January 9, 1991 -- A Drabble in Honor of Severus Snape's Birthday
Feel free to place the following in whatever universe pleases you!
:-)
He'd been offered help, but he preferred to do the packing himself.
Not that he didn't trust those who'd offered, it was just easier doing it himself. He knew what he wanted to take and how he wanted it packed...and doing it alone avoided awkward questions about certain items.
Like the pair of cufflinks he was slowly turning over in his right hand. He'd forgotten he had them, indeed he'd forgotten why he had ever kept them.
Eighteen karat white gold, she'd told him. Confirmed later by the jeweler he'd brought them to. He'd loved her, but hadn't trusted her. Not that he'd thought that she'd deliberately lie...but sometimes her enthusiasm carried her away, and her hope got the better of her and clouded her judgement.
As her death later proved.
But exactly fourteen years ago this day she'd given him these cufflinks. His birthday. He'd just turned 17, but had lost his virginiity with her a few short weeks before.
Severus traced the initials on the cufflinks, and one side of his mouth twitched upwards in spite of himself.
"MM". Their private joke.
He tried not to think of the sweetness of her smell. The velvet softness of her skin. Getting lost in the jungle of her hair.
Because he could not remember that without remembering what came later.
The arguments. The bitterness. The secrets and the lies. The irreconciable break up, never to see her again.
Her death.
He wanted to throw the cufflinks on the floor and stomp on them. He wanted to melt them down to lumps that meant nothing.
Instead he shoved them in his pocket.
Anything of real importance had been packed, or boxed for shipment to Spinner's End. He turned off the lights and as he opened the door for the last time a piece of fine parchment that had been wedged in the door jam fell to the floor.
As he picked it up he recognized the carefully crafted artistic script.
"Happy Birthday, Severus."