Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters are copyright of J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros., and they were used without permission. However, they were used with consideration and with no intention of making money. This story is simply an appreciative fan's attempt at writing something to contribute to the world of Harry Potter.
Completed August 2006.
Email comments to PG for thematical reasons and mild language.
Sindie Presents a Harry Potter Fanfic:
The Defining Moment
A year had passed. But that hardly mattered.
He was merely living on borrowed time.
With the death of Dumbledore, all hope for the side of Light had been lost. Dumbledore had been a fool to entrust Harry Potter with the task of carrying on his work.
Dumbledore's man, indeed.
The sneer was evident in every fiber of his brain. He had always suspected Potter of having no special talents or abilities; he had been right.
This seventeen-year-old boy was honestly supposed to be the savior of the Wizarding world? Doubtful. Very highly doubtful.
The options left were death or a servitude of darkness. No much of a choice.
With no where else to turn, he had chosen - out of lost hope - to turn to the Dark side again.
The wand he now held had mercilessly murdered the only man who had ever thought him worth one shred of anything... This wand was oftentimes turned in on himself as he pondered two words that could have relieved him of the nightmare that he had willingly and knowingly become.
But blasted Potter had been right.
He was a coward.
A bloody, rotton coward.
Rotten things were better off buried, since they had died long ago, anyway.
Now, in a blur of black robes and white masks on a battlefield, he was one of those cloaked and covered, hiding as he always had.
Coward.
Shouts and curses and lights flashing and hexes burning and bodies falling... lives blinking out of existence, and he was numb to it all.
He watched from the distance as the Dark Lord and Potter had their inevitable face-off, and from nothing, as his black, empty eyes shifted to the side, the invisible became clear. The air thickened, and he choked, wondering if he was finally falling prey to his own weakness.
A voice he knew spoke.
It is our choices, Severus, that show us what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
Snape knew what he had to do. He realized with a start that he had unknowingly closed the distance between himself and the spot where the Dark Lord and Potter stood. As the Dark Lord raised his wand, uttered those two words that ended life, and a green light shot toward the supposed savior, Snape moved...
...right into the green light, surrendering to his fate, finally knowing what his purpose had been all along.
Watching his hated ex-professor's body fall to the damp ground, Potter found the power he needed to defeat the Dark Lord, that Lord Voldemort.
The defining moment.