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Ginny Weasley is a miracle and she is reminded about it every second of every day of her fucking life. She is the miracle and the baby and the only girl in the seven generations, and that means Ginny is allowed to do absolutely nothing at all.
There are a lot of things implied about being a miracle that weren’t directly laid out in plain language for her. If she’d known that being adored by her entire family would also mean being wrapped up in bubble wrap forever, unable to roughhouse or walk to Luna’s alone or ride a broom, she would have thought twice.
Well, maybe the broom thing is fair. The first time Ginny rode a broom, she lost control of it, flew twenty metres higher than she meant to, rolled off the shaft and fell down and down until she collided with the hard ground. She broke her left arm that day. Ginny remembers the pain of it quite clearly. She’d screamed, something high-pitched and childlike, and Mum and Dad had come sprinting out of the house like– well, like their child was screaming. Oh, how they’d fussed over her, wincing at her arm and bundling her up in their arms to console as she blubbered on the ground. Ron had grabbed her broom from where it was drifting away through the tall grass, and Mum had snapped at him about not paying enough attention. It hadn’t been Ron’s fault, Ginny wanted to say, but Dad pulled her into another hug and she didn’t mind anymore.
So, no broom. It’s not like they have the money anyway. Mum gets tight around the eyes whenever they go to Diagon Alley and Ginny doesn’t have the heart to bother her about it. She doesn’t even want a new one! Ginny wants a shitty broom, something ugly and warped and missing half its bristles, just like her brothers have; terrible old Cleansweep Eights from the sixties that shudder when you touch them. Even that’s too much to ask for, though. Ginny is a miracle, and miracles don’t get hurt. Little miracle babies who are the first girl in seven generations are perfect no matter what.
‘I just want to show her that I’m not her baby anymore,’ Ginny writes, and she watches her ink disappear into her diary. It takes a second for words to float back.
‘That’s perfectly understandable,’ reads Tom’s tidy handwriting, ‘And it’s normal for you to feel that way.’
She smiles. Of course Tom would understand; he understands everything. He’s such a good friend.
‘Thanks, Tom,” she writes, and closes her diary. Jumping off the bed, she tucks it into her trunk and locks the lid tight.
Ginny hurries downstairs, evading one of the twins in the common room and slipping through the portrait hole out onto the landing. She grins at the sight of Luna there. The other girl is leaning against the bannister, staring over at one of the painting with an inquisitive expression and
“What’s up with the painting?” Ginny asks, and Luna hums.
“It’s got bad vibes.”
“Okay,” Ginny says, and she vows to steer clear of that painting from now on. Luna’s usually right about this sort of thing; once, she stopped Ginny from standing on a fire ant nest, and they’d only been seven years old then. They’ve grown a lot since then; they’re eleven years old now. They’re wise.
They walk down together, winding through all of the hallways together. They’ve got plenty of time before they need to get to the quidditch pitch, so Luna drags Ginny down a hallway full of shifting mosaics that seem to ripple with blue-greens like they’re underwater. It’s beautiful, honestly. Ginny itches to tell Tom about it; maybe he could tell her how to make something like it. Tom knows how to answer every question she has for him.
“–the food is good too!” Luna exclaims.
“Nothing quite as good as Mum’s cooking,” says Ginny imperiously, grinning, “But it’s adequate, I suppose.”
Mum cooks so well it’s not even funny. She might have gone to cooking school if she hadn’t gotten pregnant with Bill so young. Nevertheless, she cooks better than anyone at any cooking school. She’s tried to teach Ginny before, but Ginny doesn’t care about that sort of thing; she’s always tended more towards outdoorsy hobbies. Ron, desperate as he always is to make Mum acknowledge him, is the only one that’s taken her up on the offer. Mum was a little disappointed that the only girl in the family didn’t want to learn all of the family recipes, but she made do with Ron.
“Your Mum does cook lovely eggs,” laughs Luna, “But I’m not too picky. It’s been nice to have three meals a day recently.”
She says it very cheerfully, like it means nothing, and yet Ginny feels a sudden and crushing spike of shame in her chest. Here she is, angsting endlessly about how terrible she has it for being adored ‘too much’ and Luna’s dad doesn’t even remember to feed her every day. Mum and Dad may coddle her, but isn’t it better to be coddled than to be neglected?
Ron’s neglected, probably; Mum and Dad seem to forget about him sometimes. They never forget about Ginny even when she wants them to. Those are two separate problems, she thinks, and they’re both sort of resolving themselves. Here in this castle, Ron is the well-known one between them and Ginny is forgotten. She isn’t mad about the change, she’s just… well, she doesn’t know how she feels. A little sad, maybe; possibly a tiny bit hurt. It’s a big change living in a place where Ron is the one people care about and she could disappear at any moment and just be alone. She's happy for him, she guesses. He gets to have a family, and she gets to not have a family; it’s all either of them have ever wanted.
It’s stifling to be adored, but at least she’s loved.
They step out onto the grounds just as the sun is reaching its highest point in the sky. It’s hot, sunshine warm against her face, and Luna’s pale hair glows like a unicorn’s mane. It sticks onto the blue of her eyes and makes them sparkle; Luna closes her eyes and lowers down onto the grass. Lying down on her side, she begins to roll down the hill. Ginny grins and sprints down after her, whooping. At the bottom of the hill, she collapses into a fit of giggles and Luna stands up with a smile, brushing grass from her clothes. She’s got grass stains on her elbows and knees.
Madam Hooch is just setting out the brooms as they arrive, still five minutes early. There are two long lines of them, thirty or so; Ginny and Luna stick towards the end of one of the lines and huddle next to each other.
Ginny crouches next to the broom and outstretches her hand. Next to her, Luna shifts so that her shadow is blocking the sun from Ginny’s face to stop it from blinding her. Ginny clears her throat.
“Up,” she says, and the broom wobbles.
“Better than last time,” Luna observes, and Ginny smiles with thin lips and no humour because it’s better than last time but last time sucked and this time also sucks. Why can’t she just get it on the first try? Why can’t she be naturally talented at this?
“Up,” Ginny says, and the broom wobbles. She narrows her eyes, glaring down at it, then takes a deep breath and lets the tension seep out of her body. She’s fine. She is totally nonchalant and unbothered, actually. Broom? What broom? She doesn’t care about a broom. It’s just Ginny here, talking to the ground with no expectations that anything will happen.
“Up,” she mutters, and the broom jumps up into her hand. She smiles in triumph and stands.
“First try!” Luna cheers, dancing away to grab her own broom, and the moment she looks away Ginny stops smiling. It wasn’t her first try, and if Ginny isn’t first she isn’t good enough. She’s a miracle, after all, and miracles don’t suck at silly things like getting their broom to obey them.
The rest of the class filters in over the next few minutes, grabbing their brooms and mounting them. Ginny slings her legs over the broom handle and upon Madam Hooch’s whistle she pushes off into the air. The ground grows further and further away from her feet.
She feels a phantom twinge in her arm, like the ghost of the broken bone pushing against her skin, writhing like a parasite in her flesh, trying to break free. Ginny grabs her forearm and squeezes it tightly, and when she lets go all that’s left behind is a faint soreness. She breathes in, then out, and then in and out again. She’s fine. She drifts higher.
They’re not allowed higher than the top of the spectator towers, but Ginny gets pretty damn close. It’s colder up here, though the sun is warming her slightly; she shivers slightly. Shaking her head, she flies higher.
Twenty minutes later, she attempts a dive and falls off of her broom into a puddle of mud. If that’s not a metaphor for something, she doesn’t know what is. She should have known she wasn’t good enough to try anything more than hovering in circles.
Ginny stomps back to her common room with angry tears pricking at her eyes. She blinks hard to get rid of them. One long shower later, she is divested of the mud but not of her humiliation. Avoiding her roommates’ questioning gazes, she tugs her curtains closed and curls up on her bed. The duvet is soft around her, and the pillows are perfect for shoving her head into so that she can pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist. Head still buried in her pillow, she reaches for her diary. She didn’t think she left it underneath her pillow, but now that she thinks about it, where else would it be except for exactly where she needs it to be?
Sniffing and rubbing at her eyes, Ginny grabs a pen and starts writing.
‘I didn’t do well at flying,’ she writes, and as she scribbles the words out an angry tear falls onto the page and soaks in, ‘It’s so stupid. I just want to prove them all wrong. All of my brothers can fly perfectly fine, and then the one girl in the family is bollocks at it. Mum’s only going to take this as more of a confirmation that I shouldn’t be allowed to fly with them.’
It takes a little while for Tom to write back, but when his handwriting finally appears on the page it is a long paragraph.
‘Ginny,” he responds, ‘It’s absolutely fair to be upset about that. Your brothers aren’t inherently better than you just because they’re boys, nor are they more competent at flying than you. Your mother shouldn’t box you into the role of a ‘girly girl’ just because you might not be as good at flying as them. However, it is also important that you remember that five flying lessons don’t define you as a quidditch player. There is always room for improvement if you can remain committed to practicing and developing your skills.’
