Any Day Now

Any Day Now

Chapter 1: Anything

"I never wanted anything
The way I wanted you that night
My love transcended space and time
I never wanted anything. . . ."-Bif Naked

"Why are you here, Harry?"

"I don't wanna leave. You know that."

"Yeah. But I also know that you have to at some point." She looked up at the darkened sky. "When the light comes, you can't stay."

"I made a Patronus here once. I was with-"

"Her, I know." She looked up again before pulling her knees into her chest and holding them tightly. He hadn't seen her look so frail in a long time, not since the chamber. "But you weren't here." She tapped the side of her head. "We're here now, not anywhere where anything has happened."

"I guess I know that." He sighed, leaning back slowly, until finally he was lying on the ground, against a hill that hadn't been there before.

"You should go back."

"And you shouldn't?"

"I'm not the hero of the piece, remember? I have time. I can waste it." She pulled out a small, rumpled package.

"When did you start that?" he asked as she slid a cigarette out and watched it light itself.

"Around the same time you did," she replied, passing one over to him.

"You...you got so mean when she left."

"I was mean before then. I've always been mean." She sucked on her cigarette and watched the smoke as it left her mouth. "It started before. That's why she left. She didn't know that I loved her." She looked at him, studying his face. "I think he knew. About you. I think he left because he knew." She turned away again. "She didn't know and now she's gone."

"She's not gone forever."

"Yes she is. She wouldn't ever...you don't understand, Harry." There was a broken feel about Ginny that Harry didn't notice very often, and it was surfacing once more. "I treated her so badly, there's no way she could ever care about me again."

"Yes there is." He closed his eyes. When had he started smoking? Why couldn't he remember? Why, when he could remember everything else so clearly... "It doesn't matter how you treated her. She loved you. That'll always be true."

"He hurt you that much, huh?" The broken air was gone, and she was staring at him again, with that look on her face that she so often had when talking to him there. That knowing, experienced, unregretful look.

"More." He opened his eyes and watched Ginny watching the smoke.

"I'll never understand you," she said suddenly, irreverently. "I mean, you sleep with boys. It's disturbing. You know, because boys have that nasty little flap of skin and everything...I just don't get how you can stand it."

"And I will never understand how you can sleep with girls." He rolled his head over to the side, trying to see her through the sudden, inexplicable glare that now excluded her from his vision. "We've been through this before."

"So we have. The stars are all the same, for all of time, of course. If you never try, you never know." Why did she always speak in riddles when they were there? He had to hate her for a moment.

"What are you talking about?"

"I can understand the appeal of having one, of course," she stated easily, ignoring his question. "I mean, it's power, isn't it? Men have more money and more respect without ever having to earn it, and instead of being looked down upon and cast out for sleeping around, they're congratulated." She sucked in deeply, as if trying to consume the entire cigarette, as if that consumption would mean anything at all. She exhaled quickly, a realization, before continuing. "Woman's job is never finished, and is underpaid or unpaid, and we're the first to get fired and we should be quiet and docile and not complain about such things, because if we do, we're nagging, unfeminine bitches and if we don't we're typical weak females and-"

"Yes Ginny. I chose to have a penis. In fact, I chose to have one so that you could be underpaid."

She looked at him angrily, and just as suddenly as it had come, the blinding glare was gone.

"And if we try to make a point we're laughed at or ostracized." She ran her free hand through her thick, long hair, visibly forcing away her speech. "It's not you I'm angry at, Harry."

"Then who is it?"

She thought a moment. "Ron, mostly, but I think there's a little bit of Percy in there." She smiled sweetly at him. "And you? Who are you angry at?" A pause. "Why are you here?"

"You know that."

"It's really just Draco then, is it?" She stubbed her cigarette out and stood up, stretching and looking around the empty, disfigured grounds. "Poor boy, lost and all alone. Did you stay until the day was all gone?"

"What?"

"All that I've done..." She turned her head to the side, staring at something in the distance. "I will wonder on..." She pranced away, going somewhere Harry knew he could not follow. What did it matter, anyway? She was half-insane when they were there...

Harry was reminded that he was only in a dream. A strange dream it was, looking almost exactly like Hogwarts, different only in that everything seemed to bend for him. When he had leaned back, the ground had come up to meet him, hadn't it? And after a while a certain part of the Forest faded off into mist...that was where Ginny went when she wasn't there with him. And he knew that she couldn't go to many of the classrooms he liked to frequent there, as they were inventions of his mind, similar to the DA room in many respects.

And there were rooms he certainly hoped she couldn't visit, or wouldn't visit. They had Draco waiting there, waiting for him like he'd said he would. And this Draco was different. He never tried to hurt Harry in any way, and he couldn't ever leave. After all, he was only a figment, only a part of this world Harry and Ginny had created by accident. And so he stayed in those rooms and read books. He read so many books, all for the purpose of telling Harry about them...

Harry had mentioned once to Ginny that he missed talking to Draco more than anything. Draco had so much to talk about...he would talk on for hours about the books he read when he was younger, left alone in his father's main library. Ginny had raised an eyebrow and uttered, with her usual bored-into-sarcasm tone, "kinky."

Ginny was like Draco in so many ways. She made it obvious, painfully obvious, all the time. Hermione had been like Harry, submissive and wanting. Draco and Ginny were always in control and always, always cold and detached. Harry wondered sometimes if Ginny had ever hit her...

And of course, because she was like Draco, Ginny couldn't understand why Harry came there so often. She couldn't understand that Draco was the only reason he wasn't happy and satisfied with his life, that not having Draco was the only thing that was wrong. Ginny didn't understand how Draco could have been everything to Harry. She was there because of Hermione, true, but there were other factors. Harry simply couldn't stand living without Draco.

Draco had been everything.

Harry stood up, walked across the grounds and up the seemingly endless flights of stairs to his favorite room. It was merely a library, really, librarian was never there. Draco was there, and his face lit up when saw Harry.

***

Somebody shook Harry out of his trance. He opened his eyes. He was sitting upright in his bed, his hands folded neatly in his lap. Ron was shaking him.

"Harry, we have to go to breakfast, hurry up." Harry shook his head, rubbing his face and trying to force away his perfectly preserved image of Draco.

"I'm up, just wait a minute." He fell out of bed and pushed on his glasses.

"You were doing it again."

"Doing what?" He was confused. And he couldn't find his pants.

"Whatever it is you do when you don't go to sleep at night." Ron looked at him from the door. "You didn't sleep at all, did you?"

"I haven't for a while," Harry muttered under his breath, knowing that Ron didn't actually need an audible answer.

They went down to the Great Hall, to their usual spot. Ginny was carving her toast into strange pieces; she smiled her strange, secret smile at Harry when she saw him. Harry noticed Neville noticing them, and understood with perfect clarity the rumors that they were sleeping together. Of course, he could never sleep with her, even if he had a sexual interest in girls in any way. She was too much like Draco, and simultaneously too much like himself.

"So I was about to tell Seamus about this dream I had," Ginny said, to the group as whole, in her nearly drawling tone she so often used when bordering between amused and bored.

"Go on then," Dean urged her. He was sitting right by Hermione, across from Seamus. Harry unconsciously looked at Hermione for a brief second. She was impassive.

"Well it started out like this," she picked up a piece of her toast in demonstration. It was carved to look slightly feminine, holding a sword that was larger than its own body. "I was walking through the Forest with this highly impressive weapon used for the impalement of my lessers." She smiled at her own secret, bitter joke. Harry noticed Hermione's strange, almost hurting expression passing for only a moment over her face. "And suddenly I come across this ugly demon. And by ugly, I do mean extensively hideous."

"How extensively?" Seamus asked her, eyebrows raised.

"About...about as extensively as Pansy Parkinson."

"Oh, dear lord!" The people nearby laughed, accustomed to this form of entertainment-the back and forth between Ginny and Seamus that had begun several months before, finding its roots in an insult thrown from the former to the latter in passing.

"And thus," she propped up another piece of toast, much larger than the first and with many more spikes coming out of its head, "we fought." She moved the female in closer, maneuvering it into many different potential stabbing positions, and each time finding some inconvenience to block the much-wanted stabbing. "The evil thing would not desist!" Harry heard many sniggers when she said 'desist.' "We battled on, raging infernos within the deadly reaches of the Forest!" Her voice had assumed some strange, unearthly intonation and had traveled several octaves lower. "But when all seemed to be lost, I cried out, 'Back you vile hell-beast, insanely cabbage-like spawn of Satan! The Lord hath shown me his true might, and it rivals that of the revoltingly greasy, morbidly bad-haired men of the Hogwarts staff!" The giggles grew louder, many of the others peeking up at Snape. Harry laughed himself, knowing that Ginny hadn't meant to refer to Snape. Knowing, in fact, that this was merely whatever popped into her head, and that no one could truly understand but herself, nor were they meant to. "He told me he was a very large potato with no nipples."

"Oh Gin, cut it out already," Ron tried to say to her over the ever-rising tides of laughter.

"What, defy me, turtle-man?" she replied, turning to him. "Well, sod off, Mr. Bear!!"

"Oh god," Harry heard Hermione whisper to herself, before she quietly stood up and left, entirely unnoticed by anyone but himself.

"And the demon said, before I delivered the death-blow, 'Hail Lord Satan! And his special, epileptic, homosexual dragon friend!' And then he died. The rest is rather anticlimactic." Seamus looked at Harry and smiled. He understood, too. Ginny was insane.

"Really?" he asked, peering at her. "A dragon? I would think that Satan would take up with Blast-Ended Skrewts."

"They're only part-time lovers. The dragon's a full-time lay. In fact, from what I hear, even when the dragon's not with the Unholy Prince, he has to be laying down, being in the job description in all. You know-"

But Harry never heard what she was about to inform Seamus of, because as she said it, he locked eyes with Draco across the room, and everything else went black.