Chapter Text
“Oh what tangled webs we weave, when first we practice to deceive!”
Marmion by Walter Scott (1808)
June 10, 2023
Ginny was lying on her bed, gazing out the window, when Charlie peeked around the doorframe.
“See any dragons out there?”
“None yet,” said Ginny, as Charlie plopped down next to her.
“I wonder if you’ll even have time for your poor brother this summer,” he said, “since all of these friends of yours are going to be here.”
Ginny didn’t respond, the butterflies in her stomach fluttering again.
This summer, Charlie was on San Juan Island in the state of Washington, tucked up in the far northwest corner of the far northwest state, studying a pygmy dragon species endemic to the region with a group of graduate students. In the school year, he taught as a professor in the College of Magical Creatures at Cambridge University.
Charlie and Ginny had a very elderly aunt who owned this big drafty house, and she had let Charlie use it the last few summers on the condition that he care for the house and gardens and that he keep a room ready for her, should she decide to stay for a weekend.
Among Charlie’s group of graduate students was Luna Lovegood, who was working on her master’s thesis. Ginny had discovered this the night before, reading over Charlie’s class list as they ate dinner. When she had come to Luna’s name she had spat out her mouthful of wine directly onto Charlie.
“Ginny, what is your DEAL?” he had spluttered, mopping his face with a napkin, and rereading the class list: “ah.”
Ginny bounced off the faded quilt and threw an arm around her brother. “I’m sure you’ll see plenty of me. I’m just down the hallway from you all summer.” She reached up to rub a fist on his head. Charlie laughed, swatting her hand away.
Ginny’s Quidditch team, the Holyhead Harpies, had finished up their spring training. The draft for new players didn’t take place until the fall, and then they’d start up practice again with the whole team. Ginny, with the summer off, had taken a cross-Atlantic Portkey, and then another one across the continent to visit her brother for an indefinite amount of time. She’d need to be back home by September, to face Harry and sort out her life, but she had months to figure that out and the wide blue summer days stretched ahead of her.
Through the window, the Puget Sound’s deep blue waters reflected as though thousands of mermaids were holding up mirrors as they combed their long kelpy locks. Ginny actually thought she had spotted a mermaid when she and Charlie had walked to the beach earlier, but with the harbor seals popping their heads up every few minutes, it was hard to be sure.
Ginny was nervous about seeing Luna. Ginny had just gotten to the island two nights ago, but Luna hadn’t yet arrived for her summer quarter research yet.
It had been quite a while since they had last seen one another. Over four years. Ginny and Luna had been inseparable their sixth year of Hogwarts, staying up late into the night in the Room of Requirement, plotting against the school administration, spying for the Order of the Phoenix, researching field medicine to help students who had been abused by the people who were supposed to be educating them.
So often Ginny had fallen asleep in the Room of Requirement, not daring to show her face in the castle halls after she had set another rebellion into motion. She couldn’t tell her parents about the punishments; she needed to be there, she needed to fight. Luna had been beside her all night in the Room when she cried with worry wondering how Ron, Harry, and Hermione were doing, off in the wild. When she wondered if those three would ever be able to fix the mess the world was in, wondered how she could accept her own powerlessness. Luna would brush her long red locks and braid them with gentle fingers, and Ginny would fall asleep on her bed that the Room remade for her with fresh sheets, with Luna curled up behind her, holding her.
Nothing felt more natural than the November night Ginny turned around in the cool linen sheets and facing Luna, ran her hands up Luna’s back, and Luna let out a little sigh and pulled her closer and their lips found one another's’.
And from then on, they spent every night in the Room, and eventually the room caught on and made a little sleeping loft with heavy velvet curtains covered in embroidery of stars and dragons and mermaids. They were far from the only people sleeping most nights in the Room of Requirement, there were other little bunk beds and sleeping nooks, and they certainly weren’t the only wartime couple in the group. Everyone in Dumbledore’s Army knew they were together, and besides, Harry had ended things before he left. Once or twice some fringe member of DA would give Ginny a dirty look, seeing her with Luna, but when Dean or Neville or Lavender or Hannah would pass her in the Room after their meetings, and hug her, she knew her friends didn’t blame her for straying from Harry. She blamed herself, of course, but that was another matter.
But those winter nights, when the wind was howling, and Ginny had taken off her Disillusionment charm, when she was done spying and relaying information to the Order, done collaborating with Peeves to cause as much disruption to the Carrows as possible, done writing coded letters reassuring her mom, she would climb the old wooden ladder into the loft and crawl straight into Luna’s arms.
