All Characters are property of J.K Rowling and the Harry Potter Universe. Thankfully, she allows me to borrow them for a bit of fun.
Silhouette
Chapter XII
Shrouded by a particularly strong Disillusionment charm, Severus sat on one of his wooden kitchen chairs in his fenced-in back garden and thought of nothing in particular as he skimmed the latest edition of the Daily Prophet The newspaper crackled in the deep quiet of the early evening when he turned the pages. He had retired to the modest courtyard to take advantage of the unseasonably mild stretch of weather and hoped to find something interesting to ensnare his attention, some Ministry of Magic cock-up or dubious Wizengamot proceedings, but the only thing with any semblance of relevance was an article written by Rita Skeeter about the forthcoming Ministry-planned gala scheduled on the anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts.
Somehow the silly columnist had managed to acquire a copy of not only the planned guest list, but also a register of those individuals that had already returned a response for the invitation. The gala was to be the event of the year, the record of expected attendees reading like the who's who of Wizarding Britain. Harry Potter was the headliner, followed by the surviving members of the Hogwarts staff. Several high-profile families had been invited in their entireties either out of respect for fallen relatives, or the roles the living played: the Longbottoms and the Lovegoods; the Weaselys and the Prewetts; the Scamanders and the Kowalskis; the McLaggens and the MacMillans. The lists went on and on, taking up the nearly a third of the three-page spread.
The Malfoys and Parkinsons and Notts had been noticeably excluded along with every other pure-blood family that had aligned themselves with Lord Voldemort. That was to be expected. Numerous members of those families that held any involvement were either serving lengthy sentences at Azkaban or awaiting to stand trial for their war crimes. Those not incarcerated or arraigned had hidden themselves away from the scandal in what Rita had dubbed as a desperate effort to save their own skins and reputations.
Severus's own name was noticeably absent from the roster as well, though that was of his own doing and not an underhanded Ministry slight. His scroll was still where he had left it, sitting on the mantel above his fireplace in the event he finally decided to be rid of it. The only reason he had not watched it turn to ash was due in large part to Adelaide Harlowe. She had simply told him to wait, to give himself the chance to genuinely consider the notion of attending once the publicity surrounding his discharge from St. Mungo's had ebbed, and he had.
Skeeter had thankfully not offered much commentary on his nonattendance except to confirm that the invitation had been sent and presumably received. Instead, she chose to focus a solid portion of her editorial exposé on another and considerably more high-profile absentee—Hermione Granger.
Severus frowned at the paper and read the annotation again:
Conspicuous by its absence is the RSVP of Hermione Granger, one third of the so-called "Golden Trio" lauded for their heroism in the war. Many are speculating as to the motivation behind Ms. Granger's reluctance to attend, although she has been romantically linked to both Harry Potter and Ronald Weasley in the past, so perhaps there are still some old feelings there that Ms. Granger would like to avoid. Sources have told this reporter, however, that Ms. Granger is in fact currently out of country living in a Muggle village in France and has been since suffering a nervous breakdown brought on by her newfound celebrity. While Potter and Weasley have embraced the spotlight, it seems that Ms. Granger's delicate shoulders have been unable to bear its weight...
He had to laugh at the sheer ludicrousness of it but forced himself to keep it slight and quiet. Had she read it? Severus had no doubt that she had—Hermione had been the first to tell him about the Prophet article written about himself. It was natural to assume she was the sort that kept up with news.
Not that this is considered news, he thought, giving the remainder of the article a cursory glance before moving on to the Letters to the Editor section. Still, what he would have given to see the look on Hermione Granger's face…
Two houses down a grey-haired Muggle woman had emerged from her backdoor and started to quarrel quite loudly with an unwanted guest that had found its way into her garden. Severus watched as a shabby yellow-eyed cat catapulted itself over the rock wall and just out of reach of the broom the woman had brandished. It scuttled down the shared stone parapet of row houses and hopped down to hide in the corner of his private courtyard, completely unaware that it was not alone.
Severus considered lifting the Disillusionment charm but stopped just shy of allowing the words to leave his mouth. The Muggle was still going on about overturned flowerpots and uprooted bulbs, and with each word she flung at no one in particular, the cat shrank back closer to the wall, its ears pinned close to its head.
