'Your Heart’s Desire', Harry/Ginny/Draco, 15+
Title: Your Heart’s Desire
Ship: Harry/Ginny/Draco
Summary: Draco and Ginny have an arrangement.
Rating: 15+. ‘Adult Concepts’.
Word Count: ~6000
Notes: Deathly Hallows canon compliant. Hence, spoilers. Thank you so much to rdprice29 for betaing.
Your Heart's Desire
It starts, like many things in Ginny’s life, with Quidditch.
They decide to ban it. It takes them until January, but the management - as McGonagall calls them - finally decide that it must be banned.
‘But - but -’ Ginny stutters in the middle of Transfiguration, her hedgehog still un-transfigured on her desk. It’s not fair she tacks on the end, with a but what else am I going to do with Luna gone and a what did Quidditch ever do to Voldemort, but the sight of McGonagall’s pinched lips forces Ginny to swallow down what she’s sure will be seen as childish protests.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Weasley,’ says McGonagall, her face twisted into something that could be taken for sadness. ‘But try to remember that it’s just a sport. I’m sure you can find something else to fill your time with.’
Her slightly pitying expression shifts seamlessly into a knowing look.
As it happens, Ginny does.
Ginny does not give up - not that easily, anyway. She charges up to McGonagall’s office the next day to register her complaint.
Just because the Carrows never got on to a Quidditch team, she thinks furiously, just because they’re so stupid and fat and ugly they wouldn’t know a broomstick if one got shoved up -
‘Weasley?’
She stops in the middle of the corridor. Malfoy is standing in front of her.
Over his shoulder is a broomstick.
‘It’s been banned,’ she says stupidly.
‘I know, Weasley.’
And because there doesn’t seem to be any other reason why he would be hovering indecisively outside McGonagall’s office with a broom - maybe he thinks its physical presence will further his case - she asks, ‘Are you up here to complain as well?’
‘No,’ he snaps.
She almost says You shouldn’t be embarrassed, but her saying that to Malfoy would be embarrassing in and of itself. On the other hand … well, he shouldn’t be embarrassed. What else do they have, the Gryffindor and Slytherin Quidditch Captains? The DA, despite McGonagall’s raised eyebrows, fell apart. Quidditch was almost all that Ginny had left.
Gryffindor versus Slytherin has now become safe and easy: while the ‘management’ probably kept the playing of Quidditch in the first place to encourage division within the school, the students didn’t let it work out like that. They fought to keep Quidditch pure, and, for the most part, it worked.
When it comes down to it, it’s just the wind in your hair and flying as fast as you can to be better, faster, stronger. It’s a sport - but it’s not and it never will be, Ginny thinks furiously, just a sport.
‘Do you want to go down to the pitch?’ she asks.
He blinks. ‘And do what? Play a one-a-side match?’
‘We could race.’
He stares at her. ‘All right, then.’
She loses. One lap around the pitch, and he’s already ahead of her; in the second lap, she catches up; but in the third, he streaks ahead and she loses. Considering his broom is probably a hundred times better than hers, she shouldn’t be angry. But she is.
They land on the grass, next to their abandoned bags. He smirks; she pants.
‘Told you I’d win, Weasley,’ he says. ‘What’s the forfeit for losing?’
His eyes glitter.
‘Piss off, Malfoy.’ She shoulders her bag and starts off towards the castle. ‘Don’t try it.’
‘You’re just bitter,’ he says, falling into step besides her.
‘We didn’t specify anything before the race,’ she says, speeding up her walking and starting to regret the entire incident.
‘If I’d lost, you would have insisted on something.’
‘I wouldn’t have.’
‘Come on, Weasley,’ he wheedles. ‘Just one little thing.’
‘What?’ she snaps. Then, she wonders, what’s going on? Is Malfoy flirting with me?
‘Carry my bag.’ He chucks it into her arms.
‘Wha-oh, fuck off.’
She tries to shove it back at him, but he side-steps her, clasping his hands behind his back. ‘I just want you to do me a couple of favours, that’s all -’
‘Don’t even try -’
‘I’ll carry your broom, how about that?’ He grabs her broomstick and throws it over his shoulder.
‘But … what’s the point?’
‘Brooms are lighter.’
He has a point. His bag feels like it’s made of bricks.
‘How about …’ He raises his eyebrows mysteriously. ‘You comply with a few of my requests.’
She stares at him. ‘You must be joking.’
‘Go on, Weasley. It’s just a bit of fun.’
She bites her lower lip, which she knows for a fact is something she only does when she’s flirting. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Nothing to do with the -’ He stops. ‘Nothing to do with the outside world - how about that?’
‘And nothing perverted.’
His mouth quirks. ‘All right, then: nothing to do with the outside world, and nothing perverted.’
‘But … But I didn’t -’
‘Come on, then, Weasley,’ he says, and off he marches.
But the flirting - if that’s what that twisted behaviour was a sample of - doesn’t continue. He makes her follow him all around the school in silence as he goes on various errands - getting his Potions homework from the common room, handing it into Slughorn, sending a letter from the Owlery - and even though the stupid bags are killing her and her feet are starting to hurt, she doesn’t just chuck them on the floor and walk away.
She could. But she doesn’t.
The thing is, even though this is degrading and embarrassing and dear God she hopes no one sees her, it’s also fairly - surreal. This wouldn’t happen every day. And it makes a change from going back to the common room.
Ginny Weasley can have adventures as well.
Eventually, he says, ‘One last thing,’ and leads her down the seventh-floor corridor.
He stops outside the Room of Requirement. Before she has a chance to question him, he’s crossed the stretch of wall three times with deft, well-practiced steps, turned the doorknob and pushed the door open.
Suspiciously, she follows him in.
She stops when she sees that the only thing in there is a single bed, pushed up against the far wall.
‘Oh, no. Nothing perverted, Malfoy!’
He gives her a look. ‘I don’t want anything perverted. Just come in for a second.’
She does as he bids, still holding his bag. She’s starting to feel a little scared - no she isn’t. Considering what the rest of her family are facing on a daily basis - what Harry, Ron and Hermione are facing - she’s scared about being in a room with Malfoy? No, she thinks angrily. No, I bloody well am not.
She blinks: he’s sitting on the bed.
‘Sit down,’ he says, patting the space next to him.
Gryffindor. Against her better judgement, she chucks both of their bags down on the floor and does as he asks, shooting him a deeply mistrustful look as she does so.
‘Lie down.’
She looks at him.
He blinks innocently.
What is she doing? Slowly, she lies down on the bed, head on the pillow, legs stretched out to where he is sitting.
With a sudden movement, he’s crawling up the bed; her whole body grows rigid in preparation for some kind of attack - only to feel his hand, soft as a breath, on her hair.
‘Get your hands o-’
‘This isn’t sexual perversion, Weasley,’ he murmurs; she freezes. ‘I’m just touching your hair. What’s wrong with that?’
She blinks rapidly and furiously in an effort to clear her head and starts up in an attempt at a sitting position. ‘Get off me, I’m leaving -’
His hand clutches her shoulder with the grip of a claw. ‘Going? To go and do what?’ he whispers in her ear. ‘Plan another of your little meetings? Wonder how the war’s going without you? Sit with Longbottom and wonder what’s happened to Loony Lovegood?’
Her eyes slide closed.
‘Well, Weasley?’ The whisper is softer now, but more insistent; for a moment, she thinks it’s a voice inside her own head. ‘What is it that you have to go and do that’s so much more interesting than this?’
Slowly, he pushes her back down on to the bed.
