Crepúsculo

Crepúsculo 6

The Crystal Towers

There were ways Ginny Weasley hated to be awakened, and then there was Harry Potter's face peering over hers, saying, "Time to get up, Gin, morning practice!"

She dragged herself out of bed and into the locker room, clutching her broom in one hand and a lage mug of coffee in the other. One of the first things she had done after Harry had become captain of the Quidditch team last year was learn to Transfigure random objects around her dormitory--toilet paper, for instance--into strong, hot coffee.

"All right, team, as I'm sure you are all too aware, the Quidditch season begins in less than two weeks, with the season opener against Ravenclaw," Harry said, "and we've been slacking off."

Actually, none of the them had been aware that there was a game against Ravenclaw in less than two weeks, as Ginny could tell from her teammates' expressions, but they weren't about to tell Harry that.

"We've only been practicing three times a week since the beginning of the year, which isn't nearly enough. Ravenclaw is stronger than ever before. Between Tines, Edwin, and Van Hoch at Chasers and Robyn Trailwind at Keeper, they're nearly unbeatable. Their Sweeping Hawk attack formation..."

Ginny tuned him out. She didn't ever pay much attention to Harry's talks; she wasn't very good at learning by listening. She would figure out what he meant once they were out on the practice field, and until then she could catch up on some much-needed sleep.

"...all right then, let's get out there and give those new ideas a try!"

Ginny pulled on the last of her practice equipment. Harry opened the door onto the Quidditch pitch and was nearly pushed back into the locker room.

The worst version of the dark and stormy night cliché had come to visit Hogwarts.

It wasn't as cold as Ginny had expected, but this meant that rather than a snowstorm they had a combination of sleet and rain. Combined with winds strong enough to throw Harry Potter back into the locker room, this was a day during which people clearly weren't meant to go outside, let alone play Quidditch.

Harry stared at the storm openmouthed like the rest of them for a few moments before regaining his composure. "Well, come on, then!" he said. "Let's get moving!" He mounted his broomstick and kicked off into the storm. The door lammed shut behind him.

The rest of them gawked at the door, or perhaps prayed for their lost teammate, until Ron finally mounted his broom and hovered a few inches off the ground. "Now I understand if the rest of you don't have death wishes," he said, "but we really should make sure that that fool captain of ours doesn't get himself killed, shouldn't we? Lots of people would be very upset if he died. Especially," he stared pointedly at Colin Creevey, "his fan club."

"Right then," Colin said quickly, "everyone, let's go."

And so Ginny found herself pushed out of the warm, safe, dry locker room and into chaos. She barely had time to throw her broomstick beneath her before the wind caught her and carried her up.

She couldn't see where she was flying, not that it mattered. The wind battered and threw her anywhere and everywhere. She had to use every bit of flexibility and fast reflexes she possessed just to avoid the airborne projectiles, nearly invisible until the very last moment in the storm. She couldn't even tell what the objects were; branches, maybe, or rocks, or small forest rodents...like ferrets. An image rose in Ginny's mind of an extremely disgruntled white ferret with Draco Malfoy's pinched face catapulting through the storm, and she snorted laughter despite the weather.

Some of the flying objects she had to strike at with her Beater's bat to avoid being hit. But one of them came careening back towards her after she'd already whacked it hard away from her, with the wind. There was something familiar in the feel of her bat when it connected, too, a satisfying crack of--

Oh no. Harry had let out the Bludgers.

Ginny headed for the ground to see if she could find Harry and kill the boy for being such an idiot. Those Bludgers could hurt someone badly and mostly likely would, especially the other members of the team who didn't have bats or any other way to shield themselves. Ordinarily Ginny and Ron would have been able to help them, but Ginny could barely protect herself from the Bludgers in these conditions, let alone other people, and she was sure Ron was no better off.

On the ground, conditions were, amazingly, even worse. She couldn't see to land and thus fell face-first into a sea of mud. She struggled to stand up. Her body felt like one big bruise. By the time she'd managed to remount her broom and kick off into the air again, however, the rain had hosed all the mud off of her. At least the storm was good for something.

Maybe she'd be able to see better higher up, above the trees, where there might not be so much flying debris. She flew up--at least she thought it was up; it was the direction the rain was coming from, although, considering how hard the wind was blowing, that might not necessarily be up--and discovered that there was nothing to see there either.

