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‘I feel like it shouldn’t be allowed, is all’
Harry looked up at Ginny’s face in the mirror. She rarely looked so uncertain, smoothing down the front of her dark green dress, assessing her appearance. He reached for her hands to stop the fretting and stepped closer to her.
‘It’s your seventeenth, of course it’s allowed,’ he said, running his hands further up her arms. She leaned against him and sighed.
He let his eyes linger on the image of the two of them, framed together so neatly by the wooden edges of Ginny’s bedroom mirror. He could not exactly describe the emotions that such a seemingly trivial thing brought out of him. For a moment, the memory of Dumbledore telling him about a pair of socks swam to him.
‘I just can’t help thinking of all the people I wish were here. Sometimes I think I’ll walk downstairs, and they’ll all be there, like it was some hideous prank that they all disappeared for a while,’ she murmured.
Harry didn’t know what to say to that, besides the fact that he often felt the same. He grasped on the words that she herself had said to him not more than two months ago.
‘We lost a lot, but we gained a lot too. Remember?’
He saw her smile ruefully in the mirror.
‘Godric. I said that to you two months ago? You have every right to leave me right here, right now.’
Harry looked into the mirror, knowing she was looking right back at him. He saw the tiniest sliver of doubt behind her pupils, an emotion that he sought to dispel.
‘Not a chance. You were right, and who better to take advice from than yourself?’
She laughed lightly.
‘Mm. Carefully done, Potter,’
Harry’s hands moved to her hips and he shifted to place a kiss on her neck. She leaned back into the touch and closed her eyes. The party that was soon to begin downstairs remained forgotten, before they heard the first shouts of guests arriving at the edge of the Burrow.
They both lifted their heads to look out of the bedroom window, where they could see a blonde head bobbing along the path towards the Burrow’s front door. A red head and brown bushy-haired head appeared at the edge of the window’s pane, then met the blonde in the middle.
‘-Did you make it yourself?’ a voice carried over the yard.
‘Oh yes. I had to stew them for three days, I thought the dirigibles wouldn’t ripen in time, but they did- ‘
The words being exchanged outside faded in and out from discernible words to muffled mumbles. Harry and Ginny both looked back into the mirror, comfortable standing against one another, and shared a small smile.
With Luna being the first arrival, the rest of the guests started to trickle in. They heard shouts and laughter and snippets of conversation carry into the bedroom, but they had both decided wordlessly that they would like to stay in the bedroom, in the quiet, for as long as possible.
‘How did you do it?’ Ginny asked quietly, as the sounds from outside washed over them.
Harry creased his eyebrows slightly. ‘Do what?’
‘Sit at the table and smile while everyone sang. Have a normal conversation.’
Harry twisted a strand of her hair in thought.
‘It sounds horrible, but when all that is happening, you-’ he lifted his eyes to the ceiling and took a breath, trying to find the right words ‘- you almost forget about it all for a while.
‘And then those fleeting moments become more frequent, and you can forget for a whole hour, maybe two. And then you realise that the afternoon is over, and you sit down and the memories slam back into you.’
Ginny reached up and caught the hand that was curling her hair, she held it and traced her fingers over his palm, focussing intently on the lines and curves.
‘It makes me feel bad,’ she whispered, barely audible to Harry.
He tensed his jaw. He felt his heart tighten considerably at the tone of Ginny’s voice, he hated to hear the despair in her words, much less regarding something that he could scarcely fix.
Ginny continued looking down at his palm when she spoke further. He focussed on the copper-red strands of her hair spilling over her shoulders as he looked in the mirror.
‘I know exactly what you mean, Harry. It’s like when we lie in bed together after… when I try to fall asleep, it all comes back to me and I feel-‘ she lifted both their hands, looking for the right words ‘-So. Bad. For the moments of pleasure that I steal from the grief. That I can feel like that when so much is… wrong.
‘When we laugh at the dinner table, we all end it with an awkward sigh because every one of us is suddenly, simultaneously remembering that we can’t laugh, how could we? And then mum goes upstairs early, and we clear up in silence.’ She brought his hand across her body so that his arms were now wrapped around her, she ran her fingers across his skin.
‘I just… I just don’t know what to do. How to feel.’ She finished with a shuddering breath, moving her eyes back onto Harry’s reflected ones, looking for an answer.
Harry’s eyes roved over her for a long time, thinking of the best thing to say to her. She looked so small in front of him at that moment, dwarfed by his hands around her, searching his face.
‘Gin,’ he started carefully, ‘there’s no handbook to this, there really isn’t. But, I think… just the fact that we can all forget for a while means we’re moving forward at least the tiniest bit. Think of you now, and you three months ago.’
