I realized that I've forgotten the all-important author's note upon releasing this story for the first time.
Anyway, this is my absolute FAVORITE coupling in the entire fanfictiondom, and personally the one that holds a lot of significance - I think they really should've ended up together, as the sign of the war and its internal causes being really over. It would've been a much more (idealistic) but symbolic ending.
Regardless, I'll pay all the usual homage to the author: J.K. Rowling, I love you. With all my heart. All of your writing belongs to you, as this original plot belongs to me.
Enjoy - I honestly don't know how this story will end yet, so I might have to change the genre to angst, but I hope not.
REVIEW! I actually write a lot more and at a faster rate if I get reviews and story alerts/favorites.
She still remembers the first time she saw him after the War. He stood tall and proud, black robes immaculate and expensive as they always were, silver-blonde hair clean and neat. He didn't waste a single movement even as the crowd in the courtroom around him continually simmered. Between angry stares and biting comments, he stood with an impassive and bored face that his ancestors, immortally captured in all their sarcasm and trademark smirks into paintings of the Manor, would have been proud of.
She remembers, even now, how scared he looked in her eyes.
And she'd seen all kinds of fear – fear mixed with hatred as she aimed a wand at a throat, fear and agony as one comes to the realization that there will be an end in a few seconds, fear and bravery in the face of certain failure and danger. She's also known fear, she thinks. Fear of knowing someone you love will be dead by the end of the day.
Fear of losing the wonder that was magic, fear of losing her freedom, fear of something worse than death that could await her if she was ever caught.
Thick, choking, and petrifying fear, that made her and broke her into what she was then.
She remembers thinking with some venom that his fear should be nothing compared to the fear that tormented her for years. She remembers that she wanted to scoff, her head at a superior angle and nothing but contempt on her face. Like he used to toward her.
She remembers wanting to reach out and hold his hand, instead.
In fact, she remembers doing just that.
He still remembers the first time he wrote her a letter. It was while he was in the Muggle world, of course, serving his exile sentence with a grim sort of determination. Honestly, he couldn't complain. He still had access to his family's exceedingly large fortune and both of his parents were alive. Although he couldn't see them for the next 5 years, at least his father was only under eternal Ministry supervision instead of in a tiny, dank cell in Azkaban. Actually, on second thought, he knew his father would rather have been in the Azkaban cell than be reduced to a ward of the state, as if he were an invalid. He also knows his father would've taken the cell any day over having his son take the blame in his stead and carry out an exile sentence. But abroad, the son disagrees. It's an enormous comfort to know that he has a home to return to.
He remembers trying to say all of this in the letter. But he also remembers that 30 minutes later, there was nothing written on the cheap yellow stationery other than her formal title as required in his monthly reports. At least Muggle pens didn't leak ink like quills did. He started over, crossing out the word 'supervisor' and just leaving her last name, just as he would call her in his conversations with her in real life.
Not that he had conversations with her in his mind, or anything.
But he remembers writing, writing and watching pages fill up in his slightly slanted, disheveled script. He told her everything he wanted to say about his relief at his parents safety, his opinions about Azkaban, the merits of Muggle pens.
He still doesn't really know why he even wrote all of it, back then. Maybe it was just the relief of being able to talk about it. Maybe it was the fact that he had no one else to talk to, even if he could.
He remembers reading it over, realizing that he hadn't written a single thing about how his rather miserable exile life has been. He hasn't described how mind-numbingly boring running is after flying for so many years, or how awful office jobs are, no matter that he actually likes books and specifically requested to be put in a publishing house during his exile.
Most problematically, he remembers the last sentence at the end of the letter, one that he never wants to say over a letter, because she deserves a real apology after putting up with him for six long years in Hogwarts.
He remembers folding that letter and shoving it into a nondescript box, one carved with his family insignia with a fake bottom. It's there he put the letter, and the letter after that, and the letter after that.
He feels a slight twinge of guilt, knowing that she keeps the short, dry postcards he sent instead in a shoebox in the back of her closet.
He feels a bigger guilt, never having said the apology to her face, or the forbidden phrase that eventually replaced that apology in later letters.
She remembers being unable to talk about him with her friends.
She was going about her daily duties, filing reports about the people who had been exiled to the Muggle world at the end of the War instead of being sent to Azkaban. People still tell her what a saint she was for having been able to take these people under her wing, to fight with the Wizengamot for their lives when they deserved to be stuffed away on a cold island in the middle of the North Sea. People praise her regardless of what she has to say - that morals forbid punishing criminals' children, who were raised wrongly from the start. Secretly, she wonders even now if she could've found a better way. She fears she may have scarred them into a deeper chasm of hatred, by forcing them to live amongst those whom they had looked down on.
Her friends, of course, tried to dissuade her from this line of thought. Harry told her that day that it was the perfect solution, to expose them to the Muggles. He thought they would eventually find that Muggles had more than just magic, and realize that science was a much more impressive thing than what any wizard can imagine. Ron told her she was being paranoid and unrealistic, as usual. She remembers looking at him, expecting him to be stuffing his face full of food in the meanwhile. But he was scowling – he told her she did the best she could, and that if anyone turned out badly it was a reflection on them.
She thinks now that that was the day she realized she would never get her Ron back, the one with the oblivious grin.
She also remembers the sudden question Harry had asked, about him. Harry asked if he was giving her any trouble, and if so, that he was a goner when he came back. She remembers, with amazing clarity, how rapidly she shook her head and changed the conversation to Neville and Hannah's impending wedding. She suspects that both of them knew right then, but loves them still for not having said anything. Ron followed her lead, commenting that as Best Man, Harry had an extremely large burden on his shoulders. After all, who would calm Neville when he was hyperventilating minutes before the wedding? As Harry and Ron fell back into their usual banter, she had kept a tight smile on her face.
She remembers going back to her flat, and rereading the latest postcard he sent again and again, as if she hadn't done that already.