THEN
The question of where and when and why and how it started is a complicated one. It’s like this: life is a collection of moments, right? And when you’re in those moments, they all seem sort of random. But after some time has passed, you can see how each seemingly-unrelated event led you to the current moment, and it’s not all that arbitrary after all, is it? So the answer could be: it started at Christmas at Potter Manor. It could also be: it started at Hogwarts. Or, perhaps the most obvious possibility: it started at a funeral.
Let’s say it started at the funeral, though. You still need the context. Christmas at Potter Manor is important because that’s when they met for the first time. Hogwarts is important because that’s where they grew to like and understand each other as friends. As for the funeral? Context is needed there, too.
…
First thing you need to know: 2001 had been a dark year for Ginny, but 2002 was looking up.
At the time, she felt she could have devoted an entire memoir to why 2001 had been such a terrible year, but by the time 2002 rolled around she didn’t want to talk about it. So the short explanation was that in April of 2001, a severe shoulder injury ended her quidditch career, only a matter of months after it truly began. It was a tragic conclusion, but not an uncommon one in the world of professional quidditch. The shoulder had been bothering her for a while — since the middle of the previous year, probably — but as a reservist, she didn’t feel she had the luxury of resting it. She was trying to prove herself, and it didn’t hurt that badly; athletes were conditioned to push through the pain, to ignore the signals their bodies send them that something was potentially wrong. So she’d go to her workouts, and afterward, she’d take a mild pain potion and the dull ache she felt deep in the joint of her right shoulder would dissipate.
When she became a starting chaser, she told herself she’d make it through the season and then have a healer look at it. She didn’t want to risk being pulled before she had a chance to make herself invaluable. But then she tore her rotator cuff quite badly, taking a poorly-timed bludger mid-throw during a game against Montrose, and even with magic, her future mobility was at stake were she to continue playing on it. And thus, her dream ended not with a bang, but with a whimper.
She’d like to say it was an easy choice, prioritizing her ability to carry things or reach above her head in the future over finishing the quidditch season, but it wasn’t. She’d never considered what a life after quidditch might look like; she’d never had another ambition. It was professional quidditch or bust. But there she was in 2001, with no choice but to forge a different future than the one she planned and no idea where to go from there.
It was James Potter who asked her if she’d be interested in either coaching or writing about quidditch. At first, she wasn’t particularly receptive to it. James had always been kind to and supportive of her, but this particular outreach was clearly the work of her brother. And Hermione, who was, by then, his very serious girlfriend. And, of course, Harry was absolutely involved. Harry’s fingerprints were all over his father’s offer: this was what Harry did, quietly setting about fixing a problem to minimize the suffering of others.
For months, Ginny told James she wasn’t interested in either option. The Harpies were paying out her contract for the year, so she was all right financially for the time being, and both of his proposed alternatives sounded painful. In either career path, she’d be forced to watch other people live her dream. Ginny may have been a Gryffindor, but she didn’t think she was quite brave enough to do that day after day in perpetuity.
Toward the end of that summer, though, it became clear that she’d need to do something else. The checks she received from the team were limited in number, and — unlike anyone with the surname Potter — she didn’t have a massive family fortune on which to fall back. She looked inside herself, thought about what she enjoyed doing and how she might like to spend her life. After she thoroughly searched her soul, Ginny surmised that she had exactly two hobbies: quidditch and writing.
So she reached out to James Potter and asked him if he might help her break into sports reporting. He did her one better, just as he’d offered to right after the injury, using his extensive connections throughout wizarding England to land Ginny a role as a junior sports reporter at The Daily Prophet.
It was a pleasant surprise, just how much Ginny loved the job. She found that by the end of 2001, when she started covering games, watching other people play quidditch didn’t cause an ache of longing or jealousy in her chest, and it didn’t feel like a slap to her skin. In writing about quidditch, she found joy in the game again. In the years she was a reserve player, playing had become a fight; as a writer, she was able to appreciate the beauty of the game once more.
In a weird way, not being able to play quidditch allowed her the opportunity to fall in love with the sport all over again. She didn’t even realize how much she grew to resent it until she couldn’t compete any more.
So 2002 was set up to be the rainbow at the end of a difficult, unexpected storm: she had a new job that she loved, one that had better hours and gave her more time with her friends and family. The self-destructive behavior she exhibited following her injury — drinking too much, dating men who she didn’t even particularly like, staying out too late — abated, and in its place was a feeling of purpose and peace.
Everyone — friends, family, colleagues — noticed how happy she seemed in those early months of the year, when everything seemed possible and she didn’t have even an inkling of how dark things could (or, perhaps more accurately, would) turn in the months to come.
In 2002, Harry was in his final year of healer school. Which sets up the second thing you need to know: for basically the first time since he was seventeen, Harry Potter had free time. The Academy was like this, toward the end. The most senior students had quite a lot on their plate in the last year, between applying to enter the training program of their choice and the overwhelming anxiety of knowing they’d soon have actual people’s lives in their hands. So The Academy went a bit easier on them: they got to take all of the fun classes and shadow more interesting cases when they were on clinical rotations in the hospital. They weren’t laboring under the burden of the exams that plagued them throughout their previous three years at the school, and they weren’t shadowing trainees and supervising healers at the hospital at all hours of the night. And so Harry was afforded a bit of freedom, too: freedom from the rigors of training, if only for a few months, and freedom to be a normal young person who didn’t choose an onerous career path.
He hadn’t dated much during healer school. He wasn’t a monk, of course; even busy healing students needed release, and it wasn’t difficult to find women who were looking for something similarly casual to mutually satisfy that need. He’d once had romantic notions about sex — courtesy of being raised by school sweethearts who married young, and having previously only shagged his own school sweetheart himself — but his sexual escapades in healer school made his view a bit more complicated. Was sex better when you cared about your partner? Probably. Was it more pleasurable when you had more time to learn one another? Undoubtedly. But two years of practicing with Gemma made him a decent lover, and even one night stands weren’t clumsy or bad. They weren’t as good as they could be but, frankly, he had the rest of his life to find his other half. For the time being, he was willing to take what he could get in order to relentlessly pursue the goals he set for himself.
