FIC: Danse Macabre 15/?

[laguera25]

Title: Danse Macabre 15/?

Author: laguera25

Fandom(s): HP/CSI:NY

Rating: FRAO

Pairing: Don Flack/OFC

Spoilers: S1, S2, and S3; HP to Book 6

Disclaimer: All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.

A/N: The Malleus Necros Curse is not my creation; it belongs to the lovely ladies of hogwarts_live, an HP RP. There is one more chapter proper and an epilogue to go, but I must delay their posting until I have finished my submission for the Supernatural family_secret challenge.


Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII Part VIII Part IX Part X Part XI Part XII Part XIII Part XIV




While her husband quaffed cold, spiked coffee to help the vilest medicine go down, Rebecca sought a nostrum of her own. It was not to be found in the clean, well-lit aisles of a pharmacy or the sterile fluorescence of a doctor's office, nor-if she found it-would it be tempered with sugar and honey and vanilla extract. It would be bitter and caustic and purgative as castor oil, and it would be found in the shabby, seedy gentility of Spinner's End.

She had spent two feverish nights there with Hermione Granger in her sixth year, hunched over a table in the root cellar and crushing nightshade into deadly ichor with a smooth, stone pestle. The Serpent King had been there, too, of course; it was his den, and he was a proprietary bastard of the first water. He had overseen their desperate work with a tyrant's impatience, snapped and snarled and sunk his poisonous fangs into them to goad them, and the damnable tactic had worked. They had redoubled their pace, each for their own reason: Hermione because she was determined to prove him wrong, and she because she had not wanted to disappoint him.

It had been cool and damp in the root cellar, and beneath the mossy odor of moisture had been the less pleasant smell of rotten wool, as though the professor had left old robes to rot. It had been the smell of Snape corrupted, and as it had swept into her nostrils and crept into her mouth to coat her tongue and throat, she had thought, very clearly, that it was how he would smell just before they set fire to his corpse. The thought had made her stomach roll with a mixture of terror and revulsion, but her face had remained impassive. The Serpent King had tolerated neither children nor weakness, and vomiting was a sign of both.

Hermione had noticed it, too, and as she descended from the last wooden riser onto the oiled dirt floor, her nose had wrinkled in unthinking distaste. "Erm, Professor, what is that smell? It's awful," she had asked, and waved her hand in front of her nose to emphasize the point.

The Professor had paused on the steps, one knee bent in preparation for another step and one hand resting lightly on the crumbling banister. The other hand had been curled imperiously in the folds of robe at his throat, and she had thought of Jonathan Edwards and the hands of an angry God; it was a comparison she had made before, but that night, there had been no fear, only a dim, simmering anticipation.

Now, Granger. Now you'll see, she had thought, and her teeth had sharpened inside her mouth.

"With your unbridled lust for keen observation, Miss Granger, I should have thought you would have noticed the formidable textile mill nearby," he had murmured drily. "My apologies on overestimating the abilities that Professor McGonagall touts to the bloody ceiling and beyond in the staff room. Given her longstanding penchant for gross exaggeration, I should have known better. No matter. Rest assured that I shall not make the same mistake again." He had glided down the remaining steps and flicked a bony wrist at her in dismissal. "You've your instructions, girl. Why are you standing there with your mouth agape? If I had wanted Longbottom, I would have brought him."

Each word laced with the finest, most delicious venom that intoxicated as it ravaged. She had been intimately familiar with it by then, and more than a little addicted, though she would never have admitted it. His tongue had tempered her, broken her in her soft, unguarded places and reforged her, fitted her with adamant bones and an obsidian heart. She had considered each strike with the forked lash of his tongue a test to be borne and passed, and so, she had experienced a faint, fleeting pang of disappointment that the venom was not for her.

The Professor had summarily remedied his oversight. "Why are you looking so pleased, Stanhope, you insufferable chit? You're no better, slouching in that mechanized menace with a vapid expression. I would have been better suited with Goyle and Fang than the Dunderheaded Duo with which I have so clearly been saddled. Get to work, and so help me, Stanhope, if you damage my stores with an errant jerk of that jouncing contraption, it will be my most profound pleasure to hurl you from the roof like a garden gnome."

It was cruel and petty and blessedly familiar, and you savored it even as your cheeks flushed with humiliation and indignation. You fought a smile as you rolled towards the shelves and cabinets stacked high and deep with potions, phials, and ingredients because here was a dance you understood. It had been enmeshed in your pores through long hours of toil under that baleful, black gaze, and you recounted its steps with the unthinking precision of muscle memory. Hermione might have been smarter and more coordinated, but you were on surer ground.

Yes, sir and No, sir and Yes, sir again when his clipped step sounded behind you. You knew not to drop your gaze when he asked you a question and not to lie when you didn't know the answer. You also knew to handle the tools of his craft with care and reverence. Hermione knew, too, but sometimes, she forgot in the heat of her anger and desperation, and he gave her no quarter for youth or exhaustion.

He worked you for hours, but he asked of you nothing that he was unwilling to give himself. He ground and catalogued and brewed alongside you, eyes narrowed against the steam from three cauldrons. Eventually, the ambient heat overwhelmed the cold, and sweat beaded in his hairline and beneath his long, thin nose. It dampened the starched collar of his robes and turned it grey, and you couldn't help but blink in surprise and swallow a lump of unease. You had seen him undone by the agonies of Cruciatus in the privacy of his chambers, but that was an ugly, precious rarity. In the classroom, he was poised and cool, perfectly pressed and creased. The deepening stain on his collar was just one more proof that the world had gone mad.

It was so unsettling that you opened your mouth to comment on it, but time was short and his temper was shorter still, and he had neither the time nor the patience to soothe your skittish, child's heart. He brought the knout down across your shoulders and throat with ruthless proficiency, and the words withered on your tongue.

