The first thing Ginny did when he saw him was kiss him. Right there, right in front of her whole family, she kissed him, completely unembarrassed.
The second thing she did was clench her fists, as though she were about to hit him.
Luckily, she did not.
Instead, she said, just as the rest of her family made a silent agreement to leave them be, "I thought you were dead."
"I'm sorry," Harry told her quickly, "but—"
"I thought you were dead," she repeated.
"I had to—"
"You don't seem to be understanding me," she told Harry, glaring at him. "I thought you were dead. Dead. Did you even think—"
"Ginny, I—"
"You shouldn't—" she began.
"I didn't have much of a choice."
"I know that works on Ron and Hermione and all, but you'll need to come up with something better for me."
He wouldn't have expected anything less from her. She had been patient for long enough, he supposed. A year. It had been only a few months short of a year since he had left.
All he could say, however was: "But it's the truth."
"You could have told me," she said, clearly not feeling any more forgiving.
"And you would have let me?"
"I would have, as a matter of fact! I'd have preferred it to what you did, at least."
"Bit late now, of course."
"Well, I suppose so," Ginny said, though there was a notable lack of defeat in her tone. "But what it's not too late for is the whole story. None of that 'Dumbledore told me not to tell anyone' rubbish, because I really couldn't care less."
"But—"
"None of it."
"Right."
For a few drawn-out seconds, there was silence, and Ginny's impatience seemed more obvious than ever.
"Go on," she said.
"Well, we were gone," Harry began, unsure of where to start.
"I hadn't worked that out," she said bitingly. "Really, in how many months... Hm, I had only just realized. Thanks for clearing that up."
"And we were looking for, er, these things."
"You said," she told him, and Harry was taken momentarily by surprise.
"When?"
"Last summer," Ginny said. "You didn't mean to, I don't think, but you did."
"D'you want to hear or not?" he said at last, growing more and more impatient.
"Right."
"Well, Voldemort—he, er, he sort of took these objects and trapped bits of his soul in them. And we found them. And we destroyed most of them. There were six. Well, seven," he corrected. "But there were supposed to be six. Anyway, we went to your brother's place after, er, something happened—"
"What happened?" she said, and for just a moment, Harry could imagine that all of this was back when they were younger—in some world where Voldemort did not exist, in some world where such a thing was possible—that he was reading her a fairytale, and that her eagerness to discover more involved princes and princesses, not Horxruxes. The image, needless to say, was ruined quickly by the dark circles under he eyes and the ghostly feel of their surroundings.
"Malfoy Manor...," he said absently. "We were a bit, well, delayed. And then there was that whole Gringotts thing. I imagine you heard about that… And then we were here. And then a bit later... Snape... He was protecting me, and... He knew something. And he sort of told me, but really... It's complicated. But, er, those things—yeah, I was sort of one of them. So I had to, you know, die."
"You didn't."
"Oh, are you sure? I assumed I did."
"Shut up."
"So I went into the forest. Where he was."
"You—you walked right past me, didn't you?" she asked, outraged. "There was someone there. There was definitely someone there. That was you."
"Yeah."
"You could have told me!" Ginny shouted.
"We've been over this," Harry said tiredly.
"But I didn't know then that it was you then!"
"Does it make a difference?"
"Yeah," she said, "it sort of does."
"I would have—"
"It's not like I was stopping you," she told him. "You could have said something. I wouldn't have kept you."
"Well, I just couldn't."
"You just couldn't?" she repeated.
Harry didn't bother arguing. "Do we have to go through this again?" he asked.
"Fine. Go on."
"He killed me, I guess."
"But he didn't," she said, looking at him curiously.
"Yeah, 'But he didn't.' So then, I guess you sort of know what happens from there..."
Her brown eyes observed him carefully, as though if she did not memorize every single thing about him, he might disappear. And in the moment, it struck him that the world he had been imagining—that world without Voldemort—it was real. And Harry realized, just then, that for the first time in his life, he had a future.
(And maybe, for the first time in his life, there was someone he really, truly wanted to spend it with.)
AN: As you can see, rather than bothering trying to find good Ginny fics, I write some. Well, maybe not good. But I write Ginny fics. So that's something. This was originally going to be another all-dialogue thing, because those are really good practice for making it sound like proper talking rather than awkwardly inserting quotation marks. But then I realized there wouldn't be a very good stopping point. So then I added bits and this came about. So, thanks for reading. (: