Title: paint my skin in harmonies

Pairing/Prompts: LouisLucy, The Gift Giving Extravaganza, Any Next-Gen Cousincest Combination, diminuendo.

Recipient: Cassidy, my darling, also known as Sid, Cass, bby, Pesto, flawless human being, more widely known as our dancing days.

Notes: This is for the one, the only, the beautiful, Cass. What can I say? She seems to enjoy tearing my heart to shreds with her crazy writing skills and she has made me ship so many pairings I can't even count. She's also one of my best friends, one of my fabulous wives and we're planning on having a crazy road trip across Europe with Ali and a squirrel. She's nice enough to put up with my constant Skype fangirling, lack of typing skills and she's the flawless human that invented glasglow, muffius and charocs. So, Cass, bby, this is for you, I hope you like it sweetie. Love you gurl, you're perf. [All my love to Ali (forgotten timelords) for betaing – you're amazing. Wquah]. On with the show:

You fill the empty, white space between you with notes and crescendos and you let the treble clef bind you together – tie you up in knots and pull you closer, closer, closer still, maybe even too close. You draw over the suffocating, blank walls you've spent your lives enclosed in with tender lines of harmonies and clusters, chords and diminuendos, you draw staves and notes in emerald ink and explosive colours, trying desperately to escape the archetype and paint the world in your emotions, immerse them in your music. You fall in love with the music and, somewhere along the line; you maybe even fall in love with each other.

You run your hands over each other's skin, leaving melodies you can never hope to sing etched across your spine, collarbones, shoulder blades, in your desperate attempt to become yourselves, to become who you've always wanted to be. You kiss each other, placing accompaniments that will never be sung, never be exposed, on the tip of one another's tongue, just to try and escape the corners they've drawn you in to.

This is wrong, you whisper between frantic kisses, this is wrong, we should stop, you murmur as you paint semi-quavers and ledger lines across freckled, honey skin. But you really mean don't ever leave me, carry on etching this melody across my heart, my bones, my flesh, sing me a tune until it is engraved in my mind, let my blood run with semibreves and quavers, immerse me in music and save me.

You can't deny that you both need fixing, you both need saving, so you continue and you block out the world and you colour each other's skin in, with notes that feel like endless possibilities and a beat that promises to never, ever stop.

We're so fucked up, Luce, can't you see it, you mumble as you pluck each other's heartstrings with faltering pace, what are we doing, Louis, what have we become, she begs as you drum the rhythm that goes round and round in your head onto each other's ribs, cheekbones, shoulders. But you both know that what she really means is nothing has ever felt more right, this is what we were born to do, tap this beat until I can't get it out of my head, colour me in with symphonies and harmonies and crescendos, fill my eyes with diminuendos and chords, sing me a thousand lullabies, play me a million tunes and keep holding on.

You sing in angelic voices, glide over keys of ivory, tap your feet to a rhythm no one else can hear, scribble on blank staves and speak in sharp, staccato patterns. You carve concertos into each other's bones, paint piano keys and violins on your knuckles and argue about three-four versus eight-six timing over breakfast.

You're both naïve, carefree and in love with crescendos and diminuendos, painting symphonies across the ledger lines of ribcages and the beat that encircles your minds constantly. You're in love with music and, perhaps, you're even in love with each other. Maybe it's more than love - perhaps it's obsession – unforgiving, manic, obsession. An obsession with clusters of notes that rise and fall in haunting patterns; an obsession with golden hair, moonlit trysts, cream paper scattered with black marks and each other; an obsession that promises to never, ever end.

You carry on painting the walls with your obsession, with the marks of your love, filling the blank empty spaces with tender circles of rising melodies, no matter what they try and tell you because, perhaps, they can't decipher the marks you've left across each other.

Maybe it's not obsession. Maybe it's just love.

The obsession was forced upon you from a young age, you were both pushed into the world of music, without a say in the matter. Your parents told you that you were going to sing, you were going to play the piano and you were going to learn to read the black marks that danced their way across the ledger lines, or, as they called them 'musical notes'. And, so, of course you did.

You picked up music books, in bright colours with gaudy titles and illustrations, books aimed at children and you played short, drab, repetitive patterns that were meant to be played for learning rather than enjoyment, filled with clusters of notes that remained as black ink marks on the paper.

You played those meaningless patterns – those children's songs designed for beginners with ridiculous words and simple tunes that never really flowed, awkward phrases with rigid key signatures and rigid timing – until you knew the book cover to cover and your eyes were blurred with lines of crotchets and four-four time signatures.

Your parents bought you more of those lifeless, dull, gaudy books, claiming that you were still learning, ignoring your protests that you wanted, that you needed something more. They told you what you were going to play and when you were going to play it and they pushed you into corners, enclosing you with ledger lines and treble clefs, dictating your life through the steady pitch and tempo of those short repetitive phrases.

