SIYE Time:1:38 on 12th December 2024 SIYE Login: no | | |
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Category: Post-OotP
Characters:Harry/Ginny
Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance
Warnings: Death, Mild Language
Story is Complete
Rating: PG-13
Reviews: 6
Summary: An alternate version of how Harry and Ginny got together during Harry's seventh year.
Hitcount: Story Total: 4516
Disclaimer: Harry Potter Publishing Rights © J.K.R. Note the opinions in this story are my own and in no way represent the owners of this site. This story subject to copyright law under transformative use. No compensation is made for this work.
Author's Notes: This is a fragment from an abandoned sixth-year story, but I hope it can hold up on its own.
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The concept of a “Truth Type” font has worked its way even into Muggle vocabulary, albeit in a highly distorted form. The genuine Truth Type fonts — Integ, Oath, and Veritas — provide instant, visible surety that the claims, descriptions and quotations printed in such type are in fact true, reliable and accurate. No statement printed in any of the three fonts has ever been found to be false. (If that claim had been discredited after this book went to press, the preceding sentence, which is printed in 12-point Integ, would have been magically struck out.)
Some caution is warranted however, in interpreting the sense even of a Truth-Typed passage. Only the default, sans-serif typeface can be said to convey the “plain truth”; other typefaces carry significant caveats, such as:
Serif/Embossed: true, but somewhat embroidered
Italic: true, but biased or ‘slanted’
Condensed: true, but with significant omissions.
By far the most common Truth Type in use today is Veritas, the only font of the three which is charm-based rather than potion based and thus the only one suitable (when combined with a sufficiently strong Protean Charm) for mass-produced text….
From An Introduction to Wizarding Typography by Ariel Garmond
******
Ron, Hermione, Harry and Ginny had all arrived on the landing area outside the top of the main staircase leading to the Griffindor dorms, where Quidditch team members traditionally received encouraging sendoffs from their significant others before practices or competitions. The area had thus been dubbed “the kiss and fly zone” by some Muggle-savvy witch or wizard, and Ron and Hermione were already putting it to proper use. Harry glanced away from the scene and gave Ginny a quick smile. He saw Ginny’s face light up with anticipation and realized that now was the moment for him to...
...get out of the way of the fast-onrushing Dean Thomas, who was hastily making his way down to claim his boyfriend privileges with Ginny.
Harry tried to look off in a neutral enough way to give some semi-privacy to the two couples without too conspicuously turning away from them, then attempted to calculate how much more time to allow before calling them to practice. He was still looking down and considering when to time his cough when Ginny asked “Are we ready, Captain?” and he turned to see his four friends looking at him.
“Right,” Harry said. “We’re off. See you later Hermione, Dean.”
Ron and Ginny picked up their brooms and followed Harry and his broom down the stairs. They had descended perhaps ten steps -- scarcely time for the beginning of one of Ron’s grumbles about the cold of the morning -- when Harry saw the whole hall pivot violently and the staircase disappear beneath his feet. It took a second for Harry to understand that he really was off the staircase and plummeting towards the floor, several stories down.
Instinct told him to grasp something, and reason belatedly informed him that luck and magic had supplied the most helpful object to grasp on to: his broom. It took an additional second to get the broom rightly under himself, arrest his fall, and look back up to see how everybody else was doing. Harry was momentarily reassured to see Ron and Ginny in apparent command of their own brooms, flying at about his level, but a look further up put things in a more ominous light. The cause of the trouble was clear now: the entire staircase, including the landing area, was writhing and bucking like a dragon determined to throw off its rider, and Dean and Hermione, both broomless, were now desperately trying to stay on.
Crying “Hold on!” in three different voices, the three flyers zoomed back up to try to pick up the two stranded ones, with Ron and Harry grabbing Hermione first. Harry quickly helped push and pull Hermione onto Ron’s broom; he took off with her clinging to him from behind. Harry looked around to see how Dean was doing just in time to see him thrown off by a vicious twist of the magical masonry.
Ginny was just beneath, and Dean landed on her with enough force to nearly knock her off her broom. Ginny hung on with her back nearly pressed against the broomstick, her arms pushing Dean up and away, while Harry was trying to maneuver his way below Ginny to add his weight and arms to her efforts at controlling Dean’s fall.
