Author's Note: More of Ginny's ponderings. Ponderings and feelings that no one has ever felt before. Ever. And no, she's not just going through a phase. Of course not. ;-)
Heavy on description and internal reflection, short on action or dialogue. More of those two soon.
The entrance hall, this place of thought and clouded atmosphere, has but one window: this window faces west. Only in the evenings can anyone not kin to the hall itself find kinship in the light that makes it in this window, thin and whitened at all other times. The hall comes alive now, and its birth happens like this:
There is nothing but the dark floor, the paneled walls, and above them a cobwebbed chandelier that could almost have been elegant. Nothing changes in the room except that one moment there is nothing, and the next there is a spot of golden liquid on the floor. Directly beneath the window, along the wall, glare on cold dimension stone makes the floor asymmetric. Half closer to one side wall than the other. The liquid gold expands, and migrates, away from the paneling of the wall, across the silver-gray rug where it turns orange. Now a shaft of the same stuff – golden and orange, depending on the side of it you're watching – forms between the window and the spot, which has turned itself into a moving semi-circle. Oh-so-slow.
At times Ginny watches this metamorphosis and journey for what it really is. At times she narrates to herself: there is a spot of sunlight on the floor, and as the sun gets lower in the sky it makes the sunbeam move. The sun's light catches on motes of dust. Those sparkling signs of domestic neglect, decades' worth. But whichever way she watches it, it still proceeds the same. That always surprises her.
But this means nothing because next the hall enters the final stages of birth, and the golden orange shaft, sunbeam, what-have-you catches the chandelier. Brass it is called, this thing that reflects and infects the light, newly brass-colored, into every corner of the hall. Brass and crystal, little rainbows in arcs across the floor. The walls will have none of this nonsense, and insist on showing only the golden light.
And occasionally, yes, a door will open and deposit someone into the middle of this nativity. Someone who will blink in the light, or smile at the rainbows, or remember they had something else to do and go back into the kitchen. And occasionally, someone will come out and take Ginny's eyes away from the hall itself, as Albus Dumbledore does today. He walks out into the hall and Ginny sees the glare of light on his spectacles – twin fires, and he might be blinking behind them or not. Vague surprise filters into her mind – he must have arrived very early this morning to have escaped her notice. She watches now, as he strides to the middle of the hall, dead-center on the rug that her mother laid down. He looks up at the window and smiles: and Ginny watches more closely.
Albus Dumbledore turns his wrinkled face from the window, around the walls and straight to Ginny. He gives a solemn little wave, and Disapparates before the girl can decide whether or not he knew she was there all along, or if she had moved, or if the sunbeam, now climbing up the far paneled wall, should really have caught his glasses at the angle it did.
But it was his solemnity that puzzled Ginny the most.
He's always cheerful with students, Ginny thought, even here at the Order where we're good for nothing. Perhaps it was tongue-in-cheek.
Either way, the sunbeam was climbing the ceiling now and she'd lost all interest in the hall. As happened from time to time.
With an effort of arms and legs, Ginny wriggled out from her hidden niche. Standing brought a cacophony of popping joints – ankles, knees, hips – that told her she'd been sitting for longer than she'd realized. But again, no matter. Further down the second-floor hallway Ginny entered the room that she and Hermione shared. Like everything else at 12 Grimmauld Place, it was depressing until one got used to it. Ginny had long since accepted the room, not so much because there was no improving it (which there wasn't), as because it belonged to the place she occupied this summer. Atmosphere, or what-have-you. She flopped down on the bed.
The bed. Ginny wasn't sure yet if that fact was welcome or unwelcome to her. Or even if she wanted it to be welcome. Black (what else?) quilt, black canopy. Graying carpet on the floor that might have once been white. Windows letting in some light. A full-length mirror on the far wall. Ginny was in front of it before she realized she was moving toward it, gazing at her reflection.
Silly, she thought. I always hate remembering how vain I am.
Just enough of a figure for it to give her a sense of inane and unearned pride. Still, and probably always, her face was spotted with freckles. Ginny ran back to the bed, making a dive for the center. She hit it, and rolled over on her back. Spontaneity: one of her virtues.
Not that anything she'd done since entering the room had any meaning. That was reserved for days at the entrance hall, though really those shouldn't have counted either.
The world is no stranger to melancholy women-children and men-children. They are forever climbing the hills, up and away from the plain of the world, its grass and hummocks. Away from fellow children, men-children, men. Every single quest to this high path is the first and only the world has ever seen, every crusader the first to find this thinner grass, packed-dirt path, sunken lake, which overlooks all they have ever known.
A dream settles over, has already settled over the woman-child – mildness, uncertainty, wonder. How to explain it? This wonderful frightening place she finds herself has never been visited by another.
She is outside of time and mortality here, dipping her toes in the water of the sunken lake.