Prompt: "...Ready for it?" by Taylor Swift - "In the middle of the night, in my dreams, you should see the things we do, baby..."
Prompted by: @catherineanne512
At the serious risk of writing one too many DH tent fics (omg I’m so obsessed, I need an intervention), here is this. Thank you for the prompts so far! Hope you enjoy x
She was so bloody cold.
The trees all around her were frosted with glassy ice, frozen stark still and haunting. Her toes were numb inside her boots, and the lining had worn down and torn, creating an uncomfortable ridge of ripped fabric, awkwardly pushing against the centre of the bottom of her right foot.
She crossed her arms over her chest and sighed. She could hear Ron moving around inside the tent, and she didn’t want to even question how she knew for sure it was him, just from the sounds he made. But he was supposed to relieve her from watch soon, so she could count on that.
She was too cold to speak to him.
She was too cold to breathe.
He emerged sooner than expected, damn ginger stubble and eyelashes like the curving crystal limbs of the trees around her.
“Hey.” His gruff, sleepy voice made her muscles tense in a fierce effort not to respond.
She managed the faintest nod before brushing past him to go inside, and oh how she wished she hadn’t seen that look of sad longing cross his face as she’d let him down. Maybe he wanted to hear her voice tonight as much as she ironically ached for his. He wasn’t the one being silent.
She ignored Harry’s light snoring in his bunk, and she stripped off her jumper, put on two of Ron’s instead, and tugged his wool cap over her head, shivering as she crawled into her bed. She’d been wearing his clothes for two weeks, and he hadn’t mentioned it. She sighed heavily, yanking her blankets up to her neck and curling onto her side, closing her eyes.
It really was a bad idea to make her bunk and her bloody skin smell like him, intoxicating her dreams, making her feel his fingers on her body in the deepest realms of sleep. She’d forgiven him, clearly… the way she let him touch her in her fantasies…
To be fair, she’d been doing that for years. Only… only maybe not quite like this. Maybe not with such a burning flame, so much skin… his naked body meshed to hers, his hand between her legs. Blame it on the cold, on desperation, she thought… on being madly in love with him.
She sighed again, gathering his long jumper sleeves over her hands to warm them. Nights were too long, days too short, and the ten year plan she’d envisioned at age twelve had had two startling amendments over the years - considering how his last name sounded, after her own, around age fifteen, and the possibility of freezing to death, while a war raged on far away from them, making her reconsider that being hacked off with him for abandoning her didn’t have to mean he couldn’t share her bed at night...
Abandoning her. When had she become selfish enough to make everything he did somehow… about her? Maybe it was the way he’d apologised again, in the dark, while Harry was sleeping, telling her he’d never meant to hurt her, never wanted to leave her…
Somewhere between anger, love and lust, she’d drifted off to sleep. What felt like seconds later, a rustling sound woke her too quickly, pulse flying away, adrenaline coursing through her limbs.
She flipped over so fast, reflexes on high alert, and suddenly his wrist was in her tight fist as she yanked him down. He gasped and leaned over her bed, throwing out his free hand to the opposite side of her head, palm shaking with his weight and the nearly visible tension between them. His face was inches from her own, his wide blue eyes locked on hers.
The rate of her already compromised breathing seemed to triple, chest heaving as she stared up at him. He wasn’t moving away. His body was so, so warm. He blinked, and she felt her heart catch in her throat.
“What are you doing?!” she whispered harshly.
“Looking for my hat,” he hissed back, gaze flicking up to her head.
She frantically let go of him, as if just realising what she had done… as if a bucket of ice water had been tipped over her head.
She watched his neck move as he swallowed, taking his bloody time about getting up, shifting his hand by her head, fingers brushing through her hair as he sat up on the edge of her bed. She sat up, too, tugging off his hat and sharply holding it out for him to take.
“You can have it,” he said, somewhat weakly, gaze stuck on her outstretched hand.
She briefly imagined how he might react if she jumped on his lap and snogged him… She cleared her throat, dropping his hat to her bed and protectively crossing her arms over her chest, recalling that she was wearing two more of his things, and surely he could see it, even in the dark, now that her blankets had fallen down to her lap.
“No,” she shot back. “It’s yours. You were looking for it. You should take it.”
“Didn’t know you had it or I wouldn’t‘ve-“
“What difference does that make?”
She glared at him, but the pretense melted as his eyes grew sad, creased at the corners.
“Why’re we fighting?” he asked. “It’s a bloody hat.”
Tears burned at the corners of her eyes, and where was all this rage coming from? She’d just had his open mouth on her neck in her dreams.
“I’ve got your jumpers on, as well,” she said, ignoring his question.
Hands shaking, she crossed her arms in front of her body and tugged them both off in one go, static clinging and frizzing her hair to set a new record. She threw the jumpers at him, watching him wince as they struck his arm. Not from the physical impact, of course. Something else.
Sad eyes, parted lips, a fearful gaze that wouldn’t meet her own sharp stare.
He really wouldn’t look at her, even as she silently screamed for him to.
“What can I do to fix us?” His words were so soft, so timid, so gorgeous.
The cutting response she’d have given before was that he could do nothing. But that was so far from the truth that it felt like so much more than a lie to imagine saying it aloud.
Sitting in only her vest, she was suddenly freezing again. Her body twitched as she tried not to shiver.
He noticed. She saw the moment he did, and he finally looked at her.
“I’ll do anything you want to get you back,” he whispered, and she wasn’t going to be able to keep herself from crying, much longer.
“I don’t know what to say to you.”
This was the best truth she could offer, because she had many, many endless thoughts, desires, imagining how he’d feel, what he might do. She had many feelings of pain and sadness, hunger and an aching loneliness. But he had those things, too. He’d suffered, only in another way, one she’d been too hurt to risk trying to understand. And he was suffering now, locked in hell. Did it matter so much to him, what she thought, how she looked at him, that he’d do anything? Anything?
“That’s okay,” he said, and it took her a minute to pair his response with what she’d said before. “Don’t have to say anything. Keep the hat and the jumpers. You’re freezing.”
He moved to get up, and all instincts collided as she scrambled to her knees and grabbed ahold of his arm, gasping at her own desperation. His eyes flashed to hers, and she sucked in an unsteady breath through her parted lips.
“You’ll do anything?” she barely whispered, and he swallowed, nodding.
“Anything. What d’you need?”
“Don’t give up.”
She watched him press his lips together as he tried not to cry. God, she could see the relief flowing through him as he nodded.
“Would never,” he choked out, trying to smile.
Her hand loosened on his arm, but she slid her fingers down over his jumper sleeve. He was so close, and he wasn’t looking away from her now.
She was supposedly brave, though she’d felt far from it recently, and perhaps it was simply time to prove it to herself again. She leaned forward, tilting her head and resting her cheek on his shoulder. His hand flew up, as if he had lost control over… control. He flattened his palm to her bare shoulder blade and dropped his face to her hair. She breathed in deeply, closing her eyes as she rubbed her cheek against scratchy wool.
“Bloody hell, you really are cold.”
“Not so much now,” she mumbled, draping her arm out across his stomach, clenching her fingers in the opposite side of his jumper.
