A/N: I wrote this late at night then completely forgot I even wrote it for about 3 months. I don't know what happened – Snape/Hermione used to freak me out like no other, and here I am writing fanfiction about it. sigh
Whoever catches the Walt Whitman reference gets a cookie:)
br His eyes aren't black.
That is to say, they are.
Hermione shakes her head and almost scratches out the sentences with her quill, but stops herself. This is not an essay for Transfiguration. This is a catharsis, an endless stream-of-consciousness designed to exorcise an emotion. Everything and anything goes.
They say darkness, blackness is merely the absence of light. Light comes in spectrums invisible to the naked eye –
She nods That's something.
and black absorbs them all, regardless.
She sits back and rereads her work. She groans. It makes even less sense now, now that it's out of her and there in cramped letters on parchment. She wants to crumple it up and start again, but there's no point. So quill returns to paper.
It's easy to get lost in the dark. Like the cellar at home – you just pop down to get a lightbulb for the oven and three hours later you are surrounded by boxes and piles of nostalgia, reading old picture books and covered in dust and memories.
No, that's sort of wrong. It's more like –
Like a dream. You don't want to jump, you want to stay as far away from the edge as you can, but it pulls you. Soon your toes are pointing out into the abyss and you look down and nothing is familiar and everything is frightening. And you just can't help but step off and fall, and you wonder, Could I have prevented this, somehow? And the answer is yes, but do you really wish you had?
She puts down her quill and tugs on an incorrigible strand of hair. This is ridiculous. It's absolutely… poetic. And Hermione Granger has no time for poetry. Becoming infatuated with one's Potion's professor is a not a frivolous matter.
Black is wrong. It's a misnomer for itself. Black is like two shiny marbles, the eyes of a crow, dead things. And that's not it at all.
Well what is it? She doesn't know.
She can't talk about it – she feels simply sick when she imagines what her friends would think of her. So she writes, writes about insignificant details and ineffable emotions, writes until her fingers cramp and the pressure around her temples has leveled off a fraction.
If they analyzed the color of his eyes, if only there was a laboratory somewhere with the necessary equipment –
The dying fire collapses and sends a spark fluttering to the floor near her bare feet.
They wouldn't find black. They'd find reds and blues and shades of charcoal and teal, ivory and crimson –
She trails off, the end of her quill leaving wispy marks at the end of her sentence. And what? She can go on listing colors till the world runs out of them, but her problem remains.
Sudden inspiration. She writes it down before she can forget.
I am large. I contain multitudes.
That is to say, he is.
She doesn't know if she made that up or heard it somewhere a long time ago – but it fits. She pauses, then underlines it for posterity.
With that, she smiles, folds the parchment into quarters, kisses it impulsively and tosses it into the fire. The desperate flames consume it quickly, stalling for time as time for them runs out.
FIN