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I didn't want fireworks. I didn't want that flame lit beneath my soul, forcing me to carry on. I didn't even want that overwhelming desire to touch and be touched. I had fought too much. I had felt that adrenaline rush through my veins far too many times. Now, I yearned only for quiet.

I wanted the whispered words of love, the gentle caresses beneath the moonlight. I wanted the soft ripples of water lapping at the shore and the birds above calling out our name in song.

All these things I found in her.

Our love was a different kind of wild. It was an adventure spelled out in storybooks read by the light of flame. It was the calming welcome of home when we were together, the assurance that everything was right in this world. After the war it was what I — we — needed. It was what I needed all my life, never finding a familial love amongst the Dursleys nor a lasting one with Cho or Ginny. This was different. Better.

We stared out across the lake, the reasons that had brought us here different than those before. Hermione leaned against me and my arms were slung around her, pressing her into me. She shifted, her face turning so that her gaze could meet mine and her hand lifted to rub along the stubble I had allowed to grow.

"Why here?" I asked after a beat, the words different than she had expected, but I knew she understood. "Why the Forest of Dean?"

It was her turn for silence, the forming of thoughts, the careful selection of words. "To you it was just a stop on the way to defeat, but for me it's always been more."

I thought of the lake, how different it had been just a few years ago. I thought of the ice that had formed inside my veins, my lungs. Thought of the golden chain that had tightened against my throat, dragging me further beneath the water.

I thought of the dance we shared, the days spent here that had brought us closer in Ron's absence, the warmth of the canvas tent and how it was the same one that sat behind us now.

"We used to camp here." She started again, her thoughts breaking through my own. "My parents and I, just on the other side of the lake. There's a clearing there where most of the other muggle families went. This side...this side is different."

She didn't need to say how. Didn't need to spell out the enchantments we'd cast here, the snatchers, the rumored acromantulas. The lake was the divide, and now she remained on the magical side of it — with me.

"I just wanted... normal." She looked away from me then, any thoughts that had risen to the surface, that might have made themselves apparent on the lines of her lips now lost from my view. "And, here — now that things are so different — it feels like the last place I had any idea about what that was like."

"Normal." I repeated with a nod of my head.

Though this is not the place I would have come should I have been in search of normalcy, I understood what she meant. When we had last come it had just been us. There was no prejudiced harbored between the walls of the tent or the barrier of her spells. The only expectations we had had we had placed on ourselves.

Voldemort's defeat had brought something new. It came with a fame that was unparalleled to what I'd had before, one that Hermione nor Ron was accustomed to. With it brought new lives, the end of our places within Hogwarts and the beginnings of it in the Ministry.

We had fought harder battles, but it was difficult all the same. Different. And I had watched her struggle.

She was a muggleborn, the very thing that so many inside the Ministry had called for the extermination of only months before she applied. She had risen inside the ranks only to be met with persecution. Though to others she didn't let it show, I had seen the dimming of her sparkle. I had known that their words had taken its toll. It had only made me love her more.

I turned towards her — once more in the present — and took in her beauty.

"My own." I sighed her nickname, burying my lips within the mess of curls to whisper it beside her ear. Those words carried the weight of all the things I felt but could not say, but I knew she would understand. "I love you, I love you, I love you."

Her lips were warm as they met mine, binding me to this Earth beside her. I didn't want to be anywhere else unless she was with me. In our home, beside this lake, or on the battlefield once more, as long as we were together, I could survive.

She was tasteless but sweet all the same and when she pulled away I was left craving more. Her lips opened before I could beg for more and her soft voice fell from her mouth in a tone only I could hear.

"I love you, too."

Story Link: Escape

Focus: Making dialogue flow

School: Illvermorny

Year: 3

Prompt: 4. "I don't want normal and easy and simple. I want painful, difficult, devastating, life-changing, extraordinary love" - Scandal

Word Count: 883

I don't like using lines from other pieces of work as dialogue so the quote was used simply as inspiration. I wanted to portray that love can be painful, difficult, devastating, etc without that being about the actual relationship, but the circumstances around it. That once, for them, it was painful and difficult, but now it's extraordinary.