Colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.
—Edvard Munch
***
She used to reduce him to just three colors: the pompous platinum of his hair, the aloof grey of his eyes, the serpentine green of his House.
Relearning him as a man, she comes to know his other shades.
He’s not just a blonde, she learns over time. Nearness teaches her about the silver and copper, goldenrod and bronze threaded subtly, almost imperceptibly, throughout the blonde.
On the rare occasions he returns prickly and unshaven from a mission, she looks for one of her favorite souvenirs: a ghost of auburn in his beard.
The eyes that meet her at the door are mostly silver, but the irises shimmer with ornaments: outer rings of emerald, flecks of hazel. Above them arch eyebrows that are dark blonde, almost brown, like the double eyelashes that sharpen his stare.
He gazes wryly at her from a face that has outgrown its old pallor. In adulthood it has freshened into a fairly healthy peach color, though still prone to dark circles under the eyes. As well as bruises of every color when he comes back injured, whether from dueling or from physical combat.
The lips that greet her with affectionate sarcasm are a light plum. Darker when he bites down on them with concentration — or desire.
His clothing keeps its frost. Under his Auror robes, he wears mostly grey or charcoal trousers with his beloved black dragon-hide brogue oxfords. The shirts she unbuttons are slate or ultramarine, the ties he loosens obsidian or dark green. The green ones often fall in S shapes as he casts them aside.
The Sectumsempra scars across his torso are white and raised, reminding her of thin, snowy ridges seen from the clouds. Crisscrossing them, his chest hair — surprisingly dark, like his brows and lashes. Dark and wild — a careless impasto brushed across his pectorals, his wine-colored nipples, the column of his taut stomach.
As she pushes him onto the bed, the same dark hair rises in dense, maddening tufts under his arms as he relaxes his hands behind his head. His hips arch up slightly, showing off the hair that spirals below his navel and into his waistband.
As she kisses her way from his underarm up his bicep, along the blue veins of his forearm, she sees more white tracery: the shadow of the now-removed Dark Mark, a yearlong process involving the most ancient and intricate erasure spells.
Over the pale scar tissue, in deep purple ink, he’s tattoed the zodiac sign of his June birthday — Gemini. It symbolizes rebirth, he’s said, and the desire he’s always felt to find his other half.
The deep blush on his neck and face is the last color she sees before kissing brings an end to thinking, and she makes him hers.