A/N: The credit of the Harry Potter plot and characters belongs solely to J.K. Rowling. I own nothing of it but my own words.

It's been a hard few days, but writing always helps.

Foolish: In Defense of Ginny Weasley

When Ginny opened her eyes, she saw an angel. She was stunning, with red hair just like Ginny's and very familiar green eyes and a kind, radiant smile. It was the sort of smile that lit up rooms and very nearly forced you to smile back, it was so contagious. And Ginny spent so long simply staring at the angel that she almost didn't realize where she was.

It was her room, exactly as she'd left it before Hogwarts. There was an empty space where the diary had been the last few weeks of summer.

Tom. The diary.

It hit Ginny like a freight train, that this was not where she should have been. She should have been on the cold, damp floor of the Chamber, watching Tom grow stronger as she grew weaker. She should have been lying in a small puddle of her own tears, in the reflection of which she could see her pale, weak face. She should have been close to death.

She should not have been here, with an angel, feeling safe and warm and healthier than she has all year.

"Where am I?" she ventured to ask the angel, who moved to sit next to Ginny on her bed.

"In a sort of limbo, I suppose, between life and death," explained the angel. She took Ginny's small hand in hers. "Hello, Ginny. I'm Lily. It's all going to be okay."

Ginny's lip quivered; she hated feeling helpless, and yet here she was, scared and unable to do anything. Could she even trust this Lily? She certainly couldn't trust Tom. But there was no one else.

"It's all my fault," she wailed, and Lily wrapped her arms around her. "The chickens and Mrs. Norris and the students and Harry, and I wanted to say something, but I was so scared, and I'm so stupid, and I just — I just —"

"You just wanted someone to talk to, I know," soothed Lily. "Listen to me," she said with solemnity, looking straight into the girl's hazel eyes and speaking each with firmly, "no matter what anyone tells you, you need to know that it was not your fault. You are just as much a victim as anyone else. You were manipulated and possessed and terrified to your bloody core, and you did everything you could. There will be people who will try to blame you and who will try to make you feel like less than you are, Ginny, but you are not foolish or stupid or just some scared, helpless little girl. You are strong."

And when Ginny felt an odd tug, presumably in one of two ways: towards life or death, Lily said something very odd indeed.

"Harry," she almost whispered, "he's happy?"

"Yes" was her simple reply.

Many years later, Ginny would realize who this mysterious angel was and, more importantly, that she had been wrong on one count — she was foolish. Unflinchingly and irrevocably so.

She was foolish enough to have a fangirl obsession over a legend, though many others made the same mistake (read: Romilda Vane). She was foolish enough to trust a diary that responded to her. She was foolish enough to not tell anyone when said diary soon became apparently dangerous. She was foolish enough to join a secret organization and rebel against the Ministry; she even helped name it. She was foolish enough to fall in love with Harry Potter, a boy who literally attracted all manner of treacherous things.

"Foolish," her father said that day in Dumbledore's office.

"Foolish," she said to herself every day thereafter. "Foolish, foolish, foolish."

"Foolish," spat every victim of her renowned Bat Bogey-Hex.

"Foolish," scoffed Phlegm (ahem, Fleur) at her utter un-ladylikeness.

"Foolish," murmured every student in the halls who caught wind of her year one actions.

"Foolish," sneered Severus Snape as he docked yet another twenty points from Gryffindor.

"Foolish," her mum sighed whenever she didn't quite stack up to be the perfect daughter she'd envisioned (i.e., different from her sons).

"Foolish," smiled Harry after the Battle of Hogwarts, in which she was never supposed to fight.

It was her utter foolishness that encouraged Ginny to befriend freak-of-her-year Loony (er, Luna) Lovegood, who turned out to have one of the most beautiful hearts of anyone she'd ever known.

It was her absolute lack of sense that made her such a damn threat on that Quidditch field, in any position she played (she never had a problem with the steep dives).

It was her infectiously incautious manner that lured in bloke after bloke like a moth to a flame (and her unapologetically independent manner that soon repelled them, mostly).

It was her reckless abandon that propelled her repeatedly into the path of Cruciatus curses that final dark year, that kickstarted the D.A. and tried to steal Godric Gryffindor's sword (what a rubbish punishment she got anyway).

Everybody knows about the journey of the Chosen One that year, who was on the run and hunted and searching desperately for a way to save them all, but what about those he left behind? The ones who threw themselves in front of first years who didn't know any better, because better it be them who got tortured. The ones who shamelessly stood up to Snape and the Carrows and took hell for it. The ones who kept up morale that long year, even as they slowly disappeared.

Ginny Weasley was not simply another fangirl, or Ron's annoying little sister, or Michael's or Dean's ex, and certainly not just Harry Potter's girlfriend.

She was strong and courageous and talented and compassionate and unequivocally a Gryffindor. She was bold and confident and clever and, yes, foolish. And for that, she would never apologize.

She was no damsel in distress, and she was no one's sidekick. (Put her on a Quidditch pitch, and she'd kick Harry's ass. Put her in a duel, and she'd hold her own.) She was not helpless, not by a long shot, but she helped those who were because she remembered the feeling. She would never forget it. Dementors made Harry faint, but they made her shake, and they always would, especially after 1998.

She wasn't a glorified hero of the war; that was Harry and Hermione and Ron and, to some extent, Neville, but she was a hero of Hogwarts. She stayed and she fought and she survived. She was sixteen years old and taking Unforgivables on the daily and regretting nothing. She was sixteen years old and holding her dead brother's hand and vowing to mourn later.

When she was eleven years old, she'd poured her soul into a book and, like Pandora's box, unleashed a terrible monster on Hogwarts' populace, and the monster had been her. She'd been foolish enough to trust something with a hidden brain, but as the youngest Weasley, poor and left out, she'd found that she couldn't trust things with obvious brains either. She'd been foolish enough to steal her brothers' brooms, but she'd found, in the suffocating chaos of her home, that the sky was the best place to breathe. She'd been foolish enough to charge into the Department of Mysteries based on the visions of a boy the media had been painting as a lunatic all year, but she'd found, in everything she'd heard and seen, that some things are worth being foolish for. She'd been foolish enough to go into her sixth year with unapologetic disregard for authority and indifference to punishment, but she'd found, with the Unchosen One and the school freak by her side, that sometimes a bit of foolishness is more than warranted; it is necessary. She'd been foolish enough to believe in hope on the worse days, but she'd found, with Tom Riddle's haunting voice still in her head, that hope is much more powerful than anything he had ever known.

So yes, Ginny Weasley was foolish, stupidly, hopelessly so, and (she learned) that's a strength, not a weakness.