'Till I Wake Your Ghost

(and then)

There is ink in her veins.

Ginny dreams of pushing a boulder up mountains, finger-worn grooves in pockmarked and sun-warm stone the only mark she leaves behind. Gritty almost-sand covers the path up, skidding down in slides over her bare feet. It might be a desert. Her face burns in the white-hot light and shade only comes when forward becomes vertical.

Over and over again. Leaning in, she hears the metronome of her panting breaths. Ginny thinks she's wearing a dress, something starched and lacy with a white pinafore. Her fingers leave red streaks when she wipes her hands dry. You can tell it's a dream because time flows differently; she doesn't follow the boulder down, and never thinks to stop it from moving. Instead she watches it roll, its progress bouncing thunderous off the mountainside, and blinks herself back to the beginning again.

Ginny thinks, upon waking, that surely she can't be that boring. Even her dreams tell only one story; even asleep she wants miracles.

Potions gets more interesting in Fourth Year, because Ginny finally understands how fragments (tail, liver, eyes and heart) can become something else entirely, can merge into a greater whole. You follow the pattern: you stir until sweat stings your dry lips, you add and repeat, add and repeat, and then you wait. Sometimes the liquid in the cauldron is thick and violent red; the spoon remains upright when you let it go. Sometimes it's black, sheer with an oily surface reflecting the shapes of your fingers as you dip in the phial.

Her Potions book states that Polyjuice Potion "only creates an illusion of a new form; even the drinker sees the desired body. Yet the effects are visual rather than literal, which is what makes the Polyjuice the most desied type of temporary shape-altering potions; for the user experiences his natural bodily functions, such as perception of one's height, thereby maintaining equilibrium. Essentially a drinker of Polyjuice will feel himself and look like another."

(and then)

Ginny dreams past mountains and sand into wind and darkness, swallowing the moment. Ginny remembers things she shouldn't know about the people in a circle around her; (Nott, Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle) their faces are old and young all at once and she thinks they should be masked, but that's not how this story goes.

Ginny dreams of being tied to a stake, old wood dry and prickling against her back. Ginny thinks she's wearing a dress, something old and stained with slashes across her sides. Twisting her numb hands in the worn rope circling her stomach and wrists, she remembers pinpricks and dunkings. Smell of salt-water in the remaining clumps of new brick-colored hair. The flames spark green where they trace her outline.

Over and over again. Her hair ignites and her nails drop off, edges charring like paper and revealing him underneath. Her body is his costume. Then there will be a festival, meat and drink and blood down virgin thighs. Ashes, in urns and on foreheads. An essential part of the Valorias Potion, that which can transfer unwilling life. Smoke circles slithering into the night sky. Surrounded by voices, straw (for kindling the winter's been cold) scraping at her ankles and Ginny's toes curl into the cold stone she's planted on.

She screams every time.

Ginny takes longer showers now, but her hair always smells like smoke. She uses the sea salt scrub her mother gave her for Christmas, rubbing it into a washcloth and down her arms and legs. It feels like Crookshanks' tongue, the one time he sat in her lap by the fire: speckled roughness licking the edges away, (hair, nail, skin and heart) clogging the drain. Skin red all day, she rubs away the itch of a quill.

Ginny used to write notes on her hands, reminders about homework and exams. She told Percy once that at least this way she wouldn't forget it; it's not like you could lose your own body. But ink bleeds into her pores now, the lacework of her surface blurring into webs of color. Ginny thinks he's writing essays while she dreams, and they fade in the morning light.

Arithmancy isn't difficult, and she's glad Hermione told her to take it instead of Divination or Muggle Studies (you're quite smart Ginny use your gifts) because it makes sense: "the amount of magic in the universe is constant." Of course it is, and there are "balanced and unbalanced flows" of magic, working in "turbulent layers."

Still, Professor Vector often says that "the formulas have been established by experimental data," which means that nothing is sure, nothing is certain, and maybe there is a way to end up with more than you started with, as long as the "equations take into account what substances are involved in the reaction and how much of each is involved in the reaction."

Ginny wants to tell Harry, who's been looking so worried, and there are whispers of nightmares and screaming, about the balance of power in magic. At first, you think both sides have to add up evenly. Hermione loves that, the safety of always-matching numbers. But Ginny's reading ahead, so she knows that Dark Magic depends on unbalanced forces, Imperius, Cruciatus, equations taking all the power to one side.

The Daily Prophet still whispers about Parseltongue and dead chickens, but what they mean is children with unexplained connections to darkness, children who should have died, who came back...more. Too many substances interacting for a "neutralization reaction." Ginny finds it interesting that "unbalanced equations are sometimes called skeleton equations." She wonders who named them.

(and then)

After the burning comes the making.

She dreams of waking and hiding and seeking his ghost, and life becomes a dream of empty Hogwarts corridors, old armor and secret passwords she isn't supposed to know. Clothes tighten around her arms and chest, (like a blaze across my nightgown) she tears them away and finds black robes, thick and smothering. A prefect badge. A mirror that tells secrets, but never to him. Ginny tells the mirror what she wants, but the voice isn't hers. Your wish is granted; forget about the monkey's paw and the axe tearing open the wolf's stomach.

She feels large feet pounding down marble steps, the knobs of her spine groaning as they poke a pattern of ridges and grooves down her back. Bones lengthen, (head, shoulders, knees and toes) cracks of marrow splitting and re-forming. His neck is bare and fragile, and she can tuck fingers beneath her collarbones and pull.inny tastes air made of cigarette smoke, acrid like licorice and burnt peanuts.

When she brings long and knotted fingers to her face, Ginny can feel paper-thin skin, mottled with scars, but in the mirror she sees youth, slick fine hair drawing a point down over her forehead to an unwrinkled cheek. She likes the lack of freckles, the strength of her tooth-filled jawbone; their ridges feel like mountains, a line through his molars like a trail carved twisty from rivers and tongues. He's inscribing himself onto wiped-clean skin, layering the text of his smell, his always-cold hands over what once was her.

There is no space. No world. No time. Light from somewhere glows through eyelids, illuminating ledges and walls of smoke. A heartbeat hums. It is formed now, (sometimes they shatter in the kiln) a rewritten palimpsest, lines etched so deeply in stone that fire cannot burn them out. Eternities of rolling boulders cannot wear them out. Red hair. Long fingers. Illusions of shapes and turbulent layers and hunger for power that lasts beyond blood. Slide into my hand, for I am the potter and the potter's clay.

There is ink in my veins.