Chapter Text
Magalie was released from the infirmary soon enough, and creaked open the door just as Ginny put quill to her Charms parchment. Ginny lifted her head and stared for a moment: Magalie, slumped against the door, smiling a mean tired smile. She had gone to visit Magalie twice since the first time, and each time Magalie had been either unconscious or unforthcoming, glowering at the bustling nurses with their plump arms heaped full of crisp white hospital bedclothes. Ginny let the quill drop from her fingers and rose, crossing the room.
“Bon matin,” Magalie said, lackadaisical. She tripped into the room slowly, wincingly, as if her bones ached. She was still wearing an infirmary gown, open at the back. Ginny could see the long brown line of her spine, curving and dimpled at the base, and wondered how many had stared at her naked back as she walked from the infirmary to the tower, how many had made whispering comments, how many had laughed.
“Ce n’est pas le matin,” Ginny said, belatedly. “Il est deux heures de l’après-midi.”
Magalie shrugged, indicating that she did not particularly care, and sat heavily on her coverlet. Her bed had gone untouched for the past week, and the things cluttered on it, the open box of chocolates with the tissue frill fanning out, the pens and parchment and rings and bobbled hair-ties, had all acquired a thin patina of age or abandonment.
Under the arresting influence of Magalie’s presence, they grew lifelike again, sprouted distinct personalities: the repentant cowlick of the chocolate box tissue paper, the shabby charm of uncapped pens, the untidy bedsheets. She said, acerbically: “Stop staring at me.”
“I wasn’t,” Ginny said, but it was a lie. She cleared her throat, leaning against a chair. She remembered Magalie delirious, her eyes rolling under febrile lids, saying that there had been someone else in the forest, someone who smelled like dead things. A shiver ran under her skin, and she said: “How long have you-”
“How long have I been a monster?” Magalie said, watching her closely. “Since before I can remember, ma petite.”
Ginny crossed her arms. “That wasn’t what I was going to say.” She paused, and then said: “Fleur-”
Magalie hissed at the name, and Ginny rolled her eyes, uncrossing her arms and bracing them back against the chair. She waited a moment, and then said: “Fleur told me that everyone knew. Everyone except me, apparently. That everyone’s known since before you even came to Beauxbatons.”
Magalie was looking across the room, in her direction but not at her, her eyes unfocused. Her fingers were crumpling and uncrumpling the tissue paper with a gentleness that Ginny would not have attributed to her.
She said: “Everyone thought it was a tragedy, a horrific accident. They spoke about it, behind my back but of course I could always hear them, walking down La Place Cachée I could hear their whispers. I was bitten when I was three years old, and most of them fully grown, whispering.”
Ginny waited, silent. The tissue paper was being wrung through Magalie’s fingers now, crimped by her mincing nails. She said, with sudden and shocking savagery: “And what did I care? Let them speculate, let them have their fun, let them glory in my tragedy, they know nothing, they are nothing.” She laughed mirthlessly, hands fisted in the tissue, crumpling it. “An accident? A tragedy? I was born to be what I am now.”
“With the wolf,” Ginny said, slowly, trying to understand, “You’re powerful.”
Magalie tossed her dark head, eyes flashing. She let the shreds of tissue fall from her hands, and said: “My mother’s family is the Úlfrs. They have worshiped the wolf since the days of Fenrir. They are from Norway. It is not like it is in France or in Britain. The wolf is not something to be ashamed of, something to hide away.” She wrinkled her nose, contemptuous.
“Once every seven generations,” Magalie went on, “The first child is given over to the wolf. It is not a curse.” She spat the words. “The wolf is a gift.”
“Why didn’t you go to Durmstrang?” Ginny asked, meeting Magalie’s eyes.
Magalie shrugged and said, significantly: “Politics.” She paused, looked at Ginny, and then said, smiling with affectionate malice: “Why aren’t you at Hogwarts?”
“Trauma,” Ginny said truthfully, widening her eyes as if it was a joke. Magalie laughed and fell back on the bed, splaying all her limbs out. “Heard you got onto the reserve team, for Quidditch,” She said, muffled. “Donc, le petit elfe peut voler.” The little elf can fly.
Ginny grinned.
Ginny spent hours in the pitch, practicing until the sky darkened and long afterwards. She used one of the school brooms. Her muscles lost their familiar motions and sensations; at random times during the day, walking from class to class, one of her leg muscles would twitch spasmodically and she would nearly collapse.
She learned the names of all the girls on the Quidditch team: the captain was Solene, often abbreviated Leni. The two stocky Beaters, good-natured and brutish, twins, were Diana and Phoebe. Diana had dark hair and a flashing smile, and Phoebe had pale yellow braids and a mean swing. The Seeker, the only one Ginny had not seen before, had slanting eyes and a shining black bob, cut sharply at the chin. She wore rings on all of her fingers, which clinked when she closed her hand around the Snitch.
One of the Chasers had spiky black hair, bright eyes, and a ring through her nose; she was called Zoe, and could be at times generous and careless. Then there was Lucie, of course. The girl who hated her, the other Chaser with a long body and a silken ponytail, was called Clara.
Of course Ginny was desperate to like them, to be liked. Once when she was very little, Molly had taken her to see one of Charlie’s games. He’d won, of course, and she’d watched his teammates shake his shoulders and just scream in his face out of raw jubilation, sweat pasting their hair. They had raised him on their shoulders, they had paraded him around the pitch.
Ever since the image had stuck somewhere in the back of her mind, the laughing look in Charlie’s face, the deadly serious look of almost religious fervor on his teammate’s faces, as if the ecstasy of victory had transported them to some other realm. She wanted it, even craved it. She did not think she had gotten it, or at least not totally.
Most of the team regarded her with friendly indifference, rarely referencing her in conversation, and never by name- she was always la petite fille. The little girl. Lucie was always amiable enough, but distant. And on the ground, Clara was a fount of animosity, so extravagantly unkind that Ginny feared she knew the reason Lucie had fallen. In the air, Clara was mute and adept, passing her the ball with swift and grudging grace, saying nothing.
Not that Ginny blamed her, much. Ginny was not, currently, very good. The three Chasers had a rhythm, a beat that moved through each one synergistically, conducted by their moving bodies and the balls that flew from hand to graceful hand. Ginny could fly, at least better than any of the others who had tried out, but she could not fly with them.
It would take time, she knew that, it would take weeks or months or years of practice to reach the same state of harmony, and it did not even really matter because, barring an unforeseen emergency, she would not be playing in upcoming games, but that did not stop the hot flush of humiliation when the ball missed her stretched fingers, or when she fell behind the others. A disaster, Clara hissed in her ear. Tu ne seras jamais l'un des nôtres.
Ginny tightened her fist around her broom and forged on, her boots crunching frost and grass. Winter was coming; winter had come. Now walls descended upon the open-air dining pavilion, and great braziers of flame had been positioned by each table, leaping and dancing and throwing shadow.
Sculptures of ice had sprung up in the courtyards, vitreous and unbelievably lifelike, sly snow maidens and wicked princes with crowns of thorn, Jack Frost with his slender crook and impish smile, the Snow Queen in splendid raiment, her skirts spread out behind her, her eyes cool and bewilderingly beautiful.
A grand pine, bushy and bristling with magnificent ornaments and glowing wisps of light, stood in the courtyard, a red velvet skirt spread around its base. She crossed by it, touching one of the bristles briefly- luck. Practice went from 4 in the afternoon until about 7 o’clock every night, and then there was dinner.
Her hunger seemed to burn through her until she was nothing, a waning candlewick, insubstantial as air. She was not cold, although it was objectively freezing; her blood moved hot inside her body, flushing her cheeks and warming her skin. But she was tired, the muscles in her legs weak as a newborn’s. Still she kept onwards, until the fires of the pavilion leapt forth in her vision. Fleur was waiting for her.
