TWENTY-EIGHT
Ginny’s birthday is a Wednesday, which is one of Harry’s ministry days; given that Harry can’t think of anything less romantic than the auror department, he decides not to propose on her actual birthday. Hermione agrees this is a better strategy when he first informs her of this decision. “You don’t want to take her birthday and make it about yourself anyway,” she tells him approvingly. “Besides, she’ll be expecting it less on a random Friday.”
Harry wants to ask if Ron’s proposal made Christmas about him, but he bites his tongue. Hermione has been so wonderfully supportive over the last year — between helping them through Ginny’s pregnancy from the beginning and essentially singlehandedly getting the two of them back together, his best friend surely deserves something higher than her Order of Merlin, First Class for her service — so he’s not going to sass her. So although Harry would hardly classify the Friday after Ginny’s birthday as particularly random, he resigns himself to waiting a few days.
Despite the fact that they’ve spoken about the inevitability of marriage ad nauseam, Harry finds himself nervous in the days leading up to the proposal. He’s sure she’ll say yes, because they’ve agreed to it; she’s seen his mum’s ring and has affirmed that she wants it to be hers, too. And yet, he can’t help but run through scenarios in his mind that become increasingly farfetched the longer he allows them to linger. She might eat something disagreeable during the lunch he arranged in his office at Hogwarts, and throw up just as he’s asking her to marry him. She might fall off her broom (professional or not, accidents happen) and need medical attention more than she needs a fiancé. Or, perhaps most frightening of the scenarios, she may have a change of heart and decide they’re better off as coparents after all.
He makes an effort to conceal his ever-fraying nerves in front of Ginny when August 11 finally arrives — and he thinks he does a rather good job. Relieving her of all maternal duties, he alone wakes up with James throughout the night to ensure Ginny a full night’s rest ahead of her birthday; after gifting her a lie-in, he and James surprise her with breakfast in bed and a pile of presents. If Ginny was expecting a ring with her birthday gifts, she doesn’t show it. Instead, she gasps appropriately at the bracelet Harry insisted James picked out all on his own and then deftly clasps the bracelet on her left wrist. Harry can’t help but grin, thinking about how the delicate gold chain adorned with an aquamarine, a ruby, and a peridot — one of each member of their family’s birthstones — will look when her engagement ring is displayed next to it.
“It’s charmed,” Harry explains, only then sounding a bit tentative. “So when, er, or if, I suppose, we have another baby, his or her birthstone will be added automatically.”
An odd expression overtakes Ginny’s face, one Harry can’t quite read. To him, it seems she must be a bit surprised by his assumption that they might have more children — and while he’d never pressure her, and is so unbelievably grateful for the one child they have, he thought that they agreed they wanted that eventually. Is the puzzlement on her face an indication that she’s having second thoughts about their future together?
If he simply asked her what she was thinking, she’d tell him that he sounded hesitant, and she was only wondering what she had done, if anything, to make him feel that way. She shakes her head as if the clear her own confusion, and smiles instead. “I love it,” she tells Harry sincerely. “It’s perfect. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” Harry laughs, his expression settling back into something familiar, something that indicates he’s comfortable and happy. “It was Jamie’s idea!”
“Of course it was,” Ginny smirks in return. She reaches her hands out to James and Harry transfers the tiny boy into her lap. She presses a kiss to the baby’s soft, sweet-smelling head. “Thank you so much, Jamie. You do know how to make mummy feel loved, you do.” Then she glances back at Harry and locks eyes with him: “It shouldn’t be a surprise — your daddy’s always been good at that too.”
The remaining tension and nervousness melts off Harry’s features. They spend a minute just staring at each other silently, matching soppy expressions of adoration shining right off them, before James squawks, effectively ending any moment of affection his parents shared. “Right,” Harry laughs, handing another gift to Ginny.
This one is in a small, rectangular box, really the perfect size to hold a ring, and wrapped in shiny golden paper. Ginny’s lips part softly, as if finally recognizing what had been happening all along: Harry was nervous because her engagement ring was on this pile all along. Holding James against her body with her right forearm, she maneuvers her right hand to assist the left in peeling back the paper. As she suspected, a garnet-colored velvet box — not unlike the one which held her bracelet, although clearly much smaller in size — lays beneath the wrapping. Tentatively, Ginny steadies the box in her right hand while opening it with her left.
