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“Tell me about the Boy Who Lived!” Ginny used to beg.
She and Ron both would, hanging off their mother or father’s arm, sometimes Bill’s or Charlie’s. Desperate for a few more minutes before their lamp was blown out and fascinated by the story of a monster who fell to a baby.
“He’s my age, isn’t he?” Ron would always ask, puffing up his chest importantly, as if it meant something special to share a number with a legend.
There were many reasons Ginny loved the story. It was a true one, first of all. Not made-up like the hopping pot or three brothers. The monster in this story, she knew even as a small girl, was very real. It was the monster that had killed Mum’s brothers. So in a way, the Boy Who Lived was her family’s avenging hero.
For another, it meant that even someone small, even children - even babies - could have great powers and win against an impossible evil. She would often fall asleep imagining herself (a seventh child, the only girl in a long, long line of boys) discovering such powers after being cornered by a pack of werewolves or chased by the shadow the twins swore lived under the porch.
For the years of her early childhood, The Boy Who Lived was a bedtime story, a hero, a myth, a symbol.
And then he became her first crush, even before she ever laid eyes on him.
It was silly, really. Only a few years on she felt quite embarrassed over the whole thing. A ridiculous girlhood fancy.
A photo had appeared in the paper some time around the seventh anniversary of Voldemort’s fall. It was blurry, taken on a busy London street with a crowd milling about so that you could only catch a glimpse of a small boy with dark hair. It was impossible to tell if he had the scar people said he did. Like lightning emblazoned across his forehead.
Her mother, knowing how much she and Ron liked the story, had shown it to them one morning and read them the article that went along with it. About his parents, who were great heroes of the war, and rumors about what the famous Boy Who Lived was like now that he wasn’t a baby. The reporter, who was surely just making things up, claimed he was already being trained by Aurors. That his eyes glowed with magic. That he possessed a ‘palpable aura of power’.
Ron and the twins listened with mild interest, but as soon as breakfast was over and their plates cleared, they were off to chase gnomes in the field and mess about on the old training broom. Ginny, however, was enthralled.
She asked her mother if she could keep the newspaper clipping and hid it in her pillow case where her brothers could’t find it. When she was alone in her room, she would pull it out and stare at the blurry image, imagining a beautiful face with bright, piercing eyes.
He would not be a boy like her brothers, she thought. He would invite her to come flying with him instead of saying flying wasn’t for little girls. He would not act as if her tagging along was bothersome. In fact, he would ask her where she wanted to go and hold her hand as she led him to her favorite fairy tree. And he would look at it with those glowing magic eyes and nod and say yes, this is an important magical place. You were wise to find it.
She imagined the way he would look at her and how his hand would feel in hers and what it might be like to lean in and kiss his cheek.
She had worked out that they would only be a year apart in school. He would surely be in Gryffindor, just like her and her brothers. He would share a dormitory with Ron and become best friends with them both. They would go on adventures and play Quidditch together. And some day, after some especially great adventure like fighting a dragon, she would marry him.
By the summer she turned eight, this was the make-believe she always wanted to play on the rare occasion she got to choose their game. With the twins off at school and Ron having no alternative playmates, she had more leverage than usual. As long as they got to have a good long, muddy dragon fight, and Ron got to be lauded as much a hero as The Boy Who Lived, he would usually consent to ordaining a brief, un-frilly wedding ceremony between Ginny and her imaginary boyfriend.
He was even kind enough not to bring it up in front of anyone else in their family. Probably, she reasoned, due to his own embarrassment at being involved in such a thing at all. But she was grateful nonetheless, as she was sure no one else would understand. Even Ron did not understand, but they, as the two youngest, had a special bond in the quagmire of childhood that was to be respected.
By the time Ron was really off to school, though, that particular season of whimsy had faded somewhat. She still had the newspaper clipping, and sometimes daydreamed about her version of The Boy Who Lived, but she had not pretended to marry him in many months.