The work was simple and numbing. Hermione called out the names of decoctions and ingredients and gathered them from the shelves, and you ground and chopped and peeled. It was a testament to the importance of the task that he forewent his hard and fast rule against you use of magic, and your wand was hot and heavy in your grip as you murmured the commands to chop and section and bindle, and your lips cracked and bled with the endless repetition. You spent the night with blood on your tongue and teeth and the deep, throbbing ache of exertion in your wrist and shoulder.

The Professor brewed endlessly, batch after batch of potion. Pepper-up and Dreamless Sleep and Blood-Replenishing Draughts. Skele-Gro and Felix Felicis. Potions to sustain and potions to ease suffering and potions to undo the damage wrought by magic upon the human form. Medical miracles rose from his cauldrons in a fine, shimmering haze or a thick, rolling boil. Once, when you paused in your grinding to wipe the sweat from your eyes and adjust your grip on your wand, you saw him through the unsteady, hallucinatory curtain of heat. He loomed over the cauldron and peered into it through half-lidded, speculative eyes, heedless of the heat and noxious vapors that enveloped his sallow face in torpid, corrosive fingers. He was motionless, and the steam danced around his long, lean frame, made a mirage of him even as he lived and breathed. It was hypnotic and beautiful; he was beautiful, and for a moment, your grip grew lax with mournful wonder. Then Hermione had thumped her mortar on the workbench in wordless frustration, and you returned to your appointed task.

He brewed other potions, too, these neither so simple nor kind. Veritaserum and the Draught of Living Death. The first amber as honey and the last black as pitch. He kept the latter in a corked glassine well apart from the rest. One drop was enough to do its work, and inhalation of the vapors could cause coma and brain damage. He warded it against your unwitting predations, and when you returned to Hogwarts two nights later, it was the only potion he wouldn't let Hermione carry in her padded, compartmented trunk. He stowed it in a burlap satchel belted at his waist. You wondered why he needed such a potent decoction, but you knew better than to ask. You let Hermione do it for you and duly suffer the consequences.

He stopped only when Hermione began to slur her words. He herded you up the stairs and into the living room, the caustic, boiled-cabbage reek of industry embedded in your clothes and skin. He offered you tea and stale crackers, and then he shepherded you behind a bookcase and up a winding, rickety staircase that scarcely accommodated the hulking width of your chair and groaned beneath the weight of it when your floating wheels skimmed the risers. He led you to a small, spartan bedroom with a bed in one cobwebbed corner and a pallet of ancient, dirty linens in the opposite.

The floor is yours, Mrs. Granger, he said. Do mind the rats. They can be rather bothersome. And then he was gone. For once, Granger was too exhausted to complain.

The rest was brief. He roused you with the sun, and you shambled, stiff and bleary-eyed, into the root cellar again. The scant sleep had done little to improve his mood. Indeed, he was savage, angered perhaps by the hours of rest happenstance had so rudely denied him. He drove you hard, his helpless dray horses, and all day and long into the night, the cellar sweltered with steam and repressed emotions. If there was no rest for the wicked, then there was even less for the righteous.

Hermione cracked near the end, simply sat down hard upon the floor with a ledger in her white-knuckled hands and sobbed, and you could hardly blame her. Your own eyes were hot with fatigue and swollen in their sockets, and your defenses were buckling under the strain of too little sleep and too much expectation. Your scrawny chest constricted in sympathy as she sat on the floor and bawled.

The Professor was unmoved. He loomed over her, arms folded across his chest. Miss Granger, he murmured. Fascinating though I find this display of childish hysteria, I haven't the time for it, he snapped. Get up, stop sniveling, and get back to work.

Hermione met his gaze and scowled at him, face wet with tears and snot and sweat. I don't care if you've time for it or not, Professor, she retorted. I'm tired, and I bloody well need it. You can spare five minutes.

His response was unflinching. No, Miss, Granger, I cannot, and neither can the Aurors and students who will depend on these potions for survival when the hexes begin to fly. Potter, for instance. He paused to let the myriad implications of that statement sink in. Now get up. Almost gentle. You don't see Stanhope succumbing to lunacy.

Yes, well, I never claimed to be soulless.

You tensed in anticipation of fury at her cheek, but he startled you with a bark of derisive laughter. Only a Gryffindor would mistake weakness for the evidence of Divine animus. Then his face hardened. Either get up, Miss Granger, or get out of the way. No gentleness now, only contempt.

To your surprise, Granger fled, and for a while, it was just you in the room with his urgency and his bile. But Granger returned a few minutes later, goaded perhaps by conscience or pride or both. Her face was blotchy but defiant, and her chin was steady. There were no apologies from her and no words of encouragement from you. She just squared her shoulders and picked up the ledger, and the work resumed.

From dawn to dawn that time, stopping only to use the cramped lavatory off the sitting room. Cold and damp crept into your muscles and bones, and by the time you returned to the castle, you could barely move. Hermione wasn't much better, stooped and shambling as she delivered the store of potions to the infirmary. You both needed a hot bath after your adventures. She sequestered herself in the prefects' bathroom, and you consigned yourself to the fluttering, solicitous hands of Winky and Dinks, who barricaded themselves in the girls' lavatory with you and soaked and scrubbed you in hot water until muscles loosened their grip.

Those two days weren't enough; two hundred days wouldn't have been enough, as it turned out. The Professor brewed what he could in the dungeons, but even after he commandeered empty rooms and advanced students to help with production, the demand outstripped supply. When the trench warfare began in the fall of seventh year, he co-opted the Hogwarts kitchens and brewed Blood-Replenishing Draughts alongside pans of blackberry crumble.

It was no use. Wizards were wounded by the hundreds, and the dying were needy. Supplies meant to last weeks disappeared in an afternoon, and the Ministry, mired in its own battles and casualties across the country, siphoned precious resources. Desperate Mediwizards and Healers diluted the potions with water in an effort to conserve what little they had. In the thick of battle, when all hands were needed in the trenches-even a Potions Master's skilled ones-Healers filled empty phials with mud and called it medicine, knowing it brought no cure but kindness and false hope.

