When this is over...

The words always stick in your throat, offered up like a promise, and you can see the regret in his eyes, even as he leans down and kisses your cheek, the smell of incense and Potions overwhelming.

I know, comes the eternal response, as the two of you drift apart once more, a know-it-all bookworm in red and gold and splendour, and a dour, greasy-haired Potions Master, a spy in silver and green and treachery.

He's innocent, you insist, stubborn as always, to your hot-headed friends, to the boy who will save you all, and the boy who exists to plague you. They regard you with gimlet eyes, untrusting glares, but they don't know him like you do, now do they? They don't know the gentle grasp of his fingers on a Potions vial or stirring rod, the way his voice rolls over you like thunder and poetry. His honour, wrapped around him like a billowing black cloak. The honour that refuses to let him touch you until you are eighteen and away from Hogwarts, if the war gives either of you the chance. The long hours of detention spent in his quarters, writing extra assignments or skinning unpleasant things just for the warmth of his touch on your shoulders and the way his breath curls around your ear as he whispers the next step. You pick his brain at every opportunity, fascinated. It is you he turns to when the grief becomes too much, although the only reason you know he's even crying is the dampness of his eyelashes against the hollow of your neck.

When this is over, I will come to you, he tells you, and you echo, caught between the fiercest longing you have ever known, and the duties of a war you are too young to be so dedicated to. But you never had a choice anyway, did you?

Voldemort falls and he almost does, and you've never been so bereft as in the moments you realise he's been bitten by Nagini. It's Harry who shoves you aside, who administers the first aid you can't, and you can't understand.

He wakes up in the Hospital Wing six days later, and you're by his bedside (as always, it's not like you've left, no matter what everyone else says), and all you can say, your voice wobbly is, It's over.