Chapter Text
Sometimes Ginny thinks she was never supposed to live past twelve. Now though, a firebird curling around a bushel of dittany, each a vibrant color, she thinks she was always meant to end up here.
Here being the aftermath of a war that started decades ago, that never really ended. A war that Ginny first tasted with ink smeared across her hands and a sinking feeling in her gut. A war that she was drafted in before she knew any spells past lighting up a room.
Children make the best soldiers, at least that’s what everyone acts like.
Dumbledore isn’t a monster, but he isn’t a good man and maybe he didn’t throw her on the front lines but he sure as hell made a path for her. He opened the doors knowing that she was the sort of person to walk through them, knowing that Harry didn’t know how to die without it being for someone else, knowing that Hermione would follow him to hell and beyond, knowing that Ron would be a step behind them watching their backs.
Dumbledore may not have cut their palms, soaked their wands in blood, and bound them to a war but he never looked at them like the children they were. He looked at them like pawns and on her best days Ginny knows that he was wrong, that he was cruel.
On her worst days, she traces her scars, rough raised lines over tense muscles, and she admires him a little. Aches to be able to be that cold and calculating, he never quite mourned them and there is a cavern where her heart should be. A storm battering her ribs, grief swallowing up her lungs.
To look at someone and see nothing but what they could do for you would be a respite from the pain of losing them. She supposes it might make her a monster, or close to. But Ginny stopped caring a while ago.
Ginny hasn’t been young and naive in quite some time. She was once but that never saved her. She grew up in the aftermath of war, the wizarding world still shaking off ash and the smell of burning corpses. She grew up with a mother who held her too tightly and brothers who knew to flinch from bright green and the pop of apparition.
Ginny grew up raised by a soldier first and a mother second, because despite her best attempts Molly Weasley never managed to leave the war behind when she looked at her daughter. Her mother loves her, her mother fears for her and her brothers so greatly that it threatens to tear her to pieces. Her mother wasn’t the best nor was she the worst, she was just war-torn and trying.
Here is a truth: Ginny grew up hearing stories soaked in blood that was quickly cleaned up and locked away. Memories leaking into real life like magic soaks into objects, her mother's terror and her favorite talking mirror, her father's haunted eyes, and the car that he spent his sleepless nights working on.
Charlie’s laughter curled around her shoulders, tucked between him and the wall in his bed because he was her favorite and she was adored. He would wake screaming later, his hands digging into her soft skin as shielded her from the door. Ginny was nearly hidden beneath him, pressed so tightly to him that it hurt.
She could feel him shaking, hear his small whimpers and pleading pressed to her hair. She was four and her first memory was of Charlie’s pain laid bare. Bill was there a minute later, voice low and calm, hands coaxing Charlie to unravel, to release her.
Ginny was rushed off to her own bed to the sounds of her parent's footsteps and the sight of Bill standing protectively over Charlie, a shield from the world like Charlie was to her. She never did tell anyone about the bruises on her arms, the crescent moons pressed neatly into her wrists and covered by her hands when her mother came to check on her.
Ginny was four and she learned that the world was cruel, and she learned that protecting her brothers from anything and everything, including her parents, including themselves, came first.
It was the first time Ginny learned of the - her - first war but it certainly wasn’t the last.
Her mother’s lilting voice when she looked at Fred and George for too long, a wistful sigh of Fabian, a muttered curse Gideon you fool. The way her hands slowed by the moving pictures, two boys shoving each other and cackling madly.
Another picture beside it, this one muggle, this one still, and that made it more fitting. Gideon and Fabian Prewett, tall and grown with muscles and scars and the world on their shoulders. There were no more smiles and laughter, no more lightness and joy, they looked like soldiers, they looked like they knew their death was coming and were standing firm in the face of him.
They were killed alongside a dozen Death Eaters two weeks later and the Prewett family was reduced to Molly Weasley née Prewett.
Her mother's untouched black dress still smelled of old lavender and sage.
It was her father’s hunched shoulders and how he stiffened every time the door rang, how his first question was not how are you but who is it? Who has died now or been captured and strung up or turned sides?
Who am I mourning now? Said a man weighed down by too much grief and pain for his age.
It’s her brothers too despite their few memories of the actual war. It makes her think of muscle memory, a rather muggle word. How they may not remember but their bodies do, their bodies know the fear and the need to be still and quiet, to be nothing so Death passes you over.
