Sunshine or Shadows

Chapter 1. Seeking a Bit of Luck

A yellow and black butterfly, flitting about playfully in the blue light of a sticky summer evening, caught the attention of Ginny Weasley as she leaned back on her elbows and sighed. She was, once again, quite lost in her thoughts: sitting on the ground with her back to the Burrow and looking out into the murky depths of her neighborhood's surrounding wood. Thinking. About Harry. Again.

As she gazed at the butterfly, an abrupt noise gave her a start. She felt her body tense up and her wand hand flexed instinctively at the sound of approaching footsteps crunching on the dry August grass. When her eyes connected with the culprit, Ginny relaxed with an exhale and offered a wry smile to the stout woman who was approaching her.

"Hello Mum," she called out. "Come look at the garden. The flowers are almost outpacing our weed collection now, and it isn't quite as hideous as it used to be." As if to illustrate this comment, the little butterfly that Ginny was tracking coasted down and began to feed on some of the wild honeysuckle that had overtaken much of the Burrow's neglected garden.

Molly gave her daughter a chastising look and brushed her hands on her brightly colored, floral apron. Her thoughts were so scattered these days, she reflected, that she hardly had time to pay attention to such things as flowers and weeds, never mind worrying over the growingly unfavorable ratio between them. But, just as she was about to open her mouth to tell Ginny there were more important matters at hand, she caught sight of her daughter's face and banished the thought. Ginny hardly needed reminding of the goings on of the Order and of the war, Molly reminded herself, and she decided instead to bend down and settle her wobbly frame on the ground beside her youngest, patting the girl's hand reassuringly.

They sat like that for a few moments together, hot and uncomfortable on a patch of clover, before Molly finally broke the silence with a chuckle.

"Well," she chortled, "if I sit any longer in this position, I fear that I won't be able to get up. You kids will have to fashion a garden ornament out of me."

Ginny laughed. "You'd make a lovely fountain, Mum. And the gnomes are dead scared of you, so we might be able to get some bulbs to finally grow here," she said.

Molly grimaced at the thought of herself being immortalized in the Burrow's backyard, relegated to operating as caretaker and guardian of perhaps the ugliest garden in the United Kingdom. She reached into her apron to draw out her timeworn wand, and with a muted incantation, she transfigured a large boulder into an ornate stone bench. The huge, gray-white rock had been sitting a few feet from the garden's one "good" tree - a grand old oak that had a rickety treehouse propped up between the lowest of its branches -- for as long as Molly could recall, and she was pleased to see that it made a fine seat indeed.

"Why hadn't I thought of this ages ago?" Molly conjectured. She pushed herself back up into a standing position and reached down to offer Ginny a hand. "Think of all the stolen, romantic interludes that you kids could have been having under the moonlight, here in the garden, if you'd have had a proper bench to sit on."

Ginny laughed as she accepted her mum's help, allowing herself to be pulled out of her reverie. "Right," she said with a heavy note of sarcasm. "Nothing sparks romance more than a bed of thistles and dandelion."

She walked over to the oak tree and cast an eye up toward the Burrow before taking a seat on the bench. A few candles seemed to have been lit in Ron's room, and Ginny guessed that this meant the members of the fabled trio were huddled together once again, talking over whatever it is that they've been fussing about lately. She felt her mother's gaze follow her own and winced, chastising herself for giving her mum - or any of the Order members, for that matter - reason to suspect that Harry, Ron and Hermione may be up to anything other than getting a head start on their N.E.W.T studies.

In an effort to distract the line of questioning that she knew was about to befall her, Ginny pointed at the matted patch of clover where she had been camped out since dinner, trying unsuccessfully to sort out what her friends were obsessing over. "I must've been sitting there for hours," she said, sighing, "combing through the clover and poaching myself in this heat."

"Are you searching for four-leaf clovers?" Molly asked in what Ginny always referred to inside her own head as the "I'm worried about you" voice.

