The problem with winter was its color. So. Gray.
Ginny tucked her feet, wrapped in warm wool socks, beneath her. Her head fell gently against the cold glass of the windowpane as she stared out the window. Its chill made a numb spot on her forehead. As far as her eyes could see, it was just overcast skies, slushy three-day old snow, bitter cold.
She missed Ron.
On these cold gray days, without someone to play with indoors, it hit her in new ways. He had ditched her. He had been stuck with her by default for ten years, and the first chance he got to go out into the world and make other friends, he did.
Forgetting about her was unjust, given all the time she had spent making Ron so much cooler than he had originally been born. It was ironic, in a sad way. If it hadn't been for her, Ron wouldn't be nearly fun enough to be friends with Harry Potter.
She sighed and bounced her head a bit against the cold windowpane as her mind emptied.
Her body shivered, the cold spasm forming unbidden in her spine and splitting in opposing directions through her limbs. She winced with the pain. But that wince needled her, forcing her to admit her current sadness wasn't solely about Ron.
Her limbs still ached. With no Christmas to distract her, it was difficult to think about much else.
Ginny shifted. From the windowsill, barely visible from the corneriest corner of her eye, she could spy the broom shed.
It occurred to her, the cold had never bothered her, in the air.
Ginny shifted again, trying to get a better view. The broom shed seemed to beckon. It looked a bit lonely, too, Ginny thought, as she shifted one more time with the aches no potion could quite make go away.
Come outside, the broom shed seemed to say. Come outside and play.
Maybe, a sense of hope beginning to stir within her heart, it wasn't really Ron she missed the most.
Maybe, it was time to get back on the broom?
Ginny hugged her knees into her small, chilled body.
She could, she mused. Her Dad was at work. Her mum was running errands. Ginny was supposed to be studying her basic arithmetic, but arithmetic was so easy after all the time Bill spent with her in the hospital. Not that she told her Mum that. Noooooo. It was far better for her Mum to think it took her hour to grasp a concept than to confess it barely took ten minutes. That meant fifty minutes of free time. Even free time staring bored out the window was better than maths.
Once the tantalizing idea formed, Ginny found she couldn't let it go. Suddenly, the inertia was unbearable. What began as a vague, "maybe she should" snowballed into a "it has to be now."
Sweet Merlin, here she was, no parents, fifty minutes of free time. What was she doing? Why was she still sitting? Plenty enough time to get back on the broom.
Her body felt a bit sick at the idea, her bones pulsing with an increasing ache she hadn't felt in months. But… pfft. Bones, schmones. Go get back on the broom.
Her mind began a chant that would not be silenced, her heart beginning to pound in anticipation.
It was time. Now. Get back on the broom.
Before she had even made the conscious decision to move, Ginny's feet were thudding down the stairs. The opportunity couldn't be wasted, once she realized what she really missed wasn't brothers, but the feeling of flying. A sense of panicked urgency prodded her faster, and faster. Fifty minutes wasn't that long, and after months of rehabilitation and the regrowing of her bones, it was time.
No time like the present? Wasn't it said?
Throwing open the front door, she didn't bother with stealth. Not with such a limited time frame. And perhaps the old spare junker broom in the shed was rubbish, but it was the only broom left at the burrow. Save for the pink training one Charlie had given her for Christmas, but she wouldn't be caught dead on that.
Not until she figured out how to subvert the four-foot hovering limit, at any rate.
With a quick glance to make sure her mother was still, hopefully, safely beyond the Burrow, Ginny sprinted across the overgrown yard to the broom shed. The door was locked, but this? She had to get back on the broom! Bloody hell, this was not the time for subtlety, or stealth.
She shook the handle. It was locked.
Of course it was locked. It was always locked. With another furtive glance toward the house, Ginny considered her options, ever aware of the time crunch. She bit her lip, not really wanting to do what she thought she should do. Certainly, the shed had seen better days and…
Her Less-Than-Best Self, hibernating since Christmas, rolled over and yelled Do it! No time for plans!
