Doubling his bets? Albus's silence about Severus's sacrifices

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

Condwiramurs, you asked last week (before embarking on your series):
“Why not tell Severus the reason for giving him both of these otherwise insanely-conflicting and emotionally devastating orders?”

Here, finally are a couple of possible answers.



One, we don't know for sure that Dumbledore didn't.  Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, after all, and we saw only those of Sev’s memories that Harry did.

Albus might have explained the "doubled sacrifice" theory to Severus at another time, and Severus chose not to show that memory to Harry.  Either for lack of time, self-effacement, or on the reasonable grounds that the suggestion that Harry (or Dumbledore's) self-sacrifice needed to be improved upon would NOT find a willing audience in Mr. Potter.  Nor would it immediately seem credible to the boy that Severus should care so intensely about Harry's death (er—care as in “suffer”, I mean; Harry might well expect Snape to care as in “rejoice”…) that being responsible for that death could represent a major sacrifice on Snape’s part.

"Dumbledore knew that your giving yourself up to die would be grossly inadequate to save the world; your sacrifice had to be improved upon by adding my personal anguish in sending you to your death."

Yeah, that would go over well with Harry.

Suppose Twinkles, even before the cursed ring incident, had already been thinking about whether it might be possible to push off onto Severus the task of, er, explaining things to Harry.  It's the kind of job Albus would prefer to avoid, and if he could persuade himself that it would be a greater sacrifice to Severus than to himself that would be a good excuse for palming off the dirty work.  (Of course, it would be—it was—a greater sacrifice for Severus; the question is whether Albus would admit his impaired emotional capacity to himself, or not recognize that this argument would acknowledge it.)

Had Albus been toying with the idea anyway, then his impending death well before Harry's scheduled suicide suddenly gave him the perfect excuse for implementing it.  That could be why he was so chipper at the prospect—hey, look, I'm legitimately off the hook for coming clean to Harry!  Whew!  Sorry, Severus, but I’m afraid I’ll just HAVE to bequeath that job to you.  No choice, now.  Hate it when that happens….

But had Albus previously been toying with the idea of using Severus as his messenger (as in, shoot the), he might have already considered the possibility that Severus might have to show Harry some memories to convince him.  It's not like Harry would have accepted Snape's word of honor even before sixth year.  So he’d have planned to offer palliatives, if at all, well after the scene Severus would have to show Harry.  After setting up Snape to become his killer, Albus would expect that Harry might demand to see both the memories: of Dumbledore telling Snape to kill him, and of Dumbledore explaining why Harry must surrender himself to Tom to be killed. So there must be nothing in either memory that Snape would need to excise to make it acceptable to the boy.

In that case Dumbledore would have had every reason to separate the explanation of the doubled sacrifice from both the request to kill him and from the order to send the boy to his death at the proper time.

So, just because Severus never showed Harry a memory of getting an explanation about "doubling the sacrifice," doesn't mean he never received one.

*

But... well, Albus.

Whose apparent method for keeping Severus in line was to keep the young man guilt-ridden, self-hating, and with absolutely no affirmations of his worth save the backhanded compliments Albus occasionally doled out.

Letting the young man know that, in Albus's opinion, Lily's sacrifice alone hadn't saved her son—HE had, by joining his great sacrifice to hers—well, that might go to Snape's head (if he credited it at all).  Make him think he was worth something after all. Might even, eventually, make him willing sometimes to trust his own judgment over Albus's wisdom....

"I want to join to Harry's courage in sacrificing himself, YOUR capacity for devotion PAST the utmost self-sacrifice" just isn't something you say to someone you're keeping emotionally subjugated.  I just don't see that working well.

Conversely, if Severus simply didn’t buy the idea that the two deaths were intended to generate sacrificial luck, and that his emotional devastation at what was asked of him was expected to add additional power to the two self-sacrifices, and if he knew that that was the true reason (or one of them) why Albus was demanding such “services” of him, he might try to wiggle out of one or both.

I mean, wouldn’t you?  “You want me to kill you BECAUSE I’d hate to do it, and you think that’ll bring Harry luck on the quest that you’ve assigned to him?!?  That’s just crazy!—with respect, headmaster.  No, if that’s your real reason for demanding I do something so abhorrent, I refuse.”

We don’t, after all, know what Severus actually knows about the Dark Arts.  All we know for certain is that the subject has not been formally taught at Hogwarts since Albus was in power.  The Dark Lord and the Death Eaters, then, are Sev’s most likely tutors—and Tom simply cannot grok the power of consenting self-sacrifice.  That’s just something that doesn’t register with him.  He does KNOW about it (Diary!Tom agreed, after being told so by Harry, that Lily’s dying to save her child would have been “a powerful counter-charm”), but Tom doesn’t understand or respect it, and so he wouldn’t teach anything about it to his followers.  (And indeed, I'd expect Severus to be as resistant as Harry to the idea that his sacrifice could have improved upon Lily's.)

(Oh, merciful goddess.  Tom's lack of understanding of the power of sacrifices.   “Flesh of the servant, willingly given, you will revive your master”—how much more powerful would that re-embodiment ritual have been if Tom had used someone—Barty or Bella, say—who actually would have been happy to mutilate hirself in his service?  Peter was “willing” to cut off his hand—willing in the sense of choosing that over being tortured to death by Tom—but his sacrifice was not voluntary in any meaningful sense.

