Disclaimer: We all know its JKR's and not mine.

Author's Note: Apparently some people thought this might be worth continuing, and since thanks to "The Next Ten Minutes" from the "The Last Five Years" I know precisely where I want it to go, I thought I'd give it a try.

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As the start of term faded into the middle of term, Ginny found herself frequently wishing that Harry Potter had done a great many things differently. She wished he hadn't left, wished he had taken her with him, wished he'd kissed her earlier so they would have had more time, wished he'd never kissed her at all . . .

At the moment, however, there was nothing she more fervently wished than that Harry Potter did not own an extremely conspicuous snow white owl. She thought they were trying to keep a low profile. Hadn't he learned that sending letters by Hedwig was not an effective means of doing so? Stupid git.

"Everyone's staring at me, aren't they?" She whispered, not looking up from the piece of parchment she had clutched in her hands.

Neville didn't say anything, just continued sucking the spot on his thumb where Hedwig had nipped him when he tried to feed her.

"You're staring at me."

"I'm looking at you." He replied noncommittally, but he dropped his gaze all the same, concentrating instead on wrapping his now bleeding thumb in a clean napkin.

"You should have Madame Pomfrey take a look at that."

Neville shook his head. "I've had worse from the Mimbulus mimbletonia. I'll be fine."

"I didn't know you still had that."

"Yeah, we're on the second generation, turns out every one has its own different defensive properties, so I don't seem to be getting any closer to not getting hurt."

"Oh."

There was a long pause.

"A-Are you going to open it?"

"Are they still staring?"

Lifting his head, Neville took a very not furtive look around while pretending to take a drink of his pumpkin juice. Unfortunately the ruse proved to require a little too much dexterity from his clumsily bandaged hand, and the pumpkin juice splattered down the front of his robes, the goblet clattering against the great stone floor.

"Well if they weren't, they are now." Ginny sighed, trying hard not to laugh.

Neville had bent down to the goblet and when his head poked back up above the table, she was surprised to find that he was fighting laughter as well.

"Yeah, but they're staring at me now, aren't they?"

Ginny just gaped at him.

"Neville," She whispered in awe, "did you do that on purpose?"

He shook his head. "Wish I could say I did."

Lifting his wand to his shirt front he muttered, "Scourgify," looking immensely pleased when the spell actually did result in a pristine white shirt. "Getting rather good at that one, aren't I?"

"Oh, Neville."

"So, are you ever going to read it?"

She shook her head numbly. "I can't . . . not here, not with all these people."

"Go back to the common room then."

"Yeah, but there'll be other Gryffindors there, won't there? And they'll all know . . . who it's from . . ."

"Right then." He stood up abruptly.

"Wha-?"

"I've got to set up for the third year's lessons any way. You can just tag along, find a nice quiet spot behind a bubotuber or something." He raised his hand in a kind of half signal to Luna, indicating that they were leaving. The dreamy blonde would be along eventually . . . sometime this week.

It wasn't until they were halfway across the grounds that Ginny spoke again.

"Thank you."

"For what?"

"Getting me out of there."

"Yeah, well," Neville shrugged, and of all things looked profoundly embarrassed about it, like he'd been caught melting another cauldron in potions. She had the distinct impression that if she thanked him again he'd turn around and run away, or dissolve into the ground. So instead she fell silently in step beside him just enjoying the fact that she was outside, away from the hundreds of people who felt they had a right to know all about her private life.

As they approached the greenhouses, Neville began to pick leaves from the bushes, seemingly at random. Once they reached the door, however, Ginny found that the act hadn't been random at all.

Sorting the leaves out his palm, he quite literally fed them to the door lock one by one, muttering to himself under his breath what she guessed was the correct order. As the lock devoured the last one, the door sprang open.

"Keep to the right. The left side has the more . . . erm aggressive plants." Neville directed, already stripping off his robes and rolling up his shirtsleeves.

Skirting a particularly vicious looking plant that she didn't recognize, Ginny made her way over to sit below what she hoped was a relatively safe one composed entirely of tiny white leaves, looking to her friend for confirmation of her choice. Neville glanced up from slipping on the dragon-hide gloves and apron, and flashed her a quick reassuring smile that said she was fine there. Ginny watched as he headed over to the far left corner to deal with what looked like the meaner cousin of the plant she'd been trying to avoid. A smile still playing at the corners of her mouth, she looked around trying to see this place through Neville's eyes, to see the beauty in a plant that might eat you or kill you. She had never really liked the greenhouse. It was too warm and smelled of dank earth, but right now it was her favorite place in the world because no one was paying the slightest bit of attention to her.

So now she could read Harry's letter in privacy.

Except she didn't.

