all the protest going in my country made me write this...
Everybody Knows I'm a good girl, Auror
Ginny gets arrested for an illegal magical creature protest — the arresting Auror is Harry Potter, and she is decidedly not sorry about any of it.
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The banner had taken Luna four hours to charm, and it showed — the letters kept drifting out of formation like they'd lost interest in their own slogan, so that STOP THE CULL OF THE THAMES-BASIN KELPIES occasionally rearranged itself into something closer to STOP THE KELP, which was not the message they were going for, but Ginny had stopped correcting it around noon.
"They're not even looking at the sign," she said. "They're looking at the sign not staying still. It's basically a magic trick at this point."
"Free entertainment," Luna agreed. "That's good. People remember entertainment."
There were nine of them outside the Ministry's Beast Division annex, which had seemed like plenty that morning and now, wedged between a dawdling crowd of shoppers and a bored-looking pretzel cart, felt more like a book club that had wandered outside by accident. Ginny had a placard in one hand and, in the other, a cup of coffee she'd been nursing since ten, mostly because it gave her something to do with the hand that wasn't holding the sign.
She saw the Aurors before anyone else did — three of them, cutting through the crowd with the particular unhurried walk of people who already know how this ends. She recognized the middle one from the papers, dark hair doing its usual impression of a bird's nest, glasses a little crooked, looking more charming than he did in papers.
"Oh, brilliant," she said. "They sent the famous one."
"I did tell you the permit mattered," said a voice behind her — Romilda, who had said no such thing, but who liked to imply she had once things went badly.
The young auror, Harry Potter, his name tag read, stopped a few feet from the banner, read STOP THE KELP with visible confusion, then seemed to decide not to ask.
"Afternoon," he said. "This the kelpie thing?"
"This is the kelpie thing," Ginny confirmed. "Very much still the kelpie thing. Are you here to save the kelpies?"
"I'm here because you don't have a permit."
"That's a technicality."
"It's the whole law, actually." He had a notebook out now, which struck her as faintly absurd — as if any of them were going to give false names. "I'm going to need everyone to come with us. Nobody's under arrest, this is just—"
"A very polite kidnapping," Ginny offered.
"—a formal caution," he said, over her, in the tone of someone who had clearly had this exact conversation many times and had a script he intended to keep to. "A detainment"
She let him finish reciting the script. Rights, procedure, the bit about how anything they said could be used, which seemed like a strange thing to warn nine placard-holders about. When he got to her, notebook poised, he asked her name without quite looking up, and something about that — being catalogued instead of noticed — made her want to be noticed.
"Ginny Weasley," she said. “Journalist, technically. Troublemaker, more accurately."
That got him to look up.
"Right," he said, and wrote something down that was almost certainly not "troublemaker."
***
Harry had expected the walk back to the Ministry to be the easy part.
It was not the easy part. The redhead — Weasley, he reminded himself, there were about nine of them and he'd only ever kept the Ginny straight because his colleague Dawlish complained about her name showing up in his paperwork twice a year — had apparently decided that being escorted through the Atrium in handcuff-adjacent custody was an occasion for conversation.
"So do you get a badge for this," she said, "or is the outfit the badge?"
"There's a badge."
"Can I see it?"
"No."
"Very mysterious. I respect that." She glanced sideways at him, sizing something up. "You know kelpies are basically endangered because of habitat loss and nobody in that building's read the report."
"I've read the report."
That stopped her, briefly, which he counted as a small personal victory.
"Have you."
"Population's down forty percent on the Thames basin stretch. I read a lot of reports. It's most of the job, actually, contrary to what the picture in the Prophet suggests." He steered her gently by the elbow around a fountain that was doing something unnecessarily elaborate with its water. "Doesn't mean you get to block a street without a permit."
"I didn't block a street. I blocked, at most, forty percent of a street."
"That's still a street."
"That's very literal of you."
"It's the job."
By the time they reached the Auror department, he'd catalogued the following: she talked when she was nervous, except she didn't seem nervous, which meant she just talked; she'd used the word "technically" four times in ten minutes, each time to excuse something that was not, in fact, technical; and she smelled like coffee and rain, which he noticed and then firmly filed away as an irrelevant observation, the way you'd file away the weather.
The processing room was standard — grey walls, a long bench, a clerk named Wilson who had the enthusiasm of a man doing his hundredth crossword of the week. Harry took her statement himself, mostly because nobody else on the team seemed eager to, and possibly because he told himself it was efficient.
"Full name," he said, quill ready.
"You already have it."
"Full name, for the form."
"Ginevra Molly Weasley." She said it like a dare, like she expected him to laugh. He didn't. "Go on, then. Say something about it."
"I wasn't going to say anything about it."
"Everyone says something about it."
"It's a fine name."
She looked, briefly, thrown by that — like she'd had a joke loaded and he'd disarmed it by just answering the question. It didn't last; she recovered fast, chin up, eyes bright with the next thing.
"Occupation."
"Journalist. Quidditch, mostly. I write the bit in the Prophet nobody reads until Sunday."
"I read it."
"You read the Quidditch column."
"I read most things."
"That's either very flattering or you're required to as part of processing me, and I can't tell which."
He looked up from the form. She was leaning back against the bench, arms crossed, entirely unbothered by the room, by the caution, by any of it — and there was something underneath the performance that he couldn't quite name yet, something that made the banter feel less like deflection and more like a language she was fluent in and enjoyed speaking.
"For the record," he said, "you're not being charged. It's a caution. You'll get a letter."
"A letter. How romantic."
"It's Ministry procedure."
She spread her hands. "But for the record — I am, generally speaking, a good girl, Auror. Ask anyone. Well. Ask anyone who wasn't at Diagon Alley today."
"I don't know anyone to ask."
"Then you'll have to take my word for it."
"You were arrested for an illegal protest an hour ago."
"Detained," she corrected. "You said it yourself. Very polite. Barely a kidnapping."
He put the quill down. Not because he'd finished — he hadn't — but because he needed a second where he wasn't writing anything down, where he could just look at her without it going on a form. She noticed the pause. Of course she noticed.
"You're going to lecture me now," she said. "I can see it building."
"I'm not going to lecture you."
"You've got a lecture face."
"I don't have a lecture face."
"You've absolutely got a lecture face, it's very similar to your normal face, but the eyebrows do something."
He almost laughed — caught it, mostly, turned it into a exhale through the nose that she clocked anyway, smiling like she'd won something. He picked the quill back up, finished the form, stamped it harder than strictly necessary.
"Get the permit next time," he said. "That's the whole lecture. Get the permit, and we don't have to do this."
"And if I don't?"
"Then I have to arrest the same journalist twice in one month, and my paperwork gets very repetitive."
She stood, unhurried, gathering the coat she'd had draped over her arm since the Atrium, and for a moment there was nothing to say — the form was signed, the caution was logged, there was no more procedure left to hide inside. She should have walked out then. She didn't, quite yet.
"Well," she said, at the door, half-turned back toward him. "Wouldn't want to miss meeting you again, Auror."
And she winked — quick, unbothered, gone before he could decide what to do with it — and let the door swing shut behind her.
Harry sat there a moment longer than the paperwork required, looking at the space where she'd been, and thought, with some irritation at himself, that he hoped the kelpies stayed exactly as endangered as they currently were.
Can you write a Healer Ginny and Injured auror Harry fic?
The first thing Ginny knew about Harry Potter, she knew from the chart.
Auror, thirty. Multiple contact points, unidentified curse residue. Vitals unstable — spiking, then flat, then spiking again, like his body couldn't decide what it was reacting to. Healer Ogden had scrawled a question mark next to the diagnosis line and left it at that, which told her more than anything else in the file. Ogden didn't do question marks. Ogden did answers, fast, or referred out.
