Harry Potter and Bella Swan: A Conversation
I have much more important things I should be doing, but I've been wanting to finish this for ages, and I had a mini heart-attack earlier today when I went looking for it on my comp and couldn't find it. Thank heavens for randomly gmailing stuff to myself. So I sat and rounded it out.
Title: Harry Potter and Bella Swan: A Conversation
Author: cardinalgirl/tiemeinbows
Fandom: Harry Potter/Twilight
Word Count: 2467
Disclaimer: Don't own a bit of it, minus maybe the moderator.
Rating: TEEN
Summary: Just a little bit of fandom amusement. Harry POV. Set directly after the release of Breaking Dawn, at the monthly Character Support Group meeting in the Middle of Nowhere.
Author's Note: This is not meant to offend anyone of the Twilight fandom. It's not even snarky, really... well, Harry's a little snarky, but only to normal Harry-ness. The idea of it started out as gentle teasing from a lover of both series, but Harry... well he does have his own opinions and holds people to some very high standards, doesn't he? My view on what his honest reactions to Bella's life would be.
Take note, this takes place right after BD, when Moonlight Sun was still a go.
***
Harry leaned back in the cheap metal folding-chair and sighed, reading the large red banner that had been placed in the front of the room.
WELCOME BACK SCI-FI/FANTASY MAIN CHARACTERS!
Of all the unexpected things of being the main character in a wildly popular fictional world-which was uncomfortable enough, if you asked him-this rated pretty high on the list of worsts. Every month-every month-he had to come here, to a giant convention center that was literally in the middle of Nowhere, which was the only place equidistant from every fictional world in existence.
Luckily the meetings were large enough that most of the time he could tune out entirely. Admittedly sometimes he learned things. When he was younger and all of this was new to him he'd looked forward to hearing from the older characters about how to make it through the lull between books, and how to deal with the various stresses of MC life, but now, after years of coming? It wasn't History of Magic bad… but it had its moments.
As the sound of people moving and chairs scraping the floor as they were turned around, Harry realized they'd gotten to what was always either the best or worst part of the meeting, depending on who you got-splitting into pairs for one-on-one time.
The moderator was walking around with a magically amplified voice-he was fairly sure she was a witch, though he'd never seen her outside of these meetings-and was listing off names in pairs. "Peter Pan with Frodo Baggins, Harry Potter with Bella Cullen-Oh, Cullen? That's new."
The moderator read on, but Harry looked up, aghast, meeting for a moment the glance of the newly-changed-in more ways than one-teenager across the room from him.
She started to head towards him, but Harry went after the moderator instead, as she'd just finished reading off her list and was heading towards the front to supervise.
"Wait, no. Do I have to?" he asked, when he caught up with her.
"Rules are rules, Mr. Potter.
"Look," he said, lowering his voice, though if Bella's new look was any indication, she had super-sonic hearing now, "Can't I talk to that Skywalker chap again? At least I have something in common with him!" He caught sight of a pretty blonde passing them and changed course. "Or that Buffy girl. She'd be good-"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Potter, but partners are already assigned. I can't go making exceptions for you just because you're the Boy Who Lived."
"I'm not asking for exceptions!" Harry said hotly. He had always hated the implication that he wanted special treatment, and his life outside the book series was no different. "Look, it's just…" He thought quickly. "What if I said that talking to her would be emotionally distressing to me?" he asked in a wheedling voice.
The moderator raised an eyebrow. "And how are you going to explain that one?"
"Look," Harry said, nodding in Bella's direction. "Look at how she's changed. Her skin's all white and she's got those red eyes. If you shaved her head and chopped off her nose she'd be the spitting image of my defeated arch-nemesis. Ha!"
He realized a moment too late that that argument would have been much stronger if he hadn't ended it by grinning triumphantly.
The moderator gave him a flat look, and Harry sighed. "No luck?"
"No luck."
"Look, why do I even have to come to these meetings anymore? I've already got my 'lived happily ever after.' Can't I just, you know… go and live, happily?"
"Doesn't work that way, I'm afraid," a young girl in a gingham dress said as she passed them by, giving Harry a rueful smile.
"Unfortunately Miss Gale is correct, Mr. Potter," the moderator said. "Once you're in the public eye you're there for good. You ought to take a look in on the Legends and Myths group in room 64B. Besides, Mrs. Cullen's own series has just ended. Perhaps you could give her some tips."
