Chapter Text
The second of May dawns warm and dry on Harry Potter jabbing a fork into a coffee machine. His joggers sit low on his hips as he leans forward over the machine, jabbing the plug further into the wall like the force would jumpstart it, a shock to the heart of the dastardly fiend which was keeping him from his breakfast on purpose. Behind him, the eggs are burning on the stove.
He doesn’t notice until he smells smoke. Thick and choking, like the stale air in the basement of Malfoy Manor. It’ll set off the alarms and then they’ll blare in his head for hours after the fact, blending into police sirens and the sound of his mother’s screaming until he burrows under his covers and cries his head empty, once and for all.
He fumbles for his wand, dousing the whole stove in water, and then curses under his breath -- water and electricity don’t mix, do they? Now the eggs are wet and the stove is wet and he can’t breathe because there’s so much smoke and the sizzling of water against the stove feels like it’s going on forever. His wand feels like it’s burning the inside of his palm because he hadn’t done magic in days before this. He feels like his skin is itching, like something deep within him is trying to escape, like there is something clawing at his insides and begging him for freedom--
“I leave you alone for five minutes…” Ginny leans against the doorframe, looking deliciously disheveled, a smirk playing on her lips. She’s wearing one of his old t-shirts (something he’d inherited from Dudley) and it hurts, twists something in his gut that he’d forgotten about. The kitchen is a mess and she is wearing Dudley’s shirt and it feels like every second that passes is a nightmare of a lifetime. “Go sit down, let me fix this.”
The report from the Aurors said that he had to learn to listen to orders before he applied again. He can start with listening to Ginny, who would never ask anything of him that he couldn’t, shouldn’t, give. He can start with walking to the couch and sitting down, just like she asked. His feet carry him forward reflexively as his brain whirls thoughts about within the confines of his skull. He doesn’t realize he’s sat down until the couch creaks under his weight.
He looks to Ginny. She’s smiling. He thinks he should smile because she is, so he does. Her smile falters. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried.
She sweeps into the kitchen, and with a few waves of her wand, has the stove clean as a whistle, the pan empty, and the coffee machine humming away. Envy roils in the pit of his stomach, red hot and wanting, and he stares down at his socked feet as he sits far too stiffly on the couch. His big toes have worn holes through the cloth. He’s had these socks since he was fifteen (around the same time he’d gotten the shirt Ginny’s wearing), and he doesn’t know if he deserves a new pair. Just because the money is there doesn’t mean the will is.
“What do you want for breakfast?” Ginny asks, and he works his jaw to pop his ears, because her words don’t sound right. It’s like they’re being filtered through water, through honey, through something thick and toxic. Everything sounds garbled, just an inch to the right of real. “Any preference?”
“I think I’ll go back to bed, actually.” The words say themselves, marching out of his mouth in a neat little line. Each word is clipped, the epitome of flawless, military precision.
Ginny looks let down.
She wouldn’t be the first.
It’s the first morning he’s felt well enough to get out of bed without prompting, since the letter came. Twenty minutes and a ruined kitchen in, he’s already giving up. He’s not what she signed up for. Maybe he never was. Maybe she loved the man she thought existed, the Boy Who Lived, the hero who used the war as a springboard to something greater instead of haunting their bedroom like a ghost because someone dared say no to him.
“Should I come get you? When breakfast is ready?”
His stomach growls.
“Yeah.” He says. “Of course.”
He crosses the room, slow as a turtle, to steal a kiss. She lets him, an unimaginable kindness, and he takes her into his arms, the two of them swaying to the tune that their hearts sing to each other. It almost feels like a normal morning. It almost feels like everything is fine. It almost feels like he is worth her love, like he has earned it, like there is no wide, yawning chasm between what she wants and who he is.
They both know he’s lying, that he won’t get out of bed once he’s gotten in. He doesn’t like lying to her. He doesn’t like lying to anyone. He hasn’t since Umbridge made him carve the words into his hand, an eternal reminder that no one will believe him unless they see it with their own eyes.
