a/n: This is for the first round of the 2013 Summer Fanfiction Olympics being run by colorful swirls. Hope you enjoy!
prompts used: water, never, circle, tide, salt, August 13 2003
disclaimer: Of course, I don't own Harry Potter or anything else you may recognise here.

pour a little salt
harry + ginny

Wednesday, 13th August 2003

Five years on. The anniversary's been and gone, but the whole year is a reminder of the events of the Battle of Hogwarts. Harry had assumed – naïvely, he now realises – that everything would fall into place once the final battle had taken place; once Voldemort was gone.

It hasn't.

Ron and Hermione are living together. He knows they argue sometimes, but it's impossible not to see how in love they are. They're his best friends, and he's happy for them, honestly. It's just hard. It's hard to see them so blissful when he isn't, and doesn't know why. Every night, Ron's words echo in his dreams. I'm going to propose to her, Harry.

Four days until they become engaged. It's become a game of numbers – five years since, four days until. When did his life get so monotonous?

Of course she'll say yes. Everyone can tell she's just waiting for the question. They fit all the clichés, they really do. In a way, Harry's surprised it didn't happen earlier. He supposes they were all a little preoccupied, really, what with being on the hunt for horcruxes and evil wizards.

Maybe if they had got together earlier, they wouldn't have lasted. They'd have fizzled out like his and Ginny's relationship. It was only six months after the battle that they came to the difficult, but mutual decision that life together wasn't working.

There you go, he thinks, you can count with these figures. Four days until everything changes. Five years since everything changed. Six months before everything broke.

He debates speaking to her. It wouldn't make a difference – of course it wouldn't, she's been with Seamus for two years now. At first, Harry thought Dean would be annoyed, but apparently everyone else his age had blown off Hogwarts relationships as inconsequential. (Was he inconsequential?) Lavender was annoyed. Funny, how the annoying become the annoyed. She was actually quite nice, Lavender Brown, since the incident with Fenrir Greyback. She'd changed – become quieter, humbler, less brash and egotistical. Maybe he should ask her out. Then the whole group would've cross-dated.

Harry laughed hollowly. He was supposed to be happier than this.

/

"I'm going out, Seamus!" Ginny calls. He's not home, she knows, but she wishes he could be. It feels like he's always at work. She talks to him when he's out, in the knowledge that conversations have to be at least two-way, so maybe he'll just reappear when she starts talking; Apparate in as though he can sense her voice. He never does.

She grabs her bag and concentrates on the back entrance of the regional swimming pool. It's always deserted, so it's entirely safe to Apparate to. She finds herself swimming much more often nowadays. Quidditch practices can't take up the whole day, even at professional level, especially not during the off-season. She needs something to do, and swimming burns off the energy that would otherwise go to waste.

Ginny looks around the back end, amongst the dustbins and skips, checking nobody's seen her. The area's all clear.

She walks to the front and into the reception, waving her membership card at the receptionist and being directed straight on into the changing rooms.

As she pulls out her prim black swimming costume in the cramped cubicle, she wonders how long it's been since she wore a bikini. Her mind automatically goes back to Greece, two perfect weeks in the summer of 1998 with Harry Potter. She remembers the way his lips felt on hers like muscle memory, the way her palm slid perfectly into his. Seamus has never felt that way.

Five years on. Ginny realises it with a jolt – it's been five years since she broke up with Harry. It's still fresh in her memory, like an open wound. It was the right thing to do, but he was her first love and it was one of the hardest things she's done to let him go. I am happy with Seamus. She repeats it like a mantra, but a tiny part of her brain doesn't really believe it.

She dives in at the deep end, the way she always does it – in the pool and in life. Ginny is a natural risk taker, a born Gryffindor. Just like Harry. Seamus is a Gryffindor too, of course, but he isn't brave in the same way. Of course, he fought for his school and his house and his life in the battle, but he doesn't seek danger. She hasn't felt the rush of adrenaline of doing something completely reckless for a very long time, and she thinks that's due to letting Harry go.

She swims, and she thinks. The water is cool and chlorinated and when she comes up for air her hair smooths down her back, her body becoming as hydrodynamic as it can.

Ginny is nearly relaxed, but she can't shake Harry from her head. Something about the thought process that was triggered by a simple wonder has swallowed her. A single thought continues to resurface in her mind: why on earth would she let the Chosen One go?

Wednesday, 20th August 2003

Something about August makes Harry nostalgic. The excitement of going back to Hogwarts ingrained deep in him, probably, part of his fundamental persona. He's become obsessed with anniversaries, in the last week or so, but there aren't really any around this time.

