I Still Miss My Valentine (But My Aim is Getting Better)

Previously, on Part Two:

"I'm awful! I'm hideous! I'm absurd!" She sighed. "Why did my mirror ever let me out of the room?" Rather contrary to the custom of mirrors at Hogwarts, this one didn't answer her. However, another voice from behind her did.

"Don't ask me! I just work here. Well, for the night, anyway."

Ginny whirled to see a large pink divan on one side of the small room; she hadn't noticed it before. On it lounged an elf wearing the decidedly unlikely combination of leather pants, a frilly pink lace jacket, and shoes with curled-up toes. His long blond hair fell over his pointy ears, and he was busily filing his nails, pausing to examine his slender white hands at intervals. She goggled at him.

"Legolas?" she gasped.

And now...Chapter 3.

"That's my name. Don't wear it out, baby." He got up with one languid, graceful motion and circled Ginny, staring at her critically. "My, my. I can see I've got my work cut out for me here."

It was a decidedly un-British voice. In fact, it reminded her strongly of the time Arthur Weasley had hooked up a television in the basement and a highly illegal satellite dish on the roof of the Burrow. Both had lasted for less than a week, until Ministry of Magic representatives had removed them rather precipitously, giving them all a stern lecture about the corrupting Muggle influence of Laverne and Shirley reruns. Ginny had stayed up until 3:00 a.m. one night watching a fascinating cartoon movie entitled Blue Bikini Barbie in 'Surf's Up, Dude! The main character had sounded a lot like Legolas-- well, if that's who he really was---

The blond elf had begun picking the pins out of Ginny's hair, and she moved away as far as the tiny room would allow. "I've read Tolkien in the Hogwarts library. The real Legolas was sprung from the ancient line of the nobility of the elf-race, son of Thranduil, king of Mirkwood, carrying the arcane knowledge of the Elder Days," she said suspiciously.

"Mm-hm, just a minute, hon, I just got a call--" said Legolas, turning to speak into a Sprite cell phone in his palm, absolutely guaranteed to carry uninterrupted service in all virtual space-time continuums. (In fact, at that very moment, Sprite representatives were talking to each other as they travelled through the kingdom of Narnia and an obscure moon of the Dagobah system, respesctively, yelling "Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?") "No, I can't appear in that fanfic tonight. Nightmare of Ecstasy. I looked over the script. Mm-hm. Yes, yes, an entire dormitory at a girls' school decides to go to the lingerie mega-mall and try on teddies and camisoles in the same dressing room, and Aragorn and I just happen to fall through the full-length mirror, which just happens to be a space warp connected to Middle-Earth-- I'm not saying it doesn't sound fun, but I've got a prior commitment. I do have a personal life, you know. I'm doing a favor for someone. I don't know! Try Gimli; he's always up for these things. Can't talk. We'll do lunch. I'll have my people call your people. Buh-bye." He turned back to Ginny. "You were saying?"

Ginny crossed her arms. "You're not really Legolas, are you."

"Well-- I wouldn't exactly say I was. Although I have met him, and believe me, he's really grateful that I exist."

She chewed on her fingernail, examining him critically-- the locks of gleaming blond hair, the smooth tanned skin, the big liquid grey eyes, the perfectly arched dark eyebrows, the well-defined pecs and six-pack abs, which were rather visible under the jacket seeing as how it was unbuttoned nearly to the waist, and for the sake of keeping this fic at a PG-13 rating, we'll stop right there. "But you do look like him. In the movie, I mean."

He arched an eyebrow at her. "And how do you know that?"

"Well, the Lord of the Rings movie came to the theatre in Ottery St.-Catchpole, and I did sneak into the village and see it a time or two..." she mumbled. Or two hundred, she mentally added.

(The reader becomes a bit confused, as Fellowship of the Ring came out in late 2001, and Ginny's Valentine's Day Dance can't be later than 1997. The author, taking full advantage of authorial privilege, briskly moves on.)

"So are you really that Muggle actor, Orlando Bloom?"

"No... although I've met him, too. "

"So who or what are you?"

"It's a little difficult to explain," sighed the faux-Legolas. "I am that mythic elf of song and legend, and yet-- well, how can I put this? If it weren't for fan fiction, I wouldn't exist. I am, as a virtual life form, purely a creation of it."

