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Title: Illusionary
Author: Evandar
Rating: R
Pairings: Harry/Ginny
Warnings: Spousal and child abuse, rape, dark!Ginny
Disclaimer: Harry Potter characters are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended.
Summary: Funny how little things become sinister with hindsight. Harry really should have paid more attention to what Mrs Weasley taught her daughter about relationships – and what his relationship was doing to his children.
A/N: Thank you again to Sian for the beta. This was written as a pinch-hit for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
hp_darkarts's 2014 Horror Fest for the prompt there’s an age old dictum that children from abusive households are more likely to fall in abusive relationships. Someone unexpected (Theodore Nott or Vincent Crabbe) helps Harry leave. This prompt took me far, far out of my comfort zone and triggered more than a few bad memories on the way, but turned out being extremely therapeutic to write. I hope I did the prompt justice.
“Of course we have plans for another baby,” she says to the reporter, and she presses up against his arm. The glitter on her bodice leaves a smear of golden shimmer on his sleeve. “A little girl. Wouldn’t that be nice? It would complete us, don’t you think Harry?”
Her fingers press bruises into his forearm where they’ll be hidden by his robes. He hasn’t worn Muggle clothes or short sleeves in years – they’re beneath them, she says, and she doesn’t like the way they ride up; too afraid of what they’ll show. The last time he did, Hermione saw. She just rolled her eyes and told him to put them away; that no one wanted to know what sort of things he and Ginny were into.
“A little girl,” he repeats, thinking of the sons they’ve already had. Of James who’s pale and quiet and who looks at him with accusing eyes, and Albus who tries to hide bruises of his own behind clumsy, two-year-old lies. “Yeah. Perfect.”
She smiles at him, showing dimples that used to charm him, and pearly teeth that are sharper than they look. Her fingers ease up their pressure and start stroking instead, gentle lines across the inside of his wrist that leave burning trails that somehow hurt more than the bruises ever can. He swallows nausea and smiles back. An empty, dead smile that no one seems to see, and for a moment they are blindingly brilliant. Perfect.
Fake.
When he slips from her bed later, she’s asleep curled on her side with her head pillowed on an arm. She doesn’t like to wake with him there, and he doesn’t care to stay. He sleeps on a couch in the boys’ room, as if he can protect them somehow. He can’t, but he tries. He likes to think that he’ll always try, even if it’s not enough, because he wants to think that the reckless boy with the ‘saving people thing’ didn’t die with Voldemort.
He showers before he goes to them. He scalds himself with water before turning the knob so that the water is freezing instead. It burns just as badly, but it means that he’s clean. He doesn’t smell of her – he hates the smell of her: of green apple shampoo and sickening wet cunt – and he can’t feel her anymore. He stands beneath the spray for as long as he can bear it and when he climbs out his teeth are chattering from the cold and there are goosebumps all over his arms and legs.
There are bruises too, patterning his back and his arms and his arse; delicate and pointed like the fingers that made them. He doesn’t look at them in the mirror – doesn’t look at himself – and he likes to pretend that means he doesn’t know the exact map of them off by heart.
Harry has spent a long time pretending - “I’ll be in my bedroom, making no noise and pretending I’m not there” - a lifetime.
…
He sits behind his desk with his head in his hands and a headache throbbing in his temples. Ron’s laughter is ringing through their office as he talks to someone at the door and the scratches Ginny left on his thighs last night are itching under the heavy robes of his uniform and twisting his stomach with nausea.
He closes his eyes and tries to pretend – if just for a moment – that the scratches are from gardening or from one of his adventures, and that Ron’s laughter doesn’t grate over all of his remaining nerves. But peace doesn’t come. He can’t stop remembering. He can’t stop feeling her hands – such small hands, calloused from Quidditch and sharp-nailed – all over him. He wants it to stop. He needs it to stop.
He wants to disappear. He wants –
“Is this a bad time?”
