Disclaimer: If I lived in a castle, I would want it to be a moving castle, like Wizard Howl has. But, not being JKR, I have no kind of castle, and seeing as I make no profit from this venture, I won't be getting one any time soon, unless I take to castle piracy.
"Padfoot . . . " Remus watched the doors of the Great Hall float past as he was, for some reason, dragged toward the main staircase. "The Great Hall is sailing off the port bow."
"We're not going to the Great Hall," Sirius said, pushing his wet bangs out of his grey eyes, "we're going to the hospital wing. I don't want you dropping face-first into my butternut squash. Madam Pomfrey can pour lots of foul potions down your throat and set you up in a nice bed with a nice tray, doesn't that sound fucking magniferous?"
"It sounds nice," Remus said, although the last thing he wanted was to pick up his feet to scale several floors to the hospital wing. He'd been concentrating as hard as he could just to get to his seat at Gryffindor table. "But Pads . . . "
"I can see you want to argue." Sirius paused to wave at James and Peter—or Peter, because James had already gone striding into the hall with single-minded determination. Or Lily-minded determination. "But I can also see, from my amazing powers of seeing shit, that you have no arguments to argue with."
Then he hoisted Remus onto his back. "Climb aboard the Padfoot Express," he said. "Oof. No strangling your conductor, Moony."
"Sorry." Remus loosened his grip, which had latched convulsively onto Sirius' throat when he'd suddenly found himself airborne. "Let that be a warning to the conductor on the suitability of grabbing his passengers off the floor with no warning."
"I'll make sure to scream it in your ear next time, how's that." He hooked his arm around one of Remus' legs, swaying them slightly as he tried to find the other. "Have you suddenly become a mono-ped? Where's your other leg?"
Remus was laughing as he tried not to fall off, accidentally strangle Sirius, or brain them both toppling backward down the stairs. "You know, you could conjure the invalid a stretcher—might be easier—just a thought."
"Boring," Sirius said in tones of disgust. "There's no way a boring bloody stretcher can get you up the stairs more spectacularly than the Padfoot Express."
"I think there are a million ways," Remus said as they lurched up the first flight. "Please don't kill us, Mr. Conductor."
"What I want to know, Moony, is how you can weigh like a sack of wet cement when you look like a bundle of twigs."
"Innate talent."
Sirius still didn't let him down, even when they got to the hospital wing floor. And then he carried Remus piggyback up to the door, and through it. Remus was laughing, in a totally helpless way, until he saw a familiar face and nose and pair of black eyes giving him a surprised, scornful stare.
Sirius stopped dead. His grip on Remus' legs tightened; Remus could feel Sirius' shoulders turn to an iron rod beneath the bones of Remus' chest.
Snape sat in a chair to the left of a mint-green sound-muffling curtain, his legs crossed at the ankles, his elbows resting on the chair's arms and his fingers steepled in front of him. The look was very . . . affected, the sort of thing you'd expect to see on an older man, not a teenager. And yet something about it . . . there was something weird about it, or about Snape . . . Remus couldn't explain it, but he felt like some expectation of his had been jolted.
Even if he didn't agree with Peter's Dark curse theory—and he didn't know why, he just didn't, it didn't add right—there was definitely something different about Snape, an unidentified quality almost as weird as Lily turning around and being close with him again; closer than before.
But Remus knew the anguish of being apart from someone, even when you were so angry with them you wanted to see them hurt, when you wanted to be the one who hurt them. There was a time when you had to make a choice between what hurt you more: forgiving them or not.
Remus felt himself sliding to the floor as Sirius finally loosened his grip. He used Sirius to balance himself, trying to glance up into Sirius' face without being obvious about it. The hard, narrow-eyed look had come back, and Remus hated that look. A lot. Sirius didn't usually get it when dealing with Snape; he usually treated his and James' attacks like little larks, not much worse than the pranks they pulled on anyone, even though they were.
But when that hard look came into his face Remus felt sick inside, because when Sirius got like that, someone always got really hurt, and usually not the person he'd intended. The last time had involved a lot of the people in this room.
Remus looked fearfully across the hospital wing toward Snape, who was settling in his chair, folding his hands back into the steeple. As he did, Madam Pomfrey popped out from behind the muffling curtain, her look of curiosity fading to understanding, and then to worry.
"Oh Mr. Lupin," she said, shaking her head but coming forward readily. "I thought I might see you."
She pointed her wand at a bed as far across the ward from Snape as she could manage, folding back the blankets with a silent spell. Madam Pomfrey remembered.
"Well," Remus said, smiling at her, trying to pretend Snape wasn't there listening to every word and Sirius' arm wasn't like iron under his hand, "I missed you scolding me. It's just not the same when anyone else does it."
He pinched Sirius' arm through the coarse cloth of his school robes. Sirius pushed him toward the bed, but he still hadn't looked away from Snape; still didn't, even as Remus dragged him into the circle of the muffling curtain Madam Pomfrey was drawing around the bed.
"Why is Snivellus here?" Sirius asked abruptly, as soon as the curtains' ends had met.
Madam Pomfrey raised her eyebrows. "Can you not ask Mr. Snape, Mr. Black?" she asked, putting a gentle hand on Remus' shoulder to guide him down to the pillow. As she did, a faint cushioning charm settled against his back, gradually dissipating as he sank down.
Sirius didn't answer, just regarded her with narrowed eyes. Madam Pomfrey said, "No? Then I suppose it's not your business. That is only a professional opinion, you understand."
When she waved her wand over Remus in a complicated net of figure-eights, the glowing lines of Remus' vitals flickered into being above him. He watched them with polite disinterest, trying to compare them to something nicer than a catalogue of everything that hurt.
"Gracious Rowena, Mr. Lupin." Madam Pomfrey's expression creased. "What did you do to yourself last night?"
"Nothing out of the ordinary," he said weakly. "Sometimes they're just . . . bad."
"Yes," she said after a pause. Her hand brushed across his forehead as if checking for temperature, even though her diagnostic net would have told her if he had a fever. He closed his eyes for a second longer than a blink, wishing she were his mother. But Muggles couldn't come to Hogwarts; their systems couldn't handle the power of the magic that melded with the air. Dumbledore had only allowed her across the threshold once, after a particularly bad moon in Remus' second year; the first time he had relaxed the stipulation since becoming Headmaster. But Dumbledore had forcibly removed her when she started bleeding from the ears, and then she'd slapped him and said in a hard voice that he wasn't taking her away from her son. It was one of Remus' more horrible memories, even with all the transformations stitched together as one long tapestry, going back as far as he could remember.
"Well, get some rest, dear." Madam Pomfrey tucked the blankets around him with a kind of deft tenderness. "It's not the most auspicious start to the year, but with a good night's rest and some food in you, you'll be on the mend. You will stay with Mr. Lupin, Mr. Black," she added; Remus, eyes still closed, imagined the stern jab of her wand in Sirius' direction. "Keep him company and don't get too rowdy, or I'll have you out on your ear."
"As long as Snivellus keeps his greasy beak away from us, I can behave," Sirius said.
Madam Pomfrey did not deign to reply. She said, "Drink these, Remus dear," pointing to a tray of multicolored potions when he opened his eyes to look. Then she whisked herself out of the muffled barrier behind the curtain, which did its job so well, all the sound of her presence vanished into nothing.
Remus was a dreadful Potions student, not having scraped even Exceeds Expectations to continue for a N.E.W.T., but he knew these potions as well as, if not better, than even Slughorn did. The cobalt blue potion that seemed to glitter from the inside was a pain potion. The one in sepia was a muscle relaxant. The opalescent gray bottle held a powerful sleeping draught whose only magic was the ability to prolong deep sleep for ten strong hours exactly, because sleep healed on its own. All his body wanted to do after every moon was sleep.
Sirius didn't tell him to take his potions, even though he was leaning across Remus to pick up each bottle and scrutinize it. Sirius would remember how the potions made all Remus' food taste like a blend of insect wings and grass roots, and that Remus always ate before he took even the analgesic.
"Well?" Remus asked, as Sirius put down the sleep potion with a clink. "How do they look?"
"You're better at telling than me. And not because you knock 'em back every month," he added. "I dunno how you get so hopeless at Potions when you can tell the strength of your painkiller from how glittery it is." Sirius gave him a look of exasperated fondness, the same way he did whenever Remus nagged him about smoking or not doing his homework or jinxing first-years' fingers up their nose for sitting in the good chairs by the fire when Remus was looking for a place to study.
"Honestly, potions are even more boring than Binns. I really only know these from staring at them for so long."
"Whatever, Moony," Sirius said, rolling his eyes. "You can keep talking down to yourself, but it'll never be true."
"Well," Remus said, making his voice grave, "we can't all be impenetrably arrogant."
"Swot," Sirius said without rancor, one corner of his mouth curving up, as it had on the train. "You're lucky you're so sickly and weak or I'd give you big girly hug."
The curtains whispered aside and Madam Pomfrey re-appeared, wafting a tray of sick werewolf food: mostly meat—steak—with a side of broth. There was also a plate of chicken and potatoes, which Remus assumed was for Sirius.
