Got To Get You Into My Life

Got to get you into my life. Harry/Ginny, PG-13, het.

From her first memories, Ginny Weasley knew that she had to be a quiet girl. Her mother would mutter it often as she cleaned the house, talking to the wide-eyed young girl who followed Molly around. There would usually be a lot of other things she told her only daughter: mumbled, vaguely erratic grumblings at the lazybones who wouldn't help her clean, at the husband who was too busy at work and too tired when he came home to do much, and Molly blamed herself for it all. Bill and Charlie were studying, and Percy was starting Hogwarts, and there was always too much to do and not enough people. The twins could never be found, and even when they could, Molly had to keep an eye on everything they did lest they get into mischief, so Molly might as well do their assigned chores for them, and as for Ginny's older brother, Ron, well, he sulked the moment anyone ever told him to do anything.

Ginny grew up making sure that she was not a burden to her mother the way her brothers often could be, and she quickly learned that what pleased her mother most was her capacity to be dainty, obedient, polite - a good girl. So Ginny stopped letting the hem of her dresses drag along the dirt when she played, and she took her finger out of her mouth and ceased to suck it, and she helped her mother out as best she could. Ginny wanted very much to fit in, to be useful. She was the only girl, really, and that was the thing that defined her - her femininity.

All her brothers had something special about them. Bill and Charlie were loud, and rough, and boisterous, with wide grins and clumsy hands. Bill was always mad about going overseas, while Charlie was good at Quidditch. The twins were good at Quidditch, too, but their grins were more wicked than open, and Ginny thought that even their mother didn't trust them most of the time. Percy was stiff and demanding - like their mother (like Ginny herself) he understood the value of rules, obedience, finding one's place. As for Ron, well, his main distinction was that he wasn't distinctive.

All Ginny ever had was herself. She couldn't be her father's daughter. Her father preferred Bill and Charlie, although he never said it. Percy was a disappointment, not burly enough, not sporty. He could barely climb onto a broomstick without getting motion sickness, and Ginny laughed at him when she thought the family wasn't looking. Besides, she wasn't allowed to join in boys' games. They were too rough. Even Percy could, and did, although he never seemed to enjoy the scrimmages her brothers had out in the fields surrounding the Burrow. Ginny saw that her mother favoured Percy, and attempted to be prim and proper like him, except even more so, more docile. But Percy took his mother to task once or twice, and Molly had muttered about Percy getting ahead of himself while cleaning for the next few days. Ginny trailed behind with a bucket of soapy water, one hand clutched in her dress. She listened, and learnt. For a while, it worked. Her mother patted her on the head and occasionally gave her extra treats, before she took a critical look at the way Ginny's dresses were getting tight around waist and put her on a diet in time for her ninth birthday.

All Ginny ever wanted to be was good. All the good people seemed to be able to do whatever they wanted. Just look at Harry Potter. Ginny had heard about Harry Potter as a young girl; she couldn't exactly pinpoint when, like her mother's desire for a 'quiet child', so it seemed almost as if she'd been born with the knowledge of the Boy Who Lived. Her father would tell them stories about He Who Must Not Be Named and his war every now and then, after he had a few too many Sherries after dinner, and her mother would tell him not to be such a fool. They would exchange a few sharp words, and the stories would stop, and everything would be fine again. But the Daily Prophet would have articles as well occasionally, retelling the glorious story of Harry's sheer survival, and the mystery surrounding his current whereabouts, along with impassioned pleas to Albus Dumbledore to restore their hero to the wizarding world.

One time - Ginny figured she was around seven - she went to her mother and asked her openly about Harry Potter. Her mother had been baking a cake for supper, and she didn't take too well to being disturbed, but after a long pause she took Ginny's hand in hers and led her along to the storeroom, where she uncrated some of the boxes of old copies of the Daily Prophet they had. Her mother liked doing things the Muggle way on occasion, without magic, and the papers made a good mulch for the garden to stop weeds from growing, or when her mother or father wanted to fix, repaint or hang something in the household, the paper could go underfoot to stop anything from staining or dirtying the carpet. Ginny asked her why, once she recognised from the other girls she met at playgroup that this was a strange, different thing, and received a ramble in turn about "taking pride in one's effort" and "the joy of a good, hard day's work." (She asked her mother again during her second year at Hogwarts, and it still didn't make sense.) But then, in the storeroom, her mother took time from her work to help Ginny sort through some of the boxes of discarded papers, and by the time the afternoon was over, Ginny had a nice pile of clippings, all about The Boy Who Lived.

