In an Inglorious Spot
Chapter 3: Let Us Show Us Brave
It had been easy for Harry to smile while his best friend had been in sight. But when the door clicked shut behind Ron, Harry sank down on a desktop, feeling suddenly drained. Ginny, after letting out a shaky breath, moved in front of him and pulled his head onto her shoulder. He let her do it, and soon he was breathing slower, settling his hands on her waist, and feeling her fingers in his hair. He marveled once again that she could have this effect on him, soothe him like this. He'd never imagined that it was possible...
"That brother of mine," Ginny finally said, pulling back a little, "is the most wonderful git I've ever met."
"Yeah," Harry chuckled softly.
"However," Ginny said briskly, letting go of Harry and taking a seat at the next desk. "He does come up with rather silly ideas. I can't imagine why he thinks you can convince me to leave when he can't."
She sat there looking rather expectantly at Harry, and he hadn't the slightest clue what to say. He knew Ron expected him to persuade Ginny; Ron had only left because he trusted Harry to do it. But Harry wasn't sure how to begin. It would have been rather melodramatic to say, "Because if you die too, then Voldemort will be able to kill me, and the world will pretty much end."
After waiting fairly long for a response from Harry, Ginny seemed to decide to take his silence as agreement with her defiance of Ron. She started chattering on about the spells and strategies they had learned, the potential of Fred and George's products in battle, and her hope that they would fight so hard and so well that the horrible statistic would be proved wrong. Harry tried to tune her out, almost in a panic now to figure out how to tell her why she needed to leave, until he heard her say, "I'm just glad we can all do this together, and help each other through it like we always have."
That got to Harry in a way he'd been trying to avoid; it made him realize both how much he needed Ginny to survive, and how difficult it would be to convince her to leave the battle. He quickly buried his face in his hands, scrunching up his eyes and mouth against his emotions.
"What is it, Harry?" The concern in her voice, the tenderness of her touch, made it that much worse.
"You've got to go," he said thickly, through his hands.
Ginny seemed taken aback.
"If you think I'm just going to leave you like this--" she began.
"No," Harry cut in, finally uncovering his face to look up at her. "You've got to leave. You can't fight."
There was a pause.
"I thought we've been over this. I can fight, and I will." Ginny's voice was cool.
"Please, you've got to..." Harry knew he sounded rather pathetic.
"But Harry, you need me here--"
"No, I don't!" The tone and volume of Harry's own voice surprised him, as did the hurt on Ginny's face. He hated the immediate guilt he felt, but couldn't help realizing that this could be the way to save her. He knew that she would never leave if she thought he needed her. He looked right in her eyes and forced out the words, "I don't need you here." It felt like a lie; only the addition of the word 'here' allowed him to say it at all.
"I don't believe you." Ginny replied, and Harry immediately felt himself loving her more for it. "There have been countless other things, much less serious than this, that you wouldn't have been able to get through without me. This is the scariest, most difficult thing any of us will ever have to do, and you need me. You can't do it alone. I know you better than you know yourself, and you can't pretend to me I'm wrong."
Everything she said was true, but Harry somehow had to convince her it wasn't. So her stubbornness irked Harry at the same time as he felt grateful for it. He made his face go passive, his voice grow cold. He shut himself down to her, or pretended to, knowing that it was the thing she hated the most.
"I don't HAVE to pretend: you ARE wrong. I don't need you here. I'll have Ron and Hermione, they were always enough before YOU came along-" Harry knew that mentioning the days when Ginny was afraid to speak to him got on her nerves.
"Oh, and they were enough when YOU NEEDED TO CRY," she alluded to their first kiss, her voice raising. "And when you came back to me the fourth and fifth time saying, yes, I do need you after all, I was lying when I said I didn't--"
"Maybe I was lying then too, we all know what a notorious liar I am--" Harry was also growing angry in spite of himself.