"Since I know you're not about to leave the wing in peace, Mr. Black," Madam Pomfrey said, settling the tray over Remus' knees. "And I've other patients that need as much rest as Mr. Lupin."
"Evans?" Sirius said casually.
Madam Pomfrey gave no indication that she'd heard him. "Take your potions when you're done, Mr. Lupin, and set the tray to the side." Then she slipped around the edge of the curtain and was gone again into the silence.
"What do you think, Moony?" Sirius asked, still casual, as he batted Remus' hands away from his silverware (not real silver, of course) and started to carve into the steak. "Do you think it's Evans Snivellus is oh so concernedly watching over like a great greasy bat?"
"I think if you speculate any more where Pomfrey can hear you, she'll turn your ears into leeks."
Sirius made as if to fork a bite of steak into Remus' mouth, but at the last moment veered and ate it himself. He grinned as he chewed, then speared another bite and handed the fork off to Remus.
"At last," Remus said tartly.
"Come on, Moony," Sirius said, now abusing a leg of chicken. "It's Evans, isn't it? Got to be, the way she was looking at the station—and the way he was acting—"
"I don't know why you're bothering to ask me if you already know."
"I don't know," Sirius said with a frown. "It's because I don't know that I'm speculating. Come on, you're the one of us who's good at solving a mystery—if any of us'd been the werewolf, it wouldn't have taken you two bloody years to suss it out."
Remus sighed. "Flattering me to get me participating?" Sirius gave him a grin that was objectively charming, but Remus didn't want to be charmed right now, not by a smile, because the benefit of that always faded too fast. He didn't want to think about the hours of speculation and scheming that would rise out of this Snape-Lily thing like the steam from a smoking cauldron. He could just see James working himself into a frenzy of fear and worry, Peter feeding it with Dark magic theories, and Sirius looking hard-eyed and narrow at Snape because he hated him and all the people like him.
"If Snape is here with Lily," Remus said, careful to make it sound like his words were no big deal, "then I think it's nice he's here for her when she's sick." Like you're here for me, he wanted to add, but he'd never quite dared to compare Sirius to Snape, not to Sirius' face, even though the ways they were alike sometimes filled Remus with disquiet.
Sirius' stare was incredulous. "Moony, if you're thinking Snape's got emotions like a normal person, your brains have done a runner."
"Of course he has emotions like a normal person," Remus said, bewildered. "Most people do, Padfoot."
Perhaps the light in the wing had shifted as Madam Pomfrey put down a lamp, because there seemed to be a shadow lying across Sirius' face that hadn't been there a moment before. But Remus knew it wasn't really a darkness you could take away by moving a light.
"Normal people don't turn into fucking Death Eaters, Remus."
Remus realized he was no longer hungry. The food tasted like it had turned to insect wings and grass roots in his mouth.
He wished he wouldn't ever find out if he was right about that hard look and the shadows. There were things that Sirius didn't talk about but that Remus thought he knew anyway, just as he didn't need an almanac or a star chart to know when the moon was filling with reflected light. The question was, were they the same? Did both of these things he knew down to his bones mean monsters rising out of your skin, transforming you into someone your conscious mind refused to see?
"I think they do," he said quietly. "That's what's so scary."
As soon as Madam Pomfrey shoved Black and Lupin behind a muffling-curtain, Severus slipped behind Lily's. She was half-sitting up in the bed, slumped against the metal headboard, her hand pressed against her forehead.
"Where'd Pomfrey go?" she mumbled.
"To see to Lupin, carried tenderly over the threshold by his devoted dog of a boyfriend."
Lily rolled her eyes, but only to look up at him without turning her head. "Ha, ha," she said, barely smiling, but as though she weren't aware of doing it. That was odd; she should have scolded him for that. Perhaps she was too tired. "Which of them have you cast in that role? Wait, did you say dog?" She hitched herself up, her eyes wide.
"Yes, I know Black is an Animagus." He was surprised that she'd ask, but not as surprised as he was a moment later, to have his hand seized and himself pulled down next to her. Overbalanced and caught off-guard, he almost fell on her, but he managed to grasp the bed frame and keep himself upright, if precarious, on the edge of the mattress. Lily's arms snaked around him like Devil's Snare, and she curled into his chest, her hair tickling his collarbone above the neck of his robes.
"If Madam Pomfrey comes back and finds us like this," he told her, "she'll jettison me from the wing."
"I won't let her," Lily mumbled, her fingers curling tightly into his robes. "I'll tell her I need you here."
"Is it your fear of my being ambushed by half of Slytherin"—or your husband and his cronies—"that's making you so clingy? There's no one in here but us, Pomfrey and the canine lovers."
