Work Text:
“The pink just won’t work, not with your complexion.” Fleur was clicking her tongue. Ginny wore a dangerous look that he hadn’t seen in weeks: Harry watched her snatch the notebook and spin out of the room.
If he knocked, she wouldn’t answer. She wouldn’t know it was him. He pushed the door open just a little, an offering. He’d counted to nine when she opened the rest.
Harry gestured to the notebook, still held close to her chest.
“Can I see?”
Ginny frowned. “I thought we agreed that you’d let us take care of it.”
“I thought you agreed to let Fleur take care of most of it.”
She shook her head. “Not my corsage. Not your boutonniere.”
“What even is that? Why does it matter?”
Her eyes flashed again: Harry took one step back. “I just mean…you seemed angry, there. Is it worth that?”
“The groom’s parents ought to walk with him, Harry. If my dad, then your mum. That’s the part that matters.” Ginny sat on her bed and patted the space beside her. Harry sat down.
She flipped the cream-colored pages and laid the book open. At the top of one page, the lapel of his jacket. Below, a closer drawing of the flowers to be pinned.
One simple white lily on a bed of pink carnations.
“Your mother was born in January,” she said quietly. “January…it’s carnations. But that’s not all they mean.”
A swelling in his throat as he leaned closer to her. “What else?”
“All of them mean memory. But the pink ones mean…her. The way that a mother loves her child. To death, and beyond it. I want you to wear this, when you walk down the aisle.”
Her expression shifted to almost a smirk. “And Auntie sodding Muriel will leave us alone about it, if what’s on your suit matches what’s on my arm.”
Her chest was puffed out beneath the Harpies t-shirt, brown eyes blazing. It had taken quite a while for the love he knew she felt for him to take the form of tenderness, to release that edge of anger. The way she had snatched away the notebook in the living room, the glare she’d shot at Fleur. The rows she’d had on his behalf, her small fist shaking at Malfoy as she’d barked, “leave him alone!” His mother’s love, too, had been that fierce, by necessity. The softer things still felt a bit like someone else’s life.
More comfortable, out loud at least, to meet her where she was. “Auntie sodding Muriel would never stand a chance.” He paused, passing one finger lightly over the open page, reaching then for the upward corner with a question in his eyes. She nodded and carefully, he turned to the page right before.
A corsage, she had called it. Had Luna drawn all of them? The same flowers gathered, wrapped around a freckled wrist.
Tears pricked in his eyes and he blinked them away, before setting down the notebook like it was a sleeping child. He reached for her arm and stroked it, then bent his lips to press them where the flowers would be placed.
I get it, Auntie Muriel. I never stood one, either.