THE FOREST OF DEAN

The saddest fate of all is wondering what might have been.

It started with the dance – a dance which never really ended, not even nineteen years later, when their feet were supposed to have long stopped straying.

He had only wanted to make her smile again, for just a moment, to offer her what comfort he could. They had lost everything and everyone, with only one another left. So he lifted her up from before that radio, which conveyed a song of innocence lost. She stares at him out of a mask of desolation, and he knows she regrets. She longs for their friend who is no longer there, who abandoned them because of how his insecurities and fears poisoned his heart. And it hurts her that he couldn't just stay, not after she ran after him and begged him to come back.

Harry had expected her to leave with him. He's stared at the entrance (the exit) to the tent as her voice fell quiet, and waiting from the sound of disapparation. It never came. But it would be hours before she returned to him, showing him that he wasn't alone. And yet, somehow, when she stared at him through that mask of loss and pain, he felt like she was gone. That he soul had left with her.

He wanted to kill Ron for doing that to her.

But instead, he reached for her collar (fingertips brushing her skin softly, hot against her waxy skin) and lifted the locket from her, some of the awful weight leaving (telling her to give up, just give up, because they're going nowhere fast), which he tossed aside like it was nothing. Like, for a moment, the mission was nothing, that destroying Voldemort was nothing, that for a moment, they needed to forget. They needed to be the children they were again.

Even though innocence had been lost long ago, and they both knew they would never get it back.

He drew her over to the center of the tent, and began doing ridiculous dance moves, which made the mask crack, a hint of a smile return, her eyes brightening. They began to move, spin, rock, laugh, leave aside their burdens over by the cot, and just have a moment of hope and light in the darkness. But as they began to sway together, reality returned, and she doesn't really look at him, not for long. There is a moment, suspending in the lamp-light, where they see each other and understand.

And Harry thinks about drawing her closer and doing something he never considered before – to touch his lips to hers, to the lips of the girl who has never left him, even as her heart left her behind – but she turns away. He is not Ron. He is Harry, and there are some lines they're not supposed to cross. It not in the script laid out for them.

So why does it feel like he just lost something heartbreakingly beautiful?

Christmas Eve, then Christmas morning, at Godric's Hollow, in the cemetery of people who feared and welcomed death. She lays snow roses on his parents' grave. It would become a tradition only known between them. While their families would put the gift under the tree, they'd slip out for a half an hour to put those roses on their grave. They would briefly tell Lily and James about their lives. And they would feel a weight in their chest from wondering what could have been.

And they were not simply mourning the dead in those moments.

"Maybe we should just stay here, Harry, and grow old…."

They are lost, and they both know it. It's not simply that Ron has been gone for weeks (months?), but the fact that they are no closer to completing their objectives then they were before. Now they're short his wand, the winter's only growing colder, and that damned locket is sucking their hope dry. So as she muses on the unchanging Forest of Dean, she starts to give up – give in. She went there with her parents, who no longer even know she ever existed – the picture are blank, and she hasn't left a trace. The tea's gone cold. It's bitter. More bitter than it ever was before, considering she had dentists for parents who never allowed sweetener in their drinks.

He didn't know she'd sacrificed her life for him. No, remember, "Moody didn't die for you. This is bigger than you!" Right, Ron. She's not doing this for him, Harry. She did it to save everything and everyone, and that's why she didn't leave. She's determined to fulfill their final quest.

And yet…"Maybe we should just stay here, Harry, and grow old…." Together.

(He didn't know he was the seventh horcrux. He didn't know that reality would probably catch up to them. If he had, he wouldn't have hesitated. Right…?)

