Visions of the Apocalypse : Fractured Reality
"I hate this place."
"I don't believe you, of course," he replied calmly. The bitterness of her voice was nothing compared to what it had been only one month before, but it was still ringing in the room. "You hate the situation you find yourself in, but not this place."
She sighed deeply, but did not leave her self-embrace whilst sitting upon the window sill, her eyes still looking out into the eternal and unending brilliance of a noon-time sun reflected across crashing waves. "I'd be happier if you wouldn't be right so much," she finally muttered. "They are back there, dying, and there's nothing we can do to help them."
"True," he said after a moment. She was not looking for pity or sympathy or comfort. She was still looking for revenge, for some way to get back to heal the ones she had left behind however involuntarily it may have happened. "But you have to remember that a time is coming when we will be able to help them."
"Why not now?" It was the plaintive whine of a five year old, and he could see a vision of her at home, a skinned knee, crocodile tears from shock more than the trifling pain that being knocked down may have caused. "Why do we have to let them die if we can do something about it from this side?"
"Ginevra, the time is not right. We are not allowed to do more than we already are."
"I've never liked that name. I especially didn't like it when my brothers called me that, Percy. As happy as I am to see you, you're not winning any points from me right now."
He laughed for a moment, remembering the verbal or physical alterations that had dotted their family life. As much as he knew she was secretly longing for those days to be upon them again, he had to admit he did as well. There were so many things he would choose to do differently. "Noted, Ginny, noted."
"So who decides when the time is right?" Her anger was gone for the moment, even the bitterness was muted. A warm breeze billowed the white translucent curtains, the tang of salt sharp in the air.
"For you, or for us in general?"
She turned away from the embrasure, rising to her feet and joining him at the table. "It sounds like you're going to finally tell me something," she said while dropping gracefully into the chair opposite him. "I've only been asking for weeks. Unfortunately, I don't understand your question."
"Ginny," he hesitated briefly, wondering how he wound up with the task of covering the basics of her new reality. She did have other brothers here, ones she had been closer to when in that other place. "I will try to explain, but you'll need to be a little patient with me. All right?"
"All right."
Percy took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "The Mind Healers tell me you have started to make progress in your sessions, and their judgment is what has been keeping you restricted to this floor of the castle. Remember, you're still alive. Like everyone else that has been rescued from that place over time, it's very . . . hard . . . to adjust to being free. Your mind was struggling under the effects of torture, and years of living in fear of your life, not to mention the fighting. You simply weren't safe to be around, not for yourself or for others."
Ginny nodded along with his words, and he knew that the Mind Healers had told her similar things before. The repetition changed little, but her arms returned to the their prior position of a tight self-embrace.
Percy tried hard to ignore the slight tremor in a muscle on her neck. "We cannot simply return and fight a grand battle to reclaim our homes, Ginny. We can't even go back to spy on them. Voldemort's servants have found a way to create a drug that acts much like the Imperius, and they have had it introduced into the Muggle food supplies. That's why whenever the resistance would stage raids, any Muggles would immediately report the presence of strangers in the area. They have no will of their own anymore, they're useful only as highly trained monkeys for his Empire. When you add that to their surveillance systems that literally blanket the land, well, these were part of the reason behind the resistance almost always losing."
Ginny waved one hand, dismissing casually all of the things he knew she was aware of. "Percy, the whole world would just have to stand up and occupy the place. Why can't we just do that?"
"You can't just take over entire regions. Let's start with the first step. Each place has to have it's monitoring network severed, and almost simultaneously that region must be placed under an area-wide Fidelius. Once it's isolated, only the people inside are a serious danger – any military members or Empire Magicians. The rest are merely hostages to the few we must defeat. Second . . . let me ask it this way. You've heard of the Hebrides?"
Ginny looked a bit puzzled, but she slowly nodded her head anyway. "Of course. You were with us on the mission to try to reach the Outer Hebrides, remember? There was nothing there, it's just a myth."
They had desperately been looking for a new place for the resistance to be located. The thought was getting away from the mainland, with the ever-increasing observation cameras and magical scrying posts make it too dangerous to even get food for the safe areas. They had sent a team out to explore the vast Hebrides islands, hoping to find some place they could set up a quasi-permanent base. There had been nothing there – no islands, no boats, nothing. It was as if the common lore and suggestions of maps that something should be there were like the lost city of Atlantis, merely legend.
"Yes," Percy replied with a sigh, "you still think they're a myth – they're actually the first territory that the ICW reclaimed by this method of 'subdivide and Fidelius hide.' They discovered that the mind-control compounds in the food of the Empire are a very complex mixture of potions and drugs that double as a poison when they are no longer consumed. Most of the population died before they could work out the problem. It's a marvel that only a true Potions Master prodigy could have created."
"So . . . they found a cure? For the people living in the Hebrides?"
"Yes and no." Percy paused to study the table top at length. "It's very hard to make the complete cure, and takes a long time to purge from the bodies of the people in an area. That's why it took years to reclaim the Hebrides. They've been working on a new solution, leaving the poison in place but removing the mind-control aspects, and the rumor is that it's finally ready and in sufficient quantity to be useful. As long as everyone keeps eating their normal fare, they'll live – but they'll at least be able to think for themselves again."
