Tempus Fugit
by Verity
Madam Pomfrey walks by the private room, the light of her candle shining radiant through the doorway and then swallowed up by the great enveloping darkness of the hall. Ginny Weasley, sitting in the twilight stillness of that private room, thinks that her life has been narrowed down to such a light. Her days are spent chasing desperately down winding passageways after its flickering glitter, as she tries to escape the hungry, all-consuming blackness that wants the light too.
Her heart beats faster as she feels a sudden, irrational surge of fear run through her as the desire to follow that light's physical counterpart wars with her terror of leaving this small, impersonal private room. Sweat beads on her forehead. She digs her nails into the soft wool of the coverlet. Harry sleeps on.
It is several minutes before the panic recedes, her muscles relax, and her pounding heart returns to its usual pace, leaving her drenched in cold sweat and shivering. She barely has enough energy to drag herself off her cot and onto the foot of Harry's bed, where she curls around his feet. Eventually the shivering will leave her, too.
Madam Pomfrey has told her Yes, the panic attacks will lessen, over time, and Ginny believes this with all her heart, though it's little help in the here-and-now. Madam Pomfrey knows her secret; Madam Pomfrey understands why she's here; and Madam Pomfrey is the one who has made possible this cot, and the little bathroom off to the left. Ginny will not leave this room for the world now for her world has been reduced to her lone light, dancing in the dark, and here he is, pale and sleeping; the sort of sleep that comes out of the end of a wand and doesn't go away for a long, long time. She will not leave this room even to visit her brother.
Of course, Hermione knows her secret too, and understands far better than even Madam Pomfrey can. I hope she wins, Ginny thinks tiredly, for the hollowness in her brother's friend's eyes is the kind that comes from a war with her internal demons. It is a hollowness she herself knows all too well.
She hugs Harry's feet, and closes her eyes, walking back in her mind into her memories as Arabella taught her to do in her months in prison - in Voldemort's fortress in the mountains of Albania, where strange men probed her mind and body for information she never had. She walks past these gray days in her mind, down another road. Two months ago - Harry, freedom, sunlight; the green grass beneath them.
"Oh, Harry" she sighs, remembering the Ginny of two months before, those two weeks before Harry's attack a lost Ginny, shattered inside and he'd made her whole again. Walked the roads in her mind with her and led her out of the gray days into green ones, sweet green like summer grass crunching beneath her feet.
And taught her that her body no longer was the enemy. A lesson she'd thought she could never learn, after
She smiles and drifts off to sleep for a few minutes.
When she wakes again, Madam Pomfrey is standing over her, a warm cup of chamomile tea in hand.
"How do you know?" she askes the nurse, who smiles gently.
"I just do, dear. Was it a very bad one?"
"There have been worse," Ginny says, and sets to drinking her tea. It sends lovely warm tendrils all over her body, and she sighs happily, not even protesting when Madam Pomfrey hands her a small plate of food as well. The nurse watches her eat with an approving eye.
"Now, you'll keep that all down now, won't you?" Madam Pomfrey says in a manner that makes the question both a firm statement and a kind enquiry.
She nods. "It's not so bad now. Have you told my parents yet?" she asks, her appetite gone.
"Yes." Madam Pomfrey smiles again, though weakly. "Cheer up, dear. They're very happy for you. They don't quite understand your decisions, but they haven't been where you've been."
"What do you think of me?" Ginny snaps, though she feels rather bad about doing so. Inwardly, she asks herself, What will Harry think of me?
"I think that you're a very different woman then the little girl who walked into that store with Arabella Figg in December, dear, and it may take some time for them to understand. Harry will. Harry will be happy. Don't you worry now, dear. Are you crying? Oh, Ginny"
She weeps openly, clean tears like diamonds rolling down her cheeks, and Madam Pomfrey rocks her like a little child, whispering soothing little things in her ear. All she is thinking of is of Harry and if he never wakes up, will she and their daughter still be waiting in this room?
She knows with absolute certainty that if that flickering glitter goes out, nothing can drag her back from the claws of that terrible darkness