The infinite susurration in my ears coupled to a warm, sweet breeze were the two tangible things that reached my brain first. These were rapidly followed by impressions of soft warmth, through cocooned textures, and I found myself in an alien surseance – a tranquil island that was so far beyond what my brain could ever recall experiencing that I knew at once that I was dead. Life was not about comfort, life offered no tranquility.

The last images kept flashing through my skull – fleeting moments of death eaters, torture, and a dementor. A brilliant green flash took it all away abruptly, the memories over. There, my logic asserts itself, is where I died.

And yet I remain calm, relaxed. I feel safe, something that I know I have not felt in many, many years. Of course, in death it is hard not to be safe or secure, for there is no outcome that I must fear. As the once-great Dumbledore told us before he was struck down, death is but the next great adventure.

To be honest, it is all but impossible for me not to feel like my next great adventure has to be an improvement. Either that or I was a real psychopath in my prior life to be paying a penance of this magnitude.

I was surprised when I finally opened my eyes. The room was bright, full of sunshine from the great open windows. I was in a king-sized, four-poster bed, wrapped in pristine white sheets and blankets and surrounded by dark cherry posts. The breeze was ceaselessly stirring translucent white netting material, encasing the bed in a false image of privacy. The entire scene struck me as absurdly idyllic, a fantasy conjured for my starting place in the adventure to come. The snort of bitter amusement at the stark contrast of the settings between life and death was as inevitable as it was not resisted, echoing about the room.

I rose up slowly, and parted the netting about the bed before standing. The large, smooth beige tiles on the floor were cool but not cold, and on contact with bare skin I could feel my toes curling. Three brisk paces took me to one of the giant windows, the doors thrown wide and a seaside vista filling my vision.

Dimly I realized that I was pain free, despite the immeasurable amount of torture I had been subjected to. The tears blurring my vision were for the beauty of the vista before me, and not for that added confirmation that the pains of mortality were past me. The air coming in was warm, smelling of the ocean in a way I could never recall from my past life. The sound of the waves smashing against the rocky outcropping at the edge of the land I could see reached my ears, and it was a discordant symphony that was all the sweeter for simply existing.

I wondered about those that I had left behind. I knew that Luna and Tonks had been captured at the same time as I had, but I had no idea of the others. Were they even now saying rites over empty graves? Or had our bodies been found, desecrated in every way possible after untold horrors were imparted before death came? I still yearned to be reunited with my parents, with my lost brothers, and I hoped deep inside that those reunions were now imminent since I had crossed the boundaries.

Standing there, looking out on a world that could not exist, I tried hard not to hate the people that abandoned us to fight alone. To not hate the ones that simply rolled over and accepted the dominion of evil. They amalgamated everything that was good and right and proper from the world, taking it all away, and left us with ashes. Promises of rescue and aid never came, and would never come for her or her friends now.

My parents had always told me that at the end of all things, you had to be able to accept the decisions you made in life before you passed on. To accept those decisions, they said, meant you had to consider the actions and words you spoke in every setting, and you had to forgive yourself. You had to embrace who you were at the time, and acknowledge the good things and the bad things equally, taking neither pride nor shame. Until you could balance yourself and truly accept yourself, you could never move peacefully into what would be waiting for you on the other side.

Standing there, hearing those waves, I could not imagine longing for my parents any more than I did at that time. I needed the comfort only they could provide, and their guidance to find some semblance of peace within myself. The fear was deep inside of me that I would be in that room for eternity, trying to come to grips with how I had lived my life. How could anyone living through such times not feel horror for what had transpired?

When all of life lay in bitter, barren lumps around you, taking the moral high road was a luxury.

I wound up sitting in that windowsill, letting the sun warm my skin and dry my tears. I hated crying like that, but I was dead – what difference would it make? I could finally let go of the image everyone else had of me, the façade I felt compelled to adhere to. At that time, in that place, I could simply be.

I tried not to justify my acts to myself, but simply place them into a model of cause and effect. I doubted my ability to truly accept some of the things I had done in the heat of battle or in the quest for information, but I had to try. I have no idea how long I was sitting there, trying to order the events of my life into some kind of pattern. It could have been minutes, it could have been years. But I was suddenly aware that I was no longer alone in my contemplation.

They stood there, watching me watch them, and I knew. They were the ultimate confirmation that I was dead.

Their bodies were never found, like so many others.

Percy. Fred. George.

Watching me, saying nothing, simply waiting. I walked to them in no rush, for the dead need not keep track of time. But I knew that the next great adventure of Ginny Weasley had only just begun.

A/N:

No betas were used in this work.