"I love you," he whispers, and I'm suddenly too young for this but I don't say anything because it might make him mad and that's the very last thing that I want. "I love you and only you and don't ever leave me, Emmeline."
I nearly laugh, because I walked in on him and Mary just last week and he knows it and I know it, but I say nothing, nothing, because he's with me now and I want him and need him and his mouth is warm on my cold neck.
We're never warm these days, I think bitterly, and it's all because of a man we can't even name. Every word spoken is quiet and yet too loud, every action is subtle and yet too obvious, and it's as if the world is suddenly made out of glass and I'm just waiting for it to shatter.
It's two days until Halloween and there are brightly wrapped candies in a bowl on the coffee table just beyond my toes, and suddenly I get the urge to kick it over and watch the shining wrappers glitter as they tumble on the floor.
He's watching me, his eyes grey and intense like storm clouds. I force a smile and he wraps one arm around me, but it feels all wrong, not warm and comforting like it used to. I think of the cold again and I hate it, hate it with all of my being, and he senses it as I tense and whispers "shh" as if that will make me okay.
It won't and he knows it.
The lucky ones of us- Gideon and Fabian, Benjy and Marlene, just two weeks ago Dorcas who wasn't even twenty yet, not to mention the others, even the ones whose faces and names I'll never learn- they don't have to sit around with scars and cold skin and tears burning behind their eyes.
But Sirius and I spend every night like this lately, and when we're together it's always freezing and our limbs always tangle and there's never electricity anymore because the air is damp with chill and with death.
I would say I love him too, but I don't, not really anyway, because I'm too young for that and I was just in school a year and a half ago and how is that old enough to know what love is? And so I tilt my head and kiss his jaw, my lips warm against his cold skin like his were against mine.
His fingers tangle in my hair and he pulls me onto his lap with his other arm, as if proximity will keep us safe, but that's not true because I know that just four weeks ago the Boneses died in each other's arms and yet they were lowered into the ground in two separate boxes anyway, so being close won't ever guarantee that I'm safe, and in some ways it's actually more dangerous.
That's why I don't love him, I think. Not because I caught him with Mary or Lucy or even Sarah- though Sarah had been my best friend before- but because if I do then that means I'll lose him.
He knows it and it hurts him, even though he's looked to Mary and Lucy and Sarah before as well, because I'm Emmeline and I'm golden and they're all dark and different and foreign despite their plain brown names whereas I've been shining and smiling and familiar to him all along.
This is what he wants, I think as his fingers slide- cold- under my shirt's hem, not love; I'm fooling myself of course but these are dark days and he'll be gone by the time I wake up just because I didn't say I loved him too, but that's alright because he's holding me and he feels so good and I want this just one more time. I know I may die tomorrow and I'm scared, terrified, because I'm much too young to be so damn old.
His lips are by my ear when I drift off in his bed, and he's whispering sweet nothings that I'll never give him in return. My heart is burning, even though I'm cold, and I wonder if he knows that I'm still awake when he's stroking my hair and describing our home and our family and our future together that I know we'll never have because there's a wizard out there that we can't name who would use us to hurt each other.
I don't know when time passes, but it does, and suddenly Lily and James are dead and I'm crying on the floor and I don't know where Sirius is for once and it's scaring me, scaring me so bad, until they tell me what he's done and then I'm not scared but livid, angry, burning, suddenly not cold anymore but hot with rage and I just want to beat my fists against his chest and scream why why why until he tells me why.
And when I'm curled up alone in his too-big bed, I wonder if he still would have done it if I'd told him that I loved him, too. Even though I try to convince myself it wouldn't have changed a thing, it would have and I just know it and I'm going to be aching this way for the rest of my life and it's my fault that there's a little boy called Harry Potter who's got a cut on his head and no mummy or daddy to make him feel better about it, it's my fault that the chubby little Peter Pettigrew is no more than a memory and a bit of his hand they found.
They ask if I'm alright, and I tell them yes, but I never tell them anything else. I never tell them that before I fall asleep, I always hear the whisper of "I love you".
I always whisper it back as I drift into a dream and hope it will make everything alright, but dreams never have come true in my world of cold and damp and death. I'm too young for this, and I know it, but we all are and at least the war is over and I can try to move on, even if I never will.