Pairing: Zacharias Smith/Daphne Greengrass
Summary: In war-torn England, one is captive and the other captor. Will dark things ensue?
Rating: M. Adult themes and adult language.
Warning: Reader beware. This one is darker than I usually write, as per the request.
Author's Notes: This fic was written for faith as part of the 2007 LJ Zacharias & Daphne Fic Exchange. Many thanks to my three betas, whose spirited discourse kept me busy. The title was taken from the third movement of Claude Debussy's Suite Bergamasque.
ORIGINAL REQUEST:
BRIEFLY describe what you'd like to receive in a fic: During the war, Daphne Greengrass is captured by radical members of the Order and mistakenly branded/treated as a Death Eater.
the tone/mood desired: Dark, with very minimal usage of humor
a theme/element/line of dialogue/object you would like in your fic:Musicbox that plays Debussy's "Claire de Lune"
rating of the the fic you want: PG-13 - NC-17
canon or AU? AU :)
deal breakers (what don't you want?): Too many mentions of other pairings
Clair de Lune
Part I
Into the Darkness
"I told them not to use the shackles," Zacharias mutters, tapping the iron cufflinks with his wand. When the heavy manacles break open and fall to the floor, huge bleeding sores cover her wrists.
"I'm a Death Eater or haven't you heard?" she hisses, wincing as he picks up her left hand and examines her wrist.
He glances at her before lifting the sleeve of her robe and looking at her forearm. Its delicate ivory skin is without a blemish. There is no Dark Mark.
"There are Death Eaters who wear the Dark Mark and those that don't. You don't." That said, he casts several healing charms that leave her slender wrists as flawless as her left forearm.
"How do you tell the difference between a Death Eater who doesn't wear the Mark and an innocent bystander?"
"If you were an innocent bystander, you wouldn't be here." Zacharias throws a set of yellow prisoner's robes at Daphne, who catches them in her arms. "Put those on and place your clothes on the table."
Daphne looks at Zacharias, who is leaning against the wall staring at her.
"Aren't you going to turn around?"
"Nope."
"Bastard," she mutters under her breath.
"Bastard to you. Sensible to me. It's all a matter of perspective. If I turn my back, you could disarm me or worse." He pauses, looks her up and down and continues, "Don't worry. I don't get my jollies off of female prisoners, no matter how attractive they might find themselves."
Snorting, Daphne spins around, strips down to her knickers and bra before reaching for the set of yellow cotton robes.
"Your boots and socks as well."
Cursing, Daphne bends over, pulls off her boots and socks, fully aware of the picture she is presenting for him. Then she grabs the set of yellow robes and throws them over her shivering body. The temperature is near freezing in the small cell.
When she turns around, flush with anger and embarrassment, he has her clothes and boots in hand.
"It's harder to escape with no boots." Then he points his wand at a clean pair of thin socks. "That's what you'll be wearing for the duration of your stay here." He bids her goodnight with a nod of his head and Disapparates before her furious eyes.
Escape? How the hell does one escape from a cell with no windows and no doors?
And the lights go out.
----- ----- -----
"It's not true, you know," she says, moments after coming out of her interrogation session.
He's in the hallway waiting to escort her back to her cell. They've been coming and going between her cell and the interrogation chamber for over a week.
"What's not true?" he asks, placing his hand on her shoulder, preparing to Disapparate her back to her cell.
"I haven't been vaccinated against Veritaserum."
"CRACK!"
They land in her cell.
"That's not what we've heard."
"You've only heard what they want you to hear. And I'm here because they want me to be here. I'm no more a Death Eater than you are."
She feels his hand lifting off of her shoulder, and she turns around to look into his stubborn eyes. When he doesn't respond, she sighs.
"You think I'm lying, don't you?"
"It's not my job to decide that."
"Does the truth mean anything to you people? Did it ever occur to you that your informant stinks? That he or she maybe a double agent?"
He doesn't answer.
"They won't let me out of here, will they?"
"No."
"Will you?"
"No." He looks at her and sighs, "Your only way out of here is giving them the information they want. You give them that, and you'll get out of here. Nothing else will gain your release."
p Two days later, another guard comes to take her to her interrogation session. Zacharias has been called away to his other duties. When she asks where he's gone, no one will tell her.
