I own nothing but the fic., technically speaking.
Shaking in the rain as she felt her body being lifted from the Quidditch field, Ginny Weasley glanced, subtely, from side to side.
"No one else saw you fall. Don't be stupid and go off worrying about a thing like that - not when we both know how we feel about visitors being out here in the first place. Right?"
"I wasn't, Draco," the redhead lied in return. "I didn't think anyone saw. Afterall, it's always just the two of us out here after hours to practice, innit?"
"I don't know. You tell me." Surprising Ginny with a suddden, inexplicable (as far as she was concerned) snarl, the platinum-haired young man that was still holding her in his arms gave a shrug of sorts, before loosening his hold on her petite, rain-slickened body.
"Draco, what are you doing?" she shrieked, throwing her arms about aimlessly, going for anything to grasp at, on any given part of his body. "Draco, you're going to drop me!" she screamed.
Tightening his grip and pulling the Weasley girl closer in towards his own body - allowing for her arms to wrap around his neck at last - he said, "Mabye I should just drop you to the dirt."
"Why? Draco, what are you going on about?"
"Some did see, and you know it! That's why you were looking - - because one of your little boytoys is down here spying on us!"
"Draco, I don't know what you're talking about!" Ginny pleaded with him, realizing that while he had put new strength in his hold on her, it also brought about a feeling of entraptment there, in his arms.
To appease the frightened girl with an answer, Draco turned his neck in the opposite direction and said aloud, "Accio wand!" A slight whistling sound accompanying it, a short, thick wand was then seen, indeed, sailing toward Draco, like a spinning arrow coming in through the air. Keeping one of his strong arms around Ginny, the grey-eyed wizard snatched the incoming wand from midair with his free hand, before turning it over and glaring down at it. It was visible enough in the given moonlight from above to identify it.
"Well, well, would you look at this, Ginevra? It seems we have do a visitor, as I said we did. This looks to be Dean Thomas's wand, doesn't it?" Quickly straining her own neck about to glance at it, the ginger gave a noncommittal sort of response in reply.
"Dean Thomas?" she then repeated back, blankly. Managing to somehow miraculously wriggle her way free from Draco's grasp, Ginny then allowed for herself to drop to the ground after a short fall of sorts, coming to land softly onto the rain-slick grass. "Well, if it is him - his wand and all, well, I didn't ask him to come here. I didn't ask anyone to come here, to watch us practice. I never do."
"Indeed, that is our deal - that no one else know that I've agreed to come out here after hours - long after dark has fallen - just to help the likes of you work on some Quidditch strategies."
"And that's the way it'll stay, Draco, honest," Ginny insisted, before pushing herself to her feet and brushing the grass stains from her jeans. She then drew her wand and turned to face the person who was slowly approaching her and Draco, their shoes making mushing sounds against the ground as they trodded downhill.
Raising her wand higher, Ginny watched as her fellow Gryffindor indeed stepped on out into the moonlight, waving an arm about as he did so. "Oy! You alright out here, Gin'?"
Reaching out to Draco to take Dean's wand from him, Ginny tossed it forward to the dark-skinned teen standing before her, before making a swift motion with her own wand, muttering something nigh-incomprehensible under her breath as she did so. Within a flash of a second, Dean Thomas was clutching onto his own wand tightly, but turning to head in the opposite direction of the Quidditch pitch, instead heading back up the hill that would lead safely to Hogwarts castle, a slightly bemused expression on his face.
"Nothing a little memory modification can't deal with," Ginny murmured, watching him go as she dangled her wand at her side.
"Nice move," Draco answered her under his breath, before reaching forward and clasping a hand at her shoulder, turning her around to face him. "So tell me, Dean there your little boyfriend or something? Is that why he followed us down here?"
"I've decided that he probably just followed us down here due to a case of normal, human curiosity," Ginny said quietly, well aware of how tightly Draco's hand was clapped at her shoulder.
"Well, let's not have any more curiosity around here," he breathed back at her, running his hand up from her shoulder to her hair, wrapping his fingers up in it; it was a move that sent a streak of electricity down Ginny's spine, if even to spite herself. "Next time, all this curiosity might just result in the killing of an all too nosy cat."
"Dean is not my boyfriend. Nor is he too nosy. His coming down here was completely perchance - a random occurrence."
Tightening his fingers in Ginny's red hair, Draco leant his face in toward hers, his snarl returning.
"Why do you care if he's my boyfriend or not?" she said back to him. "Not that he is, but really, why? So what if he was? Why do you care? Who cares if people see us here?"
