Coming
Like all things to do with the Weasleys, the wooded area at the end of The Burrow's garden is equipped with a uniquely natural beauty. In their younger years, the Weasley children adopted it as their own secret place to play. Reminders of this can be found in every other oak or chestnut, where skeletons of mouldering tree houses slowly decay and drop their planks, and chalk drawings are as faint on the bark as mistakes on a blackboard.
Ginny Weasley lies in a pile of leaves at the foot of a particularly favoured oak. Memories old and new swirl thick in the damply scented air, memories that she wishes desperately to cocoon herself in, memories that evoke such dull horror that she would run forever to keep from them. More than anything, Ginny wishes to forget altogether. She wants to become an empty bottle, with no knowledge of pain or pleasure, right or wrong. She doesn't think she can stand to be herself any more.
Imagine being buried by these leaves. The top layer is still dry and light, yes, but beneath all is dark and damp and decaying. Consider the cannibalism of this oak, how its own fallen children nourish the earth it feeds from. If you lay here long enough, you too could become part of the earth. Alive, in some form, in the very trees you felt so blissful among as a child. Unconsciously peaceful forever.
Ginny entertains such fantasies just as she emptily threatens to "run away" in arguments with her mother. She would like to do such a thing, but she is lacking in conviction. Ginny is a fighter, not a coward. As much as she wants to escape or hide, she also, maddeningly, recognizes that there is a difference between desire and reality. In times like these, this is not a comforting idea. In times like these, facing up to what has happened and taking the right course of action seems impossible.
---
Harry had his old 'Quiddich' feeling. Swoops of joy and exhilaration intermingled with heart stopping terror that he might foul up, lose it for the team, come crashing down. Ginny, grim at his side, obviously did not share his sentiment. Her reluctantly-bought new boots were narrow and stilettoed and required her to hang on Harry's arm to keep balance. This, to Ginny, who saw herself as the model of a fiercely independent girlfriend, was a total indignity. Harry secretly found it quite nice. It wasn't often he felt she needed him.
He had insisted they come tonight. The world of clubbing was unknown, a world so adult and separate from what they knew that it scared them. There was no room for jolly competitiveness in broomstick flying here, or cosy talks with cocoa and marshmallows. Nobody held hands or discussed their feelings. Instead an alien, artificial intimacy was contained beneath the low black ceiling, created between closely packed bodies, painted across every face in vile strobes of fuscia and lime and aquamarine. Harry, though awkward and afraid, desperately wanted to become part of this culture. Life at the Weasleys' house was loving and secure, but it was also dully routine. For once, he wanted to be like every other nineteen year old, to be part of a crowd not warm with love but with sweat. It seemed ridiculous that he had never been drunk; that his idea of fun was to play fight with Ginny in the freshly fallen Autumn leaves. What a child.
So Harry danced badly and drank alcohol it hurt to swallow and pretended he was having a good time. He watched himself with a mixture of disgust and hope. Perhaps he'd learn to like this. The thought that things that he was skilled in, like Quiddich, had never needed to be learned was pushed away and drowned out by the music.
For want of somebody else to direct his inadequacies towards, he looked at Ginny. He was ashamed of the resent that rose in his throat. She could at least pretend to be enjoying herself more, he had paid for her ticket. Instead she was defiant, uncomfortable, regarding the other girls with a Weasley woman's distain. Ginny, of course, had been brought up in house full of boys, had spent her whole life wearing trousers and trainers. Molly had taught her that all she needed was to be herself, that vanity was the most unattractive quality in a person. At Hogwarts, this philosophy had worked. The boys had liked her because of her unaffected good nature and confidence, the girls had liked her because she wasn't a threat. This club, however, was not school, and the rules didn't seem to apply any more.
Harry was painfully aware of his girlfriend sticking out. The other girls were svelte, moving to the music like liquid. They wore bright clingy skirts and scoop neck tops, their flesh was golden to match their highlights. None of them ever smiled. Ginny, in comparison, wore a light papery cotton dress that swirled around her knees, in terrible mismatch with her skinny black boots. Limbs pale, coltish; freckles like light wood bleached in the sun, her fraying ginger hair flared around her head like a child's crayoned halo. Harry felt that he at least looked the part in his sharp black shirt and trousers, his slick hair and slim glasses. He wished she'd made as much an effort.
