no diggity no doubt.
OotP about, you guessed it, Ginny and Percy. No incest, though. No plot either!!
"All you really need is your wand, but that key, that key you're holding in your hand was brought back from Europe," Mrs. Black says. The corners of her eyes crinkle up in pleasure. "Brought back by a special friend of mine."
Ginny looks down at it for a moment, then back up at the old dried face in front of her. There's a pause.
"Perhaps you have heard of him," Mrs. Black says. The smile on her mouth looks much the same as the one that's wrinkling the skin around her eyes, all moving skin and no touchable warmth.
"He was a schoolmate of mine," she says, smiling slyly. " You may have met him -- we called him Marvelous Tom."
***
In the attic of the Black House, Ginny finds a grandfather clock six feet tall and made out of black walnut. It has sphinxes carved on its feet, and when Ginny blows the dust off the brass face, she finds that instead of numerals, there are words like "At home," "At school." In fact, there are little pictures of Hogwarts and the Black house engraved on the face in surprising detail -- the street around the Black place actually looks a little different. There are a few faint lines as if a forest once stood behind the house where there are only other wizarding houses nowadays, and when Ginny peers around the back, she realizes that it's one of the old-fashioned wizarding clocks built before they figured out how to hook the mechanism of the clock into the ambient magical surroundings.
The one at the Burrow is like that. It's one of the newer types: it taps into the inherent magic of the countryside so that when Mrs. Weasley finished building it, she patted the cherry wood and said, fondly, that it would run forever on next to nothing. All they would have to do in order to keep it running was to live in a magical area and to have wizards living in the house with it. The magic that leaked off their household charms would be more than enough, and Ginny remembers how, this one morning while she was sitting at the breakfast table eating her fruit and oatmeal, the twins let off some sort of new magical bomb that they were working on that soaked the entire house magic, and the hands spun around madly for days before settling anywhere.
Ginny tries not to think what the clock at the Burrow is doing now that none of them are living there anymore. Her mother says that it takes years and years for the magic to completely leak out of a place that's been home to wizards as long as the Burrow has, but Ginny nevertheless finds herself lifting the old brass hands of the null position and turning them around the face with her fingertip.
****
Every time someone walks in front of Mrs. Black, she screams and howls blood traitor until the rafters are ringing, but what Ginny realizes is that Mrs. Black never raises a fuss when Ginny walks past. She'll howl if somebody is there along with Ginny, but the very first time that Ginny steps across the threshold, Mrs. Black halts in mid-scream. You could practically hear her gargle the words back in her throat. Every one else attributes it to the fact that Sirius shows up at the top of the stairs and starts shouting at her to shut up, but Ginny sees that those crazy yellow bat eyes of the woman are resting on her, Ginny, and not her son Sirius.
***
After her first year at Hogwarts, after the chamber, Ginny has never been quite comfortable sleeping in a completely silent room. It's not a problem during the term because you don't share a dorm room with six other girls without at least one snorer and somebody getting up to use the washroom every five minutes, so all she has to do is keep her curtains open a crack, and all the comfortable sounds of half a dozen other people breathing and moving and living send her off to sleep quickly.
It's somewhat harder during the summers. Ginny originally tried sleeping with her bedroom window open so that she could hear the crickets and the cicadas calling, but all that did was remind her that it was terribly dark outside her window -- dark like the periods when Tom would slide all the way into control of her consciousness, silent like those periods, and since there was only one wireless in the house, she would go down and turn it on, then curl up on the couch in the parlor next to the kitchen and fall asleep.
Percy was the only other Weasley who stayed up late: the twins dropped off to sleep quickly once Mrs. Weasley shut down their night-time experiments, and Ron had never head problems sleeping. Percy's room, though, was right above the parlor where Ginny slept to the late-night wireless, she would hear him walking around his room. A pause while he opened the window to let Hermes in, a creak when he stepped on an old floorboard and a phrase, maybe, read aloud from the summer reading that he was doing while everyone was asleep so that he would be at the top of his class in the summer. If Hermes was returning with a note from Penelope, Ginny would hear him open the window for the bird. It was enough so that sometimes, Ginny wouldn't have to turn on the wireless, and she could pretend that it was a normal sort of insomnia and not the kind caused by a fear of darkness, a fear of silence stemming from the fact that somebody who had lived in her brain and stolen her limbs for months. Tom had told her once, after all, that snakes were deaf, and certain kinds of snakes are blind.
