It definitely hadn't taken long this year, thought Pansy bitterly. Second week of classes and she was already in detention. What made it worse was that it was with the filthy blood-traitor Weasley hag. As she rounded the corner and the door to the trophy room caome into view she muttered a terse goodbye to Draco, who was also on his way to detention.
"Meet me afterwards?" He asked.
"Maybe," she snapped, too preoccupied to bother with being polite.
"Merlin, Parkinson, there's no need to be a cow about it," groused Draco. "It's only detention."
"With a Weasley" she corrected him.
"Yeah, well I've got it with Potter, so consider yourself lucky. You're so damn touchy this year. Don't bother waiting for me either," Draco said, and swept on down the corridor, robes billowing out behind him. Sometimes he could be a lot like his father, thought Pansy. She shouldn't have snapped at him. What had happened to her Machiavellian Slytherin mind?
She snorted to herself as she slouched down the corridor. Best not to think about what had happened to it. Best to just make it through this evening and bury herself in homework and not think about anything.
She could hear voices- Madame Hooch's and the Weasley girl's. Pansy felt her stomach drop uncomfortably. She put on her best sullen face and took a deep breath.
Madame Hooch was sitting at a desk that had been brought in and placed at the far side of the room. The Weasley girl was leaning up against a trophy case, her long slim body relaxed and- No! Pansy shook herself mentally. The stupid ginger blood-traitor was laughing with Madame Hooch, sucking up to her like a typical Gryffindor. The bitch.
Pansy scuffed the rest of the way into the room and cleared her throat. "Are we going to get this over with or what? Some of us have things to do," she growled in her most adolescent tone. She could feel the readhead smirking at her from across the room.
"That will do, Miss Parkinson," said Madame Hooch in her infuriatingly cheerful but heartless way. "I have some business to attend to, so I trust you girls will be fine left more or less to your own defenses. Feel free to engage in POLITE conversation without worrying about disturbing me. Ginny will show you which cabinet you will be cleaning." With that, she opened a folder of papers, and, pointedly ignoring the girls, set to shuffling through them and making little annotations.
"Well?" said Pansy roughly, her voice gravely with enmity. "Get a move on, Weasley."
"There's no need to be like that," said the Weasley coyly. Malicious little whore, thought Pansy. Ginny stood up from where she was leaning against a cabinet and walked past the older girl and around a particularly large case in the middle of the room. "Well, are you coming?" she called. "I already brought the cleaning supplies over. Because some people have the courtesy not to be late to appointments." Pansy could hear the mocking smile in her voice and seethed as she followed the redhead across the room.
"I'm coming, Weaslette" Pansy snarled. "And there is such a thing as being fashionably late. Anyway, it's not like I had any pressing desire to polish trophies and commune with blood traitors."
At first they worked in silence. Ginny could feel the rage and hatred exuding from Pansy's tense body. She smiled to herself. Detention was well worth getting under the Slytherin's skin so badly. Well, at least that was one of the reasons. Ginny was going through a lot right now. Aside from the business with the Order of the Phoenix, and all the stress of Voldemort's unequivocal return, this summer had been very strange on a personal level.
Things had been going downhill with Dean since the pregnancy scare in august-oh, yes, she had lost her virginity last summer, a painful and not particularly pleasant ordeal- and now he was acting moody and distant and flirting with Lavender. Then there was the presence of Fleur in the house all summer, something that had grated on her nerves severely, and which had also contributed to her mother's preoccupation for things other than her little girl. Harry had been moody and almost cold this summer, and her friendship with Hermione had been stressed, as the older girl spent most of her time with Ron and Harry. Fred and George were busy with their business. Charlie was away. Bill was always with Fleur. Her father had no time left for anything but the Ministry. That had left Ginny with little but Quidditch practice and furtive and -from her perspective- monotonous sexual encounters with Dean.
Well, not entirely. There had been seven wonderful nights. Wonderful, magical, delicious nights. Nights where everyone had left the Burrow to go see a Quidditch match, or a concert, or to visit friends, nights where Ginny and Tonks had been left alone.
It had all started one evening in mid July. The family had gone to watch a Chudley Cannons game, but Ginny had made a promise to Dean that she'd feign sickness so that he could come over. She'd convinced even her mother of her illness, something that was getting easier to do these days. Between Voldemort and Fleur Delacour, Molly Weasley was most definitely frazzled at the edges.
But Tonks, clever, funny, gorgeous Tonks had smelled a rat, or maybe two rats, the first being that Ginny was having a boy over, and the second being that Ginny didn't really want a boy over. Tonks was right on both counts. This was soon after the virginity incident, and the redhead was not in any way looking forward to repeating it.
So Tonks told Molly that she'd stay to take care of Ginny, and Molly have them both a hug and Tonks a grateful look, and then they had been left alone in the darkened living room.
"It's a boy, isn't it," Tonks had said knowingly.
Ginny had nodded her head tiredly.
"And you don't want him over, do you?" she had asked.
"Nope," Ginny sighed. "Dean. He wanted to have sex. Again."
"Again?" Tonks had asked, raising one eyebrow. "Aren't you a little young?"
