Muggle trains.
Ginny had never been very fond of them. Not the pathetically ugly design of the seats, not the gloomy silence between the passengers, and not the lack of happiness that was everything the Hogwarts Express wasn’t. No one really seemed to be happy on muggle trains. She was lucky, though – she didn’t have to ride them very often, not with the magical world offering brooms and apparition. But sometimes, they were the only alternative she had. And this was one of those cases.
She was traveling to visit Luna down in Wales, where her good friend was doing some intense research on a new little bug she’d heard of – Ginny hadn’t quite catched the name. Ginny loved Luna, she really did, but she couldn’t quite get exactly why Luna had to go to Wales of all places. And it wasn’t just a short visit, either. Luna was staying there in a little red cottage that no one had cared about since the 1970’s with a roof awfully close to falling apart, because that seemed to be Luna’s favourite kind of cottages. The cottage stood in the middle of a great forest, and Luna was planning to spend her whole summer there. And, like the kind person she was, she had invited most of her friends to come visit her. Ginny was one of the few that didn’t decline the invitation, and here she was, on a train with weirdly soft plastic floor, trying her best not to Bat Bogey-hex the man next to her.
He had spent the first hour trying to flirt with her in different ways, which was very inappropriate, especially since both of them were wearing engagement rings. If that wasn’t enough, the man was also so drunk he barely seemed to remember how to sit. To be honest, Ginny was actually kind of worried that he would throw up on her if the train made a sharp turn. The flirting was also very, very wrong in another way – she recognized the man next to her.
It was probably only due to his drunkenness that he didn’t recognize her, too – because this drunk man wasn’t just someone in the neighbourhood she had met at the supermarket a few times. The slim, muscular body, the sharp face, the pale chin and the slick hair, so blonde it was almost white. She had met this man a lot of times before, even if it was a long time ago since, and she was almost a hundred percent sure of who he was. And she really didn’t know how to react.
Because the man next to her was a man she had wanted revenge on for a long time, revenge for all the things in their Hogwarts years. She had only given up the thought because of Harry, who had convinced her to let it go, not letting it take up her time.
And she had decided to do so. Letting it go. She had succeeded.
But the man next to her was named Draco Malfoy. And he was so drunk that he didn’t seem to remember it himself.
