Title: Sweepings
Reviews: Submit something. Anything. I might have a little bit to add to this, and I'd like to know if it matters to anyone.
Notes: Not necessarily AU, but not necessarily compliant with all books. Enough of it is ambiguous enough not to matter, but you can assume most things prior to HBP have already happened. Unless they contradict my story, in which case, they haven't.
Disclaimers: None of the important stuff belongs to me. That's JKR, and all others involved in the creation and publishing of her works. All I get from this is an excuse not to do my homework.
Ginny is the only one awake in the girls' dormitory.
She gathers up a small pasteboard book and a pencil – gifts from Harry, both – and silently sneaks from the tower.
As she makes for the lake, she's already writing her next diary entry:
Sometimes, I think he isn't really a boy at all.
Just a hero.
He's saved us all at least once. But he doesn't know what it's like. The people who save him die.
And it never ends.
He gave Ron new dress robes for his birthday – to save him from embarrassment next time there's a Ball.
He bought me this diary so I can have one all my own, completely unenchanted and unpossessed, to save me from whatever haunting nightmares he thinks I suffer.
Why couldn't he give me a necklace, a nice card, something personal?
I say 'I love you' and he says 'I'll take care of you.'
There's a difference, Harry Potter.
I think I really hate him.
By the time she reaches the bench at the lakeside, she's already forgotten where she meant to start, and instead simply breathes out the last of her anger, watching the dark ripples on the water. Absently, she gnaws at the wood of the pencil.
She met Harry here once, a year ago, before they dated. He sat alone, looking forsaken and forlorn, and she couldn't have been more enchanted.
She wonders now if he was only bemoaning a lack of heroisms to perform.
She considers casting the book into the water, but she knows full well she'll regret it later. If not out of sentimentality, then for needling a long-vexing lack of things that are entirely her own.
Someone is approaching, shoes squeaking like field mice on the dewy grass, and for a moment she irrationally worries that Harry could hear her silent ranting.
"You know, Weaslette, I could report you for being out here."
"We're both prefects, Malfoy, and you shouldn't be here, either," she snaps coldly, and a distant part of her mourns that the tone comes to her so easily these days.
Maybe he's thrown as well, or simply won't deign to initiate what might qualify as a conversation with a Weasley. Instead, he fastidiously dries the bench with the corner of his cloak and sits down silently.
"Do you mind?"
"Weasley. Do not interrupt me, and I'll allow you the same."
His voice is tired, though Ginny suspects it's merely the usual exasperation he feigns when he's forced to talk to his 'inferiors.'
Besides, Malfoy would never comply if she asked the same of him.
"What are you doing here at this time of night?"
"It has nothing to do with you."
"Don't leave me in suspense," she exclaims urgently, the sarcasm saturating her voice a gratifying payback for too many years of abuse. "What could a rodent like you possibly be contemplating?"
In an odd display of contrasts, the moonlight illuminating his pale hair obscures his face in darkness, but Ginny still sees the play of lines that exhaustion etches on even the youngest of faces. In spite of herself, she feels bad for taunting him.
"Listen, you insufferable bint. I'm tired. I don't want to talk to anyone. I don't want to talk to you. If you need company, go hunt down your boyfriend – if you can make it through that fog of self-pity."
"He's not my boyfriend," she blurts out, and it's over. He knows why she's there, and she can't pretend she doesn't anymore. She turns furiously on the Slytherin, ready to defend herself, or offend him or Obliviate the last ten minutes and leave, but Draco, on the other end of the bench, couldn't be farther away.
Ginny almost sighs in disappointment.
She tries to mimic Draco, let the gently moving water calm her like she first intended, but her thoughts are focused on him: what he's thinking, what he thinks of her, why he isn't saying anything at all. She thinks she might explode in frustration, but she refuses to let herself commit another indignity in his presence.
Malfoy can't hurt her if she knows his insults are groundless, she tells herself, and she is still.
The distinct sound of pages turning beside her breaks her concentration, and she finds Draco Malfoy paging through her journal. She curbs the initial impulse to snatch it from his hands when she sees the expression on his face; he's not smiling.
Instead, she is rapidly recalling everything she's written, trying to remember something that she should prevent him from reading, but the fact that he wants to read it keeps stopping her. She pulls her legs onto the bench and waits for him to finish.
He doesn't look at her.
"Whatever he is, an icon, a hero, a saviour, he's not human. He wouldn't know emotion of it beat him with his own bloody broomstick," Draco quotes, seemingly to himself, and Ginny's astounded to hear the very thing she didn't write on her way to the lake tonight. "Yes, that does sound like our Potter, doesn't it?"
Ginny has no difficulty summoning bitterness or anger, but, for Draco's solemn tone, she has no response. Or maybe she's just waiting for him to continue. He doesn't disappoint.
"I'm not weak and I don't need to be coddled. I don't want a hero. I want someone who needs me. I want someone who needs saving."
Suddenly Ginny lunges at Draco, tearing the diary from his hands and casts it into the lake. She doesn't give herself time to ask why, and when it's done she sits there panting with a hand on her chest, feeling like she just nearly escaped death.
She stiffly returns to her corner and notices that Draco's hands are still holding an invisible book. He seems almost transparent without his sneer, yet she doesn't understand him any better for it.
"Who would have thought. A Weasley that isn't just a sidekick."
Ginny thinks it might be an apology.
He doesn't speak again, and Ginny can't decide whether he's still thinking about her diary or if he's gone back to whatever it was that brought him here. She wants to ask him this, or why he's here, or something about his mother, so she says:
"I'm sorry about the Bat Bogey hex."
Finally, he looks at her. Something that may once have been a smile crosses his face, and he says:
"Hm."
A pleasant excitement wells up in her and reaches for her pencil but, as she watches her journal float away, she realizes she would never write about it in there, anyway.
They sit in silence until the horizon begins to glow. Then Draco's standing and brushing the wrinkles from his clothes. She tries to pretend she doesn't notice, but his hand appears in her face.
"Come on," he says. "I'll walk you back," and there's a smirk. "You can protect me from the bugbears and grindylows.
Ginny drops the pencil in the grass and accepts his offer.
"I come out here every night," she says aloud, and Draco replies:
"Hm."