Disclaimer-I don't own Harry Potter, nor any characters
Hey guys. If you're reading my time travel story, I should be putting one up this week, after I post a one-shot for PJO shipweeks. Apparently the Philosopher's Stone came out seventeen years ago on the 26th, so I decided to write something for it. Unfortunately, I couldn't get it done in a day, so here it is.
It was a dreary day in London. The fog had settled low that morning, so when one looked up, it seemed a blanket of white blocked out the light about twenty feet above the ground. It felt like being inside, cramped and pressed in, but much rainier. Yet, even with the bad weather, the sidewalks of the illustrious muggle city were still packed with pedestrians, determined tourists, and children coming home from school, their heavy backpacks dripping wet from the ever steady drizzle of light rain that dripped from the low-lying clouds.
Along with the children and the tourists were the working class, dressed in everything from the practical coveralls of plumbers and construction workers to the prim and proper suits and dresses of the office dwellers, and most importantly, one Ginny Potter.
Ginny, leaving her job at the Daily Prophet where she reviewed Quidditch matches for the sports page, was still stuck in the world of broomsticks and quaffles, the stats for her favorite sport swimming around her head and eyesight in her tired haze. This had also bestowed her with a deep, pounding headache that led to her occasionally stopping to rub her temples with her fingertips.
She was, of course, a powerful witch, and could probably Apparate home to her pleasant cottage in Godric's Hollow if she wished. But her headache and spinning stomach made her unsure of her skills, and landing in the middle of a strange street in the middle of London, or her own hometown in that matter, splinched and bleeding didn't sound like a good time to her.
Sighing, she continued on, cursing the high heels that she was required to wear for work, and, mostly, the fact that she had to wear a dress. It wasn't like anyone ever saw her, holed up in her personal cubicle, typing so fast her fingers ached when she was done. Not to mention the amount of makeup that was "workplace appropriate" was ridiculous. Ginny wore less makeup to go out to dinner with Harry, on one of the few times they could get Hermione and Ron to watch the children.
So, after a rather stressful day, a headache, and a lunch that wasn't sitting particularly well in her stomach, it was reasonable that when it began to pour, Ginny cursed aloud. She wasn't alone, however, even the multitude of school children swore, a few of them more colorfully than most of the adults would have dared.
About to cast a drying spell, Ginny swore again when she realized she couldn't do it in front of the countless muggles on the street with her. Trying to shield her face from the onslaught of water, she spied an alcove and open door. Ducking through, she found herself in a room full of books.
A breathless man pushed her further into the room, and she stumbled a bit before catching herself on a table of travel pamphlets. He gave a breathy laugh as he apologized.
"Good thing we're in Waterstones, huh? At least we can read while we wait out the rain." In a much better mood than she, he moved further into the shop, still chattering happily as if she had followed. With a short groan, Ginny brushed a lock of hair out her face, and realized it was coated in wet makeup. Luckily, the bookshop wasn't very full yet, and she might be able to find a secluded corner to perform a drying spell.
She walked further into the store, noticing that many other people looking for shelter from the weather had gone this way as well, judging by the water on the floor. Ginny stepped into a room with a- what were they called again? Yes, cash register-next to a window, which showed the few brave souls that dared to bend against the harsh wind and the painful pinpricks of rain to continue on their journey.
A woman at the register smiled tiredly at her, clearly having dealt with all of the other rain-soaked workers, as she was attempting to wipe up the water that had fallen on her counter.
"Hello, ma'am. Escaping from the rain?" She sighed afterward, almost confirming Ginny's suspicion that she had said this too many times today already.
"Yes, I am. Do you have a bathroom?"
The woman nodded. "Up the stairs, past the café, first door on your left."
"Thank you," Ginny smiled gratefully. As an afterthought, in case inevitably she had to walk to the Leaky Cauldron, she said, "Oh, and what street is this?"
"Gower, dear."
"Thank you," smiling again, Ginny turned to go up the dark wood steps, rubbing her head again as the ache increased sharply. Her feet weren't helping, slipping around in her shoes from the rain as she traipsed up the stairs.
