author's notes: Like many other stories, A Gutter Rat's Tale and Pandora's Box were finished with questions still left unanswered or scenes that could not be told because there was no space or time to tell them. Cousin Quigley's life is largely a story left untold, a little man with no control and no ability to stand up for himself. Used beyond his limits and against his will, left with nothing in return, I felt it was only fair to explain something of his relationship with the Mirror of Rebounds, and how it was that he be neither portrait or family ghost.
I will admit that I am not much of an angst fan. I have enough misery and trials in my own life that I don't need to seek out the misery and trials of others. I do have moments of happiness, moments in which the misery and trials cease and I can breathe in peace. The such is for many of us, and we can see this witnessed by both Severus Snape and James Potter as they are portrayed in the aforementioned stories. However, every now and then there are the people who seem, both to themselves and to outsiders, to never get any respite whatsoever. Cousin Quigley was one of those people.
I warned that James' side-story was miserable; it made me cry and it made other readers quite sick to their stomach with its vividly-portrayed violence. Cousin Quigley's side-story may not make other readers sick to their stomachs from any vivid portrayal of any story, although there are allusions made, it did make me cry.
Poor Quigley. I feel two inches tall for creating a character whose life is as hopeless as his own.

Despite not actually being much of a fan for angst, how is that I can write it so well? o.O

THE LITTLE MAN THAT COULDN'T

Quigley Snape had always received the short deal of things in life. Admittedly he never had much of a spine to begin with, but why was it that every time he tried to grow or establish something that remotely resembled a spine, something would come along to snap it in half? He had a beautiful wife; she left him. He had a beautiful son; he himself abandoned to a fate where death was the only and kindest action. With death, at least, one retained the sense of humanity. He had had a career in what was the first wizarding school created in a new country; his crutch that was alcohol had destroyed that. At first, the Mirror of Rebounds and the Universe could not penetrate the thick haze of alcohol. But it bore on, more relentless and more penetrating than a flesh-eating disease.

Alcohol, once effective but no longer, was now a cruel chain that held him to a destiny set in stone that could not be shattered, no matter how Quigley tried to swing the hammer. It was too large for such a frail person, to heavy for someone of such a weak constitute. He tried to bear it, tried to bow to the constant wishes of some Great Other. He was, after all, only a tool for the more important purpose of the great Universe.

Who was he, the little Hufflepuff who never amounted to anything, whose family often wondered why they hadn't taken the chance to strangle him in the crib, to say no?

"Sometimes," he says conversationally to the thing that sits across from him as his back is pressed against the bare wall, an empty bottle in his left hand, "sometimes I wonder what I did to deserve this life." He is a hundred and fifty years old; he looks like a corpse that should be buried in a deep hole somewhere. What few, desperate strands of frail white hair remains are matted and greasy. He has reached that unerring point in one's life where food, love, and air no longer matters. Death is not a friend, but a lover that giggles and plays coyly beyond his reach. Family has turned its back upon its greatest shame, and all he had to keep himself company are future horrors that he hasn't the power to halt.

"You know," he continues with a sage nod, "I wish there was someway to speak to Hyacinth. Maybe he would explain what I am; neither Wanderer or Caller, I am a Watcher. Never had one of those," he says mournfully, "and I do not relish the questionable honor of being the first." If he were the first; there may have been others, but they would surely have been driven mad at a much younger age. "It would explain the various suicides the Snapes tend to have every three or four generations." He sighs and drops the empty bottle. It rolls away from him, toward the spinning light. Quigley holds his hands up and inspects them. The skin ss parchment yellow and just as delicate. It ss stretched taut over painfully knobby fingers that become increasingly stiff as the days pass. He buries his face in his hands and remains thus for hours. When the Universe does not haunt him, his own past is too eager to make itself remembered.

How can one wash the stains away, when the stains permeate to the very core of one's being?

White Rabbit never had a place in the wizarding world. She had been the daughter of a great medicine man, and her beliefs and abilities of attending to nature could only have found its equal in the druids, long gone and passed away from all parts of the world except Quigley, who suffered the past a little better than he did the future. She had found refuge in him, although no one, certainly not Quigley, knew why. When her child was taken away from her by the man she loved, she removed herself from the man.

He pleaded with the Mirror of Rebounds, begged, tried everything that he knew, so the Mirror could tell him where White Rabbit went. The Mirror was resolute; nothing would it give to the person it demanded everything from. Quigley packed up and followed after White Rabbit to the ends of the world as she searched for her child. From the great Orient to the Arctic. Quigley always remained three or four steps behind, always a day late and a dollar short.

"No, really. What did I do?" The Mirror of Rebounds, as it was wont to do, speaks nothing. It does not yet convenience it to tell Quigley anything. "I wonder if there was any time I could have taken another path. I might still have my White Rabbit and Dominic." Quigley's head droops and his chin presses against his chest. "It's too late," he murmurs, far too past the point of tears. He has reached a sense of numbness that alcohol in all its entity and many forms could never have created.

He crosses his arms and tucks his cold hands under his armpits, and settles against the wall again.

He awaits death. It is long time in coming.

Five years passed. Ten. Then twenty, thirty, and forty more years went by. Before they knew it, they had grown old.

