LOVE STORY
This story is dedicated to my late grandmother who was the only person who displayed real unconditional love towards me and whom I loved and cherished deeply in return.
Summary – (HG, during Hogwarts, one shot fic) A poignant portrayal of a young couple who experienced the love of their lifetime and ultimately faced the greatest crisis of all. Inspired by Alice Hoffman and the 1970 movie Love Story.
DISCLAIMER – Anything you recognize is not mine
LOVE STORY
Where do I begin
to tell a story of how great a love can be,
the sweet love story that is older than the sea,
the simple truth about the love she brings to me?
Where do I start?
With her first hello
she gave a meaning to this empty world of mine.
There'd never be another love, another time.
She came into my life and made the living fine.
She fills my heart,
she fills my heart with very special things,
with angel songs, with wild imaginings.
She fills my soul with so much love
that anywhere I go I'm never lonely.
With her along who could be lonely?
I reach for her hand, it's always there.
How long does it last?
Can love be measured by the hours in a day?
I have no answers now but this much I can say:
I know I'll need her till the stars all burn away
and she'll be there.
- Carl Sigman
The first thing she noticed in her fifth year was that he could walk past a mirror without casting a reflection, as if he was already dead long before he could even begin to live his life. She carried her knowledge around inside her until it started to hurt, like a splinter in her finger, throbbing and too tiny to see.
She avoided sneaking into the boys' dormitiory to steal some of Ron's socks because that was where she had seen him turn to look at himself in the big mirror that was framed in gold. He did not seem surprised to find that nothing was there, only empty glass the color of dishwater. He did not even flinch, as if already resigned to his fate, to the inevitable end of his life.
At first she avoided him. She made certain not to be around when he was. She could tell when he was about to walk into the common room or Grand Hall the way some people say they could sense what it was likely to rain.
Then after a while, she stopped running and stayed. Somebody had to be there for Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley had decided that someone was going to be her. She was in a spiral, but no one saw it. Ron thought everything was fine because Ginny was not running around with one or another of her boyfriends anymore.
She was so well behaved that if grades had been given out for all around conduct, she could probably match Hermione. If any boys asked her out, she told them she had far more important things to do. She looked so serious those days, with her long red hair knotted, and her face washed clean, and her dark brown eyes burning as though she were on fire.
As it was, Harry was hardly talking. He had a funny look in his eyes, like he did not believe in anything. Ron would say something simple to him, such as I'm starving, and he would look blank, as if he was not speaking the same language.
He began to search out dark, empty places in order to avoid other people with the same alacrity as the voles in the greenhouse dodge the traps set out among the strawberries. Most often he stationed himself in the library, near the restricted section where no one went. He only returned to the common room when it was past curfew.
He wished he were a thousand miles away – what he would not give to be walking on the moon right now, running on its pale, cruel surface, stones in his pockets and in his shoes, stone heart and lungs and limbs. He did not want to talk to anyone, but when he looked across the library, he spied Ginny Weasley. He could tell Ginny was waiting for him, waiting for the right moment to speak to him, talk to him.
When she sat by him a few nights later in the common room and tried to speak to him, he barely looked like himself in the dark, but she knew him, perhaps better than she knew anyone in this world. His face looked different somehow, and more pinched, as though her mere presence disappointed him, as though disappointment was the only path he knew.
He had glared at her and made a strange sound in his throat, as though something was supposed to be funny, only it was not. Outside it was nearly dark, but still hot. In spite of the temperature, Harry seemed frozen. He clenched his hands in his lap and his lips were pinched and blue. She had to stop herself from reaching out and touching him to test if he felt as cold as he looked.
Then he had snapped at her, made a really cruel jab at her. When she started crying, he did not say anything. He stared at her with his big, dark green eyes. Even his eyebrows were beautiful, arched and black like crows.
"I'm going to die." He declared. Everything about him was sharp on the outside. His startling green eyes, his perfect white teeth, the messy spikes of his black hair.
"Everyone is."