"You're the most honest man I know," Ginny thrust her chin up defiantly, refusing to allow Harry to retreat into that sarcastic excuse. "Sure, you could always come up with a nice yarn for Snape when you needed to, and tell it with the face of an angel, but that's not what honesty means. You're honest because you don't misrepresent who you are, not even to yourself. You don't try to pretend to yourself that you're perfect--I'd say you're brutally honest with yourself. It borders on self-torture! It takes a kind of bravery to look at yourself that honestly, and it's one of the reasons I fell for you. But you're lying to us both if you say you don't need me, because I know you do, not just because of our past, but because of the way you're looking at me right now. I can look at you and see what you're telling yourself, and you're always honest with yourself, Harry. You couldn't lie to me to save your life." And it occurred to him that that was precisely what he was trying to do. "I can see right through every word you say, I can tell what you're feeling, I know how you're trying to hide from me exactly how well you know that you do need me, so that this lie works. And now I'm afraid you're about to start working on hiding it from yourself, and becoming really dishonest for the first time in your life--"
Was that why she wouldn't believe him, because she could read his thoughts and feelings? His real emotions were in sharp contradiction with his words, just as his intended actions were opposite to the reasons behind them. He was sending her away precisely because he DID need her. If he really was as honest as she said, and if she could really read him that well, then it made sense that this would be the one thing it would be absolutely impossible for him to lie about anymore. Having experienced her love, he could no longer deny to himself that he needed it-it was one of the things he was most sure of in the world. And he wasn't about to try to deny it; he knew that would be completely pointless. He understood he had to change tactic, and quickly. If the lie wouldn't save their lives, then maybe--
"Do I need to remind you," Harry began, triumph in his voice. She couldn't do anything about this one, not a thing. "that as your commanding officer in the Order, I have the power to MAKE you take this getaway if I wa..." Harry trailed off when he saw the look on her face. It was downright scary.
"Don't you DARE," Ginny poked her finger hard at Harry's chest, her voice low and dangerous. "pull rank on me, Harry, don't you DARE! You should know me well enough by now to be sure that there is no better way to ensure my disobedience than to try to force me to obey. You should have figured out by now that the kind of persuasion I respond to is based on reason, and you've been so busy trying to lie to me that you haven't come up with any halfway decent--"
"How about 'because I love you'?" Harry snapped. She wanted reasons, she'd get reasons, he thought savagely. "Is that a good enough reason?"
Those three words, still so unpracticed for Harry, had never spilled from his mouth so quickly and easily, without thought or force. Nor had they ever received less notice from Ginny.
"You love Ron and Hermione, don't you?" she countered quickly. "You're letting them fight."
"Only because I can't stop them."
"So what makes you think you can stop me?"
"Nothing at all; if anything I've picked the most difficult of the three!" Harry threw his hands up, exasperated.
Ginny suddenly laughed, and a still angry and now bewildered Harry soon found her wrapping her arms around him. She rested her head on his shoulder and laughed until she couldn't anymore, then looked up at him smiling.
"I love you too," she said. Harry breathed it in. He had a constant, veritable hunger to hear those all-important words that had had no place in his childhood, a hunger he'd never really been aware of until he'd heard them the first time, from her. But Ginny wasn't finished. "That's why I want to stay." she concluded.
"But it's why I want you to go," Harry argued.
"So it comes down to who loves the other more?" Ginny asked teasingly, touching her forehead to Harry's.
"No," Harry smiled. "It comes down to who has the better reason--"
"Reasons!" Ginny wrinkled her nose. "Much as I prefer them to lies, they're not what I followed you in here for."
"I know," Harry said wryly. "You followed me in here because I made a rather silly comment, and..." Perhaps this was a good starting place...
But she was waving the thought away.
"Nah. I knew Ron would take care of that. That's why I gave you two some time. Why I really followed you," Her one hand rested on his upper arm, the other played with his top shirt button. "Was to ask you if," She flicked it open and smoothed back his collar. "You wanted," She planted one soft, moist, lingering kiss on the side of his neck. "To sleep in my room tonight."
Harry's eyebrows shot high above his glasses, which he was afraid were fogging up. They'd never done THAT, never even talked about it. Harry hadn't even got bored with kissing her yet. He liked it so much that he sometimes thought he never would. The thought of kissing her all night, all over, took his breath away. His hands tightened on her hips of their own accord. He tried to whet his lips with a dry tongue. "Do you mean.?"
"What do you think I mean?" she asked coyly, kissing the other side of his neck, and moving on to his second button.
"But," His mind was moving sluggishly, beginning to shut down. It took an enormous force of will to think about anything but what her lips and hands were doing. "the getaway closes at sundown."
"Oh, I think we'll need more time than that..."
There went the second button.
"Are you trying to bribe me to let you stay?" Harry asked incredulously. He knew as soon as it came out that it probably wasn't the most tactful or tasteful thing to say, but he was dealing with fewer brain cells each second.
Ginny feigned offense.
"First off, it's not a matter of you letting me do anything. Second, it's nothing I don't want myself. Third," she grinned. "Bribe is such a dirty word. I prefer 'distract.'" And she moved to kiss him on the lips.
