This came to me during one of my MANY re-reads of Deathly Hallows. Hope you enjoy!
(And thank you so much to freshlymowngrassand on Tumblr for helping me out a bit with the terminology for tea making the British way! I hope I've tightened that bit up a little more now.)
I own nothing.
I watched as Harry looked over at her, smiling like he didn't have a care in the effing world before he went out for his watch - the tent flap whooshing softly closed behind him.
Which left just me and her. I know I'm staring, but I can't seem to stop. It's like my mind isn't even mine anymore. I'm on the back of the broomstick and someone else is steering.
She glances up at me, her eyes meeting mine for just long enough to make my heart skip and then they skim down to the chain around my neck before she turns toward the kitchen to busy herself with the pot for tea.
She can't look at you. You're a disappointment to her. Look at her avoid you - she's barely tolerating being in the same room alone with you.
I squeeze my eyes shut, but I can't scrub the thoughts from my head. They've spread through my heart and mind like the tentacles from those brains in the Department of Mysteries and I can't tear them out. They're part of me. Taunting me. Driving me mad.
She keeps her back to me, purposefully avoiding me, and it only eggs the thoughts on.
You knew she could never love you. She's always been too good for you. It shouldn't even hurt you - you've always known you weren't what she wanted.
But, it did hurt. It hurt so bleeding much as I stared at her back with her long, wild curls cascading down it and her capable hands adding sugar to mugs that I thought it could actually do me in right here in this cat piss smelling tent in the middle of Merlin-Knew-Where.
Leave it to a tosser like me to fall completely in love with the most perfectly unattainable woman in the entire wizarding world. The smartest, most beautiful, quickest, most loyal, most talented witch a bloke could ever hope for. It was so like me to want someone like her, someone I could never have. To not only want her, but to love her so bloody much that it made me feel like I was bleeding to death half the time.
She turned from the counter with a mug in her hand and made her way out of the tent flap, her eyes refusing to seek mine again as she made her way out. I could practically feel that sodding thing sitting against my chest glowing in victory.
Look at how she dotes on him. Like a lover. That's how a woman attends to the man she fancies. You're nothing to her. Second best. She's made him tea and practically carried it to him on a silver platter while she can't even bear looking at you.
I closed my eyes against the burning of the chain around my neck and the searing pain in my chest. Fuck, she was never mine,. She'd made it pretty clear during the whole Mclaggan business that I wasn't her type - but, this shit still hurt so damned bad. Thank god I hadn't gone to Slughorn's party with her...when I'd thought for maybe two seconds that she was asking me as more than a friend...when I'd let myself be a complete tit for those two seconds while I forgot that I wasn't a world class quidditch player.
Or the bloody Chosen One.
I'd never have been able to face her again if I'd actually gone through with going only to realize that she'd taken me because she felt sorry for me not being good enough to get a Slug Club invite.
She's always felt sorry for you. Poor, talentless, fool.
She bustled back inside, her impossibly lovely cheeks pink from the cold outside and she made her way back to the pot to fix herself a cup.
If my body survived this, if somehow You-Know-Who didn't manage to snuff me out, there was no way my heart was gonna make it. I was aware I wasn't the oldest bloke on earth, but in my entire life I'd loved exactly one person and it just hadn't changed as the years went on. If anything it had just gotten stronger. Deeper.
The certainty now that she could never love me too hollowed my heart out completely. I was empty. What good was I to them even, at this point? Just a shell of a person watching my girl pretend I'm not even here. Watching her get closer and closer to the bloke I'd come to think of as another brother.
You're slowing them down. What good have you been this entire time? You're moody and mean and incapable of any good theories. Half the time you were a burden so big that they couldn't even apparate because of you. They'd be so much better off without you. So much happier.
She turned then, a mug in her hand, and I lifted my eyes to watch her make her way to her bunk. Except, she didn't go that way. My weary eyes lifted to her face as I realized that she was headed straight for me and I'm sure she could see the confusion in them - despite how embarrassingly watery and red rimmed I knew they were.
Silently, she reached her arm out and it took me just a second to clear my sluggish mind enough to realize she was holding the mug out for me. She'd made me a cup. She hadn't forgotten me.