She was about to head back into the middle of the storm when a light caught her eye. She must have inadvertently drawn closer to the castle than she'd intended. Well, at least it would be a safe way to get back down to the ground, and she would have some reference point for how to get back into the castle. Landing on the ground in any other place would likely get her lost in the Forbidden Forest, which, she could imagine, would be far more fun than she wanted to deal with in this weather.

She followed the light when she could see it through the storm. As she drew closer she realized it came an arched window. She had only ever seen that kind of window in towers. She pulled up close and touched the glass with her hand in a failed attempt to steady herself, then looked inside. Broken furniture, moldy curtains, a fire, one upright armchair...she knew this place. The North Tower. The only thing that was missing was....

...getting up out of the armchair and staring right at her.

Ginny nearly fell off her broom.

The figure in the room had seen this, as evidenced by the smirk on his face. She couldn't actually see his face through the frosted glass, but every nuance of his posture suggested it, and since he only had two facial expressions, the smirk and the sneer, it wasn't but so much of a risk to assume that he was smirking.

He waved at her, she scowled at him, and a flying branch nearly knocked her off her broom, which reminded her that she was currently more than fifty feet up in the air during of one of the worst storms she had ever seen in her life, and it was time to get back inside now.

When all seven members of the Gryffindor team regrouped in the locker room, they discovered that the team had somehow managed to avoid injury entirely, with the exception of a few minor scrapes and bruises. Only Ron's diplomatic intervention saved Harry from significant damage at the hands of his teammates, however, who assured Harry that if he ever tried to get them to practice during that kind of weather again, they would personally incapacitate him for the rest of the Quidditch season, if not the rest of his life.

After a careful shower in which Ginny unsuccessfully tried to avoid getting hot water on her bruises, she wandered down to breakfast. Cora was already there, munching away on some toast and sausages. Ginny piled up her plate with everything within reach, managing to shovel oatmeal and eggs on top of her fruit. She ignored the interesting combination of foods and dug in happily.

The owls screeched into the Great Hall, delivering the Daily Prophet to Hermione, Quidditch Weekly to every single boy at the Gryffindor table save Dean Thomas, who buried his nose deeper in Football through the Ages, and yet another item Neville Longbottom had managed to leave at his grandmother's house over the summer. A tiny school owl delivered Ginny a letter addressed to Miss Virginia Anne Weasley in unmistakable script. The enclosed note read, Missing something? Weaponry room, now.

She glanced over at the Slytherin table. A certain blonde Slytherin was conspicuously absent from their ranks.

"Oh, shit," she said. Her wand. He'd taken it from her in the Shrieking Shack yesterday. She'd been so unsettled she'd forgotten all about it.

"Come again?" Cora said through a mouthful of sausage.

"I'll tell you later," Ginny yelled over her shoulder as she sprinted out of the Great Hall.

The Weaponry Room. She knew that it was on the fifth floor, south-east corridor, that it had been used extensively by the Hogwarts fencing club back in the 1700s, and that some of the strongest anti-trespassing charms in the school guarded the room's entrance, all information courtesy of Hermione The Walking Textbook Granger.

Which was why Ginny nearly fell over in shock when she tried the knob and the door opened immediately. She slipped inside and eased the door shut behind her. He must have left the door open for her, although she knew, again thanks to Hermione, that that wasn't supposed to be possible: the door was charmed to lock from the inside as soon as someone entered the room, opening only to those with a complex set of passwords. But considering what he'd done in the Shrieking Shack yesterday, she was somewhat less than surprised that he could control this piece of architecture as well.

She found herself at the foot of a narrow spiral staircase, just wide enough for one person to pass. The widest part of the stairs was to her left, the smooth cylinder made by the rising steps to her right. She knew enough of sword fighting to understand what this meant: an attacker would have to hold his sword in his left hand, which was nearly always the weaker hand, while the defender would have the instant advantage of his right and stronger hand.

Ginny climbed the steps as quietly as she could. It wasn't a very tall staircase, barely two complete spirals, lit with torches every few steps. It wasn't actually a tower, she knew, but was meant to serve as a practice version of one. This was only slightly reassuring.

