Fic: All I Need
Harry was fidgeting in his seat, staring at the pretty waitress, poking at his food - in short, doing anything to avoid looking at Ginny.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, as he said “I think we should end this.”
“What?” Her incredulous expression was becoming too familiar. “What is it this time?”
“I just need some time to define myself - not the hero, not your boyfriend, just me. I need time to think about what I want.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s not forever - you must understand. Don’t you need those things?”
“No, Harry,” she said. “All I’ve ever needed was you.”
Harry sat on the worn-out couch in his flat (his flat, not their flat, not anymore), with a carton of muggle Chinese carry-out in one hand and a pair of chopsticks in the other. It was absolutely astonishing, he thought morosely, how quickly she had removed every single trace of herself from her residence of two years.
Every physical trace, he thought, except for her smell. He took another bite of Chow Mein. Her smell still lingered in the carpets, in the bedding, in the sofa and the chairs. He kept thinking she would step out from behind the doorway shouting “surprise!”
Feeling rather sorry for himself, he took another bite of Chow Mein. It was for the best, he assured himself. He had made the right decision. He and Ginny could still end up together, he insisted, when he knew himself a little bit better. And the relationship would be better when he did; this relationship was too important for him to mess up by not knowing what he wanted. It was for the best.
She had moved out without even giving him a choice; saying that if they weren’t going to be dating she certainly wasn’t going to be his roommate either, and she could stay above the shop with George or in the Burrow with her mum until she found a suitable flat of her own. It was all very business-like. She had her team-mates, and not the Weasleys, help her move out. Probably because the Weasleys would get involved, and the Harpies could be relied upon not to.
None of the Harpies liked Harry, anyway. He wondered vaguely if they were all lesbians.
That was the bitterness speaking. Harry sighed and took another bite of his Chow Mein.
“Harry!” Ron’s face popped into the fireplace. Harry looked up slowly, set down his dinner, and sunk to the floor in front of the hearth.
“Hi, Ron,” he said softly.
“I heard what happened,” Ron said, “Or rather, what you did.” Harry sat back a bit.
“I made the right decision” Harry said, as much to reassure himself as to assure Ron.
“No, mate, I think you made a bloody stupid decision. But I’m not going to try and talk you out of it because Merlin knows that’s impossible. I’ve brought the firewhiskey.”
Harry stepped back for Ron to floo into the flat, and got his wand ready to Scourgify; Ginny hated the soot.
On second thought, Harry decided, let Ron track soot all over the flat for all he cared.
Ron stepped out of the fireplace with a cough, and Scourgified himself. Harry sunk back onto the sofa with a sigh. “It’s perfectly reasonable,” Harry said with a significant look. “What I did was for the best.”
“Not going there, mate,” Ron warned, and walked straight to the kitchen to get glasses. “You made her really upset,” he shouted.
Harry sighed. “Did I?” he asked. “She seemed more… businesslike.”
Ron stopped in the doorway. “When have you ever known my sister to be businesslike when she wasn’t upset?”
Harry picked up his chopsticks again, and didn’t say anything. Ron came over and sat next to him, pouring each of them a glass of firewhiskey. “Look, Ron,” Harry said finally. “I understand that she’s upset. But I only did what I needed to do.” Ron rolled his eyes. “Ron, you’re not taking this seriously. I don’t want to mess up my whole life with Ginny because I didn’t think things through.”
Ron laughed. “Well, you don’t have a life with Ginny right now,” he said shortly, and picked up his glass. “I’m not here to convince you, and I’m not here to be convinced.”
Harry sighed and traded his Chinese for a glass of Ogden’s finest. “Thanks for being here anyway,” he said shortly. They clinked glasses and Harry gulped the whole thing down. It scorched a path to his stomach and sat there warmly; he fought the urge to hiccup.
He had barely put his glass down before Ron filled it again.
