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Dear Severus,Do you hate me? There’s no humanity left in me anyway. You began to hate me long before I was destroyed, and it’ll stay the same well after I go. If I go. If I decide that maybe this world doesn’t deserve my benevolence. Maybe I don’t want to be bad anymore but does that make me good?I know you think like this too. I know you stay awake and think you can solve a mystery that doesn’t want to be solved. I know that you will try to save me, from myself, from you, from everyone. I was never born to be saved. Some people are born to be killed. Some are born to kill. But a savior? My, my. When did you get so hopeful?I wish death could save me. It is just another path I can’t force myself to go down. Not now. Only when the time is right that I’ll find you.I can meet you and tell you myself that I am no longer human.Forever yours,Talena.Care is not a word that can describe Severus Snape. It’s too soft, almost belittling to be called, four letters of emotion that rivets and courses through the veins of lovesick men, buried secrets closer to hearts and left an opening to reach in—reach inside and pull out, see how much care is given then. A heart only gets in the way of a war, he had said this to himself many times. This explained why he watched unperturbed at how everyone seemed to adore the brand new Ravenclaws gathered amongst each other inside the Great Hall.Specks of fine, dry powder fell through the stiff air, almost mirroring the slow march of snowflakes on a rare wintry day, inside the Great Hall, the Ravenclaws rested on a velvet tablecloth, a rich blue that Severus admired for its regalty. How facetiously royal, dark enough to eclipse black and yet holds beauty in the light. There was little enthusiasm on his pale face as he watched the moonlight from the make-believe ceiling polarised against their seats, settle and the dust quickly shone across the air. Snape’s hands were cold, fit primarily amongst his opposite thin fingers, and positioned together in a steeple. Dark onyx eyes befell the students afar.“She’s cute. The new little Ravenclaw girl.” A fellow Slytherin student commented from beside him. Snape did not smile, but he picked up on the tone, which carried suaveness. It was the confident bite of a snake, cold and experienced—an older student. Such sharp words cut through the tension that was thickly woven into the air, much like a butcher knife. The silence that lingered afterwards was only momentarily, however. Snape’s eyes were left quietly lingering on the dust, sullen but not sulking, the nonchalance on his pale complexion told he was quite fine without the presence of the rest of the Slytherins. Lucius Malfoy, however, snapped a bitter retort, always irked by crude remarks indulging any house besides Slytherin. “Enough. Keep up with this talking and I’ll have you turned into a pig.” He sat opposite of Snape, staring frustratingly across him. Blond hair framed Lucious’ face, bright even in the dimness of the candelabra-lit room. It was a silly hair style in Snape’s mind, and yet at the same time, something only Lucius could pull off. The more he observed guiltlessly, a false smile teetered at his lips.The atmosphere that had inadvertently swallowed Snape felt very different from the stupor he had been in only moments earlier; pressure flooded the surrounding air, shallow and unyielding, and the asphyxiating glaring of the numerous older students amongst each house did nothing to help mitigate it. Slytherin needn’t worry, though, for the numbers would start to dwindle soon enough. Snape, without guilt, turns his head again.Her eyes have a warmth to them as they reflect the glint of the moonlight beams, she’s sitting with Gryffindor’s students—laughing. She reminds him of a fawn, more or less, the girl was far too naive and knee-deep in a world she will never understand, stuck in a society that won’t care for her. Snape’s smile comes off a little fragile, maybe he’s just tense, but his eyes rove and pass over her uniform again. In the corner of her lips, a crease decorated her pale skin with a smile, deep red hair settled over her shoulders like a burnt orange sunset trickling over a horizon—the stars that had fallen upon her face in the form of freckles sparkling along with it. The glitter in the sky had nothing on Lily Evans. The confident red? The emblem of her uniform that Snape doesn’t recognise as something equal to Slytherin? His eyes seem to bleak with misfortune, a mournful black eclipses the other color, drowning it out. He stares, unable to fathom, unable to sustain, merely existing.Snape and Lily had grown up back in Cokeworth, pushing through together. He would hold her hand when the two of them walked down the same path, trekking deeper, pushing past damp leaves, finding their breaths were the only sounds of the day. Snape rarely smiled, and Lily always thought that it was a rare occurrence that when he did, she didn’t want to miss it—it was a snapshot of a vivid solar eclipse. He remembered the pollen from the flora around them whisked away into the beams of the morning sun and he could see every small piece make its journey, somewhere in the mid, Lily would point out the few bees and maybe even a dragonfly, but they didn’t bother them and only became one with the harmonious nature. Everything was captured by frames.Snape would notice Lily inching closer to him, he also noticed how she moved as freely as the long grass on the floor of the meadow they were sitting in the midst of. The sunlight fought its way through the branches of the trees and claimed dominance on Lily’s face—she would hook her careful arm around his bruised one and rest her head gently on his shoulder.Snape turns to the Ravenclaw table next.This girl’s hair is jet black, sleek and well-kept, the personification of an ancient branch. She's seated on one side of the Ravenclaw table, she hasn’t noticed him. Her eyes are as clear as river waters lost to their introspection, in absolute polished composure—her smile, not going unwasted as every student in the Ravenclaw house pays tribute to it, is sweet with a hint of timidness, emitting itself from a kindly mouth. Her lashes were black serendipity, black magic wands, black crow wings—and from them came a sense of home, Snape feels like her eyes made sacred marks upon his soul, conjuring a sense that they have met before. Her skin was without a blemish or a fault, airbrushed with a golden metallic finish. From her side profile, Snape could see just how gracefully unique her features were. She’s pretty. She’s so pretty. Pretty, he thinks against his will. She’s a first year, just like Snape, and her aura radiated a sense of—lucid lunacy? It was hard to describe. Snape finds himself spellbound, like a cap of a lens that has been placed over his eyes and makes this singular individual he’s staring at the center of attention, splashing her in a tinge of wild brilliance. The left side of her face shut off from the moonlight and galaxies stirred in her eyes.Slytherin had been elated, and more so infatuated—in an infuriated manner, with this particular Ravenclaw. Lucius himself had muttered under his breath when this girl was sorted into her house, that she should have been with them; with Slytherin.Snape watched as she tilted her head quite suddenly, almost in a doll-like manner and a terrifying small smile followed soon after. It was enough to have the young boy avert his head back to the others, though Snape was loftily aware of the intelligence of Ravenclaw, their cockiness always remained under flesh. How horrifying did such an expression of kindness turn into something that made the fine hair on his skin stand straight. Though kindness is a foreign word here. “I won’t dawdle,” Lucius continued, his steeple tightened. His words were not a question, but a cautionary expectancy of his subordinates. Lucius' eyes widened, almost fearfully, with curiosity. His poker expression appeared to melt as he spoke, “She’s quite popular. Another thorn in my side.” Snape rolled his eyes, folding his arms. He thought Lucius’ tone was similar to that of a stubborn child, but his shoulders never stopped from their strict posture, and every member of Slytherin listened to Lucius with interest.Lily Evans’ hair is flimsy today, messed up and unkept. She rarely keeps it in check, finding it hard to take the time to care about herself—she’d much rather let Talena Dalma spend two hours grooming it (apparently haircare is a long process). Once she blinks, she staggers back, a quickly drawn breath escaping her lungs—Talena stands next to her, as if she was always there. The Gryffindor girl turns immediately, feeling the ghastly breath, mellow and sweet, dancing on her skin like flower petals.