Before he could respond, the moderator pointedly turned away from him. With a sigh of resignation, Harry turned back towards where Bella Cullen was waiting for him, starting to look a little impatient. For the umpteenth time he envied Ron and Hermione, who were at least able to go to the Best Friends group together.
He gave her a polite smile and started towards her-only to have her standing in front of him in an instant. She'd moved so quickly that even his Seeker's eyes hadn't quite seen it-which was disquieting to say the least.
"Um, hi," he said, as they found some abandoned chairs to sit in. "So… obviously you've had an eventful month."
"I guess so," Bella said. "It seemed longer, though, of course, with the book and all."
Harry nodded. He was more than familiar with the odd experience of living a years' worth of events in some six or seven hundred pages.
"You look… um, different." He'd meant to say nice, because really she looked stunning, but there was something disconcerting about it as well, even without the blood-red eyes, which really did bother Harry more than he'd like to admit.
Bella smiled, looking a little awkward, despite having a strange fluidity to her even as she sat still. Which again was disturbing in its unnaturalness. It reminded Harry a little of the ghosts at Hogwarts, and then more chillingly of Dementors.
"So you got married?" he asked, and she nodded. "Despite your, I think… you didn't want to, right?"
"Right. But Edward and I made a deal. It was the only way he would…"
"Change you," Harry said, his voice a little flat. "So, you're a vampire, but you don't drink human blood," he said, in an effort to refresh his memory.
"The Cullens, they call themselves vegetarians. Or, we do, I guess I should say."
"So what do you eat, then? Lettuce?" he asked, thinking momentarily of Gilderoy Lockhart.
"Deer, mainly. Mountain lions, if I can get them," she said, with a smirk.
He'd never really seen a mountain lion, but for a moment, Harry pictured a large, majestic stag-and then pictured the girl in front of him ripping it's flesh and drinking its blood. He felt a little sick at the thought. It was better than humans, surely, but…
Harry struggled for a moment to force the image from his mind, and he grasped for something, anything that they might relate about. "How about your werewolf friend?" he said finally, feeling rather proud of himself for that one.
"Oh! We found out Jacob isn't really a werewolf, per se. He's a shapeshifter. Apparently the wolf shape was fairly arbitrary, really."
Harry frowned. So much for that. "He didn't want you to become a vampire, though?" Harry said, and he was fairly sure that was the entire extent of his knowledge of Bella's history.
Bella grimaced slightly. "That's where it gets complicated."
"Complicated's okay," Harry said, glancing surreptitiously at the clock.
"We should talk about you, though!"
"Oh, no… honestly. My story's over and done with. All I have to worry about now is movie adaptations and fanfic, and really I try not to think about them more than I have to."
"Okay, sure," Bella said, nodding. "Well, Jacob was against me becoming a vampire, yes. But he was pretty happy to go along with it, I guess, since I would have died otherwise."
"You… became a vampire so you wouldn't die."
Bella wrinkled her dainty-looking, chalk-white nose. "You say that like it's crazy."
Harry didn't quite know how to respond. He thought of everything he'd been taught, about the foolishness of fearing death. Of that moment in the Forbidden Forest with his parents, and Lupin and Sirius…
"I was going to die," Bella said, looking slightly miffed at his non-responsive face.
"I've died once," Harry said flatly. "It isn't that difficult."
"But then Edward would have tried to get himself killed!" Bella said, visibly upset all of a sudden.
"Wait, wait," he said, holding a hand up. "He would've gotten himself killed? On purpose?"
“He couldn’t stand the idea of losing me,” Bella said, somewhat testily. Her patience was waning thin.
“I’ve lost loads of people you’ve never seen me pitching myself off the Astronomy Tower, have you?” Harry asked, firing up in response.
“What about Ginny?” Bella countered, looking pleased with herself.
“If I were the sort of sap who went around claiming suicidal love Ginny’d’ve chucked me in the bin ages ago.”
They sat glaring at each other for a moment, then Harry sighed, rubbing a hand through his disobedient hair. “So… tell me about your ending. Do you like the way your story rounded out?”
“Very happy,” Bella said, sinking back in her chair. Luckily she was as glad as he was to change the subject. “Everything ended up perfectly.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Perfectly?” It was a fairly foreign concept to him. Life is never perfect.
Bella nodded, though. “I was worried that I’d have to give Jacob up for good, but now that he’s imprinted on my daughter-”
Harry held a hand up, feeling, if possible, more alarmed than before. “He’s what on your what?”
