Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter NOR any of his friends NEITHER any of his enemies. It's hard to admit, but when I'm done with them all, I have to return them to Joanne K. Rowling in an original wrapping and unharmed.
I make no money, I mean no harm.
Checkmate
Up and Down
For three days, Rebecca remained edgy, snarky - as much as she could without talking - and altogether unpleasant. Severus didn't know how to handle the situation and evaded her as much as he could when not being assigned to any mission at the time. During the third afternoon, he was confronted with Voldemort, who expressed his worries about Rebecca - had he possibly tired of her?
Severus, horrified that the girl could be punished for his inability to stand her moodiness, denied that and admitted the true nature of the problem.
"She mentioned she needed assistance with some kind of a monthly trouble," Voldemort replied, frowning. "I thought Bellatrix took care of that."
Severus, who had run accross a bunch of terribly adolescent girls - adolescent and terrible in the giggling, pinkish, absolutely unbearable way - during the very first year of his teaching, and had had to deal with the matter with practically no experience, realised what was the only thing Bellatrix could have helped Rebecca with.
"There is no way to get rid of it altogether," he tried to explain. "It will pass away on its own before the end of the week. It would have been much worse without Bellatrix' help."
"I only hope the disease is not contagious," Voldemort said disapprovingly.
"What? No, it..." and Severus imagined talking to the Dark Lord about details of female anatomy, "it isn't."
After the conversation he returned to his rooms, where he was confronted with a very asocial beast in the form of his lover, disappeared in the bathroom, located the small packages that had mysteriously appeared there three days before that, and in a Muggle disguise he bravely endured a visit to a local supermarket, where his appearance caused a lot of giggling and pointing on the side of the young female employees - he refused to call them shop assistants as they never offered him any assistance. Luckily, another man, who happened to be sent to the shop for the same product by his wife, seemed as lost as Severus himself, and it turned out Muggle men were only vaguely aware of the existence of sanitory pads and tampons, as the Muggle said, and were quite clueless when any crisis made them go out and buy them.
The Muggle was too friendly for Severus' liking, but for the sake of the success of his mission he remained polite during their conversation. The Muggle raised his eyebrows at the sight of variety of types and brands Severus chose.
"It's for my daughter," Severus invented quickly. "Her first time. My wife died years ago," he lied smoothly and adopted a very dark expression which made the Muggle quite sympathetic.
"It must be very hard to raise a child on your own," he commented akwardly at the checkout.
"She's a dear," Severus assured him and put his shopping in a bag. "My sweet girl." He remembered the sweet kisses that had made his head spin, the taste of Rebecca's skin in the dead of the night, the sweetness of her smile...
"Well, she won't stay like that forever, probably," the man went on as he was packing his shopping, considerably greater in amount that Severus' as it included also common groceries. "Our eldest, Margaret, was the sweetest little girl in the world before she hit puberty last year. She's uncontrollable sometimes - and to think we have two more girls! I'm sure they will give us more trouble than Jason, and he's a menace already... What's your daughter's name, anyway?" The Muggle turned to address his new acquaintance but found him gone.
"Probably gone straight home to soothe his girl," he explained to the girl at the checkout, who smiled politely.
Severus had, indeed, gone straight home to his girl. By the time the Muggle was leaving the supermarket, he was standing at his bed, having turned his shopping bag upside down. Rebecca stared at him.
"You'll never have to ask Bellatrix Lestrange for anything again," he said firmly. "When you run out, just tell me. That is, show me which one you'd prefer." Rebecca embarassed him by throwing herself around his neck and bursting in tears. He didn't know what to do - the physical contact he liked, the tears not so much. The emotional breakdown didn't last for long - fortunately - and Rebecca reemerged smiling. She smoothed his hair and petted his face until he had to pull her away, lest he should lose his mind.
"Listen, this will not go on forever. You can talk to me when it's over," he promised, hoping to get a moment for himself in the bathroom.
But for Rebecca, he had just won the title "Hero of the World" for the second time that day, and she could do nothing else than throw herself around his neck again.