At the top was a short corridor, about the same width as the staircase. She could see a little of the room, a patch of gray wall and a hint of mirror. She froze. She didn't want to be seen entering the room if she could help it. She inched to the left side of the corridor, out of the mirror, and tiptoed forward.

Her view of the room expanded as she moved. She saw what looked like a giant broken mirror. On second glance it proved to be dozens of separate mirrors positioned so close together that at first they seemed one large mirror cracked in neat, straight lines. The floor was gray stone, like nearly every other room in the castle, and the room was unusually bright, as if sunlight were glittering through a wall of windows, but the storm still roared outside. Ginny had seen it on the ceiling of the Great Hall just minutes before. She looked up and understood. The ceiling was charmed to depict a glorious morning sun, blinding both on the ceiling itself and in its reflection on the mirrors.

She scanned the room until her eyes froze on a shadow on the floor, and followed the shadow to its owner. She had known it would be Draco, but seeing him still made her start. He wore black pants and a white shirt with the Slytherin S embroidered on the chest, his tie loosened slightly. It all looked regulation, but Ginny knew it wasn't. There was no way Madam Malkin's school issue uniform could fit anyone that perfectly. He had probably paid hundreds of Galleons to have clothes made for him that looked exactly like a school uniform but weren't.

In his left hand he held a long, thin rapier--she hadn't realized until now that he was left-handed--and he jabbed and parried with it as though he were fighting someone who wasn't there. Or maybe he was fighting with himself. She almost snickered at that, the thought of Draco fighting another version of himself. No, she doubted that there was any way Draco could have another version of himself. She could not imagine a Draco Malfoy who wasn't egotistical, snobby, and unabashedly cruel. If there were two Dracos, they would likely kill each other in a duel over which of the two was the handsomer.

It really did look like he was fighting with himself. She watched him for a few more moments and then realized that, in a way, that was exactly what he was doing. He was shadow fighting. The room was uniquely suited to this purpose. The walls ran in crooked ways. Some of the walls were mirrored, some not, and the light hit off little tilted nooks and scattered shadows everywhere, dozens of shadows, so that the shadow that was in front of Draco one moment was behind him the next, or to the side of him, or gone entirely, only to reappear as soon as he moved. Or sometimes three shadows would reappear, or five. What had initially appeared to be an exercise in stupidity Ginny now recognized as what must be an accurate recreation of magical battle, with enemies Apparating and Disapparating by the moment.

Ginny shifted her gaze away from the walls and was not at all surprised to find Draco Malfoy staring at her.

"I suppose you'll be wanting your wand back," he said. His voice was tired.

"That's irregular."

"What is?"

"No insults, no taunts, not even so much as a 'Hello, Weasel, how are you'...are you ill or something?"

"You know what, I'm really not in the mood to deal with you today, so, hello, Weasley, here's your wand." He held it out to her.

She didn't take it. "Answer me something first: since when do you get to decide that you're not in the mood to deal with me? I'm never in the mood to deal with you, but you haven't once asked me if I'm not feeling good or if I have better things to do or if I just don't want to be in the same town as you, and, believe me, I don't. So tell me, Malfoy, what makes you think you have the right to decide when you want to deal with me?"

She realized, too late, that this was not the most diplomatic speech she could have made. Malfoy's features curved into a catlike smile, the one Hermione's cat Crookshanks used when he'd cornered a mouse and was deciding whether it would taste better baked or fried.

"Since when," he said slowly, "do you think that you're the one calling the shots? You're not in control here, Weasley. Don't ever forget it."

She stared him down. "Why don't you just give me my wand, Malfoy, and I'll be out of your way."

"Just give you your wand?" he echoed. "You didn't take it when I held it out to you. You don't get a second chance."

"Give me my wand back or I'll--"

"Or you'll hex me?" He laughed, and jiggled her wand. "Now, that's an effective threat, Weasley."

"Listen, Malfoy, I'm sure you're supposed to be in class right now, and so am I, so why don't you just give me my wand back and we'll go our separate ways and save both of our Houses a lot of points by not being late."

"Hmm, let's see, what do I have first today...ah, Herbology. Let me think about it for a moment." He looked over Ginny's head, then stared straight into her eyes. "No."

Ginny abandoned diplomacy. "Damn it, Malfoy, just give me my wand back!"

"You aren't very good at bargaining, you know."

