67. Spring
When Ginny was a little girl, on March twenty-first each and every year, her parents would take she and her brothers out for a picnic. It was normally still snowy, or at least grey with rain and chilled, but out they went, bundled up and sat on the damp ground and ate sandwiches and crackers and apple juice. She wonders if her parents still go now, all alone in the house for the first day of spring.
Ginny herself still makes a little deal of the day – the end of winter, she thinks, should be noted. Last year she was working, the year before that preparing for her final examinations as an Auror but this year she's heavily pregnant and home alone while Harry teaches. She considers going out for picnic of her own, but she thinks it might be depressing. Besides, she can't imagine walking more than the few steps between couch and kettle today – her feet are swollen and her back's never hurt so much. Dark Wizards Ginny could defeat – but not a kicking baby who appeared to have mistaken her spine for a punching bag.
She thought about calling her brothers, inviting them over and imagined for half a second that perhaps they missed the old ritual too. But she knew they didn't. Percy had distanced himself so much from the family that she barely knew who he was anymore, only waved at him as they passed in the corridors at work – he looked upon their whole shared childhoods as an old story, and a pathetic one at that. Bill and Charlie were, well, older and they loved her but they weren't who she thought of when she meant family – they had always been more like uncles than brothers. Ron was busy with a family of his own, she briefly indulged the vision of her nieces and nephew out for a picnic of their own, but knew Ron had shrugged off anything that seemed 'pure-blooded' years ago – family traditions included. Fred and George were busy too, with their business, the contracting for the Ministry as well as the joke shop – too busy for much else, truth to be told.
Ginny considered going to fetch Harry for at least a lunch out, or a promise to be home before dinner. But she knew he would just say no – it was Wednesday, and he tutored on Wednesdays, which he loved doing and she wouldn't stop him. Hermione would love to see her, she knew that – trapped in Malfoy Manor all of the long winter (it was dark and cold there, and hardly safe to go outside if you were expecting) with only her research and Draco for company, and now a tiny screaming blonde daughter to tend. She was desperate for company most of the time, but Ginny had never warmed up to her best friend's husband, and could not forgive him for the sins of his father. She didn't want to go there.
She laughed to think herself a lonely woman, though. She knew what the rest of the world thought of her, how they imagined her life must be blessed. And it was, in so many ways it was. What was it Percy used to say, when they had gone to Church as children? Grant me health and strength and I'll steal the rest? That was it – and health and strength Ginny had. And a family who loved her beyond compare, a new child on the way and a husband who she still wanted to spend her life with after more than ten years together. She had never in her life had anything to really pray for, save those three terrible years of the war.
But it was funny, she still missed the old ways. She'd grown up in the eleven years between – the safe years, they called them in the history book still being written – book she knew herself to be a prominent character in. Ron would never understand, even, though he couldn't really remember the first reign, and his life was book ended in terror. Hermione should have understood, growing up without even the stories, but she came into a world that exploded – even all these years later, the idea of safety in the wizarding world seemed real to her only in the thick stone walls of the Manor. And Harry, God, her poor Harry, he might never know anything but the Wars so long as he lived. Still wake up with terrors when they were ninety, scared out of his wits like a little boy looking for his mother.
But Ginny had always known better, she had grown up with Voldemort only as a bad bedtime story from a brother who might be slapped later for his troubles. She had been eleven before anything had really happened to her and she still remembered. Remembered picnics with her family where she wasn't constantly checking that everyone was alive, remembered the soft caress of her mother kissing her forehead before she went to sleep without having to think that it could be the last time. She remembered not knowing that 'forever' might as well mean 'until lunchtime'. She lusted after that world in a way she had wanted nothing else.
She laughed to herself again, blaming all of this on the silliness of a pregnant woman. What had happened was done already, and the Wars had most certainly happened – she had scars up and down her body to tell of that – and there was no use crying over spilt milk.
She shook her head and decided that next year she'd be sure Harry had the day off and she'd take him and the baby, James if it were a boy, Molly if it were a girl, out for a picnic, no matter what the weather.