Ginny remained silent for a time. He looked up when her hand took his, gently but firmly closing her small fingers around his. "So is that where we are now? The Hebrides?"
"No, no, far from it," he offered with a faint smile. "It's far too warm for there. We're somewhere in the Carribean, but I don't know precisely the location."
Ginny squeezed his hand briefly, then released it and stood up. She strode back to the giant window she spent so much of her time in, and resumed her perch while keeping her eyes on the vista beyond. He knew she would not be happy to hear about how idle everyone was relative to what she thought they should be doing, but there were so many problems that with his months of freedom he had only just barely begun to understand the tapestry outside of his former life. Her voice brought his focus back to the here and now, however. "So we're supposed to just sit back and nibble our way across Britain? Everyone will be dead by then!"
"We really have very little choice. We can't exactly reach the resistance. You know they live under Fidelius as well, constantly moving and changing Secret Keepers. It's the only reason the resistance is still functioning at all."
Ginny shot up again, her face flushed and her anger once more at the front. He could see her shaking slightly in her fury, but he understood it perfectly. He had been saying similar things when he had been in her shoes. Her voice, unlike her face, was like ice. "But Ron is back there! And Hermione, and Kingsley, and--"
"I know, and I'm sorry," he offered with his hands held up, palm out. "I'm just the messenger, remember? There's a reason they work the way they do right now. They've broken into the Empire's communications system, Ginny. That's how we know when to rescue people. We can't go too early, as the Empire Inquisitors conduct the interrogations. But as soon as they leave, we rescue everyone we can. We're just not able to spare anyone the horror of the interrogation, or else the Empire would start taking more notice to what's going on. They think the resistance keeps rescuing people, and have no idea we're even here. The bodies that are found are the ones we leave behind, the ones that don't survive the interrogations."
"Why does taking back our home have to be done so slowly, then? If they have this new cure thing?"
"Well, there are two problems. The first is that we have to completely secure each area we take back. That's going to be taking a tremendous amount of resources. We have to counter the brainwashing, the indoctrination, and make sure the people are safe – they aren't Empire agents in disguise, or Empire sympathizers. The True Believers are fanatics, and they would risk anything to spread their beliefs to the rest of the world."
"What's the second, then?"
"Each area has to be covered inch by inch by a team of curse breakers. I don't know what they're looking for, but they take down every magical ward, every construct, everything they find or dig up or bring down from the sky. They've dismantled Fidelius properties, they've scoured caves and pits, and done things that just the stories of scare me. As I understand it, until each area is finished and approved, we're not going to be allowed to take the next one."
"Why?"
"I don't know." Percy shrugged, for this is one question he had been asking ever since he had found out the procedure. No one, absolutely no one could or would tell him why. It was incredibly frustrating. "All I know is that I now work for Sirius Black, he's the head of the information gathering network. I interview all the survivors to find out what we don't know, or what's changed. It's very dangerous to go directly into the Empire for any reason at all, so it's our first line of preparation."
"So who will I work for?"
"Well, you'll probably be given a choice. Every survivor is offered a new home in a new nation, a large compensation package, and freedom. You don't have to do anything at all anymore. But you should know that the Statute of Secrecy is over. The Muggles know all about magic now." That had surprised him when he found out about it, but in hindsight, Voldemort had already torn down that barrier inside of his home. Why should he be surprised that the rest of the world did the same? Particularly when threatened by such evils as the Empire might unleash?
"What's the choice? Freedom or what?"
"Given that you were a top strike team member and excellent fighter, they'll probably offer to let you join the magical military combat forces. You'd probably end up working somewhere in Remus Lupin's group, he's laying out the groundwork for how to take back Scotland."
"So . . . Black and Lupin? They're the ones calling the shots?"
"Ah, no. Not really." Percy offered a wan smile, knowing how much she would hate what he was about to tell her. "The ICW is running things, but the delegations of power and hierarchies of power are rather hard to work out."
"Fucking politicians." She was almost hissing and spitting in her disgust at what he knew she would hate. The politicians of the Ministry had at first been in denial, then they tried to compromise, then they tried to react, but it was too late – they were already dead. "I can't take freedom. Not when all I can see are mum and dad, or Bill, or all the others. But I almost can't stand the idea of being told by some moron what to do."
"For the most part. Not always."
Her head spun around to lock gazes with him. "What do you mean?"
"Well, as just one example that doesn't follow the pattern, there's a modest sized group that is very secretive based out of this facility. I have no idea what they do, but they seem to be able to tell anyone else to change what they're doing for some reason – and can tell the ICW to bugger off. They seem to be a mix of curse breakers, fighters, and information analysts. But those are some of the most ferocious wizards and witches I've ever heard of – they make the standard fighting groups look like a group of half-trained adolescents."
He knew that her interest would be captivated by the idea of being able to both do something and tell others to get out of her way. She never had much patience for jumping through hoops when she could see the objective in her own mind. "How do you get into that group?"
"I've heard it's by invitation only."
"So? Who do I need to impress, who runs that group?"
"Harry Potter."
A/N:
No betas were used in this work. This entire arc thread is very low priority, so any expectation of updates should be correspondingly low.