Four Seasons (Winter) 2/4 Title: Four Seasons (Winter) Author: abrae Word Count: 170 Rating: PG-13 Characters: Snape/Harry Warning(s): EWE, 8th Year Summary: Wintertime musings
While the rest of the world gathers to bask in the first real Yuletide peace some have ever known, Harry wraps his solitude around him like a shroud and drifts into the woods. Neither overlooked nor forgotten, he chooses his exile, the soft, silencing cushion of snow a padded room from which he sometimes thinks he may never emerge. He is drawn to the trees, stark against the snow, their fine veins bleeding black into a gray sky. They seem dead - worn, withered, diminished by the cutting wind - yet he finds in them a nascent life that tethers him to the world. He strokes and brushes and breathes over ice-encased branches, coaxing small slivers of green from dark buds, and his mind wanders to another stark, still figure, black and immutable. So worn, so used and diminished, cloaked in icy disdain, solitary and shrouded; and Harry wonders - not for the first time - what he would find, were he to stroke and brush and breathe warm life over alabaster skin.