The Secret
I was so incredibly thirsty. My lips parched and throat dry in a way that I hadn't experienced since before I learned of Hogwarts, when Uncle Vernon would lock me in the cupboard for days and days. I was just so very thirsty. That was probably the first lucid thought I had had in quite a while. My muscles ached fiercely and I groaned in pain even as I flicked my wand out to summon water, or at least I tried.
My hand was empty, and I stared at it in numb confusion as I flicked my wrist again. Still nothing. Pulling my arm from beneath the robe, I could see that the brown holster Sirius had gifted me was still attached, but it was empty. I frowned at it in consternation, flicking my wrist once more as if doing so would make my missing wand appear. Not so shockingly, it didn't.
Where had my wand gone?
I took in the small cave, noticing the subtle differences. It looked perhaps a bit bigger, the ceiling now high enough for me to almost stand, and my sleeping alcove now concaved into the ice wall. There was another alcove, a separate cave dug into the side wall, with a small hole that led to the tiny room. I could only see what was inside because I was laying down.
The ice was blackened, most likely from fire, and a trench had been dug into the floor. Water was moving in it, like a small river, guiding the melting ice away from what lay inside. The water flowed to a pool that was steaming. I blinked at it, stunned as I watched mist rise from the surface in tantalizing curls. Oh, I really wanted a bath.
I almost started to crawl towards the pool, but the mystery of the tiny cave drew my attention once more. My muscles ached as I rolled over to look inside properly. The ice within had also been blackened, but I could see something bright red within.
I stared at it, blinking slowly as I tried to get my blurry eyes to focus. After a long while I realized what it was I was looking at. My red coat, the one given to me as a part of my uniform for the tournament. And on top of the coat lay the eggs.
They were on a mound and I could see that the river started as a moat around the tiny island. A nest made of ice. Water escaped a small hole near the bottom like a fountain, filling the moat. The heat from the eggs must be constantly melting the ice. The hole underneath the nest and the trench leading to the pool must have been the runoff.
I couldn't help the smile that spread across my lips at the sight of the eggs. Snape was such a hypocrite. He tried to convince everyone that he didn't care, convinced me he wanted nothing more than to let the eggs die. And yet he dug out a little cave, formed it to trap heat around the eggs, and from the scorch marks I could tell he had been keeping them warm with his own fire.
Snape had convinced me for four years that he hated me and was out to get me…and yet again he proved me wrong. He didn't have to keep saving me, and still he did. He didn't have to be empathetic or kind after what I had done to him, convincing Death to remove his soul from his torn body and shoved it into another…and yet he still was.
If he truly didn't care, he would have let them die. Sometimes I wondered if I really understood him at all. I was beginning to suspect that Snape really was a lot softer than appearances let on, but I wasn't going to let him know that. He would either deny it and torment me to get his point across, or set me on fire.
My eyes were drawn to the entrance where I could see light pouring in. Snape was not laying in his usual spot. I frowned again, wondering where he had gone, but continued the search for my wand instead of dwelling on it. But like Snape, it too was nowhere to be found.
I grunted in annoyance, licking my parched lips with a tongue that felt like sandpaper as I rolled onto my side. I was sore and hurt everywhere, but still I persisted. Freeing my other arm from the confines of the robe, I shivered in the sudden cold as I flicked my left wrist,
Snape's wand slipped into the palm of my hand and I waved it lazily as I summoned water. Nothing happened and I ground my teeth in annoyance as I tried yet again. Still nothing, even when I voiced the spell.
A snort of derision drew my attention and I turned to see Snape standing at the entrance…well crouching I suppose. There was a long chunk of meat dangling from his mouth he was dragging behind him. He must have just cooked it. I could see the steam and smoke curling in the air and the smell made my stomach clench. I hadn't realized how hungry I was until just then.
The meat dropped from his mouth onto the ice as he slipped further into the cave. "You're doing it wrong," his voice was dry with disdain as he turned to pull the food towards me, but I could feel his relief. It swept through me, almost taking my breath away and I tried not to wince at his suspicious glance.
"What, exactly, am I doing wrong?" I asked, trying to distract his inquisitive mind. I've never met a more mistrustful person in my entire life. He was always suspecting me of being up to no good…well, to be fair, I usually was. But that was not the point.
Thankfully, Snape allowed the questions, letting his doubt slide away to explain instead. I was beginning to learn that he never let the opportunity to teach pass him by. "You're copying the wand movements for a right handed person when you should be mirroring for a left handed one. The motion always starts from your core, from the center, and moves away. You need to mirror the movement, start from the center and move away."