When she walked in the pavilion she was suffused with warmth, needling her wind-roughened cheeks and her chapped mouth. Slipping in, out from the cold, her hair wild, her gloves crusted with frost. Fleur was holding court at the center table, of course she was, in the seat nearest the fire. Fleur was especially prone to cold, Ginny had noticed; she was always shivering.
Although Ginny had made no sound, at least not one audible amid the snapping fire and roar of conversation, Fleur paused mid-word and looked up, her eyes finding Ginny unerringly. When their eyes met she smiled, a slow cool curve of her mouth. Although the table was crowded, people pressed up against each other cheek by jowl on the long bench, there was an empty seat saved next to her.
“Back so soon?” Fleur said quietly, when Ginny slipped next to her. “I thought they would keep you until next Easter, at least.”
“Don’t even joke about that,” Ginny said, darkly, reaching for a roll. Without looking, Fleur passed her the bowl. The roll had a hot dewy center, gushy with steam, fresh from the oven. She bit into it without tasting it, only knowing that it was hot, burning her mouth. In brisk and casual movements, Fleur assembled a plate for her: sautéed asparagus, buttered potatoes, peppery roast chicken. Ginny made greedy motions towards the plate and Fleur, laughing, held it out of her reach.
“Cruel,” Ginny said. “And unfair, too, you’ve got such long arms…” She made a grab for the plate and Fleur relinquished it. The asparagus had been dressed in garlic and lemon, and was perfectly cooked; the roast chicken was tender, melting in her mouth. Fleur forked a helping of ratatouille into her mouth contemplatively.
They spoke of inconsequential things for a while. Ginny’s birthday was in a month, which Fleur had not known; for a moment, Ginny had the acute pleasure of seeing Fleur Delacour discomposed. So soon, she said, and then lapsed into silence for a few moments, mouth pursed. Eventually they went to bed, parting simply in the cool dark when the time came.
Bonne nuit, petit oiseau, Fleur said affectionately, putting a hand against Ginny’s hair, which was frizzed and matted with cooling sweat. Little bird, Fleur called her. À demain.
Ginny nodded, agreeing. Tomorrow. She turned away and walked to her tower alone. It darkened early in the winter; she was blind in the dark.
The air sang with cold, burning at her cheeks and the inside of her mouth when she opened it. At last she reached her tower and wound up the stairs. She had to stop several times on the way up, bracing a hand on the wall, her legs cramping.
Magalie was in the room when she opened the door, splayed out on her bed face-down. When Ginny kicked at one of her legs, she twitched and mumbled something indistinct. Ginny readied herself for bed silently, washing her face in the basin and putting on her nightshirt.
Everything was fine, she thought. The past week had been perfectly normal. Quidditch practice had left her no time for sojourns in the wood; instead, she practiced magic in spare moments, during class or lunch, conjuring white moths in the palm of her hand, miniature swarms of shadowy sparrows under the desk. She was getting better at the shadows, she could sustain them for up to five minutes without actively trying.
Butterflies and birds now, Fleur had said, amusedly, what next? I think you should try bats, or wolves.
Fleur. She shifted onto her back, closed her eyes, adjusted her pillow under her head. The light was out, the moon came in strongly through liquid blue glass, bathing in creamy splendour the rippling curtain, the embossed handles of Magalie’s chased silver hairbrushes. She turned on her other side.
She dreamed, for the first time in months, of Tom. They were outside, under a tree. The light lit the leaves up from behind, sending flickering patterns of shifting light and shadow along his face, which was composed, calm, a little pale.
He had discarded his robes; they lay crumpled along the grass, which sloped into a lovely bank bordering a rushing purling river. She realized that they were on the Hogwarts grounds.
Ginevra, he said. Although he said her name, presumably to her, he did not seem to acknowledge her or direct his attention to her in any way. Her body felt suddenly heavy, inanimate, swollen with the opposite of sensation, as if her body was a waterlogged corpse dragged in from the river. Take a look at this.
Ginny looked where he was looking. Across the river a group of boys had collected; they were cheering something or someone, clearly jubilant. Hogwarts students, robes discarded like Tom’s, in their white shirts with the collars loose, their ties undone. Slytherin, by the color. All heaving together, hands fisting in each other’s collars, their triumph making them into a single organism.
Doesn’t it disgust you, Tom said, very softly. Doesn’t it just?
She said nothing, she could not move. He turned to face her, and cupped her face between two cold palms. She could feel his breath on her face when he spoke next.
It’s sickening, he said softly but with great force, and his thumbs pressed under her chin, around her neck, tightening. A frisson went through her. It’s abhorrent. The things people do…
She shook her head, just barely. Her hair fell around her face, obscuring his hands. His fingers around her throat, bruising force. Tom, she said.
I don’t understand, Tom said, quietly. His hands relaxed, and she inhaled a quick breath, the fine muscles in her throat expanding and contracting again. His voice was wondering. I just don’t understand it at all.
Tom, she said, again. One of her hands came up over his, seemingly not connected with her body. An involuntary motion. Trying to prise his fingers apart, but moving so slowly it was ineffectual. Everything seemed to be seen from a great distance, dim and blurred and slow like honey.
His head moved forward, his nose brushing hers. She couldn’t make out his face, it was too close. You’re killing me, he said into her hair.
No, she thought reflexively, and then he began to laugh.
Ginny woke violently, as if surfacing from underwater; she bolted upright in the bed, breath shuddering. It was all dark lights and quiet cools in the glass tower, the intermittent whistling sound of Magalie’s breath and the wind skittering on the glass. Her lungs burned. Her eyes sought vague shapes and shadows in the dark. She pulled her legs out from under the covers and padded into the bathroom.
Her face in the mirror was white, her freckles like flecks of dirt. Somehow nothing she felt ever seemed to be reflected on her face; it was a face that showed no emotion but was not mysterious, not hiding anything underneath, just dull.
Her eyes blinked, once, twice. The second time she opened her eyes, they flashed in the mirror a deep garnet red.
Her hands tightened convulsively on the basin.
But she had been wrong, she had been mistaken. They were brown, just brown. She leaned in to the mirror, so close that her nose brushed the frosty glass. Her features lost meaning, became shapeless blurs. She closed her eyes and opened them again. Same old Ginny, her ruddy hair untidy and falling around her shoulders, her face pale, her eyes dark. She leaned back, and then she caught sight of her throat.
There were marks on her throat, deep and dark and true. They were red now; she knew they would purple later. When she touched them with a finger a slow ache went through her. They started from under her chin and stretched to the center of her throat, looking like the enclosing branches of a ribcage or a spidering tree.
Bruises left by fingers; she knew whose.
After that, she dreamed of him every night. As the nights grew longer and the days attenuated, she dreamt of his cold fingers on her hipbone, his breath on her neck. Morning bled into classes bled into practice, which was long and grueling and lasted until dark and after, then dinner, the cool touch of Fleur’s troubled eyes.
Then bed, sleep, the dreams coming for her in a gleeful rush, subsuming her, immersing her, immuring her. She dreamt of her body behind glass, her breath frosting the panes, and his cool smiling face on the other side, a little pitying, mostly smug. She woke up just as she realized that she was in a coffin.
Another time, she dreamt of him in the Chamber, their old familiar haunt. She was the basilisk; she responded to his commands. Her body was huge and her mind was ancient. When she moved, little animals suffocated under the crush of her scales. And she was lonely, she was so lonely, she had not spoken to anyone in centuries and her mind had corroded from it…
His voice leading her out of the mossy dark, confident, commanding. And she did not have to obey him but she did anyway, she wanted to. She saw Harry Potter standing, a miniscule figure with a haze of dark hair and crooked glasses and green, green eyes. In the dream, he didn’t have a sword and his wand was in Tom’s hands, he was defenseless. His eyes, shining green.
