The Last Fine Hour

The Last Fine Hour

*** ** * ** ***

I don't mind when it's over
I don't mind when it's all done
It's just the moments in between
Just before it's gone
Something's going to happen
Something's going to change
I know, I know, I know...

Jane Siberry, The Bird in the Gravel

*** ** * ** ***

Ginny Weasley watches a cloud, as thin and patchy as the worn fabric of her robes, pass slowly across the nearly-full moon. That it takes a long moment for any memory of Professor Lupin to even vaguely enter her thoughts is a testament to how tenaciously the war has raged on and on and on.

Ginny counts backwards, estimating to the best of her ability. She is acutely aware of how a meagre war-time diet and months of boredom have affected her mind, making it difficult to organise her thoughts or complete her sentences with any semblance of the mental agility she knows she once possessed. She thinks it must be about four years since Lupin fell at Foulness...his body, like Ron's, never salvaged from the burning pier; their ashes carried away by the bitter coastal wind and lost to the churning sea.

Harry had held her back that night, watching mutely as the golden flames clawed at the coal-black darkness. At the time Ginny was furious that he wouldn't let her try to reach them or pursue their assailants as Harry himself had done when Sirius and Dumbledore were killed. Instead, he had just held onto her, his face twisted with fear and horror. Looking back, Ginny is sure that was the moment when Harry began to lose hope. The moment when the war was lost.

Afterwards Harry's drive for vengeance took on an almost frightening madness. Voldemort began to toy with him like a cruel child might taunt a trusting puppy, pretend-throwing a bone again and again, all the while hiding the animal's quarry behind his back. With each victory for the Order came a demoralising succession of defeats that whittled their numbers and, eventually, their spirits.

In what should have been Ginny's seventh year, Hogwarts was liberated after ten months under siege -- and the Death Eaters responded by turning St Mungo's to rubble and massacring hundreds at Dover. Harry found and destroyed four horcruxes, but then Voldemort proved Dumbledore's theory wrong by splitting his soul until it was as uncountable as the shards of a shattered glass. As if he knew that Harry, being, after all, human, could only take so much, could only fight for so long. Voldemort seemed willing to lose a little more of his soul for the pleasure of watching Harry destroy himself.

An image of Hermione flashes through her mind, but Ginny wills herself to halt the rolling flow of memories. She will not spend these last hours thinking about all the difficult choices each of them has faced. Or about how hard it has become, sometimes, to love Harry.

Ginny pulls a small trunk out from under the bed and opens it, waving away a puff of dust that springs into the air. When she still believed there would be a new life after the war, she had stored Harry's Quidditch robes and a few other things in here. Along with their provisions, this trunk is the only thing she took with her into hiding. Except for a few phials of random potions, whose labels, Ginny notices, are faded and difficult to read, those provisions, like so much else, are long gone.

She takes Harry's robes from the trunk and lays them out on the bed. She smoothes out the fine material, picks away some tiny flecks of lint and a few stray black hairs until she is satisfied that the scarlet fabric gleams in the faint light, as unmarred and pristine as when Harry last wore them in his sixth year. Then she undresses, banishing her tattered robes to the fireplace. She lies down, runs her fingers over the embroidered Gryffindor insignia and wraps herself in the memory of better times before pulling the robes over her body.

They hang incongruously on the awkward clotheshorse of her skeletal frame. Months of poor nutrition have tinged her pale skin grey and abandoned her eyes to a sunken face she herself barely recognises anymore. It hadn't taken long after their food store ran out for her hair to turn brittle and begin to break. She had cut it away and now it clings around her head like a dull, patinated hood. She's been so thin for so long now that she can't even remember her last period but thinks it might have been early in the spring -- before Voldemort won London and the Ministry, and the dwindling Order had fractured and scattered.

Even their communication had been cut off then. And the only thing that surprised anyone about that fact was how long it had taken Severus Snape to betray the Order's last secret.

Ginny moves to the window and watches a hedgehog, bathed in the moon's obscured glow, dart across the garden. It hurries as if it senses a predator more menacing than the cats and foxes that once would have been its greatest concern. But Godric's Hollow has long been empty of even its most territorial inhabitants. Ginny's fingers flex around her wand, more from habit than any true intention of raising it. From her perch on the second floor she can tell that the animal is still young -- and probably lost, for why else would it wander into this desolate territory? It would provide such a paltry meal that she decides it should live. The war is over now, and Ginny wants to choose life for someone -- something, because she knows the good fortune that allowed her to survive this far has run out. Why shouldn't it be this tiny hedgehog that is given the chance to survive another day, even if it is on the fringe of a new dark world? She watches the animal disappear behind the azaleas and wishes it more success than she knows is wise to wish for herself.

