Chapter 18: A Confluence of Conundrums
Harry slowly entered the crowded headmaster's office, within which was everyone currently read into the time travel story - now including professors McGonagall, Flitwick, and Sprout. They hadn't been given any details, simply informed of the basics and what Snape had recently done. Harry twitched as an aftershock of the cruciatus briefly flashed through his system. He hated the spell - more for the continuing flashes of pain and slow recovery than the instant agony when initially hit with the curse. Dora rubbed his back as she followed him into the room. She had been hovering for the past few days when possible, spending her time by his bedside in the hospital wing. Harry normally didn't like it - but it was a bit different when it was his girlfriend doting upon him. Of course, he still grumbled about being bedridden.
Dumbledore, seeing their arrival, clapped his hands and brought the group's attention to him, before gesturing for Harry to join him up at the front. Dora followed, giving the headmaster a glare before stretching the chair he had provided for Harry to one that would fit them both.
"Welcome all! I suppose I should have expected neither of you to leave the side of the other." Dumbledore greeted everyone, before accepting the silent critique from Dora with a chuckle. "We have a difficult decision before us. While I had believed the best of Severus and truly thought he was remorseful, His actions this past Tuesday were - frankly - unforgivable." McGonagall let out a small grunt of agreement, she had been apoplectic at hearing a student had been kidnapped and tortured by a member of the Hogwarts staff. Flitwick was stonefaced while Sprout was holding back a few tears, with the rest of the adults matching one of the three heads of house.
"I would normally turn Severus over to Amelia here, for such a flagrant assault on a student. However, we must respect the timeline first and foremost. We cannot risk Mr. Potter and Sirius here suffering from a temporal paradox." Dumbledore placed his elbows upon his desk and bridged his fingers together. "Harry here has already suffered the results of a minor infraction - warning Mrs. Lovegood of a fatal mistake and saving her daughter the misfortune of witnessing her mother's death." Some soft looks were sent his way at that by Andromeda, proud of the young man she was coming to think of as a son, and by Professors Sprout and McGonagall.
"He reported a crippling migraine and Miss Tonks witnessed a nosebleed. Mr. Potter, would you describe further what happened, so we may better understand the effects of changing the timeline?" Dumbledore looked to him expectantly.
Harry sat forward, wincing at another cruciatus aftershock. "Well, I felt like memories were being forced into my head. Now that I've had some further instruction on Occlumency and the basics of Legilimency-" He nodded to Andromeda "- It seems familiar to when someone plants a memory within another's mind forcefully. Which makes sense, my memories of the future were being rewritten. I know what I should remember of Luna's comments about her mom, but I don't actually remember it anymore. Memories of memories." With that, Dumbledore nodded, and took back over.
"It stands to reason, then, that it is not the magnitude of the change from an outside perspective, that matters, but purely the perception of the change by Harry's younger self - And Sirius's, of course, but his perception will be easier to manage due to the circumstances. However, we must balance deception with truth - We cannot let the scale of our illusion grow to some unmanageable level, only for it to fail catastrophically. And that is where we stand now - we must decide what is to be done with Severus, such that young Harry's memories of him here at Hogwarts come to pass." Dumbledore paused, and looked around the room. Amelia and McGonagall looked constipated, Sirius resigned, Remus and Ted thoughtful. Professors Sprout and Flitwick were in over their heads, though displayed that to differing levels. Harry was whispering softly with Dora, and Andromeda was reviewing notes. Nobody looked like they had a clear solution.
Spectre pulled their head from the DoM pensieve, still confused. All three people were unknown to them, but a small tendril of recognition in the back of their mind tickled at something more. Just who were these three? Why did the man with a headache seem more familiar than the others? The more Spectre thought on this, the more confused they became. Nothing - despite all their occlumantic skill - was coming forward. It was as if there was a trained response to recognize these people, but their memories didn't… exist…
With the realization that someone had modified their mind, Spectre moved with urgency. They returned the memory to their mind, before packing away their notes and heading back to their office. All plans of reporting to Croaker just what they had potentially discovered went out the window, and it was only more imperative to discover just who this trio was - especially the man with black hair and grey eyes.
They quickly flooed "home" - or at least, what was on file as their home. Spectre was the DoM's most deadly asset, they had taken some precautions against even their employers. They stepped outside, before executing a series of random apparition jumps, bouncing around the greater London area at a speed faster than most could twist for their first, before stepping out of a maintenance area of King's Cross, dressed completely muggle. A nondescript woman of about five foot six made her way into the hubbub of one of the world's busiest train stations, her dirty blonde hair slowly fading from sight of her last apparition point.
