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. Right now T is for language and suggestiveness, and in this chapter, lots of drinking.
Spoilers: DH compliant, except epilogue. All seven books are fair game!
Pairing: Draco x Ginny.
Author's Note: Here's Chapter 10, and I'd like to point out that drinking this much cannot possibly be good for you! I wonder if it belongs in a fic rated T, but I'm not quite ready to up the rating yet, so bear with it.
As always, please be kind and please enjoy! =)
The Name of the Game
Chapter 10: Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless
"Malfoy, really, where are we going?" Ginny asked as they made their way through a rather seedy-looking part of Wizarding London.
"I told you, for drinks," he replied as he led her down a cobblestone road until they reached a building that had a line of witches and wizards wrapping around the side, the entrance guarded by a purple velvet rope and quite possibly the largest wizard Ginny had ever seen, apart from Hagrid.
"Look at that line, we'll never get in!" she protested. "We should have just gone to the Leaky Cauldron."
"Only to be served second-rate swill and have your brother show up looking for you?" Malfoy muttered. "I think not. Besides, a Malfoy doesn't wait in line."
"What?" she asked incredulously, but Malfoy had already pulled out his wand and extended it to the wizard guarding the door; the tips of their wands touched, a tiny blue light flaring between them for an instant, and the massive wizard stepped aside and lifted the end of the rope from its stanchion.
"Welcome, Mr. Malfoy," he intoned solemnly. "I wish you and your guest an enjoyable evening."
"Thank you," Malfoy replied smugly as he led Ginny inside by the arm, her stammered thanks to the bouncer nearly an afterthought as she entered the nightclub.
The atmosphere within the establishment was one of chaotic liveliness at the centers of activity, the bar and the dance floor, which blurred into a mellow reclusiveness around the edges. A hostess led Malfoy and Ginny to a private booth, where they were ensconced with an air of intimacy and some measure of quiet, at least compared to the rest of the club. It was loud enough that the lively atmosphere was maintained, but Ginny was able to hear herself think and to carry on a conversation without shouting to be heard.
"I thought your family had fallen from grace," she said loudly, looking around the opulent booth in awe.
"Politically, yes, and perhaps even socially to an extent," he replied. "But money will still get you almost everywhere, and we still have plenty of that."
She snorted at his candor. "Of course you do. I suppose that when you become a nationally famous Quidditch player, the celebrity will be nothing new."
"Perhaps not new, but at least then it'll be something I'll have earned for myself," he answered, smirking at her unabashedly. She didn't think for a moment that he was ashamed of his undeserved notoriety, except perhaps that garnered by having been a Death Eater.
"And here I was under the impression that you weren't all that into throwing your family's influence around. You certainly haven't been pushing for any special favors at camp, except for the change in wardrobe."
"A mistaken impression to an extent, Weasley," he replied seriously. "I love money and power. I always have, and I always will. But I want more out of life than my parents' wealth and prestige, especially with the tarnish my father has put on the family name. It would be advantageous to make a name for myself, and throwing my parents' name around at Quidditch camp is hardly the way to accomplish that end. I really do want to get by on skill."
"You were pretty well-known at Hogwarts for your Quidditch skills," she supplied, thinking it was in the same vein of conversation, but his expression darkened marginally.
"Maybe I could have been, were it not for Potter… and my father," he replied. "I've been on a broom almost since I could walk. I was looking forward to trying out for the House team more than anything else about school, and when I finally got on, my father had to buy new racing brooms for the whole team, and Potter never let me hear the end of it, him and Granger and your brother always spouting off about how my father had bought the Seeker spot for me. It's just how my father shows support for anything, by spending money on it. It's not something everyone understands, that's all."
Ginny watched as Malfoy shrugged and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Their first round of drinks arrived, shots of firewhiskey, and Malfoy instructed the waitress to bring the bottle and leave it.
"You're right about that," she said finally, after the bottle arrived. "That not everyone understands throwing money around, I mean. Harry, Ron, and Hermione really did think you'd bought your way onto the Slytherin team. They talked about it a lot my first year. Hermione in particular took forever to let it go, because she didn't really understand Quidditch - still doesn't, actually."
