- Chapter 4 -
All too willingly, Ginny allowed herself to be distracted from her thoughts by the amusement glinting silver in Draco's eyes. A half-smile played about his lips as he leaned in, head slanted towards hers. Her body drew forward instinctively, no conscious thought required. It still mystified her—this raw magnetism he had about him ever since their renewed acquaintance post-war; mere looks and the shedding of her own blinders seemed inadequate to explain it.
His mouth hovered over hers, milliseconds from touching when her stomach protested loudly. Ginny laughed, the movement brushing her lips against his, and the warm breath from his suffering sigh tickled her skin. When he didn't move, she chided him with a playful slap at his chest and ducked under the cage of his arms, headed for the study's doors.
"Let's go," she called back to him. "I've found this new place that has the best—"
"Absolutely not," he said, his long strides bringing him up beside her in seconds.
She glanced up at him as they traveled through the maze-like corridors, eyes wide to declare her innocence. "You don't even know what I was going to say. It could have been perfectly acceptable."
He didn't deign to reply, only one pale brow lifted to express his sarcastic skepticism, prompting her to snort with laughter.
"Okay, fine, but come on, Draco. Where's your sense of adventure?"
"It's where neither of us ends up puking for an hour straight, or has your selective memory blocked that out too? I swore then that it'd the last time I ever listened to you."
She grinned. "And who did you make that bet with? Blaise? Let me know because I rightfully deserve a cut of his earnings."
"Ha. Keep trying, but your distraction tactics won't work. I'll pay, so I'm picking this time." They'd reached the foyer, and he paused at a side-closet to slip on a dark blue blazer.
Ginny had stepped forward to open the door, but her hand froze on the crystal knob, a frown creasing her brows. Parasite-like, the suspicion wormed its way into her mind. She spun to face him, all semblance of a smile wiped clean. "I don't want any mistaken assumptions, Draco. Just to be clear, I'm here because I know my temporary use of the house is of no cost to you. Makes it a convenient option for me, nothing more. I'm not here to be a charity case or a pathetic leech. I can take care of myself."
The soft swish of green silk against her skin suddenly became unbearable as the coarsest wool. Her use of the dress technically did cost him nothing; the wardrobe service was paid for regardless with a ridiculous large complimentary balance renewed each month that the Malfoys had no danger of ever depleting. Still, if it gave him the wrong impression, she'd take her dirty clothes in an instant.
Fleetingly, she noted a tightening around his jaw, but it disappeared with the smooth drawl of his voice. Both pale eyebrows raised, clearly unimpressed with her. "I'd highly recommend putting away your Gryffindor-tinted glasses before you get all pissy. No wonder your lot seems to have a perpetual stick up their arse. You see pity; I see self-preservation. Over my dead body are we repeating the carnival night catastrophe and your brilliant idea of trying Muggle street food."
At his sneer of disgust, her own tension dissolved from her with an exhaled breath. Inwardly, Ginny scolded herself for getting worked up over a pittance. She'd let people's words get to her after all. Damn it.
"You had a wicked time anyway, admit it." She hoped her teasing tone was apology enough for unnecessarily snapping at him. He truly was her best option at the moment. No debt to rack up. No irritating judgment to wrangle with. Just Draco being himself, and that, astoundingly, was something she'd found she'd rather deal with any hour of the day compared to the alternatives.
"And you would be such a reliable judge of that night," he drawled. "Yet here I recall a mandrake-level shriek in my ear the morning after from someone so blitzed, she was convinced she got married to me the night before."
Heat flamed at Ginny's cheeks. Few mornings had ever ranked higher in the mortification factor, enough for her to swear off drinking to oblivion...though the resolution lasted only about a month.
She elbowed his side in retaliation, secretly relieved that they were back in their usual tit for tat routine. "I thought we agreed that that never happened!"
"Ouch, witch." He clutched at the impact point, doubled over no doubt in exaggeration. "Merlin, you're violent. I didn't sign up for this. You ought to come with a disclaimer."
She moved to jab him again, but he restrained her, his arms coming around her in a vise, squeezing her back against his chest. He laughed, the notes of it light and breezy, while she struggled in vain before giving up, slumping her head back against his shoulder to glare at him even as she felt her lips tilt helplessly upwards.
"All right, in seriousness, I probably shouldn't have started you out with street food, but you have to try this place out...please? Muggle, yes, but it's a proper restaurant and everything."
He shook his head resolutely in the negative before letting her go. "Not a chance. Go on your own if you want it so badly, though Merlin knows why. It's not like wizards can't offer something comparable."
