C8: A Pal and a Confidant

Sundays were days of ultimate freedom for Draco.

As the Tornados’s Keeper, his duty was to remain close to the goal posts, so he didn’t often get a chance to push his broom to its limits. And due to their sponsorship agreement with Nimbus, the Tornados were required to wear and use Nimbus-brand equipment during matches and practice. Sundays were the team’s day off, which meant that it was the one day each week Draco could ride his personal racing broom. The Nimbus 9000 he used with the team was not quite as intuitive or fast as his Starfall 6, which sliced through the air with precision and speed, making Draco feel like he was in constant controlled freefall.

The rush was intoxicating. More intoxicating than anything he felt on the Quidditch pitch using the sponsor’s equipment.

But less intoxicating than the thrill that speared through him at the sight of a tiny flame on the ground below. He didn’t have to fly lower or remove his goggles to identify that flame as a specific head of ginger hair. Ginny Weasley had come to Tutshill to see him, it seemed. He couldn’t imagine what else she’d be doing at the Tornados’s home pitch, so very far away from her team’s home in Wales and her family’s home in Devon.

Draco flew down and dismounted, slinging his broom over his shoulder so he’d have something to do with his hands. He hadn’t seen her since the last time he’d saved her life on this very pitch a couple weeks ago, after a Bludger had knocked her off her broom.

He wanted to ask her how she was doing, if she was sore or bruised, if she would be playing in the Harpies’s match against Pride of Portree next week or if she’d been benched….

Instead he said, “I can’t believe it. Mount Weasley, in the flesh.”

Weasley’s eyebrows rose. “Mount me in the flesh?”

When she repeated his words back to him, they sounded stupid… and suggestive. His face flushed pink, and he was glad most of his complexion was hidden behind his goggles.

“I didn’t mean—I wasn’t—What I meant to say—”

She burst into laughter, cutting off his poor attempts to explain and saving him from humiliating himself further.

Her laughter stunned him. Oh, he’d seen her laugh before, but never during a conversation with him, and never with this kind of bubbly amusement. All of her laughter towards him since their childhood had been full of derision. Since his friendship with Harry and Ron had begun, she’d avoided him too often for him to experience any of it at all—either contemptuous or amused.

She dabbed at the corners of her eyes as she gained control of herself once more. “Hermione was so right about you.” And then before Draco could ask her what the hell that meant, she stole the words from his mouth. “What did you mean?”

Draco swept his broom off his shoulder and gripped the handle tighter. At the moment, he would have preferred to face Rabastan Lestrange again rather than answer her question. There was something about her expression, though, that intrigued him, a tiny ember of hope flaring to life. Hope for what, he didn’t dare articulate even to himself in his thoughts, but her smile, her unsuspicious eyes, her hands dangling open at her sides instead of clenched into fists displayed an amiability she had never shown him before.

Still, his face burned hotter as he responded. “Mount Weasley. It’s what I call you in my head. Until now at least.”

She shook her head. “I don’t get it.”

“‘Mount’ as in a mountain or… a volcano.”

“Oh.” The amusement drained out of her, her shoulders slumping just a little. “Because I explode, I guess.”

Draco shrugged, somehow understanding that her feelings were a little bruised, though he was flummoxed that he had the ability to bruise them. She always brushed him off, always turned up her nose when he spoke to her, as if he had nothing to say that she cared to hear. “The red hair doesn’t hinder the resemblance, either.”

Silence stretched between them after that, Weasley’s countenance falling, her posture slumping. Draco waited expectantly, but she was too busy staring at her feet and chewing on her bottom lip to notice his growing discomfort.

“So….” Suddenly, he couldn’t bear to know why she had come to see him, so he switched his enquiry for a different one. “What did Hermione say about me?”

“Hmm?”

“You said Hermione was right about me. What was she right about?”

Her eyes narrowed, examining Draco from head to foot, her hand at her chin thoughtfully. “I don’t think I can tell you. I think your feelings would be hurt.”

Automatically, indignation swelled his chest, and he threw his shoulders back. Draco’s mind raced wondering what Hermione could have possibly said, wondering if he’d upset her, or if she’d come to her senses about being his friend.

“I’ll have you know that I don’t have any feelings!”

Weasley grinned. “You have at least one.”

“Less than one,” he snarled definitively. He realized as her mouth stretched wider that they’d drawn closer together during this exchange, and he forced himself not to take a step back.

