DirtCatharsis

Chapter 8

As she entered the circle of witchlight and drums, something happened to Ginny. Whatever rumbled awake inside her when she made her speech in the tunnel now swelled forth and burst out of her as if she'd cast a dozen spells at the same time. She threw her head back and took a deep breath. Then, she let out a mighty, ululating yell that echoed over the music and over the trees. Into that yell, she put all the grief and fury of an eleven-year-old girl who'd made her first friend, and discovered that his betrayal went so deep she'd never be without the scar. All the hate she held for Tom Riddle, she poured into the leap that took her high into the air and brought her back down, the impact shock of her feet hitting mud sending up a splash that coated her legs and sent pain shooting up all the way to her hip joints.

She flung herself down in the mud and rolled in it, letting the cool, wet mud slide over her skin and strip her to her prehistoric core. She let out the inner cave-Ginny that wanted to howl and screech and stomp in the torchlight because it was the only thing that would truly drive away the darkness. She picked up a double handful of mud and flung it in the air, howling like a banshee. "Gods damn you Tom Riddle!"

And she discovered she had company. Pansy Parkinson ran mud-caked fingers down her cheeks. "I am beautiful," she cried.

"Yes, you are," Padma Patil said, and promptly dumped a blob of mud square on Pansy's head.

"I am more than the sum of my parents," Blaise Zabini took a running start, skidding face first through a long slough of mud until she came to a stop at Susan Bones's feet. "And I admire Hufflepuffs, too."

All around her, her classmates cried out their rage and pain. "I miss you, Cedric!" "I hate my body!" "Why won't Douglas notice me?" "Why won't Professor Snape?" At that one, Ginny saw an alarmed look flit across Hermione's face. Mud flew in all directions with wet, sqooshy plops and half-liquid dribbles. It caked under Ginny's fingernails and soaked through her thin clothing.

Hermione still hadn't said anything, and her white, un-muddied clothes stood out in stark relief against the night. Ginny slipped and slid her way over to her friend. "'Mione?"

Tears glistened in Hermione's eyes, yet they didn't spill over.

"Hermione," Ginny said. "You've got to let it out or it'll break you down."

"We've started an avalanche," Hermione said. "Someone has to keep it under control."

"No!" she said. "That's the thing about avalanches. They're forces of nature. You can't control them. The only thing you can do is ride the wave, otherwise it'll suck you under."

"But I--I'm not sure I know how."

Ginny took her friend's hand in her own muddy one. Through the past six years, Ron had raged, Harry had stormed or been stormed upon, but it was Hermione who anchored them, taking refuge in her books, keeping the other two in check with research. She saw what they could not, provided them with a perspective that encompassed more than they could see. But that meant she had to hold herself apart, keep whatever it was that chewed pieces out of her soul tamped down, at the price of not being able to fall apart herself.

Letting go was not Hermione's role. But this, Ginny could do for her friend. With a mighty whack between Hermione's shoulder blades, she sent her friend sprawling face down into the mud. A shocked cry erupted from her and she flipped over onto her back. "What--?"

Ginny kicked mud at her. "Say it," she said. "Let it out. We're only safe in the circle if we're all in the mud. You can't hold yourself away any longer. It's not fair to them, it's not fair to us, and it's not fair to you."

Tears began to fall down Hermione's face, tracing pale streaks through the mud on her cheeks. She began to rock back and forth, Ginny's words ringing in her head. All around her, the other girls were shouting. Some were crying, but for others, their tears had turned to laughter. She tried to look outside of the circle, but it was as if there were some barrier between the glowing orbs of witchlight preventing her from seeing anything but dark mist.

This is our last hurrah, our last impulsive, childish thing. Tomorrow there will be consequences. If not tomorrow, then next week, or we might be lucky enough to last out the month. The war is starting out there, and it's coming here and my two best friends are in the middle of it and so am I and why is it only us who can stop him? Damn it all to hell and gone--I want my bloody May Day Dance in a pretty gown and maybe a kiss in the rose garden before I have to worry about whose funeral I have to go to first.

Her limbs shook violently now and she couldn't keep a great, anguished sob from rolling out of her throat like thunder from a stormcloud, and she let out a harsh, guttural scream, and it seemed like she'd scream forever, never stopping for even breath, until she died. Until she rotted, and became part of the mud itself and the scream would go on and on forever. She jammed the heels of her hands against her closed eyelids and cursed Voldemort and the war. She cried for Lily and James Potter, whom she'd never known, and Sirius Black, who'd lost thirteen years of his life in Azkaban prison, then lost any chance of clearing his name thanks to a cousin. For beloved, clueless Ron, who'd suffered more betrayal than he'd let on at the hands of a pet, and who would die for Harry, and she cried because he still might yet. She cried for Ginny, for not having seen the younger girl's desperate and unholy attachment to the diary of a madman. She cried for herself, as she and her best friends had learned that the safety of childhood is an illusion. That the adults around them--even all-knowing Dumbledore--would fail them--were failing them one by one until they were left to stand alone, and her greatest fear was that they would fail each other and themselves, then all would fall.

