A/N: I'm still not over the Six of Crows duology (quote belongs to Leigh Bardugo!), because I'm now killing one half of my OTP.

Hogwarts. Auction Day 17 Auction 3: [dialogue] "I can't believe Scorpius is dead. It doesn't feel real."

WC: 501

TW: Major character death, grief, fatal illness, canon divergent AU

~~ lie to me (it isn't real) ~~

"I can't believe Scorpius is dead. It doesn't feel real," Rose murmurs and Al puts his arm around her shoulder.

"I know, Rosie, I know," he whispers back to her.

And it truly doesn't, feel real. If she repeats it just enough times, it isn't real, it isn't real, it isn't real, Scorpius is alive, Scorpius is alive, Scorpius is alive, she can convince herself that it isn't, trick her brain into forgetting the truth and basking in a world of dark, terrible but comforting lies she so desperately wants to stay in.

"It doesn't feel real," she says again, because there is nothing else to say, and Al doesn't reply again, because what can he tell her that isn't the ugly, brutal truth.

Better terrible truths than kind lies, she thinks someone once told her, or maybe she read it, in one of those books Scorpius always buys—bought—for her. Either way, it doesn't matter, because all she wants right now are the kind lies.

They should've known something was wrong.

She should've known something was wrong. For Merlin's sake! She was engaged to him, they lived together, and yet she couldn't even see it when the love of her life slowly ebbed away.

Rose likes to think he didn't know, that he had no idea.

This is probably a lie.

But it's an easy one to believe. After all, everyone was so overjoyed when Astoria Malfoy woke up from the coma she'd been plunged in for the last ten years. It had gotten to the point where the Malfoys and Greengrasses were ready to do anything to cure their beloved Story, and no spell nor potion was overlooked.

No one knew what woke her up. There were too many possibilities, too many experiments for them to be sure. The blood curse was supposed to be irrevocable, and so everyone was overcome with the most intense of joys when she simply woke up one day, and with perfect health.

Maybe that was why no one paid any attention to Scorpius' health, especially not him. Rose was just too happy to see him smile so brightly that she'd brushed off his light cough as just seasonal allergies.

It was only months later when Scorpius crumpled to the floor one bright sunny August afternoon that she realised something was wrong.

The curse, it fell upon him, they'd told her. All this time it had been repressed, as Astoria had been the carrier, they'd continued. And we don't know what cured her, they'd added. There's little time left.

And indeed, there had been little time left. It happened so quickly that no one saw it pass by. So much that it seemed like a dream. A nightmare. Something that wasn't real at all.

And yet, here she is. Sitting in their empty apartment, in their queen-sized bed, all alone, apart from Albus' arm around her shoulder. A safe place for her to cry.

It isn't real, it isn't real, it isn't real.