A/N:
Huge love to my beta ABrighterDarkness.
Song Prompt: 'Demons' by Imagine Dragons
WARNINGS: A major character death occurs before the time of this fic, so it's not depicted in detail but it has repercussions for the characters within this fic. Hence, grief is a theme. Additionally, there is about five seconds of dubcon, depending on how you interpret it (which I guess is the point of the word 'dubious'...).
Chapter 1: Don't get too close, it's dark inside
"When you feel my heat / Look into my eyes / It's where my demons hide / It's where my demons hide / Don't get too close / It's dark inside / It's where my demons hide / It's where my demons hide' - Demons, Imagine Dragons.
It started with fellatio. At least, that's when it started for Ginny. Blaise would later admit that, for him, it had started long before.
It was the summer term of her seventh year and Ginny was patrolling the basement corridors on her own. Other prefects had offered to come with her but Ginny had wanted to wander the dim, quiet hallways by herself. For many months now, she had sought comfort in solitude and darkness.
She was walking past the entrance to the kitchens when she heard it: a gasp. Followed by a low, guttural moan. She halted, tuning into the sounds, trying to gauge where they were coming from. The moan was followed by a muffled whisper, then some scuffling. Ginny surmised that the noises were coming from a large alcove that was hidden behind a tapestry hanging opposite the kitchen door.
With her wand drawn by her side, she pushed the tapestry aside and ducked quietly around it. A wall mounted torch gave off enough diffuse light for Ginny to take in the scene before her. A scene which caused her to inhale sharply and freeze in disbelief.
Blaise Zabini was standing facing her, with his head tilted back and eyes closed. His lips were parted slightly and his shirt was unbuttoned, revealing a dark expanse of chest and stomach. At his feet, with her back to Ginny, knelt a girl, her head bobbing back and forth at the level of Zabini's crotch. The girl had short blond hair and Ginny didn't recognise her. At least, not from this angle.
Ginny knew she should be saying something - doing something - stopping it. But her eyes had adjusted to the gloom and she was able to make out the muscular contours of Zabini's bare torso. And she couldn't look away. The sight of it seemed to render her motionless. And she had an inexplicable urge to touch it - him. To run her fingers along the hard edges of him.
When she finally wrenched her eyes away and flicked them up to Zabini's face, her heart nearly stopped. Because his head was now upright and he was looking straight at her. Again, she tried to speak - to attempt to stop it, like she should be doing. But there were no words on her tongue, they all seemed to be trapped somewhere deep in her stomach. She just carried on staring back at Zabini whilst the girl at his feet, oblivious to Ginny's presence, maintained her rhythmic head movements.
As she continued to look into Zabini's glazed eyes and hear his quickened, gasping breath, Ginny felt a fluttering of something deep within her, something she didn't want to acknowledge. Then, to her mortification, Zabini's lips curled up into a mocking half-smile. The next minute, the kneeling girl seemed to change her pace or technique or something, because Zabini's eyelids fluttered shut again and he let low moan.
"Fuck...that feels good..." he murmured and Ginny felt a fleeting, absurd feeling of jealousy. Because a traitorous part of her wanted to be the one making Zabini gasp and moan - with her lips and her touch and her tongue. Disgusted by her own thoughts, Ginny quickly pushed them down into the corners of her mind.
Zabini's groans had become louder and his limbs seemed to twitch involuntarily. Seeming to know he was close to the edge, the unknown girl slowed her movements.
"Fu..." Whatever Zabini had attempted to say turned into an incoherent succession of groans.
Moments later, when it was finally finished, the girl pulled her head back, looking up at Zabini. But again, he was pointedly staring at Ginny, causing the nameless girl to turn and follow his gaze. Her eyes widened as she saw the Gryffindor prefect and she scrambled to her feet, scowling furiously, looking sharply from Zabini to Ginny. Ginny still didn't recognise her.
"What the fuck?" short-blond-hair exclaimed.
