A One Word Situation

When Ginny Weasley found herself waking up, she immediately cast around in her mind for some way to get back to sleep. Her mind had already begun to trawl it’s way to the land of the living, and Ginny quickly realised why she hadn’t wished to wake up in the first place.

As soon as her mind had been given some indication she was no longer completely comatose, it began to play a rhythm on her head. It was the sort of rhythm that made her feel like someone was hitting her repeatedly over the head with a concrete mallet. It was the sort of rhythm she had never got used to, despite experiencing it at regular intervals throughout the school year, and at the annual Weasley Christmas parties. She opened her eyes blearily and with a mighty effort, tried to move.

No such luck, her body deciding it was not in a co-operative mood. Soon it became apparent that perhaps it was not just her body that was acting like a bastard. She became aware that there was something lazily draped around her waist, preventing her from moving. With a start, she realised it was an arm. As Ginny was in a severe hungover stupor, it didn’t seem to bother her that usually she did not wake up with an arm thrown over her.

In fact, it did not occur to her that the arm was connected to a body: something else she did not usually wake up with. She idly followed the arm to where it came into contact with its owner. Blinking slightly with shock at the fact there was a body attached to the arm, she scrutinised her sleeping partner.

He (she congratulated herself on the distinction) was currently sleeping deeply, hair all over his face. It was the hair that awoke her fully from her languid appraisal of the hard stomach against her side. The hair was a colour that belonged to only one person in the school. The shock of this realisation caused several images to short-circuit their way through her thinking process.

Loud music pulsing in her ears... laughter as people swung into her, faces red and cheerful from whatever alcoholic beverage they had ingested... raucous singing... she was giggling at what someone said... the someone had her on their lap... music pulsing... people laughing and dancing wildly... she was dancing wildly... someone held her as she danced with them ...

She gasped, and tried to sit up straight with the proper indignation that someone in her position should possess. Sadly, the mallet-bearing drum bashers had returned at full force. Ginny sank back into the pillows, only to try to sit back up again. She really didn’t know what to think, although she did realize that she was in a rather large amount of trouble.

This trouble came in the form of the several bottles that she hazily remembered guzzling the night before, and the blonde Slytherin beside her. Overall, she estimated, this amounted to roughly five times her body weight worth of trouble.

At the fifth (or was it the sixth?) attempt, she managed to drag herself into a sitting position, or rather, a position in which she was not lying at a 180-degree angle. This act of strenuous physical activity had awoken her sleeping companion; the person she had been trying to pretend didn’t exist. This was a fruitless task, as there were many things that Draco Malfoy was not, and one of them was ignorable.

“Well, well, well,” a sleep-laced voice drawled, “I must have got more plastered than I initially thought.”

Still facing resolutely away from him, she managed to grind out a coherent sentence. “Shut up Malfoy. If I wasn’t so hungover I would have been out of here by now.” Ginny paused, and took in her surroundings: the dark wood of the four-poster bed, the dark drapes, and the green and black colour scheme.

That’s not right, Ginny thought with confusion. Had she been slightly less zombie-like, and slightly less flustered by the fact she had just woken up with Draco Malfoy, she might have worked things out a little quicker. Her first conclusion was that this was not her bed. Worse still, she realised, this wasn’t her dormitory, or even her house.

This was a bad situation. It was a situation where you wake up in your brother’s worst enemy’s bed, having got thoroughly pissed the night before and have no idea what you did while you were intoxicated. There was one word that completely summed up this situation, Ginny’s general state of mind, and possibly everything else.

“Fuck.”

Used in the plural and repeated several times over, this word can convey nearly any feeling. So Ginny put this highly versatile and descriptive word to good use.

“You know, it’s funny that you should say that word, because as I recall, you used it several times last night...” Draco trailed off, getting the reaction from the redhead he had been clearly wanting.

She whirled on him as a sense of foreboding had begun to seep into her body. Her mind, getting a whiff of the chance to be a pain in the arse, began to conjure up images that seemed to be becoming more and more likely.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuckidy fuck fuck. Fuck.

“What happened last night?” she asked, looking more than a little unsettled at the images her bastard of a brain was giving her.

“Dear God, you don’t remember?” Draco looked like he was going to chortle, but of course he didn’t; Malfoys do not chortle. “Normally I’d be quite offended, but I’m not going to waste it on you. Though,” he paused, as if to take her in properly, “you don’t look as bad as you might in my bathrobe.”

