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In the chicken shed it might as well still be the eighties, as though time had only gone on for the humans living in the house on the other side of the fence, but not in here, where the hens are quietly clucking and cooing and enjoying their naps, until Ginny shakes a handful of lettuce in the air like an invitation, a beckoning – then they come hurrying towards her, beaks tearing greedily at the green leaves.
When the hens have had their fill, Ginny looks over the gaggle of bickering ladies and finds her favourite amongst them, Genoveva with her warm brown feathers and clever eyes, who yells and shrieks when Ginny lifts her up by her impossibly soft belly, crouching down in the chicken shed, and pulls the disgruntled hen to her chest.
“Look, I’ll make it up to you”, Ginny tells her quietly. She fishes sweetcorn out of the front pocket of her dungarees and holds her open palm out to Genoveva, not flinching or grimacing when the sharp beak leaves little red marks on her skin as the hen gulps down her treat.
Ginny smiles.
The summer after her first year, she climbed into the chicken shed every day. She was soothed, then, by the arrhythmic clucking and the smell of fresh hay and the fact that the hens allowed her to share their company, that they did not recoil in horror at her sight.
It was her that named them, while she sat here for hours and hours with a chicken in her lap, more often than not Genoveva, who, for all her complaining, was easily the most patient of the bunch, and who nestles into her lap now, blinking slowly in the twilight while Ginny strokes her feathers, the burning inside her ribcage dull and pulsating like that of an infected wound.
Like it was her that took the damn Killing Curse to the chest.
“You’ve no idea how lucky you are”, she mutters, meeting Genoveva’s sharp eyes. “Nothing in those little heads of yours except earthworms and soft hay.”
She sits there for ages and ages like she did that summer, willing the comfort of the soft animal to sink into her like warmth. When she finally gets up to leave the chickens be, she tosses the rest of the sweetcorn into the hay (Genoveva looks utterly betrayed), fills up the grains in the feeder, and climbs out of the shed with the smell of warm feathers and wheat straw still in her nose.
“Chicken-feeding duty?”, calls a voice from near the house as she swings her bare legs over the wooden fence and strolls back towards the Burrow. When she looks for the voice’s owner, she discovers Ron, sitting on the weathered bench below the kitchen window.
“What’re you doing out here?”, she calls out as she comes closer.
“Hiding”, he says dully. “Mum’s crying again.”
Ginny feels something inside her chest take a tumble. “Is anyone with her?”
“Yeah, I’m not that much of a dickhead. Dad and Percy and Bill are all in there.”
“You’re not a dickhead”, Ginny says automatically, surprising them both. Then: “Mind if I stay?”
He shrugs. “Be my guest.”
So she sinks on the bench beside him, joining him in his grim silence. They gaze aimlessly over the soft green hills all around, the shape of the lake like a blue thumbprint in the landscape, where they whiled away so many happier, warmer days than this, and Ottery St. Catchpole’s mismatched roofs in the distance, smoke rising from the chimneys.
Ron finally looks over at her. “Were you with the chickens this whole time? I thought you’d grown out of your obsession with them.”
Ginny musters up a grin. “Never. I love those stupid hens. That was just an elaborate ruse so I could hide in the chicken coop when we used to play hide-and-seek. It never occurred to any of you to look.”
“Well, you stopped growing at about five feet, I figure you fit right in.”
Ginny whacks him in the knee. In a true testament to the severity of the situation, Ron does not retaliate.
She tells herself it’s that, not how much they aged him, the few short months that he was gone.
It’s less blatant now that Mum has shorn back the unkempt mop of hair that was falling into his eyes and growing down the back of his neck like wild weeds when he walked through the secret entrance of the Room of Requirements with Harry and Hermione; now that he’s shaved the patchy stubble on his cheeks and his face has regained a little fullness. But sometimes she still looks at him and wonders how ten years have not passed since she watched him slip away into thin air at Bill and Fleur’s wedding.
“Did anything happen?”, she asks. “With Mum?”
Ron shrugs, expression blank. “Some fool said his name again. I never noticed how rarely we actually said the twins’ individual names until we had to break the habit of saying Fred-and-George all in one go. It’s like he’s Voldemort.”
Ginny doesn’t laugh.
“I know”, she mutters. “Don’t think it’ll ever come naturally.”
He nods mechanically. “Anyway – I made a run for it. I just couldn’t do it right then, having to comfort her and everything.”
Ginny looks over at him. “Funny, you’re so good at it.”
“You just say that because I make the best tea.”
“Well, you do.”
The same way that children can recognise each of their family members by the sound of their footsteps as heard through a wall, or the rhythmic pattern with which they knocked on the door, the Weasley siblings have learned to read each other’s silences since they’ve come home. Often now, they appear at each other’s bedroom doors at all hours of the night, shaken from nightmares or too restless to sleep or, rarely, weeping.
Most nights, two or three or four of them eventually find themselves in the kitchen, where Ginny turns on the lights, and Ron puts on the kettle, and they sit there and while away the small hours in each other’s company, in silence, in quiet understanding, in murmured chatter about nothing at all. It’s good comfort, the idea that even after everything, there’s nothing in this world that a hot cup of tea can’t fix.
Ginny shifts on the bench next to him, pulling her knees to her chest. “Remember when that fox got one of the hens? I was inconsolable, and you were so nice to me when we put her in a shoebox and buried her behind the house, you didn’t even make fun of me.”
“You lot are different, that’s easy. I just can’t take it when it’s our parents.”
Ginny hums in understanding. “I think seeing Dad cry was worse for me. At the memorial.”
“Cheers, thanks for bringing it up again.”
She snorts.
“You’re good with Harry”, she says softly. “D’you miss him at all?”
He rolls his eyes. “He just sleeps two floors below me, it’s not like he died.”
Ginny winces.
Ron does not miss the look on her face or the heaviness of her silence, as they have all learned to do, and asks in an unnaturally light tone: “How’re you coping with him waking up three times a night?”
He seems relieved, for a moment there, when she smirks.
“It’s not too bad, actually. At least he makes for a great pillow.”
Ron looks appalled. “What the hell happened to the camp bed?”
“Oh, we just keep that around for decoration now.” She grins, comforted by the opportunity to tease him. “And he doesn’t wake up as much anymore.”
His face lights up. “That’s good news, at least. Lead with that next time.”
“Oh, he’s just … stopped going to sleep altogether.”
“That really solves that problem”, he says darkly. “The idiot.”
“I don’t think it’s purposeful”, she says. “He’s always pretending to be asleep when I look at him, but I can always tell. And when he does doze off, I’ll just stir next to him, and that’s enough to wake him up again.”
“He’s a really light sleeper these days”, Ron says apologetically. “The worst camping trip in the world will do that to a person.”
Ginny grins faintly. “Yeah, he’s mentioned it.”
“He’s talking, then?”
“Hm-hm.” She wraps her arms a little tighter around her legs. “Which is good, I guess.”
He watches her for a minute, as though unsure what to make of her tone. “Anything on your mind?”
She laughs. “Anyone ever told you you’re turning into Mum?”
“Well, we’re here anyway!”, Ron says, ears flushing. “Spit it out, will you?”
“He, uhm –”
It has not occurred to her, until right now, how difficult it would be to pass the story on, even to someone who has heard it before. Harry handed it to her because she asked him to, and still it knocked into her like a wild animal, pouncing, the weight of it like a Hippogriff standing on her chest, pinning her to the earth.
“He told me about walking into the Forbidden Forest.”
“Ah”, Ron says hollowly. “No wonder you’re hiding in a chicken coop.”
She looks around at him. “It’s not Harry I’m hiding from.”
“But you are hiding”, Ron says wisely.
Ginny shrugs. “I dunno what I expected. Somehow I’d convinced myself I already knew the worst of it. Which, as it turns out, was a bit stupid of me.”
She draws in a shaky breath.
“I thought he was in on it. Ever since I watched him come back to life at Hagrid’s feet … I thought there was some sort of plan. But there wasn’t, or Dumbledore didn’t tell him, anyway. I thought he knew he was going to survive, and it turns out that, uhm – he didn’t know shit. He went there to die, for real.”
Ginny looks back at him, words coming faster now. “And I’m – I’m so angry, and I don’t know why. Or who I’m angry with. It can hardly be Harry.”
“In all fairness, I kind of felt like punching him when he told us”, Ron says quietly, and her mouth briefly twists into something like a smile. “If anything we should be angry with Voldemort, or Dumbledore, even – but they’re not within punching distance, so what are you gonna do?”
“If Dumbledore wasn’t already dead, I would kill him”, Ginny says. “I swear, I would kill him.”
“Yeah, that sounds reasonable”, Ron says good-naturedly, patting her arm.
“And Harry – Harry keeps apologising, and I don’t know what for.”
Ron’s expression is pained. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“No.”
He sighs. She handed this to him, and now he is steeling himself to hand something back to her. She can tell.
“My best guess is … for not saying goodbye.”
Ginny does not look at him. Suddenly she is blinking rapidly in the fading light, sitting there as the blow rolls over her, something blunt and violent that should have broken her ribs like the impact of a Bludger; but there is no injury, only an ache that does not abate, that sits all around her, inside her. She doesn’t think it’s ever going to go away, all that hurting, writhing and straining inside her like a second skeleton.
“How could he have? We would’ve dragged him back to the castle by the damn hair.”
“Of course we would have”, Ron says robustly.
For a moment he looks like he’s going to reach out to her, hold her, maybe. He seems to think better of it in the end, and she’s almost relieved, dreading what she’d do if someone hugged her.
It’s another thing that won’t ever come easily: showing up on someone’s doorstep, weeping.
“If it’s any consolation”, he says after a while, “I think that’s the worst of it.”
“I’ve been wondering”, she mutters. “Can’t think of very much that beats walking to your own death. No fucking wonder he doesn’t sleep.”
“It’s funny”, Ron says, “I talked to him less than an hour ago, and he seems alright, almost.”
Ginny shrugs. “Isn’t he always? Remarkably functional, considering.”
Ron makes an attempt at a smile. “It’s such a Harry thing to do, though, isn’t it? Always dying for other people. Or trying to, anyway.”
“Hardly just a Harry thing, it turns out.”
It’s all shit, she thinks when he looks at her. Being the person knocking at the door, and the one listening on the other side, opening it.
“He told me about Malfoy Manor”, she says softly.
“Ah.” Ron kicks at the dirt to his feet. “Well, then you know what keeps me up at night.”
“He said – he said you offered to swap places with Hermione. Let Bellatrix have you instead.”
“And? You would’ve done the exact same thing for him.”
Ginny almost smiles. He might as well still be the boy who stuck stubbornly by her side next to the chicken fenceall night, when she couldn’t bear to head back to the house, in case the fox ever came back.
“Yeah. I would have.”
It settles on her shoulders as quickly and unnoticeably as night, rapidly falling all around them: everything she would’ve done, in a heartbeat, in an instant.
“I would’ve taken the forest, too”, she says, more to herself than to Ron. “I would’ve done it all for him.”
It seems significant, somehow, that Ron does not resist this. That maybe he knows what it felt like, to Ginny, when they walked out into the courtyard and saw Harry.
That, too, felt like a Bludger to the chest: the sight of him, a kid in Hagrid’s arms, his glasses askew. How she wished it was her lying there, dead in his place.
“Those two”, Ron says abruptly. “Some day they’re really gonna be the death of us.”
Ginny almost laughs.
“So you won’t strangle him for abandoning the camp bed?”
Ron eyes her for a moment, a sort of benevolent sternness in his expression – and Ginny was right, that’s all Mum. “Yeah, I’ll consider it.”
“I’m sorry, anyway”, she says, half-smiling. “For costing you your roommate.”
Ron sighs. “They grow up so fast.”
“And for all this, too. You were trying to hide, I didn’t mean to …”
“It’s all right. You had to find me eventually.”