♥ obsessedmadwoman wrote "The Room of Requirement" for treesuhboo ♥
Title: The Room of Requirement
Rating: NC17
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: Deathly Hallows, without the epilogue.
Summary: Everyone want something from Draco - all Ginny has to decide is if she does.
Author's Note: I'm glad I got this prompt! I had a lot of fun writing the first bit, but after that the plot bunnies which'd been bugging me just kind of left me stranded, which is why it was late! I hope it's what you wanted and you enjoy it :)
The Room of Requirement
Ginny knew that she was a traitor.
Certainly not of the worst sort there was, no; thank goodness she’d had enough self-control to prevent herself from sinking that low.
But her body seemed to be betraying notions she would never claim as her own. Her first inkling of it came when she was in the Library a week ago, doing her Charms homework.
She’d been reaching for a book on the top shelf, and Seamus had come up behind her and helped her get it. His robes had brushed against hers, and she’d sensed his sheer masculinity, the way his shoulders and his height had dwarfed her. In response her entire body had flushed under her robes and her pulse started thudding in her ears, and she had drooped, no longer straining her height towards the highest shelf but letting her hand fall back.
She had had to prevent herself from turning around for a few seconds after that, so that by the time she’d turned he had taken a step back and she had recovered enough to smile and take the book from him.
And it certainly wasn’t just with Seamus. Every time someone came near her, she’d been intensely aware of their presences, just like she used to be whenever Harry’d come into the room. She’d caused a commotion at the Great Hall just the other day, when Dean put his hand over hers on the narrow handle of the soup tureen as he’d taken it from her. Shed jumped, and the soup sloshed over the side and all down the front of Lavender’s robes.
Logically speaking, she knew it wasn’t her fault. It had been ages since she’d seen Harry, ages since the first time he’d kissed her and the last time he’d shown her how much pleasure you could get from mere physical touch.
She couldn’t help but feel, though, that this sort of thing was a complete betrayal of Harry and what they had had so briefly together. Also, it was completely undignified and just so… adolescent.
She was just recalling the exact way she’d felt and pondering the solution to her unhappy problem on her way to the Quidditch Pitch.
It was only two o’clock, which was the exact time the Slytherin’s time slot would expire and the Gryffindors would take over. There had been altercations at this exchange several times in the past, and she was in doubts about whether to turn up late just to avoid the Slytherin’s puffed up bravado; they had been especially insufferable since Snape became Headmaster.
Twice she turned around and then started forward again, until she finally turned the corner and saw, to her surprise, the door to the Room of Requirement appear behind her.
It had been a while since she’d been in the room - with Harry gone the entire Dumbledore’s Army had collapsed and there hadn’t been a meeting since term started.
She took a look at her watch and decided there was enough time for her to peek in before practice; she was always fascinated with the way the Room rearranged itself and never failed to look in to see what need the Room saw uppermost in her mind.
What greeted her curious eyes was a room extremely similar to the Prefect’s toilet.
There was a large marble bath set in the floor, and a toilet beside the door.
Seated on the toilet was Draco Malfoy, pants around his knees.
“So - ” she started to apologize, flushing a quick bright red as she tried to back out of the door, but he’d already caught hold of her wrist and dragged her inside, pulling himself to his feet in the process and pushing her against the door.
“Shut up!” he hissed in her ear. “And don’t bloody think I’m going to let you go out there and start blabbering about… this.”
When he glanced down, she did too,
And quickly looked up, flushing even more.
“Uhm,” she supplied helpfully.
“Yes,” he said nastily. “Just cottoned on, have you?”
She wished she hadn’t looked. Now she was hyperaware of how his weight was leaning on her, with his left hand holding her right above her head and his right hand (the one he’d just been stroking himself with, she thought hysterically) going around her back and holding her left hand behind her, pinned against the door.
Oh, and his erection pushing up against the hem of her shirt, of course.
She moved a bit, experimentally, gauging her chances of wrenching herself free, and stopped abruptly when he pressed into the soft patch above her hip and his breath hitched.
