Fic: The Changeling--Year Three (Harry Potter)
Title: The Changeling
Author: Annerb
Summary: Ginny is sorted into Slytherin. It takes her seven years to figure out why.
Categorization: Drama, angst, AU, Ginny-centric with a side of Ginny/Harry
Warnings: Older teens for adult themes (mentions of sexual assault, violence, underage sexuality and drinking)
A/N:Part of my ‘Five New Fandoms in 2011’ pledge. This lodged in my brain and grew from a Rewriting History prompt: Harry Potter, Ginny, she’s sorted into Slytherin. Special thanks to
ziparumpazoo and K. for their beta work. Any remaining errors are my own. In progress series.
The Changeling
Third Year
There is only one week left of summer when Molly Weasley finally notices her daughter’s tattoo.
Ginny had just begun to feel like maybe she’d got away with it. She’d made a trip down to Ottery St. Catchpole at the beginning of the summer, wandering into the Muggle cornershop with a stolen handful of her father’s Muggle currency. Foundation, the potion-like substance was called.
She’d grown complacent, between her long sleeves and the sticky flesh-colored substance. The weather has turned hot though, the sheen of sweat on her skin betraying the green lines as she reaches for the butter.
All movement at the table stops until Molly Weasley shrieks, “Ginevra Weasley, what is that?”
Fred and George are the first out their seats, sending her awed looks back over their shoulders as they go, as if she has pulled off the greatest single piece of misbehavior ever. Percy clucks his tongue in dour disapproval and goes straight upstairs, mumbling something sanctimonious about cauldron thickness as he flees. Only Ron hesitates, as if their newly forged truce requires it, but no amount of sibling accord can stand in the face of Molly Weasley at full volume.
He shoots her an apologetic glance and ducks out into the garden after the twins.
Ginny doesn’t see any point in bluffing at this point, lifting her chin and letting her sleeve fall further back. “It’s a tattoo,” she says calmly (or petulantly, more like, the words tumbling out as if saying that only an idiot wouldn’t know that).
Her father’s eyes narrow at her tone, but Mum jumps in before he can get a word in edge-wise. The ear-splitting complaints range from unladylike and long-term consequences to irresponsibility and had she completely lost her mind?
Ginny lets the rant wash over her, reflecting that Howlers really have nothing on her mum. She takes a moment as her ears ring to be thankful for the acres of space around their house, and the fact that neither Hermione nor Harry have arrived yet. The last thing she needs is an audience for this.
It only becomes unbearable when she makes the mistake of glancing at her father, finding him staring at her pale-faced as if she is a stranger, like she has disappointed him in some fundamental way she doesn’t even understand.
Her own expression falters, bravado leaking away. She blinks back against the unexpected prick of tears, tugging at the edge of her sleeve. The words are on the tip of her tongue now, the it wasn’t my choice and you don’t understand.
Ginny looks away. She’s not going to blame someone else for it, not when it had been her own damn fault.
“You are staying home from the Quidditch match!” Mum yells.
Ginny’s mouth drops open, discomfort forgotten. “Mum!”
Only Dad’s hand on her shoulder keeps Ginny from beginning to shriek in indignation herself. They can’t not let her go to the World Cup. They can’t!
“Ginny,” Dad says, voice quiet and infinitely calm in the face of Mum’s ringing anger. “Please go outside while your mother and I discuss this.”
Ginny stomps outside, leaving her parents to discuss their most wayward child. With an irritated huff, she sinks down on the top step.
Ron comes to stand next to her after a while, staring out over the pasture. “Who?” he asks.
Ron may be stupid and clueless about a lot of things, but he’s close enough in age to know that second years rarely come up with the idea of tattooing themselves on their own.
Ginny folds her arms around her knees, pulling them up into her chest.
Ron’s mouth tightens, pressing into a thin line, and she knows she doesn’t even have to say the name. “Right,” he says.
He goes back inside, closing the door with enough careful deliberation that Ginny winces.
She can’t help but think she’s thrown another log onto an already raging fire.
* * *
There’s no more talk of tattoos and punishments, but mostly only because Hermione arrives the next afternoon.
Ginny is relieved to see her. Not because they are close friends or anything, but because Hermione’s brought her parents along the first evening, so Ginny knows there won’t be any more scenes. Her mum can continue to slam food down in front of Ginny and level her most disappointed stares, but she won’t yell. They have to be pleasant in front of the nervous Muggles, prove that leaving their daughter here for the rest of the summer isn’t a completely crazy idea.
It’s Hermione’s first time here, so while the adults have tea in the parlor, Ron takes Hermione around on a tour. Ginny watches him as he leads her around, his eyes wary as if scared of what she’ll think of the place. Right up until Hermione nearly crawls into a bush trying to get a closer look at a garden gnome. Then she watches Ron shove his hands into his pockets as he watches Hermione, shaking his head in seeming exasperation. Ginny doesn’t miss the smile hiding underneath.
At dinner, Ginny ends up sitting next to Mr. Granger. In many ways he looks exactly like she’d expect a Muggle to. He’s wearing a nice suit and button up shirt that manages to not look anywhere near as fussy as Percy’s ministry getups these days. He cuts his food into small, even pieces and chews thoughtfully, even when he’s trying to pretend he hasn’t seem Mum float more rolls over from the pantry.
Ginny would expect her father to keep Mr. Granger busy with an endless litany of embarrassing questions, but tonight he’s oddly quiet. Enough so that Mr. Granger looks a little lonely with only his plate to entertain him. Ginny takes a careful sip of water and asks Mr. Granger what exactly a dentist is.
Mr. Granger smiles and explains his job in simple terms, not like she’s stupid, but more like he’s gratified by her curiosity. He tries to make a joke that goes way over her head, though to judge from Hermione’s expression, it probably wasn’t funny even if it hadn’t. Ginny smiles anyway, noticing the way Mrs. Granger looks at her husband with exasperated affection, something she’s seen on her mother’s face her entire life.
Ginny decides that Mr. Granger is probably a pretty good father.
When it’s time to clear the table, Ginny takes Mr. Granger’s plate, finding her Dad watching her as she does.
Later that evening, he pokes his head in Ginny’s room as she and Hermione are going to bed. “Do you have everything you need girls?”
“Yes,” Hermione says. “Thank you, Mr. Weasley.”
Dad smiles at her, patting the foot of the camp bed a bit awkwardly before moving over to Ginny’s bedside. His fingers fiddle with her covers, and Ginny wants to remind him that he hasn’t tucked her in for years, but lets him do it all the same.
He sits on the edge of her bed and lowers his voice. “Your mother and I decided that you can still go to the match.”
Ginny’s heart leaps up into her throat. “Thank you!” she says, throwing herself at him and hugging him. “Thank you, thank you!”
His arms tighten around her.
* * *
Ginny Weasley is at the World Cup.
The. World. Cup. Watching the final match between Bulgaria and Ireland.
It’s the most exciting thing that has ever happened to her. (She supposes there was a time she would have thought first laying eyes on the famous Harry Potter was more exciting, but she’s not quite that young and silly any more. And besides, he’s standing next to her, gaping around at the stadium with as much awe as she feels.)
She never thought she could be lucky enough to see the Quidditch match to end all Quidditch matches in person. Bill and Charlie are no doubt still green with envy, stuck as they are abroad. They were even more jealous when they heard their seats are in the top box along with the ministers. (This is the part Percy seems to care the most about, Quidditch a mere afterthought. Ginny can’t help but think that Charlie would have appreciated it all so much more.)
As for Ginny, she would have been content to sit on the grass far, far below and break her neck trying to squint up at the distant players streaking above. Anything just to be near this match and these players. The box and its illustrious inhabitants are more distraction than bonus.
“It’s bigger than the bloody Burrow,” Ron mutters, tinkering with the set of Omnioculars Harry bought him.
“I imagine most things are,” a snide voice remarks.
It seems they are to have company in the top box. Ron, Harry, and Hermione turn on the newly arrived Draco Malfoy almost as a unit, and it’s hard to say which face betrays the greatest amount of animosity among the four of them.
Draco hasn’t come alone, however, his parents a few steps behind.
Ginny feels her body go cold.
Lucius Malfoy’s eyes sweep across them, not lingering on Ginny as he makes some snide remark to her father that she can’t quite make out over the buzzing building in her ears. When Mr. Malfoy does turn his attention away from her dad, it’s only to stare at Hermione like she’s a bug, a disgusting smell he just walked past.
Mudblood.
Ginny flinches, but Hermione holds firm, refusing to look away from the frank stare Mr. Malfoy is giving her.
Ron and Harry have already tensed, ready to jump into the fray, but it’s Ginny who finds herself shuffling closer to Hermione as if to shield her somehow. (Like she could do anything against a full-grown wizard, and an evil one at that.) She really accomplishes nothing more than drawing attention to herself.
Mr. Malfoy’s eyes land on her like he’s only just noticed her, like it even takes him a minute to figure out who she is. She is nothing to him. Less than that. It’s a painful realization, this evidence of just how casually he condemned her to Tom Riddle’s ceaseless whisper years before without giving her a second thought.
“Ah, yes,” he says, his eyes glacial. “The youngest Weasley. You play Quidditch with Draco, if I recall.” He glances up at her father. “In Slytherin.” His lips curl as if this fact fundamentally proves something.
Ginny wonders if it does.
Her Dad’s hand presses down on her shoulder, warm and comforting. “We’re very proud of her,” he says, an edge of fierceness under his calm tone. “She’s said to be the best player on her team, despite her age.”
Draco flushes, his father’s lips pulling back from his teeth with distaste. She wonders if he is more pained by the slight to his son, or the fact that he can’t really defend his woeful Quidditch skills.
Harry unexpectedly pipes in. “She’s brilliant,” he agrees, though it’s probably more a dig at Draco than a compliment to her.
Ludo Bagman blunders in then before things can become more tense, his glistening, child-like face split wide with excitement.
“Let’s get the match started!” he says with a clap of his hands.
Ginny turns and blindly heads for the front of the box, leaning hard against the railing. Staring down over the writhing crowd, she lets the swoop of vertigo shake the crawling itch of the Malfoys’ presence off her skin.
