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And he’ll have to face up to it, what he made her into: refuge, solace, happy place. Her ignorance made, selfishly, into bliss. She was content to be that for a while, a sheltered orchard away from it all – or else, little orchards, rebuilt in quiet leafy corners of Hogwarts grounds. For a while, not indefinitely. Not forever.
Not if this is real, she’ll whisper one night, when he steals away into her bed, as he will do so often, that summer after the war. Not if it’s going to last.
–whinlatter, “Orchards.”
The sunlit days this time didn't happen near the castle. The hours unspooled around them all summer at the Burrow, mucking out the chicken coop and dipping feet into the pond. When they talked, it felt just like that—something cloudy underneath, dart of minnows past his toes, not knowing beforehand if the water was too cold. Finally, one torpid afternoon, with his back against an apple tree, Harry offered the apology he knew that she deserved.
“I hid so many things from you, when we were together that spring. It wasn’t fair. ”
Ginny seemed to shake her head hard enough to clear the thought away. “I didn’t want to face it either, Harry.”
As she spoke again, he saw her eyes trained on the dirt. “When Bill came of age, he didn’t want a new watch.” Bill had always been her favorite brother: Harry’s heart clenched.
“He took my dead uncle’s.” Her right thumb passed over the pads of her fingers: he imagined the watch there, in Bill’s hand. In hers.
“I was six. But I knew. Don’t you see it? I needed those weeks just as much as you did. I needed…I needed just the good things. Couldn’t talk about the rest.”
The memory hit him, a white tent seen out her window. Ginny’s lips crashing into his, her body pushing him urgently against the bedroom wall. The shine in her eyes of the tears she didn’t show him, tears she must have dropped afterwards, when Ron opened the door. “My seventeenth.”
She flicked her gaze back to him, shoulders thrust forward. “What of it?”
“When we kissed. When you kissed me. You were saying goodbye.”
“Yeah. Maybe I was.” Ginny was flushing; if they’d been back in that room, she might turn away again. If they’d still been in the room, he would look towards the window.
Hours and days and maybe years in which to talk.
Harry took a deep breath and leaned his body close to hers.
“It wasn’t, though. Goodbye,” he answered, in a soft voice.
Like opening his eyes in the mist at Kings Cross Station, like the crushing hugs of his friends after Voldemort fell, like his hand helping Ginny to stand up within the Chamber. Impossible to believe, but so lucky, to be true. How many times would she need to be reminded? How many times would he ?
Whatever the number, each time, it was a gift.