Heat, and Other Summer Woes
It often amazed Harry, but despite having witnessed three or four, he's never actually received a Howler before. Not during the Triwizard Tournament, with Rita Skeeter's vicious lies circulating through the whole of wizarding Britain (what a strange time in his life! it's almost funny to think of now); not when he stood his ground by Dumbledore and refused to give into Scrimgeour's Ministry and the lies it was circulating through the whole of wizarding Britain. Angry mail, to be certain. Scathing looks and shouting too. But never all together in that nice, concise, flaming red envelope.
Until now.
"HARRY JAMES POTTER!" it roars, where he's hastily dropped it onto the floor of the kitchen of his new modest London flat, where he's been living since the War ended, now that he doesn't have to go back to the Dursleys. He's tempted to hop up on the counter; it looks as though it's going to start biting at his toes. "DON'T ACT LIKE I'M NOT FULLY AWARE OF WHAT YOU'VE BEEN DOING! I DON'T CARE HOW MANY DARK LORDS YOU'VE DEFEATED OR HOW MANY TIMES YOU'VE DONE IT! I DON'T CARE WHO ELSE HAS AWARDED YOU MEDAL AFTER MEDAL AND SPECIAL PRIVILEGE AFTER SPECIAL PRIVILEGE! IF YOU LAY SO MUCH AS A FINGERTIP ON MY BABY GIRL IN AN UNTOWARD MANNER BEFORE SHE COMES OF AGE, I WILL DISREGARD ALL MOTHERLY FEELINGS I MAY HAVE EVER FELT TOWARD YOU AND PERSONALLY USE MY OWN WAND TO REMOVE THE BITS OF YOUR ANATOMY THAT YOU CLEARLY MUST BE THINKING WITH! YOU ARE FAR FROM THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN PROVIDE ME WITH GRANDCHILDREN."
It smolders into nothingness now that it's done, and Harry, unable to think of anything else, slowly turns his head to look at Ginny, where she herself is seated on the counter, hair spilling its mussed way out of its thick ponytail, lip gloss smeared nearly to her chin on one side, trying to straighten out her blouse and mouthing the words baby girl to herself with a blank, mortified expression.
But how had she known?
-xxx-
There are exactly three weeks between the day Harry Potter gets his first Howler and the day Ginny Weasley turns seventeen. Up until now, Harry has never considered three weeks a terribly long time. In school there were sometimes only three weeks between graded practical Transfiguration assignments, and that never seemed nearly long enough. He spent so long on the run from Voldemort trying to put all the pieces together that three weeks seemed merely a drop in the bucket. But after the explanation Ginny gave him, the three weeks until August eleventh are beginning to slowly stretch into an eternity, as though someone with a Time-Turner has taken it upon themselves to personally make Harry's life miserable.
"I can't believe she would do this," Ginny said, half to him and half to herself, shortly after she regained her voice and shortly before she left his flat still flush-faced from embarrassment. "Of all the people to do this. I've got six bloody brothers, for Merlin's sake."
"Care to - explain?" said Harry carefully. "I mean, that Howler - it came out of absolutely nowhere, there wasn't an owl, there wasn't - "
"Pre-laid Summoning Charm, I suspect," said Ginny, "as part of the Witch's Trace." The words came out somewhere between swearing and spitting them out as though they tasted bad. Harry, naturally, hadn't heard them before.
"...Care to - "
"Some families," Ginny said, her frustration building a little but not quite enough to edge out her embarrassment, "some older wizarding families, can request that a certain - extra layer of enchantment be placed on their children when the Trace is activated. Usually on - on girls. It'll come off when the regular Trace comes off, of course, but until then it's in place to make sure - well, you know - I mean, you know, pureblood families did it a lot so they'd know when their kids were messing around, to make sure it wasn't with anyone 'unclean,' and families that weren't full of prejudiced gits just did it out of protection, as a sort of alert, so no one would try to - to take advantage." She finally got it out, and it was just as ridiculous as her struggles had sort of foretold.
"Take - take advantage?" said Harry, almost laughing, though he tried his best not to because she was still fiercely red around the ears. "Ginny, I - you're my girlfriend, it's been at least a year - "
"I'm your sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Harry," Ginny said. "And my mum is an old hen."
"But it's not as though you're not into it!" Harry spluttered.
"Oh, yes, Potter, there's not much more I'd rather do then sit here and let you snog me half to death," she said, a bit more scathingly than Harry had liked. "But for now we've got to put things on hold. I'm - I'm going to go home and sort things out with Mum - make sure she doesn't decide to just hex your bits off anyway." She kissed him quite nicely on the curve of his jaw then. "And I'll make sure Ron and the rest know that if they give you any flack about it I'm going to hex their bits off."
He grinned, just a little. "Thanks."
"It's just a couple of weeks. I mean, we've - we've waited so long, we can go a bit longer, right?"
Harry gulped. "Right."
But he stood there in the same place, the spot of black on the otherwise clean kitchen floor and the press of her lips burning into the skin of his cheek, for several long moments after she left his flat on her way back to the Burrow.
