A/N Short epilogue. I was originally going to use these scenes in a chapter fic but then I realized I didn't know how to insert them. So I turned it into a free-standing fic instead.

Sorry for not updating yesterday like I said I would; the internet fritzed and didn't come back in time.

Chapter time!

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Why is the measure of love, loss?

Hermione had only ever skimmed that book once, on a whim, back at home. She'd found it in the bookshelf; a secondhand copy, the previous owner's name not completely cut out. She'd meant to finish it but the war had snuck up on her, and then she had no time for reading at all. But still, the first line of the book had stuck to her, and now she found it was all she could think about. But it suited her, anyway, so it was all right.

Why is the measure of love, loss?

Why indeed? Why is it that we only realize the significance of something once we have truly and utterly lost it? Why do we love all the more strongly when we have felt the pain of losing love, or when we think we might be losing it? Why do humans think of love in terms of heartbreak, of fights and recovery, of shedding piece after piece of the heart like the petals of the flowers we so eagerly pluck off? She loves me, she loves me not. Even then, love is measured by loss.

I love you, he had said. Thrice – only thrice in their brief and bittersweet relationship. Twice in the snow and the heat of the argument, and once through cold, unfeeling metal. Still, he had been able to love her, when he had not let her love him back.

Tell me when there isn't a war between us.

She had hated it, his telling her that. Why had he been allowed to love her? Why had his love been legitimate – genuine despite the war? What had she done, said, thought, to make him think that she might only love him because he might die?

Why is the measure of love, loss?

The aftermath of the war was ashy and exhausting and very, very gray. There was gray everywhere: ashen faces, charred walls, melted suits of armor. If people thought war taught you to see in black and white – good and evil – they were quite wrong. War was only ever in shades of gray.

The tombstone was gray.

His eyes had been gray, too.

Funny how the minute someone's heart stops beating, you begin to think of them in past tense. He was a good man, they might say. Or, he was all right in the end. Was he any less good because he was dead? Did he not affect people anymore?

His eyes had been gray. She, too, had fallen into the void of the past tense. He was; he had been. But always, always, her love was in present. I love him. Because love, real love, the love measured by loss, does not end with death.

"I love you."

She could say it now; there was no longer a war between them. There was no longer a death threat hanging over his head. They had won.

But she had lost.

Why is the measure of love, loss?

Was this, then, the measure of her love? That she still loved in present tense despite the loss?

Her hand came up, thin and shaking, to brush against the grayness of the tombstone. Gray like everything else in the aftermath of war. Dark, dark gray.

"I love you."

He had looked at her. In the final moments of his life – when he had backed away – his head had turned: his eyes had sought her out in the crowd. Had he, too, measured his love by his loss – by the fact that he was losing her?

"I love you."

And I, you. Such quaintness, but it suited her now, the sweetheart of a soldier fallen in war.

Even the coin was gray.

In the nights leading up to the funeral she had sometimes woken up, thinking the coin had burned against her skin. Some nights she deluded herself into forgetting and she would send a message via the coin. I love you. Or, come soon. Once it had simply been, I miss you, and she had sat through the dawn waiting for a reply. Refusing to let herself admit one would never come.

The other coin had left a slight burn mark on her bedside table.

The coin was just another shade of gray, like the one of his grave.

What once had been her sole link to him was now only a reminder of her loss. She kept the coins to remember but to remember hurt.

"I love you."

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Many years later, when Hermione Granger was laid in her grave, people would wonder why Harry Potter's final gift to his best friend was to lay two coins on her eyes. The coins were scratched and old, and the metal was cold to touch. The gesture was very Greek in nature, and it made absolutely no sense.

But Harry knew – as did Ron, and Blaise, even – that the gesture was a commemoration of the afternoon when Troy had burned, right by their tent; a memoriam to a love measured by loss. There was distance between them, now, but no longer a war.

The two sides of the coin facing Harry both read, I love you.