He had never been overly fond of cats. Working directly with a woman that could turn herself into one whenever she felt like it was partly to blame, but in truth it was because cats were the sort of creatures that could not be reasoned with. A cat would simply do what a cat wished to do, and that was the end of it. However, as he sat there, watching the dirty ginger thing try to draw back and disappear into the stone, he felt a savage pang of empathy.
Since he had come home to Spinner's End, he had been casually observing it. Clearly a stray, he had said to himself some weeks back when he noticed it sniffing at the rubbish bins. He had chucked the remnants of his dinner out the kitchen window that night and watched as hunger overrode its desire to remain invisible. Severus noticed himself identifying the animal, as he himself also preferred to isolate himself whenever possible, only opening himself up to interaction with others when absolutely necessary.
It was nearing a month since his contentious release from St. Mungo's and he was still struggling with getting through the day without going stir-crazy from the monotony, but also maintaining the distance he desperately craved. Even still, the much larger conundrum of deciphering what was supposed to come next in his life loomed in the back of his mind like a malignant shadow. It bothered him, like someone had given him a puzzle to work that was missing the pieces that held the whole thing together...
The cat, sensing the immediate threat had been neutralized, began to preen in earnest to clean away the potting soil clinging to its back leg. Severus caught himself wondering what the point of keeping with the pretense was considering its current situation and frowned. The explanation was a simple one: the cat was blindly driven by instinct to better itself, and Severus for all his reasoning did not have the slightest inclination of how to do that for himself. It was riling.
Annoyed, he folded his paper and traded it for the wand in his back pocket. He pointed it at the animal, thinking of what he wanted the spell to do and let the magic do the rest. The cat did not care for the sudden invisible surge of energy that surrounded it and hissed, hackles raised. Despite its rather theatrical reaction, the effect was almost immediate. The dirt and grime disappeared, the burnt orange colour of its fur becoming brighter and more iridescent in the evening light. The matted hair around its midsection and tail relaxed then expanded, making the cat appear less wild, like it had meat on its bones. Severus smirked and left the clean but confused feline to its own devices to prep the supper he was looking forward to.
Prior to retreating to his garden, he had puttered around the house most of the day, tending to the general tidying of the place, but that only took up so much time. As far as Hermione Granger's N.E.W.T. project was concerned the proverbial quaffle was at her end of the Quidditch pitch, and while the potioneer in him wanted to scratch away at the surface she had lain and do his own digging, the teacher in him would not stand for the interference. He recalled the last thing she had said to him almost five days previously about having a potential lead but had heard nothing from her since.
With nothing to occupy his time and the incessant need to do something calling to him like a siren song, he had popped down to the shops in the respectable part of Cokeworth on a whim. He walked through the streets totally unladen by the threat of being noticed. There he was a nobody with all the benefits. This newfound freedom led him to leisurely peruse the cases in the fishmonger shop he happened to come by. There was plenty of food in the cupboards, but he found himself buying several tins of tuna and two healthy sized filets of haddock on impulse.
Severus turned on the hob and pulled two knubby potatoes from the canister on the counter, remembering the trip home with just his haddock and his thoughts. He missed a turn on his way back and found himself walking down a recently developed street, full of sparklingly new row houses. The smell of fresh paint and newness lingered in the air like a delicate perfume, faint but definitely there. The windows of the houses still had the manufacturing stickers stuck to them and the stone facades were immaculately fresh. Bright yellow realtor signs dotting the lawns here there caught his attention next; all of them were on the market or had sales pending.
The same wild thought that came to him as he passed the new houses came to Severus again as his half-muttered spell sliced through both vegetables with absurd precision. It was ridiculous—surely it was?
He had spent his life trying to run from everything that reminded him of his past and all of its inadequacies, all of it ordinary and unremarkably Muggle, and now he found himself looking back at what had he left in a desperate attempt to bring balance to his life; tempted by biscuit-cutter mediocrity of all things. Or perhaps, the devil on his shoulder whispered, you're not suited for either one.
