I'd hit a bit of a block lately, and then I got a pronoun challenge and this thing turned into a monster that demanded to be published while I wasn't looking.
Pronoun challenge: write a oneshot without ever referring to the characters by name.
My dorm room and my bank account will gladly verify that I do not by any stretch of imagination own Harry Potter.
He finds her at the counter of a bar, hiding in plain view, and slides in next to her. She doesn't say anything to him as he raises a hand to order 'whatever she's drinking', and he does the same. He knows her, after all, enough that he understands what those outside looking for her do not: she needs to be the one to bring this to light. Any attempts to push and she will close up worse than before. They've changed, however few seem to realize that.
"It used to be simple," she says finally, swirling the liquid in her glass, "during the war." She raises tortured eyes from their place examining the countertop to lock with his. "Is it a bad thing to wish it had never ended?"
He takes a sip to give himself time to think, feeling the burn all the way down his throat. "Sometimes I wish the same thing," his voice is low when he replies, words meant only for the cover of night, not intended for any ears but hers. There are no other ears he would trust with this. "Not that we didn't win, but that we never had to stop hiding. It was…" he trails off, the silence full of almost-moments and not-quites.
"Peaceful," she finishes. "We were running for our lives and it seemed sometimes like a vacation, when it was just us."
She turns abruptly on her stool to face him, knees knocking against his leg. "Do you remember Christmas?" she asks.
He smiles. Despite the dark memories around it, that is good memory, full of wonder and closure. It's something he wouldn't choose to give up no matter the destruction that had followed. "That was a good time," he replies.
"Until it wasn't," she says gently, gaze back in her glass. Without him being truly aware of it, one of his hands goes across to take hers, thumb brushing over her knuckles.
"You have to remember the good we did," he replies, words he's said so many times he may as well have carved them into his flesh to match the other hand. Every time he opens his mouth, a variation on that theme seems to fall out and she's the only one who has the same shadow behind her eyes.
"Is that what we're doing?" her tone is bordering on frantic, but only to his ears, so sensitive to her every nuance, "cherry-picking the memories we want to have so we can pretend we're happy?"
"That's not happiness," his voice is hollow, "that's willful ignorance. I have enough putting on a smile in the rest of my life. We remember the bright moments so we can contrast them to the dark ones, to know what we have to aim towards. Otherwise we're no better than those we defeated."
She scrutinizes him, gaze piercing straight down to his soul. "How did you get so wise?" she asks.
"From being around you." By her wry smile, she doesn't believe him, but he's said only a few things as true as that.
She picks up her nearly forgotten drink and downs the last of it, head tipped back. A strand of her wild hair slips out to lie against her face and he has to clench his fingers against his own glass to fight the urge to reach out and tuck it back. The battle against himself is brief, but no less a struggle for the many times he has fought this particular war.
The glass clinks against the counter as she sets it down, but she makes no move to get another. Instead, she turns to him, the shadows in her eyes and the weight on her shoulders utterly apparent as she makes no move to hide them.
He can't stop the bloom of triumph deep in his chest that she lets him, and no other, see her like this. They both put up smokescreens for the rest of the world, but with each other, that armor comes crashing down; not so much taken off as thrown aside.
She takes him in the same as he does to her, sees the shadows that follow him still and weight that he will never truly be free of, and he knows when she accepts what she finds. The world, for all it holds them up and embraces them when the sun is shining brightly, does not want them when that light has gone and the dark things come out to play.
Some other time, they will still pretend to be the same people they were when this all started out, but he's sick of play-acting and in her eyes he can read the same sentiment.
She is nearly bruising in her intensity when she kisses him, tastes like the alcohol and something sweet and forbidden. "I don't want to remember, tonight," she breathes out against his lips, "All I've ever done is think. Help me feel."
He's been in love with her for a long time, longer than he knows, longer than he can admit to either himself or the world. The world would hang him for it, and he could never live with himself if he betrayed so many by telling, so he does the only thing he can. He stands up, leaving enough money on the bar to cover bother their drinks, and holds out a hand.
She takes it without hesitation, squeezes it; and he thinks for one horribly hopeful second that perhaps she's been waiting just as long as he has for this; that she is just as caged and unable to tell. His heart is pounding against the words stuck in his throat, and were he just a little more honorable he would scream them to the world. But tonight is not a night to be honorable, it is a time for both of them to take a few moments for themselves, away from view of the world.
So when they walk hand in hand out the door, night mercifully wraps them in her own cloak of invisibility and within a few steps, they are gone from sight.