He looks like death, she decides one morning.
Each day they wake alongside the sun and sit in the common room and pretend to study or read the Prophet (how could he, her father?). Really they are waiting for the Carrows to wake up and begin their day. Or Pansy Parkinson or Edgar Rosier or Timothy Rowle or any of the crueler students fit to cackle and punish and hurt and hate.
Timothy Rowle had been her first kiss, she suddenly realises, and the memory of a snowy garden is distance, as if it had happened in another life. Now those same lips that had touched hers mutter the Unforgivable Curses (he didn't even have the guts to be one of the ones who enjoys shouting them).
They sit like this, her and Theo, wordlessly like two body guards and wait. It's easier to protect the first and second years this way. And maybe each other.
It's been two months, and the exhaustion of trying to protect doesn't quite gnaw at them anymore, just like how they've grown used to blood and terror and hexes so vile they'd make Hecate squirm.
The dungeons are quiet in the morning. So quiet, if you think it hard enough it feels like it could stay that way forever.
It never does.
This morning she hasn't slept a wink and she knows he hasn't either. She knows she should pretend to read her Herbology textbook, out of politeness (although her staring has never bothered him, not even when she was a first year).
He looks like death - black hair curled against his neck, gnarled and ugly and greasy, lilac bags under his eyes like the bruises of a dead man, eyes black and soulless like those on a corpse.
She wonders if she looks like that. She decides that she does. She thinks her mother and father made her and Daphne that way.
She reaches up to stroke the scar that runs down the curve of her neck - hidden kindly by her hair. She wonders how much longer she can survive at Hogwarts. Everyday she feels her hand flinching to grasp her wand or the first syllables of fury escape from her mouth.
She wonders how many more children she will see tortured, before she does anything more than cry about it and heal their wounds later. (Why did that fucking hat make her this way?)
But Astoria is a kind girl (a blood traitor). Cheekbones like a pure blood (A corpse).
One day she'll start bleeding and she'll never stop, and everyone else, all the people she knows, she'll drown them with her. Preferably, this would happen before she went home for the Christmas holidays, where she believes men in masks pervert her childhood.
Her skin feels taught and tight like it might explode and she wonders if this is how he felt for seven years, awful and terrible and hideous and vile like a thestral. That was the difference between them - he had always been like this, always smelled like a slaughterhouse, always carried death with him wherever he went, and now we stink together, she supposed, stink of decay and rot and vile things.
He feels her staring and looks up from the book he was pretending to read.
"Astoria?" He asks gently, like the wind that whistles through a graveyard, and he has become ever so gentle this past term. It is what has forced her to fall in love with him.
Sometimes she wonders if he does it just for her or if he does it because he really wants to. She decides it doesn't matter either way. Sometimes, though, she wonders if he does it because he can feel her watching the sleeve of his left arm, willing it to move, just so she can see the skin is really smooth and pale and unmarked like he says it is.
Guilt flushes through her like adrenaline and she scolds herself for being stupid.
"Nothing." Her voice scratches. She cringes. It's weak and girly and shaky and she could burst into tears with how badly she wants Harry Potter.
The terror makes the Gryffindors even more certain that he will return to them, and this makes Astoria jealous and angry and pitifully sad for herself all at the same time. She smelled death where they smelled life - Ginny Weasley with her bright red hair - because after this his defeat they would go on, perfect pink babies in perfect loving families.
If the Dark Lord succeeds, her father will kill her. She knows he will. Because the war would have broken her, the defeat, it would make her insane. She couldn't - she wouldn't live in that world. If father didn't kill her she'd do it herself.
She and Theo could run away to Berlin and live inside the wall. Their babies would all be stillborn - or they'd shake them the way that muggles do so that they'd stop crying. They'd have seven tiny little headstones with thestrals carved in the stone.
Theo's eyelids are heavy and purple and he's dying and he's beautiful.
"Nothing, Theo." She says again, stronger this time, clearing her throat from tue phlegm and dust.
She realises then they'll never marry, and the thought is worse than her father wrapping his hands around her scarred neck.