Nym

Burrow

Sleep.

All I seem to do these days is sleep.

The mother (Mary? Molly? I can't remember what Arthur called her...) set me up in her daughter's room...it's pink. Absolutely everything in this room is pink, from the rug on the floor to the curtains to the warm blanket I'm wrapped in. I hate pink, but beggars can't be choosers. There's flowers, little blue and purple pansies, painted along the edge of the wall where it joins the ceiling. I don't like looking at the flowers...they make me think of my bedroom back home, and the stars Mum and I painted on the ceiling last year.

Oh, gods...Mum...

Dad isn't here anymore. He was the first two nights, but when I woke up he was gone and Arthur had to force a calming draught down my throat to get me to stop screaming.

His wife (Megan? Marian? No...it was definitely something with a 'y' at the end...) brings me food at different intervals in the day, one or three of her brood at the door whispering and watching me as she does so.

I don't like that; them ogling me like I'm some monkey in a zoo. I like their mother, though. She doesn't ask a lot of questions and shoos her kids from the doorway when they try to come in.

I don't talk to her when she does ask me things.

All I do is sleep.

If I'm lucky, I won't wake up.

~*~*~

The little girl, Ginny, is two years old, and walks in the way little Harry did the last time I saw him: all shaky and wobbly and constantly clutching at the furniture for balance. I think it's because she isn't all that used to walking, especially since she's constantly being carried around by her brothers.

She is always followed by her entourage of boys nearly everywhere she goes, whether it's down the stairs or into the garden or chasing after their grey post owl, Errol, as their mother sends packages and letters to the oldest boy off at Hogwarts. One day, when she's older, I'm sure she'll hate having her brothers follow her and catalogue her every move, but for now she seems to love all this attention.

She comes into my room sometimes. I know it's not my room, and that it's hers, but I've been in here at least a month and the sight of the unchanging pink walls has become somewhat soothing. Ginny will toddle in, dressed in pink sundresses that clash horribly with her red and braided Weasley hair, and start gathering toys to play with outside this stuffy pink room. The five boys wait in the door frame throughout all of this, crowding around the entrance but none of them brave enough to enter.

As I'm lying in my own halfway point between sleep and awake, I feel a sharp tug on my hand, and I slowly raise my head to gaze into this tiny little girl's big brown eyes. Ginny grins toothily at me as she climbs into the bed with me, a green stuffed dragon held tightly by a wing in her right hand. I glance at the door; there are no boys standing around it this afternoon.

"This is Cosmo," she says as she gives the stuffed dragon in her arms a tight squeeze. "Mummy says that he keeps allll the bad dreams away, like a dragon should. I don't really have bad dreams anymore, so Percy said I should give him to you!"

"Ginny, what are you doing in here?" The doorway is no longer empty; one of the boys is standing there with a tray of sandwiches for my lunch and a look of mixed amusement and concern on his face.

He's not the tallest of them, but he has a kind smile and soft eyes and Ginny giggles as he picks her up with one hand and sets the tray of food Molly most likely prepared at the foot of the bed with the other.

"Sorry," he says apologetically. "Ginger-Snap here knows she isn't supposed to bother you, but not even our mum can stop this one from getting into the places she shouldn't be." He tugs on one of Ginny's braids and she laughs innocently.

I try and smile back, but all I can manage is some sort of weak grimace.

He grins widely at me and leaves with Ginny whispering loudly in his ear about dragons and bad dreams.

He has eyes exactly like his sister.

~*~*~

Breakfast: the Final Frontier.

Or was that Space?

Whatever it is, I have not left little Ginny's bedroom in over a month, and it feels deliciously different to be out of the second-hand pyjamas that had belonged to one of Molly's taller boys and in a pair of my own clothes, even if it is just the jeans and blue t-shirt I had been wearing when I first came to the Burrow.

Molly takes me by the hand, steering me from my not-quite-hidden-but-not-quite-seen place in the archway that separates the sitting room from the kitchen and points to an empty chair next to the twins, who are currently flicking bits of egg at the spectacled boy across from them. Arthur sits at the head of the table, the Sunday Prophet hiding all but his increasingly balding patch of red hair as he reads, and it is lowered only to kiss Molly gently on her cheek as she dishes him sizzling bacon from a pan off the stove. She giggles like a schoolgirl (just like Mum used to with Dad...) and humming along with the wireless, she moves around to the other people at the table, filling our plates high with bacon and sausages and eggs and toast.