"Git," she murmured. "They're not. Sirius is mad about practically every good-looking girl that walks by."
Snape could believe that. "I don't think about it one way or the other. I'm only mocking them horribly."
Lily huffed a laugh against his chest. No; he didn't really think Black and Lupin had ever been anything like lovers. Such a thing would be about as likely as Lily turning away from Potter for good and turning to Severus instead. There was no chance of it, not if Severus lived a thousand repeating lifetimes. Her heightened desperation now was only a combination of worry for Severus—for herself, ill as she was—for the disturbed present of being in this place, with these people they'd watched (separately) grow up and die.
The curtain made a papery, rustling sound as Pomfrey returned. Severus staunchly resisted the urge to scramble away from Lily like a guilty and embarrassed seventeen-year-old.
"Mr. Snape," Madam Pomfrey said, actually putting her hands on her hips, "that is not where you ought to be sitting."
"I want him here."
Severus blinked and looked down at the crown of Lily's head. It wasn't her words but the tone of her voice: hard and uncompromising, totally unlike her. She had certainly never talked to Madam Pomfrey like that.
Pomfrey looked surprised, but she was used to dealing with worse than an angry tone. "You need to rest, Miss Evans."
"I am resting. I'll rest much better with Sev here." Was that a warning note in her voice?
Bewildered, Severus looked up to find Madam Pomfrey looking the same. He tried surreptitiously to see Lily's face, but then gave up on subtlety and bent down. Her eyes were trained on Madam Pomfrey, as hard as her voice and watchful, even wary.
"I'm not going anywhere," Severus said to her. He hadn't intended to say it, but it slipped out. When Lily turned her gaze to his, he felt the swell of her emotions ebbing into his thoughts: hardness, determination, desperation, fear, need—the cold. He let his Occlumency billow up gently, enough to allow himself to pull away from the edge of her mind.
The curse. He felt cold, too, but whether it was from his own fear or the memory of hers, he didn't know. They might as well be the same, anyway.
"Mr. Snape may stay until curfew, Miss Evans," Madam Pomfrey said. Lily's eyes flashed with some emotion, too quickly for Severus to make it out from his distance in the dark ocean of Occlumency.
"You'll be asleep when I'm gone," he said. "It won't matter whether I'm here or not."
Her hand found his and gripped so tightly he thought she might leave a bruise. Not like her at all.
"I don't want you to leave me," she said, still in that hard voice, but he could hear the thread of discomfort, almost panic, that fissured through.
He wrapped his fingers around her wrist. "It is not a question of leaving you."
"Rest, Miss Evans," Pomfrey said. As she tucked her wand into her apron pocket, the soft cloud of spells she had woven circumspectly above Lily dissipated into the air tinted green by the lamps shining through the curtain. "I won't bother you until it's time for you to sleep."
She rustled out, disappearing into the silence beyond the muffling charm. Severus remained on Lily's bed, not moving when her head returned to his chest and her shallow breath drifted across his robes. He was thinking.
If the curse had an emotional effect, that would narrow its identification to a single category. A deep and intricate category, but Severus didn't balk at that; knowing what to rule out, he could begin investigating immediately.
He'd intended to go back to the dorms and weather whatever puerile nastiness his first group of enemies would have brewed up for tonight, but now he adjusted his plans to include a detour to the library. He needed to work as swiftly as possible. The only good thing was that it was highly unlikely the curse had been sealed with blood . . . if no blood were involved, the spell would be capable of being reversed.
He tried to loosen his grip on her, to make it less cruel; but Lily only pressed closer to him.
They did not speak. Some point after she seemed to doze off against him, he tried to roll her into a more comfortable position off his bony chest onto her pillow, but she only tightened her hold on him and muttered, No. So he left her where she was, the metal rod of the headstand digging into his back, cold through the coarse fabric of his robes. The side of him she pressed up against felt feverishly warm.
When Madam Pomfrey turned up with a beaker, Severus coaxed a somnolent Lily into drinking its contents down. Within exactly a minute she was asleep, breathing deep and even. He and Madam Pomfrey maneuvered her to lie flat on the mattress, where she lay like the insipid heroine in a fairy tale, deep in an enchanted sleep. They stood on opposite sides of the bed, looking down at her taut face in the soft silence woven through the hospital ward.
"You did right to bring her, Mr. Snape," Madam Pomfrey said quietly. "This is the work of a serious curse."
"Have you notified the Headmaster?" Severus asked, careful to keep his voice tucked within the shroud of his Occlumency.
"Yes. He should be here shortly, now the feast is done."
