Chapter Text
“In this hollow I do grieve / for all the things that cease to be.” - Angie Weiland-Crosby
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“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.” - William P. Spencer
Ever since she could remember, Ginny saw the world cast in shades of warmth. Buttery yellow sunbeams and spicy red tomatoes growing in verdant vegetable patches. Sunsets brimming with glowing hues of orange and bursts of pale, perfect pink. The brightness of ginger hair and welcoming sets of blue and brown eyes filling her dilapidated home. Glorious green eyes sparkling and golden magic arching in the air around them.
If she saw the world in warm hues, then she processed the world in music. Her family was a crescendo; their loud, joking voices bickering and yelling and comforting in discordant harmonies that felt natural to her ears. A trip to the city was a ballad, full of long notes and conflicting emotions as the countless people walking to work or worrying on their way home sang a chorus of daily life and struggle. The forests were country aires, the insects and animals creating the instrumentals while the rivers trickled and the trees swayed in a melodious breeze. She could hear the fairies singing along to a song only they knew, and Ginny would hum in tune, letting them guide her through their domain and grinning at them when they came out to fly alongside her on her way.
But now that Harry was gone, it was as if his death had leached the color from the forests and streams and cities. Even her family’s faces, so bright and fiery in her memory, were now waxen and pale in their misery. She couldn’t bear to look at her brother anymore, worse than the rest. His eyes had lost their blueness, seeming grey and barren in his grief for his best friend. Ginny refused to look in the mirror. Seeing herself so faded and listless would push her over the edge. She knew it was bad just from the way her parents and brothers shot her worried looks even amidst their own mourning. Her mum had begged her to sing, to play her fiddle, anything to help them feel alive, remind them all that they were still here, but she couldn’t. Not without Harry.
Her life wasn’t quiet, even with her refusal to sing. Ginny’s loneliness echoed, and the only songs she heard in the world around her were funeral dirges. The slow, sorrowful melodies rose from the bones of the Burrow, where Harry had slid into their family as if he’d always belonged. They emerged from the tree trunks and crooned for the man who had lived among their branches, always fascinated by the view from up high and the effort it took to hoist himself above the forest floor. The songs swept through the wheat field that he had helped tend, stalks crumbling at the loss of his powerful magic helping them grow.
The world wept, and Ginny, with her gift for music and composition that had seen her lauded throughout their village and then by the tutors she’d had at Hogwarts, had heard the keening in all its miserable glory.
It had been two weeks, and the crops were withering. Ginny watched and heard the earth’s wailing, but she couldn’t make herself sing. How could she warble her joy and croon encouragement to the plants when she felt dead inside without Harry. He was her harmony, their magics and Voices twining together to call forth every bit of nourishment from the earth, to ease the mother sparrows’ distress as their hatchlings took first flight, to channel the ambient magic running through the ley lines into a force more primal, more powerful than anything she’d ever felt. Without his accompaniment, Ginny’s Voice sounded flat.
Her bed was so cold at night. No amount of warming charms or heated sheets replaced the cozy weight of his arms around her or the soft puffs of warm breath on her neck. She replayed visions of his smile in her dreams. Harry had been the kind of man to smile with his whole face, lips stretched wide, head tilted up, eyes crinkling at the corners and nose wrinkling at the bridge. He had held her like she was precious, but always walked beside her when they would traipse through the more perilous parts of the forest, trusting her capability if they stumbled across a pack of wolves or a lone, vicious gryphon.
Harry had fit into her life seamlessly, and now her edges felt jagged. When he had been ripped from the mortal world, it was as if he had taken a shard of her very soul with him.
Despite wanting to stay away from the mourning songs of the forest, Ginny had to get out of the house. The Burrow was even more stifling, and the family’s worry over the harvest and Ginny’s silence clung to her skin like a foul perfume. So she snuck out the back when her twin brothers had distracted her parents and unknowingly created the perfect opportunity to leave without fielding questions on where exactly she was headed. She couldn’t have answered them anyway. She was going elsewhere, anywhere away from that room that still smelled like him.
