| |
[Jun. 30th, 2008|03:30 am] |
title: (if all the statues in the world) would turn to flesh with teeth of pearl
author: ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) biggrstaffbunch
rating: pg
spoilers: post-DH
summary: You feel like your life could have ended that April, like you weren't just locked in a house with old Aunt Muriel, but locked inside yourself as well. Kept to wither slowly, to age and fade away and to be forgotten. But you can't forget, and you can't move on, and there's no one to help you cross the threshold out of that house, out of this cage of your own body. Ginny's stuck and Harry's in love. Maybe together they can make something out of this mess.
author's note: This one is expressedly for wildmagelet, who gifts me with her generosity and lovely spirit all the time...sorry if this got away with me, lady, your prompt is played with a bit, but hope you like it anyways! I love you, and thank you for being the best f-lister ever! <3
~*~
---
The war ends, and your Mum saves you from uncertain death.
You go through the motions the entire day, recovering the dead, mourning appropriately, hugging those who made it out alive. And you keep thinking of that ray of green light narrowly avoiding your face, the way it was a split second away before Bellatrix just--missed.
You wonder if perhaps she didn't, after all, because you feel more than a bit like a ghost.
---
Ginny doesn't even turn around when he touches her shoulder, and he supposes that's the second big sign that something is wrong.
The first sign being the fact that it's almost midnight and she's still standing on a grassy patch of ground overlooking the lake, staring up at the stars and saying nothing.
"Hey," Harry says, the fall of her hair brushing across his wrist, "It's late. Aren't you knackered?"
She inclines her head, tilts her chin slightly to peek over her shoulder. It's the first time he has properly spoken to her since outside the Room of Requirement, and without the dire urgency of an imminent battle humming through her skin and the brown of her eyes, she looks dimmer, darker. More stark against the landscape of the black lake beyond her. He doesn't care, though. He drinks his fill of her image, the outline of her face swimming in the shadows.
Her laughter is soft, but her voice is brittle. "Haven't you got anything else to take care of right now, Harry?" she asks. "Like, I dunno, considering the fact that you've just killed the scourge of the wizarding world, don't you want to sleep?"
He considers her profile for a moment, the sloping downturn of her nose, the fan of her lashes. "Nah," he says abruptly, brightly. "After all, that's sort of the point in killing the scourge of the wizarding world, isn't it? Doing whatever I want, even if it means nothing." He pauses, emboldened by the twitch of her lips. "Besides, I've slept all day, feels like. From dawn till supper, at least. I could get used to the idle life, but my bum was going a bit numb..."
She arches a brow. "What, you're just going to laze about now that your sacred duty is over?"
He nods slowly, grin sliding across his face. "Sounds brilliant, yeah."
She snorts indelicately, and finally turns to face him. The wind lifts her hair in a blazing halo around her head, strands moving sleepily in the breeze. She wears a heavy cloak despite the warm weather, and her skin is so pale she seems ghostly in the moonlight. Her eyes are wide, wet.
He moves forward, tries to speak. Can't find it in himself to put levity in this moment because Merlin, he's missed her.
"I looked for you all evening, before I thought of the map," he finally says. I'd know your dot anywhere, is what he wants to say, but doesn't because that would be creepy and weird and anyway, it's got her name on top of it, of course he'd know it anywhere. He's always been rubbish at words though, so all he says is, "Couldn't find you till now, though."
She moves her shoulders. "Didn't want to be found," she answers his unspoken question, simply. Her eyes search the skies again. "Looking for something, I suppose."
His hand brushes her hair again, and he breathes in the smoky, flowery smell. There's a stillness to her features that he's never seen before, and it strikes him that this is the first time in a long while that he can't see his own image in the reflection of her eyes. He wonders what secrets this year has given her to keep from him, what secrets she has that she will share. He asks, "What were you looking for?"
Her lips kick up in a faraway smile. "Oh, answers," she says vaguely. "Probably even the right questions." Her fingers twist in her cloak. "Everything's all topsy-turvy, Harry. It's like...life is just starting again, we're all starting fresh, but--I just don't know how. There's far too much to remember, first, d'you see?"
He tilts his head and thinks of everyone who's gone, everything that's been lost. "Yeah," he says heavily. "Yeah, I do." Her gaze on his, curious and knowing, is like a punch to the gut. "But," he says, more earnest than he has ever even known himself capable, "You don't have to do the remembering alone. You're not alone. Not...not this time."
Her grin is slow, and wry. "You've just got a thing for damsels in distress," she says. "You have a saving-damsels-in-distress complex, you do."
He chuckles. "You're not a damsel, Ginny." He reaches for her hand, but curls his fingers around empty air.
"No, Harry, I'm not," she says, calmly. Evenly. Her eyes are kind, face sympathetic, but she turns back to the sky with an air of hastily-recalled dignity, her jaw trembling as she determinedly searches the stars.
He stays by her side for another half-hour before touching her hair again, at a loss. "Whenever you want to talk," he says helplessly, "Or just...be with someone, I'm here. I haven't got anywhere else I'd rather be, and all the time in the world, now. So...take the time you need."
He doesn't know what else to say, to make her look at him, to break this new, impenetrable shell from around her small body. He gives her space, instead, thinking that tomorrow will be a new day and she'll come around. She's got to, because they've spent their whole time together on divergent paths, him facing a different, looming future than she. Now, when everything's over and he can finally walk with her instead of ahead of her, now...
Now, like before, it seems they're doomed to be on different pages.
She doesn't turn to watch him when he goes.
---
There's a fear here that hasn't quite disappeared, you can feel it in your pores.
Hogwarts stands still smouldering, still smoking, and the remembered blood and grime and sweat conspire on your skin to say: once upon a time there was a boy who became a man and that man killed a man who used to be a boy before he became a monster. The circularity of their story has always made you shiver, because your own place is right in the middle, a princess to one and a pawn to the other.
You pass your hand over the curve of your elbow, thinking that nothing is safe. One wrong turn, one wronged word, and villains are born. Heroes made. And the thing of it is, life isn't exactly the fairytale it always seems. There's no happily-ever-after in the offing; for whatever might be ending, there are a thousand other possible beginnings that have yet to take root, and frankly, you're scared of what's to come.
You could set quill to parchment once more, only this time you'd have power over your own fate, the ability to rewrite the way your own life is to go. There is no stranger in a diary this time, and you are not eleven years old. The freedom should thrill you.
Instead, you open your gaze slowly to the sound of owls in the night. For a moment, you think about broken things. Harry's body lying limp in Hagrid's arms, Remus and Tonks stretched out so silent and small, Fred looking for all the world like he'd wake up any second--all of this is so strangely opposite to the heartbeat drumming out its rhythm in your chest right now, the inexplicable happiness at just being alive zipping under your skin. There was a killing curse inches from your head and you saw your life filter in flashes before your eyes, and yes, you feel sorrow for all that's gone, but you also feel relief for all that's left. The conflict within you weighs on you like waves crashing over your head.
Old stones slide home now by the dim glow of wandlight and perhaps tomorrow, this castle will be rebuilt into what it was. Instead of graveyards and last words, dying actions and epitaphs, perhaps tomorrow there will be flowers growing in the field. You can believe, you suppose. You can look to the sky and to all the broken people stumbling across the way, and you can believe. A spark sails from the north towers, and you pick the leaves from your hair.
When you go to sleep, you know you will dream of the dead.
---
She finds new ways to avoid him, in the days that follow Hogwarts, when they all finally go home.
Grimmauld Place is his now, along with Kreacher and all the dusty, haunted corners of the looming mansion. He thinks that there's really no reason to stay there, however, not when there's another home that used to bursting at its seams and is now almost haunting in its emptiness. He packs the few meager possessions he has to call his own, and moves into the Burrow for the summer, cheerfully--if not comfortably--crammed into a corner of Ron's still ludicrously orange room.
