Title: If you were me and I were you
Author: rhoddlet
E-mail: rhoddlet@hotmail.com
Archive: Do NOT archive to HSPA.
Rating: R. People have sex and steal lovers and all that kind of naughty thing.
Summary: There's something about Ginny.
Sexual Harry Potter x Ginny Weasley, Ginny Weaseley x Hermione Granger, Ginny Weasley x Original Character. Non-sexual Ron Weasley x Hermione Granger, Harry Potter x Ron Weasley,
Slash-ahoy!
This story came about because I wrote down the names of Harry Potter, Ginny Weasley, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley and tried to see if I could put every single two-pair combination in one story.
No, I'm kidding. I really am -- this is actually a continuation in the universe of "Sundress," which was in turn inspired by "Speak, Desire" by Audrey. Title cribbed from the marvelous Furikake who wrote a beautiful Neon Genesis: Evangelion fic about something vaguely like this.
Yes, I am wholly derivative. Tell me about it: rhoddlet@hotmail.com
*
Ginny's a covetous kind of girl. Likes to pick up things and keep them, which is how she got into all that trouble with Riddle, but she also saves bits and things from people that she loves. No need to keep things from her family, because they're always with her and because everything she is a reflection of them, not to mention the fact that at any given day she wears Percy's shoes, Ron's shirt with Charlie's shorts because she's still boy- shaped and since Mrs. Weasley had to buy lots of new clothes for Ron since the twins wrecked everything they wore, she was dead-determined to get more than one child's worth of wear out of them
The clothes of other people she loves, though, don't fit her so well.
Allison, for example. The twins brought her home because they'd met her family and decided that they were the "Death Eaters of Boredom," and that the Burrow would suit her much more nicely than a holiday in Sweden at her Granna's place. Middle of her stay, though, and Ginny realized that Allison was the one who was running from her family and that one or both of the twins desperately, desperately wanted to get in her pants. Remembers how Mum got positively breathy when she found out that Allison wasn't the least interested in them that way, remembers how she, Ginny, felt when Allison took out that postcard of her boyfriend on a beach in the south of France, waving at her and winking suggestively.
And then, one day, towards the end of the stay, Mum had been out shopping, and the twins and Ron had gone with her -- the twins to pick up something from the joke shop in town and Ron because he wanted to look at Quidditch magazines, and Allison had stayed at home to keep Ginny company.
So they were playing dress-up in Ginny's room, although it was mainly Allison trying all of her beautiful clothes on Ginny.
"You look just like a boy," she said, but then she dressed Ginny up in bracelets and a frilled blouse to try and make her look like a girl. It wouldn't work, so she added a necklace and some lipstick, but that was too delicate for Ginny's strong shoulders. "I'd love to have shoulders like that; I'd never have to wear shoulder pads," Allison said, and when she pulled the blouse off Ginny's shoulders, she kissed Ginny in the places where her breasts ought to have been. "Your body's just like a boy's," she said even as she slipped her mouth along the waistband of the skirt and down to the place, the only place, really, where Ginny was not like a boy. And Ginny laid on the bare Burrow floor, her room glittering and beautiful from all the expensive clothes and perfume, and pressed Allison's head between her legs, thinking that it was quite all right if she thought you were a boy just as long as she kept moving her tongue like that, kept touching you like that.
Afterwards, she'd kissed Ginny with a strong-tasting mouth, and then she wrapped her arms around her and went to sleep, right there on the floor with her. Ginny remember, very clearly, lying there with Allison's dress hitched up around her hips, Allison's face powder in her nostrils and that soft, baby-fine blonde hair all across her cheeks and tickling the back of her neck. Ginny also remembers looking up at this pink, beaded thing piled on top of her dresser from when Allison was going through her suitcase, looking for clothes to try out on her, and wondering how she, Ginny Weasley, would look in it.
Awful, of course. Allison tried it on you the next afternoon, and it was just awful. Ginny has no hips to speak of, and if her stomach is flat, it's only because the rest of her is too. The only thing she's got are long legs and this hair that, under Allison's advisement, she cut it short and put in some golden highlights, to lighten the red, as Allison put it. It was actually really nice, and when Charlie came home for a visit, he didn't ruffle her hair like he usually did. Tilted his head to the side, actually, looked Ginny up and down and kinda whistled.
"Nothing to make a guy feel old like his little baby sister growing up some, is there?"
At dinner that night, Allison wore a pale pink collared shirt with sleeves that ended at her elbows and these thin, silver bangles. She'd cut her own hair when she cut Ginny's cut it right above the chin. Didn't put in a lightening charm or anything on it because she was proud of the fact that her hair color was natural. Ginny remembers Charlie looking across the table at Allison in this kind of stunned amazement at this thing that'd somehow come to roost in between the twins and to the left of Dad who was talking about these enchanted pub stools that had arrived at the Ministry that day while spearing potato chunks off the heaping big dish in the middle of the table.
Afterwards, everyone had tea and sideways cake on the porch, but when everybody else went in, Allison stayed on the porch a long time and stood very close to Charlie as he pointed out various garden landmarks. The twins had groused about it for a week, but Ginny was the one who was alone in the house with a headache when Mum and everybody else went to London to have lunch with Charlie.
