InsaneJournal

Now that Sirius had learned of the impending doom that faced him and all of his friends had he not ended up on a spaceship, the Enterprise was looking better and better. There was still a large part of Sirius that wanted to be back home, fighting, but he felt slightly better knowing that somehow he was still doing that despite also being in space.

If James were to show up, they could figure out how that worked. Or he could start talking to the people who sounded like they knew what they were talking about when Sirius overheard conversations at the bar or in the mess hall. But for now, he was content to explore the ship and test out how things worked, while trying to decide if he was actively avoiding Remus and Peter or not.

He was heading back to his room after lunch one day when he spotted Ginny. He knew exactly who she was before he even got close, and laughed as he called out to her, “Hey, Weasley!” Finally there was someone familiar with the world he knew, without the weird baggage of the future.

Someone shouting her last name was pretty normal in her life, but had become less so since Ginny had arrived on the Enterprise. Nowadays, people just called her Ginny, a benefit of so few people on the ship having knowledge of her home, her family, and the animosity that some in her world felt towards them - two Wizarding Wars about equality for all aside.

She hadn’t exactly gone out of her way to avoid Sirius and Remus - and she was still wholly unaware that Peter Pettigrew was on the ship - but Ginny hadn’t done that much to actively seek them out, either. It was odd to be from the future, to know what became of the both of them and to carry the knowledge that neither of them knew what she did.

Maybe it was because of Harry and the conversations they had had about his learning about being a horcrux and thinking he was meant to die (well, technically, he had died, but Ginny tried not to think about that part. Years later it still hurt and made her head spin all at once.), what it might have shaped or changed if he had known that information sooner. To know your future was a powerful thing, and one that she personally thought carried the potential for more harm than good, but there was also the fact that if someone knew her future, didn’t she have the right to know herself?
Undecided as she was, she had thought it best to keep her distance until her mind was made up. But Ginny knew the voice calling out to her, that happy, barking tone that made so much sense if you knew that Sirius Black was also a big black dog called Padfoot.

For an instant, she considered pretending not to know Sirius, to carry the facade of two people from the same world just meeting by chance on a spaceship, but the Wizarding World (especially in the United Kingdom) was impossibly small. And while Sirius didn’t know her exactly, he certainly knew her family.

The smile she gave when she turned towards the voice was genuine, the long braid she had pulled her hair into thumping between her shoulder blades as she came to a standstill. “Hey, Sirius,” she greeted, doing her best not to goggle at the teenager walking towards her that looked so much younger and happier than in her memories.

Right, it was more than a little strange to be staring at someone he didn’t know, but who clearly knew him. Nor did he have any idea of how much she did know about him. But he figured his own death wouldn’t be as shocking to anyone other than himself, so he cheerfully told this woman from the future, “Don’t worry, Remus already filled me in. Including the glorious end where I die by falling. Through a veil…”

That part still didn’t make sense to him as he just couldn’t picture it, but at least he went out fighting. Giving a slight shrug, he added, “Regardless, pleasure to meet you. Again?” Then he laughed, because how couldn’t he? This entire thing was bloody mental and yet brilliant at the same time. “So how do I know you?”

“I don’t know that I’d call it glorious…..” Ginny said, though the relief that Sirius seemed to know all of the things that happened in the remainder of his life was obvious in the way that her shoulders lost some of their tension and the muscles of her face relaxed just a bit. “But then again, you do have a warped sense of humor sometimes.”

And, really, Sirius would love knowing that he died fighting for a cause and protecting his godson so who was she to judge?

“Again,” she confirmed with a laugh, “At least for me. I met you when I was 13. My parents joined the Order of the Phoenix when it reorganized in the 1990s. You let us all pile into Grimmauld Place to use it as headquarters for the Order.”

Well that was news, and Sirius reacted, his eyebrows shooting up in surprise. “Apparently my time in Azkaban turned me into a masochist, huh? I hate that place, couldn’t get out of it quickly enough. Fortunately I got to stay with James during the summer until I finished school.”

That was one thing he didn’t want to picture, how he must have dealt with going back there. “Did you ever bring a new Order member there only to have them think they accidentally ended up with the Death Eaters?” he asked, smirking at how unlikely of a Headquarters that would have been.

But that was enough about him. Ginny was still unknown to him, which was entirely unfair. “So uh, other than Arthur and Molly’s daughter, who are you?”

“According to Harry, you still hated it and mostly donated it for the Order’s use because it was Unplottable and under the Fidelius Charm so you knew it would be safe for our use,” she said, with a shrug, “And it was until your death. We had to abandon it afterward as we weren’t sure who would inherit the place after you - Dumbledore thought it might be Bellatrix, so my parents house because headquarters for a while.”