His hand starts to ghost through her hair again as he props himself up on his elbow. She lies on her back, wishing her breathing wasn’t so loud, and despite it all, she feels her eyelids start to close agai
‘There’s just one more thing I want you to do for me,’ he whispers close to her ear; in an effort to stop her skin tingling, she bites her lip. His icy hand leaves her hair and trails over her neck and her collarbone, forcing her to clench her teeth to stop herself from gasping; then, the hand vanishes, only to reappear on her stomach where her shirt has ridden up.
She tenses.
He strokes lightly at the tiny, soft hairs of the exposed skin. ‘Ginny …’ he whispers, so close to her ear he’s almost inside it. ‘I want to see the real Ginny.’
He brushes his thumb firmly across the now slightly sweaty skin of her belly and she shivers.
‘This can’t be all there is, can it?’ he mutters. ‘There’s more to you than this, surely …’
She feels the slow wet slide of his lips curving up into a grin against the side of her neck and she twitches her head away.
‘You’re a bit of an enigma, you know that, Weasley?’ he asks quietly. ‘You put on such a front for people …’
‘I don’t put on a front for anyone …’ she tries, but she can barely hear herself.
‘I wonder,’ he whispers, the smile audible in his voice, ‘what Ginny looks like when she’s all on her own … I wonder what she does when she’s all on her own …’
Her back twitches; her legs brace themselves slightly; fight or flight -
‘Come on, Ginny,’ his smile breathes in her ear. ‘You lost the race.’
She clenches her fists.
‘This is the last thing I want you to do for me. I want you to show me Ginny when no one’s watching.’
She opens her mouth, but no sound comes out.
‘Touch yourself, Ginny.’
‘You’re out of your mind,’ she says shakily, shoving at the hand on her stomach and attempting to sit up.
He grabs the wrist that’s reaching for his own and, once more, pushes her back on to the bed. ‘Don’t,’ he says.
He’s stronger than she is, but she has a feeling that he wouldn’t force her down if she really struggled - Then why aren’t you really struggling -
‘I won’t touch you,’ he says. ‘Not at all, if you don’t want. I just want you to do this one thing for me.’
Fuck off, Malfoy - get your hands off me, you stinking piece of Slytherin scum - don’t you ever dare touch me again -
‘But - why?’ is what she ends up saying.
‘Why not?’ he whispers.
The question hangs in the air.
She can feel her teeth anxiously gnawing at her lower lip as she looks up and meets the grey eyes hovering above her.
A voice of reason is telling her that this is the stupidest thing she’s ever contemplated doing.
But Ginny Weasley is nothing if not a risk-taker.
Her free hand starts to slide down her stomach. ‘Don’t touch me, Malfoy.’
His smile is triumphant. ‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’
It’s remarkably easy with Malfoy watching, Ginny finds.
But then, he speaks.
‘What are you thinking about, Weasley?’
She bites her lip and moves her fingers a little faster.
‘Or, should I say, who? It doesn’t have to be me, you know,’ he adds amusedly. ‘In fact, I’m sure it isn’t. I’m just interested.’
She pushes her head back into the pillow beneath her and tries to look oblivious.
He bends his head down to whisper in her ear again. ‘Is it Potter?’
As his name spills from Malfoy’s lips, a clear vision of him crosses her mind - because of course it’s Harry - and she accidentally lets out a moan. She immediately worries about covering it up - but how do you cover up a moan when you’re lying on a bed with your hands down your knickers?
‘Think of Potter, Weasley,’ he says; she can hear the grin in his voice. ‘I like that.’
Once it’s over, she feels shaken. She sits up, frantically pushing her skirt back down. He does not seem to notice her horror.
‘Excellent,’ he says with a nod. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow?’
‘Wha-no!’
She meets his eyes and is startled to see a calm smile. ‘It wasn’t that bad, was it?’
‘Ye-I -’
‘You certainly seemed to be enjoying yourself,’ he says coolly.
She doesn’t know what to say. She eyes his still-robed appearance. ‘But … don’t you - aren’t you …’
His eyes gleam and then he leans forwards to whisper, ‘Of course not, Ginny. It’s all about you.’
But Ginny knows Slytherins, and she knows Draco Malfoy. This is not a selfless act.
The next night, she goes to the seventh-floor corridor, just to see.
The door is there, so she pushes it open.
He’s sitting on the bed. ‘You’re late.’
‘I’m not -’ she falters. ‘I didn’t come for anything.’
She stands there and feels stupid.
‘Would you like to sit down, Weasley?’
He pats the space beside him again and she crosses the room and sits down.
‘Same as yesterday?’ he asks her.
She says nothing.
‘Then why did you come here?’ He twists around to face her, puts a light hand on her shoulder. ‘It didn’t do any harm yesterday, did it?’
And slowly, slowly, she feels herself falling backwards on to the bed.
Almost as if with lives of their own, her hands start to move: one lifts her skirt up and the other pushes her knickers down a bit-but-not-too-much and strokes her thigh.
Before she can move any further, she feels his cold hands on hers.
‘May I?’ he asks.
‘May you what?’
He moves her hands. The one on her leg goes under her knee and pushes it up, and then is slid on to the inside of her thigh; the one on the hem of her skirt is dragged up her shirt to her breasts. ‘Like this,’ he whispers.
He removes his hands and she keeps them in his positions, the one on her chest moving into her bra, the one on her leg sliding over her skin and between her legs.
After many minutes, he says, ‘Faster, Weasley.’
Her legs start to shake.
‘Thinking of Potter again, Ginny?’
She can’t even bring herself to deny it. ‘Mmm-hmm.’
‘What’s he doing?’ he mutters, close to her face. ‘Bit faster.’
Her back arches. ‘Fast enough for you?’ she gasps.
‘Not quite,’ he murmurs, trailing his cold knuckles over her sweaty stomach; she gasps. ‘What’s Potter doing?’
‘What do you think?’
His hand moves over her still-buttoned shirt and slowly squeezes one of her breasts. ‘Tell me, Weasley.’
‘He’s -’
‘Stick your finger in,’ he orders. ‘The whole way up.’
Her rear moves off the bed and her head presses back into the pillow. Her hair has come completely loose - her skirt is somewhere around her hips; her legs have spread; her knickers are - what the hell are her knickers still doing on?
‘So he’s fucking you, is he?’ comes the whisper.
‘Yes,’ she moans, ‘yes -’
‘Is he inside you, Weasley?’
‘It’s - he’s - him - and he -’
She comes, furiously hard with a scream and a sudden rigidity and a huge shiver and then it’s over.
She lies there in her own sweat.
She opens her eyes and sees him hovering above her. She shuts them again.
‘I enjoyed that, Weasley,’ he says with a smirk. ‘Thank you.’
‘What are you doing for Harry tonight?’ he whispers in her ear on the third night.
‘None of your business,’ she rasps, shirt semi-unbuttoned, bra loose and one hand already down her knickers.
‘Oh,’ he whispers, ‘I think that you’ll find that it is my business, Weasley, while you’re in my bed. Now …’ Propping himself up on his elbow, he starts to pluck stray twists of ginger out from where they’ve become trapped in her collar and arrange them artfully on her pillow. Her eyes slide shut as she ignores him, hand starting to work away furiously. ‘Tonight, you’re giving him head.’
‘No I’m not,’ she gasps, fighting the temptation to open her eyes.
‘Go on, Weasley,’ he murmurs, sliding his hand across her belly. ‘Have him at your mercy.’
She whimpers.
His hand slips down, down, down into her knickers and without touching hers, his fingertips start to ease down through her curls by themselves. ‘Does he like it, Weasley?’
