Work Text:
The Art Of Letting Go
After:
It hurts.
It really hurts the first time he sees her with someone else, and it’s not because he misses her because he’s sure he doesn’t, and it’s not because he’s jealous because he’s sure he isn’t.
It’s because of something he can’t explain, but it’s something: a feeling, a wanting, a wondering of what could have been if they had stayed together if they had tried harder.
He thinks that there’s a small piece of you that’s been chipped away from your heart when you break up with someone; even if you don’t want it to be, even if you don’t need it to be, there’s a piece chipped away nonetheless. It doesn’t matter how amicable the break up is, how much of the decision had been right to end things. When you see someone again, you see a piece of your heart; a slither of the muscle that they took from you once they left. He knows that she carries a small piece of him with her wherever she goes, just like he does too. He knows she’ll carry a small piece of him into her next relationship just as he will with her.
He knows that small piece is what they had, of what they once were: the good, the bad and the in-between.
Their eyes clock across the room. She tilts her head, his hand flexes, and suddenly, he’s back to the start, at the precipice of something monumental and new and theirs.
Back to before, to when he didn’t even know what was about to begin.
Before:
The first thing he thinks when he sees her again after the war is that she’s pretty; without the green robes and the snarl on her lips, there’s something pretty about her.
“Potter,” she greets him, barely paying him much mind, barely looking up at him. It’s refreshing for her to treat him the same way she always has, to not treat him like something, a someone that barely exists and is more fiction than reality. Harry Potter isn’t a shiny hero; he isn’t the figurehead of everything new and good, no matter how much the Ministry may try to push it, no matter how much everyone around him seems to think or rather know that he is.
He knows he isn’t; he’s never wanted that particular title anyway.
“Parkinson,” he replies, part in shock that she had even said anything and partly because he wants to.
She brushes past him and heads towards St Mungo’s, he wonders what she’s doing there, why she’s-
He gets his answer not three hours later when he’s taken in because of a raid that had gone more than just a little wrong. Hexes had appeared this way, and that, and the Aurors had been outnumbered, extremely outnumbered.
She fixes him with a polite smile and a rather loud sigh once they come face to face again.
“Twice in one day, this really is my lucky year,” she comments.
“Parkinson?” He questions again because she’s not a healer, is she?
“Potter,” she nods politely, demurely, she tucks a stray hair behind her ear and gets to work.
The first thing he notices about her are her hands; they’re dainty and cool to the skin and very precise with the exact movements to fix him. She’s very good at this, he realises, and it’s startling.
He’s never really thought of Pansy Parkinson possessing any kind of skill other than hanging off of Malfoy’s arm like some pureblood version of a groupie, and it’s jarring in a way to see her like this: dressed down and working and acting human.
It’s hard to think of her as a person with feelings, bones, blood and organs; that just doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t seem to fit his idea of her properly, of the idea he was sure was right: the idea that had already been created inside his head. Perhaps he’s been a little too one-dimensional about her character, but even so, he still can’t imagine Pansy Parkinson having a living, breathing, beating heart and using it to care for people.
He’s had her memorised by what she was supposed to do, supposed to be. He realises that it isn’t fair; he hates it when people do the same thing to him, and yet he’s just done it to her too.
“Finished,” she tells him once she’s complete, “I would suggest staying here for at least tonight under observations, but you’ve never really been one to take advice, have you?”
He scoffs, “I’ll stay if that’s what’s needed.”
“Good,” she grins at him, and it’s far sharper than the polite smile she’d first offered him. He recognises this one from school, and he much prefers it.
He’s sure the last time he saw her before today was in the Great Hall; she’d been thin, and her eyes had been bloodshot, and she’d had Zabini, Malfoy, Nott and Goyle all flanked around her side. They’d look distraught; they’d lost people, too. He’d forgotten, and he’d been there when Crabbe had been killed. It didn’t matter that he started the fiendfyre. No one deserves to go up in a blaze; they’d never even be able to find his bones.
His grave now lays empty.
He was two days away from reaching his eighteenth Birthday.
He leaves the next day, hoping for whatever reason that he might spot her again, that he might just see her before he heads back home. Luck seems to be on his side because when he steps outside, she’s stepping in, and he stops, stutters, pauses.
