Current mood:	happy
Entry tags:	2nd wave, 2nd wave:fic, author:poseida9

(at-Hogwarts fic) Being Noble
Author: poseida9
Title: Being Noble
Challenge: #58 (At-Hogwarts): Clumsy!Harry doesn't understand why Ginny thinks he's so noble.
Summary: "'I looked it up in the dictionary and nothing fits me,' he says, frustrated. 'All I am is clumsy and skinny and thick, and none of those are in the definition.'"
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3,147
Notes/Warnings: This is embarrassingly late due to extenuating circumstances; sorry! Lots of thanks to Asphyxiated, for having beta superpowers.



Being Noble


The first time he tells you, you are in the middle of the corridor. Other students hurry past to their next class; you can’t think about classes when your back is up against the cold stone wall and he is so close you can smell the soap he uses. He looks into space and shakes his head. You want to run your fingers through his hair and feel ridiculous for it.

“I don’t know why you think I’m so noble,” he says, staring at a spot on the wall behind you. You look at him, a little aghast that he would contemplate it—it’s all you’ve ever described him as, in your head: Noble Harry Potter, Noble Boy Who Lived, Noble Ron’s Best Friend, Noble Sexy Bloke.

“Harry, I—”

“I mean,” he says, cutting you off and blushing a little, “you can think I’m noble if you want—but I’m not really.”

His eyes move towards yours suddenly and you are trapped; you want to respond, want to reassure him, but it’s impossible when he is looking at you so intently. Your tongue, your limbs, your mind feel heavy. You suddenly, irrationally think that you may never move again.

But he realizes the time and swears loudly, running off with a wave over his shoulder, tripping on nothing. He sprints around the corner and all you can do is sag. You’ll be late to Ancient Runes; you can’t bring yourself to care.

*

You can remember exactly when you began to think he was so noble—it’s not hard. It wasn’t when he rescued you from the Chamber; you were half-dead, then, and even afterwards all you could think about was his bravery and his courage, and you don’t think those are at all the same as nobility. All the Gryffindors are brave, in their own ways, but only Harry seems really noble to you. You’re biased, you know, but you’ve always been biased.

But here is what you remember; here is why you think he is so wonderful, so amazing, so utterly unattainable, so completely impossible:

He smiled at you once. Once, when you were only eleven, and you were getting onto the Hogwarts Express for the very first time, he smiled at you. He probably doesn’t even remember it. He probably didn’t even notice at the time. But your stomach was all in knots, and you were so afraid to leave your mum, who had spent the past weeks being unnaturally gentle with you, as though she were afraid she’d never see you again, and you were so afraid of missing your father, whose chin wobbled bravely as he gave you a wind-up Muggle clock from his collection. They have no one left after you, you know, and you’re afraid you have no one left after them.

And he smiled, then—a real smile, a wide, nice smile—and it didn’t fix anything important but it fixed everything unimportant. You fell in love with him then—not the real kind, of course; the small kind, the silly kind, the kind that is forever when you are eleven but not when you are thirteen—and even if it doesn’t really count to other people, it counts to you.

Even if he never smiles at you again, that memory is so vivid you think you must have it seared into your skull.

*

Six years later, he has smiled at you many more times, and every time is a little better than the last. The smiles are different, now, though; you don’t know why. It’s like he has a secret he’s keeping, like there’s something he wants you to know but he doesn’t want to tell you.

At dinner one day, as he’s smiling that way at you again, he slides his hand into the mashed potatoes.

He pulls it out so quickly you’re not sure if you really saw it, but—yes—he is wiping his hand on his napkin, and his cheeks are turning red, and he doesn’t look at you for the rest of the meal.

You think something important might have just happened, but you aren’t sure. Underneath the table, his foot brushes yours, and you hate yourself for still blushing.

*

You are shelving books for detention one afternoon when he walks into the back corner, where you are—the place where books called things like Uses for Graphorn Hide and Transfiguring Animal Faeces are housed—the kind of place no one ever goes voluntarily. He stands there for a few minutes, looking at his feet, the books, his sleeve, anything but you.

“I—” he says.

You hold your breath. You can talk to him now easily—more easily than you can talk to anyone else—and it frustrates you that all your words are caught inside you now, somewhere around your heart with its unsteady beat.

That’s behind me now, you think, even though you know it isn’t. He still hasn’t said anything. He is a metre away from you but it feels more like a centimetre.

“I just wanted to say—” he begins again, then stops and swallows.

Please please please, you hope inside, wanting more than you can say, more than you can even think.

“Do you need help?” he blurts finally, anticlimactically. You suppose you were the only one who thought it anticlimactic, and feel very young and very foolish.

“No,” you say, because even though you are empty when he is not there, right now you are so full you think you will burst if he doesn’t touch you. You know he won’t.

“Okay,” he says, and runs. You feel out of control, like you aren’t yourself, like your body isn’t yours. You try not to cry. You try not to do anything, in case you throw yourself completely clear of your skeleton, and wind up, small and empty, sobbing on the floor.

