"What was in the glass?" Snape asked, tossing it to one side. He heard it shatter with extraordinary clarity and counted the beats of his heart. Not dead yet.
"A gift from my heir," Voldemort smiled. "An heirloom from Josephine's potion supply."
Snape's heart skipped a beat. "What type of poison?" he whispered. He had seen the terrible things that she had made—was capable of making!
Voldemort smiled his serpentine smile. "Oh, that I shan't tell," he said wickedly. "But," he grinned still more widely, "I have something that may be of great use to you." He pulled out a tiny glass vial and waved it in front of Snape's nose.
"The antidote!" Snape gasped, and instinctively he grabbed for it.
Voldemort closed his long fingers around it. "I asked you this once before, Severus Snape: do you value your life?"
"Yes!" he exclaimed.
"Then, as you value life, you will find Josephine, my daughter, and bring her to me in less than three days." Voldemort smiled once more. "When she is in my possession, you will have the antidote."
Snape exhaled. "I'll do it," he said softly, not yet sure if he was lying or not.
Voldemort turned away and picked up Josephine's rose, staring into the flames pensively.
Snape rose to leave. "My—my Lord," he asked haltingly with his hand on the door. "What was the poison?"
Voldemort's back was cold. "If you really want to know," he said, "I suggest that you fail."
~
Dumbledore sighed, pulling out the sheaf of pictures one more time. He had to suppress a yawn as he flipped through the photographs one more time. Remus and Neville had taken it upon themselves to collect them as a way of finding Josephine's mother—which, Dumbledore had to admit, was a moot point: it didn't really matter who she was—but they had worked very hard to find all the pictures.
He flipped through the photographs. Maybe I should sort them some way, so that it looks like I've given it some thought. He sorted the various women by age first. Those too young or too old he put aside, left with a series of women in their late thirties or early forties. Dumbledore spread them out on his desk, first eliminating those that he could tell had no chance of being the girl's mother, then those that seemed unlikely, then those that didn't look anything like her.
At the end of an hour he was left with ten photographs. Dumbledore scrutinized each one, shaking his head. It was no good. Josephine carried nothing in her face or body that didn't mirror that of Tom Riddle's.
With a sigh of despair he pulled a class portrait out from within a drawer. It was the only picture anyone had left of Tom Riddle before he had been destroyed physically, and in was dated December 1944. He was eighteen in the photo, a very handsome young man. Dark hair lay in smooth waves over a high forehead and straight nose. His smile bared perfect white teeth and a pair of sable brows framed intelligent, deep brown eyes that twinkled in the light from the photographer's flash.
Brown eyes.
Dumbledore grabbed the canvas with Josephine on it. Light eyes—blue, he thought. Josephine has blue eyes.
Victoriously he grabbed the photos of the various women. Brown eyes. Brown. Brown. Green. Brown. Hazel. Blue! It was the studio portrait of a nineteen-year-old witch, taken twenty-four years before. She was not smiling, and she wore her black hair up in a bun. Her hands gripped a broomstick, and she wore the robes of her Quidditch team, the dark green and gold of the Holyhead Harpies. She had delicate features and small bones and the bluest eyes Dumbledore had ever seen. He flipped the picture over to read the name on the back and his shoulders slumped.
Jolene Longbottom-Rueben, 1979.
Jolene Longbottom had been insane for longer than Josephine had been alive. Even supposing Josephine was older than she thought she was, that still made her about six months short of the possible age range.
Dumbledore stroked his beard reflectively, compared the blue-blue eyes, and watched as Jolene waved merrily at him from her colored prison. He placed the studio portrait of Tom Riddle and the photograph of Jolene on either side of Josephine's charcoal likeness. He'd have to get a second opinion, but he was sure he'd hit on something huge.
There was a careful knock on his door.
"Come in," Dumbledore called. He looked up as the door swung open and his eyes widened.
~
Neville Longbottom bent over the smoking clear potion, blinking rapidly to calm his watering eyes. Almost automatically he grabbed the herbs and measured them quickly, tossing and stirring with a speed his that would have shocked his former classmates. Nobody, least of all Neville himself, could understand what it was that made him so good at making the Wolfsbane potion, but Neville appreciated the skill. It had got him a job as the assistant of Remus Lupin, his personal idol.
Out of habit Neville looked over his shoulder to see if Snape was watching him, knowing even as he turned that the black-cloaked man was out of Hogwarts on Death Eater/Auror business. It gave him a more than small shock to see someone else watching him. He dropped his measuring spoon into the cauldron with a splash and swore.
"Sorry," Josephine said.
Neville fished the spoon out with a pair of tongs, looked at the now-twisted metal with disgust, and tossed it onto the pile of melted cauldrons. "It's okay. I've done it before," he muttered, looking down in embarrassment. He had heard through both Lupin and Dumbledore that Josephine was an expert potion brewer—perhaps even better than Snape. Neville cherished the idea, but when faced with this mere girl he felt inferior.
"I've done that before, you know," Josephine admitted.
"What?" Neville grunted.
"Melted cauldrons. Dropped spoons." Josephine held out her left hand, palm up. "I burnt myself with dragon's blood once."
"Only once?" Neville asked irritably, trying to rebalance the ingredients so he wouldn't have to start over. Frantically he scraped and measured, only to find the spoon that he needed was the exact same as the spoon he had just melted. He frowned and tried to work out the substitute measurements in his head.
Josephine sighed. "It hurt. A lot. I didn't want to hurt like that again."
With a hiss, the potion went flat black and stopped smoking. Neville swore and Josephine winced. "Well," Neville said in a shaking voice. "There goes that."
"I'm really sorry."
"That won't save the potion, will it?"
Josephine frowned. "Who is this for?"
"My friend," Neville replied as he dumped the brew into the sink and tossed the shriveling cauldron onto the heap of other twisted pieces of pewter.
"You're friends with a werewolf?" she asked incredulously. "You don't look," she trailed off and looked away.
"Brave enough?" Neville finished mildly. "Nobody else thought so either." He pulled another cauldron out of thin air and placed it on the table. "They were wrong too."
Josephine watched the boy, taking in his thin frame and round blue eyes that shifted constantly. He seemed too meek to stand up to a werewolf. Once Josephine thought about it, she wasn't sure she would want to be anywhere near a werewolf, especially close enough to give it a potion. Not only had this Neville boy apparently done that, he must have done it many times. "What's a werewolf like?" she asked.
"Just like us. Maybe a little tougher." Neville began measuring out the herbs again. "He's a good man."
"A werewolf is still a monster," Josephine pointed out.
"I wouldn't talk if I were you," Neville snapped, his hand shaking. "Look who you've got for a father! I would rather have Remus Lupin for a father than Voldemort!"
Josephine fell silent and watched as the older boy finished the potion. Once it was safely off the fire, she asked quietly, "Do I really look that much like him?"
Neville looked her up and down. "Yes. Most people would think you were pretty if you didn't look like such a horrible—" he broke off, red around the ears.
There was a crash. Josephine looked sharply towards the door; Neville dropped a set of measuring spoons on the floor with a horrible clatter; and Severus Snape ran in. His skin, normally sallow, had taken on a green-yellow pallor, his dark eyes so wide that the whites were completely visible. His sleek black hair had come down around his face in a matted tangle. He looked like an escapee from St. Mungo's Mental Institution.
"Get out!" he half-screamed at Neville, his voice breaking on the second word. "Get out!" Neville, his eyes rounder than ever, beat a retreat through the classroom door.
Josephine moved, putting the table between her and Snape. She watched him closely as he raised a hand as if to throw something, then pulled up a chair and collapsed into it.
"What was it?" he muttered to himself, running his bony fingers through his tangled hair. "What was it?" His hand caught in a knot, and he jerked out a large clump of hair.
"Snape?" Josephine asked quietly. "What's happened?"
"It's—" the older man began, but his face contorted and Josephine watched in horror as his eyes bulged and his teeth ground together loudly. Snape fell to the ground with all the pliancy of a two-by-four.
Josephine, years of fearing the unknown warring with the urge to see if he had died suddenly, peered over the table. Snape looked up at her, his breathing short and quick. "What—did—he—do?" he panted. "Can't know what the brew was?"
"HE fed you poison?" Curiosity overcame fear. Josephine dashed around the table, her hair falling around her face. She peered into Snape's dilated pupils and felt the cold skin at his temples. "What was it?"
"One of yours," Snape replied hoarsely. "Brown. Fizzled a bit."
Josephine bit her lip. "More specific?" she asked. "Brown and fizzy describes a lot of things. How did it smell?"
"Bitter." He stared down at his shaking hands. "So far I've been shaky, and every few minutes I experience extreme pain somewhere here." The older man gestured to his middle abdomen.
"That's your liver, trying to process the poison. If you don't get the antidote soon, it will shut down, and all your other organs will follow, starting with your digestive organs and kidneys. If you don't get the antidote, you die in a matter of hours from total organ failure." Snape turned an unnatural shade of bottle green. "How long did HE say you've got?"
"Three days?"
Josephine raised her eyebrows. "Bullshit." When Snape looked grimly unsurprised, she asked "How long do you think?"
"Less."
"A lot less."
"You know what he wanted?" Snape asked, pushing himself upright.
"Me?" Snape nodded as Dumbledore pushed open the door, his face pursed into what seemed to be a thousand wrinkles.
"Mr. Longbottom has just been to my office in quite a state," he said calmly. "You've been to see Voldemort, Severus?" He turned to Josephine, who was still kneeling on the floor next to his Potions professor. "What's happened, Josephine?"
"He's poisoned," Josephine replied. "I don't know what it is, but it's one of mine."
"It will work quickly, then?" Dumbledore asked.
Josephine nodded curtly, tucking the loose wisps of her hair back into her braid and rising to her feet. "HE wants me," Josephine told Dumbledore, her blue eyes like uncut diamonds: hard and facetless; flat and cold. "I suspect that he'll kill me."
Snape cleared his throat in an effort to move to his desk chair. "No," he rasped hoarsely. "I heard him talking to himself before I went in to see him. He wants an heir. That's you."
The girl looked down, her face blank. "I don't want what he can give me," she said. "I want to go home."
Dumbledore put a hand on her shoulder. "My dear girl, you don't—"
Josephine struck it away. "I know!" she hissed. "It's gone! Everything has been destroyed! Except, it seems, me!" She began to pace, her black robes flying behind her, and Dumbledore was floored by her resemblance to her father. "The Ministry wants me dead, because everyone on Knockturn Alley who had any glimpse of a glimmer of an idea who I am is dead. If I die then no one living will step forward and say that I really existed, that Voldemort can produce heirs. Without me, the world will keep turning, much as it has this past century, but with me Fudge's ordinary little world has been shaken! He wants me dead for his own peace of mind, doesn't he?"
Dumbledore looked directly into her eyes. "I do not know what his intentions are."
"Obviously!" she spat. "For all I know you've been fiddling with other trivial matters!"
"Like finding your mother?" Dumbledore asked.
Josephine stood stock still, her face pale as a sheet. "My mother is dead," she said quietly, "And my father is the one who killed her."
"Emily Martin was your mother in everything but blood. Your birth mother has been found. We even know where she is at this very moment."
Snape watched the Headmaster and the girl as he seemed to grow in power and she seemed to shrink, her anger giving way to uncertainty. "Who?" she asked softly.
"Her name is Jolene Longbottom. She's a patient at St. Mungo's Hospital."
Josephine held her breath. Neville's mother? She wondered if Dumbledore knew she knew that Neville was her half-brother. Probably—she silently brought to mind the slumping, skinny boy who had defended the werewolf who was his friend. He had the saddest eyes she'd ever seen—as if the tragedy behind them was too much to say to the world.
"Neville and I look quite alike, don't we?" she asked, enjoying the surprise on Dumbledore's face. "That's what decided you."
"Your eyes," Snape croaked, his hands pressed against his stomach. "Voldemort has never had blue eyes." He turned to Dumbledore. "But Jolene Longbottom has been crazy longer than Josephine has been alive—how could she be the mother?"
Dumbledore pointed at Josephine. "You're not sixteen. We're not sure exactly how old you are, but it's far closer to nineteen. That would make you a little more than a year younger than Neville, which means that you were delivered about six months after Jolene was admitted to St. Mungos."
"That means that Neville Longbottom is her half-brother?" Snape said, his voice cracking again. He looked incredulous. Josephine was perversely amused at how much longer it had taken him to see it.
"That is correct, Severus," Dumbledore said, pleased. "And, Josephine, you and Mr. Longbottom do share some physical characteristics, thought not enough for there to be much proof."
Josephine hugged herself, determined to stay calm. When she was younger she had entertained a fantasy that her father was a gallant man and Emily was his Duchess, and Josephine had an elder brother somewhere who would come and find her and take them home to her father's grand estate. As it turned out, her father was an evil man, her mother was insane, and her brother was a thin, slumping boy with dejected blue eyes.
"You could see her if you want," Dumbledore offered, his blue eyes grave. Josephine shook her head and said nothing. "Do you want to go to bed?"
"I would like to discuss Professor Snape's condition with him, sir," she said coldly. "Before he keels over, if it fits into your schedule." She glared pointedly at the door.
Dumbledore glanced at Snape, his eyes amused. "Severus?" he asked, glancing at Josephine.
"I'll be fine, Headmaster Dumbledore," he said wearily.
"Right then," the Headmaster said, his eyes twinkling merrily. Josephine felt the sudden urge to pull down Dumbledore's eyelids, to hide that sparkle. She wasn't sure why it irritated her so—but it might have had something to do with the fact that everyone on Knockturn Alley had flat eyes, lacking the carbonation that this man's eyes seemed to possess in quantity. Dumbledore turned and left the room, his blue robes sweeping the ground behind him.
Snape turned to Josephine. "That was interesting," he remarked, his face paling. The girl glared at him, but supported his shoulders as he shook with the spasm caused by the poison. Josephine made herself watch as his face contorted in pain. This is my fault, she shouted at herself. This man is going to die, and it's MY FAULT.
"This is all my fault," she said.
Snape glanced over his shoulder at her. Her voice had scared him. It wasn't a plea for contradiction or a desperate cry for forgiveness. She said it calmly, just another statement of fact, just something that would not be avoided. "Really," he grunted, pressing his hand against his ribs in an effort to relieve the painful pressure in his abdomen.
"Yes," she whispered. "You're going to die, and it's my poison that's got you. My father is going to kill—has killed—to get a hold on me. He killed Emily, he killed Toad and it's my fault!" Her voice rose in pitch until it was practically a yelp. "If I had never existed, would any of this have happened?"
Her shrill demand fell on deaf ears. Snape stared at her as if she had burst into flame. "You're going to kill yourself, aren't you?"
"Would you stop me?" she demanded, whirling around in a swirl of black fabric and blacker hair. "Would you care? Maybe if I die now, I won't have to pay for any more lives in Hell." She turned to the wall, her head in her hands. Snape suspected that she had begun to cry.
"Yes, and yes," Snape murmured. "If only because you still haven't taught me anything I don't know about potions."
There was a long silence. The cold, moist air of the potions dungeon was the loudest sound in the room as it caused the tables to creak and the pewter cauldrons to moan softly like seasick souls.
Josephine turned. Her eyes were dry. "I know what to do," she said. "I'm going to need your help."
"What for?" Snape asked, mystified.
"I want you to take me to see my father."