Valentine's Day was a Hogsmeade weekend.
He had known this in advance, which was how he knew to ask — not dramatically, not with the specific loaded quality of something being named as what it was, but with the straightforward quality of someone who had decided that the time for indirection had passed and that asking directly was better than the alternative.
He had asked on the Tuesday.
She had looked at him with the sideways look. Then she had said: 'Yes,' with the specific quality of someone who had been waiting for the question and had the answer already prepared, which was entirely consistent with everything he knew about her.
Hogsmeade in February had the quality of a place that had been cold long enough that the cold had become simply the condition of being there rather than something to remark on. The High Street had its Valentine's Day decorations — Madam Puddifoot's particularly, which had committed fully to the aesthetic with the specific enthusiasm of somewhere that considered this its primary occasion — and the general atmosphere of students in pairs and clusters navigating the specific social occasion of a February Hogsmeade weekend.
He walked with her along the High Street and they went to Honeydukes because Hermione had a specific relationship with Honeydukes chocolate that she managed with great discipline during term and allowed herself to abandon on Hogsmeade weekends, which was one of the things about her he had been keeping in the list since third year. He bought things he knew she liked without asking whether she wanted them. She accepted them with the quality of someone who had noticed that he knew and was not going to remark on it directly, which was also consistent.
They walked up toward the edge of town where the path ran along the hillside above the village and the view opened out — the valley, the hills, the specific pale February sky of Scotland doing what it did with the light at this time of year, which was diffuse it so that everything had an even quality, not bright but clear, every shape distinct.
She had her scarf on and her hands in her pockets and the quality she had when she was comfortable — the absence of performance, the specific ease of someone who was not managing any distance. He had come to know this quality the way you came to know things that mattered: not all at once but through the accumulation of instances until the knowing was simply present.
He stopped on the path.
She stopped beside him.
He took her hand.
Not as something that required narrating. Not with the quality of something being declared. He simply took her hand and she let him take it, and they stood on the path above Hogsmeade in the February cold looking out at the valley, and neither of them said anything for a moment that was long enough to be complete and short enough to not require words.
Then she said: 'I've been thinking about this since the train.'
'Which train,' he said.
'Third year,' she said.
He looked at her.
She looked back, and her expression had the quality it had at the patrol window and at the birthday dinner table and at various other specific moments across the past two and a half years — the quality of someone who was simply present, not managing the distance, the real version rather than the performed one.
'Third year,' he said.
'Yes,' she said.
He held her hand and she held his and they stood on the hillside and the valley was below them and the sky was the specific pale February quality of Scotland and neither of them said anything else because the thing that had been accumulating since the train in third year had been named and was now simply present and that was sufficient.
They walked back to the village after a while. She kept his hand.