“Thanks,” he mumbles, “I’m as good as new.”
“As opposed to?”
“Wonky,” he shrugs.
“Wouldn’t look very good on my first day, would it now, Potter? Your arm reattached backwards.”
“There’s always next time,” he replies, shrugging, “perhaps next time, as it won’t be your first day, you won’t be quite as generous.”
She grins, “we’ll see what mood I’m in, goodbye Potter and do try and look after yourself.”
He watches on as she walks in; he’s there for a while, long after her body had disappeared into the sea of people that is St Mungo’s.
He’s not sure why he watches for so long.
“She’s been in France,” Hermione tells him after barging her way into Grimmauld Place later that day. She’s furious with him for not letting her know he’d been taken to St Mungo’s the day before. Her hair’s sparking, and she’s waggling her fingers at him, her other hand on her hip, a stance he remembers from back at Hogwarts. He settles her worries and, allows her moans and promises that the next time this happens, she’ll be the first to know.
“Sorry?” He’s not been paying attention to the conversation much as he makes them both a cup of tea.
“Pansy,” she adds, sounding impatient, “she’s the one who treated you, isn’t she? She’s been in France for her healer training. She specialises in spinal injuries and brain trauma.”
“But it was my arm that was the issue,” he replies, confused.
“She’s the best,” Hermione sighs, “Harry, you know how important you are to everyone, and she’s the best, had the highest marks in her course and beyond and-“
“So what?” he sighs, agitated by the mere idea of it, of the mere idea that she or anyone would have to stop whatever they were doing to tend to him, especially because he was the chosen one because he was given the birth name of Harry Potter. “She’s my own personal healer now?”
Hermione blinks owlishly at him, and he hates it when she does this, hates it when she treats him like a small child that she has to explain everything to, “it was Grace before, but Pansy has more training, more skills if anything were to happen-“
Hermione continues on, but he drowns her out because he can’t entertain it, can’t fathom that he hadn’t ever noticed this before. Grace had always looked after him, Grace had always looked after, and now it’s going to be Pansy Parkinson-
“HARRY,” Hermione screams at him, but it’s too late. The teapot smashes into a million tiny pieces on the floor.
The next time he sees her, it’s exactly a week later.
She’s in the Leaky Cauldron nursing a drink of something strong; she looks tired, as if she’s just finished a long shift, and his legs are walking towards her before he can stop himself.
She glances up briefly to examine him before she returns to looking at her drink.
He pulls the chair opposite to her out and sits on it.
She sighs, long and suffering, “I wasn’t aware I invited you to join me.”
“Are you my personal healer now?” He cuts right to the chase because-
She crosses her arms and legs and leans back into her chair, “that’s not how St.Mungo’s works Potter.”
He shakes his head, “I’m aware.”
She doesn’t answer straight away. She just sort of stares at him before reaching forward and grabbing her drink; she takes a slow, delicate sip before setting it back down again. He notices that everything she does seems elegant; everything is measured and exact, and it’s alarming? Unnerving? Enchanting? Perhaps it’s a mix of all of them
“Do you think you deserve the specialist treatment?” She questions as her finger runs a singular loop around the top of her glass.
“No,” he replies fiercely, honestly, “I didn’t want the Order to win because I wanted specialist treatment to become this,” he pauses, wondering if she’ll understand what he’s trying to elaborate on, “this person that is treated like a hero.”
She snorts, laughing, “but Potter, you are a hero.”
“Do you truly think so?”
“Why should you care what I think?”
“Well, I’m asking, aren’t I? Clearly, I want an answer.”
She taps her nails against the table; “I think you were a boy who was forced to become a man when he was neither ready nor wanting of it.” She sighs, “and now I think you’re a man forced to become a hero, and you certainly don’t want that either; what’s that expression? Heavy is the head that wears the crown.”
She’s right, but he can’t bare thinking about it, can’t bare thinking about the childhood that barely existed and the people who didn’t care enough.
“Shakespeare?”
“I’m not uncivilised like yourself, Potter.”
“But he’s a muggle.”
“And so he was.”
“But you don’t like muggles.”
“And you don’t like me.”
He laughs and shrugs, “I don’t know you, not really anyway.”
“No,” she nods, smirking as her finger does another loop around the top of her glass, “I suppose you don’t.”
