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I am the Child
By CharityDust

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Category: Pre-OotP
Characters:Harry/Ginny
Genres: Drama
Warnings: Dark Fiction
Rating: PG-13
Reviews: 3
Summary: *** The author has been reminded via the e-mail address on file that this story is listed as incomplete and has not been updated since 2004 ***

Ginny thinks on what has created her, the pieces put into the girl she is. She remembers the things that have wounded her, the things that have healed her -and everything in between- as she sorts through the memories. How can a boy change someone without even trying?
Hitcount: Story Total: 3207







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The second time I saw him was like a nightmare, or the way I used to think of nightmares before…

In the lovely small kitchen of hanging gadgets and window-filtered light, he sat happily with my brothers, my mother, my father.

Famous Harry Potter.

Courageous Harry Potter.

But never just Harry Potter, not then.

I was in my pajamas, looking for my jumper, sounding like the silly little girl that I was at the time, which I hope I’m not still.

I blushed. I ran away. And that is the story of me.

I had seen him a year before, boarding the Hogwarts Express. The ways in which he was beautiful had escaped me, but how can anyone know those things in only a minute? I didn’t have to know which ways he was beautiful, how it was so…but simply that it was.

We would get letters home from Ron explaining the ways of life within Hogwarts. The dungeons are rather drafty, he said. Professor Snape was a horror. There was one girl named Hermio-something (he swore he couldn’t remember the whole thing for sure) who was just a terrible know-it-all. He and Harry both wished that she would figure out how to defy gravity without a broom and just drop off the planet.

One word out of so many of my brother’s words became important to me. Any words close to that word mattered. Anything that word did or said mattered. Harry. Harry. Harry. Repetitions in my brain could have driven me crazy. That word…When coupled with the word Potter, it has an extraordinary power over me. I’ve gotten over wondering if those two words are some sort of incantation, some sort of very ancient spell.

So I did know ahead of time that Harry Potter was my brother’s best friend. I can’t claim that it was a surprise, although it was never pleasant. I wondered what sort of stories Ron had told him about me. Had he shared the time when I was five and had a cold that our pet Puffskein had followed me around day and night trying to stick its tongue up my nose for bogeys? Had he explained the fact that I’m a bit of an idiot at times, that I have a tendency to go outside wearing only my socks and no shoes? Had he told about the way that I cried when I heard a particularly lovely song on the radio? Harry wasn’t supposed to know the nuances of me, but I wanted the nuances of him. By now, I wonder how I could have been so self-important that I actually thought Ron would care enough to give away my habits.

I tried to take Harry down in my mind. He couldn’t be so lovely as the way I remembered him. Memories distort things, especially ones so brief. Of course mine of Harry must have done so. I told myself all these things, but honestly…? I didn’t believe that. I knew that I was remembering correctly.

So, in order to pass time and gain sanity, I looked him up in any of my Mum’s books that might mention him. Those pages painted Harry as a miraculous baby, a beloved child of two people lost in a horrible war, an enigma…The Boy Who Lived. But they did not say anything about the actual boy. I shouldn’t have been surprised. You can not find anything worth knowing in simple history books. They aren’t written by the personally involved, and if it’s devoid of care, it’s devoid of meaning.

I was alone at home. There was no company other than a snappish mother and a working father. I’m the only one in my family who’s ever had time spent like an only child. It gave me time to do all the things that a young girl left alone will do. I got Mum to buy me new a doll without worrying that anyone would make fun of me about it or use a charm to poke a hole in its head just to see me cry. I polished my toenails in every color or mix of colors imaginable. I posed in front of my mirror, experimented with Mum’s horribly outdated makeup before learning how to make my own, bit my lip or played with my hair in front of the silver and glass, trying to figure out what made for the best impression. I tried at one time to kiss my pillow for practice before realizing that it was not the most practical of ideas. I doubted anyone’s face would be so…poofy. It’s strange that playing with dolls and kissing pillows can exist within one person at the same time.

It became so that the idea ‘brother’ was simply something wrapped up in envelopes and parchment of a million people who thought that they meant more than I did. I didn’t want Ron to come back. I didn’t want George. I didn’t want Fred. I didn’t want Percy. Nothing that would interfere with me and my time and my rituals was something that I wanted. Being lonely is so much easier when you’re actually alone. It’s nice, even.

There was a change in my parents with no boys around to hassle. They did more together. A few times, I wandered into the kitchen looking for some sort of snack, and instead found two people quite like love-birds standing in front of the counter and cooing at each other, among other things. It was positively awful.

