November 2002
Why Harry loves Severus.
Even now, after seventeen years, people still ask me why. Why, of everyone sexy, young, or beautiful, did I instead choose you?
Most times I shrug, say something like, "Love is blind," and that's that. It's none of their business, after all. Besides, I know that if you heard me, you'd snort, flicker your eyes over my scar, and say, "Indeed," in your most scathing tone: we both know that our love is anything but blind.
The more persistent ones will run down the laundry list of your deficits -- your nose, your past, your hair and teeth, your overall prickishness -- as if to say, "Harry, you idiot, can't you see you deserve better? Can't you see that you've got the short end of the stick?"
The short end? If only they knew!
At that point, depending upon my mood, I either counter with my own list of favored attributes: your voice, your hands, your uncanny ability to make me come hard enough to see stars. Or, I toy meaningfully with my wand and tell them, in multi-syllabic, knife-edged, Snape-like prose, to fuck the hell off. Either way will bring the conversation to a quick, satisfying close.
Unless of course, the exchange happens to be with Sirius Black.
All this time and he still doesn't get it. Although, to be fair, I've never really tried to explain it to him. Neither of us have.
He used to be more blatant. "I don't get it, Harry," he'd yell. "Five billion people on the planet and you had to pick Snape? How can you do this to me? I thought you hated the greasy, hook-nosed bastard, and anyway, when the hell did you turn gay?"
Thankfully, he's mellowed out over the years, Remus's influence, no doubt. Now, he mostly just winks and slips me pictures, phone numbers, floo addresses of the latest young witch -- or wizard, now that he's gotten his mind round the 'gay thing' -- who he wants me to meet.
He's hopeless when it comes to you, Severus. Of course, you aren't any better about him. Pig-headed idiots, the both of you.
To be honest, I don't want to have to explain. I want the fact that you are my choice to be enough for him, for everyone. It's certainly enough for our friends, confused and disbelieving though they were when we began. Hermione squawked, Ron gawked, Hooch and Minerva seemed unsettled, and Draco appeared vaguely jealous, but they all came around in the end. Albus just smiled serenely, unsurprised; I have my suspicions about him.
At first, I myself didn't know exactly why. You were you, I wanted you, and for some reason, you also wanted me. The rest was, as Hermione would say, Q.E.D. Well, maybe not easily done, but after the arguments, the hex-fests, and the rounds of stunning make-up sex, it was done nonetheless. Besides, how do you describe the whys of attraction, of falling in love anyway?
Then, one day, as I packed up my flat -- the weekend that we moved in together -- I found the box. White cardboard, battered and scuffed, quite the worse for wear, mashed beneath a pile of old Quidditch gear. I held my breath, opened it, and remembered. In that moment, I knew precisely why, for the very first time.
###
It used to be that everything of mine started out as his, Dudley's.
His toy soldier, with one arm missing. His broken-spined books. His torn, or stained, or threadbare clothes. What little that came to me always came second-hand.
Uncle Vernon would say: "Here boy, Dudley doesn't want this," and, whatever it was I could have...if.
If Dudley didn't notice I had it.
If no one knew that I wanted it.
If I hid it well enough.
If it was broken, damaged just enough that Dudley wouldn't ever want it back.
All in all, a very fine line, that.
When I was very young, on special days like Christmas and birthdays, I'd wait, hoping that this time -- this bloody time -- I would open up a cheerily wrapped box and in it I would find something new. A something sealed in plastic, straight from the factory, perhaps. A something that was whole and unfaded, no scratches or pieces gone. But only rarely was there a box for me, and never did it contain something new.
I may not be Hermione, but I'm not stupid. After a while, I learned to want what I could have: things forgotten, discarded, broken, or flawed. A magazine left on the front stoop, soggy from last night's rain. A cigar box with one corner crushed, lying beneath leaves of limp spinach in the trash. A blue-green marble dropped from too high a height and cracked. A glow-in-the-dark rubber ball, shaped like the moon with craters, that stubbornly failed to glow no matter how long I left it sitting in the sun.
In time, I became a connoisseur, one might say, of damaged goods. A bit like Albus, I sometimes think, when I'm in a self-pitying mood.
It started out as lies that I told myself. The kind that a child creates to give shape to a world with no hope. The slippery truths that a freak tells himself when he wants to feel less freakish, I suppose.