Dean Thomas had joked, a few months before, that the color of his skin should’ve taught Harry that. He’d stared at his hands, dyed the dark brown of old photographs by the summer sun, watched the way the tendons bobbed and weaved beneath the skin as he flexed his fingers. Was that something his father would have told him, if he had lived? Was that something that someone, anyone should have told him? What the color of his skin meant to others, what they would assume of him, how they would whisper when they thought he wasn’t listening that he was one of the good ones.
“I’ll see you in a bit.” She kisses him again, with a wild ferocity that makes him think of forest fires, of flares of light crashing against the protective enchantments at Hogwarts, of the way Voldemort’s voice had sounded when he called Harry to die. She sounds hopeful, like she truly believes he will come when called, will smile in a way that doesn’t dig serrated claws into her soul. “Sweet dreams, love.”
“They’re always sweet when I’m dreaming of you.”
They sidestep the realization that he wakes screaming more nights than not, his heart a thunderbolt in his chest. He lets her believe all of his dreams of her taste like spun sugar, and she lets him pretend she doesn’t know any better, and his feet take him to bed, the lovely, lovely, traitors.
It is dark when he wakes and her shoulder blades are pressed against his chest. He leans his head forward, drags his lips against the column of her neck, and she comes awake slowly, an inch of skin at a time. Life bleeds from him into her, through his fingers, and every curve and joint he maps creak slowly beneath his hands, like she is a puppet and he is turning her movements into art. She will turn his touch into magic, into something worth remembering for the ages, and he will waste away, dust to dust, ashes to ashes.
Dreaming of King’s Cross always leaves a sour taste in his mouth, so he seeks to forget it in her, drown it in her, choke the memory between his hands until it shrivels away to nothing. None of that brutality ever reaches her. He reserves it only for himself. He is a wild, reckless thing who doesn’t learn without the belt, doesn’t learn without the raw ache of hunger sitting heavy in his stomach. There is a goodness to her sharp edges, to the way she roars and rages.
Only death ever comes of him being angry.
Cedric, Sirius, Peter Pettigrew, the endless parade of Hogwarts students that fell, one after another, during the Battle of Hogwarts in his name. Fred. Ginny’s brother Fred. Crushed under a wall that he was only near because of Potterwatch, because of the DA, because of Harry. Because he believed in Harry. That didn’t work out too well for most people either.
Nothing good ever comes of him. Sometimes he wonders if the Dursleys weren’t right, when they told him he was wasting their space, their time, their resources. But Ginny is good despite him, is still here and still perfect, so maybe there is some good in him. Maybe the part of him that loves her, totally and wholly, is worth redemption. Maybe he can cast the rest of himself off and let that love be the base of who he is, let his heart lead him with abandon.
The issue is that he doesn’t know where to go. For the longest time, his goal was to be an Auror. To fight evil. To see the Death Eaters that ruined his childhood locked away forever so no child would ever suffer again. He had planned his OWLs by that, planned the NEWTs he never got by that, chasing the siren song of being useful once the war was over, of being wanted once the war was over.
He’d failed the simulation so thoroughly that the only reason they were holding the door for him was his name. His reputation. The Aurors couldn’t turn the savior of the Wizarding World out on the curb once and for all. For the sake of everyone involved, they had to frame it as a learning experience, as a temporary pause. They’d encouraged him to reapply when he’d fixed a few things about his application (his personality), but the words felt hollow, like they were a canned response to lessen the sharp, shooting ache of being rejected.
He drops a kiss on her forehead to soothe himself, but the hurt only intensifies. Is he using her for his own gain?
“Mm, Harry, no.” Ginny bats at his cheek. “Stop.” She sounds amused rather than upset, so he lays one last kiss on her cheek and settles back in. He relishes these moments, where he brings her out of her sleep rather than the nightmares, when they are quiet and warm and content together. “I’ve got a game tomorrow.” She slurs, leaning back to nuzzle his jaw. “Are you coming?” He can tell the exact moment she comes fully awake, when she hears what she’s said and pauses. “Shit, Harry, no, I mean-- take your own time, you don’t need to--”
“I want to go.” His voice wobbles, and he buries his face in her shoulder, his breaths coming in hot puffs against her skin. He feels distinctly uneasy, like every nerve ending is raw and painful, but presses himself closer to her regardless. He wants her heartbeat to become him, to swallow him down in bloody, loving glory. “I want to go. I want to see you.” He doesn’t know when his body began to shake, but he feels it when she peels herself away from him, her face suddenly inches from hers, and settles her hands on his shoulders. “I want to see you win.” He confides breathlessly. “I miss watching you do what you love. I miss feeling good enough to do it.”
