At first it was all sneaking around and pretending not to notice. He was a Ravenclaw and you were a Gryffindor so it wasn't terribly difficult, in all honesty. You like to exaggerate the difficulty, you like to make it seem like you had it worse than you really did, because you need something to help you justify your actions.

You can't remember when it started now, the first time you caught him looking at you the way you used to look at him, the first time he dragged you into the hollow behind the tapestry in the third floor corridor in the east wing and kissed you senseless. Time seems to have almost blurred the events into one long string of kisses and touches, unimportant details like when and where erased.

The Shrieking Shack became you hideaway, nights of smoky kisses and whisky, things that you griped at your sister for doing, things that you swore you would never do yourself, but Scorpius just had this was of making your head turn topsy-turvy.

You knew it would never last though, you were a Potter and he was Scorpius Malfoy. Two conflicting worlds, the good and the bad, the pure and the tarnished.

But you weren't pure, you too were now flawed, the travesty of what you and Scorp had done would haunt you for the rest of your life.

You tried to give it up, tried to break it off, to somehow fix what was broken in you. Lily found out one day, the first time the two of you gave in after so long. She stumbled across the two of you secluded away in a corner of the dungeons. The price of her silence was your bottle of whisky and a lighter, things you handed over to her with a sigh of relief, glad for once that your little sister could be bought so easily.

She came to find you later that night, sneaking into the Gryffindor common room with practiced ease, the silver and emerald of the school tie looped around her hair glittering in the dying firelight.

"Please Al," she whispered "just think. If anyone ever finds out, if the press ever finds out, you're both done, over."

You had shouted at her that you knew that; that you had tried long and hard to defeat this longing inside you, to quell the yearning for Scorpius that beat a rhythm through your very bones. She had turned to go, yanking her heels off to creep along the corridor, turning back one last time, hurt burning through her eyes.

Maybe you would have done it differently if you had known that that would be the last time you ever saw your baby sister.

One of the second year boys had been listening from the staircase, and by the time you awoke the next morning, the whole school knew about you and Scorpius.

So you took the coward's way out, and you ran.

Scorpius tried to tell you that this was for the best, that this way you could live together, forever happy. You weren't as sure as him, but followed him all the same, France to Spain, Portugal to Brazil, Mexico to the US.

You dropped your names along the way, being a Potter was just a distant memory now. You lost your floppy black hair, your circle-rimmed glasses and your public school boy accent. You fled across deserts and mountains, trying to leave England far behind.

You weren't quite sure who you were anymore, but so long as you had Scorpius' hand to hold during the day, and his body to curl around at night, you were happy; because you had been brave enough to take what mattered the most to you, at the cost of everything else you had held dear.

You're just revelling in the delicious fragility of this travesty.