Disclaimer: I am going to grow tired of this really quick! I own nothing! Leave me alone already! Sheesh! no, just kidding! ;o)
A/N: Okay, well that was fun! I was trying to upload and somewhere I screwed up and it snowballed from there…and so I got confused and just redownloaded it! phew! So now the story is called The Dragon and the Fire Sprite. Yeah, sorry if anybody was caught in the middle of that while I was figuring stuff out. I hope it's going well so far, and remember, feel free to review! Thanks again!
The next morning Ginny woke up early; the sun was just beginning to show over the horizon. She got out of bed and put on a pair of jeans and a black quarter sleeve shirt. As she went to close the dresser drawer, she saw the wooden box that contained her knife and she took it out and pocketed it. It had been an unusually warm summer so she didn't need her cloak, so she brushed her hair, grabbed her journal and her leads and set off. Her destination was the lake; and after she stopped by the Great Hall to get some toast and strawberries she headed outside. Ginny then sat down by a tree by the lake and took out her journal and leads. She called it a journal but she really used it more for drawing and writing songs and poems. Charlie had gotten her both the journal and the leads for her birthday a year ago. He found her drawing one afternoon outside in the woods behind their house. He thought she was brilliant but respected her wish not to tell anyone about her drawings. She wanted it to remain her private, personal thing. It was her way of expressing her feelings, so calling her small sketchbook a journal was pretty accurate anyway.
As Ginny sat there drawing the morning landscape she didn't realize that she was alone. Sitting against a different tree around a small bend in the lake was Draco Malfoy.
He had seen her come out and remained as still as possible, he didn't want to be seen. Draco watched, intrigued by Ginny as she sat there drawing- her eyebrows knitted in concentration as her small hand moved rhythmically across the paper, pausing only to push her hair out of her face, just to have it fall back a few minutes later. He saw her look up after about five minutes and gaze out across the water, and he saw the sadness in her eyes. He also noticed, even though he still hated her, how beautiful she was. Her long, strait red and golden hair framed her small face, which was slightly spattered with freckles and accented with her large green eyes.
She puzzled him, Ginny Weasley. She wasn't like other girls he knew. He had always thought of her as a quite little girl, one who cried whenever someone insulted her… come to think of it, before this year, that's what she did do, every time he said something to her, no, wait, last year she didn't either, she just walked away from me. But now, it seems as though she's changed. Not only did she not cry, but she actually had the nerve to counter my remarks, he thought, anger slowly building inside him, replacing his previous thoughts of her beauty. You just don't insult a Malfoy and then get away with it!
He turned back to look at her and saw that she was now crying. Silently though, the tears falling slowly down her cheeks. He was angry at her for crying, what did she have to cry about?? He was going to get up and say something to her, but then he saw those sad eyes, and they halted him. Damn her! Why did she have to be so innocent? I will find out why this Weasley was so different from the rest, and with that he got up and walked back to the castle.
Just then Ginny saw a movement out of the corner of her eye; startled she looked over and saw Malfoy getting up and walking towards the castle. Did he know I was here? He had to have known, he must have been here before me! Flushing red, Ginny looked down at her paper and saw her picture for the first time; usually while she was drawing her mind was elsewhere and her hands did the work. She didn't know how she did it, but her drawings actually came to life when she was done drawing. It was sort of like a cartoon, but more realistic. She watched as the lake in her picture, shimmered gold from the reflection of the sun, and the weeping willows waved their long flowing branches in the slight wind. This calmed her some, though she was still sad. She had been thinking about how lonely she felt and how much she wished she had someone to talk to. She got up and started walking towards the castle. She had a lot of homework that she needed to do for the next week, and was up late trying to finish it all; she had trouble concentrating on her work.
Monday morning came and the day past pretty uneventfully. But that evening as Ginny sat down to eat dinner, or rather pick unhungrily at it, she saw Malfoy looking at her. This time however, it wasn't the death glare he usually reserved for her; no, this time it was more of a penetrating calculating look that bore deep into her eyes. She tried to shake it off but she couldn't. It was though he was trying to read her mind. After about ten minutes, she got annoyed and left the table. There was something about that look that made Ginny almost wish he would go back to his trademark glare of death. She went up to her room and did as much of her homework as she could before she fell asleep on her papers.
Ginny awoke the next morning with a start, and a pain- sleeping on one's homework does not exactly do wonders for one's neck. She looked at her clock and was alarmed (hehe get it? clock-alarmed…! I put that one in there just for you Moo!) to see that she had to be in her Double Potions class in five minutes. She hastily got dressed and shoved everything that was on her dress, into the bag. After quickly brushing her hair, she sped off to the dungeons. To her dismay she ran in to Peeves along the way. He had just finished stuffing frog guts into a suit of armor, that would explode on the first person to walk by, and was now hovering a little bit down the hallway. Unfortunately for Ginny, she happened to be that person. Boom! The force of the mini-explosion knocked Ginny backwards and into a pile of the frog parts. Now more frustrated and extremely late, she performed a quick cleaning spell on herself and rushed towards the dungeons, wondering what horrid punishments awaited her.
