Twenty-Six: Inari to Hogwarts
Albus was fighting to keep the words in, Severus could tell. But, like a lit fuse, they were coming, now or later—and Severus would prefer them now. So, he pushed.
'You will not have full control over what happens to the boy. That must be a blow to your ego, but it is hardly—'
'Hardly what, Severus?' Albus turned on him, eyes alight with flame. 'Hardly the worst conclusion to this farce, perhaps. But should a war come prematurely, should extreme and immediate measures need to be taken, I will be left helpless—though I suppose you have made it quite plain you do not care about the war, so I am likely wasting my breath—'
'I have never said so—'
'Let us return to what you do care about, then! If I put your name forward as guardian, the committee will naturally wish to look into your background. And they need only look at the first file from the top of the stack to conclude no one in their right mind would give you the child.'
'You've told me I could have him—'
'Clearly, I am not of sound mind, am I then, Severus? To have watched you go against me in such a way, and then forgive it all? None of this would have happened had you not brought down the wards at Privet Drive, shedding doubt on my very ability to determine the safest placement for the boy!'
'If I hadn't brought the wards down, you would have sent him back!'
'You purport to care for the boy's comfort, Severus, and yet you promise him again things that are not yours to give. It has never crossed my mind that you would be so thoughtless as to tell him until the trial was concluded.'
'That is entirely beside the point—'
But it wasn't. Through the shock and the anger, through the tightening of his throat every time Albus raised his voice, through the sweat breaking out on his face, Severus felt the weight of what has happened descend on him, the sum of the choices he had made, each a mistake, a miscalculation, selfish and stupid and disastrous—he couldn't breathe.
'I could still—I could still go to Lucius,' he managed, half to himself, not really knowing what he was saying; he needed this to stop, he needed Albus to fix it, and if not Albus, then he was going to have to fix it himself. 'If I tell him what you—perhaps he could appeal. If the Ministry uncovers the abuse, the jury might reconsider who has the boy's best interests in mind.'
He couldn't look Albus in the eye.
'You would do that, Severus?' he asked softly, and it cut deeper than anything he'd said before. 'You would put the future of the wizarding world at risk, just so you could have your fantasy?'
He didn't answer.
He heard him walk across the room, until the steps fell off in the doorway. He would have had one hand on the door jamb, wanting to leave but unable: Severus knew the feeling.
'If you wish to take the reins, Severus,' he said, 'then you must learn to take some responsibility.'
Severus was alone after that. The fire grew duller by the minute; it needed feeding. No one in their right mind would give him the child. They shouldn't, either: what on Earth had he been thinking, to promise the boy a home with no guarantee he could deliver? There'd been an if to the promise, of course, but it had been a specious if that went unheard and unacknowledged. Perhaps he'd known all along he couldn't deliver. Perhaps he'd selfishly wanted to play at it for a while, like Harry's pretend game of servants. Perhaps he'd done this knowing and regardless. Perhaps that was who he was, in the end.
He leaned forward over his knees, like a man punched in the stomach. His arms trembled. He had the paranoid sense that the skull in the Dark Mark was looking at him, that it was pleased. The last twenty-four hours had been a web of poor choices, but here, on his arm, here was the poorest of them all: repulsive, resentful, never satisfied. If he hadn't taken it, he could have kept his promises. That night he'd told Lucius yes, that dinner when he sat next to Valerian, the day he first allowed Lamotte to smile at him—they had taken everything from him and they would take it again and over, for the rest of his life, and of course this new fantasy was just that, just as Albus had understood. Just like Lily, it was nothing, it was a fairy tale, it was a story he told himself to fall asleep at night. A fool duped by his own lie.
The doorstep creaked under a new weight: lighter than Albus, more hesitant. Severus was surprised Leeni and Kauko had managed to restrain him that long.
'Sit down,' he told the boy, dread like a hot mass straining against the confines of his chest.
The sofa gave a whine. This was the time to take responsibility.
He couldn't do it.
'I can't stay with you, can I?'
His voice was soft as the flutter of eyelashes. It near doubled Severus down.
'No,' he said. 'You can't.'
He forced himself to look at him. The boy gave a nod, like Severus had just told him the time.
'You have to understand that—'
'No, don't explain. It doesn't matter.' He shrugged. 'I knew it would never actually happen anyway.'
He said it without any feeling at all, breezy business, eyes limber.
And then, he folded over himself, hid his face between his knees, clutched at his stomach, and started crying.
Severus moved to the sofa, unsteady on his own feet. He reached out to rub his back, stroke his hair, something, disgusted with himself—he had no right at all to come near him, but—
The boy jerked away.
'Don't touch me!' he shouted. Screamed.
'I'm sorry,' Severus said hollowly. It meant nothing.
Harry swallowed his next sob. 'I have to use the bathroom,' he announced.
Severus followed him out of the room, his own measured steps like an affront to the rushed panic of Harry's sprint. The bathroom door banged shut, the lock clicked. He could hear the boy through the wood, sliding onto the tile, shuffling into himself, trying and failing to smother the sobs in the folds of his shirt. Severus sat on the first stair, with a good view of the bathroom door, and listened mindlessly as the boy drove himself to hysterics.
Another door screeched. Voices drifted through the house, then footsteps. They seemed to him to have come from some other world. Albus was probably leaving. Severus tried to find it in himself to care.
He'd stopped a foot away, in the shadow of the armoire.
