notes: J.K. Rowling owns the lot of them. Written for Liss.
warning: yes, this contains incestuous themes. If you feel very strongly against such things, I suggest you hit the back button now.
Sometimes on Sundays
Ginny used to be sunshine, wearing flowers
in her hair and catching raindrops on her tongue. She scrawled in notebooks in
untidy handwriting, ripping out pages after she was done and burning them in
conjured flame.
Ron used to be fire, his freckled face twisted into a frown, a wand clutched in
his right hand and the words of a hex at the tip of his tongue. He stabbed at
parchment, muttering about silver-haired Slytherins while ink bled from his
quill.
Neither of them are so much the same, now. Ginny has given up on diaries, after
her time with dark-haired boys and things that should never have been. Ron
doesn't think about it anymore, but he no longer hates Draco Malfoy quite so
much – not now, not after he'd gone to his funeral and cried tears over him
that he hadn't known were inside him.
Today is like all the other days. Sunlight streams through every house's
windows but theirs; their windows are shrouded by curtains. Ginny sits at the
kitchen counter, kicking her feet against the legs of the stool. Her white
skirt barely stretches over her knees – none of her clothes fit now, but they
don't go out anymore to buy new ones. No one dares to go out, not anymore.
Ron is poking through the contents of their pantries and cupboards. "Hey,
Ginny," he says.
She glances up distractedly from the History of Magic textbook she is reading.
"Mm?"
"What d'you want for lunch? We have, er…." He pauses for a moment. "We haven't
got much of anything, actually, but if you're hungry…"
Ginny shakes her head. "It's all right," and turns back to her textbook. That
seems to be the end of the issue for her – she doesn't say that she hasn't
eaten for days, that she can't even remember when her last meal.
In turn he doesn't point out that she is wasting away. He doesn't reprimand her
like Mum would, or tease her about it like Fred and George would.
He does touch her arm and say, "Ginny."
Maybe it was the exhaustion that had come from wide-open eyes at nighttime and
padding out to the kitchen for midnight snacks that remain untouched. Maybe it
was the fear – the shadow in the back of their minds that they both refused to
acknowledge.
Neither of them thought that it might have been the love.
Whatever it might have been, it spurs Ron to move closer, and Ginny to push her
textbook aside, and freeze.
"Ginny," Ron says again.
She smiles, tentatively, and there is a shadow of the old Ginny in her eyes,
the Ginny who was full to bursting with emotion.
And then suddenly there was Ron and there was Ginny, and there was RonandGinny.
Red on red, the two are nearly identical as they cling to each other with a
feverish desperateness, as though they will wither away if they don't. Chapped
lips find each other and hands find skin under ragged fabric. The wrongness,
the sense of forbiddance, hangs over them like a black rain cloud.
Later on they both rinse out their mouths with mouthwash. Ginny falls onto her
bed, tears falling before she can stop them and hands reaching out for quill
and parchment. She writes and writes, it doesn't matter what, and the parchment
quickly becomes stained with teardrops and ink.
Ron slams his bedroom door shut, sweeping Chudley Cannons memorabilia off his
desk while cursing up a storm. The mess of orange falls to the floor with a
shatter and a bang. He ignores it.
There was the exhaustion. There was the fear. And somewhere, like a spark of
light not allowed to emerge, almost entirely buried underneath a cloud of
darkness, there was the love.