A/N: The relationship between Steerforth and Rosa Dartle is twisted and fascinating. This is obviously an unreliable narrator, but it was terrifically fun to write.

You are eight years old, friendless and orphaned.

He is eleven, as high above you as the stars.

You love him like a dog. He has no interest in you, no concern for your feelings. He is tall and strong, and you will never be able to keep up with him.

If you taunt him, he pays you mind, if only to shake you and heckle you. It is enough. You are so lonely, the house is so wide and long and empty.

(He would be enough).

You vex him, and the hammer marks you in blood. His. Forever.

...

You are sixteen, and he is beautiful, and you have decided that you hate him.

He kisses you in candlelight, crowding you against the door, his fingers curving, flaming against your waist, and then he stops, just when you are broken, laughing against your lips.

"What is it?" you breathe, because you burn, burn for him and his voice and his wild, careless eyes.

"That scar," he murmurs, tracing it with his mouth. "What man could love you, with that scar?"

You draw back, sharp and scattered, as though he has thrown the hammer a second time, and you strike him across the face. "Don't touch me."

It is not the last time he kisses you, but it is the last time you believe it.

...

He is always fascinated with you when you reject him, and mocks you at the first hint of softness. And so you learn (as you have always known, even as you knew at eight) to haunt him with daggers in your eyes, to torture him so perfectly that he would beg for it (if he were not quite so very proud).

Yours is the sort of love that burns until it blackens. You hate him because you have worshiped him, and you despise yourself for living so utterly for him.

...

It is shameful, cruel—crueler than anything, really—that he lives and dies for those sort of people.

Yours is no thick, coarse skin. When you suffer, you feel it cut to your heart, feel it burn along the seam that traces your lips.

In the end, you always burn.

He is dead, he is gone, and you never had enough time in this dreadful, lonely world to hate him as passionately as you longed to.

Never enough.