You had always thought that you would return to Manchester after the War, settle in as the Potions Master's dutiful assistant. Never so lofty a title as apprentice, no. That was not for you, with your palsied, clumsy hands. But you could buy his supplies and equipment and make deliveries. You could mind his inventory and rouse him from his single-mindedness long enough to keep him from starvation. You would be useful.

You had thought to be useful in other ways as well. You had hoped, in your young girl's heart, that he would come to you for satisfaction of other, less pragmatic needs. Not love; even at seventeen, you had lost enough rosy-eyed optimism and seen enough of his soul to know that such was beyond him, but mutual tolerance, perhaps even deep regard. He would come to your bed and share his warmth, and you wouldn't die with your maidenhead withered and dried between your legs. So intricate was the fantasy life of After that you had fashioned for yourself that you had thought to roost in the room you had shared with Hermione and had even envisioned the curtains you would hang in the dingy windows.

It's vulgar now that you were willing to settle for so little, but back then, you could not conceive of the deep, abiding love you would one day know and share with Don, your improbable prince. With no lover and no prospects for greater happiness, it seemed a paradise, an Eden of routine and familiarity. Better to be conveniently used than forgotten.

But there were no curtains, no loveless trysts in a bed with ragged linens. The Serpent King preferred a loveless life to a sweet death with you, and he tore your dreams to pieces. The gingerbread house in Manchester had gone rancid, and you hated it and him. It was a blessing unlooked for, but at the time, it was the end of the world and the dying of your light, and you swore you would never come back.

Except you had no choice. Don saw the bruises on your chest from when the magic hurtled you across the Shrieking Shack and asked how you got them. Of course he did; he loves you more than the air he breathes, and he has spent your marriage making you comfortable and happy, making you safe. He traced his fingers over the blossom of the bruise and bent to kiss it, eyes dark with concern.

What the hell happened, doll?

And you lied. You had told lies of omission over the course of your marriage, white lies designed to keep from him the truth of unicorns and fairies and dragons, but never lies of occlusion, fashioned from whole cloth to protect you from unwanted scrutiny. Those were diseased lies, corrosive and poisonous, and you had promised never to tell them. Not to him, your fair prince. It was another promise broken, a livid scar across your heart.

You tried to ignore it, tried to purge yourself with the salt and iron taste of him on your tongue, and all you could think with his scarred belly under your mouth and his endearments in your ears was that you were tainting him. You burst into guilty tears and robbed him of his arousal, but he only gathered you into his arms and tried to croon your sorrow away, and that made you guiltier still. You knew then that you could not abide another lie, not to him. So you waited until he slept and went in search of your truth.

And here you are.

Here she was, bundled in her balaclava and wending through the grimy, grey streets of the city. It was cold, the dead heart of English winter, and the wind off the river cut through the flimsy protection afforded by the balaclava's thin, woolen hood and scoured her cheeks. Breath marked her path like a smoke trail, and she blinked to clear her watering eyes.

She maneuvered around a pile of dog shit gone grey at the frozen edges, and the cold, metal rims of her wheels sank teeth into her gloved palms. "Shit," she muttered. "Should've bought dragonhide." Not for the first time, she cursed Severus Snape his Muggle roots that prohibited her from using magic in public.

The city was unchanged from her memories of it. The sky was still the color of boiled lead, and the river still stank of industry and inedible fish. It had been the industry of wool once upon a time, or cotton. Maybe it still was. She couldn't say. The stink was different, though, deeper and fouler and more entrenched in the soil. Dirty nickels and wet paper in her nose.

Even the garbage strewn along the streets was the same-plastic candy wrappers, glass bottles, chewed gum. Sometimes there were more exotic things, like used condoms and dirty diapers, but these, too, had been there before, she was sure. Maybe they were the same ones she had glimpsed back then, or maybe these were descendants. Garbage bred just like everything else.

There were few people about, and of those that were, fewer spared her a glance. They walked with their mittened hands stuffed into the pockets of their overcoats and their rough chins tucked snugly into thick mufflers. The faces were as bland and indifferent as the sooty, rundown buildings she passed, and she wondered again how she could ever have thought of this place as Eden. It was a necropolis of dead hopes.

Well, New York isn't lush, precisely, her grandfather pointed out.

She grunted. On its face, New York was an ugly city of stone and steel, dirty with the reek of eight million bodies and teeming with rats. The only greenery was in the oasis of Central Park, and even that was not pristine. Its grasses were marred with streets, sidewalks, and bike paths, and all of them were clogged with joggers and dog walkers and horse-drawn carriages. Yellow cabs flitted on the periphery like mechanical bees and pollinated the green with another thick dusting of human traffic.

But there was a deceptive beauty to New York, a vibrancy that seethed in its grey, concrete arteries and drew the wayward and dreaming there with its promise of hope, of better sometime. The neighborhoods and barrios had their unique flavors and tastes and smells, and you could start in Cuba at dawn and find yourself in Taiwan at dusk. It was "Hello" and "Fuck you" and "Hallelujah". An aspiring writer who had surrendered his pen too soon had once called it a place of "millions of Manhattans", and she thought that was right. It was a place of poverty and pride and secrets, and everything grew lushly there.

She hadn't realized it at first. She had been blinded by her hurt and cynicism when she touched down in the city with nothing but her undergraduate diploma and a trunk full of clothes and books. It had been so much dirt and smog and stone. And then Don had come, and his enthusiasm for his cradle city had passed to her like contagion. He had showed her the colors and textures of the city, rubbed them into her skin with his eager hands and tender lips, and once she had seen them, she couldn't unsee them.

New York was home. New York was where happiness lived.

Closer and closer to the river she wound. And when she stopped on the muddy, frozen bank, she watched the water bubble and rill as it sought out the sea. It was thick and brown and smelled of tannins, and the weak sunlight did not glimmer and dance on the surface. It sank to the bottom and died, a pebble cast by a thoughtless hand. It was dead, just like this city and the people in it.