“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Talena’s voice is hoarse and quiet, like the echo trapped in a seashell. It feels somber and distant, but she’s speaking right to Lily, fingers digging into the opposite girl’s forearm as her other palm smooths over the girl’s hair. A sweet, gentle smile hugs at the Ravenclaw’s lips, her hand travels slowly from Lily’s head, a playful hug—a friendly hug. Lily thinks it feels so uncannily like a noose, like a deity has wrapped her around their finger, choking the life out of her. She abruptly fixes her eyes with Talena’s own as if her stare focusing in on her physically puts a weight on her shoulders. An elusive smile infused Lily’s cheeks as a way of silently showing that she hadn’t been so startled, that she didn't feel a small trickle of chills each time she lingered around the Ravenclaw Library.Lily had a rust fountain of hair dripping over her shoulders, growing so long that it touched the skim of her waist—the light of the lamps inside of the library fluorescence behind Talena and every flyaway of her locs could be seen in sharp detail.For a moment, Lily distantly pulled in her friend’s looks, scanning over the pure beauty that she was composed of. Whatever palette that had been used to craft Talena was so pristine and effervescent that it would have made any renaissance painter jealous. It wasn’t until Lily met eyes with Talena that she came to remember she had started a sentence that was yet to be finished. “In History of Magic..”“The essays,” Talena interrupted, nodding her head like she understood something that Lily hadn’t even confirmed yet. It took a moment, but she eventually reassured her interjection. “Right.” Her eyes traced her expression this time, waiting for Lily to continue through the silence after they had taken their seats. The Gryffindor’s head dipped and gazed her cast away, like Talena wouldn’t be able to see her just because she looked away. “Did that…did that go smoothly for you?” She finally asks. The voice that Lily spoke with fell quiet at the end; breaking up like the signal of an intercom. The question was asked, but not without some pieces missing. “Yes.” Talena shrugged plainly, her eyes swelled with confusion. “Why wouldn’t it?” Each muscle on Lily’s face assisted the other in twisting off the confused look she held on her features before she registered it.
Why wouldn’t it?
“I’m not sure. I found it really difficult for some reason. Like, really difficult. That’s messed up, right?” Everything in the room spun without a sound, Talena blinked, organizing all of her notes. “So?” She finally refuted. Lily’s eyebrows raised with energetic motion. “So?” She leaned her upper body foreword, emphasizing the stretched-out word that held a thick sense of mockery. “I’ve failed as a student! It’s kind of stupid to assign those essays as if we’d know what we were talking about.” Lily complained. Talena brought her eyebrows together, fighting back a smile with force that wasn’t strong enough.Her smile broke free and blossomed on her lips. “We are supposed to know what we are talking about.” Lily pauses, her eyes meet with her friend’s again, and she sucks a deep breath before boldly asking. “..Can you help me study?” The pigment on Lily’s face scorned to a bright red color—the same color as her uniform, it seemed. She sat up, running her hands along the flowing locks of her hair. “If you say no, I’ll go find someone else to help me.” Lily lies, both girls felt their lips stretching, knowing that she wasn’t really going anywhere. The Gryffindor girl reaches over to grip around Talena’s small wrist and tugged on it insistently while her black boots glued to the hardwood.“Show me the essay drafts.” Talena enunciated dreamily, making Lily smile. The Ravenclaw sat up a little straighter, flattening out the gentle blue of her uniform. “I completed all my work.” She says. Talena hates feeling stupid. All of her short life of just eleven years, she’d been told how gifted she was, ceaselessly eulogized by teachers and family for her savviness and the uncomplicated way she devoured knowledge and remembered facts like history or trivia. Talena stood out in every room, every class, every conversation, always three steps ahead of anyone else her age. So, there was nothing she despised more than being made to feel like a fool. No, worse—the very suggestion of it, the mere hint that she might not understand something, gnawed at her fiercely.Lily’s hands rolled into the air, eyes wide with urgency. “I haven’t even started those! How’d you do it?” She coaxed, trying to lure out the response—focusing more on each new twinkle inside of Talena’s irises. Lily watched as Talena held her full lips together in defiance, childish, a sweet way of letting every teacher know that despite her intelligence, she was still just a girl.Lily’s fingers ran through her locks, pulling at them a little towards the ends as they got caught in the copper tassel. “Hey, speaking about essays. Talena, you’re the smartest in Ravenclaw—have you met Severus yet? He’s really quiet—but he’s got a spark in him.” She started towards the top of her head again. “I think you two would get along great!” Talena wrapped herself in a painful silence. Lily must have misinterpreted how far Talena’s thoughts had gone, because she spoke with a little extra volume to enliven the mood again. “I saw him on the way over here.” She declared. One side of Talena’s face moved with more freedom than the other, taking one eyebrow and lifting it upwards. The lids of Lily’s eyes left a central space between her irises, giving the color a whole new meaning. Talena momentarily sent her eyes rolling towards the ceiling, her once good mood replaced with rugged irritation. Ready to execute the study session, Lily leaned forward again, her cheeks giving an enthusiastic glow in addition to the blush that naturally burned them.Her enthusiasm, however, died on her tongue as soon as the paper drafts were settled in front of her.Snape felt like he was washed up on the shore of a cold beach, the warmth of his uniform becoming a brew threatening to boil over. Normally, he indulges in a few fantasies before falling into some unbreakable studying sessions, which was what had happened during Potions, but they were too short, slipping through his fingers before he could catch them. The anxiety in him was swelling like a balloon, fizzling and sweltering, almost devouring him whole the more he tried to bury it, but he simply couldn’t. It was overwhelming sometimes, to be him. To be stuck like this, to have hopes and dreams but worries and fears. To have Lily Evans constantly in his head like a song on the radio he couldn’t turn off.Humans always seem tethered to something, whether it was endearing or parasitical for them. The universe is vast and endless but there is an end, and no one wants to be alone when it comes. That feeling of drunk wisdom when one finds something so utterly connective and they can’t let go until it’s squeezed of all emotion from their hands. A maniac needs to be fuelled by something, something to keep him in check. To keep him alive.See, humans are fickle beings, swayed by the current of the stream, mindlessly launching off buildings and chasing false gods and imaginary shadows. They’re manipulative and manipulated, as Talena once said, something Snape had unwillingly allowed it to be drilled into him. Their desires are only so much until the jilting of reality kicks in. Snape learnt this slowly, letting the pain wash away each day