A/N: Prepare yourselves for a looong chapter! I hope it's kinda interesting but most of it's not super relevant to anything (oops) so feel free to skim read :P But hopefully you enjoy it!
At 1:47 am, after hours of willing herself not to break any more rules, Asha succumbed to her usual need to get out in the open in times of distress. She unlatched her bedroom window and silently jumped down onto the dewy grass below. Trailing around past the kitchen window to the back of the house, she slid down the short but steep slope of damp grass. She then climbed up the six-foot-high fieldstone wall and settled in for a long night of inescapable thinking.
Here in the Welsh countryside, the stars were almost as vivid and dense as at Hogwarts. The only sounds were the faint rustling of nocturnal animals along the branches of nearby trees, the occasional lowing of distant cows, and the chirping of a single cricket somewhere to Asha's left. But the calm, clear night did not at all reflect what Asha was feeling inside.
She was absent-mindedly scraping a stick along the rough surface of the wall upon which she sat, staring out at the star-lit landscape. Her mind was whirring. Snape had invited her into his home, fed her, even healed her leg. And how had she repaid him? By directly disobeying him, disrespecting him, breaking his trust. The guilt was gnawing at her insides like a flesh-eating slug. What the hell is wrong with you? she thought for the hundredth time. She gritted her teeth and scraped the stick against the rough stone with even more vigour. Why couldn't you just act like a normal human for five fucking minutes? She snapped the stick in half and flung both pieces into the darkness of the surrounding field as if trying to ceremoniously rid herself of the toxic feelings within. Sighing and placing her hands on her forehead in frustration, she lay back along the top of the wall. A second later she bolted upright and squinted into the gloom behind her. At what point had that cricket stopped chirping?
"You sure seem to make a habit of these late-night excursions don't you?" came that droning voice she knew all too well.
Whipping her head around in the opposite direction, Asha saw a tall, dark figure leaning against the edge of the cottage. She felt a sinking sensation in her chest, bit her lip and turned back around to face the countryside. Snape walked down the slope and pulled himself up onto the wall with surprising agility for a man who usually moves with such a stiff demeanour. He was wearing dark sweat pants and a thin, black long sleeve and his hair was more ruffled than usual. Settling a couple meters away from Asha, he sat with one leg dangling over the edge of the wall and the other propped up, his arm resting on his knee.
It was several minutes before Asha worked up the courage to break the silence. As though he somehow knew she was about to speak, Snape turned to look at her. Even in the dead of night his eyes were the deepest black to be seen. She couldn't bring herself to meet his gaze so she stared out at the landscape and began fidgeting with a new stick.
"I'm not good at apologising," she said to the air, "or showing gratitude... Or showing anything really. Well, anything real that is."
Snape said nothing. Asha took a deep breath.
"I know you deserve an explanation."
She cast the stick aside and hugged one of her knees to her chest. A couple more silent minutes passed as the potions master patiently waited for this clearly troubled girl to decide what she was willing to share. It took all of Asha's strength to keep her voice steady as she recounted the events that had been plaguing her all year.
"When I went back to the Foster Home last summer, one of the girls there was pregnant - Madeline. I didn't know her very well, I think she was about my age. I remembered her from summers previous as a happy kid, confident to the point of being obnoxious. But when I arrived, it was quite clear that she wasn't that same, bubbly girl. After finding out she was pregnant, the other kids at the Home had shafted her." Asha's mouth was dry. She could still hear the shouts of 'Whore!' and 'Street slut!' echoing down the hallway. But all that seemed like such a long time ago.
"I started telling the other kids to fuck off -" (she braced herself for Snape to pipe in with his usual 'Language, Winters!' but it never came) "-and giving her some company, and eventually going with her to her ultrasounds. We never talked about where the baby would go when it was born. Everyone knows that the babies of underage orphans get adopted out." Asha scoffed and grided her stick against the wall. "Fed back into the same system that landed their mother in this situation in the first place." For a moment her mind whisked off on a tangent about the blatant issues of the social welfare system, but the feeling of Snape's eyes boring into the side of her head brought her back to the present.
