He Nearly Killed the Cat
The Last Beginning
By Anne B. Walsh
Author Notes:
I disclaim the section from Harry's POV in the center of the chapter. It is quoted from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
The cottage, most unusually, was quiet.
Possibly because all the people who like to be noisy have realized I'm in an unusually foul mood today and taken themselves elsewhere…
John didn't normally like his bad temper inconveniencing his family, but today was an exception. The moon cycle of their domain might skip the one night which affected him the worst, but removing two or more days from the normal progression would have taken exponentially more power, so he had to suffer through the usual building up of tension, along with the letdown afterwards.
And it's almost worse not to transform—not that I miss the pain, especially since I'd be going through it untamed, but it leaves me feeling… empty. At loose ends. Like a piece of myself is missing, and even if it's a nasty piece that I don't particularly like, it's part of me and I've spent my life learning to cope with it. So now that it's gone…
Of course, the nastiness and disliking aside, he could say the same about a certain person.
"For this reason," he quoted softly, "a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh."
One flesh, one heart, one soul. Not complete unity, not perfect agreement—wouldn't that be boring after a while!—but wholeness. The feeling of having found my other half, that this is how it was always meant to be.
But when someone tears the halves apart…
He closed his eyes, feeling the ring he had formed from flames grow warm against his chest. "Soon," he murmured. "Soon. When the time is right."
When everyone is ready. When all the lessons are learned. When we think we won't fail miserably.
All I can say is, it had better be soon, for my sanity if nothing else!
His sense of humor thus reasserting itself, he chuckled, opened his eyes, and got to his feet from where he had been sitting in front of the fireplace, the roaring flames both comfort and necessity in the domain's current wintry state. If the only limiting factor was the readiness of the rest of their Legendbreaking team, it would serve his turn better to be working on training exercises with the most newly arrived members, rather than sitting around and feeling sorry for himself.
Or, if I still don't trust myself around other people, I could always do some theory work. Nodding to himself, John crossed the room to the series of bookshelves and selected one of the volumes, an enormously thick hardcover with an exploding bank vault on the front. Let's see here, chapter thirty-four, I think Pearl said?
He flipped pages until he found the spot his niece had been referencing, then grinned. Yes, this should do nicely as a contact point for a certain feline. And if we're lucky, my lady will feel the ripples in the fabric of the world and meet us there…
"All right, go through it with me just one more time." Captain brushed his hand back and forth against one of the stone merlons forming the crenellation in which he sat. "I think I'm getting it, but I'm not quite there yet."
"Start at the beginning." Meghan perched sideways in the next crenellation over, one foot up and the other swinging free. "When you remember being the other you."
"The other me." Captain smiled ruefully. "Not exactly the world's most thrilling person, is he? But there's something there. The seeds of a new him are starting to sprout." He looked up, eyes dark with worry. "I hope that wasn't just because I was along for the ride."
"I don't think so." Meghan shook her head. "He started to change in the last part of the ridge as well. You were just seeing the beginning of that. But you might have speeded it up a little." She beamed at him. "Now go on."
"Starwing—or her counterpart, the person she is in the ridge—she pulled me aside on the train. Said she had something to show me, and I looked out the window and saw…" Captain reached out to capture one of Meghan's hands. "I saw you. He saw you too, my host did, my counterpart, and that's what started the splitting of the world, isn't it?"
Meghan nodded. "You knew me," she said. "He didn't. And you wanted to go to me, and he wanted to stay where he was. So when Starwing asked the question, that forced the two of you apart."
"And forced there to be two worlds, because one person can't say both things at once in the same world." Captain slid a broad finger of his own between two of Meghan's daintier ones. "But the worlds never got any more different than that, because in the moment after they split apart, you reached in and pulled me through your Threshold to Outer Time, and Fox grabbed up Starwing the same way…"
"And then we merged the two worlds back together again, because only the people who were meant to be in that world in the first place were still there." Meghan squeezed Captain's finger with hers. "A forced split and merge—and a neat one, Neenie says, no loose ends or untidiness about it." She preened for a moment, then sobered. "I just hope we can do that well the next time." A small gulp. "I hope I can do that well."
"It is going to have to be you, isn't it?" Captain leaned over the merlon to cup his other hand around her face. "Everyone else's counterpart is either there that night or is already dead in the ridge at that point. I suppose your mum could go…"
"Mum wouldn't fit the lines I found, though." Meghan leaned into her love's caress. "It says 'a girl', and that means younger than… than the one we're after. So yes, I think it does have to be me." She smiled a little. "You'd almost think the Chronicler wanted us to do this, with a hint like that written right into the ridge!"
"Who knows?" Captain looked up into the clear blueness of the sky above their neighbors' domain. "Maybe she does."
Harry swung the Cloak back over himself and walked on. Someone else was moving not far away, stooping over another prone figure on the ground. He was feet away from her when he realized it was Ginny.
He stopped in his tracks. She was crouching over a girl who was whispering for her mother.
"It's all right," Ginny was saying. "It's okay. We're going to get you inside."
"But I want to go home," whispered the girl. "I don't want to fight anymore!"
"I know," said Ginny, and her voice broke. "It's going to be all right."
Ripples of cold undulated over Harry's skin. He wanted to shout out to the night, he wanted Ginny to know that he was there, he wanted her to know where he was going. He wanted to be stopped, to be dragged back, to be sent back home…
But he was home. Hogwarts was the first and best home he had known. He and Voldemort and Snape, the abandoned boys, had all found home here…
Ginny was kneeling beside the injured girl now, holding her hand. With a huge effort Harry forced himself on. He thought he saw Ginny look around as he passed, and wondered whether she had sensed someone walking nearby, but he did not speak, and he did not look back.
"Need some help here?" A witch a little younger than Ginny's mother, with brown, smoke-stained curls and a worried face, dropped to one knee on the other side of the injured girl. "Where does it hurt, love?"
"But…" the girl began with wide eyes, but stopped short as the witch shook her head. "It's my knee. I think I wrenched it, and then I fell and jarred everything." She drew her robes aside to reveal the afflicted part, and the witch touched the swelling gently, her hands creamy pale against the girl's darker skin. "If you could just help me—" She broke off in a gasp of pain as two fingers pressed down at a particular spot.
"Sorry, but I had to check that." The witch sighed. "The good news is, you're not too badly hurt, and any decent Healer should be able to put it right in a flash, but the bad news is, most of the Healers will be busy with bigger problems tonight. You may have to wait quite a while."
"I can wait." The girl smiled shyly. "I had good teachers."
Ginny sat back on her heels, her mind churning. Something about this night, the people in front of her, the feeling she'd had a few moments before that she wasn't alone, felt wrong and right at the same time. She wanted the rightness of it, but she feared the wrongness, feared it with a strength she didn't fully understand. It was as if this girl, with her bright gray eyes and the lines of pain grooved into her face, and this woman, with the untamable hair which put Ginny in mind of Hermione now that she had a better look at it, meant laughter and joy on the one hand, and terror and pain, or worse still, the blankness of unmaking, on the other…
"Help me get her inside?" the witch asked, breaking into Ginny's reverie. "We can talk once we're there."
"All right." Ginny slipped an arm under the girl's shoulders, and the witch did the same from the other side. Together, they lifted her and supported her towards the castle, finding a small corner of the Great Hall which was still unoccupied and claiming it for their own. In the better light of the floating candles, the girl proved to be about Ginny's own age, a few years older than she had assumed.
But assumed isn't the right word. More like expected. Only, how could I have expected anything from someone I've never met? I don't even know her name…
"I'm Ginny Weasley," she said when they were settled. "If you didn't know."
"I think I could have worked it out now that I can see you properly," the witch said as the girl drew her wand and began to wave it tentatively around her injured knee. "You favor your brothers a good bit." She held out a hand. "I wish condolences weren't such a meaningless thing on a night like this, but you have mine anyway."
"Thank you." Ginny accepted the hand, letting one shuddering wave of grief for Fred roll over her. "Why do people have to fight?" she burst out, keeping her voice low with tremendous effort, her sorrow and pain fueling an intense anger. "Why do people have to fight about the stupidest things in the world? Why do people have to bleed, and hurt, and die? What good does any of it do?"
"I could give you all kinds of well-reasoned, scholarly answers, but that's not what you want. You want an answer that will make it make sense in your heart, and I don't have one." The witch pressed Ginny's hand briefly. "I can only tell you that your brother was a grown man, he knew what he was doing, and he thought this cause was worth risking his life. And if we win—"
"When," the girl corrected without looking up from her self-healing.
"I beg your pardon." The witch inclined her upper body in the girl's direction. "When we win, a lot of people will be free to live long and happy lives, who wouldn't have been if we'd lost. But you know that already, and it doesn't do anything to help you tonight, because not all the winning in the world will bring your brother back to you."