"I'm fifteen," Ginny had said. "If you're going to be my mother..."
"Sorry, sorry," Tonks had laughed. "I keep forgetting that when I was your age I had already-" and they had both frozen when they heard the doorbell ring. Ginny had looked up at Tonks, face taut and pale in the gloom. Tonks had smiled and put a hand on her shoulder. "I'll deal with it," she had said.
Ginny had sat in the living room by herself. She felt like if it were a book she would have lit a cigarette right about now. She imagined how the glowing red tip of fire would look in the dark living room, pulsing brighter when she inhaled, scattering flecks of pale ghostly ash on her lap. She had been able hear hushed voices outside, and then silence. After a while she had gotten up and walked quietly into the kitchen. Peering out the window she could see Tonks silhouetted against the dark blue sky of evening. Dean was nowhere to be seen.
Ginny had caught her breath then, looking out the window of the still kitchen, grey and blue shadows lying thickly on the cabinets and nestled between the stacks of cups and plates, sliced cleanly across the floor by rectangular pools of moonlight. Moonlight that had illuminated Tonks' shape and reflected off the soft curve of her cheek and cast a blue sheen across her pink hair.
She had padded over to the front door and stepped, barefoot, onto the dusty ground of the yard. She reached Tonks, hesitated a moment, and slipped her arm under Tonks'. Tonks had responded by putting her arm around the girl's shoulders and giving her a squeeze. They had stood there a moment, Ginny every second becoming more aware of the feeling of the woman's arm around her, and the feeling of her body against her side. She was afraid to breathe. Then she finally said, "Do you have a cigarette?"
Tonks hadn't responded immediately, and Ginny had looked up suddenly when she felt the woman's body shaking. Oh, with laughter, thought Ginny, slightly annoyed.
"I'm not a little girl anymore," she had said again, quietly, but indignation coloured her voice.
Tonks squeezed her tight and brought her other arm around her. She was quite a bit taller that the redhead, and she laughed softly into her hair, planting what might have been a kiss on Ginny's hairline.
"Oh, Ginny, you know I don't think of you as a little girl," Tonks said, and for some reason unknown to Ginny at that time, it had sent little thrilling chills throughout her body.
"Well, stop treating me like one, then," the Gryffindor had managed, trying to orient her thoughts through the beautiful haze Tonks' scent, her voice muffled by the older woman's shoulder. "You've smoked for ages. You said that."
"It's a bad habit. I'm not treating you like a little girl- I don't think anyone should smoke."
"You've already stopped me from seeing Dean tonight, now smoking. Are you going to tell me I should 'bundle up' next?"
"Oh, hush," Tonks had whispered. "You didn't want to see him anyway." She had paused. Ginny had been able to feel a heartbeat then, but she wasn't sure whose it was. "Listen, wait here." And then Tonks had vanished with a swish of skirts and left Ginny standing in the yard feeling confused and elated and wanting Tonks' arms back around her.
Ginny had stayed standing, not wanting to move, even when she heard Tonks shut the Burrow's front door and walk towards her. She started at the feel of her hand on the small of her back, and when Tonks took her hand and led her up into the field behind the Burrow she felt as if she was evaporating, breaking into tiny particles that were wafted, fizzing, into the still night air.
When they were a quarter of the way through the bottle of firewhiskey Tonks leaned over and kissed her, soft and deep and tasting of the burning alcohol.
There were six more nights like that. Ginny had never felt so alive. It was so different than when she was with Dean. Whereas with him it had been painful and uncomfortable and awkward, with her it was soft and sweet and so, so good. Ginny had found herself thinking about nothing but Tonks all day; her smell, her feel, her taste. She couldn't get her out of her head, out of her senses.
And then came the day, sixteen days after the start of their affair (Ginny had been counting) when Tonks met her in a hallway of the Burrow and told her it was over, that she was in love with Lupin. Ginny hadn't, much to her later relief, broken down in front of her. She had simply looked her in the eye and said in her best cold voice that Lupin not only was a werewolf, but was also too old for her. Tonks' had threw up her hands in exasperation. "I'm to old for you! You're fifteen!"
"And Lupin's thirty-five!" she had said in a high, tight voice, before fleeing to her bedroom and slamming the door, hating herself for the sobs she was choking back.
For the rest of the summer she poured her heart into Quidditch. She was determined to get onto the Gryffindor team this year, and anyway, she didn't really want to think much about her feelings. Of course, she couldn't escape them all the time, and was haunted by the idea that maybe she wasn't quite as straight as she had previously thought. So to try to put an end to those thoughts, she threw herself into her relationship with Dean, but that didn't work either. It just resulted in disillusionment, a pregnancy scare, and Dean drifting farther and farther away from her after she made it clear there wasn't going to be any more sex any time soon. She found herself pining not so much for Tonks herself, but for the physical closeness, the pleasure, let's face it, the sex.
So when she got to Hogwarts a little over two weeks ago and saw Pansy Parkinson looking at her like that, watching her, acting just a little too defensive around her, who could blame her for wanting to get her on her own?