He regained his composure and looked at her, and all she could do was stare helplessly at his thin, ever-so-slightly asymmetrical mouth, just at her eye-level.
“I don’t have many options at this point, Weasley,” he bent his head down, curling his body around and over her to whisper in her ear, “Tell me what you think I should do.”
She could help it - her body jerked (pressing her hip into it again) when she felt the puff of hot, moist, air over her ear, and the slight brush of his nose on the delicate skin behind her ear.
She felt caged by his body, which was all around her and above her and -
Draco Malfoy’s cock was pressing into her shirt, and at this insane thought she flushed the deepest red she’d ever gone and he watched with evident interest as the blush flamed up over her face.
He puffed out a short breath of laughter then, (a puff she could feel through his whole body leaning against hers), and she thought, oh damn it.
“Looks like I might’ve a few more options than I thought,” he said, a smirk twisting his features (now she watched one side of his mouth lift higher then the other and resisted an insane urge to lean forward and bite at his bottom lip), and she jumped again when she felt something brush against the bare back of her left thigh.
He’d released her left arm, and was brushing his fingers back and forth over the sensitive skin of her thigh.
She couldn’t work her left arm free to catch at the doorknob, not with both their weight on her body, so she remained still, dragged her eyes up from his mouth to watch his eyes.
His eyelids flickered as his fingers started the slowest movement up.
She could feel all sorts of crazy things bubbling up at the very back of her throat, pleas to hurry up and fuck off and just take her. So to silence them, or at the very least prevent him hearing them she shifted purposefully, pushing her hip so that he ground right into it, and it was worth the permanent dent it was going to leave in her skin above her hipbones just to see his pale eyelashes flutter down and cover his grey eyes.
Dimly she knew that if the sight of his eyes, so different from Harry’s and inches away from her face where she’d come to expect only Harry’s, didn’t wake her and stun her into pushing him off, nothing would. And yet she floated on the great rush of emotions and pushed her hip against him again.
He opened his eyes again and swallowed, loud in the silence, and then he rested all of the fingers of that hand on her skin and skimmed his hand much, much faster up the back of her thigh and round to the front, until he had to shift (making sure to roll his hips against hers just the slightest amount) so that his warm palm covered the top of her thigh, fingers resting casually against the elastic of her knickers.
They stood there, gazing at each other, frozen.
Then she tossed her head a bit against the wood of the door and he slid his fingers with casual ease into her knickers, pushing underneath the damp crotch of them and beginning to stroke and slide through her folds.
She pushed her hips against his fingers and he pushed himself into her hipbone, the both of them moving in tandem and guided entirely by the rhythm of his fingers.
And she leaned forward and kissed him, wet, open-mouthed, and messy. He slid his tongue into her mouth smoothly and she opened her mouth wide and tilted her head so that she could slick her tongue against his as much as possible.
For a while they continued to kiss, mouths sliding over each others’ and hips jerking together and his fingers rubbing easily at her under her skirt. She could hear hitched breaths and deep, jerky ones, and the slick noises of their mouths and the much softer occasional wet sound from his fingers.
Then he slid a finger, two, into her and her hips jerked sharply and he sucked her lower lip into his mouth and bit it and the nails of his right hand dug into her left wrist where he was still holding it pressed to the door over her head and she gave a muffled moan and wrenched her mouth away from his, tucking her face into his neck and shuddering as she came.
And after a while she realized that he was still pushing insistently into her hip, so she turned her head a bit and gave a great big biting suck to the soft skin behind his ear.
“Uh,” he said intelligibly, then twitched as her tongue flicked out into his ear.
He turned his head to pant in the crook of her neck, in between open mouthed kisses.
“Suck me, Weasley,” he said, not bothering to whisper, and bit her on the muscle at the base of her back.
(For years after she would remember him saying this, the filth sounding incongruous with his posh accent.)
She looked up at him, then released the fistful of his fine blond hair her right hand had seized sometime during their snogging and slid it down his chest. Both of them watched it as it moved down and gripped him.
She twisted her left hand from his grip (there would be five red half-moons in her wrist that wouldn’t fade for a week after this) and wrapped it around her right hand.
