PG-13; Harry Potter - Highlander; Learning to live in peace time is even more difficult than in war time since there's only the good guys left to fight. Methos shows up at Hogwarts, Hermione apprentices to Dumbledore, and Sybil Trelawney sees Death.

Disclaimer: I own very little, and nothing that is contained herein.

xxxxxxxxxxx

Life & Loyalty

by MarbleGlove

xxxxxxxxxxx

Sacrifice, cont'd

xxxxxxxxxxx

"I do think that girl who gave me the tour has something of a fascination of you."

"Miss Granger?" Severus was pulled out of his contemplation by the comment.

"Yup." Adam had smirked at him, as if he had known how much this new thought would bother Severus.

They were sitting in Snape's office, a large, comfortable room, and just enjoying each other's presence. Snape had been doing some research for his most recent potions experiment while Adam had been writing in his journal.

The comment had seemingly come from no where and, as Adam did not push the issue further, they both returned to silence. But Snape found that he couldn't get back into his research.

It was a ludicrous thought, that some young woman would find him "fascinating." But, when he tried to wave the thought off, casually dismiss it, he found that he could not.

Miss Granger came to his office at least once a week to just sit and talk. And he did enjoy those conversations. She turned to him for help interpreting those parts of life she didn't understand. She was such a whirlwind of thoughts, facts, and opinions. It was a puzzle to try to find what was at the center each time.

He remembered a conversation from long ago in which Adam had said to him, "Do you understand that I'm teaching you how to survive, I'm not teaching you how to live."

No, Severus hadn't realized that, but as he thought about it, it struck a note of truth within, so, "Yes."

"Good. Someday, if you survive long enough, you will find someone to teach you how to live. But for now, you'll learn survival."

Now, as he thought about the difference between surviving and living, and the differences between himself and an optimistic young witch still in the first years of her first apprenticeship, he wondered whether he was showing Miss Granger how to survive or if she couldn't possibly be showing him how to live.

Severus stared down at the notes he had been writing but didn't see them. What was his relationship with Miss Granger? Surely he should have a better sense of what was happening than he apparently did. But after a while he realized that it did not matter.

He enjoyed the conversations he had with Miss Granger, and it was reasonable to assume that she enjoyed them as well, but in the end that enjoyment could not last. He was taking part in introducing a happy, optimistic, and heartbreakingly naive girl to some of the horrors that underlay the world of magic.

As he disillusioned her, she would eventually draw away from him and he need worry no more about what sort of relationship theirs was for the brief time that it existed. For all it was a depressing thought, he found it supremely reassuring.

When she next came to him, she was pale and wanted some reassurance after having come from an intense lesson about what it really meant to make magic. It was just such times, he knew, that would eventually ruin their growing rapport and he found himself hoping for the end to be soon. Once it was over he could remember what they had without any fear of the eventual end. It would already have passed.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Severus hadn't known that Albus had helped set Lilly Potter up to die, but it did not surprise him that he had and he said as much to Miss Granger.

"Magic is about sacrifice. It can be your sacrifice or it can be someone else's. But for every miracle that magic allows, a price is demanded.

"Everyone knows that you consider divination a fraudulent subject, but that's because the Headmaster does not allow it to be taught as it is traditionally. He has decided not to allow the sacrifices necessary to make our divination department great. All of the great lines of seers share another commonality, and that is abuse. Every last seer there is, has nightmares as well as visions. Severe physical abuse is generally the way to open the door to the future. The way to create a seer is to take a person who has the gift and then break their psyche so badly that their willpower is drained out and the future is evident. The more vivid and concrete the visions are, the more broken the seer."

"But surely that's dark!" Miss Granger's eyes begged him to say that what he was describing was illegal in her beloved adopted world.

He denied her. "How can it be illegal to be broken? And with magic that heals so easily, what evidence is there of abuse? You've said yourself that you never feared physical mutilation on the battle field because almost anything can be fixed. Nobody would ever need to know that you were injured in any way." He sent a grim smile in her direction and thought about his own childhood. And not a single scar anywhere on his body. He shook his head to drive those thoughts from his mind, and continued to speak.

"Objects that can see the future, of course, are perfectly legal. Anyone who has the eye can use tarot cards, they practically see the future for themselves. A practitioner just has to practice for a few decades and get the hang of interpreting them correctly to see the future. Of course, it's so much easier for people who are seers in their own right. They just pick up the correct interpretations. Tea leaves are the same. But crystal is just too dense to carry the future all on it's own. You have to host the future in your own psyche and there isn't room in there for the future and willpower at the same time. Any powerful magic user who had a happy home life is rare. I have never seen a powerful seer who is not a victim of abuse although it is theoretically possible. Many the parent of a seer has announced that their child is the perfect example of that anomaly." He shook his head once more, but this time in true amusement, even if the humor was black.

"Albus knew what he wanted and how to achieve it, and if that was to arrange the suicide of one of his students and then leave her child in an abusive situation that's what he would do. You don't get as powerful as the Headmaster is without being ruthless."

"So you're saying the only way to greatness is to sacrifice others?" Severus could taste the bitterness of Miss Granger's question but was saved from answering by Adam's entrance. He wondered how long his mentor had stood listening at the door to time his entrance so well, but decided against asking.

Adam smiled benignly at them both before crossing over to a chair and settling in and answering Miss Granger's question. "Not at all. Achieving great things, one must make sacrifices, but you can sacrifice yourself sometimes. Now what are you two kids talking about?"

The tense mood was broken and Severus glared at Adam, even knowing it would achieve nothing, and Miss Granger stifled a bark of laughter. Miss Granger, probably to distract attention from her laughter, answered. "We were discussing what it takes to become the acknowledged greatest wizard alive."

"I can answer that for you: luck."

