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Harry remembered the nightmare. He remembered waking up from the nightmare, the cold sweat. He remembered the silence; how terror stuck thick to the inside of his throat so that he couldn’t cry out or breathe. He remembered forcing himself to move, quietly, desperate not to wake anyone. Don’t make a sound. Don’t you dare make a sound.
He couldn’t remember leaving the bedroom, or heading into the kitchen, or making tea. Yet there he sat, at the small kitchen table with a cup of something over-brewed scalding his palms, the sharp pinch of heat slowly pulling him back into his body.
Harry had a habit of losing time these days. Minutes or hours just…gone. Not that it mattered. Not that he was doing anything with what was left of his life anyway. Most of the time he preferred when his body moved on its own. He liked finding out hours later he had managed to do everything he was supposed to, without ever having to actually experience all the moments that went into being alive.
It meant he didn’t have to exist. Didn’t have to think. Thinking was a dangerous feat these days. It had a tendency to him into spirals. Like now.
The autopilot turned off, Harry was swimming in his head. Even with the mug in his grasp, hot enough to burn his fingerprints clean off, he was lost. Images. Flashes. Nothing stuck in his mind long enough to grasp. Just fragments. A small room, a hand at his throat, darkness, a painful white light. The only constant: a bright, suffocating terror.
--
Looking back, the fact that Harry hadn’t so much as glanced in her direction as she entered the kitchen should have been a clue something was off. In her defense, Ginny was a bit preoccupied. It was well before dawn, and nightmares had left her far from restful. Waking to find her bed strangely empty had done nothing to soothe her nerves.
Seeing Harry in the kitchen, sitting at the table, nursing a cup of tea and very much not dead, was too much a relief to set off any red flags.
“You too?” She offered quietly, passing behind Harry to the kettle on the stove. She pressed her fingers to the metal to find it barely hot enough to be useful. Harry’s answering silence was a bit strange, but not completely unusual for a night such as this. She didn’t press. Instead, she chose to rummage around the kitchen for a clean mug. The dishes had really piled up. She tried to remember the last time either of them had washed anything they weren’t specifically about to use, but gave up. She chose a cup which looked relatively clean, rinsed it out, and made a mental note to do some cleaning in the morning.
It took another minute or so to locate the chamomile tea where it was buried under a mess of other teas and herbal remedies, so it wasn’t until she settled herself at the table across from Harry and looked up to speak that she noticed something was seriously wrong. Mainly that he wasn’t breathing.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Harry was breathing, but just barely. Quick, silent, shallow breaths- in and out in rapid succession. His eyes, wide and distant, were fixed on his hands. He was shaking. It wasn’t the violent, almost convulsive shaking Ginny’s had a tendency to revert to when her PTSD got the best of her. It was subtle, quiet, easy to overlook. But now that she had noticed it, it was obvious; his shoulders somehow both slumped forward and incredibly tense; his whole body trembled, somehow making him look much smaller than he was.
Ginny had never seen Harry like this. All their years knowing each other, all their time living together, all of his nightmares and all her breakdowns, and Ginny had never seen Harry have a panic attack. She had chalked it up to different coping mechanisms, figured he just wasn’t wired that way. The night terrors, the jumpiness, the days and days and days of not leaving the bed were more than enough; she never considered he might be hiding something from her.
She pushed the thought from her mind. She could scold him about that later, when he was breathing again. When he didn’t look so small.
--
“Harry.” The voice was soft, gentle, barely registering in the fog of Harry’s mind. He knew it, recognized it. He knew he did.
“Harry, listen.” And he tried. He really did. Tried to pin down the voice flitting through his head like a injured bird. “Harry, it’s Ginny, can you hear me?”
Ginny. Of course, it was Ginny. Ginny, who was always there. Ginny, who he loved. Ginny, who he almost lost a dozen times over. Ginny, with the faded smile. Ginny, with the soft hands and the hard laugh. Ginny, who could have died for him, because of him. Ginny, who could have died. Ginny, who could still die. Because of him. Because he was trouble. No good, stupid boy. More trouble than you're worth. The kind of person bad things followed. Ginny, who he loved. Ginny, who he killed, not yet, but someday. Ginny.