Ron later reported that Allison had left them after lunch to go see some friends of hers in London, and she came back very late, crawling into Ginny's room very late, smelling of trains and cigarettes and street exhaust, pub food and. . . Well, dragons, really. Like Charlie's dragon trousers, and when Ginny was helping her pack, she noticed that there was a little silver dragon pin among her things that wasn't there in the beginning. Cheap thing, actually, but it had little blue eyes just the color of Allison's.
So.
Charlie stole Allison from you, and you've stolen Hermione from Ron, as much as it's possible to steal somebody like Hermione, who has brown eyes so sharp and guileful. You can't steal anything that's so sharp and aware, and she certainly knows that Ron's desperately in love with her.
She mentioned it once or twice, particularly one afternoon when the two of you were in the orchard and dusty from making love on the dry ground, and Hermione was picking dried bits of grass out of your hair while she leafed through the Transfigurations text for next term.
"Ron was complaining to Mum, you know, that you're his friend, and that you came home with him, but that you never spend any time with him," you say to her. You'd to tell her to go spend some more time with Ron; don't let him suspect I've stolen the love of his life from right out under his nose; don't let me fall deeper in love with you.
Hermione didn't blink. "He doesn't let me study -- keeps trying to distract me by talking about Quidditch or getting me to go off somewhere with him." She'd paused for a moment to work a particularly nasty bit of grass out of your hair with both hands, then went back to Transfigurations, which she'd propped against a bit of apple tree root. "He'd like it better if I paid attention to him and only him."
Hermione's gotten darker over the course of these past couple weeks -- you remember her pale, pale arms in that sundress the day she tried to seduce you. Now, she's not exactly crisp and grilled the way the twins are because she likes to sit under trees and read and also because she uses this Muggle lotion to keep from getting sunburned, but she's this lovely golden color. It keeps her from looking like quite so much of a wraith, and her hair's lightened some from the sunshine too, little blonde streaks in parts. Put on some weight to round out those sharp bones, too, so she's looking almost well --
Pretty. Almost pretty.
Or she would if it weren't, again, for those eyes that could eat you alive. Slice you up into fillet and use you as a bookmark.
Also on the list of Hermione faults: Clumsiness, the way no Weasley is. With six siblings in a house as small as the Burrow, you learn agility right quick or you end up as a giant walking bruise, though Hermione's certainly gotten better at not running into things, particularly since Mum reorganized the kitchen a bit.
Hermione will never be able to walk around the house in the dark the way you and the twins and Ron can even after all these years at Hogwarts and coming home only for holidays. Hermione, though, has to turn on the lights whenever she goes into a room -- you've asked her about this, whether she *must* turn on the lights when she gets up at night to use the bathroom, whether she does this at home too, and she turned to you with a puzzled look on her face and said, "Why wouldn't I?"
She's learned to walk out of your room to use the bathroom at night without bumping into anything so she doesn't wake you up every time she has to pee, but she still has to whisper "Lumos" to the lightplate when she gets out into the hall and into the bathroom. She's probably temperamentally incapable of doing anything without being fully and exactly aware of where each and every table, throw-rug and standing lamp lies.
Though the two of you don't spend much time indoors anyway. After breakfast, you're always outside. If you're not working in the garden and finishing weeding duty before lunch, then you're reading books under the tree on the lawn, and in the afternoon, you always go out to the orchard to snog and study some more.
You, in fact, have never spent so much time outside during the summer, but then, you've never had a girlfriend or boyfriend during the summer, and there's barely room in the Burrow for a deep breath. There's barely room in your bed for one person – can't fit much more than Hermione, skinny and bony as she is, on that narrow little thing. You, in fact, suspect that you may be the only girl at Hogswart whose school bed was a marked step up from home. The sheer luxury of having something that big all to yourself with thick velvet curtains and a wooden headboard and a ceiling stitched with stars and constellations.
In your vaguer moments, you think how nice it would be to spend Sunday afternoons in bed with Hermione. The curtains wouldn't even have to be drawn all the way closed; they wouldn't even have to be touching, but oh, the marvellousness of having Hermione in *your* bed. Schoolbooks stacked all over the place, about to tip over because the bed is so deep and soft, kinda mashed looking scroll over there on the side, and Hermione, across the foot of the bed, pile of nightclothes underneath her head and eating a russet apple, and you like to think about crawling over to Hermione, taking the apple out of her hands and licking the juice off her fingers, chin, lips.
But, really, you knows you've run out of time, because Harry's coming, and he'll be sleeping next door. You'll lie on the floor, trying to sleep at night even though the moon is shining you straight in the face, and Hermione will come lie down next to you, press that sharp, angled body against you, push her face against your chest, and. . .
It's funny. You know what it's like to have someone pretend you're a boy while they're making love to you, and it's a funny kind of thing, but this, with Hermione, is utterly different. After all, Hermione is pretending you're a specific person. When Hermione looks up at you, you can almost feel the bones in your face stretch and rearrange themselves, feel your hair turning colors and this strange prickling when your eyes change color. "Hermione," you say, and you almost swear your voice gets darker, deeper.
But when Ron and Dad brought Harry home and you stood on the front lawn, watching Harry get out of car, you were absolutely humiliated by what a shitty lookalike you were. That's Harry, you thought, feeling your heart dissolve in your stomach. That beautiful, tall boy with hair blacker than anything and so graceful, so grace. . . For just a split moment, the look on Hermione's face when she sees Harry climb out the back of the car -- she'll never look at you like that. You don't look like at something like that until you've wanted it for just years and years, seen it lying in front of you but still out of your hands; you don't make a strangled little noise like that while watching him unless you've bred the longing into your bones, until desire has replaced calcium, and you can't move without having want moving in your body.
And you don't have time. No time to make Hermione love you, if not that way, then some way. Any way at all, really, you realize, as you follow Harry and Hermione and Ron into the house for dinner.
Dinner is an exquisite torture. Hermione watches Harry eat with such concentration that it frightens you, and you dissect your fish into neat little chunks and arrange them on your plate next to the corn, which you've pushed into neat little heaps while watching Hermione look at Harry with such blatant greed that you're surprised your mother doesn't say something like, "Dear, don't you think you're being a little selfish?"
The biggest surprise of dinner, though, is when you look up from studying Hermione and find Ron looking at first her, then you. He smiles a little at you with the side of his mouth, then goes back to eating his fish and corn, still watching Harry and Hermione.
The shock of Ron *knowing* about Hermione helps you stay rock-steady through dinner and into twilight on the lawn, which is mostly listening to your father grill Harry about Muggle life and watching Ron and Hermione play the twins at birdiecock before it gets too dark. Hermione's not used to having a shuttle that flies on its own, but she gets into the spirit of things fairly quickly. "Vicious competitor, that Granger," Fred pants, hands on his thighs while he catches his breath and Ron gets ready to serve the birdiecock
Ron just grins and grips the birdiecock more firmly while it beats its white wings desperately against his hand. "Isn't she just?" he says and serves the birdie, which promptly zooms of low on the grass and to the right.
It just so happens that you turn your head at the exact moment when Ron drops down into a defensive crouch to wait for the twin's return on the birdiecock. And you see Potter, watching Ron with lips that are wide apart. Eyes full of that same want that was in Hermione's face, but not quite as sharp, maybe because he knows the utter hopelessness of wanting your brother.
You feel like a traitor, watching people this way. You're just a mean little bitch -- you want to know that they're miserable and lonely too, nasty little creature that you are, and a crying jag starts in the middle of your spine and threatens to work its way out of your throat. You're going to start screaming soon, so you stand up quickly, and say, "Excuse me, Dad. I think I'm going to go take a look at the shovels."
Harry takes the moment to compose himself, but he nonetheless gives you a sharp look. Your father, engrossed in examining a rubber band that Harry had in his pocket, doesn't even notice. "I'll tell your Mum you've gone out, but don't be too late, Ginny. She'll worry."
You manage to stumble to the garden shed before your knees start to wobble alarmingly on you. Hands shaking with the effort required to keep from just falling down, you open the garden shed door, step inside, shut the door behind you, and the collapse on your hands and knees and cry and cry until your tear ducts run dry, and you're swaying on your knees from dehydration.
You're only fifteen, really. Allowed to have little fits like this. You wear your hair short because of Allison. You push hair back behind your ears with shaky fingers that are blotted with yellow and pink from the Muggle highlighter pens that Hermione brought and has insisted that you use to highlight relevant portions of books. Your shirt smells like Mum's dinner of beef stew, rice, steamed carrots, and an absolutely enormous cinnamon bun.
You keep your hair short for Allison. It really does look good on you, though the dying spell wore off a long time ago. Goes nicely with your long face.
Allison liked men, you think, and she liked girls, but she didn't like boys. Certainly not boys like her boyfriend, who you heard she married straight out of Hogwarts.
It's an old hurt, and it distracts you long enough to get your composure back. You might be fifteen, you think, wiping your eyes on your shirt and your hands on your pants. You might be fifteen, but frustration has been part of your life for so long that you can't imagine what your life would be like without it. In fact, you decide *that's* what's bred into your bones -- the Weasley family ability to endure. We hold on.
By this time, it's gone dark outside, and from the quietness, everybody's packed up and gone inside. You're in the middle of standing up when, through the cracks in the wooden planks of the garden shed walls, you see somebody standing on the lawn, right near the iris bed. The posture and the height and the white shirt tells you it's got to be Harry, and he's looking off into the woods behind the Burrow.
Only one thing he can be thinking about like that, and you start wondering whether there's some way you can sneak out of the shed without being noticed -- too bad your wand's back up in your room, and you're just about to brave it and walk out when Ron comes down the lawn slope towards Harry.
"Find Ginny?" Ron asks, hands in his pockets.
"No," Harry answers and crosses his arms. "'Probably went for a walk or something."
Silence, while Ron looks at his feet. Barefoot in the grass, and thin, strong brown legs with knees that are just starting to fit the rest of him.
"Harry, there's something I've got to talk to you about. It's about 'Mione."