She had screamed when she broke her arm falling off a tree she wasn’t supposed to climb. Bill was watching her but his mind had slipped and then the ground was so far away and rapidly approaching. It was summer, the sun was hot and burning, the wind a reassuring touch. It was supposed to be good, until it wasn’t.
It wasn’t a bad break but as far as she was concerned, six and a tad bit too dramatic, it was the worst thing in the world. Ginny had screamed her head off and Bill was there within the second, except he wasn’t there, not really.
She remembers screaming and clutching her arm, the smell of grass and honeysuckle thick in the air. Then she was pressed to the tree, her arm caught between her and Bill whose eyes were a mile away. “Shhh,” He hissed. “You have to be quiet or they’ll find us.”
His fingers had dug into her cheek, a grip bruising tight, but he had thrown himself over her. Bill had blocked her from the view of nearly everything, made the two of them small enough that one could almost miss them against the tree.
Tears had streamed down her cheeks, must have wet his hand, but all Bill did was look around. His eyes darted madly, every choked whimper made him tense more and more. He wrapped himself even closer around her, as if somehow that would save them both.
Their mother had found them and her face had gone pale white, their father a foot behind her. Ginny’s arm was fixed within the day and the pain was nearly forgotten, but Bill and his madness were not.
She didn’t get it then, so to her greatest shame Ginny had flinched from him when he finally came inside from their father’s workshop. He had gone still at the site of her, her arm no longer twisted, her face splotched and tear-soaked. Bill was always the protector, he was who she wanted to be.
Ginny copied him when a boy said that Fred and George were idiots who clearly gained nothing from their uncles. Hurt had flickered across their faces so Ginny kicked him between his legs and smiled in his pain-twisted face.
Ginny always looked up to Bill but she was six and tired and she flinched away from her brother. He couldn’t look her in the eye for weeks. He wouldn’t be in the same room as her until she dragged him to her room and demanded he finish the chapter book they were on.
They moved past it but neither of them ever forgot, and with the years Ginny wondered who he was protecting. If Bill, too damn young and terrified, had held Charlie in his arms and rocked him back and forth, begging in whispers for him to quiet. If there had been another child with most likely dead parents that he had looked after.
She wondered who Bill had seen when he looked at her that day, if it mattered at all.
Here is a truth: Ginny wasn’t born into a war.
Here is a truth: Ginny was born to soldiers who had war in their aching bones. Ginny was born to a country that was still burning, still scarred and blood-soaked.
Here is a truth: Ginny wasn’t born into The War, she was born into peace but that doesn’t mean she didn’t know war.
Here is a truth: Ginny Weasley has always known war’s bitter taste. She knew it long before she became a soldier and so when the time came, Ginny held her head high even as she walked towards Death. Let them kill me, she would think, let them kill me before they break me as they have broken my family.
When she is fifteen, and she is supposed to be complaining about teachers and boys and thinking about how Padma Patil is rather pretty but so is Harry Potter. When Ginny is fifteen she marches to war for the first boy she loves, already a good soldier. She fights in the Department of Mysteries, surrounded by falling glass and prophecies shattering.
Futures and pasts gone in an instant, just like her if she misses a step, a beat. There are Death Eaters, and fear wraps around her heart, fear makes her get to her feet and run when she can’t stand. There are monsters but they’re people and they want her dead. Ginny Weasley is fifteen but she won’t die here, she can’t.
So she fights, curses and hex’s whirl around her and the world spins. She’s back to back with Luna, then there’s an explosion and all of a sudden Neville is yanking her back and throwing a hex at a nameless man in a mask. They fight, blood dripping down his temple and her left wrist at an odd angle, for what seems like hours although it can’t have been.
They fight until they can’t, until Neville is gone and there’s a wand at her throat, pressed against her veins. Death is at her side, in the corner of her eyes and she can feel his harsh breath. She doesn’t allow herself to shake, she faced Tom Riddle, Voldemort when she was ten and it took him a year to shatter her.
These fools do not get to break her in an hour, they can’t.
Ginny Weasley isn’t an optimist, she never has been. She might die there, likely will if no one comes and Harry, brave beautiful Harry with messy hair she’d love to run her fingers through, Harry will bend for them because he doesn’t know how not to. Ginny might die there, but she won’t die alone, nor will she die afraid.
They do not get to see her weak, she won’t let them.
