I must've dreamed a thousand dreams
Been haunted by a million screams
But I can hear the marching feet
They're moving into the street.
Now did you read the news today
They say the danger's gone away
But I can see the fires still alight
There burning into the night.
There's too many men
Too many people
Making too many problems
And not much love to go round
Can't you see
This is a land of confusion.
This is the world we live in
And these are the hands we're given
Use them and let's start trying
To make it a place worth living in.
Ooh superman where are you now
When everything's gone wrong somehow
The men of steel, the men of power
Are losing control by the hour.
This is the time
This is the place
So we look for the future
But there's not much love to go round
Tell me why, this is a land of confusion.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter™ belongs to JKR and WB. Song lyrics (Land of Confusion) ©Genesis
Betas: Many thanks for my wonderful betas, spauthor, Arya Tai and Julianna Edwards. Links to their profiles are at the end of the chapter.
Please note that the Prologue is not just a summary of Welcome to My Truth, the prequel to this. This is a fairly short synopsis on the events leading up to the main story; this includes the prequel and what happened in the following years. I do suggest that you read WtMT first, but it is not necessary.
Prologue
It was raining.
Blind eyes the colour of the moon gazed unseeingly out of the window and across the wet, grey landscape as their owner considered the events that had brought her to this place in life. It was eight years since everything started. No, that wasn't right. Everything started long before that. Everything started and ended with Tom Marvolo Riddle. Lord Voldemort.
Was it wrong that after everything, Ginny could listen to those names, could roll them pleasantly off her tongue with a sense of affection? Of more than affection? Was it even right, after all that she knew should have and might have been, for her to even think his name without shuddering?
Lord Voldemort had ended everything. When the Order of the Phoenix had least been expecting it, he had struck. Whether it was due to luck or strategical planning was never determined, but he had struck surely and swiftly and decimated any who opposed him. Ginny had woken for the first time next to Harry, only to hear her parents dying. She had watched as her brother and his girlfriend, Ron and Hermione, had died heroes' deaths at the end of the Dark Lord's wand. By the time Ginny and Harry were locked deep beneath Voldemort's fortress everyone they loved was dead.
The two of them had been kept there for months on end, drawing strength from one another, but dying inside. Harry had been tortured daily - his greatest relief and pain was that he was 'allowed' to keep his mind. Ginny had watched as he had been dragged to and from their dank, light-less cell. She had waited alone, hugging her knees as Death Eaters performed uncountable, indescribable terrors upon the man she loved. That had been her torture.
At first they had fought back, thinking up endless, hopeless plots to escape, each more unbelievable than the last. But as each day came and passed with news only of more death and destruction their desperate hope withered and faded to near non-existence. Finally they knew it had come. The time for waiting was over. Harry was dragged from the cell one last time and murdered. Ginny listened to the raucous cheers, knowing that that fate would become hers, too, within moments.
But Snape, of all people, had saved her. Her and all of the world. A few muttered words and the passing of a simple-looking pendant and Ginny had the weapon to bring down the Dark Lord. He had taunted her, but she had stood her ground. Then, with as much malicious glee as the occasion called for, she turned the Time-Turner and had been thrown back fifty-five years - only to come face to face with the boy who was to become Voldemort.
Ginny, after muttering a few choice words to Dumbledore and a certain hat, had been placed in the sixth year Slytherin dorms… alongside a sixteen year old Voldemort.
Fuelled by mutual interest in one another - and Ginny's of saving the world - they had become something akin to friends. Then the Chamber of Secrets had been opened and a student was petrified. The entire student body was sent home for the holidays, whereupon Ginny learnt something no one would have guessed about Tom Riddle.
Even as a sixteen year old Riddle's magic was incredible and hugely powerful. So when Ginny had gone to his orphanage the last thing she expected to find was a broken, violated and sodomised boy with next to nothing to say for his condition.
The two weeks of the Easter Holidays was all it took for the fatal jaws of affection to close around both of them. A kiss or two and Ginny was standing on the edge of a familiar precipice, but this time with Tom by her side rather than Harry. From hero to murderer, there was more than a little difference between the two young men. And yet there were so many similarities - enough to make Ginny's head spin and her heart slam against the insides of her ribs.
But the return to Hogwarts showed a change so drastic that Ginny wondered that no one but her noticed it. Tom became distant, more inhumane and closed the tiny crack in his walls that she had managed to start to peer through.
Neither of them realised for a long time that the enemy they were fighting was none other than Ginny herself. An older version that had botched up events, that had turned the Time-Turner twice and then whittled away the fifty-five years of waiting going crazy; from loneliness, from the impossibilities and the not knowing. On the final night of dangling in uncertainty both of them had died. Both Ginnys, the old and the new, neither belonging to the time they lived in, had trod the ethereal path between this world and the next.
The younger Ginny had been pulled back, at the loss of only her sight and the gain of so much more. The older, half crazed and suddenly very vulnerably human Ginny - the Monster in her - had perished.
For a while there was uncertainty. The Monster had told them that the two stragglers Tom and Ginny had picked up - the orphan, Keara, and Tom's half brother, Ricky - had been killed. They had talked to Dumbledore and, of all things, that was the one he could not forgive them for.
But they had returned home and there they were, their family, alive and well, wiping away the last of Dumbledore's disapproval.
