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It's not my fault.
It's been raining all week, so I couldn't sit outside with my typewriter and write something respectable. Instead I sat inside and finished the Harry/Ginny/Tom. So I blame the weather. It's not my fault.
Also,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mctabby has told people to commit an act of writing they'd never normally commit in honor of Blame Somebody Else Day today. So I blame her. It's not my fault.
I've always thought that if the Red Badge of Courage is a classic, I ought to be able to write a tolerable sex scene. So I blame Stephen Crane. It's not my fault.
It seems like Harry/Ginny fic ranges from angst/fluff to rape/suicide with nothing in between, when canonically it's obvious neither of them would be like that. So I blame JKR and all the fluffy H/G writers, you know who you are. It's not my fault.
The gratuitously pretentious use of present tense is due to too many readings of "After the Flood" and to trying to convince myself I wasn't actually writing this. So that's the fault ofepicyclical. Not my fault.
Right, then, Here you go.
With Eye and With Gesture
"Powerful enough to start telling Miss Weasley a few of my secrets, to start pouring a little of my soul back into her . . ."
"Voldemort put a bit of himself in me?" said Harry, thunderstruck.
--- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry slams the front door behind him and stomps into the cottage, smacking his open hand angrily against every flat surface he passes. He finds Ginny in their sitting room, knitting a miniature green-and-silver jumper for the brat Pansy Malfoy is expecting. She looks up when she hears him and smiles in welcome.
He kicks her knitting basket savagely, green wools unwinding wildly across the floor, and when it hits the wall a baby kneazle leaps out of its nest among the yarns and hisses irately at him before fleeing. Harry feels like nothing so much as hissing back at it.
Ginny puts her knitting down and looks calmly up at him. "Bad day at work, then, I gather?"
This is all he needs. "Mulciber is going to get off. Again.," he snarls. "The Minister finally agreed to minimal amnesties for the werewolves, but only with the condition they leave the country. And they've made Malfoy a bloody school governor!"
"That will make him happy," Ginny murmurs. "I'd better remember to Floo the manor tonight with congratulations."
"Fucking hell, Ginny," Harry shouts. "I actually believed that all we'd have to do was kill Voldemort and it'd be over, but now that we finally did that for them they're just working their hardest to forget it ever happened, to put things right back the way they were before so it can start all over again, and the ones who actually fought and suffered for them have to bicker for every knut of a concession or change, and argue circles and politics in endless committee meetings--" He breaks off, looking for something else to kick.
Ginny only grins maliciously, walking over to him. "So that's it," she says. "You're bored. Great Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, savior of the wizarding world, victor against Voldemort twice before he was twenty-- you're bored to tears. Can't descend to the level of ordinary mortals and sit in an office all day; oh no, he needs to be out trying to kill someone or he comes home and kicks kittens."
"That's not it," he says. "You don't understand," but even he is aware that he sounds sulky and ridiculous and twelve.
"Oh, I understand, Harry Potter," she says, cupping his chin in one hand. "Do you think you're the only one who's been feeling that way? Tom hasn't been let out to play in ages." And then she pulls him down and kisses him.
Only it does not feel like Ginny kissing him. He has come to know Ginny's kisses very well in all the time they've been together. They are always sweet; not innocent, for he doubts Ginny was ever innocent, but gentle; sometimes passionate, sometimes desperate, sometimes sad; but always as solid and as safe as Ginny herself. This kiss is hungry and angry and vicious, despairing and devouring and dark, and Harry cannot help but return it in kind. At that Ginny shoves him against the wall with a strength he has never felt from her before, and a photograph from Ron and Hermione's wedding is knocked off of its hook, the happy couple goggling at them, but Ginny won't let him catch it as it falls; she has his wrists pinned against the wall.
Finally she pulls back, and Harry, dazed and breathless, tries to work out what has just happened.. She smirks and looks him in the eyes, but her eyes have gone strange, their warm brown flattened to something chilly and coppery. He has seen her like this before, of course, but not since the war ended, not since the last time they needed her to work out an enemy strategy or untangle a riddle delivered by spies-- needed her and the echo of Tom Riddle which had been left in her by a cursed diary, and which had proven one of their greatest assets in the fight against the dark power that Tom had grown to become.