"There's nothing to bargain on. You give me my wand back, I leave, everyone lives happily ever after."

"That's not the way these things work, Weasley."

She hated his calm. "I could kill you right now," she told him.

This declaration didn't even faze him. Not just that, but his eyes actually lit up at her words. "Could you," he said. "Now, there's an idea." Her wand disappeared into his pants as he took a step away from her. He swooshed his rapier through a few parries and said casually, "Weasley, what do you know of sword fighting?"

Her stomach dropped but she held his gaze. "More than you'd like to think." She'd read a book on it once, when she was about seven years old. The fact that it had contained more pictures than words wasn't going to help.

He raised a disbelieving eyebrow but said, "All right, then. I'll be happy to give you your wand back...if you can beat me in a swordfight."

She didn't have a rabbit's chance in a cage full of werewolves, but she couldn't back down now. Who knew when she would have another chance to get her wand back before he used it as a nine-and-a-quarter-inch long piece of ebony firewood? "Fine. But we have to shake on it."

He nodded, said, "Fair enough," and proffered his right hand. Shaking hands was originally a way to make sure that one's enemy wasn't going to draw his sword while they were drawing up the terms for the battle or duel: it prevented the use of the sword hand. But not all swordsmen were right-handed, and left-handed knights could certainly cause trouble. She watched his left hand out of the bottom of her eyes as they shook on the deal. It remained limp by his side. She wasn't fooled into thinking he was right-handed; she'd seen his skill with it earlier. She didn't mention it, though. She was going to need every advantage she could get.

He withdrew his hand and examined the rapiers on the wall. He selected one and tossed it towards her, handle-first. Not for nothing had she been the replacement Seeker when Harry was banned from Quidditch during her fourth year, however. She caught it and swung it a few times, testing it out.

She could tell from his expression that in catching the rapier she'd passed the first test. As for the rest of the fight, she wasn't so certain. Maybe if she thought of the sword as a longer, lighter Beater's bat her stomach would stop flipping.

Malfoy grinned. "Shall we?" He held up his sword--in his left hand.

They faced each other, circled for a few moments that felt like forever until Ginny couldn't stand it anymore and attacked. Thrust, parry, block--it fell into a rhythm so easily that she knew he wasn't really trying. And then, suddenly, he was. He forced her to retreat until her back was against the wall and she tried hard to fend him off but she had no idea what she was doing and they both knew it. She jabbed but pulled back too slowly and he stabbed her arm--not as hard as he could have, but enough to remind her that she was the one with her back against the wall for a reason.

He smirked at the blood seeping through her uniform blouse, and she seized her chance. She slipped out to the left, his right, where there was no sword to stop her, trying to poke him in the back as she escaped. He was too quick. He stopped her stroke with his rapier and the fight continued.

She was losing ground rapidly, heading towards another wall, and she couldn't think of what she could do to stop him.

But maybe she didn't need to.

The entrance to the room was behind her and to her right. If she could angle her retreat down the corridor and onto the spiral staircase, he would have to attack with his right hand, she with her left. She had a strong enough left hand, even preferred it when fist-fighting her brothers, and it wasn't particularly less skillful in sword fighting than her right hand, which had a mere five minutes more experience.

Ginny gradually angled herself towards the entrance. She didn't need to pretend to retreat; Malfoy was forcing her to do that without any of her assistance. She even feigned movements to the sides as if she were trying to escape, but he had seen her do that once and wasn't about to let her do it again. He thrust and she retreated all the way down the narrow hallway to the top of the stairs, even down three of the stairs. Still he followed her.

She switched her sword to her left hand and charged at him, reckless with success. Too late she saw him switch his own sword to his right and block her blow, holding her sword against his. He grabbed her shirt beneath the neck and pulled her so close that she could see little flecks of pale blue in his gray eyes. She could feel his breath on her face. "Did you really think," he murmured, "that I couldn't fight with my right hand?" He slid his sword along hers. It sounded like the sharpening of a knife.

Her eyes widened. She could already see herself pushed down the stairs and out the door, bleeding and sore. She could see the little envelope full of ashes and a single splinter of ebony wood, with the note Figured I'd leave you a souvenir. And then she had an idea.

