Ginny and Harry's marriage: Years 1 to 3
The day before Ginny's wedding, her mother presents her with a photographic history of her life. It is really just a scrapbook. Each page holds a single picture from each year of her life. The day she was born, nestled in her mother's warm arms, a fuzz of orange already atop her head. She flips to when she was four, her hair a bouncing bob, dressed in a flowery yellow sundress, Ron standing beside her. He wore a mischievous expression as he held his hand in bunny ears behind her head. She flips more pages, erratically, until she was 16, posing with a smile despite the war. She wore her hair to her waist in tangling curls, just like Hermione, because back then she thought Hermione knew everything. She wanted to look like Hermione, to be her, just because than she might know everything too. Eventually she realized that not only did she not know everything, she didn't know anything at all.
In the more recent pictures her hair is straight, her smile fixed. She is the pretty, perfect image of what Harry Potter's fiancée should look like.
When Ginny looks back at the pictures two years later, she wonders if her whole marriage was a lie.
She thinks on everyday life. She thinks on morning coffee and helpless laughter and screaming fights and she entertains the idea that maybe they made a decent go of it. But then she thinks of his parseltongue nightmares and the emptiness behind his eyes and she hates everything about everything.
It is during these moments that her fingers itch for a quill and a black leather-bound book, the color of shadows and secrets. Instead she bakes a cake or cleans the bathroom or looks over medical journals until the itch passes and she can breathe.
Once she was pregnant for three whole months before she lost the baby and she suffered the itch so bad her hands started shaking and she almost bloodied them trying to find something to write on. But Harry was there, of course, to still her frenzied hands and think he comforted her. She was able to still the itch when he was present, but in reality he often strengthened it with the lies he kept and the audacity to think she didn't know.
She tried to convince him to try for another baby (still tries convincing him) but he always says they aren't ready and its not as if the other one was planned anyway.
She wonders if its possible to die a small death every day.
Of course, she's not always itching and weeping. Sometimes she laughs and forgets and enjoys things.
But those times are few and far between, especially lately.
Hermione is not married. She is not pregnant. She does not want to be. She does not want to be Ron's wife or anyone else's for that matter. Ginny respects that. Sometimes she still wishes she was Hermione because there is a definition to who she is. Her traits and characteristics are not ambiguous. She is who she is, no more or less.
Ginny thinks over time her own lines have blurred into something resembling an out-of-focus photograph. The colors and shapes are of a similar nature, but unless you spent a good amount of time intent upon them, you couldn't tell who the person was.
She wants to strengthen her lines until they are heavy and black and unmistakable. She was that way as a teenager. The photograph of her at 16 shows that. It shows the flirty edge to her smile, the defiant glint to her eyes.
She begins to think of Harry as the photographer who blurred her lines in the first place.
That is, until Draco Malfoy goes missing.
Once he is gone, Harry becomes very attentive. He masks his own sadness under the guise of devoted husband. Yet after a few weeks, he begins folding in on himself. Her heart breaks for him against her will and she finds herself doing all she can to make him feel better, but nothing works and she cannot let him know she knows why he aches.
After a few months, he discards the veil of sadness like an old shirt. He never speaks about what afflicted him, just places it next to his heart for safekeeping and moves on. He doesn't argue when she tentatively brings up trying for a baby and says perhaps that's just what they need.
Somehow, she feels like she's lost more than she had to start with.
Her mother shakes off her feelings with a simple, "It'll get better with time."
With every moment of her new pregnancy, she fears finding blood. But she passes three months just fine and then she is suddenly through six and just as suddenly she finds herself holding a newborn baby girl in her arms. They name her Cora Mae Potter and she has bright eyes and, they soon discover, an infectious giggle. Harry is extremely enamored of her and oft spends hours just watching her breathe.
She is a year old when Draco Malfoy is spotted in Paris.
