Snow is nothing
without firelight.
And fire is no warmth
without snow.
It was a moment's unparalleled frozen breath.
Miles of slender evergreens stood slumbering under a coat of snow. The midnight blue of the sky settled on the scene like a familiar old blanket. Behind him, the fire crackled and popped merrily, while beneath his chilled fingers the windowpane was very cold.
"Isn't this wonderful?" he says, his voice carrying a particularly sweet inflection of both immense peace and a huge childish enjoyment. For just a moment he is a child. The other glances up sharply, ready to contradict, rebuke, sneer... and then his features soften slightly.
"Perhaps," answers the Villain.
He is standing, his forehead pressed against the glass, his eyes half closed in delight, grinning like an idiot.
The Villain loves the sight.
His consequent exasperation is born from attempting to suppress this foolish thought. "What in Merlin's name is so fascinating there, Potter, that you cannot unfreeze your forehead from the window?"
The boy shrugs, his movement fluid, the firelight slipping through the shirt. There is a muscle there that the Villain has often imagined... He shakes himself mentally, contemptuously. You always want what you cannot have, whispers someone's voice in his mind. He can't remember who it is, now, although a few years ago, he is sure he would have.
"I dunno... I've always loved Christmas at Hogwarts, you know? They're the only real Christmases I've had." The Villain admires his ease of speaking, his previous year boy-tones now man-tones, deeper, darker. He feels a twinge of protective violence, hoping he had a hand in darkening them, shading them in. He admires his lack of bitterness, his lack of self-pity, his comfortable confidence. This was not confidence he had earned, unlike the Villain - it was something he had been born with. The Villain cannot find it in him to begrudge the other this.
But it does bring back memories.
He goes to stand at the window, next to the boy - friend? Companion? All these words are eventually unsuitable! - and allows himself to be lost in memories. He recalls snow like this, too - thick and plentiful. Perhaps it was magic that caused them to settle, picture-postcard-like, on the family mansion, perhaps it was a subtle manipulation of the local weather. In any case, the snow clothed the manor like a pristine white cloak, an expensive, aloof one. It was precisely the impression his father had wished to create.
"But it sounds pretty good," says the other boy, streaking clear lines onto the frosted glass and frowning pensively.
The Villain laughs. To his surprise the laugh is soft rather than harsh and bitter, as he would have supposed it to be. Am I playing to myself? he wonders, astonished at this sudden revelation. Was it myself I was attempting to fool? But he collects himself and moves on, still held by the thought of a young boy.
"I liked it! I liked it as much as you would - as much as you might... knowing what you know, and everything, of course... I mean-"
"I know what you mean."
"Oh?" But it is still a shadow of a sneer, nothing more. He is still enraptured - by himself.
He had the crude arrogance of a child. No child expects to be beaten when he enters a world. No child expects to be hurt - to be deliberately wounded. No child stays wounded. That is what he knows - or rather, what he wishes. But his childish self-confidence - for that is what arrogance is born from, essentially - is layered over with countless centuries of tradition, of family pride, of name, of darkness, of vileness, of haughtiness. But whereas an adult will know - or pretend to know, quite successfully - what he is being haughty about, a child can never suspect - never bothers to find out. You are so- is taken with delight, with self-congratulatory innocence.
So it was with the Villain.
"I never knew you... thought about all this. I mean, that you - you puzzled this all out. Why? I mean, why bother?" His gaze is emerald and deep and disconcerting.
Now it is the Villain's turn to shrug.
"I want to know, Potter. I want to see what made me the fool I am."
The other boy turns to the window, a little uncomfortable by the intensity of the Villain's look, his talk. "I think you're too hard on yourself."
"This, coming from you?"
The black-haired boy laughs. "Oh yeah, in third year after you got your hand cut by Buckbeak I'd have happily murdered you." He looks sideways at the Villain, mischief and warmth gleaming in those eyes.
The Villain smiles, looks back at the snow-covered scene.
He was not spoiled, no, not in the way he was when he reached school when he was eleven. Rather he was petted. He was quite the handsome child, apparently, according to his nannies and his servants. The house elves were an entire hierarchy below the humans - it was the height, really, to have human servants, to be treated like dirt, and then house elves beneath them, to never be seen or tolerated. Dobby was a shocking exception.
In any case, his servants rather liked him - outwardly they even doted on him, the little scamp of a prince! - and he grew to tolerate them, even, because his parents were never around. To be more exact Narcissa was never around - of course Lucius had other things to do than to stand around looking after this slip of a boy who had never even begun proper schooling! Let him learn his place and his ranking first - because she, quite simply, never cared. She had done her duty. She was not suicidal, but he knew from the servants that she might as well be dead, for all that she did or commented or said. Her eyes were dead, when she came to visit, except for a brief sparkle like the silhouette of an emotion - whether it was pride or disgust or spite or satisfaction, he will never know, no matter how much time he spends on the enigma.
