When I was finished with a certain part, a spell, the first complete instruction I had decoded, with no references to anything I hadn't found yet, I took it directly to Snape at our next lesson. The minute he glanced it, he fixed me with a harsh, focused gaze.
"Where did you get this?"
I didn't answer. He stepped forward, my decoded page clutched in his hand.
"Where did you get this?" he demanded once more.
I clenched my jaw, remaining silent. He raised the page, and I thought for a moment that he would strike me. Then he turned with a sweeping motion, strode over to the fireplace, and threw the page in.
That could have been the end of it. I could have cried or raged—that was the only copy of that decrypted page. But it wouldn't have been worth it. I stood motionless, imagining that it was my own frustration being consumed by the fire. I had decrypted it once, I told myself, I could do it again.
You have to be careful what you damn someone for.
When the page had been reduced to ash, Snape turned to me and spoke. "Do not seek out the Dark Arts, Rookwood. I will not conceal from you their existence, and there will come a time when you must understand them, but that time has not come yet. The thing that defines the Dark Arts is that they require a price and that the price is always too high."
As he finished, the anger went out of his voice and something else crept in, and unspeakable exhaustion and anguish. I knew to keep quiet—Snape would hardly have relished being called out in a moment of vulnerability, and his defensive impulses were quick and often cruel. When at last the silence was broken, he was the one to speak.
"Now, on the matter of the Heribidean Matrix—"
"I'm sorry," I said, leaving it intentionally ambiguous whether I meant about the decrypted spell or about whatever price he had paid.
He paused for a moment, the lack of reproach as great a sign of gratitude as he could show me. Then he turned our attention once more to the Heribidean Organizational Matrix (invented by Elric Heribide) and its role in understanding how various spells and types of magic relate to one another. Or at least, how they might do so, as there are many exceptions to and problems with the Heribidean Matrix, as there is with any more theoretical tool for understanding magic.
There is a place in the Matrix, of course, for the Dark Arts. A number of places, actually, spread across the various Disciplines, Aspects, Objects, and Transitories. There is some speculation, in the limited circle that has ever heard of the Heribidean Organizational Matrix, that Heribide began to conceive of the Matrix first as a means of defining exactly what comprised the Dark Arts. And, in this regard, it seems to be a fairly good tool of measurement, yet it remains obscure.
It has occurred to me, chillingly, that Dumbledore must have been farmiliar with the Heribidean Matrix, yet he did not encourage teachers to use it at Hogwarts. I suspect it was a matter of his trying to fight a war and run a school at the same time: he was more concerned that we lack the tools to do harm than that we be instilled with a sense of morality.
When I mentioned this suspension to Snape, he said, quietly, "He takes the body who cannot claim the soul." Then he told me, sharply, that it was hardly a good idea to criticize Albus Dumbledore.
My own knowledge of the Heribidean Matrix, however, lead me to a conclusion which I wish had been more startling. As I decoded the spells hidden in my father's memoir, one after the next fell squarely within the areas of the Matrix allotted to the Dark Arts. If ever anyone had questioned Augustus Rookwood's erudition on the subject, this was the proof of it. Yet I told no one. And I continued to decode it.
All children really love their parents. All children want to be loved by their parents.
That summer, I started spending most of my time out of the house, wandering the streets of London. Sometimes I was alone, often I was with Finny. I got into a couple fights, but otherwise I kept out of trouble. Griffith and Melissa didn't worry too much: I always made Wednesday group, I was back every night when I said I would be, and they could see that I was keeping up with my studies.
Towards the end of the summer, I had the annual meeting with my father in the then-familiar room with the then-familiar air created by the then-familiar torments of Azkaban's barbaric practices.
With Sirius Black a fugitive, and the resultant increase in security, there had been some question as to whether I would even be allowed to see my father, and any attempts to brighten the visiting chamber had been abolished. Rather than the usual pair of Aurors, the room was watched by three Aurors and a Dementor was stationed just outside the door.
My father, however, was completely unchanged, his features giving no clue as to what he thought of Black's escape. Before I could so much as utter a single word in greeting, he raised his hand to silence me.
"It would be unwise, I think, to speak of recent events."
He looked to one of the Aurors, and she nodded with grudging assent.
