Aurora

Aurora

However we meet, it's fine as long as it's the two of us,

I think we still don't realize how the stars were smiling on us

Our love was like some fairy tale from long ago

And though I'm alone now, I don't regret it

~~~~~

"One, two, three, four..." Virginia mouthed the words to herself silently. "Five, six... wait did I count that one already?" She frowned thoughtfully at the young dandy waltzing by in his puce waistcoat. The fifth, or was it sixth she'd seen tonight? Out of the corner of her eye she could see an incipient frown begin to crease her mother's forehead at the sight of her drooping posture.

Roundly plump and of an unremarkable height, her mother resembled nothing so much as a small and perpetually pugnacious lap dog. When she frowned even the egret feathers that crowned her greying red hair seemed to glower disapprovingly. It wasn't that she was an angry person; or so she always protested. It was simply that she was very determined to arrange the world to suit her liking. Once an acclaimed beauty, after her looks faded -- which was practically inevitable after seven children and a comfortable home life -- she decided nothing else could be had but for her only daughter to make a brilliant match. She was a great believer in the value of an arranged marriage; after all, hers had turned out so well. She was left hard pressed to understand or condone Virginia's hoydenish behavior, especially when it seemed like any moment it could burst out and ruin her chances. Just the thought of it made Mrs. Weasley's brow crease in exasperation.

Under the weight of that maternal displeasure, Virginia, known to her intimates as Ginny, straightened her back a little self-consciously against the uncomfortable wood of Almack's chairs. Valiantly, she suppressed a gusty and thoroughly unladylike sigh.

Normally she loved the hustle and bustle of London in full swing during the Season. Having lived in the country all her life, she was still endlessly amazed by everything there was to see. She loved Hatchard's and Hyde Park, she loved the noise and the people, she loved the opera and the balls, and even if she didn't quite love the smell or the musicales or the cattishness of certain people she'd learned to be amused or to at least tolerate them.

But once a week, every week, her equanimity was upset when her mother dragged her to the subscription ball, so that she could drink stale lemonade and hopefully Catch a Husband.

She could just see herself -- the Deadly Amazon Maid on the Prowl, in Search of a Man. Sometimes she wondered what exactly she was supposed to do after she ran her quarry to the ground. Perhaps hog-tie him as she'd heard those wild colonials did? Or chase him down as they would a fox in Squire Hurst's annual hunt? She stifled an involuntary giggle at the images her imagination was conjuring.

Unfortunately, upon seeing her smile directed in what seemed to be his direction, one of the younger boys who seemed to fancy himself a poet detached himself from his set and started gravitating towards her. From his slightly unsteady gait, it seemed that he had had one too many drinks, even if all that Almack's offered in the way of beverages was watered down ratafia, stale lemonade, and some truly disgusting orgeat. He'd yet to have enough for his condition to be obvious, but definitely just enough to give him some Dutch courage.

Oh dear, she groaned to herself, I simply must get out of his line of vision.

She froze for a second, fixed like a deer catching sight of the hounds. Oh god, he's practicing his Smoldering-Eyes-and-Devastating-Look look! Now I am truly doomed.

Looking away, she tried as subtly as she could to avoid eye contact so that he wouldn't come over and try to winkle out an introduction. Her eyes shifted up to the hanging chandeliers in a desperate bid to appear oblivious.

Too bright! Her eyes watered.

Shifting tactics, she folded her hands primly in her lap and stared at them. Concentrating fiercely on the dance card dangling from her wrist, she suddenly realized that it could be taken the wrong way and seem like an invitation to fill one of the empty spaces on it.

Her mind decided to panic some more, helpfully running circles in her head and acting generally useless. She decided it would need a stern talking to later on, as it occurred to her that coherency was highly prized in escape planning for a reason.

"Oh look, Ginny dear, the second son of the Earl of Normanton is coming your way."

Her mother fairly glowed with maternal pride as she made that observation.

Looking over at her arch-nemesis, Lady Bulstrode -- an uncouth mushroom of a woman whose enormous fortune had managed to land her a titled husband -- Mrs. Weasley smiled with satisfaction at the attention that her daughter was receiving tonight.

Mrs. Weasley could barely restrain her glee. Though her daughter was certainly not the equal of the young miss who was all the Rage this Season; she was garnering enough attention that she most likely wouldn't have to fear for suitable offers this Season, even if Ginny's face seemed to slip into the most unattractive of scowls at times. And there she was doing it again when the son of an Earl was heading her way! Really, the girl was most incomprehensible -- if not downright contrary -- at times.

Oh no oh no oh no, I must get away, but how? Ginny panicked and stood up quickly.

"Good heavens!"

She pretended astonishment. "I believe there's a tear in my hem! I'll just be over in the retiring room pinning it up."

"Oh, Ginny!" Mrs. Weasley wailed with the air of one much put upon. "Why do these things always happen to you at the most inopportune moments?"

She covertly glanced in Lady Bulstrode's direction again hoping she hadn't noticed. No such luck! The vulgar woman was smirking - smirking! - at her.

