Chapter 1: Are You Ready?

Older chests reveal themselves
Like a crack in a wall
Starting small, and grow in time
And we always seem to need the help
Of someone else
To mend that shelf
Too many books
Read me your favourite line
Some things in life may change
And some things
They stay the same
Like time, there's always time
On my mind
So pass me by, I'll be fine
Just give me time.
-Damien Rice, 'Older Chests'

When she wakes some nights, she covers her heart with her hand as she tries to steady her breathing. She realizes it was just a dream, and she rolls over in her empty bed, staring out the window at the Empire State Building and the flashing of lights. It's cold, but she doesn't reach for the heater, she just bundles the blankets around her chin.

It was just a dream, she reminds herself.

But when she closes her eyes, the yellow light hits fair hair and cold gray eyes turn to her. "Are you ready?" he asks.

She sighs into her pillow, but it is just a dream, and she cannot chase it away.

The burning in her palm feels like yesterday and the stairway looks the same. She stares at him, with her eyes closed tightly, as the world falls apart. He is handcuffed. "Are you ready?"

Some nights she tries to call out to him. "What should I be ready for?" "What's coming?" or even a simple "No!". But most nights she is silent and he disappears and she is alone.

And most mornings she wakes with alcohol and nicotine before she remembers the courtyard and the cigarettes between classes and she thinks about Azkaban and tries to forget.

...

Ginny woke with a start to the sound of the phone. She peeled her eyelids open, knowing who was calling and not wanting to pick up. It was slightly selfish of her, she knew, but there was no reason to answer it right now. After all, Hermione knew that it was only eight in New York city and that Ginny was planning to sleep in today.

All things considered, she thought it was fair to let it go through to the answering machine. The body beside her apparently disagreed, and when he moved, Ginny became aware of her own nudity.

"You going to answer that?" he asked, his voice tinged with sleepy irritation.

Ginny glanced over. It was Mark, which was bad enough, but he too was nude, which made it worse. She chewed her bottom lip, sitting up and staring at his pale back before glancing at the phone.

Finally, the recording picked up and her unnaturally cheerful voice greeted the caller. "Hello," it said, "You have reached Ginevra Weasley, I'm not here right now, so please leave a message after the tone."

She groaned when Hermione started in and began to stand up, totally aware of her body and the fact that Mark had been equally drunk last night.

"Ginny, it's Hermione, I'm just calling to remind you to be at the airport at least two hours before your flight. And once again — Ron and I are more than happy to meet you, if you like. Call me back, and I'll give you the itinerary for next week. Please, call me back. Thanks."

Ginny stared balefully at the phone before wrenching open the door to the bathroom. She hated the pleading hopeful tone of Hermione's voice, but she could hardly blame the other witch. This would not be the first time that Ginny had told her she'd be in touch and had failed to do so.

Mark was sitting up when she glanced back into the room. "Are you going somewhere?" he asked, as he pulled on his trousers.

"Yeah," she called, turning on the shower. Mark was a bartender at the pub across the street. He had been trying to get her into bed since she had arrived here two years ago, and last night, he must have succeeded. She wished she could remember — loathe as she was to admit — the tattoos across his chest and arms had always intrigued her.

"I'm heading home."

"For how long?" he called, sounding as if he had moved to the far side of her studio apartment. He must have noticed the boxes.

"I'm moving back," she said, digging her fingers into her scalp as she shampooed.

"I thought you said you would never go back," he replied, after a moment. She turned, seeing him in the doorway. He was buttoning his black oxford, covering up the red and green dragons across his chest and, she got the feeling, deliberately avoiding her eyes.

She briefly wondered when she had told him that, but knowing her predilection for bourbon and his ability to get people to talk, she brushed it aside. "Well, I never planned to."

He glanced up at her, and then nodded. "I'll be leaving then. Thanks for last night."

And then he was gone, and she was rinsing the conditioner from her hair, the slimy substance rolling down her back and down the drain, wondering what had actually brought her to this. With a sigh, she turned off the shower and then headed to her bedroom.

It was too quiet now, and too empty. But she didn't question anything, just sat on her couch and stared at the wall until the buzzer went off and she had to get up to let the movers in.

...

