Severus

Severus spent the weekend waiting for a message to the effect that he was no longer welcome in Kyra's house.

He found it difficult to understand her approach to the issue of magic. It was inconsistent, to say the least. She wanted everyone around her kept in the dark about it, as the Ministry expected of her; but when it really mattered, she was both a poor and an unwilling liar. In order to keep her secret, she relied heavily on the lack of curiosity and on the gullibility of her Muggle family; but she got upset when she saw both utilised to the full. She lived constantly on the edge of discovery and hence of disaster; but she lost her nerve as soon as she was reminded of it.

Then again, she had never asked to be put into such an impossible position. None of her kind ever had. Severus was beginning to see why most Squibs decided to stay in the world they grew up in, even if it condemned them to a pitiable existence. And even the ones who lived among Muggles rarely embraced that life fully, and often remained oddballs and outsiders. The path of total denial that Kyra had taken might well be the hardest of them all, and nothing and no one had equipped her with the tools to make that journey a little easier.

He wondered why it had taken him so long to acknowledge this. He should know a thing or two by now about falling between the cracks, about being neither fish nor fowl, and about the toll it took to pretend to be either for any length of time. In his own manner, he was in an equally impossible situation, obliged to serve and satisfy two masters, his allegiance and his loyalty split in two like the tongue of a serpent. Even with the most rigorous training, the human brain did not have endless capacities to accommodate several separate variants of oneself. The strain was enormous. It was enough to make anyone crack sooner or later. And that was ugly to witness – weakness was an ugly thing, in anyone – but it should not have surprised him.

Saturday and Sunday came and went, and there was still no message from Kyra.

On Monday, in spite of all his precautions, Severus ran into Avery.

Severus was on his way back down from lunch in the tea room of St. Mungo's and had just reached the fourth floor landing when his old classmate stepped out of the Spell Damage ward. They spotted each other at the same moment and both froze, as if each expected the other to draw his wand and attack. Then the double doors of the ward opened again, and a kind-faced Healer in the hospital's lime green uniform emerged, holding a slip of parchment in her hand.

"Mr Avery – you forgot! The date for your next appointment!" Looking relieved to find her patient still there, she pressed the note into Avery's hand, smiled vaguely at Severus and disappeared again.

For a split second, none of this made any sense – and then it did, and it was so pathetic that it nearly made Severus laugh out loud.

"Get away from me," Avery snarled.

Severus slipped into his role with such ease, it was almost as if he had missed it. "Why? Afraid you'll have another Imperius curse put on you?"

Avery flushed an ugly red, and lowered his voice to a whisper. "How do you know -"

"Oh, please. Did you really think the Ministry would swallow that story without insisting on regular check-ups? Round-the-clock exposure to Imperius control for three years running? That's bound to have left some damage. What are you these days, Avery, an instructive case study?"

Avery's eyes darted up and down the corridor to check for eavesdroppers, but they were alone. "What kept you out of Azkaban, eh?" he hissed back angrily.

Severus raised his eyebrows. "Remorse," he replied in a mock-righteous tone. "I saw the error of my ways."

Avery snorted disdainfully. "Remorse? You?"

"Well, I preferred the Ministry to see me as a decent man, rather than a weak man. But I don't blame you for choosing the easier option."

"It - they – " Avery spluttered, but then he remembered where they were and mastered himself. "Leave me alone!" he intoned in a loud voice, making his words a public statement. "I want nothing to do with you, and I don't even know what you talking about!"

Severus curled his lip at this woefully transparent manoeuvre. "Well, good luck keeping up the charade. I'm sure you've given Mulciber a good reason why you're incriminating him like that? Or is he in on this, and you've convinced the Ministry that you were actually controlling each other?"

"I've no idea where Mulciber is or what he's up to!" Avery was almost shouting now. "Nor do I want to know! And now get out of my way, I'm leaving!"

Avery's acting was pitiful, but Severus could believe that as far as Mulciber was concerned, he was actually telling the truth. Severus stood aside to let his former ally pass, and watched him hurry down the stairs and out of sight. As for his own position, he was confident that he had passed this first – admittedly mild – test. Now for the next one.

As he had expected, Avery was dawdling in the Muggle street outside the concealed entrance to the hospital when Severus followed him out there a minute or two later. They fell into step and walked together in silence, weaving their way through the crowd of Christmas shoppers and besuited office workers on their lunch breaks. Avery kept shooting nervous glances over his shoulder, but the traffic was so noisy that there was no chance of them being overheard.