Right. Ginny huffed a steadying breath and kicked the door in.
"Owwww," she chanted over and over, as she hopped on one leg, her ankle smarting a bit from the impact. Realizing she had completely obliterated any chance at plausible deniability, Ginny stared at the limply swinging door.
Whatever. Get back on the broom!
The sky rumbled overhead, and with the brief, desperate thought that maybe, just maybe, the wind would pick up and any damage to the shed could be blamed on the storm, she shoved open the door, snatched up the battered spare broom set next to the horrifying pink one, and mounted it.
Her hands suddenly got damp.
Ginny's fingers flexed. She tried to shake off the realization that she had just broken out in a cold sweat. It wasn't a big deal. Damp hands happened with broom handles all the time.
Right? Hadn't the Quidditch World Cup in 1984 been played entirely - entirely! - for seven straight hours in the pouring rain? Leave it to the International Quidditch Federation to decide that southeast Asia had never gotten a chance to host, despite there being a truly reasonable reason for that being that the World Cup coincided with monsoon season. Nonetheless, Ginny coached herself, all fourteen Quidditch players played in the rain in one of the most competitive matches in recent history.
Damp hands. Broom handles. So, yes. Happened all the time.
She flexed her hands again on the broom. Her nails were clean, her hands pale with a splatter of faint freckles that would darken in the summertime. New bones, but same hands. Hands that had flown brooms since she was six.
Hands that began to shake on the handle.
"Back on the broom," she muttered, kicking off.
The broom lurched upright, knocking her feet off the ground as it jerked about six feet into the air. Ginny's stomach rumbled, and she shut her eyes. For the first time, ever, she shut her eyes on the back of a broom because she was sca-.
No. No. She wasn't scared. She was Ginny. But having shut eyes made the queasy feeling in her stomach even worse. She opened them again, the horizon bobbing in the distance.
With a tension in her jaw, Ginny grit her teeth and evened out the balance of the broom. Now parallel with the ground, hovering about six or seven feet up, Ginny's stomach settled a bit, though her hands began to ache. Realizing she was clutching the handle of the broom so tightly her knuckles were white, Ginny consciously tried to relax her fingers, easing into the gentle grip that allowed the maximum maneuverability.
Then, with an unsteady exhale that made little clouds puff in the air, Ginny leaned forward and began to climb.
The horizon blurred a bit, and at first, Ginny thought that maybe the gray clouds had surrendered to their desire to rain. Ginny shivered as she leaned forward a bit more, and the broom began to pick up speed. Her vision blurred, and she was surprised to realize that it wasn't the moisture in the air that was causing the deficit.
Her eyes were leaking.
With the realization, Ginny stiffened. Her eyes were leaking. She was crying?
Her body began to shake.
She gripped the broom handle tighter, and clenched her jaw, dipping lower and beginning to weave back and forth above the ground. She pretended the two nearest trees in the orchard held a hoop and she leaned forward a bit further, her eyes on the goal.
Her stomach lurched as she lifted, then dipped, pretending to dodge an imaginary Bludger.
She tilted to the left, in a classic sloth grip roll when her whole body began to shake in pain.
The muscle memory of the descent, the ache, the crack, the weightless feeling of falling followed by the scream and the sound of the crunch…
The crunch of…
Ginny dove.
Five feet off the ground, she leaped from the broom, rolling on the field one… two… three times.
Then she scrambled to her hands and knees and promptly lost her breakfast.
()()()
()()()
By the time spring rolled in, Ginny no longer cared about letters.
She didn't care about brothers, or magic castles.
Ginny had a mission. One sole mission.
Back on the broom.
In her mission, she couldn't even manage a bit of guilt for all the sneaking around she did. For a couple who were raising Fred and George, Arthur and Molly Weasley were entirely too trusting. There were no locks or alarms on the shed, or the front door, or the broom.
Successfully, every morning before dawn, Ginny crept out of her room, skipped the Creaky Step, tiptoed down two more steps, and then skipped the Even More Creaky Step.
