This is How You Lose Her

Disclaimer: Title doesn't belong to me! That's all the genius of literary god Junot Diaz right there. Draco, Hermione & gang belong to J.K. Rowling, queen of my life, goddess of my universe.

A/N: Inspired by Junot Diaz's masterpiece, This is How You Lose Her. If you've read it and remember it, there are some allusions to the novel! Let's see if you can point them out! Also a slight OOC warning!

This is how you lose her. Too young. Too stupid. Too cynical. Too fast.

You wake up one day and she's gone. Or at least that's what he tells himself. He tells himself there was nothing he could do – he couldn't make her stay as much as he could make the winds change direction. He blames the seasons. He blames the world in orbit. He blames the alignment of the planets. He blames everyone but himself, because he would have dug to the boiling core of the earth with his bare hands for her except she asked him not to.

That's her problem. She wants so much less than what he's already given her.

He doesn't realize it until the end, but that is her character flaw. Poor little Granger, Muggle in her marrow, magic in her blood, nose in her books, ass in the air covering for Potter. She is not beautiful in the way he's been taught to crave, and she has a mouth that fluctuates between brown sugar and thorns. And also? The worst fucking part about it all?

She is deaf to the way his heartbeats call her to stay.

o

He doesn't know how to start from the beginning. To go back would be to go back beyond her. Beyond the days he had only started to wonder how her hair would feel tangled in his greedy hands. Beyond the days her name had become synonymous with his own self-loathing. Beyond, beyond, beyond. Before.

Fine – in the beginning there was Man. And he was totally perfectly fucking fine until Woman came along.

o

"You're an asshole," she says to him, "and regrettably they haven't found a cure for that yet."

Then she whips her hair at him. He has a symbiotic relationship with that hair. It's messy and wild and untamable and uninhibited, especially on rainy days, when every molecule of the air is soggy. It taunts him just by being. The sheer volume that hair took up in a room, any goddamn room – it made her impossible not to notice.

She's angry with him, like always, and he used to wonder whether there was something subterranean in that anger. Now he knows there is. Despite Granger's commitment to privacy, there have been rumors going around the office that her relationship is on the rocks. He catches the look in her eyes sometimes when she thinks no one is watching. Like she is grasping at straws trying to steer a ship away from disaster.

He has been there, he thinks. Once he'd been there for so long he had to convince himself he didn't live there.

He thinks that for a such a smart girl she would know to run at the first sign of trouble. Wasn't that instinctual? To leave people before they could leave you? To put out the flame before it burned the whole house down?

He wants to tell her that her love for Weasley is like a leech. It has sucked out all the warm colors from her face.

Instead he calls her a bitch, as their usual conversation goes, hoping one day she'll be smart enough to read between the lines. He always watches her back for something different as she walks away, her heels noisy and adamant against the hard floors – for a single resistant muscle in her body that understands him, that has learned his coded language after all this time, that might pull her back around to him, that might make her stop.

o

He thinks he is going to lose her when he hears that she's getting married. He sees invitations on everybody's desk but his. For the first time, he knows the petty sting of exclusion. They are all huddled around an exasperated, flushed Granger like overexcited hens, prodding for useless, trivial details. Even in such a dense crowd, she looks up and meets his eyes, and it's like a glare. It hurts him so much he has to look away.

Later on, after everyone's gone home for the night, she comes into his office. She has her things with her and her coat on, but what his eyes flicker to is what she has in her hands.

He stares at it when she lays it on the edge of his desk. He fights the urge to draw his wand and hex it out of the room.

"Just came to give you this. Come, if you want. Don't, if you'd rather not. I know that happy family functions aren't exactly your cup of tea."

He doesn't say anything because he can't – not even anything cruel, like he's so good at – so he just nods like he's got a bolt in his neck and she turns around to head home.

