Suggestion for a story : one shot version of AU muggle version where Harry is 29 and recently starts to work in law office and Ginny is 37 years old , divorced and his boss.
Ginny woke up to sunlight doing something obscene to her bedroom and her phone screaming 7:42 AM at her like it had personally chosen violence.
She sat up too fast, and the room tilted, and somewhere in the wreckage of last night's decisions, a very large, very warm shape shifted under her sheets and made a low sound that was not helping the situation. At all.
New recruits. Orientation. Nine AM. She was supposed to be there at eight-thirty to set up, which meant she had — she did the math twice because her brain refused to cooperate the first time — forty-eight minutes to shower, dress, look like a woman who had her life together, and also deal with whatever this was.
This being: a stranger in her bed with shoulders like a swimmer and a face that, now that the curtains were letting in actual daylight, looked unfairly, almost insultingly young.
She allowed herself exactly one moment.
He was lying on his stomach, one arm thrown up over the pillow, dark hair an absolute disaster, and there was a scar on his forehead she hadn't really registered last night between the second round of tequila and everything that happened after. His glasses — round, slightly battered, the kind of thing that should have made him look like somebody's substitute teacher — were folded on her nightstand, and without them his face looked almost soft. Unfinished. Like he hadn't grown into whatever he was going to be yet.
He had to be — what. Twenty-five? Twenty-six?
"Okay," Ginny whispered to her ceiling. "Okay, Ginevra. Great. Wonderful. Excellent decisions all around."
She had walked into that bar after signing her divorce papers with the explicit, stated, out-loud-to-her-sister intention of doing something reckless. Something that had nothing to do with custody schedules or who got the good blender. She had wanted, for one night, to be a woman in a bar and not a cautionary tale.
Mission extremely accomplished. Possibly over-accomplished.
She reached over and shook his shoulder, and it was — fine, it was a nice shoulder, that was simply an objective fact she was noting, the way she'd note any piece of evidence in a case.
"Hey." Shake. "Hey, you have to go."
He surfaced like a man dragged up from the bottom of a lake, blinking, squinting at her without his glasses, and for one unguarded second before he remembered where he was, he smiled — slow, easy, a little crooked — and said, "Morning."
And those eyes. God, those eyes. Green like nothing she'd ever — no. No, absolutely not, she did not have time for whatever her stomach had just done.
"Morning," she said, business-brisk. "You need to leave. Like, now-now. I have somewhere to be."
"Right. Yeah." He was already sitting up, scrubbing a hand through his hair, and she watched approximately four separate muscle groups do things she had opinions about before she physically turned away and started digging through her closet like it had personally wronged her.
"Bathroom's down the hall if you need it," she said to her blazers. "There's, um. Mouthwash."
"Thanks." A pause. The sound of him finding his jeans. "This is — I had a really good time. Last night."
"Yeah," Ginny said, and meant it more than was strictly convenient. "Me too."
He found his shirt. Found his glasses, put them on, and just like that the soft unfinished boy was gone and there was a grown man standing in her bedroom looking faintly amused at how fast she was trying to get rid of him. "I don't even know your last name," he said.
"That was sort of the point, wasn't it?"
"Fair." He grinned. God, the grin. "I'm Harry, by the way. In case that matters."
"It doesn't," she lied. "Door's that way."
She made it to the office at 8:51, which by the grace of whatever god watched over disaster divorcées, meant she had nine minutes to turn herself into Ginevra Weasley, Junior Partner, instead of whoever she'd been at 2 AM.
She did not have nine minutes to spare on the inconvenient fact that she still felt him everywhere.
"You look like hell," said Romilda from Reception, with the specific delight of someone who lived for other people's hell.
"I look radiant," Ginny said, sailing past with her coffee like a queen entering exile. "I look like a woman who had an excellent evening."
"You look like a woman who's regretting an excellent evening."
"Don't you have phones to answer?"
She got the conference room set up with four minutes to spare — name placards, folders, the little laminated org chart that nobody ever looked at — and felt, for the first time all morning, like a person who had things handled.
Then the new associates started filing in.
She did her opening smile. Her welcome to the firm, I'm Ginny Weasley, I'll be overseeing your first rotation smile, the one she'd perfected over six years of doing exactly this twice a year, and she was three names into the room — Patil, Finch-Fletchley, hi, lovely, welcome — when the door opened one last time and a slightly out-of-breath man slid into the last open seat, glasses crooked, hair an absolute disaster despite what had clearly been a valiant effort with water and his hands.
Ginny's folder slipped out of her hand and hit the floor with a sound that felt, to her, roughly as loud as a gunshot.
"Sorry — sorry, traffic," Harry said to the room, settling into his seat, and then he looked up, and saw her, and his entire face did something between recognizing a person and recognizing a crime scene.
"You okay, Ginny?" Romilda, hovering in the doorway with the coffee tray, looking entirely too interested.
"Fine!" Ginny said, at a pitch she did not love. "Dropped my — folder. Fine. Everyone's fine."
She bent down, picked up the folder, took four full seconds longer than necessary doing it, and used those seconds to have what she felt was a very reasonable internal crisis.
It's not him. It can't be him. There is no possible universe in which —
She straightened up. It was him.
