For want of a nail
I have been looking back, not in joy, but in sorrow. From childhood on, I can not honestly say that any male has looked upon me with uncomplicated affection, save for a couple of dogs and a cat.
As the first-born, conceived before and thereby prompting the wedding and massive life changes of adulthood, I presented my father with a lot of uncomfortable truths, which he later perhaps reconciled to, but I still wasn't what one would call the apple of his eye, the "Daddy's girl", though both of us tried.
My one grandfather (the other dead before anything) did consider me with affection, to make up for the way he treated his daughter, perhaps...he is long gone, though, and our lives diverged way back in '69, 30 years before his death. It helped to have known his affection, but not enough.
And as for my generation of men, the less said, the better.
That is perhaps why the character of Severus Snape held such a strange fascination. Whenever his Author wasn't trying to portray him as the villain with her contrived speeches and inexplicable actions, his open wound of a heart showed through the obscurity that veiled him. This was a man who had loved, and lost, and never even gotten to first base. Somehow, by virtue of his isolation and lack of an orbit, a path to the future, he was a solitary man, by fate and by choice.
I do not believe he had enough time for any but the smallest of crimes. From 18 to 21, and probably repenting of his foolishness of enslaving himself from the first moment...and how much trouble could he get into then? After he was accepted to spy, he had to refrain from any further crime anyway, and would be excused from Death Eater duties almost entirely.
With his heart crushed, what hostage was left to blackmail him? It is no wonder that Voldemort never really trusted him, and in the end, suspected that Snape was playing him for a fool over the ownership of the Death Stick. Yet in that, Snape was protecting Draco, just as he had protected Potter, but with far more warmth and affection, I expect.
As the first-born, conceived before and thereby prompting the wedding and massive life changes of adulthood, I presented my father with a lot of uncomfortable truths, which he later perhaps reconciled to, but I still wasn't what one would call the apple of his eye, the "Daddy's girl", though both of us tried.
My one grandfather (the other dead before anything) did consider me with affection, to make up for the way he treated his daughter, perhaps...he is long gone, though, and our lives diverged way back in '69, 30 years before his death. It helped to have known his affection, but not enough.
And as for my generation of men, the less said, the better.
That is perhaps why the character of Severus Snape held such a strange fascination. Whenever his Author wasn't trying to portray him as the villain with her contrived speeches and inexplicable actions, his open wound of a heart showed through the obscurity that veiled him. This was a man who had loved, and lost, and never even gotten to first base. Somehow, by virtue of his isolation and lack of an orbit, a path to the future, he was a solitary man, by fate and by choice.
I do not believe he had enough time for any but the smallest of crimes. From 18 to 21, and probably repenting of his foolishness of enslaving himself from the first moment...and how much trouble could he get into then? After he was accepted to spy, he had to refrain from any further crime anyway, and would be excused from Death Eater duties almost entirely.
With his heart crushed, what hostage was left to blackmail him? It is no wonder that Voldemort never really trusted him, and in the end, suspected that Snape was playing him for a fool over the ownership of the Death Stick. Yet in that, Snape was protecting Draco, just as he had protected Potter, but with far more warmth and affection, I expect.