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evesaintyves · 11 months

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i wrote a hinny "micro"fic inspired by today's @hinnymicrofic prompt, august 5th - dementor. it is not really a microfic (not even close), sorry.

You can read it here on AO3 if you prefer.

warning for mild sexual content.

1999, october

Ginny's tried baking chocolate brownies and chocolate silk tarts; she's not great at it, everything she makes comes out looking like the surface of the moon, all hard and cratery, and none of it seems to cheer him up: he's still standing in the shower til the water's long gone cold; she comes home and he's sitting on the sofa in the dark like he didn't notice the sun went down. After a couple of weeks he asks her to stop.

"I'm stuffing chocolate in my face all day at work," he says. "Getting a bit sick of it, actually."

So she makes curries, and stir-fry, and a mushy attempt at her mother's lamb stew, but he pushes them all around on his plate until they're cold and scrapes them into the bin.

"Sorry," he says, and it's like a thump to the chest from a bludger.

He's been stationed at Azkaban. The Aurors have driven all the old guards away with a squadron of patronuses; Harry said they lit the rough sea so brightly that he could see the rotted hull of an old shipwreck on the rocks just under the water, for a moment, before they chased the dementors off into the sky. But the nasty things keep coming back, sometimes one and sometimes dozens, in sieges that last for days. It's delayed the workers fixing up the bars, modernising the plumbing, righting all the toppled-over headstones in the cemetery.

"Kingsley's got this theory," Harry explains, sitting on the edge of the sofa in a way that suggests he's going to get up any moment, "that all the—what happened there left a sort of residue, and they like it."

So Harry's been there, in the residue, sitting on his broomstick in battering wind and waves that crash with such force that their spray reaches up the highest tower and grabs at the parapets on the top. Casting his patronus over and over while dementors curl through the air around him like clouds of black smoke.

That's how she imagines it.

"So you're just thinking of me all day," she teases him, and he laughs without smiling, without touching her, and then gets up to oil his broomstick.

That night she gets into bed naked and still all damp from her shower, and he crawls on top of her right away, lips on the rim of her ear. Then tongue on her collarbone. She digs her fingers into the muscles of his back, closes her eyes, and imagines that she's taking all the dead things the dementors must dig up in him, sequestering them inside herself where they can't hurt him anymore.

But when it's over he's quiet again and keeps to his side of the bed.

"Do you still hear your mum and dad?" she whispers after she's caught her breath.

His back is turned and she's not sure he's awake until he answers, "No. Not really anymore."

"What is it, then?"

He rolls over and looks at her with the blankets pulled up over his mouth and nose.

"A few different things," he says.

The next afternoon she tries to keep busy, but she keeps thinking about those eyes, colorless in the dark bedroom and full of something she doesn't quite understand. She's immediately embarrassed but she can't help herself: she conjures a patronus of her own and sends it to him, no message, just her nimble silver mare galloping toward him across the sea.

When he gets home, he tells her (with his hands in his pockets and his eyebrows squirming) that he'd rather she not do that again.

"It's just distracting," he mutters.

That night in their bed all his little kisses are like apologies on her skin—or so she imagines. They're soft and deliberate and he's quiet the whole time.

"If you met a dementor tonight," he asks her afterward, still catching his breath, "would you still hear Tom?"

"No," she says instantly, and squeezes her eyes shut. Fred's staring eyes show up in the dark, and so do Harry's skinny legs hanging over Hagrid's elbow, but she's not sure if it'd be either of those things.

When she opens her eyes he's still looking at her, waiting.

"It wasn't even that I heard him," she says. "It was that I felt…"

All of that desperate, humiliating love she'd had for him, her only friend, author of those kindnesses that had faithfully scrawled themselves across the pages whenever she needed them, who had understood things about her that she hadn't even known about herself, who had seen her silly little heart and told her that it was beautiful. All that had gushed from her and out into the train compartment and into the ink-black maw of the dementor and she'd been so terrified and so ashamed that it had still been inside her all this time.

She doesn't say that. Eventually he falls asleep.

All that week it rains, a miserable rain that isn't really trying, just drizzling off and on interminably, and she can't stop thinking of him out there in the middle of the sea. Grey above, grey below. Hunched on his broom, wand outstretched, wringing out drops of happiness from some memory of a summer day with her—maybe. The awful truth is that she just doesn't know what it's like out there.

"So," she blurts out, when he's just coming home and stripping off his uniform robes, "are you just going to slink around like a kicked kneazle and not talk to me?"

He's frozen with his robes pulled over his head. They muffle his voice.

"Talk about what?"

"About—" she realises she's raised her voice and brings it down. "—all this we've been going through."

He frees himself and takes a minute straightening his uniform over the coat hook. When he looks up at her, he seems genuinely baffled.

"Have we been going through something?"

She just walks off and turns on the shower. She doesn't even know what to say.

She goes to bed in pyjamas. He puts out the lamp with a mumbled goodnight. The house is empty when she wakes up, disoriented in the feeble light and the rain drumming, and she feels like she must have heard something, like someone's in the house. She slips her wand off the bedside table, silently, and sets her bare feet on the floor.

The Patronus walks right through the closed bedroom door.

It ducks its antlers under the ceiling fan, which surprises a chuckle out of her, and comes up to nuzzle its face against her temple. It can't touch her, she doesn't feel it, but all the hairs there prickle and stand up, electrified with its presence. She brings a hand to the side of its long face and strokes the air.

"Hi," she breathes.

#hinny #harry x ginny #ginny weasley #harry james potter

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