Opposite the river, the crooked chimney of Spinner's End jabbed the sky like an impudent finger. She set out for it and left the stink of the river behind. The quickest route to Professor Snape's doorstep was up a steep embankment gnarled with hillocks and exposed tree roots. Without magic, it was an impossible climb. Her only alternative was to double back along the narrow, rutted highway and hope she wasn't mown down by a mill worker impatient to get home to his pinch and his pint.

She snorted. "Oh, fuck this. What good is magic if you can't use it?"

She cast a furtive glance at the crest of the embankment to be sure that no one had stopped to sick into the weeds or piss into the snow, and then she withdrew her wand. She gave all four wheels a brisk tap, and the chair rose gracefully from the mud and snow. She sighed in satisfaction and stowed her wand inside her robes. She waited for several long minutes, poised for the telltale crack of Apparition that would herald the arrival of an Auror, but when none came, she raised her hands to Levitate the chair even higher. It hovered magnificently above the earth, and it glided forward with a gentle flick of her wrists.

She lowered it to the ground as soon as she cleared the embankment. It wouldn't do to cause a car accident. The wheels skimmed the surface as she nudged them onward with her fluttering hands, and with each turn, more of Spinner's End came into view.

It was uglier than she remembered, but then, it had been ten years of hard winters and long absence. Snow piled in lumpy, dirty drifts in the yard, and what the snow had not claimed, hardy scrub weeds had. The brick façade was coated with soot, and the heavy, wooden door was stained with it, too. It was also, she noted with an inexplicable pang of trepidation, missing its ornate, iron knocker. The roof was missing shingles, and the exposed tarpaper reminded her of blood boils.

Maybe it's vacant, she thought. Or maybe it's inhabited by some wheezing old Muggle who's not going to have the faintest idea what I'm talking about when I go rapping on his door and asking after Professor Snape. He could be dead for all I know. It's been nine years since I saw him and almost two since I burned his owl in the oven. If not dead, then maybe he's in Azkaban, going black-toothed and even blacker-minded at the thought of his enemies getting the last laugh.

She hesitated on the fringes of the lawn, and her fingertips prickled with adrenaline. Even before the War, the Professor had ruthlessly safeguarded his privacy with an array of wards. Some had skirted the bounds of legality, and she had no doubt that if he hadn't been bound by Dumbledore's conscience and the terms of his Hogwarts employment contract, he would have happily used the darkest, most lethal wards at his command. Why not when they would have incinerated his most persistent bothersome pupils? The only reason she had trod his inner sanctums unscathed was because he had permitted her to do so. But that was long ago and far away, and absence did not make the heart grow fonder; it only made it forget.

She closed her eyes and listened. Not to the howling wind or the growling putter of passing cars, but to the subtle undulating thrum of magic radiating from the earth. It was faint, the fleeting skitter of insectile feet on her nape and against her eyelids, but it was also unmistakable. Anyone with a whiff of magic in their veins could sense it if they knew what to look for, and if the magic was strong enough, Muggles could feel it, too. They did not know it for magic, of course. They gave it other names-the paranormal, the unexplained, miracles. The promise of this last drew sick and desperate Muggles to places like Lourdes or Stonehenge, where they brought totems and offerings and prayers and left with nothing but misplaced faith. The magic would not, could not help them without a knowledgeable hand it guide it. It simply law fallow upon the ground and bought them a little more hope, a little more time to put off goodbye.

There was magic here, of that there was no doubt. Some of it was old and thin, an echo of past spells and wards that had since dissipated or been removed, but much of it was fresh. She thought she could almost see its colors on the black canvas of her closed eyelids, pink and orange and scarlet, faint as smoke and fog. She sat for a while and let it wash over her in rhythmic, dancing eddies, curious fingers and tongues that sought her crevices and unprotected skin. It slipped into her nostrils to tickle the coarse hairs inside, and she wrinkled her nose to suppress a sneeze.

She opened her eyes and surveyed the lawn and the flagstone walk that led to the front door. The chances of the wards being lethal were slim. The Professor was eloquent, but it would be hard to explain of steady parade of unwary Muggles spontaneously combusting on his lawn. Even so, that did not mean the consequences for setting foot in his yard would be minor. Magic, like the language and tongues that had crafted it, was endlessly inventive, and its potential for violence was limited only by the imagination. And the Serpent King was possessed of a formidable one, indeed.

She steeled herself and thrust her left foot onto the lawn, eyes closed and fingers curled around the armrests of her chair in white-knuckled anticipation of immediate immolation.

You put your left foot in, you put your left foot out; you put your left foot in, and it doesn't come back out, she chanted inside her head, and giggled at the mad absurdity of playing Hokey Pokey on the lawn of Spinner's End. The giggling caused her extended foot to bounce wildly, as though it were dancing to the unvoiced song.

Only the image of the Professor scowling at her from behind the flimsy curtains in the front window kept her from dissolving completely. She sniggered and hiccoughed and retracted her jittering foot, and then she trudged up the uneven, flagstone path to the front door. She smoothed her mussed robes with her mittened hands and knocked on the door.

He's not here, declared a pessimistic, rabbity voice inside her head. He's dead or fled. He had neither friends nor lovers here. He was a Death Eater, and some said he was a turncoat twice over. McGonagall trusted him as far as she could throw him, and Moody would just as soon have clapped him in irons and shuttled him to Azkaban to rot. Lupin was indifferent, and the rest of the Order judged him a valuable nuisance, there under the Headmaster's auspices. None would've shed a tear if he died; they'd have viewed it as a waste of perfectly good water, the stingy sods. Hell, Potter and his slavering coterie would've danced on his grave and pissed on the dirt that covered it.

So what reason would he have to stay? Teaching was a means to an end for him, a chance to flaunt his knowledge of a subject before a sea of inferior, dumbfounded faces. He held no love for the students under his care. He taught for the art, not for the would-be artists. Hogwarts was a sanctuary and a convenient place to exercise his art and his petty tyranny. If he could find neither there, he would have discarded it. Just as he summarily discarded you when your purpose had been served.

