When It's Not a Game Anymore

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No one sits with him, he doesn´t fit in

But we feel like we do and we make fun of him

Cuz you want to belong, do you go along?

Cuz his pain is the price paid for you to belong.

It´s not like you hate him or want him you die

but maybe he goes home and thinks suicide

or he comes back to school with a gun at his side

and a kindness from you might´ve saved his life.

Hero´s are made when you make a choice.

~ Superchic[k]´s Hero

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Chapter 1: Makings of a Hero

"Wait, Ginny! Stop!" yelled Draco as he ran to catch up with her. She didn´t even turn around and acknowledge his comment; she kept running as if her beautiful white Grecian dress was on fire.

Behind him, the door to the Great Hall slammed shut. Draco could still hear some music streaming out as the students danced. A ball was held as a celebration for the end of the year, and it had turned out catastrophes.

He gave a frustrated sigh and kept running, trying to gain distance, closing the gap between them. He used an extra burst of energy and caught up with her, and grabbed her bare shoulders and stopped. He was panting but she wasn´t even sweating. She huffed and tried to move out of his grasp, but as tired as he was, his hands stayed firm on her shoulders and upper sides of her arm.

"Ginny," he said, gasping, "Please... I - I´m sorry, I really am..." he kept one arm on her shoulder and placed the other on his chest, catching his breath. His heart beat rapidly, threatening to break through his ribs and chest. She looked at him with an unemotional stare, her brown eyes boring into his gray ones. "Imagine for a moment someone is grounding you insides and is now merrily feeding them to your intestines. Wouldn´t that be the worst?" she asked with a hint of malice in her voice. It was so strange hearing it, seeing how Draco was used to a more musical, melodic voice. It was like ice.

"Because that´s how I feel right now, so I hope that you´re happy. I hope that you´ve found enough that will send me away from school, that will label me as a failure for forever."

"Ginny, lemme explain..." he said, but Ginny cut him off.

"You know, it´s so like you to do this to someone like me. I was the perfect challenge for you, the leper-girl whose tough demeanor hides a little butterfly who looks for a companion... I should´ve known, damnnit!"

"Look, I really am sorry! I didn´t mean... didn´t mean for it to go this far..." he said, still gasping for air. He looked at her face and his fell from the look of it. She obviously didn´t believe him; it was written on every freckle of her face.

And after what had just happened, she shouldn´t.

"You know, Malfoy, so am I," she said finally, the word `Malfoy´ dripping with venom. She was no longer his `friend´, she was a mere stranger that he happened to be talking to. Malfoy looked up. She had not moved at all, her face still impassive as if it had been stone. "I´m sorry that I ever gave you the time of day, or help in potions, or ever a spare thought. I´m sorry to have thought that someone actually cared enough to spend time with me, to kiss me... I´m sorry to believe someone cared about me. Five years and I still haven´t learned that no one wants to befriend a nerd. A geek, a loser, a social failure; it was ludicrous of me to believe that someone cared and that someday I could love someone else who loved me back. I should´ve questioned your motives more.

"So I´m sorry too. And I never thought that it would go this far." She finished, and her face looked a little more flushed than usual, but it showed no emotion. Her eyes, however, showed just how betrayed she felt, how unsure of herself she now was. Ginny turned to go.

"Ginny, I know this is going to sound preposterous, but I - I love you." He had said the three words that had been racing through his mind for the longest time.

"You know, Malfoy, that does sound a bit preposterous. And it also sounds desperate. But if you had told me that five minutes before now, I might´ve believed you," she said coolly.

She was fuming at herself; how could she fall for such a trap?! She should´ve known that she was going to get hurt, like last time, and that no one really cared for her, like last time. Tom was right. No one would ever, could ever love such a reject, such a leper like her.

No one. Certainly not Draco Malfoy, the prince of Slytherin.

"You - you mean you don´t believe me?" Draco asked incredulously. Ginny looked at him for a moment and a face of pity came upon her. But she brushed it aside. "I´m not sure I know what to believe now. And I´m sorry that it had to end like this." She removed his arms with her hands and walked away.

She didn´t look back.

~~~~~

It had started with a simple task. Find something that Ginny was afraid of, use it against her, and make her leave. Humiliate her; grind her face in the dust. He was bored, it would make him laugh. Especially since she was a Weasley.

Draco had been chosen to befriend her, pretend that he had a deeper, nicer side so she would tell him secret things. And he knew that she would tell them to him. When you had no one to tell secrets too, you generally told anyone who cared. It was all innocent fun, to him. This was what he did. This is what his father did.

He had never planned on falling in love with the reject.

Never planned to spend days in the library, just staring at her long straight red hair.

He hadn´t prepared to stay up all night, just thinking about what it would be like to kiss her.

He could have never prepared himself for what it did feel like to kiss her.

He wasn´t prepared to handle the sleepless nights of denial or the jolt of electricity that flew up his arm whenever they held hands.

He hadn´t counted on Pansy betraying him. He hadn´t though that she would invite him to a classroom the night of the ball, and have Millicent invite Ginny to stand outside while they talked. He should´ve known when she began interrogating him that on the other side, Ginny was hearing every word that came out of his mouth.

"No, I don´t like the Weasley girl! She´s hideously ugly."

"I´m working on it, Pansy, she just has no weakness that I can see yet. Give me some more, and I promise, you and I can get together some night so we can thing of something to do."

"Yes, I know that it´s almost the end of the year, but if we can make it look like she´s broken some major rule, maybe she´ll be expelled."

He hadn´t thought that she might set him up to ruin him. He hadn´t even given the Slytherins a second thought while he studied in the library complicated formulas for Transfiguration with Ginny, who was in seventh year, with him, to occupied trying to figure out why her hair smelt like strawberries than to ask her what she was most afraid of.

Malfoy took one last look down the hall where Ginny had disappeared in and walked in the other direction, silent as the gray stone hallway that surrounded him.

~~~~~

Draco walked slowly to the Slytherin table, unaccompanied. His heavy bag, weighed down with extra homework assignments. If he kept busy, he had reasoned, maybe he could ignore the pain in his heart, the raw scar left by Ginny´s words. His `friends´ had deserted him after he had failed to complete his little `task´. They glared at him viciously.

He sat at the end of the table and placed his books down under his seat. He began piling food on his plate and wordlessly began eating. Everything now was a bland motion, there was no thought or effort or meaning into his life.

The food had no flavor. It hadn´t had a flavor for a week now.

His eyes were blank and dull and his hair hung lifelessly to his head. He had half-heartedly gelled it down and now rebellious strands of white hung in front of his eyes. He shooed them impatiently out of his face, remembering how he himself had gently placed the red strand behind her ear. He remembered her own chocolate pools staring at the hand, frightfully and curiously. She had shuddered when he had touched her ear, and her breathing had became very awkward. She stared at him for what seemed like eternity until, when he couldn´t take it anymore, he leaned in and pressed his lips against her warm ones. She had muttered his name breathy in his ear, a question and a statement and a curse and a blessing all at the same time.

And it drove him insane that he would never hear it again.

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