CHAPTER 12
NARCISSA
Coming back to his senses hurt beyond reason. He gasped for air, opened his eyes to a face hovering over him — a man with pale skin and blonde hair hanging over his shoulders.
The maddening ache in his head kept him from thinking straight, and the man was jolting him relentlessly. He tried pushing the man away to stop the painful jerking, but his arms failed to respond. It wasn't the man that was jolting him, he realised with a weird sense of detachment; it was his own body that convulsed recklessly on the ground.
The man kept glancing back over his shoulder as if expecting someone to show up any moment, and he kept talking.
He focused on the man's words, one word repeating over and over.
"Severus, Severus!"
A name — the man was calling someone's name. Taking his gaze off the man, he glanced around, searching for whoever was being called, but the awkward seizures foiled any effort to make sense of the surroundings.
"Severus! Look at me, Severus."
What a lousy name.
The man leaned in closer, pale blue eyes glistening unnerved.
"Don't you do this to me. Look at me, Severus."
Oh. That was him.
Really?
"That's good. That's good. Just — look at me. Listen to me — listen to my voice. Listen. I'm getting you out of this — just stay here. All right? Don't you go anywhere. And I'm sorry. I never meant to— I'm sorry. Just stay here. Don't be stupid now of all times. Stay. All right?"
Where could he possibly go?
There was no way in hell he could walk, or even crawl, or even roll to the side. The man couldn't tell as much, yet was calling him stupid? He wanted to laugh at the sheer absurdity of that, but instead he ended up choking, and the world swapped to darkness once more.
When he woke again, he was alone. Bright light burned into his eyes, and he brought a hand up to cover his temples and shield his vision from the strident intrusion. He heard screams, horrifyingly raw, though he couldn't tell where they were coming from.
It ached to move and breathe, but it was bearably numb. The headache, on the other hand, was in a class by itself — it was neither bearable nor numb.
A touch rested on his wrist, and he lowered his hand, blinking to dissipate the bright spots flitting across his sight.
Light—lines—colours settled into the shape of a face: a woman, delicate and fair, with pale blonde hair and eyes like brittles of ice. She was so beautiful she could have well been a dream. Probably was one.
Her lips moved, and her voice seemed to waft from another world, one without screams and agony, into his.
"You're safe," she said gently.
He didn't know what to say, but he wished she would speak more, if only so he could immerse in the sound of her voice and stay away from that other place.
"Do you know who I am?" she asked.
Should he?
"No," he said in a hoarse whisper.
She frowned in the slightest, a thin line creasing her brow, and her light blue eyes glistened, sorrowful.
"Do you know who you are? Do you remember your name?"
He considered her question for a while and realised, feeling vaguely embarrassed, that he didn't.
"No."
She blinked, saddened, then smiled, "Severus. It's Severus."
The name left him feeling nothing. No surge of recollection, no tremor of emotion at something that should have been familiar.
"It's all right," she said. "You've been through a lot. Take your time."
Her smile looked heartbroken, and he wondered if it was he who had saddened her. He didn't know what he had done, only that it felt unjust for someone this fair to ever be so troubled.
"You need to rest," she said. "You'll be better when you wake up."
He wanted her to stay a while longer; the other place held nothing but coldness and senseless fear.
"Rest," she repeated, her smile beckoning.
And he gave in silently, trusting she would know better than him — after all, he didn't even know his own name.
He closed his eyes and felt the hypnotic coldness seep into his spine as soon as his eyelids shut and the darkness settled in.
He screamed. He choked on blood and spit and dirt, and felt the cold cobblestone press into his back. His spine froze. His head prickled and hurt as if brittles of frost were forming on the inside of his skull.
A faceless entity, cold and deathly, seethed through his mind, pulled his thoughts apart, tore them to rags. It dug deeper, prodded its claws to the very core of his being. Grabbed. Twisted. Pulled back out.
And there, before his eyes, the claws unclenched to reveal what had been ripped out — what he had fought to guard at all cost, what laid him bare.
