Wonders Unceasing
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Author's note:It's my first time of posting at ff.net, and I've been having no end of trouble with the formatting, so I apologise to anyone who finds this hard to read. This is my very first Harry Potter fic! It started as a response to the WIKTT challenge 'Seducing Serverus Snape', but it had ideas of its own. I've been reading too many HP fanfics recently, many of them excellent, and I'm sure some of them will have taken root in my subconscious. Hopefully I've still managed to do something original here, but if you think you recognise something please take it for the compliment it is and not a desire to steal your ideas. Constructive reviews will be received with enthusiasm, praise is always welcome, and flames will be gleefully collected and added to the fire during my next episode of pyromania- Bonfire Night is not far off, after all.
Anti-litigation charm (Whoever came up with that phrase, kudos! I LIKE it!): The characters and setting are not mine, they belong to J.K.Rowling. I'm just playing with them and promise to put them back when I've finished.
******
Chapter One: Childhood's End
Smoke roiled low over the ground, tattered billows of green-grey and rust redolent of sulphur and the sickly sweet stench of death. Its choking clots muffled shouted hexes and cries of pain and death. Wispy fingers greedily stroked across the bodies of the fallen as it hovered, blanketing and distorting the vision of those who still lived.
Serverus Snape watched the sight with scientific detachment, feeling no pain, feeling nothing at all. Pain was not always a bad thing, in his experience. Pain meant you were still alive to feel it. This lack of pain, this sensation that he no longer lay on the blood-soaked ground that had once been Hogwarts' Quiddich pitch but instead floated a few inches above it, was no bad thing either. It meant he was dying.
Dying was not something Snape feared. It was not something he had allowed himself to seek, not with the debts he owed and had still to pay, but now it was at hand he was not about to fight it. Life was a cruel master: harsh, fickle, demanding and forever unpredictable. Death was alluring, fascinating, soft and welcoming. Snape waited as it approached, calmly, almost serenely. His glazed eyes no longer saw the flurry of battle that still swirled about him, scattered clots of Aurors and students, Death Eaters, Dementors, Hags and Harpies, Giants and Griffins... he had seen a unicorn earlier, he was sure. Nothing had escaped Voldemort's desire to rule. Eventually, everyone had been forced to takes sides.
His thoughts were wondering. His ears hissed and whistled, filling his mind with red cotton-wool. His consciousness struggled against the enveloping haze. This was Hogwarts. Voldemort was winning, and he was dying. Dead, death, darkness, night, nightshade... was a key ingredient in several healing potions, although its less pleasant aspects had to be carefully countered by the addition of properly activated yarrow or agrimony...
A voice broke through his dazed musings. A familiar voice, but not one he wanted to hear.
Malfoy.
"Still breathing, traitor? Who'd have thought you'd last so long? Not like my son." Lucius Malfoy's usually cultured tones were twisted and rough, distorted and malformed like the Master he served. Madness danced on his babbling words. "I'm glad you're alive, you know. You killed him. You killed my son. It was your fault. You took him away from me, and he died. You made me do it! There's blood here, see? The blood's on my hands, but you were the one that killed him, and now I can make you pay for it..."
"You're insane, Lucius." Snape wondered if it really was him who had spoken, if his voice could ever sound so faint and weak, a whisper that barely carried itself beyond his own lips. "'This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune - often the surfeit of our own behaviour - we make guilty of our own disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars¹.' Have you ever read Shakespeare, Lucius? I think you'd find most of Macbeth to be appropriate... or perhaps Hamlet... not that you'd appreciate the subtleties... he was ever the poet, keeping ajar the door to madness.²"
Lucius tired of words, and raised his wand. "Crucio!"
Through the blue-white tongues of furnace-fire that lanced through his frame, Snape tried to keep the detachment he'd felt, tried to separate his mind from the writhing torment of his screaming body, sought the release of oblivion. Through the clamouring chimes of wild church-bells within his skull he heard the quiet voice of an angel.
"Reddere!"
The verdant sparks of a counterspell zipped across Snape's bloodied vision. There was another scream, not his own, and the pain of the Unforgivable curse was replaced by the keen shock of its absence. Still he wished for oblivion, his awareness once again reminded of too many broken bones, of burns and cuts and the crackling pulse of tortured nerves. He didn't know what had happened to Malfoy. Something equally painful, Snape hoped.
"Hang on, I'm coming."
He knew that voice too, Snape thought blearily, and yet it was unfamiliar. A gentle touch brushed him, molten lava on his damaged skin.
"Sorry, it hurts I know, but it'll get better. Just hang on..."