You don’t know what to do anymore.


*

He slips you a note under the breakfast table a few days later. It reads:

Dear Hi Ginny So, Ginny To Ginny Dear Ginny,
I don’t know if you want to. You probably don’t. But the Hogsmeade weekend is coming up.
Love Sincerely Yours Yours truly From Harry

You hope and hope and hope, and catch his eye across the table. He is bright red and looks ready to bolt. You slide your foot across his ankle, and smile at him, not knowing what to say. He looks at you desperately.

“Yes, please,” you hear yourself say, as though from a very great distance, and congratulate yourself on, for at least once in your lifetime, saying what you meant to say.

*

He doesn’t kiss you afterwards, as you half expect him to. He doesn’t kiss you the day after, either, or the day after that, or the day after that. When you finally go into Hogsmeade, it is trailing behind Ron and Hermione, who are bickering as they always do. It is snowing. Neither of you talk.

“Do you want my scarf?” he asks nicely, nervously. You look at him. His nose is red and his eyes are worried.

“And you say you’re not noble,” you tease, your voice quavering. He shakes his head and smiles a real smile.

“Do you?”

“I’m all right,” you say, and, three and a half minutes later, when he grabs your hand suddenly and doesn’t let go of it until you reach The Three Broomsticks, you realize what you said is true. You are all right.

*

Three days later, you are impatient; you are an impatient young woman who has a sort-of-almost-boyfriend who happens to be extremely attractive and kind and wonderful and so you don’t really know what you are supposed to do but catch him as he comes out of the locker room after the Quidditch game and slam him up against the wall and kiss the living daylights out of him.

You were afraid of his response—you were terrified that he had meant everything as friends, but couldn’t bear to ask him about it—but even though he freezes up for a while, he begins to kiss you back and you forget about everything. When his mouth moves to your neck, you want it to last forever: his hand on your waist, his warm body against yours, his breath spiralling against your skin.

You know it has to end, but you don’t know how to let go; and so it is only when you hear footsteps that you back away from him, not remembering how to breathe.

“Hey, what are you two doing? Seamus has smuggled Firewhiskey back in the common room, and he’s sharing!” shouts Dean Thomas down the hallway, oblivious to everything. He is carrying a load of glasses. You think distantly you should help him and hopes Harry doesn’t volunteer.

He does.

*

Later, in the common room, you are chatting mindlessly with Lavender Brown about the latest Hairspray Charm from Teen Witch when you feel him very close to you, his breath hitting your neck.

“Hi, Harry!” Lavender says brightly. “How are you doing? Brilliant catch, by the way.”

“Yeah, thanks,” he says. “Ginny, can I talk to you?”

“Er, sure,” you say. He takes you by the arm and pulls you away from the crowd, into the little alcove under the stairs to the girls’ dormitory. You feel as though your intestines have suddenly disappeared.

“So I just wanted to say,” he begins very quietly, and then stops. The twisting in your gut intensifies. He swears and runs his hand through his hair.

“Harry—” you say desperately.

“No—no, wait,” he says. “I just never know how to start. I keep trying to tell you these things and I don’t know where to start.”

“You can just say the end, if you want,” you say, a bit desperate. He looks at you, puzzled.

“What?”

“You can just say the important bit. You don’t have to start it with anything.”

He gives a very small “Oh,” and then looks you straight in the eye.

“I want to kiss you again,” he says. It sounds different in reality than it did in your daydreams—better, yes, and at the same time worse.

All you can say is, “Huh?” He smiles a little.

“I want to kiss you again,” he repeats. “I want to kiss you until my mouth falls off.” He winces as it comes out. “Not literally,” he says.

“Okay,” you answer.

“What?”

“I mean, okay, you can kiss me again,” you explain. “You can kiss me until your mouth falls off, if you want.”

He does. Something inside you snaps wonderfully, or possibly explodes.

*

You remember how you told your mother when you were ten that you wanted to marry Harry Potter, and she smiled a little nostalgically and told you anything was possible.

You remember how you told your mother when you were fifteen that you wanted to marry Harry Potter, and she didn’t understand that it was different this time. She must have known, but still she said it was best to give him up, for a little while. You didn’t know how to explain to her that you had given him up, painfully, many times before, but now you weren’t sure how to let go. It was different, the sideways topsy-turvy upside-down kind of different.

What you felt for him then was so watered-down, you think now—it was so pale, so unsubstantial compared to what you feel now. Your nerve endings tingled then, sometimes. Now they practically combust.

You tell him this, though you don’t mean to, one evening in a broom cupboard. It comes spilling out of your mouth though you struggle to contain it, and he kisses you on your lips, then on your jaw, then at the base of your throat, and whispers that he knows how you feel, that he feels the same way.

Three nights later he tells you he loves you.

You don’t know what to say, knowing he’s never told anyone before. You don’t know how you can possibly encapsulate everything you feel for him in a few short words, or even a thousand. His breath hums against your ear, and you say the words—the short, clichéd, ridiculous words—against his neck as you wrap your arms around him, never wanting to let go.

