CHAPTER NINE
like lightning
November 11, 1996
Harry stood at the top of the stairs. The door stood in front of him. Neither moved.
He could hear people talking inside although the words were too muffled for him to understand. It would've been able to hear everything perfectly if it'd had ears.
His invisibility cloak was folded neatly in his pocket, resting next to his right hand. It had never been invisible in its life. Its inside knob jutted from its right side. His left hand raked through tousled hair. Its outside knob stared at him from its left side.
Harry stared back at his curved reflection and frowned, waiting for the voices inside to stop. He considered putting on the invisibility cloak for a while, but in times like these no teacher would be stupid enough to send away Harry Potter when he urgently needed to speak to Dumbledore, so the cloak was unnecessary. He shifted and waited.
That seemed like an important thing to do now: waiting. If he'd waited for her she wouldn't be missing. If he'd waited for him he'd still be alive. But he'd rushed. He'd been stubborn. He'd had to be such a bloody hero and it was always his fault. Any way he tossed it, always.
So he waited patiently, quietly, ignoring the knob's inviting shine.
Then the door creaked open and for a moment he thought it was odd that such an impeccably kept entryway should creak like that, but it fit his mood so well it was hard for him to think of it as anything but ordinary. The flustered Professor that stepped out of it was a touch worrying though. People were supposed to emerge from Dumbledore's office reassured and confident, not confused and agitated.
Especially not if they were Professor McGonagall.
It took her a few moments to notice Harry standing at the top of the stairs. She closed the door behind her softly and stood, not saying a word, staring at the grains in the woodwork. Harry stood, just as silently staring at her. His brows furrowed just slightly as she let out a defeated sigh, turning around and leaning against the door and staring down into the darkness of the staircase with unseeing eyes.
And still he stood, silent and unmoving, invisible in plain view, the cloak folded in his pocket, not saying a single word, barely even breathing—he was almost afraid to, unable to shake the feeling that this wasn't something he should be witnessing. Her lips were drawn thin, like they were when she was angry or worried or afraid. The wrinkles on her face seemed deeper, more pronounced, and the flickering torchlight didn't do much to soften them. Her eye sockets looked as though they'd sunken in, her eyes popping out slightly, and the bags under them so dark they were almost purple. Her hair was graying and so was her skin and as she stared down the staircase, that empty, vacant expression in her eyes, she looked almost dead.
Harry closed his. And when he opened them she was moving slowly, halfway down the staircase. He waited for the sound of the gargoyle moving aside before breathing normally again and then turned to the door. The knob reflected first his frown and then his hand as he placed a hand on it and turned, forgetting, for once, to knock. Professor McGonagall was his fault too, wasn't she? If Hermione wasn't missing she wouldn't look like she just had. If Harry hadn't been so bloody stupid.
He pushed and the door creaked ajar. He peered through the crack between door and way and saw that Dumbledore was sitting at his desk, humming and bobbing his head. The Headmaster, like the Transfiguration Professor didn't seem to notice Harry. So the bespectacled Gryffindor opened the door fully and stepped inside, giving it a little shove so it would swing closed behind him.
"Hello, Tom," came a despondent chirp from across the room.
Harry blanched at the name and corrected his... what was Dumbledore to him, exactly? More than a teacher, more than a superintendent, a mentor. A man who he'd once considered infallible. A father figure. "It's Harry, sir."
A part of him wanted to hate the old man, would never forgive him for turning out to be human. Blaise Zabini would've been sympathetic about this, would've commiserated with a wistful lack of sarcasm and said, "We never do forgive our fathers for being imperfect," but he was talking to Pansy and Crabbe and Harry never spoke to him anyway. He felt alone. Dumbledore wasn't just a flawed human being, he was getting senile. McGonagall looked old. Hermione was gone. Ron was unapproachable. Everything was his fault and his head hurt, only not in the way it should've been hurting.
"Oh, yes, Harry," Dumbledore said, "Hello. Is something wrong?"
Harry's reply was hesitant. "It's... my scar, sir. It doesn't hurt."
Dumbledore beamed at him, deadened blue eyes peering over a pair of half moon spectacles that looked almost childish now. For the first time since he'd come to Hogwarts, Harry got the impression that Dumbledore was a silly old man on the verge of death. And that silly dying old man was beaming at him in a mechanical, plasticene way and saying, "That's good, then. You should really get back to bed."
Harry shook his head. Something was wrong and it wasn't just him this time, it was the Headmaster too. "Voldemort was in Hogsmeade earlier, wasn't he? That's what they've been saying—but my scar, it hasn't hurt."