With no sign of Dominic, White Rabbit tried to go back to her people. Scorned by them and treated with hatred, she left with her life barely intact. She roamed the New World, from one end to another, ever searching, always staying ahead of the one who had betrayed her heart. Quigley eventually made his way into the Texas Territory, and finally caught up with his beloved. Still a day late and a dollar short; never able to recover the losses he had wrought.

Lost in the desert, unused to such a brutal land, she chased forlornly after the laughing image of a little boy with curly black hair and snapping black eyes, calling his name and crying tears of happiness. "I've found you! Come to mama, my love, come to mama!"

It had been the sight of vultures that told Quigley where she was found, and he buried what remained of his wife in a pit that he dug with his bare hands. That done, his own lost wanderings across the West left him destitute and miserable, alone in a tavern, where a Wander stumbled across him.

That face too much like the one of whose life was as dictated as his own. The things said, the pain remembered, paralyzed Cousin Quigley's heart.

"No. Stop. No more." Quigley turns his head from the spinning light, trying to block out images that pour relentlessly into his mind. "Don't. I can't." The Mirror of Rebounds listens not to the pitiful pleads of a mere mortal, no matter how tired and weary the mortal may be. Quigley whimperesand buries his head under his arms, curling into a ball as if he could protect what fragile constitute remains. Stubbornly, the future bombards him.

He stared at the Mirror of Rebounds at the end of the day when the girl-boy left, taken by the Mirror and led by himself, only different. "What have you done?" he demanded the Mirror, which remained silent and uncaring to his demands. "You will destroy that child as you have me!" he cried plaintively. Still, the Mirror would not respond. Quigley hurried over to it, picked it up, and shook it fiercely. "Stop it at once! Use me as you have always, but leave others out of it!"

If the Universe could stick its tongue out and blow a raspberry, it was surely doing it now.

"You've won." Quigley bows his head, ready for the ax to fall. Why did everything he ever tried to do amount to nothing? No one wants to remember him; his legacy is booze and nightmares, truth thought of as lies, lies thought of as truth. Snapes are supposed to be cunning; he is naïve and stupid. Snapes are supposed to be stout of heart, even if of questionable moral; he is weak and useless. "What do you want of me?" he asks the mirror.

Too sick at heart and not used to being reponded to, he nearly misses what the Mirror of Rebounds tells him.

"Me?" Quigley laughs, bitter and mocking even in his own ears. Rheumy eyes stare at the Mirror of Rebounds as it spins on its axel. He couldn't even perish in the darkness, out of sight and peacefully alone. "Oh yes, you've always wanted me. You refuse to give me up; even the smallest bit of freedom never existed."

He was a creature of whims. Someone else's whims.

"I don't want you to have him. You can't have him. You already have me and enough is enough. Please, I beg of you. You have me, you've always had me, and you've never let me go."

The Universe is said to be benevolent. It is said to be bound together by a Love that was All-Encompassing. Nothing could compare to the breadth and depth of that Love.

"The boy can win?" A feeling, so foreign and felt so far ago that Quigley no longer recognizes it as hope, fills his chest until it feels like he will burst and leave little Quigley-bits about.

"Take me then." Too old, too tired, too weak to stand up, Quigley pushes himself forward and crawls toward the light. He manages to pull himself up on his knees and hold his head high. The light expandes, and he holds shaking hands up to touch it. It presses outward, surrounds his hands, and grows to envelope his arms. He expects it to be at least warm, but it chills him and invades his bone like a creeping poison.

It is said that you always hurt the ones you love the most.

The light encompasses him, fills him, surrounds him, and draws him into its source. He falls into it, and comes to rest at the foot of a great tapestry that stretches into nothingness. He closes his eyes, and sleeps. He is still not at peace, still haunted, but at least how steeled by a purpose to rectify damages done, and to assure that his destiny will not be known by another innocent.

When the Mirror of Rebounds was found in Dinsmore by the young father-to-be of Severus the Elder, it was believed that Quigley, the plague of the Snape family, was dead. It was generally felt that this was good riddance to bad rubbish.

The body was never found.

He is not dead, nor ever would be. His life is preserved by an artifact that has known existence since the days of the druids. He has traded peace and obliteration in death for the honor that he has lost, for the family that has never accepted him.

One day, a ghost of a child came to him, lost from his own family, unable to move on, trapped and forlorn. He carried his head in his arms, which cried tears of blood.

"Here," Quigley said, "you may sit with me. We'll keep each other company, although I admit I am poor company at best."

"I want my brother," little Jonathan said. "I want James."

Quigley's face fell. "I'm trying to help and I'm botching it terribly, aren't I?"

The accusation in little Jonathon's flat, dead eyes said it all.

Yes, he is weak. Yes, he is naïve. Yes, he is stupid; that is why he accepted such a bargain. He is also alone, and in two hundred years there will be not a person living who would know what he sacraficed - no. To sacrafice something is to actually have it to give up. He hadn't anything to sacrafice . . .

He would be alive to the end of the Universe, which will come eventually, for he can see the end. It will not come in a thousand lifetimes, perhaps not even ten thousand, but it is there. The death of the Universe is slow but ever does it make progress. He has stayed a much quicker death and helped an innocent at the cost of many thousand years of torment.

The Mirror of Rebounds still exists, still besieges him, and so he will never find peace until there is no more future, no more possibilities.

Alone beneath a great tapestry that he had helped repair, Quigley Snape cries for himself.

After all, no one else will spare a tear on his behalf.