Suggestion for a story : one shot version of AU muggle version where Harry is 31 and Ginny is 21 and they have one night stand .
What do you think?
Departures
She was twenty-one and going to London. He was thirty-one and going to Berlin. The flights were delayed, the wine was Spanish, and somewhere between the terminal and the hotel room she stopped trying not to think about his eyes.
*Not explicit*
The board said DELAYED in that flat, indifferent way that airports reserved for delivering bad news — no apology, no explanation, just the word sitting there in amber letters like it had always been inevitable.
Ginny Weasley stared at it for a full ten seconds, her duffel bag hanging off one shoulder, her press lanyard still around her neck even though the tournament had ended three days ago and she'd been too lazy to take it off. Then she said, very clearly, to no one in particular, "Absolutely not."
The man standing next to her — tall, dark-haired, glasses slightly crooked — didn't look up from his phone. "Afraid so."
"I wasn't talking to you."
"I know." He scrolled something, unhurried. "You were talking to the board. Which is also not going to help."
She turned to look at him properly then. He was older than her by a stretch — mid-thirties maybe, though something about the way he held himself made it hard to be sure. Not the kind of tired that came from the flight, but a settled, considered kind of stillness. Like he'd been in rooms much worse than a delayed terminal and had simply decided not to be bothered by them.
He had very green eyes behind his glasses. She noticed that immediately and then pointedly decided not to think about it.
"How long?" she asked.
He finally looked up. "Three hours minimum. Possibly overnight. There's a weather system over northern France."
"I'm going to London."
"I'm going to Berlin." He pocketed his phone. "Both of us are currently going nowhere."
***
His name was Harry.
She found this out eleven minutes later at the gate seating, when she'd pulled out her notebook to write up the last of her match notes — it was easier than thinking about how she was going to explain this delay to her editor, who was not technically her editor yet because she was technically still an unpaid intern, which meant the whole situation was even more depressing — and he'd sat down two seats over and then glanced at what she was writing.
"Football?" he asked.
"Sports journalism." She didn't look up. "Women's Under-23 qualifier. Italy versus Spain." She paused, then added, because she couldn't help it: "Spain won. Wrongly."
"Wrongly?"
"The ref was a disaster." She clicked her pen. "I have fifteen hundred words of evidence."
He made a sound that might have been a suppressed laugh. "Harry," he said, and held out his hand.
She looked at it, then at him. "You're introducing yourself to justify asking to read my notes, aren't you."
"Absolutely not." The corner of his mouth moved. "I'm introducing myself because we're going to be here for at least three hours and it seemed like the polite thing to do."
"Ginny." She shook his hand. Firm grip, slightly calloused across the palm in a way she noticed and then also decided not to think about. "And you can't read my notes. They're not edited yet."
"I wouldn't have asked."
"You would have eventually."
He looked at her for a moment with an expression she couldn't quite read — amused, maybe, but also something more attentive underneath it. "What's your outlet?"
"I'm an intern," she said, with the cheerfulness she'd been practicing, the kind that meant this doesn't bother me. "At a sports desk in London. Very glamorous. I flew economy and I'm pretty sure there's still someone else's pretzel in my bag."
"A sports journalist at a women's qualifier in Italy."
"I fought hard for this assignment." She finally capped her pen and looked at him. "What do you do?"
"Government work," he said.
Simple. Easy. The tone of a man who had said this sentence many times before and knew exactly how to make it sound like a complete answer.
"That's not a job," she said.
"It's a category."
"What category?"
"The boring kind." He smiled, and it transformed his whole face briefly — warm and genuine and then gone again, tucked back behind the composure. "Civil service. Lots of paperwork. Nothing worth a fifteen-hundred-word write-up."
She studied him. He met her gaze evenly. Something about the way he deflected was too smooth to be accidental — not rehearsed exactly, but practiced. Like a man who'd learned how to answer without answering so long ago it had become instinct.
She filed this away and let it go. She had six brothers. She knew when a person didn't want to be pushed.
"Right," she said. "Well. I have three hours and a dying phone battery. Tell me something interesting."
***
He did, as it turned out, have interesting things to say.
Not about himself — she noticed he redirected those questions with the quiet efficiency of someone who'd had training in it, though she wouldn't have been able to articulate why she thought training rather than just privacy. But he asked good questions, and he listened in that particular way that some people never learned, where his attention didn't drift at the edges, where he stayed with what she was saying rather than waiting for his turn.
She told him about Rome, about the stadium, about the Spanish midfielder who'd been absolutely robbed of a penalty call in the sixty-eighth minute.
He asked follow-up questions. Real ones. Not the polite kind.
She told him she'd dropped out of university two years ago — business management at Bristol, which she'd chosen for approximately the wrong reasons, including but not limited to following a boy who'd turned out to be tedious — and that her mother was still operating in a state of low-level grief about it. The way Molly Weasley grieved things was to mention them approximately once a week in a tone that suggested she was only barely keeping herself from bringing it up more often.
"She's not wrong that a degree would help," Ginny said. Not defensively, just honestly. "She's just wrong that it would help me. Or that I'd survive it. I am not built for sitting down."
