Herbology: A Love Story
Title: Herbology: A Love Story
Rating: R
Pairing(s): Ginny/Neville; implied past Ginny/Dean & Ginny/Harry
Summary: His hands are the first thing that Ginny falls in love with.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction set in the Harry Potter universe - all recognisable characters and settings are the property of J. K. Rowling and her associates. No copyright infringement is intended. No profit is made from this work. Please observe your local laws with regards to the age-limit and content of this work
Warning(s): (Fl)angst, mentions of violence and canon character death, sexuality
Word Count: ~1500
Author's Notes: This was written for this round of hp_rarities, and it ended up as a gift for the community. Thanks to my fantastic beta, wwmrsweasleydo, who ventured into het territory to help me out! (And starstruck1986, you totally guessed right... leave me a pairing and prompt and I'll cook you up something!)
Herbology: A Love Story
i. Root
His hands are the first thing that Ginny falls in love with.
She's thirteen, with six brothers before her: twelve palms, all different (yes, all; Fred's has a fine scar that cuts his life-line neatly in half, and George has a double-jointed right pinky, some strange aberration in his genetic code); six sets of ten fingers that have pulled her hair, wiped her tears, shoved her into walls, cupped her cheeks. All of those boy-hands poking messily (or primly, in Percy's case) into her food and her life and her business -- but none like Neville's.
Out of all of them, his are the most like Charlie's - broad, thick-fingered, and warm - but not really. Not exactly. Neville's hands are soft in the places that Charlie's are hard. Neville touches her waist, and it isn't to throw her over his shoulder like a sack of feed, but just to know she's there. To turn her a little, this way or the other, to the music (in a rather arrhythmic way, if she's going to be honest, but it doesn't matter, really.) His hands are safe. That's the word she wants: safe.
Neville is safe, his fingers sturdy and sure like roots. When he holds her, tight but tentative, against his body in the Great Hall, lights twinkling over their heads like stars, he is grounding and real and true.
By now, Ginny has realised that there is a storm coming - felt it pricking up her spine like a cat; stared it baldly in the face, white as death with cloud-grey eyes - but she is not afraid.
ii. Shoot
He grows fast, but so does she, and by the end of Ginny's fifth year, they are only separated by a couple of centimetres.
One evening, in the corridor, she trips over his errant shoelace, and he catches her by the arm and steadies her. His hands haven't changed much, though she notices they're dirtier, callused.
They are different from the other ones she's come to know.
Dean has artist's hands; they want to paint her, sculpt her, draw her, change her. They want to make her into something lovelier than she is, something more precious. Ginny is many things, but she isn't precious. She isn't fragile. If she is art, she is something abstract, paint thrown haphazardly onto canvas, bold and imprecise, splattering against the walls and the floors and the windows.
And Harry. Harry has hands as small and quick as her own, always trembling and shaking like they can't make up their minds, then rushing into dark spaces where they haven't learned the shapes. Harry's hands, forever bloody and chewed at the nail-beds, always sweaty and anxious on her skin. They don't hold her down, but they can't hold her up, either.
But Neville's hands are familiar, like the smell of her own pillows or the fit of Ron's old jeans around her hips. When he touches her arm, she stops abruptly and looks at him - his round, baby-cheeked face and eyes the colour of earth - and it's like she's seeing him for the first time. When he pinks up under her gaze, she grins so widely that she almost splits her face in two.
iii. Leaf
He grows out from himself.
In her sixth year, the clouds hunker down like a smothering blanket, and they threaten to rain down and erode the world; wash everything into an angry sea. Though there is no sun for which to reach, Neville unfolds himself and searches anyway. Where there is nothing, he creates. Where there is hopelessness, he hopes.
But Neville's hope is not the vast, impersonal sky; the calling-down of invisible angels. His hope is metallic and gritty, webbed with cracks where Ginny's fingers can fit, and she clings and crawls and pulls herself up.
They lean over a table in the Room of Requirement and stare into each other's faces and feel naked. They have seen each other bleed, cry, sweat, scream, vomit. They have suffered in front of one another. They have been heroic for each other. They wind through each other like two ropes of vine, knotting themselves into something unbreakable and fierce; something intimate and organic.
It is here that she realises that it is not just his hands that she loves: here, bleeding from a bone-deep cut on her arm that he has bound with his torn and spelled-clean t-shirt, as he squeezes the leaf of an aloe plant over a burn to the side of her neck.
His eyes are battered, and his nose is broken, and his hands - his hands, those beautiful, strong things - are mangled and painful, but they are still his. They are sure now against her flesh, sure and ancient and as wise as the trees in the Forbidden Forest. Ginny buries her face in his shoulder and says thank you so many times her lips go numb.
When he kisses her, life floods back in, and she wants to tell him never to stop.
iv. Pistil
Two nights before winter break, Ginny stumbles into the Room, sweat-soaked and sticky from running, her heart pounding through her body like a drumbeat. Neville is already there, crouched in a corner, staring down at nothing.
They have hoped together, planned together, fought together, failed together. The Sword is gone, and Neville's despair is as thick as the gathering fog.
He won't speak, and she knows him well enough now not to try to make him. This time, instead, she drops down beside him and fits her own body into the spaces made by his: her hands under his arms, her chin against the curve of his jaw, her knees over the slant of his hips.
They make love there on the floor, their bruises pressing against one another like lips. I want all of you, she whispers. All of you. Everywhere. Please.
Leaning over her, he regards her with something like awe, his eyes wide open as she pushes against him, guiding and insisting and needing. All he says is Ginny, his voice shaking like the wind, suddenly sounding fourteen again. It doesn't hurt. Not at all. He is slow and careful, almost too careful, and it's Ginny who finally makes him move, kicking her heels into his back and pressing into the softness of his belly.
He is silent when he comes, his eyes still open, and Ginny watches his face shift back and forth, boy to man to boy and back again. When he kisses down her dirt-and-sweat-streaked body with his tongue and doesn't flinch at his own taste, the debate is settled. Ginny sobs and shakes and crashes her thighs over his ears.
v. Stamen
They tell her to wait. Hide. Be safe.
Ginny hasn't been safe since that night three years ago, twirling through Neville's unsteady arms until the music sighed to a stop. There is no safe when the people she loves are being hexed into ashes, when everything has been distilled to this.
She does what Neville would do, what her brothers would do, what she has always hoped and prayed and known that she would do: she fights.
Death descends with no mercy, only brief moments of calm as it gathers itself and prepares for more. Ginny watches Neville move in and out of the castle doors, bodies slung over his strong back, as she lays her palm against Fred's cold, white cheek. She presses his lifeless hand between both of hers, offering him her own pulse, but he won't take it.
Neville lays Colin out on his side, curling him up as though he is sleeping. He kisses Colin's forehead, and Ginny kisses Fred's, and they catch each other's eyes across the chasm of grief and see things that they recognise.
v. Bud
Life renews itself.
This is the lesson that they have taught each other.
Life is planting and sowing and reaping and rotting; life is nurtured with blood and tears and spit and come and sweat; life is nurtured by craggy, jagged rocks reflecting light, by warmth, by storms.
Life is Neville's hands tracing the pregnant swell of Ginny's belly as they make love in the garden, this time with grass beneath his back and the sun spilling across her shoulders; this time with laughter bubbling through them like a fountain. Shadows undulate across their scars, making pictures like inkblots.
What do you see? Ginny asks, pointing down at her stomach, where the shapes are changing every time she moves: letters, hearts, faces, abstract shapes with edges as blurry or as sharp as memories.
Everything, Neville answers.
Ginny reaches for his hand and brings it to her lips as she rocks herself across his body, a ship finally at peace in placid waters.
Rating: R
Pairing(s): Ginny/Neville; implied past Ginny/Dean & Ginny/Harry
Summary: His hands are the first thing that Ginny falls in love with.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction set in the Harry Potter universe - all recognisable characters and settings are the property of J. K. Rowling and her associates. No copyright infringement is intended. No profit is made from this work. Please observe your local laws with regards to the age-limit and content of this work
Warning(s): (Fl)angst, mentions of violence and canon character death, sexuality
Word Count: ~1500
Author's Notes: This was written for this round of hp_rarities, and it ended up as a gift for the community. Thanks to my fantastic beta, wwmrsweasleydo, who ventured into het territory to help me out! (And starstruck1986, you totally guessed right... leave me a pairing and prompt and I'll cook you up something!)
Herbology: A Love Story
i. Root
His hands are the first thing that Ginny falls in love with.
She's thirteen, with six brothers before her: twelve palms, all different (yes, all; Fred's has a fine scar that cuts his life-line neatly in half, and George has a double-jointed right pinky, some strange aberration in his genetic code); six sets of ten fingers that have pulled her hair, wiped her tears, shoved her into walls, cupped her cheeks. All of those boy-hands poking messily (or primly, in Percy's case) into her food and her life and her business -- but none like Neville's.
Out of all of them, his are the most like Charlie's - broad, thick-fingered, and warm - but not really. Not exactly. Neville's hands are soft in the places that Charlie's are hard. Neville touches her waist, and it isn't to throw her over his shoulder like a sack of feed, but just to know she's there. To turn her a little, this way or the other, to the music (in a rather arrhythmic way, if she's going to be honest, but it doesn't matter, really.) His hands are safe. That's the word she wants: safe.
Neville is safe, his fingers sturdy and sure like roots. When he holds her, tight but tentative, against his body in the Great Hall, lights twinkling over their heads like stars, he is grounding and real and true.
By now, Ginny has realised that there is a storm coming - felt it pricking up her spine like a cat; stared it baldly in the face, white as death with cloud-grey eyes - but she is not afraid.
ii. Shoot
He grows fast, but so does she, and by the end of Ginny's fifth year, they are only separated by a couple of centimetres.
One evening, in the corridor, she trips over his errant shoelace, and he catches her by the arm and steadies her. His hands haven't changed much, though she notices they're dirtier, callused.
They are different from the other ones she's come to know.
Dean has artist's hands; they want to paint her, sculpt her, draw her, change her. They want to make her into something lovelier than she is, something more precious. Ginny is many things, but she isn't precious. She isn't fragile. If she is art, she is something abstract, paint thrown haphazardly onto canvas, bold and imprecise, splattering against the walls and the floors and the windows.
