It didn’t seem possible. He had been standing before her merely five minutes ago, but now he was gone. She stared up at the empty archway. He had mentioned voices, but there was no sound. Someone was holding her, pulling her arm, calling for her to run, but she couldn’t move. Where had he gone? Where had Sirius gone? Why weren’t they coming back? Time seemed to trickle down her face - sticky, like blood.
The bed creaked beneath her as she sat up. Beside her, Dean muttered in his distant slumber. She reached out and pressed her cold hand against his sweaty back. He moaned. Ginny licked her lips and slid quietly off the bed. Slipping on her chemise, which lay discarded at the foot of their bed, she stood silently watching Dean for a while, wondering what she would say if he awakened.
She decided that she didn’t know, and that she didn’t really care, either, and so walked from the room and through to the lounge. Her wine glass sat unwashed on the coffee table and she picked it up, carrying it through to the kitchen. She uncorked a new bottle and poured herself another glass. It was Greek. Everything was Greek. The furniture, the house, the village—they were all Greek. They did not know anyone here, but that was the entire point, of course. It was a new life, a life away from the terror of Britain, the terror of Voldemort.
Ginny closed her eyes as the images of her dead family drifted slowly before her. This was not how she had imagined how life would turn out. She did not ever think that such darkness would ever return. Her life had been simple, and she had thought her life would always be simple. It was what she liked, what she wanted. But Voldemort had returned, and he had killed Dumbledore, her family, and Hermione, and Luna. Only she had managed to escape. Only she had managed to make her way to Europe with Dean and Neville. Everything was Greek.
She stepped up towards the arch. Pain shot through her leg, and vomit rose up her throat, hot and sour, deathly sweet. Someone screamed her name, but she continued anyway. There was a crash behind her, a strangled cry. Her hands stretched out toward the crumbling stone, and she gasped. It was so cold. Her fingers flinched away from the stone, and suddenly there was a warmth at her back, a hand on her shoulder, firmly guiding her back towards nothing.
That night seemed so long ago. She remembered the last look on his face. So hard, so broken. His lips curled into a scream, his forehead crinkled with shocked confusion. She remembered watching him struggle against Lupin’s grip, watched as he ran towards the empty arch. He had seemed to hesitate as he reached it, but perhaps that was the beauty of hindsight? She wanted to believe he had thought of all he would leave behind. She wanted to think he had known how much death that choice would cause. She wanted to think he had thought of her, of all their possibilities. But that was a teenage dream, a teenage crush, a teenage hope that had been lost at the age of fifteen, sixteen or seventeen. She did not know.
Dumbledore’s Army seemed like so long ago now as Ginny sat at a Greek table drinking Greek wine with her naked husband lying meters away in a Greek bed. Those thoughts of adventure, those thoughts of epic duels and fighting to the death were a distorted photographic negative that had never been developed. She sometimes thought it would be easier to Obliviate herself, forget everything, truly start anew. But then, their faces would come to her, his face would come to her, and she would cry instead.
Why didn’t he know? Why didn’t he realise that no one could come back from behind the veil? She was angry now. Her sorrow always seemed to slowly slip into anger—anger at Harry. He had been so selfish. He had been so absorbed in his own grief that he hadn’t been able to consider all the grief his own death would cause.
It was the beginning of the end. Life as she had known it seemed to fall seamlessly apart into broken lives. As each day dawned, the darkness that seeped across the country grew heavier and heavier, until there was nothing left. The thought of uninterrupted summer days at the Burrow—flying with her brothers, eating boiled plums in the kitchen with her parents—became nothing more than a pain in her stomach.
Dreams flickered past like dust, and Ginny reached out as if to grab them. How dare he alter her life so? She could have had him. She knew that, given time, she could have had him and everything the world could offer her. Merlin, it hurt so much.
And yet how could she be angry with him when here she was, twenty years old, drunk, and still thinking about the boy she had never known to love? How easy it would be to just walk through that veil. To escape everything. To see her family again. She could not be angry with him, when she would do the exact same thing given the chance. A balmy breeze issued from an open window, doing nothing to quell the heat she felt rising from her skin.
She was lost. There was something at her back, in her lungs, that pressed down upon her heart. She had never known him. She had never held him. She had only ever wanted him, and now he was gone. Those possibilities, those dreams of an eleven-year old girl had been cut from existence. They were gone. She could never get them back. The future had simply ceased to be.
It was like a recurring dream - only real, an alternate memory, a way to dull the pain. Her days offered nothing. Each morning, she longed for the night when she could escape Dean’s suffocating caress and pretend to die. The world held no family for her—no mother, no father, no brothers or friends. The world held no Harry. She immersed herself in the old nightmare, always waiting, waiting for the release.
Dean’s breathing could still be heard through the wall, and so Ginny poured herself another glass. This was her fifth in five hours. The haze before her eyes shifted as she leant forward. She closed her eyes without taking a sip, leant back into the chair and thought about the arch. She always did.
She watched herself walking up to the cold stone arch, stretching out her fingers and touching—touching what? She watched as she moved closer, as no one came to lead her away, as no hand touched her shoulder, as no voice called her from the deep darkness. She watched as she stepped though the veil.
Through The Veil by the opaleye
Story Notes:
Thank you to my wonderful beta, Apurva/DracoGurlFurever.
This was written as an extension to a drabble I wrote in the SBBC. The suicide warning is merely a precaution - it is implied briefly and is not graphic.
Chapter Endnotes: Thank you for reading. If you have the time to leave a review then I would really appreciate your thoughts.