Her feet automatically took her down her favorite path, past the hill that separated the Burrow from the Rookery and into the darker, denser groves of the forest. Ginny could make out the faint sounds of Luna’s favorite lullaby drifting out the window of her room, and for a moment she was filled with an intense longing for her friend to hold her in her arms and surround her with that tinkling, dreamy Voice that had drawn Ginny to her from the time they were toddlers. The only person who had ever been more musical than Luna was her Harry, and so Ginny straightened her shoulders and continued into the forest. She would not replace Harry with the next best thing. She would not lean on Luna in the absence of her love.
The sun still shone overhead, but Ginny wouldn’t have known that without a tempus spell if she’d only glanced at her surroundings. The forest was draped in shadows as the interlocked and overgrown tree branches prevented the sun from finding the forest floor. A chill ran through the leaves, the rushing air upending small clods of dirt near her feet and sending dust swirling.
Ginny’s feet continued to move automatically, taking her down past the outcropping of rocks that marked the harpies' dens and over towards the pond she and Harry had waded in on the hottest days they were out foraging. She couldn’t look at the boulder near the water’s edge with its surface smoothed from their repeated use of the space as a seat. Ginny stood there and wished she hadn’t come, wished she couldn’t hear the ripples in the water beckoning and the fish gurgling in hello.
She was about to turn around and run home when the first sibilant hiss reached her ears.
Ginny froze as the slithering and shifting of the grass joined in as an accompaniment, and all the missing warmth rushed through her body in an instant, building up into an inferno of complete and utter rage.
It thrummed through her, sent her heart racing and the world around her tinged red. She didn’t have a spare second to be grateful at the return of color to her sight. No, every part of her being was focused on the fury that hummed in her veins, that lit up her nerves and drug her magic out from where it had been hiding.
A terrifying smile formed on her face as her magic rose. Her lungs vibrated as she drew in a sharp breath through her nose the way her tutors had coached her so long ago, and she felt the tendrils of magic swirl and fuse with her intent as she spoke.
“How dare you return to this forest, you vile creature,” she spat, eyes awash in a hazel glow. The hissing stopped in the same instant as the garter snake froze in its path towards the frogs at the water’s edge. This snake didn’t have the same markings as the other, but Ginny hatred could tell no difference between the two.
The grass whistled in agitation and the pond water slushed as her magic saturated the air with every word that fell from her lips. “You, who took away what I hold most dear. You who stole my treasure, my heart, my soul. You think to return for your next meal?” Her Voice grew both steadier and quieter as the words tumbled out in a brutal song. They echoed, terrible and beautiful, and the ground shook with Ginny ferocity.
The image of Harry’s body, splayed out and motionless as his lifeblood poured out from an innocent looking puncture wound above his heel, superimposed itself on her view of the glen and the trembling snake, curled up and fearful at the waves of magic pouring from this distraught witch.
“I banish you and all your kind from this forest, from any lands I have claimed under my protection.” Ginny’s declaration poured from her chest, a clear, lovely alto blending in with the deeper base notes of the forest that answered her song. Her magic soaked into the ground, nourishing the trees and the grasses, offering life and vibrancy to the plants and animals in exchange for their acceptance and accompaniment. As it always had, the forest took her offering and magnified her song, sending a pulse of earthen magic towards her.
Ginny sang, weaving ropes of magic into each verse of condemnation and threading the forest’s nature magic into the chorus of punishment like a descant, floating high over the melody like an unseen enforcer. She had pulled her wand out on instinct, letting it swish and coil in the air as the conductor to this orchestra of exile. Runes of banishment and protection hovered in the air, alit with the condensed magic that now coated the clearing.
The earth trembled, and the terrified snake was freed from her magic’s death grip as Ginny concluded her cursed song with a final, “Begone, banished serpent. Tell your brethren of this decree and make my vendetta known.”
She held herself back from setting the snake on fire as it slithered off in a flurry of fear. It would be best to have the message spread organically rather than having the forest’s boundaries react repeatedly until it became evident that the serpents could no longer enter.
As her mind cleared from the mesmerizing magic of her song, Ginny felt alive. Her muscles ached pleasantly, and her chest burned in approval and exhaustion. It had been too long since she used her gift, and even longer since she’d needed to use her abilities for punishment instead of reward.
She looked around and saw the forest, still shining and vibrant with her magic running through the flora. She felt shame and pride wash over her in equal measure.