The café was small, and other rain-sodden commuters were enjoying hot chocolate, which Ginny wouldn't have objected to if she had actually had any muggle money. At least, she didn't think she did. The last time she had used any was when she and Harry had decided to try going on a date "muggle style," which had ended up as a long trip to the wrong side of town on a dirty subway.
The bathroom was blissfully empty, surprisingly devoid of any other women dashing inside to fix their makeup. Mirrors gleamed in the spotlights that shined from the ceiling, and Ginny caught her reflection in the far one as she passed by. Pausing to wince at her disheveled reflection, all black mascara streaming down her cheeks and blurry eyeshadow, foundation coming off in crusty pieces as she traced her fingers over face, she opened one of the bathroom stalls.
It was cramped, a low toilet whose seat brushed against the fleshy skin just under her knees, a toilet paper roll, and a trash can, but it would do. Ears straining for potential eavesdroppers, she retrieved her wand from her bag, setting the leather tote down on the tile floor to block as many venues of noticing her wand work as possible.
Pulling out said wand, she squinted hard as she tried to focus on the spell she wished to cast. Her headache didn't help a bit, and once again she wished she could Apparate-or call the Knight Bus even, but she didn't want to risk it on her lurching stomach.
A wave of her wand, and she felt the odd clumps of displaced makeup on her face disappear, and her heavy mop of wet hair become lighter and settle gently on her shoulders. The leather soles of her heels firmed and the toes on her feet no longer felt wrinkled.
Happier, and much less dryer, Ginny left the bathroom with a hint of a smile on her face, even though her eyes stood out less and her lips looked smaller without her typical workday makeup, but after a childhood of Quidditch, brothers, and being too busy to pick up a mascara tube, she could do without.
Unfortunately, as she maneuvered past the other workers taking shelter in the café, she noticed that heavy rain still pelted the window panes in a sickening rhythm of water against glass. With a heavy sigh, she sat down at one of the small tables that populated the room.
Bored, and lacking a-telephone? No, weren't they called smartphones?-smartphone, seemingly unlike the rest of the workers in the bookshop, who stared at the small screens with single-minded focus. Sighing, Ginny ran a hand through her blissfully dried hair and leaned back in the hard wooden chair, closing her eyes for a bit in the hopes that the rain would cease so she could continue home. Her stomach felt better, but her headache persisted and she had determined that it still wasn't safe enough to Apparate home. She could try the Knight Bus, but she couldn't remember how much the fare cost and she only had a few knuts at the bottom of her bag. She had used the rest of her change on her lunch break earlier that day.
"'Scuse me, is this seat taken?"
Ginny jerked in her spot, wincing as the sharp edge of the chair grazed her back. A woman stood in front of her, hair hidden under a deep red hijab, the color of expensive lipstick. Her hazel colored eyes had wrinkles at the edges from her cheery demeanor, and her mouth was lifted up in a pleasant smile. She wore a black pantsuit, small white pinstripes snaking down her arms in equal intervals.
"Oh, no." Flustered, she shook her head a bit. "I'm sorry, I'll move, I'm not buying anything anyway."
"No!" the woman smiled, holding a hand out as if she wanted to grab Ginny's arm to keep her from leaving. "No, it's fine. I'll just…" she turned to look around the crowded café, frowning as she noticed that there weren't any open tables. "Oh, someone took the table I was going to use."
"You can sit here," Ginny offered. "It's really fine." She turned to get up again, reaching behind her to grab her bag.
"It's okay, we'll just share," the woman said, offering a hand to shake. "I'm Aida."
Ginny accepted, shaking the girl's hand. "Ginny. Nice to meet you."
"You as well," Aida replied. Both of the women sat down, smiling awkwardly at each other. Ginny felt like it was her first day of Hogwarts again, waiting around for someone to introduce themselves past their name.
"You're in because of the rain, yeah?" Aida continued.
"Yeah. I'm walking home from an office near Trafalgar," Ginny replied.
"Oh, you must've had a long walk," Aida said sympathetically. "Where do you work?"
"Small newspaper," Ginny said, thinking on the spot. "Not very well-known. You?"
"Hospital down the street." Aida pointed the opposite way Ginny had come from. "Not very far away. I just got off, and walked outside to see that it was pouring."
They sat in an awkward silence again. Ginny wished she could break it, but she didn't know enough about muggles to carry on a typical café conversation. Oh, if only she had taken muggle studies in school.
Staring down at the wooden table and absentmindedly tracing the grain of the polished wood with a plain fingernail, she pretended not to notice Aida's quiet shifting of the things in her bag, pulling out something with gold on the cover and fingering through a few pages of the book. Glancing upward, Ginny struggled to make out the title, as it was positioned so the front of the book faced the table.
"What are you reading?" she asked, with casual indifference.
"Oh, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone!" Aida replied with an easy smile. I haven't read it since I was a little kid, and it's nearly the anniversary of the book." She looked back down at the page, seemingly unaware of Ginny's shocked expression.
Ginny, whoever, was having a silent panic attack, managing to contain the full-out scream she wanted to release into an uncomfortable twitch in her index finger under the table, tapping out an erratic beat on her thigh.
It couldn't be. Not possible. How would a muggle know about Harry? The exploits he had gone on during his school years were kept from even his aunt and uncle, though they had spread far around the Wizarding world. The Philosophers Stone had been a first year adventure, and had only been told to Dumbledore, not even the students knew about that one.
"Did you say Harry Potter?" Ginny surprised herself with her calm tone, with slight casualty still lingering in her tone.
"Yeah," Aida replied. "Don't tell me you haven't read it. Everyone's read it. I even waited for a Hogwarts letter when I was eleven!"
Yes, Ginny thought. So did I. But I got one. She struggled to keep a blank expression as she answered the excited woman.
"No, no I haven't read it."
Aida shrugged. "Surprising, especially since there's a character with the same name as you. And you look like her too! She's one of my favorites, plus she ends up with Harry." The last sentence was said with a sort of reverence, as if she had spent a lot of time hoping for just that. It made Ginny uncomfortable to know that it wasn't even just the Wizarding world who wished they knew more of her personal life, but muggles now too. Not to mention, this book had to be breaking the Statute of Secrecy.
"Is it very popular?" she asked, hoping desperately that Aida was just the type of person to go into secondhand bookshops and buy obscure titles for the fun of it.
"You're kidding me!" Aida exclaimed, staring at Ginny wide-eyed. Slowly, Ginny shook her head, eyebrows furrowed in confusion. "Oh my God. You're not." She shook her head, chuckling a little. "Right, Harry Potter's got seven books, eight movies, a ton of theme parks, a bunch of spin-off textbooks, one of which is becoming a movie, and a prequel play that'll be happening at the West End. The author's the only person to ever become a billionaire from writing. It's not possible that you haven't heard of it."
By the end of this, Ginny's mouth hung open, surprised and utterly dismayed at the span of the book series. How had the Ministry missed this huge breach? Looking at the way Aida's eyes lit up when she talked about it, how she had grown up with this story, it almost made her sad to think that the Ministry was going to have to shut it down. But still, the reach of this story was insurmountable. How had every wizard, even the muggle-borns, have missed it?
Rubbing her temples as her headache spiked again, she sighed. How was she going to fix this? "Wow, that's… That's pretty amazing."
"I know, right? You have to read it. They've got copies here, of course. Probably upstairs in the children's section, but everyone reads them, not just kids. Oh, this is so exciting! I've never actually introduced anyone to Harry Potter, they all already know about it!" Aida's grin was wider and her voice steadily growing more excited as she spoke. "You should check! Go on, the paperbacks can't be more than nine or ten pounds anyway." Her eagerness was at least a bit contagious, and through her shock and confusion, Ginny managed to stand up and stumble a bit in her heels as she headed for the elevator, visible across the café. She remembered vaguely what an elevator did from one of Harry's stories that getting one stuck up on the roof with accidental magic, and was relieved when she saw only a few buttons and a guide to the building inside the sliding metal doors. Luckily, one was labeled three, and according to the sign tacked into the wall, that was where the children's section was. Gratefully, she pressed the button.