The first time they have sex is that night, and it’s not some dance where they flirt and kiss, and suddenly, they just know it’s going to happen. It’s more of a sitting and ordering a few drinks and stumbling towards a Floo at closing, and when he calls out his destination, she steps forward and, grabs his arm and joins him just as the green flames take him home.
It’s not magical, sparks flying, life-changing, but it’s something, it’s the start of something new and different and freeing and-
“Fuck harder,” she breathes into the side of his neck, “faster, fuck,” she nibbles his ear, whispering, “like you truly mean it.”
So he does; he really does or tries his best to, at least. He’s not done this before; Harry Potter, believe it or not, isn’t a one-night stand kind of guy, no matter how many people have thrown themselves at him. So it’s no wonder when she tries to leave afterwards, the words slip from his mouth abandon-
“When can I see you again?”
She pauses in the retrieval of her silk knickers and spins to look at him, “you don’t need to do that.”
“What?”
“You don’t need to pretend,” she sighs, “Potter, it was a one-time thing, stress relief-“
“Can’t it be a two-time thing? Or perhaps even a three-time thing?”
“Why?”
“Didn’t you have fun,” he grins at her, and he knows his hair is sticking up all over the place and his glasses aren’t on quite right because she’s a little fuzzy at the edges, “I think you did.”
She bites her lip, chewing on it for a second or two before she shakes her head, seeming to laugh to herself a little, “I can’t be your girlfriend, Potter.”
“How do you know that? We might be good together.”
“We might be a total disaster.”
He shrugs, “there’s only one way that either of us can find out.”
And the thing is, they’re both right in the end because they are good together, especially in the beginning and the middle, but in the end, the pair of them do end in disaster, a total heartbreaking disaster.
They’re a secret at first as they’re working things out, trying to establish what they like and what they don’t about one another. Stolen kisses and quiet moments are what build their relationship, and he welcomes it because he’s never seen Pansy Parkinson like this, he’s never had the honour of knowing her like this, and he’s so desperate to know all of her. He wants to know everything now, everything that she seems to be slowly unravelling to him. He wants to know it all now; he’s greedy and impatient like that.
He wants to know everything about her and nothing at all; he wants to build a new picture in his mind, a picture of who Pansy Parkinson is, who she really is, what she’s really about and why she used to be so different. He wants to demolish the old one that he had once pictured in his mind. He wants to pretend he never knew her before, never knew her back then, never knew this person before the war and the years since. The Pansy he knows now is real and made of flesh and bones and blood and the one before was a prototype of what she should have been and his mind won’t allow itself to believe that they are one and the same.
“You’re different,” he tells her all the time. He talks about how different she is now in comparison to what she once was, what he once viewed her as.
“I’m not that different Potter,” she always replies rolling her eyes, “you just didn’t know me very well.”
They explore muggle London together because the pair are very much unknown, their identities lost in the sea of people that overpopulate the crowded city. He likes knowing their identities are gobbled up by people who simply do not care that he has a scar on his forehead that will never leave him and she was brought up in a family that hates every single person they pass. He likes being an unknown; he likes that he doesn’t stick out in the crowd; he likes that people don’t stare at him or ask him for something, for a comfort he doesn’t know how to give.
“I want to tell my friends about you,” he whispers into the dark, “I want to introduce you or re-introduce you anyway.”
She laughs, “that won’t end well, Potter, and we both know it.”
“We can’t be quiet about this forever. I want to drop you off at St. Mungo’s, and I want to do things in our world too.”
“We’re happy aren’t we?” She sighs, “I don’t want anything to change.”
“Change can be good, great even.”
“Change can be bad, fucking awful in some cases.”
He laughs because if he’s a glass half full, she’s certainly a glass half empty.
The only time she ever calls him Harry is when they’re intimate, and he doesn’t mind it; he actually quite likes it. She says it as if she’s speaking a prayer as if she’s etching what they create onto his skin with every hushed repeated word.
He knows he loves her.
“When were you going to tell me, Harry?” Hermione asks as she steps into his office.
“What?”
She closes the door and flings The Daily Prophet at him, and there they are on the front like they’ve been caught, like they’re some dirty little secret.
