Imagine being twenty-one when an exhausting war that took three years of your life away from you ends.
Or rather, imagine you are eighteen when you finish school, with no family and the only friends you have all join this cult that you know you shouldn’t join, but you have no one else left and everyone is putting pressure to just choose. You join because you’re young and terrified and think that maybe, finally, you’ll belong somewhere. It’s stupid, but you know nothing of the world and the promises the leader preaches seem like they might not actually be so bad. A little extremist, but it’s better than them, and their judging stares and harsh whispers who never understood you, never even wanted you anyway. You don’t have any parents to tell you not to, no friends to give you a reason not to, and nothing else you really want in life. You’re just you, alone in a confusing new adult world.
So you take a step down a long, dark path that somewhere deep inside, you know you’ll regret one day.
Then somehow, it quickly turns into three years of seeing horrors you can barely handle, forcing yourself to grit your teeth and do things you normally never would without a husky voice whispering charismatically into your ear, hearing screams and using spells that make your hands tremble, every day fearing for your life and wondering when you’ll finally work up the courage to back away and run as fast as you can. You hesitate, flinch and linger, hovering on a line and pretending like you’re not because weakness will only bring you pain.
Because even if you can leave, even if you want to, nothing is promised. You might die as soon as you turn your back, you might be hunted for the rest of your days, you might become one of the glassy-eyed and lifeless faces with ‘traitor’ carved into your skin and blood pouring out of your mouth.
But your arm itches with a tattoo that stains your skin possessively, you don’t recognise your reflection in the mirror anymore, and you feel like you’ve sold your soul to the devil.
You stare there now, at your sunken eyes and sallow skin, hair hanging long and uncut in your face, bony shoulders thin from lack of food because you haven’t had an appetite for a while now.
You can’t help but wonder, is this really living?
You watch your chest rise and fall, erratic from constant anxiety, throat tight like you're suffocating, like there’s a hand always there wrapped tightly around your oesophagus.
You remain on the verge of leaving and being the coward they always said you were.
Now imagine being twenty-one when an exhausting war that took three years of your life away from you ends. Except, it’s not quite as simple as that, is it?
No, the end comes in sharp, uncomfortable shards.
It starts with the chill down your spine when you overhear something you’re not meant to hear. A long-estranged friend, the first and only true best friend you ever had, your soulmate, doomed to die.
You’re absolutely terrified, but suddenly everything clicks into place and you think more clearly than you have in years. This is why you’ve pushed through so long, you tell yourself. This is why you never left, you lie. Because now, finally, you can do something. Finally, your cowardice can pay off for something.
So you sneak away in the dead of night and crawl back to your old headmaster, the one person you know who has any hope of helping you. Helping her.
You’re twenty-one and an old man offers you a hand with twinkling eyes that still hold the same trust in them for you that they did three years ago.
You take that hand.
You betray everything you’ve been a part of for three, exhausting, soul-crushing years, and it’s the scariest thing you’ve ever done because you of all people know exactly the kind of person you’re working against now, all the while pretending that you’re not because that’s what the old man tells you to do. And you listen, because you’re on the line once more and your clouded brain can’t decide which side is more dangerous.
You’re only twenty-one. You can’t tell what part of the beliefs and knowledge you have of the world is fake, carefully constructed by the handsome politician you’d foolishly followed. You don’t know what good and bad really are anymore, but working with the old man makes memories of your soulmate flood back and you remember her saying that anyone who makes people suffer is a bad person.
You are a bad person.
But you don’t want to be anymore. You’re twenty-one when you finally figure out who you want to be. You want to be the person who can save the one you love.
And you try.
In the end, though, it’s all for nothing.
The war ends, sure, but your soulmate is dead. You were too late. You’ll never be the person you wanted to be.
Imagine being twenty-one when an exhausting war that took three years of your life away from you ends, and you feel like you’re collapsing in on yourself. While the world celebrates, you grieve and tremble and try to figure out how to live now.
It’s only been four years, but it feels like you’ve never known life outside of war.
You have even less people than you started with as all of your cult friends one by one are arrested or disappear and well, you didn’t start with many anyway. The whispers are worse now, too, and they’re accompanied by mistrustful looks because they know. Everything is out in the open now, everything except for that fateful half-year that ends up saving you now as the old man protects you from falling to the same fate as your old cult friends.
Defector, you become.
Traitor, your old friends hiss.
Coward, your inner demons hiss because you know better than anyone everything you did and didn’t do. Failure. Scum.
You have nightmares every night, haunted by memories and pain you can never quite escape because you don’t know how to heal healthily. You’re twenty-one and struggling under the weight of a grief you are unable to properly process, a trauma that snakes its way into your core and turns you into a trembling mess of a young man, never quite losing the sallow skin and eye bags, almost a living corpse full of nothing but regret.
That is when the old man approaches you with another twinkle, another hand, and a decade-long plan.
You feel exhausted before you even start. You want nothing more than to fade into nothingness and give into oblivion. The world hates you and you hate yourself.
But you take the hand once more because a decade is nothing compared to the rock of grief and regret that sits heavy on your back.
It’s a twisted path, filled with doubtful turns and dark corners, and it most certainly ends in your demise, but you’ve long lost your chance to be the honourable saint-like hero. You don’t have any hope of being that person anymore.
You’re starting adulthood and you’ve already made a lifetime of mistakes. Someone offers you a job and a new start, and you take it because you have nothing left to live for.
This is the start of Severus Snape.