Then, the Battle was done, Fred was buried, and among many other things, Harry was back. Ginny left the wreckage of the castle with all her surviving friends. They had stayed at the castle for a few days, conjuring coffins, burying the dead by Dumbledore’s grave. Alicia Spinnet and Angelina Johnson worked with some of the professors to get the train tracks repaired enough to carry everyone away from the wreckage of the castle. It was the quietest train ride Ginny had ever taken on the Hogwarts Express. She didn’t sit with Harry or Luna, who were in a compartment with Neville and Hermione. She sat with her family. From London, Harry came to the Burrow with the Weasleys and Hermione.
During the long summer days Harry and Ginny (and usually Ron and Hermione) paddled in the swimming hole, ate ice cream at the shop in Ottery St. Catchpole, took train rides to see their friends at the seaside. Sometimes Ginny and Harry would stay the night in London, in Harry’s old room at 12 Grimmauld Place. In the morning they would go to a Muggle museum or Kensington Garden. Every Sunday, Harry and Ginny, and often Ron and Hermione and any other friend who was around would Floo to Andromeda Tonks’ house and they would all take turns holding the baby. They weren’t very helpful, not knowing much about babies, but Harry was determined to learn how to change diapers and feed baby Teddy.
The loss of Fred was the big hole in the center of everything, but when Harry and Ginny would lie on an old quilt in the garden of the Burrow and gaze at the stars, kissing, hands slipping under shirts, under the elastic waistbands of their summer running shorts, the butterflies in Ginny’s stomach would flutter to life. Falling asleep with the night smells of flowers and the sound of gnomes whispering, waking up at dawn with the chickadees, Ginny felt like their lives had been worth saving. The hopelessness she so often felt was not eradicated, but faded during those golden days and soft nights.
There were feelings of emptiness and disconnection, of course, there was guilt and there was anguish, but with so many causes, Ginny wasn’t sure where each feeling came from, where it started or where it ended.
Hermione and Ron were joined at the hip that summer as well, traveling back and forth from England to Australia to track down Hermione’s parents, and snogging like their lives depended on it all over the Burrow and garden. Ginny’s mum, who once had been more puritanical didn’t bat an eye. Losing Fred had changed her. At first Ginny and Harry didn’t even hold hands in front of everyone else, but when Ron kept setting a blushing Hermione practically on his lap on the couch when they listened to the radio in the evenings, Ginny began to suspect that their mum was ready for grandbabies. Harry and Ginny made gagging gestures whenever they caught Ron’s eyes.
Then they were back on the train: Ginny, Neville, Luna, Harry, Ron and Hermione, all seventh years at once. Over the summer Luna had mostly been visiting relatives in Sweden, and Ginny wasn’t sure what to do, so she sent her a few postcards and didn’t mention Harry at all, but neither did she reference their own relationship. Ginny had confessed everything to Hermione over the summer. Ginny hoped that Luna would just accept her and Harry being back together. “Consider an honest conversation,” Hermione had advised to no avail. Ginny and Luna never discussed it, only spending time together in their larger group. That year the old members of Dumbledore’s Army had parties in the Room of Requirement, they studied there, they listened to music and cried there, but the Room never made that sleeping loft with those embroidered curtains again.
As Captain of the Quidditch Team, Ginny had lots of time away from the dynamics of their friend group. On the pitch, Harry was just the Seeker, not her boyfriend, and Ginny ran the team hard that year. She drove herself into the ground and expected the rest of the team to try to keep up. Harry said he was getting muscles in places he didn’t know existed.
Luna, who was helping write and edit the Quibbler from the castle, was busy collecting interviews from students about their wartime experiences, first-person accounts that would one day appear in history textbooks. She also quietly started a Hogwarts Quidditch column in the Quibbler, which seemed to mostly feature the Gryffindor captain.
Along with all their friends, both girls were studying hard for their N.E.W.T.s. A year before they weren't sure if they would have a future. Their lives weren't guaranteed, and even if they survived another year, what would the world look like if they didn't take down You-Know-Who? The skies had cleared, and once again they had to study and plan ahead. They had gotten used to surviving another day, sometimes another hour or minute. Refocusing their perspectives to be able to imagine years, decades?
Amidst all this, Ginny felt she had successfully relegated Luna to the past and Harry to the present.