He was lonely at times, though. Sometimes, on a rare social outing, he’d look at Ron and Hermione together and feel a bit jealous of what they had: the comfortable companionship, the shared jokes, and even the light bickering they engaged in, presumably a sort of foreplay. He envied the certainty they both felt, knowing that they’d met the person they wanted to do forever with, but also that they didn’t feel much of a need to rush to happily ever after. They were young, and they had time. Harry knew all along that Gemma was never going to be that person for him, but when he laid alone in bed at night, he sometimes looked back on their relationship with fond nostalgia and wondered if maybe settling for someone with similar goals to yours wasn’t really such a bad outcome. He would quickly push that notion out of his mind — because both he and Gemma deserved better than that — but he couldn’t help that it was there sometimes.
So with his newfound free time, Harry was starting to think that maybe it was the perfect time to start dating for real. He’d enjoyed not committing to anyone while it lasted, but he was ready to share himself — or, at least, the parts of him that were available to access — with another person. And while he wasn’t sure it was necessarily fair to a potential girlfriend that he was due to soon sign his life over to training for the foreseeable future, he reasoned that the witch he was dating — should he date anyone — would be able to decide for herself whether he was worth the trouble of dating his career, too.
(At the time, he also wanted to train in healing injuries and maladies caused by the dark arts, which had a pretty short training period of about three years. He reasoned anyone could push through anything for three years while they were young. This would later prove to be an astute estimation, but more on that later.)
The stage was set such that it was, perhaps, the right time for Harry and Ginny to fall together. It’s easy to imagine now a world in which no one died where Harry still noticed at a pub night that Ginny Weasley was, in fact, the girl of his dreams, right in front of him all along. In that world, Ginny might have allowed herself to feel giddy at the fact that the feelings she’d long ago given up on for Harry were at last reciprocated. They’d have had a normal courtship, complete with a giggly honeymoon phase and the gradual comfort of falling in love with one another within the safe confines of an established relationship. They might have been built to weather the storm of Harry’s training, if it happened that way.
But any chance at that was dashed in May of 2002.
…
May opened with Kenmare vs. Puddlemere, and Ginny was shivering in the press box. She’d like to say that she had a knot in her stomach that day, like she sensed something awful and life-altering was about to happen. But she didn’t. It was just that she was cold and wet, soaked to the skin in a way that no number of impervious or warming charms seemed to make a dent in.
It didn’t help that the game was going on its fourth hour by that point. When she picked up the assignment, she’d expected it to be quick, for Puddlemere was all but guaranteed to crush Kenmare, who found themselves in something of a rebuilding season. But then Puddlemere’s seeker had a family emergency and they were forced to play a newer reserve; Ginny herself spotted the snitch no less than fifteen times, but neither team’s seeker could see through the rain, evidently. Although Puddlemere currently had the game — 320 to 80 — it was miserably unable to end. She cast two more impervious charms — one on herself, one on her notebook and quill — and another warming charm, but it was useless. It was her fate to be shivering for the foreseeable future.
She zoned out a bit when they were fifteen minutes from the fifth hour, and when she focused back in an undetermined period of time later, Puddlemere’s seeker had caught the snitch. She subtly glanced over at the reporter next to her — one of the new guys at that American magazine — for some context on the snitch chase, and hurriedly scribbled it into her notebook. Then, she tucked the notebook and quill into her top coat and trudged to the apparition point at the front of the stadium.
All she could think about was how badly she wanted a shower — a hot shower — and then to curl up with tea wearing her warmest pajamas, under a blanket her mum knitted, until she no longer felt like a popsicle. Miserably, she apparated to her flat in East London — it was in Shoreditch, which was a nice area, but her mum called it ‘seedy’ — and let herself into the building. She was in pain as she climbed the four flights of stairs to her front door, and when she finally made it, she exhaled deeply.
It never occurred to her that there was something worse than being freezing and wet until she opened her door and found her two eldest brothers waiting for her.
Now, here was the thing: it would have been unusual enough for Bill to be there waiting for her, but not wholly unexpected. Bill, after all, lived in England and worked in London, and it wouldn’t be crazy for him to stop by his baby sister’s flat to check the wards and ask her to go for a pint. It was Charlie that gave it away. Because Charlie lived in Romania and wasn’t due for a visit. If Charlie was there, something was very, very wrong.
What happened next is still a blur, really, even all these years later. Bill and Charlie spoke in soft, low voices imbued with seriousness, their expressions grave.
“Just tell me what’s going on,” she demanded, unable to hear the words Charlie was saying to her, something about how he knew it was a shock that they were there, but there was something important she needed to know.
Suddenly, Ginny didn’t feel quite so cold anymore. She felt hot with fear, a sort of anxiety that feels like it could be anger if you feed it the right diet. Absently, she noticed Bill wave his wand; she was dry again, too.
“Ginny,” Bill cut Charlie off, moving closer to put his hands on Ginny’s shoulders. In that moment she felt like a child again, but not because the gesture was infantilizing. It was more so that it felt comforting, safe, like nothing could really be that bad if her brother was there with his hands on her. But then she was snapped back to reality. “Ginny, you need to come with us. Okay? To St. Mungo’s.”
It was as though she’d forgotten how to breathe, despite the fact she’d been doing it her whole life. The force of his words was as painful as any bludger. She immediately began wheezing, the breath knocked out of her lungs. When she finally managed to find air, she coughed out: “Is it Mum?”
“No —”
“No! Dad?”
“Ginny —” Charlie started in again, voice gentle.
But Bill couldn’t bear to drag it out any further. “Ginny, it’s Ron.” When he said it, she could see that he was mustering all of his Gryffindor courage to not allow his voice to break.
There’s a bit of a blank in her memory after that.