Ginny leaned back against the dressing table. "So why are you here?"

"Oh, I'm just here to do a favor for a friend of mine. He's a distant cousin, too, and blood's thicker than water as they say."

"How can you be related to anyone here? If you're some sort of virtual life, as you said? I mean, at this school, we're real people."

"Honey, how comfortable are you with metaphysical arguments?"

"I've never been in one," Ginny admitted. "But it might be fun to try."

"Now is not the time to start, believe me. Now let's go. Chop chop. So much to do, so little time." Legolas pinched Ginny's cheek. "This face! Look at this face! These cheekbones just need to be brought out with a little contour rouge. And such a cute little tuchis. You'll be fun to dress, honey."

"To-- what? I am dressed."

In answer, Legolas waved one slender hand, and a cloud of fairy dust hovered sparkling in the air. Ginny nearly choked. "Sorry about that," he called. "That always seems to happen-- never can figure out why-- try to get down closer to the floor, you'll be able to breathe better--"

"Magic," sighed Ginny, waving her hands in front of her face. Once the dust had cleared, a red velvet dress was revealed on a magical hanger in front of her. She reached out a hand towards it, touching it tentatively. It had an extremely low plunging bodice outlined by red rhinestones and held up by spaghetti straps. A long slit went up each side; if whoever was in this dress wasn't wearing underwear, the whole room would know it. It screamed sluttiness and sin; long smoky nights and sleazy, wasted renditions of "Tainted Love" by a drugged-out jazz combo; PT Cruiser convertibles with the top down speeding through the streets of the naked city at a hundred miles an hour. It belonged on a world-weary chanteuse singing torch songs in an after-hours nightclub in a raspy voice between sips of absinthe and drags on a long cigarette in an ivory holder. Or maybe a female impersonator doing Marlene Dietrich in the kind of experimental off-off-off-off Broadway theatre that gets closed halfway through the show for non-payment of rent.

"What am I supposed to do with this?" Ginny asked dubiously.

Legolas clapped his hands together. "Baby! You wear it!"

"Me," she managed to say. "In that."

"Come on, come on. It's dress-up time."

"Well..." She hesitated, staring at the dress. The mere idea of putting it on was completely insane, of course; she'd never worn anything like this in her life. "I couldn't do it," she blurted.

"You know," Legolas said thoughtfully, "that's exactly what he said you'd say."

"What who said I'd say?"

"Well, on my way into the castle, I got a tad bit lost. Asked for directions from some guy hanging around in the hall... he said he knew you, and you'd be in here. When he saw the dress I was carrying, he kind of smirked..."

"Don't tell me, let me guess." Ginny rolled her eyes. "Very blond hair? Grey eyes? Black velvet robes? If snarkiness was a crime, he'd never make it to parole?"

"That's the one."

"Malfoy," she muttered, clenching her hands into fists.

"Was that his name?" Legolas asked innocently. "He said I shouldn't even bother to bring you this dress."

"Oh, did he! What else did he say?"

"His exact words, as I recall, were, 'She'll be too frightened to wear it. Pity, really. But that's a Weasley for you.' Then he smirked some more, and--"

"Oh, he did, did he!" she said furiously. "Just for that... I will wear it! That's what I'll do! But, uh..." Her words trailed off, and she looked at Legolas. "You'll have to go out into the hall."

He shook his head, sending the blond locks flying. "No can do, hon. None of the students are supposed to see me. This isn't exactly an official visit.But I really needed a teensy-weensy break from all the fanfiction..." The elf shuddered at the memory of a particularly unpleasant little piece from the week before involving himself, Gandalf, twenty dwarves, and several Chippendales dancers. They'd all delivered a pizza to the home of a Balrog who explained that, while he was short on cash at the moment, surely some arrangement for payment could be worked out. Legolas hadn't been able to walk properly for days after that.

"But I can't change in front of you!" Ginny protested.

"I'm perfectly safe. Don't worry about a thing. Just think of me as your fairy godmother."

"Oh. So... you mean you're... what everybody always said about Justin Finch-Fletchley?"

