cl. too dire to tell
Severus Snape always knew he would one day face a reckoning. However, he never expected that reckoning to take the form of a thirteen-year-old girl in an off-white hospital gown.
He didn't believe in Hell, not really, not any more than any other lapsed Catholic did. In the summers of his youth, his father used to drag him to services, if only to watch his young son squirm in the face of eternal damnation and hellfire. He could still remember the tightness of Tobias' grip on his shoulder, the smell of cheap Muggle tobacco wafting off his hand, the man squeezing his fingers into his son's bones when service finally ended and he went off for a drink. Nothing shouted at Severus from the pulpit had ever been more frightening than the reality of his own home, and Hell did not compare to the tortures inflicted by the Dark Lord. Scripture held no relevance for a wizard who'd witnessed the worst of man's cruelties and had lived to tell the tale.
Still, Severus understood that one day—either before a pair of pearly gates or some other adjudicator of fate—he'd be forced to reveal the truth of himself, if only because he couldn't contain it any longer. The truth was a festering abscess under his skin, one he left well enough alone, ignoring it even as it poisoned his blood. He knew it'd have to be lanced eventually, and it would spill forth—nasty, vile, and ruining.
Harriet Potter shut the door behind her and stared at him. He saw her throat bob with a nervous gulp.
"By all means, Potter, stroll into my office unannounced. Merlin knows it'd be too much to hope you had the brains or courtesy to knock." He lifted his quill from his marking, not that he'd been doing anything more than going through the motions, his Occlumency shields as thin as wafer paper and just as flimsy after the day he'd had. The Dreamless Sleep had worn off in the night, and he'd spent the hours before dawn trapped in a facsimile of slumber, too drugged to rise, too haunted by teeth and claws and bloodthirsty howls to rest. He'd been very, very tempted to hex the matron when he'd finally jerked his worthless, trembling hide out of bed that morning, but he'd resisted. He didn't know why.
Slytherin had been more of a nightmare than usual, demanding an account of things Severus had to piece together from scraps and guesses, lying his arse off to excuse his presence with three Slytherin students inside the Forbidden Forest with a werewolf and Sirius bloody Black. The school had known of Greyback's residence in the forest for some weeks now and had tightened security, not that the Ministry provided any kind of support in actually killing or capturing the bastard. He'd escaped Slytherin's lingering interrogation with his limbs intact, but Severus knew retribution would be forthcoming when he least expected it. Nothing satisfied Slytherin more than a judicious application of Crucio when no one could hear the screams.
Severus was exhausted and not at all prepared to deal with the girl.
Potter stood inside the threshold, unmoving as if her courage had been enough to propel her inside but not enough to have her take a seat. The skin of her scrawny arms and neck glistened with oil in the candlelight, and when Severus breathed in, he could smell the Pleomele and Lyre-flower used in Equill-Emollient, an unguent meant to neutralize traces of Dark magic. Pomfrey had applied it most heavily to the girl's hands, and he knew it was because she'd used his spell, and because she'd been touching him when he'd spoken the Killing Curse. The malignancy of it had brushed against her.
He felt the Unforgiveable still like a chemical burn on his tongue, in his chest. He'd poured his hatred into the incantation—not enough, never enough—and it corroded his very being, a steel brush scraping at his skin, leaving him raw and exposed and bitter.
"What do you want?" he demanded when the girl continued to stay silent.
"You knew my mum," she said, and Severus stopped breathing.
Silence sat upon the room like doom come to have his harvest, an unearthly hush intruded only by Severus' rising blood pressure and the vaguest crackle of candle flames atop their wicks. "What?" The word came out in an intense, half-stolen gasp.
"Hermione—." Potter swallowed and, realizing her back was against the door, forced herself to step forward. "Hermione has this obsession with learning everything she can, y'know? And that includes the references and credentials of all our teachers, including you. So when she found out you're the youngest Potions Master is England—or Europe, whichever, she had to figure out how old you are, right?" The girl shifted, bringing her injured hands forward to pick at the drying balm. "I didn't put it together at first, since this was back in first-year and all, but later, I—well, I realized you'd been born the same year as my parents, which means you were in school with them."
Severus relaxed, if marginally. "And what does that have to do with anything?" he spat, tidying the shoddy essays layered on his cluttered desk, making a go of appearing busy. Sweat built on the nape of his neck and his heart beat too quickly, like he'd stepped out in front of a lorry and had dodged at the last second. "I assume it hasn't occurred to you that I was in Slytherin, and your saintly parents were Gryffindors. It may have escaped your notice, but the two Houses don't mingle—."
"You said her name."
The parchments crinkled under his tightening fingers. He didn't have a pithy response for that.
