Ginny Weasley crouched behind a large rock, thwarted by the latest obstacle to Step Two of Ginny Weasley's Ultimate Awesome Life Plan™:
The Burrow's dilapidated broom shed.
She peeked around the rock and glared at it.
It stood steady, absorbing her glare without reaction.
Mocking her.
With a determined huff, Ginny flicked yet another Bernie Bott's Every Flavour Bean at its locked door.
"Go ahead and mock," she muttered. With the unerring aim of the reigning Weasley gobstone champion, she flicked another bean. "You are going to lose."
No Life Plan was worth achieving without effort and cleverness.
Nodding her head in time, she counted to ten and flicked another bean.
And she was rewarded by soft, popping sounds erupting all around the shed.
"Yes!" she hissed, arms shooting into the air in victory.
No Life Plan was worth achieving without effort, cleverness… and minions.
Earning her trusty minions with her own insanely brilliant brilliance- way, way more brilliant brilliance than any of her brothers had ever demonstrated in the whole history of ever ever- Ginny dug out another stale bean from the box and bounced it off the door handle. It pinged against the door before plopping to the ground, where several more garden gnomes popped out of the dirt to leap upon it.
The bean flipped out of their tiny potato hands as they scurried about, trying to trip each other. They fought, wrestled, and pounced as they scrambled for the rare delicacy, digging toward the bean through the hard, packed dirt in front of the shed.
"Almost there," she cooed, aiming another bean a little more to the left. The subsequent flurry of tunnelling gnomes gained her another few inches of hole.
She poked her pigtailed head up above the large rock in the middle of the garden, gauging the depth of the growing ditch. She'd been at this almost a week now, creeping out of the burrow before sunrise to pitch beans at the ever-deepening hole the garden gnomes were digging.
If she couldn't get through the lock on that darned door, she'd bloody well get under it.
A simple Alohomora would have worked, if it had been summer at the Burrow, when swipable wands were plentiful. The Burrow was always so cluttered with people the trace was next to pointless, and the presence of brothers meant plausible deniability.
But now that everyone was gone, if a wand were "misplaced", it would have been obvious who had "moved" it. And Ginny was determined to extend her streak of Not Getting Caught Doing Underage Magic.
Besides, who needed magic when one had minions?
"C'mon, go get it," she muttered, pitching another two beans and ducking back behind the rock as the digging got particularly aggressive. Hard dirt clods went flying through the air as two gnomes tackled each other and a third and fourth chased after it, deepening the hole yet some more.
When the dirt and turf stopped flying, she peered over the rock again. At the sight of the fairly wide hole, Ginny sprang up with giggle of delight. The startled gnomes scattered, smashing into one another and squealing, but Ginny had little thought of their dismay as she reached into the hole to prod its depth and dimension.
Leaning back onto her dusty arms, she could no longer contain the grin she felt splitting her face.
Wide enough? Yes. Deep enough? She could squeeze. With a satisfied wipe of her hands on her trousers, Ginny decided that, quite obviously, she was the brightest witch of her age.
It was perfect. Completely perfect. She was a diabolical genius.
For a moment, Ginny allowed herself to imagine the headline in the Daily Prophet:
Irrepressibly Spunky Redhead Foils Magic Lock without Magic!
So. So. Good.
Allowing herself to indulge for just a tiny moment more, Ginny sighed as she pictured Harry Potter reading the Prophet article extoling her bold cleverness. His eyebrows would raise beneath his dashing I-Defeated-He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named-Lightning-Bolt-Scar, as the-Boy-Who-Lived marveled at this unsinkable girl's exploits, burning with the need to meet this equally extraordinary person and maybe one day marry her and have her babies.
Well, maybe she'd grudgingly have the babies, but he absolutely would volunteer to do all the cooking.