When Ginny had decided to become a psychiatrist, she couldn't have explained why. She couldn't even explain it now, because the decision had been made too long ago. Perhaps it was because she preferred listening to talking. Perhaps because she wanted to help. It didn't really matter though, not anymore; what mattered was why she decided to stay a psychiatrist, and it wasn't because of her patients. It was because of the veterans, because of Harry Potter — not that he would ever really want the credit.

Harry Potter had a thing about mirrors. It wasn't really much of a thing, more of an irrational fear, but she didn't like to label it as fear of any sort. It was one of those things that sometimes made him go crazy with rage, or get trashed, or even cry. In restaurants, he would sit as far from them as possible. He had all of his clothing tailored at his flat so he never had to look at himself trying things on. And some mornings, he charmed the bathroom mirror black and didn't shave.

Ginny had wanted to stop studying Harry a long time ago, but that desire had faded with each new psychosis. She thought this one probably had to do with the fabled mirrors in the Malfoy dungeons that reflected the prisoners as being tortured or dying. Or perhaps the mirrors of the wizarding world that sniffed at him haughtily and picked on his insecurities. Most likely, though, it was the Mirror of Erised, the reflection of himself, a face to give his weaknesses. A face that he resented simply because of his inability to walk away from delusion.

It was one of those sorts of things. One of the things she spent her life after the war studying; all so she could rationalize them away. It was a fear of being watched or a fear of seeing oneself.

But it had been hard to rationalize Harry when she had been there, so she left it to the journals she had started after the war. They had become her escape from her patients and all of their irrational fears that she spent hours with for the two years following Voldemort's defeat. She rationalized everything away now, handing over a tiny slip that would grant an orange bottle of relief, however short-lived or fake. She even rationalized away her own escape.

But she left the prescription drugs to those who believed in them.

She had always been there for Harry before. She had been there the night before he set off. The night he melted the hand mirror Sirius had given him before he cried into her lap. And that night she walked away and decided that it was not him, but the world and the lives that he had saved, that she loved so dearly.

She had been there when the fear was supposed to crumble away. When Harry Potter had realized that he had nothing left to really be afraid of. And she had been there for him for the two years following- the bouts of depression, the drunkenness, even the occasional drugs. She had watched him fall apart, first as his friend, and then his lover, and she had done her best to be patient and care for him the way he needed. For some reason, she figured she owed him that much.

He asked her once what it was like to have everything figured out, but she hadn't had a way to respond. The war was over, and yet they all walked through the streets with one hand in their pocket, tips of their fingers resting on their wands. They kept their backs to walls. They double checked the locks on doors. They jumped. They were veterans of an all-encompassing war, and it showed.

It was just one of those things: Eisoptrophobia, a big and bulky unrecognized word. The term for his condition — for a fear of mirrors. Even on off days, when Harry would sink into depression, when his stubble would grow longer and longer, when he got agitated and stayed in the dark, even then, Ginny admired him. At least he admitted to fear of himself in such an obvious way. The rest of them were still hiding it.

They all carried their burdens differently now. It was just one of those things.

...

Unsurprisingly, Ginny never did call Hermione back. She couldn't be arsed. She did, however, get all of her boxes down the stairs, sign some paperwork, and eventually catch a cab and head off to JFK.

It had been sunny when she had left the apartment, the light hitting her unstained floor and the white furniture, giving everything a pale, simplistic glow. The tall buildings lining the street had glowed in the sunlight, sending reflections from the glass onto the streets below. Sunny days in New York were always her favorite. But by the time she got to the airport, the rain clouds had set in, and she was fairly certain that the flight would be late.

She prayed it would be late.

But the rain skirted over, passing them and heading somewhere else, and she sank back with a glass of champagne into her business class seat. Thank God for business class. Or thank Hermione.

She didn't even question the cost, just sat there, thinking about all that she was leaving behind again. She was determined not to think about all that she had left behind before, and she was asleep before she even got the command to buckle her seat belt.

...

When her plane finally landed, it was midday in London. She had slept the whole flight and felt hungry and lethargic as she waited for her bags. She was back.

The thought kept racing through her mind, but she didn't feel any different. She felt the same as she had when she had woken up the previous morning in her small apartment. Weariness hung over her, and she knew that she had dreamed on the flight, but the subject was just out of grasp.

