Your thoughts, musing on a sodden brain
Severus Snape stared at the book for the hundreth time, and the book stared back at him.
Snape, however, refused to lower his eyes first. He hadn't even bothered to pull the book off its shelf. There were only thirty three words written in it, and he knew them by heart.
He stared at the book cover angrily, furiously, hopelessly. Then he lowered his dark eyes and joined his fingers.
Beaten once again.
Maybe he should have read his father's last will, before murdering him.
Well, it was too late, anyway.
It was ironic, really, thought the Potion Master, getting up and starting to pace in his private chambers.
"Really witty of you," he said, glancing at the secret drawer of his desk where the only surviving portrait of his father was. "Funny, one could said."
He had the same conversation with his dead father's picture every time that he thought about the book – about once a week.
"Mother said it was mine. You know that. You had no right. No fucking right."
The picure, safely hidden in the desk and never looked at in fourteen years, didn't reply.
"What did it matter to you, anyway? You never understood one line of it."
Snape stopped in front of the window and looked into the night.
"I was the one…I had the skill to read it."
He placed his hands on the window-sill.
"You said I would have used it for some Dark purpose…well, that was why Rasputin wrote it in the first place, wasn'it? He was a Dark Wizard, after all."
His face was touching the glass, and he wasn't looking at the landscape. His reflection was clearly delineated by the light in the room, but its edges were dim and blurry, as though it was underwater. And he looked so much like his father…more and more so.
"Fool," Snape said through gritted teeth, and closed his eyes.
The memory he didn't want to recall, however, forced its way under his closed lids.
"Why? Why is it blank?"
The dying man on the floor didn't open his eyes. The boy, breathing hard, kneeled down beside him, and shook him by his arm, clutching a red-bound book to his side.
"Why? Why?"
The man still didn't move.
"Father…" said the boy, closing his hand on his father's arm.
"Severus, son…" whispered the man, slowly raising a hand to his mouth to rub the blood away. "You are mistaken. You will find out, some day."
"I didn't want this, father, you know I didn't."
The boy was paler than his father, his black hair falling wildly on his shoulders.
"The Mudbloods-"
"Enough of this nonsense," coughed the man on the floor, and reached up to cover his son's hand with his bleeding one. " That book is too dangerous for you now. You will be able to read only when-"
He stopped and spit out some blood. He was barely breathing, and when his head touched the floor again, his eyes rolled in their sockets.
Severus Snape stood kneeling beside the dying man feeling contrasting emotions running through his body. He couldn't believe what was happening…his father was dying, he had killed him to get at this one book, and now it was perfectly useless.
He didn't notice when the man in front of him stopped breathing. Nursing the book in his arms, he stared at the blank wall, thinking…thinking…
Snape shook himself out of his reverie. His father was dead, he had had nightmares about that night just one time too much, and he certainly didn't need to remember what had come afterwards.
He crossed the room and went to his bed, closing his hand on the glass of Dreamless Sleep Potion waiting for him on the night table.
A/N Hi! This story is already finished; it has 21 chapters which will be posted every three or four days - if you want a hint of what is coming, everything is hidden in Majakovsky's poem A Cloud in Trousers. Well, not everything, maybe grins. I tried to keep my Snape as canon as possible, and that gave an unusual love story...why don't you discover it?