Love Comes Again

Author's Note: `Bearings' and `Growing Up Granger' are on hiatus until mid-December. Uni eliminates most chances to write… Disregard DH's epilogue, please.

Love Comes Again

The dust had long since settled. The castle was rebuilt. The dead had been laid to rest and their memories fading. Hogsmeade, the Ministry of Magic, and Diagon Alley were made pristine once more. The old ways had been eroded, and a new regime was slowly finding foothold within the government, one that preached tolerance. The giant squid still lazed around the lake and the Forbidden Forest was still forbidden.

But as a warm summer breeze moved restlessly around the castle grounds, only one figure bore witness to the slowly swaying grass. The students, teachers, and headmistress were home for the summer, and the castle was closed to every soul in the world. It was during these two weeks, set aside to let the castle itself regenerate its magical capacity, when the raven-haired figure stood with his back to the squid, hands in his pockets, looking up at the stone edifice of Hogwarts. His green eyes, normally sharp with life and intelligence, were clouded over; his brow knitted, and lips pouted.

Memories, long dormant ones, would always resurface during this yearly visit to the place where it had all ended. It had been so long it would have been impossible not to move on—twenty years is a significant amount of time—but flashes of that day would flit across his consciousness, almost superimposed on those great stone walls. Green light seemed to mock him momentarily, and then he saw Fred, Lupin, Tonks…

All those who had laid down their lives that day so good would triumph over evil, so that prejudice might finally lose its dominant position in society and a new day might dawn over the dying Wizarding world… Those myriad righteous deaths; people he could only remember by the way their corpses had looked. Concentrate as he might, he could never quite get back the sound of Lupin's voice.

He stood there, a living monument to the sacrifices of the past and a testament to the hopes of the future. Just a single man, now thirty-seven, wearing a faded pair of jeans and a white tee shirt—his face was free of the spectacles that had impeded him in his youth, his hair was longer and more unruly than ever, and in moments of clarity his eyes were the truest green anywhere.

His feet were planted slightly apart, braced against the gently downhill slope toward the waters behind him; his shoulders squared up toward the turrets and his back straight; and his neck bent slightly away from the sun. Not a cloud corrupted the sky. This was perhaps the nicest day northern Scotland would see all year, but those details were far from his mind.

He made this journey every year to make sure he never totally forgot. He felt all he had already lost was a disservice to the dead, but he wasn't omnipotent, regardless of how potent he actually was. Memories faded over time due to biology in his brain he couldn't control, so he Apparated to this scenic spot during the two-week emptiness to absorb the environment, both for its changes and its constants.

He was internationally known for his defeat of the dark lord, but more so in the last ten years for his attempts at relations with Muggles. He had made it his primary goal following the horrible war during his school years to end the ridiculous discrimination in the world, and he had travelled far and wide for the cause. The campaign trail was long, hard, and ultimately infinite. His life's work would only be complete when it took his entire life, because he would never be able to solve all of the issues. But he had made several steps in the right direction, more than he would have even believed at first; he always took a rest during these few days, though, to come back to Hogwarts and listen to the silence of the stones.

His achievements had not been without cost, though. His long time girlfriend, then fiancé, then wife had eventually left him because of how little he had been home. He hadn't seen Ginny in over nine years, and their split had caused a rift between him and the Weasley family that grew more difficult to bridge with every passing year. In fact, he never felt welcome at the Burrow anymore, and preferred to stay away.

Ron and Hermione had lasted only long enough for the dead to be buried and for grass to grow over the graves, and then their passion dried up. Ron wanted to marry young and have about twelve kids, which of course meant Hermione would have had to stay at home and be a housewife, which she could not do. She wanted to go Wizarding law school and then perhaps Muggle law school, and soon after those revelations to each other, they parted ways, on semi-amicable terms at least.

But as one year became five, five became ten, and ten twenty, they drifted apart as is the way of things. The ties that bound them so close during their school years evaporated after their split, and eventually other priorities in their lives took precedent over keeping in close contact with their childhood friends. It's not as if they wanted to lose each other, but life has a funny way of getting in between one and the people one used to care about.