Severus Snape raged against his confinement. He had been put into Hogwarts' real dungeons, those still hidden beneath the level of the Slytherin common room and the potions classroom. The stairway was only accessible with a password the Headmaster knew at the time, and only house elves bound to the castle could enter otherwise. The cells were built from more precisely cut stones, runes carved into the surfaces joined together to suppress magic and prevent defacing of their abilities. Iron bars separated him from the corridor, preventing his escape, but did nothing to hold back his ravings from anyone approaching. His delusions had long since degenerated into gibberish, with only occasionally cogent thoughts breaking through, usually some variant of threat promising violence upon Harry or his father, or even at times defilement of his mother. It was a disturbing sound, carrying down the walls to where the group approached.
"Are you sure he's even still sound enough of mind for this, Albus?" McGonagall asked the headmaster, a worried look in her eye. This plan was the simplest they had managed, despite how it chafed against the justice many craved for on Harry's behalf. It had only been his resigned endorsement that had stopped Amelia and Sirius from stonewalling the proposal.
"Truthfully, I am not." Dumbledore shot her a worried glance. "But we must hope so - or that with a strong enough obliviation of the past few days - that he will be. It is not feasible for Mister Potter to morph into his abuser's likeness for five years." That was the sticking point - Their next best plan involved Harry pretending to be Snape for his younger self's time at Hogwarts.
"I still vote for the imperius" Sirius spoke up from behind them, Amelia cringing at his side.
"It's not feasible, Sirius." Dumbledore said again with a sigh. "Ignoring the legalities of it - because frankly what we're about to do is still quite illegal - Severus is an extremely accomplished occlumancer and the imperius will only hold for a shorter and shorter timeframe, until even the most capable caster of the curse would struggle to hold him under for any meaningful length of time." The group continued silently, all of them still attempting to think of a more elegant solution.
"I'll flay the skin from your flesh! I told the dark lord of the prophecy and your half-brother's place in it! I seduced that snivelling rat Pettigrew to the dark lord's hem purely to see your father dead at my feet! After the dark lord killed him, I spat on his body, before that oaf Hagrid arrived!" Continued ravings echoed down the hallway as they approached, listing off all the heinous crimes against the Potters that Snape was guilty of. The entire group came to a stop before the cell, where Snape was breathing heavily, eyes unfocused as he stared up at Dumbledore before him, who in turn was taken aback and thoroughly confused. This was not the same young man he had hired to be the head of Slytherin house, nor the same young man who expressed sincere remorse to him. Was it all fake? Where had the calm, aloof manner gone? How had he so rapidly collapsed mentally into such a state? Knowing that a simple obligation of the most recent days would not be enough, Dumbledore pointed his wand at the deranged man before them.
"Legilimens."
Dumbledore entered a shattered mindscape. It appeared to originally be Cokeworth, but it was so torn and jumbled that it was hardly recognizable. Cracks in the road became gaping chasms that exposed the very primordial subconscious from which the mindscape was built. He slowly stepped forward, stepping over the rubble and unmade portions of the formerly structured mind to journey closer to the man's broken psyche. Everything within the mindscape represented something, each brick had meaning. Most of them were elements of the man's subconscious, the structure of something like this was impossible to hold in place with the conscious mind.
He turned a corner onto a side street that should lead him to the very residence he had rescued Harry from just days ago, finding sharp spikes of obsidian had erupted through the cobbled streets, standing proud over the few streetlamps that were undisturbed. Even as he walked forward, an obsidian spike shot from the ground a handful of yards away, in a keening, scraping wail of anguish not suitable for the material. DUmbledore steadied himself, before continuing forward, stepping over another chasm. He was glad that at least the man's broken mind meant there were no active defenses, yet.
Other than the spike's emergence, it was also eerily quiet. Some mindscapes were like that - the person had simply devoted no effort to populating their mental world with sound - but this was another element, broken. Nobody built like this, based on the real world, and did not subconsciously add the appropriate sounds. An echoing, maniacal laugh echoed from down the street, coming from where Dumbledore expected Severus had built his core structures. It carried further than was natural, given the lack of other sound to mask its trailing edge.
The headmaster made his way slowly forward, more and more worried both for his own well-being and for the man whose mind he was invading. A mind in such a state as this was likely to lash out, the full might of the Id rising up to eject foreigners - And while he was normally willing to grant second chances, Severus had clearly spurned his and deserved what was coming for him. No, Dumbledore's worry over his potion master's mental wellbeing was now more about the continuing part Snape had to play.
Dumbledore looked up, a faint hissing sound drawing his attention. He cursed himself for not paying attention to the sky beforehand, but standing out against the ravaged, burnt backdrop of the scarred Id, was a slumbering, dormant serpent. It stretched across the whole canvas of Snape's mind, an Ouroboros that was likely tied to the former death eater's dark mark.
