“Are we really doing this? Are we really slow-dancing?” (mARY/Sirius)
They’ve been this way for what feels like hours; his grip tight around her, pulling Mary into him, her head settling against his chest with a content sigh. A gentle flurry whirls past their window as if in unison with their own movements. Clean hands lay gentle on hips and shoulders as they sway back and forth to the slow, stringy tune playing low through the speaker of their record player. Here and now, it seems so impossible – just the two of them with nothing outside to interrupt or pull them apart. No blood to stain the porcelain sink. No mission started with nothing more than locked gazed and a reassuring nod of the head. They’d stay like this forever if only the world would let them.
“Are we really doing this?” His voice breaks their silence, words raspy as a testament to how long it’s been since he’d spoken a single word; can almost hear the smile in his tone. “Are we really slow-dancing?”
“You know we’re not.” She replies, unwilling to move from this space until she feels him tighten, not to hold her closer, but in defense. Closed eyes tighten, as if in her own protest as to what’s to come. Their swaying stops, his arms move from her hips to her arms pushing her away to look at her, brows furrowed in confusion, searching her features for any sort of explanation.
But she doesn’t need to explain, because the moment he pulls away, like snowfall from moments prior, the façade around them falls. The cold from outside their window seeps in past metal bars, whipping around damp stone, scratching at his skin between tattered cloth. Soft melodies replaced with howling wind. An engulfing darkness that swallows what little light the stars provide.
Yet Mary remains untouched, unchanged, unaffected by the harsh elements of his cell. The realization brings pause, hands shake as he pulls them from her, now dirty and scabbed and frail, but she won’t let him go that easy. She never has. Moonlit fingers intertwine with his, the juxtaposition of war torn skin against angelic imagination cementing the fact that he is in solitude; meant to suffer here alone.
It isn’t the first time she’s watched his realization, and it never gets easier. The confusion, the anger that comes with it. How could I forget where I’ve been damned to? She watches quietly as it settles in him, doesn’t flinch when knuckles connect with one of four walls around him, each of them stained with crimson from similar moments from countless days prior. Acceptance comes quicker these days, but she isn’t summoned here time and time again to let him embrace what’s happened to him. To suffer for someone else’s crimes. Maybe I didn’t do what I was put here for, but I’ve done enough to earn my place here.
“You don’t belong here, Sirius.” The one constant is how he shudders away as she closes the gap between them; either because he no longer deserves her touch, or it’s too hard to subsist that it isn’t real. How he struggles to remember if her eyes were more green or more brown. The heat he feels when her lips press against his cheek is nothing more than a evocation of her warmth. She is alive, out there somewhere, waiting for him, but she is becoming a memory. She can’t stay and he can’t keep conjuring her back to a place she doesn’t belong. Every time is meant to be the last, but she won’t let her gaze move from him, even if he’s never been able to watch the ocean mist take her.