Hermione had helped her set up an apartment, and Ginny was looking forward to arriving to another unfurnished room filled, hopefully, with her already-arrived boxes. There would at least be books. Books but no phone. It sounded perfect.

The woman on the PA directed her to a carousal finally to collect her bags and luckily they were among the first ones down. She picked them up, readjusting, and then headed off towards customs.

"Anything to declare?" Absolutely nothing.

She caught a cab outside of the airport, sighing at what she knew would be an expensive ride, but glad to avoid the tube, and she fed him the address of the apartment she had scribbled down from her machine. He nodded and then they were moving, slowly, from the airport.

Ginny watched the fields surrounding Heathrow disappear and the city slowly transform from ugly suburbs to office buildings to row houses to areas she recognized. Memories were cropping up now, caught in places that she had visited, streets that she had walked down once. The entire journey took almost an hour, but it felt like reliving a lifetime.

Finally the driver stopped in front of a brownstone that she actually liked. They were close to the inner city, close to the underground, and close to a taxi point; Hermione had a good eye. She thanked the driver, shelled out a ridiculous amount of notes and then struggled to get her bags out. At long last, it was time to rest.

And while, theoretically, there was no problem with that — it was still early in New York and Ginny was worn out — her nerves were twitching. She was nervous, scared even. There were too many people here that she had been avoiding for two years. So when she sat down on her couch, the only piece of furniture in the high-ceilinged, first floor, beautiful Victorian apartment, it was no wonder that closing her eyes didn't bring any sleep.

After ten minutes, she finally crawled back up to sitting and glanced around the room. Hermione had taken care to put a phone in, she realized disdainfully, and there was a fireplace with a pile of logs waiting to be lit and what looked suspiciously like Floo powder sitting next to it.

There were a few boxes piled up here and there, things that had arrived before her, but none of the things that she had sent with the movers. She irrationally cursed the crappy service, before finally standing and rooting through one of the bags she brought for clean things.

Thankfully, the water had been turned on, and she took a shower, staring at the thoughtful stocking of toiletries. She smiled, reminding herself to thank Hermione later. Skin scrubbed clean, she got out and dressed quickly and dried her hair carefully with her wand. It was a little frizzier than it would have been with a blow-dryer, but a lot faster. The apartment was freezing.

And then, less than three-quarters of an hour after she had arrived at her new flat, she left it, locking it with both her key and her wand before wandering off down the street.

It had apparently been a warm September in London, but as October began the trees that lined the streets were finally changing into bright coppers and golds. Autumn had always seemed somewhat bitter to her, perhaps because it was always when her brothers left for school. There was just something not right about such a glorious beauty masking something so sad and cruel. Fall was death. It was change. It was like a war coming to an end. The long summer stretched out in unbearable heat and ended only in death. And then after the glory and the celebrating and the relief, the horrid reality settles in. And then the heat that you hated is missed.

And though she had probably stretched her analogy too far, that was how Ginny felt. She had been ready, four years ago for the war to end, for the pain and the death to stop. And then they had won and the mess had been semi-tidied up and they had settled down into ... life. But Ginny, and most everyone else, had had no idea of how to live. There was no clear evil anymore. There was nothing to fight. There was just a day by day existence that stretched out into infinity. It was a whole new precedent.

It just wasn't black and white anymore and there was no one to blame.

It was too sunny out to compliment her thoughts, though, and Ginny pushed them from her mind. She felt her step lightening gradually in the crisp air, as she walked in unity with the people on the street, all of them rushing to their work, blissfully unaware of her turmoil.

It was almost perfect, almost right, but then the clouds darted over the sun, and someone jostled her elbow, turning to snap at her. Ginny glared at his back, feeling the air slowly deflate from her chest. With a shaky sigh, she went inside a coffee shop for some caffeine and when she came out, after waiting in line for far too long, she walked into the shop next door and bought a pack of cigarettes and a bar of chocolate.

The guy had laughed at her, telling her he hoped her day got better. She had glared at him, too. Then she had glared at the cigarette box, which clearly told her she was going to die a slow and painful death. A moment later, she was cursing herself for missing America.