Harry wouldn’t want her to waste her gift. He had loved watching her weave her magic into the fields, convincing the crops to grow fat and tall. His magic had melded so well with hers, and they used to come together in the exultant aftermath of a successful song. She felt tears sting at the corners of her eyes as she remembered the joy in their kisses after a full day of planting. His calloused hands had gripped her fiercely as their blood burned with excess magic but then stroked her gently as they came down from their frantic coupling. Gods, she missed the dirt streaking her skin and the pulsing of earthen magic beneath them adding to their pleasure.
Harry’s magic had helped amplify hers, but Ginny’s was still the most powerful Voice in the British Isles. She’d heard her tutors conferring once, supposing that Europe hadn’t seen a gift so strong since Apollonius. They’d taught her to their limits, but her magic had surged, demanding more.
Her power was beyond anything another with a lesser gift could teach her. Harry, unexpectedly, had been the one to continue her learning. He had been the year above her at the school, and they’d had a few of the same tutors, since he also had a vocal talent, but Harry had long been more of an independent apprentice. He’d had lessons with most of the school’s masters, by the time she and Harry had ever been paired together by McGonagall, and even once they’d begun studying together and working on the project for Mistress Sprout that had led them to their chosen specialty, Harry still hadn’t settled on one particular mentor. He’d eventually told her, over honeyed oat cakes, mooncalf cheese spread over fresh bread, and mulled cider, that his magic was less suited to the current Hogwarts practice of a direct mentorship and apprenticeship. It was too rigid for the freedom his magic demanded.
At the time, Ginny had thought him crazy. She knew for a fact that multiple masters had tried to recruit him as their apprentice with how fast he had picked up the different branches of magic. He’d turned down Master Slughorn and Master Lupin, which had been enough of a stir before even Master Dumbledore had offered him an apprenticeship, which Harry had also politely rejected.
He’d laughed when she had started in on berating him over that decision. “Gin, listen, I get it. Master Dumbledore has so much knowledge, and it was an honor to receive his offer, but I just know it would be the wrong path for me to take.” He had been utterly calm, munching on a fresh blackberry while Ginny’s frustration at his lackadaisical attitude rose.
“How would you know if you don’t even try though, Harry! You’re throwing away a chance most wizards would kill to have.” Redness crawled up her neck as she finished, partly in anger and partly in reaction to the way Harry casually licked the remnants of the honey cakes from his fingers.
“My magic told me, Gin, and I always listen to my magic.” He’d said it so resolutely, as if the idea wasn’t completely ludicrous. He raised his eyebrows when he saw her confused, skeptical face. “Don’t you?” She cocked her head. “Don’t I what? Listen to my magic? Magic doesn’t speak, Harry. We speak magic into being.”
He shook his head, eyes pitying. “No. That’s not--” He ran a honey-free hand through his rumpled mass of untamed curls. “This is exactly why I won’t agree to apprentice under a singular master.” He sighed but reached out towards her, palm up in a silent request for her hand. She remembered a tingle running down her spine as her fingers trailed over his. They moved closer together as he turned her hand over, pressing her palm into the grass and letting the weight of his larger hand anchor her.
“Can you feel your core?” He asked, his words startling Ginny from her thoughts of calluses and emeralds. “Of course!” She snapped. “Sorry, sorry,” he chuckled at her outrage. “I didn’t want to assume again. Okay, your Voice teachers have been working on elemental magic recently, right?” Ginny nodded, abashed at her earlier sharpness. “When you sing to the rain, do you use lyrics? Do you have a melody memorized that you use for all types of summer storms?” She hesitated, feeling like this was a trick question even as she said, “Yes?”
His smile was a soft, sardonic thing that made Ginny feel as if he thought her answer was stupid but not that he thought she was for giving it. “That’s what they taught me. Isn’t that what they taught you?”
“Sure, but I never listened to them, or, at least, I never took those teachings as more than a basic template.” He must have read the confusion in her face, so after a pause he continued, painting vibrant pictures in her mind’s eye.
“Have you ever stood outside during a summer rainstorm, Gin? Have you raised your face to the falling droplets and let the wet warmth soak into your skin as the sky brightens in muted oranges and cool grey-blues?” She had. Arm in arm with Fred as George and Ron raced through the field in front of them a few summers back.
