Requiem

Requiem

The Man Who Sold the World

Men say, quite often, that poison is a woman´s weapon, that is cheating, somehow dishonest; they say that using it is tantamount to stabbing one´s enemies (or one´s friends, or given pureblood traditions, quite often one´s family) in the back. Snape has never understood what difference it makes, if one is going to be murdered, whether one is stabbed in the front or in the back. But Snape is a Slytherin and the son of a Slytherin, and Slytherins know that efficiency is worth more in the end than even style.

Draco Malfoy is perhaps the most efficient person that Snape has ever met. All beds are alike to Draco, all weapons, all causes. Draco, too, is a Slytherin and the son of a Slytherin; he is also the most dangerous man Snape can imagine because he always does what he believes is necessary no matter what the cost. Draco will not hesitate to stab you, in the back or front, and he will not hesitate to smile at you while he bleeds to death at your feet.

Despite this, despite all his great strength, all his rage, all his power, despite his blood that is pure as polished silver for thirty generations--despite this or perhaps because of this, Draco is easy for Snape to hurt. He wears his heart like a badge of honour on his sleeve; he is after all twenty years Snape´s junior and he is fool enough to think he sees something to love in his half-brother. Snape, older and necessarily wiser, tainted by his mother´s blood, scarred by his former master and discarded by his ruthless father, knows that what Draco loves is the reflection of himself.

He sees something in Snape that is not there: he has endowed his brother with his own chiseled beauty, his own passionate loyalty. Draco is perhaps not a fool (the Malfoys do not suffer foolish children) but he sees only what he wants to see in those he loves. His father becomes a hero, if misguided; his mother is brilliant and cool but not cold or vicious; and of course Severus a martyr and not a madman. He is dangerously, frivolously, willfully blind.

It is this blindness, this belief that everything will--that everything must--come right in the end, that separated Snape and Draco most of all. Even now, while Snape sits by Draco´s bed in the hospital wing of Hogwarts, occasionally reaching out to touch his brother´s hand if he thinks no one is looking, the truth is between them like sword blade. The truth is that their world is long overdue for destruction. The truth is that Harry Potter will destroy Draco if Dumbledore commands him to. The truth is that if Draco were as interested in survival as he claims to be, he would have stayed in America.

If Lucius Malfoy taught his sons one thing, anything at all, it is that one does what one must to survive. This is a lesson that Snape learned all to well and that Draco did not learn at all. And so it is Draco, beautiful and beloved, who dances with death like a matador, and it is Snape the ugly and unwanted that stays well clear of the edge.

This close, Snape can feel Draco´s pulse, slow but regular as his own. He can feel the small sharp ache of the Dark Mark that never goes away, the throb of his never quite healed shoulder, the burn of the fresh cuts on his arms and face. He can feel Draco´s despair, so strong that it is overwhelming. Draco has always felt things too fiercely; as a child he imagined himself in love with Snape, and was constantly mooning about. He has always been melodramatic and romantic and temperamental.

Snape, himself, has always preferred women to men; he cannot quite imagine what it would be like to make love to Draco even if they did not share a bloodline. He prefers soft round warm bodies in his bed. Draco is thin and fragile with bones as delicate as a bird´s. His hipbones jut and his ribs protrude and the hollows of his collarbones are deep enough to lose oneself in. Despite all this he is beautiful, but it is the fierce wild beauty of a bird of prey. His body is a map of his past and every scar is a stop on the railway to hell.

There is nothing more difficult than divided loyalties, which Snape knows all too well. The pull of family. The pull of duty. The pull of morality, of greed, of love, friendship, life. Draco is not torn apart because he follows the path of duty with the fanaticism of a convert. No, he cannot be torn apart, but he can tear himself apart and this, it is apparent, is what he has done. Snape is sorry, momentarily, that he cannot be what his brother wants him to be, that he cannot love Draco, but at the same time he is glad. He thinks Draco must be a very difficult person to love. And Snape has his own survival to think of, after all. He goes, leaving Draco to Potter´s not-so-tender mercies.