DISCLAIMER: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. Author Note: Thanks to Niamh, my beta reader. Her new fic, I Will Follow Thee, as well as, To the Honour of the Mother, should be on your reading list if you are enjoying this story.

I have attempted to upload this story so that the formatting remains intact. For some obscure reason, Word chapters are stripped and so are my html chapters. This story can also be found (with my formatting intact) at Lord and Lady Snape, as well as AFF.Net.

Severus V

Five o'clock in the afternoon.

I can't believe I told her that. Just up and told her everything.well not everything, but I might as well have done so. She'll never want to be near me again. I don't want to be near me and it's my history, my past that I just blurted out, just.mine.

What sort of spy tells a student his past? What sort of spy tells anyone his past?

Why did she have to come to me right after I'd been dealing with Draco's petty rants about injustice? Draco wouldn't know what injustice looked like if it came packaged as a Hippogriff biting his arse. He'd turn around and cast Crucio on the poor creature for having the sense to do, literally, what many of us would like to do figuratively.

I'm making myself nauseated with the mere thought of getting that close to any Malfoy.willingly.

To be in the same room as him, knowing what I know about the latest murders, witnessing his gloating madness and celebration sickens me. It sickens me more to know that the propaganda Draco Malfoy spouts is the same rubbish, albeit differently packaged, that I once believed absolutely.

.And I told her and I don't know why I told her, but I did and now I have to work out a way to un-tell her.

Is such a thing possible?

I wanted to hex Draco into dust this afternoon.

I had asked him to see me at the end of his classes at four o'clock. He was deliberately late, knocked arrogantly and then proceeded to try and threaten me by claiming a place in Voldemort's trusted Inner Circle.

How absolutely ridiculous.

Though Riddle is completely immoral and insane, Draco really is stupid to try and threaten me into acknowledging his right to harangue me with his 'talents'. The more absurd idea is that Lucius would support his own offspring in such an endeavour in front of Riddle. I told Draco as much.

He left abruptly on that note, the door echoing due to the force of his exit and I knew I had to calm down before I destroyed the classroom in my rage.

It must have been only a few minutes when she entered the classroom. I don't think she even knocked.

I was so angry with Malfoy that I promised myself that if he came back, I'd kill him and damn the consequences.

I was so focused.I nearly killed her. I don't think she understands just how lucky she is that the 'greasy git' does have a conscience.

She caught me in a rare moment, yet I doubt she comprehends or even understands it. Only Albus has ever seen me in my weaker, more doubting moments.until now.

I have kept myself sheltered and covered for the last twenty years and whatever pull I feel towards her has completely unravelled my resolve.

I can ill afford such lapses, particularly given Draco's spirited defence of his own malicious madness.

He really is quite unhinged and I had no idea that he could descend so quickly or so thoroughly.

None of this is helping me to do anything other than stall my resolve to understand why I would tell a student, a child.no not a child, a young woman why I began my descent and how I tried vainly to pull myself free.

If she didn't truly hate me before, she will now. Now she knows how I feel when I view my own reflection each morning.

I'm having trouble trying to record my stupidity in an inanimate journal, yet I had no qualms about spilling my story, my treachery to her.

I could have told Minerva; treachery for treachery, yet she so stunned me with her own revelations that such ideas didn't even present themselves in any coherent form.

I'm rambling. I need to go to Hogsmeade and obtain some ingredients. That can be my thinking time.

Just after dinner.

I made it just in time to have dinner. I dawdled on my way back to the castle, perhaps hoping that my torment was merely the result of too much intrigue and too little sleep.

No such luck.

I swept along the tables, glaring at a selected few, including Mr Malfoy, then detoured to my seat on High Table. I tried to look as though I had been detained on important business and that I had deigned to lower myself to sit with rabble not fit to lick my boots.

It is another mark against my name that blackens any record of good. To see students cringe away from me as though my sins were visible like the sores on a leper, just adds to the tumult I find my mind trying to process.

I'm waffling in an attempt to try and forget my stupidity and it's not going to work. I know it's not going to work, and yet I still do it.

My personal abyss seems closer at this moment and the wire holding my resolve feels as though it has lost some of its taut protection.

I have condemned myself to feel and to share, and I have no understanding why I would choose to do this of my own volition.

She came to me for Dreamless Sleep and I had the temerity to question her reasons. Her look was sufficient to curb my inane question, for it was quite obvious that sleep was a necessity she was sorely lacking.

I conjured two chairs and called to the kitchens for some afternoon tea. The House Elves must have been startled by my request, for they endeavoured to include a little of everything that could magically fit on a small silver serving tray.

