Fake

~Fake~

Severus Salazar Snape. She spoke his name to the darkness, loving the way the smooth syllables rolled off her tongue and hung in the still air like a charm. She smiled to herself, tracing the lines on her palm and envisioning her hands to instead belong to him. His fingers were long and brittle, shifting in obscure knobs and jutting bones. His art welled in his tapering fingertips as they curled around the long neck of a simmering vial. His skin was of a translucent quality, and she imagined that she could see the crystalline liquid of the potion he was holding through it. His hands were so unlike hers. His were slender and elongated, the sallow color of old amber. They seemed to dance in the air as he gestured in order to enhance his words. She often found herself staring in lessons at their fragile form, from his thin wrists to his almond-shaped nails. Her palms were so boring, so plain--short and crooked, with her black polish chipping off her nails. She caressed her own face, trailing her fingers down to the copse of her neck and pretending the touch was his. His hands were so delicate for such a strong man--a man so deadened to emotion.

She envied him, almost. She could glimpse in his eyes a reflection of a haunting darkness and an almost neurotic fear. She could spend hours scrutinizing him, stretching her imagination to probe at the most cryptic possibilities of his past. She wanted this. She wanted the armor with which he had enclosed his mind. She would have given almost anything to be able to face the adversaries within her own mind and return unbroken. Shadows dwelt in the depths of her own mind; demonic terrors that overcame her at the most crucial moments. Yet when she looked into those blackened eyes, she felt protected even from herself. Nothing could harm her as long as he still paced his office at the most distant hours of night as the candles melted themselves into lumps of molten wax. As long as his eyes still smoldered in disdain, as long as his voice still whispered soft, sardonic words of scorn.

She saw things about his that others did not. She saw when his arms became too weak to lift the heavy Potions book. She noticed when his tone did not hold as much malevolence as it previously did, and the tired, downcast look his gaze took when he thought no one was watching. She was the only one who saw the lines deepening on his forehead, and the only one who saw the edges of his thin lips sinking lower day by day. He was distant, pensive. Vague. The bags under his eyes were no darker, but there were reflections of ghosts mirrored in the black glass of his eyes.

She recognized this. She had seen this before. He was consumed by exhaustion and regret. Her mother had looked the same way, before she died. Her mother had tried to go about as normal too, but she had known that she was as far from normal as she could get. A week later, her mother had killed herself. The certificate said "accident", but she knew better. She had seen it happen, the wand had been pointed the wrong way--toward herself, not the spider. Avada Kedavra. Death. Suicide.

She did not fear for him, because she felt much the same. After every day was finished, every forced smile was fading, every moment of "insanity" was dissipated, did she know. She knew how fake this was. How her theater of life had been so twisted, so deformed. She did not know what she would do when she was tired of acting, when she had no strength left to fight. Severus knew too, she could feel it. He too, was afraid of the unknown. She had seen him staring almost frantically at her in those moments when he was weakest. He wanted her to survive, to prove to him that there was hope for them yet. She did not know about hope, but she knew there was something. Something obscure, something that even with all of his potions and all of her wild stories neither of them could ever hope to unravel. It kept her alive.

She captured his likeness on the page and leaned back to examine it. Yes. It was him. She brushed eraser dust from the paper and bent over it, allowing the haphazard strands of her hair to cascade over her face and pool like silvery water on the table, hiding her from view. The corners of her mouth twitched, and her lips forced themselves into a smile that was painful from disuse. The pen had captured his perfect sneering mask and the pain that lay concealed beneath. A perfect mask. So fake, yet so accepted by outsiders. His armor is smeared with decay.

They are so alike, and yet so different. The cold, forbidding professor and the strange Ravenclaw outcast. He is commanding, and she is accepting. Both are so fake.

She loves him. It is quite probable that he knows this. She does not deny that her penetrating gazes are unmistakable. He might even love her back. But he will never tell her, and she will never ask. Maybe she is crazy to care for him so. People used to say that insanity is influenced by the moon. How fitting, for she was named for the moon. If she is crazy, then he must be as well, to fall for her so.

Luna Selene Lovegood. He whispers it aloud, and smiles.

If he is crazy, then so be it.