WARNINGS: Explicit violence
Chapter 48
The Two Princes
Serafina stood in front of giant and witch and her hands on her hips, very much attempting to assert herself.
"Finally saw some sense, did you?" she bit at her daughter, who was glaring at her mother in an even more ferocious manner, if were possible. "What did the Muggle have to do to finally drive you out? Something worse than - "
"Shut-up, you old bag." Eileen barked savagely and drew her new wand. The house elf gasped and Hagrid's eyes widened in shock. Her abrupt slur had had its desirable effect: Serafina was silenced instantly, but her expression certainly was not: to her daughter's fury, what could only be described as a proud smile had infested the corner of her lips.
"Tobias has nothing to do with why I am here," Eileen lied through her teeth. "I have come for Severus; I think your indoctrinating has gone on far enough..."
Serafina gave one of her staple infuriating haughty laughs – as if she never believed a single word of what anybody told her, ever.
"If that is the case, then your timing could not have been more perfect. I am expecting him here tomorrow."
"What do you mean?" Eileen asked, lowering her wand slightly in exchange for a heavy raised brow. "Where has he gone? What is he…" the flashes of the pages of his old potions book and the Daily Prophet articles suddenly hit her with the force of a freight train. How could she have been so stupid to leave him be with this woman? But surely… not even a mother like her would have allowed him…
"What have you told him?" she changed her angle, pointing her wand threateningly between Serafina's eyes. Again it seemed to please her more than it did threaten her.
Serafina gestured to the doorway.
"It's been almost twenty years…" she said exasperatedly. "And you barge into my house, wand drawn and blazing, with a giant at your beck and call? I think we both need to sit down." She placed emphasis on the word 'both', and if she had not mentioned him in her questioning of her daughter then Hagrid might well have not been there at all.
"I am not sitting and sipping tea and chit chattering away with you!" Eileen bit with her teeth now bared, she jabbed the wand in the air with each threat. "I want you to answer my damn questions for once! Tell me what has happened. Now."
Her mother raised a far more manicured eyebrow.
"Or you will what, exactly?" she asked arrogantly. "Poke me in the nose while you try and remember how to work a wand again? I remember quite clearly that you had given up all of your magic. Foolish girl! I doubt a single trace of it lingers in your veins anymore after you allowed that Muggle to infect every pore of yours. Why don't you just try it?" Serafina opened up her arms in empty, mocking surrender.
"Stop it!" Eileen began to shout, positively shaking with a mixture of fury, absolute disgust and the most painful desolation. A few white-hot sparks emitted from the tip of her wand as it shook. "Giving up the wizarding world was my choice. As is coming back. I assure you that I have excellent recall when it comes to protecting myself."
"As it was your choice to get beaten by the lowliest of Muggles!" Serafina countered, throwing her arm through the air in unrestrained anger. Her eyes were finally flashing some form of sentiment and her face was becoming more and more contorted with each passing second. "It was your fault that you became nothing more than a dirty, beaten Muggle in rags! Your fault that you became a complete failure in everything you set out to do! Your fault that your husband was a drunken lout!"
The scream and curse erupted from wand and mouth at exactly the same time. Hagrid gave a shout of shock as the elder witch was completely knocked off her feet as a sonic wave ricocheted against her body and into the wall. Serafina Prince came crashing down in a heap against the wall of her own house, where she sat up almost immediately, coughing and spluttering, Missy ran dutifully to her side.
"Mistress!" she cried, holding up her shaking head and gazing worriedly into her dark eyes. "Is Mistress hurt? Oh Little Miss, you should not have - !"
But Eileen could not have looked less sympathetic if she tried. Her cheeks were now wet and burning red; she looked upon the mass on the ground as a woman possessed…
"I refuse to let you blame me anymore!" she announced defiantly as the pile of robes that was her mother began to attempt to straighten themselves out. "It was Tobias's choice, not mine! And it was father's fault - " she shoved a threatening finger into the abyss as if motioning toward someone out of the room. "- that he stood by and watched one of his wonderful bosom buddies have his way with me when I was twelve! Is it any surprise I wanted to find solace somewhere away from here? How dare you stand there and appoint blame where it does not belong!"
She felt Hagrid's tight comforting grasp upon her shoulder, but quickly shrugged it off. She could not bear to be touched right now.
