Luck Has Nothing to Do With It; for the OTP fortune cookie challenge
Luck Has Nothing to Do With It
Growing up in a family with six older brothers, and with the two brightest wizards of the age as nothing less than surrogate siblings, it was usually easy for Ginny Weasley to go unnoticed when she wanted to. After all, who would notice one fewer (or one too many) Wealseys?
The unfortunate fact of the matter was that it had long been just as easy for Ginny to go unnoticed when she didn’t want to. Which wasn’t to say that her family didn’t love her dearly - only that they were busy and trusted her to take care of herself; there was a reason she was so particularly susceptible to Tom’s charms in her first year, and a reason none of her four brothers at Hogwarts figured out that something was wrong until it was almost too late.
She admitted (rather guiltily) that one advantage of dating Harry Potter (aside from the fact that he was kind, and brave, and humble, and chivalrous, and everything a girl could wish for) was that her love life and her Quidditch career combined to propel her out of her relative ignominy and into the spotlight eyes of a hundred thousand jealous young bachelorettes between the ages of 15 and 35.
Well, maybe that wasn’t always a good thing. But there were definitely times when (perhaps unlike Harry), she relished her fame.
This moment, she thought as she nursed an injured shoulder and flinched at the bright flash of journalists taking photos, was not one of those times. She was hungry, tired, her head throbbed, she had only barely avoided dislocating her shoulder from that last fall, the Harpies had only barely lost the game, and she was stuck here answering questions about her upcoming birthday dinner with Harry rather than getting ready for (or, Merlin forbid, going to) said birthday dinner. She sighed and answered one last stupid question - “Are there wedding bells in your future?” “I don’t know; you’ll have to ask him.” - before chasing them out of the locker room with a beater’s bat.
She took a deep breath and downed a swig of her mother’s pain-relief potion before heading to the showers.
When she was honest with herself (and a hot shower seemed to bring out honest introversion in her), she had to admit that ‘only barely’ did not really describe how close the Harpies came to winning the game, although it did describe her near miss with serious shoulder injuries. In fact, when she was brutally honest with herself (as she could only really be in the middle of a very hot shower), she had to admit that what had really happened was the Harpies had been swept away, trounced, beaten by a landslide. But somehow, perhaps because it was her birthday and therefore she was supposed to be lucky today, she had never once thought that they would lose the game until they did - by over two hundred points. Well, she thought bitterly, maybe she had been slightly out of it after the first fall she took. She carefully picked the dirt out of her hair. The Wasps had been, unsurprisingly, incredible.
A glance at the clock told her she was already late to meet Harry, and she redoubled her efforts. He was pulling out all the stops this year; or so he said. She supposed that part of ‘pulling out all the stops’ meant a surprise. And if Harry was going to do something special, no matter what it was, the least she could do was look like she deserved the special treatment.
Those one hundred thousand jealous bachelorettes were, after all, right on her tail.
Or something.
When all the dirt was finally rinsed down the drain, Ginny Weasley stepped out of the shower half-expecting to see the reporters sneaking back in for more questions. She thanked Merlin (or whoever was looking out for her) for her solitude (her teammates had been able to leave while she was interviewed; they rightly saw the inane interviews not as a coup for Ginny but as a tedious chore). She opened her locker and pulled out of a garment bag the set of champagne dress robes she had bought with her bonus at the end of last year’s season. She fastened gold earrings vaguely reminiscent of snitches on her ears and a pendant around her neck (both gifts from Harry). She gave her locker a once-over and then was off; only twenty minutes late, and it was all those reporters’ fault, anyway.
Wanting to surprise her, he had arranged for a portkey rather than giving her directions to apparate. She didn’t even think of the effect her tardiness might have had until she was dumped unceremoniously into the center of Diagon Alley, with no Harry in sight.
No Harry, but apparently a journalist was stalking the “prime date spots” in the hopes of scooping her colleagues. She heard, rather than saw, the flash of the camera.
“Do you think you and Mr. Potter are soulmates?” the journalist asked with a bit more skepticism than was appropriate. Ginny turned and saw a woman only slightly older than herself. Probably just jealous, Ginny decided, trying desperately not to bristle at the older woman’s tone. “And what do you feel about his affair with Hermione Granger, which has continually been rumored in the press?”
Ginny bit back a retort. “I know Harry is my soulmate,” she said with her best impression of a lovesick puppy (it would have been better, but she had to look out for Harry while she did it). “I’ve known since I was ten years old. Hermione is a good friend, and I can assure you that there never was, and never will be, anything between her and Harry.” Ginny turned to leave, but the reporter kept talking.
“Surely you get jealous of their closeness,” she asked, clearly wanting nothing more than to get a rise out of Ginny. Ginny had half a desire to spin around and hex the old bat, but she didn’t give herself the pleasure of a good Bat-Bogey hex.
