This time it was Ginny Weasley who woke, bruised and aching with wounds that stung beneath stiff bandages. She shifted, and something clinked, she stiffened against the sudden resistance – she was chained down, cuffed at the wrists and ankles with heavy straps across her chest and thighs. She tried her best to tamp down her panic, but still she could not help but try the limits of her bonds, twisting back and forth on the bed until her sheets were a tangled mess.

“Hey, it’s- it’s no good, Mi- Professor McGonagall, she enchanted those herself,” a familiar voice explained from somewhere off to Ginny’s left. Rhiannon, she was here, Ginny wasn’t alone. She forced herself to take deep breaths, wincing as her bruised chest and battered ribs stretched against the straps, but pain or not it did help to provide some measure of calm. “I’m, sorry, for the record. I didn’t mean to trick you, I – I really thought they’d just give you wolfsbane, but... well, I guess they w-w-w-weren’t, telling students how bad it had been while you were... gone. And the restraints, uh... I guess, they didn’t know which Ginny we were gonna get back.”

Ginny coughed and forced herself to lie still, all her fighting was leaving her short of breath. Now she was awake, in something resembling human civilisation again, she could take stock of how battered, broken down and sick she was – that definitely felt like a chest infection rattling away wetly in each breath, she had run herself into the ground. “I suppose... I, get it,” she murmured, words coming to her slowly and clumsily – it had been so long since she had spoken to anyone but the Darkness in her head. “You – you beat it, him, then?”

There was a soft rustle of sheets, and Ginny startled briefly as Rhiannon slipped her tiny hand into Ginny’s worn and scraped one. “Yeah, me’n Luna, we – we fought him, you, that is... I could hear it, when he crushed you down, you were telling me go away go away pretty much constantly and then just went, silent, we knew something w’s wrong... uh, sorry if you hurt, um, Luna kinda brained you – Voldy, I guess – with a big rock, on’y had one wand between us, so... yeah.” she stammered, rambling away in that endearing way she had. For the first time in months, Ginny’s heart felt warm and even here, tied to the bed with an aching lump on the back of her head, she felt safe, real, alive again.

“You killed him. You got it out. I don’t... it’s quiet in my head, I can’t... I can’t remember the last time it was quiet in here,” Ginny whispered, her voice breaking. Tears rolled down her cheeks and dripped into her ears, she shook her head in disgust but there was no stopping them, she had run out of fight. Some well had broken inside her, and she longed to just curl up on her side and cry.

There was a rustling of stiff hospital wing sheets, and Ginny’s bed creaked loudly as somebody else settled their weight on it. Her eyes closed against the tears, Ginny could not see who it was, but she knew by the soft hiss of pain as they took a breath in, the fragile feather-weight of their light body and the and tentative way they hesitated before every touch – it could only be Rhiannon, and despite the bindings, they managed to make an awkward sort of cuddle nest with Ginny lying flat on her back and Rhiannon curled up against her side, one leg flung over the top and one arm wrapped tightly around Ginny’s chest, both of them trembling and crying but safe. And there was no need to speak for what felt like hours as their tears gradually dried and eventually they were disturbed by the resonating click of hard-soled shoes on stone.

“Miss Weasley, Miss Potter,” Madam Pomfrey addressed them both. “Ordinarily I would insist on one patient to a bed, but I understand you have both been through a traumatic ordeal and I will let it slide this once. However, I do need to speak to Miss Weasley alone – her parents are on their way and I’m afraid things are more complicated than I can explain to you both.”

Ginny’s heart clenched – something was wrong, she knew it. Maybe several somethings, by the tense note in Madam Pomfrey’s voice. She squeezed Rhiannon’s hand tightly, trembling and breathing shallowly as she fought to squash down her pack instinct – if it was bad as she feared, she could not deal with reassuring Rhiannon when she was so afraid herself. As much as a lone wolf was bound to fall, this was something she had to face on her own.