Harry wasn’t invited to the Burrow for dinner the next Sunday; instead he got a very nice owl from Molly saying it was just a quiet family affair and he wouldn’t be interested in it anyway, but Harry knew the real reason. He wasn’t really surprised. The Sunday after, Molly didn’t even send an owl. He wasn’t offended.
Just lonely.
She hadn’t been gone for three weeks, and already he could almost physically feel his loneliness, like a hole in his gut. He had moved up to cooking - the first week had been devoted to various and sundry take-out cuisines - but still hadn’t gotten back up to anything more complicated than pasta.
At the moment, water was boiling. Hermione, he suspected, had been kind enough to forego her invitation to the Burrow this week in favor of keeping a friend in need company. She would be over shortly. He couldn’t imagine that she would be excluded from the family simply because he had to be. In her honor, he was trying to work up the energy to make Puttanesca. The sauce was sitting in a jar on the counter; he thought vaguely that it should be on the stove instead.
Harry stared into space for a moment. The boys at work on Friday had, probably at Ron’s behest, remarked upon his morose demeanor. When Harry told them he needed some space to find himself, he got a strange look.
“What do you mean, find yourself?” one of the boys asked. “You’re Harry Potter. The boy who lived. Everyone knows who you are.”
Harry sighed. “But Voldemort’s dead. Who am I now?”
Ron laughed, and Harry stared at him until someone clarified - “You’re the same person you ever were. You’re an auror now - you’re still the hero.”
Harry sighed and looked down, and then bit his lip, and then tousled the hair at the back of his head in a motion he had unknowingly picked up from his father. “What if I don’t want to be? Now that I don’t have to. I mean, I could be a Quidditch player for all anyone cares.”
Ron rolled his eyes and left. The other boys stared at Harry. “But you don’t want to,” one of them said simply, and Harry realized that, as much as he loved Quidditch, he didn’t want to play it professionally. He could, but he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps.
“I guess not,” he said, as he realized that at the same time, he didn’t need to be an auror. He would have been perfectly happy playing Quidditch, or teaching Defense at Hogwarts, or perhaps even a million other careers that played to his strengths. What he needed was to regain the life that Voldemort had stolen from his parents, the life that Voldemort had tried to steal from him. He needed to be normal, average Harry Potter.
There was a knock at his door, snapping Harry out of his reverie. Hermione knew she could floo or even apparate to Harry’s place, but she still used the door as much out of politeness as out of the desire not to catch Harry and Ginny on the sofa. Not that that would happen again anytime soon.
Harry sighed and opened the door with a wave of his wand.
The pot of pasta boiled over.
Surprisingly enough, Hermione had banished her winter cloak to the coat closet, shut the door, and was at the stove top before Harry could even stand up. Then again, in his current mood, perhaps that wasn’t particularly surprising. “Were you planning on burning the flat down?” Hermione asked tersely as she pulled a pan down from the cabinet and poured the sauce and pre-chopped vegetables in to simmer.
Harry said nothing. Hermione sighed and set the pot to watch itself. “Harry, I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but this whole ‘finding yourself’ thing is really stupid.” Harry just sighed. So she had given up on dinner with the Weasleys in order to lecture him. He gritted his teeth in preparation for the long haul. “Ginny’s miserable and, from the looks of it, so are you. She’s wondering what she did wrong, and I’m tired of telling her that it’s nothing she did; that you’re just being a sodding idiot as usual.”
“I wasn’t being an idiot! I didn’t want to mess up my relationship with Ginny!”
Hermione laughed as she stirred. “And now?”
“What?”
“What do you want now?”
Harry sighed. “I miss her. But I can’t risk ruining a life with Ginny just because I’m selfish now.”
Hermione wasn’t looking at him; she levitated the pasta over to cool in a dish and stirred the sauce as she spoke. “Harry, what you are doing right now is risking ruining a life with Ginny. No, you can’t be certain that you’ll never mess up; but that’s always the case, isn’t it? As long as you two trust each other and are open with each other and try to solve your problems, I don’t think you’ll come up against anything worse than Voldemort. And he couldn’t keep you apart very long, now could he?” Then she mixed in the sauce and brought the dish to sit between the two settings Harry had laid out at the table. “Dinner is served,” she said soothingly.