She was just going to leave out the part where Sirius had spent weeks holed up with Buckbeak and barely talking to anyone, unable to leave the house due to his status as an escaped prison and the Death Eater’s knowledge of his animagus form. There was no reason to pile on more misery for him.

“I don’t know any Order members who didn’t get it right off, pretty much everyone knew about the Black family and their allegiances, but there was a bit of explaining as to the truth about your innocence,” Ginny sighed, still annoyed that Peter Pettigrew had disguised himself for years as a family pet. Had many times had she, Fred and George talked about the summer they had considered setting the rat loose in the woods near The Burrow, for no other reason than it would annoy Percy? If they’d been more vicious they could have killed the thing, not that it would have helped matters.

But it would make her feel better, at least in hindsight.

“I’m their only daughter, and their youngest child,” she elaborated, aware that when Sirius was a teenager that there weren’t nearly as many Weasley siblings as her parents ended up with. “I played quidditch professionally back home, for the Harpies. Sorted into Gryffindor at Hogwarts.” And Ginny stopped there, not really sure what else Sirius wanted to know.

At the mention of the Harpies, Sirius grinned, his eyes going wide. “Wait, you played with Holyhead? I now know a famous Quidditch player? That’s brilliant!” Suddenly there were so many trivial details he wanted to know, like who won the league each year, what teams made it to the World Cup and who won, and other details that would be a good deal lighter than those he knew.

But he held back, still slightly in awe that he could know anything about the future at all. Of course there had been questions about his allegiances. “Yeah, from what I hear, Wormtail did a number… You know about all of our uh… other names, right? Oh! And Peter… Here he’s not a traitor yet. Doesn’t know anything. I really should bring that up with Remus.”

Sirius hadn’t directly asked Peter about it, only made the assumption. If he was being honest, it was a selfish move, and part of the reason he may have been avoiding his two friends. Well, that and Remus was so much older than expected. Everything was weird, but even though Ginny was from his future and knew him, he found it somewhat easier to talk to her because he didn’t know her.

The laugh she gave was genuine, a clear, high sound that was followed up by a cheerful grin. If someone from her class of Gryffindors, or any other her other friends had made such a comment Ginny would have blushed and tried to downplay the compliment with a joke or a bit of sarcasm, but with this version of Sirius she just took if for what it was. “You do indeed,” she said, brushing a stray piece of hair back behind her ear. “I started right after Hogwarts on the reserves and got promoted to the starting line-up the next season. I was about to begin my fifth season when I end up here.”

“You obviously wouldn’t know him yet, but your godson Harry? He’s brilliant at quidditch, too.” People always said that her brother Charlie could have played for England, which was true, but Harry had repeatedly put Charlie to shame flying around the paddock at The Burrow. And, for all she knew, the English National Team had probably offered to let Harry play.

Not that he’d have accepted it.

“That bloody bastard is here?” Just like that, the friendly and pleasant nature Ginny had shown through the conversation changed, her spine snapping into a straight line and her eyes narrowing in anger. Peter Pettigrew was a name on a very short list of people that she’d gladly hex with the intention to permanently maim, the rage of being duped by their family pet combining with the destruction that his cowardly, selfish nature had brought upon people that she cared a great deal about because Wormtail turning traitor hadn’t hurt just Harry, though he had seen the brunt of it.

“Actually, I have a better question,” she snapped, not angry at Sirius, but furious that she hadn’t known. “You know he’s here and you and Remus haven’t ripped him to pieces yet?”

“Bloody hell,” Sirius exclaimed, startled by the sudden change in Ginny’s demeanor. “Yeah, he’s here. And he’s my age and he’s not betrayed anyone yet. So you think he should be punished for a decision he’s going to make in the future?”

He shrugged. “I haven’t lived through it. It’s hard for me to picture any of this, to be honest. And if I thought that my friend who was already on this ship when I got here had already betrayed us, I might feel differently, but he hasn’t.” Or at least that’s what Sirius thought, or what he hoped.

Then suddenly, he changed his mind and told the truth. “Actually, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s true. It’s what I’ve been led to believe and I don’t know what’s stopping me from demanding an answer. Maybe I just don’t want to believe that everything is true.”

His shoulders dropped, and his eyes turned toward the floor. “I go back and forth on this all the time,” he admitted.

And here it was, she thought, the power that knowing the future could render. Ginny had no doubt that she could tell Sirius enough to convince him that hurting Peter, or something much worse, would be the right thing to do. She had sat there and listened to Harry unburden himself of his experiences in life, had watched him struggle with not having his parents or a normal childhood, learned with horror about the mistreatment he had suffered at the hands of the Dursleys.

Even her own life had been ruined, albeit in a far less significant way, by Peter’s betrayal because turning over Harry’s parents had allowed Voldemort the opportunity to establish a way to return to power. That rise to power had killed members of her family, some of her friends, even the man in front of her had his life snuffed out because of Voldemort’s thirst for power and immortality.

