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Harry Potter sleeps like he's been hit with a Bludger.
Not in the dramatic sense — no flailing, no snoring, nothing that would give her legitimate grounds for complaint to any reasonable third party. It's more that he sleeps with his whole body committed to the project. Flat on his stomach, one arm flung sideways like he's trying to claim territory, face half-buried in the pillow. Completely, catastrophically unconscious.
Ginny has read that some people sleep lightly. She has never observed this in the wild.
She's been awake for twenty minutes. No reason — no bad dream, no noise from down the hall, no Quidditch replay cycling through her head. Just one of those 3am wake-ups that happen sometimes, her body apparently deciding it hadn't annoyed her sufficiently during the day. The room is dark except for the thin strip of moonlight coming through the curtain gap she keeps meaning to fix and never does. She can hear rain. Distant. Not the roof-hammering kind, just the background kind, like the house is breathing.
Harry doesn't stir.
She watches him the way she does sometimes when she's reasonably confident she won't be caught — which is to say, when he's unconscious or otherwise occupied, because Harry does catch her, occasionally, and then he gets that look, the soft stupid one, and she's found it's simply easier to avoid the situation entirely.
His hair is genuinely extraordinary. She doesn't know how he does it. She's watched him go to sleep with it in one configuration and wake up with it in another that shouldn't be physically possible. She's watched him pat it down in the mirror with a kind of ritual resignation, and she's watched it immediately spring back to doing exactly what it likes. It is doing what it likes right now. She supposes it always has.
She knows this head. She knows the scar — the one everyone knows, and the others too. The one on his collarbone from a training accident four years into the Auror Department, the one on his left forearm he deflected when she asked about. She'd stopped asking. She knows the grey that's come in at his temples in the last few years, more silver than grey really, and she'd thought she would mind it and found she didn't. It suits him. He's always looked older than he was and younger than he felt; the silver is just the outside catching up.
Forty-one, she thinks. Harry Potter is forty-one years old and asleep in their bed and the rain is falling somewhere beyond the window.
She still finds this remarkable, sometimes. Not in the way she did when she was eleven, reading about him with her heart in her throat, or seventeen, watching him walk toward the forest and understanding for the first time what the word unbearable actually meant. Not like that. It's quieter than that. It's more like — she'll be making tea, or watching him help Lily with homework, or standing in the doorway watching him laugh at something on the radio, and something in her will just land, some recognition, like: oh. still. yes.
She doesn't tell him this. He'd go pink and she'd have to live with that.
He shifts. Just slightly — a small adjustment, the arm that was claiming territory now tucking closer to his chest. His breathing doesn't change. He's not waking up. He won't wake up; she's learned over the years that the only things that reliably wake Harry Potter are the sound of a child calling for him, the specific creak of the third stair (left over from when the children were small and the threat was them, not intruders), and apparently some internal alarm set to six-fifteen that she has never been able to explain.
She used to watch him sleep and count his breaths.
She doesn't think she owes either of them a confession on that front. The early years were what they were. She'd come home from Holyhead tour dates to find him already asleep and she'd lie there listening to him breathe and feel something complicated loosen in her chest. She'd never said: I count sometimes, because I spent so long thinking I was going to lose you that I learned to track you like weather. She'd just listened. She figures that's her business.
It's less fraught now. Most things are. The nightmares are fewer — not gone, she doesn't think they'll ever be entirely gone, and she stopped hoping for that years ago because hope in that direction only made the bad nights worse. But fewer. He sleeps through more nights than not, these days. He looks, right now, in the dark and the rain, genuinely and completely at rest, and she thinks: good. She thinks: finally. She thinks it the same way she thinks it every time, like it's new information, because it never quite stops feeling like it.
James's Hogwarts trunk is still in the corner from Christmas. She should deal with that.
She closes her eyes and listens to the rain.
Harry breathes in. Breathes out. The arm uncurls again, slowly, finds its way back across the bed and stops just short of her. Not quite touching. Almost.
She moves two inches to the left.
The hand curls around her wrist without him waking. She knows this without looking. It's a thing he does — a very him thing, proprietary in sleep in a way he'd never quite claim while conscious — and she has never mentioned it to him because she has decided it's hers. A small secret. She collects them: the way he sings quietly and badly when he thinks the house is empty; the particular look he aims at the kids when they're not watching, some mixture of recognition and something older, sadder; the way he still sometimes just stops and looks around at the kitchen and the garden and the ordinary mess of their ordinary life like he's checking. Like he's confirming.
She doesn't know what he's confirming, exactly. She's never asked.
She thinks she knows anyway.
His thumb moves once across the inside of her wrist, still asleep, and stills.
Ginny looks up at the ceiling. The rain is getting quieter. The curtain gap is letting in the particular shade of dark that means the moon's moved on. Harry Potter is holding her wrist with the loose grip of a man who has no idea he's doing it.
She breathes in. Breathes out.
She'll fix the curtain in the morning.