Malfoy stowed Harry’s wand inside his robes and left the room smirking.
--The scene in Umbridge’s office when Draco goes to get Snape, OotP.
It’s because of me Malfoy’s stuck back in Umbridge’s office with giant flying bogeys attacking him.
--Ginny to Harry in the forest, a little later in OotP.
There were several long scratches running the length of Ginny’s cheek.
-- Same scene as above.
Did anyone else think there were a lot of unanswered questions between those two scenes in OotP? What REALLY happened after Harry and Hermione left? How exactly did Ron get all the wands back—or was it someone else? Who scratched Ginny, and why? Why did Ginny hex Draco when we’re clearly told that someone else was guarding her? And how exactly did Umbridge find out so fast that Harry was in her office in the first place? And skipping ahead a tad, why didn’t anyone seem to notice that Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle were hexed within an inch of their lives when the Hogwarts Express stopped at King’s Cross at the end of term? Why didn’t the Malfoys notice last year? Well, as so often happens, a horde of plot kittens escaped from the plates on the walls of Umbridge’s office and have been mewing piteously at me ever since (they’re worse than the bunnies, believe me.) The result was this fic. The sequel is Heavenly Creatures, and the third of the trilogy is Man In Black, the highly NC-17 one.
BTW, Ginny remembers the lyrics to Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Wave. Hey! I actually wrote about Quidditch! Never thought I’d see the day.
Part One: The Quidditch Pitch
Begin as you mean to go on, Molly Weasley had always said.
Ginny’s mother had a host of homely sayings—a stitch in time saves nine, look before you leap, least said, soonest mended. But that was her favorite. “Begin as you mean to go on,” she’d told her eleven-year-old daughter as she stood on Platform 9 and ¾ on September first four years ago, her pointed little face clean-scrubbed, her heart pounding with the nervous excitement of going away to school for the first time. Her robes were second-hand, patched and darned and taken up at the hem, and the far-from new leather of her shoes kept threatening to peep through the Anti-Scuff charms placed on them. “You’ll do all right,” her mother had added briskly. Just put your best foot forward, and always remember that you’re a Weasley. As good as anyone else, and a sight better, too.”
Her mother knew what had happened a few days earlier, when Ginny had stood outside the entrance of Flourish and Blotts with her grubby used cauldron and her shining new schoolbooks, waiting for Harry Potter. She hadn’t been there when Draco Malfoy had sneered at her daughter and insulted Harry, or when Lucius had first started an undignified fistfight with Arthur Weasley, but she had heard about it all. Ginny’s entire family had showed a subtle, unspoken shift in sympathy for her, a closing-of-the-ranks, and, indeed a recognition of shared experience. She’d run the Malfoy gauntlet, now, and in one form or another, her parents and brothers had as well. But something about it had been different, for her, and when she replayed that first meeting in her head, as she sometimes did in the years that followed, she was more and more sure of it.
Draco Malfoy had stopped walking past the bookshop, simply stopped in his tracks and looked at her for a moment before Harry had appeared. It was a look so strange that she’d had no frame of reference in which to place it, at the time. He’d been a child and so was she, and it wasn’t until Ginny was fourteen and a half years old and being kissed by Michael Corner in a deserted Charms classroom that she understood what that look might have meant. There was something more to that look as well, and it was something she’d yet to understand, that winter that was halfway through her fourth year at Hogwarts. But of course the memory of that day in front of Flourish and Blotts had been colored by everything that came after it.
Begin as you mean to go on. The Malfoys, father and son, had certainly both done that, with her.
But then in December of her fourth year, it all began to suffer a sea change, into something rich and decidedly strange, and when Ginny tried to trace back the tangled threads of how it had all begun, she always ended up at the same place. That sparkling clear winter morning on the Quidditch pitch. Much later, long after she had walked a dark and dangerous road from her schooldays, she would wonder if anything she could have said, or done, or left undone, could have changed the final outcome. But she doubted it.
It was so early in the morning that the first lemon-pale rays of sun were just starting to filter over the horizon. It would be another bright, windy, chilly day, Ginny could tell. A yawn threatened to split her face in half. Dear Goddess, but she was out of her mind to be up this early on a Saturday. But it was the only time she could be sure that the Quidditch pitch would be deserted.
And the tryouts were less than a week away.
Her heart thumped in her chest as she pulled her broom up to cruising height, partly from the exercise, partly from nervousness at the sheer gall it took to even try this. They were going to laugh, all of them, Angelina and Alicia and Katie and… whoever else showed up. The Slytherins. They’d been at every practice so far and this was their triumph, after all. Malfoy’s triumph. Everyone knew that he’d engineered all the events that had led up to these new tryouts, from “Weasley Is Our King” to the mysterious incident at the Slytherin-Gryffindor game that had ended with Harry, Fred, and George kicked off the team and banned from playing Quidditch. Ginny had never been able to learn exactly what happened, but she’d picked up enough.
She didn’t know who the figure on the other broom was at first; they were at a height so much greater than hers that it was impossible to see any features clearly, just a vague outline, and the glint of sun on blond hair. He was holding something… a parchment, perhaps? Yes, he was scribbling something on it with a silver quill; the sun was glinting on that as well. She thought it might be Zacharias Smith at first. A bolt of irritation went through her at that. She’d never liked him much anyway, and the first game after the re-formation of the team would be against Hufflepuff. Who was their keeper; Summerby… that was it. But Smith might have turned up simply to make her nervous and to take notes on her performance. She wouldn’t put it past him. She grimly practiced her moves, zooming from one end of the pitch to the other, banking hard at each turn, controlling her broom with little presses of her thighs, showing off a little when she saw that he still hovered motionless above her. She’d give him something to spy on, if he liked. He ought to come to practice more often. My flying usually isn’t this good. Then, still holding his position, the other flyer dropped in altitude until he grew to human size.
By the time she realized that it wasn’t Zacharias Smith at all, it was too late to call back her last thought.
A pang of actual, physical illness went all through her when she recognized Draco Malfoy. It was mingled with hatred, and with a heat that spread to every part of her body, setting her fingers and toes tingling; she lost control of her broom momentarily and nearly fell off, swinging round in a circle. “You!” she hissed.
His eyes raked her, up and down. “Keeping your seat all right, Weasley?” he asked in a voice that sounded almost kindly.
“Don’t talk to me!” Ginny pulled her broom up closer to him, sticking a finger almost in his face to emphasize her words. The Comet bucked under her nervously and she fought to stay on it once more.