She'd been paged in from the Janus Thickey overflow ward at half eleven at night, still in yesterday's robes, and by the time she got to bay four there were already four other Healers standing around the bed not touching him, which was its own kind of diagnosis.
"Someone want to tell me what I'm looking at?" she said, shouldering past.
"Contact curse, unregistered," said one of the junior Healers, too fast, relieved to hand it off. "Hit him and two others on the raid. The others are stable. He's not."
Ginny looked down at the bed.
She'd expected — she wasn't sure what she'd expected. Not this. Not a man lying very still and very awake, jaw tight, sweat at his hairline, watching the ceiling like if he looked at it hard enough it would tell him what was wrong with him too. His right forearm was wrapped in silver-threaded gauze that was supposed to contain magical bleed and clearly wasn't doing a brilliant job of it, going by the way it kept flickering, faint and wrong, like a candle in wind.
"Mr. Potter." She picked up his wrist without asking permission, two fingers pressed to the pulse point. Too fast. Then, three seconds later, too slow. "I'm Healer Weasley. I'm going to be looking after you."
"Wonderful," he said, in the flat voice of a man who had said that word to mean the opposite of itself many times before. "Does that mean you know what's wrong with me, or does that mean you're fourth in line to tell me you don't?"
"Bit of both." She didn't look up from his pulse. "Give me a minute before you decide to be difficult about it."
That got something out of him — not quite a laugh, more the ghost of the shape one would take. "No promises."
She noted it anyway: patient responsive, oriented, uncooperative baseline personality, unrelated to injury. Then she got to work.
***
It took forty minutes to stabilize him enough to stop actively worrying about him dying, and another six days to admit she had no idea what had actually hit him.
"It's not cursefire," she told the diagnostic team, Thursday morning, chart spread across the table like a crime scene. "Cursefire burns outward, this is burning in. It's not a hex residue either, the signature doesn't match anything registered, and before anyone suggests it — no, it's not Dark Arts. I checked against every catalogued curse from the last war. Nothing fits."
"So what's your working theory?" asked Ogden, arms crossed.
"That somebody built something new."
The silence that got her was the kind she'd learned, in three years as a Healer, to take as agreement rather than dismissal.
"Keep him another week," Ogden said. "Monitor, don't guess. And Weasley — keep him calm. Whatever it is, it's responding to something. Exertion, stress, I don't know yet. But every time his heart rate spikes, so does the residue."
Which was how Ginny ended up, that afternoon, standing at the foot of Harry Potter's bed with her arms crossed, informing him he could not, in fact, discharge himself to go "check on the case."
"I'm fine," he said.
"You're not fine. You're a man whose arm was actively smoking two days ago."
"It's not smoking now."
"Because I've had you flat on your back for forty-eight hours. That's not a cure, that's a ceasefire." She flipped his chart shut. "You so much as raise your heart rate past a brisk walk and I want to know about it. Ogden thinks whatever hit you is reactive to stress. So you're going to lie there and be boring, Mr. Potter, and if that offends you, I genuinely do not care."
He looked at her for a long moment — assessing, she realized, the way she imagined he must look at a room before deciding where the exits were.
"You're very sure of yourself," he said. Not unkindly.
"I'm very sure of the chart. There's a difference, but it usually amounts to the same thing."
Something flickered over his face, there and gone, that she'd later learn to recognize as the first crack in the wall he'd built the moment they wheeled him in.
"Fine," he said. "Boring. I can do boring."
"Somehow," she said, already turning for the door, "I don't believe you."
He didn't manage it, as it turned out. Not even close.
***
By the second week, she'd stopped bothering to knock.
"You're doing the thing again," she said, without looking up from his chart, where she'd caught the telltale uptick in his readings the moment she'd walked onto the ward.
"What thing."
"The thing where you think about work and your body decides that's a five-alarm emergency." She came around the privacy curtain to find him sitting up, jaw set, a folder of case notes open on the blanket that absolutely should not have been there. "Where did you even get this?"
