"Compromise: a Love Story" - Ginny, Ginny/Harry - Rated R
I'm at the airport! There is free wireless! Um, so I wrote this. It is not all that subtle. :P Where does one post an H/G fic? I do not know these things.
Random thing: I had to go looking for Ginny icons in order to make this post. And when I was uploading this one, I realized that like EIGHT of my shippy icons involve women LOOKING at men, and this is not the only one where there's rack focus and the guy is blurry. This is not to mention all the other icons I have of m/m, f/f and m/f pairings GAZING at each other mutually. Hmmmm.
Title: Compromise: A Love Story
Author: femmenerd
Characters/Pairing: Ginny POV, Ginny/Harry, splashes of other people.
Rating: Hard R for sex and language.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not for profit, don't sue.
Summary: Canon-compliant. Takes place during the first five years after the Battle of Hogwarts in DH. She needs to be something other than the hero's girlfriend.
Acknowledgements: Many thanks to oxoniensis for the Brit check and suggestions, and fireworkfiasco for the beta. And because I think it's fun, I'll tell you what the title of the original Word doc of this story was: “GinnyIsAStubbornBintAndHarryLovesHer.” :P
Word Count: About 3000.
*
On the fifth of June in the year 1998, Ginevra Weasley receives two proposals: one from Harry Potter involving an emerald and diamond engagement ring; the other from the Holyhead Harpies involving a five year contract to play professional Quidditch. She accepts the latter without a second thought and turns down the former, a trend that will continue for another four years.
“Does this mean-are you ditching me then, Gin?” Harry looks miserable and confused, the expression on his face not unlike a small child who’s had his very favourite toy taken forcibly away. He can hardly look at her as he alternates between pushing at his glasses and savagely pulling tufts of his unruly black hair between his fingers.
“I’m only seventeen years old, Harry!” she exclaims.
“You’ll be eighteen in August,” he replies unhelpfully, following up with a plaintive, “And I love you.”
“I love you too, Harry,” Ginny says softly, cupping his chin and forcing him to look at her face. “But this is my dream. I need to do this.”
(I need to be something other than the hero’s girlfriend.)
Harry nods glumly, thankfully not pointing out that plenty of Quidditch players have families. He does go home to Number Twelve Grimmauld Place to sulk, however, and doesn’t owl for two days.
By the following week, Harry is for the most part behaving normally again. He brings flowers for her and Hermione-roses for Hermione and yellow daffodils for Ginny-on their last day as Hogwarts students, arriving early to attend the Leaving Feast even though she knows it makes him uncomfortable how heads have a tendency to swivel when he enters a crowded room.
Later that night, after the celebrations at the Burrow have died down, Harry corners Ginny in a dark hallway and informs her in a low, ominous tone, “I’m going to ask you again, you know.”
“Okay,” Ginny says defiantly, then gasps as Harry thrusts one of his legs between both of hers and pins her to the wall. His smile is hard-edged before he kisses her, biting her lower lip and fucking her mouth with his tongue like it’s the kind of special occasion they usually indulge in somewhere other than her parents’ home. When he touches her with his hands, he seems almost deliberately clumsy, roughly groping her breasts and thumbing imprints into her hips.
“If we were engaged,” Harry hisses, “I bet your parents would let me sleep in your room tonight.”
“Perhaps,” Ginny answers, “but this is more fun.” Then she drags him up to the attic and makes him fuck her bent over a trunk full of winter coats, mittens and hand-knit scarves.
*
Ginny took Harry back pretty much immediately after the War was over. She still fancied him like mad, they’d all nearly died, one of her brothers was dead, and Ginny just didn’t have the energy to even contemplate doing anything else. They hardly even talked about it, just held hands at all the funerals, cried snotty tears into one another’s tee-shirts and then the next thing she knew they were snogging. Desperate, panting, not-entirely-happy-but-glad-to-be-alive snogging.
It wasn’t too long after that before Ginny seduced Harry. Although perhaps seduction isn’t the correct term given how easily accomplished a task this was. Harry’s primary concern was that Ron would find out and murder him in his sleep, but Ginny pointed out that Ron had his head too far up Hermione’s arse (metaphorically and quite possibly physically) to notice or care. Of course she said this while she was rubbing at the crotch of Harry’s trousers, transforming his half-hard cock into a full-fledged erection.
