Things Unacknowledged

I can´t believe you never noticed.

How we look, for starters. Haven´t you ever noticed just how alike we look? Your nose is smaller than mine, but only slightly. Your hair, your chin, your lips, the color of your eyes, the firm, patrician haughtiness of your features--they are all almost exactly like mine.

I think of the first time I stood but a few feet from you and looked you up and down. We were passing by in the hall. You scowled and tried to avoid my gaze. I knew even then that you hated me. But I couldn´t resist measuring you. For a moment, you stood straight up and looked directly into my eyes--and I discovered, you were exactly my height.

In build you were always sturdier. But that may have been due to nurture, not nature. You did have a solid family and every need provided for you, after all, while my mother and I had to struggle to get by and, often, subsist on very little food. I remember you were said to have great physical strength. Well--for my thinness, so do I.

I never had a father. Correct that--I did have a father. But not in the sense of always being there, offering a warm and stable presence. No. But you did.

Did you ever think about that?

Did you ever realize just how blessed you were?

My mother, Odile Snape. Yes, I have my mother´s surname. Your mother, Hélène Jonquière. Your father, Forrester Black. He loved them both at the same time. He married your mother. He did not marry mine.

Was it because your mother was blonde and mine was brunette? Was it because your mother was French, which in terms of stereotypical sensuality beat my Norman-English mother hands down? It couldn´t have been the purity of wizard blood, money, or family prestige, since our mothers were about equal in those respects. No--it was because your mother was pliant, and mine wasn´t. An old story. Forrester Black wanted a wife who was easy to get along with, not one who would challenge him.

But down to the wire, he had a hard time choosing. Soothing relaxation, or invigorating stimulation? You know what he eventually opted for, but it was a more difficult decision than I´d thought. Unfortunately both women turned up with child at the same time. That made it easier for him to cement his decision. It was a matter of which woman was more likely to be better at building a family. How odd that he continued to love her even though she was unable to bear any more children. You would think that, being so proud of his masculinity, he would be affronted by an unforthcoming wife.

So Black sent my mother a rather unceremonious letter letting her know where his affections lay, and her life of perdition began. She was disinherited by her family for bearing a child out of wedlock. She was forced to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet for herself and I. I remember all too well the particularly bleak time when she had to resort to prostitution. I was seven years old, and at that time I had eaten nothing but bread and cabbage for a month. It was frightening to see all those strange men paraded in and out of our home, and doubly so on an empty stomach.

You never had to deal with that. A warm house, plenty of good food, the constant presence of a loving mother and father. Many times I watched you, though you never saw me. The confidence in your walk. The particular look of your smile suggesting that you had what really mattered, so nothing could ever get you down.

I´ve never been able to smile like that.

My mother and I? We no longer existed. Out of sight, out of mind, and be sure to bury the remains.

We didn´t see each other face to face until we started at Hogwarts. It was the first time you knew of me. But I knew of you. I knew everything about you, your family, your home and your friends. I studied you as if you were a laborious scientific experiment. I will go so far as to say I was obsessed with you. I suspect there were letters between my mother and your father, but I never found any. He probably destroyed them as soon as he broke it off with my mother. After all, as an aspiring member of the Ministry, he had a happy family image to uphold. A pliant wife does have that advantage.

I must admit to being surprised when I found you hated me. After all--how could you fail to notice the likeness of our appearances? But you just hated me, I found, because I was mean and was infatuated with the Dark Arts, not because I might have some connection to you. It was just one of those things your never noticed, or chose not to acknowledge. I´m starting to believe it´s the latter. You´re too smart to let something like this get past you.

I´ll bet your father would have noticed our resemblance. What I wouldn´t give to have seen the expression on his face when he discovered a Snape was going to Hogwarts... and putting two and two together, the child of Odile Snape... the only one who´d be of the age to be starting wizarding school.

You were born October 22. I was born October 27, a mere five days after you. I was a couple of weeks premature at that. If it had been just five more days sooner... you would have had a twin. Would that give you pause?

I kept an old picture of your father for a long time. You have his bushy eyebrows, tanner skin, and cleft in your chin. You look just enough like him, and unlike me, to make an official claim to being Forrester Black´s only son.

But I´ll get off the subject of looks for a minute. It´s in the intangibles where we´re truly uncannily alike. Despite your overall joyful demeanor and my sour one, we possess the same fine mind with just the right balance between the analytical and intuitive, the same fascination with Muggle technology, the same obsessive nature, the same propensity for dry humor. Most of all, though, we have in common a definite lust for life, an intensity that in a way gives us an edge over everyone else. If you stop to think about it, Gryffindor and Slytherin are really flip sides of each other. The both have that intensity. The other two Hogwarts Houses are relatively non-edgy.

