It's funny, of all the times in my past I thought I was going to be an outlaw for something I did, I never thought I would become one for something I did not do.

What I'm about to write over these next few pages is my story and it's going to cover a couple different topics. But, mainly, this is about loss. I think I can say, with some confidence, that I'm a bit of an expert on the subject at this point. Before I was even a year old, I lost my parents. Everyone knows that story, so excuse me for not rehashing any of that. Just to illustrate my point, however, I will point out that at fourteen, I watched a friend die, the real Hogwarts champion of the Triwizard Cup, Cedric Diggory. At fifteen, I lost the only family I had left, my godfather Sirius Black. A year later, at sixteen, I lost someone I really looked up to and had a tremendous amount of respect for, Albus Dumbledore. Another year later, at seventeen, I lost many close friends in the battle at Hogwarts. After all of that, I guess I convinced myself that that was where it would end.

Today, I experienced another loss. Experience doesn't help it get any easier to cope with. This one was a real blow, I won't even try to deny that, and there's so many things I could say about her. She was many things throughout her life. A daughter and a sister, a mother and an inspiration, a little scary at times, and one hell of a quidditch player. But, above all, she was my wife.

This is going to be difficult to retell, but I don't know if i'll get the chance to explain all of this myself, so i'm going to write all of this down while I still can. I loved Ginny and, no matter what you read in the Prophet, I did not do those things they are saying about me. I can't promise i'll be able to explain every detail, some of this is hard to put into words, but i'll do my best. To help make this a little easier for me, I'm going to switch perspectives a bit and write all of this like it's just characters in a story. Even if that couldn't be farther from the truth.

1

I- er- Harry couldn't say he'd ever looked at Ginny and felt anything but happy, but lately, some odd behavior from her had caused some friction in their marriage. Something about her was just off, and his concern for her hadn't yielded many favorable results. If anything, it widened the rift growing between them.

The night it all started, the first one he was aware of anyway, he had been woken up in the dead hours of night. It was storming, hard, but that wasn't what had disturbed him. He had always slept extremely well on rainy nights and especially so during storms. It was odd for him to have even been awoken during a storm like this at all. But it took him only a couple waking moments to sense why, something was wrong.

Fumbling around in the dark, Harry's fingers searched through the sheets for the warmth of his wife. As always, his first priority when he suspected danger was his family's safety. James, Albus, and Lily were away at school, completely safe in their beds in their dormitories at Hogwarts. But, Ginny? He wanted to feel her to reassure himself that she too was safe. But his fingers couldn't find her. Her side of the bed, where she should have been, was abandoned. The sheets weren't even warm. It felt frigid cold to him.

Harry sat up then, a sense of dread beginning to seep into his stomach. He tried to look around for her, temporarily forgetting about his awful eyesight, but he saw nothing but black. It was a darkness so complete, if felt supernatural.

"Ginny?" He called into the void that was their bedroom. He waited for her to respond, but no one spoke back to him. He reached under his pillow and grabbed his wand. After all these years, he was still sleeping with his wand under his pillow. This was just something he hadn't been able to sleep without doing. Alastor Moody's words still came back to him at times like this. Constant vigilance.

"Lumos," Harry spoke, holding up his wand. A ball of milky white light bloomed out of the end, illuminated the room around him, and the shadows shrank back into their corners. Colors swam and swirled in front of Harry's eyes. He felt around for his glasses on his bedside table, felt them, made to grab them, and accidentally knocked them over the edge. He swore as they clattered to the floor.

Heart thumping, Harry threw back the covers and jumped out of bed. Ducking down to the floor, he searched blindly for his glasses. They should have been right there on the floor where they'd fallen, but it was like they were simply gone. He could have cast a summoning charm, but he couldn't see to catch them and it would likely just send them flying across the room to shatter and he had never been good at repairing charms.

Feeling rather ridiculous, he lay down on his chest and reached under the bed, scooting forward an inch at a time. He fully expected them to be just out of his reach, but his fingers finally found the round shapes. He gripped them, feeling slightly relieved, and pulled them back. He was backing up on his elbows when he heard something that startled him. It was like, something heavy landing in water. He froze and waited to hear it again but it didn't come. The quiet settled back in around him.

Then another sound hit him. It was like a growl, one he'd never heard before. Feeling on edge, this startled him and he quickly moved to stand up. His head slammed into the bed frame with a thump that sounded ground shattering against the silence. White pain lanced forward through Harry's head, making his eyes well up. He swore again, several times actually, then backed up on his elbows some more, making sure he was clear of the bed this time. Only when he was sure he wasn't going to crack his head again, he got to his feet, and put his glasses on. He blinked several times as everything finally came into focus.

His wand had gone out while he was reaching for his glasses, but he didn't need it anymore. There was a light creeping across the floor. It was coming from behind the bedroom door. He wondered how he could have missed that, but that was the least of his concerns right now.