The walls were thick in the Burrow, but the floors weren't, and Ginny would sometimes drift to sleep fancying that Percy was imminently on the verge of falling through the floorboards and landing on the couch next to her.
***
One morning, after the end of term, Ginny comes down the stairs once just in time to hear Ron shut up and stop shouting at Mrs. Black. George is with Ginny at the time, and he just sort of elbows her in the side and tells her that breakfast is ready in the kitchen and to come on if she wants some before Fred eats it all, and Ginny eventually blinks and follows him back, but she heard Ron say it as clearly as George did:
"Tom Riddle is dead -- Harry Potter destroyed his diary, and there is nothing left of him in my sister, you batty old thing."
***
Ginny had known that Tom had a Muggle father -- he told her, early on, but later he explained to her that the rest of Hogwarts hadn't.
They were sitting on her bed with the curtains tightly drawn. Ginny, sitting with her legs crossed under her, her night's homework spread out on the covers all around, but Tom leaned forward and brushed them away, then put his hand on her cheek.
"When they sorted me into Slytherin, they told me it would be better if I never told anyone about my father." he had said and slid his palm back over her cheek so that he covered one of her ears. "There was a famous wizarding family back then called the Riddles. Bad-tempered, eccentric lot. Nobody ever asked; everyone assumed my mother had slept with one of them, and since I was illegitimate, nobody was surprised when they wouldn't take me."
A pause, and then Tom had leaned over close enough so that his lips were on her ear, so that his whisper was all she could hear. "I wanted to change my name when I came to Hogwarts, but Dumbledore convinced me not to. It would be marvelous if you didn't tell anyone -- can I convince you not to tell my secret, Ginny? Can I convince you to forget it?"
***
Back when they still lived at the Burrow, and when both of them were home for the hols, Ginny would wake up on the couch in the parlor, and she see Percy already sitting at the breakfast table. He would have the Prophet at one elbow, and the book he had stayed up late studying at the other, and Mrs. Weasley would bustle into the kitchen at that point and tell him to the table eventually to make room for his brothers at the table -- the kitchen in the Burrow was crowded, the table not quite big enough, and Mrs. Weasley would always pull his arm off the table, exclaiming how stained with ink it was from taking notes all night.
Percy would flush and look a little at Ginny then. She would remember how many times she heard Percy circling the room, how many more times she heard him practicing how to say "I love you" or trying out some sonnet for a recording charm than practicing a charm out of his books. How many times she heard him open the window and stick his head out, looking for Hermes,
Ginny would smile back, and Percy would flush a little harder, and they would both let their Mum go on thinking that Percy was staying up to study.
***
Sirius's memorial service is scheduled on a dry, hot sort of afternoon where the sun just makes it more unpleasant to be dressed in all black, and where the complete lack of remains to bury just makes things even sillier. The bowl of punch that they serve after the brief service is larger than the little plaque he gets in the ground -- Harry had, through Dumbledore, convinced the Ministry that Sirius would not have wanted his memorial plaque to be placed in the traditional Black plot, and they'd gotten a plot in another part of the wizarding cemetery in London entirely.
Ginny is wearing black gloves and a black dress, and she knows that she has dust stuck in her hair. Her parents are there, of course, and so is Harry, propped up between Ron and Hermione with his face very white. Bill has gotten the afternoon off from work to stand there, too, and the whole thing is surprisingly crowded given how the Ministry only issued its decree pardoning Black a day or two ago. But Fudge is up there now, clearing his throat and doing a very bad job of trying to defend Ministry policies. He keeps sticking his hands in his pockets at inopportune times and botching the speech so badly that every time he loses his place, a titter of laughter runs through the back of the crowd.
Percy is not there in the crowd waiting for Fudge to finish his speech: he has vanished from the newspapers, from the Ministry. The Prophet no longer makes mention of the position of Minister's Junior Assistant, and when Ginny squares up her shoulders and musters the courage to ask Fudge about it, not only does Fudge completely ignore her, but Mr. Weasley gently puts his hand on her shoulder and tells Ginny to go see if her mother wants her for something.