We are therefore flip sides of each other as well. The perfect representatives of our respective Houses, if you will. If you had lived my life, you´d probably be just as bitter as me. And if I´d been in your shoes, I would likely have been as joyful as you. Everybody, even Dumbledore, thought it was James Potter I hated the most--but, no, it was you. For having what I never had. For being what I couldn´t be. For reminding me of what I longed to be, and could have been if I´d been on the right side of a certain man´s affections. Potter was an easier target, being milder-mannered and, of course, a Quidditch Cup-winner. Potter, naturally, had the same supportive upbringing as you. If not for my malnourished childhood, I may have been an excellent, rather than a moderately good, Quidditch player. That´s a technicality, but it´s symbolic.

Yes, I was jealous of him. But never to the extent that I was jealous of you. It was in fact that jealousy that led me to become fascinated with the Dark Arts. Studying the Dark Arts was my solace. It gave me a purpose, filled me full of an energy I´d never had before. I originally did it with revenge over your father in mind. Still, I fence-sat when the subject of joining the Death Eaters came up. But when your prank caused me no end of humiliation, I pitched into the ranks full force, partly to save face, partly to soothe my frustrations, and partly to have greater license to curse your father.

Even our names sound very much like each other. Sirius and Severus, the light and the dark. The light side and the dark side of Forrester Black, come to think of it. You were the side he indulged in; I was the side he preferred to sweep under the carpet. Mother was still pregnant when he left her, so he never saw what I looked like--and I imagine it would kill him with shock, were he not already dead.

What is love, anyway, but a game of whims? Whereupon your lover can cease to find you lovable at any second, and just disappear? All it took was your father´s whim to make a difference in the lives of two boys. It could just as easily have been you shamed, impoverished and embittered. Demoralized.

Wait a minute. It was you. For twelve years you experienced the anguish that can only come from being punished for something you did not do. And that, incidentally, was the result of an emotional turn as well--your former friend just decided one day, he wasn´t going to take being your second fiddle anymore. I believe you now, when you say you were innocent. But so was I, and still I suffered too.

I did come to terms with this after a while. Things did turn out better for my mother and I. She toiled her way up into respectability, and eventually married. As for me--yes, I was jealous of your popularity at first, but I earned the respect of most of my fellow Slytherins, applied myself rigorously to my studies, working my way up to prefect; and I even had a few girlfriends.

But the bitterness remained. Your parents are both dead--killed by Death Eaters, but not by me. How angry I was that it had not been me. I never got the chance to exercise my revenge. But by then I had already made my decision not to work for Voldemort anymore.

I have come a long way since both my poverty and my criminality. I teach one of my favorite subjects, and live in a level of comfort unimaginable when I was a child. And I have basically learned to stop taking personally what others think of me. However, even now I am not immune to prejudices attached to former Death Eaters. If I left Hogwarts I´d probably never be hired anywhere else. My stepfather frowns on anyone who ever even flirted with the idea of joining the Death Eaters, so a warm and close relationship is impossible. However, he treats my mother well, and I am glad for that.

So in a sense, your father still leaves an indelible stain on me. I still live a limited life... somewhat less so, but limited nonetheless. At heart I abhor limits. I demand to live life to its absolute fullest. I deeply appreciate that quality. And you have it in spades.

When I cornered you in the Shrieking Shack, I was only thinking of revenge. Since I couldn´t have it on your father, I was quite happy to get it on you. Your resiliency, your resourcefulness in escaping from Azkaban was insulting to me--yet another quality I shared that you made better on. Putting you back in Azkaban would have meant glory for me, something you´d always attracted effortlessly. Less cynical souls than I have been angered and frustrated by the loss of glory.

I didn´t believe it at the time but now I know that sending you back to Azkaban would have been a terrible mistake.

We shook hands on Dumbledore´s orders. We let go quickly, but long enough for me to glance down at your hand and see how much it resembled mine. I can see you´re still not ready to let go of your enmity. If you knew the half of the entire story, you´d see how foolish you are. But... I suppose I am foolish too, for I can´t forgive yet either.

Maybe one of these days I´ll be able to love you like the brother you are. Until then I´ll have to overcome this hatred gradually, even as I put my life in jeopardy for our efforts against Voldemort. It´s not easy undoing a lifetime of bitterness.

Maybe you will discover that it is not you whom I hate at all, but your father--our father--and that will comfort you.