There are ten wooden chairs sitting around the scrubbed oak table, all but one filled with the body of a freckle-faced redhead that is laughing and eating and each one of them so full of life it makes my heart hurt a little.

"Nymphadora," Arthur pats my arm gently. "Is something wrong?"

I begin to shake my head in a vehement NO, but stop myself.

"Who...who are all of them?" My voice is raspy and hoarse from lack of use, but Arthur seems to understand my question.

"My children?"

"What are their names?" I sound like a rusty gate, but it's better than nothing. "How old are they?"

He leans back in his chair and exchanges a look with Molly from her place at the other end of the table, obviously pleased with the fact that I've either spoken or taken an interest in his family, but which it is I can't tell.

"Well, Ginny is our little girl, the one whose room you've been sleeping in." Ginny looks up and grins at the sound of her name, knocking her bowl of mush over as she does so, and Molly wipes a bit of the food that has flown everywhere off of her daughter's cheek.

"Ron, the one sitting next to Percy over there, he's the youngest of our boys. Then there are the twins, Fred and George, which are the two troublemakers sitting next to you, and Percy is on the other side of the table. Ron is three, Fred and George are five, Ginny is almost two, and Percy is eight." Arthur beams at his and Molly's brood, completely oblivious to the fact that Percy is nearly covered in egg. "Charlie is ten, your age, and he's the one on the other side of Percy." Charlie smiles at me, and I can feel the heat rising on my cheeks.

"There's...there's an empty chair next to me...." I point to the empty chair beside me and Arthur sighs.

"That chair is Bill's. He's eleven and in his first year at Hogwarts right now, but you'll see him when he comes back for the summer holidays," he says gently. "And I hope you'll be staying with us throughout the summer, Nymphadora."

I don't know how to respond, except to smile and make a breakfast sandwich out of the bacon and toast on my plate. Arthur nods to Molly, who is busy cleaning the egg off of Percy with an Evanesco and a flick of her wand. The twins are laughing to themselves and begin throwing more of their food at Ginny and Ron. Ron and Ginny go ballistic and start throwing food back, causing Arthur to abandon his breakfast and physically separate the twins from their food, which results in Arthur's head covered in both egg and the bowl of mush Ginny has hurled at the twins in retaliation. And Charlie just sits there and asks me to pass the pumpkin juice, as though this happens every day.

This is absolute chaos.

I love it.

~*~*~

Time passes slowly at the Burrow.

Now that I've left the confines of Ginny's bedroom, Molly has put me to work. No hard labor, of course...all that is done by magic. But I help Charlie and Percy de-gnome the garden and Molly hang and fold the clothes on the wash lines every other afternoon. Molly had originally put me in charge of dishes, but after my sixteenth or seventeenth broken dinner plate she set a wicker basket in front of me and told me to fold everything inside it. Because after all, "Sheets and towels don't shatter if you handle them too roughly."

They've welcomed me into their home and are slowly turning me into one of them...not that it's a bad thing. It's the first time I've ever felt welcome in any home, really, besides with Nana and Granddad out in Gloucester. Dad's sister and her husband, my Auntie Jo and Uncle Neil, are nice people, but they're Muggles. Whenever Dad took me to see them, they'd always pressure me and ask me to tell them things about the Magical World. Aunt Jo was always very persistent, telling me that if I told her what she wanted she could put it in her book and make me a co-author. Dad walked in on that little conversation and took me straight home before sending his baby sister a particularly nasty Howler. Mum's family wouldn't have taken me in, either...Hell, I was lucky Grandmother Druella didn't drown me in the bathtub when I was born; the daughter of a filthy Mudblood and out of wedlock to boot. The same went for her sisters, Auntie Bella and Aunt Cissa...they'd never take me in. As high as they hold the notions of Family Solidarity and the Importance of Blood, they'd never acknowledge that their Muggle-born niece had a rightful place on their precious family tree.

Sirius would have taken me in. He and Jeanie and little Kate would've given me a place to stay---no, more than that. They would have made sure that I was considered a part of their little family; that what I had with them wasn't just a room in a house, but a home. But Sirius went bad, Mum had said....that was why they put him in Azkaban, because he went crazy and hurt the Potters....he hurt funny James and tender Lily.....and poor little Harry....

The Weasleys aren't like that. I don't think that any of them could hurt a fly, even if they wanted to.

If Dad never comes back for me, which I reallyreallyreallyREALLY hope isn't true, I don't think I'd mind staying with Molly and Arthur for a long, long time.