Logically, she knew there was no way to be sure that Neville wouldn’t have become the target if Voldemort couldn’t have reached Harry, and her heart squeezed with pain at the thought of one of her best friends suffering even more than he had. And she also knew that there was no guarantee that Voldemort would have been stopped by the Order with time if Lily and James had lived and Peter had not been a traitor, but sometimes anger and revenge didn’t want logic. Just justice.

Or what justice was perceived to be.

Could she really sentence someone who hadn’t made a choice yet? Punish someone for something they hadn’t done? She wanted to, but Ginny knew how guilty she would feel, how disappointed her family, her friends, and one Harry James Potter would be in that choice.

Ron and Hermione had told her about Harry refusing to let Remus and Sirius kill Peter in the Shrieking Shack once they were back at The Burrow, and she hadn’t understood it at the time. But now, standing with Sirius in a corridor on a starship, she thought she got it.

“I only know Peter Pettigrew as a traitor,” she said after a few minutes, doing her best to swallow back the bitterness and anger that rose up like a snake ready to strike. “He was a coward, someone that did a horrific thing that cost a great person his life and his family, that cost hundreds of people their lives in a second wizarding war by helping Voldemort secure a path to immortality. He hid in plain sight for 13 years, some say because he was too scared to leave the familiarity of our world and others say because he wanted to know the moment that there was a whisper of Voldemort returning to power as some of the Death Eaters always believed.”

“I couldn’t tell you which it was,” Ginny added with a sigh, “I never met him. I just know what Harry and the others told me over a period of years. But what he did…...even if it was just cowardice and no particular allegiance to the cause, I can’t forgive that. Maybe I shouldn’t hurt him like I want to, but I can’t pretend it never happened.”

“But he’s your friend, and I know how much that means,” she continued, absently lifting a hand to rub at the spot between her eyebrows where a headache was forming. “I have friends that I’d forgive for a lot of things that I shouldn’t, and I’d give them the benefit of the doubt for ever more. Your godson is one of them.”

She’d just leave out the part where she and Harry had history of a far more personal nature. Sirius didn’t need to know everything.

“It’s mental, isn’t it?” Sirius asked, gesturing at nothing in particular. “All of this? I’m standing here and you know me, but you know a version of myself that spent years in Azkaban, falsely accused of a crime that I’d know nothing about if not for being here. Me, however? I’ve never been to Azkaban. I can’t even picture a Dementor…”

Another shrug, then he added, “I still have a hard time reconciling Remus. My best friend! He’s here and it’s definitely him but it’s not the him I knew just a couple of weeks ago.” He couldn’t wrap his head around it.

Ginny might have the future, but Sirius had the past with the knowledge of things to come. He was left second guessing everything. “I had a tendency to give Peter a hard time,” he mentioned. “I warmed up to him eventually, and James yelled at me the first couple years when he thought I was being too harsh on him but it’s possible he resented me enough to betray us. That doesn’t even make sense,” he mused, voicing thoughts that had plagued him as of late. “Because he had no reason to betray us. We were friends. I can’t understand it. And I want to hurt him when I think about it too long.”

Running a hand through his hair, he said, “I sound mental. But I think it’s allowed when you end up in space and rather than making a new Marauders map of this bloody brilliant ship you find out that everyone you know is going to end up dead or a traitor.”

Sirius paused and considered Ginny for a moment. “And here I am telling you everything I’m thinking ten minutes after meeting you.”

“It’s just as strange when everyone you know from home is d---” Suddenly aware that her mouth was getting ahead of her brain, Ginny quickly closed her mouth. She had almost said dead, which was fine because Sirius knew his fate, but Remus didn’t and she wasn’t keen on being the one to tell him what happened. “Different.” She amended after a moment, “I’m eight years old than Remus remembers, you and Peter don’t know me at all.”

Blowing out another long sigh, she considered what Sirius was saying about Peter and tried to fit that in with the little she knew about why people thought he had gone to the other side, desperately wishing that Harry or Hermione were on hand to answer this one. They would mostly be theorizing just like her, but at least they had some personal experience with Peter and a greater knowledge of his life. “Sometimes friendship is no contest for the promise of power,” she said quietly, the words inadvertently sending Ginny back to a time when she’d been a lonely first-year with no one to talk to put a boy in a diary. A boy that had promised her friendship and made her feel powerful and important.

It had been wonderful until she’d started losing her memory, waking up with rooster feathers in her bed and paint on her robes. And then she’d gotten scared, but not quite scared enough to stop writing in the diary. She’d gone back to it after stealing it from Harry’s trunk, just like an addict that told herself she needed one more fix before quitting for good.

