Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.


He offers up "I love you"s like the words cost him nothing, and you drink them in like the pathetic, attention-starved fool you've always been. He offers smiles and laughter, cheery words and affectionate nicknames that provide stark contrast to your thin-lipped grimaces, your sharp anxieties, your twitchy, unconscious recollections of unfavoured hands upon your skin. You often worry about what's in this for him; why he'd want a relationship with sad, inadequate you, his former enemy. This is all too good to be true, you've never been more certain of anything, but he seems to think you'll last forever. Even stars burn out eventually, you tell him, but all he says is he's never been one for analogies.

You don't know when this crazy excuse for a relationship began, when sheer hate shifted to passion, and anger shifted to – whatever it is you have together. You know he'd call it love, but…

… but between Father and Mother, and Aunt Bella and Greyback, and all the other fanatic, vicious Death Eaters that have forced themselves uncomfortably into your life, you're not sure that such a thing can truly exist, or if it does, that it is all powerful, as fools like Harry and his mentor, Dumbledore, always seem to preach. Even with Harry, that beacon of optimism and inspiration who claims to love you more than anything, you still often feel yourself lapsing into cynicism, dwelling on memories of puckered skin and bright rivulets of crimson blood. Pure crimson blood.

You don't feel like you have pure blood, no matter what Father insists, or Aunt Bella, or the Dark Lord; you feel tainted, tainted by Greyback's bestial touch, polluted with Aunt Bella's familiar, incestuous grip. You are a plaything, and you can't understand why Harry Bloody Potter can't realize this, can't understand how befouled and unworthy you are.

Inexplicably, Harry Potter seems to care. He cares about your pallor, and the thinning of your flaxen hair. He cares about your scars, kissing them and worrying about them, instead of shielding his eyes from the hideous disfigurement they create. He cares that there are indigo shadows under your eyes and midnight splotches of pain about your torso, dusted over the scars. He cares that he can see the broken angle of your ribs under your taut, translucent skin.

You hate yourself for wanting him to care, for basking in the feeling of someone, anyone finally caring. You hate yourself for believing him, believing that he loves you, and you hate yourself for not giving the most selfless person you know more credit. You hate that with each failed attempt to cheer you up, your sadness weighs all the more heavily on his shoulders.

You are a Dementor, his Dementor, leeching happiness from his life with your desperate, unhappy neediness.

Merlin, how you hate yourself.