ᴛʜᴇ ꜰᴜʀʏ ᴏꜰ ʜɪꜱ ᴘʜᴏᴇɴɪx

15I Brave Enough [ONE SHOT]

Warning: rating K + and probably more. You have been warned. But nothing too graphic. Just mentions of a few things. 

Her mother was badass.

No really, she was.

At first glance, she looked like a normal witch — a little messy looking and flustered amongst the chaos that came with raising seven children. But that was only the thin veneer that covered a mighty, fire breathing dragon who had protected her family with a fierceness that surprised everyone except Ginny's father.

She had always known her mother loved her. Ginny had never doubted it for a second of her sixteen years. But listening to someone tell you they love you and then watching as they killed someone to prove it were two different things.

That was why, instead of following Harry the Hero out of the Great Hall and continuing what they'd started last spring, she was sitting here with her head on her mother's shoulder, trying not to think about how things could have been very different. One missed spell shot...if Harry had been just a second slower with his shield...then it wouldn't have mattered how badass her mother was.

Her mother had killed Bellatrix Lestrange. And she'd done it for Ginny and all her children. And she'd cursed. And she'd thrown off her robe like some sort of avenging warrior (which of course she was) before attacking in a fluid, almost graceful motion that Ginny would never have expected of her plump mother.

Bad. Ass.

Ginny wondered when her mother's legacy was going to kick in with her. Despite the resistance fighting she'd done in the past year at Hogwarts, despite the way she'd snuck out the Room of Requirement (even after Harry and her mother had both told her stay put), despite the fighting she'd done this day — she didn't feel badass at all. Watching Tonks die, lying to a dying third-year student who would never see her mum again, sitting with her brother's dead body — none of that was badass. Death was not badass.

Not like her mother.

It occurred to Ginny that her mother probably didn't feel like a badass. She probably felt pretty rotten; her son had died and she'd killed someone.

But she was Ginny's hero all the same. Harry was a hero too — but he was the World's Hero. Molly Weasley was just Ginny's. Somehow, that balanced out in the end.

"Mum?"

"Yes, Ginny?"

"I love you."

Her mother tightened her arm around her shoulders. "I love you too."

"I can tell," Ginny said honestly.

*******

Second by second.

He drifts, slipping down into dreams.

Instead of his old four-poster bed in Gryffindor Tower , Harry goes to a place where death, destruction and the final moments of Severus Snape are forgotten. It's a place with a warm sun and waves gently lapping against a lakeshore. Here a still-whole castle looms in the background and a light breeze blows red, red hair across his cheek.

It's good to be in that place, wherever it is, with the smell of flowers in his face.

His mind clicks, a new image rising. He recognizes her scent before he even sees her face, challenge in her eyes and laughter floating on the wind. The grass crushes beneath her bare feet as she walks toward him, wearing his Gryffindor Quidditch t-shirt. Her school robes are slung over her arm; she'd shed them because of the perfect weather.