Hours had passed and they were sitting around the campfire they had built, only they hadn’t known how to make fire without a wand so really they were sitting around a patch of dirt circled with rocks and filled with twigs they had collected from the forest floor. Harry told them it was about five o’ clock and it was getting darker and colder every minute. They shivered around the cold fire site and glared at each other, all except Luna, who was knitting a strange four-armed sweater—(“For the Crumple-Horned Snorkack calves I breed when I find two of them!”)—and staring at the emerging stars. The Muggle coats that Hermione had lent them were wonderfully cosy but nothing protected their faces or their legs from the inclement weather.
Even Harry, the only one out of the four of them to ever have been associated with Muggles before and the one most likely to know how to build a fire, stared murderously at the two sticks in his hands, which refused to suddenly burst into flame. He had been rubbing them together for the past hour but nothing had resulted from his efforts so far.
“I wish we had a magnifying glass,” he said, tossing the sticks on top of the others in the centre of their cold fire.
“W-what f-f-for?” Malfoy stuttered, hunched in on himself to try to keep in some of his body heat.
“When you align a magnifying glass with the sun just right, it will concentrate all the heat to a point and begin to burn anything underneath it. Dudley used to burn the fur off of the neighbours’ cats that way.”
Ginny and Malfoy glared at him. “Does it look like there’s any sun to you?” they yelled in unison.
“I was just saying! We don’t have a magnifying glass anyway!”
Where were Ron and Hermione? They had left more than six hours ago and they hadn’t returned yet. It shouldn’t have taken them that long to collect firewood. Ginny and Luna had found plenty of wood in the areas around the campsite, and none of them could fathom what they were doing out there. On the ground. In the cold. Where anyone could just discover them out in the open forest. They were unbelievable.
But to be fair, she doubted that there were any other people camping in the forest anywhere near them. But still… they must have walked for ages to get a safe enough distance that Harry, Luna, Ginny, or Malfoy wouldn’t discover them in any state of undress.
Oh the horror. Ginny tried to wipe the unbidden image from her mind. She did not need to imagine her brother like that.
Gah! She’d done it again!
“What the hell are you doing, Weasley?”
Ginny looked up to find that all three of them were staring at her as if she were the loony one instead of Luna. She realized she had been hitting herself on the head in the hopes that she could bash away the images of Ron and Hermione from her mind.
“Uh… nothing. Just wondering where Ron and Hermione are, is all! I’m bloody hungry, aren’t you?” she said in a transparent attempt to change the subject.
Of course they were all hungry. They had completely raided the rest of Ron’s food and eaten it all, and since they had no fire to warm the pies up with, they’d eaten them cold. Ron wasn’t going to be happy when he came back to find that the food he had refused to leave home without was gone and he hadn’t even had any portion of it. They would have eaten the strange food Hermione had brought too, but she had taken it with her.
Maybe she thought they would need the food for stamina?
GAH. Ginny shook her head furiously. Get out! Get out! Get out!
But it was hours ago that they had eaten and now here they sat around a pile of sticks encircled by rocks, all of their stomachs growling. Luna had found some kind of root in the forest and munched on that, but no one else was willing to put the thing in his or her mouth when she offered it.
“Hungry, hungry, hungry,” Ginny moaned, clutching her stomach and rocking back and forth. She took another swig of lake water from her canteen but her stomach cramped and then grumbled loudly. She had forgotten that her stomach did not appreciate being drowned when it was starving.
Malfoy stood up to go to his tent. No one asked him what he was doing; they were wallowing in their hunger. They could hear him rustling around inside before he returned with some sort of object in his hands about the size of a homemade loaf of bread. With butter. Hot from the oven.
He began to unwrap the object, which Ginny could now see was covered in a white linen cloth. He pulled the cloth away to reveal a steaming roasted chicken. A whole chicken. A hot chicken. A wonderful, whole, hot chicken that gave off the most wonderful smell of rosemary and olive oil and garlic and lemon… The scent wafted across the campsite, causing Harry and Luna to raise their heads, alerting them to the presence of food.
“What is that?” Harry asked.