Ginny snickered as she shook her head out of its Harry Potter inspired reverie. She poked at the hole once more with a grimy finger. Her arm managed to stretch a bit further until it slid straight under the door and was… mostly deep enough. Leaping forward onto her knees, she scooped out some more loose dirt, hands nowhere near as efficient as the garden gnomes, but effective enough. Then, she gulped a deep breath as if she were going to submerge herself under water and dove in, shimmying and squeezing her thin frame under the locked broom shed door.
Her head emerged on the other side as she dragged the rest of her now completely filthy body through the hole. The first rays of dawn cast a bit of light through the cracks in the shed, but did little to illuminate the interior, so it took a moment for her eyes to adjust. She swatted a few spiderwebs away from her face as she stood up, trying to dust off her clothes but mostly just filling the room with loose dirt puffs. She coughed a bit and smudged more dirt across her face as her eyes fell on the prize in the corner.
There.
There it was, next to the large shovel that would have been so much more useful outside of the shed.
A mental choir of green-eyed angels burst into song as Ginny tiptoed toward it with the reverence it deserved.
Charlie's. Quidditch. Broom.
She felt a surge of giddiness, like the kind from the initial surge of tarty goodness when she lost patience and just chomped into a sugar quill instead of sucking it.
Only so, so, so, much better.
One of the feeble rays fell on the oiled wood handle and her fingers itched to snatch at it. It wasn't fancy, like a Nimbus, but it was probably the grandest thing to be found at the Burrow. She still couldn't believe Charlie had left it behind.
Though he said it was because an "old Cleansweep wasn't worth much against a dragon," Charlie still left for Romania with a steely-eyed warning that no one should ever touch it.
True to form, Fred and George made a point of slapping its handle whenever they opened the shed, "for luck!"
Ginny understood the impulse.
Her fingers seemed to twitch again and, no longer able to stop herself, she abandoned reverence and snapped the broom up. She felt a zing travel up her arm and gave the handle a smacking kiss for luck. Glancing over her shoulder to make sure no Charlie-shaped apparition had materialized into the shed in order to rob her of her victory, she took a moment to toss the broom from one hand to the other, sighing with delight at the beautiful weight of it.
It was the best broom in the whole family. It was here, and for this moment, it was hers.
Hers! She spun in a circle, her pigtails slapping against her face. Hers hers hers hers.
She would squee in celebration of her own cleverness, if it wouldn't increase her chances of waking her parents and getting her caught.
"Perfect," she sighed, the faintest scent of broom polish filling her head as she hugged the broom close to her chest.
Flying! In just a few minutes she would be back up in the air, like her Quidditch playing brothers at Hogwarts. She snatched a rusty garden pail from the corner and set it upside down next to the back wall. Honestly, the idea that George and Fred and Percy and The-Brother-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named got to go live in a beautiful magic castle while she was stuck here at home for yet another year was flat-out unjust.
Still, she thought, squinting as her gaze searched for the open hole between the back wall and the tin roof of the shed, there was one benefit to being home alone and she was about to free it from its confinement.
She had an Ultimate Awesome Life plan, after all, and a year to execute it. She had to practice.
Because the Plan was this: Go to Hogwarts. Become youngest quidditch house player in a century. Earn universal admiration for her skill. Become best friends with Harry Potter.
Granted, there probably needed to be more to an Ultimate Awesome Life Plan. But step four was a recent addition, and she was…adjusting.
Sort of.
It was just, well, Harry Potter, with his second-hand clothes (like hers), and his Mum-approved manners (even Ginny had to admit they were lovely) and shy smile and eyes the color of the leaves in the orchard after a late spring rain, combined with the fact that he had once saved the entire world with his sheer Galahad-like virtue before he even learned how to walk…
…ugh.
Her stomach felt weird and fluttery. This flutter was new. Harry Potter and the Queasy Rumbles was… new.
And it had sprung to life on a train platform and made her feel giddy (and stupid) and lifted her up to heights not even a broom could reach only to plunge her into the hole of hopelessness a moment later.
She didn't really know what to think about it, because something other than her brain had somehow decided thinking was overrated and it was time to unleash the feelings.