The summer had brightened and lengthened and days had been filled with happy exultations and explanations. There were trips to the sea side - that neither Tom nor Keara had seen before - to a zoo, and to Diagon Alley. Keara had received her Hogwarts letter, and arrangements for Ricky to stay at a Welsh boarding school called St Brychan's were finalised. Everything was perfect. Too perfect.
Tom had become restless, his mind thundering through innumerable 'what ifs' and countless scenarios where everything went wrong, or right, or not as they had intended. He couldn't understand the timeline, how Ginny still existed… how any of them existed.
Ginny watched his restlessness with growing apprehension until, the day before their return to Hogwarts, she set him free, with a tear, and a brave smile, and a promise to wait for him. And Tom had left, a promise to return hanging in the air as he fled from a reality that was too much like heaven to seem real to him.
And time had marched determinedly onwards, as it always did.
Keara had been sorted into Slytherin, rising up society's ranks and placing herself firmly at the top, despite her Muggle-born bloodline. Ricky had become Mr Thomas Richard Riddle again and had steadfastly ignored his pseudo-sisters' snickering when they heard the teachers call him that. Ginny had passed her final year at Hogwarts in an eerie calm, the only scandals being those of friends falling in and out of friendship or love.
And still, in spite of Tom's constant not-there-ness pressing down on her, life continued to be perfect. Ginny had helped Katrina, one of her year mates, in her pursuit of the Harry Potter of this time and they were now engaged to be married. Eileen Prince, Ginny's best friend, had gone on to marry Theodore Grant, a boy in their year and long time childhood sweetheart. Yuna and Matisse, the twins, had disappeared back to Africa with their perfect English accents and strange, deep magic that belonged to their home country. They wrote frequently with wondrous stories of their adventures.
Ginny had become an Unspeakable. A year after her graduation she had still been wandering aimlessly with her life, uncertain as to where it would lead. Due to Ricky's inheritance there were no money worries, but Ginny searched endlessly for her niche. Then, to her surprise, she was approached by Galvin Cross, a thin, sickly looking man with large square glasses that he had to constantly push up his nose. Despite the slight stutter in his tone and the misfit, mismatching clothes he wore, there was a calm self-confidence that rolled off of him in waves. He had asked her to join his team of Unspeakables deep in the bowels of the ministry and, for lack of anything better to do, Ginny agreed.
One would think that finding a job when you were blind would be difficult, and, on the whole, you'd be right. Ginny's lack of sight had made her a sore thumb at Hogwarts; she was only accepted and treated normally by those who understood that, for Ginny, being blind was not about not being able to see. Ginny read magical patterns in the air. She could 'see' people through their magic, 'see' objects from the magic that had created them, or touched them, or merely wandered past. This made it nigh on impossible to live in the Muggle world normally, but in the wizarding world, where everything was touched by magic, Ginny was as blind as the next person.
And yet still, it was with some apprehension Ginny went that first morning to her new job. She was blind; she would stand out. But when she arrived and met her three other colleagues and Galvin Cross again, she knew. This was it, this was her niche. This was her little cave that she could lose herself in and enjoy life. And with that knowledge, and her new work, came happiness and contentment.
And so the years continued to pass.
One by one they marched past with nothing much to separate one year from the next, surrounded by the constant hope that maybe, tomorrow, next week, next month, Tom would come home. Keara graduated Hogwarts and went on to start Healer Training at St Mungo's, her eyes never straying from her goal except, perhaps, to the backside of one of the young male Healers who popped into their training sessions occasionally. Ricky graduated with passing grades and had, to everyone's surprise, become a fireman.
Everything was wonderful and perfect.
Perfect.
Too perfect.
Like before, it was too good to last. There were five of them: friends from Hogwarts and an occasional sixth if Keara or Ricky deigned to join them. But, normally, there were five of them every Saturday night, going to The Three Broomsticks like they were seventeen again and having a good night out. There was Eileen and Theodore, Katrina and Harry, and Ginny. Five of them.
Then, suddenly, there were four.
No one really knew the details of what happened. An accident at work, perhaps? A stray spell gone wrong? It was impossible to tell. The only thing that everyone knew with any certainty was that Theodore Grant, young husband to Eileen, was dead.
And that was how Ginny came to be staring out of the window on a grey day as the rain pounded down on the roof of her small cottage, waiting for the soup over the oven to heat. Eileen was upstairs with a high fever from staying out by the grave too long in the rain; no one had had the heart to pull her away. Finally, Eileen had stood and backed away from the grave, eyes never leaving the engraving of her husband's name.
Then Ginny had scooped the other girl up into her arms and apparated them to her home. She had tucked her in and spelled her to sleep, promising warm tea and soup when she woke. And now she sat, waiting, and wondering, and wishing that, after eight years, today would be the day that Tom returned home to her.
A/N: Well, here it is, the long awaited sequel to Welcome to My Truth. I'm going to be tackling some awkward issues in this story, so please note that this fic is M rated. I hope you enjoy it, though, and please don't forget to drop me a review! Have a very Merry Christmas everyone!
Much Love,
Cal
xxx
PS My betas' links: www (dot) fanfiction (dot) net/u/1504573/spauthor
www (dot) fanfiction (dot) net/u/800397/Arya_Tai
www (dot) fanfiction (dot) net/u/46623/Julianna_Edwards