"What are you built for?"
She thought about this. The terminal hummed around them. Someone's child ran past shrieking delightedly and then disappeared.
"Moving," she said. "Being in rooms where things are happening. Writing about them." She leaned back. "Watching people. What they do when the pressure's on and they think no one's taking notes."
His mouth curved. "And are you? Taking notes?"
"Always." She smiled at him. "Don't worry. You're off the record."
"I wasn't worried."
"You should be a little worried."
"Why?"
"I'm very observant."
He looked at her steadily. There was something in the green of his eyes that she kept coming back to without meaning to — not just the colour but the quality of his attention, the sense that he was also, in his own very different way, always watching. "I've noticed," he said.
***
The bar was her suggestion.
In her defense, it had been two and a half hours, her phone had died, and there were only so many gate announcements she could absorb before she started to feel like she was being slowly converted into an airport.
"One drink," she said. "You look like a scotch person."
He blinked. "That specific?"
"Neat, not on the rocks. You're not flashy enough for whisky sour but you're too composed for beer."
He stood up. "Scotch it is."
The bar was one of those airport ones that tried too hard — leather stools, low lighting, a menu in four languages — but it was quieter than the terminal and the stools were high enough that she could see the departures board from her seat, the DELAYED still burning amber across every London and Berlin flight like a shared punishment.
Harry ordered without looking at the menu — scotch, neat — and then glanced at her.
"Whatever's good from Spain," she said to the bartender, who produced something red and a little smoky that she immediately approved of. "See," she said to Harry. "Right country for the occasion."
"In memoriam of the wronged midfielder."
"Exactly." She raised her glass. "To Elena Morales, who deserved better from the referee."
He raised his. "Elena Morales."
They drank. The bar settled around them. She watched him from the corner of her eye — the way he held his glass, the way his shoulders had dropped a fraction since the terminal, the small readable signs of a person who was, under all that composure, actually tired.
"Godfather's," he said suddenly.
She looked at him.
He nodded at the Amex he'd set on the bar. "Before you ask. It's not mine."
She laughed, surprised. "I wasn't going to ask."
"You were thinking about asking."
"I was thinking about it," she allowed. "I'd decided it was rude."
"It's not rude. It's a reasonable question." He turned his glass. "My godfather is — generous. He made me add it to my wallet two years ago after I ended up stuck somewhere with no cash and had a bad night because of it. He said I wasn't to be proud about it."
"Is he right about most things?"
Harry considered this with what seemed like genuine thought. "Almost all of them. It's occasionally annoying."
"What's his name?"
"Sirius." A flicker of something fond, uncomplicated.
"Interesting name. Atleast than simple 'Harry'."
Harry chuckles warmly "He has the energy of a man who peaked at nineteen and has been dining out on it for thirty years."
She laughed, properly this time, and he watched her laugh with that attentive look she was starting to recognize — not performative, not flattering, just real. A person who found something genuinely interesting and looked at it.
She told him about her brothers. This was a subject she could get hours out of, and the wine was good, and he was easy to talk to in the way that some people just were — like there was no current to swim against, like she could say whatever came to her and it would just be received without judgment.
Bill, the eldest, living in France with his French wife, working in finance of some kind that Ginny had never fully understood. The kind of calm, competent older sibling who had somehow set the bar impossibly high without meaning to.
Charlie in Romania. Dragons, she said, and watched Harry's face do the very gratifying thing where it shifted into something that wasn't quite disbelief but was trying to decide.
"Animal conservation," she clarified. "Reptiles. But he'd prefer if you thought it was dragons. He has the same energy as someone who definitely told that story differently at school."
"And the others?"
"Fred and George." She smiled, and it was the particular smile she always got when she thought about them — complicated, delighted. "They have a joke shop. In London, actually. It does obscenely well. My mother still sometimes looks at it like she's waiting for it to fail, and every month it doesn't, she adds it to the list of things she was wrong about and refuses to discuss."
"And Ron?"
"Trying to become a police officer." She swirled her glass. "He's on his second attempt at the exam. He'll get there. He's stubborn as anything, always has been. Also — and I say this with love — he's a disaster, but a well-meaning one, which I think is the main requirement for law enforcement anyway."
Harry smiled. "And then there's you."
"And then there's me." She set her glass down. "The dropout. The disappointment."
"You don't sound disappointed in yourself."
"I'm not." Simply, without performance. "I'm in Italy. I watched a football match. I'm writing about it." She spread her hands. "I'll be broke for the next three years minimum, and Mum will ring every Sunday to check if I've reconsidered going back, and I'll say no, and we'll have a slightly tense conversation, and then she'll ask if I'm eating properly." She picked up her glass again. "And I'm okay with all of it."
He looked at her for a moment in that way he had, steady and full.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing." He took a sip of his scotch. "You're just — you know yourself very well for twenty-one."
"How old are you?"
"Thirty-one."
She raised her eyebrows. "And do you know yourself?"
Something shifted in his face, brief and complicated, like a door opening and then immediately deciding to stay closed. "Most days," he said. "Some days I'm still working on it."
