InsaneJournal

Harry eventually managed to find the door marked with Ginny's room number - they were really going to have to see about switching rooms so that they were together, he decided - and looked for a way to knock or buzz or whatever before he hit the scan pad next to it and heard a few chimes sound on the other side of the door. He hadn't bothered to go to his own room yet; he had come straight here after his extremely awkward conversation with his father, even if he had been distracted by some of the conversation on the PADD he had been given.

It didn't occur to him while he waited for her to answer the door that they might not be from the exact same time as one another. Of course, not much was occurring to him at the moment except that he had to see her to know that everything was all right. As soon as Ginny opened the door, Harry wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in close. "I just had a ridiculous conversation with my dead dad," he said, muffled a bit into her hair. "I have no bloody idea what's even going on right now."

“Which is why I asked if you were okay.” In hindsight, that had been a stupid question because there really wasn’t much of a chance that Harry was taking all of this well. He had managed to run into his dead father and then spoken to his dead godfather in probably a matter of hours, if not minutes.

And that had been before she had told him that Peter Pettigrew was also on the ship.

Rolling her eyes at herself for truly terrible timing, Ginny wrapped her arms around Harry anyway. True, they hadn’t been in the best place when she had been brought here and most days it felt like the word complicated couldn’t possibly sum up everything between the two of them, but it didn’t matter right then. Harry was always going to be someone that she cared deeply for and, right then, he needed a hug.

Hell, she needed a hug and she hadn’t lived through it. “It was a stupid question,” she told him, squeezing perhaps a bit tighter than she needed to. “Of course you aren’t okay, who would be? But it’s going to be fine, Harry. I promise.”

He almost laughed. No, actually, he did laugh, but he muffled it against the side of her head and held her close for another moment. He rubbed her back gently and then pulled back to look down at her. "Honestly, I don't know what I'd have done if they didn't tell me you were here." Harry gave her a lopsided grin, even if it didn't quite reach his eyes. After all, his mind was swimming with more questions than Ginny could possibly have answers to for him.

He moved past her into her living quarters and pushed his hand back through his hair, mussing it up. "You said you've been here for a few months. I'd ask how that was possible when I saw you just this morning but that seems like a pointless question considering that my dad is here. And Sirius. And they're supposed to be dead. Who else is here that I need to know about?" He didn't mean Wormtail. He wasn't even going to touch that.

Harry was already past her and into the main area of her shared apartment before Ginny really understood what he had said so he missed the way her nose wrinkled up in confusion, her head tilting to the right like it so often did when she was trying to work out something difficult. Even in the worst part of their breakup, Harry had never been cruel or inconsiderate, but she wouldn’t have pegged him to be looking for her first and foremost upon his arrival on the Enterprise or to be upset at the idea that she wouldn’t be there. That wasn’t…...well, it wasn’t them. They weren’t at that point anymore.

Or she hadn’t thought they were.

Shaking that off, she turned to press the button that would close the door, following Harry into the common area. “That’s one of the odd things about this place,” she said with a shrug, idly tapping her fingers against the outside of her thigh as she spoke. “People come and go, sometimes they come back - like your dad - but they never remember being here before. And it’s happened enough that we’ve come to realize that somehow we never seem to go missing at home either, so even though I’ve been here, I was also at home.”

“No one,” Ginny answered, “Other than Katie and Alicia. Hermione was here for a couple of weeks and your mum and Remus were both here for a couple of months when I first arrived, but they aren’t anymore.”

He sat on the couch and took off his glasses to rub his eyes, his nose. "That makes no sense. Have they got an explanation? Portkey gone wrong? Something darker? We hadn't caught wind of anything like that in the department," he continued, though even as he said it, he knew none of that made any more sense. He was in the future, presumably, and dead people were living. And his dad hadn't looked like an inferi. It was just that he had to figure it took root in something understandable, and not in something completely inexplicable.

Harry glanced over at her and huffed out a nervous laugh. "Well, that's - something, I guess." His mum had been here. Remus. He would have liked to see both of them, to know his mum. He could know his dad, he realized, as though it just occurred to him now, even though it had been a major part of the conversation he had had with his dad. "Wow."

