After the Curse

After the Curse

The door swung shut behind Harry Potter as he sprinted to fetch his bookbag, leaving Severus Snape alone in the sodden bathroom where Potter and Malfoy had just been fighting. The place was a mess. Hit by a hex, a cistern had broken from the wall, flooding the floor with water red-tinged with blood that had spurted from Malfoy's chest after he was hit by Potter's Sectumsempra curse. Snape's boots squelched unpleasantly in the gory puddles that dampened the hem of his robes. Framed by the contrast of his inky hair, his face looked more corpse-like than ever, bleached into pallid relief by the glare of the overhead light.

Snape leaned against the wall and found, without warning, that he was sliding to the floor to land with an undignified splat in the bloody water. Drawing up his knees, he buried his face on them, breathing hard and assailed by a rush of memory.

Sectumsempra--blood spattering from James Potter's face as the teenaged Snape pointed his wand . . . Seconds later, he'd been dangling by the ankle and exposing his underwear to what seemed like the entire wizarding world. First, however, he'd managed to get a good one in at Potter. Of course, his aim was more subtle than that of James's son--the younger Potter was anything but subtle--and Snape had known, even in the heat of anger, not to flick the wand too wildly, to cause less damage . . . Still, there had been the blood . . .

Like the blood in which he was now sitting . . . As if noticing for the first time, Snape leaped up from the cold pool with a muttered expletive, evaporating it and drying his robes with a few waves of his wand. His breathing slowed, but despite his attempt to regain command bile rose in his throat and he gagged. Stifling a desire to rush into the nearest stall and throw up, he willed his body to obey and the nausea receded, though the consequence was to leave him reeling from the irony of it all. A connoisseur of irony, Snape had to admit that, however you looked at it, his situation was a rich one.

His book--his spell--Potter had used them to cast Sectumsempra at Malfoy. He was going to have to punish Potter for using his own spell--and using it less culpably than the teenaged Snape, who had known exactly what he was doing while Potter presumably hadn't. Further irony: if Malfoy had died, so probably would Snape, because letting Draco perish in a school fight would scarcely count as living up to the Unbreakable Vow that he protect Draco from harm. Of course, the even further irony was that Snape would have welcomed death had he not realized it was an easy evasion of the penance he still had to perform to expiate the sins of that angry, insecure boy, self-styled the half-blood Prince, who had scrawled "Sectumsempra: for enemies" in the margins of his Potions book.

Reminded of the trials yet awaiting him, Snape shivered. Death would be preferable to what he'd have to endure before the Dark Lord could be vanquished. How did one regain virtue, he wondered for the thousandth time, by appearing to reject it? Because of the foolish, confused choices of that teenaged boy--choices that had led to terrible consequences--he'd been condemned to fight for good by pretending to be evil. Pretending--hell, much of what he did was, if not evil, pretty dreadful. In all honesty he couldn't claim his actions were entirely part of his (admittedly brilliant) impersonation of the secret Death Eater. Every day, acting and being bled into each other, leaving Snape afraid to examine his motives. How could he convince himself he was fighting for good when he regularly succumbed to petty tyrannies such as bullying Neville Longbottom, whose parents had been tortured into insanity by the thugs Snape had once seen fit to hang out with? How could he snipe at Lily Evans's son--Lily, who had come to his aid on that long-ago day when Potter's gang had humiliated him; Lily, who had been genuinely kind to him, and whose death he had caused by bearing news of the prophecy to Voldemort? What would Lily say if she saw the way Snape treated the child for whom she'd died? Of course, thought Snape, at least she'd be grateful for the times he'd saved the boy's skin--and, today, a bit of his soul as well, for if Snape hadn't intervened, wouldn't Potter have ended the day a killer? But that too would have been Snape's fault, thanks to the long reach of the half-blood Prince . . .