Then she sank to her knees and flicked her tongue out and touched it delicately to the slit at the end and his hips twitched forward.
She frowned up at him, and then leaned forward to take him in her mouth, watching him watching her.
He tasted salty and bitter and like insistence and desire and she moaned against the weight of him on her tongue. She could feel the tension in his hips at this, could almost hear him reminding himself not to thrust forward.
Ginny huffed out a quick laugh, then slid her head down as far as it would go and hollowed her cheeks as she started to suck. She pulled her head back, long and lingering, then loosened her lips and slid them down him again, and she felt his hand tighten into a fistful of her hair.
“Faster,” he said indistinctly, head thrown back and balanced against gravity, and she smiled around his cock and started to bob her head.
He tilted his head down presently and looked down at her. She widened her eyes and stared back at him.
“Fuck,” he muttered, and quickly shut his eyes and tilted his head back up.
She could hear the bell ringing to signal the end of class, and footsteps coming down the corridor a thin door away, and she hadn’t realized before how much of an exhibitionist she was because that shouldn’t have turned her on more, shouldn’t have made her want to take a hand off his cock or his hip and slide it up her skirt.
But at the thought her traitorous body responded with a moan which rumbled its way up her throat, and Draco came, his body jerking and one hand clutching her shoulder hard enough to bruise.
Eventually she swallowed and sat back, her knees still weak and patterned with the grain of the wooden floor.
He had shifted position, turned to lean a shoulder and a hip against the door as he recovered, and now he regarded her curiously through his mussed hair.
“I would ask, Weasley,” he said in his infuriating drawl, “What brought that on, but I suppose even dirt-poor Weasels are allowed to have a modicum of good taste.”
She sighed, and got to her feet.
“Sometimes, Malfoy, the best skill in the world is knowing when to shut up.”
There was a smirk, and he began rearranging his clothes.
“That, Weasley, is a skill which I already possess - didn’t you see me keeping very quiet just now?”
She was trying to wrap her brain around what she’d just done, and she listened to what he said with only half an ear.
“Look, Malfoy, I’ve got to go now.”
“You do what you have to, Weaslette,” he said mockingly, and moved just off the doorpost, so when she opened the door and left she brushed against him.
Over the next few days she kept waiting for the full enormity of what she’d done to hit her. It still hadn’t, a week later, and she kept wondering what it said about her that she felt so much worse over feeling hormonal with Seamus than over shagging Draco Malfoy.
She still couldn’t believe she’d done it, though. At random times, during a Tranfiguration class when she was staring down at her pincushion or talking to Lavender or brushing her teeth, she’d think “I’ve shagged Draco Malfoy,” and would pause and have to suppress the urge to giggle.
The good thing was that it had seemed to spur her into action. She rounded up all the old members of the DA, who had passed beyond petrified fear at the situation into sullen disobedience, and arranged a meeting.
She was in the Room of Requirement, sharpening her skills before she would have to teach the others, when the door opened and Draco Malfoy slouched in.
She looked up in startlement, and the dummy that the Room had so kindly provided her almost got her with a Body-bind before she disarmed it.
“Preparing for seditious activities, are you Weaslette?”
“Oh, just fuck off, Malfoy!” Her sudden fury at his probably enjoyment of the situation frightened her, but it dissipated when she saw his face and the recent tear tracks on it.
“Why’d I want to stay in a room with a filthy Weasley, anyway,” he sneered at once, but she caught his arm before he could open the door.
“No, Malfoy, I’m sorry.”
There was an interminable moment when he was still turned away and she thought he was going to insist on leaving huffily, but finally his tense shoulders sagged and he slid down the door and pressed his face into her stomach.
At first she wondered uneasily if he’d switched straight from depressed to horny, but when it became obvious that he was crying her unfortunate motherly instincts took over and she knelt down and hugged him until he eventually cried himself out.
And when he had, everything came spilling out of him - how Voldemort suspected that it wasn’t him who had killed Dumbledore, and wanted him to get Ravenclaw’s diadem, how his mother had escaped to the Continent after tortue but wanted him to revenge her, how Snape kept giving him veiled hints which he couldn’t quite decipher.