She makes some kind of muffled noise.
‘Is he begging for more?’ he asks, and the amusement in his voice makes her want to get up, slap him, leave the room and run - but then his icy fingers slip that tiny bit lower, her back arches and everything is forgiven. ‘What else is he doing? Moaning your name? Thrusting into your mouth?’
She nods desperately, not really listening -
‘What’s he doing, Weasley?’ he whispers, earnest - interested - in her ear. ‘Hands in your hair?’ She feels a hand twine itself into her sticky hair and hang on with a vice-like grip.
‘Mmm -’
‘Holding you down, is he? What does he say?’
‘Say?’ she gasps. She’s close now, so close -
‘Does he say your name?’ Malfoy whispers. ‘Or does he bite his lip until it bleeds and try to keep silent?’
‘Talks -’
‘What does he mutter? Filth? Instructions?’
Despite her closed eyes, she can feel him looming above her.
His breath is warming her lips.
‘What do you do to him, Ginny?’ he exhales. ‘How do you drive Potter wild?’
She opens her mouth to speak, but two freezing cold fingers slip inside instead.
‘Show me,’ he whispers.
So she does: she sucks and swirls and nibbles, and it is not long before stars explode behind her eyelids once again.
On the fourth night, she marches into the Room of Requirement and slams the door behind her.
‘I fucking hate this place,’ she storms, throwing off her robes and tossing them on to the floor. ‘I hate the school, I hate the people in it, I especially hate you -’ she kicks off her shoes and lies down on the bed - ‘and I’ve been thinking about this all day, so if you could fucking well make it good, please.’
‘Well,’ says Malfoy, starting to crawl predatorily up the bed, eyeing her nipples through the white t-shirt, ‘bra-less, Weasley. What a shame Potter doesn’t care.’
‘What?’
‘He’s angry tonight, Weasley,’ he says, grabbing her by the knees and dragging her violently down the bed - she squawks as his nails dig into her thighs. ‘He’s angrier than you, in fact. His fists are clenched and his eyes are angry and all he wants tonight is a fuck. He doesn’t care about your hair or your lips or your tits, he just wants something to stick his dick in, and as long as it’s got two legs, he doesn’t really give a fuck what it is.’
Something hard drags up the outside of Ginny’s thigh, and it takes her a second, but she realises that it’s Malfoy’s Hawthorn wand; with two of those voiceless spells she still hasn’t managed to get right, he slices up her knickers and flings them aside. Shoving her skirt up to her ribs, he pushes at her shoulders so that she falls back on to the mattress with a flump.
‘So he picks you up and throws you up against a wall -’ Slowly, he trails his fingers between her legs - ‘And takes you right there -’
He thrusts a finger up into her and she cries out: wordless, formless noise -
Within a few days, they have a system: the moment the second person enters the room, they leap on each other and tumble on to the bed. The Room’s furniture doesn’t change: Ginny thinks that a bigger or more comfortable bed would make them both realise what they are doing.
The system becomes mutual, as well: usually, it starts, still, with his attempt at control - an order to squeeze a bit harder, a lazily amused question as to what Potter is doing, a harsher command, muttered in her ear, to scream a bit louder - but the first time she looks up and catches the fierce tent at the front of his trousers, she doesn’t even think about it: leaping up, she pins him to the bed, undoes his trousers and fucks him with her fist.
He tries to bat her off, but she ignores him; quickly, he gives up and lets her get on with it. He doesn’t say anything, not even when he comes: with a girlish whimper and a bitten lip, he manages to stay quiet.
Afterwards, he gives her a small and somewhat hesitant nod - a rather patronising master-to-pupil seal of approval - but she’s not sure what it means.
So now, it usually ends up with them with their hands down each other’s trousers. Sometimes, this only happens after hours of teasing and the following of endless instructions; sometimes, it happens before they’ve even shut the door.
‘Did Potter ever do this for you?’ he asks on the seventh night, his thumb up her skirt as she shudders, back against the wall, knickers down around an ankle.
‘No,’ she gasps, fisting her hands into the duvet.
‘But you wanted him to?’
‘Ye-yes.’
‘Doesn’t know much about girls, does he, Potter?’
‘Not that much, no,’ she pants. ‘Faster, Malfoy -’
He withdraws his thumb and sinks a finger up and in. ‘But you’re not a virgin, are you, Weasley?’
‘N-’ She breaks off with a gasp as his finger starts to move.
‘You’re not? But you and Potter never fucked?’
She doesn’t answer; her eyes are closed and her chest is heaving.
He withdraws his hand and places it on her thigh.
‘Weasley?’
‘Malfoy, don’t -’
‘Answer the question.’
‘No, of course we didn’t - now bloody well put your hand back or -’
Very lightly, he traces one finger between her legs. ‘Who did you lose it to, then? Thomas?’
‘Yes,’ she snaps. ‘Not that he’s got anything to do with this.’
‘No,’ he says softly, almost to himself. ‘No, he hasn’t.’ Then, louder: ‘Interesting.’
‘It doesn’t interest you in the slightest -’
He moves a finger and she breaks off with a gasp.
‘Beg,’ he says with a smug smile.
‘No way -’
‘Go on, Ginny,’ he says in a sing-song voice, tracing his sticky finger across her sweaty thigh in circles. ‘Beg me to touch you.’
‘I don’t want -’ she starts with a light shove at his shoulders.
He catches her wrists in his hands and presses them up against the wall, above her head, and bends his head down to her ear. ‘But you want me to do it for you, don’t you?’ He crawls up, closer to the wall, manoeuvring his knees under her bum and forcing her up on to his lap. ‘That’s why you’re here, isn’t it - so that you don’t have to be the one to get yourself off?’
She whimpers.
‘Come on, Ginny,’ he whispers softly, and then he does something neither one of them has ever done before, and presses a gentle kiss to her neck. ‘Beg me to touch you.’
With a tremulous flutter, her eyes slide closed. ‘Please.’
He kisses her neck again, slower, this time, and abandons one of her wrists to bring his hand back down between her thighs again. ‘Say my name.’
‘Malfoy,’ she half-moans, her head falling back.
‘My real name.’
She gasps as his thumb grows faster. ‘Draco. Please - please, Draco -’
‘Good girl.’ As everything around her starts to lose its clarity, she hears his muttering. ‘Good girl, Ginny … good girl.’
During the day, they ignore each other.
One day, she is put into detention and taken to the seventh-years’ ‘lesson’ in what was once the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom. Malfoy is the one the Carrows decide could do with a bit more ‘practical experience’.
He stares at her and the hand clenching his wand trembles slightly.
She considers mouthing Just do it at him, the way she would if he were Neville or Michael or Seamus, but she knows she won’t need to.
He points his wand at her and says the words and she clenches her fists as she crumples to the floor and screams as loud as she can - she hopes she does, anyway; it’s difficult to tell what you’re doing in that situation - and, satisfied that Ginny Weasley is starting to break with much more ease and frequency, they let her go early.
‘You said it was nothing perverted,’ she says one night as they lie beside each other, sweaty and exhausted. Usually, they go once they’ve finished, but sometimes, like tonight, they stay. In these moments, they feel almost like a couple, and Ginny finds this feeling less unsettling than she probably should.
‘Hmm?’
‘The first time - you said it was nothing perverted,’ she repeats. ‘Nothing to do with the outside world, and nothing perverted. Those were our conditions.’
He props himself up on an arm and his hand drifts into her hair. ‘I’m a Slytherin, Weasley,’ he says, teasing out one of her semi-curly waves of hair and examining it critically. ‘You would have thought that after six years at this school, you would’ve worked it out.’ He drops the lock of hair, drops his head down to her ear and drops his voice to a whisper: ‘We are not to be trusted.’