Snape let himself feel infuriated by the voice. He knew who it was, but he couldn't place a name to it, and anger was a tool he could use now. If he wasn't to be allowed to die at last then anger would serve to get him back on his feet, anger would drive him back into the battle where perhaps at last he could find his rest. Ice flowed across his leg and torso and he drank in the creeping cold, transfigured it into flames of rage to replace the burned flesh it healed. He clenched his jaw as the long bone in his thigh slid back into place, swallowing the agony as the leg clicked and mended and adding the pain to the fuel of his ire.
"Okay, that's over. Eat this, it'll help." Sympathetic hands tipped his head and brushed aside his tumbled, sweat-matted hair, then froze. Startled and suddenly fearful eyes stared into his own. The hands almost dropped him again. "P... P... Professor Snape sir!"
Then, with something that might as well have been magic, the fear was gone. Determination settled on the rounded features, lending them a new and stark angularity. The soft brown eyes lost their scared apology. "Eat this, sir," Neville Longbottom repeated, putting a soft section of root to the Potion Master's lips. "Professor Dumbledore's rallied most of our side to the base of the Astronomy tower, sir. The centaurs are leading a group at the edge of the Forbidden Forest, in case Voldemort tries to bring in reinforcements."
Amazing, Snape thought faintly, the boy said the name without so much as flinching.
"Professor McGonagall's gone, sir... Flitwick..." Longbottom choked, and his eyes burned. Snape was chilled to see not sorrow, but a fury to match his own. "Flitwick was on his side. He's dead too," Longbottom added, cold and flat. "Flitwick's dead."
Not a boy, Snape realised. This was not a child any more, not the terrified dunderhead who brought disaster to every potions class he attended. What Snape's goading had failed to achieve, war had finally managed.
"How are you feeling?" Longbottom asked.
"I'll live, at least for the moment," Snape said dryly.
Longbottom checked around the pair of them. "Now would be a good time to move, sir. Most of the fighting is over that way." He nodded towards the castle. "If we can get to the edge of the forest there's a place to hide until the Ompassim root has time to work. Can you stand up?"
Snape stared at the proffered hand. Until today, accepting Longbottom's help would have seemed the height of stupidity, a certain recipe for failure of the most spectacular and embarrassing variety. Today, the world was no longer the same place. Without hesitating any longer, Snape took the hand and lurched painfully to his feet, muttering curses as other, smaller injuries jostled for his attention. "Ompassim root?" Snape queried sceptically, to keep his mind from brooding on the physical discomfort as he limped through the sulphurous clouds that hugged their path, putting more weight than he liked on the shoulder of his rescuer. His every step sent sickening stabs up his thigh, straight to his stomach. "Nobody's ever managed to grow that in Britain, and it doesn't travel well."
"It was m... my final project, for Herbology," Longbottom stuttered, lapsing briefly back into his younger nervousness.
"Ten points to Gryffindor," Snape sniffed. He felt Longbottom's slight start and saw the brief flash of a surprised grin before it was lost behind the clouds of disillusion.
"As if that matters now," Longbottom growled savagely. "Houses never mattered. They were only a way to... to... to tell people what to think."
"Congratulations Mr Longbottom," Snape drawled with a tired echo of his old, silk-edged sarcasm, feeling too green and ill to put much venom into it. "I see you finally found a use for the contents of your skull."
Longbottom gave him a wary, sidelong look. "Hermione was right," he said.
"Obviously the sun still shines from her nether regions, so far as you are concerned," Snape responded with a sneer.
To Snape's surprise, Longbottom laughed, a sound quickly quieted to avoid attracting the attention of any nearby enemies. "She said you were far too cynical to believe anything Voldemort might promise, and far too nasty to be the real enemy. Not like Flitwick," he spat suddenly. "I liked him."
"My apologies for failing to destroy your faith in human nature some years ago," Snape muttered, wincing at the sudden jolt as he stumbled over a nameless jumble of black that had once been a living being, pausing as he was beset by a wave of dizziness.
Longbottom scowled, an unfamiliar expression on his round, soft face. "I'd tell you I could actually like you a bit now, if you didn't look as if you already wanted to throw up." He checked around again, looking behind- a habit that everyone had acquired of late. "If it hurts too much we could stop for a bit?"
Snape immediately straightened, willing to endure any amount of pain to avoid the pity of a Gryffindor. The smoke swirled around them still, hiding their progress from the dark shapes that passed them: Death Eaters and their allies hunting down stragglers and toying with the injured. Voldemort's followers seemed to be everywhere, moving in twos and threes through the twilight and the haze of battle. If the thick of the fighting was back near the school then Snape did not want to consider the odds the defenders were facing; he should be there, with them, able at last to fight openly instead of hiding in the shadows. He would fight, once Longbottom's all-healing root completed its work... if only there was time, before the Dark Lord overpowered the desperate little knot of resistance.