Lifting Ginny up from the ground by her hair slightly, eliciting a shriek of pain from her in the process, Draco then let go and dropped her back down as he practically spat back, "Because, I'm not going to stand around in the school halls tomorrow, hearing whispers from one to the next from Ginny's little boyfriend about how he caught her out here with me while the world's asleep, helping out his little Mudblood lover on the Quidditch pitch."
Jerking herself away from him sharply and unexpectedly, Ginny swiftly raised her wand up betwixt them, before bringing her free hand forward hard, smacking Draco fiercely, across the face. "Don't go using that vile and disgusting word around me!" she hissed, before blinking as Draco, too, swung his own hand forward, returning her jaw-bound strike.
Staring back at the Slytherin as tears threatened to sting in her eyes, Ginny rubbed at her face with both her hands, having dropped her wand in surprise at recieving the blow; her breathing was low and shallow.
"I don't know who you think you are," Draco then said to her. "But if you ever take your disgusting, whore-filthy hands to me again, I'll-"
Interrupted from his rant by a sudden, second smack to the face, Draco himself blinked twice, before placing his hands on either side of Ginny's shoulders, as if he was about to shake her. But before he could make another move, the ginger-haired teenager leaned in toward him a bit, her eyes wide and glaring; a queer and fearful mix of digust and determination was in her stare as she looked up at him. It scared him slightly, and caused him to ease his grasp on her.
"I am not a whore," Ginny said to him, clearly, calmly, but quite firmly, not breaking her gaze as she did so. "And my hands aren't filthy. My friends are not Mudbloods, and… I'm not Dean's girlfriend…" at this, Ginny's voice gave and began to crack a bit. "I am nobody's bloody girlfriend, Draco, I just wish you'd trust me on that!"
Slipping his hands down from Ginny's shoulders until they were resting at her sides, Draco tilted his face downward, toward hers. He then quickly brushed his lips against hers, causing her tears to stop, her eyes to widen in a mix of shock and of what felt like an electrical burn running up her spine. "I'm sorry," he whispered, simply, before kissing her once again. "How are your legs now? You fell pretty hard from your broom earlier."
Still feeling the (albeit pleasant) shock of Draco's lips across her own, Ginny took a slight step backward, before retracting it and leaning in, toward him. "What?" she stammered, before glancing down in the darkness toward her shadowy knees. "Oh, right. I guess I did fall off my broom just… before…"
"Yeah, you did. But that's okay. We can keep working on it. With that Potter bloke always getting himself in trouble, you might need to take over on his bloody team."
"You'd really like that? You'd honestly like for me to do my very best, even if we were going against Slytherin?"
"I'd really like to see it. I've been helping you with it, after all. Doesn't mean I'd let you win, though."
Giving a slight laugh at this, Ginny tucked one foot behind the other, before swaying ever so slightly, and then turning to face away from Draco, her face falling suddenly. "Well, I think that won't be a problem much either way anymore. We shouldn't do this anymore. This practicing. It's making us too… you know? We're not supposed to be. I'm going to stop coming out here and doing this.""
"Doing what? Practicing Quidditch together with me?" asked Draco. "Is that now illegal, or something?"
"I don't know," Ginny replied honestly, glancing back over her shoulder at him, before bringing a finger to her lips, tracing first the top one, then the bottom. "But it feels that way sometimes lately. I just think it's…"
"It's because I mentioned Potter, isn't it?" the Slytherin said suddenly, before rolling his eyes. "Fine, go on then. Just because I've been helping you for the past six weeks, it doesn't mean anything. I'm not him."
"What are you trying to say, Draco?"
"What are you trying to say, Weasley?"
"Weasley?" Ginny echoed, raising her eyebrows as she turned to fully face Draco once more, her arms folding over her bosom. "This is why I can't do this anymore. Not with you."
"Oh, what are you afraid of? It's just us out here - just me and you."
Thinking about this for a few seconds, the ginger-haired girl simply shook her head, before turning and walking away, heading back toward the hill that would lead up toward the castle. As she left, she murmured back to him, "Maybe that's what I'm afraid of."
"Fine then. Go on," Draco called after her, his eyes darting upward toward the sky as a flash of lightning danced across it. "Go on and be a coward and a Mudblood lover."
Turning swiftly around, Ginny pursed her lips for a moment, before turning her head to the side and spitting to the ground. "I hate you, Malfoy," she then hissed, before shaking her head as tears welled up in her big, doe-like eyes. "I bloody hate you!"
Standing still as rain began to fall again as it had been doing off-and-on all that night, Draco watched as Ginny turned around again and ran at top speed up the hill, leaving him behind as if she were running from the Plague.
"I hate you, too," he said quietly, not that she could hear, before looking up at the sky again, for the lightning seemed as beautiful to him as it was ferocious, and it was a comforting familiarty to be left alone with.