She became aware of hands reaching out to her, the other girls clustered around her. Hands stroked her hair, stripping thick clumps of mud out of it. Other hands scooped up mud and dumped it back in. She opened her eyes and met Ginny's amber ones.

"It's all right now, love," Ginny said. "The circle's complete, and Blaise Zabini is making mud dreadlocks out of your hair."

Blaise's face appeared around her shoulder. "I thought you might like the Rastafarian look," she said, her ocean-colored eyes standing out in bright relief to her mud-darkened skin.

Just as suddenly as she'd cried, Hermione found herself laughing, nearly hysterically. She felt as if a great weight had rolled off her chest. Tomorrow would still come. People would still die and they would all be tested under greater stress than they'd ever known.

But for now, it was a warm night. The mud felt pleasantly squishy between her bare toes, and she and the other girls--her sisters--had a pack of boys to wake up.

She accepted Blaise and Ginny's hands to help her up, even though it took them a few tries to all get to their feet in the slippery mud. She fumbled for, and found, her wand. "Crescendo!" She pointed at the radio.

The music swelled. "The boys have to be blind, deaf, and stupid to miss this," she yelled to Blaise.

"Don't underestimate them," Blaise yelled back.

Hannah and crew pointed at the witchlights and removed the protections around them, causing them to flare up.

"Come on, girls!" Eva Morales slid over and elbowed Hannah. "Let's play dirty."

One by one, the figures on the beach dropped the dragnets and turned towards the circle of lights in the mudflat. As the boys approached the circle of light, she saw Neville Longbottom's and Justin Finch-Fletchley's jaws working soundlessly, boggled looks on both of their faces.

Pure, devilish joy burst through Ginny. Now that the anger and rage had spent itself, she had room for it. She embraced it, reveled in it. She scooped up a handful of mud and looked around. "Parkinson!"

Ahead of her, Hermione and Blaise Zabini had their arms wrapped around each other and were laughing helplessly, breathlessly as they rolled over and over each other in the mud. Good, she thought, they've got the idea.

Hannah and Eva had started a mudball fight that escalated into a battle of water with wands. After judging them too clean, Millicent joined them and together, the smaller girls tackled her.

Pansy appeared beside her. Without hesitation, she pulled at the elastic waistband of Ginny's shorts and dropped a handful of mud down the backs of them. Ginny shrieked and gave chase. As she flung herself onto Pansy, she spied a shock of pale hair nearby.

"Is he watching?" she asked Pansy.

"Wait--bloody hell, I don't effing believe it!" Pansy sagged underneath her.

She stole a glance outside the circle. "Oh, Merlin's arse crack already. Don't those two ever give up?"

Just about every boy in detention gathered around the circle and watched, amazed, at the massive mudfight of female bodies. All but a handful--Ron Weasley, Adrian Pucey, Harry Potter, and Draco Malfoy. The latter two being too busy tossing punches at each other to notice that Blaise nearly had Hermione's shirt off, or that there were literally dozens of nearly-naked women wrestling with each other barely a stone's throw away from them.

* * *

The music had gotten steadily louder, and even the busiest of the detainees had abandoned their tasks. Even Colin Creevey, who'd have gleefully whistled "God Save the Queen" while doing it if Harry had asked him to walk to Hell, had temporarily abandoned his post as Harry's number one fan and was staring, slack-jawed, at the spectacle before them.

Pucey bobbed his head in time with the beat. "That's Muggle club music. My older brothers sneak into Muggle clubs in Soho. They took me with them once last summer. There were girls dancing in cages with high boots and short skirts and little tiny jumpers that showed their navels. It was the best night of my summer."

Having had a taste of Muggle clothing from close association with Harry and Hermione, Ron nodded sagely. Pureblood wizarding families were always scandalized at the outrageousness and brevity of Muggle clothing. Of course, whatever the girls were wearing in the circle of light would be considered underdressed even by Muggle standards. He stared down at his best friend and his worst enemy, so engrossed in their feud that they excluded the whole world around them, and Ron felt like he was just waking from a dream. All of a sudden, he remembered that he was nearly eighteen. So was Pucey. So was Harry, and bloody hell, even Malfoy.