And Ginny sat there, and wondered at how much people were asking of this poor boy, and at how alike he and Harry were in the burdens that were placed on them and their inability to refuse.
So that was how their brief affair started - with sex and tears.
They met infrequently at first, perhaps once or twice a week.
Then Ginny, grumpy in class after staying up the night before with Draco, had spat open defiance at a Lestrange brother and hexed him in front of the class. He hadn't been expecting the Bat-Bogeys from a student, of course, which was the only reason she'd succeeded, but while he was struggling with them she'd run. Knowing that teachers had access to the dormitories and that the Room of Requirement could exclude intruders (something she'd found out when Colin had tried to come in and practice his DA skills while she and Draco were inside) she'd naturally sought the Room as refuge.
While she was living there on her own he came almost every day. Then more Gryffindors began showing up, looking to avoid the military camp that Hogwarts had turned into, and soon she was depending on Draco for all her information on what was happening outside the Room.
The Lestrange brothers had taken to posting sentries outside the corridor adjoining the Room - they weren't complete imbeciles, and mentions of the Room in literature gave them a hazy idea of where it was. So whenever Draco was on duty, she'd shoo the others into Honeydukes and meet him.
He came on the morning of the day Harry came back, and, later on, she would always think back on that time as the ultimate betrayal.
She remembered moving on top of him, looking down at his face suffused with some nameless emotion. The morning light was diffused into the room, and there were dust motes dancing in the air between them.
He stared seriously back at her in the half light.
“I would do anything for you, you know.”
The tone of his voice was a promise, and all she could think of was the weight of the obligations he was already under.
"I just want you to love me."
He reached up then, touched a knuckle to her cheek where a tear was inexplicably rolling down.
“Silly girl,” he murmured, and then he drew her down and kissed her.
But much later on in the day, after Harry had burst into the room and she had seen his eyes seeking her out, and light up when they found her, she knew she couldn’t leave Harry.
It certainly wasn’t that she loved Harry more than Draco, or that she wanted to be with him - it was just that Harry needed her now. She would do what she had to for him to see things through, and when he was sufficiently recovered and the aftermath had been dealt with (that is, presuming things went their way) she would leave him.
Draco didn’t quite see the logic of the whole thing though.
With Neville watching curiously from the corner, but everyone else busy with their own chatter in the Great Hall, she kept her voice down as she explained to him that she would need him to wait for her.
She didn’t think she’d ever seen him so furious - or, for that matter, so hurt.
“After all that, you’re still going back to Potter?”
“No, Draco, you don’t understand - ”
“It’s you who doesn’t understand!” He ran his hand through his hair. “Do you know what I wanted, the second time I met you in the Room of Requirement? I wanted someone who would take me for who I was.” His lip curled, but it wasn’t his usual sneer.
“It looks like the Room really got it wrong.”
They stared at each other. Then Crabbe came up and whispered something in Draco’s ear.
“Well,” his smile was a strange thing, now, “It looks like I must be going. I won’t be seeing you around, Weasley.”
Then he left, flanked by Crabbe and Goyle.
Later, Ginny would find out about how he met Harry in the Room for Ravenclaw’s diadem, how Harry saved his life.
Much later, she would turn up on his doorstep, to tell him she’d left Harry and have the door slammed in her face, only to be reopened an hour later for a tearful, angry, long-overdue reconciliation. She would think about the Room and wonder what magic operated it, how it knew what each of them needed.
But for now, she stared at his back and wondered miserably if he would ever want her again.
ORIGINAL REQUEST:
What would you like to receive? Draco and Ginny have a relationship while Harry is gone in Deathly Hallows. How Ginny deals with betraying Harry and ultimately Draco, when she leaves him after Harry returns.
The tone/mood of the fic: Angst. Definitely not light.
An element/line of dialogue/object you would like in your fic: Draco cries.
Preferred rating of the the fic you want: No Preference.
Canon or AU? Canon
Deal Breakers (what don't you want?): H/G fluff or Ginny too hung up on Harry. More attention to Ron than is strictly necessary.