She wanted to ask what those days looked like, but she'd learned over the course of the last two hours that certain things he said were openings and certain things were endings, and this was an ending. So she let it sit.
"Another round?" he said.
She looked at him. Then at the Amex. "Sirius would be furious."
"Good."
***
The announcement came at half past nine.
All flights to London, Berlin, Paris, Frankfurt — delayed until tomorrow morning. The airline was apologetic. Vouchers would be available. Hotels had been arranged.
The terminal became briefly chaotic in the way that delayed passengers always became chaotic — the collective intake of breath, the scramble for phones, the low rumble of people informing other people of the inconvenience that had befallen them.
Ginny and Harry stood at the edge of it, their bar tab settled, her duffel over her shoulder.
"Well," she said.
"Well," he agreed.
They joined the queue at the airline desk, which moved with the sluggish inevitability of something staffed by three people managing four hundred passengers. Ginny was used to queues. She had grown up in a family of nine, and queuing was simply a fact of existence. She spent the time finishing her match notes on the back of a receipt because her phone was still dead, borrowing a pen from Harry without asking and handing it back without comment.
He took it back with the expression of someone who had never had a pen borrowed from them without asking before and had found it oddly fine.
She got her voucher. Room 412, twin beds, dinner included.
Harry stepped up to the desk. Spoke quietly. The woman at the desk looked apologetic and typed something and then said words that Ginny could see forming even before she heard them — I'm sorry, sir. We're fully booked.
He stepped back. The composure was intact but she'd been watching him long enough by now to see the very small, very controlled moment where he recalibrated.
"Full?" she said.
"Full."
She considered this. "Come on then."
"That's not necessary —"
"Harry." She looked at him patiently. "It's a twin room. There are two beds. You're not sleeping in the terminal."
"Ginny, we met six hours ago —"
"Seven. I've known people for less time and done worse things with them." She picked up her duffel. "Are you coming or not?"
He stood there for a moment — this tall, composed, quietly strange man with the Amex that wasn't his and the job that wasn't a job and the eyes that she was very much still not thinking about — and she watched him make a decision she couldn't quite read the full weight of.
"Thank you," he said. Quietly. Meaning it.
"Don't make it a thing," she said. "I'm going to need to borrow your phone charger anyway."
***
Room 412 was beige in the way that all airport hotels were beige, as if there was a single manufacturer supplying the entire industry with walls and carpet, but it was clean and it had a decent shower and a window that looked out onto the runways, the planes sitting still and enormous in the night.
Ginny came out of the bathroom in her travel clothes — she hadn't packed for a hotel stay — and found Harry standing at the window with his jacket off, his sleeves rolled up, looking out at the tarmac. Without the jacket he looked less constructed. Still composed, but the deliberate put-together quality of him was softened. She could see a scar on his forearm that she didn't ask about.
She stood next to him. The runways were lit up, all that amber and white, and the night beyond them was very dark.
"Do you travel a lot?" she asked. "For the government work."
"Constantly."
"Do you like it?"
He thought about this in the way he thought about everything, actually considering it rather than reaching for the first acceptable answer. "There are parts of it I like," he said. "The work itself, when it goes right. The problem-solving." A pause. "Less fond of the airports."
She laughed softly. "Ironic."
"Deeply." He turned to look at her, and they were standing closer than she'd registered, or maybe she'd registered it and not minded. "You should sleep. Early flight."
"Early flight," she agreed.
Neither of them moved.
She looked at him for a moment — this man she'd known for seven hours and change, who'd bought her wine on his godfather's Amex and listened to her talk about her brothers with genuine attention and made her laugh twice with things she hadn't seen coming. There was something very clean about him, under all the composure. Not uncomplicated, but honest, in the way of someone who had decided somewhere along the way that pretending was too much work.
She kissed him.
Not impulsively exactly — she didn't do things without knowing what she was doing — but without overthinking it. She'd wanted to since approximately the second scotch and she'd decided an hour ago that she probably would, and so she did.
He didn't step back. He didn't immediately kiss her back either. He went very still in the way she was coming to understand was his version of surprise, and she pulled back to look at him.
"Too much?" she said.
"I'm ten years older than you," he said.
"I know. I can do arithmetic."
"You barely know me."
"I know." She held his gaze. "Does it bother you?"
He looked at her — the question, the steady calm of it, the complete lack of apology. She watched him consider it for real, not perform consideration, actually think about what he wanted. It was one of the things she liked most about him, that he didn't reach for the easy answer.
"No," he said.
She smiled. "Good."
He kissed her then, and it wasn't tentative — nothing about him was tentative once he'd decided something — and she made a small, satisfied sound against his mouth because yes, she had thought so, and she was, as a rule, right about people.
***
The bed was one.
She had registered this immediately on entering the room — twin beds on the voucher, one queen in the room, airline hotel booking systems being what they were — and had made a decision not to mention it, and then had kissed him, and so the mention was no longer necessary.