I settled into my seat anxiously, keenly aware of the tension in the room. We talked, with false nonchalance—badly feigned on my part—of my studies and very little else. I did not mention that a Basilisk had been set loose in Hogwarts the preceding year, or a threat to the lives of Mugglborns painted on a wall in blood. He gave no hint as to whom he might or might not have known or what he might or might not have done in his past life. Even any mention of Severus Snape was kept to a bare minimum.
"I'm glad you seem to be taking full advantage of his expertise," my father said, and I realized that I should say no more on the subject.
I do not know how my father retained such a clam and amiable demeanor in the midst of Azkaban's horrors. I glimpsed for the first time, that day, the full depth of cruelty which wizarding Britain employed in the punishment of its prisoners, and I was shaken by it. I thought, sometimes, that my father must have had some talisman to protect him, though such magic was obviously forbidden.
It helped to think that, anyways, and so from time to time I would tell myself it was true. The conditions in prisons came up often in Wednesday group. Sometimes they would be reduced to tears recounting the terrible things their parents had been through. Deserved or not, it was impossible not to abhor such suffering when seen under those circumstances.
All children really love their parents. All children want to be loved by their parents.
There was always a difficult discussion of blame. As hard as it was for us to accept, and whether the severity was fair or unfair, our parents had, at least in part, brought it upon themselves. We could hate the system for its cruelty, we were told, but we could never, ever allow that hate to bleed into places where it was undeserved.
The atrocities of men are born in the dreams of children.
And, in accepting our parents' complicity in their own suffering and their separation from us, we learned that hating them didn't diminish our love for them. We were not wrong for resenting them, and it only hurt us more when we pretended that we didn't, or that we only resented them.
I wanted my father to be proud of me. I wanted him to see me do all the things he would have done in my place, just short of being imprisoned. I worked tirelessly to decode his memoir. It was a mistake. I knew it was a mistake, but I did it anyways. It was something we had to be wary of, they told us in the Wednesday group, the desire to emulate our parents' mistakes. And for me it was doubly so. My father was a brilliant man, and it was hard to tell where the brilliance ended and the mistakes started.
That day in Azkaban, I began to see that I was too kind for my father's tastes. To him, Snape was a resource and nothing more. Yet what glimpses I had seen of Snape's agonized self-loathing had awakened my deepest sympathies, and I had acted on them.
Are we having an adventure yet?
In a classic heroic confrontation, there aren't two roles, hero and villain. There's three: victim, aggressor, and rescuer. No one in the wizarding world had the guts to ask me to be a rescuer, and so I was pulled, by example, between victim and aggressor. But every kid is a hero in their own mind. Maybe I wasn't quite ready to give that up.
When Draco's arm got torn open, for instance, I went through the whole First Aid routine without even really thinking about it. First step, check to see that no one is more qualified than you. It's absurd that we have a Professor teaching an accident-prone subject to accident-prone kids, and that Professor doesn't know the first thing about healing magic.
Step two, send for help. Usually, you pick a likely helper and tell them, "You, go call for an ambulance," but Hogwarts is rather short on emergency services, so I had to settle for telling Miss Parkinson to get Professor Sprout, who was likely to be closest by and who I hoped would have some inkling of magical healing.
Step three, check to see that the victim is conscious. Draco was sitting up, shaking and whimpering in pain and terror, so step three was easy.
Step four, stop the bleeding. I was only entirely aware after the fact that I had torn strips from my own robe to wrap the injury. At the time, it was only a matter of what was close at hand. It's not like Professor Hagrid kept a first aid kit about.
I was just getting to step five, treat for shock, when Miss Parkinson came racing back with Professor Sprout. I was about to surrender control of the situation to someone who I hoped would have greater expertise when I realized that Hermione Granger was shouting, "Get out of there!"
I half-rose, then the blow struck me on the shoulder and I staggered under it. I turned around, mind racing, getting ready for a fight, and I saw Professor Hagrid struggling to pull an angry Hippogriff away. Someone grabbed my arm—was it you?—and Draco and I were pulled to safety.
At first, I tried to insist that I was fine, just coming down from the adrenaline. My shoulder was bleeding, ripped almost to the bone in one spot, but you know? For the first few minutes, I didn't feel it. Pain just works that way.
See, step zero of first aid is to check to see if the scene is safe before rushing in and making more victims. But just ask someone to imagine that they're performing first aid ("You see a man lying on the ground.") and they'll forget that step. In a real emergency situation, you're not even thinking, just doing, and most people don't do step zero.