Series: Harry Potter
Category: Romance
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Kuja/Hilda Warning: Angst
Author's Note: Originally a gift-fic fora former friend.
Disclaimer: Final Fantasy IX belongs to Squaresoft. Be glad for that.
Archive: Abstract Reasoning.
Summary: All that we/see or seem/Is but a dream/within a dream. - - Edgar Allen Poe

Beautiful Thing

You keep telling yourself that he was just a dream.

It confuses your husband, but he never says a word, perhaps thinking that it's best this way. Such a gentle man he is, even though a little careless and clumsy at times, and you appreciate it. Still, you wonder

(what would you say if you knew why?)

but you never utter a word, shielding yourself with silence that is not gold but hardest iron, unbreakable, telling yourself it's best that way, too. And it was a dream, wasn't it, nothing real, nothing to worry your husband with, after all the suffering you have caused him already, never mind the fact that he was the one to hurt first, never mind all those times you lied down next to him and noticed that somebody had warmed his bed already and itched to strangle him, that damn traitor.

Never mind the fact that the stranger, one so pale that he must have been carved from the moon itself, was the most beautiful dream you had ever seen.

Beauty personified, that's what they once said about you, watching the dance of your golden hair upon your shoulders and the brilliant light shining in your eyes, but you always sneered at that phrase before he came, and you thought

(an angel)

while staring up into his blue, blue eyes. When he talked, his speech was as smooth as your husband's was coarse, his words like poetry, waltzing with the language, his voice like music, whispers of a piano, but you could tell that it was only delusion, for beneath the blue softness of his eyes, there was steel, there was fire, there was destruction, he was a beast behind the mask of a beauty.

If he only had been real, you would have decided to fall in love with him.

He was everything your husband never was. A day never passed by without him tainting his hands with blood, but they were always clean when he touched you (fingers dancing down your curls, following the arch of your cheek, of your breast). And when he kissed you, he was the most gentle murderer ever born.

You loved him.

(but it never happened)

26. December 2005