FIC: "The Shadows Close Around" by tosca1390
To: curia_regis
Title: The Shadows Close Around
Author: tosca1390
Pairing: Harry/Ginny
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~9,700 words
Summary: It had been a few months since she’d moved into the house with Harry. It was a large reminder of the life they’d once lived that no longer existed. Something new had been built on its foundations, something fulfilling and wonderful; but it still lay on the bones of the old. Old ghosts come back to haunt Harry and Ginny in a new way, a few years after the war has ended.
Author Notes: curia_regis, I apologize that your gift is delayed. But I hope that you enjoy the finished product! You asked for a thinky fic with potions, and I do hope I’ve fit the bill. I’ve played a little fast and loose with interview canon, so I hope you will forgive that.
Many thanks to my beta, shutterbug_12 for being amazing and making this fifty times better than it was. My eternal gratitude to flyingcarpet for her patience, her support, and her excellence as a mod. And finally, a big thanks to the Harry Potter Lexicon, for being a lifesaver when I couldn’t remember what was in the Draught of Living Death. Enjoy!
*
Grimmauld Place at night was a quiet to which Ginny had yet to adjust. Even in her dreams, she still expected to have noisy disruptions from doxies and ghosts, from Fred and George pulling their pranks. It had been a few months since she’d moved into the house with Harry, and the silence was still unsettling; it was a large reminder of the life they’d once lived that no longer existed. Something new had been built on its foundations, something fulfilling and wonderful; but it still lay on the bones of the old.
In the wet darkness of an April night, as she moved from sleep to a dim wakefulness, she breathed in and opened her eyes. It was late (or very early, depending on opinion); yawning, she reached over and found the other side of the bed empty.
“Harry?” she muttered, voice thick with sleep. She sat up in bed, pushing her hair back from her face. “Harry?”
A smudgy form stilled in the doorway to their room. Yellow light from the corridor pooled along the wood floor. “Sorry,” Harry whispered, slipping back in. His hair gleamed damply in the faint light.
She took a moment to look him over. “What’s going on?” she asked, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. “You’re all dressed.”
He shrugged, coming over to sit on his side of the bed. “Jones owled a little bit ago. There’s a flare-up of Dark activity in Manchester. My team’s been called in early to check it out,” he said, shoulders bowing. She could hear him tugging on his sturdy field shoes.
Stretching her arms in front of her, she then slid across the bedcovers and smoothed her hands along his shoulders, his black work robes coarse under her touch. “Very early,” she mumbled, fitting her knees along either side of his hips.
Leaning back into her, he sighed. “Yeah,” he said, everything in his voice echoing with weariness. “I don’t feel like going today.”
She kissed his temple, her hand resting lighting over his chest. She could feel his reassuring thump of his heartbeat. “You, not feel like working? Have you been possessed or something?” she teased.
Shrugging again, he turned his face towards her, his profile sharp in the light. “It’s been a long few months.”
Rain spattered lightly against the windows, the only sound in the room but their breathing. She shut her eyes, suddenly bone tired. There had been a sharp rise in Dark activity in the past few months, with no real cause, and the culprits hard to find. Harry, along with the other Aurors, had been working overtime, while she and her fellow Unspeakables had been scouring prophecy after prophecy, looking for the faintest hint of anything to help.
“It will settle soon,” she said finally.
His hand cupped her bare knee, fingertips skirting the hem of her old Quidditch jersey, her favorite sleepwear. “I hope so. It’s too soon for-“
He stopped, voice clipped in the air. The rest of his sentence hung silently between them. Too soon for another war. She pressed her mouth to the damp skin of his throat, breathing in the soap and water scent from the shower. “You’ll be back tonight?”
“Should be,” he said, twisting at the waist to kiss her on the mouth. “Go back to sleep,” he added, standing up and facing her.
With another yawn, she settled back against the pillows, sprawled out in the middle of their bed. He grinned slightly. “Be honest, you like when I’m not around.”
“Having the whole bed to myself is a plus, but not that much of one,” she said.
He leaned down and kissed her again, his hand smoothing back her hair. “I’ll see you later.”
“Be careful,” she said as he walked away from the bed.
With one last smile towards her, he slipped out of the room and shut the door with a quiet click. She fell asleep with only his pillow and the soft rhythm of rain against the windows to keep her company.
*
The rain was still steady past lunchtime. Ginny couldn’t hear it from inside the Department of Mysteries, but she felt it in the air and on her skin, a filmy sort of dampness. When she’d woken up for the day, alone in a house too big for two people as low-maintenance as she and Harry, she had felt every ghost from the past in the room. It had almost been like she was being watched, all of the temporal memories pressing in on her chest. For a moment in her hazy waking, she thought she saw ink staining her fingertips, chicken feathers across the blankets and floor.
It wasn’t often now that she felt older than her years. Today, with time spliced oddly and the rain and the smothering grey clouds, she felt a weight much heavier than her twenty-one years.
Her quill scratched over parchment, dark ink edging underneath her nails. A new prophecy had arrived via Sybil Trelawney, and as much as Ginny wanted to roll her eyes, she believed anything was possible at this point in her life. Her notes were sparse but precise, the ink shining in the flickering candlelight.
“Weasley!”
Rising from her chair, Ginny peered over her cubicle wall at her boss. She and her colleagues (all twelve of them) sat together in a sparse open area, sandwiched between the Time Room and the main, blue-flame-lit entryway. Only Unspeakables or those with high-enough clearance could find the entrance to their office area. “Yes?”
Geoffrey Meyers, a stocky, gruff, graying man in his late 40’s, jerked his head towards the lift. He’d been an Unspeakable for however many years, and had remained one of the few loyal to the Order of the Phoenix in both wars against Voldemort. In four years, he had expunged the Dark influences from the Department of Mysteries and brought everyone back to their original purpose: studying the weird and everyday mysteries of magic. “You’re needed on Level Two.”
Raising her brows, she pushed away from her desk and rounded the wall. Her robes fluttered behind her. “What for?”
Meyers looked twitchy, which was odd for him. He crossed his arms over his chest, frowning at the floor. “Accident in the field.”
“Something mysterious?” she said with a smile, passing the door that led to the Time Room as she moved towards the lift.
“Just go up there, will you? And take your things,” he said, shaking his head and walking away from her, shuffling between the few cubicles to his shut office door.
She stared after him a moment, smoothing her hair back from her face. As she walked, she flicked her wand and summoned her bag and pertinent files to her, catching them easily in mid air. Moving out into the blue-lit entryway, the cold air raised the hair on her arms; she pressed the button for the lift, nerves jangling in her fingertips.
When the lift doors opened to reveal Level Two, Ron was waiting. He was damp and dirty, freckles sharply standing out against his pale face. “Hey, Gin,” he said tiredly.
“You were called in as well?” she asked in lieu of hello, stepping out of the lift and breathing in. The air on the other levels was always warmer, smelling of paper and the outside world.
“Yeah. Listen, it’s Harry-“
“What about him?” she asked as they walked down towards Ron’s cubicle.
Ron sighed and sat her down in his office chair. “We’d found the hideaway in Manchester,” he said, leaning against the edge of his cubicle. “We were attempting to surprise them, but they were ready for us, and had some tricks laid out for us.”
Cold curled through her veins, her breath stuttering in her chest. “What exactly are you trying to tell me?” she asked evenly.
“Harry chased after one of them, like the dolt he is, and the bastard tossed some sort of exploding potion at him. It knocked him out cold. He’s at St. Mungo’s right now,” he said.
Frowning, she swallowed hard. “Is he awake?”
Ron shook his head. “Not yet. When he wakes up, they want to send him home for the day. I reckoned you’d want to take him home.”
“What kind of potion was it?” she asked, getting to her feet.
“Relax, all right? They don’t know. He hasn’t exhibited any sort of symptoms, apart from not waking up. They’re running tests as we speak,” he said, resting a broad hand on her elbow.
“And it doesn’t worry them that he hasn’t woken up yet?” she retorted. Her palms were clammy to the touch, her hands curling into hard fists at her sides.
Squeezing her elbow, Ron raised a brow. “I reckon it does. I came to get you, to bring you to him. You all right to leave?”
She nodded, a lump settling at the base of her throat. “I’ll owl Meyers. We’re slow this week.”
After grabbing his cloak, Ron guided her out of his cubicle and back towards the lift. “We’ll Floo over. He’s going to be fine,” he said, voice steady.
At the doors of the lift, she looked up at Ron. “How does he look?”
Jaw working, Ron glanced down. “Pale. Still as-“
Abruptly she grabbed his wrist, swallowing down the immediate as death that bubbled at her mouth. “Yeah. All right,” she said softly. There was just a flash of a memory, of Hagrid stumbling up the Hogwarts lawn with Harry’s body motionless in his arms; her stomach clenched. “Did you catch them?”
Ron slung an arm over her shoulder as the lift doors opened. He was warm and solid; for comfort, she turned her face into his shoulder. “Yeah.”
Her cheeks burned. “Good.”
*
Three hours later, Ginny sat at Harry’s bedside in a stiff, unyielding chair, her feet tucked up under her. Her work robes lay cast off over the frame of the bed. She scribbled notes on a very full piece of parchment, rolling her shoulders to try and ease the crick in her neck. Light rain smeared across the windows; in the grey dusky light, Harry looked pale and still, just as Ron had said. His breathing was shallow but even, and the Healers had no real answers for what potion had caused this, and whether there was anything else wrong. Hermione had come to visit and left with Ron in tow. The usual bystander fascination with Harry Potter had died down, four years after the fact, but it didn’t stop some people from walking by multiple times, failing in their casual attempts to look into their curtained-off space.
Instead of fretting, she had put her focus back onto the work she could bring out of the office with her, bits of research. Her large project at the moment was on ghosts and the lingering remnants of corporal forms after they left the earth; Meyers had thought her experience with Tom Riddle’s diary and its possessive elements lent her well to this type of research, and she enjoyed it. She hadn’t told Harry, yet; she wasn’t entirely sure why. Ghosts were always a touchy subject, a tender spot they avoided in their life together.
Right now, she just wished it would stop raining; and, that Harry would wake up so they could go home (a home filled with ghosts, when she really thought about it).
Sighing, she set her quill aside and rubbed her eyes. “I am maudlin today,” she murmured into the quiet, sterile-smelling room.
“Ow,” Harry groaned from his bed.
Sitting up, she looked over to find him with eyes open, hands pressed to his temples. “You’re awake,” she said, unable to help the relief spilling through her, the smile curving her mouth. “How are you feeling?”
“Like hell,” he mumbled, sitting up. “What happened?”
“Ron said some sort of exploding potion knocked you out while you were in the field. You’ve been out quite a while,” she said, moving to sit on the side of his bed, her hip pressing against his.
He frowned, face oddly bare without his glasses. She reached over to the bedside table and gently guided his glasses onto his face, touching his cheek lightly. “How long is quite a while?” he asked.
“About five hours. Don’t you remember anything?” she asked after a moment, her hands twisting together in her lap.
Brow furrowed, he shook his head. “Not really. Not since I left you this morning, and Apparating to Manchester. Did we catch them, at least?”
She shrugged. “Yes. Don’t think about it. Seriously, how are you feeling?”
He sat back against the pillows, face drawn. “Tired.”
“Not sick in any way? Any weird sort of symptoms?”
Shaking his head, he shut his eyes. “Just tired. Don’t they know what kind of potion it was?”
“Not yet,” she said, the relief slowly sliding away into a nagging sort of anxiety.
“I hope Ron caught them,” he said darkly.
Sitting there for another moment more, she touched his arm and stood. “I’ll go fetch the Healer. If he signs off, we can go home,” she said softly.
As she turned to go, his cool hand caught hers. She looked back, finding him watching her carefully. “You said you were maudlin today. Was it this, or something else-“ he asked, looking very young in his hospital bed.
She smiled faintly. “It’s just the rain.” She squeezed his hand and let it fall from her grip. “I’ll be back.”