"Light in the loafers? San Francisco Accent? Cake boy? Miss Thing?"

Ginny blushed, not having understood a word he'd just said but thinking that it all tended towards the sort of conversation for which her mother would have washed out her mouth with soap."Well... um... you do know what I mean, don't you?" she mumbled to the pink carpet.

"Yeah, yeah. And I wouldn't exactly say that I am."

"Then I can't change my dress in front of you!" She clutched the tentlike pink thing to her chest.

"Well, I wouldn't exactly say I'm straight, either. It all depends on the fanfic in question. Have you covered boggarts yet at this school?"

"Yes, in Defense Against the Dark Arts."

"Then you've learned that nobody knows what a boggart looks like when it's alone. Its appearance depends completely on what's going on in the heads of the people around it. Same thing with my sexual preferences."

"Well, what about now?" she asked suspiciously.

"Oh, in this situation, I am, believe me, entirely neuter. For once. Great relief, really." Legolas shuddered. "Just last week a group of UCLA students wrote a fic... I can't stain your virgin ears with the details... suffice it to say than when you're dealing with that many orcs, you definitely want to have more than one tube of Astroglide handy."

"All right!" Ginny flapped a hand. "I don't want to hear any more! Turn your back, at least."

He did. However, Ginny realized halfway through wriggling into the red dress that there was a mirror on every wall of the little room. Luckily for the continued tranquility of the makeover process, Legolas had been telling the truth.

Ginny stared at herself in the mirro. "Are those straps really going to hold everything up?" she asked dubiously.

"It's a very strong anti-gravity charm," Legolas replied.

She turned this way and that, examining herself. The dress. The matching red silk stockings. The perfectly contoured makeup that made her eyes look bigger and more golden, her cheekbones higher, her skin clearer, flushed with a tinge of peach.. With a wave of his hand, Legolas had styled her hair long and loose over her shoulders, with red roses woven into her curls at the top. Her garnet earrings flashed in her ears, and she put a tentative hand up to touch her reflection, finding it difficult to believe that the transformation was real. Where was plain, shy, silent Ginny?

"So, do you like it? I aim to please, you know," said Legolas.

"Do I look like a cheap tart?" she wondered aloud.

"No, no." The elf shook his head. "A very expensive one."

A wicked smile slowly spread over Ginny's face. "Yes," she breathed. "Oh, yes, I do like it!" Then she turned suddenly, eyes filled with fear. "Is this all going to disappear at midnight or something?"

"Bibbity, bobbetty, boo. No. Just click your ruby slippers together three times and say, 'There's no place like home. There's no place like home. There's no place like--'" Legolas smacked a hand to his forehead. "My bad. I've been in so many crossovers lately, I'm starting to get my fics a little confused."

"Mm-hm." Much as she appreciated the elf's help, Ginny privately decided that he obviously wasn't getting paid to think.

"There's just one last thing," he said as she turned for the door.

"What?"

He examined her critically. "It's all almost right...the dress... the shoes... the hair... but it needs the final touch." Legolas snapped his fingers in the air and, with a shimmer of sparkling lights, a necklace appeared in his hand. He clasped it around her neck.

Ginny looked down at it, drawing in her breath. On a gold chain so fine it was almost invisible was suspended a single ruby carved in the shape of a heart. "It's beautiful," she whispered. "Is it real?"

"Yes, it's real."

"Can I keep it? I mean, after tonight's over?"

Legolas shrugged. "I don't know about that. My cousin didn't tell me."

"You mean your cousin's the one who set all this up? And sent the necklace?" Ginny asked, her heart leaping. "Oh, Legolas, please tell me-- who is he?"

"Oops. Shouldn't have let that slip." The elf giggled. "I can't tell you that, hon. Sorry."

"I suppose you can't," sighed Ginny. "Can you at least nod or shake your head or something if I guess and get it right?"

"Nope. I'm known, far and wide, as a trustworthy elf. I never let secrets slip; whenever I hear one, I'm quiet as the grave--"

"Oh, just one little guess," she said in a pitiful voice, toying with the lace frills on his jacket and gazing up into his eyes. "Just one--little-- is it Harry Potter?"

