The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 25: The Dream Floo
The Severus that is actually trying to help someone other than himself fades away to nothing. He might as well not exist in that parlor.
Voldemort wants me to use the ability I've sworn I don't possess to try and extract information from someone. I'm not foolish enough to resist.
"You'll get your fill regardless," he says as if to a gluttonous child. How someone can be so skilled at manipulating people and such a poor judge of character is a mystery. My worst parts aren't my only parts!
The subject is a little potbellied nub of a man. He is naked and very frightened and I have to work to find his sensuality before he can sense mine. Having Voldemort leering noselessly over him can't help, but I'm not so stupid as to suggest he leave. Since the Dark Lord came back from the Beyond he has no sense of personal space with other people, though he's careful not to touch me. Like any good despot, he doesn't want to risk giving up any of his precious dark magic to the quicksand that is Severus Snape.
I run a hand up the man's arm. His eyes seem to focus somewhere just beyond my face, and I can sense he's seeing his heart's desire in my True Face. That this face isn't a mass of worms and corruption by now never ceases to amaze me.
The condoms are on and the little man relaxes somewhat. Voldemort grunts his approval. "Ask him how much the ministry knows about our plan."
I have to make a great effort to remember which nefarious plan he means out of all the ones I've been part and party to over the years. With a vague idea in mind I rub the subject's chest and concentrate on becoming transparent.
The man looks at me like Christmas and I'm in. Into his magic and his mind isn't far behind. Capturing thoughts in the present is much more difficult than rifling through someone's ingrained past, which is what most Legilimens do, and what I've done with Harry. With Lilly she greatly aided the process by acting as a willing and skilled participant.
I force myself into the rocking motion that is the man's thoughts and begin to catch some things. "My job, oh, my job when they find out. It's Pearline, Pearline isn't dead! How can she? Oh, just like that! If the ministry finds out I've told them about the dragons, they'll kill me, yes right there oh Merlin!"
I'm vaguely aware that our bodies are following their own agenda, but all the while I'm using every bit of my magic to remain calm while I discover
who else is in this man's mind.
My release is building but I slow it down at the same time that I bring the little man back from the edge. "Do you hear anything?" comes Voldemort's voice.
"He's enjoying himself," I say dully. "Let me try some more."
This gives me more time to go back to chasing down that magical signature. I know that fingerprint! Before I was dark my mind could have indexed it instantly, but as it is it takes another long minute of flesh slapping against flesh before I place it.
Harry Potter is in this unfortunate person's mind.
With the utmost naturalness I squeeze the man's climax from him and into the condom and shoot my noxious fluid into my own bit of rubber.
"I don't know," I say to Voldemort, completely used to conversing when naked by now. "It's like looking into a fog. I feel my pleasure and his pleasure and am doubly blinded."
Voldemort sits back in his chair. His wand is out before I even see him reach for it. How can anyone have reflexes that fast? He casts Cruciatus and I have to concentrate on cutting the sympathy that has grown up between me and the dying man so he doesn't take me with him.
"You disappoint me, Moon-calf," he says with the same bland inflection as always. "Perhaps I tire of feeding your appetites with so little in return."
The idea that he might set me free is simply too good to be true. I don't trust it. "Perhaps I will come looking for my pleasure wherever I can find it," I say just as coolly. He catches the reference to himself. All it takes is one moment's contact that shows him my True Face, and we will consume each other into some sucking void of evil and he knows it.
"You know where to find me," Voldemort replies. He knows I'm forever on the fence, too weak to be wholly good or wholly bad. The hazard of the Half-breed. He's told me so many times. "But in the meantime, I may have a better weapon than you. One that doesn't drip through my carpet."
He thinks he wounds me by turning away while I get dressed and leave, but I am grateful for the mental space it allows me. I wander around in the dark for a long time, until it starts to grow light. Experience has shown that the castle shutters itself from the evil I exude right after I come back from a Call.
