‘Look at me look at me look at me look at me look at me look at me,’ Ginny continued her private mantra in her head, hoping and praying that it would come true. That He would actually deem her worthy and bestow on her a gaze from those heavenly eyes.

He was a God, she was convinced. To Ginny’s 15- year- old heart there could never, would never be anyone to match Him. He was so smart, so funny, so so beautiful and he was special in the way that he made her feel- utterly worthless.

It wasn’t his fault as he didn’t say anything nasty or rude to her but it was just the fact that he never acknowledged her at all. She simply didn’t exist to Him.

She wasn’t part of his world. But he was a part of hers, her world practically revolved around Him. She got up at 7am every morning because she knew he liked to get up a bit early to have a wander around school by himself before breakfast. She didn’t go to bed each bed each night until she was sure he had gone to his dormitory. She had read ‘Dracula’ and scared herself silly because she had seen Him reading it and decided that it must be a good book for him to have deemed it worthy enough to read.

What she hadn’t seen was that he had got to page 10 and then thrown it aside, deciding it was too... girly, yes, that’s what it was. He found it in no way extremely terrifying, no, not him.

Ginny was way past the border into the obsessed. She regularly felt a deep desperation to touch him, to simply gaze upon him. Sometimes, she felt like a junkie, unable to survive without the rush she got each time he was near.

She thought she was special in the way that she loved Him. That made her special. It was like she had a secret magic inside of her waiting to be unleashed if only he could love her.

Little did she know that nearly every teenage girl was having the same feelings as her. Maybe not for the same boy and maybe not as extreme but she wasn’t the only one to feel it.

Then he did. He glanced up and actually looked straight at her. She blinked in shock that the chanting had worked, but then she didn’t care about anything for she was lost in the depths of those heavenly pools. She was sinking into his eyes, sinking rapidly and unable to pull herself out. She was mesmerised.

"Ahem."

She was drowning.

"I said ‘AHEM’!"

She was staring straight up into a pair of sharp green eyes gazing at her with concern.

Harry was sure she was insane. Mad. Unhinged. Cuckoo. Off her rocker. A few fries short of a Happy Meal. And he had pulled the short straw. It was his job to talk to her about it, though now he realised that, out of the three of them, he was the least qualified to handle the discussion. Hermione had the whole female understanding thing going for her, while Ron was her brother, her flesh and blood, her kin. And a coward. They had scurried away to hide behind the clump of trees 50 yards away, beside the lake. He had no doubt they were straining to listen to him squirm and splutter.

"Er... I need to talk to you." He nervously flattened down his mop of hair to no avail. He was wary as to what her reaction would be.

Ginny glanced away towards the object of her affection and saw him rise with a yawn and slump off up the field to bed. She now gave Harry the majority of her attention but one eye was still on the retreating figure.

Harry kneeled down next to her as she sat under the large weeping willow tree that swayed in time with the night breeze. The crickets had begun to sing and the Sun was just dipping beneath the horizon, bathing the land for the last time that day in it’s warm sepia glow. It was a beautiful night, but Harry only wished he could just sit there and enjoy it while it lasted. Instead he had to explain the situation delicately to an over- emotional girl who was playing dumb. God, he hated his life.

"Right... er, well, you see...I- well, really- that is to say-... we are getting a bit worried about you. You haven’t seemed ... your usual self lately. Is there anything you want to talk about?" He shifted and squirmed. He hated having heart- to -hearts with girls who weren’t Hermione.

"Like what?" She innocently blinked at him.

"Erm... well, we have noticed you seem to- well- seem to have a strong- AHEM- liking for ,erm, a certain person that we all know isn’t really-"

She interrupted him with a bubble of laughter, the likes of which he hadn’t seen from her in weeks. It made him realise how much he had missed it and how much this crush was changing her. "Oh, Harry, I don’t fancy you anymore! You don’t need to give me this talk, I’m completely and utterly over you. I mean, I couldn’t like you less in that way. Really, I think there’s more chance of me fancying Ron!!" She patted his knee affectionately, which for some reason only made him angry.

"No! Listen, I know you like him." Harry motioned over to the place where the boy in question had been sitting.

