Disclaimer: Ummm. Still not J.K. Rowling. Maybe tomorrow? No? Shucks.
When she awoke, it was back in her room at Malfoy Manor, with the silver chain tangled about the fingers of each hand, its length loose between them. Heather didn't even need to look to know the door was closed, and the room stripped of spells. The walnut moldings, probably dating from the 1700s, with her runes fitted cleverly into the original carving, had been torn out, leaving bare walls. The hardwood floors had been sanded smooth in the corners, and under the rugs, where she'd hidden trips and jinxes, and the board she'd coaxed to splinter under Narcissa's foot as she entered-that had been removed, and the hole filled with rock salt.
The bed was smooth of any embroidery, the elaborate canopy bed replaced with a rusting iron frame that was as stubbornly silent to Heather's querying fingers as a stereotypical prison guard. The walls were bare, her robes replaced with simple shifts in the wardrobe, and she smelt salt and burning sage.
The only thing in the room other than herself and the spare furnishings was the great snake. It dozed by the fire, which now had a metal grate in front of it-so they didn't care for her getting her hands on charcoal, or any other writing supplies, she supposed.
It dismayed her to find them not entirely stupid.
Someone had also tended her body for however long she'd slept. Her nails were pared down to the quick, her head newly shaved. She supposed, if she really had to, she could tear open a vein with her teeth-but there was scant munition left in this room. Iron, and salt-washed walls, and cloth that smelt of smoke and sage. The mirror was a possibility-but even as she contemplated breaking it, or the complications of trying to escape out the window, the silver chain pulled taut and bound tight her fingers.
Nuts.
She sat down on the wide ledge below the high window, looking at the white grounds below, caressed her snake, cried.
Hogwarts slept. The courtyard below was a blank slate, their footprints slowly scrawling an uneasy message across it as a figure in the window watched.
Severus Snape walked alongside Albus Dumbledore; himself, black as a crow, the other almost fading into the white world.
Odd, how wizards tended to dress up to their stereotypes.
"I do not understand this, and frankly, Headmaster, for the first time in a long while, I do not know what to expect from him. He will not touch the girl-he says the scar on her forehead, Eihwaz-it's not just from the Killing Curse. Lily did something to protect her. I almost think he burned when he touched her, but then-he will not allow Bellatrix to deface the runes on her body either. I am not sure whether to be relieved by this or whether he has some other intentions for her."
The Headmaster would not answer Severus with his eyes, which in itself was suspicious. Of the two, Albus was the superior Occlumens-so what did he think Severus might see, floating on the rim of his consciousness? Or was did it mean nothing, was he simply lost in thought-but no. He was old, this wizard, and with age came calculation.
"Tell me, Headmaster!" he pressed urgently, aware that he might as well be storming a mountain for all the good it would do. A wizard in his forties, trying to persuade a man so old he was almost inhuman? Albus himself had forgotten his age.
"Defacing Lily's rune would do nothing," Albus said at last. "Voldemort," Severus' Mark itched in recognition, "is aware of this. Minor runes, the kind paid for with pain, like the ones you say she branded on herself-those might be reversed. It would require an equal and opposite payment-either the contrary mark engraved on the flesh of another, pressed against hers, to annul it, though that would depend on the other's will being as strong as hers.
"Frankly," he smiled faintly, "Even if Voldemort did have one of his men try reversing her runes, I doubt it would be possible. Any Runemaster whose will is powerful enough to turn aside a cutting curse with a word embroidered on a scrap of silk-there is no way any of them could turn her own flesh and blood against her."
"The blood wards though," Severus demanded, "you based the wards on Privet Drive off Lily's sacrifice. Off her blood. With the Dark Mark, even I couldn't pass them to check up on the girl, not while Voldemort wanted to kill her-"
A disturbing possibility occurred to him, and he stopped in his tracks.
"Headmaster," he began, "when, and why, did the Dark Lord stop wanting to kill the girl?"
The Headmaster looked aside, as though studying a frozen fountain in the courtyard. Severus tensed, feeling like an unruly puppy. He wanted to shout, to shake the man by his shoulders, to tease the riddle out from his skull until blood bloomed out from the veins through the sclera of his eye. He could almost see the vision crystallize into being, felt a curse bell his throat like beginning of an aria, but better, real and lovely and unlike any staged drama he'd ever seen-
The Headmaster cleared his throat, and Severus shivered, both at the Arts' withdrawal and the man's sudden and knowing gaze.
