searing lips and frosted fingertips

...

Scorpius' hands are always cold.

Rose decides she needs to fix this.

It takes a while – she has to control her own heat so that she doesn't melt him down to a puddle at her feet (but she still does and she is gorgeous). She has to learn to chip away at the cracks, piece by piece, taking it slow, one foot after the other.

With time, his eyes thaw into something resembling affection, alight with knowing her so well; but this light casts shadows in the recesses of his heart and mind, cloaking doubt and uncertainty and fear that keep a tight leash on the other things, the more important things that can't seem to penetrate his shell of ice.

Rose knows she must tread lightly. It's thin ice she's walking on, and it'll hurt them both if she takes a wrong step and falls through to the cold water: He will freeze her bones solid, and she will melt the edges of the hole away and drown.

But in the end, she does take a wrong step, and it does hurt them both, in the best way possible, so that they embrace it, embrace each other in the middle of the icyicy water, struggling to keep their heads from going under. They are each other's lifeline.

And when they emerge, they are shivering from more than just the cold and the sun is still shining and somehow, some way, something undeniably beautiful has just occurred.

A pause, inches away, begging her for permission, hardly daring to look at her. He is so tantalizingly close, his breath mixing with hers; his mouth begins to curve around her name, Rose.

Then they are both sighing, "Finally" against a pair of hotblazingsearing lips – she loses her fingers in his hair, and before long they are just as coldfrozenfrosted as his, numb, even though she has never felt so much so strongly all at once.

Together, they are burning and freezing at the same time, and nothing so wrong has ever been so right.


a/n: my first ever rose/scorp, although i've been meaning to write them for a while. i mean, really, it's inevitable. lily'll just have to fall in love with some other random bloke. :P ugh, one thing i don't like about this is that i played the old 'fire and ice' card, and i've never particularly enjoyed that. too cliched. but whatever, i guess.

please, any thoughts you have will be much appreciated. what did you like? hate? what could i have done better?

thanks for reading.

~whispered touches

disclaimer: i do not own rose or scorpius or harry potter. they belong to jkr.

(also, i have to confess i don't own the style for the title, which was inspired by somewhat lovely's Metallic Lips and Stained Fingertips, which is not rose/scorp and has nothing to do with this story, but is a wonderful harry/ginny fic and should be read immediately following your review. :))