They were almost at the edge of the Forbidden Forest when Snape stiffened and directed a glare of pure animosity towards his helper. Of course he'd been willing to hurry on at the suggestion of a halt. He wondered, though the dizzying pounding of blood through his overtaxed body, where on Earth Longbottom had found the deviousness to think of that particular tactic.
"Nearly there, sir," Longbottom said brightly, a slight quaver in his voice indicating nervousness despite the bravado in the grin he gave the Potions Master.
"If it wouldn't be an utter travesty of everything my House holds dear," Snape murmured, trying to summon his usual velvet-covered steel and finding only a whisper, "I'd almost begin to wonder if some part of you mightn't have fitted into Slytherin after all."
"I think not," hissed a new voice: a voice that froze Snape's tarnished soul, that filled his limbs with leaden horror, that plucked his will from his grasp and spun him around, puppet-like, to face its owner. Longbottom turned beside him, staring like a terrified rabbit into the hellfire lanterns of Voldemort's gaze. Voldemort now ignored the younger man. He was focussed on the Potion's Master, a concentrated force of malevolent evil given bodily form and directed now upon its enemy. "Serverus Snape," the Dark Lord hissed, in a voice admirably suited to the sibilant name. "Traitor."
"Tom Riddle," Snape responded, dragging the cloak of vindictive nastiness back around the aching remnants of his battered consciousness. "I do hope the potion helped clear up that little incontinence problem." He felt Longbottom quivering and hoped it was laughter, however hysterical. Longbottom was no duellist and he himself was in no shape for a fight, but ridicule could still be a weapon. Mockery should at least ensure them a quick and relatively painless death, infuriating Voldemort beyond the desire to play with his victims. Besides, if Snape was going to be forced to meet his end while standing shoulder to shoulder with Neville Longbottom he was going to make sure that Voldemort felt at least as ridiculus as he did.
"You're a disgrace to your House." Voldemort's voice sizzled from his lipless mouth, his eyes narrowing to blazing slits of hatred. Masked, robed figures flittered behind him, unspeaking, keeping their distance. Clearly this was one matter that Voldemort wished to deal with himself.
"You are a disgrace to wizardry," Snape purred in reply, softly as a stalking panther. "So unsure of your power you surround yourself with sheep to bleat your praises. So pathetically desperate for recognition and acceptance that you would destroy anyone who dared refuse to kiss your feet. So afraid of your own..."
Voldemort's curse sent Snape to his knees, gasping and gagging. "You amuse me, traitor. Such brave words from Dumbledore's puppet. Such defiance when you can barely stand."
Snape coughed, a few drops of blood spraying from his lips onto the burned grass on which he knelt. He wished Voldemort would find himself a better speechwriter. Dying next to Neville Longbottom he could cope with, but to die at the wand-tip of a bald lizard with the dramatic flare of a bad horror story was excruciating. He struggled to draw air into his lungs and clear his spinning head, and didn't try to rise; but beneath the cover of his bedraggled robes he slipped his wand into his hand and gathered his strength. He couldn't kill Voldemort, but he could get in a good shot before he went down. "Does it make you feel good, Thomas?" he rasped, eyes fixed on the ground to give himself a point of focus. "Kicking a beaten foe?"
He felt rather than heard Longbottom's faint gasp as he gave that indirect admission of defeat, and wondered at the faith of those who thought they would survive even when the inevitable end was before them. They were beaten, they were fighting a losing battle, and the only reason to fight was to have the chance to die with honour rather than to continue living in shame after defeat. Movement nearby warned him that Longbottom had been reacting to something else entirely.
"Voldemort, you bastard! Stop giving the greasy git the beating I've wanted to give him since the first year, and come get what you deserve!"
It was a Gryffindor, Snape thought in dazed amusement. Only a Gryffindor could possess such bull-headed, idiotic, outraged, self-righteous delusions of impervious immortality. A befreckled, red-headed Gryffindor, simmering with unthinking fury, charging right into the dragon's mouth in a fit of chivalrous stupidity.
"Do I know you?" Voldemort asked. His manner was impeccably polite, the Dark Lord's prelude to his worst displays of creative brutality.
Snape lifted his head to see Ron Weasley gently laying a still, silent figure onto the dead earth; a small figure of black robes and a tumbled mass of wild, brown, curly hair. "Look what your, your damned Death Eaters did!" Ron raged, pulling out a wand and clutching it in his shaking fist. "Well I've had it! I'm not afraid of you, Voldemort! Call yourself a Lord? You're nothing but an ugly, crazy git who doesn't know when to die."