I blinked at him, focusing my attention back onto Snape's wand. My hand started to move tentatively again and I fought off the strange urge to duck my face. It was odd, using his wand under his instruction. As I felt the magic start to pulse down my arm, I tried to ignore how his wand felt both foreign and yet familiar.
I flushed in embarrassment when I realized he was right. Although it was clumsy, the spell completed and I drank hungrily from the water that was produced. So much so that I started choking and had to force myself to ignore Snape's commentary on my questionable intelligence while I got my lungs to work properly again.
"Then again," Snape continued after I had finished coughing the inhaled water, his voice entirely too smug. "You could have just switched the wand to your dominant hand."
Oh, he was never going to let me live that one down. "Is that for me?" I asked instead, trying to distract him from my obviously dumb moment.
He hummed vaguely in assent as he dropped the meat near me and nudged it closer with his nose. "I've already eaten," Snape replied, and now that I was looking at him, I could tell that he had. His stomach was ballooning and I was surprised that he was even able to move around at all with how large it was. When he settled on his legs to watch me in turn, his stomach almost reached the ground.
I grabbed the meat and started to chew hurriedly as he began to speak once more. "Do you remember what happened?" His question sounded innocent, but I could feel an underlying anger that was simmering just below the surface.
The meat sat heavy in my stomach as I tried to think back on how I had ended up here. "I remember the storm…" I began hesitantly, continuing after his head twitched in that way I was beginning to recognize as him prompting me. "I…I went," what had I been doing? I remembered leaving the cave and crawling out into the storm, but I couldn't remember why. My eyes darted around our shelter before they alighted on the small hole where the eggs lay. "I went for the eggs."
"Yes," Snape bit out, hissing the word. "And then what?"
I frowned at him as I took another bite to buy more time to think. But even when I had finished that one and the one after it, I still had not been able to recall. I shrugged at him, unwilling to voice my ignorance.
"And then you.." I trailed off, uncertain. I vaguely remembered retrieving the eggs, crawling back towards the cave, and then Snape's little dragon face peering down at me. I clenched my fist, trying to bring the memory back into focus, but the pain in my arm distracted me from it, pulling the memory further away. I glanced down at it, the brown holster stark against my pale forearm. Above it, near the elbow, were patch marks of purple that surrounded many tiny little red cuts. "You bit me?" I answered, though it came out more of a question. "Again!"
"Yes," Snape drew the word out, hissing the last consonant like a snake. He sounded furious. I swallowed thickly, suddenly very worried about where he was leading this conversation. "I found you in the snow, unconscious," he susurrated that word as well. How had he found me in the storm? I hadn't been able to find my way back…I wasn't even certain if I had been heading in the right direction.
Snape was silent after, and I knew he was waiting for me to say something, trying to prompt me, corner me. I knew, and yet I let him. "How did you find me?"
It was the question he had been waiting for, the one he had been guiding me too. "How?" Snape asked softly. His words were careful, but I could feel the fury simmering beneath them. "How?!" He screeched the word again. "You were lost in that snow, how did I find you? How did I know?"
I swallowed, my mouth dry as finally the moment was upon me. I didn't want to tell him, I still wasn't ready, but know I had no choice. "I didn't," I swallowed again, forcing my dry mouth to work. My hands were sweating and my heart was racing in my chest. "I didn't tell you everything."
"So, tell me everything." His voice was calm, the sort of calm that happened right before a storm. The kind you couldn't trust. But I began to speak anyways.
The words started to pour from me. I told him about how Death had taken the visage of my mother, that at first I had really thought it was her. I cried as I spoke of the moment I realized it had never been her, just an aspect, a shadow of what Death had kept when she had passed on. I told him again of the two trains, and finding his gasping body on the white tiles. This time, I left nothing out. I described his blood and how it poured from the wounds, that when I touched it, my hands came away clean and my clothes unstained.
It was more difficult to speak of what happened next, but I continued. My eyes were fixed on the icy ground…I was too afraid to look at him, and yet the words came rushing out of me. Once I started, I couldn't seem to stop myself.
"She…It told me no," I explained as I got to the part about the single egg. "At first I wanted to take your soul with me," he gasped, and through my eyelashes I could see him rearing back in shock. "I had already had a soul alongside mine, but she said it was only a shard before. She said you would burn through me and kill us both."