Severus pushed the thought away and focused on his dinner. It really was stupid, a pipe dream even… He dropped the slender cuts of potato in the shimmering cooking fat and recoiled, thinking some of the hot grease had had splashed back on him when the pain shot through his hand and down his wrist. He was certain he had managed to scald himself until he heard the thin whine of his frame.
"I hope I'm not intruding," said Adelaide. "I know I'm a little earlier than usual."
He winced, flexing his fingers subtly, and spoke to her without turning from his chips. "You're fine."
"I see it's supper time." Her tone was conversational and easy. "What's on the menu this evening?"
"Fish and chips."
"And the old-fashioned way, very authentic."
"You mean the Muggle way?" he said over his shoulder.
Adelaide held her hands up as if expecting some sort of rebuke, but it was all in jest if her grin was any indication. "I'm not criticizing. I was never good with Household magic. It's convenient—don't get me wrong—but I have always preferred to do that sort of stuff myself. You'll probably find this ridiculous, but I've always thought you could taste the magic when you used it, like an ingredient has been left out by mistake."
Severus knew exactly what she meant but had never heard anyone explain it that way before. "Naturally when someone uses magic in food preparation it leaves traces," he said. "They're very subtle traces, mind you, but they are there." With a slow, sweeping motion upward with his hand the golden-brown slices of potatoes rose from the oil and hovered over the pot to drain. "The residue tends to be less noticeable when a person is more proficient with domestic charms, so it would make sense why you'd taste a slight difference in your cooking."
"Do you taste it in your own food?" she asked him.
Severus thought on this as he retrieved the filets and prepped them for the oil. "I'm used to my own food so I can't say that I would notice, but I could taste it when my mother cooked for me as a child. I always blamed the lack of flavour on my father because he was study in dullness, so naturally he would be opposed to anything that wasn't as unremarkable as he was, but it was really a fault of hers. She could have followed the recipe line for line and it still wouldn't have come out exactly right because the spell work was weak."
The kitchen was beginning to get stuffy, and magical being or not, there was only so much a person could do to save crispy batter from humidity. He flicked his wand at the kitchen door and it cracked open to let some of the heat escape.
"You're very practical with your preparation, just enough magic to keep it convenient without changing the motions."
Severus smiled a little. "I prefer to work with my hands." That was the truth, always had been. It was a habit that had been hard to break during his first year at Hogwarts given that all of his previous experiences of magic had been done without the aid of a wand. He was categorically lethal and just as precise with a wand when the situation called for it and shared a special bond with the thing since the day it picked him all those years ago, but some things he preferred to do without its help. It was not a coincidence that he had been drawn to Potions above everything else—no foolish wand-waving or silly incantations...
Behind him Adelaide made an odd noise. Severus broke free from his thoughts and glanced from the fish frying on the hob to see the orange cat had found its way into the kitchen. The beast had taken particular interest to the floating frame but had not plucked up the courage to give it a proper inspection.
"I didn't know you had a cat."
"I don't have a cat," Severus deadpanned. "I made the mistake of leaving a tin of tuna out in the garden, and now it won't leave." He did not mention the fact that he had not put forth considerable effort to make it leave, nor that he had been forgetting tins in the garden for the better part of week now, but that was beside the point.
"Well he seems to think he's your cat."
Severus gave her a look. "How do you know it's a he?"
"Just a guess—most orange tabbies tend to be male. Nothing saying that one there isn't an anomaly, but it doesn't exactly have statistics on its side."
Fair enough, he thought and left it alone. Severus transferred his food to a plate and sat down at the table, falling into the nightly routine they shared; each at their own kitchen tables or sitting rooms depending on the time, the unknown but probable distance between them reduced to the thickness of the glass in either of their enchanted pictures frames.
Sometimes it was easy to forget that she was not sitting directly in front of him.
He ate while she busied herself with making a pot of tea. The conversation was casual, mostly her letting him talk, but asking enough open-ended questions to keep him going without being pushy. It was not until he made it to his trip to Cokeworth that he noticed a change in her attitude. There was something about the way her eyes studied him as he spoke, and they had done this sort of thing enough over the last month for him to know what that look meant. He was not going to like whatever it was she was thinking of saying.
"Spit it out," he told her finally. "We both know you'll do it one way or another. You might as well get it over with."