“I know it’s difficult for you right now.” She cards her hand through his hair and he leans up into the touch. He thinks of Padfoot looking for scratches behind his ears and his heart aches, but he embraces the pain instead of crushing it down. Something about the safety of the darkness reminds him of his cupboard, where everything made sense even if it was wrong. “Hearing back from the Aurors, that was difficult. You have to take your time.”
He can read between the lines as well as anyone else. She needs him there. She wants him there. He’s been hurting her, by taking time for himself. She needs his support, needs him to lift her up and hold her so she can grab the sun. They were a team before this and they will be a team after this. His hand skates down her side, dips under the hem of her shirt to settle over the curve of her hip as he draws her in for another kiss.
“I’ve taken enough time.” He says hoarsely. “You need me. I’m never going to compromise on you.”
“If it’s too hard--” Ginny cringes, the part of herself that still seeks to erase herself out of any story like words crossed out in a child’s diary seeking to smother her. It can’t hide the joy in her eyes, the excitement in her clenched fists, the way she is looking at him like he has pulled the stars down from the sky just for her. “If it’s too difficult for you--” Her words stop and start, like a tug of war between her brain and mouth, and he silences her with his lips against hers.
He knows what she means. He’s always known what she meant. Sometimes he twists the meaning to hurt himself, to drive the knives of other’s opinions a little deeper in a selfish desire to feel something, anything at all, but he always knows what she means. He can see the emotions behind her words clear as day, even in the middle of the night. She wants to give him a way out in case it doesn’t work, wants some safety for herself, wants both of them to get what they need.
“I want to go.” He rubs his thumb along her hipbone before pulling her in as close as possible, his hand settling on the small of her back. “You’ll have to win for me, won’t you? Because I’m watching?” He peppers kisses on her cheeks and she yowls like a cat in a bath. “Tell Gwen, she’ll need to know you’re scoring all the goals tomorrow.”
“Harry, stop.” Ginny laughs, and his heart is so light that he thinks it might rip out of his chest, charting new territory in the sky. “I-- I would like it if you were there. But I don’t want you to push yourself.” Her fingers are playing with the hair at the nape of his neck and it’s beyond distracting. “I want you to take steps when you’re ready for them. Not because you think I want you to take them.”
“There’s no harm in a little bit of the second sometimes.” Harry says softly. “Especially when it’s for you. For us.”
“I’ll get you a ticket.”
They are jolted awake from their nap by a voice in the living room, and Harry slides out from under Ginny, grabbing his glasses and his wand in one hand. She snores in protest, sliding halfway off the mattress before crumpling to the floor in a twisted heap of limbs. Harry barely manages to put one foot in front of the other all the way to the living room, stuck in a twisted maze of thoughts that only lead toward blood and mauling and death, until he sees Percy Weasley, twisting the hem of his knitted sweater between his forefingers, looking at him like he’s not sure he’s welcome.
Percy shrinks back, long neck crooking like a giraffe’s, and Harry marshals his features into something resembling a welcoming smile, stashing his wand away in the pocket of his joggers.
“Hello.” Harry says, trying to sound kind, trying to sound welcoming, trying not to sound like the kind of man who’s just an hour or two removed from doing utterly indecent things to Percy’s only little sister. “What’s brought you here?” He leans awkwardly against the end table, not expecting it to shift beneath his weight, and stumbles into the side of the sofa, cursing under his breath. That’ll leave a bruise. “Sorry. I’ve, uh, just woken up.”
“It’s three in the afternoon.” Percy says, confused, as Harry tugs the collar of his t-shirt up as far as it will go, afraid of what it might reveal. “And-- well, I’m here on business. Family business.”
He blushes at the word family, as if he is still not quite sure he is allowed to say it. Harry knows the feeling.
“Do you want me to get Ginny?” Harry asks, pointing his thumb back over his shoulder. “She’s still in bed.”