"Oh no, Harry! You’re wrong, I don’t like him." He let out a breath of relief he didn’t realise he’d been holding. "I love him."

The grin of a job accomplished was wiped from his face when Harry realised that simple logic would not work. She was a teenage girl who was mindlessly captivated with a self- proclaimed ‘hunk’. He had to be tough. "Look at me, Ginny." Much like Ginny had not long before, Harry began to chant a mental mantra to himself. ‘Cruel to be kind cruel to be kind cruel to be kind cruel to be kind.’

"Has he ever spoken to you?"

She looked up sharply and straight into his eyes. She might as well have punched him in the gut. He felt all the sorrow in her eyes as if it were his own.

"Well, he once told me to get out of the way-"

"Stop." Harry held up a hand. "I’ll take that as a ‘no’. Has he ever, ever given you any indication that he feels the same way as you do?"

She gulped and shook her head.

Now Harry gently pushed her chin up with his fore finger, and forced her to look at him rather than her shoelaces. "Does he know your name?"

A single tear ran down the curve of her cheek, endearing her to Harry for life. He looked down into her eyes and gulped when he saw her eyes. They were now large shimmering pools that just begged him to jump into them.

She let out a low shuddering laugh that held little humour. "I’m a fool. Always have been. Why do I always fall for the unattainable ones? It must be some deep rooted psychological inadequacy that I’ve had from birth. It’s my fault." She smiled a dark smile. "It always is."

Harry couldn’t stand it anymore. Dammit! He could not handle crying females. He didn’t know what to do with them- did he pat her on the back and hand her a tissue? Or just tell her to pull herself together and stop being such a wuss?

He decided that neither would do, and pulled her against him in a hug. He thought they could both use one.

She began shaking with her teary laughter, making Harry increasingly nervous. "No one will ever love me! I am destined to become an old maiden for the rest of my life!"

Harry frowned with worry. What if she became hysterical? Hysterics were even worse than crying. "Stop being so melodramatic, of course people love you. Everyone loves you!"

"But not the ones I want to love me. It’s to be expected I suppose. Look at me, with my stupid red hair and my stupid freckles. Why can’t I be tall and blonde like one of the models in Witch Weekly?" She tugged at her beautiful curls in disgust and crinkled her nose. Harry decided that she looked even cuter like that.

"I think you’re beautiful."

Ginny snorted, pulled away from him and jumped to her feet. "Yeah, right! You think I’m only Ron’s little sister. Good ol’ Ginny, there she is again mooning over yet another boy she can’t have! I bet he even paid you to come and talk to me- No, Ron’s too tight with his money for that. He must’ve blackmailed you. I can see it now." Her face twisted into a sneer and she lowered her voice a few octaves to match Ron’s. "’Go and tell that poor excuse for a human being that she’s tainting the Weasley name and is on the verge of being disinherited, or I won’t let you copy my Transfiguration homework."

Harry’s first coherent thought was an outraged ‘It’s Ron who copies my homework!’ even though she was getting into the full swing of it now. Somewhere at the back of his mind he knew that he should really stop her tirade before she resorted to physical violence.

However, he had no idea how to stop her and, honestly, he didn’t really want to. She came alive as she raged at him: her eyes were flashing ferociously; her face was the colour of a post box; and her eyebrows were knitted together in a way that screamed ‘Defy me and die!’. So, Harry simply watched her and smiled broadly at her magnificence.

She stopped. She stared. That was the last thing that she had expected him to do. Rant and rage, maybe, but just smile ever so sweetly at her? He looked at her in a way that she had never had anyone look at her before. She was shocked that it was Harry who was beaming at her, with his heart in his big expressive eyes. He was the boy who had been her first love, the boy she had pined over for all those years, and now he was the boy who made her feel that special magic begin to awaken inside her. There was only one thing she could do.

Ginny smiled back at him.

Everything dissolved into a blur of memory that she knew she would revisit again and again. All she could see was Him. But one thing that she would always recall was the inexplicable feeling of lightness when she realised that she was finally free of all those dark days, heavy hearts and ‘what if’s’. Draco Malfoy had disappeared from her mind. He was nothing to her.

THE END