He carried the scar on his palm for the rest of his days (and even as he sank out of sight beneath the waves, pulled down by rotting corpses grasping at his thin limbs, he'd flail his hands helplessly above him and there- on the tracks of the fate line- sat the mark of Orion Black's pocket knife, made by flighty white little girl hands, the cut that had pressed into hers and let their blood mingle and showed that she was his and he was hers, eternally.)
She carried the scar on her palm for the rest of her days, but after a decade, after a lifetime, she couldn't quite recall what had placed it there.
They lived in shades of gray in the halls of Grimmauld Place, and perhaps it was fate that in the end, they would seek out each other as a refuge from the tempest of their worlds.
The orchestra swells and sparkles like a movie score- see the lost children fall into each other's arms, the sad little boy and girl with mirror image faces and butterfly wing eyes.
He moved and she moved.
He moved in her.
They found each other amongst winter storms and brambled branches, and he took her among the thorns of roses overgrown as the house stood like a silent witness to their innocence and their sins.
He felt her kitten wheezes against his throat, felt her fingernails rake his naked back, felt the soft "oh" of her lips parting as they pressed against his collarbone. And he made his body into hers.
The church bells echoed across cobblestoned streets as they sat in their hideaway from the world, and even the floorboards fell silent as she lay in his arms against the musty sheets, the brocaded pillows.
Blonde hair falling across the sheets, tangled in his fingers, her blue eyes unfocused, she speaks:
"Is this our life?"
And he can't answer because the mere suggestion of the question floors him.
Life? Is this life? Can he expect forty, fifty, sixty more years of this? Of desperate, lonely collisions, of her and of him. He knows the nightmares she sleeps with, he knows the way she talks in her sleep, of the buzzing of wasps inside her skull. Each of them is broken. Is that anyway to start a life?
"Well?"
Her voice is insistent, and she stirs beside him, suddenly anxious, and her next words come out as a sort of whine, not annoying, but merely pathetic.
"Is this all we have to look forward to?"
To silence her, he pressed his chaffed lips to hers.
They fractured and faltered and fell like Lucifer, into tangled arms and wet sheets, until the flames licked their legs and made their eyes melt away.
Blindly they pawed, and rolled, their Eden a sweat-scented bedroom in a dying estate as childish pennants kept silent sentinel in green and silver on the walls.
The swell, the bated breath. The climax. The sin.
He spilled into her and she moaned and he moaned and the room spun and moaned and whispered, "Repent, repent, repent…"
Fingers entwined, icy blue eyes met icy blue.
"Regulus, do you love me?"
"I can't love anything."
Their gaze would meet in hallways and mirrored glass, and just as quickly fall away.
The knowledge of sin had crept into Eden; she blushed and gathered leaves and stitched them together just as he had once stitched to himself pieces of her.
Silence.