Beneath the Clouds

"Come in, Weasley." I turned the knob, and the door squeaked, just as I remembered it from my student years. Snape cursed softly, and shot a quick spell at the hinges, which suddenly moved as smoothly as if they'd been greased. "I can't afford to have anymore guests, tonight," Snape said, and then paused, giving me a considering look. "Have you died yet, Weasley?"

"Definitely," I said, "but I'm not sure how yet." I held up the unopened bottle of rose petals, and set it upright on a worktable, afraid to have it in my hand when the high pitched noise started.

Snape, who was leaning in close, sprang back when the keening whistle begin. The empty flask in his hand cracked from the high pitched sound, and I saw the bottle on the table shaking as through it too was about to burst open and release it's load.

Snape clasped his wand in his bleeding hand, and followed up my simple shield with a more complex spell...one I didn't recognize. A bubble blew out from the tip of his wand, and then drifted over the bottle of petals even as the keening sound burst the glass. A pink vapor spotted with red bounced around within the bubble, but didn't spread.

"You should never have brought this into Hogwarts," Snape growled, before reinforcing the bubble with yet another, larger one, like a double-wrapped sandwich.

"What is it?" I asked, blushing. I told myself I shouldn't be angry.

"Timed Tuberculosis," Snape said, drawing out the syllables as he dragged a heavy tome from the middle of a stack of books on his desk. "Too complex a mixture for Fudge, by far. The orange petals are not, by themselves, dangerous. They are added to potions to add precision to their effects, to make them milder or stronger, long-lasting or short-lived. It's the bitterbrew powder that would have sickened you. With that many petals in the mixture, the tuberculosis would have killed you before you could even scream for help."

Snape turned toward me, and I half expected to see the expression of a connoisseur. He did this for Voldemort in the past, after all. Probably he still had to do it, to maintain his credibility as a spy. Murder by potions. "Stopper death," indeed.

What I actually saw was that distant expression he'd had in the Headmaster's office. Only now, instead of looking out the window, into the endless distances, he'd turned that detached gaze on me, as though I was as transparent as a ghost and he needed to see beyond me.

"I may have something for you," he muttered, but when I asked what, he didn't answer. He led me back to the storage closet, where every ingredient imaginable was alphabetized on the shelves, and tapped his wand against a strip of empty wall space at the end of the shelves. Where plain stone wall had been, a strip of wood appeared, just a foot wide, with a tiny handle. It was like a door for anorexics or stick figures, but when he motioned me through, I squeezed in sideways. I barely had time to see where the mattress was on the floor before the little door shut behind me, and only a quick "Lumos" kept away the darkness.

Sleeping in the dungeons was not as strange I thought it would be. When I was eleven, anticipating the Sorting Hat with the dread of the inevitable-you know, that "get it over with" sort of fear-I thought about what the dungeons would be like. I thought they would be like a childhood punishment given with foreknowledge of future crimes. A small taste of Azkaban...no light, no cheer, no sheer joy of life; just bare survival, each in his little cell, the way men do in prison.

I knew I that if I reached my arm out I could touch the stone wall, and that the neat bottles were on the other side. I knew that if I was still here when classes started the next day, I'd be able to hear the lesson, and Snape's usual snide remarks, and that if I were to press my wand against the panel now, I would even be able to find his private chambers, most likely full of books, jars, and definitely a bed, where he, like any other man, must sleep.

If the hat had put me in Slytherin, I think I would have been just like him. Maybe that's why I wanted to know so badly then whether Snape was, in fact, redeemed.

Breakfast was steaming on the floor beside me when I woke, perhaps charmed there by a diligent house elf. The pumpkin juice was a bright, healthy orange, rather the same shade as the rose petals from yesterday. Snape's voice carried from the classroom, where, from the level of the assignment, I assumed a first year class was taking place. It scared me, for a moment, that this little not-quite-boring-yet routine was a foretaste of what it meant to be officially dead. But it scared me more that, no matter what spells I tried, I could not budge the panel.

I had never, to that point in my life, had phobias. I could handle heights, even though I never liked flying. I didn't like spiders crawling up my legs, but I wouldn't scream if I saw one. And I had never imagined that space...or lack of it...in a locked room, could cause terror.

Despite the hour of day, the only thing that brought light to that small nook was my Lumos spell. The room was bare save for the mattress and the untouched breakfast, lit just enough to show the greenish mold growing on stone walls. Snape's voice and the answering, fearful voices of children connected me to the outside, but my stomach and heart clenched in the need to be moving. To be outside in the sunshine, flexing my muscles, going for my usual walk before work.

When Snape found me, after a couple of class changes, and on what must have been his lunch break, I had lowered myself to pacing around the room. I was even clutching my head in my hands. And he reacted how of course anyone would have expected...with a sneer.

"So...you said you had something for me?" I said. Snape likes bluntness. I thought maybe if I did him the kindness of avoiding small talk he might just answer.

"I have other things to cure than claustrophobia, Weasley."