Ginny looked down at herself, with the growing feeling of being a mouse played with by a large cat. She was indeed in a black robe, one that was much too big for her small frame.

“What happened?” she repeated again, this time looking downright terrified.

“Many things,” Draco said evasively, his smirk returning to its usual place of honour on his face.

By this time Ginny’s mind was getting rather hysterical. In fact, Ginny was reaching the point where she was certain she would soon hyperventilate and kill something, Malfoy preferably. This was his entire fault.

Ginny laughing and being helped up some stairs... Ginny waving to some people she had just met... Ginny leaning on someone and giggling as she tripped over a step... someone saying something in her ear that made her laugh and kiss them firmly on the mouth...

“Malfoy what the hell happened between us last night?” she wailed, her voice rapidly rising in both pitch and volume.

“I could tell you I suppose...” he trailed off again, looking thoughtful, then turned back to her, and said wickedly, “but then, I’m also enjoying you squirm, so maybe not.”

The shock of this current flash of memory, and the fact Draco was looking very much like the cat that got the cream, made Ginny rather desperate. This desperation, and the tap dancing lemurs in her head (the mallet had gone to take a much needed break) caused her to do what she did next. She pounced on Malfoy, intent on sitting on him until he told her what had passed last night.

“Tell me what happened or I’m not bloody moving!” she hissed at him. Malfoy, contrary to what she expected, was not looking at all upset. Rather, he was looking quite smug.

“You know, I don’t think I will. I rather like you ‘not bloody moving’, so feel free to carry on,” Draco told her serenely. It was then she realised, with a start, that she was straddling him on the bed. Red pulsed its way up onto her cheeks and she tried to move away. No can do, Draco was quicker, and before she could move off him, he gently grabbed her hips, effectively staying any movement.

“Let. Me. Go,” she gritted at him. He simply smirked, and in one quick movement sat up, and moved her into his lap, all the while not moving his hands.

“You have had way too much practise at that, Draco Malfoy.” She upped her glare to ‘thou art soon to die’. Draco seemed rather unconcerned at his imminent demise, and merely raised an eyebrow at her at her, irritating her further.

“I try,” he said modestly, not pulling it off at all. This only sent Ginny even further to the homicidal side of the Quidditch pitch.

“WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED LAST NIGHT?” she yelled at him, punctuating each word with a sharp poke to his chest. He grabbed her hands before they could do any further damage to his person, and pushed them down.

He looked annoyed now, but Ginny didn’t really notice, being more preoccupied with wondering whether or not her maidenhood was still intact. If she hadn’t been worrying about this, she might have remembered that Draco Malfoy was not a very nice person when he was annoyed. When he was angry, people found it was best to find some sort of air raid shelter and hide there until the blast was over. Ginny, as mentioned before, did not remember this. So she carried on yelling at him rather forcefully and trying to get her hands free.

“For Merlin’s sake, hold still!” Draco said, exasperatedly.

“Nu-a! Not until you tell me exactly what happened! Why am I in you room? And why am I in your bed? Because I sure as hell did not... did not...” Ginny was loosing her train of thought, and Draco wasn’t denying anything, “…we didn’t... did we?”

“Did we do what? You’ll have to enlighten me a bit, Weasley, because I don’t know what you’re on about.” The irritation was gone from his face; he was holding her effortlessly and finding that he didn’t mind having the fiery little redhead attacking him. In fact, he was enjoying having her on his lap again a little too much for his Malfoy comfort.

“Merlin...” Ginny groaned, “You know what I mean!”

“No I don’t, maybe you’d better spell it out for me.”

“Fuck.”

“Language, Weasley.”

“SHUT UP!” To Ginny’s immense surprise, he subsided. For the moment.

She stopped struggling for an instant, and opened her mouth to send a bout of expletives at him, that would prove, once and for all, you could actually form several sentences consisting of the same four-letter word. While this fresh bout of swearing was directed at him, Draco mused whether he should tell her the truth or not. After a few instants of struggling with his inner Slytherin, he decided, for once in his life, that he would.

“You were drunk,” he said suddenly to her. Ginny stopped mid tirade, and some gleam of sanity seemed to reappear in her eyes, but the anger remained.

“Thank you, kind sir, for the most obvious statement of the year,” she sarcastically shot at him.