Her eyes flickered for a second, cast back to the days immediately after the battle.
‘I didn’t eat for three days,’ she said, voice hoarse.
‘I went to Hogwarts every day and almost killed myself rebuilding, collapsed a few times even,’ he reminded her, ‘but how long have I been standing with you here now? How many scones did you eat this morning?’
He raised his eyebrows, prompting her to reply to him. She rolled her eyes but betrayed herself with a small smile on her face.
‘Four.’
‘Exactly, four scones in the morning, can you imagine doing that three months ago?’
‘There’s a lot I couldn’t imagine three months ago,’ she said, running her hand up his bicep and then twisting in his arms to kiss him on the lips tenderly, but deeply.
‘Ginny! All your guests are arriving! You don’t want me coming up there!’
Mrs Weasley’s shouting brought Harry back to reality, but Ginny pulled him closer to her for a second, then broke their kiss reluctantly and strode over to her doorway. She shouted down the stairs, ‘Coming, mum!’
She turned on the spot and stood before him. She held out her hands and gave a mockingly low curtsy. ‘How do I look?’
Harry smiled at her, he could not laugh, she was too beautiful. She conjured so much affection in him that he could not help but look at her with anything but unashamed adoration. She cocked an eyebrow at him, then moved to her dresser where she picked up a few pairs of earrings and necklaces. She moved back in front of the mirror, trying them on her ear and chest.
‘All my jewellery is so grotty, but this dress is so plain,’ she said absently, swapping one dangling jewel for another.
‘That dress,’ Harry said, resuming his spot behind her and pressing his body close to hers, ‘is perfect.’
‘You’re biased, though.’
‘Doesn’t make it any less true.’
As he watched her switch jewellery and mutter to herself, he decided that her birthday present was going to have to be opened early. He pulled a small square box from the pocket of his denims and tried his best to extract the contents without her noticing.
He caught her hand at her ear; it still clutched a small beaded earring that was clearly homemade. He brought her hand down and took the earring from her, as well as the collection of silver and gold that resided in her other palm. He placed them back down on the dresser and then returned to the mirror. She studied him closely as he moved about the room.
‘It would’ve been cruel for me to watch you do that while this was in my pocket,’ he said.
As he talked, he brought up a thin silver chain necklace and draped it over her chest, so that it fell just below her collarbone.
An audible breath left her mouth and she brought her hand to the pendant that rested against her skin. It was a simple piece of jewellery, the chain met at two thin silver circles that were interlocked with each other, completing the necklace.
She met his gaze in their reflections. ‘Harry…’
He finished clasping it and brushed her hair back over her shoulders. ‘Do you like it?’ He asked, suddenly uncertain.
‘Harry, it’s the most beautiful thing anyone’s ever given me,’ she said, her palm still moving over the fine links.
‘Look at the back of the rings.’
Ginny moved closer to the mirror and turned the dainty circles over. A tiny H could be seen on one ring, a G on the other.
‘I asked Hermione to help, Fleur did too actually when she heard me talking about it. And I thought it’s your seventeenth, so I wanted something really nice, so we went to the jewellers in Diagon- ‘
He was interrupted by the full force of Ginny Weasley falling onto him, and he staggered back, holding her in his arms. When he regained some notion of control, he looked up to see her face a hairsbreadth away from his.
Ginny, with a smattering of freckles dancing across her cheeks and nose. Her brown eyes shining. Her perfect lips curving in all the right places. Flaming hair framing her face.
He took in the sight of her and kissed her. Hard. She reciprocated just as well.
‘Ginevra if you don’t get downstairs now, I am going to ask the ministry to correct your birth certificate and reflect you to be sixteen, because you obviously don’t care about being seventeen! Harry- you’re not helping!’
They barely registered Mrs Weasley opening and then shutting the door, her threat delivered in between, not batting an eyelid at her daughter engaged in a very heated kiss. Harry eventually pulled away from her, cupping her face with one hand.
‘As much I love this- and I bloody do- I also like being on Molly Weasley’s good side,’ he said, then he cocked his head and said as an afterthought, ‘And all the guests are here.’
She untangled herself from him and scoffed. ‘Harry Potter, defeater of the dark lord, cowering in fear before my mum.’
‘What can I say? I’m a smart bloke.’
Ginny rolled her eyes, then turned to the door. She checked her dress over one last time, then bit her lip. ‘If you’ve got enough nerve, right?’
Harry stepped up next to her and held his hand out for her to grasp.
‘Why don’t we start with four scones?’