HEATHENS - Harry Potter ✔

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

"Where did you get this one?" murmured Harry, tracing a long scar from Kiera's left shoulder down to the small of her back. They were both sat on Kiera's bed in the seventh-year girl's dormitories. They had reckoned that the Slytherin Dungeon would provide them with more privacy than the Gryffindor quarters, and were proven right as they had entered the common room to absolute silence.

It was late in the evening now, the castle had settled down, most people were asleep. People had begun to return to their homes after supper. Most patients were able to leave comfortably, and those who couldn't were transferred to St Mungo's. Still, a large fraction had remained in the castle for one night, sleeping in the school's dormitories.

As neither Kiera nor Harry had much energy for socialising, they had decided to go to her room rather than his, which is where they had remained for hours now, in the greenish light of the Black Lake's waters.

"Detention with Alecto," explained Kiera, a shiver running down her spine as Harry's cold fingers followed the length of the scar. "She whipped me a few times after catching me with a bottle of dittany."

As Harry was sat behind the girl, Kiera could not see him, but she could very well imagine the saddened pain that appeared on his face each time she explained the origin on a cut or bruise or burn.

He moved his fingers from the scar to another set on her shoulder blade, these ones older. "What about these?" he asked, sounding nearly afraid of the answer.

Kiera hesitated for a while, not sure how honest she should be. "I - um ... I got those from a the Baneberry Potion ... from you, actually ... sectumsempra."

She regretted telling him a second later. The silence was worse than any words he could have possibly expressed his grief in. Harry closed his eyes, the familiar stinging of tears burning at the corners of his eyes. Kiera heard him inhale sharply before slowly emptying his lungs again. He withdrew his hand, only to press his lips on the top of the first scar, before tracing it with his lips. Harry took his time to press soft, ghostly kisses on all the wounds on her back before crawling to sit in front of her instead.

"And this one?" he asked as he begun to trace another scar, this one on her arm, with his lips once more.

"Bellatrix," Kiera said. "She was convinced that if she just hurt me bad enough, you'd feel it too and then come to my rescue so that they could catch you. Evidently, she was wrong."

Harry placed a last kiss on her shoulder where the cut ended, before letting go of her hand. "I'm sorry," he said quietly.

"Don't apologise," Kiera rejected him immediately. "It's not your fault. None of it is."

"Yes, it is," Harry said, picking up her other hand, not looking at her eyes. "All of it is my fault. I should've protected you. It was my job to."

"You forget that you broke up with me," Kiera joked. "So, it really wasn't."

Harry laughed shortly, shaking his head, before pressing his lips to her knuckles. He began to kiss yet another scar that marked on her body, looking up at her through hooded eyelids a few times.

Kiera let out a laugh, biting her lip as she looked at him. "What?" he asked against the skin of her arm.

"Just something Bellatrix said to me," Kiera said, the smile still present on her face. "'Is Potter into scars? Because if you ever see him again, you'll have a lot of them'."

Harry hummed as he reached her shoulder again. "I'll have her know," he said, grinning against her skin, "that I'm into anything as long as it's on your body."