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Alone in the darkness of his usurped Headmaster Office, Severus Snape was looking at the door with a rare expression on his face. Stunned.
Pain was radiating from the bitter lines at the corner of his mouth, a strange sort of transparency that never showed itself in public.
Why was this particular instance of unpleasantness getting to him that much?
Minerva McGonagall had just slammed the heavy door of his office in his metaphorical face, nearly caricatural in all her Gryffindor rightful anger. Snape stayed frozen on the spot despite the passing of time, submerged by a wave of forbidden emotions.
It took him several minutes to begin to move, suddenly gulping for air as if he was just out of a bout of apnea. Once his breathing had settled a little, he slowly gripped his head with both his hands, letting it fall in defeat. That’s when he felt his whole body starting to shake, slowly becoming the unwilling puppet of eerily silent sobs that were taking his breath away again. It was as if their silence, their resistance to the act of getting out of him, were making them even more deep, even more painful and brutal on his body and soul.
He sighed. It was wrecking him, destroying what was left of his strength... and yet, he knew it used to make him happy in the past. He was willing to admit that he had enjoyed it a great lot even. It was the shape of his spirit, his own distorted Sacred Fire.
Being mean.
Being nasty.
Being feared.
It had been his bitter personal joy in a sea of disappointments and he had treasured that power with all his impressive potential for devotion; and he was still doing it through the darkness he now lived in, like a corpse that could not let go of the thing it had been clinging to when it was still alive.
Since his looks were so insulting to the world, since he never could entirely conceal that sick air about him, sallow face and greasy hair as his only ambassadors, since he was born ugly and knowing it in short, he made the early choice of using hatred as a reflective weapon instead of accepting the role of a passive target, not willing to accept all the daggers thrown at him because of his unfortunate existence. He always fought back.
His ugliness, inside and out, had always inspired, at best, contempt and indifference, at worst hatred. He had had to take more than his lot of indifference, thank you very much. He would choose hatred every fucking day. He was a nasty piece of work after all – everyone agreed on that, himself included.
Indifference was a slithery thing, cold and slippery, a giant eraser that made you less than a louse, an insignificant parasite. Severus Snape would never choose to go quietly in cold indifference when there were the burning fires of hatred available instead. Hatred could burn you, consume you, make you scream in a whirlwind of pain and bitterness, but indifference made you disappear into nothingness, like you weren’t even there in the first place. He would never make the world happy by disappearing in silence – it was not his style at all: he had always been a screamer, after all.
The burning pyre of hatred would always outshine the freezing echoes of contemptible indifference.
In addition to his natural inclinations, he had to admit to himself that hatred was also the only thing that remained. It was keeping him somewhat alive at this point, making him into a grotesque scarecrow made of coffee and bitterness. He was using hatred like a muggle car used petrol: to keep moving forwards. It was the only living light in an otherwise automatic life. The only distinctive proof of his humanity. He owned hatred a lot and so did the Wizarding World.
Those were the reasons why he was currently in an uncharacteristic panic. Was he finally reaching his limits, the edges of his – previously thought infinite – hatred? He had believed it to be bottomless, and his whole carefully constructed identity was crumbling around the discovery that maybe he had been very wrong about that. Was he who he thought he was? Was his intrinsic fear of indifference responsible for him having somewhat lost himself somewhere along the way?
It was a hard bout of questions, assailing him from all fronts and coming from deep inside; and all of that because of a stupid fight about Christmas with Minerva McGonagall of all things.
The spy was used to being crushed between opposite forces. He lived between acute bitterness and intense love, between arrogance and loyalty, between deep burns and freezing Hells, always helplessly pinned on the walls of excess.
McGonagall was asking for Christmas. He hated Christmas with all of his very being. Always had. It was the hypocrisy of it all that was unbearable to him, even as a child he could feel the sharpness of it pierce his heart.
However, since he didn’t like to lie to himself, he was also acutely aware that all his contempt for the little holiday stemmed from intense jealousy on his part. Oh, how he envied the happiness, the joy, the memories of happier, simpler times – all the pretty shiny things decorating the whole mess in the minds of everyone but him. All the meaning that time of the year carried around for them all... and the fact that it meant absolutely nothing to him... It was too painful. He knew the exact, nearly trivial, reason why Christmas had always left behind such a sour taste in his mouth: it was, and always would be, just another day in his personal calendar. Indifference, his absolute nemesis.
Christmas set him apart, again; and he would forever make the harmless holiday pay for adding another pain on his personal mountain of them.
He shouldn’t feel that guilty about a decision that was not even his, and yet… His two masters were even in agreement for once, both of them instructing him to skip the merry celebration this year, and do without. Of course, their reasonings were different, but still, how ironic was it that he was choosing this instance to feel conflicted about what he had to do, when everything was easy to reconcile for once.
