A/N: I've categorised this as a horror fic, but purely in a psychological sense. It's a sequel to "In Infinite Remorse of Soul," so you may want to read that one first in order to figure out what the heck is going on. Note: small hint of incest.
And Mine the Gall
Part One
Footsteps patter toward him and Albus hastily wipes his cheeks and cleans his robes. It won't be Severus, he knows that, and yet he hopes. On the off-chance, he remains kneeling while he casts a wordless Lumos.
A child in school robes stands before him, startled, teetering from foot to foot. Green eyes. Black hair. Oh dear God, no.
"Harry." He speaks the name still sweeping in waves through his inflamed soul, and the boy jumps back, alarmed.
"Bloody hell," he says. "Why does everyone think I look like my dad?" Those telltale eyes sweep the darkness. "Where in Merlin's name am I?"
Albus sees his mistake now: the boy is pointier, scruffier, more keenly observant of his surroundings than Harry ever was.
He breaks the news gently. "The afterlife, I'm afraid."
Skinny and dishevelled, the boy gnaws a thumbnail. "You're sure? Sorry, I mean, shouldn't it be more, I don't know, interesting to look at? Be rotten if it's always this dark." He squints at Albus again, timid and defensive and curious all at once. The resemblance to Harry disrupted by brusquer mannerisms and spikier features, he reminds Albus now of someone else; it's not clear who. "Have we met before? I've never—oh, crumbs, if this is the afterlife, are you—sorry, sir, but are you death? Because you're the oldest bloke I've ever seen."
"No," Albus chuckles, although he's taken aback. "My name's Albus, dear boy."
Gaze ranging anxiously over the shadows, the child whips about. "Cor, is it? Mine, too. Everyone shortens it to Al, though." His wary, calculating stare sends another wave of grief through Albus. Never look to see Severus Snape again.
"So you're him, then—that Albus?"
Albus nods. He hopes so. "I knew your father. It must grieve him terribly to have lost you."
The boy studies him a moment, then shrugs. "S'pose. He never liked me much." When Albus makes a shocked noise, he interrupts impatiently, "Oh, I know he loves me. That's different. It's just—he's only himself to blame, Mum says." He emits an unPotter-like snort, and Albus adds this to his assessment; neither James nor Harry was ever so afflicted with nerves. "Love-hate, that's what she calls it. Naming me Albus Severus. Hard to tell which is which, from the way Dad talks about them."
Albus.
Severus.
Can it be? Surely not. Albus sits very still, his mind expanding through the possibilities. An unworthy suspicion uncoils in his abdomen, and the poison slithers through his veins. He feels disoriented. And dear Merlin, jealous.
With a cry, the boy pounces.
"Oh, fantastic! I lost hold of it when the snake bit me, but look! Here it is!" He holds up Severus' discarded wand, and Lumos bursts from the tip. "Take that!" he whispers, pointing into the darkness. "Death to Gryffindors! Bloody James," he confides, eyes glowing with fury. "Told me to follow those wanker friends of his sneaking off into the Forbidden Forest. I hid behind some tree roots, and this snake slithered out. The Gryffindors all screamed and ran away. I didn't."
The problem with Slytherins exhibiting courage, Albus has noticed, is that it frequently gets them killed. Pity seizes him. "So you died."
"Looks like it." The boy's suddenly gloomy. No longer diverted by the wand, he swings it listlessly back and forth, then takes a step closer, scepticism flashing from him like a knife. "Are you really the famous wizard my dad talks about? The one I'm named for?"
"I am," Albus says. If Severus can be immodest about his body, Albus might as well be immodest about his reputation. He would think it a good moment to stand up and look imposing, but he suspects Al would see it as a threat and flee accordingly.
The boy hasn't yet learned the damascene art of folding his thoughts impenetrably inward. "D'you play games?" he says in a reedy, hopeful voice. "Chess, for instance. Do you play that?"
Warming to Harry's child, Albus peers over his spectacles. "As a matter of fact, I do."
"Brilliant! I mean, of course. Me too." With a head-ducking glance, the boy warns, "I play to win."
Surely it's appropriate to twinkle here. "Excellent. So do I."
"I knew it!" crows the lad, wand pointed at Albus again, which is irksome. "You are a Slytherin, aren't you?"
