Tonight the black serpent and skull were resting, cool against flesh and silent. Reclined on his bed with a book in ink-stained hands from marking, onyx stone eyes passed over lines and as relaxed as he dared to be, with his face unset in his usual negativity. A moment of quiet he could dare snag for himself, interrupted as flames blew warmth into the chamber and licked green tongues against the stone. Over the top of his book Severus glanced at a familiar crooked-nose and eyes behind glass crescents. Of course, if one master did not pull him away it was the other. The Headmaster's head for a moment was there, and then gone, having beckoned Snape to come to him.
He may well have had a second mark, arm opposite the dark call, outline of a fiery bird within its beak clutched a lemon drop. Snape sneered at his own macabre humor and tossed his downtime aside, book to the bed, straightening his robes.
A handful of magic and one fireplace to the other, and he stepped out brushing the powder from his billowing night-shade robes. Behind his desk sat Albus, ridiculous hat perched atop white and wrinkles, eyes intelligent and fresh behind snow-colored lashes.
With a gesture of his hand, a companionable request, and a moniker My Dear Boy did not appreciate, Severus sat stiffly across from the Headmaster. Ramrod in his chair and lip curled, Severus watched as Dumbledore regarded him quietly, fingers laced and eyes glittering—but Severus did not believe in glitter, he believed in vicious sparks and it made no difference whether blue behind jovial wit, or red behind cold laughter and hisses.
Eyes...colors, shapes, light, shadow, behind them the clockwork of thoughts and the sky of the soul, and Severus Snape had seen many eyes. He had seen eyes alive and dancing, eyes graying out to a cold marble stare, lashes splattered with blood, corners crinkled with laughter, crying and blackened-bruised, swollen and battered as they pleaded, eyes wild with rage and glassy with too much at the pub, cruel eyes behind glasses, upside-down and laughing, under topples of messy hair.
So many eyes.
He and the twinkling ones still held together, his own stony and closed off. Severus would not allow his eyes to be windows, for windows laid souls bare, and his soul was a wound that he would allow no fingers to gouge but his relentless own. Prodding, tearing, feeling the throb of unhealing beneath the thick stone of his concealment. One thing he had learned by hard hands of a common laborer and fiend, Oh Muggle, was that feelings were weak, crying was weaker, and that cruelty would always seek out those who would snivel. He stood tall to the world beneath the lie that he was numb, and his father for at least one time in his pathetic life of savagery and pissing himself drunk, had been correct.
Still, he was penetrated by these eyes. From blue and cutting like knifes turned in the sun, he felt exposed and inside out, all of his thoughts out of their bottles, all his emotions out of their cages, and swirled into those eye-blades that sat behind half-moon mist.
Snape recalled in his darkest hour, writhing and lost of all control, ripped from himself and dying heart, his soul twisted in his misery like a worm shriveling on stone in the glare of a burning sun. So miserable he had been and consumed by his grief, his guilt, twin beasts that swallowed him whole. From the darkness of their reeking gullets he had heard:
He has her eyes, precisely her eyes. You remember the shape and color of Lily Evans's eyes, I am sure?
Snape's hands like claws clenched at the arms of his chair, recalling, bile rising, though he was aware he owed this man his freedom from Azkahban, though still he was imprisoned, and his own self-made Dementors threatened often to kiss him. Closely, so closely, they brushed their lips to his sometimes, but then he would snap at them, bite at them, build walls between them. He could not allow their kiss, he was committed now and always to the sole thing that had ever made his life have meaning: her eyes.
But Albus had known his grief, had watched it overflow, and had used the most human part of Snape's broken soul. You remember the shape and color...? Remembered they were, and are, and always would be—every day, every moment, every breath, they were remembered, longed for, begged for, pleaded for, oh! He would blind himself for her eyes, he would bind himself for them, he would live, and breath, and die for them over, and over, and over again and Albus knew it.
Severus had not yet blinked, still waiting for the Headmaster to speak, but he imagined the voice a gurgle being choked by a wad of those damned lemon drop candies—sweet on the outside, but sour beneath. With amusement at his lips and curving them to the smallest of smiles, Albus moved the dish of candies towards Severus as if he had indeed known, offered as they were every time, and every time refused.
"Lemon drop?"