Postal

NINETEEN

Through the dark chamber echoed a primal scream. 

Hers. 

Severus glimpsed the metallic flash of the surgical blade, no more than a thin streak of deadly lightning as it fell. 

***

Legs and arms lay in a haphazard sprawl across the Gryffindor common room.  Nearly Headless Nick hovered paternally, issuing ad hoc comments on grammar and penmanship, as the sixth years, splayed out on poufs, filled in their DoM externship forms.  It seemed Cornelius Fudge was no fool.  With one hand, he penned speeches patently denying Voldemort´s comeback, and with the other, a series of recruitment adverts to entice a new wave of applicants to pad the Department of Mysteries.

"How long do you think they´re going to keep him in there?"  Ron heaved a frustrated sigh, stretching restlessly across the wizards´ chess board to scoop the scattered limbs of Harry´s erstwhile bishop.  "They can´t keep Malfoy in the infirmary for the rest of the school year."  He paused, raising his ginger brows thoughtfully.  "Can they?"

Harry glanced nervously around the common room.  The bishops´ heads in Ron´s chess set had taken to issuing pathetic mewling noises upon capture.  This last one was volubly beseeching Ron for a decent Christian burial and sobbing his last confession.  Ron tossed the last of its appendages into the little velvet sack, as Harry heard it blubber something about being sorry he´d ever met those altar boys.  Hunched over their forms, the sixth years barely took notice of them.  Neither Dean nor Seamus looked up, both too preoccupied, collaborating on an Arithmancy chart at the next table.  Harry only hoped the bishop´s caterwauling wouldn´t attract other Gryffindors´ attention to their conversation.  Or worse, Professor Trelawney´s.

Arching his dark brows at Ron, Harry inclined his head toward the corner table by the window.  There, the Divination professor was enjoying a cup of House tea and more than a little friendly gossip with her prize pupils, Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil.  Professors rarely frequented House common rooms at Hogwarts-even Professor MacGonagall as Head of Gryffindor House scarcely made an appearance.  But that evening, on the apparent invitation of the two girls, Sybil Trelawney was on her inaugural visit to Gryffindor House.  With her odd assortment of baubles and bohemian ruffles, she looked rather anachronistic, odd amidst the medieval tapestries and crimson furnishings in the common room.  Well, actually, reflected Harry, she always looks odd.

Professor Trelawney´s disheveled upsweep teetered precariously over her small, bony face as she peered into their teacups through thick, ridiculously over-sized spectacles.  A light wave of girlish titters drifted across the room as she trained her myopic squint to the dregs at the bottom of Lavender´s saucer.  The bangles on her bony wrists and the slow, melodramatic gesturing meant that she was treating the girls to yet another of her famous "predictions."

"Shh."  Harry raised a finger to his lips and pretended to set about reordering the board.  This would surely be amusing.

The boys fell silent and caught snippets of excited, hushed conversation.

"In areas of the heart?  Well, my dears... it is not my place as your professor to say," Trelawney began coyly, "although those of us with the Sight are never wrong-"

"Oh, pleeeeeease, Professor!" implored Parvati, fingers digging into the fabric of the armrests.  Her dark hair, wound in a long plait, swung forward like a cord of hemp.  "Do you know who my..."-her voice dropped self-consciously-"you know... will be?"

Trelawney lifted her chin, as the spectacles slid further down the narrow bridge of her nose.  "The signs are not always clear, my dear, even to me, though I have been blessed with the Gift," she droned demurely, resting a heavily-jeweled hand across the skin sagging against her collarbone.  "However, as you desire to know"-Parvati nodded vigorously-"I urge you to beware a red-haired man."

Harry´s cheeks quivered painfully with barely concealed laughter as a stunned Ron swiftly coloured, busily burying his nose in the wizard chess rulebook.  Upside down.

"What?!" wailed Parvati.  She threw a discomfited sideways glance at Ron.  "But... but you can´t possibly mea-"

"Nevermind about her," cut in Lavender, waving an impatient hand.  "It´s my turn."  The blonde girl leaned forward, blinking expectantly.  "What about my"-she nodded significantly-"you know?"

Harry lost most of the professor´s hushed reply to Ron´s incoherent sputtering.  "Life partner, dear? ...not often clear, although I sense strongly ... is one already in your acquaintance... being said, one can divine... lineage... likely Irish-"

The tinny sound of smashing glass distracted them as Seamus´s inkpot crashed to the floor.  The boy cleared his throat, loosening his collar with a trembling forefinger as a telling red tint lit up his ears.