As she ducked around the curtain and headed down the corridor to find his Healer, she thought she heard him talking under his breath. She paused, just beyond the curtain, holding her breath; but she heard nothing but his easy breathing, the muffled routine noises from down the hall. After a moment, she continued walking, writing it off to too much time invested in ghosts and their remains.
Still, she couldn’t push away the odd sense that something wasn’t quite right.
Moments later, she stood in the corridor with the Healer, watching his face carefully. “Keep an eye on him for a day or two. He’s not to go back out into the field for at least a week,” he told her as she waited for Harry to finish dressing and emerge from his curtained-off space.
“He seems all right, then?” she asked.
The Healer, older and graying and stout, looked away for just a moment, the lines around his mouth deepening. She thought she recognized him from her father’s stay in St. Mungo’s from years ago, but she couldn’t be sure. “Nothing has come up in all of the diagnostic tests we’ve run. Apart from losing consciousness, there are no other symptoms.”
She curled her fingers along her satchel, heavy and thick with parchment and work. “You have no idea what he was affected by?”
“It left no detectable traces. I’m sorry,” he said.
She thanked him; but as she walked with Harry to the Floo ports, she found herself haunted by the phrasing detectable traces. A chill running down her spine, she slipped her hand into Harry’s as they walked. He seemed colder, clammier to the touch, but perhaps that was only the rain.
Later, in the cocooned safety of Gimmauld Place, he slept lightly in their bed, his breathing shallow and soft. She sat up against the headboard, knees tucked up to prop up her reading material. In sleep, he always looked younger. Tonight in the candlelight, his skin gleamed with a light sheen of sweat. Outside, the rain had tapered off, leaving a thick cover of fog over the city.
With every breeze, the house seemed to creak and wheeze. She inhaled deeply, tapping her fingers on her knee.
“Sometimes, I think they’re still here.”
Startled, she glanced over at his side of the bed. He lay on his back, eyes open and watching the ceiling, his hair mussed. “Who?”
“Sirius. Remus. Tonks. My parents,” he said, voice oddly flat.
Something hard knotted in her stomach, catching her off guard. “We’d have seen a hint of them by now,” she said finally. “And ghosts only remain when they’re scared of what’s beyond. Your parents weren’t scared. None of them were scared.”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” he said distantly.
She set her reading aside and crossed the distance between their bodies, hitching her thigh over his hip. “You’re being cryptic, and you know that isn’t a strong suit of yours,” she said, smoothing her hands across his thin t-shirt. “What’s all this about?”
In his muscles she can feel his hesitation, an odd hitch of tension. “I just-I reckoned I saw them, when we came in the house today. Maybe,” he said haltingly, his arm curving over her waist and holding her close.
Watching him carefully, she rested her palm over his heart. Through his shirt, his skin was still cool and paler than usual, his eyes very dark in his face. “You hit your head when you were knocked out. You’re a little out of sorts, it’s all going to be fine,” she said after a moment.
He made a soft sound in the back of his throat, his fingers curling in her upswept hair. “Maybe moving in here was a bad idea.”
“I don’t believe that,” she protested immediately. “This is your house, and you want to live here.”
“It’s ours. Not mine, ours,” he said quietly. She could feel the weariness stealing through him, his muscles relaxing into the mattress.
Her chest constricted with warmth, and she leaned up to kiss his cheek, press her forehead to his damp skin. “Ours, then. And I want to live here too. It’s going to take a little adjusting, that’s all.”
“You reckon?” he mumbled, eyes falling shut.
She stroked his fringe from his forehead and watched as his face slackened with sleep. “Yes,” she whispered softly, mouth close to his temple. In moments, his breathing relaxed and evened out, his body easy as he slept. Under her breath and with a flick of her hand, she extinguished the candles and curled up to him, shutting her eyes. In the cool spring darkness, she held him close, to keep the ghosts at bay.
*
Two days plus the weekend went by, with not a word from Harry concerning their odd conversation the night he came home from St. Mungo’s, or from St. Mungo’s itself concerning the incident. Ginny was nearly ready to brandish her wand and her Bat-Bogey hex; it was inconceivable to her that there wouldn’t be any sort of idea what Harry’d been affected by.
The time he spent rattling away at home was quiet, and somewhat strained. Often, as she worked from the spare bedroom he’d converted into a study for her, she thought she could hear him muttering to himself, pacing the corridors of all the levels of the house. It kept her nerves on edge; she couldn’t escape the feeling that something wasn’t exactly right. But he smiled and joked and they made dinner together each night, as was one of their weekend traditions. He told her embarrassing stories about Ron and Hermione and their adventures in wedding planning; they listened to the Quidditch matches and she didn’t think once about a path not taken, a Quidditch uniform not worn.
Harry went back to work on Monday, still limited to his desk for another few days. They traveled in together, and in a rare moment, he kissed her goodbye in the lift as it halted at Level Two.
“Take it easy today,” she said, quiet despite the fact they were the only ones in the lift.
He ducked his head and kissed her again as the lift doors opened. “I’m fine. Listen, why don’t you pick up Chinese for dinner tonight?”
“I can do that,” she said, her hand catching at his robes. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”
“I really wish you’d all stop asking me that,” he said exasperatedly.
She blinked. “You all? Who else-?”
He backed out of the lift, waving briskly. “See you at home.”
Mouth pursed, she stared at him as the doors closed on his retreating form.
Harry’s full-throated laughter greeted her as she came into the front corridor of Grimmauld Place after a long day. She had tomes of research parchment in her bag weighing her down, and London’s usual deluge of spring rain had begun again, but the sound of Harry laughing like that immediately lifted her spirits. She stripped off her damp cloak, set down her satchel, and moved towards the sound of his voice, bags of Chinese food in her hand. They’d found a tiny little hole in the wall just two blocks down from the house that had the best Chinese food she’d ever tasted (not that she’d had a lot of experience, but Harry and Hermione said it was good, and she believed them). The bags were heavy, smelling sweetly of soy sauce and oil.
“Harry?” she called, moving downstairs into the kitchen. The lights were on, warm yellow slipping through the cracks in the doorframe.
“In here,” he called, the lightness in his voice positively buoyant.
She pushed the door open and found him sitting along in the kitchen, a cup of tea in his hand, smiling widely. His eyes were bright and warm behind his glasses, his face flushed and healthy; it was a complete reversal from the past few days.
“Hi,” she said after a moment, dumbfounded. “What are you doing down here?”
“Waiting for you,” he said, standing and walking over to take the bags of food from her. He kissed her cheek, something bashful and shy in the motion, like they were being watched. It was bizarrely different from the carefully cultivated intimacy they’d managed to balance between themselves in the years since the end of the war, and their slow edging back toward each other.
“Down here?” she asked, still confused.
“Well, yeah,” he said, and his gaze went to an empty chair, a slice of dead air. He lifted his shoulders in a slight shrug, his mouth curving into a sheepish grin, and she grabbed his elbow, an odd sort of panic rising in her throat.
“What are you looking at?”
Startled, he glanced at her. “What?”
“You’re looking at something,” she pressed.
“You’ve been working too much,” he said back, kissing her cheek once more. “Too much time with the paranoid and the wild. C’mon, let’s eat.”
“Down here?” she asked. Usually, they ate in the sitting room upstairs, and listened to the wireless for a Quidditch game. The kitchen was just for cooking and cleaning. They had a formal dining room, but that had only been used once since moving in, for a dinner for Ron, Hermione, George, and her parents.
“Sure, why not?” he said with a grin, moving towards the cabinets and pulling down solid white plates (part of a set they’d received as a housewarming gift from Hermione).
She watched him carefully as he plated their food (beef and broccoli, fried rice, and scallion pancakes) and they sat down to eat, the quiet pressing in on her. Something about him, and the last few days, struck an odd chord with her, unfamiliar and worrisome.
“You’re quiet.”
Glancing up mid-forkful of rice, she met his steady gaze. “Sorry?”
“Don’t be-is everything all right?” he asked.
No, she wanted to say, wanted to jump up and down and try and wrangle out the inner workings of his mind. But she had no proof, nothing tangible to work on; as good as her instincts were in her everyday work, she couldn’t approach Harry with anything but hard facts. “Yes,” she said finally, putting her fork to her mouth. The food was like sand in her mouth.
Later, she dozed lightly in their bed. Their window was pushed open the slightest, allowing for a breeze to carry through the room, sweet and floral in her nose. Soft murmurs echoed from down the corridor; she opened her eyes and watched the candlelight flicker in the faint breeze.
“…He’s so big, now. He runs around and laughs all the time, and he’s so smart. You’d be proud…”
Holding her breath, she curled her fingers into the bedcovers. Harry was animated in speech; from the tone of his voice, she knew he was speaking of Teddy, who’d just turned four.
But who was he talking to?
With a sense of dread rising, she listened to Harry’s soft voice until it lulled her to a disturbed, restless sleep.
*
Ginny left for work before Harry awoke the next morning, chilled down to the bone. The air was thick and damp with lingering rain. She slipped into the office before her other colleagues arrived, halting briefly at the door to the Death Chamber. Usually, she passed it without thought or issue; it had been nothing she hadn’t seen before, and it held no mystery for her any longer. Now, though, with the remnants of lives not lived gnawing at Harry, she wondered.
“In early, Weasley?”
She looked back at Meyers, hands clasped tightly over her satchel straps. “Yes.”
“Take a second look at Trelawney’s prophecy, there might be some meat to it,” he said, turning down towards his office.
“Wait,” she called after him, walking towards him. “Listen--do we have research on potions?”
Meyers grunted. “A little tame for us, don’t you reckon?”
“The Aurors asked me to look into the incident from late last week. They were attacked with exploding potions that left no detectable traces. I wanted to know a good place to start looking,” she said, holding her breath over the slight falsehood. It was a matter of safety, really.
“It’s not really our area, Weasley. I’d check with Misuse, or Magical Catasrophes. Or brush up on your Potions work and head out to Hogwarts.” He walked towards his office, but stopped to face her just outside his doorway. “Don’t let the Aurors boss you about just because your brother and your boyfriend work there, all right? You’ve got work to do other than their errands,” he muttered before going into his office and shutting the door.
She spent half the day at her desk unable to focus on much of anything before the nagging feeling in her gut won her over. On her lunch break, she went to the lift and headed down to Level Two once again.
It was quiet in the Auror offices, a vague sort of hum in the air. Harry, thankfully, was alone in his cubicle, hunched over his desk. Watching him just for a moment, she knocked on the edge of his cubicle wall, a lump forming in her throat.
He sat back and met her eyes, smiling. “Hey. You left early this morning,” he said.
“I had some work to catch up on, I didn’t want to bother you,” she said, slipping inside and pulling out her wand. She cast a quick silencing charm and settled herself on the lip of his desk.
He watched her warily, crossing his arms over his chest. “What’s going on?”
“I could ask you the same question,” she said flatly. “Harry, are you seeing--”
“Don’t,” he interjected fiercely, getting to his feet. “Don’t say anything.”
Her mouth fell open in shock. “Harry--”
“I’m fine--”
She stood as well, tilting her chin up. “You think you’re seeing Sirius, aren’t you?” she asked, voice rising.
“I don’t think anything, I am seeing him,” he retorted. “Him, and Remus, and Tonks--”
“Stop it! Stop,” she said, grabbing the collar of his work robes. “You aren’t, okay? It’s a side effect, a trick--”
“It is not,” he said, voice low and ragged. “I see them, and talk to them--they’re with me.”
“I can’t see them,” she said sharply. “No one else can see them.”
“It’s not a side effect, I feel fine--”
“Please stop,” she said, leaning heavily on the edge of his desk. Her fingers released his robes, her hands falling to her lap. “It’s been too long, Harry. They haven’t been hiding, waiting for the right time to surprise you. They’re gone, and nothing is left of them.”