Ginny had never considered herself a coward. You learned not to fear much when you had six brothers because despite their determination to protect you from anything in the world that did not seem to extend to them—being hung upside from the garret window by Fred so that George could try to catch you on his broom got you over your fear of heights, having Ron dare you to steal Percy's prefect's badge cured you of being scared of both yelling and rule-breaking, and well whatever other fears she had they'd pretty much gotten trumped by her first year at school. Yes, all in all Ginny Weasley felt she had every right to be in Gryffindor.

So why was she terrified of a little piece of paper?

Because for all her bravery she hadn't gotten over being scared for others. She thought of them constantly, what they were doing, what dangers they facing. She thought of Hermione, the closest she'd come to having a real female best-friend prior to Luna. She thought of Ron, her brother, her greatest champion and tormentor in one. She thought of Harry . . .

Merlin, she thought of Harry so much it was amazing she could think of anything else. At eleven, she thought she loved him, imagined romanticized stories of dragons and white knights only to find out they weren't romantic at all, just scary. At fourteen her romantic fantasies had transformed into real feelings that extended beyond simple admiration of an icon. She liked the way he never thought himself quite good enough, but still dared to dream of being the best; liked the way he went through life so intensely, felt everything deeply, and displayed it to all the world; but most of all she had liked the way he had treated Luna and Neville, with respect and understanding because he knew what it was like to separate, apart from the world. That had been the moment when she crossed the line from fantasy to reality when she moved from worshiping Harry Potter the Boy Who Lived to simply loving Harry the boy who couldn't learn to bite his tongue when it would be best for him.

And so now at sixteen, she was discovering that loving someone real could be far more scary than loving a white knight.

She was terrified that if she opened that envelope she'd have to learn they were hungry, or cold, or hurt, or about to go do something noble and stupid. She'd spent so much time working on being bitter and imagining the trio laughing together over butterbeer in some obscure inn without her, spent so much time being angry with him for not taking her along on his grand adventure. She didn't want to open that letter and learn the truth because being angry with Harry was so much easier than being terrified for him.

"You still haven't read it."

She didn't look up, just stared at the pair of scuffed, dirt covered shoes before her and nodded.

"Why not?" Neville squatted down to look at her, and she was forced to turn her head so she wouldn't have to meet his gaze.

"I'm scared."

"Scared?" He repeated the word as a question, his voice conveying how very odd he found it to think of her being scared of anything.

"He hasn't written in so long. What if- What if something's happened and that's why he's writing now? What if Ron's hurt or Hermione's been kidnapped or they've found the last horcrux and they're finally going to face him?"

"Maybe they just finally got to a place where he felt it was safe to write," he reassured her. Picking up the letter from where she had left it on the floor, he brushed off the traces of dirt and stared at it as though he could force it to relinquish its secrets. Defeated by its refusal to do so, he extended the small roll of parchment back to her.

"You read it." The words were out of her mouth before she'd even really formed the thought.

Obviously startled by her request, Neville lost his balance and had to drop one knee to the ground to keep from pitching forward. "I- I don't think . . ."

"Just the first few paragraphs, you know just to get the gist . . ."

To know whether they're okay.

Neville stared at the ground for awhile, weighing the parchment in his hands, and with it all she was asking both said and unsaid. Then he nodded slowly accepting the responsibility. Carefully he unrolled the parchment, smoothing it out against his leg. Then, pressing his lips together in a grimace like he was about to do something distasteful, he lifted the letter and began to scan it, his mouth moving slightly as he muttered the words to himself.

She watched his face avidly, trying to make out the slightest of movements, to zero in on anything that might be the tiniest indication, but none came, his expression was blank, wooden as he read Harry's words. Then he stopped abruptly, a flush coming over his face that could rival her own.

"What?" She whispered fearfully.

"I- I shouldn't be reading this." Thrusting the letter back at her before she could protest, he scrambled up, stumbling a little in his haste.

"Neville! What is it? Are they okay?"

"They're fine. Just fine." His voice had gone hoarse and just the tiniest bit cold.

It took a moment for Ginny to process that this was what Neville Longbottom looked like angry. She didn't think she'd ever seen him like this, not this quiet, tempered anger, like he was running it through a filter, keeping the larger pieces inside. Neville could have gone through his whole life angry, and nobody would ever know.

Dropping her gaze to the paper in her hand she scanned the first few paragraphs, trying to find what had caused him to react like this. Then she saw it, tucked halfway down the page

We slept last night in a barn, a bit mad, huh? Hedwig was right at home. Well, there were stars, like I haven't seen since leaving Hogwarts, hundreds of them in the sky. I could have sat there forever staring at them, and I did for so long that Ron and Hermione went to sleep on me. They had kind of fallen against each other and I just looked at them and thought how much I missed you, missed holding you, touching you. I miss everything about you Gin, your laugh, your hair. I wanted to be with you at that moment, talking with you, kissing you. You would have looked so beautiful in the moonlight. So sometime, when you get a chance, sneak up to the Astronomy Tower and think of me, think of us being together.

