The characters and awesomeness do not belong to me, they are all property of JK Rowling. It's weird to think that I haven't done a Harry Potter story in over a year, but hopefully I'm not too rusty. Let me know :)
Postwar, Dark Harry, AU.
She doesn't bite her nails anymore.
It's funny how you form a picture in your head of someone and it remains perfectly intact despite years of absence. The frizzy hair, the plain features, the aura of intelligence...he felt as though no matter how long they went without seeing one another she would forever be the girl he came to know at age eleven.
It was silly, of course. He himself had radically changed over the passing years, but logic never applied when it came to her. She was a constant, while others grew jaded (himself), dejected (Ron), or overly ambitious in their dueling (Ginny) she remained very much the same, adapting in the necessary areas but in essentials continuing to be a rock. A harbor.
As the war waged on she picked up a habit, better than smoking or drinking but troublesome nonetheless.
He used to sigh and tease her, and she'd smile nervously but persist nonetheless. Sometimes she'd wait until he turned away, others she'd continue to deliberately gnaw at her fingernails in order to mock spite him.
But not anymore.
She didn't see him, rather couldn't see him, and initially he only caught a quick glance. It had been upwards of five years and even from such a fleeting look from behind he knew it was her.
He only went out with the cloak on these days. It was the best method. Of course he had minions who were more than willing to submit to his will, who would jump at the opportunity to hunt for the traitors but Harry was a staunch believer of doing the important things himself. Delegating was the downfall of Voldemort, in his humble opinion. And in this day and age his opinion counted quite a bit.
She was too far away to catch her scent, but he still imagined it. He tried to suppress the instinctive racing of his heart, quell and headiness that threatened to consume him. He told himself all he wanted was to see her again. That it wasn't personal. But not even well executed denial was very persuasive.
FLASHBACK
"Harry!" Her voice was barely a whisper over the booming noises of battle, but he could hear it clear as day. Their friends joked that he, Hermione and Ron were psychically linked and he laughed along with them, but when push came to shove the truth of the matter was that they were in tune with each other more than anyone else. Short of Voldemort...
He passed Ginny on the battlefield, passionately dueling two opponents at a time, wild red hair billowing from the force of the spells. He resisted the urge to help her, to fight her fight. Ha, that was what had ended their relationship in the first place. She had a fierce independent streak that couldn't be contained, and he could respect that. And he respected her, but he didn't love her. She struck one Death Eater down, and then the other in quick succession before moving onto the next opponent without hesitation.
She didn't need his help.
The battles had really become punitive. They were fighting bitterly over this stretch of inconsequential land...and for what? Just to have a victory to call their own? Some days he felt as though they were just fighting for the sake of fighting, being a thorn in Voldemort's side with the ridiculous misapprehension that perhaps it would work its way into his bloodstream and pierce what was left of his heart. That is, if anything remained.
So many were dead, the ground littered with bodies. He had almost grown numb to it, and this scared him more than anything. He remembered Cedric's death vividly, but these days he had a hard time keeping track the recently dead from the living. Mrs. Weasley perished in a blaze of glory and he mourned her as he would a mother...and that was over a year ago. That was the last person he missed. The rest were just tallies, statistics. Proof they were fighting a war they couldn't win.
He didn't hear Hermione again, and this gave him a trill of fear. They put new bodies in the ground at such a frightening pace, but as long as she remained hope wasn't lost. There was still some sense left in the universe. He held tight to the belief that she was alright simply because she had to be. There was no rhyme or reason, or even intuition that could give him a sense of peace. All he knew was that if something had happened to her everything else would be rendered unimportant, trivial. And given the fact that they were in the midst of the most intense battle they had yet to experience made that statement a very powerful one.
It was needless, however. He ruthlessly and thoughtlessly killed four Death Eaters as he cut across, and no one touched him. He was on fire, alight with a sense of purpose. When he found her she was on the ground, crouched over a body with her hand wrist deep in its chest. It took him a long moment to realize that it was Ron. It wasn't the killing curse, no, nothing as neat as that. It was Sectumsempa several times over, and he was dead. But Hermione had yet to accept the fact.
"C'mon, c'mon," she muttered, pumping steadily onto his chest. She was spattered with gore, hair wild, eyes damp and red with tears. She had one hand on her wand and anyone stupid enough to approach faced her wrath. She didn't even need to spare them a glance, she operated solely on instinct. Ron was still warm, eyes still open (but unfocused) and he was gone.
Her wedding ring was submersed in blood, and when Harry tried to pull her away she screamed and struggled wildly. "No! No, we've got to save him. I can save him. I can save him." There was no conviction, even in her anger, fear and denial she knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that all hope was lost.
It really was a miracle that the trifecta had survived for so long as it was, statistically at least one of the three should have died long before then but they had always been somewhat untouchable. Lucky. But their luck had run dry.
