Epilogue

After he and Sirius finished the incantation, James suddenly felt empty. He glanced at Sirius and could feel that he too could sense that the two worlds now were in a transitioning period; Hermione and Ginny's souls have departed from their doppelgangers' bodies, but the souls of the original owners had not yet returned. As they waited, they could hear Lily sobbing in the background. She sounded pitiful, and they had to keep reminding themselves that she had broken the law on several counts, used dark magic and nearly destroyed another person's soul to keep from feeling sorry for her. They just could not help it; Sirius had always had a hero-complex, which is why he had taken James, Peter, Remus and even Virginia under his wing; and James had always been a big softy beneath the muscles he had acquired from working at home on their farm and playing Quidditch.

Ginny's sudden heaving snapped him out of his reverie. The girl's eyes popped open, and then she sat up rapidly in her seat, breathing as though she had just very nearly drowned. She looked around, wide-eyed, as though unable to believe where she was. Then her eyes met James's and Sirius's. Ginny's heart missed a beat and she tried to control her breathing. She looked like she couldn't decide whether to cry or laugh, unable to determine what her advances would be met with.

The boys, relieving her of her emotional burden, burst into smiles, their eyes shining with gladness.

"Come 'ere, you damsel in distress," Sirius said, laughing, breaking the tension. Ginny ran and jumped in James's arms, then kissed him impulsively, without thinking, and for a long, long time. She would have liked to go on kissing him, but laughing embarrassedly, pulled away, looking at Sirius apologetically.

"James could not wait to save you," Sirius said, messing Ginny's hair up. They were like brother and sister. "Or do that," Sirius said, referring to their previous kiss.

Ginny laughed, blushing, and James scratched the back of his head in embarrassment.

"If that's how you act in public, I don't want to know – well, about anything else," Sirius said, and they all laughed. Sirius felt awkward, and so did the other two, but the joy of being reunited made everything ten times funnier than they would have otherwise found it.

Silence. The joy soon faded away – there were so many unanswered questions. The things that had happened, however, felt … unspeakable. Part of them wanted to forget about the ordeal altogether, and a part of them wanted to discuss it to be able to fully comprehend it, and then, if possible, move on forever… All they knew was that none of them ever wanted to live through anything even remotely like the ordeal they had went through again. James did not know what he would do if he lost Ginny again; Ginny did not know how she would be able to function if she was ripped out of the life she had once hated so but had grown to love; Sirius did not know what he would do if something like this happened, and he was not there to save the day. His friends felt like family, and now he felt like had let them down. They had been through so much together… and to think that he had noticed later than James that there was something wrong with Ginny! Sure, they were in love… but Sirius had always felt like a father, or at least a big brother to them. To have them save themselves instead of relying on him made him feel unneeded. But, he realized, he had to face the fact that the once lonely, helpless children he had taken under his wing had grown into teens who knew how to take care of themselves. It was all thanks to him, and Sirius knew he was supposed to feel happy, but he would always miss the kids they had once been, and the times they once had. He knew, after this, things were going to change forever.

Then, the three of them could hear Marlene stir. Their heads immediately shot in the direction of the noise. Marlene, just sat there, knowing that her plans had been foiled, that her time was over, and waited for her final predicament. She knew there was no way to escape what she had done – for the first time in her life, she was forced to admit to herself that the reason her life was the way it was because of things she had done. This time, she could not blame her actions on anybody else. The things that had happened were solely her own doing. The unbearable feeling of responsibility and guilt weighed down upon her, and it hurt, infinitely so.

Hermione and Ginny woke up in the same room.

"This is Grimmauld Place," Ginny said when they woke up, sniffing the air. "I can even smell that Kreacher's been here,"

Hermione giggled, "Ginny, don't be so mean! That House Elf feels terrible enough as it is. Don't add to his misery,"

"Well, maybe he shouldn't be such an arse then," Ginny mumbled, but Hermione just shook her head. She was so glad to be back, Ginny's insults towards the poor House Elf she felt so much pity for could not anger her sufficiently to get into a debate as they normally would have. She could feel the difference between the atmosphere of Virginia and Marlene's world, and her and Ginny's. She could immediately tell that they were back in their rightful places in the universe. She felt, now, that everything was going to be OK.

Ginny attempted to open the door. "They locked us in," she said, then looked around the room. "They've probably taken our wands too,"

Hermione looked horrified. "What do you think had happened?" she asked.

Ginny shook her head. "I don't know," she said, then she started banging on the door furiously. "Let us out! HARRY, RON, MOM! LET US OUT!" she bellowed. When she got no response, she started slamming herself against the door with full-force. It wouldn't budge. She went on like that for a while before all the strength had kept herself together left her. She was just a fifteen-year old girl. "Let me out…" she stopped trying to force the door open, collapsing on the floor. She had been through hell and back, and now she just wanted to return home, see her family, friends, and the boy she was in love with again.

Hermione just stood there, thinking, that things like this barely affected her anymore. Sometimes, she had not been glad of her fate, but now she was grateful for all her bad experiences as they had toughened her up. She sat down beside Ginny, putting an arm around her, trying to soothe her… "They'll be here soon…"

"What if we're not even at home? What if this place is not even-?"

Before Ginny could finish her complaint, however, they could hear the door unlocking and the two quickly sprang to their feet. All trace of sadness and misery were immediately gone from Ginny's face; she was a strong girl, Hermione determined, who had their moments of weakness just like anyone.

In the doorway stood Harry. The two girls, yelling his name euphorically, jumped in his arms. "Harry! Harry! Finally!"

Virginia got her wand out, and pointed at Marlene, "Stupefy," she said, simply, coldly, her eyes so cruel that James barely recognized her. This experience had toughened her up, he could already tell; the Ginny he knew had never before had the capacity to be so cold, so desperate was she for love and acceptance she had been, having never gotten it at home. Now, James thought, she's finally realized that there are some people not worth spending our time on; not worthy of our love; whose opinions do not matter. James felt a swell of pride in his chest. Ginny was finally on the way to becoming emotionally healthy. Then she turned to Lily and did the same as she had to Marlene, smirking in satisfaction.

The two boys stared in astonishment. Ginny blushed slightly but she could not hide the enjoyment from her face. "What disgusting pieces of filth those two are," she said, no longer able to hide her grin. "Before we leave this Room," she then said, becoming serious, her grin fading from her face. "We have to decide what we're going to do about these two nitwits. I want you to be part of the process because you helped me get back here and I'm eternally grateful to you," she said.

"It's just what friends do," Sirius said, deflecting the compliment.

"Yeah, don't be grateful," James said. "You would have done the same for us,"

Ginny just smiled, unable to feel anything but thankful for two such good friends. Oh, what a complete fool she had been to ever want to leave this world behind!

"Now," Ginny said, trying to shoo the unpleasant thought away. "Ask me all your questions, and then we'll decide how to proceed."

James and Sirius asked them the only thing they wanted to know: "Why didn't you tell us you had problems? Did you not trust us?" At the question, Ginny suddenly felt ashamed. How could she have been foolish enough to believe Marlene about the boys? That they just wanted a piece of ass? How could she have been so easily influenced? She decided to choose her friends better next time.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I thought… I didn't know what I thought. I was at an all-time low. I didn't want anyone to find out about what had happened to me."

"So you told Marlene?" the boys were aghast.

"I told Marlene because she had told me lots of stuff about her parents' divorce and reckoned she would not tell anyone because I knew plenty of things about her too," Ginny said. "Please understand that I was not thinking clearly around that time. I was depressed, even suicidal, and… I just really wanted to talk to someone who would understand."

"What happened?" Sirius asked. "Did the situation with your parents really get that bad?"

"And did you really think Marlene would understand?" James could not hide his passionate hatred for the witch who had made his love go through hell.

Ginny rolled her eyes, then wiped the sides of it. "Fine. I'll tell you everything."