(There was Tom, holding off on performing that ritual for MONTHS in order to use the blood of one specific “enemy” because he expected Harry’s to give his remade form extra power—but using Peter because he was convenient and disposable.  [The same reason, the same way, the Marauders always used Peter—oh, poor Peter.  Still, at the end Wormtail had his revenge on EVERYONE who belittled and underestimated him.  For what revenge is worth.]  Had Tom had the sense to hold out for a servant truly consentng, what would have been the result?  Can we perhaps trace some of revived!Tom’s inhuman appearance, overwhelmingly poor judgment, and bad luck, to his having tried to game that rebirthing ritual with an unwilling servant?   Because it simply never registered with him that Barty’s hand would have been more efficacious than Peter’s?  Or rather, that Barty’s devotion would make his offering more meaningful than Peter’s “I’m doing it because you’re forcing me, SLASH.”)


But—to address your central point.  Is it the case, or rather did our Twinkles believe it to be the case, that Telling All to Severus would make his sacrifice more efficacious because it would be fully consensual?

Because—we hypothesize that Dark magic responds to intent, yes, but also to emotion.

Perhaps it’s the case, or perhaps Dumbledore thought it was the case, or perhaps Dumbledore only convinced himself that it was the case, that in this situation there might be a tradeoff between emotional intensity and conscious intent and consent.

A primary effect of NOT telling, after all, was to make performing the tasks more difficult, emotionally.  For most people, knowing that one’s suffering is itself meaningful, accomplishes something of worth, makes it easier to bear.

Ignorance is not bliss.

And perhaps that’s precisely why Albus thought it better to keep Severus ignorant.

Not for his personal gratification, mind you.  Not because Albus was in any way like Tom, relishing causing his followers gratuitous pain. (Though every time I reread that scene at the end of PoA now, I disagree with Albus's self-assessment.)

But because Albus believed that Snape’s pain was more important than his conscious will, and that his sacrifice would be more powerful the more grief and guilt and anguish Severus felt.  And therefore, the less consolation Albus gave him in advance.

Same reason, really, why it was better not to tell Severus that Harry might survive.  (“Second verse, same as the first, a whole lot louder and a whole lot worse!”—song from my childhood.)

After all, Severus didn't originally intend to supercharge Lily's sacrifice by adding his own.  He didn't expect that outcome, or afterwards reflect complacently that his sacrificing his own urgent desire to save her had made a difference to her son's survival.

He simply did it.  He placed fulfilling her will first, ahead of his own selfish desire for her survival, and that was enough to double her sacrifice and give it the power to protect her son against impossible odds.  

So if Severus didn't have to understand the first time that his sacrificing someone he'd unfalteringly die to save made her sacrificial death more magically powerful, why should he need to understand it the second or third times?

So.  Maybe Dumbledore thought the luck conferred on the Horcrux-hunt by his death, and towards Tom's final vanquishing by Harry's, would be greater the less philosophical Snape could be about them.  Maybe he thought that the greater Severus's suffering, the greater the power added to the sacrifice.  So Albus was, he thought, sacrificing Severus’s conscious knowledge, his full assent, in order to increase Severus’s emotional pain.  The more devastated Severus felt, the better.

From the point of view of raising power from pain.

Indeed, maybe it was the case, or maybe Dumbledore thought was the case, that Snape's continued crushing grief and guilt over Lily's death helped to power the continuing protection on Lily’s son.  That Twinkles had a conscious, magical reason to try to keep Severus depressed—that he was drawing on that emotion for his shield-spell on Harry.  After all, if we hypothesize that Lily’s physical sacrifice was given greater power by Severus’s emotional one, so too must the “lingering protection in Harry’s veins” conferred by that doubled sacrifice.  So keep the protection alive by keeping Snape’s emotional wounds open and unhealed.

So now we have an actual reason for Albus to keep Severus in emotional subjection:  he was using him, in effect, as a magical power-source.  A battery.  Keeping Severus angst-ridden was just keeping him fully charged.

“You remember the shape and color of Lily Evans’s eyes, I am sure?”

That was preventative maintenance, really.

(Which raises another question—we saw in canon that depressed people—or at least, depressed women—could lose some or most of their personal magical power.  Where does it go?  In Merope’s case, maybe her grief and despair over Tom Senior’s failure to love her, her pouring all her remaining love and hope into Tom’s baby—baby Tom—caused an unconscious permanent prenatal transfer of power.  That could be both why Merope had no magical strength left to sustain her through her physically difficult childbirth, and why Tom was born so extraordinarily powerful.)

In fact, now that I think about all this, there might actually be a magical reason behind Albus’s whole Boy-Who-Lived nonsense.  Remember that when Albus instigated that schtick he’d already decided to rear Harry so as to induce the boy to suicide when he came of age.  So—how had Albus originally intended to stage-manage Harry’s sacrifice?  If a sacrificial death becomes more powerful the more emotion is felt over it, then the public self-sacrifice of a celebrity would be much more powerful than the suicide of the obscure son of a famous mother.

It’s just like the Year-King—before the youth may be sacrificed, he must first live for a time as the King, the focus of his community’s adulation and gratitude.  Not just in compensation (or bribe) to the youth—to build up the emotional power in advance, ready to be called upon at his predestined death.

So Albus set up the entire Wizarding community to shower baby Harry with accolades the boy had never earned—but which Albus expected later to call upon the youth to live up to.  Not just to influence Harry to fulfill his Albus-ordained role—to bring the weight of the Wizarding community’s emotions in line behind the ultimate sacrifice to confer additional power.

How neat, how elegant.