Title: The Air of Regret

Author/Artist: wordsmithsonian

Summary: Ron ponders his feelings in the Forest of Dean, waiting and hoping for Hermione to forgive him.

Rating: PG

Characters/Pairings: Ron / Hermione

Warnings: mild Angst

A/N: Thanks to urbanmama1 for her incredible Beta skills and for being awesome and coming up with the title!

Prompt:

"I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary."
— Margaret Atwood

I am not J.K. Rowling and I do not own Harry Potter.

She was still angry.

Well, of course she was. He would have expected nothing less, really. Hermione Granger was a girl - he swept his eyes across her as she sat huddled determinedly away from him - a woman of passion. Her fury was a force not to be tampered with, certainly not by the likes of him.

She was a tiny ball of painful indignation, curled up within herself like a broken folding chair as she sat on the gnarled stump of some long-dead tree. It was late, and it was freezing. But it was her watch, and she was stubbornly sitting out in the cold when he had twice now offered to take over for her.

And so here he sat, on an icy patch of dirt, keeping a watch of his own.

The sharp weight that had settled in his chest during all of those days and nights spent wearing a poisonous evil against his heart had lifted when he drove the sword of Gryffindor through his deepest fears. Now there was only a persistent ache. A quiet sort of pain, a relentless companion in his waking moments, and in his dreams...

Oh, in his dreams the pain was gone. She was everywhere in his dreams. The scent and touch and taste of her, finally and forever in his reach, his arms, his bed...

She was the cure for this ache, which returned in full force the moment he opened his eyes each morning. She was... everything. And he had left her behind.

That pain, the pain of his own betrayal, the pain of his cowardice and his failure... That pain was as sharp as ever, magnified in her eyes, so deep with hurt of her own. He had hurt her, badly. And now he had to pay for it by watching her freeze to death out of stubbornness and pride.

He shrugged out of his jacket, the frayed cuffs made damp with snow catching on the thick sleeves of his jumper.

Two steps, three, four... Her back was rigid as she listened to his approach, her neck as stiff and fragile as the stem of a crystal goblet. He leaned forward, draping his jacket around her shivering form, watching as the faded cloth enveloped her in the heat from his own body.

Now he was the one frozen, her soft hair twisting around his fingers as he left his hands resting on the collar for an endless, breathless moment. Hands he had thought numb with cold, now exploding with the sensation of her wild hair and the impossibly soft skin just behind her ear brushing against his fingertip as he pulled away.

She released the breath she had been holding with a broken sigh, almost too quiet for him to hear. Almost, but not quite.

He bit his lip to keep from sighing in return, standing close behind her, willing her to turn around with every damned freckle, every fiber of his being.

If she would only look at hi - and then she was.

He was drowning. He was back in the icy lake, trying his best to stay afloat while keeping his grip on everything that mattered. Now, for him, that was her.

Those eyes... so much pain in those beautiful eyes. Pain and condemnation, and just the tiniest edge of something he was afraid to call hope.

She gathered the edges of his jacket close around her, her eyes growing somehow larger, drawing him in. He stumbled slightly, losing his balance as she looked away, standing quickly before stepping back to put some space between them.

He felt every centimeter of that space like stinging insects pricking at his heart. The insects fell away as she turned to face him, briskly removing his jacket from around her shoulders to ball it in her fists.

"You shouldn't... Here."

She thrust the ball of fabric out at him, her eyes focused somewhere just past his left shoulder. He shook his head, shoving his hands so far in his pockets that he poked one of his fingers through the seam.

"M'not cold. You've been out here for ages. Just take it until... just... take it."

Now she shook her head, dropping her gaze to his feet, blinking with suspicious frequency. She gestured weakly with the jacket before holding it tight against her stomach, cradling it in her arms.

"I can't -"

"Please."

A wealth of meaning in six unassuming letters.

She caught her breath, lifting those eyes to stab right through him. Her every breath curled around her pale face like tiny plumes of smoke, rushing between those berry lips, parted now as she dropped her guard for a tiny precious instant.

He would give anything to be one of those plumes, to rush between those lips, to sustain her from within. To slip inside of her heart quietly, without detection, for even the smallest moment. He would give his life to be that essential to her being, the way she was for him.

She was breath and life and everything for him, and now he struggled to show that fact in his face, daring her to deny the absolute truth in his eyes.

Her lower lip trembled, begging him to kiss it, his own lips burning with the urge to taste her, to absorb her pain into himself.

She whirled away, holding his jacket to her face for a few fleeting seconds before abruptly sitting down on the stump, his jacket in her lap.

He leaned against the nearest tree, watching as she bent her head to take sharp, painful breaths into her hands. He raised his own hands to his face, breathing slowly and deeply as he imagined that he could just detect the scent of her hair.

She was crying.

It hurt to watch her, to stand there and do nothing, but he knew that going to her would only make things worse. So he stood with clenched fists and watched until her breathing evened out, until the tension in her back released just the tiniest bit, allowing the constriction in his chest to ease as well.

She didn't pull the jacket back around her shoulders, instead working her arms into the sleeves, letting it fall over her knees like a makeshift blanket. Warmth coiled high in his stomach, something knotted tight within him softening somehow.

She had not refused him. She had not precisely accepted his gesture or the weight of his intentions behind it, but she had not refused him either.

It was more than he deserved. Less than he had hoped for, but certainly more than he deserved. Of course, his hopes grew larger by the day, free now from the staggering burden of his doubt and fear. His hopes for the future were... huge, now. Overwhelmingly so.

But his hopes for today, his hopes for tomorrow, these were relatively small hopes. A glance in his direction. Another precious moment of eye contact. A few words, perhaps. A smile... what he would do for a smile...

He looked down at his feet, kicking the snow around aimlessly as he contemplated their situation. He felt... a bit helpless, to be honest. It wasn't like before, when they could simply row their anger and hurt and frustration away. There was a new sort of heaviness between them now, something serious and vast and devastatingly real.

Regret was a tangible force, a monstrous ballooning pressure within his chest. He had left. He had left her, and they both knew it. It meant something more between them than it had with Harry. With Harry things were... not exactly simple, but rather more straightforward. With her, things were... complicated. He became tangled up in all of these bloody feelings, and then he inevitably mucked things up. This time he had more than mucked things up, he had left scars that would take time to heal.

Time he could only pray that they would have.