Disclaimer: I'm not muscling in on JK's turf – just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us
Shivering and sweating like an overridden horse, Severus tried hard to suppress the urge to embark on hysterical giggling, not sure whether to laugh or scream now that Pettigrew had been safely curse-bound by Draco not to transform, and marched away in Alastor's custody with his rapidly deflating widge hanging out: and thank God, thank God he had been able to clean himself and the bed up with Tergeo and grab one of his new nightshirts in the two minutes it took for Alastor and Nymphadora to come clattering down the private revolving stair at the end of the corridor. He had been naked, bloody and covered in piss and shit on a cell floor in front of Alastor Moody and his wand at twenty-one and it wasn't an experience he wished to repeat: even though he suspected that these days the old bastard was more disturbed by the memory than he was.
Draco crossed to the bookshelf to fetch the bottle from its supposedly secret hiding place, poured him a hefty shot of cognac and pressed it into his shaking fingers before fetching more glasses for Horace and himself. "Ye gods and little fishes, godfa'! For a moment there I was afraid he really was going to start slicing you open and I was going to have to, to 'abort the mission' and Stun him on the spot."
Severus resisted the urge to down the spirit in one – it was far too good for that and deserved to be savoured, but the burn of it on his tongue helped him to anchor himself and to counteract the lingering pain in his facial nerves. He personally thought that induced trigeminal neuralgia might be even worse than being stung in the "privates", even though it didn't induce nausea the way being hexed in the balls did; and that the Cruciatus felt like having trigeminal neuralgia in every pain-nerve of his body simultaneously.
"Fortunately he's a gloater: he needed to relish what he imagined was my mortal terror and humiliation" (what really would have been his mortal terror, he thought with a suppressed shudder, if things had been different) "in order to work himself, ah, up before he started to... do anything. I thought I might die of boredom waiting for him to get on with wanking himself off and slip far enough back for Horace to be able to grab him: despite his bragging his hydraulics don't actually function that well, and until he's worked himself into a frenzy of sadism he couldn't get it up with the Goodyear Blimp."
He put the glass down and sucked on his torn nail, relieving the pain somewhat, although he had to be careful not to jar the broken finger next to it. With a stifled shiver he wondered whether Pettigrew's love of making him climax against his will, there, had been some kind of surrogate, or even jealousy. In fact, Pettigrew's combination of rape-fixation and borderline erectile dysfunction with the joy he found in ramping up his victim's terrified anticipation of pain before he got to work in earnest had played a significant part in his and Alastor's planning, since it meant it took the little shit a garrulous and revealing half-hour to work himself up to actually doing anything major, and it had been a fair bet that he would want to sit in the oh-so-invitingly placed "chair" and wank while preparing himself: whereas Bellatrix would probably have moved straight in to burn his eyeballs or flay him raw and saved the sexual humiliation till later, once he was already in physical agony.
With unpleasant clarity, he recalled how casually she had flayed the soles of his feet, before Pettigrew had whittled them away one joint at a time. He gave a brittle little laugh which even to his own ears sounded slightly insane. "When he threatened to make me – in my mouth – for two hours, it might actually take that long. I never realised before I met him that even degradation could be... tedious."
Draco gave a soft snort at that, but he still looked even paler than usual. Severus grimaced, carefully blanking the fact that Pettigrew had meant him to be already agonisingly disembowelled before that two-hour degradation. There was no point in getting the shakes over something which had never been in serious danger of happening, even though he was certain that Pettigrew had meant it literally. "I'm sorry you had to witness – any of that, Draco. It can't have been pleasant, especially the details about... your father, but we had to let the sweaty little bastard incriminate himself in front of you and Professor Slughorn, so it wouldn't just be my word against his."
In fact he had actually considered using the words "sweaty little bastard" or "tedious little twerp" rather than "mediocre thing" during the confrontation, but had rejected both on the grounds that he wanted to provoke an angry self-incriminating rant, not a violent assault, and that he didn't want to give Pettigrew the correct impression that he found their situation amusing. "Otherwise he might claim that because I'm an Occlumens I had faked the memory, and Thicknesse has already shown that he suspects me of inventing false memories to get revenge."
"Whereas everyone knows I can't fake a Pensieve memory worth a damn," Horace said ruefully, huffing his moustaches and helping himself to a biscuit from beside the tea things as Severus began to sing his buzzing, lilting little healing charm, using his wand left-handed to mend the comparatively minor damage to his right hand, his bitten-bloody lip and his stomach, penis and nipples. He still felt shaky and also burningly sore wherever he had been stung, which wasn't something he could put right as easily with just a wave of his wand – going to the lavatory, in either sense, or attempting to chew was going to hurt like fire.
Still, there was nothing that couldn't be fixed with a Heal-All potion and a few hours' rest, except for the post-Cruciatus tremors which he would just have to ride out, as he always had done. At least there was no risk now of having to teach a class in this state, and a single nine-second blast was nothing compared to what he had coped with in the past, even before last year and allowing for being seven months out of practice.
"Ow, fuck!", he said conversationally, working his right arm gently back and forth in its socket. "I nearly dislocated my right bloody shoulder trying to keep my left bloody shoulder turned away, so he wouldn't notice that it looked wrong. I wasn't bloody-well expecting him to bind my arm to the bedpost."
Draco still looked scared and subdued, and decidedly green around the gills now that he had wiped off the makeup without which he would never have been able to carry out his deception. He couldn't, he thought, have done it at all if he hadn't known that Severus was perfectly safe throughout, for a given value of "safe". "I'm sorry", he said quietly. "Sorry I had to hurt you."
"Don't be. I've had to do far worse at times, to keep my cover, and I've suffered far, far worse: I only made a noise so he'd be satisfied and not make you do it again, for both our sakes. It was a clever way to put me convincingly in pain without having to injure me or hex me in the arse again."
Without actually saying it Draco's face clearly expressed what he thought about that, and that thought was "Eww". "What would you have done if – if it had been a real attack? If he had managed to Imperio me?" he asked quietly.
"I would have gone off the far side of the bed like, if you'll pardon the expression, shit off a shovel," Severus said promptly, "taking my wand – the real one – with me, and cast a Patronus to summon the Headmaster and anyone else it could find." Not to mention that the snakes around the fireplace would probably have sought out the Headmaster themselves, if they hadn't been warned in advance that he was setting a trap. "You'll understand that latterly, it's got a lot easier to come up with a happy memory on the fly – and you can wipe that expression off your face. I don't only mean my sex life, although that definitely helps."
In truth, it was clear that Pettigrew, that mediocre student, had had no idea of the magics which bound the Heads of House, in their own quarters, to the semi-sentient and -sapient castle. He clearly had had no idea that he, Severus, could at any moment have summoned Finty, the house-elf assigned to his quarters, just by calling his name: nor that even if he had been silenced and unable to call for help, either Finty or the Baron would always drop by during the wee small hours to check up on him. [Though both had taken to listening carefully before looking, after accidentally interrupting him and Hermione in flagrante.]
If they had left him alone, even for a few moments, there, he might have been able to call Finty to his aid, before they had severed his own flesh and bone and used it to curse-bind him against taking any action in his own defence. But his tormentors were always present, and even when he had still been able to speak he would not summon Finty pointlessly to his probable death. In any case the Dark Lord's prison was Unplottable.
[Had anybody ever bothered to find out whether house-elves could find an Unplottable location?]
[Had the house-elves in fact made certain that nobody would find out...?]
Even without bossy house-elves and vengeful ghosts, and even silenced and unable to summon other help, the ghastly fate which Pettigrew had planned for him would probably not have resulted in his death. Pettigrew had intended to prevent him from dying for a few hours, but only the Dark Lord himself could keep him from being healed. The stone snakes would have realised that he was in serious trouble and fetched the Headmaster to save him, and he himself would have ended up as what Adrian called a cyborg: more mechanism than man but somehow still living.
The thought of the torture itself did not terrify him as much as Pettigrew had intended, even aside from the fact that the little shit had had no chance of carrying it out, and that the chair into which he had intended to tie Hermione was Horace Slughorn. For an Animagus, Pettigrew was remarkably trusting of man-sized household objects: but probably he had relied on the map to warn him of hidden watchers, and the rug and anything on it had been deliberately made opaque to the map's magic. And not only because Severus didn't want Remus using his copy to snoop on his sex life.
But in any case, after last year there were probably no unimaginable pains left. After his collapse at Christmas he had already spent months imagining the fate that Lucius had intended for him, pared down to nothing but a torso and a skull but still writhing in inescapable agony, until that sickening terror had become routine; and the horror of it no longer seemed quite so overwhelming now that he had got used to managing with prosthetics, and to being held and comforted. He already knew with complete certainty what it felt like to have the raw fresh wounds of amputation exposed to the air; to have things shoved in his mouth and his arse that he wanted desperately to get away from but couldn't; even to be gutted... although at least last year they had left his insides inside, and not pulled them out and used them as ropes to bind him. But even there, his captors had many times put him in a state of agonizing pain where he had had to try to keep completely still, because any movement would make the pain worse, so what Pettigrew had planned, although horrifying, was nothing new.
What was new, what he couldn't think about without shaking and wanting to be sick, was the intended psychological cost to Hermione, after having been forced to watch his agony and degradation for about twenty minutes (the snakes weren't terribly fast movers) without being able to help him. Although given that she seemed to know Hogwarts: A History pretty much by heart, she probably would have realised that the serpents had gone for help.
After a tense interview with Madame Pomfrey (half asleep and in her surprisingly unsensible nightie) which had ended with her agreeing to stop by in the morning and give his godfather a health check and a massage, once the Heal-All had had time to do its work, and an even more fraught encounter explaining the previous hour to Granger after the Fat Lady had called her from her revision, Draco had sloped off to the Astronomy Tower to chain-smoke an illicit packet of Muggle cigarettes, and left them all to get on with it. The idea that Pettigrew thought he might want to rape somebody – or have sex with a bloke under any circumstances, because he was nearly absolutely sure he didn't swing that way – was bad enough, but the quasi-incestuous idea of doing it to Uncle Sev was sickening: nearly as bad as the idea of doing it with his father. He ought to be comforting his godfather, who must have been much more stressed by it all than he was, but he still felt too shaky himself to be any good at it and it would be unfair to expect his godfather to comfort him: and in any case Granger was definitely going to want to take over his shift.
He had spent weeks persuading Pettigrew and his father that he was still on Tom Fucking Taraddidle's side, that he had been kidnapped by the Order and had lured the other Slytherins into taking the hound mark so he could know who could be trusted not to support his godfather. Once the news of Pettigrew's capture reached the Dark Lord's snake-like ears, he was definitely going to join Uncle Sev on the Priority Targets list, and Lucius was going to get it in the neck for trusting him – a thing about which he realised he no longer cared at all, except to hope, despite everything, that his father's punishment would be quicker and cleaner than his godfather's had been. But for tonight, he was still the Malfoy heir who seemed to be willing to help the Dark Lord in order to protect his parents, so he didn't – yet – need his own protective escort.
In truth he was very worried about his mother, but Dobby, after some soul-searching, had agreed to allow Narcissa to summon him if she should find herself in danger, so he could Side-Along Apparate her to safety, on condition that she did not call him into the midst of an armed struggle in which he might be killed. Even the Dark Lord's great power could not block the magic of a house-elf on their home ground, and Dobby still had the ability to pass through any ward at Malfoy manor, the estate to which his line was sealed, whilst simultaneously having equal access at Hogwarts. A message to that effect had been sent to Narcissa via the house-elf network.
But probably his bastard father would survive anyway, because the Dark Lord needed access to the Malfoy vaults and funds, and if Lucius died the Gringotts goblins would hand the key over to nobody but himself, Draco.
"How could you, how could you do something so, so, stupidly dangerous and not even tell me?"
She couldn't make up her mind whether she wanted to hurl herself at him and smother him with kisses for still being alive, or hammer on his chest with her fists and scream at him for being such a risk-taking idiot, but she had the sense to realise that both would terrify him: especially after what must have been a horribly stressful encounter with one of his torturers.
"Now you know how I felt when you decided to rescue Draco almost solo, instead of waiting for proper backup!"
"That was on the spur of the moment, it was an emergency! I didn't sit down and, and plan to put myself in danger like a, a stupid wanker!" If ever there was a moment to practise her profanity.... By a supreme effort she fought her voice back down to a lower register and managed not to shout. "And without even telling me!" She was horribly, sickeningly aware that she could have slept the night through peacefully and then come downstairs to find him agonisingly dead, or maimed beyond retrieval.