--
Harry’s breathing didn’t even out as she’d hoped. If he heard her at all, it didn’t show. His eyes stayed glued on his hands.
“Harry,” Ginny tried again. “Harry listen to me, you’re okay.”
She thought back to her own attacks, how he pulled her out of them with his hand in her hand, or on her back. She reached out, hoping to ground him, or provide some sort of comfort, or at the very least get him to focus so she could calm him down. The moment her hand reached his, he stilled. No, not stilled- went rigid. The shaking stopped, but in its place was a sudden, awful stillness. Under her touch, Harry seemed to disappear. He didn’t actually turn invisible in the literal sense, but it was as if it were suddenly harder to focus on him, to actually see him. Something made him fuzzy.
Magic?
Ginny pushed against the fog, tried to concentrate on the man in front of her. She wasn’t sure if the physical contact was making things better or worse. She tried asking, but her words didn’t seem to register. Either way, the contact seemed to have gotten some piece of his attention. She moved a hand up his arm and, when he didn’t pull away, began rubbing small circles against his skin with her thumb.
“Breathe, Harry. Breathe with me okay? Like we’ve done a million times, alright? In, two three, four. Out, two, three, four, five, six. Come on. In. Out.”
It took a few minutes, minutes which felt like hours in the suddenly claustrophobic kitchen, but eventually something seemed to click. Harry’s breath became slightly less sporadic, slightly less shallow, and slowly dissolved into something resembling normal. His body settled out of the strange glamour and back into focus. As Harry’s calm returned, so did the shaking. Ginny felt the tremors start under her palm for only a moment, and then Harry’s hands were gone, pulled away into his lap. Her own hands hovered in the middle of the table for a moment, near Harry’s abandoned cup, still full, likely cold.
She looked up, trying to meet his eyes, but he kept his face ducked low. His body shook visibly now, violently in the way it hadn’t before.
“Harry-”
“Sorry.” He didn’t look up, didn’t move except for the shakes. It wasn’t the response she was looking for, but relief flooded her the sound of his voice. At least he was breathing well enough now to speak.
“Don’t be an idiot,” she sighed, trying to break some of the tension. He still didn’t take his eyes off his lap.
“I’m serious, Ginny. I didn’t- er, I didn’t mean for you to see this.”
“See what?” She asked, trying to keep her voice soft. He shrugged slightly. I didn’t mean for you to see me like this hung unspoken between them. That hurt. Ginny was supposed to be the one he came to for these things. They went to each other. The hurt pushed her walls up, gave way to annoyance; she tried to brush the feeling aside. She failed.
“You think I won’t get it?” She baited, and if he flinched, just slightly, at the tone of her voice, she was too irked to notice.
“No! No that’s not what I-”
“I can wake you up from your night terrors, and you can talk me out of my breakdowns, but somehow I won’t understand when when the Great Harry Potter has a panic attack? Like I don't get them. Like I wasn’t there, too, Harry. Like I didn’t lose people, too. We went through that war together . You think-”
“It wasn’t about that.” Harry’s voice was so soft she almost didn’t hear him, but it was enough to cut her short.
“What?” She asked, her voice gentler now. Her eyes searched his face, but he refused to look at her. He slumped back in his chair and ran a hand over his face, but didn’t answer. “Harry?”
Harry swallowed hard. He kept his eyes low. For a moment, Ginny worried he wouldn't answer her; or worse that he had shut her out completely. Then he cleared his throat.
“The nightmare, the- er- flashback, I… I wasn’t thinking about the war or Voldemort or any of that. I-” his voice broke off. He let out a long, shaky breath and leaned forward to rest an elbow on the table. He was quiet for a long while, a hand across his eyes, obscuring his face. It took Ginny a moment to realize he was crying.
“Hey,” she said quietly. Her anger gone just as quickly as it came, she abandoned her seat to cross around the table to his side. “Hey, hey, hey. You’re okay.” She wanted to hold him, then remembered his reaction to her hand earlier that evening, that awful stillness, thought better of it. “Harry? Hey, baby, what can I do? Harry?”
