Chapter Text
The first time he glimpsed them, he thought they were a trick of the light.
In the light of the Patronus, the rivulets of silver looked almost surreally bright on the naked skin.
Or maybe he had finally lost his mind, the streaks merely a superimposition of images he might have never — should have never — witnessed in the first place.
Why did that fool just tear off his clothes, without so much as a sweep across his surroundings?
They had to be, he told himself — if he didn't choke the thought. Or at least, he tried to stifle it, only for the image to resurface without fail, as stubborn as its subject; a subject he had no business thinking of the way he did.
He would have drowned himself without a wink of hesitation if he wouldn't have been hit by a spell in his back first — idiot!
Good, he thought, anger was good. Anger, he could feed into his mental defenses without suspicion; unlike worry.
And what if the aftereffects of the icy water; or the soullessness of the magic (even felt from across the clearing) were still strangling him, ravaging his body? There would be nothing left by the time it was done, slight as he was.
He couldn't — no.
Unimaginable that there would be nothing left.
And yet, was that not what he would put him up to? To become a lamb for slaughter?
How hypocritical of him to mourn the lack of meat on those bones. (Though at this point, given how he had lived his life, hypocrisy was the least of his concerns.)
He had had none left, skin pulled so taut against bones that it looked like it might rip apart at any given moment; no bulk of muscles bloating the skin which would have explained those streaks of silver, those tears flowing into one another and back apart —
But what did it matter in the face of the inevitable end?
What would these marks matter in comparison to the lightning bolt branded bright red into his forehead, sealing his prophesied doom?
It didn't.
Somehow, they did.
And yet, his thoughts kept circling back to that single moment, pulled into that glimpse as surely as a moth into the flame. It did not matter that he had torn his eyes away the moment his conscious thought realised just what he was looking at.
He had no business thinking about a seventeen-year-old's naked back.
The single moment kept insinuating that he would have understood, had he only not averted his gaze.
What would it mean, had the marks merely been a trick of the light? And more importantly, what if they had not been? What could have torn apart the skin across his shoulder blades lengthwise, again and again, if not the gain of body mass?
He must not look back on the memory — if he could still trust it at all, at this point; his mind could just as well have overwritten it with what he believed he had seen.
He had sullied himself enough — even if he did not choose to be a voyeur.
This was just one more thing he had no right to know. One more thing where the world would be better off, had he not known.
He had already destroyed Harry Potter's life.
It would just be one thing of many he would take to the grave.
(Only, Severus Snape didn't die.)