"Bastard."

"I'm sorry. I read too far." Neville's voice was still hoarse, tight with anger that she now realize was self-directed.

"Not you. Him," Ginny sighed, suddenly tired as all the fear leaked out of her. If Harry was going to tell her anything important, it would have been in the first few paragraphs.

He turned at that, slowly, tentatively as though expecting her to change her mind at any moment and turn on him. "Why?"

"Well, I mean, there's nothing there is there?" She gestured disgustedly at the letter. "A lot of rot about the stars and my hair--"

"I thought it was pretty."

"But it's not what I want to know. I want to know how they're doing, whether they've found any of the horcruxes. I want to know if he's scared or if he's had any more nightmares. Instead, all I get is he misses me . . ." Her hand tightened on the parchment. "Well if he misses me so much, why didn't he take me with him? Then he wouldn't have to miss me at all."

"He's trying to protect you."

"I don't need protecting." Ginny shot back. "If it was you . . ."

Neville tensed obviously finding the thought more than a little disquieting. Softly he mumbled, "It wouldn't be me."

"But if it was. If you were the one to go out after Voldemort, you'd take me with you wouldn't you?"

Making a great show of being engrossed in tapping the dirt off the toe of his right shoe, he just shrugged. "That's different. I need you."

Ginny faltered, her rant derailed by Neville's simple, guileless admission. Even as her mind was quick to point out that he'd just made her case for her, her heart did a little flip in a way that made it impossible to continue down the road she'd been heading. So instead she replied in the only way she could.

"I'd take you with me, too."

He didn't look up, but she could see the corners of his mouth curve in a shy smile. It meant something, her inclusion of him, to him it meant something and in some dark little corner of her heart she wondered whether it would mean as much to Harry.

"Where are we off to?"

Luna stood in the doorway, bouncing a little on the balls of her feet like she could be packed in the next five minutes if you just said the word.

"Theoretical Voldemort hunt, fifth of November." Neville responded without skipping a beat. He had adapted rather well over the past year to conversing with the dreamy blonde.

"Oh." She sounded rather disappointed. "I have tea that day."

"We'll send our regrets then." Ginny waved her hand airily, "Dear Dark Lord, thank you for your kind invitation for a final stand off, but as the day is bad for our dear friend and as we could not possibly attend without her, we regretfully must decline."

She was aware that there was a certain blasphemy to joking about this, but honestly living with the constant dictated seriousness of these times was oppressive, and somehow Luna gave them all the permission and freedom to be more than a bit absurd.

"Thank you." Luna breathed. Closing the door behind her, she came to sit down across from Ginny. "I came as soon as I heard."

"Heard what?"

"That there was a letter."

Still standing, Neville looked over her head to catch Ginny's eye, and the two shared an amused smile. It had to have been at least half an hour since they had left the great hall.

Oblivious both to their shared amusement and the fact that one of the plants was now playing with a strand of her straggly blonde hair, Luna leaned forward, her face alight with curiosity. "Have you opened it yet?"

"Yes."

"They weren't taken by heliopaths were they?"

Neville had to cough into his hand to cover a snort, and Ginny pressed her lips to keep from laughing. They had almost perfected not being shocked into giggles by Luna's statements, mostly because she was sometimes disturbingly and uncomfortably accurate, but every once in awhile she would catch them completely off guard, and they couldn't help it.

"No," Ginny managed to get out in a strangled gasp between fits of suppressed giggles, "No, no heliopaths."

"Oh, Teddy will be relieved."

Looking over to Neville, Ginny mouthed 'Teddy?' But he just shrugged, apparently just as clueless as her.

"He was very worried when he saw Hedwig come. He was afraid it would be Valkyries, but of course I informed him that would be ridiculous." Then her eyes went wide with what was obviously a very disturbing thought. "They weren't taken by Valkyries, were they?

Ginny just shook her head. She didn't think it was any more ridiculous than Heliopaths, particularly because she was pretty sure Valkyries actually existed, but she held her tongue.

"Luna? Who is Teddy?" Neville asked, looking like he was stealing himself to discover that Teddy was a twelve-foot high manticore that visited only between the hours of seven and seven-thirty in the morning.

Looking up at him like he had just asked whether sparklipunks really existed, Luna responded as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, "Titus. Only he doesn't really look like a Titus, does he? So I call him Teddy."

"Flint!" Neville spluttered, "You call Titus Flint, Teddy?"

