when will you realize? vienna waits for you

Paul couldn’t tell you whether it was due to his nerves, or due to the fact that Ringo, John, and George were currently looming over his shoulders ominously.

“Quit breathing down my neck, would ‘ya?”

“Sorry.”

That was the downside of having roommates. There was no privacy. Everything was everyone’s business. Every visitor, every TV show, every meal…

Every phone call.

Paul slowly picked up the receiver of their landline and held it to his ear. At the sound of the sharp dial tone, he punched in the number he knew by heart.

Every second it rang felt like an hour.

One second.

Two seconds.

Four-

“(L/n) residence. Who’s speaking, please?”

Paul opened his mouth to speak but Ringo beat him to it.

“Is that her?” He whispered very loudly. Heat ran to Paul’s cheeks. He slapped Ringo’s arm with the back of his hand.

“No, doorknob, it’s her father! Put a sock in it, would ya?” John whispered no quieter. 

Oh my days.

“Sorry, uhm… hello, Mr. (L/n), this is Paul. May I please speak to (Y/n)?”

“Ah, Paul! It’s been a while! How’ve you been?”

“Eh, good. Quite busy, but I’ve been…”

“Oi! Why don’t you put a sock in it!” Ringo lifted his foot and shoved it in John’s face. Paul put his palm to the receiver and turned around.

“Here’s a bright idea, why don’t both of you put a sock in it!”

“Sorry.”

Paul exhaled deeply and lifted his hand.

“…Sorry Mr. (L/n).”

He breathed a silent sigh of relief when he heard quiet chuckles coming from the other end of the line. At least he wasn’t angry.

“It’s quite alright. Here, I give you to (Y/n).”

“Thank you.”

One second.

Two seconds.

Four seconds.

Six-

“Paul!”

Paul’s face broke out into a grin.

“Hey-“

“No rush or anything, Paul, but can you hurry up? You said we would play cards,” Ringo said. Before Paul could chastise him for speaking yet again, you spoke.

“Hi Ringo! Boys.”

Paul turned and glared at his friends, cheeks a bright pink.

“She said hi,” he grumbled before going back to you. “Anyway, I was just wondering if you’d like to-“

“Fine! Maybe I’ll just leave, since you clearly don’t want me here,” Ringo grumbled, already walking off.

“Yes! Please leave!” Paul said loudly. George stifled a giggle.

“What?”

“No! No no no, not you, I was talking to this twit over here.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“I was just wondering if you’d like to go to a drive-in with me this Friday. They’re playing ‘Oklahoma!’.”

“Oh! Uh, yes! Of course, I love that movie!”

Paul smiled.

“Me too! So, uh, I’ll pick you up at six?”

“Perfect. I can’t wait!”

“Likewise. Right then, I should probably go tend to Ringo. Cheers, (Y/n). See you in a bit.”

“See you!”

Paul put down the receiver with a soft click, and the line went dead.

“Right on, Macca,” George said, clapping him on the back.

***

Holloway Road on a Saturday afternoon was, by any reasonable metric, not where you wanted to be with a first-time driver. It was busy without being gridlocked, which sounded ideal until you understood that it meant there were enough gaps for Ginny to feel confident and enough other cars for everything to be consistently, low-level, absolutely horrifying.

She was doing thirty-two miles per hour in a thirty zone.

Harry knew this because he could see the speedometer from the passenger seat and he had decided the speedometer was his primary relationship now. He and the speedometer. Together.

"You're at thirty-two," he said.

"I know."

"The limit is thirty."

"I know. I'm going with the flow of traffic." She said this with tremendous authority. He was almost certain she'd read it in the book. She was also, he noted, sitting about a foot and a half closer to the centre line than he'd have liked, though she was still technically in her lane, and she was holding the steering wheel with the focused grip of someone operating heavy machinery for the first time, which was, he supposed, accurate.

A bus pulled out ahead of them.

Harry grabbed the door handle.

Ginny braked smoothly, slotted in behind the bus without any particular drama, and glanced at him with an expression of mild amusement. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing."

"You're holding the door."

"I'm just — it's comfortable."

She looked back at the road. He did not let go of the door.

They followed the bus for two minutes, which were actually fine, which Harry chose not to trust. The bus stopped. Ginny stopped. Ginny checked her mirrors, indicated, pulled around the bus in a manoeuvre that was — objectively — competent. Harry made a sound in the back of his throat that he would later deny.

"That was perfectly fine," Ginny told him.

"I know."

"You made a noise."

