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You bury your brother after your first war. Your mother sobs the entire time, the sort of weeping that tears at your throat and sounds like a feral animal, howling, clawing at its trapped leg. George doesn’t cry. No one can look at him much these days, and you know that you’ll never forgive yourself for that.
Crimson blood drip drip drips onto unfolding petals, lily-white sinking into deeper pinks. The roots are torn from the ground, curled up and mangled as they bunch together. They crawl towards you, blood still dripping away. Petals brush against your scars, the ones from when you were fifteen and terrified, sixteen and terrified, seventeen and terrified.
You stare up at the ceiling of your childhood bedroom. The Burrow is quiet, the rooms are empty. There is a grave beneath the cherry tree you all used to fly around as children.
You haven’t flown in months. You haven’t laughed either.
Harry used to press kisses to your temple, to the splatter of freckles you have that he swore looked like stars. He’d do it after a match, when you were both covered in sweat and dirt and high on adrenaline. You’d collide, throwing your arm around his waist while Angelina and Katie laughed, stumbling over each other. His lips were feather-soft against your skin, and you almost loved him for that.
You were all so young, then at least, and now.
He’d do it in the common room as you slumped over homework that wouldn’t matter in half a year. He’d do it before you went up to bed, the girls in year giggling while you grinned because he was yours. He’d do it in the halls in the late afternoon when the sun was slipping down in the sky and the clouds were heavy.
He’d do it because Harry Potter may have been in love with you for as long as you had been in love with him.
-
A month and four days after the War ends you look into the mirror for the first time. It’s still foggy from your shower, the third that day because you can never seem to get entirely clean. You wipe it away with your forearm, and for a moment you don’t even notice.
You’re brushing your hair when you see it, the small tangled knot of scar tissue near your hairline. It’s destroyed the skin beneath, the aftermath of a curse or a falling piece of Hogwarts. Your freckles, the freckles, the stars that Harry Potter would kiss and trace with his fingertips, are gone.
You spend an hour on the bathroom floor, the cool tile seeping into your bones as you map the battlefield of your body, as you grieve what you hadn’t even realized you lost until now.
Hermione doesn’t sleep much these days, she’s too busy trying to fix a corrupted Government - one with Voldemort's fingerprints on every single law and act. There is still muggle-born blood staining the floor of the main entrance, there are still scars on the walls from where they hung their tattered, split-open bodies.
It’s hard work, remaking a system built for people like her, for people like them, and yet Hermione does it anyway. You admire her for it, you know that you could never do the same. The second someone, pureblood and hateful, told you to stop trying to help, you'd launch yourself over the table and show them what help they needed.
You’ve never been a peacemaker, you were a fighter when you were young. Then you grew up, then you became a soldier.
Sometimes you think you were built for war, molded by your mother’s weathered hands, by the scarred land you were born to, by the generation dead and the children orphaned. Sometimes you think it was inevitable, your fight, your anger, your blood smeared against your teeth and another’s on your knuckles. Sometimes you think you should have died instead of him.
Not because you want to die. Not because you are so in love with him that you’d switch places in a heartbeat. Some days you’re not even sure if you loved him right.
You think you should have died instead of Harry Potter because you are a soldier and he is hope. He is the gentle sunlit future. He is the laughter of children who will never know war, or where the scars on their parents and country came from. He is the after, the years later when they’ve grieved and healed and can smile without hesitating.
Harry Potter is hope, and you are the brutal, rusted edge of a knife.
You shouldn’t have lived, it isn’t right, it isn’t fair, it isn’t how the stories your mother read to you go, and yet -
You keep breathing while he rots six feet underneath the ground.
It isn’t right, but it is.
Your shoulders get sunburned weeks after the War ends, or at least half-ends. The trees surrounding the Burrow are no help, and your scars match the ugly pink of your skin. Bill finds you in the middle of a field, as far away from everyone else as you can be. It smells like grass, like sickly-sweet rotting apples and summer.