More than the battles and the war and the deaths, memories of his antics with Ron, Hermione, and his other close friends at the time would pervade his being. His was a lonely road, filled with foreign lands, late nights, and no time for personal relationships. He wanted to fulfill Dumbledore's legacy upon the world, which had been left on his shoulders, and it looked as if he would end up as bereft as the old man by the end of it all.

He only allowed himself these kinds of thoughts and feelings when he let the immutability of the walls of the millennium-old school wash over him. Fifty weeks out of the year he led a relentless existence, and there was something cathartic about this pause in the fabric of time, when all he did was be there in the warm summer air.

“Harry?” a soprano female voice called out, carried breathlessly across the grounds by the breeze. His blood froze for one fateful second, and then his heart triple-timed. He knew that sweet voice, even though he had not heard it in three years. Unbidden, an image of her hugging him desperately in Grimmauld Place rose to his mind's eye. They had been teenagers then, and the woman he opened his eyes upon had aged twenty-two years, though flawlessly.

His viridian eyes swept over her in the space of three seconds, but that was all it took for him to ache for everything he had lost in the last two decades more powerfully than ever before. Her chestnut hair swept down past her shoulders in shiny waves, still very thick but managed; her chocolate eyes were as lively and profound as ever; and she wore jeans and a colored tee shirt, simple but somehow elegant.

“Is that really you?” she asked, something like disbelief in her voice, as she drew near. He caught a whiff of vanilla and strawberries, and more images flooded through his brain—her helping him practice summoning spells for the first task, her helping him with Dumbledore's Army, and he and she alone in that cursed tent.

She stopped about five feet from him, put her hands on her hips, and tilted her head to the side. Her famous eyebrow rose up her forehead.

“Hi?” she asked, and suddenly he was laughing with a joy that he hadn't known was in him; joy at nothing in particular except for the mesmerizing sight in front of him, compelling not only because this was Hermione but because it was the Hermione he remembered and cherished.

He crossed the space between them in less than a second and swept her into his arms, and he could hear the musical sound of her own laughter in his ears. Before he knew what he was doing he was spinning her around and around—she seemed weightless in his arms; and then he set her down and embraced her. It was an embrace spanning the three years since he'd talked with her, one to encompass them and then move past them. He breathed deep and vanilla and strawberries found their way into his lungs and his brain, and he fought off the urge to laugh again. Finally he stepped back, and as her laughter died away, he noticed rosiness to her cheeks, absent before.

“Hi, Hermione,” he said, grinning and feeling foolish, but not caring.

Then the silence came, the inevitable time when they both wanted to ask hundreds of questions but couldn't decide which was best, so instead they just stared in wonder at each other, drinking up through their eyes the living being of the other. They had not been in each other's physical presence for so long that the reality of the other person had started to fade, but now that it was refreshed, it was awesome and at the same time slightly unbalancing.

“It's been a long time,” she finally said, stating the obvious so that Harry chuckled slightly. “What are you laughing at?” she wondered.

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “You. Us. How long it's been.”

“Harry…” she started, and there was something different in her voice so that his chuckling immediately died away.

“Yeah?”

She took a step toward him, and he almost stepped forward too. “Why don't you keep in touch anymore?”

He certainly had not been expecting an accusation, so he said the first thing that came to his mind: “Me? Why haven't you?”

She scoffed and rolled her eyes in a very familiar gesture. “It's bloody impossible to know where you are, and you must know that. Owls get lost on the way…”

He shrugged. He didn't have an answer, and he didn't know how to articulate all the things he had been feeling before she miraculously showed up. “I don't know, Hermione.”

She looked away from him for a moment, and he saw a curious set in her jaw, as if she were resisting something, and their eyes met again. Something new was there, something he didn't remember from their early years—a kind of hardness, or perhaps weariness.

“What are you doing now, Hermione?” he asked, suddenly curious as to what she did. He pushed away the shame at not knowing.

“Nothing much,” she shrugged it off.

“Come on, I don't believe that,” he responded, taking that step closer. She focused on his eyes and licked her lips.

“I do some consulting for our Muggle government,” she said, slowly.

