NOTE
Warning for continuance of last chapter's themes–dead bodies, blood, intense pain, immediate rape aftermath. There is no active violence in this chapter.

95. Willow

A door slammed open somewhere below me.

Raised voices and footsteps running up.

So I was in a house, in an upstairs room.

The footsteps and voices came closer. Just down the hallway. Doors slamming open, making the walls vibrate.

Then it was the door of the room and the bright light of lumos shone in.

My shock was too deep to allow me to narrow my eyes.

There was a second of stunned silence. Broken by a tremulous exhale.

"Holy Merlin."

Minerva's voice.

I stared forward. Black boots entered the frame of my vision.

Macnair was pushed off of me with a sickening wet slop of his organs inside his skeleton.

Severus pulled me up. His black eyes boring into my incurably wide ones. I saw my reflection in them. Covered in so much blood I looked like I'd been moulded out of red wax.

I was barely a person anymore. Merely an ugly amalgamation of violence and sickness. My body riddled with the plague of trauma. A rickety and useless thing. A clump.

I had descended to the pits of Hell. A dreadful girl. And he looked terrified of me.

He cut the gag free with his wand.

The feeling of my dry tongue filling my mouth made me bend over his arm and vomit.

My throat burned. My mind switched off.

A haze of pain ushered me back to consciousness.

I was on the table in the kitchen of our cottage.

Hands were holding me up. Supporting my head. I felt the glass of a vial on my lips and swallowed mechanically.

Something that tasted like iron.

Something else.

I looked down at myself. All the blood. Dripping down my naked legs. I was a candle and the wax was burning.

I shrieked from the horror of it.

Poppy was there. Her grey eyes. Forceful voice.

"Breathe. Miss Weasley. Breathe."

I did. And it was awful, because the breath in my lungs said I wasn't a candle. And I remembered where I was. But it also made me feel the pain more. Reminded me of its cause. An unmerciful loop.

I looked down and saw that my legs were red with blood. But not dripping.

Not a candle.

A person.

If barely.

Animalistic whimpers spilled out of me.

"I know," Poppy said.

She was preparing a bowl of water, a bowl of snow, a cloth.

"This is going to hurt."

Her wand hovered over my belly.

HOT. RED.

TORTURE.

Magic grabbing at my insides and trying to stitch together something torn. Tiny pincers inside my womb.

I screamed and writhed, my hips turning away, my whole spine rippling, hands clenched in bloody fists.

It stopped.

Poppy's voice again. Tense.

"Hold her, Severus."

It had been his hands holding me up.

Now they held me down.

Poppy started again. Razors waltzing over the silk of my uterus.

I screamed, my body wracked with convulsive shaking. The sound was lost as he pulled my face against his chest. His fingers around the back of my neck. His arm barred across my thighs.

He entered my mind, but it was different than the other times. His mind entered mine like a hand, offering itself.

I took it and he pulled me through like a thread to the other side. Past curtains and doors and stairways. Into his safest place.

Under the willow near his childhood house. Where he had used to talk with Lily. Lying there on the grass under the sheltering, hanging branches. Thin green leaves rustling above, and birds somewhere. Clouds moving beyond the canopy.

So this was his sky.

I sensed his unconditional love to bring me, dirty and ruined as I was, into this precious place. I couldn't help feeling I was soiling it with my presence.

His hand touched mine, and the sky blurred as I fell asleep. Wanting my mother.

The wall was white, and so was the window.

It was snowing. A pure white blanket forming over the orchard of crooked winter trees. Forgiving the sin of forgetting to harvest the apples.

My hands rested on top of the white blankets, no longer red with blood. I'd been put into a warm jumper and pyjamas. My body ached and stung, and hurt in every way. Inside there was a dark, throbbing pain, lined thinly with numbness from medicine.

Molly sat in a chair by the bed, her frizzy hair pulled back from her face, making her look old. There was too much thinness in her face. Too much greyness in her hair. Severus must have heard my wish.

She stared so blankly I wasn't certain she had noticed I was awake. This was not what I had wanted when I had begged for my mother. She was cold and numb. It was snowing in her soul.

"My children," she whispered. "Why my children?"

I wanted to know where Severus was, but knew he was disgusted by me and did not want to see me.

Turning my head, I saw my wand sitting on the bedside table. My connection to it was undetectable. It was like a piece of driftwood.

Pretty. But purposeless.

