COLLABORATIVE FIC: The Wind Blows So Sweetly There

Title: The Wind Blows So Sweetly There
Authors: happiestwhen & starrysummer
Pairings: Draco/Ginny, Pansy/Ginny, Draco/Pansy, possible implied Draco/Lucius
Rating: NC-17
Genre: Darkfic/HORROR
Summary: Pansy is first, and Ginny is only the flame in the gardener's shed, danger and free. But Pansy is only a chiselled name in stone by the lake, and Ginny wears white in the rain. Only Lucius speaks and there is necro femmeslash. Or something.
Warnings: infidelity, implied abuse, character death, necrophilia, incest if you squint
Word Count: about 2400
Author's Notes: Originally inspired by a couple of Draco/Ginny drabbles we wrote for queerditch_pub based on "The Bachelor and the Bride" by the Decemberists. Much thanks to garlandgraves for beta-reading this for us. Flaming Fawkes not included.


When Draco takes her, it's without asking. He never asks, doesn't kiss her, doesn't look at her. He doesn't even sound like he's breathing.

He takes her from behind because she's just skin that way. Just a tight heat around him, a spine to catch his body on. She could be anyone. She knows she’s anonymous like that, just pale flesh stretched tight over a crisscross of ribs. She cries out and whimpers and scratches at his legs, but he’ll never alter his rhythm, never give her the slightest hint that he sees something distinctive in her, something special.

The red hair gives her away, though. He has to see that much, even with his eyes closed. He has to see the strands and tangles falling sweaty over her freckled shoulders. He can’t fuck her without seeing, without knowing exactly who she is. He’ll keep coming back to disappear inside her, swallowed by her freckled Weasley body, and she will let her hair down until it’s all he can see. He twists her and turns her, but he cannot escape her.

She wonders how long it will be until he breaks and tears her limb from limb, pulls her hair from its roots until there’s no trace left of her on this body. As if there ever were.

Years go by, and it's always the same, always without looking as if it's just a touch and a feel and an unmuttered goodbye. She sees him with Pansy. She's not envious; that way is all dresses and order, and she likes it better knowing that she's seared herself into his memory behind his shut-tight eyes, pale skin and red hair. Flame in his bright-light world, and he always comes back.

With Pansy, he's different, calm, stoic even, and they're good together, with their palms pressing one to the other, their fingers lining up and curling over each other, leaving no space in between. Ginny wonders if he sounds different when he comes inside her, if he sounds as angry, if he thinks of wild red hair pulling between his thumb and forefinger and a different set of lips beneath his own.

Ginny's not surprised to find another letter -- calligraphy on smudged parchment, with nothing but a place and an hour -- even if it is only three days since she saw the announcement in the prophet. Two formal-clad figures and chaste kisses on the cheek, smiling at whoever turns past the page, an open invitation to want to be in their world.

It's a little gardener's shed on the edge of the property. She wants to go farther, wants to find out more and sink herself into the cut grass, the lake sparkling moonlight at the end of the path. But he grabs her wrist and pulls her back and she's on her knees on the floor (charmed a clean and eerie perfect, like everything else here). He's moaning her name and tugging at her hair as if to pull her closer, so she's not here, she's just with him.

He watches her as she Apparates away, and she smiles once, to give him something to hold onto.

She doesn't think about things like family and marriage and how who he is and who she is are such different and disparate things. She doesn’t think about shouldn’t and wouldn’t. She thinks only of what is, thinks only of the way his lips curve under his teeth as he bites down and the way his eyes slide back when he remembers who he's with.

She doesn't think about how things are going to change, because they aren't. Pansy is not Ginny; she is not a replacement, not who Draco wants. Pansy is just Draco's way of adhering to expectation, assembling in order.

One too-bright winter morning, she stumbles out for coffee and picks up a worn, read paper on the seat beside her.

