DESPOINA
Would he drown beneath the magnitude of her sorrow if he truly tried to drain it from her? Would it simply rise up and crash down around him? She is certain it would. Certain that even he, in all of his glory, would not be able to contain the ocean of her grief—the unending sea of it. She is made of it, carved from it, and she knows she contains entire galaxies of sorrow, of pain, of loss.
It used to frighten her, how endless it all seemed, but now it just feels inevitable.
It feels eternal.
So she wades further and further into its dark water, and it is only when he speaks that she is called back at all, her attention hooking and tethering her. Her eyes close at his admission and she leans into his touch and then collapses into the shadows of his chest. Home, she thinks, as she breathes in the spice of him, and she wonders how she has gone so long without ever having it—without ever knowing it.
At his dark promise, she smiles, softened by his violence, but she shakes her head against him. “A name will fix nothing,” she knows, and if she does it to protect Draco or expel him from her life, she is not sure. “It would just extend this,” part truth and part falsehood. She swallows hard and then rears back to look at him, to let her mouth touch his cheek gently before dipping beneath his chin and curling there.
“Just hold me,” she asks, her voice soft, and she wrestles her instincts to push him away, to run away and drown in her grief. “Hold me close,” she repeats with her eyes closing.
She could survive this, she thinks, shaking with unspilled tears.
She could survive so long as he is here.
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do