Her first drag was guilt-ridden but still a bit like heaven as she leaned against the side of a doorway, closing her eyes. Her shoulders slumped forward, and a sigh loosened her tensed back. The second drag called back a memory that she had yet to forget, and for a minute, she let herself go.

She had been standing at the door to her courtyard. A small abandoned haven that she discovered in her first year with the help of Tom, when she running from Filch. It had been February when she had found it, and slipping outside in the cold had left her frozen, but she had been drawn to the tiny space — no bigger than an Azkaban cell and just as enclosed. The walls went straight up, with no windows looking into it, and there was a small circular opening at the top, letting in a limited amount of sky. Even though she hadn't been able to see much on that first night, she had gone back the next day, and almost every day since.

But on that day, it was windy, which was strange in itself. But there it was — rustling the long dead brambles and shrubs and blowing out her second match.

As the flame sizzled and the smoke spiraled into the air, Ginny let out a stream of curses that would have made Ron stutter and Fred ruffle her hair affectionately. She kept going, muttering to herself as she grabbed her third and last match. That one fizzled out as well, and she couldn't stop herself from screaming shortly. It had been one hell of a day.

"Quite the mouth, little one," a voice from nowhere said.

Ginny spun around, coming face to face with Draco Malfoy, and she lost it. She inhaled planning a long tirade, her face already reddening and her hands in fists at her side, when she glanced down at his outstretched hand and felt herself deflate.

There was a lighter resting in his palm. She took it from him and lit her cigarette, thanking him unconsciously as she handed it back.

She leaned against the wall next to the door, resting her head against the old ivy that had grown there and long since died, as she inhaled. And slowly, almost painfully so, the horrid tension left her shoulders, her back eased, and the world stopped rocking as much.

She went for a second as he went for another, and again, she borrowed the silver lighter, remarkable only in its simplicity. Finally, he broke the silence. "So I guess you heard about Lavender then."

She glared at him as he stared at the ground. He seemed almost remorseful, but she brushed it off as insanity. "And her brother," she snapped.

He shrugged. "And her parents and a bus full of Muggles," he returned, letting his head fall back against the wall.

He stared unemotionally at the circular patch of sky; and she watched as he inhaled and exhaled, his body still tense, his robes opened, his tie loosened. She watched as he tried to hold whatever he thought he was together. His pale skin was as transparent as tissue paper and she could practically see his dark eyes through his closed eye lids. He had gotten taller, she realized, startled, and he'd lost even more weight. A flicker of something like worry traveled through her chest, and she shook it off, not looking at him again until he pushed himself off of the wall.

He held out his hand, the lighter clasped in his fingers, and she took it from him. He nodded– "Ginevra" –and then disappeared.

It wasn't until he was gone that she was angry with him for disturbing her haven and wondering how he got there. She thought about going back to the tower, but instead, she lit another, pocketing his lighter.

The wind tickled her face, and her eyes shot open. Ginny was a little surprised at how clearly she could remember the feel of that day, the panic and the loss, and that way she had seen him then, sometime toward the end of her fifth year. When she remembers what he looked like, she realizes that she should have known then. It had all been there, written in the way he had been waiting for her to ask her question, in the tautness of his forehead, and in the way he had rolled his sleeves up past his elbows.

She wasn't ready for this. She wasn't ready to remember him, though she had never really forgotten. And the memories trickled back in slowly, seeping through her skin. There were tears gathering in her eyes now, as she turned and began to quickly retrace her steps back to her flat. The rain was coming.

Her third drag felt a bit like cowardice. Her next, acceptance. And the last one just felt good.

She needed a drink.

...

The attack on Lavender and her brother Dave hadn't been the first incident where Hogwarts students had disappeared or wound up dead. The first had taken the Ravenclaw twins in second year. Then the third year Slytherin who had taken to eating his meals at the far end of the table was just gone one day. The third had been a Hufflepuff in the year above her. Lavender and Dave had been the fourth, but not the last. Ginny tried, but she couldn't remember any of the others' names.

She felt the age old pain winding up inside of her, wrapping its cottony claws around her chest and tightening. She needed to visit the wall.