One windy winter day (Ginny images the wind whistling through the evergreens and Draco holding Pansy's hand, dropping it softly by the bedside), Pansy is gone.

Draco calls for her the following morning, and he greets her not with a glint and a glare and his hands around her, turning her back towards him, but with a gleaming gown and sparkling ring. She imagines it ripped from Pansy's cooling fingers, and she bows her head and takes it.

Draco, she thinks, has stepped too close to the fire. But she sees no point in leaving, not when the sun glimmers off the lake, and he walks her up the path, to the white-stained house where his father greets her and offers her brandy.

Hand in hand and there's space between their palms, but that's all right because Pansy is only a whisper of wind now. They're together and the ring is not too tight, and Lucius is watching, his lips curling approvingly, his mouth matching Draco's in every nuance and twist.

Ginny blushes and ties her hair up with a white ribbon and says nothing, just like always, although her silence stretches longer than before.

Draco looks at her differently now, the same way she'd seen him looking at Pansy. She imagines his eyes filling in her features so that she and Pansy can be made interchangeable in his head.

It's always cold in the house, even as Spring breaks from Winter and the flowers grow cool yellows in the orderly gardens. It's always cold, even when Draco lays beside her in bed and his fingers claim circles, his nails half-moons on her flesh.

She bundles up, in robes and cloaks (heavy black fabric, put away from the winter, and in her mind they're stained with blood), with scarves that dance and choke in the wind, and she walks the property.

It starts to rain, a soft mist that barely hits her face, barely seeps in past her eyes and the scratches, and she looks up at the sky, then down at the ground. She's strayed off the path, to the gravel and the sand and the shore, accompanied by the rhythm of the wind through the branches of an under-sized maple tree. Beside the lake sits a tiny gravestone, carved simply Pansy. There are no dates, no family or standing, no message. Just her name, and she's gone.

Ginny turns back to the house, hardly seeing it through the grey-tinged air. She imagines that she can see Draco's eyes from the front walk, his hair pressed to his forehead, his lips a cold line. She glances away but she can still feel his gaze on her, pressing achingly into her skin, her bones, and the grass around her as he drives Pansy deeper underground.

Draco is gone quite a bit now, off with his father to places he won't name. Ginny never quite feels alone, though. She dresses in the morning in silk and satin, because she should await his return. The heels hurt her feet, though, and the crinoline itches her skin. She doesn't bother to change when the wind draws her outward, back to sit beneath the tree where the rain droplets shiver in the new-born leaves before landing on her face.

She thinks up stories, of Pansy with her wand drawn, and Draco caught almost – just almost – unawares. There's always silk and satin stained in blood on the floor and a soft sullen funeral with Lucius, with his cold face, as still as a statue, soulless and free, a pallbearer beside his son as the wind blows and the sky is the colour of their eyes as they return to the house and write her a letter.

Sometimes she walks to the edge of the property, broken heels sinking into the mud, trailing stains up the sole as she feels the magic grows stronger, feels herself weaken to a princess-in-the-tower as she's forced backwards, back to the house, back to Draco.

He's back when she returns, and sneers at her sagging silks and grass- and dirt-stained dress. He says nothing, but she can hear Lucius's voice filter in from the corridor: "She'll get a chill that way."

Draco nods and takes her upstairs to the bedroom, where he lays her in the crimson silk sheets and shuts the door softly behind him.

She thinks he would be more gentle to her now, and maybe he is, as he presses into her, groaning, but she feels nothing, her skin numbed by the rain. She sighs and whispers his name and says all the words Pansy's mouth has taught her to say. She's hearing that voice more frequently, enough for it to become her own. She wonders if Draco notices, if he's too preoccupied with other things, if his father tells him to ignore and forget and be content.

They are happy and Ginny is cold when he pulls out and way, watching her the whole time, wanting to draw a reaction from the hollow of her throat but earning nothing more than a shiver. Ginny tells him that she's tired and he tells her to rest. She thinks of muddied hems and graves and green green grass as she closes her eyes to him.