He flinched, and looked down. She watched him, watched as his whole body tensed, his jaw clenched. The air between them was knotted with the sharp remains of their words. Outside, people walked past without any notice of them. She breathed in, her chest tightening. “I’m sorry,” she said after a horrible, taut moment.
“You’re not,” he said tightly. “I don’t believe it’s a side effect.”
“Harry--”
“It’s the house, Ginny. They were waiting for me to come back to the house,” he said fervently.
For a moment, with him so certain and steady in his mind, she nearly believed him. There was nothing clouding his judgment, nothing hiding behind his eyes; she thought, maybe--and then she shook her head, passing a hand through her hair. “You should go back to St. Mungo’s and be looked over,” she said, pushing away from his desk.
He grasped her elbow, catching her as she moved towards the corridor separating the cubicles. His eyes were intent and resolute. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” he said firmly. “I’m not going.”
“Well, I’m not living with imaginary ghosts,” she retorted, shrugging his grip from her.
“Ginny--”
She reversed the silencing charm and slipped from his cubicle without another word, her heart hammering hard in her chest. It wasn’t until she was alone in the lift on her way back up to the Department of Mysteries that she finally breathed out, blinking back a hot rash of wetness from behind her eyes.
*
The rest of the afternoon was spent exchanging harsh owls and Floos with St. Mungo’s, trying to coax out any new information on Harry’s case. Ginny ended up no closer to a solution than she had been three days ago. The exchange in Harry’s cubicle still fresh and stinging, she lingered in the office long past the usual end of their day before finally being forced home by Meyers, who had been watching her owlishly all day long.
Grimmauld Place was large enough that she did not see Harry when she came home that evening, and she didn’t mind it. She spent the half the night barricaded in her office, pouring over her old Potions textbooks and notes, trying to find anything that would be of help. For the first time in years, she thought of Professor Snape, and wished for some manifestation of his knowledge; he had been cruel, but with a purpose, and he would have known what to do. Even for Harry, he would have helped; Snape knew what it was to be haunted by loved ones lost.
As a memory to the man who had loved his mother even to death, Harry had brought home some of Snape’s books. Most of them had been given to the Hogwarts Library as research tools, but a few he had kept for himself, including a textbook from sixth-year Potions originally belonging to the Half-Blood Prince. Ginny knew the pieces behind the story, but she had never opened the book. She hadn’t had the need, until now.
As it approached midnight, she pulled it off the shelf and onto her desk, thumbing through it gently. The notes in the margins astounded her; Snape had truly found his calling, in terms of Potion-work. As she turned into the chapter concerning draughts, something caught her eye, underneath the recipe for the Draught of Living Death. A hint of hope flickered within her; she marked the page, and tucked the book into her bag.
She crept into bed late, curling up on her side and pressing her cheek into the pillow. Harry slept quietly next to her, his even breathing a comfort to her. In the morning, she woke to find their bedroom empty, and Harry making noise two floors below in the kitchen. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes, slow and tired from her short night, and dressed quickly, ducking out of the house before Harry returned upstairs.
Instead of making her way to her office, she took the lift to Level Two, and searched out Ron.
“Something is wrong,” she said as she stood in Ron’s cubicle, her hands planted on her hips.
Ron glanced up at her. “With what?”
“With Harry. Something is wrong. He’s-Ron, he thinks Sirius, among others, is here,” she said, suddenly very weary. “He’s talking to the air, like people are in the room. And he’s been muttering to himself, and looking off over my shoulders--.”
Abruptly Ron went pale in the face, his eyes wide. “I reckoned-“
“What? What?” she pressed, jaw clenched.
“He said something-I reckoned I heard him wrong. He’d said something about Sirius and Remus yesterday, something about them being there-I was sure I’d heard him wrong,” he said, standing up from his chair and leaning against the lip of his desk.
She smacked his arm, glaring at him. “You didn’t hear him wrong, it’s true. He’s seeing them in the house, or at least he believes he’s seeing them.”
“Isn’t this your department in any case? Weird magic things?” he asked.
“Don’t be a prat, Ron! St. Mungo’s doesn’t have anything to tell me, and this isn’t just Harry wanting them to be alive!” she exclaimed, sitting down in his vacated chair. “I have to know everything that was in that potion.”
“How do you want to find that out? There were no traces left!” Ron protested.
“You caught the bastards. I want to talk to them,” she said firmly, spine stiff and chin tilted up.
Ron’s eyes widened, a sharp scoff pushing out from his throat. “No bloody way. It’s too--”
“If you say dangerous, I will hex you into next week, Ronald,” she said coolly. “I’m an Unspeakable, as hard as that may be for the lot of you to comprehend. I can handle myself.”
“I can’t let you wander into the holding cells, Ginny. There are rules and regulations--”
“And my department doesn’t answer to you,” she retorted. “I’ll get around you, so you may as well help me.”
He huffed impatiently. “They won’t tell you anything.”
She smiled slightly. “Leave that to me. Take me down there.”
“Ginny--”
She brandished her wand and raised her brow. “Now.”
*
Moments later, she found herself in a windowless dim room, watching a squirrely-eyed young man with greasy blonde hair and a scar across his cheek. He was slow to attention, recovering from a long time under a Stunning spell. Behind her, she could almost feel Ron’s nervousness, the thrumming in the air.
“Will you relax?” she asked finally, turning back to look at him.
“I don’t know what you expect to do,” he retorted mulishly.
“What’s his name?” she asked.
Ron frowned. “Henry Nott. He’s Theodore’s younger brother. Three years younger than you.”
Ginny sighed and looked over at Nott, whose eyes slowly cleared of their glazed cloudiness. She didn’t remember him from school, but that didn’t surprise her. “Good morning,” she said evenly.
Nott scowled, thin-lipped and silent. She pulled out her wand and approached him. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said.
“Don’t mind if you do,” he muttered. “Good for the cause.”
A sudden rush of anger flooded her, color flushing her face. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said hotly. “Do you even know what you’re playing at, trying to start all this up again? Don’t you remember what happened before?”
He merely glared at her, gaze very blue, deep-set and offset by the dark circles under his eyes. She shook her head and waved her wand. His arms shot out straight in front of him, palms upturned to the sky. He gritted his teeth, a sharp sound cutting out of his throat.
“There is no cause,” she said as she trailed the tip of her wand over his fingertips and palms. “It’s too bad you’re too daft to realize it.”
“Ginny-“
“Quiet,” she said back to Ron, eyes fixed on Nott’s palms. His skin began to glow in spots of blue, green, brown, and purple.
“What are you doing?” Nott asked sharply.
“I’d like to know that, myself,” Ron murmured.
“I found the Potions text from the Half-Blood Prince,” she said to Ron, mapping the glowing dots of color on Nott’s hands. “There was something about a potion, derived from the Draught of Living Death, with altered affects.” She looked up at Nott, who looked green around the face. “Isn’t that right?”
He scowled and turned his head away from her. Behind her, Ron edged closer. “But that doesn’t explain the spell, and the glowing-“
“I picked it up from a case the Department was handling a while back,” she said, pulling out a blank piece of parchment and pressing Nott’s palms to it firmly. “It’s as if doing a last-spell-performed incantation on a wand, except it works directly on the skin. It’s not perfect, but it helps.”
“What will it do?” Ron asked, interest curling through his voice.
“Tell us what magical elements he’s been working with,” she said with a small smile.
Ron let out a slow breath. “Hermione’ll go nutters over this.”
She pulled the parchment from Nott’s hands. “You can’t tell her, Ron. I shouldn’t have even done this in front of you.”
“Why not?”
“It’s called the Department of Mysteries for a reason,” she said, rolling her eyes. She pulled the parchment from Nott’s palms and rolled it up; it was warm and thrumming to the touch as she pushed it into her satchel.
“It won’t matter,” Nott said abruptly. “Go ahead and try to reckon it out. There’s no antidote.”
She watched him, clenching her jaw. He lifted his chin, dirty-blond fringe falling across his forehead. “We wanted to get Potter. Wanted him to walk through life haunted by his ghosts. He will be, and it’ll make him lose his mind, and there’s nothing you can do.”
Ginny stared at him for a cool moment, the air positively taut with tension between them. Ron touched her elbow then. Heart beating hard, she turned on her heel and walked towards the exit.
“Hey! My arms!”
“You can stay that way for a bit,” she bit out sharply.
“No, he can’t-you’re not supposed to be down here,” Ron said under his breath. “They’ll know if you leave him like that.”
Clenching her hands into fists, she waved her wand behind her, undoing the spell. She heard Ron Stun Nott again, the usual precaution, but she couldn’t hear anything but the roaring in her ears, couldn’t feel anything but the hard cherry pit of frustration and anxiety in her stomach.
In the lift, she turned her face from Ron and shut her eyes against the hot tears, mouth trembling.
“It’s okay, Gin-“
“Don’t-don’t-can we just stand here for a moment? Please?” she asked quietly, her voice cracking at the end.
Ron, for once, let her be.
*
“Now what?” Ron asked as the lift stopped on Level Two.
Collected, she glanced at him. “I’ll look at the parchment, find out some of the potion ingredients, and try to find someone to make an antidote.”
“Nott said-“
“I know what he said. I reckon if Snape knew how to make something similar to this, he’ll have an antidote. His Potions notebooks and texts are at Hogwarts. I’ll start there,” she said as the lift doors opened and they stepped off into the bustling corridor.
Ron clapped a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll go with you. Maybe we can drag Hermione away from her meeting with the Minister-“
“I’ll go.”
Both she and Ron looked off to the left. Harry stood off to the side, looking tired and drawn. “I’ll go,” he repeated, walking towards them.
Ron cleared his throat. “Harry, I-“
“It’s okay,” Harry said quietly but firmly. “I-I saw Fred.”
Around them, the corridor bustled, but she felt entirely alone with Ron and Harry, set apart. A gutted sort of sound echoed out of Ron’s throat. Her entire middle contracted painfully into a sharp inhale.“Harry, you know-“
“I know,” Harry said, cutting her off. “It didn’t… It didn’t feel right. Fred wouldn’t have been scared. He was… well, fearless,” he said, smiling faintly. “And then I thought about it, about Sirius and Remus and Tonks, how they weren’t scared-and none of it felt right anymore.”
His gaze moved past her shoulder. Ron looked behind them, but she didn’t, her eyes still fixed on Harry. “You’re seeing them now, aren’t you?” she said softly.
Harry nodded, brow furrowed. She breathed out slowly, and moved to take his hand in hers. “Okay. Let’s go,” she said gently.
He gripped her hand tightly and nodded again. His gaze went to Ron. “I’m sorry, mate-“
“Shut it,” Ron said, an odd gruffness in his voice. “I’ll cover you, all right?”
Harry nodded. Ginny swallowed hard, and forced a smile. “Let’s go, then,” she said firmly.
*
“For a magical library, it’s quite dusty,” Ginny said wearily as she scanned the shelves of the Restricted Section’s potions aisle. “Has it always been this dusty?”
“What was in the potion, again?” Harry called from two shelves over.
“Wormwood, knotgrass, and asphodel for certain. Maybe lovage as well,” she said, pulling Moste Dangerous and Mind-Affecting Potions from the Middle Ages to Modern Times from the shelf. “It was an odd variation on the Draught of Living Death.”
She blinked against the flickering torch lights as she came out into the front aisle. She could hear students murmuring to each other in the normal portion of the library. Every so often for the last three hours, Madame Pince would come by and check on them; she had given them access to every section of the library without a word needed from Professor McGonagall, although they’d gone to the Headmistress first for security’s sake.
It had been fairly unfruitful; even Snape’s notes weren’t terrifically useful in terms of an antidote. Every so often, Harry would shut his eyes, and she knew he was trying to ignore the hallucinations, the images of the loved ones he’d lost once already. Her eyes burned with fatigue and her head ached; her stomach rumbled for food, a lost cause for the day.
Harry was at her side in a moment, rubbing his eyes behind his glasses. “I’m sorry,” he said for what had to be the tenth time since they’d arrived at Hogwarts via Floo.
