A/N: First, I’d like to point out that I have absolutely no knowledge of plumbing… so *cough* to all those plumbers out there who might be reading this, I’m sorry. Not only have I failed abysmally at representing your trade with any modicum of talent and/or respect, but I’ve also managed to go this whole chapter only using the term ‘valve’ in order to illustrate the use of plumbing at all. My knowledge of plumbing jargon is terrible. I’m sorry. My limited plumbing experience hindered me somewhat. LOL. Forgive me.
Uhm, also, this fic is wholly unbeta’d, so any mistakes or flow problems within are completely my fault, not anyone else’s. The blame is on my shoulders. I’d like to say that my reason behind not having a beta is because I’m so swelling with self-confidence that I don’t feel I need one – but that’s not the case. It’s because I’m lazy, quite frankly. If anyone actually wants to beta this, feel free to send me an email or say so in a review or something. I’m sure we can figure something out. If not, then I guess I’ll just go on without and try to make sure I have as few typos as possible. *teehee*.
And that was all… I think. Enjoy the chapter!
Chapter Two
The Plumbing of Life
Bloody Slytherins, Ginny mused. They’re all the same.
Wincing as she accidentally spilt boiling water onto the bench where her hand was resting, she rushed to the tap and ran her hand under the cool water. A few moments later, as the shrill of pain in her hand settled down to a slow yet powerful throb, the water stopped.
It took Ginny a few moments to collect her wits and realise that no, her entire block of apartments had not just lost their water. She could hear the screams as a small boy down on the road was being attacked by a hose of water, his giggles and cries of pleasure echoing throughout the neighbourhood. No, Ginny didn’t pay her water bill last week. It was amazing it had lasted even this long.
Ginny swore and stalked to the window, watching as a blue van drove away at breakneck speed, the image of a large black-lined water drop still quite visible on the back. She swung around and grabbed her coat, checking her wand was still in the pocket, before pulling it on and leaving the apartment, slamming the door behind her.
It only took a few minutes to find the water valve in the basement of the apartment complex, and after that she figured it had to be easy sailing, right? Turn a few knobs, find the water control for her apartment and things would be back to normal. Unfortunately, things had gotten a bit more complicated than that since she’d last played with her father’s collection of plumbing toys in their basement with Ron. She looked over the large collection of pipes and other paraphernalia that she had no idea about. No, things were definitely harder.
A wave of nostalgia hit her hard as she imagined her father standing beside her, whispering in her ear which valve to turn and how far. She shook her head and pushed the images away, focusing on the dank and musty basement before her, nothing like the basement of the Burrow where she had spent many a happy day helping Arthur Weasley.
Ginny spotted a large valve labeled ‘water mains’ and opted against turning that one; reasoning that it probably turned off the entire building. Instead, she looked for a smaller valve or pipe that might aid her plight better.
“Oh, sod it!” Ginny cried half an hour later, pulling out her wand and slashing it through the air viciously. She watched with satisfaction as every valve in the room burst and floods of water started pouring. Barely managing to escape minimally dry, Ginny squelched back up to her room and waited for the problem to be fixed, taking what her mother would consider to be far too much sadistical glee in the cries of frustration emanating from her neighbours rooms as she went.
Slumping down on her couch, Ginny gave a withering look around her living room. There were papers everywhere. The top of the coffee table was no longer visible, a cacophony of work papers and report research covering every inch of it. Newspaper articles on the latest protest and the newest proposal for the disposal of Dark Arts were skewed across the floor in almost every room. Library books that had been borrowed and never returned lay discarded all about the room, open at pages where some grotesque curse or other was being played out over and over again without end.
The shabby chair in the corner effectively served its purpose as a make-shift bookcase, a range of heavy looking tomes having been thrown haphazardly on the cushion. She should have bought shares in a paper company. The chair’s cousin, the settee, wasn’t looking much better.
More often than not, Ginny fell asleep on the sofa, aftermath of a late night spent writing reports for Rowdry, and it was definitely showing its age. The arms were bald and foam poked through in too many places to count.
There was only one section of the room that was truly clean, and that was the mantle piece above the hitherto unused fireplace.
The place needed a clean, she reasoned, avoiding looking at the mantelpiece for fear of invoking her mother’s scorn, or to be frowned at by the picture of Percy displayed in all its shabby glory.
Realising that the only way the place was going to get clean was if she did it herself sent Ginny into a kind of frenzy, though not the kind you might expect.
Finding her inspiration in the strangest of places, Ginny pulled her father’s old typewriter out from beneath the coffee table. She dug around until she found a reasonably empty sheath of paper and shoved it into the top. For the next several hours, the only sound that could comfort Ginny Weasley was that of her typewriter hard at work.