Inside there isn't a ring, however; the box instead holds diamond stud earrings, two tastefully-sized stones on yellow gold posts. She’s sensing a theme: Harry is giving her yellow gold jewelry to match her engagement ring, though he hasn’t given her the ring itself yet. They’re beautiful, but her face still falls as the adrenaline pulsing through her chest catches up to her reality: today could be the day, but now is not the moment.
“If you don’t like them, we can return them and get you something else,” Harry jumps in, noting how Ginny’s expression of wonder faltered and settled into something rather ordinary.
“It’s not that,” Ginny shakes her head, voice barely above a whisper. She probably shouldn’t tell him what it is, anyway, because as all of the nagging in the back of her head (a voice that sounds suspiciously like Hermione, actually) is reminding her not to ruin his surprise. But since she’s never been one for being dishonest or tiptoeing around her boyfriend, she doesn’t plan to start now. “For a second, I thought this was, er, a ring,” she admits. “The ring.”
Although Harry can feel his pulse beat within his eardrums, and hear the blood pump through his body, he musters every bit of auror stealth he’s still got within him and trains his expression into something playful. There’s a voice in his head that sounds like Hermione, too, reminding him he needs to surprise Ginny, two days from now. “Don’t grow impatient on me,” Harry teases her, simultaneously trying to assess whether he senses disappointment or relief in her words.
“Me? Impatient?” Ginny snorts as if she can’t believe that such an accusation could ever apply to her. “I’ll have you know I’m the queen of the long game.”
Harry holds up his hands in defense. “I never said you weren’t,” he jokes. “I seem to recall you waiting very patiently for me to come around when we were in school.”
“And I waited patiently for you to work on yourself.”
“Kind of,” Harry admits. “You did force my hand there a little bit.” It’s not worth rehashing it, a discussion they’ve had more times than they can count. Still, he thinks it’s important to remind her that she didn’t just wait. She pushed him, and she made it clear that no matter how much she loved him, love had limits even when it came without conditions. It was a difficult lesson for him, someone who’d had so little love in his life to begin with, but a necessary one.
“You’re happy I did,” she counters.
Harry laughs, a guffaw that emerges from deep within his chest and fills the room. Upon hearing his father’s laugh, James smiles as well. Boys. “I am immensely grateful. For everything.” As he says it, Harry’s gaze flits down to their son. James is the thing he’s most grateful for, certainly, but he also recognizes that everything else led to James — not the other way around.
A fond smile on his thin lips, Harry glances back up to Ginny, losing himself in her impossibly warm gaze and feeling like he’s swimming in a pool of rich French hot chocolate as he does. “I’m not asking you to wait forever,” he tells her. “Just a bit longer.”
Ginny inhales with closed eyes, and as she exhales, her breath ruffles the wispy black hair atop their son’s head. “I can wait a bit longer,” she tells him after a few more beats have passed.
“I want it to be perfect,” Harry continues unnecessarily.
With that, Ginny recalls a different conversation, one that feels like it happened another lifetime ago. It was the summer after the war, and Harry had convinced Hermione to switch places with him, so he and Ginny could spend the night together. Ginny’s pretty sure Ron and Hermione weren’t shagging yet, but even so, it wasn’t a hard sell. They all had nightmares those days, and one of the only things that helped soothe them was knowing someone you loved was in bed beside you.
In hindsight, that’s probably one of the reasons Harry and Ginny had so much sex that summer. Yes, of course, there were all the bits about young love and teenage hormones and feeling like if they ever let go, they might never find their way back to each other, not after all they went through. But there was also something darker: when they were indulging their base urges, they weren’t chased by nightmares or what Ginny called daymares — visions of the horrors they experienced that flashed in front of their eyes even when they were wide awake.
The nights all blend together, truthfully; they were chasing their own wakefulness just as much as they chased sleep, and they stayed with each other more nights than not. But one night, as they lay breathless and side-by-side, Harry asked her: “D’you wish we had waited?”