"I warned you," he told the younger man, mildly, "what happens to those who practice the Arts. Any kind of white magic, even practical magic-the power comes from you, is an extension of your being. You control yourself, and through yourself, your power." He picked up a handful of snow from a nearby flowerbed, twisted his hands like a magician pulling scarves through his fists. The snow flowed and warped like glass, and he held a crystalline rose.
Severus' lips twisted. "And yet, there are some, like Plato, who saw the Arts as divine inspiration-opening of the self to possibility, poet as oracle, that we might become the vessels of the gods."
The Headmaster set down the rose. "You do not believe in the gods, Severus," he said gently.
"No. I don't expect I know what I believe anymore."
The man's hand came softly as a father's upon his shoulder.
"Then believe in me, Severus," he said, almost pleadingly. "Believe that whatever I have done, I am doing to save our people."
Whatever I have done
The words echoed, like rocks falling into a deep cavern, and, caught in their gravity, he opened himself.
It was though the words between them were wires, suspension for a bridge, and he was swaying on it. The image changed, the wires tore through his wrists and ankles. He saw his body stretched out as on a crucifix, hanging head down, the stigmata in his joints giving credence to the seeing.
"You," he croaked, and Albus looked tired and guiltless. "You have lectured me on the Arts for years. Given up for years. Why now. Except as a distraction."
Whatever Albus' primary purpose-to guide him back, or to turn his attention to other matters-that was irrelevant.
What mattered, was the answer.
"Why doesn't he want to kill the girl?" he demanded, his magic rising up his throat, like a cauldron on the point of bubbling over. He choked it back, rasped the demand once more. "WHY."
"I do not know," Albus lied calmly.
Severus turned away from the man before he could change his mind, and retched fire onto the courtyard.
Nothing would grow there that spring.
She had been dreading the return of Lord Voldemort to 'experiment' on her, as he'd threatened, imagined herself the victim of some cruel test the likes of Dr. Mengele might have administered. But when a day passed, days, then a week, she forgot how long she had been there, and forgot her fear. She became bored.
Sometimes-though she knew it was useless-she imagined what she would have been doing right now if Voldemort had never come. He'd come the day before her birthday. She'd never gotten to see what her Mom had gotten her, or gone out with the girls that night for drinks, or dared Jenny Andrews to finally ask her brother out.
Right now, she should have been returning from her first semester at Cambridge studying zoology, Lady snug around her wrist and spitting insults about everyone and anyone. Freshman or not, she would have been employed by one of the reptile labs within a month of getting there. Anything else was unthinkable. She would have roomed with Sara Parkes from Snyde's, the school she'd attended, and her mother before her, and obligingly dated and charmed the boys of Daddy's business contacts, and in general, had a smashing good time.
It could be Christmas right now, she considered, with the snow outside. Christmas, and Daddy would be outdoing himself again, always lavishing his family with everything he could-and sometimes couldn't-afford. It could be Christmas, and her lanky mother, a good half foot taller than she, would be decorating the tree, and if it was brighter than their neighbors, no one would really ask why. If snow fell everywhere but their driveway, someone must have shoveled it before they woke up. If a storm broke down the power lines and every house on the block lost electricity and the Dursley house was still bright and warm, the telly still blaring cheerfully from the living room-well, that was just good luck.
Somehow, around the time Petunia had stopped denying to strangers that the little black-haired girl was her daughter-the daughter she could never otherwise have, not with all the fertility treatments the doctors could offer-she'd stopped asking questions, and accepted her as a kind of dangerous miracle. Heather was wonderful, as much and maybe more than Lily, because Heather was completely hers, especially after she'd refused the old man and stayed with Petunia. They'd been happy, so happy, and Petunia had hated to love the girl, because that kind of charmed life couldn't be normal, there had to be a cost, and the red-eyed Devil had collected.
She wondered if her face was on the back of a milk carton now. If her friends had been mad when she didn't show up for drinks, horrified when they found out what had happened. If they assumed she was dead. She hoped so.
No one else needed to die looking for her.
Her meals came three times a day, delivered through a slot in the bottom of the door that doubled as the snake's exit. She imagined what her mother would say of such treatment. She supposed the measures taken against her warding the room had also made it impossible for house-elves to enter.
It was afternoon, and she had spent an unproductive day arguing with Nagini over the relative nutritional benefits of baby house elves as opposed to rabbits, when the door opened. She scrambled back, clutching behind her back a broken bit of wood planking she'd torn up from the floor and sharpened. The person in the entrance sighed.
"Accio weapon."
The blasted bit of wood tore itself from her fingers and into Narcissa's waiting grasp, and she flung it into the corridor before shutting the door behind her. Heather backed up into the corner. The woman looked at her in a way that might have been pitying as she gingerly sat herself on the musty bed.