You could almost pretend there was no war, because there isn’t, at least not here, at least not now.
He doesn’t say a word as he carefully slips down beside you, moving slowly because his leg never quite healed right. You don’t bother to look over, you just keep staring up at the blue sky, at the smear of clouds and the occasional flicker of a bird. You have just come to the realization that you are unused to a sky untouched by smoke, by burning, by the mangled green of Death Eaters, when Bill speaks.
“Fleur is pregnant.” The world does not still but you do.
You look over at your oldest brother, and he has aged a decade in the past year, and he looks - He’s happy, and terrified, but mostly happy. The corners of his eyes are wrinkled, his smile is soft, he is in love with Fleur and they’re having a child. They survived the war.
You pull a smile from the dead girl you were as you reach over and grab his hand, “That’s amazing, Bill. How far along is she?”
He swallows, squeezing your hand, “About two months, give or take. We think - We think it happened after the Battle but, we’re not entirely sure.”
You wonder how many curses Fleur took, you wonder what sort of darkness seeped into her blood while she fought for the only future any of them could bear. You wonder if this baby will be yet another thing the war takes from them. You do not say any of this.
You twist your features into something reassuring, “Well, you’re in luck that the best medics of the century happen to be in the UK. She’ll be okay,” You blink as the facts you know rearrange themselves slightly, “So will my niece or nephew.”
Bill nods, and you know he was waiting for that, for the first child he ever raised and loved to care for him in return. He starts talking, rambling about the cottage and renovations and names, and you -
In a few months, there will be a baby, a tiny, living thing with Bill’s hair and Fleur’s eyes, with your blood. There will be a child who will grow up with soldiers for a family, and a grieving country for a home. There will be a child who bears your last name and will grow up without fear of monsters and hate turned to slaughter. There will be a tiny human being who is never going to know the fear you knew, who is never going to bleed on the ministries floor before they hit sixteen, who is never going to bury the people they love too damn young.
You won’t allow it. You’ll fight the world and fate for this baby that isn’t even born yet, and you’ll win. Because you’re a Prewett, and a soldier-daughter born from a soldier-mother, and you shouldn’t have survived your war but you did and maybe it was for this.
You’ll win because you are Ginny Weasley and nothing as inconsequential as fate has stopped you before.
You never slept together, in the same bed that is, and yet some days you find yourself reaching for him in the seconds after you wake up. Your fingers stretch across worn blankets that have cradled you and your brothers and the uncles you do not know. For a few seconds, you’re somewhere between awake and asleep and the dead aren’t dead.
Then you blink, dust drifting in the beam of sunlight, and Harry Potter dies for the thousandth time. Then you push yourself up onto your forearms and you stare at your childhood bedroom and the blood-stained, grime-covered clothes in the corner of your room that you still haven’t washed, or burned. Grief comes back again, not bothering to knock on the door as it rises in your throat, as it constricts around your heart, as it presses against your scars and burns.
Fred laughs, and George doesn’t and you don’t know if he ever will again. Harry presses a kiss to your temple, he swallows your laughter and buries his face in your hair. Lavender does your makeup and Collin takes a picture of you and your girls on the Quidditch green. Your Uncles laugh, forever twenty, forever happy, forever alive in the picture your mother has on the mantle.
You grieve them all.
You grieve for yourself mostly.
Then you get out of bed and you go about your day.
You meet Luna in a cute muggle cafe outside of Westport. She’s drawing the tip of her finger over the film on her tea. Shapes unfolding, stars and moons, and the sort of magic only a rare few can see.
People like to call Luna crazy, but that’s just because she sees a different truth than they do. You love her for that.
You love her for the smile she throws at you when you settle into the seat across from her. It’s real and genuine and it shines just as brightly as it had five years ago. “Ginny! You made it, I thought you might wander for a little while longer. You’ve always been more breezy than most.”
