“Ginny! Ginny Weasley! Come down here right now! You’re going to miss the train if you don’t hurry up!” Ginny heard her mother shout from the kitchen, but she still refused to move. From her position lying on her bed, she glanced around at her walls, the posters and peeling paint. She picked at the worn bedspread, the one that had belonged to Bill in years past.
Her eyes finally stopped as she gazed up at the ceiling, and thought about how different going to King’s Cross was going to be this year. How different Hogwarts was going to be. She was the only one left. The only one left of the Weasley clan going to Hogwarts this year. What would Hogwarts be like without my friends? Without Dumbledore? Just the thought was starting to make her feel sick, as though she shouldn’t go at all.
“Ginevra Molly Weasley! If you’re not down here in ten seconds, I’m coming up there after you!” Ginny closed her eyes and sighed. “Ten! Nine! Eight!”
Ginny rolled off of her bed and grabbed the handle of her trunk in one hand, and put Arnold’s cage against her hip, and walked out of her room, clanking the trunk down the stairs behind her.
“Five! Four!” her mother continued.
“Yes, Mum! I’m coming!” Ginny answered in exasperation as she reached the bottom of the stairs. “Can we just go now?”
Molly Weasley glanced at her daughter. “Now, Ginny, why are you wearing your Hogwarts things?”
Ginny glanced down at her outfit. She wore one of her white, long-sleeved, button-down shirts along with a gray skirt. Her Gryffindor tie was hanging loosely around her neck.
“What about it, Mum? Now I just have to put on my robes on the train. It’s less fuss,” Ginny replied. She didn’t want to tell her mother the real reason that she hadn’t worn what she would usually wear, a Weasley jumper and a pair of jeans. She had decided that morning that wearing her usual outfit was like she was trying to preserve the way things used to be. And she knew, even then, that things were going to be much, much different.
“Yes, well, I suppose so. We are just going to Side-Apparate, safer this way, now that it’s only you going.”
Ginny grimaced as her mother took her trunk in one hand, and Ginny’s in the other. They both gripped tightly as Ginny felt the familiar sensation of being stuffed through a rubber tube.
***
“Have a good term, Ginny,” Molly Weasley told her daughter, hugging her as tightly as she could. “And be careful, won’t you?”
Ginny nodded and waved goodbye. She then took her trunk and Arnold’s cage onto the train, dragging it along the corridor. She sincerely hoped that she would not run into Dean Thomas. He would soon find out that she and Harry weren’t together anymore and she really did not want to have to deal with him trying to get back together with her. It was hard enough to go without Harry. When she was with Harry, she felt like the whole world was in place. Being with Dean, after having been with Harry, just seemed like a waste of time.
“Ginny!” she heard the familiar voice of Luna Lovegood coming out of a nearby compartment.
When Luna’s head popped out of the compartment, Ginny wasn’t sure what to think. All she knew was this- it was going to be a long train ride.
***
Dinner turned out to be just as awkward as the train ride had. During the journey, Luna and Neville had tried small talk, but Ginny had been hard spent trying to reciprocate. She had spent most of the ride staring at the passing countryside and sleeping. Once inside Hogwarts, she had thought things might get better, until she had ended up in the awkward position of not knowing who to sit by. Sitting between Neville, and the infamous Colin Creevey had not been her exact plan.
Colin felt that this was the time to press her with questions about where Harry was.
“Where is he? Is he off fighting You-Know-Who? Did he decide to take a flying car again like in our first year? Are he, Ron, and Hermione planning some plot to overthrow Snape as we speak? Are they going to swoop in on brooms just like Fred and-“
“Colin!” Ginny cut him off as they food arrived magically on the plates before them. Why couldn’t he just be quiet for five minutes?
Ginny absentmindedly ate her food. She listened to the beginning lines of Snape’s speech in his normal boring drawal. Instead of concentrating on the speech she knew would be glamorizing the Dark Arts, she tried to imagine what Harry, Ron, and Hermione would be doing right about now. Where were they hiding out? Did they have a plan for taking down You-Know-Who? Did they have a plan for her? She suddenly stopped the trail of questions, realizing that she sounded a lot like Colin. She noticed at the same time that Snape’s speech had finished and stood up and stalked out of the Great Hall, beating the large rush of people heading to their Dorms.
