Disclaimer: It all belongs to Joanne Rowling. I just add my touch of craziness to it. ;)
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The Founding of Pigwarts II – Cooking Chaos
Chapter 17: Surprise Indeed
Much to Ginny's and Daphne's great disappointment Malfoy hadn't hidden the deepest of his secrets under his pillow like any normal person. Or into his drawers. Or under his carpet. Or into a shoebox in the wardrobe. Or behind his mirror. Or…
"Aha!" Ginny exclaimed, staring victoriously at the object in her hand.
"What did you find? Where did you find it?" Daphne whirred, jumping over the bed in her haste to be there immediately and landing in a rather graceless heap on the floor.
"It's a box," the redhead stated, turning it around and observing from every angle. "It's covered with dark green velvet. And I found it from the nightstand."
As on top of the nightstand had been the most obvious and visible place in the room, she had seen it only when all the other places had been exhausted.
"Well, open it," Daphne demanded, once she had disentangled her arms and feet, and finally reached Ginny and the mysterious box.
"I'll open it when I wish to open it," the Gryffindor stated stubbornly, but nevertheless lifted the lid.
She stared, she gasped, and she collapsed onto the bed, her knees suddenly weak.
"This is beautiful," she finally managed, softly tracing the delicate silver of the necklace with her fingertips, admiring the sparkling diamonds and dazzling rubies which formed an intricate and breathtaking pattern.
"It is," Daphne agreed, sitting by her side. "Do you think it's for me?"
Ginny wanted to hit Daphne on the head with something for being stupid, but since the only thing she had in her hands was the jewel-box, which certainly didn't deserve such fate, and since she was reluctant to put it away and search for some other weapon to attack stupidity with, she suppressed that urge.
"It's not for you, moron," she snorted.
"You don't know it for sure," the Slytherin objected. "It could be Draco's attempt to apologize for ignoring me these past weeks."
"It's not," Ginny stated, considered a moment, and then added, "moron."
"And why not?"
"Because first, Malfoy would never apologize, he's too Malfoy-ish for that, and second, this is rubies."
"I like rubies," Daphne declared.
"Rubies are red."
"And so are strawberries but I still eat them."
"Let me make this clear to you," Ginny spoke slowly and sharply. "Rubies are red. Red. Red. Red like Gryffindor, one might say."
"But silver is silver and silver is Slytherin."
"Exactly. Silver for Slytherin and red for Gryffindor, and the diamonds of love joining them together."
"Oh," Daphne frowned and stared at the piece of jewellery.
"Oh," she repeated a moment later, the confusion metamorphosing into surprise.
"Oh!" she exclaimed for the third time as well, a smile of understanding gracing her features now.
Ginny rolled her eyes. And she had thought Ron was slow.
"Well, that's a great idea. Very romantic," Daphne commented. "But I don't think he's going to succeed with this."
"And why the hell not?" Ginny demanded. "The necklace is amazing."
"True," the other girl admitted. "But I thought you loved Harry."
Ginny took a deep breath, gave one last look of pure admiration to the glittering gems and shining silver, then closed the box and placed it carefully back to the nightstand. With cold and calculated moves, she proceeded to pick up one of the pillows and hurled it into Daphne's face with all her strength.
Her evil grin dropped a bit, though, after noticing that Daphne's expression mirrored hers, and it fell even more when she realized that now the other girl held the pillow.
As she dove to grab another one, as luckily for her Draco had more than one pillow, Ginny briefly wondered how her amazing friend and loyal accomplice had suddenly turned into a malicious sneaky bitch, then concluded it was something to do with the atmosphere. This was Malfoy's room after all, no wonder that there was a large quantity of pratness in the air.
What followed now was a ferocious war between two sworn enemies, a Gryffindor and a Slytherin, and even though the lion showed her might and courage, the sneaky snake had a rather good aim as well. The goodness and light seemed to gain victory as their heroine was sitting on top of the wardrobe and shooting one pillow after another at the evil snake, but alas! before the snake was destroyed completely, the mighty lion ran out of ammunition, and the ferocious fight continued.
"Do you yield?" Daphne cried, standing on the table and ready to strike.
"Never! Never!" Ginny shouted and fired her last pillow. "Never will I yield to the likes of you. The darkness will be banished, the light will triumph, and the mighty lion will—"
"That's not fair!" the redhead exclaimed, removing the pillow from her face and standing up. "You cannot attack me while I'm giving my grand speech!"
"But evil snakes never play fair," Daphne smirked. "Besides, that was your grand speech? I thought you were choking on something."
"I'll show you," Ginny promised, and dashed into the battle. "For glory and death! For glory and death!"
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"Do you yield?" the mighty lion cried a while later, a pillow in each hand, giving a blow after a blow to the defeated snake lying at her feet.
