"This is nice."
He watched her set the frothy cappuccino down on the small table, cross her legs, and look around the outdoor patio. People milled around them, between the tables where others sat; some spoke English but most French, snippets of which Harry could understand.
"I thought you would like it," he answered, sipping his own beverage. Their eyes met over the top of his cup.
"Why here, though?" she asked.
"I discovered this place the last time I was in Paris, and I've always wanted to come back," he replied. Warm French sun-much warmer than northern Scotland-beat down upon their table, as they had chosen one in the open. Foot and bicycle traffic moved slowly by on their right; autos were not allowed down roads this narrow. Far in the distance over Hermione's head he could see the Eiffel Tower rising toward the mid-afternoon haze.
"Do you always Apparate internationally?"
He nodded. She quirked her lips in a sort of smile and picked up her cup again. The sounds of activity washed over and around them, and they each lost themselves in the metropolitan bustle for a few minutes.
"Technically, that's illegal, you know," she pointed, wiping some foam from her upper lip with an index finger. He watched as she then licked it from that finger. He arched an eyebrow at her.
"What are you going to do, arrest me?" Though his sardonic tone was implicit, there was also something of a challenge there.
She smiled demurely. "I don't think I could if I wanted to."
"Huh?"
"Your capabilities have become something of legend, you know."
He shrugged his shoulders at her and said nothing. If people wanted to talk, he could not stop them. He just wished more of what they said was actually true, instead of based on true events. Embellishment seemed to be everyone's priority.
"Is it true you repelled three vampires while visiting the Romanian government?"
"One," he replied. She paused to consider this.
"And what about saving an American Defense Against the Dark Arts class from an out-of-control magical fire?"
"The classroom was empty-I just stopped it from burning down the building."
"Hmmmph," she intoned, leaning back in her chair and recrossing her legs.
"Disappointed?" he asked, chuckling. Of all people, he wouldn't have expected Hermione to buy into the hero stories spread about him.
"No, not really…" she started, caressing the rim of her cup absently with one finger, and staring out at the street next to them. "It's just hard to separate reality and fallacy anymore with respect to you."
"What do you mean?"
"You're never around. We haven't talked in ages. I don't even know where you live, if you're in a relationship, how many different countries you've been to." She paused, turning her head slowly toward him. Her eyes lingered on the road for a moment and then slid to meet his. "Things we took for granted in school that I've lost."
"And you're any different? I know all those things about you?" he asked, not angry or frustrated but incapable of seeing where this conversation was heading. Hermione was, paradoxically, criminally easy and infinitely hard for him to read.
"No, I suppose not," she conceded. "But why?"
"Why?"
"What happened, Harry, so that we've ended up like this? We barely know each other."
He knew in a general sense the answer to her question, but he did not know the words to express what he was feeling. Hermione always dug to the heart of his problems-of their problems-and he was always the one fumbling for the words to answer her. He wanted her eloquence and her poise and her control…
"Time, Hermione. Just time, I think."
She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes slightly; eventually she took another sip of the drink and, uncrossing her legs, leaned forward so her elbows rested on the table. The distance between their faces halved.
"Do you really believe that?" she asked, and he knew if he said yes she might just get up and leave-and watching Hermione turn her back on him now might just kill him. He still could not quite comprehend how she had found him at Hogwarts. A vision of the past had entered his present.
"In some ways, yes," Harry said, and paused to make sure she wouldn't leave. When she didn't move, he continued: "We were incredibly naive to assume that the three of us would stick together forever after Hogwarts; that is just not how the world works, Hermione. People change and grow and move on." He held up his hand when she opened her mouth to interrupt him.
"But I am not saying that we each, individually, are not partially to blame for whatever has happened during the last twenty years. I could name many reasons why it was easier for me to lose myself in my work, and they would all be valid, but they would just sound petty to you. And they might sound petty to me too, now that you're here sitting with me, after so much time. Because, Hermione, you have no idea how good it is to look at you again."
"It's…good to be here with you, too." She tilted her head, and her chocolate eyes scrutinized him intensely. He had never felt uncomfortable under her stare, but this was a new look. "It's different, though," she continued. "We're not the same people, are we? I don't know the first thing about what it means to be Harry Potter these days, nor do you know what it means to be Hermione Granger."
"And," he laughed lightly, almost painfully, "I knew you almost better than myself at Hogwarts."
"Yeah," she nodded, sitting back once again. "Sometimes I wonder how you and I didn't turn out differently," she added, almost as afterthought, and then possibly realizing what she had said, drew in a quick breath. He was confused as much as she appeared to be wary.
"What do you mean?" When had Hermione become such an enigma?
"Nothing, forget it," she said, sipping the cappuccino.
"No," he stated, leaning forward to emphasize his point. "How would we have turned out differently?"
She looked out over the street again, and for a moment he mourned the loss of her eyes. But it gave him a chance to look at her in profile once again, to see her high cheekbones, her small nose, and her pouty lips. She certainly was a striking image, turned to the side with the picturesque Paris skyline just over her head. Some outside perspective saw this as a perfect postcard illustration-it was even complete with the little French coffeehouse. Idyllic was not a term he would use to describe his life, but at just that moment, no other word seemed more appropriate. Then she turned back to him and fixed with an ambivalent look.
