He watches her in the Great Hall. It is during the Sorting Ceremony, and he tells himself he is bored and has nothing better to do. Yes, that must be it; he would never stare willingly at Weasels anyway. Bestiality, perhaps surprisingly, was not ranked among the list of Malfoy habits (with the exception of Uncle Richard, who was quite odd even for a Malfoy).

Although, he must admit that the halo caused by the fire reflecting in her hair iis/i quite... interesting, but he's only noticing it because he's bored by the ceremony. Why were they forced to attend it every year? Who cares much about the ickle firsties, anyway?

The ceremony ends - good. Now he can concentrate on better things, like the Feast that has just appeared on the empty plates. He can't quite prevent his gaze from flickering up from his shepherd's pie once in a while though, and settling on a redhead, but he solves this problem by turning to Blaise and striking up a friendly conversation about the hols (more specifically, about the plans they had cooked up over the hols to facilitate in the humiliation of everything Gryffindor... But that is a moot point.)

hr

The alarm bell rings shrilly. An unhappy little whimper comes from the bed next to it, and an arm is extended from beneath the bundle of comforters, pillows, and bolsters to give it a firm thump. Ginny groans as she sits up in bed. She forces herself to swing her legs over the side, and goes to the bathroom, carefully gathering her clothes along the way so as not to wake any of her dorm-mates (she'd decided to forego the prefect privilege of having a room to herself for the comfort of having other people around). In the bathroom, she looks at the clock and swears softly under her breath. 'Darn, my first prefect meeting and already I'm going to be late!' She rushes through her morning routine, and hurries off to the Great Hall where all the prefects are to be briefed. She is evidently the last prefect to assemble, as everyone turns around to look at her as she pushes the door open. Flushing bright red as everyone's eyes rest on her, she quickly takes a seat near the door, and tries to get her breath back after her mad dash through the corridors as the briefing begins.

hr

Draco hears the door being pushed open, and he turns round in time to see Weasley looking around in embarrassment and hurriedly taking the nearest unoccupied seat - which happens to be directly in front of him.

As Dumbledore drones on about what it means to be a prefect ('You get your own rooms, boys and girls!') and what their duties will encompass ('You get to be out after curfew, prefects!'), Draco admires the way her robes ride up when she sits, and the arch of her neck.

Terence Richards, a fellow Seventh Year Slytherin currently seated beside him, is evidently admiring this too, for he gives a low whistle of appreciation when she crosses her legs, and shifts in his seat when the briefing ends and she gets up and stretches.

After they greet Dumbledore as he passes, Draco sees Richards taking advantage of the hustle and bustle of everyone leaving and making his way discreetly to where she is helping to levitate the chairs back to their original places at the sides of the room.

He isn't even slightly startled when he sees Richards whip out his wand to help her. She turns around, surprised, and Richards smiles charmingly, before inclining his head so as to better whisper into her ear, his dark hair almost brushing her bright strands.

'They make a fetching pair, anyway,' Draco grumbles to himself as he leaves.

For the first patrol shift of the year, Draco and Ginny are unfortunately paired together (although he was Head Boy, he'd left this particular task to Hermione, Head Girl, and sadly had cause to regret it). He thinks uncharitable thoughts about the state of her robes, but makes the effort to keep them to himself. He hasn't quite forgotten the Bat-Bogey Hex she cast on him in Fifth Year, and going by the almost-shy looks she keeps shooting him from under her lashes, perhaps she hasn't forgotten either.

'Maybe,' he thinks, 'she's isorry/i.'

She seems slightly surprised by him holding his tongue, containing his insults about her, and about her family, and their shift passes in relative peace. It almost seems that a truce has been called, so much so that once, she actually laughed at one of his sarcastic comments about a snogging couple they chanced upon, before she remembered herself and stifled her amusement.

About half an hour before their shift ends, though, as they are patrolling the greenhouses, he takes it upon himself to ask her what Richards wanted to speak to her about during the Prefect Meeting. She shrugs and says that it is nothing, but a faint blush on her cheeks points to the fact that it iwas/i something.

Somehow the thought that she would lie to him even though he has taken the especial effort to be nice to her the whole evening upsets him, so he lets his nasty streak get the better of him. Perhaps it is just the thick suggestion of greenery around them, of the darkness containing ithings/i that they cannot sense, that is making him this testy; it certainly cannot be due to the thought that a lowly Weaslette would see it fit to withhold something, even information, from him.