"Yeah," Ginny answered, smiling. She was happy to have saved Harry, if only for the moment, from any inquiries into why he was still up after being sent to bed with sleeping potions, but she was also quite touched by her mother's own caring ways.

"Well, that's not how to do it," Molly offered. She pointed her wand at the patch, giving it a drawn out wave. "Felicis Revelio," she ordered.

The clover rustled noisily and Ginny turned her head toward it, blinking in wonder. A few of the clover plants glowed brightly as the rest settled themselves, and Molly waved her wand again to summon her prize.

"Accio Four-leaf Clovers," she said brightly, hastening to fetch a small handful of the tiny stems and handing them to her daughter with a kind smile.

"Wow," Ginny remarked. "There must be two dozen or so here."

Molly pursed her lips and appraised the collection. "Well," she said thoughtfully, "they have been growing in the vicinity of magic for quite some time now. Perhaps being raised in the Burrow's shadow has brought them some luck."

Ginny let out an involuntary sigh. "Luck," she repeated reflectively and then shook her head, as had become her recent custom, to clear away worrisome thoughts.

"May I?" Molly asked, nodding her head toward the bundle of clover that Ginny was holding. "I think I can make this into a rather lovely bouquet of sorts. I believe that Gilderoy Lockhart has written a chapter or two about floral arrangements in one of those books. I'll just go see what I can do and I'll bring it right back, yeah?"

Ginny smiled at her Mum and resisted the urge to make a comment on the long-held and completely barmy torch that the witch still carried for the deranged Lockhart. "All right," she agreed, and she handed the spray of clovers over.

A bit of an odd flash of something akin to despair passed through Ginny after she let go of the bundle and she watched in mild amusement as her mother made a quick dash toward the Burrow's back porch, disappearing through the house's back entrance. What a silly way to spend an evening, Ginny mused: chasing after a bit of fairy-tale luck and sweating buckets in the balmy August air. Surely, she thought, there must be more important things to do with oneself.

With this last thought sending a mild but sobering jolt to her nervous system, she redirected her line of sight back upward to the Burrow's top floor windows. The light in Ron's room still flickered, though not as brightly.

"Someone has left," she thought. She squinted her eyes to sharpen her view in the dim light of the late-summer evening, finding that if she really concentrated, she could just barely make out a bit of candlelight being emitted from the small square vent opening of the attic as well. As she watched, the light grew slightly brighter and Ginny's lip curled up at the confirmation.

"They're in there again," she thought. "What are they hiding up in that mangy old dustbin?"

It had been frustrating, these past two days, to know with not even a speck of uncertainty that something was up - something that was possibly huge - and Ginny had quickly zeroed in on the attic as a place of huge import. Ron had come down to breakfast smelling musty on the previous morning, and Ginny had heard the ghoul crashing about on several occasions throughout the day. But she hadn't grown so bold or careless as to investigate yet, hoping in earnest that perhaps Hermione would clue her in when the time was right. Ron would never come forward and she couldn't ask Harry.

There was something of an unstated agreement between she and Harry ever since their break-up: Ginny wouldn't ask any questions, and he wouldn't have to lie to her. Instead, conversations between the four friends were kept unusually light, pretty much limiting themelves to joking about the Chudley Cannons off-season debacles and sharing schemes for getting Neville and Luna together, in a romantic sense.

The meals, by contrast, seemed particularly heavy, which made Ginny wonder whether her mum too suspected that the three were fixing to take off somewhere. It seemed that Harry, in particular, was getting the full-on Molly treatment as she tried to fatten him up like a Christmas goose and mothered his headaches with impressive zeal. Ginny rather suspected that Harry was manufacturing the headaches as a means of escaping into his bedroom, but her poor mum doted as if the course of the planets depended upon Harry's restored health.

"Well," Ginny thought, "I suppose that it does. The course of this planet, at any rate...or at least our little cut of it..."