"Me? Related to that dreary do-gooder, free of the slightest vestige of fashion sense?" exclaimed the elf in an very offended way. "No! You were kidding, right?" He stopped. "Oops. Did it again. Hey, I wonder if that's why Aragorn and Faramir never let me know when anybody's going to have a surprise birthday party..."

Ginny bit her lip in thought as Legolas put the finishing touches on her hair, fluffing and fussing with the long red-gold ringlets. Who could it be, if not Harry? Of course, there was another possibility... another name that sprang to mind... but this was an incredibly nice, thoughtful thing to do, after all. So it definitely couldn't be who she'd been thinking of.

"Perfect," the elf sighed. "My finest achievement."

"I'm a little scared," Ginny admitted, picking up the plate of cookies.

"Nothing to be scared of. You look wonderful. Smashing. Absolutely fabulous. To die for. I might even go so far as to say..." he paused "... if I had a sexual orientation of my own, I'd jump you myself. But there's always fanfic, and we can hope."

"I don't quite understand."

"It's better that way." Legolas bent and kissed her forehead. "Now go out there and knock 'em dead."

Since Hermione Granger had been involved with Ginny's project, every detail had been planned with the mathematical precision of a experiment involving subatomic quarks in the giant particle accelerator at Stanford University. However, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley. Robert Burns undoubtely knew best what he meant by that, although the unrestrained use of Scots Gaelic in his poetry has rather tended to obscure the fact that an astonishing amount of it is decidedly NC-17 in nature and content. At any rate, the twin devils of randomness and uncertainty had wended their wicked way into the events of that St. Valentine's Day, as so often happens in the particular space-time continuum we humans like to call reality. And nowhere was this illustrated more vividly than in the Hogwarts kitchen around eight o'clock that night, perhaps half an hour before Ginny began making her way to the Great Hall, holding her plate of cookies, her heart pounding like a convention of trolls dancing the two-step.

Every square inch of the room was covered with cookie crumbles, smears of pink frosting, globs of pink pudding, smashed tarts, and splashes of punch.. The kitchen was completely filled with cherubs. They screeched with laughter as they chased each other through the ruined plates of refreshments. They hovered over the splatters of strawberry whipped cream puddings on every flat surface. Most of the house elves were weeping; some were cowering beneath chairs, and a few valiant souls were still attempting to stop the carnage in progress.

"Stop, stop, please, the refreshments is for the young ladies and gentlemen, sir-- er-- miss-- er--" Dobby, who was in the middle of chasing two cherubs around the floor as they flicked cinnamon red-hots at him, paused to collar another house-elf hiding under the table. "Is cherubs sirs or misses, do you think?" But Tibby only threw her tea-towel over her head and cried harder. Several more house-elves were following the cherubs across the floor with mops and frantically cleaning up after them, and others were anxiously picking up each thrown cookie and cupcake and tossing it into the magical dustbin. Dobby wondered if it would do any good to tell the other house elves that the only way to halt the food massacre was to get the cherubs to stop what they were doing in the first place. Probably not. The real problem with house elves wasn't that they liked to clean; it was that they were all born with obsessive-compulsive disorder. A little Paxil would work wonders around here, he tiredly thought.

Ginny stood in the large double doorway to the Great Hall and nervously patted at her hair for a moment, gathering her courage. Nobody had noticed her yet. The walls were covered in pink sparkling hearts, and the ceiling had been turned a misty dawn-like pink with fluffy white clouds. There were bouquets of roses on each table, and she could hear that the cherub band was doing its level best. Yet something seemed not quite right, although she couldn't put her finger on what it was. It has been said that music hath power to calm the savage breast, but for my money, nothing does the job like pink frosted Valentine cookies. They had not appeared in the Great Hall, though, and neither had the large pink cakes with twinkling hearts atop them, pink whipped cream puddings, cherry pies, or cinnamon baked apples. Nor had the pink punch which had the appropriate dilution of anti-aphrodisiac potion so snarlingly prepared by Severus Snape. Between hunger and raging hormones, the throng of teenagers milling about the dance floor or sitting restlessly at the little round red tables was a rather intimidating sight to Ginny. Although, of course, she didn't yet know why. There certainly was a lot of floor to cover before she got to Harry, who was all the way on the other side of the room...