It is another two weeks before they have sex.
There seems to be some kind of unspoken arrangement: that night, when she enters the Room of Requirement, he is standing by the door - must have been standing there for some time - and he grabs her by the waist before she has taken two steps. He lets go of her to slam the door shut; then, he seizes her bag, chucks it into a corner and pulls her hips up flush against his, her back to his front. He starts pulling her hair out of its ponytail and her shirt buttons out of their buttonholes.
She can feel him behind her, burning a hole through the back of her skirt as her clothes rapidly loosen - ‘Malfoy, are we - what are -’
He cuts her off by spinning her round and staring into her face. His skin is the exact colour of death, white and grey except for where it circles his eyes, where it’s a pale red; the grey of his eyes, on the other hand, is vibrant and fevered. It doesn’t look as if he’s slept in days.
Wordlessly, he starts towards the narrow bed, tugging at her arm; she follows, only to have him push her down on to the mattress.
He sits down and pulls her up on to his lap. Her fingers curl around his waist as he finishes off her buttons, pulls her shirt off and drops it on to the floor. Sliding his hand around her back, he undoes her bra; as it juts forward and her breasts are unexpectedly exposed to the already-sweaty air, she covers them with an arm, suddenly embarrassed, ridiculous heat blushing its way over her face and body; ignoring her, he pulls the bra from her arms and drops it on the floor.
He pulls her body closer to his; both terrified and desperate, she moves her own hands into his collar. He slides a hand up her inner thigh and, without meeting her eyes, bends over to swiftly kiss her breasts a couple of times, rather brusquely, almost as if it’s expected of him - she wonders, not for the first time, how much he did with Pansy Parkinson - but then she finds her own hands tugging at his belt and suddenly there is a fumble of hands at both of their waists, a ridiculously frantic pulling and pushing to get clothes off.
He manages to get the zip at the side of her skirt down at the same time as she whips his belt out of its buckle. He pushes her skirt down and it pools on the floor; she tugs frantically at his trousers, something an awful lot like desire shooting through her, until he wriggles out of them.
His fingers pluck at her knickers and his eyes plead with her. Giving up to whatever this is, whatever he is, whatever she is, nowadays, her head falls back and her hair tickles her shoulder blades in acquiescence.
He yanks her knickers off and then she’s naked naked naked, completely naked in front of him for the first time, but for some reason it doesn’t really matter with Malfoy - and there’s the germ of an inkling as to what exactly that some reason is, but no time to think about it now - because he’s shedding his underwear and his erection is springing free and oh oh I’m really going to do this -
He slides his thumb between her legs - a brief, efficient check of her readiness - and starts to pull her over his thighs and towards him again, but then something crystallizes in her mind and at the last moment, she stops him.
Pushing at his chest, she moves backwards and twists around.
It takes a second for him to understand what it means, Ginny looking at him over her shoulder on her hands and knees - but then, suddenly, he gets it.
His pointed face fills with something like awe - and fear? - and she looks back at him defiantly, breasts pointing straight down like udders and body thrumming with need, and for the first time in months, she feels like a Gryffindor.
His expression changes, his face filling with purpose, and then he crawls forwards, placing his hands on her hips, and then lower, spreading her apart.
She faces the front and waits, biting her lower lip. His hands fumble around between her legs, lifting her even higher and lining himself up.
He pushes in quickly, making her gasp awkwardly and her stomach clench; as she forces herself to relax, she hears him hiss as he moves in deeper. After a second, he pulls out, his hands gripping her arse, and that feels good and she moans; then, he starts to thrust in and out properly and she bounces on the bed on her hands and knees as he moans a little effeminately himself.
She can already tell this isn’t going to last very long: his actions are growing faster and his moans are becoming grunts. She isn’t anywhere near as close as he is, but it doesn’t really matter - he can have this. Goodness knows she probably owes him something.
But her gracious thoughts of letting him have tonight are marred by tiny suds of anger bubbling up to the forefront of her consciousness: it’s almost like he wants to pretend this isn’t happening - not with her, anyway.
In theory, she does not mind what, or who, his thoughts are on, but in reality - this is happening. This is her body and her - her mind, her soul, her whatever-else those bits are called that aren’t purely biological substance - and this isn’t a game anymore, because it is she and Malfoy who are having sex, no one else.
She’s the one he’s doing it with, she’s the one who’s being kind and not caring about not coming and, more importantly, not saying a word about what’s going on inside his head, and yet - and yet, he isn’t even looking at her.
He can think about whomever he damn well pleases, she decides, but she’s the one who’s really here - this is really happening - and he’s going to look at her.
‘Malfoy,’ she says, ‘Malfoy - stop -’
‘Huh?’ he grunts, but he does bring himself to a stop, and then with a slow sickening burn, he pulls out, because Malfoy may be many things - one of which is probably visible to her if she does what she’s been avoiding doing for weeks and slides her gaze down to his forearm - but he is not a rapist.
She crawls forwards and twists around, not knowing what she’s doing, a half-cocked plan half-formed in her head of forcing him to admit what’s going on, or of showing him her anger, or of somehow clearing the air - but then she’s met with a half-naked boy, still in a white school shirt, with wild eyes, a trembling lip, and messy, sweat-darkened blond hair.
Malfoy’s hair isn’t supposed to look like that.
She reaches out, as blind as he looks, in an attempt to slick it down, but he moves to stop her. He bobs against her stomach, and so she changes tack and reaches between them, instead; in something akin to anger, he bats her hand away and hauls her on to his lap once more.
He wraps her legs around him and she follows them with her arms, tightly winding them around his waist, and then he pushes her roughly back down on to the bed and enters her again. Her fingernails dig into his back as she gasps with pleasure; his body jerks as she squirms.
His gaze moves from her shoulder to her face; their eyes meet. ‘I’m -’
She tightens her grip on his waist, closes her eyes and nods, and as she expects, she feels something in him let go as his hips lose control; what she does not expect are the clammy hands she feels, smoothing their way over her face until they find her cheeks, and the wet lips that press themselves against hers.
As he comes, she threads her hands into his hair in the way she used to with another boy, and desperately, they use their first kiss to swallow down the plethora of names that try to spill from their tongues.
After a while, it peters out: boredom and the war take over, and after Easter, Ginny doesn’t come back to Hogwarts.
And then Harry is there, face-to-face in front of her in the damn Room of Requirement; then, he’s dead; then, he’s alive again, and it all seems to hang on that Hawthorn wand; and then, the war is over.
And then the war is over, and Harry is free, ecstatically happy and offering her himself, and Ginny almost doesn’t want to take him.
Almost.
Sometimes, when they’re out together, they see him, and Malfoy sees them. They’ve seen each other a few times: during the ream of funerals, held at Hogwarts in the week after, and a couple of times at Ministry functions in the years that have passed since.
She loves Harry.
But sometimes she thinks she shouldn’t have taken him.
She opened her legs and shared her heart with someone else, and now her rights to him are shared - shared with someone she doesn’t speak to anymore, someone she only sees across crowded halls, glaring balefully at them, the happy couple. Harry twitches irritably, almost longing for a good old-fashioned fight with Malfoy; Ginny pretends she does not see what flickers in Malfoy’s grey eyes.
When you are offered your heart’s desire, no matter how unfair your advantage, it is very difficult to turn it down.
Draco won the first battle. It is only right that Ginny wins the war.
At the end of the day, though, there is one thing that Ginny Weasley has learnt from this whole affair: there is more Slytherin in her than most people think.