"I will, if I don't kill Voldemort." Ginny barely flinched at the mention of the name. She was too caught up with the way Harry sounded too old and she wondered how this happened so suddenly. Harry was nearly a man, with responsibilities of his own.
"You'll kill him." She said it with such conviction he smiled wistfully.
"All right." He said.
He really was the most beautiful boy on earth, especially on this night. You would never guess he was hurting so badly from losing the one person who had ever really loved him or that death was by his side. He closed his eyes and his breathing settled.
As she watched him that entire night as he slept, Ginny knew that she would always feel the way she felt about Harry then. No matter what happened, even if she got married and had a dozen kids, even if she never said it aloud. It would always be him.
Over the months they grew close. She convinced herself that they were too young for anything as magnanimous as death. They spent nights sitting in the common room, staring at the dying embers of the fire in the fireplace. They did not have to speak about the way his godfather died; they did not have to talk at all. Silence did not frighten them.
They could just look at each other and recognize that there was pain in this world, even on beautiful nights when twilights settled in Hogwart grounds, sifting through the grass and the hedges.
After a while, they started going up to the astronomy tower. They took a blanket out there and called out the names of the constellations they knew until they were too tired and dizzy to look up anymore.
When people talked about Sirius in front of him, when he could not take the talk of Voldemort too much, Ginny would know simply from the way his fingers trembled and the way he stared at her, panicked, like a fish on a hook. Then she would say something to distract the other party and save him. That was how it went for some time.
It was all the same as it was every summer at The Burrow but this time it just felt different. On her birthday Ginny was wearing a white dress, and her red hair streamed down her back the way sunlight spilt across yards and lawns.
Later that night, when they were up in the tree house in the backyard all by themselves, Ginny unwrapped his present. She had the look that girls always had whenever they were falling in love with somebody. Her face was flushed and her eyes were browner than dark chocolate, the sure signs of her devotion.
He had given her a half a heart. It was gold and from inside his shirt, he pulled out the other side. It hung around his neck on a rawhide cord. Harry's face was so good it made her want to cry. He stared straight at her and Ginny felt incredibly dizzy.
Maybe being lightheaded was what allowed her to be bold, or maybe it was the notion that the time for this might never come again; whatever the reason Ginny leaned towards Harry and kissed him. His arms went around her waist. They were so close, he swore he could feel her heart beating; he could hear his own heart as well. It was glorious. Harry felt almost alive again.
That summer they went to the old treehouse in the backyard almost every night; everyone who kept tabs on them were asleep, nobody knew where they were. This place was theirs, at least temporarily. They found an old rug to spread out on the floor and they stored candles and bottles of butterbeer in the treehouse.
It was built when Bill was a kid but it would not be standing much longer. Harry and Ginny both had the sense that it was crumbling around them; they could feel what little time they had.
The summer was fading away, drifting into a green haze. This was what summer would always mean to them, even when they had grown old. The way the crickets called, the way they huddled close together on the old rug, the way they did not want to step into the future, not yet.
Some nights they went to the lake nearby where she and her brothers used to go swimming during the day if they wanted to cool off in the summer time. At night it was a different place - there was privacy here in the dark water, freedom on the wooded shore.
They spent several nights there kissing each other with hot, greedy mouths, not caring about the rest of the world, centered only in the intensity of their private moments: the dive off the rock, the embrace in shallow water, the whisper in a pink curved ear.
It was different between them now and there was not a thing they could do about it. They did not communicate the way they used to before her birthday – lighthearted and easy with each other. Everything was difficult now. A single word had the potential to break their hearts to pieces.
On the last night of that summer holidays, they watched the moon through the holes in the roof of the tree house and they did not talk about anything. When it was late enough for the raccoons to start taking possession of the tree house, they headed back to the house, but they did so slowly, dragging their feet as they went.
He walked her up to her room. Just before she could open the door and go in, he leaned forward and kissed her. He kissed her with everything he felt and he ran off, up the stairs to Ron's room, away from her. It was the first time he showed such physical affection in the house – the whole summer had been based on an unwritten law that they were nothing more than friends under her parents' roof.