Finally I am allowed to enter the school and go straight up to Dumbledore's. He looks at me tiredly and waits for me to stick my tongue out so he can assure me it's not gangrenous and about to fall off.
"It's still attached, Severus."
The ritual completed, I talk as fast as I can before my tongue swells up too much. The news that ministry officials are being targeted by Death Eaters makes him frown, though he seems to know about this dragon scheme already. But Albus is aghast at the idea that Harry was somehow in this poor man's mind while I was having him.
"He was with someone named Pearline," I reassure him as well as I can. "If Potter saw anything, it was this man having the time of his life with Pearline."
"And when he experienced Cruciatus?" he whispers.
Silence.
"I don't know, I had to pull out of his mind at that point," I say thickly, my tongue beginning to swell beyond the confines of my mouth.
Dumbledore floos me to the infirmary so that I can be hooked up to the IV and can give myself an injection in my tongue so I don't choke on it. No matter what species of needle I try, it seems to cause an allergic reaction at the entry site, so they place my favorite salves by my side to alleviate the itching and irritatio that will soon come to my arm and tongue. All of this happens in my usual bed, which is within sight of Harry's but not so close that Pomfrey's efficient but revolted activity will bother him.
I summon my slate and chalk. "How is Potter?"
She sniffs. "Some success your potion was. Dr. Floyd had to sedate him he was in such a state from his nightmare."
"Where is the doctor now?" I write.
She nods at her office. "He's taking a nap on the cot for an hour or two. He wants to examine Harry thoroughly once he's woken up."
"What did you use to sedate him?" I begin writing, wondering how deeply his magic might be stilled, but my question is answered for me when the boy jolts awake. He blinks without his glasses, straining to see in the dim light.
"What is it? Pearline? Is that you?" He vaults out of his bed and gets three steps closer to me before I throw up a shield that blocks the very air.
"What have you done? I can't breathe!" Pomfrey clutches her throat.
"Sorry, perhaps that was a little drastic," I choke out and adjust the shield so we can breathe.
The nurse gets a second wave of panic. "Is he—? How could you, you rotten man?" she shouts at me.
"I have done nothing," I write patiently. "Against my express instructions Mr. Potter has been practicing Legilimency this evening and it seems our paths have crossed."
She is so disgusted she actually spits on her spotless floor. "Why they let a monster like you around children is beyond me." It seems to do her good to say what she's been thinking all this time. "Kindly let me through this shield."
I allow her through and seal myself safely away from the world, with my tongue and my slate for company. The IV is pinching me so I adjust the needle a little. They let me sleep through the morning because I can't teach very well via slate, so Dumbledore has either taught my classes himself or roped in one of my unwilling colleagues. The idea of Filch babysitting my students makes me smile a little in my dream.
I open my eyes to Dumbledore's worry-ravaged face and the smile evaporates.
"How bad is it," I say with my tongue flopping in my mouth, leaving room for any number of tragedies.
"He's seen this woman Pearline through that man's eyes and is—quite smitten with her."
"So he hasn't seen my Face," I hazard. "He just recognizes the feeling from his dream."
"Did you have any idea that he was going into the Dark Circle's minds while he was dreaming? Didn't you have any hint that he was in the man's brain before you began draining him?"
It's unusual for Dumbledore to lash out at anyone, but he needs someone to blame. I don't mind.
"Harry had an extensive section of his mind devoted to fear and Voldemort as one and the same. I didn't dwell there and try to sort it all out, and I left it completely alone after Mr. Potter expressly told me to. And no, Albus, you know I have a hard time getting a clear read on someone in the present until I'm actually in their magic."
The two of us piece together a theory over the late breakfast that he eats and I absorb through my arm. Harry must be the "secret weapon" Voldemort was referring to. He's obviously realized that a link exists through the scar and that it can be manipulated both ways. Perhaps he's been trying to master this connection for years.
Dumbledore's intuition that such a connection might exist was correct, and his order that I teach Harry to shield was very shrewd. But we had no idea how actively the two of them had been moving back and forth along this connection.
