Love and the Single Ghoul

It had been a long, exhausting day, one of the most exhausting days Harry had ever known, and with recent events that was really saying something. His day began with his annual end of term pilgrimage back to the Dursley's house, accompanied this time by Hermione and Ron.

Harry had dumped his trunk with a resounding crash in the middle of the living room floor and announced loudly enough for whatever benevolent spirits had Dumbledore supposed were protecting him to hear, "Hi, Aunt Petunia! I'm home!"

The usual unpleasantness ensued; shrieking, name-calling, a few threats, a bit of throwing, a semi-surprising revelation out of Aunt Petunia and one seriously disturbing encounter with Dudley and then it was over. After enduring sixteen years of their abuse he was free to depart Privet Drive forever, and that's exactly what he did.

He need never see any of them again, Harry thought, and he never planned to. Still there was some lingering feeling he experienced well after arriving with Ron and Hermione here at The Burrow, and it was hardly the jubilation he'd expected. He couldn't seem to put his finger on it. It wasn't disappointment, certainly. Neither was it sadness, nor even anger. Perhaps it was a frustrating combination of those emotions that Harry didn't quite understand, and because he wasn't a female he wasn't about to spend a lot of time dwelling on it. In fact he wasn't going to spend a lot of time thinking about any of the feelings he had. Particularly those he reserved for the reproachful redheaded girl in the Weasley household. The one who hadn't taken her sad brown eyes off of him all evening.

Harry had never before understood the term "bone-weary". He did now. He ached with tiredness, felt as if he'd completed some monumental task and could sleep for a week when all he'd done was say good-bye to the Dursley's. He stumbled up the stairs to the attic, nodded in passing to the ghoul who was his roommate for the duration of his visit to The Burrow before Bill's wedding took place, stripped off his clothes, pulled on his pajama bottoms and collapsed onto the camp cot to sleep like the dead.

Harry slept so soundly he never heard the furtive foot fall on the roof outside the attic window. He missed the ear-piercing screech the crooked window emitted as it was lifted in its wooden sash. He snorted lightly, and turned onto his side as the desperately trying-to-be silent figure approached his bed while sucking in noisy nervous breaths of air. But there was no mistaking the dip in the mattress as a slight weight settled beside him or the feel of satiny smooth limbs sliding against his in the darkness.

Harry started awake. Fearful for a moment that Fred and George had made good on their threat to hire a succubus for Bill's stag night and that she had started the entertainment early. Then he caught a whiff of white flowers and lemon juice. Ginny had been arranging bouquets for the wedding. He opened one bleary eye to glare at her and announced as firmly as he could manage, "You had better be a dream!"

"Harry," she whispered softly laying her small cool hand against his chest. "I couldn't sleep."

"Are you out of your mind?" Harry hissed, forcing his other eye to open so that he could confront her head on. "If we're caught together up here your brother is going to kill me!"

"Which one?"

"Pick one!" Harry cringed at the thought of some of the curses Fred and George knew. What with Bill's latest affliction he might even be tempted to bite Harry. Charlie, who had flown in from Romania for the wedding, would just give him a good pounding. Percy, who of all unfathomable things was Bill's best man, would strap him into one of those awful witness chairs in the Wizengamot courtroom and lecture him until his brains spilled out of his ears. The possibilities were endless, horrifically endless and he hadn't even gotten to Ron yet. "Besides that if your mother catches us even my portrait will remain forever lifeless!"

"Harry, you don't have a portrait."

"That is besides the point!" He opened his mouth wider to continue expounding upon the point, but Ginny sealed it with a kiss and Harry was forced into shouting "Mimble Wimble!" down her throat. Not a very effective deterrent, he noted, reluctantly accepting the fact that it would take a braver, stronger, much less tired man than he was at the moment to throw Ginny out of his bed.

They didn't do anything really, nothing they hadn't done before. Ginny's nightshirt and Harry's pajama bottoms remained in place, although in slight disarray. They kissed and canoodled and touched one another very gently, reverently. Harry filled his palms with her bludger-sized breasts, delighting in their softness and the weight of them in his hands. She was delicious and wonderful and he could not touch her, or hold her, enough to be satisfied.