He lifts his head slowly. A small, weedy man with brown curls and the official robes of a Ministry archivist is standing in front of his desk. Harry thinks he should be familiar – he knows he knows him from somewhere – but he can’t place him.
“No,” he says. “Take a seat.”
“Actually Auror Potter, you may want to have this conversation somewhere more private,” the man says. His voice is soft, but Harry can hear traces of an accent – long low vowels and skipped consonants – that sounds like he’s tried to bury it. He sounds uncomfortable, and Harry can hear Ron in the background; he’s no longer laughing.
“I haven’t had lunch yet,” Harry says. “Care to join me?”
He usually eats in the Ministry canteen, mechanically spooning slop-of-the-day into his mouth. Today he leads his mystery archivist through the Floo to the Leaky Cauldron and asks Hannah for a private room. It’ll be different, he thinks, and he catches sight of the look on Hannah’s face when she recognises his guest, and he realises that the man must have been in Slytherin.
People only ever look at Slytherins that way.
When they’ve ordered and closed the door, he looks again and wracks his brain for a name. Thestrals come to mind, and he remembers a pale, weedy Slytherin boy raising a trembling hand in Hagrid’s class and a conversation between Ron and Hermione.
“I wonder who Nott saw die…”
“Who cares? He’s just a bloody Slytherin. Creepy, Thestrals, aren’t they?”
Harry looks at Theodore Nott and decides that he hasn’t changed much since he was fifteen. He’s still small and weedy, and he’s still seen someone die. Harry wonder who it was, but he knows not to ask; too many people can see Thestrals now.
…
He collects James from Kreacher’s care. He trusts the Elf with his children more than he trusts his wife, but he’s still a relic of the House of Black. He doesn’t leave bruises on tender limbs or tracks of silent tears, but his legacy is more dangerous. Harry has managed to forget the viciousness of Kreacher’s previous wards – deliberately, perhaps, choosing to forget Sirius’ fixation on murder and revenge and the Dark Mark on Regulus’ arm – in favour of remembering the good in them.
He takes his eldest son away from his afternoon lessons and into the drawing room where he drops to his knees and wraps his arms around him. James is small and stiff in his arms; angry and resentful and broken, but stronger – Harry thinks – than his father has ever been.
“We’ve picked up traces of Dark magic, Auror Potter.”
He holds James close until the stiffness in his limbs subsides and he leans in close, pressing his face into Harry’s neck. Harry feels hot tears splash against his skin and he rubs his hand gently up and down James’ spine and tries to remember when he felt the kind of anger his son does. Third year, with Sirius, when he had the strength and the will and the hate to pin a grown man to the floor and aim his wand at his heart.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry Jamie.”
“Specifically, the Unforgivables. One in particular. At first we hoped it might be an anomaly, but it appears that one of your children is practising the Killing Curse.”
He can’t blame James for this. He’s just a kid and it’s not his fault that he’s been raised in fear and hatred; that Harry is stupid enough to –
“This isn’t your fault, Potter.”
That what Harry has always wanted has been a family, and he’s wanted it enough to take what he’s been given. This sick parody of living. This noose of obligation and tradition, barbed with his best friends uncaring, unseeing callousness and the lingering memory of the Dursleys. None of it is James’ fault.
“Children are more than capable of the hatred necessary, Potter. People don’t like to think they are, but people don’t like to think about what goes on in houses like yours either. It still happens.”
James is too young to understand properly, that there could have been a time when Harry did love Ginny. A bright, long ago summer after Voldemort’s fall, when he’d seen her flying and allowed himself to think that he could be happy. He recognises now that the sudden jolt in his chest had been a love potion, slipped into his pumpkin juice – funny what you learn as an Auror – but at the time it had been a glorious, golden moment.
Fake. Like the moments they share now, in the public eye, with Ginny smiling on his arm and himself with all the purpose and charm of a corpse.
It’s funny what you learn as an Auror, and it’s funny how with hindsight, little things can seem so sinister. Fred and George’s shop, with its little heart-shaped bottles and the girls that giggled around them; spiked Cauldron Cakes on his bed and Ron’s dazed expression; a summer day where Mrs Weasley shared stories that drifted on the breeze – tales of love potions that echoed with triumph. He remembers Ginny and Hermione laughing, thinking nothing (everything) of what they heard, and he remembers thinking nothing of it himself.
He remembers the jolt of falling in love so vividly, right down to the way the condensation on the glass felt on his fingers, and he remembers waking up – years later – to the news that he was married and that Ginny wanted a baby and that “potions can hurt the baby if either parent is on them, so I can’t give you any more, but it doesn’t matter, does it? You love me, Harry, and the world loves the two of us together. We’re a family now.”
James is too young to know what rape is, but that’s okay. Before Ginny, Harry didn’t think a woman could rape a man, and while he loves his children dearly he can’t stand to think of how they were conceived.
When James stops crying, Harry pulls away. He brushes away tears and snot with the sleeve of his robes and tweaks his baby boy’s nose. He pulls out a wand, and with a flick, James is wearing a long-sleeved T-Shirt and a pair of jeans. Muggle clothes. Forbidden clothes.
“Come on,” Harry says. “Let’s get Al.”
He transfigures Al’s clothing and his own, and doesn’t let it show how much it bothers him when his boys spot the marks their mother has left behind. He orders Kreacher to pack a bag – just the essentials – and to lock up the house. Grimmauld Place is his, not Ginny’s, and she’ll not set foot in it again.
Nott had brought divorce papers to their meeting. He’d presented Harry with an option he hadn’t realised the Wizarding World offered. No one told him. Not even when they glimpsed the bruises or saw the bags under his eyes and the sullen silence of his children.
They’re leaving. They’re going to disappear together, him and his boys, and they’re going to be happy. They’re going to learn how – if they can; leave their pasts behind and teach themselves how to fly free. And one day, hopefully, they’ll do it.
“I watched my father kill my mother. Get out, Potter. Now. Before your children see the same.”
Author: Evandar
Rating: R
Pairings: Harry/Ginny
Warnings: Spousal and child abuse, rape, dark!Ginny
Disclaimer: Harry Potter characters are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended.
Summary: Funny how little things become sinister with hindsight. Harry really should have paid more attention to what Mrs Weasley taught her daughter about relationships – and what his relationship was doing to his children.
A/N: Thank you again to Sian for the beta. This was written as a pinch-hit for
hp_darkarts's 2014 Horror Fest for the prompt there’s an age old dictum that children from abusive households are more likely to fall in abusive relationships. Someone unexpected (Theodore Nott or Vincent Crabbe) helps Harry leave. This prompt took me far, far out of my comfort zone and triggered more than a few bad memories on the way, but turned out being extremely therapeutic to write. I hope I did the prompt justice.“Of course we have plans for another baby,” she says to the reporter, and she presses up against his arm. The glitter on her bodice leaves a smear of golden shimmer on his sleeve. “A little girl. Wouldn’t that be nice? It would complete us, don’t you think Harry?”
Her fingers press bruises into his forearm where they’ll be hidden by his robes. He hasn’t worn Muggle clothes or short sleeves in years – they’re beneath them, she says, and she doesn’t like the way they ride up; too afraid of what they’ll show. The last time he did, Hermione saw. She just rolled her eyes and told him to put them away; that no one wanted to know what sort of things he and Ginny were into.
“A little girl,” he repeats, thinking of the sons they’ve already had. Of James who’s pale and quiet and who looks at him with accusing eyes, and Albus who tries to hide bruises of his own behind clumsy, two-year-old lies. “Yeah. Perfect.”
She smiles at him, showing dimples that used to charm him, and pearly teeth that are sharper than they look. Her fingers ease up their pressure and start stroking instead, gentle lines across the inside of his wrist that leave burning trails that somehow hurt more than the bruises ever can. He swallows nausea and smiles back. An empty, dead smile that no one seems to see, and for a moment they are blindingly brilliant. Perfect.
