Conclusions
Ginny's run out of her good parchment and has been reduced to using something she dug out of the bottom of her trunk, hating the way her quill scratches over the rough surface. As though it isn’t punishment enough to be writing about History of Magic, she’s got to do it on this piece of rubbish.
“Bloody, buggering fu–” she swears as the point of her quill pierces a hole straight through her conclusion. Apt, probably - it had been flimsy at best. There’s a metaphor here, somewhere.
“Revision going well, then?”
The wry voice startles her so much that she nearly upends her bottle of ink all over her weak – in more ways than one – essay. “Fuck, Harry, I’d no idea you were there.”
She blinks up at him in surprise and finds him smirking, standing at the table she’s claimed in a corner of the library, looking adorably entertained by her plight. His bookbag is slung carelessly over his shoulder, his hair mussed, his stupid face made more handsome by the teasing lilt of his smile. Her heart flutters a bit, because that’s just what it always does with him. She ignores it valiantly, and hates him for it, a little.
“Sorry,” he says, though he sounds more amused than anything. “Mind if I sit?”
“Course,” she says, gesturing to the seat opposite. “Can’t guarantee there won’t be more swearing, though.”
He eyes her holey essay as he sits, jerking his head questioningly toward the parchment. “What’re you working on?”
“Something for Binns.”
“Ah, I’d be swearing, too.”
“Fucking hell, eh?”
They share a smile, and Ginny reckons she’d be better off writing an essay about that - the way she knows exactly when he’ll find something funny; the way jokes fall a bit flat when the punchline isn’t his eyes seeking her out, green and piercing and flickering with amusement. She’d fill the parchment with ease.
It’s easy to write about something you can’t stop reading into.
Just like she’s madly reading into the way he’s shown up here - no Ron, no Hermione - and sought her out, like it’s normal, like they’ve been doing this for years even though they haven’t. It feels like they have, though. That’s the worst part of it.
“What’re you doing here?” she asks, like he might just come right out and say it - to see you.
He doesn’t. She pretends that she can’t be disappointed by what she expects.
“Transfiguration,” he says darkly.
“Where’re Ron and Hermione, then?” she prods, picking at it like a scab, like a masochist. I wanted to get you alone, she urges him to say. I’ve been trying to all week and I haven’t even been subtle about it.
“Dunno,” he shrugs. Scabs bleed when you pick them, incidentally. “I can survive an evening without them, you know.”
“Can you? I don’t reckon your track record is all that spectacular on that front, if I’m honest.”
“Hey, I haven’t died even once.”
“Right,” she jokes. “Angling for a new nickname? ‘The Boy Who Hasn’t Died, Even Once’?”
He lets out a soft chuckle. “Rolls right off the tongue, that.”
“I’ll owl Rita for you. We can workshop something”
They smile.
She wants to shake him until he admits to it, confesses, like this thing brewing between them is a crime. She wants to lay all the evidence out in front of him, the aspiring Auror, and see what he makes of it. He can’t quip his way around the smiles and the banter and the looks he gives her. See, she’ll say, don’t you see?
He’s got shit vision.
They sit together for far longer than she’d planned to stay. At some point he adjusts in his seat, and his foot winds up touching hers, and he doesn’t even have the decency to move it. She fancies she can feel his warmth through their trainers, but no - it must be her own traitorous heart, frantically pumping warm blood to her foot like it’s the only part of her body that needs it, like the parts of her that aren’t touching him have ceased to matter because maybe they have.
Maybe she’s been distilled to the edge of her foot.
They talk about strategies for the Quidditch final, and OWLs, and argue playfully about which of her mum’s mince pies is the best. Ginny’s always fancied herself good at impressions, but she surprises even herself with her impression of easy nonchalance. All the while it’s building - each look, each smile, each easy joke they set each other up for feels like a firework she’s adding to the heap in her chest, ready to explode with the slightest spark.
You’ve got me alone, she tells him. Do something about it.
It’s nearly curfew. They start gathering their things, and still he hasn’t done anything. If he were any other boy, Ginny would cut through the bullshit herself, but something holds her back. She can’t fully articulate, unravel, why, but she needs him to be the one to admit it. She needs him to decide she’s worth the risk. He’s meant to be brave, isn’t he?
As she’s packing it away, Ginny remembers her abandoned essay, still punctured pathetically. She sighs, holds it up for Harry’s evaluation. “Think Binns’ll even notice?”
“Give it here,” he says, and she hands it over. He pulls his wand from his robes and waves it wordlessly, the gaping tear sewing itself together so it might never have been there. Ginny doesn’t know why she hadn’t thought to do that herself.
“Thanks. Only now, I’ve actually got to write a damn conclusion.”
He laughs and holds it back out to her. “You’re on your own.”
“Aren’t you meant to have a hero complex?” she quips, pushing the parchment back toward him. “Some useful saving-people thing? Have a go.”
To her immense surprise, he shoots her a wry smirk that sends a tingle through her stomach. “Alright.” He pulls out the quill he’d only just packed away, scrawls something at the bottom of her parchment, shielding it from view.
She’s gone utterly daft. Her heart is hammering in her chest, beating a tattoo on her ribcage; she wonders if her fingers are trembling as they reach across to take her essay back, fully convinced she’ll find the words Go out with me scribbled there.
In conclusion, he’d written, this essay is over.
She snorts, mostly at herself. She’s officially deluded. Cracked. What is wrong with her?
“Wow. Thanks for that,” she says drily. “How would Binns have known otherwise?”
He grins. “Anytime.”
“Totally unrelated, but do you offer refunds? Perhaps a voucher for another Harry Potter rescue at a later date?”
“Non-refundable. Sorry.”
“I’m going to be honest,” she lies. “I expected a better rescue than that.”
He shrugs. “You expect too much from The Boy Who Hasn’t Died, Even Once.”
She can’t help herself; she laughs. His eyes seek hers out - green, so green, twinkling with amusement and something that looks so fond. She’s going to set fire to the heap of fireworks in her chest, just to get it over with. She’ll explode in color, driven to madness by the boy who hadn’t died even once but who’d killed her, slowly, with smiles.
In conclusion, she thinks, I’m utterly fucked.