"Do you really want my opinion?"
"Not particularly, but I have a feeling I'm about to get it anyway."
"Please don't take this the wrong way," she said, both of them knowing full-well that he would do just that. Adelaide took a deep breath. "I'm not trying to diminish what you did today, but to me it, it seems like you're going through the motions without really trying."
"Two weeks ago I could barely stand the thought of leaving this house, and now when I do, it's going through the motions. What exactly do you want me to do, Adelaide?"
"Interact, and not just out of necessity. Sure, you went out today on your own, but you picked somewhere you could make yourself invisible. You keep saying that you're disliked, but how can you expect people to have any opinion if someone isn't there at all?"
"What does that mean?" Severus stabbed a few chips moodily with his fork but did not eat them. They were not talking about taking a leisurely romp into town anymore.
"You know exactly what it means," Adelaide said. Inside her frame, he watched as she spooned a generous portion of honey into a cup of tea, utterly unaffected. "All I'm saying is that you don't give people the chance to like you, even when the offer is extended."
"I can't control how others perceive me or my intentions."
"I agree with you there, but that's not what I said. You can't control other people, but you can control the occasions and situations you place yourself in." She took a drawn-out sip of her tea, then said, "Like the Ministry Gala for instance."
"The Ministry Gala?" Severus repeated. That and thrown him.
"Yes, the Gala," sighed Adelaide. "It's just one example, but don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about because deep down I think you do. Your invitation is still where you left it."
What was left of the fish and chips sitting in front of him no longer held its original appeal. Severus pushed his plate away from him and sat back in his chair. "I don't have any intention of going," he said at last, returning to the central point of the ridiculous conversation. "Not that I have to explain myself to you."
"But you've not thrown the invitation away."
"What's your point?" he muttered, frowning determinedly at her frame. Beneath the table, the cat coiled around his ankle.
"My point is that you say you have no intention of going, but you have yet to set your plans of not going in stone by either replying no or simply tossing it in the bin and being done with it. You need to ask yourself why that is."
The heaviness he had not realised was sitting in his chest slid down to his stomach. "You were the one that told me to wait. Now you want me throw it aw—"
"You're splitting hairs with the stupid scroll," she told him emphatically. "It's you I'm talking about. I want you to stop holding yourself back and live the life you finally have."
"The life I finally have?" Severus stood up abruptly, catching himself on the edge of the table as he did so. "You call living alone in the poverty-stricken Muggle neighborhood and this pit a life? The two people that ever gave a shit about me, or at least pretended to, are gone because of me. Look around you. I have no career to speak of, and a pitiful reputation that haunts me when the dead have had their fill. Some fucking life that is, so forgive me if I'm not overly appreciative."
Humiliated, furious, and thoroughly flayed open, Severus sat heavily in the chair, pinching his eyes shut to bar the incipient tension headache building in his temple. The cat approached nervously, and he snapped at it, only to feel guilty as it retreated a prudent distance away.
"Severus—"
"Don't." He held up a hand only to let it fall in the same breath. "Just don't."
For all of her acuity, Severus wondered how Adelaide could possibly imagine that his life was anything but a disaster. He had become proficient in dissembling, and in quick moments of lapse that was sufficient. In recent days, however, he had becoming uncomfortably aware that those same moments were growing into hours when left unchecked, when he allowed himself to ruminate It was starting to get tiresome and more frequent than it had been when he was trapped at St. Mungo's. Nearly every time he thought he had found solid footing beneath the crushing current of the monotony and guilt and resentment, he would go to place his feet only to find nothing there at all but the empty, inky darkness of uncertainty and disappointment.
"I wasn't trying to—" Adelaide tried again, her tone quiet, cautious.
"How am I supposed to do this?" he said, hating the incriminating, weak-willed words as they left him. Severus felt suddenly foolish. He had thought of this moment, of finally saying what he longed to say, consequences be damned, and now it was over, and he did not feel the weight lift from his shoulders for having done it. "Tell me how I'm supposed to be content or at the very least sane."
