Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter (nor any of the other characters, sadly. Wouldn't mind a Draco!) Please don't sue me. I have nothing of value anyway.

Rating: T for now but will change to M later. Language is an issue here and there, and if it gets too language-y I'll up the rating sooner. Consider yourselves warned!

Spoilers: DH compliant, except epilogue. All seven books are fair game!

Pairing: Draco x Ginny.

Author's Note: This is my first attempt at a multi-chapter Harry Potter fic. Please be kind and please enjoy! =)

The Name of the Game

Chapter 1: The Name of the Game is Quidditch

Ginny Weasley stood on the Quidditch pitch, having a serious mental discussion with herself about life and fate and taking her destiny in her own hands. It was about time, wasn't it? Her life had been, until recently, almost completely spelled out, one role leading to another, inevitably directing her to a foregone conclusion. The only daughter of the Weasley clan, the younger sister of six brothers, now five, and the girlfriend of the Chosen One - it seemed like the past ten years of her life had been dictated from the moment her brother had chanced to share a compartment on the Hogwarts Express with the famed Harry Potter. Yet, in the years after her graduation, she'd come to feel that something was lacking.

She couldn't put her finger on what it was, exactly. She had gone through the motions, attending Ministry functions, making appearances for the press, pretending to be every inch the girlfriend Harry Potter should have, the future wife of the Chosen One, Savior of the wizarding world.

When Harry had washed out of Auror training, she hadn't been surprised. He may have gotten a pass on his NEWTs, but that didn't automatically guarantee the skills required to become an Auror. He'd gone on to play Quidditch professionally, picked up by Puddlemere United at the urging of Oliver Wood. Oliver couldn't have had to urge very hard, either; Ginny was sure any team wouldn't have hesitated to snap up someone with Harry's glorious reputation, even if he wasn't the best Seeker out there.

Oh yes, he was good, but not the best. Most would never admit it, he was far too well-liked for that, but it was true. Though he'd been the Golden Boy of Gryffindor and was not unskilled, a great deal of Harry's successes on the Quidditch pitch had been down to sheer luck. Ginny's older brother Charlie had been a better Seeker in his time at Hogwarts. Cedric Diggory, before his untimely death, had been better. Ginny herself had been better, the few times she'd had the chance to play the position. Even so, Harry had become a Quidditch player, living her personal dream while she sat on the sidelines or hung on his arm like a fashionable cloak at yet more public functions.

Yet even this wasn't what left her so dissatisfied. If she was being perfectly honest with herself, something had seemed off from the moment they'd first gotten together. Still, she had willingly assumed and maintained the role of dutiful girlfriend. In those first few years after the war ended, she simply didn't want more than that. The war had taken so much from her, from her family, that for a long time she didn't feel that she had any more to give, and for a long time after that she couldn't bear the thought of bringing her parents further disappointment.

Then, one day, a very excited Hermione had let slip that Harry was planning to propose. At that moment, Ginny knew.

She couldn't be the wife of Harry Potter.

She'd liked him since she had first seen him on Platform 9 ¾, when she was only ten years old, and it now occurred to her that she was no longer that little girl, and perhaps Harry was not the person she had imagined him to be. He wasn't a bad person or anything, but the more Ginny thought about it, the more she realized that acting on a crush she'd developed as a ten-year-old girl was more than a little insane. In the end, she had broken it off. It wouldn't have been fair to either of them to continue on as she had been doing… least of all to her.

There was a life to be lived, she felt; the possibility of something greater, of something real: the life she could have had if the war had not interrupted, had not consumed her, had not claimed the life of her brother Fred. The life she could still have, though nothing could undo the war and the losses that went with it.

Ten months later, here she was, at the general tryouts for the British and Irish Quidditch League. If she made it through this stage, she'd be enrolled in a training camp to hone her potential, and from there had the chance to be drafted to a League team. That was if she could demonstrate satisfactory potential during training, which was only if she could make it past the tryouts in the first place. Harry's moderate skill, great luck, and natural ability on a broom had gotten him through with ease, helped along more than a little bit by his tremendous popularity. Ginny, on the other hand, hadn't flown much in the intervening years, and had spent the last ten months on her broom training with Charlie and George as often as she could get them to help. The trouble was, Charlie's job kept him in Romania much of the time, and George just didn't fly as well as he once had. Whether it was the loss of his ear or the loss of his twin brother that was the cause, Ginny couldn't say.

Her brother Ron could have been helpful, of course, but had chosen not to be; while Harry had been accepted to a team, Ron had not, and had decided to treat Ginny's efforts with scornful disdain accordingly. Ron's greatest ambition in life now seemed to be centered on getting her and Harry back together, a pursuit Harry didn't seem to find objectionable in the least. The two of them tended to be extremely overbearing when in her presence together, and Ginny made a point of being otherwise engaged whenever Harry was invited to the Burrow.

