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“You won’t be going back to school.”
From her silent perch at her window, Ginny looked over to the doorway of her bedroom, meeting her mother’s drawn and blood-shot gaze. In the late winter grey, Molly seemed much too old, much too gray, just as Ginny felt all the time. Her childhood bedroom was too close around her, but the whole house was too big, too empty of those larger-than-life brothers usually dogging her steps.
Ginny curled her fingers around the cuffs of her shirt, long enough to cover the scars upon scars left by the Carrows. “I’m sorry, Mum. I wasn’t listening,” she said quietly, fixing her eyes on the worn wood of her bedroom floor.
Molly stepped into the room, the wood creaking under her. Flour dusted the backs of her hands. “Your father and I won’t be sending you back to Hogwarts at the end of this break,” she said firmly.
Leaning back against the window, Ginny shut her eyes and let the cold frosted glass seep through her clothes. “And you reckon that will keep me out of the war?”
“There’s no point in arguing with us. It’s done,” Molly said wearily.
Ginny’s eyes snapped open, the finality in her mother’s voice cracking through the solid walls she’d managed to keep around her since last summer, when the façade of normalcy shattered for good. “It’s not done,” she said, voice sharp and cutting and old in the flat air. “And I’ve got to go back. It’s just Neville and I, now—“
Molly made a harsh, choked noise deep in her throat, stealing Ginny’s voice out from under her. “What do you reckon you’ve been doing there? Saving the world?”
Fingers itching, all Ginny could do was stare straight ahead. Neville’s scars and Luna’s absence and the Carrows’ curses and Snape’s damning silence and Ron, Hermione, and Harry gone, just like that, it all haunted her and the space around her, filling every crevice of her body with loss.
“You’re trying to get yourself killed Ginny, and you’re all we have left to keep safe,” Molly went on, voice thin and reedy. “And if this is what we need to do, we do it. I will do what it takes to spare you from this.”
The Burrow was too-quiet and solemn around them, enveloping them in a weird, cold spell. Molly watched, waiting, and Ginny swallowed hard on her impulses, curling closer to the window. All she knew now were harsh words and sharp cuttings to the quick, first and last to the tip of her tongue. She pressed her lips together; her mother had enough on her mind, she didn’t need this—
Except there was nothing to be spared from, because it was all around her and cluttering the open spaces of her mind, and it had been like this since she was 11 years old and soft and lonely and always going to sleep with the smell of ink on her fingertips. There was nothing to avoid, nothing to hide from; Ginny had fought in the Department of Mysteries and endured the teachings and punishments of Death Eaters at her own school for months, and she was done trying to spare herself from any of it.
“It’s too late for all this, Mum,” she said finally. “There’s nothing left to save me from.”
Stiffening, Molly smoothed back her hair, her mouth a thin, harsh line. “Your brothers can go off and risk life and limb, but you can’t. And you shouldn’t let their stories overtake your imagination.”
“They’re not stories, they’re real, and it’s not fun for me,” Ginny retorted, an edge curling through her spine. “I’m in the war, I’m fighting it, and keeping me locked up in my room won’t change a bloody thing.”
The house seemed to inhale and still, quiet and haunting. Molly shut her eyes and Ginny lowered hers, a need for blood and vengeance and violence scalding through her.
“I want to fight,” she said after a moment, voice soft but steady. “The way I reckon it, I was one of the first combatants. So I’ve earned that chance.”
Yes, she’d earned it, through her own weakness and designs, through the blind trust of a manipulative imprint on curled bound parchment, and through the guilt that never quit left her alone, eating at her in her darker moments. Those came with more frequency, now.
In moments such as these, she wanted desperately to trade places with Harry, to fight the battle on his behalf. He’d never wanted it, pulled down to the depths through horrible turns of fate, and now—now he was gone, a dark absence, a gaping hole at Hogwarts and at home, just as Ron and Hermione were. And none of it through choice, but necessity.
Those weren’t the words for now. Her mother trembled just faintly, but enough, and Ginny corralled her thoughts, pressing them deep down into cold darkness. The wind whistled softly from outside.
“I’m sorry, Mum,” she said finally. “I feel useless, is all.”
Molly cleared her throat, eyes shining in a way Ginny struggled to ignore. “I understand. But I would rather you feel useless than be lost to me entirely,” she said thickly.
A chill slid down Ginny’s spine, and she looked away, out the window, across the lawn towards the trees.
After another moment, the floor creaked behind her. “Dinner will be ready in an hour. We can talk about it more then, with your father.”
Ginny waited until her bedroom door shut with a soft click before letting out a ragged breath, pressing her forehead to the cold glass panes. She thought of the summer before, of Harry standing awkwardly in the middle of her room in a soft pool of sunlight, of the fire now gone from the House of Gryffindor, of her mother berating Fred and George for some stupid prank or pratfall, of Ron and Hermione testing each other constantly, of Luna and Neville and having something to work for, of Harry, always Harry—
She swallowed down the lump in her throat, fingering her scars lightly, a lingering ache shuddering through her. Her eyes fixed on the clouds, gray and ominous; the weight echoed in her chest like a distant bell, panging and heavy.
*