Nest

Disclaimer: They belong to JKR, I’m only playing.

A/N: For anyone interested, I’m on LJ now: www.livejournal.com/users/kundalakesi Come say hi. Right now there are requests being posted.

And thanks as always to the lovely, heartless beta miconic.

Nest

And I keep telling him that I love him; nothing is left to suggestion. For a thing to be known, it must be spoken; but also, once it is spoken, even very provisionally, it is true.

A Lover’s Discourse

Roland Barthes

*

You sit at my bare hip, one of your legs trailing the ground. You sit very still, only the fingers of one hand moving.

“Harry,” I mumble.

“Yeah?” You don’t look up.

“What are you doing?”

Your fingers have been tracing my hipbone for the last ten minutes, thumb light over the raised flesh, over and over again.

“Marking, of course,” you say softly, mouth relaxing into a grin.

I raise a sleepy eyebrow, moving my arm away from my forehead where it’s been protesting the desultory sun.

You incline your head and make the whorls on my skin more deliberate.

“I’m leaving marks on a Hermione-shaped map. Harry was here,” you drawl. “So I can make my way back easily.”

I smile. I try to think of a smart retort, but your bare eyes beneath the impossibly mussed up hair fill me up, chasing all other inconsequential things, such as words, to oblivion. The light from the window curls into the hollows of your chest and shoulders that quivered beneath my fingertips just moments before.

I close my eyes. With the world blocked out, only your fingers on my skin exist. Only you exist.

But I’m not fooled.

I know that beneath those lazy tracings, you’re stoking the deepest reserves of your courage, to begin and to end, to seal something and open it up, all at the same time.

I know what it is. But this time I can’t help you.

Minutes etch their warm way onto my skin with your hand. Your knuckles and palm and sweetened fingers raise echoes of unhurried desire with my every breath. And just as I decide I’m unable to ignore them any longer, you stop. Your hand settles on my not-so-flat stomach like the beginning of an unformed thought, heavy and irresolute.

I sigh and raise my arms. “Harry. Come here.”

You look at me and smile a little. I can see both relief and trepidation skittering along its wake.

You climb into bed and settle next to me. Then you hide your face in my neck, covering my body with yours. Somewhere outside, perhaps in that willow where we found the beginnings of a winter nest, a bird calls in a tremulous whistle. The wind blows a spray of red-gold leaves inside the room. I listen to their brittle music as they drift about on the wooden floor. It’s an ordinary October day, but I know my life’s about to take flight.

Our life.

It was my idea to come and live in Godric’s Hollow, years after the summer we first went there. Not forever, but for as long as it took for you to live out the longing and move on. You weren’t sure at first, and for weeks we couldn’t discuss it civilly. You lost your temper, I burst into tears. But later you gave in, probably just to shut me up.

The house was in ruins, the garden a muggle botanist’s dream. But a few days with the Weasley clan and the Order pitching in, we managed to make it habitable and sunny. The house was whitewashed and furnished, the roof tiled anew and the floor scrubbed. The garden was redone under Mrs Weasley’s eager supervision, wards and Apparation points cast by Ministry wizards. Now, the only recognisable feature of James and Lily’s cottage is the old willow at the gate.

And I can sense a tranquillity in you that makes all the arguments and exasperation worthwhile. A stillness that, while so out of place with what you’re about to face--the last Horcrux and the final confrontation--makes me sure about this, today.

I stroke your hair, waiting. The blue crystal wind-chime has wrought the pale sun into a thin rainbow which arches across the room. Your breath nestles in my neck, your lips pressed to my collarbone. Then finally, you rise up on elbows on either side of my waist.

I look into your eyes and I want to weep.

I have spent my whole life, the years that matter, bracing, guiding, helping you, keeping you safe and clinging to you. And I’ll do the same in the years to come.

But just this once, you’re on your own. You need to be.

You need to feel what it means to breathe life into those words screaming in your heart. That it’s to render yourself as fragile as a featherless fledgling, yet to allow yourself the chance to be stronger than gravity. That it’s to throw your life up in the air, and hope it’ll be caught and cradled before it hits the ground.

I know. I’ve been where you are.

I touch your cheek and trace your lips. You’re staring at me with such intensity, it’s all I can do not to close my eyes.

“Were you jealous when I dated Ginny?”

My hands pause.

It takes me a moment to see the question for what it is; a way of stalling.

I sigh and think for a moment of a time that seems from somebody else’s life. The betrayals, the uncertainty, Dumbledore’s death. The string of girls flocking around you, the hours Ron and I spent torturing ourselves with futile feuds for each other’s attention.

“No. I--I don’t know how to say it.” I hesitate. “I guess Ginny wasn’t quite what I wanted to be for you. Am I making sense?”