Ginny and Harry's marriage: Years 4 to 5
Ginny hates Draco Malfoy. She hates him more than she has ever hated anyone in her entire life. She hates him so much she starts to shake and her chest constricts and she has to stop whatever she's doing to take deep, calming breaths. She hates it even more that he knows Harry in the same secret way she does. He knows Harry's sounds and expressions. He never treasured them the way she does. He is a vile, heartless man not deserving of her Harry.
And Harry knows it now and knew it then. He knew what he was doing, who he was hurting. He knew exactly what Draco was capable of and he knew it wasn't good. The night Ginny realizes this she makes Harry sleep out on the couch and because of his long-ingrained guilt he doesn't even bother to ask why. She doesn't tell him.
Cora is two years old. Her first word was "cookie" and she looks up at Harry in complete adoration. Her hair is red and her eyes are green and she has Harry's nose, but smaller. Ginny decides that as much as she loves her daughter, she does not want another of Harry's children. She knows in her heart that one small part of him will always be hidden from their family. She pretends she doesn't know it and explains to her mother that one child is quite enough. It isn't true, but Ginny doesn't know what else to say.
Rumors abound about Draco Malfoy. He has been spotted several times since that first time in Paris. Every time a new rumor pops up, Harry hastily makes up a business trip Ginny knows doesn't exist and rushes off in anxious excitement to the spot. He returns depressed but forcefully smiling.
"Are you alright, love?" she asks each time knowing full well he is not.
"Of course I am," he answers with that bright smile, showing every tooth. "Just missed you and Cora is all."
Ginny thinks perhaps this is true, on some level. He does love them. It is not in Harry's nature to be so deceiving. But she thinks every time he looks at them he is reminded of the mistakes he made.
She finds herself wishing fondly for the days when Harry was so volatile. He was always a nice guy and all that, but he had the tendency to explode. It came after days and weeks and minutes of boiling and festering and building up. Then he would erupt. Ginny had always been able to handle it with a cool head and a lack of surprise because yelling was easy to deal with. She had grown up with noise. It was silence that terrified her, like the silence of their home, because silence spelt death.
So she pretended the silence was not really there because this was the life she had chosen for herself and no matter what she was not going it get destroyed.
Upon the eve of Cora's third birthday, after the partygoers had left and the house was filled with sleep, Draco Malfoy comes to visit. Ginny alone is awake, cleaning up decorations because the house is far too lovely to be so cluttered with rainbow streamers and balloons for too long. The doorbell rings and she hastily goes to answer it, wondering who in Merlin's name would be ringing the bell at such an odd hour.
She opens the door, sees who it is, and promptly says, "I hope you don't think I'll be inviting you in for tea."
He doesn't smile, just leans lazily against the door frame, his pale hair shining in the inky darkness of the night. "Why, Mrs. Potter, you don't seem surprised to see me at all."
"I knew you'd show up sooner or later," she answers. "I'd rather it was later. It's my daughter's birthday today."
"A daughter? However did he manage that?"
Ginny does not like the snide tone of his voice and responds, "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Of course you do, Mrs. Potter. Do you like being called that? Does it make you feel like you made something of yourself?"
"And what about you? Did your legacy as convicted Death Eater escaping arrest make Daddy proud?"
"My, what a quick tongue you have."
"I know you find it hard to believe former Gryffindors can string two words together without their heads exploding."
A smirk curls his lips. "As much as I enjoy our banter, I didn't come here to see you."
"You won't be seeing him. He doesn't need this." Ginny's blood is searing her veins. Just being close enough to Draco Malfoy to reach out and touch him made her hate intensify, sharpen, and focus. She is tempted to go into the kitchen, grab a knife, and finish him off the Muggle way. It would be much more satisfying.
"He doesn't need this or you don't?"
She presses a hand to her forehead, where some strange instrument is thumping a basso continuo against the inside of her skull. Her hands are starting to itch and it takes her a moment to understand why because they haven't itched in three years.
Draco reaches out a pale, sleek hand and wrenches her hand away from where is hides her face. His eyes are narrowed. "You should've known you'd only be babysitting him until I came back. It was your own fault you got a child tangled up in this. Things will only get worse unless you let me have him."
