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“Hey,” she whispered in the darkness.
He jumped at the unexpected sound of her voice, looking up at her with eyes so wide that the vibrant shade of green could easily be seen in the darkness.
Harry righted himself quickly. “Hey,” he whispered back casually as if she hadn’t just scared the shit out of him.
“Sorry,” Ginny offered as she sat down on the steps next to him. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Harry lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “It’s alright. What are you doing up?”
“I could ask you the same,” she murmured. It was two o’clock in the morning at 12 Grimmauld Place. Harry had supposedly gone to bed hours ago.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Harry said.
“Are you an insomniac?” Ginny asked seriously. She could hardly see his expression in the darkness, but Harry seemed a bit startled.
“Er, no, I don’t think so.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” Ginny said. “You’ve been up every night since we got back from St. Mungo’s.”
“How’d you know that?”
“I didn’t,” Ginny admitted, “but I do now.”
Harry snorted. “You sly little snake.”
Ginny laughed lightly. “It wasn’t difficult to guess that you weren’t sleeping. No offense, but you look pretty terrible. From there it wasn’t much of a leap to know that you must be staying up at night.”
Harry didn’t respond to that, and they sat in silence on the top of the stairs for several long moments.
“You weren’t possessed, you know,” Ginny said after a while. “You were just, like, a witness. It’s not your fault.”
“I know,” Harry murmured. “I mean, logically, I know that. But it’s… it doesn’t change the fact that he’s in my head, somehow. Who even knows, really, how deep that connection goes. It’s definitely not normal. What if…” he trailed off.
“What if what?” Ginny picked up.
He looked her directly in the eyes then, pupils dilated so that they nearly canceled out the green. “When… when it happened, it was like… I was the snake. And the snake was him. We shared the same vision, the same… thoughts…
“I just… I feel so… dirty, you know? Like, he and I already had so many similarities, and now it’s as though we are the same person, to a certain extent.”
Ginny nodded. Slowly, she reached out and took his hand. He flinched instinctively as he always did, but recovered quickly, slipping his fingers in between her own.
She rested her head on his shoulder. “I know.”
She felt Harry nod against her hair. Because he knew that she knew. And not in the general sense of just knowing, like sympathizing. It was more than that because she knew. Knew what it was like to have lost control of your mind, to see things that you didn’t want to see, to do things that you didn’t want to do…
She inhaled heavily, tears slipping out on the exhale against her will. She reached up to wipe them away, but Harry beat her to it.
He ran the pad of his thumb under the corners of her eyes, lingering on the second one. He caressed her cheek in a way that should have felt weird and awkward but instead just felt right.
This was the boy who had everything yet nothing, and the boy who had come across the Gryffindor common room and challenged her to a game of Exploding Snap while everyone else had shunned and ignored her after the incident in the Chamber of Secrets.
He was the boy who knew exactly what it felt like to be used and abused and taken advantage of and to have the true depths of your traumas be ignored.
She thought that she would never not be awed by his strength, by his resolve to keep going, by his determination to never give up. By his emerald eyes and scruffy jet black hair… Ginny had a difficult time understanding how someone couldn’t fall in love with him.
And it wasn’t the fake type of love that she meant. He had plenty of fangirls, whether he realized it or not. She had been one herself, once. Maybe it had started out like that, but…
She had once thought him to be flawless, as she had grown up believing that, it was what she had known. But now she knew him, and she knew that he was not without flaws. And that only just made him all the more human. Maybe he hadn’t seemed quite human, before. Maybe it had been natural to crush on someone she could never have.
But she had him, didn’t she? Maybe they weren’t official and maybe they never would be, but maybe it didn’t matter. Here he was now, sitting beside her in the middle of the night. They were friends. She was nowhere near the level that Ron and Hermione were at, but she was still his friend. Their relationship was different and beautiful and valuable. She held worth in his eyes and she didn’t have to ask him to know that.
Perhaps the most human thing about him was the fact that they shared the same struggles. They shared something between the two of them that no one else could understand. They’d both had the same monster invading their minds.
It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t okay. But it was what it was, and they just had to deal with it.
“It’s okay to still be upset about it, you know,” Harry murmured, hand still held against her cheek. “Just because it’s over doesn’t mean that you’re over it.”
And that was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it?
It was over and everyone just assumed that meant that she was over it. She had healed okay on the outside, she hadn’t died though she had come so close, so she must be okay on the inside too, right?
It wasn’t really true. Sometimes Ginny would still have nightmares about all the terrible things she had done while possessed, sometimes she wasn’t able to eat because the knowledge that Voldemort himself had resided in her mind weighed so heavily in her stomach.
But you didn’t have to be over something in order to move past it. You didn’t have to pretend that your traumas never happened so that you could deal with them. In fact, that was the only way to deal with them. To know and to remember… to reflect and let go of regrets.
Maybe everything wouldn’t turn out okay and maybe that was just life. But for now they could share a precious moment in the darkness of night, before daylight shone in and woke them up to the fact that they couldn’t remain to be the couple of kids who sat on the staircase together in the middle of the night. War wasn’t meant for children, but they were still children in war.
And so Ginny held on tightly to Harry’s hand, not entirely sure who was comforting the other at this point as she allowed herself a few more tears and continued to allow Harry to use his fingers as a handkerchief.