But Harry was too quick for her. He stepped back out of her reach, catching her hands in his. If he held on to them he could make sure they behaved.
"Gin, I really, really wish--I'd love to--" Harry stumbled through his apologies, gradually getting a hold of his thoughts. "It would be...but we can't--I--oh, why do you have to be so beautiful?" Harry asked helplessly. Ginny smiled. She didn't seem too hurt, he supposed. He'd certainly never imagined he'd have to refuse her... "But, Gin, if I kissed you right now, I'm afraid I'd make you miss that getaway, and then I'd never forgive myself. Although, I suppose if it really happened like that, I wouldn't live very long to regret it..."
"Why do you say that?" Ginny's eyes were full of scared confusion.
"Ginny, if you go into that battle with me, I don't think I'll make it out."
"Why?"
It was an honest question, and the only one that really mattered. But he wasn't sure how to explain it.
"Well, it was like Ron said, right, somebody needs to survive."
"Somebody WILL survive. One in three." She still didn't understand.
"But YOU-" It wasn't just anyone, it was HER that he needed to make it.
"I've got a chance, haven't I?"
"One in three!" Not nearly good enough odds for his liking.
"I don't care, Harry, I NEED to fight!"
This took Harry aback, as he would have given anything to avoid having to fight tomorrow. Anything short of throwing his friends' lives away, which would have been his only ticket out.
"You...?"
"This is personal for me too, Harry." Ginny's jaw had hardened, as if against some internal pain. "My first year..."
"I know," Harry said sympathetically, and he moved to hold her, but she didn't let him very close.
"No, you don't," she said bluntly. Harry looked worriedly at her. "I never talk about it, because for some reason you feel as if it was your fault. And it's fine with me not to talk about it, even if you are wrong to think that, because I don't like to either, and because I'd do anything to keep you from pain. But if this is what it takes to make you see why I have to fight, then I'll tell you the worst of it."
Harry tightened his grip on her, preparing himself for gruesome tales of torture. Ginny took a deep breath and continued.
"He tried to tell me who I was." Harry was puzzled at this, but Ginny went on, looking down and to the side. "He told me I was doing all those things by myself, and that I wanted to do them..."
"Of course you didn't!" Harry said, running a hand up and down her arm.
"Well, I know that now. But at the time it was hard not to believe him. I had no idea what I'd been doing half the time; I would turn up somewhere I'd never been before, and he was the only one I could tell about it. He would tell me one thing when I had seen another; my sense of reality was all askew and I felt I was going mad. He wasn't letting me sleep."
"But that doesn't mean you wanted to..."
"After everything I'd written in that diary, it was hard not to feel as if he had some authority even about that." She looked at Harry and suddenly teared up. "He said you'd never love me..."
At this Harry wrapped his arms tightly around her and rocked her from side to side for a while, making soothing noises while she let out a few soft sobs. He smoothed back her hair.
"Well, he was wrong." Harry said firmly. She looked up at him and gave a bleary smile.
"Yeah," she kissed him on the cheek and stepped away, gathering her emotions back up. "So you see why I want to fight. I know I won't get to HIM, but a Death Eater or two will do, I'm sure...Lucius Malfoy..."
"But wouldn't that make him right?" Harry asked. It was the type of thing Dumbledore might have said to him once. "You wanting to do all the things he told you you wanted to do? Wouldn't that make you the person he said you were?"
Ginny looked dumbfounded, then hurt and scared.
"But I can't help wanting it," she said sadly.
"That's ok," he said. "I want it too. When you've gone through what we have, you can't help wanting it. The difference is whether you actually do it. You're lucky in that you don't have to. You can leave."
She was staring at him, puzzled and bemused. "Do you think you can keep me innocent by making me leave?" She said the word like it was completely foreign to her.
Harry almost laughed at the absurdity of the very concept of innocence. "Bit late for that. None of us are innocent anymore. We've all seen things we shouldn't have had to see. But there's a different kind of innocence..." Ginny looked puzzled, and Harry hastened to explain. "I mean, none of us are innocent of knowledge. But you can stay innocent of deed. Me, I have to kill somebody tomorrow."
"I'd rather you kill him than--"
"Yeah, me too," Harry agreed shortly.
There was a pause.
"And Harry, I don't only want to fight him for me, I want to fight him for YOU, for everything he's done to you, for what he's going to do to you tomorrow, making you kill him--"
"You'd be more help to me if you didn't fight."
"But how can that help?"
"I can be sure I won't lose everyone." Please understand this time, he silently begged her. "I can go into battle knowing for sure that I'll have someone to help me deal with its aftermath. I can face Voldemort with a chance of victory, instead of defeating myself before I ever see him."