"I didn't."

"You made a sort of—" she did an impression of the noise, which was unflattering and accurate.

"I was clearing my throat."

"Harry."

"I was."

She smiled and looked back at the road and Harry looked at the road too, because one of them absolutely had to, and thought very privately that if Geoffrey M. Hartley MIAM could see this he would have serious concerns.

***

The first roundabout happened at Nag's Head.

Harry had been dreading it since Highbury Corner. He'd watched it materialise at the end of the road like a prophecy, like something foretold, and he'd spent the preceding four hundred metres doing complex internal mathematics about when to say something and what to say and whether saying it would cause Ginny to dig in further on principle, which was a genuine risk.

"Roundabout," he said, going for informational rather than panicked.

"I can see it."

"You need to give way to traffic already on—"

"Give way to the right, yes, I know, it's literally Chapter Seven." She slowed as they approached, which was good. She checked right, which was good. She waited for a gap, which was — actually, that was all correct. Technically. Harry was almost calm.

She entered the roundabout.

She then proceeded to take the second exit, which required going around to the left, which meant she was on the roundabout for longer than a simple left would have been, and halfway through this process a Ford Focus appeared on her right that she definitely should have let go first, except that she'd already gone, and the Focus braked, and Ginny continued around the roundabout with total equanimity while Harry experienced several years off his life in about four seconds.

"That car," he managed.

"Had plenty of time."

"Gin, it braked for us—"

"It was fine." She emerged from the roundabout onto Seven Sisters Road with the air of someone who had conquered something. "I felt good about that."

Harry turned to look out the window. He needed a moment where Ginny couldn't see his face, which was doing things he couldn't control. He was thinking about the car. His eleven-day-old car. He was thinking about the fact that he had faced the Killing Curse twice and both times had felt marginally less like dying than this did, which was probably not statistically accurate but felt emotionally true.

He was also, and he hated himself for this, completely unable to ask her to stop, because the look on her face when the engine had first turned over — that absolute delight — sat in his chest like something warm, and he was twenty years old and completely done for, and he had been since he was sixteen, and that was just something he'd learned to live with.

He did, however, put his other hand on the dashboard.

***

"Left here," he said.

"I know."

"Your indicator."

"I was just about to—" she indicated. She turned left. The turn was slightly wide, which brought them closer to the oncoming lane than Harry's cardiovascular system required, but they were through it, and there was no traffic coming, and Ginny straightened up with a small satisfied nod. "There."

"The turn was a bit wide."

"Harry. I have been driving for—" she checked the clock on the dashboard "—twenty-three minutes."

"I know."

"And in those twenty-three minutes, have I hit anything?"

"No, but—"

"Have I gone the wrong way down a one-way street?"

"Not yet—"

"Have I—"

"Ginny." He pointed.

She braked. There was a red light ahead, which they stopped at with, he was furious to note, perfectly adequate following distance. Geoffrey M. Hartley MIAM would have had no complaints about the following distance.

"I'm doing brilliantly," Ginny said.

Harry pressed his lips together.

"You can say it," she offered.

"You're doing," he said carefully, "really well for a first time."

She glowed. It was physically visible. She actually sat up a little straighter. Harry thought about the Focus on the roundabout and said nothing and looked at the red light and waited for it to change and decided that loving Ginny Weasley was the single most cardiovascularly demanding thing he had ever done, and he chased dark wizards for a living.

The light went green.

Ginny stalled.

"That," she said immediately, "was the hill start. Hills require more revs."

"This road is completely flat."

"It's cambered."

***

By the time they reached Upper Street, Harry had developed a coping mechanism. He was watching everything as if through a sort of gauze, slightly removed from his own experience, the way he'd learned to watch Quidditch when the Snitch was nowhere and there was nothing to do but wait and take in the shape of things. He noted, academically: Ginny was genuinely getting better as they went. Her gear changes were smoother. Her lane position had improved. She'd checked her mirrors at every junction for the last ten minutes.

She was also, and this was the thing that made it so hard, so confident. Not reckless — she wasn't reckless, she was Ginny and Ginny was never reckless, she had her family's instinct for the real edges of things. She was just utterly, serenely convinced that she had this, and the gap between how she assessed the situation and how Harry assessed the situation was approximately as wide as the English Channel.

A cyclist appeared on his left.

Harry didn't make a sound. He was proud of this. He breathed through his nose and watched Ginny give the cyclist a full door's width of space, which was correct, she'd clearly retained that, and the cyclist went past and Ginny moved back left and Harry exhaled very slowly into the seat.

