"I need you."

            My thin hand flew in up- and down-strokes across the paper, ink blotches and lines.

            "I love you and I need you.

            "Once you rescued me but now I am alone.  You saved my soul, but now it yearns for you.  You are everything to me, and the thought of living without you scares me.  What happiness is granted us?  Surely this is not it.  Perhaps the stars wait for us to create our own happiness, then twinkle it into the night.

            "I love you.  Please come to me."

            Tears I refused to shed brought reds and pinks to my complexion.  Noon was approaching and I knew it was useless.  Real love had spoiled me and my illusions were not enough.  I was selfish and only he could pacify my consuming greed.

            As I was selfish, he was selfless.  He had waited, too.  Watching and hoping, an obsession had, too, boiled through his body, propelling him to live another day…

            He had found a larger cause than the happiness of two.  He had left with too few deep, passionate kisses and without me in his arms.

            I tried to be like him, reaching vainly for the flawlessness my glinting raven silently flew into the night…

            I could not do it.  I needed him here, somehow—in my arms, in my dreams, for, when you allow your full body to be immersed in it, fantasy is reality.

            It was Saturday and the illusions would not comfort my crying heart.  Today I could go to  Hogsmead and drinks could steal me away from freezing, burning reality…

            My parchment curled as flames surrounded it.  Stupid words I did not need.

            Light seemed only to come from the smooth, garishly-colored surfaces, beneath which swam water laced with fire, heaven laced with hell…

            My reality.

            A shining coin and a look beneath my dark eyelashes.  He knew only two things—that I was too young and that the money made him not care.  A saccharine-sweet pink greeted me, but it proved deceptive.

            My throat burned and my eyes squeezed shut.

            More.  Not wanted, but needed.

            Denied me by something better, sweeter, warmer.  A hand upon my chin.

            Again, he rescued me.

            Now I watched him mix something different, an opague red that came from liquid transparencies.  Ashamed, I took it and drank it.  The cool, uncomfortable feeling, chased by a grating heat, left me, fleeing through my fingertips and feet.

            "I was scared."

            "I know."  He understood and we rested against the cold wall in this strange room—a communal living space for the professors that had somehow become an abandoned library and display of potions and specimens age pulled at the flesh of.  A large couch rested, empty, in a deep sleep that had remained unbroken for ages.

            "Why are you back?" 

            "I was scared."  His eyes focused on mine and stole them from me.  I could do nothing with them but stare back.

            Slowly, I felt his arms reach for me and mine reach for him.  A shuddering kiss reminded me of a beautiful reality I had long searched for and too quickly forgotten.

            "I'm not afraid anymore."  Whispered.  Truer than my even my heart.

            "Nor I." 

            We were bound by our arms, connecting us by our own choice to each other.

            "Sevarus?"

            "Hermione?"  A silly word.  I had long ago lost myself to him, for him, in the black pools of his eyes…

            "Why me?"

            "I don't know.

            "Hermione?"

            "Sevarus?"  The syllables, when together, meant the one thing I needed more than oxygen, more than anything I could think of.

            "I want to marry you."