She steels herself, bares her teeth, and spits blood onto a cruel face even as his hand tightens around her wrist. Bill was gentle, her arm trapped between them but even in his delusion, it remained uncrushed. The Death Eater does not afford her the same mercy, he yanks hard and pain burns up her arm.
Ginny smiles, a little feral, a little mad and people forget that Molly Prewett walked into a valley, walked into an ambush of six Death Eaters. She walked out, they didn’t. And Ginny is her soldier-mother’s daughter.
They scream the same, they bleed the same and she never did get her father’s gentleness.
Lucius Malfoy is demanding something. She feels a flicker of joy at his messed up hair, the red matted side, the bags under his eyes. Malfoy is demanding something and Harry’s eyes are darting around the room, they meet for a moment and he is sixteen and she is fifteen but neither of them are children. Not really.
They meet and she shakes her head even as it pulls at the hand in her hair. Don’t give in, don’t let him win she hopes her eyes say. Harry nods but she can see it even then, the apology in his eyes.
Later, much later, she’ll realize this was the first time they saw each other, truly and utterly. Ginny would tear herself to shreds, rip out her heart with blood-stained hands and bared teeth, if it meant she’d take down her enemies with her. And Harry, Harry would throw himself on a blade for them. Harry would die for them every time. Harry can’t imagine the cruelty she relishes in.
Harry is good and that is one of the few precious things that not even she can bear to ruin.
It’s why she loved him and why she and him never worked out. Ginny borders on monstrous with a smile and Harry is good. She’ll end this war by any means, and while it kills her, people like him will be left standing. People like him make a life in the ruins, they are why she fights.
But in that moment Ginny isn’t naive, she just hasn’t learned the unique cruelty of the world yet. She and Harry meet eyes and she already knows he’ll give them the prophecy, it burns, it aches. She almost wants to fight, to throw herself at anyone just to stop this from happening. She nearly does but the Order comes in the nick of time, as they always do.
The Order comes and it’s a fight once more. Her blood rushes and there is a terrible laughter pulling at her lips even as her body screams. It’s ironic and terribly fitting that Ginny has never felt quite as alive as she did then.
Ginny fights, they all do. Hermione throws a spell over her head and Ginny breaks a Death Eater’s legs from his spot behind her. Ron, burns wrapped around his arms and a snarl on his lips, pulls her back and out of the way of fire. She loses track of him in the next minute.
Ginny fights, Luna spins past her, blonde hair whirling and a small smile on her face. Luna doesn’t ache for the fight, but she does flourish in it. Tonks throws a compliment at her and Kingsley wraps a shield around her. Ginny fights and fights and is terribly, desperately alive. Until -
Until the world ends and everything stops. It’s sudden, as Death often as, and quiet. She’s fighting one moment and then there is a scream, except it’s not really a scream, it’s a gaping wound, it is grief brought to life. It is devastation, and it belongs to Harry.
There is no body but tears carve down Remus Lupin’s face, they trickle over the dust and scars, and Harry is fighting in his grasp. He’s reaching for the veil and Ginny doesn’t need a body to know that Sirius Black is dead. Harry’s face says it all, it’s her mother's face when she has her bad days and can’t look into Fred and George’s eyes, it’s her father's face when she found the old pile of photographs, each one a long-dead ghost.
It’s pure, destroying, world-ending grief. Harry Potter is good, and he loves with everything he has. Ginny knows then, as sharply as she knows that her mother is a soldier, that Harry will not survive this war whole. That his grief, that the love he has for all of them, will ruin him, will consume him.
Harry Potter is good and it will be the death of him.
That night as she stares blankly into the mirror, blood on her face alongside ash and dirt, Ginny notices that her hands don’t shake. Not like they did the summer after her first year when even Fred and George backed off of her, when she always woke up screaming.
Ginny has grown up, grown into being a soldier and her hands don’t shake as she washes away the blood. It’s not funny, not really but she breaks down laughing. Her shoulders shake and she tosses back her head, red hair falling down her back and an hour ago a hand wrapped around it and pulled. She should cut it off.
Her mother is the one who opens the door, and sees her fifteen-year-old daughter, reed-thin and smiling madly, covered in blood and ash. Unlike most would, her mother does not flinch back. Molly Weasley has pieced together many broken men before, she can hold her daughter together.
She falls still as gentle hands wash away the grime of the fight, the house is startlingly silent. They must know, or at least know enough to not want to risk their mother’s anger if they shatter her. Molly runs the shower and peels off her sweat-stained, mess of clothes.