He half laughed thinking about the first time he'd touched her chest. They were kissing in the broom shed on the Quidditch pitch and Ginny moved his hand so that his palm covered her right breast. He'd jerked his hand back as though her nipple had ignited. "Bloody hell! What'd you do that for?" Ginny laughed, which made Harry smile too. He imagined that he did look pretty comical standing there giving her the evil eye considering what they had just been doing.

"Because I wanted you to touch me?" Ginny had offered cheekily. "Harry, what's wrong? Don't you want to?"

Oh yes, he wanted to. He wanted to touch her and to love her and to look after her and he wasn't free to do any of those things. He was a marked man.

"Ginny." He tucked her bright head under his chin, gathering her in, marveling at how they fit together, two lost pieces of a gigantic puzzle connected at last. "You need to go."

"I don't want to," she said simply, as if things were that easy. She ran her hands up his ribcage and squeezed him tight. Harry brought up an index finger to tap the soft flesh of her lower lip. She captured it between her white teeth and bit down very lightly. Harry's whole body shuddered. This, he thought feverishly, was how women drove men mad. Who ever thought that the world needed love potions? Harry was ready to jump on his broomstick and fly it to Mars and back if it meant keeping Ginny in his bed for the night.

She sat up suddenly, releasing his finger. "Harry, d'you want to be like Dumbledore?"

"Huh?" Harry's mind was with his body, and at the moment his body was nowhere near Dumbledore. He groped his thoughts for the right words, pushing aside the inappropriate ones, like soft, warm, wet, breast, and desire. "Uh, yeah. Sure. I mean, of course. Who wouldn't want to be like Dumbledore? He was amazing, wasn't he? Brilliant and brave, the greatest wizard who ever..."

"Yeah, yeah," Ginny cut him off sharply. "I've heard it all before. Dumbledore was the greatest wizard who ever lived, and he was a genius, a visionary...blah, blah, blah. Yeah, Harry, he was all those things and more. You know what else Dumbledore was? He was alone."

"What are you talking about, Gin? That's just crazy! Dumbledore lived in the middle of a school! He was surrounded by people all of the time!

"No, Harry!" Ginny flapped her arms impatiently, reminiscent of Hermione. "What I mean is, yes, he was around people all the time, but who were they? His students? Employees? Followers? I don't know. Did he even have any friends?"

"Of course he had friends! He had loads of friends! Mad-Eye Moody, McGonagall..."

Ginny interrupted again. "Mad-Eye Moody? Come on, Harry! Some crazy sociopath guy spent an entire year right under Dumbledore's nose pretending to be Mad-Eye Moody and Dumbledore never even noticed it wasn't really him!" She folded her arms and looked down her nose at him. "I'd like to believe if a Death Eater was in this bed with you right now pretending to be me that you'd notice!"

With lightning speed, born of his Quidditch reflexes, Harry grasped Ginny by both arms, lifted her bodily in the air and set her down again so that she was straddling his hips. Then he did something he knew she particularly enjoyed and when she responded he chuckled throatily, "Yep, it's you."

Ginny pummeled his chest with her sharp little fists until he stopped laughing. "I'm being serious, Harry! Don't you see how lonely Dumbledore must've been?"

Truthfully, no, Harry didn't see it, but he could see she was becoming upset. "Ginny." He smoothed her hair, gleaming red in the light of the moon shining through the window. "Why did you come here tonight? I thought we had settled all of this between us."

"Well, that's just it, isn't it? I don't want things to be settled between us. I don't know what I was thinking at the funeral yesterday when I agreed with you. I've been thinking about it all day today, Harry. Thinking about Dumbledore's funeral and how it was filled with people who liked and respected him, maybe even loved him in a way, but how many of those people really knew him? He spent everyday surrounded by people and everynight when he went up to his room he was alone."

"Alone? You must be joking. Have you ever been in Dumbledore's office, Ginny? He was surrounded by talking portraits."

"Oh, right. I'm sorry," Ginny huffed. "I'm sure the portrait of Dilys Dillpickleworthy was a great comfort to him on cold winter nights."

"Her name wasn't Dilys Dill..."

"Whatever!" Ginny waved him away. "What I mean is that Dumbledore had no confidant, Harry. Nobody to really share his life with. No wife, no partner, no mistress, no lover..."

"Are you saying you think Dumbledore was a monk?"

"No! Don't be stupid! What I'm saying is: he lived his life alone! Think Harry! Who did Dumbledore share his problems with? His dreams? His hopes? His troubles? No one. Everybody went to him with all of their troubles. I don't want you to be like that, Harry. I don't want you to be like Voldemort."

"You mean Dumbledore."

"I mean both of them!"

"Ginny!" Harry was becoming irritated now. He leaned up on both elbows staring her down nose to nose. "You can't possibly be saying that Dumbledore was anything at all like Voldemort!"

"Can't I? Well, you don't know, do you, Harry? You don't know him like I do! He was inside of my head!" She knocked herself between the eyebrows with her fist. "And he's still there sometimes! I will always know more about that nasty twisted monster than I ever wanted to! And I'm telling you that he and Dumbledore aren't so different! No, I don't think Dumbledore was evil. Of course not! But the way they operate, it's much the same, Harry. Don't you see it? Neither one of them ever let anyone get too close."

"We've been all through this already! I won't have you risking your life..."

"It's my life to risk!" Ginny cried.

"Hush!" Harry put his hand over her mouth. "Do you want to bring the whole Burrow up here?" Ginny nodded her understanding and he removed his hand. She glanced over at the ghoul who was sitting cross-legged on a nearby old trunk, elbows positioned on his knees, chin in his hands, paying avid attention to their conversation. "Don't worry," she said quieter. "They'll just think it's him. You," she gestured to the ghoul, "make some noise. Clank a chain or something." Harry, who had forgotten all about the ghoul, was extremely glad in the moment that he and Ginny had not made love. All of his various and sundry first time fantasies of he and Ginny together were remarkably ghoul-free.

The ghoul obliged by raising such an outrageous cacophony that a sleepy sounding Mr. Weasley shouted through the ceiling, "Quiet down up there or I swear I'll bring in the Exorcist!" Then Harry heard Mrs. Weasley say, "Arthur! You can't do that to the ghoul! He was our wedding gift from Mummy!"

Harry and Ginny plunged their heads beneath the covers to shout at one another in whispers.

"It is my life, Harry! It's my choice and you can't make it for me!"

"Oh yes I can!"

"You can't!"

"Can!"

"Harry..."

"My mind is made up, Ginny. You aren't going to change it. As long as Voldemort exists, you and I as a couple, don't."

"Fine!" Ginny hissed furiously, closer to tears than she wanted to be. She threw back the covers and vaulted out of the bed, letting in a cold draft of air that chilled Harry to his marrow. "Fine! If that's the way you want it! I'll...I'll...just forget about you! I'll just pretend we never...this never...I'll go out with McGleggan! That's what I'll do!'' Harry winced. "Or maybe I'll date Neville! He's always been nice to me! He wouldn't just...just...d-d-ump m--m-me!." Sad to say Harry vastly preferred that she date Neville. Actually, he preferred she didn't, but he couldn't very well tell her she couldn't be with anyone else.

Before she burst into humilating tears Ginny gathered the tattered remnants of her dignity about her like a robe, whirled on her slim white heel, stalked across the attic floor towards the window and tripped over the ghouls chain, bashing her foot painfully into his trunk. "Ouch! Ow! Bloody Double Damn it"

"Ginny!" Harry jumped out of bed to rush over to her. "Are you all right? Blimey! You're bleeding!"

"I'm fine!"

Harry glanced down at the blood seeping from her foot and spreading across the floor. "You're not fine! Sit down!" He pushed her down on the trunk and knelt to examine her foot. "Crikey, Gin, you've torn that toenail clean off."

"It's fine," she repeated through clenched teeth. Harry snatched the sheet off his cot. It was the only thing in the room clean enough to serve as a bandage. He applied pressure to Ginny's gushing toe with the sheet wondering wildly how he would explain a blood soaked sheet to Mrs. Weasley in the morning. He seemed to remember Percy saying once that lemon juice and sea salt worked wonders on a bloodstain....

