Autumn Rain
One
It is the end of August. Grimmauld Place has fallen into despair; the walls need painting, the carpet is even more threadbare than when they left it and, most of all, it holds no soul. Mum does everything in her power to make sure it is getting back to what it was.
She doesn't bother to say that it will never quite be the same again.
Two
A dreary Monday morning leaves her staring, jaw wide open, at the newest occupant of the house, and she has to be restrained to stop herself from attacking him.
'Why are you here?' she hisses in a low tone, wrenching her father's grip from her arm with practiced ease.
Malfoy merely adverts his eyes, and studies the wall instead.
Three
Harry doesn't come. Professor Lupin says he will, but Mum says that they must keep him away at all times, with Sirius gone and then, on top of everything else, Dumbledore.
Ginny stops pretending to believe that she has seen him at all in the last three years.
Four
And then exactly three months later, when she has managed to tolerate him, to accept him making use of the library, to accept the fact that he cooks dinner three times a week because her mother simply hasn't the time, she leans over to retrieve the salt, and he kisses her.
He is tender, soft, as if he's deliberately making sure she isn't breaking; she is offended, shouts at him, and tells him that she hates him just as much as she ever did.
Five
She pretends not to notice him sneaking into her room at times to watch her sleep.
Eventually, she gets fed up, and says, 'If you want to sleep in my bed, just do so.'
He rarely doesn't, anymore.
Six
The storage room, the study, the room where the family tapestry hangs - where she has spotted her name, too - the kitchen, the living room; everywhere.
They kiss because he needs it to forget, and she needs it because he's everything Harry would never be.
Seven
And then it's a first time against the clear white tiles of the bathroom, and she cries and arches her back in a feline way, and when he kisses her, he claims that it's a good sort of evil they're enjoying, and she agrees – she agrees.
Eight
Her mother is most ashamed of her. She threatens to disown her, to let her leave with the traitor of the raging war, so that she can end up being his whore, his wife.
She shouts that it was them who let him in here in the first place, and who was she to blame, with everyone fighting a war she was too young for?
The mug near the counter shatters in her fury, and she helps a sobbing Professor Lupin collect the pieces, for it was the mug given to him by James and Sirius and Peter; names she knows, names she will never not know, and she wonders, somehow, if she isn't falling for the wrong sort of evil.
Nine
Silently it drops in, sneaks into the house, now fully restored to its glory (three years of hard work), creeps underneath her bedroom door; the war is over.
He comes into her room, and tells her that he is getting married.
To whom, she asks, and he remains silent; and she knows that it is not her.
She doesn't see him again.
Ten
So when he asks the following February, she says yes.
And it is easy, she thinks, because she's never quite fallen out of love with Harry.
Eleven
After eleven years, she sees him again; standing on her threshold, utterly alone, holding a bouquet of withered flowers in his hands he claims are not for her, but she knows, and she invites him in for tea.