And maybe that was why she was so hard on Peter. She saw a little of herself in his choices and her own.

“It’s alright,” she replied with a tight smile, “I understand the need. But…..is there anything else you want to ask me?” Ginny turned back the way she had been walking when Sirius stopped her, gesturing for him to follow. Her room wasn’t very far away, and she did have a bit of tea that they could share stored in her quarters.

“Anything else?” Sirius asked, trying to think of what he might want to know. He couldn’t think of anything, but he followed her all the same. Once they were in her room he realized what he wanted to know.

“Tell me something good,” he said, his voice almost pleading. “Everything I’ve learned about the future is so bloody depressing. You’re older than Remus remembers and you’re playing Quidditch. We won the second war? What good things happened in between? Do I have any good memories left?”

Were they actually memories if he hadn’t experienced them? Sirius dismissed his own question figuring she’d understand.

There was one more question, and Sirius asked it quietly. “How’s my godson? Tell me that after all this, Harry lives?” Harry wasn’t even born for Sirius to have met him yet and somehow he felt a vested interest in the boy’s life.

Ginny had gone straight for her stash of tea without asking Sirius if he wanted any. They were English, and the English always wanted tea for a difficult conversation. Sure, the more difficult parts were probably past them but she ordered two cups from the replicator just the same and passed one to Sirius while she thought about a good memory from his life.

“The year that the Order had your house as headquarters,” she explained, “We all ended up staying there for Christmas and you spent the days leading up to the holiday going through the house singing some really funny carols and decorating with us. And we had a really proper dinner that day, you got to spend some time with Harry and really celebrate.”

It wasn’t much, Ginny knew that, but it was something and she hoped it was enough. Or maybe just enough for now.

Gesturing for Sirius to take a seat, she chose her own chair and took a sip from her cup, making herself comfortable before she spoke up again. “We won the war,” Ginny confirmed with a wry smile, “It wasn’t easy or glamorous, lots of people died, but Harry made damn sure that Voldemort wouldn’t be coming back a third time. The Order rounded up the Death Eaters and the Aurors tracked most of the rest, and Kingsley Shacklebolt was appointed Minister of Magic.”

Her personal relationship with Harry was a bit difficult to define, but that didn’t mean Ginny wasn’t still smitten with him and even though she did her best to downplay the smile at the mention of him and his future after the war, she didn’t quite manage it. “Harry lived,” she told him, still able to remember the shock and sheer joy of that moment in the Hogwarts courtyard when Harry had disappeared under his invisibility cloak and the battle had started again with a fresh round of energy for the side of the light. “Had his choice of jobs. I think every quidditch team in the league asked him to join as Seeker, Professor McGonagall even offered to let him come back to Hogwarts to finish school. He could have do anything he wanted to do, including nothing if it suited him.”

She paused again, taking another drink, “He chose to save the world,” she added with a roll of her eyes that couldn’t be mistaken for anything but fondness. It was so Harry, choosing a career that would repeatedly put him in the same sorts of danger that he had spent his life dodging and trying to avoid. “He’s working in the Aurors office, completely turning the place upside down with all these crazy ideas. But he’s happy. He misses all of you, we all do, but for the most part I think he’s happy.”

The idea that he’d spent a holiday at Grimmauld Place and that it was a happy occurrence was slightly baffling, but Sirius smiled all the same. He’d gotten a Christmas with his best friend’s son, that was something. Or he was going to take it as something, at least, compared with the dark days his other best friend had told him about.

“Damn right, he did,” Sirius said when Ginny told him that Harry made sure Voldemort was dead and not about to come back which apparently had been a thing before. And if the sole Weasley daughter thought she was hiding her affection for his godson, she wasn’t. Sirius detected something there at least, but he didn’t say anything. If he had plans to, they were stopped by her last sentence.

“Who’s all of us?” he asked.

“Friends. Family.” Ginny replied, leaving it at that in terms of names. “Like I said, a lot of good people died. That’s as specific as I think I should go. There are somethings better left alone.”

Sirius gave her a long, hard look before sipping at his tea. “Right,” he agreed. “No sense dwelling on the future that’s really the past.” He figured that they had to have made it past the most awkward conversation topics, it was time for a change of pace.

“Can I confess something?” he asked. “I am completely ready to break every statute of secrecy there is because I really want to run through this place as Padfoot. Maybe get past the restricted areas and make everyone wonder when a dog ended up here. I don’t even care if I get caught. This place is bloody brilliant and I want to explore it all.”

Grinning, he reached for his computer device, the one he referred to as his Paddfoot device but only privately because even he realized just how awful of a play on words that was, and pulled it from his pocket. “This thing… If I’d had something like this at Hogwarts I’d never have gotten anything done. Muggles came up with this! It’s bloody amazing!”