Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/2088354.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Major_Character_Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      F/M
  Fandom:
      Harry_Potter_-_J._K._Rowling
  Relationship:
      Tom_Riddle/Ginny_Weasley, Harry_Potter/Ginny_Weasley
  Character:
      Tom_Riddle, Ginny_Weasley, Harry_Potter, Hermione_Granger
  Additional Tags:
      Rape/Non-con_Elements, Rape_Aftermath, Rape_Fantasy, Explicit_Sexual
      Content, Dark_Fic_Fest, Pre-Deathly_Hallows, Half-Blood_Prince_AU, Loss
      of_Virginity, Love_Potion/Spell, Room_of_Requirement
  Stats:
      Published: 2014-08-06 Words: 2936
****** Femina Nova ******
by luna_plath
Summary
     Nova: the mistaken sighting of a new star, a flash of brightness that
     quickly dims. Ginny performs some unlucky magic and is forced to live
     with the consequences. Written for hp_darkfest on LJ.
Notes
     Prompt: dark magic leaves a residue, and still, Tom lingers.
     The themes in this story are not trying to sexualize rape; Ginny
     relives a past trauma and responds in a not unheard-of manner. The
     spell Ginny uses is based off of gypsy magic and not something of my
     own creation. A huge thanks to my beta J, who helped me iron out some
     of the less polished sections.
She was stretched out on her four-poster in her bra and school skirt, resting
in the thick, musty heat that inched inside through the dormitory window. All
of her classmates were in lessons or the common room, leaving her the sole
occupant in the fifth-year girls’ room. It was the third week of term, with
homework and course material already underway, but her limbs felt so sated and
zapped of energy that Ginny couldn’t move to study if she tried.
A bead of sweat dipped between her breasts, salty and warm and indistinct,
before soaking into her off-white cotton bra. She closed her eyes and listened
to the dense, buzzing sound of the heavy afternoon until she caught sight of a
shape emerging from the dormitory window.
Blinking at the change in light, Ginny peered at the dark-haired boy calmly
sitting on the window seal, daring a gust of wind to pull him off the ledge to
the far-away ground below.
“I thought you’d come,” she said, looking him up and down with hungry eyes. His
black hair was longer than she was used to seeing it; had he dodged her
mother’s annual school shearing? It reminded her of a memory she’d lost until
now; a pale, older boy watching her from that very spot.
“You thought right,” Harry said, his white school shirt pushed up at the
elbows, showing off his summer-golden skin and the shapely plates of muscle and
sinew that stretched beneath it.
Ginny rolled off the shadowed bed and waited for him to join her, her fingers
seeking his once they were face-to-face.
“Come on then,” she said, tugging him back to the unmade bed. “Let’s not
pretend.”
----
It started during the summer after a bit of funny magic. A few months after her
fourth year school shopping Ginny had found a crumpled piece of parchment in
the pocket of her second-hand jumper with instructions for a love spell. It was
written in girlish, loopy handwriting, like the kinds of notes her schoolmates
would pass around to the other girls during History of Magic class, and the
description seemed symbolic and oddly simple. Initially the idea of placing
five roses in different places had sounded like folk magic, the kind of rubbish
that muggles dreamed up in novels or gypsies charged for out of the back of a
caravan.
But things began to disintegrate as the year went on, and despite originally
thinking it wasn’t real spellwork, Ginny held on to the frayed square of paper.
She thought about it more and more as her fourth year relationship with Michael
came to an end. It called for simple, easily available ingredients, and the
date of the casting was approaching. Midsummer served as a marker for many
magical events, chipping away at her original belief that the spell wasn’t
legitimate.
Eventually Michael had left her for Cho, Sirius had died, and two of the girls
in her dormitory had lost their virginity. With all the events of the past year
pushing her forward, she went through with the spell during the long hours of
oppressive summer heat, thinking about the differences between herself and the
other girls in her year. Her mind kept returning to how it must have felt for
them as inexperienced, unmarked women—something that she certainly wasn’t. The
longer she thought on, the tighter her chest felt, until a hard pit of anger
formed after hours of bitter recollection.
Ginny had grown past her childhood insecurities toward boys, but thinking about
virginity and sex and the first boy that had ever looked at her in that way
made her throat constrict. The last time a man had touched her between her legs
she had been eleven years old, and no one had felt her there since. A part of
her was both ashamed and terrified of what the next boy would say when he found
that she wasn’t a virgin, when she couldn’t explain when or how it had
happened. She’d considered lying about loosing it with Michael, but that idea
had been ruined once he’d complained to the entire Ravenclaw quidditch team
that she was “just talk” and wouldn’t go further than snogging.
As June progressed with her return to the Burrow, the second-hand love spell
caught her imagination again. It was enticing after the catastrophe that was
her fourth year. If he loves me it won’t matter that Tom had me first, Ginny
thought, folding and unfolding the worn parchment until it began to fray, a
plan forming in her mind.
It was a mad, reckless, stupid idea, but with the war starting to slowly
infiltrate her life it was exactly the kind of thing that made perfect sense.
