It has been an inordinate amount of time since I’ve been away. I’m not completely back yet; still struggling on dial-up, but I should have broadband soon ao I might not be replying to messages and participating fully in fandom quite yet. The move has gone well and I’m settled in—thank you to everyone who left me messages. It was really lovely to come back and have all your usernames in my inbox!

Hello to all the new people who have friended me- I am very slowly getting around to friending you all back, apologies for the delay—and hopefully this journal will become a little more interesting than it’s been for the last month or so.

Fandom, in it’s typical quick fashion, has marched on and I don’t have a clue—so feel free to leave a comment with any interesting things that have occurred while I’ve been away. News, fics, art, general updates about the state of your existence- whatever you feel like.

I didn’t want to return empty-hand, as well, so I come bearing fic. *G*

This story is, most obviously, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse. Something you should definitely read whether you are a fan of Woolf’s work or not. I’ve borrowed a few quotes along with the major symbol of the Lighthouse from that most intricate novel. The italicised quote is from Jorge Luis Borges, and there are two or three references to The Wizard of Oz.




to the lighthouse




This is a story about the beauty of fading days,



(Ginny smiles on the beach and picks up a sea-smoothened shell.) The sky bends over her forehead and clouds imprint themselves on her eyes. “We will not go to the Lighthouse tomorrow,” says Molly shaking, shaking her head

This is what she will remember; sand sky sun and a warm voice, asking and slipping over her skin and saying, “It will not be fine.” Saying, “It will rain.”

They are children and the idea of rain darkens the horizon until—


darkness.

the womb.

where?

only questions, questions in this dark place. little girls ask, “why is it raining” and always the voice, heavy like silk wrapped about her head. always the prophet the prophecy IT WILL RAIN.



(This is a story about dreams.)



This is all that she will remember of her childhood. Maybe her first day of school, maybe the smell of her own blood writing other people’s words, other prophecies on the wall.

HER SKELETON WILL LIE IN THE CHAMBER FOREVER

They tried wiping it off and scrubbing and rubbing, but the mark of her words Tom’s words still remains on the wall (you can kill the messenger but only the flesh and blood blood blood the fresh blood still ingrained in the stone of Hogwarts). She passes by that corridor on the way to Divination. Not the easiest or the quickest way, but one she feels compelled to take every Thursday. A funeral march for the Ginny that atill lies there under the spell, still listens to the heavy words of prophecy when they weigh on her back, cover her mouth and wrap fast around her body like a mummy withering away under the cloth. They’ve tried rubbing it off but the mark still remains, so now they hang a painting over it but none of the paint-and-magic people will climb into this frame, so there are just spaces where people should be. Sea rolling gently gently and a boat bobbing up and down, leaving an uncertain trail in the water, rudder missing the pressure of hands. And in the distance, when the mist clears, sometimes Ginny thinks she can she the cauterising beam of the Lighthouse. And sometimes when the mist clears Ginny thinks she can see the red of her blood-words underneath the canvas.

She’s grown up now, though. Fifth year. Prefect Badge. (the style of Hogwarts Prefect badges haven’t changed in fifty years, Ginny thinks, pinning it on her robes)

She’s grown up now, and she doesn’t believe in prophecies. You make your own fate, but when she tries to spin out a new future for herself she pricks her finger—

No.


No.

That is another fairy tale.


Reality.

Reality.

Reality.

(she clicks her heels, whispers it fiercely under her breath)

There’s no place like home, there’s no place like—

Home, here, reality: war. (though sometimes she thinks that’s another kind of fairy tale, one that crawls out from the mud and has silvery glittering scales, oozing)

Molly hangs on to Ginny’s hand as she tries to walk out of the door; the hand on the clock trembles and hisses, trembles and hisses, and the ceiling bends to her forehead and the plaid tablecloth imprints its pattern on her eyes. “You will not go to war tomorrow,” she says, whimpering. “It will rain, there will be peace, it is all a dream.”

Ginny feels the darkness rise up behind her eyesockets, but she wrests her arm out of Molly’s and says, “I don’t believe in prophecies any more.”



Ginny opens her eyes, and it is the same dream yet again- the dream of the Lighthouse in the distance and the rain separating the space between them into a thousand, a million impossible steps from there to here, each pulsing with a different light, a strobe of lightning, a promise of worlds opening like flowers underneath her toes and the soft sound of swallowing.

She stands on the shore with her hands on the mooring rope of the boat.

(The fibres scrape off her skin.)

She stands and cries because every night it is the same dream of the Lighthouse disappearing in the mist; and some nights she drowns out there in the ocean trying to push her boat against the current; and some nights she just stays on the shore and watches as the sun sublimates the mist and the light edges her back into reality; the last thing she sees, every night every night, whether she drowns or lives, the last thing she sees is the eye of the Lighthouse searing through the darkness.




Hogwarts closes down when Ron and Hermione die, and Harry finds her in the Prefect’s bathroom on the third floor. There’s blood trickling from the side of his mouth and in the distance Ginny can hear Madame Pomfrey calling his name, probably holding a spoon and a bottle of some indescribably vile medicine. Harry pulls her up and says, “Ginny.” Says, “Ginny. It’s going to be okay.”

And it’s like four years ago: his face above hers, looking comfortingly into her eyes and telling her that it’s all over. The cold of the chamber seeping into her skin, darkness like a womb and then the memory of his face, fresh and sharp and clear like the first thing in her mind. Like she died there and was reborn in his arms, tabula rasa tabula rasa the white pages which he slashes with his words.

Yes. That is the first thing she remembers.

Life and reliving.

The stretching out of life, the spinning of it out into the thinnest of skeins to hold in your hands but eventually everything settles back into the shape it remembers.

His Head Boy badge flashes in her eyes like the beam of a Lighthouse.



There’s a full-scale invasion the next day.

Well.

Well.

More like a coup.

They’ve been barring the doors and putting up Dark Mark detection wards but the blood is rising in their bellies, the skins are peeling back and the shells of who we used to be are tossed aside, glittering and semi-transparent on the flagstone. When it comes though, at dinner one day, it isn’t Death Eaters but children. Malfoy, Parkinson, Crabbe, Goyle, Moon, Abbott, Turpin, even the Patil twins- children holding wands impossibly straight and screaming Avada Kedavra! and the collected power of their voices, the congealed fragments of hatred in their hearts are enough to blow Dumbledore into the wall, stop Harry Potter in his tracks, warp the charm on the enchanted ceiling to display a great hovering green Dark Mark—

(There are none on their bodies, no marks, no ties to Voldemort except under the skin and so they walk through the hexed corridors of Hogwarts like the Founders themselves.)

Ginny watches the world explode around her and screams STOP but her words are light, light, light and floating away, bobbing like debris she’s screaming her lungs are emptied of air but there’s no sound and then there’s a jet of green light and she’s lying on the floor with the cold seeping into her skin and she’s dead—

The witch is dead.



Only.

The dream. The shore. The Lighthouse.

The mooring rope is rough under her fingers but she has no fear tonight. She has died tonight. (Again, again. Like a cat I have nine lives, she thinks)

The wind sings a nursery rhyme in her ears, a rhythm to the slapping of the waves against the hull. Row, row, row your boat…

The rain stings her face and the rudder leaps and smacks against her hands, jarring her bones but she whispers the rhyme under her breath over and over, ignores the pain because she’s dead, she’s dead and she’s getting closer to the Lighthouse.

Row, row, row your boat…

The stern hits land

Ginny scrambles out of the boat, not even looking back as the mooring rope slips from the loose knot and it slides back out to sea, rudder spinning. Her eyes are filled with the Lighthouse up ahead and the silence that gathers and suffuses all around her, a silence pure and perfect. Her feet make no sound on the gravel, she does not need to breathe; this must be death, she thinks, but when she looks down at her hands the rope has scraped off all her skin and her fingertips are dripping blood.

(eventually everything settles into the shape it remembers)

The door swings open before she touches it and even though she’s climbing up a winding stair, she knows that she’s really slipping and sliding down, slipping and sliding down a long dark tunnel until—

The Chamber.

(Row, row, row your boat--)

Tom is standing above her barely-breathing body, and Ginny can see the tips of her fingers are caked with dry blood, dry blood that will never wash off the Hogwarts walls and the prophecy HER SKELETON WILL LIE IN THE CHAMBER FOREVER and there she is, isn’t she?


questions, only questions here. darkness. the womb

a voice singing, “gently down the stream…”


“This is the Chamber,” says Tom, with a grin. He leans closer and points to her body, “and this is the secret.”


Tom is standing above her barely breathing body, and Ginny realises that the girl lying on the floor is sixteen years old.

“In the dreaming man’s dream, the dreamed man awoke.”



Tom Riddle is silhouetted against the searchlight and the light tears reality into shreds around him and all that is certain is the unwavering black of his outline. He kneels down next to her and pulls the Prefect badge from her robes, laying it on his palm with a flourish. The dirt and polish of fifty years rubs away under his fingernail and right beside the capitalised ‘G’ of her name is a tiny little snake with flickering eyes, etched on the metal. (The style of Hogwarts Prefect badges haven’t changed in fifty years, says her own voice, bobbing up and down in her mind like a stray piece of debris.) He smiles and fastens it to his own lapel as the light consumes the lighthouse, the island, the boat that leaves an uncertain trail on the water—

He turns to her and says, “I have had my vision.”

Says, “Oh, Ginny, Ginny, why would I want you dead?”

Rolling up the stone, rolling up the stone and at the top there is a moment of clarity before-

He says, “Time to begin again.”



Eventually everything settles into the shape it remembers, and her life curves gently into a figure of eight.



Ginny Weasley wakes with Harry Potter’s face above her, saying, “Ginny.”

Saying, “You’re safe now.”

Saying, “It’s over.”

The words press on her lips like a prophecy, and this time Ginny raises her arms, she opens her body like a flower. Only—

Harry Potter looks comfortingly into her eyes and says, “It’s just a memory.”



*

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