When the dust has settled over the battlefield and the corpses are cleared away and the tumbled masonry repaired and the house elves back in the kitchens and the Death Eaters in Azkaban, it is not Minerva McGonagall who comes to the Burrow to ask Ginny in person whether she will be returning to school, and if so, whether she would be willing to take on the responsibilities of Head Girl for the coming year. It's Aurora Sinistra.

"Why me?" Gin asks, because in all honesty, she doesn't know yet, whether she's going back. Luna and Neville have decided to take their NEWTs independently, and she knows that Harry and Ron have taken positions with the Aurory despite Hermione's disapproval – the muggleborn will be returning to school, of course, that was never in question – but she, Ginny, wavers wildly from day to day between being unable to stand the thought of going back, and needing to prove to herself that she can.

The Slytherin Astronomy professor – and now Deputy Head – simply raises an eyebrow and says, "You know why."

She doesn't. Not then. But she figures it out.

She says yes, of course.

The Burrow is… stiff.

Ginny doesn't know if anyone else sees it, feels it, but she does: the way they're all moving slowly and carefully around each other, around the loss of Fred, as though his absence is a wound, and they mustn't aggravate it by pulling against it the wrong way, as though they hardly dare move at all.

Molly might have been a fury in battle, in the immediate aftermath of losing her son, with her daughter's life on the line, but in the wake of the war she has become brittle, going through her daily life behind a mask of normality with so many cracks in it that it seems the slightest upset might cause it to crumble, and Molly with it. All of her children have noticed, even Ron, though he clearly doesn't know how to deal with it. Fleur has taken it upon herself to give Molly a purpose, learning all the little charms and niceties of housewitchery that Bill doesn't appreciate anyway. Percy has been out of the house most days, helping with the restructuring of the Ministry – apparently most anyone who knew what was going on around there was tied in some way to the Death Eaters – but he comes home for dinner every night. Arthur is trying to be strong for her, but Ginny has caught him crying in his muggle shed twice, now, and he always smells of alcohol when she goes to kiss him goodnight. It's hardest for George, of course. He and Angelina have been spending a lot of time together – away from the Burrow, because he says everything there reminds him of Fred – but every time he does come home, he tries to make his mother laugh. The weight of guilt and sorrow in his eyes makes Ginny want to cry, or hug him, or both.

She doesn't, because when Molly clings to him, sobbing over her lost son, his lost twin, he looks even closer to breaking than she does.

No one mentions this, even though Ginny knows she can't be the only one who sees it.

She figures that they, like her, are afraid of tearing the wound open even further if they draw any more attention to it.

What if I do something and it makes everything worse?

She, like everyone else, moves carefully and slowly, trying not to hurt anyone else any further as she slowly comes to terms with the loss of her brother.

Some days, when she can't stand the tense, awkward silence around the Burrow, she flies as high as she can and casts a silencing spell on herself and screams and cries out against the unfairness of the world, against fear and mourning and loss, venting her rage silently to the clouds.

Harry caught her doing it, once. With all his usual lack of tact, he asked her what she was doing, and why.

"What does it look like I'm doing?"

"Erm… having a fit, kind of."

He's so very earnest and concerned that she bursts out laughing. It's completely involuntary. "Never mind," she says, almost crying, she's laughing that hard. "It'll only sound silly if I try to explain."

"Erm…"

"Really, Harry, it's fine."

And in that moment, it is.

Going back to Hogwarts will not be easy. Ginny knows that. The school is no longer a safe haven, and memories lurk in every corner, every stone. She doesn't want to go back. But she's said she will, so she gets on the train – apparates herself to the platform, because there doesn't seem to be any point to a big send-off this year – and smiles at the children, making her way to the front of the train, Head Girl badge in place.

Her mask, unlike her mother's, is perfect.

The Head Boy is a muggleborn, Greg Roberts, a Ravenclaw.

Ginny hates him.

He hasn't done anything to deserve her ire, it's just…

He spent the entire war in France.

She knows he didn't have a choice. If he had stayed in Magical Britain, chances were he would have ended up in Azkaban, dead, or kissed. She's seen the statistics. She's seen the monument Percy's proposed to honor the innocents who died in the war, the list of names to be carved into its stone. She knows that getting himself and his family out of the country, out of the battle zone, was the smartest thing Greg could do.

But he comes back with this awful, cheerful, optimistic attitude, as though everything will be sunshine and daisies and generally wonderful now that the war is over and she wants to punch him in the face every time he opens his mouth, because he's wrong.

The war solved nothing.

The world is still just as broken as it ever was, and her brother died for nothing, and she was tortured on this fucking table while he was off eating croissants on the continent and he comes back all shiny and naïve in ways that even the second-years who were here last year aren't, idealizing their struggle and bloody thanking her for fighting the good fight in a way that can't help but seem patronizing because the war was – among other things – about muggleborns, and here he is not doing any of the work of changing their society, but getting all of the benefits, and if that's not the sort of thing that will make even more people hate muggleborns, Ginny doesn't know what will.

She keeps her mouth shut, deflecting his thanks with all the grace of Tom Riddle depreciating a compliment, and changes the subject, focusing on Professor McGonagall and perfecting her role as Head Girl.

She hates herself a little bit for hating him.

Hermione Granger is jealous.

She thinks that she should have Ginny's position – that as a member of the golden trio – the only one who came back to school – she should automatically have been given the job.

If Ginny could give it to her, she would. Or at least, she thinks she would, most days. Because being Head Girl is a thankless job, and she's starting to believe that the only reason Professor Sinistra chose her – and it was Sinistra, she knows, because Hermione is McGonagall's favorite, and surely she would have chosen the muggleborn – is because she already knows what it's like to live under siege.

Because that's what it's like, getting up and going to class every day and dealing with the thousand and one little problems of the prefects and the student body and never, ever, ever letting them see her fear and exhaustion and the way she can't stand being in this school for another bloody second, but does.

She hates it, this job. This school. This life.

She wants to quit.

She wants to resign. Let Hermione have the job. Let her feel important, even though Harry is gone now, and her job was only ever to keep him alive, wasn't it?

She wants to drop out. She could still go to the Aurors, could still go to George or even just give up on everything and go home and be mothered.

She wants to walk up to the astronomy tower and, without a word or a letter or any explanation, step off of it.

She doesn't. For the children, mostly. All the ones who suffered alongside her last year, who look to her as an example of how to keep going. She can't let them down.

Let Hermione be jealous. It's not like it even matters, in the grand scheme of things.

The only person in Hogwarts more miserable than Ginny, she thinks, is Malfoy.

He's back because McGonagall decided that she would take Dumbledore's attitude about second chances to heart, and because he wasn't even seventeen when they marked him, forced him to kill, watch torture. And because he agreed to testify against his father and the rest of the surviving Death Eaters in exchange for his freedom.

Limited freedom. He's been remanded into McGonagall's custody, technically, but she foisted him off onto Ginny in September, adding supervising his parole to her endless list of Head Girl duties.

Some people hate him for what he did in the war. Some hate him for what he did after. Some pity him, which is even worse, Ginny thinks. She, at least, would rather be hated than pitied.

Strangely enough, she can't bring herself to feel much of anything about him. He's told her why he did it, first spitefully, then as though his confession is some sort of absolution. He didn't believe he had a choice. He was young and scared and yes, in the beginning, even excited for the war, believing it to be his big break. He would impress the Dark Lord, finally take down Harry Potter, have a position of power in the New World Order.

He has none of those things, and he's betrayed his family and lost almost all of their power and money and influence on top.

But he's alive and if he can make it through the next five years, take his NEWTs, get his Potions Mastery under Slughorn, he'll be up for release, free to make his way back into the population, or out into the world, away from Magical Britain and his tainted name and the mistakes of his youth.

The only person in Hogwarts that Ginny might actually be able to call a friend, she thinks, is Draco Malfoy.

He's told her about his side of the war, and she, at first equally spitefully, and then as though it's a sort of medicine, purging herself of all the evil she's seen. It's a relief to tell someone who can't tell anyone, who doesn't pity her because he's caught up so deeply in his own troubles that she's not entirely sure he's even listening.

That's fine. He doesn't have to listen, and she doesn't want a response.

It comes as a complete surprise when, after a particularly bad day and a long, raging vent-session about Riddle, Voldemort, the Diary, whatever, he kisses her.

It's even more of a surprise when she finds herself kissing him back.

She doesn't tell Harry.

She doesn't tell anyone.

Malfoy doesn't, either.

But every few weeks the pressure of Hogwarts becomes unbearable and one or the other of them will offer a kiss, and they end up fucking on the desk of the Head Girl's office five times in the two months between Halloween and Christmas.

Ginny stays at school over the holidays. She goes home for Christmas itself, but the Burrow is still so wrong, so stiff and awkward, that she actually prefers to stay in the place where she was literally tortured, rather than face her broken family for more than a few hours at a time.

It doesn't help that Harry is there, too.

She almost, almost accepted his invitation to stay with him at Grimmauld over the break, but if she had, then she would have had to spend a lot more time with her family, so she'd turned him down.

And seeing him at the Burrow, escaping with him out into the cold, wet fields around the house, just walking, to get away from it all, she's glad she did.

Because this is awkward.

He's trying to talk about them, about their relationship – the one he put on hold a year and a half ago to run off and hunt horcruxes, and hasn't had the nerve to bring up since, even though he'd had all of last summer to do it. Ever since the battle, even – he could have written her a bloody letter! But no, he waited until now, until he was ready and could do it face-to-face, and she couldn't blame him, really, but she was really, really glad that she didn't have to go home with him after telling him "I'm not sure."

His face falls. He really expected her to leap at the chance to renew their relationship, to really date this time, like they never had a chance to in school, with the threat of Voldemort hanging over him.

But she tells him "I'm just not sure I'm ready for a relationship right now," and she means it. She knows this is the right thing.

But she does care about Harry, and as much as she wants to be with him, she's not sure he can handle her drama at the moment. He's not the sort to sit there and maybe not even listen and not offer advice or try to fix her.

And she's certain she can't handle his angst. She doesn't know what to say about the parents he lost or Sirius or the fact that he doesn't know what to do with his life now that he's done the one thing it's all been leading up to since before he could even walk or talk.

He sighs heavily. "Well, then. Should I – should I wait? Or… is there someone else?"

"There's no one else." She really does feel that way. This doesn't have anything to do with Malfoy. That's just stress relief, they're not together, never going to be. "It's just… why don't you write to me? Proper letters. And then maybe try dating over the summer, not just on Hogsmeade weekends."

Because, she realizes, it's not really the angst that bothers her: Malfoy has angst, and that hasn't stopped her letting him talk her ear off for hours at a time. It's that with the prospect of only seeing him once every couple of months, she'll never get through the angst to see anything else of him.

He brightens immediately, leans in for a kiss.

"Brilliant, Gin!"

He tastes like eggnog and smells like spring.

She kisses him back, but she's still glad she's not going home with him tonight.

Percy catches her as she's heading toward the floo, on her way back to Hogwarts for the night. He tells her that she's working too much. That's about the funniest thing she's ever heard, if only because she knows he's been pulling eighty-hour weeks since the Last Battle, trying to restore some semblance of order to the Ministry.

"I'll cut back when you do," she says with a laugh.

He gives her a rueful grin. "Do you know what you're going to do after your NEWTs?"

She shrugs. "I'll figure it out."

"I'm sure you will," he says, and shockingly enough, he doesn't sound condescending at all.

Ginny doesn't know what she wants to do with her life after NEWTs. She hasn't even been thinking about it, just taking each day one step at a time. But she'll be leaving school soon, just five more months, and after that, she'll need a real job, or an apprenticeship, or something.

And yes, she could go out for the Aurors, or go work in George's shop, but she really ought to think about something she actually wants to do, rather than just whatever she might fall into.

"What N.E.s are you taking?" Malfoy asks, his first actual contribution to one of her rants in months. Normally they just take it in turns to bitch about their lives.

She's so surprised it takes her a moment to respond. "Potions, Charms, Arithmancy, Runes, and Transfiguration. And Defense, but I'm not in the class."

Malfoy snorts. As though any of them need a Defense Class after what they've lived through. "Potions, Charms, and Defense could get you into a healing apprenticeship. Potions, Transfig and Arithmancy are the entry-level requirements for Alchemy, and Charms, Transfig, Runes and Arithmancy will get you into most Enchanting programs."

"I know that; that's why I chose those classes. Doesn't help me decide what I want to do."

Malfoy grins. "Go out for professional quidditch. The Harpies could use a new seeker, and you're not half bad, you know."

Ginny laughs at that, but thinks she just might do it, why not?

Luna and Neville come to visit Ginny at Hogsmeade weekends. It's the only time she's let out of the Castle, so they go to the Hog's Head and say hello to Aberforth for old times' sake, and get a pint of butterbeer and talk about all that's happened in the months since they've caught up.

"So I'm going to go out for the Harpies this summer," Ginny says. She'll have to wait for her NEWTs to come in before she can apply for apprenticeships; she probably won't bother if she makes the team.

Luna grins at her over her mug, giving herself a butterbeer moustache. It makes her look even more ridiculous than usual as she says, "Oh, good, the phoenix is stretching her wings again!"

In the convoluted metaphor that is Luna's understanding of the world, Ginny is the phoenix, or she was, last year, standing up again and again to go down in a blaze of glory and show the rest of the school that it was possible to do so, and get back up yet again.

"I'm still the phoenix?" she asks.

"Oh, yes. You've been in the ashes all this year, but I think you're ready to start flying again soon," Luna says.

"Any place for a washed up Paladin in that metaphor?" Neville asks, mostly joking, but not entirely, Ginny thinks.

Luna hums to herself for a moment. "Go forth and find a lady, to be her knight in shining armor," she says with a smirk, or as much of a smirk as Luna ever wears.

From the way Neville blushes, Ginny is certain he has someone specific in mind for his Lady, but he changes the subject before she can ask who. "I kind of feel like the whole world's been in the ashes the last few years," he says. He's always been good at speaking Lunese. "Maybe we're all going to be ready to start flying again soon."

Luna nodded seriously. "It's good, you know, even though it may not seem so in the midst of it, the burning. Destruction is a prelude to new beginnings, and here, now, all we have is potential. We have all the potential in the world, in the ashes, the survivors. We just have to decide what to do with it."

There's a heavy moment of silence as the three of them reflect on this pronouncement.

Then Luna speaks again. "I'm going on an adventure, to find a crumple-horned snorkack."

No one is surprised.

The Malfoys' trial is held over Easter. Not Draco's, his parents. Draco testifies, as he has sworn to do, baring all the secrets of the Death Eaters' revels and rituals to the Wizengamot.

He is a surprisingly sympathetic witness, making it clear that most of the original Death Eaters, like his father and grandfather before him, entered the cult under false pretenses: it was Dark in the beginning, and lawless to be sure, but it had never been about casual murder and torture and gratuitous evil.

But he makes no secret of the fact that his father sold him into slavery to a madman in an attempt to save his own skin.

Lucius Malfoy is convicted, sentenced to life in Azkaban for his crimes over the past three years. Narcissa Malfoy, whose worst crime was the harboring of Death Eaters and the Dark Lord in her husband's home, is held not to be responsible as he was the Head of the House. But the House itself is ordered to pay reparations which beggar them. The houses and land are to be sold, their Gringotts vault very nearly cleaned out, without so much as an allowance for Narcissa and Draco to live off of.

Draco is not surprised. He's been expecting this, they both have. "She's going to dissolve her marriage contract," he says one day, after the trial is ended. "The House of Black is compelled to take her back if her husband abuses her by placing some other loyalty above House Malfoy and their marriage alliance. And since there's no House Black left, really, she'll get the bulk of the inheritance, the vaults Sirius didn't manage to give to Potter. She'll be fine."

Ginny already knows about this, Harry has written to her about it, this attempt by Narcissa to take away everything Sirius gave him. She never did think it was anything personal on Narcissa's part.

"And you?"

Draco shrugs, resigned to his fate. "Once I can leave, I will. Go off to America, or Brazil. Somewhere they've never heard the name Malfoy, and start over."

Ginny glares at him. "I wouldn't. I'd fight."

"I'm not you, Weasley."

"No, but I'm right: you should stay, make a name for yourself here, save the Malfoy name from itself or some stupid pureblood dragonshite, I don't know. But you shouldn't run away."

"You're a pureblood too, you know," he says mildly.

"Shut up, you know what I mean."

The end of the year arrives suddenly, in a flurry of exams and crying underclassmen and the logistical nightmare that is coordinating the NEWTs and OWLs for all the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth years. Some of the seventh years need another term or two, as well, their sixth year ruined by the Occupation, so Ginny and Greg must help arrange for a true eighth-year class next year. More than half of them are staying, almost thirty, compared to the handful in Malfoy's 'eighth year'.

Ginny is done; she won't be back. Not that she learned much sixth year herself, and she's been hideously overextended for most of this year as well. But she's done her duty to the underclassmen, giving them an example of how to carry on, and it's time for her to go. She's taking her NEWTs once and for all, even though she doesn't feel nearly as prepared as she thinks she ought to be.

Even though all this time she ought to be studying, the final cramming push, is being taken over by Head Girl duties: calming other students and dealing with logistics, and now this new tradition McGonagall wants to start. She has to write a farewell speech.

And all that comes to mind, all she really wants to say, is fuck this, it's over, move on and have done with it, because that's how she feels about Hogwarts, now. About school. She's ready to get on with the rest of her life.

And suddenly, she gets it:

"Why me?"

Because not only did Hogwarts need her, need its phoenix, its exemplar of keeping on, but she had needed it, too. Needed this time, here, to come to terms with all that had happened, and find the strength to move on.

And she's ready, now.

Oh, she'll take her exams and she'll write her speech, but this… this is the moment that she will always remember as the true culmination of her education at Hogwarts.

She isn't good, but she's better than she was, and that, right now, seems like it's almost enough.