PAIRING: Harry/Ginny
RATING: R
SUMMARY: What if your entire life was just...rewritten? Would you even know what was missing? Or whom? HP/Angel: the series crossover
WARNINGS: None
DISCLAIMER: I don't own nothin'.
AUTHOR NOTES: I'm still trying to finish a million other fics, but this one eked out of me, sadly enough. Hope everyone enjoys!
---
A piece has gone from her self, and Ginny Weasley doesn't even know what it is, which part of her it is that's taken leave so completely. All Ginny knows is that its loss has left her dull and empty, raw like a humming, frantic nerve. She chokes on tears that rise suddenly, unbidden, in the back of her throat. Her heart beats wildly at odd moments. She fights to steady her breath in the peace of even the quietest day. There is no remedy for the uncertainty coiling and raging within her.
Only more questions.
- - -
You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved,
who were lost from the start...
- - -
One day in her seventh year, Ginny traces a wobbly heart with the letters H.P and G.W and feels some indescribable longing shudder through her.
There's this tree near the lake at Hogwarts, tall and proud, with marks of lovers past carved into the gnarled, thick trunk. Underneath the canopy of the wide, waxy leaves, Ginny lies face to face with the pair of initials that have caught her eye, and she wonders.
It's as if the heart was drawn especially for her. As if somewhere, some H.P loved her with such boyish pride that he wanted it preserved for ages and ages, remembered for all time. Ginny finds herself drawn to the tree for this reason, this daydream of romance and eternity, and when Headmistress McGonagall deems the tree dangerous and demands it be cut down, something deep and wistful inside of Ginny aches with an inexplicable sadness. It's not just the mark of the other lovers that McGonagall is erasing. It's a past Ginny never knew she wanted, and a future she's not sure she'll ever have. She could have been that G.W marked on aged wood, claimed by another set of elusive letters--
Only, the thing is, Ginny doesn't know anyone with the initials H.P. She never has.
- - -
I don't even know what songs would please you.
- - -
She writes a thousand love letters she'll never send.
Words spill from her quill like ink-stained kisses, and every emotion Ginny will die trying to name is lurking between the lines. There's something missing from her essential being, some shadow or breath or pulse, and so she writes to fill in the empty spaces when her heart skips a beat. They are the words of her very self, steeped deep in her pores and bleeding from her fingers, and in the letters, she creates elaborate histories upon which to build on. Futures and ficticious pasts are scrawled in her untidy hand, stories of a dark and terrible wizard lord, of a secret prophecy, and of a love that withstood everything but the hero's own self-martyrdom.
The letters also say pretty things like "have wanted you forever" and "dream of you always" but the reality is, Ginny doesn't know what to put when the parchment is sealed and the envelope begs a name and address to be sent to. She saves each letter in her drawer and thinks of how they will be great tales to spin in front of the fire one day.
Even though something abstract calls out that once, her stories were fact instead of fiction, if only she would take the time to remember.
- - -
I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave of the next moment...
All the immense images in me-- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape, cities, towers, and bridges,
and unsuspected turns in the path--
- - -
"You're not the same," others tell her. "You used to be so..."
"So what?" Ginny asks, because she doesn't even know what she used to be. How can anyone know for sure, when everything real feels like the grandest illusion of all?
Her mum thinks it's just growing pains, the desire to find something exciting in an existence so mundane. In a roundabout way, Ginny reasons that her mum may be right. After all, her life has been little more than seventeen years of being the youngest Weasley child, star Seeker on the Gryffindor House Quidditch Team, and occasional expert on Bat-Bogey Hexes. She wants something more, something bigger: adventure, danger, drama. Romance.
She thinks she had that once, and this is what drives her round the proverbial bend.
Her life hasn't lacked anything. She is the youngest of a very large, very close family. She is best friends with her older brother Ron, and is trying valiantly to arrange a date with him and a girl he went to school with, named Hermione. She played Seeker on the House team and led Gryffindor to the House Cup six years in a row. She has been living an absolutely normal life for so long, she isn't sure why everything is so topsy-turvy now.
"You're not the same," others tell her, and Ginny thinks that's sort of the point of this whole thing.
- - -
--all rise within me to mean you, who forever elude me.
And those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods--
- - -
When Ginny looks up at the family clock, the ghost inside whispers that there's a reason Mortal Peril is so well-worn, even though the last hand to strike that title was Uncle Bilius. There's an empty space for another hand with another face that Ginny could just see filled, if only she looks long enough. A distantly familiar name flits quickly in the ether behind her lids, but as suddenly as the thought comes, it disappears, unrealized.
Filled with frustration and mounting fear that she's well on her way to being categorically mad, Ginny shakes her head and tries to forget that brief moment of blessed confusion-clarity.
There are no answers. Only the faintest question, the disjointed images and sounds that tease late at night when she's restless in sleep. Only the echo of a thousand what-if's.
The thought that something, someone is missing.
- - -
You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing.
An open window in a country house, and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
- - -
There's a catch to her timeline now when she pauses to think about it, a glitch in the cycle of classically normal, a skip of breath that signifies something is very wrong.
Her first kiss was with Micheal Corner, and Ginny knows that the brush of his lips stirred her first feelings of feminine pride under the pale blue glow of a moonlit night. But what is so frustrating about what should be a fond memory is the strange feeling of bewilderment that attacks in the pauses between each stationary moment. If the kiss happened in a crowded corridor after a particularly bad Potions class, why does Ginny feel the phantom itchy brush of lace against her legs, and hear the tinny blare of Kirly McCormick coming from the Great Hall, of all places?