"Wanted to shag you, didn't he? Bet you let him. Was he any igood/i?"

She eyes him, an odd look he can't quite place on her face, and right before he whips out his wand, ready to defend himself against her infernally effective hexes, she replies. Amiably, surprisingly enough, especially given what he had just said.

"I might have, if he were you."

They continue strolling on for a moment, as Draco's brain tries madly to process this. After a few minutes, during which his entire worldview shifts to include the possibility of shagging a Weaslette, she laughs.

"Poor Malfoy. Somehow you're not quite as good as you used to be. If excitement is what I'm looking for, perhaps Terence is the one I should be looking to after all."

He snarls at this. "Silly bint, don't you know that Richards can't beat me at ianything/i? Top on the list being general snarkiness, in Potions, and in bed, of course."

She smirks. "Was that an iinvitation/i, Malfoy? I can assure you that I'd only be too happy to comply."

He almost gets a nosebleed as he imagines her spread-eagled on his bed, calling out his name as he fucks her.

He slams her up against one of the thick green glass walls, leaning down and pressing his lips to hers. She moans quietly, then, Merlin, iopens/i her mouth under his so their tongues are suddenly wetly touching, twining. He didn't think she'd be this eager, even his wildest of wild dreams (and he has to admit he has had a few of those; he'd always attributed them to too many hormones), but he takes advantage of it anyway and proceeds to snog her thoroughly. When they finally break apart, gasping for air, all he wants to do is go back to his room and fuck her senseless.

"Mmm..." she says quietly, her fingers coming up to trace her lips almost wonderingly. She brings up his wrist and angles it so she can read the time off the face of his watch.

"Our patrol ends in 3 seconds. What do you want to do after that?"

He doesn't even bother to answer her; she's teasing him, if the smirk playing around the corners of her lips is any indication.

He Teleports them to his room (a modified form of the Apparate spell, for use only in Hogwarts and keyed specifically to the Head Boy and Head Girl). When they get there, he suddenly feels awkward about this, about this thing that seemed so natural not five minutes ago.

It doesn't help that she is looking in wide-eyed wonder around his room, of course. But when she turns back to him with a smirk, and informs him that he obviously has an obsessive compulsion about neatness, he is suddenly overwhelmingly gratified to her for not marveling at how neat he is, like the many other girls he's brought here. He finds her banter much more interesting, but tells himself not to see him liking her more than all the other girls, even though it is their first time together, as a warning sign, and simply kisses her again.

She opens up immediately, and he enjoys the feeling of their tongues moistly entangling before he breaks away and pulls off his robe. Somehow, though, his hands are shaking so much from the electrifying sensation of her tongue against his that she has to help him, sliding the fasteners from their places with her nimble fingers.

Next to go is her robe, then his shirt. Then he stops keeping track, as they move over to the bed. Sometime later he finds that she has ended up straddling him, grinding down onto him as they moan together, and that both of them have been entirely divested of their clothes.

He rolls, then, pinning her underneath him as he drives into her. The feeling of her wet heat around him almost sends him over the edge, but he soon recovers himself and begins thrusting slowly, almost languidly. He speeds up the pace when her hips begin thrusting impatiently underneath his, until he is smoothly pistoning in and out of her. When he feels her clench around him, he comes too, his pleasure shuddering out of him in spurts.

When they've both recovered a bit, he rolls off her onto his back, onto his side of the bed, cushioning his head on his arms.

"Not bad, Weasley, not bad," he finds himself saying. Somehow this doesn't quite come out as as much of a compliment as he'd meant it to be, and he sighs noisily before trying again.

"Not too bad yourself," she interrupts him serenely, though rather rudely, he thought, "Perhaps we can do this again some other time."

He agrees, almost too enthusiastically for a Malfoy, then slowly drifts off to sleep in the comfortable silence that follows.

And they do. Meet again to have sex, that is. Frequently, in fact. Soon, she begins to talk to him, telling him how things have been going in Herbology (her worst subject; she has no interest in plants and didn't see any need to have any) or how she's pissed her brother off lately (this is always accompanied by an almost delighted giggle, and he is amused that she is actually a woman after his own heart).

In return, of course, he has no choice but to talk back, to tell her things about himself and his life in return (sometimes he gets the suspicion that this is not so much of a chore as he pretends it is, but he always banishes the traitorous thought from his brain). They get to know each other reasonably well, actually, or so he thinks. Later, when it happens, he realizes that he actually has almost no insight into the full scope of what she knows about him, of what is actually herself reflected in him.