For Ginny, the journey is nearly complete. She doesn't know who besides the two of them is left, but the heaviness in her chest is a constant reminder that their secret-keeper is dead and their location compromised. The single phoenix feather that slipped through her trembling fingers to the floor early this evening told them the news she has been expecting. She reckons it is only a matter of hours before the Death Eaters find this place and haul its last inhabitants away, perhaps to answer directly to Voldemort or maybe to face more merciful deaths.

Ginny wraps her arms around herself and tightly grasps the soft fabric of Harry's seeker's robes, which never knew defeat, and wonders if they might still have a chance. There is nowhere left to go and a future of random Apparition, hoping that they won't blindly land in a Death Eater's garden, seems more cowardly than staying here and facing whatever comes to them. And until it comes, Ginny decides they should have what each of them has always wanted.

After all, the war has taught Ginny many things, such as the hidden benefits of unexpected alliances and the power of her own mind. Draco Malfoy proved a better Occlumens than Harry could have ever hoped to be, and when he joined them, he agreed to teach them. It had come surprisingly easy to Ginny. If she can close her mind to attack, or use it to penetrate the deepest secrets of an enemy, she knows she can make herself believe anything.

There is only one thing she has ever really wanted. It had been hers once and she had found the strength to release it, hoping -- but never expecting -- that it would return to her. She had wondered, if it did return, how whole it would be. Ginny had always told herself that whatever shape it took, however broken or mangled it was, for her it would be enough.

So tonight, everything will be enough. Everything will be real for her. Tonight, in her mind, Ginny will not be a shadow, but the young woman she should have had the chance to grow into without the inconvenience of war. Tonight she will not be an orphan with too many scars and haunting memories of her own, but someone with a future and someone to share it with. Tonight she will not be tired and defeated, but still strong enough to take into her arms the only thing she has ever wanted.

*** ** * ** ***

He never wanted Ginny Weasley, he tells himself. Not like so many other boys, bursting with their newly discovered virility, had wanted her, seduced by the way her beauty and self-assurance mingled with a magic whose foundation they didn't understand. But he had understood. Her magic was seductive because it had been touched by darkness and had not faltered.

They have been in hiding together for one hundred and ten days. He has noticed that she prefers vague approximations to accuracy now, but he has kept close count since they arrived here after London fell. Now the place where it all began is poised to become the place where it all ends.

Not for the first time, he questions his right to be here, where the legendary James and Lily Potter so nobly sacrificed everything. For nothing. Since leaving Hogwarts, his own legacy has amounted to little more than a mosaic of dishonourable deeds conducted in the name of good; a mosaic he is sure, had they won, would have been scorned at and scrutinised unforgivingly. But he has given more than he knew he had to the Order and been more than willing to put his life on the line if it meant the war might end in their favour. He knows that counts for something. Otherwise, this moment would not exist.

He and Ginny are both worn thin and hardly the people they once were. Unlike the girl he remembers from Hogwarts, she is very quiet now and hardly speaks. When he hears his own voice, it sounds stripped, as if all that remains is the neediness he fought for so long to conceal. At times she seems to pity him, but he always forces himself to bite down on the anger it generates inside him. He knows she has been better to him than he deserves. Never, as he had expected, has she blamed him for his choices or for the loss of several brothers and her parents. It makes him admire how she can keep the darkness inside herself at bay.

He turns the tap, fills his hands and washes the bitterness from his mouth. He watches the water stream out of the tap and remembers his hands in colder, murkier water, struggling with Hermione Granger's lifeless body.

Lucius Malfoy had been so smug, Hermione had said, when he had delivered her to his Master. But then Voldemort had murdered the man without a second thought and laughed as he implanted a sliver of his own hideous soul into one of Harry Potter's best friends. 'Let the destroyer of horcruxes destroy,' he had said, red eyes boring into Hermione's.

When she recounted the events, Hermione had reverted to her no-nonsense, insufferably logical, know-it-all self. Just one more horcrux. Worth it if it meant they would win. Don't think of it as me anymore, Harry. And she had handed him the gillyweed, led him into the water and made him promise he would hold her only for as long as it took.

'Make sure he listens, Malfoy,' she had said to the only other person who had accompanied Harry to the place they had been told they would find her. And part of Harry never forgave Draco for pulling him out afterwards.

His hands are white at the knuckles now from holding on so tightly to the edge of the basin. He splashes cold water onto his face and forces the memory away.