Well, it was now or never. Ginny cleared her throat and started forward.

By some freak of fate, that was the precise moment when the band had finished a new song but not yet started the next. And at the same moment, one of those inexplicable lulls in the conversation had simultaneously fallen over everyone in the hall. Gregory Goyle had been turning Dennis Creevey upside down by the ankles and attempting to shake a suspected candy bar out of his pocket, and he had paused momentarily for breath as well. So Ginny's throat-clearing was as loud as a cannon. Everyone turned to stare at her, framed in the doorway, her red dress a raucous beacon, her platter of frosted cookies held high and sparkling like jewels. Then there was the loud clunk of Dennis's head hitting the floor as Goyle dropped him, and a cry went up from the entire room as if in one voice (although it must be admitted, the boys were much louder than the girls. )

"REFRESHMENTS!"

A particularly determined group of students, led by Colin Creevey, had been in pursuit of the large pink heart-shaped boiled sweet suspended over the stage. Colin was inching out over one of the large beams supporting the magical spotlights with one hand outstretched, and Draco had almost managed to grab the bottom of his robes. The latter was not in the best of moods. He hadn't seen Ginny yet, and wondered a bit uneasily if he really had managed to scare her away. Maybe she wasn't coming back at all. Maybe she was weeping uncontrollably in her room. Maybe someone should tie up everybody who bore the genetic material of the Creevey clan and dump them in a closet until they reached their twenty-first birthdays.

"Get back here," snarled Draco, grabbing at Colin's shoelaces.

"But I'm so hungry!" the other boy whined. "We all are."

"Then go back to your table and eat the roses! Get down. I mean it. I'll take away house points until you're in negative numbers. I'll turn you into a frog and feed you to the giant squid. I'll--" But at that very moment, as luck would have it, he caught a glimpse of a red-gold head, far below. Ginny had entered the Great Hall. And she was wearing a dress that was clearly held up by a very powerful antigravity charm indeed.

At the sight, Draco sat bolt upright, hearing the twitter of a thousand bluebirds, every little breeze seeming to whisper 'please,' and the bells ringing for him and his gal. He had the distinctly pleasant sensation of a spring in his step, a buoyant bounce to his xyphoid process (now that's a body part too often overlooked,) and a song on his lips. (All right, all right. It was still a rather evil song. Perhaps something by Yanni, or Zamfir and His Pan Flute. The point is, it was a song.) Zing! went the strings of his heart. She was here. And she had those damn cookies, of course. Now for the next part of the plan. To intercept Ginny before she had a chance to get across the dance floor, and then--

"Hey!" exclaimed Colin, eyes shining. "She's got cookies!" He made a mad scramble to get down. Far below, the stampede for Ginny's cookies began. Draco had a bird's eye view.

"No!" he exclaimed, backing across the beam and starting to shimmy down it, still holding Colin Creevey's feet in one hand. An strangled screech, however, alerted him to the fact that his movements had caused the small boy to swing over it the wrong way. Colin was now hanging upside down by his shoelaces.

"Help, help," he pleaded.

Draco hesitated. He still had a chance of reaching Ginny in time.

"Please. I promise I'll never sneak by the Slytherin table and steal your pudding at dinner again, Malfoy..."

Draco's eyes narrowed dangerously. "That was you?" he hissed. "The night we had both chocolate and vanilla?"

"I've learned my lesson," Colin sobbed. "Please, don't let me fall to an agonizingly painful death."

"Hmm. When you put it that way, it sounds so tempting..." Draco mused.

"If I do fall to my death, it's your fault!"

"I suppose you would have to be one of those tiresome people who'd say that's a bad thing. And I've got so many years of therapy ahead of me anyway that it seems a shame to add any more trauma onto the list. Oh, all right!" Sighing with aggrieved martyrdom, Draco began the long and arduous process of untying Colin from the beam. As the knots had tangled themselves into several dozen double half-hitches, this was no easy task.

"Wow," breathed Colin, staring at Ginny on the floor far below. "Those, uh, cookies of hers look delicious. So firm.... so pink... so..."

"Don't push it, Creevey," warned Draco, waving his wand over the first knot. "It's a very long drop."