Emsfly

"What's this, Dad?" Harry asked, looking up from the gift he'd just unwrapped. His cousin Dudley, who was sitting beside Harry on the floor, surrounded by piles of discarded wrapping paper, turned toward his cousin in envious disbelief.

"Are you kidding?" Dudley asked incredulously. "That's Martian Smash 4!" He turned to his mother, whose lips were pursed. "Mummy, that's the new game," he whined, his voice rising in pitch like a teakettle approaching a boil. "I want one too, Mummy! I want it!"

"Of course, popkin," said Petunia, smiling tensely at her son. "We would have bought one for your birthday" she added, shooting Lily a nasty look, "but they only got it in the stores just last week..."  

"Do you even have a computer?" Dudley asked.

Harry looked blankly back at his cousin. "What's a computer?" All three Dursleys started, apparently outraged by this shocking display of Wizardish ignorance.  

To James's left, Lily was giving him an exasperated scowl, but James knew his wife well enough to detect the amusement beneath her feigned disdain. All year, Lily had been trying to mend fences with her priggish sister. James and his Dursley counterpart had been the casualties of this sororal reunion, dragged to dinner parties and Quidditch matches and football games with their wives and sons, where they gritted their teeth, pretended to enjoy one other's company, and slipped unsubtle insults beneath the parlor chat.

The most obnoxious of these little get-togethers had occurred last month, on the morning of Dudley's tenth birthday. The Potters had visited Little Whinging for a birthday breakfast, but this was quickly revealed to be nothing more than a smug farce of one-upmanship. The whole event had been infuriating. Dudley had opened a frankly obscene number of gifts, tossing each aside and complaining when they didn't meet his standards, while Petunia cooed and Vernon pontificated loudly about the things a man could buy for his son when he worked a normal job like a proper provider.

Well, James had decided, if that was the sort of game that Dursley wanted to play...

Lily broke the silence. "Looks like James and I have been out of the loop," she said, with a warm smile toward her sister that James recognized as deliberate diplomacy. "What sort of computer—"

"Only two more gifts there, eh, Harry?" Vernon cut in. "Bit of a paltry number, I'd say."

"Open the little one next," piped up Sirius, who was lounging across the sitting room couch. Petunia, perched primly on the edge of the opposite armchair, looked at Sirius as though his existence were vaguely inappropriate.

"Okay!" Harry grabbed a small package wrapped in sparkling turquoise paper. The moment that his hands touched the present, it doubled, then quickly doubled again. "Woah!"

"That makes how many presents total?" asked Sirius, grinning evilly. "Forty-one?" Vernon's face achieved a genuinely impressive purple hue.

Harry, who didn't seem to be listening, tore through the turquoise paper to reveal his quadrupled gift (four variety boxes of Zonko's best). He thanked Sirius before putting the joke sets to the side, turning toward his final present.

This last box was the most impressive of all: disproportionately large and solidly rectangular, it was wrapped in scarlet paper dotted with zooming Golden Snitches. Harry approached it with childish eagerness, and even Dudley paused his incipient tantrum to stare in anticipation. Harry ripped the paper open and—

Dudley gasped. Vernon snarled. Petunia scoffed. Lily groaned.

It wasn't just any computer. James might not fully understand Muggle devices, but he knew how to speak to a salesperson, and was familiar enough with the going value of the Galleon against the pound to know that this computer, whatever it was, was damned good.

"Uh, Dad?" Harry asked. "What...is this?"

"It's a computer," James replied, unable to keep the smugness from his voice. He shot a glance at Sirius, who looked back at him with open glee.

"Okay..."

"It's for your new computer game, honey," said Lily, with the fading optimism of a Chudley Cannons fan who has finally looked at the scoreboard. Petunia, for her part, eyed Dudley's reddening complexion like a woman who has accepted defeat.

"Right. Um, thanks."

James paused his observation of Vernon's quivering moustache to notice that Harry was giving him an odd look. "It's a really good one," he said encouragingly.

Harry looked back at the box, a furrow in his brow. Then, with whooshing sigh, he turned toward Dudley.

"So, I feel a little stupid right now," said Harry frankly to his cousin. "Because I honestly have no idea what a computer game is even supposed to be." James fidgeted. "I do like games, though," Harry continued, pushing the heavy box a few inches closer to Dudley. "Don't s'pose you could teach me how to play?"

Dudley's face, which had been screwed up for a wail, fell slack in surprise. "I...guess I could," he said slowly, absorbing the new idea. "I've never met anyone who didn't know computer games before."

Lily pounced. "I'm sure your cousin knows all about computer games, Harry."