Fake.
When he slips from her bed later, she’s asleep curled on her side with her head pillowed on an arm. She doesn’t like to wake with him there, and he doesn’t care to stay. He sleeps on a couch in the boys’ room, as if he can protect them somehow. He can’t, but he tries. He likes to think that he’ll always try, even if it’s not enough, because he wants to think that the reckless boy with the ‘saving people thing’ didn’t die with Voldemort.
He showers before he goes to them. He scalds himself with water before turning the knob so that the water is freezing instead. It burns just as badly, but it means that he’s clean. He doesn’t smell of her – he hates the smell of her: of green apple shampoo and sickening wet cunt – and he can’t feel her anymore. He stands beneath the spray for as long as he can bear it and when he climbs out his teeth are chattering from the cold and there are goosebumps all over his arms and legs.
There are bruises too, patterning his back and his arms and his arse; delicate and pointed like the fingers that made them. He doesn’t look at them in the mirror – doesn’t look at himself – and he likes to pretend that means he doesn’t know the exact map of them off by heart.
Harry has spent a long time pretending - “I’ll be in my bedroom, making no noise and pretending I’m not there” - a lifetime.
…
He sits behind his desk with his head in his hands and a headache throbbing in his temples. Ron’s laughter is ringing through their office as he talks to someone at the door and the scratches Ginny left on his thighs last night are itching under the heavy robes of his uniform and twisting his stomach with nausea.
He closes his eyes and tries to pretend – if just for a moment – that the scratches are from gardening or from one of his adventures, and that Ron’s laughter doesn’t grate over all of his remaining nerves. But peace doesn’t come. He can’t stop remembering. He can’t stop feeling her hands – such small hands, calloused from Quidditch and sharp-nailed – all over him. He wants it to stop. He needs it to stop.
He wants to disappear. He wants –
“Is this a bad time?”
He lifts his head slowly. A small, weedy man with brown curls and the official robes of a Ministry archivist is standing in front of his desk. Harry thinks he should be familiar – he knows he knows him from somewhere – but he can’t place him.
“No,” he says. “Take a seat.”
“Actually Auror Potter, you may want to have this conversation somewhere more private,” the man says. His voice is soft, but Harry can hear traces of an accent – long low vowels and skipped consonants – that sounds like he’s tried to bury it. He sounds uncomfortable, and Harry can hear Ron in the background; he’s no longer laughing.
“I haven’t had lunch yet,” Harry says. “Care to join me?”
He usually eats in the Ministry canteen, mechanically spooning slop-of-the-day into his mouth. Today he leads his mystery archivist through the Floo to the Leaky Cauldron and asks Hannah for a private room. It’ll be different, he thinks, and he catches sight of the look on Hannah’s face when she recognises his guest, and he realises that the man must have been in Slytherin.
People only ever look at Slytherins that way.
When they’ve ordered and closed the door, he looks again and wracks his brain for a name. Thestrals come to mind, and he remembers a pale, weedy Slytherin boy raising a trembling hand in Hagrid’s class and a conversation between Ron and Hermione.
“I wonder who Nott saw die…”
“Who cares? He’s just a bloody Slytherin. Creepy, Thestrals, aren’t they?”
Harry looks at Theodore Nott and decides that he hasn’t changed much since he was fifteen. He’s still small and weedy, and he’s still seen someone die. Harry wonder who it was, but he knows not to ask; too many people can see Thestrals now.
…
He collects James from Kreacher’s care. He trusts the Elf with his children more than he trusts his wife, but he’s still a relic of the House of Black. He doesn’t leave bruises on tender limbs or tracks of silent tears, but his legacy is more dangerous. Harry has managed to forget the viciousness of Kreacher’s previous wards – deliberately, perhaps, choosing to forget Sirius’ fixation on murder and revenge and the Dark Mark on Regulus’ arm – in favour of remembering the good in them.
He takes his eldest son away from his afternoon lessons and into the drawing room where he drops to his knees and wraps his arms around him. James is small and stiff in his arms; angry and resentful and broken, but stronger – Harry thinks – than his father has ever been.
“We’ve picked up traces of Dark magic, Auror Potter.”
He holds James close until the stiffness in his limbs subsides and he leans in close, pressing his face into Harry’s neck. Harry feels hot tears splash against his skin and he rubs his hand gently up and down James’ spine and tries to remember when he felt the kind of anger his son does. Third year, with Sirius, when he had the strength and the will and the hate to pin a grown man to the floor and aim his wand at his heart.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry Jamie.”
“Specifically, the Unforgivables. One in particular. At first we hoped it might be an anomaly, but it appears that one of your children is practising the Killing Curse.”
He can’t blame James for this. He’s just a kid and it’s not his fault that he’s been raised in fear and hatred; that Harry is stupid enough to –
“This isn’t your fault, Potter.”
That what Harry has always wanted has been a family, and he’s wanted it enough to take what he’s been given. This sick parody of living. This noose of obligation and tradition, barbed with his best friends uncaring, unseeing callousness and the lingering memory of the Dursleys. None of it is James’ fault.
“Children are more than capable of the hatred necessary, Potter. People don’t like to think they are, but people don’t like to think about what goes on in houses like yours either. It still happens.”
James is too young to understand properly, that there could have been a time when Harry did love Ginny. A bright, long ago summer after Voldemort’s fall, when he’d seen her flying and allowed himself to think that he could be happy. He recognises now that the sudden jolt in his chest had been a love potion, slipped into his pumpkin juice – funny what you learn as an Auror – but at the time it had been a glorious, golden moment.
Fake. Like the moments they share now, in the public eye, with Ginny smiling on his arm and himself with all the purpose and charm of a corpse.
It’s funny what you learn as an Auror, and it’s funny how with hindsight, little things can seem so sinister. Fred and George’s shop, with its little heart-shaped bottles and the girls that giggled around them; spiked Cauldron Cakes on his bed and Ron’s dazed expression; a summer day where Mrs Weasley shared stories that drifted on the breeze – tales of love potions that echoed with triumph. He remembers Ginny and Hermione laughing, thinking nothing (everything) of what they heard, and he remembers thinking nothing of it himself.
He remembers the jolt of falling in love so vividly, right down to the way the condensation on the glass felt on his fingers, and he remembers waking up – years later – to the news that he was married and that Ginny wanted a baby and that “potions can hurt the baby if either parent is on them, so I can’t give you any more, but it doesn’t matter, does it? You love me, Harry, and the world loves the two of us together. We’re a family now.”
James is too young to know what rape is, but that’s okay. Before Ginny, Harry didn’t think a woman could rape a man, and while he loves his children dearly he can’t stand to think of how they were conceived.
When James stops crying, Harry pulls away. He brushes away tears and snot with the sleeve of his robes and tweaks his baby boy’s nose. He pulls out a wand, and with a flick, James is wearing a long-sleeved T-Shirt and a pair of jeans. Muggle clothes. Forbidden clothes.
“Come on,” Harry says. “Let’s get Al.”
He transfigures Al’s clothing and his own, and doesn’t let it show how much it bothers him when his boys spot the marks their mother has left behind. He orders Kreacher to pack a bag – just the essentials – and to lock up the house. Grimmauld Place is his, not Ginny’s, and she’ll not set foot in it again.
Nott had brought divorce papers to their meeting. He’d presented Harry with an option he hadn’t realised the Wizarding World offered. No one told him. Not even when they glimpsed the bruises or saw the bags under his eyes and the sullen silence of his children.
They’re leaving. They’re going to disappear together, him and his boys, and they’re going to be happy. They’re going to learn how – if they can; leave their pasts behind and teach themselves how to fly free. And one day, hopefully, they’ll do it.
“I watched my father kill my mother. Get out, Potter. Now. Before your children see the same.”