"Er—that night, in eighty-one?" Potter fidgeted when Severus continued to stare, unaware of how such a simple statement had taken the legs out from under such a composed wizard. "When the Dementors get close, I can hear—well. I can hear my dad, and my mum, and Vol—the Dark Lord. I told you about that, but I didn't—the other voice didn't come until later. I know that voice; it's yours. You were there—."
Stop, stop, STOP—.
Severus remembered the feel of the carpet under his knees, how the debris dug into his flesh, the child wailing, his best friend limp and dea—.
"And Hagrid once mentioned something about taking me from you, that night, that it was a mistake—." She swallowed again, voice growing raspier with nerves. "I—you were there that night."
The air thinned, the need to gasp sizzling in his lungs, but Severus didn't give in, his head spinning. "Does your inane blathering have a purpose?"
"Yes!" Potter asserted, hands forming tiny, impotent fists. "You knew my mum. You—you were there at the house. At Godric's Hollow! I want to know why!"
Sunlight streamed through the window curtains, green where it shone in the garden's leaves. It fell onto her back, cast a corona of gold over Lily's auburn hair—.
"Will you, Severus, always do you best by her?"
He thought she looked like a wildfire at that moment—.
"So what, girl? I knew where the Potters lived. So what—."
"If the worst should come to pass, will you keep her from danger?"
Her hand was soft in his, soft and warm, Severus' hands always so bloody cold, James Potter standing over them both as the magic wove through the air—.
"I will."
Potter scoffed. "Dumbledore said they moved there from the Stinchcombe House, and not many people knew that. Only their friends, or people like the Headmaster. Then, the house went under the Fidelius—."
Feminine handwriting swirled across the page. "Albus is due to cast the Fidelius by the week's end—."
"So, for you to have—to have been there, that night, you had know them, and to know about the Charm—."
"So this will be the last letter I'll be able to send until it's all over—."
He could smell the lilac of her perfume, the parchment worn where he'd flattened the creases so many times before.
"—which means you had to know her!"
"—I'll see you again on the other side of this, Sev—."
"You were friends!"
Her signature curled above the end of the parchment. "Love, Lily—."
Severus leaned his hand on the desk, unsure of when he'd stood. Potter stared up at him, a mixture of terror and bravado in her impertinent glower. She didn't look anything like her mother or her father, and Severus found it easier to fix his gaze on the girl than to look away, to see the candle's flame so like Lily's hair in the sunlight, the stone of the dungeon walls, unchanged for centuries, the echoes of laughter chasing—.
Harriet Potter was a wisp of a girl, a motley tapestry of bruises and cuts and Equill-Emollient, her scar rising from the loose shoulder of her robes like a spiderweb, like lightning caught in her skin.
Severus had made that scar. He might not have been responsible for the wound, but he'd been the one to douse the squalling infant in Essence of Dittany, afraid she'd bleed out in her crib with her mother dead on the floor.
"Yes," he admitted, voice soft as death, said more to himself than to the girl. It cut him, and the wounds bled inwardly, the ghoulish susurrations of a thousand memories denuded into a single, banal utterance. "Yes, we were friends."
"You never said anything."
The outrage in her tone kindled his rage. "I don't answer to you!"
Potter's brow creased, the brass of her spectacles flashing when she dared take a step closer to the snarling Potions Master. "Why were you apologizing to her?"
Shut up, he begged in his own thoughts. Shut up, shut up! The worst night of his life, and she wanted to pick over it like so much carrion—.
Severus' hand pressed so hard into the desk, he felt sure he'd find his fingertips embedded into the woodgrain later. "Thirty points from Slytherin. Get out of—I don't answer to you, Potter!" He could scarcely breathe. He wanted her gone—away, anywhere else, taking with her the unholy morass of memories, the smell of Lyre-flower—.
"But it must have been important—."
"Forty points!"
"Because you said sorry again when—."
"You wretched girl—!"
"When the Dementors attacked. You said—."
The image of her body dropped upon the carpet, unmoving, rose unbidden. "I'm so sorry, Lily. I'm so—."
"I know what I fucking said!" Severus shouted. "Because I killed her!"
Potter flinched as if he'd struck her, stumbling on the hem of her dirty school robes. "What? N-no you didn't," she asserted as Severus seethed. "It was Voldemort—or Pettigrew—."
"You never thought to ask why he was there, did you, Potter? No—you asked, but Dumbledore denied his precious would-be Gryffindor the knowledge. Too delicate to know the truth." Severus latched onto the cold, acerbic sensation churning his guts, if only because it allowed him to breathe through the roiling shame and fear. Dumbledore liked to say confession was good for the soul, that a burden shared was a burden halved—but he didn't feel less encumbered or free. Instead, Severus felt like a man throwing more dirt onto his own grave. "There was a prophecy. It doesn't matter what it said, who said it, or if you're smart enough to comprehend what a prophecy is; there was a prophecy, and that prophecy sent the Dark Lord skipping right to your front door. Sent you and Lily and your arsehole of a father right into his arms. And do you know who delivered that prophecy to the Dark Lord?"