Her scrapbook started the following day. Ginny would spend hours trimming the clippings to size with a pair of scissors, making sure all the edges were straight and the angles neat, and paste them in, one by one, with headings and borders in coloured pencils. It kept her out from underfoot, and gave her something to do when she wasn't doing chores, and her mother patted her on the head and said it looked lovely and helped her comb her hair.

When she actually met Harry Potter, of course, she didn't know it. She found out when Ron's first owl arrived back home from school. Ginny refused to eat for three days. Her mother thought she was eating, but Ginny insisted on taking her meals up to her room, and threw the food out the window to the garden down below. A few days later, her mother asked if she'd seen Ron's owl - it had gone missing from the kitchen bench. Ginny shook her head solemnly, and went down to help with chores, knowing full well that the owl (all non-Harry portions excised) had been faithfully glued into her scrapbook. The lie to her mother didn't matter, after all. Ginny would put the owl to far greater use than her mother ever could.

Going to Hogwarts the following year, Ginny had butterflies in her stomach all the train ride there. She had met Harry, of course, he'd even stayed at her house, but this was different. She was going to be at Hogwarts now. He would be noticing her, or able to notice her, and anything she did wrong might make him dislike her. And she couldn't bear that. Harry Potter was amazing, she already knew. Whole books had been written about the simple idea of him, what he meant to people. And she determined within the first week of her schooling, that Harry Potter would be hers. It made perfect sense, after all. Was there anyone else who knew him the way she did? Anyone who could possibly care the way she did? Ginny knew there wasn't.

Then it had all gone horribly wrong. The valentine had not actually been from her - that sort of thing was crass, and silly, and it wasn't good enough for Harry. Ginny suspected the twins were involved - it was their sort of joke to play on someone, to make fun of them. She had first confided in the diary a month or two before, full of fear and worry and angst, sounding like a silly little girl. She'd been so horrified by what she'd written that she tore the page out even after only writing half way down the parchment.

Except the words weren't on the page. Putting that discarded piece aside for a moment, she had wet her quill again, and tried on a new page. After some experimentation, she woke Tom up. Tom had used her. Tom had lied to her. Tom was like all the other boys, like her brothers, like her father. Tom wasn't Harry. Harry was better than that. Harry had saved her. Harry had killed Tom - but then, Tom had deserved it, for all the mean things he said to her in the end. Suggesting that Harry didn't notice her! Suggesting that she was just a girl with a crush! This was no crush - this was love.

The torn page from the diary was glued in like all the other Harry-related bits and pieces, under the heading of "this is what happens to those people who mess with Harry." She had all of Rita Skeeter's articles as well, the obvious inaccuracies circled in red ink, with arrows running out to the margins. How could that woman even think that Hermione was Harry's type! It was horrible, horrible. From his fourth year she had them as well, reports of the Quidditch World Cup and the Tri-Wizard Tournament, and after. That new MacDonald girl in Gryffindor had said that Harry was useless, was nothing, after that Hufflepuff got killed. How dare she! Ginny had closed her eyes and wished that something bad might happen to her on the train ride home.

Six months later the Death Eaters killed Natalie's parents, and Ginny had supressed a small, shameful smile when she heard the news. In some ways, Diggory's death was his own fault as well. Ginny didn't like to think about such things, but if he'd only stepped aside when Harry's name got pulled out of the Goblet, given ground to the real Hero, he wouldn't have ended up dead. Perhaps if they'd had faith in Harry, they might still be alive. If their faith in him was as strong as hers - Ginny knew he wouldn't let her down.

