It's over. Let's pretend I owned all of it instead of some. Please review. Because it will make my day!
final.xy
She blinks amid the flashes of green and runs toward the small crowd. Everything is happening in slow motion—she's noticing all the little things. She notices the exact moment the Death Eaters stop fighting. She notices the way Tonks falls, and how the way she lands is unnatural. She notices Ginny, who's not even supposed to be there, and how her expression is odd, and she knows the exact moment at which a cut she just received begins to bleed.
She does not notice where Voldemort goes when he dies, whether he just disappeared or stayed like normal people or if he said anything at all until the next day when everyone fills the others in. She does not notice that Harry is indeed passed out and that's why he's not Apparating back with them, that's why someone has to take him. She just notices one thing—who is alive and who isn't out of those that matter to her.
Ron's face is drained of color when they Apparate to the Burrow, and everyone hugs and laughs and kisses and eats and drinks and goes to bed. When those lost are spoken of, everyone remains silent and frowns or cries.
Hermione does a lot of crying in the next few days. She has a lot of serious talks with many people. When Harry wakes up, he retells the story, because it's his that matters, and has a few interviews which he actually seems to enjoy. Hermione wonders what will happen when his famousness fades. Heroes will always be heroes, but they're not remembered for long after they've accomplished their goal except in history books, after all.
She will fade into the background of life, and live to an old age. She will see her red-haired children off to the same magical school that she went to. Except, at this point in her life, she doesn't even know what she wants for breakfast tomorrow morning, let alone who she's going to marry, and she likes it that way.
Now, she doesn't have to know all the answers.
final.xx
Ron, on the other hand, has a good idea of what will happen in the future. He looks at old pictures of himself years ago and smiles, faintly, remembering those times. He hadn't thought himself innocent then, but now he does.
He wants to grow up, he decides, and normally that wouldn't be the sort of thing one could do in one night, but as soon as Voldemort is destroyed, that night, when he decides this, he does wake up the next morning an adult. He isn't in awe at this. Hermione has been a woman for ages now, hasn't she? And that's when he realizes it—he knows what his future holds, and it's in her, even with Harry and Ginny, whose relationship has been official much longer, still working things out.
He still has his boyish qualities that stick with any man throughout life. He has trouble deciding how to go about things, still, and can get nervous. He doesn't know when he'll have another serious talk with Hermione's father, but he knows what they'll talk about.
The night after the final battle, his bedroom window is shut, despite the fact that it is June. It's raining outside. Outside, he sees the colorless world of night, but somehow he notices the minute detail of a fly trapped between the screen and the pane of his window. He reflects on a time after a battle, once, when Hermione was in a bed at Hogwarts, with Harry across the room, when she stumbled out of bed and rescued a fly from a window, not allowing her father to kill it. He had helped her back to bed then, thinking that whatever potions she had been given to numb her pain had made her a little loopy, but now as he sees the fly, he feels a need to open the window and let it fly free to wherever it pleases.
And he does. He opens the pane and then the screen and lets it fly free. He quickly closes both and looks at his reflection in the glass before him. He notices a figure approach from behind him, and next thing he knows, she's kissing him in all what have become the right places, and he cares so much, because it's Hermione, and he loves her.