Still on time, I hope. I wrote this during an exam period and am utterly disgusted with myself for it. This is my final year of junior college and my school is particularly industrious, so I have another three sets of exams before the GCE 'A's in November/December. I'll see what happens, but I'm really not so sure I can or should continue at the current pace.
In any case, I've written this and I hope you like it. It's set several months before the fall of Voldemort, with Severus as its centre.
Finished 25 March 2004Tide
"He's breaking down." The voice was familiar but strangely dislocated, distinct syllables that nevertheless meant nothing.
"We've been through this, Poppy."
"I don't have the authority to counsel your staff, Albus, but if this is the boy whose grades Amelia used to swear by, then he's breaking down."
"Could you give him a little more Pepper-up Potion, Poppy? It doesn't seem to be working just yet."
"Couldn't you just let him sleep for today?"
"No, Poppy."
"Fine."
A light taste that meant far too much clarity. Severus opened his eyes and blinked, the memory of conversation fading.
Dumbledore's face passed into view. "You missed all your morning classes."
Severus shut his eyes. "Do I care?"
"Severus, this is no time to be behaving like a petulant child."
Severus opened his eyes again, focusing suddenly on the stone ceiling. It wasn't the ceiling he woke up to every morning, and he jerked into a sitting position, the movement making his head throb. "Where – oh."
The… hospital wing?
He hadn't been here since he graduated, a fact that made him dizzy. Severus touched his head lightly. "Why am I here?"
Dumbledore's voice was light and casual, which invariably meant that the subject was not. "You must have made a mistake mixing your sleeping draught, Severus."
Severus stared at him. "Oh."
The headmaster coughed softly as he sat back. "I expect a report regarding your meeting with Voldemort last night."
Report-writing was familiar and normal, distant from the terrible knowledge that he had managed to mess up a simple potion. Severus clutched at it. "Yes, sir."
"Severus?"
"Sir?"
"Try not to wince at the name."
"Yes, sir." Severus left the hospital wing and tried to stop staring blankly at everything as though he had never seen any of it before. Tried to think. He hadn't made a mistake in Potions ever since third year, and that was only because Potter and Black had thrown him into the lake the day before a Potions test in the middle of January.
He remembered Madam Pomfrey's words, suddenly: if this is the boy whose grades Amelia used to swear by, then he's breaking down.
Severus blinked. He felt like a tired child, which was all wrong. He was twenty-three and taller than half the staff and had to look Voldemort in the eye every other day and lie through his teeth and control everything that could be controlled and some that couldn't. Exhaustion was a luxury he couldn't afford.
He was back at his office. Never mind that now. Just write the report.
It was, at least, a simple thing, something he understood. Severus had graduated from essays and homework to reports and lists. The calluses on his fingers from holding his quill had never faded, and he bought parchment and ink at the same shop he'd gone to when he was a student, filling the sheets with information he had told the Dark Lord and information he had gathered, details on how he had sabotaged this operation and that and who he'd blamed it on. There was a two-inch stack of the things in a secret compartment of his desk and he gave a copy to Dumbledore whenever he finished one.
Severus didn't know if Dumbledore actually read them, or if it was just for his own benefit, to see how unsubtle and desperate and careless he had become over the last five years.
He'd started with ploys that had at least three back doors, three different people to blame mistakes and leaks on. Someone would die, someone would be punished, and Severus would be standing at a distance with everyone else, watching and righteously indignant, or simply glad that it hadn't been him. But he'd been nineteen at the time and convinced that he couldn't possibly die.
And things had changed such a lot. Last week he'd overheard his students bragging about their Death Eater parents and how Voldemort had figured out all the security changes at the Ministry and was going to raid them two days later. Severus had fretted and panicked and couldn't think of a single intelligent idea and had finally written a note to one of the new and impressionable young Death Eaters in someone else's name and his own handwriting, saying that the operation had been cancelled and the Ministry had changed its measures, and spent the next couple of days wondering if Voldemort would think that it was too cheap a reverse-reverse-reverse-psychology trick to believe that it was Severus who'd done it.
