A/N: Not sure about the timelines or Weasley children ages, so this is a bit hand-wavey and might not fit canon. Ignore that! But it's set before Ginny goes to Hogwarts and before Bill moves out of home. Mostly fluffy! No warnings!
Dialogue Prompts: "You're my favourite." / "I love you to the moon." / "I don't care what anyone says. I'm not leaving." / "Have you got the hump with me?"
"Heads up."
The pencil case smacked Ginny right in the face. It was a soft, cylindrical pencil case, and the orange fabric was worn thin and peppered with ink. The zip worked perfectly, though the end looked a little worse for wear.
Ginny didn't care about any of that. She cared about the face that it had smacked her in the face.
"Bill!" she yelped, clutching her nose. "That hurt!"
The pencil case dropped to the floor, landing on a stack of scattered paper. Bill's sheepish face peered around her bedroom door, caught in the midway sun that streaked in through the window, dyeing the scratchy carpet yellow.
"What the hell was that for?" Ginny demanded, sitting upright, her quill forgotten.
"Language," Bill said mildly, as he swanned into the room. "Sorry, Gin. I thought you'd catch it. You've got better Quidditch reflexes than the rest of us put together, so you can't really blame me."
Flattery wasn't going to win this one. Ginny knew his game. She glared at him one last time before tossing the pencil case aside. It landed with a soft flump on the other side of the room. She picked up her quill carefully and dipped it in the ink, and went back to her work, ignoring Bill's ambling stroll.
"Have you got the hump with me?"
"What do you think?" she said, refusing to look up.
Bill strolled over to peer down at her progress. "I think you've given that gnome a very majestic moustache, but the bowler hat was a bit much."
The front page of the Quibbler featured several lumpy little gnomes, all posed in the act of running away, bare-bottomed and giggling. Luna had given it to her when they both went down to the river last weekend. She wouldn't normally have drawn all over it, but the stack of paper was all coloured-in, and the last of her clean paper was in a screwed-up ball in the wastepaper basket. If she resorted to drawing on the walls, Mum would kill her with her bare hands.
"Art is subjective," Ginny said, adding a big, bushy flower to the bowler hat, simply because she could. "Why are you here?"
"Is there somewhere else I should be?"
"Egypt," she said, with as much distaste as she could muster. She scrawled a fierce, angry storm cloud inside the Quibbler's Q, still refusing to look up. She didn't want to see his soft, loving, apologetic face.
"I'm not leaving until tomorrow morning," Bill said. "I thought we could play some cards and hide Ronnie's socks, as a going-away present."
"I don't want you to go away," Ginny snapped.
The nib of the quill snapped too. Ginny stared at the splodge of ink filling the Quibbler's second B, and threw the quill over her shoulder. The wastepaper basket sighed gratefully, gobbling it up. Ginny fished another quill out of her battered, pastel yellow pencil case and swirled it in the ink, leaving a black dotted trail along the Quibbler's L. She could feel Bill's eyes on her, but she ignored him. It was harder than she wanted it to be, but she prevailed.
"Well, that's settled then," Bill said, clapping his hands together. The noise startled her; a black line of ink travelled from the gnome's cheek to his other, much lower cheek. "I don't care what anyone says. I'm not leaving."
Ginny looked up sharply in alarm, the quill drooping in her lax grip. "What?"
There was a glint in his eyes that Ginny didn't like. "You heard me. You don't want me to go away? Then I'm not leaving."
He shuffled backwards, belying his words, and then he pounced. Ginny yelped, scrambling along the carpet towards the bed, but she didn't make it out before Bill landed on her, almost cracking her back as he sprawled all over her. Paper crinkled underneath them, and she was sure there must be ink working its way into her dungarees.
"Get your big sweaty arms off me!" she yelled. "Mum!"
The Burrow buzzed with footsteps and whistling and the sound of dishes clanking together downstairs. Bill was moving house tomorrow, so the usual clutter that came from living with messy Weasleys was increased tenfold, bolstered by stacks of cardboard boxes and paperwork and an endless supply of sheets from Molly's staggeringly large collection. In the midst of all that chaos, Ginny's hollering went unheard, and Molly was too preoccupied with ironing and chopping up potatoes for Bill's moving out dinner to tend to her daughter's suffering.
