Want is a very strange thing.
I'd watch him when we were living in Grimmauld Place the summer after the war, he and Hermione and Ron and Luna and Neville and me. He'd hunch over pieces of parchment with notes cobbled together from six years of school with the worthwhile hope of gaining back the knowledge he'd need for a makeshift eighth years at Hogwarts. He and Hermione and Ron and Neville all did that together while Luna and I tidied up the house and gave them bits of wordless encouragement. Luna would visit her father and I would visit the Burrow along with the others. He often hung back. Neville stayed with him. I didn't think much of it at the time. Hindsight, as it's said, is always 20/20.
We tiptoed around each other, him and me. He made no moves forward and I followed suit, thinking he wasn't ready, not so soon after all that had happened. And I was affected, too, obviously, I with my dead brother and an eternally grieving mother. Mum seemed to forget about the rest of us, except when she remembered that we had shoulders to cry on, and cry she did. I felt worst for George, I think, who'd lost his best friend and only real confidant. We could all try to fill that void, but I knew that would never happen, not with Fred gone.
But Harry ... Sometimes, he'd just sit in the same spot in the back solar of Grimmauld Place, one with a giant picture window seat. He'd curl up his limbs and stay completely still in the corner, shying away when anyone approached. Well, almost anyone, as again, an exception was made for Neville. Neville would sit opposite him, legs stretched out, the soles of his feet balanced against Harry's knees. How I missed the intimacy of those moments, I haven't the faintest. But I did. So I keep trying in my subtle way. Sometimes I'd make him laugh, or we'd talk about the things he used to love, Quidditch and defence and Chocolate Frogs. But it started rare, and it remained that way, all through our final year at Hogwarts. I wasn't going for NEWTs so I wouldn't be staying for another. I had a spot locked up on the Holyhead Harpies and would head that way after graduation. I thought he might follow, but that wasn't to be.
We sat down in his window seat one July afternoon, just weeks before his 19th birthday. He was pulling at a loose thread on the sleeve of his t-shirt, avoiding my gaze until he told me that nothing could happen between us.
"I thought you liked me," I said without pausing to consider the finality in his phrasing. Nothing.
He let go of his sleeve and rubbed at his temples with both hands on either side of his head. "I did. Before. But we haven't had that in a while, have we? We're not the same as we were before. You lost Fred and, I don't know, I lost some part of myself but gained another."
"I don't know what that means."
"I didn't, either. But I think I do now. I'm different now, I think. I'm not the same Harry and you're not the same Ginny and it just doesn't make the sense it used to."
I wanted to nod, to agree with him, to move forward without this kind of conversation hanging at the back of my head. I chose instead to protest. "Those different people could make sense, too, Harry. We'd just have to try."
"The beginning of relationships aren't about trying, Ginny," he said wearily. "They're about stumbling around each other and being shy and realizing you're right for someone who's always been there, someone who listens and cares and understands without ever having to say so."
"So it's someone else, then."
"It's not the only reason, but yes. There's someone else."
The worst part of understanding at that moment wasn't the mere fact that there was someone else. It was that the someone else was a person that I'd in the past viewed as a consolation prize, the one I'd have if Harry never noticed me. And now ... Now, Harry was choosing that, choosing him over me.
"Was it all the times you stayed back here, then? When we went to Mum and Dad's?"
"Those, yeah, that's part of it. Sometimes, we'd go to St. Mungo's while you were all away to visit his parents and people who'd lost something in the war. But usually we'd just sit right here and be quiet together."
"Does he know?"
"We've been together for two months, so, yeah, I think he does." I could tell he was holding back a smile then. That hurt maybe more than anything else, that he could be happy, genuinely pleased with himself and how things were, when he was doing this to me, casting me aside, letting go any possibility of the two of us together.
"Oh. Well. Who else knows?"
"Hermione and Ron saw us in the dorms," he said, adopting a casual tone. I wondered to myself why Hermione never said anything. She likely wanted me to find out for myself from Harry. I tried not to shake my head at that as he added, "And Luna saw us in the Forbidden Forest, feeding the thestrals together. We weren't kissing or anything. We weren't even holding hands. She's Luna. She just knew."
I nodded slowly. "I don't suppose the two of you will be leaving the house when everyone else does, then." I was headed for training camp in three weeks, Ron and Hermione were getting married in August, and Luna was going to Nepal, though no one had quite figured out why.
"No. We're comfortable here."
"Are you getting married?"
"I don't know. It's been two months."
"Sometimes you can know after that short a time."
"I don't want to say yes or no. I just don't know. Really, I don't. I'm only 18. He's only 18. How would we possibly be able to know if this was the right decision?"
"Hermione's 18. Ron's 19."
"That's been on the books for years, hasn't it?"
"Yes."
"This isn't the same. Not at all. Theirs was a relationship of simple circumstance. Ours was borne of tragedy."
"You sound so melodramatic, Harry."
"He's worth it."
For some reason, those were the words that convinced me that nothing would ever change. They would get married, and I would be alone, or at least without Harry. Maybe I didn't fully accept that then. Maybe now, two years down the road, I still haven't. But I know it's true now. I'm with Dean again, and he knows I'm not really all that happy, but he accepts it as good enough and we move forward together. It's all I'm ever going to get. I know that now. It's not what I want. But it's what I have. And what I have is all there's going to be.