And then he goes off in search of Ginny.
He knows this house like the back of his hand, like the grip of his wand. The floorboards that creak and the times at which the ghoul chooses to rattle his chains. He knows the ways the light slats in through the windows at any given moment of the afternoon, and he knows the direction in which the grass grows on the hills beyond the path leading to the front door. He knows the knobs on the wooden gate and the secret jiggle one must give the handle to get into the upstairs broom closet. He knows where childhood stories have taken place and where every Weasley sibling likes to go when they're trying to hide in a family of eight--no, now seven. He knows because in the days and weeks before he broke things off with her, Ginny would prop her chin atop her hand and lie with him by the lake, and in the shade of looming trees, she would fill in all the blanks of everything he'd ever wanted to know about the family who made him their own.
He supposes it stands to reason that she would leave some details, particularly the ones regarding her preferred solitary jaunts, out.
"Your sister," he tells Ron, the fifth day they're home, the fifth day in a row that she is lost to him, "has this freaksome habit of disappearing without a trace." Frustration wars with amusement in his voice,
Ron laughs. "When she was about this high--" he puts his palm, face-down, right at knee-length, "Mum says she used to curl up into a ball and hide under the kitchen sink. Like a little bug. It's her way of avoiding things she doesn't want to do, you know--used to be chores and the like, but now it's more..." he trails off, bites his lip.
When Ron speaks again, it's like a spigot that can't be shut off, and there's so much feeling infused in the words that it is almost shocking.
"It's like she can't even be in the same room as us anymore, Harry. I know she was closer to Fred than any of us, save George, but she won't talk. Mum's always crying now, and we don't want Ginny to be another thing this family loses to the bloody war, you know? And I don't even know how to help her. Everyone's got something--Mum has Bill and Fleur to obsess over, and Dad and Perce have got the Ministry, Charlie's got his dragons, George has got the shop. I've got Hermione, but Ginny--Ginny's got no one." Ron looks at him, blue eyes dark. There is a question in his gaze. "Erm. Does she?"
Harry looks down, and doesn't know how to tell Ron that all Ginny's ever had to do was show up and he'd be hers, but she hasn't even done that, let alone spoken a single word to him since that night outside Hogwarts. He wants to help Ginny, too, but he questions if he even could. He remembers how he was after all of his losses, one after another in the past several years. The fear after Cedric, the anger after Sirius, the despondency after Dumbledore, and the grim resolution after Moody and Hedwig and Dobby and seemingly everyone else he ever touched.
In the yellow glow of an early summer's day at the Burrow, it is hard to believe that he can be this happy, this content. But he has learned to compartmentalize and to pull his memories, one by one, as strength instead of sadness. She, however, so tough and so defiant, is another story.
In the year that has passed since he first broke up with her, she has become someone he doesn't know. He wonders if this is because she has changed, or if it is because he has finally opened his eyes to a girl he never bothered to understand fully before.
He'd liked to think it's the former, but he knows, with the finely-honed instincts of a true prat, that it is most likely the latter.
"She's got someone, Ron," he says, voice strong and shoulders set. "She's definitely got someone."
It's just, he supposes grimly, a matter of getting her to realize it.
---
On the third week of May, they put your brother into the ground. You think it's fitting that he was one of the people who taught you anything was possible, if you had enough nerve. Because it seems that's all you've had this entire time, nerve and bravado to spare, but nothing--a bloody lot of nothing at all--to back it up.
"I won't be locked in a cage," you used to breathe to yourself, watching from the tiny window of your room at old Aunt Muriel's. Over the hills, you knew, there was a war going on that you had every right to battle on your own. You feel like your life could have ended that April, like you weren't just locked in a house with your overprotective family and a spinster great aunt, but locked inside yourself as well. Kept to wither slowly, to age and fade away and to be forgotten. But you can't forget, and you can't move on, not till you cross the threshold out of that house, out of this cage of your own body.