She had nearly forgotten that he would be there, on the platform boarding the train with Ron. The prospect of her impending loneliness - with all of her brothers off at a magic castle while she sat home doing her times tables in the kitchen - had eclipsed nearly everything in her mind.
And of course, the image she had built in her head from stories and a blurry photo did not match up with the reality at all. He was smaller, more timid, and more bedraggled than the dashing hero of her imagination. He wore large glasses that dominated his thin face and old muggle clothes with holes and stains, several sizes too big for him. His hair was wild and covered his forehead and his eyes so that she couldn’t see a scar if there was indeed one there, as the twins claimed later. He had hovered near them for a while, looking lost and mildly panicked before finally asking how to get onto the platform.
None of it spoke of an ‘aura of power’ or any mystical abilities. And yet, as soon as the twins brought up his name a thrill of dormant fervor shot up her spine. She had seen The Famous Harry Potter.
The crush was alive and well. It was all really happening. Her brothers were becoming friends with him. He was an incredible quidditch player, just as she had thought. She hung on the bits of information that winged their way to the Burrow’s kitchen through the boys’ letters. He was a true Gryffindor, and he and Ron really did do some mysterious, heroic thing that won the house cup right out from under the Slytherins’ noses.
She was star-struck. Overwhelmed by the celebrity and myth that seemed to swirl around him. Ready this time, she took in every detail she could about him at the train station. It wasn’t the face she had dreamed up from her blurry photo, but she found the face he did have captivating.
His skin was a warm, coppery brown, his jet-black hair wild in a way that fascinated her. He had sharp cheekbones she couldn’t help but imagine brushing her lips against, and she found she rather liked the effect of his round glasses. They made him seem approachable, intelligent, even a little nerdy in an endearing way.
And his eyes. This time, she noticed how vividly emerald-green they were behind those round glasses. She could believe those eyes might glow with magic.
He didn’t look at her directly. He didn’t seem to notice her at all. And suddenly, Ginny was grateful for this. She had never been shy in her life, but in Harry Potter’s presence her stomach swooped in a way it never had before. She was suddenly conscious of the way her hair was frizzing out of its two braids and how her dress was from a second-hand shop and how she was holding her mother’s hand like a toddler.
It was bizarre and almost frightening, the effect this boy had on her. When he was not around, she felt like herself: happily annoying her brothers, brawling with them on the living room floor, begging for stories of school, ganging up on Ron with the twins, snickering at Percy behind their hands.
And then there he was. The legend of her bedtime stories. The hero of the wizarding world. Sitting at her table eating toast.
Suddenly, her tongue felt so thick she couldn’t speak. She blushed tomato-red whenever he looked at her with those bright, beautiful eyes. Sometimes the butterflies in her belly were so maddening she simply had to flee the room. And to make it all worse, he was nice to her. He didn’t tease her when she did mortifying things like stick her elbow in the butter dish. He tried to talk to her despite the fact that she had yet to say two words to him. He gave her all the shiny new books that had just been gifted to him so that some of her things, at least, wouldn’t be raggedy second-hand.
He was so astoundingly normal it should have rubbed some of the mystique away, but somehow it made him all the more admirable. He was brave. He was kind. He wasn’t conceited about it all in the least. She wanted him to like her so badly she couldn’t be normal in his vicinity.
None of it was going how she’d dreamed, though, not even how she’d expected. All she’d managed to do in the month Harry Potter stayed at her house was embarrass herself, and Ron and the twins were not helping at all. Far from including her, Ron seemed to want to keep her as far away as possible from his best friend. The two of them were always together, always joined at the hip, and she was categorically uninvited. Ron was not going to share The Boy Who Lived, and the betrayal of this stung like a poisoned nettle deep in her belly.
And the twins were merciless in teasing her - about her crush and her klutziness, about what Hogwarts was really like, how the sorting worked, what house she would be in, and even Percy had no patience for any of her questions.