----- ----- -----
She stares into the darkness. She can't see her hand in front of her face. It's darker than dark. It's black. There's no alternating day and night, only night. They cut off the light in her cell when she couldn't give them the information they demanded.
She's lost all sense of time. Has she been here a month or two months or a year? She doesn't know. No one talks to her. Zacharias talked to her. No one touches her. They use a leather noose around her throat to side-by-side Apparate. The guards are as anonymous to her as she is to them, changing almost daily now.
She isn't lonely because she has two constant companions, hunger and cold. Long periods of time pass with no food or water. She doesn't know if it's been a day or two days or more since her last foul-tasting meal, eaten in the dark. She is weak from the lack of food. She tries not to move because movement wastes energy. And there is her other unrelenting companion, cold. It seeps under her skin and into her bones and twists around her aching head, where fears of hypothermia and death chase her in the dark as she lies naked and shivering on her cot, the sound of her own heart pounding until it deafens her.
"CRAAACK!"
A blinding light illuminates her cell with the strength of a thousand candles. And it hurts. She shields her eyes with the back of her hand.
The guard raps her with his steel rod before her eyes can adjust to the light.
She sits and puts the blanket aside. Where is her indignation and shame at her lack of clothing? Gone with everything else they've taken. She doesn't remember when they took her clothing away, but they told her she must earn it back by giving them the information they need. Her bare feet hit the frozen floor, and she stands, but when she stands, the room spins. She is weak-headed from a lack of food, another punishment for her lack of cooperation. The guard slams the side of the rod into her stomach like a Beater to a Bludger, causing her to gasp and double over onto the floor in agony. Then he slips the leather noose around her neck and casually Apparates her to another interrogation session where she will be beaten again.
The following week they continue to beat her, only now they beat her until she is unconscious. She prays for death and stops eating.
----- ----- -----
The lights in her cell flicker on and hiss while casting out gentle waves of illumination into the dank space and lighting up her emaciated and motionless form, covered in a filthy, tattered cotton blanket. She doesn't react to the light. In her world, there is no light.
"I've brought you hot soup and bread."
She opens her eyes, startled. No one speaks to her. She looks over at the guard, but it isn't a guard. It's Zacharias. He's back. She struggles to sit up.
"No, don't," he cautions, walking over to her cot from the other side of the room where he placed the tray of food on a rickety wooden table. "You're too weak.
When he reaches out to assist her, she shrinks back and holds the blanket firm against her chest. Ignoring her, he grabs a firm hold of both her forearms and hauls her upright into a sitting position. As he does this, the blanket slips, revealing her breasts and her upper torso, littered with raging purple bruises and scars. As soon as he releases her, she snatches up the ragged blanket and covers herself, embarrassed by her nudity for the first time in months.
Without pausing, Zacharias conjures up a set of pristine yellow robes, white knickers and thick woollen socks. He hands them to her and turns around. Daphne stares at the clothes and then at Zacharias.
"Go on," he orders when he hears no movement from her, "put them on, or you'll catch your death in here." While Daphne scampers into her new clothes, Zacharias casts a series of warming spells, chasing away the cold and bringing the temperature in her cell up to something inhabitable.
She watches as he brings the tray of food from across the room and sets it down on her lap.
"I want you to try and eat some of this."
The fragrant aroma of hot lentil soup seeps into the air. He pulls a wooden chair up to her bedside and watches as she picks up the spoon with a trembling hand and takes a small sip of the delicious mixture. Her eyes go wide as the warm liquid tumbles down her throat and into her growling stomach where it lands with a delighted splash. It's the most divine tasting food she has ever eaten. She devours sip after sip and begins ripping off pieces of bread and shoving them into her mouth.
"Slowly or you'll make yourself sick."
She doesn't slow down. She eats faster and faster until her spoon strikes the empty bowl. Then she sticks her fingers inside the bowl, scraps up the remaining liquid and sucks the precious last drops from her fingers.
"Here, I've nicked this for you," he says, taking out a small blue vial from his robes. "It'll help with your fever. I've added a few drops of strengthening potion as well."
She nods and swallows it like an obedient dog. Fever? Does she have a fever? Is that the odd warmth in the room?
He stands, collects her tray and Disapparates. She braces herself, waiting for the light in her cell to disappear, for the cold to come seeping back in. She waits and waits but nothing happens. The light and the warmth hold. She slips back into bed under the thin blanket and stares at the ceiling.
