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It makes you sick to think she’s pining over something as worthless as you are. She’s vibrant, she’s always been vibrant, but you make her mousy. You make her weak. You make her as pale as moonlight, and just as despondent, and that’s awful. You are awful. You have taken something precious, and you have corrupted it because that is what you do.
How can she love you? How can she want you? You do not deserve to be loved. You do not deserve to be loved by anything or anyone, and you especially do not deserve to be loved by someone so young, so fair, so full of life. You are half-dead.
You think sometimes that his death killed whatever was left alive in you.
There wasn’t a funeral, not for him. There wasn’t a reprieve or an Order of Merlin or a pretty speech. Nothing for him, a criminal to the end in the eyes of the world. Will his name ever be cleared? Will you live to see it? Do you deserve to live to see it when you believed it of him too? How could you have ever believed it? What kind of friend are you?
uselessworthlessweak
You remember what love feels like. You remember so acutely that love feels like soaring through the sky on an illegal flying motorbike. It feels like strands of dark hair coming loose from the messy knot they were pulled into, whipping back into your face and tickling your scars. It sounds like barking laughter. It smells like leather and fire. It tastes like contraband whisky on your tongue.
You feel it in your chest sometimes when she looks at you. That long-familiar ache. That ingrained need to be so close to another person that your life just might end if you can’t make it happen. If you weren’t a hollow man now, it might be possible to give her what she wants. It might be possible to allow that ache to bloom into soaring, flying, laughing. Fire and whisky. Leather and tongues entwining, chasing the taste, getting drunk on each other rather than spirits.
But you’re careful; you’re so very careful because you know the truth. You know that you don’t deserve her. You don’t deserve the way she looks at you. You don’t deserve the way her eyes light up when you walk in the room. You don’t deserve the way she sighs your name. You don’t deserve the way she so clearly feels like the sun shines out of your face.
You are not sunlight. You can never be sunlight.
You are the moon. You are cold and pale and you have no light of your own. Your only light reflects from the sun, and the sun is dead. You watched it die. You watched it die and you did nothing.
Except no. That’s wrong. You did worse than nothing. You failed him.
He was never sunlight. He was the stars. A whole galaxy of stars for you to explore, for you to find and name and keep and protect, but you failed so badly, so spectacularly. You threw him to the wolves. You left him to the monsters (like you, like you). You abandoned him. You believed the worst of him. He was supposed to be your stars, but you let them all wink out and die, one after the other, one by one by one, until there was only darkness. Until there was only the veil and the moon.
You’re the monster. You’re a monster, and you never deserved him. And so you can never deserve her either. It doesn’t matter what she wants, it doesn’t matter what they all might say or wish because none of them know the truth. None of them know what it would mean.
But you’re so weak, aren’t you? You’re so weak and pathetic. You think you can try. You think you can just try it, just a little, just let her into your life (what’s left of it, if anything, there’s nothing, you know that there’s nothing). You’re the worst.
She cannot possibly understand what she’s getting herself into when you touch her. When you cup her face with your paws, when you bare your razor-sharp teeth, when you scent the delicate skin behind her ears, she cannot possibly understand the danger into which she’s placing herself. Stupid, stupid girl.
But it isn’t her fault. It’s yours. Sometimes you forget what you are, but you must always remember.
Do you remember when he took your hand and helped you up and brought you through the winding steps out of the tree and into the night? Do you remember when he tugged you close and whispered promises and tasted your lips and your tongue? Do you remember when he held you as you shivered because it hurt so much as your body threatened to come apart? Do you remember when his eyes found yours and he said that no matter what happened, no matter who tried to come between you, no matter what monsters there were in the night, screaming, crying, howling, nomatternomatternomatter-- he was yours. He was so fully, so incredibly, so wholly yours.
What a terrible fool you were to think any of it was yours to keep. What a terrible fool to think you get to have any of it ever again.
You wish you could see him again, just once. You wish you could see him and hold him and touch him and kiss him and whisper how sorrysorrysorry you are that you failed him so miserably. You wish you could tell him so many things that you never did before. You wish he would look at you and tell you that you’re allowed to be okay, allowed to move on, allowed to have love again.
But then you remember once more, as you should, as you must. You are not to be okay. You are not to move on. You are not allowed to love.
Because you can’t. You cannot love.
You are a monster.