Harry listened wide-eyed and horrified as she described the imprinting process, and talked about Renesmee, her age-elapsed child. He was so profoundly disturbed by the idea of enforced love and criminally shortened childhoods that he couldn’t even form the words to ask for an explanation on the ridiculous name.
“What about your… parents? Your friends?” Harry said, weakly. “Don’t you think you’re going to miss them?”
“I don’t really have any friends outside of the Cullens, not anyone I really care about,” Bella shrugged. “And Charlie-that’s my dad-well he doesn’t know exactly, but I’ve seen him since I was changed. Jacob made sure of that.”
Harry was surprised. Maybe he wouldn’t mind this Jacob fellow.
“We’ve sort of got a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy,” Bella said, her smile a bit crooked.
“And your mum?”
Bella winced slightly, but shrugged again. “Renee would never be able to handle this. We decided it’s best to just leave her out of it.”
“So, what? You’re just never going to see your mother again?” Harry’s fury was fast and undeniable at that. It was stupidity, pure stupidity to waste any chance you had to be with the people you cared about. Harry knew this better than anyone. He tried to imagine a world where his mother was living, and he was prepared to turn his back on her for good. The very thought sickened him.
“Look, I didn’t write it, okay?” Bella said, weakly.
“Would you have written it differently?” he demanded.
Bella opened her mouth, but shut it again. He could tell from the look on her face that she couldn’t imagine her life differently than it was. They were both reflections of their creators, after all. It really wasn’t her fault. He sat mutely, an awkward silence stretching between them, and Harry was immensely relieved when the moderator called time.
Bella gave him a subdued smile as she took her leave, looking tired and bemused. Harry gave a small wave in turn, and watched her leave, once again disturbed by the fluidity of her movements.
He was tired, too. This had taken more out of him than he’d been prepared for. Never in his life had he met someone so willing and content to throw away family, friends, normalcy. The very things he’d spent his entire fictional life fighting for. Sighing deeply, he Summoned his coat from where he’d left it at his original seat. For some reason it was always cold trying to get to the middle of Nowhere. He made his way quickly to meet Ron and Hermione in their usual spot in the main foyer. Ginny usually traveled with them back to the wizarding world, but today she was planning on meeting up with some friends from Urban Fantasy for drinks.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Bella meeting up with who had to be her newly-found husband, and the pair were momentarily liplocked. Harry tried not to cringe. Just then he saw Ron and Hermione waving to him from the giant column towards the end of the main hall, and he hurried towards them, his heart warming at the sight of them.
"How'd it go?" Hermione asked, once he was near enough.
"Okay, I guess. Sort of exhausting, as usual. I had to do one-on-one with that girl from those Twilight books, though."
"Bella Swan?" Ron sniggered. "The whiny girl with the sparkly vampire boyfriend?"
"Husband, now," said Hermione. "I thought their story started out sort of romantic, actually, though that last book really was ridiculous."
"Romantic?" Ron said, incredulous. "Glittery git."
"And I'd be careful what you said about him, Ron, he's quite the gentleman but he really could kill you fairly easily."
"No he can't! Look, I'm alive in nineteen years, aren't I?" And then he seemed to have processed what she'd said earlier. "What do you mean, 'quite the gentleman'?" he asked, imitating her voice in a simpering way, despite looking as resentful as he ever had. "You know this fellow? Another pen-pal I don't know about, maybe?"
Unlike past years, however, Hermione just rolled her eyes and smirked at him, something in her look more intimate than Harry was as yet used to seeing. It was still a bit weird knowing they were together. He was simultaneously happy for them and ever-so-slightly nauseated.
"What, you're worried a sparkly vampire is going to steal me away?" Hermione asked, amusement and affection in her voice.
Ron smiled grudgingly. "Not really," he said, in a good impression of nonchalance.
She grinned, then turned her attention to Harry. "You know he's going to start coming to your meetings, right, Harry? Edward. He's getting his own book next year."
Harry groaned. "Thanks, Hermione. Thanks a lot. I'm really looking forward to that.”
She laughed, looking amused, and Ron gave him a “Glad I’m not you, mate” look. Harry rolled his eyes, and fell quiet as he walked with his friends towards the exit, only half-listening as they continued to bicker flirtatiously with each other.
Maybe his ending hadn’t been perfect, maybe he’d lost one too many people along the way-as if one wasn’t too many-but there were worse ways to live a life. He realized that he wouldn’t exchange a single one of his struggles to live a life like Bella’s, where he had everything he could wish for but friendship and family and life itself were so undervalued.
Outside of the meetinghouse, Hermione Disapparated the three of them, as she‘d become wont to do since the last book, with Harry more eager to return to his own world than ever before.
Finis.
Title: Harry Potter and Bella Swan: A Conversation
Author: cardinalgirl/tiemeinbows
Fandom: Harry Potter/Twilight
Word Count: 2467
Disclaimer: Don't own a bit of it, minus maybe the moderator.
Rating: TEEN
Summary: Just a little bit of fandom amusement. Harry POV. Set directly after the release of Breaking Dawn, at the monthly Character Support Group meeting in the Middle of Nowhere.
Author's Note: This is not meant to offend anyone of the Twilight fandom. It's not even snarky, really... well, Harry's a little snarky, but only to normal Harry-ness. The idea of it started out as gentle teasing from a lover of both series, but Harry... well he does have his own opinions and holds people to some very high standards, doesn't he? My view on what his honest reactions to Bella's life would be.
Take note, this takes place right after BD, when Moonlight Sun was still a go.
***
Harry leaned back in the cheap metal folding-chair and sighed, reading the large red banner that had been placed in the front of the room.
WELCOME BACK SCI-FI/FANTASY MAIN CHARACTERS!
Of all the unexpected things of being the main character in a wildly popular fictional world-which was uncomfortable enough, if you asked him-this rated pretty high on the list of worsts. Every month-every month-he had to come here, to a giant convention center that was literally in the middle of Nowhere, which was the only place equidistant from every fictional world in existence.
Luckily the meetings were large enough that most of the time he could tune out entirely. Admittedly sometimes he learned things. When he was younger and all of this was new to him he'd looked forward to hearing from the older characters about how to make it through the lull between books, and how to deal with the various stresses of MC life, but now, after years of coming? It wasn't History of Magic bad… but it had its moments.
As the sound of people moving and chairs scraping the floor as they were turned around, Harry realized they'd gotten to what was always either the best or worst part of the meeting, depending on who you got-splitting into pairs for one-on-one time.
The moderator was walking around with a magically amplified voice-he was fairly sure she was a witch, though he'd never seen her outside of these meetings-and was listing off names in pairs. "Peter Pan with Frodo Baggins, Harry Potter with Bella Cullen-Oh, Cullen? That's new."
The moderator read on, but Harry looked up, aghast, meeting for a moment the glance of the newly-changed-in more ways than one-teenager across the room from him.
She started to head towards him, but Harry went after the moderator instead, as she'd just finished reading off her list and was heading towards the front to supervise.
"Wait, no. Do I have to?" he asked, when he caught up with her.
"Rules are rules, Mr. Potter.
"Look," he said, lowering his voice, though if Bella's new look was any indication, she had super-sonic hearing now, "Can't I talk to that Skywalker chap again? At least I have something in common with him!" He caught sight of a pretty blonde passing them and changed course. "Or that Buffy girl. She'd be good-"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Potter, but partners are already assigned. I can't go making exceptions for you just because you're the Boy Who Lived."
"I'm not asking for exceptions!" Harry said hotly. He had always hated the implication that he wanted special treatment, and his life outside the book series was no different. "Look, it's just…" He thought quickly. "What if I said that talking to her would be emotionally distressing to me?" he asked in a wheedling voice.
The moderator raised an eyebrow. "And how are you going to explain that one?"
"Look," Harry said, nodding in Bella's direction. "Look at how she's changed. Her skin's all white and she's got those red eyes. If you shaved her head and chopped off her nose she'd be the spitting image of my defeated arch-nemesis. Ha!"
He realized a moment too late that that argument would have been much stronger if he hadn't ended it by grinning triumphantly.
The moderator gave him a flat look, and Harry sighed. "No luck?"
"No luck."
"Look, why do I even have to come to these meetings anymore? I've already got my 'lived happily ever after.' Can't I just, you know… go and live, happily?"
"Doesn't work that way, I'm afraid," a young girl in a gingham dress said as she passed them by, giving Harry a rueful smile.
"Unfortunately Miss Gale is correct, Mr. Potter," the moderator said. "Once you're in the public eye you're there for good. You ought to take a look in on the Legends and Myths group in room 64B. Besides, Mrs. Cullen's own series has just ended. Perhaps you could give her some tips."
Before he could respond, the moderator pointedly turned away from him. With a sigh of resignation, Harry turned back towards where Bella Cullen was waiting for him, starting to look a little impatient. For the umpteenth time he envied Ron and Hermione, who were at least able to go to the Best Friends group together.