It'd worked, sort of, because Voldemort apparently hadn't been able to make up his mind whether it was Severus or someone else, and since he didn't have someone else he'd finally called Severus up for a talk and listened to his lies and his feigned paranoid-and-bewildered-panic (which was different from guilt-ridden-and-desperate-panic), and then cast the Cruciatus on him.
And it'd been almost a relief, because any form of panic was perfectly all right during the Cruciatus.
Severus put down his quill and lowered his head into his hands momentarily. It was too real, the memory of dragging himself back onto his knees when all he wanted to do was lie back and close his eyes and stop caring. Voldemort had crossed over, the silks of his robes rustling, and pulled Severus' chin up to stare at him, red eyes set in pale skin stretched too tight over an elegantly-boned face.
Are you afraid to die, Severus?
Severus had answered, softly, "No."
And Voldemort had let go and let him fall backwards, where he'd stayed for the next few minutes listening to his own breath, wondering at how he wasn't dead yet, and wishing that he was.
It wasn't until he was muttering a Copying Charm over his work and a fresh sheet of parchment that Severus actually read what he'd written on autopilot, marvelling at how he had managed to sound calm and intelligent and clinically formal, as if he hadn't come back to Hogwarts afterwards a trembling wreck and mixed – mismixed – a sleeping draught that had made him sleep until one in the afternoon.
The words were crisp, black ink on fawn parchment, like a homework essay one of his students might have given him, and Severus realised that it was as normal and mundane as that. He'd been doing it for five years; after five years anything could become normal and mundane.
It was so normal that he was trying to kill himself by making stupid mistakes and bad decisions, and so mundane that he had hardly noticed until he'd almost succeeded.
Severus filed away his own copy and rolled up Dumbledore's, tying it with cord and slipping it into his pocket to deliver to the headmaster. It occurred to him that it was a nice touch, charting his progress downhill so that when things finally caught up with him Dumbledore could take out everything he'd written and say that Severus had done it to himself and what an unfortunate accident it was.
On his way out Severus realised that he was thinking as though he wasn't expecting to live through to the end of the war, and chided himself for it.
.
Hogwarts was achingly familiar; Severus had been there for half his life and sometimes he forgot that he was a teacher. He still dressed in the same black of his old school robes, only cut differently, and it'd taken a year to get used to calling the most of the professors by their first names and not think that he was in trouble whenever he went to their offices. He still couldn't do it for Dumbledore, and didn't think he ever would.
Except things were different now. Going to the Headmaster's office meant the stiff bulge of a report in his pocket, and Slytherin commons meant bad news: a funeral, the arrest of a Death Eater in the family, a trip to St. Mungo's by Floo. Sometimes it was his fault. Severus knew that when any of his students went white in the face and cried it usually also meant that most of the rest of the school were reading about a victory by the Ministry in the papers and rejoicing. Dumbledore made him speak to all the graduating Slytherins in a tactfully neutral tone about career prospects, but he invariably met some of them during Voldemort's meetings a few months later.
He'd managed to kill some of them, by accident or desperation or, sometimes, calculation.
It was too complicated to understand or accept and so Severus didn't try. He was twenty-three and always either too young or too old. It had been so much simpler once: the Marauders made his life hell, so he would seek revenge and then they would seek revenge, a comfortable cycle of petty hatred. It had been terrible but not the kind of terrible you could die from, except afterwards they'd tried to kill him and then all hell had broken loose.
Severus was almost used to people trying to kill him and all hell breaking loose, now.
"Severus?"
He glanced up, surprised, and had a fleeting glimpse of brown hair and pale skin before he passed the other man. "Werewolf filth." The insult came easily and was pleasant on his tongue, was something truly familiar where everything else had changed.
The footsteps stopped behind him. Severus turned to see what he had done, if Remus Lupin still bit his lip in vague discomfort the way he used to.
