April 1: Smile
Day 1 of April Hinny microfics! @hinnymicrofic
He’s happier this year.
Of course, the bar for such a thing isn’t terribly difficult to clear, given how bloody miserable Harry had been the year before, but still. He is. Happier.
She’d mentioned it to Dean once, in passing, and regretted it immediately. He’d asked her probing questions like what do you mean and why do you mention it and she couldn’t give him proper answers, especially when the question he really wanted the answer to was why did you notice.
“Forget it,” she had snapped, only he didn’t and neither did she.
He jokes more easily, in the Common Room, at meals, during Quidditch practice. With her. They’d always found the same things funny; she’d clung to that when she was stupid and eleven.
Now that she’s stupid and fifteen, it clings to her instead. Her eyes seek him out whenever Ron says something ridiculous, when Hermione recommends different colored ink to color-code her notes, when Cormac McLaggen swaggers by. They share a look that asks did you see that and how could I not and she soon realizes that the world is twice as funny with a private audience of two.
“--you should really finish that essay, Harry, you’re already behind from the hospital wing and–”
“Should I?” Harry says mildly, barely looking up from clipping the twigs off his broomstick. “Snape is in mourning, he won’t have the time to grade essays.”
Hermione gives him an unimpressed sort of look. “In mourning?”
“Yep,” Harry says with a snip of his scissors. “He paid off McLaggen to murder me, he’ll be sulking that I only cracked my skull.”
Ginny snorts into her tea, and Harry meets her eye with a smirk that sends her stomach into an inappropriate freefall.
Zacharias Smith pays an unwelcome visit to the Gryffindor table at dinner to gloat about Gryffindor’s defeat. Harry clenches his jaw, and Ginny pretends that isn’t the reason that she shouts, “Oi, Smith. Perhaps we can plant McLaggen on the pitch for all of your matches, because maiming the other team is the only way you’ll catch the snitch on your own.”
Smith retorts something stupid, and Ginny rolls her eyes and says, “Go gloat at your own table before I hex you.”
Harry meets her eye and they exchange that little smile, what a git and that was good and his jaw isn’t clenched anymore.
“What a git,” Dean says, and Ginny nods, feeling inexplicably irritated by the comment. She’d already said that, except she hadn’t. Not out loud, and not to him.
Harry catches her eye again across the table, and the corners of his lips twitch, and so do hers.
It’s the first time she feels a sharp stab of guilt. Because she’s stupid and fifteen and he’s happier this year and she knows what he’s thinking without words.
And when something makes her laugh she doesn’t look for Dean. She looks for a flash of green and a private little smile that says it’s only funny when you think so, too.
