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Chapter Eleven: Power United With Love"You're quite sure that you don't want a sweet, Severus?"
"Yes, Headmaster." Snape had to fight to keep a scowl away. Even when he heard what Snape wanted to talk to him about, Dumbledore had still nodded and chuckled and never let the damn smile on his face fade for an instant. He'd brought Snape straight to his office, which was something, but now he was petting Fawkes, his phoenix, and not sitting down behind the desk, where Snape thought he ought to be for a discussion of this magnitude.
At last, moving without hurry, Dumbledore turned and dropped into his seat. The first thing he did was pop a sweet into his mouth, and then try to offer one to Snape, again. At that point, Snape had had enough.
"I know that the Potter brat in my House is the Boy-Who-Lived, Albus," he said.
Dumbledore blinked—Snape had only told him that he wanted to talk about Harry—but said, "I am astonished that you think so, Severus, in the face of all available evidence. Will you tell me why you think so?"
"It is obvious," said Snape, becoming truly annoyed. "He is far too powerful for a wizard that young. He saved his brother from the troll, and again today, from the Death Eaters. He performs wandless magic, Albus, including, I'm quite sure, wandless Shield Charms. I believe that he may well be the strongest wizard to enter this school since—the Dark Lord." Habit, superstition, old changed loyalties, all kept him from calling the Dark Lord by name that often.
"Yes, I know all about young Harry," said Dumbledore, and gave him an infuriating smile as he tapped a kettle set on a table behind him, which promptly began to whistle. "I know that he is doing precisely what he is meant to do. Tea, Severus?"
For a long moment, Snape couldn't speak—first because of his astonishment, and then because he had to remind himself that reformed Death Eaters did not stand up and attempt to kill the Headmasters who'd saved them from Azkaban.
Attempt to kill, one of his thoughts hissed at him, probably originating in his Slytherin survival instinct. The spell wouldn't land, and you know it. This is Dumbledore.
Snape nodded at nothing, calmed down, and managed to say in a voice with only a thin veneer of ice rather than outrage, "You knew?"
Dumbledore glanced up at him, eyes mild. "Of course, Severus. From the moment young Harry walked into the Great Hall, I've had to strengthen the shields that protect me against seeing other wizards' magic. It grows worse when he is angry, which so far has always coincided with something that he believes puts his brother in danger. He blazed today, and I know that he was the one, not his brother, who defeated the Death Eaters." He shook his head, while pouring tea from the kettle into two small cups. "I know what their presence means here, and I am shocked and saddened. I had not realized that matters had gone this far."
For a moment, Snape let himself be distracted enough to think of asking after that, but he pulled his thoughts back to the reason he'd come here. The Headmaster had been a Gryffindor, not a Slytherin, but he manipulated as well as one. And Snape was determined that this time, this time, if no other, he would not be manipulating the Head of Slytherin House away from what was truly important.
"How can you know this," he demanded, "and yet claim that Connor Potter is the Boy-Who-Lived? I have felt the boy's ability. He could do well with training—" those words stung him to say "—but I could say that about any of the first-year imbeciles who come through our doors. What about Harry? Why isn't he being celebrated, hailed as the hero of the wizarding world, the boy who defeated Voldemort?" He was glad that he managed to say the name this time. He had calmed. He would do this, would stand aloof from the lashing anger that wanted to fill him whenever he thought of the name Potter or the stubborn way that Harry stuck to the shadows. "I am quite sure that he is."
"He isn't, Severus," said Dumbledore cheerfully, and then handed him a cup of tea that it was either take or look ridiculous refusing. Snape took it, but held it in such a manner that he hoped conveyed his deep disapproval of the whole notion. Dumbledore went on drinking his own tea with every sign of enjoyment, not speaking again until he finished the cup. Then he smiled. "It is true that Harry is a powerful wizard, but that does not make him the Boy-Who-Lived."
"Why not?" Snape said, and so much for not getting angry. He was fighting not to crack the cup in two.
"Because," said Dumbledore, "of factors that the Order of the Phoenix has been aware of since before Harry and Connor were born. We are lucky enough to have a careful, clear set of signs to guide us. We have read them all with great precision, and reasoned out what they must mean. We are convinced that Connor is the Boy-Who-Lived, and we would not have announced him to be so after Voldemort's attack if we were not so convinced." He politely ignored Snape's flinch. "Rest assured, we know what we are doing."