There was a pause, where she simply hovered beside him, unsure of her next move. Then she reached forward, slowly, and placed a tentative hand on his shoulder. The moment her she made contact, Harry’s quiet crying devolved into heavy sobs. She slid her arm down behind his shoulders, wrapped another under across his chest. She was glad when that seemed to be the right move. Harry took a hand away from his face and held her arm tightly to his chest, leaning into her.
She shifted to rest her head on his shoulder, rubbing small circles on his back with her free hand. She whispered what she hoped were reassuring words into his shoulder and let him cry himself out.
--
The great thing about a really good cry was that it had about the same effect as one of Harry’s time-blackouts. Which is to say, he didn’t have to think. He could just exist and listen to Ginny whisper you’re safe, you’re okay, hey you’re okay into the sleeve of his shirt. He didn’t have to worry about whether not not she meant it, or if he believed her. He could just cry.
The awful thing about a really good cry was always what came after.
Eventually he calmed himself enough that Ginny moved from his side. He didn’t blame her, he knew how he could be. How this made him look. Ugly, boy. Pathetic, noisy, disgusting. He didn’t blame her, but that couldn't stop the pit from forming in his stomach as she slipped her arm from under his.
“Here,” Ginny said a moment later. Harry looked up to find she had brought over a cup of water and a box of tissues. “I’m sure your tea is terrible by now, and dehydration’s a bitch.”
He was surprised to see her still standing there, more surprised by the offer. He shouldn’t be, he knew that. This was Ginny. He took the cup.
“Thank you.”
He felt more than saw her rolling her eyes, and blew his nose into some of the tissues.
“Just drink your water,” she said, pulling her chair around so she could sit beside him without crouching on the floor. Harry did as he was told. He sipped slowly, the very real dehydration following his dramatic breakdown warring with the nausea in his stomach.
They sat in silence for a few moments, Harry slowly sipping his water and Ginny watching him intently.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Ginny asked. She wasn’t looking at him now, but at a mug now wrapped in her hands. She took a sip, and glanced in his direction.
Harry knew he owed her an explanation. He wanted to explain, he really did, but his mouth went dry anyway. He could feel his hands start to shake again put the water down to hide them in his lap.
“Come on, Harry. We’re beyond that, I think. Aren’t we?” She asked. She put her hand on his arm, and he tried not to stiffen under the contact. He was being stupid, irrational. This was Ginny. And she was right, they were so beyond him hiding his hands, so far beyond him stiffening under her touch. He knew this, but his body refused to listen. Pathetic.
“You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to,” she offered when he didn’t answer. “I just...I think it might help, you know? I just want you to know I’m here. If you do want to.”
Harry didn't really know what to do with that. He almost wanted to laugh at her, at her sincerity. He felt certain she wouldn't be saying that, if she really know what she was offering. Then came the wave of guilt. This was Ginny- she deserved better than his doubt. He shoved the feeling down. Harry forced himself to nod, instead, and tried not to think too much about her hand on his arm.
“I know.” His voice sounded raspy, unused. He cleared his throat once, twice, a third time, and picked at a hangnail. He stole a look at her. She was watching him intently now, trying to figure him out. He should just tell her, but he had no idea how. He was so embarrassed, so ashamed of everything that had happened, he didn’t know where to begin.
“Do you- do you think I can’t handle it? Harry, we’ve been through hell, haven’t we? We’ve both seen hell, and- I just- I think I’ve proven whatever it is, I can take it. I’m not going anywhere.” Her voice had taken on a defensive edge, but Harry could hear the hurt beneath it. She thought he didn’t trust her. She was wrong. She was so wrong.
“I know. I know you can. It’s not that. It really isn’t, it’s just-” There are things we haven’t talked about. Things I didn’t want you to find out, not like this. Things I shouldn’t tell you like this . He couldn’t bring himself to say it, but she was watching him with those eyes so he took deep breath and tried again.
“We haven’t talked about...everything. Yet.” He dropped his eyes back to his hands. “And I don’t mean about the war or who died or what happened. I mean I haven’t told you everything yet about- er...me.”