As she skidded into the classroom, Snape saw her and glided menacingly toward her, his black eyes flashing dangerously.
"My, my Miss Weasley…15 minutes late- that is most unbecoming of a Prefect you know," he taunted coldly, "now let's see, 15 minutes late, so we'll start off with minus 15 points for Gryffindor, and since you're a prefect we'll times that by two, and since I expect to see better behavior from my advanced students we'll times that by two. That brings us to a total of 60 points from Gryffindor, let's see you try to make up for that one Miss Weasley!"
Ginny tried to subdue the stinging tears that threatened to fall from her eyes, as she sat down next to Malfoy at their cauldron. He smirked at her as he diced up night crawlers for their potions- but said nothing. She silently measured out some rat bile for their mixture, as Harry and Ron looked at her five cauldrons away.
"Say, Ginny looks like she could use some cheering up, eh Harry?" asked Ron suggestively. Hermione who was working next to them with Neville, now turned around to the two boys.
"Oh, no you…" but she was cut off by Ron, who was now forming a plan.
"What we need is to create a diversion- okay, Neville- put something in your potion so as to get Snape to come over here, then I'll go and set off a time release dung bomb under Malfoy's chair. Don't give me that look, Neville, you know Hermione can fix any mess you get yourself into."
"Ron, I don't think this is a good…" but once again, Hermione was cut off by Ron.
"Okay, here he comes! Go Neville."
Neville replied with a nod of his pale, scared head. He dumped an odd liquid into his cauldron that turned it a sickly brown color instead of the bright red it should have been…
"Longbottem!!!! You insufferable fool! You incompetent twit! I would have thought that when I put you with Miss Granger that you would not have been able to make any more mistakes. But, nooooo, you seemed to have proved me wrong!" and as Snape raged on Ron snuck up behind Malfoy, put the bomb under his chair and snuck back, all without anybody noticing. A few seconds after Snape had finished his tirade, Ron pulled out his wand, muttered a few choice words and the dung bomb exploded in a green nauseating gas that swirled inside the dungeon.
Seeing as Ginny was the closest to Malfoy, Snape rounded on her.
"So, Miss Weasley, you think that because you are having a bad day that you can take it out on my students?!? Well I think not! That'll be another 60 points from Gryffindor and I don't want to see your face in this room until next weeks class. Now out!!" Snapped practically screamed at her. Ginny quickly gathered her things- not noticing the drawing that had fallen to the floor- it must have been shoved into her bag that morning when she was in her hurry- and almost ran out of the door.
Once outside the classroom, Ginny broke into a run. She didn't know where she was running to and pretty soon she was lost. She had never been in this part of the castle before. The walls were covered in beautifully illustrated tapestries and all of the doors were glass so you could see what was in them. She walked through the hallway pausing to look into the rooms. She stopped in front of a large room that had many string instruments, which she recognized to be guitars and was just about to open it when-
"And just where do you think you're going missy?" asked a somewhat out of breath raspy voice. Ginny slowly turned around only to have her tired bloodshot eyes met with Filch's large bulging ones. Great, she thought, as though I haven't had enough idiot encounters for one day…
"I'm sorry- I guess I got lost…I'll just be heading back now.."
"A likely tale!" said Filch. "Wander about where you shouldn't be, out during class hours' I believe that will earn you a detention!"
"But I" Ginny stammered, trying hard to stop the tears.
"There's no buts about it missy! Now, you will meet Hagrid at the Forbidden Forest tonight at eight. Now get out of my sight before I give you another detention!" Snarled Filch.
So Ginny walked back to her dorm room and tossed her bag aside. She threw herself down on her bed but jumped up in pain two seconds later. She must have left her knife on her bed the night before and when she fell, the knife cut her arm. She looked down at the small wound and watched as the blood trickled down her arm. Initially the cut hurt, but as she watched the blood she felt more- relaxed somehow, as thought the physical pain helped to ease her emotional pain. She looked down at her knife and picked it up, examining the sharp blade. She caught the glint of the blade in the sun and lowered it so the cold metal was pressed against her skin. Slowly- her hand shaking slightly, she pressed down on the knife and brought it down her arm. Gasping slightly at the pain she waited for the blood to come- but was disappointed when only a few beads appeared where she had cut. So she cut again, but pressed harder this time, only wincing a little at the sharp pain in her arm. Ginny felt a rush as she saw the red liquid come faster and gently roll down her arm. She loved the feeling it gave her; it made her feel alive. So she cut again, and again. Pretty soon her blood and tears mixed in a small pool on the hard wooden floor she was sitting on. She set down the knife and looked at her arm which was now littered with about twenty cuts. In a slight state of shock, she got up and walked to her bathroom. Turning on the cold water she cleaned off her blade and then her arm. The cuts stopped bleeding after that and turned into long thin scabs. Ginny was grateful for the long sleeves of her robes which hid her arm well. The cloth that ran over the cuts hurt a little, but she felt that she needed the pain. She needed to remember…
A/N: phew! well now that that's over with… I think that was one of the harder parts to write…getting Ginny started. well I'm off to write chapter four!!! Review to your hearts desire! {:o)