Her spirits drooped flaccidly at this revelation, and Ginny fought to recover, dragging her gaze from the still growing light in the attic vent and flinching when she heard the telltale slam of the screen door. Her mum was bouncing lightheartedly down the porch steps and Ginny placed a grin on her face as she watched.

"What have you got?" she asked.

"I've got a beautifully preserved nosegay for you," Molly declared proudly. She held out a tiny ball of green that had an inch of tiny blue ribbon hanging off the end of it.

Ginny laughed. "It's beautiful, Mum!" she said. She took the "nosegay" from her mum and laughed again at the poor attempt to make a lasting keepsake out of the evening's musings. It felt quite a sturdy thing: quite solid, even if it was not at all what Ginny could call attractive.

"Umm..." she muttered, "I'll treasure it forever."

"Well," Molly returned with a deep laugh, "I may have inadvertently petrified the clovers, although I'm sure I followed Lockhart's instructions to the tee." She crinkled her brow and looked out into the garden for a moment, deep in thought. "He couldn't have mixed up the order of the spells, I don't imagine..."

To save her mother from having to suffer from losing faith in her toothy and flaxen-haired, domestic hero, Ginny sought to change the subject. "I'll put it in my Hogwarts trunk, and I'll have all the luck I need to get through the year," she offered. She smiled at her Mum and turned to the garden again, studying it critically. "You know, one of these years, I would really love to have a real garden. Wouldn't it be lovely to have a place to relax with a cup of tea where it smelled like roses; where there were little birds and butterflies and that maybe didn't have spiders, but nice insects like caterpillars?"

"Spiders are arachnids, not insects," Molly said, folding her hands in her lap, "and you usually can't have caterpillars and butterflies at once. You can have either a caterpillar or a butterfly, not both, dear, I'm afraid."

Ginny narrowed her eyes. "Or an ugly sack hanging from a tree," she added. "Anyway, I'd like a lovely garden some day."

Molly smiled. "And you shall have it, dear. Gardens and anything else you want."

Unable to prevent a flicker toward the Burrow's top floor, Ginny cleared her throat and shook her head once again to shoo away the bad thoughts: the bad, Harry-related thoughts that seemed ever-present and relentless in their quest to drive her mad.

Molly felt her smile wilt as she watched her daughter steal a glance at the boys' room and then fight to cover the emotion that had shimmered briefly in those big, expressive eyes of hers. As difficult as it was to face her own fears and heartaches, she thought, it was ten times worse to watch a child face those same things.

"Is there something in there that you want as well?" she asked, gingerly.

Ginny's eyes fell shut and Molly watched her daughter labor to put on a blasé front. It took a moment for the girl to eek out a strained and muted response.

"Yes," she said. She sniffed delicately, pushing a finger into the corner of each eye to block any oncoming tears.

A wash of shame flowed over Molly, realizing too late that she had just broached a subject that was a bit too close to her Ginny's heart to be spoken of in such a manner. "I'm sorry, dear," she said. "I shouldn't have blurted that out like that. It's none of my business anyway, I just thought..."

Running a hand up over her face, Molly searched her memory banks for the appropriate thing to say. She had been in these conversations before, with each of the boys after some witch or another had left them out here in the garden or sitting on the sofa in the middle of the night with a heart full of anguish and swearing up and down that they didn't want to talk about it. She knew how to recognize when they really did want to talk and had become quite adept, she flattered herself to think, at waiting until just the right moment to draw them out. The difficulties had always lain not in the drawing out, Molly had deduced over the years, but in coming up with the sage advice that the boys seemed so desperate to hear.

"I just thought..." she repeated as she gazed with admiration at Ginny's face. She let her voice fall off as she realized that not a drop of tears had escaped, and even the glistening in those pretty brown eyes seemed to have been controlled so that the girl sitting before her no longer looked heartbroken or distressed but merely... preoccupied. Molly drew in a breath and let it out.

