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The room was quiet. Wind worried softly at the windowpanes. Somewhere downstairs, a clock marked the seconds with an old-fashioned dignity. The lamp on the bedside table had been turned low, throwing gold over the quilt, the potion bottles, the glass of water that sat mostly untouched.
Harry Potter lay against the pillows and listened to the house breath around him.
He had spent much of his life in rooms that did not belong to him. A cupboard. A dormitory. A tent. Hospital wards. Safe houses. Offices. Cells. Barracks. Bedrooms lent out of love or necessity. Rooms he had fled. Rooms he had fought in. Rooms where he had woken in terror and rooms where he had woken to laughter.
This one he liked.
This one had books and old wood and the lingering scent of the tea Ginny had brewed an hour ago. This one had a photograph of all their children crowded on the mantel in varying stages of annoyance at being made to sit still. This one had another photograph, older, tucked into the corner of the mirror: Ginny at seventeen, leaning over a broom with her hair torn wild by the wind and her grin sharp as sunlight.
Ginny herself sat beside him now, one hand over his.
Her hand had changed over the years. It had been small once, bony-knuckled and furious, ink-smudged and quick. Then callused by broom handles, strong with motherhood, deft with bandages and buttons and turning pages and touching his face when nightmares woke him. Now it was fine-skinned, lined, warm. There was a gold band on her finger, worn dull with time.
Harry looked at it.
Ginny noticed, because Ginny always noticed.
"You're staring," she said.
Her voice had roughened with age. He loved that too.
"I've got permission," Harry murmured.
"From who?"
"You. A hundred-odd years ago."
A smile tilted at her mouth. "That sounds made up."
"No," he said. "That one happened."
Her thumb moved over his knuckles. "Did it?"
Harry turned his head on the pillow to look at her fully. Even now, even like this, there was no effort to it. His eyes found her as naturally as breath. The lamp gilded the silver in her hair. The lines at the corners of her eyes deepened when she smiled. Her face was not the face from the photograph on the mantel anymore.
He would not have traded a single mark of time.
“Yes,” he said. “You gave me permission to stare forever. It was implicit in the marriage vows.”
“That is not how vows work.”
“It is if I say so.”
She huffed a laugh. “You are appallingly arrogant for a dying man.”
“I’m old,” Harry said. “I’ve earned a few character flaws.”
Her fingers tightened over his. It was slight. Another person might not have felt it. Harry did.
There were things in the room they were not naming. The Healers had come and gone with gentle expressions and professional helplessness. Their children had all been here already, separately and together, because grief was easier in shifts. James had stood too straight. Albus had cried and then apologized for crying, which had made Harry want to sit up and shake sense into him, except he had not been able to sit up much by then. Lily had kissed his forehead and told him not to be brave about this, as if bravery had ever been the point.
The grandchildren had come in a bright herd of red and black and blonde heads, each trying to be quieter than the others and failing magnificently.
Now it was evening, and it was only Ginny.
Harry was glad of it.
Outside, a branch tapped once against the window. In the hall, the house settled.
Ginny reached up and brushed his fringe back from his forehead. The gesture was so familiar that for one disorienting moment it seemed to collapse time, and he was twenty again, feverish and shaking after some curse, with Ginny saying something sharp to a Healer over his shoulder. Then he was thirty-two and home from an investigation gone ugly, sitting on the edge of their bed while she cleaned blood from his cheek. Then he was forty-seven and she was laughing as she pushed his reading glasses up onto his head because he’d spent ten minutes accusing the children of nicking them.
He caught her wrist very gently.
“I remember every line,” he said.
Her brows drew together. “What?”
“In your face,” Harry said. “I remember when they weren’t there, and I remember when they came.”
Something tender changed her expression then.
“Oh,” she said.
He looked at her. “The one here-” He touched the air beside her right eye. “That came after James broke his arm falling off the shed roof because he was sure he could fly without a broom.”
