Oh, it has been quite some time, hasn't it? :p I am so sorry. This time I really have no excuse... this chapter was incredibly difficult for me to write and I gave up on it for a while. But now it's done I can hopefully get back into the swing of things. I have not abandoned it. I will stick with this until the end.
Thank you for your patience. I have a chapter of Lesser Good being written as we speak.
The Pureblood Prince – Chapter XXV
A Complex and Many-Layered Thing.
The grief-stricken sobs behind the door were far more muted than before; the little hand… his hand… that tapped upon its dirty white paint more blurred and nebulous. Tears stung his eyes red raw.
"Ma? Stop crying… please… please stop… I promise I'll stop if you will! Double promise, a billion promise!" – ah, but he could still hear this. The rest of the child's words, however, became indistinguishable. It was almost only a faint buzzing. A vast improvement from the day before.
The scene crumbled before him… a wave of blackness burst forth from the wallpaper and covered her in nothingness… he was covering it up, as if he had thrown a cerebral blanket over his own thoughts.
"Well done. Good boy. Another." A distant voice sounded.
He concentrated deeper on him this time. The blackness unfolded on itself… and there was Aurora: staring at him with a bemused expression in the middle of the Slytherin common room.
"You are completely amazing, do you know that?"
Severus felt sudden butterflies in his stomach, and, by the way she smiled at him, tingling elsewhere. Though an embarrassed heat followed when he remembered who else was watching this. It was rather odd, living in the past and present simultaneously…
"To what end do I owe that observation, Borealis?" he asked her, covering for the sudden rush of pleasure that was swirling in his stomach. Severus in the present let himself relax further, and continued to forget, and to empty.
The girl in the vision blurred slightly – as if someone had lost the focus on her – her edges became hazy. The room had all but vanished leaving only her form.
"The fact that you had the sheer will power not to murder your parents for giving you a name like Severus," the girl chuckled nonchalantly. All the butterflies in the younger Severus's stomach had all but curled up and died… the scene changed only for a few split seconds… the same girl was crouching on the floor with a face full of tears and surrounded by telescopes… it was only then that the blackness once again covered them both.
"Too far, you let me get in too far! Again!" the same distant voice commanded.
He was with was Lily. All of the prickly insecurities that he had always felt around Sinistra had all but vanished and were replaced by pure affection… though, worryingly to the present-Severus, the same hunger remained. Severus once again let the blackness enter his mind, and the girl he loved had disappeared.
"Good. Another."
There was but a flash of light this time, and then darkness.
"Excellent. Enough!"
And they were back in the manor. Severus collapsed against the table and could not stop himself from shaking. It was not a pleasant feeling to say the least, to have ones mind ripped open at the seams and be plucked at as carelessly as someone who had lost their keys in a bag.
"I don't think someone called Borealis should be saying anything about your name." Serafina Prince suddenly stated from where she had seemingly fallen into one of the drawing room's chairs - obviously attempting to break the tension and obviously failing spectacularly.
"Aurora," Severus bit tetchily, realising, perhaps for the first time, that he actually didn't take too kindly to people abusing his nickname for her; it was almost his property. "Her name is Aurora."
Without even glancing at it, Mrs. Prince casually reached for a long cigarette and ignited the end with her wand. "Are you sure you don't-"
If smoke had a voice...
"Outstandingly impressive," Mrs. Prince continued when Severus decided to respond with a glare in substitution for a polite decline. "I daresay after what I have seen these past few sessions that you, my dear, are bound to be the best Occlumens I've ever seen. Far surpassing my own talent for the art."
"I am not your dear, thank you very much Ma'am - I am nothing of the sort to you," Severus snapped – and snap he did. By now, and now was a time that was unfortunately far too late, he had above and beyond realised he should never have come here in the first place. It had been under a week, and already this old woman (who he felt as much family warmth from, and towards, as he did a can of baked beans) had done everything his mother had told him she would do. It was most bothersome for a late teenager to admit such a thing about their mother, that she was actually right.
The absolute worst thing about it was that he now had no choice. 'Roped in' barely touched the surface; in fact, it left no trace on the surface at all…
"And I don't need to be here anymore!" He added. "I'm just wasting time with all your ridiculous tests and training!"
"Wasting time?" Mrs. Prince almost choked on her tar cloud. He half wished she had done. "I don't think introducing you to the art of shielding your mind to the Dark Lord is wasting time. Call me old-fashioned!"
"Occlumency is something I could, and am, teaching myself," said Severus. "If there is one thing I pride myself on – it is being self-sufficient. And you are clearly not as astute as I expected, if your expectations of me were as low as to assume that I need any form of assistance from you."
Mrs. Prince smiled a tad too affectionately behind her miasma. Severus frequently received the impression that the nastier he was, the prouder she became.