Snape closed his eyes, wishing that Weasley had paid more attention in class. Even if the boy had never improved his Potions grade as a result, he might at least have been able to come up with a better collection of insults. So the Granger girl was dead too? Snape felt his teeth grit and his throat tighten. She was the last person he'd expected to die, the last person anyone would expect. Wonderboy and his carrot-top sidekick were the ones who always plunged themselves headfirst into trouble. Granger was the sensible one, the one to get them back out of the situations they impulsively jumped at. Granger was the intelligent one, the one who would take a step back and think before acting. Granger was the first student in years to have him hunting vainly for genuine criticisms and worrying that one day she'd stop finding answers to his questions and start asking them right back.
Snape looked again, but Granger remained unmoving on the blackened grass. She should have been the last to go, not the first. She should have stayed with her books and her quills and her research. She should never have taken up with the Boy-Who-Didn't-Know-When-To-Stop. She should have been brilliant, a star shining with her own light, not a satellite, not 'Hermione? Oh, the bushy-haired one who hangs around with Harry Potter.' Should have, could have, and now never would. Snape was in no position to care, had no right to care, and above all could not afford to think about why it even occured to him to care.
"Hermione?" Longbottom's distraught query drew the Potion Master's attention. Clearly it caught Voldemort's as well, because the Weasley boy's first magical shot almost caught the Dark Lord by surprise.
The red-head dodged a return blast, still hopping on the spot after avoiding the curse, bouncing like an angry ferret. "Hah! You missed! Getting slow in your old age, Mouldermort?"
Snape groaned to himself. If Weasley wanted to join his bookworm friend as quickly as possible then he was doing everything right. Voldemort had waved away his attendant Death Eaters, confident in his ability to handle an irate student, and was watching with more amusement than anger. He was simply spinning out the moment when he'd throw the Killing Curse, Snape thought; or perhaps he'd use Imperius, the Dark Lord might well think it entertaining to force Weasley to kill Longbottom.
Longbottom. After that short distraction Snape had almost forgotten him. The boy was a walking magical accident, but he'd dealt with Malfoy when he'd caught the man by surprise... Snape rolled his eyes enough to get a look at Longbottom's face, caught his attention with a subtle nudge against his leg. Snape let his wand peep from under his robes, and nodded almost imperceptibly towards Voldemort. Longbottom nodded and tensed, fumbling his own wand into his hand inside his sleeve where the masked figures in the background couldn't see it.
Snape returned to the unequal match of Weasley against the Dark Lord of the Death Eaters. Voldemort was throwing hexes at random now, chuckling rustily as Weasley stumbled and bit his lips against the pain of those he failed to dodge or deflect.
"C'mon, Tommie, I've had worse from Crookshanks," Weasley managed to shout, his voice strained and the watery fireball that followed his words rolling wide and fizzling out.
Snape refrained from a patronising snort of disgust only to avoid drawing attention to himself. He poised his wand, and froze as he caught movement from the corner of his eye, away to one side- the side away from the foolhardy Weasley boy. A pebble rolled, moved as if by invisible feet. Grass stalks bent against unseen legs. Snape prodded at a past memory: Dumbledore's effusive praise of a long ago chess game. A game where Ron Weasley had sacrificed himself to allow his friends to move into position.
Great Merlin!
Shaking with anticipation, Snape glanced at the fallen figure of Hermione Granger and saw a pair of open eyes shielded beneath the untameable mop of brown hair, very much alive, poised and ready behind a carefully palmed wand. Some instinct caused her gaze to flicker in his direction. Her eyes flared with recognition, with a Gryffindor's eager anticipation and her own instinctive calculated caution. She grinned swiftly, and in that second she roused something within the Potions Master that Dumbledore had only managed to coax into sleepy resentfulness.
Hope.
This wasn't some damned, doomed display of foolhardy Gryffindor courage. It was a desperate plan, true, the plan of those who had no choice but to seize the slightest thread of a chance, but it was a plan.
Snape returned the grin, but it dropped as the air filled with the sickly green flame flaring from Voldemort's wand. Weasley was caught in the glare, starkly outlined at the heart of the pulsing light. Hermione's attention abruptly returned to Voldemort, expression simultaneously bleak, focussed, intense, and grimly determined. Her lip trembled, but her hand never wavered.
She nodded sharply.
Four wands spewed fourth their vengeance against the Dark Lord, leaping ahead of the sudden realisation of the hovering Death Eaters. Five people forever cast themselves as heroes of the wizarding world: Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Serverus Snape, Neville Longbottom... and Ron Weasley. The masked figures struck, but it was too late, too late. The light of bittersweet victory spattered upwards, ruby drops of burning blood staining the distant starry tears of the night sky.
******
No, it doesn't stop there, there's more on the way!
Refernces:
1. King Lear, by William Shakespeare.
2. Christopher Morley
Chapter title from the novel by Arthur C. Clarke
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Author's note:It's my first time of posting at ff.net, and I've been having no end of trouble with the formatting, so I apologise to anyone who finds this hard to read. This is my very first Harry Potter fic! It started as a response to the WIKTT challenge 'Seducing Serverus Snape', but it had ideas of its own. I've been reading too many HP fanfics recently, many of them excellent, and I'm sure some of them will have taken root in my subconscious. Hopefully I've still managed to do something original here, but if you think you recognise something please take it for the compliment it is and not a desire to steal your ideas. Constructive reviews will be received with enthusiasm, praise is always welcome, and flames will be gleefully collected and added to the fire during my next episode of pyromania- Bonfire Night is not far off, after all.
Anti-litigation charm (Whoever came up with that phrase, kudos! I LIKE it!): The characters and setting are not mine, they belong to J.K.Rowling. I'm just playing with them and promise to put them back when I've finished.
******
Chapter One: Childhood's End
Smoke roiled low over the ground, tattered billows of green-grey and rust redolent of sulphur and the sickly sweet stench of death. Its choking clots muffled shouted hexes and cries of pain and death. Wispy fingers greedily stroked across the bodies of the fallen as it hovered, blanketing and distorting the vision of those who still lived.
Serverus Snape watched the sight with scientific detachment, feeling no pain, feeling nothing at all. Pain was not always a bad thing, in his experience. Pain meant you were still alive to feel it. This lack of pain, this sensation that he no longer lay on the blood-soaked ground that had once been Hogwarts' Quiddich pitch but instead floated a few inches above it, was no bad thing either. It meant he was dying.
Dying was not something Snape feared. It was not something he had allowed himself to seek, not with the debts he owed and had still to pay, but now it was at hand he was not about to fight it. Life was a cruel master: harsh, fickle, demanding and forever unpredictable. Death was alluring, fascinating, soft and welcoming. Snape waited as it approached, calmly, almost serenely. His glazed eyes no longer saw the flurry of battle that still swirled about him, scattered clots of Aurors and students, Death Eaters, Dementors, Hags and Harpies, Giants and Griffins... he had seen a unicorn earlier, he was sure. Nothing had escaped Voldemort's desire to rule. Eventually, everyone had been forced to takes sides.
His thoughts were wondering. His ears hissed and whistled, filling his mind with red cotton-wool. His consciousness struggled against the enveloping haze. This was Hogwarts. Voldemort was winning, and he was dying. Dead, death, darkness, night, nightshade... was a key ingredient in several healing potions, although its less pleasant aspects had to be carefully countered by the addition of properly activated yarrow or agrimony...
A voice broke through his dazed musings. A familiar voice, but not one he wanted to hear.
Malfoy.
"Still breathing, traitor? Who'd have thought you'd last so long? Not like my son." Lucius Malfoy's usually cultured tones were twisted and rough, distorted and malformed like the Master he served. Madness danced on his babbling words. "I'm glad you're alive, you know. You killed him. You killed my son. It was your fault. You took him away from me, and he died. You made me do it! There's blood here, see? The blood's on my hands, but you were the one that killed him, and now I can make you pay for it..."
"You're insane, Lucius." Snape wondered if it really was him who had spoken, if his voice could ever sound so faint and weak, a whisper that barely carried itself beyond his own lips. "'This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune - often the surfeit of our own behaviour - we make guilty of our own disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars¹.' Have you ever read Shakespeare, Lucius? I think you'd find most of Macbeth to be appropriate... or perhaps Hamlet... not that you'd appreciate the subtleties... he was ever the poet, keeping ajar the door to madness.²"
Lucius tired of words, and raised his wand. "Crucio!"
Through the blue-white tongues of furnace-fire that lanced through his frame, Snape tried to keep the detachment he'd felt, tried to separate his mind from the writhing torment of his screaming body, sought the release of oblivion. Through the clamouring chimes of wild church-bells within his skull he heard the quiet voice of an angel.
"Reddere!"
The verdant sparks of a counterspell zipped across Snape's bloodied vision. There was another scream, not his own, and the pain of the Unforgivable curse was replaced by the keen shock of its absence. Still he wished for oblivion, his awareness once again reminded of too many broken bones, of burns and cuts and the crackling pulse of tortured nerves. He didn't know what had happened to Malfoy. Something equally painful, Snape hoped.
"Hang on, I'm coming."
He knew that voice too, Snape thought blearily, and yet it was unfamiliar. A gentle touch brushed him, molten lava on his damaged skin.
"Sorry, it hurts I know, but it'll get better. Just hang on..."