END
Ship: Harry/Ginny/Draco
Summary: Draco and Ginny have an arrangement.
Rating: 15+. ‘Adult Concepts’.
Word Count: ~6000
Notes: Deathly Hallows canon compliant. Hence, spoilers. Thank you so much to rdprice29 for betaing.
Your Heart's Desire
It starts, like many things in Ginny’s life, with Quidditch.
They decide to ban it. It takes them until January, but the management - as McGonagall calls them - finally decide that it must be banned.
‘But - but -’ Ginny stutters in the middle of Transfiguration, her hedgehog still un-transfigured on her desk. It’s not fair she tacks on the end, with a but what else am I going to do with Luna gone and a what did Quidditch ever do to Voldemort, but the sight of McGonagall’s pinched lips forces Ginny to swallow down what she’s sure will be seen as childish protests.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Weasley,’ says McGonagall, her face twisted into something that could be taken for sadness. ‘But try to remember that it’s just a sport. I’m sure you can find something else to fill your time with.’
Her slightly pitying expression shifts seamlessly into a knowing look.
As it happens, Ginny does.
Ginny does not give up - not that easily, anyway. She charges up to McGonagall’s office the next day to register her complaint.
Just because the Carrows never got on to a Quidditch team, she thinks furiously, just because they’re so stupid and fat and ugly they wouldn’t know a broomstick if one got shoved up -
‘Weasley?’
She stops in the middle of the corridor. Malfoy is standing in front of her.
Over his shoulder is a broomstick.
‘It’s been banned,’ she says stupidly.
‘I know, Weasley.’
And because there doesn’t seem to be any other reason why he would be hovering indecisively outside McGonagall’s office with a broom - maybe he thinks its physical presence will further his case - she asks, ‘Are you up here to complain as well?’
‘No,’ he snaps.
She almost says You shouldn’t be embarrassed, but her saying that to Malfoy would be embarrassing in and of itself. On the other hand … well, he shouldn’t be embarrassed. What else do they have, the Gryffindor and Slytherin Quidditch Captains? The DA, despite McGonagall’s raised eyebrows, fell apart. Quidditch was almost all that Ginny had left.
Gryffindor versus Slytherin has now become safe and easy: while the ‘management’ probably kept the playing of Quidditch in the first place to encourage division within the school, the students didn’t let it work out like that. They fought to keep Quidditch pure, and, for the most part, it worked.
When it comes down to it, it’s just the wind in your hair and flying as fast as you can to be better, faster, stronger. It’s a sport - but it’s not and it never will be, Ginny thinks furiously, just a sport.
‘Do you want to go down to the pitch?’ she asks.
He blinks. ‘And do what? Play a one-a-side match?’
‘We could race.’
He stares at her. ‘All right, then.’
She loses. One lap around the pitch, and he’s already ahead of her; in the second lap, she catches up; but in the third, he streaks ahead and she loses. Considering his broom is probably a hundred times better than hers, she shouldn’t be angry. But she is.
They land on the grass, next to their abandoned bags. He smirks; she pants.
‘Told you I’d win, Weasley,’ he says. ‘What’s the forfeit for losing?’
His eyes glitter.
‘Piss off, Malfoy.’ She shoulders her bag and starts off towards the castle. ‘Don’t try it.’
‘You’re just bitter,’ he says, falling into step besides her.
‘We didn’t specify anything before the race,’ she says, speeding up her walking and starting to regret the entire incident.
‘If I’d lost, you would have insisted on something.’
‘I wouldn’t have.’
‘Come on, Weasley,’ he wheedles. ‘Just one little thing.’
‘What?’ she snaps. Then, she wonders, what’s going on? Is Malfoy flirting with me?
‘Carry my bag.’ He chucks it into her arms.
‘Wha-oh, fuck off.’
She tries to shove it back at him, but he side-steps her, clasping his hands behind his back. ‘I just want you to do me a couple of favours, that’s all -’
‘Don’t even try -’
‘I’ll carry your broom, how about that?’ He grabs her broomstick and throws it over his shoulder.
‘But … what’s the point?’
‘Brooms are lighter.’
He has a point. His bag feels like it’s made of bricks.
‘How about …’ He raises his eyebrows mysteriously. ‘You comply with a few of my requests.’
She stares at him. ‘You must be joking.’
‘Go on, Weasley. It’s just a bit of fun.’
She bites her lower lip, which she knows for a fact is something she only does when she’s flirting. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Nothing to do with the -’ He stops. ‘Nothing to do with the outside world - how about that?’
‘And nothing perverted.’
His mouth quirks. ‘All right, then: nothing to do with the outside world, and nothing perverted.’
‘But … But I didn’t -’
‘Come on, then, Weasley,’ he says, and off he marches.
But the flirting - if that’s what that twisted behaviour was a sample of - doesn’t continue. He makes her follow him all around the school in silence as he goes on various errands - getting his Potions homework from the common room, handing it into Slughorn, sending a letter from the Owlery - and even though the stupid bags are killing her and her feet are starting to hurt, she doesn’t just chuck them on the floor and walk away.
She could. But she doesn’t.
The thing is, even though this is degrading and embarrassing and dear God she hopes no one sees her, it’s also fairly - surreal. This wouldn’t happen every day. And it makes a change from going back to the common room.
Ginny Weasley can have adventures as well.
Eventually, he says, ‘One last thing,’ and leads her down the seventh-floor corridor.
He stops outside the Room of Requirement. Before she has a chance to question him, he’s crossed the stretch of wall three times with deft, well-practiced steps, turned the doorknob and pushed the door open.
Suspiciously, she follows him in.
She stops when she sees that the only thing in there is a single bed, pushed up against the far wall.
‘Oh, no. Nothing perverted, Malfoy!’
He gives her a look. ‘I don’t want anything perverted. Just come in for a second.’
She does as he bids, still holding his bag. She’s starting to feel a little scared - no she isn’t. Considering what the rest of her family are facing on a daily basis - what Harry, Ron and Hermione are facing - she’s scared about being in a room with Malfoy? No, she thinks angrily. No, I bloody well am not.
She blinks: he’s sitting on the bed.
‘Sit down,’ he says, patting the space next to him.
Gryffindor. Against her better judgement, she chucks both of their bags down on the floor and does as he asks, shooting him a deeply mistrustful look as she does so.
‘Lie down.’
She looks at him.
He blinks innocently.
What is she doing? Slowly, she lies down on the bed, head on the pillow, legs stretched out to where he is sitting.
With a sudden movement, he’s crawling up the bed; her whole body grows rigid in preparation for some kind of attack - only to feel his hand, soft as a breath, on her hair.
‘Get your hands o-’
‘This isn’t sexual perversion, Weasley,’ he murmurs; she freezes. ‘I’m just touching your hair. What’s wrong with that?’
She blinks rapidly and furiously in an effort to clear her head and starts up in an attempt at a sitting position. ‘Get off me, I’m leaving -’
His hand clutches her shoulder with the grip of a claw. ‘Going? To go and do what?’ he whispers in her ear. ‘Plan another of your little meetings? Wonder how the war’s going without you? Sit with Longbottom and wonder what’s happened to Loony Lovegood?’
Her eyes slide closed.
‘Well, Weasley?’ The whisper is softer now, but more insistent; for a moment, she thinks it’s a voice inside her own head. ‘What is it that you have to go and do that’s so much more interesting than this?’
Slowly, he pushes her back down on to the bed.