He could feel her watching him, but he couldn’t bring himself to meet her gaze. Logically, he knew he shouldn’t be so nervous, shouldn’t be so scared. Logically he knew Ginny loved him, knew she wasn’t going to just leave. But beneath the logic was the shame rooted and rotting somewhere deep inside him. He swallowed hard.
--
“What about you?” Ginny prodded when Harry fell suddenly silent. He shot her a fleeting glance, like he’d rather be anywhere but talking to her right now, and it was like a punch in the gut. He had slumped over again, glancing up from under his lashes, looking for all the world like a guilty child. She almost told him not to say anything, almost suggested they just go back to bed and forget it all happened, anything to make it so he never looked at her like that again. But he spoke up before she could.
“Do you remember the summer before your first year at Hogwarts?” He asked, his voice mild if still a bit raspy from before. “When I came and lived here for a few weeks before the school year started?”
Ginny swallowed, pushed away thoughts about what had happened that school year, how everything got started, and nodded.
“Do you remember what Ron told Molly about how they, uhm, found me?” He shifted in his seat and brought a thumb to his mouth to chew at the nail. Ginny thought back. That summer, she had been so excited- overly so- to have the famous Harry Potter living in her house that she honestly hadn’t been paying much attention to her brother’s stories. After a beat, she nodded again.
“Bars on your window, right? Ron said your muggles had you all locked up.” Now it was Harry’s turn to nod. He searched her face for a moment, as if trying to gauge whether or not she was understanding him. The thumb he was worrying had started to bleed, but he didn’t seem to notice.
Ron had told their mother the muggles had been starving him. Ginny had always just assumed he was hyperbolizing, the way Ron always dd when he wanted to get himself out of trouble. She thought about how his muggle clothes had fit him strangely, and not like her brother's hand-me-downs. And the jokes Harry often made, after they had survived something terrible, about how his Aunt and Uncle would be so disappointed he hadn’t died. She had laughed with him at that before. Certainly he didn’t get on well with his guardians, but no one was that terrible. Not to a child. She watched him for a moment before something clicked. Her stomach churned.
“It was about them.” It wasn’t a question. How could she have been so stupid? She should have guessed at this long before now. “All this was about the Dursleys?”
Harry ducked his head again, focusing on the finger which was now bleeding rather profusely. He shrugged and made a sound halfway between a scoff and a laugh.
“Yeah, I know. My twentieth birthday just around the bend, and I’m having nightmares about my Aunt and Uncle. It's not my best look, I'll admit. But-er. -That, though- it- well, that was one of the easier...stays I spent with the Dursleys.” Harry’s attempt at a conversational tone was betrayed by the shake in his voice. He kept his eyes down. Ginny felt suddenly far away; she knew where this conversation was headed. She focused on breathing. “I mean after the initial- I mean, when you’re locked in a room for most of the day it’s hard to get in anyone’s way. Which made certain things...better. Besides, I dropped a few extra pounds. If you’re looking to slim down, the Dursley Diet will definitely do the trick.” The joke fell flat, but he laughed a little anyway.
“Harry-”
“Did I ever tell you I slept in a cupboard?” He laughed at that, too; rubbed at the back of his neck, at the scar on his forehead.
“You slept where?” Ginny tried to keep her voice calm and even, to keep the surge of anger and hate she felt towards the Dursleys in that moment from escaping. Harry just laughed again, a short, mirthless sound.
“Yeah, for, like, the first eleven years of my life? We had this little cupboard under the stairs in the front of the house. I had a little makeshift bed in there, and, er, yeah.” Harry's strange smile faltered. Ginny was almost glad when he had to pause. She didn’t want to know this. Any of this. “They’d lock me in there, you know? Sometimes. When I’d fucked something up. Ruined breakfast or broke a plate or freed a snake at a zoo with accidental magic.” The corner of his mouth turned up in the ghost of a smile at the memory of the snake. That was a story she’d heard. She had never thought to ask what had happened after.