She dropped her sword, which surprised him and threw him off balance, and dove at his stomach, knocking his legs out from under him. They tumbled down the stairs, Malfoy's arm whacking against the wall as they fell down the two spirals and losing his sword, Ginny hitting her head against a step but not hard enough to bleed. They fell into a sprawling mess at the bottom, but Ginny didn't waste any time. She pulled her leg out from under Malfoy and straddled him, one-two punching him in the face before he'd even realized they were off the stairs. He caught on quickly, though, and flipped her on her back. She hadn't realized he was strong enough to pick her up and throw her down beside him, but anger did strange things to people. He jumped on top of her hard enough to knock the wind out of her.

It was understandable that, in her oxygen-deprived state, it took her a few moments to realize that he wasn't moving off of her. Instead he laid full on top of her, his weight pressing her into the floor. She wondered if he were trying to smother her.

She wasn't sure which of them initiated the kiss. Her eyes were closed. She felt the hot breath on her face and then her mouth was open and she was kissing him, and it was just another swordfight, more of the same thrusting and jabbing, but the tip of his tongue didn't make her bleed but rather made her stomach flip from nerves and his closeness and the way his tongue coiled around hers like a snake. His hands were playing with her ears, her cheek, her hair. Everywhere his fingers touched, burned. She wrapped her hands around his back and pulled him against her, and he complied.

That was when she felt it pressing against her thigh. She slithered her hand down his side and between them, tinkered with his belt buckle. He shifted off of her and over to the side to give her better access. She pressed herself flush against him except at the waist. In a few seconds she managed to one-handedly remove the belt and unbutton his pants. She reached in. There it was, long and hard, exactly as she'd imagined it would be.

She ran her fingers along its length, then pulled it out and whispered against his mouth, "I'll see you later, Draco," and sauntered away with her wand.

************

Ginny spent most of first bell congratulating herself on how well she'd handled the encounter with Malfoy that morning. She'd bested him in a swordfight, in his element, and even managed to get her wand back without having to finish the fight. Cora noticed her grinning uncontrollably at the beginning of Charms, but it was, thankfully, a class they shared with the Ravenclaws, so Jeremy kept Cora joking and giggling most of the bell, leaving Ginny to her own thoughts.

She was sure that Jeremy knew something was off with her, since she didn't ordinarily ignore him during Charms class. But it wasn't so much that she was ignoring him as that she needed a little time to herself, without Cora's questions, and she was grateful that he could provide that for her, especially because she really couldn't answer Cora's questions about this particular Malfoy encounter.

She thought about that for a second. It wasn't just this incident that she hadn't told Cora about. She hadn't mentioned anything out of the ordinary about Malfoy since the beginning of the school year, and in the past two months there had certainly been plenty of abnormal Malfoy encounters. She didn't ordinarily keep huge secrets from Cora.

But she hadn't thought of it as a secret, and really it wasn't one. There was nothing abnormal about Malfoy going out of his way to make her life miserable; it was a Malfoy-Weasley tradition, dating back to the year 927 when Francis Weasley killed Thomas Malfoy's favorite pet deer. Never mind that the pet deer wasn't marked as a Malfoy deer, and it had wandered fifty miles away from the Malfoy castle grounds onto Weasley territory, which made killing it clearly legal under every written and unwritten law in the land; Thomas Malfoy had considered it a personal insult and had declared war on the Weasleys, a war which, over a thousand years later, still hadn't come close to ending. Malfoys and Weasleys of every generation since then had done their best to ruin each other's lives; if Draco Malfoy was particularly overzealous in his efforts, her ancestors would understand, and his would approve.

The feud had always been out in the open, though, so why Ginny hadn't told Cora was a mystery. She didn't really understand herself what had kept her from talking about it. She couldn't tell Cora now; there was too much involved that she hadn't told Cora, and it would hurt Cora worse to tell her all that Ginny had been keeping from her for so long than just to keep it to herself as she had been doing. But as to what had kept her from telling Cora in the very beginning, she did not know. She hadn't even mentioned the Malfoy incident on the train to Cora.

Jeremy was a different matter. It wasn't that Ginny had told him more than she had told Cora--she had mentioned Malfoy to neither of them--but that Jeremy was by nature more perceptive than Cora. Not only that, he was Ginny's boyfriend, a status that made him watch her doubly as carefully as usual. He wasn't spying on her, but he could observe her actions and understand what they meant, and he wasn't as easily distracted as Cora.

