All That is Unsaid
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It could have happened like this.
He could have drawn her aside after their very last leaving feast, gripping her hands with his bandaged ones as the school came and went around them, and told her in a low voice that in the final fight he'd found himself regretting every moment that hadn't been spent with her.
It could have, but it didn't. And being a practical sort of girl, she took it in stride.
Or it could have happened later on, in her little London flat, late one rainy night, maybe even New Year's Eve. He could have Apparated in suddenly, his hair plastered to his head for once, and wrapped an arm around her with a fierce possessiveness that she secretly enjoyed. And with water still trickling down his cheek, perhaps from hours of walking the wet streets, he could have said that he finally realized that his life was here.
But it happened like this.
It was a party, it was noisy, it was loud; and he had had no less than five butterbeers in a short span of time. She knew; it was her job to keep up with these things, it always had been.
He flopped down beside her on the couch, all knees and elbows and artless grace, and somehow settled so that his head was very close to her own. And in a moment that lasted a day, a year, a lifetime, he looked into her eyes, then nodded to himself, once.
She was opening her mouth to ask What? when it was sealed for her in a hot, beautiful instant.
He pulled away and she nodded back, once; he smiled, picked up her hand in his still-scarred one, lacing his fingers through hers.
It happened, and it took no words at all.