That summer was all about sex and mourning.
Then autumn reared its head and Ginny went back to Hogwarts to finish out her seventh year and Hermione went with her to do the same. Ron started helping George at the shop and moved into Number Twelve with Harry. Harry enrolled at the Auror Academy, one of the youngest apprentices ever to do so. On as many weekends and holidays as possible Hermione and Ginny would go and visit the boys-it was like living in a perpetual double-date. Kind of corny really, so Ginny was glad that she would be happy to have Hermione for a friend regardless and that Ron-though she’d never told him as much-had always been her favourite brother.
Ginny was generally happy. She had an older, fit and terribly famous boyfriend so she was the envy of most of the girls in school. She was captain of the Gryffindor Quidditch team like she’d always wanted. And the rest of school wasn’t so horrible either; she got a more than decent number of N.E.W.T.s and McGonagall even advised Ginny to consider a writing-related career on account of the essays she’d turned in that year.
But still, privately, Ginny was somewhat uneasy about her successes. She felt guilty about the fact that it seemed easier to feel special when she was the only Weasley at Hogwarts. She had flashes of paranoia that people might just be paying attention to her due to her connection to The Harry Potter. The Harry Potter wasn’t her boyfriend, Harry was, but sometimes, especially when he wasn’t physically around, it was hard to tell the difference.
This didn’t mean that Ginny wasn’t proud of Harry-she really, really was, but uncharacteristically shy and quiet about it. Some nights when he was snoring next to her, Ginny would just stare at his face, guileless and boyish in slumber, and whisper, “I can’t believe you’re mine-that you chose me.” Harry caught her at it once, and pulled Ginny into a sleep-musky embrace, fitting her head into the crook of his armpit and mumbling into her hair, “Of course I choose you, you twit.”
*
Ginny loves sex. She loves how it makes her feel powerful and raw and hungry, like Quidditch without brooms and competition. She likes how when they’re doing it, she doesn’t have to compete with anyone for Harry’s attention. She likes finding out what her body can do, how it can affect his body in turn. She loves how when he’s randy, Harry loses much of his precariously controlled sense of propriety. She loves how she can shock him. Sometimes it frightens Ginny though, the intense depths of her desire, and she wonders if it scares him too.
*
The Harpies win Ginny's first professional game. Afterwards, Harry rushes into the changing room and wraps his hands around her middle-she's still sweaty and disheveled from flying, but he picks her up and twirls her regardless. “You were brilliant, Gin!” he shouts.
“Are you my groupie now?” she jokes, blushing hot as her teammates look on with smirks on their faces. Ginny swats at him. “No blokes allowed in here, you know.”
Harry just laughs and says, “Sure thing, Weasley. I’ll be your groupie.” He gives her a meaningful look. “Forever. Always.”
It’s embarrassing but she loves it. Loves him.
*
Harry doesn’t actually ask her again until the next spring. And then it’s just him telling Ginny in a self-consciously even tone that he still has the ring.
“Good,” she says. “You can hold onto that.”
*
They’re always going to fight, Ginny thinks. And not just those cute, bickery little affairs that her brother and Hermione are always getting up to. No, Harry and Ginny can get down and dirty. Because he’s a stubborn, arrogant prat and she has the nasty temper to match her hair.
Harry’s most annoying tactic is to counter any logic with essentially, “You’re wrong and I’m right...because I said so.”
Ginny, however, can strike below the belt.
“You don’t actually have to marry me to be a Weasley, Potter,” she sneers one time at the close of an argument about who knows what. “My mum’s been knitting you jumpers since you were twelve anyhow.” Ginny almost says something else about how it’s too bad for Harry that Ron’s got boy bits and probably would have gone lesbian for Hermione anyway, but she bites her tongue just in time. That would have been too mean, and she knows it’s not really like that, really she does.
“I don’t just love you for your family, Ginny,” Harry sighs, defeated for once.
