Title: Choices
Author: lingering_nomad
Characters: Severus, Eileen (a.k.a. Madam Pince)
Disclaimer: The characters used herein are the property of JK Rowling, Warner Bros, various publication houses etc. I stake no claim on them by using them in this story. This is written purely for recreational purposes. No money is being made and no harm is intended.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 739
Warnings: Mild angst, parent-child issues, AUish.
Summary: Severus makes a request.
A/N: This follows two years after Haunted: Ghosts.
~CHOICES~
It had been years since he'd come to her quarters.
They would pass one another in the hallways, at mealtimes, when he had need of a tome from the library; rarely speaking of more than the weather and polite inquiries into one another's health. As befitted an acquaintance between colleagues.
The resemblance between them was stark, yet no one would suspect they shared blood. He harboured that same attitude toward his daughter, she had noticed and the girl, perhaps understanding the worth of anonymity in these times, followed his lead without question.
He'd been such an engaging boy, she remembered. Oh the questions he used to ask: of the world she had come from; of the family and traditions he would never have the option to know.
He had wondered at the reasons.
And she had waited eleven years for his contemporaries divulge the answer – a transgression he had yet to forgive her for. And even all these decades later, she had yet to solve the quandary of how one might look into a child's eyes and explain that the world would reject him for choices you had made.
He had since made choices of his own, of course...
He stood with his back to her now, pretending to examine the bobbles upon the mantel of her hearth.
She recalled the last time he had failed to face her: the night he'd brought the tiding of the Black boy's death. When he'd told her of the allegiance he had sworn, of his fear, of her need to beg asylum from the Ministry, not only from her husband, but from what "his Master" might demand of him.
The rumours were certainly rampant: of half-bloods buying their "redemption" with the blood of traitorous kin.
"I need you to take Aleria and go."
He sounded weary, resigned.
"Go?" she questioned and her heart thumped against her ribs as realisation hit with the force of an Unforgivable.
"What has he asked of you?"
"I cannot disclose that."
"Sevy—"
"Don't!" he shouted, spinning where he stood.
She hadn't intended to recoil from him. However much he resembled his father, he was a man all his own, but twenty odd years of conditioning was not so easily overrode.
He flinched at her fear, instantly checking his rage.
He said nothing, but his contrition – to her – was plain on his face, shadowed as it was in the torchlight. He looked so lost for a moment then, just as he had as an eleven-year-old boy, returning for his first Hogwarts holiday at home. She'd asked if he'd had a pleasant time at school, having had no way of inquiring before (her husband detested owls and the school knew no other way). His lack of an answer said all there was to know...
"Heed me in this. Make arrangements. Then take the girl and go. As far from Hogwarts as you can."
"Severus," she began, "whatever debts you believe you must settle, surely – surely – you have sacrificed enough. He has no right—"
"No mother."
How many years had it been since he'd last addressed her as such?
"You know nothing of the debts I owe."
"Oh Severus... if you're referring to that Evans girl—"
"No," he interrupted her, voice raw with the passion of his conviction, " I shall do what I must. You only waste your breath to dissuade me."
She stared up at him for a long while, her heart like the ruin of a long abandoned home; a place where happiness should have thrived, but now only dust and cobwebs dwelled.
"This... is not as I envisioned," she murmured, closing her eyes in the face of what should have been.
He stayed silent.
"Make your preparations," he said at length. "You must depart before the end of term."
He tarried a moment longer, his eyes full of words that ought to be said, and then silently strode from the room.
~FIN~