Her hands scrub at skin until it’s clear, until the only visible wrong is the bruises smeared across her skin. A touch at her chin and Ginny leans her head back, water falls over her face and quick fingers run through her hair. Her mother works through the mats, the knots, and the burned parts softly.
She cries then, under the safety of the shower and water to hide her tears. It doesn’t hide her shaking breaths, her heavy breathing. Her mother doesn’t say a word, and Ginny notices a cut on her side dimly. A jagged thing cut across her ribs, one that matched a withered scar she had seen on her mother once.
They match now, in more ways than one, in every way. The soldier mother and her soldier daughter. Later, wrapped in soft clothes and pressed to her mother's chest, the smell of baked bread and cinnamon overwhelming, Ginny thinks - knows that they won’t see the end of this war together.
A hand is stroking her hair, her mother is singing an old lullaby softly, Ginny is small in her mother's arms. They won’t see the end of the war together, but right now she is fifteen and she allows herself to be a child cradled by her mother.
Maybe the war starts when she’s fifteen and she knows how adrenaline burns, maybe it starts when she’s a baby abandoned in her bed because her mother cannot hold her for fear of dropping her at a scream. Maybe the war starts or maybe it never ended, maybe Ginny just saw it for what it was.
Regardless nothing changes, Voldemort rises and he comes back with a vengeance, with a thirst for blood that was never satiated the first time around. The Dark Lord comes back and the rest of the world remains blinded by their own ignorance and fear until they can’t. Until Harry lies broken in a field of glass and Ginny is going to bury him one day.
She burns the first newspaper copy with black letters, all caps, He Returns front and center. She burns it and then laughs in Rita Skeeter’s face when she asks for a comment. Ginny barely restrains herself from spitting in her smudged makeup and too-tight smile.
She walks away, her back straight and her hands clenched, one in her pocket around her wand. Just like she had a summer ago, when the school year ended in death. A not too uncommon occurrence lately.
The war finally reveals itself and despite her mother’s insistence, the closed doors and Ginny can feel magic curling around her fingers. Despite her mother’s insistence and worry she can’t stop Ginny from being a part of this war.
With a kindness she doesn’t know, a kindness she rarely shows, Ginny doesn’t snarl in her mother’s face. “I have been fighting since I was twelve. You didn’t save me then and you can’t save me now.”
She doesn’t say, with a touch of madness, “There is a hurricane trapped beneath my skin, my magic burns for more. I’ve gotten a taste of fighting and I can never go back.”
Or, with the most cruelty she can muster, “I am your daughter true and true. You should be proud.”
It’s not to say that she longs for war or destruction, she doesn’t but Ginny - Ginerva Weasley, the youngest and only daughter of Arthur and Molly Weasley died in the Chamber of Secrets before her thirteenth birthday. She died cold and terrified, water lapping at her skin, blood stuck to the roof of her mouth and the back of her teeth.
Ginerva, Ginny, The Weasley Girl died in the Chamber of Secrets. The girl who walked out of there, hand in hand with Harry Potter, isn’t quite her.
She’s still Ginny of course, but she died there, and parts of her didn’t come back. Tom Riddle thoroughly stained her, ghostly ink-stained fingers marking her soul. Cold, gripping hands dragged her into the darkness.
Ginny Weasley faced Voldemort when she was twelve, she didn’t walk away, not really. That changes you, destroys you, makes you anew.
She’s been a part of this war since she was twelve, and she cannot walk away now.
So the war finally shows itself when she’s fifteen and Ginny Weasley tightens her grip on her wand and smiles, grimly and with something like chaos underneath it. She’s been waiting for this, and for the first time in nearly five years, she lets out a breath and the shadows recede.
Tom Riddle no longer haunts her dreams, instead, he is a man, or appears as one. And despite his best efforts, Tom Riddle is mortal, born to a Muggle and a Witch. He is a man and he can die like anyone in the end.
Call her naive or foolish, but Ginny plans to ensure that he does die. That Tom Riddle, he doesn’t get the title Voldemort, that Tom Riddle will die choking on his filthy half-muggle blood.
Around her, as she stands braced against a door, a meeting unfolding inside, magic laughs if it could laugh. It shimmers, it swells, Fate runs her fingers down a gold string and the red-stained bits.
Magic, long forgotten magic sings.