Just a couple of weeks. This is the span of time Harry has to wait until he can go beyond light-to-middling, fully-clothed (albeit enthusiastic) kissing and touching with his cute, fiery, nigh-on perfect girlfriend. And Ginny's right - they have waited, for much longer than this. They've waited for Dark Lords to be defeated and entire worlds to realign, they can wait for her seventeenth birthday.
Well, maybe Ginny can, Harry thinks darkly. But now that he's managed to get one or two extremely nice handfuls, he knows exactly what he's missing, and waiting is desperately, infuriatingly, excruciatingly hard.
(It occurs to Harry at this point along his line of thought that he is not, perhaps, only talking about the waiting.)
He does everything he can to keep his mind off it, absolutely. But Ginny's presence is so inexorably entwined with everything he does. He tries to go out, but he goes round to visit Andromeda and Teddy and she's there, dropping off a pie her mother has made them, her hair tied up in a silvery ribbon he's pretty sure he gave her at one point or another. He tries to stay in, but he rummages through a drawer in his kitchen and spots a small lump of red metal, wrought into the shape of a miniature rose, which he knows unfurls itself into an array of her cosmetics. Her brothers are his closest friends; her closest friends are practically his sisters. Quidditch reminds Harry of Ginny. That's somewhat of the last straw, really. All he wants to do is listen to the game on the wireless, but every move Gwenog Jones makes is overlayed with flashes of maroon and ginger and sharp brown eyes, and that, even, is enough to have him shifting uncomfortably and contemplating a cold shower.
It's Ginny Weasley. If Harry thinks about it, he supposes she was always going to haunt him. Any other girl would have wept, or huffed, or never spoken to him again, when he placed the fate of the world ahead of her and vanished seemingly without a trace. Ginny Weasley stood strong and then some; and now, with little bits and pieces of her everywhere - her scent on an old jumper, her smile glinting at him from across the table at a Burrow brunch - it's like the creature that once took residence inside his chest has spawned and multiplied, creeping down into his fingers and making them itch for her, or into the pit of his stomach and lower, which just seem to ache any more.
(The sharp brown eyes of Molly Weasley, however, are stronger than ten cold showers, and he gives Ginny a quick peck on the lips, and nothing more, before heading home.)
Ginny lingers, too, in his main occupation of late, if only by her absence. He's been helping out with Hermione's C.R.U.S.H. project, the Community Restoration Union to Save Hogwarts she's pushed for alongside McGonagall and a bunch of Ravenclaws who are outraged that a place of learning had to be a battlefield. The castle heals itself, of course, but slowly, and in a manner that would leave it utterly unchanged. Hermione, as usual, wants to make changes. It's good, hard work, both physically and magically, and it's keeping Harry occupied until Auror training starts in September. Unfortunately, Ron and Hermione are always there, and unlike Ginny, Hermione doesn't have a trace of Trace left on her, Witch's or otherwise. Ron seems keen on proving this about once every half hour.
"Nice to see you working hard," Harry says to Ron as Hermione finally pushes him off her and heads down to the kitchens (she's still bloody on about house-elves, in a way Harry will never understand).
"Hey, we're not getting paid for this, I can take breaks," Ron shoots back with no real malice, brainless grin still stretching his features.
"It's supposed to be about restoring the school, Ronald," says Harry, in an arch impersonation of the girl Ron has just stopped snogging.
"Yeah, yeah, why d'you think I'm so keen to keep her mouth otherwise occupied?"
"Couldn't have anything to do with rubbing certain facts about our respective relationships in my face, could it." Harry holds his wand severely steady as he smoothes over a crack in a reassembled plinth. In its wake the stone is fused good as new.
"Look, I never would have thought Mum and Dad would do that whole stupid thing," Ron whines apologetically for perhaps the third time. "And I don't think it's funny, even without all the threats Ginny's issued me." He wordlessly levitates the next shattered piece of stone into place. "It sucks, mate. Can't think of anyone who deserves an extra spot of good times right now more than you do."
"I appreciate that, I guess," Harry says, though he's not quite convinced. "You just think of the two of us and how not funny it is the next time you've got Hermione cornered behind one of these smashed-up columns, then."
"Ugh, sorry, but that's where I draw the line," Ron says with a shudder. "I mean, I - "
"I know, I know," says Harry, "ill-yim-big." It's the response Ron defaults to every time Harry starts crossing lines between chums talking about their girlfriends and giving Ron mental images of his little sister that he never really wanted. ILYMBIG. I Love You Mate, But It's Ginny. Apparently snogging Hermione on a regular basis has instilled in Ron a bit of her fixation with acronyms.
As they move on to the next column and the curse-scorched expanse of wall behind it, Harry hears a resounding cry of "Oi, Potter!" from up by the high, vaulted ceiling of the corridor. He looks up in time to see a slim, silver-white figure plummeting down as though it's jumped from a great height, but Hogwarts's newest ghost-in-residence lands flawlessly in front of him about a foot off the ground, then reclines onto thin air, grinning.
"Hullo Fred," says Harry, already in better spirits.