Ginny walked into her room and curled up in her bed with her legs to her chest, trying to stop everything that she felt. She slipped under the covers – she was freezing. Moonlight fell in through the window, turning everything silver and blue.
A wind came up, and the bramble bush hit against the house and Ginny listened to the sound carefully. When someone kissed you with everything they felt, you did not stop thinking about it for a very long time.
Back in Hogwarts, Harry avoided her like a plague, completely ignorant about how to go about keeping his developing feelings for this girl to himself. He spend weeks sulking around, angry over the fact that he could not be like every other normal teenage boy and be with the girl he had feelings for.
Ginny noticed this and tried to keep away as well, to give Harry the space he needed. But she knew he was shutting everyone and everything else out. She would not let him though, not this time anyway. Some people needed saving and Harry was one of them.
Many nights, Ginny stayed awake, thinking of how her love for him could set things right. In Ginny's opinion, it was impossible to exist in the world and not be in love with Harry. It was not to say she did not try to get a grip but whenever she looked at Harry, she felt something racing inside her.
So after a few weeks of his sulking, on the last day of the summer, she went up to the boys' dormitiory, knowing that he was inside alone for the rest of the boys were out playing quidditch or in the library. When she knocked though, he did not answer. She opened the door cautiously.
He was sitting on his bed, a book in his lap, staring at it with an intensity that frightened and intrigued her. Outside through the window, the grass in the fields was yellow, a beautiful sea of gold and green.
"What do you want?" Harry said. He had a hard, annoyed tone and he gave her one of his stares, a dejectedly angry look.
Ginny ignored him, sitting down on a wooden stool and picking up one of her brother's books on quidditch. The heat had a heavy, yellow cast and it was oddly exhausting. Harry lay down on his bed and turned his face towards the wall.
"Leave me alone." Harry said.
Ginny closed her eyes temporarily, willing herself to believe that he was just using this to hide the hurt, the pain of being who he was and the responsibility of his entire existence. Unfortunately, her Weasley temper got the best of her.
"Fine." She was genuinely amazed by the cool authority of her own voice. "Your loss."
Ginny felt as if she were outside herself, perched on one of the book shelves watching calmly as her earthly form flung the heavy book on the floor. She would have done anything for Harry at the moment. Thrown herself out of the window. Relinquished every possession. Slit her writs. But she certainly was not about to let him know. Not now, not yet.
Harry turned to look at her as she headed towards the door. When it seemed, that indeed she was truly leaving, he stood up, confused, regret written all over his face. After all, this was the girl he spent his entire summer living for.
"Wait." He said.
It was probably ninety degrees outside but much stuffier in the room. Ginny thought about the nights he held her in his arms. She thought about all their kisses. A single leaf fell from the chestnut tree outside the window and Ginny swore she could hear it, falling and falling. When Harry came to her, she could feel how hot he was. She was only sixteen but she knew what she wanted. She wanted him to look at her that way, forever.
"I'm sorry…" He murmured, half a feet away from her.
"You always are." She whispered, not daring to breathe, observing the length of his dark eyelashes brushing against his glasses. Harry had a face like an angel. He had eyes that were so dark you could never look away once you gave in.
"I am…really.." There was a note of pleading in his voice.
Ginny knew what was going to happen if she stayed and yet she could not imagine leaving. That was when she began to wonder if the scent of sulfur was not fury but desire, rising from both their skins, permeating the air. They made love for the very first time that Sunday afternoon, on the hottest day of the year.
As sunlight beat down on them through them window, Harry unfastened his robes, entered her. He raised himself up on his hands; he had to be able to see her face. She watched him, closed her legs around him. He could feel the cool smoothness of her legs on the back of his.
She watched him steadily, closed her eyes briefly, intently, only at the end. He was not far behind her, and he knew, when he came, knew for a certainty, that he would never want to make love to any other woman but Ginerva Weasley.
After a time, under him, she turned her face to the side. He raised himself up on his hands so that he could see her. She was smiling.
"What is it?" he asked, beginning to smile himself.
