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Nothing left but hateSnape had known what would await them, but when he entered the final hiding place of the Philosopher's stone, a barren chamber dug out of Hogwart's grey stone foundations, he was surprised nonetheless.
After having prepared oneself for a confrontation with the Dark Lord himself, the small-shouldered figure of Quirrell was something of a disappointment. Even though he had shed his stuttering act of insecurity that Snape had doubted from the first moment of contact with this strange, unfortunate man.
Obviously, the young Potter shared his Potions Master's sentiments, for he gasped, a guttural sound that Snape could barely interpret as a monosyllabic pronoun.
Quirrell smiled. This way, he was nearly frightening, and the dark taint of Lord Voldemort, the silent melody that had used to lure Snape into following, filled the room like a poisonous siren's song.
And there was Potter, his face blackened from the dark fire he had crossed, his school robes torn from the wild hunt after the key, and his eyes blood shot from the worry about his friends.
So small, so weak.
Resisting the Dark Lord himself.
A week ago, Snape would have blamed his behaviour on Gryffindor stupidity, insisting that Potter had simply been too dumb to know what awaited him, too dumb to realize what this man stood for. Who he was.
But one look in the young boy's eyes was enough to convince Snape of the opposite. Potter was terribly aware who Quirrell was, terribly aware of how little chance he had to survive this confrontation.
And still, he was standing unmoved, letting his one chance to flee back through the fire pass. His eyes were fixed on Quirrell, the bringer of his judgment and death.
And still he found the courage to speak.
„But I thought – Snape," He stammered, and Snape rather felt than saw the older Potter blush by his side.
„Severus?" Quirrell laughed, cold and sharp. „Yes, Severus does seem the type, doesn't he? So useful to have him swooping around like an overgrown bat. Next to him, who would usspect p-p-poor st-stuttering P-Professor Quirrell?"
Hadn't Snape been too distracted by the tainting presence of the Dark Lord, he would have been satisfied with that judgment. Much effort and thought had gone into his persona as „overgrown bat", after all. He caught another look of embarrassment from the elder Potter and one of dumbfounded surprise from his younger alter ego.
„But Snape tried to kill me!" Potter-the-boy protested, obviously not willing to accept a truth that so much differed from his own view of the past year.
„No, no, no. I tried to kill you," Quirrell seemed to enjoy the whole thing tremendously and delivered a speech worthy of every mad overreacher in the book. Unfortunately, Potter seemed neither willing nor able to be impressed by all those efforts to murder him.
„Snape was trying to save me?" He asked, and Potter-the-man chuckled.
„Rather slow to learn, I admit," He commented. „But in a way, you should be proud, Professor."
„No riddles tonight, Potter," Snape answered absently, and could have smacked himself on the forehead as he belatedly caught the rather bad pun his words contained. Potter only chuckled a little more.
„You should be proud because in a room filled with an evil DADA-teacher – my first one, I must stress -, the Philospher's Stone, The Mirror of Erised and Voldemort himself, I was only thinking about you."
„What an honour," Snape spat, and deliberately turned away from his patient to concentrate on the rather clichéd showdown that unfolded in front of them. Quirrell bragging around like a second rate bad guy from a muggle novel, and Potter asking questions as if the world depended on it.
"You could have concentrated on getting out instead of learning all about his private life, Potter," Snape sneered as he looked at the little boy who was already too tired to keep on his feet.
"I knew there was no way out. And I refused to leave the stone to him. So I tried to stall. Really, Professor, I am not that stupid," Potter answered, clearly amused. "Look, I'm trying to keep him from concentrating on the mirror."
"And what a good job you did," Snape remarked as Quirrell chose that exact moment to turn around and study the Mirror of Erised with mounting desperation.
"I don't understand… is the Stone nside the Mirror? Should I break it?"
"That's the Dark Side for you," Potter-the-man snorted. "If they don't understand something, they try to break it. If it doesn't break, they hex it. If still nothing happens, they try to kidnap someone who is a bit brighter than they are. No wonder Voldemort never managed to conquer the earth."
