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She brings it up as briskly as she can manage. "Harry," She asks one day because if not today - if not right now - then her courage will fail her. Just as it has so many times before. Complacency is comfortable. She doesn't want to do this, not really. But, of course, she also wants to. Desperately wants to. It has finally outweighed the unwantedness. After all this time of her believing that she never would, here she is. She can do this. Refuses to fail in doing this - not again, not this time. Today she is seeing it through. "Why did you fall in love with me?"
There is no way Harry could have been prepared for this question: she herself has been trying to prepare for years and still even now has come short. He falters at the doorway of their bedroom. "What?" He frowns. Worried, his eyes fix on her with suspicion of oncoming sadness but, for now, appears to then accept that this must be something that he can fix for her. He just needs to figure out what needs to be fixed and how he can. And then he will, of course. "Because I love you."
"You love Ron," She points out. It's an unexpected comment to him, it has to be. Harry's brow creases as he stares at her, confused and trying to decipher some secret hidden meanings behind the words when she hasn't made any ciphers. She means exactly what she has said.
"Yes," He agrees slowly, unable to decode something which has not been created in code, "I do."
She's formed a semblance of a plan now. Is gaining momentum with more of the grace she's used to controlling. Build it up, dive the broom; she can do this. "You love Hermione."
"Ginny," He says, incredulous and also unsure, "Are you jealous? Of Ron and Hermione?" He takes a step forward. "Ginny, I swear I'll never cheat on you but especially not - "
She interrupts. "George. Mum. Dad. Bill, Charlie, Fleur. Neville. Luna." Her list stops him in his tracks. "Why did you marry me?"
He shakes his head slowly. "I don't understand. What - what is this? What are you asking? Why are you asking me this"
There is a truth she's always shied away from. She does not want it to be true. Or, worse, she only wants to not want it to be true. It's hard to tell. She's thrown herself into her idealizations with such gusto; it's hard to separate what she wants from what she thinks she ought to wants and thus convinces herself to want until she can fool herself into believing it's true that she wants it. How had this began? When? She's not sure, exactly.
Somewhere from having a harmless admiration of the hero of the wizarding world that her brother had brought into her life and then having been saved by him from something so terrible and so invasive that even to this day she refuses to think too deeply upon it. Somewhere after that when she had begun to love Harry but knew - who had told her? then again, who hadn't really - that the only way to keep him had been with romance. She had not been either of his best friends. She had not been in his year or been his roommates. She had to create some claim to him that made sense, had to find a way that could be an acceptable reason why - and a justification for the intensity of her feelings. Because everyone knew that maybe best friends were allowed to love each other - but Ginny wasn't even that, was only one of his friends - so what other explanation had there been to love him so deeply other than the obvious? The one that was so simple, so easy.
No one had ever questioned it.
For a long time, Ginny had been too scared to question it.
"I don't think I was in love with you."
Harry freezes. "What?" His devastation is clear and Ginny steels herself, forces herself to continue even though it hurts to have put that look on his face.
"I love you. I really, really love you, Harry." And it's true. It's so true. It's even one of the reasons they're having this conversation, after all. Because maybe none of this would never have happened if she had only liked him and hadn't loved him so deeply. But that hadn't ever been an option - not for her, not for any of the Weasleys. "But I think... I think I needed to believe I was in love with you," She explains, "When I don't think I was. When I wasn't."
Harry seems to have ears for only one part. "You love me?" Maybe he needs to focus on that instead of the rest of what she's saying.
Her smile is sad. But it's an easy question to answer. "Of course I love you."
Harry is always smarter than people give him credit for. "And you love Ron," He says calmly. "And Hermione. George. Your parents. Charlie and Bill and Fleur. Neville and Luna. You love all of them. And - and you love me."
"Yeah," She breathes softly. Clears her throat. Says at a much more even volume, "That's exactly right."
He absorbs this silently. Leans his head back and stares at their ceiling, then turns his gaze down to where his bare feet create plush divets in the carpet.
"Ginny, if I ever made you feel like you had to say yes - "
"No," She interrupts. "It wasn't you. It was..." She can't quite exactly put it into words. The pressure to keep Harry in her life. The pressure to be happy. And the desperate need to believe that she was in love. That not only did she have someone who loved her but that she had someone - and this was a happiness that the war couldn't stop, that no one could take. And that, maybe, definitely, she wanted to have more than she actually had it. She wanted to be in love, she wanted to be loved, she wanted to want it so badly. Until somehow she couldn't separate herself from this idealized image she had of what she should be, of what she should want, and how things should be in order to make her happy - or what she thought would be happiness.
And it's not that she hasn't been happy. It's that she's been happy despite of all this rather than because of it.
"Harry," She asks again, "Why did you marry me?"
This time, he understands the reasoning behind the question. He stops to examine himself and their life and everything that's all too easy to pretend, perhaps doing so for the first time or perhaps doing so for the countless time just as Ginny has all these years. He thinks it over now and comes up with an answer that comes out honest and surprised and weary. Like it was never meant to be said but, now, needs to be. "I guess I just... really wanted to have a family."