Ron is still trying to patch up the wall and pays less attention. "Oh, wait - is this that spot that always tried to pretend to be the door to Flitwick's classroom even though it's really just a wall?" he says, frowning. "I've half a mind to stick it as a wall for good."
Harry remembers this spot, and can understand Ron's irritation - the trick wall tripped the two of them up on a regular basis before they'd got hold of the Marauder's Map, and even a couple of times after - but the ghost of Fred just hovers over to him with a chuckle. "Leave it, little brother! After all, future generations of Hogwarts students deserve to be just as infuriatingly tardy as you were. But never mind that," he continues, "it's Harry I want to speak with. I suppose it's too much to hope that you don't already have plans for next weekend?"
"I'd thought about it a bit, but there's nothing solid yet," says Harry honestly. "I just thought I might check in on whatever Neville's doing."
"Oh, that's right, it is wee Longbottom's special day as well," Fred crows. "Well that makes things even more splendid."
"What are you scheming now?" asks Ron, and though his voice sounds genuinely worried his face is grinning.
"Oh, just a little affair at our place. It'll probably be more somber than anything, since it's mostly on account of it being a year since Georgie lost his ear...." But Fred's own grin, impossibly whiter than the rest of him, betrays his thoughts completely.
"Well," says Harry, "I do know how much Angelina loves having company over." This - a bold-faced falsehood, for it has been discovered since she moved in with George that Angelina Johnson is perhaps the world's worst housekeeper - is too much for the three of them, and they burst out into conspiratorial chuckles, which they only manage to stop when a shriek and a flash of orange blitz through the hallway, knocking Fred's ghostly form in two or three circles in their wake.
"Ah, yes, my eternal opponent grows impatient," Fred sighs airily. He shoots a glance at Ron. "Tell little wifey that she's lucky I'm around, or there wouldn't be anything to distract him and you'd never get any of this Crush stuff done." He gives his brother a wink and then shoots up a couple of feet into the air, darting after the colorful, cackling blur. "PEEVES! I know it's you what's got all the chalk in the second floor classrooms writing dirty limericks on the blackboards! Don't you dare try to blame that on me, I'd never stoop so low!"
"There once was a potty wee Potter!" crows Peeves from nowhere. "Who got hot for the Weasels' wee daughter! But hands up her shirt, and sound the alert! Look but don't touch, 'cause Mummy's caught 'er!"
He rockets past Harry again, Fred hot on his heels; Fred, for what it's worth, stops for a split second to give Harry the most apologetic look he possibly can. Harry, meanwhile, focuses a little too much attention on the door-wall in front of him and scorches it up again, almost as badly as it was with all of its battle scars.
Just when he was finally putting it out of his mind.
-xxx-
Harry gives himself a final glance in the mirror, tugging on a lock of hair right by his ear.
"You know it doesn't lay flat."
How do they do that? All the Weasleys can, it seems; George can't even see him. "I know," he says, "I just...who'd you say you invited, again?"
"Just some old chums, really," he answers from the next room. "Bit of the D.A., some of the old Quidditch crowd, you know. Now hop to it!" He sticks his head round the door and waves Harry's keys at him. "We're pushing fashionably late, you know."
"I just don't want to look stupid," he says, smoothing out his shirt one last time. "You know everyone expects me to be some big man, and I'm not."
"You have always been a bit scrawny," says George, coming to stand just behind him and leer at him in the mirror. "But it's your party, Harry. You are allowed to look however you like. And since it's my flat, I am allowed to drink however I like. Anyone has problems, we give 'em the boot." He waves his wand flippantly and a large Wellington appears mid-air, complete with swinging motion.
His grin helps a little, and Harry begins to smile, and abandons his hair. "And your mum's okay with Ginny popping round to an over-age party, is she?"
George snorts. "Like she knows the half of it. I just had to assure her that Fred wouldn't be there and she seemed to give us the benefit of the doubt."
"Just Fred?"
"Well, I reckon she still figures she has a bit of power over me - like she ever has anyway - even though I'm of-age," says George. "Fred, well...he's dead. He's a ghost - he can't eat, gives anyone he touches frostbite or near enough, and can only be seen by living beings if he stays in either our flat, the Burrow, or the Hogwarts grounds. There's really not much she can threaten him with that'd make that any worse."
Harry laughs outright at this, and gives up on whinging about his appearance entirely; in the mirror they actually make quite the pair, his smart red shirt and jet-black hair and George's flaming ginger and practically fluorescent green. He snags his keys, flashes George a grin, and turns on the spot with a loud crack, and then they're in the flat above number ninety-three, Diagon Alley, along with, by Harry's estimate, about a hundred thousand other people.
"This is a couple old chums?" he yells at George over the noise - someone has got a wizarding wireless turned all the way up in on corner, and it's blasting the newest by a group that Harry thinks is called Catch the Snitch and who clearly likes to shout a lot. George just laughs at him, and tugs him by the wrist into the center of the throng, where Lee has already got things going.