"I hated hiding it from you, really I did, but I didn't want to put you off from your revision – yes, I know, but I hope you'll have settled a bit in a few days, since you can see I'm all right. I would have preferred to hold off on the whole thing till after your NEWTs but that— Pettigrew was pushing Draco to make a move and I didn't want to risk him deciding to change his plans, because Albus's hand...."
He rubbed tiredly at his eyes. "In any case, as with Padma Patil, Alastor thought you wouldn't be able to act well enough to pretend you didn't know, and for once I agreed with him. We know that Greengrass wasn't the only eyes the – Riddle has in this place, there's Bennet and that lot for one, and, well, they're bound to be watching you, especially now they know how important you are to me. Not forgetting Pettigrew might have noticed you acting strangely while Draco was carrying him in. I know it's... difficult to accept, and I don't like it any more than you do, but I need you to accept that until you get better at Occlumency – and acting! – there may be... Order-related matters I can't confide in you, at least until after the event – just as, as I understand it, you were obliged to conceal the fact that you were using a Time-Turner from your friends. Especially as it isn't... only my decision to make."
"All right," Hermione agreed reluctantly. "I don't like it, but I can see that. It's a bit like my parents not being allowed to talk about patients – even though I am an Order member," she added pointedly, "and nearly nineteen which means I'm only two years younger than you were when you became the Order's spy." It made her realise how very young he had been at not-quite-twenty-one, rather than how old she felt herself to be. "But why, why did you have to let him threaten you and do all this... stupid play-acting with Draco and Professor Slughorn, instead of just arresting him the minute he showed up?" She had a sudden memory of herself and Neville talking to Severus in the greenhouse, about capturing Pettigrew and reverse-engineering his silver hand – but she had never thought of him using himself as bait, and risking being tortured again in the process.
"Just catching the bastard wasn't enough. The Ministry still don't fully appreciate the threat from, from Him and Alastor thinks they may have been compromised: I know he's a bit, um, paranoid about Polyjuice now, even more than he already was, but there's a real risk that someone on the Wizengamot may be under Imperius, and would try to have the little shit released. To make sure he stayed caught, enough to be sure he'll never be let go, I needed him to incriminate himself, and I couldn't take the risk that he might have been trained to lie under Veritaserum, as I was. Otherwise he might claim I was lying, and would certainly force me to bare my most humiliating memories of him to the Wizengamot if I wanted them to convict him, which... well, let's say it was quite bad enough knowing they saw me in, in the boat, and anything that's known to the whole bloody Wizengamot will probably end up in the Prophet."
It was quite bad enough that they would see and hear the Aurors' memory of hearing Pettigrew gloating over what had been done to him, but having them directly witness the crawling thing which they had made of him, there, would be a thousand times worse. Once the medical report he was working on with Poppy and Addy hit the press the fact that his torture had included a lot of miserably degrading sexual abuse was going to be headline news in any case, but at least this way he could control how it was presented, to some extent, and preserve some shreds of dignity, especially if the report went to press before Pettigrew went to trial.
"Also it was fucking funny, when you think about it. Making a fool of him like, like that was a bit of payback and the injuries I sustained were no worse than your two idiot friends probably suffer every week on the Quidditch pitch. A broken finger, and a scratch!" He was grateful that the Heal-All had already soothed the renewed rawness in his throat, so that his voice wouldn't betray the fact that he had been reduced to screaming his guts up again, even if only for a handful of seconds
"But he – what if he'd tortured you again?"
"He imagined that he was doing so – that he was torturing me with fearful anticipation of what he was going to do to me later." Behind her, he saw Horace raise his eyebrows at that bit of paltering, but the old man had the tact not to comment. And in truth the actual torture had been very minor, compared to what he had suffered before, though the relentless, constant jabbing and jeering, the gruelling nature of Pettigrew's attentions even for a mere half hour, set an ice-cold shiver in his gut at the memory of four months of reeling exhaustion without rest or relief. But Hermione was his rest, his relief, and he was a total bastard for distressing her.
"I was never really in any danger of being seriously hurt, truly I wasn't: I wouldn't do that to you. And therefore, I was never really scared of anything, except possibly of giving the game away by laughing at him." He had been, he knew, terrified of his memories; scared almost literally sick by the past, even if not by the present – but it wouldn't reassure her to know that.
"Alastor picked him up on his knock-off copy of the Marauder's Map as soon as he entered the grounds, and we made sure he wouldn't be able to see Horace, or Tonks and Alastor upstairs in my office, on his own copy. They were listening in via the chimney and Albus and Remus were up in the Head's office with their copies and a talking-mirror keyed to Alastor, ready to, to 'let slip the dogs of war' and send in an army of house-elves armed with meat-cleavers if Alastor should sound the alarm."
"I wondered about that," Hermione said restlessly. "I can't imagine, somehow, Professor Moody solemnly swearing he's up to no good, or whatever it was."
"Hah, no, the new copies are activated by saying 'I solemnly swear I am acting on behalf of Hogwarts'. Anyway... as well as having people watching and listening at a distance, I took Felix in advance, not to mention that I was touching the headboard in front of Lovegood's spell-beads, which have more protective magic on them than you can shake a stick at, and I even had my wand stuck to the prosthetic hand with a Sticking Charm so I couldn't be made to drop it, hidden underneath Potter's cloak. I had a safe word to tell Horace and Draco when I wanted them to call a halt, and in case Pettigrew silenced me they were under instructions to let him Cruciate me once – so we could nail him for casting an Unforgivable in front of witnesses without having to delve into my memories – and not for more than ten seconds at maximum, and then flatten the bastard."
He grimaced at the memory. "When he did – Cruciate me" he said, trying not to react to her gasp of horrified concern, "I was afraid I was going to roll the wrong way and lose hold of Potter's cloak, and then he'd see I was armed – in, ah, both senses – and we'd end up having a fire-fight while Horace was still stuck as a chair and couldn't get out of the way, because I know it takes him a few seconds to revert. It's a bit like watching a hedgehog unrolling and trying to get upright", he added inconsequentially. "A lot of thrashing about. But I managed to hang on to it and let him keep on incriminating himself until he was sitting safely in Horace's lap."
He grinned, suddenly and savagely. "I'm not the only one without a leg to stand on: we stitched the little bastard up like a kipper, and the fact that he then stitched himself up by giving me a perfect feed-line was just the icing on the cake: he actually asked me if I knew what I was, and I told him I was the cheese in a rat-trap. He's so vain and boastful that just by prodding him a few times I made sure he confessed to betraying James and Lily, murdering Diggory and all those Muggles and, um, some witch called Jorkins and framing Black, with two Aurors listening in. Not to mention... bragging about what he did to me last year, and was planning to do once he'd worked himself up to it."
"But – suppose he'd tried to Portkey you out or – no, of course not, an unauthorised Portkey would set off the wards at once but, but, if he went to AK you –"
"Just because a fellow's not as slim as he was," said Horace plaintively, "doesn't mean he's slow, and the Killing Curse takes at least two seconds to cast. I had my wand on him the whole time, under cover of, um, antimacassar, and Severus had his under Potter's Invisibility Cloak, as he says. Not to mentch young Mr Malfoy, who's quite an athlete, with an athlete's reflexes, and was ready to tackle him physically and knock him down, and how impressive it was to see the Master Spy at work. Really, m'dear, the fellow never stood a chance. Boasting and posturing while he ensured his own conviction: I almost felt sorry for him."
"I didn't", Severus said with a shudder, at precisely the same moment that Hermione said "I don't". They exchanged smirks.
"Shhh now. Truly, truly my love," he murmured, holding her close in the restored bed in the warm dark, and finding himself in the currently-unusual position of being the one doing the comforting, "I was never, never in real danger. I wouldn't do that to you. Pettigrew he, he needs to work himself up first and there were three wands on him the whole time, as well as two Aurors with Combat First Aid training only seconds away. I may be... still a bit too sore and shaken for making love" (and not only from the Cruciatus, he thought silently: the Heal-All was doing a good job but the relevant body parts were still rather tender), "but truly, I'm all right."
"But, but, what if he –"
"Shhh. The only danger I was in was of – of forgetting where I was and panicking when the bastard came near me but having Draco there was... it reminded me that I was the one in control, teaching a class in proper Slytherin cunning!"
He sighed, rolling over onto his back and staring up at the faded canopy of the bed: restored, along with the tied-back swags at the sides, to cast shadows at the head of the bed and make it harder for Pettigrew to see his left shoulder. "If I had... panicked, Horace would have called a halt, and we would have had to have got a confession out of the sleazy little creep some other way. But the fact that, that Draco was pretending to go along with the bastard's plans was a constant reminder that this wasn't real, because when I was... there, and Draco really did see just a few minutes of what they were doing, he was shouting and panicking, not – not pretending to be a brutal realist who would be willing to join in in torturing me to impress the Dark Lord. So I always remembered that this was just a, a play, for which I had written the script."
Hermione laid her fingers over his on his still rather bony chest: lightly, remembering that the broken and mended finger would probably still be sore for a few hours. "I should probably have a word with Draco", she muttered. "He's probably feeling a bit – a bit stressed, even if he knew you were play-acting." As Severus let go of the fraying strings of himself and slid down into the blessed sleep which Pettigrew had denied him for four gruelling months of the Dark Lord's prison, cradled safe here and now in the twin embrace of the lambswool fleece and his lover's arms, he hoped silently that his godson wouldn't drop him in it by giving her a too-detailed account of their evening.
She could have lost him – she could have lost him. No, no, from the sound of it he had been very careful – certainly a lot more careful than Harry ever was – and he had been in far less serious danger than he had been when Greengrass (the cow) had attacked him. But he must have been so frightened, whatever he said, he still had sobbing, clawing nightmares about Pettigrew and his knife and now he had been so close to that, that... creature and she hadn't been there to hold him, to support him, he'd been Cruciated, Cruciated and she hadn't been there and now she felt as if she would never be able to stop hugging him, and her heart thumped to feel him sigh and relax bonelessly into her embrace....
But he was stronger now, more like his old self, she had helped him to become so and she had to accept that the stronger he was the more his life would expand out beyond these tapestried walls and become again the life of an Order member, even if no longer a spy, and it had been an intelligent move to capture Pettigrew. It might even lead to better prosthetics which would give him more independence which would enable him to take more stupid risks just like Harry and Ron but he wasn't a, a pet, he was an adult and well enough now to know his own mind and it was true, unlike the boys he was a Slytherin so he tempered his bravery with common-sense and from the sound of it he had taken every safety precaution he or Professor Moody could think of, he was telling the truth when he said he had never been at real risk of very serious injury and she had to accept that it was his decision whether to suffer minor injuries in order to achieve what he considered to be an important goal.
But she could have lost him....
And later, when the cold grey light before dawn roused him enough to make careful, gentle love to her, she held him close, in her arms and buried deep inside her, and murmured against his neck "I don't want to have to even think about losing you until you're well over a hundred, do you hear me?" She chose to take his sleepy mumble for assent.
"It's not just the knowing that that, that creature was hurting you and I wasn't there for you" Hermione said fretfully, rifling through her revision notes and trying to put them into order. "I always thought... thought that I would know if you were in danger. How could I not have known?"
"Well but that's what I've been telling you, I wasn't in danger. Not of anything I haven't experienced a thousand times before, anyway. "
"But to be so close to one of the people who, who tortured you last year...."
"It was very unpleasant, and I won't pretend it wasn't. But I was not more distressed than I am when I have a nightmare or a flashback: less so if anything, because I knew that really I was the one in control. Even when, when he Cruciated me I knew that Horace and Draco would stun the bastard if he held it on me for more than ten seconds, and even though I was – even though of course it was bloody agony that was business as usual for my bloody life prior to last October, and I knew that all the time that Pettigrew thought he was terrorising me, he was really condemning himself to Azkaban in front of witnesses. And I'm much happier about sending him there than Greengrass and Patil, believe me."
"But why, why did you do it?" Ron demanded as he dealt the cards. "I thought Hermione was going to have a stroke or something."
Severus worked his shoulders, stiffly. Even after a hefty slug of Heal-All followed by six hours of surprisingly sound sleep during which he had only once started awake in remembered terror, sweating and shaking and biting back the urge to scream in order not to alarm Hermione (who was already quite alarmed enough to be going on with); followed by some drowsy love-making, a full massage from Poppy and four hours snuggling with Hermione on the sofa while she scolded and fretted and simultaneously attempted to revise for her Charms NEWT, he was out of practice at being Cruciated and still felt sore all over.