And then the War had come and gone, and she'd filled up her original scrapbook and an entire new one with clippings and reports of Harry in action, leading the Order, and Voldemort's eventual death at Harry's hands as well. Ginny had lost a lot of family during the war. The Death Eaters killed her father, Bill, Percy, the twins. Charlie was in St. Mungo's, and well, Ron was Ron. Her mother retreated from life, only ever wearing black. The one thing Ginny had left was Harry.

He had been placed in St. Mungo's as well, in a catatonic state, although occasionally he'd have fits and cry out people's names, his body seizing, tongue thick and languid in his mouth. Ginny read to him every day when she could, and brought him soup, and managed to get him to swallow it once or twice every week, and made sure the restraints weren't biting into his skin too much. When the mediwizards released him from the restraints, she would be there with ointment and soothing creams, to massage the red, inflamed skin, and roll him over so he didn't get bedsores. As human as he was, as frail, as mortal, Harry was still the Boy Who Lived, and everything he touched turned to respectability, even her.

His first word upon recovering consciousness was her name, and she'd made sure the Daily Prophet got that down. It was one of her favourite articles, with a multicoloured border and Ginny used to trace her finger over the page as well, some evenings when she was alone in her flat. His rehabilitation was a long and painful process, but she helped him to walk, to speak coherently, to live life again. Harry had been rewarded with a hefty lifetime pension from the Ministry, and a penthouse apartment just off Diagon Alley, and a few years later he was elected Minister of Magic by a landslide. It was her idea he put his name up for it, anyway.

Ron and Hermione had come and gone, but they had failed to break his apathy, and so they'd drifted away, malcontented. But Ginny didn't care what nightmares he had or whose names he screamed at night, or even if he knew she was there most of the time. She was more real to him than anything else in the world, and that was what counted. They even started officially dating a few months after he returned to normal life, and it didn't matter if his hand was limp in hers, or if his kisses were too chaste and his excuses far too flimsy. Harry was hers. She caught him looking at other people sometime, in the street, or glancing through old school photos just a little too intently for her liking, but Harry was a Hero and Heroes Could Do No Wrong. Besides, wasn't it her job to please him? She might not have been a brilliant student, but even she could brew up polyjuice, and that way she could be everything he wanted, and he would have no need for anyone else, ever again. She could be lover and friend and companion. No matter what he wished, Ginny would give it to him, even if, as she ruefully suspected sometimes, she might have to be a blond.

But that was of little importance. Harry was Harry, and he could never be happy that way. She knew it, and so did he. It didn't matter who he thought he loved or wanted, only she could satisfy his deepest urge: to be normal. To be invisible. To fit in. The way he never had. She understood it, after all; that was why she had been quiet and good, and that was why Harry would marry her when the time came. The relationship of Remus Lupin and Sirius Black may have been a shining example to the wizarding world, but it was not an example anyone else wished to embrace. They were tolerated (at best) because of their connection to Harry, and behind their back people pointed and laughed. To their faces, people would constantly ask about their prospects for marriage, for children, for continuing the family line and heritage. In the wizarding world, you were judged by your family, your traditions, your name. You had to have a wife to fit in, to produce the children, to keep the name going.

Ginny had already told Harry that she would take his name, and have his children. She would indulge his every sordid fantasy, wear whatever face he wished in the privacy of their bedroom, but most importantly, she would give him normality in public. In turn, with him by her side she would be unquestioned. As Harry Potter's wife, everything she did and said would have the ring of sanctity. She'd never have to impress anyone, or meet anyone else's standards. No more being quiet, or invisible, or the good girl. She would free herself from being seen as 'merely' as girl by becoming the fruition of womanhood in wizarding society: a loving mother, and faithful wife. She'd simply be.

She even had a mock wedding notice already written up, and notes on the dress and the ceremony. The real wedding notice, and the wedding photos, as well would take pride of place in her scrapbook as the final entry. Once they were pasted it in, she would be a part of her fantasy, no more need for longing from the outside, and what girl could ever say they were living their dreams?

Ginny wanted, and watched, and waited, and knew she wouldn't have to wait for long. Harry needed. Just as much as she did.