Sudden movement might make her skittish, and he so very badly wanted her to stay.

The revelation wasn’t a new one. There was something about her that had always drawn him to her, even when they’d been at Hogwarts together. Back then, he’d hated himself for his fascination and hated her for her associations, so of course he had never acted on his interest.

He wasn’t acting on it now, either, but that didn’t mean his interest had waned or changed. If anything, her refusal to play nicely with him made her even more alluring. Maybe her hatred of him spoke to his own self-hatred. Maybe he couldn’t rest until he’d collected all of the Weasleys as his friends. Maybe the war had turned Draco into a masochist who couldn’t be content unless he was discontent. There was a whole world of reasons to explain why Draco didn’t want to see Weasley walk away from him.

So he’d do anything to keep her right where she was. With him, in whatever capacity she was willing to stay with him.




Malfoy was looking at Ginny strangely—and not just because he was wearing those ridiculous goggles, which obscured his eyes and half his face from her sight. She had likened his appearance to that of a toad when he’d worn them in the last match between the Harpies and Tornados, but up close like this, the likeness was distractingly uncanny. The dark lenses looked like large, lifeless eyes, with the weak sunlight refracting off the lenses resembling a slimy film.

Hidden as his real eyes were, Ginny couldn’t help but feel his gaze on her as acutely as a touch. His open, unnerving scrutiny combined with her shame had her shifting on her feet and wishing she’d stayed in Holyhead.

“Hermione is why I’m here, actually,” she said. Her fingers were entwined together, but she didn’t look down at the ground again. Could Malfoy tell that this was the last thing she wanted to be doing on a Sunday? Of course he could. Ginny’s body language was as subtle as a punch to the face.

“Oh?”

“She told me what you did for Harry and Ron. In France.”

“Did she?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about!” she snapped, the old Ginny Weasley, the one she was trying to remake into a more patient, sympathetic Ginny, making a sudden reappearance. Softening her voice, she continued. “Saving a life is a significant act. It means something.”

“Does it?” Malfoy asked, his gaze pointed.

The question brought a blush to her face, her shame magnifying. He had saved her life five times and each time she had acted as if he had mortally wounded her instead. She had never expressed gratitude or even spoken well of him for his good deeds. But when it came to her brother and her ex-boyfriend, when it came to her family, their lives were important. Their lives were worth saving. That was the awful realization she had come to at Dominique’s birthday party. For so long, she had felt like her life hadn’t been worth saving and her anger stemmed from the fact that Malfoy continued to do it against her wishes.

When had she started feeling like this? She didn’t know, but her sanity—and perhaps her life—depended on her figuring that out.

“Yes,” she said firmly, her chin rising, her eyes glinting with contention. “And I owe you an apology for never thanking you for saving mine.”

Malfoy took a step back, his expression hidden behind the goggles. Even if his face couldn’t, the surprised side step gave away some of his feelings.

And he’d claimed to have less than one, she thought with amusement.

“I think…” She shoved her hands under her armpits to keep herself from fidgeting. “I think I’ve been—Wait. I can’t have a serious conversation with you while you’re wearing those things.”

“What things?”

She pointed to her temple. “The goggles. You look like a toad.”

Malfoy pulled the goggles off and flung them over his shoulder. “What do I look like now?”

His mouth stretched upwards in a smirk, and the only explanation she could fathom for his smugness was his awareness of her staring at him.

It wasn’t that Malfoy was a handsome man. Some might call him attractive, but Ginny had always found his arrogance too bliding to see anything attractive in him. Perhaps her knowledge of his personality tainted the way she saw him, hiding his physical features underneath a layer of disdain and self-importance. When she looked at him, she saw a man who was too skinny and pale, with delicate hands, all of which suggested someone who did not exert himself or work hard. She saw a pointed nose and chin, sharp cheekbones and an angular jaw, which suggested nothing but made his face striking and painful to look at, not least because his default expression was an unpleasant sneer.

But when he threw off his goggles, it was like a veil had been lifted, the filter of the past melting away until she was seeing Draco Malfoy for the first time in years.

For one thing, he was still skinny and pale, but not as he’d been in his youth, not as she remembered from Hogwarts. He’d filled out, muscles developing from years of Quidditch training. Most of his body was hidden from view under his robes, but the breadth of his shoulders was obvious to her now, as was the thickness of his neck. She should have known, though. She’d felt that chest against her body, felt his arms around hers months ago when she fell into his lap at the Burrow. Delicate hands? Please. She knew from experience how strong his hands were, and how safe they made her feel.

