A/N: Can't sleep, so wrote a drabble.
Don't own it.
Ashprints
For those nights
When sleep eludes
And thoughts prevail.
It's late. She should be sleeping.
She should be breathing rhythmically and not thinking at all, but instead she's running in circles around the common room, jumping over chairs, running across tabletops and latching on to the iron chandelier to swing in front of the hearth and drop to the ground again. She runs up and down the boys' staircase six times consecutively, making sure to make her footfalls soft and her breathing quiet, in her nose and out her mouth, and then she does the same with the girls' staircase, only this time she does seven.
Her feet hits the worn carpet of the common room and she immediately bounces into jump-tucks, bringing her knees to her chest twenty five times, her toes barely touching the floor before they're leaving again soundlessly. Fluidly, in a practiced motion, she drops to the ground when her feet hit the carpet for the twenty fifth time and contracts her stomach into crunches. She counts every stone on the wall opposite her, a single stone for every time her eyes rise above her knee level.
Two hundred and seventy-five.
Stopping, breathing hard, she stares at the right corner stone of the common room, the last in her count, and remains poised in her crunch position, her stomach curled, knees bent, fingers interlocked behind her head.
Two hundred and seventy-five. That number of red crossmarks on her calendar. She's positive because she counted them that morning before breakfast.
Unwinding her fingers from behind her head and moving into a sitting position, she tips her head back and breathes deeply and evenly. The slightly swinging chandelier stares back at her and groans metallically every quarter-turn. She waits until it stops. Focusing her attention away from the still chandelier, she moves her eyes to the dying fire. She counts to two hundred and seventy-five seven times before the fire finally dies out with one final hiss.
She wonders which way she should go. East maybe, since Hedwig had flown in facing the setting sun with that last letter before the expanse of nothing.
Blinking, she notices the smudge of gray swiping outwards from the empty grate, and another following it on the carpet. She blinks again and trails her eyes over the edges of the common room, on either side of the chairs, over the tabletops, and back to the hearth. Looking down to her feet, she notices the two smears of gray on the carpet beneath her trainers. Rubbing a finger along the soles of her shoes, she feels fine powder before the finger trails off the edge of the rubber. It's coated with ash.
They will have left footprints of gray, the Death Eaters, burned ruins and smoky despair, a trail coated with ash.
She stands without hesitation and leaves gray marks on the carpet and stones of the staircase as she heads towards her room in Gryffindor Tower. She comes back down them five minutes later with a satchel hanging from her shoulders and a broom over her shoulder. She sits beside the window and waits patiently. With the first smells of evaporating dew comes the news, tied with twine and clutched in the beak of an owl. She deposits two Knuts in the leather bag on the bird's leg and unravels the twine. Eyes passing over the front page briefly, she sets the paper down and picks up a forgotten quill lying on the table nearest her. She places the tip on the margin of the newspaper and writes quickly.
I waited for two hundred and seventy-five. Now, so far, I've stopped for one. Keep count for me, will you?
Setting the quill back on the table, she takes the front page of the paper in her fingers and rips down the top smoothly. She glances at the words once more before she folds the slip of thin paper up and stuffs it in her pocket. She stands on the cushions on the window ledge and looks down at the note clinging to the side of the picture of a smoking ruin. The latch on the window clicks open, and the tail of her robes whip out of sight over the ledge.
The footprints on the crimson cushions of the window-seat point Southeast. No one needs a headline to know where the wind's blown the ash.
A/N: The End. Ginny's POV if you didn't figure it out. Review, ya?