☤┆five times kissed. ❜ ⇢ accepting!

                                                la première fois

tremors race against one another - his body their battlefield, his heartbeat loud in his ears, his throat stuck as though with toffee. merely 26 minutes have passed since he told her ( lightning-struck, nightmare-bred ) that he’d never see her again. 26 & a half minutes since she’d nodded like a child & stroked his face endearingly. 27 minutes since he said goodbye to his mother for the last time. the fractured sound of metal upon metal pulls him bodily out of his reverie ( dreamscape-made, a wish upon a dying star unable to fulfil it ) & ocean gaze locks with amber one. a motion made, & a nod, before manners kick him brutally & he stands, hand extended. ❛     yeah, i – yeah, you can sit here.          luke castellan.     ❜ she tells him hers ( allison. pretty. means truthful ) & places her hand in his. young though he might be, his mother knew the importance of good breeding ( when she was able to tie herself to the earth ) & it shows ; he lifts her hand, placing a chaste kiss on the back of it before releasing.   ❛     nice to meet you, allison.     ❜

                                               la deuxième fois

tyche-blessed, emerald & silver uniform resplendent, the roar seems to reverberate throughout the stadium as the winning team remains triumphant, retaining the cup for their second year in a row. he descends slowly, almost immediately pulled into the black hole that is the rejoicing slytherin house - but there is something wrong ; something that doesn’t belong. his hands find more slender ones, the person to whom they belong wearing the wrong colours - red & gold & the antithesis of his in every way, but it doesn’t matter because it’s allison & she’s rejoicing too - not with his team or his house, but with him. he pulls her close, body warm & hugs her tight as he places a kiss on her cheek. ravenclaw defeated for another year ; maybe gryffindor will have a chance at the cup next year         but not if he can help it.

                                              la troisième fois

casanova-made, dorian gray before & after the corruption, both frankenstein & his monster : somehow, he has made it here, to the circle. born broken, impure & unworthy, he has made them all forget that. he is oscar wilde’s earnest - jack & algernon both play-making at being someone they are not. but he will not make their mistakes ; he was born for this. he will show his father he was wrong to leave ; wrong to abandon him. myriad of names thrown at him, dizzying, head heavy under gilded locks. but a few he recognises, & then suddenly it’s five years earlier, on the hogwarts express, & amber gaze once again meets his ocean-blue one, & once again his lips graze gently the back of her slender hand. manners maketh man, it seems - even in circles poison-raised. for their kind aren’t made for niceties, but they play-act them well. but he play-acts them best.

                                             la quatrième fois

he made his bed a long time ago ; sides chosen, choices made, bridges burnt, & now he has to lie in it, a traitor in the eyes of both - one by blood, & one by decision - but he has hidden his heritage well & those who would turn against him if they knew have welcomed him into their folds with the expectation that he will follow their lead, do their bidding. & he will. hate being controlled though he does, he’s willing to relent for this ; for the opportunity to destroy those who made him impure, those who ruined him & made his father leave. & though his choices have placed a silken ribbon over his eyes, blinding him to the horrors of his choices, he is not wholly blind to the choices of others. he sees how jumpy she is, how uncomfortable - a lion in the snake den ; not even it is safe - & he pulls her aside into the shadows. her hurt is fresher than his ( she has not been shaped & moulded by it, letting it bleed into every atom of his being until nothing else mattered ), & for once, poison-bred boy doesn’t know what to do. he tilts her head up to face his, placing his lips on hers as he tries to comfort her. it’s only when she relaxes & returns the gesture, that he wraps his arms around her waist & deepens it, the two in their own world far from the snake den. for a moment, the war doesn’t matter, their chosen sides don’t matter, their blood doesn’t matter. for a moment, the two of them are all that matters.

                                            la dernière fois

the world has pressed the slow-play button. mud cakes golden hair as he looks up, the sky illuminated with a rainbow of coloured streaks ; golds & reds & greens & more - he loses track, head heavy, cotton-wool fuzzy. gaze isn’t focusing, the streaks giving way to their blurrier cousins as his head gets worse. hearing is broken, too, & for a moment he thinks he can hear her - the one he hasn’t seen since he was 11 ; the one he believed to be a monster all these years ( his father was the monster, he sees that now ). she’s crying out to him : ❛     luke! luke!     ❜ but his body isn’t responding to his brain, & his arm remains in the dirt despite him wanting to wave, to let her know he’s alive. i’m sorry. may castellan didn’t deserve what he did to her.         but it’s not may to whom the voice belongs ; may is made up of white-gold, & the colours that appear in front of his declining vision are china & obsidian - but he knows those colours, too. mouth won’t move to whisper his apology, & dimly he realises what’s happening. so too, it seems, does she. she chooses to comfort him in the way he’d comforted her, but he doesn’t have the energy to respond to it ; only the energy to close his eyes before he breathes his last, but he is thankful             of all the evils in the world he has seen ; he has done, at least he knows now that love endures despite all. & he’s sorry. he only wishes that he had the chance to tell allison & may that he loved them whilst he was still alive.