Dulcinea
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Dulcinea
He needs to say everything in a few words.
Severus repositions the knife blade between his fingers. The bedpost gleams torchlight on his sharp cheekbones. Bony knees ache from kneeling on a stripped bed.
The room is colder; Lucius’ expensive odds and ends neatly folded away in a mahogany chest and locked up like child in a colourless dream. A blonde graduate dozes lightly, his exquisite head resting on folded arms; flaxen hair fanned out as a halo.
The scent of jasmine blossoms under Lucius’ pillow is gone; the air tastes stale, infertile, unfamiliar.
Sharp teeth bite a thin bottom lip – Severus remembers this room filled with music, and the heady soft edges of wine. He can picture velvet scarves: silver and green and some dark shade of violet-blue for which there was no name tied across Lucius’ bedposts in crisscross patterns. Lucius always surrounded himself with colour, as though its vividness would seep into his pale marble skin and snow-white hair and give him a reason to keep his eyes open another day.
Severus recalls Lucius’ constant exhaustion: during classes, at lunch, after they made love slowly on Saturday afternoons in the bright sun. He was always asleep, closing himself off from the world with a curtain of blonde eyelashes. Such a sickly boy; his weak heart will give out in a few years if they can’t find a cure.
The inside of Severus’ mouth tastes sterile.
But dirty, his hands felt so dirty after the first time. A bruise on his knuckles screams testament to the violence of a love that could make you see a heart where there was none.
Four carved words, perfectly simple, engraved into virgin wood like a kiss upon his clavicle the night Lucius had told him God was dead.
~There is no Dulcinea.~
Severus shuts the door quietly on his way out.