taking control

Chapter 18: Skin Deep

Chapter 18: Skin Deep

Time may fly when you are having fun, but it dies when you are worried. Ginny was beyond worried. How long had he been gone now, thirty-five minutes?

She was too anxious and worried to concentrate on anything, and she could not bear to be around anyone else. She knew she would be too transparent to them, but more than that she just did not want to deal with people at the moment. She knew she was far too likely to fly off the handle at the simplest provocation, and she was also liable to interpret absolutely anything as a provocation.

She had absolutely nothing to help her pass the time except worrying and waiting. Waiting was not something Ginny Weasley liked to do. She realised that she was being a bit impatient, but she could not help how she felt. She had taken refuge in Harry's office; at least there she did not have to worry about keeping up appearances. She would sit down on the sofa, rise, pace back and forth in front of the fire, become frustrated with herself, plop down on the sofa, and repeat the process all over again. And so she waited.

She glanced at her watch. Forty-five minutes had passed since Harry left. "Ugh!" she cried, flinging herself off the sofa. She could not take it any more. She needed to do something, so she took her cue from Harry. Ginny flung the door of his office open and quickly traversed the corridors and staircases that led to the seventh floor corridor holding the portrait of Barnabus the Barmy. Impatiently pacing back and forth in front of the room, she tore open the door that appeared across from the portrait and slammed it shut behind her. Before the crash of the door had even reached her ears, Ginny's wand was in hand.

"Lacerus!" she shouted, cutting her wand across her body as she did so. A short jet of light erupted from her wand mid-slash and raced forward. She watched as it tore across the midsection of a dummy that had appeared several metres in front of her. She took grim satisfaction in seeing the curse sever the dummy in two. She was already spinning to face her next target and never saw the first disappear as soon as it hit the ground.

Incendiary, blasting, bludgeoning, and cutting curses were her preferred methods of relieving tension. Of all the curses she knew, those were the most openly brutal to their targets. At first her targets all remained motionless, taking her onslaught, but after a short time, they began moving and fighting back. Ginny found it was much more satisfying to destroy something capable of defending itself and even able to hex her in turn. The ones that slipped a jinx past her defences - all minor - did not remain standing long afterwards.

While she was busy blocking a spell from a dummy on her right, one managed to hit her with a particularly irritating Stinging Hex on her left side. She unthinkingly jabbed her left hand towards the offending dummy. When she dispatched the one to her right, she turned, intending to counter the attack from the left. She instead found the other dummy crumbling into ashes as flames consumed its body. No new dummies appeared as she watched in morbid fascination. She glanced down at her hand then back at the pile of ashes.

In that moment of calm, her adrenaline began to fade, and fatigue caught up with her. She had no idea how long she had been at it, nor could she remember how many dummies she had dispatched. Ginny stared down at her left hand for a long minute before her senses began to catch up with her. She noticed the grittiness of her hand first. The feeling of a drop of sweat tracing its way down the side of her face followed. She wiped the sweat away from her face with her sleeve before turning to find a door leading to a shower room, just the thing she needed.

She kept her mind clear as she allowed the steamy shower to relax both her mind and body. After the workout she had just given herself, the heat felt wonderful on her muscles. It offered her only a brief respite, however, as all too soon the reality of the situation caught up with her. She cut her shower shorter than she would have liked, wanting to get back to Harry's office so that she was sure not to miss him.