There was a shocked—perhaps pensive—silence. Adelaide opened her mouth and closed it again. Finally, she said, "Everybody goes through hard times. That's life. There are times that make us question our value as a person because we're blinded by frustration or dissatisfaction or loneliness or whatever we're dealing with, and it's easy to get consumed by it and forget to see the good. You have to remember to seek out the good despite that stupid self-deprecating voice in your head telling you that you don't deserve to see it."
Severus jerked his shoulders in an unsatisfied shrug. "Tell me how I do that," he said, then added somewhat unfairly, "That's what you're here for, apparently."
"I'm not here to tell you how to live," Adelaide said slowly, sounding almost plaintive. "And if I'm being perfectly honest, it's not likely that you'd listen to me if I tried."
"Trite but accurate," Severus said, looking as though he would have liked to relax. His annoyance was gone, sheathed temporarily beneath her light-hearted jab.
"It's almost like I know you," Adelaide said.
Severus cast a sidelong glance at the orange cat in the corner, snapping his fingers to catch its attention. When it made no effort to engage, he focused on the girl in the frame. "Except you don't."
"I know more than what you think," she told him. "Believe it or not, I've had myself thrown into several situations where I've had to become an expert on a rather short notice."
"As I've told you before, you're not nearly as preceptive as you think you are, Miss Harlowe—"
"I know you are stubborn perhaps to a fault," Adelaide quipped. "I know that you have a terrible aversion for asking for help, though I can't figure out if that's because of the stubbornness or if you're afraid of what lies beneath asking for help—the vulnerability, the possibility of rejection. Appearing weak..."
He could feel her watching him carefully as the words hung in the air like a dark shadow, but Severus said nothing, instead focusing on the ringing of his own pulse in his ears. How many times had she tried to bring up this same subject before? How many times had he put her back in her place? He was not sure he could muster the courage to fight her anymore, or that he even wanted to. Somewhere deep inside the hair-thin crack she had managed to make when they had first met widened, the proverbially bricks eroding away.
And still she persisted, the frame floating forward a fraction as if to punctuate her point. "I know that you can't let things go. You hold on to the past like it's a life line, but you can't see that it's an anchor dragging you down. I don't know if it's because you thought you had a purpose back then when you were caught between both sides, or if you think you don't deserve to have any happiness in your life because of the things you had to do to stay between both sides. And while we're on that subject, you don't trust people, or you don't know how. That's another mystery I can't figure out—"
"That's enough," Severus snapped.
But she rode right over him. "Is it? Because you're still not listening. You're not invisible to me, Severus. Or anybody else. No matter how much you try to pretend or tell yourself that you're this impenetrable fortress or statue or however you see yourself. I can't help you if you won't help yourself."
"Help myself," he repeated, his features twisting as though she had slapped him across the face. It was like watching a dirty cat lick itself all over again while he sat there losing his mind trying to kickstart his own instincts. "You think I don't realise what a miserable bastard I am, Adelaide? Fuck you."
He knew the moment he lashed out that he was out of line, but so was she. Severus stood from the table and began to place the dirty supper dishes in the sink, desperate for space.
"And there he is," Adelaide said in a tone that he found shockingly condescending and argumentative, as if she had drifted into the territory of deliberate boorishness on purpose. "Woe-is-me-Severus, constantly feeling sorry for himself."
Severus let the plate fall into the sink. The sound of it clanking around reverberated through the tension. He wanted to explode, could feel himself slipping down that dangerous slope of self-righteous release. There had only ever been a handful of instances in his life that he had been so overpowered by such a desire to allow the seething rage to flow unbridled and none of them had been particularly fond experiences. Still, it was a strange feeling, consuming and cloyingly satisfying. In the span of a breath he could do it. His body stiffened, like a spring wound much too tight, hands trembling in response. "Excuse me?"
"You heard me."
The tea cup connected with the wall just above the Silhouette frame and shattered. Cold tea and tea-stained fragments of aged ceramic rained down on the hardwood floor, and then blasted outward as if picked up and flung by an invisible gale. The air around Severus Snape pulsated as his pent-up anger broke free and manifested itself through his magic. He was keenly aware of the fine hairs on his neck and arms standing on end, channeling the current.