They were all fumbling, tumbling and grabbing when Ron’s “Leviosa!” stopped Dean’s descent and gave Harry and Ginny a chance to float Dean down to the ground between them, joining Ron and Hermione on terra firma. They had scarcely had a chance to get their feet under them and breathe with relief, when a cow-sized section of staircase slammed to the floor just meters away. The five looked up to see magical chaos spreading.
As the Gryffindor staircase went undulating back and forth, it was striking others, which responded like sauropods in a territorial battle, lashing back at their rivals, and even seeming to the transfixed Harry as if they were bellowing with rage as they unwound and crashed into one another. Soon the entire hall was filled with huge stone steps flying everywhere as they were broken off in combat. It was too early for students to be out for breakfast, but the crashing sounds drew curious early-risers out from their dorm rooms into the hall. Most of them quickly retreated when they saw what they had walked in on, but inevitably some tried to make their way towards the assistance of Harry and his friends, others tried to make their way towards the assistance of the assisters, and some members of one group or the other found themselves in no man’s land.
Some of the Ravenclaws were out on the floor perhaps twenty meters away from Harry right under where two of the biggest bull staircases were furiously battering each other in a contest for supremacy. The “head” of the losing fixture, a section some meters across, came hurtling straight down at them, and Harry saw with horror that one Ravenclaw had frozen in place as the massive block came towards him.
There were only a couple of seconds at most before fatal impact, and Harry was speeding on his broom in a moment, looking to knock the student out of its path. He was halfway there -- less than a second away -- when he heard Hermione’s shout of “Impedimenta!” For a moment he thought gratefully that Hermione was helping push the block away, or perhaps push the student -- now close enough to be recognized as Michael Corner -- away from the point of impact. A half second later, Harry realized his mistake as the spell slammed into him, rapidly bringing his momentum down to nothing and bringing him and his broom to a midair halt only feet away from Michael, and looking directly into his eyes.
A half second after that, Corner disappeared completely, his body lost in an impossibly short time beneath tons of stonework.
******
Harry didn’t remember how he got to the hospital wing, or how long he was checked there. He vaguely remembered being magically examined to see whether his presence on the staircase might have triggered the curse. The exam was inconclusive, but Harry felt certain that must have been what happened, though the spellwork could not be traced to its caster. It had been pure luck that the trap was set off on a Quidditch practice day so that Harry (and Ron and Ginny) could escape the worst of it on broomstick. Harry was finally released along with a map to the temporary pathways which had been arranged while the repairwork got underway. Hermione was there waiting for him to be discharged, and she looked Harry firmly in the eye, obviously inviting him to begin the discussion now. Harry thought he would rather put it off but resigned himself to the inevitable. Harry began:
“You shouldn’t --”
“I didn’t have any choice, Harry.”
“I could have --”
“No you couldn’t.”
“I was almost there, and I was picking up speed. I was on a Firebolt, Hermione.”
“And that block was closer to the ground than you were to Michael, and accelerating faster than you were. A Firebolt goes from zero to sixty in three seconds; an object that’s been falling for three seconds is already going over sixty miles an hour, and gaining twenty miles per hour each second.”
Harry forced down a sarcastic comment about whether he was going to be quizzed on this later, but still wanted to say something like Don’t you see, it wasn’t a matter of calculation...
“Look, no matter how -- even if you’re so sure, even if -- we can’t make these kinds of decisions for the other. I know you did it for -- for me, and out of -- because, you know, and I hate sulking at you because maybe you’re right, and if you’re right I should be thanking you, you saved my life, but I can’t -- you can’t do that. Because it’s my decision.”
“What if you see me about to fall into a trap, Harry; you see the trap and I don’t. Do you have the right to stop me?”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“Yes it is. I could see how fast that block was falling. You couldn’t, or you didn’t.”
Harry didn’t know how to refute that, but wasn’t convinced by it, leaving him in the frustrating position of being unable to argue because he couldn’t think of a proper argument but unable to apologize or reconcile because it wouldn’t be sincere. He and Hermione settled for some compromise language, and Harry dragged himself to bed.