Using a fork and a knife, Malfoy cut a piece of his juicy chicken away and bit into it with relish. He chewed and swallowed enthusiastically—mockingly, Ginny thought—before answering.
“Roasted chicken a la Home,” he said.
Ginny jumped up and stalked over to Malfoy, where she could smell his chicken better, and loomed over them both menacingly. “Where did you get it? No, better yet, why didn’t you tell us you had it?”
“I had the house elves at home make it for me for breakfast but I was running late to meet you lot at Weasley’s house so I put a warming charm on it and packed it away.” He shrugged. “I don’t have to tell you what I brought with me.” While he was talking, he was carving another beautiful bite from the chicken and slowly raising it to his mouth. Ginny, Harry, and Luna all eyed his fork hungrily—like a dog lazily staring at its owner, waiting for the smallest scrap from the dinner table, his stomach in his eyes. They were almost unaware that they were doing it. When Malfoy put the fork in his mouth and slid it out, they subconsciously opened and closed their own mouths as if they were the ones taking the bite and not him.
Snapping herself out of her insanity, Ginny muttered, “You eat roasted chicken for breakfast?”
Malfoy paused and gave them all an incredulous look. “Doesn’t everybody? Well, I suppose I understand why you don’t have roasted chicken for breakfast. It would take a hundred chickens to feed your family one meal.”
Ginny’s face reddened in anger, her outrage growing exponentially. Without thinking, she reached out and plucked the whole chicken from the plate with her two hands and bit down right into the fleshy centre of it. She tore the largest piece that she could from it and handed it back to Malfoy, who had stared at her murderously the whole time. She chewed slowly, closing her eyes and tilting her head up to the heavens, possibly in thanks to any deity that existed for the one mouthful of poultry. It was gloriously hot and juicy and had so many familiar flavours besides just chicken. She wanted to chew it forever but her stomach complained loudly that she wasn’t sharing. Even after she had fed her stomach the one bite, it complained some more that what she had given it was insufficient. She wanted more and so did her stomach.
“You don’t take someone’s chicken and put your nasty germs all over it, Weasley! You just don’t do that!” Malfoy was saying when she opened her eyes and acknowledged him once again. The chicken was back on the plate and Malfoy was holding it up away from her, his torso turned to protect his meal. He didn’t notice Harry and Luna’s approach until they flanked Ginny, close enough for him to see the hunger in their eyes too.
“What do you want?” he said, clutching his plate tighter.
“Come on, Malfoy. We shared our pies with you! Why don’t you share your chicken?” Harry said.
“Those horrid things? They don’t even compare to this chicken. It wouldn’t be a fair trade. Besides, I only ate those pies because they were Weasley’s. I had already eaten Yorkshire pudding when you started passing the pies out.”
“You—had—Yorkshire—pudding—too?” Ginny seethed. Here she was starving, having only eaten cold meat pies, Pumpkin Pasties, and a couple handfuls of Crumple-Horned Snorkack berries all day long, and Malfoy was dining on gourmet cuisine, nearly fresh from the oven!
“Yes, of course,” Malfoy said dismissively as he relaxed enough to place the plate back in his lap and begin to start cutting through the leg and thigh of the chicken. “It’s not my fault the rest of you didn’t think to bring your own food.”
Ginny growled and launched herself at Malfoy, trying to wrestle the chicken away from him. Of course she had thought about it, but there was just no room to pack food!
“Stop it! This is my chicken!” Malfoy cried, tugging at the plate between them.
“Let go, Malfoy, and I won’t hurt you!” Ginny snarled.
“Let go, Weasley, and maybe I will consider sleeping with you,” he returned.
Ginny was so shocked by his words that she let go of the plate sending Malfoy flying backwards, the chicken soaring off the plate and rolling a few times on the ground.
“Damn it! Look what you did!” he cried, staring at his ruined meal in disgust.
“Your damn chicken isn’t worth it! I would never sleep with you, even if you were the last scumbag on Earth!”
“Why are you yelling?”
“Why are you such a prat?”
While Ginny and Malfoy argued at each other, Harry and Luna attacked the dirt-covered chicken like vultures on carrion. They pecked at clean pieces of meat with their fingers, stuffing whatever they salvaged into their mouths.