She sat down warily and as I sat opposite her, I took the chance to look at her critically. I didn't mean to stare, but I wanted to make sure she was all right, as her face had a peaked look, as though she was valiantly trying to hold back her flood of tears.

So I started talking, just opened my mouth and told her all the fears and disgust at the murders and my fear of being not trusted as I was summarily excluded from openly helping my students because of my dubious role in a dirty war.

I told her about a student devastated with the loss of her parents, who sought comfort and peace from a wall hidden in a disused dungeon corridor, how she touched my hand and my heart with her open trust, though the thought would surely revolt her. How her serenity and suffering had fused into a connection I didn't understand, but that I wanted to protect.

She cried then, not the sniffles and scant tears during my monologue, but real, cleansing, healing tears. It was as though I'd given her the key to let go, to feel and to share her pain.

I doubt I shall ever fell so privileged again to be able to share our mutual grief for the vagaries of war.

But I didn't stop there. I could have, but I just kept talking, as though my torment paralleled her tears and I felt the need to cleanse myself to at least one other human being.

I told her about my place as a spy and how I came to see my error of ideology. Not even Albus knows as much as Miss Granger, though I may have to rectify that situation as well.

So I resumed my droll narration of the past.

I told her of a little known statute (now repealed) that sought to give more rights to those of Muggle heritage and how those selfsame rights would take the essence of purity away from my world. It was enacted following the defeat of Grindelwald and it offered reparations in the form of an overwhelming level of access granted to Muggleborn Witches and Wizards for all levels of education, employment and the previously pure and closed Wizarding society as a whole.

It was a law that sought to create even more differences and unease in a world still reeling from the suspicion and intrigue of Grindelwald's reach. It sought to prejudice those like myself who were Pureblood children, by denying us the birthright of following our parents in their chosen careers, or tending estates handed from generation to generation since the time of the Founders.

It was designed to create two distinct segments in the Wizarding world; there had in the past, been only one culture. The view of many, my father included, was that it was the dissolution of our heritage and way of life. It was touted that we of pure stock would lose our individual lineage and identity under this new way.

It was propaganda, bigotry and prejudice packaged and sanitised for my existing world and it chafed like a collar, starched and rigid.

It was the perfect opportunity for Riddle to learn his craft of deceit and he learnt well. We are, all of us, still paying for the sins of the past.

By the time I was starting at Hogwarts, Muggleborns held most of the more important Ministry posts. They were afforded scholarships to Hogwarts and both the Head Boy and Head Girl were Muggleborn and had been for the preceding four years before my first year.

I was unwillingly losing my identity and Riddle found plenty of support amongst the Purebloods. None noted the irony of a man born of Witch and Muggle championing the cause of a society that would have ignored him but for his charismatic and addictive model of retaliation.

He lured me. He won me over to his cause. My blinded hatred for all Muggleborns and the loss of our family home was easily attributed to a stupid law made by stupid men with everything to gain by sitting back and watching the Wizarding world cannibalise itself.

And I didn't realise I'd been used like so many others until I saw Riddle kill for sport and encourage all of us to do the same. He completed the indoctrination of my mind to his way, supporting, cajoling and punishing as necessary, all supposedly for the cause of purity.

My intellect ignored my heart and my uneasy feelings as superfluous and weak exclamations of a child brought up to believe the Muggle world was responsible for every ill and no technological advancement of raw magic in those who by sheer chance were born with the magic inherent in their very souls.

It was stupidity then and it remains stupidity now. I have watched Riddle's true followers kill families for sport and seen the devastation of a new generation being corrupted.

I am tired of my role and I told Miss Granger as much. I wanted to tell her that no matter my absence from her parents' murder, I was still as much responsible as Lucius Malfoy for casting the curse and Draco Malfoy for enjoying their blind terror.

I couldn't bring myself to shatter her illusions that I was somehow absent from the executions, no matter how much I wanted to tell her so. She should fear my past.

I fear my past. I am the one who lived, breathed and killed to preserve everything I had been taught to believe.

I hold no hope for our world if we cannot defeat Riddle, for he grows stronger with each death and with each new child taught to kill.

I must stop writing shortly as Miss Granger is scheduled to arrive at seven o'clock to brew her own supply of Dreamless Sleep. The fresh ingredients in front of me are my own meagre reparation should she choose to come.

I feel completely washed out, as though I've been duelling all afternoon and have come to an agreement with an opponent of equal strength.

I just need to know that she doesn't hate me.

As always, constructive criticism, comments and reviews are most welcome. (