Ginny became a soldier at fifteen, she became a General at sixteen with stinging palms and the heavy taste of blood in her mouth. It’s funny really, that her parents ever thought she could escape this war.
It starts with Hogwarts and her home that is shrouded in darkness, that has blood soaking the floors and it will never come out. It starts with hope rotting in the air and Ginny Weasley, who has been teetering on the edge of greatness, of horror since she was twelve and dying in the Chamber of Secrets, takes a look at the suffering around her and she hardens.
It starts with a home that is no longer a home and those who were supposed to protect her look away, or look at her with those sad pity-filled eyes. It starts when no one protects her, no one saves children with unbroken eyes.
It starts like this: Alecto Carrow and a tiny cub who never learned how not to flinch. Ginny is many things, shattered and rough, too harsh for gentle sweetness and she lacks a soft love. But she is a lion, and she is not afraid to defend those who cannot defend themselves.
She steps in front of him, twelve and she wishes she could tell him to hide his shaking hands. You never let them see you break.
Carrow smiles, slow and mean, at her red hair and raised chin. She doesn’t argue, in fact, she seems delighted. In her eyes, the Weasleys are a stain. One she will gladly take care of.
Ginny, although she certainly wishes to, doesn’t snarl, doesn’t bite back. She’s learned by now how to pick her fights even when anger is boiling her alive.
Instead when Carrow asks, “Do you want to take the punishment, Weasley?” She doesn’t allow her voice to shake, whether it be with anger or fear.
“Yes.”
It starts with blood in her mouth, her fingers digging into the harsh wood of a desk, and the eyes of a dead quiet room on her. Ginny nearly topples, her legs shake, they threaten to buckle but she doesn’t allow it.
There are bruises forming on the left side of her face where she had turned her head, her left eye beginning to swell. Blood in her mouth from biting her tongue because Carrow did not get the satisfaction of making her scream.
Instead Ginny smiles like Carrow had, slow and venom fused. She bares her blood-stained teeth, a silent snarl only softened by her words. “Thank you, Professor.”
She throws every word like a curse, like a dagger. Carrow doesn’t flinch back but the smile is gone and so is the satisfaction.
Ginny knows then as she sits down, still aching, still with the barest feeling of pride, that this will not be something she can win. Not really.
She’s protected one of her cubs, because the house of red and gold is hers and she will never forget that. She’s protected a child but this time it wasn’t with a curse, it was taking a blow.
It won’t be the first time, she knows then, it won’t be the first time and it won’t be the last. Ginny looks up, the vision in her left eye blurry, and Neville meets her eyes.
It’s like looking in a mirror, the same fear, the same rage, the same terrible desperation reflected. The two of them are going to protect those at Hogwarts when everyone else fails to act.
Ginny would pray that it doesn’t kill them both but she knows nobody's listening. Instead, she swallows, blood thick and heavy down her throat, and makes a promise to herself. She digs her nails into the soft skin of her palm, red wells and it smears across her hand.
They won’t kill us easy. They’ll try, Merlin they’ll try, but they’ll be met with teeth and desperation and a soldier's rage. We won’t go softly into the night, when we do go the whole world will know.
An angry martyr's prayer to a nonexistent God.
So the beginning starts like every beginning, with a blood-stained child. The middle is much the same, it only gets worse.
They’ve formed their own system, the remaining members of Dumbledore’s Army, although with how many new students join them in the room of requirements, red and yellow and blue and the occasional green, she supposes it’s more than what it used to be. They are learning new spells but this time Lavender is tearing through a book on healing spells with a half-conscious Neville in front of her.
Times have certainly changed and they, like always, have adapted to survive.
Ginny learns how to never scream even when every nerve is being overloaded with pain. She learns how to withstand the crucio curse, though it’s more outlasting it and Carrow’s attention rather than beating it. She learns too that those around her bleed the same.
Neville has steel in his spine and by Merlin, he won’t let another suffer in front of him. Lavender is cunning, dangerously so, and she uses her lipstick and purple as a weapon. They see only her smile on red lips and not the curse behind them. Seamus knows just about every swear and the first time she broke, the first time the world caught up to her and her hands could not stop shaking he was there. He held her until the sobs stopped, until Ginny was exhausted and empty, then he tucked her under blankets on the couch and never whispered a word about it.