until one day it was staring at him straight in the face as he swallowed the belly of the beast, the blood—it dawned on him that his world was non-existent, a dreamland suited to the needs of the worst.Snape knew; he was watching Lily Evans as she slowly destroyed herself, bit by bit, letting her heart of gold be the one to stretch her endurance thin and ruin everything. Everything was going downhill, it wasn’t obvious at first, but all it took for Snape to notice was observance.He misses the day he met Lily since he could only live it once. How looking at her smile was like blindly stumbling into peace. Yet, she never seemed to look his way remotely the way he looked at her, no, she looked at someone else. Lily looked at Talena. The world seemed to bow down at Talena’s feet—boys, girls, nature. Lily was setting herself on fire to keep Talena warm. She gave away bits of herself to her and Snape wonders when he’ll ever fully know Lily, that was just how it is. Sure, he knew Lily, but did he really like the person that held Lily’s complete and utter affection?Snape has seen the void that befalls Talena’s eyes; Magic didn’t like her. She drowns others in a pool of blood, leaving them to limp like a fish on land. Even if she could get a butterfly to flutter on her finger, she would kill it eventually, letting it eat away at the canvases of her rotten soul like moths to a flame. He finds that whatever happiness she experiences is short-lived—and it hurts. There is some peace when he hears Talena laugh at her peer’s jokes, or when his heart unwillingly skips a beat because her hand brushes with his. Or when Snape looks at her eyes and looks at the moon gleaming in them. Talena’s eyes were a quiet kind of color, like puddles left behind from summer rain, pretty and unforgettable. They were the same eyes as a beast; what can’t be undone cannot be cherished, so she was left with a relic to haunt her forever.“Talena looks really pretty today, doesn’t she?”Lily seems more confident today. Snape wonders why.Irked, he pushes the fawn out of his thoughts, but it's useless. He plays it safe by choosing not to answer. He felt like he was wading through ice-cold waves, the static in the darkness was akin to an infection, almost boiling out his eyes. Still, Lily was never one to give up. She knew her strength and welcomed it. Lily’s words curtail restrained thoughts, a trigger on his temper. Talena returns to his mind again like smoke he cannot wave away, nor catch. Each thought of her was like blood-slicked fingers reaching in and spooling the knotted mesh of anxiety saturated in black tar. With Lily, the two of them were fleshed out for Talena to see; all their flaws and humanity were exposed, like puppets being tweaked by their master.“I think she always looks pretty.” Lily crows, spinning her wand around between her fingers. An idle expression hides the admiration within her, she turns, bright eyes soft and gentle, almost killing Snape instantly. “Today, she complimented my writing drafts. Just wait till she sees my essays!” He’s fixed in place, annoyance striking him when he deciphers Lily’s words, he forces himself to take a step forward. “What essay? You haven’t even started it.” Snape hums.Lily leans forwards, smiling at his words, a litany of brilliant laughter quickly exiting a tongue. Her expression softens. “I’ll finish it! It’ll be so good that she’ll be moved to tears. There’s no stopping me when it comes to Talena.” There’s a subtle pause, and Snape had been so focused on keeping his eyes trained solely on the tip of his shoes, he’d had thought Lily had suddenly vanished. When he lifted his attention to her, she had been looking afar, a smile playing at her lips as her voice raised in exasperated elatedness.“Talena!”Snape’s lips move but everything falls away and the darkness of his dream returns again. Talena hates mice.They’re annoying and it doesn’t matter about how many times her guardians used to tell her the whole Look at their size and look at you! argument, she hates them. Here, she would normally insert some sympathetic anecdote about how a mouse traumatised her in her childhood, but as far as she can remember, she hates mice. Which is why the intent to murder seemingly raged throughout her whole body when she noticed a mouse on its back helplessly as it wrestled on the grassy ground, back in the courts of Hogwart.It disturbed Talena how this environment remained the same, even if she was not present in it. She was so used to being a hurricane, absorbing everything and anything and being utterly destructive that she forgot about a sense of peace for a moment. This was most apparent because after the recurrent nightmares plaguing her, she forfeited her right to solitude. Being alone would only make Talena realise just how empty it is to exist. She may have gained her own strength but if she didn’t curate it—keep it alive like a fire struggling to oxidise itself in the messy spool of a dark cave—then it would dry out, burn out and be gone forever.Talena was falling into a river of power, floating and drowning at the same time. The waves drenched her as the days before she entered Hogwarts passed and then the days turned into weeks, and two whole months later she found herself sitting at the center of the Ravenclaw’s table, eyes of her peers staring and staring—the mouse was still stuck on its back and it’s been ten minutes.Lily peeks from around her, she’s too short to be seen in Talena’s peripheral so she leans in inelegantly. “Hi!”She crouches next to her on the ground and Talena could hear the pebbles beneath her weather and crunch. The mouse is bleak and charismatically empty, lacking the thrill and warmth most rodents have, there was no sign of life in it. “You know,” Talena begins absentmindedly. “Mice probably carry bacteria.”For a moment, Snape is confused; the curtain of his dark hair hides most of his expression though. And then, he looks at the tiny mouse on the ground. Since his world is a mirage of patches, an ocean of magic he explores, he looks at the mouse. The fine hairs on his skin prick and he turns—the explosion of energy is outwardly projected from Talena, he’s confronted head-on with so much power, undiscussed thoughts, anger and malice—it’s nothing he’s used to, and it's strange how powerful Talena could be if she really tapped into it. Just for a split second, he wonders how glad the pesky old wizards were to see that Talena is oblivious/unawakened or—whatever.If Talena chose to release that power, well.“You scared of mice?”Snape doesn’t realise that she’s speaking to him; she’s a garden of red and black agonies all seeping with the puncture of rotten fruit. This emotion was a bluntness on the edge of light, tepid eyes sear and then sharpen. “..No.” Comes his answer, and he thinks his voice is a lot smaller than he’d thought.“Watch,” A simper of a smile tugs at her lips. “I’ve been practicing.”It’s meant to be a request, not an order, though it sounds like it.Snape watches.It was like screaming—jaw unhinged, eyes widened, mouth agape and voice shrill. Screaming to the world about death, because humans may have made up the word for death but would fear it for eternity. They rest: six feet beneath the ground, rotting as society moves on, uncaring because no one cares for the dead unless they want to. There’s a different world when it comes to death, a difficult outlook, but no one cares because if one is living, they are living, they’re not dead. In the end, everyone dies. The grass around the mouse is overgrown, sullen and wilting, a weak and meandering grey that teeters into yellow during strong summers. The air is dead, unforgiving and cold.“Rukiree Faresuu.”The words seem almost empty on her lips, not real. Lily is patient and replies with something kind, but Snape’s eyes are fixed on the mouse and everything is blurry, stirring an unwanted sickness inside his stomach. The colors of the world smash into each other, dizzying him further. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. He can see a tender smile make its way onto Talena’s face.There are two kinds of silence; the sweet serenity brought about from peace, and the destructive absence of sound that drives one to the brink of insanity. The silence after murder is utterly obliterative, like a piercing pain that seizes ears and yet Snape has felt it more often than not—death is no longer an insistence in this line of work, in the magic world. Death, in person, cannot be a man but a beast. That is the truth that Snape seeks in his eyes, the claws of a tiger that sits on the lap of Talena, awaiting the scent of bloody corpses and silent souls. He’s not sure which silence is enveloping him right then and there as he stood on the grassy field, blinking back almost every single emotion: hatred, anger, fear, loneliness.His legs struggle to hold what feels like the weight of the world, knees buckling, Snape trembles in front of death. The sun is searing his blistered skin as it climbs into the sky, marking the dawn of a new day, and leaving behind the darkness of the day before. Now, his eyes bleed into the greyish mouse, where the name of Talena is etched forever, a remnant of her magic, a relic of the strongest, if one will. It’s the closest he’s been to her.The mouse is no longer rotting in the earth, no longer rotting as it waits for Snape.