"Miss... Garthy..." he gasped and she realised. With a mischievious glint in her eyes she pushed him backwards on the bed, among the brightly coloured packets, and went down on him with no hesitance, no shame and no restraints. Then she surprised him by falling asleep in his arms with a happy smile playing around her lips, which Severus would have found more becoming on his own features.
Rebecca awoke late in the night, when Severus was already sleeping, and Severus left before she woke again in the morning. When he returned, just in time for dinner, he found her smiling and pleasant, her moodiness gone. Whether it was simply due to the time's passing, or because of his own actions, which Rebecca seemed to value so much, he couldn't tell - and couldn't care.
Days passed quietly and peacefully after that. Severus brought Rebecca a collection of books that he thought might interest her - and she was surprised to see how accurate his guess had been. He also became easy around her. Apparently he had thrown any reasonable thoughts to the wind, accepting the situation as it had been laid out by Voldemort, and accepting Rebecca as she was offering herself.
Days remained dull and grey, but Merlin!, the nights they shared! Having put aside any restraints, the seemingly dark wizard, traitor and a double agent opened to the mute girl. Severus never talked about what he was doing during the days, but he let Rebecca take him in her arms in the evening and melt any mask he could be wearing during hot foreplay, which usually cast his tiredness away... temporarily. Rebecca, in her turn, never tried to figure out what he was doing outside his rooms, living in blissful ignorance of the horrors of the war that continued in the wizarding world. She was absorbed in her love so much she never thought outside of the four walls she was locked in, and if it weren't for Voldemort's weekly visits, she would have completely forgotten about anything but Severus. More than a month had passed and nothing had changed in her little world.
However, the war presented itself on her doorstep in the form of Warden Macnair, bringing in an odour of alcohol when he kicked the door open.
"Letsh shee what we have here," he slurred, eyes fixed at Rebecca, before he kicked the door closed behind him and advanced on the girl.
She was wearing an extraordinary frivolous set of robes in hopes of getting Severus wild the moment he entered. Now it made wild Macnair, and she was aware of it, as she was backing away from him until there was no further to back. He stopped in front of her, pressing her shoulders into the closet that stood behind her.
"Do you know me?" he asked. She did - she had seen his picture in the papers - but she didn't even attempt to answer. She was too frightened to move at all.
"Do you know who I am, you bitch?" This time he slapped her, hard, and tears burst out of her eyes. He swayed a little, but Rebecca didn't notice.
Macnair decided to lay her on the bed, but when he roughly pulled at her arms, Rebecca awoke from her stupor and started twisting wildly. He tried to press her against the closet, but in his drunken state he slipped and pulled them both to the floor.
The weight on her body and the smell reminded Rebecca of the night when she had been attacked by a Muggle rapist. She panicked. If Macnair had been sober, she would have stood no chance against the stronger man, but the alcohol clouded his mind and made his movements sloppy. While trying to stop the girl thrashing around, he hit the closet accidentally and the door opened. A set of robes slipped and fell on his head.
In the few seconds when Macnair fought the robes instead of her, Rebecca felt a stick under her hand. She gripped it hard, and the moment Macnair's head reappeared, she stuck it in his eye.
He roared with pain and angst, and sat up and started swearing, promising Rebecca all kinds of violence as retribution. She didn't wait for him to carry out his threats, having pulled herself together enough to slip out of his grip, grab a chair and bash his head with it. He dropped to the floor and Rebecca turned to flee.
She stopped five minutes later, in a part of the fortress she didn't recognise, suddenly realising she wasn't supposed to be out of Severus' rooms.
Suzanne Prince Garthy Callagan believed herself to be a steady, reasonable woman, who had already endured all kind of unpleasantries and could not therefore be surprised by a misfortunate event.
She realised how wrong she had been the moment her two beloved children went missing. And not only missing - by all tracks that could be found, her little girl and little boy had disappeared in the Forbidden Forest, a place dangerous enough without a dark wizard and his troops running loose.