‘Thanks, Tom,’ Ginny scribbles, ‘You understand me so well.’
‘Of course I do,’ says the writing that floats onto the page, letters neat and tidy and oh so sensible looking, ‘I’m your friend, after all. That’s what friends do.’
Ginny smiles. She hadn’t considered them to be friends, but the word seems to fit perfectly. Tom is her friend, isn’t he?
‘Thanks, Tom,” she writes, and she closes her diary and hugs it close to her chest. She falls asleep like that, huddled on top of her bed with her diary clutched in her arms. It feels warm, probably just because it’s absorbing her body heat.
Ginny wakes up on the couch in the common room and has no idea why she’s there. It’s dark out, and she’s still in her thin lacy nightie, and there’s no one else around. The room is silent. Even the fire is out, and so there is no noise but the faint hum of the world far outside. She shivers.
Her diary is on the couch next to her. She grabs it and stands, nearly tripping over her feet as she hurries back up the stairs to her dormitory.
In her bed, Ginny huddles, unable to fall asleep. She considers asking Tom what happened, but he probably wouldn’t know.
The next week, she goes to flying class again. She doesn’t get the dive right, but she doesn’t fall off her broom this time. Madam Hooch looks at her with an appraising eye and mutters something about ‘potential’. Ginny grins and runs to tell Tom. After she’s done with that, she goes to tell Luna. The other girl smiles and hugs her, and it’s warm but not as warm as it could have been. Ginny finds herself shivering a little more recently. It is getting close to Christmas, though, so the weather’s cooling. That’s probably it.
Time passes, and Ginny doesn’t feel it as acutely as she thinks she should. It’s kind of lonely in this castle, she realises, but it’s welcome to be left alone. She’s gone from a place where people would pay attention to her even when she didn’t want them to to a place where she’s left alone even when she wants to be around someone. Tom fills that void within her, and Luna too, but it’s a lot easier to have a conversation with Tom. He’s there every step of the way as she improves her flying, and he helps her to understand the more difficult parts of her classwork, and when she doesn’t want to answer her Mum’s latest long, rambling letter Tom helps her draft a response that isn’t as rude as it is in her mind.
The months blend together, and Ginny doesn’t feel it. She wakes up some nights with sore feet and red underneath her fingernails and her diary in her arms, blankets kicked off even when she knows she was shivering while getting into bed.
She meets Luna in their usual place, a hallway near the forbidden girls bathrooms that rarely if ever has anyone pass by. It’s perfect for having a sensitive discussion.
“I feel like I’m… losing time, or something?” Ginny explains, arms cuddled around herself in a makeshift hug. Luna hums.
“How?”
She shrugs, arms tightening. “I keep waking up in places I didn’t fall asleep or finding myself in a different hallway than the one I was walking through.”
“Maybe the wrackspurts in your head are getting too populous?” Luna says.
Ginny rolls her eyes at the silliness. “No, I use the wrackspurt funnel you got me every week. It can’t be that.”
“Then it has to be your weird diary,” the other girl shrugs, and Ginny bristles.
“What– what do you mean, “weird diary”?” she demands, “There’s nothing wrong with my diary!”
“It’s got bad vibes.”
Ginny shakes her head, suddenly furious. “Shut up! You’re just jealous I have another friend and you don’t! At least Tom understands me!”
Real hurt flashed across Luna’s face; she stood up, grabbing her bag. “Fine.”
“Go away, Luna!” snaps Ginny, and the other girl does just that, hurrying down the corridor. Her sharp footsteps fade quickly. Ginny is left alone in the hallway.
She reaches into her bag for her diary and all of a sudden is struck with a realisation.
Tom is manipulating her. He must be. She never would have snapped at Luna like that before, because they’re best friends and best friends don’t do that. She loves Luna and all of her strange little quirks and the creatures that only the other girl can see, and she would never call her silly even in her head. Luna said the diary had weird vibes and Luna is never, ever wrong about that sort of thing.
Ginny stumbles to her feet, hand grasping the diary, and sprints down the hall towards the bathrooms at the end of the hall. The floor is slightly slippery but she picks her way over it anyway until she reaches the nearest stall. Into the toilet bowl she shoves the diary, and then she depresses the flusher handle as quickly as she can.
There is a great wet sound from the toilet as the book is sucked down into it. Ginny turns to walk away.