What Voldemort expects to learn through a seventeen-year-old who has mostly stumbled into—and out of—his fights is unclear. But what is more worrisome is the idea that this same seventeen-year-old has probably been seeing every species of depravity in Voldemort's parlor. The Dark Lord's magic must be all through everyone and everything in that place, but given what I describe as his interpersonal tone-deafness he's unable to make good use of his reach. Harry, however, might have free reign over the entire dark network—
"Did you see anything like—like that—in Harry's mind?" Albus asks for the tenth time, and I tell him again that nothing sexual jumped out at me but it might have just been folded into the general fear.
I think of my own sexual education in the Restricted Section of the library and hope Harry hasn't been exposed to the worst of sexuality before he knows who he is.
This reminds me of my crying jag earlier. I pull out the slate because it seems easier to write than fight with my tongue. And I don't want to hear myself say this. Dumbledore watches me trace the words across the surface, filling the space up several times with questions.
My old friend lays a hand on my hair. "I was hoping that would happen," he says with a tired smile and walks out with his teapot and tea service floating behind him.
A smite upon that man for acting like he is the author of the whole world!
The next day I return to classes and rely on my arsenal of glares as much as possible rather than talking. Harry is in a warded wing of the castle while the best wizarding minds try to distract him from his obsession.
One of the boy's friends looks at me a little too closely. It's that girl, Granger, the annoying one. I reinforce the shield around me and push her away a little for good measure. She goes back to her book. I make a mental note to track what she's been checking out of the library, and a special note to make sure that the Bigham's Big Book of Sexual Incongruencies has been exploded into smithereens as it should have long ago.
It occurs to me that I was right around Harry's age when I found out I was a cancer to wizard society. Slightly younger, rather, since I was a year ahead of my peers. Why couldn't he be content with the fraction of a normal boy's life left to him after you subtract the Boy Who Lived part? But he had to go snooping in the darkest place he could find.
When push comes to shove, I don't want anyone experiencing the kind of darkness I've lived with, so I'll help if a fallen creature like me can help. But Harry, I'm finding, is especially hard not to like. At some point I've joined his side. I smile wryly around my still-tender tongue.
Harry is much less pleased with me, however, when we manage to break the hold the image of this dead woman has over his mind. It takes several days and all of my ingenuity to come up with an antidote, and it requires a compromise Albus doesn't like to make.
"Plant a lie in his mind?" he says again.
"I'll just let him in to that fabricated memory and he's bound to accept the idea that I've done something malevolent as fact."
That night, I stand in the doorway of his chamber—I couldn't cross the barrier if I tried—and press on his awareness a little to make sure he is awake and knows I am there. His febrile teenage desire is awakened by the magical stamp he associated with "Pearline" the first time he encountered it. Yet at the same time I watch this desire throttle him, I see his confusion that it is mixed with some oily essence I assume must be his idea of "Snape." His curiosity aroused, it doesn't take long for him to look away from his imaginings and try to breach my mind as he did once before.
In a second Potter is advancing down the path I laid for him, watching the fictitious memory of me making a potion that was designed to distract him with some type of teenage lovesick delirium. The whys are kept deliberately vague, but the whole thing comes packaged with the idea that I think he will be too stupid to figure out how to get out of it—by seeing it as the figment of his imagination it really is. Who stays in lust with a dream, after all? Just the sort of lazy mind I have often told him he is.
Potter is thrust out of my mind as if I've just discovered him there. I even treat him to a little mock-flounce with my robe as I leave.
He feels like the most cunning boy in Hogwarts, and I'm not feeling too shabby myself as I go tell Albus.
"Thanks for the potion, Professor." The lovesick teenager has been replaced by the much-safer sarcastic teenager. "I missed a week of class."
"You're welcome, Mr. Potter," I reply mildly. "As I said, any unmastered desire can be used against one in a time of battle."
And then he is battering against my shields and I wait until he tires. "That's what got you in trouble the other night," I point out. "If you don't learn to block you have no business floundering about in someone's mind."
