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Snapshots by celeritas [Reviews - 16]


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Standard disclaimer applies - I don't own any of this, as much as I wish that I did. JKR owns anything you recognise, and, appropriately enough, watching the sun starting to set at the top of Durham Cathedral tower - one of the locations used in the films - was what gave me the idea for this in the first place! Enjoy.




In life, there are some things that are not meant to be kept. We can try to hold on to them, and kick and scream when they are taken from us, but at the end of the day they are still gone when we have finished the drama and the misery. Have you ever seen a really beautiful sunset? I don’t know if anywhere but the north of Britain gets these particular ones – they bathe the whole horizon in peaceful gold, like a watered-down Midas, turning everything it touches to the most amazing colour. Whenever I see one of those, and they are quite rare, as it depends on the winter sun and the cloud cover and the landscape, I always try to take a picture, to save it for ever, put it on my wall and let it drown me in its perfection.

The photographs never work. The colour balance is never right; the hills become too dark, and the stunning gold becomes too-bright white. It becomes a scene of contrast, rather than blending, and the whole thing gets lost into a sham. The same happens with the sky (again; I like to look to the sky) on a cloudy day at the coast. The sea reflects the sky until everything becomes purpled grey, almost like the whole vista before you is bruised. You can try to take the picture, try to get the angle and the contrast right, but it never turns out well. It’s always an imitation, never a representation. It can never match the memory.

And that is how I feel about Severus Snape.

I will be leaving Hogwarts in about seven months’ time. After seven years of it being my whole world, even though it was strange and new at first, and I had to work tirelessly to prove myself to it, it has become everything. Everything that I have grown up with – and I mean really grown up with, not just ‘become older’ with, but ‘become an adult’ with – is here. The books, my best friends – they belong here, and so does he. The difference is that while my friends will come too, and there will be other libraries even more impressive than this one, there will never be another one of him.

How can I even begin to tell you when I noticed him? How can you ever pinpoint the start of the butterflies and the racing pulse? It doesn’t just turn on one day. You can’t write in your diary, ‘Dear Diary, today, I developed a crush on Professor Snape’. It doesn’t work like that. Elizabeth Bennett had it right when she says that her love for Mr. Darcy started so gradually that she doesn’t even know where it began. That is the truth. It starts with a shared glance here, and a small sign of respect there, and they all add up until it eventually becomes something big, and then bigger, until it consumes your day and your being. Respite can come in sleep, but there is no guarantee. Dreamless Sleep can only take you so far.

As it happens, it began, I think, when I was wandering around the grounds without Harry and Ron. Severus never was any more courteous to me than to anyone else, so I was surprised at his solicitous manner when he asked me if I was feeling alright, and what I had done with ‘my two bodyguards’, as he called them. This is something which has always annoyed me – the assumption that spending time with my friends means that I cannot be, at heart, a solitary creature. I expressed this to him in slightly snappish terms, and he considered me for a moment before nodding and leaving me. No snide comments, no taking of house points for being out after some imaginary curfew that he himself had imposed six hours early, nothing. To be truthful, it was a little disconcerting, but it stopped me from thinking of him as a ninety-five percent bastard and made me think instead of him as an eighty-five percent bastard – the ten percent makes all the difference.

Anyway. I carried on with my wanders around the place, often going around and around the lake in quite an absent sort of way, and I found that he joined me with more and more frequency as the year went on (perhaps I should clarify – this was in my sixth year, before everything kicked off properly and while there was still relative peace in our time). Mostly, he stood far from wherever I was, keeping a careful distance, but sometimes he came to walk with me. When he did this, I was always caught between happiness and apprehension, lest I should do something to annoy him and cause him to stalk away in a flurry of robes and indignation, but I never did. When he talked to me, I replied. When he said nothing, I did likewise. It became a comfortable arrangement, known only to the two of us, and it caused him to spare me some of the worse punishments of his devising when I irked him in lessons. Once, he managed to restrain himself from taking ten points and only took five, even after I inadvertently helped Neville to spread a noxious orange goo all over the lab. I appreciated that – that helped to lower his bastard percentage from where it had been standing to approximately forty percent. I should have realised, intelligent girl that I am, that a less than fifty percent bastard rating would spell trouble for me.

I did not.

