QLFC submission
Season 6: Caerphilly Catapults
Round 5, Chaser 2: use the title of a story written by your Chaser 3 (thefirstservant, Numbers in a Lifetime)
Prompts: (dialogue) "I should have told you sooner." , (food) fish and chips, (action) pacing nervously.
Word Count: 1,335
Thirty-seven, fifteen, ten, and two.
Those were the numbers that Ginny is wearing. She had thirty-seven jewels in her veil, fifteen of them on the necklace around her neck. Ten silver bangles on her wrists, and two jewels in the ring I had given her almost a year ago.
That night, almost a year ago to the date, had been a stressful one. She had been, for the most part, fed up with me. On the verge of leaving, actually.
!-!-!-!
"I just can't deal with you anymore! You're always off somewhere else. You hardly talk to me anymore!" she yells at me, rather suddenly. We had been eating at my apartment because I didn't want to go out. She'd made fish and chips, but hers were on the floor from her sudden exclamation.
"What? What do you mean?" I ask, shocked. I had thought we were getting along fine. My mothers' ring was in my jeans, where it's been for almost a month now. I'd just been thinking to myself that she had seven more chips then I did, not that it bothered me, but that had no reason for her to explode like that.
"I've been talking to you for three minutes now and you haven't responded once!"
"I- you- what?" I stutter out. I hadn't realized she was talking, and I feel bad.
"Exactly! You never listen. You never want to do anything, you don't like going out. Are you ashamed to be with me now?"
She calms down as she speaks, but she's still shaking in her anger.
"No! I love you, you know that."
"You sure don't act like it! And you never say it anymore until we're arguing." She crosses her arms and glares at me. I set the fish aside and stand, moving around the table carefully. A swish of my wand has her discarded food disappearing.
"I do love you, Gin. I didn't…. I'll work on saying it more if that's what you want. I've always tried to show it, but if you want it said more, I will," I promise her. I had expected the argument to phase out after that, but she just got angrier.
"You're ignoring my point! Why don't you want to do anything!?"
"We do things together all the time! If I'm not at the Burrow or your apartment, you're here at mine. How is that not doing anything?"
"I want to go out! I want to go for drinks with our friends, and have movie dates like we used to, and go to the theatre like you used to love, and I want to just… go back to being normal! Something happened to you and you won't tell me what it is, and it's changed everything!"
I'm shocked to see she's passionate enough about the subject to be crying. I make an aborted attempt to reach out to her before I huff at myself.
"Let's go sit in the den, yeah?" I ask finally. She nods shakily, wiping at her eyes. I lead her from the kitchen. It was seven steps down the hallway, fourteen stairs, and another ten down the second-floor hallway to the den. I start the fire without thinking about it and when I turn she's sitting and, though still angry, no longer crying. How do I start explaining this?
"You know I've been seeing Dr. Pennell?" I finally start, still crouched in front of the fire.
"What?"
"Dr. Pennell. Hermione suggested him, after the war, remember?"
"I know. What does that have to do anything?" she asks, the anger getting heavier in her voice.
"I should have told you sooner," I admit, turning to face her again.
"I should have told you as soon as he told me, but I didn't. And I'm sorry. But it…" I sigh in frustration and stand up, my knees popping.
"After the war, the reason Hermione told me to see him. I started… it used to be a lot worse. I couldn't function because of it, I would take hours at a time for the stupidest things…" I run my hand in my hair and glance at her. She's just waiting for me to continue talking.
"He says it's a form of OCD. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder," I clarify when she gets an immediately confused face.
"It's like… my brain has no control over it. I'll see something and…. I can control it to an extent now. I've learned to let the smaller things go, and to distract myself when it comes to the other things."
"Harry." She's in front of me, and I realize I was pacing with nerves, telling her all of this.
"What is 'it'?"
"I count things," I say simply.
"...count things."
"You have ten buttons on your shirt. Your hair clip has twenty-seven beads. You have one hundred and fifty-seven freckles on your face. There are ten steps to the door, ten to the stairs, fourteen down, seven in the hallway and another five to the stove. I can't… help it. But before, on days I'd cancel on you it was because I'd spilled sugar and had to count all of it. I avoided the beach because the sand terrified me. I couldn't go out in public because I found myself counting how many pieces of gum were stuck under a seat or how many leaves were on the trees. It's not that I don't want to go out with you and do those things. It's that I'll drive myself crazy if I do." I stop myself rambling and reach out for her hands, gripping them a little too tightly, but she doesn't complain.
"So I haven't done anything to make you stop loving me?" she asks, and her voice is so small, so scared, it makes my heart ache.
"Oh, Gin, of course not. Lately, I've been planning things, that's why I haven't been able to go out as much." I explain, reaching out to tuck a piece of wild hair behind her ear. She still looks unsure, and it only takes a split second for me to realize that all the planning in the world doesn't mean a thing.
"Can you handle me while I try and get control over this?" I ask softly.
"What? Of course! If you had told me something was going on beforehand, I would have understood!" Her anger is back, and I'm glad that she's upset with me not telling her and not with the idea itself of me having this.
"Good," I murmur, before dropping down to one knee.
!-!-!-!
Two thousand, two hundred and forty-seven words, I tell myself as I hold Ginny's hand. She glances sideways at me and has the audacity to wink and grin. At least she was enjoying herself. That was the whole point of a wedding, the bride and the groom having a wonderful day while they bind themselves together for eternity. She squeezes my hand and I focus again. One thousand, one hundred and seven words now. I felt the anticipation racing through me. We were so close to being done, to being married, and yet the words dragged on from the man's mouth as he goes through the scripted words we had agreed on.
Nine hundred and fifty-four.
Five hundred and three.
One hundred and twenty-five.
I turn to Ginny, my throat dry as I croak out my I do's with her. She's smiling, but her eyes are tearing up too and I know she's as anxious as I am.
Fifty.
Twenty-Seven.
ten.
Six.
"You may now kiss the bride," he proclaims, and I pull her closer immediately. We were finally, finally married, after everything I put her through, after all the sessions after our engagement with Dr. Pennell so she could learn how to help me. The days, weeks, months of planning. Down to this as I lean in to kiss her.
Out of everything in the world I could count, words, jewels, food, leaves, buttons. I think the thing I was going to enjoy keeping track of the most is how many times I could kiss my new wife in my lifetime.