'Do you know when they might decide on where to send him?' Severus asked him dully.
'Hopefully, they will have staffed the committee by the end of the week. I will push for sending Harry to the Weasleys as an interim measure—it should be easy enough to secure as much.'
Severus nodded, like a man under Imperius. 'Good.'
'Bring Harry back to Hogwarts tomorrow morning. I will speak with him then.'
Severus nodded again.
Some time after Albus left, Harry emerged from the bathroom, red-faced and wrung out. He pushed past Severus without sparing him a glance, then hid away upstairs. Severus considered reassuming watch by the ladder to the attic, but then Kauko came and told him to go wait in the kitchen, so he did.
Leeni stayed with him, demonstrably to keep him company but demonstrably poor at it: she read her magazine, she sipped her tea, she ignored his turmoil and his silent presence. The radio wheezed its tunes, each of them entirely wrong in the circumstances. The sun dipped, and dipped some more, and finally fell into the lake. Mosquitoes buzzed above the leftover chocolate cake, drying at the edges.
Kauko came down a few times over the course of the night. She never said anything and she never looked at Severus. Or was it that Severus didn't look at her? She would fetch whatever it was she'd come for: a glass of water, a slice of cake, an extra blanket or some tea or a cold compress, and then disappear back into the darkness of the house, where Severus couldn't go.
He thought this must have been the longest night of his life, rivalled perhaps only by the night when Lily died. He'd thought it, and then suddenly dawn was breaking: in Inari, even the deepest despair could not keep out the sun.
It became obvious now that they were not going to sleep at all, so Leeni made coffee. Severus didn't think he could swallow it.
She looked at him, and said, 'He's going to be alright.'
It didn't sound like empty comfort. It sounded like certitude, and it chipped at something in Severus. A sob broke free. The next one was only a breath, wheezed and dry. Leeni said nothing else, after that.
Just after eight, Severus went up to his bedroom. He brushed his teeth, he showered, he shaved and dressed. Because he hadn't slept, it was as though yesterday had never ended. He'd never given much thought to those infernal questions of the afterlife—the whole matter was impractical at best—but if he were to imagine purgatory, this would be it: a torment unbroken by sleep, a single day that never ceased.
He packed his clothes, he ordered the borrowed books and magazines on the windowsill, he stripped the bed. He was perfectly methodical about it, as he should be. He was unlikely to ever return here and he wished to touch everything this final time.
He folded the Invisibility Cloak and placed Harry's wand on top of it. Voices and the hums and sizzles of breakfast ministrations drifted up from the kitchen. He could not eat if he tried, but perhaps he could step in for a moment to give Harry his things back.
He went downstairs. He couldn't bring himself to enter the kitchen. Instead, he placed the cloak and wand on the coffee table by the fireplace, and sat in the same armchair he'd sat in before. He waited. He thought of nothing.
They joined him maybe twenty minutes later. There were circles under the boy's eyes, deep and sickly green. Severus wondered if he'd slept any. He unfastened the knapsack they'd bought him in Zakopane, leather clasps against brown canvas, buckles glinting golden in the light of the ready fire. He deposited the cloak and the wand inside, and slung it back over his shoulder—just the one, careless, unbothered. He didn't say a word.
'Thank you for having us,' Severus said, and it sounded horrible.
Leeni shook Severus's hand, then Harry's. Kauko hugged the boy, so tight his hands tightened reflexively on the straps of his knapsack as he struggled to breathe. Severus hadn't expected her to acknowledge him, but then she did look, and though she didn't embrace him, she smiled—that felt horrible, too.
Then, Harry's knuckles were scraping against the bottom of the Floo bowl, and he was stepping into the fire.
'Hogwarts, Professor Dumbledore's office,' he said clearly.
Severus watched as the flames rose around him, then pulled back. With a final look at the room, he followed.
Sun spilled over the cherry wood desk, swirled around glints of golden instruments, and dappled over Albus's deep purple robes. The boy was sat already in the chair opposite, straight-backed, his knapsack tucked politely in his lap.
'—that this must have been a challenging night,' Albus was saying. He didn't spare a single glance at Severus. 'And for that, I am truly sorry. You have every right to feel anger or despair, Harry, and do not take what I am about to say as a suggestion to smother all feeling. But I have lived a long time now, and I have been shown over and again that sometimes, it is the moments when we are denied that ultimately lead to great fulfilment. The seeds of our victories lie in our defeats.'
The boy nodded, then proclaimed, solemn, 'Life is a highway.'
Severus nearly choked on the snort. Harry didn't look.
'Well put, Harry,' Albus praised, entirely ignorant. 'Shall we discuss, then, the road you'll take now?'
'Okay. Does Professor Snape need to be here?'
Through the night, he had felt tired and miserable and angry, but not once sleepy. Now, it finally hit him: the nail to his coffin. His heart seized, his breathing hitched, it was done, now, it was over. He could sleep.
'I will leave you to it,' he forced himself to say. 'Good day, Headmaster.'
Then, he fled, and he drank, and he slept like the dead.
:((((
We've only got one proper chapter and then the epilogue to go! After some consideration, I've decided to publish them both together on Wednesday- so, we're nearly done! I promise the last two installments aren't quite as angst-heavy as this one ;)
Guest review replies:
Kathleen (Feb 3): damn it, now I want to rewrite the ending so they can run off to Australia instead, that sounds like a lot of fun! ;)