And she proceeded to do just that. Ginny told them that her parents' relationship had been dysfunctional since the time she and her sister were born, and the past two years it had started getting even worse – which she would not have thought possible before – until it hit rock bottom and her father eventually moved out. Once, in the middle of the night, she awoke to her parents arguing, screaming wildly at the top of their voices like savages and throwing plates on the kitchen floor. She tried to fall back asleep, as that in itself was nothing abnormal in their household. She almost managed before her mother emitted a blood-curdling scream and then Ginny heard her falling to the floor like a bag of potatoes with a loud thud. Ginny knew she had to intervene. She got out of her bed, taking her wand with her, and disarmed her father. Her mother then began screaming at her, telling her she was a fool, calling her an ungrateful child; she didn't even thank her for her help. The next day, when her mother was away shopping, her father, in a fit of rage, punched her, giving her a black eye Molly laughed about; at dinner, everyone treated her like a pariah despite what she had done for Mrs Prewett.

Ginny said that she had reached her breaking point; for years she had endured verbal humiliation, slight shoves and pushes, which was bad enough, but never had to suffer brute force before. The worst part of it wasn't even the physical pain, but the humiliation that she then put through by her family. She spent most of the summer at Marlene's.

"Your life was so perfect," Ginny told James. "I thought you were too good for me. I thought you'd never want anything to do with me if you found out just how messed up my family was. I thought you'd get scared and not want a relationship. So I broke it off before you could break my heart,"

The sides of James's eyes were glistening with tears.

"But then you wouldn't leave me alone. And I loved you so much I couldn't help but let you back into my life. I was messed up, so messed up… When I moved back, the verbal attacks started again. Once, when I stood up for myself, my dad punched me again. I guess he thought it was fair game. You see, Mom doesn't want a divorce; she says it's shameful. She says I'm shameful for having slept with a boy who didn't ask my hand in marriage before," she said, looking at James.

"She's crazy. Absolutely crazy." Ginny went on as the two boys stared in shock. "She would stick by my dad and endure physical and verbal pain because she's been brainwashed by her equally idiotic parents! My grandparents! They say a woman must endure… that's a woman's job… Merlin!" Ginny shook her head disgustedly, a shiver running down her spine. "Absolutely horrible, the lot of them. And I kept waiting for them to change, trying to change for them, but… I mean, I have never hurt anybody. Never done anything wrong, at least not intentionally. And one day I just thought, why the hell do they hate me so much? I haven't done anything I should be ashamed of. I haven't done innocent people any harm. And then I also thought… if they already treat me as a criminal, I might as well be one. So I started plotting my escape."

Ginny recounted how she had used the Cloak and went to the restricted section, thinking that there was surely some way she could either turn back time or travel dimensions. It had been Marlene's idea to travel dimensions. "Our families aren't messed up because of us. Even if we did go back in time, our problems wouldn't be magically solved. We have to leave this mess altogether. Our lives suck."

"I didn't know whether I wanted to go that far or not. Far away from my family, back at Hogwarts, I started getting better though, even despite Marlene's constant negativity. I realized that there were plenty of things about my life that were good. For a while, before we got back to school, Marlene shut up. When we got back and we started hanging out again," she was referring to herself and the boys, "she went crazy. She called me ungrateful, selfish and vile. I tried to be her friend but she was so nasty. She kept insulting me. She declined all my invitations to Hogsmeade or even to hang out with you. She liked being miserable, I think, or at least that's the impression I got sometimes. But I don't think she knew how to be anything else, really. Something broke inside of her when her parents divorced… and she could never put it back together."

Ginny shook her head. "She wouldn't give up about traveling time and dimensions either. She kept badgering me about how she was going to go with Lily Evans if I didn't go with her – oh, yes, she told me about how they became best friends, expecting me to be jealous and then getting mad when I told her I was happy for her –, but I knew it was a load of bull. She didn't want to go with Lily Evans, she wanted to go with me."

"I realized she had a fixation on me, around that time," Ginny said. "But I felt so sorry for her and I mean, she was still my friend and I didn't want to tell anyone just how crazy she was. I didn't want to be that kind of friend, you know. So then one day in August she told me that through Lily's mother's connections they got into the Department of Restricted Knowledge, and stole the research on the subject. She tried to convince me one last time to go, but I said I didn't want to. Then she knocked me out and had Lily perform the spell on us."

"The spell went exactly as planned, and that is when I realized she was completely crazy. We arrived in a world where an all-powerful dark wizard named Voldemort was on the rise. 'Finally,' Marlene had said, 'We have something to live for. We have friends who love us and a families that support us. What more could you wish for?' She had apparently always wanted to live in a world full of adventure. She always thought herself to be the hero of her own story that no one ever wrote down. Pathetic. I mean, I had grandiose dreams of saving the world when I was like, 10, too, but I mean I eventually grew out of it because peace is so much better than war, even if you get to be some sort of hero if you partake and die in one.

Before I could tell the others what had happened, however, she wiped my memory. My last memory was of the time I was still debating whether to travel universes with Marlene or not, and then she convinced me that I had wanted to go with her, just that the spell didn't work out well and I had lost some of my memories. She also told me you helped us perform the spell and since I couldn't remember anything and I remembered her as a good friend, I believed her, initially, though I was a bit wary.

Slipping into the role of Ginny Weasley was easy. She had great friends, played Quidditch like me – in fact, was a lot like me – and most of all, had a loving family. I envied her so, so much. But it felt wrong. I eventually started getting flashbacks of this place. Her memories. It felt like I was in two places at once. I started going crazy. About two days ago, I remembered everything, and cracked. I told everything to a boy named Harry, who looked just like you, except for the eyes – in fact… you were his father in that universe, and you married Lily Evans…"

"What?!" James's eyes nearly popped out of their sockets as he laughed in disbelief. "Are you kidding me? Just how messed up was that world?"

"Very," Ginny said, smiling sadly. "But… maybe it was because of the war, maybe something else, but they were all so… good. So nice. I really grew attached to the people there." Then she shook her head. "But it was not my home. And if those people could find happiness in the times they lived in, I realized, once again, that then I could find happiness in my messed-up world too. I wanted my life back."

"We had been vary of her for some time," Harry told Ginny. "You're alterego, in fact. The other one – Hermione's doppelganger – was… well, she gave a love potion to Ron, so whenever I tried to discuss Hermione's strange behavior he just told me she was in love and that I should not worry. Eventually, she put a love potion on me as well, to make me stop suspecting her of anything… but we only realized this after your alterego, Ginny, cracked and told us everything one day. That was about two weeks ago. We then took their wands away and tried to figure out what happened to them and how to reverse the spell. We were preparing to break into the Ministry soon to steal the files from the Department of Restricted Knowledge.

It was so, so messed up…"

"When they found out who I was, they did not believe that I hadn't wanted to partake on this mission and blamed me for taking Ginny Weasley's body. They locked me in a room with that wretched Marlene, and I swear, once, she nearly killed me. If Harry Potter didn't come in and save me, she would have succeeded… they bound her to the bed, as there were no other beds available during the Holiday season in their home, and left me with her. Not that they really cared about our accommodation, either, obviously. Sadly they didn't gag her mouth and she kept going on about what a terrible friend I was. I thought I'd commit suicide if I had to stay there longer with her. But they were so suspicious of us, and of me, even, that they didn't really care about our mental states… God, it was a horrible, horrible time."

The boys had no more questions. "So… what do we do now?" Ginny asked, but she could tell she and the boys were thinking the same thing. Revenge.

"I don't get one thing, though," Ginny said. "How did part of my memories get wiped? We never figured out, did we, Hermione? And why did you have that distinct memory of us wanting to switch universes?"

"See," Mr Weasley said, throwing a bunch of documents on the table, "The answer lies in here. Sometimes, souls and bodies take time to sync. You may lose memories, and you may gain some from the one you changed bodies with. You may become more like them due to the change as well due to this. It's very dangerous."

