The Houses Competition (or THC)
House: Gryfindor
Class: Potions
Category: Drabble
Prompt(s) chosen: Fairy-tale
Word Count: 602
Happy Endings
Severus thought his hands looked strange on the brightly coloured picture book. They were long-fingered and potion-stained, elegant bones but ruined and roughened by hard work and time. And sometimes, when the night was long and the ghosts came out, he could see the shadows left by blood and the past. Hands like those – workman's hands, murderer's hands, had no business holding a book of fairy tales.
And yet here he was, not only holding the book, but reading aloud from it in the low, soothing voice he knew his audience preferred. And as he read – and he did not need to pay much attention to the story, which he had read a hundred times already and would no doubt read a hundred more – he thought about fairy tales, and how a man's life could come to be quite unlike what he had seen for himself.
Sometimes…sometimes, he thought, princesses did not marry the bright and shining heroes. Sometimes instead, they fell for the sorcerer, the dark man in the dungeons, bitter and scarred and fearsome. And sometimes when that happened disaster followed, but sometimes…just sometimes, when the stars aligned and the Lady smiled, sometimes when that happened, so did a fairy tale.
Something like that had happened to him; something that if he'd heard the tale he'd have scoffed and called it fairy-tale nonsense. And it was a fairy tale, but nonsense it was not. It was as real as any moment of his life before, from his earliest memories until the day that he had, as a man grown, taken the life of his only friend. Or so he had thought at the time, in any case. As it turned out, he'd always had friends in the most unexpected of places.
And so he had come to this, sitting by the side of a small bed in a cheerful bedroom, reading fairy tales in a low soft voice while bright dark eyes watched him and pretended not to be asleep. His Rosamund; his Rose of the World. The best and most beautiful thing he had ever done, although he would be the first to admit that his daughter was a cooperative effort.
She was a bossy little bit, which she came by naturally, and liked to hear stories with her name in it. And so Severus read, every night, the story of Princess Rosamund, whose tears were pearls, whose smile grew roses, and whose footprints sprouted gold. Although his little Rose had declared that gold was uncomfortable and so, in her version, wherever Princess Rosamund walked, a carpet of silk appeared, so that her beautiful feet should never feel the harsh ground.
It occurred to Severus that there was a lesson to be learned in this unexpected place. A lesson about being mistaken and mistreated, about the inhumanity of man. A lesson about being broken and seeing the truth, and about the sweetness at the end of suffering.
It was a lesson that he, after two wars fought under two masters, after decades under the thumb of not one, but two manipulative sociopaths, held close to his heart. There could be joy again, no matter how dark the day, if one but had eyes to see it.
The story ended and his daughter's dark eyes closed, finally asleep. He reached a potion-stained finger to touch a lock of curly brown hair, softer than thistledown, and smiled.
When he turned away, his wife stood in the door, smiling her enigmatic smile, her hand outstretched to him.
He walked to her.
He took the hand.
And they all lived happily ever after.