And pale? If she were being generous, she might call his complexion sun-kissed. He would never be tan or golden-skinned, but there was color on his face, which was missing around his eyes from, she assumed, repeated exposure to the sun while wearing Quidditch goggles.

He wore no sneer now. The longer she stared, the more his smug smile began to droop, until he was frowning, his uncertainty evident by the way he loosened and tightened his double grip on his broomstick.

She was shocked by the man in front of her and how he was so different from the man she remembered from years ago. It no longer surprised her that this man was capable of saving a life and not taking credit for it.

“Fine. You look fine,” Ginny finally said with a grimace. A shiver wracked her spine at the same time, and she hoped Malfoy interpreted her reaction as one of disgust. The status quo was easier to live with than her epiphany was.

Ginny wasn’t sure where she’d left off before she’d told him to take off the goggles, and she wasn’t sure how to go back to the topic at hand. Malfoy, however, saved her by opening his mouth.

“Wait, I have something for you.”

“For me?”

He nodded. “Stay right here. I just need my bag.”

Before Ginny could say anything further, he jumped on his broom and raced off the pitch toward a portal that led to one of the locker rooms. His absence gave Ginny a moment to breath evenly, fully, and consider the whole conversation so far.

“Mount Weasley?” she muttered to herself. As far as nicknames went, she supposed it wasn’t a terrible one. Certainly no worse than Phlegm.

A moment later, Malfoy was back and hopping off his broom with the grace of someone comfortable both on land and in the air. The broom hung suspended next to him as he rifled through his bag, until he found what he was looking for and held a drawstring sack towards her. It clinked as she took it.

Bemused, Ginny upended the contents of the bag into her palm. “Gobstones?”

“Marbles,” he corrected her.

“A… Muggle game.”

He took a step closer to her and drew a finger through the marbles in her hand, his skin brushing hers with barely-there touches that made gooseflesh pop up on Ginny’s arms.

“Not a game,” he said, his eyes lowered. “Tokens. Five marbles for the five times I saved your life.”

Ginny tensed, her whole body from her lips to her jaws to her limbs tightening at the memory of the Gobstones that caused the fall into his lap. “Reminders, you mean.”

“No! I’m explaining this all wrong.” That was evident by him running a hand through his mussed up hair, mussing it up even further. Somehow, unfairly, he didn’t look ridiculous. He made her want to run her fingers through the short locks, bringing order to the chaos… or making it even more disorderly.

The marbles glittered in the light of the sun, the colors of the swirls and the cat eyes embedded in the glass bold and bright.

After taking a moment to consider his approach, Malfoy finally said, “I don’t want you to think that you owe me anything because of what I’ve done for you. Not anything. Not gratitude, not payment… not even life debts.”

Ginny’s breath stalled in her lungs to hear her fear voiced aloud by the man responsible for it. How had he known?

“These marbles represent those life debts. I’m giving them back to you because I don’t want them. Your life is your own, and you should not be indebted to me for doing a decent thing. I don’t deserve that kind of payment.”

“Oh,” Ginny said. The marbles rolled around her palm, happy and innocent and inanimate and non-magical. “Oh,” she said again as the gesture sank in.

Her heart was swelling and racing, her chest tightening with the emotion that filled her. She wished she could draw on her outrage, her anger, her hatred, because those feelings were easier to understand. Malfoy had gloated over saving her life for months, but now here he was saying he didn’t want anything from her. There was something wrong about that, something that didn’t sit right with her.

“There isn’t… anything I can do to repay you?” Why did she ask that? She didn’t mean it, not really.

And Malfoy, shaking his head, closed her fingers around the marbles and said, “No, nothing.”

So that was it, then. This is what Ginny had wanted all along. For her fears to be acknowledged and for Malfoy to leave her alone. Why, then, did she no longer want this? The thought of Malfoy never talking to her again and only hearing second-hand information about him from Harry, Ron, and Hermione was as unwelcome to her as a hypothetical future where she could never play Quidditch again.

She looked down at her closed hand, the marbles within her fist, and her heart stuttered. This is what a kind gesture looked like from Malfoy. She wondered what kinds of things he did for her brother, for Harry, for Hermione, for people who actually considered him a friend. If he could do this for her even knowing how much Ginny hated him...? Her entire family couldn’t have been swindled into accepting him, could they?

