THREE
Time is of the essence, as Hermione reminds Ginny no less than four times, and a few days later, Ginny finds herself in the exam room at Hermione’s mum’s cousin’s office. She’s completely naked under her paper gown and shivering in the cold sterility of the place. She’s seated at the end of a strange leather table with little metal arms on either side of her. She asks Hermione what they’re for, and Hermione looks up from her book for long enough to tell Ginny that they’re for her feet. Ginny’s image of how the table is used becomes completely clear and there’s dread in the pit of her stomach. She’d thought the first part — where she’d had to pee in a cup, get prodded with needles for an entire vial of her blood, have her arm squeezed in a strange fabric sleeve for some reason, and get weighed — had been bad, but she swallows realizing it will get even more demoralizing, and soon.
Hermione notices the way her breath quickens and stands to grab her hand. She rubs soothing circles on the back of Ginny’s hand, murmuring in a calming voice that it will all be okay. “Soon, this will all be a memory,” she reassures Ginny. They both know better than to hope that they may discover this is all a nightmare, and she was never actually pregnant after all.
She doesn’t actually see Hermione’s mum’s cousin, who is apparently at the hospital delivering babies. Instead, she sees a younger doctor who works for her. Hermione intercepts a number of questions, making sure to replace Ginny’s magical facts with suitable muggle replacements.
“Were you using protection?” The doctor asks plainly.
“I was on the po—”
“She was on the pill,” Hermione pipes in, expertly covering. She even drops the name of a muggle birth control pill, never one to show up without having done her research.
“And we I guess had gotten careless about the c—”
“Condoms,” Hermione intercepts effortlessly. Ginny makes an effort to appear emotional as she explains this, as if to explain why her friend needs to answer for her.
Admitting all of this makes Ginny’s stomach turn, but that’s at least not unusual these days. She’s constantly nauseated.
The feeling doesn’t dissipate as she tells the doctor about the positive pregnancy test, about the fact that she’s pretty sure she wants to terminate the pregnancy and just needs to know the next steps. The doctor is kind and nonjudgmental. She’s also apologetic about needing to do an ultrasound, but explains that, all things considered, this is the only way to date the pregnancy.
Ginny doesn’t know what an ultrasound is, or why it involves sticking a giant rod inside of her, or why Hermione offers to watch it so that she doesn’t have to. She doesn’t know why the doctor says neither of them have to watch it at all. So instead, curiously, she fixates on the little black and white screen as the doctor focuses on a flickering little object, shaped more like a bean than anything else. Ginny realizes with a start that the flickering little bean is the beginnings of a baby; in that moment, getting a glimpse of the product of conception on a screen in the muggle doctor’s office, she’s no longer so sure about what she wants.
The doctor tells her she’s only about eight weeks along. “It’s early, the procedure is straightforward at this point,” she explains. But nothing about it feels straightforward at all. Instead, Ginny only feels bizarrely responsible for the flickering bean inside of her, and morbidly curious about what would happen if she let it turn into a baby.
Still, when Hermione tells her with relief that it’s still early enough for a potion, she agrees that they should get the ingredients. Hermione will help her brew it — it’s complicated, after all, and Ginny was always crap at potions. They start the brew that night, and 36 hours later, Hermione pours it into a vial for her. But as she brings the vial to her lips, she finds she can’t bring herself to swallow it. Her hands shake, as does her head slightly, almost imperceptibly. “I think I need more time,” she tells Hermione.
Hermione seems to understand. “I say you have another twelve days to take it and still be sure it’ll work,” she tells Ginny as she puts a stopper in the vial, tucking it away in the cabinet next to Ginny’s mirror. “You can owl me before you do,” she offers. The purple potion feels like it’s eating a hole in Ginny’s brain as the countdown begins.
…
Harry tries to owl Ginny for a week after his visit with Hermione, but he can’t seem to find the words. One letter sounds too cold, too unfeeling. The next sounds like he has too many feelings altogether. He can’t seem to get the balance right. So when he ends up at a pub with Ron and Neville after work, a pub not far from Ginny’s flat, he decides he’ll just show up. He has a few drinks for liquid courage, then feigns a headache, says he’s gotta go.