That was the moment he would look back on as the real beginning. In all of the despair, the loss of his friend, the scent of death that enveloped him all he could feel was...relief. Palpable, guilt inspiring relief. Relief that Ron was gone, that the ring on her finger and the promise it entailed were rendered null and void. It was just jewelry now. She had lived up to her promise, and til death they did part. There was sorrow and there was pain, but they were mere shadows of what they should have been. What he should have been.
He didn't know he felt that way until he realized that he couldn't mourn Ron, his best friend, the way he was supposed to.
"He's gone, c'mon, Hermione. You did...what you could." He wrapped an arm around her shoulder and she sunk her face into the crook of his neck and sobbed. Someone tried to sneak up behind them and she blasted them to the ground instinctively.
"No, no, no! RON!" she cried. But she didn't fight him anymore.
They lost quite a few that night, Bellatrix took out a dozen single-handedly and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named didn't even make a cameo appearance. Hermione was stoic at the funeral and Harry realized that they had lost so many to the point that the majority of those he had met during his youth were gone. Most of his schoolmates, too...or least those he had known well. He put on a disheartened face, but wondered (like so many times before) what the point was.
He had been lied to, deceived and treated like a child but expected to act like a man. No, more than a man. A martyr. Ginny hugged him at the funeral with tears in her eyes and he knew she was feeling lonely and that this was his chance to get her back. Her face was mere centimeters from his and tears clung to her eyelashes. It was distinctly reminiscent of his first kiss, his only kiss with Cho. All he had to do was look at her and she would do it, she would lean into him and they could melt into each other. They could be lonely together.
At the time it was appealing, it could make them forget. But only momentarily, in the morning he would be burdened with guilt and the knowledge that he could easily have a happy life with her but never would. Without the war he could settle for that existence, she wasn't a civilian, she was a warrior, so he couldn't even use the excuse that they led separate lives. She was beautiful and smart, she could make him laugh effortlessly. It had been a readily agreed upon assumption that they would eventually wed, that their kids and Ron and Hermione's kids would all play together, go to Hogwarts together and grow up a family.
When she ditched him he tried to figure out exactly why he wasn't shaken to his core, why losing a life he found so appealing (in theory) wasn't a blow to him. Why someone he could feel such a white hot passion for just was not the woman he wanted to spend forever with. Why he was so willing to let her go. It wasn't until later that it struck him like a bag of bricks, unexpectedly and painfully. If he took the time to dissect his psyche he might have seen what he had been repressing for so long. She just wasn't Hermione, and the realization that this was the breaking point was so startling that it floored him.
Opportunity before him, he averted her eyes and hugged her back in a purposefully platonic manner. She died three or so months later, having bitten off more than she could chew. She had faced off against four Death Eaters and lost. Harry felt like he should have cried, but it simply felt like another pointless death for a cause he didn't really believe in. At least not anymore.
Hermione still wore the ring. She bit her nails with reckless abandon, too. Ripping the skin and getting down to the quick. He pointed out that she could heal it magically and she looked at him funny but didn't respond. He understood later, but it took a while. Magic had gotten them into this mess in the first place, and she didn't like the quick fix anymore. Not if it only worked on the menial things. Not if it was what had taken her husband away from her and conveniently couldn't bring him back.
She believed that people were the masters of their destiny, that one shouldn't blame a gun for the violence it caused in the hands of a maniac. But the magical community had taken so much away, it had robbed them of their youth even if at the time it seemed like a mystical fantastical place to be. It took away any chance she could have had at a normal life when she was young, too young to make an educated decision. She loved being a witch, but at what cost?
In a year hardly anyone was left anymore, Voldemort worked insidiously and he worked well. Harry privately admired this trait, but it didn't lessen his despisement.
It wasn't as though the Death Eaters were winning or the purported 'good guys' were losing, they were both stubborn, had both incurred terrible losses and neither were willing to give up. Voldemort wanted to wreak havoc and dominate the wizarding world and the opposition was not willing to take it.
They were all on a crash course and those who survived, more by chance than skill, would be the victors. Harry had long since come to the realization that there would be no dramatic final battle, no climax. They were being picked off one by one, two by two, and so on and so forth.
No retreat, no surrender. Harry tried to imagine throwing up a white flag and saying that he was willing to be one of Lord Voldemort's subjects, that never mind, he wouldn't try to kill him anymore. He hated him, he hated the reign of terror he had set upon the people he loved, and he hated him for slowly but surely siphoning away bits of his humanity...drop by drop. He wanted to cry, he felt as though losing nearly everyone he held dear merited a good sob fest but he felt so very little that it terrified him.
He came to the point where he felt only love (Hermione), hate (Voldemort) and indifference (everyone else).