"The man of the hour!" George cries, clapping him about the shoulder. Unlike Harry, the redhead is clearly in his element in less than an instant - and why wouldn't he be, Harry thinks sullenly, he's only got one eardrum left for this noise to shatter.
"Or at least the man of a couple hours from now," says Lee, a frighteningly purple beverage in hand. "Right now it's our other guest of honor, innit?" He gestures, drink spilling a bit, to the sofa, where Neville - looking almost more horrified than Harry felt - is cornered between a rather sloshed-looking Seamus Finnigan and a couple of girls who'd been their year in Hufflepuff wearing surprisingly low-cut blouses.
"Right!" says Harry. "Happy birthday, Neville!" he shouts, but no one hears him beyond George and Lee.
"Fred'll be round later, of course," says Lee, taking a generous swig of purple from his glass. "Can't travel proper unless there's decent moonlight out, he says."
"Feel a bit bad for him, really, being a ghost and all," says George. "Can't even get a bit sussed with us."
"We'll just have to get twice as sussed in his honor!" cries Lee, and he tips some of his drink to George's mouth this time. "To Fred!"
"And to Neville and Harry!" George agrees after he's swallowed. Then they slip off to entertain some more guests, and Harry is left to swim through the dense crowd on his own.
There aren't really thousands of people here. There may be close to forty or fifty, which is probably violating some regulational hazard - sure enough, Harry spots Percy Weasley in the crowd and he appears to be having a bit of a fit. Oliver Wood, one arm slung low and firm around the waist of Alicia Spinnet, appears to be doing his best to calm him down. Harry laughs and avoids them. Verity Boggins, the twins' shop assistant, smiles and waves at him a bit from behind a bar by the window that Harry is sure isn't usually there. He waves vaguely back, and then makes a bit of a gesture like he's holding something, and a split-second later a neat glass of something faintly green has vanished from the bar and appeared in his grip. He takes an experimental sip of it and figures it's probably half butterbeer and half something else far more alcoholic that tastes a bit of sour apples. It's not bad.
"Happy birthday, Harry!" whistles a girl's voice as he passes the door to the flat's tiny kitchen. Peeking inside, he spots Lavender Brown, both Patil twins, Vicky Frobisher and a girl whose name he doesn't know but he thinks he's seen in Ravenclaw, piling stacks of Cauldron Cakes onto some paper napkins to take back into the fray. Did the twins really invite the entire of-age D.A.?
"Not yet," he tells them, "it's not even ten-thirty. Still Neville."
"Better enjoy the party while the two of you still can, then!" says Vicky, bouncing one perfectly-spiralled black curl practically into Harry's face as she and the rest of them bustle out through the door past him, Lavender in particular pressing her not-insignificant curves toward him. They vanish into the throng again, dispersing, and Harry grits his teeth. None of them are still sixteen. And just where is Ginny, anyway?
After half an hour of pulsing music and crowd-mingling - Ernie Macmillan is particularly happy to see him again, his accent growing thicker with drink as he demands to know why Harry hasn't made more public appearances between Voldemort's defeat and now, and inviting him up to some high-class affair somewhere Harry's already forgotten, and telling him that he and Susan Bones are engaged - Harry finds her, and immediately wishes he hadn't. She's sitting straight on the coffee table, next to Luna Lovegood, who must had said something characteristically hilarious because Ginny's head is thrown back in a laugh. She's wearing a pale yellow sundress, the back cut so dangerously low that there's no way she could have been wearing it when Mrs. Weasley last saw her, and her fiery hair is positively shimmering in the slightly-dim glow of the party (it's that same dim glow, Harry thinks, that all loud raucous possibly illegal parties seem to have). The smile curving her lips and the milkiness of her freckled skin all but destroy him; his chest/hands/stomach-pit beast is bouncing off the metaphorical walls. He has to down half his drink before he can even take two more steps in her direction.
"Hey," he says, daring to place a hand on her exposed shoulder just to shut the monster up as he takes the seat next to Neville on the sofa that used to be full of Seamus. Across from them, Hermione and Ron are squeezed almost obscenely into a squashy chair that is definitely only meant for one person.
"Hey yourself," Ginny murmurs, grinning in a way that should probably be illegal and putting her own hand on his knee.
"Harry!" cries Neville, clearly in relief. "Do you even - d'you even know half these people?"
Harry gazes around at who he can see - Katie Bell, someone, someone else, Lavender Brown enthusiastically snogging Cormac McLaggen, a third someone... "Maybe half, yeah," he says, and Neville laughs.
"Better off than me, then. I can place most of the faces but I'm dead awful with names."
"Happy birthday, Harry!" says Ron, gesturing with a glass of the same drink Harry's got. "In an hour or so anyway. I think I've told Neville four or five times now, but haven't gotten to say it to you."
"Thanks, mate," Harry says. "What'd you get me?"
"Ha, ha," says Ron. "'What'd you get me,' he says."
"You did get him something," says Hermione, pinching his side and making him squirm. "Don't be a git."
"S'true," says Ron. "It just might...be a bit before you can use it. About a week and a half, if you get what I mean."
