Cursed | Draco Malfoy, 18+

F i n

September 2018.

Talia walked her way into the library she worshipped. She stopped for a minute, placing the book in her hand back on its shelf.

She finished yet another one, another book, another novel her mother had bought for that library.

She didn't cry to this one. It was beautiful and heartbreaking as the rest, but she didn't cry. Sometimes Talia wondered if she had any more tears to spare this world.

She smiled as her fingers brushed along the spines of all the books that the library carried. She walked back and forth with her eyes closed, trying to decide which book to pick up next.

Talia always did that. She read one book a day, and she had been ever since her parents left this life for something better.

Amelie used to read to her, but she wasn't there to do that anymore. Talia had to read on her own now.

Peering around for what felt like minutes, she didn't quite know where to start looking until something special caught her eye, a book, a book she never saw before.

It looked like a diary, a black leather-bound diary. Worn and frail. It seemed to be at least twenty years old to her.

She hesitated as she watched the initials carved into it. D.M and A.A.

It hurt. Something broke within the cage of her chest, something that had been breaking for the past three years, broke a little more now. It ached a little harder.

She missed her mother. She missed her father. She missed them. They missed her.

The morning she woke up three years ago wasn't like any other. She knew they were gone. Talia could feel it to the depth of her bones that her parents weren't there anymore. They all felt it.

It wasn't something that needed to be told or explained, something they needed to see in order to understand that it had happened.

That they left, that they faded. The world turned darker that early dawn, and it never got its light back. Something beautiful was taken from their lives, and it never became the same again.

Her fingers finally found the edges of the book as she began to part it.

She opened it, and she smiled. It was her mother's handwriting. It was Amelie. It was Amelie mixed with Draco. It was his words but her sentences.

I love you. I love you. I love you.

It said, with Draco's letters, only to be finished by her mother's words.

I love you more. I love you so much more.

Amelie had written. She had scribbled, and she had worked that little diary to the brim.

Talia was overwhelmed, scared almost as she slipped down onto the sofa where her mother used to hold her, where her father used to bend down and kiss both of their heads, where she didn't know their first kiss had taken place.

And she read. Talia read and read and read. Amelie used to say she got that from Theodore. Her old Teddy. Reading. Teddy read a lot. Talia reads a lot too.

She cried. She sobbed, and she whimpered as she read what her mother had done. She moved from room to room while doing it. Feeling every emotion her mother described.

''Really?''

''Really.''

_