Curled Up Deep

Her hair hangs ungracefully off the edge of the sofa in a tangled, bushy mass. Her face is a study in worry and frustration, complete with bags under the eyes and a mouth that's resolutely pinched even in sleep. Harry is safe now, and You-Know-Who is dead, but it's not easy to throw off the effects of over two weeks of a tense near-insomnia that was barely punctuated by the occasional nap. "I can't sleep, Ron," she said when I asked her to try. "I'll barely be able to sleep a wink until Harry comes back. Besides," she added with a pointed glance at my own face, "I'm not the only one who's been hitting the Up-All-Night Potion recently."

I knew I should've bought some more of that Anti-Eye-Bag Cream.

She shifts position slightly, changing from one ungainly sprawl of limbs to another. Her arms hang loose at her side and her neck arches back as her mouth relents just enough to let out a delicate snore. Reaching over to adjust her head so that she doesn't have a sore neck in the morning, I know that I should probably get some sleep myself, but I hold off on it. Maybe it's irrational - I know perfectly well that she'll still be there in the morning - but with the war finally over, with You-Know-Who dead and the Death Eaters on the run, I want to be able to take a few minutes to watch her sleep.

Her face has matured since Harry and I first met her on the Hogwarts Express - what, was it only seven years ago? Childhood roundness has long since given way to high, elegant cheekbones and a full-lipped mouth, but now, with her face relaxed in slumber, a hint of the bossy, bucktoothed eleven-year-old I first met on the train shows through. God, I can't believe it took me so long to notice how absolutely beautiful she is.

Her beauty isn't the normal kind - not that I'd ever expect her to do anything that wasn't out of the ordinary - and it's true that when her hair, in a fit of residual stubbornness, frizzes wildly when it dries, she looks a bit like a hedgehog from behind (but please don't tell her I said that, since I don't want to end up in St. Mungo's because my sweet, gentle girlfriend tried to lodge her copy of Numerology and Gramatica up my... er, nose) but there's a certain something, a gloriously intangible something, that makes heads turn and jaws drop whenever she walks down the street. Well, people who don't know her all that well think that it's intangible, anyway, because her beauty is made up of a thousand little things that all add up to a gorgeous whole. I've known her for seven years, so I can tell you the parts. Her beauty's in the bow-like curve of her lips, the furrow in her brow when she tries to figure out a difficult problem for Arithmancy, the smooth, sweeping arch of her feet, that odd dimple on her right elbow, the deeply-etched lines on her palms... Too many things to list here. It may not be the normal type of beauty, but it's the kind that shows through even when she's exhausted, even when her skin is pasty and her hair is a tangled mess and she's collapsed in an exhausted heap on an old couch like she is now, because she's the kind of person who somehow manages to be incredible in her imperfection.

More than just the physical appearance, though, is the person who lives inside. She's one of those rare people who's just overwhelmingly true - I might tease her sometimes about being a terrible liar, but the truth is that she doesn't have a false bone in her body, the kind of person with a sense of integrity and a sense of self that just won't quit. She always lives and believes on the very outside of her skin - a girl who HAS SOMETHING TO SAY!!!!!! And if you're stupid enough to ignore her, she's perfectly willing to whack you over the head with her opinion until you have the decency to argue with her. She's passionately compassionate, taking up cause after cause while still managing to be a brilliant student and one of the best friends I ever had, and there's still a part of me that's still in shock because she's my girlfriend

It's been a long trip, hasn't it? We were never like Harry and Ginny, slipping easily into a relationship with all the quiet intuition that they both have; we fought, kicked, and scratched the entire way. Yet somehow, even in the midst of all our stupid bickering, I don't think that there was ever any doubt that we were evenly matched, or that we fit together like two incredibly temperamental puzzle pieces. Some people might get together because of "love at first sight," and all that romantic rubbish, but when we got together it was like coming home, a belated realization of what I think was always there.

The fire has burned down to the embers now, and I know that I should probably get some sleep; my first good, long sleep since Harry left to face Voldemort. We fought this war for a lot of reasons, but I think that this is one of the most important ones: The right to sleep in front of the fire with someone you love, curled up deep inside a single heartbeat.