A Little Birthday Pressie for the Muse

[teddy_radiator]

A little dark drabble for the Muse on his birthday. . I do not own these characters. They belong to JK Rowling, who allowed my sole reason for reading Harry Potter to bleed to death on the floor of the Shrieking Shack. I'm helping to build a better world.


I held him in my arms as he wept like a motherless child… “Oh, Gods, I wish I was dead!” he choked, grief twisting his heart, until I could feel it falter, and beat wildly, as if to catch up with his blinding, rending emotions.

“Shh, love,” I pleaded uselessly, my tears running unchecked. His desolation was a live animal that tore at his skin, left the slick, sour taste of reckoning in his mouth, gripping him like a palsy that threatened to rip his very soul into so many pieces they would never be found again.

I tried to comfort him, even as I realised that this was a man’s grief, a deep, abiding, inconsolable grief, and a mere mortal woman could never assuage it. Especially this man’s grief, and especially someone as unimportant in his life as me. She could have comforted him, I thought, bitterly. If she had loved him as much as I do, she would have been able to comfort him.

Unable to stop myself, I tried to placate him. “Please, Severus, he made you do this – “

Strong hand gripped me like a vice, clinging to me for support, punishing me for my sympathy. “I didn’t have to obey him! I looked him in the eye and he pleaded for his death, and I gave it to him!

“He made me! He made me say the words that killed him; that have destroyed me!” His grief turned to howling rage and his eyes became mad with terror. “You can’t kill a man with words. You have to kill him with your anger, your rage, your hatred – “

He howled to the heavens, “I hated you, old man! Do you hear me! I hated you for making me do this!”

I put my hands over his mouth and pulled his rapidly failing body to mine. “No you didn’t hate him!”

“I did! I did!” He raged, clinging to me. “I hated him!”

His fury was a terrible, childish, mindless thing to behold. “I hated him for making me do this! Gods, I hated him!”

He slumped suddenly in my arms, and whimpered, his rage spent and useless. “I loved him.”

Happy Birthday, Severus. Why you captured my heart, I'll never know.

Comments

[teddyradiator.livejournal.com]

I just have such searing emotions when I write him. It is a dragging of my heart. I have known self-loathing and self-recrimination. I have done things so horrible and betrayed good friends and found redemption in their forgiveness. I have been graced beyond what I deserved, and I learned hard lessons about wanting someone I could never have and the destruction it caused. I think I just understand the character, because, in many ways, we've walked a common path.