Picking his wand back up, he rushed across the room, opened the door, and stepped out into the hallway of their two-story home. The hallway went the length of the home before curving to the left where the staircase to the first story was. The hallway light was on, but no others were. No others except for one at the end. That was the bathroom, the one the kids shared. As he looked at the door, he heard that sound again. Now that he was closer, he realized it wasn't a growl. It was a retch.

"Ginny?" He called again. There was still no response, but he heard several coughs. Mounting concern tightening his throat, Harry walked down the length of the hallway, gripped the door handle, and opened the door.

She was in there. On her knees, her skin was a ghost white pale, a sheen of sweat on her forehead. Almost on queue when he stepped into the room, her head fell forward over the toilet bowl and he heard her retch again. Hearing the sound of sick landing in the bowl, Harry set his wand down and crouched down beside her. Having had three kids with this woman, this wasn't the first time he'd seen her like this. It was odd that she had crossed the house to the hall bathroom instead of their own, but his first instinct was to help her, not question her. He reached to hold her hair back when she was sick like this, but before he had even put a hand on her, her voice, weak and ragged, choked out, "Don't."

Harry's hand paused in mid air, hovering just over her shoulder. "Is. . . Is everything okay?" Harry asked her gently, "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, Harry." Ginny mumbled weakly, reaching up and grabbing hold of the toilet paper, "Just give me some space." She ripped off part of it, and wiped her mouth off. She let it fall into the bowl and flushed away the entire contents.

Although she had asked him to give her space, Harry felt compelled to stay with her. He watched her prop her elbows against the seat and rest her head on her open palms. Her breathing was deliberate and steady. Clearly, she was attempting to fight off another wave of nausea.

Seeing her hunched over like that, it reminded Harry of the last time he'd seen this particular scene. Ginny had spent half the night dry heaving, never getting more than bile up, but the nausea was terrible for her. The pinched nerve in her back, the one she'd got from a back injury during her Quidditch days, had only made it worse.

Moving quietly, he found a washcloth, turned on a gentle flow of cool water from the sink, and held the cloth under it until it was soaked through. After wringing out the excess water, Harry crouched back down beside Ginny, lifted the back of her shirt up to her lower back, and pressed the cloth to the skin there. She was feverishly hot to the touch and she jumped a little bit at the sudden cold, but Harry felt the tense muscles begin to relax beneath his fingers.

For several minutes, they stayed that way and Harry was almost certain that her sickness had passed. The worst of it, at least. Her breaths were coming steadily more and more relaxed. She leaned in to him more and more and he was certain she was going to fall asleep and he'd be carrying her back to their bed.

"Something's coming." Ginny mumbled, her voice sounding like a whisper from a tomb, barely even audible. The rain pattering against the window drowned her words out though. That's when a deep and angry rumbling gurgled it's way from Ginny's stomach and she sat up stiffly.

"Ginny?" Harry prodded, seeing the worried expression on her face. She looked back at him, but wouldn't meet his gaze. Her eyes were vacant and empty, staring off into somewhere only she could see. What little color had come back to her face quickly drained out of it again. Outside, the rain was coming down harder. It was battering the pane of glass in the window now.

"Something's coming," Ginny said again, her voice barely holding the words together, "very. . . very close now."

"What's coming?" Harry asked, his lips becoming a thin straight line, "What is it, Ginny?"

"I don't -" Ginny started to say, but she wrapped her arms around her middle and hunched over. Thunder boomed overhead so loud, he felt it through the floor. Ginny then let out a sharp cry that was silenced by a tremendous crack of lightning. There weren't many on to begin with, but all the lights in the house died in that same instant.

Alarm bells ringing in his head, Harry stood up and picked up his wand. Something weird was happening and he had a bad feeling about it. It was like a heavy stone had just fallen into his stomach. Now that everything had gone dark, it was all strangely quiet again. The rain was still coming down hard, but otherwise, it was silent.

"Harry, it's-" Ginny said, each word sounding like a huge effort. Harry turned back to her and put a hand on her again, just to feel her there in the dark. Heat radiated off of her so intensely, he felt certain she was in immediate need of medical attention. A hot hand reached out and found his through the dark just in time for another lightning strike. This one was so bright that, for a split second, it became daylight and the face Harry saw was not the one of his wife. Shadows etched themselves into her pale, colorless features, contorting it into a completely different and sinister face.

"It's here." Ginny said when darkness descended once again. Her voice sounding far and distant, as if through a void.

Half a heartbeat later, before Harry could even open his mouth to respond to her, there were three very loud bangs from downstairs. He bolted upright and tightened his grip on his wand. Ginny's feeble and hot fingers tried to hold on to him, but his hand slid away from hers without a fight.

