Code

“Ginny!”

Percy is startled, leaning down over the lavatory sink, splashing water over his white face, which looks whiter against the cavernous grey of the Hogwarts bathroom, where he has not stood in years. His sister’s face has appeared over his shoulder in the mirror, their identical shocks of red hair the only spots of colour in the room.

She walks towards him, their eyes meeting in the reflection. Water drips down Percy’s cheeks, onto his chin, and he pats at it distractedly with a paper towel. Behind his glasses, which he has not removed, his blue eyes look sunken and dull, rimmed in wet-spiked lashes the colour of marigolds. Ginny’s eyes are both sharp and wounded.

Dumbledore is dead, and this is his funeral. Hogwarts is closing its doors, and no one knows for how long. Bill has been savaged, and the earth is rolling on its weird axis.

“Hi,” she says. She stands at his side, bringing her fingers up to rest against his elbow.

“Ginny, you shouldn’t be in here, this is…” His voice trails off as he realizes how little she thinks it matters. Percy says nothing else, just follows her into the corridor, noting her forced-back shoulders, her regally-held neck, all of it a show. A familiar one.

“I saw you come in,” she says quietly, their footsteps echoing strangely in the emptiness.

Percy just nods.

“You don’t have anything to say?” she asks, stopping and throwing her eyes at him like daggers.

“It… it’s a tragedy, Ginny. It’s terrible. Nobody ever expected…” The pallor has not gone from his skin, even though there is sunlight now streaming against it through the windows.

“Yes they did,” she says, and her voice does not sound as hard as she wants it to. “Lots of people expected it.” Then, even softer, “But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

Percy’s jaw clenches involuntarily, as if his body is determined to ground this conversation before it grows wings. “Ginny…” he begins, but she stops suddenly in front of a door that stands half-open, and he turns and sees why.

There is an odd smile on her face, crooked and faintly nostalgic, but shot through with bitterness. “Remember?” she asks. “I watched you.”

“I remember,” he says, the corners of his own mouth twitching. “You saw me. With Penny. I gave you three galleons…”

“I didn’t see,” she interrupts. “I watched.”
The smile slides from Percy’s face, the subtle difference in meaning rendering him confused, making his heart stutter unsteadily. “What do you mean, you watched?” She had seen them kiss. She had shrieked and looked disgusted and taken a bribe, though he probably had not needed to offer one, so complete was her horror that he doubted she would speak of it willingly. That thought makes his chest pang again.

“I mean I watched. I mean she didn’t just kiss you in there, and you know it. Well. She kissed you. Just not on your bloody lips. And I watched it. All of it.”

Ginny leans against the wall, her eyes unblinking, as Percy shifts from foot to foot uncomfortably, then suddenly stops moving altogether. Not knowing what else to do, he apologizes through his shock. “I’m sorry, Ginny. It was inappropriate. I was a prefect. I should have known better than to… I’m sorry you saw that. You were a little girl. I had no idea anybody was…”

“You sure didn’t,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. “You had your eyes closed the whole time. Never knew a boy who didn’t want to watch.”

Colour starts to rise in Percy’s cheeks, and he stiffens at the thought that Ginny has this knowledge; that she knows how things are supposed to work, and he has the brief, absurd impulse to dash out the castle doors and murder the Boy Who Lived with a lawn full of witnesses. The only thing that stops him, really, is what she says next. “Makes it easy to pretend it’s somebody else, doesn’t it?”

The silence is all-encompassing. Ginny swears she can hear the vibrations from her brother’s shaking hands; can hear his toes curling tight in his polished shoes. She waits, determined not to back down, not to give him an out.

He does not answer her question. Instead, he looks her squarely in the face, everything in his countenance exhausted and eroded-away. “Why, Ginny? Why me?”

Ginny stares back. She has asked herself this question at least once for every freckle on their combined bodies and has come to only one conclusion, which is not a conclusion at all, just another unknowable. She shrugs and throws the question back at him. “Why me?” Her fingers tap down the wall with no rhythm. “Because that’s the way it is. Because that’s the way it’s always been, hasn’t it? Just mine and yours. Just a secret. Just code. Remember?”

Percy does remember. He remembers everything. He does not consider himself overly intellectual, overly talented, overly correct. He just has a good memory, and he is shrewd enough to see its advantages, so he pays attention and stores things and has brilliant recall. He remembers everything. Maybe that is part of the problem here. He can call her up in detail, no matter how much space he puts between them. He can read the code.

