A/N: Originally posted on HPFF on 11/4/15.

I am holding your hand.

Around us the ward is cold in its harsh reality. The walls are blank and white, trapping us on a canvas that will never feel the touch of a brush. There is too much sun-light, too much lantern-light, conspiring together to keep me from forgetting where I am. I close my eyes and try to shut out everything beyond you and I.

I focus on the feel of your hand in mine. It is cold and unmoving, but quietly alive with the breath of your spirit.

No matter how long I keep my eyes closed, I cannot escape from the truth of our surroundings. There is always that buzzing, that awful buzzing. The healers say it's meant to comfort us in its steadfastness, to distance us from the trials and pains of the hundreds of others within these walls.

They've got it wrong. Take away my knowledge of every other misery in the world and it only increases my awareness of your suffering. And the confounded buzzing reminds me that the only place in the world I can possibly be is this horrible hospital, beside the bed where you lay in emptiness disguised as peace.

I am always holding your hand.

In pictures of me as a baby I always seem to be trying to hold someone's hand. It didn't matter how tiny my hands were compared to the huge fingers I grabbed at. Those fingers could be the whole world for all I knew, and I was going to catch them for myself.

Mum would make Padma and I hold hands when walking in town, taking the floo, standing behind her. It became second nature. When tired or joyful or scared there was always a hand to reach for.

It makes sense that once I met you, best and dearest of friends, that I would always be reaching for your hand. It was only natural.

But holding your hand was anything but natural.

Your hand always felt strange in mine, like it didn't quite belong. Your skin was always cold against the warmth of my fingers. The lengths of our arms didn't line up as I grew taller than you, and I had to sink my arm down from the shoulder to reach your hand. Our fingers squabbled, each fighting for their most comfortable position. Your skin was softer than seemed natural, and I was afraid it would crumble away under the roughness of my own.

Your hand never stopped feeling strange, but I never regretted this. Every time I held your hand felt like the first time. Every time our hands touched I couldn't ignore the many things that made that hand so uniquely yours.

I only hold your right hand. That was what you always preferred. You said that if I was on your left side it made your stomach knot up. Even now when you are not awake to feel the knots, I sit at your right side, tenderly holding that one familiar hand between both of mine.

I have always been holding your hand.

I held your hand when we were eleven and my sister was separated from me by differences I didn't know we had.

I held your hand when we were twelve as the attacks started in our own school and we learned that we were not safe with or without each other.

I held your hand when we were thirteen and we planned a memorial for your rabbit Binky. Of course, Binky wasn't at Hogwarts for you to bury, but I was there for you.

I held your hand when we were fourteen and schemed about which boys would take us to the Ball, all the while crossing the fingers on our other hands that we would be asked.

I held your hand when we were fifteen you were positive you were going to fail your OWLs. I held your hand until you stopped crying, and I kept holding it as we helped each other study through the night.

I held your hand when we were sixteen and you asked if that ridiculous necklace was the perfect gift for your Won-Won. I told you what you wanted to hear and wondered if the knots I felt in my stomach were like the ones you got.

I could not hold your hand when we were seventeen and I found you lying on the cold stone floor of the ravaged Great Hall. Your eyes were blank and your body limp, and though they told me you were still alive I could not see it in you.

I fell to your side, and through the shattered lens of my tear-streaked eyes, I saw your hand.

Everything was different. Your skin was too pale, your fingers too twisted. Glass struck out of your flesh at strange angles, and the blood that trickled from these punctures mixed with blood from the wounds on your arms, your chest, your face.

My world screamed with the pain of those wounds as they pierced my own heart, bringing forth unrealized truths in bursts of futile anguish.

I will never tell you I love you.

You will never tell me you love me.

I will always be holding your hand.