Ginny made a sound halfway between laughter and indignation. “He was eight.”
“And an idiot.”
“Your son.”
“Strong argument for nurture over nature.”
Another line, he thought, but did not say. The little one between her brows had deepened during the year Albus scarcely wrote from school because he was miserable and ashamed of being miserable and young enough to think silence was less worrying than truth. The soft lines around her mouth had been carved by laughter, mostly, but not entirely. There was one at her forehead he knew came from another war scare, years after Voldemort, when everyone had thought for six frantic days that history was about to become repetitive.
He knew the tiny white scar half-hidden near her jaw from a rogue Bludger in training. He knew the crescent of skin at her wrist that had once been burned and then mended and never quite looked the same after. He knew the way her hair had begun turning silver first not at the temples, like his, but woven bright through the red, as if moonlight had taken a liking to her.
He knew her face.
He knew her hands.
He knew the shape of her silence when she was angry and when she was frightened and when she was simply tired.
“You’re doing that thing again,” Ginny said softly.
“What thing?”
“Looking at me like I’m about to disappear.”
Harry let out a breath.
For a little while, neither of them said anything.
Then, because the night was full and close and because it was too late for lies that comforted no one, Harry said, “I can’t quite make myself believe you won’t.”
Ginny leaned closer and pressed her forehead against his.
“I’m one-hundred twenty-nine, Harry,” she whispered. “Not smoke.”
He closed his eyes.
And memory, because it had always been stronger than sleep, opened like a door.
He is eighteen and stupid with surviving.
The war is over in the way wars are always over: messily, incompletely, with rubble left standing because no one has the energy to knock it down. There are funerals still to attend, names still to say. Harry is thin as wire and held together by habit. Everyone keeps looking at him as if they expect him either to glow or crack.
He wants neither.
He is at the Burrow because the Burrow is noise and clutter and soup handed into your hands before you realize you are hungry. He is in the orchard because the house has become too full of kind eyes and lowered voices. Evening lies warm over everything. The trees are black against a bruised gold sky.
Ginny comes looking for him and finds him sitting on the grass with his knees up, staring at nothing.
“You missed dessert,” she says.
Harry, after a moment: “Tragic.”
She sits beside him, shoulder to shoulder.
The silence is easy. That is what undoes him.
He says, very quietly, “I don’t know how to do this bit.”
Ginny turns to look at him. “What bit?”
“This one.” He gestures vaguely at the world. “After.”
Her face changes, just a little. She understands at once. That has always been one of her more devastating qualities.
“Well,” she says after considering it, “I don’t think there’s a correct method.”
“There should be. There’s a method for everything else.”
“There wasn’t for getting rid of Voldemort. You improvised that.”
Harry lets out a rough laugh, surprised into it.
Ginny looks at him, and there is no pity in her expression. Thank God for that.
“You don’t have to know now,” she says. “You can be eighteen for at least another week if you like.”
“I’m pretty bad at being eighteen.”
“You were always going to be,” she says. “You came into it with a terrible handicap.”
“What handicap?”
“Being Harry.”
He turns to her then, really turns, and there is the evening and the orchard and her hair catching sunset-fire, and there is the sudden sharp knowledge that she is not asking anything of him.
He kisses her because if he does not, something in him will remain forever unfinished.
Years later, he will remember that her mouth tasted faintly of blackberries filched from the kitchen and that her hand at the back of his neck trembled before going sure.
He will remember the way she drew back only enough to say, with her breath against his lips, “It’s about time.”
Harry smiled to himself.
Ginny, who had not moved far, narrowed her eyes. “What?”
“That orchard.”
She stared at him for a second and then laughed softly. “Oh, honestly.”
“You said it was about time.”
“It was about time,” she said. “You were painfully slow.”
“I had emotional damage.”
“You had the observational skills of a fence post.”
“That’s unfair,” Harry said. “I observed you very extensively.”
She kissed the corner of his mouth. “Not in the useful direction.”
