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The Room of Requirement smelled like effort — warm bodies and nervous energy and the particular staleness of air that had been breathed in and out by thirty people who were all trying very hard not to embarrass themselves in front of Harry Potter.
Ginny was partnered with Michael, which was fine. Michael was a competent partner and a decent boyfriend and she had absolutely no reason to be looking across the room at Cho Chang.
She looked across the room at Cho Chang anyway.
It wasn't difficult to find them. Harry had a gravitational pull in enclosed spaces even when he wasn't doing anything interesting, and he was currently doing something interesting, which was standing very close to Cho with his hand on her wrist, adjusting her grip on her wand. Patient. Focused. Speaking too quietly for Ginny to hear across the noise of the room.
Cho laughed at something he said.
Ginny's Expelliarmus hit Michael squarely in the chest and sent him staggering back two steps.
"Bit strong," he said, blinking.
"Sorry," she said. She was not particularly sorry.
She knew what this feeling was. She'd had enough time over enough years to map every corner of it, and she was not thirteen anymore and she was not going to do it the indignity of pretending it was something else — irritation, competitive instinct, general principles. She was jealous. Specifically, she was jealous of Cho Chang, who was pretty and sad-eyed and had actually managed to speak to Harry Potter without losing the ability to form sentences, which Ginny had once found impossible and now found effortless, which was exactly the problem, because it turned out being effortless around Harry had done precisely nothing to fix the underlying situation.
She reset her stance. Michael raised his wand again, game if a little wary.
Across the room, Harry was demonstrating the motion himself now, slow and deliberate, and Cho was watching his wand hand with an expression of concentration that Ginny found personally offensive. He corrected something, and she tried again, and he nodded — that particular nod he had, economical and genuine, the one that meant he actually meant it — and something in Ginny's chest did a thing she categorically refused to acknowledge.
The worst part was that there was nothing to be angry at. Harry wasn't doing anything wrong. Teaching someone in the DA was, in fact, the entire point of the DA. Cho was holding her wand incorrectly and Harry was correcting it in the patient, slightly awkward way he corrected everything, probably thinking about nothing except the spell, the grip, the angle of the elbow. He was not, almost certainly, thinking about Cho Chang's hair or her laugh or the way she looked at him like he was something remarkable.
He never thought about those things. That was also, Ginny had decided, the problem.
Expelliarmus.
Michael's wand skittered across the floor. He went to retrieve it with a look that suggested he was quietly reconsidering their relationship.
She exhaled. Pushed her hair back. Across the room, Harry had stepped away from Cho now — some distance recovered, professional, oblivious — and was scanning the room the way he always did mid-session, checking who was struggling, who needed a word, who was about to hex themselves by accident. It was a good instinct. It was deeply annoying.
His gaze moved across the room in a sweep and then, for no particular reason that she could identify, it stopped.
On her.
Just for a moment. A second, maybe two. Long enough that it wasn't accidental and short enough that it wasn't anything, except that Harry's brow did a complicated thing — not quite a frown, not quite the opposite — like he'd noticed something he hadn't expected to notice and wasn't sure what to do with it.
Ginny held his gaze.
She was good at this now. She had practiced it the same way she'd practiced everything else — stubbornly, repeatedly, until the thing that used to undo her became just a thing she could do. She looked back at Harry Potter across a crowded room and she did not flush, did not look away, did not become twelve years old again in her own skin.
Harry looked away first.
He moved on to someone else — Neville, who was having some difficulty — and the moment closed behind him like water, and Ginny turned back to Michael.
"Again," she said.
Michael sighed. Raised his wand. She disarmed him so fast he didn't see it coming.
She was very good at this, she thought. At all of it.
She wished it helped more than it did.