Fulfilling Obligations (Harmione)

Chapter 50: The Calm Before

Light, somehow simultaneously soft and blinding, burst in flashes through Harry's eyelids. He breathed in, deeply, as though the light itself would flood his lungs.

He craved to open his eyes, yet his lids (his entire body, really) felt far too heavy for such a task. The heaviness was unfamiliar, but not entirely unwelcome. In fact, the added heaviness- the gentle, solid weight pressing against his chest, his neck, his thighs...

Merlin, it was delicious.

It was good and warm and safe and everything he hadn't thought he could feel again.

Then he felt the shape of lips...felt them, soft and sweet, about his face, against his neck, along his jaw, beneath his ear...

Despite the tenderness of the pressure grazing along his skin, Harry felt as if every one of his molecules were leaping at the sensation.

Brightness crept into his vision, sliver by sliver, as his eyes finally slid open.

"Hermione?"

She smiled, her hands brushing his cheeks. Haloed as she was by the soft-yet-blinding white light, sheltered as they both were in a tent of snowy sheets, her smile struck him as truly angelic.

"It's about time," she said, and bent forward to kiss him. Her brown curls fell in curtains to frame his face, and Harry's fingers found their way into their depths.

He kissed her deeply, and her fingers trailed about, palms curling around his arms, nails scraping into his chest.

Then her lips were gone from his.

She continued to smile at him, gaze gentle as her eyes wandered about his face, dark and indiscriminate as she took him in. Her hand came up once more to his face, and he felt the caress of her thumb as it slid across his cheekbone, and down to trace the curve of his mouth.

His eyes wanted to slide shut again, all the better to revel in her touch, but instead he reached out to her.

The skin of her cheek was silky against his rough palm, and she leaned into his touch, overlaying his hand with hers.

God, that smile.

He couldn't help but wonder if his own smile was evoking this sort of emotion in her. Because surely he was smiling.

She leaned forward again, and her decadent golden irises were hidden from him as she closed her eyes, pressing her forehead to his.

"Love?" he said, an endearment, a question.

"Yes," she said, a reply, an answer.

Her eyes were still shut, and Harry felt an inexplicable, terrified lurch of his heart.

"Look at me," he said. "Please."

She opened her eyes, and their gazes were held together, millimeters apart.

Their noses brushed as she adjusted her head, just barely, to kiss him.

Her mouth was soft against his, and barely pulled away as her lips parted in a whisper.

"Accept it, love."

Harry's hands were suddenly tight against her face.

"I can't," he said, and was surprised by the desperation in his voice. "No."

Hermione's eyes were sad as her gaze flitted once more about his face before settling on his emerald eyes.

"Accept it," she said again.

And then she was gone.

The thoroughness of her absence-the lack of her weight lying atop him, the disappearance of her voice, the extinguishment of the very light that had surrounded her-was suffocatingly tangible. It fell on him, thick and heavy, and he couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't feel, the only sensation that of the sheet that fell over his face like a veil...