Divorce rates for Hogwarts alumni are unusually high.
When Harry thinks about it, later, it sort of makes sense. With him and his friends, at least, they've all had the example of Mr. and Mrs. Weasley to look to, and of his own parents, meeting and dating and getting engaged while still in school. Harry doesn't know if this is as common all across the board or not, but really, if he's honest, he's never been that able to see things from the perspective of someone other than himself or his friends, and it's worked out fine up until this point.
Fine, but drenched in tears all around, really. If he's honest, and Harry's really given an effort toward being honest with himself lately, because that's what the therapist says, and Harry figures it's best to listen to her if he's paying her 100 Galleons an hour. But if he's honest with himself, Harry still gets a wrench in the general region of his heart when he thinks about Ginny, and it's been two years. It probably doesn't help that he sees her every Sunday, her and his son. He visits them at the Leaky Cauldron where Ginny lives now, lives with Neville and Hannah Abbot-now-Longbottom, and Harry doesn't like to inquire too closely what "live with" actually means here. But James is always happy to see him, and he'll always be James to Harry even if Ginny calls him by his middle name, which is Sirius, and Harry doesn't see how that's any better, if she's trying not to remember him or something rubbish like that.
Not that she ever gives any indication of this. She always smiles and kisses him on the cheek and she still wears the same perfume she did two years ago when she slid the papers across the dinner table to him around the soup tureen, the same perfume she wore that July day he asked her to marry him, the summer after she finished at Hogwarts, the same perfume she's always worn.
Some mornings, he wakes up alone and can't figure a good reason she's not beside him, can't fathom the reason they didn't make it. He spends hours trying to pinpoint the moment it all went wrong. She was happy when they got married, he knows that. She loved him the day he kissed her in the meadow under the large tent, and she laughed while they danced and he touched the flowers woven around her veil and couldn't believe how lucky he actually was. She loved him the day she told him they were having a baby, her eyes brimming and her smile full as she stood in the doorway to the kitchen, and he didn't even bother to remove her cloak before grabbing her to him in a crushing hug.
His memories of the pregnancy are spotty, because he was working one the Delion case at the time, and spending a lot of hours at the office, but Molly moved in with them then, and every evening he'd find her in the front room knitting. Sometimes Ginny was with her, and sometimes she'd already gone to bed, flung out across it so Harry had to mold himself around her shape and slip in quietly so as not to wake her. She smiled at him the day James was born, a smile so big it could have taken the world with it, and surely she loved him then, holding their son.
It was later, then, after Molly moved out and their life went on as before, except that Ginny baby proofed the house one day while Harry was at work and he could never figure out how to open the bottom cupboards from then on. He leaned over the kitchen table every afternoon and kissed her, chucking James under the chin, and some nights he even cooked dinner. He was there, no matter what she says, and he doesn't understand how she can say that when he loved her—loves her so much. He doesn't know when it changed, precisely, but it did and Harry can't explain it and it still makes him want to cry and throw things sometimes.
But Malfoy and Parkinson make it, and that's something he's never been able to figure out.
Oh, not at first. At first, they both exemplify the norm quite nicely. Malfoy marries Astoria Greengrass in a lavish ceremony that Harry is decidedly not invited to, but he reads the write up in the Daily Prophet, and then the more detailed one in the copy of the Wedding Edition of Wizarding People that Hermione has tucked beneath an armchair in the sitting room of the flat she gets after she and Ron break up.
It feels odd now, to visit Ron and Hermione separately. They were together for so long, much longer than he and Ginny were, and even before they were together, they were still a set. Ron and Hermione, Harry's best friends. They still are, but they just don't go together anymore.
It happened five months ago, the fight, and Harry really should have known that it would happen sometime. Ron and Hermione, both of them, have always seen the world in such stark colors that they were bound to seriously clash sometime. And Harry remembers all the times at Hogwarts when one of them wasn't speaking to the other, and he remembers the birds sixth year, so he only sighs when Ron holds out his arm to show where the good china platter hit him. And they're still not speaking, which maybe Harry should have suspected too, but it feels weird and wrong that Ron and Hermione aren't Ron and Hermione anymore.
Harry flips through the pages of the magazine, which is old, almost three years, and he wonders why Hermione has kept it until he realizes that her wedding announcement's in here too. He almost stuffs it back under the chair immediately, but then it opens on the centerfold and there is Malfoy with Astoria, and they look happy, they really do, her in her white dress and him in his black suit, happy and smiling though it's a marriage made probably most likely just for mutual political and financial benefit. Astoria looks so impossibly young, and it's hard for Harry to reconcile the image with the woman he sees from three to four every Thursday afternoon for their weekly session, and he's not used to Malfoy looking happy.
But their marriage is the shortest of them all, just six months long, and Harry remembers feeling a rush of savage joy the day he heard about it, as if this was another thing he could best Malfoy at. He'd held Ginny close that day, wrapping his arms around her pregnant belly, and promising he'd never leave her the way Malfoy'd left Astoria.
He only beats Malfoy by less than a year, and by then, it's not enough to matter at all.
Pansy Parkinson shocks the wizarding world (though no one who knew her, and Harry least of all, can say they're really surprised) by carrying on with a string of high class ladies of well-connected families following her graduation from Hogwarts. The society pages are full of pictures in the first few months, pictures of her flauntingly holding hands with Astoria's older sister Daphne, whom Harry remembers vaguely from Hogwarts, with Cho Chang, whom Harry remembers very well from Hogwarts, and even Luna Lovegood. Harry endures one tea with the both of them, as well as Ginny, Ron and Hermione about a year after they've all graduated, in which Pansy smirks and pushes out her chest and feels Luna up underneath the table while Luna smiles absently and chats about her next expedition, and Harry can't see what any of them see in her.
Then she disappears for about a year with a French bloke who the gossips whisper might be part banshee. It would be just like her, Harry thinks. From what he knows of her (though if he's honest, he really knows very little), she'd do it for the shock value alone.
When she reappears, it's on the arm of Draco Malfoy, who's kept pretty quiet, at least as far as Witch Weekly is concerned, since his marriage fell apart, so Harry doesn't really know what he's been up to. Pansy writes a tell-all about her misspent youth and her time in France and all across Eastern Europe, with so much emphasis on the way darling Draco rescued her from the fiery depths of insurmountable pain that it's all Harry can do to get through it, especially since all of the accompanying moving photographs show Malfoy and Parkinson gazing longingly at each other and every once in a while grabbing each other and snogging frantically.
Harry doesn't know why he keeps up on his old classmates, his old enemies, why he reads the society pages and the wedding register. Perhaps in the end it all still comes down to competition, and that's all that's really mattered all along.
But if that's true, then he guesses Malfoy wins, because even if he had a break there in the middle, he and Pansy have been together since fourth or fifth year at least, and they still haven't broken up in the year since they got married, so that's a good sign that maybe they'll last.
Or a bad sign, for Harry's competitive side, at least, which he really doesn't think is at all as dominant as Astoria says. But then again, he has to admit that she's made some good points in past, even if she did marry Malfoy.
He almost walks right out of her office the first time he goes to see her, smacking himself for not realizing that the Astoria who's contact details have been pinned to the Auror Department notice board underneath the heading "Feeling Overwhelmed? Work or Life Taking a Toll? We're Here to Listen" is the same one he's read about, who looked so small in her white dress. But her voice is as soft as her couch and she doesn't say anything when he haltingly tells her about Ginny, only touches the back of his forearm and nods and her hands are as soft as the rest. So he keeps going back, and after a while, he even stops thinking about her as the girl in the magazine, but simply as Astoria.
And when she draws her wand through his unruly hair and stops at his temple to pull yet another memory for her therapeutic Pensieve, Harry feels calmer than he has since Ginny left. So he listens to her, and he breathes deep. He thinks he can feel the cracked places in his chest begin to knit themselves together when he listens to her voice, and he wonders if this is what healing feels like.
xXx
a/n: So at long last I have written something again. Usually I just dash off one shots and put them up here without revision, but this is one that I rewrote a couple of times, and I'm still not completely satisfied with it, but I probably never would be even if I rewrote it ten more times. So, let me know what you think!