Ever After
Life is final. You live and then you die, there's no ifs and no buts, only a chain of events that will inevitably end. It's not like the stories that Andromeda used to read him when he was little, before she left – The ones with the prince and the princess, who meet and eventually fall in love before the story ends with a happily ever after.
The 'ever after' doesn't exist.
You can't live your entire life in first's seconds, thirds or even middles. Eventually everything comes down to the lasts; last smile, last I love you, last dance, last hello, last goodbye and last kiss under the stars in an abandoned muggle play park, over too quickly, not cherished as much as it would have been if only they'd known...
Nobody knows that more than him, sitting on the floor of her house, heart breaking into a million pieces over and over and over again as he cradles her limp body in his arms, brushing strands of her hair away from unseeing, glassy eyes while his tears fall unashamedly onto her face.
See me now, he wants to yell at his family, see what you've done to me, see what your beliefs have done.
It's over for him now, it will always be over now because without her he can't breathe or feel or even think clearly. Just one thought over powering everything else, disposing of rational judgement and common sense; revenge.
Life is only short, but love, he thinks bitterly, that lasts forever.
Regulus/Oc for the Last Kiss competition over on HPFC.