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The End of Fear | ||||
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Category: Alternate Universe Characters:None Genres: None Warnings: None Story is Complete Rating: PG-13 Reviews: 9 Summary: Sometimes, late at night, when she lies safely in her dormitory bed, she allows herself to think not of Dean or her friends or her brothers or her schoolwork or the war that's slowly destroying the Wizarding world, but of Harry, and if things could have been different. In five different worlds that could have been but weren't, there are five different ways Harry and Ginny could be Harry and Ginny. Circumstances change, but they always find each other in the end. Hitcount: Story Total: 4184 Disclaimer: Harry Potter Publishing Rights © J.K.R. Note the opinions in this story are my own and in no way represent the owners of this site. This story subject to copyright law under transformative use. No compensation is made for this work. Author's Notes: Title and lyrics from "Let Love In" by the Goo Goo Dolls. |
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You're the only one I ever believed in, The answer that could never be found, The moment you decided to let love in. i. You wait, wanting this world/ To let you in./ And you stand there,/ A frozen light,/ In dark and empty streets His kisses are dark and heavy and needy, and every time he presses his mouth to hers, she feels as if he's searching for something. Sometimes, she thinks she knows him better than anyone. Sometimes, she thinks no one can ever know him, not even her, not when he refuses to let anyone in. She hates him for that. And she loves him despite it. Harry Potter is the typical Slytherin: he cannot be deigned to talk to anyone who isn't in Slytherin, he acts superior to everyone around him, and he does nothing when one of his cronies, usually Malfoy, mocks and abuses anyone who crosses his path. But Ginny knows there is more to the story. He presents a cold, careless demeanour to the world, and it's his apathy that hurts Ginny the most. She knows Hermione despises him, and a part of Ginny does, too. She despises how he stands by and does nothing when Malfoy mocks and ridicules Ron and Hermione and Neville and anyone who he takes for inferior. There's a goodness within him, she knows. When she starts to forget, she remembers her eleven-year-old self tearfully blinking up to see Harry's sweaty, bloody face looming over hers, checking anxiously to see if she was alive. When she starts to forget, she remembers the shock that flooded her system when she was brought with her brothers to Dumbledore's office in the middle of the night and found that a pale, sweaty Harry was in the room, apparently the one who had sounded the alarm. She never fully fathoms how it happens. She finds him in the library one day, and she tries to talk to him. He brushes her off coldly, as he does most people, but when she demands his attention, she finds herself on a ledge, and there's a voice in her head warning her that if she takes another step forward she'll fall and she can't ever take it back. His eyes meet hers across the table, and Ginny knows what she's always suspected: there is so much more to the story that is Harry Potter's life. She takes the step off the ledge. His kisses are addictive. He meets her in corridors when no one is around, and when they're not by themselves, she feels his burning gaze on her. They don't talk much, really, but he makes her feel so alive and he treats her as if she's more than somebody's baby girl or younger sister or simply a stupid little girl, and that means the world to her. And then he starts to talk. He talks about his awful aunt and uncle. He talks about how Dumbledore is simultaneously reaching out to him and pushing him away. He talks about how he first met Malfoy when the other boy walked into his compartment on the train at the start of first year and their fate seemed sealed. He starts to talk, and she feels as if she's the first person who really knows Harry. But their relationship is a secret, and she hates that. Their kisses taste of forbidden fruit and it's a kind of cruelty the way he so casually ignores her when others are present. It drives her to near insanity. She wants to tell everyone. He adamantly protests the very idea, and when she finally says she'll make him choose between keeping the secret and keeping her, he coldly replies that he'll keep the secret. She wonders if she ever knew Harry at all. Maybe she was a fool to get involved with him. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe Hermione and Ron and everyone else were right. She's hurt. She says she wants nothing to do with him. The year ends and summer begins, and she doesn't see head nor tail of him. He approaches her the first evening back, and in front of all their friends, he snogs her, his hands holding her face firmly, his mouth hot and insistent on hers. And she knows that this is goodbye. This is his gift to her, his sign that she's always been right about him: beneath the layers of condescending eyes and blithe attitude and unpleasantly cold and blank expressions, Harry Potter is a broken, scared boy who still knows how to fall in love. The next day, he disappears from school with Draco Malfoy. She starts dating Dean Thomas. He's sweet. Kissing Dean, though, makes her realise that Harry was searching for salvation when he kissed her. He was kissing her in hopes that it could save him. And she's pretty sure it failed. Sometimes, late at night, when she lies safely in her dormitory bed, she allows herself to think not of Dean or her friends or her brothers or her schoolwork or the war that's slowly destroying the wizarding world, but of Harry, and if things could have been different. She never sees him again. ii. You smile, hiding behind/ A God-given face,/ But I know you're so much more./ Everything they ignore/ Is all that I need to see It's easy. It's fun. It's the way teenage love is supposed to be. She kisses Harry and he tastes like Treacle Tart and Butterbeer, and his hands, the very ones that clutched the Snitch a few minutes ago and won Gryffindor the match, twirl through her hair as he laughs into her lips. She kind of adores him, and it makes her feel silly to acknowledge the giddy, heady feeling he inspires in her, but she wouldn't trade it – or him – for anything. Ginny loves all the Potters. Mr. Potter is much like Ginny's own father. He lets his children get away with most anything, spoiling them to his heart's content. He loves Quidditch, and his face lights up like a little kid when Ginny starts to talk about it. Mrs. Potter is full of so much life and energy and creativity, of ideas to repaint her kitchen with speckled paint and to take up knitting for fun and to try experiments with baking until there's flour all over every single speck of the counter and every single member of her family. She only laughs until she cries. Eleanor Potter is one of Ginny's closest friends despite being a year younger than Ginny, so full of mischievous schemes and toothy grins and loud laughter. The youngest Potter child, sweet little Charlotte, was only six when a twelve year old Ginny met her for the first time. The little girl liked to run around wearing a tutu all day and singing silly songs, gleeful when her father decided to join in. No matter how old Charlotte grows, that's how Ginny will always remember her. And then there's Harry. For a long time, Ginny considers Harry another brother. He's friends with Ron, after all, and he's Ellie's brother, and the way they all spend their afternoons and weekends and summers together, it seems as if the Potter family are another branch on the Weasley's family tree. It doesn't change when Harry takes her to the Yule Ball, despite what a good time they have. It doesn't change when Harry and Ginny start spending time together as friends away from Ellie and Ron and Hermione. It doesn't change when they're on the Quidditch team together. It doesn't change until Harry asks out Cho Chang. It's then that Ginny realises, quite clearly, that Harry is not her brother. She has to make sure he knows that. When Harry and Cho are on rocky ground, Ginny takes her chance. She corners Harry after the last DA meeting before Winter break. "I just want to try something," she says. She kisses him. He grins when she steps away, breathless, her heart pounding against her chest so loudly she can barely hear her own jumbled thoughts. "Try some more," he says, and he pulls her back to him. They become an established couple quickly, and even with the war slowly looming closer and closer, even with the darkness that passes over Harry's face when he talks about his parents deciding to join the Order of the Phoenix again, they are happy. She loves him. He's such a dolt sometimes, and he is not the most social boy or interested in much outside of Quidditch and her, but she doesn't require much more. He's a Gryffindor through and through, despite whether or not he's had the chance to prove it, and she loves him. That's it. Their love is the way it's supposed to be, and Ginny takes a kind of satisfaction in knowing people are envious of them. She still laughs at how she had once been so enamoured with Neville Longbottom. Neville might be the Boy-Who-Lived, but Harry is the only boy for Ginny. iii. I wish,/ Wishing for you to find your way./ And I'll hold on for all you need,/ That's all we need to say They share one kiss. It's her first. It's his first, too. She suspects it's also his last. She clasps his shoulders tightly in her hands, afraid to lose him, and his grip on her arms is painful. The feeling of his lips moving uncertainly beneath hers is one that seems permanently impressed upon her, and she knows that he's trying to impress the moment on himself, too. When Cedric Diggory's body is found in a Muggle graveyard a few days after that disastrous final challenge, the wizarding world goes into a tumult. Finally there is a clue as to what had happened to the two missing champions, and everyone has a theory. Dumbledore says Voldemort has returned, and he is immediately ridiculed as an ageing, paranoid man. But Ginny's parents believe him, and Ginny does, too. Everyone waits for someone to find Harry's body. Nobody ever does. Most of the world believes Harry Potter is dead anyway. Ginny doesn't. She refuses. She knows Ron and Hermione wouldn't even entertain the idea. But there are few who agreed. Harry walked into a maze and never walked out. Days pass into weeks that become months that suddenly emerge as a year. Life goes on. Dean Thomas asks her out. She says no. It changes the last Hogsmeade visit before Winter break of her fifth year. She sets off after a morning with her brothers, who are selling their products on the streets in an attempt to make enough money to buy a shop, to meet with her friends. She is taken too quickly for her even to scream. She is sure death will follow just as quickly. She sits in a dark room, a cold concrete ground beneath her, and she wishes she were brave enough not to cry. Then the door opens and she looks up and feels her heart stop. It's Harry. He's alive. His hair is so long it nearly brushes his shoulders, he has a long scar running from his disfigured right ear across his check, under his nose and twisting the left side of his mouth into a kind of permanent frown, and when he reaches a hand out to her, she sees that two of his fingers are missing, leaving behind only scarred stubs. He leads her out of the dark, dank room and down dark, dank halls, and she can hear people talking nearby, but he makes it clear with a dark green glare that she's to make not a single sound, especially not to ask anything. When he pulls her up out of sewer drain and into a back alley of what she suspects is a Muggle city, she finally demands answers of him. "I heard them saying it would be fitting punishment for blood traitors," he says, his voice strangely raspy, and her eyes flicker to the scar on his throat, "to kill their only daughter in seven generations. I knew they meant you. I couldn't just leave you there." She tries to ask more, to ask where he's been for the last year and a half and what happened and why he hasn't come back to Hogwarts and if anyone knows he's alive, but he refuses to explain anything. "Take the Knight Bus back to the Leaky Cauldron and from there you can reach your parents," he says. He tries to leave. She won't let him. She grabs his arm, and for a moment he looks as if he's going to hit her. But he doesn't. "Aren't you going to come back with me?" His blank expression is her answer. "Why not?" she demands. "I have things to do," he tells her curtly. At her imploring face, he adds, a kind of terrifying gleam in his eyes, "You hear a lot when people think they've beaten you unconscious, and I heard what has to be done to defeat him. I'm going to do it." She doesn't ask who him is. She knows. But why can't he get help from Ron and Hermione and Dumbledore and the Order? He says nothing. He doesn't seem like the Harry she remembers. That's probably because he isn't that Harry anymore. She was never scared of that Harry. She hates that she's scared of him now. He's like a shadow now. And she's not about to abandon him. She tells him if he won't come with her, she'll go with him. He steps so close to her that she feels her breath come short, and that's when he explains that she has to leave or he'll kill her, because he can barely resist the Imperius Curse Bellatrix Lestrange has on him as it is, and he won't be able to stop himself from hurting her much longer. She sees the truth on his face, and beneath it she sees that somewhere the Harry that she once knew, that played Quidditch and was friends with Ron and Hermione and had only one scar, still exists. And before she knows what she's doing, she's kissing him. It's not a kiss that speaks of a future, of dates and flirting and marriage and children and a lifetime of kisses. It's not a promise or a wish or a long-awaited moment. It's a desperate mash of him against her, of the two of them so terrified of what happens next because they're just kids and it isn't fair, and, God, she could really love him. "The diary," he whispers into her lips, "Tom Riddle's diary. There are other things out there like it. I have to find them. I have to destroy them." "But –" "Ginny," he whispers, her name a broken prayer. He Apparates. She's alone. She's in a daze as the next few days pass. She tells her story so many times the words barely mean anything, she tells her parents and Neville and Dumbledore and Ron and Hermione and . . . and all she can think of is the broken yet fiery, resigned yet determined look on Harry's face when he left her. Ron and Hermione disappear to find him. They return three months later. They didn't find him. Two years after he saved her life, Ginny receives a package. Inside is a cracked ring, a broken locket, a chipped cup, a rusted tiara, a slab of some sort of snake skin, and a note. Give these to Dumbledore. Tell him I'll take care of the seventh one, too. It's Harry's handwriting. She doesn't know what to do. She wishes there was more, but she supposes this little clue that he is alive is enough. And are these objects . . . ? She shivers at the thought. She gives the package to Dumbledore. Three weeks later, the old Headmaster defeats Voldemort. Eight days later, they finally find Harry's body. iv. I'll take my chances while/ You take your time with/ This game you play./ But I can't control your soul./ You need to let me know:/ You leaving or you gonna stay? He kisses her for the first time with her back against the wall of the Muggle movie theatre, and he tastes like too salty popcorn and a world where she doesn't belong but finds herself trapped in, and he's the one thing about it that's good. He pulls away grinning. Before she can do mare than take a gasping breath, he captures her lips again. He invites her into his world, and she forces her world on him. She never forgives herself for that. Her mother sends her to the middle of nowhere. The war has reached a new height of terrible, and Ginny fights her hardest not to be shipped off for her own protection, but she loses her strength when Ron goes missing. Iowa is as boring as Ginny suspected it would be. The summer is hot and sticky there, and Ginny imagines that living with her mother's Squib cousin's widowed niece is slowly chipping away at her soul. It changes when she meets Natalie, because the small, flighty blonde Muggle takes her to a field party on the outskirts of town, and it's there that Ginny meets Harry Evans. He sits on the back of a truck drinking cheap Muggle beer and watching over the crowd like a king watching over his castle. There's something familiar about him, about the dark hair that sticks up in the back and the round glasses, but she can't pinpoint it. She's drawn to him, and before she knows what's happening, he's asking her out and she's saying yes and he's taking her to a Muggle movie and he's kissing her like his life depends on it. A war is consuming England, but Ginny's life as the weeks past consists of Harry and his friends, of going to parties with them and of movie theatres with popcorn she grows to love and of skinny dipping in a lake as she has nothing to lose and of groping in the back seat of Harry's car because he makes her feel something she's never felt before. It's a kind of normal life she's never known, a kind of life she never thought she would possess. There's something off about Harry, something off about the way she still doesn't know where he lives, something off about the way he disappears for a few days at a time and never explains it, something off about the look in his eyes when she vaguely parries questions about her family or past or the reason she came to Iowa. But she grows attached to him anyway, to his crooked smile and his quiet confidence and the way he banters with her. The beginning of the end comes when she finally asks outright where he lives and why she still doesn't know, and he evades the question. She does the natural thing: she asks Natalie. The blonde seems surprised that Ginny doesn't know after so many months, but she takes Ginny to the pub, and she tells her that Harry's uncle owns it, and Harry lives above it with him. She knows which man is supposedly Harry's uncle. She sees him at the bar, laughing with an older woman as he pours her beer, and Ginny recognises his picture. Horror floods her. This man might be known to Iowa as Harry's uncle, but he's not. He's Sirius Black, the man who betrayed the Potters and led to their death and disappeared that same night, taking innocent baby Harry with him. She, like everyone else, knows the bedtime story of Harry Potter, the boy who defeated Voldemort as a baby and saved the world, only to disappear into thin air. But apparently he didn't disappear into thin air; he disappeared to Iowa. She wonders what Harry knows, if he knows any semblance of the truth. She rushes from the pub before anyone can see her, she writes her father and tells him that Harry Potter is alive and under the control of Sirius Black in Iowa, and she waits on the front steps of her house for Harry to pick her up. They have a date that night. She knows they won't make it to dinner. When he steps out of his car, she can see that he knows that she knows, and it's all growing so confusing. He knows that she knows something, but what does he think she knows? What does he know? He explains that Sirius saw her, that he realised she must be the girl from Britain Harry was dating, and that he had told Harry. "How much do you know?" Harry asks her warily. "I know everything," Ginny tells him. His expression goes kind of sour. "I kind of doubt that." "You're a wizard," she says. "You're a witch," he replies. "I know that – that Sirius – that he isn't your uncle." She tries to speak carefully, because what if this is something he doesn't know and doesn't want to know? "His name is Sirius Black, and he's a Death Eater –" "No," he interrupts, his face strange. It takes her a moment to realise she's never seen him angry before. "You don't know everything. Sirius is the only family I have. He saved my life!" "Harry, I don't know what he's told you, but he betrayed your parents – " "Peter Pettigrew betrayed my parents!" They stare at one another, and she doesn't know what to say or think or feel. "I can't believe this," she finally says. "You're alive. You're Harry Potter, and you're alive." "No," he says, "I'm Harry Evans." His lip curls. "I thought I loved you. I thought you loved me. But you didn't, did you? I've never been anything other than Harry Potter to you, have I? You knew all along." She starts to protest. How could he think that? But he won't listen. He tries to turn back to his car. She reaches forward to stop him, but he pulls his arm out her grasp in an instant. "Don't touch me," he says. She understands. He knows that he's the Boy-Who-Lived, and whether or not he's right about Sirius, he knows that he doesn't want the life that the Boy-Who-Lived would live. He doesn't want to be Harry Potter. She doesn't sleep much that night. She decides she's going to talk it all through with Harry and convince him to return to England with her, and he doesn't have to fight, but England is where he belongs. She can't believe any of this. He might have grown up as Harry Evans, but he's still Harry Potter, whether he wants to be or not. And she loves him either way. She bikes to the pub first thing that morning. There's a crowd surrounding it, and it looks destroyed, and alarm starts pulsing through her as she tries to find out what happened. The Red and Gold Tavern was burnt to the ground the night before, she learns, and the proof is before her. And then Muggle policemen bring out Sirius and Harry's bodies. They're