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All that was left was Ginny's old canvas school satchel and her overnight bag. She stood next to them in her empty room, chewing her thumbnail. She and Harry had wrestled her old trunk and her cardboard boxes downstairs together by hand, which had earned Harry a snivelly hug from Mum and an equally-snivelly handshake from Dad. Ginny was sure she was in for a whole rainstorm of crying when she showed up downstairs with her bags on her shoulders.
Strange how much bigger her room looked without all her things in it. A spiderweb waved loose in the corner where it had once been attached to her desk lamp. Dark shapes on the walls where pennants and posters had shielded the wallpaper from the sun. Those were all in a box now, rolled into neat cylinders by a charm and a funny whipping motion of the tip of her mum's wand. Mum had tried to teach her how to do it but Ginny had only been half-listening so eventually Mum had done that frustrated little huff of breath through her nose and rolled them all up herself.
The place on the baseboards where Ginny had once, seven years old, scratched I HATE FRED AND GEORGE was still there. She thought about charming it away so her mum and dad wouldn't see it—she even took her wand out—but it felt like erasing a memory. Fred and George had transfigured her Harpies scarf to show a bad word and she'd gone to three errands with mum before anyone noticed. Her mum had been so red that even her dad had seemed alarmed at her fury. She'd sent Ginny and the twins to their rooms, even though Ginny hadn't even known what the word meant (until Fred and George, delighted, had explained it to her over breakfast the next morning).
Harry pushed the door open with a slow creak and Ginny hid her bitten thumb behind her back.
"Ready?" he said. He was slightly out of breath. "I've got everything set up outside so we can just grab it and apparate."
He always stood in the hallway unless he was invited, as if they weren't about to be sharing a flat, a bedroom, a bed.
"Yeah." Ginny gave him a faint smile. "Just give me a minute."
He lingered there for a few seconds like he wasn't sure if he should go, then turned and clomped down the stairs.
This was the last minute she'd still live in the house she'd shared with her brothers. The next time she came she'd only be visiting. That felt like it should make her feel something, but all she had were sore arms, the buzz of excitement in her stomach, the prickly emptiness where some deeper feeling should be.
She shouldered her bag and went downstairs to face her mum's stupid tears.
That first night in their little flat, they were too tired to do anything but flump down on their too-hard new mattress and fall asleep. Ginny dreamt she was signing a contract with the Kestrels, big ridiculous ceremonial quill in her hand, the fluff of it tickling in her nose, eyes watering from all the sports-reporter flashbulbs. She touched the quill to the big scroll of parchment and signed her name.
Good evening, my dear, the contract wrote back. It's been such a very long time. Are you still wondering if you'll ever learn to do a Cuban Eight on your broomstick? Is your brother still nasty to you about it? I know—
She woke with a hiss of breath and cramps shooting up her calves. Panic hammered through her veins— dark. I'm hurt —until she remembered where she was and that she'd made about twenty trips up and down the stairs with boxes yesterday, thinking it'd be nice to get a leg workout in before tryouts.
She rolled on her side, rested her head on the crook of her arm, bit down on her middle fingernail and watched the slow swells of Harry's breathing. They hadn't hung the curtains yet and the bare bedroom wall was stained with the swapping colours of the traffic light outside: green, yellow, red. She took a breath and held it to slow her heartbeat. Tonks had taught her how to do that. She crammed that useless thought down into the dark cellar storage inside her, along with the sick lingering unease of the dream.
This view of Harry, the narrow shoulders in silhouette and that mess of black hair against the pillow: she'd seen it before, but today in their flat it was exhilaratingly new. This was going to be her every morning, this was going to be her middles-of-the-night. She was going to get used to it. How absolutely mad.
Later, in the faint blush of sunrise, Harry took a long deep breath and stretched his arms over his head. When he turned to face her, his skinny legs tangling in the sheets and that slow squinty smile spreading across his face, Ginny forgot all about the panic and the cramps and my dear and just climbed on top of him, thinking only this is how it's supposed to be, you and me, every day .
Ginny felt silly getting so excited for their first big shop. She was uncomfortable amongst all the muggles in the plasticky brightness of Sainsbury's, but Harry pushed the trolley down the overstimulating gauntlets of every-colour packets and tins with a bored confidence that looked weird on him.
"Yeah," he shrugged. "Aunt Petunia used to drag me along and make me carry the big thing of serviettes that wouldn't fit in the bags."
The muggle snacks were nasty-looking and there weren't even any pumpkin flavours, but Harry grabbed boxes of biscuits and bags of crisps and assured her she'd understand when she tried them. He piled the trolley with fruit and veg, spinach and carrots and apples and bananas.
"You know I can't cook like Mum, right?" Ginny huffed.