The haunting laugh brought his attention back to the house in which Severus grew up, though it was twisted and warped, folding in and out of real dimensions. As he approached, he watched as detail faded in and out on the brickwork, going from a smooth clay to a rough finish and back again, only to flicker into a bizarre representation of another dimension that only gave him a headache to ponder too closely. With a gentle press on the door, it swung inward, to show a younger Severus, maybe sixteen or seventeen, laughing and crying over the body of Lily Potter nee Evans.
Dumbledore pulled back from the now nearly catatonic man, who slumped away from the iron bars of the cell, only to giggle and laugh for a moment before falling silent again. The rest of the group stood behind him as he turned to face them, varying expressions of shock and confusion upon their faces.
"I - I do not believe that Severus is in any way salvageable - either as a person worth allowing to go free within society, or purely from a perspective of mental stability." The statement was a final condemnation of the man, and of the initial plan to obliviate the last few days and force him to take an unbreakable vow.
"I have to imagine his mental state is now akin to those who have been tortured under the cruciatus curse for an extended period of time, and is in all likelihood, irreversible." Dumbledore seemed to age in that moment, as if an energy and confidence left him. Harry stood by Sirius and brought a hand to his head as a pounding headache grew, but did not manifest into as sharp a pain as when he had warned Pandora Lovegood. Maybe the changes were still too unrealized, and would be brought into focus as they approached those moments.
"Well then, let's dose him with the draught of living death, and maybe we'll find a solution. But we'll need to be ready to replace him in a little over a year, so Harry, Dora, you'll need to study his mannerisms from Harry's memories." Andromeda took charge of planning as Dumbledore seemed to have an internal crisis. "For now, Dumbledore, you can say he left on an academic tour of the world, or something. Nobody actually likes him so for him to just disappear won't be questioned too closely." The elderly man nodded absentmindedly, as he ponderously began to walk away from the group, and back up to his office.
"You think he's alright?" Dora whispered to Harry, a little worried.
"Yeah, I just think that he's rethinking a lot of stuff right now. This is probably good." Harry replied, gazing at the back of the statesman, the headmaster, the grandfatherly figure, and the man who defeated Grindlewald. It was a cold reminder that everyone was human, and everyone made mistakes. Everyone else filtered away from the cell as Snape continued to mumble and laugh, no longer remotely coherent.
Spectre sat down in the small cottage that was her actual home. It was fairly barren, with empty walls and shelves devoid of any personal touch. Spectre had never thought about it, it simply hadn't been a priority. She didn't have anyone to have a photo or painting of, and art was just frivolous. All her pay was squirreled away into caches around the world in case she had to bolt. She spread her fingers wide, palms flat against the tabletop, wondering why, for a moment, did she feel that way? She knew others had emotional attachments, in an academic sense. It had never occurred to her to question why she didn't. But as this sense of unease grew, more and more evidence mounted that her mind had been thoroughly altered. Why didn't she have a life outside work? Who were her parents? Did she have any siblings? These were all questions she found herself asking. The conditioned answers sprung to mind easily - She never had time, was always too exhausted. They had died in a fire when she was a child. No siblings. But just as she felt it was wrong that she didn't recognize the hogsmeade trio, those answers felt wrong, too.
She replayed the memory in her mind, over and over, each time feeling the sense of recognition growing, but still not understanding why or who these people were. She tried to force it, but continued analysis of the memory, even with occlumantic perfect recollection, only further exacerbated the feeling of something wrong - of a gaping hole in her mind where these memories and emotions should exist, but simply didn't. It was more than an obliviation, that was a cap, a sealing of memories away. A crude method that ultimately could be undone with careful exposure to what was being hidden by the spell.
Did the time travellers have anything to do with this? Had they stolen her memories? But how could they have? Her fingers suddenly fisted the bland tablecloth, jarring the vase and tipping it over, rolling to the edge of the table and tumbling to the ground only to smash and scatter the flowers under stasis. Her eyes didn't leave the point on the table before her, staring past the surface and into the distance.
"Fuck!" She cursed, throwing herself backwards, toppling the chair to the floor as she stood. She walked away, leaving the chair cast aside and broken vase upon the tile floor, moving to stare out the front window, watching as muggle children played in the yard across from hers. She wondered why she had never registered the existence of her neighbors before. They were cute kids, about 7 and 9. Their kids would have been about that age, she thought.
Hold on. Their kids? Whose kids? Hers and someone else? Or two people that weren't her? Where had that thought come from? She slowly sank to the floor, mind awhirl with questions and no good answers. Just how much was she missing?
Who was she?
A/N:
This is my first story on FFN! I have some more works on AO3, if you're interested. I'll post a chapter a day here on FFN until I am caught up with AO3, at which time I'll be posting weekly!
Please comment with any questions, constructive criticisms, or recommendations! If you want early access or to chime in on oneshot polls, please see my linktree: /anarettekors