"Ginny, are you all right?" She was perched on the edge of the trunk, one fist crammed in her mouth so tightly it was half way down her throat, tears streamed silently down her face. She jerked her head once. Harry presumed a silent lie in the affirmative. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry about your toe." He tore off a strip of clean sheet and wrapped it around her wounded digit. He stood up, gesturing helplessly with his arms. "I'm sorry," he repeated. "I never wanted to hurt you, Ginny. I wouldn't ever...if I could help it. I wouldn't. Ginny, please. You are absolutely ripping my guts out over here. Will you at least let me hold you? Please?"

Ginny jerked her head again, and then she was in his arms drenching his chest. Harry didn't know what to say. He had seen her cry before, but never like this, the great wracking sobs that came out when her fist fell from her mouth threatened to tear her tiny frame in half. Harry found himself murmuring crazy things in her ear; things he knew weren't true, but that he half believed anyway. "It's going to be okay, Gin. Everything will work out. We'll work it out. Shush now, you're breaking my heart crying that way."

Her sobs slowed to shudders and then to soft sighs. Harry stroked her hair back from her face, caught it in a ponytail inside his fist and tugged gently. "How's your toe?"

"Killing me."

"How about your heart?"

"I think one valve just kicked in," she replied dryly. And then he said it, without thinking, without worrying, without hesitation. "I love you, Ginny."

"Really?" She sniffed, wiping away a tear. Harry nodded. "Well, when did you figure that out?"

"I'm pretty sure it was the day this stinky little dwarf in a diaper handed me a poem."

"Tom Riddle helped me write that poem."

"Well, that explains a lot."

"Did you mean what you said, Harry? About us working this out?'

"I did." He dried her eyes on the corner of the bloody sheet. "I think I must be crazy to agree to it, but I'm willing to try."

"I don't have to date McCleggan to get your attention?"

"Holy Hufflepuff's Horcrux, no!"

"Hufflepuff's Horcrux? What's that?"

"Never mind."

"Can I stay with you tonight?"

"No way. I'm taking you back to your bedroom. We'll talk some more tomorrow."

Harry escorted Ginny back down the steep and impossibly crooked slope of The Burrow's roof, amazed that she hadn't fallen and broken her neck on the trip up. They slipped into the open window of her room, climbed over Hermione sleeping in a cot beneath the window, and Ginny got into her own bed. Harry pulled the covers up to her chin. He leaned down and kissed her hard on the lips. Then he made his way back outside to the roof, and clambered up to the peak. He pressed his back against the chimney and looked up at the sky.

"They're all nutters. Barking mad, the whole lot of them, Ginny, Ron, Hermione, the entire damned Weasley bunch, to want to stick with me until I defeat Voldemort, or die trying." Harry shook his head; he was so tired, utterly wrung out emotionally. He started thinking about what Ginny was trying to tell him about Dumbledore's loneliness. Harry had never once thought about Dumbledore that way. He had always seemed to be so exciting, so mysterious, surrounded by the talking portraits of long-dead people, and all of his shiny, silver, spinning things. How could somebody so amazing, so brilliant, so damned....cool...be lonely? But it seemed, the more Harry thought about it, that Ginny was right. Dumbledore had always kept his distance from everyone really. Did anyone ever get close to him? And Ginny was right about another thing as well; Harry really didn't want to live that way. He didn't want the only people at his funeral to be co-workers and admirers.

"I could leave right now," Harry mused to the moon. "I could grab my cloak and my wand, climb down that apple tree and be long gone before a single Weasley notices I'm missing. It might be better that way. Safer for them. Or maybe, maybe I should trust them to help me, trust that we'll help each other along, and that maybe, just maybe everything will turn out all right."

A wild rattling and groaning from inside the attic interrupted his reverie. Harry poked his head inside the window and stared at the ghoul. "Do you mind? I'm trying to make a major life decision out here."

The ghoul sighed heavily and it came out as a ghastly shriek. Humans, they really were a dim-witted lot, where would they be without the ghouls in their lives?