She tries to tug away to ask Fudge again, or maybe try Dumbledore, standing on the other side, but Arthur pats Ginny's cheek then, and Dumbledore asks his opinion about something, so he doesn't notice how his fingers accidentally slips back to touch Ginny's ear or how wide her eyes get then.
***
"You're not a traitor to your blood, are you?" Mrs. Black had crooned to Ginny the afternoon of Sirius's memorial service. It had been a formal affair, and they had all been dressed in black. Ginny had running back inside and up the stairs at the last moment because she forgot her gloves, and she had to pass Mrs. Black on the way in and up. "Not you," Mrs. Black had said. " You aren't a traitor to your blood -- I can see him in your blood, you know. Both my sons are dead, but I can see him living in you. He's growing in you. Getting stronger every day, and one day, he's going to burst out of you."
"Is it today?" Mrs. Black had said, leaning as far as she can out of her picture frame. "Is today the day?"
***
One of the things that Ginny can't quite understand about the idea of Muggle wireless sets is that they have more than one channel. Wizarding sets only get one station, the Wizarding Wireless Network, but Hermione has explained to her that Muggles have hundreds and hundreds of different networks, all broadcasting different things.
Ginny asked Hermione once what sort of things make people choose one station over the other, and Hermione had shrugged and explained that different stations played different music, had different sort of programs. One popular sort of thing to do to attract listeners, she had said, was to have announcements of birthdays. You would phone in and tell them the name and birthday of somebody, and they would set aside ten minutes or so a day to read out the names of all the people who had had friends call in to the wireless station.
Percy's birthday is July 12th, three days after Sirius's memorial service, and that afternoon, while she's lying on her stomach in the attic, Ginny goes through her box of personal possessions from the Burrow and cuts up one of her precious pictures of Percy. Her Mum used to keep a file of them, but Mrs. Weasley left that at the Burrow and hadn't been saving them while Percy had been in the newspapers. Ginny had gone through Mrs. Weasley's things in fact, hoping that her mother had illicitly cut some after the argument, but she hadn't been able to find any, and in the end, she has to cut up one of pictures of Percy taken the first summer that he found out that he was going to be a prefect at Hogwarts. She pastes it on one of the blank hands on the family clock up in the Grimmauld Place attic.
The wireless is up there in the attic with her. It's a wizarding wireless, and it starts to play "That Old Familiar Feeling" starts to play on the wireless as Ginny gets up to put her wand in the back of the clock and wind it up. The floorboards creak a little as she puts her weight on them, and for a sudden, dizzying moment, Ginny has to grit her teeth and will herself out of the fear that she is going to fall through them as she used to be afraid that Percy would, as she thinks he has and as she thinks her parents are willing to do.
Forgetfulness, deafness, blindness, Ginny has learned, are things to be fought. Snakes may be deaf, the Ministry may have been blind, and her family may be willfully forgetful, but fueled as much by the memory of her brother's footsteps over Burrow floorboards as the memory of her first year at Hogwarts, the thing rising in Ginny's blood is none of these. It burns away the old fears and the last parts of the eleven year old girl; it burns the last fragments of the diary bound in leather, and when the old Black clock lets out a resounding boom after it's been fully recharged from Ginny's wand, it makes a sound a sound completely different from the ones it used to make when it was wound by a Black. The matriarch in her frame of cobwebs and spite hears it - she shakes and trembles, and fears; she barely recognizes Ginny when she comes down the stairs into the main hallway, the sound of that bell still echoing in the air. The father in his office and the Dark Lord in his cave would do well to listen, too:
There is no heading for Forgotten on either the Weasley or the Black family clocks.
. . . I am one step from phallic wands and bracing menstrual magic here.
The day after I've been told by a kind soul that my twist-endings are nifty, I suddenly become unable to write them. Instead, this is twelve thousand character ramble on angstezzz and paaaane -- I originally wanted to be some sort of weird thing about Ginny and Tom, and then I realized that I'd written two thousand words of that not half a week ago, and oh, wait, another two thousand two days ago. So the plot sort of fell through, and I put this fic out of its misery. -_-
Spellchecked with Word's spellchecker which had to be taught to recognize "wizarding" and Weasley, and it corrected me on the spelling of marvelous. The Black wizarding clock, as well as the idea for Mrs. Black going quiet when Ginny walks in front of her picture, are stolen from truly marvelous marvolo.
