A/N: I had this in my Drabbles Depository, but a kind PM suggested that I post it separately. A nice, little one-shot in yet another pairing I find myself a sucker for. The prompt was to write a love letter, and I took it quite literally. I was watching a show recently where the heroine grabs the hero's hand and traces out a character in it, trying to get his help to remember what was written earlier. The image stuck with me, and when I read the prompt, I immediately thought of runes and Sirius.
This one-shot, incidentally, led to me outlining a full novel-length SBHG/RLHG story, which goodness knows will probably take me a million years to finish. Still, though, things to come.
Enjoy!
A Love Letter
THEN
Sirius Black fades from life to non-life with only dulled edges clinging to the present. He pulls at his ear and gnaws on his arm; he tastes the dirt on his clothes and feels the pain of chapped skin. He cannot remember being human, not without also despair and madness lurking close behind. The canine mind is safer, but he loses himself there as well, a parallel slow slope to blackness.
"Mr. Black?"
He hears the words and feels the splinters underfoot, feels the cold of the night air between the rags of his robes.
"Mr. Black, sir?"
He is in the shack, he remembers the shack. Another place of nightly horror, but of a more direct source. It is also a place of fading, but with laughter and friends. He grounds himself in the memory of that time, of the warmth and the love.
"Mr. Sirius Black?"
This name- it is familiar, and the words echo deeply within his breast. He touches his skin there, feels the runic ridges that ground him when fur and jaws cannot. He traces the source of the words- the name- to the three huddled children. A girl, older than a child, with eyes traced in concern and hair that crowds her simple, pretty features. A woman-child in the making.
She touches his elbow, and Sirius Black remembers his name, remembers his years and age and life, and shudders into humanity again. He learns the girl's name later that night, when she dashes to his rescue with a hippogriff in tow.
Hermione Granger; he traces one of his oldest tattoos and repeats her name.
NOW
The war is eleven weeks over when Sirius Black realizes his house is finally silent from the passing funeral goers, their clothes thick with the soot and ash of the pyres; the later party celebrants too, depart, their smiles too wide and laughter too loud. His exoneration, ten weeks aged, gave him freedom to attend and mourn alike, but the greetings and embraces from those former classmates and comrades that spent most of his adult life believing him guilty of murder and betrayal is a fiercer enemy than those he faced previously.
He finds, seven weeks after the war's end, that he prefers the dull and peeling wallpaper of his unhappy childhood home to another toast to his innocence.
His reluctance to move onward and outward is not shared by the others, and slowly, without his complete recognition, the Order members leave the Headquarters and move on. Remus and Tonks are first, taking with them Teddy's bursts of happy giggles and cries for attention; he doesn't blame them, a family deserves sunshine-filled windows and soft grass underfoot. Severus Snape, an unwilling guest as it was, leaves as quickly as it takes for his throat to heal and his voice to return.
Sirius burns the sheets afterward, unwilling to make amends beyond a brief hospitality.
Molly Weasley arrives, in a cloud of floo powder and baskets filled with a week's worth of meals, to retrieve her youngest son a month after the dust settles, and then returns a day later to coax along her only daughter as well. Sirius knows with Ginny's departure, Harry's too is bound to follow. His godson waits another four weeks before hesitantly announcing his plans for a rental near Hogsmeade.
Sirius smiles and nods and reassures, and drinks late into the night. Silence returns to Grimmauld Place as the days pass, and he sleeps and drinks and barely notices the passing of the days, until finally, on a morning creased with gray and cloud, he hears the angry shrieks of his mother's portrait, and for all that he hates her voice, a burst of gladness strikes him.
He finds her wrestling with the portrait's curtains, her umbrella dripping behind her, and unruly hair, loose and unworried, over her shoulders. He spots her battered beaded bag dangling from a shoulder, and pathetically hopes it holds her clothes and books and all other trappings that might indicate an extended stay.
She smiles when she sees him, the expression weary and weak, and he cannot bear the sudden brightness of it. "Hi Sirius. Would it be alright if I stayed for a while? And use your library?"
Sirius agrees, his voice rough from rare use, and he spends Hermione Granger's first morning shaving and vanishing emptied bottles.
THEN
Hermione hears the familiar laughter brush up past the dinn, through the shouts of curses and desperate shields. The sound rings beautifully, unburdened and free; she pauses stupidly at the sound of it and searches for the source. That the death eaters miss this chance to remove her is their folly; she finds Sirius near an archway. He duels with abandon, his cousin shrieking and cackling as her spells miss again and again.
Hermione thinks in that second that perhaps this is what Sirius was like as a boy, all danger and bravado. His eyes shine darkly as he swipes at a patch of dried blood on his neck. Bellatrix continues to miss and Sirius laughs still. Hermione notices, when no one else does, that as he nears the archway, the spells slow, the words stretch, and his laughter- it deepens.
The warning is on her lips, but then she is fighting again, ducking and shielding, running and hoping. A shriek of anger slices through the air, and once more, she pauses in her defenses to look toward the archway. A crumpled body rests at the base of the ancient stone pillars, a shock of red hair discoloring the blackness of the robes.
She runs heedlessly toward the fallen figure; she is hit twice and chokes as blood fills her mouth. Sirius shouts at her, but she can only see Ron on the ground, unmoving. Something is wrong, and she is sure of it. Something has changed, and the guilt she feels behind the mountain of pain swallowing her allows her seconds more of consciousness.
"You're safe-" she whispers as Sirius cradles her face between stained hands, the happy tightening of her heart discordant with her fallen friend.
NOW
When Sirius dreams, he dreams of his youth. Flashes of friends long dead dash and dot forward, their words brief messages that all lead to the same final scene. His dreams bring cloud and storm, lightning and thunder, as he finds the bodies, still and cold and damp. He hears the baby's cry, and then the laughter, his laughter, as the ruined house flows into a flooded street, debris and flame and sirens surging forward in a cacophony. Always, then, Peter stares at him, the Peter of his earliest days, eleven years old again, slight and timid and always grateful.
Grateful Peter, thoughtful Peter- his friend who rarely spoke of home, of his ill mother, or of the traitorous weakness of his heart.
When Sirius wakes, he is a thousand years old, and the pain that tightens in his chest, gripping and tearing, is a phantom sword that burrows tightly and stirs only to remind him of the choices he did not make. This morning is no different, and he mourns and grieves as is his habit before finally leaving his dampened bed and sheets, and falls into a shower that gently warms his skin back to the present.
She woke before him, again, and he sees no sign of her stopping for breakfast before heading to the library. It is nine days since she arrived, and her casual request to borrow the Black Family library has revealed a less casual obsession. He leaves her a poorly made lunch, which she accepts with a brief word of thanks, and he forces her to leave the stacks of books she builds along the floor for dinner hours later.
Sirius is no cook, but he manages take-out, and he sees how she eats with one eye toward the door and the unnamed task that absorbs her. Her fingers pluck and pull apart the chips, a quarter of the pieces making their way to her mouth, before she finally wraps the whole of it in the purchase paper and once again offers up her thanks for the meal. She disappears the waste and then dashes out, his gaze caught on the bounce of her braid and stuck on the pallor of her cheeks.
He drinks that night, hating the weakness, but welcoming the crushing bliss of oblivion and escape from the dreams that the alcohol grants.
THEN
Two days before Harry's 16th birthday, Ron musters enough energy to make it down the stairs and to the kitchen. Harry treats this arrival as a personal accomplishment, and Hermione swallows her recriminations for the hundredth time since June. She wishes she could put the Department of Mysteries behind her; she wishes she, too, could think only of the fact they escaped and no one died. But she cares too much about the truth to ignore the scar that stings red across her chest.
"It's my first battle wound," Ron says proudly, pulling aside his collar to show off the sun-shaped curse mark on his shoulder.
Harry admires it faithfully, and Hermione leaves before she says the words bursting to run out. She wants to yell and scream and have someone, anyone blame her. But no one says a thing, and she suffocates under the weight of their silence.
She finds the library, and in it, Sirius finds her, dark hair lank across his forehead and grey eyes heavy with undeserved mirth. Hermione relishes the relief that floods her when he makes the mistake to greet her cheerily. Finally, someone she can turn on and share the guilt with.
"He nearly died, you know."
Sirius's lips twist into a frown. "I do."
"You don't really act like it, though." Hermione never questions why it's so easy to speak to Sirius as if he were her equal and not one of the adults she must mind and respect. At what point did he shift in her mind from Mr. Black to someone she could condescend?
Her vehemence is unreasonable, she recognizes distantly. That Sirius stands and takes her abuse only encourages her further. "What if he hadn't pushed you aside- what if Ron had been a minute too late and you'd fallen behind that curtain? What would have happened to Harry then? Did you even think?"
'And you,' she adds, silently and wretchedly, 'what if you had died? What would any of us have done?'
The door slams behind her, the sound muffled by the voiceless silencing charm Sirius casts. The thick book he carries, the one she realizes he intended for her, is cast aside, its thud a hard echo in the darkened room. When he reaches her, he doesn't yell and he doesn't strike. His hands, large and bony still, even after months of a steady diet and the Weasley matriarch forcing down three daily meals, clench at his side.
"You're mistaken if you think I'll stand still and let you speak to me in this way. I'm not a gentleman, Hermione, I'm not like your teachers or Arthur Weasley. I'm not going to indulge in the temper tantrums of self-righteous children. You'll be quiet, or I'll force you."
His voice is like how she first remembers it, a low rumble that rasps and draws on breath- straining for something stronger, heavier than the timber it carries. Desperate, she remembers, so very desperate his voice sounded those years before. Hermione wonders what provokes the sound now- which part of her words brings him back to that time?
"I nearly died, too, not that you care." She glares at him, unconcerned that his lips warn of violence or that he's drawn closer still. The fire is too hot, and still she dares.
"You're an adult, Sirius! You're his godfather- Harry will listen to you. You have to set him straight- tell him how stupid it was, how it wasn't brave, but foolish to go there like that." She says nothing of the fact that such words from her would translate to weeks of avoidance and blatant snubbing. Sirius is an easy whipping boy.
"Better to die fighting than hiding away in a hole, like some rat. Better he face his demons now, than to dream of them in the dark." His hot breath rolls against her cheek and his fingers dig too easily into the soft flesh of her arms. Hermione shudders, the feeling not quite fear, but something foreign and heady. "Harry needs to be a man, not some kid that cowers behind the closest mother surrogate he can find."
"And an early death is your way to help him grow up?" She yanks free and takes the four steps needed to bring her back to the door, to the only escape the room grants.
She watches as his expression changes, as the anger gives way to something ashamed and dark. He avoids her gaze, and the spur of victory she feels vanishes quickly. "I don't care if you have to stay in this house until the war is over, Sirius. I don't care if you're miserable throughout all of it, or if you drink yourself sick every night. Do whatever it is you need to, because-"
And Hermione ignores the guilt that clouds her, ignores the conscience that reminds her that such cruelty is unnecessary. She reminds herself of Ron's near death, of all that could have happened to Harry had Dumbledore not arrived when he had. She reminds herself that Sirius, too- and she shudders, her blood run cold- he could have died.
"- none of it matters, not if you're dead."
NOW
Sirius is not alone, but he nearly wishes he was. When she does notice him, it's to sniff at his clothes and frown at his choice of drink. Her disappointment drifts over to him at night, when she breaks for a spare ten minutes to join him for whatever food he's wrangled from the shops down the street. But she doesn't speak aloud whatever judgments her little mind's dreamt up for him. Hermione has other concerns, and he feels that old anger rolling within him.
The past almost six years are spotted with her words, crushing blows of reality against the imagined heroics his mind had created. Again and again, this woman-child ruins him with a glance and a brief recrimination. He feels the frustration of it, being bested by such a young creature, and he shudders with the edges of an ancient violence that runs in his blood, through generations of shared family lines, and a madness that taints even him.
Hermione Granger is all things proper and correct and righteous, and he wishes, baldly and unfeelingly, that she might crack and break and show a touch of that human quality of failure just the once. He wishes for a weakness, one that he might press, if only to turn her attentions more fully.
But it's concern and fear and worry that cloak him when he sees her so desperate in her search through his books, thinner and more frail than he can remember. It's something much softer that douses his heart and draws his fingers to the rune along his chest, memory re-visited time and again.
THEN
She feels little guilt for having intercepted the owl carrying Sirius's invitation to Harry. She knew once the anniversary of the Potters' murder had passed that he'd soon send a letter, and she made a point of visiting the owlery before the morning meal-time and inspecting the nondescript standard carriers for missives to Harry.
Sirius's handwriting spoke of a once elegant hand, harassed by years spent without holding a quill. The muscle memory is dim, and she can imagine his impatience, his growing anger and frustration as the letters stumbled forth. How many drafts, how many attempts led to the three short lines of blots and smudges in her hands?
His request is plain, though, and direct; Hermione has no trouble following it.
She borrows Harry's invisibility cloak and asks the kitchen elves to prepare a basket. She might not think much of Sirius's skills as a role model, but she remembers too easily the stretched skin over his cheeks and the tightness around his knuckles. She hopes a full stomach will help him to understand- to listen.
Midnight comes and she slinks through the passageways, nudging statue pieces and whispering passwords. From Honeydukes, she makes for the empty Hogsmeade streets and the even more desolate hills beyond it. The cave's entrance is hidden by convenient optical illusion; she only finds it when finally upon it, and even then, she must cross her eyes and feel with her hands to find the parting of rock walls.
Curiosity stops her from immediately announcing her presence; instead, she watches as Sirius crouches by his fire, dirty black hair hiding his features but for his eyes. Grey, the same as a north sea, but darker, like night-driven pits that speak of hidden things and unspoken awfulness. His eyes are the same as they were on that terrible night three years before, and she wonders if they'll ever lose that touch of madness and abandon Azkaban gave him.
She removes the cloak gracelessly, catching on an edge and stumbling forward. Sirius manages a smile and then looks beyond, expectantly. Hermione lets him linger there, lets him realize the deception, and then interrupts with the basket and its food.
"Harry's not coming," she admits gently, setting aside the guilt from his disappointment for a more private handling. She feeds him, heals the few spare wounds he's picked up from his traveling, and only leaves once she's assured he'll be warm and dry.
"Harry's not here because he doesn't know about your letter," she tells him, pausing by the cave's entrance. She offers a small, tired smile. "It's my fault he doesn't know- I got to it first. Him coming here, like this, wouldn't be safe, you know."
NOW
She stops marking her calendar once failure seems unavoidable. There are other libraries, of course, but the war has discouraged the sharing of certain literature, and the Black library was her last chance. It will be years before she can access similar, dark material, and by then, even if she could will their memories back, would she even be recognizable?
Hermione barely sees herself anymore when she glances into the bathroom mirror. Drawn cheeks and tired eyes, she only sees waste and loss and stupid, stupid folly in the reflection. Gone is the daughter her parents might remember; would they even want her back? She stripped their minds, after all, without asking and without warning.
She tries to imagine learning that something as dear as family, and as loved as a parent, was stolen from her; she is not kind or generous enough to imagine forgiveness for such a theft.
She only learns it's her birthday when the owls arrive: a cake from Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, gifts and letters from the boys. A thick envelope bearing the Hogwarts seal lands at her feet as well, the owl shoot swiveling in its wake. She takes the cake to the kitchen and uses a fork to take her first bite. The sweetness coats her teeth, and it is nothing like what her parents might have made.
Sirius finds her, shaking and crying, the cake on the floor, and she is wretched.
"It's my fault," she tells him, pushing away his arms and fighting off the comfort he silently offers. "My fault! I've lost them!"
He doesn't know, because she hasn't told him. He can't know, because she can barely speak the words. But she lets him close, at last, because she is weak and tired, and he is warm and strong, and she wants only to feel better, just for a moment. He smells of his alcohol and unwashed bedsheets; he smells of earth and rain water.
His hand in her hair is gentle, and she remembers, slowly, who she is again.
THEN
He sets the wards carefully, tying their strength to his blood as his father once taught him, and as generations of Blacks previously had been taught. The magic strums along his skin, and he revels in the sweet frustration of it, the dark play of the blood magic a seduction and threat warped into one. He will not miss Grimmauld, yet he cannot be glad of it.
This journey is a foolish one, but Sirius will not allow three children to face the task alone.
He apparates to the Burrow, forgetting that the wedding requires disguise, and it's only due to her quick-thinking that he's pulled into the garden shed before anyone can notice his arrival. Her sundress is yellow and dotted with tiny green flowers; a beaded handbag dangles from her wrist. Above her tanned shoulders, she frowns at him, dark eyes worried and worn.
He thinks her glamor is better than most wizards', but grief is a weight, and she cannot hide it from him. He wants to ask, even opens his lips to pass the words, but her shoulders are stiff and brittle in their effort to not touch his chest in the small space. Still-
He cups her cheek and tilts her chin upward, forcing her eyes to meet his. Quietly, he stares until she lets the glamor fall. Evidence of a night spent crying- a red nose and puffy eyes- greet him, and the smile she offers is a watery one. She sucks in small tight gasps of air, her hands fisted at her stomach, and he gently cradles her against him.
She doesn't cry, but he can feel the deep pain that she holds tightly.
He feels the slight vibration of her voice against his chest when she finally speaks. "Are you hungry? If you'll transform, I'll sneak you something to eat."
He nods, but his grip tightens. It is minutes yet before he finally changes, and she slips out from the shed, glamor and dog in tow.
NOW
She tells him, later that night, after her tears have passed and she eats both bowls of tinned soup he pushes at her, of her parents. She cannot meet his gaze, his eyes forcing a dizziness and heaviness that she can't quite name whenever she draws them into focus. Hermione speaks until her throat draws tight, and when she finishes, she feels the exhaustion of weeks spent lost in desperate hope fall on her.
"I'm sorry," she tells him, repeating the words far more than necessary. "I'm so sorry."
Sirius seems to understand that she speaks to more than just him, and when she finally stills, words and shudders ceasing, he cups her hand with his long fingers. "I was never the scholar Remus was, but I used to be quite good at charms. Perhaps I could help?"
Hermione stares, letting her eyes trace over the week-old stubble, too thin for a beard and too thick for laziness; she settles on his lips, dry and generous, and fixed tightly, as if frightened. She wonders what could scare the unflinching Sirius Black, what could make his eyes draw back as if preparing for a blow?
Her voice is not her own, the tone low and gentle and humming with second meanings, "Yes, please."
THEN
She fears the locket most when she's not wearing it; the dreams it weaves for her, the doubts and fears it prods at, are old friends. She thinks a horcrux is no match for a childhood spent friendless and alone, and she finds herself grinning, grim and determined, when its lies fail and slip into silence. She needs not fight it, she has survived it all before.
She does not have to wonder what it shows the others.
Jealousy clouds Ron's gaze, his mouth surly and stubborn with each turn of it about his neck. His griping and whining and deepest insecurities rise to the top, and Hermione wishes she could be surprised when he leaves, finally, the anger and certainty and deep relief in his blue eyes all the farewell he offers. Harry chases and swears and then hides himself in a silencing charm that does nothing to disguise the shuddering weeping.
She does not have to wonder what the locket offers Harry.
His nightmares worsen, and she knows that the locket tells him that he is no different from Riddle. The locket shows him proof that he and the dark wizard are alike, two sides of a closely bound coin. Harry resists, but he is tired, and the locket picks and pokes at the fears he buries deepest in his heart. He tries to insist on sharing the burden of carrying it, but Hermione knows better.
She wears it for hours at a time, and when the locket leaves her hands and crosses over Sirius's neck, she clutches her wand tight to her stomach, frightened and exhilarated by the heavy gaze of his darkened eyes.
She doesn't need an explanation for the bleakness that spills over him, the inky self-loathing that stains him. She's spent six years growing up with adolescent boys; she's read the books and felt the stirring of Viktor Krum's admiration against her thigh, his hands having found an ever-willing purchase. She knows what it means when a man looks at you like the desert does water.
What the locket shows Sirius is a falsehood wrapped in enough truth to linger still, even after it leaves his skin and returns to her own. Hermione blames an adulthood arrested too young, a man left without certain attentions for years on end; she offers him all and every kind of excuse, but the locket shows her, too, a falsehood dripping with truth enough to fill her glass partway.
It is enough to hasten a thirst of her own, she realizes, that for all that Sirius might reject the whispers the locket gives him, Hermione welcomes at least one of them.
NOW
He wishes he could blame the find on his intelligence or wit, or some other inherent ability that he could claim to solely own; the passage on memory charms is a footnote in reference to an unrelated potion, and Sirius only finds it because he's curious about the color-changing properties of the ingredients. His strengths had never been in studying; he prefers action, for all that it costs him.
The glow that fills her, that alights her lovely eyes and sends her arms around his middle, his chest wet with her tears- he thinks the accident well worth it. He promises himself to read more, if only to chance a second occurrence of her gladness.
He is more test subject than partner in the weeks that follow, as she reluctantly snatches small memories from his mornings and then returns them first one day, then two, then a week later. The counter-jinx is effective and reliable, and certainly their best shot at returning her parents' memories. Yet, she finds excuses to linger still.
"I should return the favor first, right?" she tells him before rolling up her sleeves and conjuring up a broom and mop. She spends a week cleaning the first and second floors before moving onto another reason to wait.
"We deserve a break first, right?" she reasons, and then summons her beaded bag and a towel. He spends the weekend watching as she dozes in the early autumn sunlight, the too cold water a tantalizing temptation. Her skin darkens easily, and he pushes away the early morning dreams that offer warmer waters for wading.
"It's about my N.E.W.T.s," she explains, finally opening the fifth letter sent from Hogwarts. "They're holding make-up exams next month, before the new semester starts. My parents would want me to focus on my studies, right?"
Sirius likes that she prefers to revise in the kitchen now, her parchment and books spread along its entire length, quills littering the corners. He drinks his morning tea slowly, pressed up against the cupboard, his eyes etching the way her lips mouth certain words and how her fingers pluck and pull at her hair, bound tightly at breakfast and stubbornly unfoiled by lunch. He drinks his afternoon tea even more cautiously, each sip taken with great care, and he stops creating excuses for his interest.
She is lovely, this woman-child, and he cannot think of her leaving.
The exams pass easily, and after another week of frantic cleaning, she finally stops and crumples, forced cheer and disinterest slipping off of her shoulders. He welcomes the fall of her into his arms, the clinging pressure of her weight along his lap, and presses his lips to her brow, murmuring the sorts of soft words she seems to need. She stirs and pulls back from his embrace, her eyes intent and wondering.
Sirius Black feels a shift, and his hand trembles along her back.
"It's time," she says at last.
"Good-bye," he hears.
THEN
She blames the battle. She blames the curse that still sends chilling sparks down her spine. She blames the hateful letters branded into her arm, and the way his eyes swore blood and vengeance at the sight of the wound. She blames the noise and the thunder and the crush of fallen stone.
The cloth of his robes itches along her fingers, and she feels the crust of dirt and gore against her skin. She pulls him down to her, forces his lighter gaze to her own, and with direct intent, eyes wide and purposeful and heavy with the strange feeling of brightness and dark that fills her chest with him so near, places her lips against his. She does not move or stir, and waits for a return on the months of silent yearning that she knows- knows- he's felt.
The rush of battle grapples for her attention, the sound of it urging past her silencing wards and she begins to doubt. She feels the stupidity of it gathering, the certainty of her silliness drawing near, and her fingers slowly uncurl.
"Hermione," he calls, his voice rough, "I can't-"
His hand is on her wrist, a chain unwilling to break. The smile she feels grow across her mouth is full of a bubbly happiness, and she can forget the awfulness of reality for a second more. She kisses him again, and this second time, he responds, his mouth a crush of desperate hunger that she welcomes and draws and bites.
She does not regret it, not later, once the battle is over and the dead are counted. The miracles of survival, of Harry's biblical rising, and she lingers still over the shape of his mouth and violent strength of his hands. She carries the taste of him as the long night fades into brilliant morning.
Hermione regrets none of it, not even when Sirius tells her, as the first funeral pyre takes flame, that it was a mistake.
"A foolish act by a foolish man," he tells her.
She watches as he leaves, his apparation leaving behind only the curling smoke of the pyre and murmurs of mourning.
NOW
The house is still again, silent again, and it only takes two nights for him to transform into his old friend, his most reliable companion. The warmth of his fur, the shift in weight and pressure as he walks along four instead of two, is a dear distraction. Sirius stretches his time into hours and days, lingering as his other self, lost to time spent asleep or half awake, the world in levels of gray. He remembers the warnings they had read, he and his friends, about animagi that lost themselves to their other forms.
