A/N: Stop squinting, it's a Ron/Ginny and you can't run away from it. I pacified it, though. With an icebag of Harry/Ginny. XD
Warning: Okay, folks, don't skip over this part. This fic contains WEASLEYCEST which means INCEST. SIBLINGS. IN LOVE. AND NOT THE FAMILY WAY. 'Ew' now all you want, because if you review like that, I'm going to throw up. I've had enough of people reviewing like that: if you're going to tell me how sick and stupid I am, well, DON'T. I've heard it all already.
Disclaimer: Oh, the babies aren't mine, they're but JKR's. She can have them all back when HBP comes out...and then we'll take them back again. :)

Childhood

She didn’t have one.

Harry sits and listens to Ginny talk on and on–not talking, really, but ranting and rambling, picking on something and then going off on a tangent. She avoids his eyes because the subject is raw and delirious and to poke it is to stab her. He doesn’t prod and she gives him all the details she has. Yes, it was like this. And it was like that. And then we did this. And everything happened.

He gave her scars, see. She points to the paleness of her inner arm, where there are angry crescent moons. “Nails,” she explains, almost hysterically, wringing her hands, “he liked it too much. So he gripped.”

Gripped and scarred and stole. Ginny talks of her childhood as if it is a favorite scarf: something she loved to use over and over again until it caught on something and choked her, almost like a betrayal; an action of distrust. In reality, it was a betrayal, but for Ron, she thinks, it was more like a calling.

“A calling of his hormones,” she snorts.

Harry smiles wryly and listens as she goes on again. According to Ginny, Ron was the scarf she loved to play with–warm and cuddly and inviting and never awkward, no, no. Safe and long and comforting. And then the thread snagged on a branch and left her split, paralyzed, lost. There is a glint in Ginny’s eye that is unnerving, as if she wants to hold the scarf again so badly she has gone mad.

“Ginny.” Harry tries to speak, but he is cut off immediately, as was to be expected.
“Harry, he doesn’t know what he did to me. I love him, I really do. But he took it from me. He took away my childhood. I didn’t have one, Harry. It died. I gave it to him. I gave it to him along with–"
“Ginny!” Harry tries again, and this time Ginny sobs and collapses backwards onto Hermione’s bed, crying and trying to be silent but hiccuping instead. He takes her hand and she lets him squeeze it.
“It wasn’t Ron’s fault,” Harry appeases, stroking her skin as she trembles. “It wasn’t your fault, either.”
“Harry, don’t be so naive, who else’s fault could it be?” she mumbles, her head tossing and turning to the side, red hair getting plastered to her cheeks.

It takes him a moment, but the Boy who Lived is used to making excuses for things. “It was nobody’s, Gin,” he soothes, running his fingertips over her veins. “Nobody’s fault. You were both children.”

“Ron wasn’t.”

“He was a child not of age,” Harry says wisely, and Ginny almost smiles. Almost. “He didn’t know anything.”
“Yes he did,” she says with a little more rage now, bending her fingers against Harry’s palm awkwardly. “He knew I was his baby sister.”

As this sinks in, Harry thinks of solar eclipses, and cinema, and novels and broken pieces of china–a menagerie of sorts in his head that makes no sense at all. Then he thinks of broken baby dolls, and stained pinafores, and trodden-on daisies, and then he thinks of Ginny. Whatever Ron did to her, he knows not of, but whatever she did to herself, he wants to know.

“You’re not broken yet,” Harry says, stroking her cheek, and she flutters against his touch.

There is a pause, and then she mumbles something incoherent. “Pass me the glue,” she might have said, or, “I love you too,” it might have been, or perhaps it was, “Not even you.” Can fix me, Harry finishes, as Ginny sighs off to sleep, not even the Boy who Lived can fix a broken porcelain baby doll.

-fin