"Oh, yes." Petunia was quick on the uptake. "He's always talking about blasting the aliens, aren't you, sweetums?"

Dudley considered Harry in the way that a general might size up his latest recruit. "You'll need to learn, actually," he said, gaining confidence, "if you ever want to play with normal kids. They might bully you, you know, if you don't know about ordinary things."

To James's surprise, it was Petunia who winced slightly at the insult. Harry, who found his Muggle cousin just as bizarre as Dudley found him, was unfazed. "I'll let you ride my broomstick after, if you like."

"Really?"

Vernon stepped forward with a huff of disbelief. For a moment, it seemed that broomstick riding might be a bridge too far.

But Lily and Petunia swooped in once more. "Vernon, do you think you could help us set the computer up?" Lily asked, bringing out the smile she'd once used to charm Horace Slughorn. "Our house is connected to the power grid, but I haven't even used an electric typewriter in ages, and my darling husband is still mastering plugs."

"Vernon is wonderfully handy," Petunia added. "And he's excellent with appliances. From his work, you know."

Dursley stared. It appeared that a combination of bewilderment, flattery and rage had completely overwhelmed his ability to react. He looked at each of them for a long minute.

"Well, of course," Vernon said finally. "Let's just open this box, here, and I'll take a look and see what it's all about."

Vernon, Lily and Petunia bustled awkwardly toward the large box. Settling into an uneasy truce, they unpacked the computer, which admittedly seemed to have more components than James had been anticipating. After a few minutes, even Sirius wandered over, his contempt for the Dursleys briefly surpassed by his insatiable curiosity about Muggle machines.

"Well," Vernon said. "Of course, any gainfully employed man today has gotten quite familiar with computers in the office. Grunnings hasn't used typewriters since eighty-eight..."

Petunia and Lily exchanged a tentative smile. Harry and Dudley, already bored of Vernon's bloviating, began rummaging together through the Zonko's sets.

As James watched the unusual scene, Lily suddenly met his eyes and smirked. James made a face. Lily stuck out her tongue.

Ginny had received a new broomstick (Harry), a lovely necklace (her parents), expensive French perfume (Bill and Fleur); a particularly good haul, even for seventeen. And yet, she’d swallowed the lump in her throat when, rather than a customary box of Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes products, she’d opened new Quidditch boots. Happy seventeenth, from George, the card had said. Just George.

Their plucky rendition of Happy Birthday sounded hollow without Fred shrieking an off-key upper harmony. Mum had always said he ruined it, all those years of birthdays with seven kids. Now, without it, the song seemed broken beyond repair. But, asking them not to sing it at all had seemed worse, somehow. 

Mum and Dad and Bill and Fleur and Charlie and Percy and Audrey and George and Ron and Hermione and Harry and Kingsley and Hagrid and Luna and Neville and Hannah and Andromeda and Teddy and…

No Fred. No Lupin. No Tonks. No Collin. Their absence was glaring. A dementor that sucked all the happiness from the room. 

She’d put on a brave face through it all. Eaten the cake even though it tasted like tears, thanked them all for the gifts that had broken her heart, cheekily conducted a song that she’d rather never hear again, tried to breathe around the gaping chasm her brother had left behind. 

Not a very happy birthday, at all. But they’re trying to make it one, and perhaps eventually the trying will work. 

One has to hope. 

For now, the firewhiskey will have to supplement. 

Ginny is pleasantly buzzed by the time the non-family guests have gone. Mum is busying herself in the kitchen, trying unsuccessfully to hide a new bout of tears. Her father and brothers - sans George - are all lazing around the den, half heartedly listening to the wireless - Wasps vs. Tornados. George had gone up to bed an hour ago, but Ginny couldn’t blame him. Hermione, Percy, and Fleur are talking about the Beauxbatons exam curriculum, something Ginny wants exactly zero part in.

One person, she notices, is conspicuously absent. 

She finds him out on the swing in the garden, looking out over the orchard, a glass of what appears to be firewhiskey in his hand. 

She allows herself a moment just to look at him - disheveled hair and handsome face and sharp jaw. She knows, logically, that Harry is safe now, and yet she can’t quite quell the old instinct to drink him in. One last look at him, like she might never get another, like she’ll have to cling onto this one, ration it out to recall when she needs to. 

It’s stupid, anyway. The memory of him had never been even close to the real thing, but in that long year apart she’d never stopped trying to remember the exact shape of his eyes, the way he had a dimple in his left cheek when he smirked at her, the way his hands were solid and sure and so good at making her feel things she’d never–

“Gin?”