“It was a small space. I mean, I was a pretty small kid, but there was barely enough room in there to breathe sometimes. Holidays were the worst. When school was in, they had to at least let me out to go to school most of the time, but during holiday they could keep me in there for days. Sometimes they’d forget to lock the door, and that was fine because I could just sneak out at night, you know? To steal food from the kitchen. I was a quiet kid, and I was pretty good at it. But sometimes they’d lock it, and, uh, it’s so- it’s so dark in there and time just stretches on forever. There’s no way of knowing when they’d let me out. I mean, obviously they always let me out, eventually- I mean, I’m here- but sometimes it really would seem like they just forgot and I’d think…I’d think maybe I’d just… you know.”
I thought I was going to die in there . He didn’t say it, but Ginny could feel the weight of the words sitting between them. Harry had been speaking with a detached air that sounded more like he was telling a story of some other child, but his voice caught at the end. He shifted in his seat, glanced up at Ginny to see if he needed to finish the thought, almost begging her to just understand.
Ginny nodded.
--
“Right,” Harry said. He cleared his throat and wiped his sweaty palms on his legs. “Anyway, so, uhm, the Dursleys, they all had, you know, pretty bad tempers. I mean you have to be pretty ill tempered to be willing to lock a kid in a cupboard, right?” Harry laughed, desperate to lighten the mood in any way he can, desperate to show he could take what his childhood dished out in stride.
“Well the summer after uh, after the uh-” Harry took a deep breath, then another, trying to bring himself to talk about what was perhaps the worst year of his life, despite having some gruesome competition. Ginny gave his arm a light squeeze. The feeling startled him, and Harry went suddenly, perfectly still- not a flinch. Harry never flinched. But could feel himself slip from vulnerable into nothing in a second flat. He recovered quickly enough. Ginny looked apologetic, but it pulled him out of his head. He shifted to peel her hand off his arm, and held it in his own. She gripped back tightly, though who she thought needed it, he couldn’t tell. Maybe both of them.
Harry focused on the feeling of her hand, trying to pull comfort from it, trying not to notice how it made his skin crawl to be touched at all. It was easier now that he had some control over it. It's Ginny. He told himself. It's just Ginny. Over and over. He breathed out. He wasn't the kid he was back then. He was fine . He pushed on.
“The year of the Triwizard Tournament, after everything that went on in the maze, I was pretty fucked up. I mean, you know that.” Harry had been such a jerk after that year. With everything that had happened, and Voldemort’s anger in his veins, Harry had hurt everyone close to him at least once that year.
“Harry, you were tortured. You watched the man who killed your parents get raised from the dead and he killed your friend- our friend. You had every right to be-” Harry squeezed her hand. She was the most forgiving person he knew. Under all that fire, she really tried to understand everyone.
“It’s okay,” He tells her, smiling a bit. It was small, but there was, life behind it. “We’ve talked about that year. I’m not going to start the- what was it you called it? The spiral-”
“The spiral of self blame,” she finished for him, smiling a little bit, too, at the made up terminology.
“Right, I’m not spiraling anywhere right now. I’m just saying, I was pretty fucked up.” Harry could feel himself slipping into the memory of that summer. "The nightmares, the were... well about as bad as they are now, I guess. You can probably imagine, the Dursleys were...less than happy about being woken up at all hours by me screaming at nothing-”
“Hardly nothing,” Ginny interrupted, indignant. Harry tried for a smile, but wasn't sure if it reached his face. It was good to hear her sympathy, but he was far away.
“Vernon- my uncle- he’d never had any qualms with anyone in the family, you know, hitting me? My cousin, Dudley, he even had a game of it. Harry Hunting. Did I ever tell you about that? He and a group of his friends would chase me around until they either caught me and beat the shit out of me, or got bored and gave up. And Petunia, I mean she used to swing frying pans at my head. These weren’t people who had any issue with, uh, corporal punishment.”
Lost halfway between then and now, Ginny’s hand in his lost its comforting edge. He felt dirty, wrong, for letting her touch him. Disgusting, boy. Pathetic . It hurt, burned. He pulled away, and she let him. He folded his arms across his chest, trying to make himself feel smaller, less of a target. Trying to make himself feel safe enough to continue. An impossible feat. He could feel himself losing touch with his body, but his mouth continued anyway.