The wall stood by the lake, overlooking all of the Hogwarts grounds, and listed on it were the names of every single victim who had fought for peace. Cedric Diggory was the first and Sirius the second, but the list stretched on after that, covering the blue stone that shone with the memories of Dumbledore's eyes.

It would be time to visit soon.

...

Ginny watched, through hazy eyes, as Pansy lit a cigarette and leaned against the bar, exhaling smoke over the surface with a look of careful disdain. Ginny waited for the bartender to snap and tell Pansy to put it out, but nothing was said.

When she caught Ginny looking, she gestured imperiously with the curled white paper and smirked. "Muggle-repelling charms," she said, breaking the careful silence.

Ginny let out a disbelieving snort. "You're incorrigible."

Pansy laughed and held out the pack, letting Ginny take one and light it, before they both leaned back against the bar and surveyed the crowded club.

They fell back into silence, smoking slowly, neither needing to speak.

After Pansy had ground the butt into the floor with her startlingly high heels, she turned back to the bartender and ordered two shots of tequila. And then it was just like it had been after the war first ended, and they were nineteen again. It felt innocent again, getting drunk for the pleasure of it, downing shots and losing themselves in music and impersonal caresses. They hit the London club scene hard, and it wasn't until they finally retired to Ginny's new flat, sweaty, spent, and full of chips, that the questions came.

"So," Pansy said, "Why'd you come back?"

Ginny's only response was to sigh and lean her head back against the couch, still the only piece of furniture in her bare apartment.

"It was time."

Pansy didn't comment on that, just shrugged, and the silence fell again. The alcohol was slipping away, sending Ginny into a spinning daze and casting the room into harsh patches of light and shade as she sat, trying to remember what had propelled her return.

"Hermione offered me a job researching for her next project, I just figured I might as well get it over with."

Pansy smirked, "Granger's writing another book?"

"I figured that was as good an excuse as any, though I'm not taking the job. I've got an offer at a private practice," Ginny responded with a shrug. She fumbled around for another cigarette and then started to search for anything that she could use as an ashtray. "It was just time, though. New York was boring me, and I started to think about what I had left behind. And I couldn't remember any reason to not come back, and so I called Hermione, got on a plane, and came home."

Finally, she found an empty pill bottle at the bottom of her purse and pulled it out. She lit the cigarette and positioned the bottle next to her for easy access.

Pansy laughed outright when she realized what Ginny had been looking for, and with a tap of her wand, turned the bottle into a hideous crystal ashtray. Ginny glared at the other woman for a moment, before a smile crept onto her face.

"I guess I'm going to have to get used to magic again. It's been a while since I've relied on it."

Pansy smiled again, laying down awkwardly on the couch and kicking off her heels. "Don't let me fall asleep like this, it will kill my back."

"You know, Gin," Pansy said after a moment, her head rolling around as she surveyed the flat. "I'm all about minimalism, but this flat is hideously bare."

Ginny laughed. "Give it time, Pans, I just got back today."

Pansy shot her a look — one of the many inscrutable looks that Ginny had yet to classify. "I'm flattered that you chose to spend your first night back with me, but shouldn't you have called one of your brothers and perhaps let them take you out for dinner?"

Ginny shrugged, smiling wanly. "I don't even know if they know that I've come back."

Pansy was silent for a minute. "Is Miss Ginevra avoiding something?"

"Always," Ginny said, grinning with the alcohol.

Pansy nodded as her eyes slipped closed and the tequila took her into sleep, and Gin just stared at the long legs taking up most of the couch before finishing her cigarette.

She and Pansy had always been a strange pair. They had become friends sometime during Ginny's sixth year when Pansy's parents had been murdered and she had started spending more time in the library than in her common room. It was an unfair game that the two played, delving into insults and alcohol and endless discussions on fashion and literature. They were strangely like-minded, and Ginny had missed her greatly when the girl had fled to the continent with Blaise near the end of the war.

It was Blaise's death that had brought her home and thrown them together again, both living in London after it ended.

The two fit together nicely because they both knew exactly what the other needed to not speak about. Then they spoke about it anyway, with a tinge of humor and mocking, and somehow, that made everything okay. They had boundaries, and then they crossed them. It was better that way.

