Draconis: A Satire

Chapter One: The Accident

It was a box.
About a foot tall, wide, and long, with a thin beige casing and a shiny but opaque panel on the side facing. It sat on an odd pedestal instead of just being on the table, and attached was a sort of flattened thing that looked like a typewriter. Nearby was an odd object which was a similar beige to the casing, but had a few squares on it and a gray bump.
Ginny doubted that that this thing could have any purpose, and told her father as much. Arthur laughed and placed a hand on his daughter’s shoulder.
“It’s much more useful than it appears, Ginny! This pomcooter can…. can… Well, I’m not exactly sure what it does, but Muggles use it on a daily basis so it must be good for, er, something…” He made some desperate movements with his hands, but they didn’t really seem to be helping.
“Weren’t we supposed to start with television?” Ginny asked.
“Now, now,” Arthur gently chided, “just try it.”
Ginny sighed and sat down, after which her father pressed a button which caused the screen to light up. There was a blue background and assorted colorful icons upon it along the left side, arranged in a neat little column. Ginny put her elbow on the table and her chin on her hand to stare at it, but her elbow brushed against the odd object sitting by the letterboard and caused a hitherto unnoticed little white arrow on the screen to move.
“Oh! That’s the mouse, dear,” Arthur pointed out. “You can move it about and ‘click’ on things.”
Ginny moved the arrow about randomly for a little bit until she got the hang of choosing where she wanted it to go and pressed one of the buttons. An odd grey rectangle with several lines of text appeared.
“Wrong button,” the Weasley father said gently.

---

Over the next couple days, Ginny got the hang of using the computer. It took a while, but she started to get attached to its unintuitive idiosyncrasies, most especially the Internet.
The Internet. It was like she’d heard smoking to be described like: It was only an irritant at first, but pulled you in the more you tried it, and eventually you couldn’t live without it. She obtained a Yahoo! Mail address, membership at a funny new thing called Xanga, all sorts of registrations at forums she forgot about next week. However, her most interesting discovery was when she stumbled upon a little site called fanfiction.net.
Ginny frowned at the categories: Anime, Books, Cartoons, Comics, Games, Misc., Movies, and TV. What was this “anime”? Wasn’t cartoon another word for comic? What did games have to do with movies or comic books? Why did they have to differentiate between movies and TV?
Sighing, Ginny decided to stick with the website and clicked on the only category which held no mysteries for her: “Books.” Once the page loaded, she was greeted by a collection of bright blue links with a list of book titles, a few of which she recognized as they were classics. However, one pair of words caught her eye: Harry Potter.
Next to it was a number in parentheses somewhere in the latter half of 300,000, but Ginny ignored this and followed the link of her ex-but-more-like-why-really-boyfriend’s name.
What appeared was a list of stories and an array to the northeast corner of purple boxes, but these Ginny ignored, opting to let her mouth drop on reading the list of stories.
A few stories involved mysterious names she had never heard and interesting enough summaries that sounded like good enough literature. These, however, were in the minority. More prevalent were misspelled, improperly capitalized explorations of all sorts of characters in manners that Ginny really would have preferred not to read – why would Snape wonder who the father of his daughter was? There was a confusing pair of tales involving Cedric Diggory in love, again with somebody she’d never seen in Hogwarts, which seemed rather schematically difficult to Ginny considering that he was rather dead. Remus Lupin was inexplicably leaving the magical world and at the same time allowing Tonks to angst endlessly over him, besides being mysteriously in love with Sirius Black. And she really didn’t want to know what “Harry and Draco … future yaoi!” meant.
As she read through more of the fics, things slowly began to make more sense. These stories were written to fill a gap: The writers had written every single possible idea (and quite a few impossible ones) when it came to stories featuring Ron and Hermione bickering into love, Harry and Hermione seriously disturbing any reader who valued reality, Draco and Hermione hooking up more times than the average person could count, and a surprisingly large amount of Harry and Draco fics.
Surprisingly, Ginny found that she actually turned up once or twice per page (at most). More often than not, it had to do with Harry; that was no surprise.
Her rare but gripping encounters with fics putting her with Draco, however, were.
It was odd, really; she was blushing at Harry, being snogged by Malfoy, or suffering under the influence of Tom Marvolo Riddle. With most of the other players in the story there were at least a few fics where they were just saving the world or something, but fics in the aforementioned three veins were almost all she could find. Eventually Ginny stopped going to that site in general because of how darn creepy it was whenever she saw herself in fiction, regardless of a role; but she never got around to removing the bookmark in her browser.
That would be something she’d thank herself for later.

