“Isn’t it?” She sounded exhausted, as if her speech had taken all the energy out of her. “What would you do in Cornwall, Harry, while I was studying?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted after a pause. “I’m sure I’d find something.”
“That sounds fun for you,” Hermione said acidly.
“Fun?” Harry echoed, puzzled.
“Yes, fun. You know, those brief shining moments we had in between you trying to kill or be killed. Snowball fights, that sort of thing.”
“I can’t make my life about snowball fights, Hermione.”
“And I’m not saying you should.” She shook her head, her dark curls bouncing against her cheeks. “I’m saying you need to be a whole person, Harry. You don’t even know who you are or what you want to do. You’ve let other people make your life for you, because you had to. And now you want me to make your life for you, but I won’t. How do you think I’d feel, watching you wander aimlessly around Cornwall, bored and miserable, just because I was there? You could be almost anything you wanted to be, Harry. Do anything you wanted.”
“I don’t know what I want to do,” Harry said. “There’s almost nothing I’m sure of, Hermione. Nothing except that I know I want to be with you.”
She looked at him sadly. Her eyes were still bright, though the tears hadn’t yet spilled down her cheeks. She said, “I’m not enough. Not enough to hang your whole life on. Some day you’d figure out exactly what it is you do want and then you’d hate me for not letting you find it out earlier…”
He moved towards her and this time she didn’t move away, just stood slumped against the balustrade as if all the strength had gone out of her.
“I would never hate you,” he said.
“I went to the Mirror of Erised once,” she said, “and looked in it — though I knew better, even then — and in it, I saw myself alone. And I was horrified — I thought maybe it meant I didn’t really love you. Or that I couldn’t love. And then when all that happened with Ron, I thought maybe I’d gone mad and didn’t know what I was doing. That was a bad time for me, Harry. But I realized, later, when I saw you in Romania, what the mirror was telling me. I do want to be alone, I need to be alone, so that I can know who I am and you can know who you are. Because only then can we really choose to be with each other.”
“You sound so calm,” Harry said, looking down into the garden. The wind was blowing the rose petals from the afternoon’s ceremony across the grass in small white tornadoes. “I suppose you’ve been getting used to this, over all these months.”
“I’m not calm,” Hermione said tightly. “I’m terrified.” Her hand was at her throat again and he realized what it was that she was holding: the blue glass ring he had meant to give her at Christmas, that he had thrown against the wall instead. A silver thread ran through it, where it had cracked but not shattered.
“I could fix that, if you wanted,” Harry said, taking another step towards her and touching the ring lightly with his fingertips.
“No,” she said, letting go of the chain so that the ring slithered down the front of her dress. “I like it the way it is.”
“Flawed?”
She looked up at him, half-startled. “Flawed but perfect,” she said.
His hand brushed her hair. “This is really what you want?”
“It’s not what I want.” She shivered. “It’s what I know. You think I’m not terrified? Terrified if I let you go you won’t ever come back to me?”
“I’ll always come back to you,” he said, and was startled when she threw her arms around him, burying her face in the front of his shirt. He could feel her shaking, as if she were crying, though she made no noise.
“I love you,” he said. “I should have said it before, when I asked you. I’ll always love you.”
“I know,” she said, into his shirt. “I love you, too. Sometimes I wish I loved you less. This is too hard. I can’t do it. I can’t.” The last word ended on a wail, and Harry tightened his arms around her, feeling the sharp edge of the ring she wore around her neck as it dug into his skin.
“Don’t,” he said. “There’s never been anything you couldn’t do, once you set your mind to it.”
At that, Hermione actually laughed a little, and pulled away, looking up at him with too-bright eyes. “That’s so typically Harry Potter,” she said.
“Now you’re trying to make me feel better about not marrying you?”
His hands slid to her waist, and to her surprise, he lifted her up suddenly so that she was sitting on top of the marble balustrade. Now her head was higher than his and she was looking down at him, her hands braced on his shoulders. “You’ll come around,” he said. “Eventually.”
She leaned down until the silk rose in her hair brushed his cheek. “And in the meantime, you’ll try to have fun, right?”
“I’ll do my best,” he said, and lifted his face so that she only had to lean down a fraction for their lips to touch. She slid down from the balustrade as they kissed, balancing precariously on the tips of her high-heeled shoes. Framed against the lights of the French doors, their clearly outlined silhouettes seemed to soften and reform as they clung together, two separate shadows melding into one.
When Ginny came back into the ballroom, she searched in vain for Draco.
He was nowhere to be found. At first, she thought he must still be with Harry, but after dancing with several partners, including Viktor Krum, a Malfoy cousin or some such with slightly crossed eyes, and Aidan Lynch (
“He’s all grabby, like an octopus,” Blaise warned her, not untruthfully), she saw Harry and Hermione come in to the ballrom through a set of French doors. They were holding hands, Harry’s former air of despondency having entirely vanished.
Ginny looked around the ballroom with a sinking heart. Perhaps Draco had found some other girl in the interim and gone off to snog with her in the gardens? After all, they had never established that this was a date, of the serious date variety. Technically she still wasn’t quite broken up with Seamus — in fact, if she were entirely honest with herself, she still hadn’t decided what to do about that love potion.