"Are our souls whole now?" Hermione asked. "Ginny said that she saw a shadow on the wall on the night of her arrival, and several other times, that she suspected to be Virginia Prewett's soul,"

"Yes," Mr Weasley said. "Your souls are intact; in fact, they have always been intact because you were on the receiving end of the spell. If you would have done it, and the part of your soul inhabiting your original body would have been destroyed, you would have been forced to live until eternity in the form you saw Virginia's soul appear in. That would have been your punishment – being that less than ghost thing, unable to communicate, spending the rest of your life in misery and alone, would have been your punishment for dark magic; a direct consequence of cutting up your soul."

"What happens to the people we switched bodies with? One of them – Virginia – did not want to go through with the spell but her so-called friend stupefied her, and performed the spell on her anyway. What happens to her?"

Mr Weasley pulled a face. "I don't know. There are no records of here – this is a restricted branch of magical study, girls. Further testing in this domain is forbidden, and it's normally kept under lock and key. Lily Evans's mother must have been a very, very influential person in the magical world if she was able to get them a permit to visit that Department."

"Oh, yes," Hermione said with a smirk. "Her mother was the Minister's secretary."

"They were rumored to have an affair," Ginny said. "She could have gotten them anything with just a lift of her skirt."

Harry looked uncomfortable. They were talking about his mother's family, but not really - a concept he found it hard to wrap his mind around, understandably.

"So, anyway," Ginny said, changing the subject quickly. "Do you not know what'll happen to Virginia, Dad? She was innocent. I'd hate for her to-"

"No, Ginny, I don't know," Mr Weasley said, sounding a bit exasperated. "And life isn't always fair. We cannot take on everybody's burdens and solve everyone's problems for them. You had done all that you could, which was returning her to her original world, a world which she had never truly wanted to leave. That was your part in her story. Let her live her life now, and forget this ever happened. It was never supposed to. It should never have. It's best, perhaps, to forget about all of it, don't you think?"

"What if you don't get your soul back, Ginny?" James asked worriedly as they were throwing pebbles in the lake at sundown. They had already talked with McGonagall and Dumbledore. McGonagall, who had secretly always wanted to become Minister for Magic, encouraged them to extract revenge and promised she would help them achieve their goal. She had immediately expelled Lily and Marlene and forced them to leave the premises.

"I don't know, James," Ginny said, trying to hide her misery. "I guess it only means that I will have to live every day as a blessing before I become a freakin' Shadowperson."

James did not want to think about that. He did not want to think about his beloved having to live the rest of her life as a mere shadow of her former self.

"We can't let that happen," James said. "It's not going to happen."

Ginny threw another rock into the Lake angrily. "I will not waste my time thinking about things I can't change anymore. I used to do that and I got depressed, remember? Dwelling on things you have no control over is a sure-fire way to want to kill yourself, mind you. I want to live in the now. Concentrate on the good things about my life. Try to make the best of everything I have. Don't treat me like such a victim! I mean, even if bad things happen to me, they don't define me. My strength does. The fact that I got through it all. And I'm going to share my story with the rest of the world. I'm done trying to pretend everything's OK when it's not in an attempt to save face, wondering what people would think about me if they knew – look where that got me."

James remained silent. Ginny threw another rock into the Lake, then turned to James. "Sharing my story is the only way I can help people. And I want to. I've been through too much to want anything but happiness for everyone. Only unhappy people hurt others."

James still didn't say anything. "Whatever you chose, I'm going to stick with you through it all." And that was the greatest confession of love Ginny had ever heard.

Three months later, Ginny's account of the ordeal got published in the form of a book.

Ripped Souls, the title said. On the back, a review by Albus Dumbledore - who had been promoted from Professor of Defence Against the Dark Arts to Headmaster after Minerva McGonagall became Minister for Magic - read:

'This real-life account by Virginia Prewett is a story that teaches a lot of lessons. It shows how easy it is to go from victim to perpetrator. It demonstrates the consequences of trusting the wrong people, and the dangers of desiring love and acceptance too much. But most importantly, it shows that our problems are often only as great as we make them out to be, and that happiness can be found in even the darkest of situations, if only one remembers to turn on the light.'

The End