Kill him, Tom said, and she reared at Harry, her jaws swallowing him whole.
He was like a phantom limb; she felt the ache of him even when he was not present. When she was eating dinner, his freezing hands curling around her ankles, his laughter pressing against her neck. She had to wear a scarf around her neck for a week before the bruises faded. He was omnipresent.
She did not understand how or why this had happened, when for almost an entire autumn she had not dreamt of him once. It seemed winter recalled him, or else he was gaining power. She kept track of her days, her time, on high alert for discrepancies, although she didn’t know what she would do if she found any. Who would she tell? Fleur? Magalie? And anyway there was no basilisk in Beauxbatons, she thought, there was no danger.
But then she remembered the dark rustling interior of the forest, unexplained shadows at the edges of her vision, the wolf’s sharp eyes and sharper teeth. Of course there was danger in Beauxbatons, there was danger everywhere one cared to look.
She made her excuses to Fleur, citing, truthfully, nightmares. Nightmares, Fleur repeated, her eyes steady, one of her hands warm on Ginny’s wrist. She had been increasingly concerned as the days went by and Ginny remained wan and listless, asking rapid interrogative questions about her eating habits, her sleep, her studies.
“They’re pushing you too far during practice, is that it?” She asked once, brow crinkled. “If you like I’ll speak with the captain, Leni and I are friends…”
“No,” Ginny said, prodding a flank of chicken with a limp fork, and then, rallying herself, making an effort, with a smile: “No, but thank you. You really do have to stop offering to do things like that for me, you know.”
“Why?” Fleur raised a brow.
Ginny shrugged, her fork scraping against her plate. “I suppose,” She said, at last, “Because it isn’t fair.”
Fleur made a noise of exasperation or derision, a sort of sharp exhalation that moved air from the back of her throat, and let go of her wrist.
After they finished eating, she took hold of Ginny’s hand again, and said: “Sleep in my room tonight?”
Ginny made a noise of assent, and put her fork down.
Fleur’s room was different in the dark, all soft cocooning shadows and velvet shapes. Fleur did not bother to conjure light, she knew where everything was, it seemed. She went straight to the wardrobe and fetched a long nightshirt for Ginny to wear: white cotton, the smell in it fresh and faintly sweet, crisp as if it had been ironed.
Ginny went into her bathroom to take off her clothes. In the bathroom it was brighter, moonlight from the glass walls bouncing off the mirror. Her body looked like a long freckled white bone. She turned on the shower and showered quickly, efficiently, scrubbing the sweat from that night’s practice off her body. When she was clean she dried herself with a plush towel and put on the nightshirt, tugging her hair free of the collar.
In the main room, Fleur had disrobed and wore a plain nightdress that brushed her knees. No lace or frills, only a spare silken slip that moved softly over her long curving body, the shape clean and simple. They got into bed together and Fleur stroked her hair. It was an awkward stroke, almost brusque, as if Fleur was not used to the motion. Ginny hid her smile against her sleeve and moved her head on the pillow slightly.
There was the fragrance of Fleur - wild violets - and the clean laundered smell of her sheets. Her eyes closed. She fell asleep.
In this night’s dream, Tom was not wearing robes but a Muggle suit, sharp-cornered at the shoulders, crisp, the neat folds of the lapel laying flat against his handsome chest. He was striding idly through racks of girl’s clothing, trailing his fingertips against a satin nightie. His nails dimpled the fabric.
He smiled when he saw her, a beautiful and inviting grin. “Hello, Gin,” He said, easily. She could sense his good mood as a kind of expansiveness coming off him in waves. “I was just thinking about you.”
When she remained silent - in these dreams, she could never speak when she wanted to, her mouth moving or not moving independent of her control - he gave a quirking frown and said: “What, no hello for me?”
“Hello, Tom.” She said, involuntarily. Her voice did not seem to be her voice, but a cool and conspiring girl’s voice bearing only passing similarity to her own.
“That’s better,” Tom said softly, moving closer. He cut his eyes to a white nightie, all lace and frills. He was smiling again. “This would look marvelous on you, don’t you think? All that white against your flaming hair.”
She swallowed, her throat was painfully dry. “Tom,” She said.
“Ginny,” Tom mocked. When he was close enough to touch her, he reached out - her hands could not move, were pinned to her sides - and put a hand on her throat, gentle, restraining.
She noticed that she was wearing Fleur’s nightshirt. Her breasts were sensitive these days, burgeoning, the nipple puffing up in a strange soft peak. Her skin twitched. He grinned again.
“You’re a beautiful girl, Ginny,” Tom told her, his voice coaxing. “I know you don’t believe it. Dear Tom, do you think freckles are ugly? I didn’t think so before, but Romilda told me today that they were absolutely horrid and I ought to cover them up…”
Somehow his recitation was worse than anything else; humiliation flooded her so absolutely that she could not feel or see anything, she could only stand there and listen to his melodious voice, her skin tremoring. No matter how much she hated him, it could never hope to match or equal the hatred she bore herself for trusting him.
“Beautiful,” Tom repeated, and then his hand slid over her fragile breast and at last her mouth opened and she began to scream as if there would never be any help or end and there wouldn’t be, she knew that by now, no one had stopped her from doing any of the things she had done which she knew were wrong so wrong so wrong and so no one would come to help her, take her up and away from the cool marble dark…
Ginny woke with the echo of a scream in the poised air and her throat raw. Fleur had her hands on her shoulders, her slender face loomed in the dark. The strength in Fleur’s hands was unsettling, and she felt alive with a kind of nameless horror, the urge to cover herself and curl so tightly inwards that nothing of her body could be seen. “Tu criais,” Fleur said, softly. “What were you dreaming about?”
The soft dry sheets against her legs and Fleur’s warmth all around her, her scent, the velvet darkness intrinsically different from the Chamber’s moldering black. She had not been in the Chamber, no. She had been-
“Rien,” Ginny said, her throat rough. “I’m sorry I woke you up.”
Fleur gave a quick shrugging motion, almost irritated, tossing her hair over a shoulder. “If I was bothered by the possibility I wouldn’t have invited you to my room, knowing you have nightmares. Don’t apologize.”
“Fine, I won’t,” Ginny said, meaning for it to come off blasé and unaffected. Her voice cracked halfway through and tears wet her eyes. Fleur went still and then the hands on her shoulders withdrew. She said, with alien gentleness: “Would you like a lullaby?”
A lullaby, Ginny thought. I’m not a child. But she let Fleur ease her back into bed and stroke her forehead, her hands natural and brisk now, calm, dry. “Il why a longtemps que je t'aime,” Fleur sang, quietly. Her voice was sweet and a little husky, the melody haunting. “Jamais je ne t'oublierai…”
Ginny moved closer and breathed out silently. “Sur la plus haute branche, le rossignol chantait.”
Snow fell the next day and continued to do so for the next week. Practice was canceled. The grounds were frosted thickly in white. Ginny slept in Fleur’s room most nights, lulled to sleep by her rich melancholy voice. The nightmares did not cease, but now she could fall back asleep again afterwards.
Christmas approached, and middle of the term exams. A haze of studying, practicing. She was fairly confident in Potions and was steadily making progress in History; it was only in the Spells practical that she felt unsure. Her magic was unreliable at best. Eventually she realized that if she held a stone or piece of bark from the forest it was easier to cast, and took to carrying little pieces of the woods in her pockets at all times.
She agonized over what to get for Fleur for Yule. Magalie was easy enough, a box of chocolates would content her. But she felt certain that Fleur would give her a Yule present, and that it would be considerate and thoughtfully chosen to an extent that would embarrass her.
She could not afford to buy anything that was good enough for Fleur, not really. Any facsimile of luxury would look crass and cheap against Fleur’s creamy gold, her darkly lashed eyes, her cool poised mouth.