“Pity,” Malfoy drawled. “And you were doing so well. For a Weasley, that is.”
She didn’t trust herself to say anything more. His mocking laughter followed her all the way off the Quidditch pitch.
Afterwards, Ginny was furious with herself. She’d allowed that prat to scare her away from practice; she wouldn’t let it happen again. She drove herself much harder in the next week than she otherwise might have done, and almost hoped that he’d show up for the tryouts. But he didn’t. Neither did any of the other Slytherins. Ginny still felt the anger that had surged through her when she’d looked up and seen him on the pitch, however, and it seemed to lend new speed to all her movements. She saw Angelina’s eyes widen when she caught the Snitch ahead of everyone else, and knew even before the announcement came that afternoon that she had accomplished what she had hardly even dared to dream was possible. She was on the team.
“If Fred and George were still with us,” said Angelina the next morning at breakfast, with a sort of resolute, do-or-die cheerfulness, “we’d be close to an all-Weasley team, now wouldn’t we?” Ginny cut her eyes at their empty seats, and hers were not the only pair that did, but nobody said a word. They rarely made it to breakfast these days.
“Yes, well, if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be the Knight Bus and we could ride in her, now couldn’t we?” Ron rhetorically asked his scrambled eggs in a gloomy fashion.
“You don’t want your little sister on the team at all, is that it?” Ginny asked waspishly. Ever since the tryouts, she had felt oddly snappish. No, if truth be told, her unsettled mood had begun before that. She didn’t want to think about exactly when.
“You know that’s not it.” Ron nibbled at a piece of toast and put it down again, as if chewing and swallowing just represented too much effort for him to make at the moment.
“So what is it then?” Ginny poked viciously at her sliced apple.
“I don’t know. But something’s odd.” Ginny’s brother turned and looked at her very directly. “I’ve never seen you fly like that, Ginny.”
“You never really paid much attention before, now did you?”
“Suppose I haven’t.” Ron sighed, running a hand over his face. “Hermione told me about the way you used to practice with our brooms by stealing them out of the broom shed at home… but it’s more than that. You had something at practice I’ve never seen from you before. A kind of determination… almost an anger. That’s what got you through. And I wonder, Ginny. Where did it come from?”
Ginny ducked her head, in case the inner blush she felt really was rising on her cheeks. “Rubbish.”
Ginny knew she was no natural Seeker, not like Harry. She didn’t really have the grace and coordination. She’d make a much better Keeper, she realized. Sometimes she thought that what she liked most about Quidditch was the comforting rules of the game. They were so straight, so clear, so black and white. So unlike life. There was more of Percy of her than she realized, she thought with a shudder as she headed for the pitch one early morning. She wanted some additional practice on her own. But she hadn’t been practicing long when she saw him again.
I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me fall off my broom, she thought. And she did not; she drove herself hard and kept herself under control, and her flying was better than it had nearly ever been. Every moment, Ginny expected him to swoop down closer to her, to hear his nasty drawling voice spitting out insults, to see his pale pointed face suddenly looking into hers. But he stayed just close enough for her to see clearly who he was, and never came closer. He continued to write something on a parchment the entire time, and that piqued her curiousity more than anything else. Ginny had enchanted a rubber ball to serve as a mock Snitch, and as she swooped and dove after it, she wondered what on earth he could be writing. Maybe he was taking notes on her flying style in case Gryffindor did end up playing Slytherin in the final match. If her team beat Hufflepuff and then Hufflepuff didn’t win against Slytherin, that was what would happen, after all. But if that was the case, then why didn’t Malfoy show up at the Gryffindor practices anymore?
Ginny didn’t realize she was staring at Malfoy until it was too late, and he looked up and smirked. Then he raised one hand and waved at her, slowly, almost lazily. Maybe he was busy doing something nastier. Writing new verses of Weasley Is Our King just for her, for instance. At the thought, Ginny’s anger exploded all over again. Unfortunately, she was crouching on the end of her Comet and reaching for the Snitch at the time. She overbalanced, and grabbed wildy at the broomstick with one hand, barely catching it, pulling herself out of her tumbling freefall only after she’d dropped some distance. He did fly up to her now, with an easy, pantherlike grace she knew she could never match.
“All the Weasleys have the same weakness, don’t they?” he asked once he was close enough for her to hear him.
She glared at him, still catching her breath.
“Temper,” he continued. “Let me give you a tip, oh littlest Weasley spawn. When you lose it, you give your opponents a weapon measured to their hands.”
Her face whitened, and she turned and fled without answering. Once again, his laughter followed her much further than she really thought it should have done.
But in the darkest part of the night, when she stared at the maroon canopy of her bed in the Gryffindor dormitory, unable to sleep, she knew that he was right.
“You’re good,” Anthony Summerby said in a sneery sort of voice as she jostled him during the third quarter of the Hufflepuff-Slytherin game. “For a girl.”
She did not answer him. She had been tracking him for the first half of the game, since Angelina had decided that might be a strategy that would work, letting him find the Snitch. She was quicker than he was, and it wasn’t a very fast Snitch. But he wasn’t very good at finding it, either, so she had switched to scanning for it on her own, and he had begun to track her, flying so close that she was sure more than once that at least one of them was going to end up falling to the ground.
“I don’t expect much from girls, usually,” he continued with a leer. “But in your case, I might be willing to make an exception.” Hufflepuffs could be every bit as nasty as Slytherins, Ginny thought. But they weren’t as creative about it.
“Shut up,” she said shortly. Hufflepuff was up by one hundred and fifty points, so she didn’t dare to catch the Snitch yet even if she did see it. This was going to be a long and irritating vigil.
He pushed closer. “Oh, c’mon Weasley, just a little feel. Remember what the Sorting Hat said? Isn’t it time for a bit of Inter-House cooperation? And don’t pretend you don’t know what it’s all about. You’ve been shagging a Ravenclaw for months now; why not spread the goods around? I’m sure you’re not so shy with Corner—“ He reached towards her. She hauled back and slapped him.
“And—wait, wait a moment, something rather interesting’s going on at the other side of the pitch,” announced Lee Jordan. “Looks like a very personal foul on Weasley—no, wait, on Summerby—it’s a bit hard to tell, isn’t it? Looks to me like one cancels out the other—“
And as Summerby gave a choked cry and nearly fell off his broom, Ginny leaned forward, her eyes snapping golden fire. “Try that again!” she said. “Just try it!” But from her new position, she saw a flash of real gold, hovering at his ankle. The Snitch. Without thinking, she eased over her broom in a backwards roll and grabbed it, holding the little ball so hard in her anger that its wings fluttered frantically against her palm.