Did it feel good to do what Talena did? (BEING THE MARTYR OF BEDTIME STORIES.)
Snape’s mind tosses and turns and he slowly loses himself in the corner of his thoughts. The crevices of anxiety seep into the pond of his memories and everytime he reflects on the beauty of Talena, her dreamy smile is cut loose by the tongue of the dead, rolling in the back of his mind like a ghost that cannot be set free. Everywhere he goes, she will follow him, and into the end of the night, she cannot be set free. Sighing, he forces his eyes not to spill tears as he focuses them on the brown dirt covering the mouse’s body. His heart hurts to the point of no return, rib cage rattling as the strings of his organ are stretched to the brink of breaking, teetering between mortal heartbreak and the loss of self in oblivion. Snape finds his body shivering under the agony of breathing and living above the molten remains of a corpse, which in the end, everyone will become.His heart is trapped; suspended by its own strings in a cruel but beautiful manner, stretched out as Talena peels its flesh off layer by layer, sadness is swelling within him. He hates it. He hates everything about what he is feeling right now.“Look. It’s back to life.”Snape’s thoughts disrupt the angry flow that had whisked him away from where he was, in an abyss between somewhere and nowhere. His eyes tremble slightly, wavering in perplexion. The mouse was alive. “What?” Lily gasps suddenly. Talena laughs, it was a hollow laugh, the kind that filled the uncomfortable silence that was slowly choking. Ringing in his ears, her laugh swallows him and spits him out a few minutes later. Snape stares. Telena doesn’t find it hard to read him, the frustration is etched onto his face; has he recognised her greatness?He purses his lips. “..What spell was that?” Talena is learning on her own, finding and tuning her power. She’s in those days where the ecstasy that rushed within her when she becomes powerful, when she felt her strength. “At first, I did little stuff. Bugs.” Telena remembers how Flitwick had done a double-take upon seeing the various bugs on his way to Charms class, he had seriously thought he’d gone loopy. “Then I tried on mammals. Mouse and bats, different weight and species. Now, I can do it with cats.”Students normally think along the lines of the bigger, the better! but here, it was things like that which were true accomplishments of ability. Snape knows how difficult getting the tiniest of details is and he’s known long enough to see other students unable to disperse every speck of magic from themselves because small things are harder to pinpoint, harder to control, to gauge a depth of perception of. Snape doesn’t reply, instead twisting his vision back to the mouse since it's the only thing one could look at. He knows this is not only the grave but also the death site, the corpse that lived there was like an eternally-contorting explosion. A time loop stuck repeating itself, regenerating corpses. Snape’s eyes were blackened by it, there was too much, it was too heavy, too dark. Too powerful. He narrows his eyes, something doesn’t make sense. Did it feel good to do what Talena did?Lily’s eyes lit up, almost cast alive against the early dawn. “That’s amazing! No professor has been able to do that!” Talena was briefly drawn back to a memorable encounter with all of her professors in a scuffle back at the Great Hall. They were no less than brainless dirt that she ignored with ease, she was eager to finish them all and unleashed all of the magic in her brand new invention she had been working on. In their final moments, blood inking down the ground like fresh paint, their croaky cries hollowed the air in Hogwarts, up to the ceiling, echoing, Talena heard it. Death.Snape turned to Talena, onyx eyes remaining completely dark, obsolete of emotion.She spoke with a hidden line, as if to say I will succeed; that is not a desire but a basic expectation.“You?” Talena spoke this word slowly, each syllable ringing something unfamiliar in him. She rested her chin on her palm, a smile crawling to her face centipedially. “What do you think?” Lily observed silently, also craving such information, her bright eyes narrowed in expectation at Snape. “Yeah, Sev! What do you think?” She questioned eagerly, prying an answer out of the almost nervous-looking Slytherin.Talena always held expectations of her accomplishments.With a quaint smile, Talena skillfully mounts her brook with a singular motion, withdrawing from the floor like a butterfly and remaining a few feet off the ground. The broomstick resumes it's course and follows the other students, as easy as breathing and as smooth as calm water. She must have been allowed to drink in the glorious sight. Though it is horror, for the most part, these students were all future candidates for the brightest occupation one can have!Quidditch.“Talena! You’re really good at flying!” A boy suddenly interferes, a grin of curiosity spattered across his boyish face while staring at her with big eyes as if she’s a rare type of butterfly he has never seen before. Suddenly, his legs totter, a dirty and unkempt feeling veering itself inside his chest—the hasty sounds of several students flying falls on deaf ears as the boy makes an entirely undignified sound while he hangs off his broom, and he falls over, with all the shame a child who has accidentally run his can possible have. Talena watches, making no effort to help. Her temporary blaze melts away while the amusement grows, like a weed in a garden sucking the life off a fresh bush of roses. A faint and cold breeze that delicately kissed her cheeks caused Talena’s eyes to brighten up. Her eyes fixed onto the hunched figure of the boy who, sensing the grueling stern eyes of all the kids all over his body, strenuously uplifts his heavy head. Her prying gaze doesn’t just observe his crushed self, she sees beyond that; she sees his beaten arms, his wobbling legs, and the dimming color of his once-resolute eyes.It is growing brighter now, skies slipping past between shades. The morning is still young as the curve of the sun finally rises over the horizon, and eminence spills across the skies, infant and emergent as it reaches the darkened blue hiding behind shrouded clouds, clouds that melt over so beautifully. They fade away as Talena watches them drift, and secretly, part of her wishes she was with them.