Chocolate Covered Cherries
He kisses her and it's like chocolate covered cherries. You'd think kissing some one like him would be more like mint or sour lemons, or even razors. Razors, she reasoned, would be so much more like him: cutting and cold and steely and drenched in blood. He'd been through so much, so much of the cutting and the cold, and the steely and the drenched in blood, so much of it that sometimes it made her sad that she couldn't taste it on him. It made her sad that he tasted nothing like what he had experienced, that maybe all of that torture had just been for some one's queer amusement, that maybe he'd been meant for experiencing the chocolate covered cherries, and not all of that miserable hubbub.
He didn't call it 'miserable hubbub'. He said to her that it was much more serious than that, and that he didn't want to talk about it. He would squeeze out a smile then, and kiss her like chocolate covered cherries. And she would be sad, because somehow he reminded her more of the razors she could see in his eyes, than the chocolate covered cherries she could taste in his mouth. She would later ask him if he preplanned kissing her with a healthy downing of chocolate covered cherries, but he would just laugh and say, "You taste like peanut butter. Do you eat a lot of peanut butter before you kiss me?"
He was one of those devastatingly sad young men you never really wanted to understand. Despite that fact that he was only a year older than her, he treated her like a child--and she let him, and she played along, because she figured it gave him something to do rather than brood. There was always something painful about him, something that seemed to constantly hinder his movements, his smiles, the sincerity he projected in those grey, grey eyes. There was always something.
She could never, would never be able to put her finger on it; it always evaded her fleeting glances, her lingering looks that suggested she had long grown out her brothers' insisted childhood. She noticed more than she let on, and she pondered more than she spoke, but when she was with him it was okay to speak a little. He wouldn't reprimand her, wouldn't laugh at her silly comments. That was just their weakness: the way they found it so easy to be around each other. The way they just could.
She loved the way he lived; as if he could die tomorrow. He lived with a vibrancy that far surpassed the sickness that seemed to haunt him, the sickness the doctors could never diagnose because he didn't want to let them. They went to St. Mungos after the war had finished, and it was filled with death and illness and the scent of metallic blood and insanity had hung heavy; they had went and the doctor had pressed his stomach. He'd thrown up blood onto the floor, and she'd rushed to his side, clutching his arm as he retched in pain. They hadn't conducted further tests, at his requests, and as they'd walked out followed by the howls of those who'd lost more than their families in the war, he'd whispered one thing, "It's working."
She'd pressed for further explanation, but he never was one to articulate. Since then he'd never missed a beat, never missed a day where he wouldn't visit his mother's grave, the grave of his friends long dead or tell her he loved her. They had a strange kind of relationship, them two. They loved each other, they did, but their love was aloof. It wasn't frenzied and desperate as the love of a young couple's should be; it was calm and quiet and before the war they had never openly acknowledged it. Maybe it was because they'd seen so much that he'd started telling her, maybe it was because he'd lost a bit too much during the struggle. She didn't know, but she didn't care, either. Maybe if it had been like this before the war, she would have cared, but now her life was such that she didn't have much to care about. All that mattered was that she had him, and whether she had him broken or whole, at least she had him. They were two people who had lost their whole family to Voldemort, two people with very little left to live for, except each other.
Each other, and those chocolate covered cherry kisses. She figured she could die for those. She figured that if she could die with a taste on her lips, it would be those chocolate covered cherries.
She didn't remember if his kisses had been like that before the war, or even during it. She didn't remember much, and she didn't really try any more.
Sometimes she'd feel a flicker of worry when she entered their washroom early in the morning to find bloody fingerprints along the wall, to see him bent over the toilet and retching his life into the basin. Sometimes. Most of the time she'd run over to him and hold his white-blonde hair away from his forehead, kissing his ear as he cried out in pain, holding onto her hand as if it were his lifeline. "It's working," he would cough, speckles of blood flying to his lips as something grated him deep inside his throat, "It's working."
Sometimes she'd miss the way her mother used to do that for her when she was sick, sometimes she'd miss her family. Sometimes.
She kissed him for what she thought would maybe be the last time that night at Mungo's, kissed him until his purple eyelids flickered open and he forced a smile onto his blue lips. "It's working." She shoved her tongue into his mouth, for once feeling desperate to get as much of him as she could before he was gone. Before those chocolate covered cherries were gone.
"What do you eat before you kiss me?" she asked, her voice a little shaken. She wasn't worried, she was just sad. Sad that he didn't taste like the razors in his eyes, but like the chocolate covered cherries on his lips.
He shrugged, his hands reaching up to cup hers, his eyes drifting to the ceiling. "Razors."
He said it so casually her heart sunk. "Oh."
He died that night, but not before she'd gotten another kiss, a kiss that filled her mouth with blood, blood, blood and her heart with razors. Blood, razors and chocolate covered cherries.
Author's Note: Characters are GinnyxDraco, if you didn't realize it yet. A bit of a sadistic story, but I needed to write something, so I wrote and this came out. It's not so great, but at least ya'll know I'm alive and functioning. High School is terrible! So much work, so little time to write. My birthday was on Thursday, so I got a few days off...I'll finish Sunsets soon (meaning XMAS), and update with my new, happy story once it's done. Thanks, READ AND REVIEW!