Die Sterne stehn zu hoch
Warning:Contains slash, profanity, and mentions of non-con and child abuse. This is not a happy fic. If you think it might distress you, please do not read.
Pairings: Sirius/Lucius, Sirius/James
Author's Note: The title means "The stars are too high".
Your face burns and trembles, bruised with sensation in the open and silvery morning, in the light. You are so fucked up because for seven years James held you together as things got worse and worse, and then for three years you just-about-managed to cling to how much he loved you, even when love bruised your hands and tore at your wrists, even hundreds of miles apart and completely drained of all your energy and all your love – and everything you'd eaten in the last week, like everyone else assigned to clean-up. You were a Black, so you had to expect the worst jobs. Oh, how you had wanted him in those years, more than you wanted to win the war, more than you wanted to keep your sanity because those – were nothing, were mere empty words, just breath – he really was your sanity, the only shining thread of realness amid all your reflections and falsity, the only one, as well, who knew every tiny fragile shard of you that had been cracking for eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one years. And the only one, ever, to touch them and hold them not fearing lacerations to his own flesh.
You could say that you've forgotten Azkaban – you could try to forget, but that sometimes you want to go back there because all there was was hate and hate and no-James and no-James. Here and now there is pretending-to-cope and trying-to-talk, so that you would like to blunt the edge of things, or stop them altogether. (How things are clear, as soon as you see them from the parapet.) Perhaps if you were able to fight for James, for Harry, for James then things would – not coalesce, because you are too sharp to be liquid, but flare up and melt you, and at the very worst you would be unrecognisable, but still, that's better than breaking. It is the Order of the Phoenix, after all. Remus has told you about all the things that still exist, about Stonehenge and aurora borealis and Oberammergau and the Alps and Harry, and your own beauty – he says that even changed, from a mystery to a hoard of muggle tourists drinking coffee out of plastic cups, from a baby with a pristine forehead to a scared, scarred teenager who loves you far, far too much, from perfect but cold to ravaged and human, and every-bone-visible – still, he says, these are wondrous things. Of course when you looked in the mirror all you saw was that beauty (because you had been so very beautiful) and pride (because you had been James's truest and most blazing love) had in one second-long, twelve-year-long, centuries-long pained throb fallen right out of your world, so that you could recognise nothing.
You had tried to go out once or twice, charmed to the back-teeth, and the second time Lucius had found you – or sought you – sitting on the banks of the Thames – how you don't know: could he really have recognised your eyes through all that magic, one glance from half a bridge away? So now you are fucked as well as fucked-up, and afterwards although you try not to cry – nothing, nothing at all to do with the pain of being taken so roughly, or your chafed wrists, or only because it reminded you how not-never-rough James was, always stopping the fight if you panicked and fucking you like you could snap in two, teasing your flesh into thrumming and holding you hours and hours after – not this, but just how you had come for Lucius, after pushing away his marble-icy hands every holidays when you were young (those times when they wouldn't let you stay at Hogwarts, when, for some reason, they missed you), actually biting him once – no one could say he hadn't deserved it, or that your anti-seduction methods weren't original and effective, for someone who had just passed his twelfth birthday. You had had James-kindled fire flaring inside you, though you didn't know yet what it was. It is not a tear or two slipping from under closed, quietly bruised lids, tonight, but really really weeping after he leaves, hearing your chest and throat and lungs and heart crack open, finally, finally, the splinters of you shuddering loose from each other, because no one has balmed them for so long, James has been away too long, so that even the most perfect and rare beauty must break, must break.