Snape's eyes were transfixed as the bright fires danced around in his mind. The flame in the corner of the room shielded by a maroon wide-bricked fireplace was the only source of light so the small living room was only dully lit. Thoughts were almost visible through his still, wet eyes which looked somewhat restless beneath the absolute calm shown by the rest of his body. He thought of Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Dark Lord Voldemort himself the latter disturbing him most of all. But he even though of Lily, his greatest love, as he sat in that lonely, darkened room. He though of her eyes and her hair and her most awful fate. No-one knew how Snape thought, not since the long gone Dumbledore had fallen to Snape's own wand. Not Draco, not Harry and certainly not the Dark Lord, because if he did all would come undone.
"SEVERUS" an angry voice roared from behind the door leading into Snape's tiny room.
Snape's stomach sunk like a stone sinks in water and he immediately jumped in the air and recoiled from the door.
A flash of orange light and the door was split clean down the middle and kicked open as a man in dark robes slithered through. One of his long arms extended holding a thin brown wand in Snape's face. The man had long mud brown hair with a rugged and stubbled face but the first thing Snape recognised was his yellow pupiled eyes. It was Ophelius Haggrow. A bully, a murderer, a thug, an insecure pureblood too sure of his own lineage and status to see muggle borns and half-bloods have any say in magical affairs. A deatheater.
"You blood traitor!" he retched, "You filthy coward!"
"Turn down the heat on your cauldron you old fool, what is it I'm suppose to have done?" Snape coldly replied, his arms down by his sides.
"DON'T! Don't try you tricks you snake, I know your games! I know where your allegiances lie! Dumbledore, the boy! You've been with them from day one." Haggrow enraged shot a curse from his wand, red light lit up the room for a split second but Snape raised his wand and deflected the curse.
"How do you-" Snape attempted to speak.
"Never you mind, Severus. Let's just say I've access to Dumbledore's office and he kept pretty clear records of your friendship!" Each sentence seemed to end with Haggrow getting angrier than when he started and he sent out another curse in a frenzy which Snape quickly dodged.
"Ophelius, surely you have more sense than to - STUPEFY!" he screamed sending the deatheater colliding back through the doorway he had just broke through and down long, wide corridor with a thick red carpet running down the Centrex. Snape chased after the flying body of the man sending frenzied curses after him but Haggrow recovered quickly and jumped to his feet.
"DISCORDIA!" he barked, shooting his arms forward hurling the hex at Snape. It hit. A ball of purple smoke hit Snape in the chest, the curse immediately going to his head into a horrendous biting headache, his vision blurred and his sanity tested.
"EXPULSO" Snape managed to bark back through his skewn vision. He missed his target but hit a large book cabinet in the wide corridor sending pages and editions of what seemed like age old books soaring into the air so densely that the two couldn't see each other.
"Avifors!" Snape tactically spoke far more quietly this time. And almost immediately every page of every book still in the air stopped falling and turned into a small parchment bird that shot towards Haggrow. The deatheater turned and ran but the birds hit him anyway knocking him to the floor ripping at the back of long dark robes. Snape knew his quick thinking had won him the duel as soon as it started. He walked over to the almost incapacitated Ophelius Haggrow pointing his blackened, smooth wand into his face.
"Ophelius I don't expect you to understand but you must try. The boy must live out his destiny. He is the only one who can stop your master whose ideals i have come to realised are wrong. Why you stay loyal to him I cannot understand, a life governed by fear and your own death waiting to jump out at you at every corner. I must do what is right, Ophelius...I'm sorry. Avada Kedavra!" A green light shot from his wand and quitely hit the deatheater and life left him. He was sympathetic towards Haggrow, but hardened, he knew the magnitude of his task. He knew he had to do evil to do good.
Snape scooped himself up, heavy with grief for himself, for Dumbledore and for everyone who had and who would die for and because of Voldemort. He knew he shouldn't but he pitied himself, he hated that no-one could know his true allegiance and he could never tell anyone for fear of exposure to the Dark Lord. Would he be swallowed by history with everyone who he had ever known or who would ever know him thinking of him only as a traitor? A rebel to Dumbledore's cause? He didn't know.