The Very Thought of You

Ginny is bright, and clever and giddy; not wise like her father, or measured like Bill, or intellectual like Percy, but she sees and understands enough to catch on quickly in any given situation. She's also clever enough to hide it, rather than endure the teasing Hermione goes through, and the endless questions as to why she's not in Ravenclaw.

Tom is knowing and intelligent and capable, and he doesn't make her feel like a little girl any more. He listens to her and takes what she says at face value, and she knows he's probably lying when he says he cares - but that doesn't matter, because no-one else has gone to the trouble of lying to her before.

He says that when he's King, he'll make her his Queen, and shower her with Valentines. She believes him because she wants to, and when Harry wakes her from her sleep (not with a kiss, no, but then he has killed her Prince and this fairytale is dead) it makes good political sense to say she doesn't know a thing, and can't remember the feel of blood, warm and slick, on her skin.

A few years later, Harry asks her out of the blue if she misses him, and she merely arches an eyebrow and wonders, "Why? Do you?" When Harry leaves without a word, she keeps the smile deep inside, for Ginny is bright and clever and giddy, and almost believes her own lies.

---

The war is over and Harry wins, because everyone knows he will. Voldemort is cast to the four winds and that name is free to be spoken, both in fear and in jest. Harry comes back from the war, reticent and shy, a little solemn, a little quiet, with wide, searching eyes.

He cuts himself away from most of his old friends, and they wait and worry, wringing their hands, and pretend to understand. Much is said about trauma, and therapy, and just being there (for them more than him, really), but Harry politely refuses all requests for company and says he doesn't want to talk about it. The legacy of history can wait; he won, that's all that matters, and the details aren't important.

He asks Ginny out two years after she finishes at Hogwarts, and soon she is seen on his arm at all the right functions and society dinners as Harry starts making good on his money and his fame. A year passes, and they marry; it is a dignified ceremony in a small chapel in Cornwall that Harry picked just for the occasion, all crumbling stone and roaming moss. Harry looks resplendent in a tux, Ginny clad all in white (even if her virginity is a thing of the past), and the good papers and the bad send photographers. The Quibbler writes it up as a foul plot on behalf of the Patagonian Pod people to infiltrate high society and steal all the dessert knives for some fiendish scheme, and Ginny writes a letter off to Luna reminding her to take her pills.

When Harry is nominated as Minister of Magic, he accepts the nomination and the world lets out a little sigh, expecting him to come back to his old, familiar self. He does start to socialise again, but he's still distant, still alone in a crowd of people, with the hint of a smile on his lips and the knowledge of a joke that only he gets. Ginny is ever the willing and attentive wife, and Harry the generous, warm-hearted husband: the war hero with a secret burden, a diplomat, a scholar, a politician with the soul of a poet. His reforms are applauded, needed and politically astute, and his father-in-law, Arthur Weasley can't say a word against some of the provisions. Besides, Arthur is getting grey, and he's been Vice Minister for so long that people assume he's going to die there. Arthur has people's respect, but not their sympathy, and so anything he might say would be dismissed at any rate. He knows this, and so does his daughter.

In bed, Harry fucks her so hard she thinks she might break, and the one night she cries out "Tom!" when she comes, nails digging into his back, he beats her until she's black and blue as a reminder that they're not supposed to use that name, even if it's true.

Fortunately, her husband is kind and considerate, and heals the skin so there's nary a blemish, and all the remembered pain is just that - remembered, in her head, her nerves set and fixed by it as if they don't want to let go of its ghost.

Harry smiles, and cradles her in his arms. "My princess," he calls her, before laying a chaste kiss on her lips, and reaches for the cane that lies across the bedside dresser. He whispers into her skin the tale of the cane's making, and how Lucius Malfoy bound a part of his soul into it. The cool metal tongue of the snake slides against Ginny's skin and she shivers. The Minister is allowed to do things at his discretion, and after the eventual execution of the Malfoy family for crimes against the state (which he signed soon after coming into office, and publicly told of the heavy heart such a decision gave him) all their property was annexed by the state.

Everything Tom promised has come true, and as her husband hits her for the first time - but not the last - Ginny knows that she will have to be a very good girl to keep what she has gained.