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As a kid, Harry always assumed love would be something soft and warm, something pleasant like a thick sweater and a place in front of a fire on a snowy day. Easy.
Then he met Ginny Weasley.
She was nothing more than an uncomfortable reminder of his unwanted fame in the beginning—an annoyance. Ron’s little sister, a tiny red-haired girl staring at him like he was at once far more and far less than he really was.
She didn’t follow them to Hogwarts that first year. The next year she did, but only to quickly disappear into the depths of Slytherin to become something even more unfathomable. A Weasley, yes, but also…not. He still risked everything to save her from Riddle, because it was right and she was Ron’s sister. But she looked at him like she knew somehow, knew she was something he couldn’t understand, didn’t want to understand.
The only time she really made any sense at all was when he watched her play Quidditch. She flew against people twice her size and never flinched. He stood next to her at the World Cup and thought from the look on her face that she might actually understand what Quidditch had come to mean to him. But she was still in Slytherin, and Ron’s sister, and something just foreign enough not to bother with.
Not that it mattered. She wasn’t part of his world. She just popped up from time to time to say the exact right thing at the right time, and that was annoying in its own way. But also…interesting.
It wasn’t until his fifth year that he finally noticed that if she had ever once harbored a mortifying amount of hero worship for him, it was long gone. He understood this as she stood with her hands on her hips and called him a hypocrite.
He was indignant over it for weeks, her gall to question his character when she was the Slytherin. (He could be slow about things like that back then.) He’d mistaken his anger at her pointed absences from the DA as annoyance with her rather than annoyance with himself. The festering emotion was shame, not anger.
He was a hypocrite.
He went to see her when he finally worked it out, and she didn’t make it easy on him, and that was annoying too. Almost as annoying as the thought that he kind of liked that fierce look she got on her face when she called him out. Like she couldn’t even remember any more that he was, well, Harry bloody Potter, Boy Who Lived. She looked at him like he was a disappointment.
He hated it.
He tried to change her mind the only way he could, by doing his best to teach her and her friends to defend themselves, by trying not to look surprised when they proved their mettle over and over again. When the betrayal that eventually destroyed everything didn’t come from them.
She didn’t make that easy on him either.
Ginny was stubborn, knew how to hold a grudge, and sometimes looked so stone-faced that he began to doubt she was capable of feeling anything. Then he would catch her laughing and rolling her eyes at that wanker Burke and think, “Bloody Slytherins.”
He tried to date Cho because she was nice and pleasant and he seemed to remember his stomach dropping towards his toes when she’d looked at him the year before. (Not like a disappointment, but like someone…special.)
He pretty much got what he deserved for that. For being a total berk even if just inside the comfort of his own mind. He knew Ginny was watching too, the way her lips twisted with amusement as she left him with a weepy Cho. (Not at all pleasant after all either, it turned out.)
Only a total wanker would secretly resent that Ginny looked at him like just any other person when he hated her attentions before. He’d have just wiped her from his brain entirely, but Ginny Weasley wasn’t one to be forgotten. Or ignored.
Especially when she barged in when no one else dared, when everyone else feared what he’d become. He started telling her things, sharing things he wouldn’t dare with anyone else. At first maybe because of her experience with Voldemort, but mostly for that fierce look, the way her face lit up when she talked Quidditch, because she wasn’t in Gryffindor.
It was the last that was the most uncomfortable, must unfathomable. That he would share his secrets with her because she wouldn’t judge him by black and white standards, but rather by her own murky shades of grey. He trusted that when he didn’t trust anything else.
She was wrong as often as anyone, blinded by her own prejudices and faults. But she forgave him his own, probably more often than he deserved. Like she could see things in people that most overlooked. See things in him.
She fought by his side in the Department of Mysteries and held his hand after he got Sirius killed. She told him he wasn’t a killer, and he let himself try to believe it. He kept finding excuses to be around her, to talk with her, even when it meant watching her date another boy and finally admitting that it bothered him. Finally admitting that he thought about her a lot more that he probably should.
She never looked at him like he was the Chosen One, never pandered, never lied to him just to save his feelings, to be polite. He knew this because she never hesitated to tell him when she thought he was a git. She called him on his obsession with Malfoy, told him exactly how she saw him, and sent him back to his house like a chastised little boy.
She was still there to wipe the blood from his hands, to hold everything together when it was spiraling out of control. More than fair trade for a dead basilisk and ink on the floor.
She cried when Dumbledore died and held her brother’s hand like the scars on his face didn’t matter. Harry knew then that he had to leave and maybe never come back.
He kissed her anyway. Kissed her and left her behind. She didn’t cry or complain or try to hold on (or even deck him), but gave him one fierce look and stood to face her own battles.
He began to wonder just which one of them was supposed to be the hero.
For long months on the run, staring down at a tiny dot bearing her name was the only way he stayed sane some days. At the end of it, he walked into death of his own free will and just when he was thinking he might not be able to do it, she was there, not to talk him out of it, but to remind him why he was doing it in the first place.
“Bloody hero,” she called him.
Not pleasant, but something infinitely more. She’d never been a weakness, but his strength. None of that, none, was what he expected, assumed. Only now, so many years later, does he understand that’s kind of the point.
“I thought falling in love was supposed to be pleasant,” Harry confesses.
Next to him, Ginny stiffens, an involuntary reaction she quickly covers, emotions disappearing under her still surface. “Sorry to disappoint you,” she says.
“Who says you did?”
Who’d want pleasant when they could have Ginny Weasley?
She rolls over to look at him, her eyes assessing, always assessing. When she finally decides he isn’t taking the mickey, she smiles.
“Idiot,” she says, leaning in to kiss him.
No. Not particularly pleasant.
He’s glad.
.fin.