He Really is Divine?
(failed Harry/Ginny, allusions to Harry/Hermione)

She had dirt on her face the first time she met him. “Just a smudge,” her mother had chided, licking her finger and rubbing it off, much to Ginny’s horror and her brothers’ amusement. It was just a smudge, but she spent the next year agonizing over it. He’d never forget it, she told herself over and over again. In his mind, she would always be the Girl With The Dirty Face…

…and The Horrid Pink Barrettes.   

Even now, she shudders at the memory of them. She’d torn them out of her hair the moment she’d arrived home and tossed them in the refuse bin but later dug them out and tucked them into her jewelry box. She’d been wearing them when she saw him, after all. That counted for something.

“I thought you’d always think of me like that,” she says in a voice that she hopes will convey the significance of this moment for her, and the need for him to hear it and disavow that particular childish fear with a rare smile and an even rarer laugh. “I was so embarrassed.”

“Mhm?”

“Are you even listening to me, Harry?” she asks, struggling to keep her voice light and even, but she’s already lost his attention.

At close range, she can see that his eyes are indeed as green as a fresh pickled toad, but he doesn’t look her way when he talks. If he talks, she should say. He’s always looking over her shoulder, out across the lake or even at Hagrid’s hut. It drives her to distraction – why won’t he look her in the eye? She twirls her hair around one finger like red thread on a spindly spool. It’s a habit borne of anxiety, something she does to fill the awkward pauses that punctuate their afternoons together. She hates how silence doesn’t drive him batty, like it does her. She hates how he can spend hours in the library with Hermione, sometimes whispering back and forth, but more often than not just sitting in silence, enjoying each other’s company.

Sure, she smiles and tries to overlook it, to convince herself that those cozy study sessions mean nothing to him, and these hours spent on the sun-drenched shores of the Lake, everything.  

“So,” she says, foraging for words. Her wit doesn’t serve her well when her audience is more interested in cloudscapes than her. The sunlight reflecting off the lapping waves dazzles her eyes. “Are you having a good afternoon?”

His answer is a swiftly-given, noncommittal “sure.”

“And…now? Still having fun?”

“Gin.”

“I’m just wondering,” she snaps, “you’re not very talkative today.”

“I’m never very talkative,” he says, which is a lie and they both know it.

“Oh, you’ll talk to Hermione,” she sniffs.

“Hermione’s my best friend… and Ron. Ron too,” he self-corrects, after too long of a pause.

“Well, maybe you ought to go and find Ron and Hermione instead,” she says, her voice rising hysterically. She clambers gracelessly to her feet and tosses back her hair in a poorly executed imitation of Fleur but he reaches out and grabs her by the wrist. For a split second, their eyes lock but he turns away and the moment is broken.

“Ginny, don’t be like that,” he says plaintively. “Please. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just nice, to be here with you. Gets my mind off things, you know.”

She sighs and reels away from him, pulling out tufts of grass and scattering them to the gentle breeze. They’d reached that impassable line again and she could tell by the way he stiffened and glanced down at his wristwatch that he wasn’t going to tell her. He was shutting her down again, locking her out, and she couldn’t even muster up the will to beat on the walls in protest…

“And what things am I getting your mind off of, precisely?” she asks, testing the waters.

“Ginny, we agreed not to talk about any of that. Don’t you see? I just want to be normal. You’re normal. Be normal with me.” He laughs a little at this, as though the whole bungled affair was some sort of horribly unfunny joke, and draws the white, unfreckled underside of her wrist up, breathing in the scent of her skin. The first time he did this, it sent her into paroxysms of delight as goose pimples erupted up and down her spine. Now she merely wrenches her wrist away from his grasp, refusing to be put off so easily.

“We didn’t agree,” she begins sourly. “You said not to mention it—” She stops short to catch her breath and, taking in the despairing look in Harry’s eyes, she changes tact. “Harry, you’re not tired of me, are you?”

He leans in to silence her with a kiss and she tenses as it lands off its mark, somewhere in the region of her jawbone. Dean – Dean – could have made being kissed on the jaw a romantic experience worth remembering but Harry is another story altogether, an inexpert kisser who never seems to know what to do with his hands – or his lips, for that matter.

“Is that better?” he asks, breaking the kiss.

“Yes, that’s a pretty good answer,” she replies, her first official lie of the afternoon.

Once she was with Harry, everything was supposed to change. He was supposed to be the knight to her damsel, her one-way ticket to happiness, prosperity, and a thousand other meaningless niceties. He was supposed to be the Hogwarts dreamboat, but Harry, Just Harry, was disconcertingly normal, slightly boring, even, (when he wasn’t slaying gigantic basilisks or ordering people around on the Quidditch Pitch), and terrifyingly unreachable.

As they settle back against the grassy lawn, she knows that nothing’s changed. True, she’s the butt of more unfriendly gossip these days and, yes, the Slytherins have taken to harassing her with renewed vigor for being the Chosen One’s chosen one, but for Harry and Ginny, it’s just another sunny afternoon.

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