"What are these 'signs?'" Snape snapped, putting the teacup down on the Headmaster's desk. "I want to know what they are."
Dumbledore looked uneasy for the first time—uneasy and slightly sad. "Severus—"
Snape stood. "If you do not trust me, Albus, then you ought to have said so," he said, feeling his voice fall into the quiet registers it did when he was truly angry. "Of course, a Death Eater can never be fully trusted, can he? Even one who turned his back on the Dark Lord and all he stood for. Even one who risked his life for you as a spy, for a year and more. Even one who is now Head of the House into which one of these precious Potter children has been Sorted." He turned towards the door. "Well, you need not be troubled with my presence any longer. Goodbye, Albus. You'll have my resignation on your desk in the morning."
"It was not entirely my decision, Severus," Dumbledore told his back. Snape halted, and didn't turn around. It remained to be seen if his ploy would win more out of the Headmaster than this. "Not every member of the Order was aware of it, either. I was, and so were James and Lily Potter, and a few of their friends. It was James and Lily who asked that the news not be spread further. They wished to keep it a secret because of the danger that it might mean to their sons."
"I am Harry Potter's Head of House," Snape said, and turned around again. "I am the one responsible for training him, protecting him, guiding him through the wizarding world during his time at Hogwarts."
"Minerva does not know," Dumbledore said, frowning at him.
Once, Snape would have quailed at that frown. He did not now. He knew he was right, knew it as surely as wandless magic exhausted wizards five times Harry's age. He folded his arms across his chest.
"I also owe a Life Debt to James Bloody Potter," he snarled at Dumbledore, "and will be protecting Connor Potter. If, that is, I know why I should be defending him at all costs, and not his brother, instead."
Dumbledore let out a long, slow sigh, as if he were feeling his age at last. "Sit down, then, Severus," he said, standing. "I suppose I should have known this day would come. So long as the boys remained at Godric's Hollow, no one else needed to know. But in Hogwarts, as you so amply point out, there are others who will, perhaps, pause and wonder about what seems a strange state of affairs." He glanced pointedly at Snape. "Perhaps someone else has already."
Snape felt his face change briefly, and sighed when Dumbledore looked at him and waited. "Draco Malfoy," he said unwillingly. "He has not made the connection with Harry being the Boy-Who-Lived, I am certain of it, but he can feel the boy's power." He tensed his shoulders, ready to dive forward and defend one of his charges. "But he is also—interested in Harry, perhaps fascinated, and would be extremely hard to get rid of."
Dumbledore nodded. "I suppose I should have realized something like this would happen when Harry was Sorted into Slytherin," he murmured, and Snape had to conceal his shock at the Headmaster admitting two mistakes in two minutes. "That was the one thing we did not foresee, when we made the decisions that we did. We were sure he would go to Gryffindor."
Snape watched as Dumbledore walked over to a small chest that occupied the back of his office, under an array of tilting, spinning silver instruments and several dozing portraits of Headmasters past. He thought, but did not say, You are a fool, Albus. The boy is a Slytherin. What else have you missed? Should I be inclined to distrust you even more than I already do?
But it was not true to say that he distrusted Dumbledore. He had faith in him to do what he thought was best for Hogwarts, and there was always, always the debt of gratitude, that Dumbledore had listened to him and believed him when Snape turned his back on the Death Eaters. But he was wary of him, too. The Headmaster favored his Gryffindors, loved his Gryffindors. He was likely to make mistakes in their favor and against Slytherins.
And, too, there was the tiny seed of anger, long-buried but not forgotten, that asked: Why didn't you expel James Bloody Potter and his friends for endangering my life? When I could have become a werewolf or died, why were their chances to stay in school more important?
He said nothing about that, though, as he watched Dumbledore straighten up with a small Pensieve filled to the brim with silvery liquid. Dumbledore carried it to the desk and nodded Snape to it with a strangely solemn air.
Snape bent over the Pensieve, dipped his head below the surface of Dumbledore's collected thoughts, and vanished into the memory.
