A Humble Love Story

A Humble Love Story

by Innermurk

"Hermione, I don't know if this is a good idea or not." Harry complained as he sat at the desk gazing at the manuscript in front of him.

"Nonsense!" Hermione replied haughtily, trying to suppress a giggle. "Would you rather have Rita Skeeter write it for you?"

Harry balked at that suggestion, and his features twisted into a grimace. "Never! That woman is still nothing but trouble, even after all these years."

Hermione's bubbly laugh filled the room. "Honestly, Harry! All these years indeed! Anyone would think we're sitting here old and gray!"

Harry smiled as he glanced up and across the room to where his wife sat on their couch magically mending some of their torn robes while reading up on different impediment charms in the newest "Aurors Today" magazine.

They weren't exactly old and gray, but they were both older and had been out of school for a while now, and the years were starting to show. Well, maybe it wasn't years showing as much as worry and care.

"Besides, I wouldn't think that writing about loving me would present that much of a challenge to you, darling." Hermione's tone implied mischief, and Harry recognized the twinkle showing itself behind her clear brown eyes.

He decided to play along. "I don't know why you would think that! After all, loving you has been the hardest thing I've ever done in my life." He suppressed a grin as he waited for the expected, "Why, Harry James Potter! What a thing to say!"

"Well, its true," he continued. "Shouldn't the most important thing in my life be you?"

"Well...I mean...that's not," Hermione spluttered. "I don't see how that makes it the hardest thing you've ever done. Especially when you throw Voldemort in the picture."

"But that's exactly why it is the hardest thing, Hermione!" Harry turned and faced her catching her hand and holding her gaze with his eyes. "It was easy to hate him after all he'd done. But I had to love you in order to save myself. I had to overcome that hatred with our love. It was harder to do that than to succumb to hate."

Hermione's eyes softened a bit, and Harry dropped her hand with a light squeeze and turned back to the desk. "Besides, I never said it wasn't worth it. I just said it was hard. It is definitely worth everything."

Hermione smiled and blushed. Even after all the time they'd spent together, his compliments warmed her to the toes. She always felt the sincere and all encompassing love behind his words.

"Well, you better get writing then. This story can't be helped. They want it in time for the Valentine's Day edition of "Witch Weekly" and if we don't supply the authentic story this year, we'll be swamped with all the made-up versions again."

As the most famous couple to ever be wed in Wizarding history, Harry and Hermione suffered little privacy. But what they did manage to keep to themselves offered up a lot of speculation for reporters and unscrupulous tabloids around the world, and their love story, especially around Valentine's Day was a free-for-all.

They were tired of reading all the stories that ran around this time of year telling how they had become a couple, with the best-selling ones involving intrigue, love-triangles, broken hearts, and broken friendships. It seemed the public wanted just as much angst and flash to accompany this part of his life as it had almost every other aspect.

Harry had suggested threatening them with a few well-timed curses, but Hermione restrained him and advised him to simply tell the whole true story. "Anyway, if the truth comes out from us we might not have to suffer through another love-triangle lie about how you stole me from Ron," she'd said.

Ron was the third party in their trio of friendship, and he cared deeply for both of them, as they did him, but he had never been romantically interested in Hermione. His love for Hermione was more the brotherly affection that he'd showered all over Ginny, full of overprotection, and verbal sparring.

He had openly protested the love triangle stories as much as they had, but to no avail. Even after he had married Luna and had seven children, all as fun loving as the Weasley twins had been, the stories wouldn't die down.

That was why Harry found himself sitting in front of the desk on this warm summer day when he'd rather be outdoors with Ron throwing around a Quaffle with the kids, to try and attempt the impossible, and put in words how much he loved his wife. How they had met, and fallen in love. It was just ridiculous to expect this of anyone!

Finally, Harry set down the Quill and grim-faced, handed the parchment roll to Hermione. She just as seriously took it in her hand and read it silently, impassive. Then she rolled it up, and tied it to Hedwig's leg sending her off to the magazine office before Harry could blink.

"Hermione! I hadn't even read it over again!" he protested.

She looked at him and seriously said, "Harry, it didn't need anything. You would only have ruined it with second guesses and indecision. Trust me, it's from your heart, and it's perfect." Then she grinned, and he felt the warmth of that grin wash over him before he took her in his arms.

*********************

The next issue of Witch Weekly was a sell-out as soon as it hit the stands.

Harry tells all! The TRUE story of how Harry and Hermione fell in love was emblazoned across the front of the magazine with A Humble Love Story, Harry's title to his article below that disclaimer.

Underneath that, was a picture of them in Hogwarts their final year, just before the final battle. It had been taken during a feast at Hogwarts right after Harry and Hermione had officially become a couple. They were standing together, not exactly touching, but you could tell that they belonged there with each other. They were gazing out at the crowds, but would occasionally turn and look at each other, smiling.

There were more pictures inside that showed them through the years, and the last one was recent, with Harry sitting on the couch, and Hermione right beside him, his arm around her shoulders and their other hands entwined. She was leaning her head against him, and they fit together perfectly.

The article was written first person, and read as such:

I remember when we first acknowledged our love. It wasn't anything huge, nothing great that happened to make us confront our feelings. We'd been growing so close over the years; she could practically read my mind. I always knew what she was going to say to me before she said it. I could hear her voice in my mind, telling me her opinion, long before I saw her face. She always kept me at my best.

She was the only one I could ever count on. Even when I thought I couldn't possibly ask it of her, she was always there supporting me in any way she could. She saved my life too many times to count, but more importantly, she saved my sanity, my heart, and my soul.