Ginny doesn’t know how to answer that; why would she regret discovering the most brilliant feeling in the world — one that made her feel alive at a time when she often felt as though the dead overshadowed the living — with this man (she had to remind herself not to call him a boy) she loved more than anything. “Do you?” She asked instead, throwing the question back to him. That was always one of their favorite linguistic games.
Next to her, his head shook wildly. She was still getting used to not seeing his hair shake with him. He’d been so matted and dirty after the battle that he’d decided it easier to buzz his hair than try to clean it. His hair was still cropped short that summer, and instead of seeing his curls flail atop his head, she heard the fuzz rub against the pillow. “Merlin, no,” he rushed to insist. “It just — it’s so much better now than it was that first day and…” He trailed off as he turned to look at her. “I wondered if you wished it had been better the first time, you know? You deserved something perfect.”
In response, Ginny could only laugh, her chuckles boisterous and decidedly unladylike. But for the silencing charm Harry cast upon entering her room, they might have been caught from that laugh alone. “Harry,” she breathed when she had finally calmed down. “It was with you — that’s all the perfection I ever needed.”
Now, in the present, in the bed that they have made their own in the home they have made their own, holding the son they made together, Ginny repeats. “Don’t worry about it being perfect, Harry. I mean, by all means, if you have a plan, follow it. But it’s you — that’s all the perfection I ever needed.”
…
So Ginny did give Harry permission to propose in a less-than-ideal way. But when she said that, he imagines she was thinking that he might feel empowered to ask during her birthday dinner at the Burrow or during one of James’ bedtime routines. Perhaps Ginny even thought she was giving Harry license to not put too much pressure on whatever plan he was loosely sticking to.
One thing is for certain: Ginny could never in a million years have imagined just how far off course Harry James Potter was capable of steering the ship.
In his original plan, Harry envisioned that Ginny would bring James to Hogwarts along with her. There wasn’t a shortage of people on the castle grounds who would relish watching the boy while his parents went for a fly, and it only felt right that they celebrate this next step together as a family. But Ginny had, instead, insisted it would be easier if James spent the day with her mum instead. And when she gave Harry a wicked smirk and described exactly what she’d like to do in Harry’s office when they didn’t have to worry about their baby, he was hard pressed to disagree with her — emphasis on the hard.
She arrives at Hogwarts around lunchtime, walking up to the gates of the school from the apparition point in Hogsmeade with a Holyhead Harpies cap slung low over her eyes. This is her preferred way to go incognito: her hair is distinctive enough on its own, and paired with the hat, it would be obvious to anyone who she is. Still, obscuring her face with the cap’s brim gave her just enough shield to keep walking without inviting anyone to intrude on her privacy. There are some whispers as she passes through town — Is that Ginny Weasley? Merlin, she looks fit. I can’t believe she just had a baby! — but she floats by without paying any mind to the gossip. She’s singularly focused on her destination.
When she spots Harry waiting for her at the school gates, flanked by the winged boars, her pace picks up to a light jog, completely exhilarated as if she hadn’t spent the morning cuddling with him and their son. She gets progressively faster and, in the end, she comes at him at a full sprint; he catches her in his arms and lifts her off the ground giving her a twirl and a quick peck on the lips before returning her to the ground and reaching for her hand to drag her through the school gates.
Their fingers interlace as they trod the familiar path up to the castle. It’s been years since Ginny’s been to Hogwarts for anything other than the requisite memorial ceremony each May, but she remembers it just as well as she remembers the constellation of scars that form a map across Harry’s chest.
“It’s strange being back,” she comments as they approach the doors that will open to the Entrance Hall.
“You’re telling me,” Harry laughs. It’s a laugh that’s familiar to her, one that is imbued with practiced ease. So Harry is anxious, she concludes. And that could be for any number of reasons, the most rational of which would, of course, be that beginning to teach at Hogwarts is the first time Harry has spent any length of time here since the weeks following one of the most intense, overwhelming, and traumatic experiences of his life. So she doesn’t allow herself to read into it beyond that, and just squeezes his hand.
She’d expected there to be lunch in the Great Hall upon her arrival, but when she asks about it, Harry shakes his head, his disheveled mop of hair bouncing with the motion. “Er, no. Faculty doesn’t eat in here when there aren’t any students, turns out,” he explains, sounding a bit self-conscious as he guides her toward a corridor she vaguely remembers they’d snogged in when she was fifteen. “I ordered lunch to my office for us, though.”