On top of all of this, Ron decided to steal the car instead of riding the train with her her first time, so she was relegated to sitting alone, the twins packed into an already-overcrowded compartment of fourth years and Percy nowhere to be found.
Ginny had always known her family did not have a lot of money, but seeing that she had never spent much time around wizards that weren’t her family, this had never been of much consequence outside the idol daydream of a bigger room or nicer things. Until her first train ride, when girls in brand new clothes asked her if she was wearing boys’ trousers, and eyed the fraying hemlines of her second-hand robes and battered trunk with expressions that seemed to curl up tightly on their pretty faces.
A gangly boy with watery blue eyes asked if she was really a girl because he heard Weasleys only made boys and she was wearing boys’ clothes, and that got the girls to whispering even more, and she wanted to be sharp and witty like she was with her brothers, she wanted to be brave and fiery like her mother always said she was, but this new version of her could think of nothing to say. Every doubt and insecurity she’d ever had seemed to rise in her throat and all she could do was sit there while they looked at her and laughed behind hands.
She was not best friends with Harry Potter. She was not even friends with her own brother, who spent all his time closeted away with his real friends. A closed little bubble in the corner of the common room or, more often than not, missing entirely who knew where. She had no friends, and she had no idea how to make them, and something was wrong with her.
She felt cold all the time. She felt hopeless and small. She was so dreadfully alone, and the castle was not magical like she’d always been told, not in a bright way, anyway. It was a maze of dark passages that swallowed her up and spat her out with fear and confusion ringing in her ears. Her dreams grew twisted and dark, full of blood and snapping bones and a desire to kill.
It was like that time in the creek when she had stepped into a sink-hole and suddenly her head was under water and she was drowning right next to her brothers and no one noticed. Not until her father jumped in and pulled her up and she coughed and coughed on the muddy shore until the sun warmed up her shaking body and she could breathe again. Only her father was not here to pull her up this time, and she was afraid - she was so very afraid of what he would say if he did. What kind of thing was she becoming in these dark, twisting halls? What had she let into her head? Into her heart?
And of course. Of course he saw all of that. Harry.
He was the one who found the diary. How stupid she’d been to think she could get rid of it just like that. To leave it lying around where anyone might find it. And what did Tom say to him? What secrets did he spill? What darkness did he spread to that beautiful boy already touched by darkness?
And later, when he took her, when she woke up and realized exactly how stupid and pathetic and scared she had been, of course it was Harry watching her. It was Harry who had had to come all the way down to the sewers, to wade through muck and grime, to fight off beasts and ghosts to bring her back from the dead and fix all of her mistakes. He watched her cry on a dungeon floor and he told her all the horrible things she’d done weren’t her fault and he pulled her to her feet and led her out of the darkness. Back to her brother, who still cared about her after all, back to her parents who forgave her, back to her real life.
He was exactly all the things she’d been told. A sword-yielding, monster-fighting hero. And he’d saved her, but the adventure had not been what she’d pictured. She had been the damsel in distress, not a co-adventurer. Not a hero in any capacity. In some lights, even the villain of the story. And for a long time she burned with humiliation and shame that she had had to be saved at all.
That shame was all she could think of when she thought about Harry, or the diary, or anything at all reminding her of the Chamber. For a long time, she wondered if she would ever be able to unbury herself from that year. Even gone, the cold of the diary clung to her. Tom Riddle’s voice whispered in her head. Most horribly of all… she missed him. Tom. Her friend. She felt empty without him, hollow and echoey.
She wondered if something deep inside of her was broken beyond repair.
But eventually warmth broke through. Her parents, her brothers, they beat back the darkness. She began to believe them when they said it wasn’t her fault. She began to feel glimmers of hope and joy and love again. Hogwarts was not the dark and desolate place she had found with the diary. There were people there who were kind - Hermione was kind and made space for her at meals. Neville Longbottom always let her sit beside him in the common room. Luna Lovegood always needed a partner in charms. And when she got up the nerve to talk to them, the other girls in her dormitory were mostly nice enough, too.