In the end, she went to the lake and sifted through the stones on the bank. Eventually she found one with a hole bored in its center from the washing of water, a cool and reflective stone, small as a Sickle, with a blue gleam in its depths if you tilted it to the right. Through the central hole she threaded a silver chain and clasp.
For Molly she sent a tin of French peppermint cocoa; for Arthur, a CD of Muggle music. She had traded with a Muggleborn girl in her Spells class for it. For Luna she transplanted a rare flower, found only in the Pyrenees, into a small vibrantly glazed clay pot from the greenhouse, bathing it in protective charms and sending it off with a school owl. The flower had pale pink petals arranged in an unbelievably delicate formation and a bluish fragile stem.
For her brothers it was easy enough: French caramel for Ron and Fred and George, a handmade quill fashioned from a scrounged feather for Percy, an earring she had made from a set of canine teeth that she had found in the woods for Bill, a woven bracelet for Charlie.
Exams passed. Her Potions exam went as well as it could have, although she nearly forgot the monkshood at a crucial portion in the practical, and had to sprint to the supplies cabinet before her potion boiled over. She felt certain she’d done quite well in Herbology, which the French called Botanique.
Her History professor had decided to take mercy on the class and make the exam multiple choice, which was a godsend. In Spells, she concentrated with spiteful determination on the written exam, double and triple checking all of her answers.
During the practical, she kept one hand in her pocket, closed around a feather she had plucked from the woods. Her spells were not particularly elegant, wobbly and too forceful, but they were undeniably spells, undeniably magic. The expression on her Spells teacher’s face was consternation and reluctant surprise.
Classes ceased for two weeks, and they spent hours outside, in the snow, playing around like puppies, bewitching snowflakes to spin and snowmen to walk, which they did, stumbling like penguins so comically and woefully that they shrieked with laughter.
When they were spent there was food, rich warm food and piping hot tea and hot cocoa. For the first time, Magalie consented to sit next to her for dinner, and she and Fleur spent the entirety of dinner sniping at each other, which amused Ginny so much she nearly slid off the bench, limp with laughter.
Ginny received several lumpy packages from the Burrow which she placed at the foot of her bed, unopened, as well as a small box with a curling blue ribbon wrapped on it. The handwriting on it was spiky, and it read: to my very favorite secret heliopath, Ginny M. Weasley.
She also received, unaddressed, a charmingly wrapped package with moving brooms on the navy blue wrapping paper. This went in the pile too, to be opened on Christmas Day.
A few days before, Magalie sauntered into the room and chucked a small fist-sized package at Ginny’s haphazard collection of presents. Eyeing it suspiciously, Ginny plucked it up and turned it over in her hands.
“What is this,” She said, peering closer, “A bomb?”
Magalie rolled her eyes extravagantly and stalked to her bed, collapsing backwards. “Is it so hard to believe I might be possessed of some Yuletide spirit? C’est un cadeau, crétin.”
“Magalie Úlfr,” Ginny said, setting the package down, “Are you feeling… jolly?”
Magalie gave her a dead-eyed stare.
“You are,” Ginny accused, pelting her with a pillow. Magalie drew her long legs close instinctively to block the pillow, drawing into her body like a spider and then lashing out suddenly, a hand reaching out and gripping the pillow mid-flight.
“The instincts of a wolf,” Ginny said, sotto voce, and Magalie threw the pillow back at her, looking as if she were trying very hard not to smile.
The day of Christmas Eve was cold and sunny, bright with fractals of brusque gray light. Ginny had slept in Fleur’s room the night before; now she tromped across the grass to her tower. Magalie was still asleep when she opened the door and put on her thickest shoes and warmest cloak, pulling on mittens with her teeth and passing a quick glance over all the paraphernalia sprawled out over her side of the room: quills, untidy bedsheets, her capelet strewn carelessly over one chair.
And yet when one looked left and compared it to Magalie’s veritable sty, it looked positively polished. That contented her; she turned and trotted down the stairs, stifling a yawn. She knew she’d dreamed of Tom, but could not even remember the details of the dream.
These days, although she still dreamt of him nightly, his hold on her seemed to be slipping away, vanishing as if discouraged by Fleur’s propinquity. Of course when in the grip of the nightmare she was helpless and terrified, but in the waking world that did not matter so much, she was able to forget the dreams as if they did not wait for her at the bottom of sleep.
She met Fleur coming down, and together they walked to the pavilion, Fleur blowing distractedly on her bare hands to keep them warm. Her fingers were slender and curving, the skin chapped and flushed with cold. Ginny absently cast a Warming Charm, and Fleur looked at her intently.
“What?” Ginny said, side-eyeing her.
“That was wandless,” Fleur said, smiling a little smile. “Wordless, too.” She let that settle over them for a few moments. Ginny slid a hand in her pocket and touched her wand, confirming: it was cool to the touch, unreactive. Then Fleur said: “Sometimes I wonder…” She broke off and looked at Ginny again.
“Sometimes you wonder,” Ginny prompted.
“Sometimes I wonder what combination of circumstances formed you,” Fleur said, her voice quiet and her eyes provokingly blue. “Ce qui vous a façonné si parfaitement. You do not make sense, you contradict. You are a mystery, Ginevra Weasley.” She added, smilingly: “One I intend to figure out, make no mistake.” Ginny’s stomach tensed, viscerally.
There was a massive breakfast spread; the tables had been set as if for dinner, and the platters steamed gently on the long velvet runners: sausage links caramelized where they had touched the stove, fluffy omelette and trays of fried egg with the yolks orange against the frilly white, curling crisp strips of bacon, rolls of pastry studded with raisins and custard, cinnamon buns with white icing, a clay tureen of hot oat porridge with little pots of nuts and honey and dried fruit and brown sugar. There were boules of crusty brown bread and butter and jewel-like slivers of salted smoked salmon festooned with capers. Pots of coffee with demitasses of cream. Herbal tea and black tea and chai. Ginny gave a cry of hunger and gladness and descended upon it all.
After breakfast there was snow-play. This time they abandoned snowballs and turned to constructing castles with magic, castles of molded snow and wrought ice. Fleur’s was magnificent, a marvel with delicately turned corners and spilling chandeliers of rattling crystal. Magalie’s bristled with icy spikes. Ginny’s castle had an uneven moat and crumbling walls a meter thick. Fleur examined this significantly and said nothing.
Her words had been echoing in Ginny’s mind for the past hour: you are a mystery, Ginevra Weasley. One I intend to figure out. When she thought the words, a strange feeling came into her, dismay and confused pleasure.
The castles built, they sprawled out into the snow and moved their limbs to and fro, creating the imprints of cut-out girls with long heaped skirts and wide wings. Les anges de neige, Fleur said. All three next to each other looked eerie, filled with light and empty space, as if their bodies had been transmuted into concavity. The wings could be wings or could be moving arms, blurring with speed, frantic as if fleeing something or someone.
Around lunch they gathered, cramming food and hot liquids into their throats before tromping out into the snow again. Ginny wanted to explore the snowy woods, and so they did, forging through snow that came up to their waists, walking across frozen rivers and crystal ponds.
There were some patches of Broceliande that were untouched by freeze, green and bright with wildflowers that nodded gently in faint breeze. When she stepped towards it, a gust of warmth drifted towards her.
Fairy magic, Fleur said.
Should be familiar enough to you, elf-thing, Magalie said in her other ear. Maybe we should leave you here, see if you come back.
No, thank you, Ginny said.
Dinner was lavish and extravagant, with a Christmas ham and roast beef and sweet potato and brussel sprouts. There was gingerbread and fruitcake for dessert, along with a truly enormous Yule log - une bûche de noël, Fleur called it - that stretched from one end of the long table to the other. The frosting, stroked on masterfully to resemble an actual log, was rich dark chocolate; inside there was chocolate sponge and chantilly cream.
