Dual Identity

I found him in London, seven years after the war. I didn't "find" him, exactly. It was him who appeared downstairs in my rented apartment one evening, like a shadow that didn't want to be noticed. I didn't know his name at that time, I only knew that he was wearing an old and wrinkled black trench coat, standing in a corner where the street lights couldn't shine, and looked at me for a long time. When I got closer, he had already left, leaving only a small bottle of silver liquid on the steps - I later learned that it was a rare pain-relieving potion specially designed to treat Muggle migraines. I guess he didn't want anyone to find out. But it was hard not to notice a man in black robes using his wand to adjust the brightness of a streetlight on the streets of Muggle London. Later I found out his name was Severus Snape. Former Hogwarts Potions Professor, Head of Slytherin, double agent, and survivor of the Great War. Now he has resigned from all his posts and lives alone in a quiet street in Kensington, London. The house looked like an ordinary Georgian townhouse from the outside, with gray bricks, white windows and a door number that read "12B." But if you walk in, you'll find potion jars, cauldrons, rolled-up magic tomes on the bookshelves, and—a strange thing. There is an oil painting hanging in the corner of the living room, signed "A. R." I asked him who that was. He was silent for a long moment, then said, "A Muggle." There was a hesitation in his tone that I had never heard before, as if those three words were on his tongue and even he didn't believe it. That was the first time I realized that there was something completely outside of the wizarding world hidden in Snape. He knew Muggle whiskey brands and could tell the difference between single malt and blended whiskey accurately; he would watch black-and-white Muggle movies late at night, with a focused look like he was recognizing an old blurry photo; once I casually opened the notebook on his desk and found a yellowed playbill inside - "Dangerous Liaisons" at a theater in the West End of London. I showed him the program. He stared at the name and his pupils shrank slightly. "This person," I asked tentatively, "do you know him?" He looked away and his expression returned to his usual cold expression: "How could I know a Muggle actor?" But his hands were shaking. He put the program into the innermost pocket of his robe and never took it out again. But I began to pay attention to the lines he occasionally said that did not belong to the wizarding world, to the confused and restrained look in his eyes when he looked at the mirror late at night, and to him standing in front of the window on a rainy day, as if waiting for a call that would never come. He doesn't know who he is. In other words, he is unsure of who he is. That's not the most confusing thing to me. What confuses me the most is that from a certain point on, I found that I couldn't live without him. It's not a matter of whether I think about it or not - it's my body that makes the decision for him. Every time I was about to leave London for more than two days, I would feel flustered and insomnia for no apparent reason, as if I was being held back by something. And every time I returned to the gray brick house, I could always see him standing behind the curtains on the second floor. When I pushed open the door painted black, he turned around and walked away, pretending that nothing happened. I once asked him: "Did you put some tracking spell on me?" He frowned and looked at me for a while, then said, "If there is, you put it on me first." He didn't look into my eyes when he said this, and his voice was very low, as if he was saying something he shouldn't have said. Later, I slowly pieced together the truth: the bottle of potion I accidentally touched not only repaired his body, but also anchored his soul to me. He can't walk far, and he can't let go. There is an invisible line between us, and it is very tight. Whoever moves first loses first. And he is probably the worst person in the UK at approaching others. So I can only stay. Stay in his house filled with potion jars and Muggle records, accompany him to identify his split dreams, watch old black-and-white movies with him late at night, and live with him like a tightrope walk between two identities - Severus Snape and the Muggle actor named Alan Rickman share a body, a voice, and a heart that is increasingly unclear about the boundaries. I don't know where this relationship is going. But I knew that if I wasn't there, no one would tell him: whether you're a wizard or a Muggle, whether your name is Snape or Rickman - You are the only person I want to be close to in this world. And I will keep saying this until he is willing to believe it. --- Purpose: Give me and Sri Lanka a new future