A voice shook him from his reverie.
"Well, well…fancy seeing little Harry Potter here, of all places, away from his safe little Weasley hovel."
The voice was so close Harry could feel its hot breath of laughter against his cheek.
"Didn't think you were the type to indulge in such primitive activities" Draco Malfoy mocked, pausing to take a noisy slurp from his drink. "Trying to remove the stick from your arse, Potter? I think it'll take more doing than this. I think it's wedged there for life."
Harry spun to face him, fists clenched in anger. He was aching for an excuse to punch Malfoy. That in itself would make the evening worthwhile. It would probably be the most fun he'd had in ages, he realised hollowly. Just for a second, it occurred to him that it had actually been rather enjoyable, those years of feuding at Hogwarts. Life back then appeared far more interesting than it was now, coloured with adventure and passion and honour. The slow, steady pace of his present situation couldn't compete.
When Harry looked at Draco, his resolve to punch him doubled, but the nerve to do it died. Draco was so effortlessly part of this scene, an extension of the glaring lights and pulsing music, the dirty kisses of alcohol-sodden fools. This was not like Hogwarts, this was not mutual ground. It was Draco's domain. Harry's protestations would be as useless as a hymn at a cross burning ceremony. All Harry could muster was an angry glare, which was thoroughly ignored.
Malfoy's white tee shirt was plastered to his body, revealing new muscle definition through transparent patches of sweat. At his wrist, a silver serpent coiled tightly, its mouth gaping and frenzied. At his other wrist hung a girl, another clone of the dozens who surrounded Malfoy, brushed their breasts and buttocks against his body as they squeezed their way past. These girls, prettier, cooler than the dowdy Ginny, only paused for a second to look down at Harry before they dismissed him, returned their eyes to what they desired.
Malfoy, for the first time, appeared to Harry not as a rival but an object of jealousy. When Malfoy threw a smirk at him and began to dance with the girl, when Malfoy roughly shoved his tongue down her throat and slid his hand up her lithe long thigh, Harry could only turn away in disgust; both at her treatment and his secret longing to do something similar. Unpleasantly, he remembered his own demure little encounters with Ginny, how Mrs. Weasley was happy to leave them alone in a bedroom to kiss. What had seemed so tender and intimate then was now depressingly dull, civilised. Harry had never imagined a situation (apart from one occurring in the often discussed, but mythical time of when we're married or when we grow up) where he could touch Ginny anywhere he pleased, kiss her ferociously and at random. She'd made it clear to him she wasn't ready to go any further, and until now he had been satisfied with this, he'd respected her wishes. This now seemed embarrassingly unmasculin. He was almost, as Malfoy would add, a eunuch.
With increased ferocity, Harry wished he could be somebody else. He wanted to break out of his comfortable little routine, wake up somewhere other than the collapsing guest bed in Ron's room. He wanted to live out all the dreams they'd had for him, all those things they'd said he could achieve; be a famous auror; a Quiddich captain. Why had he chosen to retreat the Weasleys' ramshackle backwater after leaving school? Why had he chosen comfort over adventure, when adventure was what he knew, what he'd experienced every day of his teenage life?
Guilt bubbled in him like the rising red line of a thermometer. It was unfair to think like this, after all the family's kindness towards him. He ate their food and he slept under their roof for free, and sometimes he felt more aware than the Weasleys of how much extra strain on their bank balance he was. This guilt lead to quick bitterness, anger at the Weasleys' manipulative love that held him back, that bound him to them.
It was with these emotions grappling within him that Harry realised Draco was no longer kissing the girl. His eyes were fixed on Ginny, narrowing in the way a wolf may both appreciate the beauty of his prey and seek out her exposed jugular.
