Disclaimer:
All things not Allosia and Gabriel belong to JKR.
Not making anything off this, no intent to, blah blah blah.
-----------
Snape slipped out from under Allosias arm and waited a moment until she settled back into sleep before climbing out of bed.
Shrugging into a robe and padding out to what had been her sitting room and had become their private study, he folded himself into his leather desk chair, and taking quill to parchment he began to write.
Sia —
Since it is my intent not to share these with you, I should, no doubt, be writing this somewhere other than our rooms. The knowledge of you and ours asleep though, within audible breath of me is a miracle and a safety I hesitate to disturb. Besides I know it irritates and frightens when I go missing in the small hours.
It worries me when you ask if I regret Gabriel, if I regret you, as if I did not have enough terrible things in my life to regret instead. I killed Riechart, which, I hope you realize as I do, is not, especially in the scheme of my life, so terrible a thing at all. I had the opportunity and I took it, entirely out of self-interest I might add. It was made to look like an accident, and whether Voldemort knew the truth of it or not I was punished for it anyway. I can't say I minded the Cruciatus that night. I can't, I suppose, say I mind it most nights. Even as my body recoils from it, my mind is often grateful for the clarification, like astringent, or I suppose more accurately, acid. I wonder, from time to time, if your experiences of it have been similar, but I also realize, I would prefer not to know.
I will, eventually, kill Lucius. Perhaps, it will be in battle or on a mission and perhaps I should have done it long ago. It will however happen when it can as it has needed to for some time. I increasingly suspect, his son concurs with me.
There is darkness in me, Love. Not because of what I have seen or done and not because I once chose out of adolescent fear, greed and miscalculation to ally myself with the wrong side and to have it branded into my arm. There is darkness in me because I was born with it, as surely as I was with this hair, these features that I have warred with my entire life. When I see myself in my mind's eye, it is as a man other than the man I am, not in deed so much as in detail. That I always believed that I was someone capable of having what you provide me, was, I suspected for years when confronted with the truth of myself, my one intellectual failing.
Now, at your hands, I know I am two men, not the wicked and the spy, but the ugly and the true.
I am sorry if I frighten you.
As ever,
Severus.