His hand starts to ghost through her hair again as he props himself up on his elbow. She lies on her back, wishing her breathing wasn’t so loud, and despite it all, she feels her eyelids start to close agai
‘There’s just one more thing I want you to do for me,’ he whispers close to her ear; in an effort to stop her skin tingling, she bites her lip. His icy hand leaves her hair and trails over her neck and her collarbone, forcing her to clench her teeth to stop herself from gasping; then, the hand vanishes, only to reappear on her stomach where her shirt has ridden up.
She tenses.
He strokes lightly at the tiny, soft hairs of the exposed skin. ‘Ginny …’ he whispers, so close to her ear he’s almost inside it. ‘I want to see the real Ginny.’
He brushes his thumb firmly across the now slightly sweaty skin of her belly and she shivers.
‘This can’t be all there is, can it?’ he mutters. ‘There’s more to you than this, surely …’
She feels the slow wet slide of his lips curving up into a grin against the side of her neck and she twitches her head away.
‘You’re a bit of an enigma, you know that, Weasley?’ he asks quietly. ‘You put on such a front for people …’
‘I don’t put on a front for anyone …’ she tries, but she can barely hear herself.
‘I wonder,’ he whispers, the smile audible in his voice, ‘what Ginny looks like when she’s all on her own … I wonder what she does when she’s all on her own …’
Her back twitches; her legs brace themselves slightly; fight or flight -
‘Come on, Ginny,’ his smile breathes in her ear. ‘You lost the race.’
She clenches her fists.
‘This is the last thing I want you to do for me. I want you to show me Ginny when no one’s watching.’
She opens her mouth, but no sound comes out.
‘Touch yourself, Ginny.’
‘You’re out of your mind,’ she says shakily, shoving at the hand on her stomach and attempting to sit up.
He grabs the wrist that’s reaching for his own and, once more, pushes her back on to the bed. ‘Don’t,’ he says.
He’s stronger than she is, but she has a feeling that he wouldn’t force her down if she really struggled - Then why aren’t you really struggling -
‘I won’t touch you,’ he says. ‘Not at all, if you don’t want. I just want you to do this one thing for me.’
Fuck off, Malfoy - get your hands off me, you stinking piece of Slytherin scum - don’t you ever dare touch me again -
‘But - why?’ is what she ends up saying.
‘Why not?’ he whispers.
The question hangs in the air.
She can feel her teeth anxiously gnawing at her lower lip as she looks up and meets the grey eyes hovering above her.
A voice of reason is telling her that this is the stupidest thing she’s ever contemplated doing.
But Ginny Weasley is nothing if not a risk-taker.
Her free hand starts to slide down her stomach. ‘Don’t touch me, Malfoy.’
His smile is triumphant. ‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’
It’s remarkably easy with Malfoy watching, Ginny finds.
But then, he speaks.
‘What are you thinking about, Weasley?’
She bites her lip and moves her fingers a little faster.
‘Or, should I say, who? It doesn’t have to be me, you know,’ he adds amusedly. ‘In fact, I’m sure it isn’t. I’m just interested.’
She pushes her head back into the pillow beneath her and tries to look oblivious.
He bends his head down to whisper in her ear again. ‘Is it Potter?’
As his name spills from Malfoy’s lips, a clear vision of him crosses her mind - because of course it’s Harry - and she accidentally lets out a moan. She immediately worries about covering it up - but how do you cover up a moan when you’re lying on a bed with your hands down your knickers?
‘Think of Potter, Weasley,’ he says; she can hear the grin in his voice. ‘I like that.’
Once it’s over, she feels shaken. She sits up, frantically pushing her skirt back down. He does not seem to notice her horror.
‘Excellent,’ he says with a nod. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow?’
‘Wha-no!’
She meets his eyes and is startled to see a calm smile. ‘It wasn’t that bad, was it?’
‘Ye-I -’
‘You certainly seemed to be enjoying yourself,’ he says coolly.
She doesn’t know what to say. She eyes his still-robed appearance. ‘But … don’t you - aren’t you …’
His eyes gleam and then he leans forwards to whisper, ‘Of course not, Ginny. It’s all about you.’
But Ginny knows Slytherins, and she knows Draco Malfoy. This is not a selfless act.
The next night, she goes to the seventh-floor corridor, just to see.
The door is there, so she pushes it open.
He’s sitting on the bed. ‘You’re late.’
‘I’m not -’ she falters. ‘I didn’t come for anything.’
She stands there and feels stupid.
‘Would you like to sit down, Weasley?’
He pats the space beside him again and she crosses the room and sits down.
‘Same as yesterday?’ he asks her.
She says nothing.
‘Then why did you come here?’ He twists around to face her, puts a light hand on her shoulder. ‘It didn’t do any harm yesterday, did it?’
And slowly, slowly, she feels herself falling backwards on to the bed.
Almost as if with lives of their own, her hands start to move: one lifts her skirt up and the other pushes her knickers down a bit-but-not-too-much and strokes her thigh.
Before she can move any further, she feels his cold hands on hers.
‘May I?’ he asks.
‘May you what?’
He moves her hands. The one on her leg goes under her knee and pushes it up, and then is slid on to the inside of her thigh; the one on the hem of her skirt is dragged up her shirt to her breasts. ‘Like this,’ he whispers.
He removes his hands and she keeps them in his positions, the one on her chest moving into her bra, the one on her leg sliding over her skin and between her legs.
After many minutes, he says, ‘Faster, Weasley.’
Her legs start to shake.
‘Thinking of Potter again, Ginny?’
She can’t even bring herself to deny it. ‘Mmm-hmm.’
‘What’s he doing?’ he mutters, close to her face. ‘Bit faster.’
Her back arches. ‘Fast enough for you?’ she gasps.
‘Not quite,’ he murmurs, trailing his cold knuckles over her sweaty stomach; she gasps. ‘What’s Potter doing?’
‘What do you think?’
His hand moves over her still-buttoned shirt and slowly squeezes one of her breasts. ‘Tell me, Weasley.’
‘He’s -’
‘Stick your finger in,’ he orders. ‘The whole way up.’
Her rear moves off the bed and her head presses back into the pillow. Her hair has come completely loose - her skirt is somewhere around her hips; her legs have spread; her knickers are - what the hell are her knickers still doing on?
‘So he’s fucking you, is he?’ comes the whisper.
‘Yes,’ she moans, ‘yes -’
‘Is he inside you, Weasley?’
‘It’s - he’s - him - and he -’
She comes, furiously hard with a scream and a sudden rigidity and a huge shiver and then it’s over.
She lies there in her own sweat.
She opens her eyes and sees him hovering above her. She shuts them again.
‘I enjoyed that, Weasley,’ he says with a smirk. ‘Thank you.’
‘What are you doing for Harry tonight?’ he whispers in her ear on the third night.
‘None of your business,’ she rasps, shirt semi-unbuttoned, bra loose and one hand already down her knickers.
‘Oh,’ he whispers, ‘I think that you’ll find that it is my business, Weasley, while you’re in my bed. Now …’ Propping himself up on his elbow, he starts to pluck stray twists of ginger out from where they’ve become trapped in her collar and arrange them artfully on her pillow. Her eyes slide shut as she ignores him, hand starting to work away furiously. ‘Tonight, you’re giving him head.’
‘No I’m not,’ she gasps, fighting the temptation to open her eyes.
‘Go on, Weasley,’ he murmurs, sliding his hand across her belly. ‘Have him at your mercy.’
She whimpers.
His hand slips down, down, down into her knickers and without touching hers, his fingertips start to ease down through her curls by themselves. ‘Does he like it, Weasley?’
She makes some kind of muffled noise.
