Best Two Out Of Three

-Fadeaway Windwaker-

"If you got the money, honey, we got your disease." –Guns N Roses "Welcome To The Jungle"

It frustrated her. She didn't love him; sometimes she didn't even like him. Maybe she felt guilty. Maybe she thought he would kill himself if she left him. Maybe that was more condescending than anything else. Maybe she was scared, scared to lose the last tie she had with Cedric. But then, perhaps better to break up with Harry than to wait until You-Know-Who murdered him. Besides, everyone would hate her if she left him. One more heartbreak for Harry Potter. Vicious bitch, they'd whisper. As if the poor thing really needed that.

It was hard for him. He couldn't just grope at her and pretend he was holding his erstwhile boyfriend. Her breasts weren't large, but they were certainly there. He never said a word about it but his hands would jerk if he touched them. The first time he'd even apologized. As if he were allowed to shove her up against any wall he pleased and take her, but god forbid he should touch her chest. The whole thing frankly confused the hell out of him. He didn't like girls, why the hell was he shagging one? Sometimes his hand would dart away before his fingers even really touched down. But occasionally he would feel a rush of anger, and squeeze her breast until she cried against his mouth, as if punishing her for not being what he wanted. Which was completely ridiculous, of course, because he didn't even know what he wanted.

As if I really need any of this! She felt like screaming at them. It's MY boyfriend who died! They didn't know. They couldn't know. Maybe they knew what it was like to lose someone, but nobody was assaulting Neville Longbottom, grabbing him in dark corridors and telling him he smelled like his parents. She hated that. For the amount she paid for perfume she had better not smell like a goddamned dead boy. But it was more than that. Because if she hadn't rid herself of Cedric Diggory after six months and 186 showers, she was never going to be free.

He was jealous. Sometimes he looked at her and he could see Cedric's fingers on her body, and it made him sick. Did she know? Did she even realize that his having touched her made her precious? Cedric's fingers had touched Harry's body, too. And now they touched each other in lieu of Cedric's fingers, but they didn't do so because they were precious to one another. He wanted to own her, he wanted to have the liberty to pull every little bit of Cedric out of her, every single remnant, until all those pieces were his again. He didn't want to leave her with anything. But every time he thought he was finished, every time he believed he'd taken it all, she'd brush past him in the Great Hall, and he'd catch the scent of pine and cider. So he'd track her down, again, and continue his excavation of his boyfriend from her body. He could never suck her dry.

She tried to suck him dry. Every time she sucked him off, her mouth became a vacuum, struggling to take it all, take everything, so that maybe she could drain him enough that he'd never want her to do it again, maybe she could get enough of him that she'd never need to taste him again. She hated the way he tasted. She knew cum was essentially supposed to taste the same no matter what, but she swore Cedric's had been easier to stomach. The first time she sucked Harry off, she swallowed and promptly threw up. And each subsequent time she swallowed, and grimaced, and turned her head away from him while she bit her lip and begged her stomach to just deal with it. To get used to it, because no matter what, she'd always come back to see if maybe, this time, it would taste like Cedric.

Her mouth was all wrong, anyway. He wasn't trying to say she wasn't good at it, because she was. It was his favorite part of their game (he supposed he could call it that; she always did when she was angry) because it was easier to pretend it was still Cedric. Except Cedric had loved him. Cho hated him and loved him and was furious and confused, and somehow she channeled all of that to her mouth, every single time, and he could feel it all. He'd heard of reading people through their eyes, their gestures, even their kiss, but never through the feel of their mouth on your cock. In that moment where she assumed he was all lost to passion and pretending, his head was actually spinning with her personality. And he was delirious and almost happy until it was over and he realized that he'd wasted it all thinking of her and wondering why her mouth felt like she was crying, because her face was always dry when he looked at her.

"Why do women close their eyes during sex? …They can't stand to see a man having a good time." She tried to laugh when she heard it, but really, it wasn't a joke to her. Or it was too much of a joke. Except they hadn't quite gotten it. She closed her eyes because she could no longer take staring up at him like a little girl waiting for reassurance that she'd done a good job. She hated feeling so responsible for his emotions; it was enough to make her regret every decision all the way back to agreeing to attend the Yule Ball with Cedric. She couldn't handle seeing that once again she was wrong about this time being the one to fix everything. She closed her eyes because she couldn't stand watching him trying to have a good time and failing. And it took her a very long time to open them afterwards.

He wasn't used to touching a girl. He didn't know how they were supposed to be handled. At first it didn't matter much, but when he saw the marks on her wrist he cringed. He thought about apologizing, but was it really worth it when he was only going to do it again? He grabbed her too roughly because he needed her too much. Because he didn't think himself capable of hurting her until she stood naked in front of him and he couldn't look away anymore. The first time, it had jumped into his head to ask "who did this to you?" …but he wasn't that stupid and somehow he wasn't supposed to even care. But he did, because he couldn't even kiss the bruises the way Cedric used to kiss Harry's. He turned her into something ugly, every single time, and he couldn't even apologize because the only time he tried the violet looked so awful against her pale body that he bit instead of kissed and she locked herself in the bathroom for the rest of the night.

She couldn't look at herself anymore. Maybe no one would believe her, but she had liked her body. Not to the point of narcissism or anything, but it wasn't as if she'd felt the urge to cry every time she looked in the mirror. For the most part, she'd been comfortable, accepting of herself. Now she couldn't look. She constantly felt like she was trying to jump out of her own skin. She had to shower to remove his scent, but once she was there she found it hard to touch her body, to put her hands where his had been. He'd taken something that was inherently hers and cut his ownership so deep that if her fingers so much as brushed her own skin she felt like she was trespassing on someone else's property. Forget not being a person, she wasn't even a body anymore. She was a fucking puppet. And she stood there until the water ran cold and she was forced to pick up the soap and deal with doing Harry Potter's laundry.

"Cho?"

She wanted to pretend she hadn't heard him, but she couldn't remember the last time he'd actually said her name. "What?" She hadn't meant for it to sound so bitter. She didn't look at him.

He sighed, his fingers shaking too much to unzipper his pants. He'd let her do it. "Did you love him?"

He saw her hands pause, her shirt half-unbuttoned. "…I wanted to." Maybe. She didn't know anymore.

He nodded, though she didn't see it. "Do you think this is helping to keep him alive?"

She laughed, loud and flat. "Oh Harry." She turned and looked at him now. "I think this is killing him even more."

His eyes darkened. "He doesn't deserve that."

"No," she agreed, her tiny fingers beginning to work on removing his pants. "But we do."