Disclaimer: Everything from HP books belongs to JK Rowling

Camelot

He doesn't know where to begin. What do you say, what do you do when someone you are so utterly devoted to asks you why you love her? How do you give words to emotions that are completely indescribable?

It was a game at first. A fun game in which getting her as furious as possible was the key objective. He excelled at this particular activity. He is the only person who can make her ears flare red and her eyes light up a blinding green. He is the only person who has ever been able to steal away that calmness, that complete control that she lives with each day of her life. He stripped her naked so many times, left her raw and real in front of him as he laughed viciously with his friends. Left her naked of all the perfect qualities she's assumed so that she's just there, stripped before them and vulnerable as he liked her to be. He has killed her so many times. Has made the lights die out of her eyes as her eyes glisten with ungushed tears as he mockingly begged for a date. Mockingly made it known how far above her he believed himself to be.

It was a game that thrived off of for a good two years. He was fourteen that first time he saw her cheeks dangerously red and her mouth in a harsh scowl that stole away all her natural beauty making her tangible before him. She has always been a mystic being. Always seemed too perfect to be real, of another life, another dimension. It's impossible, he thought the first time he saw her. She has such a delicacy about her. One of those girls who looks as though the wind will blow them away. One of those girls who look as if they'd break if you touched them. She is dainty and so painfully beautiful he never thought she could be real. She was an idealistic dream, some phantom he thought up in his mind because how can someone so utterly perfect live in a world of such corruption? She's his dream of another life, the one true fantasy that until recently had no way of becoming real.

It wasn't just her appearance. Everything about her made her seemed to be of another place, another time. He couldn't believe that someone as charming as her, as intelligent and undeniably witty could be more than a well thought up façade of a person trying to hide their true vindictiveness. No person can have such purity, can smile without an ulterior motive or laugh simply because they're happy. No person can be so kind without being cruel behind closed doors. No person can be so beautiful, so perfect without a mask that comes off at night. She was a fake. She had to be because he couldn't believe that someone like her actually existed. She was a heroine from some novel he read long ago. Some character, an Elizabeth Bennet sent here to plague him for all eternity because she could never be real. Girls like her didn't exist. It was an impossibility his mother accidentally taught him as a child growing up.

He doesn't pretend to be anything but cynical. He doesn't hide the fact that the world has tainted him. Everybody has a story, a moment in life in which they forever grow up, in which they can no longer hide behind the childishness of adulthood. Many people think it was the sudden death of his parents that ripped the child out of him and thrusted him into the clutches of adulthood. Everyone thinks it was his devastating loss when he was just beginning to grow up that made his eyes grow cold, that made his laugh nothing more than a sarcastic cackle.

He doesn't like to talk about his parents' death. If you ever asked he would tell you that he was thirteen when they died. If you ever asked he would tell you that he was never filled in with the details contributing to their deaths because he was at school and all he knows is that no one allowed him to see that bodies at the funeral. All he would say is that it is a loss he will never forget and then respectively tell you to shut the bloody hell up and get out of his face. All he would do is glare at your sympathetic face as he mistook your altruism for pity.

He doesn't like to admit he still grieves. It was four years ago and to this day he still cries himself to sleep some nights at the thought that they're gone. It was four years ago and he can still smell the stench of death in the air he smelled at their funeral, still shivers when he goes to put on a black shirt or pants. He likes to idealize them a lot. He likes to pretend his world was an impenetrable Camelot that he lived in blissfully for years. He likes to pretend that they were the perfect parents like the ones he read in stories and heard about in small whispers since no one enjoys saying the word "parent" around him any longer. He likes to pretend that there were never any whores, never any booze that destroyed his haven.

When he remembers his father he sees a brilliant wizard with that messy hair he sees whenever he looks in the mirror. He sees kind green eyes and hears a humorous laughter of a man so completely in love with life. He remembers the times his father taught him to ride a broom and play quidditch. He remembers the times when he had his father's undivided attention before he sunk completely into work to hide his ever consuming despair. He doesn't try to remember his father's back walking out the front door, doesn't try to remember the months spent each year wondering when his father would be coming home because he's been gone for too long.

When he remembers his mother he remembers her singing. He remembers her voice soaring through the house. He remembers how it soothed him, made him fearless, made him calm and so in love with her perfect figure. He idolized her as a young boy. High on a pedestal she sat has she sung to him sweet tunes at night so he could sleep without the night terrors that plagued him as a baby. She was his heroine, the perfect being that couldn't be real and yet was. She lived and breathed and he never once thought that one person would ever measure up to her. Never once thought that she was like him, a human complete with weakness.

