you raise me up || harry potter

chapter 69

»»————-　song:　————-««

dreams drive out the days

★ jef martens ★

❝Above all else, guard your heart,
for everything you do flows from it. ❞

~ Proverbs 4:23 ~

♢ ♢ ♢

It was always strange to walk into his house at Spinner's End after a full year at Hogwarts. Year after year, it was always the same: the funny sensation in his stomach, the unease, the feeling that he had both come home and left it at the same time. And oh God, the dust.

"This is not home," Snape would chant as he moved around the house carefully, pretending to be a stranger, pretending he didn't know that the tenth floorboard from the door always creaked and that the corner of the coffee table was chipped because his head had been thrown against it when he was eleven years old. Because for the first few days, it was easier to pretend he was a stranger than pretend this was his home.

The fine velvet layer of dust, shuddering as they softly floated upward, disturbed by his footsteps. The walls themselves almost sagging in relief at the quietness. The warmth. Like a final hug. The sun would catch the ascending dust in just the right way, and the air would turn a brilliant gold, and suddenly the summer of 1976 and his mother's body in the kitchen would blind him.

Death is beautiful. Not despite it, not in spite of, but in itself.

Snape didn't cry, not when he found her on the floor the day he came home sixth year, not when he called for an ambulance, not after they took her away to the morgue and the nurses told him there was nothing left for him to do but to go home. Not at their pitying faces when no father came to comfort his son, when no husband came to send off his wife. And when Tobias lumbered home and shouted for Eileen to take his coat, Snape said to him calmly, "She's dead," before pushing past him out the door.

And Snape was glad for it.

I may go to Hell for it, he told God, But what kind of son isn't grateful that his mother suffers no longer?

Death is beautiful. Because the last thing she carried with her, and the last thing she left her son, was a smile. The first in years, and her final.

"You're free, Mum," Snape whispered to the smoke rising from the smokestacks in plumes.

The smoke disappeared into wisps. And so would 1976.

It was 1994, and every year it was the same. And why shouldn't it be? The house was the same. Every single piece of furniture the same. The carpet, almost threadbare, the creaking floorboard, the chipped fucking coffee table, he had kept it all the same. Of course he saw his dead mother every time he came back from Hogwarts. He couldn't bring himself to change anything. Because even if he tried to erase his father, it would mean erasing his mother, too.

If Heaven exists, it means you made her suffer. And that means I have every fucking right to hate you. Death is beautiful because you made her life ugly.

He could never be sure if he was talking to Tobias or to God.

♢ ♢ ♢

The church wasn't small. It was one of the largest buildings in Cokesworth, or perhaps the only large building—large didn't really mean much in a town where everything was a bit stunted. The steeple, though, was visible from almost anywhere in town, and the spire so tall and sharp it might've killed God himself, intent on impaling whatever descended from the heavens.