Ginniversary Drabble 9
Prompt: B1 - You sort of start to believe anything's possible if you've got enough nerve.
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It had been an exceptionally long morning. Not, as Harry would have preferred, because of any threat posed by a dark wizard, but because of the sheer amount of tremendously boring meetings he was expected to attend in his new position as the Deputy Head of the Auror Office.
His eyes flicked to the clock on the far wall of the stuffy meeting room he'd been sequestered in for the past hour. They were now two minutes over the allotted time to discuss the thrilling topic of the proper layout of risk assessments, and still there was no end in sight.
Harry stifled a yawn behind his hand. Across the table, Hermione was still scrawling furiously across her parchment; it was almost like being back in History of Magic.
Except he had never been rescued from History of Magic by a very sheepish looking trainee popping their head into the room and declaring, “sorry to interrupt, Mr Potter, but your wife is here, and she says she needs to speak to you.”
Hermione looked up sharply from her parchment, throwing him a questioning look across the table. Harry shrugged wordlessly, torn between utter delight at being saved from the drudgery of the meeting by an alternative as pleasant as Ginny, and concern that she'd apparently shown up, unplanned, in the middle of the day.
He wasted no further time excusing himself from the table and slipping out the door, where he immediately found Ginny awaiting him in the corridor beyond.
“Sorry,” Jenkins, the trainee, said. “I told her I'd fetch you, but she wouldn't wait at your desk.”
Ginny shook her head. “And I told you, I'd find him myself, if you'd just tell me where he was.”
In fairness to Jenkins, he only shrunk slightly under the weight of Ginny's accusatory glare. “I'm sorry, Mrs Potter, but as I said, I can't allow you to go wandering around the Ministry unescorted–”
“Well, I'm escorted now,” Ginny said sharply. Her hand slipped into Harry's, and he couldn't help but notice it was trembling slightly. “Consider the Ministry safe from the threat of an unsupervised Quidditch player.”
“Thanks, Jenkins,” Harry said in a slightly more amiable tone. “I've got it from here.”
A look of relief washed over Jenkins’ round face. He nodded his head sharply in acknowledgement of the dismissal, and then quickly took off down the corridor in the direction of the lifts.
“Are you alright?” Harry asked, now able to focus all of his attention on Ginny. Her hand was gripping his tightly, and her foot was tapping impatiently against the polished wood floor. “I think you might have made Jenkins cry.”
Only one side of her mouth curved into a smile, and even that quickly fell again. “Surely he's got to have more fortitude than that if he wants to be an Auror.”
“We usually start them off with something a little bit less intimidating than your temper.”
Her laugh was short; Harry suspected she'd given it over reluctantly. “Is there somewhere private nearby?” She asked. “I don't know this floor.”
They were on one of the lower levels, a rarely visited section of the Ministry that was, in Harry's opinion, a fitting location for the pointless meeting he'd just escaped.
He could take her back to the Auror Office, it was almost lunchtime; no doubt he'd be able to find a spare meeting room now, but he could feel nervous energy radiating off Ginny in waves, and he doubted she had the patience for the journey.
Moreover, Harry doubted he had the patience for the journey when every moment he spent in Ginny's mysteriously agitated presence was causing trepidation to rise more strongly within him.
“Come here,” he said decisively, pulling her a few steps down the hallway until he reached an innocuous wooden door. It opened to reveal a small, tidy broom closet.
Ginny hesitated for only a moment, casting him a doubtful look, before ultimately stepping inside. Harry followed her in, letting the door fall shut behind them with a soft click.
“Lumos.”
The light from his wand cast an ethereal glow over the tiny space, illuminating the stacked boxes of Magical Mess Remover, several ancient sweeping brooms, and Ginny's tense face.
Her hand tightened in Harry's; she drew a deep breath. “This is really not the appropriate place to tell you this.”
“Tell me what?” Her nervousness was infectious in the tiny broom cupboard; his stomach began to tie itself in knots.
“I probably should have thought of some clever way of doing it.”
His nerves seemed to tense beneath his skin. “Doing what?”
“I was going to tell you at home, but I couldn't wait that long, it was torture–”
“Gin, you're torturing me.”
“Right. Sorry.” She slid her free hand into the pocket of her robes with agonising slowness. When she removed it, she held a small glass bottle out to Harry.
He placed his wand on the stack of Mess Remover boxes, angling the ignited tip at the vial and illuminating the vibrant purple potion within.
“Purple for positive,” Ginny said, her voice unnaturally high.
“You're–” Harry didn't manage more than a single word; his mind was reeling, his brain had ceased functioning, and the only thing his instincts told him to do was pull Ginny closer.
He felt her breathe a sigh of relief against his lips, and then he was kissing her with such ferocity that neither of them could catch their breath.
The knots in Harry's stomach unwound, replaced by soaring elation that set his head spinning faster, and made clinging onto Ginny even more necessary than it usually was.
His elbow knocked into the stacked boxes beside him, sending them tumbling. His wand clattered across the floor.
Ginny broke apart from him. They were both laughing breathlessly.
“You're happy then?” She asked, her grin visible even in the dimness of the cupboard.
“Yeah,” Harry tried to frown, but his smile seemed to be permanently fixed to his face. “Did you think I wouldn't be?”
“I thought you might be a bit anxious,” she admitted, still smiling widely. “It's a bit of a daunting prospect… y'know, raising a child… making sure you don't mess it up.”
“True,” Harry agreed, though the scope of the task did not seem capable of penetrating his europhoria at the current moment. “But, you see, the thing about being married to Ginny Potter, is you sort of start to believe anything's possible if you've got enough nerve.”
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