At the end of sixth year, when the world exploded and we began to fight in earnest, we all called him traitor for killing Albus Dumbledore. He did kill Professor Dumbledore. There is no question about that. However, his motive for doing so was proven sound, and his loyalty was shown beyond doubt when he did so much for Harry, the son of the man he hated, and the woman he adored. None of us ever bothered to wonder how difficult it would be for him, every single day, to see the eyes of his beloved Lily looking out of the face of his sworn enemy, James Potter. When we thought that he had died, and only then, did we realise precisely how much he had given up for us. He could have had a normal life, but he would never forgive himself for his past. We won the battle. We held the memorial. There was suddenly a gaping hole in my heart. Harry and Ron, to their credit, never tired of trying to make me smile. They could never have imagined what made me so sad – I once heard them muttering about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which almost made me laugh, until I remembered the numbers of our side who actually do suffer from it – those who never will be whole again, in any way, who sit rocking all day, and whose once-confident movements are constrained into confused shuffling and twitching, and who cry piteously in their long nights. They also paid the price of our victory.

Severus Snape was found, barely breathing and with almost no blood left in him, two months after we held that service for him, where we all eulogised about how much we had really loved him and neglected to mention the cruel treatment he had suffered at the hands of all of us. He was in a park in London, although how he had got there is still a mystery to all of us. He has never spoken of it. He was so close to death that the Muggles who found him called a priest, and had him administer last rites, before the Aurors arrived, Obliviated them, and carted him off to St. Mungo’s. He spent another month in recovery as the world got used to the idea of him being alive again. To my shame, I never went to visit him. I should have done, and I wanted to do so, but I was not sure how I would be received. Would he think that I was intruding on his privacy? Would he even want to see the stupid Know-It-All who had assumed him dead and left his body to its fate? His bastard rating dropped even further when I saw a picture of him in the Prophet. He did not snap at the photographers, who were jostling in his face for a photograph, or at the journalists who hovered around him every waking moment to catch every single word he spoke. He was sad, and it was etched on every line of his pale face, and I finally began to love him, after a year of watching him and two months of mourning him.

I alone out of the three of us have returned to Hogwarts to finish my schooling. Sometimes I wonder why I bothered, because I can never learn in the same way. There is no substitute for having to remember a hex because there is a Death Eater pointing his wand at you with the Killing Curse on his lips, and because if you don’t remember that hex, you will be one of the unbroken and yet still useless bodies on the floor. Hogwarts is emptier, now. Some families have kept their children at home, wanting to feel secure as a unit again after heavy losses. Some children are no longer with us to come back. Their names are on a memorial in the grounds, and I look at them often. I don’t like to, but I need to. Such things need remembrance. We have some new staff now, too. Some of them are parents who proved their skill under fire. Most of them are just new faces who came out of the woodwork after Voldemort (it still feels strange to say the name) was defeated. It’s strange how the world rebalances itself after a cataclysm. But Severus came back. Term started later this year because of the need to find new teachers, and because there were so many recovering staff members and students that the castle would have been almost totally devoid of humanity. But now we are back, and I am suddenly preparing for my NEWTs as if nothing ever happened. Except, of course, that Harry and Ron have gone straight to Auror training. I am without them, but I never expected anything less of them.

Severus is still teaching Potions. I can’t honestly say that I am surprised. Defence against the Dark Arts must hold some terrible memories for him, and now he spends much of his time in the dungeons, working on various healing and restorative draughts, trying to help the fractured in St. Mungo’s. At the very beginning of our year he asked for my help. He did so quietly, and he did not demand it. He asked for it. His bastard rating dropped almost through the floor, and I agreed readily. I can spend hours with him in the lab, working in near-silence, and come away feeling as if I have had the best conversation of my life. He is mellow, now. Occasionally I find myself wishing for the snappy old Potions master that I knew, but on the whole, I don’t. He seems happier, in some ways, and emptier in others. Very rarely, I am the recipient of a smile now. Those are the days when my heart is in my mouth and I have to wipe my palms on my robe, so that I don’t drop things from my slippery hands.

Last week, he asked me if I would like to have tea with him. I accepted readily, not for the sake of conversation, but for the sake of being near him for longer. I knew, when I was checking my hair desperately in the rounded reflections of the bottles, that not only did I love him, but that I was in love with him. This is problematic, but also beautiful. I will not try to stopper this feeling, nor would I ever try to brew it again. It is wholly itself, and I will not do anything to change it, or recreate it, or take it with me. The love of Severus Snape is the sunset and the sky. It is beautiful, sometimes painfully so, and unreachable. He will remain unreachable, even as I sit a foot away from him and watch him stare into his cup, looking melancholy. He is not meant to be captured and kept – I must let him go, and hope that one day he reappears, so that I may remember these moments, and then treasure the snapshot in my heart until the next time.

I will let him go.






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Snapshots by celeritas [Reviews - 16]


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