Please review, darlings. This came to me in a moment of slight madness, and I'm interested to see what you all think.
I don't own. Obviously. If I did, someone wouldn't have ended up dead in a cave- he would have been recognized as the hero he was.
An endless series of questions, of numbers that didn't add up to two or four, but instead to infinity. How can I love her? How can I not? The answer was in her eyes, her pale, flighty hands, the smooth secret patch of skin behind her ears that she loved him to caress, the flyaways in her thin white-blonde hair, the way she bit her lip and crossed her legs, the way she smiled- shyly, insincerely, vulnerability seeping out of the edges. It was simple arithmetic, dazzlingly mundane if he thought about it.
Narcissa. Regulus. Love.
What is love if not obsession? If not carefully constructed madness?
He was never the sentimental sort, at least not as a child; he was the sort that tore the wings off butterflies not out of malice but out of curiosity. Who broke things to see how they fit together. The things Regulus cherished most always ended up in shreds.
Like a forgotten teddy bear or a quidditch banner.
Like a brother.
Sometimes it became too much for him; he'd imagine her pale neck thrust upwards, a shimmer of sweat across the small of her back, his hand tangled in her hair. A cruel smile on his lips as his fingers clamped down against her windpipe, as her face turned blue and the light left her eyes.
Love isn't pretty. It isn't delicate. It is brutal and quick and stabs like a letter-opener into an eye socket.
With bated breath he'd cry for her, and wake up to sheets around him tangled and soaked in sweat and semen as he drowned himself in his agony.
As daylight cast its first rays across his pillow, he would lie numbly, face turned involuntarily towards the window, the glass bending and distorting the morning light. He let the sun burn his eyes. He wished it was her, mercilessly beaming down at him with those colorless eyes. It was always the things he loved that hurt him. Unless he hurt them first.