Another door in memory swung open.
He is twenty-two, and he hasn't set foot in Grimmauld Place for years. Their flat is so small that if Ginny opens the oven too quickly it threatens to hit the kitchen table. Rain rattles at the windows. There are case files spread over half the available surfaces because being an Auror apparently means drowning in parchment.
Harry is bent over a report with a headache pulsing behind his eyes. Ginny, back from training and fresh from a shower, drops onto the sofa and puts her cold feet in his lap.
He jerks. “Merlin, Ginny.”
“You love me.”
“I do.”
She grins and steals his quill. “Read to me.”
“You can read.”
“Not your handwriting, I can’t.” She stretches like a cat, long limbs and unapologetic occupation of space. “Then tell me what horrible things you’ve written.”
Harry looks at her. She is heat and life and wet hair darkening the shoulders of one of his shirts. She has one knee hooked over his thigh and no intention of moving. The room smells of rain and cheap curry and parchment and Ginny’s soap.
He thinks, with a small and almost frightened clarity, that this is happiness.
“Fine,” he says, and reads her the driest paragraph on illicit portkey modifications ever composed.
She makes heckling sounds throughout and falls asleep halfway through page two with her head against the arm of the sofa and her feet still in his lap.
He does not move for nearly an hour, because she looks comfortable.
In the bed, in the last room, Harry said, “That first flat was awful.”
Her eyes were bright with remembered laughter. Harry held onto that brightness greedily.
Another memory.
He is twenty-eight and standing in the doorway of Lily’s room at half past two in the morning. She is six days old and screaming. Ginny sits in the rocking chair, hair escaping its plait, dressing gown half-buttoned, looking one step from either laughter or murder.
“Your daughter,” she says flatly as Harry enters.
“Our daughter,” Harry corrects.
Ginny fixes him with the stare that makes seasoned Chasers move aside on instinct. “I did my part. Your turn.”
He takes Lily, tiny and furious, and begins pacing the room. “All right,” he says to the bundle in his arms. “Listen. We need to have a conversation about several things. Firstly, sleep.”
Lily continues screaming.
Ginny puts her head back and closes her eyes. “Tell her the one about the dragon.”
“What dragon?”
“The one you make up every time.”
“I do not make up a dragon every time.”
“You do,” Ginny says, eyes still shut. “It’s always blue.”
Harry looks down at the red-faced infant in his arms. “Well I can hardly tell her about the real ones.”
Lily hiccups in her crying. He sways. He starts, because the hour is late and logic is gone, telling a story about a blue dragon who steals socks from wicked people and only returns them if they apologize properly.
By the time the dragon has reached Devon, Lily is asleep.
Ginny opens one eye. “See?”
Harry looks at his daughter, then at his wife. “I hate that you were right.”
“You’ll live.”
He does. For many years.
Harry breathed shallowly and watched the rise and fall of Ginny’s shoulders.
“Do you remember,” he asked, “when Lily cut her own fringe and told us the gnomes had done it?”
Ginny smiled without looking away from him. “I remember you pretending to consider the evidence.”
“I was teaching critical thought.”
“You were trying not to laugh.”
“She looked horrid.”
“She looked,” Ginny said, “exactly like you did the first time I met you.”
“Cruel.”
The room was getting dimmer, or perhaps his eyes were. It was hard to say. Tiredness came strangely now. Not in waves but in distances. He would begin a thought and find it taking place farther and farther away.
Still, he was here.
Still, she was here.
He said, “Talk to me.”
Ginny’s expression softened. “About what?”
“Anything. Everything. Which child was the worst liar. Whether Teddy still cheats at cards.”
“Teddy absolutely still cheats at cards.”
“I knew it.”
“And as for the worst liar, that was James by miles. He got your face when he lied.”
“Albus lied well.”
“Terrifyingly well.”
“Lily never bothered.”
“No. Lily believed honesty was other people’s problem.”