"Robards sent it."
"Robards is going to answer for that." She held her hand out. "Give it here."
"It's just background reading."
"Your pulse says otherwise." She wiggled her fingers. "Hand it over, or I'll have it confiscated and I'll make sure you know it was me who did it."
He handed it over. Reluctantly, and with the specific, wounded dignity of a man who'd clearly never had to defer to anyone about his own case files in his life.
"You know," he said, watching her tuck the folder under her arm like contraband, "most people are slightly more deferential. Given who I am."
"I've noticed. It's very tedious, watching people tiptoe around you." She sat on the edge of the visitor's chair, which she'd started doing without quite registering the decision to. "I'm not going to do it. You're not the badass Auror in here. You're bay four, and bay four is being a nightmare patient."
He almost smiled at that — she was getting better at cataloguing the almosts, the flickers before he caught himself and reeled them back in.
"You're the only one who talks to me like that."
"Good. Someone should." She checked the readings on his arm — the flicker had gone down, marginally, now that the folder was out of reach. "See? Better already. Turns out irritation lowers your heart rate faster than case files raise it. Interesting."
"Are you saying I should be irritated more often?"
"I'm saying it's diagnostically useful information and I intend to use it liberally."
"That's concerning."
"You'll live," she said, and only realized after she'd said it how much weight the words were carrying, in a room like this one, for a man like him. He seemed to realize it too. Neither of them said anything about it.
***
The mystery cracked open in week three, not because of anything Ginny did in the lab, but because of something Harry said, half-asleep, at two in the morning, when she was doing rounds and he was supposed to be unconscious.
"Antler," he mumbled.
She stopped in the doorway. "Sorry?"
His eyes were still closed. "The bloke. Runic thing on his ring. Antler shape." A pause. Then, clearer, like he was surfacing: "Wasn't a curse he cast. It was in the ring."
Ginny was at his bedside in four steps. "Harry. Say that again. Slowly."
He blinked up at her, disoriented, and it took him a second to catch up to what he'd said. "The ring. On the bloke we raided. I grabbed his wrist to cuff him and — that's when it hit. It wasn't a spell he cast at me. It came off the object."
"You're sure."
"I'm an Auror. I notice things even when I'm being cursed by them." A ghost of his old dryness, worn thin by exhaustion, but there.
She didn't sleep that night. By morning she had Robards' team pulling every confiscated item from the raid, and by that afternoon they had it: a signet ring, unregistered, radiating a magical signature that didn't match anything in the catalogue because it wasn't a spell at all. It was a vessel. Something built to store and discharge curse-energy on contact, cobbled together from experimental theory that had no business existing outside a research lab, let alone a black market stall.
"It's not actively cursing you," she told him, that evening, laying it out with the kind of relief that came from finally, finally understanding the shape of a problem. "It transferred a payload. A stored charge. Which means it's finite — it's not sustaining itself, it's depleting. Every spike you've had, every flare — that's the charge working itself out of your system. You're not getting worse, Harry. You're emptying."
He looked at her for a long moment. "So I'll be all right."
"You'll be all right." She said it firmly, because she believed it, and because some part of her had needed to say it out loud as much as he'd needed to hear it. "It'll take time. Weeks, maybe. But it has an end point. It's not indefinite."
Something in his shoulders came down that she hadn't fully registered was up until it wasn't.
"Thank you," he said. Quietly. Not performed, not for an audience of Healers or reporters or anyone but her. "For not giving up on figuring it out."
"It's my job."
"It's not, actually. Your job was to keep me stable. Figuring out what it was — that was you being stubborn about a question nobody else could answer." He looked at her properly then, in a way that made the room feel smaller than it had a moment ago. "I noticed."
Ginny found, for possibly the first time in three weeks, that she didn't have a quick answer ready.
"Well," she said, eventually. "I'm told I'm very sure of myself."