---

When the holidays were two thirds of the way through, Arthur came home with a little television and a set of what Ginny later learned were called “deevedees”.
By way of extension cord, Arthur set up the box in a little-used room of the house and connected it to his generator in the shed. There was also a silver box attached to the television, which they were supposed to put the DVDs into.
“Look, Ginny! I got a fellytision for us to watch! And tapes of this television show!”
And so it was that the Weasley father and daughter began to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They watched rapturously at the unfolding story; they laughed at the witty lines; they sat on the edge of their seats during the fights; and cried when Buffy lost it to Angel, although for different reasons.
“This show has crossed that certain line! This is why so many other wizards complain about Muggle promiscuity!” Arthur cried.
Ginny was sobbing too, although for different reasons. She was for one thing emotionally unsettled by the scene, but also, a part of her was feeling sorry for Spike. Ginny didn’t know why, and she wouldn’t for a long time, but there was something oddly compelling about his character. Spike’s wit was sharp, his story fascinating, and, of course, his looks were very good. Something odd swelled inside Ginny every time he and Buffy fought hand-to-hand, or yelled at eachother, or whatever it was when they interacted.
In the case of around the fifth case of DVDs, that something was triumph.
“You have a heart, Spike.”
“Ewwwww.”
“And it’s in love with Buffy Summers.”
“EWWWWWWW!”
Ginny grinned and pumped her fists in the air.

---

“I touch the fire and it freezes me—”
“I died—”
“I look into it and it’s black—”
“So many years ago—”
Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun…
“This isn’t real—”
“You can make me feel—”
“But I just need to feel…”
Dun, dun, dun… Spike and Buffy were coming closer and closer – their bodies were touching – the music swelled – Buffy’s head was already tilted up to meet Spike’s—
And then the TV chose this excellent moment to turn itself off. This was accompanied by a roll of thunder and flash of lightening.
Arthur was fascinated by this event. “Interesting! I’ve never had experience with the Muggle phenomenon of occasionally being without eckletricity!”
His daughter, on the other hand, had a much less jovial reaction. “No! No! I want to see them kiss!”
“Now, now, Ginny, once the eckletricity comes back, we can see them snog, all right?”
The girl was not placated. She decided to take a walk outside to calm her raging nerves. As soon as Ginny stepped outside the door, however, she heard a horrible scream.
It was a horrendous, bloodcurdling wail that would have given Grace Poole’s cries a serious run for their money. Ginny’s heart was unsettled by the degree of human suffering that would cause such an awful noise, and decided to seek its maker out.
She found the source curled up miserably whimpering in a nearby thicket, and he looked oddly familiar. The thin, pointy quality of his face; his lack of stature; his oddly pale skin. However, Ginny was caught off-guard by his silver hair.
Hair. That was silver. It was like watching how this guy ought to look in about eighty years, only he wasn’t wrinkly or suffering from arthritis. His hair was also rather unusually long, granting him a rather effeminate appearance.
Suddenly he cried out again. “No, no, no! There is no –nis on the end of my name and there never will be! It’s just Draco!”
Draco. “Malfoy?” Ginny wondered out loud. What could he be doing here? And what was with his hair?
The boy in question twitched on the ground. Lightening struck somewhere else and thunder rolled again. Malfoy wailed. Ginny rolled her eyes. What was wrong with him?
Well, even though he was an enormous git, she couldn’t just leave him there. But how would her dad react if she came in with a boy late at night?
Exactly. To the local hospital? No, when he woke up there was a chance he would try to kill the Muggles there – what had he been doing here, anyway? And besides, what was wrong with him? There was the silver hair, of course, but besides that he appeared to be his usual pale, skinny, ferretesque self. So why did she feel that her help was needed?
Ginny sighed. This was pathetic. She was about to stay out here all night – for some stupid little petty jerk – who might not even have anything wrong with him – in the middle of winter – and this country was on the same latitude as Siberia—
That son of a bitch would owe her big time when he came to.

---

“When he came to” was in fact after Ginny succumbed to sleep at one in the morning, as well as before she woke up. These facts would combine to turn out the worse for her. But at least, when eventually she did wake, at least Ginny felt at peace. Somebody’s hand was holding hers, and it felt very, very nice.
At least, until she opened her eyes.
“Let go of my hand, Malfoy!” she cried, rapidly drawing her hand out of his – for of course, it was his. Or was it? It was of course a pale hand attached to a pale arm attached to a presumably pale shoulder and a thin neck and a pointy face, but that mysterious silver hair was still there…
“Sweet, dearest, prettiest love?”
…and now it was accompanied by some sort of personality transplant.
“Since when have I ever been seen by you as sweet, dear, or ‘love’?” Ginny rapidly moved away from Malfoy, who had the oddest expression on his face.
“You really don’t remember the details of that interesting night in detention?” Ginny had exactly enough time to notice that his voice was much crisper and his smirk rather snarkier before, without any warning, he kissed her.
His kiss was like having oxygen cut off from your brain and being struck by lightening and having an orgasm all at once. Most predominant, however, was the lightening. Electricity surged through her veins, sparks besieged her cell walls, and all she was capable of was just lying there to receive this incredible kiss…
“Yup,” Malfoy said when he finally took his mouth off hers. “You still remember that night so very, very well, don’t you, Gin.”
Ginny was trying to regain her breath, inhaling and exhaling desperately. “What…” she managed, “the bloody f***… are you talking about?”
Malfoy laughed. “You’re an impetuous girl with a brilliant poker face, Ginny. Of course, that’s what I like about you.”
The impetuous girl (an accurate but incorrectly used description) scowled and slapped him in the face. “Sod off, Malfoy.” On saying this, Ginny was slightly relieved. This was almost herself again.