*

You tell him about how you like Muggle poetry, and he asks you to lend him a book, so you do—an Edna St. Vincent Millay book, a tattered copy your father picked up a while ago on the job and had to disenchant to keep it from making the owner speak in rhymed iambic pentameter—and you don’t think he’s going to read it, but a couple nights later, on Valentine’s Day, he sits down beside you in the common room and hands it to you. You look at him stiffly; you two fought the day before, when he was upset and angry about the war and you approached him at the wrong time. You haven’t spoken since.

“There’s a line I like in there,” he says with difficulty, gesturing at it. You open it to the marked page and look at the poem, expecting some wonderful quote about love or eternity or something equally romantic.

The poem is “Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare.”

“Thanks a lot, Harry,” you say, half-sarcastically.

“That’s not what I mean.” You look at him, trying to get him to continue, and after a minute of silence, he does. “I mean the line about heroes. I think that’s what it’s about. ‘Geese / Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release / From dusty bondage into luminous air.’ That’s how I feel sometimes, and, also, sometimes I feel like you’re my—er—luminous air. I don’t really understand that part, but I think that that’s what I mean. I just wanted to tell you, because I know I can be a prat.”

But a perfectly wonderful prat, you think, and kiss him.

*

One night, he has a nightmare.

You don’t know how to deal with it. You know it doesn’t mean anything, you know Voldemort’s gone, you know Harry is safe, you know your family is safe—but it’s hard to remember that when he is tossing and turning and pulling at you. You can’t move closer and you can’t move away. You get, again, that feeling of not being in control, and all you can do is whisper gently to him and trace the scar with your fingertip, heart hammering as the split of lightning down his forehead throbs beneath your touch. He kicks your ankle, and you know in the morning you will have a bruise. You cast a Silencing Charm around the bed, not wanting to wake anyone up, and lie there, worried, for what seems like forever. Eventually he relaxes and sleeps peacefully. Your ankle still hurts.

The next morning he looks at you and knows by your shuttered eyes what happened the night before.

“You don’t have to stay,” he says. “I’m not stupid. I understand.”

But he is stupid, and he doesn’t understand, so you shake your head and pull him closer to you, holding him against your chest, less afraid of bruises and nightmares than you are of losing him.

*

Later on in the summer, when the nights are long and you still love the feel of his mouth on yours though you’ve felt it a million times, he tells you again, as you lay together, you using his arm as a pillow,

“I don’t know why you think I’m noble.” You turn to him and smile against his neck. “I mean, you always say I am, but I’m not really. I don’t do anything special.”

“I love you,” you whisper.

“That’s not an answer,” he replies, annoyed.

“I know,” you say. “I can’t explain it. I just think you’re the noblest person I know.”

“I looked it up in the dictionary and nothing fits me,” he says, frustrated. “All I am is clumsy and skinny and thick, and none of those are in the definition.”

“You never like other people to be upset,” you reason, tracing patterns on his shoulder and trying to think of words to say what you mean.

“Just you,” he says, in a delicious voice that makes shivers run up your spine. “I just never like you to be upset.”

“You bought that girl a new ice cream cone the other day when hers fell off.”

“That’s not the same.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Ginny—”

“Harry, you’re being impossible.”

“Why do you think I’m noble?” he asks. “If you’re just saying it to be nice, that’s all right, you know. You can just tell me the truth.”

You pause for a moment. What is there to say? The moonlight slants over his face, creating pools of shadow and light. Without his glasses, his eyes are unfocussed. His heartbeat thrums beneath your fingers, and you love love love this man, and want to be with him for the rest of your life, and probably after as well.

He is noble—you know that, you know that as well as you know your name—but you don’t know how to tell him. You used to believe it was all he was; you know now it’s only a small part of him—but that only makes it more difficult, somehow, to explain it.

“One time, you smiled.”

“That’s a terrible answer, Ginny,” he says, turning to glare at you.

“It’s the truth!” you exclaim. “You said I could tell you the truth. I never said the truth was any good.”

And it’s not, not really. You’ve told all the good parts of the story—not the fights, not the nightmares, not the sobs—but the thing is, the good parts are all that matter in the end; right here, with him beside you, the good parts almost overwhelm you. Happy endings, you think, aren’t about not having bad parts—they’re about having enough good parts to make all the bad parts worth it.

You tell him this, and he doesn’t believe you.

“That’s ridiculous. You never answered my question.”

“Yes, I did!” You are put out—all that deep thought for nothing? (And yet how can it possibly, possibly be nothing, when he is still holding you and still kissing you and still loving you? You know you’re being silly, but you don’t care.)

“Go to sleep,” he says crossly.

“I’m not taking orders from you,” you say teasingly.

“Go to sleep anyway,” he replies, and moves closer to you, putting his arm around you and burying his face in your shoulder. You roll your eyes: the git may be noble, but he snores something terrible.

*