"We were the best of friends?"
It was rhetorical, but he answered anyway: "Yes, of course."
"And we were in close physical contact-hell, emotional and mental as well-for quite some time?"
"Yes."
"And we were a growing man and a growing woman?"
"Yes…" Harry said slowly, beginning to understand where Hermione was going with this. Surely she couldn't be suggesting what he had always denied himself from thinking, and if she was, it might have been twenty years wasted, or twenty years too late.
"And we were willing to die for each other; to protect each from external threats and from ourselves; to carry on with a futile quest to the bitter end; to stick with each other through thick and thin; and to know each other better than we knew ourselves?"
He just nodded.
"Then what do you think I'm talking about, Harry?" she asked, leaning forward now too, so that their faces were six inches apart.
"But…" he started. "But Ron-"
"We obviously didn't work out," she said, cutting him off. For a few moments, he could do nothing except stare at the gold, black, and flint speckles in her irises.
"Why are you telling me this now?" he finally asked.
The tension, which had been building steadily between them, broke. They both leaned back in their chairs and regarded each other with rather resigned eyes. Some new kind of understanding had been reached with the knowledge Hermione had elicited, but in some ways it was far too late. Too late for anything like that to happen, at least.
"I don't know," she revealed, weariness in her wonderful voice. "I guess if I never told you it would eat me up for the rest of my life."
And suddenly the insanity of it all occurred to him. He was only thirty-seven, and as a powerful wizard he could be expected to live for at least another hundred years. Had he been willing to live three times more than his current existence without someone such as Hermione in his life? Had he slowly stepped back from his younger relationships without really thinking about the mind-numbing loneliness that would haunt him for the rest of his life?
He looked across the table at her, really looked, and in an epiphanic moment realized that the unique otherness of Hermione was why she had always attracted him so much, first as a friend and then as something more, though that never bore fruit. She was a complete being, beautiful and intellectual, and over the years as her physicality had faded from his mind so had what he'd taken for granted-how much her presence had influenced his own being and his own life. He knew without being able to conjure the true picture that their mortalities were intertwined in a way few others were.
Yet there was this gulf of time between them, that had separated them both physically and also emotionally, and he felt like he had to get to know her again, even though he knew somewhere deep inside that the fundamental Hermione-ness would always be the same, no matter what. It was just the small things he needed to relearn, such as how she liked her tea now, and where she lived, and what she did for fun…
He refocused on the present and saw her staring at him, waiting for some kind of response. She looked almost ready to bolt again, and that was something he certainly did not want to happen, so he leaned forward and laid a hand on hers. She glanced down at the gesture and then back up at him.
"Hermione."
Her eyebrows crawled up her forehead.
"I just want you to know one thing."
"And what is that, Harry?"
"That I'm sorry," he said, and averted his eyes at the powerful and sudden feeling of shame that sped across his consciousness, at having so easily and gradually lost touch with her. And he knew it wasn't just her, though; it was all of his friends, all of the people that mattered most to him. He didn't know how to deal with that kind of realization, so apologizing was the first thing he had thought of.
She could have just accepted his apology, but instead she chose to do the same. "I'm sorry, too." He felt her hand turn under his and then she gripped his in hers.
Silence settled across the table for a long time after that, within which they barely looked at each other, but all he needed to keep him grounded to the moment was the feeling of her hand closed around his. That was all that mattered to him this instant, no matter how long the silence held or how many people he watched walk by on the narrow boulevard. A server eventually came by and cleared their cups, but still the silence held.
It wasn't until he heard Hermione take a great, deep breath that he forced himself to look at her once again, and he saw that she was looking at him. He didn't know how long she'd been staring at him, but he found he did not care.
"You're still beautiful, you know," he said, and immediately both of them blushed at the statement. He then almost laughed at the absurdity of a man and woman in their late thirties blushing at each other, but he supposed they were still twenty in each other's eyes, due to the magnitude of the intervening time. He had seen her briefly three years before in London by chance, and again five years before that, but he did not count those little meetings as real contact.
His hand in hers was the first and most important contact he'd had with her for a very long time. The thought saddened him, but it also invigorated him. He had much lost time to make up for.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she responded, softly. Clearly, self-consciousness was still an issue.
"You don't have to," he said. "As long as you know I know…"
She glanced up at him, and within her half-lidded eyes he saw something enticing in her gaze. This was a look he had never received from Hermione, as far as he knew, but it was there and it was real. It faded after several seconds, but that did not weaken the effect on him. He knew she could feel his pulse racing through his fingers.
Suddenly, she pulled him from the seat and hugged him tightly. There they stood, on some unnamed Parisian street in the balmy France summer, embracing each other like there was no one else in the world. And at that moment, there were no others. It was just Harry and Hermione, as perhaps it always should have been.
"Take me somewhere," she whispered. She was rubbing his back.
"Where?"
"Anywhere," she breathed, and gripped the back of his tee shirt in her hands. He flattened his hands over her back, pressing her to him so that they were one, and prepared to Disapparate.
"By the way, Hermione, I live in London," he said, in answer to one of her questions, and the sound of her giggles cut off abruptly as they flashed out of existence.
Life in the small French bistro went on uninterrupted as if nothing had happened.
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