Serafina was halfway through steadying herself on the low table in front of her before she seemed to freeze on the way up. Her eyes tunneled into Eileen's with such intensity that her daughter felt prickles in her belly; she knew was what about to happen, she knew that look, and she knew she was powerless to resist it. Out of nowhere her mother's wand had appeared at her side.
"Legilimens!"
Eileen Snape stumbled backward viciously, Hagrid's yelling muffling everything else as she fell into flashes of her own memory.
"Silencio!"
A middle-aged man wearing red robes wrestled with a helpless, silently screaming twelve year-old child in the garden.
"Owes me a lot of favours that Atticus does…" Serafina and the present day Eileen heard him telling the young Eileen. "… Auror entanglements…"
Eileen could not bare to watch one of the nightmares of her past unfold before her eyes again as if in real time… she gazed upon her mother instead – whom she was relieved to see was watching the entire exchange with a look of utter horror, the kind of which Eileen had never seen upon her mother before. Her mouth hung open in complete disbelief, all the colour had drained from her face until nothing but the artificial rouge on her cheeks remained.
But Serafina was not watching Arcturus Black - one of her husband's old Ministry friends - undress her own daughter in their own garden. It seemed that she, along with Eileen could not bare it. Her wide and watery eyes rested instead upon another man who was watching the entire scene from one of the windows in his manor.
Atticus Prince turned away from the window… no help came for his child. Of that Eileen remembered clearly.
A scream of fury broke the connection between the two women. The present day Prince manor seemed to spin in front of Eileen's eyes before she steadied herself against Hagrid, where she finally relented and sink into his grasp.
"Why…" Serafina gasped, clutching at her chest and being steadied by Missy in turn, she looked at Eileen with the most pained expression she had ever seen. "Why did you…? You never told me…"
Eileen shrugged, still very much trembling. "Would you have done anything about it?" she asked quietly, as Hagrid rubbed her shoulders despite not knowing what they were going on about.
Serafina's eyebrows almost touched one another in disgust. "Of course I would!" she snapped angrily. "I would have torn that Arcturus Black limb from limb! And your father! I'll - " she wrung her hands together fervently as if not knowing quite how to unleash her anger.
"Even though father would have been sacked? Even though Black family would ensure that the Prince name would have lost all credibility? Please." Eileen scoffed. "Forgive me, then, for having you completely wrong all of these years mother."
She was compelled to give a sick little laugh when her mother failed to respond.
"I wish I didn't know you so well."
It was apparent that Serafina had no more bite left in her; she continued to stare, panting, into her daughter's eyes but seemed completely incapable of speech.
Eileen turned to Hagrid instead. "Right, I've finished with her. I'll come back tomorrow for my son." She added, flashing a glare at her now mute mother.
"You…" Serafina choked after a few moments, her house elf gazing worriedly on. "… you are more than welcome… to stay here."
"We has your old room still!" added Missy cheerfully; apparently thinking that she was helping to persuade her younger Mistress.
Eileen merely scoffed and exchanged looks with Hagrid, who, having not the faintest idea what memories Serafina had just seen, could only pretend to know why he was shaking his head and scoffing along with the woman he had recently declared his love to.
"No, thank you," Eileen answered, brushing off a small patch of Floo from her black robes as if it her new clothes had been tainted with a most unwelcome splat of bird excrement. "I don't think I could reside under the same roof as him," she inclined her head toward the room in which her father was usually found, unmoving, "and not end up in Azkaban. I will be back tomorrow morning."
Apparently Serafina knew better than to counter.
"Missy," she addressed her elf, her eyes still trained on Eileen so intensely that her daughter was beginning to feel uncomfortable. "Take Eileen and her… friend to wherever they need to go."
"We'll take the Floo." Eileen retorted stubbornly, even though she realised that they had just sealed the fireplace and it would take a few hours to get it operational again… she could not bare to just blindly take her mother's help without appearing resistant. In the end, however, she and Hagrid had both taken Missy's hands, and had decided to journey back to Hogsmeade. If Diagon Alley was indeed being patrolled by supposed Death Eaters, as Hagrid had assumed, then she did not need that added little issue.
They journeyed toward Hogwarts together – with the explicit promise that Dumbledore, nor any of the other staff, would be unaware of Eileen's presence. The half-giant and the witch sheltered themselves in his cabin for the night, where he attempted to force her to eat, but the memories that her mother had broken into and brought to life once again rendered her entirely void of any sort of appetite. Several times that night there would be the rattling of a branch against the window, and all she would see in her mind was Arcturus Black: tapping on the door and forcing his way through to finish what was left of her off.
"It must've been sommet horrible…" Hagrid eventually told her softly, clearly becoming weary of watching her with her forehead pressed against the window and shaking slightly. His voice shook Eileen back into the cabin; she turned to him.
"Sorry?"
"What happened to yeh," Hagrid answered as kindly as he could. "I don't wanna know, I just… wish I could've done sommet."
She sighed and gazed back out of the window. Darkness had now swept across the grounds, and all over the castle little windows flickered with the warmth and light inside.
"Wizards were always so confident, so sure, that their world… our world… was somehow superior. As if we'd acquired something the Muggles had not, and could never possess," she murmured, her arms wrapped around her velvet-clad legs. "I was born believing that. Born confident of my preeminence. Even amongst wizarding kind, we were somehow superior to those who were smarter, more talented than us, because of our blood."
"Well, that's the pureblood prejudices ain't it?" Hagrid contributed from the table behind her, his eyes trained on the back of her long hair. "Yeh can't be blamed if yeh had it drilled into yeh… and yeh certainly didn' keep it up if yeh became best friends with a half-breed like me!" he chuckled sympathetically into his cold mug of tea.
"I knew it was a complete lie in my second-year when… I just knew" Eileen said, evading having to explain why she had been so specific in her age. "That's when I became fascinated by Muggles, despite knowing nothing of their world. My parents forbade me to take any Muggle Studies… said we'd be better off as if they didn't exist altogether… but I couldn't stop…" she found herself choking on her words now, as the realisations came to mind. "I needed to know there was something better, more ingenious than magic in the world. I mean the way Muggles would go about living, completely oblivious to us, the way they transported themselves, the way they communicated and healed themselves! It was more magical to me than this world of ours here," she gestured gloomily to the glittery castle in the darkness beyond them.
"Perhaps fascination is where I should have left it," Eileen finished sadly. "Perhaps hanging onto a stupid false hope would have served me better than chasing it like the misguided, young idiot I was."
"If yeh hadn't, yeh'd be always wonderin'… and not Muggles… I mean," Hagrid looked away sheepishly as if he had suddenly cornered himself. "… I mean not all Muggles are like him."
He coughed.
"Besides, yeh would have never had yeh son. That's gotta be worth what yeh did…"
The naïve sentiment, very typical of Hagrid, struck Eileen much unlike the others. She felt a great stabbing pain of guilt in her belly.
"I'm not so sure of that," she replied sadly, trying to ignore the horrified look on Hagrid's face from the table, when she couldn't any longer she felt that she had to clarify herself.
"If you knew the life he's lived…" she said, the choking sensation returning to the pit of her throat again. "His father… Tobias… he wasn't always this way. We were fine for a very long time; happy, even, for some of it. Flashes of it. Toby told me it was my unusualness that drew him to me," she stifled a bitter laugh at the thought "said he'd never met a lass like me. Well of course he hadn't, the stupid dolt. As if a place as dreary as Cokeworth had seen the likes of anything magical before he dragged me there.
"Not that Cokeworth would have seen magic from me," she continued. "I stifled it. Did not think of it for years. Shoved all my old books and potions ingredients in the far corner of the tiny attic where he never bothered to look. I wasn't living the life I had always dreamed of, only a fool would have been satisfied where I rested my head," containing the emotions swirling in her chest was proving far more difficult than it usually was for Eileen now. As if sensing this, and being a far more emotional being than her by ten million miles, Hagrid had found his way next to her – and his constant stroking of her hand was doing nothing to contain the weaknesses leaking out of her now. "But I was away from here at least. But I knew, there was a constant inkling that I could never be rid of magic forever, you know it was Toby who wanted a child…"
She laughed so bitterly this time that Hagrid appeared quite unnerved.
"I was never maternal, never even thought of bearing offspring, especially a magical one. We fought on and off about it for years, but Toby was still insistent; said it was unheard of, unnatural for a woman to be so cold and off about the idea of providing for children – children, plural, mind – as if I could stomach more than one. Well of course I ended up meeting him halfway, didn't I? Perhaps that was his plan all along."
"And was he happy?" Hagrid asked curiously, now completely enraptured in her words.
Eileen smiled sadly.
