Innocent

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Innocent

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She tells him that she loves him.

He looks at her from across their dingy living room, and leans back into the leather back of the recliner they bought together ten years ago. He closes his eyes for a moment, mind heavy with intense thought and emotion. Wordlessly, his hands stroke a large stack of parchment bound together by a single, lifeless staple. He opens his blue eyes and drops the sapphire orbs to the paper, reading the black ink marks to himself.

He has put off this moment for far too long, he thinks to himself as his raw fingertips graze his tear-splattered signature on the paper. He has spent ten years wasting away in his own pathetic misery, drinking to his depression with 100-proof liquor and spending nights tortured by nightmares of Sirius' body, twisted and mangled, in his arms. He has watched as, slowly, his strong wife has been driven mad by the mere memory her cousin, the cousin who Remus refuses to let go of. Remus knows it, knows that it has come close to killing him, and even closer to killing her, and he is finally done with causing near-death experiences.

He says that he can't do this anymore, can't bear to be the one who hurts Nymphadora so. She shakes her head, and swears that Remus is not hurting her. She claims that Remus makes her happy, that the only thing she could ever want is for her husband to be happy, and that she is hurt that he thinks he is hurting her. She says this with a wretched hope in her green eyes, and she can't stand to look at him as she says the words. She instead stares at the dirty floor that she hasn't gotten around to cleaning in the last few years, and holds back a sob.

She starts to cry as he shakes his head back and forth, his graying hair falling into his eyes as he feels his heart race. She moans his name over and over again, closing her eyes so the blue tears spill in a single, all-consuming waterfall down her rosy cheeks onto her nude lips that Remus so loves to kiss. He watches as her chest rises and plunges down, her once healthy body terribly thin now as she has been starving herself for the past few months in a last effort to appeal to Remus' sexual desires. He told her once that he didn't like when she starved herself, that he wasn't attracted to women who were composed of bones and skin and nothing more, but Nymphadora just started crying, and Remus stopped speaking.

It has been a long ten years for her. She was just twenty-six when she married Remus Lupin. She had thought herself to be in love with the charming man who was her senior by more than ten years, and, by the first month of marriage, had thoroughly convinced herself that Remus would outgrow his sorrow over Sirius. Five years passed, and though try as she might, Nymphadora learned to accept the fact that she was never going to be the one that Remus thought about when he made love to her, Five more years passed, and she has been reduced to a living corpse, void of feeling the physical pain inflicted by her husband as she allows him to claim her body, but utterly consumed by a mental ache that threatens to devour her alive.

She is suddenly aware of how close he is when she finally opens her eyes. He has set four sheets of paper in her lap, three red circles marring the black and white print. She takes a black quill from his hand, trembling, and signs her maiden name on the three different papers. Her signature looks imprudent, similar to that of a young child in their first year of writing in cursive, and she feels foolish as she hands the sheets back to Remus. Her hand makes slight contact with his own, and she shakes her head. Ten year ago she would have felt a tingle dance up and down her spine, but now she feels nothing.

Before he can protest, she stands up and kisses his lips fiercely. The papers fall from his weathered hands, and he presses against her furiously, as if he has something to prove before he goes. Her hands travel the length of his back, flying under his graying shirt, and she gasps as his tongue invades her pliable mouth and his arousal presses against her stomach. He pushes her against the wall, murmuring her name over an over again, her heart racing as she dares to believe for a moment that this is the beginning of something new, something better, and that, finally, she and Remus can live a happy life together like people on television do.

He breaks the kiss as she reaches for his trousers' snap, pushing her broken body away from him. She watches as his form hobbles towards the door, stopping to pick up the fallen papers and, quite suddenly, she is left alone with a roaring fire and a single envelope that Remus placed in her hands after he plucked the divorce papers from her grasp. She looks at the withered parchment and, for a fleeting moment, considers allowing the flames to lick and torture it until it is nothing more than crisp ash at the bottom of the fireplace. She wants to see the memory of Remus burn like the wood that kindles the fire, wants to make sure that his ghostly memory can't come back and haunt her in her newly empty home.

Holding the envelope as if something inside might explode, she takes a seat next to the fire. She sits a little too close, and her arm is licked by a hungry flame. Nymphadora barely notices; she has grown far too accustomed to simple pains to be bothered by them anymore. She trembles slightly as her fingernail brushes the lips of the envelope, and starts prying them apart. She feels as the flame nibbles at her flesh again, and this time it aches, but it only aches because she is the only one who will see the burn mark. Remus always bandaged her arms when she would become burnt by their fireplace or when she would get cut by the knife that she left in her dresser drawer that had the deplorable habit of slitting her frail wrists. Remus will not be there to watch as she peels the dead skin from the flesh wound, and he will not be there to kiss it better when she finishes cleaning the burn.

The single sheet of parchment finally emerges, and she drops the envelope that concealed it into the grasps of the flames. She looks at the small paper and begins to cry again as the silence screams through the home. She finally understands that she will lay alone in bed tonight and for probably the rest of her life because, for ten long years, she has been Remus Lupin's whore, his slave, and wears scars that he placed on his arms in a monstrous attempt to prove that she was his. She let him tear at her skin when he pleased, for Nymphadora always believed that someday Remus would realize that she was his, and that Remus would finally let go of her cousin's memory. She allowed Remus to take her body all those nights in whatever way he pleased, and she never fought him. She gave him everything, and for that, no man or woman could ever want her again because Nymphadora was tainted, stained by Remus Lupin's hands and mouth.

She reads the three words on the paper, and screams his name hoarsely one last time, like she does when she comes and he comes too, Remus desperately hoping that this time she will carry his child, but Nymphadora knowing that will never be a possibility. Looking back, she wonders if having a child could have saved the love that did exist between her and him, but she shakes her head and knows that though they loved one another, love just wasn't enough to overcome obsession.

Slowly, almost tenderly, she places the paper into the inferno, and watches as Remus' handwriting is devoured by the greedy conflagration. The paper shrivels as it is eaten, curling like a butterfly's wings. She wonders for a moment if it will fly away, fly back to the writer and bring the writer home where he belongs. But the thought leaves Nymphadora as she crumbles to the floor in tears and realizes that this is no longer a home, it is a house where one pathetic person lives, where a man committed unspeakable cruelty against his wife without knowing it, and where a single spirit is slowly driving a woman insane with jealousy. Nymphadora knows this, accepts this, and tries her hardest to stop crying, but she just isn't sure that she is strong enough.

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The three words echo through her mind as she wakes up the next morning, nestled in the dust of her floor.

You are innocent.

She hopes that Remus is right.