This brings him up short. "How do you know what I was doing?" he demands. "Were you inside my nightmare?"
So, he files these excursions into the parlor as nightmares. Dumbledore and I have discussed my next move and it is a difficult maneuver. "I learned your magical signature when I was in your mind during one of our lessons," I say. "I can follow it in your dreams much better than your waking state because there is so much less going on than when you're awake."
I've actually never tried to follow someone's dreams, but he accepts the idea with no question even as it disgusts him.
"You've been poking around in here after hours, Snape?" he says without bothering to call me by my proper title. "Anything strike your fancy?"
None of the students would be caught dead thinking of me as a sexual being, so I don't take this as a gibe against my hidden preferences.
"Dumbledore told me to watch over you and that included making up for some noted deficiencies in your blocking and—constitution." That much is true. "I was merely alerted when your consciousness actually left your body and the castle. No more."
His face almost seems disappointed for some reason. He must have been hoping for a nefarious motive to resent.
"But if you would like to share your dreams with me I have taken some courses in Psychoneutics," I offer modestly.
He snorts. "Dream on, Snape. You're the last one I would trust with my deepest self."
Now that I have lied about it, the idea of trying to figure out when his mind goes wandering actually seems like a splendid idea. I convince Albus to let down some of the wards between me and the Potter boy so that I can sense—with several floors of stone between us—if he might be traveling back to Voldemort's den. Perhaps he does so unconsciously.
"Lock me in my rooms, seal up my fireplace, do whatever you like, but otherwise we are left with nothing to do but wait for him to stumble onto some grotesque orgy," I remind the headmaster.
He makes me a prisoner in my suite every night, and I open myself to the purple-pink note that I recognize very clearly as Harry. It's much brighter now than all the other warded magics, which seem to come to me through smoked glass. As the vibrations slow a little when he slips into sleep, it is not difficult to learn to go on alert, but nothing happens for several nights.
Only on the fourth night, when I am asleep myself, does the image of a moth beating itself against a thick pane of clear glass come to me. Usually I would be repulsed by a moth, but this one is the most beautiful purple-pink color. It wants so badly to get to the flame on the other side of the glass, but I know it shouldn't.
Sitting up in bed I start shaking against the wards to wake Albus.
"Let me out," I cry when his head appears in my restored fireplace. "He's probably traveling right now."
"You can't go with him," he replies firmly. "Leave this to me, and I'll tell you how he is in the morning."
"You're right," I agree.
My mind starts reaching for him as soon as the old man's head disappears from my chimney.
It's not something that ever occurred to me before, but it suddenly seems like the subconscious could be one great Floo network. If Harry and Voldemort can sneak back and forth on their line, why can't I map my way to them too?
It takes some time before I can get out of Hogwarts with my mind, but once I do, everything is very bright and moving very fast. The world is a rich velvet black and the colored magics stand out like fireflies. There is a cluster of variegated magical signatures that must be Hogsmeade, and I wheel around the English countryside sensing various clusters of colored lights. Being able to pinpoint without any doubt where the magical beings are in Britain would be a very dangerous knowledge for a certain dark wizard. The idea tempers the exhilaration that comes from flying through the dark searching for one purple-pink dot.
It's never been possible for me to locate Voldemort's lair on the face of the earth, though it must exist somewhere. He's found a way to fold space over itself and hide, or so I thought until tonight.
There he is. I have no way of later tracing this "there" but at the moment, Harry's magical fingerprint is right before me, though somewhat obscured by the fact that it's burrowing inside a familiar yellow color.
Hermès Trismégiste! That's Lucius!
Knowing full well what the man was capable of when he rationalized the perversions he so enjoyed with me in our youth—and suspecting him also much changed since he took the Mark—I almost attempt some sort of totally ill-advised dream attack, but stop in time. Voldemort must not sense what is going on essentially under the aegis of his subconscious—me chasing Harry chasing whatever he's looking for. Otherwise a whole new vista of power would open up for the Dark Lord, and he'd use me to tap it.