She cried every night before she fell asleep, every single night of the sixteen, until Professor McGonagall appeared at her threshold, bringing her back her son. She cried even harder then; but these were tears of joy and happiness and brought her relief.
When Charlie went to have a good long bath, Professor McGonagall told Suzanne the little that was known. Her daughter had, apparently, made some kind of a deal with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, about which they would try to find more. The hard lines around McGonagall's mouth and the worried look in her eyes spoke of possible nature of such a deal. Suzanne herself, even if not being involved in the war directly, was aware of the existence of dark spells that required a willing sacrifice, and knowing her daughter better than anybody else, she couldn't deny Rebecca would sacrifice herself for the sake of eight smaller children.
And a terrible, un-motherlike thought occured to her: without thinking about the consequences to the war, the danger to the rest of the wizarding people.
Would she, herself, realising that, not sacrifice her life for those of her children? Wouldn't anybody?
Professor McGonagall left, unsatisfied, presumably to look up all such spells, presumably to try to determine which one You-Know-Who would choose, presumably to try and stop him somehow. Suzanne locked the door and went to check on Charlie, who had gone to bed in the meantime. He was wide awake, waiting for her.
"Oh, my dear..." she started, but he interrupted.
"Becca sends you something." He held out a brass phial. "She told me to give you this. I th- think," he sniffed, "it's im- important." Suzanne took the phial. It was a container, she realised, Rebecca had used to hide her mascara in when she had been younger and had been forbidden to wear make-up. If she pulled out the stopper, she would find a soft girlish perfume in it, but if she unlocked it with Alohomora, the phial would reveal its true contents.
"Mum," Charlie sobbed, "she'll be allright, won't she? She'll be alright..." Suzanne took the boy in her arms and told him that of course she would, why wouldn't she? The boy was too young to know about the ancient magic that willing sacrifices could rouse and believed her with all his heart. Despite that, Suzanne had to give him a drop of the Draught of Peace for him to be able to fall asleep, and she remained sitting at his bedside for hours, just watching his serene face, his boyish chest rising and dropping, just holding his hand and occassionally brushing his hair.
It was past midnight when she finally left his bedroom and put the phial on the kitchen table. It probably contained something important, maybe even a clue about what was to happen with Rebecca. But Rebecca might have only sent her something to let her know she loved her, and that would mean she had seen no way to meet her mother again.
Briskly, to stop such thoughts, Suzanne cast Alohomora and with a soft popping sound, the phial opened.
There was a flask in it, a crystal flask containing a cloud of silvery mist.
A memory.
There was a very little chance Rebecca would have been allowed, let alone able, to retrieve a memory of her own head and store it in a flask she would send to safety with the children. This, she must have kept for a longer time. She must have kept it secret and believed it very important, and for a moment, Suzanne wanted to hurl it against the wall and let it be gone for good. For if this was the last thing her daughter ever sent her, it was terribly impersonal and cold.
Then she composed herself. She retrieved a Pensieve from its place in an ancient wardrobe. There were already several memories in there, swirling, and Suzanne regarded them with disgust.
Although she knew how to evade slipping from one memory to another involuntarily in the Pensieve, she took a large jar she had prepared for the summer jam-making and stored her ugly memories in it. She poured the memory into the empty Pensieve, took a deep breath and bent over the surface.
Fifteen minutes later, she returned, crying once again. The memory was truly important, and to think her daughter had been trusted to keep it safe made her unbelievably proud. Also, to know that her cousin's son - and her daughter's beloved, for the mother's heart could only hardly be deceived - was neither a traitor nor a murderer, lifted her spirits. And a wild hope appeared: would Severus let her know? Would he remember her, his distant relative, and would he send her a message, whatever brief, to let her know about her daughter's fate?
Was he possibly the means to find more about the deal Rebecca had made? Or were there two infiltrants among You-Know-Who's ranks? Both thoughts were comforting, each in its own way.
And the tiniest sparkle of light brought by the faintest hope of all: Would he help Rebecca if there was a way? Would he, possibly, save her life?
Suzanne clung to the hope with all her might.