“Shut up, or I’ll feel some urge to tell anyone who passes me in the hall my own personal account of what happened, using all the hyperboles I can find.” At this thought, Ginny paled somewhat and subsided.

“Go on.”

“As you know, Parkinson was having a party in one of the spare classrooms, and somehow everyone within a hundred metres of Hogwarts found out about it. I wonder how...” Draco said ironically, eyeing Ginny.

“Hey! I didn’t do anything!” An eyebrow was raised. “I didn’t! Colin told me, who’d got it from Parvati, who’d supposedly got it from Seamus.”

“Oh, the Irish potato hybrid. How on earth would an amoeba like him get hold of that sort of information?”

“He’s not an amoebae I’ll have you know. Seamus is a really nice-”

“-asexual being,”

“Right. Wait... oh-”

“And he may have syphilis.”

“How the hell would you know that?”

“When you sleep with girls from certain houses, you learn things from them,” he informed her calmly, but with a wicked gleam in his eye.

“How’d she know?” Ginny didn’t know whether she should be outraged at Draco, or outraged at the little bint who told him this. Then it struck her that there was a fundamental flaw in Draco’s arguments of Seamus' current… ahem… status.

One of these flaws was that another time when she had got herself thoroughly pissed at a party, she was sure he’d admitted to being a virgin. Ginny was fairly sure this piece of information had been divulged during a truth or dare game. Then again, perhaps it had just been one of those party games where you corner someone and threaten to set their underwear on fire if they do not divulge to you about the state of their cherry.

She wasn’t too sure on any of this however, because she actually didn’t have much recollection of what actually happened that night. She did remember that the next day she’d woken up outside the Prefect’s bathroom with someone’s bowling trophy in her arms, not to mention a headache the size of a small island in the pacific.

“Wait a second Draco… how do you know that he’s actually… well…”

“Got himself laid? Well, I’m told that it was after one of the Head Boy’s more memorable parties and her sister…”

“Ew. Who was it?” She was getting more and more revolted by each word that came out of Draco’s mouth. Draco’s mouth… whoa! Bad girl. Rule one of having a nemesis at Hogwarts: Thou shalt not call thy before mentioned nemesis by thy first names.

“A little bird...” Draco clearly wasn’t going to say any more; Ginny would dearly have loved to know whom the ‘little bird’ was, so she could decapitate it with a nearby blunt meat-axe.

“I hate you very much you know,” she settled for a flat, rather mediocre insult, to signal the end of the subject.

“The feeling is mutual, but we have got off the subject. Anyway, you sneaked into the party...”

“How did you know that?” Ginny asked, looking perturbed. Draco stared at her for an instant, before carrying on.

“Do you know how drunk you actually were, Weasley? You were so smashed you didn’t even recognise me. You were so drunk that Finnigan no longer looked like an ugly Irish potato, you were so intoxicated that dancing around in your underwear seemed rather blasé. You were so far gone you would have snogged Goyle if he’d asked, which he was going to-”

“Malfoy...” Ginny growled, looking slightly green. Draco decided it would be best to carry on before something happened to him. This happening would probably be in the form of a knee into his manhood at a fast rate of knots.

“All right, all right. You were so far off with the dancing monkeys, that you thought I was your new best-friend. You told me all sorts of things about yourself, seemed to think we’d met before.” Draco was beginning to enjoy himself, as another flush spread up Ginny’s cheeks.

“What sorts of things did I say?” she asked, tentatively, rightly afraid of what was about to come.

“Interesting things.”

“Like what?”

“Things that were extremely entertaining for me.”

“Elaborate please.” Ginny’s tentativeness was quickly, again, becoming annoyance of the first degree. It was something that seemed to happen a lot when she around Draco Malfoy.

“Things.”

“What ‘things’, are you referring to Malfoy?” Ginny’s glare was back, but unlike everyone else, Draco seemed immune to it. “The sorts of things you would no doubt gain sadistic pleasure from, or just plain old ‘things’?”

“Interesting things.”

“LIKE WHAT?”

“Things that were extremely entertaining for me.”

“Elab- Draco you are purposely annoying me aren’t you?” She jabbed him in the chest again for emphasis on this fact.

“Am I?”

“Yes, you are.”

“I’m glad to know I’ve succeeded in what I was aiming for,” he said, grinning with genuine amusement at her. She squealed in annoyance and began to struggle again.