“You can go, I’ll be okay,” Ginny whispered as she let go of Rhiannon’s hand, though she couldn’t help the little whine of grief as the smaller girl’s comforting presence seemed to vanish, her soft musky scent lost amongst the acrid sterility of the Hospital Wing. All that remained was the sound of her hushed footfalls, and those were quickly fading away as Rhiannon left. The scrape of a heavy door, a thud – then nothing. Ginny was alone in the silence that was broken only by the dull thump of her pulsing headache and the low whisper of the nurse’s breathing.

Silence – a strange and frightening thing after almost a year with another presence riding in the back of her mind. Visceral fear and discomfort rose in Ginny’s aching stomach, but the nurse broke the silence before panic could overwhelm the young girl. “Ginny. There are some things I need to speak with you about before your parents arrive – in fact, they might be in my office already, but... I have to know. Are you alone, in your mind? We pieced together what has been happening, and Miss Potter confirmed for us that you had been possessed and she believes that to be ended now – but I have to know, or I will not be able to release you from the restraints; their presence is a legal matter rather than one I truly believed necessary.”

Ginny gulped and clenched her malformed hand-paws into fists as a frisson of fear travelled across her skin, setting every hair to bristling. She had been right – Madam Pomfrey’s fear was not only for her health, there was a legal element to all of this. It was unsurprising given the prevailing opinions on werewolves, but she had hoped that perhaps the Ministry would make the connection between the attacks and the Dark Lord’s possession of her body. “He’s – he’s gone,” she murmured, her voice cracking painfully as once again she could say it out loud, the thing she had lost all hope would ever happen. “It’s just me. Well... me and her. The wolf.”

Madam Pomfrey sighed, her relief almost tangible as it hung in the air with her breath. “I believe you – I just needed you to say it out loud so I could get a read on it. I could have probed you for the answer but the Ministry can forgive me for choosing to ask rather than physically invade the mind of a possession victim. I don’t want to put any patient of mine through that. It does concern me a little, though, that you refer to the wolf as a separate being – it’s not uncommon of course, especially with how our world treats werewolves... but I would like you to see a therapist in any case, one who is experienced with werewolves – it’ll have to be under the table, but I have someone in mind provided she agrees... it’s clear that for you to heal, you’ll need help reconciling your lycanthropy from the way your possessor used it to do harm – right now it feels like there’s a monster in your head, doesn’t it? Like every instinct is a message from a monster, like it’s turning you into one as well. No, don’t look at me like that, Hogwarts has had more than a few secret werewolves in its’ time and I have known them all – and while I cannot fully understand what you are feeling even with the help of my gift, I know that you are feeling and most of it bad and I want to make space for it, help you process it - help you heal.”

“But I won’t, will I?” Ginny rasped, voicing that other deeper fear, a loss that she had become more and more aware of the longer she was conscious – like lightning had run in her blood before, a powerful tide that surged with her emotions, and now she felt lifeless. A cracked vessel, broken. Empty. “That’s what you’re dancing around – I can hear it. I’m not going to heal, not completely. Nobody talks about hearing me and making space for my feelings unless they’re leading up to admitting something bad.”

Madam Pomfrey’s breath caught and there was the tiniest hint of a sob in her voice as she hastily stepped in to reassure Ginny – or try. “No – Ginny, you can’t think that. I am not trained in assessments as complex as all that, I am a school nurse – the professionals at St Mungo’s will be better able to tell what has happened, what things might look like going forward-”

“Don’t LIE to me!” Ginny roared, and she thrashed against the restraints as that same sick, empty hopelessness rose and flooded within her – rage without power, without life – at least not in the way she had known it for almost twelve years. Without magic. She hadn’t realised until this very moment just how fundamental magic was to a wizard’s being, how it coloured every emotional ebb and flare and as she opened her eyes for the first time since waking, it was as if the world was now too vibrant, taunting her with the magic that she knew; whatever Madam Pomfrey might say; that she would never again have herself.

