chapter 26 - light
i'll give you everything i have
i'll teach you everything i know
i promise
i'll do better
corvus wakes up to the feeling of a cold body next to hers. evan is always cold. always has been. him and barty have that in common.
“hey.” he greets, his voice raspy from sleep, eyes tired.
granted, his eyes are always tired these days.
“mmm.” she hums back, rubbing her eyes and groaning. “what time is it.”
“the meeting is in an hour.” evan answers instead of a time, knowing that's what corvus really wanted to know.
“i get the shower first.” she says, slipping out of bed and into the bathroom before he can argue.
corvus black’s engagement to evan rosier is commercial. it's simply business. there's no true love brewing between the two of them. but if corvus is going to be forced to marry anyone, she'll gladly take evan over some other blood supremacist pureblood douchebag.
even if it means having to find something else to occupy her saturday nights while her fiance and barty “entertain” themselves.
it's not bad, per say, just, unwanted.
it's necessary though. for her family to believe that she is really in this. she needed a husband. needed to keep the pure bloodline strong.
all in all, it's not awful. most of their families are built on loveless marriages, so it's not out of the ordinary. they're basically the same as they always were, except for the fact that they now live together, and they lock arms in public.
they're not at the age where their parents have started talking about children yet, thank god. corvus doesn't know if she could bring herself to do that. not with evan, for sure.
but evan's always there. just like he always has been.
when she wakes up screaming in the middle of the night and he has to pretend not to be annoyed at being woken up too.
when she's having a panic attack so bad she can't breath and he has to count with her.
when he can't fall asleep and she has to scratch his head to get him tired.
when someone says something in a meeting that she knows will set him off and she has to squeeze his hand under the table.
it's a joint effort. not to let the engagement get in the way of the friendship. not to start loathing each other just because they got stuck together when all they really wanted was the one person they each know they can't have.
because at the end of the day, she still loves james. today. tomorrow. forever.
~~~
it's a thursday when corvus finds out that james potter and lily evan's are engaged.
she's in the kitchen preparing dinner, she always likes to do it herself rather than having their house elf do it, when she overhears evan, barty, and pandora talking in the living room.
“she's going to be devastated.” pandora’s voice echos into the kitchen.
“she doesn't have to find out, you know?” barty hisses. “you know it's only going to do damage. there's no reason for even us to know.”
“barty, this is james we're talking about.” evan pitches in. “she has a right to know that the man she loved, and still loves, mind you, is getting married.”
corvus feels her stomach drop, her body collapsing silently to the floor.
she holds her hand over her mouth, keeping in her sobs.
they can't hear. not now.
so she puts the mask back on, she's gotten it for back onto her face in the last couple of years, and she stands up, and plasters a smile on her face.
“dinner’s ready.”
~~~
it's a tuesday when she figures out how she's going to die.
voldemort talks about needing his “‘most dedicated comrade’s” house elf at their meeting that day.
and corvus spots an opening.
she offers up kreacher. with the careful consent of him at first, of course.
this is how she goes. she's said it before. said she'll die some “sirius type of death”. this is the most sirius death she can think of.
she hasn't spoken to either of her brothers in almost three years.
sirius never even said anything to her. never said that he knew. never said goodbye. he just stopped speaking to her. almost as if she never existed in the first place.
regulus completely broke down. it was the first time corvus had seen him cry in a long time. he begged her to just go back to the potters’. they'd figure it out. corvus had never seen him so desperate before.
she's going to do better for them. make the world better for them. they may never know the reason she dies, but she'll know that she died for them.
she's going to take out voldemort. betray him. the most dangerous wizard alive. all for the sake of a few kids not even in their 20s yet.