What Morning Felt Like

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The journey had been miserable.

It was cold. Not just the kind of cold that made you shiver and your fingers go numb, but the kind of cold that made you give up on shivering. It wouldn't help anyway, it only wasted precious energy that had come from hasty meals that had been less than filling.

It was the kind of cold that made your soul go numb.

It would have been enough, really, to know what they were doing. To think of the deaths, the foreboding danger, the knowledge that each day could be their last. To know that for every moment that they were unsuccessful, he was growing stronger. To realize that their families and loved ones were in danger, and the fate of the world they knew was weighing more each day.

But no, it had to be cold. Cold that you felt in your bone marrow, that consumed you from the inside and clouds that never went away, despite the unrelenting winds. The sun didn't rise for them. They lost track of the time of day. It didn't matter any longer.

Each moment mattered, and each moment slipped away from them, as the cold settled into them.

It could have been two in the afternoon, or two in the morning. Harry didn't know, and he didn't care. The dreary winter sky had no light to it anymore, and even if it did, Harry wasn't sure he'd notice. He was lying on his back, a Muggle sleeping bag and the thin waterproof nylon of the tent keeping him from coming into direct contact with the frozen ground. He stared up at the ceiling of the tent, a mess of poles and fabric that he and Ron and Hermione had become practiced at setting up, even when they were taken by exhaustion and their limbs were heavy. The roof looked exactly the same as it always did. He had spent countless hours memorizing each bend in the metal and each fold in the blue nylon as he laid awake, his body weary but his mind not allowing him to succumb to sleep. The contours of the ceiling never changed, except when the wind shook them, or when the spiders decided to build their own homes on the rafters (not that Harry would ever tell Ron).

Staring up into space was the safest thing he had.

It was night, or the closest thing that they had to night. They chose specific times, when exhaustion had made them unable to think, or when the cold became so intense that they couldn't get anything done, to be Night. At least, that's how it was at the beginning. More recently, as it got colder and they seemed to be less and less productive, Hermione had decided that they needed to get rest, because no matter how much the boys protested, nothing but arguing was getting accomplished on no sleep. So a few short hours daily became Night, and this was how Harry spent his. Cataloguing the ceiling of the deteriorating tent in his mind.

Ron, who had never had trouble falling asleep, typically dove into slumber mere seconds after his head touched the pillow. Thankfully, he had outgrown his snoring, although occasionally he could be heard murmuring nonsensical phrases to no one in particular. Sometimes, though, he murmured to a someone in particular, one of the many someones who could never answer him.

Hermione slept, too. She fell somewhere between Harry's and Ron's sleep patterns, just as she laid her sleeping bag between theirs. Most nights, she would curl up on her side, always facing Harry, just watching him as he began his Nightly ritual of tracing the ceiling with his eyes. She would fall asleep, after a few minutes or a few hours of watching him, curled tightly against the cold, her knees nearly against her chest. Some nights, though, she would just sit next to the film window of the tent and gaze out into nothingness.

And then there were the nights when emotion and cold took Hermione. Those nights were the ones when the flaps of the tent never kept out the wind, and the cold sunk right through the sleeping bags and the sweatpants and hooded sweatshirt that she slept in. On those nights, as she lay, curled as tightly as she possibly could, she shivered and moved minutely closer to Harry, as though she didn't want him to know that she was. The first few times, she would place her frozen fingers just under the curve of his back. Then, one night, he took her cold hands and slid them under the fabric of his own sweatshirt, resting them on his stomach and letting his heat warm her.

She would move closer to him throughout the night, knowing she wouldn't wake him, since he barely slept anyway. It was selfish of her, she knew, to use him for heat. But it comforted her, and she hoped that somehow, it would comfort him too.

When Harry did his nightly census of the overhead beams, he often disappeared into himself. Although he was totally aware of his surroundings and could move at a moment's notice, he could tone out Ron's quiet musings, and the hissing of the wind. He just counted.

On this night, though, he knew Hermione was thinking. She wasn't next to him. He missed the sound of her rhythmic breathing just inches from his ear, and the safety he felt while she watched over him. He wasn't worried for her, though. He knew she was fine. He could feel her, somehow, and didn't need to look to know where she was.

She was strong. As fragile as she looked sometimes, and as cold as her small hands became, she was an incredibly strong person. She amazed him occasionally; he'd always known of her intelligence and quick thinking under fire, but the girl who had cried in the girls' toilets over rude comments regarding her appearance had disappeared years ago. She was tough now. Kind, but ruthless when it was needed. She'd seen enough suffering of those she loved. Hermione held fiercely to those she cared about, but took no prisoners when it came to her enemies. Harry had thought more than a few times that he was damn happy that she was on his side, because when she dueled, she dueled with nothing on her mind but winning. She hated this side of her, he knew, but this was what was needed of her, and she did it. She fought harder, faster, and sometimes, dirtier than her opponent. She had to. Her eyes when she was dueling… he swore that she could burn straight through a Death Eater with a mere look.

He saw the slightest movement out of the corner of his eye. It was merely a shadow, a fuzzy bit of motion, but he knew it was her. She got to her feet by the window and, without even stopping for her heavy coat, unzipped the door to the tent and slipped out.

He bolted out of bed, reaching for his glasses with a trained hand and drawing his wand from a pocket in his pants. There was no reason to wake Ron yet; if there had been, Hermione would have woken them both. Harry knew she didn't need him, his help, or she would have shaken him awake, as she had done on many a night. And she certainly didn't need his protection. He didn't have any intention of saving her, or protecting her. He would just look out the door… see what she had left for. He slid the flap of the tent over by just a few millimeters and, the tip of his wand in the small open space, looked out.

She was dancing.

It was snowing. There was some on the ground, and it was falling in big flakes. She was twirling, and smiling, and sticking her tongue out to catch the falling snow, waiting for it to melt in her mouth.

Her arms were out at her sides, head thrown back, her unruly brown curls catching snowflakes and making her sparkle. And she was smiling. The kind of smile that they didn't have anymore.

She was beautiful.

She stopped, mid-spin, looking straight at him. He had let the tent flap drop from his hands as he watched her in silence. The smile, that smile that went straight through him, never faded.

“It's snowing,” she said.

He said nothing, merely looked at the sky and put out his hand, catching the flakes that melted as soon as they touched his palm.

She reached out for his open hand.

She danced with him. She twirled, and smiled, and ran in circles with his hands in hers. She broke from him, and took her previous pose, arms spread wide and eyes to the sky. One big flake fell straight onto her waiting tongue, and she giggled like the schoolgirl that she should have been. Her eyes sparkled.

For the first time in a long time, quite possibly forever, he smiled. A real, whole, smile.

They couldn't feel the cold, and he wasn't even sure it really was cold anymore. It didn't matter that in the morning, they would go back to war, or that the beautiful snow would turn to treacherous ice. That wasn't morning.

This was what morning felt like.

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