And Let Them Last

It starts with a single touch: her face buried against his shoulder, her tears falling into his lap. A gesture of comfort in the face of insurmountable grief and fear and -and - and something they cannot quite pin down - that lingers overlong. They write it off from the first (or try to), afraid to embrace feelings that seemingly sprang up from nowhere. Overly emotional affairs - funerals. They berate themselves for putting stock in something so strange, so new, so against the rules. They're afraid of feelings that don't change the facts.

(Aren't we all?)

And - when they can no longer deny “it” - they play it down, restricting themselves to stolen glances and slight motions all but undetectable to the untrained eye. Just enough to confirm what they're coming to place their trust in. Nothing more. There are entirely too many eyes in the Burrow. Too many lives all tangled up into one horrendous mess.

And then there are weddings - another one of those showy occasions where feeling tends to get the best of even the best of us.

Inside, away from the explosions of light and laughter, away from the calls for toasts to love and life (“—and let them last!”), they make short work of the strictures and conventions that bind them.

“Are you scared?”

(And who isn't, really?)

She laughs, soft and low. What do they have to be afraid of? They're just two teenagers in a back bedroom. Beyond the next five—fifteen—forty minutes, they have nothing planned, no grand designs. There are no guarantees, no mile markers in the unmapped expanse of the future - their future.

(And no one, as we all learn in time, has a right to expect anything more than just the here and now. Some of us learn sooner than others.)

Every pass - every touch - is dangerously out-of-bounds. They've numbered three for as long as anyone cares to remember. Harry-comma-Ron-comma-Hermione-period. But while Ron gambols on the lawn with the rest of the Weasleys and the Delacours and the newly christened Weasley-Delacours, reveling in the momentary respite from life's paralyzing uncertainties, the other two systematically go about breaking all the rules, rewriting history. The don'ts and shouldn'ts that have governed the past days' and months' revelations are recklessly brushed aside, reduced to the barest, simplest of terms. Musts and needs and wants, and skin and hands and tongues.

Just for this moment, they don't owe the world a thing.

-->