Rating: NC17
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: Deathly Hallows, without the epilogue.
Summary: Everyone want something from Draco - all Ginny has to decide is if she does.
Author's Note: I'm glad I got this prompt! I had a lot of fun writing the first bit, but after that the plot bunnies which'd been bugging me just kind of left me stranded, which is why it was late! I hope it's what you wanted and you enjoy it :)
The Room of Requirement
Ginny knew that she was a traitor.
Certainly not of the worst sort there was, no; thank goodness she’d had enough self-control to prevent herself from sinking that low.
But her body seemed to be betraying notions she would never claim as her own. Her first inkling of it came when she was in the Library a week ago, doing her Charms homework.
She’d been reaching for a book on the top shelf, and Seamus had come up behind her and helped her get it. His robes had brushed against hers, and she’d sensed his sheer masculinity, the way his shoulders and his height had dwarfed her. In response her entire body had flushed under her robes and her pulse started thudding in her ears, and she had drooped, no longer straining her height towards the highest shelf but letting her hand fall back.
She had had to prevent herself from turning around for a few seconds after that, so that by the time she’d turned he had taken a step back and she had recovered enough to smile and take the book from him.
And it certainly wasn’t just with Seamus. Every time someone came near her, she’d been intensely aware of their presences, just like she used to be whenever Harry’d come into the room. She’d caused a commotion at the Great Hall just the other day, when Dean put his hand over hers on the narrow handle of the soup tureen as he’d taken it from her. Shed jumped, and the soup sloshed over the side and all down the front of Lavender’s robes.
Logically speaking, she knew it wasn’t her fault. It had been ages since she’d seen Harry, ages since the first time he’d kissed her and the last time he’d shown her how much pleasure you could get from mere physical touch.
She couldn’t help but feel, though, that this sort of thing was a complete betrayal of Harry and what they had had so briefly together. Also, it was completely undignified and just so… adolescent.
She was just recalling the exact way she’d felt and pondering the solution to her unhappy problem on her way to the Quidditch Pitch.
It was only two o’clock, which was the exact time the Slytherin’s time slot would expire and the Gryffindors would take over. There had been altercations at this exchange several times in the past, and she was in doubts about whether to turn up late just to avoid the Slytherin’s puffed up bravado; they had been especially insufferable since Snape became Headmaster.
Twice she turned around and then started forward again, until she finally turned the corner and saw, to her surprise, the door to the Room of Requirement appear behind her.
It had been a while since she’d been in the room - with Harry gone the entire Dumbledore’s Army had collapsed and there hadn’t been a meeting since term started.
She took a look at her watch and decided there was enough time for her to peek in before practice; she was always fascinated with the way the Room rearranged itself and never failed to look in to see what need the Room saw uppermost in her mind.
What greeted her curious eyes was a room extremely similar to the Prefect’s toilet.
There was a large marble bath set in the floor, and a toilet beside the door.
Seated on the toilet was Draco Malfoy, pants around his knees.
“So - ” she started to apologize, flushing a quick bright red as she tried to back out of the door, but he’d already caught hold of her wrist and dragged her inside, pulling himself to his feet in the process and pushing her against the door.
“Shut up!” he hissed in her ear. “And don’t bloody think I’m going to let you go out there and start blabbering about… this.”
When he glanced down, she did too,
And quickly looked up, flushing even more.
“Uhm,” she supplied helpfully.
“Yes,” he said nastily. “Just cottoned on, have you?”
She wished she hadn’t looked. Now she was hyperaware of how his weight was leaning on her, with his left hand holding her right above her head and his right hand (the one he’d just been stroking himself with, she thought hysterically) going around her back and holding her left hand behind her, pinned against the door.
Oh, and his erection pushing up against the hem of her shirt, of course.
She moved a bit, experimentally, gauging her chances of wrenching herself free, and stopped abruptly when he pressed into the soft patch above her hip and his breath hitched.
He regained his composure and looked at her, and all she could do was stare helplessly at his thin, ever-so-slightly asymmetrical mouth, just at her eye-level.