Ginny seemed to accept the main gist now; she didn't protest his point this time but sidestepped it. It was a feeble, almost childish argument.
"But this is the most important thing I've ever had the chance to do..."
"It's more important to me that you survive to love me past tomorrow." Harry said. He'd never said anything quite like that, never explicitly asked her to love him. She seemed to understand its significance, because she paused a moment before going on, in the gentlest voice she had, a hand on his cheek.
"But, Harry, even if I die, I'll still always love you. Your parents and Sirius still love you, wherever they are."
The very idea hurt physically. Harry turned his face from her and stepped away, pushed up his glasses and pressed his wrists into his eye sockets to stop the deluge.
"That's not good enough!" he cried. "I need you HERE, alive. I needed them, but I can't have them. I can't bear to lose you too."
Harry felt her hands on his shoulders and arms. After a moment of her calming touch, he was able to drop his hands from his face and hold her again.
Then he heard a whisper in his ear, quite forceful for being so soft.
"I want to be right there with you in the end, Harry, in the very end..."
"I want that too," he said, touched by the sentiment. He ran his hand up and down her back. "But tomorrow can't be the end..."
"You know it very well could be," Ginny said accusingly, an inch from tears.
"I know. But we can't give up hope. We can't play it like it's the end or it will be for sure."
Ginny studied his face a moment, then gave the smallest nod. She dropped her hands and said, "Fine, you're right. I'll leave."
Relief flooded Harry, and his knees seemed to give out at the force of it. He sank into the chair behind him.
"Thank you," he said weakly, and then suddenly felt himself overcome by the desire to show her how thankful he was. He grabbed her hands, the most readily available bit of her, and kissed them again and again. "Thank you, thank you, thank you."
And then he looked up at her, holding her hands, and it occurred to him that today, on the eve of battle, they had talked more about the future, their future together, than they ever had before. And Ginny seemed to take it for granted that they'd be together, probably even more so than he did, since he always seemed to add an 'as long as I don't screw things up' clause in his own thoughts about their future. She'd just said that about the very end.and she'd offered. He wondered if he should just drop to one knee and make it official, here and now. He was halfway there...That would certainly give him something to live for...
"Ginny..." he began.
"Yes." She replied. He looked at her puzzled. That sounded more like an answer than a question, and he hadn't even spoken yet. However, she could practically read his mind.
"You mean..."
"I mean yes, Harry." She smiled and lifted his chin with her fingers. "I'm always going to mean yes."
He threw his arms around her without even waiting to get up out of the chair. He caught her with one arm on her lower back, the other behind her legs. His head pressed into her stomach, where he felt her laughter as she ran her fingers through his hair. Suddenly he had an ecstatic fantasy of pressing his face to her belly again someday, just like this, and feeling tiny kicks along with her laughs. He was about to stand up and kiss her properly, when she sat down in his lap and found his lips with hers.
At first pause, quite a few minutes later, Ginny looked out the window, where the colors were beginning to turn for a spectacular golden sunset. "I suppose it's definitely too late to go up to my room now; we don't have anywhere near enough time..."
Harry laughed softly and nuzzled her. "No," he said. "We've got all the time in the world."
And so they kissed until the very last moment before Ginny had to leave. And she left gladly, knowing that she had given Harry the hope he needed to fight for his survival and the world's-she'd given him his reason to live. It was the only real weapon he would need to defeat Voldemort.
Ginny's promised love, and Ron and Hermione's sacrifice, would make Harry's survival, and, with it, victory, possible. Life would prevail, because love was its driving force.
A/N: Ok, that is the end of this fic, and most probably the end of this fic- verse. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I have writing it! People have been asking me in reviews of Our Precious Blood whether Ron and Hermione really die, and the answer is yes. I hated to kill them, but in my opinion it's still a happy ending. I only added this one because I felt so bad for Harry, not getting to die. Now he's happy too!
This is the poem I've been stealing titles from, in its entirety:
If We must Die (1919)
If we must die, let it not be like hogs/ Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,/ While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, / Making their mock at our accursed lot. / If we must die, O let us nobly die, / So that our precious blood may not be shed / In vain; then even the monsters we defy / Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!/ Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, / And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!/ What though before us lies the open grave?/ Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
By Claude McKay (1889-1948)
I'm also indebted to Arabella of Sugarquill.net for her fic, The Very Secret Diary, which inspired my interpretation of Ginny's first year. It's an absolutely bone-chilling account of everything written in Riddle's diary.
