Work Text:
The common room was loud in the specific way it got loud when everyone was pretending to do something else.
Homework, mostly. People had books open and quills out and were very industriously not-studying while they talked about the Yule Ball, which had been announced three days ago and had since colonised every conversation in the castle regardless of what the conversation had nominally been about. Ginny had heard it discussed at breakfast, in the corridors between classes, once memorably in the middle of Binns's lecture when he'd droned on without noticing for a full four minutes while the two boys behind her debated whether Lavender Brown would say yes to either of them.
She had her Transfiguration essay in front of her. She had written one sentence.
Across the room, Harry was having a crisis.
She could tell from the posture — that particular arrangement of his shoulders that meant he was thinking very hard about something and finding the thinking very unpleasant. He had his Charms textbook open but hadn't turned a page in twenty minutes, and every so often his gaze would go somewhere unfocused and he'd tap his quill against the parchment in a rhythm that was getting on Ron's nerves, judging by the look on Ron's face.
Hermione was beside her on the sofa, actually doing her homework, because Hermione was the only person in the fourth year who appeared immune to the Yule Ball's gravitational pull. Or she was very good at pretending. Ginny had not yet worked out which.
"He's going to work himself into a state," Ginny said, without particularly meaning to say it out loud.
Hermione looked up. Followed her gaze across the room to where Harry had now put his quill down entirely and was staring at the fire with the expression of a condemned man. "He just needs to ask someone," she said, with the brisk practicality of someone who had clearly already solved this problem in her own head and found Harry's difficulty with it faintly baffling.
"Yes," Ginny said. "That's rather the part he's stuck on."
Hermione made a small sound that might have been agreement and went back to her essay. Ginny looked back at Harry.
The thing was — and this was the thing she generally tried to keep in a box with a very firm lid on it — she knew exactly what she wanted. She had known for long enough that the knowing had stopped feeling dramatic and started feeling like furniture, just a thing that was there, that she moved around in the course of daily life without making a production of it. She wanted Harry to look across the common room and see her. Not Ginny-Ron's-sister, not Ginny-who-used-to-go-red-and-fall-over-things, not Ginny as backdrop to some other part of his life. Just her. She wanted him to walk over with that slightly pained expression he got when he was about to do something that required courage in a social rather than life-threatening context, and she wanted him to ask.
She was aware this was foolish. She kept a clear accounting of the foolishness — the fact that he still barely looked at her, that she'd been eleven and he'd been twelve and she'd made it so weird and strange that there was scar tissue over the whole thing now, that Cho Chang was in the fifth year and was beautiful in the uncomplicated way of someone who had never accidentally paralysed a conversation just by entering a room. She knew all of it. She kept it in a neat list and looked at it regularly, like a person checking a wound to confirm it was still there.
It didn't stop her wanting it. That was the part that was hardest to explain, even to herself. Knowing a thing was foolish didn't make you stop feeling it. It just meant you felt it with full awareness of your own foolishness, which was, if anything, worse.
Harry said something to Ron. Ron said something back that made Harry drag a hand through his hair — already destroyed, always destroyed — and look at the ceiling like it might offer him structural support.
Ginny looked down at her essay. Transfiguration as a branch of magic requires not only technical precision but an understanding of —
She had no idea how that sentence ended.
"Who do you think he'll ask?" she said. She kept her voice very even. Conversational. The voice of someone with no particular investment in the answer.
Hermione glanced at her, and for one horrible moment Ginny thought she was going to say something perceptive, because Hermione was frequently perceptive at the worst possible times. But she just said, "Cho Chang, probably. He's been — " She stopped. Seemed to reconsider. "He watches her in Quidditch."
"Right," Ginny said.
"You should ask someone," Hermione said, not unkindly. "Before all the good options are taken and you won't be able to attend. Neville asked me last week, actually, which was very sweet, but I'd already — " She stopped again, more deliberately this time, and looked back at her essay with slightly heightened colour.
Ginny filed that away for later. "I'm sure someone will ask me," she said, which was probably true and not particularly the point.
Hermione nodded. Kept writing.
Across the room Harry had apparently reached some internal conclusion, because he'd sat up straighter and had the look of a person who had decided to do the thing and was now just working out how to do the thing, which was, in Ginny's experience, the most painful part to watch. He kept glancing toward the girls' staircase in the way as though Cho Chang would come through the common room if he watched it hard enough even though she was a Ravenclaw.
Ginny picked up her quill.
She was not eleven anymore. She was thirteen and she was good at Quidditch and she had friends and she had opinions and she could hold a conversation with Harry Potter without her face doing anything embarrassing, which had taken work but which she'd managed, and she was not going to sit here and feel sorry for herself because a boy she liked was looking at the staircase waiting for someone else to come down it.
She was just going to feel it quietly and write her Transfiguration essay and not say the true thing to Hermione, who was right there and would probably be kind about it and would definitely remember it, and that was fine. That was perfectly fine.
Transfiguration as a branch of magic requires not only technical precision but an understanding of intention, she wrote. The caster must know exactly what they want the outcome to be before they attempt the spell.
She stopped. Read it back.
Across the room, Harry was still watching the staircase.
She crossed out the last sentence. Wrote something else. Kept going.