She looked back at her hoydenish daughter in despair. Oh, she hid it well enough for the most part behind her faultless manners -- Mrs. Weasley being nothing if not persistent -- but it was there in her attitude. Being raised with so many male siblings had left her quite lacking in the more delicate sensibilities.

"I vow I've never seen anyone as victim to misfortune as you when an eligible parti appears."

Ginny wondered when "eligible parti" came to be defined as anything male and related to a title. Did personal hygiene and a smidgen of intelligence count as additional bonuses?

Ginny ducked her head meekly, "Yes mama, I know I'm a sore trial to you."

Peeking through her lowered lashes, she tried to gauge her mother's response to her repentant pose. It was her best look, she knew without vanity. With her large hazel eyes fringed with dark auburn lashes and slightly retrousse nose, her features already had a pixie-ish cast. This only added to it, allowing the delicate arches of her eyebrows to pull together just slightly in contrition.

"Well there, there child. I didn't mean to imply anything," Mrs. Weasley said unconvincingly. "Why don't you just run along, perhaps he'll come again after the next dance."

Patting Ginny's arm, Mrs. Weasley shooed her daughter on her way as she bent her gaze back upon her rival.

Ginny rose and delicately lifted her skirts an infinitesimal yet precise degree; just enough to prevent the ungraceful snagging of hems or - horrors! - the dreaded trip and tear, but not enough to show the slightest bit of indecent ankle. She flung her shoulders back and steeled herself for the Herculean task ahead.

For though crossing a room seemed a simple enough procedure in theory - it was an undeniable fact that when one took into account such things as dowager canes, trailing hems, careless bucks and having to maneuver through all this while keeping your ankles out of sight and your hemline spotless - it multiplied into a task greater than any of the trials of Psyche.

As these thoughts ran through her head, Ginny glumly realized that what her mother said was at least partially true. She really had had too much of a classical training and not enough of a social life if she was making allusions in her head instead of conversation. I simply don't have the knack of it I suppose, she sighed, wishing for the thousandth time that someone interesting would come and sweep her off her feet. Someone she could talk to without embarrassing pauses or awkward silences. Someone as far removed from the stodgy country squires and painfully guileless younger sons she'd been introduced to as, as... a unicorn from a pony!

Oomph!

Fate was fickle indeed as Virginia Weasley -- lost in her thoughts -- tripped over the elegantly clad leg of one tall, pale, and quite devastatingly handsome Draco Malfoy, Marquis of Ashbourne, only heir to his father the Duke of Waverly, Lord of the Isle of Wight.

A slender, long fingered hand reached out languidly to prevent her fall. His grip was light and impersonal, yet she felt as if each finger was imprinted on her arm like a brand. She stared at the gloved hand encircling her upper arm blankly. Her mind tried to recall the significance of the dragon rampant on his signet ring.

Whose crest was it?

Looking up to mouth her thanks, she was arrested in mid-motion.

Trapped by grey eyes the color of storm clouds edged in black -- eyes that were framed by long dark silver lashes and dark slashes of eyebrow. Coupled with his flawless pale skin, high cheekbones, and elegant nose, it was only his surprisingly sensuous mouth that saved his features from cold forbidding austerity.

Seeing her balance restored, he withdrew his support and casually straightened his lean length from the gilt column he'd been leaning against, coming fully out of the shadows.

Thank God he doesn't believe in puce waistcoats, Ginny thought to herself irrelevantly.

Instead he was impeccably clad from head to toe in black unrelieved by any touch of color except for his cravat.

Everything in the precise cut and fit of his black coat and knee breeches showed the hand of Weston, though it was obvious that his lean frame would show to advantage in even the meanest sackcloth. His snowy white cravat was tied in a casual Mathematical, utterly perfect but obvious to any observer that he didn't give a damn if they didn't like it.

There was about him a certain understated power and casual elegance, with just the slightest edge of danger to make girlish hearts flutter unwisely. In a fair world, his clothes should have washed him out with his pale coloring, or at least made him look like a hopelessly stuffy crow. Instead, improbably, it made him look almost inhumanly beautiful.

"I have had young misses throw themselves at me before, but this is the first time it has actually happened in the literal sense," he drawled languidly. The smirk in his voice unequivocally dispelled the inane notion that briefly flitted through her head that she had stumbled upon an angel come down to earth.

Oh! I can't believe I thought for even a second that he was remotely interesting or attractive...! Arrogant man! Ginny was so infuriated at his insufferable arrogance that for once she actually found the right words to say.

Drawing around herself the tatters of her dignity, she regally replied, "I do not believe I have had the pleasure --" she said the word pleasure as if it left a bad taste in her mouth, "of being introduced to you."

She wondered if he was actually looking slightly nonplussed or if it was just a trick of the unsteady light or her own wishful thinking.

No, it had merely been his eyebrow lifting a fraction in a thoroughly inscrutable manner.

"Good night, sir," she added, deliberately leaving out the courtesy title she knew he possessed. Amazingly saying the right words got even easier the second time around. Amazing! Who would've guessed it? she marveled.

"Minx."

With a toss of her head, she ignored his parting remark and swept away.

