*

Her eyes were ablaze with a passion that I had previously believed to have died out. Somehow this defiance, this tiniest hint of uprising, had lit a spark within her, and it was a welcome sight.

*

I had sat with her on that overcast September morning, sat alongside her on the train like I had done numerous times before, yet it was as if something fundamental had shifted. Her eyes, normally full of fire, were hollow. She sat, hugging her knees and staring at the compartment door, as if she was merely waiting for a delayed friend or family member. We both knew that wasn’t the case. We both knew no one was going to walk through that door. We both knew Harry wasn’t coming back.

It was if the moment Harry failed to embark upon the Hogwarts Express Ginny had begun to spiral into this… numbness. It was if she hadn’t truly believed he had left before, but it was now indisputable. She didn’t think I noticed her tears as we left Kings Cross, but I did. I noticed everything she did.

Everything I thought he knew about Ginny was no longer applicable. She was no longer a fiery redhead with an infamous temper. She was no longer able to fight emotions with laughter, and most pertinently those who loved her no longer surrounded her. There were no Weasleys remaining at Hogwarts, I knew Hermione had been a close confidante to her and Harry, well he was another matter. Her whole live she had been encompassed by love; she was the youngest, the only girl, popular and vivacious. Yet now she had no one. No one except me.

Nothing provoked her anymore. The announcement of Snape as headmaster, the first sight of the Carrows, the anti-Muggle-born propaganda thrown at us, none of it even made her flinch. She spoke only when spoken to. She was the shadow of the girl I had once known.

It was as though she were grieving, though for whom I couldn’t ascertain.

Each day I would accompany her to breakfast, then walk her to her lesson. Mainly because I was terrified that if I didn’t she simply wouldn’t go, and I felt she needed the distraction of lessons. Walking down the bustling corridors seemed to bother her; she flinched every time someone brushed past. In fact I’d noticed she recoiled every time anyone touched her, even me. Unfortunately her sudden disconnection from the world didn’t stop the stares, or the whispers, for everyone knew her to have been with Harry, and he was without a doubt the most wanted man in Britain after all. Yet she seemed oblivious. Whether she was truly oblivious, or this was just a front, I was uncertain. I wasn’t certain of anything, for conversation between us was non-existent. I would chatter incessantly, desperately trying to provoke a reaction, or even a smile, but it was no to avail. The only time she spoke was in response to direct questions, and even that was in monosyllables. At least it was something though, and I kept trying.

I watched, helpless, as Ginny crumbled before my eyes. She would push food around her plate, picking at morsels here and there. Gradually she stopped eating altogether. Her frame, once slender but with curves in all the right places, was skin and bones, something obvious as her robes began to engulf her. Her eyes became hollow, dark circles and her hair was no longer a glossy mane, but lank and matted. I had long suspected she wasn’t sleeping, something which was confirmed when I found her alone in the common room at three o’clock in the morning a few weeks into term.

She was sat, legs huddled into her chest like she had been that dark day on the train, simply staring at the fireplace. It was as if she were pleading for the flames to turn vivid green and for someone to step out. Yet they didn’t, the fire raged on red and gold, and as I stood at the foot of the stairs I knew she had withdrawn further into herself than I thought possible, and I knew now that nothing I did would pull her out of the darkness that had long since overcome her. She was a lost cause. But Gryffindors do not have lost causes. Gryffindors fight for what they believe in no matter how impossible it may seem. If I had learnt anything from sharing a dorm with Harry for six years, it was that even when it seems as though you haven’t a chance in hell of succeeding, you must still fight. For sometimes just the act of fighting is what is important, for it symbolizes your refusal to give in to the forces that threatened you.

And there was no way I was giving up on her now. She may have thought she was alone, but she wasn’t. She never had been. She had me. I just had to hope that was enough.

In the midst of Ginny’s spiral into oblivion, the world as we knew it was falling apart, just like she was. The Carrows had outlawed every method of entertainment known to Hogwarts students, including Quidditch (something which particularly pained me, for I had hoped the rush of being up in the air would help rejuvenate Ginny), and terror reigned. Cruciatus Curses were flung left, right and centre, yet somehow they had ceased to brew the same fear within me as they had once done. It was as if seeing students and teachers alike casting the Cruciatus Curse took away it’s power over me, no longer did the mere mention of it stir emotions I had little control over. Perhaps fighting for Ginny’s state of mind had allowed me to overcome my own insecurities, for suddenly having two parents tortured into insanity seemed to weigh less on my mind than rescuing Ginny from the same fate.

One of the numerous manners in which the Carrows deigned to inflict suffering and impress their supposed superiority over the student body was the withholding of post. By early October no student had received a single letter or newspaper; we were being deliberately isolated from the outside world. The Carrows seemed terrified of an uprising, thus they did everything within their power to keep us subdued. Loneliness and homesickness was rife, not least among the first years, whose only knowledge of Hogwarts was that of a place of torture. I wish they had seen it in its glory. I hoped that glory would be one day restored.