He gave her a polite smile and started towards her-only to have her standing in front of him in an instant. She'd moved so quickly that even his Seeker's eyes hadn't quite seen it-which was disquieting to say the least.
"Um, hi," he said, as they found some abandoned chairs to sit in. "So… obviously you've had an eventful month."
"I guess so," Bella said. "It seemed longer, though, of course, with the book and all."
Harry nodded. He was more than familiar with the odd experience of living a years' worth of events in some six or seven hundred pages.
"You look… um, different." He'd meant to say nice, because really she looked stunning, but there was something disconcerting about it as well, even without the blood-red eyes, which really did bother Harry more than he'd like to admit.
Bella smiled, looking a little awkward, despite having a strange fluidity to her even as she sat still. Which again was disturbing in its unnaturalness. It reminded Harry a little of the ghosts at Hogwarts, and then more chillingly of Dementors.
"So you got married?" he asked, and she nodded. "Despite your, I think… you didn't want to, right?"
"Right. But Edward and I made a deal. It was the only way he would…"
"Change you," Harry said, his voice a little flat. "So, you're a vampire, but you don't drink human blood," he said, in an effort to refresh his memory.
"The Cullens, they call themselves vegetarians. Or, we do, I guess I should say."
"So what do you eat, then? Lettuce?" he asked, thinking momentarily of Gilderoy Lockhart.
"Deer, mainly. Mountain lions, if I can get them," she said, with a smirk.
He'd never really seen a mountain lion, but for a moment, Harry pictured a large, majestic stag-and then pictured the girl in front of him ripping it's flesh and drinking its blood. He felt a little sick at the thought. It was better than humans, surely, but…
Harry struggled for a moment to force the image from his mind, and he grasped for something, anything that they might relate about. "How about your werewolf friend?" he said finally, feeling rather proud of himself for that one.
"Oh! We found out Jacob isn't really a werewolf, per se. He's a shapeshifter. Apparently the wolf shape was fairly arbitrary, really."
Harry frowned. So much for that. "He didn't want you to become a vampire, though?" Harry said, and he was fairly sure that was the entire extent of his knowledge of Bella's history.
Bella grimaced slightly. "That's where it gets complicated."
"Complicated's okay," Harry said, glancing surreptitiously at the clock.
"We should talk about you, though!"
"Oh, no… honestly. My story's over and done with. All I have to worry about now is movie adaptations and fanfic, and really I try not to think about them more than I have to."
"Okay, sure," Bella said, nodding. "Well, Jacob was against me becoming a vampire, yes. But he was pretty happy to go along with it, I guess, since I would have died otherwise."
"You… became a vampire so you wouldn't die."
Bella wrinkled her dainty-looking, chalk-white nose. "You say that like it's crazy."
Harry didn't quite know how to respond. He thought of everything he'd been taught, about the foolishness of fearing death. Of that moment in the Forbidden Forest with his parents, and Lupin and Sirius…
"I was going to die," Bella said, looking slightly miffed at his non-responsive face.
"I've died once," Harry said flatly. "It isn't that difficult."
"But then Edward would have tried to get himself killed!" Bella said, visibly upset all of a sudden.
"Wait, wait," he said, holding a hand up. "He would've gotten himself killed? On purpose?"
“He couldn’t stand the idea of losing me,” Bella said, somewhat testily. Her patience was waning thin.
“I’ve lost loads of people you’ve never seen me pitching myself off the Astronomy Tower, have you?” Harry asked, firing up in response.
“What about Ginny?” Bella countered, looking pleased with herself.
“If I were the sort of sap who went around claiming suicidal love Ginny’d’ve chucked me in the bin ages ago.”
They sat glaring at each other for a moment, then Harry sighed, rubbing a hand through his disobedient hair. “So… tell me about your ending. Do you like the way your story rounded out?”
“Very happy,” Bella said, sinking back in her chair. Luckily she was as glad as he was to change the subject. “Everything ended up perfectly.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Perfectly?” It was a fairly foreign concept to him. Life is never perfect.
Bella nodded, though. “I was worried that I’d have to give Jacob up for good, but now that he’s imprinted on my daughter-”
Harry held a hand up, feeling, if possible, more alarmed than before. “He’s what on your what?”
Harry listened wide-eyed and horrified as she described the imprinting process, and talked about Renesmee, her age-elapsed child. He was so profoundly disturbed by the idea of enforced love and criminally shortened childhoods that he couldn’t even form the words to ask for an explanation on the ridiculous name.