“STAR-CROSSED ROMANCE OR A DANCE WITH DISASTER?”
See all the inside details on our famous war hero’s new girlfriend: Pansy Parkinson the only surviving relative to the rather infamous Parkinson family.
The pair of them are laughing together; his hand is settled in hers, he’s pulling her closer to him, and then he kisses the top of her head. Repeat, repeat, repeat. It loops and repeats and they look so blissfully happy. No wonder the department had been looking at him strangely all day.
He looks and re-looks, and he scrunches the paper between his fingers and- “she’s, she’s changed.”
“Do you love her?”
“Yes,” he nods, answering automatically because he does, he can’t seem to help himself.
Hermione doesn’t respond and the quietness in his office seems to drag on and on.
Then she nods and smiles at him, “as long as you’re happy Harry it’s all I care about,” she sighs chewing her lip, “I can’t say the same for Ron.”
Hermione hadn’t been wrong but she hadn’t been entirely right either.
“I told you,” Pansy seethes as they enter Grimmauld Place, “I told you it would be a fucking disaster.”
“It wasn’t a total disaster,” he replies, “Ron-“
“Hates me, and I can assure you the feeling is very much fucking mutual.”
“The article didn’t help,” he replies pointedly, ignoring her confession over the hating of his best friend, “it didn’t help either of them that they learnt through The Daily Prophet . He thinks of you teasing him and his family in school over money and everything else-“
“He wants you to marry his sister,” she spits, cutting him off, “never mind that she prefers the company of women, never mind that she-“
“He just doesn’t know you like I do.”
“I don’t want him to know me like you do,” she glares at him with frustration etched into her tone, “is it always going to be an issu-“
“No,” he cuts her off shaking his head, “things will simmer down eventually everyone will get used to it.”
She scoffs, “I’m sure. Draco will return to England and Crabbe will resurrect himself from the grave too. They’re all lovely ideas Potter but I doubt any of them will come to fruition.”
Harry sighs and closes the distance between them; she rolls her eyes when he hugs her but eventually melts into it; she does that often, he notices. She’ll reject affection, to begin with, but then gradually welcome it. It’s like her body and brain can’t quite accept what’s going on, to begin with, but then they both remember who he is and that this is fine to explore, accept, want. For him, it’s already muscle memory.
She’s a dancer and a good one. Saturday mornings are spent with cold mugs of tea and music blasting from his Godfather’s old record player. She wears one of his shirts and doesn’t brush her hair properly as she spins around on slippery socks. She tries to teach him the various dances she was taught as a child by her personal dance teacher but he can’t really master them and he stands on her toes more often than not.
They never really speak about before about the war and the mess it had caused everyone, especially their own age group. They aren’t the type of couple that spends hours speaking things over, discussing their past. Whenever she brings it up he waves her off, wanting this slate to be new and their own. She’ll roll her eyes and nod and he’ll grin at her, kissing each of her cheeks.
He likes that they don’t talk about the past because there really isn’t a need; the past is in the past, and this is something far better. He wants to plan a future with her; he can easily see one where she is a part of his life for a very long time.
He tells her he loves her for the first time on a Sunday morning in early spring; he whispers the confession to her as he leisurely strokes her naked side. She turns over grinning at him but she doesn’t confess it back, he doesn’t expect her to either. She reaches up, playing with his messy hair and leans in to kiss him; he can feel that she’s still grinning against his mouth even as their tongues dive in to explore more.
He thinks he prefers this response far more than if she were to just repeat his own words back to him. He knows she feels the same way anyway.
Whenever he drops her off outside of St.Mungo’s the pair of them receive more than just a few curious looks. She never minds too much, and he always makes sure to kiss her in front of someone that she knows; seeing that her face has turned more than just a little pink after they break apart warms his heart to an extent he can’t quite understand. She’ll glare at him for it but he doesn’t care. He wants everyone to know that they’re dating, that she’s his girlfriend, a permanent fixture in his life that he wants to keep forever if he can.
The next time he lands himself in St.Mungo’s it’s months and months after the first time she’d tended to him and it’s bad, far worse than before.
It’s a touch-and-go kind of bad.
If the last thing he ever sees are her emerald eyes-
She looks like she’s trying not to cry; he wants-
She looks so beautiful she’s always so beautiful if this is the last thing he ever see’s-
“If you die on me, Potter-“ she starts, but then it’s too late. His unconsciousness finally wins.