Oh, Merlin and all the wizards of Britain, you think, almost incredulously. Only Ron could do this. Only Ron could fail to notice the look on Harry's face, the way Harry was holding himself, where it looked like he was going to fly apart if he didn't hold himself so damn tightly.
"I know it's not really nice to do this to you, since you've just gotten here, and I know it's been a really shitty summer so far -- but Harry, I just have to know." Ron takes a deep, desperate breathe, and then plunges forward. "I really like Hermione, Harry. I really, really, really like her."
Only your brother could sum up five years of longing and despair and desire like that. Really, really, really.
I really, really, really hate you, Ron Weasley.
"I know," Harry says and holds himself tighter.
"Really?" A smile breaks out on Ron's face, and he just relaxes. "I wasn't sure how you'd take it. Breaking up our friendship and all, and. . . "
"Ron, I --" There's a strangled noise from Harry, and then he gets a grip on himself. Shakes himself a little to make sure he's got a good hold. "Maybe you should tell her someday, you know."
Ron doesn't say anything, just looks down at the grass, and there's a long awkward silence where the three of you listen to crickets and cicadas and the moon in the trees. "It's not that, Harry. It's more that. . . well, that Hermione likes you. And I'd. . . I'd like to know whether you're going to do anything about that."
"I. . ." Harry makes that strangled noise again.
You're going to strangle Ron for doing this to Harry. The blind bastard -- the blind little *bastard*.
"I don't feel like that about Hermione, Ron. Don't worry."
Don't worry. I'm *gay*, you moron.
Don't worry, Ron. You're the one I want.
Harry practically screams this into the night, but Ron's deaf as well as blind. Just grins like a fool and punches Harry in the arm. "Come up to bed, Harry. Mum will just have a fit if I leave you outside in this air."
"No, I think I saw a sweater over there in the grass. I'll go put it on in a minute, but I just. . . " There's a silence, and Harry puts his hands in his pockets, just as a wind picks up in the trees, and in the rustling that follows, you to strain to hear what he says. "I just need a moment alone, Ron."
"Sure, no problem, Harry." Ron bounds up the lawn towards the house, and then, in the middle, he stops and turns around.
"Harry, I'm so glad it worked out this way. I don't know what I would've done if you told me you liked Hermione. You're such a great friend, Harry." Then, Ron runs the rest of the way up to the house, and when the porch door shuts and the kitchen light goes off, Harry calls out again.
"Why don't you come out, Ginny -- I know you're there," he says, in this voice that's broken up and splintered all over, so you come out of the garden shed, into the moonlight, and your heart just turns over, looking at this beautiful, beautiful creature who could have any girl he wants but only wants the one boy he can't have.
If I were a boy, you think, I'd want you. I'm a girl who loves another girl, and I still want you; if I were old and dying, I'd still look at you and think that you're the most beautiful creature in the world, even though I love Hermione like I love breathing, like I wake up in the morning, like I put one foot in front of the other when I walk.
That's the difference between Ron and me, Harry. Ron's not stupid -- just blind, more like it. Doesn't really notice beautiful things, which is why he loves Hermione and not you, when you're like stars and summer nights and she's. . . She's not.
Me, Harry?
I don't know. I love Hermione, but you're *beautiful*.
You're looking at me, now, your face very white and your hands shaking. So I know your secret. It's not that big a deal, although your mouth is very sweet, wet on mine
Are you trying wash out the words I saw in your eyes, make me forget? Bribe me, I guess, because you've heard that I like you.
So.
Am I just supposed to let you bribe me, Potter? Just because I love you, I'm supposed to forget the way you shook for my brother, the way you looked at him as if you could eat him whole, and he'd be gone by the time he realized what you were doing?
Can't do it, Potter. I've looked at Hermione the same way, you know, and she looks at you much the same way. We're all hopeless.
I've spent the past three weeks living as you, Potter. I certainly ought to know your body. I certainly ought to know how to kiss you, how to slip out of your arms and push you against the garden shed. I've heard the sound you make when I take you in my mouth before -- I've made it myself so many times these weeks, heard it from Hermione too, while she was wishing I was you. And Harry, I know how you press my head between your legs and say in your mind that you don't care if I'm a girl and his sister to boot; I know how you say that in your mind and how you say, with your lips, don't stop, don't stop, please don't stop.
Don't stop.
Can't stop.
*
Your nails scratch just like nails
And your teeth bite just like teeth
But when your legs wrap around me
I fall from the floor
And I never want to go home
Fluid by the Gerbils
*
I can't make out that second to last line, but that's what I *think* they're singing.
Go read Furikake who supplied the title:
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Gulf/7463/pure.html Break your heart and make you wonder why the hell you bother editing and proofreading when fic can be that raw and that fucking amazing. You don't need to know anything about the anime -- just appreciate the fic, and blow out a kidney or two laughing along to Maya and Makoto's Excruciating Adventure.
By the way, you're not allowed to have healthy, fulfilling sex until after you graduate from Hogwarts.
This story was also written as a bit of a technical exercise in shifting tones and persons -- it starts off in the third person, shifts to the second person, and then moves down to the first person. Aside from my craven need for feedback, I'd like to know whether this experiment succeeded or not.
rhoddlet@hotmail.com
Author: rhoddlet
E-mail: rhoddlet@hotmail.com
Archive: Do NOT archive to HSPA.