When she opens her eyes again, Draco is standing in the doorway. He moves in short, little movements, his lips pursed tight as Lucius stands behind him. She wants to tell him in a soft voice to come here, to hold her, but she never had a soft voice, she only borrowed it from Pansy in her memories.

He's still watching as her eyelids grow heavy and close.

When they awaken, heavy and crusty with sleep or tears, she's back by the gravestone, but she can hear a soft singing behind her. She turns, and Pansy sits beneath the tree, watching the lake. Her lips aren't moving.

I'm not really here, Pansy says. Not really here and it echoes in Ginny's mind until it hurts her. Ginny looks back, through the rustling leaves reflecting the yellowing glare of the sun, and Pansy is gone. She falls to her knees and looks at the gravestone. It's scratchy on her fingertips when she touches it. In her mind, the wind blows, the rain falls, and the gravestone, the words, Pansy, her, and everything, they slip away.

Ginny's hands feel the earth, it gets beneath her fingertips and the weeds (when were there weeds here - everything was perfect) prick at the pads of her fingers. She digging, digging faster because she has to know, she has to know if it was ever short notes and beware-the-footsteps, or if it was always the silken sheets and lace and Draco's hand on hers as the mirror counted down four hundred brushstrokes before she could follow him, racing in her heels down the hall.

There are no shoes now; they're barefoot, and the dress is a night-dress, cotton and thin and rain-soaked and sweat-soaked and she's crying as she feels the dirt, hot and real on her skin. It grows warmer as she gets closer and sees a wisp of brown hair, two feet beneath the surface.

She stands in the dirt, stands in the earth wet from the lakewater, and it's hot and heaven down here. Pansy's skin is on hers, and they're closed beneath the surface where no one can see and steal their features, switch them and tame them and wash off the dirt.

She'll bury them both and keep them safe from Lucius' prying eyes and Draco's hands that do not understand the difference between alive and dead. They're both alive down here and Ginny's fingers press indentations into Pansy's skin just to see it blossom red and real under her touch. She kisses and tastes earth between her lips, Pansy's tongue and the rain and it's all the same and it's all warm.

They're both moving, perfect, different rhythms and speeds, and Ginny doesn't feel like she has to pretend. She lets her hair down, out, the strands dropping red roots into the earth around her, tying her to the grave, to Pansy, keeping her here, planted and solid.

Ginny thinks of Draco and all the words he’s said to her and she wonders how many of them were actually meant for Pansy, how many she’d stolen jealously. Her fingers scrawl down Pansy's back, reclaiming all the things she deserves, marking Draco’s dead wife in a way he never will.

Pansy howls out a low, wronged note, and her eyes flash open.

Draco stands in the doorway; he does not even move to step over the threshold. So Ginny reaches down below the blankets and touches herself where she is still swollen and aching from the feel of Pansy's skin against her own.

Draco tries to stop her, but he won't touch her, only the hem of her night-dress which rips away, flutters behind her. Lucius's hands are on her, but she spits in his face and runs away, her feet traipsing dirt-marks in the back of her mind on the marble. She's free now, and the sun is peeking out behind the clouds as she runs, her breath out and aching on her empty lungs as she falls to the dirty, to the grass in need of keeping.

Her finger traces the gravestone. Pansy, it reads, and she thinks that maybe the gravestone needs a flower. So she reaches, she curls over, for a dandelion that she drops softly by the curl of the "y" as she closes her eyes and thinks that now, without Draco watching, she can sleep soundly.

There are footsteps, and she can hear them, but she keeps her eyes pinched shut and she knows they will go away.

"It's all right; we'll find another one," says Lucius, in his cold voice, and she can hear their breath growing hot (like the steamy, mouldy air grows in the dungeons, where she used to go to be alone and stare at the manacles), as she closes her eyes and reaches for Pansy.