Now

Now

By: steel lily (Nell)

Rating: Erm…PG or a light PG-13.

A/N: This is with utmost thanks to my wonderful and spazztastic beta Amber (MalfoyMyFerret), the Beta Empress of the World and Queen of All That Is HTML.

Disclaimer: I am not J.K. Rowling, although I think it would be rather fun and lucrative to try my hand at.

Ginny lies outside, the wind stroking her hair, the half-dead grass rustling stiffly. It is quiet in the lazy golden light, and Ginny savors it. With six brothers quiet does not come easily.

She was sixteen yesterday.

There was a celebration because with Mum there was always a celebration. Bill or Charlie or Fred or George or Ron or Ginny seated at the place of honor, flushed slightly pink but happy to be singled out in a family of seven simply for being born.

But it seemed somehow subdued.

And Ginny knew why. This was war. She smelled it in the urgency of the air and in the worried, anguished glances Mum and Dad gave each other when they thought she wasn’t looking. The deaths and the determined faces of Harry, Ron and Hermione, who will fight to the death but will always strive to keep Ginny out of the fray. Ginny is supposed to be spoiled, the youngest child, the princess of the Weasley clan, but she is spoiled in more ways than one.

She is still the little girl with two bright pigtails, skin pale as parchment in dim light, and fingers perpetually stained with ink.

She can run, she can get on the awful secondhand broom Percy thought he was doing her a favor by sending with a terribly pompous note telling her she’d always been the most promising of his siblings, but she can’t hide. It used to be that soaring through the air made her feel free but now nothing can.

Nothing but…

Ginny wonders sometimes if Hermione knows. Hermione observes things, she knows. Hermione is sharp and wouldn’t tell Ron or Harry if she knew, if she knew about stolen kisses and murmured passions.

Hermione is supposed to be her best friend. Ginny can’t help but think the term is a stupid one, used too often. She knows that girls like Lavender and Parvati like to whisper to each other about girlish fancies and who said what to whom, where. But such things don’t interest Ginny. She was flattered when Hermione told her, smiling with a faint flush, about Viktor Krum, and reciprocated by telling her about Michael. Silly Michael with the stubborn face. Ginny had pulled him to meetings of Dumbledore’s Army, but the pretense was too great to keep up. It was simple to fend him off with a silly, simple excuse.

And Harry.

Harry with the strange look in his green eyes. Ginny thinks sometimes that he is only a silly boy too, that they are all silly with their hopes and dreams. He and Hermione and her big brothers and the rest. She knows she used to be hopelessly in love with him. She tells Draco that.

He whispers to her, kisses fluttering down her pale neck, that then she didn’t know what love was.

Sometimes she still thinks she doesn’t. She doesn’t know why she comes to him so willingly, so hopelessly, and neither does he.

It intoxicates her. Heady and passionate, she feels like she needs to gasp, to come up for air. With him she is no longer the little girl, fingers stained with ink, her family insists upon her being.

Ginny doesn’t believe in hopes. She knows that even if Tom is killed, the world will not be glimmering rainbow.

Ginny believes in now.

She feels sometimes like she needs to seize the present, clutch it close to her. Otherwise it will get away.

That, she thinks sometimes, is why she goes to Draco. But she doesn’t tell him.

Ginny lies there still, oblivious to the noise, only a lazy hum pervading her silence. She knows eventually she will have to get up, knows that the grass can’t be doing anything good to her new jeans, knows that Mum will be worried.

But somehow, everything’s okay for now.