“I know,” she said tiredly.
He slipped his hand under her hair, to press at the base of her neck and her shoulder blades. “Not for this-well, yes for this. But for yesterday, in my office.”
Leaning into him, she looked at him. “I didn’t mean to be so harsh,” she said after a moment.
He turned his head to hers, his mouth brushing her temple. For a moment, they stood there in silence, breathing in the musty parchment and dust of their childhoods. She pressed the book to her stomach and shut her eyes, her side flush with his. He was solid and warm next to her, comforting in the middle of this mess.
“Ever since we moved into the house, I’ve been thinking about them all, more than I usually do,” he said after a moment.
“Me too,” she said quietly.
“It hasn’t been sad. I’ll go into a room and remember something Remus and Sirius were bickering over, or a prank you, Fred, and George played on us all. I think about Christmas that one year, spending it with you and Sirius and Ron and Hermione-“
“You acting like a silly prat,” she added.
He smiled against her hair. “Yeah. It’s just the memories of them, they’re so central in the house. So when I saw them, I reckoned-I reckoned it was normal. The natural progression.”
She dragged her fingers along the grimy spine of the book in her hands. “In my work, I’ve been looking at ghosts and the other side,” she said. “It’s been shown that people leave imprints on the places they’ve lived in and loved the most. They’re not ghosts, exactly; it’s-”
“Sort of like Riddle’s diary,” he said.
She sighed. “Sort of. Without the curse part of it.”
“You really do work on the weirdest things up there,” he said, humor faintly coloring his tone.
She shrugged, smiling slightly. “Sometimes, I feel like they’re there,” she said after a moment, tilting her head back and looking at him. “I don’t blame you for feeling how you do, for acting how you did.”
His gaze was very green in the torchlight, steady and intent on her face. “This morning, I saw my parents.”
Something hard knotted at her heart, catching deeply. “Oh, Harry.”
“You thought I was asleep,” he said, looking away. “I woke up, I saw you getting out of bed and leaving the bedroom, and I was so sure you were my mother. My dad was right there next to you, and I couldn’t tell the difference until I saw your face. Then they were in the drawing room, where the picture of the first Order of the Phoenix has been taken. I knew, I knew it wasn’t right.”
Breath caught hard in her throat, she leaned up and kissed his cheek. When he turned his face to hers, she kissed him on the mouth, soft and gentle. “We’ll have our own memories there, soon enough. Stick with me, Potter. We’ve got quite the lives to lead,” she whispered against his mouth, her fingers curling in his robes.
He kissed her back for a long moment, his mouth wet and warm on hers. “I know,” he said, sure and steady.
They parted, moving with their books to the table they’d taken over in the rear of the revising area. With the books open in front of them, they sat at the same side of the table, his hand settled on her thigh lightly. For a moment, she could almost pretend it was five years earlier and they were revising for her O.W.L.s, stealing time whenever they could under the dark cloud of portent approaching.
In the end, it was so easy, they passed it over at first. Then, Harry stilled next to her and began flipping the pages backwards.
“What are you doing?” she said, weary and crabby.
“Living dead,” he murmured.
She shook her head. “We’ve already looked at the Draught of Living Death, it’s not the same thing-“
“No,” he interrupted, stopping and setting his finger in the middle of the right-hand page. “The Living Dead Potion.”
She peered across his arm, skimming the page. “What, here? ‘The Living Dead Potion was used for mental torture and disintegration; it infects the brain and seeps into the victim’s consciousness and gives them hallucinations of the images of dead loved ones. It is brewed in such a way to be rendered tasteless, and can be used in the air as an inhalant, which leaves it undetectable. This potion also works at the brain and, if untreated, will cause dementia and-’”
“A vegetative state,” he finished grimly.
They sat together in silence for a moment, the sounds of the library distant and muted. Outside, the sky was beginning to color orange and blue into dusk. The tips of her fingers were cold, the relief of finding an answer cut with dread.
Finally, she turned her eyes back to the page. “There’s an antidote,” she said quietly. “It takes a week to brew.”
Suddenly, he put a hand to her cheek and brought her face to his, kissing her gently. “We’ll need Hermione for this,” he said against her mouth, the determined resolution in his eyes familiar from those years ago, in the Department of Mysteries, at the Battle of Hogwarts.
She nodded and kissed him again, shutting her eyes. Their clasped hands lay between them, warm and entangled.
*
After berating both Harry and Ginny for a solid ten minutes for not keeping her in the loop, Hermione immediately started collecting the necessary ingredients and brewing the antidote. Ginny and Ron were sent to Diagon Alley for holly bark, dittany, and laurel, and to the grocery for ginger, among other things; after an owl to Neville, mandrake was delivered to Grimmauld Place with expediency.
Ginny, after informing Meyers of the situation, was forced to write up a report (“It’s absolutely rare to have this kind of potion used and see it work effectively, it’s part of your job, Weasley”), leaving out the minor details that could get Ron in trouble. The same report was filed for the Aurors, to give them evidence for prosecution for the culprits. As for Harry, he was limited to the house and work. In the week or so it took, he remained on limited duty and at his desk. He functioned normally at the office, but at home he was distracted and spent most of his time with Hermione, or Ginny when she was home.
“It’s as if they know I’m getting rid of them,” he said to Ginny one night as they ate chocolate biscuits and had tea in their favorite sitting room, the wireless quiet in the background. Hermione had gone home; the antidote was to be ready tomorrow morning.
Ginny lay next to him on the plush red sofa, her shoulder pressed to his. “You’re not getting rid of them,” she said firmly. “They aren’t real to begin with.”
He rubbed his forehead, huffing sharply. “I know.”
She sat up and put the box of biscuits on the coffee table before sliding into his lap. Slipping an arm around his neck, she kissed his cheek. “Any chance I could distract you?” she teased, her mouth very close to his skin. He smelled fresh and clean and grassy.
His hands curled over her waist, slipping under the hem of her worn t-shirt. “It’s possible,” he said softly, a flush rising on his skin.
There, on the sofa in the room where he had slept night after night while on the run, she peeled his clothes from him and mapped the familiar lines of his body. She lingered over the scars that remained from years before, the shiny lines on the back of his hand that matched the scars she now bore from a year under the Carrows. His hands were insistent and needy, fingers digging into her hips, her thighs. In the flickering candlelight, with the wireless floating in and out of focus, she couldn’t help but feel like this was some sort of last, a kind of goodbye.
After, when they’d laughed and picked up their strewn-about clothes and settled into bed, she lay awake long after he fell asleep. On her side, her back to him, she looked out into the starry night (the first night free of clouds and rain in a week), and swallowed down her fear, just as she had all her life. After her first year, Ginny Weasley refused to cry in front of anyone else; the only time she had broken her own vow was when Hagrid had brought Harry’s body out of the woods. Now, she felt like she was waiting at the steps of Hogwarts all over, holding her breath and pressing down tears.
Behind her, the bed shifted. Her gaze focused on the hardwood floor, watching a slim shaft of moonlight curve over the whorls and curls in the wood. Harry’s arm settled over her waist, his bare skin cool against hers. His mouth pressed to the back of her shoulder, his nose near her hair; by his even breathing, she reckoned he was asleep. She shut her eyes and curled into him, letting his breathing soothe her into an uneasy sleep.
*
Harry was all set up in bed when Hermione came in with the potion. In the late morning sun, the potion was a thick viscous green, the color of grass.
“Is this going to be worse than Polyjuice Potion?” he asked warily, sitting up against the headboard and looking down into the pewter mug. Steam curled in front of his face, edging his glasses.
Ginny smiled slightly, sitting Indian-style on her side of the bed as she watched him. Hermione wrinkled her nose. “Judging on how it smelled while brewing, most likely,” she said.
He rolled his eyes, sighing as he glanced over at Ginny. “I want to-“
“Do it when you wake up,” she said, fear catching every word in her throat.
Hesitating for a moment, he nodded. His gaze went to just beyond Hermione, his face creasing sadly; Ginny had to look away for a moment, an odd burning behind her eyes. He then shut his eyes, and gulped down the potion in two long swallows. Instantly, he fell back against the pillows, the pewter cup clattering to the floor; unconscious, he lay as still as death, his head lolling to one side.
“I wasn’t certain how quickly it would work,” Hermione said as she and Ginny adjusted him into a more comfortable position. “I reckon I have my answer. You’re staying with him?”
Ginny nodded, unable to speak against the lump in her throat. Hermione leaned over and hugged her tightly, pressed cheek to cheek. “It’ll be all right,” she said softly next to Ginny’s ear. “Owl Ron and me the moment he wakes up.”
She left her then, leaving Ginny alone in a sunny bedroom in an empty house, with only Harry’s prone form for company.
The hours dragged on, Ginny’s nerves rising with every chime of the clock. She only left the bedroom to make tea that she didn’t end up drinking, cups and cups going cold on her night table. She opened the windows for a breeze, thankful for sun. The sounds of the streets distracted her, cars and busses rolling past, snippets of conversation floating up. With every hour, she found it just a little harder to breathe.
By the early evening, with the sky deepening to a rosy purple, she lay stretched out along the length of his body, her cheek pressed to his shoulder. He was cool where she was too hot. She lay her hand in his and shut her eyes. “Please wake up,” she whispered into the floral air.
At one point, she must have drifted into sleep. She woke with a start when his chest rose and fell in quick shallow bursts, his fingers curling into hers. Sitting up, she held her breath as he opened his eyes and exhaled hard, the color returning to his face. His eyes found her face, focused and deeply green behind his glasses.
“How long was I out?” he murmured, voice thick with sleep.
“All day,” she said, touching his chest, trying not to cry. “Are you all right?”
He looked around the room and sat up with a groan. “Reckon so.”
“You don’t see anything?” she asked, half wanting to jump on him and kiss him breathless, half wanting to rush him to St. Mungo’s (a lot of good that did him last time).
In the dim light, he took a moment to look around before shaking his head. “No. Nothing.”
Smiling, she leaned over and kissed him, gripping his hand tightly in hers. “Okay. Okay,” she murmured against his mouth.
His other hand came up to touch her hair, her cheek. “Ginny-“
“Wait, I have to go owl Ron and Hermione, I promised,” she said, kissing him once more before sliding off of the bed.
“Ginny, wait-“
“I’ll just be a moment-“
“Marry me.”
At the door to their bedroom, she halted and turned to stare at him. “What?”
He sat up against the headboard, smiling slightly. The candle light lay sharp shadows across his face. “Marry me.”
She passed a hand through her hair, taking a step towards him. “Are you joking?”
“No. Marry me,” he said firmly.
Rolling her eyes, she waved a hand at him. “You’re under the influence, you’ve just woken up-“
Her words died on her tongue as he opens the drawer to his night table and pulls out a ring, shining silver and glinting off the candle light. “You said we’ve got to make our own memories in this house. I want to start right,” he said fervently.
Slowly, she came back to sit next to him on the bed. He pressed the ring into her hand, and she looked down at it, holding her breath for an entirely new reason. It was a silver band with a three stone setting, an emerald and two diamonds on its side. It was simple, petite, and perfect.
“What do you say?” he asked, his hands covering hers. His fingers trembled faintly, even as his voice was steady.
Warmth bubbled up through her middle and up to her chest, expanding her whole heart. She looked up and smiled at him. “You would propose after a near-death experience,” she said after a moment.
His mouth twitched, his brow furrowed. “No time like the present. Is that a yes?”
Nodding she leaned into kiss him. Together, they fumbled to slip the ring onto her finger. She couldn’t stop kissing him, couldn’t let go of him. He pulled her into his lap, his hands hot on her back and waist.
“I really do have to owl Hermione and Ron, now,” she said into his mouth, his fingers running a trail under her t-shirt and across her skin.
“In a minute,” he said back, mouth opening under hers.
She shut her eyes and smiled. A cool light breeze curled through the room, and they both breathed easily, looking into the future.
*.
Title: The Shadows Close Around
Author: tosca1390
Pairing: Harry/Ginny
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~9,700 words
Summary: It had been a few months since she’d moved into the house with Harry. It was a large reminder of the life they’d once lived that no longer existed. Something new had been built on its foundations, something fulfilling and wonderful; but it still lay on the bones of the old. Old ghosts come back to haunt Harry and Ginny in a new way, a few years after the war has ended.
Author Notes: curia_regis, I apologize that your gift is delayed. But I hope that you enjoy the finished product! You asked for a thinky fic with potions, and I do hope I’ve fit the bill. I’ve played a little fast and loose with interview canon, so I hope you will forgive that.
Many thanks to my beta, shutterbug_12 for being amazing and making this fifty times better than it was. My eternal gratitude to flyingcarpet for her patience, her support, and her excellence as a mod. And finally, a big thanks to the Harry Potter Lexicon, for being a lifesaver when I couldn’t remember what was in the Draught of Living Death. Enjoy!
*
Grimmauld Place at night was a quiet to which Ginny had yet to adjust. Even in her dreams, she still expected to have noisy disruptions from doxies and ghosts, from Fred and George pulling their pranks. It had been a few months since she’d moved into the house with Harry, and the silence was still unsettling; it was a large reminder of the life they’d once lived that no longer existed. Something new had been built on its foundations, something fulfilling and wonderful; but it still lay on the bones of the old.
In the wet darkness of an April night, as she moved from sleep to a dim wakefulness, she breathed in and opened her eyes. It was late (or very early, depending on opinion); yawning, she reached over and found the other side of the bed empty.
“Harry?” she muttered, voice thick with sleep. She sat up in bed, pushing her hair back from her face. “Harry?”
A smudgy form stilled in the doorway to their room. Yellow light from the corridor pooled along the wood floor. “Sorry,” Harry whispered, slipping back in. His hair gleamed damply in the faint light.
She took a moment to look him over. “What’s going on?” she asked, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. “You’re all dressed.”
He shrugged, coming over to sit on his side of the bed. “Jones owled a little bit ago. There’s a flare-up of Dark activity in Manchester. My team’s been called in early to check it out,” he said, shoulders bowing. She could hear him tugging on his sturdy field shoes.
Stretching her arms in front of her, she then slid across the bedcovers and smoothed her hands along his shoulders, his black work robes coarse under her touch. “Very early,” she mumbled, fitting her knees along either side of his hips.
Leaning back into her, he sighed. “Yeah,” he said, everything in his voice echoing with weariness. “I don’t feel like going today.”
She kissed his temple, her hand resting lighting over his chest. She could feel his reassuring thump of his heartbeat. “You, not feel like working? Have you been possessed or something?” she teased.
Shrugging again, he turned his face towards her, his profile sharp in the light. “It’s been a long few months.”
Rain spattered lightly against the windows, the only sound in the room but their breathing. She shut her eyes, suddenly bone tired. There had been a sharp rise in Dark activity in the past few months, with no real cause, and the culprits hard to find. Harry, along with the other Aurors, had been working overtime, while she and her fellow Unspeakables had been scouring prophecy after prophecy, looking for the faintest hint of anything to help.
“It will settle soon,” she said finally.
His hand cupped her bare knee, fingertips skirting the hem of her old Quidditch jersey, her favorite sleepwear. “I hope so. It’s too soon for-“
He stopped, voice clipped in the air. The rest of his sentence hung silently between them. Too soon for another war. She pressed her mouth to the damp skin of his throat, breathing in the soap and water scent from the shower. “You’ll be back tonight?”
“Should be,” he said, twisting at the waist to kiss her on the mouth. “Go back to sleep,” he added, standing up and facing her.
With another yawn, she settled back against the pillows, sprawled out in the middle of their bed. He grinned slightly. “Be honest, you like when I’m not around.”
“Having the whole bed to myself is a plus, but not that much of one,” she said.
He leaned down and kissed her again, his hand smoothing back her hair. “I’ll see you later.”
“Be careful,” she said as he walked away from the bed.
With one last smile towards her, he slipped out of the room and shut the door with a quiet click. She fell asleep with only his pillow and the soft rhythm of rain against the windows to keep her company.
*
The rain was still steady past lunchtime. Ginny couldn’t hear it from inside the Department of Mysteries, but she felt it in the air and on her skin, a filmy sort of dampness. When she’d woken up for the day, alone in a house too big for two people as low-maintenance as she and Harry, she had felt every ghost from the past in the room. It had almost been like she was being watched, all of the temporal memories pressing in on her chest. For a moment in her hazy waking, she thought she saw ink staining her fingertips, chicken feathers across the blankets and floor.
It wasn’t often now that she felt older than her years. Today, with time spliced oddly and the rain and the smothering grey clouds, she felt a weight much heavier than her twenty-one years.
Her quill scratched over parchment, dark ink edging underneath her nails. A new prophecy had arrived via Sybil Trelawney, and as much as Ginny wanted to roll her eyes, she believed anything was possible at this point in her life. Her notes were sparse but precise, the ink shining in the flickering candlelight.
“Weasley!”
Rising from her chair, Ginny peered over her cubicle wall at her boss. She and her colleagues (all twelve of them) sat together in a sparse open area, sandwiched between the Time Room and the main, blue-flame-lit entryway. Only Unspeakables or those with high-enough clearance could find the entrance to their office area. “Yes?”
Geoffrey Meyers, a stocky, gruff, graying man in his late 40’s, jerked his head towards the lift. He’d been an Unspeakable for however many years, and had remained one of the few loyal to the Order of the Phoenix in both wars against Voldemort. In four years, he had expunged the Dark influences from the Department of Mysteries and brought everyone back to their original purpose: studying the weird and everyday mysteries of magic. “You’re needed on Level Two.”
Raising her brows, she pushed away from her desk and rounded the wall. Her robes fluttered behind her. “What for?”
Meyers looked twitchy, which was odd for him. He crossed his arms over his chest, frowning at the floor. “Accident in the field.”
“Something mysterious?” she said with a smile, passing the door that led to the Time Room as she moved towards the lift.
“Just go up there, will you? And take your things,” he said, shaking his head and walking away from her, shuffling between the few cubicles to his shut office door.
She stared after him a moment, smoothing her hair back from her face. As she walked, she flicked her wand and summoned her bag and pertinent files to her, catching them easily in mid air. Moving out into the blue-lit entryway, the cold air raised the hair on her arms; she pressed the button for the lift, nerves jangling in her fingertips.
When the lift doors opened to reveal Level Two, Ron was waiting. He was damp and dirty, freckles sharply standing out against his pale face. “Hey, Gin,” he said tiredly.
“You were called in as well?” she asked in lieu of hello, stepping out of the lift and breathing in. The air on the other levels was always warmer, smelling of paper and the outside world.
“Yeah. Listen, it’s Harry-“
“What about him?” she asked as they walked down towards Ron’s cubicle.
Ron sighed and sat her down in his office chair. “We’d found the hideaway in Manchester,” he said, leaning against the edge of his cubicle. “We were attempting to surprise them, but they were ready for us, and had some tricks laid out for us.”
Cold curled through her veins, her breath stuttering in her chest. “What exactly are you trying to tell me?” she asked evenly.
“Harry chased after one of them, like the dolt he is, and the bastard tossed some sort of exploding potion at him. It knocked him out cold. He’s at St. Mungo’s right now,” he said.
Frowning, she swallowed hard. “Is he awake?”
Ron shook his head. “Not yet. When he wakes up, they want to send him home for the day. I reckoned you’d want to take him home.”
“What kind of potion was it?” she asked, getting to her feet.
“Relax, all right? They don’t know. He hasn’t exhibited any sort of symptoms, apart from not waking up. They’re running tests as we speak,” he said, resting a broad hand on her elbow.
“And it doesn’t worry them that he hasn’t woken up yet?” she retorted. Her palms were clammy to the touch, her hands curling into hard fists at her sides.
Squeezing her elbow, Ron raised a brow. “I reckon it does. I came to get you, to bring you to him. You all right to leave?”
She nodded, a lump settling at the base of her throat. “I’ll owl Meyers. We’re slow this week.”
After grabbing his cloak, Ron guided her out of his cubicle and back towards the lift. “We’ll Floo over. He’s going to be fine,” he said, voice steady.
At the doors of the lift, she looked up at Ron. “How does he look?”
Jaw working, Ron glanced down. “Pale. Still as-“
Abruptly she grabbed his wrist, swallowing down the immediate as death that bubbled at her mouth. “Yeah. All right,” she said softly. There was just a flash of a memory, of Hagrid stumbling up the Hogwarts lawn with Harry’s body motionless in his arms; her stomach clenched. “Did you catch them?”
Ron slung an arm over her shoulder as the lift doors opened. He was warm and solid; for comfort, she turned her face into his shoulder. “Yeah.”
Her cheeks burned. “Good.”
*
Three hours later, Ginny sat at Harry’s bedside in a stiff, unyielding chair, her feet tucked up under her. Her work robes lay cast off over the frame of the bed. She scribbled notes on a very full piece of parchment, rolling her shoulders to try and ease the crick in her neck. Light rain smeared across the windows; in the grey dusky light, Harry looked pale and still, just as Ron had said. His breathing was shallow but even, and the Healers had no real answers for what potion had caused this, and whether there was anything else wrong. Hermione had come to visit and left with Ron in tow. The usual bystander fascination with Harry Potter had died down, four years after the fact, but it didn’t stop some people from walking by multiple times, failing in their casual attempts to look into their curtained-off space.
Instead of fretting, she had put her focus back onto the work she could bring out of the office with her, bits of research. Her large project at the moment was on ghosts and the lingering remnants of corporal forms after they left the earth; Meyers had thought her experience with Tom Riddle’s diary and its possessive elements lent her well to this type of research, and she enjoyed it. She hadn’t told Harry, yet; she wasn’t entirely sure why. Ghosts were always a touchy subject, a tender spot they avoided in their life together.
Right now, she just wished it would stop raining; and, that Harry would wake up so they could go home (a home filled with ghosts, when she really thought about it).
Sighing, she set her quill aside and rubbed her eyes. “I am maudlin today,” she murmured into the quiet, sterile-smelling room.
“Ow,” Harry groaned from his bed.
Sitting up, she looked over to find him with eyes open, hands pressed to his temples. “You’re awake,” she said, unable to help the relief spilling through her, the smile curving her mouth. “How are you feeling?”
“Like hell,” he mumbled, sitting up. “What happened?”
“Ron said some sort of exploding potion knocked you out while you were in the field. You’ve been out quite a while,” she said, moving to sit on the side of his bed, her hip pressing against his.
He frowned, face oddly bare without his glasses. She reached over to the bedside table and gently guided his glasses onto his face, touching his cheek lightly. “How long is quite a while?” he asked.
“About five hours. Don’t you remember anything?” she asked after a moment, her hands twisting together in her lap.
Brow furrowed, he shook his head. “Not really. Not since I left you this morning, and Apparating to Manchester. Did we catch them, at least?”
She shrugged. “Yes. Don’t think about it. Seriously, how are you feeling?”
He sat back against the pillows, face drawn. “Tired.”
“Not sick in any way? Any weird sort of symptoms?”
Shaking his head, he shut his eyes. “Just tired. Don’t they know what kind of potion it was?”
“Not yet,” she said, the relief slowly sliding away into a nagging sort of anxiety.
“I hope Ron caught them,” he said darkly.
Sitting there for another moment more, she touched his arm and stood. “I’ll go fetch the Healer. If he signs off, we can go home,” she said softly.
As she turned to go, his cool hand caught hers. She looked back, finding him watching her carefully. “You said you were maudlin today. Was it this, or something else-“ he asked, looking very young in his hospital bed.
She smiled faintly. “It’s just the rain.” She squeezed his hand and let it fall from her grip. “I’ll be back.”
