A/N: This is an odd little story that was floating around in my head for a while. More my come later...my first attempt at any fan fiction, so please review! I'd love your feed back.
Disclaimer: Isn't it obvious?
He hadn't asked for much. Just the love and compassion his friends were experiencing at home, with their families, while he was left to spend his holidays in this alarmingly lonely castle. That was what had brought them together this night, with 90 seconds between now and another year wasted. The ever-present loneliness that pervaded his thoughts was suffocating him, pressing down on him, pushing him towards her—the only other person in his entire bloody House who'd stayed back for the winter holidays. He only wanted to relieve the unbearable loneliness, if only for a moment.
But he should have known, after they'd emptied that last stash of Firewhiskey, that this wouldn't lead anywhere good. He should have seen it in the way that she recklessly cast aside the bottle, flinging it dangerously close to the fire, that she'd lost touch with her senses. But he wasn't any closer to sobriety than she was, and his conscience had long gone, eloped, most likely, with hers. When she cried to him, lamenting her family troubles and pouring out her soul in staggered gasps, he should have realized that he was delving into uncharted lands. He should have been prepared for the dense jungle that was Lily Evans, but he was so caught in the moment, so vulnerable, so easily taken in by the undergrowth. And he felt compelled to share in her pain, to wallow in a bit of his own tragedy, if only for empathy's sake.
But he didn't simply wallow. He dived in, head first, with reckless abandon, and he found himself drowning. He was in too deep; in over his head in emotions he'd never bothered to, and never wanted to sort out. And he was so bare, so painfully bare, without those walls to protect him, because despite her grace and delicacy, she'd bulldozed past each barrier. So bare and so cold, and so desperate for something, anything to bring back that warmth, or at least the illusion of it, for that had sufficed for all these years.
But he should have known that she could never provide that. The electric shock that ran through him when she leaned in was temporary, dying in the same brilliant flash that had created it. He should have overlooked it, let time continue to the next second; but she kept him there, wrapping her arms firmly around his neck, anchoring him in that moment. It was static, stagnant, unbearably still as he stared into her eyes, trading in reality for a trip to the Emerald City. And then she crashed into him, and they were no longer stopping time; they were catapulting through it into everything they weren't prepared for.