Harry’s voice pulled her out of the memory and into another as he asked, “Can you picture that moment and tell me it feels the same as a thunderstorm in the winter as the rain pours from the heavens in icy sluices while the sky crackles and booms above you?” Ginny thought back to watching a thunderstorm through the tower windows last month. Curled up in the window seat with a fleece blanket wrapped around her, she had watched the lightning glow in the sky, felt the thunder shake the stones beneath her, urged the droplets to race faster across the frosted surface of the windowpane. No, they weren’t remotely the same rainstorm, she realized.
Harry kept on, even as Ginny’s head began to ache with the implications. “What about when the clouds burst and the rain descends in sheets of water, making it almost impossible to see more than an arm's length in front of you?” He questioned, growing more and more impassioned. “What about a drizzle while the sun shines overhead, when the rain is a refreshing mist over your skin? Nothing in nature can be so compressed into a single, unchanging song, Gin.”
His skin was flushed, and his green eyes were alit with a frenzied passion as he upended everything she thought she knew about her talent. “The rain? It’s multifaceted. A different chord every time it returns. One song could never capture it. Trying to do so would be like trapping a hurricane in a single glass jar.”
Ginny could feel it in her bones that he was right, but a piece of her resisted. How was Harry aware of this when every teacher she had ever had was not? Harry was still months away from turning 17. He shouldn’t know something like this, so she hesitatingly said, “But Mistress McGonagall has only ever taught me one variation for how to sing to the rain? What are the other songs, and where did you learn them?”
Harry’s laugh was loud, a combination of glee and bitterness that made Ginny’s stomach twist and try to leap into her throat. “That’s the thing. The masters here don’t teach you anything other than that single melody focused on the same, repetitive lyrics for any instance of rain you’ll encounter. Which is utter shite. There’s no way that single song can help channel our power into the water well enough in every type of rainstorm.”
“So what do we do?” She asked quietly, abashed. “Where do we find the other songs?”
“We don’t. We make them ourselves.” Harry said it like it was a logical, common thought rather than a revolution.
And so Ginny fell. She sunk further and further into him as they spent weeks, months talking about tailoring songs to their surroundings, to the outcome they desired. It had all sunk in a few weeks into Harry’s informal tutelage. They had spent four hours listening to the babbling of a brook deep in the southern quadrant of the forest near the castle. The rushing water glugged along, but Harry had taken her hand and dipped their fingertips into the stream. He had shown her how to recede into herself, to focus on the swells of the nature magic around them, but Ginny has struggled. Growing up, she’d always pushed to be seen, heard over the ruckus of a house full of older boys. Harry’s way was new and frustrating in that she hadn’t picked it up immediately. But, that day, the last thing she saw before she closed her eyes and dropped into her core was his blissful smile and the ways his rampant curls flickered in the breeze.
Something inside her had settled at the sight. She was content, here in the wilderness with the trees swaying and the brook trickling and Harry sitting beside her. But then she had heard. The water hummed its wishes to anyone who cared to listen, and Ginny could feel her power stirring in the hollows of her bones. She could provide. Harry’s fingers tightened between her own. Together, they could sing the brook’s wants into being. Lyrics, melodies, notes. . . they would come, but the unwritten song was already begging to be sung if Ginny had only ever listened.
As the clarity of it all rushed through her, Ginny’s eyes sprang open in excitement. Harry was grinning, his off hand trailing through the damp silt on the bank of the little brook while his wand hand was still entwined with hers. “You felt it.”
Ginny had never felt so radiant. Her answering smile had to be brighter than the sun, brighter than the strongest lumos maxima.
“I did.”
And so she eschewed choosing a Master when her own time came. She and Harry learned together, immersing themselves in fields of asphodel and burrowing their ankles and wrists down into the dirt, flaring their cores until they picked up on the rhythm of the soil, the yearning of the flowers. They held thatches of fireweed under their tongue for an hour, standing back to back as they removed the bundles, a hum reverberating between them before they let it build up in their chests and roar out as a steady stream of fire into the dusky twilight of Litha. They screamed atop the hill beside the Burrow when Ginny brought him home for Beltane, the air whirling and whipping around them and sending the tall grass into a flurry of movement. They swam naked in the lake at midnight on her seventeenth birthday, Harry serenading her under the moonlight as the water lapped at her thighs, her stomach, her neck. The both of them making a different kind of music, laid out on the shore, bare to the stars and the fireflies and each other.
