" Shoot me."
“F-fuck.” His cold-stiffened fingers fumbled around the heavy weight of the metal in his palm, something slick rolled down his sleeve to further inhibit his already unwilling grip. They’d been out for two days, his snapped wand hung uselessly out of his back pocket where they were holed up just outside of a desolate Dundee and the heat of her fever was curling the bright red hair at her forehead. Her wand had stung at him, the second he’d tried to pick it up and she was barely coherent enough to speak.
“I can’t- Lily… I CAN’T.”
Scor longed to bury his fingers in his ash-darkened hair and pull, to ground himself. But the gun. The gun was in his hands. The little catch the muggles DARED to call the ‘safety’ was hooked back and he couldn’t. He couldn’t do this again, he couldn’t watch his family die by his hand again when all he ever tried to do was h e a l. A dark, twisted thing that rooted itself in the pit of his stomach months ago wailed for the fact that if he did as she asked he would be alone, that this time he wouldn’t have anyone to pull him from the wreckage like his mother had. No wand, no way to get back to the castle. This time he would die and it wouldn’t be quick, it would be slow, with only the company of his own mind till the end. Cloying, sick and ruinous, like tar. Selfish.
He raised his arm with a finger on the trigger, trembling like a leaf as though he had any right to being scared, trying to think of the last words that she would ever hear.
Failing.
