Ficlet: "waking dreams," Tom/Ginny, PG-13
Title: Waking Dreams
Author: scythia
Pairing: Tom/Ginny
Word Count: 692
Rating: PG-13
Summary: "Tom has all the answers and Ginny didn’t even think she had so many questions in her. She opens to him and had not even known she was closed."
A/N: written for starrysummer
i.
At first it is only words on a page and Ginny is young enough that her lips still move faintly when she reads. In the beds around her someone is always casting a silencing charm imperfectly and every now and then a giggle or a sigh or the heavy damp sound of flesh on flesh slips out, but what Ginny reads under her breath is dry as scales and twice as hard.
ii.
There is a bruise on Ginny’s hand. She doesn’t remember receiving it. She can tell it is a deep one, a nasty one, and she thinks she would remember. She thinks she would remember something like that.
iii.
Later the dreams begin. First they are just images, stones, snakes, mists, forest clearings. Well. She is in Scotland, after all. Then they are... more. In the mornings she wakes and scrubs her face clean with a flannel, skin red from the cold, from the friction.
iv.
When Tom is with her her dreams are dense and lush as green velvet and her handwriting becomes so fine and lovely, old-fashioned, almost, in its precision, that all of her teachers smile to see her grown out of the chicken scratch, to see her take such care in the things she does. What a fine young lady you will become, they say.
v.
Tom has all the answers and Ginny didn’t even think she had so many questions in her. She opens to him and had not even known she was closed. The dormitories are cold at night and she is sullen and scratchy in her only sweater, the sweater her mother has knit for her, as dense and oppressive as all that love, all those expectations. Tell me about your family, she writes. There is a pause, long, longer. I grew up in an orphanage, unfurls the answer.
Ginny pushes the sweater above her wrists. Orphanage. The word is clean, clinical, it does not smother like cheap wool. It does not look at her; she looks at it. It shines like chrome, hard and pure. She puts her hand on the page and Tom's handwriting slips into her. She holds up her hand and watches the ink seep into the whorls of her fingerprint.
That night Tom shows her in a waking dream how to kill a chicken for its blood.
vi.
Later, she wakes up to find herself already awake, and he is there. She can feel him rummaging around in her mind like wind through a wheatfield, can feel him experimenting with the movement of her fingers. When he holds them in the light just so she thinks she can see the sheen of where the ink was when she touched him. When she touched the words where he was.
I thought it would be easier for you this way, he says, and his voice is as she knew it would be, dry and smooth except for the edges, where the metal of his voice rasps against the parchment she has become for him. She feels herself become miles and miles of surface for him to bleed into her the marks of his passage.
it isn’t, she says, and takes his hand where it ghosts inside hers and slides it down, down, down.
vii.
Cheap mercury glass, wavering and vague, skinny boy, eyes too big for his head, everyone says so. See where the collar frays, when he moves the cuffs show his wrists, white as bone. A disgrace, says a voice over his shoulder. Over her shoulder.
Ginny wakes up then. That dream -- was that you? I thought I recognized you in it. she says. She pities him, that skinny boy. She knows how poverty makes you burn like white phosphorus. She knows about need. The answer is instant. He has never been angry with her before. Where's your sweater, little Weasley? I don't recognize you without it. Ginny throws the book against the wall and when she sleeps tonight she does not dream.
viii.
The next day they do not speak of it. The next day they open the chamber of secrets and the basilisk rises towards them, and they go to meet it, eager as the first snow, down, down, down.
Author: scythia
Pairing: Tom/Ginny
Word Count: 692
Rating: PG-13
Summary: "Tom has all the answers and Ginny didn’t even think she had so many questions in her. She opens to him and had not even known she was closed."
A/N: written for starrysummer
i.
At first it is only words on a page and Ginny is young enough that her lips still move faintly when she reads. In the beds around her someone is always casting a silencing charm imperfectly and every now and then a giggle or a sigh or the heavy damp sound of flesh on flesh slips out, but what Ginny reads under her breath is dry as scales and twice as hard.
ii.
There is a bruise on Ginny’s hand. She doesn’t remember receiving it. She can tell it is a deep one, a nasty one, and she thinks she would remember. She thinks she would remember something like that.
iii.
Later the dreams begin. First they are just images, stones, snakes, mists, forest clearings. Well. She is in Scotland, after all. Then they are... more. In the mornings she wakes and scrubs her face clean with a flannel, skin red from the cold, from the friction.
iv.
When Tom is with her her dreams are dense and lush as green velvet and her handwriting becomes so fine and lovely, old-fashioned, almost, in its precision, that all of her teachers smile to see her grown out of the chicken scratch, to see her take such care in the things she does. What a fine young lady you will become, they say.
v.
Tom has all the answers and Ginny didn’t even think she had so many questions in her. She opens to him and had not even known she was closed. The dormitories are cold at night and she is sullen and scratchy in her only sweater, the sweater her mother has knit for her, as dense and oppressive as all that love, all those expectations. Tell me about your family, she writes. There is a pause, long, longer. I grew up in an orphanage, unfurls the answer.
Ginny pushes the sweater above her wrists. Orphanage. The word is clean, clinical, it does not smother like cheap wool. It does not look at her; she looks at it. It shines like chrome, hard and pure. She puts her hand on the page and Tom's handwriting slips into her. She holds up her hand and watches the ink seep into the whorls of her fingerprint.
That night Tom shows her in a waking dream how to kill a chicken for its blood.
vi.
Later, she wakes up to find herself already awake, and he is there. She can feel him rummaging around in her mind like wind through a wheatfield, can feel him experimenting with the movement of her fingers. When he holds them in the light just so she thinks she can see the sheen of where the ink was when she touched him. When she touched the words where he was.
I thought it would be easier for you this way, he says, and his voice is as she knew it would be, dry and smooth except for the edges, where the metal of his voice rasps against the parchment she has become for him. She feels herself become miles and miles of surface for him to bleed into her the marks of his passage.
it isn’t, she says, and takes his hand where it ghosts inside hers and slides it down, down, down.
vii.
Cheap mercury glass, wavering and vague, skinny boy, eyes too big for his head, everyone says so. See where the collar frays, when he moves the cuffs show his wrists, white as bone. A disgrace, says a voice over his shoulder. Over her shoulder.
Ginny wakes up then. That dream -- was that you? I thought I recognized you in it. she says. She pities him, that skinny boy. She knows how poverty makes you burn like white phosphorus. She knows about need. The answer is instant. He has never been angry with her before. Where's your sweater, little Weasley? I don't recognize you without it. Ginny throws the book against the wall and when she sleeps tonight she does not dream.
viii.
The next day they do not speak of it. The next day they open the chamber of secrets and the basilisk rises towards them, and they go to meet it, eager as the first snow, down, down, down.