He rounded the desk and paced closer, towering above the girl, Potter's shoulders rising toward her ears as she shrunk back.
"I did, Potter. I did."
The girl appeared as if she may be sick. "I don't believe it."
"Believe it, Potter. Because it's the truth."
"Why?" she whispered.
Why indeed. Severus had asked himself the same question over and over, from the very day he'd relayed the words to Tom Riddle, and he'd probably ask himself again every day until he finally shuffled off this mortal coil. What an ironic twist of fate that he had no reason for what he'd done, no explanation for the biggest mistake he'd ever committed. Exhaustion, perhaps. The hours he'd spent toiling among Voldemort's victims, wrist deep in their viscera, had taken their toll, the Dark Lord's hints of displeasure and impatience becoming more tangible the longer Severus struggled to find his footing. Maybe it had been cowardice.
It hadn't been malice. Divination was utter rubbish, and Severus had never set store by the moronic mumblings of seers and soothsayers huffing too much incense and other herbal stimulants. He believed nothing of prophecies and destiny, the utter tosh of gullible, near-sighted fools who lived their lives like teenage girls reading horoscopes in the latest issue of Witch Weekly. Merlin help him, how in the fuck was he supposed to guess the Dark Lord would interpret the nattering of Sybil Trelawney as bloody gospel?
Severus hadn't known he'd go after Lily; he hadn't known he'd go after anybody, but at the time, he hadn't cared. He would have done anything to remove the proverbial lash from his back and earn a reprieve, and so he'd repeated the words like a mindless parrot. A greasy snake, hissing in the ear of his master. Just like the Marauders always said he would.
In the end, there was only one answer to Miss Potter's question. He snatched hold of his left sleeve and yanked it upward, buttons breaking, his cuff-link hitting the flagstones with a sharp ping! Potter glimpsed the pale red tattoo and turned away.
"Look at it," he ordered. "Look at it, Potter! You wanted to know so badly! I told him because I was a Death Eater! Because it was my job to do so!"
She wouldn't open her eyes, not until Severus bellowed, "LOOK!" loud enough for the specimen jars to tremble on their shelves, the candles wavering, casting darker shadows as the light died.
"No! Professor Dumbledore wouldn't—!"
"Dumbledore knows perfectly well what I am! And now you do as well. Now you know I'm the reason she's dead. I'm the reason—."
"I'm so sorry, Lily—."
His own fingers scrambled over the Mark, nails scratching at the skin, wanting it out, wanting it gone. Potter stared at it with horror, with revulsion.
Why did I show her? Why did I tell her? Why, why—.
Because Dumbledore had cornered him after his debriefing with Slytherin, when his shields were at their weakest, and the older wizard had looked so fucking proud. Because his Patronus had betrayed him, had become something good, and Severus Snape was not good. He was not a person to be proud of, not someone worthy of gratitude, of lov—.
He was a wizard worth nothing more than the Mark on his arm and the hatred in his heart. He was worth nothing.
His right wrist prickled, and the pain sent a bolt of clarity through Severus' muddled head like a deluge of ice water. The Vow. Potter felt threatened, threatened by him, her back pressed to the door again and her wide eyes bright with anger and tears.
What have I done?
Severus reeled back and didn't stop until his leg hit his desk, and he sagged against it, ducking his head so his lank hair swung forward. The Vow stopped aching, but he could hear her heavy breathing, tight and anguished as if she might sob or scream at any second. He deserved her rage. He deserved all of it.
"Go," Severus told the frightened witch. "Go, now."
Potter didn't leave. She sucked in a breath, hiccuped, and said, "I hate you," the words breaking like fragile baubles shoved from a shelf. "I hate you. How could you tell me that? How could you do that?!"
He lifted his chin but failed to reply, grasping for what mental shields he retained to fix the witch with a cold, unfeeling gaze.
"How could you?"
When she left, the girl did not rage or shout or go running for Dumbledore's office. Instead, she left with a gasp, the defeated sound of someone betrayed, and the door shut behind her without a sound. Her departure shook Severus all the more for its gentleness when he'd expected violence. Needed it. Those inward cuts bled with feeling in the face of her quiet animosity. Her apathy.
Severus stared at the place where she'd stood. His eyes remained hooded, unblinking, and his body hunched until he lashed out and threw his red inkwell at the wall, watching the glass shatter. The crimson ink crawled along the stones as if the castle was bleeding—dying—and Severus wanted nothing more than to sink into the crevices and join in on that slow death.
A/N: Two chapters left.
Severus: "I faced a werewolf and a hundred dementors. It can't get worse than that."
Harriet: [enters room]
Severus: "Never mind."
