Hermione reached across the table, trying to grasp her hand. “Ginny. Ginny, if you do this, you could die. Don't — don't leave James an orphan.”
Ginny stared across the table at Hermione. “I don't think I can keep living with myself if I don't,” she said in a flat voice. Her face twisted. “You feel guilty for being here, and you sold yourself to try to win the war. You were imprisoned in a hole somewhere in Hogwarts while I was here gardening; you were raped and nearly died more times than I probably know about while I was teaching myself to make meat pies; and you feel guilty that you're here, even though a mind-healer said going back would probably kill you.” Ginny looked down and swallowed. “Staying because of James is just an excuse for me, I know he'll be safe with you.”
Hermione nodded.
Hermione reluctantly compiled all her research on bomb-making. She'd had time to perfect it. She'd refined the analysis and technique as a mental puzzle. She hadn't planned to ever share it, or use it again.
Draco taught Ginny to duel. He was more unpleasant training her than he'd been training Hermione, and he was much more exacting. Hermione hadn't realised how much time and consideration Draco had invested in strategizing and determining the best way to kill Voldemort. Hermione watched them train and realised with horror that if his psychosomatic tremors didn't still manifested severely under stress, he probably would have gone back and tried to kill Voldemort after Hermione created his second prosthetic.
Hermione taught Ginny all the basic techniques involved in designing a bomb. Draco provided Hermione with as much information as he could recall about how the enchantments on the castle functioned.
Ginny looked over it all and then up at Hermione. “You should put your name on this. It's going to be obvious that I didn't come up with it. Even if you want people to think you died, you should get credit for inventing it.”
Hermione gave a strained smile and looked down. “I don't want to, Ginny. I don't want anyone to start looking into me. If they ask, tell them it was Order information you took when you escaped and you don't know who developed it.”
For James' birthday, Ginny went on a trip to the mainland with Draco and James. They returned with a long-legged puppy named Padfoot.
“I have to go on a trip, but you have to stay here and help Uncle Draco to keep the island safe,” Ginny told James. “Padfoot will help you be brave like a Gryffindor, won't he?”
James nodded seriously.
Ginny's eyes were shining with tears. “I'm going to write to you — every day. The elves will bring big bundles of letters from me, and Aunt Hermione will read them all to you, and maybe she'll help you write some letters back to me. You have to listen to Aunt Hermione and Uncle Draco, alright? And take good care of Aurore — she's your best friend. You two have to stick together. Right? That's what best friends do.”
Ginny left in November of 2008, leaving Hermione and Draco with two children to raise.
Ginny's absence had a deeply sobering effect on James. Despite the efforts to conceal the war's shadow from James and Aurore, the children had an undeniable sense of awareness about the precarious and anomalous world they lived in.
After Ginny left, James grew more serious. He would follow Draco around the house when Draco checked the wards. Aurore became the mischievous one.
Draco added an additional room to their wing of the house so that James wouldn't be alone in another part of the house.
Hermione tucked James in first night after Ginny's departure, with Padfoot in bed beside him. “Draco and I are just down the hall.”
James was sitting in bed, his arms wrapped tightly around Padfoot. “I'm a Gryffindor like Mum and Dad, so I'm brave,” James said in a quivering voice.
There was a stabbing pain through Hermione's heart. She wrapped her arms around James, kissing the top of his head through his wild red hair.
“I was a Gryffindor too, you know,” she said in a thick voice. “We Gryffindors need lots of hugs to be so brave, so we'll have to give each other all the Gryffindor hugs until your mum comes back. If you need any extras, I'm just down the hall.”
Hermione woke in the middle of the night when Aurore failed to appear asking to cuddle.
Draco sat up when Hermione did. They looked in Aurore's room and found it empty. They slid open the door to James' room and found both children curled up with Padfoot in between them.
Draco stared with narrowed eyes for several moments before going over and taking Aurore back to her room.
The next morning, Aurore was asleep in James' room once again.
Lord Voldemort died in January 2009, a week after Aurore's third birthday.
According to the papers, his castle was breached by an elite team of MACUSA aurors accompanied by Ginny Weasley, the last surviving member of the Order of the Phoenix. They used a new type of advanced magic to break through the wards. The castle was then painstakingly deconstructed in order to dig Voldemort out of his hiding place and bring his decaying body into the light of day.
Most of the aurors were killed in the process, and Ginny nearly died. The auror leading the attack ordered that everyone fall back, but Ginny refused. She went in and cast her first and last Killing Curse.
The newspapers around the world featured a picture of Ginevra Weasley emerging from the rubble of a castle, her face filthy and streaked with blood. The brutal scar on her face was the first thing the photo clearly made out. She tossed her head back, her expression a mixture of exhaustion and cold triumph as she stepped into view, dragging Voldemort's corpse behind her.
There was no denying Ginny's heroism, despite the pointed questions about where she'd hidden during the last several years. Ginny was tight-lipped; she'd been confined due to sickness and a Wizarding family had hidden her. She had returned when she realised that the Liberation Front did not intend to kill Voldemort. She did not want to be treated like a hero; she only wanted her family and friends remembered.
The reconstruction efforts slowly shifted from the staunch lines about “moving on” to memorialising the fallen: the Resistance, the Order members, the surrogates. Ginny Weasley was unmoving in her solidarity with the surrogates. She didn't care about how ancient the Wizarding families or their traditions were. Pureblood ideals from old Wizarding families who couldn't be bothered to speak up against the atrocities committed in front of them had allowed the war. They didn't deserve to raise another generation with the same ideology that had resulted in the Wizarding War.
The courts tentatively decided to grant custody to mothers who wanted it. The titles and estates of the old families were stripped from the fathers, and the surrogates were granted control of the estates until their children came of age. The surrogates who did not want custody of the children were given “compensation”, and the children placed into fosterage or an orphanage set up specifically to raise them to eventually take up their family's seat.
There had been talk of razing Hogwarts and building a new magical school, but Ginny refused to hear of it. It had been the first home of Harry Potter and the birthplace of Dumbledore's Army. Hogwarts would be rebuilt; it would have classes that taught about what had happened so that the atrocities of the Wizarding War would never happen again and never be forgotten.
When there were whispers about the curse on Hogwarts' DADA position, Ginny announced her intention to become the professor.
On the island, life adapted to Ginny's absence. James and Aurore grew intensely attached to each other to the point that Draco and Hermione often cast worried glances at each other when they observed it.
“She's not going to handle it,” Hermione said while she watched Aurore and James wading at the beach. Padfoot was racing up and down the shore, barking madly at the seagulls. “She's so possessive. I don't know if it'll be better or worse to begin preparing her for it.”