A Wonderful Life

A Wonderful Life

His mind was whirling--controlled and confined, but still, whirling. He gripped the boy on the shoulder and forced him to run faster, faster, faster...

In that moment, he hated every particle of himself. He hated his mind, his past, his feelings, his lack of feelings, and every word that had ever come out of his mouth. If he could have killed himself then, he would have done it, and done it with relief. And, whatever his motives had been, whatever the prearrangements, whatever was going through his mind, he knew full well that the Ministry would have no compunctions with killing him on sight. He knew that, if he was ever captured, that he would be a dead man. It was simple, and he had accepted this months earlier.

He had known that, if he did kill Albus Dumbledore, whatever excuses he had to offer would not cancel or even delay his trial, if it was even seen fit to have a trial. It did not matter which side he claimed to be on, he would either be dead or soulless within, at most, two months of capture.

Fair? Yes. He had, after all, killed one of the most important members of the fight against Lord Voldemort.

Severus had accepted this and its consequences long before the final moment on the top of that tower, and he would feel no hatred against those that killed or captured him. Perversely, morbidly, he wanted to be captured just then, he wanted to die. Lord Voldemort's man or not, he had still murdered someone who had been a friend, savior, and guardian to him through sixteen long years. It was sick, sick, he told himself, that he had just sent the man to his doom who had protected him ceaselessly from every sabotaging, piercing, hateful eye trained on him since he had begun work at Hogwarts.

In a sickening twist of fate, he thought grimly, the death of that same man was sending those same eyes towards him again, intensified by thousands.

His insides were churning in a violent manner he had been unaccustomed to since he became an adult; it was as though they had been poured into a jar and shaken up by a malicious dragon before being chewed to bits. He told himself sternly that it was the pace at which he was running, but, honestly, he knew better.

It was guilt, mostly. Guilt for listening to part of the prophecy, for doing all he had done for Lord Voldemort and Dumbledore over the years...guilt for being involved in everything in the first place, for daring to interfere with everything that just needed a tip of the scale to sink downwards in a slow but steady fall. In his temporarily crazed, guilt-wracked mentality, he was regretting his own birth.

He swore silently as Draco almost fell flat on his face, and roughly pulled him up by the shoulder and pushed him onwards again, faster, faster...hatefully, Draco shoved his hand away, but he didn't care then, he didn't care, he didn't care--he had just killed one of the few people that he had been comparatively close to in sixteen years, and he wanted to be so violently sick that he would throw up every single one of his vital organs.

Later, he would throw himself down on a hard mattress and realize why, exactly, this particular image would not let him lie still for more than five seconds; he would hate himself even more for not staying, buried, in his potion-making, and he would hurl his fist at an unyielding stone wall, madly thinking that he was facing Fate. He would, masochistically, take a macabre sort of pleasure in feeling two of his broken fingers spill blood onto the floor, and he would pull himself together and carefully Obliviate himself for the second time in his life. And he would wake up the next morning, horribly shocked to find that the memory had somehow buried itself so deeply into his mind that magic was powerless to erase it.

But, for now, the imagined picture of a terrified woman with long, red hair, twisting inhumanly to hide her baby from a force of green light, was haunting him unexpectedly. It was imagined, because he had never actually seen her die, but worse, because he could envision far more than had really happened. And it was unexpectedly ripping him apart inside, because he had started to imagine what would have never been if he had not been born.

Now he was the one to stumble and the one to feel horribly ashamed, because Draco was staring at him with smug astonishment. He picked himself up quickly and nodded jerkily towards wherever they were going, madly hating himself for being such a clumsy idiot. And they kept running, running...faster, faster, always faster--breath choking itself in their sides and legs weighing themselves down with what felt like iron balls on a chain...hair everywhere; in mouths, in eyes, streaking out behind them...and the lovely, lovely picture of his dying lady stamped irreversibly across his eyes. His madly, hatefully blazing eyes, which were burning with spite and revulsion for himself alone.

The only consequences that he had ever wanted to kill himself over, he thought harshly, were those that he had never dreamed possible. If he had known that his Obliviated mental picture of the night Lily Potter died would streak back to bury itself into his brain again, he might well have allowed himself to be in the middle of a freak accident in his study.

He would never again have even half a minute during which his guilt would not drive him to inflict pain on whatever he could, be it himself or those around him. As long as he was alive, the red-haired girl would haunt him in the most unromantic ways possible, and he would never allow himself to even think the words "I couldn't help it". That phrase had kept him halfway sane through the years, as had the Obliviated fantasy, but now, the latter was never to leave again, as opposed to his reason.

In that one wild flight, he hated himself more than anyone had and would ever hate him, and he hated himself for not being willing to leave the boy alone. Otherwise, in his current senseless state of mind, he might have killed himself directly, and ended the bottomless pit of guilt and hate that would control his life from then onwards.

Maybe, if he had had the chance for suicide, it would have been better that way. Maybe things would have actually gone well for the rest of the world, or better, at least. He would not have the chance to quail from suicide when he came to his senses, and he would not feel, for the rest of his life, as though he and everyone else would have been better off if he had never been born.

There was no one, truthfully, whose life had been changed for the better because of him, and many, many that had changed for the worse. There was no angel to show him how much better off he would be alive than dead, and there was no one on the entire face of the earth that cared enough to beg some unknown deity to help him. He was completely and utterly alone, and drowning in guilt as surely and fatally as his father had drowned in a lake when Severus was eighteen.

No--not quite alone. Never alone, never, from this point onwards. The fantasy of the dying woman had no intention of letting him live any semblance of a peaceful life; she was ruthless, unconquerable, and dead, dying, twisting, screaming, begging, pleading...pleading with Lord Voldemort, but more particularly with him.

Every time she fell, and every time he heard the imagined crack of her skull against the imagined hardwood floor, he was left horrified with the thought that she had been pleading with him, and that he had unmercifully sent her to her death. The Dark Lord had killed her outright, but the one person that could have shown her mercy was still alive sixteen years later and torturing himself with the imagined memory of her murder.

He stumbled again, and flew ungracefully onto his face. Too stunned to pick himself up immediately, he stared unseeingly into the darkness ahead, until Draco dragged him back onto his feet.

He could not stop running, and he could not stop living, because of the boy next to him. There was always something that kept him alive, he thought bleakly, although he believed unswervingly that that particular twist of Fate was well-deserved.