Percy nods, and then he shakes his head, and then he nods again, and Ginny seems to understand. “I know,” she says, half of a laugh coming through her nose before her face goes serious. “Come home, Percy. I… we need you. Everything is different now.”

“I’m not. Not different enough,” he says back. Then, before she can respond, “You should go. Harry will be looking for you.” He swallows hard around those last words, forcing them through his lips.

“No, he won’t,” Ginny says, simply. “It’s done. He has things he has to do. So do I.” She stops. “So do you. Besides. I like him mostly for his glasses.” The corner of her mouth lifts into a wry half-smile that cuts straight through Percy’s chest like a cleaver.

He does not have the breath to say goodbye, and so he shakes his head, his eyes puzzled and longing and sad, and walks away. Ginny calls to his defeated-looking back, “You aren’t the only one who pretends!” He keeps walking. She hollers louder. “Did you kiss her back? Did you?”

Over his shoulder, Percy yells, “NO!”

“I didn’t think so!” Ginny screams, and her voice is shrill and echoing, the sound bouncing everywhere. “I didn’t think so, you selfish prick!” She dashes into the lavatory, her dress shoes sounding like explosions against the stone.

As she is sitting on the floor, her head in her hands, something tickles her ear. It is a bewitched piece of parchment, winged and hovering. Snatching it out of the air, she opens it to discover an address written in Percy’s close, neat handwriting, and one short sentence. Use the Floo.

Underneath it, he has drawn a pair of glasses. They are not round. They are carefully constructed, but the lines are shaky, as if his hand was trembling.

Ginny sobs harder, but it is the sound of things unknotting.


_______________________



“Ginny?”

Ginny, who is standing by the fireplace, watches as her mother comes in from the kitchen, dusting her hands against her apron.

“What, Mum?”

“Where are you going?” Her mother looks tense. Her mother always looks tense now, hates having her children out of her sight.

“I’m going to talk to Percy,” Ginny answers, after pausing to consider.

Her mother’s eyes go wide. For a moment, Ginny thinks that she is about to burst into tears. Her voice comes out choked and unnaturally high. “Ginny, I don’t know if that’s a good idea, sweetheart. He…”

“I know,” Ginny says, trying to keep her voice soft. “I know, Mum. I thought maybe if it were me… I mean, I’m prepared if he’s going to be a prat. Really. I’ll just come back home. I’ll even take extra powder for the Floo, see?” She shoves a handful unceremoniously into her pocket. “I just… I thought with Ron leaving… I just want to try. Before…” She cannot finish her sentence.

Her mothers eyebrows knit together. She thinks hard for a moment. “Maybe he’ll talk to you, then,” she says with a sigh. “He always did have a soft spot for you. Wait a moment, let me grab you some things to take. Just in case.”

Ginny waits patiently as her mother bustles back into the kitchen. She returns with a parcel of pickled things and a small carton of tea. “Should you firecall him, do you think?” she asks, handing them to her daughter.

“No,” Ginny says at once. “No, I think I might have better luck if I surprise him.”

Her mother considers her again. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Ginny sighs. “I’m a big girl, Mum. I’m sixteen. I can handle him.”

Her mother nods. “Tell him we love him, will you? Tell him we miss him?” Her eyes start to water.

“Of course, Mum.”

“Do you need the address?”

“Please,” Ginny lies.

Her mother retrieves it, and Ginny tucks the parcels tightly under her arms and steps into the fireplace, her voice loudly and unmistakably directing her to her brother’s London flat.

____________________


“Ginny?”

Percy’s voice sounds tight and anxious as he pokes his head around the corner to see his sister brushing herself clean and stepping out of the fireplace, two small boxes at her feet. The sight of her tangles his insides. He cannot decide whether or not he regrets this invitation. He wonders why she has waited as long as she has to take him up on it.

She leaves the boxes on the floor and walks toward him, reaching him in three long strides and throwing her arms around him in the narrow corridor. The force of her body knocks him into the wall, where she leans against him and mutters “Hi,” into the exposed skin at his throat.

“Hi,” he says back, reaching to brush strands of her unruly hair out of his mouth. “Do you want some tea?”

Ginny laughs a little, quiet and muffled by the stiff collar of her brother’s shirt, and says “No. I don’t want some tea.”

Percy shuts his eyes. Against him, her body is warm and familiar (too familiar, he thinks). Her hair smells like home; woody and vaguely sweet, something like smoke running through it. He argues with himself fiercely about the question he asks next. “What do you want, then?”