The confession makes Harry self-consciously scratch at the elbow of his sweater. Mum has been teaching Fleur and Bill to knit, and Harry eagerly and gladly has been accepting all of their somewhat misshaped attempts as they learn; he wears one now and his fingers pick between the edges of a dropped row and where Bill had tried to later fix it with a different color yarn when he had realized what had happened far too late. Harry doesn't have to wear cast-offs or misshapen, missized clothing; he knows that, they're not the Dursley's. It's just that Harry enjoys these sweaters. Even as Bill and Fleur promise to give him more when they get better and the sweaters get less ugly, Harry won't hear of waiting. Won't hear of not accepting these sweaters with a delighted and grateful grin.
Knitting, in Harry's eyes, is a holy symbol of love. It makes sense then that to receive something knitted by someone is to receive their love. He already has their love. But for Harry, knowing that and holding the tangible proof of it - well, Ginny understands her husband very well in this. Harry wants proof. It's the reason why that she wishes they didn't share: Harry, she knows oh too well, fears that he doesn't deserve their love. That he doesn't have it actually and that he's been wrong all these years. Somehow misunderstood. Is waiting for the shoe to drop, the cauldron to bubble over.
Is waiting to be proved right.
Harry, she could tell him, we already were your family. But she too knows the feeling. Just in a different vein. She never believes it either, is also always waiting to be proven right about the worst of herself. "And I just really wanted to be worthy of someone's love."
Green eyes meet hers. "You are," Harry passionately tells her. "Ginny, of course you are." He looks to her, so staunchly assured of this and willing to defend the matter. "You didn't need me for that at all."
That's the point, though, isn't it? She smiles at him with more kindness than she gives her own reflection - just as Harry is doing now for her. "And you didn't need me to be part of our family."
Without ever once flinching, Harry has faced innumerable threats and more than that in unpleasantness. But it is here that he recoils. His passionate defense of her interrupted by something he hadn't braced for.
"You already were," She promises softly. Calmly. Remains composed while Harry's face shatters as a glass mirror taken a great blow. He fractures before her. She knows the feeling - she breaks any time Harry when looks at her and deems her good and lovable. Which is, she knows, it has been so difficult to do the same for Harry even as she's intended to for so long. Always holds herself back. She knows how much it hurts. And hurts worse for it every time she gazes into that mirror and sees her warped reflection shining back in fragments that mistakenly portray her as whole.
They've spent so long pretending. All this time because they were afraid to be alone, to be unlovable. All this time that she's spent - not unhappy but as a coward. Running from something she's been too afraid of hearing for the fear of discovering that those stupid insecurity buried deep down are true even as time and excavations have proven otherwise.
And she could carry on this way, living with the fear above her head like an axe always about to fall, except that it isn't just her living life this way: it's Harry too. Harry, who is so good and deserves good things; Harry, who she knows thinks the very same of her even as she often fails to.
They've spent so long pretending. Somehow she never imagined being the one to shatter things.
She draws the final blow. It's been left unspoken for too long. "You are. And you always would have been. We found you, Harry, as much as you found us. Ron just was the first one to realize that we needed to keep you."
Ginny leans into the warm palm cupping her cheek. Closes her eyes as Harry tenderly brushes her tears away. She shakes her head and it nuzzles her cheek further into being cradled. Opens her eyes and says, "I think maybe you're the last one, Harry, to realize that we need you to keep us too."
"Ginny," Harry says softly. And casts his eyes down as he tries to come up with something to say. His brow furrows and then he crumples, lifting his gaze back to her in anguish. "Ginny, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
Too quick as always to accept faults as his responsibility alone. But she simply agrees, "Me too, Harry. I'm sorry."
He shakes his head. And, endeared, she lifts her hand to cradle his hand, the one that's still oh so gently holding her cheek. Deeply, he sighs. Content and melancholy all in one. "I didn't mean to," He tells her. Like she didn't already know that.
"None of us did." She smiles as he leans forward and presses a kiss - perhaps the very last of its kind - upon the back of her hand as it holds his hand holding her cheek. A kiss to her and a kiss to them both all in one final gesture.
They let each go of other slowly but simultaneously.
Harry sighs again. This time more sad than anything. He casts his gaze around their bedroom and shakes his head with a rueful smile. "I'm going to miss this place." He runs a finger gently across the carved wood of their dresser.
She hadn't thought about - well after. Living arrangements or any of that sort. All these times she's thought about actually voicing these things - and yet while fearing the consequences, this had not been one of them. An oversight lost beneath the heavier worries: of losing Harry, of saying the wrong things, of breaking Harry's heart if she was wrong and he actually had been in love with her.
Still it's almost incomprehensible to her to answer anything other than, "Why don't we stay here?"
Harry turns with wide eyes. "What?"
She bites her lip, clarifies, "Of course you don't have to. I just thought... Well if you wanted to stay - to stay here with me - then I'd like that. Even after we get a, um, divorce." The word is absurdly difficult to say. Harry similarly looks to dislike the word even as they are both in agreement to proceed down that path. "And if you, well, if you'd like that too, Harry, then really I don't see any reason why we couldn't. Stay here. Together. Just - different. Instead of married."