She shook her head slowly. She turned her back to him, gazed at him steadily, seeing him as he knew he had never been seen before. Her smile was full of knowledge, beyond the circumstances of just this day, just this bed.
"I've been waiting for you all my life." She said.
They kept their relationship a secret from everyone else. They spent time in the library researching or in the Room of Requirements refining their curses only taking time out to practice their kissing, which was getting better by the day. By then they could not look at Ron or Hermione any more than they could face each other in front of other people.
Dumbeldore called Harry to his office in the middle of the year. That whole day Ginny could not find him wherever she looked. Realizing that she had better leave him alone for a while, she decided to go for a walk by herself.
The lawns were wet as Ginny walked across them. The air was motionless and thick the way it always was before it rained and a haze hung over the castle. The rain was quite near; Ginny could taste it in the air.
It was as her footsteps squished across the damp grass, the only sound filling the entire place, that she spotted him. He was sitting on a log on the other side of the lake, nearer to the Forbidden Forest and a long way from the castle. Even from the distance, she could tell that he was gazing desolately into the lake.
As she walked towards him, the wind rustled her robes, the fabric making a moaning sound. He did not hear her footfall, not with the crickets' noise, their song quickened by the humidity of the coming storm.
"Harry."
He looked up at her, taking in the murky sky above the both of them. He thought that she would look for him. He wondered why she was not asking him any questions or admonishing him for trying to take the blame for everything and keeping the people who cared for him the most out of his life. Ginny knew though that it was best not to talk to Harry when he got like this
Instead she simply watched him, her expression almost as carefully guarded as his own. What did she have to hide, he wondered. He, on the other hand, had to hide the darkness overwhelming him – hallmark of the searing pain in his scar last night as he sat in Dumbledore's office. Voldemort was happy and that made him seethe with an anger that none of them would or even could begin to comprehend, a sulphurous anger that singed the white cuffs of his school shirt.
As they stood there, in their own thoughts, a fine drizzle began. Ginny did not coax him to return to the castle before the rain got heavier as it most likely would. Instead, she plopped herself on the log beside him. A cloud burst above and the rain begun to fall in sheets, like rivers of glass. It was falling so hard that the whole world seemed silver and turned upside down.
Ginny enjoyed the rain and leaned her head back for a moment to let it hit her face. She knew that the front of her robes would soak through in a couple of minutes, but she did not care. She did wonder though, if Harry noticed.
She ran her hands through her hair, feeling its wetness. It felt wonderful despite everything else that was happening. Here, with the person she loved with all her might, together in the rain. Ginny looked upward and laughed, laughter of delight.
Harry turned, his reverie snapped, to glance at Ginny and he stopped breathing for just a second. She was incredibly beautiful as she sat beside him, watching the lake, completely comfortable in the rain. She did not try to keep dry or hide herself, and he could see the outline of her breasts as they pressed through the fabric of her robes that clung tightly to her body.
He felt his loins begin to stir and quickly turned away, embarrassed, muttering to himself, glad the rain muffled any sound. But like an addict in need of his fix, he watched her and was still watching her sometime later when the first bit of lightning cracked across the sky, when a tree on the far side of the lake turned white with heat. They were both close enough to feel the charge and they would feel it even that night as they crawled into their respective beds after a warm bath.
Presently though, Harry came to his senses, and realised the danger he was putting the both of them in.
"We'd better go back!" He shouted in order to be heard, standing up.
Ginny nodded. As she stood up, she took his hand in hers. Despite the downpour, they did not rush towards the castle. She felt the warmth in his hands and remembered what it felt be like to have them touch her body, feeling all of him, lingering slowly across her skin. Just thinking about it made her take a deep breath and feel her skin tingle with a strange warmth.
As they reached the common room and both of them went inside, pausing for a moment upon realizing how strangely empty the place was. Everyone had to be at dinner. They stood there, sopping wet, water dripping all over the place.
Harry opened his mouth to speak, "Dumbledore says I have join in the War soon. I have to fight."
