Disclaimer: I own nothing not even myself. J.K. Rowling owns everything.
"There's nothing I can do to make you want me more than them is there?" A swift glance to the cluster of Slytherins on the left, bent together in conversation. A whisper, an inch more than a thought, an inch more dangerous.
"Lily, I do. I just...I just—I can't."
The tears were rising in her eyes and that ship of normalcy was sinking inside of her, had been sinking since he clambered in ten minutes ago, face flushed from running, from panic.
She turned away from him, walked back to the mirror of the vanity adjusting her earring, first the left then the right, barely listening as he blew out words between breaths.
"Lily, I just wanted to-when I heard about-I had to-You just...Lily, you can't," he finished in one final huff, his chest still rising and falling rapidly.
She snatched her eyes away from her reflection, lowered her gaze to the lipstick and the hairbrush, to the mother of pearl comb, to the lace veil still resting silently in its box.
"I loved you so much, Sev," she said, her idle fingers sliding over the bristles of the brush. "I loved you so much," she repeated the tears now climbing down her cheeks, descending like train tracks running through her make up, settling in the corners of her lips, rolling into her mouth, carrying memories and secrets in their compartments, sins that should never be spoken. "And you still didn't pick me."
"Please," he said. "Lily, please."
She turned back to him, her eyes searching his face like flashlights searching the darkness for what had been lost.
"You were everything to me, you have to know that," he said, his breath back to normal, his gaze falling to an empty spot on the ground. "You still are."
A whispered confession he hoped only the blank floorboard heard.
He knew how dangerous the present tense was. The past tense was safer. It stated that something that once was had ended, that a boundary line had been drawn beyond which that something no longer existed.
He loved her.
Yes, once upon a time. In another life, where things were simpler. Where pureblood, half-blood, mud-muggleborn did not matter. Where there was no school, no bullies, no pranks. Just summer suns and drowsy trees and grass as warm as blankets.
The future tense was safer still. Use of it meant the birth of a promise that may or may not be kept. They were not broken promises but empty ones that time blew around like leaves. Who could say for sure if they all landed where he said they would?
He will love her.
Yes, in death perhaps. If they meet again. If they both go on. But maybe they won't.
She steps closer, closer than she should, the folds of her dress wash over his shoes and she brings her hands up to his face, her fingertips graze the line of his jaw.
The present tense is dangerous because it is mid-action, a beating heart that has not stopped beating yet, that does not hinge on a fragile possibility of beating again.
She presses her lips against his.
He loves her.