----
The way Ginny remembers it, the order went as followed: Anger. Light. Hands. Movement. A rush of cold air against her face. And then-
When she breaks it down further, allows these memories to flow through her and become almost alive, she thinks she can create some sort of cohesive story as to why she ended up standing in a lonely alleyway with Draco Malfoy.
It starts with anger. She was so angry at Harry that night she could hardly look at him. It was as if he had turned himself inside out and revealed something rotten. All that she loved about him, his integrity, his courage, his kindness, seemed to dissolve under the blinking eyes of the spotlights and become ugly. Ginny had never based her judgements on appearance, and was horrified to find her own boyfriend suddenly did. Beneath his hooded, despairing gaze she found herself stripped of all real worth and become an object of shame. It was a humiliating experience. She doubted Harry even knew the extent of his actions, how he was hurting her. He probably didn't realise he had ignored her all night. He definitely hadn't noticed he'd left her to left to stand as an awkward centrepiece to the dance floor, with only her excruciating shoes for company.
It was with a savage kind of pleasure that Ginny first encountered Draco Malfoy. Her initial thought was This will really piss Harry off. He appeared to her as silhouette backlit by lime green strobe. The sour glow around him (especially where it shone through his damp blonde hair) made him appear radioactive. Ginny amazed herself by giggling, unheard of in the presence of the loathsome Malfoy. When he spoke to her, however, all the old feelings of disgust returned. It was a comfortable relief to fall back into the roles they'd played at school and Ginny was unexpectedly entertained.
"Well hello, Miss Weasley. And there was me thinking you'd have curled up and died by now, being stuck out away from everywhere in that shack you call a home. But lookie here, you've pulled on some rags and scrubbed up as best a Weasley could and you've come down here searching for something…now what could that be?"
"Cut the cryptic talk, Malfoy. If I was searching for anything, it wouldn't be you."
"Still feisty, I see. Which makes me wonder even more how you can stand to be around Dickless Potter. No, don't look at me like that, I'm asking a serious question."
"He's not like you. That's how I can stand to be around him."
Adrenaline from getting the last word gave Ginny the strength to turn on her heel and prepare to run back to Harry. They could leave right now. They could go back home and talk this over and everything would be ok. But Draco caught her arm with surprising strength. His hand over her flesh was warm.
Without quite knowing what was happening, Ginny felt herself being dragged through the crowd, pulled through a maze of reproachful girls who tried to waylay Draco but did not succeed. Her spiked heels skidded on the gritty floor as she tried to yank away, but her held her with a singular determination she couldn't break. For a moment, she saw Harry's head bobbing through the crowd, his face illuminated in a tableaux of terror. Ginny turned away in sudden satisfaction. Too late to care about me now.
Ginny wishes she hadn't left with Draco. The knowledge she had no alternative, that she couldn't escape, is not much comfort. Perhaps what bothers her is she was willing to leave because it would aggravate Harry. She knew him as she knew herself and it was obvious to her how he would react. In this moment, he would feel that he was all Malfoy said him to be, and scared that Malfoy's poisonous words would convince her to agree. In this fragility, his feelings of inadequacy would dwarf any confidence he had in Ginny's own judgement of him.
She wishes she could tell him that yes, he had acted stupidly that night, but that didn't mean that underneath her anger she didn't feel the same depth of love for him. She is furious that he didn't understand this already. If they were different people, not so stubborn, not so insecure, perhaps all this would never have happened.
The club had a side door that led into an alleyway. Rain was pelting between the slimy black walls, creating a thwack thwack thwack symphony against the pile of thick olive plastic rubbish bags stacked against them. Their rank scent mingled with stale rainwater made her cuff one pale hand to her nose and recoil back into the doorway. Draco, determined to the last, pulled her through and shut the door behind them. Then he released her arm.
A beat. Ginny couldn't remember how long they stared at each other, it could have been a second, it could have been several minutes. She felt the imprint his hand had left on her flesh cooled by the rain, felt her own interest in the situation cool.
"Is this it? What are we doing here?" Ginny snapped.
"You are searching for something" Draco proclaimed suddenly, calmly, matter-of-fact.
