Take My Hand

This is my first Harry Potter fanfic [well, the first one I'm posting, anyway] and I really hope that some of the people who have reviewed my Twilight stuff will enjoy this, since I'm not likely to write a Twilight fic ever again. :-) [P.S. Harry Potter eats Twilight with ketchup.]

The inspiration for this fanfic was the shot of Ginny and Harry together in the newest trailer of Half Blood Prince. Pretty much, it is exactly what was happening in the trailer [perhaps slightly extended] through Harry's eyes, including all of his contemplative thoughts.

Please, please, please, please review!

Disclaimer: Do I look like a genius to you?


She stood there before him, her fiery hair swaying gently from her step, looking more like an angel than anything Harry had ever seen. A golden glow came in through the windows, falling against her body, and he blinked his eyes, half-expecting her to vanish. And if it weren't for the faint sounds of the grounds to be heard in the distance, Harry wouldn't have believed that they were at Hogwarts at all.

He could guess how he must look—bewildered, certainly. Would the seeming entrancement of his gaze make her uncomfortable? He tried to compose himself, but his lips parted slightly as she smiled softly at him, and a deep, powerful burning emanated from the inside of his chest, spreading out everywhere. In that moment, it seemed to Harry that all of the impossible things that had happened to him…every time he had told himself, this isn't your life, this isn't your life—When Cedric was killed, and Sirius, and the feeling of having Voldemort inside of his head, of the blade in Wormtail's hand slicing across his arm—Somehow, all of it still seemed more real that what he was experiencing now.

Because he was used to it, and there was no other way to say it, nothing else more bluntly truthful. He expected things like that to happen to him, it was why he alive, it was price he had to pay for surviving. This was something else…something he wouldn't have known he would be blessed with.

Had she always been so beautiful? It didn't seem possible that he wouldn't have noticed her, that he wouldn't have wrapped himself around her in the corridor and never, ever let go…

She had always been there, always, and she had not changed; Harry knew that it was himself who was different. And he felt that every moment that he had looked at her and not seen… He was someone else then, rather than simply a former version of himself—someone completely separate from the true person he was now, the person she had made him.

An image of the Room of Requirement and Cho Chang flashed through his mind, and he tried desperately to comprehend what he had been thinking that day…and all of fifth year, for that matter…and fourth….and third…

She smiled again, as if she knew exactly what he was thinking about. She reached her arm out towards him, her hand floating lithely on the air…

"Take my hand," she told him, and he stepped forward into her light, weaving their fingers together, and Harry could feel the heat from her hand sliding to every corner of his body, warming him as nothing else ever could.

She had known. Ever since the very beginning. She had loved him from the first moment she saw him, loved the idea of him—The Chosen One, The Boy Who Lived—always seeming more a character in a storybook than the real-life best friend of her brother. He was the gangly boy at the train station with the jet-black hair, eyes that she was always afraid to look into—but that was nothing unusual; in his presence she had always been quite nearly afraid to breathe. And then she loved Harry himself, loved his witty nature, his selflessness, his courage. Realized that beneath the legend there was a person, such a person…

She always loved him. And when he never gazed at her the way she did for him, she had strength, a strength to let go and yet still hope, still hold on…hold on tighter than ever…

His fingers relaxed in hers, curling around her palm, and their hands gently fell beside them. And he knew that he would never let go.

As she stood there, smiling into his eyes, Ginny was the most beautiful thing that he had ever seen.

And she always had been.