Ginny laughed under her breath, staving off her tears by the action. "You don't just look like Hermione," she said. "You think like her too. Do you know her? Hermione Granger?"
"Do you think I know her?" the witch countered. "Look carefully, Ginny. Look at both of us. Tell me what you see. Don't pause, don't think. Just speak out."
"You're wrong," Ginny said immediately, pointing at the girl. "You're the wrong age. You're too old, older than me, almost, and that's not right. You should be…" She trailed off, threads of memory beginning to weave themselves together inside her mind. "You're the little sister. You always hated being younger, younger even than me and Luna, and you were always asking your mum and dad, and…and your other mum and dad?" She blinked at the older witch, who was smiling and nodding in encouragement. "You were always asking them if you couldn't use an Aging Potion, and they were always saying no. Because it would only change your body, it wouldn't change your mind, and you really weren't the same age as…as…"
"As who?" The girl slid her wand away and curled her legs under her, both of them moving equally well now. "Whose little sister am I, Ginny?"
"You sensed him outside," the witch put in. "You knew he was there, even though he didn't speak to you. You know what he's going to do, and you hate him and love him equally for it, because it's a very heroic thing to do, but you don't see how it will make any real difference."
"How do you know all this?" Ginny felt her breath coming short, and couldn't have said for the life of her if she were more afraid of the girl and the woman sitting in front of her or the firestorm building inside her mind. "We've never met—"
"Haven't we?" The witch held out her left hand, palm up, slightly cupped, and twirled her wand three times within the space of air her fingers defined. A picture formed within it, as though it were a crystal ball, a picture of a compartment on the Hogwarts Express, filled with laughing students and one older witch and wizard, the witch who sat in front of her now and…
"Yes," Ginny murmured, peering into the depths of the picture. "Yes. Professor Lupin. You, and he—" She broke off, recalling what she had seen already tonight. "But he and Tonks—and they're—"
The witch bowed her head. "Some things cannot be changed," she said softly. "All honor to them, for their valiant fight. But tell me this, Ginny. Are you beginning to remember a time, a world, a life that your mind tells you is impossible?"
"How do I answer that without sounding mad?" Ginny let her fingers hover above the floating picture. "I think I am. But is it real, or am I just imagining it because it looks so much nicer than what I have?"
"Are we real?" the girl asked, laying her hand on Ginny's arm. "Are we real, and really here, and asking you to remember us?"
"If you're not, I'm having one incredible dream." Ginny looked from girl to woman. "Just tell me this. Is Harry going to die out there?"
"Swear that you will tell no one the answer," the witch said sharply. "You could change things for the worst, start this whole cycle over again, if you do. Swear, now."
"On my life, and my hope of seeing him again." Ginny pressed a hand momentarily to her heart. "And going with him to…to wherever my brother went. After the fight outside the Room of Requirement." She looked hard at the girl. "You remember."
The girl bounced in place, grinning. "Yes, I do," she said. "And so do you. Danger, you hear? You hear that?"
"Hush, Pearl." Danger vanished her crystal-ball picture with a flick of her fingers and laid that hand firmly atop a braided head. "Don't get too excited. We're a long way from being finished yet." She turned her attention back to Ginny. "As for your question—he will appear to. In some respects, he will. And you will have to give the impression that you fully believe he has. But in the end, no. Harry Potter will not die tonight." She smiled. "By being willing to die, by going to what he thinks is his death for the sake of others, he will sever Voldemort's link to him, he will destroy the hold that evil has over him. Because evil cannot understand love, and 'greater love hath no man than this'."
"And then it will be over." Ginny shut her eyes, weak with a relief she hadn't known she could feel. "Then it will finally be over."
"Then this part of it will be over," Danger corrected. "The next part will just be beginning. And a lot of that, Ginny, is up to you. You're the one Harry will trust, the one he'll listen to, the one he'll want to see after it's over and he's had time to rest and think a little. So you're the one who's going to have to make our case for us. Always assuming we're what you want."
Ginny sat still and quiet, letting the memories which were being released by Danger's and Pearl's words seep into place in her mind. The fight outside the Room of Requirement, especially, was coming clear to her, and the choice she had made there, to sacrifice herself so that her friends could get her brother away to safety.