----- ----- -----
Over the next month, Zacharias woos Daphne back to life. He not only returns night and day to her cell and warmth to her life, but he also brings her special foods, a heavy blanket, strengthening potions, an oversized woollen jumper and even house slippers in addition to her thick socks. She waits for his daily visits and no longer dreams of death. The interrogation sessions and the beatings stop. She doesn't ask him what he's done to make that possible. She refuses to believe that they finally realize she doesn't have the information they want, that she can't give them something she doesn't have.
"I thought you might fancy this," he says late one evening.
"What is it?" she asks, leaning over to watch as he fishes around the pockets of his robes.
"There you go." He places a small wooden box with an intricate inlay pattern into her hands.
Daphne stares at the box and then at Zacharias.
"Open it," he says. "It's for you."
She opens it, and when she does, glorious, haunting music fills the room, chasing away the chill and the darkness and filling her soul with hope.
"It's beautiful. What is it?"
"It's you," he says.
"Me?"
He smiles, the first smile she's ever seen on his face. "It masquerades as "Clair de Lune" by Claude Debussy, but it's really you."
She doesn't know who Claude Debussy is and has never heard of his "Clair de Lune", but she hugs the music box to her chest. Of all the gifts he's given her, this is the one that will most transform her endless incarceration. It will lift her out of her dank cell and let her dance among the shimmering stars and frolic in the fragrant wild meadows that live on in her mind and her heart.
She looks at the beautiful box, wondering where it came from. Is it a stolen treasure? Her belongings were confiscated the day she entered this hellhole, and she's never seen them again. Do the guards divvy things up or simply help themselves on a first come first serve basis? Is the original owner dead? She doesn't want to know. She doesn't care. It's her music box now.
"Thank you," she says, tears filling her eyes.
----- ----- -----
One night, he sneaks her out of her cell with its myriad wards and into his quarters for a shower, her first real shower since her imprisonment. When they land in his room, he releases her hand from his. She looks around his personal space. It's a typical soldier's quarters: a bed, a desk and a chest of drawers fill the modest space. She can't help herself. She's drawn in.
He watches as she lingers over the few objects strewn about. She reads the titles of his books, runs her fingers over the handle of his broom, and stares at pictures of his Hogwarts Quidditch team and of his parents. He waits as she picks up the picture of his parents and studies it.
She decides he rather favours his mother, an elegant blonde, but he has his father's penetrating cerulean eyes.
"Go on," he says, handing her a soft white cotton towel.
"I'll be as quick as I can." She grabs the towel and rushes into the bathroom, not bothering to lock the door.
When she emerges from the steaming room more minutes later than she intended, she finds him lying down on his bed reading. She's never seen him like this. What else does he do when he's not tending to his prisoners? Do the guards play an occasional game of Quidditch? Where does he eat his meals?
"All done?" he asks, putting the book aside and sitting up.
"Did I take too long?"
"Of course, not. Come here."
She sits down on the bed beside him, her face flush and limbs relaxed from the hot water beating down on her. Zacharias takes out his wand and casts a series of drying spells on her hair then stares at his handiwork.
"There. Much better."
Daphne laughs, startling Zacharias. It's the first time he's heard the melodious sound emanating from her throat. Her infectious smile transforms her face, and he's captivated.
"You're beautiful," he whispers, his hand reaching out to touch her. It's an exquisite face, a perfect face. He rests the palm of his rough hand on her soft cheek.
The laughter in Daphne's throat dies, and she stares at Zacharias, at the fascination on his face. He has never touched her before - not like this. Is she beautiful? She doesn't feel beautiful, and she hasn't seen her own face in eight months. Daphne turns until her lips meet his palm. Then she kisses it, a gentle, tentative kiss. Zacharias gasps, and Daphne kisses his palm again and again, each time deeper, longer and more passionate, leaning into the kiss until she is pressed up against him.
Zacharias remains as motionless as a human being can be without rigor mortis setting in, but she doesn't stop. Instead, she kisses him. She impales his cool lips with hers, hot and moist and deadly. They tenderly cajole and beseech him to join her, killing whatever futile resistance he might have had to her and trampling the nexus of morals and self-respect he's been hanging onto for the past many weeks as he spends day in and day out with her, enticing her back to life and then some. She doesn't think he expects this, does she?
