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"Are you okay?"
Ginny looked up. Ron stood just behind the threshold of her room, a long, lean shadow against the light in the hallway. Ginny straightened and shrugged, holding a sheet in her hands.
"I guess. It's not like I was fighting," she said, and she couldn't quite keep the bitter undercurrent out of her voice. She'd always hated being left behind, especially after Ron had gone too.
Ginny walked up to the door and stopped just behind the threshold — the dividing line. She couldn't remember when Ron had stopped coming into her room. She used to go up to his room all the time, though. When she'd wanted to wheedle him into playing Quidditch with her, or when she'd wanted to watch him tinker or read something, or when she'd had a nightmare and she'd sneaked upstairs and nudged him with urgent whispers until Ron had grumbled and made space for her, still half-asleep.
She didn't — Ginny missed those days. She didn't know when things changed so irrevocably.
Ron's eyes flicked over her face. He glanced down the hallway, but the others were still downstairs, waiting for Ginny and Ron to make beds for everyone on Molly's orders. Their voices were hushed and indistinct, maybe a little slurred after several more glasses of Firewhisky.
"Did Harry ask you?" Ron said, his voice low.
Ginny stared for a moment and then laughed, not sardonic but just tired. "Harry is a little too busy to think about how I'm feeling," she said, her mouth quirked in a humourless smile.
It was... fine. She'd known that.
She just — She thought about her mum bustling anxiously around the house or trying to make forced small talk until she'd just winded down and they'd sat waiting in dead silence, all the hands on the old grandfather clock pointing at mortal peril. Nonsensical, terrible thoughts had kept flitting through Ginny's mind; futile wishes that she could've gone with them, terror that her family wouldn't make it back, half-realised conviction that there should've been a better plan, and brief guilty resentment at Harry, who was the reason her family was in mortal peril in the first place.
It wasn't his fault, but...
Ginny remembered the feeling she'd had when she and Molly realised Ron had missed his portkey, and then her dad and Fred had failed to appear as well; the gut-wrenching fear that something had gone wrong, that they'd been captured or worse, dead. She remembered the look on her mum's face, the deathly pallor of her skin, and she had suddenly thought that her uncles had died fighting Death Eaters.
Harry and Hagrid had been the first to arrive, and something about that had struck Ginny as ironic. Lupin and George had arrived soon afterwards, then Hermione and Kingsley, and Harry had looked at her over her brother's bleeding body, but he hadn't made a single move towards her. Ginny wasn't exactly sure he'd even been thinking of her. She'd thought back to the battle at Hogwarts — at Harry standing next to her over Bill's mangled body, talking emotionlessly about Snape and Malfoy.
Eventually, her dad and Fred had made it back too, but the gut-wrenching fear had got worse with each moment that had passed without a sign of Ron. Ginny remembered thinking, not him, not him, please not him. It'd got so bad that Ginny had grabbed Harry's hand as they'd walked outside to wait — a little touch of comfort that she hadn't been able to help but take, even though Harry had broken their relationship off. Then Ron had been there, unharmed and safe, and Ginny had released a shuddering breath that had gone unheard.
Hermione had immediately flung herself at Ron, hugging him tightly, and Ginny remembered watching him pat her back while murmuring soothingly into her hair, and she'd just — she'd wanted something like that and the pang of longing had hit her so hard that she'd run back inside with the excuse of telling Mum and Dad that Ron was okay.
Ron was watching her now, his expression complicated and pained. His arm twitched as if he was going to hug her, but then he clenched his hand into a fist instead. Ginny thought of the last time they'd hugged, in a bathroom after the battle at Hogwarts, his lips pressed to the top of her head in a not-quite kiss. She wondered, idly, when they'd stopped hugging casually — maybe when she'd pushed Ron away after the Chamber. But he'd been the only one whose touch had made her feel vile, the only one whose comfort she hadn't thought she deserved.
"I..." Ron said, his voice rough. "We should go tell the others the beds are ready."
Ginny looked at him, his features more familiar to her than her own.
"Yeah," she said. "Okay."