Malfoy grimaced bitterly as he prodded his shot glass with a long, delicate finger.
"But you really were an incredible Seeker in school," she continued, "and you still are. I had such a horrid crush on Harry back then and I still noticed how good you were."
The grimace shifted slightly, becoming a small, pleased smile.
"Well at least somebody noticed," he drawled. "You were pretty amazing as well… and you still are. I used to think that you would have made an excellent seeker full-time, if Potter hadn't been clogging up the spot. I wish I'd had more of an opportunity to fly against you back then."
She found herself grinning at his praise, and her grin only widened as he flushed the slightest pink and changed the subject.
"Anyway, Weasley, about our drinking challenge: what are the rules?"
"Hmm…" she pondered. "What are the rules usually?"
"Usually you try to match the other person, shot for shot, until one or the other passes out or is otherwise incapacitated. But from what I've heard of your later years at Hogwarts, you already know that, I think," he smirked again, and this time it was Ginny who blushed. Yes, that was embarrassing… but those last years at Hogwarts had been rough, and the students had needed to find some way to pass the time.
"In our case though, given the circumstances of the evening and the fact that we were both forced to endure the presence of the insufferable Potter," he continued, "I think we should both just drink until we can hardly stand and have to summon the Knight Bus to take us back to the training grounds."
"Agreed!" she replied emphatically as they clinked their glasses together before they each knocked back a shot. The whiskey burned through her, leaving a trail down her throat that was pleasurably warm, and she realized that it was of a far higher quality than she'd ever had.
"Also, I think it's only fair that since I'm the one funding this non-competition," he gestured at the bottle with his empty glass as he set it down, "you should dance with me at least once. And don't go saying you can afford to split the tab, because you can't."
She found herself about to protest, but she hesitated. He was almost certainly correct that she wouldn't be able to afford it. She couldn't begin to imagine what the bottle of whiskey would cost, and living in the training dorm was a blessing because she couldn't really afford anything other than living at the Burrow. It also occurred to her that Malfoy had been nothing but friendly to her lately, though at times abrasive, and this might be an example of what he'd talked about earlier: throwing money at something he cared about.
Only as a friend, though! she reminded herself firmly. If he was going to go out of his way to cultivate a friendship with her, she would not ruin it by deluding herself in some romantic fantasy of being rescued from poverty by a rich boy. It occurred to her that Malfoy might want, and even deserve, to have a friendship that didn't turn out to be a means to get to his money or status, at least what was left of it, no matter how much he enjoyed those things.
"That's the Malfoy I've always known, never without terms and conditions," she said, laughing as she poured them each another shot. "Fair enough, though. And I think that dance should be now, because they're playing the latest from The Weird Sisters, and I just love them."
Malfoy's eyebrows shot up in surprise, but he swallowed the shot and followed her onto the floor all the same, leaving the bottle in their booth along with Ginny's handbag; Malfoy assured her that the private booths had charms on them that made them quite impenetrable to anyone who wasn't meant to be there, another reason apart from the privacy and lack of media attention that he favored this particular club.
Ginny really did love The Weird Sisters, and she danced with more enthusiasm than Malfoy would have expected. The floor was crowded with witches and wizards in their twenties, all writhing to a beat that pulsed loudly enough to threaten to turn their brains to mush, had the alcohol not already done so. One dance turned into two, and two into half an hour, until when Ginny pulled them from the floor at last, both she and Malfoy were sweating.
There were several trips back and forth from the dance floor to the booth, each marked by a decrease in both coordination and inhibition. The Ginny that had dated Harry would undoubtedly have cared, fretting over such displays in public, even the limited, relatively safe public of the club, but now she couldn't be bothered. She was finally out on her own, without Harry, her brothers, particularly Ron, and her parents telling her what she could and could not do. The truth was, it felt amazing.
If she was being honest with herself, being out with Malfoy felt pretty amazing, too. He had been known for his appeal with the ladies during his time at Hogwarts, even if he hadn't acted on it overly much; even in those houses that ostensibly hated all Slytherins in general and Malfoy in particular as the most Slytherin of all, it was widely agreed amongst the girls that he was one of the more attractive boys at the school. It was validating in a way Ginny never would have expected to be in the company of such a person, even if only as friends.
There had been times, when she dated Harry, that she had felt as though he was embarrassed by her, as though in some way, they were unequal. She suspected that in some way, Harry would always see her as that little girl who had followed him around like a little lost puppy, and though he had obviously recognized her as a grown woman, albeit after far too long, he would never fully accept that she was an autonomous adult. There was always that need to shelter and protect her in all the wrong ways, as though she was still eleven years old and in need of rescue from the clutches of Voldemort.
Not so with Malfoy. Perhaps it was because he, too, understood what it was to move beyond what you were as a child.
Or perhaps it was because he was completely hammered, and so was she. Who could say for sure?
What Ginny did know is that she'd never had so much fun. Harry never went to clubs, and when they had danced at formal affairs he had danced stiffly and awkwardly, in a way that made it clear that he didn't particularly enjoy showing her off.
Malfoy, on the other hand, had obviously done this kind of thing a lot, because he was quite good at it. As the night wore on and their consumption of alcohol increased, their dancing took on an almost intimate quality; at one point that she would only vaguely recall the next day, he'd pulled her against him, her back to his chest, his hands on her hips and his breath hot on her neck. It was like nothing she had ever experienced, and she liked it.
The events of the night became less clear with every shot until, at last, they decided it was time to leave before one of them really did pass out. They had stopped counting shots long ago, and neither of them was really able to stand without leaning on the other. Laughing at nothing in particular, or maybe something Malfoy had said, though she couldn't clearly remember what that was, Ginny drew her wand as they reached the street and summoned the Knight Bus. The purple monstrosity came careening out of nowhere as it was wont to do, and Malfoy only barely pulled her back in time to avoid being hit as it screeched to a halt in front of them. The inebriated duo fell to the ground, laughing as though they hadn't just narrowly escaped a terrible death as they struggled to extricate their tangled limbs.
"Quidditch training grounds," Malfoy slurred as the exasperated bus attendant asked for their destination, and after paying, he and Ginny fought the pitch and roll of the bus as it took off in maniacal fashion with a pitch and roll of their own drunken design, staggering to their seats. The Knight Bus deposited them unceremoniously at the edge of the grounds, leaving them to pick themselves up from where they fell as they disembarked, and both stumbled off toward the dorms, his arm around her shoulders and hers around his waist.
The doors to the dorm rooms were spelled to recognize their designated occupant and open accordingly, which Malfoy thought was rather fortunate as he was pretty sure neither of them could manage a key, a password, or even a simple unlocking spell at the moment. In their present state, they couldn't even very well make out one door from another, so they ambled along until one opened for them.
Malfoy hadn't a clue whether they'd ended up in her room or his own, as the rooms all shared the same layout and it didn't occur to either of them to turn on the light. She fell against him, laughing, and a frisson of excitement at the feeling of her body pressed against his tingled through his belly, blocked by the whiskey from reaching its destination. Her lips brushed his, whether by accident or on purpose he did not know, and he could see her eyes gleaming like liquid before his own in the darkness.
"Easy, Weasley," he breathed. "I've had a bit too much for what you've got in mind."
She giggled wildly in response, as though he'd said the funniest thing she'd ever heard, and in an instant he was laughing with her. She shushed him dramatically as though someone might hear, and they both fell silent only to burst out laughing again.
Stripping off his shirt as he made his way to the bed, he let himself fall to the mattress and pulled her with him, and everything became quite unclear after that.
A/N: Hoo, what now? Well, I'm not ready to smut this up, but there will be awkwardness and hangovers aplenty in the morning. Don't worry, the M rating will come eventually. Not that long off, probably... just not quite yet. =)
My deepest thanks to Greenstuff, Darinmeg, Dracosbaby7, Julia Tsukino, Nutmeg44, Princess Phoenix Tears, bitemyheadoff, and shana rose for their awesome reviews since the last update!
And I'd just like to mention that this story just got its 50th review! I am so happy about this, like, just over the moon. Thank you all so very much! =D