Dumbledore waited in a small, comfortable room, whistling tunelessly to himself and studying the walls as though he admired the dreadful artwork hung on them. Now and then he lifted his wand and cast a ring of colored smoke into the air, watching and chuckling as it changed through several shapes. When one faded, he would whistle, study the walls, and then cast another.
Snape entertained himself, if one could call it that, by trying to guess where the room was. The walls were wooden, which made him think it was not part of Hogwarts, but it had no windows to let him make sure.
At last, a knock sounded, and Dumbledore turned and called, "Enter."
A woman stepped through the door, blinking at the light of the torches that gripped the walls. Snape felt his mouth curl in a sneer. The woman was Sybill Trelawney, Hogwarts's useless excuse for a Divination teacher. She had her shawl wrapped around her like a snail's shell, and she didn't make much faster progress than a snail would towards Dumbledore, either.
"Headmaster?" she asked hesitantly. "I don't understand. I thought you had offered me the Divination job, that I was now secured as Professor?" She spoke in a meek and humble voice Snape had never heard before. He thought he rather preferred it over her usual manner.
"You are, Sybill, never fear," Dumbledore said, smiling at her. "However, I called you here because I did not hear the whole of the prophecy that you recited to me that night in the Hog's Head. There was a—bit of a commotion, and I am afraid that I missed the rest. Will you please say it again?"
Snape stiffened. He had been the commotion, since he had overheard the first part of the so-called prophecy that Trelawney had recited. Then someone had seen his Dark Mark, screamed, and gotten him thrown out. He had scurried away to the Dark Lord and reported all he could, which was a measly few lines. It was a surprise that Dumbledore had not heard the rest, either.
Trelawney blinked at him. "What proph—"
Then her eyes rolled back in her head, and she began to speak in a far more powerful voice than Snape had ever heard from her, even on that night when she had begun to speak the prophecy.
"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches… Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies…"
That was all Snape himself had heard. And Dumbledore was nodding along in encouragement, though Trelawney could see nothing of it. Snape leaned forward to hear the rest.
"He is the younger of two, and he shall have the power the Dark Lord knows not…For the elder is power, but the younger is power united with love…O guard him, O shield him, for the darkness through which he passes otherwise is vicious and hideous, and love has but a scant chance of surviving…The elder will stand at his right shoulder, loving him, but the younger will love the whole of the wizarding world…The Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, and in so doing mark his heart… The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches, born as the seventh month dies…"
The prophecy ended. Snape didn't wait to hear the stammering sounds Trelawney would no doubt make; most true Seers did not remember their own prophecies afterwards. He pulled his head out of the memory.
He was shaking, both from the roused memories and from the power intoned in the words. He sat down in his chair, and said nothing as Dumbledore covered the Pensieve and carefully put it back in its chest. Fawkes, watching with his head on one side, suddenly let out a rich trill. Dumbledore paused to stroke the bird. Snape noticed that his hands were trembling.
Snape whispered, "And so that prophecy fits the Potter twins?" He had never known, never suspected. The Dark Lord normally had as much use for Divination as he had for kindness. And he had arranged matters almost alone, with the help of Peter Pettigrew, the Potters' Secret-Keeper now rotting in Azkaban, and Bellatrix Lestrange, who had tortured the Longbottoms into insanity. Snape had thought he had attacked the Potters for their expeditions against him in the past, not because he truly believed an infant could be a threat to him.
"It does," said Dumbledore, moving forward and sitting down behind his desk again. "They were born at the end of July—as was Neville Longbottom, incidentally, but they were the only wizarding twins born 'to parents who had thrice defied him' then. Harry is the elder twin—"
"You know that for certain?"
"Of course," said a cool voice behind him. "I should know it. I was there."
Snape turned sharply. Lily Potter stood in the doorway, glaring at him with eyes deeper and sharper than her son's. Snape wondered what to say, until he saw James Potter behind her, face red with fury.
Take refuge in hatred, always, Snape advised himself, and smirked. "Come to hear the unexpected news of your sons, Potter?" he taunted. "Come to hear that the Slytherin is the one who shall save the wizarding world?"
"Severus."
Snape flinched and glanced over his shoulder. Dumbledore had stood and was scowling at him. Snape slunk back into his seat, and watched in sullen resentment as the Potters took two more chairs beside him.