Her first night as a woman, she spent with Dean Thomas. This has to be indisputable fact, because she can still see the faint outline of blood smeared on her thighs and his fingers in the electric light of a rainy afternoon. Although, when she asks Dean of it later, he will say that their first time was bloodless, clean, surprisingly easy. Then he will kiss her on the forehead and all the memories of urgent hands and furious kisses against the backdrop of a summer storm and bloodied sheets will fade away.
Micheal Cornor has black hair that sweeps untidily across his forehead, and Dean Thomas has strong hands with slender Seeker fingers and why do these facts make Ginny ache even more with the confusion of memories that flicker in between two vastly different scenarios?
Why, when she shared so many firsts with these men, does she still feel as if nothing has ever begun?
It hasn't always been this way, Ginny knows. Her finger will slip in the dead of the night, sliding across her clit in a way that feels painfully familiar, and suddenly, the touch of hot breath against her neck and the throb of a steady heartbeat against her skin will overcome her. Closing her eyes, she can almost see thin lips framing the words "Love you," to her in the moonlight, and the curve of spectacles against a stubble-roughened cheek. Everything in that second glides into place with an almost audible 'click.'
Then she opens her eyes again and it's morning again: bright, harsh, empty.
A new day with old ghosts, nameless as ever.
- - -
Streets that I chanced upon-- you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and--
Startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
- - -
The places Ginny goes now are saturated with him, dripping with his presence, deep into her very bones.
An imprint of a thumb other than her own smudged against the side of her vanity, as if a hand had caressed her reflection in some other world.
A dried rose pressed behind the cover of her long-forgotten novel, A Wand in Time, the petals crumbling across a page that is curling over with an inscription faded so faint that it's only when she presses her ear to the paper that she can hear the words skate over her skin.
A deep crease permanently imbedded in her bed, the outline of a body longer and thicker than hers, arms spread-eagled to form a cocoon that Ginny finds herself rolling into in the dead of the night, when her own fantasies overcome her.
Diagon Alley, where every cobblestone flashes her back to some rosy-hued day when bright green eyes were shining in anticipation at the new broom in the Quidditch shop.
Hogwarts, Hogwarts, each corridor and stairwell and nook and cranny whispering of illicit liasons and giggles that sound otherworldly to her dreamy ears.
Every step, every breath is soaked in the essence of him, the dream of who he was or is or could be to her, the remembrance of what they were together in some existence different than this.
She doesn't even know who he is.
- - -
Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday,
seperate, in the evening...
- - -
Her boss is a mysterious man.
Powerful, but then, Ginny has always felt drawn to the sort of power he has: latent, unspoken, just under the surface.
She got the job when she turned nineteen, travelling to London after seeing an ad in the Daily Prophet that caught her attention. Secretary was easy enough a position to fill, and the job description sounded exactly right: a respect for anonymity, a willingness to turn the other cheek to things more--strange than normal, and a healthy respect for all things magical. Ginny packed her things, kissed her mum, and hopped in the first train headed to the big building in the center of London.
He was standing in front of his office when she arrived, and it was something of a shock the way the wind was knocked out of her when she saw him. Tall and thin, with dark hair and dancing emerald eyes, he looked the way all her gauzy dreams have gone.
She slipped into the role of his secretary very well. She slipped into the role of his lover even better.
He doesn't tell her much--business dealings at work are shady enough, and Ginny has learned not to ask questions. She doesn't even know his name, or if he has a wife at home. All she knows is that he kisses as if he's melting butter, and he holds her as if she's salvation.
He never looks in her eyes, and never speaks unless it's about work. He just touches, and somehow it's enough.
Then one day a memo comes in from one of their American branches, something about memory modification spells and a demon named Cyrus Vail, well-versed in restructured realities. Suddenly he looks as if he's drowning, his eyes wide and face pale. She gets in a fight with him about the mysterious name and the connotations of the message, and before he can yell back, his lips are on hers and he's taking her right there on the office floor.
There's no speaking for awhile, but for that long period of silence, the atmosphere is full of unspoken words.
The next morning, Ginny gathers her things and heads to the door, feeling a strange emotion rise in her gut. She pauses at the threshold, turns and looks at the dark-haired man still lying on the floor, the sun illuminating a strange, thin, lightning-bolt-shaped scar on his forehead. She thinks that strange emotion is the same magic she felt last night, when he traced the lines of her face and gazed deep into her the eyes for the first time ever.
She thinks she knows him. Like really knows him. Perhaps as if he is from the past life that still has not stopped following Ginny around, haunting her and taunting her with its unattainability. A name echoes and echoes, so loud she can't breathe for a moment in the tumult.
Then, as quickly as the thought enters her mind, Ginny dismisses it. There is no man she knows with that name. Just a spectre of Ginny's own creation, whom she continues to see in every man's face, hear in every man's voice, taste in every man's kiss. Just a ghost who was probably never real to begin with.
Still, though. Ginny thinks back to his face when that memo came in last night. The way his eyes kept darting back and forth between the slip of paper and her face. The way he stormed in and took her with a desperate ferocity she only just understands. Flipping open her cellphone, she prepares to put in a call back at work.
"Hello, Wolfram & Hart? Yeah, this is Ginny Weasley from the London branch. I understand you blokes in Los Angeles have recently done dealings with a man I'm very interested in."
Her insides clench in expectation.
"Tell me all you know about Harry Potter."
--finis--