"Stay here, Ginny." Harry said, taking two steps out of the bathroom and into the hall then turning to look back, "Lock this door behind me. I'm gonna. . . " But he didn't know what he was going to do, so he let his words trail off and he closed the door. He hadn't been able to see if Ginny had acknowledged anything he'd said, but only a few seconds after he shut the door, he heard a small click from behind the door and felt a measure of relief.

He tapped the door handle with his wand, attempting to unlock the door with a stronger spell than the one he'd learned in his first year. It was a test of the security spells they had placed on every door of the house and he was pleased that, despite the years that had passed since they'd placed them, the spells still held strong. Ginny was safe.

Instead of using the Lumos spell to light the way down the stairs, Harry put his back to the wall, bent slightly over the handrail, and felt his way down each step. Lumos was a useful spell, but it had the drawback of being a light attached to his wand and, if there really was danger, it was better to not give away where he was. He'd only ever seen one wizard throw the light from their wand one time before and that was Dumbledore. That man had been full of impressive tricks like that.

After the first five steps, he was on the first landing where they turned a full ninety degrees. From here it was another five steps to the second landing where they made another ninety degree turn and then five more steps to the first story. Harry was halfway down the staircase when he heard the bangs again. They were louder this time, much louder and they were coming from the front door. Someone, or something, was knocking on the door to get in.

Where's the cannon? He remembered stupidly, dragging up a memory from another lifetime.

From the bottom of the staircase, the front door was immediately to the left. Anyone entering the building would be greeted with the wide entrance with it's warm colors of hardwood flooring, the cream colored carpeted staircase to the right, and the living room in the back. The kitchen and dining room were in a unique space that was behind the staircase. The realtor that had sold them this place had explained that the designer had wanted to keep the eyes focused on the more appealing and welcoming entrance that led straight to the comfortable atmosphere of the living room space. The staircase was given a second turn at the bottom so that the way to the other rooms could be hidden away out of eyesight.

It was a bit much for his taste, having had enough of all that while living with the Dursleys, but Ginny loved it. So they put down their offer and won the place outright.

Now he stood at the bottom of the stairs facing the door, his wand held up at the ready. The knocks that were really bangs came again, but this time they kept on hammering the door in slow, even, thunderous blows. Bang. . . Bang. . . Bang. . . Bang. . .

Barefoot and wearing nothing but his bed clothes, Harry crossed to the door completely silently, even though it was hardly necessary anymore. He pressed his eye to the peephole to see who or what was at his door but he couldn't see anything. Whether that was because the lightning had killed the power to the entire street or because of some other means, he couldn't be sure. All he saw on the other end was pure, impenetrable, blackness.

"Alright, that's enough!" Harry shouted in order to be heard over the banging racket. At any second now the door was probably going to break into splinters if it didn't stop. His words had no effect. The bangs continued on.

"I said, that's enough!" He yelled again, louder this time. But, still nothing.

Frustrated, Harry reached for the door handle and the second his fingers gripped it, the bangs came to a sudden stop. He turned the lock, pulled open the door, and held out his wand defensively. He wasn't sure what to expect to see, but it wasn't anything like what he did see. It was nothing. There was nothing there.

Disbelievingly, he took a step outside the door and looked around. The rain was pouring down in sheets, thick heavy drops soaked his clothes within seconds, but there was not a single living thing standing at his doorstep. He looked at his door and was baffled to see no sign of damage at all. It was like the pounding he'd just heard it receive had never happened.

He walked out to the road and looked both ways, peering down the dark street in both directions, squinting through the rainfall to try and spot some kind of moving shape. Was this someone's idea of a joke?

Seeing nothing, he lowered his wand, and turned to go back inside. That's when he heard the unmistakable sound of shattering glass. His heart stopped inside his chest when the high-pitched scream followed the crash.

"Ginny!" He yelled, running back to the door. He ran as fast as he could back inside and leaped up the stairs three at a time. His drenched clothes left puddles of water on the hardwood flooring and soaked into the carpet, but he didn't even notice. His heart was beating against his chest now as he tried to open the bathroom door, forgetting he'd told her to lock it.

"Open the door," He could hear her crying on the other side, "Come on, Ginny. I need you to open up!" It was a battle to fight back the panic and keep his voice steady.

"Harry, it's . . ." Ginny's voice broke and fumbled over her words that were thick with tears.

"Please, just open the door. It's me." He begged.

"It's awful," she spluttered, but then there was a soft metallic click, and the door swung open.

"Lumos," Harry said, holding up his wand and immediately scanned the room for his wife. He found her hugging her knees to her chest, pressed into a corner of the room as far away from the window as she could get. The window, he barely acknowledged, was completely blown in. Broken glass littered nearly the entire tile floor. Ginny had her wand in her hand and had it pointed somewhere between the toilet and the bathtub where seemingly nothing was. Once he entered the room, she looked at him, and let her wand clatter to the floor.