“Talena! Wait for me!”Lily’s heart trembles just thinking about Talena gaining further along her process, and leaving her behind. The other girl hears it, few things could do that to Lily—the sorrow deep-rooted in her words was transcending; there are words and then there are none because humans could come up with all sorts of syllables to string together but never live out the meanings or emotions. Talena finally sees her, she’s in the sky, and Lily is on the ground. There’s blood on her uniform—the red is the first thing Talena fixes on because it's so obvious.Her legs wobble; she can feel Talena from so far. Lily’s heart pines for her, rather embarrassingly. (Sometimes, she’s glad her friend isn’t much of an empath.)The way her lips flick upwards makes Lily kick off on her broom, drawn to the conviction of her, the beauty of her own self. To know Talena was to know, well, her. That in itself made Lily feel blessed just to know someone as brilliant and soulful like her. She begins to soar, making her way over to Talena and before she knew it, her arms enveloped her into a hug.The stench of murder is rife, yet Talena stomachs the horror and ignores it.Lily’s fingers rest gently on her friend’s backbones, face pressed into her shoulder. It is a long time before the Gryffindor girl lets go, but when it happens, her cheek is still on Talena’s shoulder. Lily has a tremor in her hand. “What is wrong, Lily girl?” She opens her mouth, expecting a warble or even nothing to come out, but instead, everything does. What she had kept caged, restrained and repressed, she had let loose her tongue in front of Talena. Lily does not hold back, but it was like a stream of emotions overpowering her, compelling to blurt out everything that had happened as if talking about it would make it better.Talking did. Lily talked to Snape for so long that her voice was hoarse but she still wanted to talk with Talena, emptying herself out in front of her.Talena isn’t very good at comforting people, but she’s a good listener—pursing her lips, she half-wonders.“I’m scared you’re gonna leave me.” Lily says very suddenly, her eyes full of pressing thoughts. Talena pauses, the memory taking its time to return, her quiet expression arrives at the brim of her mind. Talena Dalma will have to leave eventually. What will happen to Lily Evans then? Oh, how her life has changed. How she had her life uprooted, thrown into a world she did not understand but was forced to.Warm air crawled up Lily’s papery spine and kissed her neck as the breeze brushed against her while she drew herself away quickly into the flying zone. Talena’s laugh seemed to part the seas and open the clouds above seeing as how her friend’s attitude balanced on shy and clingy. Talena cannot escape the feeling that, below the surface, something is breaking—below the surface of the fragile web of thoughts, lingers the truth. Lily blinks, the mist around her eyes clearing, she catches the sight of the uniform on her best friend, it’s a beautiful color, and she understood why Talena had it—blue holds the deepest connotations, after all.Talena, however, doesn’t bother opening her mouth to say something; what would she say after all? For a long time, her magic was a silent outreach of death’s smile, healing in the raptures in her wicked heart with a frothy venom. It was some black and rotting cavity of wrongness that hurt somewhere inside her; she could feel it but could never quite name it. Talena blinks, looking down at seeing the other students that had yet to kick off the ground; how could she have forgotten? Perhaps the nightmare of last night had blocked out the memory of this morning. What she wore consisted of a black sweater, a grey pleated skirt, and a pair of polished loafer platforms. Thankfully, her attire was not a morbid black, which would have given students fear of forever looking like a funeral attendee when out in class—it was the color of black just before midnight hit, the color of blue like a midwinter night an hour before pitch dark.Lily takes in her sights as she’s above the ground. Hogwarts is a jewel beyond comprehension, hidden behind foggy mornings with blankets of grey smothering the sky, but peel back the layers and the truth is revealed. The sky was azure, white clouds as fluffy as they look, drifting hazily across her peripheral vision, thousands and thousands of feet away from her mellow eyes. The harsh gaze of the sun had dwindled in the early morning, now emitting a more soft beam of light down on the very vast field of flying class, the sunlight reflecting off the glassy windows of nearby towers. Such natural beauty. That was the endless treasure Lily had embedded into her head about the cunning wealth that life brought; the serenity of the countryside is nothing compared to the endless possibilities that a place as magical as Hogwarts seemed to brim with.Talena’s mind is not as fragile as teacups inside an antique store; it has its uses but in a witting admiration, it can fumble and collapse. Once fractured, it can never be the same again. Such an analogy is befitting of a girl who was plagued by predictions of curses, spirits, and spells of death across her short lifetime. Talena is not a witch where magic blooms on the crooked wand, but instead she is the end of everything in existence. Magic’s end.“I will leave you anyway, Lily.” Talena says suddenly, lips moving without thinking.The wave of darkness crawls unwelcomingly across her skin, a vivid coldness that reminds Talena of the sulphur lakes trembling in Azkaban. She blinks, and she’s standing in front of a prison and every nerve in her body feels like it’s been painfully unwoven at the merciless thought of a curse. The young girl blinks away the illusion, resisting the urge to whimper beneath her breath—fear is no longer an option. Not anymore. Lily trembles on her broom as she meets with Talena again, a pout hanging off her bottom lip as her eyes embrace the softness of the horizon. “What? We’re best friends!” Lily Evans smiles as she says this, what a delicate aura, like a fawn. Talena thinks this curse was visceral in its approach as it tears open Lily’s chest to reveal a broken heart, no longer pulsing but instead, it withers like the strings have snapped in two. Rotten flesh lays aghast around the ribcage; like the jagged cutting rock of a cave, it surrounds the demise of Lily’s organs.Talena recoils, shifting away in horror at the descriptive nightmare presented in front of her.Her eyes press against Lily’s chest and the wavy skin to reflect the ribcage, but she sees no gaping hole physically presented in the opposite girl’s body. While metaphorically, her heart was cut open with a wizard’s spell, beautified for the world to revel in its pitiful plight, realistically, the organ was beating away within Lily Evans, a constant force that shrouded her body everywhere she went.“Hey, are you okay?” Lily looks at her; her eyes haunt the remains of something somber, lonely and lost. The green hues take some of Talena’s sadness away, leaving her a little hollow at the beckoning thought of sorcery. The Ravenclaw looks away, catching her breath; curses seem to affect her more than anything else.“Sorry, Lily. I didn’t mean that.” Talena’s lips bitterly curl. Her expression is always difficult to place, an illusion that befits all. Perhaps it was the short locs masking the corners of her eyes that made her such a mysterious figure; she was intrepid in her gaze, and far too wise with her words despite the heavy-set accent she carried. Something about Talena made the professors quiver with anxiety, like she is simply a deity too far away, out of reach of a wizard or witch. She understood things one cannot even begin to comprehend, and Albus Dumbledore can imagine there to be a plethora of secrets webbed tightly into the string of her thoughts. Not that he could ever predict what a girl like Talena was thinking.Madam Hooch flies by, rather surprised. She had become aware of how cordial Lily and Talena had been in comparison to the other students; the two of them were still learning the workings of this separate world to the one they were most used to.“Come along now, girls! Keep those brooms flying with the others.” She reminds the girls.“Yes, Madam Hooch.” Lily whines; she can’t really complain after all. She had been hesitant on allowing her feet to leave the ground until she had seen her best friend up in the sky. The girls watch their professor glide to aid with the other students, Lily retreats alongside Talena, the contours of their youthful beauty being traced by the fingers of the gentle wind. “I won’t leave you, Lily.” Talena shakes her head, she’s sitting on her broom and the top of her head still matches the same level as hers, given their height. The Ravenclaw tilted her head in inquiry, wondering what the reason for her lies were.Lily nods and looks at Talena for the longest time, as if she could spot the pupils hidden in the meiotic throttles of gold in her irises. She was trying to read her best friend as if she was an open book, and it would be unsettling if she wasn’t so truthful and nonchalant about it.