My eyes were drawn to him as he began to make tiny distressed noises. Snape looked like he had started to choke on something. "Are you completely mad?" He shrieked, and I winced as my ears began to ring. "Soul magic? You dare try and use soul magic? And whose shard –" his words trailed off and he stared at me in horror. He knew…he knew exactly whose soul shard had resided within me. "What…happened to it?"
My eyes met his, purple and green and glowing. "I left it," I replied, glancing back down. "It looked like a baby, sort of, but it was all twisted. Mum, I mean Death, told me to leave it there. That's how I survived the killing curse. The second one, I mean."
Snape reared back, hissing and growling low in his chest. For all his miniscule size, it was still a terrifying display. "The spell hit me right after you went down, before we fell into the nest."
Silence stretched between us and my eyes fell back onto the floor. It took a few moments to gather my courage to continue, but I did. "She said it wouldn't work, with the egg. Said you were too much soul for one so small…" the words stuck in my throat and I summoned more water to by myself time. I didn't want to say them, didn't want to speak about what had happened next. But I continued to speak.
"She-It," I corrected again, it was hard to think of the thing wearing my mum's face as Death. "It had almost convinced me to leave you behind, but I asked it how much was too much, and…" I couldn't finish, but after I looked up at him, I don't think I had too.
"You," he spluttered the word. I had never heard him fail to articulate himself before but after a few false starts, Snape stopped speaking all together and just stared at me in horror.
My eyes began to well up and I felt my chin start to tremble. "Please don't hate me," I whispered, biting my lip to keep away the urge to sob. "I had no choice."
"You could have left me," Snape spoke quietly, the words hiding the deeper feeling of fear and anger that simmered beneath. But I could still feel them, just on the edge of his calm façade.
"That wasn't a choice," I replied just as softly. I still had nightmares about what had transpired in that place of transition. Just the thought of leaving him behind and being here alone…it was unbearable to think about.
"So you resulted to using soul magic?" He spit the words out as if they were something disgusting, something dark. Perhaps they were. I hadn't learned much of soul magic in my time at Hogwarts, it was one of the forbidden arts. Perhaps there was something inherently wrong with what I did, but I couldn't bring myself to regret it.
"It wasn't exactly me that did it," I argued, but even to my own ears it sounded weak.
"No," he snapped back, his head slithering side to side in the threat display he only used when he was furious or uncomfortable…or both. "You got Death to do it for you."
I winced at the words, but didn't reply. What could I say, he was right. "I didn't know," was the only thing I could come up with.
Snape hissed, a small stream of purple flames lapping at the sides of his maw, the anger and fury I could feel were beginning to simmer over. I flinched away, suddenly afraid of him. It wasn't a sensation I was unused to, but after all we had been through since the tournament…I had thought I could trust him, trust that he would never spend so much time saving me and teaching me if he had ever meant me harm. But now I was not so certain.
Tears welled up once more and I fought them off, trying not to let him see my fear, or how his anger hurt me. But I knew I failed when I felt a flash of remorse that wasn't mine. "I'm so sorry," I whispered the words like they were fragile things, as if speaking too loudly would feed the flames that kept his anger simmering just below the surface. "Please, don't be mad."
The silence stretched for what seemed an eternity before he moved away, back towards the entrance. "Finish eating," Snape said after a moment, his voice that level of calm once more…the calm before the storm. "And then bathe yourself. You'll find your wand near the exit, where you dropped it."
And then he was moving once more, leaving the cave and dragging himself to the tunnel. "Wait!" I shouted, desperate as I reached for him, but he was already too far away. "Please, Snape! I'm sorry," I felt the tears drip down my cheeks and off my chin. "Please don't leave!"
He turned back to me, looking at me over his shoulder. His green and purple eyes alighted on mine and the breath froze in my chest as I was flooded with his emotions. Anger was the most prominent, but below that I could feel fear, anguish, and betrayal. It only made me cry harder.
Snape blinked slowly and then retreated out of the cave. "Snape!" I screamed, trying to crawl after him, but my body was exhausted and the fever still made me weak. I didn't make it even a few feet before I collapsed, my face pressed into the icy floor as I gasped through my tears in great having sobs. "Please, Snape!"
He didn't answer, nor did he return. I must have laid on the ground crying for hours, but Snape didn't come back. For the first time since we had been stranded in this strange and barren place, I felt truly and utterly alone.
For the first time, I was terrified.