He was careful with her in a way that she found unexpectedly moving — not cautious or distant, but careful, the way someone was when they understood that a thing mattered. He paid attention with the same quality he paid attention to everything, which meant that when she laughed at something he looked delighted, and when she pulled him back by the collar she felt him smile against her jaw.
She told him at some point — after, tangled in the beige duvet with the runways still visible through the gap in the curtains — that he was not what she'd expected from a man who worked in civil service.
"What did you expect?"
"Less interesting." She stretched. "More PowerPoint."
"I do a lot of PowerPoint," he said, and she laughed, and he turned his head to look at her with that expression she hadn't found a name for yet, the one that was warm and attentive and private.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing." He looked back at the ceiling. "Go to sleep."
She did, eventually. She fell asleep to the sound of his breathing and the distant low hum of an airport that never fully went quiet, and did not dream.
***
In the morning he was already dressed when she woke up.
She watched him from the pillow — half-awake, the early grey light coming through the curtains, his jacket back on, his passport in hand. The composure was back, fully assembled, but he didn't look different exactly. Just himself. Like the night had happened and he'd put it somewhere it could stay, intact.
He looked over and saw her watching.
"First boarding call," he said. "Berlin."
She sat up. "Mine's in an hour."
He nodded. The room was quiet. She thought about last night and the bar and Elena Morales and the way he'd listened and she thought there probably wasn't a word for what this was — not nothing, not something with a name, just the specific texture of a thing that happened exactly once.
She got up and pulled on her hoodie and he handed her a coffee — instant, from the room's small machine, not good — and she accepted it because the gesture mattered more than the quality.
"Your phone," he said, and handed it back to her.
"My phone," she agreed.
They stood in the middle of the beige room in the early morning and she thought about asking for his number and then didn't. Not because she was afraid of the answer, but because there was something right about leaving it here, in this particular airport hotel, contained and whole.
He seemed to think the same thing. Or maybe he had reasons she didn't know and wouldn't ask about.
"Safe flight," she said.
"You too." He paused at the door, and she watched him consider something and then decide to say it. "For what it's worth — and you don't need me to say this — you're going to be a very good journalist, Ginny."
She looked at him. The green eyes behind the slightly crooked glasses, the scar on his forearm, the borrowed Amex, the careful unspillable quality of him.
"I know," she said.
He smiled. Tucked it away. Opened the door.
She listened to his footsteps down the corridor until she couldn't anymore, and then she finished her terrible coffee and looked out the window at the runways, the planes beginning to move again, all of them going somewhere.
Oooo I could go long on this w/ quote and everything but my brain is tired so- shortish answer:
He gets her- he gets her humor, he gets her drive, he gets what makes her tick, he gets what upsets her- he just has an intrinsic understanding of her that few people do.
He’s strong. He can’t be bulldozed by her when she’s fierce and independent. he’s strong and can take her when she’s an emotional mess. For the most part, he can handle her when she feels she’s unhandle-able.
He supports her and admires her in the way she wants to be supported and admired. She can burn bright- in achievements, personality, emotions etc- and he’s there for it and doesn’t shy away from it. He’s not trying to bring her down, or infantilize her, or make her feel a damsel in distress- he admires her and wants her to be set up for success- be it him volleying up joke set ups for her, or cheering her on in quidditch of bouts of fierceness to protect others.
She enjoys his company. She finds him fun to hang out with, laughs with him, connect with him, and it’s just EASY. They get along well- there’s a lot of balance and understanding there.
She feels safe with him. She knows he’d never use or hurt her and that he’s a good man.
They share the same values on every level- and love the same sorts of people.
He’s the best person she knows, in her opinion. She respects him so deeply because of who he is and his values and kindness.
They have the same interests.
She thinks he’s adorable- While many people see Harry as ‘The Boy Who Lived’ she sees the woobily boy who is lost and upset when his friend have to go to prefect duty- and instead of thinking ‘what a baby’ she like him and enjoys helping him through stuff- because he’s good and deserves it. She goes soft for him.
They physically meld together so well- the intimacy between them is so easy and unthinking for both of them.
She thinks he’s hot as hell.
my mum is nagging me to take driving lessons, but i don't want to cos it's scary so I wrote this
Perfectly Fine
Harry bought a sensible car. He was going to be a sensible adult. He was absolutely not going to let his nineteen-year-old girlfriend drive it through Central London three weeks after buying a book about it. And yet. Here they are. On the A1. In traffic. Ginny is beaming. Harry has not let go of the door handle in forty minutes.
The book had been Ginny's idea.
The Complete British Driver's Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pass Your Theory and Practical Test with Confidence, by one Geoffrey M. Hartley, MIAM, whoever that was. She'd ordered it three weeks ago and Harry had watched her read the entire thing cover to cover in four days, which was frankly more academic effort than he'd seen from her in six years of Hogwarts combined. She'd highlighted passages. She'd made notes in the margins. She'd quizzed him on stopping distances at dinner until he could recite them in his sleep.
"Seventy-three metres at sixty miles per hour," he'd mumbled once at two in the morning, and she'd patted his head and said good boy like he was a very promising student.
He should have known this was all leading somewhere terrible.