"You're really marrying him?" he says, then, and it gives him the slightest, most intoxicating satisfaction to see her pause in her step. There is a crinkle in her coat on her back. He likes to think it is something – a muscle, a cell, a tendon – in her body that is trying to signal to him, Message received.

"Yes," she says, without turning around.

Suddenly the air smells like gasoline. Hard to take in. Makes his lungs shrivel.

He wants to say, you are 23 and beautiful and much too young to be wedded and then ignored. He imagines her in a cozy, yellow-lit home not even large enough for house rats. She would be disastrous at cooking, even though she's brilliant at Potions. She will cry herself to sleep during the nights they fight. She will be a victim of his blue-eyed temper. She will have his children. He won't know what he has. He'll make a wreck of it.

He wants to say, Don't, but what merit would his words carry? She knows nothing about what he's suppressed from the universe, concerning her. She would brush him off and think he was just trying to be cruel and ruin her happiness and whatever else one-dimensional-villain bullshit she's tacked onto his existence. He can't tell her he loves her but he could just tell her that she deserves to be looked at, every second of every day, and heard, too. And held. That, most of all.

He would bleed for her in turn of the words he can't shepherd, and he has, on many days, with his office door shut and her just a few walls away. But all he can think of now is to protect himself. To put out the flame before it burned his house down in his sleep, and him along with it.

"Good," he says, instead. His words are perfect ice. So orchestrated. So synchronized in pretend. "You can make him miserable now."

He wonders if she can feel his eyes burning into her shoulders, through the layers of clothes she has on.

She doesn't say another word. She just leaves, like she's so good at.

He tells himself it is the last time. It is the last time he'll ever watch her leave.

o

Every night he magically packs his things and then unpacks. Wizarding London is too small, he argues. He will see them everywhere. He could lock himself up in his manor but his pride gets in the way of finishing that thought.

He could take a vacation. Go on an island somewhere. Lose himself in the mountains. Drown himself in the husky French of a woman from Marseilles. Fuck until his brains melted, until her face was nothing but a stain, faded in the sun over time. He is rich and handsome and famous and has so many options, but they are all fraught with holes. When he peeks through all of them, all he can see is her. She is incredibly invasive that way. If he looks closely enough at anything, all it does is remind him of her.

He thinks of Ibiza. Has she ever been there?

His laugh burns in his throat like whiskey when he realizes he would take her there in a heartbeat if she asked.

o

She doesn't speak to him for a week and he keeps the invitation in the back of a drawer in his desk. During the nights he stays late at the office, alone, he swears he can hear it beating, like a heart.

He still watches her for any signs of happiness. He looks hard, despite the lock in his jaw, but he doesn't find any. This gives him hope when he least wants it. Hope is dangerous, he knows. It makes people destructive and reckless. He says to himself he is done with that. The war is over, he has buried that version of himself that learned to rot his own roots – even given it a proper funeral.

Pansy is married to Dean Thomas. She invites him over for tea, sends him a howler every time he fails to show up, but this time is different, his mind is heavier and he can no longer ignore Pansy's exclusive ties to the lions' den that crowd Granger's personal life. She is not close to Granger, no, that would never happen, not even in an alternate universe where half of her personality's been erased, but she is privy to things and people and murmurs he is not.

"Finally I get to see you, you bastard," she greets him at the door. Pansy had a baby a year ago but still looks perfectly manicured, wearing an ivory pantsuit that would make other women hate themselves. "Thought I'd have to stop by your fucking office just to get a word with you. You live there now, apparently."

He says sorry, the influx of accounts has kept his personal life paralyzed, and she snorts.

"Apologize when you mean it, Draco. I've heard that's a more effective way of keeping friends. Or, at least, take an acting class." She flashes him a smile before she picks up her little boy from his caretaker. He's got mocha skin and dark hair like his father, but eyes like his mother. Perfectly discerning.

"I'd ask you if you want to hold him but I don't trust him in bachelor hands," she says, smoothing some hair from his face. "He's my world, Draco. And you're his godfather and this is only the second time you've come to see him. Which is my mistake, really. I really should put more effort into making new friends."