Severus opened the door, and Molly left.

He had a book in his hand. Jane Eyre. His eyes searched mine coldly. He sat in the chair, opened the book and started reading. His voice stiff and monotonous. I didn't remember this part. He must have marked it at the page where we'd left off. But I couldn't remember anything that had happened.

I stared at him.

His voice started breaking on the edges of the words. He tried to keep going. Then he stopped and bent over in the chair and cried.

He got to his feet and came to the bed and cried over my body as if I were dead.

But I was not dead.

I had not taken the rowboat.

He pulled me up from the pillows and brought me around, my body braced uncomfortably in his arms while he sat down on the bed. Then he eased me into his lap and cradled me.

Stroked my arm.

I was numb and staring. All of my emotions were stuck inside of me. I could not haul them up from the frozen well.

His tears fell on my nose.

"I would take out my heart," he said.

He did not stop sobbing until I managed to move. Just a little. Just enough to touch my little finger to his wrist.

Then he stopped. Quite suddenly. And we sat in silence for a while and he kept stroking me and then he started to sing. Singing to me through slow tears.

His voice was still uneven. I couldn't hear the words. But lullabies were never about the words.

An argument downstairs.

Heavy people coming up. Important people. In our house.

Knocking on the bedroom door. And opening it. And stepping through.

Two men. One shorter. One taller.

My body went rigid and Severus let me hide against him.

The taller one preceded the shorter one into the room. "After examining the scene of the crime we have concluded an interrogation is necessary."

"Is this her wand?"

My wand was picked up from the table. Its most recent spells drawn out, hovering in golden letters in the air. I feared they would see the contraceptive charm, but they did not search that far back.

"No killing curse."

"Please step away a moment, Mr. Snape."

Severus did not step away a moment. He remained holding me, pulling me closer. But his arms did nothing to stop the shorter man, a Legilimens, from stepping into my mind.

The room I'd created at Hogwarts was gone now and his passage through my memories was effortless and unfair. His presence was messy. Immature.

My guilt was announced. "She intended to kill. And… Search the wand again. Farther back."

There was the contraceptive charm

"Are you mad, girl?" the short man seethed.

"Did you know about this, Mr. Snape?"

Severus looked pale.

Poppy drew up straight. "You cannot punish this girl."

"Say more along those lines and risk losing your licence."

"Who are you? Let me see your identification."

"Oberon Ollerton."

"Louis Midgen."

"Department of Magical Law Enforcement."

"We must take her, now, to a secure location where she will await her trial."

"She needs to be in hospital!"

"Madam, again–"

"The girl was raped!"

"Madam, we are well aware…"

Then I was being pulled. My body the subject and the object of dispute.

Don't touch her.

–very fragile–

You will not carry her!

You carry her then, or I'll be forced to.

Severus picked me up and carried me down the stairs.

The shorter man stepped into the fireplace – "Dreadfully sorry about this Mrs. Weasley, Mr. Snape" – and disappeared in the rush of green flames.

Molly was distraught, and Severus didn't let go until he was forced to, my body torn away from his arms. I was pulled fast against the taller man's side, his arm too tight against my ribs.

"She needs bedrest!" Poppy demanded.

"She shall have it, in a secure location."

More powder was tossed on the fire, and Severus's hands pressed my fingers one more time. The man–Midgen or Midgerton or Ollergen or Ollerton–pulled me over the hearth, my stocking feet dragging through the cinders.

I saw their faces staring, masks of pallor and fear, before the flames swelled and propelled this stranger and me into the darkness of the floo network.

We landed hard, and pain splintered up through the bones of my legs before entering the numb zone of my hips, which stopped its progress.

My breath rattled, woozy, waiting to sneeze out the soot.

The man helped me to step out of the fireplace, heaving the heavy sigh of one who has been put-upon. "Here we are, Mrs. Snape. I trust it is familiar to you. Not such an inconvenience after all…"

And there was the sofa, the piano, the wall of books, the windows facing the grey trees of the public garden.

The sound of glass shattering on the floor.

And a shaking voice.

"Wilma?"

NOTE

I am deeply sorry for these last few chapters. The story is not always under my control, and it is simply my job to channel it. I wish these terrible events did not befall Wilma. She is a piece of my heart and when she hurts, I hurt. But I have to believe there is a reason that the muse led me in this direction.

Thank you for reading, if you still are. The healing begins now.