Her favorite color was the color red.

He knew that her favorite kind of light was just as the sun was rising across the misty Quidditch pitch on an early morning practice. She didn't like chocolate, but could pick out every peppermint flavored bean in the bag before you could say Bertie Bott. She had this unusual knack for knowing just what he was thinking before even he did, and if he looked back, whenever something went wrong, she always seemed to be beside him.

Her most ticklish spot was just behind her left ear, a place his lips had explored in the privacy of dark corners and beneath the shady trees beside the lake. If the truth be told, she was just as good a Seeker as he was, but neither of them ever let on - it was far too much fun to keep the secret to themselves.

Even if he tried, he couldn't name all the different ways her face seemed to light up when something amused her, but he could pick out her laughter blindfolded in a room of a hundred other girls. And her smell. She smelled of flowers, of mischief and wit and all the other things he loved about her. He loved the curve of her calf as she ran up the steps two by two, loved the darkness of her eyes as she leaned in to kiss him - the way they played off each others humor and finished one another's sentences, the way she could wash away all his insecurities like water, and the way she was just as passionate and committed to the fight as he was.

She once told him that all the danger he was facing, all the agony, the pain and hardship, was hers as well, because if anything ever happened to him, she swore she would feel it too, whatever the distance between them. He told her she should never again have to feel what she felt down in the Chamber, and that he would do anything to make sure Tom never hurt her again. She said that every time she looked back on it, what pulled her out of the shame and guilt and anger was the memory of waking up to find him waiting for her, just as he had pulled her from the brink of death in the bowels of the castle when they were barely more than children.

Their relationship was just as fraught with pain and reality as it was with laughter and the rush of youth. He loved that about her too. The way she could look him in the eye and know that what he was doing he was doing for all of them, and still love him for it, even if it meant leaving her.

Walking away from her had been the hardest thing he had ever done, marking it as the beginning of a long and twisting path that he knew he must travel alone. And though he stayed resolved in his mind and in his actions, the memory of her laughing by the lake with the wind in her hair was never far from his heart.

When they saw each other back at the castle and on the train ride home, they sat apart. She talked with her friends while he plotted with Ron and Hermione - they barely looked in one another's direction. But as he knew the lines on her hands, as he knew the feel of her lips against his, he knew that all of their senses were tuned to each other. He knew she was listening to his hushed tones under the chatter of friends around her, and he strained to hear the shiver in her voice as she laughed, and prayed he hadn't broken her heart.

Not until the wedding, as he watched her standing between Fleur and Gabrielle at the alter, did he allow himself to give in a little and renew the unspoken vow he had made to himself the day before in her room with a kiss – that one kiss. And in the following months, as he lay in kip beds in the shabby old tent he shared with Ron and Hermione, he let his thoughts stray to the color red, and unbidden to his mind as naturally as though it had always been there he realized that he loved her.