Disclaimer: All things Harry Potter are not mine.
My first story! Read and enjoy! It is AU, Voldemort was not defeated at the Battle of Hogwarts. After the battle the Ministry entered into a military state, and a truly desperate war began. The loved ones of important war figures were placed in Ministry safe houses for their protection, and one of them goes on to write a letter to anyone who will listen...
Dear Friend,
Firstly, I would like you to know that I don't really have much of a story to tell. I have no story of my own. The one that I was once a part of was going to be beautiful, and proud, and heroic, but stories can so easily be changed forever with only a few simple words and the wave of a wand. I am unsure whether I was every really a part of that story to begin with, though. Even back then, when everyone in the country knew my name, I was safely tucked away from the action, writing and dreaming just as I am now.
You see, I am nothing more than a lump on a couch, hidden in the countryside, reading old letters. That's all I am. I was more once, of course, I had more. But one tends to lose things they don't appreciate, and the world I used to live in was too fabricated, too romanticized, and too disgustingly fake for me to appreciate, for me to even realize, what I really had. I had a family, and dear friends, and a boyfriend who all loved me, and I loved them. I was too consumed by that, that love. I hardly saw them, hardly spoke to them, and while they were away I dreamed them into a lovely existence far from spell-fire and death. I was too blinded by all the beauty I cloaked under mighty worlds like glory, honor, and hero to see that their true existence was spell-fire and death. I never saw them all suffocating beneath the weight of a losing war, I saw only Sunday morning cinnamon rolls and long letters full of sweet, empty sentences.
That was life at Ministry Safe House #6.
After the Battle of Hogwarts, the Ministry finally prepared for war. Students fell into the role of soldier instead of sitting for their NEWTs, the auror corps began training new recruits en masse, and the dusty, bloody rubble that was once Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry remained a dusty, bloody relic in the Scottish hillsides, forgotten by both the papers and the people mere days after its fall. The Prophet announced it "temporarily closed," and "reconstruction would begin at a later date." I suppose the date still isn't late enough.
These days it's hard not to think about the battle, and the months leading up to it, and how I never believed that war was actually coming despite all of the worried looks Harry, Ron, and Hermione would constantly exchange, and the first years crying over the morning paper. The Prophet started reporting all sorts of murders and tortures and whole towns burning and people going missing. Curfew got earlier and our heads of house checked on us every night. The paper stopped coming. They told us to run, and we ran as far and as fast as we could. All I wanted was to do was get far enough away where I couldn't hear or smell or see anything anymore. I can't remember when I stopped checking over my shoulder to make sure my friends were still there. I can't remember stopping caring, but it must have happened. It's hard to forget when the wards went down and the floo system crashed and portkeys wouldn't work, but somehow I managed to forget it.
I blocked that day out. My family lived, and my friends lived, and Harry lived, and I lived. There was no reason for me to dwell there, on the burning castle lawns. There was no good there, nothing worth recalling over bread at the dinner table or on the hammock by the pond. For years, it was no more prominent in my memories than opening presents on my seventh birthday (I think my aunt gave me a stuffed rabbit, I can't be sure). But after Harry died, the crackle of fire in the Great Hall and the crumble of stone walls rumble in the background of all of my daydreams and nightmares. Like I could recognize— am finally able to recognize— that day as the end of everything real, and the beginning of a world entirely my own. Now, Every moment of every day I just want to close my eyes and sleep, and know that when I wake up, I will be in my dorm under my fluffy down comforter surrounded by red velvet hangings. But every morning I wake up and remember that that room is now in ruins and I will never wake up there again, and when I walk down the stairs to get breakfast, Harry will never be waiting for me.
It was always Harry, though. Even now that he's gone, whenever I do anything at all I think of him. Each morning from the top of the stairs in #6, I look for him still.
No matter what happened, he was my hero. I told him that, every day, every minute, whenever merited it—whenever I actually saw him, anyway. He was a hero, but no matter what anyone said, he never believed it. Nearly everyone else did, though. Harry Potter and hero were synonymous to wizarding Britain, and I was so proud to call that hero mine. He belonged to the country, but more importantly, he belonged to me. I was the hero's girl and I was on top of the world— the military uniforms, the meetings, the cameras flashing, the glory and the glamour of wartime wizarding society attempting to go on like normal. I was with him, and even when I was able to leave the safe house I was blind to all the misery surrounding me. If something went wrong I never saw it. If Harry was hurt I never saw the blood. There were other people to handle those things. I wish I had been one of those people. I wish I knew what had been happening.
I wish someone had told me that heroes don't always come back home.