“It got bad that summer. I wasn’t sleeping well, which meant they weren’t sleeping well which was...bad. I tried just not sleeping all together, but that didn't work out so well either. So there was the whole issue of me waking them up in the middle of the night, which was one thing. And then, during the day, God, I could hardly ever focus on anything long enough to get a task done. And the panic attacks, they’d happen at the worst moments. I don’t think a day passed until I came and met the order where I wasn’t on the wrong end of something, you know?”
--
Ginny felt numb. She watched Harry intently as he spoke, and he looked lost. No, not lost- gone. His eyes were so distant they were almost lifeless. She longed to reach out again, to wrap him in her arms and convince him that he was safe and here; that she would never let anything hurt him again. But Harry was all but balled up in his chair, very obviously avoiding her touch, so she kept her hands to herself.
“It wasn’t the beatings that were the worst part, though, you know?” He asked it like a question, unsure, but didn’t seem to need an answer. “It was the... helplessness. I mean, there I was, the Boy Who Lived. Faced Voldemort himself more than once and lived to tell about it, and there I was, getting it handed to me by some muggles who hardly even bothered to remember my name. Pathetic, really it was. Just pathetic.”
Harry spat the last word. The air around him buzzed momentarily with an anger so totally encompassing it felt like static. Ginny could could feel her hair stand on end. For a moment, that static was everywhere- and then, just as quickly, it was gone. Harry took a deep breath and composed himself, fixing his features into as neutral an expression as he could manage.
“And so the dream, I was, uh, back, I guess?” He glanced up at Ginny. “I was back there and I’d done something wrong again and there was nothing I could do. Everyone dead, and Uncle Vern- and there was nothing I could do. Just nothing. And then waking up and the room was so dark, it was like...like I hadn’t gotten out? I know it sounds stupid, but I couldn’t get back out of the dream. I couldn’t get out of it and-”
He cut off, taking a few deep breaths. His hands, balled into fists, shook with the effort to contain himself. Ginny had bit into her lip so hard she tasted blood. She watched Harry struggle against his emotions, and tentatively reached out to him again, desperate to take away some of the hurt he was trying to hide.
“It’s not stupid,” She said, lamely, placing her hand on his knee.
His eyes shot to where her hand had landed. Everything else about him froze.
“I’m sorry.” She dropped her hand. “You need more space? I can-”
His eyes snapped up to meet hers, breaking the perfect awful stillness of him. The panic from before returned to his face. He looked torn. “I’m- no, I’m sorry, you should-”
“Just tell me what you need, Harry,” Ginny insisted, and he searched her face. She tried not to be hurt by confusion there, reminding herself that he wasn't totally with her at the moment. It hurt anyway.
“It’s just-” he squirmed awkwardly. “People don’t-. I'm not-.” He cleared his throat and looked away.
"God, this is embarrassing." Harry laughed nervously- a hollow sound. He ran a hand through his hair. Already messy, it now stood up in every direction.
"People don't what?" Ginny pressed gently.
"Touch me?" he replied. He tried again for that same terrible laugh. "When I'm like this."
With that, Harry's anxious smile chipped, his voice caught. He cleared his throat once, twice, a third time without meeting her eyes. Ginny had to physically bite her tongue to keep every warring emotion from pouring past her lips. She didn't know what to say, but she knew neither the anger or grief burning in her chest would do them any good. Harry rubbed at the back of his neck.
"I told you it's embarrassing." Harry said it like a joke, but his voice sounded thick- hurt.
“Harry.” She placed a hand on his shoulder, gently. When he didn’t pull away, just stared at her, she moved it to his face. His eyes seemed to burn straight through her, his face unreadable. It took a moment, but he eventually relaxed into the touch, leaned toward her.
“I'm- I'm so sorry,” She told him, brushing a particularly messy bit of his hair back with her other hand. It was true; she didn't know what else to say. He opened his mouth to respond with something Ginny was certain she rather die than hear him say. Something like Don't be sorry or It's fine.
