Incandescent
He looked at her, once.
She shone. Not like a star and not like the sun, but like a flame breeching the very edge of existence, hovering like a swallow's shadow against an endless backdrop of nothing and everything. On the fringes with a façade of shambolic beauty and the giggle that would sound at the end of time, she drifted in a melancholic ecstasy of being loved and loving everyone and never really understanding why. She gleamed against her security frame of friends and cousins, the adorers and the adored.
He saw her. Not across a crowded room or a busy street like in the turbulent romance novels that she stole from her cousins' rooms. She was staring through a window, right at him, though she did not recognise his pointed figure. Her glove covered hand ran down the wooden bars against the squared windows. The Caledonian snow was falling fast and she wiped her fingers across the pane in a caress of desire that he found as mesmerising as a siren's song. Her red hot curls tickled her neck as the wind galloped past her in its quest for escape to a place where it could be free to dance its own ballet to a beat defined by no-one but itself. Her rose tinted cheeks and cherry red lips glowed against a blanched complexion reserved for the dead.
She was not dead. She was beautiful.
He looked at her and she at the quill that he held in his hand. When he glanced back, she had gone but on his exit, the paper bag clad purchase tucked inside his robes, he placed his bare fingers atop the burning print that the flame had left behind and he felt warm.
He touched her, once.
She was the build of a pixie in a human's body. Her hair cut shorter than before, it licked at her cheeks with the affection of a familiar friend, a soft stroke of watery sunset against the menacing glow of night. She was awkwardly beautiful, like the strike of a bell in the dead of night, echoing a perfection that could never be replicated but that could always be destroyed. Floating like a ghost on water, she wafted towards him with a drastic necessity for cover.
He touched her. It was inadvertent. She propped herself up against the bar, her elbows resting atop the mahogany barrier with a heavy elegance of expectation and desire. He stood beside her, lacking all the sophistication that she dressed herself in so naturally. The money clenched inside his fists was beginning to smell and as he released it into the hands of the barmaid, his arm brushed hers.
It was not electric. It did not make his hairs stand on end and she did not jump. Their eyes did not collide. They swept past each other like strangers in the street. They did not remember every detail. They did not even recognise the glimmer in the other's eyes: the glimmer of infantile necessity that they would not grow out of until their reason for being passed into their lives.
He turned his back on her but saw her drink. Lemon and gillywater: a bitter lifesaver. The drink of a dreamer without a dream.
He spoke to her, once.
She stood with a laced pride like a swan with nowhere to go. She felt obligated to be so and so she was. She was the woman everyone expected her to be. She was seventeen and a woman. She was seventeen and golden but not solid. She was gold leaf, painted on over and over to hide the cracks that were unavoidable, a part of her, like a fissure in a cottage: ignored but growing, growing until it tears the place apart, until it collapses to the ground in rubble that cannot be put back together. A jigsaw puzzle missing its edge pieces.
He spoke to her. He didn't know where his confidence had come from. He was merely a boy, still. She was a woman. An idol. A goddess without a cause. She was everything he might have wanted to be, if he was someone else: a girl, older, a Weasley. For now, she was everything he wanted. His words sounded stiff and proper and everything he thought she'd want.
"I believe this is yours."
He passed her the Charms book that he had found waiting for him on his desk that morning. She did not lift her eyes for more than a second but nodded.
"Cheers."
She did not speak like an angel. He had not expected her to. She was like a child; a small girl whose dreams were lost across an ocean of impossibility that she had never so much as paddled in. He found himself turning away as though he had stepped across an unwritten border into an innocuous yet indecent new pathway of expression and honesty and the abrupt abolition of everything their surnames, the history that was not theirs but that was forced upon them, meant.
He kissed her, once.
She was doused in a deep tranquillity of contented isolation. She was not alone, not surrounded by her wall of safety and never ending comfort, but was lost amongst the thoughts of the not too distant future and forever racing present. Her left side was flanked with Cousin Number One: Albus Potter and the most recent delicate addition to his side in the form of a small brunette with a penchant for plum coloured lipstick. Her right saw Rose and the Finnigan boy, their endless tormenting of the other having culminated in a heated embrace and thus a lustful fling, she referred to call it relationship and certainly not passionate, had ensued. Her wall was falling down around her and she saw him.
His pointed features seeking out the bottom of a glass of Butterbeer, his lips moved like the soft stutter of the dying tide at twilight. She slipped through the widening gap in her wall and edged towards him. She coasted by and out of the door in the distant hope that he might follow, that he might see what she had wanted him to see since the first time she had ever seen him. She paused outside the door to Scrivenshaft's. The window panes were frozen in the February air, like the last time she had been there. The span of her hand barely fitted across the small square of glass and her eyes fluttered shut like the rustling of an evergreen in the autumn snap.
She thought of childhood escapes and dreams that swung from the highest tip of the highest cliff in bitter torment of their undeserving subjects. She thought to expectations and standards and everything she'd tried so hard to be and ultimately repelled like a threatened snowstorm. She thought of innocence and easiness and youth and everything she had lost and she gasped as a hand came over hers and wrung out all the inexplicable dissatisfaction with everything that she had been content to leave behind. It twirled her round, a guiding star against a stretch of nothing but black and blank and bleak and every other word she felt reaching out ahead of her, every other word to describe the future.
He kissed her. She did not open her eyes. She did not move a muscle. She froze and melted and thawed from ice queen to snow angel and as he drew away, she let herself see. She let herself be something that she was not requested to be. She let herself take the carefully wrapped quill that he had tucked in his pocket, etched with her name down the side. She let herself stand by as he passed her the Lemon and Gillywater drink without having asked her. She let herself love him because he had remembered, because he had acted, because he had noticed.
"Happy Valentine's Day, Dominique."
He loved her, forever.
A/N: Usually I'd align the parts in italics to the right, but as it won't let me, italics will have to do!
So, potential for this ship? It's dedicated to Celeste (Celestie) over at HPFF for bugging me to write this pairing. It was written for the Newsies' Valentine's Challenge at The_Golden_Snitches forum too!