Sitting in the grass that grows wild and green on the hill overlooking Ottery St. Catchpole, you wish you had the strength to take the hands that have been offered to you in help.
Unwittingly, you think of Harry, and of hope, and of the terrible ways you could be pulled under by the rising happiness in your throat when you see his smile behind your eyes. He has done his utmost to keep you company these past weeks, and has in fact been invaluable to the collective sanity of your family, but you haven't been able to bring yourself to do anything but just sit with him. Because in the end, even though Voldemort's bones have been crushed into the dirt, your fight is still unfinished. It's there in the everyday battles of everyday men, in the making do and the letting go. In the learning to live again.
And it's something you think it's only fair that you do alone. Harry's already waged his war, after all. Isn't it your turn?
---
"I wish," he tells Hermione, one day in the beginning of June, "I knew how to get her to talk to me."
Hermione smiles, not unkindly. "You might try getting her to stay in a room with you for more than ten minutes, first," she suggests, and looks away quickly when he scowls. "Oh, honestly, Harry, it's not as if we haven't all tried speaking with her. But she's determined. She's finding herself, it's a delicate process."
"What d'you mean, finding herself?" he asks irritably. "She's right there." He is being deliberately obtuse, and they both know it, for Hermione only raises an eyebrow before sitting down next to him.
She takes his hand. "I suppose that's just another example of things getting lost in translation," she sighs. "Look, Harry. When a girl who is clearly in love with a boy decides to keep herself from that boy in the manner that Ginny has employed with you, it means that she's looking to be completely sound on her own, before undertaking the sort of responsibility a relationship would mean. Do you understand?"
He blinks. "If I say no, will you hex me?"
She groans. "Harry, Ginny has spent so much of her life constructing this image of herself based in direct opposition of what others think of her. She's coddled by her family, so she's got a rebellious streak. She's tiny and looks fragile, so she gets loud and puts herself into dangerous situations. And she's, frankly, arse over teakettle for you, so she stays away because it's the only way she can feel like she's calling the shots."
He shakes his head. "But she is calling the shots, Hermione," he says. "I dunno if she's realized, but I'm a bit arse over teakettle myself, and more than a little desperate to even get her to look at me half the time! I just..." He rakes his hands through his hair. "I miss talking to her, and laughing with her. I miss touching her. But most of all, I just want her to not feel worse about herself just because she has feelings for me. Do you have any idea how that makes me feel, to know she hates the part of herself that likes me?"
Hermione's eyes are curiously damp. He feels a rush of embarrassment at his speech, but a sense of relief that it's finally all out. And Hermione's one of Ginny's mates--maybe she can shed some light on the insanity of the female brain.
"Oh, Harry," she gushes, and promptly bursts into tears. He sighs, and pats the springy curls escaping the bun atop her head, and waits for her to compose herself.
"She doesn't hate the parts of herself that like you," she finally says soggily. "It's just that she doesn't want to be comprised solely of those parts. So much of the past two years have been all about you, in some way or another, to her. And now that you haven't got anything else keeping you from her, she's just...frightened. It'd be easier for her to lose herself in you, now, do you see? To lose who she's become. And she fought so hard for those small parts, while we were off Horcrux hunting. I'd hate to see her throw it all away now."
Harry frowns. "I'm not looking to climb a bloody trellis and woo her into a state of addle-brained bliss, Hermione," he says. "She's never been anything but clever and sharp, and I doubt being in any sort of relationship--friendship or otherwise--would make her something less than what she is now."
Hermione shakes her head. "You'd be surprised," she says softly. "When she was eleven years old, she let herself fall quite deeply for a handsome boy in a diary. I don't think Ginny ever wants to feel that vulnerable, ever again."
"And I think you're underestimating her." His voice is quiet. "I think she gets the same thing that I do, out of what we've got together. I think she's stronger for it, and happier. I think it's not maintaining what she's become that's the problem, it's finding out who she even is. When you lose someone..."
