Disclaimer: Characters are the intellectual property of J.K. Rowling
Author's note: First, I have to acknowledge James Herriot, who although I don't allude to at all, provided me with the inspiration for Dumbledore's country house. Second, this is not meant to be a conclusive piece; there is a third part in the works that hopefully should tie up some loose ends. Thanks for reading, and please review :0)
Severus woke up to the sound of rain splattering against the window beside his bed. Groggy and disoriented, for a moment he thought he was back in his old London flat, then the details of the room swam into his consciousness and he remembered the long dark, dark drive from the station with Dumbledore to the lonely little country house he was in now. He remembered begging for help. Looking over at the mechanical alarm clock, he saw it was already late afternoon. Despite his reluctance to leave the warmth of the bed and its piled quilts, a paranoid need to find out about the house drove him to put on his clothes and exit the room. Just outside the door was a note from Dumbledore telling Severus to amuse himself for the day, and that he shouldn't leave the house or there'd be all kinds of hell to pay. Severus tossed the note aside and went into the kitchen, where, he discovered a tearing, gut-growling hunger in his stomach as he looked at all the different kinds of food laid out there. Before long he polished off half a loaf of raisin bread with four different kinds of jam, accompanied by eight cups of tea. After this feast he felt more cheerful than he had in months, and decided to celebrate the sanctuary he had stumbled upon -- after all, he could find himself in Azkaban within the next twenty-four hours.
So, Severus rolled himself a joint and smoked it on a Persian rug in the middle of a room that seemed to serve as the house's library and office. Aside from the rug, the room contained an old-looking desk and chair by a bay window, two floor lamps, several filing cabinets, and many, many books in shelves that lined the walls. Judging from the softness and pleasant smell, the rug probably wasn't a real antique, but it had a wonderful pattern on it that made Severus feel as though he were looking down on miles and miles of rust-coloured mountains, capped with ice palaces, bounded by sand-stone towers and walls, which harbored lush rose gardens between their peaks. Somewhere he had heard that the tradition of white face-paint in Asia began when an explorer went to Europe and returned with tales of ladies whose faces were pale as driven snow. Severus thought of Hamlet's Ophelia, and ran his hand over a Sanskrit phrase, shaped like a tongue of fire, red as blood.
The house was very quiet; his bed upstairs had long gone cold, and he felt a bit uneasy as he imagined it left rumpled and abandoned, each crease and wrinkle put there by the movements of his own body, blind and dreaming, alone in an empty house in the middle of no where. Who had last slept in that bed, and where were they sleeping now, he wondered as goose-bumps spread down his arms.
Severus sat up and became aware of the sound of rain. Drop after drop, hurtling down a dizzying distance, thousands of them, striking the roof in a dark rhythm, like the numbing drone of a crowd in casual conversation, like the babbling of Ophelia's river rushing downstream. He flinched involuntarily.
A distraction was wanted. Was needed. Severus got up and forced himself to read the titles of the books on the shelves. To prevent the words from mindlessly rolling over his eyes, he pronounced them out loud to internalize each of them. Sweet syllables filled up his mouth; these thoughts written by others curbed his loneliness and bounded his mind's wandering. He calmed down and reminded himself that in a matter of hours Dumbledore would return. He fell into the comforting order of the titles and their words.
Then he came across a black book with nothing printed on the spine. Instead of skipping to the next title, he took it off the shelf and opened it. Inside, the pages were covered in Dumbledore's hand-writing and between some of the pages were newspaper clippings dated from the mid-thirties -- photographs of Chamberlain and Hitler; of the Minister of Magic and Grindelwald in conference. There were articles on appeasement from the Daily Prophet with approving comments scribbled on them, also in Dumbledore's hand. A sick, sliding sensation over-came Severus as he skimmed over the book, which had entries ranging from early 1934 to mid 1940. Here, Severus found himself confronted with a man entirely different from the one he had been acquainted with at school; this was not the righteous champion who defeated Grindelwald in an epic battle in 1945. Instead, Severus saw a frightened idealist, scrambling against his own instincts to justify peace even after Anschluss had occurred.
Severus read on, almost pitying this younger Dumbledore who was so changed from the Headmaster he had grown up knowing. Then, shortly before the Munich Crisis would have begun, many pages were ripped out; the next entry was August, 1939, and Dumbledore's tone was now steely and understated. He made bitter jokes about the Nazi-Soviet pact and complained at length about the French for no apparent reason. Whatever disappointments over Munich festered in the missing pages, they had left a miserable human being, seething helplessly at the state of the world around him, a character Severus found altogether quite sympathetic. The last date in the book was June twenty-second, 1940, and it simply said: France is gone. You idiots.
Pulling himself off the floor, Severus felt oddly inspired as he walked on sore knees over to the window. He heaved the thing open on its Edwardian hinges and breathed in the dark, heady scent of the rain, its cold rhythms no longer scared him.