"Our apologies, Headmaster," Lily said, ignoring Snape entirely and not sounding sorry at all. "We came to see you about something else concerning our boys, but when we heard what was being discussed, we felt we had to enter."
"Quite all right, my dear." Dumbledore beamed at her, and held out an Acid Pop, which she accepted. "I think that Severus does deserve to know, since he's Harry's Head of House now."
"Not for much longer," James Potter muttered.
Snape looked sideways to meet a glare of equal intensity. He sneered at it, and turned back to the Headmaster.
"So Harry is the elder twin, Connor the younger," he said.
"By almost fifteen minutes," Lily added.
Dumbledore nodded. "And Harry is more powerful, there is no doubt about that. The elder is power… When we came to Godric's Hollow that Halloween night, to find Voldemort defeated and Peter fled, we could feel Harry's magic raging about him like a windstorm. We believe that the presence of so much other power in the room—Voldemort's magic, Connor's essential innocence and purity—set Harry's free, earlier than it should have been loosed." Dumbledore's eyes darkened. "So much power is unnatural in a child, Severus."
He did not have to say that Voldemort had been the same. Snape could feel him thinking it.
He wanted to shake the Headmaster. He wanted to shout, Not every Slytherin is the Dark Lord. Stop reflecting us with a mirror of your own creation!
Instead, he raised one eyebrow and said, "It seems clear to me that that makes him the Boy-Who-Lived."
"Not so," Dumbledore said. "Recall what else the prophecy speaks of, Severus. The power the Dark Lord knows not. Voldemort knows all about magical power. He is versed in the darkest of the Dark Arts, and much other knowledge that no child of eleven could have hoped to acquire, much less a baby. But love—ah, that he does not know. And Connor will be power, well-trained power by the end, united with love. He loves effortlessly, easily."
Snape ground his teeth. "And how can you be so sure that love is this unknown power?"
"You forget," Dumbledore said gently. "You are talking to the man who defeated the last Dark Lord, Severus."
Snape opened his mouth, then snapped it shut. It was true; he had forgotten. He had known Dumbledore as Headmaster for so long that it sometimes made him forget that he had done other things, such as defeating Grindelwald.
"True," he murmured. "My apologies, Headmaster. Continue."
"It was my love of the wizarding world that let me defeat Grindelwald," said Dumbledore, and closed his eyes with a sigh. "Seeing him standing there, knowing he would poison everything we are if I did not destroy him—that was what made my hand move as it did. But I was an adult, Severus, and had had long years to gain in experience, wisdom, and love. Connor and Harry are only children. We cannot trust to sheer power, however great. We must trust to the one who loves more. And that is Connor. Harry loves and cares only for his brother."
Snape watched Lily flush a bit from the corner of his eye, and wondered, How much of that was your doing? But he said aloud, "And the part about marking as his equal?"
"Connor's scar," said Dumbledore. "And in so doing mark his heart. Connor's scar is in the shape of a heart."
"Harry bears a lightning bolt," said Snape, determined to pry as far as he could, because he could not believe that everything was really this neat.
"Caused by a bit of falling roof the night of the attack," said Dumbledore, shaking his head.
"You cannot be certain of that," said Snape. He would press this until it dried, he decided. He had squeezed blood from harder stones. And the chance at a Slytherin hero who could do what the boy had done today, in defense of someone else, was closer than it had ever been.
"No," Dumbledore admitted. "But the wording of the prophecy, and the presence of fallen roof close by Harry's crib, makes it near-certain. Alas, only two people could tell us the truth about that night, and one of them was lying dead of a reflected Avada Kedavra." He smiled, as if the mere mention of the Potter brat's triumph was a matter for wonder.
"Who is the second?" Snape said, leaning forward.
"Peter," said James, with an even deeper loathing in his voice than he reserved for Snape.
"Peter," Dumbledore agreed, with a long sigh, and shadows in his eyes. "The Aurors caught him the next day. There was no need for a trial, or Veritaserum. When they asked him if he had betrayed the Potters' location to Voldemort and created the rumor that their sons had already been taken, he admitted that he had. He went to Azkaban laughing, as if he were already mad. I have visited him several times since then, attempting to confirm what we know already about the attack, but he grows progressively more insane. I fear that we will get nothing useful out of him."