Yet I still hadn’t come up with a way to alleviate Ginny’s depression. Days turned into weeks and she became unbearably weak. Even looking at her made me feel ill. Late one night in mid October I could stomach it no longer, the girl sat beside me needed help, help I could no longer kid myself I was capable of giving. The Common Room was all but deserted, and the lack of people seemed to comfort her, for she fell asleep on the sofa. With every ounce of bravery I could muster I scooped her feeble body into my arms, and carried her out of the Common Room and towards the Hospital Wing. She needed professional help, I had been denying it all term, yet the broken girl in my arms told me I couldn’t help her any longer.

As I walked as quietly as I could towards the Hospital Wing, for being caught by the Carrows was not top of my priorities list, I began to hear voices further along the corridor. Silently cursing, I crept further, hoping to make it down the staircase before whoever the voices belonged to noticed us. Yet as I edged forwards I was able to ascertain that the voices belonged to the Carrows, and by the sounds of it they were sifting through piles of something undetermined. Then, suddenly, a hoot broke the silence, and with a pounding heart I realized what that room must contain: a month's worth of post.

The owl’s hoot seemed to have caused Ginny to stir, for she began to fidget in my arms. She opened her eyes and all I could do was hope to convey the importance of her staying silent through my own eyes. Somewhat understandably, she seemed apprehensive, as she had woken up in my arms, hidden behind a statue, in a dark corridor in the middle of the night. Yet as the Carrows carried on their discussion she seemed to catch on to why we were hiding, and mercifully remained silent, though I’m not sure why that was a surprise as silent was all I had known of her since September First.

As the Carrows left the room and headed down the staircase, a thought popped into my head. A ludicrous idea. An idea that would put me in great danger from the Carrows, but as I looked at the broken body of a girl I had once known in my arms I realized that this hare-brained idea was all I had to attempt to inject some joy back into her life.

And so I set her on her feet, took her hand, and crept along the corridor until reaching the door to the room the masters of terror had just left and muttered alohomora under my breath. To my great relief, for I had feared more complex security would be in place (but on second thoughts I doubted the Carrows were capable of more complex spellwork), the door swung open. I heard Ginny gasp beside me, for the disused classroom before us housed over a month's worth of post and newspapers intended for the entire student body. The piles closest to us were naturally the most recent correspondence, and thrust haphazardly atop a precarious looking stack of letters was a copy of the previous day’s Daily Prophet.

Emblazoned on the cover was a photo of Harry, with the words ‘Undesirable No.1’ stamped across his chest.

And then something extraordinary happened; Ginny started to cry. In all the time I’d been watching her fall apart, not once had she shown a single emotion, happy or sad. Yet here she was, tears streaming down her face.

‘It means he’s alive.’ Whether it was aimed at me or herself I was unsure, but either way it was first real words I’d heard from her in a long time. She carried on, repeating the same phrase over and over again, until it simply became ‘He’s alive!’

Clutching the newspaper to her chest, she turned round and, seemingly disregarding the look of sheer disbelief upon my face, looked up at me expectantly before saying ‘I think it’s time the school got their post, don’t you think?’ And then she smiled.

*

Breakfast the next morning was uproar. Upon every house table sat a huge mound of post we’d laboriously sorted through the previous night. The joy radiating from everyone surrounding me was astonishing, for it had been so long since we’d had any contact with the outside world that even letters and newspapers several weeks old were treasured like gold.

The Carrows stood in the doorway to the Great Hall, frozen in sheer disbelief at the sight before them.

Yet they were not my concern, for as I turned to look at Ginny beside me, not only did I realise she was eating, but her eyes were ablaze with a passion that I had previously believed to have died out. Somehow this defiance, this tiniest hint of uprising, had lit a spark within her, and it was a welcome sight.

A grin was plastered across her face, but with a heavy heart I knew it wasn’t as a result of our rule-breaking. For laid in front of her was the same copy of the Daily Prophet she had grasped onto the night before. She sat, grinning at Harry’s image.

That was when I knew that nothing I could ever have done would have fixed her. For the only person capable of that was Harry. I suddenly realized who she’d been grieving for; she’d been grieving for him, and for their relationship. Yet the knowledge that the dark forces hadn’t yet found him had reignited the fire she had once blazed with.

She had been, and she would still, wait for him.

I’ve been denying it for far too long, I put her misery down to loneliness, the fact she no longer had her family around or the fact that so many people were dying, but it wasn’t that at all, for as she gazed at his image nothing had changed, except she had seen him again, and her love for him had banished the darkness from within her, and brought her back to life.

I, Neville Longbottom, never stood a chance.