Dumbledore was quiet for a minute, and for that minute Harry thought he'd gotten through for him. Dumbledore would stop being ridiculous and start being sage. "Tom, you say? Was she with him?"
"What?" Harry asked, eyes widening as he grasped for some meaning that would make his words make sense. "Hermione? Do you mean Hermione?"
Dumbledore appeared introspective. "Was that her name? No. She's that now, isn't she? Hmm.."
"Sir," Harry interrupted, hoping to wrestle the old man's train of thought back onto the right tracks. "My scar."
"Oh, yes," Dumbledore replied. His eyes closed for a moment, and hope came rushing back to Harry—"Well, if your scar didn't hurt He must not have been nearby."—and receded just as quickly.
And Harry felt as though he were looking down from the top of a very high cliff in very strong wind. His stomach fell the distance to the ground and he stared forward blankly. "Of course, sir," he replied. "I'll go to bed now then."
"Growing boys need their sleep," was the only reply before Dumbledore started humming again.
As Harry left the room he could've sworn someone was laughing, but there was no one else around. And as he closed the door he knew why McGonagall had looked the way she had. If he looked in the mirror now he'd probably look the same—just to check, he glanced down at his reflection in the doorknob only to find that his fingerprints had smudged it. He shook his head and turned around, putting right foot before left as he walked down the stairs.
If Dumbledore, Dumbledore, the one man reason why Hogwarts remained mostly untouched by Voldemort was losing his mind...
Harry didn't even want to think about it. All he wanted to do was go to sleep and forget the whole damned day had ever happened.
Severus Snape stared at his door, at the fine network of craze lines winding out like a spider's web from the center of it, so faint they could almost have been a figment of his imagination.
He'd traced these lines with his eyes more times than he could remember. A constant reminder of a nightmare made flesh that'd rampaged through his house one night when his mother was out, that he'd killed with a lot of silver even though it'd been twice his size with yellow eyes and a dripping mouth, fangs sharp and glistening, and fur the same hue as the instrument of its death under the moon. He'd been eight and small and so afraid he'd shit his pants, but he had that long silver spear his father'd made him keep next to his bed.
And now that he thought about it he could smell the sour stench of fecal matter, feel it oozing in his trousers, feel his face go red at the humiliation that came with having done something so untidy, so cowardly. He could smell the rancid stink of the fearful sweat that drenched his clothes and he knew that the monster outside the door could smell it too.
His breath was humid and he could taste the acidic bile in his mouth. He could see the door cracking. He knew any second now it would fall, and he gripped the spear as tightly as he could with slimy palms and wanted to cry. Wanted to call for his dad or his mom and run away in tears. But they weren't there and there was nowhere for him to run to and he'd already shit his pants. If he cried now he'd be even more of a baby, so he stood his ground, trembling and dry-eyed, teeth clenched to keep tears from coming, waiting for the monster to break through, hoping it would turn tail and run and knowing that it wouldn't.
Then the door exploded inward, and the beast pounced, knocking Severus backward. Its claws sunk deep into his shoulder and he screamed as warm, canine saliva dripped onto his face. His eyes shut tight as an unearthly howl echoed in his ears, dominated his mind, bounced back and forth in his brain so that he still heard it seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades after it'd ceased.
And when he opened his eyes the beast was gone and in its place was a man, impaled through the chest (maybe the heart?) on his father's silver spear. Blood was pouring from the man, but he wasn't dead yet and he looked down at Severus and said, "I'm sorry," before his eyes rolled back into his head. And his blood dripped down onto the little boy, covering him with sticky crimson and he screamed and screamed and didn't stop screaming not even when his throat burned and his voice was lost until his mother found him.
But he wasn't eight years old any more. He was a grown man, with no time to dwell on past nightmares. Not when there were new nightmares to worry about.
He shook his head. For a minute there—for more than a minute—it'd felt absolutely real; he'd been terrified as though it had been happening all over again. He checked his pants. They were clean, but his palms were sweaty. He went to his bed, sat down, and stared at them.
There were only five people besides himself who knew about the incident and of those five, three were already, for all intents and purposes, deceased. They were Amias Malfoy, Eris Daw, Ardennes Snape, his mother, and Tom Riddle. And of the six people who'd known he was the only one who thought himself a coward.
But no one had ever bothered to tell him their take on the issue.