As she ducked around the curtain and headed down the corridor to find his Healer, she thought she heard him talking under his breath. She paused, just beyond the curtain, holding her breath; but she heard nothing but his easy breathing, the muffled routine noises from down the hall. After a moment, she continued walking, writing it off to too much time invested in ghosts and their remains.
Still, she couldn’t push away the odd sense that something wasn’t quite right.
Moments later, she stood in the corridor with the Healer, watching his face carefully. “Keep an eye on him for a day or two. He’s not to go back out into the field for at least a week,” he told her as she waited for Harry to finish dressing and emerge from his curtained-off space.
“He seems all right, then?” she asked.
The Healer, older and graying and stout, looked away for just a moment, the lines around his mouth deepening. She thought she recognized him from her father’s stay in St. Mungo’s from years ago, but she couldn’t be sure. “Nothing has come up in all of the diagnostic tests we’ve run. Apart from losing consciousness, there are no other symptoms.”
She curled her fingers along her satchel, heavy and thick with parchment and work. “You have no idea what he was affected by?”
“It left no detectable traces. I’m sorry,” he said.
She thanked him; but as she walked with Harry to the Floo ports, she found herself haunted by the phrasing detectable traces. A chill running down her spine, she slipped her hand into Harry’s as they walked. He seemed colder, clammier to the touch, but perhaps that was only the rain.
Later, in the cocooned safety of Gimmauld Place, he slept lightly in their bed, his breathing shallow and soft. She sat up against the headboard, knees tucked up to prop up her reading material. In sleep, he always looked younger. Tonight in the candlelight, his skin gleamed with a light sheen of sweat. Outside, the rain had tapered off, leaving a thick cover of fog over the city.
With every breeze, the house seemed to creak and wheeze. She inhaled deeply, tapping her fingers on her knee.
“Sometimes, I think they’re still here.”
Startled, she glanced over at his side of the bed. He lay on his back, eyes open and watching the ceiling, his hair mussed. “Who?”
“Sirius. Remus. Tonks. My parents,” he said, voice oddly flat.
Something hard knotted in her stomach, catching her off guard. “We’d have seen a hint of them by now,” she said finally. “And ghosts only remain when they’re scared of what’s beyond. Your parents weren’t scared. None of them were scared.”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” he said distantly.
She set her reading aside and crossed the distance between their bodies, hitching her thigh over his hip. “You’re being cryptic, and you know that isn’t a strong suit of yours,” she said, smoothing her hands across his thin t-shirt. “What’s all this about?”
In his muscles she can feel his hesitation, an odd hitch of tension. “I just-I reckoned I saw them, when we came in the house today. Maybe,” he said haltingly, his arm curving over her waist and holding her close.
Watching him carefully, she rested her palm over his heart. Through his shirt, his skin was still cool and paler than usual, his eyes very dark in his face. “You hit your head when you were knocked out. You’re a little out of sorts, it’s all going to be fine,” she said after a moment.
He made a soft sound in the back of his throat, his fingers curling in her upswept hair. “Maybe moving in here was a bad idea.”
“I don’t believe that,” she protested immediately. “This is your house, and you want to live here.”
“It’s ours. Not mine, ours,” he said quietly. She could feel the weariness stealing through him, his muscles relaxing into the mattress.
Her chest constricted with warmth, and she leaned up to kiss his cheek, press her forehead to his damp skin. “Ours, then. And I want to live here too. It’s going to take a little adjusting, that’s all.”
“You reckon?” he mumbled, eyes falling shut.
She stroked his fringe from his forehead and watched as his face slackened with sleep. “Yes,” she whispered softly, mouth close to his temple. In moments, his breathing relaxed and evened out, his body easy as he slept. Under her breath and with a flick of her hand, she extinguished the candles and curled up to him, shutting her eyes. In the cool spring darkness, she held him close, to keep the ghosts at bay.
*
Two days plus the weekend went by, with not a word from Harry concerning their odd conversation the night he came home from St. Mungo’s, or from St. Mungo’s itself concerning the incident. Ginny was nearly ready to brandish her wand and her Bat-Bogey hex; it was inconceivable to her that there wouldn’t be any sort of idea what Harry’d been affected by.
The time he spent rattling away at home was quiet, and somewhat strained. Often, as she worked from the spare bedroom he’d converted into a study for her, she thought she could hear him muttering to himself, pacing the corridors of all the levels of the house. It kept her nerves on edge; she couldn’t escape the feeling that something wasn’t exactly right. But he smiled and joked and they made dinner together each night, as was one of their weekend traditions. He told her embarrassing stories about Ron and Hermione and their adventures in wedding planning; they listened to the Quidditch matches and she didn’t think once about a path not taken, a Quidditch uniform not worn.
Harry went back to work on Monday, still limited to his desk for another few days. They traveled in together, and in a rare moment, he kissed her goodbye in the lift as it halted at Level Two.
“Take it easy today,” she said, quiet despite the fact they were the only ones in the lift.
He ducked his head and kissed her again as the lift doors opened. “I’m fine. Listen, why don’t you pick up Chinese for dinner tonight?”
“I can do that,” she said, her hand catching at his robes. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”
“I really wish you’d all stop asking me that,” he said exasperatedly.
She blinked. “You all? Who else-?”
He backed out of the lift, waving briskly. “See you at home.”
Mouth pursed, she stared at him as the doors closed on his retreating form.
Harry’s full-throated laughter greeted her as she came into the front corridor of Grimmauld Place after a long day. She had tomes of research parchment in her bag weighing her down, and London’s usual deluge of spring rain had begun again, but the sound of Harry laughing like that immediately lifted her spirits. She stripped off her damp cloak, set down her satchel, and moved towards the sound of his voice, bags of Chinese food in her hand. They’d found a tiny little hole in the wall just two blocks down from the house that had the best Chinese food she’d ever tasted (not that she’d had a lot of experience, but Harry and Hermione said it was good, and she believed them). The bags were heavy, smelling sweetly of soy sauce and oil.
“Harry?” she called, moving downstairs into the kitchen. The lights were on, warm yellow slipping through the cracks in the doorframe.
“In here,” he called, the lightness in his voice positively buoyant.
She pushed the door open and found him sitting along in the kitchen, a cup of tea in his hand, smiling widely. His eyes were bright and warm behind his glasses, his face flushed and healthy; it was a complete reversal from the past few days.
“Hi,” she said after a moment, dumbfounded. “What are you doing down here?”
“Waiting for you,” he said, standing and walking over to take the bags of food from her. He kissed her cheek, something bashful and shy in the motion, like they were being watched. It was bizarrely different from the carefully cultivated intimacy they’d managed to balance between themselves in the years since the end of the war, and their slow edging back toward each other.
“Down here?” she asked, still confused.
“Well, yeah,” he said, and his gaze went to an empty chair, a slice of dead air. He lifted his shoulders in a slight shrug, his mouth curving into a sheepish grin, and she grabbed his elbow, an odd sort of panic rising in her throat.
“What are you looking at?”
Startled, he glanced at her. “What?”
“You’re looking at something,” she pressed.
“You’ve been working too much,” he said back, kissing her cheek once more. “Too much time with the paranoid and the wild. C’mon, let’s eat.”
“Down here?” she asked. Usually, they ate in the sitting room upstairs, and listened to the wireless for a Quidditch game. The kitchen was just for cooking and cleaning. They had a formal dining room, but that had only been used once since moving in, for a dinner for Ron, Hermione, George, and her parents.
“Sure, why not?” he said with a grin, moving towards the cabinets and pulling down solid white plates (part of a set they’d received as a housewarming gift from Hermione).
She watched him carefully as he plated their food (beef and broccoli, fried rice, and scallion pancakes) and they sat down to eat, the quiet pressing in on her. Something about him, and the last few days, struck an odd chord with her, unfamiliar and worrisome.
“You’re quiet.”
Glancing up mid-forkful of rice, she met his steady gaze. “Sorry?”
“Don’t be-is everything all right?” he asked.
No, she wanted to say, wanted to jump up and down and try and wrangle out the inner workings of his mind. But she had no proof, nothing tangible to work on; as good as her instincts were in her everyday work, she couldn’t approach Harry with anything but hard facts. “Yes,” she said finally, putting her fork to her mouth. The food was like sand in her mouth.
Later, she dozed lightly in their bed. Their window was pushed open the slightest, allowing for a breeze to carry through the room, sweet and floral in her nose. Soft murmurs echoed from down the corridor; she opened her eyes and watched the candlelight flicker in the faint breeze.
“…He’s so big, now. He runs around and laughs all the time, and he’s so smart. You’d be proud…”
Holding her breath, she curled her fingers into the bedcovers. Harry was animated in speech; from the tone of his voice, she knew he was speaking of Teddy, who’d just turned four.
But who was he talking to?
With a sense of dread rising, she listened to Harry’s soft voice until it lulled her to a disturbed, restless sleep.
*
Ginny left for work before Harry awoke the next morning, chilled down to the bone. The air was thick and damp with lingering rain. She slipped into the office before her other colleagues arrived, halting briefly at the door to the Death Chamber. Usually, she passed it without thought or issue; it had been nothing she hadn’t seen before, and it held no mystery for her any longer. Now, though, with the remnants of lives not lived gnawing at Harry, she wondered.
“In early, Weasley?”
She looked back at Meyers, hands clasped tightly over her satchel straps. “Yes.”
“Take a second look at Trelawney’s prophecy, there might be some meat to it,” he said, turning down towards his office.
“Wait,” she called after him, walking towards him. “Listen--do we have research on potions?”
Meyers grunted. “A little tame for us, don’t you reckon?”
“The Aurors asked me to look into the incident from late last week. They were attacked with exploding potions that left no detectable traces. I wanted to know a good place to start looking,” she said, holding her breath over the slight falsehood. It was a matter of safety, really.
“It’s not really our area, Weasley. I’d check with Misuse, or Magical Catasrophes. Or brush up on your Potions work and head out to Hogwarts.” He walked towards his office, but stopped to face her just outside his doorway. “Don’t let the Aurors boss you about just because your brother and your boyfriend work there, all right? You’ve got work to do other than their errands,” he muttered before going into his office and shutting the door.
She spent half the day at her desk unable to focus on much of anything before the nagging feeling in her gut won her over. On her lunch break, she went to the lift and headed down to Level Two once again.
It was quiet in the Auror offices, a vague sort of hum in the air. Harry, thankfully, was alone in his cubicle, hunched over his desk. Watching him just for a moment, she knocked on the edge of his cubicle wall, a lump forming in her throat.
He sat back and met her eyes, smiling. “Hey. You left early this morning,” he said.
“I had some work to catch up on, I didn’t want to bother you,” she said, slipping inside and pulling out her wand. She cast a quick silencing charm and settled herself on the lip of his desk.
He watched her warily, crossing his arms over his chest. “What’s going on?”
“I could ask you the same question,” she said flatly. “Harry, are you seeing--”
“Don’t,” he interjected fiercely, getting to his feet. “Don’t say anything.”
Her mouth fell open in shock. “Harry--”
“I’m fine--”
She stood as well, tilting her chin up. “You think you’re seeing Sirius, aren’t you?” she asked, voice rising.
“I don’t think anything, I am seeing him,” he retorted. “Him, and Remus, and Tonks--”
“Stop it! Stop,” she said, grabbing the collar of his work robes. “You aren’t, okay? It’s a side effect, a trick--”
“It is not,” he said, voice low and ragged. “I see them, and talk to them--they’re with me.”
“I can’t see them,” she said sharply. “No one else can see them.”
“It’s not a side effect, I feel fine--”
“Please stop,” she said, leaning heavily on the edge of his desk. Her fingers released his robes, her hands falling to her lap. “It’s been too long, Harry. They haven’t been hiding, waiting for the right time to surprise you. They’re gone, and nothing is left of them.”
