Tea

The door clicks shut, and Harry sits bolt upright. His head is spinning, and the sheets are wound around his legs, damp with sweat and...

Blinking, he searches around and finds his glasses. They'd been knocked off of the nightstand and onto the floor.

Ginny is gone. Her room is crystalline in the moonlight, lace and filigree like sugar icing, and a stain shows black and damp in the middle of her bed, beside his knee. He reaches down and touches it with a finger, and it comes away moist, and the hair on his arm bristles, like a cat's. He has done this to her. They have done this.

Perhaps she's gone to the WC to clean up. Perhaps--under the circumstances--she wouldn't mind if he joined her.

Her absence fuels a hunger in him, quite different from the one they have just indulged. Being apart from her hurts. It frightens him.

In a bright patch of moonlight, Harry sees Ginny's dress on the floor, coiled with his jeans where they had been jettisoned some hour or so before. He kneels to disentangle them, and catches the scent of her, the scent of dry grass and sun--if sunshine had a scent. He wants to scream her name out, to find her, but he doesn't want to wake everyone... or disturb everyone. The Burrow is very full tonight. Through the ceiling he hears a creak and a muffled giggle. Ron and Hermione.

He needs to find Ginny.

He steps into his jeans--forget the pants--and pulls on the Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes shirt Fred and George had given him for his birthday present... Well, the first one.

The memory of the signed receipt for seventeen Skiving Snackboxes delivered to 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey, brings enough of a smile to Harry mind and mouth that he feels able to open the door and begin his search for the prettiest of the Weasleys.

Well, no offense meant to Mrs. Weasley or Bill or any of them, but the only pretty Weasley.

Out in the third-floor landing, Harry hears loud snoring from Fred and George's room and a prim wheezing from Percy's. The bathroom door is open and dark, but Harry peeks in anyway, just to be sure.

In the gloom, he thinks he sees a pale face, but is shocked to discover that it is his own. He tries to flatten his wildly mussed hair, but the mirror murmurs sleepily, "Give it up, son."

Back at the landing, Harry gazes up the stairs. He hears Hermione give a loud yelp. No, Ginny's not up there.

On the second floor, he hears more nocturnal sounds from Bill's room and--disconcertingly--from Ginny's parents. Blushing, Harry rushes down the stairs to the ground floor.

At the kitchen table facing away from him sits a woman, but it is not Ginny. Hair--black silk--floods down her back. She turns her head, and Harry sees that it is Tonks, her face wry as usual, but her eyes red-rimmed. "Wotcher, Harry."

"Hey, Tonks." He feels naked. He wonders if he should have washed. Suddenly, he is very aware of Ginny's scent on him.

"Looking for Ginny?" the older woman says with a sniff.

Harry nods, then asks, "Tonks, are you okay?"

As soon as the words leave his lips, Harry regrets them. Tonks's face twists, as if wrenched from the inside, and her eyes glisten. After a moment of silence, however, she smirks, the familiar Tonks smirk for all that the hair framing the face is totally strange. "Yeah. Brilliant. You? Ginny give you a, uh, nice birthday gift?"

Harry feels heat rising into his face like steam, seeking escape. "Uh. Yeah."

"Good," says Tonks, still smiling, rubbing a finger under one of her eyes. "She's been talking to me and Hermione about it for weeks."

Harry splutters, humiliated.

Tonks laughs. "What, you didn't think it was just the heat of passion, did you? Don't expect a girl as level-headed as Miss Ginevra to go in unprepared? Besides," Tonks says, the smile stretching to a broad smirk, "Hermione told me you'd been getting some coaching from Ron."

Harry sits down, placing his face on the table, his arms over his head to hide his humiliation.

"It's okay, Harry. I mean, even with all the silencing spells being cast tonight, it wasn't like Charlie and I couldn't hear what was going on. We were right below you."

"Merlin," groans Harry into the scrubbed oak surface. "Charlie'll kill me."

"Nah. I think he thought it was kind of sweet." Tonks looks upward. "In this house, everyone seems to know everything about everybody."

Harry grunts and looks up. "Ginny's parents... They'll want to kill me."

"Maybe. But probably not. And..." Now it is Tonk's turn to blush. "Um, I think they were kind of busy tonight."

"Oh, Merlin," Harry laughs. "Yeah. I think you're right."

He sits upright and he and Tonks stare at each other for a moment. "So," she says staring down, suddenly, at her fingers, "was it... okay?"

"What?" Harry asks. Then the blood pools in the pit of his stomach as he realizes what she is asking. "Oh. It was." He looks at her hands too. She's changing the color of the nail polish on her fingers from red to pink to lavender. "It was... brilliant."

"Oh," says Tonks, still focused on her nails. "Good." As they both watch, her nails shift through a neon rainbow's gamut of colors. "Harry?"

"Uh, yeah?"

"Did you?... Ah, bollocks. Did you make sure it was, you know, brilliant for her, too?"

"What?" He looks up to see that her face, still tear-blemished, is turning a deep, vivid crimson. "Oh. Hell. Tonks. Yeah. I mean, I made sure it was, you know, for her. First. I really wanted to..."