“I won’t leave you alone.” Talena says blankly, and Lily wonders what she’s thinking.Something tells her that Talena wouldn’t ever speak her mind, but she hopes that she’ll open up at some point.The Ravenclaw's lips curve upwards into a small smile; looking up at the twinkling stars locked in the green blanket rolled across Lily’s irises—Talena thinks about the sting of death just as how she had thought about it that morning. One day, it will sting her, the hardship of sorcery, and Talena knows Lily will never be the same after that. For now, sitting outside a compound in the middle of an empty field with her would suffice.It’s just a waiting game now.Friendship is painful.Talena knew that from the moment she split apart the magic world like a blade to skin, slicking silver to flesh, a sickle lined with teeth and it latched down—she tasted it in one bite. How quick the glimmer of blood caked into rot. It’s why she held no qualms against leaving Lily to fend for herself, a fawn let loose from the cage and now it whimpered in the midst of the unknown. Rather, it was almost euphoric, a shaking feeling that rattled Talena’s demeanour with delight. It tantalised her to push the limits even more—send Lily off some cliff into the North Sea and watch it swallow her whole entirely.Talena knew the world was rotten incarnate. Kill or be killed.She edged near a hallway, narrowing her eyes at the sight before her.James Potter was a piece of work, the latter enunciated it enough to draw a rise out of eleven year-old Snape. She jutted her head to the side where Lily found herself speaking with him, apathy burns in her eyes like hot ash. Lily stepped closer to Snape, the sound echoed hard; it reverberated off Hogwarts magical walls so deeply it stirred something unsympathetic within her. Talena’s eyes were far too gentle and light to hold anything in them. Just seeing James in flesh, soft skin, hard eyes, thin lips; it weighted Talena down, like she was being buried inside herself, the space left for another, for this person. It hurt her in a way she had never felt, to be sympathetic, it held her by the throat, and worked its way on the corner of her mouth. Talena found that she couldn’t breathe, she lowered her head—biting on her lip. Her face was hidden by the sprawl of her long locs.Talena finds blood troubling, she’s not sure why. Blood is hard to avoid; the color of red paints her life. (LILY. LILY. LILY.) Blood is shaped by it all, Talena doesn’t know life without bloodshed, she can never live her life in peace if red stares at her from everywhere. It’s as if she wanted to suffer.The smell from her nightmares almost seems to want to choke her, the smell of flesh, bits of blood being flicked into the air, muddied with webbed-out billows of grey smoke. A bonfire worthy of the divine. (The divine never arrives, only the lords do.) The smell of blood was what hit Talena first, it’s a coppery stench, thick and metallic, the kind of thing that would web itself so intensely into the air that one could taste it on their tongue—Talena was all too familiar with it. Her eyes followed; a slouch of crimson strewn so recklessly that it slid down their warm wallpaper, like a shield throwing paint. He is stooped in pitch black and opulent omens, and no matter how much Talena can prevent it from happening, by protecting this boy—a fleshy body of pity, fate will kill James Potter. The best way it could happen was killing James Potter.And it’s not fair that Lily Evans will be next.The air is stale with dead prey that Talena had littered across Hogwarts, thick with the flames of lanterns and the dust garnering anywhere beneath each of them. She’s different when the day draws to a close, the recluse crawls out of her mind and ventures into the open—blood is spilt across the magic world, bleeding into dirt. Wizards and witches vanish and Talena’s lips are tightened.She sees the ceiling has collapsed, tiles smashes and dents the floor, it’s carnage. Droplets of blood have sunk into the broken home, dried in little circles like a nosebleed, but the fabric of everyone’s clothes were smeared with crimson—wet and absorbed like water. Debris hindered Talena’s nightmare as she drew her eyes closer, laying her sights on the massacre of the future.Talena sees Snape, too.When she loves, she’s afraid. Afraid of the light that comes with purity, afraid of wanting to touch, afraid of hurt and real darkness. Talena is rotting at the core of the trouble the wizarding world suffers, and she was blighted by the tainted hearts and empty souls. Nothing Lily can say could possibly lighten the darkness of the nightmares, the gravity of it. Lily can’t wind back time, she can’t do anything. She can’t help herself, not when it’s set in stone—Lily, the girl that grew up too fast, will be dead in 10 years.The only thing Talena can do as the unchanging, harsh, and untamable witch of the magic world, is put on another fake, pretty smile and watch herself drift further and further away from Lily. Talena feels like someone’s walked all over her soul, heel pressed into the blurry edges and suddenly everything hurts all over again. Smoke rises inside the cage of her heart and ignites a screaming, burning fire, dust of bones and ash wood. It washes over her, not like a wave of water, but guilt as thick as blood—a throat dried up by being lynched of all the words in the universe.Night time is a killer, but the black sky no longer fazes Talena as her tiptoes gently fall away amongst the sound of crackling thunder and whipping tree branches. She knows why she’s awake, why her skin is colder than ever, when her hair pricks thin and sharply—a fine line of fear scrubs against her skin. She’s not scared, not when Lily’s smile stretches up and up and up until her whole face is gone, her head backwards and blood vomiting out of her unhinged jaw. Since yesterday, which was only a few hours ago, Talena had seen Lily twice. Once in the nightmare that kept her shackled right before she broke free and headed into the thick of the Ravenclaw Library. Lily’s face was slim and giant with a burden only spirits can wear, lids heavy and lips twisted. A pale, unruly and ghoulish silhouette. The memory of burnt blood and ash is imprinted into Talena’s skull.The second time, Lily was in her bed. She’s singing to herself as she combed her hair, sunset and bright as her eyes are so pretty when she stares out to a moonlit sky. Talena’s figure crept past her bed and she swore Lily was dead. Her personality, which carried happiness, seemed unreal now. Talena could see her, as if she herself had ripped apart her friend’s bones, her blood, the sinews that bound her together, tracing her thoughts through the bloodstream of murder; fool’s courage blurs. The stench of blood is pungent on Lily, and it froths in the gaunt air, rivaling her capacity for not vomiting upon instinct—it's a putrid and sad wave of death that rolls over the room like a blanket. It wanes. It stares Talena dead in the eyes because why must she kill?The rain poured down in sheets—Talena’s doing.The sound of thunder echoes through the air, as if the heavens themselves were mourning. Talena bowed her head in accordance, Lily’s heavy fate burdening her already corrupt heart, it was too late to save her now; Snape wouldn’t reach her on time, and Talena, she would be gone. Her breathing was steady, and she clutched at her chest as if trying to see if she truly had a heart. Lily still had so much to go on for. She’s only eleven.This world of magic is a line running along the edge of the universe, swerving around stars and thinning out in the midst of sunny skies and porcelain clouds—Talena feels eternity in motion, in unrelenting rains and waves of sunshine pouring over