"Yeah, I dunno—you've got tryouts and I've got the Auror Academy physical coming up—thought we could try making smoothies or something—you know—grown up, healthy—" He shrugged and ruffled his hair with his hand.
Making smoothies for breakfast with the boy who lived, in their bright little flat that smelled of his cedar trunk and soap. Ginny was stricken, for an instant, by an idea that seemed stupid but dizzyingly true at the same time—that she'd never understood before what it must have been like for Harry to suddenly find out he was a wizard when he was eleven, but maybe it was something like these last few days: the buoying relief of having survived her old life long enough to see her new one, and the unmoored thrill of all the future discoveries unknown, undreamt-of.
She pressed a kiss to the crescent of skin behind his ear as he counted out the strangely-coloured muggle banknotes, and she could feel the warm flush in his skin where her lips touched him.
Of course the smoothies never happened.
Harry was in meetings with Minister Shacklebolt and his transition team most days, and Ginny spent afternoons practicing for tryouts with Bill, swooping over the seaside cliffs like starlings and hurling his battered old quaffle over the peaked roof of Shell Cottage.
The spinach wilted in the cupboard and the bananas sat unbothered in the fruit bowl, mottled with brown spots. Harry and Ginny ordered pizza and ate it in knackered silence. All the singing nerves of the day they'd moved in together had subsided under the heavy disappointing drone of the neighbour's telly through the wall. Harry would rub Unknotting Unguent into Ginny's spasming back and then she'd crawl into bed and fall asleep listening to the scratch of his quill as he revised for the Auror Academy exams. It wasn't anything like she'd imagined. It wasn't anything. It was like the time just before winter holidays or her birthday, the dragging, drudging lope of days spent waiting for something exciting—but what? This was it. This was supposed to be it.
Her mum and dad dropped by while Harry was out, and while Molly managed to hold her tongue at the stack of pizza boxes next to the bin and the gnats buzzing round the fruit bowl, Ginny could see on her face that she wasn't impressed. She looked so old, all of a sudden. Arthur did too, but at least his face lit up with a boyish glee when he wandered through the flat flipping all the lightswitches. Ginny pulled the chain of the the ceiling fan for him and he giggled like a little kid.
"Has Angelina been round lately?" Ginny asked them over chipped mugs of tea. She knew better than to ask directly about George.
"She's in Freiburg, actually, consulting with Ellerby and Spudmore," Arthur said. That sounded dead grown-up. Ginny couldn't even imagine. With a cautious glance over at her mum, he added, "I gather they're on a bit of a break. George has been... in one of his moods, I think. We don't hear much."
He was speaking in that hushed, apologetic tone he'd been using ever since all the funerals.
"Oh," Ginny said.
"I've been to the Tonks house this week," her Mum cut in. Her dad pressed his lips together until they went white.
"Did you see Teddy?" Ginny asked, setting down her half-eaten shortbread. She and
Harry hadn't been to visit him in the last few weeks, with the way all their time was eaten by moving out and practice and exams and just everything, every thing.
"He was having a little kip—" Molly started, but then she stopped and took a big slurp of her tea, the way she always did when she was about to deliver hard news.
A brand-new understanding thumped in Ginny's chest: that steadying tea-slurp was her mum's need to soothe herself, the way Ginny would peel off slivers of fingernail with her teeth. Somehow it was both startling and obvious. She'd been watching her mum do it for almost nineteen years.
"He's been having a bit of trouble—er, sleeping and that—" Arthur filled in for Molly with a weak chuckle.
"He won't sleep in his bed," Molly blurted out, "he's afraid something's underneath and trying to get him. Andromeda tried to make him tell her what he thinks is under there—you know, he's barely two—and all he would say was 'Mummy and Daddy'—"
Another slurp of tea. Arthur reached out to stroke Molly's upper arm.
Hours later, when Harry came home, he didn't ask why Ginny was lying on the sofa with her eyes all swollen. He just sat next to her and laid his hand on her cheek. She didn't start crying again, but it was a weird comfort to just lie there and throb with his quiet warmth at her side.
The neighbours downstairs had a party so loud Ginny could feel the bass vibrating in the mattress springs. She and Harry cast every muffling and white-noise charm they knew, but the beat pounded through the very frame of the building. It invaded Ginny's head like a commanding voice and made her legs twitch with electric, frustrated rage.
"I'm going to go downstairs, curse the door off the hinges and hex every single one of them and their—their muggle—music box or whatever—"
Harry turned over and squinted at her in the dark.
"You can't get arrested, they'll disqualify you from tryouts," he croaked.
Ginny kicked all her covers off and rolled in a ball on her side, clutching her stomach.