Bill chuckled, wrapping her tightly in a hug. He spat out a mouthful of her hair at one point, not bothering to dislodge her elbow from his gut. No matter how much she kicked or cursed, he didn't budge. Eventually she flopped to the ground, exhausted from the struggle, and succumbed to her older brother's idiotic charms.
"You're so stupid," she muttered into the floor, forcing the tears to stay down. "So stupid."
"You're my favourite."
"Well, yeah." She let him hug her a little longer, and then prodded his arm. "Let me up so I can talk."
Bill pulled away obligingly, finally releasing her from his clutches. She wiggled upright until she sat cross-legged on the floor, eyeing him shrewdly until he arranged himself opposite her in exactly the same position. When she crossed her arms, he did the same. When she stuck out her tongue, he pulled the most ridiculous face possible. When she smiled reluctantly, his grin was brighter than any she'd ever seen.
"I know you have to go," Ginny said, turning her head slightly, her smile fading. "You've got a fancy job and you need to live closer to it. It's fine. I just wish you didn't need to go so far away, that's all."
"Hey," Bill said softly, leaning forward to catch her eye. He had the same happy crinkles around his mouth that Arthur Weasley did; she wondered if she would have them too some day. "I'm not going far."
"Egypt is pretty far."
"Nah, I don't mean realistically, or geographically. I mean in a mushy, sickening way, you know?" Bill grinned victoriously when she groaned. He softened his voice again and leaned in further to pick up her chin, warm eyes seeing right through her. "I'm not going far. I love you to the moon. Or Saturn, even. So even if I did, hypothetically, go really far away, it wouldn't matter, would it? It's never going to be too far for me to stop loving you."
Ginny picked up a screwed-up ball of paper and flung it at him. It was the principle of the thing, she said, when he whined about it. Because sentiment was for Ronalds and sappy gits. But admittedly, it did make her feel a bit better.
"I guess you can go then," Ginny said magnanimously. "But only after I beat you at cards."
And she did beat him at cards, and she could tell by Bill's badly-hidden frustration that he wasn't even letting her win to be nice. Her brothers rarely indulged her that way, which was why she was so good at winning on her own terms. When he hugged every single one of them goodbye the next morning, she tucked the packet of playing cards into one of his boxes, with a note that said: "Because you need practice!"
The note also had a few other sentimental things on it, but because Ginny wasn't a Ronald or a sappy git, she pretended those were put there by accident, and not be her own shaky hand last night.
The Burrow felt a little quieter with Bill gone. It wasn't as if he was always making noise like the twins or complaining like Ron or shouting at everyone to shut up like Percy did. But Bill was charismatic, bright, easy to chat to, and he never had a problem bursting into a room and inciting cheers and laughter. It seemed emptier without him there. Mum did a lot of crying, which made enough noise on its own to have Ginny retreating to her room more often than not.
Which was when she remembered the pencil case.
It took a moment of rifling through mess to find it. Ginny sat cross-legged on the floor again and held it carefully, paying attention to each little rip and splodge of ink. She pried open the zip and peered inside, finding a note tucked in there and unfolding it eagerly.
Hey, Gin. You're my favourite. Pretty sure I told you that, but so you know that you're my favourite, here's a little gift for you. I gave Dad all the permission paperwork and he'll do the spells for you, so you don't have to worry about any of that. Come and see me in my new home soon, yeah?
Love, Bill.
P.S. The pencil case is supposed to be a Portkey, but it's also a pretty good pencil case. You'll need it when you go to Hogwarts, and it always served me well. Miss you already.
Ginny dropped the note and picked up the pencil case again. It looked ordinary, but what she knew about portkeys proved that was usually the case, to attract less attention. It wasn't glowing or anything. But then, Dad still had to do the spells. She grinned, hugging the pencil case to her chest. Right now, it was just a pencil case that said Bill Weasley on the inside, and it was the best thing she'd ever been given in her whole entire life.
[Word Count: 1598]