Severus raised an eyebrow. "Luck? I would say ruthlessness."

"Nah." Adam gave a somewhat twisted smile and settled down in a third chair. "Great respect and acclaim is a foolish thing to strive for. It depends not on actions of your own, but on other people's perceptions and those are tricky things to manipulate en masse."

"Then I would think all the best Slytherins would be down in the history books as being the great good guys." Miss Granger put in her two cents worth and seemed to be studiously avoiding looking in Severus' direction. Adam threw an amused glance at Severus to see if he had noticed the subtle ribbing.

"There's no real way to tell how people will react to great achievements. Salazar Slytherin thought he could get his place in the history books as a good guy by discovering the countercurse to Crucio, the only Unforgivable that had been created at that time."

"An impossible task."

"Not impossible at all. He did create it. Cast on someone suffering or about to suffer Crucio, the countercurse protected the person from all the effects. It was even a partial cure for crucio madness, if applied repeatedly at decreasing intervals over the course of a year. "

Both Severus and Miss Granger had straightened in their chairs. Miss Granger was alternating looks of inquiry between Adam and Severus. Severus looked intently at his old mentor and asked, "There's a cure?"

The Longbottoms were not the only people suffering from crucio insanity. If there were a cure, a cure that had existed for over a thousand years, Severus didn't know if he would be relieved to be able to help those people or enraged at the great insult that they had not been cured already. Both. The two reactions were not mutually exclusive after all, he thought.

Adam nodded. "Yes."

"What is it?" Severus still spoke in his most intense voice.

"Unfortunately, if the countercurse was cast on someone who was not suffering from Crucio it gave the recipient a feeling of mindless euphoria that took some practice to throw off, and in a time where muggle religion argued strongly for the necessity of pain and suffering for the soul's good, Salazar's discovery was considered sacrilege.

"He tried to argued that if those wizards with religion wanted to live short, miserable, painful lives, then they should do so out in the muggle world and let the wizarding world separate itself from them and create a world in which problems could be fixed and pain taken away.

"Godric Gryffindor, who was a Templar Knight, a largely muggle organization, argued that any spell that could create such euphoria, no matter what the benefits were, was dangerous. Rumor has it there were some rather heated arguments containing references to the serpent tempting the people of God. Anyway, in the end, Salazar was so worn down by arguments that he took himself off and was seen no more, leaving behind the message that one day his heir would revenge him.

"The other founders went to his study, maybe to keep his notes, maybe to destroy them, but he had taken them all with him."

Severus and Miss Granger stared at Adam, trying to absorb what they had been told. Miss Granger responded first, putting off, for the moment, the concept that there had once been a cure for crucio that had been thrown away. At least now they knew a cure was possible.

"So, Slytherin was really mad at muggles and wizards, and everybody. I understand that. But why did he put off his revenge for a thousand years until "Slytherin's Heir" came? Why not just hurt the people who harmed him, rather than their descendants?"

Adam looked at Severus for a moment but the potions master was obviously still deep in thought. When he did ask a question, Adam knew it would be a pointed one. He would deal with that later. For now, he answered Miss Granger.

"When Slytherin left, he was worn down. He was old and tired, his best friend had betrayed him and he was being called a satanist for trying to help people. He wanted nothing more to do with the wizarding world, not even it's destruction. However before he left he gave a warning to the wizarding world at large. It was not a threat. You might feel more comfortable thinking of it as a prophesy. One day his heir would come and they would rue the day that happened. His heir would not be distinguished by blood, or houses, or parseltongue, but by anger. One day the wizarding world would again wrong one of their own. They would allow muggles to have their way with a wizard rather than protecting him, or her. And that wizard or witch would not be old and tired, but would instead be made strong by their anger and hatred and would attack the wizarding world in turn.

"I've heard the rumors that maybe Harry Potter is truly Slytherin's heir, or maybe even Severus here. But Lord Voldemort is truly Slytherin's Heir, because he knows the anger of having been betrayed by wizards to muggles. The fact that he carries Salazar's blood in his veins is coincidental; he carries Salazar's hatred in his heart."

"Was Salazar Slytherin was a seer then?" Miss Granger was the very image of concentration, obviously trying to put all of this knew information together.

"He didn't need to be a seer to know what would happen. It was inevitable. In a society that is based on betrayal and abuse, it didn't take a seer to say that sometime the wizarding world would betray the wrong wizard. If Godric betrayed Salazar, then it was only a matter of time before such an event happened again. And again. And again. Hundreds of wizards and witches have been harmed, it is only Lord Voldemort who had the understanding and the anger to fight back."

Adam suddenly froze. Severus and Miss Granger pulled themselves from their individual thoughts to looked at him inquiringly but he seemed to be listening for something.

When Adam finally moved, he shifted his chair to be facing the door, and when he spoke is voice was expressionless. "If you spend a thousand years bringing about pain, eventually someone will respond in kind. It doesn't have to be a specific person, it doesn't have to be a specific time, but eventually, someone, somewhere, somewhen, will try to hurt you back."

The door opened and a witch that Severus had never seen before took two steps into the room. She had an aura of power about her, but Severus was used to dealing with powerful wizards and witches. It was not the power or even the feel it had of being slightly unstable, that made him nervous. What made him nervous was the look of ill-suppressed fear and hatred on her face along with the unsheathed sword in her hand.

She stopped right inside the door and was so tense she seemed to vibrate. He desperately wanted to have his wand in his hand but it seemed a poor idea to make any action that could possibly trigger the woman's fight or flight instinct. He sat still in his chair and Adam and Miss Granger in their chairs and none of them did anything for a long drawn out moment. All four of them waited in silence to see what would happen next.

The silence was finally broken by Adam.

"Hello, Cassandra."

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

A/N: I like reviews. Please?