Chapter 2: A Sign of Things to Come
Sausage. It was always the smell of sausage just after sunrise that made Harry's stomach turn.
As of late, it seemed every morning was accompanied with sausage and that sickening, fickle flop of his stomach had almost become routine. Wake up, trudge down to the Great Hall, plop into a staff chair, pass the sausage, and try not to vomit.
In an attempt to avoid the ordeal all together, Harry turned his head to the left, only to be confronted by a steaming platter of ham and bacon. The thought of more salty, breakfast meat only made matters worse. Harry was starting to see the appeal of becoming vegetarian. That was until he spied the tomato and egg casserole just beyond the bacon platter; the aroma was enough to turn him green. So, not just the sausage then. Odd it seemed though, since Harry had always been one with a stellar appetite. While at school, he was among the first to enjoy all the dishes the house elves conjured be they meat, starch, vegetable or anything else. With one last glance at the smoked ham, Harry sighed and focused his attention to the croissant on his own plate. Bread. At least that hadn't changed.
Time passed at a slow march as Harry picked purposefully at his plate. Just try to look busy. If that could be accomplished, then none of them would talk and none would be the wiser. Dutifully, he reached for his water goblet, again with purpose, as one who wanted to participate in the breakfast meal would. Occasionally, he would lift his head and glance around the room. Taking in the students, their laughter, their joy, Harry would give a knowing smile and then lower his head once more. Pick at the plate, drink from the goblet, lift and smile, lower it once more. Pick, drink, lift and smile, lower. Over and again he would perform the same routine, like a well-trained pony. Pick, drink, lift and smile, lower; the perfect impression of a normal, happy person. What a load of bollocks.
"All right, Harry?" The voice startled him. Uneasily, Harry broke his repetition and turned to face the voice, only to find a set of worried brown eyes beneath shaggy red hair staring back at him. He must have seemed quizzical, because the talking happened again, "You spilled your goblet."
"Ah, well, Bill… I didn't sleep well last night," Harry mumbled. Bill Weasley gave a reluctant nod and turned back to his conversation with Professor Slughorn regarding hinkypunks and Invisible Draught. Damn that Bill Weasley and his keen eye. Glancing down at his hand, Harry noticed a shaking tremor run through it. Clenching his fist seemed to cure the tremble for the moment, but he knew it was only a matter of time before it would return. The tremors were the first side-effect of the extended use of Pepper-Up potions.
Harry had been brewing them for weeks now and every morning, he would consume enough to rattle a hippogriff. It seemed to be the only way he could keep any amount of focus through the day. And yes, the potions worked, but only while the body was in control. After time, the potion would increase in potency as the body's ability to process the brew decreased. Hand trembling was the first sign that Harry's tolerance level was diminishing. Soon the jitters would spread to his feet and legs. A few days after that, his pulse would accelerate and he would sweat even in the coldest of dungeons. And if he continued to consume the Pepper-Up potion, he would find that sleep would come rarely, if ever. Sleeping draughts could be used to combat the side-effects, but the cycle was vicious and never-ending. Wizards had gone mad from the abuse of such a simple potion.
Thinking back to his lessons in Potions, Harry tried to recall other brews meant to heighten mental acuity, but all that came was inky black and foggy images. He would try researching the books in the library, but deep down, Harry knew it to be useless. Only rudimentary potions were kept on public record for the students. If he wanted something with more power, he knew where to look.
Guess it was once again time to visit the pensive.
Pushing back from the table, Harry rose quickly to leave.
"Oh, Harry," Bill called, his hand coming to rest on the crook of Harry's arm. "Oy, you feel a tad parky. All right there, Harry?"
"Yes, just a bit of a draft in my room, s'all."
"Precisely why you should move into the staff quarters on the upper levels. No need, really, to stay in those dreary dungeon rooms." Harry opened his mouth to protest, but Bill stopped him before he could get the words out. "Yes, I know, you prefer the quiet. I suppose I understand, what with you not being a Professor and all. Quiet is good for those who can achieve it," he said with a rueful laughter.
"Is there something you needed?" Harry asked, looking poignantly at the hand clenching his now throbbing arm.
"Oh right," Bill said as he released his hold, "I wanted to invite you to my classroom today. We are taking on a bogart, and since you have become something of a legend in the bogart department, I thought it might be grand if you attended."
Tried as he might, Harry felt the fake smile slip ever so slightly from his face. Since the beginning of term, Harry had attended exactly none of the classes in session and had hoped to keep up his stellar attendance record. Going back to the Defense Against Dark Arts classroom was like stepping back in time, except there was no way to go back, so why bother even trying? And a bogart no less. Surely a dementor wouldn't appear this time, nor Voldemort. The thing he feared the most… it wasn't the thought of that which brought an icy chill to his spine. It was the fact that he, Harry Potter, couldn't think of a single thing that scared him anymore.
"Well, Harry, will you do it?"
"Sure," he muttered. With a nod of his head, Harry ducked out from beneath that dodgy Bill Weasley's penetrating gaze and made a bee line for the back entrance.
Walking swiftly, Harry stayed to the shadows so as not to be noticed. The jaunt from the Great Hall to his private quarters in the lower dungeon was one fraught with the possibilities of confrontation. Students darted in and out of classrooms, the female ones usually stopping to wave or smile in his direction. Professors flitted about with their cheery smiles and small talk just waiting upon their lips for one such as Harry with nowhere else seemingly to go. Being a guest at Hogwarts was like being in pleasantries hell. One could be detained for an entire afternoon pleasantly chatting with those who happened to pass by, just because that one was neither a professor nor student and therefore automatically available for such rubbish.
Harry did his best to be unavailable most of the time. If he could convince everyone he was all right for longer than a day, he would take his meals in the dungeon as well. The last time he'd tried that though, Ginny came all the way from her Yorkshire vacation to check on him. Much to her disappointment, the Man of Our Time couldn't have been bothered to see her. Actually, it had been over a month since the two had spoken in person and Harry knew that even though it didn't bother him a bit, Ginny was going nutters over the whole predicament.
Ginny. His mind reeled with a mess of conflicting emotions at just the thought of her. In times past, Harry had developed feelings for the little ginger-headed girl, so much so that he at one point thought she was the one. But over the course of the last year, the two had grown apart, not just physically but emotionally. For Ginny though, Harry's arrival at Hogwarts meant the two could repair what damage had been done. But for Harry… the damage was much too far gone. In his heart he knew; it was time to end things. Ah, the pain and guilt, right on schedule. Harry couldn't stand the thought of hurting Ginny. Even if he didn't love her, he still cared a great deal for her and to cause that much pain was unthinkable. It was there that Harry always ended his thoughts of Ginny: stuck somewhere between breaking it off and committing like hell to faking it.
With a stale gust of air, the hidden entrance to the lower dungeon pushed open. As Harry sank into the darkness, all thoughts of sausage, Bill, Hogwarts and Ginny receded to the back of his mind. The stale air was a blessing, the crushing black a welcomed alternative to the pure sunlight of the halls above. It took only minutes to walk the rest of the way to his personal chamber.
"Lumos," he mumbled, holding the now illuminated wand before him. Truth be told, he didn't need the light after having traveled the narrow, dank corridors of the dungeon hundreds of times over. He supposed the spell was habit by now. Just another part of him that didn't make much sense. Noticing a familiar chink in the rough stone wall, Harry stopped and turned to face it.
"Specialis Revelio." From the tip of Harry's wand a murky, yellow light oozed forth, covering what anyone else would think was just another section of the tunnel. The yellow light turned a brilliant white as it took the shape of a thick, wooden door. With a wave of his wand, the spell receded, the light oozing away into the inky dark of the corridor. Before him now stood a solid door that marked the entrance to his quarters. Scarpin's Revelaspell was particularly useful in undoing the Disillusionment Charm that Harry wove into place each time he left his chambers. Both spells proved particularly easy for Harry to master and hence forth became a normal part of his daily routine. The room opened up before him, lamplight illuminating as he entered.
Much like the dungeon itself, his quarters looked as though they were dug out of the side of a mountain. The walls were ragged stone that rounded up and into a similar ceiling. Shivering, Harry quickly spelled a thick, downy blanket from the back of the sofa to wrap itself around his shoulders. Staving off the cold was the only downside to living in this part of the castle. That and the lack of a view outside. Out of the corner of his eye, Harry caught sight of a massive tentacle wiggling by the glass of his large, picture window. Obviously the glass was spelled to withstand the pressure of thousands of pounds of water from the Black Lake, but even still, when the giant squid swam past Harry caught himself cringing every time. It would be his luck the spell would falter and all that murky water would crush him to bits. He shivered once more, only this time it was the thought of sticky tentacles rather than the cold that Harry had a difficult time shaking off.
"Right, what to do about those tremors," Harry spoke aloud, checking his hand once more.
The trembling had ceased, for now, but he knew it was only a matter of time before it returned. The second bout would be worse than what occurred at breakfast and the third after that worse than the second and so on and so forth. It was definitely time to find a new band aid for the yawning hole of emptiness threatening just on the edge of his mind. Without it, Harry knew he could very well just wander off, lost in his own thoughts to never be seen again. 'Would it be so bad,' he thought, 'if it all just ended. I could disappear down here so easily; it would be as if I never existed. Everyone would think I'd just gone bugger all and fled.'
As if in response, a large cabinet in the back of the room awoke, the doors sliding open and the shelf within creeping forward until a pedestal unveiled itself.
"All right, all right, I'll gen up a bit on advanced potions before deciding to go off the trolley."
From the depths of the pedestal, a large round dish rose and floated gently just above the surface. The pensieve, the very same one that Harry had first fallen into in Dumbledore's office all those years ago, greeted him much like an old friend would. Eerie waves undulated across the surface of the mysterious liquid that flowed of its own accord into the bowl. Above, two cabinets opened to reveal shelves lined with glass vials and jars, each one labeled accordingly. Some said things like 'Tom- first encounter' or 'Slughorn- late night oration' and those were in a neat, elegant script indicative of the man who used to take his time recording every memory possible. There were at least a hundred of those vials, maybe more. Then there were the remaining bottles whose labels were scribbled in a hasty hand with descriptions such as 'Quidditch first year, game one' or 'DADA- werewolves'. Those were the recent additions of Harry's, each memory carefully extracted and stored, leaving behind vague black holes in his mind's eye. Most of them, Harry didn't miss on a day to day basis, but there were a few, all the way in the back, that Harry found his mind tried to revisit more often than not. 'Severus Snape- Sectumsempra' sat next to 'Severus Snape- Sleeping Draught and Living Death' and so on the row went, unlike the rest, in an orderly alphabetical nature.
"There you are," Harry murmured, gently reaching for a vial written in red ink, the handwriting unlike the Harry's or Dumbledore's. The label simply read 'Potion Study, volume 1'. From the moment McGonagall had given the pensieve, the cabinet and all of the contents inside to Harry (as instructed in the latter part of Dumbledore's will), he knew that the vials labeled volumes one through seven were from the late Potion's Master himself. The handwriting was strong; the curls of each letter deliberate and decisive, much like the man himself. The vials therefore came to rest next to all those memories of Harry's that pertained to Severus Snape. Having lived and relived each memory in the cabinet since his return to Hogwarts, Harry knew exactly which volume pertained to what type of potions. Volume one, for instance, contained memories of vitality, health and wellness potions while the remaining volumes spoke of all other types from love potions to poisons.
With a practiced hand that came from countless hours spent peering over the edge of the pensieve, Harry poured the memory and leaned forward, allowing the magic to swallow him whole. The sensation of falling, surrounded by the tendrils of powerful magic, was a thrill unlike any other. No matter how many times he entered the pensieve, Harry's body still surged with pleasure and excitement whenever the magic took hold.
"A pinch of crushed fairy wing added when the brew starts to bubble."
The voice came out of the murky dark as the memory took shape. Severus Snape stood straight, shoulders bent slightly forward as he gazed into a large, bronze cauldron. Harry shuttered at the sound of his voice, the reaction the same each time Harry listened to the man speak inside the memories. At first, it had frightened him, made him think he had completely gone mental, but as time wore on and Harry visited more and more memories of Snape, he came to enjoy the skitter of goose bumps across his skin. Harry watched as Snape moved about the room, collecting ingredients and reading aloud from an open book. Each motion caused his robes to billow behind him, framing his thin body in a black, fluid cloud. A low heat collected in the pit of Harry's stomach as he continued to play the voyeur. It was wrong; he knew it, on so many levels. Yet after months of stealing away and hiding in the dark, the idea of how wrong it was only added to the stirring, molten emotions bubbling away just below the surface.
This was it. This was the secret he refused to share with anyone. Not Ron, nor Hermione or Bill or McGonagall and especially not Ginny. The great Harry Potter reduced to nothing more than a school boy getting his thrills by spying on a dead man. None of it made sense, really, so Harry knew it surely wouldn't make sense to anyone else in his life. For all intents and purposes, he had always been attracted to girls, so why now in the dawn of his adult life did he find those feelings transferred to a man? And THIS man at that! The confusion of it all kept him up at night, kept him roaming the castle trying to sort it all out. To no avail, though, because every day Harry found himself right back here, inside a mirage of dreams and long-forgotten memories. He was the keeper of the dead. Snape cleared his throat as he dabbed his brow with a soft, green cloth. Harry silenced the running thoughts in his head, focusing like mad on what was to happen next.
With gentle hands, Snape reached up and threaded his fingers through his mass of black hair. In a swift motion, he gathered the strands and tied them up in a leather bind, exposing a delicate and porcelain patch of skin at the base of his neck. Elation washed over Harry like a drug, begging him to fall deeper into the memory and as the scene moved on around him, Harry realized he would enter the pensieve countless more times that afternoon, just to experience the rush. Truly those memories were a drug and Harry knew himself to be nothing if not a hopeless junky.