"Sure," came Daphne's slightly muffled voice since her face was hidden into the carpet and her arms were trying to protect her head from the vicious blows of her enemy.
"You do?" the said enemy asked, dropping her pillow in surprise.
"Sure I do. If you can't fight them, join them. Being a martyr doesn't pay well."
"True," Ginny agreed. "But I'm not offering a union. What I want is your utter and complete surrender. From now on, you will be my slave."
Yes, there was definitely something evil in the air.
"Yes, Mistress," Daphne succumbed, making her captor drop the other pillow in a new wave of surprise.
"I never thought it would be this easy," Ginny managed to say before the positions of power were suddenly reversed and she found herself from the floor, an evil snake standing above her with an evil smirk on her face.
"Foul! Foul!" she cried with indignation.
"Foul play indeed," Daphne agreed and raised the pillows.
The wounded lion braced herself for the blow, but it never came. What did reach her, however, was someone's laughter from the hallway.
Ginny froze. Daphne froze. The laughter continued.
"Damn!" Ginny exclaimed silently, jumping to her feet and looking around the room, which was quite similar to a battlefield, especially after a couple of tornadoes had gone over it.
"Damn! Damn! Damn!" she cursed under her breath again, wondering why the idea that maybe Malfoy's bedroom wasn't the best place to have a pillow fight had never crossed her mind before. It had to be the evil air.
Daphne was already busy with cleaning up their mess, and once done with the cursing, Ginny joined her.
Books and parchment flew back to the table, pillows regained their rightful place on the bed, clothes returned to the wardrobe, a few trinkets rose from the floor and repaired themselves – had they really wreaked such havoc on this place? Yes, they had.
"Let's go," Ginny whispered urgently, once everything seemed to be in proper order.
Daphne nodded and reached for the doorknob, but someone beat her to it, grabbing it from the other side and turning.
The two chaos makes exchanged one meaningful glance, and the next moment they had both managed to squeeze themselves into the wardrobe, drawing its door shut at the exact same time the other door was opened.
Ginny didn't dare to heave her sigh of relief. Luckily for them, Malfoy's wardrobe was just as big as she could have expected from one spoiled brat. Unfortunately, though, he seemed to have just as many robes as she could have expected from one vain spoiled brat, meaning that while the wardrobe might have been spacious when it was empty, now they barely had room to breathe, not to mention make themselves comfortable.
"So, where's the surprise?" a voice asked from outside the wardrobe, sounding amused and carefree. Good for you to say, Ginny thought, you aren't forced to sit on shoes with the high heel of your friend pressing into your stomach.
She tried to push that said high heel away before it managed to stab a hole through her, and was rather happy to hear the hiss of the evil snake who wasn't very comfortable either.
"Where do you think it is?" another voice drawled out, and she immediately recognized its owner as Malfoy.
"Let me look again," the first voice, definitely female and definitely familiar, spoke.
"Hopefully she doesn't look into here," Ginny whispered.
"Not here," the joyful carefree voice rang out, then again after a small pause, "not here either. Perhaps here?"
"Well, she would definitely find a surprise from here," Daphne whispered back. "Although perhaps not the one she is expecting."
"No, not here," the voice didn't sound one bit disappointed, "I guess I'll just have to keep looking."
"What are they doing? And who is she?" Ginny poked Daphne.
"You're closer to the keyhole," the Slytherin poked her right back, and rather painfully. "Take a peek."
"There's no keyhole!" Ginny hissed furiously, rubbing her hurt shoulder.
"Use a spell then," she suggested.
"I don't know any keyhole creating spells!"
"How about the invisible hole one?" Daphne offered.
Ginny had to admit that the idea was good, and after a bit of silent squirming to get her hand free, she pointed her wand to the door, and cast the spell.
And would have exclaimed out loud if Daphne hadn't been quick enough to cover her mouth with her hand.
"That sneaky lioness!" Ginny fumed under her breath, once she had managed to push Daphne's hand away.
"That was the easiest bit of matchmaking I've ever had to do. Except for that time maybe when I pushed Bones into Boot."
"Susan dated Terry? I never knew it," Ginny was surprised that this little piece of gossip had never reached her ears.
"They didn't last for long though. About three heated snogging sessions in broom closets before he started to get on her nerves. Really, those Ravenclaws are way too smart to bear them."
"Oh… oh… yes!!!"
Ginny turned her head on instinct, realized her mistake, and quickly squeezed her eyes shut.
"I'm scarred for life now," she complained.
"Like we haven't seen that before," Daphne winked.
"We didn't look!" Ginny reminded. "And we certainly didn't hear a thing. Like now."