"You mentioned."
***
He was discharged in the fifth week, on a grey Tuesday morning, arm fully healed, readings clean for the first time since bay four. Ginny signed the last of his paperwork at the nurses' station, and told herself the strange, hollow feeling in her chest was just the natural comedown of a case finally closing.
He found her there, coat already on, looking distinctly like a man who didn't know how to end this particular conversation.
"So," he said. "That's it, then. Clean bill of health."
"That's it." She capped her quill. "You're free to go be reckless again. Try to space it out more than every fortnight, if you can manage it."
"No promises," he said, and it landed the same way it had five weeks ago, except nothing about it felt the same at all.
He didn't leave. She didn't tell him to.
"I don't actually know how this works," he admitted, after a moment. "The — after. There isn't really a protocol for what you're supposed to say to the Healer who spent five weeks keeping you alive and figuring out you weren't dying after all."
"There isn't a protocol on my end either," Ginny said. "Patients don't usually stick around to ask."
"I'm not most patients."
"No," she agreed. "You were significantly worse."
That got the real laugh out of him, the one she'd been chasing for weeks without quite admitting that's what she'd been doing. It changed his whole face when it was unguarded like that — she filed the observation away with the same clinical precision she'd given his pulse readings, and knew, even as she did it, that this particular chart entry had nothing to do with medicine at all.
"Have dinner with me," he said. Plainly, like he'd decided somewhere in the last five weeks that plain was the only way he knew how to do this anymore. "Not as a patient. I'd like that very much to be clear, actually — that I'm not a patient anymore, and you don't work for the Ministry's insurance about what you say to me."
"I don't work for anyone's insurance," Ginny said. "I do actually have opinions."
"I noticed that too."
She considered him — the sling gone, the color back, the wall he'd built in bay four mostly, finally, undone.
"One condition," she said.
"Anything."
"If your heart rate spikes during dinner, I reserve the right to say I told you so."
"Healer Weasley," he said, and it was the first time her name had sounded like that in his mouth — not a title, not a formality, something closer to a promise, "I would expect nothing less."
Ginny Weasley spent thirteen years in France attempting to heal after the Chamber of Secrets. Upon returning to England for a clinical fellowship in Dark Magic Trauma, she found Harry Potter again and discovered a man who had survived Voldemort, survived a war, but somehow never learned how to survive himself.
Because I legit have very little self-control. This sprung from my obsession with The Pitt. While I'd love to write me some Kingdom, I think I'd miss my Hinny babies too much.
A LOT has changed from canon, so be patient as all the facts of what went down since the Weasleys moved to France unravel.
Seven stories from the long, tense week between Harry’s departure from Little Whinging and Bill and Fleur’s fateful wedding night.
Or: The Weasleys prepare to go to war.
2 August 1997
Ginny has spent the last six hours tossing and turning in her tangle of sheets, twisting them tighter and tighter around her legs so that they now feel more like restraints than bedding. Sleep has come only in brief, treacherous snatches. One moment she’s blinking heavily into darkness; the next she's jerking awake with her heartbeat lurching in her throat, convinced she’s heard another crack of apparition in the yard or a bellowed curse from downstairs.
The night has slipped by without her permission. She never saw darkness give way to dawn, though she knows it must have happened; the pale, gray light of early morning is spilling through the gaps in her curtains. But every time exhaustion begins to pull her under, her mind hurls her back into the night before, fixating on the strangest, most vivid details.
The ache in her knees from kneeling on the solid gold dance floor, waiting, watching, while Yaxley and Macnair questioned each member of the family in turn.
The eerie calm her mother wore as she led two Law Enforcement Patrol officers into the house to show them the ghoul.
Madame Delacour swearing at Macnair in sharp, furious French.
The tear tracks cutting through the dirty streaks on Gabrielle’s cheeks.
