Gift for: nyladnam04 - How it begins again [1/4]
Title: How it begins again
Gift for: nyladnam04
Author: aperfectsong
Pairing: Harry/Ginny
Rating: PG
Word Count: 12,713
Summary: After the last battle, life at the Burrow goes on. A story in four chapters and four perspectives (Ginny Weasley, Molly Weasley, George Weasley, and Harry Potter)
Author's Notes: Sorry, I couldn't really work your quote in. But I hope it's in there somewhere in spirit. I got in most of your requested items though, so I hope you enjoy the story! Sorry about the length!
To live in this world
you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the times comes to let it go,
to let it go
Mary Oliver, “Blackwater Woods”
Pity you had to see him on a burning day.
Albus Dumbledore
Chapter 1. Lessons in flying
Healing begins on a cold September morning some time after the end of everything. A new beginning after the grand fermata of grief.
But it isn’t anything sudden. In fact, it’s barely a shift. Ginny notices it in pieces. With the windows nudged open and two old patchwork quilts atop her bed, the sensations of warmth and cold are distinct and sharp for the first time in months. She is roused by a birdsong, and with that rousing comes the scent of cinnamon and fig wafting up from the kitchen. It is just the smallest bit easier to pull herself out of bed and step her bare feet down on the groaning floorboards. But that’s how she knows.
Above her, the ceiling creaks. Someone’s awake. George maybe. Or Harry in Bill and Charlie’s old room. But not Ron. He never gets up this early.
Her father and Percy have already gone to work by now, already returned to life, while the rest are still suspended and floating, or drowning maybe, in the pause brought on by the end of the war, so much heavier than the silence that preceded it. The Weasleys, like the rest of the Wizarding World, are torn between celebration and mourning, between promise and the memory of what will always be lost.
In the months since it happened, the long summer, the only September first in modern history where no one has boarded the express train at King’s Cross Station, Ginny has watched the world change through blurred eyes.
It took her-and, she imagines, the rest of them-a long time to get used to this life tinged with his absence. Days to get used to the empty seat at the dinner table, weeks to be able to think of the Diagon Alley apartment filled with his things, months to be able to look at George without seeing him there too, somewhere in the shadows. It was even harder to stop thinking of them as the twins, a single unit of two souls.
For a while, every day brought on some new lack of him.
His boots out by the shed. He would never wear them again. The sweaters embossed with the letter F, one for every year of his life, some of which had found their way to her armoire for sleep clothes years before. The tables he had leaned tired elbows against. The long sofa he had sprawled across when a Quidditch game came over the wireless. Stairs he had climbed, windows he had looked out of, doors he had passed through. The clock hand that bore his name still pointing confusedly on Home. She can’t hide the memory of him sitting in this chair or paging through that book any more than she can unravel the threads of his life from her own, anymore than she can undo his existence altogether.
She thought, for a few days, about going to stay with Bill or Charlie, to be without the reminder of him in every corner and every room. But in her sixteen years raised in the house of the brave, she has learned one thing: that running away doesn’t solve anything.
Luna wrote to her that keeping a journal might help let things out. But Ginny isn’t much of a writer. At least, she hasn’t been since the whole thing with the diary. She learned to be careful and to keep herself close. She hasn’t picked up a quill ready to bare her soul, or even to transcribe anything other than assignments or letters since she was eleven. She can’t bring herself to break that five-year-old resolution, not for fear, but something else she can’t explain.
After fixing her hair into a ponytail, slipping a faded jumper over her nightshirt, and grabbing her wand from the teetering nightstand, Ginny pads down the winding staircase. From the landing, she hears voices in the kitchen.
“No, no, no dear,” her mother is saying, “You are not intruding. You’re part of this family. Don’t think that way.”
Before he speaks, Ginny knows who her mother is talking to.
“Mrs. Weasley-” Harry begins.
“Not another word on the subject.”
His response is too quiet to be heard from the stairs, but she distinctly hears him clear his throat after a minute or so. “Can I at least give you a hand with that?” he asks.
“Of course, dear. You know, I haven’t had any of my little ones home for a harvest season in years. I heard from Hermione that some muggle schools have class only during the day and everyone goes home in the afternoon. How nice that must be,” her mother is saying.
When Ginny slips unnoticed into the kitchen, Harry is sitting at the table manually whisking a bowl of eggs while her mother bustles around the room, bringing ingredients together in a large bowl.
“Morning,” Ginny mumbles and slides into a mismatched chair.
Harry turns reflexively in his seat and smiles at her.