She supposed her parents figured a sane person would have learned her lesson, after breaking her bones…
…and spending too many weeks at St. Mungo's…
… plus the weeks of rehabilitation after that….
Ginny swallowed hard at the thought, willing the emerging queasiness to disappear. Yes, her parents probably thought Ginny would be far too sensible to sneak out in the pre-dawn hours to buck about on a broom.
Again.
And Ginny was grateful, of course, that they thought this.
They hadn't even noticed the broom shed door was no longer on its hinges, and the grass on the left side had died because Ginny had gotten sick so many times in the same spot.
They never knew, because Ginny always made sure she was back in the house before the sun finished breaking over the horizon.
This morning's flight had been particularly difficult. Ginny stood in the dark at the sink, chugging from a bottle of water and then swishing it to clean the foul taste from her mouth.
Then, she braced her hands against the counter, and took one, two, three steady breaths to try to calm her stomach.
It was no use.
She gagged a bit more over the sink, though she had learned several days ago to just not eat before flying. There weren't any contents in her stomach to really expel.
Her heart clenched, as did her knuckles.
It wasn't getting better; it was getting worse. Especially the last nine days.
Nine mornings, back on the broom, and always less than nine minutes in the air before her limbs and stomach rebelled.
The limbs part, she could handle. She could bloody well will her fingers to grip the broom, even when she imagined several of them cracking as they tried to brace her fall. She could will her thighs to tighten around the broom, though they always shook when she got more than seven or eight feet off the ground. She could will her breath to stay steady when she imagined she could hear her collarbone cracking, and the panicked feel of falling, falling, and the sound of leaves crunching and branches snapping as her body hit each one on the way down… down…
But she couldn't stop the nausea.
Her heart was beginning to beat heavier in her chest, as the unthinkable thought that kept threatening to break loose, become real, tried to become solid.
"No, no, no, no, no," Ginny whispered, her stomach still gurgling.
The unthinkable thought poked at her, nudging her, beating at her until she couldn't ignore it anymore.
Nothing she did seemed to change the outcome. Fast, slow, low, high. Right side up, upside down…
It was as if her body knew something about flying on a broom that her brain and heart and soul just couldn't comprehend.
She had tried visualizing the way it used to be… she could do that. She could close her eyes and remember the jubilant feeling of freedom and excellence. The desire to push the limits of not just the broom, but herself and quite literally soar up above the world. She could imagine diving and rolling like Charlie's dragons, up in the air where no one and nothing could stop her.
Except she knew something now. She knew the ground could stop her. Her heart and soul longed for the freedom of the sky, but her body?
Her body remembered the sick cracks it made as it smashed back to the ground and her body would not let her forget it.
Ginny pushed back away from the sink and ran up the stairs to her room, not bothering to be stealthy about the steps. At the first landing, she caught sight of her pale face in the mirror that hung a bit crooked, with the crack up in the corner where Fred had once launched a chess piece from a makeshift catapult he and George had fashioned out of a handful of twigs and Drooble's Best Blowing Gum.
Her face was pale and had that slight greenish-white hue of the recently queasy. Her lips looked like they, too, had lost their color. Even the smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, ever-present whether winter, summer, spring, or autumn, were so pale they were barely visible.
"It's just fear," Ginny growled at her reflection. "I'm brave, I can get over fear."
Her reflection seemed to disagree with her. At some level, Ginny understood that her body was having an unwelcome, unbidden, completely UNWARRANTED reaction to flying.
She loved flying. But her physical reaction was ruining it. It was ruining everything.
Ginny stared at her reflection, somewhat confused because she just didn't recognize the thin, haunted-looking girl staring back at her.
"No," she spoke to the mirror, a sudden, blazing look appearing on her face. "I'm not giving up. I'm going to grow up and become the world's best Quidditch player." She whirled around and stomped up the stairs.
She made it three steps, before she scurried back down and jabbed her finger at the mirror. "And be best friends with Harry Potter," she added fiercely. Then, she stuck her tongue out at herself, and with a whip of her braid, spun around and marched up the stairs.