He flinched, and looked down. She watched him, watched as his whole body tensed, his jaw clenched. The air between them was knotted with the sharp remains of their words. Outside, people walked past without any notice of them. She breathed in, her chest tightening. “I’m sorry,” she said after a horrible, taut moment.
“You’re not,” he said tightly. “I don’t believe it’s a side effect.”
“Harry--”
“It’s the house, Ginny. They were waiting for me to come back to the house,” he said fervently.
For a moment, with him so certain and steady in his mind, she nearly believed him. There was nothing clouding his judgment, nothing hiding behind his eyes; she thought, maybe--and then she shook her head, passing a hand through her hair. “You should go back to St. Mungo’s and be looked over,” she said, pushing away from his desk.
He grasped her elbow, catching her as she moved towards the corridor separating the cubicles. His eyes were intent and resolute. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” he said firmly. “I’m not going.”
“Well, I’m not living with imaginary ghosts,” she retorted, shrugging his grip from her.
“Ginny--”
She reversed the silencing charm and slipped from his cubicle without another word, her heart hammering hard in her chest. It wasn’t until she was alone in the lift on her way back up to the Department of Mysteries that she finally breathed out, blinking back a hot rash of wetness from behind her eyes.
*
The rest of the afternoon was spent exchanging harsh owls and Floos with St. Mungo’s, trying to coax out any new information on Harry’s case. Ginny ended up no closer to a solution than she had been three days ago. The exchange in Harry’s cubicle still fresh and stinging, she lingered in the office long past the usual end of their day before finally being forced home by Meyers, who had been watching her owlishly all day long.
Grimmauld Place was large enough that she did not see Harry when she came home that evening, and she didn’t mind it. She spent the half the night barricaded in her office, pouring over her old Potions textbooks and notes, trying to find anything that would be of help. For the first time in years, she thought of Professor Snape, and wished for some manifestation of his knowledge; he had been cruel, but with a purpose, and he would have known what to do. Even for Harry, he would have helped; Snape knew what it was to be haunted by loved ones lost.
As a memory to the man who had loved his mother even to death, Harry had brought home some of Snape’s books. Most of them had been given to the Hogwarts Library as research tools, but a few he had kept for himself, including a textbook from sixth-year Potions originally belonging to the Half-Blood Prince. Ginny knew the pieces behind the story, but she had never opened the book. She hadn’t had the need, until now.
As it approached midnight, she pulled it off the shelf and onto her desk, thumbing through it gently. The notes in the margins astounded her; Snape had truly found his calling, in terms of Potion-work. As she turned into the chapter concerning draughts, something caught her eye, underneath the recipe for the Draught of Living Death. A hint of hope flickered within her; she marked the page, and tucked the book into her bag.
She crept into bed late, curling up on her side and pressing her cheek into the pillow. Harry slept quietly next to her, his even breathing a comfort to her. In the morning, she woke to find their bedroom empty, and Harry making noise two floors below in the kitchen. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes, slow and tired from her short night, and dressed quickly, ducking out of the house before Harry returned upstairs.
Instead of making her way to her office, she took the lift to Level Two, and searched out Ron.
“Something is wrong,” she said as she stood in Ron’s cubicle, her hands planted on her hips.
Ron glanced up at her. “With what?”
“With Harry. Something is wrong. He’s-Ron, he thinks Sirius, among others, is here,” she said, suddenly very weary. “He’s talking to the air, like people are in the room. And he’s been muttering to himself, and looking off over my shoulders--.”
Abruptly Ron went pale in the face, his eyes wide. “I reckoned-“
“What? What?” she pressed, jaw clenched.
“He said something-I reckoned I heard him wrong. He’d said something about Sirius and Remus yesterday, something about them being there-I was sure I’d heard him wrong,” he said, standing up from his chair and leaning against the lip of his desk.
She smacked his arm, glaring at him. “You didn’t hear him wrong, it’s true. He’s seeing them in the house, or at least he believes he’s seeing them.”
“Isn’t this your department in any case? Weird magic things?” he asked.
“Don’t be a prat, Ron! St. Mungo’s doesn’t have anything to tell me, and this isn’t just Harry wanting them to be alive!” she exclaimed, sitting down in his vacated chair. “I have to know everything that was in that potion.”
“How do you want to find that out? There were no traces left!” Ron protested.
“You caught the bastards. I want to talk to them,” she said firmly, spine stiff and chin tilted up.
Ron’s eyes widened, a sharp scoff pushing out from his throat. “No bloody way. It’s too--”
“If you say dangerous, I will hex you into next week, Ronald,” she said coolly. “I’m an Unspeakable, as hard as that may be for the lot of you to comprehend. I can handle myself.”
“I can’t let you wander into the holding cells, Ginny. There are rules and regulations--”
“And my department doesn’t answer to you,” she retorted. “I’ll get around you, so you may as well help me.”
He huffed impatiently. “They won’t tell you anything.”
She smiled slightly. “Leave that to me. Take me down there.”
“Ginny--”
She brandished her wand and raised her brow. “Now.”
*
Moments later, she found herself in a windowless dim room, watching a squirrely-eyed young man with greasy blonde hair and a scar across his cheek. He was slow to attention, recovering from a long time under a Stunning spell. Behind her, she could almost feel Ron’s nervousness, the thrumming in the air.
“Will you relax?” she asked finally, turning back to look at him.
“I don’t know what you expect to do,” he retorted mulishly.
“What’s his name?” she asked.
Ron frowned. “Henry Nott. He’s Theodore’s younger brother. Three years younger than you.”
Ginny sighed and looked over at Nott, whose eyes slowly cleared of their glazed cloudiness. She didn’t remember him from school, but that didn’t surprise her. “Good morning,” she said evenly.
Nott scowled, thin-lipped and silent. She pulled out her wand and approached him. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said.
“Don’t mind if you do,” he muttered. “Good for the cause.”
A sudden rush of anger flooded her, color flushing her face. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said hotly. “Do you even know what you’re playing at, trying to start all this up again? Don’t you remember what happened before?”
He merely glared at her, gaze very blue, deep-set and offset by the dark circles under his eyes. She shook her head and waved her wand. His arms shot out straight in front of him, palms upturned to the sky. He gritted his teeth, a sharp sound cutting out of his throat.
“There is no cause,” she said as she trailed the tip of her wand over his fingertips and palms. “It’s too bad you’re too daft to realize it.”
“Ginny-“
“Quiet,” she said back to Ron, eyes fixed on Nott’s palms. His skin began to glow in spots of blue, green, brown, and purple.
“What are you doing?” Nott asked sharply.
“I’d like to know that, myself,” Ron murmured.
“I found the Potions text from the Half-Blood Prince,” she said to Ron, mapping the glowing dots of color on Nott’s hands. “There was something about a potion, derived from the Draught of Living Death, with altered affects.” She looked up at Nott, who looked green around the face. “Isn’t that right?”
He scowled and turned his head away from her. Behind her, Ron edged closer. “But that doesn’t explain the spell, and the glowing-“
“I picked it up from a case the Department was handling a while back,” she said, pulling out a blank piece of parchment and pressing Nott’s palms to it firmly. “It’s as if doing a last-spell-performed incantation on a wand, except it works directly on the skin. It’s not perfect, but it helps.”
“What will it do?” Ron asked, interest curling through his voice.
“Tell us what magical elements he’s been working with,” she said with a small smile.
Ron let out a slow breath. “Hermione’ll go nutters over this.”
She pulled the parchment from Nott’s hands. “You can’t tell her, Ron. I shouldn’t have even done this in front of you.”
“Why not?”
“It’s called the Department of Mysteries for a reason,” she said, rolling her eyes. She pulled the parchment from Nott’s palms and rolled it up; it was warm and thrumming to the touch as she pushed it into her satchel.
“It won’t matter,” Nott said abruptly. “Go ahead and try to reckon it out. There’s no antidote.”
She watched him, clenching her jaw. He lifted his chin, dirty-blond fringe falling across his forehead. “We wanted to get Potter. Wanted him to walk through life haunted by his ghosts. He will be, and it’ll make him lose his mind, and there’s nothing you can do.”
Ginny stared at him for a cool moment, the air positively taut with tension between them. Ron touched her elbow then. Heart beating hard, she turned on her heel and walked towards the exit.
“Hey! My arms!”
“You can stay that way for a bit,” she bit out sharply.
“No, he can’t-you’re not supposed to be down here,” Ron said under his breath. “They’ll know if you leave him like that.”
Clenching her hands into fists, she waved her wand behind her, undoing the spell. She heard Ron Stun Nott again, the usual precaution, but she couldn’t hear anything but the roaring in her ears, couldn’t feel anything but the hard cherry pit of frustration and anxiety in her stomach.
In the lift, she turned her face from Ron and shut her eyes against the hot tears, mouth trembling.
“It’s okay, Gin-“
“Don’t-don’t-can we just stand here for a moment? Please?” she asked quietly, her voice cracking at the end.
Ron, for once, let her be.
*
“Now what?” Ron asked as the lift stopped on Level Two.
Collected, she glanced at him. “I’ll look at the parchment, find out some of the potion ingredients, and try to find someone to make an antidote.”
“Nott said-“
“I know what he said. I reckon if Snape knew how to make something similar to this, he’ll have an antidote. His Potions notebooks and texts are at Hogwarts. I’ll start there,” she said as the lift doors opened and they stepped off into the bustling corridor.
Ron clapped a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll go with you. Maybe we can drag Hermione away from her meeting with the Minister-“
“I’ll go.”
Both she and Ron looked off to the left. Harry stood off to the side, looking tired and drawn. “I’ll go,” he repeated, walking towards them.
Ron cleared his throat. “Harry, I-“
“It’s okay,” Harry said quietly but firmly. “I-I saw Fred.”
Around them, the corridor bustled, but she felt entirely alone with Ron and Harry, set apart. A gutted sort of sound echoed out of Ron’s throat. Her entire middle contracted painfully into a sharp inhale.“Harry, you know-“
“I know,” Harry said, cutting her off. “It didn’t… It didn’t feel right. Fred wouldn’t have been scared. He was… well, fearless,” he said, smiling faintly. “And then I thought about it, about Sirius and Remus and Tonks, how they weren’t scared-and none of it felt right anymore.”
His gaze moved past her shoulder. Ron looked behind them, but she didn’t, her eyes still fixed on Harry. “You’re seeing them now, aren’t you?” she said softly.
Harry nodded, brow furrowed. She breathed out slowly, and moved to take his hand in hers. “Okay. Let’s go,” she said gently.
He gripped her hand tightly and nodded again. His gaze went to Ron. “I’m sorry, mate-“
“Shut it,” Ron said, an odd gruffness in his voice. “I’ll cover you, all right?”
Harry nodded. Ginny swallowed hard, and forced a smile. “Let’s go, then,” she said firmly.
*
“For a magical library, it’s quite dusty,” Ginny said wearily as she scanned the shelves of the Restricted Section’s potions aisle. “Has it always been this dusty?”
“What was in the potion, again?” Harry called from two shelves over.
“Wormwood, knotgrass, and asphodel for certain. Maybe lovage as well,” she said, pulling Moste Dangerous and Mind-Affecting Potions from the Middle Ages to Modern Times from the shelf. “It was an odd variation on the Draught of Living Death.”
She blinked against the flickering torch lights as she came out into the front aisle. She could hear students murmuring to each other in the normal portion of the library. Every so often for the last three hours, Madame Pince would come by and check on them; she had given them access to every section of the library without a word needed from Professor McGonagall, although they’d gone to the Headmistress first for security’s sake.
It had been fairly unfruitful; even Snape’s notes weren’t terrifically useful in terms of an antidote. Every so often, Harry would shut his eyes, and she knew he was trying to ignore the hallucinations, the images of the loved ones he’d lost once already. Her eyes burned with fatigue and her head ached; her stomach rumbled for food, a lost cause for the day.
Harry was at her side in a moment, rubbing his eyes behind his glasses. “I’m sorry,” he said for what had to be the tenth time since they’d arrived at Hogwarts via Floo.
