A/N: This had been written for a friend. Hope you like.

Disclaimer: Blah blah not mine blah blah blah blah.

~* Black Roses *~

She sat in the greenhouse, alone with her thoughts.

This was her favourite spot in the place, here in the corner. It was a lovely place in general, where Professor Sprout grew roses of all different colours, not the reds and pinks and whites that were normal roses... but roses blue as sapphires, or the glittering gold of sunshine, or the elusive turquoise of the ocean.

But Ginny's favourite haunt was in the corner, where the roses were black.

Black as midnight and darkly fragrant, the petals velvet-soft, but the stems covered (riddled) with sharp thorns. Most people preferred the lighter, less thorny and more cheerful pastel-coloured roses at the opposite end of the greenhouse.

But Ginny's spot was here, where she could almost taste the dusky aura, and she would be free (or perhaps doomed) to think of other dark, dangerously beautiful creatures...

When she picked a rose, more often or not, her finger would get pricked, and there would be a crimson dewdrop on her fingertip, a slight metallic-yet-clean tang in the air, and a thorn on the rose's dark stem would be reddened as well. But despite the tingle of her fingertip, or perhaps because of it, she picked the rose anyway, and brought the flower up to her lips and nose, to drink in the nectarous, heady scent, slightly tainted with the scent of blood.

Time and again, and for every rose she plucked, a new one would bloom. Magic, after all. Always there, eternal.

Roses were for love, and black roses...

Perhaps it seemed rather morbid that a young, fresh-faced girl of sixteen would choose black roses.

They had a beauty that most couldn't understand, that most feared... but then, he had shared those qualities. And black roses... for a strange love.

She had worshipped him with all the idolatry of any young, naive girl, to someone who seemed her saviour, and it was sweet and silly and unconditionally complete. She was a good girl, with an enormous capacity for love that they just did not see, and he saw it.

He took ruthless advantage of it too.

But then, he took ruthless advantage of... of many people and many things. That was his way... and the way he learnt, after years of silent bitterness and the development of his dark brilliance.

Ginny had no illusions... she did not try to convince herself that he had been pure and honest and noble in his devotion to her. He had his motives... and he did not worship her like she did him.

He did not worship.

And yet, he was there, and no one else was. And a saviour is a saviour is a saviour, no matter how dark and dangerous, and saviours are beautiful to the saved.

It was... ironic and yet strangely enthralling... that the one who was her first love, the idealistic dream and unquestioned, heroic angel who pulled her out of loneliness and the blinding, glaring solitude, was the one damned as any fallen angel, with a heart of seductive darkness and mesmerizing hypnotism in his beautiful blue eyes. Odd, indeed... that her innocent worship and pure soul had been soothed... had gone to someone who the world considered evil, and did not understand.

She was still a good girl, and she despised the practices of cruelty that went on in the world. But as she sat there, with red-stained fingertips folded, surrounded by those starkly beautiful, alluring black roses, she understood...

That things... were not simple or easy to categorize, the handy little boxes and groups that most of her friends... or even her family... most everyone, really... tended to clump things into.

For she knew of beauty that no one else saw, and of a rich, intoxicating sweetness that most dared not to breathe.

~*Fin*~