title: salubrious

pairing: [eventual] h/g

an: I'm not dead. s/o to aggie holmes, thank you for the review last chapter.

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salubrious

He's studying the floor when she sits next to him.

He knows it's her because it smells just like her flowery perfume, the smell that haunted him from that potion during 6th year and clouds his senses and makes him want to forget and sigh and crumple just a little bit—

A tentative hand touches his forearm, a small, seemingly platonic touch that feels anything but to him.

He does not look at her, but he can feel her eyes on him.

The hand retracts.

"Ginny…" the word comes strangled and unbidden from his lips, the sound just as much a part of the confounding push-pull he's felt over her since he woke up after the battle. The confidence of all the time in the world has left him, and he's struggling for air here.

His head makes the mistake of turning towards her, his eyes sweep up to meet hers.

They are deep, swirling brown, staring back right at him, a mask of strength but he can see the vulnerability underneath. He wonders what she sees in his own, she, who was always one to call him out whenever he tried to hide.

There are tears pooling in her eyes again, and, dammit, he doesn't know what he's supposed to do here, because something about Ginny was that she didn't cry. She was too proud, too determined to succumb to sadness but Harry knows that everything is too much for her small frame now. And he knows that it is not him, that right now she could not be thinking of him because—because of Fred and there is no way anything about him or their short time of us can compare. And it's not a competition.

They are still watching each other. She is biting her lip in a subtle way that doesn't show her teeth. Harry doesn't know what to say, has no concept of where to start or what she wants from him and he feels trapped because one part of him wants to just sweep her up in his arms because she's here -she's safe, she's alive, she made it through and he made it through and now they can be happy and together like they should have always- while another is frozen and yet feels so raw and it is too much and surely it must be too much for her, if she cares enough still anyways. A year is a long time.

She opens her mouth and Harry, with a confusing mixture of trepidation and eagerness, waits to hear her first words to him.

"Ginny!"

Their faces mirror a shared confusion, until a girl with tearstained cheeks that Harry recognizes but doesn't know sits down on Ginny's opposite side.

Dammit, couldn't people see they were trying to- to-

Harry doesn't drop his head to his hands like he wants to as Ginny's eyelids shutter close. It feels like slow motion as he watches Ginny gather herself. When brown eyes meet green again, the tears are gone.

She leaves him with one last look, filled with a mixture of emotion and steel that he doesn't know how to interpret, before turning and embracing the girl next to her. Harry listens for a moment as the girl blubbers words onto Ginny's shoulder, watches as Ginny runs her hand through the girl's chestnut hair.

Harry turns away, holding in his sigh before quietly excusing himself from the table, a few murmured goodbye's trailing in the wake—but none from her, he can't hear her and he can't help but feel a little bitter.

It was just a moment, but that, too, had been stolen away from them.