Customary Awkwardness

She'd ruined the butter that day, the day so close to the end of the world. She remembered her mother scolding her silently with her eyes once she'd taken notice. She was mortified. Had she really just plopped her elbow in the butter dish, as though it was the most normal thing in the world to do, right in front of him? She reminded herself she'd been eleven. She'd been too young to know better. But she was older now, and realized with a bit of disdain her elbow was once again in the butter dish. She sighed as she wiped her arm with her robes, telling Ron to mind where he walked. She turned back to her text, which was placed haphazardly beside her bowl full of porridge almost like a dream, and tried ceaselessly to focus on complicated symbols and verbose explanations. Instead of thinking of her lessons or the darkness swallowing her soul, she thought of butter, and of sitting down to breakfast on a morning like this one.

"Only this morning's cloudier," she whispered as she peered out the window.

Hermione seemed to nod in agreement but she wasn't listening to Ginny. She was responding to Ron, shaking her head knowingly as she always did when she had all the answers. Was she finally validating her feeling to Ron? Was she confessing to him what she had confessed to Ginny not so much explicitly but implicitly? Ginny wondered vaguely why such things should matter when the world was in such peril, but at that moment they mattered very much to her. She preferred to spend time thinking on such frivolity as the world teetered on the brink if extinction.

She knew what it was like to taste death. She knew what it was to feel it overwhelm her senses and suffocate her soul. She knew these things, yet only recently had she allowed herself to acknowledge them. When the world was bright and her days were filled with laughter, it seemed futile to relive her darkest memories. But she knew one day all that would end, and she would have to revisit old ghosts in the shadowy recesses of her mind.

Had it been another day, she decided, she most certainly would have chucked the old piece of rubbish away (it was too old to be so new) or examined it with quiet amusement. But she had just ruined the butter and toppled her bowl of porridge. A peek inside an old book seemed harmless.

Thus, in an act of defiance against her common sense, she had set quill to paper and allowed her world to crumble. In the beginning, it had seemed so innocent. Most her peers wrote in journals, which they shared with each other late at night in hushed voices. But she was sure they never confessed their darkest secrets to a stranger with the wisdom of gods or watched in terrified glee as ink issued forth with reassuring words. Slowly, she felt her childhood innocence swallowed by a sea of black. Common sense told her it couldn't be blood, that she couldn't have thrown the world into such peril and then have someone else have to sort it all out and rescue her. As she looked upon Harry just then at the breakfast table, she felt a familiar pang of rage coupled with humiliation. She snapped at Ron for tapping his fork against his plate as he and Hermione were once again embroiled in another one of their enigmatic games of innuendo.

She never consciously allowed herself to respect her perpetrator, but somewhere in the depths of her mind she longed for his persuasive abilities. She wanted many things when she was eleven, even if she couldn't properly name them. Perhaps that was why, in some intangible way, she resented her rescuer who, until recently, had been oblivious to the small (yet quite large in fact) connection which sealed them together.

It was a quiet, symbiotic resentment she carried without comprehending its full scope. In many ways, it defined him as solidly as the sound of his voice or his propensity to write in tiny scrawl. In other ways, she wanted nothing more than to be eleven again, and naive and brazen in her uncertainty. But in more ways she wanted to solve the one puzzle which had vexed her since was so small and unobtrusive around him.

"Isn't it funny how long ago it seems?" she said once they were alone, and silence rested between them.

"It wasn't that long," he said with tired eyes. He was right of course, but she was quite sure it had been millenniums.

"Don't you remember?" she whispered, leaning in as if trying to catch his breath.

"Of course I do, I remember everything," he said and looked at her. Suddenly, she felt safe.

"Why won't you tell me?" she never was one to resort to begging, but she felt a sense of urgency she didn't understand. She leaned in closer once he didn't reply, attempting to use proximity as a weapon.

"Harry," she said barely above a whisper, "I'm no longer eleven."

"Don't you often wish that you were?" he finally said.