She shot him a pitying look that she knew would annoy him. "You poor, deprived soul, and you don't even know. It's not the same at all. Come with me and be enlightened. Besides, it's boring to eat on my own—robs me of the chance to mock you for my amusement."
"Oh please. Admit it. You crave and miss my witty insights." His smug tone didn't reach his eyes. Instead, they seemed to rove over her face in a searching manner.
She rolled her eyes at the obvious bait. How many times did she need to reassure him? He had nothing to worry about in that regard.
Her response came easily, airy and teasing. "Fine, I admit that I do miss your company, so come with me."
A pensive shadow flickered across his face, but she didn't give him a chance to say no. In seconds, she'd Accio'ed for her remaining Muggle money and pulled him through the door. A couple more ticks of the clock and she'd linked her arm through his, Apparating them away into Muggle London.
She was prepared for more fight from him, but Draco only silently fell in step beside her, grey eyes warily scanning the Muggle crowd milling around them once they'd emerged from the Shielded alley.
It struck her how surreal the moment was. She and a Malfoy, walking down a Muggle street together in broad daylight and in tolerable enough amicability, all traces of true hostility good and gone—who would've ever thought? If someone had proposed the scenario to her even half a year ago, she would've laughed in their face and told them there was a better chance of teaching trolls to dance.
She didn't like to dwell on the thought though. It brought to mind too sharply the painful lesson that had brought her to this point: Nothing in life was certain, most of all people.
But lulled by the white noise of the crowd and the warm sunlight on her skin, her mind slipped without resistance, like fish into the reservoir of her memories back to the first night when she finally bothered to questioned how the hell she got involved with a Malfoy.
She and Draco had been sitting at a bar side-by-side, sipping their third or fourth round of drinks. It was a quieter, more low-key joint that night. Assumingly, both of them had been too drained by earlier events in the day to have energy for the rowdier crowds.
"What changed, Mal—Draco?" she had asked him abruptly, his first name at the time still a foreign taste on her tongue.
"What do you mean?" he countered, and she felt the intensity of his gaze turned to her while she swirled the drink in her glass, eyes focused on the blood red of the cocktail.
She paused to mull over the answer for herself. When the reply came, she spared nothing, her words blunt as a broom's end. With anyone else, she might have held back or lie, but this was Draco. She had no need for pretense or to sugarcoat. "For one thing, you're not nearly the nasty, pathetic git you used to be."
"Why thank you," he bit out dryly. "You're quite the improvement yourself, but we all know why. That's no mystery."
She ignored him, continuing on as if he hadn't spoken. "I mean you're still infuriating and vexing certainly, but you're...not truly malicious, not really." But then again, it occurred to her that he'd never been truly hostile to her. All his rage and hate had been reserved for Harry and to a less extent, his close friends. She hadn't come close.
He chuckled in response. It was a low and throaty sound, warm and intimate amidst the clinking of glass and soft murmurs of the other patrons. Even now, the memory of the it sent a tingling through her spine.
"Careful, Weasley," he said, "can't have people thinking I've gone soft. My ulterior motives are still very much intact I assure you. I don't give something for nothing."
She'd glanced at him then, and he flashed her a lewd smirk, his hand crossing the sliver of space between their knees to trail fingers lightly up her bare thigh. They paused at the bottom edge of her short red dress, catching the fabric to rub between thumb and forefinger.
She smacked his hand away, lips curled in an arch smile. "That's not what I meant, and you know it."
He shrugged and reached for his drink. "Are you the same person you were at Hogwarts?"
"Good Godric, no." She raised her glass for a mouthful and slammed it back down on the bar top in emphasis.
"Well, there you go," he said before emptying his tumbler and signaling the bartender for another.
Isn't that the truth, she'd thought to herself. The world wasn't static and neither were people. Strange how easy it was to forget that reality.
"Cheers to that," she'd said, clinking her glass with Draco's once he'd received his new drink. Indeed, cheers to the fact that she was no longer that pathetic, naive little girl. Cheers to the fact that Draco was now so much more than the smarmy, malicious git that bullied her brother and friends. If not for that reality, they wouldn't have been sitting there together in relatively agreeable company, and she wouldn't have found a most unlikely ally.
Ginny knew that if all that had changed about Draco was newly-acquired muscles and a better hairstyle, she would've never repeated their initial encounter. The first could've been chalked up to hormones and the heat of the moment, but the physical excuses were already wearing thin by the third time—when they'd spent the whole night in drunken banter without so much as a snogging session.
"How do you really hate something you don't even know?" he had admitted bitterly to her that night when the alcohol began kicking in enough for words to slur together. "All along I thought I was being trained for something great, only to realize what a perfect puppet they've molded out of me." He'd broken into hysterical, delirious laughter then, but she was too inebriated at the time to properly make fun of him for it.