"There," Ginny said. "See? I gave him loads of room."

"You did," Harry agreed. "That was good."

"I read about cyclists. They're vulnerable road users."

"They are."

"I take my responsibilities to vulnerable road users very seriously."

Harry thought about the Ford Focus on the roundabout. "I know you do."

"Geoffrey says—"

"Please," Harry said, "do not quote Geoffrey at me while you're driving."

Ginny laughed. It was a real laugh, full and bright, and she glanced at him for just a second with her eyes crinkling, and Harry grabbed the dashboard because she'd glanced away from the road for a second while doing thirty in traffic, and also because he was twenty years old and completely lost.

***

They stopped at another red light and a man in a BMW pulled up alongside them and looked over with the expression of someone who had clocked a young woman in the driver's seat and was pre-emptively disappointed. Harry watched him look. Harry watched Ginny, who had not noticed, doing a perfectly reasonable check of her mirrors while stationary.

The light went green. The BMW moved off promptly.

Ginny stalled again.

"The clutch," Harry started.

"I know what the clutch is."

"You need to—"

"I know what the clutch is, Harry." She restarted the engine with a bit more force on the key than was strictly necessary. The BMW was now twenty metres ahead. Ginny found the biting point, moved off, and by the next block had caught back up to them and then overtaken them with a gear change that was, Harry noted involuntarily, actually quite smooth.

The BMW driver did not look over.

"Ha," said Ginny.

Harry looked at the ceiling of his eleven-day-old Volkswagen Golf and thought about all the choices he had made in his life that had brought him to this precise moment, and decided that, on balance, he wouldn't change most of them, even this one, even now.

He did keep his hand on the dashboard.

***

They were almost back. Harry could see this on the map in his head — they'd done a loop, he'd planned a loop, he wasn't an idiot — and they were three streets away from the Tesco Extra car park and his plan was to get back into that car park and never discuss any of this with anyone, specifically Ron, ever.

"You're going to need to turn right at the end," he said.

"Mm." She was checking her mirrors. Good. "Is it clear to move right a bit?"

Harry checked the side. "Yes, there's—" he stopped.

There was a gap. A very normal gap. In the traffic. About thirty metres long.

Ginny turned to him with a gleam in her eye.

"Don't," he said.

"It's a perfectly good gap."

"Ginny—"

"There's loads of time."

"There's really—"

She went.

The thing was, she was right. There was time. She made the gap, she completed the right turn, the oncoming car — which Harry's body had clocked as a missile but which was in fact a normal Audi doing twenty-five — slowed slightly and then continued and no one was in any real danger and the whole thing was completely fine.

Harry had left his stomach somewhere back on Upper Street.

"Perfect," Ginny said.

"You're going to give me a heart attack."

"You're twenty."

"Early onset."

She laughed again and it echoed in the car and they pulled into the Tesco Extra car park and Ginny navigated to an empty row and stopped the car and put it in neutral and applied the handbrake and turned off the engine in the correct sequence, which Harry noticed and slightly resented.

Then she turned to him, and she was luminous, she was absolute sunlight in his passenger seat, she was the most terrifying and wonderful person he'd ever met, and she said—

"I think I'm a natural."

Harry looked at her. He thought about the roundabout and the stalling and the gap on the right turn and the cyclist and Geoffrey M. Hartley MIAM and the eleven days he'd had this car and the at least forty-seven individual moments in the last hour in which he'd genuinely considered the possibility of his own death.

"Yeah," he said. "You really are."

She beamed.

He leaned across and kissed her once, briefly, because she was right there and still a bit flushed from concentrating and it was that or tell her the truth, which was that he'd been holding the door handle for the last forty minutes and his hand had actually gone slightly numb.

"Same time next week?" she asked.

"Sure," he said.

Cho laughed at something he said.

Ginny's Expelliarmus hit Michael squarely in the chest and sent him staggering back two steps.

"Bit strong," he said, blinking.

"Sorry," she said. She was not particularly sorry.

She knew what this feeling was. She'd had enough time over enough years to map every corner of it, and she was not thirteen anymore and she was not going to do it the indignity of pretending it was something else — irritation, competitive instinct, general principles. She was jealous. Specifically, she was jealous of Cho Chang, who was pretty and sad-eyed and had actually managed to speak to Harry Potter without losing the ability to form sentences, which Ginny had once found impossible and now found effortless, which was exactly the problem, because it turned out being effortless around Harry had done precisely nothing to fix the underlying situation.