“Ginny?” Hermione asks, appearing next to her and looking for all the world as if there aren’t people who hate her standing a few feet away. Ginny wants to know how she can do that.
“Here come the mascots,” Ron shouts, pointing.
In the rush to get the best view, Ginny ends up wedged in between Harry and Hermione, enveloped in the group. It feels surprisingly nice.
Once the match starts, the noise of the crowd is deafening, even in the top box. Ginny forgets Malfoy’s glare boring into her back in the face of the glitter and energy and soaring excitement of the two best Quidditch teams in the world squaring off against each other. She won’t let them ruin this.
The Bulgarian seeker drops in a dive unlike anything she has ever seen before, and she and Harry are plastered up to the rail side by side, knuckles white.
“Did you see that?” she shrieks.
Harry lets out a whoop. “I know! That was amazing!”
His shoulder remains pressed against her the rest of the game, the hum of excitement from his body like the feel of a broom under her palms. Hermione occasionally grabs Ginny’s other arm, tugging on it with an excited squeal.
Ginny bounces in her toes and lets out a shout as Moran swoops and feints, sliding the quaffle home with an aching sort of grace.
Yes, Ginny thinks. One day this will be me.
The moment the match ends, everything becomes a blur of Quidditch stars and trophies and celebrations.
They talk it out for hours after, just how Krum pulled off that move, how he had been brave enough to end the game on his own terms. Hermione looks on with bemusement while Fred and George dance triumphant jigs around Ron. Harry leans across Ginny, his hand cutting a tight arc through the air as if to work out the specifics of a new technique. He half-trips over a root in his eagerness, and Ginny laughs as she grabs his arm to steady him.
“You may need to work on that one,” she comments.
Harry shoots her a sheepish grin and joins in with Fred and George’s mocking serenade of Ron.
Leaning her head back to look at the stars, Ginny thinks this must be one of those perfect moments that should be bottled up in a little glass jar and kept forever.
Too perfect.
She’s barely managed to close her eyes and dream of heart-stopping dives and the feel of a warm arm next to hers when screams and chaos shatter the night, sweeping them all up into a nightmare.
Wedged between Fred and George in the pitch-black, Ginny feels just how small she is, the sweep of panicked crowds on either side as the faceless wizards torture the Muggles like a little kid pulling the legs off a spider. She grips her wand in her pocket, but knows her small catalog of hexes won’t save her.
She stares up at the skull and snake floating in the air like a stain and tries to remember to breathe.
Even when dawn comes, everyone safely back home and away from the danger, it feels like something has changed, like the chaos was a signal the grown-ups were just waiting for.
Death Eaters.
Ginny feels it in the way they look at her.
There’s never been a witch or wizard who went bad that didn’t come from Slytherin.
They’re all thinking it. They just aren’t brave enough to say it. (And isn’t that ironic?)
She takes the stairs two a time and disappears up into her room.
* * *
Ginny’s room feels like an oven. It’s like the weather is doing its best to add to the already tense atmosphere. In some small attempt to cool down, she’s wrestling her hair up into a pony tail.
Hermione eases into the room like she’s going to apologize yet again for taking up some of Ginny’s precious space, a dance they already played the first night. Everything feels reset though now, like nothing can be taken for granted.
Ginny isn’t so stupid not to know why.
She’d finally worked it out, that horrified stare her father had given her upon first seeing her tattoo, finally understood as she stared up at a green stain in the sky with screams of fear on all sides. She knows why he’d watched so closely as she spoke to Mr. Granger.
Even if she’d somehow managed to forget it, here it is again on Hermione’s face as she stares at Ginny’s exposed tattoo.
Ginny drops her arms, cursing that she hadn’t thought to wear long sleeves despite the crushing heat.
Hermione doesn’t say anything, slipping into her camp bed.
Ginny douses the light and follows suit.
They don’t say goodnight. Ginny isn’t sure how much time passes, just feels thoughts and unspoken words heavy in the air between them.
“I don’t agree with them,” Ginny blurts when she can’t stand it any more. She keeps her eyes trained on the anemic flutter of the curtains above her. “Just so you know.”
Hermione doesn’t ask what she doesn’t agree with, or even whom. Slytherins? Death Eaters? Are they the same? Ginny’s scared to look for differences and not find any. The memories of careless and cutting words are far too clear.
Sticks and stones, she thinks.
Hermione still hasn’t said anything, and Ginny begins to hope that maybe she’s is asleep and they won’t have to have this conversation. She chances a glance. Hermione’s eyes are wide open as she stares at the ceiling, sweat plastering strands of hair to her forehead.
“I didn’t assume--,” Hermione starts to say. “I mean, it doesn’t--. Really, it’s not--.”
Ginny flinches with each unfinished, fractured thought.
Hermione lets out a frustrated breath and swings her feet to the ground. “It’s hot,” she announces, like this is root of all the world’s problems.
Ginny feels the bizarre urge to laugh, biting down on a snide remark about the brilliant deduction. Did you read about that in Hogwarts: A History?
Hermione gives Ginny a wry glance. Ginny has to remember that Hermione is perfectly familiar with the Weasley temperament.
“I could braid your hair,” Ginny says.
Hermione looks surprised.
“It would be cooler,” Ginny explains.
“Okay,” Hermione says, holding her gaze, and it feels like more than a simple agreement.
They sit near the windowsill, bodies turned towards the non-existent breeze. Ginny clumsily works through plaits of Hermione’s hair and waits for Hermione to speak. She swears she can hear the thoughts clanking around in Hermione’s head.
“I don’t like brooms,” Hermione announces after a while.
Ginny frowns. She leans to one side, noticing that Hermione is staring hard at a poster of Gwenog Jones. It’s possible she’s trying to apologize for not being as into Quidditch as the rest of them are. Harry and Ron must give her a hard time about that from time to time.
“I see,” Ginny says. Lack of interest in Quidditch may be unfathomable to Ginny, but it’s hardly a capital offense.
“Do you?” Hermione asks, turning her head. She doesn’t so much look embarrassed or apologetic as determined. “I’m supposed to be brave, aren’t I? But I’m terrified of brooms.”
Ginny feels her chest tighten, like someone just chucked a Quaffle into her solar plexus.
“Ginny?” Hermione asks, trying to turn further around and wincing.
Ginny realizes her fingers are tighten in Hermione’s hair. She forces her hands to relax.
“Well,” Ginny says, swallowing past the thickness in her throat. “While we’re confessing things, there’s something about me you should probably know.”
“Yeah?” Hermione says warily.
“Yeah. I’m completely rubbish at braiding.”
Hermione blinks, looking like an owl, before she laughs.
Breathing out, Ginny finishes Hermione’s terrible, crooked braid.
They sit on the sill together until the moon rises up and out of sight, a cool breeze finally fighting its way up over the pond.
* * *
September the first is always a day of chaos in the Burrow.
Mum is flitting back and forth between rooms and the kitchen and the washing lines out in the yard as usual. But as Ginny packs the last few things in her trunk, Mum is moving around her room, straightening her bedding even though it’s already been made and remade twice. Ginny recognizes hovering when she sees it.
Fred and George come in to help Hermione get her trunk down the stairs, leaving just Ginny and her still fiddling mother.
“Mum?” Ginny dares to ask. Things have been less frosty between them since Ginny almost got herself trampled by dark wizards, but no less strained.
“What?” she says, seeming surprised to find them alone. “Oh, yes.” She compulsively straightens the pillows on Ginny’s bed again.
“I’m almost done,” Ginny says.
“Good.” She looks like she wants to say something more, but instead pulls something out of the pocket of her apron. She presses a cool jar into Ginny’s hand. “Secrecy Salve,” she says, looking awkward. “It will work much better than that Muggle makeup.”
Ginny wants to say she’s sorry, but she doesn’t even know what she’s apologizing for any more.
Mum gives her a brief squeeze and disappears out into the hall.
Ginny tucks the jar safely into her trunk.
* * *
Hogwarts.
She’s glad to be back, ready to throw herself into things that are simple and predictable, like classes and Quidditch. Even the confusing minefield that is her House’s common room offers a sort of familiarity at least. This she can handle.
Only Hogwarts decides to do to her what it does best: pulls the rug out from under her feet. There isn’t going to be any Quidditch this year. Just two more classloads of strangers to be wary of and an archaic tournament she can’t participate in anyway.
Honor and glory? She’s more interested in surviving.
Next to her, Flint’s fist smacks the table, a goblet of pumpkin juice jumping. “What a fucking waste.”
Ginny flinches, but reminds herself that this is even worse for him in some ways, being a seventh year and the team captain. That would piss her off too. “I take it you aren’t going to put your name in the Goblet,” she says.
He glances over at her as if surprised to see her. He lets out a humorless huff of air. “Yeah, Six. I think that’s pretty safe to say.” His brow furrows, and Ginny can feel herself changing in his eyes from chaser to useless third year.
He pushes to his feet. “See you around, Weasley,” he says, moving down to the table to talk to some other seventh years.
Just like that, she’s back to square one. Another first night spent lying in bed staring at her curtains with a long year stretching ahead of her.
Only then Smita climbs up on the foot of Ginny’s bed, clearly not willing to be put off by the black cloud hanging over Ginny’s head. She’s cut her hair, the dark strands now curling just below her chin. “How was your summer?” she asks.
Ginny shakes her head, only able now to think how it ended, the good days faded from memory. “A disaster. You?”
Smita’s nose crinkles with distaste. “Cousins. Lots of them.”
They stare at each other a moment, expressions perfectly mirroring long-suffering annoyance. Then Smita’s lip twitches, and Ginny starts to laugh. Laughs long and hard until her stomach begins to ache with something other than disappointment.
They draw the curtains and sit in the cocoon of Ginny’s bed, talking until the wee hours of the morning, Smita’s weight heavy against her legs.
Ginny decides that maybe square one won’t be quite so bad after all.
* * *
For a while, classes and new subjects are substitute enough for Quidditch. Smita is still trying to convince Ginny that Ancient Runes was a much better choice than Care of Magical Creatures. Despite how much she’d love to be outdoors, Ginny is convinced enough when other students in their year start appearing back in the castle with singed fingers and sooty faces. At least Professor Babbling’s lessons rarely lead to physical injury. Besides, as much as Ginny hates to admit it, runes are pretty interesting.