When she came to, she was in a private waiting area at St. Mungo’s, with her knees to her chest. She had no recollection of how she got there and no idea how much time had passed. It was just her in that waiting room and she wasn’t sure where everyone else had gone. Had they left her there because she was catatonic? Was it all just a nightmare, one she’d wake up from any second? For just a minute, she closed her eyes and willed herself to wake up, as if pretending to sleep in a dream could rouse her consciousness from a deep slumber. But her eyes snapped open as the door to the room opened.
Harry entered the room looking disheveled and ashen. He was wearing those pajama-like sets healers tended to favor and the funny open robes that identified him as a healing student on an educational rotation at the hospital. He held up a hand and waved at her. “You didn’t go with them?” He asked. He was trying very hard to keep his tone light — a skill he’d been taught in healer school but wouldn’t develop into until much later — and the effort of it was apparent.
She looked over to Harry, wondering if she’d already had an entire conversation with him without having any memory of it. “I don’t know who’s been here or where they went,” she admitted. If she sounded terrified, it was because she was. She’d never lost a whole swath of time before, not even when she’d been drinking. The blank space where the previous hours or days could have been was more than unsettling. “I…Harry, I don’t even know when or how I got here.”
Harry nodded, biting his lip. He dragged a chair across from her and sat close to her until their knees were only inches apart; one of his hands reached out to offer comfort, and she slid one of hers into his outturned palm. Harry always had a good bedside manner, she recalled, and that was before he’d trained at it. “All right, Gin, I need you to do something for me, okay?” Ginny nodded, though she didn’t know what she was agreeing to. “I need you to take one really big breath through your nose for three counts. Then you hold it for three counts. And then, exhale through your mouth for three counts. Like this.” She noticed he seemed lighter after a few rounds of it. It was worth a shot, she thought, if it made the heaviness in her chest abate. He counted for her, timed her breathing, taking her through maybe ten rounds of the breaths. By the end, she could at least think, and her view of the sad, lifeless room was at long last clear.
“Thanks,” she croaked, licking her lips. They were dry and cracked, and she wondered again how long she’d been here in this room. “How long have I been here?”
Harry’s top hand twitched a bit, clearly itching to adjust his glasses or tug at his hair, but he didn’t move it from its position on top of hers. “Not long,” he assured her. “Maybe two hours.”
“I still don’t know —” She gestured vaguely, trying to find the words. “I remember Bill telling me it’s Ron, but I don’t know…”
Harry nodded solemnly. “I’ll tell you what I know, which isn’t much, but I’ve been playing medical translator for your family so I reckon it’s more than they’d tell you otherwise.” He took a deep inhale. “There was an explosion,” he explained. “The Aurors are looking into exactly what it was, and what caused it, but it seems to have originated at an apothecary near the Burrow. He was going to get some ingredients for Hermione, I think? The shop owner is all right — said Ron pushed her out of the way of the blast. His body is in decent shape, all things considered — flesh wounds are easy, I think, for healers. Simple, straightforward.”
“So he’s all right?” Ginny felt relief wash over herself. His body was in decent shape after an explosion, which seemed nothing short of a miracle. Her body was in less than decent shape after a bludger injury, and that had to be less traumatic, didn’t it?
But Harry took a deep inhale. “He’s alive,” he offered, and again, it sounded like there was so much effort going into keeping his tone level like that. “There’s, er, there’s an unusual injury to his brain. The cerebral healers have got the bleeding under control for now, I think, but, er, it’s hard to make guarantees in cases like this. The brain is…well, it’s a difficult organ. An amazing one, to be sure, but difficult.”
“What does that mean?” Ginny pressed, sounding desperate because she was — desperate and terrified and confused and completely out of her element.
Harry took another deep breath — three counts in, three counts hold, three counts out — and then locked eyes with hers. “It means that even when things are under control, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re okay.” As she searched Harry’s vivid emerald eyes, she could see the threat of tears just behind them, his beautiful humanity shining through. She often thought of healers as unfeeling — the musculoskeletal healer who told her that her quidditch career was over certainly was — but Harry clearly prized his ability to empathize. She hoped he’d never lose that.
“Are they all with him?” She asked, because she couldn’t bear to know more details.
Harry shook his head. “I’ve seen him, because I played the trainee healer card, but they’re not allowing family in at the moment.” He frowned. “I gave Hermione dreamless sleep and put her in bed at my flat — I’ve never seen her so…” He trailed off and bit his lip. “Well, as you can imagine, she’s devastated. And she always takes care of us, so I begged her to let me take care of her. As for your family, my mum and dad came here to take them for some air and food. They invited you, too, but you told my dad your shoes were too heavy to walk in.”
Ginny couldn’t help her dark sense of humor; she snorted. “Poetic, really.”
“If you get bored of sports journalism, I think we found you a new career,” he joked, forcing a smile. “Are you hungry?”
“Not really,” Ginny admitted. “I haven’t eaten since lunch so I should be but —”
“Yeah,” Harry nodded with such complete understanding that she wished she could bottle the essence of it for any future feelings of loneliness. “I smelled a sandwich on one of the meal delivery carts and had to retch into a bin.”
“He’d be so disappointed in us.”
Harry gave her a funny look at that, and only in hindsight did she realize that it was because that marked the first time one of them spoke about her brother as though he was dead.
“If you don’t want to be alone, I have an extra room at my flat. You’re welcome to stay there, once they kick you out.” It was an innocent offer, to extend one’s guest room. The Potters had been giving Ginny places to stay for more than a decade by then.
And yet…
“But Hermione’s there, right?”
“I put her in my bed,” Harry admitted. “It’s darker in there, and I wanted to make sure she really slept.”
“So then where would you stay?”
“I have a very comfortable couch,” he shrugged. “You don’t have to. No pressure. Just…I really don’t want to be alone tonight and I don’t want you to be alone, either.”
Ginny had a feeling she wouldn’t be alone no matter what; if she didn’t go with Harry, her presence would be requested at the Burrow. Without even stepping foot into her childhood home, though, she felt suffocated by it: by the sadness and anxiety that would surely hang in the air, as well as by the inevitable lack of space.
When the hospital staff predictably appeared to tell them that visiting hours were over and they would be contacted were there any urgent change in Ron’s condition, Ginny knew exactly where she’d spend the night.
…
In truth, Harry envied the fact that Ginny blacked out and couldn’t recall the moments after finding out about her brother’s incident. (Was incident even the right word? Harry didn’t know. These are the things a person might expect you to learn in healer school, but the training was woefully inadequate at conferring such skills, truth be told.)
He envied her because he knew that he would never be able to forget the moment he found out about Ron. It was the last thing he’d ever expected to see during his trauma rotation.
As a student, you weren’t permitted to spend all of your practical education time within the specialty you most favored; you needed a breadth of experience across many healing disciplines to be a good, holistic healer and unearth passions you may not have otherwise discovered. That was the theory, anyway. When Harry started his in-hospital rotations, he had only been given one six week stint within dark arts — the specialty that made him want to be a healer in the first place. He had to try other things, too; among the required clinical experiences were: general health, pediatrics, mindhealing, witches’ health, cerebral, and A&E. It’s noteworthy that trauma — where he was the day Ron arrived at St. Mungo’s — was not a required experience.
So why was Harry on trauma the day that Ron came to the hospital? Simply put, he had to be somewhere in the hospital, and of the electives offered during this particular block, trauma was the only one that aligned at all with his goal of specializing in injuries caused by the dark arts. Years later, he’s still unsure whether it was luck or misfortune that had him on that particular rotation in that particular room on that particular day.
He hadn’t been the only student on trauma. Delia Jamieson and Piper Monroe were there as well, along with a solid cohort of trainees of various levels who were pursuing the specialty. But Harry was favored by Healer Bayer, who’d been in school with his mother once upon a time; when the call came in on his coin that an explosion occurred near Devon and the victim who had taken the brunt of it would be brought to a private room shortly, Bayer had grabbed his two favorite trainees and Harry and brought them into the private room. One of the trainees — a senior named Tessa Lang, who was sweet and seemingly too soft for the brutal specialty she’d chosen — bowed her head and whispered a warning to Harry about what victims of explosions typically look like. Singed, she said, bruised. Often bloody. What she didn’t tell Harry — what she couldn’t tell him, because it’s not like she knew — was that the body that was levitated into the exam room looked exactly like his best mate. Because it was his best mate.
Quickly, he took in Ron’s appearance. Parts of his pale, freckled skin were blackened from exposure to flames; the bright orange-red hair atop his head was slick with a darker brownish-red liquid; his blue eyes were wide open, but it was clear he wasn’t seeing much out of them, and they were rimmed with fresh blood. Purple-blue bruises were blooming across his skin already, and when Lang cut through his shirt, a particularly large one was revealed on his chest. All of that happened in a matter of thirty seconds, and he’d barely processed what he’d seen before he ran to the bin at the side of the room and promptly vomited in it.
Lang tried to tell the others that she warned him, but Harry couldn’t exactly say it wasn’t like he was squeamish in general. He couldn’t really say anything, couldn’t find words as Lang began performing complicated, careful diagnostic spell work over Ron’s body. Bayer shot him a reproachful look, one that seemed to say that he would never be a healer if he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. But the other trainee — another senior called Will Wyatt — had been in Gryffindor only three years ahead of Ron and Harry when they were in school. He knew exactly who the patient on the table was to the shellshocked student healer in the room.
“Potter,” Wyatt called over, beginning to heal the superficial scrapes and burns on the skin while Bayer handled the assessment of organs and Lang, the vitals. “You shouldn’t be here. Conflict of interest. Go back and send Jamieson here instead, all right?”
Harry could not recall ever feeling simultaneously desperate to leave and to stay as he did in that moment. But he knew his job, which was to heal more than he hurt. And he was in no state to heal his best friend, which meant he could only hurt the only brother he’d ever gotten. Wordlessly, he pushed the doors open and fled the trauma bay. Before he was able to go get Jamieson, he took a gulp of air and kicked the heavy door of the room in lieu of crying.
An owl felt too impersonal, so he insisted on flooing to The Burrow to notify the Weasleys. He didn’t stay for the full scope of their reactions, only quickly excused himself so he could be with Hermione. He needed to muster the last of his emotional control to share the news with his other best friend, and it had to be him. So he told the Weasleys that he’d see them at St. Mungo’s and reentered the floo without waiting for a response.
He found Hermione in the kitchen of the flat she shared with Ron, textbooks spread out in front of her. The sight was almost comforting in its familiarity. How many times had he seen her like this in school? But then a lump formed in his throat, remembering that Ron had always been there, too, teasing her, making her cheeks flush pink. He cleared the lump away, which had the dual function of alerting Hermione to his presence.
She startled a bit, but brightened visibly when she saw who was there. That broke Harry’s heart, too. He didn’t want to be the person to devastate her; telling Hermione would make it real, and he didn’t want to risk the two of them associating one another with the worst news a person could ever receive.
Except he reminded himself it wasn’t the worst news yet. He reminded himself that Ron was still alive and not all hope was lost, even if the blood near Ron’s eyes seemed to indicate some sort of a cerebral injury. Hermione didn’t need to know that Harry had seen Ron, Harry decided. He’d keep that bit to himself.
“Harry?” She asked, sounding curious and concerned, but not unhappy. He realized then that he must look awful and anxious, but at least that was nothing new. He looked awful and anxious from the moment he started healer school, basically.
“Hi,” Harry croaked, forcing the words out of his too-dry mouth.