She reset her stance. Michael raised his wand again, game if a little wary.

Across the room, Harry was demonstrating the motion himself now, slow and deliberate, and Cho was watching his wand hand with an expression of concentration that Ginny found personally offensive. He corrected something, and she tried again, and he nodded — that particular nod he had, economical and genuine, the one that meant he actually meant it — and something in Ginny's chest did a thing she categorically refused to acknowledge.

The worst part was that there was nothing to be angry at. Harry wasn't doing anything wrong. Teaching someone in the DA was, in fact, the entire point of the DA. Cho was holding her wand incorrectly and Harry was correcting it in the patient, slightly awkward way he corrected everything, probably thinking about nothing except the spell, the grip, the angle of the elbow. He was not, almost certainly, thinking about Cho Chang's hair or her laugh or the way she looked at him like he was something remarkable.

He never thought about those things. That was also, Ginny had decided, the problem.

Expelliarmus.

Michael's wand skittered across the floor. He went to retrieve it with a look that suggested he was quietly reconsidering their relationship.

She exhaled. Pushed her hair back. Across the room, Harry had stepped away from Cho now — some distance recovered, professional, oblivious — and was scanning the room the way he always did mid-session, checking who was struggling, who needed a word, who was about to hex themselves by accident. It was a good instinct. It was deeply annoying.

His gaze moved across the room in a sweep and then, for no particular reason that she could identify, it stopped.

On her.

Just for a moment. A second, maybe two. Long enough that it wasn't accidental and short enough that it wasn't anything, except that Harry's brow did a complicated thing — not quite a frown, not quite the opposite — like he'd noticed something he hadn't expected to notice and wasn't sure what to do with it.

Ginny held his gaze.

She was good at this now. She had practiced it the same way she'd practiced everything else — stubbornly, repeatedly, until the thing that used to undo her became just a thing she could do. She looked back at Harry Potter across a crowded room and she did not flush, did not look away, did not become twelve years old again in her own skin.

Harry looked away first.

He moved on to someone else — Neville, who was having some difficulty — and the moment closed behind him like water, and Ginny turned back to Michael.

"Again," she said.

Michael sighed. Raised his wand. She disarmed him so fast he didn't see it coming.

She was very good at this, she thought. At all of it.

He appeared now — rumpled, barefoot despite the cold of the stone floor, looking at the room like he was checking to see if it was safe. His gaze skimmed over her mother, over Fred and George squabbling over something near the fire, over Hermione, who was playing chess badly against Ron. It didn't land on Ginny. It never really did.

That was fine. She had stopped needing it to.

She watched him drift toward the counter and reach for the kettle, still half-asleep from the look of him, hair worse than usual which was genuinely impressive. There was something different about him this summer, and she'd been trying to put her finger on it for days without quite managing. It wasn't the weight he'd clearly lost, or the shadows under his eyes. It was something in the way he moved through a room — careful, like he was apologising in advance for taking up space.

She thought about the boy who had followed a basilisk into a Chamber to save her when he was twelve years old, and she thought he would be very angry at himself for that.

Harry poured his tea. Set the kettle down. Stood there for a moment with both hands wrapped around the mug, staring at nothing in particular, and Ginny looked back down at her own cup.

She should say something. She was aware that she should say something — that she was, arguably, one of the better-positioned people in this house to say something, given that she was neither Ron, who was too close to see clearly, nor Hermione, who would try to solve him. Ginny had the advantage of being mostly ignored, which meant she'd had a lot of time to pay attention.

She didn't say anything.

She wasn't twelve anymore, which meant she knew when a person needed to be left alone with their tea and their thousand-yard stare. It also meant — and this was the part she was less comfortable examining — that she knew the difference between the Harry Potter she'd constructed in her head when she was small and the Harry Potter who was currently standing eight feet away from her looking like he hadn't slept in a week.

She liked the real one considerably more. She didn't know what to do with that.

He moved to leave. She looked up without meaning to, and he turned — she didn't know why, some instinct or coincidence — and for a moment they were just looking at each other across the kitchen, her with her unwanted tea and him with his, the fire crackling and Fred saying something loudly and everything else going on as normal, as if neither of them were standing in it.

Harry opened his mouth. She had no idea what he was going to say.

Whatever it was, he seemed to think better of it. The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, more like the ghost of one — recognition, maybe, or something she didn't have a word for — and then he was gone, back through the doorway, bare feet silent on the stairs.

Ginny looked down at her tea.