And if it doesn’t work no one will be the wiser, she reckoned, plucking five
red, long-stemmed roses from her mother’s garden and slipping the last one
under her pillow for three evenings. On the final night she turned on her side
and slipped her hand in her knickers, thinking of long fingers and cool, soft
lips. It had been so long, and she had never been the patient type.
----
Harry was crouched over her hips with his unruly hair tickling her lower
stomach, his index finger hooked on the side of her knickers, inching them
beneath her waist. His touch grazed a deliberate path over her skin, teasing
her and making her tense with wanting while he mouthed a pattern against her
hip.
Ginny could feel her body quivering in response to the lightest contact from
his lips—a pinprick of heat starting at her inner thigh and traveling straight
to her groin, a sharp current of desire pooling in her belly as he kissed the
baby-soft skin along her thighs—and it took more self-control than she thought
she possessed to keep herself from reaching down and angling him in herself.
The pressure that was building in the hollow between her legs made her
unconsciously arch toward him, groping for the kind of firm, living pressure
that she usually tried to simulate with her fingers.
She reached for his warm hand, guiding it over her center and pressing the heel
against her downy curls.
“Be patient,” he said, shimmying up her body and kissing the underside of her
breast, fingers teasing the edges of her folds. “It’ll be better that way, I
promise.”
An antsy, unsatisfied part of her wanted to say and how would you know?—but she
held her tongue, wriggling underneath him in search of that elusive feeling
he’d conjured in her over the summer.
After Ginny had cast the Midsummer love spell she had started running into
Harry all the time—when she was hanging up the wash to dry, as she was coming
down from the attic, just after taking a bath—and each time if felt like
something physically hung between them, like an extra weight had settled into
the room. The Harry she’d known last summer had been almost shy around her, but
somewhere between Sirius’s death and her Midsummer spell, he had changed. The
Harry she’d known would never have pressed her against an apple tree and
slipped his hand in her shirt and kissed her to keep her quiet, but she found
herself fantasizing about each day’s events as she lay in bed at night with her
windows open to the summer breeze.
They had been circling each other for months now, and without her mother or
Hermione or her brothers around to interfere it felt like the right time to
move in for the final act. After ages of reliving her memories of Michael
Corner’s awkward groping and Tom’s possessive hold on her little-girl body, it
was time to reach out and grasp what she’d been hunting all this time.
----
With her hand clutched in Harry’s, she followed him to the seventh floor of the
castle. It was sundown, just the time when the rest of the school would be
leaving the Great Hall and heading up to their respective common rooms, and
after making an appearance at dinner the pair were ready to disappear for the
evening. Side by side, they passed the tapestry of Barnabus the Barmy three
times, waiting as the door finally appeared in the stonework.
As he led her inside, the searing touch of his hand on her lower back caused a
pressure to start at the base of her spine, slowly crawling upwards as Ginny
shut the door behind her. With her pulse ringing in her eardrums and her body
loose and soft against his firmer touch, she let herself be led over to the bed
that the Room of Requirement had conjured.
Harry pressed her into the sheets with his full weight, rubbing his smooth
palms underneath her woolen school skirt, over her legs, inside her knickers.
She let out a soft, quiet moan against his neck, shivering at the feeling of
his cold hands against her skin as he deliberately removed the last of her
innocence.
----
Ginny shivered and rolled over in the bed, her naked back and shoulders covered
with gooseflesh. Sometime during the night she must have moved away from Harry
because she remembered the warm, enveloped feeling of sleeping tucked against
him—a sharp contrast to the prickling coolness she felt now.
Opening her sleep-dilated eyes to the dark room, she saw his shock of black
hair, his lips lightly parted in sleep. She reached out and brushed her fingers
over his cheek, pausing when his skin felt abnormally cool to the touch. The
air around her began to feel positively still, and a creeping uneasiness came
over her as she sat up in bed and studied him more closely. Crawling towards
him, Ginny fearfully realized that Harry wasn’t breathing. A stab of panic shot
through her before she quieted the buzzing that had suddenly erupted inside her
head.
She laid a hand over his chest, feeling for the strong push of his heart
against her fingertips. When no vibration reached her, she pressed an ear to
his lips, listening hard for any sign of breathing, any evidence of life. Just
as she was placing her fingertips against the immobile vein in his neck in
search of conformation, the sound of rustling fabric, of a living person
readjusting themselves behind her, reached her ears.
Any hope that she was somehow mistaken or dreaming died in her throat at that
sound. Like paralyzed prey waiting to be seized, Ginny tensed, every muscle in
her body screaming with fear.
Slowly, she turned.
“Good evening, Ginevra.”
Just as dark and handsome as the boy next to her, Tom rose from the straight-
backed chair from which he’d been watching, his face a mask of controlled
interest. He wore the white Oxford shirt and pressed trousers of a student, but
he looked much older than an adolescent of sixteen. As he moved closer, Ginny
could make out more about his appearance, spying his sharp cheekbones and full,
pouted lips. The air between them was tense with magical activity, strained
with the weight of it.
“Why are you here?” she asked, suddenly feeling vulnerable in her nakedness.