She looked up finally to find Malfoy watching her, his eyes soft, half-lidded. He straightened as soon as her scrutiny was upon him, blinking away thoughts Ginny couldn’t fathom. She wasn’t ready to push him away yet, not before she could experience his friendship for herself. And she knew exactly how she could repay him for saving her while continuing to keep him in her life.

“Thank you for these,” she said as she deposited the marbles back into their sack. “You know, every time you saved my life, I got angrier, and not just because you were my savior. I hated the act itself. Part of me wished you hadn’t bothered.”

Malfoy flinched. “You mean….”

Ginny crossed her arms. “I don’t feel that way anymore. I am grateful to you. But I don’t need a hero, Malfoy. I think instead I could use a friend.”

“Oh. Well. I could go call Hermione? There’s a Floo connection in the—”

He started to walk off, his gait unsteady, his body stiff. Ginny grabbed his arm and yanked him back, aware, amused by, awed at his disturbed expression. It took a moment for her to identify the hurt that creased his brow and drew his lips downward in a frown. Maybe she wasn’t the only one who could use a friend. Malfoy had many now… could he stand to have one more?

“Why drag Hermione all this way when you’re already here?”

“Me? Are you sure?”

She nodded and squeezed his gift as she stuffed it in her pocket, grateful that the marbles were Muggle in nature and unable to squirt her with putrid liquid.

He looked thoughtfully at his floating broomstick for a moment and failed to hide his pleased smile. She wondered about that expression, about his gift of marbles, about what Ron had said at Dominique’s birthday party about Malfoy’s lies all revolving around Ginny. Malfoy was a mystery to her, and it was no one’s fault but her own. She’d spent so long hating him and avoiding him; she had no idea what her friends and family saw in him now. Maybe he’d let her find out. The smile he tried to conceal by biting his lip suggested he might be willing to give her a chance.

Malfoy gestured grandly at the pitch around them. “Fancy a bit of flying then? I’ll let you use my Nimbus 9000. It’s in the locker room.”

Ginny released a breath of relief, her own lips curving into an answering grin.

“Are you kidding? Those things are awful. That model hasn’t even been on the market for six months yet and I hear Nimbus is already planning a redesign with more versatility and a power level way over the 9000. I am not riding that thing.”

“Just imagine playing professional Quidditch on it,” he said with a sneer. “And we still managed to beat your team on finicky, faulty brooms. What does that say about the Harpies this year?”

Ginny’s eyes narrowed, but Malfoy wasn’t wrong about the Harpies. When she beat him on a flawed broom, she’d gloat about her victory just like a Malfoy would, and then he’d have something to sneer about! “Fine! Gimme the Nimbus.”

He flew out to the locker room and returned with the second broomstick in a matter of seconds, and as they mounted their individual brooms, Ginny said, “If I fall off this thing, you better catch me.”

Malfoy, grinning widely as he kicked off into the air (sans toady goggles), called back down to her, “Of course. What else are friends for?”

End

Author notes:

This is the definite end to this story, my friends. At this current moment in time, I don't have any plans to expand this story further or write a sequel, but that doesn't mean I won't change my mind in the (distant) future! If anyone else would like to write a continuation of this, I give you my blessing. This is an ending I'm really happy with, and I hope you enjoyed it, too! If you didn't, let's discuss! I have reasons for ending this with a friendship instead of an explicit romance.

The name of Draco’s broom, the Starfall 6, is inspired by the A Court of Thorns and Roses trilogy by Sarah J. Maas. Starfall for a holiday celebrated in the second novel, A Court of Mist and Fury, and 6 for Rhysand’s inner circle and because it sounds nice. :) The marbles and Draco using them as tokens to represent Ginny's supposed life debts were inspired by The Countess Conspiracy by Courtney Milan, in which marbles are used to represent favors that can be called in or traded between friends. I also made a Dragon Ball Z reference, because I couldn’t not make one with a broom I intentionally named the Nimbus 9000.

In unrelated news, The DG Forum is hosting its annual fic exchange over on fanfiction.net! Information about the exchange can be found HERE. Sign-ups are open now and will close at 11:59pm (CDT/UCT-5) on Sunday, July 21st, 2019.

Thank you all for reading!

The End.
idreamofdraco is the author of 51 other stories.
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