Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.
Summary: Another school year coming to an end, and for her it would be the last. Wandering in her memories, she stumbles upon someone who is just as lost as she, and who might be able to help her find her way home. Ginny/Colin. One-shot.
Reminiscence
It's funny, she muses, as she stuffs the last shirt into her suitcase, steals a hand under the bed to drag out the final sock, and calls to a neighboring dorm mate to see if she's seen her watch. Time was so rich back then, and now it seemed to float just beyond her grasp, always moving just fast enough to elude her one more time.
Dragging her luggage down the stairs, the wheels banging with every step, she pauses a moment to glance across the almost-empty common room; one last, long look that she'll remember forever, before turning to check out and be off, away into an unpredictable world that'll either have her, or it won't, but she's ready to take the risk.
And when the headmistress asks her if she'll leave the luggage to be carried off, and go find the stragglers scattered across the school, she does so with a crooked smile, straightening her Head Girl badge and running one hand through her wild red hair, glad to have the chance to walk the halls once more and give the younger ones one last telling off, something she's still not entirely used to.
The Charms classroom is empty, as she'd thought it would be, despite the merriment that went on there during normal school days, and the Transfiguration classroom is also devoid of life. But when she comes to the Defense Against the Dark Arts Room, the both beloved and hated room of so many confused memories and emotions, she can already hear someone before she turns the door handle.
A lense meets her when she opens the door, big and round and attached to a camera the flashes as it goes off, blinding her for a few seconds in which she hears the beginnings of someone apologizing, and then the camera is whisked away, and the hapless lad is left standing looking rather embarrassed, reading glasses askew, though she doesn't know why he'd be wearing reading glasses to take a photograph.
"I was –" he stutters, but she already knows; she has the same feeling of wanting to linger here, perhaps for some time more, though something is calling her away now and she can no longer ignore the taste of freedom she's only had a sip of but has already become accustomed to the flavor.
"Taking a few last photographs to remember this by?" she finishes for him, and he nods.
Her eyes stray to the boxes he's set aside, filled with photographs he's taken, clippings from the newspaper, and odds and ends she can only guess he's gotten from him, the one she fell for, loved, and lost. She is starting to believe that he too had felt something that went beyond hero-worship, but she doesn't think she wants to know the truth of it, not now at least.
"You have a picture…of us?" she asks, idly shifting through one of the boxes, her curiosity peeked, despite the freshness of a wound two years past. And when she says us she doesn't mean herself and the boy in front of her.
"It was…his first kiss. Well, that he'd given anyone, anyway," he explains softly, removing his reading glasses and setting them folded atop a secondhand copy of Hogwarts, A History, beloved reading material of a friend she'd once had and a girl he knew to be his friend. She flinches a little when she sees the next clipping and immediately turns the box aside, looking again to the boy next to her, whose aging had eroded away the high energy he'd had in his first years, chasing after him with that camera of his, trying to bewitch badges and brew potions to improve his photographs.
"It's about time to go," she finally says after a moment of silence. "I'm just rooting out the stragglers."
"Right," he replies, straightening up and busying himself with collecting his valuables. "I'll be out in a bit, then."
"What'll you do?" she asks quickly, not wanting to leave just yet, not wanting to lose this piece of memory standing before her; getting ready to slip out of her grasp like the rest of them. "For a job, I mean."
"I don't know. I don't have any strengths really, and my only hobby is photography, which at best I could work for some newspaper or other. What about you?" he says, tracing a box flap with his index finger, a dreamy look in his eyes as he travels back through his own stay in the castle and seems to manage a smile of it, even though so much ill had occurred in their time.
"Quidditch is, and always had been my forte," she responds, smiling roguishly for the thought of a stolen flight out on the pitch earlier when everyone had gone and she had just flown and flown without thought, only feeling. He nods and picks up one box, reaching out for another as he balances his book in the crook of his arm.
She does not ask, only picks up some of the boxes and walks out ahead of him, but she catches the grateful look in his eyes and knows that he needs her company right now just as much as she needs his; both of them struggling with wanting to linger because once they were gone they would have left behind so much more than they could bear.
"Do you…see him much these days?" he asks hesitantly from behind the pile of boxes he is carrying, as they continue into the Great Hall, whose enchanted ceiling is starting to fade, if a little; the castle finally beginning to feel its limits as well.
She lets out a long sigh, but answers his question anyway. "Now and again. He was friends with my brother first, anyhow, and I think he's really been one of us since before he first saw me. Mum's made sure of it."
As they board the carriage to leave the castle, she touches his hand and gestures for them to take one final look back at their castle of memories, Hogwarts, for now and eternal in their minds. He fumbles slightly, as the carriage begins to move, and she notices that he's taken the hand she's reached across with in his own.
She raises her eyes to meet his and he smiles; a melancholy smile that holds the weight of the past in it, but when he squeezes her hand, she smiles back. She doesn't know where it'll lead, but she knows she's going to follow it anyway, because her memories of him are still there, but she's still got some memories left to make.
Fin.