xposure’s the thing. It’s probably worth giving it a shot.

He walks over and sits down next to her before he can think better of it.

“Harry!” Ginny says. She sounds surprised, but—pleased, Harry thinks. He’s almost sure. There’s a beat of hesitation, just long enough for Harry to think that this was a mistake and he’s an idiot and he’s going to have to sit here with her in horrible silence for five minutes, before she smiles at him and says, “So. Did the chair go off?”

Harry laughs, more out of relief than anything else. “It did. My own fault for sitting on it, but it was pretty spectacular. As farting chairs go, anyway.”

“My brother the genius,” Ginny says. She rolls her eyes, but her tone is too fond to give the gesture any weight. “I heard him talking the other day—apparently he wants to run a whole line of furniture like that. You know, farting chairs, farting ottomans, farting chaise longues. ‘If you can sit on it, it should fart,’ seems to be his philosophy.”

“It’s hard to argue with,” says Harry, and Ginny laughs, the sound bright in the muffling, pervasive quiet that alwayses on the heels of fresh snow.

There’s a pause, and then, with the air of someone striking out bravely into the unknown, Ginny says, “So, Nev told me he ran into you at Draco’s the other day?”

“Oh,” says Harry, wondering briefly and with passion why he can’t seem to escape talking about Malfoy tonight. “Yeah, it was—wait, Draco?”

Ginny raises her eyebrows. “That is his name.”

“I know,” Harry says. He wraps his arms around himself, trying to keep the heat in. “It’s just…well. It’s a little weird to hear you say it, to be honest.”

“Yeah,” Ginny says, shrugging a shoulder. “For me too, but after a while it just felt strange to call him Malfoy all the time. Their whole relationship is a little weird in general, anyway—actually, truthfully, I think he’s just a little weird. Draco, I mean.” Ginny pauses, and then laughs. “Well, and Nev too, I suppose. I think most of their conversations revolve around who gets to marry a scary old plant.”

“Vicky,” Harry says absently.

Ginny gives him a look he can’t quite interpret. “Um, yeah. Vicky. Right.”

Silence does descend after that, but Harry’s pretty sure—not certain, but pretty sure— that it isn’t awkward silence. It’s the silence of sitting side by side on a snowy evening, watching the steadily deepening night. Ginny’s got a mug of mulled cider huddled between her gloved palms, gentle tendrils of steam winding up from its surface and floating away on the wind, and in the distance Bill and Victoire are building a snowman. asionally Ge will pop out from behind a tree and throw a snowball at them, his cackles and Victoire’s half-laughing little shrieks carrying back to the stoop. It’s nice.fortable.

As they watch, Fleures out of the house and joins her husband and daughter. Bill wraps an arm around his shoulders, kisses the top of her head, as Victorie throws herself against her mother’s legs in a snowy hug before tearing off after her uncle.

Softly, Ginny says, “I used to think that would be us.”

Harry wants to whip his head around to stare at her, wants to insist that they start slower than this, wants to demand wildly to be excused from this conversation and given time to prepare, but he doesn’t. It’s been years; if he’s not ready now, he never will be.

He keeps his eyes firmly fixed on an arbitrary spot in this distance, this spiky-looking fir that’s a little too far out from the rest of the treeline, and says, “Me, too.”

Some of his hesitation—and, okay, if he’s going to be honest about it, his fear—must bleed out into his voice, because Ginny says, “Oh, Harry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to just—I shouldn’t have said—”

“No, hey, it’s fine,” Harry says. He forces himself to look at her; she’s beautiful, snowflakes caught in her hair, eyes heavy with worry. “Really, it is. It was a long time ago, and I know—I know we weren’t, you know. Going to make it, in the long run.”

“I don’t necessarily think that’s true,” Ginny says. She toes a little at the stair with the tip of her boot, then puts her mug down, scoops some snow up into her gloved hands and starts rolling it into a ball. “I think we could have gone the distance.”

“Then why—” Harry starts, and stops. He knows why. She told him, that horrible night all those years ago: because he was closed off. Because he wouldn’t confront his emotions. Because some days she thought he was dead inside. Because she was in love with someone else.

“Because I couldn’t shake the thought that you’d wake up in twenty years with no idea why you’d done it,” Ginny whispers. “I didn’t want—I know I went about it wrong and I’m sorry, I was all kinds of messed up at that point and anyway I’m. Impulsive. Like you,” she adds, and he hears thepliment he thinks she means it to be; he doesn’t know if he would have, even a year ago. “But, Harry, you always—I always felt like you were just, I don’t know. Going through the motions, I guess? And that wasn’t what I wanted. Not for either of us.”

Harry knows she’s right, and it stings in his eyes, at the back of his throat. He can’t believe how much old history he’s seen dug up this week, not after all this time he’s spent avoiding it. It’s like he turned over the earth, running into Malfoy, and now all these things he’s kept safe and buried for years are running loose again.

“You deserved better,” Harry says, quiet and sorry, into the cold air of the night.

“Don’t do that,” Ginny says. When Harry turns to look at her, her eyes are hard. “Don’t act like that, like you’re some kind of monster I got saddled with. We both deserved better, Harry. We both deserved to be with someone who saw us for who we were, not as,” she stops, swallows, “a future, or a hero, or whatever else. Just someone who wanted us for us.”

Harry doesn’t have anything to say to that; she’s right, not that he imagines he’ll ever manage to find that for himself. It’s enough, though, that she has it. It’s enough that one of them does.

He looks at her again, really looks, and sees the way the lines of her face have changed, the differences in the way she carries herself. Ginny at 17, at 18—she’d been a spitfire, a perpetual motion machine, always throwing herself into the center of whatever was going on. She liked to go to concerts and stay out dancing and kiss Harry messily against the side of his jaw, just under his ear, one hand fisted in his hair. She was a beautiful girl, but nothing like as eous as the woman in front of him, steadier and calmer and content with herself in this way she’d never been able to manage when she was with him.

“God,” Harry says, feeling ancient even to hear ite out of his mouth, “we were so young.”

Ginny lets out a little huff of surprised laughter. “Yeah,” she says wistfully, and then punches Harry lightly in the arm. “Hey! We’re still young.”

“Not that young,” Harry says, grimacing.

“Go say that to my mother’s face, I dare you,” Ginny says. “Better yet, say it to Fleur’s —she’sing up on the big 3-0, and reports from all corners say she’s not handling it well.”

“Yikes,” Harry says mildly. “Maybe I’ll leave well enough alone.”

“Well,” Ginny says, tone sparkling with mischief, “if that’s the kind of mood you’re in,” and then she lobs the snowball she’d been making right in Harry’s face, because deep down she’s all mischief, regardless of circumstance.

Harry lets out a war cry and soon the whole family’s outside, screaming and laughing and pelting snowballs, tackling each other into the drifts. He catches Gin’s eye a few times as the fight wears on, and when she looks back at him, grin fierce and happy, he checks for his bitterness and finds that, at least for this moment, it’s gone.

For the next three days, Harry buries himself in the Malfoy case.

He actually goes to Grimmauld Place on Monday; he doesn’t bother to Owl first, figuring that if Malfoy can turn up on his doorstep unannounced at 6:30 on a Sunday, Harry can show up at his crime scene whenever he damn well likes. It backfires on him, though, because Malfoy’s out.

Still, Kreacher lets him in, takes his coat, and tells him to wait in the foyer. He vanishes with a crack and reappears a few minutes later, beaming, to say, “Master Draco says Harry Potter can stay if he does not break anything!”

Harry raises his eyebrows at the still-visible carnage of the place, but he does as he’s told and breaks nothing. It’s actually easier to get through the note-taking and cataloging he needs to get done without Malfoy around to distract him, and after an hour or so he leaves Kreacher with a list of things he’ll need from Malfoy and heads back to the office.

And if he pauses, hand raised, half considering—he doesn't know, patting the wall in apology for past treatment, or something—well, nobody sees him do it. It's not like it counts.

On Tuesday, he receives the following Owl.

Potter -

Having now taken aplete inventory, I can tell you there are in fact several things missing. They are as follows:

-Amortentia, one (1) vial (vintage; estimated brew date June, 1934)

-Draught of Peace, one (1) vial (though it was an Everlasting Elixir and was, I might add, not cheap, so in terms of actual loss, it was considerably more than one vial)

-Dreamless Sleep, four (4) vials

-One (1) charmed necklace, unprocessed for display on date of loss; estimated date of production 14th century. Based on what initial examination I had time to do, the charm allows the wearer immunity to disease. Probably a relic of the Black Death; I could say for certain if I’d had the chance to do further research.

-Two (2) self-sheathing daggers, 4th century. Protection charms in handle inlays, sheaths and blades.

-One (1) music box, 20th century. Tune causes…let’s say ‘youthful exuberance,’ though in reality the experience is not unlike being extremely drunk.

-One (1) box Witch Ranger Biscuits, flavor Cocoa Glacier. (You can leave this out of your official report, Potter, I’m aware that the Au

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