Word Count: 1,027
Challenge/Competition: The Diagon Alley Fic-Crawl & Gift-Giving Extravaganza
Prompts: Towel, scared, 'there was too much between them', quiet, future & Millicent/Marcus.
Warnings: Light depictions of alcohol abuse.
Disclaimer: I don't claim to own Harry Potter, it's all JKR's.
Note: This is written for the wonderful Mew-Tsubaki, I hope you like it!
You pull the towel off the rack and rub it on your face as you stand in front of the cracked mirror. You don't believe in bad luck – we choose our own luck, in your opinion.
The face that stares back at you in between the cracks of the mirror is one you barely recognize. It's tarnished by years of stress, anguish, fighting, and nothingness. You note that however pallid or worn your face may look, that there are no lines. Lines indicate having lived, they remind you of all of your laughter and smiles and tears.
Nope, not for you. You don't have any of that. We can exist but not really live, and that is how you have wasted your twenty-three years so far on earth. But you look old, and you look ill. The sleepless and red rimmed eyes, along with your translucent skin don't help, but for some reason feeling and doing nothing, being nothing has made you fade.
And there's that little part of you that is so scared – absolutely terrified to your core, actually, that you're going to push the one good thing you have away. Because you really want to, because everything you touch turns to dust, everything that once was around you now ceases to exist, and you're fading too, so what will happen to her?
She's not a good person, no, but neither are you. You're not going to look yourself straight in the eye and pretend that this is or ever were a fairy-tale – it isn't and it never was. It's as cracked as the mirror in front of you. But if someone loves you, and someone as broken as you are, in spite of every flaw you have and the curse that you seem to bear, then surely you should hold on.
But you're so close to giving up and you hate yourself for that, because with so little to live for you should be overwhelmed with love and in the grand scheme of things that should be all that you need. Because that's love, right? You guess you'll never know – you'll never truly understand, as much as you wish that you will.
The two of you seem to just get by, you don't really do anything or go anywhere or be anyone, you just breathe and act right. With no parents to guide you both in many years, and a war in your recent memories, you suppose that you're both scarred. But you're too proud to do anything about it, even if you know that something's not right, even if you find yourselves delving into the hard alcohol every night until you forget. And then you can kiss until you pass out, and you reach your dreamless abyss. The place where you really feel like you don't exist, nor have to. The place where you finally find peace and quiet while your icy hand is still tightly laced into hers.
The door downstairs clicks shut and you jolt terribly, the smallest broken memory of rubble crashing onto a group of people flashing through your mind, almost gone before it appeared. Her scratchy voice calls through the house, to which you don't reply. You put the mirror on its front because you can't face yourself anymore, and you walk through to the bedroom you share and she stands there with a half-smile – because neither of you do anything in full, because you just don't know how.
She doesn't bother to ask if you're okay or why you look so tired, because you always look exhausted and there's those constant dark rings made deeper by each flashback or each hard memory, as well as every day of ageing and every night of drinking. Instead, she keeps her sympathetic smile and loops her arms around your neck as you walk towards her. Again, there's nothing larger than life about it – it's half done, just a kiss, mingled with sadness or hopelessness or something equally glum, and it's hard. It's hard because even if she loves you and you love her, all you do is make each other worse. But there's too much between you both and you know deep down you couldn't and shouldn't walk away, even though you want to because you don't want to ruin this, too, because you don't want to stop caring, because you don't want it to fade.
The future never seems to exist, you just seem to pass through each day and hope that one day you start to look alive and feel alive, and at one point maybe Millicent will be the one to make you feel that. Maybe it will be okay, you say to yourself today as you say every day before the alcohol comes out of the cabinet. "Why do we do this?" Slips out of your mouth before you can stop, and she stops mid-pour, freezing at your words.
"I don't know," she mutters, placing the bottle back on the dresser, falling backwards onto the bed in a defeated kind of way. And silence takes over, blanketing them but not in the awkward way – in the comfortable way that is kind of calm, that soothes your thoughts and makes everything sort of still for a moment.
But after a few minutes, she decides to carry on. "We just don't really know what else to do. We don't know anything but breathing, each other and drinking to forget. Do we?"
And you shake your head slowly. Because she's right, and she said it in such a way that she's never said anything. You think it's because it wasn't a half job this time, that she put everything into her words – the way she said them, what she said, and her expression. All of it. And you realise that maybe you can't go on like this, but maybe you'll never know anything else.
So you don't resist the alcohol, but you toast to each other and yourself, because you want to live this time. And you want to feel everything that you can. So here's to having one drink, taking a sleeping draught, sleeping peacefully, waking up, and living.
AN- I know some people really hate second person, but I really enjoyed writing this. I haven't been very happy with or proud of anything I've written lately, but I am both of those with this, so I really hope you all like it. Please leave me a review to give your feedback & don't forget to favourite! x