The deepest, most desperate

[Mistress Siana]

Snape, Dumbledore, the Mirror of Erised, odd explanations, odd style, general oddness...This is a little writing experiment of mine... And I have to warn you: I've very purposefully ignored the rules of storytelling and structure for this fic, and I had the time of my life doing so. So, as always, if you understand nothing, you're most probably sane.

(Most of the lines in italics are quotes from the HP books.)


The deepest, most desperate

Gold. Gold and more gold, and life, enough life for all the gold.

The two things most human beings would choose above all... humans do have a knack for choosing precisely those things which are worst for them.

Human life. Barely human at all.

Snape, standing with his back to the mirror. He did know by then that the deepest desire, the one craving written onto the surface of the very soul is never altruistic. It is what self is; the blueprint, the essence.

Albus Dumbledore, hiding life behind desire, the perfect shield. Few knew he used to brew life just as well, and gold, enough gold for all the life, or rather everyone knew but few realized what it meant. It was a chocolate-stained truth, traded by children's hands, Dumbledore the Alchemist, somewhere between Dumbledore the Great and The Only One He Ever Feared. It was a long time ago, before wisdom had come and he had turned his back on eternal life. He believed in second chances.

So, Snape thought, it had been only natural for Dumbledore to trust him; one disgusted with all the life, one disgusted with all the death, turning and meeting in the middle.

Severus Snape, the Potions master, who brew death in all tastes and colours, who was scared of the middle, of the void in it. A story should not begin in the middle, there had to be a beginning to understand.

In the beginning, Albus Dumbledore had been an Alchemist.

In the beginning, Severus Snape had been a boy with an old Potions book.

In the beginning.

He remembered standing deep down below the surface, watching the two old friends talk.

...and agreed it's all for the best

Fighting with their deaths, fighting the one who fought death, fighting so there would be life. (Don't turn around.) Destroying desire, while they were at it. (Don't turn.) So much wisdom, yet how painfully bought? He wondered, then, what Dumbledore really saw... something he'd lost because he'd turned, something he'd lost because he'd turned too late, something he'd never had? He'd be such a lonely man, with Nicolas gone.

With the Dark Mark, he had never been alone, always ready, always alert. On this side of the coin, he'd realized, people always came as Ones. The One He Feared. The Chosen One. One is perfect. One is eternal.

Unfixed, mutating, indestructible.

Death Eater.

Snape, standing with his back to the mirror. He'd always somehow lived other people's lives, and only realized it when he'd learned he was afraid of their deaths. (Whatever you do, just don't turn around.)

-----

The middle, the middle was for living, for falling and rising and falling and everything that came in between. The middle was for choices.

Our choices are what matters, nothing else.

And our desires?

Humans can choose against their desires.

Yes, but for how long?

Some things just had to be done, and they'd made their choices. Failure was human, Lord, yes, they knew, but they simply could not afford failure. And they could not pretend they were not afraid...yet they continued to do so.

A boy with a porcelain mask.

A man with a scowl.

A man with a smile.

Meeting. Falling. Rising. Living?

They sat in the darkness and drank to the failure of the inhuman.

I told him he was looking in the wrong places ... I could not show him the right places, though.

So much wisdom...

The middle was neither reason nor result, just so very human one simply had to be afraid.

-----

There had to be an ending for redemption.

In the end...

In the end...

The Alchemist, the Potions master and the boy with the book, they all had become men of war. They had made a bargain, back then, to go back to the point from which they had meant to return, to conserve/consume life and death in order to wash their hands clean.

And now, Dumbledore was breaking it. Breaking in. Coward.

Coward.

Snape felt betrayed. Angry.

You can't...

Helpless

...can't do this to me.

Sardonic

...can't do this to Potter.

He thought he was deep when in fact he was desperate, and gave him socks for Christmas. He could not possibly...

You agreed to do it, and that is all there is to it.

He knew he'd never had a chance.

He would be the One Who Killed Dumbledore. He would be a One.

-----

There had to be an ending for redemption. There had to be pain, for it was pain that brought wisdom, not age or knowledge. In his pain, he thought it fitting for Dumbledore to find his death through him. Him, who had begged for all the lives he was saving.

In his pain, Dumbledore might always have known it would be like that. Some things have to be done, and then Dumbledore calls for his...

Death Eater.

Just as much as I am.

The deepest, most desperate desire is never altruistic. It really shouldn't have been a surprise.

-----

In the end...

One disgusted, one dead.

The One Who Did It.

One.

-----

Dumbledore the Alchemist, and life, all the unlived.

Snape, standing with his back to the mirror.

[Phoenix in the Ashes]

Such passion.
What makes your writing so appealing are all the wonderful descriptive words you use.
They're so... as I said before, passionate. Forceful. Everything you could expect from a great author, which is, I suppose, what every fan-fic author wants to hear.
It's a great reflection of the emotion in the human mind and heart, and blew me away. I actually read the entire thing, which is a compliment in itself really.
I loved it.
Where do you find time to write them all?

[Asphodel]

Wow. Just wow. Usually I don't bother reading fics this long, but this is an exeption. Your words are so... powerful. If you use those words in different context, you wouldn't make a bad motivational speaker.

[Scarlet Lioness]

WOW!!!! Is all I can say really...

That was beautifully written....your descriptions are perfect...wow...

[Asphodel]

Have you considered posting on a fanfiction place? I think your story is more than good enough for Sugarquill.

[Phoenix in the Ashes]

Haven't read too much on Sugarquill, but yeah yours is pretty good. Got the emotions down pretty well.

[Asphodel]

I didn't read it so much as a story, as a poem. It truly is poetry, props to you .

[Phoenix in the Ashes]

A very, very long poem. I've seen longer, though.

[Asphodel]

There's this dude who writes, like, 500-page books a says it's just one poem.... freakish.

[Phoenix in the Ashes]

Yeah I read somewhere about the longest poem ever written. Think it was a few centuries back or something, heard it was massive.

Can't remember too much really.

[Asphodel]

Yeah, well technically, you could call Harry Potter a long poem if you wanted to, except the thing is, HP has a whole plot and everything, rather than just talking about things like poems.

[Phoenix in the Ashes]

What is the actual dictionary definition of it?

[Asphodel]

po-em, n. verse composition. po-et-ic, po-et-i-cal, a. po-et-i-cal-ly,adv.[/b]

[Phoenix in the Ashes]

...? Verse composition

That's a detailed description. Accurate though I suppose.

Well, of course it's accurate, it's the dictionary...

[Asphodel]

See, the problem with looking things up in the dictionary, is then you have to look up those words in the children's dictionary .