Hermione may have said she suspected things with Ginny never really ended, precisely because Harry does things like this, but Ron is so oblivious that Harry could probably be confessing his love to Ginny in this very booth and he’d never suspect a thing. So he cracks a joke about Harry’s headache, reminds him to take a sober up potion before bed. And Harry heads out the door and walks six blocks up to Ginny’s flat.
It’s clear she’s not expecting him when she answers the door at ten at night and finds him there, cheeks flushed with the pints he’d had at the pub. But what she does know is that when Harry shows up at this hour, flushed with drink and eyes glassy, what he really wants is sex. “Hi,” she greets him, an unfamiliar edge to her voice that he can’t quite identify.
He stares at her for a few moments, still standing in the small crack she made in the door. “Can I come in?” He asks finally, sounding nervous more than confident. He hears this and tries to fix it, cocks an eyebrow in a way she finds sexy. He’s not trying to seduce her, but he does know what she likes and what endears him to her. He hasn’t got much of a plan, but he reckons he’ll need to be endearing.
She counts to five before holding the door open for him to follow her into the living room. She’s been thinking more and more about what might happen if she had a baby, and figures if Harry is showing up at her doorstep, it might be a sign that it’s time to let him in on the secret.
If this were any other night, she’d know the routine. They’d chat for a bit, trying to make themselves feel like they aren’t just using each other, and then they’d have great sex and then they’d chat a bit more. And then Harry would leave. But tonight is different.
“How drunk are you?” Ginny asks with practiced nonchalance. She’s still standing as Harry kicks off his shoes on the mat by the door, and goes to flop on her couch.
Harry shakes his head. He doesn’t want her getting the wrong idea. He might be a little tipsy, but that’s not why he’s here. “I don’t need to be drunk to want to see you,” he points out instead, sounding almost pained by her insinuation to the contrary.
Just horny is the retort she bites back. “I need to know if you’re sober enough to talk to me about something,” she tells him.
He shoots her a cheeky grin, wondering if what she wants to talk about and what he wants to talk about are one and the same. He’s gaining confidence now. “We’re talking about something,” he reminds her smoothly.
“We’re talking about whether or not you’re pissed,” she points out, falling into their routine of playful banter easily.
“And I don’t seem to recall you ever minding if I was,” Harry points out with a chuckle.
Something about his arrogance ignites the part of her that always wants to jump him, and before she can rein her hormones in enough to focus on the task at hand, she presses her body against his and kisses him. The rational part of her brain tries to tell her to stop, but that little voice is easily suppressed when Harry’s lips are moving hungrily down her jaw, to her neck, to that little sensitive spot above her pulse point he’d discovered when she was only fifteen. She’s putty in his hand, tugging his shirt out of his trousers, hastily unbuckling his belt. He’s making quick work of the pajama bottoms slung low on her hips and the ratty old Gryffindor Quidditch shirt (so old it must have belonged to one of her brothers) she wears to bed. They stumble to the couch and take their dance horizontal there.
Harry has worshipped Ginny for ages, and long ago memorized every square centimeter of creamy, freckled flesh on her body. He knows every sharp edge of her bones, every ripple of her muscles. He’s not sure he could ever tire of the sight of her splayed out beneath him, on display for his eyes only. So he notices that her breasts seem — fuller, is that the word? He settles on fuller as she pulls him on top of her and moves to guide him into her. Sometimes, they take their time, but often their trysts are like this: frantic, fast, desperate. It makes him think that maybe she needs him just as badly as he needs her; that maybe they could really slow down and enjoy the experience more if they didn’t restrict themselves to these stolen moments.
He’s needy for her, embarrassingly so, and greedy. So he does something she normally likes, roughly reaching for her breast to knead a perfect pink nipple between his fingers. She’d usually gasp with pleasure, but instead he hears her immediately yelp in pain. He pulls back his hand as if he’s been burnt and with great difficulty stops the motion of his hips. “All right?” He asks her, voice gravelled and low.
