#ootp

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.