He still did, and Severus smiled.
And then Lupin, older and dressed in patched brown robes that weren't student-black, blurted out, "Dumbledore's sending me to Berlin."
Severus blinked. "What?"
"Berlin. I – " Lupin glanced away, bit his lip again, and forced a bland smile. " – never mind."
"Good riddance," Severus finally said, realising how delayed his reply was. He remembered that he had heard about this, two months ago when Dumbledore asked him if he'd ever seen Remus Lupin with Voldemort and Severus had wanted to say yes but told the truth and said no. And Dumbledore had shut his eyes and done his tired-old-man impersonation and dismissed Severus from his office. So this was the conclusion: Dumbledore was sending his beloved werewolf to Berlin, out where he couldn't create any trouble or get into any, and Lupin was unhappy and hurt by the suspicion. Typical Dumbledore, and typical Lupin.
Lupin was looking at him thoughtfully, his smile almost genuine. "In retrospect I should have expected that reply."
"Yes, you should."
"Never mind, then." Lupin shook his head. "I'll – well. I'll take my leave."
"Don't let me delay you." Severus turned and went on, not wanting to think about how strange that conversation had been, as if both Lupin and he had played their parts badly and bungled up what used to be a seamless double-act. It was always exasperating and sometimes unbearably so, but nevertheless almost reassuring in its repetitive sameness.
And now even that was gone, lost in a new and awful familiarity that had covered the old one completely.
Severus stopped again and glanced over his shoulder, but the werewolf was already gone and the rolled-up report was solid in his fingers, demanding his attention.
.
Almost a year ago Dumbledore had added two new names to Severus' list of families to protect at all costs: the Potters and the Longbottoms. Severus had accepted them without protest and left his own thoughts about the matter to more private moments.
James Potter had grown up, got married, and started a family. Had become a part of a whole rather than aiming to be the whole, as he always had. Potter was suddenly just another family name and meant James and Lily and Harry Potter, instead of just James. It was strange and mindboggling: any moment now Severus would receive news that Sirius Black was getting married too, and then very probably the world would end.
But the Potters had behaved like any other family on his list of names, were distressingly vulnerable and prone to stupid domestic things like talking too much to the grocery store clerk, after which Severus had had to step in and quietly tinker with the man's memory before the Death Eaters forced it out of him. And Black had not got married, so the fundamental logic of the world had been preserved.
He was used to it now. The James Potter who had nothing better to do with his time than torment Severus had evidently disappeared into the past and been reduced to, of all things, a family man. Keeping an eye on the Potters were a task Severus had been charged with, like looking after his Potions classes and Slytherin, and that was that. By and large, worse changes had taken place.
And so Severus was vaguely discomfited when, a year later, Dumbledore took the Potters off his list. "Why?"
Professor Dumbledore smiled. "You've done a very good job, Severus. It's just that I've found a better way to keep them safe, and you have enough on your hands."
"It's the sleeping draught," Severus said flatly. "You think I'm breaking down."
Not that I'm not, of course.
"You are breaking down," Dumbledore said crisply, and waited for Severus to stop spluttering. "It's not a weakness, but I presume you understand me when I say that you simply aren't allowed to."
"Yes, sir."
"In any case, that isn't the reason I'm removing the Potters from your care. And – " The Headmaster smiled, suddenly, pale-blue eyes twinkling with real humour, " – I didn't realise you were this attached to the family."
Severus stared at the man. It occurred to him that he had stopped thinking about the Potters as James Potter and Company about three months into the task.
He had forgotten. It was a stranger and more terrible thing than Potter's reformation, Lupin's departure. Stranger than the slow sea-change of objects and events and what everything had once meant.
"Of course not," Severus finally said, abruptly. He stood up to leave. "Do what you wish with the Potters, sir."
.
And then it was two months later and Severus fell off his bed clutching the Dark Mark on his arm, convinced that Voldemort had finally found out what he'd been doing for the last five years and was trying to kill him in his sleep. His next thought was that he was being called for, in which case he needed desperately to get out of school and Apparate.
After that there was nothing but the terrible pain.
And after that there was nothing at all.
.
Severus opened his eyes. He recognised the ceiling this time. Not again.
"Good morning." Dumbledore, sitting next to his bed with a placid smile.
Severus sat up and pushed his sleeve up to the elbow. The Dark Mark was a faint etching on his skin, hardly there at all. "Something happened last night." He paused. "If anyone knows about it, I suppose you would."
"James and Lily Potter are dead."
"Oh."
"Voldemort has fallen."
Severus tried to understand this. The words meant something but it was too much to grasp. "The Dark Lord has… "
"… fallen," the Headmaster finished.
He stared at the man and didn't see anything at all. The light was all wrong. It was the same light Severus woke up to everyday and it said that nothing had changed and Dumbledore must be lying.
But Dumbledore was staring back with steady blue eyes and it couldn't be a joke because it wasn't funny at all. Severus found his voice. "May I leave?"
"Of course."
Severus staggered back to his office and wrote something down. Then he slept for the rest of the day and half the night before he woke up in a desperate panic, thinking that he couldn't do this, there was work to do and reports to write.
Then he twisted round. The parchment was still where he'd left it, pinned into a crack between the stones of the wall, above his bedstead, and it declared that Voldemort was gone and it hadn't been a dream.
And it was only then that Severus remembered that James and Lily Potter were dead. It was another piece of knowledge that he held in his fingers and didn't know what to do with.
It occurred to him that he had too many of those, shelved away neatly over the years when he hadn't had the time or the energy to deal with them. Except now Severus was suddenly empty and didn't have any excuses, and it was time to take them out again and remember, all the things that had been and were still more than he could understand or accept.
Severus stared into the dark, listening to his own breathing, and it seemed to him a terrible thing, to remain so stable in the face of so much change. He hardly knew how or why he'd managed to stay alive; there was no good reason for anything at all and it hurt to know everything that he did.
When he woke up in the morning his face was still sticky with tears and he had a crick in his back from sleeping bent over with his legs drawn to his chest. Severus unfolded himself slowly, conscious of being too old and far too tall to sit in this manner comfortably, and wondered how he was ever going to get through the rest of his life.
.
The next few weeks were something that Severus was never able to remember clearly afterwards. The whole of the Ministry and the Order turned up for the Potters' funeral and, later, Peter Pettigrew's. Severus saw that under the sombre greyness there was joy and relief, that the Potters' deaths had bought them this victory. There had been too many funerals and this would be one of the last; it had an air of the slipshod despite its sobriety, and Severus knew that after the event people would go home and celebrate with their families and be lost again in the dizzy joy of Voldemort's fall. For the first time he felt a little sorry for James Potter, who had died a hero but whose death was simultaneously most-mourned and least, first-forgotten and last.
He read in the Daily Prophet of Sirius Black's arrest and felt nothing, not even satisfaction that he'd been right after all about Black having a criminal mind: it felt petty and weak and the man laughing in the picture was not the Sirius Black he had known because Severus had always associated him with Potter. Potter and Black, in a single breath, like twins.
And then there were arrests and trials and verdicts, which Severus read about with the same indifference. The names were text on paper and the memories of lying on the floor with Voldemort staring into his face were fading quickly, only real at night when he woke up and forgot that the war was over. He heard that his own name had turned up twice or thrice, only to be neatly erased from all records after Dumbledore handed the Ministry the two-inch stack of reports that Severus had written over the years, and he wondered that he had never, ever thought that Dumbledore had wanted him to write them for that purpose.
Severus was never asked to testify. He suspected that Dumbledore had had a hand in the matter, but as long as no one said anything about it he wouldn't either.