"Sorry I shouted," Avery muttered, sounding despondent. "But I'm still being watched sometimes. It was a damn close shave. The Ministry were going to get me. I had to tell them something. But it's hard. The looks people give me – I don't know how you do it."

A blue car passed them, driving so close to the kerb that it splattered Avery's shoes with muddy rainwater. Avery cursed. A motorbike clattered after the car.

"Well, we all do what we can." Severus took care to drop all venom from his voice now, and injected it with sympathy instead. "When the time comes, the Dark Lord will acknowledge how useful it was for some of us to remain at large, and free to act in his name."

Avery stopped in his tracks. Predictably, he looked terrified rather than reassured. "So you think he will return?"

"Oh yes, of course. Have you ever known the Dark Lord to do things by halves?"

"Well, I -" But Severus never found out what Avery had to say about the Dark Lord's thoroughness.

A little further down the street, a strange spectacle was unfolding. The blue car that had passed them moments before had come to a screeching halt at the side of the road. The driver jumped out just as the motorcycle pulled up next to it. The car driver hopped onto the pillion seat, and the motorbike went off at top speed, abandoning the car where it stood.

It had happened in a matter of seconds, but the people closest to the event reacted immediately. A collective scream of panic rose up from the crowd, and the steady flow of the foot traffic on the pavement was rudely interrupted as people turned and started running away from the vacated car. The panic-stricken stampede clashed violently with the oncoming walkers who had not yet realised the danger. Severus saw an old man with one leg shoved to the ground, his crutches knocked from under his shoulders.

A blast, so loud that it seemed to shake the very foundations of the buildings around them, erupted from the blue car, and its body was ripped apart in a gigantic ball of fire. The shock wave swept everybody in the vicinity off their feet. Severus went down like everyone else, shielding his head from the debris that was raining down on them. He had been so close to the explosion that he had felt the heat of it pass over his face, and for a moment, he was back in the Burkes' house in Knockturn Alley, choking from the fumes of Mulciber's Fiendfyre. With an effort, he wrenched his mind back to reality. His ears were ringing, and the carpet of broken glass that littered the pavement scrunched under his hands and knees as he moved to pick himself up. He felt blood trickle down the side of his face. The blast had shattered all the windows of the surrounding houses and sent shards flying everywhere.

People were still screaming. A cacophony of mindless terror and mortal agony filled the air. Just ahead of him, a child's pushchair had been knocked sideways and crashed into a lamppost. The flimsy construction had folded in on itself under the force of the collision. A small body, its blond head adorned with pink-ribboned pigtails, was hanging out from under the torn hood like a broken doll. A shapeless form was moving towards the wreckage through the smoke, crawling on its belly like a snake, but slowly, so slowly.

Without thinking, Severus started moving as well. A hand on his arm pulled him back immediately. It was Avery, ashen-faced and covered in soot.

"Are you out of your mind?" he shouted. "They're only Muggles! Let's get out of here!" He screwed up his face in concentration, getting ready to Disapparate. At the last moment, Severus broke away.

He reached the child in the pushchair at the same time as the snake-like shape, and he realised that it was the one-legged man dragging himself along the ground. The old man was bleeding from a number of cuts, too, but his gnarled hands were already busy prising the wreckage apart.

"Get her out, there's a good lad," he wheezed. "Careful. Put her down."

Together they freed the little girl and laid her on the ground. She was alive, but with every tortured breath she drew, something rattled horribly inside her crushed ribcage. Her face was turning blue before their eyes.

The old man took her tiny hand. "I've got yer, luv," he murmured, but when his eyes met those of his companion, he shook his head. "Nothin' we can do."

"Are you sure?"

"Trust me, son, I've seen a thing or two like this in the war. They never make it."

Severus didn't even look around to check that nobody else was watching. In a trice, his wand was out and pointing at the little girl's dented ribs. "Episkey." It took another attempt, and even a third, but then the girl's chest expanded as air flooded back into her lungs, and a few breaths later, a rosy colour started returning to her face.

Severus turned to find the one-legged veteran staring at him with eyes that were threatening to pop out of his grizzled head.

"What the bloody hell -"

"Never mind. You've been dreaming. Obliviate."

He had overdone the Memory Charm a bit. The old man's eyes rolled back into his head, and then he keeled right over, peacefully joining the mass of injured and unconscious bodies around them. Severus pocketed his wand, got to his feet, dusted himself down and Disapparated just as the first vehicles with blue lights and sirens swept into the ravaged street.

TBC