Zabini, who had calmly started to tuck himself back into his boxers, merely shrugged nonchalantly at the girl's questioning look. Before Ginny had managed to assemble her thoughts into a coherent response, the girl huffed indignantly and stormed away, past Ginny and behind the tapestry. Zabini had finished casually buttoning himself back up and started to saunter away too, directing his gaze straight ahead.
"Enjoy the show?" he asked sardonically.
His words and tone finally awakened the lioness in Ginny. She fumed - at Zabini's arrogance and shamelessness, yes, but also at herself - at her reaction to the whole sordid event. Or rather, at her lack of action.
"Ten points from Slytherin," she clipped. Then hated herself for it. Because it sounded so prim and prudish. And not a little pathetic. Especially after everything that had happened at this school last year. After the rules they had had to break then. After what they had been made to do to each other.
Zabini halted mid-stride at her words. He'd been in the process of walking past Ginny so had come to a stop right next to her, but facing the opposite direction. Ginny heard him chuckle. Clearly, he thought her statement was as stuffy and priggish as she did.
Ginny went to step forward in order to get away from him, but Zabini's arm came out in front of her at waist height, strong and solid, and she walked into it, her path blocked. She could have easily moved it, with her own strength or magic. Could have easily gotten away, but for some reason she again found her feet anchored to the floor like the roots of a hundred-year-old oak tree.
"You know," Zabini's voice was slow and contemplative. She could tell he'd turned his head to look at her, could feel the heat of his breath inches from her ear, but she kept her gaze straight ahead. "What that girl did with her tongue was obscene...but you know what really got me off?"
Ginny didn't answer - couldn't. Because, again, it was like she'd forgotten how to speak, much like her heart had forgotten how to beat. Zabini kept his arm stretched across her waist, as if in some kind of bizarre restraint - or embrace? Ginny didn't know anymore.
"You watching," Zabini answered his own question, his voice sultry. "You could have stopped that. But you didn't. I saw how your cheeks flushed as you watched us - me. You were as complicit in that blow job as that girl was. It may as well have been your lips around my cock."
Zabini's words seemed to travel into Ginny's body and strum over parts of her as if they were playing her like an instrument. Ginny hated her body in that moment. Hated it for the way it was betraying her.
She stayed stock-still, staring ahead, because she didn't know what would happen if she turned to look at him. She had contradictory urges of spitting in his face, or conversely, crashing her lips on to his in a desperate kiss. With a concerted effort, she summoned her thoughts to form something coherent, and forced her next words out.
"Fine. Keep your points," she conceded, her voice firm but hoarse. It seemed her mouth had gone dry. She willed him to leave, to move away from her because for some reason she seemed incapable of walking away from him. But Ginny sensed him lean even closer to her.
"Good girl," he said softly, his mouth so close to her ear she was sure his lips brushed against it. His voice was so low the air seemed to vibrate from it, and the vibrations seemed to continue into her, rippling through her body and flooding it with warmth. Her chest was rising and falling rapidly, no doubt giving away the effect he was having on her.
"You know, I've seen you watching me all year. But every time I come near, you run. Why do you run, Weasley?" His voice was taunting and the realisation that he'd noticed her frequent, furtive glances at him mortified Ginny.
"Is it because of my reputation?" he asked, sounding genuinely curious. Ginny made a slight movement with her shoulders - a half shrug.
"Not that then...is it because the colours of my tie are green and silver?" His hand, which had been hovering just above her left hip, moved and he slowly ran his fingers over her pelvic bone. So slowly - as if he had his whole life to explore her body and he was just starting on that one little part.
"Partly," Ginny managed to answer. Despite the reconciliation efforts, the hostility between Gryffindor and Slytherin houses still stirred within Hogwarts like an insidious poison.
"Because I was on the wrong side of the war?" Zabini suggested, his voice wary now.
Ginny finally managed to turn her head to look at him. She could feel the heat of his arm burning across her waist and when she looked into his eyes, she realised she must have caught him off-guard. Because she saw something in them - something vulnerable shifting around behind the irises. And she knew then: she knew there were demons inside him as well.
She wondered how long he'd been fighting them.