"Firstly, to capture a current Death Eater to interrogate, since I can no longer gather information and Potter's access to the Dark Lord's mind is mainly... pictorial. Seeing that he is currently in a house with tall sash windows isn't much help if we don't know where that house is."
"Sorry", Harry muttered.
"Not your fault, especially as the – His mind has become even madder and less coherent than it was before, thanks to being rebuilt out of spare parts, not all of them human.
"Secondly, to get a good look at that hand, and try to find out from his memory how it was made. Not just for my sake, although having access to a completely integrated prosthetic might certainly be useful, but because the curse in the Headmaster's arm is... beginning to pass beyond my ability to control it. Soon it will enter his torso, and once that happens he will be dead in a few days, but if we simply chop the arm off the curse will break free of my control anyway. But I have an idea that if we can seamlessly replace the arm with an integrated prosthetic I can trap the curse into the prosthetic permanently."
"Oh, like – I saw this Muggle Tell-E thing and there was this guy who had to keep his foot on an, an accelerometer or something to keep a milk flight thing going fast – ish – because if it slowed down it would explode, and he was meant to put a brick there instead of his foot but he cocked it up because he was an idiot" Ron finished happily.
"Well... yes. Essentially."
"You two need to get on with your revision, now." A half-hour break for cards might refresh the teenage male brain, but he certainly wasn't going to encourage shirking and slacking.
"Harry is all right revising with Luna and I – I wanted to talk to you about something." Severus sighed, seeing the blasted boy's pleading expression.
"Very well: but just one game." Games played against Weasley rarely lasted long, despite his best efforts. With a wave of his wand he Summoned the chess set, and watched the pieces sorting themselves into position. "Black or white?"
"Um: black, I think."
Severus watched gloomily as his white pieces were slowly eroded from the board. Over on the sofa, Potter seemed to be helping Luna revise for her sixth-year DADA exams: although he was loathe to admit it, from the little he could overhear Hermione had been right to say that Potter was a good teacher, and teaching a subject was a very good way to master it oneself.
"You wanted to speak to me?" he asked, as his knight narrowly dodged an attack.
"Yes, I...." Ron looked down at his suddenly clenched hands. His voice sounded choked, and Severus looked at him in sudden concern.
"Are you all right, Weasley?"
"Yes. No. I—" The boy looked up at him, suddenly wild-eyed and pleading. "He, Scabbers, Scabbers was my pet, and Percy's pet and how am I going to tell Percy? I used to tickle his belly and kiss his little rat feet, I loved him: I loved him and all the time he was that, that sweaty little bastard, he was in my bed and I didn't know, I should have just wrung his neck –"
"That would have been very cruel," Luna said sternly from across the room, "since you didn't know he wasn't a real rat."
"I should have known, how could I not know?"
Severus saw with alarm that the boy was beginning to rock back and forth with tears in his eyes. This called for something a bit more than a peppermint and a clean hanky. He passed the chess board to Harry, who had drifted over to join them, and patted the side of the bed next to him. "Come, sit here boy."
Sniffling, Ron moved over to sit next to Severus, who gave his shoulder a tentative pat. "You couldn't have known. He was an accomplished spy: he fooled the entire Order for a year, back during the first war. Even his friends."
Ron leant against him, shaking, and Severus put a cautious arm around him and patted his elbow. "When I was four", the boy muttered, leaning into that stiff embrace, "Fred and George turned my teddybear into a giant spider, in my arms: one minute it was, was soft and, and comforting and then it was all fangs and these hideous, hairy – how can I trust – supposing everything I love turns out to be a lie?"
Severus silently cursed the Twins to Hell or Azkaban: nearly as unpleasant a pair, in his experience, as James and Sirius, but their brother probably wasn't ready to hear that. "Speaking as a Legilimens who has had mental contact with both of them, I can assure you that Potter here, and Granger, are exactly who they appear to be. You can trust them with your life. Also...." He coughed slightly. "There are generally clues to identify an imposter, if you pay attention. For example, rats do not usually live longer than three years."
"I don't think Ron can be blamed for not being suspicious about that", Luna said, frowning. "Life-extending charms do exist. Giant squid only normally live about five years, not to mention they live in the ocean, but ours is in fresh water and must be about thirty years old – you said he was here when you arrived."
"And don't let's forget," Harry added, "that Professor Dumbledore didn't notice that Barty Junior wasn't Professor Moody, and neither did you. Sir."
"I had... reasons why I didn't want to get close enough to what I thought was Alastor Moody to Legilimise him. He and I have a... history."
"All right, but Dumbledore should have known."
"Professor Dumbledore, Potter."
"This isn't exactly helping", Ron said plaintively.
"I apologise. And I do see that, that finding out that a beloved pet was really an enemy wizard is not dissimilar to finding out that a romantic partner is an undercover government agent, or is really there to kill you for the insurance money or molest your children. These are things which do happen, even in the Muggle world, but it must always be... deeply traumatic."
"I suppose", Luna said brightly, "that was why some of the Death Eaters who used to be your friends hated you enough to...."
"I suppose. Yes. Learning that I had betrayed them, that I had been stitching them up for years – well, for a year, they thought – when they had thought that they could rely on me... not Pettigrew, of course. He always saw me as... prey. Something to be used. Humiliated. As the Marauders all did: even Lupin.
"And I have wondered, when I – when I still had a mind to wonder with, there, why the little bastard became a rat. Animagi usually represent the wizard in some way. Black, whatever else he was, was loyal to a fault but his only morality was what served those to whom he was loyal. James was, was courageous, but vain and with a drive to dominate, both physically and sexually. Minerva is a watcher and apparently very keen on...." He cleared his throat. "Anyway, rats are generally quite pleasant creatures in my experience. But perhaps it was the fact that they appear... harmless prey, but are actually deadly predators in their own right."
"And the same but, the other way", Ron said sadly, as he sat up straight again. "You thought they were your friends, but...."
"I was never as close to them as you are to your friends, Weasley. Truly, you can trust that all the people that I am aware of as being close friends of yours are who they say they are. At least – well, people sometimes change with age, especially – especially before the age of thirty. It is possible that some of you will drift apart over time. But that they might betray you – no. None of them give any indication of treachery." If he had been less nice about Legilimising students without good cause, he might have seen Greengrass coming.
"All right." Ron gave a rather shaky nod. "But still – will you teach me Legilimency? Sir?"
"That – might be possible, yes. After NEWTs, and if we are still in contact through Hermione, or through the Order. Then you and Potter here and, and Hermione could practise together, which would give you more general experience than practising with me, only."
"Cool!" Harry exclaimed, then thought about it. "But I'm not letting Ron see me kissing Cho, either – or Ginny." Ron turned slightly green: an interesting combination with the freckles.
"Anyway," Harry said, setting the chessboard down on the foot of the bed and fixing Severus with a stern, grass-green gaze. "I thought that what you did – luring Pettigrew into a trap using yourself as bait, and that – I hafta say I thought it was bloody brilliant!"
It occurred to Severus that when it came to Harry Potter and risk, he had traditionally played the Hermione role, fussing and scolding. But while he appreciated her – and his own – good sense and protective instinct, it was curiously pleasing to have his own reckless daring appreciated for once.
Neville and Luna would both still be here next year, Neville because he had taken a post as teaching assistant to Pomona, since the greenhouses of Hogwarts were an excellent venue in which to carry out research into magical botany, and Luna because she still had another year of school to go. He wondered how it was going to feel next year, teaching her after all that had been between them, but she patted his hand and insisted that she expected him to be his usual, snarly self in the classroom. "I prefer it" she said, smiling. She was torn, she said, between becoming a professional cryptozoologist, or a counsellor, like somebody named Troy whom she had once seen in a Muggle TV show, since Severus's treatment had highlighted the need for psychological counselling in the wizarding world..
She was placidly unconcerned about his run-in with Pettigrew since, as she said, nothing very bad could possibly happen to him when he was in the same room as the blue-glass beads which were hanging behind the headboard, and which she had spelled to protect him – and he wasn't going to argue with that.
Neville meanwhile eyed him beadily, as they sat at the workbench together using Reparo to piece together the shards of the gift of protection which Neville had given him: it was, they had agreed, good practice for Neville's Charms Practical next week. Severus wondered whether by shattering the mobile, Pettigrew had actually released and activated the protective spells it contained, like the old-fashioned Muggle glass fire-extinguisher bulb he had seen once on a primary-school trip to a museum of local history.
"And are you really as OK about what happened with Pettigrew as you're pretending to be?"
Severus bared his irregular teeth at him. "Are you really as gnomic as you're pretending to be, Longbottom, or are you just a bloody garden gnome?" When the blasted boy just looked at him steadily, he sighed. "Nearly but not quite. Satisfied?"
Neville's lips twitched. "Nearly but not quite."
Luna was a lot less harried and frantic than Hermione and her entourage, since she only had sixth-year exams to sit, and their results would have no lasting impact. Like the exams at the ends of years one to four, they existed only to give the student, and their teachers, an idea of where they were performing well enough to get a good grade at OWLs or NEWTs, and where they needed extra work.
So he was not too concerned when she took a couple of hours off from her revision to help her father by editing an article which had been submitted to The Quibbler. But he was more than concerned when he noticed the design on the page: a circle within a triangle, the whole split by a vertical line.
Luna, who was worryingly observant, noticed him noticing, and showed it to him. "Daddy is really interested in the story of the Deathly Hallows, and he's certain they are real."
"Yes, I... saw a symbol like that recently. On something in the Headmaster's office."
"Oh! Perhaps he's interested in the Hallows too!"
"I wouldn't be surprised. The Headmaster in my experience is interested in a great many things."
"So you think that you might be able to reverse-engineer this Pettigrew person's false hand, leik, to make a better prosthetic?"
"Yes, that and, more immediately, to replace Albus's cursed arm before the curse spreads to the oxter. In his case the degree of sensitivity and movement is a secondary consideration." He stood up suddenly and began pacing restlessly, sure enough of the willow-wood prosthetic now that he could use it even when not strictly necessary.
"I suppose it was – almost inevitable that it would be Pettigrew that would think of... disjointing me, since he has lost his own right hand, and a finger before it. God. If only I'd listened to Black, if I hadn't been so – so overwrought and, and scared that night in the Shrieking Shack, we could have had the bastard in custody then, the Dark One might never have risen and Pettigrew wouldn't have been free to – to whittle me away like driftwood.
"Not", he added sharply, "that the bastard made much of an effort to explain, instead of jeering at me for not already knowing what nobody had told me. If he'd had the sense to say that he hadn't been the Potters' Secret Keeper and Pettigrew had been, and that Pettigrew was a rat Animagus, instead of sneering at me and then saying 'Look at the rat' without any explanation, he would still be alive and I would be – whole."
"About that", Adrian said, sounding slightly awkward. "I've been doing some research and, um, I discovered that the, ah, the thing with your voice, the hoarseness, it's called... well, it's called 'Screamers' Nodules'."
"You don't have to spare my feelings – we both know I spent four bloody months screaming my guts out, not to mention – the other day."
"Yes, well – anyway, the thing is, it's treatable. Probably. It makes these little hard bobbles, leik, on your vocal cords, but it's possible to trim them off and I thought if you didn't want to go to a Muggle hospital, leik, we could borrow a bronchoscope and get a look at what's happening in there, and then you or Poppy could make a spell to fix them...."
"Very probably. That's..." something else he could have back, he thought, that could be put right. "It's not at the top of my list of concerns, you understand, but I suppose that before I resume teaching – what?" he added, seeing Adrian's suddenly shifty expression.
"They're, ah – they're also called 'Teachers' Nodules', presumably because teachers – "
"Do a lot of screaming, yes." In truth, he supposed it was because Muggle teachers spent their lives projecting their voices without a microphone or Sonorous.
Watching Potter's memory of the Dark Lord's resurrection was horrific. Even though they had joined the memory after the scene of Cedric Diggory's murder which he had glimpsed in Potter's mind two years ago, still he was aware of the dark shape sprawled on its back on the ground in the darkness beyond the tall white headstone to which Potter had been bound by Pettigrew, just as Pettigrew had bound him, Severus to the bedposts only a few days ago. And there was Nagini, and Pettigrew himself manoeuvring the stone cauldron into the space between Potter and the corpse of Diggory.
He could walk around in the memory, trying not to look at the dead boy whose eager intelligence and gentle nature he remembered so well, and see the clear liquid in the cauldron begin to sparkle like the sky of stars, but the memory didn't extend back far enough to see what had already been added to the brew. Potter had assured him that it must have been done before he and Diggory arrived, since Pettigrew had first approached them carrying only the Dark Lord, in the monstrous form in which He had possessed what was probably Bertha Jorkins' aborted foetus. He watched the Summoning of bone, the drawing of Potter's blood, and in between them Pettigrew slicing off his own hand with the knife with which he had later disjointed Severus, piece by piece. Whatever else his tormentor lacked, he had iron nerve, and Severus was reluctantly impressed.
