a/n: meh. I don't like it that much, to be honest. But I just wanted to try my hand at a one-shot for once in my life, and so..this is what happened. This is LITERALLY my first one-shot, so be nice! Who is the person talking in this? I figured it was Severus's guardian angel or something, but I'm not positive on that, so feel free to make your own theories.

Disclaimer: nothing belongs to me. Duh.

I see you as you bend your head over your desk, marking people off for things that perhaps they cannot help. You do not care. Why should you, when you have been shunned for things you cannot help your whole life? Fair is fair.

But is it?

I watch as you take joy in hurting people with a kind of desperate sadism, a clamoring for power over something just to show you have control. But you do not have power over them, really, because soon they will go home over the summer, go back to living in comfort, and forget perhaps that you exist.

Something you can never forget, no matter how much you may want to.

I looked on as you sold yourself to the force of evil, to the darkness within, and I know that you did not know what you were selling in the first place, or else you would not have done it.

I watched as you killed, knowing it was wrong. Not enjoying it exactly like the mindless others who accompanied you, but doing it to save your mind. Because when evil was the only path you saw, you took it and convinced yourself that maybe there is no evil after all. Maybe you deserved the torment, the neglect, the hurt, the abuse…just like they deserve it as you give it to them now.

But I know your mind, and it is not so easily fooled. When night falls, there have been times when I have looked into your mind and soul and I have seen another man drowning there, a man who never learned to swim.

I saw what you could have been.

A man of passion, of intellect, and of courage and creativity, and ambition. A silently contemplative soul in a fast-moving world. A man who possesses a sense of his own value. A hero, perhaps. A passionate lover. Someone who would have children and treat them as he was treated as a child; love them, nourish them, give them dreams and help them to believe.

But no matter their qualities…one who is never cared for cannot care for another; one who has never learnt what they are worth cannot believe in their ability to do good; one who is not appreciated cannot appreciate themselves. And the things that make the world's best hero are not far from what makes the world's best villain.

I watched as you committed murder, and I cried, for what you could have been…had died as well.