Ghosts

A/N: I love Harry/Hermione. I love the HBP ships. This is my attempt to reconcile the two. Ergo, there's mentions of past-R/Hr and H/G. Just so you know.

--

At her second wedding Hermione wears a long-sleeved blue dress and sensible shoes. She does not bother to hide the grey at her temples, because there are a hundred other things to worry about, not the least of which is making her son sit still for five minutes.

The Prophet gossip page has a field day with her choices. She politely ignores it until a columnist speculates about true loves and long-running affairs, at which point Harry has to hold her back and tell her it's not worth getting angry about.

--

Hermione believes in love, although not in the romantic all-consuming sense of the word. She's far too practical for that. She loves simple, familiar things -- a book so well-read that it falls open to her favorite page, the irritated face her son makes when she tells him to at least pretend he combed his hair, the way Ron's eyes lit up when he argued with her and the way Harry smiles and shakes his head when she lectures whoever will listen on the details of a new theory.

"You like love well-worn," her mother says. "There's nothing wrong with that."

--

She sits up in bed sometimes and listens to Harry's breathing -- softer than Ron's, whose snores were nothing short of epic -- and she thinks about how much she loves a challenge. And this is a challenge, no matter what soft-hearted friends might claim. She knows that Harry is at once stronger and more brittle than Ron was, that she can't measure his opinions by how loud he gets.

There is nothing simple about a marriage that comes complete with children and the memories and unfinished dreams of old loves. If it were simple, she's not sure she would trust it.

--

Hermione does not believe that love is a precious commodity, nor that it should be doled out in bits and pieces. She does not find it so exceptional that she loves her second husband just as deeply as she loved her first -- and she would think less of him if he tried to push Ginny out of his heart to better accomodate her.

--

In the wedding photograph, the fidgeting flowergirls have black hair and freckles and wide brown eyes. The ringbearer's bushy red-brown hair looks like it has never seen a comb in his life. The entire wedding party is a hodgepodge of adopted family and could-have-been family and family that still is, for all intents and purposes -- Grangers and Weasleys and the occasional Longbottom and Lupin snuck in for good measure.

It is, the more morbid side of her thinks, a picture crowded full of ghosts.

But she knows they're there. She sees them and welcomes them, and they are as much a part of her life as the tangibles.

--

One day in the middle of the chaos, Harry asks if she's happy.

And Hermione stops in her tracks and takes in the world around her. She hears her son outside telling Harry's rambunctious twins to give back his new Firebolt right now, and she watches a tiny knee-high girl with bushy black hair wait patiently by the door until she's old enough to join them, and she feels the ever-present ghosts swirling around her in a haze of memories and hopes for the future.

"I'm in love," she says.

There are a dozen meanings behind those words, and she knows with utter confidence that Harry understands all of them.