She notices a flash of genuine concern across his face, and she knows how difficult it must have been for him to stop what he was doing to ask. She likes knowing that he doesn’t want to hurt her, and it makes her feel pathetic that what is probably more stupid, noble instinct than care means so much to her. Still, she doesn’t think she should tell him her secret while he’s still inside of her, and she doesn’t trust herself to speak. So she nods, moving his hand to her hair, and he knows just what to do with that. He switches to tugging gently on the ginger locks and continues where he left off.
It’s over all too soon after that, him collapsing on top of her after a final few jerky thrusts. He takes a minute, still inside of her, to brush some hair out of her face as he unwinds strands of brilliant copper from his fingers. He smiles just a little, something soft in his eyes that leaves her with more questions than answers. It’s all too much, so she squeezes her eyes shut and the trance is broken.
He pulls out, rolls off of her. He picks up her wand from the coffee table and offers it to her so she can clean up — she stopped letting him do it for her a few months into this arrangement. She said it felt too much like being together. At the time, he’d wanted to ask what they were, then, but he couldn’t bring himself to. He was so scared that if he’d said anything at all, she might end whatever tenuous relationship they still had. “Guessing that’s what you wanted to talk to me about, then?” He asks the question uneasily, sad to think that she wasn’t going to confess feelings to him, after all. He’s just about lost his nerve as a result.
“Not quite,” Ginny admits, her chest flushing red as she grabs the quidditch shirt she’d been wearing and pulls it on over her head. It’s long enough that it covers her bum, though she hastily gropes around for her pants. He realizes this won’t be a night where they laze about naked, and begins searching for his clothes too. “I actually really need to talk to you?”
He finds his boxers, wishing he had something clever to say in return. “I’m listening,” he tells her gently, stepping into his pants and shimmying them back up his legs.
“Right,” she agrees. “Okay, er,” she crosses her arms across her chest, and then winces at the way the movement squishes her breasts painfully. She uncrosses them again and drops them to her side. His brow furrows in concern — likely thinking about how he hurt her earlier, but she doesn’t know if he knows enough to figure it out just from that detail. “I don’t really know how to bring this up? I didn’t exactly plan on—”
“I think I know what this is about,” Harry nods with understanding. He’s thinking that they’re on the same page again, that they’re both ready to give this another go for real.
Ginny shakes her head, eyes going downcast. “I’m not sure you do…” She supposes it isn’t impossible that he’d figure it out, but it’s not very likely.
“I’ve wanted to talk to you about the same thing,” he admits with a smile, reaching for his jeans. The legs got turned inside out in the shuffle when she was undressing him, so he’s occupied with fixing them when she just blinks.
“You also wanted to talk to me about how I’m pregnant?” She asks with obvious confusion. It’s almost to herself, and it’s only after a few seconds have passed that she realizes she said it out loud.
Harry stops fussing with his jeans. He goes completely still. This was not in the realm of what he’d been expecting. “You’re…” He can’t say it, it’s like the word is suddenly no longer in his vocabulary.
“Pregnant,” Ginny repeats, louder this time, more sure of herself. “I, uh, went to a muggle doctor? Because I didn’t want anyone to see and I didn’t really know?” She leaves out Hermione’s role in all of it. “Anyway, she said I was about eight weeks and you’re the only one it could be. So.”
Harry shakes his head, still struggling to understand. “Aren’t you — you’re on the potion, I thought?” She always had been, so if he couldn’t remember if he’d done the charm after they’d been together? He didn’t stress it. He knew Ginny was responsible. He never felt like it could be a problem.
“It can — well, it can fail, I guess,” she explains helplessly. “I guess one of the team healers put me on a potion that can interact with it? And didn’t tell me it could be a side effect.” She still doesn’t know all of the details, and can’t bear to learn them.
“So you’re…” He can’t find the words. He gestures wildly. “I mean, we’re…” Something warm, like excitement or happiness, is starting to bubble in his chest, but he can’t trust it. None of it feels real, and even if it did, he’s used to things going to shit for him. Just because something is real now doesn’t mean it will be a few months, a few weeks, a few days, or even a few hours from now.