Ginny moves away from him. She puts space between their bodies, and Percy thinks, half with relief, half with frustration, that she is going to tell him that she will take the tea, after all, and maybe she will tell him about her O.W.L.’s, and maybe she will complain about Mum, and then maybe she will go back home. But that is not what happens.

She looks at him straight-on and says, “I want you to take me apart.”

Her face is serious. She looks disturbingly adult, her features defined and strong, her head high, no little-girl hesitation, no giggling into his neck on the back of a broom, nothing baby anymore about his baby sister. It is clear that she knows what this means, even if he does not. He blinks, and she correctly decodes it to mean What the fuck?

“I want you to take me apart,” she says again. Her voice starts to quiver. “Everybody is just holding their shite together, holding it by a fucking thread, Percy. Mum’s halfway to the bin at St. Mungo’s; Ron is going off with Harry to play at being some kind of hero, Bill looks like something Fred’s fucking wand backfired on, and you’re here. You’re here, pretending that this” she gestures along her body, gestures back at his, “this doesn’t exist. And it does, and I am so fucking tired, Percy. I’m exhausted. I am tired of holding my own shite together, of holding Mum’s together, of being wound up and wound up and wound up, and I’m sixteen years old, and it is my turn to decide, now, and I want you to take me apart.” Her voice rises up high and then collapses under its own weight, falling into her throat. “Do you get it? Do you get it?”

Percy gets it. He gets that if he tells her no this time, she will not be back. He gets that there are things between them that are not normal, and he also gets that they are no longer living in a world where normal means much of anything. He gets that this is theirs if they want it to be, and he remembers – clearly, vividly; remembers so hard that it hurts -- how she feels under his fingers, how his name sounds in her mouth, how she looks at him as though she actually sees him, and how she always has, and how she is the only one who ever has, really.

And he sees her, too. Ginny. Capable, clever, brave Ginny; Ginny who knows exactly who she is; Ginny who calls things by their names. Ginny, who calls him brother and calls him lover, because that is what he is to her; Ginny, who is not going to let him hide anymore.

“I get it,” he whispers, and slides his glasses off of his face. He offers them to Ginny, a code in three dimensions, and she takes them between her trembling hands and smiles. She lays them carefully on a bare end table at the end of the corridor and when she turns around to walk back, he is already there, and he grabs her so hard that her knees buckle in surprise.

He catches her, is ready for her weight like he has been waiting for it for a very long time, and this time, it is his mouth that insists. No tears now. No tears, just teeth and tongues and lips, and the heat cuts straight through the pane of ice-cold magic that Percy has erected, with painstaking care, between who he is (law-abiding, self-controlled, rational, upstanding, please-and-thank-you-sir) and what he wants (GinnyGinnyGinny, takemeapart Ginny). Ginny feels it dissolve, feels his body transform, and she can hear herself muttering thank you thank you thank you down her brother’s throat, and then her feet are on the floor and her face is against the wall.

“Shhhh,” he mumbles into her ear as she makes a noise of protest, and his hands slide her shirt over her belly. It catches – first under her chin, then her elbows, then her hands, which are trying to help but are too eager to be useful – before it hits the floor and Ginny kicks it away, losing one shoe in the process then sending the other flying against the bathroom door.

His face is in her hair now, his lips against her scalp making her body hum, and one hand is under her bra, his palm smooth and hard and just the right size. Suddenly, Ginny mutters, “No,” and shakes her head. The world goes silent and starts to spin. Percy feels his stomach drop, and he thinks that he might be sick, but then she shakes her head harder and says, “No. Not like this,” and starts to turn. “I won’t let you pretend I’m anybody else.”

Percy’s stomach unknots. He holds her fast in place, says, “No. I’m not. I won’t.” Then, “Ginny,” as he kisses between her shoulder blades. “Ginny.” Her neck. “Ginny.” Her cheek. “Ginny. Ginny. Ginny.” Her ear. Her jaw. Her neck again, open-mouthed. She is satisfied; she arches into him; he slides her bra from her body, and the wall is cool, and his hands feel hot, and she can feel him now, hard beneath his trousers, her name on his lips bringing him all the way there.

Ginny smiles against the wall and reaches back for him. “Hard for me, big brother?” She is teasing, but she can feel his body retract slightly at the words, though he does not pull away. “Hmm?” she asks again, her hand closing over him.

Percy’s breath comes in through his teeth, shaking, and he tells her, “Yes.”

He feels like there is a hummingbird trapped under his ribs, beating its wings furiously and pelting around in his chest, and when Ginny says, “Let me see it,” the bird falls abruptly into his belly and dies.