No, the only living person grateful to Snape was Dumbledore. Dumbledore, who for all his quirky quaintness, his Santa-Claus twinkle and sweet tooth, was a tough old bird with a diagnostic gaze sharper than a scalpel. Dumbledore's pale blue eyes had sliced through that mass of angers, grudges, and envy enveloping Snape's soul to see something purer beneath--that enigmatic something which enabled Snape to slog on in the cause of Light. The only living person grateful to me--pain like a white-hot needle seered the heart that students were certain Snape didn't have. If things worked out as Snape and Dumbledore feared, Dumbledore wouldn't live much longer. His last command would probably be to order Snape to witness his death without intervening, or, worse yet, to kill Dumbledore himself. Over and over Dumbledore had insisted this was the only way to keep Snape in his useful position in Voldemort's camp at this crucial point in the campaign. Yet, while he had always followed his vow to obey Dumbledore at all costs--the vow Dumbledore had exacted in allowing Snape to join their side--now Snape finally rebelled. I can't do it anymore, he'd raged one evening at their meeting place near the Forbidden Forest, you're torturing me, you can't make me do this thing, how could it possibly be right, let me die instead, damn the stupid Vow, I don't care. He had taken a perverse satisfaction in making Dumbledore lose his temper, a rare event, and tell Snape bluntly that he would do as Dumbledore asked. Secretly, Snape suspected both he and Dumbledore knew all along that Snape would again take up his burden, doing the bidding of this gentle, inexorable wizard who alone held the key to Snape's salvation--a salvation, it seemed, that could only be won through unimaginable pain and loss.

Sin, penance, salvation--in describing his life Snape could not avoid religious language. He had, after all, been brought up Catholic--the faith of his dour, abusive Muggle father, a person one would not normally associate with Christian forbearance. The faith, such as it was, was a battered heirloom carelessly tossed from one generation to another, so that as a child Snape had been packed off to catechism class from his run-down, Yorkshire mill district home. On his first day, thrown in with a bunch of equally bored working-class kids, Snape had amused himself by making the veil of the nun teaching the class sail by itself around the room. The ensuing fun was worth the beating his father gave him that evening. Still, something of that training must have stuck. Stalking the castle in his black robes like a puritanical priest, Snape searched for a glimpse of his own absolution as for the proverbial needle in the haystack.

Strange, really, for a kid from mill housing to end up nannying upper-class brats as the head of Slytherin, the Hogwarts house most associated with shameless elitism. Draco--what a child of privilege, so different from the child Snape himself had been. What would have happened, Snape suddenly wondered, if I'd let the arrogant berk die today in a pool of his own blood? I'd probably have died, too, but Draco wouldn't be around to try to kill Dumbledore. I should have let him die, he thought desperately, only to realize that had Draco died Voldemort would have found some other way of bringing about his goal--a way more dangerous in being completely unknown, beyond even the fragile control that Snape and Dumbledore were trying to exert over an increasingly uncontrollable situation. Besides, Snape thought sourly, how could I let the little twit die in the service of the evil he'd been raised to commit--an evil from which Snape had never protected him? No, Snape was hardly a shield against bigotry and moral corruption when it came to Draco. Good thing he hadn't taken an Unbreakable Vow about that. Anyway, he'd have tried to protect the boy from his follies even if he hadn't taken an Unbreakable Vow. It was all part of the job of doing good without receiving much thanks--quite the opposite, really.

Maybe that's another reason I resent Harry Potter so much, he thought. It's not just James--it's that the boy gets to be the good guy, the Chosen One, while I, the half-blood Prince, end up with the role of Judas Iscariot.

Speaking of Potter--where the hell was he? It'd had been ages since he'd left Snape to his bitter musings in this bilious, green-tiled bathroom. The boy was probably off somewhere hiding the book. Now Snape would have another task to add to the daunting pile of things he had to do in his (he felt sure of it) fast-dwindling time in the castle: he'd have to hunt for the dratted thing before some other student was corrupted by his former self. Was this what they called Karma? Wasn't there some Muggle saying--"What goes around, comes around?" Again, Snape had to appreciate the irony.

Pounding footsteps thudded to a halt outside the door. Snape just had time to plaster on the habitual daunting mask of the Professor from Hell. Professor from Hell--all too appropriate a moniker, really.

The door opened and Harry Potter stepped in, panting, mingled shame and defiance on his face as he slid the bulky bag from his shoulder and handed it to Snape.

Silently, Snape reached for it.