Still prickly from defending himself to Severus on the same charge, Albus starts to expound upon the concept 'technically untrue,' but Al scoffs, "Slytherins play to win. Trust me, I've done the research. I'm documenting the war, you know? I've got books and notes and souvenir albums and I've—I even sneaked a look into Dad's Pensieve one of those times he fell asleep over his firewhisky. He has sad days, Mum says. Gets it into his head—or out of his head, actually. To look back. He almost never forgets to put them away. His memories, I mean. But this once he did, and—" Al quiets, turning the wand over and over in his hands. "It was a bit—dismal. Dad's pretty convinced Slytherins are awful, you know? And they were awful. Mostly."
He shoots Albus a dubious, dissecting glance. "I'll tell you what. Dad sees you a lot differently than I do."
"As my association with Harry spanned years and our encounter may be tallied in minutes, it's not surprising, don't you think?" Freed of the grim necessity of wooing children to his cause, Albus thinks it fair to tease. "I'd hazard your father has a finer appreciation for hard choices than—"
"Dad thought you were nice," Al says. "I don't." His tone dares Albus to find fault. Of course, he can't possibly know that Harry's gullibility was one of the things Albus cherished about him, to the point, truth be told, of exploiting it.
"Ah. Well, you're not alone. I'm afraid 'niceness' was an occasional casualty of my position." It's downright refreshing, if humbling in its way, to sit on one's haunches and be found wanting by a first year. "Perhaps over time you can be persuaded to change your mind."
Al shrugs. "I'm not nice, either, come to that." He flicks his wand, startled when a spark of intent flares and fizzles at the end. "There's loads of fascinating stuff being dug up, did you know? About you. I skipped the earlier bits. What you did in the war, that's what interests me. Bloody hell, if what they say is true, you outplayed Voldemort. It was ace the way you manoeuvred my dad around the board. The pawn who made king! As for that wanker Snape—"
"Professor Snape," Albus corrects a tad sharply, more to relieve his own feelings than in defence of Severus, who isn't here to have his wounded.
Al steps back, wrapped in a tightly elegant sulk. Children often have moments of spontaneous grace, but not quite so…self-consciously. Eyes in shadow, arms folded, he smiles, red-lipped, not at all like a boy who has just died. If Albus didn't know better, he'd say that smile owed something to blood. Fresh blood. The question, of course, would be whose.
"You outplayed absolutely everybody, you old snake. There's no fucking way you're a Gryffindor."
Shocked, Albus straightens up. That's not a child's voice. That sounds like—
"If our choices do indeed make us who we are," pursues the boy with heart-stopping distinctness, "then tell me, Dumbledore: who are you? You set up the board. You wrote the rulebook, then wiped your arse on the rules. You moved us as you saw fit, and won. While I, for reasons that no longer matter, chose you, and lost. But as my personal history attests, and your adage implies, it's always possible," the low voice rises to a scathing, childish treble, "to change one's mind."
About to retort, Albus is prevented by the boy's body-convulsing sneeze, signalling Al's repatriation to his own soul.
In life, steeped in insecurities—every one of which Albus had assiduously cultivated for the greater good—Severus had rarely managed to wrongfoot him. Albus refuses to let him do so now. He doesn't regret it. He can't afford to. He would have told Severus, if he'd stayed to listen, that he had made the only choice he could. If he were to poll all those who benefitted, those he saved from misery and bloodshed, he would, beyond the shadow of a doubt, win again.
Renewed circulation tingling through his calves, he creaks to his feet, dusting sand grains off his robes and from his beard with shaky dignity.
"Well, that's neither here nor there," he announces, throat dry. "Shall we go? This place is rather depressing, now you mention it."
The boy bounces forward, ambidextrously swapping wand hands as he lays claim to Albus' gnarled fingers. "D'you mind if I call you 'old snake'?" he says cheerfully, swinging their joined hands back and forth as he leads the way. "Since we can't both be Albus." He stops, the flicker of a serpent's tongue forking from his perceptive green glance. "I'll find us a chessboard, all right? We'll play—five rounds, what do you say to that? And if I'm good, and I win, you'll send me back."
"Oh, my dear," Albus murmurs, distressed. He feared something like this was in the offing. The confusion between 'good' and 'winning' doesn't escape his notice. "I'm afraid it doesn't work that way."
"You can do it, though, right? Like you did for my dad."
"Your father was a special case," Albus says gently. "I wish I could. But—"
"You can," the boy insists, letting go of him and backing away. "You have to. You're Albus Dumbledore. I'm Albus Severus. You can save me. That's what you do."
