A Safe Darkness

Her mother had screamed that day. That day that Ginevra Iduna Weasley had forgotten to lock her bedroom door when she went to change clothes after work. She had been standing there, debating between the black top and the pale blue one, wearing nothing but her knickers (because as all witches know, which shirt you wear determines what bra goes under it). Not that a bra would have hidden the marks that flamed red against her white skin all the way down her back.


Her mother had screamed when she saw her, and Ginny had turned and met her eyes with an opaque look, and grabbed the first shirt that came to hand.


She moved out a week later.



Her mother owled her regularly, and she Flooed over for Sunday dinner, and they talked about everything in the world and nothing at all about the reason that Ginny wore long sleeves and high necks, even in the summer. And they did not look each other in the eyes because neither needed to see the abyss that yawned between them.



He tilted her chin up as long clever fingers latched the collar closed, and she shivered at the tiny sound of it closing, a little rippling of muscle running down the alabaster smoothness of her naked back. \"That\'s right,\" he whispered. \"Beautiful.\"



Her salary there at Flourish and Blotts wasn\'t much, and she slept, rolled in blankets, on the sagging sofa in the little rented room, her clothes in boxes here and there on the floor. But it was hers, and no one would come in when she cried out in a dream, or ask her what was wrong when she paced the floor, hands clenching, pacing like an addict needing another hit. Three more days. The pain of her nails in her palms was a faint echo of what she wanted, what she needed. She cast a glamour that following morning to hide the shadows under her eyes.



He was so lovely. Not that she looked at him. Insolent, it would have been. And she was a good girl. \"So pretty,\" he whispers. \"But your skin is too perfect. I think it would look better with a little color. What do you think?\"


\"As it pleases you, master,\" she whispered, and the heat ran through her body, blood flushing her cheeks. She was warm. How lovely to be warm again.


She had been eleven. Innocent.


Not so innocent. She bled that year, though, waking in a bloody bed in a panic and scared to death before an older girl came in and comforted her. Perfectly natural, not the first one, here, clean sheets and blankets and I\'llk yok you to Madam Pomfrey to get something for the cramps.


Sometimes she remembered how it had smelled down there, of mold and dust and old water and secrets and the vague wrongful tang of blood that she could always smell seeping from her pores everywhere no matter how much she washed on those days.

When she shuts her eyes he is standing there, always seventeen and so perfect and lovely, challenge and pride in his dark eyes, dark hair just enough mussed to be thoroughly sexy, and his voice in her mind was always gentle as he made the marks on her soul. He is seventeen and she is twenty, and hard and spoiled and tarnished, and she never was as perfect as he was and she knows that this is the sin for which she punishes herself.



\"Hey, Gin, if you need to talk about anything...\" says Bill, his facade failing for the moment as he whispers intimately to his sister. His hands are large and heavy on her shoulders, and he stands like a wall between her and her mother. Bill was always her favorite brother.


\"When I can, I\'ll talk to you,\" she said. Her sleeve had ridden up when she reached for her glass of wine at dinner, and Bill had looked at her wrist, a long steady look, where the cuff marks hadn\'t faded yet from three days ago.


Bill nodded. \"I know,\" he said. And she had felt he did, and she put her arms around him, feeling the bruises twinge most pleasantly. He didn\'t pat her back, and said, \"Don\'t do anything stupid.\"


\"Same goes for you,\" she\'d said, and had pushed him away and said something about having to get back to the apartment because they were doing inventory this week at the store. Or something like that. The knowledge in his eyes seared, and she needed her safe darkness again.



You could say that he is an artist. She doesn\'t know. All she knows is that he knows how to hurt her. Her entire back is hot now, shoulders to knees, where the whip has struck, a solid surging mass of feeling. She has not felt anything for a long time. Not since the last time.



She had snuck out to the top of the stairs that night after she came home, that summer, and listened to her mother talk.


\"She doesn\'t have nearly as many nightmares,\" her mother had said. \"I know they want us to let her talk to someone from St. Mungoes but....\"


\"It\'s an awful expense, if she\'s doing fine on her own,\" her father finished. \"IS she doing fine?\"


\"She says she is.\"


And she had crept back to bed and thought about the dream she\'d had of her diary, her precious diary, hers and no one else\'s, bleeding ink like blood, and she wept with pain even as her hands drifted down and found their way under the waistband of her knickers and bit her lip so she wouldn\'t sob his name.



This close, she smells the leather, and the blood, and there is the crisp verbena scent of his cologne, and the notes of his sweat, and of sex, him and her, mingled. She doesn\'t have to do anything now except kneel here while han hands trace the welts of the whip. His breathing gets faster, and he takes what he wants from her, bowed over her back. It\'s so close, the light, so close, and he draws his nails down her back as he spasms and she falls into the light and the pain has broken her open and finally she cries and he cries and there is a moment where she is not hungry any more.

\"I...I\'m sorry,\" she says, and turns away from her date. She pulls her arms in close. He was warm, so warm, and his hands had been gentle and slow and his kisses sweet and innocent, the perfect gentleman. \"I....\" How do you explain to such a nice boy that the only thing that makes you feel alive any more is pain? She feels old, and soiled.


\"It\'s okay,\" he said, and takes her home. She didn\'t owl him back again. The next day she met an old enemy, and went home with him, and found out they needed each other.



And finally she cries, bound and gagged so that she doesn\'t have to worry about moving or making noise, and she cries and cries until finally she is empty and he is stroking her hair, and the voice whispering endearments to her is thick with sobs.


He is always so gentle to her afterwards. He heals up anywhere he\'s drawn blood, but she likes the marks. She likes the residual pain as they heal. It helps, she says, and he nods, trickling water over her gently in his bath. He is all silver and beautifully pale, and the flush of orgasm has left his face with just a little color. They don\'t talk, just wash the sweat and blood and tears off each other like a sacrament.



\"Two weeks?\" he says, fastening his robe. Neither of them looks the other in the face.


She nods.\"Two weeks,\" she says. The welts throb painfully under the weight of her clothing. She would go home and sleep. This is the only time she ever sleeps without dreaming.





Followed by Fragments of Copper and A Gracious Silence.