It's the twentieth, though. Dobby died on the twentieth. Not August – March – but it's still an important number. Harry thinks about Dobby every day. He thinks that his death was the worst injustice of that year. It sounds horrible – he doesn't admit it to anyone, because the responses would undoubtedly be, "What about Fred?" "What about Remus and Tonks?" "What about Colin Creevey?" and a thousand others who died valiantly in battle. But Dobby didn't fight. Dobby didn't lay a finger on anyone, and he died unnecessarily in the name of friendship. Harry thinks that is possibly the saddest thing he's heard.

So it is on this day that he decides to visit the beach where Dobby died. The beach behind Shell Cottage is private, so it won't be flooded with excited holidaymakers. Bill and Fleur are in France with Fleur's family for the summer, with their little Victoire. Harry loves her, but she's another reminder of the anniversary. All these dates – he's too young to have so many sad memories.

He Apparates early, and the morning tide is coming in. He has arrived almost on the exact spot. He can see the details of the stone, the slight erosion on the words carved five years earlier. Here lies Dobby, a free elf.

The grave isn't perfect, and Harry is glad. He deliberately made it like that. Dobby wouldn't want them to have cast a spell on his body. He would've wanted his death to be like his life – defined by his friendships. Harry closes his eyes and it's like returning to the same spot in 1998.

He can remember Luna's eyes like they are in front of him now, and they are kind and sweet and sad, but they aren't Ginny's. The feeling comes back to him, stronger than ever – in that moment, he had wished for her and she hadn't been there.

It is this memory that tells Harry Potter he is in love with Ginny Weasley.

/

It's happened so quickly. One minute Ginny is swimming, and the memories of her time with Harry are flooding back to her, and the next she's leaving Seamus.

Things were tense for a few days after the thirteenth, but neither of them really knew why. They just weren't clicking the way they used to. Seamus wondered if it was because he was at work so much. Ginny pretended to herself that it was – and it was, partly – but something told her she was with the wrong person. She tried to ignore it but nothing could thaw the freeze between her and Seamus.

On the eighteenth, she caught Lavender's face in the embers of the fire. It wasn't a surprise, really; Seamus and Lavender had always flirted, way before he and Ginny started going out, and before she had any interest in Seamus, Ginny had assumed he would end up with Lavender. There was no reason why things should be different now – except, of course, the two year relationship with her. But wasn't the breakdown of that relationship her fault? She could hardly blame him for speaking to Lavender again when she couldn't rid her mind of Harry.

She tried to get mad. She shouted and packed her bags and hot, angry, salty tears spilled down her cheeks. They ended up lying, legs tangled together, in each other's arms. They both cried.

"I'm still going to leave," she said.

"I think that's probably for the best," he said.

And so she took her bags and hugged him and Apparated to Shell Cottage. Bill and Fleur wouldn't mind – they wouldn't be back for a week or two anyway, and she was just stopping over until she found somewhere permanent to stay, alone.

She arrives on the beach as the high tide is coming in. There is a body on the sand. She fights the urge to scream as it sits up. The man had just been asleep; probably awoken by the crack of her Apparition. It takes a moment or two before the two lone figures recognise each other. It takes a split second to collide into each other's arms.

Friday, 20th February 2004

"I am trying, Harry, but you're just not listening to me!"

"I'm listening, go ahead, then!"

"Do you have to be such a child?"

They'd been arguing like this for the best part of three days. They lay facing away from each other in their bed, they didn't speak except to argue. When she'd left for practice this morning, she hadn't said goodbye – an unprecedented level of coldness.

Harry sits down slowly as he realises something.

"What, was standing up to argue too much to ask? Are you too lazy even for that?" Ginny demands.

"It's our six month anniversary, Gin," he says.

"Is there some subtext I'm supposed to read into that?"

"Last time—last time we broke up, we'd been together six months," he says. She's slowly starting to get it. "Are we stuck like this? In a circle, never able to keep each other happy for longer than six months?"

She sits down.

"I love you, you know," she says.

"I love you, too," he says, "but … what's happening to us?"

She looks at him, making direct eye contact. After a few seconds, she leans in and kisses him, firmly, passionately.

"We are breaking the circle, that's what."

/

She takes him to the regional pool where she realised she loved him. They Apparate to the back entrance and walk round to the front.

They split up to change. When they meet again, Ginny is wearing a bikini.

"I've kind of gone off one-pieces," she says.

"You know, I've never been to this pool before," he says, "as long as I've lived here."

"After all this time?"

"Never."

They look at each other, silently counting down. They jump into the deep end, and together they take the impact of the water.

a/n: Thank you for reading! Please leave a review, especially if you liked it enough to favourite. :)