“I don’t have many options at this point, Weasley,” he bent his head down, curling his body around and over her to whisper in her ear, “Tell me what you think I should do.”
She could help it - her body jerked (pressing her hip into it again) when she felt the puff of hot, moist, air over her ear, and the slight brush of his nose on the delicate skin behind her ear.
She felt caged by his body, which was all around her and above her and -
Draco Malfoy’s cock was pressing into her shirt, and at this insane thought she flushed the deepest red she’d ever gone and he watched with evident interest as the blush flamed up over her face.
He puffed out a short breath of laughter then, (a puff she could feel through his whole body leaning against hers), and she thought, oh damn it.
“Looks like I might’ve a few more options than I thought,” he said, a smirk twisting his features (now she watched one side of his mouth lift higher then the other and resisted an insane urge to lean forward and bite at his bottom lip), and she jumped again when she felt something brush against the bare back of her left thigh.
He’d released her left arm, and was brushing his fingers back and forth over the sensitive skin of her thigh.
She couldn’t work her left arm free to catch at the doorknob, not with both their weight on her body, so she remained still, dragged her eyes up from his mouth to watch his eyes.
His eyelids flickered as his fingers started the slowest movement up.
She could feel all sorts of crazy things bubbling up at the very back of her throat, pleas to hurry up and fuck off and just take her. So to silence them, or at the very least prevent him hearing them she shifted purposefully, pushing her hip so that he ground right into it, and it was worth the permanent dent it was going to leave in her skin above her hipbones just to see his pale eyelashes flutter down and cover his grey eyes.
Dimly she knew that if the sight of his eyes, so different from Harry’s and inches away from her face where she’d come to expect only Harry’s, didn’t wake her and stun her into pushing him off, nothing would. And yet she floated on the great rush of emotions and pushed her hip against him again.
He opened his eyes again and swallowed, loud in the silence, and then he rested all of the fingers of that hand on her skin and skimmed his hand much, much faster up the back of her thigh and round to the front, until he had to shift (making sure to roll his hips against hers just the slightest amount) so that his warm palm covered the top of her thigh, fingers resting casually against the elastic of her knickers.
They stood there, gazing at each other, frozen.
Then she tossed her head a bit against the wood of the door and he slid his fingers with casual ease into her knickers, pushing underneath the damp crotch of them and beginning to stroke and slide through her folds.
She pushed her hips against his fingers and he pushed himself into her hipbone, the both of them moving in tandem and guided entirely by the rhythm of his fingers.
And she leaned forward and kissed him, wet, open-mouthed, and messy. He slid his tongue into her mouth smoothly and she opened her mouth wide and tilted her head so that she could slick her tongue against his as much as possible.
For a while they continued to kiss, mouths sliding over each others’ and hips jerking together and his fingers rubbing easily at her under her skirt. She could hear hitched breaths and deep, jerky ones, and the slick noises of their mouths and the much softer occasional wet sound from his fingers.
Then he slid a finger, two, into her and her hips jerked sharply and he sucked her lower lip into his mouth and bit it and the nails of his right hand dug into her left wrist where he was still holding it pressed to the door over her head and she gave a muffled moan and wrenched her mouth away from his, tucking her face into his neck and shuddering as she came.
And after a while she realized that he was still pushing insistently into her hip, so she turned her head a bit and gave a great big biting suck to the soft skin behind his ear.
“Uh,” he said intelligibly, then twitched as her tongue flicked out into his ear.
He turned his head to pant in the crook of her neck, in between open mouthed kisses.
“Suck me, Weasley,” he said, not bothering to whisper, and bit her on the muscle at the base of her back.
(For years after she would remember him saying this, the filth sounding incongruous with his posh accent.)
She looked up at him, then released the fistful of his fine blond hair her right hand had seized sometime during their snogging and slid it down his chest. Both of them watched it as it moved down and gripped him.
She twisted her left hand from his grip (there would be five red half-moons in her wrist that wouldn’t fade for a week after this) and wrapped it around her right hand.