You’d like to pretend you don’t know what that means, oh but you do. You are a fighter, you run in curses and hellfire like you were born to. But you never have liked to face the truth, to face the vulnerable, soft part of your heart that bruises at a touch.
Instead of acknowledging her comment, you grab a chocolate croissant from her plate. The chocolate melts on your tongue as you tear into it, the hard-crusted edge breaking beneath your molars as Luna tilts her head at you.
Unlike most people she doesn’t bother to let you finish eating before she tears out another chunk of your heart. “You haven’t cried since the Battle.” Luna leans closer, fingers tracing the edge of her cup, “The Dallies around you are positively starving.”
You don’t know if Dallies are real, but Luna sees them, Luna says without saying, “You haven’t felt since then.” You aren’t stubborn enough to think she isn’t right.
But you are stubborn enough to ignore it.
“Have you tried these yet? Delightful. I’m always astonished at what muggles can create, genius really.” Luna’s brows don’t furrow, she doesn’t push, she doesn’t even look upset. She nods, tearing open another pastry, scooping out the green paste, and licking it off her finger.
She smiles at the taste, “They are good. I had almost forgotten how lovely the small things could be during the War.” Then Luna gets serious, in a way she so rarely does which makes it even more severe, “It would be a tragedy to forget that life is overwhelmingly good, don’t you agree?”
Luna buried her mother at nine, you bury your brother at seventeen, and the maybe-could-have-been-almost love of your life the day after. You cannot find good in the world that lacks them. Or at least you aren’t sure how to.
Fleur is pregnant. Hermione and Percy are making plans to enact a government with equal protections and fair statutes, and Ron is planning on marrying her one day. Hogwarts is almost rebuilt, there is talk of a new semester in a few months.
The world is moving on. The world continues turning, spinning in circles despite the loss you have endured, despite the war you have survived, despite the life you cannot live. You are not young enough to scream at the unfairness of it all, you have not been a child since you died on the floor of the Chambers of Secrets, since Tom Riddle seeped into your bones, into your body, into your corpse and HE NEVER LEFT.
Your hands shake. You breathe in and out.
You are not a child, and you are not going to scream at Luna until you choke on your own agony. “Can we talk about something else, please, Luna?” She smiles at you, and for a split second, it’s so incredibly sad that you almost start sobbing, that the wave of grief clawing at your throat almost crests and crashes. Then it’s gone, and her smile is real, and neither of you have been young in so very long.
“Have you heard what’s happening with The Quibbler?” Then she’s gone, spiraling to a conversation about nothing important, nothing concrete, nothing that speaks to the scars they bear and -
You love her for it.
The wave of grief subsides, and you breathe, in and out, in and out, in and out.
You find Ron up one night, sitting on the porch and staring up at the stars like they personally screwed him over. He doesn’t say a word when you sit beside him, he barely reacts from where he’s hunched over, his knuckles whiter than the scars that creep up his arms. You are one year, five months, and ten days apart. It’s barely any time at all, and still, regrettably, he’s always been your older brother.
He was the one who cheered you up after the twins were a little too mean. He was the one you pranked first, and hugged first, and it was his bed you hid in when you had your night terrors. He was the one who slept on the ground beside your bed every night for three weeks after your first year. He was the one who comforted you, and loved you, and held your hand while you both buried the boy you loved.
Because Harry was yours, but he was Ron’s first. You never learned how to untangle the two of them, you never wanted to, and by the time Hermione Granger ended up at the Burrow all three of them were too intertwined for any sort of separation to be possible. You always thought nothing could tear them apart.
Except of course Death.
The boy you maybe-could-have-almost-loved is dead, so is your brother’s best friend, so is a third of his soul. Your grief is shared, and if you tried to compare it you know you would fall short. But that’s the thing about grief, it is incomparable, it is incomprehensible to nearly everyone except for the people who grieve with you. It’s not a competition, and you won't make it one.