"Um, anyway, she went into labour in the middle of the night - two weeks early. She refused to go to the hospital without me. I sat with her in the hospital room for hours. At one point - I remember the nurse had just told us she was eight centimetres dilated - we got a moment when no one else was in the room. She immediately started begging me not to let them take her baby away. I had known this might happen. Of course, she'd feel that way. There wasn't anything I could say, I just held her and comforted her. She was hysterical but when the nurses came back in they assumed it was from the pain."
Asha finally looked over at Snape. She knew that once she continued there was no going back. Was she really going to share what she swore no one would ever hear of? She did not know what kind of expression she had expected from him, but it certainly wasn't what she was met with. He was looking at her in a way that made her chest swirl and her eyes prickle. His intense, attentive expression felt like he was validating the severity of what she was sharing with him. And something in those calculating eyes made her feel like he knew what was coming. She pressed on.
"When the baby was finally born, it was a boy. He was ..." She couldn't bring herself to finish the sentence.
"I watched Madeline holding him and something in me just switched. It's like something possessed me - this feeling that I don't understand. I think maybe it was to do with... " Asha gripped the edge of the wall and tried to focus on the cool, sharp feeling in her palms. "It's just, I know how much it means to have that person; someone who's connected to you in a way that no one else can be. And... I know what it's like to lose the only family you've ever had."
At this point, Asha became oddly calm and numb. She was familiar with blocking out this source of pain.
"It's not an excuse, I know. I let my emotions blind my rational thought. I became consumed with this need to keep Madeline and her son together, because if they weren't together then what's the point of anything. So I planned it all out. The adoption agency was going to pick him up in 48 hours so while Madeline slept I stole painkillers and baby blankets and nappies and anything I could think of. I watched the nurse use a swipe card to get into the nursery and saw which cot she put Charlie in - that was what she named him, after her Dad. I figured out when security swapped shifts and how this all coincided with the timetable of the bus stop that was outside the nearest fire exit.
"Luckily Madeline could walk pretty comfortably by the time we ran for it. She said she had an uncle out in Ipswich who had been deemed unfit to be her guardian. But they wrote to each other every so often and she had been allowed to visit his house once. I figured he would be able to help her out.
"We caught the bus to the train station and boarded for the three-hour journey to Ipswich. Charlie was such a good baby. He hardly cried unless he was hungry. For the last bit of the journey to her uncle's house, we needed to walk about five kilometres down this country road. It was getting dark and cold and Mad was not in a good state so she finally let me carry Charlie. That's when I notice something wasn't right. He was wheezing and I realised he hadn't cried since we got off the train.
"After another ten minutes, it had gotten much worse. He wasn't breathing properly and his little lips were pale. Straight away I tried to get help but everything went wrong. There weren't any payphones for miles and Madeline was refusing to move. She was panicking and totally hysterical. I left the baby with her and sprinted back down the road to a house we had passed not long ago but it was deserted and there wasn't even a working landline or a radio."
Asha's anger at herself swelled as she spoke.
"I should've thought to try magic before I left them! But even then - I didn't know any kind of healing spells at the time. I put so much time into learning stupid jinxes and disillusionment charms, yet I hadn't once been bothered to learn a healing spell. If only I'd -" Asha felt her voice about to break and stopped. After a steadying breath, she continued.
"When I got back to Madeline she had gone quiet and I could tell before I even touched him that Charlie had died. He was so white and his little lips were blue. Mad didn't know though. Or she was refusing to believe it. The realisation of what I'd done hit me so hard and fast." Asha could remember the feeling in such vivid detail. And the way reality had seemed to unfold in front of her eyes. Madeline rocking and whispering to the silent, unmoving bundle of cloth.