“Ron’s not home,” Hermione told him, not sounding like she was worried about where he was. “I was just studying for the bar,” she explained. She’d finished her degree in magical law not long before. “Is everything all right? You look pale. You’re on trauma now, right? I imagine that’s difficult. You must see some really upsetting things.” She had no idea, Harry thought, as she closed a few books to make room at the table for him. “But then, I guess you want to go into dark arts healing…”
“Hermione.” He tried again, but the words felt like glass in his throat. How did he find the words for Ron’s literal mother when he couldn’t find them for Hermione ? His friend — one of his oldest, best friends — looked at him, then, like she was seeing him for the first time. And as she took in his appearance, she paled, her face washed with concern.
“Harry,” she started again, slowly and gently, unable to hide the tremor of anxiety that wormed its way into her voice. “Harry, what’s wrong?”
He wanted to break down in tears the moment she asked. Instead, he bit down on the inside of his cheek until the urge to cry passed. Then, he took a breath in through his nose for three counts, held it for three counts, and exhaled through his mouth for another three.
“I need you to come back to St. Mungo’s with me.” It was easier to start this way, with the action. “There was an accident, while Ron was running errands. An explosion. He pushed the shopkeep out of the way, took the brunt of the impact himself. I — I don’t know much, Hermione, but I’m scared it’s bad.”
Tears immediately filled Hermione’s eyes and within seconds, they were flowing freely down her cheeks. Harry opened his arms to her and wrapped her in them, holding this girl — no, woman — who was his sister by circumstance before he’d ever gotten one by blood. He didn’t allow himself to cry; he had to put on a brave face.
By the time Ginny arrived at his flat with him later that evening, that moment somehow felt like it happened both minutes and several lifetimes ago. He tiptoed into his bedroom, though he knew it would be difficult to wake Hermione with the way he’d dosed her, and carefully extracted a pair of soft sweatpants and an old Gryffindor t-shirt, bringing them to the guest room where Ginny was already settling in.
“I brought you some clothes.” He held the neat stack in the air, as if to demonstrate, before dropping the items on the bed. “Figured you might want something comfortable to sleep in.”
In return, Ginny offered him a weak but grateful smile. “Thanks, Harry.” She paused, as if considering and then added: “For everything.”
“It’s nothing,” Harry shrugged.
But Ginny knew that wasn’t true. She knew it was costing Harry a great bit of effort to take care of everyone else, because Ron was the closest thing he had to a brother. She could feel his pain and worry acutely — because she was feeling it too. “Turn around,” she commanded. She wanted to change, but she also wanted to keep talking to him. He obliged.
As she began to unbutton her jeans and push them down over her hips, she started to speak. “You don’t have to act like you’re indifferent to this, you know,” she told him as she kicked the denim off to the side and reached for the sweatpants. “He’s your best mate, Harry. I know this must be so…difficult for you,” she settled on the word as she tied the string of the waistband tight.
She reached to pull her shirt over her head as Harry responded, still facing away. “I mean,” he hedged. “I’m going to be a healer in a few months, Ginny.” It was hard to articulate this part to her, because that was relevant for a few reasons.
Ginny unhooked her bra — plain beige, and she found herself weirdly grateful that it had been such a plain garment because a prettier one would have felt like it was taunting her — and let it slide down her arms and fall to the floor. “That doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to feel things, Harry.”
And it was probably that — the fact that Ginny knew without him saying that part of the reason his becoming a healer was relevant was that devastation is an unhelpful emotion for a healer — that he decided to tell her everything. “I was there. When he was brought in. And you can’t tell your mum or dad or brothers, and whatever you do please don’t tell Hermione. But I saw him when he came in Ginny. I’m scared,” he admitted, his voice small.
Ginny inhaled sharply. It never occurred to her that Harry Potter — risk taker extraordinaire, the most daring seeker she’d ever had the honor to play with, and true Gryffindor — was capable of feeling fear. She pulled his shirt over her head and as the fabric fell to the tops of her thighs, she announced: “You can turn around now.”
He turned around and his eyes tracked Ginny as she moved to sit atop the duvet of the double bed in the center of the room.
“You were saying?” She patted the bed, motioning for him to sit with her.
He perched uncomfortably and took another few calming breaths. Three in, three hold, three out. “I’ve spent four years in healer school,” he started, sounding shaky and unsure. “I’ve been studying injuries and diseases and observing them on real patients. And my heart wants to believe that what the healers did today is enough, yeah? That they stopped the bleeding in time, that Ron will be awake and cracking jokes with us again soon. But everything I’ve learned — everything my brain knows to be true — is telling me that it’s more likely that he won’t. Or, if he does, he won’t ever be himself again. And miracles happen in this field, but I never realized how easy it is to hope one of them will happen to you until now.”
They didn’t say anything for a while after that. Harry’s breathing grew shallow. Feeling tears prickle her sore eyes, Ginny laid her head on one of the pillows and closed her eyes.
“What did you see?” She asked finally, having decided she needed to know, even if it would hurt even more. There was nothing in the world Ginny hated more than being surprised; if she needed to mentally prepare herself for the loss of her closest brother, she wanted to know now.
“I shouldn’t say,” Harry responded quietly. She rolled onto her side to look at him and saw he’d removed his glasses and was pinching his nose between his fingers. She wondered if he’d had a chance to cry yet; he might not have felt as tormented if he did. “I signed up to see these sorts of things, but you certainly didn’t.”
She reached across the distance between them and put a hand on his knee, imploring him to look at her — really look at her. When his green eyes are visible, she tells him: “Harry, please. I — I won’t tell anyone. I just need to know.”
They stared at one another for a long while, until Harry understood her perfectly. And then he told her everything. She didn’t interrupt much, save for a few questions (“What does blood around the eyes mean?”), and when Harry was finished, he found his cheeks were wet. Quite without realizing it, he’d finally cried.
Ginny didn’t comment on that, either. Deep down, he knew she wouldn’t. Maybe that’s why he finally felt safe enough to show his real feelings once they were alone, in the guest room he insisted he didn’t need when his parents bought the place. (“You’ll want to grow into it,” his father had insisted. “Dedicated study space will come in handy for your boards,” his mother had countered practically.)