“Oh, Ginny, you’re awake,” her mother says, wiping her hands on her apron and pulling out her wand. “Tea?” she asks, already levitating three cups and the teapot to the kitchen table.
Both Harry and Ginny hold their cups steady as the teapot dances and squirts tea into them in turn. Mrs. Weasley pours the bowl of eggs into a skillet on the stove and charms a spatula to turn and mix them. From the oven, she removes a freshly baked loaf of bread and begins to slice it.
Her mother continues, “It might be the last week for the apple trees. Do you think you and Harry could take care of that after breakfast? Ron stayed up late talking to Hermione on the telephone.” She pronounces the foreign word slowly and carefully. “He probably won’t get out of bed until after noon and I want to have the apple tarts ready for when everyone gets home. Bill and Fleur and Charlie are coming for dinner.”
Then her mother’s voice falls to a whisper. “And George went back to the shop today.”
Ginny looks up at the clock on the wall. Sure enough, George’s hand is settled on Work, along with Bill’s, Charlie’s, Percy’s, and her father’s while the others all point Home.
Different people, even in the same family, handle loss in different ways. Ginny has heard Ron crying, but only in the shower among the half empty bottles of shampoo and musty towels. From her room, she can hear her parents talk and cry together sometimes, if she goes to bed early enough. But it isn’t every night, not anymore. Percy sometimes comes to dinner with misty eyes they all pretend not to notice. But George - he hides it well. And probably casts perfect silencing charms.
“I knew something about this morning felt different,” Ginny says with a slight smile.
Her mother tuts at her and then says, “It is a beautiful day. But I just worry about him. It’ll be his first time back since-”
“He told me he had been looking forward to getting back,” Harry said quietly and unobtrusively. “Help take his mind off things. He wanted to reopen tomorrow.”
“When did he say all that?” Mrs. Weasley asks. “I never heard a thing about it.”
“He hasn’t said anything to me either,” Ginny chimes in. Then she takes a sip of tea and it burns her tongue slightly. A quick swish of her wand brings the temperate down a few degrees.
“Err,” Harry starts. “Last night. While Ron was on the phone, he came up to play Wizard’s Chess. ”
“Needed to hear from his investor, then?” Ginny manages a smile.
Harry’s eyes grow big and he stares into the teacup.
“She’s known for months already. Honestly, you’ve been here long enough now, Harry. Nothing stays secret in this house.”
“Ginny, don’t tease him,” he mother scolds. “Harry, dear, it isn’t my place to tell you what to do with your money.”
“These are Fred and George we’re talking about. They would have found another way if you hadn’t supplied them. It just might have taken a while longer.”
Ginny pretends not to notice when her mother tenses at the mention of him, at the mention of additional time that might have prevented the operation altogether.
Once, she caught her mother and George crying together beside the fireplace. It might have been the night before the funeral, when everything was still so raw and unreal. She saw George’s silent tears, heard her mother’s gasps. She couldn’t hear what they said, if anything. She just saw them from the side, heads curled forward, an expression on their faces that made her feel like nothing would ever be okay again. That none of it would ever stop. That none of them would ever, for even a second, stop missing Fred with everything they had. It was all she could do to make it up to her room before everything spilled out. Her life now (all of their lives, she supposes) is divided into a strict game of before and after. It will be, probably, for the rest of their lives.
Looking at Harry crouched over a bowl of batter, a thought occurs to her. Where was Harry that night? Did he come home with them after the funeral? Everyone else came to stay at the Burrow that first week, to grope through the loss of Fred together. Where else could he have gone? She wonders if he and Ron talked about it or if Harry just listened to him cry from across the room in the middle-of-the-night darkness that seemed to have lasted that first week. He certainly hasn’t gathered up enough courage to comfort her, not that she allows herself to cry anywhere except behind her locked bedroom door. In a family that shares everything, it is strange that she is allowed to hide away in the privacy of grief, that it isn’t another thing she has to share.
Her mother relaxes a moment later, recovered, and places a plate of eggs and a piece of bread in front of both Harry and Ginny. Her mother’s resilience continually surprises her. After losing her two older brothers in the first war, one of her sons and dozens of friends in the second, she is still able to gather together what is left of her family and carry them forward.
“Eat up,” she chides. “Those apples aren’t going to pick themselves.”
---
Outside the leaves have already begun to change. They flitter across the lawn and gather in orange bunches against the side of the house next to the garden spade, watering can, and haphazard pile of Wellington boots.
