Return to Godric's Hollow Who: Ginny Weasley and Mike Corner What: A friendly arse-kicking check-in Where: Godric's Hollow When: Wednesday, 30 July Why: Because Mike seems to have drawn a giant target on himself
Ginny stalked through the streets of Godric's Hollow, trying not to look at anything. Trying not to remember. It had been ten years, but in her mind's eye she could still see everything as it was. Here, the hill where Fenrir Greyback drew his last breath through a shattered throat, the ground still barren where his blood had pooled. There, the pile of rubble that had once been an abandoned house, until Ginny brought the whole thing down on the heads of a pair of masked Death Eaters. She never knew who they were, never came back to see whether they survived -- because just there, over the next small rise, stood the place toward which the pair had been directing their magic: a circle of scorched earth, the boundary of the explosion that had taken Harry. And Tom.
What became of Tom's body? Was it even properly his body anymore, or had it become by then so little flesh held together by will alone that it had truly disappeared, disintegrated, as they all thought Harry had?
Was that what Bellatrix had been trying to find? Some remnant of him, from which she could regrow the whole? Or... something else.
Maybe Mike knew. Maybe that was why he was here. How else to explain that he seemed so determined to dance naked in the rain with a giant target painted on himself? ...Metaphorically speaking. The literal act she might've been a little more willing to get behind. Or in front of. Or... no, she had other things to think about right now.
She reached the cemetery and the giant elm that stood just at its edge, its ancient limbs bearing witness to everything that had come before. She reached out to touch the trunk, absently, to trace bark scarred by wind and lightning and....
There. A hole, no bigger around than her little finger, but deep, and smoothed over by a decade's healing growth. Her mind had forgotten, but her fingers remembered -- and now the memories came flooding back: stumbling through town in an ever-widening circle, calling his name; friends she couldn't identify through her tear-blind eyes, their hands and their voices offering comfort, urging her to stop her futile searching; and then, long after midnight, after everyone else had gone, her fingers closing over the only remnant she could find, drawing it forth, cradling it, and laying it to rest in the only way, the only place, that seemed appropriate....
She peered about to make sure she was alone, and pushed her way through the little gate and into the cemetery. She picked her way along the path to a pair of graves that had stood here nearly her whole life.
Someone had placed flowers on the graves. Recently. Ginny smiled a little, and then knelt down to whisper to the dirt and the stones -- really, to the memory of those they honoured -- a quiet litany of explanation and apology.
She withdrew her wand and laid it on the ground, its tip halfway between the two headstones, marking the spot where the other end landed with her thumb; and then again, and again, measuring out three wand-lengths along the ground, midway between the graves. When she'd found the spot, she pointed her wand at it and spoke a word -- and the earth moved back, opening a hole as wide and as deep as her arm up to the shoulder.
Ginny lay on the ground and slipped her hand into the hole, and down, all the way to the bottom... there. Her fingers closed over smooth wood, and she pulled; it came free as if her hand were where it had wanted to be all along.
She sat up again and replaced the tumbled earth with another word and a flick of her wand, then sat back on her heels to examine the thing she'd retrieved: an eleven-inch-long wand of holly, worn smooth about its handle from seven years' use.
On impulse, she replaced her own wand in her jacket pocket and took up the holly wand, testing its weight in her hand....
"Expecto Patronum!"
The silvery phoenix that burst forth from the wand seemed more solid than usual, somehow; it sailed a slow circle around her head and then perched on her shoulder, nudging her cheek with its ethereal head. She had always known who the phoenix was, of course, but in this place, from this wand, it was unmistakably Fawkes.
She whispered words of instruction to it, and then watched it sail off over the cemetery wall to find Mike and deliver her message, in her voice: