She laughs as he whirls her around their living room, her brown eyes flashing mischievously before she stretches out her hands and dances them around his torso, smiling widely when he breaks out into laughter and collapses, dragging her down with him.
For a few moments, they lie, panting on the floor, and he watches as the girl who became a woman much too fast starts to relax and drift off to sleep. Her eyelashes flutter slightly when she breathes out and he stares at her with suppressed wonder, sliding his arms around her lean form and in her sleep, she burrows further into him until the smell of his cologne and him wrap around her.
It is hard to believe that just minutes ago, they were hurling heated insults at each other, their shouts resounding across the small apartment, he thinks as he fondly brushes away her hair from her forehead, pressing a soft kiss to her smooth skin. But that has how they work, with their arguments and their debates, the way they dance around each other angrily during one of their many fights.
Their friends thought them crazy to stay together, being the shocked audience to many of their arguments. They didn't care. She was a living contradiction. So was he. He knew he loved her from the moment they stepped into their apartment and had their first row, her eyes cold as they he once been in Hogwarts, how her words practically froze the air around them with their frigidness. But she burned, oh, how she burned, like the most expensive rum thrown on a dying fire, heated and angry, dancing around him until he could only focus on her eyes and the tide of her breathing, the only thing that kept him grounded.
He was, he supposed, even stranger, walking a thin line until he fell and ploughed right into her. He yelled with passion and love and everything he had, lighting up their apartment faster than a bonfire. But he could have been a statue for all it was worth, frozen like his body was made out of the heaviest stone, his pale body rigid as threw her words at him like he was a wall and her words were boulders.
They weren't normal. But they never had been in the first place. And he knows she loves no matter what because her body cannot lie to him. She is fire and he is ice, but she loves him, with the sweetest intimacy and tenderness, with mercy like he is the most amazing thing. He is the one who rocks her when she wakes and screams for her parents, for Harry, for Ron. He is the only one who knows the reason she doesn't get rid of her scar is because it means too much, makes her remember. He is the one who lets her drag him to her favourite cafes and bookshops, the person who holds her with the most warmth she has ever felt envelop her.
He loves her, with all he has left, every broken part of him, because she is the only one who understands the nightmares and his habit of gripping her hand when he is scared or nervous, the thought of her leaving panicking him. She is the only one who gave him a real chance, the one who stands with him, who holds his hand as they stand in silence, sipping tea, as moonlight streams over their tired forms. Because she is the one who laughs with him, and dances with him, the one who doesn't care about his arrogance and the way he puts up walls that only she can break through. She is the one who puts up with his tantrums and smiles at his dry humor. The only one who knows him.
They fight with passion that otherwise never shows around the others, and they love each other in their own strange, unique way. They cherish the little moments when they are simply together in silence, when they comfort each other. When they clear out a room with their explosive fights, and the peaceful times that come after. Those are the times he can't help but think of with endearment.
Pressing a light kiss to her red lips, the faint taste of cherry wine lingering on them, he chuckles sleepily when she murmurs something in her sleep and turns over, her hair covering them like a light blanket.
So, he thinks as he too drifts off to sleep, there are hundreds of ways they will never work. But there are hundred more that they will. It's all in the way she him that he is hers and she is his.
And that is all that matters anymore.
The way she tells me I'm hers and she is mine
Open hand or closed fist would be fine
The blood is rare and sweet as cherry wine
~Hozier - Cherry Wine