Chapter 3: Let Us Show Us Brave
It had been easy for Harry to smile while his best friend had been in sight. But when the door clicked shut behind Ron, Harry sank down on a desktop, feeling suddenly drained. Ginny, after letting out a shaky breath, moved in front of him and pulled his head onto her shoulder. He let her do it, and soon he was breathing slower, settling his hands on her waist, and feeling her fingers in his hair. He marveled once again that she could have this effect on him, soothe him like this. He'd never imagined that it was possible...
"That brother of mine," Ginny finally said, pulling back a little, "is the most wonderful git I've ever met."
"Yeah," Harry chuckled softly.
"However," Ginny said briskly, letting go of Harry and taking a seat at the next desk. "He does come up with rather silly ideas. I can't imagine why he thinks you can convince me to leave when he can't."
She sat there looking rather expectantly at Harry, and he hadn't the slightest clue what to say. He knew Ron expected him to persuade Ginny; Ron had only left because he trusted Harry to do it. But Harry wasn't sure how to begin. It would have been rather melodramatic to say, "Because if you die too, then Voldemort will be able to kill me, and the world will pretty much end."
After waiting fairly long for a response from Harry, Ginny seemed to decide to take his silence as agreement with her defiance of Ron. She started chattering on about the spells and strategies they had learned, the potential of Fred and George's products in battle, and her hope that they would fight so hard and so well that the horrible statistic would be proved wrong. Harry tried to tune her out, almost in a panic now to figure out how to tell her why she needed to leave, until he heard her say, "I'm just glad we can all do this together, and help each other through it like we always have."
That got to Harry in a way he'd been trying to avoid; it made him realize both how much he needed Ginny to survive, and how difficult it would be to convince her to leave the battle. He quickly buried his face in his hands, scrunching up his eyes and mouth against his emotions.
"What is it, Harry?" The concern in her voice, the tenderness of her touch, made it that much worse.
"You've got to go," he said thickly, through his hands.
Ginny seemed taken aback.
"If you think I'm just going to leave you like this--" she began.
"No," Harry cut in, finally uncovering his face to look up at her. "You've got to leave. You can't fight."
There was a pause.
"I thought we've been over this. I can fight, and I will." Ginny's voice was cool.
"Please, you've got to..." Harry knew he sounded rather pathetic.
"But Harry, you need me here--"
"No, I don't!" The tone and volume of Harry's own voice surprised him, as did the hurt on Ginny's face. He hated the immediate guilt he felt, but couldn't help realizing that this could be the way to save her. He knew that she would never leave if she thought he needed her. He looked right in her eyes and forced out the words, "I don't need you here." It felt like a lie; only the addition of the word 'here' allowed him to say it at all.
"I don't believe you." Ginny replied, and Harry immediately felt himself loving her more for it. "There have been countless other things, much less serious than this, that you wouldn't have been able to get through without me. This is the scariest, most difficult thing any of us will ever have to do, and you need me. You can't do it alone. I know you better than you know yourself, and you can't pretend to me I'm wrong."
Everything she said was true, but Harry somehow had to convince her it wasn't. So her stubbornness irked Harry at the same time as he felt grateful for it. He made his face go passive, his voice grow cold. He shut himself down to her, or pretended to, knowing that it was the thing she hated the most.
"I don't HAVE to pretend: you ARE wrong. I don't need you here. I'll have Ron and Hermione, they were always enough before YOU came along-" Harry knew that mentioning the days when Ginny was afraid to speak to him got on her nerves.
"Oh, and they were enough when YOU NEEDED TO CRY," she alluded to their first kiss, her voice raising. "And when you came back to me the fourth and fifth time saying, yes, I do need you after all, I was lying when I said I didn't--"
"Maybe I was lying then too, we all know what a notorious liar I am--" Harry was also growing angry in spite of himself.