"Then why," she pressed softly "did you freely allow me to break into your mind?"
Severus took a moment to pick out his words with care. "Well…" he murmured poisonously, "a picture speaks a thousand words, after all."
Mrs. Prince looked impressed. He knew that particular look well. It was the look all pureblood folk gave him when they assumed that he had just made up the Muggle sayings spurting forth from his lips right there on the spot. He always hated it when this happened. Severus never could quite gauge what was magical and what was Muggle aphorism… it was something that often, too often, quite annoyingly gave his blood heritage away to other half-bloods and indeed Muggleborns - usually at the most inopportune moments imaginable.
"That… that is very true…" said Mrs. Prince, stunned. Then it appeared to dawn on her just what he meant by that. "… You wanted me to feel guilty."
Severus threw his hands up into a shrug.
"Your words," he said. "I cannot be held responsible for what you feel."
'Oh, well on the same token then, I cannot be held responsible for what happens to your foot when the oh-so-very sharp heel of my boot pierces through it!' – Oh God, Aurora's voice hit his cerebrum like a freight train. Oh God! He suddenly realised he was arguing with her in his own head! That could not be norm -
"That is the reason you sort me out – to punish me, not to learn from me." Mrs. Prince cut into his thoughts, obviously far more diplomatically than Aurora Sinistra would have done.
"Not originally," he corrected. "I wanted to find the family that I felt it was my duty to seek out…"
He could see her features brightening at this, and immediately wanted to cut them down.
"… to seek out the family who abandoned their own children the moment they made a wrong turn, and come crawling back only when they required a blood-related human weapon to act as the family guard dog."
But they annoyingly were not cut down; there was no drop, no dip, no sinking of her greyed and sickly face whatsoever. In fact, if anything, it appeared to intensifying.
"Oh?" she piped, rolling the cigarette around between her fingers. "Is that what you think? May I draw your attention to the reason you are joining the Death Eaters?"
"Because you don't have the backbone to safeguard your own family – any further questions?"
"I think you want more than that."
"You have no idea what I want."
"I know you crave power from our first meeting," Mrs. Prince mused, almost to herself. "And I certainly know that you crave recognition from your memories you so gracefully bestowed upon me… I saw you with that redhead several times, I could see it in your face – how many times your heart sank when she failed to react to you. And I felt what you felt when that other Borealis girl was on the very brink of giving you a shred of the feelings that you felt for her. That is what you want."
"Shut-up! Aurora and Lil… they have nothing to do with this and if you mention them again, I swear to God -!"
"Ah, but your cravings – they have everything to do with this. Why else would you be here, asking me for a way into the fold? To safeguard the Prince's? The family you never knew? To play carer to your sickly old grandmamma, the one who held onto millions of Galleons while her daughter rotted in poverty and destitution? Hah! No."
She tapped out the last of the ashes of her cigarette and walked over to the furthest door, which she proceeded to peek out of. With an inner jolt, Severus realised that her antique husband must have been sitting in there the entire time. She turned back around looking slightly unhappy… probably because he was still breathing.
He must have been, what, thirty years her elder? Severus inwardly shuddered. Marriage was a horrific thing. This marriage was a nauseatingly horrific thing.
"No," Mrs. Prince started up once again. "With some people it's a substance, a material object, something they can ingest and swig perhaps. With you it is recognition, respect… to have someone finally appreciate you – ah, but the people you want it from the most are always keeping it at an arms length, dangling it in front of you, and you love the feeling of craving it. Yes. Thanks to your attempt at a self-reproach, I now know a lot about you."
"Legilimency is flashes, pictures! It is not mind reading! You cannot possibly believe that I don't already know that," snarled Severus. He rubbed his temples vigorously; it was as if she still lingered within its chamber even after he had completely shut the doors… he vowed there and then that he would never open it again, to anyone. "You know nothing."
Gallingly, the old Galleon-digging woman simply chuckled and stubbed out her cigarette on a silver platted ashtray.
"Speaking of," she said. "Have you practiced your Legilimency this morning?"
"Who do you recommend I practice it on? The House Elf? The bees in the garden? That stupid kneazle that somehow keeps materialising on my bed no matter how many times I lock the-"
"Oh, Bella! She was your mother's pet kneazle… funny that she has appeared to a take a liking to you as well, you know. She has a knack of attempting to hack everyone else to death."
Severus faltered for a second or two. Ever since he had arrived at Prince Manor he had never truly stopped to take in the concept that his mother had actually grown up here. To him she had always been… there, in Spinners End, depressed, broke and depleted of all optimism. She had never been a real pureblood witch with a stately home and tickets to Quidditch World Cups and pet kneazles. And she had given everything away for a sadistic drunkard and a terrace house where it was an all too regular occurrence to wake up in the middle of night with a cockroach running up one's leg?