Harry managed to fall asleep with his head sandwiched between two pillows, but Ginny laid there in spiraling despair until the police came to break the party up. The curtains were still in a wrinkled lump on the bedroom floor, so the flashing lights made a red-and-blue lightshow on the bedroom wall. Harry didn't even move. When the music finally shut off, Ginny closed her eyes in exhausted relief, but it seemed like the moment she fell asleep the sun was shining red through her eyelids and the pipes were groaning with Harry's morning shower.
The browning bananas curved like a smirk in the fruit bowl. Ginny blankly spooned Harry's weird muggle cereal into her mouth. Her thoughts were the same slow pointless drip as the broken tap in the kitchen. Harry leaned down to kiss her neck on his way out the door. He followed her gaze to the bananas.
"They're getting almost as freckly as you," he murmured into her ear, smacked another kiss on her cheek, and left. Ginny sat in the abrupt calm of the flat for a moment, blinking, then threw her spoon into the bowl with a clink and flooed over to Bill's, where she slung the quaffle so hard and so wildly it broke the weather vane off the roof and sent it spinning into the kitchen garden. Fleur came running out the back door at the noise, wiping her hands on a tea towel and cursing in French. Bill pulled his broom up alongside pinkfaced, panting Ginny and gripped her shoulder with his big rough hand.
Harry sat up in the dead of night with a gasp like he was coming up from underwater and touched his fingertips to his scar.
Ginny sat up too, so fast it made her abs twinge. "What is it? Does it hurt?"
"No," Harry said, "not really. Only in the dream."
He sat there blinking for a moment, red traffic light painting his face, then flopped back on his side and pulled the covers up to his neck. Ginny felt suddenly very alone in their bed.
"I have weird dreams too," she whispered.
She didn't think Harry had heard her at first, but after a moment, muffled by the duvet, he said, "Do you?"
"Yeah."
He turned over to face her. "Like what?"
"I dunno," she said. She didn't know why she'd even said it, because she didn't really want to talk about it now. "Like I made it on a Quidditch team but I don't want to play anymore."
Harry was quiet for so long she thought he must have gone back to sleep, but then he slid over and rested his forehead against her thigh. It had taken him so long, when they'd first begun seeing each other, to start giving her little touches like this. She didn't suppose the Dursleys had been touchers. She wove her fingers into his hair.
"I haven't felt like myself lately," she blurted out. "I mean—not just lately—but especially—I dunno—"
She took a breath and the hitch in it repulsed her.
Harry didn't say anything, but she could feel his eyelashes blinking against her leg. The light from outside turned green and painted the rumpled sheets that pooled around the both of them.
"I just—we never even made smoothies. The bananas are all rotten now. The curtains are still over there on the floor. How long is it going to be like this? How long can I not feel like myself before I have to admit that this is just how I am now?"
She shoved her thumbnail in her mouth. Warm stupid tears were leaking down her face and dripping all the way down her neck to her collarbones. She'd normally have scrubbed them away with the back of her hand and gone somewhere to collect herself, but she wanted them, weirdly, to prove how pathetic this dumb fucked-up feeling was. Mum's coppery hair was coming in white, poor Andromeda had to think about dead Tonks crawling out from under the bed, George was aching alone in his filthy bedsit, Fred was in the ground turning into something unrecognisable, and Ginny was sat here crying like an idiot over some fucking brown bananas.
Harry sat up and looked at her. "The bananas went bad?"
Ginny laughed through her noseful of snot.
"They're nearly black now," she sniffed. "Its so stupid, I just hate to waste—"
Harry suddenly swung his legs out of the bed and walked in his stiff morning way out of the bedroom.
The traffic light was yellow now. Ginny got up and followed him into the kitchen.
Harry was holding the bunch of bananas betwen two fingers. A tenacious fruit fly looped circles around them. He broke one off the bunch with a nasty squishing noise.
"I'll eat them right now," he said. "Zero waste."
He pulled the black peel back from the banana. A fermented smell came off it and stung the back of Ginny's nose. Webby strings of goo stretched between the fruit and the skin, and they caught the light from outside and shone with it like tiny filaments of neon.
"Er—" Harry started, his brow furrowing.
"You don't have to eat it," Ginny said quickly.
Harry stared at her for a moment with such intensity that she thought he might take a bite just to shock her.
Then he turned around and chucked them into the kitchen bin.
"We'll go to Sainsbury's in the morning," he said. Ginny's face was itchy with drying tears. Harry wiped his hands off on the seat of his pyjamas and brushed past her into the bedroom.
"Come on, I'll rub that stuff on your back if you want," he called over his shoulder.
Ginny didn't, but she followed him back to bed. In the morning, she woke to the quiet rustling sounds of Harry putting up the curtains. The flat still reeked of rotting banana. When she sat up, Harry turned around to look at her, grinned, and accidentally bashed the curtain rod into the window frame. Ginny felt a sleepy little flicker inside: this is it. You and me.