Snape let himself feel infuriated by the voice. He knew who it was, but he couldn't place a name to it, and anger was a tool he could use now. If he wasn't to be allowed to die at last then anger would serve to get him back on his feet, anger would drive him back into the battle where perhaps at last he could find his rest. Ice flowed across his leg and torso and he drank in the creeping cold, transfigured it into flames of rage to replace the burned flesh it healed. He clenched his jaw as the long bone in his thigh slid back into place, swallowing the agony as the leg clicked and mended and adding the pain to the fuel of his ire.
"Okay, that's over. Eat this, it'll help." Sympathetic hands tipped his head and brushed aside his tumbled, sweat-matted hair, then froze. Startled and suddenly fearful eyes stared into his own. The hands almost dropped him again. "P... P... Professor Snape sir!"
Then, with something that might as well have been magic, the fear was gone. Determination settled on the rounded features, lending them a new and stark angularity. The soft brown eyes lost their scared apology. "Eat this, sir," Neville Longbottom repeated, putting a soft section of root to the Potion Master's lips. "Professor Dumbledore's rallied most of our side to the base of the Astronomy tower, sir. The centaurs are leading a group at the edge of the Forbidden Forest, in case Voldemort tries to bring in reinforcements."
Amazing, Snape thought faintly, the boy said the name without so much as flinching.
"Professor McGonagall's gone, sir... Flitwick..." Longbottom choked, and his eyes burned. Snape was chilled to see not sorrow, but a fury to match his own. "Flitwick was on his side. He's dead too," Longbottom added, cold and flat. "Flitwick's dead."
Not a boy, Snape realised. This was not a child any more, not the terrified dunderhead who brought disaster to every potions class he attended. What Snape's goading had failed to achieve, war had finally managed.
"How are you feeling?" Longbottom asked.
"I'll live, at least for the moment," Snape said dryly.
Longbottom checked around the pair of them. "Now would be a good time to move, sir. Most of the fighting is over that way." He nodded towards the castle. "If we can get to the edge of the forest there's a place to hide until the Ompassim root has time to work. Can you stand up?"
Snape stared at the proffered hand. Until today, accepting Longbottom's help would have seemed the height of stupidity, a certain recipe for failure of the most spectacular and embarrassing variety. Today, the world was no longer the same place. Without hesitating any longer, Snape took the hand and lurched painfully to his feet, muttering curses as other, smaller injuries jostled for his attention. "Ompassim root?" Snape queried sceptically, to keep his mind from brooding on the physical discomfort as he limped through the sulphurous clouds that hugged their path, putting more weight than he liked on the shoulder of his rescuer. His every step sent sickening stabs up his thigh, straight to his stomach. "Nobody's ever managed to grow that in Britain, and it doesn't travel well."
"It was m... my final project, for Herbology," Longbottom stuttered, lapsing briefly back into his younger nervousness.
"Ten points to Gryffindor," Snape sniffed. He felt Longbottom's slight start and saw the brief flash of a surprised grin before it was lost behind the clouds of disillusion.
"As if that matters now," Longbottom growled savagely. "Houses never mattered. They were only a way to... to... to tell people what to think."
"Congratulations Mr Longbottom," Snape drawled with a tired echo of his old, silk-edged sarcasm, feeling too green and ill to put much venom into it. "I see you finally found a use for the contents of your skull."
Longbottom gave him a wary, sidelong look. "Hermione was right," he said.
"Obviously the sun still shines from her nether regions, so far as you are concerned," Snape responded with a sneer.
To Snape's surprise, Longbottom laughed, a sound quickly quieted to avoid attracting the attention of any nearby enemies. "She said you were far too cynical to believe anything Voldemort might promise, and far too nasty to be the real enemy. Not like Flitwick," he spat suddenly. "I liked him."
"My apologies for failing to destroy your faith in human nature some years ago," Snape muttered, wincing at the sudden jolt as he stumbled over a nameless jumble of black that had once been a living being, pausing as he was beset by a wave of dizziness.
Longbottom scowled, an unfamiliar expression on his round, soft face. "I'd tell you I could actually like you a bit now, if you didn't look as if you already wanted to throw up." He checked around again, looking behind- a habit that everyone had acquired of late. "If it hurts too much we could stop for a bit?"
Snape immediately straightened, willing to endure any amount of pain to avoid the pity of a Gryffindor. The smoke swirled around them still, hiding their progress from the dark shapes that passed them: Death Eaters and their allies hunting down stragglers and toying with the injured. Voldemort's followers seemed to be everywhere, moving in twos and threes through the twilight and the haze of battle. If the thick of the fighting was back near the school then Snape did not want to consider the odds the defenders were facing; he should be there, with them, able at last to fight openly instead of hiding in the shadows. He would fight, once Longbottom's all-healing root completed its work... if only there was time, before the Dark Lord overpowered the desperate little knot of resistance.
They were almost at the edge of the Forbidden Forest when Snape stiffened and directed a glare of pure animosity towards his helper. Of course he'd been willing to hurry on at the suggestion of a halt. He wondered, though the dizzying pounding of blood through his overtaxed body, where on Earth Longbottom had found the deviousness to think of that particular tactic.
"Nearly there, sir," Longbottom said brightly, a slight quaver in his voice indicating nervousness despite the bravado in the grin he gave the Potions Master.
"If it wouldn't be an utter travesty of everything my House holds dear," Snape murmured, trying to summon his usual velvet-covered steel and finding only a whisper, "I'd almost begin to wonder if some part of you mightn't have fitted into Slytherin after all."
"I think not," hissed a new voice: a voice that froze Snape's tarnished soul, that filled his limbs with leaden horror, that plucked his will from his grasp and spun him around, puppet-like, to face its owner. Longbottom turned beside him, staring like a terrified rabbit into the hellfire lanterns of Voldemort's gaze. Voldemort now ignored the younger man. He was focussed on the Potion's Master, a concentrated force of malevolent evil given bodily form and directed now upon its enemy. "Serverus Snape," the Dark Lord hissed, in a voice admirably suited to the sibilant name. "Traitor."
"Tom Riddle," Snape responded, dragging the cloak of vindictive nastiness back around the aching remnants of his battered consciousness. "I do hope the potion helped clear up that little incontinence problem." He felt Longbottom quivering and hoped it was laughter, however hysterical. Longbottom was no duellist and he himself was in no shape for a fight, but ridicule could still be a weapon. Mockery should at least ensure them a quick and relatively painless death, infuriating Voldemort beyond the desire to play with his victims. Besides, if Snape was going to be forced to meet his end while standing shoulder to shoulder with Neville Longbottom he was going to make sure that Voldemort felt at least as ridiculus as he did.
"You're a disgrace to your House." Voldemort's voice sizzled from his lipless mouth, his eyes narrowing to blazing slits of hatred. Masked, robed figures flittered behind him, unspeaking, keeping their distance. Clearly this was one matter that Voldemort wished to deal with himself.
"You are a disgrace to wizardry," Snape purred in reply, softly as a stalking panther. "So unsure of your power you surround yourself with sheep to bleat your praises. So pathetically desperate for recognition and acceptance that you would destroy anyone who dared refuse to kiss your feet. So afraid of your own..."
Voldemort's curse sent Snape to his knees, gasping and gagging. "You amuse me, traitor. Such brave words from Dumbledore's puppet. Such defiance when you can barely stand."
Snape coughed, a few drops of blood spraying from his lips onto the burned grass on which he knelt. He wished Voldemort would find himself a better speechwriter. Dying next to Neville Longbottom he could cope with, but to die at the wand-tip of a bald lizard with the dramatic flare of a bad horror story was excruciating. He struggled to draw air into his lungs and clear his spinning head, and didn't try to rise; but beneath the cover of his bedraggled robes he slipped his wand into his hand and gathered his strength. He couldn't kill Voldemort, but he could get in a good shot before he went down. "Does it make you feel good, Thomas?" he rasped, eyes fixed on the ground to give himself a point of focus. "Kicking a beaten foe?"
He felt rather than heard Longbottom's faint gasp as he gave that indirect admission of defeat, and wondered at the faith of those who thought they would survive even when the inevitable end was before them. They were beaten, they were fighting a losing battle, and the only reason to fight was to have the chance to die with honour rather than to continue living in shame after defeat. Movement nearby warned him that Longbottom had been reacting to something else entirely.
"Voldemort, you bastard! Stop giving the greasy git the beating I've wanted to give him since the first year, and come get what you deserve!"
It was a Gryffindor, Snape thought in dazed amusement. Only a Gryffindor could possess such bull-headed, idiotic, outraged, self-righteous delusions of impervious immortality. A befreckled, red-headed Gryffindor, simmering with unthinking fury, charging right into the dragon's mouth in a fit of chivalrous stupidity.
"Do I know you?" Voldemort asked. His manner was impeccably polite, the Dark Lord's prelude to his worst displays of creative brutality.
Snape lifted his head to see Ron Weasley gently laying a still, silent figure onto the dead earth; a small figure of black robes and a tumbled mass of wild, brown, curly hair. "Look what your, your damned Death Eaters did!" Ron raged, pulling out a wand and clutching it in his shaking fist. "Well I've had it! I'm not afraid of you, Voldemort! Call yourself a Lord? You're nothing but an ugly, crazy git who doesn't know when to die."
