and love's the burning boy.

slash: (ginny/hermione), (harry/draco). also (draco/ginny).

disclaimer: characters not mine- just borrowing them from JKR. Lyrics in the summary are credit to Leonard Cohen, originally (I think), although I was actually listening to the Rufus Wainwright cover, and I've taken the lines out of context and thus warped the meaning, I imagine. Oh well.

-this started off as a one-shot ginny/hermione, but it's a bit like a weed- keeps on growing and twisting, won't stay out of my head. Should be something like eight or ten chapters when complete, if i ever get there. Pretty dark right now, but i think there's a happy ending in there somewhere, and i'll try to keep the dramatics to a minimum (no, that's a lie; i like drama. there will be drama.)

-(And if you've never listened to anything by Ani DiFranco, go download the song I plagiarized the first chapter title from right now and listen to it. The story can wait. And while I'm on the subject, you should also go read the complete works of Elizabeth Bishop. Right now. I mean it.)

-summary(sort of)- Set post-hogwarts, post-war, and post-voldemort. Remember when your mother told you that life isn't fair?

-hermione loves ginny and loved ron, and hates draco because he loves ginny, who loved harry and misses ron, and thinks she loves draco, who loves ginny but not the way he loves harry, who tries not to hate ginny just because she loves draco, and loves draco. At least, that's where things stand right now(subtle, eh?)

Anyway, here it is; enjoy, and review if you like. (please?)

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Casabianca (Elizabeth Bishop)

Love's the boy stood on the burning deck

trying to recite "The boy stood on

the burning deck." Love's the son

stood stammering elocution

while the poor ship in flames went down.

Love's the obstinate boy, the ship,

even the swimming sailors, who

would like a schoolroom platform, too,

or an excuse to stay

on deck.

And love's the burning boy .

chapter one: fixing her hair

Hermione's feeling dramatic, but that's okay, because it's a dramatic sort of night. Wind outside the apartment is howling through the charcoal and watercolour trees, and rain sheets down like shards of broken glass, or dirty paintbrush water. More like the glass, more like shattered stainglass windows. Hermione has not been to church in a long long time. The light inside the apartment, here, casting burnt umber shadows across the floor- here, the light is dull, shadowy gold, because the power's gone out and all they have are candles. At least the heat is still on.

Hermione folds a towel and presses it against the chink at the bottom of the window, although it's useless really and she knows the floor will be soaked by morning anyway. Cold wind has, lately, a way of soaking through, even on her canvas. She looks out at the night. Leaves are tearing from the trees, streaking down on the gale and skittering madly over the rain-glazed asphalt. Even the streetlights are out.

The bathroom door opens with a blast of titanium white and dove grey steam (brushed on in diluted acrylic and rubbed soft with a rag.) Ginny comes out drying her hair, red ochre shot through with gold. Hermione paints it this way: First, a solid layer of iridescent gold acrylic, left to dry while she mixes a brilliant flame from cadmium red and light amber. Now, layer on red over gold. Acrylics dry fast. Next, be brave, be decisive, and reveal the gold in strokes with a blunted knife. Hermione could mix the colours in her sleep.

Ginny sits down at the mirror and summons a couple of glows, her face eerie in the twilight. Hermione leaves the window and the night unfinished in dark not-yet-dry oils, and crosses the room because she's got that feeling again of a thousand silver fishhooks sharp under her skin, the lines pulling taut. She curls into the armchair behind Ginny and watches her in silence.

Ginny's hands are twisting through her long red hair; her eyes are intent on the mirror. The bruise on her shoulder is cobalt blue and mars black. Hermione unconsciously reaches up to pull her not-quite-shoulderlength curls into a spiky ponytail. She listens to Ginny singing ever-so-softly under her breath and can't believe, no matter how many times she has painted it, the dancing gold in her hair. The cuffs of her shirt are stained in every colour of the rainbow, except for silver. Hermione has always associated people with colours. Ron is clear deep atlantic blue, or bright warm gold; Harry is greens, like fresh grass and emeralds, and browns, like chocolate and terracotta clay. Draco Malfoy is silver, and only silver, because Hermione can't paint without grey, so she won't give him grey. Silver is, at least, avoidable.

Ginny once asked her to paint the two of them together, after a month of relative peace. Hermione just explained that she had no silver, that silver was hard to come by, even in the Diagon Alley art stores. She would have to have just the right silver for Draco Malfoy's beautiful (dead blank cold cruel) silver eyes, she said. And that kind of silver is hard to find. Ginny looked at her roommate unhappily with her own beautiful (oh, beautiful, and wondering, and how sad, how sad) beautiful green-gold eyes. Three days later, Draco left Ginny alone again for a while, and the subject hasn't come up since.

"So he called to apologize?" Hermione paints Ginny's eyes in oils, even when the rest of the canvas is acrylics or charcoal or pastel. Nothing else is really dark enough.

"Yes." Ginny is still looking in the mirror, but she finds Hermione there now and watches her guardedly. Too many times, Hermione has taken the knife she uses to find the gold in Ginny's hair and scratched too deep, through to the canvas, through to the bone. Hermione shrinks a little at the pain she thinks she might have painted into those eyes, already dark enough. It is not easy to be Ginny, who understands too well the price of love. It is also not easy to love her. Hermione feels fairly sure (feels certain, certain as blue and yellow mix to green) that she is the only one who knows, who has ever known, this second thing.

But still, it is not easy to be Ginny, especially, Hermione thinks violently, when you've dashed off black from your canvas with a chemical soaked rag (and how Hermione hates Tom Riddle), and rubbed away the faint coloured pencil lines that were beneath of green-like-grass and chocolate-brown (although she can't hate Harry, ever), and replaced those with silver which is all too easily mistaken for white, for nothing. Especially, (and here she finds someone to hate more than all the rest), when the one who has a colour for everyone but herself, paint streaked hands and a tongue like her knife, is painting ugly shapes on your silver canvas with an acid truthful brush. Ginny knows the price of love because love has always hurt her, and now, one way or another, it continues to do so.

Thinking this, Hermione closes her mouth and swallows her response, although it tastes like the water and chemical she washes her brushes in, although she knows it will poison her, because she knows that her beloved oil paints are made with lead, with slow poison.

"I'm glad," she says softly. Ginny bends her head and her hair falls around her face, a curtain of liquid fire. "No, Ginny, I mean it. I hopeI hope he means it, this time."

Ginny looks up at her with something almost like hope, almost like happiness. After she leaves, tonight, Hermione will paint her like this, in oils and acrylics on white canvas. She'll lick the paint from her brushes, after, swallow the bitter everyday poison. Now, she gets up and crosses the distance, and hugs Ginny for one second, imagining that she can paint the world in new colours for Ginny, or give her, at least, a new white canvas. Pulling away, she stands behind Ginny, watching her in the mirror, and begins to arrange heavy swirls of red and gold acrylic on her white shoulders, where they will hide the bruises.

"Here, let me fix your hair."