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Chapter Three
Arrival

Harry was watching out the front hall window as he had been for nearly an hour. He was so anxious to see Ginny that he hadn’t been able to do anything else, though she wasn’t due for nearly fifteen minutes yet, even after all his waiting. Sure, it was nice to have the house all to himself, without the Dursleys constantly annoying him, but Harry had a sneaking suspicion that sharing the place with Ginny would be nothing like sharing the place with his horrible relatives. Even with the thought of chores marring the next week, Harry knew that he would never be happier here then when Ginny was with him.
For the next few minutes, Harry allowed himself to daydream about the girl he loved, and he thanked his lucky stars that he had found a book that had enabled him to learn Occlumency a lot better then when Snape had taught him. Though he had asked Hermione to try her hand at Legilimency in hopes that she would be able to test his barriers the next time he saw her, Harry had also studied from his book. He didn’t want his thoughts of Ginny to be unprotected from Voldemort for any longer than they absolutely had to be, but Harry didn’t want to make Hermione learn both kinds of difficult magic any faster than she had too. Harry figured that he had improved significantly, if only because he had actually been willing to practice this time around, but he still would feel easier when he had someone testing his defences.
Suddenly a brief flash of purple and the tingling sense of magic in the air caught Harry’s attention, and he looked up to see a gorgeous redhead looking up at the house. Ginny was probably checking the house number, trying to find number four. Harry was up and to the door in seconds, opening it before Ginny was even half way up the garden path. “Ginny!” he called, his heart jumping in his chest. A half-crazy grin of pure joy lit his face, and a matching expression appeared on Ginny’s.
“Harry!” she responded, running to hug him. The two quickly slipped into the house, and then they kissed.
Staring into his deep emerald eyes, Ginny melted into him. They stood a long while, entwined in each other, tongues clashing. When they finally pulled their mouths apart, Ginny rested her head on Harry’s shoulder. “So, you want something to eat or drink?” Harry offered, stroking her sparkling red hair, not sure if he would even be willing to let her go long enough to get either of them so much as a snack even if they were both starving to death.
“Sure,” replied Ginny, who was extremely hungry because she had been to excited to eat properly ever since her plan to come to Harry’s place for the week had been approved. The pair linked hands and went into the kitchen, walking so closely together that they nearly tripped over each other’s feet.
“Alright. Well, I doubt the Dursleys left me much, but I think there is probably some disgusting diet foods and maybe some sugarless fruit juices,” Harry told Ginny, crossing to the fridge. He opened the modern appliance to reveal just what he had predicted: very little.
“Water is fine with me,” Ginny said with a smile, masking the annoyance she felt towards people who would leave their own nephew to starve for a week. They couldn’t even have expected him to order in because Ginny knew that the Dursleys thought Harry was completely penniless.
“What the lady wants, she gets,” Harry said with an answering smile. He poured two glasses, and handed one to Ginny. “I thought I’d warn you right off, my uncle left a list of chores for me while they were gone. Unfortunately, I had better do them at some point.”
“No problem. How many times have you de-gnombed our garden? I plan to pay you back this week,” Ginny said with much more genuine smile, thinking of the times that she had watched him from her bedroom window as he had helped her brothers rid the garden of the pests.
“Totally not going to happen. They’re my chores, and I’ll do them. Now,” Harry said firmly, “Do you want to sit down?”
“Sure,” Ginny replied, silently promising herself that she would make sure to help Harry if she had to do his chores for him while he slept and pretend that house-elves had broken in during the night and done it.
“Okay, where?” asked Harry, “Maybe in here, or maybe the living room if you want…”
“Why not the living room?” asked Ginny, thinking of snuggling with Harry on a comfy couch.
“Okay,” Harry said with a smile that seemed slightly faked to Ginny for no reason she could think of.
The pair went into the fancy room, and to Ginny’s surprise, Harry sat across from her instead of beside her on the couch as she had hoped. They sat in silence for long moments, and things became awkward quickly. Ginny was confused. There were never awkward moments when she was with Harry, they just didn’t happen. Because of that, Ginny was totally unprepared to work through it, and so the pair sat. Harry was visibly uncomfortable, and Ginny just couldn’t understand why.
“Are you alright, Harry?” asked Ginny finally, after long minutes of awkwardly sitting across from him.
“Er, yeah,” he said, gulping his water quickly, and glancing around a bit nervously.