Snape sat back in his chair, stymied. He could not think of any other target to focus his questions on. He turned his memory of the prophecy over and over in his mind, but could think of nothing there. If nothing else, the fact that Connor had been born after Harry seemed to seal their respective fates.
"Now," said James Potter, leaning forward in his chair, "we came to speak to you about Harry, too, Headmaster." He sent Snape a distrustful glance. "I am doubly glad that we did, now that I hear about Severus's worrying obsession with him. We would like him Re-Sorted into Gryffindor."
And there is a new target for my questions.
"You will permit this farce, Headmaster?" Snape drawled, turning his eyes on Dumbledore. "Then I might know well and for all what House you really favor, and which you do not."
He watched in amusement as Dumbledore's face struggled between several expressions. In the end, Dumbledore shook his head. "We must trust the Sorting Hat," he explained to a visibly sagging James. "It put Harry in Slytherin for a reason, I am sure. Perhaps it is to enable him to learn even stricter control of his magic, which in the end he will put to use protecting Connor."
This again, Snape thought, seething behind his outward mask. I am sure that Harry could kill the Dark Lord in front of you, Dumbledore, and still you would insist that his brother had done it with this mysterious power of 'love.' I despise your romanticism. It is not the way to win a war.
"But the Hat may have made a mistake—" James began.
Lily took his arm, and he hushed. That disappointed Snape. He would have looked forward to more bluster that he could attack and refute. But Lily turned towards the Headmaster and said, "Why was our son in danger today, Headmaster? Who were those Death Eaters?"
"The Lestranges," said Dumbledore quietly, his face dropping at once into grave, worried lines. "The Minister has spoken with me. Someone claiming to be acting with my authority—and with impeccable credentials, apparently—told him that the Lestranges were to be removed from Azkaban and put in a more secure location. They were released, and then they traveled here. The same person, likely, dropped the anti-Apparition wards around the Quidditch pitch. There seems little reason to doubt that the Lestranges planned to Apparate away when they were done." He closed his eyes. "We have a traitor in the Order of the Phoenix."
Lily sagged back in her seat, looking ashen. James Potter, for once, had no words to say.
Snape found himself astonished, and then frightened, briefly, as the sense of the Headmaster's words came home, and then angrier than ever. The anger was combined with a fierce pride, which was a most peculiar mix.
The Lestranges! Top Aurors fell before Bellatrix's wand. They tortured the Longbottoms into insanity. I cannot count how many atrocities they were responsible for during my time in the Dark Lord's Inner Circle. And the boy defeated them with a few wandless Charms and a Bludger!
Snape changed his mind in that moment. He could not insist that Harry was the Boy-Who-Lived. Dumbledore would not believe him, and neither would the Potters. They had already made up their minds. For all Snape knew, they might even have sought to "tame" Harry's power by insisting that he focus on protecting his brother. It seemed likely.
That did not mean that he need sit idle and do nothing.
The Order—with a traitor in the middle of it, how wonderful for everyone involved—could have their Boy-Who-Lived. He would work with Harry. He would insure that the bloody stubborn boy learned to look beyond his brother's skin, and out for his own, and then for other Slytherins'. And then, if they had the time for it, he might urge Harry to think of the rest of the wizarding world, including the father who would be torn apart by Snape having such control of one of his sons.
And if he chose to expunge his debt to James Potter in guarding Harry, who was to gainsay him?
He sat through their discussion of the traitor, uninterested; as he had suspected, no one had any idea who it was. Dumbledore trusted too many people, and Lily and James had been too isolated from the world in Godric's Hollow to have any idea of current political realities.
Snape stood when he could safely excuse himself, and made his way back to the dungeons, glad that he ran into no one to whom he would have to explain the pleased smirk curling his mouth.
There was no point pushing for credit right now, not with the Headmaster dead-set against granting the boy any notice at all, even half-thinking that he might turn into another Voldemort if he were praised for his power. Snape would work in secret, and then push Harry into the light when matters were already so far along that no one else could stop them.
First, of course, he needed to have a little talk with Harry. Snape did not anticipate that being easy. But since he had the perfect weapon in mind, he did not worry overmuch about it.
Halfway to the dungeons, he was horrified to realize that he was almost humming under his breath, and made himself stop it.