Death

Death.

I've always wondered what death would feel like. Would be a quick end to breathing, like a winter breeze freezing my heart in place? Would it be a painful submission to the encompassing darkness? Would it be a release? Would it be a curse?

I'm dying now, and it is none of those things. It is all the regrets I've ever had knocking down the doors of my mind, screaming all the things I should have done. It is all the mistakes I ever made, crying for the apologies I never said. It is all the emotions I've ever felt, swimming through my heart and all the emotions I'll never feel reminding me of the missed chances and the lost opportunities.

I have never been in love, and now, that thought is yelling at me. No one has ever loved me, and I have never loved anyone. Now I am about to die knowing that love will always be just outside my grasp.

If someone were to ask me what death feels like, I would tell them that those who say it's your life flashing before your eyes have the right idea. I don't see specific pictures or memories, but I feel it. Every feeling I've ever felt is washing over me and carrying little pieces of me away with it.

I wonder how long it will take before I am gone, every part of be torn away until there is nothing left. Knowing my murderer it will be slow and painful. I deserve nothing less for my betrayal. The floor underneath me is cool and hard, and I am thankful for this because I am burning. I try to move my hand to feel my face, knowing that the skin will be hot to touch, but find that I cannot move my arm. I'm not sure of all of what was done to me, but obviously it has taken from me the use of my limbs. I am lying here dying, vulnerable and pathetic. I should have known it would end like this, but in my mind I always saw myself fighting valiantly to the death. I called myself a realist and yet let myself imagine a glorious death. People like me are not granted glorious deaths. Those are reserved for people like James Potter or Sirius Black. Even in death they best me.

I never taught Harry Potter occulomancy. When I am dead, who will? Who will teach Potions? Who will brew the Dark Lord's potions, and who will spy for Albus? Why do I care? I will be dead. Nothing will matter then. Nothing matters anymore.

I wonder if Albus will mourn my death. Will the students hold celebrations? Or will they guiltily regret the time they wished death on me. What will Potter do? Probably think it is his doing, he is so self-absorbed. The world does not turn because of Harry Potter. Severus Snape does not die for him either.

My breathing is labored now. I can hear it heaving, trying to intake air into a body that doesn't want it anymore. I notice that someone is laughing, it is high pitched and painful. I flinch and try to register where the laugh is coming from, but everything is blurry, a bright white crowding the edges of my vision. I always thought I would die in a burst of darkness, not with light overtaking me.

"Do you regret it now Severus?" His voice is mocking and terrible, "now that you are weak and pathetic at my mercy?"

I try to fill my lungs with air and cringe at the hoarse sound of my voice, "no."

He is laughing at me. All I can hear is his terrible laugh, echoing off of the walls that I can no longer see. Bouncing back and forth between my ears. It is seeping into my heart and twisting like a knife.

I will not regret that choice. Will all my other regrets shouting at me within my mind, that is one thing I will not regret.

I can no longer feel my feet, and there is a cold numbness growing up my legs. Entangling them in a web of cold death. Death is like winter. The white light obscuring my vision bring to mind visions of the sun reflecting off of the snow. The cold climbing through my body is like the winter frost, killing everything it touches. I am unusually metaphorical when dying, it appears. Perhaps if I died more often I would have become a poet.

Rational thought is leaving me and all I can think of is the way the snow looks, decorating the trees at Hogwarts when I venture up from my dungeons and glance outside. In my mind there are no children playing in the snow outside. The snow is untouched, resplendent and cold. The picture is frozen in my mind, a beautiful promise of death.

My father was always cold. I rarely touched him, but when I did he felt like a corpse. I remember when I was very young, my mother musingly telling me that his heart was frozen in a castle of ice, and that it someday we would melt it. She died a year later. My mother was not like my father, she was spring to his winter, alive and warm.

I try to pull my mind away from these thoughts; I do not want my last thoughts to be of my parents and their less than perfect marriage.

I try to let go, to hurry on this crawling death. I do not want to wait for the light to blind me and take me away. I want to end it now.

"So quick to surrender, Severus? What waits for you in death?" His voice cuts through the glacier I am trapped within. "Were you ever a religious man? Do you believe that Heaven will save your soul now? A traitor like you?"

A traitor like me, a soul that cannot be saved. I will not be welcomed in Heaven. If such a thing even exists. I don't need salvation in death; the only thing that matters is the cold promise. The promise I can see in the frozen grounds of Hogwarts, the trees are calling to me. Hope such as I have never felt echoing in their branches.

The light is blinding, white everywhere. The cold is at my heart, constricting and freezing. Ending the beating of the organ. Endless waves of emotions run through me. I am free.