Left Behind
Chapter Two
"My word, Severus, that I shall never reveal the best of you?"
Albus Dumbledore
Hogwarts Express, first of September 1997
'I would rather that you not come back next year.'Hermione shook her head and could not help but grimace at the memory. There was nothing she could do with leaving or coming back now because she was already on the train and it was oddly silent at that. The latter being because for the first time in six years, she was riding the Hogwarts Express alone. Glancing around, she felt the empty seats in the coach were made more empty by the awareness that every September for the past five years, she had had Ron to bicker with and Harry to soothe.'At least I only have to make revision schedules for myself now,'she tried for a bit of humour and giggled. Quickly, she lined the parchment before her, in preparation for the timetables she would plan. The glass door of the coach slid open.
"Going mad, Hermione?" Neville slipped inside the train compartment while Hermione was still giggling to herself. She laughed again.
"Definitely mental then," he said before he joined her in laughing. He gestured to the papers on her lap, "Am I disturbing you?" When she replied in the negative, he then sat across her, eager to see what was being written on the parchment.
"Revision schedules, Hermione?" his tone incredulous, "This is early, even for you... By the way, where are Ron and Harry?"
He looked up to see a flash of sadness crossing her unnaturally calm visage. "No, they didn't ... they did? Those gits! They left you and – "
"It's all right, Neville. I sent them off with my blessings."
"- and me and Ginny, and Luna even. What were they thinking? Wait. You sent them off without you? With blessings?"
The surprised look on Neville's face was comical enough to make Hermione chuckle again. "Yes. Yes, I did. You see, it's part of the pl –," Another look crossed Hermione's face, this time too fleeting for Neville to catch and her next words seemed stilted or somewhat measured. "Neville, what happened to you the night Harry, Ron and I went after the Sorcerer's Stone?"
"What?" Neville was surprised. "Er… you cast a fully body-bind on me."
"Where did we take the Floo to the Department of Mysteries?" she continued.
"We did? I thought we rode Thestrals." Neville began scratching behind one ear. "Hermione, why the sudden questions?"
"Last one. What was the colour of Ginny's dress at Harry's last party?" The question was punctuated by a smirk.
"Pale yellow. She kept complaining that it clashed with her hair and I do think it did, but apparently Mrs. Weasley bought it as a present for her. Why are you asking all these?"
Hermione smoothed the parchments in front of her. "Just checking you're you," she smiled apologetically. "Actually, the first question was enough, considering I lifted the Body-Bind and you said no one else passed by that night so no one else could have possibly known. The latter two were just to make sure."
Neville grinned, "I never did get back at you for that Body-Bind." He moved to sit beside her. "So why did this third of the Golden Trio not join this adventure?" Pretending not to see Hermione's prefect badge, he cast a Muffliato about the compartment. The expected look of reproach turned out to be one of gratitude.
"They're off to do… work Dumbledore left behind, but frankly, I don't think I'd help much on the field. They need more help from outside. Research, supplies – my job. I just hope I'm making the right choice." She leaned closer to the window, resting her cheek on the cold glass. Her fingers tugged at the black heart-shaped pendant hanging from a silver chain around her neck. "Oh, bollocks. Being dramatic was never my style, Neville."
"The morbid black heart you're holding says otherwise."
They both chuckled at that; Neville continued, "Don't worry, Hermione. I doubt you made the decision without thinking it through. There is no shame in being left behind, especially if it's by choice. I would know." His smile was small but most sincere.
"What matters is that you play your assigned role well. Besides, you have Ginny, Luna and me to help you here. We have the DA to restart, don't we?"
Hermione smiled, "Really?"
Neville's grin grew. "Yes, really." Leaning back, he placed a friendly arm around her shoulders. The familiar gesture relaxed Hermione and she leaned towards him.
"Thanks." While they continued to look out the window at the meadows they were passing by, Hermione couldn't help but tease, "Since when did you become so wise?