She passed infatuation the first time they sang together, months before the lake. Melding their Voices was intimate, revealing. Infatuation had turned to admiration, to lust, to desire at the feel of their magics brushing against each other, nudging the tendrils of oak roots to burrow into the soil and blossom. Harry’s magic was heady. Spicy and warm with a hint of fiery sweetness. She wanted to cradle it in her palms, subsume it and embed it in her skin.
She fell in love with him somewhere in between watching him grin mischievously, head bent together with Fred and George over some mysterious parchment, and helping her mother knead bread dough while he whistled. Their hands pushed and prodded in perfect patterns, and Ginny basked in the lingering glow of Harry’s magic in the kitchen where she’d learned her letters as a child. They had been gathering tomatoes in the garden, tossing the ripe fruits back and forth and laughing when she’d realized oh, I love him, but it had been so long, so slow in coming that she was fully in it before she had recognized this utter contentment, this comfortable joy as love.
As Ginny’s feelings and knowledge of her own capabilities grew, she learned that Harry’s was a magic of instinct. He carried less pure power than she did, but Harry trusted his magic on a level most other magicals couldn’t comprehend. Harry relied less on tried and true spells or rituals passed down in family lines, and he had told her from the start that while he had a gift of Voice as well, theirs were almost as dissimilar as two gifts of the same type could be. So, no he couldn’t make a field flourish, couldn’t create a full harvest from seeds or cleanse a polluted river on his own, but Harry could adapt to almost any song or tune begun by another lead caster, automatically.
His casting was fluid, graceful and sinuous as his body moved to a rhythm only his core could hear. He always took the harmonies when they sang together, adjusting his Voice to match hers as the buried earthen magic responded and changed the original melody. Harry had taught her that she needed to be reactive, responsive, and it had changed everything. Ginny communed with nature in a way heretofore unheard of in their history. She had brought notoriety, prosperity to her family as she wove her magic deep into the fields surrounding the Burrow. They were never without food, housing a bounteous surplus in the grain barn her brothers had built after the first planting season she and Harry had overseen once they’d left Hogwarts. Ginny had taught herself how to heal with her Voice, convincing tissues and muscles to knit themselves back together with her song and magic. People across the country sent her letters, begging for her to help their sick relatives, heal their herds, perform at bondings and ceremonies.
She had learned all this, done all this, but she couldn’t sing the poison out of Harry’s wound when it mattered. She had tried, letting her weeping act as a cantor to her song when she tried to refill his lungs, restart his heart. The venom had swept through his veins like a crashing tide, unstoppable and inevitable. For the first time in Ginny’s life, her magic had failed her. No matter how she had tried to rid his body of the poison, she couldn’t sing the life back into his still, cold body.
It was wrong to see Harry lacking his characteristic warmth.
Something in her broke when she closed his unseeing eyes. She had never thought she would wish to stop looking upon his emerald irises, but it was unbearable to gaze upon Harry, lifeless and dull, when he had been the definition of vibrancy while alive.
But now, with her power surging through her and the forest brimming with life at the return of her magic to the environment, Ginny wondered.
If Harry had taught her anything in the years they sang together, it was that limits only existed for those who agreed to them. Ginny had worked wonders, written her own songs, devised an entirely new branch of vocal magic.
If she could do all that, then she could do anything. And Ginny would do anything, cross any line, reject any limit, even death. For Harry.
After they married, when they tumbled into their bed that first night with rings on their fingers and wedding clothes strewn about the floor, Ginny had vowed to burn the world down for her husband if only he so asked. His heated laugh had stoked a different kind of fire in her belly, and his hands worshipped her while he whispered into the skin of her neck, “Then the world had better hope I never ask such a thing of my lovely,” kiss, “fiery,” kiss, “wife. Because the woman I married can do anything she sets her mind to.”
Yes, for Harry, Ginny would do anything, be it set fire to the world or raise the dead.