Rating: R. People have sex and steal lovers and all that kind of naughty thing.
Summary: There's something about Ginny.
Sexual Harry Potter x Ginny Weasley, Ginny Weaseley x Hermione Granger, Ginny Weasley x Original Character. Non-sexual Ron Weasley x Hermione Granger, Harry Potter x Ron Weasley,
Slash-ahoy!
This story came about because I wrote down the names of Harry Potter, Ginny Weasley, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley and tried to see if I could put every single two-pair combination in one story.
No, I'm kidding. I really am -- this is actually a continuation in the universe of "Sundress," which was in turn inspired by "Speak, Desire" by Audrey. Title cribbed from the marvelous Furikake who wrote a beautiful Neon Genesis: Evangelion fic about something vaguely like this.
Yes, I am wholly derivative. Tell me about it: rhoddlet@hotmail.com
*
Ginny's a covetous kind of girl. Likes to pick up things and keep them, which is how she got into all that trouble with Riddle, but she also saves bits and things from people that she loves. No need to keep things from her family, because they're always with her and because everything she is a reflection of them, not to mention the fact that at any given day she wears Percy's shoes, Ron's shirt with Charlie's shorts because she's still boy- shaped and since Mrs. Weasley had to buy lots of new clothes for Ron since the twins wrecked everything they wore, she was dead-determined to get more than one child's worth of wear out of them
The clothes of other people she loves, though, don't fit her so well.
Allison, for example. The twins brought her home because they'd met her family and decided that they were the "Death Eaters of Boredom," and that the Burrow would suit her much more nicely than a holiday in Sweden at her Granna's place. Middle of her stay, though, and Ginny realized that Allison was the one who was running from her family and that one or both of the twins desperately, desperately wanted to get in her pants. Remembers how Mum got positively breathy when she found out that Allison wasn't the least interested in them that way, remembers how she, Ginny, felt when Allison took out that postcard of her boyfriend on a beach in the south of France, waving at her and winking suggestively.
And then, one day, towards the end of the stay, Mum had been out shopping, and the twins and Ron had gone with her -- the twins to pick up something from the joke shop in town and Ron because he wanted to look at Quidditch magazines, and Allison had stayed at home to keep Ginny company.
So they were playing dress-up in Ginny's room, although it was mainly Allison trying all of her beautiful clothes on Ginny.
"You look just like a boy," she said, but then she dressed Ginny up in bracelets and a frilled blouse to try and make her look like a girl. It wouldn't work, so she added a necklace and some lipstick, but that was too delicate for Ginny's strong shoulders. "I'd love to have shoulders like that; I'd never have to wear shoulder pads," Allison said, and when she pulled the blouse off Ginny's shoulders, she kissed Ginny in the places where her breasts ought to have been. "Your body's just like a boy's," she said even as she slipped her mouth along the waistband of the skirt and down to the place, the only place, really, where Ginny was not like a boy. And Ginny laid on the bare Burrow floor, her room glittering and beautiful from all the expensive clothes and perfume, and pressed Allison's head between her legs, thinking that it was quite all right if she thought you were a boy just as long as she kept moving her tongue like that, kept touching you like that.
Afterwards, she'd kissed Ginny with a strong-tasting mouth, and then she wrapped her arms around her and went to sleep, right there on the floor with her. Ginny remember, very clearly, lying there with Allison's dress hitched up around her hips, Allison's face powder in her nostrils and that soft, baby-fine blonde hair all across her cheeks and tickling the back of her neck. Ginny also remembers looking up at this pink, beaded thing piled on top of her dresser from when Allison was going through her suitcase, looking for clothes to try out on her, and wondering how she, Ginny Weasley, would look in it.
Awful, of course. Allison tried it on you the next afternoon, and it was just awful. Ginny has no hips to speak of, and if her stomach is flat, it's only because the rest of her is too. The only thing she's got are long legs and this hair that, under Allison's advisement, she cut it short and put in some golden highlights, to lighten the red, as Allison put it. It was actually really nice, and when Charlie came home for a visit, he didn't ruffle her hair like he usually did. Tilted his head to the side, actually, looked Ginny up and down and kinda whistled.
"Nothing to make a guy feel old like his little baby sister growing up some, is there?"
At dinner that night, Allison wore a pale pink collared shirt with sleeves that ended at her elbows and these thin, silver bangles. She'd cut her own hair when she cut Ginny's cut it right above the chin. Didn't put in a lightening charm or anything on it because she was proud of the fact that her hair color was natural. Ginny remembers Charlie looking across the table at Allison in this kind of stunned amazement at this thing that'd somehow come to roost in between the twins and to the left of Dad who was talking about these enchanted pub stools that had arrived at the Ministry that day while spearing potato chunks off the heaping big dish in the middle of the table.
Afterwards, everyone had tea and sideways cake on the porch, but when everybody else went in, Allison stayed on the porch a long time and stood very close to Charlie as he pointed out various garden landmarks. The twins had groused about it for a week, but Ginny was the one who was alone in the house with a headache when Mum and everybody else went to London to have lunch with Charlie.