The Prophet always wrote about heroes and their triumphs to the point where they all seemed invincible, the bravest men and women among us, unconquerable. I read about ceremonies far more than I read about battles, and I took that to mean that the battles weren't so bad. People tend to do that, change things in their heads to be something better. War is a lot prettier in the pages of a novel than from a trench, and the human mind is a powerful thing—I think I could have even made the real war pretty if I wanted to. After all, I'm excellent at imagining. But, I think that maybe the Ministry truly believed that the war was pretty. In Harry's mind it wasn't. In my mind it wasn't anything at all. Despite everything I was told and everything I believed for a long time, I finally came to realize that war is bloody and lonely and no one belongs there. There is no honor in a Victory Ball. There is no glory in a battle won and an army and a half destroyed.
The war to me wasn't black and red and gray. I didn't see the untreatable wounds, the burning houses, or the scars and hasty battlefield stitches. While the British countryside went up in flames and smoke and screams, I sat in a ministry safe house with steaming meals and fresh sheets. While Voldemort terrorized the people the Ministry stood strong, and if you were connected to someone important, things went on without pain. In fact, they went on better than ever, since the Ministry was trying to present itself as unbeatable, unfazed, and empowered. I went to balls in fancy gowns and had my hair done and danced with Harry. I clapped when they gave him trophies, I adjusted the pins on his uniform, I drank champagne. I was sheltered and in love with a man who would do anything to keep me that way. I was living in a complete delusion. My soldier looked handsome in his uniform. My soldier brought me to glitzy balls and gave me glitzy earrings. My soldier was an everyday hero just doing his job and then kissing me goodnight. Maybe if someone had told me during that fancy Ministry ball that three days ago my soldier boyfriend was in a trauma induced semi-coma instead of trying to protect me from the truth of war, things would have been different. I would have been more prepared.
You can't find any family; you can only lose it. I wish someone had told be that in the beginning.
In Ministry Safe House #6, I lived with the families and loved ones of a lot of important war figures, and overtime we grew to call each other family. We were all unbelievable lucky for a time, seeing as everyone we cared about who was out there waving their wands in battle were lucky enough to survive, we were able to believe in some sort of safety and permanence. We were tricked, or rather we were fools, of course. In hindsight our little sterilized world was almost inhumane in its censorship. The only newspapers we ever received were directly related to those who had placed us there— and only the good news, battles won, death eaters securely imprisoned, you know, the glorious stuff. The building itself wasn't indicative of any national state of panic. The walls were freshly painted a smooth, non-threatening shade of off-white, the couches were an assortment of mismatched floral, and the kitchen appliances were outdated, but #6 was cleaner and friendlier than one would expect it to be, given the circumstances. Ministry workers came and delivered us bags of food every Friday, it was mostly canned and frozen, but we had hot meals, and around Christmastime a man brought us a muggle television set, and in the afternoon I could always hear cartoons from anywhere in the house. But best of all, Harry would write, and he would visit every once in a while.
In late June he showed up just after lunch, his smile ear to ear; he twirled me around and kissed me and everyone aww'd and got starry eyed. He wore jeans and a gray t-shirt, and I was taken back to old summers at the Burrow in the backyard playing quidditch with my brothers. When I looked at him sitting on our ugly floral couch eating diced pineapple and cherries from a tin can with a plastic fork, I did not see a soldier. In his smile and old worn-out t-shirt I had begged him to replace countless times I could see only backyard summer nights. I could feel his arm around my shoulders, his lips on my cheek, and mum's scratchy puce green blanket on my lap. I could smell the campfire smoke in the air and in my hair and on my sweatshirt, and hear the music from mum's radio drifting outside from the open kitchen window. And I wanted nothing more than for it all to be real. I think somewhere deep inside I knew that it wasn't, and that it never would be ever again. But that vision, it pushed aside burning houses and screaming and crying. There was never any contest, of course the vision won out. It filled me up with fireflies and warm butterbeer and smiling kisses and it told me that all the blood and scars were just a dream. It was a reality far more beautiful than my own, and it transcended all my fears. On an ugly floral couch, but on the grass under the stars again.
Harry was there, and he was smiling at me, and his eyes didn't look like death but like resilient life. It was only too easy to stay that girl forever, and to see Harry as that same boy with messy hair and quidditch-calloused hands. We talked for hours and he never once mentioned the war and I never once thought to ask, instead we joked and laughed and named Ron and Hermione's future children. When I looked into his green eyes I never thought of the things they had seen, I just thought of how lovely my daughter would look with those eyes. He was so normal, we were so normal, everything was so perfectly normal.
If only I had been brave enough to take a closer look. I truly wish that I hadn't been so terribly disillusioned, distracted by shiny medals of valor and sweetly worded letters sent from field camps somewhere in the north. It was all so wistfully romantic to a wistfully naïve girl. Sure, I was well aware we were in a war, and I did worry. I worried about my family, about what I would do if someone died. I did think about Harry dying, maybe. But thinking and believing are such different things— boys like Harry always won. They won in a big glorious blaze of light with uproarious cheers and embraces, and the whole country, the whole world even, would celebrate his victory. That's the kind of boy Harry was. He was historic. He was a symbol of hope and happiness; he was everything to our cause. But most importantly he was my everything, and I never even realized that honestly enough to see what was happening to him.