"No," Albus protests, regret scorching along the paths left by Severus' betrayal. "The truth is, I never had that kind of power. I'm terribly sorry, but—"
"No! You're lying!" cries Harry's son, and a sudden glitter of tears stripes his pale cheeks. He levels the wand. "You're the one who set up the game. I saw. I watched you. Even Dad knows, he just won't admit it. You're the one who decided who lived or died. You could do it if you wanted to."
"I'm afraid you misunder—"
"Imperio," shrieks the boy, jabbing his wand at Albus' forehead. Nothing happens. "You're lying! You've always lied! You're not a Gryffindor. That's what Gryffindors do! They save people! They don't leave them to die of fucking snake bite!"
He slashes the air in frustration, then focuses the wand on Albus again, snarling, "Imperio! Crucio! Avada Kedavra!" The air rings with shock, and the poison in Albus' system rushes forward, ecstatic as absinthe, the part that greets darkness and obsessive love and sneering lips with a snake of competitive lust. "I hate you!" screams his namesake, and for a moment Albus thinks he'll throw the wand in his face. Instead the boy whirls as dramatically as his other namesake and pelts off across the border, sand crunching under his heels, his sobs echoing long after he's gone.
The venom sliding inside Albus like a sleepless night whispers: Follow him. He needs you.
His mind uncompromised by recent events, he resists the temptation. Instead he lifts his head and looks around. Behind him, as in a theatre in which the house lights have dimmed and all is black, only the glow under the curtain hem visible, with the willed suspense of an audience forbearing to breathe until it starts to rise, he sees a distant lightening of the darkness.
A molten, eye-searing line of gold incises the horizon.
Albus exhales. The landscape lifts with dream-like solemnity from black to grey, crowned with fire. The child is nowhere to be seen. In fact, the world appears strangely empty, untouched. The light (the colour of poppies and peonies now, so tender and exalted) drives the shadows out of his blood; an unwanted exorcism, because the shadows are all he has left of Severus.
He has done everything he could, but Merlin help him, he doesn't wish to be alone with his victory. He had hoped to ask Ariana's forgiveness. Or consult Godric Gryffindor on the terrible cost of being right. Neither wish has been vouchsafed him. Meanwhile, the one who knew him most deeply, who—the word will never stop sounding out of place—loved him the longest, has left without a backward glance, choosing the brief candle of life over an eternity spent at his side.
Very well. There are others, are there not? Grindelwald, for instance. Albus' fallen angel, split and twisted like a lightning-struck tree. Together, perhaps, they will locate the boy who is neither Albus nor Severus, the boy who looks like but cannot be, Harry. Albus has an inkling of where to search first; apparently the afterlife is a nest of snakes, and Salazar Slytherin has already proved himself more than willing to play God.
But no. Gellert is only a symbol to him now, and the boy has run away. Both boys.
He allows himself one last melancholy look, drinking in the austere beauty of the Scottish hillsides, chilly with shadow save for where the rising sun heats the high-most green. Then, knowing what he leaves behind by making this choice, he steps out into the desert, this last, bleak, breathtaking echo of Severus' existence, turning so that his back is to the sun.
The path laid down by his shadow stretches before him. He knows if he follows it he will find what he's looking for. He still wishes—oh how he wishes—he could have risked this in life, but more than his own soul was at stake then; and what lives in the darkness should, he has long since decided, be left in darkness.
His motives still as mixed as the day he outwitted the Sorting Hat, Albus strides forward, robes waving like a colourful spring morning, the parched-smelling breeze winnowing his beard. His hair glistens auburn in the sun, and he notices that instead of lying straight his shadow loops through the dunes, winding from side to side. It will lead him into a maze of blind turns, forward and back as the sun travels overhead, reversing his shadow's path so that he walks the same ground twice. He won't rest until the sun sets once more in a blaze so sublime the sky sheds its veil of light and pale blue becomes black, the true, inscrutable face of the universe; until he meets himself coming forward or back, his past and future fusing in a single encounter; and if time doesn't stop, if the choice is still his, he will find out the truth.
He will judge. Has been judged, indeed: Aberforth, Severus, Harry's son, the postwar world. He can't deny they have the right, but none are as qualified as he. The fact is, he could be anything. That was the great lesson he learned in his youth, the great and terrible thing Gellert showed him, and it hasn't grown less true with time.
Because with Albus Dumbledore, you never know. He could be anything. He's the wizard behind the curtain, but also the master of ceremonies standing in plain sight, making it impossible to tell whether the curtain is rising or falling. It's rather exciting, frankly. He's alone in the desert, readier than he's ever been to face himself, and he could be anything. And no one will be hurt. No one will ever know.
Anything. Anything at all.