“Sort of.”

I push your hair back over your forehead. The silkiness sliding through my fingers quickens the dormant thrill low in my belly. “I guess she belonged to a life you wished you had.” I run my fingers wonderingly over the uneven lines of your scar, understanding my own words only as I say them. “And I was already part of the life you actually lived.” I drop my hand.

You continue to look at me for a moment longer, then smile. “Guess you’re right.” You bend your head and nuzzle my breast. “As usual.” Your lips curve against my skin and I wriggle a little.

“But what about the others? Were you jealous of them?”

I snort. You look up, incredulous. “You mean those twittering bird-brains who’d have licked your toes had you asked them?” The rumble of your laughter mingles with my pulse. “Most certainly not.”

Still chuckling, you lay your cheek on the skin just below my throat. I grin into your hair.

The bird trills again. I hear the click of a latch and the creak of wood, followed by a high-pitched cry of ‘Daddy’. You lift your head. We both listen to the sound of footsteps and peels of laughter as father and daughter from next door walks inside their house. I watch you as you smile at the lilt of words tumbling awkwardly from the two year-old’s mouth.

A few years ago that smile would have just been wistful. It still is, but there’s hope beneath the longing, a sense of possibility.

We’ve changed.

We still fight the same thing we fought when we were eleven. But now we know we can’t wait till the fight is over to begin living.

I sigh and wrap my arms around your shoulders. An early moon gleams faintly in the sky still pale with sunlight.

“So, what about you? Were you jealous of Ron? Or Adam?”

It’s your turn to snort. “Well, first of all, with Ron, I was too busy making sure you two didn’t kill each other to be jealous…”

I giggle. “We were bad, weren’t we?”

You raise an eyebrow. “Remember the birds-turned-bullets?”

I cover my mouth with my hand as the memory squirms. “He was thrashing about with Lavender right in front of my face! What was I supposed to do?”

“Um, I thought rationality was your greatest virtue?”

“I was sixteen!”

“And when did Hermione Granger ever act her age? You were born old and wise!”

“Oh, shut up. What about Adam then? Were you jealous?”

“No, not a single jot.”

“Care to explain?”

“Well. It was obvious you were just using him.”

“I was not!”

“’Course you were,” you say impassively. “You were just trying to make me jealous while I was with Sophia.”

I cover your smirk with my lips, my tongue beginning a heated fugue with yours. Your mouth still tastes faintly of me. I feel my body rise again to the insistent thrumming I’m barely holding at bay. I break off.

I know, I said I’m not going to help you.

But I am Hermione. I can’t help myself.

“Maybe I’d just discovered I loved you and didn’t know what to do about it,” I say quietly, breathlessly. My heart’s beating fast. Or maybe it’s yours; it’s hard to tell.

Your laughing eyes become still, and you swallow.

“Harry?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s okay.”

You look at me quizzically.

I cup your face in my hands and smile.

“You don’t have to do this now. I’m not going anywhere.”

Your eyes widen. Then they smile. You blush and shake your head.

“You’ve known all this time what I’ve been trying to say, haven’t you?”

“Yes.” I whisper.

“I should’ve known.” You groan and drop your face into my neck again. When you speak again, I can’t really hear you, the words merely vibrate next to my skin.

“It’s hard…”

“I know.”

“I’ve never said it to anyone.”

“I know.”

“And no one’s ever…”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Except you.”

You raise your head. Once again, I have to will the tears back. I kiss you lightly and run my palms over your shoulders, trying to soothe your errant pulse.

“I didn’t exactly grow up hearing it.” You attempt a wry grin.

It’s not like you to feel sorry for yourself; it’s a mark of how nervous you are. I run my fingers over your eyes. “It makes a difference, yeah.” I smile.

“But I want to say it. To you.” The tremor in your voice touches me where I’m softest, deep in my heart where I’m nothing but a quivering globule of feeling.

“Then say it.” I can hardly get the words out. “I’m listening.”

You brace yourself on either side of me again, looking into my eyes.

I watch as within you all that we are to each other converge into three words, the way the crystal wind-chime catches the immeasurable sunlight. And when finally you say those words, they’re almost lost in the sound of my tears.

“I love you, Hermione.”

I take your face in my hands, my body moving to wrap you up. I can no longer tell whose tears are running down my face.

“I love you and--”

You take my lips between yours, your voice lost in me. “I’m so sorry it’s taken me so long to say it.”

“That’s okay.” I want my arms to be wide enough, my lips to be ardent enough to hold and taste and feel all of you, right this minute that spans all our time together. “I love you too. You know that.”

“Yeah, I do.” Your hands move along my body, seeking and finding. The last thing I see before I close my eyes is the rainbow across the room quiver and dance as the wind plays with the crystal.