As if timed, Ginny groans loudly enough to be heard in the living room. Neither Harry or Percy can quite make eye contact for a few seconds after.
“I’ll have to tell you both separately, I suppose.” Percy licks his dry lips. “We have a niece. Well, I suppose Ginny and I do. Seeing as you’re not yet, err, well, not yet, but--”
“We have a new niece.” Harry said softly. He tucked the slight away for later, to turn smooth with the sandpaper of self-doubt. “So Fleur’s had the baby, then.” He glances down at his watch, like it will tell him the date, but in his heart, he knows the second of May isn’t over. “That’s quite a birthday.”
“Yes.” Percy looks rather regretful. It strikes Harry, then. The baby will forever share the second of May with Fred’s death. “Her name’s Victoire. They wanted… They wanted her name to mean something.”
Wasn’t that what they were all searching for? A way to make the senseless violence of the second of May mean something? And here was this child, one who would be raised in a world without war, with a name that meant victory, a promise of a brighter future. One Harry might be lucky enough to be a part of. She might even call him Uncle Harry someday, if he played his cards right.
“Victoire.” The name felt like a new pair of Quidditch gloves. Stiff, but with the promise of familiarity, of fitting like a second skin, in the future. “That’s quite a name.”
“No nicknames.” Percy said brusquely, with the nervous smile of someone who had found it out the hard way. “A Healer dared call her Tori and nearly lost her head for it.”
“Tori?” Harry frowned. “Wherever did they get that from?”
“No idea.”
Ginny chooses that moment to tromp down the hallway, looking half-drowned and freshly dug out of her own grave, and grunts at Percy by way of a greeting. “What’s he doing here?” She slurs, before draping herself over Harry’s side like a limpet. “I didn’t let him in.”
“There’s another Weasley girl in the world.” Percy says, an ocean of fondness condensed into seven words. “And she’d like to meet her Aunt Ginny.”
Victoire is bundled up in a pastel pink blanket hand-knit by her grandmother, a tuft of blond hair sticking straight up at the crown of her head. Someone’s pinned a bow on it, which Harry thinks is frankly ridiculous. She’s a baby. What does she know about bows? He shoots a look at Ginny, one he thinks is fairly innocent, and she giggles. Maybe it wasn’t. He’s never been good at hiding his thoughts.
“D’you want to hold her?” Bill asks, and Harry blanches.
“Uh, let Ginny go. She’s good at this stuff.” He backs up behind Ginny, placing both hands on her shoulders like he’s using her as a human shield. “I’ll just, uh…”
“Hold her by proxy?” Hermione supplies. Like everything else, she is perfect at this. The sight of her cooing at Victoire, her and Ron’s head’s bent over the babies, tugged at Harry’s heart strings. Someday, his best friends will have someone new to sink their time and energy into, and the thought of it doesn’t scare him. If anything, it’s exciting. “You’re good with Teddy, Harry. She’s just Teddy, but smaller.”
“Ginny can go first.” Harry amends, and watches as Bill gently places Victoire in Ginny’s arms. He peeks over her shoulder, more nervous than anything else, and when Victoire mewls softly, getting settled in her aunt’s arms, Ginny looks up at him and beams. They were too young themselves to properly appreciate this stage with Teddy, the beautiful intersection of vulnerability and love.
He reaches around Ginny to softly rub Victoire’s head with the pad of his thumb. Ginny’s heartbeat is loud against his chest, the baby is still quiet and sweet, and nothing has gone wrong just yet.
Maybe the game won’t be so bad, if this has been good.
The chairs in the Harpies’ stadium are uncomfortable, even up in the family and friends box, where Harry is currently haunting the farthest corner of the room from the action like a particularly grouchy gargoyle. On the other side of the glass, green and gold blurs soar through the air. Harry’s fingers twitch around an imagined broom handle, his stomach swooping as Ginny rolls and dives, like he’s right out there with her again, like when they were young.
Neither of them say “when we were kids” anymore. It feels like a false promise, like they’re painting over their childhoods in brighter colors, like they’re pretending the Dursleys and Tom never happened. Instead, they say “when we were young”, as if they aren’t young still, over the background noise of joints that crackle and pop like logs in the fire, and pretend they haven’t traded their old problems in for new ones.
