Trying to strike a balance here of being true to canon, with the ups and downs they surely go through, but without descending into nothing but angst, or creating a really unconscionable relationship that I myself wouldn't want to be advocating...

Heh. That's exactly the line I'm trying to walk in the Kaleidoscope chapter I'm currently working on (and have been for an embarrassingly long time now). In my ficverse the sticky point comes in early HBP rather than during OotP, but it's exactly these same questions.

And so, I do really like the way you've approached it here.