Patterns

She was one big inside-out sock who saw the world in polka-dots. Harry Potter was a stripe. She secretly thought she was a stripe too, but she would never tell. Not even as his hand grazed hers that night, his fingers bonier than she expected somehow. It wasn't a full night, the sun was merely hiding between three and four o'clock, but she still couldn't beleive that he was spending even part of it with her. She was out of place, this trumped everything else, the way the moonlight embraced her sunlight hair, or the sharpness of the swishing of her robes as she moved her foot from side to side.

"What are you doing?" Harry was suprsingly calm as he watched her sit on the edge of the astronomy tower.

"Dying."

"What?"

She offered an orphaned smirk. "That's all we're doing all the time, dying you know."

"Are you..." he couldn't bear to keep on talking he needed the silence for distance.

"Loony?"

"Right," he said meek as an unquirked eyebrow.

"I suppose so."

"You shouldn't let it get to you, you know."

"I'm not. I'm okay with death I really am. I'm just--"

He stepped closer wanted to grasp her for the seconds her focus hit on something that he could see, could understand. She shivered and slid down onto the ground away from the edge. "I'm angry. Of how much we make of people when they are gone."

He can't bear to touch her after she says that. "Don't talk that way." He never really was afraid of her, just the ghosts in her eyes.

"I loved them." If she was anyone else she would have added something else to defend herself. It was unclear to Harry wether it was just that she knew what she said was indefinsible or that she was completely oblivious. She spun around once and then turned to him and held up his hands to her cheek. He flinched back but she held them tight.

"I know, I know, okay."

"I just wish that someone would--" here she allowed a tear.

"What?" He gulped down the feeling of her flesh against his bony hands into his memory's stoumach.

"accept that they aren't gone."

"What, why?"

"Because it makes me begin to beleive it." And she pounced off into the lightening dawn more Hermione Granger than Luna Lovegood, leaving Harry Potter to wonder if he had missed the "I love you," hidden between the lines. He always was a checker kind of guy himself.