"You're the most honest man I know," Ginny thrust her chin up defiantly, refusing to allow Harry to retreat into that sarcastic excuse. "Sure, you could always come up with a nice yarn for Snape when you needed to, and tell it with the face of an angel, but that's not what honesty means. You're honest because you don't misrepresent who you are, not even to yourself. You don't try to pretend to yourself that you're perfect--I'd say you're brutally honest with yourself. It borders on self-torture! It takes a kind of bravery to look at yourself that honestly, and it's one of the reasons I fell for you. But you're lying to us both if you say you don't need me, because I know you do, not just because of our past, but because of the way you're looking at me right now. I can look at you and see what you're telling yourself, and you're always honest with yourself, Harry. You couldn't lie to me to save your life." And it occurred to him that that was precisely what he was trying to do. "I can see right through every word you say, I can tell what you're feeling, I know how you're trying to hide from me exactly how well you know that you do need me, so that this lie works. And now I'm afraid you're about to start working on hiding it from yourself, and becoming really dishonest for the first time in your life--"
Was that why she wouldn't believe him, because she could read his thoughts and feelings? His real emotions were in sharp contradiction with his words, just as his intended actions were opposite to the reasons behind them. He was sending her away precisely because he DID need her. If he really was as honest as she said, and if she could really read him that well, then it made sense that this would be the one thing it would be absolutely impossible for him to lie about anymore. Having experienced her love, he could no longer deny to himself that he needed it-it was one of the things he was most sure of in the world. And he wasn't about to try to deny it; he knew that would be completely pointless. He understood he had to change tactic, and quickly. If the lie wouldn't save their lives, then maybe--
"Do I need to remind you," Harry began, triumph in his voice. She couldn't do anything about this one, not a thing. "that as your commanding officer in the Order, I have the power to MAKE you take this getaway if I wa..." Harry trailed off when he saw the look on her face. It was downright scary.
"Don't you DARE," Ginny poked her finger hard at Harry's chest, her voice low and dangerous. "pull rank on me, Harry, don't you DARE! You should know me well enough by now to be sure that there is no better way to ensure my disobedience than to try to force me to obey. You should have figured out by now that the kind of persuasion I respond to is based on reason, and you've been so busy trying to lie to me that you haven't come up with any halfway decent--"
"How about 'because I love you'?" Harry snapped. She wanted reasons, she'd get reasons, he thought savagely. "Is that a good enough reason?"
Those three words, still so unpracticed for Harry, had never spilled from his mouth so quickly and easily, without thought or force. Nor had they ever received less notice from Ginny.
"You love Ron and Hermione, don't you?" she countered quickly. "You're letting them fight."
"Only because I can't stop them."
"So what makes you think you can stop me?"
"Nothing at all; if anything I've picked the most difficult of the three!" Harry threw his hands up, exasperated.
Ginny suddenly laughed, and a still angry and now bewildered Harry soon found her wrapping her arms around him. She rested her head on his shoulder and laughed until she couldn't anymore, then looked up at him smiling.
"I love you too," she said. Harry breathed it in. He had a constant, veritable hunger to hear those all-important words that had had no place in his childhood, a hunger he'd never really been aware of until he'd heard them the first time, from her. But Ginny wasn't finished. "That's why I want to stay." she concluded.
"But it's why I want you to go," Harry argued.
"So it comes down to who loves the other more?" Ginny asked teasingly, touching her forehead to Harry's.
"No," Harry smiled. "It comes down to who has the better reason--"
"Reasons!" Ginny wrinkled her nose. "Much as I prefer them to lies, they're not what I followed you in here for."
"I know," Harry said wryly. "You followed me in here because I made a rather silly comment, and..." Perhaps this was a good starting place...
But she was waving the thought away.
"Nah. I knew Ron would take care of that. That's why I gave you two some time. Why I really followed you," Her one hand rested on his upper arm, the other played with his top shirt button. "Was to ask you if," She flicked it open and smoothed back his collar. "You wanted," She planted one soft, moist, lingering kiss on the side of his neck. "To sleep in my room tonight."
Harry's eyebrows shot high above his glasses, which he was afraid were fogging up. They'd never done THAT, never even talked about it. Harry hadn't even got bored with kissing her yet. He liked it so much that he sometimes thought he never would. The thought of kissing her all night, all over, took his breath away. His hands tightened on her hips of their own accord. He tried to whet his lips with a dry tongue. "Do you mean.?"
"What do you think I mean?" she asked coyly, kissing the other side of his neck, and moving on to his second button.
"But," His mind was moving sluggishly, beginning to shut down. It took an enormous force of will to think about anything but what her lips and hands were doing. "the getaway closes at sundown."
"Oh, I think we'll need more time than that..."
There went the second button.
"Are you trying to bribe me to let you stay?" Harry asked incredulously. He knew as soon as it came out that it probably wasn't the most tactful or tasteful thing to say, but he was dealing with fewer brain cells each second.
Ginny feigned offense.
"First off, it's not a matter of you letting me do anything. Second, it's nothing I don't want myself. Third," she grinned. "Bribe is such a dirty word. I prefer 'distract.'" And she moved to kiss him on the lips.
But Harry was too quick for her. He stepped back out of her reach, catching her hands in his. If he held on to them he could make sure they behaved.