“Is this not the most divine thing you’ve ever eaten?” moaned Luna. Harry didn’t bother with a reply, only nodded and stuffed his mouth.
“What is going on here?” a voice cried in alarm, making everyone freeze in his or her tracks.
They hadn’t realized what the scene would have looked like to someone just walking in on it. Ginny and Malfoy were nose to nose, yelling in each other’s faces while Malfoy was sprawled out on the ground. A few feet away, Harry and Luna were crouched on the ground around what would have looked like road kill, their eyes wide and fearful as if caught doing something they shouldn’t have been doing.
Hermione and Ron had no idea what to make of the scene at all. Hermione’s eyes travelled from one person to another, to the cold fire, to the carcass Harry and Luna were hovering over, and didn’t know how to make sense of it. She never got the chance to. Ginny jumped up just then and stalked towards her and Ron, a furious fire in her eyes that Hermione recognized as the patented Mrs. Weasley’s Deadly Glare.
“Where have you guys been for six hours? We’ve been waiting and waiting and starving and freezing! Explain yourselves!”
Ron immediately started babbling some explanation but Hermione cut him off.
“No, Ron! We don’t have to be interrogated about what we’ve been up to!” Even as she said it, though, she began to blush. Of course they all knew what they had been doing. “If you were so cold, why didn’t you start a fire?”
“You took our wands, remember?” reminded Malfoy sneeringly as he picked himself up and dusted off his dirty pants. “We don’t know how to build a fire!”
“Why didn’t you use the matches, then?”
They all paused.
“Matches?” Harry repeated slowly.
Hermione’s tone became impatient and wise alecky. “Yes, matches. I kept some in Ron’s back pack.” Harry pulled out Ron’s bag from his tent and shuffled through the pockets. “In the side pocket,” she informed him. His hand wandered to the correct pocket and pulled out a box of matches, right where no one had looked.
“Oh,” Harry said simply.
“Well, where’s your firewood, then?” Malfoy cross-examined them. And Ginny, Luna, and Harry realized that he was right. There was no wood in either Hermione or Ron’s hands and the bag Hermione had taken with her was flat and seemingly empty.
The couple flushed some more and looked away from their hostile audience.
“Oh, well, we kind of couldn’t possibly carry it all back, so we… we…” Hermione began.
“We left it in the woods!” supplied Ron helpfully.
Hermione glared at Ron. "Yes, we left it in the woods."
"Fat lot of good that does us," said Malfoy. "You went out to get us wood and didn't bring any back? Mind telling us what you were doing instead?"
Hermione turned her glare to Malfoy now. "I told you we don't have to tell you what we were doing. It's none of your business."
"I guess I missed that part," he said sarcastically.
"I guess you did." She sniffed and surveyed the scene once again. By this time, Harry and Luna had gotten up off the ground too, although, they had ripped chunks of the chicken off and were now munching on the leg or breast they had in their hands. "Do you mind telling us what you did here?" she continued, looking curious and annoyed.
Everyone broke out talking at once, creating an unintelligible, confused babble that provided absolutely no information to Hermione or Ron at all. Eventually they worked it all out, organized the confusion, and everyone was in the loop again.
"You ate all my food?" Ron yelled. He snatched the bag from the ground where Harry had dropped it earlier after looking for matches and searched inside of it. "There's nothing left?"
"Well, to be fair, Ron, you actually left all your food with Luna, remember? Because there was no room in your bag," Ginny reasoned.
"That does not give you the right to eat my food!" Ron complained, his voice growing louder the hungrier he became.
"Don't worry about it, Weasley,” Malfoy said happily. “She's taking food from everybody. Thinks of no one but herself, she does. I would bet your firstborn child that she would take food from babies, children, kitten and other appallingly cute things, if she was hungry enough.” Ginny gave him a Deadly Glare, which had no effect on him at all. She reeled, unused to the idea that someone could brush it off as easily as a piece of lint. The Deadly Glare had never failed to silence anyone it was directed towards, and had the effectiveness of any Silencing spell.
