They came back to Hogwarts at two in the morning.
The castle was lit — not the ordinary night lighting of a building in its sleep, but the specific quality of somewhere that had been kept awake deliberately, the torches at full rather than low, the specific warm quality of a building that had been asked to be present and was present. He came through the main doors and the castle received him in the way it had been receiving him since second year, which was in the way of somewhere that recognized what was coming through its doors.
The Defense Association students were in the entrance hall.
All seventeen of them. They had been patrolling in pairs since eleven — he could see the quality of them, the tiredness that came from alert waiting rather than sleep, the specific composure of people who had been given a task and had done it correctly. Susan Bones had the particular quality she had when she had been doing something serious and it had gone well — not relief, because she had not doubted, but the specific settled feeling of completed work. Cedric had the quality of someone who had been built for exactly this kind of occasion and had found, in meeting it, that he was right about himself.
They looked at the group coming through the door — Ron, Harry, Hermione, Neville — and the quality of the looking was not the looking of people who needed to be told. They could read it in the way the group was moving, the specific ease of people for whom something was done.
'It's over,' Susan said. Not a question.
'It's over,' Ron said.
What happened in the entrance hall then was not dramatic — not shouting, not the specific exuberant quality of a celebration designed for an audience. It was the particular quality of people who had been holding something for a long time being allowed to put it down. The seventeen students and the four of them and the specific warmth of two in the morning in a castle that had been kept awake by people who had trusted each other with the keeping of it.
He looked at all of them and thought: this is also what the five years were for.
They sat in the entrance hall until four in the morning, not because there was anything specific to do but because nobody wanted to leave yet, and nobody needed to, and the castle was warm and the night was what it was and they had earned it.
At some point the group arranged itself, the way groups did when they had been through something together and the something was finished — Harry against the wall with his knees up, Neville talking quietly to Susan about nothing in particular, the Defence Association students dispersing into small clusters across the entrance hall floor. The volume was low. The occasion did not need managing.
Hermione sat down beside him.
She looked at him 'Are you all right,' she asked.
He thought about this honestly, the way he thought about things she asked honestly. 'Yes,' he said. 'I think so. Ask me again in a week.'
She nodded, which was the correct response — not reassurance, acknowledgment. She understood the difference. 'I was watching the map of the ministry,' she said. 'When you stepped into the centre of the Hall.' A pause. The quality of someone who had been holding something and was now putting it down carefully. 'I knew you would be all right' Another pause, smaller. 'However it was still very difficult to watch.'
He looked at her.
She was looking at the entrance hall — at the students, at the torches, at the specific quality of a space that was warm and full of people who had kept the castle safe while others went elsewhere to end a war. She had the expression she had when something was too large for her usual architecture and was finding its own way through.
He took her hand the same way he had taken it on the hillside in February. Without announcement. Simply because it was where his hand wanted to be.
She looked down at their hands. Then she looked at him, and the expression she had was not managed in any of its components, and he leaned in and kissed her.
When he pulled back she was looking at him with the expression he had been hoping, for some time, to see.
Harry, across the hall, was very carefully looking at the ceiling. Neville, to his left, had developed a sudden intense interest in the flagstone in front of him. Neither of them said anything. Both of them were, Ron noted, doing a genuinely poor job of it.
She did not, however, let go of his hand.