It had unnerved him at first to see her slip so easily into the personality and and memories of someone else, but the anger in those eyes was always controlled, and knew it; dominated by Ginny's mind so securely and completely that it could not even remember how to hate her anymore.
Only-- control is not what he sees in those eyes now. She smiles very slowly and he shivers. "We've been wanting to do this for a very long time," she says, and it may be Ginny's voice but it's Tom's way of speaking, smooth and precise and menacing and supercilious, and very slightly husky as if it had enjoyed that kiss as much as Harry had. "Do you want it too, Harry Potter?"
And Harry knows that this is stupid, and reckless, and dangerous, and he can not even be sure that Ginny is still there at all anymore; but he looks back into those sharp yellow eyes, and feels delicate fingers snaking down his face, and shivers again, and oh god, he does want this, and he pulls her down into another kiss, and when she takes charge of it he sags back against the wall.
Eventually she pulls away. He makes a sound of protest, but she only reaches a hand and takes off his glasses. Without them the world becomes slightly unreal; Ginny before him is blurred and translucent around the edges, like a bad photograph or a memory pulled from the pages of a diary. He realizes suddenly, seeing her standing there positively, that she has grown to the exact same height that Tom was at sixteen. Without any detail her practical black house robes take on an altogether different, and disturbing, aspect. He would be certain it was not Ginny were it not for the wild red hair, which completely spoils the effect.
She seems to realize this as well, discarding the glasses somewhere as she pushes the hair back with a look of disgust. "Close your eyes, Harry Potter," she says, and he does, as if obeying that voice were the one thing he'd been born for. With nothing to see, the two of them standing so closely that he can feel the other's body heat, it is only the smell that still tells him it is Ginny, and when those slender, precise fingers stroke again across his forehead and down his face, it its not his best friend's little sister he sees in his mind's eye but the slim, dark-haired boy who has haunted his dreams and nightmares since he was twelve, whom he has hated and admired, envied and pitied, desired and destroyed.
And the lips that follow the fingers, the tongue which traces along the scar and flicks over his sealed eyelids, those are Tom's too. The voice which hisses words he cannot quite hear into his skin, the hands which are moving on his chest, that slice open his ministry robes with economical movements, contemptuous of mere buttons, then slide under his vest and lift it over his head before crawling, excruciatingly slow and precise, inexorably downward.
"Tom," says Harry, and Tom kneels before him.
***
When Harry finally opens his eyes again he thinks it is probably Ginny he is looking at, but he is aware that he is not exactly thinking clearly at this point. Then she giggles and he is sure it's her, and his first thought is "Damn," and this worries him a little.
"Well, that was interesting," she says in a tone she's picked up from Hermione. She looks at him sideways, her face still blurred and inscrutable. "I really wasn't expecting you to be quite so-- enthusiastic about the idea."
"How much of that do you remember?" he asks cautiously.
"Oh, all of it," she says, flicking a lock of coppery hair behind her shoulder. "He hasn't been able to hide anything from me for ages. I'm much stronger than he is." She says this matter-of-factly, as if any young witch would be capable, every day, of utterly defeating the Dark Lord in a battle of willpower. He watches her, little more than a smear of fire in the dimness, and suddenly no longer regrets that it has turned out to be her, after all. He pulls her to him and kisses her with all the fierceness he had offered the other, and she answers, and it's all Ginny, but there's more than a little of Tom in what she gives him too.
But after he says, "I'm still not sure that was a wise thing to do, Ginny."
She looks at him, then reaches back and hands him his glasses from somewhere. "Harry, I was never worried about Tom coming between us." Her hair is falling around her, and her face is entirely earnest. "We've dealt with him before, many times, alone and together, and it's only made us stronger. And he put as much of himself in you as there is in me. Did you not notice that you were both speaking Parseltongue the whole time?"
He gapes at her, and she looks on the verge of giggling again, so he speaks up to stop her. "That wasn't what I was worried about, actually," he says, though they both know that he is lying. "You know it's dangerous for you to give in to Tom like that. Especially when there's no need for it."