Ron later reported that Allison had left them after lunch to go see some friends of hers in London, and she came back very late, crawling into Ginny's room very late, smelling of trains and cigarettes and street exhaust, pub food and. . . Well, dragons, really. Like Charlie's dragon trousers, and when Ginny was helping her pack, she noticed that there was a little silver dragon pin among her things that wasn't there in the beginning. Cheap thing, actually, but it had little blue eyes just the color of Allison's.
So.
Charlie stole Allison from you, and you've stolen Hermione from Ron, as much as it's possible to steal somebody like Hermione, who has brown eyes so sharp and guileful. You can't steal anything that's so sharp and aware, and she certainly knows that Ron's desperately in love with her.
She mentioned it once or twice, particularly one afternoon when the two of you were in the orchard and dusty from making love on the dry ground, and Hermione was picking dried bits of grass out of your hair while she leafed through the Transfigurations text for next term.
"Ron was complaining to Mum, you know, that you're his friend, and that you came home with him, but that you never spend any time with him," you say to her. You'd to tell her to go spend some more time with Ron; don't let him suspect I've stolen the love of his life from right out under his nose; don't let me fall deeper in love with you.
Hermione didn't blink. "He doesn't let me study -- keeps trying to distract me by talking about Quidditch or getting me to go off somewhere with him." She'd paused for a moment to work a particularly nasty bit of grass out of your hair with both hands, then went back to Transfigurations, which she'd propped against a bit of apple tree root. "He'd like it better if I paid attention to him and only him."
Hermione's gotten darker over the course of these past couple weeks -- you remember her pale, pale arms in that sundress the day she tried to seduce you. Now, she's not exactly crisp and grilled the way the twins are because she likes to sit under trees and read and also because she uses this Muggle lotion to keep from getting sunburned, but she's this lovely golden color. It keeps her from looking like quite so much of a wraith, and her hair's lightened some from the sunshine too, little blonde streaks in parts. Put on some weight to round out those sharp bones, too, so she's looking almost well --
Pretty. Almost pretty.
Or she would if it weren't, again, for those eyes that could eat you alive. Slice you up into fillet and use you as a bookmark.
Also on the list of Hermione faults: Clumsiness, the way no Weasley is. With six siblings in a house as small as the Burrow, you learn agility right quick or you end up as a giant walking bruise, though Hermione's certainly gotten better at not running into things, particularly since Mum reorganized the kitchen a bit.
Hermione will never be able to walk around the house in the dark the way you and the twins and Ron can even after all these years at Hogwarts and coming home only for holidays. Hermione, though, has to turn on the lights whenever she goes into a room -- you've asked her about this, whether she *must* turn on the lights when she gets up at night to use the bathroom, whether she does this at home too, and she turned to you with a puzzled look on her face and said, "Why wouldn't I?"
She's learned to walk out of your room to use the bathroom at night without bumping into anything so she doesn't wake you up every time she has to pee, but she still has to whisper "Lumos" to the lightplate when she gets out into the hall and into the bathroom. She's probably temperamentally incapable of doing anything without being fully and exactly aware of where each and every table, throw-rug and standing lamp lies.
Though the two of you don't spend much time indoors anyway. After breakfast, you're always outside. If you're not working in the garden and finishing weeding duty before lunch, then you're reading books under the tree on the lawn, and in the afternoon, you always go out to the orchard to snog and study some more.
You, in fact, have never spent so much time outside during the summer, but then, you've never had a girlfriend or boyfriend during the summer, and there's barely room in the Burrow for a deep breath. There's barely room in your bed for one person – can't fit much more than Hermione, skinny and bony as she is, on that narrow little thing. You, in fact, suspect that you may be the only girl at Hogswart whose school bed was a marked step up from home. The sheer luxury of having something that big all to yourself with thick velvet curtains and a wooden headboard and a ceiling stitched with stars and constellations.
In your vaguer moments, you think how nice it would be to spend Sunday afternoons in bed with Hermione. The curtains wouldn't even have to be drawn all the way closed; they wouldn't even have to be touching, but oh, the marvellousness of having Hermione in *your* bed. Schoolbooks stacked all over the place, about to tip over because the bed is so deep and soft, kinda mashed looking scroll over there on the side, and Hermione, across the foot of the bed, pile of nightclothes underneath her head and eating a russet apple, and you like to think about crawling over to Hermione, taking the apple out of her hands and licking the juice off her fingers, chin, lips.
But, really, you knows you've run out of time, because Harry's coming, and he'll be sleeping next door. You'll lie on the floor, trying to sleep at night even though the moon is shining you straight in the face, and Hermione will come lie down next to you, press that sharp, angled body against you, push her face against your chest, and. . .
It's funny. You know what it's like to have someone pretend you're a boy while they're making love to you, and it's a funny kind of thing, but this, with Hermione, is utterly different. After all, Hermione is pretending you're a specific person. When Hermione looks up at you, you can almost feel the bones in your face stretch and rearrange themselves, feel your hair turning colors and this strange prickling when your eyes change color. "Hermione," you say, and you almost swear your voice gets darker, deeper.
But when Ron and Dad brought Harry home and you stood on the front lawn, watching Harry get out of car, you were absolutely humiliated by what a shitty lookalike you were. That's Harry, you thought, feeling your heart dissolve in your stomach. That beautiful, tall boy with hair blacker than anything and so graceful, so grace. . . For just a split moment, the look on Hermione's face when she sees Harry climb out the back of the car -- she'll never look at you like that. You don't look like at something like that until you've wanted it for just years and years, seen it lying in front of you but still out of your hands; you don't make a strangled little noise like that while watching him unless you've bred the longing into your bones, until desire has replaced calcium, and you can't move without having want moving in your body.
And you don't have time. No time to make Hermione love you, if not that way, then some way. Any way at all, really, you realize, as you follow Harry and Hermione and Ron into the house for dinner.
Dinner is an exquisite torture. Hermione watches Harry eat with such concentration that it frightens you, and you dissect your fish into neat little chunks and arrange them on your plate next to the corn, which you've pushed into neat little heaps while watching Hermione look at Harry with such blatant greed that you're surprised your mother doesn't say something like, "Dear, don't you think you're being a little selfish?"
The biggest surprise of dinner, though, is when you look up from studying Hermione and find Ron looking at first her, then you. He smiles a little at you with the side of his mouth, then goes back to eating his fish and corn, still watching Harry and Hermione.
The shock of Ron *knowing* about Hermione helps you stay rock-steady through dinner and into twilight on the lawn, which is mostly listening to your father grill Harry about Muggle life and watching Ron and Hermione play the twins at birdiecock before it gets too dark. Hermione's not used to having a shuttle that flies on its own, but she gets into the spirit of things fairly quickly. "Vicious competitor, that Granger," Fred pants, hands on his thighs while he catches his breath and Ron gets ready to serve the birdiecock
Ron just grins and grips the birdiecock more firmly while it beats its white wings desperately against his hand. "Isn't she just?" he says and serves the birdie, which promptly zooms of low on the grass and to the right.
It just so happens that you turn your head at the exact moment when Ron drops down into a defensive crouch to wait for the twin's return on the birdiecock. And you see Potter, watching Ron with lips that are wide apart. Eyes full of that same want that was in Hermione's face, but not quite as sharp, maybe because he knows the utter hopelessness of wanting your brother.
You feel like a traitor, watching people this way. You're just a mean little bitch -- you want to know that they're miserable and lonely too, nasty little creature that you are, and a crying jag starts in the middle of your spine and threatens to work its way out of your throat. You're going to start screaming soon, so you stand up quickly, and say, "Excuse me, Dad. I think I'm going to go take a look at the shovels."
Harry takes the moment to compose himself, but he nonetheless gives you a sharp look. Your father, engrossed in examining a rubber band that Harry had in his pocket, doesn't even notice. "I'll tell your Mum you've gone out, but don't be too late, Ginny. She'll worry."
You manage to stumble to the garden shed before your knees start to wobble alarmingly on you. Hands shaking with the effort required to keep from just falling down, you open the garden shed door, step inside, shut the door behind you, and the collapse on your hands and knees and cry and cry until your tear ducts run dry, and you're swaying on your knees from dehydration.
You're only fifteen, really. Allowed to have little fits like this. You wear your hair short because of Allison. You push hair back behind your ears with shaky fingers that are blotted with yellow and pink from the Muggle highlighter pens that Hermione brought and has insisted that you use to highlight relevant portions of books. Your shirt smells like Mum's dinner of beef stew, rice, steamed carrots, and an absolutely enormous cinnamon bun.
You keep your hair short for Allison. It really does look good on you, though the dying spell wore off a long time ago. Goes nicely with your long face.
Allison liked men, you think, and she liked girls, but she didn't like boys. Certainly not boys like her boyfriend, who you heard she married straight out of Hogwarts.
It's an old hurt, and it distracts you long enough to get your composure back. You might be fifteen, you think, wiping your eyes on your shirt and your hands on your pants. You might be fifteen, but frustration has been part of your life for so long that you can't imagine what your life would be like without it. In fact, you decide *that's* what's bred into your bones -- the Weasley family ability to endure. We hold on.
By this time, it's gone dark outside, and from the quietness, everybody's packed up and gone inside. You're in the middle of standing up when, through the cracks in the wooden planks of the garden shed walls, you see somebody standing on the lawn, right near the iris bed. The posture and the height and the white shirt tells you it's got to be Harry, and he's looking off into the woods behind the Burrow.
Only one thing he can be thinking about like that, and you start wondering whether there's some way you can sneak out of the shed without being noticed -- too bad your wand's back up in your room, and you're just about to brave it and walk out when Ron comes down the lawn slope towards Harry.
"Find Ginny?" Ron asks, hands in his pockets.
"No," Harry answers and crosses his arms. "'Probably went for a walk or something."
Silence, while Ron looks at his feet. Barefoot in the grass, and thin, strong brown legs with knees that are just starting to fit the rest of him.
"Harry, there's something I've got to talk to you about. It's about 'Mione."
Oh, Merlin and all the wizards of Britain, you think, almost incredulously. Only Ron could do this. Only Ron could fail to notice the look on Harry's face, the way Harry was holding himself, where it looked like he was going to fly apart if he didn't hold himself so damn tightly.
"I know it's not really nice to do this to you, since you've just gotten here, and I know it's been a really shitty summer so far -- but Harry, I just have to know." Ron takes a deep, desperate breathe, and then plunges forward. "I really like Hermione, Harry. I really, really, really like her."
Only your brother could sum up five years of longing and despair and desire like that. Really, really, really.
I really, really, really hate you, Ron Weasley.
"I know," Harry says and holds himself tighter.
"Really?" A smile breaks out on Ron's face, and he just relaxes. "I wasn't sure how you'd take it. Breaking up our friendship and all, and. . . "
"Ron, I --" There's a strangled noise from Harry, and then he gets a grip on himself. Shakes himself a little to make sure he's got a good hold. "Maybe you should tell her someday, you know."
Ron doesn't say anything, just looks down at the grass, and there's a long awkward silence where the three of you listen to crickets and cicadas and the moon in the trees. "It's not that, Harry. It's more that. . . well, that Hermione likes you. And I'd. . . I'd like to know whether you're going to do anything about that."
"I. . ." Harry makes that strangled noise again.
You're going to strangle Ron for doing this to Harry. The blind bastard -- the blind little *bastard*.
"I don't feel like that about Hermione, Ron. Don't worry."
Don't worry. I'm *gay*, you moron.
Don't worry, Ron. You're the one I want.
Harry practically screams this into the night, but Ron's deaf as well as blind. Just grins like a fool and punches Harry in the arm. "Come up to bed, Harry. Mum will just have a fit if I leave you outside in this air."
"No, I think I saw a sweater over there in the grass. I'll go put it on in a minute, but I just. . . " There's a silence, and Harry puts his hands in his pockets, just as a wind picks up in the trees, and in the rustling that follows, you to strain to hear what he says. "I just need a moment alone, Ron."
"Sure, no problem, Harry." Ron bounds up the lawn towards the house, and then, in the middle, he stops and turns around.
"Harry, I'm so glad it worked out this way. I don't know what I would've done if you told me you liked Hermione. You're such a great friend, Harry." Then, Ron runs the rest of the way up to the house, and when the porch door shuts and the kitchen light goes off, Harry calls out again.
"Why don't you come out, Ginny -- I know you're there," he says, in this voice that's broken up and splintered all over, so you come out of the garden shed, into the moonlight, and your heart just turns over, looking at this beautiful, beautiful creature who could have any girl he wants but only wants the one boy he can't have.
If I were a boy, you think, I'd want you. I'm a girl who loves another girl, and I still want you; if I were old and dying, I'd still look at you and think that you're the most beautiful creature in the world, even though I love Hermione like I love breathing, like I wake up in the morning, like I put one foot in front of the other when I walk.
That's the difference between Ron and me, Harry. Ron's not stupid -- just blind, more like it. Doesn't really notice beautiful things, which is why he loves Hermione and not you, when you're like stars and summer nights and she's. . . She's not.
Me, Harry?
I don't know. I love Hermione, but you're *beautiful*.
You're looking at me, now, your face very white and your hands shaking. So I know your secret. It's not that big a deal, although your mouth is very sweet, wet on mine
Are you trying wash out the words I saw in your eyes, make me forget? Bribe me, I guess, because you've heard that I like you.
So.
Am I just supposed to let you bribe me, Potter? Just because I love you, I'm supposed to forget the way you shook for my brother, the way you looked at him as if you could eat him whole, and he'd be gone by the time he realized what you were doing?
Can't do it, Potter. I've looked at Hermione the same way, you know, and she looks at you much the same way. We're all hopeless.
I've spent the past three weeks living as you, Potter. I certainly ought to know your body. I certainly ought to know how to kiss you, how to slip out of your arms and push you against the garden shed. I've heard the sound you make when I take you in my mouth before -- I've made it myself so many times these weeks, heard it from Hermione too, while she was wishing I was you. And Harry, I know how you press my head between your legs and say in your mind that you don't care if I'm a girl and his sister to boot; I know how you say that in your mind and how you say, with your lips, don't stop, don't stop, please don't stop.
Don't stop.
Can't stop.
*
Your nails scratch just like nails
And your teeth bite just like teeth
But when your legs wrap around me
I fall from the floor
And I never want to go home
Fluid by the Gerbils
*
I can't make out that second to last line, but that's what I *think* they're singing.
Go read Furikake who supplied the title:
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Gulf/7463/pure.html Break your heart and make you wonder why the hell you bother editing and proofreading when fic can be that raw and that fucking amazing. You don't need to know anything about the anime -- just appreciate the fic, and blow out a kidney or two laughing along to Maya and Makoto's Excruciating Adventure.
By the way, you're not allowed to have healthy, fulfilling sex until after you graduate from Hogwarts.
This story was also written as a bit of a technical exercise in shifting tones and persons -- it starts off in the third person, shifts to the second person, and then moves down to the first person. Aside from my craven need for feedback, I'd like to know whether this experiment succeeded or not.
rhoddlet@hotmail.com