But after a while it became commonplace for them to have romantic dinners or romantic anythings for that matter. Mum enlisted me in the kitchen, and it was then that I really learned how to cook. Let me simply say that I cannot imagine the perils of muggle cooking considering the fact that it’s hard enough with a wand and a deluge of magical cooking instruments.

We would pour chocolate that I’m sure had been magically enhanced as an aphrodisiac into a whining little machine that sent the chocolate out solid and shaped like hearts. Mum giggled a lot. It made it quite easy to convince her to buy me things that she normally would have told me were too expensive. Of course, I’d pay for it later with her harsh words and reminders of how very ungrateful I am. I just nodded my head, said, “Okay Mum, I’ll be better from now on,” and realized that my brothers had not ever mastered the art of fake submission.

It’s often better to be the wrong one and get what you want than to be right and still defeated.

After the preparations, Mother would send me away. I usually wasn’t allowed to go outside if I had the inkling because she said that she didn’t want her romantic dinner interrupted when I decided to come back in. She said that the loud noises and banging of doors would upset the ambience. I halfway wanted to laugh, halfway wanted to cry when she said these things. The idea was absurd. I made no noise coming or going, but Mum didn’t remember that when coupled with all her memories of boys in the house. Apparently, I was just another boy. Sometimes, that is; when that’s what’s she wanted me to be.

Of course they weren’t always so sweet natured. Before, with so many children in the house, any row between the two that wasn’t about one of us kids ended quickly. It would have been impossible to raise up all those children with any extra focus on what they were doing wrong as a couple. But just having me at home, it had become so that Mum and Dad could go a week in a fight without either one owning up to their responsibility of it. During those times, I had to simply stay away, wherever I could.

Outside was nice because I could manage to get far enough away that Mum would just give up calling on me if she decided that there was some inane chore that she just could not do without a helper. My room was the other choice, but even then I couldn’t get complete peace. Every twenty minutes, she’d come by my door wanting me downstairs because she was much too tired to de-gnome the garden or because she just wanted my company. If I wanted to be alone, then it was simply the moodiness accompanied with the approaching teen years, the patented explanation for parents who find anything unsettling within their child. My needs could not hold their own when compared to my mother’s.

Watching my parents in arguments started out as painful. I felt abused by being in their presence, breathing in the anger and hurt being released through their very pores, out into the air where anyone with a nose or mouth could scent it, taste it. It would have sounded silly for me to tell this story next to others I had heard of…ignored children, beaten children, children with unspeakable crimes built up against them by their own parents. The pains given to me were also unspeakable, but not out of their extremes in horror. They weren’t horrors, not even close. It was simply the fact that to be spoken, something must be explained. And I couldn’t explain.

It was so unfathomable how two people could kiss each other in the same tender way that children don’t like to think of their parents kissing, how they could go so quickly from that to yelling and wide eyes watering shinily.

Their cruelties to each other were neither extreme nor intentional. Mum and Dad simply acted as wounded animals, all in the defensive. So there were many fights, just as many fights as there were romantic dinners. Eventually I learned how to just not care about those fights. Silly things, didn’t last, and they could help me if I wanted them to. Sic Mum on Dad or Dad on Mum, let both cry on my shoulders in a way that they hadn’t when I was the baby rather than the only, talk with each about what was so wrong with the other. It was horribly wrong, but I couldn’t help feeling that they deserved it. I didn’t create the fights after all; I only fanned the flames to see how much they could pull themselves out of.

I felt so naïve and so wise at the same time.

Naïve for all the things I didn’t understand about my parents’ fights or their kisses. How those two things could come in such quick succession. More so for the fact that I couldn’t go out and experience the world, the fact that I had to stay as inexperienced as they told me I was. Innocent is more the word for it. But innocence can feel like shackles when you’re just near the edge of it.

Wise for the fact that I was outside of their passions, that I could analyze their behavior without being a part of it. The fact that I was not a blind victim of emotions. That is what I thought.

Harry was still in the back of my mind. Even when his face was a blur, it was in the back of my mind, drifting to the front when I let it.

The time passed so slowly, but was over so quickly…

And do you know...it wasn’t so terribly long before I saw his face again as I ran down the stairs searching for a misplaced jumper.

My memories of his blurred face were mended in less than a second, but seeing the actual Harry was a lot harder than studying his face. I could only get glimpses of the boy himself through mottled glass that I had put up, a window made of his fame, his scar, his mystery...
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