[That stops him in his tracks, leaving him feeling something he likes far less than the unnamable sensations that stir when she's too near: uncertainty. No, not about their relationship, but about her. He knows what she is, of course, but there are times when he pretends to forget. There are times when her eyes are those of a young woman and her smile is untroubled, and he can pretend that there's nothing remarkable about her at all.
And then there are times like now, when her age shows in her eyes, and the reality of what she is makes him feel as if he's missed a step in the dark. It stretches out before him, a mere number on paper, but the concept so enormous he can only barely process it. She is a road stretching into an incomprehensible distance in either direction, and Severus is the mark of just one more mile.
When he has grown old and died, she will still be exactly as she is now, exactly as she was hundreds of years ago. Thousands, perhaps. He has never screwed up the nerve to ask.
When she looks at him the way she does now, he can feel the weight of all those years, and he understands that there are things more important on that road than mile markers.
The fight goes out of him, leaving only the wound of her absence, and even that manages to fade with her words. There's the balm.
With a look that is somehow an intersection of capitulation, regret, and ever-present irritation, he closes the distance, though the chair's back remains between them just in case he needs a shield. The backs of his fingers brush her cheek as though he can coax to the surface the fiction of a young woman, unimportant, whose only real obligations to the world are small enough to include him.]
I doubt I would ask.
[It would have been a more romantic admission if he didn't sound so consternated, so tired, so self-deprecating. But the fondness is there, to be read between the lines.]
no subject
And then there are times like now, when her age shows in her eyes, and the reality of what she is makes him feel as if he's missed a step in the dark. It stretches out before him, a mere number on paper, but the concept so enormous he can only barely process it. She is a road stretching into an incomprehensible distance in either direction, and Severus is the mark of just one more mile.
When he has grown old and died, she will still be exactly as she is now, exactly as she was hundreds of years ago. Thousands, perhaps. He has never screwed up the nerve to ask.
When she looks at him the way she does now, he can feel the weight of all those years, and he understands that there are things more important on that road than mile markers.
The fight goes out of him, leaving only the wound of her absence, and even that manages to fade with her words. There's the balm.
With a look that is somehow an intersection of capitulation, regret, and ever-present irritation, he closes the distance, though the chair's back remains between them just in case he needs a shield. The backs of his fingers brush her cheek as though he can coax to the surface the fiction of a young woman, unimportant, whose only real obligations to the world are small enough to include him.]
I doubt I would ask.
[It would have been a more romantic admission if he didn't sound so consternated, so tired, so self-deprecating. But the fondness is there, to be read between the lines.]