THC Year 9 Round 6

House: Gryffindor

Class: History of Magic

Category: Drabble

Prompt: [Location] The Department of Mysteries

Word Count: 972

Warning: References to canonical deaths and traumatic events

Author's Note: Minor deviations from the book narrative of events in order to position characters more closely to one another during the battle

Beta Credit: Such sincere thanks to too many folx to name


There are days when Ginny wakes beside Harry and they're children again: in her mind, she hears the water dripping before she sees the chamber floor. There are mornings when Harry raises his body from crisp ivory sheets and she knows that the forest still feels pressed into his back. There are things about dead loved ones that they struggle to remember and things that almost make them want to die so they'll forget. Time bends around them both as they move together through a life they stole back from Tom and gave again to themselves.

Today, Ginny startles awake in the Department of Mysteries.

As the lift doors open, for a brief instant she wonders if this had been how Harry felt when he entered the Chamber of Secrets. She feels the urge to move in two opposite directions—to run towards the place where they can save Sirius, and to get her friends away from where her father almost died. The screams build inside her and she almost trips. Which pull, which voice, is the Gryffindor courage?

In the cold, black-walled corridor, time freezes and then boils. Blue flames waver along the edges of the first room they enter, their shadows engaged in a menacing dance on the floor. The room spins them impassively until the doors outside lose all sense of order, until none of them know which to enter or leave through.

There isn't enough time to make plans or understand things: the sight of brains drifting smoothly through tanks of green water won't make her shudder until later the next day. Hermione scrawls cross marks on the doors that don't hide Sirius. A still archway beckons to Harry and Luna; voices sound behind it that Ginny can't hear yet.

The next room is full of clocks and light, as time itself takes form and confronts them. Ginny stands, entranced, in front of a bell jar. A small living world within is unmade and made again: the hummingbird snugs itself back into the egg, and she imagines herself stepping aside this time, shifting so Tom's diary can't slip into her bag. Harry pulls her from the jar with the urgency of Hermione pulling him from the archway. Much later, they will realize that the threat was the same—the insistent call towards a thing that isn't possible.

There isn't time to think clearly in the hall of glass orbs. When everyone shouts at once so that all the prophecies tip over, it feels for a moment like they're breaking the whole world.

She'll muse about them with Harry, on a sunlit day ten months later. Each ball was a story, a future, a thing to come to pass; she'll wonder out loud what changed when they were shattered. "It'll all just happen anyway, if it's meant to happen," Harry will tell her. She won't understand why he looks away from her a little with a sad and careful smile, before kissing her so ardently that neither can say more.

In the room with the archway, time splits and runs in parallel. The battle itself is over in a handful of ragged breaths; Sirius slips through the veil in less than a blink. Yet somehow, days later, it seems like he's still falling.

There is too much time—only time—to think in the atrium, a cavernous room that hisses with spent magic. Ginny stumbles inside and sees Harry on the floor with the Headmaster crouched beside him, a fear on the old face that only she understands.

"He's being possessed," Ginny mutters, with the nails of her fingers digging into Ron's wrist. Her brother's eyes widen; he steps back and she leans forward, addressing Riddle directly to beg, "Let him go."

She knows Tom can't hear her—that he's left her completely. Ginny remembers a dark jagged gash in the diary, Harry's arm a seething wound, blood thick and cooling on her own shaking hands. What plays out before her now is too clean, too separate, too obscenely precise. The silence presses on her as Harry's body buckles, alone and unmarked on the glossy blue floor.

Please fight him, Harry. I know you can fight him. She doesn't say the words out loud.

Perhaps he hears her anyway.

Much, much later, they talk about what happened. Over hours and days and maybe years, they go back to the Department, to the Chamber, to the Forest. Some things don't make sense until both of them listen. Some things don't make sense until both of them speak.

When they talk of the last moments in the battle at the Department of Mysteries, she says that what hurt most was to know he had to fight without them helping, and he takes her hand earnestly when he tells her that he didn't. When he explains that love itself burned Tom away from his mind and back into the atrium, she thinks of the room that no-one could open.

There is plenty of time to have that one conversation, and enough time to realize that there can't be just one. In carefully watched silences and tentative starts, at all hours of the night and in unexpected late mornings, things come up and settle down as they build their life together on this side of the Veil.

Love and time, sleeping and waking, life and death—all of it sometimes is too much to handle. Ginny squeezes Harry's hand and feels her own steady heart. She says her children's names to each of them, making sure they know the stories. She comes to see the folly of a Department of Mysteries, to scoff at the idea that time could fit in a bell jar or a future in a ball. Everything that matters is all around her, every second. Every mystery, within them—not to study, but to live.