He became a man at the age of nine. He was shattered one night. He was completely torn apart at the realization that his parents were human, that his perfect mother was anything but. He never asked the name of the man his mother brought home and never asked his father what went through his head as her affairs finally surfaced but he realized that night how utterly foolish children are. He believed in them, believed in their masks because he so wanted to thrive in the goodness every child knows as the truth. It was taken. Taken as his father cried angry tears. Taken as his mother's body slammed against the wall after he father slapped her hard across the face. It was taken as he realized that the perfect life he lived in was nothing more than a dream. It wasn't real anymore and he isn't sure that it ever was.

He became a man that night as he realized that everything he sees is merely a lie veiled in some distorted truth. Those smiles his mother gave him veiled sadness, veiled an infidelity and love of alcohol that, after her husband found her in bed with one of her many lovers, she never again tried to hide. She broke him, his father broke him, because never once did they try to regain the Eden he once lived in. Never once did they hold him and tell him that they loved him after that night. He watched them, watched the feigned happiness, the false pretense of love that created the tense atmosphere. No longer could he pretend that they were perfect and when they died all he remembered was a slap in the face. All he remembered was carrying his mother up the stairs after she passed out on their living room couch. He tried to cry at the funeral, tried to grieve but all he could do was hate them for stealing away his childhood, for stealing away his faith.

It doesn't take a genius for him to realize why he hated her so much. She is so perfect, too perfect, and all she did was remind him of a mother he had lost a long time ago. Every sweet smile, every blissful laugh, it sickened him beyond comprehension because he knew in his heart that she was another lie. Some façade concocted to hide her true being from the world because manipulations is what gets people places in life. He wanted to knock her off her pedestal, to hurt her because every time he saw her beautiful face and every time she would say hello in her quiet voice she would tear away at his already broken heart. Every time she looked at him with her gentle eyes he saw his mother staring back.

He was fourteen when he finally got the courage to shout cruel words her way. He remembers nothing of that day but her pink cheeks and large tears. He remembers nothing about that day but a sickening feeling in his gut that he ignored because who was she to do that to him for three years? Who was she to pretend to be so utterly perfect when he knew she could only be anything but? When he knew she was nothing more than a pathetic lie?

He lived to belittle her those days. Any insult, any action would do as long as he could hurt her, pain her because her very existence pained him too much to handle. He wanted to tear her heart out, wanted to watch her wither away under his scrutinizing stare because she killed him. She killed him and hurt him and it was only fair. Only fair for her to share in his intense pain since she was the cause of it. Only fair for her to die inside because he shouldn't have to be miserable alone. He shouldn't have to live every day wishing for death as life went on peacefully around him.

She became his obsession. A deep obsession that began controlling his every move. He wanted to destroy her, wanted so badly for her to stop being so unreachable. He thrived of her anger some days. Thrived off those brief moments when he saw the human deep within. Those moments when he knew she wasn't the monster he blamed her of being and became a tangible essence he so dearly needed to hang on to. He loved her raw emotions, loved the tears he caused her to cry because they were something real. They were something he could see and feel and she was so completely intangible. She was a mere phantom, a spirit sent to stab him in his heart with her painful perfections.

She killed him when he was eleven years old. Killed him as she introduced herself in her usual polite manner and reminded him of a mother that he isn't sure ever existed. She killed him a few days later when he realized how beautiful she was. When he realized how utterly perfect she seemed. He killed her when she was fourteen. Made her feel raw pain for the first time. Made her all but naked in front the world because he could no longer take the innocence she seemed to radiate. She gave him life when he was fifteen. Was the essence that sustained him throughout the rest of Hogwarts because of who she was, because of who she reminded him of. She was that ethereal being he so badly needed to believe in. That ethereal being that was the essence of the goodness, of innocence he lost as his mother ripped his heart out. She was his mother incarnate. She was the figure he only believed existed in his wildest dreams.

It was a dangerous game he played with her. A dangerous game that would end up murdering what was left of his already dying soul until she decided to save him. He never realized he was falling for her. Never realized he needed to be in her presence because she represented the fantasy he so dearly needed. So still he hurt her. Still he made sure she was in pain because it was his revenge. It was his revenge on that whore of a mother, on the monthly abandonment of a father. His friends tried to warn him, to tell him that his actions will end up haunting him. He never listened.