Harry sat down to eat, and they didn’t speak about Ginny any more that evening.
Time sped up, again, slowly. By the time a month had passed the dull ache in Harry’s gut had half-healed, and he was beginning to act like a normal human being again. There were still no Burrow dinners in his future, or at least not for quite some time, but at least now his cooking surpassed that which he could buy pre-made at the supermarket. And Harry Potter’s life stayed like that for quite some time; passable, almost acceptable, but not quite whole. Not sparkling, not exciting.
Not alive.
And then the breakthrough occurred. It was a Saturday evening, and he was busy keeping his mind off of other things by preparing a rather labor-intensive baked tilapia filet. His pride when it went into the oven was surpassed by his pride at taking two perfect pieces of fish out of the oven.
He plated them with asparagus risotto and a small watercress salad, poured himself a glass of wine, and ate at the counter because without a guest the kitchen table felt so empty. And then he looked at the door and realized that, as beautiful as the fish was, and as wonderful as it tasted, well, the one thing that he wanted so badly it was a physical pain in his gut was for Ginny Weasley to burst through the door apologizing for being late, and perhaps bringing one of her mother’s pies as recompense. She would pick up his plate, split it in two (the meal would stretch with a little bit more risotto and the rest of the salad), pour herself a glass of wine, move everything to the table and sit down with a confident smile.
She would take a bite and comment with a wry grin that his aunt and uncle trained him well.
In the end, the pie was optional.
He thought of flooing the Burrow, but it had been a month and a half at least; she had probably found a new flat by now.
With a sinking feeling, he realized that maybe she had found a new boyfriend as well.
The sickening, heart-wrenching pain he felt when he imagined her back with Dean (or with someone else, really, anyone else, because if anyone would be acceptable then Dean Thomas should have been acceptable) settled him.
He grabbed a handful of the blue powder from the mantle, threw it onto the last embers of the fire, thrust his head into the bright blue flames and enunciated “The Burrow!”
No one was in the living room, not that he could see. “Mrs. Weasley? Mr. Weasley?” he asked, quiet at first and then louder. “Is anyone here?” he finally yelled.
The steps entering the room were all too familiar. This wasn’t quite what he had imagined. “Harry.” It was a statement, a statement of a not-so-appealing fact. “I suppose you want to speak to my brother,” she said with a sigh.
“No!” he said, perhaps too enthusiastically. “No,” he said quieter. “I wanted…” He trailed off. What had he wanted? To find out from her mother that she was happily moving on and not at all hung up on him? To get an address or a message to buzz off? He wasn’t sure. “I wanted to apologize,” he said. “I’ve been a fool.” That much, at least, he knew. He’d known that for a while, but it maybe wasn’t conscious until he said it. At work he had realized all he needed was a normal life, a family, and love. And he had since realized that he needed only one thing for that - someone who thought of him not as The Boy Who Lived, but as only-slightly-above-average Harry Potter.
And someone who loved Harry Potter, and not The Boy Who Lived. Or maybe both, but with a preference for the former.
He realized he had trailed off, because she was staring at him. “Er,” he said. “Can I come in? Or could you come over here?”
She frowned, and looked about to deny him even that, but then sunk into the threadbare sofa and said “Come over if you want; mum should be back in half an hour and she’ll be thrilled to see you.”
Harry nodded, and tried to ignore the fact that Ginny distinctly left out any knowledge of herself being thrilled or otherwise to see him.
That was probably because he was a bloody fool and had dumped her, it seemed, for next to no reason at all.
He grabbed a handful of green powder and was at the Burrow in a second. When Ginny didn’t move a muscle, he Scourgified himself out of politeness, and then fell into an armchair. “I missed you,” he said by way of introduction.
She didn’t return the sentiment; her face simply grew harder.