You played those books until your fingers knew the patterns so well, you could play them in your sleep. You played those books until you began to resent the keys of ivory, the thin strings, the harmonies. You played those books until your neck ached and your eyes blurred, until you could no longer stand to listen to them anymore. You slammed the lid and you shut the case, you threw the books in the bin, you vowed to never ever, ever touch another piece of music again. You were both nine and back then, everything lasted forever and promises felt like unbreakable vows.

When you were thirteen, you could no longer resist the temptation. You stumbled across a proper book of music and you both picked up it up, turned the tattered red and gold cover and you never looked back. You fell headfirst into the pages of monochrome ink stains; you danced across the ledger lines; you fell in love with legatos and you embraced the treble clef as though it was an old friend. You sat for hours, together, in the Room of Requirement, surrounded by the gentle tick of the clock and the song of the instruments you held so lovingly.

You whiled away many a day there – just the two of you and the comforting tune of the melodic instruments you cherished so much. In those days, you needed the golden silence and the silver song of the piano far, far more than you knew at the time. Each other's presence and the gentle tempo of the music was the only thing holding you together, blocking out divorce, death, media attention, breakdowns and despair. The treble clef held you together, stopped you from breaking, cracking and smashing into irreparable pieces and one another's presence kept you sane – your comfortable companionship knitted you closely together.

It started out as hands innocently brushing against each other and before you knew it, you were pushed up against each other, kissing violently and passionately, leaving lyrics that could never truly be sung on the tip of one another's tongue.

Music healed you both, the soft rising and falling of the melody stitched you both back together, made you both whole and bound you tightly to one another.

But music also broke you, it tore you apart from the rest of the world – the ledger lines wrapped you up and made sure that you could never ever be torn apart, but they also enclosed you; they separated you from everyone else and now, no one seems to understand you – you're nothing but two cousins involved in a forbidden relationship with bass clefs scarred across your wrists with the whole world against you. You're nothing but silly little children with harmonies echoing round and round your heads and you can't help but tap your fingers to the rhythm that never seems to leave your mind. The concertos ravage your mind; quavers and crotchets dance across your eyes and your fingers constantly jerk with the ache and desire of wanting, craving, needing your fingers to drift across keys and strings, needing to create music.

And now, you fall into broom closets, the steady beat of your hearts and that never ending drum beat the only sounds that surround you, and you engrave treble clefs and sonatas into each other's bones until your honey skin drips red blood made of semibreves and obsession and forbidden love. You run your hands over each other and you whisper prayers of salvation, declarations of love and poetic lyrics into each other's ears, trapped within your electric fence of lust and crescendos.

You draw circles around each other with staves and you let nobody but each other in. You walk around school with your skin coloured with each other's love and musical notes – a phrase stitches the skin above your eyebrow together, your cheekbones are lined with chords, your collarbones are lined with staccato beats, an F Sharp scale dances down your arm and your spine flows with a river of crescendos and diminuendos. You wear these marks, these scars like they're war medals, but no one else quite seems it the same way. They think it's shameful, odd, wrong, and that you should be hiding in dusty corners in glaring white rooms, rather than strolling about an ancient castle, wearing dishonour as though it's a prize. They don't understand that it's more than just an obsession. They don't understand you.

No one seems to understand you anymore.

All you have left is each other; the golden song of the instruments that have made you and broken you and set the world against you and the scars and sonatas of your love.

Maybe it's not enough.

Maybe it is.

Maybe you'll have to take a risk and find out the truth the hard way.

You climb to the top of the Astronomy Tower together, you take your violin and she takes her book of lyrics and you play one final piece together – it's beautiful, haunting and it may be the best thing you've ever played. You paint one final stanza and an accompaniment across her freckled golden skin and you smile at each other one final time.

If you could compose a song about this moment, it would be clear, uncluttered and beautiful, a gently rising crescendo filled with promise, skin painted in mossy green sonatas and cerulean harmonies and indigo eyes filled with sunsets and tears of maybes.

You hold out your hand and she nods, her golden hair catching the sunlight. You take a step closer to the edge and you close your eyes, spread your wings and hope that the next crescendo will catch you.

You look at her face one last time and an aureolin harmony on the bridge of her nose glints in the last rays of the day, sparking memories of monochrome books, kissing against an ebony piano, drawing across each other's skin in azure ink and turning each other into masterpieces of lyrics and chords and riots of colours.

You realise that you're not ready, that you're not ready to jump

You step back from the edge and you pull her with you, pull her into her arms. You let the treble clef pull you closer together and you paint one last violet sonata across her ribcage. It's a masterpiece - perhaps the best thing you've ever composed and then you kiss her, kiss her properly, without feeling the need to whisper lyrics in her ears or engrave your love across her skin for what feels like the first time.

And, finally, you see through the colours you've etched upon her and you realise, with heart stopping joy that it's her you love, not the music you've covered her in but her, Lucy Weasley.

This is how the realisation hits you - not with a violin, nor rose petals or a concerto composed in her name but with a violet sonata, a thwarted jump and tears of pearlescent joy erasing the labels you've drawn across one another.

And, it finally feels like freedom.