“I know,” she doesn’t say, “but I don’t like it when I feel like they love me for you.” That isn’t remotely fair either, she knows it.
The post-row shagging is, however, consistently fantastic, and sometimes-sometimes they even work some “issues” out before Ginny is forced to tear Harry’s clothes off.
*
They’re starting to have patterns, grown-up sorts of patterns, the ebbs and flows of their work schedules rubbing up against each other, and Ginny only nominally still lives at the Burrow. She’s gone with the team much of the time during the season and then for promotional tours off-season as well and most of the time she shows up at Grimmauld Place first without bothering to go home when she’s got time off. It’s comfortable, routine. Ginny likes missing Harry, just knowing he exists. And she likes knowing where everything goes in his kitchen and the fact that he always keeps the biscuits she prefers well-stocked.
Ginny knows what Harry really wants-he wants a family, and he wants to plant those seeds with-in-her. And Ginny wants that too, maybe, but not now, not yet. She doesn’t ever let on to Harry that the times she comes the hardest aren’t necessarily on account of his latest tricks with his hands or cock; they happen when she’s pretending she’s gone off her birth-control potion, when the Harry in her head is telling her about how he’s going to fill her up, come inside her, oh yeah, even while the Harry she’s actually shagging is just punctuating his moans and groans with the occasional I-love-you.
It’s one of Ginny’s most tightly held secrets. Because as much as she loves her, when Ginny thinks about how her mum already had Bill on the way by the time she was Ginny’s current age, she envisions herself weighed down by dozens of squalling, red-faced babies with scars on their foreheads, one and all.
Contradictorily when Ginny sees Harry playing with little Teddy Lupin, that’s when her love for him thump thumps the loudest in her chest.
*
Ginny does so well her third year with the Harpies that she gets her own action figure. It’s totally weird and slightly creepy, but worth it when several of her brothers only semi-ironically give the Ginny-toys to people for Christmas gifts. They’re so enthusiastically proud of her that Ginny forgives them all for the way she used to have to secretly practice flying while they were having skirmishes together in the back yard without her. Harry never seemed to doubt her ability to play Quidditch though, Ginny recalls.
Just as gratifying and far more surprising is when Harry actually apologises for treating Ginny in such an infuriatingly chauvinistic, chivalrous fashion when he shut her out and ditched her “for her own good” during the War. He does not use the word “chauvinistic” though; he just says he’s sorry, tacking a loaded jest onto his apology about how he should have known there was no way he could stop her from being a hero after all.
Ginny lets out an enormous, shocked breath and says slowly, “I think I’ve never entirely forgiven you for that.”
“Yeah,” Harry agrees, “but I hope you will.”
*
Ginny dances with Harry at both of Hermione and Ron’s weddings that summer, once in a thankfully-not-too-poufy Muggle bridesmaid's dress and once in dress robes. Harry looks equally handsome in his tux and his robes but improves upon his best man’s speech the second time round, making everyone misty-eyed-especially the mums in attendance, and Ron, of course.
He also gets a bit too pissed with Seamus and Dean at the reception and tells Ginny reproachfully that she could have any kind of wedding she wanted if she wanted, bugger the expense. Then he falls over. Ginny takes him home, pumps him full of water and hangover potion, and the next morning Harry doesn’t seem to remember it at all.
The next time they have dinner with her family, Ginny announces that she’s officially going to move into Grimmauld Place now Ron’s moved out. Before anyone can ask any questions, Ginny continues, “Harry’s been trying to buy the cow for years now, I figure I’ll give him a bit more milk at least.”
The Weasley family is pretty much equally divided between being scandalized and amused. Harry looks shell-shocked, mortified, and hopeful.
*
The new living arrangements are surprisingly placid for the months leading up to the fateful game. The game in which Ginny blows her knee out beyond repair-after the abuse she’s submitted her body to these past few years the medi-wizards tell her she’ll walk just fine but her professional career’s over.
Ginny proceeds to sulk, get extremely familiar with the characters of multiple Muggle soap operas, and be a complete arsehole to everyone in her vicinity...especially herself.
