“He read the letter again, but could not take in any more meaning than he had done the first time, and was reduced to staring at the handwriting itself. She had made her “g”s the same way he did.”

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That awkward moment when you have more chemistry with an INANIMATE OBJECT than with your GIRLFRIEND.

Here is my contribution to Hinny ship week, because I spend too much time thinking about how Harry proposed. 

“Harry, why’s there a snitch in here?” 

“What?” Harry feigned a puzzled expression and followed Ginny’s gaze to the minuscule golden ball fluttering near the ceiling fan. 

“Oh, that. It’s probably for you to catch, isn’t it? That’s what snitches are usually for.” 

Ginny raised her eyebrows. “Why me?” she countered, “you’re the seeker, Harry.” 

Harry just shrugged and tried to keep his expression impassive. 

“Oh, fine,” she snapped, tossing her long, red hair over one shoulder and rising to her feet. “But I swear if this is some kind of trick I’ll make you sorry, Harry Potter.” 

Harry grinned, and watched with unabashed pleasure as she leaped atop the kitchen table, and missed the snitch by a millisecond; it darted away from the tips of her painted fingernails and through the doorway. 

She pursued, and he followed her. 

Ginny may have suspected Harry of plotting some elaborate prank, but even at that she was nothing if not determined. She jumped from the back of the couch to the top of a low book-case, nimble and purposeful. 

It took her half an hour (or thereabouts, Harry may have lost track after Ginny bent low to search under a display-case, which was followed by several minutes in which neither of them were bothered about the whereabouts of the snitch), but in the end her look of reverent pride was worth the endeavor. 

And that was before it slid open in her hands. 

“What the - ?” 

“Snitches have flesh memories,” Harry told her, and when that was met with just as perplexed a reaction, he continued, “they remember the first person to touch them. That’s the one you caught, in your fifth year, remember? The time you played Cho…” 

The game you played just before I kissed you for the first time…

“Okay. But…why do you have it?” 

“I wrote McGonagall and asked her for it.”

“And she just - what, gave it up? Why?”

“Look inside.”

Ginny huffed, but her curiosity outweighed her stubbornness, and she peered inside. There was a moment of suspended silence before her honey-speckled brown eyes widened and lifted again in search of Harry, but in the second that had elapsed he’d sunk to his knees. 

No - sunk to one knee. 

Later Ginny would marvel that she managed to extract the diamond band from inside the snitch with such trembling fingers, and with her vision blurred from tears too strong-willed to be shed. 

There were more words, and a kiss, and later, as they lay in their bed, Ginny’s arm outstretched so she could see the way the streetlamp outside their window glinted off the princess-cut stones, those stubborn tears fell to her cheeks. 

It wasn’t the beauty of the ring that brought her to tears, or the way her mother had sobbed when they flooed over to share the news. It was the story Harry had told her then, quietly, as if the syllables were just shadows: a story about snitches and flesh memory, and a walk through the forbidden forest.  

ginny warned ron not to piss her off.. not that harry would complain.

What do we have here?