Once after one quiet evening in the common room, while she was in the middle of studying for NEWTS, I looked over at her and I felt that old familiar burn. Something I'd always ignored before, well, perhaps ignored isn't the exact word, I guess. Just something I'd never thought about. It just was. But that night it seemed to occupy my mind more. It distinguished itself. I recognized it.

I was gazing at her when it happened. Noticing how her hair swept across the surface of her page, following her quill, and she impatiently brushed it aside leaving faint marks through the not quite dry ink. She has these three freckles across the bridge of her nose, that she tries very hard to mask, but the sun pops them out, and she would never dream of missing one of my Quidditch games just to keep them invisible.

Her eyelashes are naturally long and curl in a graceful sweep that perfectly frames her gorgeous brown eyes, which always seem to be swimming with some sort of emotion. I truly see her through her eyes.

Oh, I know that to the world at large she doesn't look like much. She would never win a beauty pageant, and a lot of people would even go so far as to call her plain, though not within my hearing if they know what's good for them. But to me, she is the world. She is so much more than her hair, her freckles, or even her luminous eyes.

People will so much more readily recognize her for her brains. She's smart. And not just book smart, she's clever and has wit. She can tackle almost any situation, desperate or otherwise, and find the logical way out. Books have been her friends long before I ever was. A lot of people will look at her and her accomplishments and be intimidated. But to me, she is so much more than accomplishments and wit.

She gets emotional at times, I've decided all girls do, it's a part of their nature that they can't help. Some unreasonable thread connects the outside world to their tear ducts, and anytime something big happens, happy or sad, good or bad, they cry. They also get ecstatic, and jump around a lot during good times, when they're younger. Squeals and giggles all tie into this emotional thread too. But to me, she is more than her squeals or her giggles, or her tears.

You see, I love her. All of her. And nothing could have prevented that, I think. We just shared too much. We grew so close. And looking at her that night, I understood that I was madly, deeply, head-over-heels in love with her. That I could never imagine, let alone live in a world without her.

And I sort of panicked a little, because how was I going to tell her? How could I even begin to express the depth of my feelings? I mean, they were so tied into everyday things. I couldn't stop her in the hallway and ask her to go to a dance with me like I had tried to ask Cho in my Fourth year, or to a free Hosgmeade visit on Valentine's Day. She was always with me already. If I asked her to go to Hell and back with me, she would, and she has.

All my smiles, and hers, all my tears, and hers, everything was already shared. Small things, so very small, just meant more between us than they would for anyone else. They meant more than any number of giant sparks that could come along from someone else.

It was the little things. All of these things that were just second nature to us. I had practically bent to the floor to retrieve a dropped quill for her before she even dropped it, or lean over to lend her extra ink just as she was hitting the last drop in her bottle. She could raise her wand and cast a stunning spell at the exact moment that I did, and our backs naturally found each other in battle, protecting each other, moving together as one. We just seemed to synchronize our movements without thought.

How then, how, could I explain this love? It was already there. It lay between us, and stretched back through the years, for as long as I'd known her.

I was mulling all these things over in my mind when I realized she had stopped writing. She was looking at me, and I realized we had been staring into each other's eyes for a minute or so without even realizing it. Her eyes focused slightly and I knew she had been thinking without seeing me too. But when we looked at each other, that love that had lie hidden and growing, blossomed out, and I could see without asking that she knew it too, that she felt it too, and that she loved me too.

And just for that moment, big things did happen. The world stood still in her eyes. Our hearts reached out to each other, and there was no one else alive. Just the two of us, with all we'd shared.

They say that you hear music, but I didn't. I heard my heart pumping, and I think I heard hers as well. Beating out a tattoo of how much we meant to each other. I could have sworn that we sat like that for an hour with the feeling inside intensifying, and the sound of our hearts beating in our ears. But then we both blinked. She lowered her eyes to her paper, and I raised my book, and we were lost again in our work.

It was all understood between us, you see, without the need for even words, let alone a nosey classmate, an interested teacher, a desperate enemy, an evil plot, or a natural disaster. It was as we always were. Together, quietly, respectfully, and simultaneously comprehended.

From that time on, our closeness changed a little. Instead of just walking side-by-side between classes, our hands found themselves entwined in the other's and instead of just sitting by each other, we were sitting together. It was gradual, a natural procession, and a lot of people didn't even realize what was happening. Even Ron missed the first tentative grasping of fingers when I reached for her hand the first time. No one saw our timid first kiss, nor the passionate and uplifting embrace that followed.

In fact, it wasn't until we had been under this new understanding for a few weeks that people started to cotton on to the change. I say change, but I don't think of it as a change, so much as the natural growth of the pattern we'd started way back with the troll. At first I think there was some surprise, but it was just so right, and so inherent, really, that we didn't really see a lot of reaction to it.

There were a couple of girls that were sad to have lost out on my fame, and a few boys that were disappointed to have failed in securing Hermione's witty affection, but I think overall it was almost expected of us someday. It had been in the making far too long for either of us to abandon it for something so much more shallow.

You see, our affection runs deeper than you might know. It's more than a woman I love. It's Hermione, every fiber of her being, every little speck of her soul. Her and only her. We grew up together. She made me what I am. And I simply could not live without her, she's so much a part of me; the most wonderful part of me.

Hermione put down the magazine, gently pulling it out of Harry's grasp. She looked at him and said, "I love you."

He smiled, kissed her and replied with the same words he'd used years ago. The first words he spoke after the final battle when he woke up in the hospital a full three days after it had ended, and found her there holding his hand, "Now I know why I'm alive."