"I can't stay," you murmured against my lips. "Not the night, and not forever. You understand, right?" Your eyes were pleading, so wide and so green.

So I nodded, because what use am I to you if I don't understand? I want to be useful to you.

It was selfish of me, letting you need me. Of course, it wasn't for long. I was a passing phase and we both knew it. But I said I didn't mind, and you were so relieved, and that I understood.

It worked out in the end. You got to run after her, run back to Hogwarts. I am stationary. I am chained to my Manor, to my mistakes. You deserve to chase her into a bright future and leave me here in the shadows of the past.

But I won't forget it, not for a moment. I will live in that bliss for as long as my mind will allow it. I will write down every memory until my hand throbs, aching and sore.

I never wish to see you again—not if it means replacing those memories with fresh moments of stilted awkwardness, or worse, active avoidance. I never wish to look at you and see someone other than the boy who kissed my tear-stained cheeks and held my clammy hand. I refuse to have my freshest thoughts of you be images of you running—away from me, toward her, and into places I can't follow.

I will never let another person mark me, claim me. No one else will press soft bruises into my skin, or bring their lips to mine.

I'm not waiting for you; there's no use in hoping for a day that will never arrive. But yours is the touch I want to remember. Yours are the only lips I want to know. Yours is the only love I want to feel.

I will not wait, I will not hope.

But I will not forget. And I'll not stop loving you.


I look at the same vividly green eyes and the same messy dark rats nest that passes for hair, and the same beautiful vulnerability in my sweet child's face, and know that there is no way I can hide him from the world any longer. One only had to look into your face, into your eyes, into the feel of your incredible magic to know that your name is all but a lie, that no magic or contracts can hide.

For all that the world will call you Damien Harrison Greengrass, they will take one look at you and know. Ten years that the world had taken to forget us both and our name, and all that it means to be a Greengrass in Wizarding England, the minute you walk into Diagon Alley, they'd know you. The minute you walk into the Great Hall to be sorted, sitting at the head table, the uncrowned king of these lands, he'd know you. And me. And the Lies we told each other for the past 11 years.

No matter, my son, my heir, my soul. We shall go on, heads held high. For it was our love, our life and our very existence that won them the peace they cherish so much. And we know the price we paid to love without being loved in turn.

I'm sorry I never asked you, but it is our legacy to love and love gladly, and then let them go.

Our love is destined to always re-write history and still always be ...Unrequited.