He trails off, and Hermione looks at him, her gaze wide and encouraging. He continues. "When you lose someone, you start to think in terms of what you were, either to them or with them or even just when they were alive. You don't think about who you could be, in the future. Or who you even are, now, in the moment, as someone who's lost this...really important part of your life." He scratches his ear. "I think she just needs time, and Hermione--I can give her that. I can give her time, I just...I wish she wouldn't shut me out completely."
When he is finished, Hermione is looking at him in something like awe. "When," she breathes, "did you grow up?"
To be honest, he really doesn't know. He shoots her a wry grin. "Without all of Voldemort's thoughts in my head, I have more room for my own," he shrugs. "Maybe I'll skive off on the Auror exams and become an advice columnist, or a therapist or something."
She gives a watery giggle. "I'd rue the day," she says, and it's probably not a joke. He laughs anyway. "I'll talk to her again," she promises, sincerity shining in her gaze. "I don't know if she knows herself as well as you seem to, but I'll try, alright?"
Two days later, Ginny squats next to him as he is degnoming the garden, and her eyes are soft in that special way he remembers. "Nice day," she comments, the first words she's spoken to him in a long while.
"Beautiful," he comments, because all of a sudden, it really is.
---
A month after Fred's funeral, you wake to a summer storm. The sky is still indigo, the moon fading out before the sun can pinken the horizon, and as thunder cracks in the distance, you sleepily watch the window melt into a mottled mess of black clouds and silver rain. Pale columns of light slant into the room with each flicker of lightning, and after a moment, you kick restlessly at the sheets twisted around his knees. Stretching, yawning, blinking blearily into the walls of your room, you push out of bed.
The threadbare floor is rough beneath your feet, you push your toes into the carpet as you curl your thumbs around the window latch, sliding the glass up and sucking in a sharp breath through your nose as a blast of cool air hits your skin. The breeze is heavy and moist, the air redolent of soil and rain. You cup your hands together, watching as the water pools in the cracks of your palm, running in thin streams between the slips of your fingers.
Down below, the trees sway in the building wind, leaves spinning through the sky. The grass flattens as mud rises, puddles sparkling in the flickering glow of the fading moon. You are transfixed for a moment, watching the shimmering pool of rain sitting in the curve of your palms, soaking in the wild beauty of the weather outside.
When you were younger, the twins used to help you steal into the broomshed on nights just like this one, and hoisting you over a broom two sizes too large for your slight frame, they used to fly you into the summer downpours, laughing as the water trickled through your hair and clung to your gloves, slipped down the blades of your back. You were skinny and small, but you were determined to make your brothers proud, and you clung to the crooked handles of those Cleansweeps with such tenacity, such wonder. Once, Fred and George taught you to fly through storms.
Now Fred is lying in a grave and George is missing more than his ear, and here you stand at your window, every inch the quiet guard of a quiet heart that is somehow full of ghosts. Harry sleeps in Ron's room just a short distance away, and everything you have ever wanted waits just at the end of a road you only have to step onto. But you're not a child anymore, and bravery is so much more than stealing brooms and taking forbidden flights. You're still not sure that you even know how to move forward, after all that you've invested into the past. You're still not sure you even want to. Sometimes it's easier staying cocooned in a pain you know, rather than putting your toe, however tentatively, in a pool that could drown you without a second's notice.
You spill the water from your hands and trace a dewy trail across the pane, beads of rain rolling down the siding like slow tears upon a stone wall.
You watch the sun rise slowly in the sky, and your lips taste of salt.
---
He thinks perhaps he's become a bit single-minded in his pursuit of her, but really, he can't be bothered to feel any shame.
She still only says one or two words, but he's starting to realize it's not a condition exclusive to him. Hermione must have worked a miracle, getting her to talk at all, because more often than not, their time together is spent sitting in Ron's room, soaking in the dulcet tones of Hermione and Ron having a row for the billionth time. Her eyes reflect inward and her smile is almost dreamy, but her fingers always contract whenever his hand brushes hers, and he knows she is still with him.