“Don’t listen to him, Ron. Malfoy’s being an even bigger prat than usual and getting on everyone’s nerves lately,” she retorted, all the while staring in her narrow-eyed fashion at Malfoy’s stupid smirk.
Harry walked by to go to his tent, biting into one of the poor, abused chicken’s thighs with relish. “Nope. Just your nerves, Ginny.”
Ginny growled to herself. Was everyone trying to be insane today?
After finally eating a decent meal of soup and bread in which everyone had a hot portion and two servings (“Hermione, where do you carry all of this stuff?” Ginny asked as they all cleaned their soup cans and spoons in the lake.), everyone had wandered back to their own tents, full and content and exhausted from sleepiness and fatigue combined. The day had not been kind to them—no, actually, Hermione had not been kind to them—and if she tried to wake any of them up before noon, they all planned to slap her silly.
Ginny lay down in her tent, Luna snoring softly next to her, staring up at the fabric above her. The tent was round and had a flap on top of it that could be unsecured so the occupants could see the sky outside. She stared outside now at the clear, clear sky, the full, bright moon shedding much too much light. She couldn’t sleep because of the light. It annoyed her that it was bothering her so purposefully. It certainly seemed to her as if the moon did not want her to sleep at all, but just hung there in the sky to make her suffer.
She loved Sleep. She needed it and wanted it so much right now. She wished Sleep would just come lie down next to her and help her drift off into fantabulous dreams. She did not love the moon, nor did it love her. It hid Sleep away, had him caged somewhere so that he and Ginny could not be together like they wanted to be.
Ginny couldn’t take its brilliance anymore and sat up to reattach the flap to the ceiling of the tent and secure it with the zipper. She flopped back down onto her sleeping bag with a sigh, and curled up inside it, cosy in the warm coat Hermione had loaned her. It was too cold to sleep without it. She wasn’t very comfortable in the clothes she had been wearing all day long but it was necessary to keep wearing them for warmth. She had brought her own pyjamas for some reason, but they were too thin to protect her from the chill, and she didn’t want to ruin all of the clothes she had brought by wearing them all in layers on the first night. She would have to bathe tomorrow but she loathed the idea of undressing in the cold autumn weather just to submerge herself in the icy lake.
Now that the moon was hidden away again, Sleep came to her, sang to her, soothed her into his realms of fantasy. Her mind drifted wherever Sleep prodded it and she ended up picturing the moon again. Stupid moon wouldn’t leave her alone, wouldn’t let her sleep. She imagined the moon smirking at her and she stuck her tongue out at it, but in the morning she would only remember the action as part of her dreams. He existed only to annoy her, didn’t he? Why did he have to be so bright, so shiny? Why did he have to garner so much attention? He didn’t deserve anyone’s attention. He was too bloody annoying to deserve it, but no one cared because he was the moon! They thought just because he hung in the sky up there, way above everyone else, shining like silver or—or platinum, that he was worthy of their devotion and admiration.
But she knew better! She knew how obnoxious and rude the moon was. He didn’t care about anyone other than himself, shining in the sky like that, ruining the sleep of other people—good people! No, she was onto the moon. She wouldn’t be fooled by that bright, platinum shine… by those pale grey stars… by that rakish smile and smirk…
They did not fool her at all.
She drifted and she floated and pretty soon Sleep claimed her as his own.
Ginny awoke the next morning feeling like she had slept on glass and rocks and anything else that any decent person would consider uncomfortable to mash their weight on. Her eyes had a hard time staying open—not that she could have drifted back into sleep with her back killing her the way it was—because the sun poked its needle-like rays into her pupils, making sure she didn't try to close her eyes again. She couldn't fathom from where the sun was coming from. Certainly the tent would have afforded her, at least, that much protection? After blinking a few times, her eyes finally adjusted to the light and she found herself staring up at the damn flap that had kept her awake the night before, only this time it was the sun who refused to let her be.
She sat up slowly, her back cramped as she moved so she had to move slow, or otherwise start her day with unbearable and mysterious pain. Luna seemed to have left the tent already. Her sleeping bag was all made up and tidy. The corners met exactly at the corners, all zipped up, flat, and straightened out. Her pillow sat squarely at one end of the sleeping bag just waiting for an exhausted head to fall back onto it. Ginny certainly thought it looked inviting. She wished for nothing more than to go back to sleep, but the pain in her back from the hard, unforgiving ground inspired her to get up and start her day.
