A/N: For the Femmeslash Challenge, because the world needs more lady love.
Dedicated to Rish, because she put this pairing in my head and it won't get out omg.
Pairing: Lavender Brown/Luna Lovegood
Prompt: 22. Endearing
There is a girl who collects clocks. She is scarred and scared and she stacks them up around her home in wavering towers, a castle of ticking hands. She knows that you can never have enough time.
They do not tick in sync. They are a melodious cacophony of life. Each tick and tock strikes her in the chest, and sometimes she swirls her fingers through the dust on clock faces and calls her reflection beautiful. She stares at the flashes of scarred skin that catch on the swirl's edge and promises to try and believe that the silver slashes and red raw gashes are rather endearing.
It is all she has left.
There is a girl who chases fantasies. She looks for creatures that don't exist through always-believing eyes and, sometimes, she thinks she knows everything, if only someone would listen.
She hears the ticktickticks and follows monsters she's seen too many times before into the darkest of places and finds a girl, one who is scarred and scared, caught in the unwieldy hands of time, trapped between numbers that seem to end rightnowthissecond and somehow go on forever.
She looks in the darkness for faeries and elves, or perhaps creatures much darker, or spirits much brighter, but the girl with the clocks says, "You're looking in the wrong place."
She wanted to find monsters and fairytales. Instead, she stumbles across a girl in a clock tower who's afraid to breathe too slowly in case the second hand overtakes her heartbeat.
She finds this and nothing more.
There is a girl who collects clocks, and sometimes she smashes the biggest ones, picks them up in both hands and throws them to the ground and dances on their faces until the hands are twisted and the glass is shattered, sharp shards embedded in the soles of her shoes.
She knows you can never have enough time.
So she kisses the girl who searches for wisps of imagination, says, "You're looking in the wrong place, you're looking the wrong place," over and over and over until the girl blinks and decides the only monsters she wants to chase are the one hiding in the clock girl's chest. Because they will never have enough time.
And then, "I don't like the dust," she says quietly, so they spend the night polishing clocks that don't tick and dancing on the ones that do. When they are done, the can see their reflections in shining clocks and shattered glass, and there are no scars that have ever been anything less than beautifully tragic and tragically beautiful, especially not reflected back in smashed and shining glory.
The monsters do not find them, and they revel in the silence between ticks and heartbeats, pressed perhaps too close to each other and pretending the hands of time are fingers they cannot let go of.
And through the night, they breathe in sync, ticking on and on and on.