“And Ginny Weasley’s got the Snitch! Oh, good show, Weasley! Of course—“ Lee continued a bit awkwardly. “Since Hufflepuff’s up by a hundred and sixty points, they win the match, don’t they?”
Oh dear. Ginny didn’t even see Summerby’s gloating face as she descended slowly to the ground, still clutching the Snitch in her hand. The stadium erupted in a confusing mixture of cheers and jeers, mingled with a surprisingly faint strand of that awful song. She’d have thought that this would be the ideal situation to sing it with gusto. Unconsciously, her eyes sought out and found a dazzlingly blond head as she trudged past the Slytherin stands. He was sitting on a lower level, and she could see his expression. She fully expected it to be gloating, but it was utterly blank, and it did not change when he saw her. She felt oddly chastened. Malfoy told me days ago what I was doing wrong, she thought. How strange, that he actually should have helped me—or might have done, if I hadn’t lost my temper with that idiot Summerby.
“You know what’s really odd, though?” piped up Jack Sloper as the team trailed back to the changing rooms.
“What?” Angelina asked wearily. “The way you managed to hit me in the mouth with your bat?”
“Er—no. I was thinking something more along of the lines of how the Slytherins are still singing Weasley Is Our King, but their hearts just don’t seem to be in it the way they were before. And Malfoy hasn’t written a song about Ginny.”
“That is odd,” said Katie, her brow puckering. “You’d think he would have done. Or come up with new verses for her at least. Wonder why he didn’t?”
Everyone glanced at Ron, who looked much the same as he did after every game, and every practice—as if he had conjured up his own personal storm cloud, which he was carrying with him everywhere he went. “Did someone ask me something?” he mumbled.
“No,” said Alicia, hurriedly.
“We were just wondering why Malfoy wasn’t leading all the Slytherins in a chorus of a new song about Ginny,” said Andrew Kirke. “Perhaps something about, ‘two are down, and two to go, a plague of Weasleys—‘ what rhymes with ‘go’? Snow? Slow? Impetigo?”
“Andrew,” said Angelina, “have you thought about your future career? Only I really hope you aren’t planning to go into diplomatic relations. What about training security trolls?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Ron gloomily. “Malfoy figures it would be a waste of his time to write anything new, I expect. Why beat a dead hippogriff?”
“No, it really is strange,” said Katie thoughtfully. “What d’you think?”
She was looking straight at Ginny when she asked the question. Ginny mumbled something and walked faster.
Whenever Ginny practiced by herself in the early mornings after that, she kept an eye out for Malfoy. I won’t let him sneak up on me ever, ever again, she thought. But he never came. In fact, all of the Slytherins had stopped coming to the Gryffindor practices entirely, even Pansy Parkinson, who was the last holdout. “Why would they bother?” Ron had a way of asking, in a resigned tone of voice that would have made the happiest person on earth head for the nearest bridge and find a good vantage point from which to jump. Ginny told herself that she was relieved. She spent a great deal of time figuring the odds of Gryffindor playing Slytherin in the final match of the year.
She also had a long conference with Hermione, during which the other girl advised against Ginny telling her brother what Anthony Summerby had done.
“Not that he doesn’t deserve to get in trouble,” Hermione said. “But Ron would go after him, and you know what our position is with Umbridge. She’s just waiting for an excuse. He’d get expelled, even if it wasn’t his fault.” She bit her lip. “I wish you could report it to the proper authorities. I hate that it happened to you, but—well, if Ron heard about it—“
“Umbridge wouldn’t need to come up with an excuse,” Ginny said grumpily. “Ron would kill Summerby with his bare hands and get sentenced to life in Azkaban, and that’d pretty much take care of it.”
“You’re right.” Hermione sighed.
“Isn’t there anything we can do? Something that couldn’t be traced back to us? Something that didn’t need wands or even magic, maybe?”
The other girl’s eyes crinkled in mischief, and she glanced around the common room to make sure they were alone. “Well,” she said quietly, “I’ve heard that Muggles get good results from putting saltpeter in food.”
The two girls found it surprisingly easy to spike Summerby’s pumpkin juice the next day. And according to gossip they overheard from some Hufflepuff girls, their efforts were quite, quite successful.
“Let’s never tell the boys about this,” gasped Hermione after they had rolled on Ginny’s bed laughing for several minutes that afternoon.
“Never,” agreed Ginny, reaching up to her bed for a pillow to muffle her giggles.
Hermione leaned against the foot of the bed, pulling herself to a sitting position. She propped her head in one hand and looked at Ginny searchingly. “I’m glad to see you so happy,” she said.
“I’m always happy,” said Ginny, turning away a little.
Hermione shook her head. “No, you’re not. Oh Ginny, you can’t fool me! Harry and Ron—well, I’m never quite sure which of them is more emotionally immature. Ron in particular… he sees exactly what he wants to see, and that’s the beginning and the end of it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Ginny made as if to get up. Hermione took her wrist.
“They think you’re happy because you don’t talk about what’s happened to you. You put up a good front, Ginny—and you have for a long time.”
“What business is it of—“
“Because I’m your friend,” Hermione said firmly.
“I’m dealing with everything all right,” Ginny said in a surly voice. “What do you expect me to do, mope about all the time?”
“No, of course not. But—“ Hermione hesitated. “These past few months, you’ve been—different. It started right before you made the Quidditch team, actually.”
Ginny swallowed. “Different in what way?”
“I don’t know. Not unhappier, maybe. But more unsettled. More irritated, but also more—well, more alive. Sometimes it’s actually as if you have a purpose you didn’t have before… and I wonder, Ginny, what it is.”
Ginny loosened her friend’s fingers from her wrist and stood up, hoping her face showed nothing of what she felt. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Hermione.”
She and Michael Corner lay next to each other on his bed in the Ravenclaw dormitory later the same night, during one of the rare hours when they could count on his roommates being gone. She had been able to sneak out of Gryffindor. He had been nuzzling at her neck and she had been letting him do it, staring up at the ceiling, but abruptly he stopped.
“Your heart doesn’t seem to be in it tonight, Ginny,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
She sat up. “What have you been telling everybody about what we’ve been doing?”
“What are you talking about? I don’t tell anybody anything.”