For the first few weeks, Harry’s as sensitive as can be, treading lightly and bringing plates of food to Ginny’s station in front of the telly. After a month of living with a cantankerous shut in, however, his patience has worn beyond thin. As he rants and rails at her with loving, encouraging insults, Ginny notes impassively that it’s actually fairly impressive that it took Harry this long to break out with the red-faced tirades. “You’re more than just Quidditch, you bint,” Harry yells. “Your life isn’t over,” he pleads.
But Ginny’s determined to be miserable, so much so that she effectively ignores the internal voices reminding her how bloody tired she was of travelling all the time or how much she missed thinking about things besides quaffles and snitches.
One afternoon when Ginny’s gleefully poking at the wee potbelly she’s developed from her time on the sofa, Harry busts into the room minus snacks but with one Michael Corner in tow. Ginny immediately ceases (literally) contemplating her navel and sits up at attention. Of all the people Ginny could imagine Harry calling in for reinforcement, her long-ago ex is one of the last she would have considered.
“Michael?” she says quizzically, caught too off-guard to scowl or grumble.
“Hey there, Gin,” Michael says nervously, and Ginny racks her brains trying to remember what he’s been up to since school. She’s sure she knows, but the information eludes her currently.
“I was sorry to hear about the accident,” Michael says as Ginny digs further into the recesses of her memory. Michael keeps talking-something about The Daily Prophet, oh yes, that’s it, he became a newspaper man, an editor of some kind. Makes sense, Ginny thinks, he always used to check over her assignments back at Hogwarts when they were dating.
Michael’s voice keeps droning on in a monotone and Ginny also remembers why she broke things off with him. “...so as I was saying, we could really use a fresh voice for the Sports Section and...”
“Excuse me, what?” Ginny looks up sharply as the actual content of Michael’s words filter into her mind. Michael’s looking earnest and expectant. Harry’s facial expression is unreadable. Ginny narrows her eyes and addresses her current boyfriend instead of the old flame who’s actually posing the questions. “Harry Potter,” she bites out, “are you trying to buy me a job?”
“Shame on you, Ginny Weasley,” Harry scolds, “casting aspersions on our old schoolmate’s journalistic integrity.”
Michael interrupts in a fiercer tone than she ever recalls hearing him use previously and says seriously, “I’m not messing about, Ginny. You’re a great writer-I remember. But I won’t pretend to be entirely uninfluenced by external factors. You’re also a household name and it’d be a pretty big coup for me with my boss if I landed you for the paper.”
Ginny purses her mouth and considers this. Michael was, she’s willing to admit, always excessively honest in addition to dull. “All right, Corner,” she finally says, “you’re on.”
Later that night Ginny lets Harry touch her again for the first time in what feels like ages. He tongues into the shell of her ear while he fucks her and proclaims the subtle, new softness to her midsection “damn sexy.”
*
It takes Ginny more months to admit to Harry that she loves her new career than it did to relocate her bum from the sofa to the chair in front of the writing desk he bought her. She warms back up to him slowly, pretending not to notice the clippings of her columns he tacks up in the kitchen but hugging his body closer to hers every night.
“I suppose you’re happy now, Potter,” she says dryly one evening before kissing him long and hard, pulling his glasses off for better snogging access. “Now that you’ve got me where you want me.”
“Yes,” Harry answers, not denying anything, but qualifying his assent with, “I’m happy that you’re happy.” But when Ginny starts going for his belt, Harry stops her and sighs. “Gin-” he starts.
“Out with it,” Ginny coaxes, impatient and lust-addled.
“Never mind,” Harry grunts. “I’m just going to feel like an utter git if I ask you again-” Then he fully disentangles himself from her and shoots the floor a withering glare.
For a moment there’s complete silence until Ginny swallows her pride. “Okay then,” she says softly, swallowing hard before she bites the bullet. “Harry Potter, will you marry me?”
Harry’s face goes through a series of distinct expressions-first shock, then wonder, then unabashed (and just ever-so-slightly smug) joy. “Well,” he says slowly-as though it’s difficult to get the words out through his grin-“if you insist.”
*
For their vows, Ginny suggests-at least eighty percent facetiously-that they go with, “Well, I still don’t like anyone else better than you.”
