A/N: Lots of reviews! Hehe. LOTS OF FLUFFINESS APPROACHING! Not in this chapter, though. This is very short, because it's leading up to… THE YULE BALL!
Note: I would like to kindly inform you now that Ginny and Riddle aren't going to the Ball together. Duh. Ginny's with Alden. That's too cliché, and I'm avoiding as many clichés as possible. Thank you for your time.
Disclaimer: Get the idea into your head. I don't own it. Now move on.
The Letter P
Chapter Thirty-Eight: P is for Princess?
"Shut it, you," said Ginny, rolling her hazel eyes. "I just defended you. Though I have to confess I was impressed by your heroic attempt at protecting me."
The smallest smudge of pink was discernible on Riddle's cheeks. He was looking down at her with something strange and unreadable in his eyes. Like a kind of respect, mixed with sadness and something else that made Ginny's stomach hurt.
xxx
The words around the school were the whispered, I'm so excited! Everyone was. Why?
It was the twentieth of December.
With the Yule Ball only four hours away, Ginny and the others on the team for the Ball, as opposed to the under-fourteens' disco, were frantically busy. The redhead was certain that her entire day would be spent creating paper-chains and turning mud into glitter.
She crossly eyed the enormous mound of paper-chains beside her. Grace had pitched in to help, babbling for England as she did so, and even Alden had created a few before sloping off to do some reading or some homework or something else geeky.
"I can't wait!" Grace shrieked, throwing her most recent paper-chain into the air.
"Yes, I know," said Ginny dryly. "You've only told me, what, seven times in the past…" (she looked at the clock) "thirty seconds?"
"Yeah well… I can't wait!"
"Eight times."
A few seconds later, Ginny completed the last paper-chain. "Right," she said, standing. "Let's get these down to the Room of Requirements." Together they Levitated the huge mass of paper-chains and walked with it down to the Room of Requirements. They dumped them in a large tub, which Antonia Durrell, the resident expert at Charms, waved her wand over; the flimsy parchment links transformed into strings of glittering silver beads.
"Thanks, Grace," said Antonia, smiling at the brunette. "It's really nice of you to help, considering that you don't have to."
Grace shrugged. "It's not like I have anything better to do," she replied honestly.
Antonia looked at her check-list. "Okay, well, you can help to bring some of the tables down from the Great Hall."
Nodding, Ginny and Grace set off for the Great Hall. On the way, the Prefect commented, "Can't the Room of Requirement just make all of the decorations and things for us?"
"Then that would be unfair," said Grace as they arrived, selected the nearest table, and Levitated it away, "because your group wouldn't have to do anything, and the group working in the Great Hall would have to slave away trying to get this room perfect."
Ginny grumbled.
Scott and Mia Brown went to go and get the second table, so Ginny and Grace were assigned the task of setting up the music.
The list of jobs was endless. They had to set up the stage.
Set up the lights.
Set up the amplifying of the stage area just right.
Dim the sounds of the rest of the room so that the chatter wouldn't drown out the band.
Clean the tables, to get rid of the daily stains of bacon fat and pumpkin juice.
Enchant the ceiling.
Decorate the Christmas trees.
Levitate the mistletoe.
Avoid the mistletoe after you'd set it up.
And then, of course, there's the tinsel fight. I mean, honestly. What Yule Ball preparation would it be if there wasn't a tinsel fight?
"TINSEL FIGHT!" yelled Mia Brown, and she immediately ran at Robert Harris with a long strand of furry gold tinsel.
The room exploded in laughter, shouting, and tinsel. Had the Quieting Charms not been in place, everyone might have deafened.
Ginny sprinted towards Grace and hurled herself onto her friend's back, wrapping her arms, legs, and her string of tinsel, around Grace's torso. "GO, HORSEY, GO!" she yelled.
Shocked, Grace staggered, but then she straightened up, grabbed Ginny's legs to keep the redhead aboard, and sprinted across the Room, throwing tinsel left, right, and center happily.
"Look out!" someone screeched.
Too late.
Grace skidded on a patch of spilt Firewhiskey, and, arms whirling, she flew forwards like a mad, overgrown bird of prey. Then she fell over her own feet, and, painfully, she and Ginny rolled across the ground.
Bang. Ginny crashed into a table leg. She blinked past the haze of confusion, and turned to see where Grace had got to.
The other Slytherin girl had collided heavily with none other than Scott Reeve. Grace was on the ground, and Scott was grinning at her, extending a tanned hand to help her up. Ginny's eyes narrowed. Grace, suspiciously, stretched out her hand, and Scott pulled her to her feet. Then, suddenly their faces were a lot closer than they should have been… furious, Ginny leapt to her feet.
It turned out that she didn't need to.
Grace gave a gasp of fury, and then her hand whirled out to slap Scott, hard, around the face.
Scott stumbled. He scowled, and marched away.
"Whoa, Grace!" said Ginny, rushing over to the brunette. "Whatever happened to the marriage and the house with the picket fence?"
"Marriage?" Grace snorted, and went on to call him a word so vulgar that Slughorn would have had a fit, had he been in the area.
Deciding that letting Grace rant on about how much of an arsehole Scott was would not be good for her physical, and especially mental, health, Ginny gave her some more jobs to do. When these ran short, the Room of Requirement was finished.
The two Slytherin females stepped back to admire the room.
"Nice."
xxx
Her hair sodden down her back from the shower, Ginny slipped into the dress that Grace had lent it. She had admit that it was fabulous, though she wasn't totally sure about some aspects of it.
One of these aspects being the tight upper half.
I'm so short – as if it wasn't already enough of a problem that to look down at me, male eyes are automatically attracted to… ahem.
