She still writes him letters. Long, detailed novels of cloaked concern and and reminiscing and flamboyant Weasley signatures crowding up the margins and every other sentence beginning with 'remember when we . . .', letters that always begin with Dear and end with Love, quill traced over pencil in her neat staid handwriting. Sometimes Ron signs the back, just his name and a note about those bloody Chudley Cannons and that big loopy R. Hermione puts him up to it, Harry knows this, and it must be something else they fight about, he thinks with a fuzzy sort of fondness; he knows this because sometimes in lieu of a note there is just a tacked-on postscript, just pencil, no ink. Ron sends his love. And Ron would let Hermione castrate him before sending something as mortifying as love via Pig.
The letters give Harry the most pleasant stretching sensation in his chest, like warm blankets on wet hair, like too-weak tea in a clinking saucer and like the flavour of butterbeer frothing over the bottle's lip, and that last makes him remember the feel of Hermione soft and laughing and half-inebriated between them, the pendants of ice gathering on her scratchy woolen mittens burning into the back of his neck like his blush. He doesn't look at Hagrid's photo album any more; it gathers a light and spare film of dust on the floor of his trunk with his Sneakoscope and torn-up Potions essays. His parents waltz in the flat shadow of a closed book, and sometimes behind his eyes, but he never counts the autumn leaves swirling around them anymore. He uses these newer, warmer memories as buffers instead, pages through them in the wee hours of the morning like loose-leaf notes, tries to cup them in his nimble Seeker's palms and hide them away before they become yet another casualty of the war. He is only nineteen--he shouldn't need a Pensieve. The vast dark shape of twenty lurking in the furthest corners of his bedroom cupboard (not his cupboard bedroom, there is a difference) hits him with a rough, unbecoming sort of panic. His boggart is more than likely a birthday cake.
He will not tell Hermione this, not ever, not even when she asks him if he is well, if he is all right. Fine, he will say, as always, soaking up the rightness of the moment, imagining it is August 31st and that he is still a great, great wizard and that the world begins again tomorrow. And then she will grab him, enfolding him in her strong, child-thin, autumn-scented arms, unleashing a stream of familiar recriminations and exultations to the finely-stubbled line of his jaw and half-laughing, half-scolding at how funny his hair looks now, cut so very short, not messy at all. It is all hypothetical, all in the future tense, because he has not seen Hermione, or anyone, in weeks.
He is on holiday--where exactly he is, he isn't quite sure any more, because the unraveling roads overlap and bend and turn and Muggle drivers are quite content to drive on and on and on for hours and hours if you flash them enough gold. He likes traveling, likes roaming on and on and feeling that he is adventuring on an endless quest. All he needs is a tent.
Ignatia, his owl, whose feathers are grey except in the evenings, when they shimmer a half-hearted white, brings him the weekend edition of the Prophet every Friday afternoon. The headlines are never about him any more, except one week when he and Ginny are spotted going out to dinner, holding hands and ducking from the camera in the spattering rain. The picture is eighteen months old, but Harry supposes that doesn't matter if you're trying to prove a point. Ignatia brings him letters every day now, each new arrival punctuated with a disapproving cluck, and although the letters never betray any anger and he always writes back within the news cycle, if only to let her know that no, he hasn't been assassinated, he thinks he will be lucky if he isn't greeted with her fists, the pointed edge of her (ruby, not diamond) ring making every blow sting just a bit sharper, echo just a bit louder in the chambered confines of his chest. He wonders if Ron will hold her back or if he will waver on the edges of the scene and let her pummel him, and if the role reversal will be amusing or if it will just make him feel queasy. Mostly he wonders if they really want him back or if they only say they miss him to keep him away.
We're terribly worried about you, she writes, and here her pen stumbles briefly off into the margin, the shadow of a magicked-off inkblot framing her careful penmanship, the tail of her y. He shifts and bites his lip at the prickling pucker of guilt growing in his closed-in throat, staring up at the high rafters of his rented room. It looks a bit like the Shrieking Shack must have before Remus got there. He likes it here. It's quiet and wizard-free and chock-full of industrious spiders. He goes for long walks in the morning, up and down twisting alleys and then down them again, and when he returns just after nightfall there is always a new cobweb waiting for him, draped across the sepia-tinged window or perhaps the four-poster bed, frail and translucent in the wandlight. When they begin to look less like veils and more like shrouds he decides it is time to go back.
He takes the train, for old times' sake. When he steps onto the curb at Grimmauld Place and stares up at that implacable old door he considers apparating in to avoid touching the rust-tainted knocker, but remembers just in time, with a twinge of chagrin, that Hermione would have seen to the security measures already, and he doesn't fancy losing an ear. He drags his near-empty trunk up the steps, clatter clatter thud, but before he can knock the door is open and he is reeling back on his heels, his muddy shoes scuffing up the doormat, hands flying around bushy hair and sliding with accustomed breathing space down the familiar ribbon of her spine. He grins, and grins some more, grins with abandon because she can't see it, her face buried too deep in his shoulder, and barely winces at the feel of his glasses digging into his skull, knocked askew by velocity, too stunned to care.
"Hi," he gasps. Ignatia hoots.
"Why were you gone so long?" It is the tenth question on her list, after are you sure you didn't catch cold and immediately preceding, he suspects, what is wrong with you. Her arms are folded quietly across her striped sweater and her fingers ink-stained, and it makes an echoing voice in his head whine, no, Hermione, no, don't think whatever it is you're thinking. His mind runs in concentric circles, always, and he sees hers blazing straight ahead. But the tilt of her head makes him think, hope that she understands. He traces absent patterns in the condensation covering his mug of butterbeer.
"I guess I just . . . lost track of the time."
She doesn't really nod, but doesn't stop looking at him, either, looking at him like she expects him to suddenly explode in a flood of anger or something similarly interesting, just looking at him, diagnostically, like she did after their fifth year, and the hush of the moment feels like snowfall. Time. The word is a chain connecting his neck to hers, an hourglass spinning in her fingers and adrenaline smiling in his lungs. Her hands fold themselves into a pyramid on the table between. The ruby glistens.
"Reparo," she murmurs without moving, and he knows that the verbal nature of the spell is for his benefit, and his glasses sizzle and straighten on his nose, his eyes crossing a little with relief and disorientation. Thank you, he thinks, would be unnecessary, eagerly swallowing down the quivering smile she directs his way. "Harry," she says now, and butterbeer and butterflies pop bubbles in his stomach. He just wants her to tell him what comes next.
"I missed you," she whispers, accusingly, exasperatedly, oh Harry, and the kitchen is empty, empty, empty but for them, and when he says me too he feels like he is eleven years old, and the thud of a troll crashing to the water-slick floor could not be louder than the grateful pattering of his heart.