“Er. I’m sorry for what I did. It was stupid. I just… well… I was a coward.” She perked up at that. “I feel a bit like a Bludger in the china shop, to be honest; frantic and violent and just breaking things. I don’t know what to do, and I’m worried that I’ll slip up or mess up and ruin my chances with you.” Harry sighed. “Because, well, I couldn’t do that.” He shook his head. “I mean, I could, and that’s what I was worried about, but… Oh, Merlin, I’m no good at this at all.
“What I mean to say is, I was scared, so I ended things, but since I ended things I’ve just been a pile of mucky misery. And I realized that there’s a lot of things I want - to rebuild the ministry, to become a great auror, to get a house in a nice wizarding community, to win the department Quidditch tournament, to have three children who all go to Hogwarts and live peaceful, happy lives - but that I would be happy if someone else did any of those things. As long as the ministry is rebuilt, as long as we have aurors, and the world is peaceful for Ron and Hermione’s future children, as long as all of that happens, I could be happy.”
He sighed and rumpled the back of his hair. He didn’t look up, or he would have noticed that her hard-eyed expression was gone and she was smiling through silent tears. “Merlin, I’m bollocks at this. I’d rather face a hundred Voldemorts, or at least a hundred Hungarian Horntails. I’ve always thought that, since the triwizard tournament fourth year.” He paused. “And it didn’t even matter then.” He allowed himself a small laugh. “What I mean is, well, someone else can be the hero, and someone else can have the family and the white picket fence, and someone else can have the quidditch cup, but I need you.”
He looked up nervously. “You’re probably angry with me.”
“You’re an idiot, Potter,” she whispered, and she punched him on the arm, but it was a friendly punch and he saw the tears on her face and the laughter in her eyes, and he knew that everything would be okay, eventually. “You’re lucky I’m a sap. But if you ever do that to me again, I swear, I am hexing you so black and blue you will never be Witch Weekly’s most desirable bachelor ever again.”
Harry smiled, and bit back the comment that so long as she would forgive him, he didn’t much care about Witch Weekly.
hglove
“What’s wrong?” she asked, as he said “I think we should end this.”
“What?” Her incredulous expression was becoming too familiar. “What is it this time?”
“I just need some time to define myself - not the hero, not your boyfriend, just me. I need time to think about what I want.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s not forever - you must understand. Don’t you need those things?”
“No, Harry,” she said. “All I’ve ever needed was you.”
Harry sat on the worn-out couch in his flat (his flat, not their flat, not anymore), with a carton of muggle Chinese carry-out in one hand and a pair of chopsticks in the other. It was absolutely astonishing, he thought morosely, how quickly she had removed every single trace of herself from her residence of two years.
Every physical trace, he thought, except for her smell. He took another bite of Chow Mein. Her smell still lingered in the carpets, in the bedding, in the sofa and the chairs. He kept thinking she would step out from behind the doorway shouting “surprise!”
Feeling rather sorry for himself, he took another bite of Chow Mein. It was for the best, he assured himself. He had made the right decision. He and Ginny could still end up together, he insisted, when he knew himself a little bit better. And the relationship would be better when he did; this relationship was too important for him to mess up by not knowing what he wanted. It was for the best.
She had moved out without even giving him a choice; saying that if they weren’t going to be dating she certainly wasn’t going to be his roommate either, and she could stay above the shop with George or in the Burrow with her mum until she found a suitable flat of her own. It was all very business-like. She had her team-mates, and not the Weasleys, help her move out. Probably because the Weasleys would get involved, and the Harpies could be relied upon not to.
None of the Harpies liked Harry, anyway. He wondered vaguely if they were all lesbians.
That was the bitterness speaking. Harry sighed and took another bite of his Chow Mein.
“Harry!” Ron’s face popped into the fireplace. Harry looked up slowly, set down his dinner, and sunk to the floor in front of the hearth.
“Hi, Ron,” he said softly.
“I heard what happened,” Ron said, “Or rather, what you did.” Harry sat back a bit.
