Challenge: The Eclectic Bookworms' 19,000 Prompt Challenge on HPFC; Cheeky Slytherin Lass's Fanfiction Scavenger Hunt Competition on HPFC.

Characters: Ginny Weasley

Prompt: Death; 38. A oneshot collection of 5 (each over 500 words)

Word count: 1,239

Death: n. 1.1 The state of being dead: 'even in death,
she was beautiful'.
1.4 The destruction or permanent end of something: 'the
death of her hopes'.

Ginny had never quite worked out how to deal with death.

When she was six, her Great Uncle Billius, Fred and George's favourite relative, passed away. He had been losing his mind, the adults whispered when they thought she couldn't hear; he had said that he'd seen the Grim,, so obviously he was completely and totally barmy. Really, they said, it was a mercy that he'd slipped away.

So, to six year old Ginny Weasley, being dead was mercy. She didn't know what 'mercy' was, though, not then, not exactly. She had a vague concept of the word as being neither good nor bad; it was just a term that expressed something that should be. A concept, as she saw it, that existed and should exist, if her mum spoke of it so highly, but didn't really matter right now in her life.

She started Hogwarts five years later, her eccentric, insane uncle's death a ghost in the back of her mind, a memory on the wind. The school became her second exposure to death. There were ghosts everywhere, hovering in the halls, floating through walls and hanging around.

The Fat Friar, Hufflepuffs' house ghost, was the only cheerful one. Oh, Nearly Headless Nick tried, but in the end he was depressed and unpretentious, and he couldn't feign happiness. The Bloody Baron was creepy, covered in shining silver blood, and almost never spoke. The Gray Lady was even more silent: dignified, graceful and constantly mournful.

Moaning Myrtle was the worst, though. She was loud in her misery. It was in her bathroom, where almost no one dared to go, that Ginny met death first-hand.

Tom Riddle's diary fell into her hands inside an old book with pages more worn than the floorboards at the Burrow. The book itself, an old Transfiguration spellbook, was of no real interest to her at all. Upset and mourning a relationship that didn't exist and probably, in her mind, never would, she started to write.

She never expected that Tom Riddle would write back.

She continued to write throughout the year, panicking at one point and believing it good and gone, only to steal it back from the new owners, an addict to the written words of a boy who no longer existed.

Her year became fragmented. Blood dripped from the hall walls at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and Ginny Weasley was lost to a darkness so complete that even the unshakable Albus Dumbledore began to fear her death. It was a miracle that Harry Potter had reached her in time to save her.

Dementors in her second year taught her what mercy was: mercy was an end to the endless, viciously penetrating cold of the creatures' presence. In her third year, it was Cedric Diggory, laid stiff and bare beneath her weeping saviour, that made death finally seem like a real, reachable force.

It wasn't until fourth year, though, that she discovered that death was a very real thing. Watching Harry's brokenhearted reaction as Sirius Black, his godfather and last remaining family member, plummeted into the Veil, stole her warmth. Seeing someone she had actually known disappear like that, with barely any sign out in the world, had set an idea of what death really was in her mind.

Unforgiveable. Unending. Absolute - and unyielding. Once you were dead, you were gone.

Nothing could bring you back.

It was her sixth year, finally, that just about killed her.

The Carrows were hell, she'd known that. They would torture you to the brink of insanity, but they would stop before they completed the deed. They couldn't afford to spill a single drop of magical blood, those orders were absolute an inarguable. There was no changing the way things were.

Knowing that Ron, Hermione and Harry were all on the run had been worse. What, though, was worse than hell? She didn't know, but she thought she'd found it.

Every day, she was terrified that she would hear they had died. Hundreds of muggle-borns and blood-traitors, decent people who had dared to oppose the Dark Lord, died with nary a whimper. No one mourned their passing, because they were too afraid to. Sadness was weakness.

If the Golden Trio - any member of them - was killed, then there'd be a bang. The wizarding world would end, and there'd be no hope at all.

If that was worse than hell, though, then what was this?

Hogwarts was a wreck. The once grand structure was crumbling around them, huge portions of stone cluttering the grounds, blocking staircases and halls alike. In some sections, the roof had been caved in, and a wide hole was like a mouth void of teeth, opening into the seventh floor. Ginny, like everyone else who was still alive, was standing in the front courtyard, in a cluster of witches and wizards who were standing across from the Death Eater army, too small to pose a threat.

Inside, the meaning of death was already beginning to rot despite their best efforts. Dozens of magical folk had fallen, far too many on Harry's side to be fair. Remus Lupin and Tonks had left their newborn son an orphan, as alone against the world as his godfather had been what felt like a hundred lifetimes ago, before Ginny was anything more than a hope in the mind of Molly Weasley, who wanted nothing more than a daughter. Fred, her brother who had secretly always been her favourite, even though he and George were identical and, like every one else, she had been unable to tell them apart until the loss of George's ear. Little Colin Creevey with his muggle camera, who should have fled, shouldn't have been at Hogwarts at all under the new regime. Hufflepuffs, Ravenclaws, Gryffindors and teachers - too many lives lost for her not to understand, at last, that death was the absolute end.

Her heart was in her throat, though, hope buried deep in spite of the mourning she was already preparing for. She would not greet Fred's death as flippantly as she had Uncle Billius's, because George and everyone else would need her to mourn. All she had to be thankful for was that the war would be over in the next twenty-four hours, because there was no way they could hold out longer. If they were not victorious, they would be dead, and that was that.

She'd have no use for mourning if she was dead, she thought, and then shook it away like an errant insect. She couldn't do that to Harry, couldn't do that at all.

Then Voldemort's dreaded voice echoed through the castle and the courtyard, and she had to be sure. She shoved through the crowd, tall enough to see from several rows back but unwilling to believe her eyes until she saw it clearly. No, she thought, and then began to chant aloud, "No no no no no no..."

Within the huge arms of Rubeus Hagrid a small, unmistakable head of hair was visible, dangling limply over the stained moleskin-covered arm of the whimpering half-giant. A broken cry rang out, first Hermione and then Ron and then, weirdly, Professor McGonagall. It was that cry that finally broke the dam building within Ginny Weasley, and she felt her heart swell to the point of being painful, and then, as suddenly as though jabbed with a pin, popped.

"HARRY!"