Harry-naturally-wants something more traditional.
*
Random thing: I had to go looking for Ginny icons in order to make this post. And when I was uploading this one, I realized that like EIGHT of my shippy icons involve women LOOKING at men, and this is not the only one where there's rack focus and the guy is blurry. This is not to mention all the other icons I have of m/m, f/f and m/f pairings GAZING at each other mutually. Hmmmm.
Title: Compromise: A Love Story
Author: femmenerd
Characters/Pairing: Ginny POV, Ginny/Harry, splashes of other people.
Rating: Hard R for sex and language.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not for profit, don't sue.
Summary: Canon-compliant. Takes place during the first five years after the Battle of Hogwarts in DH. She needs to be something other than the hero's girlfriend.
Acknowledgements: Many thanks to oxoniensis for the Brit check and suggestions, and fireworkfiasco for the beta. And because I think it's fun, I'll tell you what the title of the original Word doc of this story was: “GinnyIsAStubbornBintAndHarryLovesHer.” :P
Word Count: About 3000.
*
On the fifth of June in the year 1998, Ginevra Weasley receives two proposals: one from Harry Potter involving an emerald and diamond engagement ring; the other from the Holyhead Harpies involving a five year contract to play professional Quidditch. She accepts the latter without a second thought and turns down the former, a trend that will continue for another four years.
“Does this mean-are you ditching me then, Gin?” Harry looks miserable and confused, the expression on his face not unlike a small child who’s had his very favourite toy taken forcibly away. He can hardly look at her as he alternates between pushing at his glasses and savagely pulling tufts of his unruly black hair between his fingers.
“I’m only seventeen years old, Harry!” she exclaims.
“You’ll be eighteen in August,” he replies unhelpfully, following up with a plaintive, “And I love you.”
“I love you too, Harry,” Ginny says softly, cupping his chin and forcing him to look at her face. “But this is my dream. I need to do this.”
(I need to be something other than the hero’s girlfriend.)
Harry nods glumly, thankfully not pointing out that plenty of Quidditch players have families. He does go home to Number Twelve Grimmauld Place to sulk, however, and doesn’t owl for two days.
By the following week, Harry is for the most part behaving normally again. He brings flowers for her and Hermione-roses for Hermione and yellow daffodils for Ginny-on their last day as Hogwarts students, arriving early to attend the Leaving Feast even though she knows it makes him uncomfortable how heads have a tendency to swivel when he enters a crowded room.
Later that night, after the celebrations at the Burrow have died down, Harry corners Ginny in a dark hallway and informs her in a low, ominous tone, “I’m going to ask you again, you know.”
“Okay,” Ginny says defiantly, then gasps as Harry thrusts one of his legs between both of hers and pins her to the wall. His smile is hard-edged before he kisses her, biting her lower lip and fucking her mouth with his tongue like it’s the kind of special occasion they usually indulge in somewhere other than her parents’ home. When he touches her with his hands, he seems almost deliberately clumsy, roughly groping her breasts and thumbing imprints into her hips.
“If we were engaged,” Harry hisses, “I bet your parents would let me sleep in your room tonight.”
“Perhaps,” Ginny answers, “but this is more fun.” Then she drags him up to the attic and makes him fuck her bent over a trunk full of winter coats, mittens and hand-knit scarves.
*
Ginny took Harry back pretty much immediately after the War was over. She still fancied him like mad, they’d all nearly died, one of her brothers was dead, and Ginny just didn’t have the energy to even contemplate doing anything else. They hardly even talked about it, just held hands at all the funerals, cried snotty tears into one another’s tee-shirts and then the next thing she knew they were snogging. Desperate, panting, not-entirely-happy-but-glad-to-be-alive snogging.
It wasn’t too long after that before Ginny seduced Harry. Although perhaps seduction isn’t the correct term given how easily accomplished a task this was. Harry’s primary concern was that Ron would find out and murder him in his sleep, but Ginny pointed out that Ron had his head too far up Hermione’s arse (metaphorically and quite possibly physically) to notice or care. Of course she said this while she was rubbing at the crotch of Harry’s trousers, transforming his half-hard cock into a full-fledged erection.
