Days After Death

“I’m worried about you, Harry.”

“Me?”

Ginny shifts in his embrace, so she’s facing him now. He can see the outline of her long red hair, but there’s nothing he can do to discern her facial expression due to the darkness of the night and the fact that his glasses are put aside on the bedroom side table.

“Yes you,” she says fondly, raking her hands through his messy hair.

He feels a pang of guilt.

“Have I been talking in my sleep?” He frets, not wanting to be a burden to her slumber for being too loud. Plus, it would do no good for anyone to hear them and find out he had snuck away to Ginny’s room and was not sleeping on his own. Ron would probably go mental, but it was losing Molly’s favour he fears most of all.

Even in this dark, Harry can tell that Ginny makes a face at him.

“More like unintelligible muttering,” she says, but her words are fond.

He shifts in bed too, looking in her face, not wanting to move away from her as he relishes in her warm skin against his. It’s almost amusing how she’s concerned for him, because he feels the most at peace beside her.

He’s used to hearing words of worried advice from Hermione, who’s getting on his case about talking to someone, but Harry knows he doesn’t need to. The war is over, and though he feels an overwhelming sense of grief for those he lost, he supposes it’s natural. What did talking ever do that fixed anything? Harry supposes what he needs to do is take action, go out and live the life others fought so hard for, and that started with providing his girlfriend with all the love and attention he had always wanted to give. There is nothing stopping him now, and it feels like more than he deserves.

Ginny isn’t a talker, she doesn’t need words to communicate. Harry isn’t a talker either, which he thinks works better for them.

But then Ginny grabs her wand and whispers a Lumos spell, and Harry is there squinting at the sudden brightness it brings, one arm flayed out and feeling around for his glasses on the other side of the single bed. When he has them on, his eyes adjust slightly, and Ginny is sitting up with a pensive expression on her face.

“Harry,” she starts, seeming to struggle with finding the right words to what she has to say, which makes him nervous because she’s usually so blunt with everything, “you know, if you need to talk about anything, I’m here to listen. I know I can seem hard to talk to when it comes to deep stuff, but I’m not that cold-hearted–”

“I know you’re not, Gin,” he says quickly. “I’m fine, though. Really. What’s brought this on?”

She bites her lip, tucking red strands behind her ear.

“It’s just– I was talking to Hermione the other day–”

“Hermione’s always worried about me, it’s been that way since we were kids. She’s got good intentions, but don’t pay her much mind.”

“But she was kind of making sense,” Ginny says, turning to him, and if Harry had missed the tone of urgency in her voice, he doesn’t now. She looks almost panicked. “She was pointing out things that happened, things that happened to you over the course of these few years. And I was just, you know, nodding my head and whatnot. But, it unnerved me because half of the things she was saying were things I had never heard about from you.”

Harry feels his blood go cold.

“Things like what?” Though he doesn’t really want to know what Hermione could have told her.

Ginny hesitates, as if she doesn’t want to say these things aloud. It makes Harry feel even worse about himself.

“Those horrible things your aunt and uncle used to call you, how Dudley and his friends used to treat you,” she murmurs, as if it's hurting her physically to think about it. “She told me about that time when you were allowed to follow him out to the playground when you were around eight, and how he and his mates, you know, ganged up on you.”

Harry thinks she means how they stripped him naked and threw him in the mud from the storm that occurred the night before. They forced Harry to walk home like that, and it had been probably one of the most humiliating moments of his life. Even more so, when his aunt and uncle had screamed at him and called him an idiot over and over, and Harry had just stood there and tried not to cough on them and give them his cold.

He doesn’t really like thinking of that.

Merlin’s beard. Why couldn’t Hermione just keep quiet for once? Once this is over, he swears he’ll give her some bitter, deserved silent treatment. Why did she have to spill everything to his sodding girlfriend? She obviously couldn’t trust Harry to tell her in his own time, and that pissed him off all the more.

