Visitation
"The summer had inhaled and held its breath too longThe winter looked the same as if it never had goneAnd through an open window, where no curtain hungI saw you, I saw you, comin' back to me."Marty Balin ('Comin' Back to Me, song by Jefferson Airplane in the album Surrealistic Pillow 1967.)
AN: The weregild or price of the blood was the money paid for taking a person's life. It was an improvement over the Lex Talionis (a life for a life) that could end up in a feud with revenge crossing generations. The Gorgons were three sisters who were punished by turning them into monsters because one of them got raped inside Athena's temple, by the by, the rapist (Athena's uncle Poseidon) was not found at fault (yikes). Amulets with the likeness of all three sisters are thought to exist, but I'm using the best known, Medusa, as a stand in for all three. Anemotis is an epithet for the Greek goddess Athena that means the subduer of the storm and Glaux is Greek for little owl. The goddess of wisdom was usually represented with an owl and that seemed to fit nicely in the HP world. The OC is based on my favorite middle school Maths professor. I'm old enough to have had an actual kaftan wearing flower power girl teaching me Algebra and Trigonometry. I thank her from the bottom of my heart for teaching me to love Maths. That is one of the best gifts anyone has ever given me.
Chapter II: Weregild
Euneirophrenia is the word to describe the state of mental peace one has after having pleasant dreams and it was also the best to describe Severus' disposition that morning. He had slept well for the first time in months. He woke up with light streaming through the window, slightly disoriented, but with a sense of wellbeing that he hadn't felt in years. Perhaps since he had joined the Death Eaters.
He rose from the bed tentatively, waiting for despondency to jump on him like a prowling beast. He tucked the Walkman and the cassettes inside his desk, picked up a clean black gown and a towel from his closet. On the way out the door he remember to summon his bag of toiletries and made his way to the men faculty's bathroom. All the time while he shaved and bathed he kept checking for signs of the blinding darkness that had been his constant companion up until yesterday. But the darkness had declared a truce. He didn't let his guard down, though, Severus Snape was a man of suspicious nature and he viewed any good thing as a mere respite in the torturous road of life.
He was going downstairs to the Great Hall when guilt paralyzed him. How could he? How dare he forget for an instant how he had betrayed the women he loved? He was about to start panicking when he was ran over by Professor Anemotis Glaux, the Arithmancy teacher. The airhead, as he called her inwardly, was in charge of minding the girl's that had stayed behind during winter break. She had been reading from a huge binder. It was usual to see her with her freckled flat nose stuck in a book, not watching where she was going. Even though she was thin as a rail, she was tall and muscular. She had bumped full force right into him, almost sending him flying down the stairs. The woman was oblivious and had only taken her eyes off the pages she was reading when she heard him grunt.
She looked like a crane that had an owl head pasted on. She tilted her round head sideways and blinked with her big gray blue eyes, magnified to even greater proportions, behind her horn-rimmed cat eye glasses. She gazed at him from her height, a good head above him, and said with her thick American accent: "Morning Severus. Like I didn't see you there."
He scoffed: "I surmised as much. Perhaps, if you weren't reading while you walk, Anemotis, you would have noticed I was right in front of you."
She giggled, an incongruous sound given that she had a deep raspy voice. It was discomfiting how such a wispy person could produce such a gravelly sound. She had caught his surprised look the first time they had spoken and had said her mamma had called hers a Loretta Lynn voice, if Loretta had been born in Jersey, which she hadn't as she had been born in Kentucky just like mamma. She had said all that in just one single breath and had left Severus deeply regretting having asked her to pass him the salt. How could he have known the horror that he was going to unleash with what seemed like a perfectly innocent request? And no, to this day he hadn't the faintest clue of who on Merlin's green Earth Loretta Lynn was and, as far as he was concerned, he was not worse off from it.
When she finished giggling she said: "Oh I had looked about just a heartbeat 'fore and there was no one there. Are you sure you were there all along?"
The staircase had started moving. He struggled not to be cast out of it. The woman held him by the elbow and he was able to get a hold of the railing. He answered jerking free from her grasp just in the border of rudeness: "As sure as one can be of anything."
She giggled some more: "Good, you aren't supposed to apparate on the school grounds, you know?" She squinted and noticed he was grabbing at the railing for dear life as he hadn't quite regained his balance when he got free: "Are you alright, Severus?" She said offering him her hand.
She was the person closer to his age in the faculty, being twenty seven. She was a Muggleborn who had studied in Ilvermorny. She had been sorted in House Thunderbird and went around telling it as if people were supposed to know what that meant. She also had a Ph.D. in a Muggle college called Caltech. She was actually very proud of completing the graduate program in Maths in five years straight. Maths being the Muggle version of Arithmancy for what Severus could surmise. And she wore either ghastly orange and white gowns for her Muggle college or red gowns with a clover print and golden trim for Ilvermorny.
Anemotis Glaux, Annie as even her students called her, was an airhead that wore her dirty blonde hair in a messy pony tail and always had enchanted fresh daisies for earrings. Whenever he had crossed her on the hallways she was or mumbling things to herself. She also liked to tell at length to anyone who'd listen that she was a fierce Fitchburg Finches fan. Apparently she had been a Keeper in school. She was also a New Jersey Nets fan, they played a Muggle sport called basketball that the barmy bird had played too. She had tried to explain to him the mechanics of the game over the course of four meals, in spite of the evident lack of enthusiasm he had showed for the subject of sports or, for that matter, to engage in any sort of conversation with her. Somehow everyone had assumed they were going to get along, Merlin knows why, and they had been sat besides each other in the faculty table.
He straightened up without accepting her help and regarded her with a disapproving scowl: "Not quite, Anemotis. I'm not used to starting my day by almost being thrown down a flight of stairs."
She tilted her head the other way and blinked some more: "Was that my doing?" She didn't let him answer: "I'm sorry, Severus. Like I was distracted by the most fascinating paper by Daniel G. Quillen. Brilliant guy, won the Fields medal a couple of years back. He is from Jersey too." She winked at him in a way that was disquieting and then she resumed her rambling: "Dumby lent me some of his works to have something to read over the holidays. Mamma and pops are on a cruise in the Caribbean, they have just retired and mamma finally convinced pops to take their first vacation in like years. They invited me to go, but Mighty Merlin I'm violently allergic to shellfish, turn into a freckle under the sun and mamma always bugs me to shave my legs when we go for a swim, which is like bummer. So I figured I'd cover for Sybill and let her enjoy her vacations. She was so excited about it. She said the Department of Mysteries was covering all her expenses and that her gift was finally gonna pay off… I dunno what gift she was talking about, perhaps she won something in a raffle. What do you think?"
She adjusted her hideous glasses on the bridge of her pudgy nose and blinked perplexed. Severus stifled the need to wrench her neck and remained silent. He had found out it was better not to encourage her. Besides, she didn't need any encouragement to keep yapping.
"Anyways, the paper is fascinating. This guy has the most A-Mazing notions on K-theory and Ring theory, real revolutionary for topology. And the implications for physics… Are like mind blowing!" She all but shoved in his face her thumb and forefinger held closely together and giggled: "I think non-magical theorist are this close to figuring things in field strengths and charges that may help them understand the nature of magic. Everything is leading them to posit the existence of a fifth elemental force. Once they get there then figuring out quintessence is a magical field is pretty derivative." She smiled brightly: "Don't you think that understanding is the best way for all of us to finally learn to live in peace together?"
That was a rhetorical, not to mention stupid, question, so Severus didn't bother answering.
The woman didn't even noticed: "I mean like I haven't been so excited about a paper since I found out about Noether's Theorem and its implications on conservation laws. I honestly couldn't understand Gamp's Law until after I read Emmy Noether. She is the reason why I became a mathematician in the first place. She's A-Mazing. Well, was, 'cause she's dead now… Died at fifty three. So sad, a real shame. Dumby introduced me to her during my exchange here at Hogwarts. I mean to her work… But he met her, like for real back in 1932, right before the Nazis took over, when she was teaching in the University of Gottingen. Apparently an old boyfriend of Dumby was very interested in her work. Dumby says the guy had an uncanny intuition for finding people who were gonna become mayor players and he figured out it was worth checking her out."
Severus rose an eyebrow: "An old boyfriend?"
She frowned: "Oh, aren't we supposed to talk about that? Jeez, there are lots of people that are not supposed to be named and things we are not supposed to mention and I'm always getting them wrong. Wouldn't it be easier for everybody if we just like talked about whatever we want?"
He scoffed: "Only if you are dead set on bringing about the Armageddon."
She shrugged it off in her crane like way: "Pops is always telling me that I should think before I speak. I guess that is what mamma calls being polite…"
"Wise people, your parents."
She giggled: "What I mean is that Dumby has had such an interesting life. Like he knows everyone! Literally everyone! Just last summer he was at Feynman's house in Baja. Like for real I would give a limb to be invited there… Well maybe not a limb, but you know? I've heard the man plays some mean bongos. Can you imagine how groovy it would be to play my ukulele with like the man himself? Did you know Dumby plays the transverse flute? You should hear his arrangement of Mr. Tambourine Man. That's another one! He knows Dylan too, so that sure can't hurt." She giggled some more.
No one would have dared suggest Severus Snape was a coward, but at times caution is the better part of valor, he didn't even blink, least he brought upon himself the blight of having the woman bring her horrid Muggle instrument to the Great Hall.
"Anyways, the paper is awesome, real interesting things are about to happen in topology. It is a great time to be alive!" She ended with a bright toothy smile that just rubbed him the wrong way.
He scowled even meaner: "I suppose the war victims will concur with you, those who survived that is."
She looked sad for about two seconds, bowed down, and then bounced right back pushing her cat eye glasses up her nose: "Oh yeah, the war… Such a mess. My older brother was in Vietnam. He was a commercial pilot and they enlisted him to fly a chopper. He barely made it out in one piece. He saw things, man… heavy stuff. That one was a mess too. I dunno why people can't be nice to each other. Good thing what's his name kicked the bucket, don't you think?"
He didn't feel inclined to think about the subject of Voldemort's undoing. He tried to steer the conversation from the course that could sent him spinning right back into darkness. He threw her a bone while the woman paused for breath: "Dumbledore thinks he is still alive."
Her eyes grew even bigger, something that seemed impossible: "Wow! Then he probably is, 'cause Dumby wouldn't say something like that without having good reasons for it. He never jumps to conclusions. I've seen him go as far as demonstrating a theorem… Like twice! I mean when most people won't be bothered… I mean a theorem is like already demonstrated and stuff."
He decided to try scolding her to send her on her way: "Professor Dumbledore is a man of many facets, on that we all agree. I hope you also agree that you shouldn't be calling him Dumby where students can hear you, Professor Glaux."
She tilted her head one way and then the other. Her glasses rode down her insignificant nose as she did and Snape had to cross his hands behind his back to stop himself from fixing them once and for all: "Guess you are probably right, Severus…I mean Professor Snape… Hmm, I wonder..."
"Yes?"
She fixed her glasses on her own and pouted: "I wonder if I should have sausages with my eggs for breakfast. I probably gonna stick to bacon though. I mean, I can't get over what happened to poor Étienne. It was like so AW-ful. I hope he fully recovers over the winter break."
And she went downstairs without looking back. The woman was insane, no doubt.
The students that remained were already sitting in the Great Hall around one of the tables. All houses were mixed together, though they were more than usual because of the war. Some of these children no longer had a family to go back to, they were going to be allowed to stay during the winter break, but during the summer they would have to go with relatives or to orphanages.
Anemotis had beat him to the Great Hall and was already "row calling" in her unusual way, which involved going around the table and greeting each student, asking how they had spent the night, talking about Quidditch teams, the last issue of The Adventures of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle or the last chapter of Swept off Her Broomstick, a radio soap that had just resumed transmissions. Somehow the woman who couldn't remember to look where she was going, remembered every child's name and favorite things. And even more surprising, she listened patiently to their inane blabber.
She went around the table, all sunshine and giggles, in her billowy orange gown, like a giant toddler. You'd think that these gloomy students would hate her, but they didn't. For some reason she inspired maternal feelings even on the boys. They had lost everything but still managed to feel protective of the scatter brain. They probably saw her as one of them. Severus had even seen one of the meanest Slytherin girls braiding the airhead's hair so the loose strands wouldn't fall on her soup at lunch time. Even if the girl had nagged at the airhead all the time while she braided the barmy bird's hair, it was a surprisingly kind gesture.
The effect of his presence as he entered the Great Hall was like a draft of cold air. The students all stood up immediately and said: "Good Morning, Professor Snape."
He nodded with the bare minimum courtesy and took a sit; while Anemotis went around the table unfazed. She even hugged one of the smaller boys and, for the look on the face of the girl and the boy sitting on either side of the fortunate one, they would have wanted a hug too. Much as it pained him to admit it, the woman was good at teaching them too. Of course she did it in her own weird way. But she got results. He had benefited from her willingness to tutor students for remedial classes. Two hours baking cookies with the barmy bird and even the worse dumbarse in his Potions third year class was able to handle proportions and fractions.
Watching her interact with the children from the corner of his eye he admitted grudgingly that Albus Dumbledore had been right to choose her to stay behind. These children needed someone as off her trolley as Anemotis, who could remain cheerful after all that had happened. Frankly he didn't feel up to the task of comforting them. His own grief was more than enough to handle. Perhaps even more than he could handle, if he had had to consider the children.
Things had the tendency of falling right into place around the Headmaster in a way that made most people wonder if it could all be due to pure chance. Severus Snape did not wonder, he was sure that underneath that multicolored gown the man was a Machiavellian master mind. Dumbledore was adept at placing the pieces in just the right way so they would topple just like and when he wanted. He had been one of the pieces on the man's board and perhaps he still was.
He was trying to figure out if that was a good or a bad thing when he noticed that Anemotis had sat down and was discussing the day's activities with the children. Did she just say what he thought she had? No, he must have heard wrong. Not even the barmy bird could be so out of it to actually propose that they gamble with the students. But she repeated it between giggles.
He drew breath in: "Is Professor Dumbledore aware that you intend to turn Hogwarts into a casino, Professor Glaux?"
One of the older boys dared roll his eyes at him. It only took a raised eyebrow to have the little fool shrink back in his seat. Barmy bird was undeterred by raised eyebrows.
She tilted her head: "Oh they don't let you count cards in casinos, believe you me. They get like real mad about it if you do. I don't really understand why, but they kinda think it is cheating. The tales I could tell you about it... Long story short, after my cousin Amelia's hen party I'm no longer allowed in any casino in Atlantic City... unless I like use Polyjuice potion or something."
Perhaps some Muggles were not that idiotic, if they were wise enough to ban barmy bird. He had some thoughts on that: "Professor Glaux! You know the use of Polyjuice Potion to associate with Muggles is discouraged unless you have a permit from the Ministry. I'm sure they have some equivalent law in all countries of the civilized Wizarding World."
"I bet they do, governments are like the worst party poopers."
"Professor Glaux!"
"Right." She turned to face the students: "I'm sure the party poo… I mean the governments have the best intentions at heart… Though, mamma always says that the road to hell is paved with good intentions… So there is that." Severus looked at her sternly: "Anyways never, ever use Polyjuice potion without a permit. And Dumby...ledore is unreachable. He went hiking and camping with his… uh… his friend. Anyways, he'd probably think it is just a great way to teach the kids probabilities and stuff. But I ran it by Min… I mean Professor McGonagall and she said that as long as we didn't bet any money it would be OK. To keep things interesting I thought we could use IOUs. Like, I can put two hours tutoring for an entry fee and use cookies and stuff to raise bets, you know?"
"No I wouldn't, I've never played Muggle blackjack before."
Her eyes grew wide: "Oh then you are just gonna love it, Sev… I mean Professor Snape. 'Cause you are gonna play with us, aren't you? Otherwise you'd kind of look like a chicken."
He almost chocked on his tea. Had barmy bird just called him a chicken in front of the students? The students were looking at him with wide-eyed terror. That damned woman! He let out a low growl. And one of the Hufflepuff girls yelped but nevertheless held onto the airhead protectively, as if Severus were going to slap her, for Merlin's sake!
An hour and a half later, as he faced off with barmy bird across the table, he was so close to breaking the promise he'd made to himself in his childhood of never laying a finger on a woman that he almost drew blood from his palms trying to regain control.
"What do you mean you were bluffing? You said there is no bluffing in blackjack!"
"Oh, that is not what I said, Sev… I mean Professor Snape. I said that in casino playing there is no point in trying to bluff your way through blackjack. 'Cause with the dealer having set rules of when to fold it makes no sense, you know? But in the version we are playing, player vs player, where each of us decides when to fold, then it totally makes sense."
He grunted: "That's cheating, Professor Glaux. You misled me on purpose."
"Not at all, I'm sticking to the rules we defined. That is why I insisted on having them in writing and why I said we should all read them carefully. I actually recommended we all read them twice and asked questions, if there was something unclear about them. I also said that this was a game to learn probabilities and logic. Learning to work the rules in your benefit is where the logic part comes in. In the wise words of Kenny Rogers: every hand's a winner and every hand's a loser. And with the lousy hand I was dealt the only chance of winning I had was to bluff like there was no 'morrow." She smiled brightly, fixing her glasses: "And it kinda worked. You folded like a cheap tent."
He grounded his teeth half an inch shorter: "Basically what you are teaching your students is how to lie. That is a lousy lesson and a lousy way to win."
She flickered her toothy grin at him and winked at the students: "A win is a win and sometimes all you can do is take them as they come. Someone always benefits from the small print. Better we teach that lousy lesson to our students playing than they learn it the hard way. Besides, pops says that in life you can count yourself a winner if you break even. So what do you say we make it double or nothing?"
He scoffed and rose to leave: "I rather not. I fear if I stay here any longer, I might start to understand your logic and I don't feel quite prepared for that."
She giggled: "That's the great thing about logic: it is not mine or yours, but the same for all. And no one walks from this table without a prize, take a cookie and grab your prize before you leave."
He sighed, there was no point embroiling in a lengthy discussion with the barmy bird. He picked up a ginger snap from a tray and shoved it in his mouth. Bloody witch! It was a surprisingly good cookie and that somehow made him sourer. He walked out of the Great Hall without picking up the prize and went to his room.
He forgot about it while reading a book by George Starkey published in 1677 twelve years after the man died of the plague with notes by Isaac Newton: Experiments for the Preparation of the Sophick Mercury; by Luna, and the Antimonial-Stellate- Regulus of Mars, for the Philosopher's Stone.
He kept reading until it was time for lunch. He wasn't really feeling up to it. The sense of wellbeing he had woke up to was slowly fading, not to the point of all-encompassing darkness he had felt when he was hung up to the Lethe serum, but he was definitely not in the mood for company.
"This is what you are getting paid for," he grumbled to his image in the mirror in a tone so like his father's that it made him flinch. As disturbing as it was, it got him moving, he got up and dutifully went to eat with the students he was supposed to be minding.
He went through the meal as well as he could and then he supervised the children during the two hours of study hall that the Board of Governors had made mandatory, probably to justify keeping the school open during the winter break. He felt little enthusiasm about it. He was surprised by the students' commitment to it, though that was probably because of barmy bird's apparent inexhaustible cheerfulness. She went through their assignments with each child and she did it with the same sunshine disposition she had in the morning. He absentmindedly wondered what it would take for the woman to come down from her cloud. By the end of the two hours he felt worn out raw just by watching her.
He was ready to go back to his room and bury himself in another intense reading session or, perhaps, even go to the lab and give Sophick Mercury a try, when Anemotis caught up with him.
"You forgot your prize," She said putting her hand over his shoulder.
He stared meanly at her until she pulled off her hand. He expected her to leave but the woman was not moving. He gave in and asked: "What prize?"
She smiled: "Your prize, from this morning. Yours is the only one left unclaimed. Dumby and Filius, I mean Professor Dumbledore and Professor Flitwick enchanted a box of prizes for the kid's activities during the winter break. They had been working on it for Christmas but, apparently, it still needs some tweaking for it is supposed to give you a fair mix of what you want and what you need. But in some cases that turned to be kind of a curse, so they ended up limiting the wish spell and this is the prototype. Wish spells are like real fascinating examples of hyperbolic equilibrium with no center manifolds, it all hinges on the attraction and repulsion of the stable and unstable manifold, they are structurally stable with small perturbations but with bigger perturbations they easily become chaotic, you know? Need and want, wonder which one of the two is the stable manifold… Cool equations..."
He looked at her with a raised eyebrow.
"Anyways, Dumby wanted us to test it. It is supposed to disappear from the Great Hall once all prizes are reclaimed and don't come back until the next activity and it hasn't… you know? Like disappeared. I've asked everyone else and they all have gotten theirs, so it is a simple process of elimination to find out that you are the one missing your prize."
"I..." He was about to say that he didn't want the prize, but the woman was looking at him expectantly, he sighed: "Fine, where is this magic prize box."
She pointed him towards it and giggled: "It does need so tweaking. Or maybe, it is my wants and needs that need some tweaking. I dunno. Mine was kinda weird, but fun: I got some hyperbolic doilies and some crochet material. You can't really use them as doilies, though, 'cause they won't stay flat. Their inner angles are all like real screwed up. I can't wait for Dumby to come back so we can talk about them. Wonder what yours will be? Give it a try. You don't have to tell me what you got, but I would like to know if it works for you. For Dumby, you know? I mean Dumbledore. I'm helping him keep track of results… For the tweaking and stuff." Once more she left without looking back.
"And stuff," he let out a dry chuckle as he put his hand inside the cardboard box through a hole covered with a black curtain on one of the sides. He pulled out a cassette with a blank J-card. He pinched his aquiline nose between two exasperated fingers and muttered: "What game are you playing, old man?" But of course Dumbledore was not listening, at least Severus didn't think he was. And even if the Headmaster turned out to be that devious, why would he bother answering?
Severus Snape went back to his room and managed to read for a good ten minutes before curiosity got the best of him. He had to listen to the cassette, he just had to. Chiding himself for being so easy to manipulate, he took the Walkman out from the desk and put the cassette in. He pressed the play button tentatively, not knowing what he could expect. He was assaulted by drums, guitars, female and male voices, a Muggle rock band. What in all nine hells?
The band kept singing undeterred, after all it was only a recording. He flickered his wand and cast Revelio on the cassette J-card, in hopes it would tell him something about what he was listening. Dumbledore's neat, leftward slanting spiky calligraphy began appearing on the cardboard. It read: Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow Side A 1. She Has Funny Cars/ 2. Somebody to Love / 3. My Best Friend / 4. Today/ 5. Comin' Back to Me. Side B 1. 3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds / 2. D.C.B.A.-25 / 3. How Do You Feel / 4. Embryonic Journey / 5. White Rabbit / 6. Plastic Fantastic Lover. Which was incredibly unhelpful, by the second song he had guessed they were titles.
The first song's title was odd, the guy was going on about how you only live once and good things can be found in spite of all the sorrow. The choir insisted that everything you need is in your own mind, which had nothing whatsoever to do with funny cars, at least for what little he knew about the Muggle transportation. It may have been a metaphor but of what he could not guess.
The second song had drums and guitars too, but they sounded nothing like the first, they were played in fast beat that, regardless, felt loaded with longing. The singer was the woman with the raspy voice that had sang along in the first song, she was the lead singer here. And he could have guessed the title by the choir. But there were lyrics that rooted him to the spot. Don't you need somebody to love? The woman with the raspy voice asked insistently. He held his breath: "What is this?"
He took the J-card out and realized that some lettering had also appeared inside: Free love can at times feel like too much freedom. Freedom gets lonely really fast. What was that supposed to mean? For the briefest moment he entertained the thought of asking barmy bird about it. He chuckled. It was preposterous. He was around the part where the woman sang about friends treating you as if you were a guest and a single solitary tear rolled down his cheek. He wiped it up immediately, feeling foolish. He'd never had friends. He doubted anyone does. Once upon a time he entertained the notion but he knew now all he had ever had were accomplices. People were only interested in what they could get out of you.
The third song was a sugar-coated inane love song that made him snort derisively. He pushed the stop button after the first bar and rewind the cassette roughly to where the second song was. He listened to it again, and then he skipped the third song altogether. It took a few trials but he went to the fourth which left him feeling brittle. By the fifth and last song of the A side called Comin' Back to me, he was about ready to plunge head first back into darkness.
He looked up towards the window, almost unconsciously. The sun was setting, bleeding reddish rays of light through his window. His rooms were on a third floor, he saw no need for curtains. He fixed his gaze and there was nothing there.
He laughed bitterly: "What were you expecting? The shadow in the mist won't be her. She is not coming back, she is gone."
His voice broke. All the sorrows of the world seemed to drop on his head. He let out a big sigh that resolved into a woeful moan. He took the headphones off brusquely and threw the Muggle contraption against the wall. Except, it didn't hit the stone, it floated midair and was lowered slowly onto the rug at the foot of the bed.
The contours of a shimmering figure were apparent against the carmine sunset rays. He felt his temper raising. It better be an emergency or whatever ghost had dared enter his private quarters was going to exist just long enough to regret it. Ghost are mere resonances of what people once were, voluntary or else, the spell that fixated ghosts was the same in principle as the one used for magical portraits. You can't really harm them, but you can erase them, with the appropriate spells. Of course, what self-respecting wizard would bother? It would be like spitting at the sky, worst case scenario the spit will only fall right back in your face.
He got off bed and snarled: "What do you want?"
The figure became clear and he gasped, grabbing at his wand. This had gone too far. He was going to have a word with the Headmaster, unreachable or not.
A mockery of Lily Evans replied: "I want my due, Severus Snape."
A joke? A joke in the worst possible taste. Damned Dumbledore. This was enough to hand the man his resignation. Then he remembered the wish spell. What barmy bird had said? The wish spell granted you a fair mix of what you wanted and what you needed. That was a curse indeed. She had also said that the spell was unstable under great perturbations. And he had been wallowing in a bucket full of self-pity listening to the stupid Muggle toy. So that thing was nothing but the bloody spell gone terribly wrong.
He hurled the words at the apparition with distilled rage: "Retexo!"
The thing chuckled, with the sparkling river laughter she used to have when she was a girl. The charm was strong enough not to be undone by a generalist counterspell.
He ordered himself to toughen up, of course the thing laughed just as he remembered, it was his mind feeding the illusion.
"It is just an illusion," he said sternly, forcing himself to look straight at the thing.
The thing faced him bemused: "Am I now?"
He growled angrily: "Abrogo!" That was strong enough to undo all but the most powerful curses.
The silvery figure trembled with laughter and then scowled: "Would you undo me?" Her voice rose up to a clamor: "Was killing me and my family once not enough for you, Severus?"
"I did not..." But he had been telling himself that, over and over, for the past couple of months. He fell to his knees.
The figure approached him and with a harsh hand that felt impossibly real made him look up at her. She leaned towards him, her moonlight hair burning like a crimson oriflamme by the crepuscular sun. She spat each syllable of the word at his upturned face: "Murderer!"
Her icy exhalations stole all color from his already pale face. He wanted to shirk away, but her hand held him firmly in place. Saying he was sorry would have been just empty words. All the words he could have told her about having tried to save them died in his lips before uttering them. She was dead at the hands of Voldemort because of him, the faithful servant that had gone to tell him of the prophecy as soon as he heard it. He might as well have pointed the wand and cast the unforgivable curse himself.
Her eyes were empty. But her dead stare was somehow fixed on him. Like those ancient Greek statues whose pupil-less eyes seem to follow you across the room. Her face was a mask of hatred, a gorgoneion, monstrous Medusa heads that were worn like pendants or carved in doors or shields as amulets against evil. It was easy to see her hair waving in the dying sun rays as a nest of snakes.
Her cold breath bathed him again: "You, my childhood friend, brought death to my door. Where my husband, who you always despised, died defending us! Was it worth it? Where are your thirty pieces of silver, Severus?"
She was oozing anger, like that time. No, not like that time, back then she had been fire and now she was a blizzard, fearsome but ice cold. A non-nonsense part of him asked if he was stupid. Illusion spells feed off the subjects mind. It was so obvious why she would look like a modified version of the single time they had been intimate. Only an idiot would fall for it. He had been so wrapped up in grief that he had screwed the Headmaster's experiment. He needed to pull himself together and end it right away. But that calm and collected voice was drowned by another, louder voice: that of guilt.
"You always acted like you worshiped the soil I walked on, I can only imagine what he offered you to betray me. Won't you show me the price of our blood?"
He whimpered and tried to close his eyes. He wasn't going to be able to think straight if he kept looking at her.
"Oh no, you don't. Look at your handy work! That much you owe me Severus Snape. Look at me! A carcass laying by my boy's cradle. My sweet boy, killed by that monster!" She howled.
Those words untied his tongue: "Your boy is not dead, Lily."
She looked astounded: "What?"
"He lives. He is under Dumbledore's protection. I suspect he is with your sister, but I don't know it for sure. As you might imagine traitors are not readily trusted with sensible information."
"What about Voldemort?"
Her reactions were so genuine that he responded without thinking: "Everyone thinks he is dead."
She scoffed, sharp as ever: "Everyone but you. Why is that?"
"There are signs that point at him being alive, badly hurt, but not yet dead." he rolled his sleeve and showed her the Death Eaters' mark.
She brushed a couple of sinewy frosty fingers pensively over his arm and he should have recoiled but, instead, something within him stirred.
She noticed. She rose a mocking eyebrow: "My word, Severus, would you have me even like this?"
He couldn't answer, he held his breath as she passed her hand purposefully over his chest. She was reaching for his collar to undo it when she took her hand away brusquely.
"What is that you have hanging from your neck? Show me!"
"I don't understand..."
She stepped back: "Show me what is inside the pendant around your neck."
It felt like a nightmare, like one of the many nightmares that had populated his dreams since the day she had died. He obeyed her, undid his collar and showed her the locket, without raising from the floor.
She hissed accusingly: "You stole blood from my cadaver? Have you no shame?"
"I didn't steal it from your dead body." He closed the locket and blushed. He didn't remember ever having blushed before: "You left it behind that time when you… when we..."
"Ah, and what did you expect to gain from it, other than what I had already given you?"
He stood up scoffing: "Lily Evans, what you gave, you also took from me. Let us not pretend that I was anything else but convenient. I'm sure that if I had not been so obliging you would have found someone else. I don't cultivate self-delusion. This was nothing but a token." He pulled the chain, breaking it and tossed the pendant to the floor: "I was fully aware that I should not expect anything else from you." He felt anger replacing a small part of the hurt: "You couldn't wait to go after Potter almost as soon as he was made head boy… so much for the lady's protestations that she'd rather date a squid."
The apparition looked at him intrigued: "Did you sell our lives not driven by greed but by envy then?"
He couldn't admit he had been envious of James Potter, not even to himself. "I asked the Dark Lord to spare you, just you, and knew that he wouldn't as soon as he told me that he would. That is when I went to Dumbledore."
Her voice dripped disdain: "So you offered my child and my husband to your master in exchange for me. And when you realized he was not going to honor the bargain then you turned coats. Well, at least my son was spared thanks to your mercenary loyalties, Snape. You bought enough time for the Order to find and defeat your master."
He scoffed: "On that you are wrong, your friends were not fast enough to rush to your rescue, Evans. Your child was not spared through any action of the Order of the Phoenix, nor any action of mine."
"It is Potter, I died Lily Potter, Snape." He wasn't going to respond to that. The wraith continued: "Then tell me: How was my boy spared?"
"I don't know, no one knows for sure. Dumbledore thinks that your sacrifice saved your boy. Something to do with ancient blood magic. You know Mrs. Potter, for someone who likes to present himself as a white wizard your master sure knows his way around blood magic. I doubt even Voldemort is more knowledgeable of it than he is. Even though blood magic is widely considered a Dark Art."
She pointed at the pendant: "You'd know more about it than I ever could. I don't regret giving up my life to save my boy. My boy who is a Potter too. Is that what makes you hate an innocent baby enough to be able to sacrifice him to your master without a regret? Is that the man you've become?"
He had asked himself those very same questions before. He was not one to visit the sins of the father upon the son, considering who his father had been. That was a kinship he had felt with Tom Riddle. Part of him thought that the reason he had climbed up the ranks of the Death Eaters so fast was not only his magical prowess, but that shared history of having Muggle fathers they both despised. But there was some truth in what the wraith was saying: the fact that the baby was James Potter's son had made things easier when it was determined the boy had to die for Voldemort to live.
"The boy could not be spared, Lily. There was a prophecy telling of Voldemort's downfall and signs that pointed at your boy being the one who had to enact it. There was nothing that Voldemort wouldn't have done to make sure he didn't."
She frowned, her anguish palpable: "But my boy lives and so does Voldemort, according to Dumbledore. So Harry is still in danger and I have no way to keep him safe now."
He was going barmy. He was basically having a conversation with himself through a botched wish spell. He had to put an end to it. But he made the mistake of looking at her. Wraith or not he wanted her, he wanted her as much as he had ever wanted her before.
She looked back at him with narrowed eyes: "I can't do a thing for my boy anymore, but you can." She smiled contemptuous: "Are your loyalties still up for sale, Severus?"
He lifted his wand and muttered: "Abrogo," with so little conviction that he wasn't surprised it didn't worked. He pleaded: "Please, just go away."
"Come on, Sev. We both know I have something you want." She took a step towards him, the tunic enveloping her glowed, becoming thinner than air against the last sun rays.
He stepped back: "Don't call me that."
She kept walking towards him while the clothes she was wearing vanished under the crepuscular light as if they were made out of mist: "I thought you liked it when I called you that."
He kept walking away from her, like a scared little boy: "Only she called me that and she is dead. You are not real, you are just a stupid wish spell gone awry. The spell got it wrong, this is not what I want and certainly it is not what I need."
By the time they had reached the wall, the wraith appeared to be naked. She leaned towards him and she could smell her hair. She had used a lily of the valley air freshener mist as perfume when she was little, mistaking it for the real thing. Petunia had laughed at her, but Lily had twisted it around and had made the air freshener her perfume. Severus remembered how her friends at Hogwarts asked her about it and how she had kept it secret saying it was an old family recipe. Now she smelled the same way she had when she lived, with only the barest whiff of decay underlying it to make it all terrifyingly real. He wouldn't even have been able to smell death on her if it weren't for his Alchemist nose, trained to detect the faintest odor in the lab.
"Don't I look real?" She took his hands and put them over her shoulders: "Don't I feel real to you, Severus?"
She felt real, colder than a corpse but very real. Her cold breath was chilling the air around them and making his own breath rise in wisps of hot vapor, coming out of his mouth irregularly to the beat of his racing heart. Insane as it all was he couldn't help reacting to her.
He tried to look away: "It can't be… It just cannot be!"
"How can you be sure? There is little known about blood magic, let alone about it being used along with wish spells. Merlin knows what are the limits, you enchanted my blood, called me forth in your mind and then set in motion a spell that draws from your want and your needs. Is it really impossible that it is me here, called from my early grave, willing to strike a bargain with you for my son's life? Are you really going to pass on it, if there is even the barest possibility that I am the woman you love?"
His eyes grew wide. And then she kissed him and he was unable to fight her anymore. He kissed her back, throwing the last shreds of caution to the wind. Letting her lead him to the bed as she had done once when they were younger. He knew there were going to be consequences to pay, there always are. But he was already living in hell, so he doubted he would be worse off for allowing himself to have a little taste of heaven, even if it all came from a dark place inside his head.
Ever since he was a child Severus Snape had often been accused of lacking both imagination and a sense of humor. Well, he was proving his accusers wrong. He couldn't help mentally laughing for falling for this crude mind trap. And he sure had more than a little imagination or he wouldn't have been able to conjure up a succubus that looked just like the love of his life down to the freckles on her back. Her skin, her hair, all of her was perfectly rendered. As he caressed her, ever more frantically as they went on, the silvery ghost like color was replaced by the creamy pinkness and fiery red he remembered from the single time they had been together. Even the salt of her sweat tasted right after a while. It was, indeed, an uncanny resemblance; down to how she bit her lips to stifle little moans and rolled her eyes when he touched a particularly sensitive spot. He didn't know if he remembered what she liked or that was just his own ego catering to him.
There was room to doubt the exact extent to which the wish spell was drawing from his mind, because Lily Evans, if the being in his bed was her, had apparently learned a thing or two during her married life that she hadn't known way back when. Things he wouldn't have thought of or experienced the few times he'd been with women afterwards. Things that made it really hard to keep things going for long, even though he'd never been more into the moment with any real person than he was with this illusion. A very realistic illusion, mind you, for he was still hard inside her after he reached release and he managed to keep it while she worked on achieving hers.
As soon as the wraith had regained composure she got off the bed, clothing appeared around her just as promptly as it had disappeared earlier.
She looked at him and pointed towards the pendant lying on the rug: "Pick it up, Severus."
He didn't feel like getting up, in fact he was feeling sleepy for a change. But he obeyed, wrapping the sheets around his waist in an impulse of modesty he couldn't very well explain.
Her skin began to turn silver again, her hair shone like moon rays in the darkness: "By the blood that you enchanted and the price that I've just paid, I bind you to look after my son, Severus Snape, even if it means giving up your life."
He sported a currish grin, the contempt mainly directed at himself: "You don't have to try to bind me with a spell Lily. Ghosts cannot cast spells. And whatever you may want of me, you just have to ask. I've never been able to deny you."
But the spirit, if spirit it had been, was already gone, leaving him clutching the sheets and the locket. He stood there for a couple of minutes, waiting for despondency to set back in, but he didn't feel darkness claiming him. The hurt was there but what once had been a roar, was reduced to the level of a murmur.
He felt oddly peaceful and had the suspicion he would be able to catch sleep by the tail if he went right back to bed. He picked up the Walkman and placed it along with the locket inside his desk. And then he laid down, without bothering to get dressed. He slept all the way through morning a rare occurrence even under the best of circumstances.
The next day he woke up with a certainty that allowed him to get out of bed with willingness. Oddly enough because what he should have felt was doubt, doubt that the whole experience had been real. He didn't know and he didn't care if it had been a true visitation by a vengeful wraith or a botched spell that had drawn from his wounded mind, or –worse- a manipulation by the Machiavellian Headmaster who had rescued him from his plunge into madness. He wasn't looking the gift horse in the mouth; whatever the case may be, Severus Snape had found a reason to live and he was going to hold onto it come hell or high water; right until the moment he could join Lily Evans behind the veil.