But Zacharias can't think with her this close. He can't remember what is wrong with something that feels so right. He can't remember who is prisoner and who guard. When he feels Daphne hesitate and falter while waiting for him, Zacharias reaches out and pulls her to him, crushing her lips beneath his and kissing her back until he feels the room revolving around that intoxicating kiss, around the juncture of their two aching bodies. His hands are on her, roaming up and down in places he shouldn't, stroking her curves and delighting in her heated response to his touch. And he doesn't want to stop. He wants more. He wants all of her. He has wanted her for so long.
Her hands are on him, desperately grabbing and touching in a hurried exploration. She tears at his robes and his shirt, at anything that separates the two. She's fumbling with his belt and his trousers when he slips her yellow robes off her shoulders. They tumble down around her waist, exposing her chest and her back. Their lingering bruises and scars scream in the brutal light of his room. This is no moonlit romantic interlude. His hands freeze.
Zacharias goes cold and sick in the pit of his stomach, until he feels he might wretch all over both of them. This isn't what he wants for them. Not here. Not like this. He jerks the yellow robes back up over Daphne, covering her scars and her bruises. Then he pushes back and stands, stumbling as he pulls up his pants and tries to buckle his belt.
He is so disoriented and nauseous that he doesn't remember his fallen wand on the bed, not until she picks it up. Zacharias looks at Daphne, who is staring at the wand in her hand. Then she looks up, and her startled dark eyes meet his. Each stares at the other for many minutes, until Daphne whispers, "I'm sorry," and Disapparates from his view and his room and his life.
Zacharias collapses against the wall and eases his grip on his second wand. No soldier carries one wand in a war.
Part II
Lost
A week after the war ends, when his part in the interrogation and torture tactics at the outpost comes to light, Zacharias is placed in shackles and thrown into Azkaban on charges of war crimes.
At the start of the War, he and a handful of others were tasked with perfecting several dark methods of altering basic aphrodisiac potions until they produced horrific waking nightmares of torture and abuse, indistinguishable from reality. These potions could be laced with a touch of time distortion, turning two days into two months, or spiked with physical manifestations, such as bruises, broken bones, hunger and weight loss. By the end of the two-year War, they had created an apothecary of horror potent enough to break any prisoner, including Daphne.
Zacharias' original repulsion and reluctance at such a scheme evaporated in the face of the unethical methods Voldemort's Death Eaters were using on their captives to gain a tactical advantage. Zacharias threw all of his energy into the project, believing it was essential to the outcome of the War. All was fair in a war with no fair play. It was imperative that the Order win the War for the greater good of wizardkind's future.
While in Azkaban, Zacharias experiences the haunting pleasure of a lifetime's worth of tormenting reflection, and he finds his culpability knows no boundaries. He not only helped create the dark potions, but he also hand selected the prisoners who would be most vulnerable to their manipulation. He chose Daphne. Yes, he was the one who determined her fate. He decided to torture her long before he decided to save her.
But the beginning of her torture was also the beginning of his awakening, the realization that what he and the Order were doing was wrong regardless of Voldemort's tactics. It is a realization that will lead to a lifetime of imprisonment in guilt and shame and remorse. Zacharias helped win the War by creating unethical potions but at what price to his soul and to that of wizardkind? Had she been Voldemort's favourite consort, he would have protected her and let her keep her secrets. That had nothing to do with the greater good of anything but his own selfish wants.
After eighteen months in Azkaban, the Wizengamot grants a general amnesty to all prisoners held on war-related charges in an attempt to heal the badly fractured wizarding community and to allow them to go forward as one.
Zacharias stumbles out of Azkaban and sets out for an isolated stretch of Northern Ireland, to a small wizarding community his uncle had taken him to as a child en route to Belfast. Once there, his brief stay turns into a new life, one of anonymity and desperate loneliness. He works in isolation making brews for the local apothecary. The War and Azkaban have left him unfit company for everyone, including himself.
----- ----- ------
"Zacharias?"
He looks up from his tumbler of Firewhisky and begins coughing and choking and spewing the golden liquid when he sees her.
"Daphne?" he croaks, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
"May I join you?"
Zacharias rises and looks around the crumbling pub with its questionable clientele before glancing at the elegantly dressed witch.
"Here?"
"Yes, of course."
He brushes off the rickety, wooden table and pulls out a chair for her.
"May I order something for you?" he asks.
"I'll have whatever you're having."
"Firewhisky?"
"Firewhisky."
Zacharias motions to the bartender. "Frank, one for the lady, please." Then he sits down across from her.
Daphne takes off her cashmere scarf and her fur lined gloves, setting them aside. "You called me Daphne," she says. "It's been a long time. I wasn't sure you'd remember me."
How could he forget her? She's emblazoned across his heart and soul like a crucifix in motion.
"Of course, I remember you," he mutters into his glass, taking a sip.
"Thank you," she says as Frank places her drink before her. She waits until the curious bartender takes his leave before leaning over and speaking again. "You're a hard wizard to find." When Zacharias doesn't respond, when he takes to staring at the remains of his Firewhisky instead, she says, "What are you doing here?"
"Drinking," he says, continuing to swirl the golden liquid around in his tumbler.
"No, how did you end up living here?"
Zacharias sighs and looks over Daphne's shoulder, out the window and into the night beyond. He wants to crawl into that darkness and be lost to the world, invisible to her and her inquiring eyes.
"What are you doing here?" he snaps, defensive and irritable. Wasn't that the real question? He turns and stares at her, a beautiful, misplaced creature amongst a sea of rats and scavengers and drifters.
"I've come looking for you," she says, her hand gripping the tumbler of Firewhisky.
Zacharias pushes his unfinished drink aside, throws a Galleon on the table and stands. He's too drunk to have this conversation. If he weren't too drunk, then he would be too sober to have this conversation. He isn't capable of having this conversation.
"Congratulations, you've found me."
He grabs his cloak and strides out of the pub without looking back. He doesn't see Daphne scramble after him, forgetting her scarf and her gloves. Instead, he stands out in the biting winter gale, fumbling for his wand. Where was a graceful exit when you needed one?
"Zacharias?"
He looks up.
"I haven't come to harm you."
Seeing her is harming him. Doesn't she realize that? He continues rifling through his cloak, looking for his wand. Why didn't she come intent on killing him? He would have preferred that and the justice in such a twist of fate. To die at her wand would be a fitting end for him, and one that he would have gratefully succumbed to with no hesitation.
He isn't the same wizard she remembers.
"Let me help you," she offers, after watching him bumble through one side of his cloak and then the other before returning to start all over again.
Zacharias holds up both hands in defeat and watches her rifle through the pockets of his cloak and his robes until she finds his wand - nine pockets and one bottle of Firewhisky later. He snatches the bottle back and tucks it away again for safekeeping.
"You're too drunk to Apparate. Let me help you home."
He shakes his head. He's struggling enough as it is. The last thing he needs is this witch in his flat. He can barely look at her as he holds out his hand, waiting for his wand. When she places it in his palm, he notices her hand. It's a fine boned, aristocratic hand, the same hand he has dreamt about with its fingers intertwined in his. Only in his dreams, the tips of her fingers aren't turning blue from the cold.
"You're freezing," he says, the edge to his voice dissolving into concern. Despite his better judgement and the promises he's made, he can't help himself. He wants to take care of her. He needs to take care of her. He longs to fall down at her feet and selfishly beg for forgiveness. Instead, he conjures up a pair of mismatched mittens and slips them onto her frozen hands, one after another. Then he takes off his scarf, wraps it around her neck and pulls up the hood of her elegant cloak. Now she's nicely tucked in and unbelievably beautiful in the mid-December moonlight, the most exquisite creature he's ever seen.
"What are you doing here?" he whispers. "You shouldn't be here."
"I don't know."
She's spent years searching for him, hoping to find answers to the questions and the pain that have plagued her since she saw him last, but here he is as lost as she is.
"Is it true that you let me escape?" she blurts out.
"Escape? What makes you think I let you escape?"
She reaches into her cloak and pulls out his other wand, the one she Disapparated with the night she escaped from the outpost. "This isn't the kind of wand a wizard carries during a war, at least not as his primary wand."
He stares at the wand but doesn't reach for it.
"I read the Ministry transcript of your Veritaserum interrogation by the Order. It said you had planned my escape, that it wasn't an accident, that you had your other wand and didn't use it. It also said you tried to stop the use of the Dark potions for interrogation purposes."
She stares at him, wanting him to right her world, to make sense of the nonsensical reality they exist in.
Zacharias looks at his wand in her hand, the one he thought he'd never see again, and then stares up at her out of his dark and bitter drunken haze.
"You want the truth? I'll give you the truth. I selected you for torture by the potions that I created. I was responsible for your suffering. That, my dear Daphne, is the truth, the only truth that matters." He ends this announcement with a grand sweep of his arm.
"So it was the truth," she says, reaching out to steady him as he stumbles with his exaggerated gesture. She knows things, and what she doesn't know she's heard rumours about.
"The truth is that there is no truth," he says, disillusioned defeat in his voice and in the slump of his shoulders.
"I also found records detailing the Order's methodical torture of the victims you saw at the beginning of the War. Voldemort never tortured those victims. The Order lied to gain your support for their interrogation program. They had to convince you to create their potions. When the War was over, they let you take the fall for their dirty work. That was their plan from the beginning."
The puppeteer was a puppet.
"It doesn't matter," he sighs. "It doesn't change the lives that I've ruined or the minds that I've broken. It doesn't change my culpability."
Daphne falls silent.
"What are you doing?" he asks. "Why didn't you undergo selective Obliviation?" The Ministry and St Mungo's, working together after the War, offered selective Obliviation treatments for victims of torture and those suffering from traumatic stress disorders due to their wartime activity, convicted war criminals excepted. Why choose to remember when one could forget?
"Because," she says, staring into his pained drunken eyes, "there was a certain wizard I didn't want to forget." Daphne slips Zacharias' old wand into his cloak, gingerly wraps her arms around him and lays her face on the rough fabric of his cloak.
"Daphne - " he begins. He is as undeserving a wizard as ever walked the earth. He has no right to whatever affection he may have manipulated out of her during their time together. It isn't real. Nothing in his world is real, even her affection is tainted.
"No, don't say it," she counters, cutting him off. She knows what he's going to say. She's heard it a dozen times before. She's insane, and what she's proposing is insane, even sick, and she's sick for wanting him. The precarious limb she's crawled onto begins to crack. "Not tonight."
"Not tonight what?"
"Don't send me away tonight," she says, tightening her hold. "Send me away in the morning."
He wants to laugh at her ridiculous words, but he doesn't. Instead, he leans over and whispers, "Let's continue this someplace a bit more private, shall we?"
He turns her until she's facing the pub where half of the town's male population is standing with their noses pressed up against the front window, watching.
"Unless you'd like to continue this public performance," he says, throwing his arm around her.
"Oh," she says, horrified, but he's already Disapparating them.
Late that night, long after he's passed out on the sofa in his workroom, leaving his bedroom for her, she sneaks out to steal a look at him. She's never seen him asleep. Even in his deepest slumber, there's a furrow marring his brow. She runs her hand over his forehead, trying to soothe his worries away, but it doesn't work. A tentative kiss to his brow does nothing to lighten his load, either. The burdens and the scars he carries won't be scurried away by even the most passionate kisses.
His bright blue eyes open and lock on her. She startles and flushes pink with embarrassment, but she's more beautiful than his mind remembers, standing barefoot in one of his oversized flannel nightshirts with the silver moonlight nipping her shoulders and splashing a freckled sheen on the floor between them. He's sober now, and his previously sluggish brain is active.
"It wasn't a dream," he says, unable to take his eyes off of her. "You're not a dream."
"No," she says, kneeling beside his sofa so they are eye-to eye, and she feels his penetrating gaze again for the first time in years, "it wasn't and I'm not. Would you rather everything was a dream?"
He shakes his head. But he's dreamt about her many times over the years, and it always ends the same way.
"Will you be gone in the morning?"
"Not if you ask me to stay," she whispers, her heart pounding loud enough to wake the gods.
When he opens his arms, she stifles a cry and falls into them. His warmth envelops her, shattering the fear and the longing and the pain in her heart. They hold each other to the point of suffocation, too afraid to let go for fear everything will vanish and be as it was before.
Daphne has found the wizard she's been looking for. He's not the wizard she remembers nor the one she expected. His words didn't right her world or explain away the insanity that overtook their past, but she doesn't care. All she sees is the hope in his eyes when he looks at her. Perhaps that hope can heal his broken soul and fill the cavernous ruins in hers. Perhaps they can find a way forward together.
----- fin -----