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Ginny and Harry realize it isn’t working around three years after Hogwarts, when they realize that they haven’t done anything couple-y for almost a year.
It’s not that they’re not in love, it’s just… they’re not in love. Ginny and Harry are friends – closer than they were before, but they’re just not in love. Ron and Hermione half-heartedly protest that they just need time, but Ginny knows that they’ve noticed it, too. The Prophet goes ballistic; everyone who matters promptly ignores it. Mrs. Weasley is sad, but she doesn’t fight it.
Ginny wants to travel around the world, and Harry does, too. But Harry wants to stay away from people – he wants to see the Sahara, see glaciers up in the far north, climb mountains. Ginny wants to go to New York, and San Francisco, and Paris, and Barcelona. So they go their separate ways, keeping in touch constantly with two-way mirrors, but still apart from each other.
They do meet up sometimes – a delightful month in San Francisco, a backpacking trip across the Sierra Nevadas, a week on safari in Tanzania, and one more week in Arusha right after, a blurred weekend in Las Vegas and a desperate few days afterwards trying to get as far away from Vegas as possible.
Before Ginny realizes it, it’s been two years and she hasn’t looked back once.
Traveling is wonderful – seeing other cultures, meeting new people, being in other places. She has friends around the world now, both magical and Muggle, keeping in touch through mirrors or letters or email, which she finally figured out after three separate explanations from a “mundanacido” witch in Costa Rica.
She doesn’t travel under her own name, usually, and Harry doesn’t travel under his. They mix and match, changing out first and last names like they’re going out of style, mangling each others’ last names or their friends’ last names or just random names they like. Last she heard, he was Hadrian Evans, the time before that Harold Weatherby, the time before that James Black. (After that time, he’d decided that it was too hard to respond to a name that wasn’t actually yours, and Harry was common enough anyways.)
(Ginny keeps daring him to try out “Roonil Wazlib” again. At least it would be more creative than “James Black”.)
Harry travels under fake names because his is known far too commonly for him to stay unnoticed; Ginny’s name isn’t as well-known, but she’d still be recognized. That’s only part of the reason she uses fake names.
She likes being different people, trying out different personalities and different lifestyles. She likes being unable to recognize herself for a bit. Harry uses fake names; she uses different names and personalities, but she likes to think that they’re all her. Sometimes she likes being Ginny Weasley, sure. But sometimes she likes being Ginny Granger, or Jean Descommunes, or Ginevra Finnegan, or Virginia Potts.
That last one sticks a bit longer, actually.
Ginny does need money to travel, so every few months she gets a job, either in the muggle world or wizarding world, and sticks with it for a little while. Costs of living can get pretty low for any competent witch, which Ginny definitely is, so she uses all the money she’s earned to travel, making everything much simpler.
The only complications she runs into are when she gets promoted.
Ginny had always been good at Arithmancy, okay, and Hermione had even gotten her to take some muggle math classes back before she’d started traveling. It was a ridiculous error, too – it would have thrown off so much data, she’d just had to correct it.
And then Mr. Stark had promoted her to be his Personal Assistant.
“I don’t have any PA training,” she’d argued.
“No problem,” he replied. “Only prerequisite is competent cat-herding, which you’ve shown. Is that an accent?”
“I’m technically a foreigner,” she tried. “I’m from England!”
“You have a work visa, right? We’ll get that upgraded. You want a full citizenship, or just permanent resident?”
She gaped for a moment. “You can’t just… do that, can you?”
“C’mon, Pepper, this is me. I totally can. You don’t sound English, by the way.”
“I’ve traveled a lot,” she said faintly. “And we can’t be arguing about this now, you have a meeting in five minutes.”
Ginny (Pepper?) gets him to his meeting only twenty minutes late – record time for Tony Stark.
“Do you like it?” Harry asks that Saturday, when she calls him on the mirrors. “Working for him? Because if you didn’t like it, and you told him, he’d probably let you quit. Or if you really don’t like it, you could call in the American Department of Wizardry, request an obliviation.”
Ginny thinks for a moment. She hadn’t really thought about whether she’d liked it, before. “… I’ll give it a try,” she decides. “If I hate it in six months, I’ll quit. I’ve never stayed in a place that long without going stir-crazy since we started.”
Harry flashes her a grin. “Good luck,” he says, and then starts telling her about New Zealand.
Pepper stays.
After six months, not only is she not stir-crazy, she’s more content than she’s been in a long time. Part of what made travel interesting was the new experiences, but part of it was also the challenge, finding an entirely new culture and trying to adapt, to fit in, to keep things together.
Tony provides all that challenge and more.
He is, at once, infuriating and lovable. He makes messes for her to fix, and is ridiculously unapologetic, but she loves fixing messes and she can tell that he tries not to make them too messy. They banter, almost the way she does with Harry but with more snark, not fighting but not quite agreeing, either.
It lasts much longer than she thinks it will, by a longshot.
And it’s not as if she forgets she’s a witch. It would take a lot more than getting a good job to make somebody forget the first twenty-five years of their life. She does sort of… stop using magic, though.
It’s not a big thing. Pepper still lives in an apartment where the pictures move and the sink washes the dishes. She carries her wand with her always, in a purse or a holster around her wrist or, if she has to, a pocket. But she definitely uses magic less.
She gets up to grab things from far away, instead of summoning them. She orders out for food instead of getting her kitchen to make it. One or two times, she forgets that there are spells to dry-clean dirty clothes until after they get back from the dry-cleaner’s.
But… it’s not as if that’s a bad thing. Pepper has traveled for long enough to learn how to live in the muggle world in any number of cultures, and then traveled enough to know that it’s just a different way of doing things, not a less-advanced way. It’s surprisingly relaxing at times.
And so she stays calm, collected Pepper Potts, who wields her power more subtly and lives with her adrenaline coming from corporate deals and cleaning up disasters rather than quidditch and foreign countries.
That’s not to say that there aren’t foreign countries, though – she still gets some traveling done, whenever Tony has a meeting with suppliers or buyers from outside America. It’s definitely very different, meeting with rich socialites and business leaders instead of wandering the streets, but it’s still travel, still meeting new people and finding the status quo, and if it ever gets to be too much, she gets enough vacation days that she can head off to just wander somewhere for a week or two.
There are only a few times she doesn’t accompany him on his business trips.
Afghanistan is one of those times.
Two harrying months follow, with no way to find him, magical or muggle. The best wixen in the world can’t follow someone without a tracking charm already on them. (Pepper vows to put a permanent tracking charm on Tony the next time she lays eyes on him.) Harry shows up three days in and stays with her for the duration, making sure she eats and sleeps and doesn’t curse anyone. Stane and his readiness to declare Tony dead practically beg for a bat-bogey hex, but Harry reminds her about the Statute of Secrecy and besides, wouldn’t it be better to see the look on his face when Tony comes back fine?
Tony does come back fine, with an arc reactor in his chest, a new perspective on life, and flying armor. The last point does quite a bit to counter out the second, in regards to how many messes Pepper is left to clean up.
(The only part of that whole time period she really hates herself is when Stane is in his stolen suit and she shoots him. However cathartic the gun might have been, her wand would have worked so much better.)
(In her defense, though, she’d been really angry.)
After that is the whole fiasco with the palladium poisoning, which she could have just fixed with magic if he’d even so much as bothered to tell her. Tony did end up creating a new element, though, so at least all the consequences hadn’t been negative. The relationship was nice, too. And then there was the whole CEO thing, which was just ridiculous. But she definitely wasn’t complaining. Much.
“Have you told him you’re a witch?” Harry asks one evening. “You’re in a relationship now, he’s allowed to know.”
“I think that’s only married couples, Harry.”
“Really? I never knew that. Probably, though… I should actually go read those rules sometime.”
Pepper sighs.
“That doesn’t really change my question, though,” Harry mentions. “Have you told him?”
“Not yet,” she admits. “I keep lecturing him about hiding things from me, it would feel too hypocritical.”
“And not telling him helps that how?”
She hangs up.
A few months after that, there are aliens in New York.
It seems like things should get complicated after that, but they don’t, surprisingly. Tony renovates the Tower for the Avengers, but they don’t move in quite yet; things generally stay status quo, except for Tony’s nightmares and compulsive suit-building and general anxiety. So, things don’t change much.
Until Tony gives the press his address and Maya Hansen shows up, and suddenly everything is complicated.
Killian doesn’t know she’s a witch, but the extremis is inhibiting her magic. She can’t disapparate, she can’t call for help, she can’t do anything except play hostage.
Pepper hates extremis. (There’s also the constant chance that she’ll spontaneously explode. She’s not a huge fan of that, either.)
But Tony does come through, as he always does when actual lives are on the line. He makes good on his promise, gets extremis out of her–
And she can feel the magic pulsing through her body, much stronger than it was before. She breaks three lamps and a television before she gets it back under control.
“So,” Tony says, far too casually, as soon as all of the broken glass is out of the way. “Is sudden, violent telekinesis a new thing for you?”
“Not exactly,” she says, and sits him down and violates the Statute of Secrecy.