Ginny rips her wrist out of his grasp, her skin flushing brightly. "Is that a threat?"
"No, it's a prediction," he says dispassionately.
"Just leave, Malfoy." She is burying her hands in the folds of her robe. She hates the lack of strength to her voice.
He turns to oblige, but halfway down the path he turns and says, "It's his decision. Not yours."
Ginny shuts the door slowly and carefully, as if it, like her, could shatter easily. There is a crack in the fragile shell enclosing her world and she doesn't know how to fix it.
She locks the door and drags herself up the stairs, past her sleeping daughter's quiet room, to her own bedroom door. The light of the hallway spills inside the dark room, illuminating Harry's slumbering form perfectly. She watches his deep breathing, the way his body tangles in the sheets, his arm flung over the empty side of the bed as if trying to hold someone close. Who, she doesn't know. But she has a sneaking suspicion it isn't her.
Ginny buries her face in her hands and begins to cry. Her sobs are violent and jerk her whole body and she wonders how the whole house can sleep on while she falls apart. She cries because even through her bitching and moaning and mood swings, she really does love Harry. And she can't decide whether to keep him or let him go.
She goes to sleep that night in the rocking chair in Cora's room. The soft, creaking sounds soothe her, remind her of a time when life was simple and all it took to make her feel better was a lullaby from Mum. Now life is so hard. She wonders if she complicated it herself, if she would be happier if she had never married Harry. Maybe she would be. But she wouldn't have Cora and she thinks maybe that makes it all worth it. That just because a child exists out there that is both hers and Harry's this will never truly be over.
She is grasping at straws, but she doesn't care much anymore.
Draco Malfoy does not come to call again for a month and Ginny writhes in guilt every single day. Harry goes on with life, smiling and lying, because he doesn't know Draco came back for him after all. Ginny pretends she doesn't know because she's perfected that art, but every time she looks at Harry, the knife twists just a little bit more.
There is a rational part to her mind that explains patiently that she is being very stupid and if she just let go things would be much easier. But Ginny has never listened much to the rational part of her mind (which had somehow acquired Hermione's voice) and instead clings, clings like she did to Tom Riddle. She finds that once she has her hold in something it is hard to let go.
When Draco Malfoy does come to call again, she is not home. She is at the market with Cora, getting caught up as old women murmur how pretty the little girl is and stroke her soft red hair. When she returns, she finds Malfoy sitting at her kitchen table, drinking slowly from her teacup, talking quietly to her Harry. Harry's expression is hard, wary. She draws closer and they still don't see her there. She discovers Draco's low words are not ones of comfort, but ones of anger. He and Harry are fighting, softly, and Ginny doesn't think she's ever heard a more beautiful sound.
That is when they notice her, unsuccessfully eavesdropping, Cora wiggling out of her arms to get to Daddy. Harry accepts the child with a controlled whisper of "You could've said something." Ginny knows the whisper wanted to be a yell and wasn't simply for Cora's sake. She responds in a similar tone.
"What could I have said? 'Harry, dear, the man you used to cheat on me with that I was never supposed to know about asked me to let you know he came over.' Don't be ridiculous, Harry."
Harry flushes angrily, the way he always does when other people make sense and he doesn't like it. His infuriated eyes stay locked on her as he says, "Malfoy, could you come back later?" Malfoy nods and leaves, gratefully not mocking for once.
Ginny is almost thankful later that night when she and Harry erupt in screams. The house had been so quiet for so long.
Ginny and Harry's divorce: Year 2
After a year of stony silences, her appearing back at the too pretty house only to drop off or pick up Cora, they finally speak in civil sentences. They come to understand each other, for the first time really, and Ginny thinks they might actually enjoy each other's company again one day. Her hands have stopped itching again and she thinks this time it is for good. They were both trapped, she thinks, and now they are free.
One day, she muses, she might even loose the urge to kill Draco Malfoy.
Not yet, though. But soon.