There wasn't anything to be done for it. She would overcome it. Fear wouldn't get to win.
She just… had to keep getting back on the broom.
But when the weather turned and buds started beading on the orchard trees, Ginny finally stooped to trying the pink training broom, just to prove that she could do something with flying that didn't involve sweating, shaking limbs, nausea and failure.
When she got sick again after less than ten minutes on the pink broom, in a rare tantrum she snapped the bloody pink broom over her knee and pitched the pieces into the broom shed, slamming the rickety door behind her.
She spent a week studying Fred and George's old copy of Miranda Godshawk's Standard Book of Spells vol. 2, until she memorized the motions and concept for "reparo."
Two days later, she swiped her Dad's wand after he had gone to bed. She managed to repair the training broom enough to get it airborne. Forever after, it listed a bit to the left.
By Easter, Ginny could remember how much she had once loved flying.
But she didn't love flying anymore.
Flying had become a war between what her heart craved and what her body would allow. It was defeat and despair and a stubborn losing battle.
She woke up every morning and got back on the broom again, anyway.
()()()
()()()
Summer came, and so did the Hogwarts Express with her brothers.
Life at the Burrow was… almost normal.
To avoid being caught she was up before dawn, which came earlier than it had been during the winter. Despite her early bird status, she was tired.
Still, she had a routine. Wake up. Sneak down the stairs. Go outside. Mount broom. Fly with ever more daring. Dive with ever more verve.
Get sick with ever more fervor.
And every morning, by the time the twins, Ron and Percy were awake, Ginny was sitting at the breakfast table, with a dry piece of toast and a cup of weak tea. If she was a little paler and her hands a bit wobblier on the teacup handle, they didn't notice.
Which was exactly the way she wanted it.
She had meant to hold a grudge against Ron. He had sent a total of three letters the entire school year. He had detailed a Gryffindor-Hufflepuff Quidditch match and in a rare burst of verbosity, he had written a full tale about a life-sized chess game, the Philosopher's Stone and rubbish she didn't really understand.
In retaliation for his lack of writing, upon their arrival back at the Burrow, Ginny thwapped Ron over the head with a copy of the Daily Prophet, called him a lousy stupid prat, and then proceeded to trounce him at Gobstones. She also won her first game of wizard's chess against him the second morning he was back.
Fred and George crowed, awarded fifty points for future Gryffindors and threatened to tell Dumbledore that Ron had been dethroned. Ron demanded a rematch, but Ginny stuck her nose in the air and refused, reminding him that it was unbecoming to be a poor loser.
Also, because she knew she wouldn't win a second time. Since the new year, she had spent most of the time she wasn't puking next to the broom shed pitching Gobstones at Ron's chess pieces. They had protested fairly loudly, but last spring she finally promised them she'd stop, on the condition they had to throw the first match against Ron when he returned home from school.
The white queen - who had been decapitated once by a particularly accurate Gobstone- called a council once her head was repaired. It had taken a few days for Ginny to be able to swipe Dad's wand again and perform the reparo, but it worked much better than it had on the pink broom. Still, despite the fairly decent reattachment of her head, the queen was from that moment forward not a particular fan of decapitation.
In the wee hours of the night she and her council of advisors debated, at length, the moral ramifications of player partisanship.
The black queen refused to entertain the thought until one of the frustrated pawns pitched the offending Gobstone and decapitated her as well. After which point, there was consensus.
They'd do it once, not a second time. But once, Ginny figured, was enough bragging rights for years if she played it off well.
She did, and was able to feign proper modesty, given that Fred and George managed to rub her win in Ron's face perfectly adequately without her help.
Sometimes, rarely, being the little sister was tolerable.
She forgave Ron after that, and everything that summer was back to normal, as if Ron had never left for Hogwarts at all.
Except, of course, for the broom sickness.
Until the moment Harry Potter appeared in their kitchen.
()()()
()()()
Thanks again to ginnyweasley777 and Curse-04 for beta reading.