That summer was all about sex and mourning.
Then autumn reared its head and Ginny went back to Hogwarts to finish out her seventh year and Hermione went with her to do the same. Ron started helping George at the shop and moved into Number Twelve with Harry. Harry enrolled at the Auror Academy, one of the youngest apprentices ever to do so. On as many weekends and holidays as possible Hermione and Ginny would go and visit the boys-it was like living in a perpetual double-date. Kind of corny really, so Ginny was glad that she would be happy to have Hermione for a friend regardless and that Ron-though she’d never told him as much-had always been her favourite brother.
Ginny was generally happy. She had an older, fit and terribly famous boyfriend so she was the envy of most of the girls in school. She was captain of the Gryffindor Quidditch team like she’d always wanted. And the rest of school wasn’t so horrible either; she got a more than decent number of N.E.W.T.s and McGonagall even advised Ginny to consider a writing-related career on account of the essays she’d turned in that year.
But still, privately, Ginny was somewhat uneasy about her successes. She felt guilty about the fact that it seemed easier to feel special when she was the only Weasley at Hogwarts. She had flashes of paranoia that people might just be paying attention to her due to her connection to The Harry Potter. The Harry Potter wasn’t her boyfriend, Harry was, but sometimes, especially when he wasn’t physically around, it was hard to tell the difference.
This didn’t mean that Ginny wasn’t proud of Harry-she really, really was, but uncharacteristically shy and quiet about it. Some nights when he was snoring next to her, Ginny would just stare at his face, guileless and boyish in slumber, and whisper, “I can’t believe you’re mine-that you chose me.” Harry caught her at it once, and pulled Ginny into a sleep-musky embrace, fitting her head into the crook of his armpit and mumbling into her hair, “Of course I choose you, you twit.”
*
Ginny loves sex. She loves how it makes her feel powerful and raw and hungry, like Quidditch without brooms and competition. She likes how when they’re doing it, she doesn’t have to compete with anyone for Harry’s attention. She likes finding out what her body can do, how it can affect his body in turn. She loves how when he’s randy, Harry loses much of his precariously controlled sense of propriety. She loves how she can shock him. Sometimes it frightens Ginny though, the intense depths of her desire, and she wonders if it scares him too.
*
The Harpies win Ginny's first professional game. Afterwards, Harry rushes into the changing room and wraps his hands around her middle-she's still sweaty and disheveled from flying, but he picks her up and twirls her regardless. “You were brilliant, Gin!” he shouts.
“Are you my groupie now?” she jokes, blushing hot as her teammates look on with smirks on their faces. Ginny swats at him. “No blokes allowed in here, you know.”
Harry just laughs and says, “Sure thing, Weasley. I’ll be your groupie.” He gives her a meaningful look. “Forever. Always.”
It’s embarrassing but she loves it. Loves him.
*
Harry doesn’t actually ask her again until the next spring. And then it’s just him telling Ginny in a self-consciously even tone that he still has the ring.
“Good,” she says. “You can hold onto that.”
*
They’re always going to fight, Ginny thinks. And not just those cute, bickery little affairs that her brother and Hermione are always getting up to. No, Harry and Ginny can get down and dirty. Because he’s a stubborn, arrogant prat and she has the nasty temper to match her hair.
Harry’s most annoying tactic is to counter any logic with essentially, “You’re wrong and I’m right...because I said so.”
Ginny, however, can strike below the belt.
“You don’t actually have to marry me to be a Weasley, Potter,” she sneers one time at the close of an argument about who knows what. “My mum’s been knitting you jumpers since you were twelve anyhow.” Ginny almost says something else about how it’s too bad for Harry that Ron’s got boy bits and probably would have gone lesbian for Hermione anyway, but she bites her tongue just in time. That would have been too mean, and she knows it’s not really like that, really she does.
“I don’t just love you for your family, Ginny,” Harry sighs, defeated for once.
“I know,” she doesn’t say, “but I don’t like it when I feel like they love me for you.” That isn’t remotely fair either, she knows it.