"As I was saying," she said, to a room of eleven new associates and one absolute disaster of a man she had, eleven hours ago, seen completely naked. "Welcome. I'm Ginny Weasley. I'll be supervising your rotations for the next six weeks."
Harry, to his credit, did not say a single word. He simply sat there with the calm, fixed expression of a man holding very still in the hope that a predator hasn't noticed him yet.
She got through the next forty minutes on autopilot. She talked about billable hours. She talked about the associate handbook. At one point she heard herself say "client confidentiality is the bedrock of trust in this firm" while making, against her will, brief and devastating eye contact with the one person in the room whose confidentiality she had personally, comprehensively violated several hours earlier.
She did not remember a single word of the dress code section. She would find out later she'd said it twice.
When she finally said that's everything, welcome aboard, see you all at the team lunch, and the room exhaled into chatter and chair-scraping, she watched Harry stand up, gather his things with the over-careful focus of someone defusing a bomb, and try, try, to slide toward the door without making eye contact with literally anyone.
He did not make it three feet.
"Potter." Ginny's voice came out sharper than she meant it, and half the room turned to look. She smiled, recalibrated, dropped her volume by several decibels. "Could I borrow you for a moment. Quickly."
"Of course," Harry said, in the strangled tone of a man being asked to step outside by someone much larger than him.
She steered him by the elbow — professionally, she told herself, this is a professional elbow-steer — into the little alcove by the supply closet, out of the main hallway, and rounded on him.
"Potter?" she hissed. "Your name is Potter?"
"You said it didn't matter," he hissed back, glancing over her shoulder like the carpet might be listening. "Which, side note, is genuinely the most insane thing to say to someone before also turning out to be his new boss."
"I am not your boss, I am your supervisor, there's a—"
"Ginny. Genuinely. Not the distinction I'm focused on right now."
"What are the odds," she whispered, with the particular venom of someone who'd done the math and hated the answer. "What are the actual odds. This city has eight million people in it."
"I don't know! Statistically very low! And yet here we—" He stopped, dragged a hand down his face. "Okay. Okay, can we just — can we be adults about this."
"I am an adult, Potter, I am the most adult person in this hallway —"
"You called me Potter four times in the last ten seconds, you're not as calm as you're presenting."
"Shut up." She glanced down the hall — empty, thank God, except Romilda was definitely, definitely lingering by the water cooler a touch too long for someone simply refilling a cup. Ginny dropped her voice to nearly nothing. "Listen to me. This cannot — nothing happened. Do you understand? As far as this firm is concerned, you are a first-year associate and I am the person who signs off on your performance review, and that is the entire relationship."
"Right. Yes. Agreed. One hundred percent." He nodded so hard his glasses slipped. "Although — and I'm just observing — you're the one who grabbed my arm and frog-marched me into a closet five minutes into my first day, which, if anyone is watching—"
"It's not a closet, it's an alcove—"
"—looks significantly more suspicious than two people simply existing near each other."
Ginny opened her mouth to argue and then shut it, because — damn him — he wasn't wrong, and Romilda was now very obviously not filling a cup that had been full for the past ninety seconds.
"Fine," Ginny said. "Fine. We're going to walk out of here separately. Normally. Like two colleagues who said an entirely unremarkable thing to each other."
"What did we unremarkably say?"
"I don't know, Potter, improvise, you seem to have a talent for digging holes—"
"I improvised pretty well last night, as I recall," he said, and then visibly heard himself say it, and went the precise color of the firm's burgundy carpet. "That — okay, that came out — I didn't mean—"
"Out," Ginny whispered, pointing toward the hallway with the icy authority of a woman who had once cross-examined a hostile witness for six hours without blinking. "Go. Walk. Be unremarkable."
He went. He made it exactly to the doorway of the alcove before turning back, and for one second the panic dropped off his face entirely and there was just that same easy, crooked grin from this morning, the one that did absolutely nothing for her composure.
"For what it's worth," he said, quiet, just for her, "I had a really good time. Still do, even with the — career-ending implications."
He went. Ginny stood alone in the alcove for a solid ten seconds, pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, and tried to locate the version of herself who had walked into a bar last night looking for exactly this kind of trouble.
She found her. That woman was, infuriatingly, grinning.
By the time she made it back to her office, there was a message slip on her desk in Romilda's looping handwriting: Everything okay with the new guy? You two seemed — and then, instead of finishing the sentence, just a string of question marks, which Ginny found almost more alarming than actual words would have been.
She balled it up. Threw it in the bin. Sat down at her desk and tried, valiantly, to care about the merger filing in front of her.
Her phone buzzed. Unknown number.
Got your number off the new hire contact sheet. Don't hate me. — H
She stared at it for longer than was professionally advisable.
That's a fireable offense, Potter.
Worth it. Lunch is at one, right? Asking purely for logistical reasons.
Strictly professional reasons.
Ginny looked at her phone, and then at the closed door of her office, and then, very deliberately, put it face-down on her desk and picked her pen back up.
She got through one entire paragraph of the filing before she turned the phone back over.
One o'clock. Don't be late again, Potter. It reflects poorly on your supervisor.
She did not examine, even a little, why that landed the way it did.