“Oh really? That’s not what Summerby said. According to him, you’re bragging to everyone that we’ve been shagging up a storm.”
“I didn’t tell Anthony Summerby anything at all! Why would I talk to him? And anyway—“ he turned away from her slightly. “It isn’t as if there’s anything to tell.” His voice was petulant.
“Right,” she snapped, pushing him further away from her. She didn’t even know where all this irritation with Michael had come from, but she seemed to be drawing from a bottomless well of it now. “There’s nothing that gets a girl in the mood better than knowing your idiot roommates could come galumphing through that door any second—“
“It’s not just that, Ginny!” he said hotly. “You never let me get anywhere with you; why not? I’ve never really touched you or seen you naked or anything! When we first started going out, you seemed so—well, so different to the way you do now. Much more interested in me.”
Ginny remembered the letters they’d exchanged all summer, and the lovely hot snogging sessions in nooks and corners that autumn, once they’d both returned to school. She knew he was right. “Maybe I don’t want to go that far yet with anyone,” she said, avoiding his gaze. “I’m only fourth year, do I really have to—“
“And loads of fourth-years have started sleeping with their boyfriends already,” he said doggedly. “You’re fifteen now, and I’m sixteen... We could.”
“Except that I don’t want to!” blurted Ginny.
There was a long moment of silence.
“So that’s it then,” said Michael.
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“No. You did.” He felt around for his socks.
“Please don’t be angry.”
He sighed. “I’m not.”
Michael walked her to back to the portrait hole of her dormitory and kissed her once before letting her go. She knew from the feel of his lips that things were not quite over between them, not yet, but that they soon would be. She tried to feel sorrow at the knowledge, but she could not.
Then Slytherin was beaten by Hufflepuff, and Angelina was visibly relieved. “Not that they won’t still be there singing that horrible song,” she confided to Ginny, “but—well—it won’t be as bad—don’t you think?” Ginny had merely nodded. Whether you agreed or disagreed with Angelina, it was best simply to nod. She knew that she would never see Malfoy alone again. Whatever strange reason he’d had for coming in those early mornings on the Quidditch pitch, it was over now. Whatever indefinable thing had been between them, that was finished as well, stillborn before it ever had a chance to breathe air.
But she was wrong.
One early morning when dawn had just stained the sky, when Ginny was practicing by herself for the final match against Ravenclaw, she saw Malfoy again. He hovered above her, not exactly close but not as far away as he had been that first time either, scratching on a parchment with a silver quill. She watched him for a long time without saying anything. The same emotions as before had coursed through her at first sight of him—hatred, anger, a grim determination to show him what she could do on a broom—but now a new one was mastering all the rest. Curiosity.
Hatred was all she should really be feeling. She knew that he was behind the breakup of the DA meetings. Well, perhaps not precisely behind it—Umbridge had been that—but Ginny certainly knew that Malfoy was the one who’d tipped off that hideous toad of a woman several weeks before, and had also been the one who’d caught Harry that night. But there was still that lingering curiosity, and Ginny found that she needed it satisfied. She felt more genuinely confused than anything else, because she realized that she no longer had any idea why he was coming out to watch her. There was no point in learning the Gryffindor strategy; Slytherin had no chance of playing them that year. He hadn’t been writing new verses of Weasley Is Our King, as the Slytherins had never sung them. So why was he here? She pulled up next to him, her broom hovering parallel with his.
“Malfoy,” she said briefly.
He touched two fingers to his forehead, as if in salute. “Weasley,” he said. His voice was low, drawling, almost intimate. Her hackles rose at the sound of it. Whatever it is he’s planning, I’m not going to let him get away with it.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she asked without preamble.
He shook his head, the faint smile still on his face. “Manners, Weasley, manners. You skip breakfast for these practices of yours, don’t you? Biscuit?” He offered her a tin from his robes. It was Mummy Mabel’s Magical Shortbread—Lemon, Orange, Citron, Butterscotch, Treacle, and Chocolate Flavor in Each Bite! Her favorite. Her mouth watered. She shook her head, keeping her eyes on him.
“Pity. It’s very good.” Malfoy took one himself, and the delicious smell wafted up to her nose as he bit into it. His teeth were very white and very sharp. “Ready for the match?” he asked in conversational tones.
He was being civil. She hadn’t even realized he was capable of it. It put her on her guard more than anything else could have done. “Yes,” she said.
“No, you’re not.”
Ginny glared at him. “So you’ve come to insult me. I should have known. You probably poisoned the shortbread, too. Now if you’ll kindly get out of my—“
Malfoy popped another piece in his mouth. “Yes, that’s right, Weasley. That’s why I’m eating it. I’m going to kill myself on the Quidditch pitch for unrequited love. I’ve admired you from afar for a long time, you see, and—“
Ginny had heard enough. She turned and spurred her broom away from him with a violent motion. He tracked her without the faintest effort.
“—knowing that as a Weasley, you’re infinitely and unfathomably beneath me, I’m sorry to say, our love must always remain forbidden—because unfortunately you’re from the branch of the family that so recently began to wear shoes—“
Ginny pulled up so sharply that she was sure he would run right into her, but he did not. “You know about that?” she demanded, shocked. “That we’re related?” She had known ever since that summer at Grimmauld Place because Sirius Black had once showed her the family tapestry, but she hadn’t dreamed that Malfoy would know.
“Of course I know, my little third-cousin-once-removed. But back to the point. Lately my feelings for you have ripened, rather like your brother’s Quidditch uniform—does he ever wash it? He may not realize that the house-elves will do, if you leave it in the laundry pile, which I suppose comes from there never having been any at your house. At any rate, my refined sensibilities have thankfully taken a much finer, purer route, into something rather like—dare I call it--”
Ginny gave him a savage push. He moved backwards a few feet but regained his balance without difficulty. She was hurled towards him by forward momentum and was spared falling fifty feet to the ground only by the fact that he stopped her. He was very lithe and taut under the black robes he wore; more finely woven and softer than the standard issue school robes, she was sure, and she could feel his sinewy muscles moving and contracting to hold her up.
“Let go of me,” she said once she could speak again.
Malfoy raised an eyebrow. “No word of thanks for saving you from falling to your death?”
“I wouldn’t have fallen if you hadn’t gotten me so angry in the first place!”
He looked at her, and when he spoke again, all mockery was suddenly gone from his voice.
“That’s why you’re not ready for the match, Weasley.”