And even if she wanted to talk about the feelings to try to understand them better, she only had her brothers. The only thing that her next-to-useless brain understood was her stupid git brothers could never ever know about Harry Potter and Queasy Rumbles of Feely Feelings.
She'd never hear the end of it.
Not that she could tell them even if she wanted to because brothers never answered letters anyway (which inspired a whole OTHER set of feelings feelings feelings).
And… bleh… the feelings were so exhausting Ginny just needed to escape to the best place to not to think about feelings feelings feelings.
In. The. Air.
Her muddy trainers teetered on the rusty bucket as she reached up, angling the broom juuuuuust so, allowing her to shove it through a broom-sized hole Fred and George once made with a swiped wand and summoning practice. She may have tried out a few words she wasn't allowed to say out loud as the bristles got stuck a few times, but finally it thumped to the ground outside.
She was back through the ditch and in the air faster than she could say "Quidditch."
Ground falling away below, Ginny squeezed her eyes shut and drank in the cold morning air. She wagged the broom upward through the sky and pushed the speed fast enough that her pigtails flew behind her as she climbed.
Nothing was like this. As wonderful as this. Nothing in the whole, wide world.
Freedom.
The light drizzle of rain stung her face a bit, but not even the threat of a soaking could pull her out of the sky this morning.
The air made everything better. Grounded, it was too easy to get lost. She remembered shifting from foot to foot on that stupid train platform, watching the train abandon her to an entire school year without her brothers.
But here? Ginny could see everything. Who she was, where she was going, how she'd get there.
Up here, there was no waiting for a letter from the-Brother-Who-Ran-Out-Of-Ink. There was no confused hurt over the buggy-eyed loony girl in the tower over the hill who hadn't wanted to be friends. No incessant fear she was missing her chance to know the magical boy who woke up all the feelings feelings feelings.
No loneliness. Up here there was skill, and purpose, and wonder, and danger, and fun, and freedom.
She clutched the broom with her knees, arced one arm back, and with a yelp of joy, pretended to throw a quaffle at the horizon.
A wild, glorious, freedom.
She leaned forward, urging the broom faster as it shot across the meadow. Birds pecking at the morning worms on the ground scattered. With a laugh, she chased them, moving higher and higher.
Charlie's broom was much faster than the twins', but it was rougher, bumpier. Ginny shifted her grip to compensate as she let out a huge whoop, diving down before leaning into several barrel rolls above the tall reedy weeds, reaching a hand outward to brush against the seed pods on top. The broom bumped again while she was upside down and with a startled laugh, she twisted, righting herself before climbing higher.
Hair blowing away from her face, Ginny Weasley shut her eyes again. She gulped another breath of damp morning air, the tightness that she had felt in her chest since laying eyes on Harry Potter finally, finally easing.
Flying, she thought as a small smile tilted the corners of her mouth, fixed everything.
She lazily zig-zagged a bit higher… and higher….
But then, as if she had bumped into some kind of invisible ceiling, the broom bucked from under her. Startled, her eyes snapped open as she lurched over the handle and was, through no design of her own, thrust forward.
Seventy-three seconds.
In later days, Ginny would look back at those seventy-three seconds and wonder. Wonder if she could have done anything different to change the outcome.
In later days to come, she would curse herself for being so, so stupid.
Charlie's broom shouldn't have been a bumpier ride than the twins. She should have known from her first kickoff something was wrong.
In later days to come, she would relive every single moment. The panicked decision to lift above the chop of the air. She'd feel the stinging cold of her hands locked around the broom handle in a white-knuckled grip that she couldn't break. In her nightmares, she'd relive the sensation of the broom tail rotating from behind her, then beneath her, and the feeling of having nothing to support her weight.
In later days, she'd remember the broom having a life and will of its own, flinging the once brave girl off as if it were flicking away an insignificant bug. And with that last pitch and buck, the daring and clever girl tried as hard as she could not to scream as her fragile human body plunged through the air to shatter on the earth below.