He wiped his cheeks with the back of his hands, slid his glasses back over his red-rimmed eyes, and moved to stand. “You look knackered,” he commented. “I’ll let you sleep. But if you need anything I’ll just be on the sofa —”
“Just stay in here with me, Harry.” It surprised Ginny, how quickly she offered it. Of course, there was nothing untoward about the offer. All she could think was that Harry’s presence felt safe and familiar to her when everything else felt like it was hurtling toward change, and he’d been so generous — with his space, experience and information — that it felt rather unfair to let him sleep on a couch when the bed was big enough for both of them. He hesitated. “There’s more than enough space and…Harry, I came here because neither of us wanted to be alone, okay? I’d feel better if you were here.”
He hesitated only a few more seconds before nodding, and then excusing himself to grab a set of pajamas for himself from his room. She’d later learn that Harry really only wore pajamas for lounging, and that he otherwise preferred to sleep in his underwear or completely naked. But that night, they curled up next to each other — her in his sweatpants, him in tatty flannel trousers — and fell into an uneasy, fitful slumber.
It was the first time they’d ever slept in the same bed, and they turned away from one another, facing the wall, trying very hard not to touch.
…
That night, when they laid next to each other in bed, lost in their own thoughts, each of them consciously made the decision to accept that the most likely outcome of this shit situation was Ron dying. It was better to begin accepting it and be surprised by a miracle than expect a miracle and allow death to sneak up on you. And yet, it wasn’t any easier when the worst did happen.
A few days after the accident, the family — along with Harry and Hermione — were gathered at the hospital when a cerebral healer came in and threw up a silencing charm around the door, announcing apologetically that he had news. Harry stiffened, and Ginny noted a look of harsh recognition; he knew that the update they’d receive would be something terrible. Detecting the change in Harry’s posture and general demeanor, Hermione burst into tears on the spot.
The thing was: they could have kept Ron alive, if they’d wanted to. Merlin knows, Molly and Arthur Weasley considered it. His body was fine, and with the right regimen of potions, spellwork, and equipment — all of which would necessitate around the clock care in a ward dedicated to these cases — he could have had years. But the years weren’t worth much if his brain had stopped transmitting signals to the rest of his body and he never woke up, would they?
Tearful and desperate, the Weasleys asked Harry for his thoughts on the matter as a healer — or a student healer, anyway. His reluctance to weigh in was clear. It felt like he was choosing, and it was an impossible choice. He didn’t want to imagine the world without Ron, a world in which he might get married and have children and become an accomplished healer without his best mate there to see it. But that was the kinder option, and he instinctively knew that Ron wouldn’t want to live like this, kept alive purely by magic. Ron was vivacious — so full of life — and Harry could hear his friend tell him: “Nah, mate. Just let me go. It’s better if I can haunt you, I reckon.”
So Harry offered the medical context, as best he knew it. Once the brain turned off, so to speak, for this long, no amount of magic could turn it back on. If they continued with treatment, he’d keep living, but only insofar as his body would still be present on earth with them. Ron Weasley as they’d known him was already dead, though. Then, with a dry throat, Harry blinked back the tears stinging behind his eyes and said: “As a friend — not as a healer — I don’t think this is fair to Ron. He wouldn’t want this.”
Through sobs, Hermione agreed. “He’d hate this.” Her voice was quiet and raspy as she said it, as though the stress of the last few days and the grief of the last few hours had literally robbed her of her ability to speak.
“For what it’s worth, I agree,” Ginny admitted, sounding so exhausted it tugged at Harry’s chest for reasons he couldn’t yet identify.
And one by one, the other Weasley siblings concurred. It wasn’t fair for any of them, the way this was playing out, but neither was life. So they had to do one last act of service toward their brother. Knowing that this happened and that they couldn’t change it, they had to do the right thing by him.
So the next day — after Molly and Arthur tore themselves apart over the decision — they decided to withdraw care. A week earlier, Harry and Ron were at a pub, laughing about what dating would be like for Harry now that he’d spent three years actively avoiding commitment, and suddenly, Ron was dead.
…
That night, Harry went home. Not to his flat — home, to Potter Manor. At times like these, when he felt raw and vulnerable and emotional, he just wanted his parents: his dad’s coddling, his mum’s reassurance that he did right by his friend. And when he thought about the looks on the Weasley siblings’ faces — Ginny’s in particular — he wanted to squeeze Phoebe tight and cast a bubble charm around her and protect his baby sister from all of the terrible, inexplicable accidents that could harm her.
There was another draw to Potter Manor, though: James had a pensieve. And as dumb as it was, Harry wanted to preserve all of his best memories of Ron in it sooner than later. He didn’t want to forget what Ron’s voice sounded like or the way his face turned red as his hair when he laughed at a particularly funny joke. He wanted to remember every second of their friendship before time had the chance to erode any of it. Lily pointed out that this might not be a particularly healthy exercise, but James just told Harry to use the office and the pensieve for as long as he needed.
Harry stayed up all night — the type of wakefulness generally reserved for intense studying or night shifts — cataloging more than a decade of memories with an organizational rigor that would have impressed Hermione. He’d always been smart and competent, but he was also sort of messy and absentminded, definitely not prone to alphabetizing books or arranging things in a prescriptive order. But he transported each memory to a vial, and then carefully labeled it with a date before arranging them in chronological order in a box he charmed to be indestructible. Then, he locked it in the small vault inside his father’s office for additional safekeeping. One day, he’d have his own pensieve, but until then, it was less risky to have something of such value in the place where it would be used.
He was knackered when the sun rose over his parent’s house; before his dad could force him to eat or his mum could lay a sympathetic hand on his shoulder and ask him how he was doing, he went upstairs to his room and swallowed a few drops of dreamless sleep — just enough for a few hours of solid rest that wouldn’t be filled with reliving the memory of seeing Ron’s body levitated in the room, and the guilt Harry felt for listening to Wyatt when the trainee told him he should leave.
