Hide Behind the Window Pane
I crave feedback. I'll happily do circus tricks for it, pay for it, whore myself for it; anything you want...
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Propping his hands beneath his chin he stared out the window of Minerva's office and out across the Hogwarts grounds. It was his only real complain about the dungeons this; there were no windows to stare mindlessly out of when looking at your life and your surroundings, and the other people in the room, became too much for you.
Of course, there were days when sun light was such an insult that no windows were a benefit, but today, Severus would have liked windows.
Those days, those windowless days, were the worst. The days when no windows meant you could be yourself. When no windows meant no prying eyes to stare in and watch you fall together and come apart again. When you crawl into a deserted corner like the over grown bat you're told you resemble and howl like Lupin at the moon.
The bat was a necessary persona though. It stopped the outside coming too close in. A painful but necessary protection. Because if the outside came in, then the outside would notice that the inside wasn't a death eater like the outside. And then the outside might get ideas. Ideas about sinking in it's fangs and tearing out his heart and his mind and his soul in one fell swoop, in retribution. So to keep them safe, those precious organs, he wrapped them in tissue paper and put them away in a box, and used the grumpy professor costume instead.
The dramatic, arch, overly highly strung, acidic, sarcastic man hidden in the inside cupboard and the potions master were entirely different beings, sometimes in accord, other times at war. One lusted after a life it would never achieve again, while the other beat sense into snot nosed school children. And like a schizophrenic listening to their other voice, he curled up in corners and wept.
Perhaps one day he would wipe the dust from the human being and let it walk again; but not yet. Not yet. For now he still needed his comfort blanket of the greasy, hook nosed bat.
He envied the people, people like Minerva, who'd made the right decision the first time around the track. Why could he not stay on one ship? Set his course and run it's distance. Why did he flinch from one thing, deflect towards it, dance backwards from it, before finally succumbing to it's dubious charms?
And he knew the answer to why he left Voldemort's cold embrace. For love. The one thing he wouldn't ever get back again.