For the Houses Competition. This is a Hamilton fusion, it should be fairly easy to figure out which HP characters represent which Hamilton characters. Many thanks to the mods for another amazing year of this competition!
House: Ravenclaw
Year: 6
Category: Musicals
Prompt: Hamilton
Word count: 966
She had thought that they were one of the lucky ones. One of the families who didn't lose a brother, a son, or a husband in that stupid war against the Ministry. She had thought that Harry would come back from the fighting, and they could finally be together, the whole family, and everything would be fine.
She had been foolish.
They had been lucky for a time, Ginny knew this. Happy, even. Harry was well respected, having served well as General Albus Dumbledore's right-hand man during the war. They had a home, children, peace, a life. It was a good life, despite the facts that Harry worked long hours and Ginny's best friend, Hermione, had just left the country to marry someone named Viktor Krum. It had been a political marriage, arranged by their fathers, although Ginny suspected that Hermione did genuinely like Viktor's company.
Everything had been perfect. Too perfect, really; she should have known that it would all fall apart. But she had wanted so desperately to believe that she could have the life she'd wanted ever since she was little more than a girl, hopelessly in love with Dumbledore's dashing young aide.
It was all gone now.
Her brother, her husband, her son; they had all survived the first war, only for her to lose them all in this second war - the war of bureaucracy and political sniping.
It all began with her brother, Fred. He was always getting into trouble, so perhaps it shouldn't have come as a surprise to any of their family that he finally wound up in a situation he couldn't get out of. In the end, it wasn't really his fault, although Ginny never really found out the exact circumstances of his death.
He died. That's all she knew.
She lost her husband twice. The first time was heartbreaking, and she had thought that there wouldn't even be a second time. When she first heard what he had done, she hadn't wanted to believe it - surely, Harry wouldn't take a mistress behind her back.
But he did, claiming to have been unwillingly seduced by Cho Chang. Ginny didn't really care how it happened, though; that it had happened at all, was enough.
She burned every letter he had ever sent her, every lie he had told when he said he was hers. She had allowed herself to fall into his words, not realising how he was blinding her to his faults. Hermione had warned her, a long time ago, how dangerous it was to fall in love with Harry Potter. Ginny had not believed her, and now she was paying the price.
Or, rather, Harry was. She was not some damsel-in-distress - she was Ginny Weasley, and she would not be broken by him, not matter how much her heart might argue with that. She would never forgive him for what he had done, she was sure of that fact. She couldn't.
And then they lost their son. James was a sweet boy, but impetuous and impulsive, just like his father. He looked like Harry, too, with black hair that refused to be tamed and brilliant green eyes. He had more than just a fragment of Harry's mind, and Ginny had been so proud when he graduated from King's College. It seemed as though everything was getting better.
But James was too much like Harry. He was proud and stubborn, and he wouldn't let a grudge go. The duel had lasted barely a minute, and then James was dead.
Burying her son was worse than burying her brother, worse than burying the memories of Harry. It was an unimaginable pain, one she had never even thought she could feel. It was crushing and, deep down, she knew that Harry was feeling it too.
So they healed together. They moved uptown and learned to live with everything they had done, everything they had lost. It was quiet uptown, so different to the city noises that she and her siblings had once loved so much. The quiet was easier, though; there was no politics or scandals or gossip intruding on their lives. It was just her and Harry, and, slowly, she learned how to forgive him.
Uptown was peaceful, so she knew that it could only last so long. Politics creeped back into Harry's life once more, old tensions between he and Tom Riddle arising again. Ginny disliked the man greatly; he had once been something akin to a friend to Harry, but that had soured a long time ago, only worsening when Harry endorsed Draco Malfoy over him in the recent elections. She knew that Riddle had been deeply embittered, had thought of Harry as nothing but an orphaned immigrant with no place in their society, but she never realised it would go this far. Never realised that he would kill Harry.
When Ginny found out, she rushed to Harry's side. Hermione was there too, and they held his hands as he died, as Ginny lost her husband for the second, and final, time. She wept, at first; wept for her terrible losses and for the unimaginable pain she had received. But tears would solve nothing, she realised this quick enough.
She gathered all of Harry's work, all of his writings and his thoughts. She spoke to everyone who had known him, she work to build the legacy he had so desperately wanted. She told his story, as best as she could, for the fifty years she lived after his death. And she told her own story, writing herself back into the narrative of history and making a name for herself outside of being Harry Potter's wife.
She was proud of her work, in the end. And she hoped that, wherever he was, he was proud of her, too.