His arm is gone because he battled a dragon. Ten other men died. He's the only one who lived.
This way, Aunt Petunia can't hit me if I get grass stains, since they're already there.
So what that pages are missing. Now I can make up my own ending.
Lies, yes, but ones that widened the world for me, that sharpened my eye. Once the sting of always being less had worn off, I came to appreciate the beauty of the flawed things I acquired. The tea-stain on my shirt was the exact shape of Africa, for instance. I could spend all day, as I cleaned or cooked or hid, imagining cheetahs and gazelles running wild across my ribs. The crack bisected the blue-green marble just like the horizon split sky from sea, and I sailed a million ships across those glassy waves. Every crack and chip and stain told a story, made that object very much more rather than less to me.
Perhaps it takes a certain kind of eye to see past the obvious, like it does to find the snitch. Then again, maybe it's just a case of like calling to like. As time and again, you called to me; we called to each other.
It may be that both the eye and the call are one and the same.
Some nights, after dinner and chores, I would sit in the dark in my locked cupboard. I'd open my box, assemble my things on the blanket by touch, and run my fingers over jagged edges, the spots where missing bits would go. I'd memorize every pit and gouge, each hair-line fracture and scar that made this object or that somehow unworthy for everyone else but me. I'd gather those objects up, flaws and all, and whisper "Mine, mine, mine!", as if the words of an ungrateful freak would somehow make them more. As if that motley collection of flaws could somehow soothe away the ache behind my heart.
People aren't things, not exactly, but similar rules apply. Once the novelty wears off, what is left? We are always ever one chip, one scratch, one hidden or obvious flaw away from being too old or worn or otherwise useless.
I remember too well the night that Hagrid led me from my old world into one both strange and thick with possibility. In a single instant, I was made new. The scar that had branded me a freak for so long was suddenly a designer label, the mark of a distinguished pedigree. And every street I walked in Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley, every store I entered, people knew me as someone else, someone better than I had ever guessed I could be.
I hadn't known such magic was possible!
But you were never fooled, Severus, not once. "Mr. Potter. Our new...celebrity," you drawled on my very first day of class, cutting straight through the hype to the misfit lurking below. Unfair, I thought, I never asked to be famous, I just wanted to belong. But I didn't protest. You would have laughed. And since all that I had known of the world 'til then was injustice, what was a bit more, really?
Of course, it wasn't very long before most of the sheen wore off on its own, what with Parseltongue, Rita Skeeter, Cedric's death, and the rest. In time, once again I became the cracked marble, the one-armed soldier lying in the cigar box, forgotten and alone. Still, I hoped that my patina could be renewed, as it had been once before.
Nevertheless, that year, and the six years thereafter, you tried to convince me that the lessons I had learned in my cupboard applied perfectly to people as well as things: that new always becomes old. That perfection is a deadly illusion. That the marks and flaws we bear, our bitterness, our desolation, our passion and loyalty, our raw, unedited history, these are what make us more to the people we love, who love us.
I hated you for it, Severus, and my hatred blinded me. It would be years until I could see the beauty in your cruelty and could take pleasure in your lean, elegant malevolence. And though I never mistook others' illusions for my own reflection, I believed that, one day, if I put my mind to it, my self and their self might match.
When I left school, I was certain I had left you behind. No more Snape, I thought, no more greasy, slimy, hateful bastard, thank god. I stepped out into the world, a fully trained wizard, a war hero, all my obvious cracks patched, my smudges buffed away, with only good things ahead of me.
Voldemort was dead but there was still plenty of work to be done. I was at loose ends, the Ministry was insistent, and so I trained as an Auror. Twelve months later, I was released into the field to roust the last of the Death Eaters.
Afterwards, for too many years, I worked hard -- no job was too dangerous for Potter and his team! -- and I partied harder. I kept the tabloids rolling in galleons. Young, old, witches, or Muggles, blonde, brunette, or red-head, I didn't care. I was looking for...something but I didn't know what.
But the women knew exactly what they wanted. And despite the hair cut, and the stylish clothes, despite the Order of Merlin, the glamorous job, the list of so-called heroic deeds, despite all that, it never took Cheryl, or Beth, or Amy, or Ann, or any of them very long to discover that, underneath it all, I was still the scrawny freak in broken glasses and second-hand clothes who lived in the cupboard beneath the stairs.
At which point they would cross me off their to-do list, and move on.
Each time, I would shrug, set my jaw, and keep searching, more out of habit, I think, than anything else. Then one day, to my shock, I found it -- I found you.
A raid had gone to hell: more of them than of us, an excess of Muggle weapons, and eight students taken as hostages. Someone had to make the tough call; I decided it might as well be me.
I was shot twice, hit with a pipe, hexed six ways from Sunday, then tossed off the end of a pier. In December.
All the kids made it though, unharmed.
So I lay there, on my back, in a narrow bed in hospital, in a room stuffed with flowers and candy and obnoxious singing get-well-soon cards, on Christmas Eve. I was drugged to the teeth, my eyes still watered a bit from pain, and Sirius and Ron droned on and on, giving a play-by-play account of the last raid to Remus, Hermione, Ginny, and Colin.
Suddenly, the door swung open and you stalked into the room, with your usual flair. You loomed for a bit, sneered around at everyone, and then, you threw them all out!
To this day, I don't know how you did it. What you said remains a blur, though I can recall your dark, cutting tones and the cold fury in your eyes. Whatever it was that you said sent them slinking out the room like whipped dogs; except for Ginny, who was eight months pregnant and sort of waddled.
When the door was closed and the room empty but for us, you draped your snow-flecked cloak over the chair, sat down on the edge of the bed, and took my hand. I could smell your cologne. The contact was electric.
"Tell me, Potter," you said bluntly. "How long have you wanted to die?"
My brain froze and my heart pounded unsteadily. "I don't want to die," I stammered through the spell that kept my broken jaw immobile. "I'm just trying to..." To what? I didn't know; that was the crux of the matter. All at once, my chest hurt and I was very exhausted.
Then, you looked past the lies, past the scar, saw straight through to me and you didn't turn away. "You're trying to be something you're not," you said, with that terrifying fierceness I'd only seen from you during battle. "Quit playing the hero, Potter, and just be yourself."
Something shattered then, beneath my broken ribs. Perhaps it was my pride. "What if I'm not enough?" I choked out, looking down at our clasped hands. They were blurry, despite the charm to correct my vision.
You grasped my chin and tilted my head to meet your eyes; I felt the tears spill. "Harry," you said very softly. "You will always be enough for the people in your life who matter."
I inhaled and it was like breathing broken glass. Then I blinked, my vision cleared, and suddenly, the pain in my chest was supplanted by a tremendous warmth. All at once, I could see -- everything. I saw your face -- sharp, impatient, unapologetic, just like your life. I saw your burning eyes ignite, then incinerate, twenty-seven years of my hopeless wishes. I saw the lank, dark hair caress your lined cheek, like crow wings against the moon. I saw our clasped hands, pale and paler, against the morning blue of the coverlet. I saw us both, years into the future, lying side-by-side, patched and worn, missing a few pieces, mended here and there, with dried-up and crispy glue.
"How do you know?" I asked, even though by then I had a dawning suspicion.
You smiled, perhaps the first genuine smile of yours I'd ever seen, you traced my scar with your finger tips, then said, "I just do."
###
And that's why, Severus. As if you didn't already know.
It's why I quit the Ministry the very next day. Why I moved from London to Hogsmeade. Why every year I make an anonymous donation to St. Mungo's. Why I kissed you on the steps of Gringotts the day we opened our joint account, breaking female hearts across the country and boosting the Daily Prophet to a record circulation.
It's why I love you.
Would Sirius understand if I told him, do you think? Would anyone?
You were alone far longer than I: could anyone else see the man that I do when you take my hand and turn to me?
Could someone else trace your wrinkles, your scars, and see only the map of an ever-changing, beloved territory both familiar and mysterious by turns? Could they run their fingers down the powerful leanness of your ribs, your belly, your thighs, like a herd of antelope running free over the plains? Could their kisses soothe the faint outline of the skull on your forearm, like rain over parched earth?
Could they love the murderer as well as the man, like you love both the hero and the freak from beneath the stairs?
Could they?
No.
Our love is not blind, Severus, not at all. But perhaps it's easier if the rest of the world believes that it is.
Finis.
Note: Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete; it is a beauty of things modest and humble; it is a beauty of things unconventional.