Instead, I ease up to the yellow streak to see if it is obvious what is going on.
"My son tells me the Potter boy has been ill," Lucius is saying, and I feel his pride at being able to share something Voldemort doesn't know.
"Ill? In what way?" comes the flat voice.
"Apparently Snape has been using him as a guinea pig for some experiment," Lucius says and I wonder if he could possibly be aware of how dangerous this statement is.
"He has, has he?" The evil creature (who looks like a god through Lucius' eyes) thinks for a moment. I've been feeding him disinformation about my supposed Spagyrics studies through the years, but I thought everyone in my life had become accustomed to the idea that I would never deliver on any of my promise. "And what is the purpose of this experiment?"
"Spite. You know Snape was in love with the elder Potter," Lucius is prattling on. "But he's always disliked the boy. Potter was in a delirium for days."
"Perhaps our pet Snape is a little more of a deviant than he has been letting on," Voldemort says mildly, as if he were the picture of normalcy. "This is excellent news. Well done, Lucius,"
I can feel a sensation like a dog wagging his tail welling up within Malfoy when the purple vanishes from my awareness. Harry is gone.
It is easy for me to return to my body in Hogwarts, much easier than getting out of it, so in a few moments I'm pounding against the wards in my chamber. "Albus! What have you done!"
My fireplace unseals and I floo up to the bed where they've been keeping Harry in isolation. "Mr. Potter has just woken up from a nightmare," Dumbledore says.
But the young man in question is looking at me as if the nightmare continues.
He tries to drum into my mind on several fronts:
Point one: That I loved his father.
Two: That I am using him as part of a spiteful experiment, and
Three: That I have a taste for young boys, particularly him.
This last is intolerable even for me. "Professor Dumbledore, a word," I hiss.
"Send me to Azkaban. Preserve me in a vat of Evermort Elixir, do whatever you like to me, but you must prevent Harry from doing any more dream traveling," I rage as soon as we are alone and Albus is filled in on our night's wanderings. "If he thinks me capable of the most filthy impulses towards him, so much the better reason for him to keep his distance, but he can't be exposed to more espionage and perversion. Lucius had some rather specific reactions when Voldemort referred to me as their 'pet.'"
"If Voldemort tried to compel you to—enjoy—–the boy, would you be able to resist?"
"It's not a matter of me resisting—it's he that wouldn't be able to resist. It could happen by accident. He nearly touched me our first lesson! All it will take is the slightest contact, a moment when I stop guarding my True Face, and then we're both done for, Albus! He's a boy of seventeen—he'll shag anything, especially someone that beckons with the promise of true union."
"And how likely is that to kill him?" Dumbledore muses. "Most of your victims merely live without magic for a week or so."
We are not talking about this. "You do want to see me face the Dementors' Kiss."
"Sixteen is the age of consent, Severus. Everyone knows that." He pauses. "Or perhaps we tried to obscure that fact with you."
"The boy is of age but he is my student. You think the Dementors will overlook this fact? Or his muggle guardians, for that matter?"
"We just have to make it until he graduates. After that point, if something happens, we will try to minimize the damage," Dumbledore declares, and not for the first time I wonder if I'm actually the one with the morals out of the two of us. "Several of us aware of the problem now, so no attempt by Voldemort to use your condition as a way to neutralize Harry's magic will go on for long within these walls. Most of your—partners—have survived with no noticeable long-lasting effects."
The image of a sickly James returning to school after being nearly drained by me flashes before my eyes, with the crazed Lilly following close behind. Not again.
"Of course. You are absolutely right. No need to catastrophize." It hurts me that my friend thinks I would agree to this unethical idea. I still know right from wrong! "It's been a rather long night. Do you think someone can cover my morning classes?"
"Certainly, Severus. Sometime you must tell me more about traveling by Dream Floo."
"I'll try to make it to lunch," I say.
Within an hour I've discreetly assembled some supplies and convinced the castle to distract from my exit for as long as possible. The old stone beast is only too glad to conspire in aid of my definitive departure.