"I'm ready," she said now, standing beside the Volkswagen Golf in the car park of a Tesco Extra in Islington with her hands on her hips and her chin up, looking like she was about to lead a Quidditch team into battle. She was wearing her hair back and she'd borrowed his aviator sunglasses and she looked, objectively, completely brilliant standing there.
She also had absolutely no business being behind the wheel of a car.
"Gin," Harry said. "We've talked about this."
"We have," she agreed pleasantly. "And I won."
"You didn't win, that's not — that's not how conversations work—"
"Harry." She looked at him with those brown eyes, warm and patient and utterly immovable, the way she looked when she'd already decided something and was simply waiting for the universe to catch up. "I have read that book twice. I know the stopping distances. I know what a box junction is. I know that you must not reverse further than is necessary, whatever that means. I am completely prepared."
Harry looked at his car. It was eleven days old. He'd driven it off the forecourt himself, still slightly amazed that he was the sort of person who could walk into a dealership and buy a car, that he had a bank account with enough money in it, that he was, in some technical sense, a functional adult. It was a very sensible car. Dark navy. Four doors. Good safety rating. He'd bought it because Teddy was three years old and you couldn't Apparate with a toddler, which he'd discovered the hard way — not by doing it, thank God, but by imagining it vividly enough to feel sick.
The car had done nothing wrong. It deserved better than this.
"What about," he tried, "we do the car park first? Just — driving around here? Getting used to the—"
"I've read about car parks. They're straightforward." She was already opening the driver's side door. "Come on, we're wasting daylight."
Harry stood very still for a moment and had a quiet conversation with himself. He was Harry Potter. He had faced Voldemort seven times, depending on how you counted. He had died, briefly, in a forest. He had flown a Hungarian Horntail and survived the bottom of a lake and walked through a wall of Fiendfyre and come out the other side.
He could survive his nineteen year old girlfriend driving a Volkswagen Golf through North London.
He got in the car.
***
Ginny adjusted the seat with the confidence of someone who had been driving for thirty years. She moved it forward two clicks, then back one, then decided the first position had been fine and moved it forward again. She tilted the steering wheel. She adjusted the mirrors with small, authoritative movements. She put both hands on the wheel at ten and two — that she definitely knew from the book, Harry had watched her memorize it — and sat up very straight.
"Right," she said. "Ignition."
"Gin, you need to—"
"Clutch in." She pressed the clutch. "Gear to neutral." She checked. "Turn the key."
The engine turned over and caught and Ginny's face broke into a smile of such pure delight that Harry almost forgot to be terrified.
"There we go," she said warmly, like the car was a horse she'd just gentled. "Hello."
"You're talking to the car."
"It's polite."
"Ginny—"
"Okay." She checked the mirrors in quick succession — left, middle, right, left — which was correct, Harry noticed despite himself, she had definitely read the book. "Handbrake off. First gear. Clutch up slowly to the biting point—"
The car kangarooed forward eight inches and stalled.
Silence.
"That," Ginny said carefully, "was a calibration."
"Absolutely," Harry said. His knuckles were already white.
She started the engine again. She found the biting point again — more carefully this time — and the Golf rolled forward in a manner that was, technically, driving. They crossed the car park at roughly four miles per hour. Harry breathed. This was fine. This was actually completely fine. They were in a car park. There was nothing to hit except a few trolley bays and a—
Ginny turned toward the exit.
"Wait—"
"I'm ready for the road," she said serenely.
"You've been driving for forty-five seconds!"
"And I've been reading about it for three weeks. It balances out."
It did not balance out. Harry was fairly certain that was not how any of this worked. He opened his mouth to say so and then they were at the exit of the car park and Ginny was peering left and right with great seriousness and then she pulled out into the road.
***
Holloway Road on a Saturday afternoon was, by any reasonable metric, not where you wanted to be with a first-time driver. It was busy without being gridlocked, which sounded ideal until you understood that it meant there were enough gaps for Ginny to feel confident and enough other cars for everything to be consistently, low-level, absolutely horrifying.
She was doing thirty-two miles per hour in a thirty zone.
Harry knew this because he could see the speedometer from the passenger seat and he had decided the speedometer was his primary relationship now. He and the speedometer. Together.
"You're at thirty-two," he said.
"I know."
"The limit is thirty."
"I know. I'm going with the flow of traffic." She said this with tremendous authority. He was almost certain she'd read it in the book. She was also, he noted, sitting about a foot and a half closer to the centre line than he'd have liked, though she was still technically in her lane, and she was holding the steering wheel with the focused grip of someone operating heavy machinery for the first time, which was, he supposed, accurate.
A bus pulled out ahead of them.
Harry grabbed the door handle.
Ginny braked smoothly, slotted in behind the bus without any particular drama, and glanced at him with an expression of mild amusement. "What are you doing?"
"Nothing."
"You're holding the door."
"I'm just — it's comfortable."
She looked back at the road. He did not let go of the door.
They followed the bus for two minutes, which were actually fine, which Harry chose not to trust. The bus stopped. Ginny stopped. Ginny checked her mirrors, indicated, pulled around the bus in a manoeuvre that was — objectively — competent. Harry made a sound in the back of his throat that he would later deny.