“Don’t lie to me,” she repeated, softer this time and broken-voiced as she lost the energy to fight and sagged back into the bed and the grip of the restraints. “I can feel it, as much as I ever felt Him – my magic’s gone, and it’s not coming back.”

_____________________________________________________________________

As it turned out, Ginny was right about the loss of her magic – and it was hard to keep in the vindictive urge to howl I TOLD YOU SO at her family when they received the final news. They cared for her and they were doing their best – but their best wasn’t good enough, and there was something very unintentionally cruel about insisting she try to hold to some false hope when she knew, deeper than she could ever explain to them, what she had lost. She just wanted to accept it and move on, but they needed confirmation – her knowledge of that loss wasn’t enough for them.

Ginny didn’t recall the words the Healers used – she didn’t like them for starters, they insisted on restraining her to a bed for every session or a chair if they were only talking and she got the impression they were almost relieved that the killer werewolf in front of them had lost her magic, something so essential to the idea of a self she had built in her twelve years of life – but it was all very scientific in any case, and essentially amounted to the fact that when Luna had knocked her body unconscious, Voldemort had accepted that he would have to find another way of killing the Girl Who Lived and her companion and had drained Ginny’s magic and life force, the two things being fundamentally intertwined in a wizard, to power the projection that Rhiannon and Luna had then defeated. Such a drain could be recovered from in some cases, the Healers waffled hopefully, but in Ginny’s case they had discovered the drain to have been so complete and so fast, it had permanently destroyed her body’s ability to regenerate her magical core the way an ordinary wizard’s could – and thus preventing her from ever casting magic of her own.

At least she wasn’t a Muggle, they told her – as if that were some sort of consolation prize. Ginny could still see and feel the magic in the world around her – but just as she had felt when she first realised the depth of damage Voldemort had wrought upon her, that sense of the magic in her environment only served as a bitter contrast against the fundamental lack of magic in her own self. As if she was a gray person in a world that went about its’ business in full colour. ‘Squib’ was a clumsy word for such a profound loss.

Previously Ginny might have referred to the two people that kept her getting out of bed every morning as bright spots, but in this harsh new technicolour world they were more like safe havens of moon-glow grey. Despite Madam Pomfrey’s initial resistance to acknowledge Ginny’s disability – and it was a disability even if her parents refused to call it such, she grated against the idea of refusing to accept her new limitations, it seemed dishonest in a deeply irritating way – despite all that, the therapist Madam Pomfrey had found for her was better than Ginny could have hoped for. Not only was she werewolf-friendly, Chiara Lobosca was a werewolf herself – living stealth as many did, there was no way she could have kept her position at St Mungo’s otherwise. They met twice a week at Chiara’s own house, an awkward compromise but the hospital was not safe for either of them if they were to be as honest as Ginny needed to be to heal; and the short, white-haired woman was endlessly patient and kind, even when Ginny screamed and sobbed and threw things – it was rare that Chiara so much as raised her voice and would only question Ginny at all once the overwhelming bitter rage had blown itself out like a summer storm at sea.

That infinite patience, the quietly neutral expression on the thin woman’s red-blotched pale face, it all served to create a safe space that Ginny needed more than she could express and that made her all the more guilty whenever she lost her own temper – but Chiara never rubbed that guilt in and only asked once it had blown out, what was Ginny really angry about, because they both knew she was only projecting it onto the woman before her simply because she was nearest. Ginny was far from ready to accept the Red Wolf of the Moors as a part of herself, a separation that was only increased with each full moon that passed with her magically warded by Ministry order into the nearest surrounds of the Burrow and no hope of any further wanderings – but her time with Chiara gave Ginny at least the faintest of hopes that someday she might be able to, and she was self-aware enough to recognise that her startle response when her own wolfish instincts flared was slowly becoming less pronounced the longer she spent with the white-haired Healer.