Feeling guilty, he tells her he'll visit more. He asks when his birthday is, and Pansy answers with a smirk, saying, "You miss his birthday, Draco, and I'll gut you. I will."

She places him in an ornate crib in the corner of the kitchen to keep an eye on him while they have tea.

"We got an invitation to Granger and Weasley's wedding last week," she said, helping herself to some cream and sugar. "Another wedding at the Burrow. How sublime."

"Are you going?"

"That's a stupid question, Draco. Of course I'm going. Dean's practically exploding with happiness at the news. Keeps going on and on about how 'it's about time' and 'I know they're going to make each other so happy.'"

Pansy rolls her eyes, except Draco knows Pansy doesn't dislike Granger as much as she pretends she does. He has seen them interact enough at parties to know when Pansy's softened towards a person.

"And you? Are you going? Should I know to request an extra pair of forks at the reception for you to scrape your eyes out with?"

He stares at her for a second, her right eyebrow raised well above her brow line. He realizes what she is telling him. She knows. "Real subtle, Pans."

She smiles, mouth closed. "I think you're a sad, sad man, Draco. Which is why I make excuses for you. I've been watching you for some time. Seen you sneak peeks at her from across the room at the sordid Christmas parties. You keep your distance but you always have to know where she is. You look irritated or cold whenever she talks to you, but I've known you long enough to know when you're pretending." There is clarity to her voice that slices right through him, makes him feel conviction. "You're enraptured by a bore with a fiancé. And it tortures you."

Draco says nothing for awhile, just drinks his tea. But the longer her words hang over him, the more they crowd the room like unwanted guests, and he has to say something, anything.

"It's not like I meant for it to happen," he says, needlessly.

"Nobody ever does. I didn't," she says. "Dean didn't."

He takes a breath, looks away. He focuses his eyes on a distant wall. "I've been thinking about going away for a little bit. Just until the wedding's over."

Pansy sets down her tea cup and looks at him with narrowed eyes. "If you run, if you let this happen sitting on your ass like a defeated man while you have another woman's mouth around your cock, you don't deserve her, Draco. You will never get her. I promise you that. And when that happens, I hope you're prepared to live with that. To move on, and actually come visit your godson."

"And what if she doesn't want me? What then?"

He feels ugliness seep out from those words. They gurgle in his throat, threatening to suck the light out of everything. His throat dries up from shame.

"Then you can run. Run away for however long you want. Get seven intercontinental blowjobs a day, for all I care." She leaned in a little closer, her eyes on him, unflinching. "But you come back. You don't get to stay gone. You're a godfather, you know? And a friend."

She leans back, takes a sip of tea.

"I know it might seem romantic to shatter from somebody not wanting you. But it's a myth, and it's messy. You don't let anyone rule your world, Draco. You can let them get pretty damn close. But they don't get to hold the trigger. They don't get to be in charge of the bomb."

He asks her when she got to be so wise. She smiles and says that this is just the first time he's paid her any attention.

o

It's always when you're about to lose her that you start thinking of when losing her had become something to fear in the first place.

It is after the war. Freshly after the war, and they are freshly wounded, freshly haunted. Their relationships, once triumphant and golden in the light of their victory – and their survival – had begun to deflate without the adrenaline-fueled desperation war brought. Whatever they had prayed to keep in the darkness of destroyed forests and ratty back alleys now seemed bleak and wanting in the afterlight.

He overhears an argument between Weasley and Granger. It's not hard, because Weasley has an infamous temper and the recklessness of a public grenade. Their arguments had become a staple in the soundtrack of war.

