Interlude

She stood in the eerie darkness, shivering as the wind racked against her threadbare robes and whipped the fire into great arcs of feral flame. The glow of his lamps streamed through the thin walls of his tent, illuminating the deceptively simple path to him. He was sitting, quite clearly awake, head in hands. She knew he was exhausted. She knew everything about Harry Potter even though she hadn't said a word to him for three long years, not even a muttered hello or a distracted goodbye. And while he was following his destiny, she was following him.

She could open the door to his tent, smile softly. It was only ten steps away. She could crush her mouth against his, twine against him anxiously, extinguish the lights and afterwards, tenderly cover him with his sheets, smoothing his hair and kissing his forehead like a child. She had imagined it in five hundred thousand different ways, ached for it and woke at night sobbing and sweating because of it.

She could get him to fall asleep and dream uninterruptedly; smooth the worry lines by his mouth and the pinpricks at the corners of his eyes.

He was only 19. She repeated the number wonderingly, swirling it around in her mouth and almost laughed. Teenagers were directing the course of this war. Teenagers were saving the world.

Five steps away.

She could turn around at any point. He was furiously scribbling; she could hear the sounds of his quill through the tent. He was busy, she was dirty with encrusted blood from the infirmary where she healed. Her hair hadn't been brushed properly for a few days and her eyes were encircled with unbecoming shadows-she wasn't the girl he had fallen in love with his sixth year-she was darker and sadder and harder and oh gods, she was older.

We are all so old, she thought. Teenagers battling and killing and being killed and dying and seeing death, and if they all went back to Hogwarts, those Thestrals would be far from invisible now.

2 steps away.

She could hear the tiny sighs he emitted as he methodically scratched out an error, the tapping of his foot against the ground, the squeaking of his chair as he leaned back, the slapping of skin on skin as he threw his head into his hands again.

She could almost taste him in her mouth, and her hands froze by the tent flap as she remembered his smile and his kisses and her lips ached for him. She had to turn back, she rationalized, she was a distraction. After the war-after the war they could get married and have hordes of children-twins even-with red hair and glasses perched on freckled noses. After the war there was time for a future that might never happen.

One step.

She twisted her mouth as she pulled across the tent flap. She had known since the beginning that she would never turn back.

And when he lifted his head, his mouth opening, his eyes shining, his hoarse cry of "Ginny?", was full of wonderment and amazement and love and hope, and that was all he had to say, and she rushed to him and she extinguished the lamps and afterwards she covered him with his blankets and snuck out into the gray-tinged gold of dawn.

And she knew then, that it was, and always had been, infinitely more than just one night.