She hovered where she was for a long time after he left, looking after him.
--The scene in Umbridge’s office when Draco goes to get Snape, OotP.
It’s because of me Malfoy’s stuck back in Umbridge’s office with giant flying bogeys attacking him.
--Ginny to Harry in the forest, a little later in OotP.
There were several long scratches running the length of Ginny’s cheek.
-- Same scene as above.
Did anyone else think there were a lot of unanswered questions between those two scenes in OotP? What REALLY happened after Harry and Hermione left? How exactly did Ron get all the wands back—or was it someone else? Who scratched Ginny, and why? Why did Ginny hex Draco when we’re clearly told that someone else was guarding her? And how exactly did Umbridge find out so fast that Harry was in her office in the first place? And skipping ahead a tad, why didn’t anyone seem to notice that Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle were hexed within an inch of their lives when the Hogwarts Express stopped at King’s Cross at the end of term? Why didn’t the Malfoys notice last year? Well, as so often happens, a horde of plot kittens escaped from the plates on the walls of Umbridge’s office and have been mewing piteously at me ever since (they’re worse than the bunnies, believe me.) The result was this fic. The sequel is Heavenly Creatures, and the third of the trilogy is Man In Black, the highly NC-17 one.
BTW, Ginny remembers the lyrics to Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Wave. Hey! I actually wrote about Quidditch! Never thought I’d see the day.
Part One: The Quidditch Pitch
Begin as you mean to go on, Molly Weasley had always said.
Ginny’s mother had a host of homely sayings—a stitch in time saves nine, look before you leap, least said, soonest mended. But that was her favorite. “Begin as you mean to go on,” she’d told her eleven-year-old daughter as she stood on Platform 9 and ¾ on September first four years ago, her pointed little face clean-scrubbed, her heart pounding with the nervous excitement of going away to school for the first time. Her robes were second-hand, patched and darned and taken up at the hem, and the far-from new leather of her shoes kept threatening to peep through the Anti-Scuff charms placed on them. “You’ll do all right,” her mother had added briskly. Just put your best foot forward, and always remember that you’re a Weasley. As good as anyone else, and a sight better, too.”
Her mother knew what had happened a few days earlier, when Ginny had stood outside the entrance of Flourish and Blotts with her grubby used cauldron and her shining new schoolbooks, waiting for Harry Potter. She hadn’t been there when Draco Malfoy had sneered at her daughter and insulted Harry, or when Lucius had first started an undignified fistfight with Arthur Weasley, but she had heard about it all. Ginny’s entire family had showed a subtle, unspoken shift in sympathy for her, a closing-of-the-ranks, and, indeed a recognition of shared experience. She’d run the Malfoy gauntlet, now, and in one form or another, her parents and brothers had as well. But something about it had been different, for her, and when she replayed that first meeting in her head, as she sometimes did in the years that followed, she was more and more sure of it.
Draco Malfoy had stopped walking past the bookshop, simply stopped in his tracks and looked at her for a moment before Harry had appeared. It was a look so strange that she’d had no frame of reference in which to place it, at the time. He’d been a child and so was she, and it wasn’t until Ginny was fourteen and a half years old and being kissed by Michael Corner in a deserted Charms classroom that she understood what that look might have meant. There was something more to that look as well, and it was something she’d yet to understand, that winter that was halfway through her fourth year at Hogwarts. But of course the memory of that day in front of Flourish and Blotts had been colored by everything that came after it.
Begin as you mean to go on. The Malfoys, father and son, had certainly both done that, with her.
But then in December of her fourth year, it all began to suffer a sea change, into something rich and decidedly strange, and when Ginny tried to trace back the tangled threads of how it had all begun, she always ended up at the same place. That sparkling clear winter morning on the Quidditch pitch. Much later, long after she had walked a dark and dangerous road from her schooldays, she would wonder if anything she could have said, or done, or left undone, could have changed the final outcome. But she doubted it.
It was so early in the morning that the first lemon-pale rays of sun were just starting to filter over the horizon. It would be another bright, windy, chilly day, Ginny could tell. A yawn threatened to split her face in half. Dear Goddess, but she was out of her mind to be up this early on a Saturday. But it was the only time she could be sure that the Quidditch pitch would be deserted.
And the tryouts were less than a week away.
Her heart thumped in her chest as she pulled her broom up to cruising height, partly from the exercise, partly from nervousness at the sheer gall it took to even try this. They were going to laugh, all of them, Angelina and Alicia and Katie and… whoever else showed up. The Slytherins. They’d been at every practice so far and this was their triumph, after all. Malfoy’s triumph. Everyone knew that he’d engineered all the events that had led up to these new tryouts, from “Weasley Is Our King” to the mysterious incident at the Slytherin-Gryffindor game that had ended with Harry, Fred, and George kicked off the team and banned from playing Quidditch. Ginny had never been able to learn exactly what happened, but she’d picked up enough.
She didn’t know who the figure on the other broom was at first; they were at a height so much greater than hers that it was impossible to see any features clearly, just a vague outline, and the glint of sun on blond hair. He was holding something… a parchment, perhaps? Yes, he was scribbling something on it with a silver quill; the sun was glinting on that as well. She thought it might be Zacharias Smith at first. A bolt of irritation went through her at that. She’d never liked him much anyway, and the first game after the re-formation of the team would be against Hufflepuff. Who was their keeper; Summerby… that was it. But Smith might have turned up simply to make her nervous and to take notes on her performance. She wouldn’t put it past him. She grimly practiced her moves, zooming from one end of the pitch to the other, banking hard at each turn, controlling her broom with little presses of her thighs, showing off a little when she saw that he still hovered motionless above her. She’d give him something to spy on, if he liked. He ought to come to practice more often. My flying usually isn’t this good. Then, still holding his position, the other flyer dropped in altitude until he grew to human size.
By the time she realized that it wasn’t Zacharias Smith at all, it was too late to call back her last thought.
A pang of actual, physical illness went all through her when she recognized Draco Malfoy. It was mingled with hatred, and with a heat that spread to every part of her body, setting her fingers and toes tingling; she lost control of her broom momentarily and nearly fell off, swinging round in a circle. “You!” she hissed.
His eyes raked her, up and down. “Keeping your seat all right, Weasley?” he asked in a voice that sounded almost kindly.
“Don’t talk to me!” Ginny pulled her broom up closer to him, sticking a finger almost in his face to emphasize her words. The Comet bucked under her nervously and she fought to stay on it once more.