Except that one time.
But Harry never found out, and Luna never mentioned it, never even alluded to it. Sometimes Ginny would convince herself it was just a dream. Merlin knows similar things had happened often enough in her dreams.
*
The past
*
Back at the castle for seventh year, Luna had never felt more disoriented. She had spent six years at Hogwarts, mostly minding her own business, with a few friends, never the center of attention unless people were laughing at her. The year before she, Ginny, and Neville were respected and looked up to by members of Dumbledore’s Army, but most students were wary of them, and Slytherins had hated them viciously along with the Carrows, had actively tried to harm them. But now, she was popular. And it felt very strange.
Witch Weekly, Magical Her, students from different countries, brands, and radio shows were contacting her, along with Hermione, Ginny, Harry, Ron and Neville. The six of them had become the face of Voldemort’s downfall in the media. Their youth, friendship, and resilience added up to amazing human interest stories, the kind that sold out magazines, the interviews reprinted in the next issue for people who couldn’t get their hands on it the first go-round.
Harry was of course the most famous, but Neville was experiencing a renaissance, helped along by Harry, who in several interviews had pointed out that Neville had been the one to kill Nagini. Harry had given Katie Bell, who was starting a career in journalism, an exclusive interview in which he revealed that Neville was also the chosen one, kind of.
While Neville’s grandmother was pleased, Neville was less so. “Harry, just because you’re sick of being on the front page every day, doesn’t mean you can just sic them all on me! You saved the world; deal with the consequences.”
Witch Weekly had run a big story by Rita Skeeter titled “Zero to Hero: A Long Way up from the Bottom” that had relied mostly on anonymous sources to talk about Neville’s rise from a “bumbling tot pronounced a Squib at age 10 by the family’s healer,” to a “surprisingly dashing figure, who upon destroying the last Horcrux became the object of every young woman’s affection.”
Ginny, Ron, Harry and Hermione had a lot of interconnecting relationships binding them together. Hermione and Ginny were very close, as were Ron and Harry of course; Ginny and Ron were siblings; Harry and Hermione had been best friends for years; and then Ginny and Harry were together as were Ron and Hermione. Luna and Neville, though close with all four of them as well, were naturally a little bit on the outside of their dynamic, which was fine as they were very close themselves. Before seventh year, Luna would have said that Neville and Ginny were the people she was closest to. Now there was a big wall between her and Ginny, but Neville was still there.
On the Hogwarts Express that September, Ron had suddenly looked at Neville in their compartment around lunchtime.
“Wait, why are you here?” he said, through a mouthful of sandwich. “Didn’t you graduate last year?”
Hermione rolled her eyes. “Ronald, do you listen to anything besides the sound of your own voice?”
“I basically lived in the Room of Requirement,” said Neville. “The school didn’t hold N.E.W.T’s or anything, on account of the castle being blown up, and besides I don’t think I learned anything last year. I forgot pretty much everything besides Defense Against the Dark Arts spells.”
“Neville told us all about this when we went camping in June!” said Hermione, exasperated.
Hermione was Head Girl seventh year and she helped select a progressive set of Prefects. They worked with McGonagall to establish a pilot year of no passwords for the common rooms. Neville had been appointed Head Boy, but he mostly let Hermione call the shots.
“This year we will not be locking common rooms and our student body away from one another. We will shake away the clouds of obfuscation and see one another clearly. We are all students at one school, and our house divisions do not serve us,” Hermione had announced rather grandly at the Welcome Feast.
“We sit in our houses tonight for the Sorting, but until the Goodbye Feast in June, we will not separate into House Tables, but sit wherever we want. No one here is our enemy, but a future friend. ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’”
And so, Neville and Luna were often together in the Ravenclaw or Gryffindor common room, or sitting beside one another at mealtimes or in class. Neville had started designing a board game over the summer, and he and Luna were often to be found sitting in the watery light of the greenhouse, painting designs for his cards and boards. The concept was a Muggle role-playing game. Neville was starting with an American high school setting where the adventures would be things like going to a dance or being offered drugs behind the school bleachers.
“When this is ready, we’re going to roleplay as Muggle teenagers?” said Luna, as she painted a character for the guide book.
“Muggles have a game called Dungeons and Dragons,” Neville said. “One of my neighbors introduced me to it over the summer, and you pretend to be a human wizard or an elf warrior, or whatever. All these types of people that Muggles think are imaginary. Then you go and fight a dragon or whatever ‘imaginary creature.’”
