[fic] what mother doesn't know
fic: what mother doesn't know
fandom: harry potter
pairing: ginny/blaise
word count: 2,000
prompt: your/my mother didn't raise you/me this way
recipient: happyg_rl in celebration of her birthday (whomp) and for the october meme! yay two birds, one ship! (and just in case any of you are new around here, the last time I wrote mk fic for her bday, I'm sure I broke all kinds of sisterly rules by writing her bizarre damon/elena/alaric voyeuristic porny angst fic. This year we are much more cheerful and a lot less porny. yay progress or something.)
a/n: I know, I know. I had to skip over some of the prompts on the meme in order to get this one out in time. Sorry! I have changed the dates for the ones that I had to skip over, they will still get done I hope swear.
[a tale of dragons and princesses and knights... sort of]Ginny’s earliest memories of her mother are infused with smell and light - cinnamon and cloves and a soft orange light.
Into Ginny’s young and impressionable mind, Molly Weasley tried to instill a sense of romance and wonder, thinking that in her youngest and only daughter she would see a fairy tale spring to light. Otherwise a very practical person, alone with her daughter in the quiet moments when they would find each other in the sprawling Burrow, Molly was taken to weaving magical castles in the air.
For her daughter, she sought a world of princesses and knights and spell-breaking kisses soft and true.
Into the world Ginny was thrust, armed by her mother only with a soft smile and a sense of reality in which all will be as it should be - because she was a princess in a tale as bright as time.
(What she took with her of her own fortitude was something quite entirely different, unspoken, and unacknowledged by the family she loved so dearly.)
After her first adventure, it was the gleam in her mother’s eye as she whispered a tale of a girl rescued from a dragon by a handsome knight that told her she had done her job - she was shaping up to be the daughter her mother had wanted.
(What happens when the princess falls in love with the dragon?)
(There are some questions daughters learn never to ask their mothers.)
(In her second year, the first time she dragged her Potions partner into a dark corner of the lab and pressed her lips against soft, female lips and dragged a hand up under her dark robes, she bit too hard and took too much and thought I’m sorry mom, I’m not cut out to be a princess.)
She got too close to the dragon and became something worse when it was taken away.
(She reminds him of his mother.)
He thinks his mother would like her.
Her red hair and her bright eyes and a smile that could cut, a trail of broken hearts lingering in the hallway like shadows in her wake.
(He thinks she does this to hide her own shadow. Creates them out of flesh and blood and desire and trails them behind her so that no one will see. If she has a dozen shadows you can’t make out the real one underneath. In the stories the Muggles tell themselves, vampires don’t have a reflection and that’s how you can spot them, it’s what sets them apart. Looking over Ginny’s shoulder at their reflections in a window in the dead of night, between them the body of her newest victim in his palm the sweaty hand of his latest conquest, her eyebrows raise and she reminds him of something older and darker.
A creature without a shadow.)
’Believed to be the ancestors of modern-day vampires and werewolves, these unnamed shapeshifters in ancient days were said to eat their own shadows.’
Ginny raises her hand, Blaise’s eyes linger on the way her robe exposes her slim wrist, ‘So they were humans?’
‘Humans who ate their shadows and by doing so were able to change their form at will. But of course, it is only early superstition. Now we know a bit more about these diseases. Tomorrow I would like five inches of parchment on one of these humanoid creatures that we have been discussing the last four weeks.’
Blaise wrote five inches on the shadow-eaters and received the highest marks in the class.
‘Feeling a bit inspired Mr. Zabini?’ Professor Lupin smiled down at him.
Blaise only shrugged because that’s what people expected him to do, but his eyes flickered over to Ginny’s long finger tracing a pattern on the exposed bit of flesh above her seatmate’s knee.
(This never happened.
He never had a class with Miss Weasley - she wasn’t in his year.
But he thinks that this could have happened.)
At Christmas she moons about the house and is given a stern lecture from Hermione about ‘moving on’ and ‘Harry’s not the only boy’ and she smiles and no one notices when she rockets through the trees on her brothers’ broom in the light of the moon. During the long summers she knits and helps in the kitchen and her wit is only as biting as it needs to be to keep up. She is unnoticed and small. Everything is easier when she isn’t seen.
At Christmas he rambles about the villa and greets a stepfather with sharp appraisal that tickles his dangerous mother into giggling and pulling her to him. During the long summers he shrugs off his malcontent and travels to places he shouldn’t.
Her mother winks at her over rising dough and she smiles back as if she knows the secret they share.
His mother winks at him from across the dance floor as he leans against a bar and drags a finger slowly down the arm of a charming Muggle girl with red hair and grey eyes and she dances with a tall man with dark hair, he smiles back because he knows the secret they share.
(The girl’s eyes are all wrong and he finds himself searching aimlessly for deep brown eyes and none are quite right.
His mother whisks him away and pats his hand comfortingly, knowingly.)
She’s much too young to be snogging a sixth year in the corridors after curfew.
(He remembers being a fourth year snogging a sixth year in the corridors and his stomach curdles with the hypocrisy of his righteous anger.)
He makes too much noise coming down the hall and the boy springs away guiltily, running off muttering to himself and leaving Ginny smiling up at Blaise lazily from where she was so rudely left.
She is disheveled, her hair in knots and her shirt hanging loose from her shoulders, unbuttoned and ripped open in haste. She makes no move to hide herself from him.
It makes him laugh, her defiance.
‘My mother would like you,’ he says bitterly, keeping ten feet between them, his hands itching at his sides.
She untangles her limbs from the floor and walks towards him. His hands turn to fists at his side, she’s close enough for him to feel her warm breath on his neck. She tilts her head to the side to look up at him and that smile turns feral, ‘Oh. I think my mother would like you. But probably not in ways that either one of you would expect I think.’
In the part of his brain that usually is in control, Blaise says something rather witty and biting back. He keeps his cool. Like he always does. He pretends not to care, to dislike everything and not care about everything so that he never has to commit to having an opinion or stance one way or another. In the part of his brain that usually would stop him from doing something foolish, Blaise keeps the upper hand.
Instead, he grabs her face in his hands and runs his thumbs over her cheekbones and kisses her.
The minute it happens he knows it’s too needy, too wanting, there’s too much of him in it and he’s giving it all away.
Which is so not his style.
She drinks him in like he’s a fine wine, isn’t even aware that she’s pulled away until she’s gone.
His mother knows immediately, pulls him in and hugs him.
‘I tried to make you into something that couldn’t be hurt.’
‘All you did was make sure I fell for something cold and dark like you.’
They spend Christmas on a tropical beach and leave behind a trail of broken hearts.
‘Love each one,’ she whispers to him as he boards his train back to school. ‘Love each one for the freedom their love can give you. Love them for only being enough to walk away from.’
What if I want to lose myself? he doesn’t say it out loud, but she hears him anyway and he shrinks from her pity.
After the welcome back feast in the Great Hall, Blaise wants nothing more than to collapse on his bed and never get out of it. The boisterous rivalries between Houses seem even more hollow and empty than they did before Christmas and being back in these halls brings makes his lips tingle with memories he’d rather have left behind on white sandy beaches.
He opens his door to find Ginny Weasley tucked into his bed, a paperback novel on her knees.
Ginny started to feel like a Hydra roaming the halls of Hogwarts. The shadows of past exploits following her around, two springing up in the place of every lingering glass, every stolen kiss.
It was comforting the way a stolen tube of lipstick is comforting; it’s tiny presence in your pocket or on your nightstand telling you (and only you) that you got away with something, that it doesn’t belong to you and yet it hasn’t been taken away from you yet.
It was comforting the way she imagined a full moon is comforting to a werewolf, the wait is over and the thing that brings you darkness is lingering overhead for you to see and there’s no hiding anymore.
Even if no one else but her could see it crawling up behind her with every step.
(Except that someone could see and that was less unsettling than she would have liked.)
Christmas felt like she had stepped into a time loop. The Dynamic Trio with their heads bent over books and whispering secrets she really didn’t care about. Another lecture from Hermione that ‘Harry really isn’t the only boy out there’ as if she had paid any of them any mind in years. A sweater from her mother and Quidditch practice with her brothers in the evenings.