“Pity,” Malfoy drawled. “And you were doing so well. For a Weasley, that is.”
She didn’t trust herself to say anything more. His mocking laughter followed her all the way off the Quidditch pitch.
Afterwards, Ginny was furious with herself. She’d allowed that prat to scare her away from practice; she wouldn’t let it happen again. She drove herself much harder in the next week than she otherwise might have done, and almost hoped that he’d show up for the tryouts. But he didn’t. Neither did any of the other Slytherins. Ginny still felt the anger that had surged through her when she’d looked up and seen him on the pitch, however, and it seemed to lend new speed to all her movements. She saw Angelina’s eyes widen when she caught the Snitch ahead of everyone else, and knew even before the announcement came that afternoon that she had accomplished what she had hardly even dared to dream was possible. She was on the team.
“If Fred and George were still with us,” said Angelina the next morning at breakfast, with a sort of resolute, do-or-die cheerfulness, “we’d be close to an all-Weasley team, now wouldn’t we?” Ginny cut her eyes at their empty seats, and hers were not the only pair that did, but nobody said a word. They rarely made it to breakfast these days.
“Yes, well, if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be the Knight Bus and we could ride in her, now couldn’t we?” Ron rhetorically asked his scrambled eggs in a gloomy fashion.
“You don’t want your little sister on the team at all, is that it?” Ginny asked waspishly. Ever since the tryouts, she had felt oddly snappish. No, if truth be told, her unsettled mood had begun before that. She didn’t want to think about exactly when.
“You know that’s not it.” Ron nibbled at a piece of toast and put it down again, as if chewing and swallowing just represented too much effort for him to make at the moment.
“So what is it then?” Ginny poked viciously at her sliced apple.
“I don’t know. But something’s odd.” Ginny’s brother turned and looked at her very directly. “I’ve never seen you fly like that, Ginny.”
“You never really paid much attention before, now did you?”
“Suppose I haven’t.” Ron sighed, running a hand over his face. “Hermione told me about the way you used to practice with our brooms by stealing them out of the broom shed at home… but it’s more than that. You had something at practice I’ve never seen from you before. A kind of determination… almost an anger. That’s what got you through. And I wonder, Ginny. Where did it come from?”
Ginny ducked her head, in case the inner blush she felt really was rising on her cheeks. “Rubbish.”
Ginny knew she was no natural Seeker, not like Harry. She didn’t really have the grace and coordination. She’d make a much better Keeper, she realized. Sometimes she thought that what she liked most about Quidditch was the comforting rules of the game. They were so straight, so clear, so black and white. So unlike life. There was more of Percy of her than she realized, she thought with a shudder as she headed for the pitch one early morning. She wanted some additional practice on her own. But she hadn’t been practicing long when she saw him again.
I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me fall off my broom, she thought. And she did not; she drove herself hard and kept herself under control, and her flying was better than it had nearly ever been. Every moment, Ginny expected him to swoop down closer to her, to hear his nasty drawling voice spitting out insults, to see his pale pointed face suddenly looking into hers. But he stayed just close enough for her to see clearly who he was, and never came closer. He continued to write something on a parchment the entire time, and that piqued her curiousity more than anything else. Ginny had enchanted a rubber ball to serve as a mock Snitch, and as she swooped and dove after it, she wondered what on earth he could be writing. Maybe he was taking notes on her flying style in case Gryffindor did end up playing Slytherin in the final match. If her team beat Hufflepuff and then Hufflepuff didn’t win against Slytherin, that was what would happen, after all. But if that was the case, then why didn’t Malfoy show up at the Gryffindor practices anymore?
Ginny didn’t realize she was staring at Malfoy until it was too late, and he looked up and smirked. Then he raised one hand and waved at her, slowly, almost lazily. Maybe he was busy doing something nastier. Writing new verses of Weasley Is Our King just for her, for instance. At the thought, Ginny’s anger exploded all over again. Unfortunately, she was crouching on the end of her Comet and reaching for the Snitch at the time. She overbalanced, and grabbed wildy at the broomstick with one hand, barely catching it, pulling herself out of her tumbling freefall only after she’d dropped some distance. He did fly up to her now, with an easy, pantherlike grace she knew she could never match.
“All the Weasleys have the same weakness, don’t they?” he asked once he was close enough for her to hear him.
She glared at him, still catching her breath.
“Temper,” he continued. “Let me give you a tip, oh littlest Weasley spawn. When you lose it, you give your opponents a weapon measured to their hands.”
Her face whitened, and she turned and fled without answering. Once again, his laughter followed her much further than she really thought it should have done.
But in the darkest part of the night, when she stared at the maroon canopy of her bed in the Gryffindor dormitory, unable to sleep, she knew that he was right.
“You’re good,” Anthony Summerby said in a sneery sort of voice as she jostled him during the third quarter of the Hufflepuff-Slytherin game. “For a girl.”
She did not answer him. She had been tracking him for the first half of the game, since Angelina had decided that might be a strategy that would work, letting him find the Snitch. She was quicker than he was, and it wasn’t a very fast Snitch. But he wasn’t very good at finding it, either, so she had switched to scanning for it on her own, and he had begun to track her, flying so close that she was sure more than once that at least one of them was going to end up falling to the ground.
“I don’t expect much from girls, usually,” he continued with a leer. “But in your case, I might be willing to make an exception.” Hufflepuffs could be every bit as nasty as Slytherins, Ginny thought. But they weren’t as creative about it.
“Shut up,” she said shortly. Hufflepuff was up by one hundred and fifty points, so she didn’t dare to catch the Snitch yet even if she did see it. This was going to be a long and irritating vigil.
He pushed closer. “Oh, c’mon Weasley, just a little feel. Remember what the Sorting Hat said? Isn’t it time for a bit of Inter-House cooperation? And don’t pretend you don’t know what it’s all about. You’ve been shagging a Ravenclaw for months now; why not spread the goods around? I’m sure you’re not so shy with Corner—“ He reached towards her. She hauled back and slapped him.
“And—wait, wait a moment, something rather interesting’s going on at the other side of the pitch,” announced Lee Jordan. “Looks like a very personal foul on Weasley—no, wait, on Summerby—it’s a bit hard to tell, isn’t it? Looks to me like one cancels out the other—“
And as Summerby gave a choked cry and nearly fell off his broom, Ginny leaned forward, her eyes snapping golden fire. “Try that again!” she said. “Just try it!” But from her new position, she saw a flash of real gold, hovering at his ankle. The Snitch. Without thinking, she eased over her broom in a backwards roll and grabbed it, holding the little ball so hard in her anger that its wings fluttered frantically against her palm.
