Whiskey Lullaby
A/N - This is so not my usual style of writing, it's even in present tense. Be warned now, it's also not a very happy ending. If you know the song, you'll probably guess what this the story is about. Well, here goes my first attempt at a totally fluff-free story. Hope you like it!
Disclaimer: The Harry Potter characters belong to J.K. Rowling, and the song belongs to Brad Paisley and Alison Krauss, and whoever else holds legal claim to it. Only the plot is mine.
This story is dedicated to James Milamber, who has been kind enough to offer editing of my stories. If you haven't read his stories, which is highly unlikely, go read! He's one of the best authors I've ever read, you won't be sorry if you take the time to read his stuff. Well, JM, here's another Harry Potter story instead of an update on my Summerland one. Enjoy it!
She put him out,
Like the burnin' end of a midnight cigarette.
She broke his heart.
He spent his whole life tryin' to forget.
She's not dead. But she is to him. She might as well be after all she's put him through. He wants to believe that she's dead to him, but nothing will ever erase the memories of holding her, kissing her, stroking her fragrant, long auburn hair.Nothing will ever erase his love for her. No matter how much she acts like a double crossing, back stabbing bitch, he will always see deep into her core where the heart of goodness he knows she has is laying in wait.
She's changed. The day she watched her family murdered before her eyes something inside of her died and never came back. Harry wants to blame it all on Voldemort so badly, he wants to be able to say that it's entirely The Dark Lord's fault. But deep down, he knows that he could have done so much more to prevent Ginny from becoming the kind of person she is now.
He watched her change from the lighthearted, sweet little girl he'd known at Hogwarts into a cold, empty shell of a person. She's become so different that he can't even bear to be around her anymore. Their relationship has crumbled to dust. They had come together in Ginny's seventh year, a mere 6 months before she became the only Weasley left standing.
Harry still remembers the day that he realized Ginny Weasley was no more.
Ginny's eyes are sharp and clear, but utterly devoid of emotion. She shows no sign of the love she's always held for the Boy Who Lived. "Harry, I want you to leave."
Harry gives her a small, bewildered smile. "What are you talking about?"
"Leave. Right now."
She turns her back to him, and stirs a pot of soup on the stove. She is now the only remaining member of her family, and has taken over the Burrow. She will soon have to find a job on her own, and learn to support herself. She is never going to depend on anybody to take care of her. And she will never love anyone again because when she lets that happen, she only lets herself get hurt. And Ginevra Weasley is somebody that will never be hurt by anybody, ever again.
"Ginny - "
"It's Ginevra. And I have nothing to say to you."
"Fine, Ginevra," Harry spits out the name like poison. "Will you at least tell me why you're being such a bitch?"
"Get out."
Harry is immediately contrite. "I didn't mean that - "
Ginny swings around with a wooden spoon in her hand. Her face is slowly beginning to tinge red with anger. "Get. Out. Of. This. House."
Harry ducks his head in shame and does as she asks. When she is finally alone, Ginny refuses to feel the pain that denying Harry always brings. Not knowing what she is doing, she rushes to the door and searches for Harry's retreating form, but is turned down the reward of seeing him. She wants to tell him she's sorry, that she loves him. But he's gone.
We watched him drink his pain away, a little at a time.
But he never could get drunk enough to get her off his mind.
Until the night . . .
He put that bottle to his head and pulled the trigger,
And finally drank away her memory.
Nobody is permitted to speak her name in Harry's presence. He still keeps in touch with Hermione, but now the Hogwarts foursome is downgraded to two.Harry is irreparably scarred by Ginny's rejection. He found love in her like he's never experienced before. And then it was yanked away from him before he knew how to deal with it.
Now he just turns to firewhiskey to ease his pain. He loves how it fogs his mind and pushes away the image of Ginny's face. He doesn't have to remember her as long as he has a supply of alcohol. When the effects wear off, he just starts the cycle all over again.