~~~~~

Finding her cheeks flushed with a delayed mortification Ginny hadn't allowed herself to feel in front of him, she had to take several deep breaths when she finally reached the powder room. Done in more tasteful and subdued colors than the main assembly room, it was meant to be soothing. It didn't work.

That... that MAN! Ginny clenched her hands in a manner that no well bred young lady should have done in public -- in fact she looked more like a gentleman at Jackson's Salon, or more accurately, a girl whose brothers went to boxing mills on the sly. It was outside of enough that he'd witness her humiliating distraction, but to mock her instead of politely ignoring her faux pas...

"Ooooh!" She seethed as her fingers reflexively strangled her reticule to death at the memory of one singularly elegant and rude lord.

"Yes, give that bad reticule what it deserves," a laughing voice said from the direction of the mirrors to her left. "Bad, wicked reticule!"

Flinching in surprise, Ginny dropped the sadly abused reticule to the floor as she jerked her fingers away guiltily. "This is outside of enough!" she shrieked quietly to herself.

The whole evening felt as if she'd been stumbling from one humiliating contretemps to another. Her head drooped and she glared daggers at the unoffending floor. Even her curls felt like they were drooping in shame. No, that was because her pins had fallen out, as she could all too clearly see with her unimpeded view of the floor.

"Here, let me get that for you."

Slender, elegant fingers twined around the straps of the reticule, heedless of the carpet hairs that clung to her modish glove.

As an afterthought they swept down and picked up the stray pins Ginny had been desperately hoping would go unnoticed.