“And Ginny Weasley’s got the Snitch! Oh, good show, Weasley! Of course—“ Lee continued a bit awkwardly. “Since Hufflepuff’s up by a hundred and sixty points, they win the match, don’t they?”
Oh dear. Ginny didn’t even see Summerby’s gloating face as she descended slowly to the ground, still clutching the Snitch in her hand. The stadium erupted in a confusing mixture of cheers and jeers, mingled with a surprisingly faint strand of that awful song. She’d have thought that this would be the ideal situation to sing it with gusto. Unconsciously, her eyes sought out and found a dazzlingly blond head as she trudged past the Slytherin stands. He was sitting on a lower level, and she could see his expression. She fully expected it to be gloating, but it was utterly blank, and it did not change when he saw her. She felt oddly chastened. Malfoy told me days ago what I was doing wrong, she thought. How strange, that he actually should have helped me—or might have done, if I hadn’t lost my temper with that idiot Summerby.
“You know what’s really odd, though?” piped up Jack Sloper as the team trailed back to the changing rooms.
“What?” Angelina asked wearily. “The way you managed to hit me in the mouth with your bat?”
“Er—no. I was thinking something more along of the lines of how the Slytherins are still singing Weasley Is Our King, but their hearts just don’t seem to be in it the way they were before. And Malfoy hasn’t written a song about Ginny.”
“That is odd,” said Katie, her brow puckering. “You’d think he would have done. Or come up with new verses for her at least. Wonder why he didn’t?”
Everyone glanced at Ron, who looked much the same as he did after every game, and every practice—as if he had conjured up his own personal storm cloud, which he was carrying with him everywhere he went. “Did someone ask me something?” he mumbled.
“No,” said Alicia, hurriedly.
“We were just wondering why Malfoy wasn’t leading all the Slytherins in a chorus of a new song about Ginny,” said Andrew Kirke. “Perhaps something about, ‘two are down, and two to go, a plague of Weasleys—‘ what rhymes with ‘go’? Snow? Slow? Impetigo?”
“Andrew,” said Angelina, “have you thought about your future career? Only I really hope you aren’t planning to go into diplomatic relations. What about training security trolls?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Ron gloomily. “Malfoy figures it would be a waste of his time to write anything new, I expect. Why beat a dead hippogriff?”
“No, it really is strange,” said Katie thoughtfully. “What d’you think?”
She was looking straight at Ginny when she asked the question. Ginny mumbled something and walked faster.
Whenever Ginny practiced by herself in the early mornings after that, she kept an eye out for Malfoy. I won’t let him sneak up on me ever, ever again, she thought. But he never came. In fact, all of the Slytherins had stopped coming to the Gryffindor practices entirely, even Pansy Parkinson, who was the last holdout. “Why would they bother?” Ron had a way of asking, in a resigned tone of voice that would have made the happiest person on earth head for the nearest bridge and find a good vantage point from which to jump. Ginny told herself that she was relieved. She spent a great deal of time figuring the odds of Gryffindor playing Slytherin in the final match of the year.
She also had a long conference with Hermione, during which the other girl advised against Ginny telling her brother what Anthony Summerby had done.
“Not that he doesn’t deserve to get in trouble,” Hermione said. “But Ron would go after him, and you know what our position is with Umbridge. She’s just waiting for an excuse. He’d get expelled, even if it wasn’t his fault.” She bit her lip. “I wish you could report it to the proper authorities. I hate that it happened to you, but—well, if Ron heard about it—“
“Umbridge wouldn’t need to come up with an excuse,” Ginny said grumpily. “Ron would kill Summerby with his bare hands and get sentenced to life in Azkaban, and that’d pretty much take care of it.”
“You’re right.” Hermione sighed.
“Isn’t there anything we can do? Something that couldn’t be traced back to us? Something that didn’t need wands or even magic, maybe?”
The other girl’s eyes crinkled in mischief, and she glanced around the common room to make sure they were alone. “Well,” she said quietly, “I’ve heard that Muggles get good results from putting saltpeter in food.”
The two girls found it surprisingly easy to spike Summerby’s pumpkin juice the next day. And according to gossip they overheard from some Hufflepuff girls, their efforts were quite, quite successful.
“Let’s never tell the boys about this,” gasped Hermione after they had rolled on Ginny’s bed laughing for several minutes that afternoon.
“Never,” agreed Ginny, reaching up to her bed for a pillow to muffle her giggles.
Hermione leaned against the foot of the bed, pulling herself to a sitting position. She propped her head in one hand and looked at Ginny searchingly. “I’m glad to see you so happy,” she said.
“I’m always happy,” said Ginny, turning away a little.
Hermione shook her head. “No, you’re not. Oh Ginny, you can’t fool me! Harry and Ron—well, I’m never quite sure which of them is more emotionally immature. Ron in particular… he sees exactly what he wants to see, and that’s the beginning and the end of it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Ginny made as if to get up. Hermione took her wrist.
“They think you’re happy because you don’t talk about what’s happened to you. You put up a good front, Ginny—and you have for a long time.”
“What business is it of—“
“Because I’m your friend,” Hermione said firmly.
“I’m dealing with everything all right,” Ginny said in a surly voice. “What do you expect me to do, mope about all the time?”
“No, of course not. But—“ Hermione hesitated. “These past few months, you’ve been—different. It started right before you made the Quidditch team, actually.”
Ginny swallowed. “Different in what way?”
“I don’t know. Not unhappier, maybe. But more unsettled. More irritated, but also more—well, more alive. Sometimes it’s actually as if you have a purpose you didn’t have before… and I wonder, Ginny, what it is.”
Ginny loosened her friend’s fingers from her wrist and stood up, hoping her face showed nothing of what she felt. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Hermione.”
She and Michael Corner lay next to each other on his bed in the Ravenclaw dormitory later the same night, during one of the rare hours when they could count on his roommates being gone. She had been able to sneak out of Gryffindor. He had been nuzzling at her neck and she had been letting him do it, staring up at the ceiling, but abruptly he stopped.
“Your heart doesn’t seem to be in it tonight, Ginny,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
She sat up. “What have you been telling everybody about what we’ve been doing?”
“What are you talking about? I don’t tell anybody anything.”
