Disclaimer: I own one person, and I think you'll know that when you see her name. Nobody else is mine.
Set during Half-Blood Prince.
"Truth or dare?"
Ron eyes his girlfriend warily. She's super-pretty, Lavender is, and she may not be the brightest crayon in the box, but she can certainly be clever and evil when she wants to be, especially when it comes to Truth or Dare. Nobody ever wants her to give them a truth or dare, not even Parvati, because hers are always the worst.
"…Dare," he finally says after a moment of intense thought. At least she won't ask him to tell everybody – or at least, all the Gryffindors playing, which currently isn't that many, but news has a way of getting out from their private games – something embarrassing that she already knows. (She's done that a few times, and he's not sure he'll ever forgive her entirely for it.)
Lavender taps one manicured finger to her lips in thought, smirking at him in a way that has him grasping for his wand out of instinct. "I dare you to…wait. Where are Harry and Ginny?"
"Out in the courtyards," Hermione pipes up from her armchair a few feet away from the circle of players where she's doing her homework, after letting them quietly murmur in confusion to themselves for a minute. "The one with the waterfall," she clarifies, rolling her eyes at the blank looks she's getting.
"Fantastic!" chirps Lavender, and Ron steels himself, trying not to wonder why she was so curious about the whereabouts of his sister and best friend. "So, Won-Won…"
Ron groans, partly from the dare he knows is upcoming and partly from the nickname itself.
"I dare you to go find Harry and Ginny and take a picture of them making out."
His groan chokes, falters, and turns into a series of splutters that has Seamus cracking up (and he has a feeling Dean would, too, if he weren't too busy glaring at the floor and wishing it was Harry's face, probably).
"What?" he demands when he can talk properly. "Making out?"
"You can borrow my camera," chimes in Colin Creevey, and the look Ron gives him should be able to burn his stupid camera on the spot.
"Terrific," Lavender beams, casually plucking the camera from Colin's grasp and holding it out to her boyfriend with a spark in her eyes. "Have fun! You'll have to show us the picture when you get back, of course, so don't think you can cheat."
"Wasn't planning on it," Ron grumbles, snatching the camera and scrambling to his feet. "Hermione, come with me?"
"Why?" she mutters, very carefully not looking at him.
"Because you know where they are?" he suggests, smiling charmingly at her. His real reason is more along the lines of I want to spend time with you and please don't make me watch my best friend snog my sister alone, but he decides not to voice those particular thoughts out loud (or in front of Lavender).
Apparently, his charm works, because Hermione huffs, snaps her book shut, and stands up, looking annoyed, but there's still a pleased smile playing on her lips, especially when she takes a look at Lavender's suddenly murderous expression, so Ron mentally congratulates himself, anyway.
Today is the kind of beautiful day that is so rarely seen in Scotland, Harry muses, and it'd be a shame not to take advantage of it, really. He can't understand why all his friends are holed up inside Gryffindor Common Room when they could be outside, enjoying the rare sunshine with a girl as pretty as Ginny.
"You're thinking too loud," mutters Ginny, her breath warm on his neck where her head is leaning against. "Just relax, would you? Voldemort isn't going to pop out of that waterfall and attempt to kill you. And if he did, he'd probably fail."
Harry laughs, absently tangling his fingers in her vivid red waves. "Sorry. But I wasn't thinking about Voldemort. I was thinking about what a beautiful day it was and how our friends can stand to stay in the Common Room today."
"Oh," Ginny smiles up at him. "That's much better than thinking about a Dark Lord who wants to kill you."
"Well," Harry smirks, "now I am thinking about that, since you mentioned it. Reverse psychology and whatnot, right?"
Ginny blinks at him. For a moment, she is dead silent.
And then she pushes him into the waterfall.
"Ginny!" Harry splutters, surfacing and spitting water out. "What was that for?"
She shrugs, smiling innocently as she rakes a hand through her hair, meticulously untangling the knots he's been trying to work through for the past half an hour, with no luck. "I just thought you could use some cooling off," she says brightly, but there's an unmistakably mischieveous laugh in her voice.
"Cool off," he repeats skeptically, wading towards her and planting his hands on the grassy bank of the waterfall lake, one on either side of her body. "Really, now?"
"Don't you dare get me wet, Harry Potter," she says warningly, clearly recognizing the intention of his hands so near her. "I'm serious. Don't even think about it. I'm actually having a good hair day for once, you know that?"
