AN: Written for the wonderful Rainpuddle, whose fics you should all be reading. Right now. :-)

***

Ginny Weasley was somewhat distracted these days.

Her Housemates had noticed it. Her distraction wasn’t as bad as it had been her disastrous first year, but still she noticeably wasn’t as involved in the everyday dynamics and life in the Gryffindor house. Her brother had noticed it, and had started to keep a much closer eye on his wayward little sister. Her professors would ask her if she was doing okay as she left class, and Dumbledore had offered her a sherbert lemon the one time she had nearly run into him in the hall. Harry Potter remained oblivious to her behavior, but that was no surprise to anyone.

Colin Creevey, unable to hold back his curiosity any longer, finally asked the question on everyone’s mind. “What’s up with you, Ginny?”

“Huh?” she replied, eloquently. Her fingers danced along her collar unconsciously, bringing his attention to a love bite fading on her neck.

“Who is it?” he demanded.

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ginny replied, well aware that the entire section of the Gryffindor table that she sat at was watching her every move. She wasn’t aware of the fact that half the faculty table and a good portion of the Hufflepuff and Slytherin tables were watching as well. The faculty thrived on student gossip, after all, and the Hufflepuffs lived vicariously through the actions of the other three houses. The Slytherins simply could not allow one of their enemies to be brought down without lurking around, waiting for fresh blood and preparing to attack the fallen creature.

Ron, Hermione and Harry even deigned to turn their attention onto the action.

“C’mon, Gin, tell us who it is,” said Seamus Finnigan.

“Yeah,” said the recently jilted Dean Thomas.

Ginny looked like a cornered Hippogriff. “There isn’t anyone,” she said emphatically, then fled the table.

Everyone looked around.

“I saw her on the third floor the other day,” Lavender offered. “I didn’t see her with anyone though.”

“I saw her coming back from the lake two days ago, but I didn’t think to look for someone with her,” Parvati added.

“Who in the world could it be?” asked Hermione.

Cut to the Slytherin table. Draco Malfoy was studiously inspecting his green beans, hoping that the gossip surrounding Ginny Weasley would die down soon. He’d already spat out the obligatory insult on both the girl and the stupidity of anyone wanting to get involved with one of the Weasleys, and now he just wanted to be able to leave the Great Hall without stirring up any completely, totally unfounded rumors about him following the girl to comfort her with their forbidden love.

God, could he use some forbidden love right now.

Alas, he was not willing to even plant the seeds of suspicion in anyone’s mind, so he sat, listening to Pansy and Blaise prattle on about how fat, ugly and stupid the Weasley girl’s lover had to be in order for her to not want to share who he was.

He had nearly been driven to murdering a Housemate when the owl swooped in. The owl was plain and most likely a school one, he noted, as it dropped in front of him and offered him a letter. He took it, shooed the owl away, and read.

What the hell are you waiting on, you coward? I’m waiting on you!

She hadn’t even bothered to sign it, he noticed, and judging from the shaky writing she had written it against a stone wall. He folded the note imperiously, and stood gracefully. “I must go,” he said to his Slytherin disciples, and they mumbled, “See ya,” back at him.

He strode purposefully out of the hall, making sure that he didn’t accidently swish his robes around like a ponce, or Snape. After all, everyone was surely watching his exit with awe, lust or fear, and he didn’t want to make a bad impression.

He had started to head down towards the dungeon when an arm grabbed him. The arm was attached to Ginny Weasley, who looked vaguely distraught.

“What are we going to do?” she asked immediately as they headed down a dusty, disused hallway to their favorite abandoned classroom. It was filled with old-fashioned and very sturdy furniture, and had no windows or extra doors for people to sneak in on them from. It was the perfect location for an illicit affair.

“We?” he asked. “No one suspects me of having a wicked affair, sweetie. You’re on your own for this one.”

As soon as her glare rested on him he knew that had been the exact wrong thing to say aloud. He had thought that her incident with the younger incarnation of the Dark Lord had left her with ability to rend him shamefaced with a single glance, but after asking her one night when she had been particularly mellow she had told him that her mother possessed an even more potent variation of the glare. He had made a promise to himself then and there that he never wanted to even meet her mother in fear of what he might say in face of such a glare.