“Oh?” Three feet separated them now.

“Nothing as flashy as your globe-trotting, but it pays well and I like to think I'm helping people,” she said. Her eyes flitted away from his and then back again, and there was something like surprise or expectation in them. He never knew they held so many emotions, and he didn't know how he could still read them.

“Whatever you put your mind to, Hermione, you make things happens; that's always how it was and how it will be, I'm sure,” he said, watching through his peripheral vision how every breath she took strained her tee shirt. The details, it seemed, were important to him today.

“Why are you here?” she suddenly asked, locking gazes with him. She wanted an answer, and it threw him off his slow progress toward her. He stopped and broke eye contact with her, looking up toward the Astronomy tower.

“Because…” he started, but stalled not knowing what to say.

“Because you need to remember?” she asked, looking at him as if sizing him up. He nodded, still looking away over her shoulder.

“Something like that, yes. But also much more—I need to get away every now and then, and this is the best place to go. So much history here, so much life and death…and I was involved in nearly all of it.”

He flinched at a pressure on his shoulder, and looked down to find her small hand there. His eyes travelled along the fingers, over the back of her hand, her wrist, and then up her arm to the shoulder, before rising to meet her own. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes briefly, imprinting on his brain the touch of her fingers, so that during the next twenty years he could carry it with him.

“I miss you, Harry,” she said, almost a whisper, and he wasn't sure he even heard it. His eyes slid open and there was a naked sadness in hers, so real he was stunned. He grabbed the hand on his shoulder with one of his own.

“I…I miss you too, Hermione,” he replied. “I've missed you for a long time,” he breathed.

She looked away again, and in profile he saw her lip tremble. She bit it to stifle the moment of weakness, but it was too late. He had seen it, and he couldn't stand it. He moved forward and embraced her again, this time much more gentle than his greeting. She was soft and firm at the same time, and her silky hair brushed against his face. The nostalgia was incredibly intoxicating.

“How did you know I was here?” he whispered into her ear, and she shuddered in his arms.

“No one knew where you were,” she whispered back. He could feel her warm breath on his jaw. “And this seemed like the last likely place.”

“You've been looking for me?” He rested his head against hers.

“For a few weeks,” she admitted, leaning into him some.

“But why?”

“Because, Harry,” she said, pushing away from him a little so she could look into his face. “I've missed you, and lately it's been getting harder and harder to take your silence. Was it something I did?”

He shook his head, slowly at first, then more vehemently. “No Hermione, absolutely not. You're perfect. You've always been perfect. I've just been…busy.” The last word came out of his mouth very softly. He was ashamed of it.

She moved forward into his embrace again. “Care to tell me about it?” she asked, in a kind of sighing whisper.

He pressed her body tightly to his, felt every curve and her push against him, and nodded. “Of course. Where shall we go?”

“Anywhere.” She was trembling.

He thought for a moment of someplace warmer and sunnier than Hogwarts, and then they were gone. The tiny pop echoed off the walls of the school, fading once more into the breezy silence of the grounds.

-->

“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.

-->

For a moment, he did not know where he was. The quality of light splashed across the ceiling and the sounds coming in through the open window were unfamiliar nighttime sensations, but as he absently reached out across the bed, the warm spot made him remember.

He rolled that way to find the other side of the bed empty, and the clock glowing green above that side told the lonely tale of 4:32 in the morning. He could hear autos passing in the distance, and every so often the headlights of one would flash across the far wall of the room. He rolled onto his back again and breathed deeply, feeling the sheet caress his naked torso.

He listened intently for sounds from within the small house, but the only noises were external. Wherever she had gone, she was silent. Perhaps she was feeling regret, even though they had stopped themselves? He certainly wasn't, but he was only one piece of the puzzle. The other piece, the one that had extraordinarily—only because it had been so many years—fit perfectly with him, was no longer in the warmth of her own bed. He threw off the sheet and rose to find out why.

Wearing only light sleeping pants he had borrowed from her, he padded on bare feet from her bedroom down the hall into the kitchen. All was silent and dark there, too, so he continued through a doorway into the living area. He drew up short at the sight before him.

