***

It had started with a room. It wasn’t the beginning of all things but it was a good start.

***

Ginny found it first, learned about it from the twins and concidered it a gift. She wanted time alone and an abandoned room nobody knew about seemed the perfect place for it. Her O.W.L.’s needed extra hard studying and here she could practice her spells and hexes without fear she could hurt someone.

Draco found it by accident. He was trying to set a tapestry on fire out of spite, as usual, when he realised it wasn’t a tapestry; it was a door. There were plenty doors with identity crises in Hogwarts but this door had a secret. A large empty room he could claim for his own. A place for privacy. Where he could brood over Harry Potter’s most recent accomplishment and occasionally study, in silence.

But the room was already claimed, by a Weasley.

“Out Weasley, this room is mine,” he declared.

“By whose law Malfoy?” she asked.

“My law. Now get out.”

“Will not. This is my hiding place!” she yelled.

“It won’t be for long if I tell on you.” Draco smirked feeling his win approaching. He would get this room.

“I’ll tell on you too Malfoy. This is a lose/lose situation,” she answered back contended.

He didn’t like her attitude. He narrowed his eyes. “So no one get’s the room,” he determined.

Ginny didn’t like where this was going. She had the room for a few days so far and liked it already. She frowned thinking.

“Look Malfoy since I feel really bad about the whole Bat Bogey incident we can share this room if you like. There’s two of us and it’s a pretty big room and I’m sure we won’t bother each other.”

He laughed. “I’m not the sharing type Ms. Weasley. I want this room whole or noone can have it.”

Now Ginny was really mad. She pulled out her wand and pointed it at him. “Listen you good for nothing egotistical git. Either you share this room with me and we both get our way or I’ll hex your pompous hide into St Mungo’s! Now stop being a annoying little brat and act like a normal wizard for once!”

Draco was stunned, and scared. “Fine! I’ll share but there’ll be rules!” he spat back.

She laughed at his face. “Fine.”

***

So they shared the empty room. All it had was two chairs in Ginny’s side of the room and a plush easy chair of Draco’s in the other. Surprisingly there wasn’t trouble between them but then there wasn’t talking between them either. Until one day Ginny decided to break a rule and test out Draco’s easy chair. Next thing she knew she woke up to find a seething Draco glaring at her. And they were arguing.

“Oops.”

“How dare you! That’s my chair!”

“It looked tempting. I’m sorry!”

“You broke the rules!”

They were stupid rules anyway. I was only checking it out and I fell asleep.”

“Nobody sits in my chair!”

“I’m sooorry . It’s not my fault this room is too bloody empty. It needs serious decorating.”

“We can’t bring anything from the rest of the castle. They’ll notice.”

“But we can transfigure stuff into sofas and chairs and it won’t make a difference!”

“Hmmm.”

“Come on Draco! This way I won’t sleep on your chair when I’m tired.”

And then they were arguing over which colour would match the window sit and where exactly near the fireplace the sofa would be perfect, all according to Gilderoy Lockhart’s Feng Shui For Your Wizarding Accomodations. This is how they started talking.

***

Over the months Draco’s brooding over Harry Potter lessened to a minimum and was replacde by more studying arguments-turned-into-conversations with Ginny.

He was snide about her family but whistled in amazement when she told him about Charlie the dragon tamer. She mocked him for the public scenes his girlfriends made more often than not but he was always serious when he asked her if she wanted him to beat her latest ex-boyfriend to a bloody pulp. And then she’d laugh and smuck him lightly when an anonymous yet cruel prank would be played on the latter. She cried when he sometimes talked about his family but always after he left, because she knew how proud he was. And he let her take out her anger and frustration on him sometimes, because he knew she needed it and then let her sleep it off on his plush chair.

***

Thus past two years and it was a week before Ginny would leave for the summer and Draco would leave Hogwarts for good. The graduation party was scheduled for that evening and Ginny’s brother Ron along with his classmates were all jittery with nervousness and anxiety.

There wasn’t any practice or studying to be done but she still crept out to get to the shared room. Draco was there, half-dressed for the ceremony, sitting on the sofa looking at the flames. For the first time in a long while there was a silence between them that fell heavy on Ginny’s throat.

“There’s whispering in the Slytherin dungeons that the Dark Lord will strike tonight,” he started.

Ginny smiled. “They know, they’re waiting for him.”

And she sat beside him with nothing else to say. At long last Ginny turned and looked at his pensieve face, his hair and eyes ablaze with the fire.

She reached up and kissed him fleetingly on the lips. He looked at her hard, his body still as stone. She kissed him again not daring to linger more than a fragment of a second. She kissed him trembling, once more, fearing he wouldn’t respond but then he grabbed her neck and trapped her lips with his own before she could pull back.

It felt like instant and utter satiation that simultaneously ignited a hunger a thousand times more powerful. Like the world came into place with a sounding click and everything made sense but it didn’t matter. Not when they were like this, both a part of a whole in the arms of each other, her an extention of himself and him and extention of hers.

When it was done and both needed eargently air he pulled back, still holding her and leaned his forehead against hers.

“I’ll write,” he said, still catching his breath.

***

The seniors of Hogwarts never officially graduated that year because of the attack. But the –almost- whole of the wizarding world was celebrating and nobody really cared about a stupid formality anyway. The news from the battle were terrible but as all unsettling and disturbing things, it was left to oblivion. Ginny found out that Lucius Malfoy had been kissed by the Dementors during the battle and she cried because noone deserved a fate like that, especially one with children who loved them.

Ginny and Draco kept having their conversations through the owl post. She spent most her free time in the room that wasn’t shared anymore studying and thinking and writing to him. His last letter to her said:



Don’t let them find our room like we left it. I shared with you but I don’t share with anybody else. I’ll meet you at King’s Cross.

Draco



She cried once she emptied the room. But when she left Hogwarts for good, she didn’t look back.

He met her at King’s Cross Station with the sun in his eyes and a smile on his lips. She jumped in his arms and he held her tightly to him and kissed her. Her brow, her eyes, her lovely red hair, her lips, and held even more tightly and that by itself was a good start as well.