He wondered before dropping off whether to offer some kind of condolence to Ginny; Michael Corner was her first boyfriend, after all, and even with their breakup that still must mean something to her, it must have been horrible for her to watch... but then he would have to offer a condolence to her while she was sitting with Dean, her current boyfriend... not to mention that Michael had died because of Harry, because he was the target... not to mention all that other stuff, all those other feelings, which he wasn’t going to mention .... so many complications. It occured to Harry that he would also have to approach Cho then with some sort of expression of regret, a thought which was enough to drive the entire condolence concept entirely out of the realm of possibility. Harry finally dropped miserably to sleep.
* * * * * *
Over the next few days, Hogwarts (as she usually did in such cases) fought through the emotional shock and the physical rubble to attain a fair approximation of normality. Discussions of Hogsmeade plans and speculations about new romantic partnerships returned to the dining table agenda, much to Harry’s distress.
When he heard a heightened buzz of conversation on coming down to breakfast this morning, therefore, he initially assumed there had been some spectacular breakup or gettogether. When he got close enough to the buzz to see that it was accompanied by mass persusal of that day’s Daily Prophet, he suspected it must be something worse. When heads began to turn in Harry’s direction, he knew it was something worse. And when he heard a high-pitched Malfoy cackle rise above the buzz, begging Harry to inform himself of the latest news, he knew it had to be very, very bad.
Harry sat down at the table and braced himself to await Hermione’s summary of the bad tidings, but Hermione was grimly shaking her head as she held on to her copy. At the same moment, Ginny came down to the table hand-in-hand with Dean, and Harry was startled to see that all of the paper-reading heads now seemed to be turning not to Harry but to Ginny. Ginny started for a moment at this, and at all the murmurs of her name running through hall, then returned the nearest glances with some Weasleyglares of her own.
“Come on, Hermione, let’s have it,” Ginny said.
“It looks very bad, Ginny, but I’m sure there’s an explanation....”
“Let us read it, Hermione,” Harry interjected.
“Here you are, Potter, have my copy. No need to thank me, the act is its own reward.”
Draco had apparently silently apparated to the Gryffindor side, and stood by Harry’s left shoulder, holding out his newspaper. Harry snatched it without looking at Malfoy’s face, and laid it down on the table where Ginny (now standing by his right shoulder) could also read it. The story was Death at Hogwarts Raises Unanswered Questions, and the byline was “Rita Skeeter.” The three opening paragraphs were a straightforward account of the events leading up to Michael Corner’s death, but it was the fourth that grabbed the reader’s attention, both through its power of innuendo and by standing out in sixteen-point Veritas Condensed, Italic:
Corner’s death is of course tragic in itself, but its suspicious circumstances have also raised speculation about the role of Harry Potter in the entire incident. Potter may indeed have been, as Headmaster Dumbledore and others have surmised, the intended target of the curse on the staircase. On the other hand, it must be noted that Corner has dated not one but two young witches who have each been romantically linked with Potter: first Ginny Weasley, notorious for being devoted to The Boy Who Lived in their earlier years at Hogwarts, then Cho Chang, who broke off her relationship with Potter last year under bitter circumstances. The extraordinary coincidence of Corner himself being the one fatality in a supposed attack on Potter has not gone unnoticed. Miss Ginny Weasley herself has said to this reporter, and I quote precisely, “Some people think that Harry had something to do with it” (“it” meaning “setting up Corner’s death”).
Harry had experienced various forms of illness before, physical and psychological, natural and magical, but he’d never felt less in control of his body or mind than in the second after reading that last sentence. He barely had time to whirl away from his housemates at the table before the explosion in his stomach overwhelmed him.
Harry could only dimly hear the sound of Malfoy and the other Slytherins laughing, of Ginny calling him to come back and listen, of Ron yelling something at Ginny and Hermione yelling something at Ron... Better get to the hospital wing was Harry’s only coherent thought, and he had made it halfway down the hall in that direction before the second wave hit. Harry finally felt the blessed relief of Professor Flitwick’s anti-nausea spell taking hold, and allowed himself to be assisted up the familiar stairs to his familiar examining station.