Ginny cast her eyes back to Pansy's legs, stretched and long, covered partially in the black silk skirt that she had worn out. With slight drowsiness, Ginny pulled out her wand and lengthened the couch, making it much longer than she had intended, before she settled into her end and closed her eyes.

Tomorrow was going to be one hell of a day, but she put it out of her mind and settled back into the couch. She prayed the room would stop spinning and that her hangover would be fairly painless, smiling as she fell asleep without even noticing.

...

It was hard being back, just as expected. In the first week, there was a windfall of guests and she was almost as shocked at their proclamations of missing her as she was to find out she hadn't missed them at all.

Harry had come and smiled at her, giving her a hug and saying that she looked good. She wasn't sure what that meant, but it had made her uncomfortable. She hadn't left because of him, she had been expecting their breakup as long as she had hoped for their relationship. Well, not that long, but she had expected it as soon as the relationship had begun. She hadn't exactly been torn up enough to move to a different country for two years.

Twenty-six months, Hermione had corrected unconsciously when they had met for lunch. Ginny had found herself laughing at the witch's precision, hanging onto the hope that it wouldn't get irritating too fast now that she was home again.

Her family had held a giant party and she felt the gap at the table even more clearly then. But Bill had given her a hug and whispered in her ear: We still don't blame you. Her father had insisted she come sit beside him at the table and tell him all about the Muggles in Manhattan. Ron had tried to convince her to hold his daughter. Ginny couldn't believe she had missed that. He accepted her honest apology with a kiss on the cheek. Her mum had fretted about her weight and the crime rise in London. Fred and George had offered her jobs, from cleaning to running a branch of the store. Percy had given her a book. It was perfect and more than she deserved.

Neville had shown up at her flat with a potted-plant and a message from Pansy, which made Gin's eyes widen a bit. He smiled at her then and asked her how she was doing, and she had let loose the stream of words built up within her, talking almost constantly for an hour. He had nodded and then calmed her with a kiss to her temple.

Ginny thought it was funny how you could disappear for two years, leaving everything and yet nothing behind and come back to find it all exactly the same and yet completely different. She felt the age-old remorse, the memories of loss billowing up under the surface — all of it coming to a head now that she was home. She didn't want to deal with it again, she had gotten through it once, and she didn't want to have to struggle to move forward again.

She had smiled and nodded when Neville asked to take her out for drinks.

Things, then, progressed from there; life rearranged itself without much effort, as it tended to. It's hard for Ginny to remember exactly what happened in the first month of her return, but if anyone asked, she would have smiled charmingly and said that she furnished her flat, bought lots of clothes, and got a job. Then she would have changed the subject, her eyes driving deep into theirs, begging them to open up for her. And they would.

She was shocked often with how little changed. Routines reorganized, but did not alter, and the people that she knew and loved sill lived lives remarkably similar to the lives they had lived before; and so did she. There was less pain for them, though, they were pulling it together. Ginny wasn't, she realized too soon. She was falling apart.

Now, when Ginny thought about it, The only purpose New York had ever had, was to put off Ginny's own feelings of the war. When the smoke had cleared, Ginny had given up on being a Mediwitch, and had moved on to doing what she had always wanted to do anyway. She had listened to hundreds of other people's tales of the war. Stories of horror, of heroism, of sadness. They had plagued her, and the only way to protect herself had been a layer of cold that had served as a wall between herself and her life.

She had moved with all the responsiveness of one not truly there, and when Harry, a beautiful mess that needed fixing, had knocked on her door less than three months after it had ended, she had invited him into her house, her bed, her life, but he had never gotten near her heart. And so, when he left her, or when she had asked him to leave, she had watched him go with an odd sort of feeling that something was wrong.

Because Harry Potter was like glass, and he had been shattered so horribly that the pieces wouldn't go back together. There was no healing him, there was no fixing him, and the puzzle that was him would never be finished.

In the end, it had been a mutual decision; he had left, and she had stayed, and then later, she too had abandoned London.

And now that she'd returned, so had the past. And she had been shattered by it as well. The cold had come down, had dissipated in New York, replaced by a simple happiness and a hopeful delusion that she had moved on. But that's the problem with lying to yourself, no matter how beautiful the lie, eventually, it catches up to you and the honest truth that you didn't want to face is there, staring you down.

Thanks for reading! xxx