In exchange, Ginny strong-armed Smita into Muggle Studies for their second elective. Probably because she knows it will make her Dad happy and she’s looking forward to having things to write to him about. Things he can relate to.
Professor Burbage pulls her aside at the end of the first day of class. “You’re Arthur Weasley’s daughter, aren’t you?”
Ginny looks up into her smooth, kind face and nods. “Yes, Professor.”
She smiles. “Would you tell him hello for me? We did a great deal of work together on the Muggle Protection Act. He’s a very dedicated, very kind man.”
“Of course, Professor,” Ginny says, feeling her face flush. She knows her father isn’t a Ministry big shot. Far from it, really. She isn’t embarrassed by that, she’s just heard her mother complain far too often over the years that he doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Dad doesn’t seem to care, but it still makes Ginny feel warm inside to hear someone say such nice things about him, to see the things Ginny admires in him.
Burbage touches her arm. “I’m glad you’re taking my class, Miss Weasley.” She says this like she knows exactly why Ginny is here, knows it has less to do with her father than she’d like to think.
Ginny gnaws on her lip, and mumbles something about not wanting to be late for her next class.
Burbage doesn’t single her out again, or treat her any differently than any of the other students, and Ginny’s glad. She decides she likes Burbage, who talks about Muggles not like they are the enemy or even wayward pets, but people. (Though Ginny still isn’t convinced those areoplane things Muggles travel around in can possibly be safe. She’ll stick to brooms and floo powder, thank you very much.)
There’s only one other Slytherin in the class with them, a boy called Tobias. Despite the fact that Ginny and Smita have had all their classes with him since first year, they’ve never spoken. In the end, he’s the one to approach them. Class has just ended, the typical chatter of post-lecture freedom filling the room.
Tobias leans a hip against the edge of Ginny’s desk, his sandy hair falling into his eyes. “They all want to know what the Heir of Slytherin is doing taking Muggle Studies, in case you’re wondering,” he announces.
Ginny’s trying to figure out if he is mocking her or if people honestly still associate her with the Chamber. She glances around at the other students, most of them looking hastily away. She feels her face flush.
“What, this isn’t the class where we learn how best to season Muggles before we eat them?” she snaps.
A few heads nearby whip around so fast that Ginny worries for their necks. Tobias simply looks surprised, his eyebrows lifting. “No,” he says with calm seriousness. “I think that must be some other class.”
Ginny blinks at him, wondering what his problem is. It’s annoying to realize she’s just as confused by his presence in this class as the others are about hers.
“What other elective are you two taking?” he asks. “The care and tenderizing of magical creatures?” His lips twitch, and Ginny realizes he’s trying really hard not to laugh.
“Merlin,” Ginny curses, shaking her head and letting out a breath.
Smita’s eyes widen. “She didn’t mean--.”
“He knows, Smita,” Ginny says, touching her arm. “He’s just having a nice go at us.” Teasing her, really. And not the vicious kind she would expect. It’s kind of confusing.
Tobias presses his hand against his chest like he’s taking some sort of oath, and she’s beginning to wonder if he’s incapable of taking anything seriously. “I would never.” He jerks his head towards the door. “Come on. Maybe we’ll learn something useful about basting in Potions.”
Ginny rolls her eyes, but grabs her books and follows Tobias out into the hall. “I suppose we are all going the same place.”
“That’s the spirit,” Tobias says, holding the door open for Smita. “We poor, outnumbered Slytherins need to stick together, after all.”
Ginny frowns, wondering what he means by that, but his attention has already turned to asking Smita if she thinks Muggle pets can really be as useless as they sound.
To Ginny’s surprise, Smita quirks her head and starts telling them both about a dog her father had as a child that her Muggle grandfather had taught to carry in the newspaper each morning.
She isn’t quite sure which shocks her most, that Smita isn’t a pureblood (aren’t all Slytherins supposed to be purebloods?), or that she’s talking with Tobias. Chatting, even.
When they get to Potions, Tobias leaves them to join his friends across the dungeon, and Smita notices the look on her face. “What?”
Ginny stows her bag and pulls out her cauldron, a grin playing at her lips. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
* * *
The weeks begin to slide by with greater and greater speed. Ginny still misses Quidditch more than she can properly express, feels a little lost without it. But she likes her classes and she has Smita to talk to. Even Tobias is pretty amusing from time to time, when he isn’t being a complete berk.
Though by the time the Durmstrang and Beauxbatons students arrive at the end of October, Ginny is already sick of the Triwizard Tournament. It’s all people have been talking about for weeks, and she thinks if she hears the phrase ‘honor and glory’ one more time she’s going to lose it.
Though seeing her brothers get knocked back by the Goblet’s Age Line sporting matching grandfather beards is almost worth all the fuss and bother. Almost.
Only then things take a turn for the worse.
Sitting in the Great Hall on Halloween, Ginny thinks that she should have seen this coming: Harry Potter getting himself swept up in the middle of everything, rules be damned.
For about half a second she believes it. Believes Harry Potter has been stupid and brash and arrogant enough to bend all the rules to his fame, but then she turns to stare at him like everyone else. She sees it, the way he flinches back as if wishing he could melt into the very woodwork itself. This isn’t guilt, Ginny recognizes, having seen more than her fair share of it growing up. It’s something more like…terror. It makes her think of a battered boy staring across ink-stained stones at her, the feel of a shoulder against hers as brooms sped through the air.
Harry sends a panicked look to Ron as he flounders, but her brother is looking at the floor, his ears tinged red enough to be seen all the way from where Ginny is sitting. Hermione has to shove Harry to get him moving.
He looks so small, walking up the aisle towards Dumbledore between the rows of fully grown Beauxbatons and Durmstrang students. Ginny bites down on her lip and watches his progress, trying to pretend that she doesn’t see that Dumbledore looks more worried than a wizard of his power and position has the right to.
Once Harry disappears out the door after the other champions, the hall erupts into chatter, Harry’s name floating above the din with varying levels of sharpness and venom.
Cheater, they call him. Glory hound. Full of himself.
Even Rita Skeeter talks about him like that in the papers.
They don’t know the real Harry, Ginny thinks, remembering the boy tripping over his own feet in his excitement over something as simple as Quidditch, the way his eyes still grow large over things she’s long since learned to take for granted. He may be a lot of things, but she can’t quite picture him doing this on purpose.
Over the next weeks, she watches from afar as Harry is ostracized, turned into a walking pariah. She watches the way he tries to pretend it doesn’t bother him, knowing with absolute certainty that the other students’ vicious scorn is nothing to him next to the desertion of her stupid brother.
She remembers the look on Ron’s face as he first showed Hermione around the Burrow. His utter dismay at moldy old dress robes as Harry stood nearby with a brand new set. She’d always silently wondered what it would be like, having someone like Harry Potter as a best friend.
Oh, she understands her brother perfectly well. Well enough to know that no word from her will change anything, or make him understand that abandoning his best mate because of his festering jealousy doesn’t make him a hero, just a wanker.
So Ginny doesn’t talk to Ron, just walks in the grounds with Hermione occasionally, letting her vent her spleen about the stupidity of boys. She looks exhausted, spending all her time running back and forth between Harry and Ron like an overworked owl. So much so that Ginny wants to smack some sense into both boys. Or hex them. She still hasn’t decided.
“I worry about him,” Hermione confesses once between classes.
“Ron?” Ginny asks, thinking of her brother’s pale and set face, the way he walks around like he’s beginning to suspect he wandered down the wrong path but refuses to admit it.
Hermione shakes her head. “Harry. I think he’s terrified, but refuses to admit it. Any more than he’ll admit that he misses Ron like an amputated arm.” She gives Ginny a shaky smile. “They’re rather pathetic without each other.”
Ginny tries to smile back, thinking that Hermione isn’t any happier herself.
Two days later, Draco’s stupid badges appear, and Ginny’s had enough. She tells Smita that she’ll catch up with her and slips down a different hallway. It doesn’t take her long to find him, particularly with the swath of open space that seems to float around him these days.
When she gets close enough, she makes a grab for Harry’s sleeve. She tries not to notice the way his eyes track to her robes as if expecting to see ‘Potter Stinks’ blazoned there. She can’t blame him for that, not really. It hasn’t been all that long since she walked the halls trailing after Draco, forced laughter on her lips.
“Ginny?” he asks, eyes guarded. (Trained to expect the worst from all sides, she thinks.)
She takes a careful breath, jaw tightening. “Ron’s a prat.”
Harry’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise, as if this is the last thing he expects to hear from her.
“But he’ll figure it out eventually,” she promises. He always does. This is what she needs Harry to understand. That her brother, for all his stupidity, is also honorable to a fault.
Harry tries to smile, but it’s just a grimace, and she doesn’t blame him. “You think so?” he asks, the tiniest painful bit of hope hiding under his forced humor.
Inexplicably, she feels the urge to give him a slap get replaced with the bizarre impulse to hug him. He is rather pathetic. Instead she squeezes his arm, giving him a bracing grin. “Good luck on the first task. I know you’ll do brilliantly.”
He doesn’t seem quite as optimistic, but still manages a grateful look. “Thanks, Ginny.”
She watches him go, knowing she hasn’t fixed anything, but hoping maybe he feels a tiny bit better. That maybe Hermione won’t have to worry quite as much.
“Aw,” a mocking voice drawls. “I think little Weasley has a crush.”
Ginny turns, colliding with Draco. Her face flushes, half with anger, half with the embarrassing memory of a stupid little girl struck speechless and clumsy by the very sight of Harry Potter.
Draco seems to take this as all the confirmation he needs. The Weasley’s support of Harry is no secret after all. His eyes dart down to her robe, something flinty and frightening taking up residence there. “You’ve forgotten your badge.”
“No, I really haven’t,” Ginny snaps. She moves to shove past him, but Crabbe and Goyle step across her.
Draco fingers his wand. “Maybe you’d like something a little more permanent?” He grabs her right hand, twisting to expose her wrist. “A matching pair, perhaps?”
