When Mars Looks Blue
by : epiphanies
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It happens sometimes. Not too often, just often enough to catch the attention of a gull or a turtle, nobody really important. Hardly ever, actually. Only when the moon is full and when mars looks blue instead of red.
He'll give her a glance, now and then. A sort of inquisitive glance that says, in a whisper, What are you doing? She'll give him a glance back that says, Nothing. It means nothing but nothing. He'll smile furtively and then keep his eyes away from her, because Hermione's starting to notice his ruddy cheeks.
It's not as if he has a crush on her. He just likes to watch her, sometimes. Her neck is like a swan's, and he never got to see one, being the deprived child he was, so he didn't know what was so fascinating about it. Perhaps somebody could have pointed it out to him, had he have told anyone. Not a soul, though.
She would watch him, under her thickly coated eyelashes. She knew that her eyes were a dull blue and her hair sprang phonily about her shoulders, and that her cheeks looked whitewashed, not pearly like the other girls. She likened herself to a pug-face, but she didn't tell anyone that. She pretended to be the Princess of Slytherin when the other girls were round. Like she wore a fat diamond from Malfoy (she didn't) and could sing like a nightingale (she couldn't) and had kissed more than a dozen boys (she hadn't.)
Potions could become unbearable when she couldn't tear her eyes away from the green. Her mother had an emerald ring that looked like those eyes - the same size as well. But not the sparkle, not quite.
Living in a world where the sunlight browns your skin but darkens your own perception is a world that few enter often, or in constancy. Where the twinkling stars aren't giving you hope but are mocking you and the sun is a big round puddle of mud, pulling you downward into an abyss of never-never-happy. Or perhaps it wasn't never-never-happy. Perhaps it was always-always-cynical. Yes.
Furtive glances ran amok in the castle, but never so often as in a hidden... fascination between the two houses which stored enough hate between to feud a dozen wars or more.
Red roses fade and die and rot, and sunflowers rise tall and fall in the autumn. In the world of magic and power and fiendish contemporary competition, roles and rank are rampant in the air and if or when lines are crossed....
Blue and green eyes are simply not right, in that world of theirs. Blonde hair with black. Pale with pale, witch with wizard, pure with half.
Mars looks cold today, but nobody noticed. They consider themselves lucky.
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End.