Slowly, pieces of herself came back. Her voice unstuck. Her wit came back to life. The tough outer shell she’d cultivated in a house of brothers regained its protective rigidity. Like a garden in the first soft rains of spring, she came back into bloom.
And when she could think back to waking up in the chamber without her insides freezing solid and her breath going tight, she started to remember things. Like the way Harry Potter’s hands felt when he took hers to pull her to her feet: warm, slightly calloused, gentle but strong. Or the worry in his eyes as he peered at her, the flooding relief as he’d realized she was going to be okay. The calm, matter-of-fact way he had carried the sword of Gryffindor over his shoulder. That he had shielded her from blame or suspicion, even with Ron.
He was at once more human and more hero than he ever had been before. She dreamed about his hands in hers, pulling her up out of nightmares. She dreamed about his lovely green eyes, assuring her everything was alright now. She dreamed about that crooked smile he would get when something funny surprised him. And she wondered, looking down the long Gryffindor table at him toward the end of her second year, if there was any hope he would ever look back at her.
When Hermione came to stay that summer and they shared a room for almost three weeks, Ginny decided to ask her. She was thirteen now, after all, and daydreams about boys and kissing were becoming less the things of dreams alone. Who would know if there was any merit to her fancies better than one of Harry’s best friends? Who would be able to advise her better?
She jittered with nerves all day, wondering if she really wanted to know the answer. Imagining Hermione laughing at her in the dark. You? Why would Harry Potter ever like you ?
But Hermione wouldn’t laugh. She wasn’t that kind of person. And if Hermione really, truly didn’t think Ginny had a hope of catching Harry’s interest, well wasn’t it better to know now?
Hermione didn’t laugh, of course. She listened kindly as Ginny began, embarrassingly, to gush about the little details that kept running through her head. How brave Harry must have been facing down that Basilisk and how afterwards he had barely ever brought it up again. How he’d learned to fight off dementors (how she had hated dementors) - and on a broom, no less! How she was obsessed with watching him fly, how natural he was in the air. How he never let all the fame go to his head.
“You make him sound so… dashing,” Hermione commented with some laughter in her voice.
“Well, he is, isn’t he?” Ginny countered, a little affronted.
“I suppose he has his moments,” Hermione conceded, but her face was still lit with amusement. “But there’s a lot more to him in between those moments.”
Hermione could not tell her if there was anyone Harry liked or even if Ginny might be the kind of person he could like. It was apparently the one subject they never got round to discussing in all their private, whispered conversations. Something about too many monsters and murderers around to talk about something as trivial as crushes.
“It might be a good start,” she did say, “to stop thinking about him as so dashing all the time and try to get to know the rest of him. I’m sure it will help you be yourself around him if you notice when he has corn flakes stuck to his chin or pokes himself in the eye with his glasses.”
So Ginny began to make a point of noticing the in-between moments. The things that made him just Harry, her brother’s friend, and not Harry Potter, slayer of basilisks and dementors and You-Know-Who himself. The boy, not the legend.
She noticed how ridiculous he looked the mornings he would wander downstairs with his hair shooting up in every direction like a porcupine. The way he had to climb up onto the counter to reach the top shelves in the kitchen. The way he blushed when Bill told him he could pull off a fang earring. She could see the ways he was like her brothers, like her, too, like every teenager they went to school with: hoping to be deemed cool, or at least not too lame, but with no idea how to do it.
And when she started looking, there were other things she noticed too. The anxious way he searched for Ron or Hermione when they were not right next to him after the World Cup. Tired purple smudges that darkened under his eyes. A quietness that drew him back, sometimes, from the rest of her loud, boisterous family. Harry Potter had nightmares, too. There were things that frightened him.