The other safe grey haven was none other than Dudley Dursley. Ginny had paid him little mind the year before, she had been deeply preoccupied with the possession; but now she saw him in a new light – another Squib but one who had been born that way, and while he did not see his own limited magic as a disability he was the first to respect her firm definition that it was such for her. Molly Weasley was deeply distrustful of the werewolf cousins, holding them in no small part part responsible for what had happened to her daughter despite Ginny’s pleading that it had been Voldemort and not becoming a werewolf that had done so much damage, but even the distrustful Weasley matriarch could not deny that her daughter was happier when Dudley was around and so she begrudgingly allowed him to visit whenever Ginny wanted provided they stayed within sight of the house – and never at night on the full moons.

In truth, most people – the Healers, the Ministry, her parents, probably Madam Pomfrey and maybe Chiara too – didn’t believe that it had been Voldemort who had possessed her at all. He was dead, they said. Ginny knew different, but she’d seen the Healers scribbling it enough to know what delusional looked like when written upside down, and Dudley was a great comfort in that other way – he was one of the few who knew it had been the Dark Lord and never once tried to convince her otherwise. So while Rhiannon was still too consumed with her own guilt to be of any great help to Ginny for now, Dudley stepped up and he walked himself, janky hip and all, over the hills to the Burrow almost every day to visit and remind her that she wasn’t crazy and she wasn’t a monster either.

Today they lay side by side on the long, tickly grass in the Burrow’s orchard, both grumpy and irritable with the surge of pain brought on by proximity to the full moon – three days from now on the twelfth of August if Ginny’s memory served, not that it was reliable these days. Huh - it was almost her birthday, she'd forgotten she had one of those. Dudley had brought a janky old music player over from the Rookery, Muggle technology but adapted to draw power from magic rather than an electrical cord; and the air was filled with the slightly tinny tunes from one of the discs Dudley had brought along with it.

A fun descending guitar riff rang out into the air as a new track started, and Dudley cheered, then lurched upright in the grass beside Ginny, swearing as he hauled himself to his feet with aid of the cane he always carried but grinning nonetheless. “C’mon, I like this track – dance with me!” he wheedled, sounding so puppyish that Ginny couldn’t help but give in although dancing felt like the last thing she should be doing with such sore joints.

“Doo doo doo-doo doo doo-doo doo,” Dudley chanted along as he pulled Ginny to her feet, bringing a reluctant smile to her face – he actually had a pretty good voice, even if he wasn’t singing properly, and she could pick up the rhythmic tune easily enough to join in with him a couple of lines later. He held her in a goofy sort-of-waltz stance and rocked their joined hands up and down until Ginny couldn’t help but laugh and loosen up as best she could.

She got lost again as the singer started in on the first verse, but Dudley apparently knew the words by heart and he sang energetically along with the track as they rock-danced awkwardly back and forth. “You've got your mother in a whirl, she's not sure if you're a boy or a girl,” he sang and Ginny burst out laughing, startled and amused – Dudley was more right than he knew, Molly had wanted a daughter so badly that she’d never had any idea what to do with this girl who insisted on wearing nothing but her brothers’ castoff jeans and cords and too big shirts, and in truth, sometimes Ginny wasn’t sure she knew the answer to that one either – girl or boy? Good question.

“Hey babe, your hair's alright, hey babe, let's go out tonight,” Dudley carried on giddily, and he spun Ginny out in a silly sort of swing arc and pointed to her as he got to that next line, laughing in between lines and grinning so broadly Ginny thought his face might split. She couldn’t help it, as he got to the line about her hair she crumpled and broke away, hiding her face in her hands as all the fear and self-hatred came flooding back. Red hair, red wolf, it was falling in her eyes and she collapsed to her knees trying desperately to push it out of sight as the moment and the dizzy spinning feelings that had begun to grow between them were punctured all at once like a burst bubble.