Instead she threw her arms were around him and pulled him into her. She pressed her mouth into the crook of his neck and held. He was slow to respond, slow to move. But soon his arms were around her, too, crushing her to him. Harry could be so quiet. If his face weren't pressed into her hair, if he wasn't holding her so tightly, she probably would have missed it. As it was she could hear him sniff, feel him shake around her.
For the second time that night, Harry was crying. Ginny could count on one hand the number of times she had seen Harry cry before this night, and always it was preceded by death. She wondered just how much Harry hid from her, and tightened her arms around him. She maneuvered their bodies so they wouldn’t be hovering awkward in the halfway space between the chairs, and lowered the both of them to the floor, their backs against the wall. They sat like that for a long time, until Harry stopped crying, and then until Ginny stopped crying- when had she started? She couldn't remember- and then until Harry suggested they move because his butt had gone numb. Ginny chuckled, and he helped her to her feet.
There were a few minutes while Ginny made them fresh cups of tea and they moved to the sofa to sit snuggled up against one another, in which neither of them mentioned the scene they had just left behind. Instead, they talked about their plans for the next day, the dishes that needed doing, Harry’s outing with Molly to buy some new curtains, before settling into a comfortable silence.
“I’m sorry,” Harry said suddenly. Irritation sparked inside Ginny, that he still thought that was necessary. He continued before she could retort, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, about all of it. I know you can handle it. I do. There’s just always some part of me that doesn’t want to be so-”
“Helpless?” She finished for him. He looked away.
“Yeah.”
She leaned back to stare at his face, trying to make sense of him.
“I don’t want you to think I was hiding this, though,” he told her. “It’s not like this all the time. I’m not like this. I hardly think about them anymore. It’s just... loud, you know? It’s hard to get out of my head.”
Something inside of her loosened. She nodded, and they returned to silence.
“They were wrong, though, you know that, right?” Ginny said after a while.
“Ginny, don’t.” Harry’s voice was rough, hard in a way that was unfamiliar to her. She looked up at him again.
“Don’t what? Don’t tell you they were wrong? Because they were, Harry. The way they treated you? The way you talk about yourself sometimes, it’s not-”
“Ginny, I’m tired. It’s been a long night. Please. Can we not do this right now? Please?” He sounded so broken, looked so tired, Ginny couldn’t bring herself to press the issue. They had time to talk about these things later. Instead, she sat up. He watched her pull away, then stared at something across the room, his face unreadable.
“I love you, you know that right?” She said. His eyes snapped back to hers, and she stared him down, willing him to understand just how much she meant the words.
“I-.” He faltered, looked away. Ginny put her palm against his cheek, gently turning him to look at her again. She ducked her head to meet his eyes.
“I love you, Harry Potter. Whatever’s happened, whatever you’ve been through, whatever we’ve been through, I love you.” There was a beat of silence, and then the corner of his mouth tugged upwards.
“I know,” he sighed. He pressed his forehead to hers for just a moment. “I know. I love you too.”
Ginny smiled, leaned in to press a kiss to the corner of his mouth, relieved when he kissed back. It was short, chaste even, but they could both feel so much more behind it. She settled back into his side, and he wrapped his arms around her. There was so much more she wanted to tell him, to make him understand, like how her heart skipped ten beats every time he smiled, that he was so much more than just the Boy Who Lived, that he had never deserved a damn moment of the awful things he’d been through. She almost tried again, but when she glanced up, she found him fast asleep.
Harry always looked young in the rare occasions when he slept well. Young in the best way. Nothing about him echoed the night they had just had. He just looked peaceful. He looked happy, or at least something close to it. She pulled the throw blanket off the side of the sofa and did her best to drape it over the both of them. Suddenly more exhausted than she had felt in a long time, Ginny settled back into Harry’s side. She closed her eyes and focused on the steady breathing of the man beside her. This boy, her boy.
So maybe okay was a long way off for the both of them. Maybe happy was just the small moments between catastrophes. So long as they were together, so long as the happy moments happened, they could handle the rest. She could handle the rest.