Ginny looked up, amazingly she managed to be mortified out of her self-pity.

Her reticule dangled from the fingers of Blaise Zabini, the apple of her father's eye, the pampered daughter of an expatriate Italian Count who luckily managed to retain the bulk of his wealth when he emigrated. Her exotic origins, her wealth, and most especially her beauty had caused Society to declare her this Season's reigning Toast.

With her slim figure, guinea gold curls, cornflower blue eyes, and peaches-and-cream complexion it was no wonder that she'd been declared the ideal of feminine beauty. Men wrote reams of poetry to the perfect arch of her eyebrows, the damask of her cheek, and the deep pools of her eyes.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to laugh. My mother often tells me my sense of humor is quite lamentable," she offered apologetically.

"I didn't think Diamonds of the First Water were allowed to have a sense of humor."

The words popped out of Ginny's mouth before she realized what she was saying.

Blaise started laughing again. "I'll remember to correct Mama the next time she rings a peal over my head then."

Ginny flushed red with embarrassment. "I beg your pardon Miss Zabini; I don't know what came over me."

"Oh but do call me Blaise. Accomplices in murder shouldn't have to stand on formality should they?"

Smiling, she pressed Ginny's reticule back into her unresisting hands. "And I shall call you...?" her eyebrow lifted inquiringly.

"Virginia Weasley, though my friends call me Ginny," she said belatedly.

Blaise clapped her hands together in delight. "How delightful! I knew you seemed familiar..."

At Ginny's puzzled expression, Blaise kindly reminded her. "We were in the same finishing school were we not? I remember how I envied you."

"Envied me?" Ginny looked blank as all she could recall of her one short year at finishing school was the endless succession of hoydenish scrapes she had gotten into until she'd been summarily ejected by the headmistress.

"Oh indeed," Blaise seemed charmingly solemn. "I wanted to be the one riding barebacked through the woods and keeping pet snakes in my drawers. And when you left..." - she sighed - "How lucky I thought you were to escape those dreary confines."

Ginny blinked. "I never thought of it that way."

"Well now we shall be the best of friends shall we not? Bosom bows," Blaise declared grabbing her arm and squeezing it companionably.

"I'm sure we'll..." Ginny replied confusedly, feeling liked she'd been trampled by a coach-and-four...

"Lovely, so it's settled," Blaise interrupted. Grabbing the unresisting Ginny's arm, she dragged her to a seat.

Shoving Ginny's forgotten reticule back into her limp hands, Blaise proceeded to circle around her, taking out pins from her hair and rearranging them. Occasionally she would nod her head. Mostly she frowned.

"Who did your hair?" she asked abruptly.

Ginny felt her childhood stammer come creeping back. "M-my mother's a-abigail."

"Yes... that would explain it..." Blaise tapped her chin with one slender finger and gazed intently at Ginny's hair.

"Explain what?" Ginny asked, taken aback. "My hair is perfectly unexceptionable."

Blaise patted Ginny's arm pityingly. "Of course it is dear, that is precisely what I meant."

She reached out and fingered a lock of Ginny's reddish gold hair thoughtfully. "An unusual color, but not unattractive... Are these curls natural?"

Ginny gasped. "I think that is a bit personal!"

Blaise emerged from her pre-occupation and smiled wickedly. "Zat is ze fun of being a foreigner. I don't know any better."

"That wasn't even an Italian accent!" Ginny accused.

"Oops," Blaise said unrepentantly. "My governess was French and my mother was English."

Oh... well..." Ginny subsided. "Yes they're quite real. Or at least normally they're wavy but there were some hot tongs... I don't recall the rest."

"Well if you insist on being so unenthused, I might as well give up." Blaise made a moue of disappointment.

"What could you possibly do with my hair?" Ginny asked doubtfully. "It's red and it frizzes."

