Word Count: 322
Warnings: None
Challenge/Competition: The 5 Drabbles Competition
Prompt/s: Luna/Severus & (object) leaves
Disclaimer: I don't claim to own Harry Potter, it's all JKR's.
Note: Slightly AU world here - as though the war is extended.
'I imagine the world is still very beautiful despite all of this. The leaves will always be green... the sun will always shine... the flowers will always be vibrant. No amount of evil can blacken nature,' she says as he slides open her prison.
It's just another of many completely Luna sentences. She's sewn herself so tightly under his skin and interlaced with his veins and as it grows each day he find that he just cannot shake her.
As much as this war and this duplicity has been eating away at his sanity, this is so much worse. She is just a girl. A girl who is probably hinging between sanity and insanity, too, and she could never love him.
He stares at her, swallowing the bile creeping its way up his throat. He does not reply. He cannot reply. Fear freezes his insides - fear that he will say something too kind, do something too kind, that he will do anything except from scare her, really.
Loving her is not his job. Crushing her is his job, and he fails. She holds onto these fragments of the world that attach her and her sanity together, just enough for her to keep going.
'Is the world still as beautiful as I imagine, Severus?' she prompts, too calmly considering her situation and the cold, hard concrete room that surrounds her.
All he can do - still taking every ounce of strength he has - is nod. Because she is right. And she smiles and closes her eyes, and thousands of tiny daggers stab at his heart as she imagines the world she hasn't seen in three months.
Silence hangs in the air. She stares at him, those oceans for eyes piercing his insides.
'I'll get you out of here,' he says, suddenly, before clamping his mouth shut when he realises the repercussions that come with the words that just fell from his mouth. 'You deserve to see the world again.'
AN: So, uh, weird pairing, right? I almost dropped the competition, but then I thought I just had to give it a go haha. These will all be AU but one, as obviously it's basically the premise of the drabble collection: all the different life times in which they could've ended up together! Hope this is enjoyed, reviews would be soooooo appreciated. X