He's in Latvia or Lithuania or the dark heart of Bulgaria, countries where darkness is embraced as a necessary counterpart to the light and the Dark Mark isn't viewed as the Mark of Cain. Perhaps he traded the fortress of Hogwarts for the squat, subterranean bunker of Durmstrang. Each of its three floors is a dungeon unto itself, and his ambition and ruthlessness would serve him well as its headmaster.

Even if he chose to remain at Hogwarts, odds are that he's still there. He seldom left for the winter holiday when you were a student, and he was ever a creature of routine. Took his tea the same way and at the same time every day, and stayed behind over the winter hols. Practical, he said, and one of his duties as Head of House, but the simple truth was that he had no reason to leave. Hogwarts was as much his home as it was his prison.

She was contemplating Apparition to Hogsmeade and a trek up its winding egress to the castle when the door opened with an authoritative click of retreating tumblers. Severus Snape, black knight of childhood past, loomed over her, and as she had done one September afternoon a lifetime before, she craned to get a better look at him.

Age had lined his narrow, sallow face and streaked his lank, black hair with strands of white, but he was otherwise unchanged. His eyes were polished obsidian inside his face, and they still burned with the Devil's fire. He was tall and lean, a living shadow in his black robes, and she thought again of Jonathan Edwards and God's wrath. One long-fingered, alabaster hand curled around the door, an albino tarantula creeping stealthily from its lair, and she shivered.

Once upon a time, she had dreamed of those hands, had willed them into feverish, desperate places in her most secret, shameful dreams. She had imagined them dipping between her legs and stirring the pleasure coiled in her cunt like a cramp, dancing over her lips and clit with an artisan's cunning. He had palmed her breasts a thousand times in sticky-fingered fantasies that had left her shivering and spent and wet as she wiped her hot, pruned fingers on the pillowcase. Those hands and fingers had molded her into a woman in the dark recesses of her mind.

They had done nothing of the sort, of course. The only gentleness they had ever shown her had been on the floor of the Gryffindor girls' dormitory, when she had shaken herself to pieces in the throes of a seizure and he had pieced her together with delicate efficiency. He had braced her against his bony chest while she had bowed and shrieked, and those flawless hands had brushed the hair from her mouth, cool against her burning skin. His hands had never been more intimate than that, not even when his own fits had turned him inside out and stripped him of his mind, but that simple, necessary caress had made her ache and fueled her dreams until his tongue had shattered them.

They were still beautiful, and though her body no longer yearned for them to map its contours, she knew how they would look in the flickering torchlight of his laboratory, how they would move, nimble and precise and elegant as they danced over the tools of his trade. She was startled by a wave of nostalgia so fierce that her throat constricted. If nothing else, she wanted, needed to see him work one last time. She swallowed with an audible click.

"Professor." It was a strangled, phlegmatic rasp.

"Miss Stanhope." He gazed at her without enthusiasm.

"I…didn't expect you to be here."

"Hence your serendipitous appearance at my door," he muttered. "What do you want?"

Vituperative as ever, and she found that comforting even as she shifted in her chair. "To see you."

He surveyed her through half-lidded eyes, face impassive. "I don't know what nostalgic madness drove you to seek me out, nor do I care. Inflict yourself on someone else." He made to close the door.

"I need your advice," she blurted.

"I spent three years playing nursemaid and manservant to you, you miserable chit. I've no desire to play agony aunt now."

"You played nursemaid to me? I-you- You were my teacher."

"I see you are still able to conjugate verbs. If only you could grasp their subtleties as well. I was your teacher, but I'm under no obligation to be so now. There is no pity for you here. Go. Now. And for the love of Merlin, put it in reverse. I have no desire to gaze rapturously at the self-portrait your mangled form would make should it crash through my unsuspecting door." And then he slammed said door in her face.

She gaped uselessly at the door, stunned and furious, and she told herself that the tears blurring her vision were from the scouring wind, which howled in reproach and tore at the hood of her balaclava with icy, triumphant fingers. This was not supposed to happen. Because-

Because despite all the evidence to the contrary and your hard-bitten cynicism, you believed that you were different, that a bond had been forged between you by the long hours of eternal night in his dungeons and tempered by being the keeper of his secrets. How could you not be special when you had seen him stripped of his armor and his dignity, writhing in a stew of shit and piss and revisited sin? You had kept his secrets even after he betrayed you, loyal to the last, and you had held his hands though they were slathered in blood. You had saved his life not once, but twice. He owed you. Of course he would repay those debts, if not for love, then for salvaged pride and an opportunity to divest himself of another unwanted obligation.

A staccato thud interrupted her thoughts, and she was surprised to see that her fisted hand was banging on the door. The pocked wood scraped her knuckles, and the reverberations from each rap rattled in the small bones of her wrist and elbow like aftershocks. She pounded until the rattling of the door in its frame began to sound like music and her raw knuckles left stippled smears of blood in their wake.

A pox upon thee and thy house, she thought, and redoubled her assault.

The door flew open so suddenly that she nearly pitched out of her chair. Only a mad scrabble for her armrests prevented her from toppling across the threshold in an indecorous, twitching heap of upraised ass and splayed limbs.

Professor Snape stared dispassionately at her. "Why are you still here? I distinctly recall telling you to leave." Flat, bored, but his eyes flashed with indignation.

"As you pointed out, sir, you're no longer my teacher, and I'm no longer obligated to give a damn what you want," she shot back. "Since you won't be my teacher or even a decent bloody human being, you'll have to be a wizard. You owe me a life debt twice over, and I've come to collect. One or both, I don't care. You can hex me if you wish, and it's a safe bet you'll win because my coordination is nothing short of appalling."

"An epiphany at last," he sneered.

"But if you do," she went on as though she had not heard, "it better be a killshot, or so help me, I will draw blood before you're rid of me."