“Oh really? That’s not what Summerby said. According to him, you’re bragging to everyone that we’ve been shagging up a storm.”
“I didn’t tell Anthony Summerby anything at all! Why would I talk to him? And anyway—“ he turned away from her slightly. “It isn’t as if there’s anything to tell.” His voice was petulant.
“Right,” she snapped, pushing him further away from her. She didn’t even know where all this irritation with Michael had come from, but she seemed to be drawing from a bottomless well of it now. “There’s nothing that gets a girl in the mood better than knowing your idiot roommates could come galumphing through that door any second—“
“It’s not just that, Ginny!” he said hotly. “You never let me get anywhere with you; why not? I’ve never really touched you or seen you naked or anything! When we first started going out, you seemed so—well, so different to the way you do now. Much more interested in me.”
Ginny remembered the letters they’d exchanged all summer, and the lovely hot snogging sessions in nooks and corners that autumn, once they’d both returned to school. She knew he was right. “Maybe I don’t want to go that far yet with anyone,” she said, avoiding his gaze. “I’m only fourth year, do I really have to—“
“And loads of fourth-years have started sleeping with their boyfriends already,” he said doggedly. “You’re fifteen now, and I’m sixteen... We could.”
“Except that I don’t want to!” blurted Ginny.
There was a long moment of silence.
“So that’s it then,” said Michael.
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“No. You did.” He felt around for his socks.
“Please don’t be angry.”
He sighed. “I’m not.”
Michael walked her to back to the portrait hole of her dormitory and kissed her once before letting her go. She knew from the feel of his lips that things were not quite over between them, not yet, but that they soon would be. She tried to feel sorrow at the knowledge, but she could not.
Then Slytherin was beaten by Hufflepuff, and Angelina was visibly relieved. “Not that they won’t still be there singing that horrible song,” she confided to Ginny, “but—well—it won’t be as bad—don’t you think?” Ginny had merely nodded. Whether you agreed or disagreed with Angelina, it was best simply to nod. She knew that she would never see Malfoy alone again. Whatever strange reason he’d had for coming in those early mornings on the Quidditch pitch, it was over now. Whatever indefinable thing had been between them, that was finished as well, stillborn before it ever had a chance to breathe air.
But she was wrong.
One early morning when dawn had just stained the sky, when Ginny was practicing by herself for the final match against Ravenclaw, she saw Malfoy again. He hovered above her, not exactly close but not as far away as he had been that first time either, scratching on a parchment with a silver quill. She watched him for a long time without saying anything. The same emotions as before had coursed through her at first sight of him—hatred, anger, a grim determination to show him what she could do on a broom—but now a new one was mastering all the rest. Curiosity.
Hatred was all she should really be feeling. She knew that he was behind the breakup of the DA meetings. Well, perhaps not precisely behind it—Umbridge had been that—but Ginny certainly knew that Malfoy was the one who’d tipped off that hideous toad of a woman several weeks before, and had also been the one who’d caught Harry that night. But there was still that lingering curiosity, and Ginny found that she needed it satisfied. She felt more genuinely confused than anything else, because she realized that she no longer had any idea why he was coming out to watch her. There was no point in learning the Gryffindor strategy; Slytherin had no chance of playing them that year. He hadn’t been writing new verses of Weasley Is Our King, as the Slytherins had never sung them. So why was he here? She pulled up next to him, her broom hovering parallel with his.
“Malfoy,” she said briefly.
He touched two fingers to his forehead, as if in salute. “Weasley,” he said. His voice was low, drawling, almost intimate. Her hackles rose at the sound of it. Whatever it is he’s planning, I’m not going to let him get away with it.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she asked without preamble.
He shook his head, the faint smile still on his face. “Manners, Weasley, manners. You skip breakfast for these practices of yours, don’t you? Biscuit?” He offered her a tin from his robes. It was Mummy Mabel’s Magical Shortbread—Lemon, Orange, Citron, Butterscotch, Treacle, and Chocolate Flavor in Each Bite! Her favorite. Her mouth watered. She shook her head, keeping her eyes on him.
“Pity. It’s very good.” Malfoy took one himself, and the delicious smell wafted up to her nose as he bit into it. His teeth were very white and very sharp. “Ready for the match?” he asked in conversational tones.
He was being civil. She hadn’t even realized he was capable of it. It put her on her guard more than anything else could have done. “Yes,” she said.
“No, you’re not.”
Ginny glared at him. “So you’ve come to insult me. I should have known. You probably poisoned the shortbread, too. Now if you’ll kindly get out of my—“
Malfoy popped another piece in his mouth. “Yes, that’s right, Weasley. That’s why I’m eating it. I’m going to kill myself on the Quidditch pitch for unrequited love. I’ve admired you from afar for a long time, you see, and—“
Ginny had heard enough. She turned and spurred her broom away from him with a violent motion. He tracked her without the faintest effort.
“—knowing that as a Weasley, you’re infinitely and unfathomably beneath me, I’m sorry to say, our love must always remain forbidden—because unfortunately you’re from the branch of the family that so recently began to wear shoes—“
Ginny pulled up so sharply that she was sure he would run right into her, but he did not. “You know about that?” she demanded, shocked. “That we’re related?” She had known ever since that summer at Grimmauld Place because Sirius Black had once showed her the family tapestry, but she hadn’t dreamed that Malfoy would know.
“Of course I know, my little third-cousin-once-removed. But back to the point. Lately my feelings for you have ripened, rather like your brother’s Quidditch uniform—does he ever wash it? He may not realize that the house-elves will do, if you leave it in the laundry pile, which I suppose comes from there never having been any at your house. At any rate, my refined sensibilities have thankfully taken a much finer, purer route, into something rather like—dare I call it--”
Ginny gave him a savage push. He moved backwards a few feet but regained his balance without difficulty. She was hurled towards him by forward momentum and was spared falling fifty feet to the ground only by the fact that he stopped her. He was very lithe and taut under the black robes he wore; more finely woven and softer than the standard issue school robes, she was sure, and she could feel his sinewy muscles moving and contracting to hold her up.
“Let go of me,” she said once she could speak again.
Malfoy raised an eyebrow. “No word of thanks for saving you from falling to your death?”
“I wouldn’t have fallen if you hadn’t gotten me so angry in the first place!”
He looked at her, and when he spoke again, all mockery was suddenly gone from his voice.
“That’s why you’re not ready for the match, Weasley.”
She hovered where she was for a long time after he left, looking after him.
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