The moon, low on the western horizon at this early hour, threw its soft white light through the west-facing window in the room, illuminating Hermione in an ethereal glow that caught his breath. She did not know he was there in the doorway, so he just watched her for a minute. She was curled up in an armchair, staring out of the window into the night. In the light of the moon, her hair shone brilliantly and her eyes twinkled, reminding him very strongly of his long-dead mentor.

He watched as she reached out and took a mug from the end table, sipping the steaming liquid and then replacing it. She shifted in the chair, bringing her legs under her a little more, and then sat motionless again. Though there was nothing to indicate it, he thought it was somehow a forlorn sight. How often had she sat up all alone in this house of hers?

He moved into the moonlight, hoping not to startle her. She just turned her head toward him, so that he saw her profile in silhouette against the bright light, and the ghost of a smile hit the corners of her lips. He moved to the chair across from her and eased himself into its soft acceptance.

“Hi,” she whispered. Her voice was still throaty from sleep.

“Hey,” he responded. “What are you doing up?”

She shrugged; one side of her face was veiled in shadow now that they were half-turned from the window. “Couldn't sleep, I guess.” He watched the steam rise from the mug for a moment.

“How come?”

At this she chuckled, though it sounded half-hearted to him. “Well, you know me…” she said, still very quiet.

He did, but he didn't. He wasn't going to say that to her, though. “Yeah, and?”

“Always thinking.”

“I can always count on you to be thinking.”

“Sometimes over thinking…” she continued, not hearing him.

He did not say anything for several seconds, and during his silence he saw her look up slightly and make eye contact with him. There was a look on her face that plainly told him she doubted herself. And by the way she was staring at him…he knew it was about him.

“We didn't do anything to regret,” he said. “I can leave if you want and we can forget this ever happened.” Three or four painful clunks of his heart followed that statement.

She shook her head, looking once more at something over his shoulder, or more probably nothing at all. “Even if we had, I wouldn't have regretted it.”

“Then—”

“And I don't want you to leave,” she cut him off. He nodded his head, conceding the point. Something that had been gnawing at him for a long time, something just above his diaphragm, eased up for the first time in many years. Warmth began to seep into that spot.

“Well then, I'm not going anywhere.”

“Good,” she affirmed, and sipped from the mug again. The clink of the porcelain on the table was the only sound for several moments.

“But what's the problem?”

She appeared to consider her words carefully, and then: “Do you think it has been too long?”

“For us, you mean?”

She nodded slowly. “Are we just deluding ourselves?”

“I'd like to think not.”

Apparently, that wasn't the answer she was looking for. “Come on, Harry. Look how Ron and I turned out, and you and Ginny. Who's to say the same thing won't happen to us, if we go down this road?”

“Our other relationships were so many years ago, Hermione…we're different people now.”

“Exactly,” she pointed out.

“Well, I don't know then,” he continued. “It's been years since I've seen you, and here I am at 4:40 in the morning in your living room. How did that happen? I don't know, but I do know that it's better than sitting in my living room at 4:40, alone.”

He refocused on her face and was somewhat surprised to see tear tracks glistening in the moonlight. She made no move to wipe them away. As he waited for her to say something, he watched another tear well up and then fall over her lid, speeding down her cheek and off her face.

“If you could go back, what would you do differently?” she asked, no trace of the crying in her voice. He knew she was stronger than that.

He almost gave her a quick response, something to the effect of never losing track of her, but that would have been meaningless. They had not wanted to lose track of each other originally, but time and circumstance had intervened anyway. He dug through his memories of their school years, and suddenly he knew. He smiled slightly.

“I guess I would have asked you to the Yule Ball.” Her head twitched toward him, and he saw disbelief on her face.

“What?” she asked.

“I said, if I could change something, it would have been the Yule Ball. Instead of being a coward, I would have asked you to go to the Ball with me.”

“You wanted to ask me?” The disbelief was clearly manifest in her voice.

“Of course, Hermione,” he said, enjoying this.

“Then why didn't you?” came her voice again, with frustration, laughter, and a tiny bit of sadness.

