Dare Not Speak Its Name
Title: Dare Not Speak Its Name
Author: Snape's Nightie
Pairing: Unfulfilled AD/SS, mentions past AD/GG
Rating: R, adult themes.
Summary: Snape's daily presence in the castle is taking a terrible toll on Dumbledore, who thought he had learned to master such weakness. Set soon after the first fall of Voldemort.
Warnings: Dark and very angsty. I just sat down at my computer and this came pouring out. Rather worrying, actually! Hmmm, perhaps I should go an have a nice lie down.
Author's note/Disclaimer: (optional) Characters all belong to JK Rowling. I am making no profit and intend no disrespect by using them in my own situations.
I am a strong person.
Now, at least. Perhaps I wasn’t before. Before, I allowed myself to lose contact with reality, washed away on a tide of dreams and youth and love, when I was selfish and saw no further than the transient pleasure of a forbidden infatuation. I paid dearly for that brief escape from my duty.
Since then, duty has been my master, my mistress. I have tried night and day, tried so much it hurts my soul to atone for the evil I have done, by become a force for good. I cut them down, the dark ones, time and again, I save innocent lives rather than causing them to be taken, I build and nurture humanity instead of brushing the small concerns of the individual aside.
Still, I weep at nights and pound my fist against the headboard because none of my unceasing work for the right side can undo what has been done either by my hand or by because of me. My nights are tormented but no one is there to see my weakness. For I must be the strong one.
The torture I had grown accustomed to, like the familiar dull ache in my back or the creaking of my knees, until his arrival ruined everything.
His is a different strength to mine. He is like something wiry - a vine or a weed which bends under a heavy weight without breaking, buffeted by the wind but clinging on even when firmer trees have fallen. It is the sort of strength which people despise for they cannot comprehend it.
I wish I could despise him. Any emotion would be better than this, for I see his brooding darkness, his intelligence turned vicious by circumstances which, in the guiding hands of kinder people, could have made the world a better place. I feel the fire of his suppressed anger in the jerky little movements and the iron self-control the others mock, and it thrills me in ways I dare not articulate.
He is nothing like That Boy, not really. No easygoing manners designed to charm and enchant here - no infectious laughter or sparkling eyes from that pinched, haunted face. Yet I have not teetered on the brink of sanity in this way since I met That Boy, lifetimes ago. In his presence, my fallible eyes follow his skulking figure of their own accord. In his absence, my mind imagines what he can be doing at that moment, inevitably crashing through the mental barriers I’ve been shoring up to protect myself from this kind of assault, leaving me shaking with the effort of preventing the violent lustful scenes in my brain from showing on my face.
For it is lust and I would be lying if I tried to deny it. For all that I have sworn to protect him, to see him safe and fed and sheltered here in my own domain, I want to hurt him. My loathsome, animal body wants to seize him and strike him and bite his sallow skin while I claim him, to make him bleed and somehow transfer to him some of the pain his presence here causes me.
He cannot be sent away. The world needs him to be here, ready for next time, when his peculiarly flexible strength will be mine to command, for I will not allow others to use it. For the Greater Good, he must stay at my right hand, close enough to summon insanity to my door.
My fingers are under a glamour now, for it would not do to have others see the nails bitten away to nothing, the quick raw and red. I fill my belly with food that tastes of nothing. I expend all my energy on maintaining the façade of the dear old man I have never been during the daytimes then stagger hopeless and spent into the solitude of a eunuch’s night.
I need him. Much more of this infuriating abstinence will kill me, but it cannot be otherwise.
I know myself of old. One taste of his thin, sneering lips and I will be undone - the world will follow soon after. Perhaps it is pure arrogance to say it, but I hold too many of the cards to walk away from the table. If I gave in to this intoxication, the rest of my world would fade away and without me there, being strong, everything would descend into chaos. Everything.
Gellert has his prison and I have mine.
Author: Snape's Nightie
Pairing: Unfulfilled AD/SS, mentions past AD/GG
Rating: R, adult themes.
Summary: Snape's daily presence in the castle is taking a terrible toll on Dumbledore, who thought he had learned to master such weakness. Set soon after the first fall of Voldemort.
Warnings: Dark and very angsty. I just sat down at my computer and this came pouring out. Rather worrying, actually! Hmmm, perhaps I should go an have a nice lie down.
Author's note/Disclaimer: (optional) Characters all belong to JK Rowling. I am making no profit and intend no disrespect by using them in my own situations.
I am a strong person.
Now, at least. Perhaps I wasn’t before. Before, I allowed myself to lose contact with reality, washed away on a tide of dreams and youth and love, when I was selfish and saw no further than the transient pleasure of a forbidden infatuation. I paid dearly for that brief escape from my duty.
Since then, duty has been my master, my mistress. I have tried night and day, tried so much it hurts my soul to atone for the evil I have done, by become a force for good. I cut them down, the dark ones, time and again, I save innocent lives rather than causing them to be taken, I build and nurture humanity instead of brushing the small concerns of the individual aside.
Still, I weep at nights and pound my fist against the headboard because none of my unceasing work for the right side can undo what has been done either by my hand or by because of me. My nights are tormented but no one is there to see my weakness. For I must be the strong one.
The torture I had grown accustomed to, like the familiar dull ache in my back or the creaking of my knees, until his arrival ruined everything.
His is a different strength to mine. He is like something wiry - a vine or a weed which bends under a heavy weight without breaking, buffeted by the wind but clinging on even when firmer trees have fallen. It is the sort of strength which people despise for they cannot comprehend it.
I wish I could despise him. Any emotion would be better than this, for I see his brooding darkness, his intelligence turned vicious by circumstances which, in the guiding hands of kinder people, could have made the world a better place. I feel the fire of his suppressed anger in the jerky little movements and the iron self-control the others mock, and it thrills me in ways I dare not articulate.
He is nothing like That Boy, not really. No easygoing manners designed to charm and enchant here - no infectious laughter or sparkling eyes from that pinched, haunted face. Yet I have not teetered on the brink of sanity in this way since I met That Boy, lifetimes ago. In his presence, my fallible eyes follow his skulking figure of their own accord. In his absence, my mind imagines what he can be doing at that moment, inevitably crashing through the mental barriers I’ve been shoring up to protect myself from this kind of assault, leaving me shaking with the effort of preventing the violent lustful scenes in my brain from showing on my face.
For it is lust and I would be lying if I tried to deny it. For all that I have sworn to protect him, to see him safe and fed and sheltered here in my own domain, I want to hurt him. My loathsome, animal body wants to seize him and strike him and bite his sallow skin while I claim him, to make him bleed and somehow transfer to him some of the pain his presence here causes me.
He cannot be sent away. The world needs him to be here, ready for next time, when his peculiarly flexible strength will be mine to command, for I will not allow others to use it. For the Greater Good, he must stay at my right hand, close enough to summon insanity to my door.
My fingers are under a glamour now, for it would not do to have others see the nails bitten away to nothing, the quick raw and red. I fill my belly with food that tastes of nothing. I expend all my energy on maintaining the façade of the dear old man I have never been during the daytimes then stagger hopeless and spent into the solitude of a eunuch’s night.
I need him. Much more of this infuriating abstinence will kill me, but it cannot be otherwise.
I know myself of old. One taste of his thin, sneering lips and I will be undone - the world will follow soon after. Perhaps it is pure arrogance to say it, but I hold too many of the cards to walk away from the table. If I gave in to this intoxication, the rest of my world would fade away and without me there, being strong, everything would descend into chaos. Everything.
Gellert has his prison and I have mine.