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pandora is just as fair-skinned as narcissa and has the same platinum hair the color of crushed moondust. only pandora’s has gold traces in it when the sunrays fall upon her like apollo stumbling down from olympus, and narcissa’s remains starkly-silver, a moon with too many craters to count (the craters are all scars).
and maybe their eyes are both blue, but narcissa’s are crystalline, icy, frozen, forever hardened by the incessant burn of mother’s stone-cold touch and scorching-hot words; she had to freeze over in order to not catch fire like bella did, like andy would have if she hadn’t escaped just in time. but pandora’s eyes—narcissa loses herself in them because they’re like lakes in late spring; too many shades of warmest blue to count with a light undercurrent of sea-green.
pandora is seaglass washed to the shore—colorful and cleansed by ferocious gentleness of the ocean, her edges forever soft.
pandora brings her to the lakes where all the poets went to die, and together they watch wisteria grow one summer after the next. and each time narcissa seems herself undeserving of peace and moves to leave, pandora doesn’t allow it. whenever narcissa tries, pandora simply pulls her closer, as if narcissa is not rotten to the core, not everything that’s wrong with this world, not made of hatred and prejudice that run so deep within her family line they feel impossible to eradicate. pandora pays no mind to quiet, half-hearted protests and rambles until narcissa is intoxicated from the sound of pandora’s voice, and only then—when narcissa is struck speechless by pandora’s beauty, so similar yet so unlike narcissa’s own—does pandora lean forward and kiss her.
they’re seventeen, yet the kiss tastes of being ten and eating bowls of strawberries the summer before their first year at hogwarts. they’re seventeen, yet the kiss has the gentleness narcissa can only associate with being fourteen—pinkies linked together as they brush past each other in hogwarts’ crowded hallways. they’re seventeen, yet the kiss does not hold an ounce of war, and for the first time in years, narcissa feels like she might belong in a place that’s not full of cruelty and destruction.
to this day, narcissa still wonders whether she deserves it—one-of-a-kind peace that comes with being held by pandora, with the soft brush of pandora’s full lips against narcissa’s own, with the striking sound of pandora’s lively laughter.
narcissa knows that loves too much, feels too much, is never enough. narcissa knows that she’s jagged and broken and sharp-sharp-sharp, made of betrayal that courses through her each time she catches pandora’s lips with her own. narcissa knows that, forever broken down by the force of father’s fury, she’s everything pandora isn’t, and not in a good way.
and yet, despite or maybe because of it, pandora holds her like she could be something soft and kind and great, one day, if only she was cleansed by the tides of pandora’s poetry-filled love.