He led me out nonetheless, and I saw he had brought two filled plates from the Great Hall. They were sitting, many feet apart, on one of the empty worktables. "Listen," Snape said, when we had both finished a bit of food and drink. "I do have something to tell you, if you're not afraid to hear it."

His look indicated that he knew my response. I didn't even bother to confirm it.

"You're going to find out just what happened to the MIAs--the unaccounted losses."

I paled, because I knew exactly what he was talking about. I had spent half the night wondering about it.

"You're about to find out, because exactly the same thing will happen to you."

I swallowed hard. I set down the glass of pumpkin juice, wondering if maybe it was more than overripe...wondering if maybe there was something treacherous within it.

I thought of Dumbledore's coolness towards me, and the blind eye he turned towards Snape's activities in the company of the Death Eaters. For Snape to maintain the trust of You Know Who, some on his own side had to die by his hand. And no one but Snape and Dumbledore knew where I was. Not even Mother; though by now my death must have made a headline in the Prophet.

My vision began to blur, and I felt the few bites of ham sandwich I had taken turn in my stomach. The muscles in my neck had twisted, and I had the torturous urge to get up and move, even if I tore my legs in half to do so.

Snape was still talking, and though I barely had sense enough now to observe it, I saw that he was wearing an expression that looked entirely foreign on him. It warred with the habitual stiffness of his face so much it was unrecognizable, and all I knew was that in that moment...the moment before I blacked out and woke again...he was actually looking at me and not through me.

I didn't have the luxury to think of Snape's expression for a long time, nor the inclination to bother with anything that trivial. Why? Because after enduring the most painful moments of my life and blacking out, I woke up in Purgatory.

I don't mean the Purgatory of Catholic doctrine, the place between Heaven and Hell where sinners earn, through pain, the right to sing among the angels. Snape had that in mind, I'm sure, when he named this place, although actually it's just a small town.

Relative to the muggle world, it's much like Platform 9 and 3/4s. Accessible only to witches and wizards, the township lies directly on the boundary line separating two rural Pennsylvanian counties. I know that now, looking back on the past. But when my body apparated against my will in a haze of pain, I didn't know where I was...I only knew where I wasn't, and I was enraged at knowing the man responsible.

Snape's first "victims", I found out soon, had really believed they were in the afterlife. What else would they think, when everywhere they turned, there were living, breathing, chatting semblances of people they knew had died? Everyone knew about the MIAs--the unaccountables who, in the midst of torturous pain, seemed to explode into pieces too small to be found. Everyone knew that Voldemort's first generation of Death Eaters had produced the spell...the charm or draught...whatever it was. The one that wouldn't allow the families of the dead even the small consolation of a burial. The one that, due to strict Ministry regulations on proof of death, always had to be officially recorded as "Person Missing in Action."

And that wasn't the only lie everyone knew. After all, everyone knew that Harry Potter was lying about You Know Who's Return. Everyone knew the Minister of Magic had his integrity magically assured. Everyone was on the same page, and everyone's knowledge was wrong. Even mine.

Purgatory was small. Snape had, after all, created the place when he was seventeen or so...that's what I heard from Madeline Root, the first inhabitant to come here. She said that for the first three days she lived here, she was scrunched in a box shorter than her height and barely wider than her body, without food and water...the victim and benefactor of a desperate, last-minute change of heart on the part of Severus Snape. She was a Ravenclaw who had worked with him on projects, up till the time her parents came out, firmly and publicly, in their stance against You Know Who.

Snape told me later that Root was his "test case". That had a double meaning, of course. He passed the "test by murder" that anyone allied with Voldemort had to face; and he tested Purgatory, which became, victim by victim, slightly more comfortable.

There was a sense of timelessness there; the illusion of a small town was cut short for lack of space, and where perhaps stores or thoroughfares would have gone, there were dorms and more dorms. Mattresses. Desks. Cafeterias. Books. Labs.

It didn't take me long to realize what specific research most of the tomes in the library were for; and it didn't take a genius to see that Snape, with his lifelong experience of a wizarding boarding school, had created much the same lifestyle for us.

We woke up, read the books, took notes, compared ideas, and tested experiments. We chose our own pace--a fast one--because we understood what Snape had done. He had created a think-tank of imprisoned people...men and women whose freedom to leave Purgatory depended solely on the utter defeat of You Know Who.

We played our part. Oh, there's a reason that The Boy Who Lived was mentioned in the prophecy and not The Supposedly Dead Who Lived. But then, all of you reading this know that...any five year old knows that. I would say that we were the harmony under the melody. Snape would sneer at language like that to describe a battle. I know that now because the war is over and I can allow myself to think of trivial things. Things like understanding another person. And knowing the difference between "talking at" and "talking to." Things that occasionally make Mother stop her worrying, and start looking at me, waiting for a metamorphosis.

Even with the Dark Lord gone, I had to face my own darkness. Oh, I did. I recognize it now. The purgation comes from bringing it to light.