Her first year, as unspoken head honcho of the younger students, Draco mostly ignored her. She thinks maybe that was a matter of demonstrating daily that she wasn’t even worth his notice. Her second year things changed, her mystique rising in tandem with the Chamber of Secrets scandal and her position on the Quidditch team. But when she had subtly shown that she was not going to be in his pocket, the silent war had begun.
This year, Draco does not seem content with the silent part. She doesn’t have Quidditch to lord over him any more, and he’s more than aware of it.
All term he’s been talking loudly about Ginny’s poor family and Muggle-loving father, his stage whisper echoing through the common room. Did everyone hear that she’s taking Muggle Studies? Pathetic.
And what has she done about his verbal attacks? Nothing.
Ron, Fred, George…even Harry, they would have already drawn their wands, flown across the room to shut Draco up any way they could. She hasn’t.
She isn’t her brothers. That probably makes her a coward. (Not a Gryffindor, at the very least.)
Draco’s hand tightens around her wrist. “What do you say, Weasley?”
She wrenches away from him as hard as she can, his nails raking against her skin as she escapes. Ducking her head, she dives into the swarm of students, the sound of their laughter following after her.
* * *
“Ginevra,” a voice drawls. “Is that a love letter?”
Ginny looks up from her dad’s latest letter describing a new plug he’d found at something the Muggles call a ‘Swap Meat’. (Though what meat has to do with elektricity, she still doesn’t know. She’ll have to ask Burbage.) Tobias, sprawled on the Common Room floor with an acre of notes spread around him, is waggling his eyebrows at Ginny.
She rolls her eyes. “Oh, yes. It’s from Heathcote Barbary. He wants to take me on tour with him.”
Tobias snorts. “Thought you had better musical taste than that.” Looking back up over his shoulder, he nudges Smita on the couch behind him. “How can you be friends with her?”
Smita bites her lower lip like she’s fighting off a smile and buries her face in her runes book.
Tobias and Ginny share a grin. It seems to have become one of Tobias’ greatest ambitions, trying to get Smita to laugh. Ginny wishes him luck with that insurmountable task.
Turning back to her letter, Ginny is interrupted yet again when a badge flies across the room, bouncing off her chest before landing on her lap. ‘Potter Stinks,’ it announces. She feels her smile fade.
Draco has been quieter in the common room since a seventh year grew tired of his heckling and told him to shut it. But that just means he’s always finding new ways to torment her.
Ginny brushes the button off her lap and goes back to her letter as if nothing happened.
Smita sighs. “I wish he’d just…give it up.”
Tobias picks up the badge, turning it over in his fingers. “Yeah, well,” he says, the badge disappearing into his pocket. “The bloke has to have a hobby.”
Ginny wishes he’d find a different one.
“Anyway,” Tobias says, scooping up the papers and getting to his feet. “Thanks for letting me look at your notes, Smita.” He passes her a giant stack of parchment covered with her careful writing.
To Ginny’s endless fascination, Smita’s face flushes the slightest bit red. “Sure,” she says. “Any time.”
Tobias smiles at her, one of his hands scratching at his neck. “Yeah, well, I don’t plan on getting the firepox again anytime soon.”
The blush on Smita’s face deepens, her mouth dropping open. “Oh! I didn’t mean--.”
Tobias’ grin widens. “Course you didn’t.”
Ginny snorts, both of them turning to look at her.
“What?” Tobias says.
“Nothing,” Ginny says. “Nothing at all.”
Tobias’ eyes narrow at her, promising later retribution. Ginny just smiles pleasantly back.
Tobias shakes his head in defeat. “See you later,” he says, abandoning the girls for his more macho guy friends, no doubt.
She watches him cross the common room, her eyes straying over Draco.
He leers at her, and Ginny lifts her letter, the words swimming in front of her.
* * *
At the first challenge, Ginny has to rethink her indifference to the Triwizard Tournament. It may still be a giant imposition and nowhere near as important as Quidditch, but it isn’t a total joke. Not to judge from the four enormous dragons waiting to eviscerate the champions.
“They can’t be serious,” Ginny says, trying very hard not to think of how small Harry looks from the top of the stands.
“Brilliant,” Tobias breathes, looking positively giddy at the prospect of carnage.
Smita doesn’t offer a comment, just fists her hands against her mouth, eyes wide over her knuckles.
Despite Ginny’s misgivings, Cedric and Krum and Fleur do credible jobs. There are only two or three times she’s certain someone is going to lose an arm. (She’s only slightly disappointed not to see the glamorous Beauxbatons champion lose some of that shiny perfect hair of hers in a stray flash of dragon-breath.)
By the time it’s Harry’s turn, Ginny’s posture closely mirrors Smita’s.
Fortunately, Harry doesn’t get torn apart or reduced to a Harry-shaped column of ash, but instead faces his dragon (the biggest, meanest one, she’s sure) with a blinding sort of courage that she can’t help but admire, almost as much as she admires the way his broom becomes an extension of his body.
(She wonders if he misses Quidditch too, or if he’s too busy with the not dying and people glaring at him in the halls to bother.)
She sees Ron and Harry later, arms strung across each other’s shoulders, hands thumping each other’s backs in that jubilant way boys have. Like there’d never been a breach between them.
Hermione walks a few paces behind them, Ginny catching her eye as they pass. Hermione rolls her eyes in exasperation at Harry and Ron, the censure softened by the brilliant smile on her lips. Boys, she seems to say.
Ginny shrugs her shoulders in commiseration and turns back to Tobias and Smita, who are still madly debating the scores assigned by the judges. (Rather Tobias is madly debating, Smita only occasionally disagreeing.)
Tobias throws his arms up. “No way Potter should have gotten that many points. He used the simplest spell ever!”
“No one else thought of it though, did they,” Smita counters. “Besides, you have to admit he flew very well.”
Tobias frowns. “Yeah. I suppose so. But I still say Fleur had the best…technique.” He gets a stupid grin on his face.
Smita doesn’t glare exactly, just gets this look on her face like maybe she wishes Fleur had gotten a bit more singed as well.
Ginny slows her steps and lets them get ahead of her as the crowds stream up towards the castle. Smita has never said anything, but Ginny isn’t stupid.
This is how she ends up alone when Draco ambushes her. He shouts a spell she doesn’t know, something hitting her in the back like a gong, vibrating unpleasantly through her bones. It doesn’t particularly hurt, so she doesn’t immediately panic. Not until she tries to turn and face her attackers and realizes she can’t.
She’s completely immobilized, from toes to throat, her body frozen as if encased in ice.
It’s the worst thing she has ever felt.
Draco circles around in front of her, standing much too close. “You think you can pull one over on me, Weasley?” he hisses, holding up a badge. In her panic, it takes her eyes a while to adjust to what he’s trying to show her.
The badge no longer says ‘Harry Potter Stinks.’ It’s now stuck saying ‘Draco Malfoy is an inbred tosser.’
Her eyes widen, not so much at the insult as the livid lines of Draco’s face as it occurs to her that she’s utterly helpless. She never wanted to feel this again.
Pathetic.
“Is there a problem here?” a calm voice asks.
Ginny’s tormentors look up to see Professor Snape approaching, and Draco drops his wand. Ginny feels her limbs soften and relax and wants to cry with the relief of it.
“Just practicing for Charms,” Draco lies, clearly comfortable in his assumption that their Head of House will choose his side.
Sure enough, Snape gives him an indulgent smile that makes Ginny’s teeth ache. I’m in your house too, she wants to say.
Snape’s eyes flit over her, catch, and then almost linger. “Is there something you wish to add, Miss Weasley?”
Draco gives her a threatening glance from behind Snape’s back.
She clenches her jaw, not sure which of them she hates more in that moment. “No, sir.”
Snape nods, black eyes glittering. “Then why don’t you move along.”
Draco and his cronies saunter off, and Ginny watches them go, willing her heartbeat back to a normal rhythm. She’s not sure if it’s fear or anger that is making her legs shake, but with Snape still there watching her, she forces herself to start walking, legs be damned.
Snape follows a few paces behind her all the way back up to the castle, as if he doesn’t even trust her to do that properly.
“Miss Weasley,” he says as she splits off in the entryway.
She turns back to look at him, not bothering to hide her blazing anger. “Yes, sir?” she asks, clipping the words short.
He looks taken aback, as if he hadn’t expected that sort of a response from her. But then his face clears, settling back into cool, uncaring lines, and she’s sure she imagined the glimmer of something almost…sad in his eyes.
His chin lifts. “No loitering in the halls.”
It takes her a moment to understand that he’s chastising her, when he’d been the one to stop her in the first place. “Yes, sir,” she says again, spinning on her heel and disappearing down the steps.
She can feel his eyes on her back as she goes.
“Ginny,” Smita says as she enters the common room. “Where did you--?”
But she must look almost as bad as she feels, because Smita stops talking mid-sentence and steers her to their dorm.
Her hands are still shaking.
Ginny spends the next thirty minutes calling Draco and Snape every dirty word she can think of.
“I didn’t even do it!” she exclaims, hands slapping down on her quilt. It’s the most galling part, not that Draco had done that to her, but that she hadn’t been brave enough to think of pulling the prank he’d been getting revenge for in the first place. She should have thought of it.
“It was Tobias,” Smita says, eyes wide and horrified.
“What?” Ginny asks.
Smita bites her lip, shooting her an uncertain look. “The badge. I’m sure he never meant for you…”
Ginny shakes her head. Lying down on the bed, she wraps her arms around her pillow. “It doesn’t matter.”
Smita curls up on the foot of the bed with her, her hand tight and comforting around Ginny’s ankle.
Ginny starts awake the next morning with Smita’s weight heavy across her legs and a voice ghosting her ears, fading dreams of ink stains and pulling strings and limbs moving without her control.
“Ginny?” Smita asks, blinking sleepily up at her from the foot of the bed.
“Cramp,” Ginny lies, pulling her legs up to her chest and rubbing at her calf.
“Sorry,” Smita says, sitting up and grimacing as she stretches her back.
The other girls in the room are stirring, and it’s time to get dressed and go down for breakfast and go to class. Normal.