You move until you are close enough to Ron to feel his body heat, to hear the quiet gasping noises he’s making as he cries silently. He is your older brother and your protector and his best friend is dead, and he’s been grieving him for nearly the entire decade that he knew him. He is your older brother, and his shoulders are breaking beneath the weight of carrying it all.
He doesn’t fight you when you reach over, when you tug him into your arms, when you curl your arms around his shoulders, when his hands grasp at your waist and back and scars. You hold him like he is a child again, you hold him like he is not a soldier. You hold him and your older brother breaks in your arms, his cries turning from a whisper to weeping because -
Because Harry Potter is dead, and Ron has always been too much like you, and you’ve always been his cracked mirror. You both have loved a dying boy for years and now that he is finally gone, there is no waiting any longer, there is no desperate, flickering hope that maybe they’re all wrong and he’ll live, somehow, someway. The boy you love is dead, and all the two of you have left is your grief.
And it hurts.
You don’t sleep much anymore. You don’t fly either. You don’t laugh. You don’t smile. You -
You haven't lived since you kissed Harry before the end, and you had so much hope for a second that you could almost see your future. You could almost see it, and it was so blindingly beautiful.
Then Fred died. Then Harry played his part perfectly, and the lamb went to the slaughter, and the boy who lived died in a forest, alone.
Six months after the Battle you cannot get out of bed. You cannot move your fingers, you cannot sit up, you cannot do anything more than blink and breathe and even that was a struggle. There is no particular reason for it, for this grief, for the wave crashing, battering at your broken, half-healed body. There is no reason.
You are functioning one day, moving on and on and on because the world has never stopped turning for senseless tragedies. Then you blink, then you fall and you cannot claw your way out of this hole. You can’t do anything but stare at your walls and wonder if the girl who used to be would kill you for this - for giving up, for laying in bed and doing nothing.
You were a soldier, and now your War is won and your brother is dead and your love is dead, and there is no victory in the waiting. There is no prize, there is no triumphant grin as you live happily ever after. Your war is won, Ginerva Weasley, now live, they whisper.
But you don’t know how to, you try and scream and barely manage a croak. You don’t know how to live with all this pain, with these scars and the body that is barely yours. You don’t know how to live in a house with a clock that only holds eight hands. You don’t know how to live with a gravestone beneath the cherry trees. You don’t know how to live with a love that is barely a sentence long.
You don’t know how to live with all your what ifs, and i wasn’t ready, and there wasn’t enough time.
You’ve won your war, and you do not know how to live in the aftermath.
So you lay in your bed, and you don’t eat, and you don’t drink, and you don’t hear your mother’s worried voice, and you don’t feel her touch. You lay in your bed and you open your hand, your palm to the sky and there is no one to hold it, to hold you until -
At first, for a horrible, agonizing second, you think it’s Fred. You think you’re dead, and he’s here to take you away to whatever comes next. Then you see his ear, or the lack of it, then you see the look in his eyes. It matches yours, half dead, half hollow, and it can only be George.
Before he speaks you feel more than you have in hours or days or weeks, you lost track of time. You feel horrifically guilty, for grieving, for experiencing this pain as if George didn’t lose the other half of him, as if George didn’t lose his twin, as if you have any right to be this pathetic.
It’s almost enough to make you get up, to throw yourself in the shower, to pray to magic or ancient gods for forgiveness for this, for everything. But then George takes your hand, kneeling beside your bed, and his voice is quiet and even. “Can you hear me, Gin? Blink twice if you can.”
You blink twice.
He nods, and you’ve never seen him look so serious, you haven’t looked at him much in the after, “Okay, good. Here’s what’s gonna happen next: I’m gonna help you get up, and we’re gonna go eat something. Then you’re going to shower, and get dressed, and we’re going out to fly.”
What?