As if reading his mind, Pucey mumbled. "When was the last time any of us thought about something that wasn't life-and-death important? Something as stupid as 'I wonder what color are her knickers?' "

"Bugger if I know," Ron said. He looked up at the dark sky. Thick clouds scuttled across the inky dome, occasionally letting the moon peek through. Warm, wet wind slapped at his cheeks. He looked over at the girls in the circle. The glowing witchlights backlit the feminine forms jumping and dancing in the mud. "I'm not a betting man, but I reckon none of them are even wearing knickers." Suddenly, he wanted the question of their knickers to be the most important thing in his life.

A flash of dull red caught his eye and his stomach flip-flopped. "Bugger! That's my sister!" He moved towards the circle of light.

Pucey was right next to him. "Steady on, Weasley."

"But it's Ginny!" He reached out a hand to the circle. Lavender sparks danced along his fingertips, stinging him with nasty little shocks. "Bloody hell!" He yanked his hand back and shook it.

"It's warded," Pucey said.

"D'you think?" Ron retorted, still shaking his fingers. Bollocks but his brothers would have his arse in a sling if they found out he'd let Ginny participate in this--mud-wrestling stomp dance or whatever the bloody hell it was.

Pucey clapped him on the shoulder. "See there," he said. "They're the sixth and seventh year classes of all the houses. Your sister's got a right to participate with her housemates."

Ron stood stock-still and just waited for the fine trembling in his body to settle. Hadn't Ginny, just the other day, knocked a bludger at him at Quidditch practice for refusing to let her be? But wasn't he her brother, and honor-bound to keep her safe?

It's this night, he realized. The whole night is bizarre--what's one more thing? Tomorrow, he could go back to being the overprotective big brother, but tonight was a night for weirdness, and he had a feeling it was bound to get weirder.

He raised one booted foot and kicked sideways, breaking the mutual chokehold between Harry and Draco. "Oi! Harry. Quit dancing with Malfoy and have a look at this." He automatically reached down, searched for, and found Harry's glasses with the practiced ease of a lieutenant who'd performed this same function a dozen times before. He then pulled Harry off of Draco and set the shorter boy hard on his feet.

"Sod off, Weasley," Draco said, sitting up. "Potter and I have unfinished--"

"Malfoy," Ron cut him off with the most shocking words he could think of. "I take back everything I ever said about you."

"You--I--what?" Draco sputtered.

"Huh?" said Harry.

Adrian Pucey held his hand out to Draco and pulled him up. With a violent jerk, he pulled Draco closer to the circle of light. Ron followed with Harry, shrugging at his friend's look. "It was the only thing I could think to say that would guarantee to shut him up."

Harry and Draco continued to cast evil looks at each other until, with a shared rolling of the eyes, Ron and Pucey physically turned their heads towards the circle. Ron unfolded Harry's glasses and put them on his face. Beside him, Pucey was pointing Draco in the same direction. They could have been negative images of each other as the reality of their situation registered on their faces, and the first cooperative move ever made by Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy was a synchronous dropping of the jaws.

All around them, the other boys were crowding closer to the circle. "Look, there's one of the Patil twins!" "Hullo, is that Mandy Brocklehurst?" "Bulstrode? I'd no idea she was hiding such a great pair of--"

Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived and Was Never Allowed to Forget It, surged forward. "There must be something wrong with them," he said.

"Or something very right," Pucey said.

Harry stared at Pucey, then turned to Ron. "But isn't that--with Blaise Zabini--Hermione?"

Ron nodded.

"And--and Ginny! Your little sister Ginny is there and she's getting--er, no, I think she's holding her own--but--"

Ron sighed. "Harry, you don't know how badly I'd love to go in there right now."

"Me, too!" Seamus Finnegan shouted.

Ron whipped his head around and glared at Finnegan. "To rescue my sister," he said pointedly, then turned back to Harry. "But there's a ward around them. They don't want us involved."

"But what the bloody hell are they all doing?"

Beside him, Malfoy had tilted his head all the way to the side and focused on a pair of girls rolling around in the mud at the edge of the circle. He couldn't tell if they were laughing like loons or screeching like banshees, but he recognized Pansy's voice and made a move to help her.

"Whoa, there, Malfoy." Ron Weasley's hand on the back of his robes drew him up short. He turned around, fully ready to shove his wand and an Imperius curse straight up Weasley's nose if he had to.

The taller boy dodged him neatly. "Don't interfere with them," he said, jerking his chin in the direction of the circle.

"Bugger that," Draco said. "I'll not let that cow hurt one of my housemates!"

Ron rolled his eyes. "I ought to let you try it for calling my sister a cow, but I don't fancy us all being turned into squid chum because of your stupidity. Can't you feel the wards around them?"

His inbred hatred of anything Weasley had temporarily obfuscated the crawling sense of magic that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. Adrian clapped him on the shoulder. "Relax, mate. Just enjoy the show."