As Madame Pomfrey magically prodded and potioned him, Harry heard a ruckus being raised just outside the door: Ron, Hermione, and Ginny in a no-holds-barred three-way, with Ginny the loudest. Madame Pomfrey got up to end the disturbance, and once she got on the other side of the door began shouting something to Ginny about her nerve in coming up here demanding admission under these circumstances.
Harry felt lost for a moment in the fog of potion fumes: why shouldn’t Ginny be here? What circum- Oh. Right. She’s the one who accused me of murder. And the moment that ‘answer’ came to him, Harry saw its utter absurdity. It was the Daily Prophet that was making her out to be his accuser. It was Rita Skeeter. It’s also Veritas type, he thought, but then put the two alternatives to himself: It’s a choice between believing that Ginny is capable of saying something like that, or believing that some rubbishy spell can be fooled or gotten around. There’s no question which one is more likely.
“Let Ginny in, please, Madame Pomfrey” Harry shouted from his bed. “She didn’t say that nonsense in the Prophet, I’m sure of it.”
A long moment later the door opened and Ginny trotted briskly to Harry’s bedside, relief evident on her face and vindication in her voice as she turned back to inquire “Did you hear that, Ron?”
“Yeah, I heard that alright; you OK in there, mate?”
“Yeah, OK,” Harry answered.
“I want to hear the explanation for this one,” Ron said. “It had better be goo-”
“I don’t owe you any explanation Ron,” shouted Ginny. “I’m not your sister any more, don’t you remember?”
“Look,” Harry said to Ron, “we’ll hash it all out and I’ll give you the scoreline later. Just leave us be for a minute.”
Ron departed with some perfunctory objections, and Harry and Ginny had a moment of awkward silence before Harry asked, “Does he really have the authority to disown you?” Ginny returned Harry’s thin smile.
“I’m sure he thinks he does. He’s been trying to veto Percy’s readmission to the family. We both committed the ultimate sin, you know, so far as Ron sees it: we betrayed you.”
Harry felt a flush of embarrassment, but there was some pleasure along with it. Not that he wanted to be the cause of this fighting -- not between Ron and Ginny, anyway -- but knowing that there was somebody who was that much on his side, that was still something to hold on to through all this.
“Anyway,” Ginny continued, “I’m really glad that you aren’t an idiot.”
“Right, I’m glad I’m not an idiot too. So what did happen with Skeeter?”
“Now I feel like the idiot because looking back it was so stupid of me... I knew I should have just walked away from her, but I heard from Sarah -- you know her, in my year -- how Skeeter was badgering everybody, especially everybody in Gryffindor or Ravenclaw who knew Michael, or you, or me, or Cho, and going through every combination of rumor possible, so I said to myself, ‘Right, I’m going to put an end to this’. And the moment I get within hex length of her she turns to me and says ‘Miss Weasley, now regarding Michael Corner’s death, you are of course aware that some people think Harry had something to do with setting it up’. And I was just... flummoxed. Struck dumb. And the only thing I could do -- which turned out to be the stupidest thing I could do, and the one thing she must have been hoping I would do -- was stand there with my jaw open and repeat what she said: like, ‘Some people think Harry had something to do with it???’ -- you know, question mark, double-question-mark, are-you-bloody-insane-mark... and then I told her, well then ‘some people’ could do this to themselves, and do that to themselves, and they should all get themselves photographed doing this and that with Rita Skeeter, and on and on, but...”
“But none of that made it into the Prophet.”
“Right.”
Harry and Ginny sat quietly for a while, shaking their heads in turn. It could have been funny, almost.
“Well, I believe you, of course,” Harry said, and after a slight pause Ginny responded with what seemed to him a rather flat, quiet “OK.” Frankly, he was expecting a little more return from this display of trust and magnanimity. Not tears of gratitude, or... no, not thinking of that, but something sounding less bordering on a tone of resentment would have been nice.
“Something bothering you?” Harry asked.
“No, everything’s fine.”
“Really?”
Ginny looked at Harry for a long moment. “All right,” she said. “I wish you would have ‘believed me, of course’ from the beginning.”
“You mean, even after reading it in Veritas?”
“Yeah, even after that. I know it looked bad Harry--”
“It looked bad enough that even your brother thought--”
“And I have to forgive him because you’re his best friend, and he’s an idiot.”
