CHAPTER FIVE - Vulnerability
"Could someone find me the facts on the new wing again? Please?" Ginny didn't really know who she was calling out to; after all, she was more or less shouting into a giant filing cabinet which seemed to have eaten her entire file on the upcoming expansion of St. Mungo's.
At the moment, the only fact she could remember was who had funded the new wing.
Bloody convenient.
Any plea she made for help had to have looked ridiculous, she knew, with her rear end waving out of the filing cabinet and the entire upper half of her body obscured. But she'd been looking for damned near a half an hour, and she was sick of looking. She was the head of her department, damn it, she could just call up a file and have someone find her some information other than the wing being a product of Draco Malfoy's money and Draco Malfoy's guilt.
Immediately after she thought it, Ginny felt guilty and dove back in to look one more time. A bit of self-regulation, penitent activity.
The truth of the matter was, she was being petty and she knew it.
He'd always managed to bring out the worst in her, and a few years' time seemed to have made no difference at all.
But then again, that's what she'd been hoping for-nay, counting on.
She'd read the article in the Daily Prophet a few times, never certain where to look. The words didn't captivate her; the pictures did. Draco with his stained sleeve, alternately scowling and acting proprietary with her. She couldn't even bear to look at herself. She looked ridiculous.
And Harry.
She looked at Harry the longest, perhaps, looking at the features she hadn't forgotten.
And looking at them, it was her turn to feel guilty.
Looking inside the fathomless, dusty depths of the cabinet was preferable by a kilometer.
"Why can't I ever find what I'm looking for?" Her moan was dejected, and not for the first time, Ginny wished the Ministry's budget would stretch enough to allow an office where all of her department could be together. It would make communication ever so much easier.
"If it's so urgent, my office can certainly owl you the information." He'd been standing there far too long, Pansy's idiotic words zinging through his head like a flock of Cornish pixies, brightly colored and obnoxious and vicious and impossible to ignore.
Not much different from Pansy herself, then.
Walking down the halls of the Ministry, he'd not known it was her office until he'd heard her call out for the file on the new wing, and by that time, he was in her doorway and had a fantastic shot of her rear end sticking out of the cabinet.
Her skirt was marginally longer than Pansy's had been, but caught his attention with much more expedience.
A Weasley, he reminded himself. And Potter's Weasley, no less.
And no matter how hard he tried, Draco couldn't keep his brain from throwing in former. She was no longer Potter's Weasley.
She was her own woman.
For the moment.
She stood upright the moment he spoke, and though he had rather hoped she would rap her head on the cabinet, she didn't. Instead, she looked up at him with wide, shocked eyes hidden behind masses of unruly red hair.
Ginny shoved her hair out of her face with one hand and slammed the drawer of the filing cabinet with the other-directly onto her thumb.
"Damn it!" she yelled, yanking her hand out and glaring at the cabinet, which shut itself perfectly.
If a magical filing cabinet could look smug, Ginny would have sworn this one did.
"What?!" she shouted, cradling her throbbing thumb to her chest. She wished she had… a blanket, a hole in the floor, a train ticket to elsewhere. A hammer to hit him with. "Have you not caused enough trouble, Malfoy? My entire family thinks I'm brainwashed, must you make a public display of your asininity?"
"I heard someone shouting," he said dryly, casting an eye down to her waste paper basket, where the newspaper was stuffed.
He could at least tell Pansy she'd been wrong about that.
"I thought perhaps the person shouting might need some help." He came around her desk and looked down his nose at the piles there. "And clearly I was correct, though any help you need is quite beyond my means."
Ginny performed a spell as discreetly as she could to ease the pain in her thumb, then slipped behind her desk. She wasn't using it as a shield, she thought defensively. It was just more official. She was at work, after all, and people were already talking.
"I need no help," she said levelly. "Though I thank you for your willingness to be of service."
Wrong choice of words, she figured as his smile spread over his face.
He was uncomfortable. Really bloody uncomfortable. But he wasn't about to show her that. No, this was all about keeping her off her balance while figuring out what her game was, exactly, and why she had left the immeasurable, unequalled Harry Potter.