"Gin, I really, really wish--I'd love to--" Harry stumbled through his apologies, gradually getting a hold of his thoughts. "It would be...but we can't--I--oh, why do you have to be so beautiful?" Harry asked helplessly. Ginny smiled. She didn't seem too hurt, he supposed. He'd certainly never imagined he'd have to refuse her... "But, Gin, if I kissed you right now, I'm afraid I'd make you miss that getaway, and then I'd never forgive myself. Although, I suppose if it really happened like that, I wouldn't live very long to regret it..."
"Why do you say that?" Ginny's eyes were full of scared confusion.
"Ginny, if you go into that battle with me, I don't think I'll make it out."
"Why?"
It was an honest question, and the only one that really mattered. But he wasn't sure how to explain it.
"Well, it was like Ron said, right, somebody needs to survive."
"Somebody WILL survive. One in three." She still didn't understand.
"But YOU-" It wasn't just anyone, it was HER that he needed to make it.
"I've got a chance, haven't I?"
"One in three!" Not nearly good enough odds for his liking.
"I don't care, Harry, I NEED to fight!"
This took Harry aback, as he would have given anything to avoid having to fight tomorrow. Anything short of throwing his friends' lives away, which would have been his only ticket out.
"You...?"
"This is personal for me too, Harry." Ginny's jaw had hardened, as if against some internal pain. "My first year..."
"I know," Harry said sympathetically, and he moved to hold her, but she didn't let him very close.
"No, you don't," she said bluntly. Harry looked worriedly at her. "I never talk about it, because for some reason you feel as if it was your fault. And it's fine with me not to talk about it, even if you are wrong to think that, because I don't like to either, and because I'd do anything to keep you from pain. But if this is what it takes to make you see why I have to fight, then I'll tell you the worst of it."
Harry tightened his grip on her, preparing himself for gruesome tales of torture. Ginny took a deep breath and continued.
"He tried to tell me who I was." Harry was puzzled at this, but Ginny went on, looking down and to the side. "He told me I was doing all those things by myself, and that I wanted to do them..."
"Of course you didn't!" Harry said, running a hand up and down her arm.
"Well, I know that now. But at the time it was hard not to believe him. I had no idea what I'd been doing half the time; I would turn up somewhere I'd never been before, and he was the only one I could tell about it. He would tell me one thing when I had seen another; my sense of reality was all askew and I felt I was going mad. He wasn't letting me sleep."
"But that doesn't mean you wanted to..."
"After everything I'd written in that diary, it was hard not to feel as if he had some authority even about that." She looked at Harry and suddenly teared up. "He said you'd never love me..."
At this Harry wrapped his arms tightly around her and rocked her from side to side for a while, making soothing noises while she let out a few soft sobs. He smoothed back her hair.
"Well, he was wrong." Harry said firmly. She looked up at him and gave a bleary smile.
"Yeah," she kissed him on the cheek and stepped away, gathering her emotions back up. "So you see why I want to fight. I know I won't get to HIM, but a Death Eater or two will do, I'm sure...Lucius Malfoy..."
"But wouldn't that make him right?" Harry asked. It was the type of thing Dumbledore might have said to him once. "You wanting to do all the things he told you you wanted to do? Wouldn't that make you the person he said you were?"
Ginny looked dumbfounded, then hurt and scared.
"But I can't help wanting it," she said sadly.
"That's ok," he said. "I want it too. When you've gone through what we have, you can't help wanting it. The difference is whether you actually do it. You're lucky in that you don't have to. You can leave."
She was staring at him, puzzled and bemused. "Do you think you can keep me innocent by making me leave?" She said the word like it was completely foreign to her.
Harry almost laughed at the absurdity of the very concept of innocence. "Bit late for that. None of us are innocent anymore. We've all seen things we shouldn't have had to see. But there's a different kind of innocence..." Ginny looked puzzled, and Harry hastened to explain. "I mean, none of us are innocent of knowledge. But you can stay innocent of deed. Me, I have to kill somebody tomorrow."
"I'd rather you kill him than--"
"Yeah, me too," Harry agreed shortly.
There was a pause.
"And Harry, I don't only want to fight him for me, I want to fight him for YOU, for everything he's done to you, for what he's going to do to you tomorrow, making you kill him--"
"You'd be more help to me if you didn't fight."
"But how can that help?"
"I can be sure I won't lose everyone." Please understand this time, he silently begged her. "I can go into battle knowing for sure that I'll have someone to help me deal with its aftermath. I can face Voldemort with a chance of victory, instead of defeating myself before I ever see him."