He is smoking a cigarette, nursing a glass of whiskey, out in the field. It is summer. They are at the Burrow. He hates the Burrow but with the pints he's bled for the war it has adopted him like a prodigal son, less tentatively than its tenants. On some nights he likes to take a stroll out in the field and watch the Burrow, catch the moving silhouettes from the windows, and every room is lit so it looks like the heaving, stocky building is bursting with light. It is such a different sight compared to his own childhood home – with its heavy velvet curtains perpetually drawn, light a proclaimed enemy because of how it makes layers of dust shine like glitter. Now the manor is a tomb. A mausoleum of a life that had seemed more than enough before – before the world declared war on itself, and before loss had become the fat, throbbing artery that connected all of their lives.

Weasley has a voice that travels, which is something any person with a short fuse and an unaware arsenal of foul vocabulary should learn to fear. From the conversations he's heard, he knows intimate things about them. Like that Weasley loves her violently, just like the way he loves Quidditch violently, and his family violently. Perhaps to someone like Granger that had once seemed romantic. The women he knew had a tendency of fawning over men who love them like the tides crashing.

He has the last word with her before he storms back into the house. It is somebody's birthday so the noise and celebration has drowned them out. Draco watches Granger as she stands there on the porch, her face crumpled in thought, arms crossed in an oversized sweater knitted for her by Mrs. Weasley.

Granger has a face like a wall of glass. You could see every emotion running through her. It used to annoy him – for so many reasons. He thinks it should be a crime for somebody to care so much, to feel so much. She is that person. Over time, he has learned to read her like his favorite book.

She looks out at the sky first before her eyes quickly swivel back to the door, making to head back inside, when she stops. She looks back out at the field. Her eyes land on him in the sea of dead, tall grass.

For a minute he wonders if she really sees him, if she can make out that it's him, but she starts walking towards him. Her body makes a trail in the grass. She is coming to him and he decides, secretly, that this is one of his favorite sights.

"So this is where you'd gone," she says dryly when she reaches him. There is a lilt in her voice that sounds like half of a smile and she sits down next to him, lies down, and surrenders her eyes to the stars. "I take it you heard."

"Bloody impossible not to," is all he says.

"Years of watching Quidditch in the stands, I reckon," she sighs. "Impeccable voice projection becomes second nature."

He scoffs even though his heart feels like a planet and she its moon.

"He was being cruel."

"No he wasn't," she says defensively. Then, after a second, she composes herself. "When you love someone," she clarifies with a resurrected Head Girl tonality, "you aren't cruel to them."

He doesn't tell her cruel is the only way he knows how to be. Instead he tells her that she's wrong.

"People are the cruelest to the people they love," he argues. "Half of the fucked up things we do to the people we love the most we'd never have the guts to do to a stranger. Not in a million years."

She looks at him like he is bacteria under a microscope. A cloud covering the moon passes and suddenly they are illuminated, revealed.

"We know exactly how to hurt the people we love. We use that to our advantage. And then we have the gall to say all's fair in love and war." And then he looks at her, pointedly, thinking, You are a different kind of war.

"I'm sorry you think that way," she only says, softly. "But cruelty is a choice, Malfoy. It's not a condition. It's not an inevitability. When you love someone, that doesn't have to be in the fine print. That's a myth."

It is just the beginning but it is the kind of beginning that throws you. It is just the beginning but if he is presented the choice of kissing the moonlight out of her face and dying immediately after, right now, or not kissing her and living forever, he thinks what a sweet death that would be, how impossibly, ludicrously worthy.

But there is no choice. Instead he looks at her for the first time, half drenched in ancient light, the other half in shadow. She is smiling at him because she is still naïve and young and thinks she's won this argument through her logic and, most of all, her unwavering faith in the goodness of human kind.

On any other night he might have scoffed at her, waved her own delusions in her face, and have tried to crush her hope. But this is the beginning. Of what, he can't exactly name. Of everything, maybe.

Of his entire being all tangled up over her.

o

It is through the grapevine he learns about how the dress Granger had always dreamed of wearing was long gone. It had been her mother's and had been burned with her house when the Death Eaters had attacked her home during the war. He spends a good five minutes with this on his mind before he leaves his office and doesn't return until hours later.