“There was another time, and, of course I was already at the school by then, but I didn’t truly know how bad it had affected you,” Ginny says choppily, like she’s stopping and starting, too short for it to exactly be called pausing. Harry hates how guilty she sounds. “That whole thing with the Triwizard Tournament. How you were selected and yelled at, and then the whole Potter Stinks badge too. Ron had stayed up with you that night when you cried, and he only told Hermione.”

“Who told you,” Harry states flatly, feeling his temper flare.

It wasn’t as if he was never going to tell Ginny, he just had found it awkward to bring it up now, since it all looks quite bad in hindsight. He had planned on opening up a little once the aftermath of the war died now a bit more but now that power of choice was taken away from him by Hermione, who always thought she knew better. And Ron too, who always defended her self-righteousness.

Ginny shakes her head, not understanding, and maybe that’s the worst part about it all.

“It seems stupid that I hadn’t truly considered how terrible that must’ve felt for you. How ostracising.”

“I was basically different from everyone else the moment I was the baby who defeated Voldemort. Besides, it was worse for me when I had to come back without Cedric.”

He regrets saying this as soon as the words leave his mouth, because he sees the way Ginny’s face crumples in empathetic devastation, and Harry decides he well and truly despises this conversation. It’s making him uncomfortable and her sad, and it isn’t doing a lick of good. He doesn’t want to dwell on having to hold Cedric’s corpse in his arms as he spins back towards laughter and celebratory music of the schools that had no idea what would have just occurred. How their world had changed. He didn’t want to think of the silent accusatory glances that followed, how even some of his closest friends would turn against him. He didn’t want to think of the cruel, muttered words of a passing Slytherin in a year above him, muttering “We all know you killed him, Potter.”

Harry wants to live now. He doesn’t want to waste anymore time on the war. He wants to keep doing the good he’s done, without conjuring all the phantoms and ghosts that he could. Merlin knows he had an abundant selection to haunt him.

“Of course. I’m sorry. You never really spoke about him either.”

“I was more focused on the fact that Voldemort was alive again.”

“And no one would believe you.”

“Yes. No one would.”

Harry had died and came back alive again. How many people can say that? He is truly grateful, and now he has to prove he deserves this extra chance. And he will.

“But he’s well and truly gone now. You can talk about it.”

“I don’t particularly want to, Gin.”

She purses her lips here, thinking hard. She’s not the kind of person who talks, not the one who feels the need to put feelings into words, verbalise concern and hurt and grief. She can shoulder it all herself, so her stark awkwardness now is not surprising to him. Ginny’s doing this all for his sake.

“I feel like you should,” she says, hand reaching out to touch him, brushing his cheek, then the side of his neck and shoulder.

“Is that what you think? Or what Hermione thinks?”

“She’s right, though.”

Harry doesn’t answer her, but turns his head away from her hand. Hopefully, she’ll understand to drop it now.

Ginny sighs, she’s stubborn, and she likes to fight, but even he can tell this conversation is wearing her out. It’s not doing any good, it’s not getting them anywhere.

“I’m okay, Gin. Please don’t worry about me,” he says in hopes for her to stop fretting. This isn’t like her, all these words bringing up the pain of the past. He wants her to know that she doesn’t have to worry about him, that he’s completely fine. He feels it’s imperative, but he doesn’t know what to do or how to do it except by pathetically repeating himself like something that’s truly broken.

Ginny doesn’t look completely convinced, which, in a way, makes Harry feel more guilty than just making her worry about him. Like he should feel tormented. Is he a terrible person for just wanting to get on with it? For not wanting to bother with the tears and the grief and the terrible talks. And, he knows if he ever says these things aloud, especially to Hermione, he’ll never hear the end of it. It sounds bad, coming from him. But he remembers lying with Ginny, one of those early nights in their relationship where all he could focus on was trying to keep his heart beating at a safe pace because she had been bloody lying next to him as she is now, and he remembers her saying how she hated feeling stuck in her grief, how she was going to take the steps out of it and live her life like she ought to. Harry had agreed. She had agreed.

What is this now, if not a disagreement? Is he expected not to feel the same?

He watches her, scrutinises her as much as he can, and despite how sodding blind he is, he can still see the way her lip is caught between the whites of her teeth, how her face gazes out behind him, as if deliberating something. He wants to ask what she’s thinking, but he knows she will tell him without his words too.