He lives in a rundown flat above the Hog's Head, where nobody will bother him. He's finally outrun the fame by not appearing in public anymore. He hasn't been seen more than twice since he lost Ginny, and even then it was only on his way to buy more firewhiskey. Otherwise, he stays locked up and removed from the world.
But today is different. He sees her. All the drinking has closed up the wound left by her absence a little, but now it's ripped afresh and bleeding. He sees her eating dinner with Draco Malfoy. He should have expected something like that from the woman she is now. But the damage is done. He sees her smile and hears her laugh. He hasn't heard or seen that side of her for two years, and when he does, that in itself is enough to make him want to die.
So he picks up three bottles of firewhiskey and returns to his lonely apartment.
Life is short,
But this time it was bigger,
Than the strength he had to get up off his knees.
We found him with his face down in the pillow
With a note that said, 'I'll love her 'til I die'.
And when we buried him beneath the willow,
The angels sang a whiskey lullaby.
La la la la la la la.
La la la la la la la.
Ginny - You're the one, and I'll always love you. Sorry I took the coward's way out. I just can't try any more.
Harry scribbles the note on a piece of parchment and places it under a paperweight on his desk. There's no easy way to tell her what he wants to, so he keeps it short and simple.He picks up the bottle that he's emptied already and glances at the two full ones. He uncorks the second and listens to it sizzle for a few seconds before downing two gulps in quick succession. It burns his throat, but he doesn't care. He just prays that these three bottles will be enough to end his life.
Just in case they're not, Harry pops several sleeping pills he nicked from Hermione's bathroom. He knows that she takes them when old nightmares resurface, but they'll do the trick for him now. Harry picks up an old picture of Ginny. She's young. Fresh, innocent, and sweet . . . so unlike what she is these days. She's sitting beneath the large oak tree next to the lake at Hogwarts, waving and smiling at him. Harry puts the picture down. That's the old Ginny. She's gone.
He keeps looking at the picture until tiny spots invade his vision and his head starts becoming fuzzy. He knows it will be over soon. He stumbles to an armchair near his fireplace, which reminds him of the times he spent with Ginny in the Gryffindor common room. He loves her. And he will forever.
The rumors flew,
But nobody knew how much she blamed herself.
For years and years
She tried to hide the whiskey on her breath.
Ginny thinks she's succeeded pretty wonderfully at forgetting about Harry. Never mind all the whiskey she uses to do it. She's never cared for firewhiskey, but Muggle whiskey works pretty well. She drinks it all the time. Sometimes to forget about Harry . . . sometimes to forget about her family. Or lack thereof.
She's watched each and every member of her family get tortured, and eventually murdered, by Voldemort. She's glad that none of them went down without a fight. The only reason she escaped unscathed was Harry. He rescued her, as he has always done, but by the time he came back for the others, they were gone. That's another reason Ginny sometimes blames Harry for the demise of her family. Why did he have to choose her to save? Why not her mother, or her father? Or Ron?
She went out with Malfoy tonight. And Harry saw her. He has no clue that Ginny still loves him every bit as much as she ever did, but she does.Ginny knows that Harry locks himself up with his firewhiskey night after night, but she's never done anything to stop that. If she thinks about it, she's probably encouraged it by never seeking to reconcile her relationship with him. The only reason she went out with Malfoy was because she thought he might be another means of forgetting the past. He had proved himself a good person in the final battle, claiming that he would always fight alongside Harry. Nowadays, he's the only one left who can even stand to be around the unbearable monster Ginny is.
Ginny sighs and knocks back another shot of whiskey at her favorite Muggle bar in downtown London. She's been here the last three nights in a row. But tonight something's wrong . . . she can feel it. As if to prove her suspicion correct, the television above the bar suddenly flickers and the image of a petite blonde woman wearing a suit and holding a microphone appears.
"Good evening, this is a special report just into BBC studios." The woman disappears and a shot of the Prime Minister speaking takes over, though her voice continues. "Mr. Harry James Potter has been discovered dead just moments ago."