He wonders if loneliness is the more dangerous enemy.
As Padfoot, he can smell her still, he realizes almost immediately. A catalog of soap and eucalyptus, yellowed parchment and stirred ink- echoes of her step through the house, teasing and punishing him for having let the weakness grow again.
It's in her absence that he thinks of her kiss, that first chaste bare touching of lip to lip. He remembers the warmth of her skin, the dry softness of her, and he traces over the memory more closely than the heated touch that followed. There are thousands of reasons for him to hate himself, to curl up in the self-disgust that likes to dance and strum about his thoughts, but he settles on this most recent reason:
He loves a woman twenty years his junior, and he's loved her since she first called his name on a dark and stormy night.
When he returns to himself, to the form he was born to, his fingers trace along his bare chest, his lips repeating the runes' names as he reminds himself of the tattoos he carved with sharp stone on his deepest and darkest of nights. Runes for protection and warmth; runes for hunger and thirst; the first, though, the oldest and dearest, feels the faintest.
Years of freedom- months and weeks returned to friends new and old has made him forget its importance, this oldest scar of his. The pain of his heart, its beat steady and sure, reminds him of its lingering danger.
NOW
Sunlight fills the kitchen, and her ears ring with the comforting sounds of her parents making breakfast. Her father teases and her mother laughs, and an egg shell lands short of the sink. Her father fusses and her mother smiles with love and affection and a fullness that brings tears to Hermione's eyes.
She is waiting for them to grow angry; she is waiting for them to frown and close the door on her. She has sinned and she waits the punishment.
They treat her with grace, with tears of joy and welcome and comfort. Their memories returned, and they tell her stories of missing pieces, or deep longing. Her mother cries when Hermione shows her scars; her father leaves and returns with a red nose and wet eyes and complains of the southern hemisphere's dodgy pollen.
They take her shopping for furniture and fill the small bedroom closest to the back garden with bookshelves and white quilts. Missed birthdays are celebrated, restaurants visited, and neighbors introduced. Too easily they accept her, and despite her happiness- despite the glowing, bubbling giddy joy that fills her- she feels a strain.
Too easily they forgive her; too easily she feels her heart begin to pull.
Her father laughs again, and in a huff, her mother sits beside Hermione, muttering promises of later retribution. Hermione's fingers still in her mother's gentle grasp; she stares, unaware of their movements.
"What do you keep writing, dear? You've been tracing the same little pattern over and over. Your father and I have noticed for days."
Her mother provides a blank paper and pen, and slowly, Hermione obliges. "A friend-" she stutters on the word, not knowing how to call him, not knowing how to think of him and not breath deeply, "- has several tattoos. This is one of them."
Her mother holds the paper at a distance, blinking and turning the page to the left and then the right. "Do you know… I think I recognize this. Yes-"
The wood of the stairs strains with the sudden, hurried steps and then repeats its complaints as her mother drops a thin text on the table. Pages flip, and then it's pushed to Hermione's nose, the same symbol and a scrawl of italicized text explaining its origin. Hermione reads the words and feels the truth pluck at her magic, zing through her blood and send her to her feet.
"Mum-"
Her mother smiles, the same lovely stretch of slender lips that watched her age and grow and become all that she is. "Go, darling. We'll catch up with you soon."
The pain is swift, but dear, and Hermione relishes the warmth of her mother's embrace before making for the back garden and bespelled portkey.
When her father brings his plates of breakfast offerings to the table, he finds only his wife, blinking rapidly and smiling faintly at an opened page. "Did you know," she asks her husband, voice thick, "that Sanskrit has over 90 words for love? It seems our daughter's found at least one of them."
SOON
Soon, he'll awake.
Soon, she'll arrive.
In between the awkward pauses that dot the two, he'll take her hand.
And before they fall to the bed sheets or make announcements to friends-
Before he says the word carved along his heart-
Before she smooths away the last of the scars-
Before either can move two steps forward and dash into the future-
In the warmth of his hand, she'll remind herself of the fluttering, heavy feeling of before and promise not to run away.
In the taste of her lips, revisited and remembered on the nights when neither his other self or drink or dreams could chase away the memory, he'll put to rest the doubt.
Soon.