"Tobias has never been happy. He lives in a world of unrealistic dreams, thinking he is more than he is, and he can't bear the fact the only person to whom he was ever important was me. It's what turned him to drink, I think. It was the only way he knew how to cope. No, he was not happy when Severus arrived, if anything he got worse: he knew something was different about him. Where he enjoyed that difference in myself, he was repulsed by it when it was his own flesh and blood. I can't recall a single time he smiled at him."
Hagrid's grip tightened on her hand. She wished he would stop being so demonstrative… then again she wished she could stop herself bombarding him with the ammunition he needed to comfort her. She shook herself off and pulled back her hand.
"And that's how magic ruined our lives yet again," Eileen ended simply, taking a robotic sip from her cold tea, trying to ignore the memories of sitting in Tobias's old flat while they drunk the very same thing, cold and tepid but not because she had been blabbing about her sad tale – but because they had been unable to keep their hands off each other all night. Christ, after all this she still missed him. She wondered what he was doing at this very moment, whether he was desperately searching the high heavens for her or, a more likely scenario, at the bottom of a glass bottle.
All of sudden she felt her ice-cold palm bathed in a pool of warmth. She tucked her shielding black curtain behind her ear and found him so close that she could almost have become intoxicated with the smell of earth and grass… all that was fresh and clean with the world.
"I could only dream of bein' that important to yeh," Hagrid whispered.
Eileen smiled. Not sadly. Not patronisingly. She smiled.
"You are important, Rubeus."
But this time it was Hagrid's turn to smile sadly. He didn't know much, but he knew there was reason why she had omitted certain words in her reply. He was important in the world, she said, but he would never be her reason.
He still had to say it… he had never been good at hiding what he needed to say.
"I love yeh," he told her with heartbreaking sincerity, she bit down hard on her lip. "I can't pretend to know why yeh love this… M – man so much…" (he was halfway saying 'Muggle' before he caught himself) "and I don' need yeh to love me back, I just… I just don' want yeh going back…"
"I won't be," Eileen said definitively. "I don't know what will happen, or where we will go, or even if my son will speak to me… but Tobias…" her words became caught in a net of memories and pain before they finally began to leak through.
"If I know one thing: it is that I will never see my husband again."
Eileen was so assured of this that Hagrid instantaneously appeared to believe every word she said.
The smell of the earth and the wild, long grasses that surrounded this very place grew stronger. Their lips had found one another.
The one kiss could have been considered harmless had it been isolated. But the one kiss was closely followed by many more in succession; gentle, quick little kisses pressed themselves over soft lips and hard lips. Eileen felt struck with that familiar feeling that she was melting into desperately craved affection, and yet it was, as ever, tainted with guilt, so much that it panged in her belly.
But, tonight, tonight, she ignored the latter. Soon their hands were caressing each other with a delicacy that Eileen could have only dreamed about, and she allowed her tired body to be held and be adored as he explored every inch of her with sparkling fascination. The days had been long and grey. For once, for once, she allowed herself to drink and bask in the sunlight.
And she would never know it, but it would be because of her. She would end up becoming the overruling reason why, for all the years to come, her son would have had to perform cold-blooded murder in front of Hagrid's eyes before Hagrid could ever bring himself to think ill of him.
Serafina had stood upright by the window for so long that Missy was beginning to grow concerned.
"Mistress… are you wanting some sandwiches?" she asked inquisitively, inching toward her very slowly.
"No, Missy," came Serafina's cold and automatic reply.
"Some wine, then? We have the elf-made ones in the cellar?"
"Missy…" Serafina addressed her elf in the tone she was acquainted with at last. "I have an errand for you."
"Oh, yes of course! What might Missy do for her Mistress?"
Serafina paused and thought for a while. She did not particularly need anything so she pulled out the first thing she could think of.
"I need you to go into Diagon Alley and fetch me more Lionfish spines and Salamander blood from the Apothecary, then I want you to take my telescope to Wiseacre's… it is in dire need of repairs. Tell him you will wait."
She was guessing at a million miles per hour. Anything to keep Missy away from the house for the better part of the day. Of course, Missy did not catch on, but merely frowned in confusion.
"Mistress has not used her telescope for years!"
"Because you have not taken it to be mended!" Serafina shrieked so suddenly that the elf jumped backward about two feet. The horrors of what she had just seen in her daughter's mind were still so painfully fresh and raw in her own.