"Moving towards the mirror inch by inch and hoping that something might happen doesn't seem too clever, either," Snape just commented, for Potter-the-boy was attempting exactly that. And failing quite spectacularly, as the ropes around his ankles were too tight to let him move easily. Despite the severity of the situation, Snape couldn't help a dark chuckle when the boy slowly lost his balance and crashed to the ground like a badly positioned Christmas Tree.
"Well, it wasn't my grace and good manners that made me win every confrontation with him, was it?" Potter asked, but his lips, too, twitched at the sight of the fallen hero who tried to get back on his feet with a lot of badly organizing wriggling.
On Quirrell, however, the joke seemed to be lost. He was pacing in front of the mirror, his agitation heightening with every step.
"What does this mirror do? How does it work? Help me, Master!"
With a sudden implosion of silence, as if all air and sound and happiness had been sucked from the stone chamber, the atmosphere in the room changed. Gone was the playful banter, and both men, Snape couldn't help noticing, seemed to straighten, as if readying themselves to meet their final adversary.
For from the darkness, a voice answered Quirrell's question, a voice that came from nowhere and everywhere, a pure echo that seemed to haunt stone and flame and chilled Snape to the bone.
"Use the boy… use the boy…"
"Yes – Potter – come here," If Quirrell felt the haunting effect of the voice, he didn't let on. The teacher simply clapped his hands once and the ropes binding the boy fell off. He got slowly to his feet.
Snape's eyes felt as if they were glued to the strange turban on Quirrell's head. He knew who was lurking under it. He had heard every detail of this story, and he knew what would happen. Never had he been so tempted to shed his perfect self control. He wanted to scream at the little boy, to order him away immediately, and yet he knew what would happen.
Watching the small, still too scrawny figure that was approaching the mirror, torn between the wish to protect and do what was right, and the urgent need to curl into a ball and hide from the world, Snape finally understood what Potter-the-man had meant back in the cupboard, when he had said, without the slightest emotion in his voice, that he had had worse.
But obviously, Potter-the-boy had decided to put on a stand, and after watching the mirror for a moment, while only a small widening of his eyes betrayed a sudden surprise, he started another attempt to get Quirrell on the wrong track.
"I see myself shaking hands with Dunbledore," He quite obviously invented. "I – I've won the House Cup for Gryffindor."
It seemed that Quirrell accepted this bad performance. "Get out of the way," He shouted, and once more positioned himself in front of the mirror.
Potter-the-boy walked away, his hand resting on his pocket
"It's obvious Quirrell hasn't been a teacher for long," Snape commented. "I would have caught that blatant lie immediately."
"So what you are saying is that Voldemort would have made an excellent teacher," Potter answered dryly. "For here he comes…"
He stopped when the high, eerie voice filled the room again. It came from Quirrell's direction, but the teacher's lips hadn't moved, and no living human being could have made such a sound.
"He lies… He lies…" The voice hissed, and slithered, and Snape shuddered in sudden revulsion.
The high voice spoke again.
"Let me speak to him… face to face…"
"Master, you are not strong enough!"
"I have strength enough… for this…"
Like the boy, Snape felt that he couldn't move even if he had wanted to. Petrified, he watched as Quirrell reached up and began to unwrap his turban, exposing a head that looked strangely small without it. Then he turned slowly on the spot.
Where there should have been a back to Quirrell's head, there was a face, chalk white with glaring red eyes and slits for nostrils, like a snake. Snape could see the shadows of the not-quite-human face of the reborn Voldemort, but this parasite, this monstrosity that was stitched on the body of another man, seemed even more revolting.
"Harry Potter," It whispered, satisfaction and hate turning his words into sweet poison.
"Entrance of the Supreme Evil Being, formally hidden in a turban," Potter commented dryly.
Potter-the-child's eyes darted from the circle of fire to the ghastly figure in front of him and back, clearly torn between his wish to flee and his inability to move, frozen in shock as he was.