Ginny leads the way down the beaten garden path, past the mums and Queen Anne’s lace, past the few ripe squashes in the vegetable garden. Some of the hens cluck as she passes by and Ginny waves a hand at them. They fuss louder in response.
“You’ve already eaten,” she tells them, exasperatedly.
Harry gives a snort somewhere over her left shoulder. So close she can feel the warm air of his breath. Still, he doesn’t touch her, and it’s the closest they’ve been in what seems ages.
He has fallen behind by the time she reaches the shed. Inside, her father’s muggle artifacts, a weathered box of Quidditch supplies, the family’s broom collection, and a bin full of worn childhood toys sit covered in dust. The bin must have been excluded when her mother scoured the house for toys to bring Teddy and Andromeda. It’s obvious why: too old or broken, having survived the seven of them already. She stares at it but sees nothing.
A few long, silent moments later, Harry pokes his head into the shed behind her.
She shakes her head, clearing something, and grabs an old Cleansweep Five for herself and Ron’s Cleansweep Eleven for Harry. Her first instinct is to make some joke about the Firebolt having gone the way of George’s left ear, but thinks better of it. It’s still too soon. Not for Harry. But for her. That was the night it all really began. And she can’t think of beginnings without bringing to mind the endings, too, without calling forward a sky full of ghosts.
Harry holds the broom in both hands before handing it back to her. “I’ll take one of the older ones. I don’t want Ron to-”
“We have a Shooting Star that refuses to go left, and an even older Comet that seems scared to be more than two and a half meters up. I took George’s Cleansweep Five to Hogwarts last year and didn’t get a chance to get it, since I didn’t go back after Easter Hols… I don’t know what happened to it. And these old Nimbuses are complete rubbish. No acceleration at all. I’ll use Ron’s if you don’t want to. He’s always mad at me anyway.”
“These aren’t too bad,” Harry says, taking the Cleansweep Five from her. It is engraved at the top with the name Fred Weasley. He glances down at it and sucks in air quickly through his nose. “Would you rather I use Ron’s?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, but her voice shakes.
“Here,” he says, “I’ll use Ron’s.”
Ginny holds Fred’s broom in her arms and stares down at it while Harry, watching her, swallows slowly. “Why do we need the brooms anyway? I thought we were picking applies?”
“To reach the top. If you climb, you can’t reach the far out branches,” she says.
“We can’t use wands?”
“No, not for this. We have to leave the stem on the tree, so next year, it’ll blossom again. Sometimes magic is imperfect. It can’t account for the twist. It would just tear the whole thing off and we have to leave the stem.”
“Leave the stem. Alright,” Harry repeats, still staring at her.
Ginny pulls the shed door closed with a solemn slowness and the two mount their brooms and ascend into the clear sky.
There hasn’t been much of a chance for the two of them to spend time alone, even living, at least temporarily, in the same house.
Harry was Ron’s friend first. From the time Ron turned eleven and went off to school, Ginny suddenly became much younger to him than she had always been before: a tag-a-long rather than the companion she had been growing up. Even though they were older now, even though she had found a friend in Hermione, and at one point a boyfriend in Harry, that little nagging feeling that she was unwanted among the three of them refused to be quelled completely.
She has spent most of the extended holiday from Hogwarts hidden away in her bedroom among her old school books, quills and parchment, and the novels from Hermione she never had the time or inclination to read before. Now, time is something she has too much of. She has kept up her summer correspondence. She has even learned to charm knitting needles to make baby clothes for Teddy. She has spent hours staring out the open window of her bedroom, always at the sky, always with longing for a time she can revisit only in memory.
“Ginny?” Harry calls to her. She’s lagging behind, and not just because he has the faster broom.
“Sorry,” she calls back.
She speeds up and hovers to the side of one of the apple trees. Steadying herself on Fred’s broom, she withdraws her wand from the pocket of her jumper and charms two baskets to float next to them. After replacing the wand, she grasps a shiny red apple, twisting it around on its branch until it snaps free, stemless. Then she drops it into the basket. Harry, on the other side of her, repeats her actions.
Despite the October air, the sun is warm on her scalp and neck. After a few minutes, Ginny has to roll the sleeves of her jumper up to the elbows. A light sheen of sweat covers her forehead. She is maneuvering higher, tilting her body to reach an inside branch when Harry speaks.
“You fly well.”
Her first instinct is to laugh. Two years on the Gryffindor Quidditch team and Harry Potter compliments her flying skills as she stretches to reach a particularly difficult apple. She plucks it and tosses it at him. Of course, he catches it. Smiling, always smiling now. It unnerves her, just the slightest bit. It’s like there’s so much life shining out from inside him, she has to look away or close her eyes. It feels impossible for him to be so happy after losing so much.