“I still mourn my brother,” Ginny says, and Harry is paying more attention to the conversation than he had before. She is serious, if she’s talking about it. Because Ginny hates to talk about it. “Fred was annoying as hell, and he pissed me off especially when I was younger, because I was always the youngest only girl in a house full of boys and so I always got picked on the most, and Fred and George were the biggest instigators. I hated him for a long while before I grew up, and started to realise the git was actually quite funny.”

She smiles, and lies back down next to him. He reaches out and brushes her red hair, and his girl with no need for words talks and talks to him.

“He had me so pissed off after he died, you know? Because I was finally building a relationship with him, finally actually beginning to understand him, and then he just fucking dies. Like, he used to have the biggest crush on Angelina Johnson, and he used to wait out in the Gryffindor dorms every morning, waiting for her to wake up and come downstairs so he could fucking juggle for her. Juggle, Harry. The stupid bugger flirted by flexing his juggling skills.”

“Sounds like Fred,” Harry smiles, and Ginny takes his hand and he presses a firm kiss to it.

“You know how I found out?” She asks him softly.

“How?”

“I woke up early, saw him juggling again, and asked George. George was the one who told me, and we laughed because it was so dumb, but I think we could both tell we thought it was secretly sweet. Because Fred is just the type to wake up early every morning for the girl he fancies, just so he can see her laugh. I would have never thought Fred was the kind of guy to do that, but when I found out, I couldn’t say why I was surprised. I still couldn’t tell you. All I know is that I discovered something new about him, and two months later he’s gone.”

She turns on her side, and though Harry can’t quite see well, he can feel the weight of her gaze on him. The light of her wand outlines her nose.

“Do you realise that George used to call Fred ‘Freddie’ all the time?”

“Yeah.”

“And now he calls him Fred. Now that he’s gone.”

“Yeah, I realised that too.”

“I think we all lost George that day too, Harry.”

He knows she’s right. George, still cracking his dumb jokes, still laughing and yelling bright and loud and obscene things, but changed nevertheless. Harry couldn’t erase the memories of how truly corpse-like he had been a week after Fred’s death. Hollow, disoriented, confused. It was disturbing, it still is, because it’s still there.

Harry doesn’t want to think about it, but he’s Ginny’s brother and how can he ask her to stop?

“I don’t know what to say,” Harry says, almost defensively, like he needs to say something, something to make all of this go away and make it better for her. For everyone.

But Ginny surprises him.

“You don’t have to say anything,” she says, her voice fairly light with normalcy, as if they could be discussing the weather tomorrow morning. Like it’s obvious. And Harry realises here that he well and truly loves her. “Not if you don’t want to.”

Harry squeezes her hand, now squished between both of his. He wants her to know so many things, but he’s afraid too. He doesn’t quite understand any of it, and he doesn’t know if he should speak on any of it unless he’s sure on what he feels at all, about why he feels that way. He feels he needs it figured out first. Because once these feelings take the form of words, they become very real no matter how careless they are. They immediately exist, and so he should be cautious, surely.

“I wanted to tell you this,” Ginny says, and he understands her. And he’s hit with the knowledge, whether she’s conscious of it too or not, that she must really love him. The realisation soothes him, like a steady embrace, a welcoming sink into the mattress below him, where the soft pillows smell of her, wild and undaunted, and selfishly, he knows everything is okay.

He touches her face again, and she turns her head to kiss his palm sleepily.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk, Harry,” she says.

“It’s okay if you do,” he says, and he also feels the tug of sleep, and he can’t even be angry at Hermione anymore. “It’ll be okay.”

“Of course it will.”

Ginny turns her gaze upwards, towards the ceiling. Her smile grows wider, just a little, and he hopes she’s feeling a little selfish too.

“I keep thinking of Bill and Fleur’s daughter,” she says, dreamily. “Victoire. Such an awesome name, such a cute little baby.”

Her hands fly to her face, a familiar grin spreading across her face.

“I’m going to be an aunt,” she sighs, and Harry laughs tiredly, content.