"You've been gone too long; your Gryffindor is showing," he mused idly.

Heat rose in her cheeks. He was right, of course. In the old days, there would have been no threat, only raw, unapologetic action. Only fools and braggarts make threats, and they are often paid in blood, Stanhope, he had told her once upon a time. Make certain it isn't yours.

"Are you going to invite me inside, or would you prefer to freeze your bollocks off while you play agony aunt?" she demanded.

Her voice was stony, but her stomach was a fluttering, greasy ball of apprehension. If he chose to call her bluff, the jig was up. She had no killing in her veins; even something so simple as Sectumsempra was beyond her now. All her hatred had been spent on Lessing, and only dead embers remained.

He pursed his lips and stepped back, and she thought he was going to slam the door in her face again, but he only pivoted on his heel with the crisp snap of swirling robe. "You have ten minutes," he snapped, and stood aside to let her enter.

Spinner's End, like the city beyond its genteelly shabby walls, was unchanged, frozen in time. The same drab curtains and spindly furniture, the same books lining the shelves. The same boiled-cabbage stink, dirty wool and sour youth.

The Professor scowled at her and strode to the yawning threshold that led into the root cellar. "Nine minutes," he spat, and disappeared into the black maw of his laboratory.

She sighed and followed him down the rickety staircase. "Not even going to offer me tea?"

"Tea implies an invitation, which I did not extend. However, if you wish to spend the nine minutes of my time at your disposal mucking about with tea, be my guest. Far better for me than your inane blather." He crossed the dirt floor to his worktable. Ingredients lined its surface like surgical implements, and he plucked a fat, pink gobbet of flesh from a cloth and held it to the weak torchlight for inspection. It took her a moment to recognize it as a weasel gallbladder.

"You're making Camoflous Draught?"

"Once again, your powers of observation astound," he murmured. "I thought you wanted tea. It's in the kitchen; this isn't Hagrid's kettle." He gestured carelessly at the cauldron in front of him.

"I haven't come for tea." Here in the den of the Serpent King, her tongue had reverted to the formality of the Queen's English. One less shortcoming to pique his inexhaustible ire.

He snorted. "What did you come for, you miserable pestilence?" He set the hunk of weasel gallbladder on a wooden cutting board and began to slice it into wafer-thin slivers.

She looked at him for a long time. Tell the truth and shame the Devil. Or make him smile.

"Seven minutes." Quiet, implacable as the ticking of a clock.

"Tell me how to live with damnation."

The rhythmic tap of his blade on the scarred wood of the cutting board stopped for the briefest instant, and silence blanketed the room like a caul. "The melodrama does not become you. What damnation consumes you, Miss Stanhope? The feverish shame of wanting to shag your Potions professor? You're hardly the first pubescent imbecile to harbor a schoolgirl crush, and I assure you that your hormone-addled lapse in judgment never left the field on which it was made."

Though the time measured by the steady thock of his knife was slipping through her fingers like sand, she could not resist rising to his obvious bait. "I should think the story of my idiocy and subsequent humiliation would have proven rich fodder for your tales of infamy and scathing repartee. Then again, perhaps you didn't want the world to know you'd captured the heart of a misbegotten mutant." Sullen and juvenile, but old hurts welled between the fissures of her crumbling fortress walls, and rage mingled with the sweet, milky desperation in her mouth.

"You've unmasked my villainy at last," he murmured, and swept the translucent slices of weasel gallbladder into his cupped palm. He tossed them into the gaping, iron mouth of the cauldron with practiced grace. "Go. Bask in your victory. Burn me in effigy if it pleases you. But leave me to my work. I've neither the time nor the patience to nurse the useless wounds of your adolescence."

Dismissed.

"A man blew up my husband. The Muggles sentenced him to life in a sanitarium. It wasn't enough. All the blood in his veins and all the marrow in his bones wasn't enough," she hissed, and tendrils of remembered venom caressed the backs of her teeth and dripped from her burning tongue like acid. "Nothing would be enough. So I brought him into this world and made my own justice. Piece by bloody piece." She let out a rattling, strangled breath, and tears warmed her numb face.

The Professor had gone very still while she spoke, his back turned to her as he watched steam rise from the cauldron in a shimmering vapor. He rounded on her with the crunching grit of spinning heel, arms folded across his chest. "So you come to me seeking absolution? You want me to ease your guilt with saccharine platitudes about redemption and hope and the triumph of the human spirit over the nascent evil that lurks in the souls of man? Would you have me ease the agonies of your conscience with the promise that there exists no Hell beyond this one? That is beyond my purview even if I were still your teacher. You need a vicar or a confessor, Miss Stanhope, and I am neither."

"But you know why I have no guilt," she croaked. "Why I peeled another human being like a potato and felt…nothing. You can teach me about that."

Oh, yes he could. A hundredfold. A thousandfold, if he were honest with himself, and the Ghost of Albuses Past that had taken up residence in his mind since the damnable old saint had fled the bonds of earth would allow him to be nothing but. He had been divorced from his conscience for so long that he seldom recognized it, and when he chanced upon it, he greeted its appearance with nettled irritation. It only served to complicate matters that should have been as simple and stark as life and death. It bollixed affairs quite nicely if permitted, a Peeves housed within the cockles of the heart and impossible to outrun.

He had lost his conscience to Lord Voldemort at seventeen, forfeited on the promise of greater glory, and even then he had counted it as no great loss. It had been baggage to be left behind. He had sold his conscience to Albus Dumbledore at nineteen, and for the rest of his days, the canny old Headmaster had shaped it according to his whims. Albus Dumbledore had needed a viper to do what his own conscience would not allow, and so he had told his charge that murder destroyed the soul, all while pressing the means of its execution into his outstretched hand.

He had spent eighteen years walking the valley between shadows and light, and he had survived because he had been stripped of conscience. By day, he had prowled the corridors of Hogwarts, dispensing knowledge to ungrateful dunderheads and reading unintelligible essays from those who purported a grasp of human speech, and by night, he had crept into unwarded homes in his Death Eater's mask and slit the throats of their sleeping parents while their infant sibling squalled from its cot. On one memorable occasion, he had sat at the High Table with dried blood under his ragged nails and listened to the Headmaster wax rhapsodic on the sanctity of life. His throat had burned with the bloody taste of irony.

The Headmaster had not been a liar, precisely; he had simply been in possession of a disposable conscience. Hardly surprising, since the old bastard had collected people like baubles, plucked them from the rubbish heap and the flat breasts of ale-soaked slatterns and set them to his own ends. Argus Filch, a filthy squib with rotten teeth and sharp eyes who shambled the bowels and ramparts of the castle and learned its secrets. Hagrid, a great, lummoxing oaf of a half-giant who had a rapport with every misbegotten creature ever to crawl from the deep. Mundungus Fletcher, a tosspot who would scavenge the rings from his mother's bones for the right price. Remus Lupin, the flea-ridden wretch, and Peeves the poltergeist, who acted as sentinel while the rest of the castle lost itself to dreams. Potter, the golden child who could taste no death, and Stanhope, the miraculous chit who held the spool of the world in her unlovely hands and could read its threads or weave them howsoever she chose. And him, of course, his conscienceless sin eater, swallowing depravity so worthier lips would never taste it.

So, yes, he could teach her about life without the luxury of regret, but she was the last witch under the light of Helios' fire to need it.

She came to you hard as adamant and fierce as the lion I deemed her to be, said the Headmaster inside his head, and he saw him in all his glory, seated behind his desk with his long fingers laced across his chest, bright as the phoenix that sidled to and fro on its perch in the opposite corner of the room. Merlin, but the memory was strong, strong enough to smell the tart sugar of his beloved sherbet lemons on his breath and see the sticky dewdrops of honey in the thick mat of his beard. Stanhope, it seemed, had brought the past with her on her infernal rubber wheels.

Damn you, you insufferable chit, he thought.

Oh, but you did, Severus, the Headmaster reminded him, and now twinkling blue eyes were grave. Every time she refused to buckle beneath your deliberate, crafted cruelty. You cursed her resilience, her refusal to yield. You railed at her audacity and devised the most wrenching tasks, designed to break her will. You made her chop and slice and grind until her fingers sloughed flesh and blood onto the dungeon floor in tribute. You pushed her past the limits of human endurance without a moment's pity, and when her muscles rebelled and left her shrieking and spasming on the ground, you stood over her and told her it would stop hurting if she but wanted it to.

Sometimes when the spasms struck, you sat in a chair opposite her and watched, as though she were another in an endless series of experiments. In truth, she was. You wanted to see how hard you could push before another human soul shattered in your hands. She was a phenomenon to be studied and catalogued and properly disposed of when the game was over. Each shudder and guttural howl was another data point for your collection.

It should have been easy. She was fragile and wracked with infirmity, eggshell and spun sugar beneath cold, pale skin. She had been formed haphazardly from the dust of the earth by novice hands, and you sometimes wondered if she wasn't the product of inexpert Transfiguration, a broken puppet that had been twisted into human form and imbued with life by virtue of arcane magic. Cold or prolonged tension could reduce her to a shivering, dribbling wreck and turn her piano-wire sinew against her. She was helpless and boneless as an infant when fatigue stole over her. She should have offered little resistance to your machinations.

But she was a bundle of contradictions. The misbegotten angles of her twisted body afforded her an endurance you had not foreseen. She bent and weathered your blows with the implacability of the tortoise and plodded inexorably onward. Even when her body surrendered, her mind stood firm. She lay on the cold floor and clawed at the stone, eyes wild and defiant and locked on your face as the convulsions wracked her. She never closed her eyes, never turned her head in shame, and later, when the game had escalated to asking her questions on potions-making techniques while she waged war with herself, her answers were decisive if not always correct. Sometimes, she spat them at your spit-polished feet and bared her fangs in challenge.

You could not break her, and Umbridge could not, and Lucius could not. She was as the rocks against the sea, and it maddened you and fascinated you by turns. Soon, irritated fascination became grudging admiration, and when you could not induce in her a perfect hatred untainted by injustice, you sought to remold her in your own image, harness her unexpected strength into a valuable commodity. I had my golden child in Harry Potter, and you would have yours, though she would be made of darker gold by far.

There was surprisingly little work to be done. She was fifteen and devoid of the dewy-eyed sentiment of youth; it had been subsumed by the remorseless instinct to survive, to go on breathing long after her enemies were dust. It was batrachian and inexhaustible and unnerving even as you reveled in it. No one so young should be so hard, so steeped in the watches of the night. She smelled blood and did not balk, tasted death and did not weep.

You trained up your child in the way she should go, and she was a most avid pupil. She was your faithful fetch, following in your wake as though she were a part of your soul sundered from the flesh. You taught her hexes and Curses not found in any textbook because you knew she possessed sufficient bile and hatred to cast them. Sectumsempra and Malleus Necros and Excoriatum. They flowed from her wand with disturbing proficiency, and when you inflicted them upon her, recognition flickered in her eyes. She had met their kind before, and she relished their company.

Then the War, and the hard shell of the tortoise metamorphosed into the liquid, sinuous twine of the asp. You had thought, by then, that she had been graven in your image, but oh, Severus, you had underestimated her once more. When you unleashed her upon the battlefield and commended her into the hands of the Fates, she was no serpent. She was a Fury made flesh, Alecto with her lash of bone and tongue of fire. She was howling, bloody-handed Vengeance, scouring the moor in her clanking, improbable chariot of metal and rubber.

Her hatred was boundless, dredged from the pit of her belly and vomited onto the earth and spit into the faces of her foes in black clots. Alecto, with her unceasing anger, and Tsiphone with her need to avenge the dead. For all her rage, she injured more than she killed directly, though you often saw her picking through the bodies and snuffing out those too weak to defend themselves. An altruistic soul would have mistaken it for mercy, but you knew better. You had driven the last vestiges of mercy from her heart. It was ruthless expediency that compelled her.

Only once did the unquenchable flame of her hatred flicker, and that was when Lucius stood over her with wand upraised and triumph in those grey eyes. She sprawled at his feet with blood on her face and made no attempt to deflect the killing blow that must surely come. If he had but stifled his insatiable need to preen, your rescue would have come too late; she was tired and weak, and for once, her eyes looked beyond her ravenous anger. She would have gone to death gladly. But Lucius was as predictable as he was insufferable, and his gloating earned you precious seconds in which to orchestrate his dramatic exeunt with a lazy point of your wand.

She had been so resigned to the end that her sudden reprieve startled her, and for the briefest instant, you saw disappointment in that flat, reptilian gaze. Then unseated Alecto reclaimed her throne. She writhed and twisted until she was within reach of Lucius' body. Even in death, he was the picture of elegance, porcelain and bruised dignity in the bloody dirt. She admired him for a moment, and then she dipped her fingers into a seeping shoulder wound and flicked her tongue to taste of his blood. It was the atavistic gesture of a lunatic, but you knew her to be utterly sane. She spit it into the mud beside him, and then you scooped her up and carried her to the castle infirmary. She went without a whimper of protest, slack and heavy as a corpse in your arms, but she returned to the moor with the grey, fog-shrouded dawn and watched the carrion crows plunder Malfoy's stiffening body. What he had refused to give in life, the birds and the grubs took in death.

And yet, her armor was not impervious. He who forged it knew its weaknesses, and one night in the trench, you drove the blade deep. She tried to kiss you, brushed her lips against yours, and despite the blood and dirt, they held sweet promise. But love was a killing weakness, a distraction you could ill afford, and what was more, she was but a child, and she would never stir in you the desires of a man. So you did what you must to save you both and drove her out. You cut to the bone and held no mercy for the soul that had shown you nothing but and attached no strings to the gift. You made sure she hated you by the end, but your salvation came at a price, and when you carried her to the infirmary, she did not emerge from the scorched wood and stone like a broken phoenix. Her fighting, her War, was over.

She left Scotland after that, packed her trunk and forsook all the ties that had thought to bind her, Slytherin to the last. Your indifference was the one obstacle she chose not to overcome. Some might call it cowardice, but you know that it was simply enough. She had found the line she would not cross, the sacrifice she was unwilling to make, and in typical Stanhope fashion, she set her feet and refused to yield. In truth, you admired her bollocks. Tears and snivelling were the tools of the cheap and useless, and she was neither.

You never thought to see her again, your Alecto with the golden hair and Hades' spleen, especially after your owl went unanswered, but in the miniscule part of you that allows for hope, you wished her godspeed and a softer place than you had made for her in your belly of smoke and stone. Now, here she sits, nine years older and asking you a question to which she has had the answer since she was fifteen, as though she hopes yours will be kinder.

He thought he knew why. She had found the softer place he had wished for her in his idle moments. The evidence of it rested on the third finger of her left hand. She had traded her dull, battered armor for a piece of Potter's gold, had traded its stalwart, inglorious protection for pretty, sparkling hope and left herself unguarded. He suspected there would be other shiny baubles if he looked for them, tokens of the affection that had undermined the steely resolve of her youth. Love had wounded her to the quick, and she had been unprepared for the consequence of vulnerability.

"I told you love was poison." No malice, just unflinching fact.

She offered him a rueful smirk. "Yes, sir. You did. But I drink from it gladly."

"His name?" Brisk, as though they were discussing the properties of aconite and not the man who had clearly stolen her soul.

"Don Flack. He's-," Her mouth worked, and she closed it with the click of clacking teeth.

"Your softer place?" He concentrated on the consistency of the Camoflous Draught, but he could see her on the periphery of his vision.

Her eyes widened in surprise. "Yes," she said. "Yes."

He stirred the potion and then turned to face her. "Do you regret what you have done?"

"No." Dark and ugly, a pebble spat upon stone.

"Then you know what to do, Miss Stanhope, and I'll not mollycoddle you. I'm not a Weasley, thank Merlin for small favors."

She stared at him in the gloom, and resignation warred with desperation on her face. "But-," she began.

"You're not Potter, Stanhope; the world cannot be accorded to your petty whims. I've told you the truth. Pay a visit to that infuriating tartan baggage, McGonagall, if you want fairy tales. There will be no foolish wand-waving here. Live with the lie or accept the consequences of the truth. I can make it no plainer. Make your choice and be on your way."

She sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. "Thank you, Professor. I'll leave the way I came in. I appreciate your time."

She was halfway to the stairs when he said, "Why did you come to me, Miss Stanhope? There are kinder hearts than mine in your past."

She gazed at him over one rounded shoulder, and blue eyes shone silver in the deepening dark of the room. "Because I knew you'd tell me the truth. You never lied to me, not even when I needed you to."

A glimmer of Alecto still in that answer, and he was tempted to ask her to stay and resume the task of apprentice, if only for a few hours. But she was his fetch no more. Too much damage had been done and too much time had passed, and so he merely acknowledged her honesty with a terse inclination of his head and returned his attention to the potion.

He felt her presence for a moment longer, heavy and perversely intimate, and he was convinced that if he turned, she would be but a hairsbreadth away, gazing at him with that terrible expression of absolute awareness, one hand poised to touch his bony shoulder or caress his sallow cheek as she had done so often during his fits of helpless shame. Then he heard the rumbling groan of warped riser and knew that she was gone. He felt suddenly hollow, but he told himself it was relief and kept working.

When he trudged upstairs several hours later to brew his evening tea, he discovered that she had left the door open. A light dusting of snow had accumulated on the threadbare threshold, and as he pulled out his wand to Banish it, he thought it was morbidly fitting that Rebecca Stanhope had gone and left cold and darkness in her wake. She had not forgotten her lessons, after all.