The Dark Lord wanted the students to pay for their little rebellions at the school – Snape could not disagree this time as it was a pain in his side too. And Dumbledore, his insufferable painting that is, was deadly set on protecting his spy’s cover at all costs, having decided that Christmas was definitely not worth it.
He was used to the feeling of being crushed between opposite orders, by opposite sides, rendered as thin as his conscience by the deadly pull of making differences look the same. Caught between two deadly fires, two madmen: a deadly psychopath and a genius manipulator; every day he survived his personal twisted miracle.
His life had been so far the perfect emulsion of deathly oil and nauseating sugar, everything suspended in mid-air, waiting for the little thing that would destroy the precarious balance. And now, he was losing every bit of self control, losing his footing on the very edge of a precipice: all to save the stupid tinsels and carols and decorated trees, when both his masters were pulling his strings in the same direction for the first time? Something was definitely wrong with him. Why was the idea of being the thief that took Christmas away so unbearable to him? How could this be when he already was the murderer, the traitor, the despicable Death Eater in their eyes?
It was irrational. He loathed irrationality, everything that didn’t follow his carefully sharpened logic, the cold machinery of reason. Worse, he couldn’t allow himself this sudden uncontrollable analysis of his own emotions, he couldn’t even admit to their existence in the first place: it was dangerous. He was the spy-robot after all, a deadly machine, a deadly tool, something in which his crushed-humanity couldn’t shake him hard enough to endanger his only purpose. No human that was whole could accomplish what he was set to do, none; it was too terrifying, too much pressure, too thankless.
Severus Snape had just said no to Christmas at Hogwarts, denying someone he didn’t even know he cared about and he was now watching his armour crack, powerless and terrified, slowly falling apart; all for a stupid day about presents and roast turkey.
He agreed to be a traitor in their eyes. He agreed to be a murderer, the most despicable thing. He had accepted the sickening task of ending the life of the only human being who had offered him a second chance, who gave him a new purpose, something to do with his tainted life, a way to redemption, at least in part, with all the meaning he was able to put into it – not that it made any difference. He was willingly embodying the killer of all hopes, the destroyer of light, the epitome of ingratitude: trading his legacy against a little bit of usefulness in a rightful fight. All of that for her, the only one of his victims he could never forgive himself for, to pay for the cruel absence of the only warm smile that had ever been sent his way, the absence he was unbearably responsible for. But also for a bit more, for what she believed in before he came around and ruined everything; and for Dumbledore too, for the old man and his mad idea that their world was worth saving.
And suddenly, in light of all of that, he just couldn’t kill Christmas. That ridiculous holiday that held no meaning for him, that he didn’t even like, it was forcing introspection on him at the most dangerous time and it was going to ruin everything! How could he put the few above the many when it went against everything they were trying to accomplish?
Or maybe it was her, his colleague’s hatred, her disgust, her scorn against him just a moment before, that was gnawing at him, at the walls of his carefully crafted mind-prison? Maybe it was Minerva McGonagall's judgement and condemnation that was destroying him; like a castle that stood fiercely against all sorts of terrible assaults and finally crumbles under an unexpected windy day, the most ridiculous final straw.
Minerva McGonagall, who had been able to trust him on the word of a dear friend, who he admired deeply for her loyalty, her bravery, her integrity... especially when he was wearing masks as others breathed, never true to anything entirely. The woman whose friendship he coveted without ever being aware of it, the embodiment of the only sense of family he ever had: Hogwarts itself.
Her approbation had been like a warm blanket in his otherwise very cold existence; her contempt was killing him.
Contempt from the likes of Potter, he could live with. He had grown up with the heavy contempt of a Potter on his shoulders, it was nothing new. But from Minerva, it was unexpectedly painful, it was piercing his defenses with a sharp poisonous tip; it was a slow, horrible death.
He grimaced suddenly, becoming aware of how petty and self-centered he was being right now: killing Christmas, taking it away from all the not-so-innocents-anymore children in his charge meant nothing to him. His restlessness was at a much more egotistical level – that was so very him, wasn’t it? Nasty and pathetic.
That realization seemed to derail the spiral that was trapping him in his own head. He straightened himself back up in his chair, his eyes shining strangely in the obscurity of the circular room. Shaking himself back into clarity, he stared at the dissipating remnants of his nightmare, erasing every emotion again, cherishing the blank empty space replacing them that he so needed to function. And then, calm once again, he turned the light back on in the entire room, lighting all the candles up at once with a wordless spell. Light over darkness; it was his only usefulness after all. Back to work.
He had a report to make now. He was not done playing his loyal Death Eater role. But before that, he should make sure that Longbottom’s detention was with Hagrid, not done with his secret-hero role either.
He fought for a moment against the hard knowledge that he was neither a Death Eater nor a hero. He was only the man who stole Christmas.