“What about your… parents? Your friends?” Harry said, weakly. “Don’t you think you’re going to miss them?”
“I don’t really have any friends outside of the Cullens, not anyone I really care about,” Bella shrugged. “And Charlie-that’s my dad-well he doesn’t know exactly, but I’ve seen him since I was changed. Jacob made sure of that.”
Harry was surprised. Maybe he wouldn’t mind this Jacob fellow.
“We’ve sort of got a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy,” Bella said, her smile a bit crooked.
“And your mum?”
Bella winced slightly, but shrugged again. “Renee would never be able to handle this. We decided it’s best to just leave her out of it.”
“So, what? You’re just never going to see your mother again?” Harry’s fury was fast and undeniable at that. It was stupidity, pure stupidity to waste any chance you had to be with the people you cared about. Harry knew this better than anyone. He tried to imagine a world where his mother was living, and he was prepared to turn his back on her for good. The very thought sickened him.
“Look, I didn’t write it, okay?” Bella said, weakly.
“Would you have written it differently?” he demanded.
Bella opened her mouth, but shut it again. He could tell from the look on her face that she couldn’t imagine her life differently than it was. They were both reflections of their creators, after all. It really wasn’t her fault. He sat mutely, an awkward silence stretching between them, and Harry was immensely relieved when the moderator called time.
Bella gave him a subdued smile as she took her leave, looking tired and bemused. Harry gave a small wave in turn, and watched her leave, once again disturbed by the fluidity of her movements.
He was tired, too. This had taken more out of him than he’d been prepared for. Never in his life had he met someone so willing and content to throw away family, friends, normalcy. The very things he’d spent his entire fictional life fighting for. Sighing deeply, he Summoned his coat from where he’d left it at his original seat. For some reason it was always cold trying to get to the middle of Nowhere. He made his way quickly to meet Ron and Hermione in their usual spot in the main foyer. Ginny usually traveled with them back to the wizarding world, but today she was planning on meeting up with some friends from Urban Fantasy for drinks.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Bella meeting up with who had to be her newly-found husband, and the pair were momentarily liplocked. Harry tried not to cringe. Just then he saw Ron and Hermione waving to him from the giant column towards the end of the main hall, and he hurried towards them, his heart warming at the sight of them.
"How'd it go?" Hermione asked, once he was near enough.
"Okay, I guess. Sort of exhausting, as usual. I had to do one-on-one with that girl from those Twilight books, though."
"Bella Swan?" Ron sniggered. "The whiny girl with the sparkly vampire boyfriend?"
"Husband, now," said Hermione. "I thought their story started out sort of romantic, actually, though that last book really was ridiculous."
"Romantic?" Ron said, incredulous. "Glittery git."
"And I'd be careful what you said about him, Ron, he's quite the gentleman but he really could kill you fairly easily."
"No he can't! Look, I'm alive in nineteen years, aren't I?" And then he seemed to have processed what she'd said earlier. "What do you mean, 'quite the gentleman'?" he asked, imitating her voice in a simpering way, despite looking as resentful as he ever had. "You know this fellow? Another pen-pal I don't know about, maybe?"
Unlike past years, however, Hermione just rolled her eyes and smirked at him, something in her look more intimate than Harry was as yet used to seeing. It was still a bit weird knowing they were together. He was simultaneously happy for them and ever-so-slightly nauseated.
"What, you're worried a sparkly vampire is going to steal me away?" Hermione asked, amusement and affection in her voice.
Ron smiled grudgingly. "Not really," he said, in a good impression of nonchalance.
She grinned, then turned her attention to Harry. "You know he's going to start coming to your meetings, right, Harry? Edward. He's getting his own book next year."
Harry groaned. "Thanks, Hermione. Thanks a lot. I'm really looking forward to that.”
She laughed, looking amused, and Ron gave him a “Glad I’m not you, mate” look. Harry rolled his eyes, and fell quiet as he walked with his friends towards the exit, only half-listening as they continued to bicker flirtatiously with each other.
Maybe his ending hadn’t been perfect, maybe he’d lost one too many people along the way-as if one wasn’t too many-but there were worse ways to live a life. He realized that he wouldn’t exchange a single one of his struggles to live a life like Bella’s, where he had everything he could wish for but friendship and family and life itself were so undervalued.
Outside of the meetinghouse, Hermione Disapparated the three of them, as she‘d become wont to do since the last book, with Harry more eager to return to his own world than ever before.
Finis.