Around her, the leaves are all golden and sunrise, and in a few weeks, the lawn will be blanketed with them.
“Not right now,” Harry says, “That’s not how I meant it. I mean, I’ve seen you take Ron’s broom out at night. Bill and Charlie’s window has a nice view of the garden.”
When she gives no response, only arches her body further into the branches, he continues, “I don’t think he knows. Too busy with Hermione’s letters.”
At this, she smiles and picks another apple. Then she switches to the other tree. Harry follows.
“Odd to be home for harvest season,” Ginny says after a few more minutes, and places a bright green apple into her basket. If not for the charm on basket, the apples would have already overflowed. “I haven’t been out in the orchard this time of year since I started at Hogwarts. I’ve really missed it.”
“Hogwarts in autumn is beautiful, too,” he says. “But this is nice. Peaceful.”
“It never used to be. Not with all seven of us running around.”
She smiles at a memory that cannot possibly belong to her, probably something forever preserved in a photograph: the slight wind rustling through the branches, Fred and George chasing Percy around the big tree while Bill and Charlie rose above them on broomstick. Ron, still pudgy and baby faced, pushing handfuls of crumpled leaves toward their father. Ginny, a few weeks old, sleeps in her mother’s arms. Even Errol, not so gray, is perched on a low-lying limb. It must have been right after Voldemort’s first downfall. She sees the war in her mother’s eyes - a mixture of pain and relief. She wonders what happened to the picture, if it’s still lying around somewhere in the house. She begins thinking through dresser drawers and the box of old photo frames, broken when they twins tried to play Quidditch in the sitting room.
“Gin,” Harry says and distracts her from her reverie. “Are you all right?”
She feels the moment slip away. She looks up, startled, and responds, “I’m fine,” before she realizes even Harry Potter, the thickest-headed boy who ever lived, can see through it-he can see right through her.
“I just…” he starts. Then he adjusts his glasses and tries again. “I’ve been here for a few months and I thought we’d have a proper chance to talk. George says you don’t talk much to anyone about… what happened… or really anything bothering you, not since your first year. But, I thought…” He pauses. “I guess I just thought you would talk to me.”
“Harry, really, I’m fine.”
He inhales for a long time.
“No you aren’t. You aren’t fine, Ginny. How could you be? Fred’s… Fred’s gone.”
At this, she starts to cry, but hides it, turning away from him. She breathes slowly through her nose and blinks away the warm tears. She cannot cry in front of Harry. A little voice inside her keeps repeating it. Do not cry in front of Harry.
“You’re punishing yourself for it. There was nothing anyone could do. It happened so fast. Suffering for his sake isn’t going to bring him back.”
At this, she whirls on him, so quickly she nearly upsets the basket of apples. Her face is red and glowing as she says in the harshest way she knows how, “You don’t understand! He was my brother. He was one of us. Fred. Fred.” By the end of the phrase, her voice has fallen to a whisper and tears are once again rolling down her cheeks.
And Harry is by her side. He touches her shoulder tentatively, but she hides her face from him, even though she can’t hide the sounds caught in her throat. “You don’t understand,” she manages, though it comes out a cross between a sob and a cough. She wipes her eyes and nose on her sleeves.
“You’re right. I can’t understand, but I know it feels like you have to keep remembering them, every moment, and it has to hurt because they can’t, because this is all they have left-you remembering them. So you can’t let yourself be happy. You can’t let yourself move on from that moment because they never will.”
“Stop it!”
“Listen to me, Ginny. Please, listen to me. I saw my parents that night. And Remus, Sirius and Dumbledore, too. I felt it, how they feel. And it doesn’t hurt.”
She is sobbing in earnest now, in a way she never thought herself capable of. Harry is at her side, lowering them both to the ground, holding her to him. The dry leaves crunch beneath the weight of their bodies. He is solid and warm and soft and smells like she remembers, a scent she can’t exactly place, but that reminds her of sweat and soap and autumn.
“It’s warm and light, and it’s peaceful. It fills them. There is no pain and no sadness. It’s all warmth and light. All of it. He doesn’t need you to hurt for him.”