"I would apologize for confiscating your stick, but landing myself in a hospital bay once this month on your behalf was enough for me."
Heather eyed her warily.
The woman sniffed. "Well. Off the floor. Don't be ridiculous. If I did mean you harm, I'm the one with the wand."
She hated it when they were reasonable. Still. Reason on their part didn't mean she had to act rationally. And if that made no sense, neither did her life right now. She remained on the floor, holding her knees, staring into space.
She heard Narcissa breathing, and then, slowly, the creaking of the planks as the woman eased herself down onto the dirty, salted floor, skirts and all. Still, she flinched when the witch hand brushed her jawbone. The hand hesitated, and moved onto her shoulder, holding her in a half embrace. She remained stiff and unyielding.
"I'm sorry," Narcissa breathed, moving her hands away finally. They sat silent for a moment, and Heather wondered if she could punch the woman in the crotch, run for the door-but no. After last time, they wouldn't be stupid enough to send the woman alone. If she could wrest away the woman's wand. But the silver chain shackling her fingers would not allow magic.
So all there was to do was listen.
"I'm sorry. I know what it's like to lose your family, to be in a place totally unfamiliar to you. My parents died in the war too."
She refused to listen, but Narcissa refused to stop talking.
"The Ministry had my uncle in Azkaban. You don't know about it yet. It's a terrible place."
"Sounds like most of the wizarding world I've seen so far."
"It can be horrible," Narcissa admitted. "I can't imagine war is pleasant in any world."
Heather shut her eyes against the memory of images off the telly, the kind always passed over while they were flicking through the channels to the football game, the kind she never imagined to have any relevance for a girl living in Britain.
"There's no war in my world."
"Wake up. Whether you are blind to it or not, you have been living in a warzone your entire life. Maybe your Muggle-visions censor it out, or maybe we've Obliviated the worst of what has happened from your collective memory, but it is happening and has been happening since before you were even born."
"I don't care!" she suddenly burst out, flinging herself back from Narcissa. "I don't care, do you hear me! I was safe, and my family was safe, and then all you lot came along, and-"
Narcissa stared at her as though she were an unfamiliar object, and Heather realized she breathing hard, crying, again. She sat on the bed, turned away.
"You're not what I expected," the woman's voice came, gentle again.
"What the hell did you expect?" snarled Heather through her tears.
"I don't know," Narcissa hesitated. "A resolution to this war. Everyone at the Ministry thinks you will defeat the Dark Lord."
Heather laughed as she cried, choked on her own phlegm, blew her nose on the sheets to Narcissa's disgust. "So that's it! Everyone in my family dies because of some stupid rumour. Is he keeping me here for execution then?"
"No one knows the Dark Lord's mind, but I think, if he meant to kill you, you'd be dead already."
"Then why am I here?"
Narcissa regarded her evenly. "You tell me that."
"What?"
Narcissa tucked her hand inside a pocket of her robes and brought forth a box that had no business fitting in a space that size.
"You have a choice, Heather. You can either spend your days sulking in here like a Muggle cow, magic-less, until the world burns to cinders, or,"
"Or," she demanded, choking on the word.
Narcissa opened the box. Inside lay a strange set of jewelry. Heather leaned closer to examine it. The top pieces appeared to be sets of slender rings, engraved with unfamiliar glyphs, and connected with silver chains.
"Pick it up," Narcissa directed.
Uneasily, she took the thing in her palm.
"Your other option," Narcissa told her, "is to find out for yourself exactly what the Dark Lord wants with you. He has asked my opinion as to whether or not you are prepared to deal with polite society. I want you to tell me what my answer will be."
Heather stared at her, wide-eyed.
"I can keep you here. A protected prisoner. Away from my mad sister and the Dark Lord. Maybe you might even get another chance to escape."
"You didn't slip through the floorboard," Heather breathed, and Narcissa cast a wary glance at the snake.
"Hush," she cautioned.
Heather swallowed.
"Or," Narcissa continued grimly, "you can try your luck out there. I can't guarantee it'll be easier. I think I can prepare you, to some degree, for what they might expect of you, but if you want any chance to getting away," she whispered closely, "you'll have to get them to trust you. Ask to learn the Arts."
Bile rose in her throat.
"I'm never-I can't do that to someone."
"Hush. It's not all blood and warfare. The Arts are all instinct. If killing isn't a basic pleasure for you, you can't use the Arts for that purpose. The spells won't accept an indifferent caster."
"Then how do I convince them?"
Narcissa smiled grimly.
"There are other, more visceral urges than the need to kill. And not even the Dark Lord himself is immune to them."