And even though it was all so ordinary as to be bordering on boring, she felt at ease in the relative calm.
It was all going to change.
(She was finally ready to accept that it needed to.)
She had to choke back a laugh at the look on Blaise’s face when he opened the door and found her in his bed. This wasn’t the most delicate move she’d ever played. But she had never been very good at keeping her cards close to her chest.
(She thinks that’s something you’re supposed to learn from your mother.)
(Funny how people will see what they want to see. She’s never been dishonest with anyone about what she wants, but the power of wanting more from her will keep them coming no matter how much she warns them to stay away.)
‘Draco is going to flip. Having a Weasley in his room violates the future Prime Minister in him.’
‘I’m thinking about writing a set of Muggle children’s novels about Hogwarts. They’ll think I’m a genius.’
‘Surely your parents have a more illustrious career path in mind for their only daughter?’ Blaise shrugged out of his robe and shoes and pants and shirt without his eyes leaving hers.
‘My father will think it’s adorable and keep all of my reviews in a scrapbook,’ she moved over slightly to make room for him on the bed, his long bare legs sliding down the length of hers. ‘And my mother will probably tell all our relatives that I’m going through a phase.’
He removed the book from knees and tugged her down so that she was lying beside him, placing his head on her stomach, his arms under the blanket circling around her. ‘Will I be the hero of these Muggle novels?’
Her fingernails scraped against his skull, ‘An author never reveals her ending.’
‘Is it a happy one?’
‘Oh, I hope it is a beautiful one.’
‘Happiness can be beautiful.’
‘The most beautiful things are tragic.’
‘You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?’
‘Only if you ask very nicely.’
Like all young people, they decided to do exactly the opposite of what their mothers had taught them.
She was supposed to be a princess.
She became the monster and lured the knight to her instead.
He was supposed to have the strongest armor.
He took it all off and was slayed by the monster instead.
Funny how children always have a way of disappointing their parents’ expectations.
'I'm sorry,' she whispered to him once. 'I'm going to take too much.'
'I'm sorry,' he whispered back. 'I'm going to give too much.'
They opened up the floodgates and damned themselves.
And it wasn't like any fairy tale at all.
fandom: harry potter
pairing: ginny/blaise
word count: 2,000
prompt: your/my mother didn't raise you/me this way
recipient: happyg_rl in celebration of her birthday (whomp) and for the october meme! yay two birds, one ship! (and just in case any of you are new around here, the last time I wrote mk fic for her bday, I'm sure I broke all kinds of sisterly rules by writing her bizarre damon/elena/alaric voyeuristic porny angst fic. This year we are much more cheerful and a lot less porny. yay progress or something.)
a/n: I know, I know. I had to skip over some of the prompts on the meme in order to get this one out in time. Sorry! I have changed the dates for the ones that I had to skip over, they will still get done I hope swear.
[a tale of dragons and princesses and knights... sort of]Ginny’s earliest memories of her mother are infused with smell and light - cinnamon and cloves and a soft orange light.
Into Ginny’s young and impressionable mind, Molly Weasley tried to instill a sense of romance and wonder, thinking that in her youngest and only daughter she would see a fairy tale spring to light. Otherwise a very practical person, alone with her daughter in the quiet moments when they would find each other in the sprawling Burrow, Molly was taken to weaving magical castles in the air.
For her daughter, she sought a world of princesses and knights and spell-breaking kisses soft and true.
Into the world Ginny was thrust, armed by her mother only with a soft smile and a sense of reality in which all will be as it should be - because she was a princess in a tale as bright as time.
(What she took with her of her own fortitude was something quite entirely different, unspoken, and unacknowledged by the family she loved so dearly.)
After her first adventure, it was the gleam in her mother’s eye as she whispered a tale of a girl rescued from a dragon by a handsome knight that told her she had done her job - she was shaping up to be the daughter her mother had wanted.
(What happens when the princess falls in love with the dragon?)
(There are some questions daughters learn never to ask their mothers.)
(In her second year, the first time she dragged her Potions partner into a dark corner of the lab and pressed her lips against soft, female lips and dragged a hand up under her dark robes, she bit too hard and took too much and thought I’m sorry mom, I’m not cut out to be a princess.)