And then there were other things. An odd, reverent look that sometimes flashed across his face when her mother ran her fingers through his hair. An irrepressible flicker of a smile when her father would call him a ‘good lad’ or ‘son’. She wondered that she had never noticed these things before, for all the time she’d spent staring at him. That she’d never thought too hard about the fact that he was an orphan or what that must be like.
It wasn’t the way Rita Skeeter wrote about it in the paper, she thought, reading the story in the back of History of Magic. She’d been paying enough attention lately to know it wasn’t the sort of superficial sadness that would make someone well up in an interview, nor was Harry the sort of person to cry in front of other people. His loss was something that throbbed so deep, there were no words to bring it to the surface, and he held silent about it, she thought, not out of some stoic machismo, but for the same reason he tried to hide the sleeplessness in his face or the anxiety burning behind his eyes. Because it was private and he did not like people looking at him.
The more she looked, the more she began to see a different picture than the Boy Who Lived. A different picture, even, than the boy who saved her from her nightmares. She saw a teenager trying to live a normal life under the scrutinizing gaze of the entire wizarding world. She saw a boy whose deepest grief had been flung across headlines and turned into a title and a bedtime story for children. She saw how unfair the world’s expectations had been for a fourteen-year-old, hers included, and she began to set them down.
After her first real date with a real boy, the mere thought of her daydreams from last school year made her insides squirm with embarrassment. How childish she’d been, imagining Harry as her white knight, fantasizing about him holding her hand and leading her out of dark tunnels and inviting her to fly with him. That wasn’t what dating a boy was.
It was sharp, clever banter and stolen glances full of a new, thrilling kind of tension. It was not one person leading another, it was two people equally in control. It was interest and intrigue and silent conversations where both of you were daring each other to inch just a little closer to the same finish line. Or at least, that was what dating Michael Corner was like. And she found it as heady a sensation as flying.
By her fourth year, there was nothing left of the glamor of The Boy Who Lived, or even the Basilisk-slaying hero. She no longer burned for his attention. What she had liked, she reasoned, was an image, a story, something that wasn’t really true. She could see him clearly now, and he was just another boy, albeit a bit more battered than most.
Being friends was easy. She found his awkwardness amusing and did her best to help him through it, as he had once helped her. They exchanged opinions on Quidditch, school, family gossip, and the darker news outside the castle walls. She could both admire his prowess with defensive magic and also call him an idiot when the occasions warranted. He was funny, and he usually thought she was funny. (Hermione complained that they shared a gallows humor that was just a bit too biting.)
And she did her best to help with some of the darkness, when she could. She remembered falling into her own darkness, having to claw her way back out. His was different, maybe, but the sensation must be similar. So she forgave his raised voice and spoke with firm cheer or calmness. She threatened to fight anyone who said ignorant shit about Cedric Diggory. When prefect duties pulled Ron and Hermione both away, she made a point of stepping in. When he seemed hollowed out, she asked him what she could do. He was the one in need of protecting, now, and she had services to offer.
This was how she ended up at the Ministry of Magic. This was how she ended up in a real battle for her life. Fighting alongside Harry Potter and her brother against something more terrifying than a dragon. It was not fun. It was not exciting. Evil was not vanquished. Someone she knew died. Someone he loved died. Again.
She didn’t regret her choices. Although she walked away with more nightmares, going with had been the right thing to do. The brave thing. Had she not been there, it likely would have gone much worse. But it did dispel any lingering assumptions about the simplicity of heroism. Sometimes trying to do the right thing led to the wrong thing. Sometimes no matter how hard you tried, there was no saving the day. Sometimes the ‘right thing’ left you scarred and aching and wishing it didn’t have to be you.
These were things morons like Romilda Vane and all the other girls turning misty eyes on Harry now would never understand.
She thought by the time they played on the same Quidditch team, by the time they could tease their friends in synch, by the time she caught him staring at her just a little too long. She thought by then, she knew him better, saw him more clearly than almost anyone else. Not a hero, but one of the bravest people she knew. Not a legend, but strong enough to hold a crumbling, shitstorm of a world on his shoulders. Not some Prince Charming, but gentle and kind in a world that had shown him neither of those things.