"Dunno." Neville patted Hermione's book bag. " Say, you wouldn't have happened to have made me one of those timetables too, would you?"
She punched him lightly before she started on a parchment for him.
Hogwarts' staff room, after the Sorting Feast
Severus Snape paced repeatedly across the rich brown carpet, thinking his feet on regular rugs would have worn the threads sufficiently to create a distinct path. Only house elves' magic perhaps kept this one as clean and apparently as new as it had been the first time he had stepped into the room almost two decades ago. Its rather dull, but undeniably tasteful, appearance was always a bit out of place in this room, in his opinion, given the varied odds and ends of the professors cluttering the available workspaces. Behind him, the door swung open and Alecto Carrow entered the room. Her brother, for once, was not following closely behind her.
"Professor Carrow."
"Headmaster," she replied while taking a soft black arm chair, plausibly the best seat in the room.
For a second there, with the use of the title, Snape almost believed Carrow had greeted Dumbledore. Skills in feigning nonchalance gained over a lifetime were all that could effectively combat the strong urge in Snape to turn around and greet the man he had called Headmaster.
To distract himself, he contemplated the seating arrangements in the room. Not for the first time, he wondered why the best seat was normally the spare one in meetings past. Most teachers had conjured their own during their first week at work like Minerva and her rigid oak chair (with secretly applied cushioning charms. He knew. He had sat on it once when she was out.), Flitwick and his not-so-subtle high chair, Sinistra and Hooch shared their chintz sofa, Snape with his boring regular arm chair now back in his quarters, and Dumbledore had always sat in a hideously upholstered, rainbow-coloured wicker chair. To the staff, the soft black armchair had always been the odd one out, meant for passing guests and when Lucius or another from the board would occasionally sit in.
He watched the other professors slowly trickle in, drawn in partly by the tradition of a staff briefing to begin the year, partly by Snape's clearly worded missive that none were exempt from this meeting. Realising how odd it must appear to them for the Headmaster to be continuously pacing, Snape gingerly sat himself in the late Headmaster's wicker chair, touched the padding and wandlessly charmed it black with a subtle flick of the wrist. The unmistakeable glares resulting from that action were easily ignored by his contemplation of his spindly fingers lacing and unlacing themselves in different arrangements. Last to enter were the Heads of House, obviously late from their own house briefings.
"How are my Slytherins?" he asked Amycus as greeting. The possessive pronoun hinted at territoriality. He barely listened to Carrow's leering laugh and detailed response, distracted, however much he denied the reality of him feeling such, by the thought that he was not Head of Slytherin anymore. It was the first time in over a decade and half that he was not there to welcome the new first years in their common room. He wondered if Carrow had given the same opening speech half welcoming and half expectation of honourable conduct and good manners. From the way Carrow ate his dinner, Snape doubted so.
Instead of enjoying his last night of no essays to mark as he was wont to do in years past, he was here, conducting a meeting amongst people who either wished him a slow death or loyally served his murderous, bloodthirsty master. All while sitting on the chair previously used by a man he had considered both father and manipulative master, whom he had killed only three months ago.
'If this was the kind of pressure Albus had to face daily as Headmaster, it's no wonder his hair was all white', he thought, 'Of all the sodden times to have a moment of vanity for my own hair.'
If he could do so without being noticed, he would have rolled his eyes. Since it was clearly time to begin speaking to the staff, he desisted from such puerility.
He began to cover the reinstatement of Umbridge's Educational Decrees, complete with ward alarms to be monitored by him and the professors while studiously avoiding the sheer delight in the Carrows' expressions or the way Minerva's eyebrows were meeting and her lips thinning.
If anything, it was cold comfort that sitting in that chair, with all the hurt and guilt and betrayal it entailed, was one thing he could do. It was a perverted testament to his strength of will. No one, perhaps not even the late Headmaster, could equal him in that.