Albus Severus Potter (bp_albusseverus) wrote in breaking_point, @ 2010-04-29 03:06:00 |
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Entry tags: | *complete, 2025 04, character: albus potter, character: severus snape |
RP: Al, Snape
Who: Al Potter, Severus Snape
Where: Hogwarts, Severus' rooms
When: April 29, 2025
Rating/Warnings:
Summary: Al takes time to read
When Al attended his former therapist's funeral on April 2, 2025, he brought an umbrella, a notepad, and two books which now lacked an owner. Al was a firm believer that social conventions dictating the timely return of borrowed items were not to be interrupted by the untimely cases of death, and so he braved the crowds and tolerated the queue to hand them to Ben.
Ben told Al to keep them and Al was not surprised by that as much as the later, follow-up offer: first to borrow and then to keep more, much more than merely two borrowed books. As a result of such an offer, a small personal library's worth of content on the topics of Muggle psychology quietly made its way into Al's collection and into its newly selected places amid Severus' shelves of grimoires, alchemical manuals, and poison references.
Thankfully, not all of the acquired titles were by Freud, and it is to the parts which were not Freudian, that Al looked up to with most hope in order to reassure himself of an important notion: of how misplaced and uneducated his Mother's definition of 'insane' (correction, 'mentally challenged') was.
Facts calmed Al down. Therefore reading of doctors attempting to cure male homosexuality by castration or female hysteria by inducing orgasm, of family members desperate enough to be convinced by charlatans into willing abuse of the very people they wanted to help most, of practitioners strapping the patients down for torture by the electrical charge, of physicians severing frontal lobes and mangling minds in search for a hypothetical cure, somehow made the sting of his mother's words dull in comparison. It put 'insane' in perspective, it made this particular instance of human ignorance seem infinitesimally less tragic and less relevant on the global scale.
Of course there were other things in these new books of Al's, better things: researchers and scholars and practitioners who relied on facts, who challenged prior notions and definitions, who applied science and information to learn new ideas and wrote them down for others read. Al looked to them for inspiration and relied on them for strength.
He was more surprised than anyone when he came across a particular fact on the pages of an encyclopedia reference which he considered worth reading. A fact which had the potential to turn his entire life upside down. A fact which shocked him by the most unexpected papercut sting and didn't stop there.
So strong the shock was, Al almost dropped the book.
Al was a creature of rational thought, and so he took such great care in polishing and reinforcing every decision in his life with facts and research to perfection. He took pride in whatever morsels of his own independence he could gain from life. He craved it like others craved family or wealth or fame. He never thought himself incapable of making a decision - he's made so many of them since he was a child - but that is precisely what the pages of the book were telling him now.
Mental condition... Developmental disability... a disorder. A syndrome.
Al's eyes focused on the page. It was staring him right in the face, that fact. A condition with listing of symptoms and a name, which, his logic told him would have most likely matched his therapist's diagnosis.
Significant difficulties in social interaction... restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviour and interests... limited empathy... clumsiness... limited empathy... atypical language usage... limited empathy...
Incurable.
Al's breath went out of him. The air seemed too heavy to breathe it back in. For a brief second, he was a child once more: struggling to perfect his handwriting, to comprehend an idiom, to sip his tea, only now he didn't have the unwavering belief of his own capability to overcome anything by merely trying it over and over again.
What was the point if he was incapable of achieving what he most wanted?
Fly! he thought. Al's thoughts could still fly, faster and more complex. But would that be enough?
Al opened the book with the full intention to improve his own mind, but what he had read, left his fingers clenching at the cover, left him questioning and then robbed him of any questions at all, instead replaced with the undeniable fact.
Mum was right. I'm mental.
Beyond the consideration of worst-case scenarios and the possibility of being declared incompetent to function, to think, to cast spells, to make decisions, to live an independent life, to marry Severus, there was another nagging question on the back of his head which led him to wonder:
Am I even capable of love? It's not something I can ever prove.
The minutes were passing so slow and it was only after awhile that Al forced his hands to unclench from the book's cover.
He summoned the strength to draw in another breath, enough to call across the room. "Severus. Look at this."