“Harry,” Ginny had to press her lips together to keep from snorting in laughter. He was still in Auror mode, that much was certain from the questions he was asking and the determination that she could see lurking underneath all the confusion and anxiety. As usual, Harry Potter was going to try and save the world from whatever terrible thing had been thrust upon it which, really, might have been frustrating if she didn’t know him so well. “There’s nothing like that here. This world isn’t like ours, they don’t have magic or portkeys or anything, not unless one of us makes it.”

Taking a seat beside him on the couch, she oriented her body to face his and gave him a small smile, hoping that if she remained calm and relaxed that it might somehow rub off on him. “They don’t have an explanation, just that people started appearing back in January and, since the first few arrived, there have been more and more of us popping in. Some of us stay for awhile, others don’t stay for very long at all, and there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. But the people in charge of the ship have been very kind, they’ve given us places to live, we can even have jobs if we want them. But nothing since I’ve been here has hinted to any sort of dark magic or danger.”

Reaching out to place a hand on his shoulder, she gave him another small grin. “Your mum was pretty great. A lot like you, actually. Very determined, very opinionated.” Ginny also knew that Lily Potter was a whole lot like her, but she wasn’t going to say that. Some things were just too weird. “Remus was…..well, Remus. From your fifth year and my fourth.”

Harry had seen a lot of things over the years, most of which he would have never thought were possible before the turned eleven and learned that he was a wizard and there was a whole other world happening out there that he hadn't known about. "So we're actually in outer space," he said in a disbelieving tone. "And we're on a spaceship, and we're nowhere near home." It was going to take a while for everything to really sink in.

Reaching up, he tucked her hand inside of both of his and shook his head. "I'm going to need to take a very long nap, I think," he admitted. And maybe when he woke up, he'd back back home and not here. But either way, Ginny would be there, he imagined.

He slipped one of his hands out of theirs and wrapped it around her to tug her in against him. "Are you working here? I mean, I figure there's probably no Quidditch, so what are you doing?" There, he thought, ask something normal. Focus on the normal. Focus on Ginny and what she does all day on this space ship. Right.

Though Ginny went easily when Harry nudged her towards him, it wasn’t without a certain measure of confusion in her mind. Physical contact wasn’t a problem, it was Harry after all, but it was strange because even with everything that he was currently going through, she just couldn’t imagine him being this comfortable with her after everything that had happened between them.

The only solution was that he must be younger than her, pulled from some other point in time before he had unexpectedly asked Ginny to marry him and she had regretfully told him no. Though it had taken a few weeks before her turning him down had prompted them to sit down and really talk about what they wanted from their lives. She hadn’t been ready, some days Ginny wasn’t sure she would ever be, and rather than ask Harry to wait around for her, she’d cut him loose.

And having to tell him that really wasn’t something she was looking forward to, because it’d be breaking his heart all over again.

“I…..” Ginny felt her voice catch on the first word she had been planning to say, but she pushed past it, hoping that he hadn’t noticed. There would be a time to explain what happened in the future with them, but after everything that had happened to him today, she wasn’t going to add one more enormous thing onto his plate. “We actually can play quidditch,” she said quickly, forcing some cheerfulness into her tone. “They have this brilliant thing called a holodeck and someone helped me recreate the quidditch pitch at Hogwarts. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s better than nothing.”

“But my job?” she shrugged at that. “Nothing yet. I thought I’d maybe work in the medical bay, since I had thought about being a Healer but how they treat people is so different than what we do at home. So I thought maybe I’d just go serve drinks in the bar with Alicia, but I haven’t decided yet.”

He had noticed it, and his head snapped up to look at her, narrowing his eyes with worry as she hesitated and then hurried on to answer his question about Quidditch. That wasn't what she was going to say. He knew that. He knew her better than that. But he didn't call her out on it right then. "Well, that's good. I've got my broom with me, oddly enough," Harry told her. "I took it in to the office so I could stop over to Diagon on my lunch and get it fixed." They had been working on some drills together a few weekends before when an unfortunate hit from a bludger had splintered the end of Harry's broom. He hadn't got around to fixing it. "It's still in bad shape but maybe I'll be able to fix it here or something."