The only thing for it was to avoid him. Not forever, just until she figured out how to hide her emotions from him a little better. It wasn't lost on her that, as his girlfriend, she was supposed to be honest with him. That was the definition of trust, wasn't it, and what was a relationship without trust? But he was going to have to trust her in that there were parts of her life that did not concern him, and that she had to deal with on her own, without his interference. Malfoy was one such part of her life.

Ginny started at that. Malfoy was a part of her life. She hadn't ever thought of him that way, but as soon as she thought it she knew it was true. He'd weaseled, or rather ferreted, his way into her life so thoroughly that she hadn't even realized he was part of it. She no longer noticed his presence but rather his absence. When that change had taken place, she had no idea, and it scared her more than she would admit.

Ginny paid not a bit of attention to her classes all day. Jeremy covered for her without even asking why--she knew there was a reason she'd been friends with him for so long--and Cora, thankfully, managed to be mostly oblivious to her distraction. She would have to thank Jeremy later, but not until she'd created a believable cover for her problems and figured out how to better hide herself from him.

But she would not know how to hide herself from Jeremy until she knew exactly what she needed to hide. Malfoy, she knew that much, but she didn't know what that name meant anymore. The mention of that name brought out more emotions in her than she would have thought possible. The hatred had not diminished any, certainly not, but she no longer felt the pure red hatred she was used to. There were other problems to deal with, other feelings. None of them happy, none of them easily explainable, all of them strong but not easily definable.

She needed to define them, though; she could not hide what she did not understand, and the only way to understand was to see Malfoy again. She didn't know if she wanted this or feared it.

*************

After dinner Ginny snuck out of the Common Room, telling Cora she was going to the library to work on a Potions essay. If she had a brain in her skull that was exactly what she would be doing: the essay was due the day after tomorrow, and she hadn't even begun to research it. She told herself that after she talked to Malfoy she would work on it. She pretended to believe it.

She headed towards the North Tower by way of the library, so that anyone who saw her could say that they had seen her walking towards the library. She didn't need anyone wondering where she was going tonight.

She reached the entrance of the North Tower too soon. Forever would have been too soon. But if she turned back now she would not come again, and that would be worse than not coming at all.

She had to delineate Malfoy's presence in her life so that she would know how to keep him out of the rest of it, she told herself, and it sounded good all the way up the stairs, past the portraits, and even into the tower, but as soon as she caught sight of Draco Malfoy's shadow in the firelight she forgot everything but the way he'd slithered his tongue around hers, the way he'd arched his body around hers. Her face burned. She struggled to maintain composure as she hunted for an opening line.

"Malfoy," she said. That was creative. At least she hadn't managed to mispronounce his name.

He didn't turn around.

"Malfoy," she repeated a little louder. "Malfoy."

He turned. "I assure you, Weasley, that I heard you the first time, and that if I wished to speak with you I would have."

Not the response she'd expected--although what she expected him to say in response to his name, she couldn't have said--but it gave her something to work with, which was more than she'd brought with her. With all the time she'd spent worrying about talking to Malfoy, she would have thought she'd have spent at least a few minutes preparing for the talk itself, but no, apparently not. Insults, however, she could ad lib. "Didn't your mother ever teach you that it's rude to ignore people?"

"Didn't your mother ever teach you that rude only applies to barnyard animals, a group with which I'm sure she's had plenty of experience?"

Ginny wasn't entirely sure that his logic made sense, but his insinuation came across clearly enough. "Are you trying to say that my mother grew up on a farm?"

"No. I'm saying that your mother is a fat cow." He grinned, and Ginny's vision blurred red. She forgot everything she knew about how he so often turned her attacks against her. All she knew was that she wanted to pound him into the floor so hard that it took the house elves a week to clean up his remains.

He caught her around the waist before she even finished winding up her punch. "You have the fastest, most predictable temper I've ever seen," he told her. "You always let your anger boil over. You need to learn to let it simmer."

She wasn't particularly interested in discussing anger management, so she latched onto the metaphor. "What do you know about cooking?" she wondered.

"Enough." At her incredulous stare he added, "There are certain Malfoy family dishes that we have never allowed the house elves to touch."

"What, filet of Muggle?"

She couldn't tell if his laugh was one of amusement or of affirmation. "Charming, Weasley," he said as he released her. She'd been so surprised by the culinary turn of the conversation that she hadn't even realized he was still holding her until he let go. She flushed. "You make such charming comments."

"I'm glad you think so."

"Wonderful. However, much as I've enjoyed your company, I'd really like to return to my Arithmancy homework right now, if you'd excuse me...?" He gestured at the expanse of Arithmancy texts and papers that coated the floor nearly wall to wall. She'd treaded on a few of the sheets and was currently standing on a page labeled "Trigonomanthic Theory of Time," from which she gingerly removed her foot.

"All this is your homework?"

"If you open your mouth a little wider, Weasley, I'll bet you could swallow an owl. Yes, it's my homework, and I've been working on it for a very long time, so I'd appreciate it if you'd leave before you destroy any more of it than you already have."

"I didn't realize you did homework." Now that was an intelligent comment.

"Contrary to popular belief, the average Slytherin actually can read and write, and even do spells every once in a while."

"That isn't what I meant." He stared at her. "I thought homework was beneath you or something. You know, pureblood pride and all that?"

"Just because I'm rich, pureblooded, and a Prefect doesn't mean I don't have to work, Weasley. Or did you think I paid the house elves to do my homework for me?"

"Something like that, yes," Ginny said.

"While I could certainly afford it if I wanted to, I have never paid a house elf to do my work for me."

It was rather late in the game for Malfoy to be developing morals, Ginny thought, and something about S.P.E.W. and house elves not accepting any money for their work was tickling at the back of her mind, but she couldn't quite catch it. It wasn't important, anyway. She was looking at the corner of his mouth: slightly curved up in an easy smirk. He only ever smirked or sneered, but he had different degrees of each. Like the "I-insulted-Potter-and-he's-too-stupid-to-realize-it" smirk. And the "I-beat-Granger-on-a-Transfiguration-test" smirk. And the "I-know-something-you-don't-know" smirk, the one that had made Ginny physically ill at the Opening Feast.

He was using a variation of that smirk on her now, but it wasn't making her sick so much as nervous. Her pulse sped up so much that she wondered if she was having a panic attack. And it wasn't just the smirk that was making her nervous. He was standing far too near her. She closed her eyes but couldn't hide from his face; it was imprinted on the inside of her eyelids. She imagined she could feel his breath on her face, and when she opened her eyes she realized that she really could. He was less than half a foot away from her and staring into her eyes.

"You aren't here to talk about my homework," he observed. "So, Ginny"--the way her name rolled off his tongue ought to be illegal--"what are you here for?"

She opened her mouth to say something, anything, moo like a cow. It didn't matter what, any noise that wasn't his voice making her pulse splutter, but she couldn't even manage a squeak.

He traced the curve of her jaw with his finger and she almost died. He watched her throat as she swallowed. "Really, I'm curious"--his eyes flicked up to hers--"Ginny"--she swallowed again--"about what you're doing here." His fingertips reached her lips.

She kissed them. She couldn't help herself. He smirked again, an "I-knew-it" smirk, and she didn't even care. She brushed his hand off her mouth and kissed him on his smirking mouth, ran her hands through his hair. She was sure that he'd comment on that later: "You destroyed forty-five minutes of quality hair styling!" or something to that effect.

At first he stood there and let her kiss him, and panic flooded through her. It was all just another trick, and she'd been stupid enough to believe it. In a minute he was going to pull away and let loose an enormous "have-I-ever-got-a-lot-of-blackmail-material-on-you" smirk, and he'd return to making her life miserable in more conventional ways.

She was horrified to find that she much preferred his more recent tortures to pulling of pigtails and taunting about her crush on Harry Potter.

But no. She could deal with this latest torture being just that. What had made her think it was anything different anyway?

The fact that just then his tongue slammed into her mouth and he pressed himself hard against her might have had something to do with it. She lost her breath and never got it back. She thought of nothing but his hands on her hips, his lips on hers, his hair tickling her forehead.

Even after she left she could see nothing but him. She did not notice Cora pull up from a steaming make out session on a Common Room couch to try to catch her attention as she headed up the dormitory steps. She did not pay attention to the necklace she still wore around her neck dangling down on a silver chain. It glowed icy gray just before she fell asleep.

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