DISCLAIMER: Harry Potter belongs to JK Rowling.
~ Pretentious Attention ~
She should not be here. She should be at home, where she has an infant to tend to and a husband who adores her. She should not here with a man she hates. She should not be in his bed, letting him do all manner of things to her that her husband is too sweet (and too fat) to even think of trying.
She likes to think she's happy with the life that she has built for herself, but she can never truly be happy while she is still clinging to the past. She is a broken puzzle piece, trying to fit into a scene which has no aperture for her awkwardly shaped edges.
She should be at home with her family, not here scrounging for scraps of intimacy and affection from her sister's old discarded leftovers.
"I hate you," she whispers as she curls into his side, but there is no venom in her tone.
"I'm glad," he replies, more amused that anything else. "I've seen the way you treat the people you claim to love."
Not bothering to try to refute that statement, she hisses, "I hate you."
"You keep saying that," he says. "But if it were true, why would you be here with me instead of at home with your loving husband?"
She buries her face against his chest and does not answer. He idly strokes her hair.
"Maybe you do hate me," he says. "But I think you hate yourself more."
"Shut up!" She swats him on the shoulder to punctuate the command. Sitting up straight, she declares, "I love myself. In fact, I love myself so much that I'm practically a narcissist."
He does not respond to that and she falls silent as well, settling comfortably against his side once more. He wraps his arms around her and holds her close. He doesn't mind cuddling, even though she is starting to feel more like a skeleton than a person.
She doesn't hate him as much as she'd like to think she does, he's sure. She certainly doesn't love herself as she claims. Narcissists do not know that they are narcissists. If anything, she has an inferiority complex. That, coupled with the anorexia and the obsessive-compulsive disorder (both of which he has seen enough evidence that he is certain she suffers from them), must make for a rather unbearable existence.
It is little wonder to him that she sometimes needs a break from her "perfect" life. How ironic that her former childhood tormentor has become her last bastion of sanity.
He knows her presence in his life could destroy him if any of the other Death Eaters were to find out, but when she comes to him in the night he somehow can't quite bring himself to turn her away.
~end~