A/N: Written for the darling .princess as a prize from the Reviews Lounge Too Green Room. My ability to write like a human being seems to be pretty undercut lately, but I tried. XD Hope you enjoy it, lovely!

The Help

Ginny's graffiti isn't quite finished when Astoria rounds the corner into the corridor. POTTER FOR PRESID, announce the stones in the wall, painted green as Harry's eyes or Astoria's house colors. She wore them on her dress robes at the Yule Ball, Ginny still remembers: lime silk trimmed with silver lining. They could all use a bit of silver lining these days, but the ball was so many miles ago and still driving away, and there's laughter in the skid marks and dust still skinning her eyes.

"Of course it's you," says Astoria, which seems a bit unnecessary to Ginny considering it's the umpteenth time she's been caught this month alone, but all swords have a double edge, and here's hers.

"What, going to report me?"

Her prefect's badge gleams. "Maybe in the morning. Come hold me," Astoria tells her, so she does.

She smells like shortcake, and it mixes badly with the paint staining Ginny's hands. Now she can say literally that she breaks everything she touches. "We've got to stop meeting like this. I'm not—I mean, I don't—…"

"I know."

"Harry might still be alive."

"I know."

Ginny doesn't remember how she started kissing Astoria, or when, just that it's always the last time and that they always do this, dodging glances in Defense class and tossing eyes behind their clasped hands. Ginny's a dangerous choice for a rendezvous, and anyway she's got a boyfriend, sort of not really, and besides Astoria is so remarkably unlikable, when you think about it: understanding to the point of patronizing and, afterward, quick to run away. Unfortunately, Ginny doesn't know how to run away. She chafes her feet raw from the chasing.

Astoria interrupts, "It's strange you do it by hand. Everybody else uses magic, from the looks of it."

"Yes, well." She's had plenty of practice, all those acres ago, and it jars her that she can't remember a whit of it but the blood on her hands after the chamber of secrets had been opened, enemies of the heir beware. The green helps, green like Astoria's robes. It helps, too, to fill in the gaps by doing the thing by hand, because Ginny's mind is full of spaces, like an Undetectable Extension Charm that somebody threw away, like Grimmauld Place.

"You're very sad. Are you very sad?"

"This helps."

"You sure?" Astoria asks. She's not. But there's nothing left to embrace anymore, between Snape and the Carrows and the locked up sword of Gryffindor (these things Ginny grasps at now that everything else has lost its footing, Ron missing and Harry missing and Neville's face torn up like a garden), and Astoria's hair is close enough. When Astoria goes, she misses her all the time, and Astoria always goes because she knows better, unlike Ginny, who can't afford to.

Clinging to Astoria's collarbone, she says, "I'm going to go now," and the dust doesn't protest when she kicks it up on the way out.