“You told me all about your pet quaffle Sara, and how you loved her very much,” he said, deadpan. She stopped struggling again and, not for the first time, began to blush with embarrassment.

“I was five years old!”

“Were you? I got the distinct impression you were eight.”

“All right! So I was eight. What else did I tell you?” She sounded desperate, and Draco decided to put her out of her misery.

“That’s all.”

“That’s all?” she repeated, looking dumfounded.

“Yep, after that you collapsed on Zabini’s left knee and I had to take you to Slytherin.” Ginny gaped and her mouth fell open. Then, seeming to realise that her mouth was wide enough to catch golf-balls, she closed it.

“Why?” she managed to get out, still looking flabbergasted.

“Well, I couldn’t just leave you there could I? As much as I enjoy seeing a Gryffindor passed out and would gladly leave them where I found them, Zabini wasn’t as happy with the arrangement. I know for a fact he was far more interested in having one or the other, or even both, of the Patil twins on his lap, and not just for the warmth either. He told me that-”

“YUCK. Draco, too much information. I didn’t mean that, I meant why didn’t you just take me to Gryffindor?”

Draco looked at her.

“Oh, right. You don’t know where it is.”

The look changed to a glare.

“Of course I know where Gryffindor is, it’s what’s IN Gryffindor that I don’t like. Personally, I’m rather attached to my manhood, and God-knows what would have happened if they’d caught me with a very dead-looking you.”

“Why not the infirmary?”

“Not very bright today, are we Weasley? It was a PARTY. One that the teachers would have loved to have got their hands on, so they could make us all scrub the floors down for the next ten years, Pomfrey included. She hates having to deal with intoxicated teenagers, especially passed out drunk teenagers, at one in the morning.”

“Oh, yes, you’re right. There was this one time, in my fourth year…” Ginny noticed his expression, “…which isn’t anything compared to the epic you are already telling me…”

“Thank-you. Anyhow, I took you back to Slytherin and you then proceeded to be sick,” he elaborated. Ginny blinked, not once, but twice, before realising that this was the part where embarrassment overcame her, and forced her to bury her head in her hands. She obliged this feeling whole-heartedly and without any acting.

“Oh, Merlin,” she muttered, ears scarlet. Draco, looking down at her, felt a twinge in his stomach. He began to try to identify it. After running through the usual list of things that caused twinges in his stomach (hunger, his Aunt Mary’s cooking, Millicent's face...), he came up with none of the usual things. He soon had a dawning conclusion: he was feeling, sympathy... toward Ginny! Ginerva Weasley, of all people. He sighed and gently lifted her face up.

“Look, you got to the bathroom in time...”

“I know,” she moaned, dropping her face again, stilled at the feel of his fingers sliding into her hair.

Bending over a toilet bowl... feeling ill... someone holding her hair back... soothing her...

“You held my hair back?” she asked him, again looking confused.

“Yeah,” he looked shifty, as if slightly uncomfortable.

“Why?”

“I felt... sorry... for you,” Draco eventually got out.

“Oh,” Ginny said quietly, “what happened then?”

“You had a shower, wandered into my room and passed out again.” He had his hands idly in her hair, running his fingers through it, not even noticing what he was doing. Ginny, however, was very aware of what he was doing.

“And?” Draco didn’t notice her breathing was coming slightly faster.

“You happened to inconveniently collapse on my bed, so I left you there.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s the whole of it. I’d have liked to have made some more things up, things that would no doubt cause endless amusement on my behalf and make you do anything to keep me from telling them, but that’s all. I wasn’t going to sleep on the couch, so I stayed here too.”

She looked up at him, and he had the distinctly uncomfortable feeling her eyes were shining from tears.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Why?” For the first time in the whole experience he was baffled.

“For not leaving me on the floor of the Charms classroom to the mercy of Crabbe,” she answered, smiling, despite the pain in her head, which thankfully, seemed to have receded a bit. Draco couldn’t help but smiling back, it was a good feeling, he quickly found.

“It was Goyle, but…” She rolled her eyes in his general direction.

“Do you plan on doing this often?” he asked her cheekily soon after.

“What?”

“Passing out onto my bed. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but everyone else might begin to get the wrong idea about-”

“DRACO!” she shrieked, but was cut off as he kissed her. Whoa! Maybe this would be happening more often. She made a little moan deep in her throat as Draco nibbled on her lower lip; maybe this wasn't really a one-word situation.