Opus Primo
More than thirty-odd of the forty-odd years
Of the life of Severus Snape had been spent
As a weevil in the mortared cracks between
The massive boulders of stone that made up the castle of Hogwarts.
O! How he loathed it!
But what could he do but wait,
Biting his tongue and biding his time and bearing the troubles
Of men he had no reason to love.
His heart was already long scarred,
Scarred enough that the daily violations of his soul and psyche
That he endured from both parties he served
Took their toll only on his body.
A self-flagellating masochist,
His homeostasis was a state of constant anguish.
Nothing else would be proper in the light of his transgressions,
Which were against goodness, against beauty, against humanity,
And against the God of his saint-swearing father, Tobias.
A slave who worked to earn the regard of dead women's shadows,
Of the holy trio of disapproving martyrs who guarded his heart,
Eileen Prince, Lily Evans, and Mary, Mother of God,
(All of whom probably never even liked him at all,
Much less loved him, much less forgave him);
This was one of many careers known intimately to Severus.
He was faced with acknowledging eternity's edge too young;
There was only so much that his potions and dark arts could heal.
So he filled the wells of his curious subconscious with earth,
Swearing never to plumb them again.
Instead he scraped the sand in marble rock gardens built atop these wells' covers,
Gardens of Pandemonium so excellently crafted that his masters rarely even knew
That there had been sights and smells of Eden there before.
And time went on.
The Christ-like Divine Child Potter danced onto the landscape
Leaving the shakily-rooted oak of Severus' cultivation
Disrupted and withered, as bare as the cross on his father's mantel.
Severus could not find himself any solace;
What was once scarce was now unfindable.
He could no longer bear the rank smell or greasy taste
Of his dungeon dwelling-place,
Which stank with the blood of unacknowledged martyrdom.
For every moment of his waking
Was wrought with interminable loathing-
For his life, for his essence, for his surely-damned soul.
And aggravated by the sight of Lily's eyes trapped by Potter's goggles,
Severus could not deny his most mortal, gravest error,
Which was otherwise kept from his nightly homage to the Oneiroi
Only by Occulmency; Morpheus had no chance to draw
Images of the fairy-goddess Lily in Severus' dreams.
When the apparent time came for him to arise and go
To the place where his heart would be weighed,
Severus breathed with the fire of blood at his lips and venom in his veins
Until the Potter-child left him for dead, bearing sacred but unwanted memories.
Ash-wing fly, wormwood and thyme had been long prepared
In an alchemical mass for the unholy praise of human ingenuity
For this day, and they were antibodies repressing the foreign toxin
And aiding the inoculated liver of a self-acknowledged devil.
He did not want to pass to the realm of the Stygian flow
And there drink up the hemlock potion of justice that his life's calamities had brewed.
He'd not had a chance to saturate himself in softer colors than green,
And there was also the desire to flaunt his resilience to two masters-
Three, counting the Lord God-who wanted him dead.
A survivor he'd always been, and he planned to not change.
The talented pawn had reached the end of the board,
And, in his view, had earned a chance to checkmate as a queen.