everlasting ink harry potter/ginny weasley teen | 6.2k words
‘blood is thicker than water,’ they all muttered, conspiratorially, when percy left. but, ginny will think, as delphini manages to turn harry into a teddy bear and run into the crystalline stream, water is just as life-giving as blood.
ginny weasley has always been a magnet for dark-haired orphans. what's one more?
this piece was written for week ten of @ladiesofhpfest, on the theme of daughters [you can find the masterlist for this week's fics here].
as i’ve said elsewhere about this piece, i am not ordinarily a hinny fan. i am a sweety, though, and was perfectly happy to be the sort of lovely lass who would write noted twee hinny girly @whinlatter her favourite couple, as a treat.
i've also written her some notes.
my reasoning for thinking that harry and ginny don’t really work is that, frankly, i think ginny deserves better. after all, she spends most of the seven-book canon being kept at arm’s length from harry’s mission - with a brief, and iconic, burst of forcing her way in during order of the phoenix - because he spends books one to four not really interested in her (which, fair, i tried to hang around with my brother’s friends when i was little and it was not well received) and because he spends books six and seven actualising her into a place of safety, a person who needs to be protected, rather than his supporter and equal in the task he has been dealt.
as i’ve written about many times - and as i’ve had numerous enjoyable conversations with @ashesandhackles about - i cannot even imagine how furious i would have been if i were ginny, to discover that my boyfriend seemed to be constitutionally unwilling to acknowledge that i spent the period in which deathly hallows takes place as a resistance leader in my own right.
but above and beyond this, i also think that the pre-epilogue harry is remarkably self-centred when it comes to his trauma. i don’t think this is malicious - or even particularly intentional - but i always find it striking that harry believes himself to be the only person of his acquaintance who is badly affected by dementors, or whose family was hunted down by the death eaters, or who was devastated to see sirius die.
or who was manipulated by tom riddle.
harry’s relationship with the young voldemort is incredibly interesting, not least for the way in which he separates this voldemort (attractive, orphaned, at home in hogwarts) out from the one who killed his parents. that harry understands and empathises with voldemort’s issues - especially his colossal childhood trauma - better than dumbledore does is one of the key themes of the series, and it is - of course - one facet of the purity-of-soul which makes him the books’ hero.
but it is also something ginny can’t ever relate to. after all, the voldemort that ruined her life was the one that harry feels sorry for.
the shadow of ginny’s first year is something which is glaring in canon by its absence. this isn’t, i think, harry’s fault, and nor do i think it’s jkr’s - that chamber of secrets needs to resolve itself neatly with an ‘and then everything was fine’ is a genre convention, since the book is children’s literature. but i do think that it’s something which is really valuable to explore.
because we do get hints that ginny is traumatised by her experience with riddle’s diary even when the books are still conforming to the conventions of children’s stories - above all, as mentioned in everlasting ink, that she seems to be equally as affected by the dementor on the train in prisoner of azkaban as harry is.
and yet all the attention goes to him.
everlasting ink was, then, an attempt to deviate from my usual way of looking at this tension in harry and ginny’s relationship (break them up) and choose a different path (keep them together and happy). and i only had to scream into a pillow once or twice to get that done.
harry does not, i think it’s fair to say, initially appear to be acquitting himself well in the rekindled relationship. he throws himself into being the saviour of the world with a righteousness which blinkers him to anyone else's needs, he never asks ginny about what she is going through, he continues to view her as something to protect, he doesn’t dream about her when he’s reliving his almost-death, and - perhaps worst of all - he foists a daughter on her without asking.
[but perhaps we can forgive him this - after all, he doesn’t really have any experience of motherhood which isn’t sacrificial, or mothers who make their children something other than the entire focus of their self-conception. although i do still think he might have spent a little bit of time thinking about why plopping a toddler with the patented riddle face (those muggle genes are strong, lord voldemort is turning in his grave) on his girlfriend might not have been the best idea he’s ever had…]
this is the part of the author’s note where i out myself as a delphini stan account. [i think her conception makes sense! the entire point of the series is that lord voldemort can't outrun basic human biology! it’s not his fault that he was daydreaming about horcruxes when slughorn was trying to teach him sexual education!] the bellamort baby is a great little plot device for an examination of all sorts of people’s post-war neuroses, and she’s really delivering here, providing a little window not only into harry and ginny’s relationship but into ginny’s wider understanding of her position in her family.
it’s always struck me that ron’s belief, expressed in deathly hallows, that ginny is the favourite child doesn’t seem to be reflected in canon (the favourite child, by quite some distance, is clearly bill). which isn’t to say that ron’s feelings of neglect are invalid - he clearly is overlooked! even though his parents love him and are trying their best! in particular, i've always noticed that ginny’s suffering during her first year doesn’t make her special within the family - as she points out in this piece, nobody ever remembers that she nearly dies.
but there is also a gendered implication to what the locket spills about ron’s darkest secrets - that he thinks that ginny is special within the family solely because she is a daughter. and i have always wondered how that experience - of being the last and longed-for girl to make the family complete - might weigh on her.
so the main familial relationship examined in this piece is the mother and daughter one: ginny and delphini; hermione and rose, and - of course - ginny and her own mother.
i’m always struck that molly weasley must - like her narrative mirror, narcissa malfoy - be quite lonely. this is, i think, not exactly what the narrative wants us to read her as: the text sets her up as central to the weasleys and pseudo-weasleys’ worlds, and most scenes set at either the burrow or grimmauld place take place around mealtimes, with kitchens and dining rooms cast in the story as molly’s domain. and, while this association of good mothers with domestic labour is something i am critical of in the series, i do acknowledge that it makes narrative sense in a way which evidently isn’t intended to be condescending. the weasleys are harry’s first experience of the family life he desires above all else, which - naturally - features as its maternal figure someone who is the polar opposite of the detached, brittle, and cold petunia.
but, on the other hand, the narrative excludes molly from the rest of the family once the domestic sphere is left. she is the only one of them not to like quidditch (there is, after all, no meaningful reason why she would miss the world cup if she did), she doesn’t seem to have any friends of her own (whereas arthur, who seems to be sincerely popular in the ministry, does), and the child with whom she is most aligned - percy - is estranged from her for much of the series. in terms of personality, she lacks the daring streak which defines the other weasleys, she is more interested in social convention, and she is less flexible in how she defines things like ambition or success.
and i think it’s worth noting that this loneliness is gendered. all of the weasley children - and arthur - help out around the house, absolutely, and i don’t think that it’s ever possible to suggest that ron and his brothers become the sort of boors who don’t lift a finger while their wives do everything; but molly’s place within the family is still defined by providing. she is a table or a hand-knitted jumper or a cake. and the rest of the weasleys, who go out and live active lives away from the home, are not.
i always wonder if this is something we’re supposed to read behind molly’s dislike of fleur. that, maybe, she was hoping for a daughter-in-law who would be a kindred spirit, and gets instead someone who considers any sort of domestic role to be beneath her. it is, undoubtedly, also something which features in her relationship with ginny.
and so everlasting ink deals with ginny maturing from an adolescent chafing against her mother’s experience of womanhood - which she sees through her child’s eyes as meaning playing with dolls and being a housewife - into something which understands the complex web of dreams and disappointments which drive molly’s life, and which enables her to embrace the similarities between the two of them she might have once run from.
because they are very similar. above all, i always think that the canonical ginny must also be quite lonely. we are told she’s popular, but all of her friendships seem to be tenuous - she never writes to or visits anyone, harry never notices her with a particular close friend, she spends a full summer not seeing her boyfriend (an insult from jkr towards dean’s canonical rizz).
in particular, i never feel that her friendship with hermione is as close as fanon makes out (nor, indeed, as close as harry suggests it is in half-blood prince - he should have a think about how likely it seems that hermione has any time for other friends when she’s locked in a codependent triad with him and ron), and my view has always been that post-war ginny and hermione would take a long time to become comfortable with each other. some of this is just due to them having to learn how to let their opposing personality traits work together (ginny has no interest in hermione’s constant desire to argue, push, and debate - she’s going to see it, like harry does, as nagging and meddling), but it’s also due to the fact that neither of them can really relate to the defining experiences of the other’s life in the way teenage girls might ordinarily be expected to be able to.