Then Severus ought to leave. "I'll be going, then," he said. He hesitated, thinking of thanking her, but in the end decided he'd probably drawn enough attention to himself for the evening. So he simply lifted the edge of the curtain and slipped into the more open silence of the vaulted ward, his head full of Lily's translucently pale face, stark against the tangle of her dark red hair.
He was within arm's reach of the door when the curtain at the bed next to it crumpled to the side and Black stepped out. Severus' first thought was how much bigger than himself Black was at this age; his second for the hardness of the emotion on the hateful, handsome face. Severus recognized that emotion, oh he did.
Severus went still, a reaction from years of expecting attacks. He felt the bare pressure of his wand was in sleeve, its slight weight that pressed against his wrist. Black wouldn't know that Severus had perfected a way to slide it into his palm with a twist and flick of his wrist; Black wouldn't see it coming . . . whatever Severus wanted to do to him . . . with even the middling force of his Dark Arts power, Severus could shatter through Black's shields, cut his beautiful face to ribbons, fill his dark gray eyes with blood—
The infirmary doors groaned inward, and Dumbledore appeared in the widening gap between the wooden halves. His robes were a deep, magnificent crimson embroidered with knots of silver that looked like spell-shot, so that he seemed to sparkle faintly as the lamp light moved across him. He'd seen Severus and Sirius perhaps even before they turned their heads to face them, but his light blue eyes were only calm and curious.
Severus ripped his Occlumency into place so hard he felt a pulse of pain. His wand had slid into his palm, grown clammy and damp. His heart was thundering like a horse.
"Good evening, gentlemen," the Headmaster said, as if they weren't mortal enemies with their wands out and every line of their bodies thrumming with hatred. "I was sorry to hear your friends have fallen ill enough to keep you from attending the feast tonight. But, ah . . . "
He drew toward them, smiling slightly now. But his eyes did not twinkle over the crescents of his glasses; they remained probing and serious. "Not even our festivities at their most excellent can compare to the delight of such affection."
God, those speeches—Severus had remembered them, but he'd forgotten exactly what they were like; he'd forgotten exactly how much Dumbledore always meant them. Severus wanted to break all the windows in the hospital wing, but if he let any emotion beyond the merciless grip of his Occlumency, he was afraid he would shatter.
Dumbledore had drawn between Severus and the dog. "To bed with you now," he said, looking from one student to the other with his slight smile. "Weeping may tarry for the night, you know, but joy comes in the morning."
"Goodnight, sir," Black said curtly, giving Severus one last hard look, much harder than Lily would ever accomplish. Severus only stared back at him, beyond the cool, deep embrace of Occlumency, where even his hatred had been compacted. But still there; it was always there . . .
Then Black left them, striding out of the wing, the echo of his steps ringing faintly in the corridor beyond.
Severus did not dare look at Dumbledore. He moved toward the door, aware that he was hunching, praying hard, but whether it was to get out before Dumbledore spoke or to hear something kind, he didn't know; he didn't know—
He made it to the door before Dumbledore's voice arrested him. "Mr. Snape?" he said, and Severus was so very glad it was not 'Severus' he had to endure, not at first, not yet, not when this was first time he was hearing his voice since Severus, please had ripped off a piece of his heart.
He turned, saying nothing, only watching Dumbledore from the side, as an owl would do, and not meeting his eyes. He could feel Dumbledore looking back, but not with the full weight of his gaze, only with that same serious curiosity as before.
"Yes, Headmaster?" Severus asked when Dumbledore said nothing. Did something shift beneath the light surface of Dumbledore's own Occlumency?
"I only wished to welcome you back to school," Dumbledore said. Severus' instincts told him this was not what Dumbledore had at first intended to tell him, but he didn't know what that could be. "It is the first year we did not have your company over the holidays."
If Severus could walk into that Hogwarts in his mind, the one where he was fully grown and everyone knew who he was, what he'd done, and forgave him, as Lily had done, Severus hoped he would hear, Welcome back, my boy. Welcome home.
All Severus could manage in this Hogwarts was, "Right."
"I thought perhaps you'd gone to find something you had lost," Dumbledore said. "I hope you've found it now. Good night, Mr. Snape. May you have a peaceful night."
Unable to speak, Severus fled.
The halls were still lit by torchlight, but only every other two, so that the flames knifed up the stone walls. Severus walked through deep spells of shadow and lighter waves of firelight, his wand held low against his hip, his senses alight, hoping that outwardly he looked as if he were brooding unalertly. He did not think a strong attack would come first; the older ones would want to wait and see how he dealt with the smaller students before making their mark . . .
