On a dark, hopeless night a scene played out just as it had so many times before.
One person found their way to another who was waiting in the hidden shadows. For a few hours their lives were filled with sparkling passion and then sleepy contentment. Then one of them returned to the barren darkness of the real world. After a while the other followed, and the two of them resumed killing each others' comrades because their leaders told them to.
Both always swore to themselves that this would be the last time, but it never was, and they knew it never would be. Not until one of them died or found something better elsewhere.
Neither of them ever spoke during these meetings. The risk of ruining it was too great. If they spoke, they would eventually have to discuss the implications of what they were doing, and that would lead to the decision that it couldn't go on, and neither would be able to say that they didn't want it to end. The simple honesty of silence would be gone with the first word.
So silent they were, every time. They communicated through looks and gestures and never really felt the need for anything else.
They both knew that what they had could never be more than what it was; that there was no rational reason not to end it... but passion was never rational, and they knew that too.
It had started years ago, when they were still at school. They had found themselves alone in the astronomy tower late one night; neither could quite recall why. It wasn't important. They had never intended for it to go any further than a one night stand, but somehow they ended up there again and again, and the other was always there. Now it was one of his family's country homes where they met, but that was the only thing that had changed. They were still on opposite sides, both neither able nor wanting to defect. If they had met each other on a battlefield neither would have hesitated to end the other's life. But they never did, and both were secretly grateful for that fact.
When they died, it was at the hands of people they did not know. In the split second before darkness overcame them, they both wished it was the other who had killed them. It felt wrong to share the intimacy of death with a stranger.
After, the only thing that was left of them was the carving in one of the walls at Hogwarts, enchanted to make it last forever. It read, simply:
DM+HG
No one knew what it meant. Of course, many assumed correctly that they were the initials of a boy and a girl who had been in love at Hogwarts. But no one could ever understand the complicated, passionate relationship the two of them had shared, or that this was the only evidence of that relationship that ever existed. No one knew that it had been carved and enchanted on a whim, and that both of them had regretted the stupidity of taking such a risk immediately after. No one could know how great that risk had been.
No one knew that, when they were both resigned to the fact that they were going to die long before the war was over, they were glad after all that they had made that tiny mark on the world. That there was proof that they had been there and been loved.
Loved. Yes, it was love. A strange, twisted kind of love, but love nonetheless. Neither would have denied it if the other had asked. But neither needed to ask. Knowing that they were loved was enough.
It was this knowledge that let them keep fighting even when the war had gone on for years and there was no end in sight. It was this knowledge that let them die their pointless deaths with a sense of still having accomplished something.
It was this knowledge that let them rest in peace.