Forbidden Fantasies (Darkest Desire Book 2)

20. Questionable Intentions

Arg.... karma's a bitch. Let me tell ya.... moving ain't fun. Surely not when you have two left feet and are clumsy as hell. I've sustained physical injuries (none serious, I might add) beyond even my furthest expectation and can now say with a deadly certainty that I was never meant to be a handy-man. Nah-ah. I mean I can fix a light-socket, paint a wall, assemble a closet... but boy do I get hurt. And even after all the moving I've found that my schoolwork doesn't allow me much time for writing. And I don't want to put te story on hold, but the updates will be slow and irregular. For this, I apologize.

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Realization of what had happened in the dungeons didn't settle in until the next day. After Minerva had left, I somehow managed to make my way to the Gryffindor Common Room. I say somehow because I don't remember a single thing of it. My movements were mechanical, automatic, my mind a thousand miles away.

Well, that last part wasn't exactly true. My mind was indeed far gone, but more closely than a thousand miles. More specifically, seven floors down to the ground level, another level down to the dungeons, and then pertaining a certain Potions Master's private chambers......

Had I really kissed Severus? More importantly, had he kissed me? Was this another reaction I forced him into? Eliciting another forced response? Or was this real? Genuine?

A part of me understood the need for me to not over-think and over-analyze this. But I also knew myself, and I wouldn't be able to stop myself from thinking about this situation I'd gotten myself into. Severus Snape was, after all, a very complicated man.

And I'd just barely scraped the surface when it came to this dark, menacing man that threatened my very sanity. After all, he owned my heart and soul. It was difficult to think of him as the man I loved, and yet it felt wrong to think of him as anything else. Just like everything else in my life, he was complicated, complex and difficult. Now it was time to analyze what I knew, and make a true assessment of the situation at hand.

Severus Snape was a lonely man, shaped by his turbulent childhood and upbringing. His (often violent) interactions with his family, specially his abusive father and neglecting mother, as a child, and the following years of education riddled with classmates that ridiculed and scorned him, had stunted his social interactions, and sadly had limited his ability to form relationships with others. There would have been no whispered confidences, no secrets shared, no shoulder offered to cry on from his part-except maybe when it came to Lily Evans. And therein lay the danger. She had been his first inkling to what a co-equal relationship could be like, besides the love and affection his mother might have occasionally shown him. After being denied the endearments of the people you love and care about, after failing to receive the affection and care of those surrounding you in your personal life, he must have wanted these things-badly. Yearned for them- in fact- but destined to be the observer, the outsider instead. He must be so isolated, so lonely, leading a tortured existence in which everyone thinks the worst of him and he's expected to play the part and go along with it.

Again my subconscious argued against the image of a martyr that was starting to form inside my mind at this train of thought.

Severus was no hero. No martyr who was sacrificing his happiness for the greater good. This wasn't some moral high-ground he took in which everything would turn out to be good and gracious in the end.

No.

Analyzing Severus' life, I came to realize that his was probably one of the best examples of what NOT to do when life hands you a bottom deck.