And when he did finally kiss her, it wasn’t something out of a fairy tale. It was better than that, because it was real. She liked him - (loved him, maybe?) because of all those things. Because he was just a boy. Just an awkward, sad, funny, brave, kind boy. And everything about the weeks they were together - from the secret hand-holding under the table to the long walks around the lake to his lips on her neck in a secret passage to her hand in his hair beside the fire - all of it was blissfully ordinary.
Her feelings now were not a silly crush or smitten hero-worship. They were grounded in reality. In friendship. In all the real things they knew about each other. In all the ways she could see him that the rest of the world couldn’t.
But she had missed something again. What she had forgotten, what she had failed to see for all the normalcy, was that this boy was also doomed.
There was a scar. There was a prophecy. There was a rising evil that must be met. In the end, he was a hero after all. And she should have seen it coming, she really should have, but she never could have predicted the way he broke her heart.
It wasn’t just the breaking up, although that smarted. It was the leaving with no word. Not trusting her - or anyone else for that matter, anyone besides Ron and Hermione - with half a pence of their mission. How likely was it exactly that they’d all end up dead? How were the rest of them to know whether they were alive or not? It was the treating her like something fragile. Something small and breakable, as everyone else always had. Like something that needed to be wrapped in silks and packed away in a chest somewhere. Far away from him and his dangerous curse. Nevermind all the Nazis and monsters who could open that chest up in his absence and find her.
There were nights she lay awake and hated him. Nights she missed her brother and one of her best friends so much it hurt, and she hated him for leading them off to certain doom. Nights she lay with screams echoing in her head, with scrapes and bruises and curses smarting across her skin, and she hated him for leaving her here in this nightmare castle and thinking she was safe.
It wasn’t fair. She knew even as she hated him that it wasn’t fair. That she wanted him to live and to come home and to find a peaceful ever after. That she wanted this deeply, with every fiber in her being, even if that ever after wasn’t with her. But she hated him all the same.
In the aftermath, though, she finally began to see the two parts of him and how they fit together. He was a legend shoved into the body of an ordinary boy, and what this really made him was a tragedy.
It was only after becoming a barrier between evil and innocence herself that she understood the aches it left in every joint. It was only after losing someone she loved more than anything that she was able to see the lines and cracks still creeping across his surface from his losses. He wrapped her in silk not because he thought she was delicate but because he had watched everything else he’d loved destroyed in front of him. He left because he had been raised to be a weapon before anything else, and he hadn’t taken Ron and Hermione with him, they had gone because they already knew all of this.
As the rest of the world healed, grew stronger, she watched its savior fall apart. His prophecy fulfilled, his duty over, he didn’t know how to keep moving forward. The cracks grew wider and darknesses she didn’t know were there began to seep out and out and out. Eighteen years worth of hurts and traumas she couldn’t begin to imagine.
It turned out he’d been held together for years by the inertia of war and tireless efforts by Ron and Hermione to keep him standing, and without the first, the second wasn’t enough anymore.
She watched him unable to eat, unable to sleep, unable to let anyone touch him. Not even Ron and Hermoine. She watched him run himself into the ground trying to catch Death Eaters because it was all he knew how to do, and when they wouldn’t let him do that anymore, she watched him run himself into the ground every other way he knew how.
“Did you know being locked in a cupboard is child abuse?” he asked her once, halfway down a bottle of whiskey in Aberforth’s back room. “No one ever told me.”
He looked younger than she had ever seen him then, clutching the bottle like a security blanket to his chest, eyes overbright, lost in a world long ago and far away.
“You know he was inside me?” he said another night. He was skin and bone then, shivering next to the fire, something dark and viscous running down his arm slowly.
“Yeah, he was inside me too,” she whispered. Hermione would be home soon. Then she could go to bed.