I lifted my arm to take it from her, the effort almost too much. It felt like my limbs were all buried in sand and it took every ounce of mental strength I had left just to raise it up.
Then my finger brushed hers as I took the mug from her hand, and a flash of something shot through me. It was so quick that it was almost over before it had started, but it had been there.
It was like a tiny patronus had raced from her skin through mine and a memory sprang to my mind from somewhere buried deep of the time we'd sat out by the black lake in fourth year when Harry and I weren't talking. We'd split a pasty that we'd brought down from the Great Hall and she'd quizzed me on the ingredients of an indigestion draught that she was sure Snape was going to quiz us on.
Her eyes had glittered with every answer I got right and it had struck me in that moment that I was fantasizing about reaching out to brush my fingers down her soft cheek. I thought my heart was going to beat out of my chest when I realized I'd not only been thinking about how it would feel to lean in and kiss my best friend- but that I'd been thinking about that very thing for months now.
It was the moment that I knew I felt something for her. I didn't know yet that it would be such deep love that it would eventually crush me. That I would lose sleep some nights dreaming of how she'd feel pressed against me with her hands in my hair or, as I got older, how she'd feel beneath me in my four poster with the curtains drawn.
She'd smiled, almost shyly, back at me in that moment and I'd wondered if maybe she could feel it too, could feel that the world as I knew it had just tilted on its axis.
"It's my turn."
I came back to the present with a snap at the sound of her voice, the happy vision disappearing as if a curtain had been yanked over it in my mind, and I met her dark eyes. She was looking calmly down at me, but her eyes...there was something in them. There was concern there, and fatigue too, but if I didn't absolutely know better I'd think that maybe there was...affection?
I took a sip of the tea, the hot and sweet of it seeping through my system in an attempt to comfort me. She'd made it just how I like it. Somehow knowing that she'd paid enough attention to me to know how I took my tea sparked a tiny bit of hope. Another voice, a softer, weaker one that seemed to stay mostly silent these days spoke up in my head.
She may not love you, not like you love her...but, she cares about you, mate. She gives a rat's ass what happens to you. That's not nothing.
It didn't take even half a second for the other, stronger voice to shout it down.
She pities you. She knows you can't handle the locket on your own. She's asking to wear it - to bear the burden - that she and Harry can handle so much better than you. You're pathetic and she knows it.
I yanked the necklace over my head and thrust it at her, tearing my eyes away from the warm, milk chocolate color of hers that I wanted nothing more than to lose myself in for the rest of my life.
She took it without a word and made her way over to her bunk. I felt my heart lighten a bit with every second it was away from my skin. I felt like I could breathe, like the hand that had been pressing against my chest had let up and I realized I never thanked her for the tea.
Getting up from the chair, I took another sip of the perfect brew she'd handed me and turned toward her. She'd curled into a tiny ball on her bunk, her eyes shut tight and the locket around her own neck.
I hated seeing it there with every cell in my body and I found myself walking toward her. She heard me approach and looked up, the affection and calm gone from her eyes and mistrust replacing them.
Was that thing poisoning her mind like it did mine? Was I just so weak that it only affected me and she was glaring at me like that now because I was such an insufferable arse all the time?
Either way, I was desperate to comfort her somehow. Leaning down, I grabbed her blanket and she watched me warily as I shook it out and then laid it gently over her. When I met her eyes again, they were as watery as I know mine had been just a few minutes ago and my heart sank.
I was hurting her. I had no idea if it was just my presence alone or my surliness lately or...dammit, I didn't really want to hope that it was anything more than that. All I knew was that I was hurting her and I had no effing clue how to make it stop.
"Thank you. For the tea." My voice sounded gravely to my ears and I realized it was the first thing I'd said in hours and hours.
She nodded once and I walked to my bunk, climbing in and staring at the bottom of Harry's above me. The voice in my head was silent now, but the words it had spoken to me cycled through my head in a constant loop.
She's over there with tears in her eyes because of you. You're making everything worse.
I ran my hands down my face and closed my eyes, willing myself to go to sleep if only to stop the thoughts. But, even as I drifted off, I couldn't escape.
If you truly loved her, you'd do what was best for her and for Harry. Stop standing in the way of their success and happiness. Just go.
I finally, silently, let the tears fall.