The post-row shagging is, however, consistently fantastic, and sometimes-sometimes they even work some “issues” out before Ginny is forced to tear Harry’s clothes off.
*
They’re starting to have patterns, grown-up sorts of patterns, the ebbs and flows of their work schedules rubbing up against each other, and Ginny only nominally still lives at the Burrow. She’s gone with the team much of the time during the season and then for promotional tours off-season as well and most of the time she shows up at Grimmauld Place first without bothering to go home when she’s got time off. It’s comfortable, routine. Ginny likes missing Harry, just knowing he exists. And she likes knowing where everything goes in his kitchen and the fact that he always keeps the biscuits she prefers well-stocked.
Ginny knows what Harry really wants-he wants a family, and he wants to plant those seeds with-in-her. And Ginny wants that too, maybe, but not now, not yet. She doesn’t ever let on to Harry that the times she comes the hardest aren’t necessarily on account of his latest tricks with his hands or cock; they happen when she’s pretending she’s gone off her birth-control potion, when the Harry in her head is telling her about how he’s going to fill her up, come inside her, oh yeah, even while the Harry she’s actually shagging is just punctuating his moans and groans with the occasional I-love-you.
It’s one of Ginny’s most tightly held secrets. Because as much as she loves her, when Ginny thinks about how her mum already had Bill on the way by the time she was Ginny’s current age, she envisions herself weighed down by dozens of squalling, red-faced babies with scars on their foreheads, one and all.
Contradictorily when Ginny sees Harry playing with little Teddy Lupin, that’s when her love for him thump thumps the loudest in her chest.
*
Ginny does so well her third year with the Harpies that she gets her own action figure. It’s totally weird and slightly creepy, but worth it when several of her brothers only semi-ironically give the Ginny-toys to people for Christmas gifts. They’re so enthusiastically proud of her that Ginny forgives them all for the way she used to have to secretly practice flying while they were having skirmishes together in the back yard without her. Harry never seemed to doubt her ability to play Quidditch though, Ginny recalls.
Just as gratifying and far more surprising is when Harry actually apologises for treating Ginny in such an infuriatingly chauvinistic, chivalrous fashion when he shut her out and ditched her “for her own good” during the War. He does not use the word “chauvinistic” though; he just says he’s sorry, tacking a loaded jest onto his apology about how he should have known there was no way he could stop her from being a hero after all.
Ginny lets out an enormous, shocked breath and says slowly, “I think I’ve never entirely forgiven you for that.”
“Yeah,” Harry agrees, “but I hope you will.”
*
Ginny dances with Harry at both of Hermione and Ron’s weddings that summer, once in a thankfully-not-too-poufy Muggle bridesmaid's dress and once in dress robes. Harry looks equally handsome in his tux and his robes but improves upon his best man’s speech the second time round, making everyone misty-eyed-especially the mums in attendance, and Ron, of course.
He also gets a bit too pissed with Seamus and Dean at the reception and tells Ginny reproachfully that she could have any kind of wedding she wanted if she wanted, bugger the expense. Then he falls over. Ginny takes him home, pumps him full of water and hangover potion, and the next morning Harry doesn’t seem to remember it at all.
The next time they have dinner with her family, Ginny announces that she’s officially going to move into Grimmauld Place now Ron’s moved out. Before anyone can ask any questions, Ginny continues, “Harry’s been trying to buy the cow for years now, I figure I’ll give him a bit more milk at least.”
The Weasley family is pretty much equally divided between being scandalized and amused. Harry looks shell-shocked, mortified, and hopeful.
*
The new living arrangements are surprisingly placid for the months leading up to the fateful game. The game in which Ginny blows her knee out beyond repair-after the abuse she’s submitted her body to these past few years the medi-wizards tell her she’ll walk just fine but her professional career’s over.
Ginny proceeds to sulk, get extremely familiar with the characters of multiple Muggle soap operas, and be a complete arsehole to everyone in her vicinity...especially herself.