Harry exchanges a frantic, appalled look with Ginny, which he immediately regrets - it's far too loaded with the knowledge that both of them get exactly what Ron means. "No, I don't believe you," he says.
"I don't believe you," says Ginny, whirling around away from Luna to glare at her brother.
"I don't believe you!" cries the ghost of Fred, slinking out from under the coffee table from where he's risen up through the floor. "Just, you know, on principle."
"You don't have to believe me," says Ron slyly. "I'll just drop it by your place tomorrow afternoon and you can see for yourself."
"Oooh, and now I'm not so sure I want to know," says Fred, slipping into the crowd in search of his twin.
"Whatever happened to ILYMBIG?" Harry hisses, astounded (though not, he realizes miserably, in an altogether unpleasant way).
"It's not really for her," says Ron, "it's for you." Harry's mind goggles at this. What on Earth could Ron possibly have in store for them? Would it - or could it - and oh Merlin, had Ron got one for himself first? Harry suddenly feels as though he might have to instate I Love You Mate, But It's Hermione.
"Now hear this!" cries Lee Jordan, standing on top of Verity's bar and shouting over everything, interrupting Harry's thoughts (thankfully). Michael Corner, standing closest to it, turns down the wireless. "Tonight we gather here to celebrate the eighteenth birthdays of two hearty, strapping young men, with whom I have been so fortunate to become acquainted in my time in the noble and most badass house of Gryffindor." With a huge grand gesture he indicates the sofa, and most heads - the ones that aren't otherwise occupied at any rate - turn to face them. "To my left, the great Neville Longbottom, son of two Aurors and an up-and-coming Auror himself, who captained Dumbledore's Army this past academic term and personally decapitated Voldemort's nasty pet snakey!" Neville, commendably, gets to his feet and does a little bow, grinning like mad. Several people start cheering (Harry thinks Hannah Abbott, still seated immediately to Neville's right, cheers loudest of all).
"And on my right...er...that bloke with the scar." This gets a huge laugh from the crowd, and Harry, a bit of drink in his system, jumps up on the sofa and laughs right along with them.
"Oi, hang on!" he scolds Lee. "I did play a good bit of Quidditch!"
"You're damn right y' did, Potter!" shouts Wood, and the masses chuckle some more.
"Oh, and I think you helped me with my Defense Against the Dark Arts homework, y'know, once or twice," Parvati adds with a snigger.
"Yeah, and you don't snog half-bad either!" pipes up Cho Chang from where she's sitting on a windowsill.
"Oi, Chang, keep your tarted-up lips to yourself!" says Ginny, jumping to stand on the coffee table.
"Yeah, or else turn 'em this way!" calls a burly, tow-headed boy from by the bathroom door.
"And," says Luna, rising to her feet floatily, "you did an awfully good job killing Lord Voldemort."
The laughing and jeering sort of falls apart, and people who had been staring at Harry shift their gazes a bit to stare at Luna instead. Harry means to, as well, but there isn't much space between himself and Ginny now that they're both standing on furniture, and in the hot crowded air of the party her presence seems awfully oppressive. He takes her hand, but then her hip, loosely, as bold as he dares and still not satisfied. Everything's reaching a boiling point, and all too soon Harry thinks the cauldron will probably overflow.
"Well...yeah, I guess," he finally says to Luna, though he's looking straight at Ginny, who's looking straight at him.
Fred cracks the awkward silence at long last. "To Harry bloody Potter, the Boy Who Better Have Lived because I sure didn't!" The laughter resumes, and so does the music, and the party kicks back into action.
"Happy birthday, Harry," Ginny says, and though it's barely more than a whisper, Harry hears it louder than any of the room's other throbbing noise. She kisses him deliciously softly, then pulls away, vanishing into the crowd again but keeping deep piercing eye contact with him until the last possible second. By the time Harry can blink again he realizes that Ron's making gagging noises from the chair and Hermione's giggling and waving her wand to clean up the drink he's dropped.
Luna, meanwhile, just nods sagely. "I can definitely understand what you see in her, Harry, she's quite your type. You're awfully the same, aren't you?"
"Guess you could say that," he says, numbly.
There's another dizzying half-hour or so of people congratulating him and slipping small gifts into his hand - there's an IOU for some free Wheezes products from the twins, a moving black-and-white line drawing of himself and Ginny from Dean Thomas, a pair of Quidditch tickets from Wood. Verity, meanwhile, has provided him with another drink, and this time it's one of the purple ones that Lee's been nursing all night, which Harry discovers taste a little bit like charcoal smells, if you were to put a lot of sugar and alcohol in it. All in all it is probably the best party Harry has ever been to, which considering the Weasley twins he supposes shouldn't surprise him. At exactly midnight Luna grabs his wrist, and Neville's too (though he has to pry Neville away from the enthusiastic embrace of a pleasantly pickled Hannah Abbott).
"Just think," she says to them excitedly, her protuberant eyes swimming a bit, much more out of focus than usual. "For this split-second, it's almost like it's both of your birthdays at once, isn't it?"