“What I mean is,” he said, frantically trying to come up with a diplomatic way of saying the same thing, “I can’t be involved, because that would defeat the entire purpose of keeping this secret.”

Sometimes he couldn’t even believe how good he was.

Ginny sighed. “We shouldn’t even have to keep this secret. It’s not our fault who our families are and their various political affiliations, after all. We’re just two people, not our families.”

“But our families make us who we are,” he pointed out evenly. “They give us our name, and we’re stuck with them and their influence forever.”

“But that doesn’t mean we have to bend to their will!” Ginny exclaimed. Draco wasn’t quite sure that he was happy where this train of thought was taking them. He was pretty content right here, after all.

“We aren’t bending, Gin, we’re just not announcing this to the world,” Draco said. “We’ve gone over why it wouldn’t work a million times.”

“But that’s just it!” she said. “There isn’t any good reason why it wouldn’t.”

“What do you mean?” Draco said cautiously.

“Well, your father wouldn’t actually hurt you over this,” Ginny said. “He couldn’t cut you out of the will, as you’re his only son and the last of the line. Your mother loves you, so she wouldn’t let him do anything truly spiteful to you. He wouldn’t hurt me because that would be too obvious, and he’d be sent back to Azkaban for sure.”

Draco was forced to agree. “But what about your family?”

“My family wouldn’t actually hurt you either. There’d be a big blow out, with lots of screaming, but I wouldn’t get kicked out of the family or something ridiculous like that Besides, after all the stuff they’ve spouted over the years about supporting us no matter what we do and all that, it’d be hypocritical of them to get too mad about my choice in lover.”

Draco cocked his head to the side, and thought about what she was suggesting. The secretive way they had been going about their relationship had become tiresome at best, with the thrill of forbidden love fading under the spell of real love and wanting to just be together, consequences be damned. He was a Malfoy, after all, and if he decided that Ginny Weasley was worthy of him, then by God she was worthy of him.

He just hoped that his father would see things that way.

“Okay,” he said.

“Huh?” Ginny said. She clearly hadn’t been expecting that answer.

“Why should we have to slink around in the shadows? We have as much of a right to be together as anyone else. More, in fact, considering how good we look together,” Draco said.

Ginny grinned, and leaned forward to kiss him. “We do look damn good together,” she mumbled, before they got down to the dirty, secretive forbidden love. It wouldn’t be secret for much longer, after all, so they knew they shouldn’t waste it.

They decided that making an announcement in front of the Great Hall was too crass, and that letting one of the school gossip queens catch them together was too iffy. Finally, Ginny came across the perfect way to reveal their relationship to the world.

“How about we just write our parents and tell them?”

It had seemed like a simple enough task, Draco thought as he stared at the empty sheet of parchment that night. Just write his parents and inform them of his choice in girlfriend. He had already tactfully decided that the use of the word lover would be a mite too forward. He didn’t want his father to have a coronary on the spot, after all. He wasn’t as young as he used to be, and the idea of the pure Malfoy line becoming tainted by the pure Weasley line just might be too much for him to stand.

Dear Mother and Father, he wrote. That looked nice. How are you? I am fine. Continuing the niceness, and moving the conversation forward. Now, to drop the news. I’m seeing someone. There. Ginny Weasley. Okay, the dungbomb had been dropped.... He really didn’t have anything else to say, but the letter looked awfully short. He quickly scrawled something else, to beef up the letter and maybe clear the waters. You might not approve of my choice, but it is my choice who I see, after all. Perfect. He signed his name with a flourish, and sent the letter before he could decide that it would be better used as kindling.

In the Gryffindor dorms, Ginny Weasley was having a similar problem. She had written a letter, lovely and insightful and justifying her romantic choice quite eloquently. She had stared at the two pages, with the ink still shiny and wet, and had crumpled them up and thrown them into the fireplace. Now, she knew that it had been her idea to write their parents, so she wrote a new letter. This one was short, sweet and to the point. She had sent it before the ink was dry, and now wished that she hadn’t.

Maybe her mother wouldn’t send her a Howler in the morning. Maybe she would react like Ginny had told Draco. Maybe her brothers would be rational and maybe her father wouldn’t get upset and maybe...

Who was she kidding. Draco was going to get the crap beat out of him as soon as the news of their relationship reached Ron and her other brothers, so maybe her telling them would cause less grievous injury to him than if they caught them shagging in a broom closet or something. This was would surely leave his bits and pieces intact, at the very least.

The next morning, Ginny slipped out of her dorm room at the crack of dawn and rushed to her and Draco’s usual empty classroom. Draco was already there, pacing back and forth.

“Well?” she asked.

“I haven’t gotten a reply yet,” he said tersely.

Ginny glanced around the room. “Could the owl even get in here?”

Draco glanced at the conspicuous lack of windows, doors and hallways, barring the door Ginny had barred immediately after entrance out of pure habit. Ginny began to giggle, and Draco began to laugh. “We’re getting worked up over nothing, really.”

“What’s the worst that could happen?”

Ginny unbarred the door, and looked out cautiously. The owl that had been crankily stalking back and forth in front of the door swooped up and into the room, dropping a letter onto the table in front of Draco before swooping out as quickly as possible. Moments later, another owl dropped a red envelope in front of Ginny. She shut the door again.

She looked up at Draco.

He finished reading his letter, and folded it neatly. “Well, my parents think that this is a smashing opportunity for spying on the Side of Good.”

Ginny prodded the Howler, considering just letting it lie there. Smoke leaked out of the envelope.

“Open it!” Draco snapped. “You know it’s worse not to.”

“Okay,” Ginny said, shutting the door and hoping that her mother’s voice wouldn’t echo all the way to the Great Hall. She carefully opened the envelope, and braced herself for the screaming...

Which never came. She shook the envelope, thinking that it was somehow a dud, when an exasperated sigh was emitted. Finally, the envelope screamed, “What are you thinking?” before crumbling to the ground.

“That definitely went better than we planned,” Draco said.

“Yeah,” Ginny said. “I think we managed to shock them into submission.”

“So,” said Draco. “That disaster is averted, and here we are, alone together with the door already locked...” He trailed off as his fingers trailed along the open neck of her school blouse.

“Wow, Draco, you sure know how to sweet talk a girl,” Ginny said as sarcastically as she could manage while sighing contentedly.

 “That’s why you love me,” he replied.

“And why do you love me?” asked Ginny.

“Because you let me,” Draco replied. The conversation dwindled after that for more favorable actions.

*

Once the news broke to the public at large, it was scandalous, of course. Draco would point out evenly that Ginny was, in fact, just as pureblooded as any Slytherin, even if her family did have its pitfalls. Ginny would point out the hypocrisy of condemning someone based on parentage when the reason for the condemnation was the family’s prejudice against people with non-magic parentage. The skeptic-eyed inquisitor would be startled and slightly confounded at the argument presented, and would then scurry off to report what had been said to the awaiting gossip mongers.

The couple in the limelight seemed not to care. They would laugh softly together as they sat and talked while looking intimately, sinfully close, and they would be seen slipping off into the darkness at the end of the evening, and they would always seem too entwined in their affair to notice or care what everyone else thought.

Meanwhile, everyone and anyone that heard of the relationship would gossip relentlessly.

“I hear that she’s only in it for the money. A poor girl like that only has one reason for wanting to date one of the richest men in the Wizarding World,” whispered Madam Rosmerta as she served butterbeer in the Three Broomsticks one Hogsmeade weekend.

“Please,” replied Arabella Figg, accepting her drink. “One look at the boy shows what she’s interested in. If I were fifty years younger, I know what I’d be doing with him.”

Dolores Umbridge, who was waddling past, froze and gasped. “I can’t believe you said that, you lecherous old woman. Besides, it’s clearly a case of teenage rebellion.”

“True,” agreed Madam Rosmerta. “What better way to outshine a whole slew of siblings than to date a member of a family that has been at odds with your family for years?”

The women hushed up real quick like as they spotted red hair entering the pub. The red hair in question was attached to the head of one Ron Weasley, who looked extremely unhappy with the recent course of events.