It took Ginny a moment to process who they were talking about, but then she suddenly remember the dark-haired Slytherin boy who was built like a tank and had opined that it was a "bloody crime" none of them would ever have a sparklipunk. In truth Ginny thought he looked quite a bit more like a Titus, and she wondered if Marcus Flint's little brother knew that she would now forever equate him with a stuffed animal.

Before she could stop herself, Ginny tacked on a question of her own. "To his face?"

"Well, he won't let me talk to his feet. That would be forward."

"Oh, right."

And that was the end of it. There were times when it was pointless to argue with Luna, and this was one of them, though from the expression on Neville's face he wanted to try. True he had been the one to contact Titus, to bring him into the fold, and display unquestioning trust at their meetings by dueling with him when the others wouldn't, but apparently that trust did not extend as far as Flint allowing Luna to call him Teddy. Ginny made a mental note to try to explain to Luna that she should never tell Neville if she and—Oh Merlin—Teddy, progressed to foot talking.

"So what does it say?"

"Read it yourself." Ginny gestured listlessly to the now much abused missile. In truth, she didn't really care right now if it got tacked up on the Gryffindor notice board, for the entire world to see, just as long as she didn't have to explain it to anyone else or think about it at all.

With a flick of her wand Luna called the roll of parchment over and began to read it far more carefully than either Neville or Ginny, her great eyes moving from word to word and then back to the start at the next line. Like one of those typewingers or whatever it is dad keeps bringing home. As Luna finished the second page, which neither of the others had actually ever gotten to, she sighed longingly.

"Which one of you is keeping her?"

"Keeping who?"

"Hedwig. She'll be ever so angry with him. She thinks the owlery is beneath her."

"Wait- What?"

"He wants you to keep Hedwig, says he can't have her with him anymore."

Ginny closed her eyes. She distinctly did not want to keep Harry's prized pet. She did not want to feed it, or tend it, or even look at it. The last thing she needed was a great, bloody, daily reminder of her absentee love, or whatever the hell he had decided he was.

"Neville?"

"No." The older boy shook his head in that firm way he rarely managed but never backed down from. "I'm not keeping her. Beastly creature hates me."

"Well, I'm not doing it," Ginny grumbled, slumping against the cabinets petulantly. "Great prat didn't even bother to ask, did he?"

It had been meant as a rhetorical question, but Luna was not well acquainted with the concept. Scanning the last few lines of the letter, she looked back up. "No."

"Of course not, Harry decided it was his right to decide, just like everything else."

"Can I keep her?" Luna asked breathlessly, obviously hoping past all hope. "We'll get along fabulously. I speak owlish, you know."

Ginny swallowed a rather biting comment about the majestic bird's reaction to a girl who wore radishes on her ears and nodded. "Sure. I bet she'll be over the moon about it."

"Do you think so? I really would like a moon frog for my collection." Then without even so much as taking a breath she added, "They must be about to go somewhere really dangerous."

The hair-pin turn of thought was so sharp, that Ginny jerked back in an effort to follow it, banging her head against one of the cabinets. "Wha- Why do you say that?"

Neville nudged Luna with the toe of his shoe a little harder that necessary, so that it was almost a kick.

"Shut up," he muttered under his breath.

Coming to a kneel, Ginny reached out and laid a restraining hand on her friend's leg. "No. I want to hear. What makes you say that they're going somewhere really dangerous?"

Luna blinked at her, twice. "Well, he goes everywhere with Hedwig, doesn't he?"

She felt her hand tighten convulsively around the Neville's pant leg, felt him crouch beside her, his hand moving cover hers, but it was all somehow separate, far away.

"He didn't say a word," she whispered in a voice that wasn't her own, "not one damn word."

"He probably didn't want you to worry." Neville murmured.

"Well, he screwed that up rather spectacularly, didn't he? If he didn't want me to worry, he should have taken me with him, instead of leaving me here, where I've got nothing to do but worry. But of course Harry decided I couldn't be risked. Harry decided that if . . ." Suddenly needing to be far away from absolutely everyone, she stood up. "Well, I'll be the one left, won't I? And apparently that was Harry's decision, too."

She had almost made it all the way out of the greenhouse, when Neville's voice called after her, "What about your letter?"

"Burn it."

"Ginny . . ."

She spun on her heel, and in one fluid movement, before either of her friends had a chance to stop her, raised her wand. "Incendio."

She didn't stay to watch it become ashes.

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Thanks to all of you who've made it this far. I'd like to give a special wave to KatieBell70, whose Moondance is one of the frickin greatest Lupin/Tonks fics out there. You reviewed my work! I lived on that for days. Also, thanks to all my PR reviewers who followed me over to the new fandom.

As always, Comments and Criticism are appreciated.

Panache