"Oh, I don't know what I thought, to be perfectly honest. I was just being plain old-fashioned meddlesome. I'm sorry, love."

Ginny smiled. "It's okay, Mum," she said sweetly. She silently congratulated herself on being able to control her emotions before her mum caught the full affect that Harry's staying at the Burrow was having on her. She looked up at the sky and wondered abstractedly if it would be getting darker soon.

"It's no big secret that I carry the big torch for Harry," she added. "Half the world knows it, I suspect, and I'd give anything to find out the top ten reasons that they've come up with for why we've broken up."

Ginny shook her head again. She wished that the habit actually did stir her brain up, rather than merely causing it to pause momentarily and giving her a monster of a headache. Sitting next to her mum in the garden that was only barely visible now in the growing darkness, she wondered how it was even possible that she'd survived the past forty-eight hours without marching up to Harry and giving him a piece of her mind.

Sure, George had been maimed terribly and the Order had suffered a deep blow with the death of Mad-Eye, but wouldn't this all be easier to take if she and Harry could just share a cuddle in the forgotten basement stairwell or whisper words of a romantic sort into each other's ear at breakfast? She shut her eyes for a few seconds to try and relieve some of the tension that had been building steadily since dinner and was currently fueling her headache.

Molly stood up a bit straighter and cocked her head to the side, giving Ginny another empathetic look and raising her eyebrows slightly.

"Want to talk about it, dear?"

Ginny shook her head, smiling up at her mother from her spot on the newly formed garden bench. Just above her mum's head, Ginny was surprised to see several orange flashes of light, coming in quick succession from the attic vent. She clenched the muscles in her abdomen tight to keep from reacting, and returned her gaze to her mum's kind face once again.

"No, it's really okay, Mum. Harry and I...well, we'll be fine some day," she muttered, somewhat vaguely, laughing when her mum pursed her lips in an open display of skepticism. "Look," Ginny continued, "Harry thinks that if we are together now...that I'll become some fantastic damsel in the next of Voldemort's evil ploys...world domination and such. He doesn't want to attract attention to me."

Molly smiled and glanced up at the house. "He's taking a page right out of Arthur's book, then. Your father will be very pleased."

"Well, I can't say that I'm pleased," Ginny said, flattening her hand on the cool surface of the bench. It was so sweltering outside, she thought, and it was amazing how nice it felt to be able to find a spot of relief, no matter how small. "I do understand, though, and I have faith that everything will work out."

"All right, dear," Mrs. Weasley said, giving another skeptical nod before turning her head back up to the dark sky. "I think we should head in then, we've all got so much to do tomorrow with the Order visiting and I'd like to try and fit in a trip to Diagon Alley. We've got to get the school shopping done soon or there'll be no supplies left for you or Ron."

"I'll be right there, Mum," Ginny replied.

"All right," Molly said. She turned toward the house and took several slow steps toward it. As Ginny closed her eyes again, she heard the heavy footsteps stop their paces.

"Mum?" she asked, opening her eyes to see that her mum had stopped a few feet from where she had left and was looking up at the Burrow's attic.

Molly turned back around. "Does he know how you feel, Ginny?" she asked.

"I think so," Ginny replied, smiling.

"Make sure he knows," Molly said. "I know what it's like to watch someone you love go off to war..."

Ginny watched in silence while her mother seemed to struggle with memories of her brothers and the others that she'd lost in an earlier war.

"I know, Mum," she said. "There should never be any doubts among loved ones, yeah?" Molly nodded. "Why don't you go on and get to bed then," Ginny suggested, "I'll be right up."

"Good night, dear," Molly said and she turned once again toward the Burrow and went in, taking a moment to give a little wave through the screen door, which Ginny returned with a smile.

"It's all right, Mum," she said softly, directing her voice softly over the black garden. "I know what I need to do."