When you don’t twitch his lips curl up in an echo of a smile, and it’s so painfully George you almost start crying then and there. But you don’t because he ruins it by being a prick, “You don’t get a choice in this, my frustratingly stubborn little sister.” His words are teasing, and his eyes are warm before they go soft, before he gets serious again, “You don’t get to give up and die here, that - that is not an option. You don’t get to give up, and maybe I’m being selfish by pushing and not letting you grieve or whatever, but we all know that we,” He lets out a hiss of air, and then he keeps speaking, “We were the worst of this bunch, so I’ll be the selfish one. You’re getting up if I have to drag you, okay?”
Later you’ll think, oh, George loves me enough to fight, he loves me enough to think about Fred and keep going.
But right now all you do is stare because you can barely twitch your hand against his, how the hell does he think you can fly? George gives you about thirty seconds to do anything, and then he decides for you, and you love him for that, although right now you mostly hate him for it.
He stands up so suddenly it almost gives you whiplash. When he grabs both your hands and yanks you up it actually does give you whiplash. The world spins and blurs and you want to lay back down and sink into your bed and fucking die there because Fred is dead and Harry is dead and so many people are gone. And yet you’re still here, you’re still here and you’re a horrible human being, you’re still here and it isn’t right and it isn’t fair and you should just go.
But George doesn’t give you a choice. He tears back your blanket and you barely blink before he’s scooping you up, lugging you halfway across the house, looking down like he’s daring you to fight back. When you don’t, when you stay limp in his arms like a corpse, he doesn’t give up. He kicks up a door and dumps you, gently, into the tub.
You know what he’s about to do, and it’s enough that you open your mouth and speak for the first time in three weeks, “George -” You don’t finish your sentence because a burst of ice-cold water hits you and you shriek instead. You try to pull yourself out of the tub and punch him in that smug face, the only problem is that after weeks of little to no movement and even less food you - you have the strength of a kitten.
And you must look like one, soaking wet and clawing at the tub edge in your pajamas, glaring at George with everything you have.
You’re so angry with him, at the audacity, at his bluntness, at the ice-cold fucking water still hitting you, that you almost forget the why behind it all. George is smiling at you, he’s smiling and you’re screeching mad but you are feeling something that isn’t grief, that isn’t an even worse nothingness. Oh, oh.
At the realization you slump back into the tub and George shows you some pity by turning off the water. Once again he kneels beside you, and his eyes - You don’t need a reminder that this isn’t some petty prank he would have pulled years ago, but the love in his eyes, the overwhelming, i would do anything for you, including dragging your ass out of your weeks' long depressive episode, love would certainly do it. “There you are, I missed you.”
And he means it, of course, he means it. They all must miss you, because you were gone, really gone, almost completely gone. You hadn’t realized how far you had slipped until he dragged you up, not out, but up. George forced you to get up, he forced you to feel something, anything, he forced you to live regardless of how painful it is.
You love him for it, and you are so fucking sorry for it.
“Hey, don’t space out on me again,” He grabs your shoulder, fingers digging in just enough that pressure is grounding. “Stay with me.”
You are, you’re trying, you swear you're trying. It hurts, your throat is impossibly dry, and it takes about half the energy you have to manage, “Hi, Georgie.”
He smiles, and it’s sad, and it’s also full of so much fucking love. “Hey, Gin.” George swallows, and then you remember that only Fred called him Georgie, and then you remember that he’s already buried one sibling - he cannot do it again. “If I leave you here can you manage to shower or are you going to just lay there looking like a drowned rat?”
Your lips twitch in an echo of a smile, or a snarl. There is a retort sitting on the tip of your tongue, and by the time you remember to reach for it it’s already gone, lost in that unforgiving wave of grief that sounds mostly like why are living when they aren’t? It threatens to pull you down too, and you want to give in like you had so many times before because you are just plain tired.
You want to give in, but George is still looking at you, and - you just can’t let him bury you too.
You draw on your strength, whatever was left beneath your scars and freckles, and you say, “I got this.” It’s slightly unsteady, and only a whisper, but it’s still something. His eyes flicker, and you can tell that he’s torn between believing you and, well maybe you weren’t the only one who has experience with grieving the living. You reach over, and your muscles are so sore from lack of use that it hurts a little. You grab his hand and squeeze, “Save me some apple pie?”