dead. Ginny retches onto the side of the road until she feels as if she doesn't have any insides left. She goes back to England against her mother's wishes. She learns her father never got her letter. It was intercepted. The war goes on. She never goes back to Iowa. Her worst nightmares are the ones that start with her shoulder blades pressed to the cold brick of a movie theatre and end with the knowledge that when she fell in love with him, she killed the boy named Harry Evans. v. There's nothing we can do about/ The things we have to do without./ The only way to feel again/ Is let love in She kisses his lips softly, chastely, and when she pulls away, he smiles at her, his eyes unseeing, and she wishes she knew what he's remembering that's so much better than the real world. He's in St. Mungo's for months before Ginny's mother finally convinces the Healers to let Harry live at the Burrow. She can take plenty good care of him, she says, and it'll be better for him to be with family. She knows her mum is barely keeping it together in the face of Fred's death – they're all barely keeping it together – and maybe taking care of Harry is as good for her as it is heartbreaking. Ginny still has trouble fathoming that he did it, really did it, really defeated Voldemort. And she has even more trouble fathoming that it took all of him. It's months before Hermione gives in and leaves Harry long enough to go fetch her parents from Australia, and Ginny knows that it's killing both Hermione and Ron to see Harry like this. It's killing her, too. The rest of the world slowly moves on as the months pass. People bury their dead and the injured recover and Hogwarts reopens and life goes on. But Ginny, and Ron and Hermione, too, live in a kind of limbo, waiting for Harry to snap out it. A part of Ginny starts to think he never will. Most of the wizarding world agrees. But she brutally suppresses that part, because she waited for him – she waited for them – and it's not fair to think that the only time she and Harry will have together is that time in her fifth year, those few brief, sunny, perfect days before the real world tore them apart. She helps her mother tend to him, and he seems to enjoy her company, to enjoy it when she reads books aloud, and he doesn't start eating until she starts, and even if he never talks, she sometimes thinks (imagines, wishes, hopes) that he's listening to what's being said around him. She goes off to Hogwarts for her seventh year with a heavy heart, and it all seems so wrong. When she returns for breaks, Harry is unchanged. When she comes home for the summer, a year after the final battle, as a Hogwarts graduate, it's like she never left. Harry and her mother have something of a routine, and it makes Ginny's heart hurt just to see. This can't possible be Harry's life. It can't. But it is. The day Voldemort's spell backfired and hit himself was the day Harry, for all intents and purposes, lost his mind. He collapsed the moment Voldemort's wand flew into his hand, and when they revived him at St. Mungo's, he wasn't the same. Sometimes, Ginny tries to remember that last moment when Harry was Harry, that moment when she saw the fierce, certain expression on his face as he and Voldemort faced off, and the memory always makes it worse to see Harry blankly eating his Treacle Tart and holding the yarn as Ginny's mum knits and sitting outside quietly watching the gnomes. The Healers can't explain it. They say that he's drawn into himself, but they offer no reason why. Hermione and Ron try everything they can to pull him out of it, but they're as unsuccessful as the Healers. Ginny simply spends a second summer with him, hoping that somehow he'll wake up one morning as Harry again. He begins to like her company, she thinks, and he smiles at her sometimes, and he likes holding her hand. She gives him chaste kisses and falls asleep at night imaging she's fifteen and the late Spring sun is beating down on her as he laughs into her mouth and kisses her like it's his most favourite thing to do. She puts off a future, a career, because she can't stand to leave him, and she helps her mother take care of him, and it's like caring for a helpless little boy. It's Neville who convinces her that she needs to get out and away for just a little while. She refuses at first, and he finally tells her it's not as if Harry will miss her. Ginny is unbelievably hurt by that, but it's the truth, and that's what makes it all the worse. She reluctantly agrees to go with Neville, Luna, and a handful of other old DA members to visit Hannah Abbott's uncle in Germany. She's only gone six days. When she returns, Harry rushes her. He swoops her up into his grasp, and she realises he's crying, and she doesn't know what to say or do. "You left," he says, and it's the first thing he's said in years. "You left me. You left me. I'm sorry I left you. You left. You left me. I'm sorry. Don't leave me. Don't leave me. Don't leave me." "No," she whispers, stroking his hair. "No, I won't. I'm here, Harry. Always. It's me and you, Harry, whether we like it or not. No matter what. It's me and you, Harry," she repeats. "Always." He clutches her, and she knows she'll keep waiting for him to get better, even if he never does. "Always," she promises. "Always." Fin. Now I'm banging on the door of an angel. The end of fear is where we begin, The moment we decided to let love in. |
| Reviews 9 |
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