“My room?” Fleur said in her ear, and without looking at her, Ginny moved her head, slowly.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” Ginny said, cutting a little piece of gingerbread with her fork and bringing it to her mouth. “We can congregate to open presents, it’s not nearly as fun by yourself.”
A Christmas miracle: no Tom that night. Instead she dreamt of whirling around in a wide circle, no setting or surroundings, just resonating fields of white light and her fingers spread like stars. She woke to sunlight streaming through the glass and Fleur rapping on the door, her knock characteristic of her: brisk, cadenced, a bit impatient.
Ginny hurriedly shrugged on a cloak and put her feet into slippers. She ran down the stairs and flung open the doors; she was more joyful than she had been in a year and a half. “Come in!”
Fleur stepped inside. She wore a slouchy red hat pulled low over her ears; her hair was in braids. Over her shoulder was a great bulging sack, as if she was Father Christmas come to spread goodwill and materialism. “Joyeux Noël,” She said, giving a faint smile. Ginny pulled her in.
Presents were torn into. Molly had knit her a roomy sweater in Beauxbatons blue; Ginny crushed it to her nose and inhaled: the smell of the Burrow come Yuletide, faint but unmistakable, Christmas ham and wool and crackling smoke, Molly must have knit it before the fire, her back hunched busily over the yarn, the fire a crown of leaping thorns for the backdrop, her clicking needles making a metronome of sound.
Arthur brushing snow off the front of his sweater, the wool stretching thin over his belly, his hat crushed thoughtlessly to his balding head, a bundle of firewood under his arms, satisfied, out of breath: this is how the Muggles do it, see?
Celestina Warbeck on the radio, her throaty warble amid a river of rushing static, fritzing in and out of audible range. The platters of food laid along the creaking table, battered from years of Weasleys but strangely empty now, Arthur at one end and Molly at the other and all the food in between them, taking up space.
The package addressed in loopy handwriting had no manner of identification; it contained a pair of mittens, striped red and gold, the sort a harried mum might owl-order for 6 Sickles after her child had been Sorted.
She examined them, turning them over in her bare hands while Magalie and Fleur sniped at each other overhead. Gryffindor colors. She had not worn Gryffindor colors in quite a while.
An image came into her mind: a wizened old man in her mother’s parlor, his knobby fingers curled around their chipped chinaware, his eyes piercing on hers. She knew suddenly who had sent it, and had the image of a spider skillfully manipulating its web, twitching the little bundled bodies of subdued prey towards itself along the long sticky threads of silver.
That was unfair, she thought, turning the mittens over in her hands once more. Her fingers tensed around the wool. She was reading too far into it. A kindly headmaster, beneficent and generous in his old age, sending presents to students, even recalcitrant ex-students such as herself. But she could not put aside the feeling of unease, even once she had tucked the mittens away.
The small package Magalie had chucked at her turned out to be a clattering bracelet made from the long teeth of a wolf. “They fall off sometimes,” Magalie said by way of explanation, shrugging her shoulders very casually. Her knuckles were white around the edge of her table. “When I’m running. I thought it would suit. Bring back memories, perhaps.”
Magalie’s yellow eyes in the sulfurous dark and her hot breath on Ginny’s ankles…
“I love it,” Ginny said, truthfully, and slid it on her wrist, where it looked appropriately macabre.
Luna’s present was a spiraling dreamcatcher made from delicate and luminescent strings of some unspeakably fine material. When she trailed a finger over it, there was a sound like a plucked string, a low sweet note.
A note was attached to the fine net in the center, pinned with a thorn. Luna’s handwriting, twitchy and twining, read: for the prevention of bad dreams.
Luna, Ginny thought, with an ache of acute longing. Luna had always known her so well.
“You haven’t opened my present yet,” Fleur said. She had been watching Ginny keenly, watching as Ginny ran her fingers over the unbelievably fine fretwork wrought between each hoop of the dreamcatcher. “Here.”
From her sack she withdrew a long slender package. From one end, a fine point extruded.
Ginny took it; it was heavy. A mounting suspicion was building in her, one that ballooned to breathless heights and then down again, simmering low. In silence she undid the ribbon and put it aside, peeling off the Spellotape on the sides of the wrapping before slowly, meticulously, unsheathing what was inside.
First the handle, a gleaming brassy mahogany color, and then the fine gold rim around the base, closing around the fattening bristles. A broom. She held it in two hands, and the light caught the gleaming writing on the tapering stem: Boulon-Feu. She translated: Firebolt.
“You won’t have to use the school brooms anymore,” Fleur said unnecessarily, smiling.
The broom trembled in her hands. She was staring at it, unmoving, her face tremoring with the effort of keeping it still.
Fleur’s smile was fading, she looked concerned. Magalie was watching her intently, eyes bright.
Ginny’s hands closed around the broom, gripping tightly for a single instant, and then she thrust it at Fleur, nearly shoving it away. “I can’t take this.”
Fleur drew herself up. She took the broom from Ginny but held it lightly, as if it did not even matter, as if it was of no relevance to the proceedings. She said, tightly: “Comment ça, tu ne peux pas l'accepter ? Bien sûr que tu peux. It is a gift, for you.”
“I can’t,” Ginny repeated. She backed away. The room was closing around her, shimmering like gray water. She felt dizzy. A succession of images ran through her mind: Fleur’s slender hand offering the ribbon, invisible Fleur tugging her through the malevolent dark, their desperate breaths wetting the cold night air, Fleur making a derisive noise in response to Ginny’s muffled it isn’t fair as if to say nothing is, as if to say don’t be stupid, as if to say you silly girl.
And these melded and swirled with Fleur stroking her hair in the quiet stillness of her bedroom, singing a song about a nightingale, her hood settling over Ginny’s head, enveloping her in a rush of slow warmth, Fleur turning at the sight of her, swiveling and smiling brilliantly, the empty seat beside her at the dinner table waiting for Ginny to fill it, Fleur laughing behind her on the cool rush of the kelpie, her arms digging tightly into Ginny’s waist. She could not tell the difference anymore between what was right and what was wrong, the previously unmistakable line between permissible and too far.
She shook her head and said, again: “I can’t take that. You can’t do things like that for me.”
Fleur’s hand whitened around the broom. Her face was angry, her eyes glittered. Giny remembered the bruising grip of her ungloved hand around Ginny’s wrist at the Quidditch match, her cold voice: do not think you can deceive me. She could be so cold.
She said: “This again.”
“Yes, this again,” Ginny said, fisting her trembling hands behind her back. “There are things I cannot accept from you. I can’t-” She broke off. “I don’t know what it is,” She said, with difficulty, “I don’t know what it is you want from me.”
“What I want from you,” Fleur repeated. Her face was so cold that Ginny nearly shivered. With a shock that was like plunging into a dark room and realizing it went on and on forever, Ginny recalled asking Tom the same question. She had thought herself brave, very bold, almost coy, she had written it quickly in her childish hand and slammed the book shut afterwards with a squeak, only to open it an instant later, tentative, eager to read his response, which blossomed outwards in beautiful cursive: to be your friend.
She had traced her fingers over the letters, spellbound by their simplicity, their unfailing sweetness. And alone in her most secret thoughts, she had erased the ending and rearranged the sentence so it became something else entirely: to be yours.
“Nothing,” Fleur was saying, her tone freezing, sucked of all warmth and light. Her eyes glistened, flat, blue. “I don’t want anything from you.”
Ginny looked at her quietly, not blinking. After a moment Fleur emitted a rough sound and, stooping, seized her things - the sack and the broom and the still-wrapped present from Ginny, which she had not yet opened and did not seem likely to - and left, closing the door swiftly behind her.