Harry grins at her, lifting his hands, but instead of pulling her into the water, he lets them rest on her bare arms. "You're never not having a good hair day, Ginny," he tells her, half-teasingly, half-sincerely. "Not that I know anything about hair, but – "
Ginny rolls her eyes. "Oh, get over here," she mutters, fisting her hands in his sopping wet t-shirt and dragging him up till his lips collided with hers in a blaze of passion and energy and that bubbly feeling he only ever experiences when he's with her.
"You're beautiful," he murmurs insistingly against her lips, catching her body between his arms and the grass, both of them half-bent but not even caring, because it was impossible for them to be uncomfortable when they were together.
"And you look really cute when you're soaking wet," she returns, giggling, and twists her fingers into his hair as he peppers kisses down her neck, forgetting the rest of the world entirely.
"Ugh," Ron mutters, sulking as he leans against the trunk of an orange tree only a few feet away from Harry and Ginny in the waterfall. The Invisibility Cloak hides both him and Hermione from view, but he has a feeling neither Harry nor Ginny would have noticed them anyway, considering how wrapped up they are in each other.
"Oh, calm down," Hermione chides, unsuccessfully hiding an amused smile as she watches Harry and Ginny. "They're happy. Can't you be happy for them? He's finally got a girlfriend and you know he's going to treat her right. What's the problem?"
"The problem?" Ron gapes at her. "Blimey, Hermione, that's my best mate and my little sister! Snogging! That's not…that's not—that doesn't make me happy, for Merlin's sake!"
Hermione raises an eyebrow.
"Shut up," Ron mutters after a moment of silence, knowing full well she's right because she's Hermione and she's always right.
"Well, you know, the sooner you take the picture, the sooner we can leave and go back to Gryffindor," she reminds him, eyeing the camera he's discarded in between their bodies.
Ron makes a noise that indicates just what he thinks of his dare and tries not to look at Hermione's smile. Maybe she's realized that the reason he's stalling is because he wants to spend time with her, but maybe she hasn't. Either way, he's not letting on.
"Do you want me to take the picture?" Hermione asks teasingly.
"Yes, please," Ron says, bobbing his head up and down like a little kid. His gesture surprises a laugh out of Hermione, and he settles back against the tree quite pleased with himself as she picks up the camera. The fact that his sister is probably going to have a mark on her neck tomorrow thanks to his best mate doesn't even register while he watches Hermione (but, to be perfectly honest, not much registers with him when he's watching Hermione).
Snap!
Hermione glances down at the screen of the camera, then offers it to him. Curious, Ron takes it and observes the picture she's snapped. It's not anything special or particularly tricky, but it's definitely Harry and Ginny making out, judging by the position of his lips on hers and her hands roaming freely up and down his bare chest (though when she got his shirt off, Ron's not entirely sure and doesn't really want to know), and it definitely fulfills the terms of the dare.
"Fantastic," he grins, clambering to his feet and offering Hermione a hand. "You're brilliant, Hermione, honestly. You're the most brilliant girl I know."
A blush blossoms across her face as she accepts his hand (and he tries really, really hard not to notice how warm and soft her hand is and how it fits so easily into his and – never mind). "Thanks, Ron," she mutters, affecting an exasperated air, but he knows when she's pleased and when she's not, and she certainly is pleased.
"I'm serious, you know," he insists, holding her hand for perhaps a moment too long before hastily dropping it. "You're amazing and you're – "
"Not your girlfriend, so stop complimenting me before Lavender gets wind of it," Hermione interrupts, muffling a laugh, but Ron's pretty sure there's something more than amusement in her eyes, something darker, something that hurts.
"Oh," he says intelligently, his good mood falling like a stone when he remembers his (prettyprettypretty – but not Hermione) girlfriend waiting back at the Common Room. "Right. Of course. Um, let's…let's go, shall we?"
He has to clear his throat before she responds. "Yeah," she says slowly, "Let's go."
And he probably – definitely – shouldn't be thinking this as they walk back into the castle, but he has to wonder if some day, somebody will dare Harry or Ginny to take a picture of him and Hermine making out – and if he and Hermione ever will make out in the first place, and he should probably stop right there, shouldn't he?
Besides, Lavender's waiting, and that's all that should matter, right?