Ginny rushed up the large flight of stairs until she reached the Fat Lady. She stared blankly at the portrait.
“Can’t you just let me in?” Ginny asked, pleadingly.
“Sorry, dear, stricter security, more than ever. The Headmaster originally decided against using passwords and such, but McGonagall felt it unsafe. You’ll have to wait for a Prefect,” the Fat Lady replied, as if it were Ginny’s fault that she was the only portrait that had to guard the entrance to some of the students’ dorms.
“But, can’t you tell I’m a Gryffindor? I’ve been through this portrait a thousand times!”
“I wish there was something I could do.” The Fat Lady shrugged and went back to sharing a glass of wine with her friend, Violet.
“Perfect, just perfect,” Ginny muttered under her breath as she sat down next to the portrait. Just as she sat down on the cold stone floor, she saw a body beginning to ascend the stairs.
And, for a moment, she swore it was Harry running up the stairs towards her. Ginny slowly got to her feet as stranger reached the top of the stairs. He was tall, less lanky than Harry, with the same black hair. His was longer, and it didn’t stick up in the back, but lay perfectly flat. Instead of emerald eyes, brown ones stood out from under the hair.
“Need the password, eh?” he said simply. “It’s ‘chocolate frogs’. McGonagall thought it would be appropriate, considering that’s not the Headmaster’s password any longer.”
“Indeed it is,” the Fat Lady replied as the portrait swung open. The boy gestured for Ginny to go in first, and he followed behind her.
Once inside the common room, Ginny said, “Thanks, who knows how long I would have been sitting out there.”
“No problem, Ginny,” he replied, graciously.
“This might side a bit rude, but, um, who are you, exactly?” Ginny asked, her curiosity taking over.
“You know me, Ginny. I’ve been in practically all of your classes since first year,” he answered as if she had just said something very funny.
“Sorry, I don’t,” Ginny responded, embarrassed.
“Zach Rosen, I’m Tory’s twin brother,” he said, nonchalantly.
“Zach? Zach Rosen? By Merlin, you’ve changed! You used to wear glasses,” Ginny started, dumbfounded.
“Oh, I got them fixed with that potion for eyesight.”
“And you were shorter than I am!”
“I had a growth spurt.”
“And your hair! It used to be less than inch long!”
“I let it grow out.”
“But weren’t you sick or something? In St. Mungos for a while, weren’t you? Didn’t you get some weird flu?”
“Um, yeah, I haven’t been back at school since March. That’s when they fixed my eyesight.”
“Well, you look, um, better, loads better.” Realizing that she had just implied that he hadn’t look the best before, shecorrected herself. “Well, I mean, you look, well, what I meant to say was-“
“It’s alright, Ginny, you can say it. I was a bit weird, and I looked awful with that hair, didn’t I? But look at you! I mean, you grew your hair out as well. Why the change?”
“Oh, well, my, uh, boyfriend, said he liked it better long so…” Ginny answered, shrugging as she took a seat on the nearby couch, and he followed suit, taking a chair across from her.
“Dean, right? Where is he this year? Haven’t seen him around,” Zach questioned, looking around as though he might suddenly appear.
“I’m not with Dean,” Ginny corrected.
“Oh, who then?” Zach asked, curiously.
“Well- well- I’m not with him anymore, but, um, Harry Potter, actually,” Ginny sheepishly answered.
“You and Harry?” he asked, unbelievingly. “You finally got him, did you? Didn’t you and Colin Creevey have a sort of Harry Potter Fan Club back in first year?”
“We did not have a Harry Potter Fan Club!” she corrected, half-laughing. “Though Colin did mention it once.”
Zach laughed out loud. “Well, I, um, better go unpack,” he said, pointing at the staircase.
“Yeah, me too,” Ginny answered, quickly.
“Well, it was good seeing you, Ginny.”
“Yeah, you too, Zach.”
With a wave, he ran up the stairs, two at time, leaving Ginny in the Common Room, slightly confused at what just had happened. She had never talked to Zach for more than a few words before, and now she had just spent the last ten minutes talking to him.
I guess Hogwarts is very different this year.
***
Later that night, Tory Rosen, Zach’s twin sister, came into the sixth year Gryffindor girls’ room.
“So, I guess it’s just the two of us,” Tory said, uncertainly, as she sat down on the bed next to Ginny’s.
“Yeah, it’s kind of weird, isn’t it? I mean, I always thought that there would be five of us in here. It just feels kind of empty,” Ginny replied, lying back on her bed.
“But it seems like the whole school is like that- well, except for Slytherin. Not a person missing there.”
“Yeah,” Ginny said. “So, I ran into Zach today, he looks better.”
“Yeah, loads, I finally got him to grow out his hair. It looked bloody awful before, didn’t it?”
“Definitely,” Ginny answered, staring at the ceiling.
“Well, I’m going to go to sleep, I’m knackered,” Tory told Ginny as she began to rifle through her trunk for a pair of pajamas. After pulling them on, Tory wished Ginny goodnight, and got into bed, closing the bed hangings around her.
Ginny closed her curtains without changing her clothes and tried to fall asleep before Tory’s snoring became unbearable.
***
There were spells flying across the dark grounds. Screams and the sounds of destruction filled the air as Ginny recognized the scene around her. Hogwarts looming in the distance, hundreds of people and bodies across the familiar grounds. It was the Final Battle.
She instantly twisted her head from side to side, looking for someone familiar.
She started running, wanting to look for familiar face. And then she found it. The lifeless faces of Tonks and her mother, frozen forever in shock on the ground, people trampling across them in their haste to stay alive.
No, Ginny thought desperately. She grabbed her mother and Tonks by their clothes and began pulling with all of her weight, trying to get them out of the way. No, I have to save them, I have to save them, I can’t be too late she thought as she desperately continued to drag them through the blood splattered grass. Tears started falling freely down her face as she continued to drag them. Then, she felt something against the back of her heels. She turned around slowly and saw the faces of two of her brothers, the twins were sprawled across the ground.
No, no, no She continued to chant in her head as she tried to get them out of the way along with Tonks and her mother. The strain was getting to be to much but she couldn’t leave them alone.
“Ginny?” the familiar sound caused Ginny to turn around
Lord Voldemort. And Harry. Lord Voldemort and Harry. Ginny couldn’t get her mind around it. It was finally here, the last moments of one of their lives. The moment that both of their lives had been leading up to.
“Harry?” Ginny asked in a whispered disbelief.
“You’ll never defeat me, Harry,” Voldemort’s voice caused both of them to turn back to Voldemort and away from each other. “You can’t even throw a curse at me, let alone one that could kill me. Oh, little Harry, do you honestly think a little seventeen-year-old boy could defeat the greatest wizard of all time? Voldemort sneered at Harry.
Voldemort’s red eyes flicked over to Ginny and he smiled. He hadn’t noticed her before.
“Ginny get out of here!” he screamed at her, pleading.
“No, Harry, I’m not leaving you!” she said, somewhat out of reflex.
“Oh, look, Harry, your little girlfriend has finally caught up to us. What you thought I wouldm’t find out about her? It’s still a wonder I haven’t gotten to her already. I wonder, does our little friend remember the Chamber of Secrets? It was all her fault after all that poor Harry almost died to save her.”
“Ginny, go now, I’ll be fine. Don’t listen to him,” Harry responded.
Ginny was about to reply when she saw Voldemort raise his wand and point it at Harry’s turned back.
“And it will be your fault that he hesitated, I really wish this would have been more difficult.”
“Harry! No!”
Ginny woke up, panting loudly. She got out of bed, her legs barely working as she walked into the bathroom. She splashed cold water on her face, and then stared at herself in the mirror.
“It was a dream. Just a dream,” she told herself.
Ginny's Battle by MarauderWannabe
Chapter Notes: Hope you guys don't completely hate me......review! Thanks to Laura aka Pittsy for helping with the betaing.
Chapter Endnotes: So...what did you think? No idea when the next chapter will be up. I have a pretty good idea what will happen in the next chapter, just have no idea when I will actual be getting around to writing it. Sorry....Review!