her head when the warmth of empty hugs do no more than widen the gap in her heart. This is the world she’s trapped in, full of death and death and death. Right now, the world is centered on the Ravenclaw Library where the rain becomes more vicious than she thinks. It’s the day after Talena had officially seen James Potter and the atmosphere that has swallowed her up whole feels different to the nightmare; tension swallows the air around her, thick and unforgiving as she struggles to feel empathy in the darkness.Talena is a little girl. The web of lies is cut-throat as it spindles a veil around her skin, warping the beauty of the universe and helping evil emerge from the darkness. Her eyes are blacker than the ebony spat in the spaces between stars. She felt a strong shiver skip down her spine like piano keys at the cold flesh she harbored, she had good reason to be freezing. Talena felt like her body was shutting down the way candles go out one by one in the compound at midnight, naked and flickering, diseased. If she stepped back from her body, she was afraid to be unable to find her way back—this was her punishment. Talena felt as though her existence was tainted, she wanted the air to rip open and take her whole, jaw unhinging and swallowing down her gore and girlhood. It never will. Death birthed Talena, and left her in the carnage of her own making—to feed the hungry deity, to wallow in her own pain.Her pajamas are white, a gift from Lily when Talena had forgotten her sleepwear. They’re sweet and simple—the kind of pajamas dolls wear. The purity of its color is brighter than the blackness of the darkness of Talena’s shadow conveyed. As white as the sclera of a dead man, or the wishing bones of templar skeletons. Talena hadn’t smiled when she received such a gift, her expression was as still as the undisturbed surface of a lake beneath the moon.The Ravenclaw Library was a sanctuary on its own, anyone who wasn’t in the house was always startled at the infinitial height of the room. It seemed like the walls never ended and the black corners haunting the air above Talena grew thick upon the scent of her. Naturally, relief sets in like water filtering through a crack in a wall. The mannerisms she briefly adorned shed when the horror unfolds, and as she trailed deeper into the darkness of the high hallways in the library, Talena realises that the world is eclipsed in black and white; a merciless reality awaits her—the one she refuses to think about.Each breath of the autumn air was a promise of the rain to come, Snape took it in with gratitude, letting it dance over his skin. The fall environment had a burnt sense of warm aromatherapy to it, much like summer air that basked him and Lily in the meadow just over a month ago. The yellow and red hues from the trees around him were a visual representation of the passage of time and how he’d become a bit more at peace over the course of it. Since Snape had found his tree, he made it a routine to mingle in it everyday—reading books, sneaking a piece of blancmange, the juices adhering to his mouth. He would sift through the rare growth of flora, and when he would pull one out, he’d think Would this look pretty in Lily’s hair?Snape was alone, his one friend off with her group of Gryffindors—and Lucius was unlikely to be seen willingly spending time with someone like Snape, no matter how well they seemed to get along.Unwillingly, Snape had been spending his time looking at someone who was just out of eye’s view.Talena Dalma.The beam dancing on her soft lips swirled around them like the summertime pollen in the meadow, starlight and earth had never agreed to make a more beautiful being through the windows of Snape’s scuffed soul. His hand reached up to tousle his hair, using the sole of his shoes to collect the dry mix of dirt and pebbles under him and kicked them into a grey cloud that melted into the Fall atmosphere. He felt his nerves tremble suddenly, urging for him to slow his breathing so he could catch his breath—the air around Talena tightened around her and became the only thing coming out of her mouth, Snape waited for a moment, his breath tightening in his throat as he began to wonder if seeing her was just a coincidence, or if he was simply losing it.Snape felt that same burning fire within him that he had felt the first day he met her, the one he continuously compared her to when he realised just how cold and bitter the rest of his life was. Looking over at Talena when she was in the sun was like re-discovering his favorite book, remembering just how much he loved it since the last time he read it. He could recite the words back to himself and somehow feel them ten-times more than he had before despite having read it a million times. Snape’s heart coursed through the rest of his veins and spoke to him through his consciousness. Even though everybody who knew him knew that he’d never get himself to follow through with saying it aloud, he still thought: Talena is beautiful under the light.Snape tucked his chin into his knees shyly, he had a sort of embarrassment to him that made itself visible in his expression. His hair blew in the biting wind, and his face was dressed, unknowingly, with a small smile. Snape looked at Talena again—the crisp breeze billowed around the edge of her plaid skirt, pulling it up slightly while the rest curved tightly around her lower body. He momentarily wondered how she wasn’t cold, but it seemed like she was never anything but warmth. Talena’s eyes glimmered, they were no longer the windows to the soul, they were the golden gateway to every positive emotion he could think of. Her eyes looked like coming home, Snape thought, but this time, his home wasn’t filled with a dense emptiness. He sees the way her fingers combed through her locs, they were the color of obsidian and turned to diamond with each stroke. Snape could hear himself repeating how beautiful he thought Telena was even though his mouth wasn’t moving.Her mouth. Snape’s gaze perplexed over it and realized that it held millions of secrets—her lips were blushing and full, doused with an energetic pull that unconsciously lured him in. He figured that just like Talena’s eyes, and his life, and her presence, that he’d get lost in those, too.Snape didn’t exactly have a clear-cut agenda, a goal or desire or any carnality to cling onto like others. Maybe he did, but something died within him when Lily decided to deem Talena her best friend instead of him. Snape didn’t feel lost though, if anything, he felt trapped—people might call him hopeless, sad, weak, in the days to come, a “misunderstood creature”, a “grieving mess”. Talena might see right through him, like he’s a ghost. The thought of Lily leaving him behind threw a sharp punch at his heart and everything around it. He focused his gaze again, it seemed like with every action she made, Snape felt himself fall further and further into her spellbinding existence—Talena was a vortex, pulling everything out of him and into her.The apples of his cheeks suddenly radiated many hues of red with equal intensities, basking in the feeling of abrupt exposure, it wasn’t embarrassment, no. It was exposure. Even when she was afar, nowhere near enough to even catch a glimpse of him, she’d seen through him yet again. Snape had to force himself to shut down before she could find out how he really felt about her. Oxygen froze in his throat in the form of ice, pausing for a moment, he could see her interacting with something—something he couldn’t see. The field he sits in garners a breeze of hoarse whispers, nesting into Snape’s eardrums as his heart starts to pound, leaves rustle while something slithers and lurks behind his shadow, but he doesn’t look back, just ahead, until he finds what he’s looking for.The guessing is getting urgent, but Snape is growing nonchalant, perhaps even numb. His skin feels cold and his eyes gaze but are distant; it’s as if his consciousness drifts apart, silhouetted against the pulsing instinct of his heart. Telena crumbles his normal, rational and weak thoughts, like ash—and replaces them with what feels like the cackle of a madman. A dark rotting