“But it’s harder to forgive me because I’m not an idiot?” Harry asked, starting to build up a head of steam on this topic.
“I don’t have any problem ‘forgiving you,’ I just, like I told you, it bothered me that you thought I could have said such a foul thing. If it had been Ron or Hermione quoted in that paper you wouldn’t have believed it for a moment, no matter what kind of type it was in.”
“I didn’t think you said it, Ginny. I just had a reaction, I couldn’t control it.”
“Right. You can’t help it, it was just how you felt. Everybody knows you can’t help how you feel, everybody says that, like it’s one of the seven pillars of wisdom or one of the four noble truths or something. Right?”
Harry started feeling a mild sense of alarm on hearing Ginny ramble this way, knowing he was missing something, sensing there was some kind of trap waiting for him however he responded, so he kept his mouth shut. Ginny kept going anyway:
“I don’t think so, though, I don’t think we’re all just... helpless, that way. There’s such a thing as an acquired taste, there has to be something like an acquired... immunity? And--”
Ginny looked at Harry. He imagined she saw his confusion. Whatever she saw, it obviously didn’t make her happy.
“You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” she asked.
“No, I just know that for some reason you’re upset with me now, and I don’t get it!”
“You don’t get it? You can’t even guess?”
Ginny paused to allow Harry time to see the obvious, but he still didn't pass the quiz.
“Alright, I take it back, Harry; you are an idiot. I hope you get better soon.”
And with that Ginny left the hospital wing, leaving Harry to review their conversation. It didn’t take too long for him to reach a conclusion.
Well, maybe I am an idiot, he thought, but I’m not such an idiot that I didn’t get it that time.
* * * * * *
Harry’s word for the day, for the next several days, was “complicated,” as in “it would make things too complicated if I got involved with Ginny.” Complicated because of her dating one of his friends, because of her being Ron’s sister, because of the prophecy craziness and all that entailed, because he had to admit he didn’t know how having a girlfriend was supposed to work. He therefore resolved to squelch any possible expectations Ginny might have as unambiguously as he could without risking a friendship that had come to mean a great deal to him. Towards that end Harry embarked on a campaign to be a pal and a buddy to Ginny in as clear, strong and public a manner as possible, through a combination of punches on the shoulder, firm slaps on the back, and gender-neutral forms of address.
He couldn’t be sure he was succeeding -- there seemed to be some mixed signals from Ginny, even some moments when her face clouded -- but Harry thought he was doing a reasonably good job, right up until the time he loudly spoke out, in the middle of a quietly studying common room, to ask Ginny whether she and Dean had anything special planned for the next Hogsmeade outing. Harry hadn’t noticed until he asked the question that Ginny and Dean weren’t sitting together, and in fact hadn’t been sitting together since the day the Prophet article came out. As he considered that odd fact, he saw the Gryffindors all looking at him with varied degrees of incredulity: except for Ginny, who was getting to her feet and giving him a look of complete outrage. Harry knew that nothing good was coming, but stood his ground as Ginny stared at him.
“Did everybody get that?” Ginny asked the Gryffindor assembly (while continuing to look straight at Harry). “Everybody got the message? Good. Now everybody clear out, because I have a couple of messages to give to Harry myself.”
The room quickly cleared.
“I would never have believed,” she said, once they were alone, “that you could be such a complete, sadistic bastard. And then did--”
“What, wait a minute!--”
“--did you somehow think I’d just take it? You--”
“Maybe I was being stupid, but--”
“--you taunt me in front of all my friends about--”
“I wasn’t taunting! I just overdid it with the, the--”
“--about what I said to Dean, about how--”
“To Dean? what are you talking about?”
“--I felt about--”
“Ginny! I have no idea what you said to Dean!”
That was enough, finally, to stop Ginny’s rant and make her lower her wand a fraction from its previous alignment with Harry’s nose.
“You’re saying that nobody told you what happened,” Ginny said, “after you went to the hospital wing?”
“No; what happened?
Ginny examined Harry’s face for several seconds. The rage in her eyes gradually subsided, and she gestured for Harry to take a seat near her. After one deep breath she plunged right into the cold water of mortification.