"That was perfectly fine," Ginny told him.
"I know."
"You made a noise."
"I didn't."
"You made a sort of—" she did an impression of the noise, which was unflattering and accurate.
"I was clearing my throat."
"Harry."
"I was."
She smiled and looked back at the road and Harry looked at the road too, because one of them absolutely had to, and thought very privately that if Geoffrey M. Hartley MIAM could see this he would have serious concerns.
***
The first roundabout happened at Nag's Head.
Harry had been dreading it since Highbury Corner. He'd watched it materialise at the end of the road like a prophecy, like something foretold, and he'd spent the preceding four hundred metres doing complex internal mathematics about when to say something and what to say and whether saying it would cause Ginny to dig in further on principle, which was a genuine risk.
"Roundabout," he said, going for informational rather than panicked.
"I can see it."
"You need to give way to traffic already on—"
"Give way to the right, yes, I know, it's literally Chapter Seven." She slowed as they approached, which was good. She checked right, which was good. She waited for a gap, which was — actually, that was all correct. Technically. Harry was almost calm.
She entered the roundabout.
She then proceeded to take the second exit, which required going around to the left, which meant she was on the roundabout for longer than a simple left would have been, and halfway through this process a Ford Focus appeared on her right that she definitely should have let go first, except that she'd already gone, and the Focus braked, and Ginny continued around the roundabout with total equanimity while Harry experienced several years off his life in about four seconds.
"That car," he managed.
"Had plenty of time."
"Gin, it braked for us—"
"It was fine." She emerged from the roundabout onto Seven Sisters Road with the air of someone who had conquered something. "I felt good about that."
Harry turned to look out the window. He needed a moment where Ginny couldn't see his face, which was doing things he couldn't control. He was thinking about the car. His eleven-day-old car. He was thinking about the fact that he had faced the Killing Curse twice and both times had felt marginally less like dying than this did, which was probably not statistically accurate but felt emotionally true.
He was also, and he hated himself for this, completely unable to ask her to stop, because the look on her face when the engine had first turned over — that absolute delight — sat in his chest like something warm, and he was twenty years old and completely done for, and he had been since he was sixteen, and that was just something he'd learned to live with.
He did, however, put his other hand on the dashboard.
***
"Left here," he said.
"I know."
"Your indicator."
"I was just about to—" she indicated. She turned left. The turn was slightly wide, which brought them closer to the oncoming lane than Harry's cardiovascular system required, but they were through it, and there was no traffic coming, and Ginny straightened up with a small satisfied nod. "There."
"The turn was a bit wide."
"Harry. I have been driving for—" she checked the clock on the dashboard "—twenty-three minutes."
"I know."
"And in those twenty-three minutes, have I hit anything?"
"No, but—"
"Have I gone the wrong way down a one-way street?"
"Not yet—"
"Have I—"
"Ginny." He pointed.
She braked. There was a red light ahead, which they stopped at with, he was furious to note, perfectly adequate following distance. Geoffrey M. Hartley MIAM would have had no complaints about the following distance.
"I'm doing brilliantly," Ginny said.
Harry pressed his lips together.
"You can say it," she offered.
"You're doing," he said carefully, "really well for a first time."
She glowed. It was physically visible. She actually sat up a little straighter. Harry thought about the Focus on the roundabout and said nothing and looked at the red light and waited for it to change and decided that loving Ginny Weasley was the single most cardiovascularly demanding thing he had ever done, and he chased dark wizards for a living.
The light went green.
Ginny stalled.
"That," she said immediately, "was the hill start. Hills require more revs."
"This road is completely flat."
"It's cambered."
***
By the time they reached Upper Street, Harry had developed a coping mechanism. He was watching everything as if through a sort of gauze, slightly removed from his own experience, the way he'd learned to watch Quidditch when the Snitch was nowhere and there was nothing to do but wait and take in the shape of things. He noted, academically: Ginny was genuinely getting better as they went. Her gear changes were smoother. Her lane position had improved. She'd checked her mirrors at every junction for the last ten minutes.
She was also, and this was the thing that made it so hard, so confident. Not reckless — she wasn't reckless, she was Ginny and Ginny was never reckless, she had her family's instinct for the real edges of things. She was just utterly, serenely convinced that she had this, and the gap between how she assessed the situation and how Harry assessed the situation was approximately as wide as the English Channel.
A cyclist appeared on his left.
Harry didn't make a sound. He was proud of this. He breathed through his nose and watched Ginny give the cyclist a full door's width of space, which was correct, she'd clearly retained that, and the cyclist went past and Ginny moved back left and Harry exhaled very slowly into the seat.
"There," Ginny said. "See? I gave him loads of room."
"You did," Harry agreed. "That was good."
"I read about cyclists. They're vulnerable road users."
"They are."
"I take my responsibilities to vulnerable road users very seriously."
Harry thought about the Ford Focus on the roundabout. "I know you do."
"Geoffrey says—"
"Please," Harry said, "do not quote Geoffrey at me while you're driving."