"All you really need is your wand, but that key, that key you're holding in your hand was brought back from Europe," Mrs. Black says. The corners of her eyes crinkle up in pleasure. "Brought back by a special friend of mine."
Ginny looks down at it for a moment, then back up at the old dried face in front of her. There's a pause.
"Perhaps you have heard of him," Mrs. Black says. The smile on her mouth looks much the same as the one that's wrinkling the skin around her eyes, all moving skin and no touchable warmth.
"He was a schoolmate of mine," she says, smiling slyly. " You may have met him -- we called him Marvelous Tom."
***
In the attic of the Black House, Ginny finds a grandfather clock six feet tall and made out of black walnut. It has sphinxes carved on its feet, and when Ginny blows the dust off the brass face, she finds that instead of numerals, there are words like "At home," "At school." In fact, there are little pictures of Hogwarts and the Black house engraved on the face in surprising detail -- the street around the Black place actually looks a little different. There are a few faint lines as if a forest once stood behind the house where there are only other wizarding houses nowadays, and when Ginny peers around the back, she realizes that it's one of the old-fashioned wizarding clocks built before they figured out how to hook the mechanism of the clock into the ambient magical surroundings.
The one at the Burrow is like that. It's one of the newer types: it taps into the inherent magic of the countryside so that when Mrs. Weasley finished building it, she patted the cherry wood and said, fondly, that it would run forever on next to nothing. All they would have to do in order to keep it running was to live in a magical area and to have wizards living in the house with it. The magic that leaked off their household charms would be more than enough, and Ginny remembers how, this one morning while she was sitting at the breakfast table eating her fruit and oatmeal, the twins let off some sort of new magical bomb that they were working on that soaked the entire house magic, and the hands spun around madly for days before settling anywhere.
Ginny tries not to think what the clock at the Burrow is doing now that none of them are living there anymore. Her mother says that it takes years and years for the magic to completely leak out of a place that's been home to wizards as long as the Burrow has, but Ginny nevertheless finds herself lifting the old brass hands of the null position and turning them around the face with her fingertip.
****
Every time someone walks in front of Mrs. Black, she screams and howls blood traitor until the rafters are ringing, but what Ginny realizes is that Mrs. Black never raises a fuss when Ginny walks past. She'll howl if somebody is there along with Ginny, but the very first time that Ginny steps across the threshold, Mrs. Black halts in mid-scream. You could practically hear her gargle the words back in her throat. Every one else attributes it to the fact that Sirius shows up at the top of the stairs and starts shouting at her to shut up, but Ginny sees that those crazy yellow bat eyes of the woman are resting on her, Ginny, and not her son Sirius.
***
After her first year at Hogwarts, after the chamber, Ginny has never been quite comfortable sleeping in a completely silent room. It's not a problem during the term because you don't share a dorm room with six other girls without at least one snorer and somebody getting up to use the washroom every five minutes, so all she has to do is keep her curtains open a crack, and all the comfortable sounds of half a dozen other people breathing and moving and living send her off to sleep quickly.
It's somewhat harder during the summers. Ginny originally tried sleeping with her bedroom window open so that she could hear the crickets and the cicadas calling, but all that did was remind her that it was terribly dark outside her window -- dark like the periods when Tom would slide all the way into control of her consciousness, silent like those periods, and since there was only one wireless in the house, she would go down and turn it on, then curl up on the couch in the parlor next to the kitchen and fall asleep.
Percy was the only other Weasley who stayed up late: the twins dropped off to sleep quickly once Mrs. Weasley shut down their night-time experiments, and Ron had never head problems sleeping. Percy's room, though, was right above the parlor where Ginny slept to the late-night wireless, she would hear him walking around his room. A pause while he opened the window to let Hermes in, a creak when he stepped on an old floorboard and a phrase, maybe, read aloud from the summer reading that he was doing while everyone was asleep so that he would be at the top of his class in the summer. If Hermes was returning with a note from Penelope, Ginny would hear him open the window for the bird. It was enough so that sometimes, Ginny wouldn't have to turn on the wireless, and she could pretend that it was a normal sort of insomnia and not the kind caused by a fear of darkness, a fear of silence stemming from the fact that somebody who had lived in her brain and stolen her limbs for months. Tom had told her once, after all, that snakes were deaf, and certain kinds of snakes are blind.
The walls were thick in the Burrow, but the floors weren't, and Ginny would sometimes drift to sleep fancying that Percy was imminently on the verge of falling through the floorboards and landing on the couch next to her.
***
One morning, after the end of term, Ginny comes down the stairs once just in time to hear Ron shut up and stop shouting at Mrs. Black. George is with Ginny at the time, and he just sort of elbows her in the side and tells her that breakfast is ready in the kitchen and to come on if she wants some before Fred eats it all, and Ginny eventually blinks and follows him back, but she heard Ron say it as clearly as George did:
"Tom Riddle is dead -- Harry Potter destroyed his diary, and there is nothing left of him in my sister, you batty old thing."
***
Ginny had known that Tom had a Muggle father -- he told her, early on, but later he explained to her that the rest of Hogwarts hadn't.
They were sitting on her bed with the curtains tightly drawn. Ginny, sitting with her legs crossed under her, her night's homework spread out on the covers all around, but Tom leaned forward and brushed them away, then put his hand on her cheek.
"When they sorted me into Slytherin, they told me it would be better if I never told anyone about my father." he had said and slid his palm back over her cheek so that he covered one of her ears. "There was a famous wizarding family back then called the Riddles. Bad-tempered, eccentric lot. Nobody ever asked; everyone assumed my mother had slept with one of them, and since I was illegitimate, nobody was surprised when they wouldn't take me."
A pause, and then Tom had leaned over close enough so that his lips were on her ear, so that his whisper was all she could hear. "I wanted to change my name when I came to Hogwarts, but Dumbledore convinced me not to. It would be marvelous if you didn't tell anyone -- can I convince you not to tell my secret, Ginny? Can I convince you to forget it?"
***
Back when they still lived at the Burrow, and when both of them were home for the hols, Ginny would wake up on the couch in the parlor, and she see Percy already sitting at the breakfast table. He would have the Prophet at one elbow, and the book he had stayed up late studying at the other, and Mrs. Weasley would bustle into the kitchen at that point and tell him to the table eventually to make room for his brothers at the table -- the kitchen in the Burrow was crowded, the table not quite big enough, and Mrs. Weasley would always pull his arm off the table, exclaiming how stained with ink it was from taking notes all night.
Percy would flush and look a little at Ginny then. She would remember how many times she heard Percy circling the room, how many more times she heard him practicing how to say "I love you" or trying out some sonnet for a recording charm than practicing a charm out of his books. How many times she heard him open the window and stick his head out, looking for Hermes,
Ginny would smile back, and Percy would flush a little harder, and they would both let their Mum go on thinking that Percy was staying up to study.
***
Sirius's memorial service is scheduled on a dry, hot sort of afternoon where the sun just makes it more unpleasant to be dressed in all black, and where the complete lack of remains to bury just makes things even sillier. The bowl of punch that they serve after the brief service is larger than the little plaque he gets in the ground -- Harry had, through Dumbledore, convinced the Ministry that Sirius would not have wanted his memorial plaque to be placed in the traditional Black plot, and they'd gotten a plot in another part of the wizarding cemetery in London entirely.
Ginny is wearing black gloves and a black dress, and she knows that she has dust stuck in her hair. Her parents are there, of course, and so is Harry, propped up between Ron and Hermione with his face very white. Bill has gotten the afternoon off from work to stand there, too, and the whole thing is surprisingly crowded given how the Ministry only issued its decree pardoning Black a day or two ago. But Fudge is up there now, clearing his throat and doing a very bad job of trying to defend Ministry policies. He keeps sticking his hands in his pockets at inopportune times and botching the speech so badly that every time he loses his place, a titter of laughter runs through the back of the crowd.
Percy is not there in the crowd waiting for Fudge to finish his speech: he has vanished from the newspapers, from the Ministry. The Prophet no longer makes mention of the position of Minister's Junior Assistant, and when Ginny squares up her shoulders and musters the courage to ask Fudge about it, not only does Fudge completely ignore her, but Mr. Weasley gently puts his hand on her shoulder and tells Ginny to go see if her mother wants her for something.