And it’s not just the lion-hearted, burning children with red and gold in their veins. It’s Padma Patil, her eyes colder than her sister's, an efficiency with spells that match her silver tongue. It’s Hannah Abbott’s easy care, the warm hand on Ginny’s shoulder steadying her after another bout of curses. She and Neville have the same steel, and she has a feeling they have the same snarl. It's Luna and Ginny's learned that she has a dangerous silence, that her eyes can turn into a steel gray without a drop of her kindness.
In the beginning, it was just survival, and her terrible, limitless anger. But like all things it transformed, it changed to fit the world it lived in. Harry was gone and Dumbledore's army wasn’t just about learning spells and Ginny became one of the leaders.
She hadn’t meant to be a General, she was just one of the first who looked into the eyes of cruelty and refused to bend. It was easy with Luna, her too-smart best friend who once said, You, Ginny Weasley, are intertwined with blood and violence. I don’t think you could escape it if you tried. It’s easy with Luna at her left, and Neville at her right, it shouldn’t surprise her but it does.
He’s - there is no other word for it, he is good and he has all the faith Ginny lacks. The three of them work well together, her anger and Neville’s kindness and Luna’s faith. They’re good together, and somewhere along the line, they shift into the spots before them.
Neville shares Harry’s goodness, he’s the person you want to believe in. Luna has Hermione’s intelligence, if a little odd, and the relentless need to right a situation. She has Ron’s loyalty, and although few see it, his cruelty when needed. And for once she doesn’t mind sharing something with her brother.
So the first time someone calls her General as they had Harry, she doesn’t flinch. Although that might be because she’s far too pale from the cruiciatus and blood is still smeared across her nose.
Neville had been the one to drag her in, Luna having run off the get Lavender. She was stumbling but stubbornly on her feet after one minute and thirty-eight seconds of agony. One minute and thirty-eight seconds of daggers and fire and hell. One minute and thirty-eight seconds in which she had fallen to her knees and nearly bit off her tongue in an effort not to scream.
One minute and thirty-eight seconds in which she failed and screamed her throat hoarse, her head colliding with the cold ground, her body thrashing.
When Carrow had finished, she had allowed herself twenty seconds to lie on the ground. Then she got up, fingernails digging into the wooden desk, swaying with every step. But Ginny had walked out of the room, walked away from Carrow.
She walked out of the room and promptly collapsed in the hall, pressed against the cool stone as if it would steady her throbbing head, her heavy tongue, and her trembling hands.
Ginny didn’t know how long she was there but she knew that Neville had found her, most likely brought by one of the other students. He had helped her walk to the Room of Requirements, her arm over his shoulder, his hand gripping her waist tightly, and it was one of the most comforting things she’d felt all year.
There were students in the Room of course, for various reasons and various levels of danger. But around thirty of them had watched Ginny stumble in, already hearing how bad it was from Luna and Lavender when they had rushed in.
As Neville brought her over to them and a cot for her to collapse on, she heard it. The whispers as she passed, the silence, the look in the eyes of the students around her as they took in her bloody nose, the bruises on her arms and legs, and nearly every inch of visible skin.
She heard it in bits and pieces, voices fading over one another as Neville watched Lavender fret over her. “Heard it was over a minute…My Dad says that anything more than thirty seconds can nearly break you…Ingrid said she walked out of the room. Can you imagine? After being under the cruciatus for over a minute and walking out?... Of course, she walked out, she’s our General. As if she would ever give Carrow the satisfaction of breaking her.”
The words slide together as Lavender hands her a potion that was supposed to help with the pain. General, it echoed in her head like Soldier had when she was a girl and war was only a word.
With the very little strength she had, Ginny looked up and met Neville’s eyes, his arms crossed and his body tense. Over the months she had found they didn’t need words, that he got her and she got him. And right now, even though she was bloody and exhausted, he got her.
General? Is that what we are?
If that is the burden we must carry.
We’re so young, what can we do?
No one is coming to save us, or them. So we’ll protect them, we’ll save them. Someone has to.
And it has to be us?
Neville smiled and Ginny thought it suited him, thought he should do it more. Who else could it be besides our stubborn asses?
So Ginny slipped into the role of General as easily as she had Soldier, like she was born to be one. The world moved on and the war only grew, the cruciatus curse became more and more familiar and so did the other's screams. She survived and did her best to keep everyone else alive and when she could, she sat shoulder to shoulder with the others and let herself breathe.
The world kept turning and Ginny Weasley was a General, and a damn good one. She also had this annoying issue of blushing at Neville Longbottom’s smile and his bleeding heart. A terrible habit really.