Ginny is not surprised when Harry Potter tells her he's leaving to fight monsters.
"You can't come," he says and there's sorrow in his eyes, a shade of something that he's letting go of with one hand while clenching its tail with the other. "It's dangerous. I couldn't leave with myself if something happened to you," and Ginny nods. She'd known.
She sheds a tear for this boy, this boy she's kissed and hugged and cradled closer to her heart trying to make his shadow worm its way in there, she sheds a tear and smiles prettily and lets one of her fingers follow the contour of his cheekbone all the way down his jaw.
"Come back," she whispers. It's not come back for me but it's all that she can give him and the difference doesn't matter anyway. Harry doesn't understand nuances very often; he projects over her irises the kind of pain he yearns to see in there and lifts a corner of his mouth in a defeated grin, a mirror of what he fools himself he'd discovered, a mirror of all that she can't give him.
He leaves and Ginny is alive through it all. She sees Ron sending her worried glances, sees Bill looking at her as if waiting for combustion, she sees and rolls her eyes. They are all ridiculous, especially her mother who, so good at shoving Tom Riddle under her rug and stepping all over her daughter's damaged mind, is walking on eggshells now, with plates of cakes, with tearful eyes. It's tragically comic how little they perceive and she - she's not going to die over a boy. She's been there before, and learned her lesson, and when Ginevra Weasley unfastens her fists, they let go both at once. She is not going to die over this boy.
She goes back to school in the fall to find the dragons he went after dining between her walls, almost at her table. They breathe fire in her classrooms and flap their wings down her corridors and they're stupid and uncouth and altogether verminous. They like it that way.
She marches on.
People whisper that Harry Potter isn't back. He's out there, best friends at his sides, fighting the good fight, and he's their symbol. They rally around his existence because they have to, soldiers who were never meant to form troops, prisoners of a War everyone pretends they aren't part of.
Her father had wanted to hide her but the Order hasn't agreed. "Go back to school, Ginevra. It's safer there. It's better there." Go back to school and see for us, listen for us, go back to school and suffer for us. Do it. There are so many scars layered on her shoulder blades, she could draw constellations with the burn marks.
Neville fights. It's like someone poured melted steel in his spine over the summer and it cooled there, and now he can't be broken, he can't be bent, he won't bow. They blanket him in so many Crucios, Ginny thinks that by the end of this year there'll be three Longbottom beds in Janus Thickery and wants to cry at the thought. "There's no time for tears," Luna says. "Your tears alone aren't enough to drown them." She doesn't cry.
Ginny does things she shouldn't do.
Small things. Correcting them in class, impertinent words, jabs at their magical prowess, jabs at their other kind of prowess. Talking back. Throwing herself in front of others. There are slashes on her faces from their curses, there is blood flowing from the place the nail of her pinky used to be every time she moves her hand just so.
Bigger things. She brews in bathrooms, healing potions and solutions and skele gro – it's sickening how much skele gro they need – she tip-toes in their quarters when they're empty and pours infirm doses of poison in all the bottles and cups she can find. She's reckless.
Luna is focused. Her eyes are clouded but her mind is sharp and for the first time, Ginny does believe she lives on an existential plane different from them all. If Luna could choke Alecto Carrow with a thought, she'd do it. She heals instead. Flows into dungeons like an unstoppable river, untangling kids from their ties and tangling them in her aura, and these people who have been cruel to her for so long take to her shelter and fall in her embrace. Luna is not kind. She's steady and moral and when she pushes the hair from their foreheads, they see their mothers. Luna rolls shame into a word and hope into the other. They bleed all over her and she takes it.
Ginny can't. She protects them and comforts them and is mean and pushy and demanding when she should be but she doesn't offer to lift anything from their shoulders. She's not sharing herself. She'll never share herself ever again.
When he comes, they're almost dead. The room is small, the food is little, they are an army in close quarters and there is resentment in the air. They still get up to fight.
Her mother is apoplectic with it but Ginny can't be moved. "It's my War, too," she says. "You've stayed in your houses and plotted your big fights, and eaten, and slept in peace, and now you come here, where the War has been all along, you pace on the floor where I almost died and think you can still tell me what to do. You can't."
He's nothing like the pretty boy she'd almost died for. He's cadaveric and red-eyed, he's death and famine and pestilence rolled into one, and War has ridden before him to open the path. They fight him as if he's the monster from the stories, finally out from under the bed.
He's not. He's just a man who once upon a time had been the monster in her head. And she'd kill him if she could.
I should probably make a story for all of my drabbles but I feel like then I would lose the desire to write them. Also, I kind of want to do a bigger piece with this Ginny but I don't have any plans.