Harry smiled. “That sounds like you.”
“It is like me.”
He listened to her voice. He had done that through war and peace, through kitchen arguments and Quidditch stands and crowded station platforms, through middle-of-the-night confessions and jokes muttered into pillows and the sharp, bright fury of her when the world offended her standards.
One more memory rose, clear as glass.
He is twenty-one, hands shaking in a way they have not done in years, standing in the garden of the Burrow under a summer sky with a ring in his pocket and his heart misbehaving.
Ginny comes around the side of the house carrying a basket of washing. “Why,” she says immediately, “do you look like you’re about to confess to arson?”
Harry had, in fact, rehearsed three different speeches. Sensible speeches. Thoughtful speeches. He remembers none of them at all.
What he says instead is, “I want to keep doing this.”
Ginny blinks. “Laundry?”
“Living,” Harry says helplessly. “With you. For as long as they let me. I had something clever prepared and then you said laundry and it all vanished.”
The basket slips to the grass because she has let go of it.
Harry takes the ring from his pocket with clumsy fingers. “Ginny-”
“Yes,” she says.
He stares. “I haven’t asked.”
Her eyes are wet and laughing all at once. “You are asking. Very badly, but I know you.”
Then she steps close, touches his face with both hands, and says more softly, “Yes, Harry.”
He remembers every line of that too. The exact angle of sunlight. The smell of soap from the sheets spilled in the grass. The way she cried after she’d already said yes, as if joy had simply taken a second to catch up.
Harry’s breathing hitched.
Ginny moved at once. “Harry?”
He blinked, came back to her with effort.
“There you are,” she whispered.
“I’m here.”
“I know.”
The house held its breath.
Harry looked at her for a long moment. There was no panic in him. Some fear, yes, because there was always fear where love had somewhere to be left behind. But not panic. He had done enough of that for a lifetime already.
“I wish,” he said slowly, “that I had one more decade.”
Ginny’s face tightened, but she nodded. “I know.”
“Or five years.”
“I know.”
“Or Sunday.”
At that, a tear slipped free and ran down the line age had drawn beside her mouth.
Harry lifted his hand. It was an effort now, absurdly so, but she bent into it before he finished the movement, pressing his palm to her cheek.
“There,” he murmured. “That one’s new.”
She gave a broken laugh. “Don’t be impossible.”
“I remember every line,” he said again, because it was important that she understand this, because it might be the truest thing he had ever said. “Every one.”
Her eyes closed.
When she spoke, her voice shook. “Then remember this too.”
She opened his hand and turned to kiss his palm.
“I loved you when you were sharp corners and eyes too old for your face. I loved you when you were unbearable at twenty and certain you ought to save everyone. I loved you when you came home angry at the Ministry and when you forgot where you’d put your glasses and when your hair started going grey and when you snored and pretended you didn’t. I loved you frightened, and ridiculous, and kind. I loved you every age you ever managed to reach.”
Harry swallowed.
Ginny leaned forward until their foreheads touched once more.
“And,” she whispered, fierce even now, “just because you are going where I can’t follow yet does not mean you get to be gone from me.”
Something inside him, tight and aching and human, gave way.
“All right,” he said.
He did not know whether he meant it as promise or surrender.
Perhaps both.
The room dimmed further. His body had become distant, cumbersome, a thing he was nearly done carrying. Ginny’s hand remained warm around his. The clock downstairs went on with its patient counting.
Harry’s last clear thought was not of prophecy, nor war, nor the green flash that had divided his life into before and after.
It was this:
Ginny, at seventeen, saying It’s about time.
Ginny, at twenty, saying Yes.
Ginny, tonight, saying I loved you every age you ever managed to reach.
He smiled.
“I was very lucky,” he said, though he was not entirely sure the words made it all the way out.
Ginny answered him at once.
“So was I.”
And because he had spent a life learning the shape of her voice, because memory had always loved her best, Harry went toward the dark with that sound in his keeping.