28 - Tightrope Walking II

Laura couldn't sleep. For four nights after the conversation with Severus, for four long and guilt-ridden nights, she couldn't sleep. Slowly, life in the castle was returning to normal, or at least a reasonable facsimile of normal. But there was a muted shock about the place, and faces missing from classes, and Laura couldn't sleep.

People were starting to notice. For the first time, she was neglecting to hand in her homework, and her work in classes was taking a visible nosedive. She wasn't the only one, though. All around the school, the people who'd been in Hogsmeade seemed to be in shock, late or missing from classes, emotionally fragile and with their concentration shot. The atmosphere was brittle, on the edge of snapping, and Laura wondered whether it would always be like this, or whether her own distraction was making it seem worse than it was.

She took Pep-Up Potion every morning, borrowed from Xiang, who seemed to have a never-ending stash. She didn't like needing it, but when she was working on maybe an hour of sleep a night, it was necessary. It wasn't like she could stop and explain what was keeping her up at nights. How could she explain that she might have been able to stop it? That the names of the dead and injured were constantly echoing in her head, as if she'd thrown the curses at them herself.

Did he kill any of them? And, if not then... has he killed before? How many? How many people has Severus Snape murdered?

She knew she was being ridiculous, stupid, counter-productive. Having worked out what she should do, the only ethical thing to do, she wasn't actually doing it. She could have reported him to the Ministry by now, an anonymous tip-off or a signed owl, it didn't matter. She could have told Dumbledore, or pulled up his sleeve and shown the world his tattoo. And yet, she hadn't. She couldn't. Every time her mind went there, it rebelled, and she remembered the surprising softness he'd shown at odd moments, the mournful look in his eyes when he thought nobody was looking, the squalor and misery of his home, and the soft frown he got when he was dealing with a difficult problem, in the stillness of the potions dungeon while they ran their experiments. That was the boy she loved, and one of her closest friends. That was the Severus she wanted to keep safe.

He wasn't evil. He wasn't some faceless, masked villain who threatened schoolchildren and killed old men. It was impossible to reconcile Severus, quiet and soft-spoken and intelligent, with the idea of a Death Eater, violent and cruel and bigoted. For the first time, too late, Laura really understood the desire people had to simplify the situation. If she had been able to convince herself that because Severus was a Death Eater, he was ipso facto evil, this would all be so much easier.

But she couldn't. She couldn't betray him, when he'd been betrayed all through his life. She couldn't live with the guilt if he went on siding with murderers, knowing she could have stopped it. She couldn't trap him in Azkaban, where he would have to deal with his father's memory every moment while his memories of her and Lily were sucked away. She couldn't.

She just couldn't.

Her life seemed to be grinding to a halt. Classes which had been easy before were becoming an uphill battle she was losing; she was losing weight with alarming speed, getting pale and sick-looking; her whole mind, her whole life, was taken up by the insoluble problem of Severus. Xiang was the first to confront her about it, when Laura came to her for Pep-Up for the fourth morning in a row.

"You sure you want it?" she asked, pulling the bottle out of her drawer with a concerned frown. "I mean, no judgement, just... this isn't like you, Laura. Are you feeling okay?"

"Fine. Fine. I'm fine." Laura managed to meet Xiang's disbelieving stare for all of five seconds before she cracked. "All right, I'm not fine. I don't know. I think I'm just... I haven't been sleeping too well lately."

"Me neither," Xiang admitted with a sigh, slipping the bottle back into the drawer and sitting down on her bed. After a moment, uncertainly, Laura sat down with her. It wasn't usual for Xiang to admit to weakness, even this much. Laura had been starting to think, against her better judgement, that she might not even have weaknesses. Yet here she was, clearly affected by everything that had happened, and openly admitting to not being perfect.

"It's been hard on all of us," Xiang said, when they'd been sitting there in silence for a moment. "But, listen, Laura, you're going to give yourself a nervous breakdown like this. You shouldn't be drinking Pep-Up, you should be drinking a Sleeping Draught or something. Reena has been, and I think some other people might have, as well."

Have you? Laura wondered, looking at the other girl with new eyes. Xiang looked as flawless as usual, hair brushed, makeup done, tan skin smooth and carefully washed. Had she been taking potions to keep herself so seemingly together?

If she had, was it working? Or did she cry into her pillow when the curtains were drawn, and hate herself for not having fought harder, and flash back to the bookshop and the broken glass?

"It wasn't our fault," Xiang murmured, and Laura thought it might have been for either of their benefit. "We got Reena out. We Stunned that Death Eater. We saved the bookshop. We did everything we could possibly have done." Her arm went around Laura's shoulder, and Laura struggled not to cringe away. There was a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, and it wasn't Xiang's fault, but the attempt at encouragement made Laura want to vomit. Xiang had done everything she could have done. Xiang had got Reena out, had Stunned the Death Eater. Xiang hadn't had any way to stop it happening.

"I know," Laura managed to mumble at last, through lips that felt suddenly numb. "But..."

"But nothing." Xiang sounded more certain now, more like her usual self. She gave Laura a smile, watery but definite. "Listen, Laura, we're all in shock. But we've just... sometimes, we've got to pull ourselves through on our own power. I know we can do it. All of us. We're going to be okay."

"I hope you're right." Laura took a deep breath, closing her eyes. "You're right. Of course you're right." There was something forming in her head, not quite a thought, not quite a plan, but something still unshaped, and she needed to act on it. On our own power. My own. By myself. Swallowing, she pulled herself away from Xiang and stood up.