sensation, venom as thick as blood that drips down teeth. Telena is scary, she scares him.Doves. Snape sees doves.The wind howls, leaves ravaging and stirring above the dirt. Her locs gently drift, shadows highlighted by the flaming sunlight, there is silence again, because Snape forgets all the words in the world when he looks at Telena. At the white feathers hanging on such a pretty uniform, the most prettiest smile he has ever seen, which hangs sweetly on her lips. Snape sees that she was training doves—fletchlings, to take the leap from her arms and to glide into the sky for the first time. Dandelions sprouted from the soil beneath her, carrying themselves in ivory waves that hugged around her white socks with kisses of silver—Snape looked down on them, the bottom of her trainers lost amidst the earth that the soles were digging into.Snape had learned that Talena was like a flower, she held his eyes open and made him watch: Talena is a flower, he thinks, they’ll watch her bloom and watch her break.It’s wrong that she was woven from soft and gentle skin and smiles, that her armour are petals, smoothened out under the sunlight. Thin-lipped grace, a nebulous charm in her eyes, dresses made out of flower patterned fabric that reaches her knees and the wind sends ripples across her body, that’s what Snape has heard makes a girl. (LILY. LILY. LILY.)Talena is soft and gentle, but like the bruised skin of a fruit, rotten inside, sour teething inside a mind of bitter misfortune. She’s subdued, kindled like a rosemary bush ablaze, rising up from the ashes with gritted teeth and a flat tongue. Talena is wounded, like a flower with a twisted stalk, growing in the shadow of its friends, listening to the chatter of darkness and begging to see the light. Snape thinks that Talena is silent, because she wraps people's heads in soft cushions to stop the bleeding—she knocks on the skull, ivory blotted out by bloody hands, and pretends to hear nothing, because it is nothing (to Talena). Talena is too young, cherished but will be let go too soon, a bud that was pried open because they were too eager, too impatient. Behind a fractured petal lies something unborn, something not wanted, because her beauty had long since been ruined by them.Snape’s fingers pry a red lily out of its place on the earth, it was firmly rooted until he felt his nails digging into its stalk and he twisted until he heard the dirt moving. An unnatural feeling overwhelms him, it’s sticky and unpleasant, like he’s wading through a pool of tar and it’s clinging to his skin—black seeping through his nails, ebbing from an explosion of emotions and now through his eyes like he’s crying.The lily is still fresh, even if it is dead. Snape had just killed it.He lets go of the rigid breath that he didn’t even know he was holding.Snape edged his hand towards her direction, he allowed it to linger for a second, taking the tension that it gave his aching muscles and holding the lily out as if that was the way to first initiate such a gesture. Then, in a swift movement and an epiphany of bravery, he allowed the flower to hover from his palm. Snape felt roses bloom between them and become a garden of yearning, the petals of her hands covered in fresh rain—looking at Talena took whatever breath he had away but he’d never breathed so freely before. He asked himself one question at that moment, and it wasn’t who, what, when, how, or why, it was: What if I’m in love? Then what? The tinted shades of the leaves had never been so red, dripping in a blush of bright crimson like Snape’s cheeks whenever he would glance up at her with soft eyes.Talena’s expression is easy to see, softness discerned in the corners of her eyes, doleful and sweet, the smile which blossoms across her face like spring flowers is kissed by the light of the sun. She strides through the field of Quidditch like she had freshly escaped the pages of a fairytale book—gems crowned around her irises, a magic potion stirring inside of her. For a moment, a meditative buzz carried by Snape’s ears as a bumble bee hovers gracefully into their familiar golden hexagons, he doesn’t flinch like the other kids, doesn’t curl away, doesn’t even fear being stung. Beautiful is an understatement to describe the world around them, but the way Talena twinkled like a thousand diamonds drinking in the sun, perfectly polished and cut to perfection, she was a gem worth more a thousand lifetimes.Snape’s blushing is of pink perfection; the hallmark of one who is true of heart.The lily he had let go of dances slowly with the pollen in the air, it steps into the peaceful ballroom of nature while heading towards the girl kissed by falling feathers.The closer the flower got, the more warmth stirred in Snape’s stomach, the kind that stirs around the top of a fresh mug of hot chocolate and makes itself visible in laces of white steam—the air circulating in his lungs grew heavy as he looked at Talena, bringing in oxygen so scarcely that the only other option he had was to stop breathing at all. He felt a scornful heat build up to his forehead and down his throat, his eyes picked up off of her face and found something else to wilder on so that she wouldn’t see how mesmerised he was for that split second. Snape’s eyes sang and kissed as he wondered about the infinity that cradled the space between him and Talena both. He was completely shrouded with potential, but it seemed he lacked the confidence to achieve it—being quiet and to himself, bullies were drawn to him like parasites would be to a feeble, healthy body that can offer them a chance to harbor.Snape’s eyes came into contact with Talena’s own, the red lily had found home in the warmth of her palm, a dove balanced on her shoulder, another clinging to her arm.Even from afar, the meadow wavers under another gust of wind, one that howls in frustration, taking him back to a few days ago. He still feels the horror and the fear that sunk deep within him, wedged between his ribs like an anchor to weigh him down. Talena is all over his mind and if he had to draw it out, it would be an incomprehensible image of scribbles, a madness that once inflicted, could not be cured.Talena does not exactly scare Snape, he cannot say that he isn’t fearful of her for that would be a lie. But he also cannot pinpoint what malignant veil of sentiment had swallowed up her troubled heart. It was unlike anything that overcame him, like a paper swan that crumbled under water, or rot peeling off something unsavory. Snape had been devolved ever since Lily chose Talena. She stares back, equally unfathomed, the air stills around the two of them—one movement, a flinch, a crinkle of clothing, and the strong apathy dissolves. The scent of flowers edged his dirty fingernails, he saw the lily's petals were now molten and withered, dried up like old blood and stalked dead and crumbled in the heart of her palm.Dead.
[The lily is still fresh, even if it is dead. Snape had just killed it.]
A crude smile brims beneath her youthful eyes.The flower is red like a wound on her body that bleeds in tandem with the rhythm of her heart.Snape is silent for a while, soaking in this feeling, the feeling of bleak satisfaction. He’s stretched beyond endurance in her palm, clinging tightly to her and the sight of her. He would move but suddenly the ground feels like one big landmine, his chest has a sudden aching feeling, a crippled instinct. Fear. No, Snape can’t be scared, he needs to be brave. For Lily.“Thank you.”Talena’s lips move in such a graceful manner, parting like the wings of a butterfly. Still, only a whisper ebbs out, hushed and low, pushed out from the tip of her tongue. A curt but clearly honest response, it’s jutting, like a stab to his heart.A crow doesn’t dare to tread into the territory of a snake, perhaps a larger, more powerful snake would—perhaps that’s what Snape could be, because he’s walking straight into death, welcoming the cold rather than running from it.Talena’s lids left space between themselves, and the dense nebulas that were her eyes felt like a slap across Snape’s face. The world whisked away and brushed through their hair, and for a moment, all was serene.