He’s out for almost three days and when he wakes she’s staring over him, her eyes joyous if only for a split second before she glares at him.
“You could have died,” she spits as she continues with her wand movements as if he’s any other patient, “you need to look after yourself, Potter; I can’t-“ she sighs, rubbing her forehead; she looks tired, “you’re so reckless and head first and don’t give a fuck about the consequences, and you just can’t be like that anymore.”
He reaches out grabbing her hand and she tries to bat it away but he doesn’t let her, he interlinks their fingers and she sighs when he gently rubs the outer part of her hand.
His voice is raspy for disuse when he speaks, “have you been here the whole time?”
She rolls her eyes, “where else would I be, Potter?”
He grins at her soft and small, “I love you.”
She leans down and kisses his forehead whispering in his ear so only he can hear as if it’s a wonderful shared secret between the pair of them, “I love you too.”
Ron visits him soon after and Pansy leaves the room and the pair of them to it. He tells her to go home, saying she needs a shower and to look after herself more; she rolls her eyes but agrees.
“She didn’t leave you once, mate,” Ron tells him as he settles into the seat next to his bed, “barely wanted to leave you to use the toilet or brush her teeth in case you woke up whilst she was gone, she was the one who worked on you too you know.”
He smiles at his best friend and nods; it’s nice knowing she cares so much. He’d been quite sure before, but now he’s sure she loves him more than he ever thought possible.
She loves him perhaps even more than anyone ever has; it fills him with a feeling so pure he can hardly believe it or handle it. He’s always believed in love, always craved it especially because of the lack of it during his childhood, for a while he wasn’t even sure he deserved it feeling far too damaged over the years of war and running from a man living inside a part of his head. He’d thought his soul had turned bad once upon a time but he’s sure now that wasn’t the case. She wouldn’t be able to love him so much if he did.
“Grape?” Ron offers, “Mum sent them.”
He accepts one plopping it into his mouth.
She returns later and she and Ron exchange an awkward and muffled hello and goodbye, progress even if it’s only small. She stays with him every night until he’s discharged, stroking his messy hair and reminding him he needs to shave or at least shape the stubble that’s slowly forming a beard.
When she falls asleep nestled into his side in his barely big enough for one-person single bed, he’s almost certain he never wants to be without her.
He should have known good things can’t last forever; they never have.
“She’s a good person,” Nott tells him at some pureblood party he’d agreed to go to with her; the pair of them have had to dress up, and he hates it, but he loves her, so he does it, “whether she believes it or not.”
He nods, watching her as she flitters about talking to people he has no hope of knowing or wanting to know. Blaise Zabini is next to her with Daphne Greengrass on his arm-
“She’s always been a good person,” Nott adds, “even back in school.”
“I didn’t know her in school.”
“No,” Nott shrugs, “you didn’t. No one did, really, but after Crabbe died and when Draco left, it was hard; she was devastated, and thus she left too.”
He ponders his reply to this; they were all devastated; they were all trying to work out where to go from where they were. This certainly isn’t the revelation Nott thinks it is.
“She always loved Draco, not in the way either of them wanted, but she loved him nonetheless.”
His ears perk up at this, he’d always presumed-
“She loved Crabbe ever since we were kids,” Nott laughs wistfully as if remembering something from long ago, “he brought her pansies when we were young, and she was smitten ever after.”
He didn’t know that. He isn’t even sure he wanted to know that. He bites his tongue, trying to think of a reply.
“Her Mother didn’t approve. The Crabbes aren’t a-” he pauses, “weren’t a wealthy family,” Nott sighs, “not that it matters anymore, and I’m sure she’s told you all- “
“No,” he cuts in, “she hasn’t, we don’t,” he pauses, mulling the words over in his mind, “we don’t talk about the past much.”
Neither speaks for a moment, and he continues watching her as she flitters between people. She shines; he thinks in a way that all pureblood girls do, but it looks different on her, better.
Nott coughs, drawing his attention back to him; he then taps his shoulder, “don’t you think you should?” The question isn’t a question more of a statement, one that, by the looks of things, has already been spoken with Nott about.