He continued this way for two or three days. During that time, his mum called in a favor at The Academy, getting Harry dismissed for the rest of his trauma elective. Harry didn’t question it; he couldn’t bear the thought of going back to the trauma department at St. Mungo’s ever again.
(Months later, a mindhealer pointed out the irony that Harry was traumatized on a trauma elective. As astute an observation as it might have been, Harry fired him nearly immediately.)
In the days between Ron’s death and his funeral, Harry didn’t feel like he was living his life so much as he was observing himself from above as he went through the motions. He alternated between being painfully awake and alert and so tired he could spend days in bed without ever feeling rested. His dad, who saw it as his fatherly duty to be his children’s cheer-up crew, made or sourced every single one of Harry’s favorite foods. But even treacle tart had lost its appeal, and truth be told, everything Harry tried to put in his mouth tasted like cardboard. He subsisted mostly on tea and toast — save for the night before the funeral, when Sirius arrived with firewhiskey. Then, Harry subsisted on that.
He woke the morning of Ron’s funeral with a wicked hangover, and a sinking realization that he really had to say goodbye to the best friend he’d ever had. He had no more time to think about what he might say during his eulogy. As of the afternoon, Ron’s body would be buried among the trees of his childhood home, never to be seen again. But it wasn’t worth suffering any more than he absolutely needed to, so he gratefully swallowed the hangover potion someone — his mum, most likely — left on his bedside table and showered before shrugging on the black dress robes his father had laid out for him.
During the service, Harry found himself filled with the overwhelming need to cry and scream for the first time in days, but the tears wouldn’t come. His emotions instead bubbled uncomfortably beneath the surface, making him feel as though he might vomit instead of cry. The more his eyes resisted his brain’s signals to sob, the tighter his chest constricted. Years later, he will still be unsure of how he managed to give an entire ten minute long eulogy when he couldn’t actually breathe. But then the body is an amazing thing: you might feel like you can’t breathe, but your body keeps you breathing anyway, keeps your heart beating, keeps your neurons firing. That is, until it can’t anymore.
For much of the somber luncheon after the ceremony, Harry kept close to Hermione, who certainly needed his support right now. Hermione was strong, and he had no doubt that she would, eventually, move on, fall in love with someone new, and only have fond memories of Ron and the love they shared. But she was nowhere close to that point now, and what she needed, above all else, was the support of her best friend. She needed someone to be there for her, and Harry knew he was the best person for the job. And yet, there was something about Hermione’s grief that felt to Harry as though it was necessarily so much more important than his. It was as though Hermione losing her boyfriend trumped his losing his best friend, and so he didn’t feel like he could burden her with his feelings. He’d need to find someone else to talk to about that.
It’s not like he intentionally set out to make Ginny his confidant. He wouldn’t have: to some extent, her grief as Ron’s sister also felt far more precious than his. But when Hermione excused herself to go lie down, he spotted Ginny in a lumpy armchair, sipping at a mug and staring blankly at the wall, he felt like he at least needed to check on her. He hadn’t seen her since that day at the hospital — the worst day — and hadn’t really spoken to her since the night at his flat. So he walked over to her and sat on the arm of the chair. “How are you doing?”
Ginny’s eyes snapped to him as she snorted, half-incredulous and half-amused. “How do you think I’m doing, Healer Potter?” She raised a single pale eyebrow at him in challenge, though he couldn’t hazard a guess at what she was daring him to do.
He shot her an annoyed glare. “Don’t call me that. Not until I graduate,” he reprimanded quickly. The truth was, he was worried that he wasn’t going to become a healer now. He wasn’t sure he could go to a hospital ever again, which would count him out of specialty training, and even in the (likely) event that he got over it, a life spent healing dark magic felt empty when he knew other people needed his help more. He still hadn’t decided what to do with that feeling.
But then, his glare turned to pity — although it wasn’t clear who he pitied more: Ginny or himself. “I know what you mean, though,” he finally said, his long legs jittery. And Ginny wanted to tell him that he didn’t and he couldn’t, but she knew that it wasn’t fair. Harry and Ron were good as brothers from the day they met; in some ways, Harry could understand her better than anyone. “This morning, I woke up and I almost owled him and then it hit me that…”
“The owl wouldn’t know where to go,” Ginny finished sadly. “You could have still written him, though. If you wanted to.”
“No use if he can’t read it,” Harry commented. And an uneasy silence fell between them, pregnant with agony.
Ginny wracked her brain for something — anything — to say next. Having Harry beside her was comforting, and the last thing she wanted was for this strong presence to leave her on a day like this. “Those robes are nice,” she said finally, wincing as she heard herself. “They suit you.”
“I’m pretty sure they’re my dad’s,” Harry replies, flushing ever so slightly. The pink tinge wouldn’t have been particularly noticeable, had grief not made him appear so pale to begin with.
Ginny’s eyes flickered across the room, where James Potter had his hands on Bill Weasley’s shoulders and was inevitably saying something perfectly comforting and just funny enough to cut through the tension. James and Harry really did look so alike; it was no wonder any clothes of James’ would hang nicely on Harry’s frame.
“I’ve been at my parents’ since I left St. Mungo’s that day,” Harry rambled. “Cataloged all of my memories in my dad’s pensieve, let my mum call in a favor to get me out of the rest of that elective…”
“Mmm, love the smell of nepotism in the morning,” Ginny joked, tone dry as ever. Harry let out a surprised guffaw and then clapped a hand over his mouth, hoping no one noticed he was laughing at his best mate’s funeral.
“What about you?” He asked. “Have you just been here since…?”
Ginny sighed, shrugged. “Pretty much. After a day or two, I honestly would have preferred to be at my flat, but…I dunno, I’m worried about my — my mum’s not really sleeping and my dad spends all his time in the shed,” she finished. “Everyone else is here, and we’re almost playing this mad game of chicken. No one wants to be the first one to leave, y’know?”
Harry nodded, as though he understood perfectly. He glanced over to Percy, who was encouraging Molly Weasley to drink water while Arthur sat beside her, looking blank and unfocused. “Maybe just a break?”
