Disclaimer: Anything you recognize isn't mine.

Little Girl

In the aftermath, so many times, she feels as if she's been enveloped in one enormous wave of salty ocean water, forced to kick and scream and fight her way to the surface, just to find a place to breathe, but she'll do it. She will; she has to, because she's Ginevra Molly Weasley, and she has never been anything but a fighter.

(Always – from the day that she was born, much too early, a sickly, sort of impermanent infant… but she lived, didn't she? For even then, she must have had something in her – some sort of inner strength, some perseverance, which made her push onward, always onward.)

So she shoves back against the giant hole in her heart, the great sadness that tries to fill it, like sea water, after Fred's death. She combats the cloud of depression, ever-present, always a threat, that permeates the corridors and the rooms of her house, where it seems, no one can do anything without it being about Fred anymore.

(She'll beat it, even if everyone else seems to have given up.)

The laughter in the Burrow always has an edge to it now, as though no one can be happy without thinking that they shouldn't. There ware gaps in conversations where she can see, where they can all see – his – name, fitting like a glove, like a puzzle piece. It's a twisted piece now though, ripped and shredded, right once, but no longer.

Everything in her house is like that now – the right things in the wrong places, the wrong things in all the right ones… People do things that they have never done before, and it grates on her nerves like a badly played violin, like the screech of fingernails on a blackboard. She wants to scream at them, sometimes, wants to say, act normal, act normal, you bloody God forsaken whiners, act normal because I can't deal with it otherwise!

George never stirs from their – his – room, and her mum all too often lets the stew burn while she collapses, sobbing, onto the aged wood of the kitchen floor, dirty because it has not been swept nearly as often as it used to. The whole house, really, is muddled, confused, impeccably clean in some places, when her mother's grief manifested itself in a gigantic show of her skills as a house wife. But in other rooms, there were piles of garbage that never would have lasted a second before. And some people went through all of his things, threw half of them out and put the rest with the ghoul in the attic, while the rest of the family constantly undid this, taking out all of the things half of them had never paid any attention to before – to cry over.

Like her mum and brother, Charlie, too, annoys her, angers her, in his constant refusal to play Quidditch. Usually, he does not even meet her eyes, for she had fought in the Battle of Hogwarts while he was too late, too late. Sometimes, even her father fell victim to the despair that seemed out for them all... He has never looked so old to her as when he sits in their old stuffed green chair. Once, it was the spot where he used to tell her bedtime stories, often about Muggles, whenever her mum was out of earshot…

But it is Harry who angers her most, Harry, who is forever either in a fit of melancholy or a fit of joy, or usually, both – a heightened example of the jubilated grief that has claimed them all. Yet in any of his strange moods, there is always a dark spot in his eyes, a twist to his smile, a constant reminder to her that he seemed fundamentally unable to get over the past. He would never, ever listen to her, never get it, even when she told him, again and again and again that it wasn't his fault, that it had never been his fault.

She refuses to be like that, to be like him. She's not going to sit around and cry and mope and wish that her older brother was still alive.

Like that could bring him back.

(Like anything could.)

Yet in spite of all her efforts and strength, of all the brave faces she puts on, the irrational walls she erects in her head, she still cries, sometimes… At night, into her pillow, out on the front lawn, among the trees, wherever, whenever, she lets her guard slip, whenever she is alone, whenever she thinks no one is watching. And isn't what you do in those times that, they say, truly defines you?

So she reckons it's those moments that undo it all, that undo her, as a fighter, as someone who will never lose, and leave her, weakened, naked before the world, nothing more than a little girl who misses her brother.

It's one of those times now, out in the apple orchard where she had gone to practice Quidditch but soon dropped her broom and crumbled into tears. She doesn't hear him approach, until he says her name, and it is only then that she realizes how loud her own sobs must have been, that she did not even hear his heavy, bumbling footsteps.

She looks up at him, defiantly, angrily wiping her eyes, embarrassed that it was he of all people that found her here. The time when they used to play together, on this very lawn, exiled from the Quidditch games their older brothers – save for Percy – played constantly. It was a long time ago; they could not have been more than five and six. She remembers him explaining magic to her, when she made it explode out of her, once, and turn Charlie's broomstick a bright shade of purple.

Since they both started at Hogwarts, however, he has been too close, in age, in school, for her to actually like. He was always too interested in her business, always sticking her overly long nose where it did not belong, as though he had authority over her. He is forever saying the wrong thing, forever telling her what to do, so very immature, such a prat… She has never been able to understand what Hermione sees in him.

But he looks taller, now, his cheeks longer and thinner, somehow. She wonders if perhaps he has grown up, this past year he spent, with Harry and Hermione (without her), grown up, after watching Fred die, after carrying his body…

She waits, lying on the grass in the place she thought she was safe in, waiting for his taunt or his stupid joke – not cruelly meant but hurtful just the same – for he has at last found her crying, like she would never do in front of him, like she would never do in front of anyone. She waits, for him to patronize her, to cry too, to lecture, to blame himself, to turn away, not able to deal with the tears – like Harry would, or Charlie, or Hermione or George or even her parents, all of whom would do one of these… Like he would have, once.

"Come on, Ginny. Let's go back to the house."

She stares at him a moment, squinting in the sun, before slowly, getting up to follow. He leads her back through the trees and the grass to the Burrow, her hand in his, like they are five and six again, and she thinks that perhaps it's not the worst thing in the world, to be a little girl, a little sister, again.