It is the next day when the box is returned to him, in person. Granger's eyes are shiny with rage when she lets the box gracelessly fall to the floor in front of his desk.

His face is stoically blank but the sound echoes in his chest like it is a hollow cave.

"If this is your way of saying sorry, it's barbaric," she spits at him.

"It's nonrefundable," he tells her.

"Then burn it."

She leaves the wedding dress in his office, and slams the door to let him know his apology is not accepted.

Later on he hears from Pansy, who heard it from Dean, who heard it from Ginny, that Granger had tried on the wedding dress. Weasley wasn't at home. He didn't have a clue. She put it on, even the veil, and looked at herself in the mirror and cried.

o

She and Weasley weren't always together. They fluctuated, were inconstant yet somehow still constant – they'd break apart but would somehow always find their way back to each other. He doesn't understand it until he feels it for himself: the pull of someone that gave new depths to the meaning of longing, who changed your orbit to the space around their front door.

She is not yet engaged – nor is she with Weasley – when they kiss. She is with Draco, in fact, wholly with Draco, but the metaphysical aspects aside from that, he doesn't know. It is a kiss that makes his sober mind reel and hallucinate, that mistakes it for a dream, and then pinches himself to make sure it isn't.

He knows there are a million reasons why he should have turned away but they are tiny and irrelevant to the way she moans his name. She says his name like she has practiced it in her sleep. Draco. No other mouth has been more than perfectly fitted for it, he thinks, and no other mouth ever will be.

That is his first mistake. He has her once and then again and she lets herself get close to the parts of himself that have never been kissed by the sun. She is insatiable, even, and that's okay, because they are young and unattached and secretly longing for each other in a way that will be lucky to ever see the light of day.

"Have you ever loved anyone?"

She asks it in the privacy of his bed, with his curtains shut, so it feels okay to answer. Not so loaded.

Still, that doesn't mean he actually does. He is Draco Malfoy. A closed door. The king of withholding. A soldier for self-preservation.

"Why?" he asks.

"Because I've always wondered that about you. You're privy to so many intimate details of other people's relationships and yet…" she pauses in thought. "Ever since the war, you've been so alone." She shifts in his bed and he hears the rustle of his sheets. "I suppose what I'm trying to ask is if you're happy."

He doesn't answer for such a long time that he thinks she's fallen asleep by the time he does.

"Right now," he says, quietly, "I am."

He is even more surprised to hear her say back, "Me too."

o

"There wasn't always nothing between us. Once upon a time, there was something. A very good something."

This is what he thinks she will say. This is what will be engraved on the tombstone of their short but passionate affair.

In his dreams he pictures that it is not him but Weasley she is saying it to. To their future. To their unborn children. To the wedding they will never have.

o

This is how you lose her.

After days spent in his bed, living out his wildest dreams, he asks her to go away with him. Just for a little while. Just to get out of London.

He wants to see her constellation of freckles darken under the French summer sun, and make sure she exists outside this plane of reality he fears he has made up.

She says yes, and in the morning he waits for her. Hope makes him infinitely patient; until it is clear she does not intend to show up.

He gets an owl from her later on, two meager words scribbled on a torn piece of parchment, in a rush – I'm sorry.

On Monday he hears the news. Granger and Weasley have yet again completed another round in their on-again-off-again relationship and have gotten back together. They're like magnets, he hears some women say as he passes. After all this time, they still snap back together. They belong.

He is reminded of how some things will always remain the same.

o

It is late and she is standing two feet from his desk, both fists clenched at her sides.

"Malfoy," she says. Then she stops. Tries again. "Draco."

He tells her never to call him that ever again.

o

"So? Are you going to tell her?"

He is still deciding. He is deciding whether she deserves to know. His feelings are a priceless commodity and he is thinking of whether he should invest in her in a way that could undo him.

