Brief Candle

Brief Candle

The sleet fell against the window with a distinctive beat. The shadows waltzed gracefully in circles around the man with the porcelain hands. They moved about the candle with a gentle beauty that others would have stopped to stare at. But now was not the time, nor the place. The porcelain hands were cracked and bleeding from the dry winter air, and the man had hurriedly wrapped cloth around them. It was a futile attempt to try and stop the blood from staining the pure white of the parchment he was scribbling on with desperate scrawls, stretched across the paper in a midnight hue. They imitated the matching night around him.

His dark hair fell in strands around his face, framing the faceted features that poked out at possibly all the wrong angles. The geometry of this man seemed sharp and full of corners, like a piece of glass that had been thrown to the ground in a fit of fury. His angular writing fit this awkward shape, this glass man with the painted porcelain skin and face. He was not real, he was an entity, a vessel for the hatred and derision of the casts of thousands. He was a vase, filled with rotting flowers that had long been forgotten.

This man, this broken man who was held together with sheer willpower, did not blink. His eyes stared at the paper with such a fixation that it seemed as though he wanted to burn through it. His hand moved swiftly across the page, but his eyes did not follow their path. The dark eyes reflected the light of the candle and flashed it back to oblivion. They focused at a point that no one else could see, that held no interest to anyone else but this man.

He did not blink for a specific reason, for everything in his life was done with a defined purpose. Done in the same Euclidean, mathematical fashion that he seemed to be built upon.

How much time gets lost between blinks? How much of your life do you lose behind those closed eyes? If you add all your blinks up over the years, how much time do you miss? Days, weeks, months... Can you lose a lifetime in those moments behind closed eyes?

This man, with his bitterly worthless life, had come to that conclusion. Enough decisions, mistakes, had been made while his eyes were closed. He had witnessed first hand evidence of the fears blinking could cause.

The dull ache on his forearm reminded him of this every chance it got. He had lost his years behind those eyelids, living in a world that was not his own to create. He had made his decisions, made his mistakes, completed his portrait of failure that the others, the entire waking planet could view and judge him on. They did not look for the shadows, the spots of discontinuity that they glazed over with their blind eyes. They didn't want to see anything that would force them to... care, to care about this man that was so easy to hate.

He shrugged it off, shaking his hair and his angular shoulders, trying to clear his head of the mutinous thoughts. They always tried to drag him down, to bring about his downfall that he was so anticipating. The end of him; that would show them.

The stinging on his hand distracted him temporarily. He could make it go away, make the annoyance and the pain stop. It was a simple gesture, a flick of his wrist that had been ingrained so well into the back of his skull. But he did not. He flexed his hand, grimaced, and continued writing.

It wasn't masochism. It was nothing so trivial as that. It simply didn't fit into the geometric plan he had laid out. It didn't coincide with the hard work he had done to keep his life together. The simple memory of those simple words he had learned so long ago could destroy him.

He blinked, and the pain disappeared.

The man, the porcelain man who spent his life lost in the details of defense and who had lived in the mazes that were behind his eyes, blended with the black writing on the parchment. They were one and the same, scribbled onto a background of pure white, where all their faults and inadequacies would be on display for the entire world to see.

Severus Snape, alone in his dungeons with his own failures, heaved a sigh. Despite all his mathematical plans, the pattern he had so carefully laid out to get him through his life, he wished for one thing. In the part of him that still wished, he begged for the entire world to blink, and for he to get lost in the jungle of their memories. To be forgotten behind their closed eyes.

The blood seeped out of his thin cloth and left a small, perfect, beautiful red speck on the paper. Severus Snape wrote on.