He looks in the mirror, at his reflection. The veneer of youth, he thinks, is so transparent, so imperfect. He takes in the face staring back at him: the scar, of course, jagged and raw like the edge of his own existence. The ridiculous hair. With his tongue, he feels around for the tooth torn out in exchange for yet another horcrux. Bone for bone. He shakes his head, incredulous. Despite everything, Ginny seems to love every inch of this face and of this would-be hero's too-thin body.

Time is short, he knows, so he allows himself only another moment. And for once, he doesn't see the deep lines that the war has etched into his face faster than a more benevolent time would have allowed; he doesn't see the flatness in his eyes. No, even with the end so very close and hope lost, tonight the eyes staring back at him from the mirror possess a fierceness he had nearly forgotten. And he knows that this, more than anything, is what Ginny Weasley needs to see again.

*** ** * ** ***

Ginny waits in the bedroom. When she hears the door open, she closes her eyes and tells herself that she is beautiful again and that Harry is whole Ð that they both are. She tells herself that this is the new beginning they believed in for so long, and not the end at all.

She feels him standing behind her, hesitating. She rubs her hand invitingly over the place beside her and he sits down. Ginny senses what she can only describe as confusion in the air around him, as if his old pride is making one last attempt to deny a secret already revealed. Finally, she looks at him and without being able to stop, puts a hand to her mouth and begins to cry, silently. He reaches up and rests one hand at the back of her head. It is a comforting gesture she hadn't expected.

With him beside her now, it is suddenly easy to remember: Harry, who had found it in his heart to spare Peter Pettigrew; who had walked away because he had wanted to protect her; who had never forgotten the slow lowering of a wand. Harry, easy to love.

She pulls at the clasp at his collar, opens his robes and runs her hands across his smooth chest. He doesn't move and she tells herself it's just like Harry, to be so uncertain even now.

So Ginny stands and faces him, letting Harry's Quidditch robes slither to the floor. Then she moves forward so that he has to do something. And when they move again, they move together.

*** ** * ** ***

He wonders if his own mother ever looked at his father the way Ginny looks at him now. Her eyes seem to take up her entire face and he has never seen love so up close. Ginny's eyes burn with an intense surety that shakes from him the numbness that has seemed inseparable from himself. He raises his head and closes his mouth over hers.

He knows it is contrived and that they are desperate. As if by pretending it's real for a little while, they win something. Such artificiality would have offended him once. So much about this situation would have offended him once.

But shortly after Hedwig had appeared with the golden feather in her beak, Ginny had come to him. Clad in Quidditch robes that brought to mind simpler rivalries, she had explained what she wanted and succinctly outlined why he would agree. He realised that she now knew everything that mattered about him. And still, she had asked for this.

Ginny melts into him and he feels suddenly angry that she was right. This is all he has ever really wanted. Even if the war had ended differently, no other body could ever have taught him so well what it feels like to be loved. Suddenly, he wants more than this one last hour, so excruciatingly delicate and fleeting and fine.

Ginny pushes her fingers through the dark tangle of hair that is already showing signs of white, already beginning to thin. He feels her wet tears against his face as she kisses away his scar and whispers. Harry.

The word feels like a bludger and sends a tremor through him. As she clings to him, a wordless, strangled sound escapes him, tearing to shreds all the cruelty and injustice they have endured. He feels something ripple beneath his skin, change him and, too quickly, the pleasure is displaced by a hollow awareness of reality.

They draw apart and lie side by side, not touching. Another ghostly expanse of cloud moves across the sky and the moon casts a pale light across the bed. Outside in the garden, there are voices. And then a flash of green light. A woman speaks, her tone cold and hard and familiar. 'A hedgehog. I thought maybe an auror.' He closes his eyes.

Beside him Ginny stifles a sob, which he misunderstands for fear. He reaches, uncertain again, across the space between them until he finds her hand and takes it in his, aware of how little he knows about comforting others.

They can hear what sounds like an army of Death Eaters moving through the dry, fallen leaves. Someone mutters another spell and they feel the anti-Apparition charm encapsulate the house. There is the sound of shattering glass on the ground floor. Somewhere a floorboard moans.

Ginny weaves her fingers through his and squeezes. He feels her shift suddenly and is surprised when she moves closer to him, extends her free arm across his chest and sifts her fingers through the fine white hair. He has never felt his insides twist in quite this way or his throat constrict so tightly, and he hopes that this is what dying feels like.

Ginny looks into his eyes without any sign of regret or disgust. She places the most ethereal kiss he has ever known on his temple. And before rising to retrieve her robes and her wand, whispers to him. 'Thank you, Draco.'

*** ** the end ** ***