Around them the wind plucks orange and red leaves from branches, carries them up in a spiral motion before cradling them back down to the earth. Ginny, through tears, sees the leaves in a swirl of autumn colors, then, slowly, turning towards him, focuses on Harry’s green irises, bright in the light of the morning sun.
continue to part 2
Gift for: nyladnam04
Author: aperfectsong
Pairing: Harry/Ginny
Rating: PG
Word Count: 12,713
Summary: After the last battle, life at the Burrow goes on. A story in four chapters and four perspectives (Ginny Weasley, Molly Weasley, George Weasley, and Harry Potter)
Author's Notes: Sorry, I couldn't really work your quote in. But I hope it's in there somewhere in spirit. I got in most of your requested items though, so I hope you enjoy the story! Sorry about the length!
To live in this world
you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the times comes to let it go,
to let it go
Mary Oliver, “Blackwater Woods”
Pity you had to see him on a burning day.
Albus Dumbledore
Chapter 1. Lessons in flying
Healing begins on a cold September morning some time after the end of everything. A new beginning after the grand fermata of grief.
But it isn’t anything sudden. In fact, it’s barely a shift. Ginny notices it in pieces. With the windows nudged open and two old patchwork quilts atop her bed, the sensations of warmth and cold are distinct and sharp for the first time in months. She is roused by a birdsong, and with that rousing comes the scent of cinnamon and fig wafting up from the kitchen. It is just the smallest bit easier to pull herself out of bed and step her bare feet down on the groaning floorboards. But that’s how she knows.
Above her, the ceiling creaks. Someone’s awake. George maybe. Or Harry in Bill and Charlie’s old room. But not Ron. He never gets up this early.
Her father and Percy have already gone to work by now, already returned to life, while the rest are still suspended and floating, or drowning maybe, in the pause brought on by the end of the war, so much heavier than the silence that preceded it. The Weasleys, like the rest of the Wizarding World, are torn between celebration and mourning, between promise and the memory of what will always be lost.
In the months since it happened, the long summer, the only September first in modern history where no one has boarded the express train at King’s Cross Station, Ginny has watched the world change through blurred eyes.
It took her-and, she imagines, the rest of them-a long time to get used to this life tinged with his absence. Days to get used to the empty seat at the dinner table, weeks to be able to think of the Diagon Alley apartment filled with his things, months to be able to look at George without seeing him there too, somewhere in the shadows. It was even harder to stop thinking of them as the twins, a single unit of two souls.
For a while, every day brought on some new lack of him.
His boots out by the shed. He would never wear them again. The sweaters embossed with the letter F, one for every year of his life, some of which had found their way to her armoire for sleep clothes years before. The tables he had leaned tired elbows against. The long sofa he had sprawled across when a Quidditch game came over the wireless. Stairs he had climbed, windows he had looked out of, doors he had passed through. The clock hand that bore his name still pointing confusedly on Home. She can’t hide the memory of him sitting in this chair or paging through that book any more than she can unravel the threads of his life from her own, anymore than she can undo his existence altogether.
She thought, for a few days, about going to stay with Bill or Charlie, to be without the reminder of him in every corner and every room. But in her sixteen years raised in the house of the brave, she has learned one thing: that running away doesn’t solve anything.
Luna wrote to her that keeping a journal might help let things out. But Ginny isn’t much of a writer. At least, she hasn’t been since the whole thing with the diary. She learned to be careful and to keep herself close. She hasn’t picked up a quill ready to bare her soul, or even to transcribe anything other than assignments or letters since she was eleven. She can’t bring herself to break that five-year-old resolution, not for fear, but something else she can’t explain.
After fixing her hair into a ponytail, slipping a faded jumper over her nightshirt, and grabbing her wand from the teetering nightstand, Ginny pads down the winding staircase. From the landing, she hears voices in the kitchen.
“No, no, no dear,” her mother is saying, “You are not intruding. You’re part of this family. Don’t think that way.”
Before he speaks, Ginny knows who her mother is talking to.
“Mrs. Weasley-” Harry begins.
“Not another word on the subject.”
His response is too quiet to be heard from the stairs, but she distinctly hears him clear his throat after a minute or so. “Can I at least give you a hand with that?” he asks.
“Of course, dear. You know, I haven’t had any of my little ones home for a harvest season in years. I heard from Hermione that some muggle schools have class only during the day and everyone goes home in the afternoon. How nice that must be,” her mother is saying.
When Ginny slips unnoticed into the kitchen, Harry is sitting at the table manually whisking a bowl of eggs while her mother bustles around the room, bringing ingredients together in a large bowl.
“Morning,” Ginny mumbles and slides into a mismatched chair.
Harry turns reflexively in his seat and smiles at her.