"See what I have become?" The face said. "Mere shadow and vapour… I have form only when I can share another's body… but there have always been those willing to let me into their hearts and minds… Unicorn blood has strengthened me, these past weeks… you saw faithful Quirrell drinking it for me in the Forest… and once I have the Elixir of Life, I will be able to create a body of my own… Now…. Why don't you give me that stone in your pocket?"
Potter stumbled backwards, wild panic replacing the fascination in his eyes. But as the child retreated from this image of horror, his older counterpart moved forward slowly, until he had nearly reached the thing that had once been the most powerful evil wizard on earth.
„Oh, Tom, poor, stupid Tom," The older Potter whispered as he approached Quirrell's shivering form, and as he had done with his friends, he lifted a hand, stopping only inches away from the ghastly face. There was sadness in his voice and eyes, and a strange, implacable tenderness. „So much forgotten, so much lost. Nothing left but hate and anger to drive you into the wrong direction."
While Quirrell moved slowly towards the boy like a hunting animal of prey and the older Potter stood silent like a statue, his eyes fixed on his arch nemesis, Snape found that he could finally breathe again.
The one good thing about Potter, he thought, was that the irritation he caused usually overrode every other emotion in Snape.
„Potter," He shouted. „If you even consider justifying Voldemort like you did with your pathetic relatives, I will stun you and get you to a psychiatric ward!"
„Fair warning, Professor," Potter accepted with an amused smile. „And to put you at ease, not even I could be mad enough to justify him."
„You are wearing that forgiving look again, Potter," Snape warned him, irritation growing with every word. "Remember that you have every right to hate him."
"Don't be a fool, Potter" Snarled the face of Lord Voldemort, as if to stress Snape's words. "Better save your own life and join me… or you'll meet the same end as your parents… They died begging me for mercy…"
"Liar!" Potter-the-child shouted suddenly, and his anger seemed to give him new strength, for he stopped moving backwards and stood his ground against the approaching monster.
It seemed that the memory of his parents, or the outrage at Voldemort's desecration of their memory, was a strong enough power to make him resist even the Dark Lord, and only through this did Snape realize exactly how much the memory of his parents had meant to the young boy.
His older counterpart however didn't appear to have heard the words. His answer to Snape wasn't tainted by even a hint of emotion.
"But I did hate him, Professor. For so many years, he was the one thing I concentrated all my hate on. I knew I had to kill him, and I wanted it more than anything else in the world. And when he caught me, and kept me in his Fortress, my hate nearly consumed me.
"But then," He continued, his eyes fixed on the abomination that was the Dark Lord, on the slitted nose and the red, burning eyes. "Then I understood. Why it was me that had been bound to him. Why we were truly equals. And why I had a power he did not know of."
"You know, Professor, we were very much alike, Tom Ridde and I. Both grown up in a muggle world that hated and abused us. Both suddenly confronted with a world we couldn't understand. Both driven by the thirst to prove ourselves, to show everyone that we were worthy of being a wizard. Where I had Voldemort to hate and to blame for everything bad that happened in my life, Voldemort blamed the wizarding society. He blamed the muggles. He blamed the whole world. Where my hate was centred on one single being, his hate was all encompassing, all consuming. But we were both driven by hate."
He turned around to his younger self, who was staring at the monster before him with fearful loathing in his eyes.
"This mirror is a curious thing," He then murmured and turned around to the softly shimmering Mirror of Erised. "When I looked into it the first time, a few months before this memory occurred, I saw myself reunited with my parents. I found it again in my seventh year, hidden deep in the dungeons, but instead of happy futures for myself, all I could see in it was the slain body of Voldemort. He had become my past, my present and my future, as Tom Riddle will tell me in a year. He had swallowed me whole. Had become my white whale, and I tried to finish him without sense or knowledge when to stop. Until that one night, down in his dungeons."
Quirrell was walking backwards now towards Potter, so that Voldemort could keep his eyes fixed on the boy, and his words seemed as much a comment to the young boy's denial as to the man's explanation.
