ivyblossom | [FIC] Possessed

Title: Possessed
Pairing: uh...your guess is as good as mine.
Rating: PG
Notes: I think what's happening here is that I'm writing a sequence of fics about Ginny. Perhaps this is a series called "The Possibilities of Ginny", I don't know. But I have another Ginny thing here. And more serious pessimism about our heroes. The last time it was poor Harry getting demonized (in the last thing I wrote, uh, yesterday) and this time it's someone else. Thanks to

gelishan for looking over this to tell me whether it sucks or not, and my apologies to her for not taking her very wise editorial advice. It's not personal. I have an unfortunate resemblance to Anne Rice in that way and that is a personality flaw I will work on as soon as...well, one of these days. But I suspect she was right. Apologies also to

boniblithe, who again didn't get to beta because for some ungodly reason she opted to go to bed instead. Inconcievable.

Possessed

Ginny stands under the too-bright light in her kitchen with an empty glass in her hand, her red hair hanging loose over her shoulders and her shirt done up one button too low to be decent. She's still wearing her stiletto heels and her eyelashes are thick with mascara.

"Can I get you a drink?" she asks. There's a woman sitting in the living room, her ankles covered in cheap fishnets and crossed anxiously, her coat still on.

"Sure," she says. "What have you got?" Her voice wavers; Ginny clearly makes her nervous.

"Oh, everything," Ginny says, waving the glass in the air for emphasis. "Anything you might want to put in your mouth," she says, her lips slipping into a sly grin, "I've got."

It wasn't always this way. There was a time when Ginny did not bring home women wearing fishnets, or too much eyeliner, or anyone at all. There was a time when Ginny baked in an apron her mother gave her, pinned her hair back with tortoise shell barrettes, and fell asleep next to a snoring Neville Longbottom. Her husband.

The first argument she didn't have was over her last name. Weasley isn't ideal, but Longbottom is a few hundred times worse. Ginny Longbottom. She wore it, humiliated, for three years, and she filed to change it back before she even told Neville she was leaving him.

"A gin and tonic?" The woman on the couch moves to take off her jacket, and Ginny doesn't offer to take it. She's taking bottles out of a cabinet under the toaster oven.

She also didn't argue about where they lived. A tall townhouse on a busy street, straight-backed and severe; paid for by Neville's sizable inheritance and located directly across from the graveyard where his parents were buried. It was pinched, cold, awkward, and dark. The windows were mostly north-facing, the stairs were short and steep, and the previous owner had clearly not enjoyed a bit of air, because most of the windows were unopenable, nailed shut.

"Too easy," Ginny laughs, dragging a half-empty bottle of gin out of the cupboard. She pulls a lemon and some tonic out of the refrigerator and realizes there's a heavy silence between them. The woman is looking at her, studying her back. Ginny can feel it through her clothes, through her skin. Of all the kinds of magic in the world, Ginny is blessed with the ability to feel when someone is looking at her. Heavy like syrup dripping down her spine. She isn't sure if she likes the feel of this one's gaze just yet. "So," she says chirpily, measuring out a too-generous shot of gin. "Tell me about yourself. Where did you go to school?"

An awkward pause. "Well, at Hogwarts of course." Ginny freezes, almost pouring tonic over the lip of the glass. "You don't remember me." A slight accusation in her voice, a pinch of hurt.

"Oh," Ginny says, swinging around to look the woman in the face again. Lots of eye makeup, thick lips, small golden hoops in her ears, short cropped hair. Eyes so black she felt as if she were falling into them. Those eyes were reason she invited this woman back home with her. She asked for a name hours ago, but has forgotten it in the intervening time. "I'm sorry, I thought you were a Muggle. No offense. It's been...a rather long time."

In place of remembering the woman's name Ginny claps her stiletto heels across the room and hands her the drink. She pastes a Hogwarts-worthy smile on her face and says, "well, help me remember then. What house were you in? Not Gryffindor, was it?"

But inside feels defeated, her secret identity revealed. The sly, sexy girl she had been trying to impose on her own slight frame has slipped out of the room; Ginny feels the apron returning from the garbage can and her tortoise shell barrettes were almost rattling in the drawer. She sits down in the armchair beside the woman, her coat carefully folded next to her on the couch. For a moment she catches a glimpse of her own modest bosom nearly falling out of her shirt and she winces. A good Hogwarts girl doesn't dress like this.

"No," the woman says, smiling ruefully. "I always wished I were a Gryffindor. Just a humble Hufflepuff, me."

"You weren't missing anything," Ginny says, reaching for the glass of gin and tonic and taking a deep gulp from it. "Trust me."

The last argument Ginny didn't have with her husband, or even with her mother, was about the children she was going to have. Neville told her the first night after they got married that he wanted babies as fast as possible. Lots of them, too. He wanted his very own Weasley clan, the happy, glowing Longbottoms, with a stay-at-home mum and a warmth hearth and no end of noise. A hero's ending; a Gryffindor ending. She would never want for money, he told her quickly. There will always be enough. The very next morning, left alone in that big, ugly old house, she stared out a nailed-shut window and cried. There was nothing in the Gryffindor list of traits that made any of them kind to one another.

"We weren't friends or anything," the woman adds hastily. "We had a class together once, in third year. Herbology."

Ginny is still drawing a blank. Sitting there, staring at this woman's fishnet-covered knees, she cannot remember the name of a single Hufflepuff. Not even that good-looking one Harry managed to get killed.

"I saw you once," the woman goes on, her voice half-drunk and riddled with something like fascination. Something like awe. "With the chickens. Blood all over you. I guess you wouldn't remember that."

"What?" Ginny blanches. All she hears is blood all over you and she feels terror biting into her heart. Five times, blood all over her. Five times in three years. She feels her stomach tighten, as if the cramps are about to start, as if she is about to witness the demise of yet another lump of a child, born seven months early, eight months early.

"The chickens," the woman says. "In first year. Terrible time."

Ginny feels herself begin to shake. She feels as though there's a draft in the room, a cold wind with Tom Riddle on it, Neville on it. They swirl around her, pointing fingers, mocking her desire to belong to someone. She belonged to them once. She stands, meaning to walk quickly back to the kitchen to compose herself, but the skinny heels of her shoes cannot keep her upright. She sways and the woman with the fishnets catches her.

"I'm sorry," she says. Her arms are strong. She is holding Ginny, keeping her from falling. With two fingers she wipes the tears that Ginny doesn't realize are on her face. She strokes Ginny's hair, kisses her neck. "I shouldn't have mentioned it. It was an awful thing. I shouldn't have said."

Ginny barely hears her. She doesn't remember the chickens, she doesn't remember the blood. Tom Riddle possessed her so fully that she doesn't even remember what she must have done; sat in the bathroom, blood all around her, washing herself clean of evidence. Neville didn't possess her fully enough; she remembers every drop.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

myclevername.livejournal.com

There are a few little things about this that make it incredible for me. "Half-empty bottle of gin" being one of them. I don't know why, but Ginny always seemed like a "bottle half-full" kind of girl to me. I've felt pulling a half-empty bottle of gin out from under my toaster over, and it isn't necessarily a pretty feeling.

The unpretty feeling is everywhere in this. The pure Gryffindor Ginny is gone, but replaced by something way more real. Well done.

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