“I made the right decision” Harry said, as much to reassure himself as to assure Ron.
“No, mate, I think you made a bloody stupid decision. But I’m not going to try and talk you out of it because Merlin knows that’s impossible. I’ve brought the firewhiskey.”
Harry stepped back for Ron to floo into the flat, and got his wand ready to Scourgify; Ginny hated the soot.
On second thought, Harry decided, let Ron track soot all over the flat for all he cared.
Ron stepped out of the fireplace with a cough, and Scourgified himself. Harry sunk back onto the sofa with a sigh. “It’s perfectly reasonable,” Harry said with a significant look. “What I did was for the best.”
“Not going there, mate,” Ron warned, and walked straight to the kitchen to get glasses. “You made her really upset,” he shouted.
Harry sighed. “Did I?” he asked. “She seemed more… businesslike.”
Ron stopped in the doorway. “When have you ever known my sister to be businesslike when she wasn’t upset?”
Harry picked up his chopsticks again, and didn’t say anything. Ron came over and sat next to him, pouring each of them a glass of firewhiskey. “Look, Ron,” Harry said finally. “I understand that she’s upset. But I only did what I needed to do.” Ron rolled his eyes. “Ron, you’re not taking this seriously. I don’t want to mess up my whole life with Ginny because I didn’t think things through.”
Ron laughed. “Well, you don’t have a life with Ginny right now,” he said shortly, and picked up his glass. “I’m not here to convince you, and I’m not here to be convinced.”
Harry sighed and traded his Chinese for a glass of Ogden’s finest. “Thanks for being here anyway,” he said shortly. They clinked glasses and Harry gulped the whole thing down. It scorched a path to his stomach and sat there warmly; he fought the urge to hiccup.
He had barely put his glass down before Ron filled it again.
Harry wasn’t invited to the Burrow for dinner the next Sunday; instead he got a very nice owl from Molly saying it was just a quiet family affair and he wouldn’t be interested in it anyway, but Harry knew the real reason. He wasn’t really surprised. The Sunday after, Molly didn’t even send an owl. He wasn’t offended.
Just lonely.
She hadn’t been gone for three weeks, and already he could almost physically feel his loneliness, like a hole in his gut. He had moved up to cooking - the first week had been devoted to various and sundry take-out cuisines - but still hadn’t gotten back up to anything more complicated than pasta.
At the moment, water was boiling. Hermione, he suspected, had been kind enough to forego her invitation to the Burrow this week in favor of keeping a friend in need company. She would be over shortly. He couldn’t imagine that she would be excluded from the family simply because he had to be. In her honor, he was trying to work up the energy to make Puttanesca. The sauce was sitting in a jar on the counter; he thought vaguely that it should be on the stove instead.
Harry stared into space for a moment. The boys at work on Friday had, probably at Ron’s behest, remarked upon his morose demeanor. When Harry told them he needed some space to find himself, he got a strange look.
“What do you mean, find yourself?” one of the boys asked. “You’re Harry Potter. The boy who lived. Everyone knows who you are.”
Harry sighed. “But Voldemort’s dead. Who am I now?”
Ron laughed, and Harry stared at him until someone clarified - “You’re the same person you ever were. You’re an auror now - you’re still the hero.”
Harry sighed and looked down, and then bit his lip, and then tousled the hair at the back of his head in a motion he had unknowingly picked up from his father. “What if I don’t want to be? Now that I don’t have to. I mean, I could be a Quidditch player for all anyone cares.”
Ron rolled his eyes and left. The other boys stared at Harry. “But you don’t want to,” one of them said simply, and Harry realized that, as much as he loved Quidditch, he didn’t want to play it professionally. He could, but he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps.
“I guess not,” he said, as he realized that at the same time, he didn’t need to be an auror. He would have been perfectly happy playing Quidditch, or teaching Defense at Hogwarts, or perhaps even a million other careers that played to his strengths. What he needed was to regain the life that Voldemort had stolen from his parents, the life that Voldemort had tried to steal from him. He needed to be normal, average Harry Potter.
