Forever Knight [Harmione]

Chapter 17: Reminisce

Hermione grinned ever so slightly as she watched Lucien haul in the last of his trunks. The look on Harry's face was priceless, like he couldn't believe a man would drag around so many clothes.

Her room in the dungeon looked the same as when she last left it, down to her dressing table and armoire. Whatever she expected, it hadn't been this. She thought initially that she would be coming back to a barren room, all the furniture that had once been in it thrown away, or at least redistributed throughout the house. Had Harry left it here all these years or had he simply returned the furniture from all over Grimmauld Place back to this room?

She had many, many questions, actually, all of which had to do with how Harry has been living his life these past five years. The problem being she was a bit afraid of the answers. That was unacceptable, since she had managed to convince herself, before this night, that she had completely gotten over him, her relationship with him, and everything else in between.

It was devastating when, seeing that werewolf clock him, she had felt a whine of panic rise from within her. Without even considering how it looked, she had shoved both Lucien and Solomon aside so she could check Harry herself, and oh, how his skin felt under her fingertips was most astonishing. The simple, innocent touch had shot bolts of electricity beneath her skin.

It's his looks, she had told herself. Seeing Harry for the first time in five years was a somewhat pleasant surprise. She had left a seventeen-year-old boy behind. He had been developing quite well, then. His years in Hogwarts and the tender loving care he had gotten from those like Molly and herself had made up for the eleven years of negligence he had suffered from the Dursleys, but Hermione had always believed that that negligence would forever be marked by a permanently boyish breadth and bone-structure.

Now, at twenty-two, Harry wasn't the broadest of men, but man he was. His shoulders and body weren't as wide as Ron's (who was huge, by the way), and really, he wasn't going to grow any more than his near-six-foot frame, but the toughness and strength of Harry Potter had been apparent when he fought that werewolf and when she managed to cop a feel of his shoulders and arms.

Harry's been eating his wheaties, she remembered thinking with feral delight.

She had scrapped that thought hastily from her mind, of course, no matter how difficult it was to focus when those beautiful eyes of his stared at her. It was bad enough when the flash of attraction and desire in his eyes sent pleasant tingles down her back, but when those same eyes took on sheer desperation, she felt like she was falling into that void again; that agony she felt when she first left him five years before.

And how was it that in spite of those awful looking glasses, she still thought he was the handsomest man she'd ever had the pleasure of seeing? She had seen many good-looking men. In the vampire world, the only thing someone had to worry about when it came to looks was being a ten in a room full of elevens. Vampire men were just divine. If they didn't exactly have Greek God faces, they were elegant, or sophisticated, or sexy, or beautiful, or powerfully interesting. Harry was not elegant or sophisticated or even beautiful. His good looks were not, by any means, Wizard Quarterly cover material, but he was so unaffected by it, so unbothered by his easy-fit, rumpled clothing and battered trainers, that it just made him so damn attractive, especially after seeing him fight that werewolf. She didn't know whether to mother him or demand that he make a woman out of her.

She had decided on neither, of course. It just wouldn't do to let on that she was still feeling things for him that should have withered away in the last five years of their separation. The purpose, after all, of staying away from him, was to get both of them to move on with their lives; realize in no small way that it was possible to go on without each other. He was supposed to have moved on to better things; found a beautiful girlfriend he had plans of marrying so he could have a bunch of beautiful kids with her. It was as much Hermione's dream to see him happy as it should have been his.