So he sat and stared at his sweaty palms and remembered that when danger'd arisen he'd shit his pants, conveniently forgetting that he'd stood his ground ready to fight even though he'd gotten the shit scared out of him. That was the way he was sitting and brooding and silently calling himself a crooked nosed coward—the way Sirius Black used to—a half hour later when his mother entered the room.
Ten minutes later, when the both of them left it, he took one last look at the door. Despite the millions of times they'd magically repaired and refinished it, it'd never fully recovered.
Harry got to Gryffindor tower without incident. The fat lady was in her portrait, so he said the password, which was "valor" and she swung open. Inside the common room a fire was blazing in the fireplace. Harry took no notice of this, though, intending to flop down on his bed, go to sleep, and never wake up.
He was so tired his bones ached, hell, it felt like his soul ached. Exhausted and stressed and worried and feeling guilty like an idiot all over again he wondered how many times one guy could fuck up?
The brave Mr. Potter's trek back to Gryffindor had been so uneventful, he'd been able to draw up a list of things that were his fault, people who were dead or hurt or missing because of him and Merlin if it wasn't a lengthy list... First there were his parents, then Cedric Diggory, Sirius, Hermione, Dumbledore's condition was probably his fault too, and so was...
Then someone called him.
He turned to see Neville sitting by the fireside in an armchair and replied, "Yeah?" taking a cautious step toward the other boy.
"Did you go see Dumbledore?" Neville asked. "That is where you went, right?"
Harry nodded in reply, shifting slightly. If Neville asked about Dumbledore what would he say? The old man's cracking up, we're all going to die ?
Neville nodded back and queried, "Any news about Hermione?" Harry almost sighed in relief.
Of course he didn't ask about Dumbledore, why would he? Then the question sank in and Harry's mood took a nosedive. "No," he replied, shaking his head morosely. "I've only heard rumours and Dumbledore didn't say anything. What've you heard?"
Neville shook his head. "Nothing about Hermione, but the newest is that Draco Malfoy tried to walk out on a Death Eater initiation ceremony in or near Hogsmeade." He shrugged.
That rumour was the handiwork of one Blaise Zabini, who figured it was always good to have well known dissenters, and it'd spread like wildfire. Proof positive of the Slytherin boy's theory that if one utilized the right people (and portraits), a rumour could get across the school and back within the hour. But neither Harry nor Neville knew where the rumour started, and that was just as well.
Harry felt his jaw drop. "What? Why?" he asked, trying to wrap his mind around this new information. Malfoy walked out on a Death Eater initiation? Malfoy?
Neville stared at his feet and said, "Well, it is just a rumour... but it feels true for some reason... maybe because it's so hard to believe?"
Harry shook his head slowly, the implication sinking in. "It can't be true, though. Because if it is, that means Voldemort was definitely at Hogsmeade—but Nev, my scar."
"What about it?" Neville asked, eyebrows furrowing in typical Gryffie style.
"It didn't hurt while we were at Hogsmeade," Harry replied, feeling a bit relieved as Neville's eyes widened at the fact, thankful that at least someone besides himself thought there was something odd going on. Well, besides the obvious at least.
"Is that what you went to see Dumbledore about?" Neville asked, still staring at his shoelaces.
Harry swallowed before saying, "Yeah," knowing what the next question would be.
"What did he say about it?" inquired Neville, not failing to disappoint.
Harry shrugged and faltered. "I...he... he doesn't know what to make of it."
Neville apparently failed to notice his hesitation and said, "That's not good."
"No," Harry agreed, and then feeling a change of subject was in order asked, "How's Ron?"
Neville shook his head, pudgy fingers dancing on the armrests of his chair. Harry felt sorry for him sometimes, the poor boy always seemed so nervous. "Not good," he replied, finally. "He's just gone to the infirmary. Blames himself, you know. Because he's the one that suggested you leave because she could catch up with the second group."
Harry nodded, acknowledging the fact before shaking his head to refute it. "But it's not his fault."
"I know that and you know that, but he won't believe it." Neville said, clearly. "I think the only person to blame here is Voldemort."
Harry shrugged, not quite agreeing. The way he figured it... but he'd been brooding on that for hours...
"Tom."
"Hmm?"
"What exactly do you mean when you say you 'tried something' on my son?"
"Just an experiment."
"An experiment?"
"Yes."
"What sort of experiment?"
"The fun sort."
"Fun?"
"Oh, don't worry, it isn't as bad as it could be."
"What do you mean?"
"It could be worse if you persist with these questions."
"You're a bastard."
"Yes."