Harry makes eye contact with Neville, which is difficult to do as he seems to have lost his glasses somewhere, despite the fact that he still definitely feels like they're on his face. "S'pose it is."
"Cheers then, mate," says Neville, who's got a glassful of purple as well. They clink them together and down them in unison, grinning as they come up for air.
Air. The concept is suddenly surprisingly novel to Harry - he feels like he's been trapped in this big stuffy box of a flat for years, and in Diagon Alley in July it's no wonder he's getting flushed and finding it a bit hard to breathe. He staggers away, past Vicky Frobisher taking her top off and Michael Corner trying to convince Terry Boot to go ahead and brew up some hangover-dulling potion for everyone while he's still sober enough to use a measuring cup, and manages to get to the back door of the flat, which opens onto a narrow staircase hugging the back of the building. Outside the midnight air is blessedly cool compared to the body-heated inside. Harry scrubs at his eyes - he is still wearing his glasses, how peculiar - and takes a few deep, revitalizing breaths.
Well, he thinks with a small smile, it's definitely better than my last birthday.
He's still a bit warm, and he undoes another button of his shirt, desperate for contact with the breezy night. The motion of his hand catches his attention, and he recalls, suddenly, the sensation of Ginny's sweating palm against his own, almost as though it has happened again. There was one kind of heat, thinks Harry, that he wouldn't particularly mind never cooling down from. He's starting to think the raging creature and all its little spawn within him flourish more and more in hotter and hotter conditions, like a brood of Hagrid's salamanders. Perhaps this is why his skin seems to be practically crawling, the sensations coursing through it, through his blood, standing out way more starkly than anything that's going on inside his head.
The door thumps behind him and someone else is on the stairs, and two moments later that someone is sitting dangerously close beside him, and radiating the exact kind of heat he needs.
"Hullo, Harry," she murmurs, and slides a hand across his back. There's something darker than normal in her voice, its pitch lower than usual, the words fuzzing a little as they pop from her throat.
"G...Ginny," he says. Sweet Merlin he wants to touch her. It would be so easy.
"Eleven days to my birthday now," she says, her white-hot fingertips scorching him in thin swirling lines up and down his spine. "We're halfway there."
"Eleven days," he echoes, his mouth dry.
"I know it's killing you," she says, practically in his ear, "I do."
"Do you?" he hisses, because obviously she doesn't if she thinks any of this is okay bloody hell.
"Yes," she insists. "Because it's killing me too."
He makes an effort, then, to look into her eyes - and an effort is most certainly what it takes - but when he manages to focus, he sees it. Harry sees in that instant that there is a similar monster raging deep inside of Ginny, roaring out for him. It's just as Luna has said. We're awfully the same.
"Kiss me," he says before he can stop himself, and she does, deep and full and laced thick with the night, and her own glass of that green drink, and the last ten days. He curves his hands over her knees, just barely up under the hem of her dress, and leans in, nudging her up against the back wall of the flat. She hums a little into his mouth, clutching at his arms just below his shoulders in a grip as fierce as he wishes his own could be.
"I've been dying to, honest," she tells him, her mouth switching back and forth between kissing, talking, kissing again. "Mum and I have rowed about it at least twice since that day in your flat, I can't stand it. I'm not sixteen, any more than you were seventeen a half hour ago. After this past year or so, we're all ancient." She slides a hand up from his shoulder to bury in his hair, just by his ear, where it never lays flat. "So I - talked to Hermione."
This throws Harry. "Sorry?"
"I talked," says Ginny, "to the person who always knows the answers. 'N' she said that it's all down to you, Harry."
"What all is?"
"The Witch's Trace." She grins as if it's altogether obvious. "Most of what'll set it off is what you do. But if we rig this right, there's quite a bit more that I can."
Harry closes his eyes and nearly pitches forward, his intoxicated mind still quite capable of coming up with an awful lot of things that Ginny could do without much help from him.
"Now?" he breathes, before he can stop himself, and she just breathes back "Yes."
It takes a bit to get them both on their feet, but they have each other to lean on, to stumble into, to stop and snog a bit against the doorframe before they go back in. Everyone inside is moving a bit slower now, the lights burning a bit dimmer, but Ginny's glowing enough for both of them, and they slink their ungraceful way back toward other doors. The first is the bathroom, which they open just to check, only to discover - so bluntly that Harry has to blink and Ginny nearly bursts out laughing - Seamus Finnigan wearing no shirt and all but fused to none other than Dean Thomas. Tonight, apparently, is going to be full of surprises. At their intrusion Dean colors a bit and sends them a frown. Seamus is less abashed.
"Oi, this one's taken, Weasley, savvy?" he snaps, squashing impossibly closer to Dean in an almost territorial manner.
"So sorry," Ginny swears, "didn't mean to interrupt. By all means, carry on." And they duck back out, presumably to let the two of them do just that, Ginny's face all the while contorted into a disbelieving but thoroughly amused grin.
The next door is the bedroom, which is totally, miraculously, gloriously empty.
"Guess you ought to lay down over that way," says Ginny, indicating vaguely. At this point Harry will do anything she says, he's so hot for Ginny's heat, so he does, sprawling a little, propped up on his elbows. She kneels more at the foot of the bed and grins some more, but then frowns.