“Ron was screaming at me,” Ginny recounted, “and just wasn’t listening to anything I said. It was like ‘How could you?’ ‘I didn’t!’ ‘But how could you?’ And back, and forth, and Dean is trying to support me, and trying to come between Ron and me, and holding my hand, and giving Ron what-for about not trusting his sister, and Ron asks ‘Is this some way of getting back at Harry, because you used to be so crazy about him?’ and I yell back at him, I yell ‘I never stopped, stupid’.”
Harry gave a cringe which twisted himself in knots from his eyes to his toes, part for how horribly embarrassing that must have been for Ginny, and part for how unspeakably humiliating it must have been for Dean. He thought he probably deserved some kind of medal for being capable of empathizing with Dean in such a situation.
“So you can see,” Ginny continued, “why I was so sure you were making fun of me.”
Harry shook his head in disbelief. “How could you think I would make fun of you for that?" he asked. "I couldn’t do that, it saved my life.”
Ginny stared at him as if her suspicions were growing back, that he was somehow taking the mickey. “I saved your life, by shouting out my feelings to Ron?”
“No, no,” he said in frustration, “not that you saved my life, it saved my life, from Voldemort when I was a baby, that, having that, feeling.”
And now Harry could see that Ginny understood what he was so very badly saying, but that she looked, if anything, even more at a loss. And it slowly dawned on him that he had just compared the mother's love that had thwarted the unstoppable killing curse with the love that this girl felt for him, and that he had done so without having to think about it. Of course he knew they weren't the same kind of, that thing, but he really didn't feel that one was nothing like the other or that it was some kind of ridiculous teenage stupidity to compare one to the other.
The silence between the two stretched out awkwardly, and Harry made a move to break it.
“I thought you’d given up on — given up. What changed?”
Idiot, why did you bring that up? he asked himself, and was afraid to try giving himself an answer.
“Why do you want to know,” Ginny came back. “You want to take notes, so you can work out a better way of heading off --”
“No, forget it, I'm being stupid--”
“You probably don’t even remember,” Ginny continued, apparently unwilling to forget it. “Beginning of the year, the four of us were looking at the hall and half the girls were giving you the eye. You looked flustered, and you asked Hermione what was going on. She said that a lot of girls must really be into the mysterious, brooding hero type. And I said --”
“You said, 'I like him better when he smiles'.”
Ginny paused a moment.
“And then you said --”
“I said, 'Well, that settles it, then'.”
Harry felt quite proud of himself for showing Ginny that he wasn't the kind of idiot who forgot that kind of conversation. Then he felt a moment of panic as he sensed things getting complicated again. Ginny must have read this in his face.
“Forget about it,” she said. “I’ll just go back to giving up. It’ll come easier with practice.”
“You know,” Harry responded with some heat, “I never asked you to be interested in the first place --”
“Oh, I'm very well aware of that! You don't need to --”
“But I never asked you to give up either!”
.......
I didn’t say that. I did not just say that.
Damn it, DAMN it! You bloody moron, why did you say that?
Please, let me find a time-turner, so I can go back and not say that, and I promise I'll do all my homework on time.
Oh God what happens now? I can’t take it back. My life is over.
......
Ginny was still looking at him.
“What exactly are you saying, Harry?”
He paused to consider what was the least complication-inducing thing he could say without lying.
“I’m not sure.”
“Right,” said Ginny, “Those three little words every girl wants to hear.”
“Oh, come on,” Harry snapped back. “Don't talk as if, the only possible thing I could say, to — to be anything above 'idiot', is to make this something like a stu-- something like one of those romance novels. It's not going to work like that. I mean, obviously, I feel something for you. Obviously. And obviously it worries me and scares me. And if you're thinking 'Oh, that's just stupid, what is there to be scared about,' then you don't know what you're talking about.”
Harry stopped there, half-expecting Ginny either to hex him or to storm out, but she did neither. She was still just looking at him, waiting for him to finish. He considered his next words carefully.
“I guess I'd like to see what happens, if you don't give up, and I don't run away.”
After a couple of moments, Ginny finally offered Harry a smile.
“I guess that doesn't sound too idiotic,” she said, and placed her right hand on his left. Harry turned it up and gave her hand a soft squeeze.
OK, I said it. It's said. Let's see what happens now.
END
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