“Who dares shove a book down my toilet!” comes the screeching voice of Moaning Myrtle from the toilet, accompanied by the rumble of water ready to explode out of pipes, and Ginny runs before she can be spotted. She skids the rest of the way out of the room, soles slippery, and crashes into the wall. She’s breathing hard from the adrenaline.
Unconsciously, her hand drifts to her side to tell Tom about her newest fright. Instead, she sprints down the hall, grabs her bag from the alcove, and gets the hell out of there.
Over the next few days, she’s pale and withdrawn. Suddenly, everything in the world is bigger and scarier than she remembers without the veil of whatever Tom was across her mind. Flying is scarier now. Schoolwork is harder now. The castle is enormous and ugly and she can’t even bring herself to explore it because Luna isn’t here with her. She nearly kills Fred for sneaking up on her one night, wand shoved into his side the moment he touches her, and though half the common room cheers and he shrugs it off with a grin she is still horrified. Who has she become; some skittish little girl who squeaks at any halfway strange look? Some baby who the rest of Gryffindor sees as an adorable way to get the twins to lay off? Is that what she’s been reduced to?
Her rumination is cut short when she sees Harry Potter in the common room laughing along, a familiar little black book in his lap. She is seized with a mighty fear like she’s drowning in it, suddenly gripped by the thought of him writing to Tom and Tom telling him exactly what she’s written, all those god-awful fears and worries and requests for help like she’s stupid and incompetent, and Merlin, all the things she’s written about Harry himself! Oh, what horrors Tom could parrot back to the Boy-Who-Lived!
Does her skin still rise into gooseflesh at the thought of talking to the diary again? Yes, but it would be worse for Harry Potter to do so.
She steals it from his room the next day. She huddles in her little alcove near the bathrooms, one girl in enough space for two, and opens it.
‘Hello, Tom,’ she writes, and then she stops understanding what’s going on around her.
Ginny starts writing to Tom, and once she starts she can’t stop. She stops going to free flying days in order to keep talking to it. She keeps losing time and waking up with blood on her hands and she can’t even tell anyone, because they’ll think she’s just a silly little girl who can’t take care of herself and is too weak to resist a diary. Every time she opens her mouth, the shame overpowers the need and she tells no one. She’s independent, see. She can take care of herself. Percy thinks she’s awfully pale recently, and that she hasn’t been eating enough or has perhaps been gripped by the fear pervading the castle.
“No,” she wants to tell him, “I am pervading the castle. There is blood on my hands when I wake up and my nighties come back from the wash pink because the elves can’t get it all out. I think I heard the ouroboros painting on the fourth floor talking to me. I keep having dreams– no, not dreams– nightmares, where I am surrounded by yellow eyes and I hear laughter and then I wake up and my arm hurts. I keep floating higher and higher and I don’t know when I’m gonna fall. There are bones in my room, my bones on top of your bones on top of everyone else’s bones; I open my eyes in the dark and I see the skulls that will be there in fifty years when all of our corpses have rotted away where they once laid. Can’t you push your fingers into my mind and sense what’s going on so that I don’t have to say it aloud? Why don’t you see me for the monster I am, the monster that I’ve become, the one I’m letting myself be? Dig into the most secret parts of my mind and find the cruelty there, and know that I am helping a monster make me a monster.”
Ginny says nothing, and one day she wakes up on a cold stone floor and knows that the monster has succeeded.
She doesn’t remember a lot of what happens in the Chamber of Secrets. Afterwards, white-faced, strong-jawed Mum sweeps her into a hug and says that she was taken, forced to be a hostage for a mad diary. Dad sighs and shouts at her about knowing better than to trust a talking book, and maybe he cries too as he buries his face into the crown of her head.
She doesn’t go home on the train; her parents take her home with them through the floo. They give her soup and bundle her up in a blanket like she’s a shock victim. The next day, she wakes up past noon to the sound of her brothers’ shouting and whooping as they play quidditch carried by the wind to her window.
At the end of the year, Ginny is back where she started; watching out the window as her brothers fly. It's all going back to the way it was, isn’t it? This whole debacle will only cement to her parents that she’s a fragile little baby that can’t be trusted to take care of herself at all, nevermind the fact that not a single one of her brothers could have saved themselves from a basilisk. No, it’s Ginny who’s uniquely delicate. It’s Ginny who won’t be allowed out of the house for the rest of the summer and possibly until the end of time.
