Just a quick something I wanted to slip in.
The room is dark. Her breathing becomes shallow, she is aware that there is someone else in the room. Her grip tightens on the blankets she is wrapped in and she relaxes when she picks up on that familiar scent. Her.
She wants to lie still, to observe her love as she moves around the room, but when the mattress dips behind her she can no longer control herself. She rolls over and meets the body that has joined her in the bed.
A soft chuckle graces her ears as the bodies mesh together, fitting perfectly. Arms wrap, legs entwine and lips find each other.
"Will I ever surprise you?" the contralto voice asks in the darkness.
Tracing her fingertips over the beautiful face she knows so well the curly-haired witch whispers.
"Only when I want you to."
The room changes then reforms.
This time Hermione can hear shouting, there is smoke everywhere, she appears to be in a street, surrounded by sand-bags and sirens.
She quickly becomes aware that it is her voice shouting, in anger.
"Hermione, please. We have to calm down!" The soft brogue-filled voice reaches her ears as though across a battlefield, "you know what happens when-"
The sentence goes unfinished as an incredible light fills her senses.
"Oh god," a voice whimpers, "oh god, oh god, oh god," it is her voice, "what have you done? Hermione, what did you do?"
Hermione feels the pain of the other, the other she unconditionally knows is the other half of her. Her pain mirrored in the other.
Strong tendrils of pain lance through her as she is pulled into a different place.
She is now in a light room, there is sunlight streaming through the open windows of a library.
Hermione feels the ache of age in her bones, her face is etched with lines and her hands are stiff and slow but she knows it is her. She walks towards a mirror and pauses in front of it, she raises her hand and guides her fingertips across one of the more pronounced wrinkles.
It does not worry her that the lines are there, moreover she feels that the lines are meant to be there, they are a sign, a representation of what her life has meant. What her life has been.
She does not know how she knows but she knows that her life has been much longer than she thought.
Another hand closes around her own and she looks up to meet startlingly clear, emerald eyes.
And Hermione sits bolt upright, panting in the Gryffindor Dormitories, still trembling from the emotion those eyes stirred.