Order Only: Private message to Draco

[alt_severus]

Are you well, or were you distracted by your housemates? I was expecting you sometime today.

Comments

[alt_draco]

Right, I realise that. I apologise for not letting you know that I wouldn't make it.

[alt_draco]

Do you really think this will work? I want it to. I need it to work. The great majority of the time I am absolutely sure that I can do this, but then something will happen - something that should really be small, insignificant - and then the cracks appear.

I need to figure out how to make that not happen anymore.

[alt_severus]

I am not a sentimental man, and any amount of fawning reassurances I could produce would not only ring false in your ears but create more doubt than encouragement. However, when your worst fears threaten to overpower your mental disciplines, consider this fact, which you may not yet have consciously apprehended: I would not entrust my own safety and ability to remain at liberty to your self-discipline, did I not believe that you were wholly capable of rising to this challenge.

I say this not to add more weight to the burden you have already shouldered, nor to increase your already-too-visceral knowledge of the stakes for which you have chosen to play, but because — after the work we have done together, and the truths of mine of which we have not spoken that you have seen in passing — you will, I trust, recognise the amount of confidence this bespeaks. In all our time together, I have seen nothing to suggest that confidence is misplaced — and you may be certain I have been looking.

It is possible you may never free yourself of those moments of doubt and fear. Indeed, those fears are one of the means by which one might measure your suitability for the purpose: only a fool or a madman could cling to blithe confidence in such straits, knowing what you know. But despite those doubts, your progress is quite satisfactory.

In reading the content of your first reply I was poised to award you full marks for obfuscation and misdirection. I am pleased you chose to elabourate. Having disclaimed sentiment, I will say this: of all the hard things you have chosen to dedicate yourself to, I am well aware that in many ways the most difficult is allowing yourself to acknowledge, much less allowing me to see, these moments of vulnerability. Contrary to your fears, their existence does not make you weak. They are what has kept you from becoming, and will keep you from losing yourself to, the monster you have always feared.

See me when you are free today; we may restrict ourselves to contemplation of less fraught manoeuvrings should you wish an afternoon less encumbered, but I do not like the prospect of leaving you alone with such thoughts. For all that you are the one bearing the standard of this gambit, you are not alone.

[alt_draco]

I don't need or want reassurance - what I need is help. But I realise you can't help me unless you know exactly what it is that keeps surfacing, keeps making me question my readiness.

I warn you, though - it's stupid. It's so, so daft and stupid.

[alt_severus]

By now you have seen enough of my secrets to know I have no room to judge. Not without being a hypocrite — something I find exceptionally distasteful.

[alt_draco]

Right, but it doesn't make it any less daft and stupid.

I should be free in a few hours; I'll find you then.

[alt_severus]

If it is lingering with you this firmly, it is likely neither daft nor stupid, no matter how trivial you believe others might find it.

And even if it is, you may call upon whatever help is within my power to give; you are owed that much, at least.