That night, she crawls out the window. It’s easy enough to sneak out of the house from her room; she just shimmies across the wall a bit and then jumps over onto the nearby magnolia tree, and from there it’s easy to climb down and steal away from the house. She doesn’t usually go further than the little seat she’s worn into the tree from years of midnight angst sessions, but tonight she leaves.
Luna’s house isn’t far away. It’s a ramshackle thing in the distance, connected to the Burrow by nothing more than a well-worn dirt path that forms the halfway line for the quidditch field. Ginny takes her time walking.
She does a bird-call outside of Luna’s window and waits. Countless sleepovers have taught her that Luna is a very light sleeper and tonight is no exception; she opens the front door within minutes, clad in a warm sweatshirt and jeans. Ginny offers her a tentative smile, shifting on the balls of her feet and forcing herself to hold eye contact. Mum always says the best way to show sincerity is good eye contact; well, too much and you look like a serial killer, but Ginny’s pretty sure she hits the balance right. Luna blinks at her, face soft with sleep and vulnerability.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and Luna smiles, and with that all is forgiven. They’re eleven years old, it turns out, and when you’re eleven your apologies don’t have to be grand and wise, just sincere. When you’re eleven, sometimes things really are just that easy.
“Wanna go flying?” Luna asks, and Ginny nods.
Luna goes to the shed at the end of the field and comes out with two ancient-looking brooms, one of which she gives to Ginny. She hoists it in her hand, testing the weight. It’s missing a lot of bristles and the end is slightly bent like someone crashed and broke it, but it’s usable.
It’s still dark out when they reach the field, though the first hues of dawn are trailing over the tree line. Ginny puts the broom on the ground and crouches next to it, extending a hand.
“Up,” she says, and the immense powers of character development and narrative importance that she was relying on do not work; the broom doesn’t move. She sighs.
“Up,” Ginny says tiredly, and the broom jumps into her hand. Well, it's good enough.
She shoots into the air, wind whipping past her face. Below her, Luna cheers and begins to steadily climb higher until she reaches Ginny’s level. Not waiting for her to speak, Luna zip away and Ginny follows her, giggling.
They spend an hour or two in the air just flying around. Ginny does a few dives and though she falls off once or twice the grass muffles her landing. She keeps getting up, though. Luna does a pretty good job keeping up too; she’s not quite as interested in quidditch as Ginny, but nevertheless she’s happy to chase after each other like they’re rival seekers out for the same snitch.
After a while, they’re tired. Luna drifts to the ground and watches Ginny as she does the last of her tricks. She does a dive, then a Wronki Feint thing that she’s not actually able to pull off, and then she attempts to do a loop-de-loop. As she reaches the apex of the circle, her hands slip; her fingernails graze the handle but fail to grip, and she falls.
She lands on the ground with a dull thump, and immediately pain stabs through her. Almost instinctively, she reaches for her left arm to grip the skin there, but she’s surprised to see that that part is still intact. In fact, it’s her right forearm that is already bruising a bright purple-red.
“Shit,” Luna says.
Ginny laughs, because it is objectively funny that the only two times she’s snuck out of the house and ridden a broom she’s broken an arm. Then she cries, great heaving sobs, for the pain and for herself and Luna and for Ron and the twins, and for Tom, and for Harry Potter, and once more for herself. Her bone is pressing against her skin and Ginny’s other hand hovers over it, unsure of whether to touch it or leave it alone. She’s never been able to leave anything alone, really, so she touches it and the pain whites out her mind, and she sobs for the pain once again.
Then she laughs, because it feels beautiful to laugh like this. Luna laughs too. They giggle for minutes on end, rolling in the grass together, until eventually their chests burn and their throats are dry from the crisp summer air. Ginny coughs, swallowing convulsively, as Luna reaches out a hand. Ginny takes it.
They trek back to Luna’s house to put the brooms away, pushing through the long grass to shove them into the shed at the far end of the house. Its door creaks as they open it and dislodges a spiderweb. The sun is nearly up as they leave and head over to the Burrow.
As they approach, Ginny hangs back, nervous. She turns to Luna.
“Can you…?”
“Sure,” Luna says, and she skips up to the window and raps on it. From inside, Ginny hears Mum turn down the song warbling on the radio, though the sound of dishes clinking against each other above the sink remains.
“Luna?” Mum exclaims, confused.
“Hi, Mrs Weasley. Ginny broke her arm.”
There is a tremendous clatter from the kitchen as the array of floating dishes all drop into the sink at one. For a beat, there is silence.
“What?”