Normal.
Part Two
Author: Annerb
Summary: Ginny is sorted into Slytherin. It takes her seven years to figure out why.
Categorization: Drama, angst, AU, Ginny-centric with a side of Ginny/Harry
Warnings: Older teens for adult themes (mentions of sexual assault, violence, underage sexuality and drinking)
A/N:Part of my ‘Five New Fandoms in 2011’ pledge. This lodged in my brain and grew from a Rewriting History prompt: Harry Potter, Ginny, she’s sorted into Slytherin. Special thanks to
ziparumpazoo and K. for their beta work. Any remaining errors are my own. In progress series.
The Changeling
Third Year
There is only one week left of summer when Molly Weasley finally notices her daughter’s tattoo.
Ginny had just begun to feel like maybe she’d got away with it. She’d made a trip down to Ottery St. Catchpole at the beginning of the summer, wandering into the Muggle cornershop with a stolen handful of her father’s Muggle currency. Foundation, the potion-like substance was called.
She’d grown complacent, between her long sleeves and the sticky flesh-colored substance. The weather has turned hot though, the sheen of sweat on her skin betraying the green lines as she reaches for the butter.
All movement at the table stops until Molly Weasley shrieks, “Ginevra Weasley, what is that?”
Fred and George are the first out their seats, sending her awed looks back over their shoulders as they go, as if she has pulled off the greatest single piece of misbehavior ever. Percy clucks his tongue in dour disapproval and goes straight upstairs, mumbling something sanctimonious about cauldron thickness as he flees. Only Ron hesitates, as if their newly forged truce requires it, but no amount of sibling accord can stand in the face of Molly Weasley at full volume.
He shoots her an apologetic glance and ducks out into the garden after the twins.
Ginny doesn’t see any point in bluffing at this point, lifting her chin and letting her sleeve fall further back. “It’s a tattoo,” she says calmly (or petulantly, more like, the words tumbling out as if saying that only an idiot wouldn’t know that).
Her father’s eyes narrow at her tone, but Mum jumps in before he can get a word in edge-wise. The ear-splitting complaints range from unladylike and long-term consequences to irresponsibility and had she completely lost her mind?
Ginny lets the rant wash over her, reflecting that Howlers really have nothing on her mum. She takes a moment as her ears ring to be thankful for the acres of space around their house, and the fact that neither Hermione nor Harry have arrived yet. The last thing she needs is an audience for this.
It only becomes unbearable when she makes the mistake of glancing at her father, finding him staring at her pale-faced as if she is a stranger, like she has disappointed him in some fundamental way she doesn’t even understand.
Her own expression falters, bravado leaking away. She blinks back against the unexpected prick of tears, tugging at the edge of her sleeve. The words are on the tip of her tongue now, the it wasn’t my choice and you don’t understand.
Ginny looks away. She’s not going to blame someone else for it, not when it had been her own damn fault.
“You are staying home from the Quidditch match!” Mum yells.
Ginny’s mouth drops open, discomfort forgotten. “Mum!”
Only Dad’s hand on her shoulder keeps Ginny from beginning to shriek in indignation herself. They can’t not let her go to the World Cup. They can’t!
“Ginny,” Dad says, voice quiet and infinitely calm in the face of Mum’s ringing anger. “Please go outside while your mother and I discuss this.”
Ginny stomps outside, leaving her parents to discuss their most wayward child. With an irritated huff, she sinks down on the top step.
Ron comes to stand next to her after a while, staring out over the pasture. “Who?” he asks.
Ron may be stupid and clueless about a lot of things, but he’s close enough in age to know that second years rarely come up with the idea of tattooing themselves on their own.
Ginny folds her arms around her knees, pulling them up into her chest.
Ron’s mouth tightens, pressing into a thin line, and she knows she doesn’t even have to say the name. “Right,” he says.
He goes back inside, closing the door with enough careful deliberation that Ginny winces.
She can’t help but think she’s thrown another log onto an already raging fire.
* * *
There’s no more talk of tattoos and punishments, but mostly only because Hermione arrives the next afternoon.
Ginny is relieved to see her. Not because they are close friends or anything, but because Hermione’s brought her parents along the first evening, so Ginny knows there won’t be any more scenes. Her mum can continue to slam food down in front of Ginny and level her most disappointed stares, but she won’t yell. They have to be pleasant in front of the nervous Muggles, prove that leaving their daughter here for the rest of the summer isn’t a completely crazy idea.
It’s Hermione’s first time here, so while the adults have tea in the parlor, Ron takes Hermione around on a tour. Ginny watches him as he leads her around, his eyes wary as if scared of what she’ll think of the place. Right up until Hermione nearly crawls into a bush trying to get a closer look at a garden gnome. Then she watches Ron shove his hands into his pockets as he watches Hermione, shaking his head in seeming exasperation. Ginny doesn’t miss the smile hiding underneath.
At dinner, Ginny ends up sitting next to Mr. Granger. In many ways he looks exactly like she’d expect a Muggle to. He’s wearing a nice suit and button up shirt that manages to not look anywhere near as fussy as Percy’s ministry getups these days. He cuts his food into small, even pieces and chews thoughtfully, even when he’s trying to pretend he hasn’t seem Mum float more rolls over from the pantry.
Ginny would expect her father to keep Mr. Granger busy with an endless litany of embarrassing questions, but tonight he’s oddly quiet. Enough so that Mr. Granger looks a little lonely with only his plate to entertain him. Ginny takes a careful sip of water and asks Mr. Granger what exactly a dentist is.
Mr. Granger smiles and explains his job in simple terms, not like she’s stupid, but more like he’s gratified by her curiosity. He tries to make a joke that goes way over her head, though to judge from Hermione’s expression, it probably wasn’t funny even if it hadn’t. Ginny smiles anyway, noticing the way Mrs. Granger looks at her husband with exasperated affection, something she’s seen on her mother’s face her entire life.
Ginny decides that Mr. Granger is probably a pretty good father.
When it’s time to clear the table, Ginny takes Mr. Granger’s plate, finding her Dad watching her as she does.
Later that evening, he pokes his head in Ginny’s room as she and Hermione are going to bed. “Do you have everything you need girls?”
“Yes,” Hermione says. “Thank you, Mr. Weasley.”
Dad smiles at her, patting the foot of the camp bed a bit awkwardly before moving over to Ginny’s bedside. His fingers fiddle with her covers, and Ginny wants to remind him that he hasn’t tucked her in for years, but lets him do it all the same.
He sits on the edge of her bed and lowers his voice. “Your mother and I decided that you can still go to the match.”
Ginny’s heart leaps up into her throat. “Thank you!” she says, throwing herself at him and hugging him. “Thank you, thank you!”
His arms tighten around her.
* * *
Ginny Weasley is at the World Cup.
The. World. Cup. Watching the final match between Bulgaria and Ireland.
It’s the most exciting thing that has ever happened to her. (She supposes there was a time she would have thought first laying eyes on the famous Harry Potter was more exciting, but she’s not quite that young and silly any more. And besides, he’s standing next to her, gaping around at the stadium with as much awe as she feels.)
She never thought she could be lucky enough to see the Quidditch match to end all Quidditch matches in person. Bill and Charlie are no doubt still green with envy, stuck as they are abroad. They were even more jealous when they heard their seats are in the top box along with the ministers. (This is the part Percy seems to care the most about, Quidditch a mere afterthought. Ginny can’t help but think that Charlie would have appreciated it all so much more.)
As for Ginny, she would have been content to sit on the grass far, far below and break her neck trying to squint up at the distant players streaking above. Anything just to be near this match and these players. The box and its illustrious inhabitants are more distraction than bonus.
“It’s bigger than the bloody Burrow,” Ron mutters, tinkering with the set of Omnioculars Harry bought him.
“I imagine most things are,” a snide voice remarks.
It seems they are to have company in the top box. Ron, Harry, and Hermione turn on the newly arrived Draco Malfoy almost as a unit, and it’s hard to say which face betrays the greatest amount of animosity among the four of them.
Draco hasn’t come alone, however, his parents a few steps behind.
Ginny feels her body go cold.
Lucius Malfoy’s eyes sweep across them, not lingering on Ginny as he makes some snide remark to her father that she can’t quite make out over the buzzing building in her ears. When Mr. Malfoy does turn his attention away from her dad, it’s only to stare at Hermione like she’s a bug, a disgusting smell he just walked past.
Mudblood.
Ginny flinches, but Hermione holds firm, refusing to look away from the frank stare Mr. Malfoy is giving her.
Ron and Harry have already tensed, ready to jump into the fray, but it’s Ginny who finds herself shuffling closer to Hermione as if to shield her somehow. (Like she could do anything against a full-grown wizard, and an evil one at that.) She really accomplishes nothing more than drawing attention to herself.
Mr. Malfoy’s eyes land on her like he’s only just noticed her, like it even takes him a minute to figure out who she is. She is nothing to him. Less than that. It’s a painful realization, this evidence of just how casually he condemned her to Tom Riddle’s ceaseless whisper years before without giving her a second thought.
“Ah, yes,” he says, his eyes glacial. “The youngest Weasley. You play Quidditch with Draco, if I recall.” He glances up at her father. “In Slytherin.” His lips curl as if this fact fundamentally proves something.
Ginny wonders if it does.
Her Dad’s hand presses down on her shoulder, warm and comforting. “We’re very proud of her,” he says, an edge of fierceness under his calm tone. “She’s said to be the best player on her team, despite her age.”
Draco flushes, his father’s lips pulling back from his teeth with distaste. She wonders if he is more pained by the slight to his son, or the fact that he can’t really defend his woeful Quidditch skills.
Harry unexpectedly pipes in. “She’s brilliant,” he agrees, though it’s probably more a dig at Draco than a compliment to her.
Ludo Bagman blunders in then before things can become more tense, his glistening, child-like face split wide with excitement.
“Let’s get the match started!” he says with a clap of his hands.
Ginny turns and blindly heads for the front of the box, leaning hard against the railing. Staring down over the writhing crowd, she lets the swoop of vertigo shake the crawling itch of the Malfoys’ presence off her skin.