His surprise falls into soft wonder. But still he remains silent, as if not allowed to agree.
"We are friends after all," She reminds him. "And friends live together all the time."
Harry's smile is small and, albeit slightly uncertain, lights up his face. He'd needed the reminder. She'll be glad to remind him often an sincerely. They are friends, and she loves him.
"It's a little weird, isn't it?" He asks but doesn't truly mean the question. Means something else. His answer shines brightly in his eyes.
"A little," She allows. Pauses. Shares a secretive smile with her soon-to-be-ex-husband. "But between everything that happens to the two of us, things always are bound to be."
He grins. She loves that grin, she loves him. And she loves now being able to love him without stubborn pretenses of romance. She suspects that he feels the same way about all of this. To be able to love without the romance - well it settles them into a different category where they can just be. Instead of trying so hard to be what they think they ought to be, of what they think they ought to want to be.
"I want new curtains," Ginny decides. The ones hanging now had been a wedding present from Charlie but Ginny has secretly always thought them to be unbearably gaudy.
Harry looks to her with almost as much surprise as he had when she had told him she wasn't in love with him. "But they're from Charlie."
"I love Charlie, I love you, but I really have never liked these curtains."
Harry tilts his head and examines first her, then the curtains. "Huh." Sheepishly he grins as he runs a hand through his hair. "I, uh, actually have never liked them either. I thought... I thought you liked them. And that's why I wanted to hang them in the bedroom. So you could see them often."
Ginny presses her face into her palms and groans. "Harry, you don't mean to say that neither of us like the curtains?" His laugh only causes her to groan again. "Harry."
"Well is there anything else?" He asks. "Anything else we both secretly agree on? Might as well say it now, I s'pose." She lifts her head. His grin is amused, a touch embarrassed.
"The living room rug," She answers promptly. It's terrible after all. A wedding gift from Luna.
Harry laughs. "Hey! No, I really do like that one!"
Somehow that's almost the worst part of their whole entire conversation. She gasps, "No! Really?!" She places an appalled hand upon her hip and throws the other one towards the bedroom door, as if that would help Harry visualize the monstrosity. "But it's so terrible!"
"It's not that bad!" Harry exclaims. Then throws his arms out. "It's got character!"
"It scrapes up my feet every time I step on it!"
Harry's mouth works silently for a moment before he manages a weak defense of, "It's for decoration only. You're not supposed to step on it."
"Harry, it's a rug. You're supposed to step on a rug. It's just made out of crystals when rugs are not supposed to be made out of crystal."
He purses his mouth. He hesitates. "It can... be used as a tapestry?" He suggests, sounding like it's a question.
That's not a bad idea actually. "Deal," She accepts.
"Are you sure you want to get divorced?" Harry cheerfully asks. "I think we've rather gotten the hang of this marriage thing."
"Oh shut up," She laughs at the joke. Content, Harry basks in her laughter. Smile small but sure. She loves him. It's enough. Somehow - it's enough.
She never thought that she could be enough. Not like this, especially. Not on her own without someone to complete her. To redeem her mistakes and inadequateness.
But she's alright. She's still loved. She's not alone. Deluding herself into trying to be in love had never cleansed her of her insecurities. It had only worsened them. Had only added to the pressure upon her. Revealing that she isn't in love - it hasn't fixed those insecurities. But still she feels so much lighter. Buoyant in the shedding of the pretense. If the mirror has to be cracked, at least she can stop punching it while her knuckles split again and again. No, now at least she can stop and process things as they are instead of hurting herself - her heart - in the process.
"Can we really do this?" Harry asks quietly, the mirth gone from him.
"Yes."
He looks to her the same way she does to him. For salvation that neither can grant. "How do you know?"
"I'm scared," She says, and his face falls. Almost as if bracing for her to change her mind. "But I'm more scared of what it'll be like to keep living like this."
Harry's eyes are sad. "But we're happy. Aren't we?" Sadder than his eyes is that he truly is unsure of the answer.
"We are happy. But we'd be happier if we didn't have to work so hard at pretending to be a specific type of happy. Which we're not. We're not that kind of happy, no not that. But we just... thought it the best form of happiness. The highest rank of it. Romance is supposed to be - "
"Everything," Harry agrees with a nod. "Right. No I understand. I just... wanted to make sure." To make sure, she thinks, that she is certain of this decision. If Ginny decided to change her mind, Harry would just accept going back to pretending even as now he knows how much of a falsehood it is. He would - has - for her.
Just as she would - has - for him.
But it's about time that their happiness isn't centered on what they should or shouldn't do. On sacrifices and sacrificing oneself - that should have been left behind in the war.
"I love you, Ginny," Harry says firmly with the weight of the first time saying so without having to implicate romantic feelings. "And we'll do this together."
It sounds like a wedding vow - except even better. Except it isn't a wedding vow at all and is all the more wonderful for that fact.
"Together," She agrees. It's a comforting notion. Together, in love, but not in love.