Title: Love Should End With Hope
Summary: Once more, Oliver doesn't get what he expects when he comes home.
Rating: PG
Author's Notes: This is the final installment. I hope it pleases. The prompt for this one was a line from A Knight's Tale. "Love should end with hope. My husband, god rest him, said something that I'll never forget. Hope guides me, that is what gets me through the day and the night. The hope that after you're gone from my sight, it will not be the last time that I look upon you.
A once burly young Scot pushed through his front door, dropping his bag with a small clatter. In the morning, he’d find out what he’d smashed, but for tonight, he just wanted sleep. It had been a long two months since he was last home, the stench of defeat covering him like a cloak as he’d run from her rejection. Oliver Wood was not a man to take defeat lightly, and when he wasn’t training, he was replaying that final evening in his head, searching desperately for a way to change the outcome.
In the end, he decided that if he’d only kept his fool mouth shut and let her have her way, he’d be coming home to a warm and smiling Hermione instead of a cold, dark flat. As he wove through the maze of the living room, he left the lights off, habit taking over. He’d always tried to be considerate of his flatmate when coming home late at night, and the thought that he could turn on a light, and thereby save his shins, was too depressing to contemplate. What did it matter if his legs didn’t sport bruises in the morning? She was gone.
The idea of crawling into the bed she’d slept in for over a year, a bed he’d nearly been able to share with her made his skin shrivel. He just couldn’t do it. He’d have to move. He’d been debating the idea with himself for the past month; the sentimental part of him, the part he tried so desperately to squash, wanted to stay forever in the place where they’d been so happy, but the logical part of his brain admitted that he’d never be able to move on if he wallowed in memories of her for the rest of his life.
He ignored the dark bedroom, the door tauntingly open across the room, visible in the dimness as his eyes adjusted. When Hermione had lived in that room, it was always closed at night to give him the illusion of privacy in the common living areas and to help him prevent from waking her. The open door seemed to accuse him of driving him off and he resolutely turned his back on it.
He stripped to his boxers and stretched his large frame, now rather gaunt and haggard-looking, down upon the sofa. Pillowing his head on his arms, he rolled to his side and closed his eyes. The now-familiar sting of tears pricked at him, but he resolutely squeezed them closed and forced back the lump. It was three in the morning and he was exhausted. He simply didn’t have time to grieve for his lost love.
He finally drifted off, troubled by fitful dreams throughout what remained of the night, waking several times. Each time, he refused to allow himself to give into the fantasy that he was in that bed he’d bought for her, lying next to her, with her whiskey-colored curls draped riotously across his arm and her head on his chest, that he could hear her deep, even breath with the slightest bit of a snore that she had resolutely refused to believe was there when he’d once commented upon it. That he was so far gone that he could actually hear it forced him to put a pillow over his head and try not to smother himself in frustration.
He woke again when the first rays of the dawn crept into the room and he groaned. Sleep warred with idealism, and he was forcefully tempted to crawl into that bed that probably still smelled of her and go back to sleep.
And, for Merlin’s sake, man, why did you have to think of her scent? he grumbled to his mind. Now that he’d brought it to mind, all he could smell was the sweet vanilla and cinnamon that seemed to accompany her wherever she went. He groggily opened his eyes, blinking and squinting against the brightness of the sun when he noticed the whiskey curls it was filtering through.
He closed his eyes. He was definitely in bad shape if merely being home was giving him hallucinations.
“Oliver, I know you’re awake.”
Now he was having auditory hallucinations, too. He groaned and rolled to face the back of the sofa. “Go away. You’re a bloody figment of my imagination and I’ve enough to worry about without seeing your face every-bloody-where I go.”
“Now, is that anyway to greet a woman who has breakfast all prepared for you?” the tone was teasing, but he heard hesitance in it, and it was that which convinced him. In his dreams, she was always bold, confident, and (given the fact that she was a horrid cook) they never ate anything she made.
“Hermione?” he whispered, turning slowly and opening his eyes. They collided with deep brown pools which spoke of uncertainty. “What are you doing here?”
“Well, obviously you need a new shoe rack, seeing as how you’ve destroyed the one I made,” she teased. “I’ve come to repair it, of course.” It took him a moment to register her comment, but when he recalled the crash his bag had made the night before, he couldn’t help but grin. “Now, sit up and eat, and then we can talk.” He obeyed her in sitting, but he looked somewhat askance at the meal she placed in front of him.
“You mustn’t have eaten a thing while you were away,” she prattled. “You’re skin and bones.” He glanced from the food up to her as she busied herself about the room and noticed that this Hermione was much thinner than the girl he remembered and there were dark circles under her eyes. She glared at him. “Eat! I didn’t make it, so it is perfectly safe!”
Eyeing the food with more enthusiasm than he’d felt in two months, he dug into the plate with gusto, polishing off the meal in no time as she rambled through her thoughts. “I didn’t expect you to be back last night,” she murmured. “Imagine my surprise when I woke up and there you were! I’ve been leaving the door open on purpose to hear you when you came in, but I was so tired last night – Gone with the Wind was on again and I stayed up far too late watching it.”
“Hermione, lass, what are you doing here?” he asked again, more forcefully.
“I – I never left.” Her eyes were downcast, but he saw a faint blush stain her cheeks at the admission. “I was so mad when you left that I packed up all my things – I’ve been living out of my suitcase for the past two months, by-the-by. I kept expecting you to show up and demand I leave at once.”
“Why didn’t you leave?” he asked curiously.
“I calmed down considerably the next day, and I started thinking about what you’d said – and - and I agree with you.” She took a deep breath and looked up, her eyes fixing on his. “I don’t want just your friendship, Oliver, and I don’t want just a tumble between the sheets, either.” She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and he felt as though a warm spring had bubbled into his veins. He was fairly certain his jaw was on the floor, but he didn’t care. She was here and she wasn’t leaving and she – she agreed with him?
“Agree with me?” He raised his eyebrows. “Is that how you tell a man you love him, lass?”
“No, of course not!” she declared indignantly before launching herself across the coffee table and into his lap, plastering her mouth to his.
She tasted of honey and vanilla and everything he remembered and he was drowning in it. “This is how,” she said, pulling away. “I love you.”
His heart swelled. The rest of it didn’t matter, not really, he decided. They’d work it out. For right now, there were more important things to be working out. The knots in her hair when they finally made it off the sofa and into the bathroom, for example.