"Oh God. Not this again. You know what annoys me about you? You think you're living in a movie. You think you can walk up to a girl you don't even like and make a statement that's seemingly profound, but is actually any old crap, and you'll use it to make her think you've got some sort of deep insight into her soul. Girls who throw themselves at you aren't any kind of challenge, and a cunning slytherin needs a challenge every now and again. Enter Ginny Weasley, stage left."
Draco smirked at her, his hair plastered silver to his forehead. He resembled a water rat.
"I bet Potter never gives you a reason to get worked up. In any sense of the phrase. You need people like me more than you think. A good healthy scream at someone can brighten up any day, even to people with such dull little lives as your own."
Ginny spluttered. She knew what he was proving his own point, and was angry at herself for complying, for exciting in the row. She must put a stop to it. She was a gryffindor and better than this. She was also freezing cold. A glance down her front confirmed this, and also the fact that heavy rain and pale cotton dresses should never mix.
"Just admit it, Weasley. You love it." Draco menaced, stepping closely to her so the single lamp that lit the alleyway was eclipsed. Ginny couldn't see, she could only feel. The hard contours of Draco's chest through his sopping tee shirt felt strange against her cheek. She was so used to Harry's slim bones, being close to him when safe and warm and dry. Danger and discomfort were new sensations. Ginny felt flushed and acutely embarrassed, wanting to escape but aching to stay. Harry hadn't acted himself tonight, why should she?
When she tipped her face up, Draco's lips came down to meet her.
It was the most intense emotion she had ever felt. Like strawberries laced with cyanide, like flying freely through the air with a broken parachute. Malfoy was cruel and faithful in all he did, interweaving pleasure and pain with divinity. His mouth pressed against hers with darkly melodic pressure, his tongue, so crude and sharp in speech, was given tender dexterity when moving against her own. Ginny couldn't understand why she loved to kiss somebody she despised, why she felt such raw urgency to touch and be touched. All she knew was she wanted more.
The door opened, flooding them with harsh, judgemental light. Draco's hand dropped from her breast like a stone, his lips dissolved like melted frost. She looked into his face in desperation but came up against a smirking mask. It had all been a game, not for personal points scoring as she had thought, but for points against Potter.
Ginny looked into Harry's eyes. He was taking her in with utter disgust, from her filmy transparent dress to her peaky breasts to her bruised, swollen lips. Ginny's stomach caved in and the black walls move to crush her. She was the worst person in the world, a shameless, undignified wretch. She could not even recognise herself. Harry, however, looked as if he understood all too well. Treat her as she likes to be treated.
-----
You're a fucking joke, Potter. A fucking joke,
"Get on the broom, Ginny. We're leaving."
too pathetic to even realise what she really wanted all along. All girls are the same, they want to be treated like shit in some filthy back alley, they don't want to be cared for and respected even though it's such a goddamn effort to do it;
"I don't know why you're still snivelling. It's me that should be upset. In fact, just shut up all together, just the sound of you sickens me."
they'd rather a minute being groped by Malfoy than a year of cherishing from Potter. A whole year. Remember the way you kissed her, hand against her jaw line, eyelashes resting curled on her cheek. Remember the way you kissed her like you were speaking, as if a kiss could convey a thousand pronunciations of those three little words. You could have done so much more than that, but you didn't, you held off because that's what she fucking wanted and if you'll admit it, that's what you wanted too. Or rather, you'd never considered anything else. Unlike Malfoy.
"Home again. Home sweet home, eh, Ginny? One big happy family. Tell me - after you've wiped the snot from your nose - do you love me?
'I can't hear you. Louder. Ah, that's better, that's all I wanted to know. You can stop with the apologies, they don't matter now. Let's go to your room. We can talk all you want in there."
