Disclaimer: JKR owns all.

Warning!! This is fiction. I'm not making any kind of religious statement. If you're a sensitive Catholic, are horridly opposed to atheism, or believe in Santa, please turn back now. Thank you : )

-

-

-

-

She laid in quiet darkness while he stood by the dying fire, his hands on the mantle, leaning toward the heat and staring intensely, though distantly, into the embers.

He wore nothing but a pair of trousers that hung low on his hips. Tall and lean and strong, his muscles taut under smooth skin, he reminded her of a stallion. He even brooded like one.

Except that he wasn't brooding.

And she watched him intensely. Bitterly. Incredulously. She felt like jumping out of bed and slapping him. Like shaking and beating and knocking some fucking sense into him.

Because it was pitiful.

Because it was galling.

Because it was futile.

Her mouth tight and her chest tighter, she eyed him. He felt her burning gaze raking over him, she knew, and he did not meet her eye. Well, he may act ignorant, but he wasn't stupid. And neither was she.

He wasn't dreaming or thinking or brooding. He was praying.

And in all the places he looked so tight and so broad and so strong, she saw his weaknesses, his fragility -- his gut wrenching sincerity.

But not her.

In all the places she looked strong, she was strong. And it had nothing to do with the inexplicable or esoteric. She wasn't strung together by hope in the illogical and intangible. She wasn't.

She wasn't.

She didn't believe in God.

She couldn't.

Her parents had blamed her early lack of faith on her pragmatic mind, never themselves for fooling their young daughter into believing in Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny.

But, she remembered her intense feelings of humiliation when she questioned the logistics of such stories and found out that she'd been lied to. Deceived. Tricked. Betrayed.

And, after that, how could she believe in some big, invisible man in the sky who listens to everyone in the world whinging and begging for wishes all at the same time, constantly? She had been one of them once. She knew the ridiculousness of the things people prayed for. Selfish things. Insignificant things.

Again her eyes raked him over.

Impossible things.

"Prophesies always come true," Theo said softly, reverently.

And she didn't believe that either.

Just another fucking bedtime story to relax her agitated mind and make her more complacent. Be a good girl. Go to church. Pray. Someday you'll go to heaven and see Nana and Papa again.

Did God keep count of how many times she yawned during Sunday services?

Did He hear her wicked thoughts?

Did He care how often she laid in sin with her lover? How many times she touched herself while dreaming of his hands and his mouth and his cock doing the things she did for herself while he was away?

Would she burn in Hell for just being born a witch?

Or was she already there?

Parvati wasn't a very religious girl, but she was spiritual. She believed in reincarnation and that life on Earth was our Heaven or our Hell. We are all stranded here. Marooned. Abandoned. Left to fend for ourselves and the others we meet along the way. We could be selfish and greedy and bad, and Karma would serve it right back to us. Life would be Hell. Or, we could be noble and generous and good, and Karma would deliver that back to us, as well. Heaven on Earth.

Parvati was a self-absorbed cunt who gossiped all the time, never studied, and kissed other peoples boyfriends. Perhaps that was why the last time Hermione had seen her, Parvati had been coughing up her insides under Antonin Dolohov's quivering wand.

But then what did that say about Hermione? What was she being punished for? And what of Theodore?

Theodore who believed. Theodore who prayed.

Theodore the Death Eater.

He said he didn't want to take the mask and mark, but had no choice. It was join or die. But, he did do the Dark Lord's bidding, even if he didn't enjoy it the way Dolohov did. And when Theo left the Dark Lord's side, he returned to his lover, his confessor, his personal celebrant savior, and confessed his many sins. Begged for forgiveness. For understanding.

But he also begged for blow jobs, and while she imagined some people prayed for sexual favors to be delivered to them, she didn't think they went to their spiritual guides for it.

Or, perhaps some of them did.

The Catholics, maybe.

The thought of Theodore at Mass with her in her old church appeared vividly in her mind. His Death Eater's robes remade into those of an alter boy, a rosary in place of his wand. It was a ridiculous juxtaposition in any other time or place, but here in this moment, in her mind, it made perfect sense.

Because Theodore could believe anything.

And it wasn't that he was naïve or gullible, but that he had a profound amount of faith. Faith in a higher power. Faith in the world. Faith in Harry Potter.

Harry was dead.

She knew it in her bones the way she knew that there was no God and no Santa and the sky only appeared to be blue because of the way sunlight is refracted by oxygen and nitrogen.

But Theodore said he believed, and she knew that he did. That he needed to.

"Prophesies always come true," he repeated. His prayer. His mantra.

He turned his eyes to hers, pained, lost, but impossibly hopeful.

She swallowed hard against her own bitterness and pride. "I know," she answered softly.

Her hand sought his.

Her heart ached to be filled.

Her mind whispered.

Heresy.

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

A/N: (Braces self for flames and howlers, or worse, utter silence)