It happened late one night, he was almost asleep and she was still up reading. The wizarding world was in such a state that neither of them felt that old pressing desire to be a part of it anymore. The fire was crackling and it felt almost like Hogwarts again.
Sometimes Harry thought that at any moment Ron would come clambering down the stairs into the common room again, that he and Hermione would start bickering about Potions homework, or how much of a know-it-all she was or how S.P.E.W. was a waste of time. Before they were in love, or at least before either would acknowledge it. When Harry didn't really know how he felt, while he was chasing after Cho and later Ginny and just like in some lame eighties teen movie not realizing that he already, completely, unwittingly and irrevocably in love with one of his best friends.
He felt like he should feel sad at this reminiscence, that he should wish things were back to the way they used to be. But as he glanced bleary eyed over the fire and at Hermione he couldn't feel it. All he felt was an all-consuming and entirely confusing desire to be all that she had (left). She married Ron, she would have been a wonderful wife to him and mother to his children had he survived. They would have had babies after babies, and with each milestone she would move further and further away.
When they were younger the idea of losing Ron would have been equally, if not more so terrifying, but a change had occurred that he couldn't pinpoint. It was selfish and it was dark and he spent so much time ignoring it and fighting it that he never even considered giving into it.
"Harry?"
He twitched and sat up. "Wotcher," he replied, feeling a pang for Tonks. But it was passing, it always was.
She struggled with herself for a moment, clearly debating the best course of action. She swallowed hard and persisted. "Do you think...can we even win this?" she asked. He felt mildly surprised, they rarely acknowledged the hopelessness of their situation. Of course they had had a conversation like this before, filled with insincere noises about how they were doing the right thing, neither (well, and Ron when he had been alive) acknowledging the possibility of leaving their world behind.
Now Hermione and Harry were two of the few, and both had been raised in the Muggle world. It was difficult to consider the benefits of simply abandoning ship, surrendering magic and looking over their collective shoulder for their rest of their lives.
He shifted. "I dunno." He wanted to say something encouraging, something to bolster her. Well, that was a lie. He knew he should want to do that, that the Hogwarts Harry would have done that but something in him squashed that instinct. "It's not looking good." Comfort would help her sleep through the night, but he knew her. He didn't realize he was manipulating until he had already begun doing it.
"I don't know what to do anymore." The helplessness in her voice almost made him cringe.
Harry came to his feet and stumbled over to where she sat, on a squashy armchair. There was barely room for the two of them but they made do. "Neither do I. As the supposed Chosen One I reckon that's a problem." She chuckled lightly. He put an arm around her shoulder with some semblance of awkwardness. He didn't understand why, apart from remaining comrades (so few and far between) they were all that they had left. Harry was well aware of the fact that he should think of that with sadness and lament its truth, but he needed to suppress a smile. That scared him.
"There's always been someone telling us what to do. Now that we're the ones I just don't know what I'm supposed to do anymore," he said, though it wasn't entirely true. He had a plan, and one he had already put into action. But he wasn't going to tell her that, at least not just yet.
"Neville killed himself," she said quietly.
Thinking he had misheard her, he turned and asked her to repeat that. And she did. A sudden headache accosted him, and his right temple throbbed. "They had him surrounded, but they weren't going to kill him. No, Bellatrix made sure that didn't happen. She wanted to complete the Longbottom collection, apparently. And he wouldn't let her." The bitterness in her voice was distinct and quite uncharacteristic.
When he stared at her with unrestrained wonder she elaborated, "The owl arrived when you were sleeping. I...I didn't want to wake you."
He didn't know how many down that was or how many left to go there was. Hogwarts was empty and hope was lost for so many. "It's only a matter of time before Voldemort finds me." He purposefully didn't use us out of the misguided hope that somehow mentally omitting her from the problem would physically remove her from it. That was nonsense, of course. She was as much a part of this as he was, and it wasn't fair.
"Don't let him find you," she said quietly, cheek resting against his shoulder. He was ready to open his mouth and protest, but she wasn't done yet. "Find him yourself. And kill him."
He looked down at her with acute amazement but she continued on, completely oblivious. "All of these people...all of our friends can't have just died for nothing. There are two Weasleys left, can you believe that?"
Harry squeezed her shoulder. "Three, actually."
She smiled. "I hadn't quite gotten used to the name change. I think I'll always feel like a Granger." He suppressed an inappropriate grin. He liked it that way.
"I can't keep letting people die for me," he said. The smile died from her eyes almost instantly, but her lips remained stretched.
"You aren't letting them, this isn't just your fight," she said, fixing her eyes on him. "None of this is your fault."
And he didn't blame himself, he was beyond that.
He didn't recall who leant into who first and when it ceased being platonic and when their lips met, but it really didn't matter in the end. He gripped her needily, simultaneously terrified she would pull away and that she wouldn't, only to profess a desire to forget about it in the morning.
It didn't happen.