He shrugged. “I thought Ron was going to ask you, and I'd known he liked you for about a year, so I didn't want to cause problems.” She raised both her eyebrows at him, and then looked around the room pointedly. She seemed to be hinting at all of the problems it had caused instead; but he couldn't be angry with her and she couldn't with him. All of that was water under the bridge, and in some ways it was futile talking like this. But he had to ask her anyway.

“What about you? What would you have changed?”

Her eyes unfocused for a moment—he knew she was rifling through her Hogwarts memories just as he had. Finally, she shifted in her seat and smiled good-naturedly at something. He waited for her response.

“Instead of hugging you at Grimmauld, I would have snogged you senseless.”

Harry considered this for a minute; he remembered the hug very well, almost bone-crushing in its strength and warm in its love. But then he remembered there had been a third person in the room.

“You would have done that in front of Ron?”

She shrugged. “Why not? Ron and I fought all that summer before you arrived—I guess I should have taken as a hint then what would eventually become our future failure.”

“I don't—”

“And besides,” she continued, “it would have stopped you from shouting your head off at us. Remember that?”

He nodded. Though the specific words were long lost, he remembered genuinely yelling at Ron and Hermione for the first time, though not the last.

He chuckled at a random thought. “If I had asked you to the Yule Ball the year before, I probably would have just snogged you on sight,” he said.

She smiled, and her face lit up with a kind of happy reminiscence that, although genuine, was not from real events. To him, this conversation was more bittersweet than seeing her after so long. He was finally realizing just how many missed opportunities there had been in the past.

And eventually she might have realized the same thing, because the smile slowly faded, to be replaced by a sadder, more introspective look. They said nothing and merely stared at each other as the light changed in the room, from the deepest night to the earliest dawn.

“How did we never realize in school what I'm starting to see right now?” she asked.

“I don't know,” he replied, wearily. “Voldemort? Ron? We were too young?” He shrugged.

“Is it too late, Harry?” So they were back her original question.

“No—“ he started, but cut himself off. He wanted to avoid a rote answer. “It probably is too late for the kind of thing we might have had,” he said, carefully. “We may never know each other as well as we did just after the war. But I think we're still the same people, no matter how long it's been, and it might take a little work, but you're still Hermione Granger and I'm still Harry Potter.”

“And that's all that matters, isn't it?” she asked, a new quietness in her voice. She slid her legs out from under her, placing her feet on the floor, and leaned forward to rest her elbows on her knees.

He remembered what the simple sound of her voice had done to him at Hogwarts the previous day, and nodded. “I think so.”

Something crackled in the air between them, at the same time intangible and also real, and she pushed out of her chair into a standing position. He started to get up, but she held out her hand to stop him. She walked to him and carefully sat on his lap, so that she was sideways across the chair with her legs thrown over one arm and her neck resting on the other. Her soft weight was exquisite.

Absently, he began to trace circles around her navel, bared because her tee shirt had ridden up slightly. Goosebumps promptly greeted his fingertip.

“Hey,” she protested, lightly. “That tickles.” So he stopped and instead flattened his palm across the smooth, warm skin. He stared at the sight for a moment.

“Harry,” she whispered. “Look at me.”

He drew his eyes away from her stomach and gazed down at her face. For an instant, he saw that same half-enticing quality in her eyes, which he had seen in the French bistro, but then she blinked and it was gone.

Moonlight was fading to morning light, but she was still beautiful; she reached up and touched the back of his neck with a hand, rubbing lightly over the top of his spine. She then cupped her hand and pulled him down to her, sitting up slightly as she did so. He couldn't keep his eyes off her lips as they drew near his…

It was sweet, slow, and not very deep, but Hermione's lips were something he had never properly indulged, so he enjoyed every instant of it. That hollow spot that had begun filling with warmth earlier was now full. Their lips left each other after several minutes and they leaned back again. She was smiling wonderfully and her hand had tangled in his hair. He didn't mind, though. He could stare down at her all day.

“Harry.”

He raised his eyebrows at her, too content for words.

“Take me to bed.” He squeezed her more tightly to him and then the room was empty, except for the still steaming mug on the end table.

A new day began as the sun rose in the east.

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