It was the same choice Fred made tonight. The same one Harry's going out there to make. And it's hard to sit here and think about it in cold blood, but when the decision comes, when the moment happens, there isn't even really a choice. Not if you love the people enough.
I loved them enough then. I don't think anything's changed.
Though it might be harder in the long run to live with them than to die for them!
"I can't think of much I've wanted more," she said, opening her eyes. "But I'm afraid I don't quite understand. We can't go back to the world we came from, can we? Not with everything we've seen and done."
"We don't have to." Pearl cupped her hands as Danger had earlier, and between them grew a vision of a snow-covered cottage. "We have a different place to belong now, and different jobs to do, stopping what happened to us from happening to other people who just want to live their own lives and make their own decisions…"
One slightly jumbled explanation of Legendbreaking later, Ginny had an idea. She wasn't sure if it was the best one available, but it was hers, and she wasn't about to second-guess herself.
Besides, if Harry's like me, the self that came from the world with Danger and Meghan and everyone else—the Pack and Pride world, I guess—is enough like the self that lives in this world that they'll be sort of…blended. She probed gently at the inside of her own mind. There should be at least three of me in here, but I only feel like one person. A few different memories here and there, but nothing that really changed who I am. I know I did feel different, back in the first world I was in, before I knew Redwing was there with me, but the lines blurred between then and getting taken by the RC's again, and now…
Now I'm just me, Ginny Weasley. I love my family and doing Charms and playing Quidditch, I hate pureblood bigots and rude people and Brussels sprouts, and I want to spend the rest of my life with Harry Potter, fighting against evil.
No matter where that means I have to go.
"I think I might be able to get Harry's Pack memories to wake up, the way you woke me," she said when Pearl was done talking. "Not by telling him things, but by asking him a question. One I don't think anyone ever asked him before. Especially not in this world."
"That sounds like a very good idea." Danger looked around as the noise at the front of the Great Hall began to increase. "And I think you should be up there, not back here with anonymous members of the crowd." She winked. "Take care of yourself, and we'll see you tomorrow."
"See you then." Ginny started to get up, then stopped. "Danger, how did you know all of this? You haven't been out of this world with Harry since they left you here, you said so yourself…"
Danger's smile was sad. "One of the double-edged swords of not existing in the ridge," she said. "They had no one to rehabilitate me to, so they had to leave all my memories as they were. And a certain link of mine reawakened, at least in its receiving capability, almost as soon as its other half was freed. There have been times it was far more of a burden than a pleasure, knowing what they were doing and not being able to be with them. But as you said yourself, tomorrow it will all be over." She put her arm around Pearl and kissed the top of her Pack-daughter's head. "One way or the other."
Ginny displayed crossed fingers, smiled at her love's little sister and his foster mother, and turned to go to her own family. She would miss them intensely if this worked out, but it was the way of life for children to grow up and leave their parents, for sisters to be parted from their brothers.
And if I become a Legendbreaker, I can stop families from having no choice about being torn apart. I can make sure fewer parents have to cry because their children died before they did, and fewer sisters have to pick up their wands or their swords or their guns and seek justice for the death of their brothers.
All that, and I still get the boy I want, and his big crazy family.
Plus one brother of my own, but hey, nothing's perfect.
The thought counterbalanced the inevitable tears which came to her eyes as she fought her way to her mother's side. "I love you, Mummy," she whispered when she was there. "I love you so much."
Treasuring the last hugs she would ever receive from her family, Ginny Weasley mourned with them, and prepared herself mentally for the fight of her life.
Author Notes:
What can I say? It comes when it comes, and sometimes I can make it come, but sometimes it runs away and hides and stomps its feet and shouts "No!" a lot…
If it's any consolation, I have been writing. Not in any universe any of you have seen yet, but I have. My latest work is sci-fi rather than fantasy, an exploration of gender roles, what it means to be human, and all that good stuff. It's called "Killdeer," and if all goes well, it will be a large part of the personal anthology that I plan to release through Amazon as soon as it's done.
Also, I've had some success at contacting people who may be able to help me get A Widow in Waiting published, so good news on that front. Stay tuned both here and at the Facebook page if you want to know more. More fanfic, and original fic, coming as quickly as my mind, fingers, and voice can produce it!
Also also, happy Administrative Professionals Day to all my fellow AA's out there! If you're happy in your job, please, hang in there—everybody knows who really runs things, after all! If not… hey, look at me. Dreams really can come true, if you're willing to pay the price…