She tries to tug away to ask Fudge again, or maybe try Dumbledore, standing on the other side, but Arthur pats Ginny's cheek then, and Dumbledore asks his opinion about something, so he doesn't notice how his fingers accidentally slips back to touch Ginny's ear or how wide her eyes get then.
***
"You're not a traitor to your blood, are you?" Mrs. Black had crooned to Ginny the afternoon of Sirius's memorial service. It had been a formal affair, and they had all been dressed in black. Ginny had running back inside and up the stairs at the last moment because she forgot her gloves, and she had to pass Mrs. Black on the way in and up. "Not you," Mrs. Black had said. " You aren't a traitor to your blood -- I can see him in your blood, you know. Both my sons are dead, but I can see him living in you. He's growing in you. Getting stronger every day, and one day, he's going to burst out of you."
"Is it today?" Mrs. Black had said, leaning as far as she can out of her picture frame. "Is today the day?"
***
One of the things that Ginny can't quite understand about the idea of Muggle wireless sets is that they have more than one channel. Wizarding sets only get one station, the Wizarding Wireless Network, but Hermione has explained to her that Muggles have hundreds and hundreds of different networks, all broadcasting different things.
Ginny asked Hermione once what sort of things make people choose one station over the other, and Hermione had shrugged and explained that different stations played different music, had different sort of programs. One popular sort of thing to do to attract listeners, she had said, was to have announcements of birthdays. You would phone in and tell them the name and birthday of somebody, and they would set aside ten minutes or so a day to read out the names of all the people who had had friends call in to the wireless station.
Percy's birthday is July 12th, three days after Sirius's memorial service, and that afternoon, while she's lying on her stomach in the attic, Ginny goes through her box of personal possessions from the Burrow and cuts up one of her precious pictures of Percy. Her Mum used to keep a file of them, but Mrs. Weasley left that at the Burrow and hadn't been saving them while Percy had been in the newspapers. Ginny had gone through Mrs. Weasley's things in fact, hoping that her mother had illicitly cut some after the argument, but she hadn't been able to find any, and in the end, she has to cut up one of pictures of Percy taken the first summer that he found out that he was going to be a prefect at Hogwarts. She pastes it on one of the blank hands on the family clock up in the Grimmauld Place attic.
The wireless is up there in the attic with her. It's a wizarding wireless, and it starts to play "That Old Familiar Feeling" starts to play on the wireless as Ginny gets up to put her wand in the back of the clock and wind it up. The floorboards creak a little as she puts her weight on them, and for a sudden, dizzying moment, Ginny has to grit her teeth and will herself out of the fear that she is going to fall through them as she used to be afraid that Percy would, as she thinks he has and as she thinks her parents are willing to do.
Forgetfulness, deafness, blindness, Ginny has learned, are things to be fought. Snakes may be deaf, the Ministry may have been blind, and her family may be willfully forgetful, but fueled as much by the memory of her brother's footsteps over Burrow floorboards as the memory of her first year at Hogwarts, the thing rising in Ginny's blood is none of these. It burns away the old fears and the last parts of the eleven year old girl; it burns the last fragments of the diary bound in leather, and when the old Black clock lets out a resounding boom after it's been fully recharged from Ginny's wand, it makes a sound a sound completely different from the ones it used to make when it was wound by a Black. The matriarch in her frame of cobwebs and spite hears it - she shakes and trembles, and fears; she barely recognizes Ginny when she comes down the stairs into the main hallway, the sound of that bell still echoing in the air. The father in his office and the Dark Lord in his cave would do well to listen, too:
There is no heading for Forgotten on either the Weasley or the Black family clocks.
. . . I am one step from phallic wands and bracing menstrual magic here.
The day after I've been told by a kind soul that my twist-endings are nifty, I suddenly become unable to write them. Instead, this is twelve thousand character ramble on angstezzz and paaaane -- I originally wanted to be some sort of weird thing about Ginny and Tom, and then I realized that I'd written two thousand words of that not half a week ago, and oh, wait, another two thousand two days ago. So the plot sort of fell through, and I put this fic out of its misery. -_-
Spellchecked with Word's spellchecker which had to be taught to recognize "wizarding" and Weasley, and it corrected me on the spelling of marvelous. The Black wizarding clock, as well as the idea for Mrs. Black going quiet when Ginny walks in front of her picture, are stolen from truly marvelous marvolo.