Ginny tilted her head like a dog might if you said an enticing word like treat or walk. “I don’t think you’re supposed to take a break from a funeral?”
Harry shrugged. “You could go for a walk, or get a drink, maybe. Mourning doesn’t have to be your full time job.”
And though Ginny was pretty sure mourning was, in fact, supposed to consume her foreseeable future, a brief respite sounded incredibly nice. “I’m not going to drink alone.”
“I’ll go with you,” Harry offered, and Ginny was immediately certain he really just wanted a drink himself and also didn’t want to drink alone.
She glanced around the room, trying to gauge if anyone would notice if she just slipped out. Satisfied that they wouldn’t, she turned back to Harry. “All right,” she agreed. “One drink.” She grabbed her shoes and her coat, and together, they snuck out of the house, each of them telling themselves they were helping the other one.
…
Squire & Nettle was the muggle pub in the village of Ottery St. Catchpole, and though it had been there for ages, Ginny had never been inside. Harry seemed to know his way around it, though. He must have come here with Ron at some point, maybe for his eighteenth birthday, the summer after they’d finished Hogwarts. She, only sixteen then, would certainly not have been invited.
“You want a pint?” Harry asked her, removing his coat to reveal the suit he transfigured from his robes. Ginny felt relieved she was at least wearing a dress. He tossed his coat onto a booth across from the bar and gestured to her to sit. The pub was pretty empty, but Ginny felt certain that Harry considered this his job.
“Something stronger?” Ginny wrinkled her nose. “Last time I went to a muggle pub, I got this clear drink that was kind of bubbly and bitter? I quite liked it.”
“Probably a gin and tonic,” Harry nodded decisively. “Coming right up.”
While Harry went to go fetch drinks, Ginny fidgeted in the booth. Without her brother in the world, everything felt different, and even her skin felt like it didn’t quite fit her body right. It wasn’t as noticeable when she was at the Burrow, surrounded by other people who were desperately sad and missing Ron just as much as she did. But this was her first time in public, surrounded by people who had no idea what the world had just lost, and the sting of it was excruciating.
When Harry returned to the booth, he slid a tall glass filled with clear liquid and rimmed with a wedge of lime toward her; with a chaser’s dexterity, she caught it between her hands and cupped it like you might a cup of tea on a cold day.
Harry took a gulp of his own drink — a pint of a very dark beer — and winced as he swallowed. “Maybe you had the right idea,” he commented, wiping the foam off his upper lip with the back of his hand.
“Not strong enough?” She did it again — that thing where she raised a single eyebrow, silently daring him to do…what exactly? Be honest with her, maybe.
“Not nearly,” he laughed. “And I only even got this one because Ron liked it? But, I’ll be honest, kind of tastes like piss.”
“That the kind of thing they make you do in healer school?” She teased. “Drink piss?”
Harry snorted. “I would have dropped out,” he told her seriously. “Nah, your brother just really had a taste for piss. It was his kink.” His tone was deadpan, but he broke at the end, a dead giveaway that he was being a sarcastic shit.
Ginny giggled before stifling it. “I’m not supposed to laugh at my dead brother during his funeral, I don’t think.”
Harry shook his head. “He’d want you to laugh.” He said this confidently, as if Ron had told him himself, and Ginny didn’t know how he could be so sure.
“He’d want you to laugh,” Ginny couldn’t help but correct him. She paused. “You were much closer to him,” she admitted. “Like the night after the accident, I came home and realized I don’t even really remember his favorite color.”
“Orange,” Harry answered without hesitation. “Always a Cannons fan, even though it clashed terribly.”
“See?” Ginny thought this proved her point. “I honestly don’t even know that I have much of a right to be this upset about it.” It was one of her deepest, darkest fears throughout this whole ordeal, and she felt self-conscious having revealed it to Harry without really trying.
“Of course you do,” Harry dismissed her. “He was your brother. You grew up together. And he loved the shit out of you.”
“I annoyed the shit out of him,” Ginny rolled her eyes.
“And he still loved you,” Harry insisted. “That’s what big brothers do. He was always bragging about you? Like last month, he came and met me and some of my school friends for drinks and he was just, like, bragging about how you’re killing it as a reporter, about how you didn’t let the end of your quidditch career be the end of your life.”
“Really?” Ginny asked, sounding surprised because she was, genuinely.
Harry nodded. “Yeah. He was super proud of you.” He paused. “Still will be, too.”
The statement felt out of place coming from Harry; it was the kind of thing Luna might say. “You don’t believe in that shit,” Ginny challenged him petulantly.
“How do you know?” He fired back. “We live in a world where there are literally ghosts. Is it so crazy to think that even non-ghosts stick around in some way?”
“Okay, but. You’re, like, a man of science,” Ginny said as though it was obvious. “None of that spiritual crap should resonate for you.”
“Spirituality and science do mix, you know,” he told her. “And between you and me, I think the thing keeping me going right now is the idea that maybe my best friend isn’t totally gone, okay?”
Ginny didn’t know what to say to that. “Okay.” She raised her glass to her lips, taking a sip; the drink was certainly strong, but the gin also happened to be cheap. It burned her throat. “Well, I mean, I know you’re busy with school and everything, but if you ever need someone to talk to...I mean, I live on the East End but I’m around.”
Harry smirked, pulling a small muggle notebook and pen out of his coat pocket. He turned it toward Ginny. “Give me your address. I want to be able to check in on you.” As she was writing, he added: “You know where I live now. I’m going to add you to the wards on my flat, all right? So feel free to drop in whenever. And now until graduation is honestly easy mode, so if you want to get drinks or dinner or something, just owl or floo.” Ginny could tell that he meant every word; she decided she’d take him up on that. She had plenty of friends, but she could tell this friendship was going to be critical for her in the months to come.
And though they finished their drinks and made it back to her parents’ house before anyone ever noticed they left, that wasn’t the last time they talked. From that point forward, they talked every single day.