23. Chapter 23: Ginny

Everyone: thanks to a review by QueenMazyofLazy, I was reminded to clear things up a bit. The howler was the dinner the night before the revenge on Blaise, so the revenge and closet stuff was the day after they went to Hogsmeade. Otherwise Draco could not have been in the closet snogging Hermione and have received the howler. So if there's any part of the story that suggests otherwise in terms of order of events, please tell me and I will fix it.

(Btw, I accidentally made a mistake about the above subject in chapter 21 - I have changed it now.)

Thank you!

& before you, you see...

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10 Ways to Kill Draco Malfoy

Chapter 23

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GINNY

Sometimes I can get really pissed off at Hermione. But when you look at things from another angle, you can always see that what she's doing is good for me. Like when she was yelling about Harry liking me in front of the whole school. Embarassing, yes, but without it I wouldn't be here right now, sitting beside Harry in the common room. Plus there was that howler she made Dobby record... that was the funniest thing I'd heard in a long time.

Conveniently, the room is empty. Then again, it IS quite late. We just sat here, doing our homework together, until everyone else had gone to bed. I feel like jumping in joy that Harry isn't making a big deal about the Blaise thing - he was even jealous! That had been so cute. I wish I could replay that over and over again. Heehee!

"'The properties of Veritaserum is that it forces the truth out of a person,'" Harry recites monotonously, holding up his Potions notes.

I giggle. "You can stop the pretense now, Harry. Everyone's gone to bed."

He glances around, looking surprised. "True! I didn't even notice."

"You were that absorbed in your work?" I ask incredulously.

"No... I was too busy staring at- uh, I mean, staring at my parchment. Yeah, that's it. Parchment." Harry blushes a little and clears his throat, shuffling his papers. He adjusts his glasses and unconsciously runs a hand through his already messy hair. Messy hair would normally look good on any boy (with some exceptions, like Lee Jordan - if his hair had gotten any more messy, it would be an afro), but on Harry it looks simply gorgeous. At least, in my eyes.

I sigh, smiling wistfully. "Riiiiiight," I drawl. There is a period of comfortable silence as we grin at each other foolishly.

Then Harry speaks up shyly. "Want to, um, finish what we were doing last time before Ron interrupted us?" he asks, turning a bright shade of crimson. His emerald eyes are now a stark contrast to his skin color.

"I thought you'd never ask," I exclaim, my heart leaping around crazily like a mad rabbit. Butterflies do somersaults in my stomach as Harry leans over the table. I get closer to him, and close my eyes...

"OUCH!"

I open my eyes again, wondering what happened. Then I see Harry clutching his stomach in pain. I giggle. Obviously he'd been a tad too enthusiastic in leaning over to kiss me and had smashed his abdomen against the hard table. "Oh, Harry! Be careful! Are you alright?" I stand up and walk over to him, concerned but still smiling in spite of myself. "That looks like it hurt. Don't try battling the table with your stomach - not a good idea."

He grimaces at me, doing his best to sit up. "Y-you should have told me that earlier, Ginny. It's kinda late for that kind of advice now, don't you think?"

"Awww. Sorry," I coo. I pat him on the arm and look into his eyes. He stares at me through his glasses, hair falling onto his lashes. We remain like this for a while, me standing over him while he sits, looking up at me. Soon, my back starts to get tired and I feel the urge to sit down. At this moment, Harry pulls my arm towards him. Losing my balance, I stumble forward and my lips fall onto his.

How romantic - apart from the fact that my back is very sore, Harry is having to crane his neck up in order to reach my mouth, and I am in a rather awkward position, half supported by him and half unbalanced. But who cares; I mean, this is the big moment, the moment I've been waiting for since I set my eyes on Harry when I was 10.

OK, well maybe not that early (when I was 10 I hardly wanted to snog any boy - I was still recovering from the whole 'boys have cooties' thing that girls and boys get when they are about 8 or 9), but you get my idea.

After a minute or so, we pull apart, and I struggle to stand up. "Phew. Not too shabby," I comment with a grin. Harry smiles. "Your first kiss?"

He looks embarassed. "Actually... no," he admits.

I raise an eyebrow. "Oh? Who was your first?" I'm pretty sure I know the answer, but I want to make sure, just in case I am wrong and it is something- er, someone horrible like Millicent Bulstrode or Pansy Parkinson (don't ask me how Harry can be fooled into kissing the former).

"Cho... Cho Chang," he says. "In my 5th year. Last year, basically. Um, it was when I was teaching all those DADA spells secretly to 'Dumbledore's Army'."

I laugh. I remember those lessons; they were pretty helpful. Never knew what was going on after them, though. Looks like Cho picked a decent place for a snog. I never would have guessed. "Oooh, I see. Was it good?"

"..." Harry glances at me. "Um... well... it's not like I have much experience or anything, but I have to say this one was better." He grins shyly. "Much better."

"Good, good," I reply. Just then, the portrait hole swings open and a flushed Ron crawls through. He looks a bit worse for wear and seems to be nursing a bruised arm. He limps towards us - has he broken something? - and collapses on the nearest armchair. "Accio cup! Accio water jug!" I shout, waving my wand. The aforementioned items zoom towards me and I stop them smartly at the table. Ron thirstily pours himself a drink. "Where were you, Ron? Have you been fighting?" He scowls as he puts down the cup. His black eye becomes apparent. "Oh. Oops. Didn't see that."

Sighing, Ron rubs his eye. "Thanks, Harry," he says as his best friend conjours up a wet towel to wipe him off. "Yeah, obviously I've been fighting. Blaise, to be exact."

Harry inhales sharply. "Don't tell me you were taking revenge by trying to beat Blaise up with all his friends nearby," he says dangerously. "By yourself, too."

Ron looks sheepish. "Actually, that's what I was doing. But Blaise was pretty fair. He called off all his mates when they leaped on me and proposed a one-on-one fight." He groans as he accidentally bumps his arm on the table. "Godammit, that boy can fight. Never knew he had the material. I had almost expected him to slap me as a first move, but no - a punch straight onto the face. Ow." He touches his right cheek, wincing.

I sigh. "Ron, you thickhead. Haven't you ever seen Blaise fight? He fights like a madman, that guy. I think he does karate or something."

"What's that?" Ron frowns.

"It's a kind of battle style used by muggles," explains Harry. "It's hand-to-hand. No wands, guns - that's those metal wands with bullets in them - or anything, just bare hands and feet."

"Wow," Ron laments. "I wish I'd heard of that. Then maybe I could have learnt it and kicked his ass."

I pat his shoulder. He yelps. "Oh, sorry. So, who won the fistfight in the end?"

Ron looks up, rolling his eyes. "It was a draw, I swear. Well, except I ended up more bruised and beaten than him, but we were both tired and winded so we called it quits."

I roll my eyes to myself. That usually means that he lost. Ron never admits that he lost a fight - his pride won't let him. "OK. A draw. We believe you."

"Honest!" he protests, but Harry silences him with a glare. "Sorry. Oh yeah, have you guys seen Hermione? She told me to do whatever kind of revenge I want to Blaise and that she'd take care of Malfoy's punishment from you. And plus something about beating him over the head with a broom."

Harry chuckles at the mental image that arises with Ron's description. "Oh yeah. She came back asking for my Invisibility Cloak, too." Then he sits up. "Hey... if she has the cloak, she should be able to just attack and then come back straight away. But yet she's been gone longer than you, Ron." He turns to face us. "Think something happened...?"

We are silent for a while, thinking. I'm not exactly worried about Hermione - rather, more for the person who decided to mess with her, but she has been gone for quite a while. Hexing someone to oblivion wouldn't take this long. She's been gone since she and Ron left Harry and I here, which has been about three hours.

Malfoy couldn't possibly survive a 20-minute beating, with a broomstick and Hermione's vigour, let alone a 3-hour one.

And I don't think Hermione's going to actually kill Draco... at least, I hope not.

"Where do you think she is?" I ask, out of ideas. "Near the Slytherin common room?"

"Could be a good place to start looking," Harry agrees. He glances at his watch. "But it's 10pm. And we don't have the Invisibility Cloak, so if Filch catches us we're dead. Literally."

Ron sighs, rubbing his temples. "What can we do, what can we do, what can we do...? Hermione sure was stupid taking the cloak... but then again, if she didn't, she'd be caught, reported and possible expelled. Well, maybe not expelled, with her grades, but we can't let her take the blame for anything we do in the future. All three of us will be in Filch's bad books - if we aren't already, which I think we are."

"Then all we can do is wait till she gets back," I declare. "I know Hermione well enough to trust that she can take care of herself. And unless the staircases shift an unusual amount tonight, I wager that she'll be able to get back here."

"You sure, Ginny?" Ron asks, worried. I grin. He's liked Hermione for a while now; several years, to be exact. Not as long as I've liked Harry, of course. But I don't think he really loves her or anything - it's more like just a crush. After all, Hermione is very pretty, even more so now that her hair has grown out of its bushyness. It's not sleek and shiny, but it looks good on her.

Harry stands up and stretches. "So now we wait," he says, trudging sadly up to his dormitory. "Oh, wait," he adds, as if he just remembered something. He runs back down and pecks me on the cheek. "Goodnight," he says, face red again, and sprints into the boys' dormitories. Ron stares at me open-mouthed. I refrain from laughing loudly and thus waking the rest of the Gryffindors.

"Since when did you two get so cosy as to kiss each other goodnight?" he asks suspiciously as I head up the stairs to the girls' side. "What did you two do while we were gone?"

I recall the kiss and the conversations, and smile. "Nothing," I say nonchalantly. "Nothing at all. Well, actually, that'd be a lie, but really, nothing apart from a snog..." I chuckle at Ron's horrified expression. Honestly, I don't know why he looks like that. Probably because his best friend and little sister have just become an official couple, meaning that both will spend much less time with him.

He should really get himself a girlfriend. OK, so Ron's not the most handsome or sexy boy in the school (at the moment, Draco Malfoy holds that title), and I can't really say anything really positive about his appearance in a female perspective without sounding incestuous (is that a word?), but I know for sure that he's actually not bad when it comes to looks. His orange brown hair is slightly wavy and curls around his ears and at the nape of his neck, and his eyes are an interesting blue-gray color. He looks like Fred and George, and I know for a fact that those two were never short of girls.

Even if Ron isn't exactly as interesting as them.

But still.

I shut the dormitory door behind me and head straight to my bed. My dorm-mates are already sound asleep, and a few of them occasionally emit soft snores. Tessa, the loudest snorer, sleeps farthest away from me, thank God. Right now I want as little distraction as possible to let me sleep. My worry for Hermione is literally gnawing at my mind.

Oh, Hermione, Hermione. Won't you show up, so we can all sleep in peace?

I really wonder what she's doing with Malfoy... if she's still with him, which is a very big possibility. Snogging? I wouldn't put it past them, considering their relationship with each other. One minute they're throwing insults and casting lethal spells at each other, and the next they are seen together, not fighting at all.

Let's just hope it's not anything past a little kiss or two.

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I know some of you just want to read Hermione and Draco's POVs, and that's fine with me, but I doubt I'll stop writing other POVs because they provide another interesting perspective to a situation and occasionally make you laugh at their stupidity. Like right now. Ginny knows little about what they're really doing, but she can guess. Ron and Harry, however, don't know a thing (or at least haven't said anything :D).

Anyway, if I just write Hr or D POVs the story would suddenly become more fast-paced than before.

So there:D

Please review and leave me a comment. I love reading them!