Ginny remembered fondly those days when life was good, work was fun and her boss wasn’t a tyrant. Times that had ended early last week, and would haunt her many times a day. Yeah right, Ginny said to herself wryly, grimacing as she directed yet another Ministry tour through the Interracial Relations Department.
If it wasn’t bad enough that she had to deal with nosy tourists and the occasional nosier reporter, Ginny had to stop in at Parkinson’s office several times a day, with it being the climax of the tour and all. She had never thought that her position in the Ministry could get any lower – apparently she’d been wrong.
“I want you where I can keep an eye on you, Weasley,” Parkinson snapped, nodding a solid-built woman in a matronly uniform over. “This is Griesline. She will teach you the ropes.”
“The ropes of what?” Ginny demanded, looking over at her cubicle and Luna longingly.
“You’ll be instructing the Ministry tour from now on. That way I know you can’t screw up, and you’re not slacking off.”
“The Ministry tour??” Ginny practically shrieked, attracting a bit of attention. “You’ve got to be joking!”
“I don’t joke, Weasley.”
And that she believed, beyond any shadow of a doubt.
And so she did what she had to. Every fake smile, every falsely sweet voice she had to make, was a silent but vehement curse sent in the direction of one Elaine Parkinson, bane of her existence. It was purely because of this absolute hate of the woman that she was able to build up enough courage to walk into her office that afternoon, freshly printed report in hand.
“M’am?” she enquired, and tried not to throw the bloody report at the woman’s head as Parkinson grimaced at the sight of her.
“What do you want, Weasley?”
She sat down on a chair uninvited, determined not to be intimidated.
“I thought you might be interested in a report I’ve written, M’am. About the liberation of the Dark Arts and its confinement in smaller wizarding communities.”
“And why, pray tell,” Parkinson snapped, her eyes blazing blue fire, “would you do that? You certainly had no authority from me.” She held out her hand, expecting to be given the report and not given an answer. Ginny handed it over.
Parkinson opened the report and began leafing through the pages, stopping occasionally to scribble out whole pages with her violent red quill or simply tut her disgust, making grotesque wrinkles appear at the side of her mouth. She looked up at Ginny, her eyes full of contempt.
“This is utter rubbish, girl!” she seethed, throwing the report out the door. The echo of it landing on the blue linoleum floor outside carried throughout the entire department, a strange hush passing over everyone. “Next time you get the inane notion that anybody wants to hear what you have to say, do everyone a favour and shut up!! Do you hear me? You’re a nobody, Weasley. A nobody! Now get back to work, there are people waiting to be shown around.”
Ginny was shaking when she left Parkinson’s office. She was barely able to control her tears of anger, and every muscle in her body was clenched tight. Wound like a spring as she bent to pick up her discarded report, she was about ready to snap. One more thing to go wrong, just one more thing.
A hand reached out to clutch hers, and she grabbed onto it like a life raft.
“Forget her. She’s a stupid bint and wouldn’t know a good idea if it kicked her up the arse.” Luna smiled and smoothed Ginny’s hair down. “I’m sure whatever’s in there is so good that she wishes she’d thought of it herself. She’s scared of you, use that to keep you sane, hmm?”
Ginny smiled weakly back and swallowed loudly. “I think I might… well, I might just quit.”
“No!” Luna admonished, snatching the report from her hands. “That would be giving up. She’d have won then!” Luna straightened out the pages within the report, smoothed down the crumpled first page and handed it back to Ginny, nodding her approval. “This has been your goal since longer than I can remember, Ginny. How much would you regret it later if you let it go for someone as simple as her? Go home. Rest. Cry. Do whatever you need to do to make yourself stronger tomorrow. I’ll keep the fort for you here – just go.”
Ginny smiled and she felt as if she might cry again. “You’re the best friend anyone could have. Ever.”
Luna giggled. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew about the Geofox incident last year,” she said, her eyes wide with sincerity. “That was very near fatal, I think.”
Ginny nodded, not wanting to ask. “Uhm, well, I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Of course.”
And so she left.
Outside, Ginny felt wretched. She knew that she shouldn’t let women like Elaine Parkinson affect her, especially after every thing that she had gone through and somehow survived, but she couldn’t help it.
Old wounds were ripped open by the incestuous words that shot from that vile woman’s mouth, and there was little anyone, even Ginny, could do to stop aged doubts from resurfacing and teeming like moths to the light. Angrily, she launched her report proposal into the bin, not sparing another glance at it as she marched back to her apartment, prepared to quench her sudden thirst for some Ogden’s Firewhiskey in the hidden cupboard beneath the kitchen sink.
What she didn’t see, in her haste, were the hooded hazel eyes watching her from the shadows, examining her, calculating at a speed far beyond what they seemed. A black gloved hand reached into the bin, pulling out her discarded ideas, his discarded effort, and tucked it easily into a billowing black robe before silently disappearing.
Not an hour later, Ginevra Weasley was incapacitated on the couch in her apartment living room, her family portraits looking down despairingly from the dusty mantelpiece at the empty bottle of Firewhiskey on the floor.
Uhm, also, this fic is wholly unbeta’d, so any mistakes or flow problems within are completely my fault, not anyone else’s. The blame is on my shoulders. I’d like to say that my reason behind not having a beta is because I’m so swelling with self-confidence that I don’t feel I need one – but that’s not the case. It’s because I’m lazy, quite frankly. If anyone actually wants to beta this, feel free to send me an email or say so in a review or something. I’m sure we can figure something out. If not, then I guess I’ll just go on without and try to make sure I have as few typos as possible. *teehee*.
And that was all… I think. Enjoy the chapter!
Chapter Two
The Plumbing of Life
Bloody Slytherins, Ginny mused. They’re all the same.
Wincing as she accidentally spilt boiling water onto the bench where her hand was resting, she rushed to the tap and ran her hand under the cool water. A few moments later, as the shrill of pain in her hand settled down to a slow yet powerful throb, the water stopped.
It took Ginny a few moments to collect her wits and realise that no, her entire block of apartments had not just lost their water. She could hear the screams as a small boy down on the road was being attacked by a hose of water, his giggles and cries of pleasure echoing throughout the neighbourhood. No, Ginny didn’t pay her water bill last week. It was amazing it had lasted even this long.
Ginny swore and stalked to the window, watching as a blue van drove away at breakneck speed, the image of a large black-lined water drop still quite visible on the back. She swung around and grabbed her coat, checking her wand was still in the pocket, before pulling it on and leaving the apartment, slamming the door behind her.
It only took a few minutes to find the water valve in the basement of the apartment complex, and after that she figured it had to be easy sailing, right? Turn a few knobs, find the water control for her apartment and things would be back to normal. Unfortunately, things had gotten a bit more complicated than that since she’d last played with her father’s collection of plumbing toys in their basement with Ron. She looked over the large collection of pipes and other paraphernalia that she had no idea about. No, things were definitely harder.
A wave of nostalgia hit her hard as she imagined her father standing beside her, whispering in her ear which valve to turn and how far. She shook her head and pushed the images away, focusing on the dank and musty basement before her, nothing like the basement of the Burrow where she had spent many a happy day helping Arthur Weasley.
Ginny spotted a large valve labeled ‘water mains’ and opted against turning that one; reasoning that it probably turned off the entire building. Instead, she looked for a smaller valve or pipe that might aid her plight better.
“Oh, sod it!” Ginny cried half an hour later, pulling out her wand and slashing it through the air viciously. She watched with satisfaction as every valve in the room burst and floods of water started pouring. Barely managing to escape minimally dry, Ginny squelched back up to her room and waited for the problem to be fixed, taking what her mother would consider to be far too much sadistical glee in the cries of frustration emanating from her neighbours rooms as she went.
Slumping down on her couch, Ginny gave a withering look around her living room. There were papers everywhere. The top of the coffee table was no longer visible, a cacophony of work papers and report research covering every inch of it. Newspaper articles on the latest protest and the newest proposal for the disposal of Dark Arts were skewed across the floor in almost every room. Library books that had been borrowed and never returned lay discarded all about the room, open at pages where some grotesque curse or other was being played out over and over again without end.
The shabby chair in the corner effectively served its purpose as a make-shift bookcase, a range of heavy looking tomes having been thrown haphazardly on the cushion. She should have bought shares in a paper company. The chair’s cousin, the settee, wasn’t looking much better.
More often than not, Ginny fell asleep on the sofa, aftermath of a late night spent writing reports for Rowdry, and it was definitely showing its age. The arms were bald and foam poked through in too many places to count.
There was only one section of the room that was truly clean, and that was the mantle piece above the hitherto unused fireplace.
The place needed a clean, she reasoned, avoiding looking at the mantelpiece for fear of invoking her mother’s scorn, or to be frowned at by the picture of Percy displayed in all its shabby glory.
Realising that the only way the place was going to get clean was if she did it herself sent Ginny into a kind of frenzy, though not the kind you might expect.
Finding her inspiration in the strangest of places, Ginny pulled her father’s old typewriter out from beneath the coffee table. She dug around until she found a reasonably empty sheath of paper and shoved it into the top. For the next several hours, the only sound that could comfort Ginny Weasley was that of her typewriter hard at work.
Ginny remembered fondly those days when life was good, work was fun and her boss wasn’t a tyrant. Times that had ended early last week, and would haunt her many times a day. Yeah right, Ginny said to herself wryly, grimacing as she directed yet another Ministry tour through the Interracial Relations Department.