She disappeared for a month during the beginning of sixth year to go to her parents' funeral. For so long her presence had been this light blindly sustaining him and when she left he felt submerged into the same darkness he died in at the age of nine. He was empty, just a hollow shadow roaming Hogwarts searching for a light he didn't even know that he was missing. He would look for a wisp over her red hair. He would listen for even an echo of her light laughter. And every time he would realize she wasn't there. Every time he would wonder why the castle suddenly became so dark, so cold.

He got his answer when she came back and looked for the briefest of seconds into her emerald eyes. He got his answer when the glow always on her face, the sparkle he once so dearly hated, disappeared and a broken, real girl was left in the place of the phantom that once plagued his nightmares. She was broken as he had been for over seven years and all he could think as he looked into her dead green eyes was where did the light go? Where is that goodness I so desperately abhorred? And he fell in love with her. He fell in love with her when he realized that she was what kept him alive, kept him going since he was eleven. He fell in love with her when he realized, painfully, that she would never smile in that beautifully naïve way again.

He felt foolish the first time he looked at her, really looked at her, and realized she was just a girl. She wasn't evil, wasn't some demon coming to earth to ruin what was left of his already devastating life. He feels foolish sometimes. Feels foolish for allowing his melancholy to blind him. He feels foolish remembering when he realized that he had loved her for years as he slandered and hurt her.

It took her so long to trust him. It took her so long to lean on him for support and take that hand of friendship he offered when he first realized she had broke. It took her so long to allow him to fix her as she fixed him. It scared her more than she would like to admit because for so many years he scorned her every chance he got. He hated her. She saw that whenever she looked into his angry hazel eyes and it was something she, to this day, cannot understand. She'll never know, never have the courage to tell him she sees through his lies and it's why they're stuck like this. Stuck in their pain and their past unable to lean completely on each other for support since she can never fully trust him and he'll never fully allow her to.

She was vulnerable the night he fell in love with her. She was how he liked her best: human and reachable. She was something real, a tangible form that he could hold in his arms and kiss with his lips. She was no longer a dream, no longer some mystic essence that incurred his seething wrath. She was real to him, a vulnerable girl who expelled a purity he could once again believe in. It was there, a physical thing he could reach out and feel and no longer would he have to worry if he was holding onto a dream, a mere figure of his past.

He stopped crying himself to sleep at night the first time he held her inside his arms. He stopped being plagued by dreams of his Camelot, stopped remember his mother that deeply disappointed as a young boy. He moved on, moved passed, and although his pain was still so much a part of him, he was able breath, able to live.

He told her he loved her the other night. He had for a year when he finally spoke the words. They're seventeen and passed their harsh history, passed the tears he had caused her to cry. It was just time for her to know, time for her to realize the impact she had on his life because without her he would still have been dying that painfully slow death he couldn't escape from before her. Without her he would still be lost in darkness. And he told her as they sat in the common studying for exams. He told her as she looked at him with her small smile on her lips and sparkle in her eye.

She never completely learned to trust him. She would always remember his old taunting, always remember his own hatred for her because he cannot speak the words that would make her suspicions go away. It will make the past too real for him, too tangible and he can't have that plaguing him now that he finally feels he can be happy. It hurts her to think about sometimes. To always wonder if it is some joke he's playing on her, some cruel prank to bring her yet another notch lower than before.

It was the scar her parents' death left on her. She could no longer blindly trust people because she had seen the dark side of life and it tainted her. It tainted her purity. So when he told her that he loved her so many questions flooded her mind and she just begged herself to believe him. Begged herself to trust him because her heart ached for him, ached for him so badly.

She could never tell you the reason she asked him why. She could never tell you what possessed her to put all her faith into one simple question that could hold such an array of answers. She somehow reasoned that if he could answer that, if he could tell her everything he loved about her it would make the love he says he feels something real, something she could hold onto. But he couldn't utter a word.

How do you tell someone you love them because they gave you a second chance at life? How do you tell someone you loved them because they saved you from yourself, saved you from a darkened future that would have tortured you into an early grave if they hadn't come along and saved you? He couldn't utter a word because too many reasons flew to his mind and not one of them seemed to even begin to tell her how deeply and how plainly he needed her in his life. Not one word could even describe what he owes to her because she gave him so much even as he gave so little in return.

She walked away from him after that. Walked away as his thoughts hung silently in the air unreachable to both of them as they stood needing to know the naked truth. She needed to see him, real and raw, and know that he loved her. She needed to hear plainly the reasons he loved her because she could no longer put blind faith into him. She walked away thinking how perfect it would be if he had told her everything she had wanted to hear. She shakes her head as tears fall down her cheeks and he watches her, raw pain in his eyes. It would have been too perfect to be real.

End (James/ Lily)

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