“I feel him everywhere. I have to - I have to get him out -” he squeezed his arm and the blood flowed thicker.
She reached over to pry his fingers loose. To knit the skin back together with her wand. Hermione would be home soon.
There was a lot of shouting the night Ron caught him with Malfoy in the kitchen at Grimmauld Place. Ginny had guessed it months before, the way their eyes lingered too long across crowded pubs and how he sometimes didn’t come home at night. How fire seemed to leap across his skin when anyone asked him where he’d been.
“I’m not gay!” he howled at Ron.
“I don’t care if you fuck a bloke, I care if you fuck a Malfoy!” Ron had bellowed back. “In a dark house full of curses, with no one knowing where the hell you are! You’re a fucking moron!”
“I’m not gay,” Harry had said back, knuckles white where he was gripping his own elbows, nails digging in.
Malfoy didn’t last long after that; it was all fire and knives between them. But then there were others. She never saw them. They were all strangers, Muggles, anyone he could meet on dark, pulsing dance floors and burned out houses on the wrong side of town. Hermione told her about the places they tracked him down in. Any place where sensation and substance could drive every conscious thought from his body. They couldn’t make him stay put. He always seemed to drift off, like smoke, like a ghost. Staying away as long as he could and being dragged back with other people’s sweat all over him and the remnants of drugs and booze still racing in his veins and that look on his face like someone who has seen the other side of death and wishes they could see it again.
She wished it didn’t have to be this way. He didn’t deserve it. She wished there was an answer for him that wasn’t pain, but she didn’t have it. She couldn’t be the person who picked him up off the floor. That was Ron. That was Hermione. Sometimes it was Neville or her parents or, oddly enough, Andromeda Tonks. It was a job for people he hadn’t left. She could be his friend. She could share a drink with him or a lonely night by the fire, but she wasn’t going to wade in and scrape him off the floor. She was not going to make that her job.
Her bones weren’t stable enough for it. She needed to plant herself in the soil and breathe in the blue sky and regrow parts of herself lanced off in a war. She helped her mother bake bread. She planted flowers. She cried rageful and ugly sobs in the broom shed. She slowly built herself around the hole her brother left gaping in their lives. She learned to ride the memories of her sixth year at school like waves.
She played quidditch. She moved into a flat with the other reserve Chasers and drank just enough to have fun (not enough to drown her thoughts) and laughed and learned what being an adult was like, albeit a young one. She went on holiday with Luna to some islands in the South Pacific. She let other people kiss her. Boys, and also some girls. Luna liked to kiss her and sleep curled up against her side, but not much besides that.
Without realizing it, she was gone a lot. Practicing and playing all over Europe, tagging along with Luna to new corners of the globe. Finding pieces of herself she hadn’t known were missing. And one day she came home, and he was someone new, too.
She came home and he stood in her mother’s kitchen with his five-year-old godson on one hip, his dark green Unspeakable robes open over slacks and a button-up, black and gold tie loose around his neck, sleeves rolled up. The scars on his arms had faded to brushstrokes. He laughed and the sound filled the room like music. He saw her in the doorway and smiled and it was like a star had fallen to earth.
He had found pieces of himself, too.
He was twenty-three and finally seemed to know what to do with that number. He had a cottage somewhere in the countryside with overstuffed armchairs around a great hearth and a garden overrun with wildflowers and a field surrounded by towering trees for flying. The house always seemed to be full of people. Ron and Hermione had permanent occupancy in the primary bedroom. Neville had a room upstairs, and everyone else they knew seemed to filter in and out of the guest room.
He spent all day studying the mysteries of love and death in the depths of the ministry while Hermione wrote laws and Ron sold pranks, and no one had to worry about him getting himself killed.
He had decided to reconcile the twisted scar of his childhood by being for his godson what no one had ever been for him. He had Teddy every other weekend, now, and went over to Andromeda’s for fish and chips on Thursdays.
