This Way
She rested her palms on either side of his face. Water clung to him, beading against his slightly tanned and heavily freckled skin. Firm and battered muscle clenched beneath as her feather light fingers painted goosebumps across and down his neck, halting when they reached his shoulders. Eyes paused amidst the caress of their gazing duet to meet somewhere in the middle, emotions stretching too wide for this tiny motel bathroom, walls groaning as she touched his nose with her own.
"What can we do?" she whispered, breath trembling against his lips. He shook his head.
Her bath robe fell slack, a column of skin revealed from neck to navel, and he dipped his head to slide his lips across her jaw and down.
The ticking of his watch on the bathroom counter seemed to echo off the tile walls and floor, a constant reminder.
She touched every fresh, new scar, every unfamiliar scratch across his body, a body she'd once memorized. Her nails raked through his hair, against his sensitive scalp, and he squeezed her close as he shivered, bodies gathered in a heap against the porcelain of the antique tub behind them.
"Please, don't go again," she begged, and somewhere beneath the knowledge shared between them that her words were useless, there lived a particle of hope.
"Do you want them to kill me?" he joked, regret pooling in the pit of his stomach before he'd even felt her reaction, body tense as she held her breath.
"Every time you go," she began, voice so light and soft that he had to press his ear down against her lips so he wouldn't miss a word, "I'm so afraid it's for the last time, that I'll never watch you walk away from me again. That it's the last time I'll ever see you."
He bit his lip as he pressed his cheek to her forehead, sliding tired lids down over his sore eyes.
"Hermione... I can't," he started, smoothing down her hair with a gentle hand. "I can't. I can't leave you."
She sobbed out her next breath.
"Not for good. Don't say that. Don't," he pleaded, fingers knotted in her still shower-damp curls.
"I'm being irrational," she sniffed, lifting her head to look into his eyes, legs curled uncomfortably beneath her, ankles digging into the tile painfully.
He framed her face with his hands now, pads of callused thumbs against the smoothest skin he'd ever imagined.
"Come with me," she said, leaning briefly into his perfect touch before taking his hand from her cheek and lacing their fingers together as she stood before him, her bath robe now a useless article draped haphazardly over her naked body.
"Where?' he sighed as he stood with her, boxers clinging to his skin, water still dripping down his torso and thighs as his body dragged itself into her warmth, chest an agonizing inch from hers as he tilted his head to keep his eyes locked with hers.
"This way," she said, tugging him backwards, pulling him into her before she turned to lead him through the door.
A large bed sat untucked and cold in the center of the faintly glowing bedroom. As she reached the foot of the bed, she let go of his hand to shrug her shoulders, terrycloth pooling on the rug at her feet. And he stopped to slowly remember each inch of her velvety skin, across the bones and muscles visible along her back as she walked.
His mind drew a blank, a world encompassed and somehow completely filled with only her. The edges were creased with the strain of fourteen months apart… and who knew how many more yet to come. If he could have only forgotten to remember the details, left them at the door when he'd walked through to meet her here tonight. But they remained, like so many of his scars, the old and the new. Ever present. Ever growing. And no future beyond the eternity of the chase.
If they caught him… what then?
"Ron…" she whispered, and he knew before she explained. He knew what it was that she'd found by the tightness through her shoulders, body still turned away from his, head bent as she made her discovery.
"No," he whispered, stepping into her, wrapping his arms protectively around her waist, as if he could make her forget all the things he never could. That he wasn't free.
She was shaking in his arms as he dropped his head, pressing his cheek tightly to the back of her head.
He wasn't ready to see it.
But that small hope, the desperate, illogical hope from earlier… he knew how quickly it could fade, how easy it was to remember the truth. And she was back to that place, the place where optimistic words could not break through, where no matter how many 'alrights' were spoken, not a single one of them would ever truly be real.
It's not going to be alright.
Her fist clenched around the envelope she'd found on top of their mattress, crushing the contents within her fierce grasp, though she could not unwrite the words that waited inside, the ones they already knew by heart.
So many directions and futures reduced to a demand, not a request.
And he finally pulled back from her, startled to feel so many tears already drying down both of his cheeks. He reached around her and took the letter from her white-knuckled hand, ripping it open as he swallowed thickly in a pointless attempt to clear the lump from his throat.
It wasn't dread. That could only come when you didn't know, only feared.
And he knew.
This way, she'd said. The only time in his life when a small piece of him hadn't died hearing those two little words together.
He read the letter, typeset words he'd recalled in his nightmares…
Ron Weasley... This way. Follow me.
She pressed her face to his shoulder, eyelashes tickling his skin as his heart beat out of his chest.
"Don't forget me," she whispered.
And he turned her further into him, crushing her lips with his own as the parchment in his hand fluttered silently to the floor.
A/N: So, I wrote this in twenty minutes or so just now... the idea just hit me while I was brushing my teeth for bed. It's a bit mysterious, but I do have a full idea of what's happening and could maybe be convinced to write it all out... in 2014 when all my other stories are completed! For now, this is just a glimpse, a little ficlet of angst. I hope you enjoyed it!