Chapter Text
2 May 1998
It takes six Death Eaters to force Ginevra Molly Weasley back from Harry Potter’s cold, dead body.
The good news is that Voldemort is dead, too – he lies shrunken and withered on the flagstones of the great hall, two metres away from where she had pumpkin juice and toast every morning she spent at Hogwarts for five and a half years.
The bad news is that Voldemort’s followers are still mostly very alive.
Her mother and father are duelling Dolohov and one of the Lestrange brothers. Percy and Bill are covering for Charlie, who is desperately trying to drag himself to safety with one hand and half a leg in bloody ruins. She doesn’t need to look to know that George is still crumpled around Fred’s body, unhinged and uncaring. She doesn’t see Luna or Neville. Ron is screaming bloody murder and Ginny whips around for half a second to see a bolt of green strike Hermione in the back before she goes down like bricks falling.
She’d thought that the battle before Voldemort’s fall had been pitched. The Death Eaters are fighting with renewed fervour now, and she isn’t sure how many of the Order will survive today.
Some of Voldemort’s former henchmen look wildly elated – they are finally rid of the halfblood who had more power, more control, and more cruelty; they are now the biggest baddies in the room. Others look frightened; they look hunted, and cornered, and Ginny knows that few things fight fiercer than an animal caught in a trap that it isn’t sure it can escape.
Better news is that Ginny no longer cares about things like honour, or goodness, or rightness. Her brother is dead and her boyfriend-not-boyfriend is dead and one of her best friends is dead and so many of her other best friends might be dead and so many people are dead.
She is done with being part of the side that Stuns.
The saddest thing is that she recognises some of those who come after her. She sidesteps a Crucio from Blaise Zabini and Vanishes a hole straight through his chest. Lisa Turpin is a Ravenclaw a year ahead of her and Ginny knows that she likes to warble Celestina Warbeck oldies out by the lake during sunny days. None of that matters when Ginny hurls a locking spell at her throat and chokes her to death.
She’s hit briefly by a distracted Imperio before she shakes it off and sends a gouging spell at a woman who looks too much like Pansy Parkinson to not be her mother.
Ginny dodges just as many Unforgiveables as she curses, and something in her splinters when she looks straight into Theodore Nott’s hard blue eyes and casts the killing curse before ducking around a pile of rubble and sprinting to the safest place she knows. His sleeves had been pushed up to his elbows as he duelled and she’d seen that he’d not been Marked. He’d snuck back in to fight alongside the people he’d grown up with and shared blood with, just like she had.
She doesn’t have to watch him fall to know that she’s cast successfully.
Nobody is bothering with quietfoot charms and the thunder of her pursuers (Gregory Goyle? Eddie Carmichael?) is only marginally louder than the beating of her heart, but Ginny knows this castle like she knows the backs of her eyelids.
She zig-zags up a staircase and banks a hard right into the second-floor girls’ lavatory. Moaning Myrtle is gone, for once; drawn off into the fighting with the rest of the ghosts washing harmlessly and discomfortingly through Death Eaters.
There’s a clattering outside in the hall, and she can hear Goyle and Carmichael shouting about what they’ll do once they get her. She almost smiles. It’s as if they don’t realise that there’s nothing they can do to her that she fears.
She slashes her wand violently through the air and her Bombarda rains chunks of stone and plaster down, blocking the doorway and buying her minutes.
Ginny inhales a breath smoky with dust and chokes out a rasp. A hiss. A song hidden on the tip of her tongue and slithering around the edges of her consciousness.
A sink slides out of place, and Ginny doesn’t hesitate before she leaps into the opening it reveals and skids down the slide. There isn’t time to seal the gaping entrance – she’s moving fast, too fast – and she hears an explosion as they blast through her makeshift blockage and stumble into Myrtle’s bathroom.
She’s got a head start, though, and she’s already three-quarters of the way across the Basilisk’s chamber before the first curse flies over her shoulder.
Salazar Slytherin is dead. The last of his line is dead. But Tom Riddle was once a boy who lived in Ginny’s bones like a cancer, and so this is now her Chamber. Her Chamber of Secrets.
Enemies of the Heir, beware.
Ginny flicks her wand through the air again, and the rank, green water lapping sluggishly at the stone path beneath her feet pulls away from gravity and sweeps towards the intruders.
There is a gurgle and a scream. The Death Eaters fall back, but she isn’t stupid enough to think that a little tsunami is enough to stop them. She has magic, yes, but they do, too.
She keeps on running, her footfalls ringing like a familiar beat through the hallowed resting place of Slytherin’s monster.
She doesn’t know what it is that propels her towards the shadowed nook between the feet of the giant statue of Slytherin, but she doesn’t flinch when a wooden door flickers into sight once she’s past an invisible threshold.
Ginny feels the magic trickle through her system and recognise her ancestry. Pure-blood, the Chamber murmurs with approval. Once, blood-traitor Ginny would have felt sick, but today all of her is invested in staying alive so she welcomes the distinction with open arms.
Ginny doesn’t stop for a cordial Alohamora. Instead, she throws the greater part of her strength behind her shoulder and smashes through the door, scything her wand before her to blow the debris out of her face as she tumbles into a small stone room lit with green witchlight.
There’s a pit ringed with runes in the middle of it, and the darkness seems to nip at the air around it.
Ginny never took Ancient Runes, but she grew up with magic seething in her sinew and coiling in her gut, and so laughter, hard and hysterical, bubbles up in her chest when she sees a precisely cut crescent moon sitting inside a pictogram of a sun.
The sun marks the hours of the day, but the moon marks the passage of weeks. Months. Years.
There’s still shouting behind her.
Ginny doesn’t hesitate.
She cuts a gash open in her left palm (closest to her heart) and smears her blood – her pure-fucking-blood – over the rune for Time.
Take me back, she whispers. Far back enough to fucking make sure this never fucking happens.
The witchlight flickers.
Ginny clutches her wand tight in her right hand, takes five steps back, and makes a running jump.
She twists onto her back just as momentum carries her over the abyss and shouts a Bombarda Maxima at the ceiling.
The rumble of rocks falling is the last thing she hears before she’s swallowed by the timestream.