“Yes,” Ginny said with what she hoped was an honest laugh. “I was jealous of Hermione when I was eleven. But I wasn’t myself that year.”
Ginny realized too late that implying anything about her first year in front of a reporter was a bad idea, and quickly interrupted her interlocutor’s pointed questions with a pointed lie. “I hate to be rude, but I’m already late to meet Harry.”
Well, it wasn’t entirely false, Ginny congratulated herself for her honesty as she strode away from the reporter. She lost the woman in the crowd. That was the easy part; finding Harry was considerably more difficult. Ginny made a bee-line for her brother’s store, figuring that they would be in on the surprise, or at least likely to know of a way to contact Harry.
It was just her luck when it was closed. She slammed her fist into the door and then turned around, wondering what on earth she could do. With a sigh, she realized that he had probably headed back to his flat when she was late, and she trudged along to the Ministry to use their fireplaces.
She avoided running into anyone she knew and found a fireplace in a somewhat secluded corner, flooing to Harry’s place and sticking her head in the grate to see if anyone would answer. “Harry?” she asked. A long moment went by in silence.
To say she was surprised when Hermione (blue dress robes slightly askew, hair wild, cheeks flushed) answered would be an understatement. “Ginny? Oh, Merlin, Ginny!” Hermione looked distraught, as though her very presence would give something away. And, truth be told, the rest of the flat was all shadow behind her. “Where are you?”
Ginny frowned. “The Portkey Harry set up sent me to Diagon Alley. What are you doing at the flat?”
Hermione’s eyes went wide. “What am I doing? Oh. Nothing. Just dropped by.”
“On my birthday?”
“Well, you weren’t here,” Hermione offered.
“Is Harry there?” Ginny asked, her patience finally running out.
Hermione looked over her shoulder, and then turned back to the fireplace. “He’s… occupied at the moment. You’re at the Ministry?” Hermione paused for a moment, and Ginny was so dumbstruck that she couldn’t put two words together. “Stay right there,” Hermione finally said, and then she disappeared.
Ginny had no idea what was going on, and she had no idea what she was going to do, but the one thing she knew was that if she stayed in one place, with her aching head and her throbbing shoulder and her exhausted, over-taxed mind and body, harried by reporters and apparently put off in favor of his best friend by her boyfriend on her birthday, well, if she stayed in one place for very long at all, she would burst into tears.
And that was not an appropriate thing for Ginny Weasley to do on her birthday.
She left the ministry before she realized where she was going, and then realizing that Harry’s flat wasn’t that far away at all, she decided she would walk the distance there.
Harry caught up to her about halfway there, and in his haste to catch her, he stepped on the hem of her robes. They tore in two with a sickening rip.
She whirled around to hex whoever had the misfortune to almost trip her at such a point in what might be the third worst day in her life, and completely broke down when she saw it was Harry. It was just about all he could do to steer her on the way to his flat as she cried. “What’s wrong?” he asked, and just the sound of the terror in his voice made half of it better.
“I’ve had a terrible day; we lost the game by a landslide, I fell twice, almost dislocated my shoulder, and for the past two hours I’ve been grilled on what we’re doing tonight and are we soulmates and what’s your favorite flavor of Bertie Bott’s Beans and I don’t know what else, and I couldn’t find you and I didn’t know what to do and now my robes are ruined and I’m a total mess…” she trailed off.
“Peppermint,” he supplied.
“What?”
“My favorite flavor of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans: peppermint.” She laughed, and leaned against him. “And I’m sorry about your robes, but if it helps you don’t look a total mess; you look positively stunning as always.”
All of a sudden, everything was better. “Really?” she asked.
“Really,” he said, and they were at his doorstep. He paused for a moment before opening the door, and grinned at Ginny before reaching up and tearing one of the sleeves straight off his own robes. “Now we’re even,” he said.
She shook her head quickly, grinned, and ripped the neckline twelve inches wider. “Now we’re even.”
He grinned and held the door for her. They entered a deserted flat. “Wasn’t Hermione here earlier?” Ginny asked, suddenly suspicious, but Harry said nothing and offered her his arm, and she decided that he had never been untrustworthy before so she might as well trust him now.
Harry insisted on covering her eyes as she entered the living room, and when she could see again, she saw every single one of her unruly brothers, most of her friends from Hogwarts, the rest of the Holyhead Harpies, and quite a few of the Aurors she particularly liked arrayed in front of her. She almost screamed for joy. “Surprise,” Harry whispered. “Happy birthday. I hope you don’t mind that it’s not just us.”
“As long as you have another surprise for later tonight,” she whispered back, but even if he didn’t she would have been perfectly, and utterly, happy.