To his credit, Dudley noticed at once and hurried to slam the power button off with a very audible clunk before rushing as best he could on one and a half legs to Ginny’s side in the grass, his warm hands covering hers as she tried now to tear at the hair that wouldn’t stay out of sight, but he was stronger than she was and all she could do was fall apart against his chest, her vision filled with red and nostrils with the phantom scent of blood so thick she choked on it. Rationally she knew it wasn’t real, red looked green at full moon time anyway – but that didn’t stop it and a muffled shriek bubbled up from between her tightly-pressed lips as she was swamped by it all. “Hey, no, no – he hurt you, don’t you hurt you too,” Dudley murmured softly, and once he was satisfied that she would not grab for her hair, he shifted position and pulled her close so that her back rested against his chest, warm and squishy and safe as he held her tightly with both arms crossed around her chest.

“Don’t – don’t, wanna hurt,” Ginny managed to gasp out, slowly beginning to recover from the sudden onslaught of flashbacks and self-hatred. “It’s the – you know,” she added clumsily, unable to even form the word that had triggered the spiral. Hair. It seemed so innocuous and already the self-hate was turning inward into guilt at such an overreaction.

“No, stop it,” Dudley chided her gently as Ginny began to beat at her temples and ears, overwhelmed again. “I – this, actually, God I’m dumb, I’d already noticed you flinch whenever it falls in your eyes and... I’m really sorry for pointing it out, I wasn’t thinking. Are you going to be okay if I let go and grab something from my bag, or do I need to hold you a bit more? I know Rhi just sometimes needs to be squished a bit when she’s all overwhelmed and stuff, it’s okay – really, it’s my fault.”

Ginny nodded a wordless assent, but she couldn’t quite keep down the puppyish whimper that escaped her lips at the sudden loss of the pressure that had been keeping her grounded in her body, it was like that hug had been keeping all of the mess and trauma that made up this new Ginny Weasley firmly inside her body and now it had all bounced free, scrambling wildly around the orchard leaving her dizzy, disoriented and unable to do much more than clutch her ears and keen at a rising volume in her distress until the pressure returned.

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m back now,” Dudley murmured softly on her left, his chin tucked over her pointed shoulder so that their cheeks were squished together. He shifted one hand and ran it up over Ginny’s forehead, this time her hair stayed out of her eyes but he kept his hand there on top of her head anyway and fumbled in front of her with something in the other hand. “If you look, I moved it for a bit – yeah, there you go, prettiest brown eyes in the West Country,” he told her cheekily.

Ginny snorted and laughed despite herself, a snotty snuffling sound all choked up with the residue of tears and panic but a laugh nonetheless. She’d never thought of her brown eyes as anything but ordinary – they weren’t the pretty light kind like his or some of her brothers’, they weren’t anything striking like Fred and George with their one blue eye one brown eye look; but the compliment stuck in her heart and spread warm fuzzy affection everywhere as she blinked and forced her vision to focus on the box Dudley wiggled in one hand in front of her. White, with an inch-wide stripe of a muddy dark gray-green she guessed might have actually been brown running right around the middle, and lettering in a greenish gold kind of colour that she couldn’t quite make out through the leftover tears.

“It’s h- dye,” Dudley explained as Ginny made a bewildered sort of humming sound, carefully avoiding the trigger word at the last moment for which Ginny was more than grateful. “My foster dad helped me pick it out, it’s magical so it won’t wash out unless you treat it with the wash-out potion and I can help you redo the roots every so often if you like – as long as you need to. I just... It hurts, seeing you flinch at something that you can’t get away from, and I wanted to help.”

Ginny’s heart swelled and for the first time since losing her magic she felt something real, as sharp and strong as anything had been before. She wasn’t sure she’d call it love but it was something like it – love, gratitude, affection, all bundled up with her grief and hurt but enhanced rather than diminished by it. He had watched her closely enough to see that she was hurting and found a solution – and that meant something, all the more when compared to the way her own family walked on eggshells around her pain and hid rather than be caught up in her panic attacks when they occurred. Dudley was exactly right – her trauma had a trigger that she could not simply avoid without some help, and he had paid enough attention to guess what might actually be help instead of yet another useless suggestion from people who wanted to help but didn’t know or look closely enough to do so.