Should have punched him when you got the chance. Why did you let him swagger past you, back into the club to ruin another boyfriend's life? Perhaps because the problem isn't with Malfoy. He's never pretended to be something he's not. She knew how far he'd go to destroy you and she was willing to help. She betrayed you in the worst possible way and she enjoyed it, his touch was allowed where your touch wasn't, his lips moved in ways yours couldn't, his
"Take off your dress. Don't look at me like that, it's soaking through anyway. I won't see any more than Malfoy's seen already. Ok, the boots too, since they're causing you so much pain. And the underwear - look, if you don't, I will. There shouldn't be anything to stop us anymore, Ginny. I'm ready, you're ready, so no argument."
hand has spoiled what's yours once again. You're worthless, Potter. You and Ginny both. Everything seems to be slipping away - your prospects, your girlfriend, your whole life. If only you could stop it all. If only you could feel like you were in control for once; not Malfoy or the Weasleys or anyone. Just you, with all the power you
"Lie down on the bed. Why are you shaking? This is what you wanted from him. This is what you wanted."
----
Ginny looks at slices of sky through the network of golden branches spreading above her. She is breathing heavily, recognising the layers of scent that coloured her childhood. Mellow air, crisp biscuity leaves, red berries crushed into the decaying ground. A few years ago, her father had tried to chop down some of the trees to make way for a new garden shed. His axe had never got past the first blow. Mr. Weasley, feeling too sentimental for his own good, had returned to his old spider-infested shed and the axe had remained lodged in the tree, a winking reminder of the preservation of innocence.
Ginny couldn't have felt less innocent if she tried. An hour in the shower this morning, pressing her forehead to the steamy glass. Finger shaped bruises on her buttock still tender. Collar bone where he had pinned her still aching. Conversations running through her mind that always stayed the same, no matter how many times she tried to interject. Silently watching herself stumble in answering, this can't be her, this wasn't her.
"I'm so sorry, I never meant to hurt you. Please speak to me. Just tell me how to fix this and I'll do it"
"You know I would never do this on purpose. You told me you were ready. I thought you were enjoying it…please don't cry…"
"Next time I'll be more gentle, I promise. It's just I love you so much, I wanted you so much-"
They both knew what Harry had done; why he had done it. But neither of them had the strength to say it, or wanted to face up to the emotional wreckage the accusation would entail. A silent agreement had been made. Harry wouldn't mention Draco if Ginny didn't mention Rape.
For Ginny, it is harder to mention it even to herself. She cups the experience between her palms like a speckled egg, terrified of breaking its shell and reliving the horrors it contains. What she knows already, what she cannot adequately block out, is enough. She sees Harry as a shadowy torso towering above her, feels him pin her shoulder and scoop her up by the buttock and grind inside her. She feels herself limp and inanimate, with a hand free to claw at his face and a mouth free to shout HELP. She does neither. All she can think of (despite the hot tears and streaming nose and choking throat) is the call that would bring her mother. What her mother would see. Her little girl, naked like an animal beneath her boyfriend. After all her mother had trusted in her to be sensible, after all the pride she'd invested in her, it would be unthinkable to shatter the dream, to show her mother what an ugly, dirty daughter she really had.
Ginny doesn't speak much to Harry nowadays. They've grown apart. Everyone's noticed it, commented on the strange atmosphere between them. Harry's looking for a new place to stay, under the pretension that he wants to start on a career. He has the qualifications, he says with a rueful smile, but now he needs the drive. And he doesn't think The Burrow is the right place to look for it. Hogsmeade, maybe. Diagon Alley. Mr. Weasley is ever so proud. When he was a boy, there wasn't half as many opportunities open to him.
Just as Ginny is imagining what a perfect day for hide and seek this could be, she hears familiar footsteps. They aren't the loping, clown-footed thud of a brothers, or the slow perambulation of her mother. They are quick and light. A Seeker.
"Ginny? Where are you? Molly says lunch's ready."
Silence.
"It's baked beans and sausages and it's getting cold, so get a move on!"
Silence.
"Ginny!"
A large, orange leaf falls through the air with the faintest of whistles. It rests across Ginny's face like a hand. After a moment of deep contemplation, Ginny removes it and closes her fist around it to produce a satisfying crunch. Brushing fine brown powder from her palms, she climbs to her feet and begins to move swiftly through the trees, swiping up the axe that rests in the oak as she goes.
"Coming, Harry."