Dumbledore ordered all the students to go home and spend the next two weeks with their families. Severus returned to teaching Potions as soon as they came back, and took due notice of the fact that about a fifth of the Slytherins had been transferred to Durmstrang. Life went on, in a steady flow of day after day, and Severus walked to and from his classes and did his best to pretend that the past five years meant nothing.
One Saturday afternoon Remus Lupin walked into his office, silently and without knocking.
Severus had heard quite a lot about the werewolf, mostly against his will: how he had come back after the funerals and found out that everyone he knew and cared about were either dead or arrested or fostered out, how he'd gone to Azkaban one day and come back and said nothing at all. How Dumbledore had told him to relief-teach Defense Against the Dark Arts and Lupin had accepted without protest.
He saw the exhaustion in Lupin's face, wondering where he had seen it before, and then realised that it was in his bathroom mirror, black eyes instead of grey.
Lupin was standing near the door, as if he was expecting to leave shortly.
Severus poured a cup of tea, pushed it wordlessly across the desk, and went back to his work.
The next hour passed quietly, while Severus read his students' essays and carefully wrote 'Disgusting' across the top right-hand corner of two-thirds of them, and Lupin sat on the other side of his desk with both hands folded around the cup as if he needed the warmth, sipping every few minutes and staring out of the window as the light turned dusky gold.
And then Lupin replaced the empty cup on Severus' desk, and left as silently as he had come. Severus stopped writing after the werewolf had left, sighed softly at nothing in particular, and continued marking essays.
.
Professor Dumbledore extended the Christmas break that year by a week and gave Severus a grey scarf to go with his black robes. It was thick soft wool, sensible and not at all like the brightly-patterned things Dumbledore usually chose for himself. Severus thanked the headmaster and went back to his office, where he stared at his old Slytherin scarf for two minutes and finally packed it away, slowly.
He realised that he didn't know what to do with his time, so he went to Flourish and Blott's to look for something to read. It was Monday morning and everyone who didn't have Albus Dumbledore for an employer was still at work.
Severus listened to the snow underfoot, warm in not-quite-school-robes and his new scarf, and watched his breath cloud in front of him as he walked, a steady regular rhythm.
And it was reassuring and predictable, a comfortable cycle.
There's very little to say about this, apart from the fact that the name 'Amelia' that crops up in the first section applies to Professor Amelia Absinthe, the Hufflepuff Potions teacher of my own invention, who is mentioned in passing in some of my fics, and who resigned when Severus graduated.
(I realise that unless my Slytherin Head of House, Professor Azazel, stepped down at around the same time, Severus wouldn't have been Head of House. But the idea of Severus as Slytherin Head offered some quite interesting situations.)
Severus, I think, responds very badly to change. He tries to form conclusions about everything around him, and after he manages it it's very difficult for him to let go. If and when he finally does, he builds new ones fairly quickly. Battling the Marauders was a routine. Serving both Voldemort and Dumbledore is another. Severus hasn't quite formed his post-war beliefs yet, but will quite shortly. One fic I read pointed out that the idea of Sirius as Voldemort's second-in-command was probably one of the strangest delusions Severus constructed, since he'd been a Death Eater and certainly never seen or heard of Sirius Black in that circle. But by Prisoner of Azkaban it's fairly obvious that over the last twelve years Severus has accepted it completely.
Severus always ties up his loose ends, however badly, and given enough time he can always persuade himself that they're true.
It occurs to me that Remus and Severus are two fixed points in a setting that has changed a great deal. For Severus Remus will always be werewolf filth, and for Remus Severus will always be the Slytherin that hates his guts no matter what he does. I imagine that in the days before Voldemort's downfall when Severus had to be careful with all of his words and couldn't trust anyone to be anything, talking to (read: insulting) Remus must have been a great comfort, despite the fact that any meeting with Remus always leaves Severus exasperated at best and apoplectic at worst. It's just the notion of
I find it great fun to write conversations between those two. The dynamics are really the most amazing I've ever seen.
End
Notes: