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That May, being at the Burrow sometimes felt like someone had dialed up the volume in a room he couldn’t escape. Tonight had been one of those— the second time the Weasleys had all sat together for a meal since all together meant eight and not nine.
Afterward, Harry stood by the sink, accepting clean plates to dry. The manual occupation drew focus from the ringing in his ears— uncomplicated repetition, wiping each one without reaching for a wand.
“Ron still after a game of chess?” Ginny asked quietly after several minutes of working to the sounds of the running tap and the murmur of her family.
He smirked. “Think so. He mentioned something about wanting you to play, though.”
She rolled her eyes and scoffed. “For real? He hasn’t forced me into that since you started coming round all the time… what, five years ago?”
“Maybe you can convince him Hermione’s a better opponent, then.”
Ginny passed him a dripping tureen. “Don’t insult me, Potter. I’m not that bad.” But then her brow creased, eyes softening as they met his. “I can just tell him off, though, if you want.”
He shook his head automatically, probing the tea towel into each crevice with more attention than necessary. What he wanted was to lie with her somewhere quiet, the way they’d done that afternoon: while she’d drifted in and out of sleep and he’d found patterns in the freckles on her shoulder. Moments— hours, sometimes, if he was lucky— that he craved but would never request.
“Nah. Kick his arse.”
Much of the family had broken off after pudding; soon only Charlie, Percy, and Arthur were settling in the living room for a nightcap while Ron hunted down chess sets. Harry and Ginny tidied the rest of the kitchen, wrapping up leftovers and tucking them into the icebox. She paused in the larder to slip her hand into his, squeezing lightly with that same little wrinkle between her brows. He remained a minute longer after she’d gone, filtering stale air through his nose, surveying jars of carrots and jams without seeing.
Their chess match was, as Ginny had predicted, woefully one-sided. At one point, Arthur rose from the sofa to investigate the source of viscous expletives issuing from the kitchen table, rolling his eyes when he found his two youngest children embroiled in a battle of wills.
“We used to have to limit them to once per week, especially when Ginny’s magic started coming in,” he chuckled to Harry on his way to fetch more brandy. “Let me know who wins.”
“Dad, stop pretending there’s a chance she’ll win.”
“I said shut up and let me think, you insufferable prick.”
“Language, Ginny.”
The kitchen tablecloth’s paisley pattern flickered in the overhead lantern’s glow. Harry found himself mapping the swirls, finding the longest paths he could make from a single line. He couldn’t recall the last time they’d all sat and bickered around a game like no one had a bottle of dreamless sleep at their bedside. Summer before sixth year, he reckoned.
Hermione caught him on his way back from the loo, touching his arm as he passed.
“You alright?” She probably meant to sound casual, betrayed by the anxiety in her face.
He nodded. Tried to look like he hadn’t just risen from the tile floor where he’d pressed palms to his ears against a high, cold laugh. “Why?”
She shrugged. “You’ve been quiet. And I didn’t want to ask Ginny, but… I thought maybe you two had talked some more, earlier today.”
He glared at her as his pulse quickened. “What? Why?”
Her eyes widened innocently. “It just seemed like you had some time alone… never mind.”
“Well, we had a kip is all. So don’t. Ask Ginny, I mean.”
“Of course not.” Her concern was starting to irritate him.
Ron had taken Ginny’s queen by the time Harry returned, but he had to hand it to her: she was managing to keep her king out of check. He took a spot at the far end of the table and rubbed his eyes until bursts of color spotted his vision. Kept his gaze low, avoiding the shadows lurking between shelves and cabinets— distorted silhouettes cast by hanging pots and kitchen tools, stretching like faces in the low light.
“Pawn– yeah, you there. Up to C8.”
“Shit.”
“Hah.”
The captured chessmen roared mutinously and brawled with one another from where they'd been sidelined. As the cacophony of tiny voices and cracking marble rose, Harry’s hands clenched into fists beneath the table.
“Harry! HARRY!”
“Set him down at my feet, Hagrid, where he belongs.”
He closed his eyes, praying his intake of breath hadn’t been audible. Opened them, a moment later, in time to catch Ginny’s gaze flicking back to the board. He returned his attention to the tablecloth, jaw tight.
Eventually, Charlie and Percy turned in one by one, and Arthur slipped on a pair of loafers to wander out to his work shed. Harry watched on for a bit longer before migrating to where Hermione had taken over Percy’s armchair, bending to Ginny’s ear as he passed.
“He’s not set up to parry if you take that rook,” he suggested under his breath.
She quirked her lip without turning her head, while Ron seethed. “Oi, knock it off. No one said you could cheat.”
“Take it up with him, I didn’t ask for advice,” she said haughtily before instructing her bishop toward the offending piece.
Hermione lowered her book when Harry slumped onto the sofa across from her. He ignored her searching look and took the chance to speak first.
“Can we agree this was a bad idea?” He pointed toward the kitchen with his chin. “Those two are monsters; they’re seconds away from drawing wands.”
She held his gaze a moment longer before resting her head back with a resigned smirk. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. This seems like nothing but healthy competition to me.”
"Merlin's balls, Ginny, you can't do that!"
He was grateful for her reticence when she turned her attention back to Ancient Grecian Muggle Relations, and he propped his head in his hand to observe the kitchen from afar. But the living room’s silence seemed to dangle from an increasingly precarious ledge; he barely noticed when, in the other room, Ron shot a smug grin across the table.
“Checkmate.”
“Fucking fuck.”
“Looks like you’ve lost your edge.”
Ginny swept the crumbled remains of her pieces from the board, shooting him a filthy look. “Rematch. It’s only ten.”
Ron frowned. “No way. At least Harry makes it interesting, and he doesn’t chuck around insults.”
Harry gave a start at the sound of his name. “What was that?”
Ginny rolled her eyes. “Harry doesn’t want to play. It’s me or Hermione.”
“Hermione doesn’t want to play, either,” quipped Hermione without lifting her eyes.
Ron grumbled while Ginny set the repaired pieces back in their slots, and shortly thereafter he yawned and announced he was headed to bed. Hermione scooped up Crookshanks and stood as well, offering a final, lingering look in Harry’s direction before she followed. From the kitchen, the sound of the tap cut off, and then Ginny carried a glass of water toward the stairs. She paused at the bottom.
“Do you want company?” she asked hesitantly.
Harry met her eyes with a response caught somewhere between his brain and mouth, and she crossed the threshold without another word. Somehow, the quiet felt sturdier with her there, cross-legged and facing him on the sofa. She raised a hand to his hair, combing with gentle fingers.
“I know you’ve been somewhere else tonight,” she said from where her cheek rested against the cushion. “And that’s alright. But… I’m here, you know. If you need.”
He cleared his throat with difficulty. “I’m fine. Let’s go to bed.”
She sat up, but he didn’t miss the corners of her mouth tightening. “Okay. Goodnight.” Her face tilted toward his. “Get some sleep, yeah?”
Harry squeezed his eyes shut. “Actually… Sorry, can we talk for a sec?”
“Of course,” she murmured, settling back. Waiting, when he didn’t speak right away.
His heart thudded in his windpipe. “Not down here.”
“Oh. Yeah, sure.” Her voice dropped. “Hermione might be up with Ron, anyway.”
She waited for him on the second landing with one hand on the doorknob. When light from the hall flooded her room to reveal two empty beds, Harry released a small breath of relief. He drew his wand to save her the trouble of finding matches for the candles, feeling her gaze as the door closed behind them with a soft click.
“Everything alright?”
Harry nodded, gripping the frame at the end of Hermione’s bed. “Yeah. I just… I wanted to talk to you about something.” The words felt formal and wrong. He frowned at his hands.
Ginny was quiet. When he looked up, she gave him a stiff nod, brown eyes hard and opaque. He ground his teeth, hating himself for what she must be thinking.
“Look, can we just… sit for a second?”
She waited until he’d sat on her bed before lowering beside him, staring into her lap.
“I haven’t been entirely truthful with you.”
Whatever she’d been expecting, it clearly wasn’t that.
“So… the Horcruxes. The things we were searching for.”
She nodded with a slight frown.
Harry cleared his throat. His tongue felt dry and clumsy. “I told you there were six. We were looking for six… that’s all we thought there were. But Hermione, Ron, and I are the only ones who know there were really seven.”
Her frown deepened.
Harry pulled in another breath before he dove in, reciting the words he’d held back all afternoon, and yesterday by the pond, and nearly every day before then: “The night my parents died, the night that curse rebounded, he made another Horcrux by mistake.” His spine prickled, hearing it in his own voice. “He was gone except for the last bits of his soul, and one of them latched onto… onto the only living thing left in the room.”
He stared down at her faded quilt, hundreds of little daisies flickering in the candlelight. When he glanced up, a look of unease had been carved into her face, still as stone.
“You mean… you.”
He wanted to run. Wrench her door open, Apparate to Grimmauld Place or the Forest of Dean or the bottom of the Thames. Create as much space between them as he could, and never catch another glimpse of her slowly-burgeoning horror.
He nodded instead.
Ginny tensed, her shoulders rigid as she shook her head. Maybe she, too, finally shared that instinct for distance. “But… wait, Neville had to kill that snake…” Her eyes fell to his chest, panic frothing at the edges of her voice. “Harry, what did you do ?”
But he drew a blank. Dropped his head into his hands, leaning forward over his knees.
“Harry.” Nothing more than his name, whispered weakly. The only demand she’d ever made of him.
He pressed on his face. “He meant to kill me. I meant for it, too.” It was like hearing it all from the other end of a long tunnel. He sat up. “It was the only way to destroy it. I don’t know why I lived.”
She was quiet. Harry plucked an orange cat hair from the quilt. His ears rang as he braced himself for it to be too much.
“That’s why you went in there.”
His gaze snapped to her. She looked slightly sick.
“I didn’t understand why you’d give yourself up… we both know he wouldn’t have spared anyone.”
Harry nodded, surveying his knuckles.
She sucked in a shuddering breath, blew it out through clenched teeth. “But I get it now.” Her voice cracked into a whisper.
He was finding it hard to look in her direction, tilting his face toward the ceiling, preparing to mean every one of his next words. “I know it’s a lot to take in. I still don’t understand it, but I just needed you to know. And I get it, if you need some time, or…”
The rustle of fabric had started before he trailed off; now Ginny stood in front of him. Her lashes cast long crescents in the dancing light, fluttering over her cheeks as she blinked rapidly. “Stop. Please.”
Her embrace felt foreign: arms still brittle with shock around his neck, and she rocked slightly— tiny, soothing motions for herself more than him, probably. He found her with unsteady hands, spreading across her back and tangling in her hair, breathing her in as she stilled. She was hoarse when she next spoke.
“Something happened to you in there, though, didn’t it?”
Harry thought of the forest and his spectral company and her blazing look. He slowly nodded into her neck. Her heart raced beneath his ear.
“I love you.”
He pulled back. Surely he’d misheard… but now there was an unmistakable, burning steadiness reflecting back at him. Ginny’s gaze penetrated until she found something that made her fingers flex in his hair, and she lowered her lips to his scar.
“I love you,” she murmured again.
The room felt strangely airless. Her hair was silky between his numbed fingers, and then he was cupping her jaw, drawing her in. His lips slid over hers, slow and gentle before he pressed his response into her mouth, a rumbling, unfamiliar sound: “I love you.”
It felt like a cold plunge into icy water— a feet-first, straight-backed leap into a dark pool with a glimmer of promise below. The words stole the air from his lungs with a shiver, and Ginny smiled as she kissed him in earnest, fists forming in his hair, finding purchase with her knees until he was surrounded by her, drowning in her. Hands found her thighs as he leaned back against the headboard, kissing her like he’d been underwater and was coming up for air… a deep, yearning ache swelling in his chest.
He tested the words again against her jaw, weighing them in his mouth, sliding his grip to her hips. Again, along the side of her neck. Ginny made a soft sound in the back of her throat before her hands lowered between them, skimming beneath his top. Harry froze.
“Will you show me?”
The next plunge he braced for didn’t feel quite as bold, armored as he was with the taste of those words on his tongue. In one motion, he pulled the hem of his t-shirt up and over his head, righting his glasses after they caught and avoiding her gaze. He was suddenly acutely conscious of the things that hadn’t occurred to him to be nervous about: the pathetic pallor of his skin, the hollow beneath his ribs, the sharp jut of his hips. He fought the urge to hunch forward, to shrink the surface where her gaze could probe.
She seemed suspended, for a moment, before a trembling hand reached forward to touch the white, puckered oval above his heart. Fingertips traced over and beyond, across yellowing bruises before arriving at the crimson sunburst, gnarled lines like a web of lightning that branched from a single point, stretching from below his left shoulder to his sternum.
“Does it hurt?”
“No.”
Her touch was featherlight, descending to the angry red burns along his side. His stomach jumped.
“Gringotts,” he murmured with a frown. “Everything we touched burst into a bunch of hot copies. I think they’re mostly healed, but I keep forgetting to use the burn cream we got.”
“You haven’t just stopped using it because you think the scars are sexy?” she asked with a smirk. Even she seemed surprised by her own boldness, with a pink flush blooming over her freckled neck and cheeks.
He spluttered in shaky disbelief. “Forgot you always had a thing for Mad-Eye.”
He was grateful for her chuckle that fissured through air heavy with static, and then it felt easier to meet her eyes. The softness he found there seemed to yield beneath his gaze, exposing something deeper, reflecting something back.
“What happened?” she whispered as she reached for the oval again.
“The locket.” The words seemed to flow without thought, now. “Christmas, I think. We were in Godric’s Hollow, and he’d left a trap for us that almost worked. Something made it stick, though… Hermione had to cut it off me after we escaped.”
“Godric’s Hollow,” Ginny breathed.
He nodded.
Her palm covered the scar, fingers spreading across his collarbone as she stared. Harry squirmed beneath her gaze, and she seemed to snap out of her thoughts, studying the quilt for several long moments.
“I cut my hair over Christmas,” she finally said slowly, without looking up. “It’s grown back a lot since, but… sometimes they’d grab me by it, yank me up. I thought it might hurt less if it was shorter.”
Harry’s jaw clenched around a familiar thrum of panic, like hearing her fear while she slept, searching through the dark for her hand. The fury tasted like metal.
She was chewing her lip, now. Her eyes flicked to him— steady, but too close to hide the hitch in her breath. And then she was lifting the hem of her top, too, sliding it up her sides, and Harry couldn’t breathe, slamming his eyes closed, steeling himself. Praying.
He knew the cell numbers. He could get past the Dementors.
But when he looked, the skin he could see was just as he remembered: smatterings of freckles, a tiny scar above her navel from Ron’s wooden sword when she was six, the valley of her clavicle above a pale yellow bra. The breath of relief parted his lips.
Then Ginny turned until her back faced him— more skin, mercifully unscathed— and she took his hand in hers, guiding two of his fingers to the back of her right shoulder.
“Just… there,” she murmured.
And he felt it, the odd ridge protruding from her shoulder blade. He could see the subtle difference between right and left, if he looked carefully.
“What…?”
“It doesn’t hurt the same way it used to.” She was choosing her words slowly, holding it all close to her chest, guarding it. Or, guarding him. “Usually only at night now. Pomfrey doesn’t know how to fix it, though. I wasn’t allowed to see her when it happened, and… it might have just healed wrong, or something.”
Harry slid his thumb over it. “What happened?”
“Detention.”
“They— you broke bones, in detention?”
“Just once.”
He swallowed. “When?”
“November,” she whispered.
The next question filled his mouth like bitter smoke. He felt the rise and fall of her breath pause beneath his hand.
But he swept her hair aside, bending to let his lips find the base of her neck, smothering his curiosity and every imagined scenario that turned his stomach.
“I’m so sorry,” he breathed against her.
Ginny tipped her chin back with a long, slow breath. “Me too,” she said, fingertips ghosting over his thigh.
Harry’s pulse thundered in his ears as he found her waist, thumbs slow against her skin, nose tracing a path to her jaw. Her hand tightened.
She faced him again, and this time when she kissed him it was achingly, painfully slow. She pulled back slightly as her palm came to rest over the locket’s imprint. And then, still slowly, offering him the option of stopping her, her lips replaced her hand.
Harry swallowed. His chest contracted with the release of a ragged breath as she moved to the curse’s mark, hands splaying over his ribs. Lower, still, along his side to the edge of the longest burn. Something about watching her touch him— feeling her mouth against the skin he hid even from the mirror— had his voice catching high in his throat.
“Gin.”
She paused. “Is this okay?”
“Yeah. Just…” He let out another breath, hands curling into her hips, wincing at the ceiling.
“Hey. It’s alright.”
She moved to lie next to him instead, long against his side, hair fanning across his chest and falling between her bra. The candlelight contoured each curve, every gentle valley he followed with his gaze.
“Fuck. I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
“Stop it.”
“...okay.”
His thumb grazed the bottom of the yellow fabric. Ginny reached up to touch his jaw.
“I can’t believe I didn’t notice,” she said suddenly, as if nothing had happened. “You got that swanky razor to work, then?”
He shrugged. “Think so. I probably missed a few spots, but I think I figured it out.”
“Hm. Shame.”
A laugh bubbled from his chest, spreading warmth to the back of his neck. “You liked it before?”
She rolled onto her stomach with a lazy grin. “A bit. It grows in better than it used to.” Her chin rested on his shoulder. “Doesn’t really matter, though.”
“Huh… so you find scars and stubble sexy, anything else I should keep in mind?” His hand contracted and spread, low on her back.
Her chuckle waned into a sobered, dour look. “Just the beard, Potter.”
He didn’t respond as he watched her watch him, absently tracing his arm, eyes skimming over his chest. Wondered whether she was registering it all over again, the way he had during those first frayed mornings before the real nightmares had set in. Whether she, too, was comparing the mark from a Killing Curse to a hole through a diary.
The thin, jagged line along her shoulder was a sliver of shadow in the room’s warm glow.
He told her he loved her, again, on his way up to the attic. The long silence had been broken by footsteps on the back porch and the clatter of the kitchen door (“Hey, relax, it’s just Dad”), and he’d pulled on his top before ruefully handing over hers. For a moment he’d genuinely considered her offer to stay, longing tugging low in his gut (“That’d be real shit timing, if he found me leaving his daughter’s room at midnight”), and the words hovered between them as her parting kiss lingered.
Upstairs, Harry winced as he tapped on Ron’s door. Hermione opened up a minute later, eyes bright, searching him beneath moonbeams from the slanted skylight.
“Sorry to make you swap,” he muttered with a smirk.
She shook her head, folding her arms over her dressing gown and stepping onto the landing. “We shouldn’t make it a habit, anyway.”
She was halfway down the top flight when he whispered down: “You were right, by the way.”
She glanced up. There was that knowing concern that had nettled him, once.
“She’s still got loads of questions, though.”
Hermione snorted softly. She ran a hand absently down her plait. “So do I.”
The overbright moon had bleached the orange bedroom walls gray and blue. Harry pulled back the covers of the camp bed as shadows of clouds slipped silently over the ceiling.
“You okay, mate?”
Ron’s voice cut through a too-still quiet that he hadn’t noticed. Harry felt a grin pull at his lips.
“Yeah.”
“Ginny okay?”
“Yeah.”
He heard the rustle of legs between sheets as Ron turned over. Harry lay on his back, tracing knots in the ceiling planks with the sour odor of troll faintly lingering around his nostrils. For the first time that day, he felt alone in a silence that unfurled in every direction, deepening with each passing moment, yawning wide with the capacity to draw him in. The half-full vial of dreamless sleep on the table glinted blackly beneath a beam of silver light.
Unwillingly, he thought of the ridge on her shoulder, foreign beneath her skin, a reminder of something bigger and darker that made his stomach roll again. He wondered whether she was in pain now, hiding it from Hermione the way she’d hid it from him. A deep breath filled his nose, shuddering on the way out as he realized that it hurt, loving her.
And that he’d be fooling himself to think it hurt any less, loving him.