There was a knock at his door, snapping Harry out of his reverie. Hermione knew she could floo or even apparate to Harry’s place, but she still used the door as much out of politeness as out of the desire not to catch Harry and Ginny on the sofa. Not that that would happen again anytime soon.
Harry sighed and opened the door with a wave of his wand.
The pot of pasta boiled over.
Surprisingly enough, Hermione had banished her winter cloak to the coat closet, shut the door, and was at the stove top before Harry could even stand up. Then again, in his current mood, perhaps that wasn’t particularly surprising. “Were you planning on burning the flat down?” Hermione asked tersely as she pulled a pan down from the cabinet and poured the sauce and pre-chopped vegetables in to simmer.
Harry said nothing. Hermione sighed and set the pot to watch itself. “Harry, I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but this whole ‘finding yourself’ thing is really stupid.” Harry just sighed. So she had given up on dinner with the Weasleys in order to lecture him. He gritted his teeth in preparation for the long haul. “Ginny’s miserable and, from the looks of it, so are you. She’s wondering what she did wrong, and I’m tired of telling her that it’s nothing she did; that you’re just being a sodding idiot as usual.”
“I wasn’t being an idiot! I didn’t want to mess up my relationship with Ginny!”
Hermione laughed as she stirred. “And now?”
“What?”
“What do you want now?”
Harry sighed. “I miss her. But I can’t risk ruining a life with Ginny just because I’m selfish now.”
Hermione wasn’t looking at him; she levitated the pasta over to cool in a dish and stirred the sauce as she spoke. “Harry, what you are doing right now is risking ruining a life with Ginny. No, you can’t be certain that you’ll never mess up; but that’s always the case, isn’t it? As long as you two trust each other and are open with each other and try to solve your problems, I don’t think you’ll come up against anything worse than Voldemort. And he couldn’t keep you apart very long, now could he?” Then she mixed in the sauce and brought the dish to sit between the two settings Harry had laid out at the table. “Dinner is served,” she said soothingly.
Harry sat down to eat, and they didn’t speak about Ginny any more that evening.
Time sped up, again, slowly. By the time a month had passed the dull ache in Harry’s gut had half-healed, and he was beginning to act like a normal human being again. There were still no Burrow dinners in his future, or at least not for quite some time, but at least now his cooking surpassed that which he could buy pre-made at the supermarket. And Harry Potter’s life stayed like that for quite some time; passable, almost acceptable, but not quite whole. Not sparkling, not exciting.
Not alive.
And then the breakthrough occurred. It was a Saturday evening, and he was busy keeping his mind off of other things by preparing a rather labor-intensive baked tilapia filet. His pride when it went into the oven was surpassed by his pride at taking two perfect pieces of fish out of the oven.
He plated them with asparagus risotto and a small watercress salad, poured himself a glass of wine, and ate at the counter because without a guest the kitchen table felt so empty. And then he looked at the door and realized that, as beautiful as the fish was, and as wonderful as it tasted, well, the one thing that he wanted so badly it was a physical pain in his gut was for Ginny Weasley to burst through the door apologizing for being late, and perhaps bringing one of her mother’s pies as recompense. She would pick up his plate, split it in two (the meal would stretch with a little bit more risotto and the rest of the salad), pour herself a glass of wine, move everything to the table and sit down with a confident smile.
She would take a bite and comment with a wry grin that his aunt and uncle trained him well.
In the end, the pie was optional.
He thought of flooing the Burrow, but it had been a month and a half at least; she had probably found a new flat by now.
With a sinking feeling, he realized that maybe she had found a new boyfriend as well.
The sickening, heart-wrenching pain he felt when he imagined her back with Dean (or with someone else, really, anyone else, because if anyone would be acceptable then Dean Thomas should have been acceptable) settled him.