"Good," she says, and they both nod. The flood of color has just begun to fade from both of their faces when Tonks looks up and gives Harry a grin that reminds him how much older than him she is. "Told Ginny she was a lucky girl. First three or four boys I was with, I had to smack 'em with something hard to remind 'em there was someone else involved."

"Not Charlie, though."

Tonks looks up, caught off guard, the black hair cowled around her face. Her mouth sets itself in a neutral line. "No. He can be thick as a bloody brick about some things, but no, not that. Bloody Weasleys, they have no idea."

Now it is Harry's turn to register surprise. "What do you mean?"

Tonks begins to shake her head, as if she's sorry she brought the subject up, then she peers at Harry. "You're an orphan too, Harry. You understand." Seeing that he doesn't, she presses on, her dark eyes flashing, the habitual humor gone from her voice. "Grew up like you, I did. Mum died when I was six. Dad my first year at Hogwarts. Mum's family wouldn't have us, obviously, so it's just me and my grandda. And then I... with Charlie, they're all in each other's pockets all the time, everyone knows how everyone feels, how everyone thinks. Like I was saying." They hear a groan through the ceiling. Both look up, look to each other, and laugh. Tonks shakes her head. "We were, you know, up in bed tonight, And he turns to me and asks see me... Like I am." She runs her fingers through her hair. "Like... this. And I did. And he starts going on about how bleeding pretty I am..."

"You look beautiful, Tonks."

"I look like what I am, Harry. I look like a bloody Black, like my bloody Auntie Bell, and I can't stand that, I haven't let myself look like this in front of anyone since I was old enough to understand... And Charlie just keeps talking about not being your family, but he's a bloody Weasley. He has no idea what it is to be without a family, to hate the bit of family you've got."

The kettle begins to sputter and whistle. Harry gets up. "I know," he says.

Startled, Tonks looks at Harry, her black eyes wide. Then she nods.

Harry fills the teapot and brings it and two mugs to the table.

"I never told you, Harry, but... I knew your family."

With as much nonchalance as he can muster, Harry asks, "When?"

"Right after Mum died. My dad and I were hiding out. We spent two weeks with you and your folks in Godric's Hollow."

"You?..." Harry can't even begin to formulate a question.

Tonks shrugs and nods anyway. "You were just one. So bloody cute. I hadn't laughed in months and you..." Deciding, apparently, that the tea has steeped long enough, she pours herself a mug. "Pass the sugar, will you?"

Harry does. He still can't speak.

Tonks blows at her mug thoughtfully. "You learned to walk while we were there." She peers at him with uncharacteristic shyness. "Took your first steps from your mum's arms to mine."

"Wow," Harry mouths, but no sound comes out.

"I remember your dad--he was just like you. Funny as hell, but serious, you know? But your mum..." Tonks attempts a sip of her tea. "She was brilliant. I'd just lost mine, right? And she was... as warm as Molly Weasley, you know? But passionate and funny and..." She looks up and seems to realize that Harry is stunned. "Kind of like another redhead we know."

Harry shakes himself and laughs. "Wow," he says, fully voiced this time. He pours himself a mug of tea and looks into the steam. It is Ginny's face that he sees there, beautiful and terrifying, as it was earlier this night.

"We left just before you lot went into hiding. I didn't see you again till we picked you up from those awful relatives of yours." Tonks's tone is measured, but her eyes are bright.

"Tonks... Thanks." They sit for a moment, both sipping at their tea, neither one of them looking up. "What... You don't have to tell me, but what happened to your parents?"

Tonks looks up, then nods again. "Dad was just a heart attack. Got the owl in the middle of Charms, Floo'd down, was there at St. Mungo's when he actually died. They, uh, didn't think to contact my grandda, 'cause he was a Muggle." She snorts angrily. "Mum. You got to understand that my mum and her sisters hadn't talked since she had married a Muggleborn. The only time I ever saw my aunts as a girl, we were at Narcissa's wedding to that great prat, Malfoy, and Bellatrix came over, pinched me on the cheek and asked, 'How's the little blood traitor?' Stupid bint." She is gripping her mug so hard that Harry is concerned that it might break. "Dad and I went out to the cinema one night, some stupid Muggle film about people running, and when we came back, there was that, that bloody Mark floating above our house. Her own sister..."

Harry puts his hand on Tonks's. He can feel the heat of her anger and of the tea. "Have you told Charlie any of this?"

She shrugs. "Some."

"Well, it would be hard for him, wouldn't it? This lot, even when two of them are angry with each other, there's always someone to let you know you're loved...."

She nods, once. "They're so bloody lucky to have each other."

"And I suppose we're bloody lucky to have them," Harry says, the thought forming itself as it is leaving his mouth.

She sips her tea, and Harry knows that she is thinking what he is thinking: that there is more than one way to become a Weasley.

They sit there in silence for three minutes or more before the door to the back yard opens. Charlie enters and--Harry's heart stops--Ginny, her hair a fall of wild flame around her shoulders, her tattered robe clutched tightly to her. She fixes Harry with her squirrel-black eyes, and Harry knows that, whatever time it is given to him to live, he will spend it loving her.

He lifts the teapot. "Want some tea?" he asks.