"Whatever you do, don't be the asshole who tells her on the day of her wedding," Pansy warns. "Soften the blow a little. Lessen the humiliation. It'll look less sloppy, more considerate when you're trying to steal the bride away if you don't wait until the wedding day."

Pansy is full of advice that makes him think she has lived lifetimes before he ever knew her. He tells her this after she sneaks one of his cigarettes outside in the garden.

She lets out a puff of smoke, throwing her head back to reveal the pale belly of her neck, eyes shut, savoring it.

"Haven't we all?" she sighs.

o

This is how you lose her.

Weeks of mutual disdain after their affair, weeks after she'd left her musk in his sheets, he makes the mistake of asking, in a toxic, whiskey-fueled rage, "Why Weasley? Why does Weasley get to be the one who gets to have you?"

"Ron," she says, and he thinks he can almost hear her teeth splitting under the weight, "does not have me. Nobody gets to have me. I have myself. That's how I was born, and that's how I'm going to die – not as anybody's property." He thinks she's finished but then she spits out an afterthought to thoroughly wound him. "Least of all, yours."

"You know that's not what I fucking meant," he snarls. Because Draco owns many things. His family is in the business of acquisition and possession and he knows all about property. But from the very first time he looked at her, he knew that she could not be owned. Held, maybe, and kissed, and fucked, but never owned.

He is simply rich, not stupid. You can own a house. You can't own a person.

It is just a poor choice of words – if he were sober he would have been more immaculate, but there is no being sober around her. Just her being in the same room makes him high.

It is just a poor choice of words, he wants to say, but she leaves, and this is how he loses her.

o

It is the beginning. They are at war and he has caught her crying deep in the forest. Her sleeves are full of snot and her face is full of dirt, her entire being like a crumpled up piece of paper, discarded.

"You are a fucking stupid bint, you know that?" he says to her. Numbed somewhat by war, and exhausted from being constantly on the run, he is irritated by the sight of her tears. He does not care to ask what she's crying about. He has one guess and only one. "We all thought you'd been taken."

"I can take care of myself, you prat," she shoots back, hiding her face.

He scoffs. "Famous last words," he mutters, turning around and heading back to the camp. He realizes a few steps later that nobody had actually asked him to go after her.

"Do you ever let anyone in?" she calls out to him. Her voice is full of curiosity, all softness and without the acidity of their usual remarks. It shocks him so much it makes him pause in his step.

Gone are the sound of cracking dead leaves and his muffled footsteps on damp soil.

"No," he answers.

"Why not?"

"Because I haven't met anyone worthy of that privilege yet," he says acerbically. He mutters a fuck off but she doesn't seem to hear him.

"Sometimes you have to let them in first before you can decide if they're worth keeping in," she says. She sounds closer to him now, and he realizes she is walking to him.

"That's the stupidest logic I've ever heard."

"It's true."

"Well, life is full of stupid logic like that precious little gem there. So thank you for that useless, unwelcome piece of pseudo-wisdom." He begins walking again, annoyed. His footing is rapid and sloppy. In the back of his mind, he is reminded of how war has made her less preachy, more conflicted and quiet, and that it is rare when these old echoes of her so-abruptly-ended Head Girl days crop up.

Still, he is not here to be shepherded by someone as self-righteous as her lot. He is here to survive, whatever that has come to mean.

He hears something from her, but it is not in the form of a word. It is a strangled sort of sound, as if she had been in the process of saying something, but decided against it.

Later on she will tell him she had been on the verge of apologizing for how stupid she'd sounded. How inappropriate of a question that is to ask someone in the middle of a war.

"I felt delirious and alone," she explains. "I don't have a good reason, aside from that."

When she tells him this, she is in his bed, close to him. She is curved into him and he can feel the hot, radiating moisture of her against the side of his thigh, and it makes it hard to concentrate on this conversation. Hard to let her keep dragging him back to the beginning, whenever that is, when he can still taste her in his mouth.