All at once, Ginny felt scared. Everything kept ending, and there was nothing she could do about it. She realized this moment would be with them for the rest of their lives. She felt weighed down somehow. Oh please, she thought, don't ever leave me, but she remained quiet. The odd thing was, she already felt as if he had left her, or maybe she was just telling herself that so she would not feel so bad when he actually did.
That was when the madness began. That was when the deathwatch beetle was found beside the chair where Harry most often sat in the common room. This insect, which marked off time, clicking like a clock, issued the sound no one ever wanted to hear beside her beloved. A man's tenure on earth was limited enough, but once the beetle's ticking begun there was no way to stop it; there was no plug to pull, no pendulum to stop, no charm that would restore the time you once thought you had.
It was on a rainy afternoon, as she was doing her homework in the common room when she thought she heard something. The common room was empty but there it was. A click, a clatter, like a heartbeat or a clock. She covered her ears with her hands, allowing her quill to tumble onto her parchment staining it with ink.
She refused to believe in such signs, she would not; yet it was claiming her just like it had a year ago when she had seen the first sign – the lack of reflection when Harry walked past a mirror. That was when she saw something dart beneath Harry's chair - a shadowy creature too swift and too artful to ever be caught beneath a boot heel.
She noticed the black dog that had taken to sit at the sidewalk every time they went down to Hogsmead, how it always pointed its face to the sky whenever Harry approached, and howled at the sight of him and quickly backed away from his shadow, tail between its legs.
In spite of her own rational nature, she placed myrtle beneath Harry's pillow and urged him to bathe with holly and a bar of black soap specially made by Madam Promfrey. Into his cloak pocket she slipped the foot of a rabbit Hagrid had once caught eating his lettuce. She mixed rosemary into his breakfast cereal, lavender into his nightly cup of tea.
Still she heard the beetle in the common room. Finally she said an ancestral prayer backward, but of course that had consequences of its own: soon everyone in the Gryffindor house came down with flu and insomnia and a rash that would not go away for weeks, not even when a mixture of calamine and balm of Gilead was applied to the skin.
Ginny read from the reference books in the library that no one who was doomed could hear the sound of the deathwatch beetle but Ginny knew even Harry sensed something. He stopped wearing a watch; when he was in a room he pulled down all the shades and kept them drawn against the sun and moon, as if that could stop time. As if anything could.
Ginny grew nervous from all this thought of death. Talk about the escalating Second War and all the planning for Harry's battle against Voldermort made it even worse. Her skin became blotchy; her hair lost its shine. She stopped eating and sleeping and she hated to let Harry out of her sight.
Whenever he kissed her, she cried and wished she had never fallen in love in the first place. It made her too helpless, because that was what love did. There was no way around it and no way to fight it. Now if she lost, she lost everything.
When Harry had to go away for a special briefing at The Order headquarters in the quiet of the night, that night, at twilight, Ginny found Hermione alone and told her everything, as if she had not already figured it out for herself. She dropped to her knees and begged her to help save Harry. She offered up all that she had of any value.
"I'll do anything." Ginny cried. "I'll believe in anything. Just tell me what to do. You're the clever one. You think of something."
Hermione was clever and that was why she knew there was nothing she could do. The beetle was still beside Harry's chair. Some fates were guaranteed, no matter who tried to intervene.
That last night, Harry took her for a walk by the lake. The sky was ablaze with stars – white ones, yellow ones, pink ones, ones that have never been seen by anyone else before. Harry was staring upward, searching the sky. Ginny looked up too. She had chills down her arms. She had wrecked havoc by falling in love with someone who had no reflection and now she was paying the price. She had loved someone completely only once in her life and she was paying for that.
"I won't be here tonight." Something caught in her chest as he spoke. "It's all been planned right down to finest detail. Before the sun rises, we attack. Before the sun comes up, I have to kill Voldermort."
"You don't have to, y'know. I would do anything to make you happy." Ginny said. Her voice sounded small even to herself.
Harry turned away from her, so she could not see what he was feeling for her, but she knew anyway. If they never saw each other again, shewas not sure he would miss her, not really, not the way she would miss him. She did not care how far away he went, inside, she was never going to give him up.
