Disclaimer: Characters belong to JK Rowling. I do not profit from this work.
The smoke curled in front of him in lazy spirals, drifting up up up, until it vanished above his head. His grey eyes didn't track the smoke the way hers did. His eyes stared unseeingly at the back fence as he lifted the half-burnt cigarette to his chapped and cracking lips.
He was beautiful in a tragic way, she thought as she watched him from the open doorway. Years spent instigating active, aggressive hatred found him on his nemesis' doorstep, broken and bleeding, and on the same side after all. Over the subsequent two years, his arguments and hostility lessened, but were replaced with nothing. Silence. A boy who was once so loud, demanding everyone be aware of his presence, was now a shadow of a man.
Fading away, just like the smoke.
She was one of few who knew there was more to him than this quiet ghost. Somewhere beneath the layers of silence and self-control was someone entirely human. The brilliant red tally marks above the elbow of his left arm were the first thing that made her realize he still felt something after four years of war. She remembered the first sight of him carving the lines into his skin with a cursed blade. He sat on the floor of the drawing room, the only place in the safe house where he could be alone. The battle that day had been devastating to both sides; more than a dozen lives lost. With practiced patience, he cut fourteen red lines into his pale skin just below the sleeve of his once white, now blood- and mud-stained, t-shirt.
It had become a ritual, after the first time she caught him. He thought she'd be judgmental, angry, disgusted. She had surprised him by taking her shirt off, pulling her hair up, and turning her back to him. Wordlessly, he cleaned the knife and scored her back.
One, Colin Creevey.
Two, Remus Lupin.
Three, Molly Weasley.
Four, Hestia Jones.
Five, Theodore Nott.
Six, Seamus Finnigan.
Seven, Alastor Moody.
She felt him pause after the first seven marks, and kept her hair resolutely lifted from her shoulders. All of them. She wanted all of them, just like he did.
Eight,Walden McNair.
Nine, Amycus Carrow.
Ten, Jacinta Meliore.
Eleven, Angus Travers.
Twelve, Dane Jacobs.
Thirteen, Vivian Thornburn.
Fourteen, Rowan Parkinson.
They repeated the ritual after every battle, every report. The cursed wounds were rarely healed before more were added. And after every ritual, he went to the wooden table on the back deck and smoked two cigarettes. While the smoke curled around his fingers, his arms, his head, she watched with sad brown eyes and thought about how beautiful things can be when they're broken.