It occurred to her that buying the book and bringing it to the Ministry, or at least showing it to someone once the goddamn rain let up and she could get to the Leaky Cauldron, would be a very good idea. Perhaps they could figure out how the biggest breach of the Statute of Secrecy had gone unnoticed in a worldwide community.
Aida had seemed content with letting Ginny discover the supposedly fictitious magic on her own, and she was almost grateful for it, as her head was steadily becoming more and more painful as she felt the elevator move. Honestly, she didn't know what was wrong with her. She usually never got sick like us, even after a hard day of work.
It wasn't until she had stepped onto the green carpet of the third floor when she remembered that she had no muggle money. Ginny decided that at least she would get a good look at the book so she could tell someone about it when she got back to the Wizarding world.
It was in the children's sections, and the cover was full of bright colors and a whimsical illustration of Harry standing in front of the Hogwarts Express. She opened the cover to read the flap, which told of an eleven year old boy who lived under the staircase-Ginny gritted her teeth as she read this. Dursleys. Her contempt was matched only by Harry, who was too kind of a person to show it.-who was visited by a certain hairy wizard and told blatantly that he was a wizard. She almost stifled a laugh as she read this, trying to ignore the growing knot in her stomach from realizing the incredible detail of the story. It seemed such a Hagrid thing to do. Flipping through the book, she noticed that it also included his thoughts, which had to be impossible. The Harry she knew was a private person, and she could barely get him to talk about feelings, let alone the author… J. K. Rowling, who, judging by the author's note on the back cover, he had never met.
Ginny nearly dropped the book as her headache pounded in her ears. She could feel veins pop out on her forehead, and the splitting pain drowned out any other sounds. What was going on? Was this a migraine? But she had never gotten migraines before, and weren't they supposed to be a slow, long ache and not sharp pinpricks of pain?
Blinking black spots out of her eyes and desperately wishing for an ice pack, Ginny stepped uneasily back toward the elevator, where she had also seen another cash register, hoping to at least get some help. Her fingers clutched at the book, her panicked mind remembering that she at least had to . She tried to take another step, but her knee gave out under her, and she crashed to the carpeted floor with an oomph. Staring up at the ceiling, the world seemed to swim, and she had a dim feeling that she was going to be unconscious soon.
It was forgotten as the world turned black.
"Ginny? Ginny, are you waking up?" Harry's voice pierced through her slumber, seeming to hit a stitch in her head as her headache came to the front of her mind again.
"Wouldn't answer if I wasn't," she managed sleepily, eyelids half closed.
"Only you would be sarcastic after waking up from being unconscious," Harry replied, half amused and half worried.
"Mmmhmm." She had wanted to tell him something, she remembered. It was important, and it definitely had something directly to do with him. The book! That book, in the Waterstones, with his name on it, that told stories of a magic castle and a little boy who lived under a staircase with his muggle aunt and uncle.
"Harry!" she gasped. He turned around, emerald eyes wide, uneven black bangs flicked to the side by his movement so his lightning shaped scar showed. "Harry! There was this book! And it had your name on it! And-" She noticed his confusion and his disbelief. "I'm not kidding! There was! In the Waterstones!"
"The Waterstones?" Harry asked incredulously. "The bookshop? Where did you find out about that?"
"I was walking home from work, and it started to rain," Ginny said, feeling rather silly at his tone.
He blinked, watching her, eyebrows furrowed. "Erm, I don't know what that's about, but we've been in a drought for the whole summer, and it's your week off. And you don't walk home from work. James," he sighed again, rubbing his forehead. "James accidentally charmed his broom so that it went warp speed, remember? He hit you in the head. You're okay, we talked to the Mungo's people and they gave me a spell to use. But I don't know about this book stuff. Sounds awful."
The memories flooded back into her brain at full color, particularly James's foot coming at her face, blurred by speed and smacking her in the forehead before she could react. And sure enough, as she rubbed the spot on her temple, she felt a twinge of pain, and her headache began to steadily reappear.
"Oh," she said, nodding. Harry's shoulders dropped in relief. "Oh. You have no idea, Harry. I've just had the strangest dream."