“Potter,” she calls, waving him over, and he turns to look at her once more, “dance with me.”
He does.
He ignores Nott and speeds over to catch up with his girlfriend. He doesn’t stand on her toes too much, but she laughs and laughs and laughs. He wishes he could bottle up her laughter and keep it on a shelf; hearing it always seems to settle him.
The past hardly matters when the future seems all the brighter for them both. He won’t think of Crabbe again.
He can’t quite work out where it all goes wrong.
One minute, they’re happy, maybe a little too happy, and the next, they’re arguing over the past and the future and the everything in between. Doors slam during arguments, and they don’t makeup before they fall asleep. They had months and months of happiness, and he can’t work out where it’s all gone wrong-
“Don’t you think life’s a bit like a ball of string,” she comments, making strange patterns with her fingers in front of the both of them, “it’s messy, and we have this path that has to stretch out in front of us, there are bumps in it, and sometimes we may go off course a little, but there’s an end, there’s always an end.”
He looks at her, confused, “I don’t understand.”
She gives him a sad sort of smile. He’s never seen this one on her, and he’s not sure he likes it, “one day, you will.”
She spends more time at her flat than at his house now, and it hurts him to know that there’s this distance growing between them that he can’t seem to bridge, that he can’t seem to stop from ever increasing. She wants to talk about the past, about what they both were before; she says it’s the only way they can move towards the future, but he disagrees; they don’t need to look back on their old lives, on their past mistakes and dissect them to be happy they just need to be who they are today. She no longer lets him kiss her questions away, she no longer lets him get away with it, and she tries to dig and needle pieces of information that don’t need to be shared. That doesn’t need to be rehashed and thought over.
“Are you going to move in together soon?” Hermione asks him as they sit with one another at the Ministry for lunch.
The question catches him off guard, and the food, which he had been so eager to eat before, balances on his fork as he thinks about how to respond.
Hermione smiles at him, “two years soon, isn’t it? I thought maybe you’d be thinking about it.”
“We’ve not discussed it, no,” he replies.
Hermione looks at him strangely, “have you not discussed where this is going at all?”
Now, isn’t that the question, because they haven’t, not really, not at all.
He’s taken her day-by-day, taken the relationship day-by-day, and that’s always been fine; that’s always been better than fine; it’s been perfect even. They never planned for the future. They just carried on, and the future came to them, but now, as he sits here with his best friend, he wonders if that’s any way to form a relationship. He wonders if they’ve lost themselves by not plotting out the days and, the weeks and the months that should follow a relationship timeline.
“Harry,” Hermione admonishes, “you can’t just bumble through a relationship, you can’t just-“ she shakes her head, “that’s not how it works, that’s not how life works.”
He doesn’t want to hear it, so he gets up and leaves. Hermione calls after him, but he ignores her.
He knows now that it’s not the future. That’s the problem; it’s the past. Whenever the future has been brought up, she wants to discuss everything; she wants to speak about Hogwarts and the war and the stuff he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to figure out. Dumbledore is a no-go topic, as is Professor Snape. She grows angry that he won’t let her speak about Slytherin, let her speak about her past mistakes. She’s perfect now as she is. He doesn’t need to think about her as she was. He doesn’t need to think about him as he was, either.
The future doesn’t scare him; it never has. He can imagine her by his side; he can imagine her as a wife, as a partner, as a Mother even. Her warmth is different to Hermione’s or Ginny’s because it’s hard to get to, it’s hard to crack, but once she lets you bask in her sunlight, you know that there’s nothing better. He knows that her warmth is precious, and that’s what makes it all the warmer.
Realising there are more bad days between them than good is a startling thing; realising they try to avoid each other is a staggering thing. He avoids her because he doesn’t want to talk; she avoids him because she does. But, there are good days, there are better than good days, there are days where he loves her so much it hurts, and he thinks it will pass; relationships go through phases, everyone feels growing pains once in a while, and this is no different. This will pass, and they will carry on laughing and loving and being the pair that they are.
He makes her breakfast in bed on a Saturday when her shift starts late, and she kisses him, kisses him because of the vat of coffee he’s given her, and they laugh, and they laugh, and he thinks they’re going to be okay.
He knows they’re going to be okay.
But then the cycle starts again, and they argue, and they ignore, and the problems become bigger once more.
And then suddenly, they’re at the precipice of the end of it all, and he has no idea how they got here, how they landed here, how everything would now boil down to this one moment. To the complete and total end.
“Why do you always want to talk about the past,” he sighs, “the past is in the past, and this is now. You and me, us, why does the past even matter?”
“Because we never speak about it! We never speak about the war or the hardships or anything else,” she curses, “fuck we’ve never even spoken about me being your personal healer since the day you realised it. And I’ve tried, I’ve suggested therapy and-
“I don’t need to see a therapist to know that I love you and what we are today. The past, the war, the hurt, it doesn’t matter, the old you, it doesn’t matter-“
“But Harry,” she shouts, and it’s deafening and different than any fight before, “can’t you see that I am her? She’s a part of me; she’s helped me become who I am today.” She’s crying; he’s never seen her fully cry before, “she’s a part of me still; she’s helped me become who I am, and you don’t love her; you only love me today, and I want you to love all of me and you don’t. I know you don’t-“
“Pans-“
“I can’t do this anymore,” she sighs, wiping her tears and straightening her back, her pureblood mask of indifference placed upon her face; he’d forgotten she even had that mask, “I want someone to love all of me. Not just the good.”
He stares at her dumbfounded because he knows he loves her, knows he loves the woman standing in front of him. He knows he loves her, he knows he started falling in love with her that night, and he can’t, he’s not-
“Don’t deny it,” she tells him, harshness etched into every word, “you might not even realise it, but you do.”
“Pansy,” he shakes his head, “I love all of you, every part of who you are.”
“Today,” she shakes her head, “you love part of the person I am today.”
And he can see it then that she’s done with this, them, the us that they are. She’s not going to fight anymore, and she’s not going to carry on with this. She’s wearing a look of defeat like it’s a badge, and he’s lost her, lost her to something he doesn’t truly understand.
So he doesn’t try and argue with her; instead, he just nods, “stay tonight-“
“I-“
“Please,” it’s a plea, a beg, and he’s never had to beg her for anything before, and it’s a startling realisation that in all these months, everything he’s ever wanted she’s given to him without him ever having to even ask.
She nods and stays, and they share a bed for the last time. He watches her for a while, watches her breathing as it goes up and down, and he wonders if she’s even asleep. But then she turns, and she’s not crying; she’s not anything, and so he reaches out to touch her, and she grasps him in return. He pulls her to him, wanting to just touch her for one last time because they’d always been good at that, the touching and the holding.
She reaches up and touches his hair, and he grabs her fingers because he’s greedy for her. He’s greedy for this last time together to be something to remember. He pulls her to him, and they kiss, gasping and grinding, and he loves her.
He loves her; he loves her in a way he’s not quite sure he’s ever loved anyone, will ever love anyone again. They tug at one another’s clothes, at the small bits of fabric that create space between them, between every part of their skin, making contact with each other.
Their touches grow desperate for a short while, but then he realises this will be the last time, and he wants to savour it, wants to savour her. He slows them down, tracing the soft peaks of each part of her. His touches grow reverent, as he wants to worship her, especially because tonight is the last time.
She seems to understand why he slows, why he lets her ride him as he watches on from below. He tucks stray hair that falls in front of her face behind her ears. He touches her lips first with his hands and then with his tongue; he touches her neck and her breasts; he touches every part of her that he can, and then he pulls her close, letting her body weight settle on top of him so that he can remember the exact feel of her.
So he can remember the exact feeling of what this once felt like, of what she once felt like.
When they finish and break apart, he whispers as if it’s a secret, as if he’s telling her for the first time all over again, “I love you.”
He watches as her back stiffens, and he hopes, hopes that she’ll say it back one last time.
She doesn’t.
He thinks of the string then, of their string and how their interwoven strings have now officially come to an end, how they’re now frayed, split, damaged.
He thinks of how messy their intertwining had been in the first place.
She’s gone by morning.
His re-occurring healer is Grace once again.
After:
It hurts.
It really hurts, but it feels like it should because it might be hard to remember what they once had, but it is far worse to forget.
She was right in the end; he only loved the parts of her he could; he couldn’t love all of her no matter how much he thought he did, no matter how much he wanted himself to.