In her frame Adelaide remained unflinching rigid, and when he saw her the meager dam holding the true torrent of his bitterness and resentment burst alongside the windows in his kitchen. The sound should have been deafening, but Severus could hear nothing above the white-noise in his head. The force of the implosion caused the Silhouette portrait to wobble preciously but it remained upright and within his field of vision, no doubt out of great effort from its occupant. The cat was somewhere yowling.
"Severus, stop—"
"No!" he roared at her. "You don't get to demand a god damned thing from me. You sit in your frame and you sermonize your philosophical horseshit about hardships and life, but you don't have a clue!" His hands went to his head, as if to pull every horrible thing out as evidence to prove his point. "Have you ever had to watch people around you die because of the decisions you've made or didn't make? Do you know what it feels like to feel paranoia every waking second of your life, wondering if one wrong move could send everything spiraling out of control? You can't begin to understand what I carry—"
"Then tell me!" Adelaide shouted, and for the first time Severus felt her anger lash out like a whip.
The next thing he knew he was on the floor with shards of tea cup and brittle windowpane digging into his palms. Severus could feel the inevitable sob building in his chest, threatening to break free and label him as the coward he was. He hated it. "I have all of this horrible shit inside of me, but I don't have the slightest clue how to pour it out before it drowns me." He closed his eyes and spoke the truth he had never dared to confess to anyone. "God, help me. I don't know if I'll survive this."
"Don't you see?" Adelaide said. "That's the problem. What you're doing—all you are doing—is surviving."
Severus felt a deep stab of renewed anger at the effortlessness of her analysis, and he wanted to snap back with something suitably withering in response, but he found the truth hidden in what she said prevented it entirely. I'm fucking miserable, he thought, staring at the glass beneath his hands. And I have been for a long, long time.
He rocked back on his heels and came to sit amongst the remnants of his blasted kitchen window with his back against the sink cupboard. Severus tasted bitterness in the back of his throat as his eyes stung with the childish urge to cry. "It's strange," he said finally, not caring if she heard the slight quiver or the exhaustion in his voice. "For the last ten years or so of my life, I have thought about this moment. Not exactly this, and certainly not you," he continued, looking around at the new mess he had made, "but the moment when I would finally acknowledge what I've always felt instead of pretending it wasn't there, but…"
"It doesn't feel any different?" Adelaide offered, after a stretched, stunned pause.
"It's worse." Severus looked up at her, uncertain of whether or not this revelation was something to proud of or if should have been shared at all.
"How is it worse?" Adelaide asked, the question genuine. Her frame had drifted down into his field of vision. There was no where to hide anymore. No point in it.
"It's heavier." His words came slow, but not unwilling. It was absurd, sitting cross-legged on his kitchen floor, pouring his heart—or what was left of it—out for her, but that was the way with things that fell apart. They never quite went back together exactly the same as they were before. "Recognizing it—nothing changes, but it's accentuated. The fact that no matter where I go, no matter what I do, I will always have to take myself with me."
"You just need to figure out how to take the best parts of you along," Adelaide said. They would have been wise words had her tone not suggested she had no idea how to do exactly that. "You can't change the past. You can't bring anyone back, but you can fix yourself."
"Your optimism is a constant comfort," Severus muttered. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the cat had emerged again and was sitting in the kitchen doorway, regarding him in a supercilious manner. That figures, he thought, as if he needed another soul casting judgment in this very instance. He closed his eyes, feeling hot and sick to his stomach, and leaned his head against the cupboard.
"Sarcasm aside, you have to know that I'm right. If you can't let go of the past, the mistakes you've made, the people you've lost, it'll eat you alive."
Severus made no reply. He was already having problems forgiving himself for not realising what he was doing to himself sooner, but hearing someone else—a complete fucking stranger he did not know existed three weeks prior— spout the same dose of truth Augusta Barnes used to beat him over the head with for nine months carried a different significance this time. It was a lot less clinical and sterile. For some godforsaken reason, he marveled, it was personal, and it hurt coming from Adelaide Harlowe.
He wanted to feel angry because it was easy and familiar, but now, as he sat there in silence surrounded by the shards of broken glass and pride, all he felt was shame. As if he had sat back and willingly allowed himself to get into such a state of malcontent on purpose. Severus tried to think of when his life had changed, when he had noticed the subtle shift in his psyche had occurred, and each time he came to the same conclusion. It was that he had lived when others had not.