He needed to know, and he couldn't avoid her. She was Ministry and he was Malfoy. So he would mingle.
"Don't be too grateful," he said, planting one long-fingered hand on her desk and nudging her waste basket with his foot. "You still owe me dinner."
Her eyes darted to the basket at his feet and back to his face, and he felt a flush work its way from his toes up. Something about her uncertainty, something about that hesitation, had his gears turning.
Something about Ginevra Weasley's vulnerable side was awfully bloody appealing to Draco Malfoy.
And he didn't like it one damned bit.
"I don't leave deals or promises uncompleted," Ginny said through her teeth, wondering why she hadn't just burned the damned paper. "We can't all be unscrupulous, you know."
"You could have fooled me," Draco said thoughtlessly, falling into banter as easily as he fell into work, as easily as he'd once mounted a broom. "You certainly didn't look as though you were really discerning at the party this weekend."
His voice was low, pleasant, and undoubtedly inaudible to anyone outside her office. She wanted to rail, to scream, and could have thrown up a silencing charm, but it would have been obvious.
When had she last given into the urge to be emotional?
Before she'd left Harry, that much was certain, and even those indulgences had been in the dark of night, in the hours just before dawn, sitting in the loo with her knees drawn to her chest and her mouth buried in the flannel of her nightgown to stifle her sobs from Harry, sleeping just on the other side of the door-
"You'll have your dinner," she said faintly, finding she was too breathless to scream at him now. "I'd thank you to leave now. I've work to do."
He gaped. He couldn't help it. It was as though someone had doused a candle in water, so drastic was the change. Hell, he'd nearly even heard the hiss as the flame went out. She'd looked ready to spit on him one moment, and then the next?
The next, it was as though he'd hit her.
This Weasley wasn't nearly as much fun as the angry one. No, this Weasley only brought forth more questions, and more vulnerability. And vulnerability? Well, Draco didn't like that he seemed to be vulnerable to hers.
He thought of something to say, decided she wasn't listening to him, and walked out the door, leaving her staring fixedly at her hands clasped together on her desk.
Why had he even bothered?
Because he couldn't help himself.
When he was finally gone, Ginny cast the silencing spell around her office, just for a moment, and let out a scream. It wasn't anger, though, but something else entirely, a mix too complex to put a label to, and as soon as it was out of her, she pulled herself together and took the barrier off her office.
No one would ever know.
~~~
"Shut your fucking mouth. I don't care what you were about to say, I don't want to hear it." She was
standing outside his office like a vulture, and it was all Draco could do not to voice the fervent wish that every
woman he knew would disappear, at least for a day.
It would be so peaceful.
"I was only preparing to ask your secretary for a parchment, love, you needn't get so defensive." Pansy kept her tone quiet, solicitous.
He looked shaken. Shaken Draco, in Pansy's opinion, was a very good thing. It certainly beat emotionless Draco, which had prevailed for quite some time after Lucius's death.
Emotionless Draco was a dead fucking bore, not to mention Pansy was fairly certain that wasn't healthy.
"Octavia," he called to his secretary without checking to see if she'd heard. "Owl a draft of everything you have on the St. Mungo's project to the Ministry. Use a fast owl and send it to the Department of Magical Medicine." He could feel Pansy's eyes on his back, so he swung to face her, shocked to see she wasn't smirking at him. "What does a woman want when she approaches you with intent in her eyes, pulls away with anger in her voice, then looks at you with fear written all over her?"
Pansy considered this for a moment, filed the observations away for her own perusal later. "Isn't the more appropriate question what you want from a woman who would do those things?"
"Fuck!" he said, giving her a dirty look. "You're absolutely worthless." But he'd felt like a fool, like for a moment she'd known exactly what he was thinking, known exactly what he was planning, and had just… rolled over to it.
It wasn't that, exactly, he knew, but he couldn't put his finger on it.
It should have been easy to want two very simple things.
Sex was simple.
Revenge was simple.
Being who he was, certainly he could mix the two. But he had to figure her out, and for now, that wasn't going very smoothly.
"Contact Ginevra Weasley's flat, Octavia," he said in a low voice, holding out one hand with his index finger extended to keep Pansy quiet. "Arrange dinner."