Above them a star fell from its place in the luminous sky. "Make a wish!" Ginny cried.
It was such brilliant light; Ginny forgot she made a vow to stop believing in such things. She herself closed her eyes and wished hard, but when she opened her eyes again and looked at Harry she could tell it was no longer possible for him to believe. He was done wishing.
They walked back to the castle. The air was so thick and hot it slowed them down; ever step took effort, willpower and courage. The air smelt of sulfur and sweet apples like the first time he made love to her. Harry felt as though he was seeing everything for the first time, as though he were a stranger in this place.
He looked at Ginny and knew that she was the only reason why he kept on living, really living his life. If he defeated Voldermort tonight, the wizarding world owed a debt to Ginny for keeping him alive this long to fulfill the purpose of his existence.
That night Ginny dreamt that Harry was with her, beside her in her bed, his face close to hers. He was so handsome that she was blinded, and for an instant she was unable to make out her own lover's features. He leaned closer, and although she could not really see him, she could feel his warm breath, as well as the catch in her stomach as her desire for him rose, the way it always did when he was near.
Why did you think you could save me when you needed to be saved most? He whispered to Ginny in her dream.
He got out of bed and walked to the window. He moved the flimsy curtains aside, then turned back to smile at her. She wanted him so completely she was tied up in knots, yet when she tried to speak, she found she could not say one word, nor could she leave her bed and go to him.
She could only watch as he stepped beyond the curtains and cast himself out the window, like a bird that longed to be free, disappearing from view so quickly that when Ginny finally struggled from the tangled sheets to look for him, there was nothing to see in the hot pallid air. Anything a man might leave behind, footprints and fingerprints alike, had vanished, and the clothes he wore had unraveled into a pile of white cotton thread.
Sunlight flooded the room as Ginny awakened and rose from her bed with her dream still around her, a foggy halo that nagged at her. Shealready knew what had happened as she padded down the stairs into the common room where her brother sat beside Hermione, sobbing. He was covered in blood and dirt but Hermione did not seem to care less as she held him in her arms, crying herself.
Ron looked up and saw Ginny at the foot of the stairs. He mustered all his strength, stood up and walked towards her. It was his duty to tell her – Harry had said exactly so before going into battle. Ron broke down, unable to contain himself and went down on his knees, right in front of his sister.
"Don't do this," Ginny took a step back. She had the terrible feeling that she might choke, she might stop breathing altogether.
Ron told her, anyway. She had to know. Harry had killed Voldermort but he was brought down by the killing curse from another deatheater.
Ginny did not react and why should she? Everything seemed like a dream now; the way Harry had kissed her, the way she had loved him. How could she have ever possibly let herself believe that there was going to be a happily ever after where Harry was concerned? When she thought about it, it seemed as if her entire time with Harry was spent either dreading or preparing for his untimely unavoidable death.
Instead she sank to the ground and threaded her arms around her brother. She knew him well enough to know what he wanted. "It's not your fault." She said.
Ron cried even harder, sobs wrecking his frame. Once a man started crying, he could never get away from it, it became a habit he could not break. Years from now, whenRon was a senior Auror, he would stand in his office corridor looking at his case fileabout a young abandoned girl and not even realize he was crying until the letters began to swim, the ink dripping down the page.
As Ginny embraced her brother, she looked at the chair where Harry sat most of the time and she thought she saw him sitting there as he usually would – slumped in the chair, legs spread out and crossed at the ankles, black hair a mess. She walked over to the chair, leaving Hermione to comfort her brother. She wanted to reach out to brush her fingers through his hair.
Then she realized something Harry had already known all this while – attachments were for the living. So she decided to do the honorable thing. She let Harry go. She leaned close so he would hear her say it was all right for him to leave her. She realized because she loved him so deeply and for so long, she would just go on loving him, with or without him.
THE END
A/N – I wanted to write this story to express the finality of death, there was no sequels, no surprise resurrections of the people you love and have lost. Reality is very different, death is very final and I wanted this story to indicate that. Please let me know what you think. This is the unbetaed version - will be reposting the betaed version soon...