Cleaning the attic at his house doesn't really seem to be a punishment, James thinks. At least, not for him, though Lily and Al will probably disagree. But he just finds something so fascinating about searching through his parents' old things and finding objects from their past.
Like this one.
His hand folds around an old, crumpled piece of paper within the cover of an old, empty photo album he'd discarded. Carefully, he tugs it out and finds it miraculously not ripped. With tentative hands, he spreads it open on the box in front of him, smoothing out all the wrinkles.
James stares at it for a moment, trying to discern what the photo is depicting. Then he realizes what it is, and his jaw almost drops to the floor.
It's his parents, but they're young, almost his age, sixteen or seventeen. They're at Hogwarts, in a courtyard he vaguely recognizes – it's the one with the waterfall. And his father is in the waterfall itself, soaking wet and shirtless, and his mother is sitting on the bank, her hair long and loose and her legs around his father's waist.
And they're – James doesn't really want to say it, but (they're snogging). Rather heatedly, too, at that, because he can definitely see traces of pink lip gloss down his father's neck and his mother's hair is ridiculously disheveled, and that's not even mentioning the wet shirt discarded on the grass or the way their lips are moving against the others.
"What the bloody hell…?" he whispers to himself, right before the door randomly swings open behind him and makes him jump.
"James?" His father's voice echos oddly in the attic as he enters the wooden room. "What are you doing still up here? Didn't your sister call you down for dinner?"
"Um…" James wracks his memory, which is hard to do when he's holding a photo of his parents making out in his hands, but he has a vague memory of Lily bouncing up into the attic, dancing on his last nerves, and being shooed out via his famous Dust Bunny Hex (he spends so much time up here, he's gotten quite good at it). "I think so. I'm not hungry, though."
"All right, but you can come down, now," Harry tells him, looking half-amused, half-exasperated. "Unless you'd rather stay up here with whatever it is you like to look at."
"Oh, well," James says, raising an eyebrow as he glances at the picture he's still holding. "Actually…I did find this."
With a flourish, he brandishes the rather incriminating photo in front of his father's face and watches, highly entertained, when Harry's face immediately turns bright red just looking at the photo.
"Erm," Harry says eloquently. "James, where did you find that?"
James shrugs. "In one of these boxes. That's not important, though. Just what were you and Mum doing?"
Harry's blush brightens further, if that's even possible at this point. "I—um, that's really—that's not…you can see perfectly well, James!"
"Yes," James smirks, "but come on, Dad. Is this really you and Mum? Snogging?"
"I…" Harry's eyes dart wildly around the attic before settling back on his son. "Well, uh, yes," he admits finally. "But it's not—I mean, we were kids!"
"Well, obviously, you've done that since," James teases. "Considering Al and Lily and I exist, and all…"
Harry rolls his eyes and holds his hand out for the photograph. "Go to bed, James."
James heaves a sigh and drags himself to his feet, passing the photo to his father as he starts walking. "Can I ask a question?"
"Hm?" Harry asks absentmindedly, his gaze fixed on the picture. "What is it, son?"
"How did you know?" James asks quietly, shoving his hands in his pockets. "That Mum was the one, I mean. How'd you know you loved her?"
Harry glances up at him, green into blue, and smiles. "Around the same time I started fantasizing about marrying her instead of just snogging her, I'd imagine," he answers. "Why? Got any bridal dreams for your Ellie or something?"
It's James's turn to blush under his father's knowing gaze as he tries desperately not to think about Ellie Longbottom and how she would look really pretty in a wedding dress. "No!" he insists hastily. "I—Merlin's beard, Dad, we're just friends!"
"Of course," Harry chuckles, dropping a hand on his shoulder as they walk out the door. "You know, that's what I said about your mother at first. I didn't want to realize I was falling for my best friend's little sister, but…well," he grins, holding up the photograph of them as kids, "I think we all know how that turned out."
"Yeah," James says, distracted by a fantasy of a time in the future, when maybe, just maybe, he'll be kissing Ellie the way his father had kissed his mother all those years ago in the waterfall courtyard.
A/N: I admit, I had debated between making this James/Lily or Harry/Ginny - but I thought Harry/Ginny would be more fun since they're both alive ;) Hope you guys enjoyed this! If you've read this far, please do review! I'd really appreciate it! :)
And don't favorite without reviewing, please and thank you.