The sharp, predatory glint to his eyes raked over her and she squirmed
underneath Tom’s gaze, a frightened rabbit cornered by the big, bad wolf. His
expression was dark and haughty but her body was beginning to respond despite
her fear. A rush of heat streaked up her abdomen, curling in the lower pit of
her stomach and making the muscles in her thighs contract.
“Should I not be asking you that question? It was by your magic that I arrived
in this place,” he said languidly, as if her inner panic couldn’t possibly
reach him.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, her protest sounding hollow
in her own ears. The darkness of the room had taken on a living, indigo
quality, swallowing them in its completeness.
“Really, Ginny, I didn’t arrive here by force of will. It was that little spell
you cast all those months ago—don’t you remember? Haven’t you noticed at least
a little change in dear Harry since then?”
Her heart dropped to a pit in her stomach, the sound of each beating rush
filling her eardrums. “No.”
The look Tom wore gave her the impression that he was entertaining himself with
a little private joke, his emotions just beyond her reach. “Well, if you think
not then this surely can’t be real, can it?”
“I want you to leave,” she said, her heart fluttering against her ribcage like
a frantic bird.
Before she could voice any dissent he was up and within inches of her, his cool
fingers grazing her cheek. “Lets not play games, Ginny. I think you’ll find
that I’m a very sore looser.”
Her body was practically quaking, small shivers of awareness tingling from
where she could feel his hands on her, and she had a suspicion that it wasn’t
just from the cold.
“I don’t understand how this happened,” Ginny said. “I don’t understand what
you did to Harry.”
The air between her body and Tom’s had begun to take on a life of its own,
holding a low, purring charge. He angled his head to the side, bringing his
lips close enough to her neck to make her ache with anticipation.
“Your spell was for a lover’s return,” he said, gliding his fingertips over the
dip between her hip and her waist, the flat plane of her stomach, the gentle
curve of her breast. “You loved me once, and the strongest, most intact piece
of me has been lying dormant in young Harry for years, weaker than his true
identity but slowly growing stronger. All it took was your bit of magic to give
me life again,” Tom said, his hands reaching to cup her breasts, to claim her.
“No,” she said, but Ginny let herself be handled like a rag doll as he shifted
from teasing contact to harsh force.
“Foolish little witch,” he cursed, crushing her against the bed with his
weight. Tom arranged himself between her legs and ground his hips into her,
pain dizzying the corners of her vision in colored bursts of light. His right
hand pinched her nipple and twisted it while leaving raw bite marks along the
angle of her jaw. Tom lowered his trousers with his long fingers, further
escalating the panic that had started to overwhelm her.
Tears formed in her eyes, wet and hot and blurring her vision as he reached
between her legs and felt inside. Ginny gasped and jerked her hips upward,
ashamed of the insidious excitement she felt at his touch. Her features
crumpled as Tom roughly slid into her, and she tried to ignore the cold, silent
presence of Harry on the bed, revulsion and desire clattering through her
spine.
----
She didn’t go to lessons the next day, hiding behind her bed hangings with the
sour, unwashed scent of her hair and a dull throbbing in her center. The sounds
of the other girls going through their normal routine failed to reach her, and
the slow warming of the castle under the midday sun left her feeling withered
and extinguished.
After laying in bed far past noon, Ginny disrobed and looked at herself in the
pale afternoon light, running her fingers over the bite marks, the bruises. Her
mind felt empty and full of dust, as if her life were a collection of memories
locked away in neat, impenetrable boxes. Every stride and triumph she’d made
since Tom and the Chamber of Secrets had been wiped clean, leaving her barren
and paralyzed by the awfulness of it all.
What a silly, stupid girl, she echoed, curling her shoulders inward as she lay
on her side. After a time, Hermione came to check on her, peaking her head in
the doorway and asking if she was there. In lieu of responding she rolled over
and clutched her bed sheets tighter over herself, sinking into the feeling of
her warm sleep shirt. Hermione prodded a bit further, asking if she was ill, if
she wanted to talk, if she wanted to come down to the common room and play
chess. Her silence was taken as a no. Ginny held her breath, waiting for the
sounds of Hermione’s footsteps to fade away, relieved when her ears were met
with nothing but blessed silence.
She pulled her hangings back and breathed in the darkening night air, enjoying
the sting of the cool wind against her limbs. Rolling over, something in her
breathing hitched while a gust of wind lapped at the open panes.
Easy, careful footsteps sounded on the floor, along with the silken drag of an
invisibility cloak.
“Ginny.”
She didn’t move. The world became a separate place from the inside of her brain
and she huddled against the side, watching from her invisible perch.
Harry sat down next to her on the bed, not quite touching her. “Hermione’s
worried about you. She says you’re ill, that you won’t talk to her or any of
your roommates.”
He placed his cool hand over hers. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” she said, feeling as if another person was speaking for her. “I’m fine.”
“You shouldn’t play games like that,” Harry said, lightly dragging his nail
over her palm. The room began to spin and she squeezed her eyes shut.
“Yes, Tom. I’ll come down in a minute.”
“Good,” he said, brushing her coppery hair out of her eyes with his long
fingers. “You know how I don’t like to wait.”
----
fin
Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed
their work!