Draco blinked several times and wiped sweat out of his eyes. The Muggle music was making his eyes water with its obnoxiously driving beat. He saw Pansy throw back her head and wiggle out from under--oh, right--Ginny Weasley. Weasley must've let her go, because he remembered the other night when she'd tackled him, and Pansy's petite form was no match for those long, strong legs of Ginny's. He'd had a hard time himself getting her off--

Draco suddenly felt as if a bucket of cold water had just been levitated above his head, then unceremoniously flipped over, so that its icy contents all landed right on the back of his neck, where the shock took no time at all to travel up and freeze his brain while simultaneously waking up every other part of his body to full-contact awareness.

The events of the Gryffindor dorm raid of the other night came crashing back to him. Ginny Weasley hitting him solidly in the middle. Going down hard on the floor. Her legs--Merlin! Those long, strong legs of hers pinning him to the ground until he'd managed to get the upper hand. Even of the faint scent of lemons rising from the russet masses of her hair as he rescued Julius from his would-be nest. He remembered the feel of her hips, of the warmth that radiated from her body as he straddled her.

"Balls," he said, to no one in particular. He remembered every single second of the tower raid, including and especially his embarrassing lack of awareness of Ginny Weasley as not a Weasley, not a Gryffindor, but as a woman. "Balls, balls, balls," he repeated, wondering if his own had, in fact, packed up and gone on holiday in Portugal without him. Serve him right if they did. "Pucey," he said, a sharp note of command in his voice.

"Malfoy," Pucey replied mildly.

"How long has it been since any of us gadded about with the girls?"

"Ages."

"Blo--feckit--why?"

"Age-related stress." Ron Weasley answered for him.

"I didn't ask you."

"I answered anyway," Weasley said.

"Hang on," Potter said. "What's our age got to do with stress?"

"We're seventeen," Ron said. "Why are we constantly acting like adults?"

"That's easy," Harry said acidly, "Because we all have a very near future that prominently features a murderous Dark Lord who'd like nothing better than to turn us all into clouds of green light? Except for you, Malfoy."

Draco, dripping mental cold water from his numbed brain, couldn't seem to summon the habitual anger over that. "He's the Dark Lord, Potter--d'you think he plans on taking me to EuroDisney?"

Harry raked an agitated hand through his hair. "He might."

Weasley snorted. "Fred and George are sure that's where his evil headquarters is located."

"There you are," Harry said.

Ron shook his head. "You're looking, Harry, but you're not seeing. Maybe it's because you never had one to miss, what with growing up with the Dursleys and all, but I did have a childhood. It was fun and carefree, and Merlin, do I miss it sometimes. Hogwarts was supposed to be seven more years of it."

"And instead you got me," Harry said dejectedly. "And at least one too-close brush with death every year. Ron I--"

"Don't you dare apologize, Harry Potter," Ron said, anger cutting through his voice. "I don't blame you for any of this. I blame the adults who put us in this position. The adults who couldn't wait to either call forth their champion or set out to kill their enemy." His voice rose as he looked at Malfoy and Pucey, and at the other boys nearby who'd turned to look at what the ruckus was. "The adults who didn't let you have a childhood. It's them I'm blaming for all this, and it's them I want to say 'sod it' to."

Harry's mind called up Albus Dumbledore, Cornelius Fudge, Lucius Malfoy, Voldemort, and any Death Eaters that happened by. He suddenly saw what Ron was trying to say. He was sick of the games, of the half-shadowed plots and manipulations, the secrecy, the sense of unfolding destiny happening to him, and his only permitted action being a reaction set in motion by the actions of others.

But he was seventeen years old. What could he do that could really matter in the decades-long machinations and plots of those so much wiser and subtler than a single teenager from Surrey?

The answer came to him with a kind of quiet peace that slipped unnoticed into the back of the room while his conscious mind blathered on, and waited for him to shut up and look around. And there it was. The only thing he could do was the only thing he knew how to do.

He was seventeen. The only thing he could do was to act seventeen.

"Look at them, Ron," he said softly. "I think it might be one of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen in my life."

"Now the young grasshopper sees," Pucey deadpanned.

"We've all been bloody stupid, haven't we?" Seamus Finnegan said.

Draco shook his head, most of his attention still on Ginny Weasley. She rose to her feet and pulled Pansy up with her. "We've done what needed doing," he said, his glance flicking to Potter.

Harry's eyes met his and they sized each other up for a long minute. Harry said quietly, "It'll matter tomorrow, Malfoy."

Draco nodded. "Yes. It'll matter tomorrow. But tonight matters now."

Harry nodded along with him, and while he wasn't about to join the Boy Who Lived's fan meetings anytime soon, for now, they had an Understanding.

* * *