Note: This is also posted at Checkmated. D Thank you to my beta there…because else-wise, it would not have been like this at all.
The thing about the battle is that I spend the whole time thinking about her. I don't think about protecting the boy who lived, although that is my purpose, and that is pretty much all I do. I don't think about arresting or killing or counter-cursing Death Eaters, although I do that as well. I don't think about helping to find Horcruxes or sleeping in caves, although I do those things too. I barely think about quick visits home on the holidays, exchanging practical gifts by a fire.
I think about her.
It's certainly been expected of us forever now. I think even my mother believes we're a couple, whether we are or not. At the funeral, at the wedding…we've been terribly close since then, inseparable even. But amid all those exchanged glances and promises and jokes, we are still not officially together.
Days of fighting turn to weeks, and week of fighting turn to months. I watch many people I knew, loved, and respected die. I lose a brother and another brother loses himself. My best friend gets lost in his own little world and turns into a person I've never seen before, and my little sister becomes spiteful and vindictive and worrisome.
I watch a newly engaged man kill someone he once trusted but now despises. I watch the same man enter the most tumultuous stage of his life ever, in which he spirals in and out of consciousness for days, watching his own fiancée do the same in a hospital bed next to him. We all watch healers in green suits bustling about.
But my refuge is her. When I go to bed at night, even though she is another room, or across the cave, or somewhere completely different and dangerous, she is with me. When we visit my home, I sometimes get up in the middle of the night and tip-toe towards my sister's room to view her sleeping frame on the mattress on the floor and the way her eyes flutter in her sleep. When we are sleeping in caves, I hear her murmur, and I long to reach out and touch her and hold her to me and kiss her, but I refrain. And when she is kidnapped for those few weeks that feel like millennia, I lose sleep, and when I do get some rest, my dreams are filled with her—laughing and kissing, or screaming and dieing. I do not care what she does, I am only happy to see her image, although both dreams pain me in different ways.
At Christmas dinner at my family's house, we sit together always, whether we're opening gifts or eating or avoiding snogging on the couch. My mother smiles when I tickle the girl beside my playfully, my brothers joke around when she says something that sends me bright red.
They think we're together.
When we sneak outside upon visiting home when finding Horcruxes is going slow and sit among the trees and come back, everyone thinks that we've been doing more than talking, but we haven't really. We've been talking and crying and forgiving. We've been making promises and avoiding touching each other for more than the required amount of time.
When the hero of this story enters the cave on a rainy night after going outside to "use the bathroom" and finds us lying together, he assumes too much. But when we both simultaneously wake up upon his entry and realize the position we are in, we are both perplexed and confused and neither of us have any idea how we got that way.
When we attend various funerals and cry and comfort one another, family members and friends look on expectantly. I hear whispers that radiate in my head, giving me the craziest ideas. Kiss her. Love her. Tell her you love her. Make love to her. But I brush them aside even though they all sound so nice. The ideas sound so wonderful and tantalizing and they sound like experiences I want to share with her and her alone.
But then I stop myself and remember what we've decided.
When I wake up after a particularly brutal battle to see her hovering over me, tears in her eyes and rolling down her cheeks, tracing the fresh scars on my shoulder and chest with her fingers, I want to hold her right then and there. And as she confesses to me what she worried, I sit up so we're level and lean into her.
Her face is so close to mine, and her lips are parted. How easy it would be to kiss her, to drag her onto this hospital bed with me.
Instead I tell her of the times when I was just as worried about her, and when I worried the same things she was worrying about just then. I tell how I worried I might do what my brother had done.
She thinks that idea is horrible, but grief mixed with relief hang in the air around her, making her hair seem limp and her face wan. Have those same ideas crossed over her mind? Those ideas of leaving this world so empty of those that you love?
The truth is my brother did that, and one that I was close to, too. He had lost his twin and his fiancée, and what was left to live for now? If only he had thought it through and realized it was all a ploy for me to weaken, and for the boy who lived to do so in return. If only he had remembered that he still had people who cared for him—his parents and his remaining siblings and his friends—perhaps he wouldn't have done what he did. But in those days when the one I love most was kidnapped—another ploy for the hero to weaken—and for all I know, dead, I almost realize why he killed himself.
The final battle comes and goes, and we have spent all night celebrating and resting and rejoicing as well as mourning over those lost. There have been smiles and tears and hugs and kisses and dialogues lasting hours. There has been food and drink and there have been reunions—plenty of those—happy, sad, and somewhere in between.
And as every one tuckers out and heads to their beds or to guest beds or to their individual homes, and as the two of sit, side by side on the back porch, looking up at the stars in silence, it dawns on us.
What has kept us hanging on—that single promise—to wait…the moment has arrived.
Part of me wants to lean towards her, to kiss her, to envelop her in my arms, to take her into my own bed as I've wanted to do for all these months and years and decades and centuries, but something stops me. She reaches towards me and takes my hand, tentatively, slowly, as if we have all our lives ahead of us. As if we are still just teenagers and, we are able to go through a courtship and take all the smallest steps.
And that is what I realize.
We're finally able to take things slowly.
I whisper leaves my lips and hangs in the air, bold and never to be forgotten. "I love you, Hermione."
"I love you, too, Ron."