Note: This is a drabble for a harmony plunny. Harry Potter x Hermione Granger. Post War, Marriage Law.
Prompt: What are the three things he could never tell her.
He'd thought she'd known.
How could she not? As the world was going to shit around them - they were trapped in the middle of a war. She was a constant, and maybe she had been for a long time. Despite the times he'd come down hard on her in school, or when she reported his firebolt that had come from a suspicious sender.
Yet Hermione was brilliant. So how couldn't she realize that it was so much more than the mutual brokenness that had led him to her on the night Ron had abandoned them?
Harry wasn't a stranger to finding comfort in someone, but it was - it was explosive. The combination of her skin sliding against his, or how her nails bit into his shoulders as he slid into her. The sound of her whimpering in his ear, blindly reaching for her wand to cast a silencing charm on the tent - he couldn't forget it.
So standing across from the pair of them, being so sure to look away from her whenever she glanced his way left the vilest taste in his mouth. There was a ring on the third finger of her left hand, a small stone that was centered in the middle, and it glinted beneath the bright lights of the Ministry.
Harry knew it was Hermione and Ron's last ditch effort to avoid the marriage law, something that had been coming for months but was only just coming into effect in society. Yet they weren't married, merely engaged by the time Kingsley Shacklebolt deemed it time to announce the wildly unpopular law.
He barely heard the minister's voice carrying over the silent crowd. Ginny's arm brushed against his, a small smile curving her lips. The youngest Weasley was so certain their names would be called together, and it made his stomach roll. To be paired with any woman in the room would make him miserable, but he couldn't have her.
As Kingsley made his way through the pairings - some disgruntled shouts rang out, but he paid them no mind -, Harry realized he would eventually have to come to terms with it all. He would never be permitted to tell her how he loved her, certainly more than his best friend ever would. Or that when it was time to make a choice to come back after being stuck down in the Forbidden Forest, it might have been for the sake of the world, but it was equally for her.
Or that, well he was backtracking, that when Ron snogged her in the Chamber of Secrets it had felt like more of a betrayal than anything.
"Harry Potter," his attention was called up by Kingsley's long pause, and the way his brows furrowed as he stared at the slip of paper. Swallowing hard, he announced, " and Hermione Granger."