“Oh, Ginny, you’re awake,” her mother says, wiping her hands on her apron and pulling out her wand. “Tea?” she asks, already levitating three cups and the teapot to the kitchen table.
Both Harry and Ginny hold their cups steady as the teapot dances and squirts tea into them in turn. Mrs. Weasley pours the bowl of eggs into a skillet on the stove and charms a spatula to turn and mix them. From the oven, she removes a freshly baked loaf of bread and begins to slice it.
Her mother continues, “It might be the last week for the apple trees. Do you think you and Harry could take care of that after breakfast? Ron stayed up late talking to Hermione on the telephone.” She pronounces the foreign word slowly and carefully. “He probably won’t get out of bed until after noon and I want to have the apple tarts ready for when everyone gets home. Bill and Fleur and Charlie are coming for dinner.”
Then her mother’s voice falls to a whisper. “And George went back to the shop today.”
Ginny looks up at the clock on the wall. Sure enough, George’s hand is settled on Work, along with Bill’s, Charlie’s, Percy’s, and her father’s while the others all point Home.
Different people, even in the same family, handle loss in different ways. Ginny has heard Ron crying, but only in the shower among the half empty bottles of shampoo and musty towels. From her room, she can hear her parents talk and cry together sometimes, if she goes to bed early enough. But it isn’t every night, not anymore. Percy sometimes comes to dinner with misty eyes they all pretend not to notice. But George - he hides it well. And probably casts perfect silencing charms.
“I knew something about this morning felt different,” Ginny says with a slight smile.
Her mother tuts at her and then says, “It is a beautiful day. But I just worry about him. It’ll be his first time back since-”
“He told me he had been looking forward to getting back,” Harry said quietly and unobtrusively. “Help take his mind off things. He wanted to reopen tomorrow.”
“When did he say all that?” Mrs. Weasley asks. “I never heard a thing about it.”
“He hasn’t said anything to me either,” Ginny chimes in. Then she takes a sip of tea and it burns her tongue slightly. A quick swish of her wand brings the temperate down a few degrees.
“Err,” Harry starts. “Last night. While Ron was on the phone, he came up to play Wizard’s Chess. ”
“Needed to hear from his investor, then?” Ginny manages a smile.
Harry’s eyes grow big and he stares into the teacup.
“She’s known for months already. Honestly, you’ve been here long enough now, Harry. Nothing stays secret in this house.”
“Ginny, don’t tease him,” he mother scolds. “Harry, dear, it isn’t my place to tell you what to do with your money.”
“These are Fred and George we’re talking about. They would have found another way if you hadn’t supplied them. It just might have taken a while longer.”
Ginny pretends not to notice when her mother tenses at the mention of him, at the mention of additional time that might have prevented the operation altogether.
Once, she caught her mother and George crying together beside the fireplace. It might have been the night before the funeral, when everything was still so raw and unreal. She saw George’s silent tears, heard her mother’s gasps. She couldn’t hear what they said, if anything. She just saw them from the side, heads curled forward, an expression on their faces that made her feel like nothing would ever be okay again. That none of it would ever stop. That none of them would ever, for even a second, stop missing Fred with everything they had. It was all she could do to make it up to her room before everything spilled out. Her life now (all of their lives, she supposes) is divided into a strict game of before and after. It will be, probably, for the rest of their lives.
Looking at Harry crouched over a bowl of batter, a thought occurs to her. Where was Harry that night? Did he come home with them after the funeral? Everyone else came to stay at the Burrow that first week, to grope through the loss of Fred together. Where else could he have gone? She wonders if he and Ron talked about it or if Harry just listened to him cry from across the room in the middle-of-the-night darkness that seemed to have lasted that first week. He certainly hasn’t gathered up enough courage to comfort her, not that she allows herself to cry anywhere except behind her locked bedroom door. In a family that shares everything, it is strange that she is allowed to hide away in the privacy of grief, that it isn’t another thing she has to share.
Her mother relaxes a moment later, recovered, and places a plate of eggs and a piece of bread in front of both Harry and Ginny. Her mother’s resilience continually surprises her. After losing her two older brothers in the first war, one of her sons and dozens of friends in the second, she is still able to gather together what is left of her family and carry them forward.
“Eat up,” she chides. “Those apples aren’t going to pick themselves.”
---
Outside the leaves have already begun to change. They flitter across the lawn and gather in orange bunches against the side of the house next to the garden spade, watering can, and haphazard pile of Wellington boots.
Ginny leads the way down the beaten garden path, past the mums and Queen Anne’s lace, past the few ripe squashes in the vegetable garden. Some of the hens cluck as she passes by and Ginny waves a hand at them. They fuss louder in response.
“You’ve already eaten,” she tells them, exasperatedly.
Harry gives a snort somewhere over her left shoulder. So close she can feel the warm air of his breath. Still, he doesn’t touch her, and it’s the closest they’ve been in what seems ages.
He has fallen behind by the time she reaches the shed. Inside, her father’s muggle artifacts, a weathered box of Quidditch supplies, the family’s broom collection, and a bin full of worn childhood toys sit covered in dust. The bin must have been excluded when her mother scoured the house for toys to bring Teddy and Andromeda. It’s obvious why: too old or broken, having survived the seven of them already. She stares at it but sees nothing.
A few long, silent moments later, Harry pokes his head into the shed behind her.
She shakes her head, clearing something, and grabs an old Cleansweep Five for herself and Ron’s Cleansweep Eleven for Harry. Her first instinct is to make some joke about the Firebolt having gone the way of George’s left ear, but thinks better of it. It’s still too soon. Not for Harry. But for her. That was the night it all really began. And she can’t think of beginnings without bringing to mind the endings, too, without calling forward a sky full of ghosts.
Harry holds the broom in both hands before handing it back to her. “I’ll take one of the older ones. I don’t want Ron to-”
“We have a Shooting Star that refuses to go left, and an even older Comet that seems scared to be more than two and a half meters up. I took George’s Cleansweep Five to Hogwarts last year and didn’t get a chance to get it, since I didn’t go back after Easter Hols… I don’t know what happened to it. And these old Nimbuses are complete rubbish. No acceleration at all. I’ll use Ron’s if you don’t want to. He’s always mad at me anyway.”
“These aren’t too bad,” Harry says, taking the Cleansweep Five from her. It is engraved at the top with the name Fred Weasley. He glances down at it and sucks in air quickly through his nose. “Would you rather I use Ron’s?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, but her voice shakes.
“Here,” he says, “I’ll use Ron’s.”
Ginny holds Fred’s broom in her arms and stares down at it while Harry, watching her, swallows slowly. “Why do we need the brooms anyway? I thought we were picking applies?”
“To reach the top. If you climb, you can’t reach the far out branches,” she says.
“We can’t use wands?”
“No, not for this. We have to leave the stem on the tree, so next year, it’ll blossom again. Sometimes magic is imperfect. It can’t account for the twist. It would just tear the whole thing off and we have to leave the stem.”
“Leave the stem. Alright,” Harry repeats, still staring at her.
Ginny pulls the shed door closed with a solemn slowness and the two mount their brooms and ascend into the clear sky.
There hasn’t been much of a chance for the two of them to spend time alone, even living, at least temporarily, in the same house.
Harry was Ron’s friend first. From the time Ron turned eleven and went off to school, Ginny suddenly became much younger to him than she had always been before: a tag-a-long rather than the companion she had been growing up. Even though they were older now, even though she had found a friend in Hermione, and at one point a boyfriend in Harry, that little nagging feeling that she was unwanted among the three of them refused to be quelled completely.
She has spent most of the extended holiday from Hogwarts hidden away in her bedroom among her old school books, quills and parchment, and the novels from Hermione she never had the time or inclination to read before. Now, time is something she has too much of. She has kept up her summer correspondence. She has even learned to charm knitting needles to make baby clothes for Teddy. She has spent hours staring out the open window of her bedroom, always at the sky, always with longing for a time she can revisit only in memory.
“Ginny?” Harry calls to her. She’s lagging behind, and not just because he has the faster broom.
“Sorry,” she calls back.
She speeds up and hovers to the side of one of the apple trees. Steadying herself on Fred’s broom, she withdraws her wand from the pocket of her jumper and charms two baskets to float next to them. After replacing the wand, she grasps a shiny red apple, twisting it around on its branch until it snaps free, stemless. Then she drops it into the basket. Harry, on the other side of her, repeats her actions.
Despite the October air, the sun is warm on her scalp and neck. After a few minutes, Ginny has to roll the sleeves of her jumper up to the elbows. A light sheen of sweat covers her forehead. She is maneuvering higher, tilting her body to reach an inside branch when Harry speaks.
“You fly well.”
Her first instinct is to laugh. Two years on the Gryffindor Quidditch team and Harry Potter compliments her flying skills as she stretches to reach a particularly difficult apple. She plucks it and tosses it at him. Of course, he catches it. Smiling, always smiling now. It unnerves her, just the slightest bit. It’s like there’s so much life shining out from inside him, she has to look away or close her eyes. It feels impossible for him to be so happy after losing so much.