Then she sank to her knees and flicked her tongue out and touched it delicately to the slit at the end and his hips twitched forward.
She frowned up at him, and then leaned forward to take him in her mouth, watching him watching her.
He tasted salty and bitter and like insistence and desire and she moaned against the weight of him on her tongue. She could feel the tension in his hips at this, could almost hear him reminding himself not to thrust forward.
Ginny huffed out a quick laugh, then slid her head down as far as it would go and hollowed her cheeks as she started to suck. She pulled her head back, long and lingering, then loosened her lips and slid them down him again, and she felt his hand tighten into a fistful of her hair.
“Faster,” he said indistinctly, head thrown back and balanced against gravity, and she smiled around his cock and started to bob her head.
He tilted his head down presently and looked down at her. She widened her eyes and stared back at him.
“Fuck,” he muttered, and quickly shut his eyes and tilted his head back up.
She could hear the bell ringing to signal the end of class, and footsteps coming down the corridor a thin door away, and she hadn’t realized before how much of an exhibitionist she was because that shouldn’t have turned her on more, shouldn’t have made her want to take a hand off his cock or his hip and slide it up her skirt.
But at the thought her traitorous body responded with a moan which rumbled its way up her throat, and Draco came, his body jerking and one hand clutching her shoulder hard enough to bruise.
Eventually she swallowed and sat back, her knees still weak and patterned with the grain of the wooden floor.
He had shifted position, turned to lean a shoulder and a hip against the door as he recovered, and now he regarded her curiously through his mussed hair.
“I would ask, Weasley,” he said in his infuriating drawl, “What brought that on, but I suppose even dirt-poor Weasels are allowed to have a modicum of good taste.”
She sighed, and got to her feet.
“Sometimes, Malfoy, the best skill in the world is knowing when to shut up.”
There was a smirk, and he began rearranging his clothes.
“That, Weasley, is a skill which I already possess - didn’t you see me keeping very quiet just now?”
She was trying to wrap her brain around what she’d just done, and she listened to what he said with only half an ear.
“Look, Malfoy, I’ve got to go now.”
“You do what you have to, Weaslette,” he said mockingly, and moved just off the doorpost, so when she opened the door and left she brushed against him.
Over the next few days she kept waiting for the full enormity of what she’d done to hit her. It still hadn’t, a week later, and she kept wondering what it said about her that she felt so much worse over feeling hormonal with Seamus than over shagging Draco Malfoy.
She still couldn’t believe she’d done it, though. At random times, during a Tranfiguration class when she was staring down at her pincushion or talking to Lavender or brushing her teeth, she’d think “I’ve shagged Draco Malfoy,” and would pause and have to suppress the urge to giggle.
The good thing was that it had seemed to spur her into action. She rounded up all the old members of the DA, who had passed beyond petrified fear at the situation into sullen disobedience, and arranged a meeting.
She was in the Room of Requirement, sharpening her skills before she would have to teach the others, when the door opened and Draco Malfoy slouched in.
She looked up in startlement, and the dummy that the Room had so kindly provided her almost got her with a Body-bind before she disarmed it.
“Preparing for seditious activities, are you Weaslette?”
“Oh, just fuck off, Malfoy!” Her sudden fury at his probably enjoyment of the situation frightened her, but it dissipated when she saw his face and the recent tear tracks on it.
“Why’d I want to stay in a room with a filthy Weasley, anyway,” he sneered at once, but she caught his arm before he could open the door.
“No, Malfoy, I’m sorry.”
There was an interminable moment when he was still turned away and she thought he was going to insist on leaving huffily, but finally his tense shoulders sagged and he slid down the door and pressed his face into her stomach.
At first she wondered uneasily if he’d switched straight from depressed to horny, but when it became obvious that he was crying her unfortunate motherly instincts took over and she knelt down and hugged him until he eventually cried himself out.
And when he had, everything came spilling out of him - how Voldemort suspected that it wasn’t him who had killed Dumbledore, and wanted him to get Ravenclaw’s diadem, how his mother had escaped to the Continent after tortue but wanted him to revenge her, how Snape kept giving him veiled hints which he couldn’t quite decipher.