Ginny listened to her quick forceful steps, rat-tat-tat, down the glass stairs, silenced at last by the muffling embrace of the grass. She felt dizzy again, as though she would vomit.
“Dra-ma,” Magalie sang in accented English, looking gleeful.
After that everything sank into oblivion, or rather she sank into oblivion. The week of beautiful things and laughter that she’d had - ice forts and snowball warfare, steaming cocoa, the softly gleaming Yule tree, Fleur’s fingers combing through her hair in the hushed crepuscular echelon of her bedroom, her voice singing endless lullabies - was a false thing, a mirage lit by a trickster sun.
Brief respite and then plunged into the thick of it again, the rayless thorny forest whose branches grew darker and more resolved even as she pushed their bristles from her face.
The nightmares returned in full force, they had never really stopped, but now there was no Fleur to comfort her upon waking. Fleur would not speak to her, or more rightly neither would speak to the other, Fleur’s eyes straying past her whenever they happened to cross paths, Ginny lifting her chin and walking past her without a word.
Rumors and whispers swirled, questions abounded, but what remained was that Ginny was nobody, the dregs of an ill-regarded legacy washed up on French shores, bedraggled, not worth further scrutiny, not worth the extension of a friendly hand. She had been, however briefly, elevated by Fleur’s attention; now that it had evidently gone, she was no one once more.
And yet she did not even notice it. Magalie referred to her in a carrying voice as a pariah, and perhaps that was true, but she did not know, did not really care. If people spoke about her, she did not hear their whispers, she did not even really register it when people spoke directly to her face: pass the salt, excuse me, hello, are you even listening? Anyone in there?
The world passed before her eyes, sometimes beautiful and sometimes banal, flowers opening in broad daylight and her History professor droning, snow falling, endless snows. She saw it all, but dimly, dimly. Everything seemed to be cast into leaden shadow by the eclipsing mass of something far larger than herself. She woke in the morning, ate listlessly at breakfast, sloped off to classes, prodded at her lunch, went to classes, and then went to practice.
Practices had resumed, but because there was a game soon and she was only on the reserve team, she spent most of it sitting in the stands, shivering, her breath coloring the night air in pure exhalations of white.
This was fine, she didn’t really care, the escape of flight was lost to her now, she almost did not want to attempt it for fear that it would not work anymore. Sometimes she fell asleep on the stands, half-slumped, her fingers frozen in their mittens. When someone shook her awake she would stand, stretch out her stiffening limbs. Usually she skipped dinner and walked back to the tower alone in the dark, falling into bed, into him.
He was waiting for her in dreams, smiling, smiling, his eyes colored winsome gray, his cheeks flushed healthy rose, his black hair curling, a lock falling across his eyes as he reached out to touch her. Are you alright, Ginny? You need to eat more, you’re so thin. Even his facsimile of concern was better than nothing at all.
She had stopped trying to wean herself off of him, because by now she understood that his appearances were not connected to her desire for him; he came at random times, whenever he liked, and that was the most frightening of all: to know that he existed as more than a figment of a traumatized imagination, to know that he had a will of his own.
They were not even nightmares anymore, she did not think she could call them nightmares. She didn’t know what to call them. They bled into her waking life, gradually and then all at once. Sometimes, trudging down the hallway, she would glance up and see him leaning against a doorway, his hair arrayed gleamingly, his smile brilliant.
Or at lunch, sitting alone, he would lean across the table from her, smoothing a hand down her shoulder: come on, Gin, another forkful. You need your energy. When she stared at him his smile would twist, mischievous: not too obvious, now. We don’t want anyone catching on that I’m here, do we?
Yes, she thought, no. I don’t know. The egg or salad or slice of apple, whatever it was, sliding off the tines of her fork with a dull plop. She stared at it, unable to will herself to stab it and bring it to her mouth, unable of really moving.
And his hand would reach across the table and pick up her fork for her, putting the food to her mouth. She would glance around as she opened her mouth for him, disbelieving: did no one see this? Was he really invisible? Had she gone mad?
She lost appetite, lost will. Sometimes she could not even move out of bed; she would miss breakfast and half of first period because of it. These spells of lethargy were rare at first and then ever frequent. Her thoughts came like bloated fish in a frozen sluggish river, bumping against each other. She knew that he was gaining in form and energy, and that he was using her as a catalyst for his return. Every time she ate, every time she slept, he became more powerful, because, as before, he was drawing on her life to resuscitate his own.
So why live? She thought. Why live, if it meant furthering his life? She had been foolish to think she could escape him so easily. He was a part of her now, she understood that much, attached to her as surely as a leech fastened to the vulnerable skin of river-goers, except the connection was far more intimate and far more immutable; he was not fastened to her skin, he was fastened to her soul.
So she lay in bed for hours at a time, dizzy, dry-mouthed, her head rattling with strange aches. She watched Magalie come in and out of the room, casting her uncertain glances, she watched the shadows lengthen on the wall and night fall, draping the room. But Magalie could not say anything, Magalie was worsening as the moon waxed.
Ginny, supine, watched night after night as the moon fattened from a mere sliver to a half-jowled grin, until it was totally full and Magalie was all bones, her teeth too big for her mouth, the whites of her eyes strangely yellow.
“I’ll be gone tonight,” Ginny heard her say, distantly, as if from rooms away, although in reality she was bending to the bed, her mouth directly over Ginny’s ear. “Tonight will be a rough one, I can feel it.” And then she was gone, for however long, for as long as it took for the wolf to howl loose and the human to subside.
Ginny lay, quietly, the sheets rucked up under her arms, thoughts rolling in her head like marbles in a rotating glass bowl until one caught her attention: she sat up straight. Bad idea; the blood rush, the swaying nausea. She wobbled on her feet but managed to stand. Tom looked alarmed. Where are you going?
With effort she looked directly at him, and managed: Out. She was wearing her nightshirt and socks. It was below freezing outside. She shambled to the door and stumbled down the stairs, Tom reaching for her as she descended. Out, she thought, out, out, out.
Outside the night pressed itself against her with feverish ardor, needling her face with cold. The world yawned and swayed and shook; there was wind in the trees, rattling through her bones. She shook herself and headed in the direction she thought was the woods. A low, eager sound was echoing through the air, the rumble before a howl.
Behind her, Tom froze. He said, his voice clearly audible: “No.”
“Yes,” Ginny said back, indistinctly, struggling through the winds. She was almost at the forest now. “Yes.”
“No-” His face distorted, contorted when she looked back. But he could not stop her. She had not eaten for days, he was as weak as she was. “Ginny Weasley.”
She was inside the forest now, and he was gone. Not, she thought, permanently; she could not have extinguished him so easily. Wherever he was, he had gone there on purpose, to try to fight against whatever she was going- but what could he do? She was inside the woods now, and the woods belonged to the wolf.
A howl, raising the hair on her arms. She shivered and moved weakly towards it. It occurred to her to make noise, so the wolf could hear her, and she began shouting, straining her voice which was hoarse from days of silence. She moved further into the forest, still shouting, screaming now, letting the wolf know she was here, she was ready.
The wolf’s footsteps behind her, in front of her, all around her, its quiet snarl. The pads of feet against a whiskery forest floor. The great head first, massive, a storm of black and gray, then the glinting eyes, lumed by light from the moon, emerging from the darkness.
They were in a clearing, one that was vaguely familiar to her. A tree above her head where she had once sat, shutting her eyes, hands over her ears. The wolf moved closer, treading almost delicately. It understood that she would not run.
What happened next happened very quickly. She heard Fleur’s voice as if plucked from a dream, but not the melodious voice lifted in song, not the amused voice in elegant French, but hysterical, raised, screaming her name.
And then Tom rushing at her, too, his figure ghostly in the dark, his arms raised, his eyes narrowed, filling her body like a rush of inhaled air.
The wolf sprung at her with its jaws extended, and she saw that it had hands that were almost like human hands, with long eerie nails. She shuddered, and then its jaws closed around her, almost gentle.
Fleur’s voice, frantic. The moon overhead, wavering like a reflection on disturbed water. One of the wolf’s teeth was embedded deeply in the crook of her elbow, and she could feel something dissolving like grains of sand washing clean of a wound, filtering away, some long-buried rot blazing clean.
Hurts, she thought, breathlessly. Ow.
The wolf was blasted off of her in a wave of frenzied magic. The tooth remained, socketed in her elbow like a treasure. She landed on the forest floor with a muffled sound. Fleur was hovering over her, her golden hair a hyperspectral haze around her face, the shape of it blotting out the moon.
What are you doing, Ginny thought, dizzy. Her thoughts were like escaping birds, they flew out of her and away into the night, never to be seen again. She could not hear what Fleur was saying. She did not know what Fleur was saying.
The woods were all around them, stampeding them with sound and fury, with shaking branches, with the smells of rot and leaf-mold and other, darker things. What had been done, in this clearing? A girl with white shoulders, an unknown boy, and Ginny’s eyes shut tightly. What had she done? The wolf making small hurt sounds on the other side of the clearing, its breathing harsh, labored. The extraordinary pain in her arm and other places, her stomach, her hip, washing over her like a tide, turning all of her thoughts to mud.
Are we out of the woods yet, she thought, and began to laugh, a breathless laugh that turned her insides to fire and pain but she could not stop, it was too funny, she could not stop.
She woke in an infirmary. The sheets were tight under her arms, as crisp as if they had been ironed, and the light was gray, rain coming down and clattering the glass. Madame Maxime was sitting by her bedside.
Ginny, weakly, struggled upright. Madame made a tutting noise and flicked her wand; the sheets loosened, and her pillows slid back, propping her up. Once Ginny was situated, she folded her capable hands and regarded her.
“Well,” Madame said, precisely. “Well.”
“Bon matin, Madame,” Ginny whispered, a cough on the other edge of her words. She swallowed it down.
“I’m sure I don’t need to tell you,” Madame said, in perfect English, “How well I have always regarded you.”
Ginny stared at her in quiet astonishment.
“You, Ginevra Weasley, are the very epitome of what we expect from our students at Beauxbatons,” Madame said, nodding vigorously, “Which makes it all the more surprising that you have come to us from Hogwarts, of all places.”
Ginny looked at her silently.
“I am extending an offer to students such as yourself,” Madame continued, “An offer I believe you will be interested in. This summer, as you may know, the Quidditch World Cup is taking place. A staff member and a few other deserving students will be going to represent our school. All expenses paid- everything taken care of. Prime seats.”
Ginny had a coughing fit then, and had to hold the sheets to her mouth. Madame’s mouth pursed disapprovingly, and then she went on, voice raising: “And, of course, the incident last night will be… graciously forgotten. By myself, and by you as well, I am sure.”
Ginny got her breathing under control, although she had the overwhelming urge to laugh. So this was Madame’s tack, holding the Quidditch World Cup like a carrot under her nose to entice her into silence. Well, she would not have to worry. Much.
“Merci beaucoup, Madame.” Ginny said, smiling at her. “Mais il se trouve que j'ai déjà des projets pour cet été. I already have plans this summer, I’m afraid. I couldn’t possibly.”
Madame’s face contorted. She said: “Ginevra Weasley, I advise you to think carefully.”
“Oh, but Madame,” Ginny said, resting her hands in her lap, “I assure you, I am. My head is clearer than it has been in months.”
When Madame had left, the nurse bustled over to her. She was not anything like Madame Pomfrey; she was slender and prompt, with lipstick and a tight-waisted apron. Her fingers moved quickly and professionally, unwrapping the bandage on Ginny’s arm.
“Well, nothing for it, I’m afraid,” She assessed, briskly. “This’ll have to heal on its own- werewolf wounds, you know. You cannot simply wave a wand at them. All the same, you have been extraordinarily lucky, Mademoiselle Weasley.”
“Oh?” Ginny said.
“Most people would have either died or been turned, with a bite like this,” The nurse said, examining the wound closer. It was so deep that Ginny could not look at it without wanting to look away. “In fact, I can’t understand why it is that you-” She broke off. “Well, it is good, anyway.”
She rebandaged the wound and moved on to the next bed, whose occupant received her with a disagreeable growl.
“Mademoiselle Diouf,” The nurse said, sharply, “That is enough.”
Magalie! Ginny shot upright. Magalie was on the bed next to her, lying down, her eyes closed, her face scrunched up. “No,” She was saying to the nurse, “Get that away from me, I won’t have it in my body.”
An argument ensued; the nurse wanted to give Magalie a potion, Magalie wouldn’t have it. Magalie, predictably, won; the nurse stormed off in high dudgeon, harried. When she was gone, Ginny turned to face her.
“Little elf,” Magalie said. Upon further scrutiny her face was haggard. “Or should I call you little wolf, now?”
Ginny shook her head. “You didn’t turn me.”
Magalie blinked, and then said: “That is not possible. I felt my teeth go into you. So far-” She broke off.
“The bite killed something else,” Ginny said, quietly. “Something that was in my body. I had meant it to, of course, but I didn’t expect it to work so well. I didn’t expect to be alive afterwards.”
“Something else,” Magalie repeated, dully. Her hands were trembling. “Explain.”
Ginny opened her mouth- but the door of the infirmary was slamming open with such force that a sheaf of papers at the nurse’s desk went flying, and Fleur came flying in, a storm of gold and fury, irate, beautiful. “Mademoiselle Delacour!” The nurse cried out, but there was no use, Fleur did not even spare her a glance. Her eyes were on Ginny, and as she came closer something almost tentative grew about her expression, her manner; her hands were folded in front of her body.
“Hello,” Ginny said, and then could not say any more.
“Bonjour,” Fleur returned. Her eyes were troubled, flitting over Ginny’s body, over her bandaged arm, the dressing white and clean against her freckly bronze arm. “Ginny, are you…”
“She’s not a wolf, apparently,” Magalie said from the bed over, eyes closed. “What?” In response to Ginny’s glare.
Fleur sank into the seat beside her, her eyes fixed on Ginny’s. She said: “That wasn’t what I was going to ask.”
“Ask, then.” Ginny said, looking at her. For so long the sight of Fleur had been painful, even when seen from afar: her indifferent gaze, her cold face turning away, and even more painful Ginny’s inability to say to her help, say I’m sorry for what I said, I meant it, but not in the way you thought. Now she welcomed the flushed face, the blue eyes, the bitten lip, the hair tangling around her face in drifts of flaring gold.
“I was in my room,” Fleur began, “And I heard- rattling. At the glass. I opened the window, there was nothing there… then thumps, on the floor, my books shaking in the shelves. I thought I had gone mad. And then- there is a jug of water on my nightstand, perhaps you know the one… it broke upon the floor. When I went over I saw that the water had spilled in a distinctive formation, spelling out the words: SHE IS IN THE WOODS.”
“And so you went,” Ginny said, understanding. This explained a lot; where Tom had gone, why Fleur had known to find her.
“So I went,” Fleur echoed. She was staring at Ginny’s hands. “Ginny-” Speaking quietly now, moving closer so Magalie would not hear, Magalie who had a very self-satisfied expression on her face and a lupine sense of hearing. “I opened your Yule gift yesterday.”
The stone with a hole bored into it by water, from the lake. Ginny remembered sitting by its shores a lifetime ago, Fleur’s hair obscuring her face as she confessed that sometimes she saw the faces of drowned girls in the water.
“Did you like it?” Ginny asked.
Fleur’s throat moved as she swallowed. She said, helplessly, “Ginny.” Her hands moved to cover her face, and then she put her head down on the blankets and said nothing else, only her golden hair visible.
Muffled: “I thought you were dead.”
“Me too, for a bit,” Ginny said, petting her head gently. “Isn’t it just wonderful that I’m not? Aren’t you wonderfully surprised? I know I am.”
“You horrid girl,” Fleur said, her voice clearer, the vibrations moving through the blankets along Ginny’s leg. “I should never have gotten you a broomstick.”
Ginny’s hands stilled. She said: “About that.”
Fleur straightened. “Ginny-”
“I didn’t mean whatever you thought I meant,” Ginny said, speaking rapidly. “I just meant- my family is poor. You might know that. We’re not- I mean, we get by, it isn’t so bad, but we can’t afford new robes every year, or- or a new owl, or unused textbooks. Or the latest broom.”
“Ginny-”
“And I’m- you’re so,” Ginny broke off, frustrated. “In every friendship there is a question of what one is able to offer the other person,” She said, at last. “You know that. And to everyone else in this school, to the eyes of the world, I am a charity case, you must know that. I am the nobody, the girl you have taken pity on. You understand that, don’t you?”
Slowly, Fleur nodded. She had gone silent, she had stopped trying to interrupt. Her nod filled Ginny with a sense of relief: so she had not imagined it after all, so she was making sense.
“But I am not nobody,” Ginny said. She had difficulty going on, her voice wet, and had to focus on a window on the opposite side of the room in order to keep going. “I am not nothing. Sometimes you make me feel- insignificant.”
“You’re not-”
“I’m not finished.” Ginny said, narrowing her eyes. Fleur subsided gracefully, raising her hands. “It doesn’t bother me, being in your shadow. I don’t care what people think, you needn’t worry about that. It’s just- sometimes you seem to think I am a part of you, and I need for us to be separate people.”
There was a long moment of silence. Fleur’s eyes were lowered; Ginny could see the movement of her eyelashes, shadowing her cheeks.
“I’m done,” Ginny said, unnecessarily.
“Then I will speak,” Fleur said, straightening up. Her eyes, Ginny saw, were snapping, a lively blue. “Do you remember what you said to me, the night we first met? You had just saved my life. You told me that everyone talked about me, because they were jealous.”
But not you, Ginny remembered. Fleur’s burning eyes. Ginny, agreeing: not me.
“But not you,” Fleur said, echoing the ghost of her memory. “You were- unpolluted, by anything and anyone. No one knew you. You didn’t care about anyone, you didn’t care to know anyone. I saw you after that, moving through the hallways, slipping past people like a little white ghost. You had saved my life not because you had anything at stake, not because you wanted leverage or a favor or anything. I still don’t know why-.”
“Because I didn’t want you to die,” Ginny said. “Obviously?”
“Ah,” Fleur said, as if a great mystery had suddenly unfolded before her, revealing the secret nestled in its innermost heart. Ginny rolled her eyes.
“Well, after that- I have known most of the students here for a long time, and even if I do not, we move in the same waters, in a way we are all the same, myself included,” Fleur said, looking at Ginny intently. “You were - are - something totally new. I don’t understand you, actually I think I don’t even want to. I have not been so glad, laughed so hard, felt so happy, in years. You have shifted the course of my life.”
Ginny stared at her, stricken.
“So I am sorry if I sometimes am- too much,” Fleur finished, with gravity. “I am not used to this. I do not mean to make you feel insignificant. In reality you are very significant. I have not had a genuine friend in quite some time, and it is an honor to count you as-”
“Oh, do be quiet, let’s forgive each other already,” Ginny said, and threw her arms around Fleur, squeezing her tightly. “Also, can we see each other this summer?”
“Yes?” Fleur said, sounding uncertain. “Ginny, it is the first day of January.”
“It’s just that I may have lied to Madame Maxime about my summer plans,” Ginny explained, “And I need a reasonable excuse.”
“So you turned to me,” Fleur said, sounding resigned. “Well, well, I see, I have bared my heart to you, proclaimed you my first and only true friend, while to you I am an excuse to Madame Maxime-”
“Oh, really now-”
“You can also stay over at my estate,” Magalie interrupted, yawning. “Although you may want to lock the door during the full moon. Or not,” Grinning, widely. “You do have a sizable death wish, after all.”
“My estate,” Ginny mimicked, rudely. “What’s wrong with a house? You,” She turned on Fleur, releasing her, “Do you have an estate as well?”
Fleur remained diplomatically silent. Ginny recalled that Fleur’s family was old as rocks and purported to be richer than God. She said: “Don’t bother to answer that.”
Fleur’s laugh, like a spool of gold unwinding midair.
Dear Mum,
Happy New Year. How have you been? In all my letters, I haven’t asked you about how you and Dad have been getting along. How’s the Burrow without all of our noise? Although I suppose the ghoul’s still clattering around in the attic, clashing and banging on.
I’m doing well, really good actually. Me and my roommate got into a sort of fight the other night, but when it was all over I felt better than ever, as if I was finally clean. Do you ever feel like that? The tension just building and building until it bursts- and then everything afterwards is a thousand times easier?
I’m looking forward to coming home in the summer, of course, and see everyone again. A few friends have invited me over too, so I might be back in France for a few weeks but I’m looking forward to spending most of summer with all of you. Maybe we could get Charlie to come over, it’s been too long since he’s been back at the Burrow with us. I can’t wait.
All my love,
Ginny
FIVE MONTHS LATER:
“I’ll see you this summer,” Ginny said, heaving her trunk out from under the seat. “In about a week. Really, this weeping is undignified, Fleur, we shan’t be parted long.”
Across from her, Fleur’s face was perfectly composed, her slender figure neatly pressed in crisp paperbag shorts and a jaunty hat. Her golden hair was pinned in braids. She smelled of violets. She said: “But Ginny, my darling, however shall I live without you? I will weep into my pillow every night-”
“Please stop, both of you.” Magalie groused. She was in the compartment too, and looked as though she might be motion-sick. The yellow train whipping through the Pyrenees was not really good for one’s stomach, Ginny reflected. “I swear I’ll be sick if I have to look at you any longer-”
“Not in this compartment,” Fleur said, edging away. “Go out to the toilet if you really must-”
“Nonsense, there’s bound to be a barf-bag in here somewhere,” Ginny said, easily. “Better out than in, eh?”
Fleur grimaced. “Don’t say that, you’ll encourage her. Besides, we’ve only minutes left.”
“We’re witches, we can Vanish it if she makes a mess-”
“You can’t Vanish a smell-”
The whistle blew, the train grating to a halt at the Gare d'Austerlitz. Ginny looked at Fleur in sudden panic. Fleur was not getting off for another two stops, and Magalie not for three, she knew that, she had known that- but still, it was another thing to get to her feet and know that she was leaving, that there would not be glass towers and lakes and endless forests for at least a summer.
“Go now,” Fleur said, pushing her lightly. “You’ll miss the stop.”
“See you in a week,” Ginny said, instead of moving. Her eyes moved to Magalie, and then she said, brightly: “And see you never, you absolute liar-”
“I told you, I didn’t choose to go to Norway for the summer,” Magalie said, but she was smiling. “Although on reflection it’ll be nice to have a break from you. Another year with you as my roommate, how disgusting.”
“Yes, good-bye to you too,” Ginny said, waving, and then hurried out the door, her feet light. Spilling out of the train steps, the fresh air stinging her face, her hair flying into her blinking eyes, the feeling of solid ground under her feet dizzying.
In her peripheral vision she caught sight of them, a knot of red heads moving through the crowd, the British English clearly audible in the rustle of French: is it this way? Are you sure? Oh! That must be the train… do you see her? Ginny! Ginny!
Here, she thought, racing forward, exultant. Don’t worry, I’m here.