Ginny’s known since Harry suggested this day that lunch was far from the most appetizing thing they could have in his office. Heat tingles her extremities in anticipation, a pleasant buzz in her fingers and toes and scalp. She hardly even takes note of where they’re heading before Harry pulls her in front of a stone door.
“This is it,” he announces with a sheepish grin. He reaches into his robes and — more carefully than she’d expect him to, all things considered — pulls out his wand. He taps it to a point in the center of the door and it pops just the slightest bit ajar, reading his magical signature. It’s a low-level ward, but perhaps one of the more useful ones a teacher could add to his or her office. After all, students are clever, but not quite clever enough to attempt disarming the ward in front of their professor without him noticing — and he would need to be present for that particular ward to be undone. “Defense lesson number one,” he jokes, sounding inappropriately nervous given that he’s explaining his choice of protective enchantment to his live-in girlfriend. “Often, the simplest measures are the most effective.”
“Expelliarmus and all that,” Ginny responds teasingly, crossing the threshold into the office without waiting for Harry to do so first. “Don’t forget, Harry, you were basically my defense professor, too.”
“Well, when you say it like that, it sounds borderline inappropriate,” Harry quips, loosening up enough to follow her through the door.
“What would you call it, then?” Ginny asks, quirking an eyebrow as she turns to face him. By now, she’s reached his desk, so she hops up to sit on the edge for dramatic effect.
In response, Harry swallows hard and shuts the door behind him; he’s not sure there’s ever been a more arousing sight than his gorgeous girlfriend perched on the edge of his desk, the skirt of her sundress creeping tantalizingly up her creamy thighs. “Dunno,” he shrugs, trying to play it cool. There’s a couch with a coffee table in the corner, upon which one of the Hogwarts elves has placed their lunch. He flicks his wand in that general direction, casting a stasis charm he isn’t sure really took on the food. “Your tutor, maybe,” he suggests, quirking an eyebrow.
“Mmm.” Ginny appears to consider this, tapping her finger against her chin thoughtfully. “Tutor sounds much too posh for a pair of ruffians like us,” she decides, her eyes twinkling with mischief. And Merlin, Harry loves her so much that he’s never felt more sure about anything in his life than he does about the question he’ll be asking her out on the pitch later.
A dopey, lopsided grin surfaces on Harry’s lips as he stalks forward toward where Ginny is perched atop his desk. When he reaches her, he places a hand on each of Ginny’s supple thighs, splaying his fingers as he grabs onto them and creates enough space for himself to stand between them. His cock twitches eagerly against the zip of his trousers; he must make the face — the one Ginny teases him for making the very second he gets hard — because Ginny giggles victoriously and picks up her own wand to cast a locking charm and a couple of silencing spells toward the door.
“Nice,” he manages huskily before leaning forward to capture her lips with his own.
They continue like this for several minutes, mouth sliding against mouth and tongues dancing with one another, before Harry instinctively moves one hand up Ginny’s thighs, his fingers inching beneath the flimsy fabric of her dress. In response, a wanton sigh escapes her lips where they are still pressed against his. Encouraged, Harry moves to hook a long, slender finger around the edge of her knickers, only to find she isn’t wearing any. His cock presses against the too-tight fabric of his trousers all the more urgently.
“I told you we were going to fly,” he admonishes breathily as he breaks the kiss, pushing his forefinger into the wetness between her legs.
She smiles devilishly. “I have a pair in my bag along with some track pants,” she pants, bucking her hips further until her clit rests on Harry’s knuckles. Ginny gasps again at the contact. “Seemed a waste to sully a perfectly good pair of knickers when I knew I wanted to do this first.”
“Clever girl,” he compliments her, rewarding himself for making her make those noises by allowing himself to taste her delicious mouth once again.
They continue like this for a while longer, adding and removing fingers or changing the tempo as though he was playing an instrument, before Ginny’s walls spasm around him and she breaks the kiss again. “I need you.” She doesn’t wait for a reaction before she moves to push Harry’s robes off his shoulders. Harry is so preoccupied with shaking them off and moving to unbuckle his belt that he misses the sound of a thud against the stone floor of his office.