And in a moment of weakness, he considered it. He considered doing what was easy instead of right, because it would give him a chance – where she was concerned – to finally do what was right instead of easy. He considered saying "Let's," and abandoning their missions so they could stay here in the Forest of Dean. They would watch that frost melt and spring overtake the woods. They would leave their tent behind and construct an actual house – they had all the wood they needed, and with magic, it shouldn't take long. She was a brilliant spell-caster, and his muscle tone from Quidditch had only grown more wiry from the constant walking. They could put protections spells around a few acres, and she could experiment all she wanted with magic, while he worked on a garden –watching things grow instead of dying, always dying. And that moment of dance would follow through.

And in some distant part of his mind, he saw the improbable, even in a dream. Of a little girl with bushy brown hair and green eyes, and a boy with black hair and chocolate brown (not hazel) eyes. He could almost see them running through the frost, their breaths coming from their pink mouth in puff of mist, and hear their laughter in his ears. Laughter people would chalk up to spirits of the woods, not really there but still heard. And the dream cracked before he knew, just knew that any children with his sense of adventure and tendency to get into trouble, and her inquisitiveness and willingness to make their plots foolproof, would never content them to stay in the forest. They would stray, or break out, and enter in the world their parents had abandoned.

And yet, he couldn't help but wonder if they could. If they could just exist here, and lives out their years, and face whatever challenges they had in their own time. No more running from evil, no more facing homelessness and loss, no more watching people die or fearing being killed before the mission was complete. No more carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders (they were children! Why should they have to be responsible for that?)…they could just live.

And someday Ron (Ginny, god, Ginny!) would be a distant memory, and it would just by them, alone, rebuilding and becoming more as the world outside was consumed by chaos.

And they would live unfettered, in peace. Maybe in love.

Why not? The foundation was already there – so the saying went, that the best of friends made the best of lovers. And theirs would be a quiet love. A gentle one. It was what they wanted most of all right now, after being crushed under all their weight. With Ron, with Ginny, there would be fire and passion and all the things that made youthful love so entrancing, so glorious, so thrilling. Summer, not winter lover. That was true. They both knew that.

But neither of them were here with them, were they? It was just him and Hermione. Just them.

He almost said yes.

…But it would just be trading crushing responsibility for crushing guilt that way.

So he changed the subject.

And the next day, Ron returned.

He stood corrected when it happened. When the locket showed Ron his deepest fears, of Harry and Hermione intertwined, of the betrayal of a friend and the woman he loved. And Harry had stared, transfixed. Though they were evil, some part of his mind whispered that those things came from somewhere. That the locket had been around their necks for months, feeding off them – perhaps now showing Ron not only his deepest fear, but Harry and Hermione's deepest regret, averted in the last moment by some noble sense of duty.

He screamed for Ron to kill the locket (to banish the image from his eyes), and as Ron stepped through the wraiths, killing the locket, Harry knew it was over.

But the image would haunt him as much as it would haunt Ron.

And after all of that, he couldn't say she was like a sister to him.

The words were like ashes in his mouth.

He would never say that his life with Ginny was an unhappy one. That would be a lie, all facts considered. He had shared his life with her for roughly nineteen years (longer than with Hermione or Ron, really, though they were still there), had three beautiful children, and a lovely home. Yet even though he was happy, there lacked a certain contentment – a certain peace. It was funny, because when asked, most people would take happiness over contentment. He would. Yet somehow, he always found himself wondering about the other path he and his (now) sister-in-law could have taken. Had Ron not returned, had Ginny not waited, had the cementing of a family not been a part of the allure. As only children, they had wanted more love then they could contain.

Still, looking over at Hermione one night, he thought he saw a hint of the mask. A hint of her eyes through it. Eyes that saw.

Eyes he still had.

But they didn't dance.

He heard the laughter of children in his head, haunting him long after the thought of them was dead and buried beneath the ice.

Nineteen years later, and none of them ever spoke of the Forest of Dean. It was a part of the story alluded to, be never detailed. Because for Ron, telling others how he'd returned to his friends would mean admitting to having left them in the first place.

And for Harry and Hermione, it had meant leaving something of themselves behind once they'd returned.