The moans were getting louder and impossible to block out, and for some reason neither accomplice thought to cast a Silencing spell.
"I want to get out of here," Ginny whined, her hands pressed onto her ears, "and right now."
Daphne looked around in the wardrobe for a while, realized it was too dark to see a thing, shrugged, removed one of her shoes, and placed the tip of her wand against it.
"Portus," she spoke, watching her shoe shake a bit and glow blue.
"Where will it take us?" Ginny inquired.
"Does it matter?"
"As long as it's a place outside this room, no," the redhead said, grabbing hold of the shoe, and suffering several loud moans before Daphne managed to activate it.
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Ginny flinched at another moan.
"When I said I wanted out," she whispered, "I didn't mean quite this."
"We are out of the room," Daphne remarked.
"We are hanging from the window ledge!" Ginny hissed.
"At least the window is open."
"I know!" the Gryffindor gritted through her teeth, wondering whether it would be worth to cover her ears and take the 30-feet fall.
Creating the portkey, Daphne had been stupid enough, and Ginny didn't fail to tell her so, to specify the location as 'outside the room'. While it had seemed like a good idea, the Slytherin had defended herself, instead of landing outside the door of the room, they had got the wonderful chance to land outside the window of the room. Popping out into air and nothing but air, they actually had to consider themselves very lucky to have succeeded in grabbing hold of the window ledge at all.
Hanging outside the window of Malfoy's bedroom while he was there doing things to her best friend, very pleasurable things, actually, judging by the moans and screaming, Ginny didn't consider herself one bit lucky. But she did consider Daphne rather dead once she got the opportunity to use her hands again for something else than holding on.
"Can't we Levitate ourselves down, or something?" Daphne wondered.
"We could," Ginny agreed, "if our first reaction to finding ourselves in mid-air had been placing our wands between our teeth and only then grabbing hold of the ledge."
"You mean you dropped it?" the Slytherin asked in horrified whisper.
"It was in my hand!" Ginny defended herself, "and I needed my hand to hold on. Didn't you?"
"No. But I can't hold on with one hand so I'm not going to reach for it either."
"Any other plans?" Ginny asked sarcastically.
"One," Daphne admitted. "We can climb in through the window."
Ginny looked at her friend as if she had gone crazy.
"In there? You want me to climb in there?"
"Unless you'd rather stay out here," Daphne smirked. "Besides, judging by the sounds, those two are not going to notice us anyway."
Ginny couldn't deny that there was a point there somewhere. Probably. Plus her arms were starting to hurt really badly. But then again, getting caught by a white tiger and angry lioness sounded almost as bad as 30-feet fall, if not worse.
And talking about sounds… Ginny had always known that Hermione had a loud voice, but that scream must have been heard in the radius of at least fifty miles. Especially with the open window.
"Okay," she agreed a bit reluctantly, knowing that inside the room not only the sounds would be louder, but accompanied by the visual part as well. Still, that paved road down there seemed rather painful, and she was sure she wouldn't be able to outhang those two either.
"But you go first," she added.
Daphne nodded and started to climb. Fortunately, they were both lithe adventurous girls, meaning that although this situation might have been novel to them, they had done their fair share of climbing and hanging before. Where some other, less experienced people would have huffed and puffed and fumbled and fallen to their death, Daphne first found leverage for her feet, pushed, pulled, wriggled a bit, pushed and pulled some more, and slipped through the window into the room. Once she had made it inside, Ginny followed her, discovering that all this pushing and pulling looked a bit easier than it actually was. But having done a fair share of climbing herself, it didn't take too long until she too dropped to the floor on the other side.
"Well, that was fun," she commented, turning towards her friend, who was staring in front of her with an odd expression on her face.
"Wasn't it?" Ginny inquired, realizing the moans and screams had stopped annoying her that much. And that was nice. After that, however, came the realization that the moans and screams had stopped altogether. And that wasn't so nice anymore.
Slowly, very slowly to postpone the inevitable as long as she could, Ginny turned her head towards the bed and its occupants, who had finished.
Finished their previous activity, that is, but it didn't look like they were going to finish glaring daggers at them any time soon. Perhaps they should have picked the fall instead.
"Hey," she said weakly. "We thought we'd drop in. But as you seem to be… erm… busy, we can go now. Right?"
"Yes," Daphne nodded vigorously and stood up as inconspicuously as she could, shifting towards the door which seemed to be light years away. "It was nothing urgent, just thought to see what you were up to. But now that we know it, there's really not much else to say or do. So, see you later. Bye!"
"Bye!" Ginny repeated and they both dashed towards the door.
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Note: I like this chapter. :) I hope you liked it, too. Aah, but I haven't had a decent pillow fight for... actually, I can't remember ever having a decent pillow fight. Poor me.
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