Strange. It was really strange when she thought about it—how she and Draco had managed to find an unexpected kindred spirit in the other. In a world where everyone else seemed optimistic and determined to move on, they'd both hung suspended, not knowing how to cope with the fact that all they'd ever known had been turned on its head. Not just people and things had been lost, but entire dreams had been snuffed out, the future they'd been looking forward to blown out like a candle, all in an instant.
Old Dumbledore had been fond of the saying, "It is our choices that show what we really are." But the more she hung out with Malfoy and the remnants of his Slytherin class, the more she'd begun to wonder to what extent really were they free to make their choices. How much choice was even there to begin with if the type of people they were had already been shaped by forces out of their control?
It was on one of those philosophical nights drunk on beer and liquor that she found herself questioning what kind of person she would've been if she'd been born into a family like the Malfoys and Malfoy into hers. In what ways would their respective moral compasses have lined up instead? She'd learned all too piercingly how quickly people could cast her aside the moment that what she thought was 'right' no longer aligned with their worldview.
But these were not thoughts she wanted to linger on, letting their weight and gravity drag her down when the rest of the world teemed around her in a vibrant hustle. She pulled back from her thoughts to watch Draco instead as they made their way down the busy street, arms still linked so as not to lose each other in the throng.
Draco's sharp eyes never stopped scanning the crowd, the tense set of his shoulders belying his impassive face, hinting at his discomfort, but there was no true enmity there. Not anymore, and as she'd come to realize, for Draco, there likely had never been anything beyond a shadow imitation of such hatred to begin with—certainly nothing on the levels of the other Death Eaters who had thirsted for death and torture. Draco had lived far too sheltered a life for such a brand of hatred to have taken deep root, and when the reappearance of Voldemort had shattered that privileged bubble spectacularly, fear had run the show.
Not that many would believe it. Even more would be shocked to learn that she hadn't been the instigator of Draco's Muggle ventures. With war wounds still raw and hurting, a bitter Wizarding community had already pushed him to Muggle pubs long before she'd stumbled across him post-war. These outings were rare though, reserved for the worst of nights, and even then, he'd kept his interactions with Muggles to a brusque minimum.
"If you think they're so inferior to us, then why are you afraid of them?" she'd taunted him. Through similar jabs and at times the help of a few Firewhiskey shots in his system, she had since then successfully goaded him into branching out in the Muggle world a few times over.
Just like now. Though if Blaise was here, he would've called it the result of Draco being thoroughly whipped. Ginny couldn't help her snickering.
Without looking at her, Draco asked with a sigh, "Do I even want to know what's so funny?"
"You, basically," she admitted gleefully. "I can just guess the thoughts running through your mind."
"Somehow, I doubt that."
"Never bet against me. Haven't you learned that by now?"
The faintest of pinks suffused his cheeks to her delight, but before she could bring up past incidents, he cut her off. "Don't even think about it. Keep in mind I have just as much blackmail on you."
She snorted but let it slide. "Fine, but aren't you curious about what I'm thinking that you're thinking?"
"Not at all."
She pinched his arm for being no fun. "Then it's a good thing that I don't need your permission, do I?"
"By all means, go on. You are so riveting after all."
She jostled him to the side for his sarcasm. He'd been prepared and barely stumbled, but her movement careened her into a large, rotund man. The Muggle staggered back with a swear and upon recovering, his black mustache quivered and mean blue eyes bored into her, no doubt prepping for a tirade. Draco immediately stepped up and placed his arm around her, gripping her shoulder. At close to six feet, he towered over the Muggle, his voice a steel blade as he uttered, "Is there a problem?"
Ginny bit her lip to hold in laughter as the Muggle wilted before her eyes. She knew Draco could manage to look quite intimidating these days. Maturity had brought him height and broad shoulders, and a dedication to fitness post-Hogwarts had filled the rest of him out. He remained slender overall, but his lean muscles now radiated a palpable strength she felt through the hand secured on her shoulder. Add to that the cutting mannerisms picked up from his parents and hardened in the war's aftermath, and this was no longer the little boy who was nothing without his goons and his father's backing.
I forget sometimes. Her gaze flickered over to take in her companion's austere profile. The angles of his face seemed even sharper in the intensity of his attentions on the Muggle.
Before Ginny even thought to defuse the situation, the thin, blond woman beside the Muggle man tugged insistently at his arm. "Forget it, Vernon. Let's go," the woman hissed, and they pulled away down the street.