Ginny laughed. It was a real laugh, full and bright, and she glanced at him for just a second with her eyes crinkling, and Harry grabbed the dashboard because she'd glanced away from the road for a second while doing thirty in traffic, and also because he was twenty years old and completely lost.
***
They stopped at another red light and a man in a BMW pulled up alongside them and looked over with the expression of someone who had clocked a young woman in the driver's seat and was pre-emptively disappointed. Harry watched him look. Harry watched Ginny, who had not noticed, doing a perfectly reasonable check of her mirrors while stationary.
The light went green. The BMW moved off promptly.
Ginny stalled again.
"The clutch," Harry started.
"I know what the clutch is."
"You need to—"
"I know what the clutch is, Harry." She restarted the engine with a bit more force on the key than was strictly necessary. The BMW was now twenty metres ahead. Ginny found the biting point, moved off, and by the next block had caught back up to them and then overtaken them with a gear change that was, Harry noted involuntarily, actually quite smooth.
The BMW driver did not look over.
"Ha," said Ginny.
Harry looked at the ceiling of his eleven-day-old Volkswagen Golf and thought about all the choices he had made in his life that had brought him to this precise moment, and decided that, on balance, he wouldn't change most of them, even this one, even now.
He did keep his hand on the dashboard.
***
They were almost back. Harry could see this on the map in his head — they'd done a loop, he'd planned a loop, he wasn't an idiot — and they were three streets away from the Tesco Extra car park and his plan was to get back into that car park and never discuss any of this with anyone, specifically Ron, ever.
"You're going to need to turn right at the end," he said.
"Mm." She was checking her mirrors. Good. "Is it clear to move right a bit?"
Harry checked the side. "Yes, there's—" he stopped.
There was a gap. A very normal gap. In the traffic. About thirty metres long.
Ginny turned to him with a gleam in her eye.
"Don't," he said.
"It's a perfectly good gap."
"Ginny—"
"There's loads of time."
"There's really—"
She went.
The thing was, she was right. There was time. She made the gap, she completed the right turn, the oncoming car — which Harry's body had clocked as a missile but which was in fact a normal Audi doing twenty-five — slowed slightly and then continued and no one was in any real danger and the whole thing was completely fine.
Harry had left his stomach somewhere back on Upper Street.
"Perfect," Ginny said.
"You're going to give me a heart attack."
"You're twenty."
"Early onset."
She laughed again and it echoed in the car and they pulled into the Tesco Extra car park and Ginny navigated to an empty row and stopped the car and put it in neutral and applied the handbrake and turned off the engine in the correct sequence, which Harry noticed and slightly resented.
Then she turned to him, and she was luminous, she was absolute sunlight in his passenger seat, she was the most terrifying and wonderful person he'd ever met, and she said—
"I think I'm a natural."
Harry looked at her. He thought about the roundabout and the stalling and the gap on the right turn and the cyclist and Geoffrey M. Hartley MIAM and the eleven days he'd had this car and the at least forty-seven individual moments in the last hour in which he'd genuinely considered the possibility of his own death.
"Yeah," he said. "You really are."
She beamed.
He leaned across and kissed her once, briefly, because she was right there and still a bit flushed from concentrating and it was that or tell her the truth, which was that he'd been holding the door handle for the last forty minutes and his hand had actually gone slightly numb.
"Same time next week?" she asked.
"Sure," he said.
He was absolutely going to call his insurance company on Monday.
Hello, how are you? It is so good finding another Potterhead that is from the same nationality as mine , especially a veteran so tell me what was like being a fan during those times where even books were being released and how the fans from our nationality were reacting and living those times?
Helloooo!!
It’s always so good to find real Portuguese potterheads. They’re so rare
Back then, to be honest , I only properly started reading the books in 2003.
And the first film I watched was the third one, because that was the book that made me a fan. I quite liked the first book, wasn't too bothered about the second, but I absolutely adored the third. So it was only after that I started watching the films.
Back then, there were only two films out, and all the Potterheads were on tenterhooks, waiting for news about the third one. We didn't have big social media networks back then, so what we had were online forums, where fans would gather and share opinions, theories, fanfics, fanart, and all that jazz.
There was only one Portuguese forum, and (as it still is today) far too prim and proper, not really for crazy fans like me🤣🫣 So, I used to hang out on Brazilian and a few English and American forums. I started writing fanfics on Brazilian forums (in Brazilian Portuguese) after the fifth book came out. Made quite a few friends there.
At the time, there were theories that Ginny would end up with Draco (that was probably the strongest ship of all) or Neville, and that Harry would get together with Luna. There were also theories that Lupin would end up with Tonks (which actually happened), or with Sirius (which I always thought was as absurd as Ginny with Draco) or that Pettigrew would kill him with his silver hand.
We used to goi to Fnac at midnight, waiting for the books to be released. It was a proper event!
JKR used to do chats with fans, where she'd answer questions and curiosities, which have been completely forgotten by fans nowadays, like Voldemort being inspired by Hitler and the Slytherins being based on the Nazi party, or Lupin having a bit of a crush on Lily.