“Not yet,” he answers, and the bird resurrects itself as he reaches for Ginny’s skirt at the same time she does. He pushes up; she pushes down, and their hands tangle. In the confusion, her fingers crawl into Percy’s palm, and she scratches a messy heart against his skin. It happens so fast that he almost misses it, but he does not miss it. Percy Weasley does not miss anything. He says her name again, and she shoves her skirt over her hips and steps out of it.

Then he is sliding down her body, heading down to his knees (the floors are clean), hands traveling over her breasts, her belly, the backs of her legs; his mouth tracing her spine, leaving behind a slow burn that makes her clench her fists. And then his teeth, oh fuck his fucking teeth, are on the elastic of her knickers, dragging them over her bottom, and he has a finger hooked through at each hip, and he pulls them from her, slow and meticulous, the same way he opens his presents, peeling the tape and not tearing anything.

She steps from them, and they are damp in Percy’s hand when he lays them aside, and he kisses her thighs apart, her muscles jerking madly under his lips, her groan swallowed by the wall.

He did not lie to his sister when he told her that he did not do this with Penny. In fact, he has never done this before, and he thinks it will probably be obvious, but neither of them cares. Percy turns so his back is at the wall, and Ginny braces herself with both hands. His tongue is careful at first, mapping her out. Astronomy. Then translation, like runes: the pitch of her moans, the cant of her hips, and the ones he likes best – the directions he can follow, there and faster and his favourite of all, please. She says please and his cock throbs, heavy, and her hands pull at his hair. He likes how she tastes, sharp and humid, and she likes how he feels, smooth and wet, and he follows her when she moves, pressing his fingers inside to hold her still, hold her close.

Ginny grabs his hair, hard, and pushes his head back before she comes, gasping “Stop,” but this time, Percy does not worry that she has changed her mind. She yanks up, and Percy leans his weight into the wall to stand.

Before he has even steadied himself, she is fumbling with his buttons. One pops clean off under her fingers, so Percy takes over, efficient and quick, as she moves to his belt, which fights and then gives in, and then to the button of his trousers, which is cool and satiny and yields to her touch, and then his zip is down and everything is off and he is turning her again, pressing her bare body flush against the wall, pressing his cock flush against her belly.

Ginny runs her hand down to hold it in her fist. She strokes it with the tips of her fingers, and pre-come leaks into her navel. She laughs, tinkling and pretty, and Percy sees her as a little girl, dashing up the stairs away from Fred, who is pretending to be a lumbering troll, and shutting herself, breathless, in Percy’s bedroom, slamming the door just in time and leaping into his startled lap, giggling hopelessly. He closes his eyes against the image, and Ginny says, “Look at me.”

Percy looks. Her pupils are wide and round, her cheeks pink. Around her head, her hair is frizzy and wild. Eye-makeup is smudged in a grey line to her temple. She is breathing fast. Where they are skin-against-skin, it is almost impossible to tell them apart; they are the same shade of paperwhite, their freckles the same odd shade of tan. They look the most alike out of any of their siblings, save for the twins. Her nose, her cheekbones, her chin – they all mirror his own. There is even a flash of him in her expression now, serious and searching layered over something hot and hungry. He realizes that she is double-checking. She is so like him in some ways; ways that he is sure only the both of them know. Percy does not have to speak; he makes his eyebrows say yes.

“Come in my mouth,” she says, so direct it almost makes him flinch, “not inside.”

He nods. He has only a brief second to feel vaguely offended at her suggestion that he might be careless, and an even briefer one to feel both thrilled and slightly alarmed that she wants him in her mouth, and then she is hooking her legs up around his waist, her arms around his neck, nimble and trusting, and he presses his forehead into hers, her shoulders into the wall, and guides himself toward her. Before he enters her, he stops. “Have you…” he whispers, unable to finish the thought, knowing the answer before she gives it.

“Yes,” she says. “You don’t have to be gentle.” Her voice is rough and though she does not say it, he knows that she means please don’t be, knows she means take me apart, so he does.

He fits perfectly. Ginny likes that she is stretched just enough to feel full, to feel fucked, but not enough to hurt. He feels like she thought he would: good and hard (ohfucksohard) and somehow familiar, but he does not sound like she thought he would. Not at all. He sounds better. He is noisy, full of gravel and dirt and the aching sounds of beautiful surprises, and she squeezes as hard as she can around him, angling herself against his pelvic bone and the thick base of his cock, which she can make grind against her in the most spectacular way, just to hear them louder and louder and to add her own noise to his when his body sends off sparks behind her eyes.