Around her, the leaves are all golden and sunrise, and in a few weeks, the lawn will be blanketed with them.
“Not right now,” Harry says, “That’s not how I meant it. I mean, I’ve seen you take Ron’s broom out at night. Bill and Charlie’s window has a nice view of the garden.”
When she gives no response, only arches her body further into the branches, he continues, “I don’t think he knows. Too busy with Hermione’s letters.”
At this, she smiles and picks another apple. Then she switches to the other tree. Harry follows.
“Odd to be home for harvest season,” Ginny says after a few more minutes, and places a bright green apple into her basket. If not for the charm on basket, the apples would have already overflowed. “I haven’t been out in the orchard this time of year since I started at Hogwarts. I’ve really missed it.”
“Hogwarts in autumn is beautiful, too,” he says. “But this is nice. Peaceful.”
“It never used to be. Not with all seven of us running around.”
She smiles at a memory that cannot possibly belong to her, probably something forever preserved in a photograph: the slight wind rustling through the branches, Fred and George chasing Percy around the big tree while Bill and Charlie rose above them on broomstick. Ron, still pudgy and baby faced, pushing handfuls of crumpled leaves toward their father. Ginny, a few weeks old, sleeps in her mother’s arms. Even Errol, not so gray, is perched on a low-lying limb. It must have been right after Voldemort’s first downfall. She sees the war in her mother’s eyes - a mixture of pain and relief. She wonders what happened to the picture, if it’s still lying around somewhere in the house. She begins thinking through dresser drawers and the box of old photo frames, broken when they twins tried to play Quidditch in the sitting room.
“Gin,” Harry says and distracts her from her reverie. “Are you all right?”
She feels the moment slip away. She looks up, startled, and responds, “I’m fine,” before she realizes even Harry Potter, the thickest-headed boy who ever lived, can see through it-he can see right through her.
“I just…” he starts. Then he adjusts his glasses and tries again. “I’ve been here for a few months and I thought we’d have a proper chance to talk. George says you don’t talk much to anyone about… what happened… or really anything bothering you, not since your first year. But, I thought…” He pauses. “I guess I just thought you would talk to me.”
“Harry, really, I’m fine.”
He inhales for a long time.
“No you aren’t. You aren’t fine, Ginny. How could you be? Fred’s… Fred’s gone.”
At this, she starts to cry, but hides it, turning away from him. She breathes slowly through her nose and blinks away the warm tears. She cannot cry in front of Harry. A little voice inside her keeps repeating it. Do not cry in front of Harry.
“You’re punishing yourself for it. There was nothing anyone could do. It happened so fast. Suffering for his sake isn’t going to bring him back.”
At this, she whirls on him, so quickly she nearly upsets the basket of apples. Her face is red and glowing as she says in the harshest way she knows how, “You don’t understand! He was my brother. He was one of us. Fred. Fred.” By the end of the phrase, her voice has fallen to a whisper and tears are once again rolling down her cheeks.
And Harry is by her side. He touches her shoulder tentatively, but she hides her face from him, even though she can’t hide the sounds caught in her throat. “You don’t understand,” she manages, though it comes out a cross between a sob and a cough. She wipes her eyes and nose on her sleeves.
“You’re right. I can’t understand, but I know it feels like you have to keep remembering them, every moment, and it has to hurt because they can’t, because this is all they have left-you remembering them. So you can’t let yourself be happy. You can’t let yourself move on from that moment because they never will.”
“Stop it!”
“Listen to me, Ginny. Please, listen to me. I saw my parents that night. And Remus, Sirius and Dumbledore, too. I felt it, how they feel. And it doesn’t hurt.”
She is sobbing in earnest now, in a way she never thought herself capable of. Harry is at her side, lowering them both to the ground, holding her to him. The dry leaves crunch beneath the weight of their bodies. He is solid and warm and soft and smells like she remembers, a scent she can’t exactly place, but that reminds her of sweat and soap and autumn.
“It’s warm and light, and it’s peaceful. It fills them. There is no pain and no sadness. It’s all warmth and light. All of it. He doesn’t need you to hurt for him.”
Around them the wind plucks orange and red leaves from branches, carries them up in a spiral motion before cradling them back down to the earth. Ginny, through tears, sees the leaves in a swirl of autumn colors, then, slowly, turning towards him, focuses on Harry’s green irises, bright in the light of the morning sun.
continue to part 2