Disclaimer:
It's JKR's world, I just play in it.
I'm having problems again with the italics on the letter, but you get the idea.
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Snape looked from his place at the small desk to the bed where Allosia dozed, still in her robes from the evening, with Gabriel next to her. Too much wine and sociability had taken its toll on them all.
He fidgeted absently with the ribbon she had used to bind his hair back, before running his hand through it and wincing at its texture. For it to be anything but a frizzy monstrosity to rival Granger's, it had to feel like this. It was a stupid misery, but a perpetual one.
He cast his eyes over the conference schedule yet again, making notations next to sessions he wanted to attend as well as lectures he thought might interest his wife. All in all, it still left plenty of time for sight seeing. He figured he could send her off with Adrimori or Durefhan while he paced and practiced his own presentation in their rooms. They were both safe enough, and would both understand the need to guard her without asking too many questions. Snape's own habits prevented him from knowing if those were political decisions or merely kindnesses.
He sighed then, twirled his quill in his hands and began to write:
Sia —
In case this fact was not already abundantly clear, I detest when you ask to fix my hair. It is too much, makes me too vulnerable, forces me to remember that it is not that you overlook or do not notice my genetic predisposition towards filth, but that you choose to tolerate it. I would be different if I could.
I sit here now and stare, I can feel the anger you would have towards me at those words — "That is not true, Severus." To believe you is frightening, too close to ceasing to question everything, too close to death.
Every time you touch my hair or my face, run the pads of your fingers across my eyebrows, or down the bridge of my nose, or perhaps across my lips, I am redeemed. And every time you ask, every time you offer to help me enhance what I am, I react with irrational panic, at the possibility that this redemption could end.
An unwilling sinner,
S.
Allosia stirred in her sleep, and made a small noise. Snape smiled sadly and for a moment considered going into the spare room to sleep on Gabriel's narrow bed. He suspected that that would only cause his perpetual sadness to infect them all however, and so stood to quietly take Gabriel to his room, and then rouse his wife just enough to get her undressed and under the covers.
She muttered further in her sleep, and he smiled as she pressed against him, the humidity of her breath reminding him that fundamentally they really were different species. He smiled then and wrapped his arms around her; he found it hard to mind.