"Do you know a six letter word for stupid?"
For the fiftieth time that day, Terry Boot cursed himself for tripping over that trick stair. If only he'd been a little bit more careful... but no, he hadn't, so here he was and there Ron was. He turned his head to the left, wondering where Madame Pomfrey'd gotten to and why she hadn't closed the curtains.
"Stupid is a six letter word, Ron," he replied.
The Gryffindor didn't seem placated. "You know what else has six letters?" He was still staring straight up at the ceiling. Terry frowned. That probably wasn't very healthy. "Ronald has six letters," he finished, when Terry said nothing.
Terry thought it best to keep his silence, but his reticence didn't seem to have any effect on the other boy whatsoever.
"It's also a good six letter word for stubborn. Stupid, stubborn, oh, and impatient. Remember that the next time you're doing one of those... word things you do."
Terry sighed—"Ron, you're being stupid."
"Bloody right I am."
—and gave up for the moment
His hands were somnambulists. She watched intently as his fingers tiptoed across the edges of his bed one moment and then rose, picking up some unseen ingredient, dumping it into an equally invisible potion, and stirring the whole with exquisite care the next.
They said true potions Masters could concoct complicated elixirs in their sleep. Mr. Snape could and she had half a mind to stand Severus up and drag him to a workstation to see whether he had the same ability. But if he wasn't as good as she liked to believe the entire house could go up. So she bit her bottom lip and watched him stir the air with a spoon made of carbon and oxygen and who only knew what else.
It was dark out and a week till the full moon. One candle flickered on the bedside table to Severus's right. They were in the late Mr. Snape's cabin, in the heart of his namesake.
Severus wouldn't be told that, though. Best if he didn't know where they were—that was what had been decided. If he was unsure of his location it'd be harder for him to escape or rendezvous with any of his cohorts in that Order he was involved in.
Mrs. Snape shook her head and stared out the window. Children so rarely did what was best for them and parents so rarely directed them toward the right course of action. Perhaps if she'd dissuaded him from joining Tom in the first place... but she hadn't known he was even considering it, the idea was so foreign. That one of her own, her son would ever think of signing himself over to the "Dark Lord Voldemort" was more than incomprehensible. It was almost galling.
He should've known better. And he should've known better than to try to rectify his mistake by signing himself over to that Dumbledore. He should've known never to pledge allegiance, never to make a promise he couldn't revoke. He was a bloody Slytherin for Merlin's sake. How could he have made such ridiculous mistakes?
But that was the problem with Slytherins nowadays wasn't it? They had to be directed. They couldn't be satisfied with simply striking out on their own and making the world better or worse as it suited them, oh no, they had to have community, they had to have a bloody cause. Why, in her day Slytherins were irreverent, apathetic as hell, and pleased as punch about it.
Well, perhaps that wasn't entirely true, but nonetheless...
Nonetheless, she'd never been inspired to go out and get herself branded like a ranch cow and most of her friends had abstained as well. Of course, they were all dead now, but... And she frowned, deepening the wrinkles around her mouth. That was Tom's fault more than theirs. Tom's fault more than hers. And perhaps that'd been their cause. Freedom, liberty, and the right not to be kicked around by one of their own bloody classmates. Perhaps they hadn't thought of it in so many terms, but only cattle got branded and they were much too clever and much too contrary to ever be ground beef.
Besides that, selfish pride was a much better cause than genocide. If all Slytherins had followed their desire to put themselves in absolute first, Tom Riddle wouldn't have gotten as powerful as he did. At least that's what Mrs. Snape believed. He would still have gone far, but not half so far without followers.
The silver filigree on the windowsill winked at her and she traced it with the tips of her nails.
All was past now. Everything was over for the two of them. At least it was if she had anything to say about it. They'd stay in the cabin, hidden away as agreed. They wouldn't leave, food and things would be brought to them, and they wouldn't have anything further to fear from Voldemort or from Dumbledore. She'd cut a deal. She'd cut a deal and now they were safe and they'd be safe until everything was over with and all their bases were covered for the aftermath. If Dumbledore won Severus was on his side. If Voldemort won Mrs. Snape's deal stayed intact and they lived out the rest of their lives in the cabin in the woods.
So blame didn't matter, Slytherin didn't matter, and all causes lay slain at her feet. All was past and the past was dead. And Mrs. Snape would keep it that way.
end notes: reviews are always loved and appreciated.
THANK YOU!
JellyBellys, Black Aliss, trapped-in-a-dream, Merit Somnia