Besides, she remembered that she needed a bath, and she felt she needed it even more this morning than the previous night.
Exiting the tent, she found Hermione crouched in front of the fire in the centre of the campsite, stirring something in a pot that sat on a figure she seemed to have made out of twigs for just that purpose. She looked up when she saw Ginny and glared, though Ginny couldn't for the life of her imagine why she’d be glaring at her.
"Good morning," Hermione greeted tersely.
"Good morning," Ginny reciprocated hesitantly. She stretched her arms over her head, trying to work out the kinks in her back, but unable to do so by herself. What she really needed now but could not afford was a nice massage. She wondered if Hermione might secretly be an expert masseuse along with being an adventurous, camping wild woman. "Where is everyone?"
Hermione glowered at her pot. "The boys took off for the lake to take baths. Luna ran off somewhere, skipping, singing, and the like." It seemed as if she disapproved of Luna’s mode of hiking.
"What's wrong?" Ginny asked, sitting down next to her friend and taking in the tense way she gripped her wooden spoon. As if she was so angry she could snap it in two with less than half a thought.
"I was yelled at four times this morning. I tried to wake Ron up at six, but he got really angry at me and told me to bugger off. Then I tried to wake up you and Luna, but you slept like the dead and didn't wake up. Then I tried Harry and Malfoy, which I was already uncomfortable doing because I don't really know Malfoy well, do I? But both of them threw pillows at my head and Malfoy was reaching for the flashlight next to Harry's head so I left real quickly. Then I waited half an hour and went back to your tent but Luna began thrashing a bit and then yelled at me. I think she was dreaming but she says she doesn't remember it. You still wouldn't wake up, and after getting yelled at four times, I thought I would just let you be."
It was funny because Ginny did not remember Luna thrashing or yelling at all and she shared the tiny tent space with the girl. She guessed that she had been exceptionally tired the night before, too tired for anything to waken her but the annoying blinding sun.
“What are you doing?” Ginny asked.
“Making lunch.”
Shrewdly, Ginny guessed, “But not for the others, huh?”
“If they’re hungry, they can hunt a bear.”
“Are bears in season?” she teased.
Hermione couldn’t help but smile. “I don’t know.”
“Well, that just leaves more for us then!”
“Who said you could have any?”
Ginny stared at her friend in shock. She hadn’t known that sleeping in late was a crime. Upon seeing the look on her face, Hermione laughed. “I’m just kidding! Of course you can have some.”
Peering into the pot, the red-headed girl asked, “So what are you making?”
“Oatmeal,” Hermione replied as she continued to stir.
“You got that from the forest?”
“Oh, yes. We ate all the rest of the food, so I had to scrounge up something from scratch.” She sighed dramatically and Ginny had the distinct impression that she was making fun of her. And then Hermione smiled slyly and glanced at her from the corner of her eye and Ginny gasped in surprise and punched her friend jovially in the arm.
Luna drifted back into the clearing within an hour after Ginny and Hermione had eaten all of the oatmeal and washed their utensils and bowls. She smiled dreamily, though that wasn’t uncommon for her, as she sat down next to Ginny around a happily crackling fire that Hermione had built.
“I’m famished. What’s for lunch?”
“We had oatmeal,” Ginny said, smiling into the fire. Hermione was smirking uncharacteristically next to her, not looking at Luna at all.
“Ooh, that sounds lovely! How much is left?”
“None!” Ginny said with an amount of surprise, as if she were confused as to why Luna was silly enough to believe they’d have left some. “We finished it off.”
“You didn’t leave any?” Luna asked with a somewhat disappointed expression on her face.
“Nope. Sorry.”
Luna stood up and clapped her hands together in front of her. To Ginny and Hermione’s enquiring glances she responded, “I’m just warding off negative vibes. The sound vibration of clapping pushes them away, you see.”
“Right.”
“Well, I’m going to go look for some lunch. It’s a good thing the forest is full of berries and roots, or we would all starve!”
As Luna bounded away again, Ginny and Hermione shared a look.
“That was no fun at all. She wasn’t even fazed!” Ginny said.
“She isn’t fazed by anything, it seems. Well, the boys are the ones I’m the angriest with. Let’s see how they like the idea of eating roots and berries.”
“And don’t forget having to search for them by themselves!”
They laughed at the thought because they both knew that the boys would not be satisfied with berries or roots for lunch, nor would they appreciate having to—dare they do it?—scrounge up their own lunches, instead of having them already made for them.
The boys came back soon after with wet hair and squeaky-clean bodies. They seemed to be getting along exceptionally well. It boggled Hermione and Ginny’s minds that they were smiling and laughing together like old chums. As they watched, Ron even went as far as to punch Malfoy lightly on the arm. He did not scowl and threaten to hex Ron into next week, either, like Ginny expected him to. He smiled widely, showing off all his pearly white teeth.
Ginny was blinded by that smile; she tried to shield her eyes by closing them but she couldn’t stop herself from imagining him smiling, and smiling just as he was at that moment and in all sorts of other scenarios. The only problem was that Ginny really could not imagine him smiling so jovially at all, for anything, and she had not believed him capable of it until she witnessed the phenomenon right then. It was a sincere grin, no mockery in it, no smirk, no sneer, no hate, no disgust, no arrogance. He was genuinely amused or pleased about something that her brother had said and he allowed that to show on his face.
Ginny couldn’t help but think she wouldn’t mind being blinded if she had to be blinded in this way. It was a very nice smile to have, and coming from Malfoy, a rare and precious commodity.
Harry spotted Ginny and Hermione first and waved. “Hey! I hope you made lunch. I’m starving!” he said by way of greeting.
Malfoy’s smile dropped quickly upon seeing them. Ginny was reminded strangely of a ball of bread dough dropping from a great height. It retains its shape in the air but falls apart when it lands with a wet splat upon contact with the table or floor, the roundness no longer in tact until someone comes along to roll it again.
“We made lunch an hour ago. You missed it,” Hermione replied as she poked at the fire with a stick, conveniently hiding the smirk that was quickly making itself at home on her face.
“Missed it? You knew we were coming back! You didn’t save us anything?” said Ron with growing alarm in his voice.
“Yes, well, you should have woken up earlier, shouldn’t you? Then you would have bathed earlier, and then you would have been here when lunch was ready. But since you weren’t, Ginny and I ate it all.” Hermione rubbed her stomach with an innocent expression on her face that did not fool anybody. “I’m full, aren’t you, Gin?”
Ginny stretched her arms over her head with a loud groan and then patted her own tummy. “Absolutely stuffed. There was really too much for two people.”
“Sorry, boys,” Hermione said.
All of their faces drooped like wet laundry, expressing looks of disbelief.
“Well, what are we supposed to do for food?” Malfoy snapped, the first to come out of his stupor.
Ginny smiled a wide, benign smile and fluttered her eyelashes coquettishly. “Why don’t you go find that bear you saw yesterday? It shouldn’t be too hard for you manly men to hunt a bear, should it?”
Harry and Ron gaped, while Malfoy snarled, “Yeah, we’ll get a bear! And we won’t share any of it with you! So when you’re freezing because you don’t have a bear skin blanket, you can’t come crying to us! And when you’re starving because you don’t have any bear meat, we won’t share that either! Stop laughing!”
Indeed, Hermione and Ginny were laughing so hard they had fallen onto their sides, clutching their stomachs and rolling on the ground. They tried to breathe but only laughed harder and choked and cried because they couldn’t breathe and just because Malfoy was being ridiculous and they knew it. He spun around and grabbed Harry and Ron’s arms, dragging them along behind him back into the forest, seething with rage and determined by the challenge dealt by the clearly inferior life forms Ron and Harry called wife and friend.
Neither Hermione nor Ginny heard Harry say, “Girls are just evil!” as he was pulled dazedly along into the trees. It wasn’t until long after the boys had left that either one of them was able to regain some sense of control of herself.
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