If it wasn’t bad enough that she had to deal with nosy tourists and the occasional nosier reporter, Ginny had to stop in at Parkinson’s office several times a day, with it being the climax of the tour and all. She had never thought that her position in the Ministry could get any lower – apparently she’d been wrong.
“I want you where I can keep an eye on you, Weasley,” Parkinson snapped, nodding a solid-built woman in a matronly uniform over. “This is Griesline. She will teach you the ropes.”
“The ropes of what?” Ginny demanded, looking over at her cubicle and Luna longingly.
“You’ll be instructing the Ministry tour from now on. That way I know you can’t screw up, and you’re not slacking off.”
“The Ministry tour??” Ginny practically shrieked, attracting a bit of attention. “You’ve got to be joking!”
“I don’t joke, Weasley.”
And that she believed, beyond any shadow of a doubt.
And so she did what she had to. Every fake smile, every falsely sweet voice she had to make, was a silent but vehement curse sent in the direction of one Elaine Parkinson, bane of her existence. It was purely because of this absolute hate of the woman that she was able to build up enough courage to walk into her office that afternoon, freshly printed report in hand.
“M’am?” she enquired, and tried not to throw the bloody report at the woman’s head as Parkinson grimaced at the sight of her.
“What do you want, Weasley?”
She sat down on a chair uninvited, determined not to be intimidated.
“I thought you might be interested in a report I’ve written, M’am. About the liberation of the Dark Arts and its confinement in smaller wizarding communities.”
“And why, pray tell,” Parkinson snapped, her eyes blazing blue fire, “would you do that? You certainly had no authority from me.” She held out her hand, expecting to be given the report and not given an answer. Ginny handed it over.
Parkinson opened the report and began leafing through the pages, stopping occasionally to scribble out whole pages with her violent red quill or simply tut her disgust, making grotesque wrinkles appear at the side of her mouth. She looked up at Ginny, her eyes full of contempt.
“This is utter rubbish, girl!” she seethed, throwing the report out the door. The echo of it landing on the blue linoleum floor outside carried throughout the entire department, a strange hush passing over everyone. “Next time you get the inane notion that anybody wants to hear what you have to say, do everyone a favour and shut up!! Do you hear me? You’re a nobody, Weasley. A nobody! Now get back to work, there are people waiting to be shown around.”
Ginny was shaking when she left Parkinson’s office. She was barely able to control her tears of anger, and every muscle in her body was clenched tight. Wound like a spring as she bent to pick up her discarded report, she was about ready to snap. One more thing to go wrong, just one more thing.
A hand reached out to clutch hers, and she grabbed onto it like a life raft.
“Forget her. She’s a stupid bint and wouldn’t know a good idea if it kicked her up the arse.” Luna smiled and smoothed Ginny’s hair down. “I’m sure whatever’s in there is so good that she wishes she’d thought of it herself. She’s scared of you, use that to keep you sane, hmm?”
Ginny smiled weakly back and swallowed loudly. “I think I might… well, I might just quit.”
“No!” Luna admonished, snatching the report from her hands. “That would be giving up. She’d have won then!” Luna straightened out the pages within the report, smoothed down the crumpled first page and handed it back to Ginny, nodding her approval. “This has been your goal since longer than I can remember, Ginny. How much would you regret it later if you let it go for someone as simple as her? Go home. Rest. Cry. Do whatever you need to do to make yourself stronger tomorrow. I’ll keep the fort for you here – just go.”
Ginny smiled and she felt as if she might cry again. “You’re the best friend anyone could have. Ever.”
Luna giggled. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew about the Geofox incident last year,” she said, her eyes wide with sincerity. “That was very near fatal, I think.”
Ginny nodded, not wanting to ask. “Uhm, well, I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Of course.”
And so she left.
Outside, Ginny felt wretched. She knew that she shouldn’t let women like Elaine Parkinson affect her, especially after every thing that she had gone through and somehow survived, but she couldn’t help it.
Old wounds were ripped open by the incestuous words that shot from that vile woman’s mouth, and there was little anyone, even Ginny, could do to stop aged doubts from resurfacing and teeming like moths to the light. Angrily, she launched her report proposal into the bin, not sparing another glance at it as she marched back to her apartment, prepared to quench her sudden thirst for some Ogden’s Firewhiskey in the hidden cupboard beneath the kitchen sink.
What she didn’t see, in her haste, were the hooded hazel eyes watching her from the shadows, examining her, calculating at a speed far beyond what they seemed. A black gloved hand reached into the bin, pulling out her discarded ideas, his discarded effort, and tucked it easily into a billowing black robe before silently disappearing.
Not an hour later, Ginevra Weasley was incapacitated on the couch in her apartment living room, her family portraits looking down despairingly from the dusty mantelpiece at the empty bottle of Firewhiskey on the floor.
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