Teddy and Victoire are the heralds of a new generation. A new world, to which Harry is still acquainting himself. One that isn’t scarily like the maze during the third task of the Triwizard Tournament, a new horror lurking around the next corner, hackles always raised in case a new danger sprung up like the vines that had nearly dragged Cedric into the hedge. Cedric. Nearly five years after Cedric died, it still hurts to think of him.
It feels like everyone in the world is talking at once, the words knocking into each other in the hollow space between Harry’s ears. The sight of Ginny is the only thing keeping him rooted to this room, to this stadium, to this game. The sight of her doing what she loves most, the sight of her, joyful and throwing all her cares to the wind. There is nothing she takes more seriously than this game, nothing she plans and perfects more than every single turn and dive and feint. All of them blend into each other seamlessly, a mess of fingerpaint against the fabric of the sky, her greatest masterpiece.
He can’t believe anyone ever doubted she was meant for this.
He can believe that they doubted him. He might have killed Voldemort, but he’d had so much help. So many people had pushed him over the finish line. Of course, when tested truly by himself, all his weaknesses had shone like stop lights. Of course, when asked to act alone, to prove he’d learned from what he’d done, he’d come up empty. He had never been good at proving himself -- only at making impulse decisions that seemed to work out well, though he’d found himself wondering how much of that had been the prophecy, keeping him alive until that final confrontation.
Ginny scores another goal. Harry’s empty hands, and career prospects, seem bleaker than ever.
“Mr. Potter.” A nervous, mousy looking boy who can’t be more than two years older than Harry asks, as if he’s not sure he’s being formal enough. “Do you have a moment?”
“No.” Harry says curtly. Something deep in his chest twists, Aunt Petunia’s voice whispering that he’s being unaccommodating, that he should just shut up and give everyone what they ask for without trouble for once. “I don’t.”
He’s recently learned to say no, and while he relishes it, it still tastes bitter on his tongue, like stomach acid heaved up from an empty stomach. He remembers hunger well, remembers running from the bruised arms of his body into the embrace of his similarly starved soul, every part of him empty and wanting. He’s still stunted, one of those little trees in a pot that Mrs. Figg carefully pruned branches off of while the cats jumped off furniture in the background.
“You weren’t at the memorial yesterday.” The boy pushes. Harry is losing his patience. “No one saw you leave your house.”
“I was ill.” Harry says, because it is easier than admitting that he slept half of the day away, drowning in decades old feelings of rejection. “I’m better now. Just in time for Ginny’s game.” He points out the window, like it will return the boy’s attention to the game, but instead more of the vultures circle around him, like him speaking was the cue they had all been waiting for. “I’d like it if you watched her play, please. She’ll be upset with me for stealing the spotlight.”
“Relationship on the rocks?” One of the faceless mob asks, snapping a picture.
Harry’s sure he looks as shocked as he feels. They’ll undoubtedly spin it into something toxic. The press has never been kind to him -- he thinks of the ghost of his past, shining in his eyes, quite often when he needs a laugh -- but since the war, they have traded in rumors more than ever. Over the course of a month, he was said to have cheated on Ginny with Neville, Romilda Vane, Seamus, and Dean. A single month! He couldn’t fathom the effort necessary to keep two partners independent of each other, let alone two partners who knew each other, who ran in the same social circles.
People clearly thought he had more time and energy free than he did.
“No, not at all.” He says, with as much confidence as he can muster. They hem and haw over his words like they’re the arbiters of the truth, like his word isn’t the only one that matters. “It’s her game, is all. I think you should watch her. I’m doing it.”
His eyes flicker to the scoreboard. The Harpies have lost ground in the last thirty minutes, and maybe he should divert the reporters’ attention so they’re not so ruthless in the paper tomorrow, but his vision is blurry despite his glasses and he feels faint. He starts counting through the list of things she will need for him, whether they win or lose, and is down to item five when Appleby’s Seeker closes his hand around the Snitch.
The Harpies lose by thirty points. The sound of quills scratching against parchment is too much for him. He grabs whatever few belongings he came into the room with and disappears down a side hallway to the fireplaces reserved for players and their families, Flooing home before the mob of disappointed reporters crushes in on him.