"But we did need that, Harry," she says. "All three of us, I think. I know my limits," she adds, seeing his expression. "It wasn't much of a risk, and it was worth it."
"Ginny--" he starts, but she stops him. "Harry, did I ever once tell you to be careful? Tell you it was too dangerous? I can handle Tom. Let me do this." Then she tucks her long legs under her, a dreamy look on her face. "No, my only regret now is that I was too young to take advantage when he had a body of his own. Apparently he didn't exaggerate his skills in that area." When she looks back at him she grins. "Jealous, Potter?"
"Considering we just made you watch us have sex, I don't think it's allowed."
"Pish-tosh, Harry," she says. "Watching you two together was my main fantasy in adolescence. Second only to you and Draco together; too bad he's disgustingly loyal to his wife."
He has no idea how he's meant to respond to that one, so it's a good thing that she stands up then and starts tossing his clothing at him. "Speaking of Draco," she adds, as she rights her knitting basket and starts re-winding the green yarn, "If I don't Floo him soon with congratulations about the Governorship he'll be intolerably sulky the next time I see him. It's after eight already--" she tucks the neat ball of yarn into the basket and picks it up, "Want to straighten yourself up a bit, then see if you can figure out some dinner?"
"Sure," he replies, but he doesn't get up, watching the swish of her hair and skirts as she walks back toward their bedroom. The kneazle kitten, which Harry recalls was rather cruelly named Colin after its tendency to follow him around worshipfully, pokes its head cautiously around the back of the couch. It seems to have forgiven the kick, as it climbs into his lap and starts purring.He pets it absentmindedly.
end.
It's not my fault.
(The title's from the Crane poem of the same name. Well, since he gets the blame . . .)
Also,
mctabby has told people to commit an act of writing they'd never normally commit in honor of Blame Somebody Else Day today. So I blame her. It's not my fault.I've always thought that if the Red Badge of Courage is a classic, I ought to be able to write a tolerable sex scene. So I blame Stephen Crane. It's not my fault.
It seems like Harry/Ginny fic ranges from angst/fluff to rape/suicide with nothing in between, when canonically it's obvious neither of them would be like that. So I blame JKR and all the fluffy H/G writers, you know who you are. It's not my fault.
The gratuitously pretentious use of present tense is due to too many readings of "After the Flood" and to trying to convince myself I wasn't actually writing this. So that's the fault of
epicyclical. Not my fault.Right, then, Here you go.
With Eye and With Gesture
"Powerful enough to start telling Miss Weasley a few of my secrets, to start pouring a little of my soul back into her . . ."
"Voldemort put a bit of himself in me?" said Harry, thunderstruck.
--- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry slams the front door behind him and stomps into the cottage, smacking his open hand angrily against every flat surface he passes. He finds Ginny in their sitting room, knitting a miniature green-and-silver jumper for the brat Pansy Malfoy is expecting. She looks up when she hears him and smiles in welcome.
He kicks her knitting basket savagely, green wools unwinding wildly across the floor, and when it hits the wall a baby kneazle leaps out of its nest among the yarns and hisses irately at him before fleeing. Harry feels like nothing so much as hissing back at it.
Ginny puts her knitting down and looks calmly up at him. "Bad day at work, then, I gather?"
This is all he needs. "Mulciber is going to get off. Again.," he snarls. "The Minister finally agreed to minimal amnesties for the werewolves, but only with the condition they leave the country. And they've made Malfoy a bloody school governor!"
"That will make him happy," Ginny murmurs. "I'd better remember to Floo the manor tonight with congratulations."
"Fucking hell, Ginny," Harry shouts. "I actually believed that all we'd have to do was kill Voldemort and it'd be over, but now that we finally did that for them they're just working their hardest to forget it ever happened, to put things right back the way they were before so it can start all over again, and the ones who actually fought and suffered for them have to bicker for every knut of a concession or change, and argue circles and politics in endless committee meetings--" He breaks off, looking for something else to kick.
Ginny only grins maliciously, walking over to him. "So that's it," she says. "You're bored. Great Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, savior of the wizarding world, victor against Voldemort twice before he was twenty-- you're bored to tears. Can't descend to the level of ordinary mortals and sit in an office all day; oh no, he needs to be out trying to kill someone or he comes home and kicks kittens."