It was not the grief of having lost people, that felt decidedly different, like a hollow spot that could be shrunken with time. It was the guilt that he, a man branded, had finally been dealt a playable hand in the proverbial game of life when others had been forced to fold. He supposed he should have been grateful, and some days he truly was, but this was the sort of trauma that defied all logic. Augusta had called it Survivor's Guilt, as if attaching a shiny, generic label to what he was experiencing was supposed to make it all disappear.
"When I finally woke up," Severus said, finding his voice at last, "I had been unconscious for nearly four months, almost seventeen weeks. The attending Healer that day asked me what my name was. I couldn't tell him." He opened his eyes to see Adelaide and the cat orange staring at him, but quickly averted his gaze to his hands in his lap. "I wasn't that I couldn't speak, not that that alone wasn't a challenge because my throat had been all but ripped to shreds, but it was because I honestly didn't know."
"I can't even begin to imagine," said Adelaide. Her voice sounded as strained as he felt, but Severus knew if he looked at her, saw the expression she undoubtedly had on her face, he would not be able to go on with what he intended to say.
"I think back to that time and realise that should have scared me, because it scares me now to know that my mental faculties had suffered just as much as my physical condition. I have never had a lot, as you can clearly see," he continued, gesturing halfheartedly, "but I have always had my wits about me. It should have scared me, but it didn't. What scared me was the same recurring dream of a giant snake. Every time I saw it, it was always the same vision of this snake coiling around itself, primed to tear my throat out, but at the last minute it would change course and viciously strike down someone else. At first, they didn't have faces, just a vague silhouette of someone I knew that my subconscious would try to cough up each night. As the weeks passed and my memory began to improve the figures lost their anonymity and started to grow their faces and find their voices. I would come to in a panic because I confused my own sweat for their blood."
Severus paused, choosing his words carefully to spare her the mental image of people being torn apart. The immense feeling of weariness he felt wash over him had nothing to do with the imaginary carnage he had endured, but rather what he knew it meant.
"All of them, sometimes dozens of them each night, were all of the people I could not help, for whatever reason," Severus heard himself say, suddenly feeling separated from his body. He had never told anyone this, and now that it was happening, it was almost surreal. "I couldn't save them, yet they would plead with me to do something. They would die, gasping for air, and I would wake only to realise that sound wasn't a figment of some fever dream, but me trying to remember to breathe."
"You couldn't save everybody," Adelaide said. It was not hard to see she was struggling to find the right words to say, but unlike Adelaide, Severus knew she would never find them, not because she lacked the vocabulary but rather the life experience capable of guiding them into place.
"And therein lies the problem." Severus frowned, stretching out his legs. He contemplated the kitchen chair but could not rouse the effort to move. "Your assumption of my character can be neither black nor white. It's not that simple, I'm afraid. My involvement in the Dark Lord's second coming was a series of both action and inaction, carefully orchestrated to maintain my position as a double agent. I have done things I am ashamed of, but it is what I did not do that demands a much heavier toll. Those pleas in my dreams, those were not a fantasy," he said, hoping the deliberate cadence in his tone made the point. "Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you, Adelaide?"
"Do you still have this nightmare?" Adelaide asked after a long, drawn out silence. Her voice was hushed, a little more than a whisper, but perfectly audible in the stillness of the kitchen. He could have sworn he saw her eyes flash briefly to the faded Dark Mark on his forearm.
"Yes." He had been expecting this question, but he had not anticipated his own confession to blindside him. Severus opened his mouth to elaborate, but closed it just as quickly, the words dissolving into mist. He looked away, as if to usher what he meant to say into place, and his eyes came to rest upon the cat, who was still sitting sentry at a cautious distance. It regarded him in a passive sort of way before deciding Severus' undivided attention was all the invitation it needed to approach. He extended his hand as a metaphorical olive branch of sorts, and the cat humored him for its own benefit as all cats did. Beneath tufts of orange fur and the bony protuberances of vertebrae along its spine, Severus felt the steady vibrations of a satisfied purr not yet audible and found himself asking if he really going to do this.
