Snape: the Riddle... (LONG)

[severelysigune]

No: HPFGUIDX 136048

<snippity snip snip, bye bye Cissy...> 

Sigune previously:
<snip>  
< < Snape does some quick thinking and sees that there are two 
options. 

1) He openly declares his allegiance to Dumbledore. This means that 
he has to put up a fight against four skilled Death Eaters plus 
Draco. Assuming that he can defeat them, 
- Draco's mission fails and the brat is killed by the Dark Lord in 
punishment.
- Snape himself dies too, because he has failed to honour his 
Unbreakable Vow.
- There is no chance of saving Dumbledore, who is too far gone to 
begin with, and who is going to heal him if Snape is dead?

Result: the Order is one leader and one spy short and a young life is 
destroyed in a pointless battle. But at least Harry will be convinced 
that Snape, God rest his soul, was on the side of the angels after 
all.

2) He kills Dumbledore. This means that
- He saves Draco's life, because the mission has been successful 
even if not carried out by Draco and the Dark Lord cannot be all that 
displeased. On top of that, Draco isn't a murderer at sixteen.
- He saves his own life because he honours his Vow.
- He extremely convincingly maintains his cover as a spy.

Result: By sacrificing the already lost life of a dying 150-year-
old wizard, he saves a sixteen-year-old (buying him time to think 
things over), himself, and safeguards one of the Order's most 
significant pawns in the coming confrontation with the Dark Lord. 
Drawback is that nobody trusts him anymore; but judging by people's 
reactions, nobody except Dumbledore and Hagrid did trust him to begin 
with. <<


Marianne:
> I think the one thing that bothers me with the scenario is that 
> Snape has to have realized that it would eventually come down to 
> someone dying.  Do you think he was trying throughout the year to 
> somehow come up with a counter-plan that would keep the 3 of them 
> alive (Snape, Draco, DD)? Or are you saying that Snape knew 
> eventually he'd be faced with a horrible situation and that then 
> he'd make what he considered the best choice at the time?

Sigune again:
The trouble with this kind of speculation is that we don't know quite 
enough of the magical specifics in order to give a really good 
answer, I think. My first thought was: why doesn't Dumbledore 
dissolve that Unbreakable nuisance? But if it truly is *unbreakable* 
then even a wizard of Dumbledore's stature couldn't remove it. It 
also means that as soon as Snape says yes to the third clause, he 
will at some point in the future have to choose between his own life 
and Dumbledore's - *if Draco fails*.

Snape must have known that sooner or later he'd find himself in the 
circumstance where he has to choose to either obey or disobey his 
Vow, to kill Dumbledore or be killed. The third clause only really 
kicks in when he arrives on the battlement where the scene for the 
murder is set: Draco is facing an unarmed Dumbledore and he doesn't 
get himself to do the dirty deed. If Snape so much as turns around 
and walks away, he is a dead man. He must either kill or die.
Coming to think of it, there is one option I didn't mention before: 
he could egg Draco on to do the killing yet. He doesn't. 

My guess is that yes, Snape must have been desperately seeking a way 
around the Vow, only to realise that there really was none (- to me, 
that is the meaning of the argument in the forest). What we see Snape 
do is 1) try to hamper the mission without touching Draco, by giving 
Crabbe and Goyle detention; 2) trying to worm the particulars of the 
plan out of Draco in order to report them to Dumbledore. That covers 
about all the wriggling space he has. It also shows that this early, 
he has already made one choice: if it's up to him, Draco will fail. 
That alone is already proof of the fact that he isn't "teh ebil", to 
use what is apparently a fashionable term. Only Voldemort has no 
qualms at the thought of making a sixteen-year-old into a murderer.


<snip Sigune> 

Marianne: 
> And that's been my interpretation of DD's words - that he believed, 
at least for a moment, that he had been wrong about Snape. Maybe 
there was some Legilimens going on between the two, as some have 
theorized, and DD was then able to see the situation Snape had been 
in all year and quite possibly recognize that the best choice was 
for Snape to save Draco by killing DD. But, I wonder, if that was 
indeed the case, if there was not some residual thought in DD's 
brain of "Severus, if only you had trusted me enough to tell me the 
whole story of the Unbreakable Vow..." <

Sigune:
No matter how you read it, it's a truly horrible moment.
I hadn't allowed for Legilimency in my original post, which is 
probably a mistake. That said, I'd like to know who was reading and 
who was being read...