He notices her standing there, and offers her a half-smile through the darkness. She can just make out the glint of his eyes behind his specs. 

“Thought you’d left,” she says, aiming for teasing but ending up somewhere just shy of it. “Alright if I join you out here?”

“Of course,” he says, as though offended she’d even asked. “Plenty of room.”

There is, but she snuggles up next to him anyway, her added weight causing them to sway gently on the swing. He drops an arm over her shoulder, and a kiss to her temple, and pulls her up against him. The vague thrum of anxiety that had plagued her all day seems to quiet under the warm weight of his touch. 

“Happy birthday,” Harry says. He’d said it earlier, with everyone, but she likes hearing it again, just for her. 

Ginny hums. “Yeah, I suppose. Mum’s crying again, and George went up to bed ages ago. Dead grim in there. Dunno why Mum insisted we do this whole party when it’s made her so bloody miserable, I’d have been alright with a normal dinner.”

“It’s your seventeenth, though,” Harry points out. “Suppose she wanted it to be special. It should be special.”

“Well, we put on a good show of it, anyway,” Ginny says, reaching over and snatching the glass of firewhisky from Harry’s grip and stealing a gulp. She relishes the burn of it. 

Harry lets out a small breath of a laugh, pinches at her side for her thievery, but he lets her do it anyway. He tugs the glass back out of her grip once she’s finished and takes another gulp himself. 

“It’s what we’ve got to do though, isn’t it?” Harry says suddenly. “Pretend it’s alright until it is.”

“Doesn’t seem like it’ll ever be alright, really,” Ginny says cynically, snuggling deeper into Harry’s embrace. “Or at least, it’ll never be the way it was.”

“No,” Harry agrees, and he sounds more serious than she wants him to. 

God, what is wrong with her? She used to be better at this: lightening the mood with a joke or some good banter, fighting off the gloom. She doesn’t want to sit out here on her seventeenth birthday with her boyfriend and talk about death.

After a minute, she can sense Harry is searching for words. She leans back so that she can look up at his face, and finds he’s staring straight ahead, chewing on something. He seems to be on the precipice of speech, but then he takes another gulp of his drink. 

“What is it?” Ginny breathes. 

“Nothing,” Harry says quickly. “It’s stupid.”

“No, it’s not,” Ginny says firmly. She can’t imagine ever finding anything he has to tell her stupid. 

He looks down to meet her eye, and god. He makes her feel too much, like her heart is overbrimming and spilling out over her bones. 

“I just…” he struggles. He seems to find his words. “I was just thinking that I’m really glad I chose to live so that I could be here at your shite birthday party.”

“Oh, thanks,” Ginny snorts before the entirety of his words strike her. “I really appreciate–” She cuts herself off and sits up straight. “Hang on. What do you mean, ‘chose to live’?”

Harry averts his eye and takes another sip of firewhiskey. 

The question hangs in the evening air, and as the silence swells, Ginny realizes she isn’t sure that she wants to hear the answer. 

They’d spent weeks, filling each other in about the last year in dribs and drabs. She doesn’t yet have the full picture of all he’d been through, of all that had happened, but she doesn’t begrudge him. There are sore spots in her own past she’d rather not press – not yet, not just now – things she hasn’t been able to find the words to say to him yet. 

She reckons the same is true for him, too. She’d never wanted to press him, but it had not escaped her notice there is a gaping hole in her understanding of what had transpired in May: Harry, dead in Hagrid’s arms. 

He’d gone into the forest to die, and he’d come out alive. That’s all she knows, and frankly it’s all she’d mustered up the courage to ask. There seem to be too many painful doors to open down that particular avenue, things like why didn’t you say goodbye and did you know you’d come back and were you scared and I thought you were dead and I felt like I was too. 

They hadn’t touched it, and yet Harry seemed to be offering it to her, now. 

“What do you mean?” she says more softly, more bravely. “You chose to live?”

And so he tells her. Slowly, and stilted, but his hand is warm in hers. Snape’s memories. Learning that he had to die. The long walk into the forest. Finding Voldemort. 

“...I closed my eyes and I thought of you,” Harry says, like it’s just some part of the story, like he’s not breaking her heart and stitching it back together in one with these words. “So that you’d be the last thing I saw, and then he did it. Avada Kedavra. And I was gone.”

He presses a hand to his chest, and Ginny can picture the green light striking him there. She can’t fathom any of it, how difficult it must’ve been for him to walk to his own execution, how scared he must have been, how he could possibly still be sitting, living and breathing, beside her now. She grips his hand so tightly that it’s a wonder he has any feeling in it at all. 