“Come on, Ron,” Hermione Granger was saying. Rosmerta, Dolores and Arabella leaned in as closely as they could without becoming too obvious. “It’s not the end of the world.”

“But it’s my baby sister! And Malfoy!” Ron snapped. “Lord only knows how he’s managed to corrupt her already.”

“How do you know she hasn’t corrupted him?” Harry asked.

“Because it’s Ginny, and she’s sweet and-- oh,” Ron said.

“She can hold her own with him, if nothing else,” Hermione said logically. “Remember in Fifth Year when she took him down?”

Arabella’s lips twitched, but before she could make any of the comments that flitted immediately through her mind Rosmerta smacked her and hissed, “Hush!”

“I think they’re kind of cute together,” Hermione said then, to Ron’s complete shock and dismay.

“I don’t,” Ron finally managed to say. “Ferret Face doesn’t deserve her.”

“It really is kind of an odd choice,” Harry said. “I mean, how could she go from liking me for all that time to supposedly madly in love with him?”

“You’re just unhappy that she really is over you,” Hermione snapped. “Besides, I think it’s romantic. Star-crossed lovers and all that.”

“But we know how that story ends,” Harry argued.

“I don’t,” Ron said as they wove their way to the opposite end of The Three Broomsticks.

Dolores, Arabella and Madam Rosmerta looked at one another.

“Well then, I’d best be back to work,” Madam Rosmerta said, eyeing the door. Dolores and Arabella looked over to see the couple in question standing just inside the entrance.

Madam Rosmerta approached Draco and Ginny, smiling broadly. “Want a table?” she asked.

“We’re fine,” Draco said.

“Yeah, there’s my brother,” Ginny said. “Thanks anyway!”

They pushed past Madam Rosmerta and approached the table where Harry, Hermione and Ron sat.

“Do we have to do this?” asked Draco plaintively. Somehow the idea of actually having to socialize with his inferiors hadn’t occurred to him when they decided secretive love wasn’t for him.

“Yes, Draco,” replied Ginny. “Try to be civil.”

They stood by the table, and Ginny asked, “Can we sit down?”

“No,” Ron replied immediately.

“What he means is, of course you can,” Hermione corrected immediately.

“Really, Ron,” Ginny admonished. “You’ve been sullen and curt ever since you found out. Don’t you have anything to say to us?”

“I don’t have anything to say,” Ron said. He stood and punched Draco in the nose. “I just wanted to do that.”

“Ron!” Ginny yelled angrily. “Draco, are you all right?”

“Ow, my nose,” managed Draco, holding one hand to his bloody nose. “Can I kill him?”

“No!” shot back Ginny.

Madam Rosmerta approached with an ice pack. “Here, dear, put this on that until Madam Pomfrey can fix you up.”

“Thanks,” Draco said, accepting the ice pack graciously. “I’m going.”

“Me too,” Ginny said with an angry, disappointed glance at her brother. “I thought that you could manage to accept my choice, Ron, but I guess I overestimated you.”

Ron looked ashamed as he said, “Gin, wait.”

She stopped and turned back to face her brother. Draco also paused in his trek towards the door, and waited patiently.

“You know why I don’t like this one bit,” Ron said. Ginny knew. He’d given her a big speech the night before about how if she were under Imperius to blink four times and he’d have the Aurors out in full force before she could say baboon. “But I can try to accept it if you’re serious about this and aren’t just trying to cause a big hoopla.”

“I’m serious about it,” Ginny replied.

“I should hope so, after all this,” Draco muttered in the background.

“Fine. At least I got my one shot in,” Ron said, and hugged his sister.

“I’m happy you’re happy,” Harry said.

“It’s wonderful,” Hermione said.

“Thanks,” Ginny replied. “We have to go...”

“See you at dinner,” Ron said amiably, and Ginny grinned, knowing everything was going to work out.

“See, that wasn’t too bad,” Ginny said as they walked towards the castle.

“Coming from someone who doesn’t have a possibly broken nose,” Draco replied, wrapping his free arm around her. The other hand still held the ice pack to his face.

Ginny laughed, and offered to kiss it better. Draco immediately took her up on the offer, and together they wandered into whatever life had in store for them.

The End.