“Ginny?” Hermione asks, appearing next to her and looking for all the world as if there aren’t people who hate her standing a few feet away. Ginny wants to know how she can do that.
“Here come the mascots,” Ron shouts, pointing.
In the rush to get the best view, Ginny ends up wedged in between Harry and Hermione, enveloped in the group. It feels surprisingly nice.
Once the match starts, the noise of the crowd is deafening, even in the top box. Ginny forgets Malfoy’s glare boring into her back in the face of the glitter and energy and soaring excitement of the two best Quidditch teams in the world squaring off against each other. She won’t let them ruin this.
The Bulgarian seeker drops in a dive unlike anything she has ever seen before, and she and Harry are plastered up to the rail side by side, knuckles white.
“Did you see that?” she shrieks.
Harry lets out a whoop. “I know! That was amazing!”
His shoulder remains pressed against her the rest of the game, the hum of excitement from his body like the feel of a broom under her palms. Hermione occasionally grabs Ginny’s other arm, tugging on it with an excited squeal.
Ginny bounces in her toes and lets out a shout as Moran swoops and feints, sliding the quaffle home with an aching sort of grace.
Yes, Ginny thinks. One day this will be me.
The moment the match ends, everything becomes a blur of Quidditch stars and trophies and celebrations.
They talk it out for hours after, just how Krum pulled off that move, how he had been brave enough to end the game on his own terms. Hermione looks on with bemusement while Fred and George dance triumphant jigs around Ron. Harry leans across Ginny, his hand cutting a tight arc through the air as if to work out the specifics of a new technique. He half-trips over a root in his eagerness, and Ginny laughs as she grabs his arm to steady him.
“You may need to work on that one,” she comments.
Harry shoots her a sheepish grin and joins in with Fred and George’s mocking serenade of Ron.
Leaning her head back to look at the stars, Ginny thinks this must be one of those perfect moments that should be bottled up in a little glass jar and kept forever.
Too perfect.
She’s barely managed to close her eyes and dream of heart-stopping dives and the feel of a warm arm next to hers when screams and chaos shatter the night, sweeping them all up into a nightmare.
Wedged between Fred and George in the pitch-black, Ginny feels just how small she is, the sweep of panicked crowds on either side as the faceless wizards torture the Muggles like a little kid pulling the legs off a spider. She grips her wand in her pocket, but knows her small catalog of hexes won’t save her.
She stares up at the skull and snake floating in the air like a stain and tries to remember to breathe.
Even when dawn comes, everyone safely back home and away from the danger, it feels like something has changed, like the chaos was a signal the grown-ups were just waiting for.
Death Eaters.
Ginny feels it in the way they look at her.
There’s never been a witch or wizard who went bad that didn’t come from Slytherin.
They’re all thinking it. They just aren’t brave enough to say it. (And isn’t that ironic?)
She takes the stairs two a time and disappears up into her room.
* * *
Ginny’s room feels like an oven. It’s like the weather is doing its best to add to the already tense atmosphere. In some small attempt to cool down, she’s wrestling her hair up into a pony tail.
Hermione eases into the room like she’s going to apologize yet again for taking up some of Ginny’s precious space, a dance they already played the first night. Everything feels reset though now, like nothing can be taken for granted.
Ginny isn’t so stupid not to know why.
She’d finally worked it out, that horrified stare her father had given her upon first seeing her tattoo, finally understood as she stared up at a green stain in the sky with screams of fear on all sides. She knows why he’d watched so closely as she spoke to Mr. Granger.
Even if she’d somehow managed to forget it, here it is again on Hermione’s face as she stares at Ginny’s exposed tattoo.
Ginny drops her arms, cursing that she hadn’t thought to wear long sleeves despite the crushing heat.
Hermione doesn’t say anything, slipping into her camp bed.
Ginny douses the light and follows suit.
They don’t say goodnight. Ginny isn’t sure how much time passes, just feels thoughts and unspoken words heavy in the air between them.
“I don’t agree with them,” Ginny blurts when she can’t stand it any more. She keeps her eyes trained on the anemic flutter of the curtains above her. “Just so you know.”
Hermione doesn’t ask what she doesn’t agree with, or even whom. Slytherins? Death Eaters? Are they the same? Ginny’s scared to look for differences and not find any. The memories of careless and cutting words are far too clear.
Sticks and stones, she thinks.
Hermione still hasn’t said anything, and Ginny begins to hope that maybe she’s is asleep and they won’t have to have this conversation. She chances a glance. Hermione’s eyes are wide open as she stares at the ceiling, sweat plastering strands of hair to her forehead.
“I didn’t assume--,” Hermione starts to say. “I mean, it doesn’t--. Really, it’s not--.”
Ginny flinches with each unfinished, fractured thought.
Hermione lets out a frustrated breath and swings her feet to the ground. “It’s hot,” she announces, like this is root of all the world’s problems.
Ginny feels the bizarre urge to laugh, biting down on a snide remark about the brilliant deduction. Did you read about that in Hogwarts: A History?
Hermione gives Ginny a wry glance. Ginny has to remember that Hermione is perfectly familiar with the Weasley temperament.
“I could braid your hair,” Ginny says.
Hermione looks surprised.
“It would be cooler,” Ginny explains.
“Okay,” Hermione says, holding her gaze, and it feels like more than a simple agreement.
They sit near the windowsill, bodies turned towards the non-existent breeze. Ginny clumsily works through plaits of Hermione’s hair and waits for Hermione to speak. She swears she can hear the thoughts clanking around in Hermione’s head.
“I don’t like brooms,” Hermione announces after a while.
Ginny frowns. She leans to one side, noticing that Hermione is staring hard at a poster of Gwenog Jones. It’s possible she’s trying to apologize for not being as into Quidditch as the rest of them are. Harry and Ron must give her a hard time about that from time to time.
“I see,” Ginny says. Lack of interest in Quidditch may be unfathomable to Ginny, but it’s hardly a capital offense.
“Do you?” Hermione asks, turning her head. She doesn’t so much look embarrassed or apologetic as determined. “I’m supposed to be brave, aren’t I? But I’m terrified of brooms.”
Ginny feels her chest tighten, like someone just chucked a Quaffle into her solar plexus.
“Ginny?” Hermione asks, trying to turn further around and wincing.
Ginny realizes her fingers are tighten in Hermione’s hair. She forces her hands to relax.
“Well,” Ginny says, swallowing past the thickness in her throat. “While we’re confessing things, there’s something about me you should probably know.”
“Yeah?” Hermione says warily.
“Yeah. I’m completely rubbish at braiding.”
Hermione blinks, looking like an owl, before she laughs.
Breathing out, Ginny finishes Hermione’s terrible, crooked braid.
They sit on the sill together until the moon rises up and out of sight, a cool breeze finally fighting its way up over the pond.
* * *
September the first is always a day of chaos in the Burrow.
Mum is flitting back and forth between rooms and the kitchen and the washing lines out in the yard as usual. But as Ginny packs the last few things in her trunk, Mum is moving around her room, straightening her bedding even though it’s already been made and remade twice. Ginny recognizes hovering when she sees it.
Fred and George come in to help Hermione get her trunk down the stairs, leaving just Ginny and her still fiddling mother.
“Mum?” Ginny dares to ask. Things have been less frosty between them since Ginny almost got herself trampled by dark wizards, but no less strained.
“What?” she says, seeming surprised to find them alone. “Oh, yes.” She compulsively straightens the pillows on Ginny’s bed again.
“I’m almost done,” Ginny says.
“Good.” She looks like she wants to say something more, but instead pulls something out of the pocket of her apron. She presses a cool jar into Ginny’s hand. “Secrecy Salve,” she says, looking awkward. “It will work much better than that Muggle makeup.”
Ginny wants to say she’s sorry, but she doesn’t even know what she’s apologizing for any more.
Mum gives her a brief squeeze and disappears out into the hall.
Ginny tucks the jar safely into her trunk.
* * *
Hogwarts.
She’s glad to be back, ready to throw herself into things that are simple and predictable, like classes and Quidditch. Even the confusing minefield that is her House’s common room offers a sort of familiarity at least. This she can handle.
Only Hogwarts decides to do to her what it does best: pulls the rug out from under her feet. There isn’t going to be any Quidditch this year. Just two more classloads of strangers to be wary of and an archaic tournament she can’t participate in anyway.
Honor and glory? She’s more interested in surviving.
Next to her, Flint’s fist smacks the table, a goblet of pumpkin juice jumping. “What a fucking waste.”
Ginny flinches, but reminds herself that this is even worse for him in some ways, being a seventh year and the team captain. That would piss her off too. “I take it you aren’t going to put your name in the Goblet,” she says.
He glances over at her as if surprised to see her. He lets out a humorless huff of air. “Yeah, Six. I think that’s pretty safe to say.” His brow furrows, and Ginny can feel herself changing in his eyes from chaser to useless third year.
He pushes to his feet. “See you around, Weasley,” he says, moving down to the table to talk to some other seventh years.
Just like that, she’s back to square one. Another first night spent lying in bed staring at her curtains with a long year stretching ahead of her.
Only then Smita climbs up on the foot of Ginny’s bed, clearly not willing to be put off by the black cloud hanging over Ginny’s head. She’s cut her hair, the dark strands now curling just below her chin. “How was your summer?” she asks.
Ginny shakes her head, only able now to think how it ended, the good days faded from memory. “A disaster. You?”
Smita’s nose crinkles with distaste. “Cousins. Lots of them.”
They stare at each other a moment, expressions perfectly mirroring long-suffering annoyance. Then Smita’s lip twitches, and Ginny starts to laugh. Laughs long and hard until her stomach begins to ache with something other than disappointment.
They draw the curtains and sit in the cocoon of Ginny’s bed, talking until the wee hours of the morning, Smita’s weight heavy against her legs.
Ginny decides that maybe square one won’t be quite so bad after all.
* * *
For a while, classes and new subjects are substitute enough for Quidditch. Smita is still trying to convince Ginny that Ancient Runes was a much better choice than Care of Magical Creatures. Despite how much she’d love to be outdoors, Ginny is convinced enough when other students in their year start appearing back in the castle with singed fingers and sooty faces. At least Professor Babbling’s lessons rarely lead to physical injury. Besides, as much as Ginny hates to admit it, runes are pretty interesting.