He has almost forgotten about Richard's interest in her, until a Prefect meeting about a month after they were first together.

Draco sees Richards approach her again after the meeting, put an arm around her waist and draw her snugly against him. He is about to storm over and tell Richards to get his filthy paws off his property when he suddenly realizes that he and the Weaslette never agreed on a policy of exclusivity, and if he has been indulging in one, it is because he is too much of a berk to perceive that that isn't what she wants from him. He only realizes this, of course, when he notices that she isn't removing Richards' arm.

'What choice did I have but to storm off?' he asks himself later in the Slytherin Common Room, fuming in his favorite chair beside the fire. 'She obviously didn't want me there anyway.'

His reverie is broken when there are appreciative whistles as Richards comes in. His hair is mussed up and there is a red print on the side of his face. When Blaise Zabini asks him if he'd scored, casting a cautious glance in Draco's direction (he knew about the two of them) he pumps his hand in the air and replies in the affirmative, smiling smugly. Drano's scowl deepens.

Later, in the Slytherin Prefect Common Room (which adjoins the Slytherin Common Room itself through a password-locked door), Richards is talking about what a great shag she was. Shooting his mouth off about what a great shag she was, rather, Draco thinks, briefly contemplating homicide.

Richards says he took her right up there against the wall after he'd cast an Invisibility spell and a Silencing Charm. He says the vivid red mark on his face is from when she came, hitting him in her throes of pleasure. Draco sulks until it is late enough to go to bed without risking raised eyebrows from the other Slytherin Prefects. He doesn't notice that the mark looks suspiciously more like a handprint that you'd get from an angry slap on the face than anything else, or that Richards coloured when Zabini asked him about it.

The next night, she sneaks into his room (he sometimes sneaks into hers, but his room is so much more convenient; he doesn't have to share it with anyone else, after all). This time when they shag, he is much rougher with her than usual, grasping her roughly by the ankles and forcing her legs onto his shoulders while he pounds into her. They do it in complete silence, but he registers slight surprise in her eyes.

When they are curled up in their separate corners of the bed, she starts talking again.

She is halfway through telling him how her day went when his anger explodes uncontrollably out of him.

"You shagged Terence Richards last night, didn't you?" Now that the dam is burst, his bitterness comes pouring out of him inexorably. He sits up in bed so as to do full justice to what he is feeling. "I bet you were dying, ibegging/i for it, you stupid iwh/i..."

She slaps him, hard.

His surprise is so great he manages to stop himself. Of all the reactions she could have had, this is the one he is least expecting. He hates the words that he hadn't managed to stop himself from spewing, hates the filth that poured out of his mouth about her. When he looks up at her, though, he sees that she didn't slap him from anger, but simply out of a need to stop him, to snap him out of his anger-fuelled rant.

He sees understanding dawn in her eyes as she stares at him gazing mutely, miserably, back at her.

"But you should have said if you were that unsure about us, silly." She sits up, going over and cradling him. "I knew you were insecure, Malfoy, but I didn't know you were ithat/i bad."

He allows himself to enjoy her embrace for a brief moment before he pulls back.

"But I saw him put an arm around you! And you didn't do anything! And we hadn't ever discussed us, so..." he trails off, managing somehow to look angry, miserable, and defensive at once (if he were anyone else, she would almost have called his expression apologetic, but he was Draco Malfoy).

"I was waiting for you to do something, you completely twerp! When you didn't, I thought you hadn't seen so I had to tell him myself just where he could shove his groping hands." She pouts although both of them know that she is more than capable of looking after herself, and he is both utterly relieved and utterly turned on by the thought of her defending ithem/i.

As both of them are stark naked, she naturally notices the last. When she gets onto her hands and knees and offers herself, looking back over her shoulder at him, he almost splutters (except that Malfoys, of course, don't), all his blood now coursing to his already half-hard cock.

He kneels and carefully slides into her. Now he is much gentler with her, his caresses almost apologetic. His rhythm, however, is as urgent as ever, their combined pleasure coursing through their veins.

When he reaches in front of her and feathers light touches to her clit, she sobs his name.

"What are you?" He growls into the junction between her shoulder and her neck, almost stopping the movements of his fingers.

"Yours," she groans, and just like that, he comes, hips thrusting wildly. She follows a split second later, clenching around him. This time, he curls up around her as they fall asleep.

He decides that perhaps bestiality is not such a bad thing, after all.