"All I could do was focus on minimising the consequences. My consequences I suppose. I tried to pretend the baby was still alive to keep Madeline calm but she didn't understand why we were going back home. In the end I used tranquillium sedato. I remembered reading about it somewhere but the use of the spell is supposedly frowned upon because it makes the target much more inclined to follow instructions they usually wouldn't. But I think I messed it up because it made her almost zombie-like."
Now Asha was feeling claustrophobic despite the hundreds of acres of open land ahead of her. She was in the midst of admitting one of her darkest secrets; her most heinous of crimes.
"By the time we got back to East Sussex, it was the middle of the night. I left Madeline in an alley with the baby still in her arms and used a payphone around the corner to call the police. Then I caught the bus back to the Home and told them I had come back from the bathroom to find Mad gone and had been looking everywhere for her. It was a shit story - I don't know why they believed me. I think part of me wanted to get caught, wanted to go to prison for what I had done. But evidently I was too selfish to take responsibility."
At this, Snape's lips parted slightly as if he were about to speak, but he stopped himself and continued to listen intently.
"Besides, I knew that the police knowing my involvement wouldn't change anything. Madeline's child was dead. She would tell them the farfetched story of my involvement and I would deny it. She would get a psychiatric evaluation and be determined to be not in a right state of mind. She would be sent back to the Home, broken."
At this point, Asha had gone numb. The pain was too much to comprehend.
"But it turns out she didn't even mention me to the authorities. Even after what I'd done, she protected me. That's what good people do, not people like me. I left for Hogwarts before she was discharged from the Hospital.
Silence fell between the pair and the sounds of the night seemed to resurface. The cricket on the left had begun its chirp again.
"I still don't really know why I did it". Asha spoke more to herself now. She was fighting the tightness in her throat and night air was suddenly feeling muggy. "In the moment I was sure that nothing else mattered more. And... I think part of me also felt as if achieving this would fix a piece of me too. The part of me that always feels wrong and broken". Asha hadn't planned on sharing all this. She felt nauseous and exposed, but she remembered her story had a point and she needed to get to it.
"So, that's why I don't want to go back there. I don't want to see her. I'm scared to see the way she'll look at me. What happened was my fault. I am responsible for the death of her child and I'm too fucking weak to face what I did and look her in the eye."
Asha was afraid to look at the man beside her. Scared to see the disgust and condemnation in his eyes. But when she finally turned her head, his face had the same neutral intensity as before. As he turned away his eye's flickered with something she couldn't quite put her finger on. He had remained totally silent through her entire recollection, and only now, after a few moments, he finally spoke.
"You may stay. For now."
It took Asha a moment to process what he was talking about. Despite feeling a rush of gratitude, she couldn't bring herself to say thank you. It was like her lips were glued shut, adamant not to expose herself any further. Snape swung his legs around, getting ready to climb down from the wall, but paused, looking at the ground with furrowed brows and parted lips.
"Did you ever get any reprimand from the Ministry? What you did was a serious violation - underage magic and performing it on a muggle." His tone wasn't reproachful, but curious.
"Well, no, I mean, no one saw me do it. We were in the middle of nowhere," Asha said, thinking this was rather obvious.
"Have you not heard of the Trace Charm?" Snape said in a tone similar to the one he used when pointing out one of his students had misread the potion instructions. "The Improper Use of Magic Office is notified if any magic is performed in the vicinity of an underage wizard. You should have received a letter almost immediately."
"Got lucky I guess," said Asha. Snape growled and slid off the wall, landing softly on the grass below.
"Try to get some sleep, Winters," he said, not bothering to look back as he strode back up to the gloomy silhouette of the cottage.
Asha turned around and gazed out at the moon-lit rolling hills. Even though the feeling was totally illogical (because ultimately nothing had changed), Asha felt like the iron band around her chest had loosened slightly; it was a little easier to breathe; she felt the slightest bit lighter.