In exchange, Ginny strong-armed Smita into Muggle Studies for their second elective. Probably because she knows it will make her Dad happy and she’s looking forward to having things to write to him about. Things he can relate to.
Professor Burbage pulls her aside at the end of the first day of class. “You’re Arthur Weasley’s daughter, aren’t you?”
Ginny looks up into her smooth, kind face and nods. “Yes, Professor.”
She smiles. “Would you tell him hello for me? We did a great deal of work together on the Muggle Protection Act. He’s a very dedicated, very kind man.”
“Of course, Professor,” Ginny says, feeling her face flush. She knows her father isn’t a Ministry big shot. Far from it, really. She isn’t embarrassed by that, she’s just heard her mother complain far too often over the years that he doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Dad doesn’t seem to care, but it still makes Ginny feel warm inside to hear someone say such nice things about him, to see the things Ginny admires in him.
Burbage touches her arm. “I’m glad you’re taking my class, Miss Weasley.” She says this like she knows exactly why Ginny is here, knows it has less to do with her father than she’d like to think.
Ginny gnaws on her lip, and mumbles something about not wanting to be late for her next class.
Burbage doesn’t single her out again, or treat her any differently than any of the other students, and Ginny’s glad. She decides she likes Burbage, who talks about Muggles not like they are the enemy or even wayward pets, but people. (Though Ginny still isn’t convinced those areoplane things Muggles travel around in can possibly be safe. She’ll stick to brooms and floo powder, thank you very much.)
There’s only one other Slytherin in the class with them, a boy called Tobias. Despite the fact that Ginny and Smita have had all their classes with him since first year, they’ve never spoken. In the end, he’s the one to approach them. Class has just ended, the typical chatter of post-lecture freedom filling the room.
Tobias leans a hip against the edge of Ginny’s desk, his sandy hair falling into his eyes. “They all want to know what the Heir of Slytherin is doing taking Muggle Studies, in case you’re wondering,” he announces.
Ginny’s trying to figure out if he is mocking her or if people honestly still associate her with the Chamber. She glances around at the other students, most of them looking hastily away. She feels her face flush.
“What, this isn’t the class where we learn how best to season Muggles before we eat them?” she snaps.
A few heads nearby whip around so fast that Ginny worries for their necks. Tobias simply looks surprised, his eyebrows lifting. “No,” he says with calm seriousness. “I think that must be some other class.”
Ginny blinks at him, wondering what his problem is. It’s annoying to realize she’s just as confused by his presence in this class as the others are about hers.
“What other elective are you two taking?” he asks. “The care and tenderizing of magical creatures?” His lips twitch, and Ginny realizes he’s trying really hard not to laugh.
“Merlin,” Ginny curses, shaking her head and letting out a breath.
Smita’s eyes widen. “She didn’t mean--.”
“He knows, Smita,” Ginny says, touching her arm. “He’s just having a nice go at us.” Teasing her, really. And not the vicious kind she would expect. It’s kind of confusing.
Tobias presses his hand against his chest like he’s taking some sort of oath, and she’s beginning to wonder if he’s incapable of taking anything seriously. “I would never.” He jerks his head towards the door. “Come on. Maybe we’ll learn something useful about basting in Potions.”
Ginny rolls her eyes, but grabs her books and follows Tobias out into the hall. “I suppose we are all going the same place.”
“That’s the spirit,” Tobias says, holding the door open for Smita. “We poor, outnumbered Slytherins need to stick together, after all.”
Ginny frowns, wondering what he means by that, but his attention has already turned to asking Smita if she thinks Muggle pets can really be as useless as they sound.
To Ginny’s surprise, Smita quirks her head and starts telling them both about a dog her father had as a child that her Muggle grandfather had taught to carry in the newspaper each morning.
She isn’t quite sure which shocks her most, that Smita isn’t a pureblood (aren’t all Slytherins supposed to be purebloods?), or that she’s talking with Tobias. Chatting, even.
When they get to Potions, Tobias leaves them to join his friends across the dungeon, and Smita notices the look on her face. “What?”
Ginny stows her bag and pulls out her cauldron, a grin playing at her lips. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
* * *
The weeks begin to slide by with greater and greater speed. Ginny still misses Quidditch more than she can properly express, feels a little lost without it. But she likes her classes and she has Smita to talk to. Even Tobias is pretty amusing from time to time, when he isn’t being a complete berk.
Though by the time the Durmstrang and Beauxbatons students arrive at the end of October, Ginny is already sick of the Triwizard Tournament. It’s all people have been talking about for weeks, and she thinks if she hears the phrase ‘honor and glory’ one more time she’s going to lose it.
Though seeing her brothers get knocked back by the Goblet’s Age Line sporting matching grandfather beards is almost worth all the fuss and bother. Almost.
Only then things take a turn for the worse.
Sitting in the Great Hall on Halloween, Ginny thinks that she should have seen this coming: Harry Potter getting himself swept up in the middle of everything, rules be damned.
For about half a second she believes it. Believes Harry Potter has been stupid and brash and arrogant enough to bend all the rules to his fame, but then she turns to stare at him like everyone else. She sees it, the way he flinches back as if wishing he could melt into the very woodwork itself. This isn’t guilt, Ginny recognizes, having seen more than her fair share of it growing up. It’s something more like…terror. It makes her think of a battered boy staring across ink-stained stones at her, the feel of a shoulder against hers as brooms sped through the air.
Harry sends a panicked look to Ron as he flounders, but her brother is looking at the floor, his ears tinged red enough to be seen all the way from where Ginny is sitting. Hermione has to shove Harry to get him moving.
He looks so small, walking up the aisle towards Dumbledore between the rows of fully grown Beauxbatons and Durmstrang students. Ginny bites down on her lip and watches his progress, trying to pretend that she doesn’t see that Dumbledore looks more worried than a wizard of his power and position has the right to.
Once Harry disappears out the door after the other champions, the hall erupts into chatter, Harry’s name floating above the din with varying levels of sharpness and venom.
Cheater, they call him. Glory hound. Full of himself.
Even Rita Skeeter talks about him like that in the papers.
They don’t know the real Harry, Ginny thinks, remembering the boy tripping over his own feet in his excitement over something as simple as Quidditch, the way his eyes still grow large over things she’s long since learned to take for granted. He may be a lot of things, but she can’t quite picture him doing this on purpose.
Over the next weeks, she watches from afar as Harry is ostracized, turned into a walking pariah. She watches the way he tries to pretend it doesn’t bother him, knowing with absolute certainty that the other students’ vicious scorn is nothing to him next to the desertion of her stupid brother.
She remembers the look on Ron’s face as he first showed Hermione around the Burrow. His utter dismay at moldy old dress robes as Harry stood nearby with a brand new set. She’d always silently wondered what it would be like, having someone like Harry Potter as a best friend.
Oh, she understands her brother perfectly well. Well enough to know that no word from her will change anything, or make him understand that abandoning his best mate because of his festering jealousy doesn’t make him a hero, just a wanker.
So Ginny doesn’t talk to Ron, just walks in the grounds with Hermione occasionally, letting her vent her spleen about the stupidity of boys. She looks exhausted, spending all her time running back and forth between Harry and Ron like an overworked owl. So much so that Ginny wants to smack some sense into both boys. Or hex them. She still hasn’t decided.
“I worry about him,” Hermione confesses once between classes.
“Ron?” Ginny asks, thinking of her brother’s pale and set face, the way he walks around like he’s beginning to suspect he wandered down the wrong path but refuses to admit it.
Hermione shakes her head. “Harry. I think he’s terrified, but refuses to admit it. Any more than he’ll admit that he misses Ron like an amputated arm.” She gives Ginny a shaky smile. “They’re rather pathetic without each other.”
Ginny tries to smile back, thinking that Hermione isn’t any happier herself.
Two days later, Draco’s stupid badges appear, and Ginny’s had enough. She tells Smita that she’ll catch up with her and slips down a different hallway. It doesn’t take her long to find him, particularly with the swath of open space that seems to float around him these days.
When she gets close enough, she makes a grab for Harry’s sleeve. She tries not to notice the way his eyes track to her robes as if expecting to see ‘Potter Stinks’ blazoned there. She can’t blame him for that, not really. It hasn’t been all that long since she walked the halls trailing after Draco, forced laughter on her lips.
“Ginny?” he asks, eyes guarded. (Trained to expect the worst from all sides, she thinks.)
She takes a careful breath, jaw tightening. “Ron’s a prat.”
Harry’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise, as if this is the last thing he expects to hear from her.
“But he’ll figure it out eventually,” she promises. He always does. This is what she needs Harry to understand. That her brother, for all his stupidity, is also honorable to a fault.
Harry tries to smile, but it’s just a grimace, and she doesn’t blame him. “You think so?” he asks, the tiniest painful bit of hope hiding under his forced humor.
Inexplicably, she feels the urge to give him a slap get replaced with the bizarre impulse to hug him. He is rather pathetic. Instead she squeezes his arm, giving him a bracing grin. “Good luck on the first task. I know you’ll do brilliantly.”
He doesn’t seem quite as optimistic, but still manages a grateful look. “Thanks, Ginny.”
She watches him go, knowing she hasn’t fixed anything, but hoping maybe he feels a tiny bit better. That maybe Hermione won’t have to worry quite as much.
“Aw,” a mocking voice drawls. “I think little Weasley has a crush.”
Ginny turns, colliding with Draco. Her face flushes, half with anger, half with the embarrassing memory of a stupid little girl struck speechless and clumsy by the very sight of Harry Potter.
Draco seems to take this as all the confirmation he needs. The Weasley’s support of Harry is no secret after all. His eyes dart down to her robe, something flinty and frightening taking up residence there. “You’ve forgotten your badge.”
“No, I really haven’t,” Ginny snaps. She moves to shove past him, but Crabbe and Goyle step across her.
Draco fingers his wand. “Maybe you’d like something a little more permanent?” He grabs her right hand, twisting to expose her wrist. “A matching pair, perhaps?”