Ginny gritted her teeth as memories surfaced, unbidden and unwanted, of a handful of awkward encounters with her ex-boyfriend perpetrated upon her by her brother. Their mother had quickly realized how uncomfortable these incidents were for Ginny, though she, too, wanted her daughter to go back to Harry; nonetheless, Molly Weasley had decreed that there would be no surprise visits by Harry to the Burrow, and made sure to inform Ginny of his impending presence even when Ron conveniently 'forgot' to do so, as he often did. That didn't stop him from arranging for Harry to 'happen by' while they were out and about, and so public outings with Ron had needed to be curbed as well.

The pitch was sunny and warm as late spring was turning to summer, a perfect day for Quidditch. Training would last through summer, allowing those players with potential to train without fear of inclement weather. They would train under those conditions later with their teams, if chosen. For the summer, it would be all about practice, with various teams scouting them from time to time.

But first, there were open tryouts, set up to weed out those who thought they could just show up with a broom. Some people, she noted, hadn't even done that; there were plenty of people using old loaner brooms that belonged to the training ground. Her own broom, Fred's old Cleansweep 5, wasn't much better, but it was what she had to work with. That George had given it to her when she returned to Hogwarts for her seventh year meant something, and had spared her from using a school broom which would be even older and more unwieldy, but the majority of the serious applicants around her carried brooms that had been manufactured in the last ten years, and some even had top-notch, cutting edge racing brooms.

As she glanced from broom to broom, keenly aware that the Cleansweep 5 in her hand had ceased production by the mid-1950s, she suddenly noticed that one of the newest-model brooms was held by someone very familiar, with very familiar white-blonde hair… someone she did not particularly want to see. She realized, too, that he had just spotted her spotting him.

"Fuck," she muttered to herself as he sauntered over to her group, condescending sneer firmly in place. "What is he doing here?"

Tryouts hadn't even begun, and things were already going spectacularly, mind-bogglingly, well-and-truly to shit. Draco Malfoy, of all people, just had to be at Quidditch tryouts with her. He'd get in, too, if he flew like he had in his Hogwarts days, of that she was certain. He had been a great flyer, a great Seeker, and not all of it was attributable to always having the best broom. Unlike Harry, almost none of it was attributable to luck, either; if anything, it was extraordinarily poor luck on Malfoy's part that he'd come into his own as a Seeker against Harry Potter.

It was almost as poor as the luck that kept her from ever being able to make a name for herself on the Gryffindor team, for Harry had always been the star, and even in the two years he wasn't there, all anyone ever did was lament his absence. Gryffindor just hadn't been ready for a new star, even after the war had ended.

"Well, if it isn't a Weasley," he opened snidely as he reached her. "One of you lot always seems to turn up. Like bad Knuts. Even your hair says so."

Ginny glared at him reproachfully. "Straight to the comment about my hair? That's disappointingly unoriginal, Malfoy, even for you."

"You're in the wrong group, Weaslette," he continued as if she hadn't said anything at all, pointing with his broomstick. "Beaters are over there."

"What makes you think I'm trying out for Beater?" she snapped.

"Your broom, of course. What is that, an old Cleansweep 5? Those were ancient when your brothers were flying on them at Hogwarts a decade ago. I suppose it's a hand-me-down?"

"It belonged to Fred," she informed him haughtily, "and it worked for him just fine."

"Ah, yeah…" he replied, hesitating slightly as a shadow passed over his face for an instant. "Well, do you know why it worked for Fred?"

Ginny narrowed her eyes. She had been almost sure he was going to make some crack about Fred's death, was certain that he remembered that Fred had died, judging by the look on his face, but the expected cutting remark had not come, and she was left with a biting response on the tip of her tongue that now had no place in the conversation.

"I suppose you're going to tell me one way or another," she responded cautiously. "So, why?"

"Fred was a Beater. Beaters don't have to be as fast or agile as the other players. They can work with a broom like that, especially if they're as good as your brothers were. You're trying out for Chaser?"

"Obviously," Ginny stated, still eyeing him with mistrust, despite his knowledgeable and surprisingly complimentary reply. "That is why I'm standing in the Chaser group and all."

"Bad broom for a Chaser. It's sluggish and not nearly maneuverable enough for the position. It was good enough in its day, but now…" he trailed off with a shrug.

"I did just fine on it at Hogwarts in seventh year," she replied defensively, knowing he was right.

"You did alright on school brooms too, but you were playing against other students. Here, the competition is going to be a bit more challenging. Maybe not today, but eventually that broom isn't going to cut it, and I'm thinking sooner rather than later."

One of the tryout coordinators blew sharply on a whistle, and Malfoy took it as a cue to head back to the Seeker group before she could say anything. He didn't get more than a few feet before he stopped, turning to face her again.

"You're still in the wrong group, Weasley," he said, his tone completely serious. "I've seen you fly. You should be trying out for Seeker. Not on that broom, though."

With that, he returned to the collection of would-be Seekers waiting to be put through their paces, leaving Ginny with her mouth hanging open, empty of a suitable reply.

A/N: Thank you for reading! If you like it and you want to know what happens next, show it some love and review! Please please please? And be sure to come back for Chapter 2! =)