For the first few weeks, Harry’s as sensitive as can be, treading lightly and bringing plates of food to Ginny’s station in front of the telly. After a month of living with a cantankerous shut in, however, his patience has worn beyond thin. As he rants and rails at her with loving, encouraging insults, Ginny notes impassively that it’s actually fairly impressive that it took Harry this long to break out with the red-faced tirades. “You’re more than just Quidditch, you bint,” Harry yells. “Your life isn’t over,” he pleads.
But Ginny’s determined to be miserable, so much so that she effectively ignores the internal voices reminding her how bloody tired she was of travelling all the time or how much she missed thinking about things besides quaffles and snitches.
One afternoon when Ginny’s gleefully poking at the wee potbelly she’s developed from her time on the sofa, Harry busts into the room minus snacks but with one Michael Corner in tow. Ginny immediately ceases (literally) contemplating her navel and sits up at attention. Of all the people Ginny could imagine Harry calling in for reinforcement, her long-ago ex is one of the last she would have considered.
“Michael?” she says quizzically, caught too off-guard to scowl or grumble.
“Hey there, Gin,” Michael says nervously, and Ginny racks her brains trying to remember what he’s been up to since school. She’s sure she knows, but the information eludes her currently.
“I was sorry to hear about the accident,” Michael says as Ginny digs further into the recesses of her memory. Michael keeps talking-something about The Daily Prophet, oh yes, that’s it, he became a newspaper man, an editor of some kind. Makes sense, Ginny thinks, he always used to check over her assignments back at Hogwarts when they were dating.
Michael’s voice keeps droning on in a monotone and Ginny also remembers why she broke things off with him. “...so as I was saying, we could really use a fresh voice for the Sports Section and...”
“Excuse me, what?” Ginny looks up sharply as the actual content of Michael’s words filter into her mind. Michael’s looking earnest and expectant. Harry’s facial expression is unreadable. Ginny narrows her eyes and addresses her current boyfriend instead of the old flame who’s actually posing the questions. “Harry Potter,” she bites out, “are you trying to buy me a job?”
“Shame on you, Ginny Weasley,” Harry scolds, “casting aspersions on our old schoolmate’s journalistic integrity.”
Michael interrupts in a fiercer tone than she ever recalls hearing him use previously and says seriously, “I’m not messing about, Ginny. You’re a great writer-I remember. But I won’t pretend to be entirely uninfluenced by external factors. You’re also a household name and it’d be a pretty big coup for me with my boss if I landed you for the paper.”
Ginny purses her mouth and considers this. Michael was, she’s willing to admit, always excessively honest in addition to dull. “All right, Corner,” she finally says, “you’re on.”
Later that night Ginny lets Harry touch her again for the first time in what feels like ages. He tongues into the shell of her ear while he fucks her and proclaims the subtle, new softness to her midsection “damn sexy.”
*
It takes Ginny more months to admit to Harry that she loves her new career than it did to relocate her bum from the sofa to the chair in front of the writing desk he bought her. She warms back up to him slowly, pretending not to notice the clippings of her columns he tacks up in the kitchen but hugging his body closer to hers every night.
“I suppose you’re happy now, Potter,” she says dryly one evening before kissing him long and hard, pulling his glasses off for better snogging access. “Now that you’ve got me where you want me.”
“Yes,” Harry answers, not denying anything, but qualifying his assent with, “I’m happy that you’re happy.” But when Ginny starts going for his belt, Harry stops her and sighs. “Gin-” he starts.
“Out with it,” Ginny coaxes, impatient and lust-addled.
“Never mind,” Harry grunts. “I’m just going to feel like an utter git if I ask you again-” Then he fully disentangles himself from her and shoots the floor a withering glare.
For a moment there’s complete silence until Ginny swallows her pride. “Okay then,” she says softly, swallowing hard before she bites the bullet. “Harry Potter, will you marry me?”
Harry’s face goes through a series of distinct expressions-first shock, then wonder, then unabashed (and just ever-so-slightly smug) joy. “Well,” he says slowly-as though it’s difficult to get the words out through his grin-“if you insist.”
*
For their vows, Ginny suggests-at least eighty percent facetiously-that they go with, “Well, I still don’t like anyone else better than you.”
Harry-naturally-wants something more traditional.
*