Title: A Wizard's Love is a Bitter One (L'amore di un mago è amaro)
Pairing: SS/SB (past SS/LM, platonic there-but-not-there parental-thingy SS/AD)
Rating: R
Disclaimer: All characters are Rowling's. Never mine. Storylines borrowed from Tetuzoh Okadaya and Basso. Not mine.
Summary: The saying went "the path of true love never runs the way you wanted them to, or something like that." (Snape/Black, past SS/LM, and therefore Slash)
Warning: AU, something a little like revisionist history, something a little like whimsy, many disregards of canon, additional notes below.
.prologo/fuor d'ogni misura.
"You called?" Irritated. Amused. Indulgent. Bittersweet tea and lemon cakes were Fridays, an hour or so after dinner. It's Wednesday.
"Yes, yes, sit down, sit down, my boy." Wrinkled fingers on the small of thick-clothed back. A slight pressure, an apologetic smile. Please humour an old man.
Dark eyebrows rose, a questioning smirk, and yet he sat down. For once, he had no potions to brew, no marking to be done. So he sat and waited. Across the table valiantly trying to hold itself up despite the numerous tea things and cake things and a little velvet box that looked so out of place.
"That was left for you," Dumbledore slid the box across, nudged it an extra inch, letting it tumble into Snape's lap. "From our mutual acquaintance."
"Lucius?" White fingers. Stained fingers. They reached out hesitantly. "Despite swearing never wanting to have anything to do with me anymore?" Since when had Dumbledore become their matchmaker, their go-to-person. This sordid romance that never should have existed in the first place?
The old man smiled, knew what was running through the other's mind. How could one resist not to meddle? He never knew anything else, never could do anything else. And it was such a spectacular break up. Several trees and boulders could attest to this, scarred and all but dead. It happened in a secluded place of course, away from prying eyes. But the Headmaster of Hogwarts couldn't really be categorised as prying eyes, could he? He smiled again.
"I wonder what he meant by this." Lower than a whisper. But Dumbledore heard it anyway. The box laid unopened in those slightly trembling palms. Too little time had past, the sting and scars from hexes and curses should remain still. Fatigue, bewilderment. Where do we go from here?
"You know what he meant by it." The Malfoys, Dumbledore thought, had always been rather flighty in matters of the heart. Unused to things that weren't purely politics, selfish in ways they couldn't even fully realise themselves. And yet, not only them. All of us mortals, poor and confused, trundling up and down places unknown.
"And yet..." a pause, another flicker of hesitation, before the box finally opened to reveal its secret. Pale gold, never brazenly so yellow, never so serene as silverwhite. It seemed to look up expectantly at its holder. "Yet. What he wants, I cannot give."
"I don't think he expects you to." He floated a cup of tea, gently, insistently. And the blue-white china waited, quivered slightly in the air as if impatient, until Snape accepted it.
"It seems he expects very little."
Snape thought back to the days, those days that appeared as simple as to be complicated. He knew Malfoy's attraction to him and he would not be a Snape if he didn't use it ruthlessly. He was the one who approached the older boy, part attraction to Malfoy's charm, part recognising the importance of having such a powerful backer. With the Marauders breathing down his neck, and sundry students brazenly following their Gryffindor Gods' lead, he saw the importance of having something other than personal brilliance (of which he knew he had in spades) and sheer bullheadedness.
Consorting with the devil seemed worth its weight in being called all sorts of names. Most of the threats fell away in an instant, leaving only the Marauders. Not that they didn't step up and fortify their own front.
"We were young, then," he said, replacing the ring back, closing the box, sliding it back to the centre of the table.
With age came awareness, if not understanding. Childhood dreams and gullible notions disappeared as corpses piled one on top of another, as time dragged on, the glorious day the Dark Lord kept peddling never arrived.
Promises fell away, shattering into a million different regrets.
"How can he still?" Have I not used him? Have I not thrown him away when I couldn't handle him anymore? Questions that went unvoiced.
And yet, Dumbledore, who praised himself for knowing other people who didn't even know themselves, knew. Understood. "Have you both not used each other?"
It wasn't as simple as that. Dumbledore also knew. This man sitting in front of him could never be simple. Snape believed he had merely used the people around him.
Yet, there was also love, no less true, no less sincere. This man who so fiercely and earnestly loved, no matter how much he sought to delude even himself. He wound those he loved. How could he not. Such passion could only love until it drew blood and tears. Haven't all the epic passions of the world led to bittersweet tragedies? Aren't they the ones history remembers most?
Then, for someone who was neither comely nor physically alluring (not like the Malfoys, the Blacks, the Potters), never perfect, always seeming like a sorry afterthought, Snape had always managed to charm his way into people's lives.
Dumbledore should know. There was no point in denying that. He wasn't about to, as he stood and walked the short distance between them.
"How can he still?" Dumbledore asked, mirth and laughter trying to bubble over, threatening to spill and destroy the mood. "How can he not!" Because Snape burned himself deeply into the soul of those he touched, be it love or hate. Never something in between. Etched branded leaving no room for forgetfulness. If not lovers anymore, then friends, then acquaintances. Reshuffled up and down, reprioritised, recompartmented. But a fire of this magnitude, a passion of this brightness would never fade. Dying embers and ashen coals they may be, but never one to lie dead and forgotten.
"How can anyone?" Dumbledore asked. Softly. Gently. Imploringly so.
He didn't know who embraced the other first, but there they were: half-sitting, midway-standing, awkward and clumsy.
"I worry," he admitted. "When I think of your future, I worry."
"You shouldn't." Confident. Unyielding. Already closing himself in.
"Shouldn't I?"
The sun disappeared beneath the horizon. The tea cooling as warming charms dissipated into the air. Night wind knocked upon stained glass panes.
"You needn't worry."
Once you run out of yourself to give, what then?
"Let me."
"You always do whatever you wish. I shan't be the one to deprive you of that one indulgence."
Dumbledore had always wished for many things in his life. Some wishes were granted, some seemed to went unheard, as if he never made them.
I wish for you to not be alone. And yet Snape was already walking a path of loneliness, had already been walking it for far too long, it seems. A forever's worth of loneliness isn't so hard to believe when one looked at Snape. And what if Snape was to live as old as Dumbledore?
I wish for someone to understand your loneliness.
All these he never said out loud.
But there were times, sitting alone with cold tea and stale buttered bread, when he wished he could have. Even when he knew what Snape would say. Something along the line of derision, of impossibilities, of lost faith.
If this world is one of balance, that person must surely exist somewhere, no matter how unlikely.
Notes:
Inspired heavily by: "The Man of Tango" by Tetuzoh Okadaya and "Amato Amaro" by Basso, as well as Gaspara Stampa's "Rime d'Amore". Indeed when I say "inspired heavily" it's actually filching storylines and dialogues.
I literally stumbled upon the two mangas on Mangafox, and found that they bore similarities to what I have in mind about Severus and Sirius, for some odd reason. Possibly made the characters OOC this way and can seem to only destroy those things Rowling lovingly built.
I know this is not such an original plot (as this fic uses storylines other people wrote), but I was compelled to write it in Potterverse. I understand that this is probably cheating, even though I do try not to use them as is, but trying to make them still fit in the Potterverse.
So, even if it's only for myself, I want to see where it leads me (and where it leads Snape and Black and Malfoy and...) *shrugs* Blame it to the sweeping blackouts that lasted for hours, leaving me with nothing to do but morbidly recreating things out of other authors' loving works.