It’s your favorite, and as far as you can smell it’s all your mother bakes these days.
George nods before standing up, he almost leaves but before he does he turns around and says, “We’re still flying, Gin.”
You haven’t flown in months, in years, in lifetimes you can barely remember. “Okay.” This family cannot take another loss, not so soon. You don’t get to die to your grief, even if you really, really want to just give in.
It’s not an option so, “Go.”
George goes, and it takes you thirty minutes to manage a shower without collapsing.
It takes three hours for you to fly again.
You hover somewhere between the clouds and the ground, knuckles white against the wood of your broom. It’s warm, but a lovely sort, the type that sinks into your bones and makes you feel alive. You haven’t flown in months, you haven’t moved in weeks, you haven’t felt alive in years.
It would be easy to unclench your hand and just lean a little too far to the right, to just fall and fall and fall. It would be easy to die up here, but George is watching you like a hawk even if he is silent for once and -
It clicks with all the gentleness of dirt being thrown into a grave. You never really wanted to die, you just didn’t want to live. Not when it meant living with your grief, and your pain, and the ghosts that are always there. Not when it meant living beyond them, beyond the war. Not when it meant moving on from something that should never heal.
But your family cannot take another funeral, and you have never known how to go without a fight.
You close your eyes, and you breathe the fresh air, in and out, in and out. The wind rustles around you, it tangles in your hair and it brushes against the trees beneath you. You can hear the chirping of birds, and the grumble of the river near the Lovegoods. In the distance you can make out your mother’s voice, calling your father in for lunch and IF I SEE A MOVING CAR ARTHUR WEASLEY I WILL
You can feel the smile working its way onto your face. You can feel the warmth inside of you, you can feel the love, you can feel the - oh, this is what life is. Your brother is dead and your mother makes your favorite dessert and yells at your father over the same ten things with too much love in her voice for it to be effective. Your love is dead and the birds still chirp and the sun still shines and the world still turns and you - You still breathe.
You allow yourself to think, for the first time, that maybe that’s okay.
Victoire Soleil Weasley has a pure white tuft of hair and brown eyes, a shade darker than her own. She’s born a month early, and despite that, she has lungs strong enough for her scream to echo through the maternity ward. She is perfect, she’s the tiniest thing you’ve ever seen, she is so incredibly fragile.
You love her.
You’re terrified you’ll break her.
You almost don’t want to hold her for fear of staining that pale, untouched, and unscarred skin. But Fleur is delirious on potions, Gabrielle is speaking French so quickly you cannot make out a single word, and Bill is staring at his wife and his daughter with so much pride that you cannot say no.
You hold her, wrapped in a soft crochet blanket that is soaked in your mother’s magic. Her head fits perfectly in the crook of your arm, and when you cradle it with your hand it is downy soft. When you brush your crooked finger, broken and broken and broken and never healed right, against her nose she opens her eyes.
Victoire looks up at you, a flicker of gold in her eyes, and she’s so incredibly curious, like you were once. She looks up at you, and in this moment, three people are her entire world and she wants so much more. And you know, as you stare down at her, that she will get it all. She will live, unafraid and unbroken, she will laugh and howl with reckless abandon. She will see the world, and love without death at her shoulder. She will live and have her heartbroken half a dozen times, she will throw out declarations of teenage hate to her parents for stupid reasons, she will run from home and return, and leave again.
She will live as you did not, as you did not have the chance then, when you were young.
She blinks, and her entire face scrunches up as she sneezes, for the first time, and like everyone else she hates the feeling. You love her, you love her with every bone in your body, you love her as you love your brothers, dead and gone and here and everywhere in between. You love her, you love her, you love her, and for that alone you hope.
Victoire Soleil Weasley will live, and maybe - maybe you will too.
One day.