A hand flashed out from behind a black tapestry shifting with vines, seizing him by the arm and hauling him behind the cloth, plunging him into the darkness behind it. He reacted with as much thought and time it took to blink, firing off a spell that blasted the stones iwith an explosion of light, sound and a rain of rock dust, diving forward to trap his assailant to the wall by his throat.
"Merlin's hairy arsehole, Snape!" a strangled voice choked.
Severus snapped his wand alight, filling the narrow space with blue-white light. It carved out of the darkness the half-terrified, half-angry features of a fifteen-year-old Regulus Black.
"Black Minor," Severus said without thinking.
Regulus had Severus' hand at his throat, pinning him against the wall like a claw, but he stiffened at that old nickname. "I am the only Black now," he snarled—or tried to, but Severus' grip was cutting off his air supply and it came out as a wheezing squeak. "Snape, let me up!"
Severus felt a sneer curling over his face. Regulus seemed to shrink for a moment, but then he pushed at Severus' arm and Severus did let up, stepping back. But he didn't put his wand away. Instead, he flicked a net of privacy spells around them, raising a brief starlight glow that trickled up from the ground to the ceiling and then faded into dusty sparkles, and finally to nothing.
"If you're getting your revenge in early, Black," Severus said, "I think you've officially flunked."
"You're such an ingrate," Regulus said in a small voice, although perhaps that was from the strangulation. "I came to warn you, of all things."
Severus barely kept himself from snorting. "Warn me? Of all things that's what I won't believe."
"Snape, you stood up—him!" Regulus was probably trying to sound impressive, but his eyes in the wand-light were round and very young. But perhaps that was the influence of years Severus was no longer supposed to possess. "D'you know what—everyone—is planning? Lucius Malfoy—"
"What, did he send key invitations around?"
"He didn't have to, he's related to half the people in the House, they meet up over hols. Everyone knew the minute you failed to show! Lucius was so angry . . . "
Perhaps Regulus' tiny voice and huge eyes weren't merely Severus' doing. And here he thought he'd managed to look fearsome. What a laugh—he was pretty sure everyone held him in wary contempt at this age.
"Beat the house elves in my stead, did he?" Severus asked.
Regulus shuddered. "Merciful Salazar, don't remind me. The whole House is against you now, Severus, how could you?"
Severus registered—with considerable surprise—the use of his personal name, but he made no comment on it. It was probably only a Tactic. "If you're here for a helping of confidences, you're further off your mark than you've dreamed. Stick to revenge, Black, and leave the heart-to-hearts to Hufflepuffs."
"I'm not here for revenge," Regulus said hotly, and then added, "But I'll have to be later, you understand, right?"
"Don't foreshadow your own ambitions, you twat," Severus said in disgust. "What kind of Slytherin are you?"
"What kind are you?" Regulus retorted. "Getting yourself hexed by a Gryffindor and standing up the Dark Lord, that's one thing—"
"Actually, it's two," Severus said.
"—but then carrying the Mudblood to the hospit—urk!"
Severus enjoyed the way his wand dug into the soft flesh of Regulus' throat, how his eyes went round again, the expression of comprehending fear that stole onto his face like a shadow in the wand-light. Now Regulus was afraid, and it was all him, all Severus' doing . . .
"Do not," he whispered, now enjoying the cruelty in his voice as it curled in the narrow space between them, "use that word around me."
Regulus did not nod or swallow or say anything. He didn't seem to dare. Without stepping back, Severus tipped his wand away from Regulus' throat, freeing him. Regulus' hand crept up his neck, trembling. The point of Severus' wand had punctured the skin, leaving a small dark blotch on the pale expanse of his throat before Regulus' hand covered it.
Suddenly this wasn't enjoyable anymore. Severus may look sixteen, but he was fully thirty-eight, and Regulus Black was nothing more than a wide-eyed boy. As his own mother had pointed out, most children simply spouted whatever they heard in their parents' drawing-rooms day in, day out; and in pure-blood families like Regulus's, he heard 'blood-traitor' and 'Mudblood' the way Lily heard 'communist' and 'Labour Party.' Had Regulus ever given a serious thought to any of it? Severus doubted it, the way he doubted that he and Sirius Black would ever stop loathing each other to the ends of the earth.
Regulus was just a child. Which made Severus an utter shit.
"Just don't say it," Severus said at last. "I hate that stupid fucking word."
"Right," Regulus whispered. The soft rustle of his voice was nothing like Severus' had been; it was not cruel, only frightened. "Merlin and Salazar, Severus, what happened to you over hols? You didn't—did you defect or something?"
"I think it would be better for everyone, Black, if you neither thought about that nor even let anyone suspect that you had. The point everyone will hinge on is my worthless abandonment, not what it signifies, if it even signifies anything at all."
