Mirrors

Mirrors

She didn't go have dinner, though; she couldn't think of anything she'd rather do less - sit at the great Gryffindor table amid the hubbub of whispers and giggles and excitement over the Yule Ball and who asked who and who was going with who and who was wearing what colour dress robes. Instead she grabbed her winter cloak with its worn silver fastenings (it was Fred's before her) and took a big step through the portrait hole, having to hop a little because she was still short, then headed out to the grounds.

Her breath made twisted pictures in the frosty air, curling away from her mouth in silver knots, and she sighed a little, which came out in a disheartened puff. Well, it was all out, every bit of it except for the part about just who Hermione was going with, and she had a hunch that when her brother found out, there was going to be an even greater row than the one she'd just witnessed in the common room. Hermione didn't understand, of course; when she told Ginny, in the doorway to the Great Hall and a bit of a nervous and stammering giggle, that Viktor Krum had asked her to the Yule Ball, she basked in the shimmering glow of excitement for a moment, then narrowed her normally-soft brown eyes and asked Ginny why she was looking at her like that.

"Like what?" Ginny replied quickly, doing her best to banish the expression - whatever it was - from her face without looking like she was banishing an expression from her face.

"Like - like that. Like you are." Hermione, still excited and a little shy to spill out her news, had trouble finding the right words. "You look like - like you're worried or something."

"Me? Worried? No, no. Why would I be worried? It's fine. I think it's great that you're going with - with Viktor. You look so excited. What colour are your dress robes?" Ginny seized on the very girly topic of conversation and allowed herself an inward nod of satisfaction, proud that she actually remembered what Parvati and Lavender had been squealing about in the common room while she stuck her fingers in her ears and tried to finish her Potions work the other night.

"Blue," Hermione said shortly, and then stared at Ginny again. "Really, Gin, what's the matter? You can tell me. Is it because you don't have a date yet? I'm sorry, I thought this would cheer you up."

"No. No! I mean, sure, it's cheering me up fine. You don't have to be sorry. No, no." Ginny heard her own voice rising hysterically, and she did her best to yank it back into its normal lower register before Hermione glared at her any more like Ginny had just sprouted a sixth head. "I'm really very happy for you. Yeah. Very happy. Happy, happy. It's fine." Hermione nodded skeptically and opened her mouth, probably about to tell Ginny that she was growing a seventh head, and Ginny added hastily, "But I have some, um, some Divination homework to finish. Yeah. So I'll just do that, and get out of your way - see you, Hermione!"

She'd raced off to Gryffindor Tower, not to cry herself to sleep in red velvet comforters, but to see her brother and Harry, who were sitting in the common room griping about the Potions exam Snape was planning on the last day of the term. Ron was building a castle with his Exploding Snap pack, and she helped him get the first layer steady while Harry reread Quidditch Through the Ages. She suspected that Ron thought, and Harry thought, that she only wanted to be with them to see Harry, but she didn't take the opportunity to set him straight. That would take too much explaining, not to mention divulging Hermione's secret, and so she simply sat with her brother, feeling his own unspoken unhappiness about the Yule Ball wrap around her throat and mirror her own, and then when Hermione came through the portrait hole she excused herself to Harry and Ron and went quietly to her room.

That night she dreamed about a girl in blue dress robes dancing with a tall round-shouldered boy, the girl sparkling and shining and glowing with delight that the Cinderella inside her had finally come alive, and when she woke her pillow was damp with sweat.

Ginny stopped her headlong flight across the Hogwarts grounds and shook her head once, briefly, making red waves of hair slide across each other and over her flaming cheeks. Well, now Harry and Ron knew that Hermione was going to the Yule Ball with someone, and they knew that Ginny was going with Neville - she didn't mind, not in the way that Ron seemed to think she did. She was pleased that he asked her, and pleased that she'd get to go. The girls in her year were already jealous, they didn't care who her date was as long as she had one, and she liked Neville. It seemed silly to want someone else, to want more, when the someone else in question was a spoken-for impossibility.

"Just because it's taken you three years to notice, Ron, doesn't mean no one else has spotted I'm a girl!"

I have, Ginny thought resignedly, stamping her small feet across the frozen grass so that the pale green blades shivered, terrified by the power of this awesome giant above them. It didn't seem to matter, though, when she couldn't say the words out loud - as if, in their silence, her thoughts ceased to exist.

She gathered them in her head and closed her brown eyes, dark-copper lashes dipping into creamy freckled skin. Hermione, laughing ... Hermione, writing, an eagle quill wavering slightly between her fingers ... Hermione with Harry and Ron, always with Harry and Ron, and sometimes Ginny watched them and wondered if Hermione loved Harry, if she loved Ron, how much she loved Ron, how much Ron loved her - for it never was a question, if her brother loved Hermione - and if perhaps Ron loved her more than Ginny did. Hermione sleeping with a soft, involuntary smile on her face, when her teeth were still large they pushed slightly at her upper lip, giving her the look of a child whose baby teeth have just started to fall out, Hermione sleeping the way she had one night, and one night only, at the Burrow, when she had fallen asleep in Ginny's bed mid-conversation. Ginny turned out the lights and lit a single stubby candle that threw relief-shadows on Hermione's relaxed face and ran her small white fingers tentatively over the curves of her cheek and neck, and then she blew out the candle and got into Hermione's bed, wishing she dared to stay in her own and hold her close.

Hermione apologized in the morning, and she never knew how strongly Ginny meant it, when she said, "It's fine."

And so Ginny Weasley walks the Hogwarts grounds in December, standing silently still in the middle of a small frozen field, as still as one icy blade of grass, and she holds back all the tears but one. It falls on the ground and melts the ice on a wide yellow-green leaf. She smiles and swipes at the bridge of her nose and alternately curses Ron, curses Viktor, and tries to tell herself "It's fine" all the way back to her dorm room.

For the Yule Ball, Ginny slips into a dress robe of deep hunter green, almost black, that Mum made over for her when she owled home to tell her that she had a date to the Ball. She tries to smile at Neville even when he accidentally stamps on her toes - six or seven times each song - although she can't hide her occasional winces. "I'm not very good at this," he says apologetically, resignedly, after the third song.

Ginny hears the despairing note in Neville's slightly squeaky voice, and she realizes that it mirrors her own. "Why don't we sit down for a minute," she suggests, trying not too look too relieved when Neville agrees. He gets them each a Butterbeer in an ornate glass goblet and she watches the couples on the floor - her brother and Angelina, who are spinning and whipping without paying much attention to the unfortunate dancers around them; Katie Bell, who has just cut in on Cedric Diggory and Cho Chang to whisper something to Cho that makes her smile self-consciously as she slips back into Cedric's arms; Viktor Krum and Hermione. For a fleeting instant she wonders what it would feel like to be half of a couple.

Neville hands her the glass of Butterbeer and she is surprised at its weight. "You look nice, Ginny."

"Thank you. So do you."

"Your eyes look so shiny," Neville continues, then looks horribly embarrassed. "Er, I mean, I heard Lavender and Parvati talking about some special kind of eye makeup. Do you have that on?" He pauses, uncertain. "I'm sorry. Did I say something wrong?"

And because he's trying so hard (certainly much harder than her brother and Harry, who look disgruntled even from three tables away), and because she doesn't really want him to know about the mirror that reflects their similarities, she smiles and bites the inside of her cheek to the keep the tears inside her eyes and tells him, "It's fine."

finis