"Yes," Ginny admitted.
Zabini turned away from her, letting out an impatient exhalation as his lips curled up into a knowing smile. He nodded imperceptibly. "Probably wise not to get too close. It's dark inside," he said, his tone oddly melancholic.
He withdrew his arm and Ginny instantly felt a rush of cold in its absence, causing her to miss his touch despite herself. Zabini took a few steps away from her, then stopped again.
"The war's over Weasley...but if you want to keep fighting…I'm game." His mocking tone had returned.
She turned around just in time to see the back of his white shirt disappearing around the tapestry. It took a few moments for Ginny's heartbeat to return to normal.
And it was then that she realised that, despite it only lasting ten minutes or so, the altercation with Zabini was the longest she'd gone without thinking about Harry Potter since the day the 'Chosen One' had died.
The problem, Ginny thought to herself for probably the thousandth time in the last eleven months and thirteen days, was this: the Boy-Who-Lived wasn't fucking living anymore, was he?
It had taken Ginny a long time to believe Harry was dead. When he'd collapsed in the Great Hall along with Voldemort, his body limp and lifeless, she hadn't believed it. When he'd been taken away with the other corpses and Madam Pomfrey had insisted that "he's gone and there's nothing that can be done", she hadn't believed it. When they'd been planning the funeral and she'd sat staring out the window of the Burrow - staring but not seeing - she hadn't believed it. Because he'd died and come back once already, hadn't he? And survived the killing curse twice, hadn't he? She kept asking hopefully - desperately.
But when they'd finally buried his body, she'd had to believe it. And then the tears had come. She'd cried and cried, for Harry and Fred and the others, as if she could cry them back. And then the tears had suddenly stopped, surprisingly abruptly, as if she'd run out of them. She hadn't thought that could happen, that tears could dry up like a river bed in a drought.
The numbness had descended then and Ginny had welcomed it, because it was so much easier to not feel anything. The gap Harry left was like a huge, gapping black abyss and the things Ginny tried to fill it with just fell into it, echoing and rattling around into nothing. It was only now, nearly a year later, as the mountains and valleys that surrounded Hogwarts were coming alive with spring, that Ginny had starting to feel once more. But she hadn't cried again. Not since last summer.
Ginny was jolted out her reverie by Parvati seating herself down next to her. They were in the library, a few days after the incident with Zabini, surrounded by a group of Gryffindors.
"You'll never guess what I've heard!" Parvati whispered dramatically, her eyes wide as she leant conspiratorially in to the group. The Gryffindors looked at her expectantly. Since Lavender had gone, they all kindly humoured Parvati's need to gossip. "Blaise Zabini shagged Daphne Greengrass in that alcove by the kitchens the other night!"
"I heard she sucked him off, not shagged him," Dean stated indifferently.
So Daphne Greengrass, that's who it'd been, thought Ginny. But she remained silent because she didn't want the others to know she'd been there. She didn't want to have to admit to her total lack of ability to stop the whole sordid affair.
"Whatever," Parvati said dismissively. "Either way, that boy's a slut."
"I heard he's shagged about twenty girls...has he ever been in an actual relationship?" Neville questioned.
"Nope," Parvati replied. "He doesn't do exclusivity. Or commitment."
This is what Zabini had been referring to as his 'reputation'. The handsome Slytherin was known throughout the school for his promiscuous behaviour, shameless womanising and unerringly successful seduction skills.
"Although, I have it from good sources that he's really rather good at, you know, the sex," Parvati continued with a mischievous smile.
"I hope you're not getting ideas Pav! He's an ex-Death-Eater-snake," Seamus admonished.
"He never took the mark," Hermione corrected, distractedly. She was the only one focusing on her studying more than the conversation.
"But still, you'd be a total traitor to go there Pav," Ron warned.
Parvati rolled her eyes. "Get down off your war hero high-horse, Ron...it would never happen...Lav would turn in her grave."
And, seemingly reassured, the group returned to their studying. But despite herself, Ginny couldn't help wondering how true the rumours were.