Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or anything else that is recognizable in this fic. If at any point it gets confusing, please ask me or wait it out - everything happens for a reason, unless it's a mistake.
She cuts a striking picture, and she knows it. Red hair flies at the wind - brown eyes that could eat the world and still ask for more don't bother to look up - pale skin clings to the sparse amounts of sunlight that are brave enough to touch her skin - the graceful way in which she moves has drawn better men than he is into an oblivion that they begged for - yes, Ginny Weasley is a striking woman.
He stays back from where she walks, following the footsteps that she leaves in the sand as though they will bring to light the way that the world moves around her - not through her or with her or to her, but as though she is a stone in the midst of a creek that has started high in the mountains and flows down towards the earth with an inexorable pace, and she would laugh if she could hear his thoughts. Her laugh brings the sun, though, so he is quite sure that if she laughed at him - never with him; that would be unlike her, in a way that he isn't sure she even knows anymore - he doesn't think he would mind.
She is the sun and the moon to him, and the more that the waves beat at the shore, the more he can feel his wantneedlustlove for her grow and grow, until it as though his heart is moving with the waves. She sways in time to the pulse of the earth - he knows that she is lost to him. If he were close enough to see her, he knows that he would see a face that doesn't see him, eyes that look into the future - so far that he cannot begin to imagine what she is watching, only guess from the play of emotions across her face. And guessing isn't what he wants - he wants to hold her, to feel the slim body against his own and know that for a moment, she is his.
He has never truly had her, though. That is the tragedy of it all - because no one will ever truly own Ginny Weasley. He cannot even say her name without automatically following up with her last name, as though she is so attached to the other in his mind that she is lost without one. He doesn't care; he never cared about her last name. It was the pale skin that had drawn him in first - the skin that glowed in the lights of the candles, the bravery in her face when she looked around the room and didn't see the people she was looking for. He had seen the devastation that had spread in the space between the freckles dotting her nose, had watched as her eyes - others had called them the color of chocolate, but he preferred to think of them as something like heaven - had dimmed,
and then he had smiled at her.
And she had lit up, as though lit from behind - as though the angel that had always watched over her had recognized that, in that very moment when she had accepted his smile - he watched her tuck it away behind her heart, and the answering smile on her lips had tugged at his own heart - she had gained a new protector. And so he had protected her - how he'd protected her! It was as though she were always there - he'd known where she was whenever she walked in the room, had followed her for the years that they'd been trapped in the same glass prison, had woken with her name on his lips when she had been unable to speak. The times that he had found her in the rooms that she fled to - the times he'd wished that he'd had the courage to walk in and stir her from the reverie she sunk into - they would have written a book on their own.
But nothing good will last - it never does, and he'd learned that from a young age, had ached at her learning it, too. She was so much better - she was his angel, was an angel to a world so far gone that it would never even realize. And she'd pined just as he had, she'd given herself to the war just as he had, but she had done it better. Ginny Weasley had stood in the carnage of the Great Battle and smiled, and he'd felt - just as he'd given her a smile when she was younger than young, when she'd still been innocent and pure and what the idea of an angel was, before she'd embodied revenge the way so many others had - that it was all going to be okay.
It hadn't been. Nothing was ever that simple.
And still the waves beat at the shore, and still she walked, and still the shore beat back - because that was all it knew how to do.