Ginny seemed to accept the main gist now; she didn't protest his point this time but sidestepped it. It was a feeble, almost childish argument.
"But this is the most important thing I've ever had the chance to do..."
"It's more important to me that you survive to love me past tomorrow." Harry said. He'd never said anything quite like that, never explicitly asked her to love him. She seemed to understand its significance, because she paused a moment before going on, in the gentlest voice she had, a hand on his cheek.
"But, Harry, even if I die, I'll still always love you. Your parents and Sirius still love you, wherever they are."
The very idea hurt physically. Harry turned his face from her and stepped away, pushed up his glasses and pressed his wrists into his eye sockets to stop the deluge.
"That's not good enough!" he cried. "I need you HERE, alive. I needed them, but I can't have them. I can't bear to lose you too."
Harry felt her hands on his shoulders and arms. After a moment of her calming touch, he was able to drop his hands from his face and hold her again.
Then he heard a whisper in his ear, quite forceful for being so soft.
"I want to be right there with you in the end, Harry, in the very end..."
"I want that too," he said, touched by the sentiment. He ran his hand up and down her back. "But tomorrow can't be the end..."
"You know it very well could be," Ginny said accusingly, an inch from tears.
"I know. But we can't give up hope. We can't play it like it's the end or it will be for sure."
Ginny studied his face a moment, then gave the smallest nod. She dropped her hands and said, "Fine, you're right. I'll leave."
Relief flooded Harry, and his knees seemed to give out at the force of it. He sank into the chair behind him.
"Thank you," he said weakly, and then suddenly felt himself overcome by the desire to show her how thankful he was. He grabbed her hands, the most readily available bit of her, and kissed them again and again. "Thank you, thank you, thank you."
And then he looked up at her, holding her hands, and it occurred to him that today, on the eve of battle, they had talked more about the future, their future together, than they ever had before. And Ginny seemed to take it for granted that they'd be together, probably even more so than he did, since he always seemed to add an 'as long as I don't screw things up' clause in his own thoughts about their future. She'd just said that about the very end.and she'd offered. He wondered if he should just drop to one knee and make it official, here and now. He was halfway there...That would certainly give him something to live for...
"Ginny..." he began.
"Yes." She replied. He looked at her puzzled. That sounded more like an answer than a question, and he hadn't even spoken yet. However, she could practically read his mind.
"You mean..."
"I mean yes, Harry." She smiled and lifted his chin with her fingers. "I'm always going to mean yes."
He threw his arms around her without even waiting to get up out of the chair. He caught her with one arm on her lower back, the other behind her legs. His head pressed into her stomach, where he felt her laughter as she ran her fingers through his hair. Suddenly he had an ecstatic fantasy of pressing his face to her belly again someday, just like this, and feeling tiny kicks along with her laughs. He was about to stand up and kiss her properly, when she sat down in his lap and found his lips with hers.
At first pause, quite a few minutes later, Ginny looked out the window, where the colors were beginning to turn for a spectacular golden sunset. "I suppose it's definitely too late to go up to my room now; we don't have anywhere near enough time..."
Harry laughed softly and nuzzled her. "No," he said. "We've got all the time in the world."
And so they kissed until the very last moment before Ginny had to leave. And she left gladly, knowing that she had given Harry the hope he needed to fight for his survival and the world's-she'd given him his reason to live. It was the only real weapon he would need to defeat Voldemort.
Ginny's promised love, and Ron and Hermione's sacrifice, would make Harry's survival, and, with it, victory, possible. Life would prevail, because love was its driving force.
A/N: Ok, that is the end of this fic, and most probably the end of this fic- verse. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I have writing it! People have been asking me in reviews of Our Precious Blood whether Ron and Hermione really die, and the answer is yes. I hated to kill them, but in my opinion it's still a happy ending. I only added this one because I felt so bad for Harry, not getting to die. Now he's happy too!
This is the poem I've been stealing titles from, in its entirety:
If We must Die (1919)
If we must die, let it not be like hogs/ Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,/ While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, / Making their mock at our accursed lot. / If we must die, O let us nobly die, / So that our precious blood may not be shed / In vain; then even the monsters we defy / Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!/ Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, / And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!/ What though before us lies the open grave?/ Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
By Claude McKay (1889-1948)
I'm also indebted to Arabella of Sugarquill.net for her fic, The Very Secret Diary, which inspired my interpretation of Ginny's first year. It's an absolutely bone-chilling account of everything written in Riddle's diary.