“Which neighbor was this?”
“Kareem. We only played it a couple of times so I don’t fully get it, but I thought it would be fun to make it about Muggles since their version is about us.”
“I like Kareem,” Luna said. Then, glancing at her watch: “Aren’t you supposed to be in a Prefect meeting right now?”
“Shhh,” said Neville, dipping his brush in the water.
Neville had become a hot commodity. He had grown up from the small, cherubic, but clumsy little boy. He was tall, with surprisingly strong bone structure that had hidden for years behind round cheeks. Evidently Rita Skeeter had sold a lot of Witch Weeklys with her Neville coverage, because a month into school she wrote “Horcrux Breaker or Heart Breaker?” in which she claimed that Neville was engaged in an endless series of trysts and that classes were disrupted daily by fights and tears between the girls over Neville. Neville’s grandmother shortly thereafter sent him a letter in which she admonished, “the Longbottom charm and good looks are not to be used frivolously.”
Luna was constantly being asked if she was his girlfriend, or she would be buttered up by girls who were hoping that she would pass along a good word. Neville did go on a few dates with Hannah Abbott over the summer and the start of the school year, but that fizzled out quickly.
“She’s a good sort of a girl,” said Neville, one September night in the Astronomy tower. He and Luna were wrapped in blankets and looking out across the starry night sky. “I just don’t see it with her.”
“Do you like any of these girls? I’ve heard from about a dozen contenders who want to be your date to Hogsmeade on Saturday.”
“I just want to go with you,” Neville grumbled, setting his head down on his knees.
“Works for me,” said Luna.
“Want to meet up with Harry, et al? He and Ginny are going to leave around 10.”
“I guess,” said Luna, picking up the Astronomy essay she had been working on, and peering through the darkness at what she had written.
“We don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Neville said, sympathetically.
Neville was the only one Luna had confided in about Ginny. Most of the DA knew that there was something going on with them, but the only one who Luna had wanted to talk about it with was Neville.
“Do you think Harry knows?”
“He must have heard something,” said Neville. “But I think most people are trying to move on from last year.”
Luna gazed out at the stars reflected in the lake. “I’m not. I mean, I am, I should be trying. It’s just hard.”
***
After they all graduated, Harry and Ginny spent the summer renovating Grimmauld Place. Harry had lots of connections and favors he could call in, and the house became unrecognizable. Harry had long since freed Kreacher, who was collecting a salary and spending lots of time helping Bill and Fleur at Shell Cottage with their new baby. When Kreacher was in London he would fuss at everyone, make an enormous meal of pie and soup and then spend his evening watching Muggle television in his room, having finally been convinced to move out of the airing cupboard.
Harry and Ginny and assorted friends and family tore down walls, cut holes for new windows and skylights, finished getting rid of the Dark objects that had once filled the house, and soon the place was gleaming wooden floors, burnished copper pots, and as much natural light as you can hope to get in London.
Harry let all his friends who wanted to stay there choose rooms. Somehow each time another friend expressed interest, they seemed to find another brass doorknob in a hallway they swore used to be shorter. (“Maybe the house was tired of all those old poisons and house elf heads, maybe it didn't like being evil. Maybe it's saying thank you," Luna said.) His friends insisted that they at least chip in for the property taxes and the water bill, but as the house had long since been paid off, no one paid any rent, which was a welcome relief after the stress of the last few years. Ginny and Harry had their own rooms, but they still ended up in the same bed most nights.
In a dusty shop in Diagon Alley, Ginny found a vintage wallpaper for her room: unicorns, glowing fairies, mermaids and dark forest. On days when the gray haze that had descended on her ever since the war, and really ever since she was eleven and possessed by Tom Riddle, was particularly thick, she would lie under the quilt her mum had made her and watch the unicorns canter among the fairies.
Harry decorated his room with Sirius’ old posters, Gryffindor pennants, snapshots of his friends, and old photographs of his parents and Sirius and Remus. And while Ginny was often battling old monsters, so too was Harry. He sometimes stayed in his room for days at a time. Hermione, Ginny or Ron would bring him cups of tea and toast they had enchanted to stay warm, but they often went untouched.
The British and Irish Quidditch League had taken a hiatus at the peak of the war, but was coming back strong. Ginny had the summer off before she was drafted. Like all players straight out of Hogwarts, she was often on the bench her first season, but Harry and Ron were always in the audience.