They sat there wordless for some time, Dudley rocking them both softly until Ginny felt she had recovered enough to sit on her own and wiggled free of his embrace. “Can you help me do it? I don’t – I can’t look at it enough to make sure it’s not all patchy, and if I touch it over and over – I know I can’t see r- see that colour right now but I know what it is, it just blots everything out anyway.” Ginny ventured, her brows drawing together in an anxious frown. She didn’t like to ask for help, even less now – her family always looked so frustrated when she asked for help after telling them they’d been helping wrong on some other occasion, she felt like a burden – but no, he had brought it, presumably he must be willing to help.

Dudley reached out and took hold of one of Ginny’s hands, squeezing it in a gesture quick reassurance. “Sure I can. I came prepared – two boxes of dye and a bunch of water bottles and a bowl to wash it out in. I think we’re far enough away to not poison your ma’s apricot tree,” he quipped wryly, and Ginny closed her eyes as a genuinely warm, happy smile spread over her face and that same fuzzy affection spread through her chest as Dudley rummaged in his bag and she leaned back against his shoulder, at peace.

It took him several minutes – Ginny quickly learned that Dudley was also a perfectionist with his work no matter the field – but eventually Dudley had his work area set up and he turned back to Ginny with a frown. “What?” she asked with a shrug as he looked her up and down.

“We’re gonna get dye all over your shirt and your ma’s gonna kill me,” Dudley replied frankly. “And I forgot one of those capey thingies they make you wear in hair places.”

Ginny snorted, genuinely amused – boys. “Dudley. Dudley, I’m wearing a bra,” she retorted with a shake of her head – though a cautious one, so that her hair did not flick into her field of vision. “And the bras for pre-teens are like, basically a whole top on their own. It’s fine. And it’s black, so the dye won’t show.”

Dudley audibly gulped and slowly Ginny began to blush as she realised why he’d been stuck. He’d probably already thought of her taking her shirt off. There was barely a year’s age difference between them and Ginny had certainly had those thoughts about other people, but somehow she had not quite considered how it applied to her – with six brothers it had never really been a big deal and she usually ditched her shirt in the summer heat anyway. Well, too late to back out now, she thought with a twinge of anxiety, and shifted away an inch or two so that she could pull her gold-edged green Harpies fan shirt over her head, a movement without any particular fanfare or flourish, but also without any elbowing of the boy sitting less than a foot behind her.

“See? No big deal,” Ginny replied as she turned back, though a shiver belied her words – brought about as much by the sensation of her loose hair settling back over her shoulders as it was by nerves, though Dudley lurched forward to catch the front section before it fell into her eyes. No big deal indeed, she mocked herself as she found herself staring at a spot directly between Dudley’s eyebrows while he very pointedly dragged his eyes back upwards to meet hers.

“No big deal,” Dudley agreed, his voice distinctly a good half-octave higher than usual as he brushed Ginny’s hair back into place behind each ear. “D’you, mind if I turn the CD back on? It’s okay if not, or I can skip the song,” he added hurriedly.

Ginny shrugged and managed a lopsided smile. “Sure. Why not. After all, it will look alright once you’re done – or it better,” she joked. “Uh – really it’s okay. Same word, different association, context ‘n stuff – Chiara could explain better, I dunno, my brain’s just not stuck on it the same now is all.”

Dudley hummed agreement and turned away to fiddle with the music player, clacking several buttons so that, Ginny guessed, the track would begin at the start rather than where they’d left it. “Doo doo doo-doo doo doo-doo doo,” Dudley hummed along under his breath, and pulled the music player closer as he sat back up. His fingers were gentle on Ginny’s scalp and neck as he separated her hair into sections and tied each up in what felt like a messy little knot with hairties she already knew he kept on his wrist. Still, Ginny couldn’t help but flinch as his fingers brushed over the myriad scars that criss-crossed her skin, some hidden beneath her hair, others revealed as he lifted it up off her neck – each a mark the Dark Lord had left on her skin, each a reason she was so determined not to be convinced it had been someone else by those who thought her crazy.