He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. "Don't suppose you can think of anything an auror can do," he said with a sheepish smile. "Probably don't have much use for me here, if there's no dark magic users about."

“I might be able to fix it,” she replied, the way her lips twisted after she’d said it a clear indicator that Ginny was trying not to smile. “Sirius kept asking if there was a way for us to play quidditch, and while I have my practice broom that the Harpies issued to the team, that was the only one on the ship. But they have a device called a replicator and I figured out how to make a broom with it and then put all the charms on them. They aren’t as fancy as yours or mine, or any that anyone else is going to bring with them, but they work well enough.”

Pressing her lips together, Ginny did start running through a mental list of jobs that she knew other people had on the ship. There weren’t any other Aurors around, but there were people who had been the muggle equal. “There are people here that used to catch criminals, just the muggle kind,” she said, “And I think they all work in security. Keeping the ship safe, making sure no one hurts anyone else and that sort of thing.”

He gave her a look. "If you weren't able to fix it when it broke in the first place, what makes you think you can fix it now?" Harry teased, though he wouldn't keep her from taking another look. Who knows, maybe this replicator thing she mentioned might be useful and that could help fix it up. "It's in my room, I guess. They told me everything I came with that wasn't in my pockets was moved to where I'm staying. I just have to figure out where that is. I came straight here."

Muggle security wasn't too far gone from what he was used to. "Are we under the statute here?" he asked. Maybe not, he realized after asking the question, if she was talking about charming manufactured brooms and playing quidditch on this hollow-thingy. "Would I have to do security the muggle way or do you think they'd let me use magic?"

“Hey, I said I might be able to fix it,” Ginny said, reaching up to lightly thump the outer shell of his ear with her finger. “Don’t get cheeky with me, Harry Potter.” Of course, she was just teasing him because even if she couldn’t fix it, she would let him use her broom or maybe Hermione would come back. She’d undoubtedly know the spell they needed to repair it properly.
Wrinkling up her nose at the question, she tilted her head to get a better look at him. “Technically, no. We use magic pretty freely on the ship and if anyone has minded it they certainly haven’t said anything. There are other people that are magical, too, so it could just be a case of being out numbered or scared of us, but we haven’t been asked to stop.”

“Now, if we stop somewhere? It’s a different story,” Ginny explained. “We went to Earth a few weeks ago and while we weren’t told not to use it, it was suggested that we be careful because even in the future, the Muggles aren’t sure what to make of it. And it’s been that way in some of the other places we’ve gone, too.”

Would he have to forgo magic to work in security? She truly didn’t know and Ginny had opened her mouth to tell him as much before her brain finally caught up to what Harry had said about his broom. In her life, Harry had never asked her to repair a broom and she’d never tried to fix one of his on her own and that knowledge slammed into her like a stunning spell.

“Wait a second, Harry…..” Though she had still been leaning against him, Ginny made sure to untangle herself from her ex-boyfriend and put a little distance between them. There was now a little warning bell going off in her head, the whisper of an idea that maybe Harry wasn’t from her past at all but, unfathomably, from her future. Swallowing back the nerves that had flooded her system at that realization, she opened her mouth again, asking the question before her nerves got the better of her and kept her silent. “How old are you?”

He wasn't sure if it was a relief that they didn't have to treat this as the muggle world and not use magic or if he was worried about what exactly it meant that they didn't have to. It certainly would be easier to just be normal rather than have to change anything else about life (living for the time being on a spaceship was already enough of a change, really). "So we get to see other planets?" he asked suddenly. "Are there aliens, too?" Had he missed something while he was in the medical bay? Were there aliens living here on the ship? His eyes widened a little in wonder about that.

Filing it away that he could use magic, he thought that maybe security might be the way to go. "I think I want to wait and get settled," he told her, "before I go getting a job. The woman who talked to me told me I didn't have to get a job, at least not right away." Could he actually do that though? Relax for a while and not work? When had there ever been a time in his life when Harry wasn't actively doing something?

His brow furrowed. "What do you mean, how old am I?" he repeated, confused. But as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he found himself looking her over as though he was going to see a different Ginny than the one he had seen just that morning. No, she didn't look any different, but if Sirius was here, and Remus had been, and his dad was … "22. It's April though," he said quickly, "So almost 23. How old are you?"