"What stopped you?" he asks.

"Because it would mean apologizing to you," she says, and there is a faint smile in her voice. "At the time it seemed like such a monstrous thing. Like a real sign everything was really going to hell."

And then she laughs, really laughs, and his thoughts twist to form three words: this is real.

She kisses his chin and moves her mouth down his stomach, down his hip, and his hands find their home in her hair. He closes his eyes. A few minutes later, somewhere inside him, a galaxy explodes.

o

It's a fucking clichéd thing to do and he hates it but he paces. He wears a path down on the rug in front of his fireplace. He thinks about what he's about to do, trying to calculate the hazy gains and losses that keep coming up blank in his mind. He thinks about what kind of story this is going to be. The ending dictates the type of story, he thinks, and even though that's a medieval concept, he still believes it.

He Apparates to her apartment, thinking, Some stories, you know how they end even before you begin.

o

It's mad, the things you want to know when you know things are ending. Suddenly there is a scrambling desperation to know every pore of what you had. Was it real? Yes. Was it good? Yes. Better on some days, but yes, good. Is it worth staying for? Leaving your fiancé for? I don't know, I don't know, please, don't ask.

"How can two men love you so differently?" she says, so softly he knows she is speaking to herself. "One waiting for me at the altar, and one at my front door."

He makes a smart remark about what an inconvenient turn her life has made, but she only smiles at him. I hate you, he wants to say, with the blind passion of that version of himself from before. But perhaps, he thinks. Perhaps I mean it more now.

He hates her the way a man resents light after he'd lost his sight. She's become an embodiment of things lost, of things he would never have again. With her in his mind, he feels the emptiness of his reality. She had left a shadow of potential, and it is the cruelest thing to leave anybody, ever.

"You split my life into halves, you know that?" she says to him. She is not crying but her eyes are glassy, with its edges brimmed pink. "Into a Before and After. Into a Before You," she says, slowly, "and an After You."

And he knows what she is saying without her having to say it. That is what happens when you dream of someone for so long, you think you know them. You see the words secretly stitched in the seams.

She is saying, Thank you, I'm Sorry, Goodbye.

o

He holds her one last time. The voices of the nosy hens from the office echo in his brain.

Ronald Weasley and Hermione Granger. I wouldn't be surprised if they were written in the stars.

He fancies the thought that maybe he is in her stars, too. But briefly. Just a glimpse. A shimmering blip. A streak of stardust in her sky – there, and then gone.

In his own stars, he squeezes once, and then lets her go.

o

It is the beginning.

It is the end of war, or in the middle of it, or at the start of a new one – he doesn't know. They are 21 years old and scarred but also trying to regain the depth back into their eyes. He is at the Burrow, which he hates, but has adopted him like the prodigal son. Even so, he spends more time outside of it than inside, staring at the shadows in the windows, listening to the cacophony that echoes out into the night, watching the light. It is full of light. He lies down in the field of tall grass and he remembers the names of the constellations, grateful for how they haven't changed. Stars are ancient. They've been waiting a long time to die, he remembers his mother once telling him.

He hears the front door slam open and two figures step out, arguing, saying cruel things only lovers can. It is an argument that has been worn thin over the years, one with strained logic and a tiresome tone.

He leaves with the last word and Granger is left out on the porch. She stares at the door for a second, biting her lip, before she looks out at the night sky, before catching sight of him. She makes a quick decision. She is coming to him. He memorizes the sight. He'll keep it with him to his grave.

You will let her go. That night and so many others, until the night you decide you don't, you can't, and you think it is a victory, but it is too late. This is how life is. You wait until you're ready and you're so intoxicated by the potential, you don't notice when it's already half slipped out of your hands.

Thinking, She is a different kind of war. The kind you want to win. The kind you want to come home for.

Under the stars, with her lying beside you, looking at you, wanting to see in.

This is how you lose her.

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