"Ha! I will show you what I can do with your hair." Blaise reached for a glass of water with a dangerous glint in her eyes.

"Hold still, this won't hurt a bit," Blaise commanded.

Several minutes later, with some hair pulling that gave lie to her earlier promise, Blaise pronounced her satisfaction.

Ginny looked in the mirror and blinked at her reflection in disbelief, trying to dispel what must be a hallucination.

Instead of seeing her hair ruthlessly tied back with a white riband and left to explode in a profusion of tight curls, she had a loose, artfully disheveled look with wavy locks coaxed to curl becomingly near her ears. With the addition of several jeweled pins and velvet riband from Blaise's reticule, she suddenly looked less like a miss straight out of the schoolroom and more like a young lady with a pleasing amount of Town Bronze.

"Amazing," she breathed, reaching up a hand to touch it and reassure herself that it was real.

"No, don't!" Blaise slapped her hand away ruthlessly. "You will disarrange it and we will be in here until all the dances are over trying to fix it again."

"Come. Time to dazzle your new admirers with your ravishing coiffure and witty conversation!" Blaise grabbed Ginny's arm again and dragged her back to the assembly rooms. What witty conversation? she wondered to herself. But by this point, Ginny almost felt resigned to her fate as Blaise's pull toy, dragged every which way by her enthusiasm.

"I can walk," Ginny said desperately. "Honestly."

~~~~~

"So, tell me who he is!" Blaise whispered as she and Ginny nimbly made their way back to their respective chaperons.

"Who whom is?" Ginny's mind whirled. It was beyond confusing the way Blaise leapt from subject to subject.

Blaise lifted up her fingers ticking off her points, "You came into the retiring room completely flustered, you were muttering something about 'that MAN' --"

"I said that aloud?" Ginny looked startled and then guilty. "Which of course I most definitely did not because I assuredly wasn't thinking of arrogant too-handsome-for-their-own-good lords..." Her voice trailed off as she thought she caught a glimpse of silver-gilt hair in the shadows.

"--muttering something about 'that MAN', and now that we've returned to the ballroom you keep glancing around as if hoping to see someone," Blaise continued relentlessly. "And of course all the while carrying on an apparently external monologue with yourself, which I am much too polite to point out to you directly."

"No one, absolutely no one," Ginny declared, resolving to keep her monologue internal.

"Humph!" Blaise had a look in her eyes that said that if they weren't in a crowded ballroom right now and she wasn't the exceptionally polite and well bred lady that she was, she would be crossing her arms and giving Ginny her most dubious look.

Ginny was amazed by the amount of content Blaise had managed to cram into her expressive glare.

"Very well, I shan't tease you anymore on the subject... for now." Though there was a resolute tone in her voice that didn't bode well for Ginny's future chances.

Ginny scanned the room quickly for anything that could divert Blaise's single-minded determination. With genuine delight she lighted upon her long-time neighbor Lavender Brown, who had apparently come up to Town for the Season.

Seizing the opportunity -- and Blaise's hand -- she quickly made a beeline to Lavender's side, where with her glossy chestnut hair and serene manner she had attracted a loyal following among the more shy of gentlemen.

Lavender, spotting their approach, turned to greet Ginny warmly. Seeing Blaise in tow however, her smile froze ever so slightly before she regained her composure. It was over so quickly that Ginny would have thought she had imagined it, if not for the slight stiffness in Blaise's posture as she introduced them to each other.

"No need Ginny," Blaise interrupted, "we are already well acquainted. Is that not true, coz?"

Lavender smiled politely, a certain tightness around the eyes belying her apparent unruffled serenity. "True enough, though I'm sure that we have grown past our childhood squabbles."

Blaise slanted an unreadable look at Lavender and looking almost feline smiled back. "I am sure they were so unremarkable that I have forgotten them already."

Ginny looked back and forth between the two of them, puzzled. From out of nowhere a thought drifted through Ginny's mind.

This is weird...

~ to be continued ~