And Ginny sat there, and wondered at how much people were asking of this poor boy, and at how alike he and Harry were in the burdens that were placed on them and their inability to refuse.
So that was how their brief affair started - with sex and tears.
They met infrequently at first, perhaps once or twice a week.
Then Ginny, grumpy in class after staying up the night before with Draco, had spat open defiance at a Lestrange brother and hexed him in front of the class. He hadn't been expecting the Bat-Bogeys from a student, of course, which was the only reason she'd succeeded, but while he was struggling with them she'd run. Knowing that teachers had access to the dormitories and that the Room of Requirement could exclude intruders (something she'd found out when Colin had tried to come in and practice his DA skills while she and Draco were inside) she'd naturally sought the Room as refuge.
While she was living there on her own he came almost every day. Then more Gryffindors began showing up, looking to avoid the military camp that Hogwarts had turned into, and soon she was depending on Draco for all her information on what was happening outside the Room.
The Lestrange brothers had taken to posting sentries outside the corridor adjoining the Room - they weren't complete imbeciles, and mentions of the Room in literature gave them a hazy idea of where it was. So whenever Draco was on duty, she'd shoo the others into Honeydukes and meet him.
He came on the morning of the day Harry came back, and, later on, she would always think back on that time as the ultimate betrayal.
She remembered moving on top of him, looking down at his face suffused with some nameless emotion. The morning light was diffused into the room, and there were dust motes dancing in the air between them.
He stared seriously back at her in the half light.
“I would do anything for you, you know.”
The tone of his voice was a promise, and all she could think of was the weight of the obligations he was already under.
"I just want you to love me."
He reached up then, touched a knuckle to her cheek where a tear was inexplicably rolling down.
“Silly girl,” he murmured, and then he drew her down and kissed her.
But much later on in the day, after Harry had burst into the room and she had seen his eyes seeking her out, and light up when they found her, she knew she couldn’t leave Harry.
It certainly wasn’t that she loved Harry more than Draco, or that she wanted to be with him - it was just that Harry needed her now. She would do what she had to for him to see things through, and when he was sufficiently recovered and the aftermath had been dealt with (that is, presuming things went their way) she would leave him.
Draco didn’t quite see the logic of the whole thing though.
With Neville watching curiously from the corner, but everyone else busy with their own chatter in the Great Hall, she kept her voice down as she explained to him that she would need him to wait for her.
She didn’t think she’d ever seen him so furious - or, for that matter, so hurt.
“After all that, you’re still going back to Potter?”
“No, Draco, you don’t understand - ”
“It’s you who doesn’t understand!” He ran his hand through his hair. “Do you know what I wanted, the second time I met you in the Room of Requirement? I wanted someone who would take me for who I was.” His lip curled, but it wasn’t his usual sneer.
“It looks like the Room really got it wrong.”
They stared at each other. Then Crabbe came up and whispered something in Draco’s ear.
“Well,” his smile was a strange thing, now, “It looks like I must be going. I won’t be seeing you around, Weasley.”
Then he left, flanked by Crabbe and Goyle.
Later, Ginny would find out about how he met Harry in the Room for Ravenclaw’s diadem, how Harry saved his life.
Much later, she would turn up on his doorstep, to tell him she’d left Harry and have the door slammed in her face, only to be reopened an hour later for a tearful, angry, long-overdue reconciliation. She would think about the Room and wonder what magic operated it, how it knew what each of them needed.
But for now, she stared at his back and wondered miserably if he would ever want her again.
ORIGINAL REQUEST:
What would you like to receive? Draco and Ginny have a relationship while Harry is gone in Deathly Hallows. How Ginny deals with betraying Harry and ultimately Draco, when she leaves him after Harry returns.
The tone/mood of the fic: Angst. Definitely not light.
An element/line of dialogue/object you would like in your fic: Draco cries.
Preferred rating of the the fic you want: No Preference.
Canon or AU? Canon
Deal Breakers (what don't you want?): H/G fluff or Ginny too hung up on Harry. More attention to Ron than is strictly necessary.