Ginny followed Harry’s sporadic gaze for a moment before she suddenly realized what was bothering him so much. It was the room they were in. There wasn’t one picture of him, and millions of his cousin and his aunt and uncle. The room was meticulously neat, and it felt as though Harry wasn’t even familiar with it. “Harry, do you want to go some where else?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said in relief so complete that it nearly hurt. “How bout my room, or the kitchen?”
So it wasn’t a case of Harry not being at home in his aunt’s house. It was as though he wasn’t supposed to be in this room, as though it had been off limits. Ginny wondered if the only two rooms Harry felt at ease in were the kitchen and his room. If so, why those two? One would think that the kitchen was likely where he spent the most time with the Dursleys, and Ginny would have thought that that would have filled it with bad memories for Harry if any room was. There seemed to be much more to the mystery of Harry’s relationship with his only living relatives than she had ever realised before…
“Why not the kitchen. I’m nearly done my water, and we can leave our glasses there when we’re done,” Ginny suggested. Harry leaped up and scarcely waited for Ginny to rise before he left the room.
“Do you want a snack?” he asked, moving towards the cupboards as Ginny sat at the kitchen table.
“Sure,” Ginny agreed, mostly because Harry seemed to want to make her one, not because the fridge full of wilted lettuce had looked very appealing earlier.
“How about an omelette?” he asked.
“Can you cook that?” she asked, a little taken aback. None of her brothers would have dreamed of making much more than a sandwich.
“Sure, I can. In fact,” said Harry as he pulled things from the fridge and cupboards, “That’s about all I can think of making with all this rabbit food.”
“What’s with all the diet food?” asked Ginny curiously, “Do they think you need to lose weight?”
“If you’d ever seen my cousin, you wouldn’t ask,” Harry told her with a bitter smile. “For the past two summers, I haven’t eaten much here besides grapefruit and stale sweets.”
“That sucks,” Ginny said, liking the Dursleys even less, though she would have sworn that that wasn’t possible.
“Yeah, well, I always got to eat your mother’s cooking, except the summer before my third year. Then I ate at the Leaky Caldron or some place in Diagon Alley. Of the two, I have to say your mother’s food is better, if only because I could have as much as I wanted,” Harry said, his back to her as her cooked the omelettes, “And usually even more than that.”
“She’s good about food, that’s for sure,” Ginny agreed, not missing the fact that the Dursleys obviously limited how much he ate of even the bits of carrots and whatever else the family dined on.
“Here you are, love,” said Harry, putting a plate before her.
Ginny took a bite, not expecting much, and deciding that she should probably cook for him this week. She would get as many good meals into him as was possible in the next week. Ginny didn’t even realise how like her mother that intention made her. Instead, the omelette was so good that she decided that he should cook instead. “This is so good!” she exclaimed, eating another hot mouthful.
“Yeah, well, practice makes perfect,” said Harry with a wry grin.
“You must have had a lot of practice then!” she praised him in between bites, not really thinking about what she said.
“Every day of my life from the time I could see over the stove until September of the year I turned eleven, plus a lot of summers after that,” Harry told her. “Anyway, I think that we’ll need a trip to the grocery in order to survive the week. I have some pasties and things from the train, but I won’t subject you to those.”
“Sounds good, but where do we get muggle money?” asked Ginny, who was rather troubled that he had been expected to cook for his relatives when he was so young.
With a hard frown, Harry replied, “I know where my cousin stashes the money he and his gang take from the neighbour hood kids. I don’t feel the least bit bad using some of it to feed us.”
“Won’t he notice?” asked Ginny, worried that her presence would cause Harry problems with his cousin when he returned.
“Nah, Dudley’s not good with numbers, he’ll just think he miscounted before, if he even bothers to look close enough,” Harry said, his scowl thickening, “He doesn’t need the money they take, they just do it because they can.”
“Then to the market we go,” Ginny said, glad that the nervous tension had been left behind in the living room, and sure that the rest of her visit would probably be spent in the two rooms Harry felt comfortable in. Still, that gladness was tinged by sadness at the thought that it was necessary for Harry’s comfort that he stay out of most of the other rooms in the house. Ginny decided to just focus on being with Harry for the week though, in whatever room he wanted to be in.
And the fact that she would be spending so much time in Harry’s bedroom didn’t worry her in the least…