Then he turned, deliberately showing Regulus his back—a mark that could communicate either deepest contempt or sincerest trust in Slytherin—and walked out of the hidden corridor, his body dissolving the invisible net of privacy spells as he passed through them, as one destroyed a spider's livelihood.
"Severus!" Regulus' hiss slowed his steps, but he did not turn all the way. "The password's mania."
He listened to Regulus' feet patter down the other end of the hidden corridor and disappear into the silence of a castle preparing to sleep.
Then Severus resumed walking, through the halls as more torches guttered down, headed to the Restricted stacks of the library.
Severus knew the castle so well he could walk it in complete darkness. He did not even hear Filch, who moved with considerably more spryness at this age and kept two cats named Counter and Clockwise. Severus used to feed them catnip-laced treats outside of Filch's office, before shutting them inside so they would wreck his records. If Severus had found a student doing such a thing to him, he'd have strung them from hooks by their nostrils.
It was hours past midnight, and he had two books concealed in his robes that the library would miss eventually, but not know where to find. Books secure, unlit wand still in his hand, he wound his way beneath the ground, moving toward the dungeons by memory. His memories of the damp that seeped through the walls and the earth were older than he thought they would be, as was the smell of moisture's tinge on the stones. He hadn't dared to prowl as much as Headmaster. It would have made him look too restless.
But here was that scent again, of damp earth and stones, and it was dear to him; as dear as the traces of gardenias and oranges and Muggle fabric softener that had always clung to Lily when he saw her during hols. And Dumbledore . . . the Headmaster had smelled of cinnamon, the smoky depth of tea leaves, and brown sugar. The blinding sparkle of his robes was as familiar as the sight of Lily's flared corduroys and green sweater whose cuff she'd picked loose of a thread that she liked to wind around her finger, turning the tip white.
Severus shook these reminiscences into the back of his mind. He needed to remain alert, however unlikely an attack would be at this hour.
The darkness down beneath the earth seemed as deep as ocean waters. He heard nothing, but that meant nothing. He sank into the place of instinct, just beneath the surface of his Occlumency, extending his senses out from himself.
But he reached out for the entrance to the common room untroubled and murmured, "Mania," partly surprised when the stones scraped open as they should. A brief spell ascertained that someone pathetic had laid a tripping jinx across the threshold. Severus dismantled it with a flick, and with another sent a spell forth that would tell him if anything living occupied the common room. When the feedback was only a cat and a couple of scrabbling mice, he stepped through the doorway.
He felt distinctly odd. Not from a spell; from walking into the Slytherin common room for the first time in—he couldn't even remember. He had occasionally had to go there for something his hideous students desperately needed, but only very occasionally.
He set a jinx on the door to knock whoever left the room first in the morning on their arse and sprout their face with pus-filled boils. Juvenile and disgusting—disgusting in its junvenility, too—but it was the sort of thing they'd expect from him. No, actually he believed they would expect a lot worse, but he wasn't going to hex a bunch of stupid brats with Dark magic, even if he couldn't simply do nothing. He hoped the door-jinx would be triggered by one of his would-be overeager attackers, not some hapless first-year girl, but there was no way to make a spell gender-specific.
The vaulted cavern of the common room was as dark as it was empty, thinly lit by the banked fire in the hearth. Severus moved around the hulking shadows of the furniture, sending another wave of sentry spells into the network of boys' dormitories, and a second into the girls' for good measure. The majority of the pings reflected back to him were sleeping markers, but there was one knot awake in the boys' dorms: about four boys, and they were moving down the branch that led to the sixth-years' wing . . .
Severus made his careful, silent way toward them, down the pillared halls whose chambers were only distinguished in the sightless dark by the quiet breezes that drifted through the dungeons. Everyone was asleep but that clump of boys, and as he drew up to the corner where the sixth-year dorm intersected the main corridor, he heard them whispering . . .
" . . . do it now, while he's sleeping, he won't be expecting it this late . . . "
"Yeah, but what if he's awake?"
"He won't be, Barty, it's the middle of the night! He'll be asleep, mark my words . . . "
Barty Crouch, Junior—so these must be fourth or fifth-year boys; Severus couldn't remember how much younger than himself Barty Crouch had been. He did not want to be so pathetic that he was relieved to not hear Regulus' voice with them, but Regulus would not assign himself to vengeance in a crowd. He was a Black; they had their pride.