"That's not it," he says. "You don't understand," but even he is aware that he sounds sulky and ridiculous and twelve.
"Oh, I understand, Harry Potter," she says, cupping his chin in one hand. "Do you think you're the only one who's been feeling that way? Tom hasn't been let out to play in ages." And then she pulls him down and kisses him.
Only it does not feel like Ginny kissing him. He has come to know Ginny's kisses very well in all the time they've been together. They are always sweet; not innocent, for he doubts Ginny was ever innocent, but gentle; sometimes passionate, sometimes desperate, sometimes sad; but always as solid and as safe as Ginny herself. This kiss is hungry and angry and vicious, despairing and devouring and dark, and Harry cannot help but return it in kind. At that Ginny shoves him against the wall with a strength he has never felt from her before, and a photograph from Ron and Hermione's wedding is knocked off of its hook, the happy couple goggling at them, but Ginny won't let him catch it as it falls; she has his wrists pinned against the wall.
Finally she pulls back, and Harry, dazed and breathless, tries to work out what has just happened.. She smirks and looks him in the eyes, but her eyes have gone strange, their warm brown flattened to something chilly and coppery. He has seen her like this before, of course, but not since the war ended, not since the last time they needed her to work out an enemy strategy or untangle a riddle delivered by spies-- needed her and the echo of Tom Riddle which had been left in her by a cursed diary, and which had proven one of their greatest assets in the fight against the dark power that Tom had grown to become.
It had unnerved him at first to see her slip so easily into the personality and and memories of someone else, but the anger in those eyes was always controlled, and knew it; dominated by Ginny's mind so securely and completely that it could not even remember how to hate her anymore.
Only-- control is not what he sees in those eyes now. She smiles very slowly and he shivers. "We've been wanting to do this for a very long time," she says, and it may be Ginny's voice but it's Tom's way of speaking, smooth and precise and menacing and supercilious, and very slightly husky as if it had enjoyed that kiss as much as Harry had. "Do you want it too, Harry Potter?"
And Harry knows that this is stupid, and reckless, and dangerous, and he can not even be sure that Ginny is still there at all anymore; but he looks back into those sharp yellow eyes, and feels delicate fingers snaking down his face, and shivers again, and oh god, he does want this, and he pulls her down into another kiss, and when she takes charge of it he sags back against the wall.
Eventually she pulls away. He makes a sound of protest, but she only reaches a hand and takes off his glasses. Without them the world becomes slightly unreal; Ginny before him is blurred and translucent around the edges, like a bad photograph or a memory pulled from the pages of a diary. He realizes suddenly, seeing her standing there positively, that she has grown to the exact same height that Tom was at sixteen. Without any detail her practical black house robes take on an altogether different, and disturbing, aspect. He would be certain it was not Ginny were it not for the wild red hair, which completely spoils the effect.
She seems to realize this as well, discarding the glasses somewhere as she pushes the hair back with a look of disgust. "Close your eyes, Harry Potter," she says, and he does, as if obeying that voice were the one thing he'd been born for. With nothing to see, the two of them standing so closely that he can feel the other's body heat, it is only the smell that still tells him it is Ginny, and when those slender, precise fingers stroke again across his forehead and down his face, it its not his best friend's little sister he sees in his mind's eye but the slim, dark-haired boy who has haunted his dreams and nightmares since he was twelve, whom he has hated and admired, envied and pitied, desired and destroyed.
And the lips that follow the fingers, the tongue which traces along the scar and flicks over his sealed eyelids, those are Tom's too. The voice which hisses words he cannot quite hear into his skin, the hands which are moving on his chest, that slice open his ministry robes with economical movements, contemptuous of mere buttons, then slide under his vest and lift it over his head before crawling, excruciatingly slow and precise, inexorably downward.
"Tom," says Harry, and Tom kneels before him.
***
When Harry finally opens his eyes again he thinks it is probably Ginny he is looking at, but he is aware that he is not exactly thinking clearly at this point. Then she giggles and he is sure it's her, and his first thought is "Damn," and this worries him a little.
"Well, that was interesting," she says in a tone she's picked up from Hermione. She looks at him sideways, her face still blurred and inscrutable. "I really wasn't expecting you to be quite so-- enthusiastic about the idea."
"How much of that do you remember?" he asks cautiously.
"Oh, all of it," she says, flicking a lock of coppery hair behind her shoulder. "He hasn't been able to hide anything from me for ages. I'm much stronger than he is." She says this matter-of-factly, as if any young witch would be capable, every day, of utterly defeating the Dark Lord in a battle of willpower. He watches her, little more than a smear of fire in the dimness, and suddenly no longer regrets that it has turned out to be her, after all. He pulls her to him and kisses her with all the fierceness he had offered the other, and she answers, and it's all Ginny, but there's more than a little of Tom in what she gives him too.
But after he says, "I'm still not sure that was a wise thing to do, Ginny."
She looks at him, then reaches back and hands him his glasses from somewhere. "Harry, I was never worried about Tom coming between us." Her hair is falling around her, and her face is entirely earnest. "We've dealt with him before, many times, alone and together, and it's only made us stronger. And he put as much of himself in you as there is in me. Did you not notice that you were both speaking Parseltongue the whole time?"
He gapes at her, and she looks on the verge of giggling again, so he speaks up to stop her. "That wasn't what I was worried about, actually," he says, though they both know that he is lying. "You know it's dangerous for you to give in to Tom like that. Especially when there's no need for it."
"But we did need that, Harry," she says. "All three of us, I think. I know my limits," she adds, seeing his expression. "It wasn't much of a risk, and it was worth it."
"Ginny--" he starts, but she stops him. "Harry, did I ever once tell you to be careful? Tell you it was too dangerous? I can handle Tom. Let me do this." Then she tucks her long legs under her, a dreamy look on her face. "No, my only regret now is that I was too young to take advantage when he had a body of his own. Apparently he didn't exaggerate his skills in that area." When she looks back at him she grins. "Jealous, Potter?"
"Considering we just made you watch us have sex, I don't think it's allowed."
"Pish-tosh, Harry," she says. "Watching you two together was my main fantasy in adolescence. Second only to you and Draco together; too bad he's disgustingly loyal to his wife."
He has no idea how he's meant to respond to that one, so it's a good thing that she stands up then and starts tossing his clothing at him. "Speaking of Draco," she adds, as she rights her knitting basket and starts re-winding the green yarn, "If I don't Floo him soon with congratulations about the Governorship he'll be intolerably sulky the next time I see him. It's after eight already--" she tucks the neat ball of yarn into the basket and picks it up, "Want to straighten yourself up a bit, then see if you can figure out some dinner?"
"Sure," he replies, but he doesn't get up, watching the swish of her hair and skirts as she walks back toward their bedroom. The kneazle kitten, which Harry recalls was rather cruelly named Colin after its tendency to follow him around worshipfully, pokes its head cautiously around the back of the couch. It seems to have forgiven the kick, as it climbs into his lap and starts purring.He pets it absentmindedly.
end.
It's not my fault.
(The title's from the Crane poem of the same name. Well, since he gets the blame . . .)
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. . . Harry and Ginny might or might not end up together in the books. I'm not telling. S'pose you'll just have to read them and find out, hm?
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Actually, I have a couple slightly more respectable pieces up on archive sites. But since you haven't finished the books yet . .
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Interesting combination
Sexy. Quite.
~Icarus
Re: Interesting combination
That means a lot from someone who writes as well as you do. ^_^
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(Anonymous) 2003-04-15 04:05 pm (UTC)(link)--C
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You weren't supposed to read that either.
Besides, it wasn't my fault.
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(Anonymous) 2003-04-15 07:56 pm (UTC)(link)Why wasn't I supposed to read it?
--C
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And I prefer to maintain the delusion that everyone I know is completely innocent of such things. Even me.
Especially me.
Actually, self-insert is traditionally the first stage. Then you realize it's fairly boring and most people despise it, and write kinky sex instead.
ginny likes yaoi?
(Anonymous) 2003-08-06 03:46 am (UTC)(link)