110. all dressed in pastels

Nov 26, 2010 19:45

Title | all dressed in pastels
Chapter | 1/1
Rating | pg-13
Characters | Harry. Harry/Hermione, (Harry/Ginny).
Summary | I am not the kind of girl who should be rudely barging in on a white veil occasion.
Notes | Written for this prompt at the HP Non-Canon Comment Ficathon.

The world divides itself into before and after.

Everyone talks with those terms, those divisions, as if it’s perfectly normal: hey, do you remember before when…

Before encompasses a lot. It means Hogwarts, a new teacher every year and Dumbledore and Ministry interference and running through dark forests. It means the days when Harry had a white owl and Fred was alive and a whole student body mourned for a boy from Hufflepuff.

Before, it was a lot simpler. They knew what they had to do, it was only a matter of time before they did it.

After, she wears a lot of black. It isn’t surprising at first, when Harry sees the whole world like he’s wearing sunglasses, everything shaded.

(He keeps expecting the dazzling light of clarity, but it never comes.)

Everyone wears black to Fred’s funeral. It’s windy and the hem of her dress tangles around her legs; out of the black sleeve of her robes her fingers are wrapped so tightly around Ron’s that both of their hands turn white. Harry keeps one hand on Ron’s shoulder and one arm around Ginny and breathes deep as he watches the wind whip Hermione’s hair viciously into her face while she stares forward, unblinking.

On that day, it is right to wear black. George looks like he doesn’t know how to stand upright on his own.

The whole world feels off-kilter, trying to recover, trying to be whole again after spending so much time broken.

And they can all relate.

He escapes with Ginny to a run-down, quiet hotel in London. They sneak out late at night and return very early in the morning - Mrs. Weasley’s clock no longer indicates that any of her surviving children are in moral peril, but old habits die so very hard.

Her body curls around his and she looks at him with expectant eyes, shiny in the darkness. He proposes, she says yes with a kiss; simple as that.

When she shows up at number twelve Grimmauld Place she is quite honestly the very last thing he was ever expecting.

She’s wearing a dress, no robes over top, and it’s black (typical, these days), but it is also strapless and short and it clings to every inch of her skin that it touches. He gawks at her for a moment, thrown back to the Yule Ball and her pink dress and how he’d had to reassess half of the thoughts he’d ever had about her the moment he’d seen her like that: more girl than best friend.

Her heels are tall and spindly and damp from the rain. He doesn’t even know how she can walk in them, never mind navigate the London streets on a day like today, when the sun is fighting against intermittent torrential downpour.

“I made a list,” she announces, and it jars him into studiously staring anywhere but at her breasts. He lets his gaze her against hers but he doesn’t feel any less shaken.

“Do you…want to come in?” he asks, and he wonders why it sounds like that, his voice low and the question loaded with something not entirely foreign but not entirely right.

“I made a list, Harry,” she says, ignoring him, pink tongue darting out to moisten her lips, “of one hundred things I used to be good at.”

He rubs at the back of his neck. “That should be longer, yeah? You’re good at…everything.”

She closes her eyes. “I’m not good at this. I’m not good at…after. I was good at the books and I was good at helping you. I was…” She laughs but it is free of mirth. “I was so very good at being mad at Ron.”

Harry stares, aware that he is completely unhelpful.

She blinks and whispers, “I’m not good at now.”

They stand there for a moment, gazes locked, and it reminds him of a decade ago, her eyes finding his over whatever book she was reading, pleading with him to understand whatever telepathic moment of communication she was trying to share. He had gotten good at it, over the years, at understanding the intricacies of her glances, at catching up with her ideas only a moment after her eyes lit up - but he’d never quite mastered her the way she had him.

Abruptly, she shoves her list into his hands. “Congratulations,” she says, and then she turns to go.

“Hermione, wait - ”

She doesn’t.

She comes to the stag party Ron insists on throwing him - he gets a sheepish look and a lot of complex, indecipherable gesturing from his best friend when she appears, decked out in a little black dress, the only woman present.

It’s the first time he ever sees Hermione drunk, and it’s kind of beautiful, the way she throws her arms around his neck and the way her breath falls against his cheek before Ron carefully pries her off and carries her home.

Hermione wears black to his wedding and she looks even less like just a best friend than she ever has before but it almost makes him laugh.

Her fingers are like a vice around his wrist while Ron, in the background, attempts to give a lecture about treating his little sister well. Her eyes collide with his and he works so hard to read her.

Through her teeth, she hisses, “Harry James Potter, you absolute idiot, for the saviour of a generation you can still be so incredibly dense sometimes.” Her hair, he notices, smells like something heavenly. “Do not make me this…this girl, Harry.

He finds her where he thought he would, sitting on the ground with her back against the sturdy trunk of a tree, surrounded by air thick with nostalgia.

“You’re right, you know,” he tells her, hands jammed into his pockets, tie loosened around his neck. “You’re not very good at now. You were much more eloquent before.”

When she jumps to her feet and throws out a hand he expects a slap but instead he gets a kiss, her hand clutching one of the lapels of his suit-jacket.

He catches her time and time again, wand poised to draw a black line over number one hundred on that list she gave him. She says it’s embarrassing and juvenile and that’s the point where he usually tunes her out and starts reading out every item on the list to drown out her voice, laughing through every number.

Rarely does she ever actually allow him to make it to one hundred, but he always knows what it is, and he believes - he knows - that it’s one of the things she excels at in the after, in the now.

(#100. loving you

written as neatly and as explicitly as an essay for Charms class,

it’s a dazzling burst of clarity.)

fin

character: cleverest witch of her age, pairing: harry/hermione, character: they boy who lived, fandom: harry potter

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