He grabbed a handful of the blue powder from the mantle, threw it onto the last embers of the fire, thrust his head into the bright blue flames and enunciated “The Burrow!”
No one was in the living room, not that he could see. “Mrs. Weasley? Mr. Weasley?” he asked, quiet at first and then louder. “Is anyone here?” he finally yelled.
The steps entering the room were all too familiar. This wasn’t quite what he had imagined. “Harry.” It was a statement, a statement of a not-so-appealing fact. “I suppose you want to speak to my brother,” she said with a sigh.
“No!” he said, perhaps too enthusiastically. “No,” he said quieter. “I wanted…” He trailed off. What had he wanted? To find out from her mother that she was happily moving on and not at all hung up on him? To get an address or a message to buzz off? He wasn’t sure. “I wanted to apologize,” he said. “I’ve been a fool.” That much, at least, he knew. He’d known that for a while, but it maybe wasn’t conscious until he said it. At work he had realized all he needed was a normal life, a family, and love. And he had since realized that he needed only one thing for that - someone who thought of him not as The Boy Who Lived, but as only-slightly-above-average Harry Potter.
And someone who loved Harry Potter, and not The Boy Who Lived. Or maybe both, but with a preference for the former.
He realized he had trailed off, because she was staring at him. “Er,” he said. “Can I come in? Or could you come over here?”
She frowned, and looked about to deny him even that, but then sunk into the threadbare sofa and said “Come over if you want; mum should be back in half an hour and she’ll be thrilled to see you.”
Harry nodded, and tried to ignore the fact that Ginny distinctly left out any knowledge of herself being thrilled or otherwise to see him.
That was probably because he was a bloody fool and had dumped her, it seemed, for next to no reason at all.
He grabbed a handful of green powder and was at the Burrow in a second. When Ginny didn’t move a muscle, he Scourgified himself out of politeness, and then fell into an armchair. “I missed you,” he said by way of introduction.
She didn’t return the sentiment; her face simply grew harder.
“Er. I’m sorry for what I did. It was stupid. I just… well… I was a coward.” She perked up at that. “I feel a bit like a Bludger in the china shop, to be honest; frantic and violent and just breaking things. I don’t know what to do, and I’m worried that I’ll slip up or mess up and ruin my chances with you.” Harry sighed. “Because, well, I couldn’t do that.” He shook his head. “I mean, I could, and that’s what I was worried about, but… Oh, Merlin, I’m no good at this at all.
“What I mean to say is, I was scared, so I ended things, but since I ended things I’ve just been a pile of mucky misery. And I realized that there’s a lot of things I want - to rebuild the ministry, to become a great auror, to get a house in a nice wizarding community, to win the department Quidditch tournament, to have three children who all go to Hogwarts and live peaceful, happy lives - but that I would be happy if someone else did any of those things. As long as the ministry is rebuilt, as long as we have aurors, and the world is peaceful for Ron and Hermione’s future children, as long as all of that happens, I could be happy.”
He sighed and rumpled the back of his hair. He didn’t look up, or he would have noticed that her hard-eyed expression was gone and she was smiling through silent tears. “Merlin, I’m bollocks at this. I’d rather face a hundred Voldemorts, or at least a hundred Hungarian Horntails. I’ve always thought that, since the triwizard tournament fourth year.” He paused. “And it didn’t even matter then.” He allowed himself a small laugh. “What I mean is, well, someone else can be the hero, and someone else can have the family and the white picket fence, and someone else can have the quidditch cup, but I need you.”
He looked up nervously. “You’re probably angry with me.”
“You’re an idiot, Potter,” she whispered, and she punched him on the arm, but it was a friendly punch and he saw the tears on her face and the laughter in her eyes, and he knew that everything would be okay, eventually. “You’re lucky I’m a sap. But if you ever do that to me again, I swear, I am hexing you so black and blue you will never be Witch Weekly’s most desirable bachelor ever again.”
Harry smiled, and bit back the comment that so long as she would forgive him, he didn’t much care about Witch Weekly.
hglove