"Oh I just...never imagined getting up to much in a bed that belonged to one of my brothers," she says with a giggle.
"Ill-yim-big," Harry chuckles absently to himself.
"What?"
"Never mind. More?" It's vague, too, everything going over unclear any more, but she follows him just as well, and crawls over him, her hands holding her up against the mattress on either side of his ribcage and her thick dark kiss back in his mouth. Harry's hands twitch and clench at his sides, more and more frantic as she pivots in tiny increments and gasps with tiny sounds above him.
"Ginny I can't - it's going to be too much not to just - "
"Wait, I can - " She rocks back and finds her wand, somehow, and mumbles a Body-Bind incantation. He thinks she's aiming for just his arms, but she's just a bit too drunk to get it quite right and he ends up fully locked up, his legs snapping together underneath her and his arms shifting position just enough that he's lost most of his support, and his elbows are pressed in that wicked way that makes your pinky fingers go numb. She does manage to leave his mouth blessedly functional, and he makes the fullest use of it, tugging at her lips, her ear, her pale throat, anything he can as her slim white-hot hands find their way into the unbuttoned collar of his shirt and beyond. He can feel the creature inside Ginny then, her palms against his chest, barely anything separating it from his own, and he wants to roar along with it, or to fly, or mostly just to touch, which is the one thing he horribly, miserably cannot do.
But Ginny can. And Ginny does. One small foggy corner of Harry's brain finds it within itself to start praying that he is not too drunk to remember this all in the morning, when he is eighteen and hung-over and looking back on the furthest he has ever gone with Ginny Weasley. It's not terribly far, to be certain, with her damnable Trace like a halo of barbed wire between them, but she seems to have really thought this through, and even in her also-foggy condition she's figured out exactly which tiny ways to twist and press against Harry's disabled form, locked up stiff just about everywhere.
"Did I," she huffs, "did I tell you happy birthday?"
Harry thinks she has already, but it's hard to remember anything that's happened before this because this is cutting through the fog to eclipse just about everything else. "Tell me again," he groans, his arms straining at the spell, practically aching with it. "Give me all your - your best wishes."
"I wish," says Ginny, "for you to be happy."
She rocks her hips down, down, in the most solid movement that her soft-dark-pressure-tipsy style has managed yet, and Harry's happiness spirals to one bright point against her and then erupts, and the creatures have roared out in tandem, and the heat is finally too bloody hot, and the cauldron has finally bubbled over.
-xxx-
Cooling down, it turns out, takes a while. Ginny has to undo her jinx, and undoing a botched jinx is always harder; Harry has to make sure he still has his wand, and then charm himself clean. There's a lot of laughing, and awkward looks, and strange shuffling, but mostly there is a lot of wishing it could have been a bit easier, and a lot of smiling. Harry is pretty sure the grin is stuck to his face with a Permanent Sticking Charm.
"Good?" says Ginny, a bit hesitant, once they've done all they can do to re-ground themselves.
"Good," grins Harry.
And they are just rising to try and rejoin the festivities - whatever's left of them anyway - when, with his greatest sense of comedic timing, the ghost of Fred stumbles through the adjoining wall between the bedroom and the rest of the flat, flashing a snow-white grin at the two of them.
"Whoa now, young lady," he says, mock-scolding.
"Don't worry," snipes Ginny, "my maidenhood is still unsullied."
"Oh, I'm sure - it's Harry's maidenhood I'm afraid for." He waggles his eyebrows and Harry laugh-coughs.
"Yeah, well, you'll never know, will you?" he says. "Unlike some people I'm not booby-trapped." The possible punnish implications don't occur to Harry until about three beats later, and when they do he is the only one chuckling.
Instead, Fred has an absolutely devious look blooming on his translucent face. "Oh, Gin, that's so bloody perfect, you've got to."
"What is, now?" she asks, but her eyebrow is raised and she, too, seems to be scheming.
"Remember when - well you might have been too young but - well Mum had just planted those new cabbages for the first time, and she set up that horrible buzzing ringing thing for whenever the gnomes got too close to them, trying to keep them safe?"
"And you two," says Ginny, "it was all you could do for a - at least a week or so - trying to trick Ron into getting too close and setting it off?" Now even Harry is catching on, and he was furthest behind to begin with.
"Go on then, sis, tart yourself up a bit more."
"Oi," Harry says, vaguely offended. Ginny's still laughing, though, and goes right along with it. She runs the tip of her wand from cheek to cheek across the bridge of her nose and suddenly her eyelids are darker, her lips are redder; then she deftly twists the wand up into her hair, pinning it in a thick and almost artfully messy clump there to leave her cream-white neck and shoulders exposed (even Harry's cooled-off tired insides stir a little at this, though the most it does is just frustrate him). Then, unabashedly, she reaches down into the front of her dress and adjusts...something that only serves to make her look sloppier and further gone than she is. It would almost be sexy if it weren't so disastrous.
