"Tradition is an explanation for acting without thinking."
-Grace McGarvie
:::
Harry starts the tradition of kissing her once every spring.
Towards exams, she begins to get stressed and, in order to help her relax and refocus, Harry will pull her from the Common Room or the library—wherever they happen to be when he sees her start to overload—and drags her from the castle to the lake.
It's usually cold, or at least chilly, since she usually starts to hit her maximum stress level in mid-April. The ground usually squishes under their shoes annoyingly, but there's a tree trunk by the water that's been there since they started the tradition and they sit on it, side-by-side, huddling together for that slight bit of warmth the chill has leeched from their skin.
They usually don't talk, but he'll put his arm around her waist after a while. Right before they leave, like clockwork each year, he'll lean over and kiss her gently, before pulling back and smiling at her. Then he'll take her hand in his and lead her back to wherever they'd been to begin with.
The first time he kissed her—their fourth year—she'd been so shocked that she didn't talk to him for a few days, afraid that this had changed everything, that everyone had seen it coming but her. When she did start up talking to him again, though, he hadn't mentioned anything about it, and, she'd almost begun to believe that she'd imagined it. Until the next year.
After that, on their way back up to the castle, after his lips have touched hers so briefly, she starts to notice little things around her; flowers growing, grass turning green again and growing longer, leaves begin to return, and there's always a smell in the air. The smell of life returning to normal, of beauty coming to stay.
She starts to associate this smell with Harry. She starts to associate spring with Harry. It begins to become hard to imagine a world where his lips have never touched hers, where his hands have never held her waist gently, like she's something that could break so easily. It's hard to imagine a world where they'd stayed the people they used to be.
But, if kissing Harry is spring, then kissing Ron must be autumn.
It's almost summer the first time she kisses him—with such reckless abandon that she almost loses her head when she turns to see Harry watching—but his lips don't taste anything like flowers blooming or the smell of grass. His arms around her don't feel anything like the slight chill in the air and his eyes aren't like the warmth of the sun.
Later, she wonders why she did it, why she kissed one of her best friends when she'd already been kissing her other best friend for three years. Maybe she needed to see if she was making the right choice. Maybe she hadn't known if kissing a different person could be like growing back too.
It wasn't. And she was disgusted with herself.
The second and last time Ron kisses her, he's saying good-bye. Like he knows what he's seemingly been missing for years. Like he understands that she's belonged to someone else the entire time.
His kiss tastes less like spring than ever. It's filled with dying leaves and cold air. Shivering branches and chill rain. Pumpkins and cloudy skies. That's what she feels when she kisses Ron.
Harry takes her away from the Burrow—away from reminders of her mistakes and everything going cold—a few days later. He goes back to Privet Drive and they stand on the street in front of it, hand in hand, while he stares at it in a final farewell to the house that ended up building him into everything he is.
He offers to take her back to the Burrow after that, as if he knows nothing of what's been going on in the month and a half since the war ended. She just shakes her head and lets him apparate them into the Leaky Cauldron.
Their room only has one bed and, when he offers to complain and get a separate room, she shakes her head and rests her hand on his arm—the first time she's touched him since he kissed her for the last time the first day of spring, outside their tent in the dead of night. He looks down at her hand, resting gently on the arm of his sweater and shivers.
They sit on the bed for a while, trying to think up topics of conversation even though they're not entirely sure they'll have the guts to say anything at all to the other. Around the time Harry realizes that it's useless to try to put what he's feeling into words she'll understand, he reaches out his arm and rests it around her waist, pulling her side into his.
She rests her head against his shoulder and thinks of all the times he's held her like this. Ron's parting kiss flashes in her mind, then, and she silently prays—to whoever would want to listen to her—that the man holding on to her will never go away. She's not completely certain she'll be able to survive if he did.
After what feels like hours, Harry uses his free hand to lift her chin up, craning his neck so that their eyes meet. Without another word, he leans down and kisses her again, for the fifth time. The air escapes her lungs and she can hardly believe that she's been given a chance to do this again.
She leans up into him, reaching her hands up to pull his neck down gently, wondering if there's any space between them at all. Her senses are on overload and she feels like she could burst at any moment.
All she can feel is the slightly warm chill of spring on her skin, the sun on her face and arms, warming her through her clothes. She can taste the air, the smell of flowers and grass, smell things growing and returning to life, starting anew.
There is no rain or rotting in his kisses (the way they trail down her chin and into the hollow her neck) no dead leaves or cloudy skies in his hands (the way the callouses rub against her smooth skin when he holds her arms, gently running them down the length of them). There is the sun (how he smiles at her when they pull back for air, his white teeth glinting in the candlelight of the room)and warmth (his forehead against hers, his sweet breath spreading across her face and blowing her hair back gently like a breeze by a lake) and beginning again (his tearful eyes when she reaches up and runs her hands over his cheek, the, "I love you," she's just whispered ringing in their ears).
And when they wake in one another's arms the next morning—their clothes and shoes from the day before still on them—his fingers trail random patterns onto her cheek and his eyes lock on hers as the early morning sunlight streams in through the window by the bed. "I love you, too, you know," he whispers quietly, surely, before he kisses her, pulling her weary mind into spring all over again.
fin