knew better and on the first day of every year, she would always make certain to say a prayer for those to whom she wished peace, both the living and the dead.

THE END

A/N NOTE –

If you like this story, I can bet my nonexistent collection of chocolate frog cards that you will love 'In The Shadows' and 'Harder to Breathe' and 'Spring Fever' –three one shot DG fics

And if you're into any kind of DG fic, do check out 'That Thing You Do'

All these stories can be found by simply clicking on 'Nutsaboutremus' and going to my author's profile