She loved him.
The realization had come as a shock, and yet it didn't. She'd known she had feelings for him for a long time. She'd always liked his teasing, more than she ought, and his words could hurt her more than anyone else's. She knew her feelings were returned when he held her at Dumbledore's funeral, and again when they danced at the wedding. Neither of them said anything about it, they just accepted it, and enjoyed this new comfort they could find in each other, in a simple touch, in a look. Harry had known it too, and perhaps it had been for him that they had never tried to make it something more, though he would never have said a word. Ron had been her rock, and perhaps she had been his, in this fumbling new kind of life on the run.
With the locket, everything had begun to go wrong. Ron changed, and maybe she did too, but when he wore that locket his change was so drastic that sometimes she wondered who he was, and if he had ever really cared for her, and if she had ever really cared for him. Her rock was gone, and she had never felt so alone. They circled each other, her and Ron and Harry, wary, close to breaking. She wanted to talk to him, to ask him what had changed, but they had never talked about it before. Perhaps she had imagined it all.
It was a stupid, stupid fight that made him leave, and it wasn't even hers. Perhaps that made it worse. Every accusation from Ron's mouth and every wild defence from Harry's was like the twist of a knife in her heart, and when he turned to her, with a kind of desperate demand, and asked her to go with him, she'd said no, without thinking, because he wouldn't really leave them, not Harry, not her.
His next words told her more than anything else he'd ever said. "I get it. You choose him."
She couldn't reach him fast enough, but she ran for the door anyway, screaming his name in anger, in desperation. He couldn't leave now. There was so much more to say.
As he spun to disapparate, she saw his face, and it was hard and set in anger and pain. And then he was gone.
The next weeks she barely remembered now. All she felt was anger at his stupidity, at his assumptions. Betrayal that he had left her alone. Pain because it turned out that he didn't care.
Feelings, even the worst, fade, and eventually they'd begun to accept the new arrangement. They continued the mission. But something was missing.
Some part of her knew that he was back when Harry woke her that night, looking happier than she'd seen him since the wedding. But her eyes were harder to convince, and it wasn't until she'd reached him with her fists that she believed he was real. There weren't words bad enough for what she wanted to say to him, so she'd let her frustrations come out in this childish way, feeling crude satisfaction at his spluttered protests and ashamed apologies, and at the same time taking in as much of him as she could: his long nose, his freckles, his hair, dripping wet on the floor of the tent. His blue eyes. His laugh, his voice. Things she'd tried to forget, things she'd honestly thought she'd never see again. It was that night she knew, as she crawled into bed, that she must really love him. Because under all the anger and hurt that his return renewed, for the first time since he'd left, she was going to bed happy.
It was hard to keep this happiness in check. She was determined to stay angry, to make sure he knew how terrible his actions had been. He was appropriately full of reproach, which made it harder to stay upset. He was also annoyingly cheery. His efforts to get back into her good books were so endearing that it was all she could do to hide the fact that it was working.
These games were silly, and it was all wrought open when they were caught by the Snatchers. He tried, and failed, to protect her, and she feared what they might do to him for his efforts. Amidst the cloudy pain she felt under Bellatrix' wand, she'd heard his voice screaming her name. She'd never asked him it that had been real. But she thought it was.
When she woke at Shell Cottage he was there. They didn't say much but there were tear streaks on his face and he held both her hands as she drifted in and out of consciousness. They were back to the beginning, but they were beyond that, too.
It was his idea to go to the Chamber of Secrets, him that opened the tunnel, him that turned to her, looking serious, and said, "Just remember, whatever you see, whatever you hear – it's not real."
She frowned, and looked at blue eyes, earnest but worried. What had he seen when he destroyed the locket? What had he heard? Suddenly she was afraid to have him there, afraid of what part of her might be revealed.
"Just keep looking at me," he'd said then, and he'd held up the cup. "Just remember that I am real, and- and that I came back to you."
It was this last statement that gave her the courage. She saw it all in the cup: his betrayal, his pain, the impossible nature of their task. But she tore her eyes from the cup and looked at him as she raised the stinking, yellow Basilisk fang.
And then the cup was gone, and he didn't say anything, but just held her as she cried all the tears she'd been holding back since he returned, and she finally understood what he must have gone through that night he'd destroyed the locket, the night she'd attacked him with her fists, the night she'd realized she loved him. And it was something of this realization that must have prompted her, at his mention of the house elves, to fly at him and kiss him like she did, regardless of where they were, of what was happening, even of Harry, standing there in bewilderment.
He was kissing her back and she would have stayed there with him forever if it wasn't for Harry.
"OI! There's a war going on here!"
Ron, looking quite as dazed and happy as she felt, said, and it summed up her feelings succinctly: "I know, mate. So it's now or never, isn't it?"
He had rarely let go of her hand since, save when it was truly necessary. Through his brother's death, fleeing from the Fiendfyre, and battling Death Eaters, he had been there with her. They ran to Harry together when it was all over. They stood now, facing each other in the deserted Gryffindor common room, the home of their childhood, marvelling that it was truly over, that Voldemort was gone, that Harry was alive and they were safe.
And they loved each other.