Chapter 16: Detention Desires
The dungeons swallowed sound, leaving only the scrape of their quills and the hiss of torchlight. Detention with Snape had been a given. The howler Molly Weasley had sent Ginny, its echoes about "proper decorum" still ringing in the stone corridors, had been predictable. This silence was not.
Ginny worked with a savage precision, scraping dried tentacular pulp from the bottom of a brass cauldron. Her hair was a furious curtain around her face.
Harry scrubbed at his own cauldron, the gritty paste turning his hands grey. The air between them was a live wire.
“Dean broke it off,” Ginny said, her voice flat, not looking up. The statement cut through the drip of distant water.
Harry’s scrubbing slowed. “Because of what I said?”
“What do you think?” She slammed her scrubber down. “Half the school now has a mental picture, courtesy of you. ‘Perfect handfuls. Pink tips.’ He couldn’t handle it. Said he couldn’t look at me without thinking about everyone else looking.”
“I didn’t mean for—”
“Don’t.” She finally looked at him, her eyes blazing in the low light. “Don’t you dare say you didn’t mean it. You meant every crude, disgusting word. You wanted to hurt us. You wanted to feel powerful. My tits made you feel powerful.”
The word in her mouth, so blunt and angry, hit him like a hex. A bolt of raw, unwelcome heat shot straight to his groin. He shifted against the stone bench, hoping the shadow of the table hid his instant, traitorous reaction.
“I was out of line,” he muttered, the apology ash in his throat.
“Out of line?” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “You reduced her to a thing. You reduced me to a thing. And the worst part is, you enjoyed the specifics. The freckles. The colour. You painted a fucking portrait, Harry.”
He said nothing. His jeans were becoming uncomfortably tight. Her anger was a physical force in the damp air, and it was morphing, twisting into something else entirely inside him. He was hard, achingly so, and the shame of it fed the desperation.
She saw it. Her eyes, sharp as flint, flicked downward for the briefest second, then back to his face. A new, more dangerous understanding dawned in her expression. The fury didn’t leave, but it changed, curdling into something disdainful and ruthlessly pragmatic.
“You’re disgusting,” she whispered, but she leaned forward, across the worktable. The movement caused her school robes to gape slightly. The neckline of her shirt beneath was modest, but he remembered the curve beneath it, the pale skin he’d described so clinically. “Aren’t you?”
“Yes.” The admission was a hoarse escape.
“This is what you wanted? This is what all that talk was about?” Her voice was low, venomous. “To get hard in a dungeon thinking about my tits while my boyfriend dumps me because of you?”
He couldn’t speak. He just nodded, his jaw clenched.
She stood up abruptly. The wooden legs of her stool shrieked against the flagstones. She walked around the table, not towards the door, but towards him. She stopped, looking down at where he was trapped, seated and painfully aroused.
“You don’t get to look,” she said, her voice trembling now, not with tears but with a potent, terrifying fury. “But you don’t get to hide, either.”
Her hand moved. It wasn’t an embrace. It was an attack. She fumbled with the buckle of his belt, her fingers cold and ungraceful. He sat, paralyzed, watching her furious face as she undid his jeans.
“Ginny—”
“Shut up.” She yanked the fabric down just enough, her grasp firm and impersonal. When her hand closed around him, it wasn’t with desire, but with a fierce, righteous intent to punish. “This is what you wanted. This is all it is.”
She began to move her hand. The sensation was a brutal shock, a jarring collision of utter shame and blinding physical pleasure. He threw his head back, a strangled sound catching in his throat. The rough stone wall scraped against his scalp.
“Look at you,” she hissed, her rhythm steady and unforgiving. “The great Harry Potter. Brought low by a pair of tits he saw once. By my tits.”
Her words were the spark. The dam broke. With a snarl that was part agony, part surrender, he grabbed the front of her robes and pulled. Buttons flew, skittering like beetles across the floor. She gasped, but didn’t stop her furious motion. He yanked the fabric of her shirt and bra down, baring her to the waist.
There they were. In the shuddering torchlight, pale and freckled, the peaks taut and pink from the cold dungeon air. Just as he’d said, but real, immediate, and offered in rage.
“See?” she spat, her breath coming in hot pants, her hand working him harder. “Perfect handfuls. Go on. Look your fill. Since you love talking about them so much.”
And he did. He stared, transfixed, as she stood there, half-naked and seething, her touch orchestrating his ruin. The visual was obscenely perfect: her furious face, her exposed chest, her punishing hand. His climax tore through him, a wave of intense, degrading release that left him shuddering, emptying himself onto the cold stone floor between them.
For a moment, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing. The drip of water. The distant, imagined scuttle of rats.
Slowly, mechanically, she let go of him. She pulled her shirt and bra back up, covering herself, her fingers fumbling with the torn fabric. She looked at the mess on the floor, then at his slumped form, his pants still undone.
There was no victory in her face. Only a hollow, spent bleakness.
“We’re even now,” she said, her voice stripped of all its earlier fire. It was a statement of grim fact. “You humiliated me. I just did the same. Don’t you ever talk about me like that again. Don’t you ever look at Hermione like that again.”
She turned and walked to the door. She paused, her hand on the iron handle.
“Clean yourself up,” she said, without looking back. “And clean that up. Snape will be back soon.”
The heavy oak door closed with a final, echoing thud. Harry was left alone in the flickering dark, the scent of potions ingredients and his own shame thick in the air. The cold of the dungeon began to seep into his bones, but it was a feeble chill compared to the glacial void opening inside his chest. He had gotten exactly what he’d fantasized about. And it had felt like annihilation.