A beat passed before Ginny clasped her hands to her heart and batted her eyelashes at Draco. "Aw, my knight in shining armor. Careful, I think your closet-Gryffindor is showing."
He smirked right back. "You would see it that way. Mind your rose-tinted glasses, will you? This wizard doesn't go saving damsels for free, or Merlin forbid, for the nobleness of it."
She laughed at how he spat the word out like it was a vomit-flavored bean, but in a more serious tone, told him firmly, "I'll allow it so long as it amuses me too, but don't go making a habit of it now. I can—"
"—take care of yourself. I know. Salazar, you're really hung up on that, aren't you?"
"Who wouldn't?" she grumbled, pulling away to set them moving again. "Try being the baby girl of a family of six older brothers. Practically suffocated me to death. Add in...whatever, you already know."
He slipped his arm across her back, settling his hand on the curve of her hip and squeezing her there. She tensed up and shot him a warning glare.
"Merlin, relax, Ginny. I, for one, solemnly promise to never lock you up in an ivory tower for your own good. That's hardly any fun."
"Hah. Like I'd ever give you the chance to."
Draco turned his gaze forward, focusing on some unknown point down the street. "Merlin knows, we've been in one too many bar fights," he muttered, voice edged with annoyance. "Have I ever once played the noble brat and told you to get out of there and go hide at home?"
As often happened around Draco these days, she couldn't help the upward tug of her lips. "No, quite the opposite. I do believe you've threatened me on several occasions with retribution should I leave you to clean up my messes." She sighed. "Sorry, I knew that. I'm just letting nonsense things get to me again."
His eyes found hers once more, the irises a cool and calculating shade of grey. "I have to say, seems like people aren't even allowed to care for you. A little extreme stance to take, don't you think? You do know caring doesn't have to equal coddling?"
"Why Draco, are you implying that you do care?" She smiled impishly and relished in the irritation that skittered across his face.
"No more than you do," he challenged. A typical Draco answer, but she wouldn't have him any other way.
"Thing is they don't ever just care, Draco. There's always something expected of you in return, and if you fail to fulfill it, they throw all that 'caring' back in your face to guilt-trip and shame you. No bloody thank you. I like that I at least know exactly where I stand with you. You're completely upfront about what you want from me, and I know I can say no with impunity."
"So you have a thing for unabashed devils, is that it?"
Do I? She glanced him over. If the worst of a person was laid bare from the start, there was no pretense to the business. He could never turn on her. She'd know to never let him in where he would have that power in the first place.
"Perhaps." She smirked. "Is that how you see yourself? But really, thank the Fates that you're in no danger of turning into a paragon of virtue. I've had enough of my share of so-called knights and princes." She pantomimed gagging and immediately resolved to put the issue out of mind, letting herself relax, though she shot Draco a pointed look to remove the hand from her hip.
That particular physical contact didn't mean anything coming from him, she knew. How could it when they were of nothing consequential to each other? But she had long hated the feel of it—that she was some smaller, lesser thing to be shielded, secured in that arm circled around her. The only arms wrapping around her that she wanted was in the context of mutual pleasures.
Unsurprisingly, he ignored her dagger looks and welded her even tighter to his side. She huffed but let it slide, knowing he did it only to be contrary. She was too hungry anyway to have the energy to play-fight about it in the middle of a crowded pavement. With his next words at least, she was glad that he too had decided to let their prior subject drop.
"So where is this shop of horrors you intend for us? Or, even better, we could make the sensible choice and detour to the best Wizarding French food to be found in all of London."
She turned her face towards him, putting on a show of considering the option and wavering, watching the hope rise in his eyes before crushing it with a decisive smirk."Not a chance, Draco."
She giggled at the aggravated roll of his eyes. With walls lowered through familiarity, he was becoming too easy. This between them was all too easy now, unbelievably so.
As she led them up a side-street, the buildings' long shadows falling across her back and cutting off the sun's warmth, a colder thought trickled in.
Easy. But when have things ever been easy for you, Ginny Weasley? Are you forgetting yourself?
An involuntary tremble shot through her—memories knocking against their locked doors. Draco's hold tightened, pulling her closer.
"Cold?" he asked.
She didn't correct him. It was infinitely preferable to the far too messy truth.
Author Notes:
Ack. I've been waffling over this chapter for ages. On the one hand there were key aspects about their relationship and about themselves that I wanted to take the time to show you. On the other hand, I worry that it was too quiet and introspective a chapter as to bore you. Whichever way it fell for you or something in between, I'd really appreciate to hear your thoughts on it. Thanks for reading! Summer's here, so you'll get updates a little quicker as I finally have more free time to write.
And thank you, Anise, for looking this over.