And Harry. Harry has hands as small and quick as her own, always trembling and shaking like they can't make up their minds, then rushing into dark spaces where they haven't learned the shapes. Harry's hands, forever bloody and chewed at the nail-beds, always sweaty and anxious on her skin. They don't hold her down, but they can't hold her up, either.
But Neville's hands are familiar, like the smell of her own pillows or the fit of Ron's old jeans around her hips. When he touches her arm, she stops abruptly and looks at him - his round, baby-cheeked face and eyes the colour of earth - and it's like she's seeing him for the first time. When he pinks up under her gaze, she grins so widely that she almost splits her face in two.
iii. Leaf
He grows out from himself.
In her sixth year, the clouds hunker down like a smothering blanket, and they threaten to rain down and erode the world; wash everything into an angry sea. Though there is no sun for which to reach, Neville unfolds himself and searches anyway. Where there is nothing, he creates. Where there is hopelessness, he hopes.
But Neville's hope is not the vast, impersonal sky; the calling-down of invisible angels. His hope is metallic and gritty, webbed with cracks where Ginny's fingers can fit, and she clings and crawls and pulls herself up.
They lean over a table in the Room of Requirement and stare into each other's faces and feel naked. They have seen each other bleed, cry, sweat, scream, vomit. They have suffered in front of one another. They have been heroic for each other. They wind through each other like two ropes of vine, knotting themselves into something unbreakable and fierce; something intimate and organic.
It is here that she realises that it is not just his hands that she loves: here, bleeding from a bone-deep cut on her arm that he has bound with his torn and spelled-clean t-shirt, as he squeezes the leaf of an aloe plant over a burn to the side of her neck.
His eyes are battered, and his nose is broken, and his hands - his hands, those beautiful, strong things - are mangled and painful, but they are still his. They are sure now against her flesh, sure and ancient and as wise as the trees in the Forbidden Forest. Ginny buries her face in his shoulder and says thank you so many times her lips go numb.
When he kisses her, life floods back in, and she wants to tell him never to stop.
iv. Pistil
Two nights before winter break, Ginny stumbles into the Room, sweat-soaked and sticky from running, her heart pounding through her body like a drumbeat. Neville is already there, crouched in a corner, staring down at nothing.
They have hoped together, planned together, fought together, failed together. The Sword is gone, and Neville's despair is as thick as the gathering fog.
He won't speak, and she knows him well enough now not to try to make him. This time, instead, she drops down beside him and fits her own body into the spaces made by his: her hands under his arms, her chin against the curve of his jaw, her knees over the slant of his hips.
They make love there on the floor, their bruises pressing against one another like lips. I want all of you, she whispers. All of you. Everywhere. Please.
Leaning over her, he regards her with something like awe, his eyes wide open as she pushes against him, guiding and insisting and needing. All he says is Ginny, his voice shaking like the wind, suddenly sounding fourteen again. It doesn't hurt. Not at all. He is slow and careful, almost too careful, and it's Ginny who finally makes him move, kicking her heels into his back and pressing into the softness of his belly.
He is silent when he comes, his eyes still open, and Ginny watches his face shift back and forth, boy to man to boy and back again. When he kisses down her dirt-and-sweat-streaked body with his tongue and doesn't flinch at his own taste, the debate is settled. Ginny sobs and shakes and crashes her thighs over his ears.
v. Stamen
They tell her to wait. Hide. Be safe.
Ginny hasn't been safe since that night three years ago, twirling through Neville's unsteady arms until the music sighed to a stop. There is no safe when the people she loves are being hexed into ashes, when everything has been distilled to this.
She does what Neville would do, what her brothers would do, what she has always hoped and prayed and known that she would do: she fights.
Death descends with no mercy, only brief moments of calm as it gathers itself and prepares for more. Ginny watches Neville move in and out of the castle doors, bodies slung over his strong back, as she lays her palm against Fred's cold, white cheek. She presses his lifeless hand between both of hers, offering him her own pulse, but he won't take it.
Neville lays Colin out on his side, curling him up as though he is sleeping. He kisses Colin's forehead, and Ginny kisses Fred's, and they catch each other's eyes across the chasm of grief and see things that they recognise.
v. Bud
Life renews itself.
This is the lesson that they have taught each other.
Life is planting and sowing and reaping and rotting; life is nurtured with blood and tears and spit and come and sweat; life is nurtured by craggy, jagged rocks reflecting light, by warmth, by storms.
Life is Neville's hands tracing the pregnant swell of Ginny's belly as they make love in the garden, this time with grass beneath his back and the sun spilling across her shoulders; this time with laughter bubbling through them like a fountain. Shadows undulate across their scars, making pictures like inkblots.
What do you see? Ginny asks, pointing down at her stomach, where the shapes are changing every time she moves: letters, hearts, faces, abstract shapes with edges as blurry or as sharp as memories.
Everything, Neville answers.
Ginny reaches for his hand and brings it to her lips as she rocks herself across his body, a ship finally at peace in placid waters.