She got too close to the dragon and became something worse when it was taken away.
(She reminds him of his mother.)
He thinks his mother would like her.
Her red hair and her bright eyes and a smile that could cut, a trail of broken hearts lingering in the hallway like shadows in her wake.
(He thinks she does this to hide her own shadow. Creates them out of flesh and blood and desire and trails them behind her so that no one will see. If she has a dozen shadows you can’t make out the real one underneath. In the stories the Muggles tell themselves, vampires don’t have a reflection and that’s how you can spot them, it’s what sets them apart. Looking over Ginny’s shoulder at their reflections in a window in the dead of night, between them the body of her newest victim in his palm the sweaty hand of his latest conquest, her eyebrows raise and she reminds him of something older and darker.
A creature without a shadow.)
’Believed to be the ancestors of modern-day vampires and werewolves, these unnamed shapeshifters in ancient days were said to eat their own shadows.’
Ginny raises her hand, Blaise’s eyes linger on the way her robe exposes her slim wrist, ‘So they were humans?’
‘Humans who ate their shadows and by doing so were able to change their form at will. But of course, it is only early superstition. Now we know a bit more about these diseases. Tomorrow I would like five inches of parchment on one of these humanoid creatures that we have been discussing the last four weeks.’
Blaise wrote five inches on the shadow-eaters and received the highest marks in the class.
‘Feeling a bit inspired Mr. Zabini?’ Professor Lupin smiled down at him.
Blaise only shrugged because that’s what people expected him to do, but his eyes flickered over to Ginny’s long finger tracing a pattern on the exposed bit of flesh above her seatmate’s knee.
(This never happened.
He never had a class with Miss Weasley - she wasn’t in his year.
But he thinks that this could have happened.)
At Christmas she moons about the house and is given a stern lecture from Hermione about ‘moving on’ and ‘Harry’s not the only boy’ and she smiles and no one notices when she rockets through the trees on her brothers’ broom in the light of the moon. During the long summers she knits and helps in the kitchen and her wit is only as biting as it needs to be to keep up. She is unnoticed and small. Everything is easier when she isn’t seen.
At Christmas he rambles about the villa and greets a stepfather with sharp appraisal that tickles his dangerous mother into giggling and pulling her to him. During the long summers he shrugs off his malcontent and travels to places he shouldn’t.
Her mother winks at her over rising dough and she smiles back as if she knows the secret they share.
His mother winks at him from across the dance floor as he leans against a bar and drags a finger slowly down the arm of a charming Muggle girl with red hair and grey eyes and she dances with a tall man with dark hair, he smiles back because he knows the secret they share.
(The girl’s eyes are all wrong and he finds himself searching aimlessly for deep brown eyes and none are quite right.
His mother whisks him away and pats his hand comfortingly, knowingly.)
She’s much too young to be snogging a sixth year in the corridors after curfew.
(He remembers being a fourth year snogging a sixth year in the corridors and his stomach curdles with the hypocrisy of his righteous anger.)
He makes too much noise coming down the hall and the boy springs away guiltily, running off muttering to himself and leaving Ginny smiling up at Blaise lazily from where she was so rudely left.
She is disheveled, her hair in knots and her shirt hanging loose from her shoulders, unbuttoned and ripped open in haste. She makes no move to hide herself from him.
It makes him laugh, her defiance.
‘My mother would like you,’ he says bitterly, keeping ten feet between them, his hands itching at his sides.
She untangles her limbs from the floor and walks towards him. His hands turn to fists at his side, she’s close enough for him to feel her warm breath on his neck. She tilts her head to the side to look up at him and that smile turns feral, ‘Oh. I think my mother would like you. But probably not in ways that either one of you would expect I think.’
In the part of his brain that usually is in control, Blaise says something rather witty and biting back. He keeps his cool. Like he always does. He pretends not to care, to dislike everything and not care about everything so that he never has to commit to having an opinion or stance one way or another. In the part of his brain that usually would stop him from doing something foolish, Blaise keeps the upper hand.
Instead, he grabs her face in his hands and runs his thumbs over her cheekbones and kisses her.
The minute it happens he knows it’s too needy, too wanting, there’s too much of him in it and he’s giving it all away.