"How touching…" He hissed. "I always value bravery… Yes, boy, your parents were brave… I killed your father first and he put up a courageous fight... but your mother needn't have died… she was trying to protect you… Now give me the Stone, unless you want her to have died in vain."
"Never!" In a desperate attempt to escape, Potter-the-child sprang towards the flames that surrounded him, but Voldemort screamed, "Seize him!"
Potter-the-man's eyes followed his fleeing counterpart and Quirrell hot in pursuit, but Snape could see that he wasn't really concentrating on the scene. A muscle twitched near his mouth when the Professor grabbed the boy hard and cruelly, and he blinked once when Quirrell cried out in pain and let go of the boy.
"That was what the prophecy was talking about, you know?" He continued, watching Quirrell as he hunched over his hurt hand, whimpering in pain and watching his fingers, which were blistening before their very eyes. "Neither can live while the other survives… We would drive each other to death and ruin in our hate, one seeking to destroy in the other what had hurt and deformed him, one seeing his most lethal fear in the other's eye. There. You can see it in our faces – the hate, the desperation, the fear."
He pointed towards Voldemort's twisted face, his screaming, salivating mouth that even over Quirrell's howls of pain demanded the destruction of the boy that had been his downfall.
"Seize him! Seize him!"
Potter-the-boy's stare was alternating between Quirrell's wounds and his own hands, the cause of this destruction. There was disbelief in his eyes, and fear, but also a rising coldness, a determination, and the awakening knowledge of power, a power so great that it could destroy even the Dark Lord.
Quirrell's words were barely discernable as he pleaded for his life. "Mater, I cannot hold him – my hands – my hands!"
"Then kill him, fool, and be done!" Screeched Voldemort, and though he knew what must follow, Quirrell obeyed. He descended on the child, but instead of fleeing again, Potter reached up and pressed his bare hands on the teacher's face, the madness of fury in his eyes.
"And so it begins," Potter-the-man whispered as he watched Quirrell disintegrate under the hands of a child. "A fight that would lead us to his dungeons, to torture, pain and his final destruction."
He shook his head. "If only somebody had taught me. We could have ended it here and now. But instead of telling me everything, Dumbledore kept silent. Instead of preparing me, he tested my abilities secretly."
He turned away from the memory of his collapsing body and towards one of the huge columns that supported the room.
"See, Professor," He asked and pointed towards a shadowy figure hiding outside the circle of flame. "He is waiting to rescue me at the last second. Watching and assessing my abilities. Letting Voldemort flee. Again."
Once more, Snape felt his jaw drop as his eyes followed Potter's outstretched hand. There was the Headmaster, indeed, crouching by the column as if he prepared for a mighty jump. Waiting in the shadows while an eleven-year-old boy defeated Lord Voldemort. Again.
Only when Quirrell had disintegrated into dust, only when the spectre of Voldemort, his mouth gaping open in a soundless scream, had vanished from the chamber, did the old wizard walk forward quickly. He caught Potter before he could touch the ground.
"Perfect timing, as always," Potter commented and turned away from the Headmaster.
"But… How long has he been waiting there…" Snape whispered, shock turning his blood to ice water.
"I don't know," Potter answered tiredly. "A few minutes at the very least. I didn't notice him in the past, but I guess he saw most of my confrontation with Voldemort."
He sighed and a tiny shudder went through his body as if of remembered pain, but then he shrugged and the shadow seemed to fall from him.
"Shall we leave then, Professor? There is nothing else to see, and I need a good dinner."
Dumbfounded, his eyes still fixed on Dumbledore, Snape nodded slowly and let the mists of the pensieve carry him away from this place of terrible revelations.
It seemed that yet another part of his knowledge about the world had fallen away, and the ground on which he walked didn't seem so firm anymore.
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A/N:
The term "Supreme Evil Being", or short SEB, originates from Jasper Fforde's ingenious "Thursday Next"-novels – go read them, they're fabulous!
The white whale is, of course, "Moby Dick", written by Herman Melville.
This was tremendously difficult to write (I hope it doesn't show…) so give me a treat by clicking on that little button down the left and review!