“I don’t know.” Her voice is small and weak as she admits it. “I didn’t think I wanted to? I thought I was going to, you know, terminate.” The use of that word is deliberate; it feels less personal to her, more scientific. “But, uh, I got the potion and I went to take it and — well, I just thought I needed more time. But the more I think about it, the more I think. I don’t know — would it be crazy to have a baby?”
“Er,” Harry scratches the back of his neck, trying to tamper down the traitorous flutter in his chest, the one that is pointing out to him that everything he’s ever wanted could be his, quite by accident. After all, she just said she wasn’t sure; it could all still disappear. He’s not daft, he caught the implication that she almost ended it without telling him. “Not if you want to have a baby, no.”
Ginny cocks her head to the side questioningly. “Is that what you would want?” She isn’t sure why she asks it. What Harry wants was never a factor in her decision — if she had been smart, she’d have already swallowed the potion in her bathroom cabinet.
“Doesn’t really matter what I want, does it?” Ginny doesn’t think she’s imagining that the statement carries an air of defeat; it constricts her heart within her chest.
“I’d like your…” She trails off, trying to find the right words. She decides she’s never going to tell him that she initially hesitated to tell him at all. “Well, I’d hope that you’d support whatever it is I decide to do.”
Harry nods, lips pressed into a tight line. “Well, I do. It’s your choice.” It’s the right thing to say, the thing Hermione would tell him to say. But his heart wants to tell her that they could be a family and maybe this is exactly what was meant to happen. “So whatever you choose.”
It’s vague, and she realizes she should have asked a more specific question if she wanted a more specific answer. It’s one thing to say he’s okay with it, but that’s not what she wants to know. She wants to know that he’s going to be there if she goes through with it, that he’s going to be a dad to their kid, and that he isn’t going to show up at Sunday lunches and pretend the child who may very well look just like him isn’t his. Harry always does the right thing, so that last one doesn’t especially seem likely; but she’d rather that Harry do something because he wants to, not out of a sense of duty.
She finds she’s unable to form that question, so she presses on. “I have about ten more days,” she tells him.
His brow knits in confusion. “Ten days to what exactly?”
She blinks at him, almost like he’s stupid. And, he considers, maybe he is. “To, you know, decide what to do. Before it’s too late to take the potion.” He doesn’t respond, so she continues. “After that…I think after that, I’d have to do it the muggle way, which doesn’t seem particularly pleasant, to be honest.” The pamphlet the muggle doctor gave her said something about vacuum aspiration , which Hermione translated to sucking everything out. Ginny decided she’d rather be pregnant for nine months and a mum for the rest of her life than find out what that felt like.
“Right,” Harry agrees, mostly because he senses that she needs him to say something . Truthfully, though, he’s not sure how to respond to this. “Well, if you, er, do that, I can come over when you take it,” he offers. “And, well, if you don’t, then I’m here for you and the —” He can’t bring himself to say baby. It’ll make it real, and then it’ll be unbearable if she takes it away. The word gets caught in his throat. “Just, er, let me know, then.” He finishes buckling his belt, realizing for the first time how surreal it is that that conversation happened as he was getting dressed. There’s a finality as he reaches for his jacket that makes him wonder if there’s more to say.
Ginny can’t help but feel a bit put off by his seeming indifference. “So you don’t have an opinion?”
Harry pauses, midway through shrugging his jacket back on. “I have loads of opinions,” he clarifies slowly, voice wavering just the smallest amount. “They just don’t matter as much as yours do.” And it’s in the slight hesitancy in his voice that his opinion becomes apparent to Ginny: he wants the baby, and he’d never ask her to do that for him.
She sees him out, hugs him awkwardly before he leaves — and that’s not a thing they do, not anymore. And though she tells him vaguely that she’ll be in touch, feigns needing more time, she knows what she’s going to do. Because all along, all she needed was to know that he wanted this. He’d never ask her for this, but she’s going to do it anyway.
But it’s not because she wants to have a family with him. It’s not because she loves him. It’s not.