His hands squeeze her arse, and picturing the bruises she will have there makes her arch wildly, and in the middle of it all, she bites at whatever flesh she can reach, lets go, and says, “Talk to me.”

Percy is so far gone that he does not know if what he is saying is English, or if it is even speech, or if it might somewhere, in some universe of desire, have grammar and syntax and diction, but things come out of his mouth anyway, and here and there are things he is pretty sure are words: good, he hears (and will later feel embarrassed by, thinking is that the best you could come up with?), fuuuuuuuuck (with all of those u’s, long and low and desperate and dirty), and her name, again and again and again, Ginny.

She talks back. She is, somehow, telling him a story as she is being thrown into the wall, over and over and over again, by the force of this. I watched, she gasps, and Percy does not want to think about Penny, not at all, but this thought is forced out of his head when Ginny says, I watched, and I wanted it, in between his thrusts, So. Fucking. Bad. In his head, Percy thinks, ELEVEN, bells going off all over, but she is still talking, Wanted it. That night. Three fucking fingers. Pretended they were yours.

Her body is tightening around him, impossibly close, impossible pressure everywhere, impossible friction, and her story dissolves into nothing as she swears and her fingernails bring blood rising out of Percy’s back and he licks her throat as she comes in dramatic shudders and pulses and a sheen of sweat.

He fucks her through it, and she grips him hard, slumping down against the wall just a little, her knees knocking around loose at his hips, and then, Oh, Ginny, oh, and she understands.

Percy eases her down as gently as he can, which is not gently at all, and with what he feels might be his greatest act of self-control ever, pulls out of her and holds on until she kneels for him and takes his cock into her mouth. Her voice is shaky when she says, “I promise you I’m so much better.”

When he comes, she tastes them both, finding them oddly similar, finding it incredible, finding it exactly what she wanted, finding herself drawing hearts on his freckled thigh with her fingers as he empties himself down her throat with a groan that comes straight from his guts. She swallows, licks, swallows. She does not want to let go when he starts to go soft, but she does, and she pulls him down onto her lap.

Their bodies are a strange knot. It pulses and breathes. Their lips find each other, and Percy is surprised to find that the taste in her mouth does not repel him in the slightest. Nothing is repelling him now, even though it should; he is too spent and too blank and too full of static; he cannot see much of the world without his glasses; he cannot move to do anything because she is woven through him so tightly it is difficult to say who is who.

He feels his own body start to curl. Ginny opens her arms into a circle. Her limbs are long and lean and still trembling, and he fits into them as neatly as he fits everywhere else. He cannot remember the last time he allowed himself to be held, but everything is different now, and he discovers it is easier than he thought to be small.

_____________________________


“Ginny?”

Fred is dead, and everyone is mute with grief. Ginny’s name is the only word that is uttered with any clarity during the funeral.

Percy cannot touch his family. He cannot look them in the eye. The last body he held in his arms was his brother’s, and he can feel Fred, still, on his skin and is afraid that that is all he will ever have of him. He is afraid that someone else’s fingers will brush him off, turn him to dust.

But he says Ginny’s name, and she crawls under his arm and stays there.

Fred does not turn to dust. The world is quiet, but does not end.

After Ginny, George seeks him out, and that night, they all have dinner together – what is left of together; the new version of together; still with one empty place-setting, but not at the same chair – though none of them chews more than a mouthful, and the chickens have the rest.

Nobody says a word when, in the morning, Ginny is beside Percy in his bed, both of them still buttoned tightly into their clothing, the covers as neat as a pin.

Percy moves back in. The quiet of the Burrow is so unnaturally thick that all of their silencing spells go unnoticed.

__________________________


“Ginny?”

She is twirling through Percy’s stiffly-held arms, barefoot now in her white dress, looking the way a bride ought to look, which is radiant, which is thrilled – which she is. Ginny does not examine her reasons too carefully anymore.

“What, brother mine?” she asks, tittering at the serious way he pushes his glasses onto his face.

He stops twirling her. As casually as he can, he takes her arm and leads her to the side. She waves at someone over his shoulder.

“This ends now. It has to.” His mouth is tight. He is Doing the Right Thing.

Ginny does not answer him. She is also Doing the Right Thing.

(The Right Thing changes shape, shifts like a boggart into what each of them fears most, and they both learn to wave their wands and make it disappear.)


-fin-