"Harry, it's a. . . " She choked, like she couldn't quite fight the right word. Harry pushed his wet hair out of his eyes and crouched down beside her, putting a comforting hand that she didn't even notice on her shoulder. She was still radiating heat like a furnace, her hair hanging in wet tendrils in front of her eyes, but she didn't seem to notice. Her eyes were wraithlike in the light from his wand, but they were fixed on the same point where her wand had been pointed.

"It's a letter. . . for you."

Taken aback, Harry followed her eyes to the point between the toilet and bathtub. The shattered glass glittered against the light from his wand but there was something else there. A dark colored liquid covered much of the broken glass and covered the wall in a grisly domed pattern, and smeared down to the floor. Harry recognized it at once as blood and laying on the floor, horribly, still twitching, was a black feathered raven. It's small head was a complete ruin and attached to one of it's unnaturally bent legs was a letter. Scribbled across the face was two words. Harry Potter.

He wasn't sure what to do with the bird, it was clearly dead from flying through the window and colliding with the wall, but it was still stomach churning to see it's body still twitching. After taking the letter from the bird, he decided the best he could do right now was to throw a towel over it.

"Read it," Ginny managed to say through her deliberate breaths again. It sounded as though her nausea had returned. No doubt because of the dead raven and the smell of it's blood that was quickly filling the room. "Read what it says," She repeated, more firmly, "What kind of messenger sends a raven to kill itself?"

"Uh," Harry began, wondering the very same thing as he unfolded the letter. It had no envelope or seal, all it was was just a crudely folded piece of parchment, but once he straightened out the paper, he began reading out loud so Ginny could hear.

"Mr. Potter, I'm sorry to have disturbed what looked like a very deep and restful sleep,"

Harry looked up from the letter at Ginny, feeling deeply disturbed, "We're being watched." This unsettled him too much to take notice that Ginny had begun to crawl toward him.

"Keep reading." She commanded.

Harry swallowed, and continued, "-but this had to happen tonight. You see, this is just the beginning of something. Something very, very important and I do hope you take it seriously. This was just a mere demonstration of what a nuisance I can be if you don't do what I say. Your wife will be okay tonight, so don't fret. Her fever will break and her nausea will pass, but I can't promise the same next time."

"I don't have much time, so allow me to cut right to the chase here. I have in my possession something which I believe you are going to want back dearly. Likewise, you possess something of mine. Here's the long and short of it, I want what is mine and, until i get it back, you will never see her again. Await my next letter for your instructions."

"P.S. Enjoy the attached picture. It was a lot of fun and I took it just for you."

Harry's hands were shaking by time he got to the end of the letter, but he was also confused. He had no idea what this person was talking about. What did he own that wasn't rightfully his? Equally confusing was this claim that something dear to him had been taken away, and there was no attached picture. It was all extremely strange and disturbing.

"Ginny, did you understand any of-" Harry began, but Ginny cut him off.

"Harry, this is. . . this is impossible."

Harry looked down at her and saw her holding something small in her fingers, something which she was staring at so intensely, she didn't seem to have heard a word he had said. "What is it?" He asked, crouching down beside her again. The moment Harry looked closely enough at what she was holding to recognize it as a photo, the power suddenly came back on. The lights turned back on and made it impossible to mistake what the photo showed.

"This is impossible," Harry breathed, staring at it. It was a wizarding photo in which the people moved and in this particular one, he saw Ginny. She looked extremely battered, bruised and bleeding. She was pale, extremely thin, and chained up to the wall behind her. Her wrists bound together above her head. Harry's mouth went dry looking at the photo, but then he saw himself walk into frame, stand beside her, and lift his wand. The photograph Ginny recoiled away as much as she could, but the photograph Harry pressed his wand to her arm and drew a slow line across her forearm. The photograph Ginny screamed silently as a long red line opened up along the line and began to bleed.

"You're torturing me, Harry!" Ginny blurted out, dropping the photo on the floor, "That's just. . . impossible." She said shakily.

"It's not real," Harry reassured her, "It can't be. It's. . . "

They both heard the sound of feathered wings and looked up. A gurgling croak sound, deafening in the bathroom, came from another raven that had appeared. At first, Harry thought it was another raven, but this one was still untangling itself from a towel. Harry watched it look at him, shake it's head, sending blood flying from it's feathers, and then took off and flew out the window.

"Impossible," Harry finished. What could be more impossible than seeing a dead bird get up and fly away like it hadn't just crushed it's head and neck by flying through a window and into a wall?

"A lot of impossible things happening tonight," Ginny managed to groan just before she leaned over the toilet again, retching up a fresh wave of sickness.