Her first year, as unspoken head honcho of the younger students, Draco mostly ignored her. She thinks maybe that was a matter of demonstrating daily that she wasn’t even worth his notice. Her second year things changed, her mystique rising in tandem with the Chamber of Secrets scandal and her position on the Quidditch team. But when she had subtly shown that she was not going to be in his pocket, the silent war had begun.
This year, Draco does not seem content with the silent part. She doesn’t have Quidditch to lord over him any more, and he’s more than aware of it.
All term he’s been talking loudly about Ginny’s poor family and Muggle-loving father, his stage whisper echoing through the common room. Did everyone hear that she’s taking Muggle Studies? Pathetic.
And what has she done about his verbal attacks? Nothing.
Ron, Fred, George…even Harry, they would have already drawn their wands, flown across the room to shut Draco up any way they could. She hasn’t.
She isn’t her brothers. That probably makes her a coward. (Not a Gryffindor, at the very least.)
Draco’s hand tightens around her wrist. “What do you say, Weasley?”
She wrenches away from him as hard as she can, his nails raking against her skin as she escapes. Ducking her head, she dives into the swarm of students, the sound of their laughter following after her.
* * *
“Ginevra,” a voice drawls. “Is that a love letter?”
Ginny looks up from her dad’s latest letter describing a new plug he’d found at something the Muggles call a ‘Swap Meat’. (Though what meat has to do with elektricity, she still doesn’t know. She’ll have to ask Burbage.) Tobias, sprawled on the Common Room floor with an acre of notes spread around him, is waggling his eyebrows at Ginny.
She rolls her eyes. “Oh, yes. It’s from Heathcote Barbary. He wants to take me on tour with him.”
Tobias snorts. “Thought you had better musical taste than that.” Looking back up over his shoulder, he nudges Smita on the couch behind him. “How can you be friends with her?”
Smita bites her lower lip like she’s fighting off a smile and buries her face in her runes book.
Tobias and Ginny share a grin. It seems to have become one of Tobias’ greatest ambitions, trying to get Smita to laugh. Ginny wishes him luck with that insurmountable task.
Turning back to her letter, Ginny is interrupted yet again when a badge flies across the room, bouncing off her chest before landing on her lap. ‘Potter Stinks,’ it announces. She feels her smile fade.
Draco has been quieter in the common room since a seventh year grew tired of his heckling and told him to shut it. But that just means he’s always finding new ways to torment her.
Ginny brushes the button off her lap and goes back to her letter as if nothing happened.
Smita sighs. “I wish he’d just…give it up.”
Tobias picks up the badge, turning it over in his fingers. “Yeah, well,” he says, the badge disappearing into his pocket. “The bloke has to have a hobby.”
Ginny wishes he’d find a different one.
“Anyway,” Tobias says, scooping up the papers and getting to his feet. “Thanks for letting me look at your notes, Smita.” He passes her a giant stack of parchment covered with her careful writing.
To Ginny’s endless fascination, Smita’s face flushes the slightest bit red. “Sure,” she says. “Any time.”
Tobias smiles at her, one of his hands scratching at his neck. “Yeah, well, I don’t plan on getting the firepox again anytime soon.”
The blush on Smita’s face deepens, her mouth dropping open. “Oh! I didn’t mean--.”
Tobias’ grin widens. “Course you didn’t.”
Ginny snorts, both of them turning to look at her.
“What?” Tobias says.
“Nothing,” Ginny says. “Nothing at all.”
Tobias’ eyes narrow at her, promising later retribution. Ginny just smiles pleasantly back.
Tobias shakes his head in defeat. “See you later,” he says, abandoning the girls for his more macho guy friends, no doubt.
She watches him cross the common room, her eyes straying over Draco.
He leers at her, and Ginny lifts her letter, the words swimming in front of her.
* * *
At the first challenge, Ginny has to rethink her indifference to the Triwizard Tournament. It may still be a giant imposition and nowhere near as important as Quidditch, but it isn’t a total joke. Not to judge from the four enormous dragons waiting to eviscerate the champions.
“They can’t be serious,” Ginny says, trying very hard not to think of how small Harry looks from the top of the stands.
“Brilliant,” Tobias breathes, looking positively giddy at the prospect of carnage.
Smita doesn’t offer a comment, just fists her hands against her mouth, eyes wide over her knuckles.
Despite Ginny’s misgivings, Cedric and Krum and Fleur do credible jobs. There are only two or three times she’s certain someone is going to lose an arm. (She’s only slightly disappointed not to see the glamorous Beauxbatons champion lose some of that shiny perfect hair of hers in a stray flash of dragon-breath.)
By the time it’s Harry’s turn, Ginny’s posture closely mirrors Smita’s.
Fortunately, Harry doesn’t get torn apart or reduced to a Harry-shaped column of ash, but instead faces his dragon (the biggest, meanest one, she’s sure) with a blinding sort of courage that she can’t help but admire, almost as much as she admires the way his broom becomes an extension of his body.
(She wonders if he misses Quidditch too, or if he’s too busy with the not dying and people glaring at him in the halls to bother.)
She sees Ron and Harry later, arms strung across each other’s shoulders, hands thumping each other’s backs in that jubilant way boys have. Like there’d never been a breach between them.
Hermione walks a few paces behind them, Ginny catching her eye as they pass. Hermione rolls her eyes in exasperation at Harry and Ron, the censure softened by the brilliant smile on her lips. Boys, she seems to say.
Ginny shrugs her shoulders in commiseration and turns back to Tobias and Smita, who are still madly debating the scores assigned by the judges. (Rather Tobias is madly debating, Smita only occasionally disagreeing.)
Tobias throws his arms up. “No way Potter should have gotten that many points. He used the simplest spell ever!”
“No one else thought of it though, did they,” Smita counters. “Besides, you have to admit he flew very well.”
Tobias frowns. “Yeah. I suppose so. But I still say Fleur had the best…technique.” He gets a stupid grin on his face.
Smita doesn’t glare exactly, just gets this look on her face like maybe she wishes Fleur had gotten a bit more singed as well.
Ginny slows her steps and lets them get ahead of her as the crowds stream up towards the castle. Smita has never said anything, but Ginny isn’t stupid.
This is how she ends up alone when Draco ambushes her. He shouts a spell she doesn’t know, something hitting her in the back like a gong, vibrating unpleasantly through her bones. It doesn’t particularly hurt, so she doesn’t immediately panic. Not until she tries to turn and face her attackers and realizes she can’t.
She’s completely immobilized, from toes to throat, her body frozen as if encased in ice.
It’s the worst thing she has ever felt.
Draco circles around in front of her, standing much too close. “You think you can pull one over on me, Weasley?” he hisses, holding up a badge. In her panic, it takes her eyes a while to adjust to what he’s trying to show her.
The badge no longer says ‘Harry Potter Stinks.’ It’s now stuck saying ‘Draco Malfoy is an inbred tosser.’
Her eyes widen, not so much at the insult as the livid lines of Draco’s face as it occurs to her that she’s utterly helpless. She never wanted to feel this again.
Pathetic.
“Is there a problem here?” a calm voice asks.
Ginny’s tormentors look up to see Professor Snape approaching, and Draco drops his wand. Ginny feels her limbs soften and relax and wants to cry with the relief of it.
“Just practicing for Charms,” Draco lies, clearly comfortable in his assumption that their Head of House will choose his side.
Sure enough, Snape gives him an indulgent smile that makes Ginny’s teeth ache. I’m in your house too, she wants to say.
Snape’s eyes flit over her, catch, and then almost linger. “Is there something you wish to add, Miss Weasley?”
Draco gives her a threatening glance from behind Snape’s back.
She clenches her jaw, not sure which of them she hates more in that moment. “No, sir.”
Snape nods, black eyes glittering. “Then why don’t you move along.”
Draco and his cronies saunter off, and Ginny watches them go, willing her heartbeat back to a normal rhythm. She’s not sure if it’s fear or anger that is making her legs shake, but with Snape still there watching her, she forces herself to start walking, legs be damned.
Snape follows a few paces behind her all the way back up to the castle, as if he doesn’t even trust her to do that properly.
“Miss Weasley,” he says as she splits off in the entryway.
She turns back to look at him, not bothering to hide her blazing anger. “Yes, sir?” she asks, clipping the words short.
He looks taken aback, as if he hadn’t expected that sort of a response from her. But then his face clears, settling back into cool, uncaring lines, and she’s sure she imagined the glimmer of something almost…sad in his eyes.
His chin lifts. “No loitering in the halls.”
It takes her a moment to understand that he’s chastising her, when he’d been the one to stop her in the first place. “Yes, sir,” she says again, spinning on her heel and disappearing down the steps.
She can feel his eyes on her back as she goes.
“Ginny,” Smita says as she enters the common room. “Where did you--?”
But she must look almost as bad as she feels, because Smita stops talking mid-sentence and steers her to their dorm.
Her hands are still shaking.
Ginny spends the next thirty minutes calling Draco and Snape every dirty word she can think of.
“I didn’t even do it!” she exclaims, hands slapping down on her quilt. It’s the most galling part, not that Draco had done that to her, but that she hadn’t been brave enough to think of pulling the prank he’d been getting revenge for in the first place. She should have thought of it.
“It was Tobias,” Smita says, eyes wide and horrified.
“What?” Ginny asks.
Smita bites her lip, shooting her an uncertain look. “The badge. I’m sure he never meant for you…”
Ginny shakes her head. Lying down on the bed, she wraps her arms around her pillow. “It doesn’t matter.”
Smita curls up on the foot of the bed with her, her hand tight and comforting around Ginny’s ankle.
Ginny starts awake the next morning with Smita’s weight heavy across her legs and a voice ghosting her ears, fading dreams of ink stains and pulling strings and limbs moving without her control.
“Ginny?” Smita asks, blinking sleepily up at her from the foot of the bed.
“Cramp,” Ginny lies, pulling her legs up to her chest and rubbing at her calf.
“Sorry,” Smita says, sitting up and grimacing as she stretches her back.
The other girls in the room are stirring, and it’s time to get dressed and go down for breakfast and go to class. Normal.
Normal.
Part Two