Harry shifts uncomfortably, and his words are awkward now. “I still don’t know if any of it was real, or if it was just something I imagined while I was… wherever I was. But I… I spoke with Dumbledore. Or… I imagined I did, I dunno. About a lot of things, but mainly that I could choose to go, you know, on. Or I could go back and live again, if I wanted.”

He explains of the protection his mother’s love had left him with, that had tethered him to life despite the Killing Curse to his chest. 

Harry’s grip on her hand tightens, and he turns to meet her eyes fully for the first time since he began speaking. He wipes his other hand wearily over his face, and sighs. “I’m sorry, I’m a bit drunk. This is… it’s your birthday. I didn’t mean to–”

“Harry,” Ginny interrupts gently. “Go on.”

Harry inhales, bracing himself against the memory. “I knew if I chose to come back, I’d be coming back to the war, and Voldemort, and everyone I loved dying. And for a minute the thought of just… leaving it all behind, being at peace with my parents, and Sirius, and Lupin…”

Ginny can imagine how strong of a pull that must’ve been. She grips him harder, as though he’s facing the choice again at this moment and she might be able to tether him to her with her fingers.

“But then I thought of you, and the life I wanted – I want, with you. And I knew I had to come back, even if it meant dealing with all of the shite that came with it.”

Just like with the rest of it, he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s said anything of any particular import, but the words burrow under her skin and make a home there, painful and vulnerable and hopeful. 

“I’m sorry,” Harry says anxiously, interrupting himself as he looks at her expression. “Shit, Ginny, I didn’t–”

Ginny realizes she has tears streaming down her cheeks. She wipes them away impatiently. 

“--shit timing, it’s all a bit heavy for your birthday, isn’t it?” Harry babbles. “I just said it because I know today was dead grim, and you’re right, things will probably never be the same. But I just kept thinking that I’m so glad we’ll get to do it all again next year and for the first time that doesn’t seem like–”

She cuts off his anxious babbling with a kiss, hard and searing, and she holds his chin in her hands, precious, appreciating how very close she came to rationing memories of him for the rest of her life. 

She pulls away, her head still spinning with all that she’d told her. She needed to think about it, ask more questions about Snape and Voldemort and Horcruxes and blood magic. But most pressingly: “Let me see if I’ve got this right. You’re telling me that I’m the last thing you thought of when you went to die, and the reason you decided to live?”

Harry stares at her. “Well, when you put it like that– I suppose, yeah. Yes.”

Ginny shakes her head slowly, helplessly. “Harry.”

“I love you,” Harry says, like this is all the explanation that’s needed, because perhaps it is. He’s said this to her every day for weeks, but this is the first time she truly appreciates that love is a verb; that he’s not describing a state of being but rather something he’s actively doing: loving her. 

“I’m not always the best with words–” Harry continues, and Ginny nearly chokes. “--but you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and it’s not even a competition, really. You’re everything. I didn’t mean to put pressure on you, or anything, I realize now how that all sounded and–”

“I love you, too,” Ginny says fiercely, ignoring any out he’s offering her, like she’d want one. “And I want to talk about the rest of it, all of it. I can’t believe you had to– I don’t even want to think about–” Ginny shakes her head. “You haven’t put any pressure on me, other than I don’t know how I’m meant to respond to that in a way that measures up–”

“No, you don’t–”

“But I love you,” Ginny presses on. “So much. And that’s what I want with you too, all of it, everything. I always have. I’m… so glad you came back because I don’t know what I’d have done if–”

“Gin–”

Ginny kisses him again, desperate. Harry says he’s the one who’s no good with words but Ginny has never been less articulate in her life. Instead she tries to pour the contents of her heart into the fingers she runs through his hair, the grip of her hands over his chest where his heart beats reassuringly beneath his warm skin, the press of her lips against his. 

She pulls back, eyes wet, breathing heavily. Harry’s looking at her with that soft wonder that he sometimes gets, an expression she might understand a bit better now. “That was the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard, but if you ever try to go off alone and die again, I will kill you myself. Don’t you ever do that again, alright?”

Harry grins. “Alright. I think I can manage that.”

“Good.”

A grin spreads across Ginny’s face, and now they’re just two grinning idiots on a swing who want to spend forever together, and for the first time there isn’t any glaring obstacle in the way of it. She allows herself to picture it - a nice cozy home to share, a wedding, kids with messy hair and green eyes, a life that might grow around the grief in her chest. 

She settles back into his arms, snug against him, miraculously alive and hers. She loves him so much it has nowhere to go. 

“I am sorry your birthday was shite, though,” Harry says.