Severus heard the door to his dorm scrape open, the soft shuffling sounds of the boys stealing through. And then—
BANG. Someone had warded the door; two of the boys went flying into the hall to the sound of yells and sizzles; the other two hurtled forward into the room and out of sight. From the yelping, shouting, swearing, and muffled explosions of magic that flickered starkly to life on the walls, Severus' dorm-mates had either set traps or were especially quick on the draw.
Severus walked calmly down the hall, which was now lit by lamps thrown on in the dorm room, and stopped above the two groaning lumps in the hall. When they looked up at him, their expressions of terror and consternation made him almost say Twenty-five points from Slytherin, but he caught himself. One of them had the straw hair and milk-white round face of Barty Crouch.
"Bad luck, tossers," Severus said, and silently flicked a spell that would turn their genitals into turnips. It wasn't painful, only unpleasant, and as they shrieked with shock he stepped over them into his now-battered dorm room.
A haze of smoke hung over everything, and the other two fourth-years were lying in a heap on the floor, apparently unconscious, their features obscured by a combination of leeks, scabs, boils, and little fluttering tentacles. They were lucky nothing worse had got them; although perhaps it had, and the effects were simply more subtle.
Haddock had got tangled in his sheets and was trying to free his head. The hangings around Mulciber's bed were sputtering with flames he was attempting to put out; but when he snarled, "Aguamenti!" he produced a jet of rum that only set the fire roaring. Avery picked up a jug of water and hurled its contents at the burning curtains, hitting about one-quarter of the fire and three-quarters of Mulciber.
"What an idyllic scene," Severus said; Avery, Mulciber, and Rosier all whirled to face him; Haddock struggled harder to get the blankets off his head. "Are you wizards, or baboons with sticks?"
He pointed at the fire and a fountain of icy water exploded from the tip, drenching Mulciber and the nearby Avery, soaking Mulciber's scorched hangings and his bedding beneath it. Both boys sputtered as the water died away, the now-thin jet trickling back into Snape's wand like a hose shut off.
Then he swept the unconscious fourth-year boys tumbling into the air and, turning, made to toss them out into the hall—which was when he saw the crowd back there, all sleep-muddled boys, the younger ones all gaping, the older ones watching. The back of Severus' neck prickled; someone could have got him while he was turned away. He'd been lucky they only decided to watch.
He chucked the unconscious boys at them. Another turn of his wrist and the door swung shut, hitting its frame with a muffled boom.
For a moment he waited, his back still to the boys in his year, three of whom would become some of the Dark Lord's closest Death Eaters. He had not formulated a plan on how to deal with these boys, other than to take things as they came. There were times when that most Gryffindor of plans was the only thing you could do.
But they would be interpreting the sight of his back as it faced them. Whatever Regulus had read into it, Severus had been showing him trust.
Not this time.
He turned, Occlumency tight around his mind, his wand held low in a defensive position that could turn to attack in a moment. Avery and Mulciber were still dripping, standing where they'd been; Haddock had freed himself but was still sitting on the floor, his mouth hanging open. Rosier had not moved, either, but three wands were out, every face watched him, and Rosier's wand was held slightly up and forward . . . an attack position that could fire almost without notice.
Professor Snape would be able to tell when the attack was coming, but Severus had not yet been able to decide how capable to appear.
"You've got a lot of nerve coming in here at all, Snape," Rosier said in a quiet voice. It was almost thoughtful, yet almost a threat.
"I've got a lot of nerve in general," Severus replied. Then he wanted to smack himself. Oh Christ, what a Gryffindor's remark.
Rosier smiled at that, but it was thin, soft with unpleasant thoughts behind it. "I'll say you do. Do you know what Lucius Malfoy is offering the person who takes you down?"
"A stock of Muggle gangster movies? Riches of the Orient? He doesn't have a sister, so it can't be—"
"Merlin's prick, Snape," Avery said, staring, "what in the hells's the matter with you?"
"He's gone mad," Mulciber said softly, in an echo of that voice he used to whisper to girls between the stacks of the library.
Madder than you know, Severus thought. And I'm not remotely afraid of any of you pricks.
And he really was not. He was wary of what they might do, not what they could do. They couldn't touch him on even ground, and even though Slytherins rarely fought even odds, the long odds weren't worrying him either. It was . . . a relief to understand that. For all his assurances to his mother and Lily, all his careful logic, he realized he hadn't been able to quell his lingering doubts. With Occlumency, yes, but not in any real way.
No, the only fear Severus had was for Lily. That was the only place they could hurt him. And they would have to step over his headless, eviscerated corpse to get to her.
"What I am right now," he said, "is going to bed."
And with one wide arc he sent four glaring, crimson Stupefies across the room, knocking them all into oblivion.
His birthday present to himself.
To be continued. . .