Snape closed his eyes, wishing that Weasley had paid more attention in class. Even if the boy had never improved his Potions grade as a result, he might at least have been able to come up with a better collection of insults. So the Granger girl was dead too? Snape felt his teeth grit and his throat tighten. She was the last person he'd expected to die, the last person anyone would expect. Wonderboy and his carrot-top sidekick were the ones who always plunged themselves headfirst into trouble. Granger was the sensible one, the one to get them back out of the situations they impulsively jumped at. Granger was the intelligent one, the one who would take a step back and think before acting. Granger was the first student in years to have him hunting vainly for genuine criticisms and worrying that one day she'd stop finding answers to his questions and start asking them right back.
Snape looked again, but Granger remained unmoving on the blackened grass. She should have been the last to go, not the first. She should have stayed with her books and her quills and her research. She should never have taken up with the Boy-Who-Didn't-Know-When-To-Stop. She should have been brilliant, a star shining with her own light, not a satellite, not 'Hermione? Oh, the bushy-haired one who hangs around with Harry Potter.' Should have, could have, and now never would. Snape was in no position to care, had no right to care, and above all could not afford to think about why it even occured to him to care.
"Hermione?" Longbottom's distraught query drew the Potion Master's attention. Clearly it caught Voldemort's as well, because the Weasley boy's first magical shot almost caught the Dark Lord by surprise.
The red-head dodged a return blast, still hopping on the spot after avoiding the curse, bouncing like an angry ferret. "Hah! You missed! Getting slow in your old age, Mouldermort?"
Snape groaned to himself. If Weasley wanted to join his bookworm friend as quickly as possible then he was doing everything right. Voldemort had waved away his attendant Death Eaters, confident in his ability to handle an irate student, and was watching with more amusement than anger. He was simply spinning out the moment when he'd throw the Killing Curse, Snape thought; or perhaps he'd use Imperius, the Dark Lord might well think it entertaining to force Weasley to kill Longbottom.
Longbottom. After that short distraction Snape had almost forgotten him. The boy was a walking magical accident, but he'd dealt with Malfoy when he'd caught the man by surprise... Snape rolled his eyes enough to get a look at Longbottom's face, caught his attention with a subtle nudge against his leg. Snape let his wand peep from under his robes, and nodded almost imperceptibly towards Voldemort. Longbottom nodded and tensed, fumbling his own wand into his hand inside his sleeve where the masked figures in the background couldn't see it.
Snape returned to the unequal match of Weasley against the Dark Lord of the Death Eaters. Voldemort was throwing hexes at random now, chuckling rustily as Weasley stumbled and bit his lips against the pain of those he failed to dodge or deflect.
"C'mon, Tommie, I've had worse from Crookshanks," Weasley managed to shout, his voice strained and the watery fireball that followed his words rolling wide and fizzling out.
Snape refrained from a patronising snort of disgust only to avoid drawing attention to himself. He poised his wand, and froze as he caught movement from the corner of his eye, away to one side- the side away from the foolhardy Weasley boy. A pebble rolled, moved as if by invisible feet. Grass stalks bent against unseen legs. Snape prodded at a past memory: Dumbledore's effusive praise of a long ago chess game. A game where Ron Weasley had sacrificed himself to allow his friends to move into position.
Great Merlin!
Shaking with anticipation, Snape glanced at the fallen figure of Hermione Granger and saw a pair of open eyes shielded beneath the untameable mop of brown hair, very much alive, poised and ready behind a carefully palmed wand. Some instinct caused her gaze to flicker in his direction. Her eyes flared with recognition, with a Gryffindor's eager anticipation and her own instinctive calculated caution. She grinned swiftly, and in that second she roused something within the Potions Master that Dumbledore had only managed to coax into sleepy resentfulness.
Hope.
This wasn't some damned, doomed display of foolhardy Gryffindor courage. It was a desperate plan, true, the plan of those who had no choice but to seize the slightest thread of a chance, but it was a plan.
Snape returned the grin, but it dropped as the air filled with the sickly green flame flaring from Voldemort's wand. Weasley was caught in the glare, starkly outlined at the heart of the pulsing light. Hermione's attention abruptly returned to Voldemort, expression simultaneously bleak, focussed, intense, and grimly determined. Her lip trembled, but her hand never wavered.
She nodded sharply.
Four wands spewed fourth their vengeance against the Dark Lord, leaping ahead of the sudden realisation of the hovering Death Eaters. Five people forever cast themselves as heroes of the wizarding world: Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Serverus Snape, Neville Longbottom... and Ron Weasley. The masked figures struck, but it was too late, too late. The light of bittersweet victory spattered upwards, ruby drops of burning blood staining the distant starry tears of the night sky.
******
No, it doesn't stop there, there's more on the way!
Refernces:
1. King Lear, by William Shakespeare.
2. Christopher Morley
Chapter title from the novel by Arthur C. Clarke
