Only Him by R_Ravenclaw
Chapter Notes: Thanks to Social Loner for betaing!
I could see it every time I looked into her eyes.
At first I thought her eyes were beautiful. They were black and strong; she obviously wanted nothing more than to follow the one she loved.
It wasn’t me she loved.
And I don’t know when I found out.
But it was never about love. For me it was, but love seemed so unimportant in comparison. I was the pureblood she had to marry. She had to marry me to keep her family pleased.
But I could tell.
I could tell even before we married that she didn’t care for me. I could tell she only thought of me as a means to become the perfect pureblood. To her I was only a device to be used if necessary.
I could tell from her eyes when I proposed. At first she looked pleased, but then her eyes turned emotionless again when she realised who was asking.
It was obvious. She was thinking of Him. I was never Him. I could never have been Him.
It didn’t matter if I loved her.
She couldn’t make herself pretend to love me. She was always thinking of Him. I know that she questioned our marriage even before the actual event. I think she wondered if she were doing the right thing. I think she still does. I think she’s still unsure.
When we got married, all I knew was that she was satisfied that she had the marriage she wanted, but at the same time I could tell she was always too aware of the fact that I wasn’t Him.
He could have made her happy, but I could never have.
Always, I knew it. Once or twice I tried to tell her how I felt, but she could always sense it beforehand. She didn’t want to hear how I felt.
She didn’t want to know that I loved her.
She didn’t want anyone except Him to love her… But He never did.
She was always so realistic and logical about everything—you’d think that she would have eventually given up on the hope that He would fall in love with her. But she never did. It was always in the back of her mind.
Would He ever feel any differently? All she could do was stand next to Him, waiting, watching.
She followed His every move. I came to realise that the way she looked at Him was the most obvious look of love. Obsessive love, maybe, but it existed. And she never stopped. It was always Him.
Never me.
We aged, and we served Him. I don’t think I would have lasted that long if it hadn’t been for her. I loved her, in spite of everything. Sometimes I knew my expression resembled hers when she looked at Him—except I was only looking at her.
She loved Him, and did everything He asked. She tortured and killed and she enjoyed it more than anything in the world because He asked her to. Maybe she just enjoyed it for herself as well. But what she wanted wasn’t as important.
She loved it because she loved Him. That was His world, and she embraced it.
But then her whole world came crashing down on her.
Because His did too. He was destroyed by the half-blood. She never called the half-blood anything other than ‘it’. It destroyed her whole world. But even more than that… it destroyed everything she cared about.
Because once He was gone, the only strings holding her life together snapped. She had no direction, no meaning, no purpose.
It had always been only Him. How could she exist without Him? She was just as intelligent and driven, but she never could have lead without Him.
So she turned to what she knew.
Torture.
She tortured the other family. The purebloods with the son He had decided wasn’t a threat. She tortured them anyway, but she wouldn’t kill them: she said it would have been too kind.
In her mind, they were part of the cause.
The cause that had torn her world apart.
I wanted to help her, to love her, but that wasn’t what she needed. She needed her life back. She needed Him.
I could tell she hated me more than ever. Every time she looked at me, I knew she blamed me as much as the family she tortured. I knew she was questioning more than ever if she should have married me. If marrying me hadn’t been the ultimate betrayal.
She kept calling me her husband. She repeated it over and over, as though she had forgotten I had a name. To her I ceased to exist in any form other than a title.
I was her mar on her otherwise perfect record.
I was her husband, and for that she hated me. She hated me and the love I would have given her too readily.
She hated me because I was in the place where He was supposed to be. I should have been just another follower, not at all connected to her.
She was the queen, and I was just a servant.
And she couldn’t forget it. She would have killed me a thousand times over if it would bring Him back.
Soon we were caught. And all at once, she was the queen. She sat straight and tall, and for the first time it was as if I didn’t exist.
It was only her and what she had done.
She had tortured the purebloods for Him. Everything she had ever done was for Him.
Except me. I ruined it.
I ruined her and her perfect world.
All she ever wanted was Him.
He was her one weakness, her one downfall. He was her one strength and her only meaning. Without Him, she would have been perfect. Except she could never have truly lived without His presence.