"Erm,...should probably take care of, er... fetch the, uh... house-elves," he mumbled.  Harry watched the boy spring abruptly for the portrait hole.  Sniggering, Dean turned back to the table, his hunched shoulders shaking over the Arithmancy chart with ill-concealed mirth.

"What´s with Seamus?"

Hermione dropped a stack of scrolls beside a squashy leather armchair, tilting her head after Seamus´s retreating form.  "He´s red as a Quaffle."  She leveled her eyes suspiciously at Harry and Ron, oscillating an accusing finger between the pair of them.  "Did you feed him Fred´s Cayenne Pepper Imps?"

Ron shook his head distractedly, keeping an eye on Professor Trelawney´s tea party.  Hermione followed his stare.  By this time, the demimondaine of Divination had switched party tricks, now loudly claiming to channel people´s auras in parallel, but alternate, universes.

Hermione frowned in obvious disdain.  "What´s she doing here?" she hissed.

"My dears," Trelawney continued dramatically, "we all of us have our Other Selves, Cowalkers, in dimensions parallel to this world.  The True Seer´s powers enable her to see through the layers of these alternate realities."  There was a theatric pause as she gauged the faces of her novices before resuming the performance.

"You," she said loftily, gesturing at an open-mouthed Lavender, "are a celebrated entertainer.  Your fame precedes you wherev-"  Hermione frowned as delighted squeals muffled the remainder of Lavender´s prophecy.

Next, Trelawney turned to Parvati. "As for you, my dear,"-she smiled beneficently-"in these other worlds, even at your age, you are an artist and a muse."

Parvati beamed.  (Harry thought it perhaps for the best that Ron´s commentary drowned in the depths of his rucksack, "Well, she doesn´t amuse me.  Ho ho.")

The professor´s watery eyes drifted idly to the centre of the room, resting unseeingly for an instant on Hermione, who glanced away automatically.  Hermione rolled her eyes and received a sympathetic look from Harry.  There had been no love lost between those two since the day Hermione walked out on their third year Divination class.

Her eyes still on Hermione, Trelawney´s forehead wrinkled into a thoughtful frown.   Then suddenly, let out a startled gasp.  She blinked her magnified eyes several times. 

"Oh, heavens!"

She leaned forward to address the inquisitive stares Lavender and Parvati.  "I-I am quite surprised.  And yet, there can be no doubt, as I have Seen it."  With a rather indiscreet glance at Hermione over the rims of her coke-bottle spectacles, the Divination professor dropped her voice to an astonished whisper.  But her voice was still audible given the common room acoustics and the fact that all the sixth-year quills had abruptly stopped scratching.

"That one, there..." Trelawney leaned in further still, jabbing an accusing thumb in Hermione´s direction-"clearly, highly over-sexed!"

Hermione gasped.  Her indignant, red face turned to Harry, waxing livid and affronted and livid again.  Parvati´s and Lavender´s mouths rounded into astonished little "o"s, before exploding predictably in squeals and giggles.

Harry blinked at Ron, bug-eyed and similarly stunned by this revelation.  Over-sexed?  Hermione?  Of all people... She alphabetizes colours in her sock drawers.  Heck, in an alternate universe, she´d be just as likely to spend all her time in the bloody library-er... that is, when she isn´t serving detentions with Snape.  How could she possibly...?

Bemused, he noted the pink flush creeping past Ron´s collar and an odd glaze in his friend´s eyes as he smiled at Hermione.  Hermione, who didn´t seem to be taking this revelation at all well. 

Ashen, she sank down primly into the squashy chair, self-consciously tucking one leg under the other and looking too mortified for words.  Harry looked into his friend´s flushed face, trying to reassure her with a sympathetic shake of his head. 

A little voice inside him laughed.  Yeah, right.  As if Hermione would... Nah!  Not bloody likely.  Harry shook his head.  Trelawney, that old fraud.  She really is something.

The whole idea of Hermione´s promiscuity was so laughable that he let out a chuckle-that quickly turned into a yelp, as a painful burning seared into his hip.  Telltale wisps of smoke trailed from the right pocket of his trousers.

Ow!  Ow! OW!  OW!  OW!

Leaping to his feet, Harry dug into his pocket, rooting out the ring they had found in the Potions classroom. 