Ginny needs him. He went to the game for Ginny and now he goes home for Ginny. It is all for her, about her, inextricably wrapped up in her, these days.
Ginny is laid out over him like a blanket, and he rubs his thumb in circles at her temple as she exhales softly, a sweet release of tension. She smells of his soap, his shampoo, and his deodorant. He chooses not to complain. After all of these years sharing each other’s space, he’s learned better than to call her out on the little bits of comfort she scrounges together to call her own. He’s been housetrained, she says, when their friends ask. He isn’t sure how he feels about the metaphor, but having her here in his arms, her heart beating against his chest, smelling of him, soothes his soul.
“You played an incredible game today.” He strokes down her jaw instead, and her eyes flutter shut. “The League standings, the points, that’s not all up to you. But you did your best, and that’s what’s a measure of your worth.”
He follows his fingers with his mouth, craning his neck uncomfortably to trace the line of her nose. Her lips are a reward, a surprise at the end of the journey, and she smiles before she realizes he’s twisting himself into shapes he’ll regret tomorrow. He’s no longer an athlete, after all, and certainly hasn’t stretched before trying this latest feat of acrobatics.
“Come on, then. On your back.” She pulls him further down the sofa with a thump, his head slipping off the arm onto the cushions, leaving his legs awkwardly bent. “I keep forgetting you’re tall.”
She says it like he chose to be this tall, like it’s an insult to her personally. He rather likes his height. He looks in the mirror and sees his father in his height and his nose and his hair and his mother in his eyes and his hands and his smile and feels like he belongs to them, truly, in a way that the Dursleys never could have erased. He stretches his legs out, calves hooked awkwardly over the far arm of the sofa, and raises an eyebrow at her.
“Good enough?”
“As long as you’re comfortable.” She sounds awfully pragmatic before curling up on top of him like a particularly reticent cat, allergic to the idea of getting anything but her way. “Keep telling me about what I’m worth, then.” She pats his shoulder. “Go on.”
“Well, you work very hard.” Harry says. “And you always contribute to the team’s success, but that doesn’t mean that the failure goes on your shoulders too. That means that you take what you did do and leave what you didn’t to fix for the next game. They don’t have Time Turners anymore, so what’s the use worrying about this game until you play again?”
“Two weeks.” Ginny says sleepily, inching up his body until her face settles in the crook of his neck. “Against Montrose.”
“They’re the ones with those awful Azkaban uniforms, aren’t they?” Harry asks, just so she’ll lightly slap his cheek. “What? I’m right.”
“Their colors are black and white.” Ginny says. “There’s not much they can do.”
“And then”, Harry laughs, “then they put that crow on both sides, and it’s like it’s watching you no matter what side of a player you’re looking at--”
“I should hope you’re not looking at anyone’s back except mine.” Ginny opens an eye, completely awake.
“Oh, I haven’t got eyes for anyone but you, I promise.” Harry winks. “I do have enough eyes to complain about the Magpies’ uniforms, though. They’re criminal.”
“Fine.” Ginny sighs. “They look awful. What can you do?”
“Let me finish, and then pass judgment.” Harry took a deep breath. “I buy the Montrose Magpies. I change the colors to pink and orange. Then, I let Ron design the uniforms.”
Ginny is nearly in tears by the time his plan comes to an end, forty-eight steps later, on “we debut the worst uniform design Ron comes up with on an important anniversary of a European Quidditch League Cup win”, shaking like a leaf in a hurricane. She looks free, like the weight of the guilt she’s been carrying since the final whistle blew has finally sloughed away, and this brand new Ginny that was hiding underneath, all the old, dead skin of loss molted away, is ready to live.
“Professor McGonagall would kill you.” She says, in between deep breaths that only manage to delay loud, raucous fits of laughter for seconds. “She loves the Magpies.”
“And she’ll love them even more when I’m through with them.” Harry says, brimming with unearned confidence, and Ginny laughs until bedtime, in fits and starts, remembering his plan whenever things get too dull.
No matter how little he achieves, how little money he makes, how little use he is to the world outside their flat, his presence, his words, his love mean something here. And while he used to wonder if that could be enough for him, he isn’t wondering so much anymore.