Chapter Text
In the bad days, Ginny would ponder over the scars the war had left on them. Many years later, when the bad days had become rare and they had become virtually functioning members of society, Hermione would mention their resemblance to the Muggle Lost Generation.[1] The Lost Generation – a term coined by Americans to refer to people that reached maturity during the Muggle First War. And they were truly lost back then, weren’t they? Directionless and disoriented, they couldn’t be called children anymore and yet, they were hardly adults either – people with no idea what to do with the youth they had left.
When Ginny looked back at those months after the Battle of Hogwarts, she did so with an ounce of derision at their foolishness, principally at her own. To leave a country of adrift souls to their own devices was unadvised under any circumstances, but under their particular ones, it was a recipe for a great disaster. Fortune had favoured the Wizarding World, for it could have been much worse.
Take, for instance, her relationship with Harry. At the time, she had been deluded enough to believe she the man figured out: a noble boy, she had told herself countless times, who struggled to accept love and with a misplaced sense of guilt. All those aspects were obviously correct, but also not – in truth, Harry Potter was a complex man who, even after all those years, was not completely known to her.
Ultimately, how much can you truly know someone, when most people still struggle to understand themselves?
In 1998, Ginny certainly didn’t know who she was. A daughter yes, but to a family of nine who had no idea how to function as a family of eight. A girlfriend perhaps, she and Harry hadn’t taken long to fall in bed together, though what they had back then could be hardly called a relationship. There were still her friends, but after months of coexistence cooped up in a school or a hideout, they had to rush back to their lives, with no time for friendships. She had no place to call home – the Burrow, a ruin after the Death Eaters attacked it at Easter; no laws to follow – or at least, no government to impose them, as the Ministry scrambled to dispose of the parody left behind by Voldermort’s rule; and too many scars on her body – and her soul, a fit of aimless anger at the world and what it had done with everyone she loved.
If left unchecked, her anger would get the best of her – because that, she resorted to throwing herself at work: in the days after the battle, when her mum couldn’t muster the will to get off the bed, Ginny would take over her aunt’s kitchen and cook through sunrise, even though most of them hadn’t mustered any will to eat. Fairview[2] was kept pristine clean by her efforts, and even Muriel couldn’t find much to complain about the matter.
Her family lived dived, metaphorically in the sense that none of them was able to reach for another past their grief and physically, Charlie and Percy relocated to the Shell Cottage, while the rest of them spent their nights in Dorset. Ginny hardly saw most of them throughout the days – neither her mum nor George left their rooms most days, and her dad had made his duty to at least attend to the former; Hermione too, for days she would be too anxious to leave the house and then, too anxious to stay around, and whenever the Hermione went, Ron and Harry were dragged behind.
Her moments with Harry belonged to another life, which could only be lived in the hours before dawn. Their encounters could not be simply be defined by pleasure though, it was far more primal than it: a need to be assured of the other existence, stolen moments of forgetfulness, in each the world outside did not matter.
It had all started on the dawn of the day after the battle. Throughout the day past, Ginny had caught glimpses of Harry across the school, but there was too much to be done for them to meet. At sunset, she noticed he and Ron had disappeared and nearly panicked before Neville took notice of her worry, and swiftly informed her brother and his friends were dealing with Shacklebolt, the newly appointed minister. Nev, like Harry, would be too aware of everything in the days that followed. When her dad dragged them to her aunt’s, they were still nowhere to be seen; Ginny had cooked dinner and gone to bed, or at least, tried to: in the following weeks, she’d discover that sleep eluded her – in the middle of the night when there was nothing more to be done, her ire became more pronounced and the more she tried to fall asleep, the stronger it grew.
The birds were already rehearsing their chorus when she heard someone in the kitchen; that had been Harry, of course. Muriel had a lovely kitchen – olive-coloured cabinets and oak counters, copper cookware hanging from racks — needless to say, that could barely be seen at the shade of firstlight, even Harry was difficult to recognise, his body eclipsed by the light coming out from the window. He had no trouble:
“Gin, tea?” he had offered, putting a kettle on the fire. There was something very portentous about him then: strangely, it would take her a week to notice how her brother and his friends had emaciated in the past year, even after seeing his best friend naked at least four times during that week. That night, his undernourishment had gone unnoticed, as had his new scars. That night, Harry had only looked alive and there – the man she had loved for a few years already, a man she had thought dead quite a few times in the past year.
Ginny hadn’t answered his offer – that she remembered because the puzzled look he had as she approached him was so very Harry. She imagined he had looked even more confused when she snuck her arms around his torso, burying her face between his shoulders. At first contact, he froze under the touch, before relaxing. For quite a while, they had stayed like that, Harry settled under her touch as she counted his breaths. He smelled of soot and fresh earth, and Ginny doubted he had bathed after the battle – probably just a cleaning charm throughout the day. The moment was broken by the chiming of the kettle.
“Gin, I’m sorry.” He whispered into the night. “It’s all my fault.”
That was also very Harry. An unreasonable guilty complex wrapped up by some self-centredness. She had probably snorted – she always snorted when he fell back into his old habits. Most of the time, she would reply with something witty – she certainly had thought of many things to say on that occasion, but she hadn’t, choosing instead to ignore that conversation. If she could, she would ignore that conversation forever – all the reassurances in the world weren’t enough to make Harry any less prone to guilt, and she had too much anger within herself to provide any of it.
You are alive. “I love you.” She had mumbled into his shirt. Don’t dare to die again. What must I do for you to stay alive?
Ginny knew Harry wouldn’t understand all the things she left unsaid – it was not in his nature to perceive any kind of protectiveness related to him. No matter – she didn’t wish (or couldn’t, for the matter) to explain the sentiment to him either.
“Gin.” Ginny, on the other hand, found her name on his lips was enough of a declaration of love: she turned him around and pushed herself onto the tips of her toes to kiss him. Nine months without feeling his arms around her as he kissed her back, nine months without tangling her fingers on his hair, pulling his head to meet hers – it felt more like an eternity as if they had aged a thousand years apart without a source of joy in their lives. When they broke apart, he cradled her face with his hands, a whisper: “I can’t go on without you.”
“Come, you must be tired.”
They didn’t fall asleep that night. She had dragged him to her bedroom – the one she was supposed to share with Hermione but her friend hadn’t ever shown up. Instead, she had taken off his shirt and laid her head on his chest, counting heartbeats until she wasn’t quite unconscious, but more dazed than she had been in the last hours. Harry hadn’t slept a moment; she felt his left hand tracing patterns on her back until the end of the morning when they both decided to get up, his other hand laid still by his side, gripping his wand as he watched the door.
The next night, Ginny did everything to relax him, and while they were together, he did. But after they were finished, he fell back to his watchful state. Soon, Ginny dropped any delusions of actually falling asleep; and their nights were turned into rounds of sex, interspersed by post-coital haze. Together, they discovered that shagging was the best way to take a break from reality.
After the first night, Harry was more careful, leaving after the crack of dawn, just before the house awoke, to jog around the outskirts of Wimbourne. He always brought fresh groceries back, which put him on the graces of Aunt Muriel. To be honest, they weren’t particularly careful about hiding their relationship, though they didn’t announce it either (if they did, Ginny knew someone would feel compelled to advise they should add talking to it, and that, she didn’t want); still, nobody seemed to notice, too much absorbed on their minds. In the light of day, it was almost funny to find Harry in the house. He didn’t stick around Fairview after breakfast, therefore every encounter was as unexpected as the first time she had seen him in the Burrow’s kitchen.
He was very confused by her behaviour, she reckoned. Harry was like that – easy to read in certain situations, and completely unreadable on everything else. He kept his thoughts too close to his heart for them to be read and yet projected very simple emotions. Hence, she knew he was confused by her actions and still had no idea what went through his head when faced with them. Even then, she knew they should talk. The great challenge was, and still is, the distance between should and would. To talk, she would have to process the thoughts, to let herself be angry, to let herself be sad – and she knew that whatever came out of those feelings, would not be pretty.
Most of the days after the battle, Ginny tried not to think.
For most of it, she was successful.