A/N: Iola's pronunciation: Yoh-la
Violet Stars
There was something about him that made her think that yesterday might not even have happened. Something there, something between them made the days between their meetings blur into insignificance around the impossibility that was this relationship made of dreams and promises and the day after tomorrow. His beauty was to her the ultimate, the unsurpassable, the untouchable. In person, he was strong and kind and everything she wanted. Deeper still, he loved her and the way that it shone from the very depths of who he was made her want to fade into him.
He twirled a strand of her hair – he said once that he thought it to be like the lining of the finest jewellery box in Hogsmeade – around a finger idly and she pretended for one moment that the lap of the lake in the wind was the breaking of waves on a beach, somewhere further away than her daydreams would allow. Dawn teetered on the horizon but it had not yet shattered the faint illusion of security that swamped them in their solitude, and she saw in it opportunity and scope for something more.
Winter had always been her favourite month: an excuse to bury herself in jumpers that hid her body and evenings sat in front of fireplaces, filled from a meal that she thought could never be bettered, not even by her own mother. Winter never made her feel cold. It made her feel at home and secure and safe in herself.
The mornings were always the best, when yesterday was lost behind a barrier of imagination and today still in its infancy. The crack of light through dark blue cloud, the sniffle of noses red from piles of tissues and the idea that anything might happen, anything at all, made winter mornings worthwhile. Chocolate wouldn't melt in December. Smiles were lifted by holly bushes and fir trees and kisses because her lips looked cold.
He had said that once and she thought she might have fainted if he hadn't been holding onto her so tightly.
Others underestimated him, thought him silly and too distanced from reality. She was quite sure that if given half the chance, he would have put them all to shame twice over with his stories, his imagination so bright that she felt that inspiration would never end, to discover and to learn and to listen to him discourse on wonders that she could barely comprehend but accepted beyond anyone's belief.
"Are you cold?" he asked and she felt instantly that they were exceptions to temperature, to heat. She did not reply. Words ruined beauty in a way that only mankind could manage. Her answer came in a slow movement of her body against his chest, of her lips brushing his jaw, of silence. "Iola."
He made it sound magical and it lifted on the air, each syllable trickling away, away into tomorrow, into calls of the register and shouts in the corridor and it would be monstrous from anyone else's mouth. She would not say his name back. She appreciated the splendour of silence far more than him and she would not ruin it with the whisper of his name across her tongue.
The crow of a rooster somewhere on the grounds sang the breaking of the day and with it the breaking of their unspoken pact. Together, pulled by strings and made of cotton rags and frayed wool, they stood and they were there, then not. From Xenophilius and Iola they became Lovegood and Miss Vaisey and the day beckoned them with open arms and a suffocating grip, the only sign that they had ever been anything more the call of her name across the lake but it didn't matter because in all of its perfection, they knew that it would not be the last. They knew that it was trapped in the foundations of what they knew to be only the beginning. They knew that meetings under creaking trees in December rain would be the mortar to their slowly setting bricks. They knew the end could not come before the beginning.
They would not let it.
A/N: Entry #1 for the third round of the Writathon at TGS: two one-shots of opposing genres in a week ^_^