“I know,” she said tiredly.
He slipped his hand under her hair, to press at the base of her neck and her shoulder blades. “Not for this-well, yes for this. But for yesterday, in my office.”
Leaning into him, she looked at him. “I didn’t mean to be so harsh,” she said after a moment.
He turned his head to hers, his mouth brushing her temple. For a moment, they stood there in silence, breathing in the musty parchment and dust of their childhoods. She pressed the book to her stomach and shut her eyes, her side flush with his. He was solid and warm next to her, comforting in the middle of this mess.
“Ever since we moved into the house, I’ve been thinking about them all, more than I usually do,” he said after a moment.
“Me too,” she said quietly.
“It hasn’t been sad. I’ll go into a room and remember something Remus and Sirius were bickering over, or a prank you, Fred, and George played on us all. I think about Christmas that one year, spending it with you and Sirius and Ron and Hermione-“
“You acting like a silly prat,” she added.
He smiled against her hair. “Yeah. It’s just the memories of them, they’re so central in the house. So when I saw them, I reckoned-I reckoned it was normal. The natural progression.”
She dragged her fingers along the grimy spine of the book in her hands. “In my work, I’ve been looking at ghosts and the other side,” she said. “It’s been shown that people leave imprints on the places they’ve lived in and loved the most. They’re not ghosts, exactly; it’s-”
“Sort of like Riddle’s diary,” he said.
She sighed. “Sort of. Without the curse part of it.”
“You really do work on the weirdest things up there,” he said, humor faintly coloring his tone.
She shrugged, smiling slightly. “Sometimes, I feel like they’re there,” she said after a moment, tilting her head back and looking at him. “I don’t blame you for feeling how you do, for acting how you did.”
His gaze was very green in the torchlight, steady and intent on her face. “This morning, I saw my parents.”
Something hard knotted at her heart, catching deeply. “Oh, Harry.”
“You thought I was asleep,” he said, looking away. “I woke up, I saw you getting out of bed and leaving the bedroom, and I was so sure you were my mother. My dad was right there next to you, and I couldn’t tell the difference until I saw your face. Then they were in the drawing room, where the picture of the first Order of the Phoenix has been taken. I knew, I knew it wasn’t right.”
Breath caught hard in her throat, she leaned up and kissed his cheek. When he turned his face to hers, she kissed him on the mouth, soft and gentle. “We’ll have our own memories there, soon enough. Stick with me, Potter. We’ve got quite the lives to lead,” she whispered against his mouth, her fingers curling in his robes.
He kissed her back for a long moment, his mouth wet and warm on hers. “I know,” he said, sure and steady.
They parted, moving with their books to the table they’d taken over in the rear of the revising area. With the books open in front of them, they sat at the same side of the table, his hand settled on her thigh lightly. For a moment, she could almost pretend it was five years earlier and they were revising for her O.W.L.s, stealing time whenever they could under the dark cloud of portent approaching.
In the end, it was so easy, they passed it over at first. Then, Harry stilled next to her and began flipping the pages backwards.
“What are you doing?” she said, weary and crabby.
“Living dead,” he murmured.
She shook her head. “We’ve already looked at the Draught of Living Death, it’s not the same thing-“
“No,” he interrupted, stopping and setting his finger in the middle of the right-hand page. “The Living Dead Potion.”
She peered across his arm, skimming the page. “What, here? ‘The Living Dead Potion was used for mental torture and disintegration; it infects the brain and seeps into the victim’s consciousness and gives them hallucinations of the images of dead loved ones. It is brewed in such a way to be rendered tasteless, and can be used in the air as an inhalant, which leaves it undetectable. This potion also works at the brain and, if untreated, will cause dementia and-’”
“A vegetative state,” he finished grimly.
They sat together in silence for a moment, the sounds of the library distant and muted. Outside, the sky was beginning to color orange and blue into dusk. The tips of her fingers were cold, the relief of finding an answer cut with dread.
Finally, she turned her eyes back to the page. “There’s an antidote,” she said quietly. “It takes a week to brew.”
Suddenly, he put a hand to her cheek and brought her face to his, kissing her gently. “We’ll need Hermione for this,” he said against her mouth, the determined resolution in his eyes familiar from those years ago, in the Department of Mysteries, at the Battle of Hogwarts.
She nodded and kissed him again, shutting her eyes. Their clasped hands lay between them, warm and entangled.
*
After berating both Harry and Ginny for a solid ten minutes for not keeping her in the loop, Hermione immediately started collecting the necessary ingredients and brewing the antidote. Ginny and Ron were sent to Diagon Alley for holly bark, dittany, and laurel, and to the grocery for ginger, among other things; after an owl to Neville, mandrake was delivered to Grimmauld Place with expediency.
Ginny, after informing Meyers of the situation, was forced to write up a report (“It’s absolutely rare to have this kind of potion used and see it work effectively, it’s part of your job, Weasley”), leaving out the minor details that could get Ron in trouble. The same report was filed for the Aurors, to give them evidence for prosecution for the culprits. As for Harry, he was limited to the house and work. In the week or so it took, he remained on limited duty and at his desk. He functioned normally at the office, but at home he was distracted and spent most of his time with Hermione, or Ginny when she was home.
“It’s as if they know I’m getting rid of them,” he said to Ginny one night as they ate chocolate biscuits and had tea in their favorite sitting room, the wireless quiet in the background. Hermione had gone home; the antidote was to be ready tomorrow morning.
Ginny lay next to him on the plush red sofa, her shoulder pressed to his. “You’re not getting rid of them,” she said firmly. “They aren’t real to begin with.”
He rubbed his forehead, huffing sharply. “I know.”
She sat up and put the box of biscuits on the coffee table before sliding into his lap. Slipping an arm around his neck, she kissed his cheek. “Any chance I could distract you?” she teased, her mouth very close to his skin. He smelled fresh and clean and grassy.
His hands curled over her waist, slipping under the hem of her worn t-shirt. “It’s possible,” he said softly, a flush rising on his skin.
There, on the sofa in the room where he had slept night after night while on the run, she peeled his clothes from him and mapped the familiar lines of his body. She lingered over the scars that remained from years before, the shiny lines on the back of his hand that matched the scars she now bore from a year under the Carrows. His hands were insistent and needy, fingers digging into her hips, her thighs. In the flickering candlelight, with the wireless floating in and out of focus, she couldn’t help but feel like this was some sort of last, a kind of goodbye.
After, when they’d laughed and picked up their strewn-about clothes and settled into bed, she lay awake long after he fell asleep. On her side, her back to him, she looked out into the starry night (the first night free of clouds and rain in a week), and swallowed down her fear, just as she had all her life. After her first year, Ginny Weasley refused to cry in front of anyone else; the only time she had broken her own vow was when Hagrid had brought Harry’s body out of the woods. Now, she felt like she was waiting at the steps of Hogwarts all over, holding her breath and pressing down tears.
Behind her, the bed shifted. Her gaze focused on the hardwood floor, watching a slim shaft of moonlight curve over the whorls and curls in the wood. Harry’s arm settled over her waist, his bare skin cool against hers. His mouth pressed to the back of her shoulder, his nose near her hair; by his even breathing, she reckoned he was asleep. She shut her eyes and curled into him, letting his breathing soothe her into an uneasy sleep.
*
Harry was all set up in bed when Hermione came in with the potion. In the late morning sun, the potion was a thick viscous green, the color of grass.
“Is this going to be worse than Polyjuice Potion?” he asked warily, sitting up against the headboard and looking down into the pewter mug. Steam curled in front of his face, edging his glasses.
Ginny smiled slightly, sitting Indian-style on her side of the bed as she watched him. Hermione wrinkled her nose. “Judging on how it smelled while brewing, most likely,” she said.
He rolled his eyes, sighing as he glanced over at Ginny. “I want to-“
“Do it when you wake up,” she said, fear catching every word in her throat.
Hesitating for a moment, he nodded. His gaze went to just beyond Hermione, his face creasing sadly; Ginny had to look away for a moment, an odd burning behind her eyes. He then shut his eyes, and gulped down the potion in two long swallows. Instantly, he fell back against the pillows, the pewter cup clattering to the floor; unconscious, he lay as still as death, his head lolling to one side.
“I wasn’t certain how quickly it would work,” Hermione said as she and Ginny adjusted him into a more comfortable position. “I reckon I have my answer. You’re staying with him?”
Ginny nodded, unable to speak against the lump in her throat. Hermione leaned over and hugged her tightly, pressed cheek to cheek. “It’ll be all right,” she said softly next to Ginny’s ear. “Owl Ron and me the moment he wakes up.”
She left her then, leaving Ginny alone in a sunny bedroom in an empty house, with only Harry’s prone form for company.
The hours dragged on, Ginny’s nerves rising with every chime of the clock. She only left the bedroom to make tea that she didn’t end up drinking, cups and cups going cold on her night table. She opened the windows for a breeze, thankful for sun. The sounds of the streets distracted her, cars and busses rolling past, snippets of conversation floating up. With every hour, she found it just a little harder to breathe.
By the early evening, with the sky deepening to a rosy purple, she lay stretched out along the length of his body, her cheek pressed to his shoulder. He was cool where she was too hot. She lay her hand in his and shut her eyes. “Please wake up,” she whispered into the floral air.
At one point, she must have drifted into sleep. She woke with a start when his chest rose and fell in quick shallow bursts, his fingers curling into hers. Sitting up, she held her breath as he opened his eyes and exhaled hard, the color returning to his face. His eyes found her face, focused and deeply green behind his glasses.
“How long was I out?” he murmured, voice thick with sleep.
“All day,” she said, touching his chest, trying not to cry. “Are you all right?”
He looked around the room and sat up with a groan. “Reckon so.”
“You don’t see anything?” she asked, half wanting to jump on him and kiss him breathless, half wanting to rush him to St. Mungo’s (a lot of good that did him last time).
In the dim light, he took a moment to look around before shaking his head. “No. Nothing.”
Smiling, she leaned over and kissed him, gripping his hand tightly in hers. “Okay. Okay,” she murmured against his mouth.
His other hand came up to touch her hair, her cheek. “Ginny-“
“Wait, I have to go owl Ron and Hermione, I promised,” she said, kissing him once more before sliding off of the bed.
“Ginny, wait-“
“I’ll just be a moment-“
“Marry me.”
At the door to their bedroom, she halted and turned to stare at him. “What?”
He sat up against the headboard, smiling slightly. The candle light lay sharp shadows across his face. “Marry me.”
She passed a hand through her hair, taking a step towards him. “Are you joking?”
“No. Marry me,” he said firmly.
Rolling her eyes, she waved a hand at him. “You’re under the influence, you’ve just woken up-“
Her words died on her tongue as he opens the drawer to his night table and pulls out a ring, shining silver and glinting off the candle light. “You said we’ve got to make our own memories in this house. I want to start right,” he said fervently.
Slowly, she came back to sit next to him on the bed. He pressed the ring into her hand, and she looked down at it, holding her breath for an entirely new reason. It was a silver band with a three stone setting, an emerald and two diamonds on its side. It was simple, petite, and perfect.
“What do you say?” he asked, his hands covering hers. His fingers trembled faintly, even as his voice was steady.
Warmth bubbled up through her middle and up to her chest, expanding her whole heart. She looked up and smiled at him. “You would propose after a near-death experience,” she said after a moment.
His mouth twitched, his brow furrowed. “No time like the present. Is that a yes?”
Nodding she leaned into kiss him. Together, they fumbled to slip the ring onto her finger. She couldn’t stop kissing him, couldn’t let go of him. He pulled her into his lap, his hands hot on her back and waist.
“I really do have to owl Hermione and Ron, now,” she said into his mouth, his fingers running a trail under her t-shirt and across her skin.
“In a minute,” he said back, mouth opening under hers.
She shut her eyes and smiled. A cool light breeze curled through the room, and they both breathed easily, looking into the future.
*.