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Harry had never liked the sound of raised voices. It made his heartbeat thunder in his ears, his skin prickle uncomfortably, his breath catch in his throat. Raised voices grated his nerves raw, turned every sound unbearably loud, every touch into a sledgehammer. It overwhelmed him, turning his brain to jelly, and never more so than when it was Ginny’s voice inching up in volume. When it was Ginny’s cheeks reddening under a forest of freckles, eyebrows drawing together and jaw clenching between words spat out like threats. When it was Ginny, transformed by her anger, stealing his breath away in more ways than one.
His hands shook at his sides, so he slid them into his pockets, deciding to pretend at being casual rather than admit to the thoughts racing around his skull on their little motorbikes, which looked suspiciously like Sirius’, probably, in the way that every motorbike now did, after the war. His whole body felt wet, like his resolve was pouring out of his pores, its way eased by sweat. Did she not see what this was doing to him? His tongue was thick and heavy in his mouth, refusing to move, refusing to give life to any of the words in his head, in his heart, drowning in the fire in his chest.
His vision narrowed, the edges fuzzy, and he dragged a hand up to his face, feeling as though he was pulling it through a sea of honey, rubbing roughly at his eyes as though it would solve the problem. The nosepads of his glasses dragged up his forehead before catching in his hair, leaving him free reign to try and quell the itching in his eyes that warned of tears to come. She couldn’t see him like that. She couldn’t know how much this was affecting him. What would she think if he told the truth? What would she do with the knowledge that the savior of the Wizarding World could be reduced to rubble by the threat of an argument?
Only seconds before, he’d wanted her to look at him and see the words fighting to leave his mouth, but now, he wanted nothing less.
“Harry! Harry!” Her voice caught him by surprise, an alien exiting her spaceship for the foreign territory of his ears, unmapped and unexplored. It was if he was truly hearing her speak for the first time, even though he’d spent years upon years wholly focused on the sound of her voice, on the way her lips shaped every word that left her mouth. “Harry, stop, you’ll hurt yourself. Harry. Harry, please.”
He stumbled as her fingers closed around his wrists, deftly guiding his shaking hands away from his face, desperate for a lack of contact. Her fingers were warm and steady, the pressure unrelenting, and a ragged breath tore itself from him, as if it couldn’t stand to be confined by his lungs any longer.
The look on her face was truly unreadable, or maybe he wasn’t focused enough to try, the world dancing by between scatters of dark spots in his vision.
“I can’t—Don’t talk to me like that.” He mumbled. “Don’t—Don’t just—”
“Don’t what?” Ginny asked. Was that annoyance? Exasperation? He couldn’t tell and it was killing him, sapping the strength from his bones. If he could have collapsed into himself like a house of cards to save them both the trouble of speaking ever again, he would have.
She let go of his wrists. He felt unmoored, like a balloon left to float into the sky untethered.
“Don’t what, Harry?” Her voice softened, melting like butter left out in the sun. “You can tell me. We can’t read each other’s minds every time.”
“I can’t—Loud voices, I can’t.” Harry’s mind spun. Now that he’d let go of the words, he felt even worse. “Makes me feel—Makes me feel like I’m in trouble, and I can’t—I can’t do that, not after everything. Not after how—” The cupboard felt closer than it had in a long time, a threat hovering at the edge of his vision. “Not after how everything was. Before. Before, before you met me.”
Uncle Vernon used to yell until his voice gave out on him, the limits of his anger defined by the body that corralled it into a shape. Harry would be subsumed, consumed, destroyed by his anger for as long as it suited him, for as long as Harry was interesting enough to hold his attention. Was Harry still interesting to Ginny? Or would the anger that seemed to dog his footsteps find her too, tearing into her like a starving man’s first meal and making her over in the image of the people he feared most?
Ginny nodded slowly. “Was that too loud for you? Is that why you..” She took his hands in hers again, lacing their fingers together gently. “You need to tell me these things, Harry.” She brought their joined hands to her mouth, kissing each knuckle like it was a prize she’d unearthed, treasure salvaged from the depths of the sea.
It nearly brought tears to his eyes. She had such a beautiful way of making him believe he might have value.
“I couldn’t. It got…” He swallowed hard. “The words got stuck. I wanted to tell you. I know—I know I need to be better, about telling people things, but… for a long time, before Ron and Hermione and you, I had no one to tell anything.” He hung his head. “Nobody was going to listen, so what was the point? It just—It’s hard. To forget. To let the words out. Because you’re listening. You won’t—you won’t hurt me with what I say. You want to know because you want to understand.”
“I do.” Ginny said. “And don’t you forget it.” She pulled herself up on her tiptoes to kiss Harry’s nose. “I know it’s hard to remember, when things get heated. But I’ll try too. It’s both of us in this, together. We both have things to fix.”
“I don’t want you to change who you are. I like that, that you get passionate, that you get loud about the things you love. I worry that I just—that when you’re talking to me like that, that you’re mad and you just—maybe you’ve stopped loving me?” Harry tried to pull his hands from Ginny’s, but she refused to let him go. “I want you to keep that energy, I don’t want you to feel like I’m trying to limit you, to stop you from being you—”
“You aren’t limiting me by wanting to feel safe, Harry.” Ginny said, each word infused with the determined pluckiness that Harry loved. “We both deserve to feel safe here. And if you need me to be gentle with you, I’ll do it. Same as you’ve promised to talk to me more. It goes both ways. It doesn’t have to be just you giving things up anymore. Not here. Not with us.”
“Not with us.” Harry repeated, his words ghosts of hers. “You’re right. We—we both make promises. Both of us. We keep them, both of us.”
“We try. And if it doesn’t work all the time, that’s alright too.” She straightened the wrinkles in his shirt. “As long as we’re both doing our best. I’m not made of glass, Harry. You can ask for things and I’ll try to give them to you.”
“Takes a long time to unlearn ten years and a few odd summers of… whatever that was.” Harry chuckled faintly. He pried his hands from hers to pull her into his chest, craning his neck to rain kisses down on her forehead, her cheeks, the tops of her ears. She laughed, pushing at his chest, and when he paused, genuinely worried that she might be asking him to stop, she stuck her tongue out at him. “I want to do my best, like you said. For you. For us. We deserve each other’s best and I—I always want to give that to you, even when I don’t. I’m trying. I promise. It’s important to me, that you know that. That you always feel that. Like you say I should feel safe.”
“I know. Thank you, love.” She cupped his cheek and he leaned into her touch, mumbling something incoherent under his breath. The relief it brought him was sublime, intoxicating and heady. “We can work through this together. What I need, what you need. We’ve done harder before.”
“We have.” They spoke about the year he’d been on the run often, now, and with each remembrance, with each day added to the running total between himself and who he’d been on May second, it hurt a little less. “We have and we’ll crush this just like we crushed that. Together, like you said. We’re good at that. Thriving, not just surviving.”
“Thriving.” Ginny grinned. “I like that. Let's keep calling it that.”