but they get there. even if bitching about their daughters is the way they have to do it.
the harry potter series’ quasi-mystical view of motherhood means that it has a tendency to treat adoption as something negative. we have three examples of kinship adoption in canon - harry’s by petunia, neville’s by his grandmother, and teddy’s by andromeda - and all come about because of a tragedy in which the biological mother sacrifices herself for the anti-voldemort cause.
all three are also treated as something which is a cause of suffering to the adoptee - which, crucially, the series thinks is a good thing. harry’s neglect by the dursleys is considered character-building, and his orphanhood is set up several times in the text as the cause of his ability to understand love.
[on the flip side, voldemort’s own orphanhood is not permitted to be an excuse for his own struggle with the concept of love, and the narrative blames merope gaunt for not staying alive for him, by implying that she could simply have chosen not to bleed to death in childbirth if she’d had little of lily potter’s courage.]
but adoption is neutral. it happens for all sorts of reasons and it provokes all sorts of emotional responses in the people involved. and so it was important to me to show that ginny went on a journey from feeling as though the fact that delphini wasn’t her biological child was a bad thing to not caring about that in the slightest, and that all four potter children grow up equally loved by their parents and extended family.
more specifically, i wanted to focus on ginny choosing not to care about things like the tragedy of orphanhood to the detriment of being happy and silly. i talk a lot about how i find the aspect of love which the harry potter series focuses on - love as suffering and sacrifice, love which is rooted in loss, love which has, to some degree, an element of fate behind it - insufficient. the canon narrative rarely approaches love as something comforting, pleasurable, self-indulgent, or fun - indeed, harry and ginny’s brief burst of a love which is all of these things is snatched away at the end of half-blood prince so that harry can focus on love-as-sacrifice - and it also rarely approaches love as something people choose. love drives characters’ choices - snape chief among them - but the text tends to imply that these choices were made because the love itself was innate and unstoppable.
but that’s kind of bullshit. in the vast majority of relationships we have in our lives, love - whether romantic, platonic, or familial - is a choice freely and constantly made. love as a choice - above all, how love is a very strange choice - is a key theme in everlasting ink, both from the perspective of harry and ginny’s decision to make their relationship work and from the perspective of them becoming part of a sprawling post-war found family.
this gave me a chance to explore one of molly’s most underappreciated traits - that she is someone who collects waifs and strays, and that she is extraordinarily generous in how she opens up herself to these people. i think this is often missed in fanon criticism of her for meddling or being overbearing in the lives of people who aren’t her immediate family - particularly in relation to sirius in order of the phoenix. i wanted her to be the source of the idea that ‘water is just as life-giving as blood’, and for her obvious affection for delphini to be a turning point in ginny’s relationship both with her own role as a mother and with her role as a daughter.
in particular, i wanted it it to change how ginny thinks about heredity.
having to learn that your children have lives outside of you is a complicated experience for all parents, but for the parents of adopted children there is the additional complication of knowing that your child has the right to uncover who their biological parents were, no matter how painful that might be. for harry and ginny, this means becoming comfortable with the idea that delphini might want to have a relationship with the malfoys, or to speak to rodolphus lestrange about her mother, or to think positively about her father.
this would be difficult for them to face. obviously. but i think it would also be healing for them to realise that lord voldemort was not just a one-dimensional caricature of absolute evil but also someone with lots of admirable personality traits. (nor that the positive experiences which they - ginny especially, you can prise the headcanon that they were sincerely bffs from my cold, dead hands - had with him based entirely on lies). delphini is - both physically and in terms of personality - exactly like him, which means that she is funny and theatrical and daring and cunning and possessed of a great taste in tattoos. [he is also, as fans of the asenora cinematic universe will know, the source of her sweet tooth.]
the same is true of bellatrix - that she is very like both andromeda and tonks is a headcanon i’m wedded to, and i like the idea of harry and ginny coming to see her with more nuance as they begin to understand what she had in common with two women they adore.
[i’m not sure they ever get over delphini not liking quidditch, though - but i think they can both begrudgingly respect that voldemort learning the principles of unaided flight because he was terrible on a broom is iconic.]