He’d had a boyfriend for two years, a muggle Uni student, and then when the boyfriend moved back to India, he’d fallen in with Susan Bones. She’d only been able to put up with the press that still hounded him for about ten months, but they were at least still friends, he told her with a smile that betrayed just a little bit of heartache left over.
The shadows still trailed him, but more like angel wings than choking tentacles these days.
She started going to his cottage whenever she was in England.
It wasn’t like last time. They didn’t hold hands in front of everyone and make the world look at how sickeningly happy they were together. Because sickeningly happy was a lie for sixteen-year-olds. She slipped into his room after everyone else had gone to sleep, or they walked along anonymous muggle streets, existing together as a boy and a girl. In her mother’s house on Sunday afternoons, they didn’t so much as cross pinkies, and she didn’t tell Hermione what she did at two in the morning, although she thought Hermione somehow knew anyway.
When she was gone, she knew that Theodore Nott slipped into his bed on cold nights. This was okay because other lips touched hers in dark pubs in Poland and sunny beaches in the Caribbean. They didn’t belong to each other, owed each other nothing, and she liked this because it meant every time they were together, they were choosing it.
Months passed this way. Blissful, uncomplicated months. All around them, her brothers were planning weddings and popping out babies and moving into new houses. She won a cup for Hollyhead and scored 50 points in an international tournament. She did a photoshoot for the cover of Quidditch Monthly. She lay on a frozen lake and watched the Northern Lights dance above her while Luna took pictures of phosphorescent humbees.
She walked hand-in-hand with Harry Potter through a Christmas market in Liverpool. She kissed her way down the jagged scars that crackled across his chest as rain pounded the sloping roof above their heads. They talked by candlelight about what it feels like to share a soul with evil and how you miss it when it’s gone and all you feel is empty.
And then, quite suddenly, uncomplicated turned complicated. It was a sticky July day and a yellow light glowed softly above her pelvis because there were the beginnings of a life gathering there, and now some decisions would have to be made.
Was she willing to pause in the prime of her career for this? What if it meant giving it up all together? Could she be the mother of ‘The Chosen One’s’ child? Did she want to be tied to him, inextricably, forever? Did she even want children?
The answers were easier to work out than she expected. He was in the kitchen when she got there, coloring at the scrubbed wooden table with Teddy on his lap, chin resting in his godson’s sandy curls. They wore matching dragon-patterned pajama bottoms. Ron was cooking an enormous breakfast while Hermione sat on the counter practicing a speech she planned to give before the department of MLE. Neville was tending to an array of plants in the window box and Luna was humming tunelessly from the living room.
It was warm and chaotic and comfortable. He smiled when he saw her, and it was the sun streaming through a window.
She liked her career. She loved him. She had never set out on this path to gain infamy. She had wanted to fly and to be good at something and to figure out who she was outside of her family and war and school. She had done that. She had spent four-and-a-half years finding herself. Now she was found, and she wanted to come home.
There was darkness in him she would never understand. And there was darkness in him she understood intimately. But there was light too. So much light it hurt to look at sometimes. So much love it poured out of him with no place to go. He had saved the world with love. He was so many things. So many jagged, beautiful pieces turning in a kaleidoscope. It wasn’t ‘The Chosen One’s’ child, it was his child, and he would love this child with everything he had. He would love her, and she would love him back, pour some of that love back into him.
Not because he was her hero. Not because she wanted to save him. But because they knew each other. Because they wanted the same things - home, family, love, better days. Because there was no one else she had felt so much for.
She married Harry Potter on a warm day in June when she was twenty-three. Ron officiated, in front of all their family and friends in the overgrown garden behind her childhood home. Her mother held their black-haired baby and beamed through thick tears in the front row.
He was The Boy Who Lived. He was The Chosen One. He was her brother’s best friend. He was the boy who broke her heart. He was an unimaginable tragedy. He was a miraculous triumph. He was ordinary and extraordinary. And now he was hers.