"I don't – I don't care about the damned kneazle!"
"No, I suppose you don't." Mrs. Prince agreed. "I'd wager, however, that you care greatly about the reasons why you never grew up as a wealthy and cultivated beneficiary?"
"I am cultivated." Severus retorted defensively, and all too automatically.
"Well - from where your mother chose to dump you, that is nothing short of a miracle. Honestly, my dear boy, I am surprised you even went to Hogwarts at all…"
It may have been the post-Occlumency-training shock to the system - but the more Serafina spoke, the more Severus began to see the woman he first he encountered in Hagrid's hut. The ailing, frail and desperate elderly grandmother seemed to be withering away before his eyes just as quickly as she had withered into sickness.
"You're not dying." He did not even bother to follow this with an: 'are you?'. It was far too painfully palpable to even humour her with one.
It was Serafina's turn to falter.
"What on earth makes –"
"Oh, this would make for wonderful Legilimency practice, I thank you." Severus bared his uneven teeth in the most sardonically jubilant state he could manage and leaned back against his chair, folding both arms and legs.
"I am dying," said Mrs. Prince. "And you will not acquire any valuable answers from me. I suggest you search in other rooms…" her black, wrinkle-enveloped eyes flickered to the left. "… There are those who have more to conceal than I."
A more fitting string of words could not have possibly been uttered. Severus's lip curled in triumph; he was winning.
"Liar." He uttered silkily. Her mind was betraying her the more he fixed his mind's eye on her. He sensed her thoughts rapidly re-arranging themselves as if in dance and soon her eyes became impenetrable once more, but the window had been opened…
He raised his wand.
"Severus…"
"Finite."
"Protego!"
Serafina's Shield spell collided into Severus's own, sending it straight back at him. It merely bounced off his chest with the force of several cotton wool balls and evaporated into tiny sparks of smoke upon contact.
It was met with a curious raised eyebrow.
"Well, we now know two things, Madam – that I really am this ugly and that you undoubtedly have something to hide. Expelliarmus, Finite!"
The order in which the curses happened was so quick that it was almost impossible to detect which one had affected Serafina first. All Severus knew was that his grandmother's wand had shot vertically upward toward the sky-scraping ceiling and that she was holding out one of her hands to catch it while shielding her face with the other.
"Accio!"
But Severus's wand was trained on her own before she could manage it. Spells came out of him as fast as film cells composing moving pictures. The wand torpedoed right into his ready palm, and he was now left with two weapons trained on the woman who was now squirming so harshly that she had actually tumbled onto the floor. Ripples appeared to be consuming her entire body, and her hands were sporadically all over the place - trying to swathe all of her at once, but to no avail. He watched with baited breath as stringy, parched grey hair transformed into ebony silk… wrinkles vanished as if flooded by life… she knew that she would have to face him now, there was no other option… it was this realisation that also coincided with Severus's first feeling of any sort of remorse for what he was doing. He had just rendered this woman completely helpless and he was standing here with two wands trained on her.
Severus could not take this anymore. He looked away and threw the wand back toward the panting woman, all the while shaking off the features of his father - features that were beginning to creep into his flesh and burn him.
"Why…" he began. "… did you reduce me to this?"
"What sort of Death Eater would you be if you weren't ready to exercise your power?"
"STRIKING A WOMAN IS NOT POWER! It is the epicentre of cowardice!"
Serafina finally dropped her hands and wiped her ivy coloured robes tidy with them. It was as if the ground on which they stood remained constant, but the hands on the clocks around them had backtracked several billion rotations. She stood to her full impressive height, all sickness and ugliness forgotten under Finite's undoing power. God, she must've been almost fifty years younger than her husband, Severus realised with a jolt of stomach-churning disbelief.
She sighed.
"You never struck me, you silly boy; you never laid a finger on me. And as you can see…" she motioned to her new (or was it old? Or was it simultaneously new and old?) physical form, "I indeed would be more than capable of defending myself. Though now I see that it obviously hits a nerve with you - I have a few people I would so dearly love you to re-educate regarding that issue. Think of their… edification as an initiation rite if you will. "
He could almost physically see the letters T. O. B. I. A. S. in flashing red lights above her head with the venom in which she spat the latter part of her sentence.
"Ah. I would never have guessed..." Severus replied calmly. He lowered his wand which he only just realised was still pointing toward her, and it was shaking.
"But first," he continued, moving a couple of steps closer to the woman who had done nothing but deceive since the moment he arrived, "I want the truth and I will not let you leave this room until I get it. I think I am owed that modest slice of remuneration at the very least… don't you agree, grandmamma?"
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