"I did not ask you to question me!" she continued to bellow. "Take my Galleon bag and leave my sight!"
The house elf needed absolutely no further instruction, she scurried away into the other room, where Serafina could hear the distant jangling of several of the Princes' many galleons and sickles. Finally, the loud crack from the room in which their many artifacts were kept signaled to the witch that she was now quite alone.
Well… almost alone…
Atticus had grown even more useless and pathetic in his ancient age. Serafina had to admire his tenacity for clinging onto the final shreds of his life for what seemed like no purpose at all.
She watched him from the doorway for a while, her face shrouded in the murky, darkness of his bedroom (they had separated sleeping quarters for many years now, she could not bear to be anywhere near that feeble and paper-thin old body of his… the thought of it sent chills through her spine); outside of the drawn curtains, life was spinning and evolving all around them, and yet here he was, lying there, useless, stealing oxygen from those who truly lived.
Yet she let him live. She had been no monster. She knew that the Princes had always suspected her of marrying to their family merely for the notoriety, to have her name plastered upon an immortal golden family line, probably for the money too.
They had not been… technically wrong in their assessment. But at least she had never gone as far as to steal his fortunes from him. Or his life. For that act of charity alone, Serafina Prince had commended herself.
She twirled her wand absentmindedly around her fingers as she watched him dozing, her breathing becoming more and more difficult to control.
He had lived in such incomparable luxury his whole life; surrounded by friends and family had greatly esteemed him, respected by all in the Ministry of Magic, close friends with the Minister himself during his heyday - and her, Serafina, for his wife. She had given the best parts of her life to him… when she had once been a witch of incomparable beauty and intelligence that she had not remembered a single moment where a man had not gazed upon her once and had been compelled to gaze again, and again. It was immaterial that she had not loved him: the mere fact that she bore his ring upon her finger was more than he deserved.
And (Serafina's usually barren and cold eyes begun to shimmer at the thought) he had a daughter who did love him, until she rightfully had been driven to hate every atom inside his disgusting body.
Atticus had gotten away with it all, right under her nose. He must have either been far more apt of Occlumency than she had given him credit for… or, and the thought made her resolve all the more set, he merely did not care enough for it to plague his thoughts.
Without knowing how she got there, Serafina found herself standing over him – watching his chest rattle up and down with a morbid sense of calm. Her wand began to burn her palm, made it itch with an unbearable irritation… it was halfway to the centre of his forehead before she dropped it.
No… they may test it. There was always the probability that some distant Prince would insist his body be investigated from top to toe to prove that their distrust in her had been genuine all these years. They would know what she had done.
Serafina swallowed hard.
She would have to do this in exactly the way he would despise. She would have to do this like a Muggle. Savagely. It was all he deserved.
All the hatred that he had created, that her far too long suffering Eileen had finally shown her, bubbled up from her belly and into her veins, her pores, finally her fingertips. She sat gently beside him on the bed and curved her thumb and index finger around his nose, resting her other palm gently upon his cracked lips. With a deep, contemplating sigh she bore her teeth and contracted both hands.
Atticus's eyes snapped open so fast that the sudden view of his bulging eyeballs almost forced her hand away. He gripped feebly at the back of her slender hand, coated with gems, but he was no match for her physical prowess.
"Thought you could get away with it, did you?" the beyond-uncompromising witch's hand shook violently against his both airways. "Thought you could go through life and not pay for what you did? How does it feel? How does it feel to finally pay?"
She knew he had not a clue in the world what she was referring to, but his comprehension meant nothing to her rage. Atticus began to cough and splutter; it wasn't long until she could feel his mouth frothing around her palm… his grasp began to loosen around her wrist. And soon Serafina was on top of him: the closest physical contact they had in years would be ending with his ultimate demise. She straddled his twitching and meekly struggling corpse. For a corpse was the only thing he had been for so long.
"This is for my daughter!"
She refused to take her eyes off him as she began to see the signs of life leave his body. His eyes had soon glazed over, and his body had turned deathly still once more - as if he had merely returned to his normal day-to-day activity.
And all was suddenly as still as it ever was.
Serafina casually massaged the hand that had been scrapped and clawed at by her now very much deceased spouse, and decided that she'd best use a healing potion on it before Missy returned home.
She dusted herself off and left him. Feeling oddly satisfied that she had been the last thing he had ever seen, and her daughter the last thing he had heard from her lips…