‘Is he begging for more?’ he asks, and the amusement in his voice makes her want to get up, slap him, leave the room and run - but then his icy fingers slip that tiny bit lower, her back arches and everything is forgiven. ‘What else is he doing? Moaning your name? Thrusting into your mouth?’
She nods desperately, not really listening -
‘What’s he doing, Weasley?’ he whispers, earnest - interested - in her ear. ‘Hands in your hair?’ She feels a hand twine itself into her sticky hair and hang on with a vice-like grip.
‘Mmm -’
‘Holding you down, is he? What does he say?’
‘Say?’ she gasps. She’s close now, so close -
‘Does he say your name?’ Malfoy whispers. ‘Or does he bite his lip until it bleeds and try to keep silent?’
‘Talks -’
‘What does he mutter? Filth? Instructions?’
Despite her closed eyes, she can feel him looming above her.
His breath is warming her lips.
‘What do you do to him, Ginny?’ he exhales. ‘How do you drive Potter wild?’
She opens her mouth to speak, but two freezing cold fingers slip inside instead.
‘Show me,’ he whispers.
So she does: she sucks and swirls and nibbles, and it is not long before stars explode behind her eyelids once again.
On the fourth night, she marches into the Room of Requirement and slams the door behind her.
‘I fucking hate this place,’ she storms, throwing off her robes and tossing them on to the floor. ‘I hate the school, I hate the people in it, I especially hate you -’ she kicks off her shoes and lies down on the bed - ‘and I’ve been thinking about this all day, so if you could fucking well make it good, please.’
‘Well,’ says Malfoy, starting to crawl predatorily up the bed, eyeing her nipples through the white t-shirt, ‘bra-less, Weasley. What a shame Potter doesn’t care.’
‘What?’
‘He’s angry tonight, Weasley,’ he says, grabbing her by the knees and dragging her violently down the bed - she squawks as his nails dig into her thighs. ‘He’s angrier than you, in fact. His fists are clenched and his eyes are angry and all he wants tonight is a fuck. He doesn’t care about your hair or your lips or your tits, he just wants something to stick his dick in, and as long as it’s got two legs, he doesn’t really give a fuck what it is.’
Something hard drags up the outside of Ginny’s thigh, and it takes her a second, but she realises that it’s Malfoy’s Hawthorn wand; with two of those voiceless spells she still hasn’t managed to get right, he slices up her knickers and flings them aside. Shoving her skirt up to her ribs, he pushes at her shoulders so that she falls back on to the mattress with a flump.
‘So he picks you up and throws you up against a wall -’ Slowly, he trails his fingers between her legs - ‘And takes you right there -’
He thrusts a finger up into her and she cries out: wordless, formless noise -
Within a few days, they have a system: the moment the second person enters the room, they leap on each other and tumble on to the bed. The Room’s furniture doesn’t change: Ginny thinks that a bigger or more comfortable bed would make them both realise what they are doing.
The system becomes mutual, as well: usually, it starts, still, with his attempt at control - an order to squeeze a bit harder, a lazily amused question as to what Potter is doing, a harsher command, muttered in her ear, to scream a bit louder - but the first time she looks up and catches the fierce tent at the front of his trousers, she doesn’t even think about it: leaping up, she pins him to the bed, undoes his trousers and fucks him with her fist.
He tries to bat her off, but she ignores him; quickly, he gives up and lets her get on with it. He doesn’t say anything, not even when he comes: with a girlish whimper and a bitten lip, he manages to stay quiet.
Afterwards, he gives her a small and somewhat hesitant nod - a rather patronising master-to-pupil seal of approval - but she’s not sure what it means.
So now, it usually ends up with them with their hands down each other’s trousers. Sometimes, this only happens after hours of teasing and the following of endless instructions; sometimes, it happens before they’ve even shut the door.
‘Did Potter ever do this for you?’ he asks on the seventh night, his thumb up her skirt as she shudders, back against the wall, knickers down around an ankle.
‘No,’ she gasps, fisting her hands into the duvet.
‘But you wanted him to?’
‘Ye-yes.’
‘Doesn’t know much about girls, does he, Potter?’
‘Not that much, no,’ she pants. ‘Faster, Malfoy -’
He withdraws his thumb and sinks a finger up and in. ‘But you’re not a virgin, are you, Weasley?’
‘N-’ She breaks off with a gasp as his finger starts to move.
‘You’re not? But you and Potter never fucked?’
She doesn’t answer; her eyes are closed and her chest is heaving.
He withdraws his hand and places it on her thigh.
‘Weasley?’
‘Malfoy, don’t -’
‘Answer the question.’
‘No, of course we didn’t - now bloody well put your hand back or -’
Very lightly, he traces one finger between her legs. ‘Who did you lose it to, then? Thomas?’
‘Yes,’ she snaps. ‘Not that he’s got anything to do with this.’
‘No,’ he says softly, almost to himself. ‘No, he hasn’t.’ Then, louder: ‘Interesting.’
‘It doesn’t interest you in the slightest -’
He moves a finger and she breaks off with a gasp.
‘Beg,’ he says with a smug smile.
‘No way -’
‘Go on, Ginny,’ he says in a sing-song voice, tracing his sticky finger across her sweaty thigh in circles. ‘Beg me to touch you.’
‘I don’t want -’ she starts with a light shove at his shoulders.
He catches her wrists in his hands and presses them up against the wall, above her head, and bends his head down to her ear. ‘But you want me to do it for you, don’t you?’ He crawls up, closer to the wall, manoeuvring his knees under her bum and forcing her up on to his lap. ‘That’s why you’re here, isn’t it - so that you don’t have to be the one to get yourself off?’
She whimpers.
‘Come on, Ginny,’ he whispers softly, and then he does something neither one of them has ever done before, and presses a gentle kiss to her neck. ‘Beg me to touch you.’
With a tremulous flutter, her eyes slide closed. ‘Please.’
He kisses her neck again, slower, this time, and abandons one of her wrists to bring his hand back down between her thighs again. ‘Say my name.’
‘Malfoy,’ she half-moans, her head falling back.
‘My real name.’
She gasps as his thumb grows faster. ‘Draco. Please - please, Draco -’
‘Good girl.’ As everything around her starts to lose its clarity, she hears his muttering. ‘Good girl, Ginny … good girl.’
During the day, they ignore each other.
One day, she is put into detention and taken to the seventh-years’ ‘lesson’ in what was once the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom. Malfoy is the one the Carrows decide could do with a bit more ‘practical experience’.
He stares at her and the hand clenching his wand trembles slightly.
She considers mouthing Just do it at him, the way she would if he were Neville or Michael or Seamus, but she knows she won’t need to.
He points his wand at her and says the words and she clenches her fists as she crumples to the floor and screams as loud as she can - she hopes she does, anyway; it’s difficult to tell what you’re doing in that situation - and, satisfied that Ginny Weasley is starting to break with much more ease and frequency, they let her go early.
‘You said it was nothing perverted,’ she says one night as they lie beside each other, sweaty and exhausted. Usually, they go once they’ve finished, but sometimes, like tonight, they stay. In these moments, they feel almost like a couple, and Ginny finds this feeling less unsettling than she probably should.
‘Hmm?’
‘The first time - you said it was nothing perverted,’ she repeats. ‘Nothing to do with the outside world, and nothing perverted. Those were our conditions.’
He props himself up on an arm and his hand drifts into her hair. ‘I’m a Slytherin, Weasley,’ he says, teasing out one of her semi-curly waves of hair and examining it critically. ‘You would have thought that after six years at this school, you would’ve worked it out.’ He drops the lock of hair, drops his head down to her ear and drops his voice to a whisper: ‘We are not to be trusted.’