Ginny uncomfortably shifted it, and then turned her attention to the rest of her. She wasn't much of a girly-girl (she had barely brushed her hair twice in the past month. How much less girly can you get?), but, like all girls, she had a crazy urge to look like a princess.
She combed out her hair and twisted it into the look she desired, after at least ten minutes of trying to decide what would look best, and then called in Grace to do her make-up. Ginny was the eyeliner queen, and she could do the basics, but she couldn't do the whole… princess look.
And that was where Grace came in.
Grace herself looked incredible. She was clad in a floor-length lilac dress that put a lot of emphasis on her height. Ginny felt like a hippo next to a giraffe.
Five minutes to go.
I hope we're not late.
"Aren't you going to look in the mirror?" inquired Grace, puzzled.
"No," said Ginny. "I will, without a doubt, find something wrong with my appearance, and then I'll probably run away from the entire ball in favour of spending the night in bed with a tub of chocolate ice-cream."
Grace stared. "Are you nervous?" she said incredulously.
"Well. Kind of."
"Who is it?" Grace demanded, putting her hands on her hips. "I haven't seen you this nervous since you wanted to look your best for that Hogsmeade trip because you had overheard that Scott had accidentally reserved the table next to the one that we had. And then," she continued, as the story wasn't already long enough, "he didn't even show up!" she flickered her blue eyes over Ginny's face. "Who is it?"
"I don't like anyone," said Ginny truthfully, not able to understand why Grace was so adamant that if she was nervous, she must fancy someone. "If I did, I'd have told you."
"What, like how you told me that you fancied Scott?" Grace snorted. "If memory serves me well, I believe that you were in strict denial to having any feelings for him until he asked you out!"
"I. Do. Not. Fancy. Anyone."
"Suit yourself," Grace shrugged. "Don't expect me to drop this, though."
I had no doubt that you would.
xxx
A/N: Sorry it's so short. But trust me, the next two chapters will MORE THAN make up for it. Please review! Thanks to my beta SilvanXan.
SwirlyL: Haha, your review made me laugh so much, thinking about Tom's 'widdle cotton socks'. Haha. Thanks!
kyraThePoop: Sorry, they're not going together. Too cliché. And, I think you'll be happy to know that I've worked out – they'll kiss two days before your birthday. If I post once a day, that is.
XxRandomHeartxX: ARGH! –slaps computer- DIE! Haha. I can just imagine this person sitting at a desk, completely silent and then going "SQUEEEEE" randomly. Haha. Teehee. Thanks.
Maddiegirl: Er, a glomp is a combination of a hug and a rugby/American Football tackle. Lol.
BDSanta2001: Er, I'll explain the expressions for you. The respect: he'd always felt under-appreciated and less than worthy because of blood status, and Ginny's just like: "I'm a Mudblood and I honestly don't give a damn!" Next. The thing that made Ginny's stomach hurt: a certain emotion that Tom is so far unfamiliar with, that starts with L. Finally: the sadness. Because he is just starting to understand the L-word emotion, and knows that he can probably never have her.
SiRiUsLyInLuV71: It's coming, it's coming! Trust me, the next two chapters will make you a very happy person.
00jade: Thank you! He was going to ask her, but Ginny sort of wasn't paying attention because she saw Tommy-boy.
Hydra27: Yeah, that's a good idea. Thanks. A letter of atonement would be excellent, thank you.
AppleC0re: Well, you have to remember that despite Grace, Alden, Ginny, Flora, and Tom as exceptions, they're still Slytherins. Mugglebornismness is like the plague. And Vegrandis was probably kicking himself for even thinking about asking her out.
Saene: Ooh. You had a prom. I have a prom in eighteen days. I bought a yellow dress. GO ME! You only gave three rant topics. Tut tut. Can't you count? That's why I love my Tom. He's so anti-Gary Sue. He's a geek, he's snarky and sarcastic, he's antisocial, and he's socially insecure. Wow! Nice dream! I had a dream last night that I was on a school trip and we were on a plane with five storeys, and, due to encouragement from my friends, I sat on the top floor, and I was scared shitless (excuse my language) because I hate flying – paranoid fear of death, and to a thanatophobe, flying three thousand feet in the air in a metal can doesn't seem very safe. Lol. So I was terrified, because I couldn't see the wings properly through the windows (totally irriational phobia, yes, move on), and then suddenly the engines cut and the plane nose-dived. Then I screamed and woke up. –shiver-
storm-brain: Lol. I'd prefer sir, even though I'm a girl. HOUSE-ELF REVOLT!
o00Bubbles00o: Yeah, I checked through the chapter and found a lot of mistakes. I just couldn't be bothered to fix them. Sorry. I'm glad you like the glompage! I love glomping people! Hehe. Thanks!
creative-writing-girl13: Thanks! Did you have a nice holiday?
X-XsiobhanX-X: Haha! Triumphant! Thank you!
Darkangels24700: Thanks! I can't answer any of your questions, sorry. But you'll find out soon enough.
The-Quoi: HAHAHA! YOUR REVIEW MADE ME LAUGH SO HARD! Hahahaha. That was hilarious. "All night long. With various kinky objects". LMAO! Thanks for making my day!
Pixar: Aw, thanks! Yay! I get to use your phrase! Thank you!
M.E.Potter: Er, thanks!
Peacegirl: You'll have an overload of fluff soon.
DeadlyCreative: Er. Who? Who called out in pain? I don't recall that. Thanks!
XevenOf9: The dates for the Ball are as such: Grace, single. Tom, single. Alden and Ginny together. However, the pairings are: Ginny and Tom, Grace and Alden. Teehee.
Kallie: Sorry, I didn't mean to ignore you. Thanks for the review!
Exohexohex: Did I get it right this time? Water vision? I'm confused. What water vision? Yeah, Tom's getting emotional. And such is his downfall.