She sighed, feeling an icy wash as the Bloody Baron passed through her.

Sometimes when she looked upon Harry he elicited no more desire than Neville or Colin. But more often than not, when the world seemed to close around her, she wanted nothing more than to drown in him. She pressed her knees hard together, trying to squash the growing ache.

She longed to see what he saw, to know what he knew, and to remember what he remembered when they were so alone and so small and so close to death. She felt this yearning grow as she looked upon him just then, as a cloud obliterated the sun and the color drained from the room. It was not the same yearning she'd experienced as a child. No child could understand the desires she felt now.

"Why won't you let me in?" she murmured but he didn't hear her. He was too busy reading a text Dumbledore or Lupin or some other impenetrable figure had passed on to him.

"I remember the last time I saw you," she said, "you were by the window, and I was so afraid you knew. I thought nothing could be worse than that fear, until I was drowning."

"It's no use, Ginny, to relieve those nightmares," he said quietly, his eyes still on the text. She had half a mind to rip it out of his hands and throw it across the room, to scream and demand he make everything right.

"What did you see?" she said leaning in so close now her lips very nearly touched the surface of his face. He didn't pull away.

"Tell me what you saw, Harry," she said attempting to use his name as a catalyst. She squeezed her knees tighter together than ever, and fought the urge to touch him anywhere and everywhere at once, knowing it would seal her wounds and intoxicate her soul. She felt alone too often, except on those rare occasions when he would look upon her with wantonness in his eyes she was sure she had misread.

Was that the look he was giving her just then, when he finally turned to face her? An impulse to reach out and crush her warmth against his, feel her breath and taste her air? Inexplicably, she moved away from him as he leaned towards her.

"What I always see," he said simply, still looking into her. She realized faintly that his knee was pressed slightly against hers. She caught her breath, taking in every sensation from the minuscule, yet overwhelming contact.

"I don't know what that means. You never tell me," she said, his warmth becoming more tangible with each passing breath.

"I never tell anyone," he said finally looking away. Before he could turn away, she grabbed his arm.

"Tell me," she said in an urgent tone, "please tell me."

He pulled his arm free of her grasp, and for an instant she thought he might gather his belongings and stomp off as Ron would after a row. Instead, he sat quietly with a pensive look on his face, as though trying to figure out the cosmos. She sighed heavily, unable to understand what she needed to do to reach him. She could nag him like Hermione, coddle him like her mother, or make light of the world like Ron. She shifted uncomfortably, knowing she would have to find her own way but terrified of the consequences. It was too easy to be so hard because she felt somehow that they fit. She felt it. Looking at his hand resting on the table, she was sure hers would fit perfectly in its cusp. She let her eyes wander to his face, not flinching as she would when she was small and realized how extraordinary he appeared in his ordinariness. Her face burned a little as she imagined drinking him in as she covered her mouth with his, relinquishing her trust and conscious and soul, all those facets she felt ripped from her prematurely.

"I don't expect you to save me, Harry," she said quietly, pressing her knee against his and she immediately felt brave yet terrified. She would be able to tell instantly if he flinched.

"You can't blame me," he said flatly. She was silent for several moments, the clinking of glasses and forks fading. How did he know? How could she expect him not to know? She wanted to lie to him. She wanted to tell him that was an absurd statement, she didn't blame him for anything. But she did. She blamed him for not holding the door for her when she'd enter a room behind him, and for looking away when their eyes caught. Above all, she blamed him for having the audacity to carry on in belligerence. Her rational side had long ago absolved him of any wrongdoing. He was oblivious, she'd told herself, and too busy carrying the world on his shoulders to stop and notice. But her emotive side would not be as lenient. Sitting with him now in their customary awkwardness only compounded her frustrations. Saving her had perhaps been more of a punishment than a favor. She didn't say anything as she gathered her bag and stomped off, her shoes oddly loud on the stone floor. She was not surprised when he failed to call after her.