Snow Angels
Severus watches them from on high, unsure of which one he is really more in love with. Not that it matters, really –up in that window, he knows he is nothing like them; will never be anything like them. As lofty as his perch is, the knowledge is always with him that not only angels frequent spires and towertops. Gargoyles squat there, too: spiky and grotesque, more stone than stone.
Severus wonders what draws him so intensely to this pair, the ones who are at once his exact opposites and his doppelgangers…and never, ever accessible.
He is a dark, silent, sliding thing; one less likely to have been weaned at the breast than to have sucked the sap from the shadows as an infant. These two look as bright and cool as plate-glass windows on Christmas morning, but it doesn't fool him for even one minute.
In the morning sun on the snow, they seem to glow and flash. Their light isn't like that of the warm candleglow of the Mudblood – no, the Muggleborn, the Witch in spite of everything – Evans, or even the huge, world-shattering supernova of Potter and Black, as beautiful and awe-inspiring as it was terrifying (to him, anyway. He sincerely doubted that anyone else got their ass kicked by these two on a regular basis.). No, the sum of their light, he was unfazed by admitting, was less than even his. Cold and brittle, it bounced off of them as from a mirror. It wasn't really their own.
Severus has fallen in love with them both, and he likes to think about them. He especially likes how their names are not quite right, yet at the same time fit them so well.
Didn't the name Lucius, he reflected, have its root in a word that meant "light"? Strange that that name would exactly fit a man whose soul was one of the darkest and most intense that Severus had ever encountered. But he was a magnificent blond.
And Narcissa? Severus felt his breath hitch in his throat for a moment. She had received her name because she was such an outsider in her family, like him, though their circumstances were very different. The Blacks were a family of Stars: Sirius and Regulus, and Narcissa's parents Orion and Casseiopeia begat Bellatrix and Andromeda…and then Narcissa. The unexpected blonde in a family of brunettes, she was sylphlike, dainty and slender where the rest were much more bountiful in appearance: Bellatrix and Andromeda with their thick dark hair, their full, feminine figures. Narcissa was different. She was the crown jewel, because she was so rare, and was named for someone so beautiful that it had killed him in the end.
Severus found that a little morbid.
Her father put her on a pedestal. Severus would have built her an empire if she had asked.
Her mother had wept for joy when her seventeen-year-old champagne beauty, her little queen, had announced that she would marry Lucius Malfoy sometime in the fall after her seventh year. Severus, the same age as Narcissa (some six or seven years younger that Lucius), had, to his shame, wept what felt like a sea of thorns. He could have killed her with his bare hands.
The self-proclaimed gargoyle watches Mister Malfoy the Younger escort his fiancée back towards the castle he himself had quit a few years back. Wintry sun dances off the whiteness of their skin, their footprints in the snow (shallow and delicate, the tread of the noble), their blond hair, and he aches.
Aches because he envies Lucius so deeply that he idolizes him, and such is the extent of his idolatry that it has become a form of love.
Aches because he would have done anything and sworn everything for the strange and perfect Narcissa Black.
Narcissa slips in the snow and lands on her back. Lying prone, the sleeves of her silvery school robes (definitely not uniform attire) spread like wings, so pale, she looks like she could be an impression of herself, as if someone had just walked away and left this star-colored thing lying there…or like she had just fallen from the sky. Severus tries not to think about whether her body is as white and cool as the powdery drifts in which she lies.
In a decidedly uncharacteristic movement, Lucius lays down next to her. The tips of their fingers brush faintly, like in a painting where God makes the world, and for a minute, Narcissa does seem possessed of a light of her own. Severus (gargoyle, gargoyle, gargoyle) is sure that if he were to lean close, he might see great pairs of wings resplendent on both their backs, vibrating softly like birds.
Of the two, Narcissa is the most likely candidate for angel-hood. She has never done good works in her life, but she is aloof and untouchable, a marble Madonna. Even Lucius, with his lusts and wanton whims knows it is forbidden to touch her until their wedding night.
This thought brings Severus a kind of secret relief.
Maybe Severus has projected his thoughts onto her mind, but more likely he's just lucky. Either way, Narcissa lifts her gaze, and he knows she has seen him.
She climbs to her feet, politely excusing herself to Lucius –and he loves them, he loves them both, wants to put his arms to their icy skin and press his lips to their dappled hair, but most of all hers – and then she is gliding rapidly towards the castle.
If he didn't know better, he'd say she was running.
Maybe she's flying.
In a matter of minutes, the door to the North tower opens, and Severus finds her staring at him. They look like dawn and dusk, white and black at opposite ends of a room, being pulled irresistibly toward the center.
Tentatively, she sits down. Her pale green eyes are still locked on his black ones, which seem to have sparked to life. Her whole body shakes from the cold, but to him it looks like she's about to ascend to the stars. He can see the place on her back where her wings would start when she turns around.
He continues to stare at those cool jade eyes, as human as his own, though they seem preternaturally beautiful because he believes himself so repulsive.
Severus realizes that they are the same, and for a minute he feels like he too might have wings, because she also is in love with two people at once.
He wants to rise and fly with her, the motion of their soaring disturbing the stillness of the towertop.
Instead, he kneels at her feet and rests his head on the smooth terrain of her thighs, Sometimes, staying on earth is worth it, too.
And unthinkably, she bends to let her head rest on top of his, letting her long, long hair surround him, warmer and brighter than sun on snow.