In those hideous claws, torn out from the core of his being, pulsing orange and warm and painfully tragic, was the remembrance of Lily. Voldemort had found her.
It was Severus' death sentence.
He could no longer protect her son. It was Severus who had sent the boy to his death, anyway — and her as well — and all of them.
He apologised as he looked into her eyes… green and gentle. She smiled, and she was kind, and his heart broke with the sorrow of a thousand regrets, and there was light.
Light that pulsed and grew and then dimmed and finally settled, as Severus' eyes adjusted.
It was coming from a chandelier, the light, grand and ornate — all Severus could register as he woke from the nightmare into reality.
A coldness prickled along his spine, up into the back of his head, and a fear, transcending all reason, was seizing his senses.
The bright chandelier was all he had for a distraction, and he laid regarding it, how it hung and sparkled coolly indifferent to the sore mess of his awakening.
He was in a bed, he realised, though he was failing to recollect how he had gotten here. Or where here was. High ceilings, sumptuous furniture, heavy curtains drawn closed over the window. It was a room in any case, and through a slit in the curtains, the frozen night peeked eerie inside.
The wind was beating against the window, fighting to drift in through the glass. Severus felt the room turning cold and the coldness seep into his bones, diffuse into his blood, and with it came a sound of screams, as though it had crawled out of his nightmares to follow him here.
Those weren't nightmares. It had been real.
Painfully real.
Something moved, a flicker of colour rippling the air, and just out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed an inhuman figure — it was the Dark Lord — and at its feet, someone was shivering on the floor. Without turning his head to look closer, Severus recognized the trembling form to be himself, and the recognition left him feeling no trace of surprise.
It was nothing but a hallucination, and he should have looked closer at it. It was a fabrication of his tired mind and nothing more, he knew, broken memories projected into thin air. And they would dissolve when he would stare into them, look for the details, the unsewn seams. They would dissipate to nothing.
Maybe it was cowardly of him — avoiding to confront merely thin air — but he let the vision dwell at the edge of his sight, didn't turn his head to look at it. He couldn't do it, cloudn't watch that. He really couldn't.
He tried pulling together his thoughts, but they splayed with no beginning and no end. He remembered, with jarring clarity: the presence in his head, the Dark Lord, the splintering pain. Everything else was a mess of shattered memories that had not yet fallen into their right place.
A faint noise rustled, outside of his head he hoped, and he looked to the side to find its source.
It was a woman, slender and gracious — and although they were in the same room, he was glimpsing her as though from a great distance — facing away from him, standing before a wooden bookshelf.
She pulled a book out of the shelf, skimmed through it, put it back, trailed her finger further along the row of books, picked up another one, turned around and sat down in the reading chair, face buried in the pages of her book.
In the disjointed haze of his discernment, she seemed so misplaced she could have been a dream.
It could all have been a dream.
Sure enough, it felt surreal — the coldness around him, the hollows of torture, the gracious woman with her book… all blended together in his languid awareness.
She straightened slightly, brushing a blonde strand of hair away from her face, and looked up. Her face was fair and beautiful and — he knew her. Though, the pulse of recollection felt only more befogging, and for a while, he couldn't recall her name. Which was strange, because he had known her for a lifetime. Half of it at any rate.
Their eyes met, and she flinched. A moment later, she was sitting on the bed, leaning over him, light blue eyes filled with concern as she studied his face.
She rested her hand on his shoulder.
It felt gentle and calming and everything other than the coldness that filled the air. Severus let himself immerse in the warmth of her touch on his skin, and the fact that he did so puzzled him, although in a vague way.
"You've been wounded," she said softly. "You are safe now. Do you know who I am?"
The greeting was out of place, just as everything else. Maybe he was out of place.
He wondered what had given away his faulty recollection of the events that had brought him to… Lucius' house, he realised. He had been in this room before. He knew her name too.
"Narcissa," he said in a voice so hoarse he barely recognised it as his own.
A slight shiver made her flinch, blue eyes glistening in surprise, and she burst in a smile of relief, the brightest Severus had ever seen her smile.
"Yes," she nodded, her smile so heartily it could have been a laugh. "That's me."
Nothing made sense — her concern, her question, her laughter, and more to it. He had never seen Narcissa so distraught.
Something must have happened to Lucius, Severus figured, bemused by how numb the thought left him feeling. His emotions, or the lack thereof, seemingly had little to do with Lucius, though. Everything around him felt dulled out and distant, lazily disconnected. Like a seashore shrouded in mist, where all colour has bled out, and colourless skies blend into colourless water, the winds fading into the sluggish drift of waves.
He felt terribly cold.
Narcissa was speaking, but he had missed the moment and now couldn't capture her words. She looked worried and consumed. Something was amiss.
"How are you?" he asked.
She blinked a couple of times, taking him in, and Severus thought that, maybe, she had as hard a time making sense of him as he of her.
"I'm well," she finally said in a quiet note. "Though I should be asking you that. Do you remember what happened?"
He thought about it for a while, tried anew to bring his memories together and found they were still a sore jumble adding to nothing but pain. He didn't remember anything that made any sense. But for a reason he couldn't yet discern, he didn't want to ask Narcissa about it.
"Enough of it," he lied. "Just… how did I get here?"
"Lucius brought you. The meeting was long, very long, and — he said he's rarely seen the Dark Lord so angry."
Yes, there had been a meeting… and apparently, Lucius was all right and wasn't the cause of her worry.
"Lucius was exaggerating, surely," Severus said, still feeling like he needed to get used to speaking.
"It didn't look like he were. You were —" she studied his face for a moment, as though trying to decide how much to say, and Severus hoped it wouldn't be much. "You didn't even remember your own name. I feared — I thought that—"
She sighed and pursed her lips shut and shook her head slightly, looking halfway resigned and all the way exhausted.
"I'm sorry you had to see that, Narcissa."
He was. He really was. He must have put on quite a show.
If anything, his words seemed to have saddened her. He didn't know what to make of that. Things were senselessly confusing as they were, anyhow, and Narcissa… she had never been easy to figure out, not even on his good days.
He glanced around the room, trying to figure out his best option to sit up. Somehow, despite the convenience of the mattress and the softness of the pillow, the setting was becoming increasingly uncomfortable, and he was slowly beginning to feel rather ridiculous.
He must have done something to give away his sudden uneasiness, because Narcissa pulled away from him to sit straighter, and she retreated her hand from his shoulder to her lap.
"Rest!" she said gently." I've kept you up enough already. Just — do you need anything. Water perhaps? Would you like some water?"
He nodded. "Thank you."
"Of course."
She got up from the bed and walked out of the room, and Severus found himself alone, trying to deal with his awkward awareness.
His head was a sore mess, and his memories were no better.
The Dark Lord had searched his mind in very unkind conditions, he knew that much. Beyond that, things weren't adding up — how he'd gotten there — how he'd gotten out. How come he was still alive and well… relatively well. It didn't add up.
He tried and couldn't piece back together the Dark Lord's incursion in his head, or maybe he could have, but he didn't want to. He really did not want to see that.
Bringing a hand to his forehead, he covered his eyes for a moment. The lingering headache was quite something. Though, given what had been going on, it hardly came as a surprise.
But there was some surprise to this odd chaos: the Dark Lord had missed the hints of his treason, somehow. Otherwise Severus wouldn't be in Narcissa's soft bed sheets right now, but most likely in — he shuddered at the thought.
Maybe he had searched in all the wrong corners of Severus' mind, thus failing to find the memories that would give away the deceit.
Or maybe the search had been too hasty, too brutal, and Severus' mind had cracked in disarray earlier than it could reveal anything of use. Things seemed to be adding up to that.
In the end, a Legilimens could only read what the mind could make sense of. Once the mind broke, all it revealed were senseless delirations, scraps adding to nothing.
He thought about Narcissa and what she had told him — he hadn't remembered his own name… Yes, sure enough, the details were adding up.