TITLE: I Dreamt I Fell
AUTHOR: Aviatrix
PAIRING: Ginny/Tom
RATING: PG-13
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, Rowling's. Blah blah blah.
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Ginny hasn't slept in days.
She's tired, a bone-tired that is with her every moment, lingering after her words and stretching over her hands. And she's awake, seeing the world in hot sharp clarity (lights too bright and voices too loud) but it's like she's watching a play or a muggle movie - like there's a sheet of glass between her and everything else. She moves slowly or not at all, people moving around her and handing her clips of memories that she quickly discards: Mum making her a cup of tea, her father's hand on her shoulder, Percy hugging her awkwardly. Things happen, and they repeat and change in a subtle, rumbling way, and she thinks that they're absolutely beautiful.
But they're not hers.
She knows what is hers: the clothing that rubs against her with static electricity, the sticky feeling of the insides of her eyelids, the whorls of her fingerprints and these shoes that are too small. She owns makeup to blur away the circles under her eyes, and she owns the moments in the middle of the night while everyone else is asleep. She owns quills and ink and -
And she used to own a diary.
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She hasn't slept in days, and it hasn't caught up with her, not really, not yet, and though she can't see the sun rising through the shutters, she knows it's there, can feel it burning through her and pushing at her chest and replacing the air in her lungs with something else. Or maybe it's air replacing the something else that ran jaggedly through her, but all she knows is that, for some reason, she now has to think hard to remember to breathe.
Her body still feels like it's being moved by someone else, like her muscles have memorized what she's done, and if she wasn't looking down at her legs she would swear that she was still running. She gets cold flashes, too, and she's not sure if it's a memory or just wishful thinking. But she feels it, rushing down her spine, tingling and trickling through her until she knows that the reason nothing feels real is that nothing *is* real, because she's actually just dreaming and soon she'll wake up feeling the stone beneath her and the darkness above her, and his voice somewhere to the left of her:
"Welcome to the world of the waking."
Cool, smooth, charming, dead (almost). He, too, has been asleep, and she knows that he was never quite dead, and never will be; Tom will exist in a dream of death, dreamt by those things that own the night, that crawl and slither in the dark underneath the earth.
She hasn't slept in days.
She waits, behind the pane of glass, for those moments after midnight when (if she thinks about it hard enough) she might, conceivably, wake up.
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AUTHOR: Aviatrix
PAIRING: Ginny/Tom
RATING: PG-13
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, Rowling's. Blah blah blah.
xx
xx
xx
Ginny hasn't slept in days.
She's tired, a bone-tired that is with her every moment, lingering after her words and stretching over her hands. And she's awake, seeing the world in hot sharp clarity (lights too bright and voices too loud) but it's like she's watching a play or a muggle movie - like there's a sheet of glass between her and everything else. She moves slowly or not at all, people moving around her and handing her clips of memories that she quickly discards: Mum making her a cup of tea, her father's hand on her shoulder, Percy hugging her awkwardly. Things happen, and they repeat and change in a subtle, rumbling way, and she thinks that they're absolutely beautiful.
But they're not hers.
She knows what is hers: the clothing that rubs against her with static electricity, the sticky feeling of the insides of her eyelids, the whorls of her fingerprints and these shoes that are too small. She owns makeup to blur away the circles under her eyes, and she owns the moments in the middle of the night while everyone else is asleep. She owns quills and ink and -
And she used to own a diary.
xx
xx
She hasn't slept in days, and it hasn't caught up with her, not really, not yet, and though she can't see the sun rising through the shutters, she knows it's there, can feel it burning through her and pushing at her chest and replacing the air in her lungs with something else. Or maybe it's air replacing the something else that ran jaggedly through her, but all she knows is that, for some reason, she now has to think hard to remember to breathe.
Her body still feels like it's being moved by someone else, like her muscles have memorized what she's done, and if she wasn't looking down at her legs she would swear that she was still running. She gets cold flashes, too, and she's not sure if it's a memory or just wishful thinking. But she feels it, rushing down her spine, tingling and trickling through her until she knows that the reason nothing feels real is that nothing *is* real, because she's actually just dreaming and soon she'll wake up feeling the stone beneath her and the darkness above her, and his voice somewhere to the left of her:
"Welcome to the world of the waking."
Cool, smooth, charming, dead (almost). He, too, has been asleep, and she knows that he was never quite dead, and never will be; Tom will exist in a dream of death, dreamt by those things that own the night, that crawl and slither in the dark underneath the earth.
She hasn't slept in days.
She waits, behind the pane of glass, for those moments after midnight when (if she thinks about it hard enough) she might, conceivably, wake up.
xxx
xxx
f
i
n
xxx
xxx