I was obsessively in love with a 17 year-old kid long since gone, and he was in love with a 16 year old girl he wanted to keep 16 forever. So, as you can see, we were sucked into this wretched cycle of pretending we were different people and we were both perfectly content to just keep on making believe. I can't imagine what coming to visit #6 must have felt like for him. We didn't have a care in the world, how could he stand it? How did he sit there and listen to me prattle on about cartoons and the old school days and not want to scream at me what was happening outside of my smooth, non-threatening, off-white walls? I didn't want to believe in what was real and Harry, well, I bet he just wanted to stop believing.
I used to ignore all of his scars (besides the one on his forehead, the one that made him a hero, I always liked to look at that one). Sometimes his shoulders would slump like he was carrying something dreadfully heavy on them. Sometimes his eyes didn't shine with happiness but with tears. I was too afraid to acknowledge what these little things added up to, and whenever I would notice— just for the shortest, flightiest moment— the wrong kind of glint in his eyes, I would make a joke or a batch of cookies to push that glint away. It's painful how clearly you can see things once it's too late to change them. It's much more painful to realize that I did see things, and chose not to see them.
At his funeral his second in command made a speech. People would praise what he said for years after, and I always try to escape his blasted sentences but they just keet popping up- I hear them in the streets, in the papers, on the radio, see them in textbooks. I hear about a young man who led entire armies into battle, who could perform powerful wandless magic easier than Albus Dumbledore himself ever had. I feel like the world just enjoys mocking me, constantly reminding me that I didn't know Harry, not really. Sure, I would read in the paper about a battle won, led by Harry Potter. But still, my Harry didn't kill anyone; he crafted grand, brilliant strategies, and gave inspiring speeches, visited orphanages, you know, things like that. All that time, and I never once saw him with blood on his uniform.
Back then I used to think I hated Voldemort and his death eaters, but I never hated them so much as I now hate who I used to be. I am disgusted to think about how I used to curl my hair in the morning and play with the younger kids in the backyard in the afternoon and sit down to a big laughing dinner in the evening and go to sleep, mind laden with images of my parents, and brothers, and Harry, all happy and healthy and beautiful. I hate that I didn't have nightmares. I hate that I never cried because Harry was really hurt, I only cried when I missed him. I hate that I never tried to even bother caring. I thought I hated Voldemort because he took Harry and Ron and Bill all away from me for such long amounts of time, but that wasn't real hate. It could have been, though. It so easily could have been if I knew what was happening. If I knew that when they told me Harry was acting as an ambassador to the French Ministry he was actually a prisoner in a death eater camp for a whole week. That Bellatrix Lestrange used sectumsempra on Ron six times before someone could stop her. I would have hated them, then.
So what are you when the world you constructed around you, full of life and happiness and love, comes crashing down to reveal unimaginable pain. What are you, when all of your illusions are ripped away, and then what is real is ripped away, too, before you can even understand it. What are you, when all of your worlds are gone? You are nothing. You are a lump, on a couch, hidden somewhere in the countryside, reading old letters. You have nothing left to cherish but a thousand false memories that should have been something entirely different. The reals, the fabricateds, the confusingly in betweens— they're all dead. In the end, it didn't matter if it was real or imagined or anything at all, it was all destroyed. All of it. All of me, too. Everything that was once kind and beautiful and hopeful is gone. Some of it, literally— burned, blown up, lost. Most of it just looks different now, though. The diamonds, the medals, the old gowns, and the pond in the backyard, even the pictures are all wrong, like imprints of someone else's life and someone else's world. It creates a terrible sense of detachment.
I made up my old life. Or maybe other people made it up for me, I don't know, I don't think I dreamt it up totally alone. Number six was a dollhouse. But it wasn't to me, back then. It was all I knew and it was completely, tangibly real, and then all of a sudden it wasn't any more, only a pretty façade wrapped around an ugly reality. And then, just like that, it was all I had left— just diamonds, medals, gowns, photographs, and letters. I had nothing of the real Harry, or Remus or Tonks or Colin… anyone. I only had them for a few days; I never even got the chance to understand them. These cold items— remnants of a time that I thought was warm— I have spent days watching them just trying to figure out their place in the world. But they, like me, are only props of a grand play long since closed, and may never make proper, honest sense in their new surroundings— for which they were never intended.
The dead who haunt my home, my memories, and my nightmares, are much more real to me now than the living who occasionally seat themselves on either side of me. Those who are left from my family and friends feel like ghosts—lonely, elusive, and intangible. Sitting on the ugly floral couch I had once shared with real people, I wondered, are they the ghosts, or am I?
Love,
Ginny