Days turn into weeks, and then into a month, and soon, it is July. "My birthday, soon," he teases her, and she gives wan smiles in return. He misses seeing the vibrancy lingering at the corners of her mouth, and he is starting to understand Ron's frustrating at how much like a phantom Ginny has become, walking slowly and smiling that small, unreal smile. The tangles in her hair have resolved themselves and the circles under her eyes have faded, but she still looks like she's only half-trying.
"But she is," Hermione reminds him, and he shuts up.
One day, they are weeding the garden, planting flowers in anticipation for Mrs. Weasley's imminent return from Shell Cottage. The sunlight catches Ginny's hair just so, and he grins at her without thinking, unable to restrain the wild happiness that tears through him at the sight of color rushing back into her faded lines.
She smiles back, a reflex, perhaps, but--there is brightness, and something bold. A flicker of fire at the edges of her lips, a joyful slant to the crinkle of her lashes. For a moment, and only a moment, she is more than she ever was, a possibility, a wisp, a prophecy, even. A promise from the future of what happiness could really look like.
She ducks her head at the stunned gape of Harry's mouth, but after that, she is quicker to give more smiles that are something other than niceties.
When she inquires what he'd like for his birthday, he says the first thing that comes to mind. "Flowers." It is an immediate response, and though she is obviously startled, she dutifully asks what kind. "Oh, I dunno," he says evasively. "Any old kind..."
He sneaks a peek at her shampoo later that day, and tells her, "Gardenia. Definitely gardenias." Her blank look, then narrowed eyes are enough to make him hastily wave and duck away, but it is a small price to pay to have something of hers, without going around sniffing shampoo all day.
When July 31st comes, he sees a long, slender box by the side of his bed, and wonders how the hell he'll explain to Ron. He tears the package open, fully expecting stems and petals, but all he finds is a small, pink bottle of Flora Flunderhagen's Gardenia Spritzer.
He doesn't think he's ever blushed so hard in his life.
He also feigns extreme ignorance when Ron asks (bellows at) him about why exactly his room smells like a 'bleeding flower festival!'
Ginny smiles for days afterward, and he thinks that it's been a good birthday, indeed.
---
Eventually there comes the day when you finally wake from a fitful sleep, and the morning sun doesn't hurt your eyes in the way it usually does.
You look out your window and you don't feel that aching wound of loss in your heart. Your first thought isn't of what will remind you of Fred or Tonks or even Colin Creevey today, but rather, something quite mundane: hunger. Your stomach growls loudly and very unexpectedly and you laugh, without any prior thoughts or a flash of guilt. It's just a hitch of your breath, a sigh, even. A giggle like air. But that lightness, the utter rightness of the laughter is so startling that you widen your eyes and laugh some more.
You are still laughing when your Mum comes upstairs to see what the fuss is about. And when she tells you very sternly, but with her mouth set in a wobbly sort of pursed line that tells you she's holding back a giggle herself, "Ladies don't carry on like this so early in the morning," you let yourself go and howl, your shoulders shaking and your hands clutching your belly with the force of your hiccuping guffaws.
Your mum's eyes are shining when you finally get ahold of yourself, and she asks, "Why are you so happy all of a sudden, then?" You can only shake your head, touching your lips like you can't believe they curved so willingly, so easily.
"I dunno, Mum," you tell her, and the honesty surging through you is as much as relief as the sunshine flooding your room. "I just...am."
Of course later that day, when Harry touches your wrist at lunch and you send a fork spinning its way across the table, going very, very quiet, your Mum heaves a huff of exasperation and lost hope. But it's baby steps, you reason, letting your fingers deliberately brush his when he politely hands you back your utensil, firmly holding back any other unsightly bodily spasms. Baby steps.
You spend the week taking walks in the afternoons with Harry by the pond near your home, talking animatedly with him all the while, and when your feet skim the surface of the water, you think that, really--
Jumping in doesn't look half-bad anymore.