The blue stone was humming. 

It glinted in the firelight for a moment, shimmering from hues of royal blue to indigo, deep plum to claret, until at last it flashed a bright Titian red.  Harry winced as it scorched the skin of his palm.

He rescued his hand, letting the ring fall to the flagstones.  Hermione and Ron rushed to his side, as the rest of the common room fell back to their own activities.  For once, Harry was grateful that Fred´s and George´s practical jokes, now commonplace, had effectively immunized students against anything out of the ordinary in Gruffindor Tower.  By the time he had stooped to retrieve the ring an instant later, the stone had returned to its normal lapis.  Harry drew it level with his eye and inspected the rectangular stone and the inscription before sliding it back into his pocket.  It hadn´t visibly altered.  But he´d already made up his mind about what they had to do.

"We´ve got to see Dumbledore," he announced.

***

He remembered every second of every moment he had shared with Esmerelda-few and far between as they were-both before and after her disappearance.  With the Dark Lord´s henchmen only a few clues shy of guessing their whereabouts, there wasn´t much time to come up with a foolproof hiding place.  It had been her idea to be the Keeper.  Severus had fought, argued, ranted and raved in stolen moments in the Potions lab.  He had even begged. 

In the end, she won.  She always did. 

And so Esmerelda´s disappearance was staged to safeguard his own secrets and those of their closest ally, Albus Dumbledore.  She had accepted her duty with dignity, and also great sadness...

On the night of her departure, the misty rain penetrated their robes with the persistency of its thin, dewy layers, as they proceeded along the steep rock face, camouflaged miles above the Muggle view of Mount Snowden.  Beside him, Dumbledore nodded reassuringly at Esmerelda as they watched her gingerly cross the temporary footbridge joining the treacherous lips of the craggy abyss.  As she reached the stone marker on the other side, the bridge shimmered and vanished.  And it was as if the gulf between them had always existed.

Esmerelda turned slowly, suddenly foreign, wrapped in unfamiliar Muggle clothing, and fixed Severus with a solemn stare.  The waves of her dark hair whipped about in the breeze as the wispy clouds rushed between and around them, borne by the howling wind.  In her hand, she clutched the portkey: the ring they had forged together, signifying their union-encasing the stone that was, ironically, the catalyst of their separation.  Severus sighed.  The emblem of their love, charmed to appear as no more than a Muggle´s scholastic trinket.  His eyes cast about again for one last glimpse of her through the thickening fog.   And he felt his will dissolve, nearly surrendering to the single, impulsive temptation to leap across to join her, as a hapless sailor to his siren.

But in the distance, she shook her head.  Know this.  I will always be with you, my love, until death do us part.  She was trying to be brave.  But the sudden tearful, despairing look in her eyes had been almost too much to bear-a look he knew he shared and that promised to haunt him.  He watched helplessly, not daring to breathe, as she stepped forward and dropped headlong into the chasm, disappearing into the blackness. 

The void in his heart was complete.

***

Only yesterday, it seemed, Snape had gazed determinedly across the banks of Loch Ness, prepared to lay his life down for his wife.  A small price to pay for the one need his soul had ever craved. 

He had had no idea it could end like this.  In the waning fireglow of the cellar, Severus blinked disbelievingly at Esmerelda´s face, flushed and feverish, flickering between calculation and compassion.  The knife poised to strike.  He understood nothing.  But there was no time for rationalizations.  Only the fraction of a second before resigning himself to the role of sacrifice. 

So be it.  

Yet despite himself, Severus´s eyes swung shut reflexively, an absurdly impotent shield from the incomprehensible nightmare.  The muscles tensed in his chest, in anticipation of the blade.  Since losing her on that rocky ledge so many years ago, Severus had often thought he wanted to die.  Of loneliness.  Of misery.  Self-loathing.  Guilt. 

But now, he was ready.  He was ready to die. 

For love.

... Which was more or less why he was disconcerted when he felt nothing.

Nothing but the cool, recirculated air on his bare chest.  He heard no sound, save his own ragged breaths.  Then, two awkward clunks against the flagstones, followed by the swift swish of heavy fabric and a small slapping sound from above.  At Esmerelda´s startled gasp, Snape´s eyes flew open and he himself let out a little cry.

Esmerelda struggled above him, still gripping the knife, paused in mid-air, her wriggling fingers growing pale in the stranglehold of a disembodied hand.

To Be Continued...