"You don't want the Pep-Up, then?" Despite the fact that Xiang had been the one to mention it, she looked rather concerned by the thought, half-rising from her bed towards Laura.

"No." Laura shook her head, trying to order her thoughts. "Yes. Maybe. Can I get back to you on that? You're right, I need to fix my sleep."

Not with a Sleeping Draught, though, she thought, as she headed for the door, still in her pyjamas. That won't do it. Not for this. She did head for the Hospital Wing first, though, and pick up a bottle of just that. It would still do better than nothing. Besides, it killed time while the note she'd charmed flew through the school towards Severus.

He met her, as she'd asked, in the Potions dungeons. It was still very early, and the dungeon was mostly dark. The stone floor was cold on Laura's bare feet, and she was chilled to the bone through her flannel pyjamas, but she hardly noticed. Faced with him, tall and pale and with the bruise on his cheek still just about visible, she couldn't swallow around the lump in her throat. She didn't know what she was going to say, or how to say it. She was drifting, clinging at the threads of an idea, and she hated it.

"Well?" he drawled after a moment, his voice cool. "Did you want something, or did you just call me here so you could split my lip again?"

The injustice of that flared up angrily in her chest, and she narrowed her eyes at him. She knew she couldn't be very intimidating, short and weak as she was, barefoot and pyjama-clad and with her hair in a mess from tossing and turning all night. She didn't care. She was infused by the same kind of frustrated anger that had incited her to hit him, and she suddenly had a hold of the answer that had been trying to form in her mind.

"I'm here," she said, aware of the tremble in her voice, "to tell you what you've done."

Severus' eyebrows raised, "I thought you already did that," he replied, but she could have sworn she heard a tremor of uncertainty in his voice. "Listen, Laura, if this is still about Hogsmeade... I'm sorry, all right? Is that what you want to hear? I'm sorry. So you can drop it already."

"Sorry won't bring them back." She looked down at the floor, her shoulders sagging slightly. "Sorry won't let me get to sleep at night. Sorry won't make this not have happened. And sorry," she added challengingly, looking up and meeting his eyes, "won't stop it happening again. Will it?" He didn't answer. "Will it?"

Severus' guard dropped a little. She could see it clearly in his face, in how heavily his eyebrows drew together, in the way his mouth shifted from a sneer to a frown, the way he lowered his head. He was ashamed, she thought – ashamed because he knew she was right. His dark eyes glittered, unreadable as ever, but less inhuman.

"I can't," he whispered, and his voice shook a little. He wasn't meeting her eyes any more. "I can't stop it happening, any more than you. I'm not... Laura, please."

"How many people have said please to you, Severus? How many of them have begged?" She was crying now, barely aware of it, tears trickling down her cheeks and splashing onto her bare feet or soaking into her pyjamas. "I don't know you. Severus, I had you in my house. With my parents. How many people like them have you killed? How many people like me?"

He half-raised his hands, as if to touch her, then let them drop back to his sides. Other than that, he didn't move, standing rooted and horribly vulnerable in the middle of the dungeon.

"I'd never hurt you, Laura," he croaked, his bravado and sarcasm entirely gone. "Never."

"I didn't ask you that." Swallowing around the lump in her throat, she raised her head, tossing her hair back, and tried to recapture some kind of certainty. "How many, Severus?"

"Six." It was barely a breath. "Six I helped to kill. Two I killed myself." He didn't meet her eyes, turning his head away in shame. Laura felt her chest constrict, her stomach churning. She'd expected a number like that, or more, but against all the odds, she'd hoped he'd tell her it was none, that he'd never do that. She wanted to believe he'd never do that. Her Severus would never do that.

Like the first time they'd kissed, she could feel the precariousness of her position. She was too high, with no way down but falling. But now the tightrope was thinner than ever, and it was starting to fray. Her voice didn't sound like her own any more. She couldn't meet his eyes, as if she was the one in the wrong, as if she was the murderer. In a way, maybe she was.

"I'm going to tell them," she told him, her voice sounding thin and flat in the dizzy heights of her predicament. She moved a little to meet his eyes, inadvertantly stepping closer to him in the process. "Severus, I can't... it's going to keep happening, isn't it? You're going to keep killing people. And it's going to be my fault." It was hard to talk around the thick clog of tears in her throat; hard to think through the haze of self-hatred for what she was saying. "So I'm going to tell them. You've got one week. You should probably run." That was a whole new kind of pain, an agonising twist in the gut, like a hot knife. "Or kill me. I suppose you could kill me."

She was still looking up at him, but through the mask of her tears, she couldn't see his expression. She could hear the despair and the pain in his voice, though, and that was bad enough. "I can't," he whispered again, hoarsely, and she knew he was crying, too. "Never."

"Then you're going to have to run." She dashed the tears out of her eyes, biting down hard on her lip, and looked up at him. "I don't want to hurt you, Severus. I love you. But I can't, I can't just not do anything..."

"I know."

She hadn't expected that. She blinked at him, too shocked even to know what she felt, too shocked to keep on crying. She'd expected him to rail against her, to threaten her, to plead. She hadn't expected, wouldn't have expected in a million years, that he'd understand. It only made the knife twist deeper, made her betrayal feel worse. But what else could she do?

The Sleeping Draught wasn't enough to let her rest easy that night.