He saw the liquid in the stone belly turn white, showering sparks and a blinding light in the darkness, and the Dark Lord rise up as a hybrid horror. He watched his former colleagues Apparating into view: many of them identifiable, despite the masks, as abusers who had forced their way into his cringing body less than eight months ago, and he tried not to vomit watching Avery being Cruciated – Deserved! Deserved! part of him crowed but it was always horrible to watch, and reminded him not only of what Avery had done to him, last year, but of the round after round after round of Crucio which he himself had endured in that graveyard, in front of those watching, smirking eyes, as punishment for returning to his master a whole two hours after he felt the Summons.
His muscles clenched and shuddered at the memory. Even the semi-translucent shape of Albus, skulking on the far side of the cauldron and adjusting his glasses to peer into its depths, and the double image of Potter standing next to his past self, was little comfort, as Potter's memory of the Dark Lord boasted and prowled and threatened and jeered at the pain of the man who had given his right hand for him (until Pettigrew sought a victim to control and humiliate in his turn).
And there it was, the whirling gesture, the streak of silver in the darkness, the prosthetic hand Summoned from nothing... the wand itself had not been in contact with the sparkling liquid in the cauldron, it had been in the robes which Pettigrew had left on the ground when he lowered the skinned-baby-thing under the shining surface, but Voldemort had been born from that liquid and the wand was in His hand. Did the generative power which had made a permanent prosthetic originate in the same ritual and the same potion that made the Dark Lord's new body?
Back in the daylight of three years later, minus a month, he stood shivering and trying not to notice how apologetic Potter looked. If he ever saw the Dark Lord again in what passed for the flesh, he hoped it would be as a clear target at the end of his wand, once they had dealt with the matter of the Horcruxes. He made a mental note reminding himself to have a word with Albus about the Room of Hidden Things, once they were sure Albus was actually going to live.
Albus himself lifted his face from the carved stone basin and its silvery contents: not that dissimilar from the star-filled, shining liquid in the stone cauldron. Could it be that the Dark Lord had been reborn from a bowl of his own memories, or of other people's memories of him? Albus evidently had the same thought, as he contemplated the bowl and its contents for a long moment and then shook himself briskly.
"First, I think... would you come over here, Harry, and place your hand on this device? Yes, that's right, place your hand flat on that plate. Now, describe what we just saw."
"I, um, we saw my memory of, of three years ago. The churchyard by Little Hangleton, I think it's called. Pettigrew had tied me to Riddle's father's gravestone. He dragged over this big stone cauldron which was full of sparkly white – stuff, lit a fire under it, then he – he undressed this horrible um, thing that was V— sorry, Heehoo, and placed it in the cauldron.
"Then he Summoned bits of bone from old Riddle's grave, and chopped off his hand and, um, cut me and collected my blood, added them all to the cauldron and it sort of, not exploded exactly but like a flare, sort-of, and then Heehoo poked up out of it all weird and, um, butt-naked and Pettigrew dressed him and gave him his wand, and then flopped around whimpering. He, that is, Heehoo, activated Pettigrew's Mark and Summoned Lucius and that lot and, uh, cursed Avery to make an example of him, and then he did this showy twiddle with his wand and Summoned a new hand for Pettigrew."
"It may be that that 'showy twiddle', as you call it is the key, in which case – well, my own wand is an unusually powerful one, even more remarkable than I am myself." Behind him, Severus raised his eyebrows, and wondered. "But..." He tapped a button on the side of the silver instrument. "Tell us what Mr Potter does not know, and that is relevant to the creation of Pettigrew's silver hand."
A spindly protuberance, like a metal spider's leg tipped with a nib, began to scribble on a scrap of parchment. Skritch, skritch.... When the device ground to a halt, Albus peeled off the parchment and examined it.
"Harry Potter", he read aloud, "does not know what was placed into the cauldron before the poppet of the Dark Lord, nor what ritual was performed over it prior to the addition of bone."
"All right", Severus said, rather grimly. "That sounds as if the exact potion in the cauldron is critical and it isn't, or isn't only, externalised memory."
"Heehoo was, well, pretty helpless when he was that – dead baby thing", Harry muttered. "I saw it in his mind. So any ingredients must have been gathered by Pettigrew, and probably chopped or whatever, as well as, well, any ritual or spell that couldn't be done sitting down in a chair."
He was going to have to interview the little bastard and find out what he knew about how his hand was made, and how it worked. Shivers still chased each other across his skin at the thought of Pettigrew being anywhere remotely near him, but he made sure to have other things to occupy his mind and relieve his tension. Hermione gripped the edge of the headboard behind her head in a grip like iron and did her best to lie still with her knees apart as he had told her to, as he teased her with his long fingers and his busy tongue until her whole belly pulsed with desire. But when he moved up her body to kiss her deeply, his tongue sliding against hers and the tip of his – his widge, she thought distractedly – nuzzling between her legs, her self-control slipped and she wriggled and bucked, trying to get enough leverage to push herself harder against that gentle insistent probing – and when after what felt like an eternity of frustration he suddenly fell forwards, down and into her, she gave up all pretence at passivity, wrapped her legs round him and kicked in rhythm, screaming as loudly as his fierce and smothering mouth would permit.
It might have made sense to return one of the dungeons to its original purpose, but he could not have born to have his torturer so close, however securely housed. So Pettigrew had been locked into a hole in wizard-space on the seventh floor, a clean but minimalist cell from which there was no way out except the heavily guarded door, since the other dimensions of the cell did not, in a very real sense, exist, and any attempt to burst the bubble of unreality would drop him eight storeys into a enclosed and stone-flagged courtyard.
A dampening spell ensured that he would remain in human form. It was tied to a steel collar padlocked around his neck, after Harry, the Quidditch player, had suggested that if he could break out of the wizard-space bubble he might turn into a rat in mid-air, land safely and disappear up a drainpipe.
But even with the staffroom gargoyles guarding the door with unwonted ferocity, and Alastor at his side with wand drawn, it took Severus all the nerve he possessed to enter that room.
"Don't forget which of us is in command here, Pettigrew!"
"Going to read my mind against my will, are we, Snivellus – going to thrust yourself into me?" He licked his lips unpleasantly. "Eager to see yourself as I saw you? Sobbing and grovelling for mercy on your hands and knees, or just on your knees, while you still had two, begging me for the chance to make me – pleased with you.... Is that a turn-on for you, Snivelly? Did you enjoy the fun we had together last year so much, you wanted to come back for more?"
Severus grabbed him by the throat with the left hand, the one that was made out of willow and moonshine, and shoved him up against the wall. "Or we could just dissect the bloody hand to find out how it works – your cooperation isn't essential."
"You wouldn't!" Pettigrew said with a slight squeak. "You owe me a life debt."
"How do you work that one out?"
"If I hadn't persuaded the Dark Lord to let us – play with you for a while, when we first grabbed you, you would have been dead within a few days, and it was my adapted spell which kept you alive."
"That's not a reason to be grateful" Severus snarled, tightening his grip and lifting the man up onto his toes. "It's a reason to bloody-well kill you!"
"You can't – you know how it works."
"Better than you, Wormy. Magical life-debts are just superstition, and I can have no debt of honour to an honourless little shit who betrayed his own boyhood friends."
"As if you didn't, you filthy traitor! And everybody thought blood-protection was just a superstition until our Lord spent years without a body because of it, and only I could save him. You'd be a fool to risk it."
"Maybe so – but I hear Hagrid is looking for something soft to feed to his latest pet."
"You wouldn't: you're too... civilized."
Severus let him drop, and wiped the palm of his hand ostentatiously against his thigh. "Want to bet?"
"It's no use, Albus – he won't agree to use a Pensieve, and would probably deliberately scramble it if we tried to extract a memory by force, especially as he seems to have worked out that the goal it to save your life and strengthen me. He doesn't know enough about how the thing was done to be much use under Veritaserum, even if it would work on him: he always was an ignorant little fool. One of us is going to have to go in and read the bastard, then extract a Pensieve memory of anything that looks relevant from our memory of his memory – there's nothing else for it. From the point of view of understanding the methodology I ought to do it myself, I know I should, because there are potions involved. But I just know that the spiteful little shit will force me to see myself being – abused, before I can get at his memories of three years ago, and I don't think I could bear it. This is a case where viewing my own experiences from the outside would not be helpful, believe me."
"Then I'll read him, dear boy, and you can review an edited version of my memories. And I venture to suggest that though I am not as gifted at Occlumency as you, my boy, I am by far the more powerful Legilimancer."
"But I don't want you to see me – like that, either – and I know I'm being illogical, because it probably has to be one or other of us, so you don't need to tell me: and I know we have to act fast. It's getting worse, isn't it?" The older man's hand looked like something long-dead, and he knew that the necrosis had spread as far as the biceps.
"I have a few weeks in me yet, dear boy."
"It may take a few weeks to construct the new limb, even after we're sure of how to do it. It has to be done as soon as possible but – but how could I bear to be seen by you, to be near you, knowing that you had seen me so... utterly degraded? Knowing that that was in your mind when you looked at me, knowing what you must think of me...."
"I insist that I will think of you exactly as I have always thought of you – a brave man taking appalling risks with his own safety and sanity, in order to do what is right."
"'Aways', Albus?' Severus snapped, suddenly angry. "I still remember your – absolute, withering contempt when I came to you wanting to defect, risking my life – what did you say, that I disgusted you?" He saw the old man flinch and turn pale, but ploughed on, unwilling for once to suppress his own misery for the sake of placating one of his masters. "Why should I expect anything better now, when I have so much more for you to be disgusted by?"
"Severus I –" He made a rather helpless gesture, then coughed delicately. "I was – I believe the expression is 'scared shitless', in case you were there to kill me, so I wanted to, ah, destabilise you. Also – sit down, dear boy, do, and stop looming. Although I suppose I should be glad that you are well enough now to glower at me."
"Don't mock me, old man. None of this is a fucking joke." He perched rather awkwardly on the edge of the chair in front of Albus's desk: bending the prosthesis at the hip to sit down decorously instead of with an inelegant thump still required concentration.
Albus steepled his fingers, as if he were going to give one of his infuriatingly twinkly lectures, then sighed and evidently thought better of it. He looked more discomfited than Severus had seen him since receiving the bombshell about the ... thing with Hermione.
"When I was... a little younger than you were when you joined Voldemort", the other began, "I fell – I became infatuated with an exceedingly handsome visiting Bulgarian boy a year or two younger than myself, the great-nephew of a family friend. He was – interested in politics. Some of it – extreme."
"I understand."
"You don't understand", Albus said sharply. "His name was Gellert Grindelwald." Severus sucked in his breath, and Albus looked down at his desk, fiddling with a luridly bright macaw-feather quill. "Yes, well", he said fussily. "As with Tom, at first sight his ideas for ending the Statute of Secrecy and enabling a magical world government seemed – best for all concerned, at least superficially."
"For the 'Greater Good'?" Severus jibed.
"YES for the greater good!" It occurred to Severus that he had never heard Albus swear – but his tone suggested it. "If it had worked as he – we – I thought, we might have prevented two world wars and saved tens of millions of Muggles."
"So what went wrong?"
"The same that went wrong with Tom, approximately. At least Gellert – at least he truly was interested in political theory, it wasn't just a cloak for self-aggrandisement as it was with Tom, but he – he saw Muggles as cattle to be exploited and even butchered rather than as charges to be shepherded, and we... you know Aberforth, of course."
Severus winced and unconsciously put his hand up to his ear. "Yes. Your vigilant little brother."
"We had – we had a third. A younger sister. Ariana. We... I believe now that we, all of us, and my father, had a condition that Muggles call autism. It often goes with, ah, high intelligence – don't make that face, it doesn't suit you – but also with, well, difficulty in understanding social cues, excessive sensitivity to noise, odd obsessions, unusual sexual... ah... I was the least affected, and even I have often had to resort to Legilimency to understand how my words might be received."
"That was why you never understood me, old man, until you saw me – broken open. I mean – I don't mean –" He gestured wordlessly at his stomach. "I mean mentally."
"Yes. You were too good an Occlumens. Also why I made such a poor job of handling Harry during his fifth year when I dared not look him in the eye. But Ariana... she was the worst affected. But powerful. A Dumbledore.
"When she was... six, I suppose, because I was just ten, about a year before I turned eleven and went up to Hogwarts, she had a burst of involuntary magic. I never found out what. Some Muggle boys saw her, and they... it all got out of hand. Violent and, ah, at least somewhat... sexual. So you can see that I – that knowing that you were, um, attacked, it... makes me angry, but not with you."
"What – what happened to her?"
"Nothing good, I'm afraid. She, she was already easily confused by other people's actions and overwhelmed by stimuli to the point of panic, and after the attack she became very disturbed. Not able to speak whole sentences. Our father, he – he was capable of great rage. Oh, not like your father – not at us. He went after the Muggle boys and he... killed one of them. And they were, were monsters, I suppose, but they were also twelve, and Muggles, and he used magic and didn't try to hide it, and then didn't explain his actions to the Ministry in case they took Ariana away to St Mungo's. He was sent to Azkaban, and we never saw or heard from him again."
"Oh, I'm – I'm sorry." He recalled Albus saying before that his father had died in Azkaban when he was twelve: he himself would probably have been happy if somebody had taken his own father away, but he knew enough to understand that normal families didn't work that way.
"It was – distressing. We knew that he was suffering terribly, for the two years until he starved to death, but we could do nothing, and Ariana – she blamed herself for what happened to our father, blamed her magic, so she forced it down and became an Obscurial. A very dangerous and powerful one, and shut your mouth dear boy: you look like a goldfish. Yes, they exist, and we had to more or less go into hiding, cutting ourselves off from other family, and hide her, or the Department of Mysteries would have swallowed her whole. And you will perhaps understand that after what had happened to her and to our father I was willing to see Muggles as... primitives in need of direction, and to find Gellert's ideas persuasive, at least initially."
"You had no fucking right to spit on me for having followed the – Riddle, then. Why did you never mention any of this before? You must have known that if – if I had known that you too had been involved with an extremist in your youth I would have been... I might have hated myself less."
"Because of what came after", Albus said grimly. "Ariana was always closer to Aberforth, in years and emotionally, so I didn't know her as well as I should have done. When I was seventeen, a few days after NEWTs, there was – an accident. Her magic got away from her and she... she killed our mother. It was while I was arranging her funeral that I met Gellert, and you will understand – I was in shock, I think, and grieving, and also not best pleased at the idea of giving up my future career and any prospect of finding a partner in order to care for somebody who might kill me too at any moment. Ariana was – sweet, in many ways, but she was... do you understand the Muggle expression 'an unexploded bomb'?"
"Yes."
"Gellert at not quite seventeen was – beautiful, and charming, and brilliant, and full of life, and also casually and enthusiastically bisexual, and I was – at least initially – a not quite eighteen-year-old virgin and he and his brilliant plan for re-shaping the world and his, um, personal attributes provided some distraction from grief and from worrying about Ariana. She terrified me: she had killed our mother and it wasn't possible either to blame her or to reason with her and teach her in order to render her safer, because she was, whether it was from birth or emotional trauma or because the attack had caused some organic damage, a bit mentally, ah, lacking."
"But you couldn't find anyone else to care for her, because, and I'm still not sure I believe you, she was an Obscurial."
"The Ministry would never have allowed her to remain at large, if they had known – and in retrospect they would probably have been right. My mother and, and Ariana herself might not have died. In any case Aberforth felt that I wasn't looking after her sufficiently, that I was spending too much time with Gellert, and a few days after my eighteenth birthday he said so in quite... colourful terms which included speculation about our sex-lives and Gellert, he – he showed what I'm afraid were his true colours and said that Ariana was a useless mouth and should be killed. There was a – an undignified brawl between three teenage boys which I, as the eldest, should have been able to stop but did not, and Ariana tried – we never knew which of us killed her, as there were no visible marks and spells had been fired on all sides, more or less at random. Gellert left – fled, in fact. At her funeral, Aberforth broke my nose and that, as they say, was that. We became as you have seen us."
"I'm – sorry." He had never seen Albus as an object of pity before, but it sounded as if Albus's childhood had been in some ways even more traumatic than his own, since Albus had had people to love and who loved him, and then had lost them under such awful circumstances. "You lost your whole family – mother, sister, brother – and your, ah, boyfriend in a few months."
"Scarcely even that. From my mother's death to Ariana's was perhaps nine weeks."
"Have you considered that – well, that if she really was an Obscurial it may have been her own suppressed magic which killed her when she saw magic being used in anger?"
"It's possible, yes, but I... I never knew. Never will know. That – that was why I put on the ring, to speak to her, but when I saw her she didn't – wouldn't or couldn't speak to me. Aberforth has a portrait, but he has never let me see it, and he won't tell me whether it speaks." He made a wry face. "So you see, I blamed you when you came to me because I saw myself in you, a foolish boy putting a loved one in danger for the love of a plausible fanatic and his own cleverness."
"Which was why you were so – fucking vicious to me when she... when I was already on the point of suicide!" It had been, until just under a year ago, probably the worst moment of a life full of worst moments.
"I was fairly sure Voldemort would be back, so I had to make sure you would stay to protect Harry, even now that Lily herself was... no longer a factor."
"No you fucking didn't! All you had to do was fucking ask – you didn't have to, to torture me." The memory did still seem like torture, even in comparison to Pettigrew and his little knife. "You could simply have said that I could still serve Lily's memory by protecting her brat and that would have been sufficient, but you wanted to make me your whipping boy – to hurt me to punish me for what you yourself had done!"
"Perhaps", Albus said, sounding profoundly depressed. "But also, I didn't know that – I mean, that you would have done what I asked just for the asking . As I told you, I cannot read your intentions by, um, social cues, and I cannot see what is in your mind except when it is, is broken. So I... broke you, intentionally." At the time, it had seemed a necessary next step in a long campaign, to ensure that a valuable tool would still function as needed. "I'm sorry. If I could undo it, I would – but we cannot take back our own actions, however... disastrous."
"More fucking manipulation – you don't have the moral high ground here, old man, and my actions are not the point." He sighed, feeling suddenly more tired than he had for several months. "But you are also quite correct. Neither of us can undo what has been done, although... there might be a back way in to The Hog's Head. Let me think about it."
"Ever the Slytherin, the spy –" He sighed and made a wry face again. "Please believe me that I don't mean that as an insult. You were a better man than I was, always – and a better spy than I deserved. You have always been – my right hand, even before...." He gestured with the blackened, withered twigs which had replaced his literal hand. "Witnessing the – details of what Voldemort did to you may make me thoroughly ashamed of myself, for having been so cavalier with your safety, but, my dear lad, I assure you it won't make me ashamed of you. Quite the reverse."
"If you can see me – as I was then, this – cringing, abject – if you can look at me and still see me as something fully human, that would be.... It would be a bloody miracle, in my opinion, but it might be – comforting. Less lonely."
"Company on the journey, you mean? If I could have taken the burden away from you and suffered it for you I would have, believe me."
"Don't even suggest it till you know what you're suggesting, old man." He gave a huff of desperate laughter. "I suppose you at least would not have an aversion to sexual contact with other men – even with frothing sodding would-be dictators, from the sound of it – but even you would prefer it to be consensual, unless your tastes are far more unusual than I imagine."
Albus Dumbledore walked through the hallways of Hogwarts, and there was no twinkle in his eye. He would have clawed his eyes out, rather than have to see what Pettigrew had seen, the wreckage of a man he cared for and Pettigrew hated hung up bloodied and twitching in rhythm with the lash, or sprawled convulsing on the ground in mindless agony, not even allowed to scream – begging to be allowed to die. Jerking and gasping, held fast and unable to pull away as the silver hand that felt horribly as if it was his own jammed the point of a knife between the surfaces of another joint and then another and sawed them apart. He would have torn his own skin off and gelded himself rather than have to feel what Pettigrew had felt and relished feeling, the rack of bones squirming and sobbing under him as he forced his way in – the battered, starving ghost of a man weeping with shame, trying to turn his face away and not being permitted to – having his mouth slashed horribly open as a punishment for trying to keep it closed –
He wanted to go somewhere private and be very sick, but his friend was waiting for him, sitting quietly in the office where he had left him with his shoulders slumped and his head bowed, like someone patiently awaiting execution. He walked up behind the dark-haired man and placed a hand on his shoulder and Severus turned to look at him, his face white and blank with shame and the expectation of rejection, but Albus drew him to his feet and embraced him tightly, holding him close as if he was afraid to lose him.
"Don't cry, old man" Severus said gruffly; "it's not as bad as all that. Come on now – it was the fortunes of war, and it was my fight as much as yours and I knew what I was risking. Not your fault." He was ironically, darkly amused: among all the scenarios he had played out in his head while awaiting Albus's verdict – a few fragile, hopeful dreams of kindness and sympathy and a dozen dire variations on a theme of rejection and disgust – having the man sobbing on his shoulder until his robes went soggy had not been included. "Come on me owd," he murmured, the soft growl of the native accent he had left behind over twenty years ago creeping into the edges of his voice; "that's it – come now Albus, sit down, do – I promise I'm not going to die or disappear again." He eased the older man down onto a chair, then stared at him in some alarm. "Good God, Albus, what have you been doing with your knuckles?"
The great Albus Dumbledore glanced up at him bashfully, like a schoolboy caught with his hand in the biscuit tin. "Something I hadn't done since I was a slip of a lad of eighty-nine. I'm very much afraid I socked him in the teeth."
"Oh! I wish I'd seen that...."
"And so you shall, dear boy." He reached out and patted the Pensieve affectionately. "So you shall."
"Well, we saw the potion created, but I'm not sure it adds much to what Potter witnessed, especially as... well, a Pensieve memory of something seen by Legilimency is bound to be a bit uncertain, even for a master like Albus. We can see the spell gestures – we already knew that – but now we at least know what went into the cauldron, aside from all the 'bone of the father' ritual stages that Potter saw. The base certainly wasn't just water, even though it may have looked like it to Potter! I'm going to have to analyse every ingredient to see if any of them were relevant to the creation of the hand, rather than just of – His – replacement body. And Flitwick is going to examine the hand itself in, in situ, before we offload the little shit to the Ministry."
"I suppose that's something – although I'm still not sure it was worth the risk. Or the stress." She shivered. "Were you able to get the information without having to see...?"
"Without witnessing my own – immolation?" He made a sour face. "Oh yes. The Headmaster – Albus looked at his mind for me. And yes, the little bastard made him watch me being, being degraded – that way – but even aside from the information about the prosthetic Albus found out that Ollivander is still alive somewhere, poor bastard, and being forced to make wands for them. That knowledge alone was worth my... embarrassment."
"Oh, love, that's... you're right, it's important to know, at least if it lets us find him. But you matter too and it must have been very... It must have been a strain on you." Of course the Headmaster, like all of the team, had heard many of the details of his suffering as he raved in the grip of nightmare, but she knew he was still half convinced that if any of them actually saw it they would recoil from him.
"It was – much better than I feared. Expected. If anything, I had to comfort him. And then we – we ate dainty cucumber sandwiches with the sodding crusts cut off and pretended everything was normal and he hadn't just watched me being made to use my mouth for something else, in literally bloody technicolour. But it still – humiliation was always my greatest fear" – or one of them, at least, but there were so many to choose from – "and I, I can't bear it. Not again. And Pettigrew knows that." He flashed Hermione a fleeting rictus of a smile, perched where she was on the end of the long sofa next to him. "Even when I know intellectually that you – and Albus! – don't see me that way."
"I really don't. Truly I don't. And I'm sure he doesn't either." They had had this conversation before, many times, but she had learned that she had to be patient and that his progress was always going to be three steps forwards and two steps back. Just so long as it wasn't the other way round they were, still, slowly gaining ground.
"One day I might even believe it", he said with a sigh. "But – when I was a child the other children laughed, I was so poor and shabby and sometimes my shirts were, were my mother's because she was more my size than Dads was and they all laughed, and then half the time I was going home to be whipped by Dads until I begged and pleaded with him to stop; and then there was Lucius, and that was – flattering, at first, until it became clear I wasn't to be allowed a choice. And then James Potter and his little gang – stripped me. You know how."
For a moment he stuffed his knuckles into his mouth to suppress an insane giggle. "I suppose seeing Pettigrew get arrested with his widge hanging out at half mast was – quite poetic, really, but at the time.... And then Lils joined in and mocked me because my underthings were poor and greying."
Hermione made a suppressed tutting noise and he flashed her the same fleeting smile. "Yes. Well. Being friends with a pretty girl did something for my status – and my ego, not to mention my libido – but it didn't last, mainly through my own bloody fault. In my idiotic embarrassment at having to be rescued I insulted her and she, she turned on me and then left, and James bloody Potter hung me up and stripped me and showed me what humiliation really was and I couldn't – the shame of it burned me, so that I had to keep trying to, to knock him down, to try to take away the memory. When I had to teach Potter – Potter junior I mean – Occlumency I took that memory out so I had some hope of reacting to him as himself and not as the thug who sexually humiliated me in front of a mob at sixteen, and when he spied on my memories it all came flooding back and I thought that it was all happening again and that he— Which I realise now was not the case, and I understand now why Albus said that Potter— Harry was more like Lily than James."
Hermione privately thought that being like the Sainted Lily wasn't much of an improvement, but now was not the time to open that particular can of worms. "If anything I think Harry is more like you – I mean not academic or brilliant or anything but, uhm, chippy and sarcy and from a horrible family and a bit – well, a bit rude, but very keen on protecting people even when he doesn't like them, and very, uhm – lacking in self-interest I guess. He really is."
"That's... I'll have to think about that. It's true that he seemed – inexplicably! – to have some fellow-feeling for my teenage self, as encapsulated in my, um, marginalia. But the father – he saved my life only to continue treating me like a, a chew-toy for bloody Padfoot, he humiliated me, sexually and socially, and even one on one we were too evenly matched, I could never defeat him conclusively enough to take away the shame of it. If I had managed to save him by my defection that would have given me back my standing, at least in my own eyes, but he took even that away from me by choosing thrice-damned Pettigrew as his Secret Keeper."
"He was obviously a terrible judge of character all round."
"I can't – that's one thing I can't really hold against the bastard, considering how most of my own schoolfriends turned out." And he had a fresh crop of scars to show for it, didn't he? "Serving the – Him – involved a lot of crawling and kow-towing, believe me, even when I really thought he was – what we needed. And Albus – when I came to him to defect he – he rubbed my face in the dirt, almost literally, and told me I disgusted him. I realise now that it was because he was projecting his own shame about his sister onto me – I'll tell you about that some other time, I only heard about it myself this morning – and I would have suffered far worse to keep Lily safe but at the time, it burned me – it undermined me for years.
"And I served him, and I took the risk, and he didn't keep her safe and then the Aurors took me and, and tortured me – it only took Albus a couple of weeks to convince them to let me go, and it wasn't anything like as bad as – but it was bad enough. Shaming. The more so because I didn't even want to resist them, I was on their bloody side, but they wouldn't believe me. And Alastor – I know he knows we're on the same side now but the man was replaced by an insane Death Eater for nearly a year and nobody even noticed, and what does that tell you?"
"He's certainly not the most... balanced of wizards, is he? I mean, even aside from having mismatched legs." She had tried to forgive the older wizard for his treatment of Severus in the past, given how helpful he was being in the present, but it was a stretch.
Severus snorted with laughter at that. "Not very balanced, no, although these days his paranoia is useful. And don't get me started on mismatched legs. But even after that there were a thousand petty humiliations because I was so young that the other staff still treated me like a child; Albus in particular just dismissed any of my professional concerns as if I was – negligible, and it would have to be Remus, one of the bloody Marauders despite his oh-so-polite emollient little smile, who showed my image to the children in an old woman's dress and told the whole bloody staff-room about it. Then more crawling to the Dark Lord and it was even worse, this time, because he was madder and more random, and then Potter – Potter with that face seeing nearly the whole bloody thing, what his father did by the loch, and it never even occurred to me that the brat might see it and take my side."
Remotely, he could remember how terrified he had been at the idea that Potter might have seen his dangling, upside-down teenage genitals (something which, as at a year ago, nobody currently in the school except Poppy, Finty and Rinna and, regrettably, Alastor had or should have seen) put on display to the mob: how the mortifying expectation that Potter might tell all his little friends had caused him to lose all his progress and regress to being that angry, miserably humiliated sixteen-year-old for weeks. With a slight shiver he wondered whether, if he were ever, God forbid, to be raped again it might send him straight back to the mewling, almost mute basket-case that Adrian had saved, leaving him to spend months again regaining any sense of self.
If circumstances had been different, if he had been as helpless as Pettigrew had assumed then being repeatedly hexed in the arse and forced to shit himself and have a partial erection in front of his godson and his old house father might have been close enough to rape to send him crashing back into abject panic and submission. But as the circumstances had actually been, it had been more equivalent to having dutifully consensual sex with some Death Eater-adjacent bint at a party in the hopes of gathering information: a thing he had done several times without more than mild discomfort – and that mostly guilt, although in Pettigrew's case being conned and made use of had been thoroughly deserved, and he had definitely not felt any obligation to make it good for the creepy little shit.
"It was just one more bloody humiliation on another even before – last year. With the – overtly sexual aspect, which makes being jeered at for wearing my mother's paisley blouse or hung up half naked for the whole school to laugh at my widge seem like a bloody medal ceremony. And then having to see Bennet and his little cronies smirking about it."
Hermione shifted closer to slide her arm around him, murmuring indistinct soothing noises, and he sighed and leant against her. "It's not – I thought –" The tremor in his hand caused the nearly-empty tea-cup to clink against its saucer, and he set it aside onto the coffee table and clenched his fist in irritation. "Having the little bastard strip me and grope me and gloat over what he was planning to do to me, and making me get a hard-on and shit myself in front of Horace and Draco was – revolting, almost literally vomitous, I really thought I was going to hurl when he –" When he started to talk about what he had planned for Hermione herself, forcing her to watch him die in abject misery without being able to help him, but he wasn't going to tell her about that, and he really hoped that Draco had had the sense not to. If he lost control and raved about it in a nightmare, he could at least claim it was only a dream terror about what might happen to anyone who took the risk of caring for him.
"If you'd asked before – last year," he went on quietly, "I would have said that, that having Draco and Horace hearing Pettigrew gloating over such... intimate details about what they – did to me, and having them see my, my arse, my widge, put on display like that would have been... more than I could possibly bear. Even after months of – of torture and – and months more needing help just to wash myself or go to the bloody lavatory, I still hate to feel exposed. But after having to show the image of my injuries to the Wizengamot as evidence, as just... Exhibit A in a court case, after that, having friends I trust see me shit myself is, is just more of the same. It doesn't really hurt much any more. It feels more medical than sexual, if you can understand that, even though the intention was sexual."
"It's still a, a trigger, but for a different set of associations, you mean?" She bit back the urge to comment on the fact that the initial encounter with Pettigrew had clearly been much more stressful and upsetting than he had previously let on (and what was that about the little creep having had his penis out?). Scolding his ears off for keeping things from her could wait.
He pulled a wry face. "Yes. And at least all of us except Pettigrew himself knew that really I was the one in control, and that I was only play-acting not being. Mostly. What he showed to Albus, though, knowing that he actually saw that – mindless, pleading thing, that's... far beyond humiliating. It's not what they did to me, or even what they made me do, that hurts so much, but how far they – broke me. And I know, I know intellectually that Albus doesn't blame me, now, or if he does he won't say so to me, but I remember how excoriating his disgust is and I still felt – being seen like that, and I'm quite sure Pettigrew will have shown me to him at my most – degraded.... The sheer bloody shame of it still burns me and I still more than half expected to see – revulsion."
"Oh, love...."
That earned her another faint smile before he bowed his head, looking down at his remaining hand resting on what passed for a remaining knee, and ignoring the prosthetic next to it. "You, too," he said quietly. "I know it's – stupid, and I know that Lovegood didn't recoil when she saw how they – kicking me and treating me like rubbish, in the boat, and you – and Potter! – saw me when I was – cut open and, and rotting, and you can still see past it." Potter, he realised with a slight feeling of guilt for having so totally misjudged James Potter's spawn, had apparently read a letter from the Dark Lord gloating over how he had been used as a live sex-toy by most of the Death Eaters, and must have seen his naked, bruised genitals and torn-open arse, and far from savouring his humiliation the boy had apparently thought absolutely nothing about it except to worry about how to save his life. "I know that, so you don't have to tell me.
"And I know that you, all of you, know intellectually what, what happened to me, and also that many of the, ah, sexual things they did to me or made me do to them would be acceptable, even pleasurable if they were consensual and not forced or, or made deliberately painful and degrading." Unless painful and degrading was your Thing, he supposed, but in his case it definitely wasn't. "God, you've done a few of the things they made me do to them, to me, and we both enjoyed it very much, and I don't even want to speculate about what Albus has done in that line." Or the Gay Gargoyle double-act from outside the staffroom, either.
"So I, I know intellectually that, that, that sucking – you do it, I presume Albus has done it even if I don't want to think about it, and it doesn't make you dirty or, or less or anything like that. And you do it so well", he added with a sudden smirk, and Hermione laughed.
"Apparently Cleopatra was famous for it, and I mean to be at least as good as a dead queen. And you're very good at uhm reciprocating, and that doesn't make you feel all sullied, does it?" At least, she sincerely hoped it didn't.
Having to suck off his torturers – he could say the brutally crude words in his head even if, ironically, not with his mouth – had been associated with shame and revulsion and, latterly, mortifyingly, with gratitude that they had chosen a game which at least didn't hurt much. Having Hermione suck him off rarely brought up that wave of remembered horror and revulsion, these days, because he knew that she loved him enough to take pleasure in pleasing him, felt close enough to him to enjoy the effects on him vicariously and found watching those effects on him intensely erotic, or so she said. And most of the time he could shut away the memories and enjoy her ministrations very much indeed, both for the sheer sensation; for the pleasure of knowing that somebody loved him enough to want to give him pleasure and saw his body as clean and acceptable enough to allow it in in such an intimate way, somehow much more intimate even than regular sex; and because knowing that she found it erotic was erotic in turn, because he enjoyed her pleasure too.
The same applied to deep kissing, which had been an intimate invasion in itself, there, but with Hermione felt like a sign that she found him clean and desirable rather than something to be dominated and shamed. And as for using his own mouth on her, it was similarly erotic to please her and see her pleasure, it didn't taste like – blank it out, blank it out, some things he still couldn't name even inside his own head – and he had only occasionally been ordered to pleasure Bellatrix, and when he had been he had mainly been remembering doing the same for her sister and enjoying thinking about how furious and humiliated Lucius would be if he only knew.
"No", he sighed: "if anything it makes me feel... liberated. But context matters. To lose any shred of bodily dignity and be forced to do something so, so intimate against your will is – it shows how my will was broken, was irrelevant, as if I was – nothing. Garbage. A blow-up doll spelled to scream almost like a real person while they spent themselves in it."
He wondered, distantly, whether he would ever consider attempting consensual anal penetration, if Hermione wanted it, and whether reframing the act in a calm, consensual context would reinforce the horrors in his memory, or take away some of the sting from them, as her pleasure in sucking him had done. But she would ask of him nothing which he was reluctant to allow. Vividly, he remembered telling Hermione on May Eve that they would need to have pleasurable penetrative sex about fifteen hundred times to make much of an impact on his negative conditioning: he had suggested five times a night for ten months, which would exhaust him if not her, but once a night on average for four years might actually be doable, and she had certainly made a valiant start. But realistically it might take decades, and perhaps eternity, to wholly over-write the painful associations which had been pounded into him.
Having anything up his arse, even a mild Stimulus parvus jinx, might still be too linked to the remembered, terrifyingly overwhelming combination of extreme stimulation with extreme pain. That might always remain a step too far, whether to experience something appropriate from the range of magical sex toys which he knew perfectly well were available (Hermione had obtained a catalogue), or to do to Hermione something which his memory told him would hurt her even if both she and his intellect told him it wouldn't.
He grimaced, remembering that sickening combination of pain with forced arousal. "Part of me still feels that if you or Lovegood actually saw, had seen, me being – being raped, being made to respond to being raped and –" he gestured wordlessly at his mouth and saw her slight nod out of the corner of his eye "– that you couldn't – couldn't bear to touch me any more because I was – dirty. Contaminated."
"I..." She sighed, concentrating, trying to find the right thing to say. "I would hate to see that, but because – because horrible things are horrible to see, and because seeing horrible things happen to you, especially, is – horribly upsetting. As upsetting as it would be to you if you saw something like that happen to me or to, to Lily." She felt as much as saw him shudder and blanch at that idea. "But if – if something like that were to happen to me, you wouldn't recoil from me, would you?"
"Oh, God, no!" He sounded genuinely horrified. "I would – I would burn the world down to get you back, to make you safe, to hold you –"
"Well, then." She smiled at him, feeling rather sniffly, as he stared at her wildly. "It's the same. Knowing that they – It doesn't make me think less of you, it makes me want to hold you and make it better for you. It certainly doesn't make me want to – to recoil from you, or anything daft like that." She nearly added that he was a daft lump for thinking it might, but he wasn't in a mood for teasing, however affectionate. "And if – it would be horribly upsetting, as I said, but if you need to show me – by Legilimency or in the Pensieve – what it was really like, I'd be willing see it to prove to you that that – that it doesn't change how I feel, except to make me even more protective." If Luna could see how he had been brought into the school with his stomach cut open and Cormac kicking him , and not even flinch....
"No I –" He bowed his head again, his eyes tightly closed and his skin as pale as she had ever seen it. "Perhaps. Some day. Not now." He shuddered. "Even if – even if you wouldn't recoil, I recoil from myself."
"Severus – love... Look at me." He raised his chin and looked at her rather blindly, and she saw that slow tears were leaking from his eyes, apparently without his even being aware of it. "You must know I've known roughly what they did, and made you do, since I first began spending the night with you: you used to rant about it in your sleep. And you know it doesn't make me, um, fancy you any less."
If anything, it roused all her romantically protective feelings and made her more driven to prove to him that he was still desirable and unsullied. She considered giving him a practical demonstration of that fact, but dismissed it: she didn't want to risk making him associate sex with humiliation any more than he already did, so demonstrations would need to wait until his raw nerves had settled back down a bit... and she was absolutely not going to do what the Headmaster had done to Severus when he was barely sixteen, and prevent him from speaking about his own terror – even though she understood why it had been necessary to protect Remus. "Your feelings are your own and I won't belittle you by saying you don't have a right to them, but never think that I, that any of us, see you as lessened because of what those, those fiends did to you any more than if you'd had, had cancer or some such. And we all admire and respect you more than you can possibly imagine for how bravely you've fought through it, even if only I am allowed to admire you in an, uhm, physical way." Although she did gather that Madame Hooch was a great fan of his bum....
Very carefully, she kissed a tear from the cheek nearest her and he sighed and leaned into her arms, dropping his head onto her shoulder. She smoothed his hair back, silky and heavy, and then cupped the back of his head very gently as he leaned against her. Slightly embarrassed to be so sentimental, but feeling that sometimes sentimentality might be what he needed (even if he would never admit it), she murmured "No more humiliations, my love: only admiration and, and honour. Come to bed, now, and rest."
He sighed and got up to progress rather unsteadily to the bed, leaning slightly against her. "I suppose it's the Catholic in me that makes me so sure that I am – sinful, although Addy says that that whole Original Sin thing is just a metaphor for the point at which we evolved to be morally responsible for our own actions, and for the inner chimp we have to control, that wants to grab and bite."
Hermione patted him on the shoulder as she helped him out of the prosthetics and into a nightshirt. "I've learned that your inner chimp is more of a pussycat, my love – like Crooks."
"Snuffly and smelling of sardines?" He bared his teeth at her. "If I was a cat, I would have eaten Pettigrew."
"I've been thinking," he said quietly, lying on his back and staring up at the canopy above, after Hermione's increasingly clever fingers had dealt pleasantly with his early morning erection. "I know that you – that you don't like me keeping secrets from you and I don't like it either. I also don't like making you keep secrets from the idiot boys, any more than is strictly necessary. And you – I told you that it was me that... that I was the one who told Him about the prophecy."
Hermione sat up and looked at him anxiously. "You couldn't have known –"
"I didn't know. But I know now, and the more... the longer I spend talking to Potter, getting on with him, God help me, without telling him the worst that I... the more of a betrayer I feel, and the worse it will be when I do tell him. Or you do."
"Oh love, I, I do see." Secretly, she had a little Moment over the fact that he now cared enough about Harry to want to continue being on good terms with him. "Do you want me to tell him?"
"I don't want to burden you and I don't, I don't want to be a coward about it but – I don't want to hurt him either, which is a thing I never thought I'd say, and I don't want to wreck my um whatever-it-is with him which is even less likely, and I think it would come better from you and be, well... not as potentially explosive. So long as he knows that I wanted him to know. I don't want to – I'm trying not to hide, you understand. No more false pretences."
"Uhm, Harry, Severus asked me to, uhm, that is, he wanted you to know that...." Damn. This was going to be worse than telling him and Ron that she and Severus were "seeing" each other (seeing every inch of each other, she thought with a suppressed giggle, remembering this morning's activities). She fiddled nervously with the cuff of her robe. "And uhm, you can tell Ron and, and Neville and Luna as well if you like but he wanted you to know first. Nearly first."
Harry grinned. "Spit it out, 'Mione, it can't be as bad as all that."
"That's all you know" she muttered under her breath. "He wanted to tell you, because it's really only the Headmaster and I that know and I haven't known for that long really, only since, uhm, late April, but he thought you should know...."
"What is it?" he asked, more gently. "You can tell me, honestly. I won't be mad, whatever it is."
Hermione tittered nervously. "Don't promise until you know what you're promising. He, ah... well. Remember that the Headmaster told you that the prophecy, that prophecy, was overheard by an eavesdropper...?"
She saw him stiffen. "Yes...?"
"Well it – it was Severus." Before he could react she rushed on: "He didn't know, Harry – he didn't know that it was about you or your mum or, or about a baby really and as soon as he did know that it might be you, and your mum, he went to Dumbledore to warn him – that was why he became our spy, to try to save you all, and why he –" She gestured at her own face, at her mouth, to remind him of her lover's scars. "In the end."
Harry's face was pinched, his expression tight. "And he decided to tell me this now but not before why, precisely?"
"Well he, he was afraid of how you might react and he thought it might come better from me – at least he was pretty sure you wouldn't hex me but he couldn't be as sure that – well...."
"Scared that I might finish what Voldemort started?" he said bitterly. "He should know me better than that. I'm everybody's fool, me. I trusted Barty Crouch, too."
"Well, but that was why.... He didn't like feeling that he was accepting your, your friendship, although he's still scared to call it that, on false pretences. And he, he knew that the longer we didn't tell you, the more of a shock it would be to you, and the more of a difficult position it would put me in."
"Because he didn't want to risk losing you," he jibed, and she gave him a gentle, inexorable look.
"No, Harry: because he didn't want to risk you losing me. And as odd as it still seems to him, he doesn't want to lose you, either."
Severus's equivalent of nervous nattering was to sit at his workbench dicing yarrow root as viciously as if he hated it, while muttering to himself and picking holes in everything which Hermione had learned from Horace Slughorn all year. It was a relief to both of them when the other shoe dropped, and Harry turned up with Ron in tow for moral support. Some kind of support, anyway.
Severus rose rather stiffly to his feet and leaned back slightly, propping his arse on the edge of the stone workbench for support while Hermione, still seated, gazed up at him anxiously. The two black-haired men (and Severus supposed Potter was a man now, more or less, since he would be eighteen in two months) eyed each other warily. After a moment Severus made a rather helpless gesture with his flesh-and-blood hand. "Potter, I –" He made a small, desperate prayer to whoever might be listening that Potter, with those eyes, wouldn't tell him to save his breath.
"I suppose I should be grateful that you decided to tell me," Harry said remotely, "rather than letting me find out for myself. Hermione said that you didn't know, but – what the hell did you think you were doing? Sir."
"Reporting a threat to my commanding officer, which the – which He was. At the time. I had no way to know – no way to know that it would be you. It sounded like...some fighter. Travelling."
"But you must have thought... born as the seventh month dies, dies, in the future."
Severus rubbed his hand across his temple, trying to ease an incipient headache. "'Dies' is actually present tense, Potter, which didn't make much sense however you look at it, and I was being dragged away from the door by my ear by the Headmaster's delightful brother at that point, I couldn't be sure... I didn't even know whether Sybil was saying 'born', as in, given birth to, or, or 'borne', carried. It was talking about someone approaching, as if they were on a boat or, or in a Muggle car. The prophecy was made in December of nineteen seventy-nine, when dear Sybil was angling for a job, and it took – took Him nearly a year to decide it even might refer to you...."
"That was when you joined our lot then," Ron said, nodding.
"Yes. At the end of November nineteen eighty. He'd been waiting to see if an adult champion would turn up. Even then it took nearly another year before he acted on it and he, unlike me, knew who had defied him exactly three times. And before you ask, Potter, I know once was when both of them refused His... offer of employment. Twice on your father's side was when your father refused to sell him a property he wanted, and on your mother's when Lily, who had a way with words, publicly called him a, a 'fading matinee idol with delusions of grandeur, desperately trying to hold on to his rapidly disappearing looks'." Harry, who knew what a matinee idol was, grinned; Ron looked slightly confused, which as far as Severus could tell was his normal state. "Explain it to him later, Potter. The third ways I don't know, or whether they were a joint enterprise or done separately – which is the point. I didn't know. Even if the word was 'born' it wasn't clear whether it meant born to a couple or born to a family – the thrice-defying could have been done by an entire family line.
"And in any case, prophetic language can be a bit...." He drew a deep breath, feeling Hermione reach up slightly to take his hand, her fingers twining supportively with his.
"There was a song, when I was your age – a song about Nostradamus, about prophecies he had made which seemed to relate to this century, and one of the verses...." He frowned, fishing after the memory, and then sang softly.
The boys, of course, had never heard him sing before, and Hermione saw Ron's eyebrows rise. Severus himself grimaced. "'Shall become', 'does this man', 'shall be' – future tense, you see, then present, then future again, with no especial logic except that it sounds good. So I couldn't be sure that 'dies' really did refer to the future even if I'd been certain that that was what I'd heard. It might just be... woo-woo prophetic language, you know? It was Sybil, after all. And in proximity to alcohol. And if it was in the future, how much in the future? It said 'the Dark Lord', not which Dark Lord – it could be one a thousand years from now."
"If you had known" Harry said, frowning, "that it was about a baby – would you still have told V— him?"
"I don't know. Honestly. I'd like to think not but – it was my duty. That was why... I wish I had killed that bastard Pettigrew, I should have done it when I had him in my house, knowing he betrayed your parents to their deaths, but I thought... he had been doing his duty too. I should have remembered how he... how he enjoyed cruelty, how he used to practically salivate while he watched your – watched me being humiliated at school, but we, we were in different cells in the first war, I didn't even know he was one of us. Them."
He gave a rather cracked laugh. "If I had killed him he wouldn't have been there to make the spell which He used to keep me alive. I would have died in a few weeks when they – last year. I still don't know that that wouldn't have been better, even though – even though I have gained so much." He was still hanging on to Hermione's hand like an anchor so he gave her fingers a gentle squeeze, and saw her rather sad smile out of the corner of his eye. "But at the time...I loathed the little shit but I thought he had betrayed them because he thought it was his duty to do so. That unlike me, his loyalty to our Lord had outweighed his loyalty to an old friend. Whereas now I think it was mostly spite and jealousy."
"You went against your own duty for – when it was my mum."
"Yes Sit down, do: both of you." The two boys crossed the room and sat down on the couch, looking uncomfortable. "By that point I'd been a – one of them, long enough to have begun to have doubts in any case. About whether the game was worth the candle. It was supposed to be this grand... we were supposed to be bringing wizards out of hiding, saving the world from nuclear war, taking what He told us was our rightful place on the throne of the world, and he was – it looked almost certain that he would head up the next government, and insofar as I still thought about your mother at all I thought that it might help her to have a friend on the inside, and she.... Even though blood-purists like Lucius and Bellatrix were determined that Muggle-borns would be second-class citizens, the Dark Lord still hoped to recruit her."
"Like apartheid," Hermione said, and he gave her a grateful smile. Ron looked totally blank, and Harry not much less so. She assumed her lecturing-to-idiots voice. "It means, uhm, apartness, in Afro-Dutch. In South Africa – that's a country at the southern, that is, the bottom end on the map, of Africa – until a few years ago black people, black Muggles that is, were, uhm, treated as not full citizens even though most of their families were there first, confined to areas with sub-standard housing and not allowed to do certain jobs or mingle with white Muggles much or, or donate blood to them or anything."
"That's stupid," Ron said firmly, and she flashed him a smile.
"It is, yes. Just as stupid as not letting people do jobs because they're Muggle-born, and I know there are people at the Ministry – like Umbridge! – who would like to make that the law even now. But the point is that even in South Africa, under apartheid, there were still jobs for black lawyers and doctors and so on even if they weren't allowed to work for white people, so black people who were talented could still do fairly well. And from what Severus has told me, it looked like it would be the same. Voldemort wanted to recruit your parents, Harry, both of them, so they would still both have had good jobs."
"Yes," Severus said with a sigh. "And it's not as if...this was twenty years ago, remember, when the Ministry itself was even more prejudiced that it is now. Minerva told me that was why she left her Ministry job in the fifties and started teaching: because she didn't like the way the Ministry treated Muggles and Muggle-borns. A Death Eater government didn't – didn't look as if it would be that much worse for Muggle-borns than the Ministry already was, and it was sold to us as ushering in some kind of Golden Age of Magic, as well as being...as well as looking inevitable, the way things were going. But once we were on the inside, I and, and Regulus, it had all turned out to be... sordid, just an excuse for Him to inflate his already massive bloody ego, and even less like a democracy than the bloody Ministry."
"Would you still have left, do you think if – if it hadn't been for my mum?"
"I don't know. Honestly. I don't know if... if I would have found the courage to leave without the threat to Lily, because I expected that if He caught me my punishment for leaving would be – what it was." He gestured at his scars, and had the dubious pleasure of seeing both boys flinch as one, remembering the condition in which he had been returned to them. "To say nothing of the risk of being t'tortured by the Aurors and thrown into Azkaban to rot. But I was already starting to realise that we might be... the slightly worse guys, even compared to the damned Aurors and their thrice-damned Dementors. The threat to Lily just gave me the impetus to take the risk, to get out of the mess I'd landed myself in." He gave another slightly cracked laugh. "And then I had to go right back again to play spy for Dumbledore, in exchange for him hiding you all."
Ron held up his hand, as if he was in class, and when Severus raised his eyebrows the boy started with a bit of a rush.
"D'you think that might have made it worse, Harry's lot hiding I mean? I mean, old Mouldyshorts, he knew you were, thought you were pretending to have changes sides but he didn't know you'd told Dumbledore that he thought the prophecy related to Harry, did he?"
"Oh God, no. If he had, he would have –" He gestured at his scarred face, at the space where his flesh-and-blood legs should have been, instead of the prostheses.
"Yes, right. But he knew there was more prophecy that Dumbledore had heard and you hadn't?"
"Well, then, surely when he saw that Dumbledore was hiding Harry's mum and dad he must have thought that that meant that Dumbledore also thought the prophecy was about Harry, independently I mean, based on the second half which he hadn't heard, and that must have made him think he was right to think it was about Harry, surely?"
"Oh. That's...." He felt as if he had been abruptly drenched with cold water. "Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. It really was self-fulfilling."
"Yes," Ron said, nodding, and Severus wondered why he had ever doubted the blasted boy's intelligence. "It's a kind of a recursive loop, innit? They went into hiding because Mouldyshorts thought that the prophecy said that Harry was a danger to him, but the fact that they went into hiding made him more sure Harry was a danger, so he attacked him and tried to kill him, but Harry was only a danger to him because he tried to kill him, and because you'd asked him to spare Harry's mum, which, well –"
"Which set up the conditions for the blood-protection, yes. And that – Dumbledore tells me that was vital, that without it the – He would have won the war. But perhaps Lily and, and James would have been safer if... not just if I hadn't relayed the bloody prophecy in the first place, but if I hadn't given Dumbledore reason to hide them."
"I don't think so," Harry said slowly. "Not a lot safer, anyway. Mad-Eye showed me a photo' of the Order from when I was a baby, and loads of them were killed just in the few months between then and the end of the war. I'm not...thrilled about what you did, but I don't think you put them in a lot more danger than they were already in, even to start with, and in the long term... if you hadn't done what you did they would probably have been killed anyway, just for being in the Order and not wanting to be recruited especially as, as Pettigrew would have been spying on them and shopping them to V— to Heehoo either way, and if – if you'd relayed the prophecy and then you hadn't asked Heehoo to spare my mum, he would have killed her out of hand and then me too, which – well, I'm pretty glad he didn't. One way or another."
Severus looked out at the early morning sunlight on the loch and the almost painful green of the trees that ran along the far bank, and it all looked as bright and fresh as new paint. Something felt different – he felt different, and he realized, with a dull shock and a catch in his breath, that for the first time... the first time ever, really, he didn't feel dirty or ashamed. He was so used to feeling that way, that he was somehow loathsome, ever since his father had first called him an ugly, worthless thing, that not to feel it any more was disorienting and even disturbing. Even with Hermione, there had always been a part of him that thought "You'd recoil from me if you really knew" and that was weirdly comfortable even as it was depressing, because it enabled him to cling to his established world-view.
But now Potter had absolved him, after a fashion, of the guilt of Lily's death or if not quite that, at least of the guilt of having concealed his part in it, and he no longer had to feel that he was lying to the brat by accepting his concern. Now he knew that he had not been uniquely sinful as a teenager, because Albus had been just as venal and silly and gullible and misguided as himself. And now Albus really did know, not only what he had done as a Death Eater but what the Death Eaters had reduced him to; he had looked that crawling thing in the face, metaphorically and probably literally, and he hadn't flinched away. Not even a twitch. And that meant that – oh, really, probably it was true what she told him and Hermione wouldn't flinch if she really saw it either, she was at least as tough-minded as Albus and if he had raved about it in his delirium, even more than in the awkward conversations he could dimly remember having when he was awake, then she had known the depths of his humiliation from the outset, even before she had developed her inexplicable attraction to him, and it hadn't stopped her from wanting him. And that meant that it was possible to trust, it was possible to take the gifts of companionship and desire which she offered him so freely and not to always feel that he was doing so under false pretences.
Safe in her arms he might be able to look the multiple nightmares of memory steadily in the eye and accept her comfort and care as he did so, and accept that the comfort was deserved and the abuse had not been. He might even be able to remember and re-experience that everywhere-and-nowhere dissolution of self, and then find the power in that and turn it into a weapon with which to strike at his tormentors.
He stretched, enjoying the sun, and flicked his long hair back from his face. It was well over twelve hours since he'd last washed it, and it hadn't even begun to get greasy again yet... and he thought, suddenly, of the book which the Lovegood girl had read to him when he was half-mad and drifting in delirium: "I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full."
As a standard domesticated pet rat Scabbers is a brown rat or Rattus norvegicus, one of the true or murine rats. The black rats who were seen using their tails as skipping ropes were Rattus rattus, another murine.
"Ye gods and little fishes": a slightly old-fashioned emphatic exclamation, similar in effect to saying "Jesus H Christ!"
The Goodyear Blimp: any of a fleet of giant airships used to advertise the Goodyear tyre company, and seen in the UK as well as the US.
Shit off a shovel: very fast and slippery.
No, it's not OK that Hermione is tempted to hit Severus when she is angry with him for taking risks. But it is in character: think of the flock of little birds she set on Ron.
Paltering is lying by telling the truth in a misleading way.
More [X] than you can shake a stick at: a very large amount of [X].
To be without a leg to stand on is to have no excuses or arguments to offer.
Stitched up like a kipper: a kipper is a pickled and smoked herring, and literally this would mean to be gutted and hung on a smoking-rack: but metaphorically it means to be tricked into an inescapable position.
Feed-line: a line of dialogue provided with the purpose of enabling a comedian to reply with the punchline of the joke: in this case, Pettigrew asking "Do you know what you are?" which enabled Snape to reply "I'm a piece of cheese".
The incident with the milk float, the accelerator and the brick that Ron refers to is from the Speed 3 episode of Father Ted. I'm pretty sure Ron would be a Father Ted fan. Speed 3 aired at the end of March 1998, about ten weeks before this conversation, so we can assume Ron saw it, either live or on video-tape, during the Easter holiday.
The original meaning of "nice" was to be overly finicky or nit-picking, still preserved in the phrase "a nice distinction".
"A counsellor, like somebody named Troy whom she had once seen in a Muggle TV show" – Deanna Troi, ship's counsellor in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Oxter: regional word for your armpit, found in Scotland, Ireland and the north of England.
A poppet was originally an effigy of somebody, made in order to cast a spell on them. The foetus which Voldemort possessed is acting as a proxy for his own body, and does not contain any other mind because he possessed it before it could develop one, so it could be loosely described as a magical flesh puppet, or a special type of Inferius. Because poppets usually took the form of a crude doll, the term gradually drifted to become an endearment for a small child.
Lightweight but strongly-built animals can fall any distance and not be hurt, so long as they don't land very awkwardly or on something sharp, because even at terminal velocity their momentum is low; and rats, like cats, lash their tails in order to turn in mid-air and land on their feet. Rats are borderline as far as weight goes: a large, heavy rat like Scabbers would probably break his wrists on landing but they can't be sure of it. Cats overcome the weight limit because the loose skin on their flanks has a slight parachute effect, like a weaker version of the flight membrane of a flying squirrel.
"Like a rat up a drainpipe" is a proverbially fast way of disappearing.
Formal, magical life debts are a fanon idea: in the books, when Dumbledore speaks about a life debt between Severus and James, or between Peter and Harry, he appears to be speaking about no more than a sense of obligation. However, in the books Peter dies because he hesitates to kill Harry. It's possible that he hesitated because he had some shreds of honour, but given that he betrayed James to death and Sirius to Azkaban "honour" seems a bit of a stretch, so it may be that he believes, like the fandom, that he will be cursed if he kills somebody to whom he owes a life debt.
Dumbledore's summary of what autism is is very simplistic: but remember this is taking place in 1998, and he's probably going by something he read in a Muggle magazine.
"Me owd" is a Derbyshire expression of affection – I assume it's short for "my old mate" or "old fellow".
The story about Cleopatra being famously talented at fellatio is probably just a later, mildly scandalous myth, or a misunderstanding of the fact that she was extremely gifted at languages (="tongues"). But it's a story which is widely known and which Hermione has heard.
Stimulus parvus should mean something like "small stimulation" – basically a little tingle.
This is the prophecy: "The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches ... born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies ... and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not ... and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives ... the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies ..."
But Dumbledore says that "the eavesdropper was detected only a short way into the prophecy [cut] He heard only the beginning, the part foretelling the birth of a boy in July to parents who had thrice defied Voldemort. Consequently, he could not warn his master that to attack you would be to risk transferring power to you, and marking you as his equal." So, Snape heard as far as "as the seventh month dies" and enough past it to know there was more that he hadn't heard (since Voldemort knew there was more to it), but not a lot past it. He only heard "a short way into the prophecy" and "mark him" is nearly 40% of the way through it (37th and 38th syllables out of 97), so he probably didn't hear as far as "mark him" – and definitely not as far as "as his equal". So this is probably all he heard:
"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches ... born(e) to those who have thrice defied him, born(e) as the seventh month dies ... and the—"
There was nothing in what he heard to tell him whether the word was born or borne, and he definitely didn't hear "will be born" so there was nothing to tell him that the birth or conveying was in the future, other than that it said "dies" rather than "died". Dumbledore says he heard a prophecy about "the birth of a boy in July to parents" because he knows that's what it did foretell, but there was nothing in what Snape heard to say that "the one" was a person, let alone a male human person, rather than some kind of weapon; or that the "those who have thrice defied him" were the one's parents rather than their general family or people to whom the one was being conveyed – or that "the seventh month" was July and not September, or the seventh month in the Jewish or Chinese calendar, or the seventh month from when the prophecy was made, or the seventh month of pregnancy.... And "approaches" emphatically doesn't sound like it refers to an as-yet-unborn foetus of two months' gestation. You can say that a birth approaches, but you never say that the baby does, so if "the one" is a person it clearly sounds like an adult, physically travelling. It was Voldemort who decided what it meant, and it took him nearly a year.
The song Nostradamus is by Al Stewart, who was very popular when Severus and I were teenagers.
If you think it isn't likely that Harry would forgive or excuse Snape over the prophecy, even now that they are friends of sorts, remember that in the King's Cross scene he forgave and excused Dumbledore for much worse. Snape relayed the prophecy without having any idea that it would be connected to the Potters, or to a baby. Dumbledore borrowed the Cloak that hides the wearer from Death from James knowing that the Potters were in imminent danger of death, and not knowing that in the event it probably wouldn't have made much difference if they'd had it on hand. Snape put them at risk unknowingly by doing his duty and reporting a potential threat to his commanding officer. Dumbledore put them at increased risk knowingly, to satisfy his own curiosity, but Harry excused him, because he is fond of Dumbledore. In this story, by this point, he is fond of Snape.
I wanted to get this chapter up fast because of the way it follows on immediately from the previous one. The next chapter will take a bit longer because it involves tying a lot of fiddly loose ends in – but not years, I promise. If you are seeing this text, your browser does not support inline frames: to select a chapter you will have to return to the <a href="../Lost_and_Found.htm">title-page</a>