I remember people wanting her to carry on the series and hurry up writing the Deathly Hallows. They wouldn't leave her alone, always pressuring her. And she was absolutely knackered and a bit overwhelmed by all the changes her life had gone through in recent years. So, when the last book came out, a lot of people were disappointed (myself included), thinking she'd lost her touch with all the pressure and exhaustion.
I don’t know what more can I tell you, but this is what I can remember right now 😊
Rule: Make a poll with five of your all-time favourite characters and then tag five people to do the same. See which character is everyone's favourite.
Tagged by the lovely @no-i-can-not-shut-up thank you for tagging me in this fun tag game I appreciate it very much xx !
Harrypottertvshowthought’s favorite characters in no particular order:
Hermione Granger
Nymphadora Tonks
Harry Potter
Ron Weasley
Fleur Delacour
Voting ended onMay 24
Of course I had to go with the Harry Potter theme this time around because duh.
Not doing images because i’m pretty sure you all don’t need images to know who these characters are.
Runner ups/honorable mentions:
- The Weasley Twins Fred and George.
- Luna Lovegood.
- Lee Jordan.
I’m tagging randomly: @denmark-street @hboharrypotter @pussy-nefarious @be11avida @decadentdeath @furiosa-femininst along with anyone who I didn’t tag who wants to participate after seeing this come join the fun as well you are more than welcome to come along.
I can’t wait to see the results of the poll this should be fun and interesting to see lol yay 🥰👍
The poll results are in and it looks like Harry James Potter himself won. I’m honestly shocked because I’m so used to people overlooking him in the series compared to all the other characters but this makes me so happy I know that’s right.
Thank you all for voting and thank you again @no-i-can-not-shut-up for tagging me in the game. It was a lot of fun !
I think most people don't choose the main character because it is " too obvious " and if he wasn't the main character and with the same background he would be more loved and appreciated.
Back in the dinosaur era (also known as the 2000s), while reading the books for the first time, I had a theory that Remus Lupin was a Legilimens.
He always seemed to know what people were thinking before they even said anything.
Not long ago, I discovered that many people still have that theory.
Personally, I don’t think he actually was a Legilimens (although it’s an idea I’ll probably explore in a fanfic someday, because it genuinely makes sense), but he absolutely gives the impression that he knows everything.
And apparently I’m not alone in thinking that.
Iwan Rheon, who voiced Lupin in the full-cast audiobooks, once said, and I quote:
“Lupin always seems to show up and explain everything.”
And honestly? He does.
Which brings me back (once again) to how criminally underrated Remus is.
He is incredibly powerful.
In his very first scene in the books, he wakes up and immediately casts flames with his bare hands. Non-verbal magic. No wand.
Then he casts a Patronus without even shouting “Expecto Patronum”, casually jokes with a literal Dementor, and sends it away with:
“No one is hiding Sirius Black under their cloak. Now go.”
EXCUSE ME??? How did he handle the Dementor so well?
And let’s not forget: Dementors feed on your worst memories.
Remus had enough traumatic memories to fill several lifetimes: fear, pain, prejudice, isolation, extreme poverty, monthly torture since childhood, being treated as less than human…
And yet he seemed remarkably unaffected by the Dementor.
And what do you need to cast a Patronus? Happy memories.
Did he even have enough happy memories left to produce one so easily?
Sure, he could think of the Marauders days… except those memories would also bring James’s death, Sirius’s imprisonment, and Peter’s supposed death, crashing down with them.
And yet he still casts a Patronus effortlessly. Silently.
That says a lot.
So, let’s review:
- Remus went through absolute hell from early childhood and still managed to cast a Patronus and joke at a Dementor.
- He was highly skilled at non-verbal magic and wandless magic.
- He was so intelligent that he always seemed to know everything. Whenever Harry needed answers and Hermione couldn’t explain something, Lupin usually could.
And honestly? We’re told James and Sirius were the brilliant ones, but were they really more intelligent than him? Or was Remus simply trying not to draw attention to himself?
- He worked alongside Aurors and was often even put in leadership positions.
- During the battle in the Department of Mysteries, he was the only member of the Order besides Dumbledore to come out unharmed. Even Mad-Eye was taken down. Not Lupin.
- He survived:
1) a war,
2) monthly excruciating transformations since childhood,
3) poverty,
4) starvation,
5) depression,
6) dangerous missions,
7) isolation,
8) prejudice (to the point of not even being able to find paid work),
9) and life as both a soldier and a spy.
And according to Pottermore, the only reason Dolohov managed to kill him was because Remus had spent the previous months out of practice, focusing mainly on defensive magic to protect Tonks and Teddy.
So again: Why on earth is Remus Lupin so underestimated?
Ginny Weasley will be recast for Season 2 of the HBO #HarryPotter series!
Gracie Cochrane, who plays Ginny in Season 1, will not return for the second installment. Her family released a statement: "Due to unforeseen circumstances Gracie has made the challenging decision to step away from her role as Ginny Weasley after season one. Her time as part of the Harry Potter world has been truly wonderful."
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