After defeating Voldemort, Harry had become known to the Muggle public only as a hero who had gotten rid of a very troublesome 'criminal'. "The cause is undetermined as of yet, but officials suspect it to be suicide."
Ginny needs to hear no more after these words. She abandons her whiskey in shock and stumbles from the bar, ignoring the guys whistling and hooting at her. Harry's dead. That's what this night is about.
She finally drank her pain away,
A little at a time.
But she never could get drunk enough
To get him off her mind.
Until the night . . .
She put that bottle to her head and pulled the trigger.
And finally drank away his memory.
It's been a long time. Five years almost. But to Ginny it feels longer than it really is. She's never gotten over the guilt of killing Harry. It's not as if she shot him or performed an Unforgivable on him, but she as good as killed him. She killed his love, she killed his heart . . . and that killed his body and soul.
She's taken to visiting his grave at night with a bottle of whiskey. That's where she is tonight. Her mind is already a little hazy from the four hours she's just spent in the bar, but it wasn't enough to block Harry. Damn him, he always finds a way into her thoughts no matter what she does. Unless she gets enough whiskey into her system before a certain point, she'll be swept away by him. And she does not want to be swept away anymore.
"I'm sorry," she whispers into the darkness, but there's nobody to hear her apology. She goes on anyway. "I never wanted you to get hurt that bad. I thought you'd get over me eventually." Ginny throws her head back and gulps more of the burning substance. "It hurt just to look at you, and I couldn't do it anymore! Why couldn't you understand that?!" Ginny is sobbing openly in great gulps now, screaming at the headstone.
After her outburst, she has calmed and stands to leave. She Apparates, dangerously in her condition, to the Burrow. She ignores the screams of rage bursting to tear themselves from her throat and continues upstairs to her room. But she is sidetracked by the open door of . . . Ron's room. It hurts just to think his name.
Tentatively, Ginny pushes his door open all the way. The vibrant orange Chudley Cannons paraphernalia has now been dulled to the color of the setting sun. It suddenly comes to Ginny to do something she hasn't done since his death. She walks to his dresser and opens the top drawer. She's shocked to find several pints of whiskey and a bottle of painkillers. I really should have come here sooner, she thinks.
She pulls two of the four liquor bottles from the drawer, as well as the pills. She wonders how he got Muggle medication, but doesn't care much at the moment. He must have had this stuff during the final days, when he knew there wasn't a chance of him surviving. Maybe he wanted to forget like Ginny wants to today.
She makes her way out of Ron's room and outside. It is pitch black and cold outside, but neither of those things penetrate Ginny. Somehow she finds the place underneath the old willow tree where she and Harry made love for the first time. There is a limited supply of light from the moon reflecting off the lake, but it's enough for her. She won't need light much longer anyway.
Ginny unscrews the top of the first bottle and empties about a quarter of it in one shot. She chases that with a handful of the painkillers. For hours she sits there, slowly draining both bottles of whiskey and the entirety of the pills. Quite a few times she thinks she sees Harry somewhere in the distance, and once she even gets up to go after him, but sinks to her knees when the full effects of what she's just done hits her hard.
She doesn't know that this is almost exactly how Harry's last moments alive were spent, but if she did she would laugh at the irony of it all. She crawls back over to the base of the tree and shoves aside the empty containers of death she's just consumed. She rests her head against the rough bark and closes her eyes. Images of her life flash before her, scattered and fleeting. She sees the first time she met Harry, when she was 10 years old at King's Cross. She remembers when he saved her in the Chamber of Secrets, she sees Ron, Hermione, Mum and Daddy, Bill, Charlie, Percy . . . Fred, George, Neville, Dean . . . they all appear in flashes to Ginny. They're all dead, but she knows she's on her way to join them. That thought is what carries Ginny into death.
Life is short,
But this time it was bigger
Than the strength she had to get up off her knees.
We found her with her face down in the pillow,
Clinging to his picture for dear life.
We laid her next to him beneath the willow,
While the angels sang a whiskey lullaby.
La la la la la la la
La la la la la la la.