He was a happy child! He did not sneer - had no cause for it, because the servants were always unfailingly obsequious, and he had not reached the stage where he despised others because they were beneath him - that would come later, in school. He liked attending his father's Christmas parties, because it was rather a showing-off session then - he was perfectly polite and charming and innocent and adorable. His father abided this, because he was sure school would change those characteristics - not, however in the way he imagined it would be - and he liked showing off. He was the son of a famous person! He had power, even in his little chubby boy's hands! He could boss other children around! Ah, no, not that, because Lucius took care not to let him mix too much with the others. In the event that he did, he found that many of them acted as though they would soon be servants of his, and although he was bored, he was not particularly unkind to them.
"Merlin, you remember a lot, don't you?" The other boy stares at him in a little shock, a little awe, a little disgust.
"I tried to - I told you, I was attempting to learn something about myself. And I have a good memory." He does not realise he has spoken out aloud.
But after a while he realized that not only was he bored - he was lonely. The other children did tend to play by themselves a little - rather out of a common desire to stay together rather than any affection towards each other - and he was either too bored or contemptuous to join - he had already begun reading many texts, most not suitable for a boy his age, but the library doors were easy to open.
The Hero stares at the golden-haired boy as he talks. It's not his usual drawl, it's a precise, clear intonation, but also smooth and low. It's him, thinking aloud. He wonders, suddenly, but not for the first time, how much of him is real and how much of him is an act. He gets the feeling that this is not an act - that is can never be, actually. He can't put his finger on it, but it isn't even as though he is angry, or bitter, or sneering over his past, which surely can't be that happy. He knows what price name and honour - at the price of self, surely. Yet the Villain speaks dryly, almost to himself, almost as though he is exploring, clarifying. He is under the strange surety that this is the Villain himself speaking...
"But yes, I did like Christmas! I liked it very much, actually. There were good things to eat. I got presents. I didn't throw tantrums for them, I didn't beg or whine or grovel for them, because I always knew I would get good things. I know it sounds astonishing, but there it is..."
"You knew you would get them?" The Hero feels a strange mixture of disbelief and wistfulness, remembering the numerous Christmases from which he had learnt not to expect anything. Discovering the existence of a Christmas at Hogwarts was so absolute and beautiful that he'd erased the memories of anything before his eleventh year. The Villain had not caught the tone of his voice, however - his face was softening.
"The outside of the Manor was good enough - if you wanted the cold and aloof look, but the inside of the Manor was the best. It was the only time it was really alive. There were candles, fires - very large, roaring ones, magically and superbly maintained. Do your know-" and here he sounds faintly amused and half wondering, "that fires can look cold in a house as large and stone-walled as ours...? It was the effect I expected on any other day, but not, never, on Christmas..."
The Villain is lost, now, in his meditations. He does not notice the rising intensity of the look that the Hero gives him, leaning back from the window to survey his features - natural now, not confined to any pre-determined look.
"And the trees - there was one, huge pine tree in the main hall, of course, and so fantastically arranged! The ornaments were always new, nothing saved and left over from years ago, like others. I used to look up in the firelight and the candles and see the star at the top, glinting and shining, and that was what I think I loved my father for - no, loved is too strong a word, I admired him, very much, for being able to bring down one of those heavenly things and stick it on top of a tree, just like that. Oh, the food was beyond comparison, of course! I think I used to put on a few pounds during the winter simply because of that - in Christmas season there was always cooking, and the smells were truly magical. I loved Christmas..."
The Hero watches as the moonlight brush-strokes across the angular planes of the Villain's face while the firelight behind him paints his fair hair bronze-gold. For some inexplicable reason, he feels the fire's heat on him, then an answering blush on his face. Caught off-guard, and confused, he looks down, and licks his lips unconsciously, trying not to think.
The Villain turns, ostensibly to see the expanse of whitened trees - grandpapa trees (he smiles; he remembers that the servants used to call them that to humour him, once long ago - the things he remembers!) - and finds himself instead studying the Hero. His head is tilted down, so that the firelight tousles it, and the shadows of his face are copper and black, skin tanned - so easily! - by hours of Quidditch. Unfortunately, while grudgingly admiring this stolen view, the Hero suddenly lifts his head to angle an intense gaze at the boy he thought was absorbed in his past visions - and both of them are locked, trapped like deer in wand light, caught in the act.
There is no reason why the glance should last - none at all...
Except that the Villain thinks of the coldness of the windowpane beneath his fingers and his once-buried wish to be embraced by a vision he labels as his mother and thinks, also, of the heat of the skin of the boy standing so close next to him he need not even reach out so much to touch him...
And the Hero thinks about the number of times he's spent playing in the snow during Christmas, but that he had sometimes sat in the common room, as he was doing now, and watched the snow outside, and felt the fire inside, and, lately, about how nice it would be to have someone watch the snow like this, too, with him, only nobody seemed to understand why he would only want to watch while they could have some brilliant snow fights, and that he could never explain why, until now...
The Hero reaches out, almost as if in a trace, and smoothes a palm down the Villain's cheek, half in shadow. He lets his hand linger, unaccountably, against the boy's skin, feeling its coolness from the window pane, but knowing that his pulse thudded somewhere underneath his hand, behind the skin of the throat, a few inches beneath his palm.
"I loved Christmas. Perhaps I still do," whispers the Villain.