Which is so not his style.
She drinks him in like he’s a fine wine, isn’t even aware that she’s pulled away until she’s gone.
His mother knows immediately, pulls him in and hugs him.
‘I tried to make you into something that couldn’t be hurt.’
‘All you did was make sure I fell for something cold and dark like you.’
They spend Christmas on a tropical beach and leave behind a trail of broken hearts.
‘Love each one,’ she whispers to him as he boards his train back to school. ‘Love each one for the freedom their love can give you. Love them for only being enough to walk away from.’
What if I want to lose myself? he doesn’t say it out loud, but she hears him anyway and he shrinks from her pity.
After the welcome back feast in the Great Hall, Blaise wants nothing more than to collapse on his bed and never get out of it. The boisterous rivalries between Houses seem even more hollow and empty than they did before Christmas and being back in these halls brings makes his lips tingle with memories he’d rather have left behind on white sandy beaches.
He opens his door to find Ginny Weasley tucked into his bed, a paperback novel on her knees.
Ginny started to feel like a Hydra roaming the halls of Hogwarts. The shadows of past exploits following her around, two springing up in the place of every lingering glass, every stolen kiss.
It was comforting the way a stolen tube of lipstick is comforting; it’s tiny presence in your pocket or on your nightstand telling you (and only you) that you got away with something, that it doesn’t belong to you and yet it hasn’t been taken away from you yet.
It was comforting the way she imagined a full moon is comforting to a werewolf, the wait is over and the thing that brings you darkness is lingering overhead for you to see and there’s no hiding anymore.
Even if no one else but her could see it crawling up behind her with every step.
(Except that someone could see and that was less unsettling than she would have liked.)
Christmas felt like she had stepped into a time loop. The Dynamic Trio with their heads bent over books and whispering secrets she really didn’t care about. Another lecture from Hermione that ‘Harry really isn’t the only boy out there’ as if she had paid any of them any mind in years. A sweater from her mother and Quidditch practice with her brothers in the evenings.
And even though it was all so ordinary as to be bordering on boring, she felt at ease in the relative calm.
It was all going to change.
(She was finally ready to accept that it needed to.)
She had to choke back a laugh at the look on Blaise’s face when he opened the door and found her in his bed. This wasn’t the most delicate move she’d ever played. But she had never been very good at keeping her cards close to her chest.
(She thinks that’s something you’re supposed to learn from your mother.)
(Funny how people will see what they want to see. She’s never been dishonest with anyone about what she wants, but the power of wanting more from her will keep them coming no matter how much she warns them to stay away.)
‘Draco is going to flip. Having a Weasley in his room violates the future Prime Minister in him.’
‘I’m thinking about writing a set of Muggle children’s novels about Hogwarts. They’ll think I’m a genius.’
‘Surely your parents have a more illustrious career path in mind for their only daughter?’ Blaise shrugged out of his robe and shoes and pants and shirt without his eyes leaving hers.
‘My father will think it’s adorable and keep all of my reviews in a scrapbook,’ she moved over slightly to make room for him on the bed, his long bare legs sliding down the length of hers. ‘And my mother will probably tell all our relatives that I’m going through a phase.’
He removed the book from knees and tugged her down so that she was lying beside him, placing his head on her stomach, his arms under the blanket circling around her. ‘Will I be the hero of these Muggle novels?’
Her fingernails scraped against his skull, ‘An author never reveals her ending.’
‘Is it a happy one?’
‘Oh, I hope it is a beautiful one.’
‘Happiness can be beautiful.’
‘The most beautiful things are tragic.’
‘You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?’
‘Only if you ask very nicely.’
Like all young people, they decided to do exactly the opposite of what their mothers had taught them.
She was supposed to be a princess.
She became the monster and lured the knight to her instead.
He was supposed to have the strongest armor.
He took it all off and was slayed by the monster instead.
Funny how children always have a way of disappointing their parents’ expectations.
'I'm sorry,' she whispered to him once. 'I'm going to take too much.'
'I'm sorry,' he whispered back. 'I'm going to give too much.'
They opened up the floodgates and damned themselves.
And it wasn't like any fairy tale at all.