The little moan of surprise she gave wasn’t really much of an answer to his question, but it was all Ginny could manage for the moment as she squeezed her eyes closed and lifted her hand to cover her mouth. Her feet carried her off the couch and nearly across the room before she had even realized she had moved, that hand over her mouth migrating to bury in the red hair at the top of her head. “Merlin’s beard,” she said softly, her eyes darting from Harry’s face to his hands and then his chest before making the trip all over again. There wasn’t that much different really, maybe his jawline was a little sharper and his hair a little shorter, but he still looked like Harry.

Her Harry. Not Harry Potter circa two years from when she had last seen him.

“I’m 20,” she finally answered, cringing at the realization that he’d know with absolute clarity what was going on with them at that time in their lives. Though there was some comfort that she at least didn’t have to tell him that they were going to break up before long. “It was February so I wasn’t that close to my birthday, though I am now…….”

Harry was to his feet as well, the moment she was, concern crossing his face but he knew better than to reach out to her or interrupt her train of thought as she worked through whatever it was that was making her upset. "Gin," he started, but then clamped his mouth shut when she turned to him and told him that she was only 20.

At 20, the two of them were - he winced. Visibly. Ducking his gaze away from hers for a moment before rubbing his hand up through his hair and sinking back onto the sofa all over again. "February. Right." Well, this was awkward. And here he was, acting like nothing was wrong, like they were back together. But they were, he told himself. At least, they were for him. "Sorry," he muttered, though he didn't know what exactly he was apologizing for.

He remembered well the stress of that time. His impulsivity that had driven her away. How long it took before they could both sit down and have an actual conversation about it only to determine that he wanted something different than she wanted. At least, at that point in time. That had changed over time too, though for him, not for her. If she was standing here in front of him at 20 years old, then she hadn't yet made the decision that he waited for and wanted her to make on her own, without his pressuring her or influencing her or anything.

After a moment, he stood up again and brushed his hands off on his robes, checked to make sure he had his wand, the ID and the PADD they gave him, and then gave Ginny a brief nod. "Right then," he continued on, completely flabbergasted at what he was supposed to say. "You probably don't actually want to see me right now then, yeah?"

She knew the look Harry was giving her, the casual body language that he was using to mask the hurt. It was like reliving a nightmare, breaking his heart all over again though this time it was because of something she couldn’t control or easily repair. “No, don’t apologize,” Ginny said quickly, doing her best to get the words out even though the emotional onslaught of the past few minutes had her throat clogging up and her eyes stinging with tears. “This isn’t your fault…...it’s never been your fault,” she added, swearing softly as the first teardrop broke its ranks and carved a path down her cheek.

Though she quickly brushed it away, there was no use in pretending that Harry hadn’t seen it. He was looking right at her, unintentionally reopening a wound that had never closed but hadn’t hurt quite so much without him on board the Enterprise. But this time it was so much worse, so much sharper because he had done enough and said enough for Ginny to know that somehow, someway they were back together.

And that meant that Harry was walking away from her for the third time in his life.

“I……” she started, trying to think past the stunned confusion and pain to answer his question. “I don’t know what I want.” It was the absolute wrong thing to say, it was also the truth. If Harry had wanted to get married and start a family with her when he was 21, he would also want it at 23.

And she still wasn’t ready for that.

Harry stayed where he was even though the most natural thing for him to do would be to pull her into his arms and wipe her tears away himself. But that wasn't his job right now. He held his breath for a moment and watched as Ginny struggled to figure out what to say. When she finally did speak, he almost blurted out, "but you will!" but bit his tongue. That wasn't going to help matters.

The truth was, he didn't know, suddenly, like a punch to his gut, how Ginny would work through this here, in this time, in this place. Especially since she'd been here without him for a while now. Every decision and influence she'd had back home to get them to where they were won't ever happen here. "I know," he said tightly, then cleared his throat and repeated himself, with a more concerned and affectionate tone to his voice.

"I've been assigned to room in D-13," he said, "if you need me for anything." He crossed to her and stopped in front of her, leaning down to kiss her forehead briefly, and then made his way to and then out the door.