The identical storm-dark expressions on Tonks’s and Fleur’s faces as—after what had already been nearly two hours of painful, taunting interrogation about Harry’s whereabouts—none other than Fenrir Greyback suddenly emerged from the dark orchard, hulking into the tent, prowling toward the half-circle of kneeling Weasleys, Delacours, and Lupins.
“William Weasley,” drawled Greyback, and Ginny’s stomach turned over as she watched her oldest brother close his eyes, his lips thinning, his chest rising and falling in a slow, deep breath. “Well, well, well, I’m a bit miffed I wasn’t invited to this little do of yours. I mean, you’ve a lot to thank me for, haven’t you? Look at that gorgeous face of yours.”
Read the full chapter on AO3.
Read from the beginning on AO3.
The sun was dipping low, closing out the long summer day in a wash of gold and amber that shimmered across the surface of the small fishing pond. The noise of the family gathering faded behind them as Ginny and Harry slipped away, their footsteps unhurried, their shoulders brushing as they walked.
Ginny let out a laugh, bright and incredulous. “The whole cubicle?”
“Filled to the brim,” Harry said, grinning. “Letters, postcards—everything. Kingsley promised they had security wizards screening them all before delivering the lot. Said it like that was meant to reassure me before they buried me alive in it.”
“And what did you do with them?” she asked, glancing sideways at him.
“Donated them,” he said lightly.
“To the Harry Potter Memorial Library and Orphanage?” Ginny asked with a sly grin.
Harry nudged her in the side when she snorted. “You haven’t seen the latest Skeeter article? It’s apparently a Quidditch Training Centre now—for orphans and reformed Death Eaters.”
Ginny huffed. “Oh, well. How noble of you.”
“Apparently,” Harry said. “Anyway, I tossed most of them. Figured anyone who actually knows me would know where to send a birthday card.”
“You did not throw all of them away!”
“Well… Ron and Neville had a look through first.”
“Oh, and you didn’t?”
“I was mostly trying to clear a path back to my desk chair,” he admitted.
Ginny bumped his shoulder. “So what did your adoring fans send you? Anything good?”
Harry sighed, dragging a hand through his hair. “I kept the ones from little kids.”
“Of course you did. For your very real, completely legitimate orphan Quidditch empire.”
“Obviously.”
They walked a few steps in comfortable silence before he continued, “There were loads of party invitations. People seem to think I’m terribly lonely. That I need a proper family to celebrate with. No one should spend a birthday alone.”
“If only they knew about Mum’s dinner.”
“Exactly.” He smiled faintly. “And then there were the homemade gifts.”
“Oh, not homemade gifts from rabid fans!”
“I got a pair of knitted socks,” he said. “They reminded me of Dobby.”
Ginny scrunched up her nose in judgment. “Who sends a stranger knitted socks?”
Harry’s grin turned crooked. “That wasn’t the strangest one.”
“Oh?”
“A witch sent me—” he hesitated, already laughing, “—panties made of licorice wands. Neville opened that one. Went about as red as the… gift.”
Ginny doubled over, laughter spilling out of her.
“She included a homemade Bertie Bott’s recipe,” Harry added, barely holding it together. “Assorted… intimate flavours.”
“No!” Ginny gasped, clutching her sides.
“Ron tried them,” Harry said solemnly. “Said they tasted salty.”
“Stop!” she choked. “You are making that up now.”
“I really wish I were.”
Ginny shook her head, still laughing as she straightened. “Wow. And all we had to offer you was cake and decent company. You must feel thoroughly unappreciated by us in comparison.”
Harry took in the sight of her laughing, the setting sun reflected in her brown eyes. “It truly is a tragedy,” he said dryly.
But his hand found hers as they walked, and he didn’t let go.
I DID IT!!!
IT'S FINISHED!!!
The final chapter of the Red Fury is now out!
A HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who read this fic and supported me along the journey. It feels like a crazy accomplishment to get 20 chapters and 131k words out and shared with this amazing community.
Read the complete story on AO3!
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