The noise startles Ginny, who looks over Harry’s shoulder to see the velvet pouch from Harry’s sock drawer has slid across the cold, smooth ground; the ring it holds — the perfect oval solitaire that once belonged to Lily Evans Potter — slips out and skids a meter further. Her breath catches in realization of what today is — the hope she hadn't fully hoped becoming a reality. She’s so stunned and overcome, she nearly forgets she’s sat at the edge of a wood worktable in her soon-to-be fiancé’s place of employment, her dress hiked around her hips and her legs straddled as said soon-to-be fiancé struggles to release his erection from its fabric prison.
Harry doesn’t recognize her change in demeanor until he’s standing in front of her, pants and trousers around his ankles and the hardness of his penis sticking out in front of him, the tails of his button down shirt hanging down to about his hips. Then, he’s just confused: only a minute or two ago, Ginny had been desperate to be in this situation, and now sex seemed the furthest thing from her mind.
He clears his throat. “Er, all right, Gin?”
Freckled eyelids blink rapidly over her warm brown eyes before she points behind him mutely. Now, it’s Harry’s turn to startle, his hands move forward to cover himself as he whips around, almost expecting someone to have walked in on them. In the seconds he has, he says a silent prayer that their interruptor isn’t McGonagall.
But the door is still safely closed. His eyes scan downward through the fogged lenses of his glasses and he finally sees what’s shocked his girlfriend so: the engagement ring he’d carefully stowed in his robes had broken free.
“Oh,” is all he manages, tone dumb.
A haughty, incredulous laugh erupts from Ginny’s chest in turn. “Yes, oh.”
Harry turns back to blink at her, his hands no longer covering his crotch and instead carding through his ever-untidy hair. “That, er, wasn’t supposed to happen yet.”
“Believe it or not, I got that. Not that it isn’t every girl’s dream to be proposed to while she and the man proposing are half naked and getting ready to shag in a semi-public place.”
“Shagging in semi-public places is our thing,” Harry can’t help but point out cheekily. “Our son was conceived in a semi-public place! It’s almost romantic.”
Ginny snorts. “Almost,” she agrees. They stare at each other for a few moments, unsure of how to proceed before Ginny speaks once more. “So what was the plan, then?”
“The plan is to take you out to the pitch and go for a fly,” Harry explains to her after a few moments of hesitation. “And then after we fly, we’re going to land in the Gryffindor stands — not on the ground. And there, I’m going to get down on one knee and ask you to marry me.”
“Sounds lovely,” Ginny agrees, something like sentimentality brewing and bubbling from her stomach up to her chest. “It’s too bad you won’t be needing it.”
Harry blinks again, confused. “Er, sorry?”
Ginny jumps down from the desk and smooths the skirt of her dress, before stepping around Harry and gesturing to the ring where it lays on the grey floor. “No time like the present, Potter.”
Before he can think better of it, Harry blurts: “I’m half naked!”
But Ginny understands — she always does and she always has and isn’t that, above all else, why he wants to spend the rest of his bloody life with her? — so she shrugs. “All right. So pull your pants back up.”
And so, only minutes after wrestling his trousers down, Harry pulls them back up his hips and buckles his belt. He wipes his now-clammy hands on the cotton of his trousers before he walks over to the ring and picks it up. Then, he strides back over to his girlfriend. “Hi,” he says dumbly.
“Hi,” she responds with a dazzling smile, her face flushed and her lips swollen, all at once the cutest and hottest and most beautiful woman he has ever seen.
So he lowers himself to one knee, the stone cold and hard enough to bruise if he stays there for long enough. “I can’t believe after everything we’ve found our way back to each other, Ginny. I literally died and I found my way back to you. I cocked things all up along the way, and still — we found our way back to one another. You’ve given me everything I’ve ever wanted: love and a family and a person to call home. Can you give me one more thing? Be my wife?”
A wide, blinding grin splits Ginny’s face in two. Extending her left hand toward her new fiancé, she giggles in the way she only does around him. “Well, Professor Potter,” she quips. “I thought you’d never ask.”