---
It's the middle of August when another summer storm barrels through Ottery St. Catchpole. As the horizon melts into a slate grey and the clouds empty onto the hills, someone suggests a game of Quidditch. The family, never more obviously a pack of loons, is quick to agree, and soon five red-haired, boisterous men and one red-haired, beautiful girl are streaming into the back green, laughing into the rain.
He catches her just as they've boarded their brooms, hovering in air and waiting for the game to begin.
"So," he says, mud dripping from his shoes and the rain slicking his hair into his eyes, "We should date."
She spins on her broom, on level with the swaying trees, looking small and windswept. "What, like--each other?" she asks, and moves her hand over the sodden mass of her own hair, quick fingers twisting the length into a loose braid.
Under the lopsided seat of the spectacles on his nose, he blinks. "Well," he begins, eyebrow raised, "yes, like each other."
She considers him, gaze speculative. Water curves down her face in thin lines, droplets catching tremulously on her lashes and lips. "Right," she says after a stunned moment, shrugging. "Fine, then. Let's...date."
He squints, hands braced loosely around the crooked, swooping handle of his borrowed Cleansweep. Rain streams from the ends of the bent bristles.
She waits, legs swinging in the air and the sky pouring down all around her.
"Be ready at seven?" he finally tries, gamely. In the columns of silver rain, his face is a mess of dark shadows and pale, wet skin. The smile he flashes is bright, uncertain.
"Sounds lovely," she responds, her own mouth twitching around a reluctant grin. "Now get ready to lose miserably."
He looks confused for a moment before a Bludger whizzes its way past his head. He ducks, his broom dipping wildly, and curses.
When he is upright again, she laughs, a slow unfurling of tight shoulders and set jaw. "This isn't going to be easy as you thought," she warns, and her voice is not unsympathetic.
"You're not talking about Quidditch anymore, are you," he says more than asks, a sigh working its way up his chest.
She gives him a speaking sort of glare, affection threaded through the sudden warmth that softens her cheeks, her chin, the lines around her eyes.
"If you want me," she says deliberately, heel kicking slightly, "you're going to have to catch me."
With a wink, she rears back and then shoots straight up in the air, flying higher and faster than he's ever seen her do. The crimson flag of her retreating braid is a beckon he can't refuse, and he takes off behind her, blankets of rain blurring their shapes as he chases her through the sky.
He catches the snitch in his fist just as he is grabbing for the thin circle of her wrist. The shape of the sphere warms in his hands, wings fluttering like a tiny little heartbeat, a fragmented glow in the gold reflection as water pools under it, running in streams through the cracks of his fingers. He smiles as he realizes that someone has released the snitch early. Technically, he's won the game before it's even started.
Then he feels another pair of hands curl over his own. Cold, small, slim. The brush of a thumb over his knuckles, the catch of gold in the mirror of her eyes. He looks at her and she looks at him; for a second, he wonders whether this is a challenge or a compromise.
He gives her the snitch and she lets it drop, and they both watch as it disappears dizzily into the downpour.
"I don't think I want to play games after all, Harry," she says, and in a sudden flash of lightning, her face is stark and set. "Seven o' clock, okay? I've missed you." Before she darts to the ground, she bites her lip and adds, "I'm sorry it took me so long to say it."
With those words, she is gone, and he's left staring after her as another strike of lightning cracks the sky wide open, illuminating his dark gaze and the rapidly emptying fields below.
---
He takes you to dinner, and he forgets his wallet. His elbow knocks over the vase, and a candle almost catches the tablecloth on fire. His teeth bump yours and his specs go crooked when he moves in for a kiss.
It is perfect.
The rain keeps on falling, and you both are soaked to the skin by the time you Apparate home. Another kiss, chilled skin and hot tears at the back of your eyes, and for a very long moment, all you can think is:
So this is what it feels like to come alive.
---
finis.
|
|
|