It is another two weeks before they have sex.
There seems to be some kind of unspoken arrangement: that night, when she enters the Room of Requirement, he is standing by the door - must have been standing there for some time - and he grabs her by the waist before she has taken two steps. He lets go of her to slam the door shut; then, he seizes her bag, chucks it into a corner and pulls her hips up flush against his, her back to his front. He starts pulling her hair out of its ponytail and her shirt buttons out of their buttonholes.
She can feel him behind her, burning a hole through the back of her skirt as her clothes rapidly loosen - ‘Malfoy, are we - what are -’
He cuts her off by spinning her round and staring into her face. His skin is the exact colour of death, white and grey except for where it circles his eyes, where it’s a pale red; the grey of his eyes, on the other hand, is vibrant and fevered. It doesn’t look as if he’s slept in days.
Wordlessly, he starts towards the narrow bed, tugging at her arm; she follows, only to have him push her down on to the mattress.
He sits down and pulls her up on to his lap. Her fingers curl around his waist as he finishes off her buttons, pulls her shirt off and drops it on to the floor. Sliding his hand around her back, he undoes her bra; as it juts forward and her breasts are unexpectedly exposed to the already-sweaty air, she covers them with an arm, suddenly embarrassed, ridiculous heat blushing its way over her face and body; ignoring her, he pulls the bra from her arms and drops it on the floor.
He pulls her body closer to his; both terrified and desperate, she moves her own hands into his collar. He slides a hand up her inner thigh and, without meeting her eyes, bends over to swiftly kiss her breasts a couple of times, rather brusquely, almost as if it’s expected of him - she wonders, not for the first time, how much he did with Pansy Parkinson - but then she finds her own hands tugging at his belt and suddenly there is a fumble of hands at both of their waists, a ridiculously frantic pulling and pushing to get clothes off.
He manages to get the zip at the side of her skirt down at the same time as she whips his belt out of its buckle. He pushes her skirt down and it pools on the floor; she tugs frantically at his trousers, something an awful lot like desire shooting through her, until he wriggles out of them.
His fingers pluck at her knickers and his eyes plead with her. Giving up to whatever this is, whatever he is, whatever she is, nowadays, her head falls back and her hair tickles her shoulder blades in acquiescence.
He yanks her knickers off and then she’s naked naked naked, completely naked in front of him for the first time, but for some reason it doesn’t really matter with Malfoy - and there’s the germ of an inkling as to what exactly that some reason is, but no time to think about it now - because he’s shedding his underwear and his erection is springing free and oh oh I’m really going to do this -
He slides his thumb between her legs - a brief, efficient check of her readiness - and starts to pull her over his thighs and towards him again, but then something crystallizes in her mind and at the last moment, she stops him.
Pushing at his chest, she moves backwards and twists around.
It takes a second for him to understand what it means, Ginny looking at him over her shoulder on her hands and knees - but then, suddenly, he gets it.
His pointed face fills with something like awe - and fear? - and she looks back at him defiantly, breasts pointing straight down like udders and body thrumming with need, and for the first time in months, she feels like a Gryffindor.
His expression changes, his face filling with purpose, and then he crawls forwards, placing his hands on her hips, and then lower, spreading her apart.
She faces the front and waits, biting her lower lip. His hands fumble around between her legs, lifting her even higher and lining himself up.
He pushes in quickly, making her gasp awkwardly and her stomach clench; as she forces herself to relax, she hears him hiss as he moves in deeper. After a second, he pulls out, his hands gripping her arse, and that feels good and she moans; then, he starts to thrust in and out properly and she bounces on the bed on her hands and knees as he moans a little effeminately himself.
She can already tell this isn’t going to last very long: his actions are growing faster and his moans are becoming grunts. She isn’t anywhere near as close as he is, but it doesn’t really matter - he can have this. Goodness knows she probably owes him something.
But her gracious thoughts of letting him have tonight are marred by tiny suds of anger bubbling up to the forefront of her consciousness: it’s almost like he wants to pretend this isn’t happening - not with her, anyway.
In theory, she does not mind what, or who, his thoughts are on, but in reality - this is happening. This is her body and her - her mind, her soul, her whatever-else those bits are called that aren’t purely biological substance - and this isn’t a game anymore, because it is she and Malfoy who are having sex, no one else.
She’s the one he’s doing it with, she’s the one who’s being kind and not caring about not coming and, more importantly, not saying a word about what’s going on inside his head, and yet - and yet, he isn’t even looking at her.
He can think about whomever he damn well pleases, she decides, but she’s the one who’s really here - this is really happening - and he’s going to look at her.
‘Malfoy,’ she says, ‘Malfoy - stop -’
‘Huh?’ he grunts, but he does bring himself to a stop, and then with a slow sickening burn, he pulls out, because Malfoy may be many things - one of which is probably visible to her if she does what she’s been avoiding doing for weeks and slides her gaze down to his forearm - but he is not a rapist.
She crawls forwards and twists around, not knowing what she’s doing, a half-cocked plan half-formed in her head of forcing him to admit what’s going on, or of showing him her anger, or of somehow clearing the air - but then she’s met with a half-naked boy, still in a white school shirt, with wild eyes, a trembling lip, and messy, sweat-darkened blond hair.
Malfoy’s hair isn’t supposed to look like that.
She reaches out, as blind as he looks, in an attempt to slick it down, but he moves to stop her. He bobs against her stomach, and so she changes tack and reaches between them, instead; in something akin to anger, he bats her hand away and hauls her on to his lap once more.
He wraps her legs around him and she follows them with her arms, tightly winding them around his waist, and then he pushes her roughly back down on to the bed and enters her again. Her fingernails dig into his back as she gasps with pleasure; his body jerks as she squirms.
His gaze moves from her shoulder to her face; their eyes meet. ‘I’m -’
She tightens her grip on his waist, closes her eyes and nods, and as she expects, she feels something in him let go as his hips lose control; what she does not expect are the clammy hands she feels, smoothing their way over her face until they find her cheeks, and the wet lips that press themselves against hers.
As he comes, she threads her hands into his hair in the way she used to with another boy, and desperately, they use their first kiss to swallow down the plethora of names that try to spill from their tongues.
After a while, it peters out: boredom and the war take over, and after Easter, Ginny doesn’t come back to Hogwarts.
And then Harry is there, face-to-face in front of her in the damn Room of Requirement; then, he’s dead; then, he’s alive again, and it all seems to hang on that Hawthorn wand; and then, the war is over.
And then the war is over, and Harry is free, ecstatically happy and offering her himself, and Ginny almost doesn’t want to take him.
Almost.
Sometimes, when they’re out together, they see him, and Malfoy sees them. They’ve seen each other a few times: during the ream of funerals, held at Hogwarts in the week after, and a couple of times at Ministry functions in the years that have passed since.
She loves Harry.
But sometimes she thinks she shouldn’t have taken him.
She opened her legs and shared her heart with someone else, and now her rights to him are shared - shared with someone she doesn’t speak to anymore, someone she only sees across crowded halls, glaring balefully at them, the happy couple. Harry twitches irritably, almost longing for a good old-fashioned fight with Malfoy; Ginny pretends she does not see what flickers in Malfoy’s grey eyes.
When you are offered your heart’s desire, no matter how unfair your advantage, it is very difficult to turn it down.
Draco won the first battle. It is only right that Ginny wins the war.
At the end of the day, though, there is one thing that Ginny Weasley has learnt from this whole affair: there is more Slytherin in her than most people think.
END