Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter. Nope, not me.
A/N: Yay for reviews!
This is a Severus chapter, and therefore involving much angst. Enjoy!
I'm going away for a couple of days, so I'm going to post two additional chapters. If you're sensible, you'll read one on Monday and one on Tuesday, but… are you sensible, eh?
To the reviewer that asked - Aemilia's name is pronounced Ay-meel-ee-ah.
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Severus wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand and tossed a pinch of powdered monkshood into the cauldron before stirring it with the tip of his wand.
I hate making this potion, he thought. I really do.
Under normal circumstances, Severus enjoyed making potions. The need for exactitude and total concentration allowed him to clear his mind of… other things. Of his emotions. Of his fears. Of his troubling thoughts.
But this potion was the Wolfsbane potion and that meant, of course, that everything was different.
Severus sighed, thinking back to a silver bracelet with a green stone in it. It was sitting in his chambers now, hidden away in the back of a drawer where he didn't have to look at it. Just because I said I respected the man, he thought, adding powdered silver to the potion, didn't mean I liked him.
You're jealous of him, an insidious little voice said in his mind.
Severus knew it was true. He was jealous of Remus Lupin, and it seemed completely unreasonable.
It turned out that he, Severus, had not been the only one to communicate recently with Regina. Remus had spoken to her too, through the veil - confirming that she was with Sirius Black.
Severus resisted the urge to spit bitterly on the ground. Sirius Black.
Sirius Black seemed to be laughing at him out of every corner these days. Every mealtime, Sirius was echoed in Remus's face. Every part of Gryffindor Tower seemed to reek of him. The library too, where Aemilia Fudge was working on the lawsuit that contested Sirius's will. He had gone up to see Dumbledore yesterday and had found the headmaster listening to a box that played violin music.
And, most of all, in Helena.
He had not spoken to her since their last argument when she had told him that he had not known Regina at all, but he saw her every day, and each meeting seemed to be etched on the inside of his eyelids, to be replayed every time he closed his eyes. Helena Seraphim walked in his dreams - golden hair pouring like a waterfall down her back, clad in black and smiling, clad in white and weeping, grey eyes warm and opening, grey eyes cold and forbidding, the embrace of Midsummer in the glade, when he had broken his vows.
When she had broken his heart by telling him one thing.
There was a child, he heard her voice echo in his head.
A child. The child of Sirius Black and Regina Lupin.
A travesty.
He wondered where that child would be now. If it were living or dead. If it were a daughter or a son. If it sat in his classes now and he taught it, not knowing what it was. If he wasted all his hatred on Harry Potter when there was a child far more worthy of it.
James Potter and Lily Evans deserved each other, he thought bitterly, but Sirius Black did not deserve her. No-one could have ever deserved her. Not him, not me, not anyone.
He wondered, idly, what the child of Sirius Black and Regina Lupin would look like. They were both beautiful people, he thought. Black was beautiful. Even I will not deny that.
A child… Sirius's dark hair, Regina's grey eyes. Regina's quiet grace, but Sirius's fiery temper.
The damn child probably plays the violin, he thought bitterly.
The only time he had heard Sirius Black play the violin had been at their Seventh Year graduation, but it had stayed with him. James Potter and Lily Evans had made the obligatory speech that the Head Boy and Girl had to make, then an enormous smile had lit up James's face, and he had said, 'Now, for the first and only time, on the Hogwarts stage, Lily and I would like to present Gryffindor's resident muso, Mr. Sirius Black!'
Severus remembered sneering at the word 'muso' but the sneer had fallen away the second Sirius had touched the bow to the strings and begun to play. He had known Sirius played, of course - one could scarcely avoid knowing, considering how all the girls (including the Slytherins) talked non-stop about how attractive it was. But he had not been prepared to hear it, not by a long shot.
Listening to him play, Severus could not believe that this was the same boy that had almost got him killed the year before. Passion, emotion in its rawest form, seemed to pour off the strings as Sirius played. It left him strangely vulnerable - Severus had never really humanised Sirius before, but now he realised that he was human, excruciatingly so. No-one without deep feeling could play like that. On the dais, he could see tears pouring down Lily's face before James enfolded her in his arms and kissed her temple.
It was, truly, nothing short of beautiful.
And it made Severus realise, painfully, that he had none of that beauty in his soul. He was all hard edges and corners, wrongness and sharp angles. He was a chemist and a spy.
Whereas Sirius Black was a musician and a hero.
And he could never, ever hope to compete with that, as he had been shown in the most horrid of ways.
A child. The child of Sirius Black and Regina Lupin. His enemy and his beloved.
Severus decanted some of the Wolfsbane potion in a goblet before covering the cauldron. It was the full moon tonight and Remus needed it.
As he left his dungeon, he thought he heard violin music.
Mocking him.
*
He left the smoking goblet on Remus's desk. Remus was inhabiting the quarters he had lived in while he was the Defence Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts during his tenure there, with Aemilia staying next door to him. Helena, he had heard from Dumbledore, had elected to stay in quarters closer to the Ravenclaw common room, her old house.
Odd, isn't it, he thought wryly, that the Ravenclaw common room is about as far away from the Slytherin one as is possible?
He wasn't sure if Helena was trying to avoid him as much as he was trying to avoid her. I wonder if it's called cowardice, he thought to himself. In a Gryffindor, yes, it would be terrible cowardice. But to a Slytherin… it's self-preservation.
A Gryffindor girl had broken his heart once. With innocent song and an aura of serenity, she broke into his heart. With her death, she broke his heart. And even now, she broke it again, and again, and again, scraping his nerves raw as if someone were drawing a violin bow over them.
Never feel anything, and you can never be hurt, he thought.
"S-Severus?"
He stopped. The voice was so quiet that it might have been his imagination.
"Severus?"
"Yes?" he replied automatically.
Helena Seraphim stepped out of the darkness in front of him. He barely had time to register the silvery tear tracks on her face before she collapsed at his feet in a dead faint.
*
Severus shook her shoulder. "Helena?"
No movement.
"Helena?"
He felt her forehead. She was burning up.
"Sweet mother of Merlin," he muttered. "Fever."
Gingerly, he lifted her off the ground. Her head fell back almost immediately and he had to catch it quickly before she did any serious damage to her neck. Without really thinking about it, he made his way down the stairs to his dungeon quarters.
She was still unconscious as he laid her carefully on his bed, her golden hair lying around her pale face like a halo. Severus pulled out one of his small cauldrons and set it over a burner, boiling a pint of water before throwing in chamomile and mugwort. Restorative teas, the snide little voice sneered at him. How the mighty Potions master has fallen.
Shut up, he told it tersely, before transferring about half of the mixture to a tea cup. He hefted Helena's shoulders up and braced her upper body against his before pouring the tea down her throat.
She came to at once, spluttering. "Sweet Merlin, Severus," she gasped, "what was that?"
"A restorative tea," he told her curtly, pouring the other half of the mixture into the cup and forcing it into her hands. "Drink the rest of it."
Helena obeyed, unquestioning. She raised one hand to her head. "Wh-what happened?"
"You fainted at my feet," Severus answered shortly. "Care to tell me why - sweet mother of Merlin, woman, don't pass out again!"
Helena had suddenly gone white as a sheet. "I remember," she moaned. She turned her eyes on him, and he was almost frightened by their numbness. "The Arachniae, Severus. They're - they're - He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named -"
Sweet mother of Merlin, he thought. The Dark Lord.
"He killed them," Helena whispered. "He killed them all."
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