The Qualities of Alabaster
Alabaster is a stone.
It's pale white, easily shaped by knife or pressure, and when lit from the inside–it glows. There is a Muggle story that the ancient Egyptians once carved an alabaster sarcophagus for Seti I from one large calcite block, and that when the body was interred, the stone lit, burning so bright, the priests were forced the look away. It was misplaced in its tomb out of fear, and even after the tomb was sealed, there was light shining in the Valley of the Kings.
The purest form of alabaster is a pale, snowy white that is translucent and easily stained. The purity fades with age, and even the most beautiful of alabaster is not anything special. It's just a mineral, after all.
Alabaster is a stone that Hermione knew all about long before she met Draco Malfoy. She had held alabaster trinkets, pressing small dents into them with her thumb. She had touched alabaster lampshades, confused by the combination of hot and cold that passed shivers down her spine. She had squinted through alabaster windows in small chapels in Florence. And, of course, she had visited the Soane Museum at night to walk the short steps into a tomb of history and drift between the mirrored halls, confused by the space and the eerie light.
Hermione had given precious little thought to alabaster before she met Draco Malfoy; it's just a stone, after all.
People often relate alabaster to the moon, stories and myths flying from a simple thought that focused on a glowing orb floating somewhere far above them all, with craters and spots and imperfections. But Hermione never saw the connection; alabaster was never feminine for her. She related it more to the Cliffs of Dover, both earthly and ethereal. And she wished that alabaster was more like chalk. She wanted to write with it, to create something with it, even if it was just something temporal.
Alabaster is often thought to be a stone with spiritual healing qualities, one that brings clarity and freedom. Ground up, people used to believe that it would ease pain, especially those phantom pains that keep you up at night. It was said to be a stone of inner peace, one that gave you the power to release burdens and to forgive–both others and yourself. But Hermione had never been very spiritual, and she couldn't see the reason there.
Yet, despite everything, she was constantly drawing comparisons between the simple paleness of his skin and the nature of his spirit to the blocks sold on the streets Florence, waiting to be shaped.
It wasn't all that long, though, before she realized that there was too much about him to be compressed into a simple study of a base mineral. The magic of the comparison had worn thin. Even if his hands were cold and his mouth viciously hot, even if her fingers left red indentations on his skin, even if he did seem to glow in the dark–he was not made out of stone.
Because the indentations faded, the molded areas changed, and beneath the hardness there was something achingly soft. Something that memory and time had not changed and that was, even if only a little bit, still pure.
And she would vaguely wonder if she was just one more of those people, chipping off pieces of a statue lining the court. Stealing chunks to grind apart and turn them into her own release.
But then he would roll over, or wake up, or blink silently at her, and she would dismiss the thought, because, after all, alabaster was a just stone. And Draco Malfoy was something else entirely.