“Sorry. I – I know it’s a mess,” Ginny murmured as Dudley’s fingers paused over a particularly thick ropy scar that began next to her collarbone and looped around over her neck, where it ran down her back for almost a foot before tapering off and trailing away down her ribs. That one had been the mark of a particularly furious crofter with a very large heavy knife, more like a small sword. One of the few that had survived meeting the Red Wolf, though not unmarked himself.

“No, no – well, it is. But I didn’t stop because I think it’s disgusting,” Dudley replied quietly, interrupting the train of her thoughts before it could run off back into the blood-soaked past. “It’s just familiar. I was wondering if mine looked anything like that.”

Rebel rebel, you've torn your dress
Rebel rebel, your face is a mess
Rebel rebel, how could they know?

The music faded back into Ginny’s awareness as they both fell quiet, and a wry smile picked up one corner of her mouth – face, body, all of it was a mess. “Unless you met a really angry Scotsman with the biggest knife I’ve ever seen – probably not,” she replied with a diffident shrug. It was becoming easier to talk about what happened – in no small part because the man responsible for that particular anecdote was still alive, but her twice-weekly sessions with Chiara were also making it easier to open up about what memories she did still have of that time to those she trusted – and while that was a very small circle, Dudley was first there. He was just easy to talk to, never disappointed in her, ever patient – she couldn’t use him as a therapist, that wouldn’t be fair... but a friend, that he could certainly be and maybe in time something more – provided he was interested in prickly-tempered, traumatised girls who weren’t all that sure they were in fact girls.

“No,” Dudley answered with a tense sigh, like his mind had also gone somewhere dark. “Uh – large angry Englishman, buckle end of a belt, a lot,” he admitted. Ginny bit her lip, feeling as if the grass beneath her folded legs had been ripped away all of a sudden – despite her own tensions with her family she loved them deeply, she could not imagine being betrayed by them in that raw and violent a way and it struck her that she did not know all that much about Dudley or his past. To have experienced something that dark, he must have triggers of his own, fears and hurts hidden deeper inside for the time that had passed but no less deserving of care. She resolved then to pay closer attention and learn – to better care for this boy who had put so much time and energy into doing so for her at a time when she felt the most alone and vulnerable. He deserved that, from everyone certainly – but as far as she was concerned, most of all from her.

You like me, and I like it all
We like dancing and we look divine
You love bands when they're playing hard
You want more and you want it fast

“Sorry, I made it dark,” Dudley broke the silence with an uncomfortable laugh, and it hurt Ginny to hear him so tangibly stuff his vulnerability away. She turned to him, carefully enough that he could keep from spilling any dye from the bottle in his hands, and cupped his round cheek in one hand.

“No. No you didn’t. It’s just dark and we live here,” Ginny told him firmly, breathless with emotion – affection, hurt, anger at the man who had no doubt been his father and so much more all nameless and tangled up together and for the first time she felt the wolf’s clamouring pack instinct as hers. Before she could lose her nerve she leaned forward and pressed a quick kiss to his cheek, then turned away hurriedly so he could not see her blush. 

I could live in the dark forever, as long as he was here with me, Ginny realised - and that frightened her, but it was not the sort of fear she wanted to run from. This was more like a revelation of what the rest of her life might look like - and as disconcerting as that was,  she wanted to grab it with both hands and hold it tight to her chest. But she could not say any of that, that was not the sort of thing people said – so instead she closed her eyes and relaxed as Dudley shook off his stupor and began to gently rub the dye into the section of hair he had left loose at the nape of her neck. The light pressure on her scalp, the soft kneading of his careful fingers and that revelation mingled together in her chest and Ginny smiled to herself, drifting into a light doze as the last bars of the song rang out into the hazy summer air around them.

So what you wanna know
Calamity's child, chi-chi, chi-chi
Where'd you wanna go?
What can I do for you? Looks like you've been there too
'Cause you've torn your dress
And your face is a mess
Ooh, your face is a mess
Ooh, ooh, so how could they know?
Eh, eh, how could they know?