"It's evolved," he went on, answering his own silent question.
Adelaide regarded him pensively. The wheels and cogs were turning behind her blue eyes, that he was certain of, and he decided that it was not imperative for her to know that he had left out the bit about him now being the one that delivered the fatal blow and not that fucking snake.
"The nuances remain," Severus added as somewhat of an afterthought hoping it would be enough. He watched as the cat grew displeased with the half-hearted petting and sauntered off to sit beneath the kitchen table and lick itself—the irony of it almost made him laugh aloud.
Adelaide considered this, then said: "Have you tried to medicate with Dreamless Sleep?"
"They tried that in the beginning when they realised I was a danger to myself, but that made it worse. It had something to do with venom being a contraindication…" Severus trailed off, neatly dodging the suggestion. Perhaps there was no longer a reason not to try it again considering his body had long since burned up all the poison the snake had filled him with. It would have been impossible to count the number of times he had taken it prior his final confrontation with the Dark Lord. Severus dismissed the notion just as quickly as it had come, a small blip of possibility, there and gone. A potion was not the answer, it was a temporary fix meant to shroud what he wished to forget. He looked to the frame to tell her precisely that, but she was staring at him in such a way that set off a clamor of internal alarm bells.
"You were a danger to yourself." Adelaide repeated, as if she had heard the words in a foreign language. It was not entirely a question, but it carried all of the weight of a critical one.
It was not a surprise that was all she latched onto. Normally he would have considered that sort of comment as a slight against his character, but he had already done that enough to himself for the day and chose to tell her the truth instead. "If you're trying to ask me if I'm—if I was suicidal the answer was and still is no. I'm simply miserable. There's a difference." When she made no reply to that, he went on:
"I would wake in a frenzy, and as a result there were some instances where those outbursts, though unintentional, would result in serious discharge of defensive wandless magic. My fits coupled with magic that tends to be unpredictable by its nature alone wasn't a combination ideal for me or anyone in my vicinity. The draught was meant to take the edge off, except the more Dreamless Sleep they dosed me with, the worse it became. I refused everything they offered me after that if it was stronger than Pepperup."
There was another bloated pause filled only by the sound of the white curtain flapping in the nighttime breeze, like a bird trapped in a net.
"I wish I could snap my fingers and take it all away," Adelaide admitted. "At the very least, I wish I knew what to say to make this easier for you."
"I don't need for you to say anything, but I do need for you to recognize that this is not just a part of myself that I can disassemble and toss in the bin whenever the notion strikes. Navigating whatever this is is going to take time, probably longer than we'll find ourselves tethered together." Severus sighed, then, taking a page out of Hermione Granger's book, said: "With that in mind, and what I've told you tonight, I would very much appreciate it if you wouldn't treat me as if I'm fragile, or broken, or whatever. I can't stand it."
"I can do that," she said. He believed her and could feel an unmistakable expression of relief cross his face that proved to him that he believed her. It left him breathless; he had forgotten what it had felt like to have faith in someone. "Can you promise me something in return?"
"I'll try," he said.
"Don't resent me. I said some things tonight that were out of line and I feel wretched for it. I wasn't trying to lessen or poke fun at what you feel, but I needed you to see that what you were doing to yourself before it was too late, and you shut me out again."
God, what an enigma, he thought. He had blown to pieces and she was the one asking for forgiveness. He wanted to tell her that he could never hate her, even when he tried, he simply could not do it. It had only been a month, but she had managed—when no one else could—to capture him in the irresistible gravitational pull of her sincerity. It mattered very little how much turmoil he was in because her orientation never wavered, just like the stupid frame hovering in front of his face that simultaneously brought them together but kept them apart. He wanted to tell her that he needed her, but instead Severus dusted the glass from his trouser legs as he stood, wincing at the stiffness in his muscles and said, his voice was calm and level, "Okay."
"We'll figure it out," Adelaide said. "You just wait." She was smiling again. It was not the sort of smile of a person who feels what she was seeing was foolish or impossible, Severus thought, but rather someone who had just stumbled upon something presumed lost.
It was a step in the right direction. It had to be.
Author's Notes: It's been a while, folks. Happy reading to all.