Rest In Pieces
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
The trousers of time do not belong to me, sadly. Terry Pratchett has to take all the blame for them.
Summary: What would you do if somebody locked you into a room with your worst enemy, and you were told that at the end of 24 hours, one of you'd be killed. But you don't know who? A question Ginny and Draco have to ask themselves when facing a very difficult situation.
Author's Notes: First of all, I'm sorry for the long wait - I had finals, and was stuck with not knowing what to write after the first 300 words of this chapter. I told myself that I wanted this chapter written before dropping my sister off at la gare this morning, sat down with a cup of coffee, daring myself not to stop before finding a nice, evil cliffie, and something to happen inbetween. I am still not happy with its outcome right now, but I fear that it won't get any better. Enjoy.
Chapter 5: The peanut butter leg
Her first thought was to - well, actually she had no first thought because her brain seemed to have stopped working properly the moment their lips touched.
At first the kiss had been hesitant, almost chaste, but then Draco had grabbed and turned her around, pinning her to the wall and at the same time deepened the kiss, urging her lips open with his tongue. Lateron she could not explain why she did it, but right there and then she didn't care, so she eagerly complied, granting his probing tongue access, relishing in the feeling of his hands that were drawing small circles on the sides of her waist, running her own fingers through his soft, downy hair.
But even though she was almost completely lost in the intensity of the kiss, she did notice when his hands slid under her shirt and upwards until they reached her breasts. Somewhere in the back of her mind Ginny knew that she did not really want him to do this, to go that far. After all, she knew what would inevitably follow next, and despite the pleasurably feelings that Draco's touch was creating, she was able to draw away from him, panting heavily.
"No," she said when she finally regained the breath to do so.
"No?" Draco repeated, raising an eyebrow. "No what?"
"Just no," Ginny replied, ineffectively tugging at her shirt. Judging from the low grumble that her stomach emitted at the same time, she supposed it had to be somewhere around mid-day. She had stopped eating breakfast somewhere during her fifth year, and started to get hungry only at about noon or one o'clock. Damn. That meant that they'd been in that chamber for almost half a day now.
"Time's running away," she mumbled into her non-existent beard, looking glum.
"Pardon?" Draco asked, obviously confused by her mood swing.
"I said time's running away," Ginny repeated.
Draco's only response was to lift one of those infuriatingly perfect, pale eyebrows.
"It must be around mid-day," she explained, sighing.
"So?" he actually had the gall to ask. "Tempus fugit," he added calmly.
"That's what I've been trying to get your big head to see for about five minutes now!" Ginny screamed exasperatedly.
"Calm down Weasley, I assure you that it was merely a matter of seconds," Draco replied, completely unaffected by her outburst, looking illegally calm and collected after such a snog. Snog. At the thought of what had happened not too long ago, a deceptive blush crept up Ginny's neck.
Deciding to simply ignore it - it being about everything that had happened in the last five minutes - she grabbed her wand and tried various spells that her mum had taught her last summer after giving Ginny The Lecture for about the fifth time in a week.
She silently thanked her mother for the first time in her life for being, well, herself, when, after some experimenting the table held a loaf of bread, some peanut butter and a glass of pickles. It was not exactly the best combination, and the pickles admittedly appeared to be moving, but it was the best she could come up with.
Trying to hide her self-satisfied smile she ripped off a piece of bread and started munching on it enthusiastically, while she could see Draco eyeing the glass of peanut butter with a strange glint in his eye.
He finally opened his mouth as if to say something, but then seemed to think the better of it, scoffed, and reached for the glass, opening it in one swift motion.
Ginny blinked in confusion. Was she imagining things, or had he just almost asked whether he could take it? Scrunching up her nose she nearly missed the look that he gave the brownish substance. A look that she had never seen cross his features and that a strange part of her would like to see directed at herself. One of utter adoration.
She watched him curiously as he dipped one elegant finger into the glass and her eyes went wide as saucers when he proceeded to lick it off, repeating the motion when he was finished, completely oblivious to her stares.
Ginny was more than acutely aware of what was happening to her that very moment. Some gland thingy with a very strange name was sending out messengers to carry messages to some of her intestines, all of which had very strange names too, and in the end, those would reply and send messages out too, causing the parts of her body that a nice girl never talked about to do things that they talked about even less. Ah, yes, the magic of pheromones.
The fact that she was a nice girl and would not talk about that stuff greatly relieved Ginny, until she realized that she needn't talk about it anyway: she felt…stuff.
When Draco had reached the point where he dipped his whole finger into the diabolical peanut butter, and therefore had to lick it off his whole finger, alternately taking it into his mouth and running his tongue up and down, the nice girl with the piece of bread in her hand was flushed like a tomato and desperately trying to avert her eyes. But she couldn't help it, her gaze was drawn back to his face with the now shining eyes, his sugar- and fatcoated finger and his tongue, his tongue that had touched her lips not too long ago.
Suddenly shoving him away seemed like the most foolish thing she'd ever done in her life. He was so dam sexy.
Ginny's eyes went wide when she realized what she had just thought. Oh no, that had not been her. That had been the other her, the bad her. The one that would steal cookies when no one was looking. The one that would wear that would secretly wear no underwear when she was feeling rebellious because she'd had a row with her brother. The one that had secretly but guiltily thanked God for making Umbridge suspend Harry, Fred and George from Quidditch in her fourth year because she got to be in the Gryffindor locker rooms that way.
And Draco only noticed all this upon finally deciding that half a glass of peanut butter would be more than sufficient to glue a fully grown man to a wall, and more than enough to upset a not so weak stomach, and therefore put the glass down, screwing it shut and frowning when he saw that the piece of bread that Ginny had taken earlier was still in her hand, which was hanging limply by her side.
He lifted his gaze to her face in wonder, trying to decipher the more than strange expression that she was wearing, and to find out why on earth she was blushing now. He probably would have never found out had he not chosen that exact moment to absent-mindedly lick off a last piece of peanut butter that he had overlooked earlier.
People sometimes talk about the trousers of time. It can go down either leg, and it does, in some people's opinion. What they think is that there are zillions of other, parallel universes that all have second legs to their time trousers too. It apparently works like this: in what we consider to be the real universe, a men gets up and tries to decide which foot to put on the floor first. He picks the right. But at the moment he is trying to decide which foot to pick, time travels down the other trouser leg too, and in another universe, the very same man picks the left foot.
Perhaps Draco would have not licked his finger in another leg. Perhaps he wouldn't have noticed the look that crossed her face when he licked it in another leg of the same leg. But perhaps time had forgotten to get clothed that day and everything would have happened anyway. The Draco and Ginny in that leg didn't even know any of this, and at least one of them would have probably said "But it's not jeans, right? I hate jeans. They're so plebeian," completely failing to grasp the deeper meaning of trousers that went beyond fashion.
But they did not, he didn't ask, and fashion was surprisingly the last thing on his mind at that moment, when he was trapped in a small chamber with a girl he hated and the knowledge that the chance that he might have to be carried out of there was 50:50 in the back of his mind.
"Like what you see?" he asked after long moments of silence, a mischievous but at the same time dangerous light glimmering in his eyes that made her feel even more uneasy and trapped than before. And she was trapped. Trapped in a secluded chamber, trapped with her supposed enemy who just had to be dead sexy, trapped in her scrawny body that was anything but sexy, trapped in her mind that thought such treacherous thoughts, trapped with being a Weasley that had to hate him, trapped in a situation that suggested she was trying to free herself from some of her other traps.
She finally broke his gaze, her cheeks flushing some more and snatched the glass with the offending substance off the table. "No more peanut butter for you," she said determinedly, looking everywhere but at him, which proved to be a mistake when his arms snaked around her waist from behind, one of them coming to rest on her abdomen and the other one reaching for the glass she was clutching so hard her knuckles started to whiten.
Snape in underwear, Snape in underwear, she chanted to herself when she felt his body against her back, his hot breath tickling her ear.
"Oh, but I insist," he whispered silkily, drawing small circles with the thumb that was resting on her lower stomach.
If only I had some abs, the part of her that had fortunately decided on wearing underwear today thought, being immediately pushed away by the part of her that would never even get the idea of not wearing it chanting Snape without underwear, Snape without underwear singing 'I'm a little teapot'
Although this did not help get the fog from her mind entirely, it at least cleared a little, and she managed to do two things at once that made him stumble away from her immediately, namely dropping the glass and elbowing him into the stomach with the boniest elbow of Hogwarts.
As the glass shattered and he tried to regain the breath that had been knocked out of his lungs Ginny managed to stumble away and lean on the wall for support, while realization of what she'd done dawned on his features.
"You broke it! It's gone!" he screamed, looking near frantic.
Taking a deep, calming breath she managed to appear semi-unaffected when she lifted an eyebrow as if to say "So what?"
"I," he began, his breaths heavy and laboured with barely suppressed anger now, "happen to like peanut butter."
"So it seems," she ground out, a little unsettled by the dark and eerie expression on his features that had been relaxed and delighted mere moments ago.
"You're going to pay for that, Weasley," Draco hissed through clenched teeth. "One of us might not come out of here alive, and I honestly don't know whether it'll be you or me, but before that happens, you're gonna pay," he ranted on, looking deadly serious about enacting dreadful revenge upon the destruction of a glass of peanut butter. "Let me think," he continued, a layering a little thoughtfulness over his dark features, "what is it that a dirt poor muggle-loving fool like you still has to be proud of, to value? Oh, right. Your honour. Your decency. You're a nice girl, aren't you Weasley? Innocent, pure, and protected. Well, there's no-one here to protect you now, and you won't be any of the other anymore either, before long, if I can help it."
And something in his voice told her that he meant every word he had just said.
Well, that was the fifth chapter. Go kill me now. I think I'm gonna have the sixth chapter out sooner, as I got a
surge of motivation upon finishing this chapter. But if you think it's horrible and not worth continuing, and that
I'm a lazy bastard, then I shall respect that and stop.
Also, I'd like to thank everyone who reviewed this story so far - you guys rock. And the guy who sent me an e-mail yesterday saying "Finish ur story on Portkey". I don't know which one he meant, but it's kind of flattering, despite the commanding tone *laughs*