[prompt] shrapnel is shrapnel and at the end of the day i am alone with the things i have done

[apostatised]

Master Snape posed the notion: a matter of discerning what one man did so hateful that not even hell would take him off the hands of the world.

In a solitary moment, seeing to it that his tower is precisely as he would have it - he catches himself modelling it somewhat after dim memories of the Preceptor's study and moves the desk a third time - it catches him and he laughs, leaning his hands on the windowsill. It's something that should weigh on him - something that should worry him. Keep him up nights. Distract him.

It comes in passing, and it'd weigh if it weren't so damned obvious. If it weren't such a simple question. Martel, better than anyone, knows the full extent of what he did. Even those left behind cursing his name and gladdened by his death can't know the whole and plain truth - there are days he acknowledges that nobody can, not any more. Perhaps not even him. It doesn't matter; he doesn't debate with himself or with anyone else what it was that sealed his fate.

When asked for a good reason not to strike him down again, he doesn't have one and in a way - in a strange and likely unhealthy way - in a way it's freeing. This freedom of knowledge; this freedom of acknowledgement. Now there are no chains left, none not of his own making. (Lord Martel of Valdis; lord, master, teacher, would be husband and father; he has never found tying himself to something a challenge.) From the tower window he can survey much of the castle, the grounds spreading out that soon he'll have thoroughly hidden from prying eyes and enemies (an enemy; a brother) that like as not will never come.

There is one thing, though.

Some days he wakes up wishing it were Kurik given this in his place.

"My Lord?"

The title grates (and does not grate) the same way it has every other time he's been addressed this way in recent months; he turns away from the window and his introspection.


prompt: I wake up some mornings hating me too. Rahm Emanuel quote [5:2]
word count: 350