"Oh, Freddie," she giggles, in a desperate caricature of her actual intoxication, "it's so hot in here." Together they head back out - Fred glides, Ginny staggers, and Harry brings up the rear, trying to stay far enough behind that he won't be noticed and silent enough that he won't give them away. As brother and sister meander back out into the quieter, stiller central stirrings of the party, where George and Angelina are above and beyond the ones with the most life left in them, it doesn't take long for her affected giggling and stumbling to attract the attention of weedy, frizzy-haired Ritchie Coote, whose face alights with an unpleasant smile as he heads toward her.
"Wherezza birfday boy?" he asks her, eyebrow raised.
"Who, Harry?" she laughs. "Gee, dunno. Can't find 'im anywhere, 's a bit lonely ackshully." Harry would almost be upset at how flawlessly she does it if it weren't so funny.
"I c'n...keep ya comp'ny," Ritchie assures her, and she leans heavy on his shoulder.
"Oh, could you?"
He goes in for a kiss but she dodges, working it flawlessly into her fake-tipsy meandering, and the perfect moment is close, so close, there! Ritchie tries so pitifully but succeeds and gets one in, and it takes not five minutes for the bright red envelope to zing! in through the window and smack the back of his drunken head.
"Oooohh!!" crows half the room, pointing and laughing like the school-children most of them were, mere months ago. Ritchie, as much as he may have had to drink, has clearly got Howlers before, and knows better than to leave it, especially with Fred and George hovering like hawks over their precious facilities. He snatches it open like yanking off a band-aid and out squawks Molly Weasley in all her squawking glory.
"ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT YOU WERE THINKING, YOUNG MAN - SHE IS ONLY A CHILD, NOT TO MENTION MY DAUGHTER - AND AS FAR AS ANY OF US ARE CONCERNED SHE'S GOOD AND WELL SPOKEN FOR - YOU'RE CLEARLY NOT IN YOUR RIGHT STATE OF MIND, AND IF YOU ARE NOW, THEN YOU CERTAINLY WON'T BE WHEN I'M DONE WITH YOU - AND THEN SHE'S GOT SIX OLDER BROTHERS, SIX, ALL WAITING TO TAKE THEIR TURN TOO - "
All of it - the Howler, Ritchie's face, the crowd reaction - is just too priceless, and Ginny staggers, with laughter and not with drink, back over to Harry, to collapse into giggles against him. They're being supported by the wall, and by each other, and really, all of it's quite hilarious.
When it's happening to someone else.
-xxx-
With all the self-discipline he can muster, Harry paces himself.
The party wrapped up nicely. Eventually all the guests cleared out except the right ones - Neville, Luna, Hermione, Lee, Oliver, and the seven Weasleys with Fleur subbing in for the ever-abroad Charlie. This, Harry thought, was his true family, precisely the crowd he would have chosen for his birthday party, and while the rest of it was actually quite amazing, this lot was just about perfect. They told stories, and laughed, and cried, and helped each other sober up, and by then it was basically morning and they all Apparated home and slept all day, like a good and proper party should make you do. When he woke up around four in the afternoon it was to see that Ron's birthday present had arrived; it was nothing at all like a possible bedroom aid, but was rather a nice rack for a pair of broomsticks, with a note alluding to Ginny passing her Apparition test - which she was cleared to do upon turning seventeen. Harry immediately set about trying to concoct his revenge for what was basically the stupidest joke of that stupid-joke riddled night.
The week since then Harry's spent more time with Teddy, and at the Auror office, and with C.R.U.S.H. The pieces of his life that seemed so shattered in May seem to be coming back together again at last, just like the wrecked fragments of the Hogwarts castle, and hopefully - if Harry has anything to say about it, at any rate - they will never crumble apart again.
Today, though, thinks Harry, is the day. And it's almost funny, because now that the day is here, it almost seems anti-climactic. Really, it shouldn't be such a big deal - not after a war, and getting a godson, and getting a job, and putting his whole life back together.
But as ancient of an eighteen-year-old as Harry Potter might be, he is still eighteen, and it is still only almost anti-climactic.
Plans have definitely gone into this. He's not got ridiculous about it, with candles and rose petals everywhere and all that other nonsense, but there is a nice tart in his Muggle refrigerator, and he is going to try to be fairly smooth about things. And from the time she gets there until well on into the evening, everything looks basically flawless. Harry can clearly see his destination on the horizon, and he watches with confidence as it draws nearer and nearer.
And then seems to catch fire.
"...Sorry?"
"Well, I've given it a lot of thought, after your birthday party," she tells him, wringing her hands. "Hannah Abbott says she's always planned to do it, you know, and Mum said it was probably one of the best decisions she ever made. I just want to do what makes me happy, honestly..."
"But - but you're going to - "
"Save myself, until marriage," Ginny repeats, as if Harry is somehow stupid for not understanding it. "A bit old-fashioned, but it's what I need to do."
Harry is gone from the room, striding up Diagon Alley, and halfway into Gringotts to retrieve gold from his vault for the most extravagant ring he can possibly find before it occurs to him that Ginny is probably kidding.