Pretty Good Year

2.

He cannot Disapparate from Hogsmeade. The town has fallen, and he would be observed.

Those who would see him are allies to his present guise, but if he leaves the school freely they will know that he does not keep his movements secret from Dumbledore. He navigates treachery with the expert step of one long at practice, but it would be deadly to assume he is beyond mistakes.

The hippogriff is tethered in its usual place. He Disillusions them both, the animal first because she panics if she cannot see him when he mounts her. He dislikes flying as much as he dislikes any task that confronts him with his limitations, but he is accustomed to sacrificing more than comfort for this work.

He flies to York, sending the hippogriff back to the castle; from this point he is free to Apparate to his destination. Getting back to the castle will be harder without the beast but he cannot leave her tethered here—wizards are sparse in the area and there is always the chance that he won't be able return for her in time. Or at all.

"You're late, Severus." Antonin Dolohov appears by his side the moment he materializes on the grassy hill. They are just near enough to see the lights of the house below, shining bravely into the unknown.

"I was delayed," he replies, curtly. "As you know, my situation is delicate."

Dolohov lays a hand on his shoulder, a gesture meant to be brotherly. "The time of deception and guise is almost over. Soon you will be able to show the world your true face."

For twenty years, Snape has pursued Occlumency with a near religious fervor. The truest measure of his skill is the fact that, after twenty years of spying, he is still alive. Nonetheless he is uncomfortably mindful that Dolohov's grandfather had been a Seer, and he pulls his thoughts farther into his mind, the gesture of a man turning his cloak against the rain.

"In my haste," he says, addressing Dolohov and whoever else might be near—he thought he had seen the swirl of Mulciber's robes from the corner of his eye—"I was obliged to leave without the Cerements."

"You shall wear Rabastan's," Dolohov says, gesturing to a distant figure. "We celebrate tonight in memory of him."

Snape holds out his hand for the long cloak, and the white mask. He sheds his own cloak before donning Rabastan's, an unnecessary, superstitious act. There are no werewolves in their number, and it is unreasonable to imagine that one of them might smell Rabastan Lestrange's murderer on his clothing, even if he had been drinking tea with her an hour ago. Still, his pulse calms by a fraction after he is masked and indistinguishable from the nine who surround him.

They walk eight abreast toward the little house, which glows purple under combined Anti-Disapparation Jinxes and Shielding Charms. Dolohov, and Rodolphus Lestrange, mount brooms and soar over the heads of the others, aiming for the slanted roof. One of them—Rodolphus, he is sure—laughs brilliantly, and for a moment Snape is seventeen again, on his first raid, exulting in the terror and the sensation of being, for once in his life, precisely where he belongs.

He watches as Dolohov and Lestrange touch down on the roof briefly, then push off again. Immediately, the Dark Mark bursts into green flame in the sky above the house, and Rodolphus' laughter becomes part of a chorus.

"Open up in the name of the Dark Lord!" Mulciber shouts in a gleeful sing-song, pounding on the door.

They peel off one by one, taking up positions around the house until one man stands at each corner and two stand at points north and south. No more than six may perform this task, lifting the immensely strong wards and enchantments that guard the homes of even the least talented witches and wizards. Crabbe, Goyle, and Mulciber stand outside the circle, waiting to rush through the doors as soon as the enchantments fall. Snape, contrary to custom, stands with them. They trade glances among themselves, but neither Crabbe nor Goyle would dare question him, and Mulciber wouldn't care if he happened to notice, which is unlikely.

Snape can feel the protective enchantments resisting the counterspell, as though shrieking in angry human voices, until they dissolve with a noise like someone screaming from very far away.

"Steady on, lads," Mulciber says, staring hungrily at the door of the house, his wand at the ready. "Steady...and...now!"

The door explodes under an arc of red light, and Mulciber is through it so quickly that he has to fight his way through a shower of splinters. Crabbe and Goyle follow him closely and Snape trails them at a slight distance. Those who formed the circle will not be fit to join them for several minutes yet, and it is the job of those who precede them into the house to make the way secure.

The moment before Snape steps over the threshold, the room on the other side fills with yellow light, and Snape throws his arm up to shield his eyes. A man cries out, and another curses.

"Little blighter," says Mulciber from the floor as Snape enters to find the remnants of what had moments ago been a drawing room. His schoolboy's mane of dark hair has escaped its style enchantment, and now hangs raggedly in his eyes. "Hit me from out of nowhere with a Spine-Softening Hex. Missed though." He is cradling his arm, limp and useless, to his chest, and glaring, as though in an inter-House corridor duel, at a motionless figure sprawled across a settee where Crabbe and Goyle are standing guard, and looking proud of themselves.

Leopold Lovegood is some ten years older than Snape, but at the moment he looks fifty. He has the long, ascetic face of a scholar, his bushy grey eyebrows the only hint of his wilder eccentricities. This is the man who published the first public declaration ever issued by the Order of the Phoenix, and continued to reprint it twice a month for six months after Fudge outlawed the Order and deployed all the Aurors who hadn't joined Kingsley Shacklebolt in the General Strike to arrest every member they could track down. Lovegood's face is frozen in an inappropriate expression of gravity and determination; he was obviously immobilized seconds after Mulciber came through the door, probably immediately after hexing him. Blood trickles from the corners of his mouth and nose, and tears are forming in his eyes. They are panicked, horrible in the slack expressionlessness of his face.

When Snape replies, it is in tones of mildest interest. "Why don't I bring the daughter down to join us?" He looks around the room, as if addressing all of them. For the briefest moment, he meets Lovegood's eyes, and into his own he summons all the apology and all the promise he can muster.

Mulciber begins to pull himself to his feet, smiling until he winces and clutches his arm again. "Fine idea. Goyle, go with him. Crabbe, take the blood-traitor outside."

Snape glances at Goyle, who lurches from his position and crosses the room to the staircase. Snape sweeps after him, forbidding himself to look back.

"How old's the girl?" Goyle asks in a low voice as they approach the landing.

"Eighteen, I believe. She left school at the end of last term."

Through the shadows he sees Goyle grin. Snape's own mouth twists, as though in sympathy to the implication, even as his fingers tighten around the stem of his wand.

There are three rooms in the upper portion of the house. The one with the door standing wide is a water closet, which Goyle pokes his head into then turns his back on. The second appears to be Lovegood's bedroom, and Goyle's perusal again reveals it to be empty.

Snape moves deliberately to the door of the third room before Goyle can beat him to it. "Alohomora."

He throws the door open and nearly enters before reminding himself that Luna Lovegood is no longer a child, but a fully qualified witch, and that even a child can be dangerous when cornered. He mutters the shield charm, then raises a light and steps into the small, cheerfully furnished room.

It too is empty, however.

An instant later, Goyle groans, stiffens, and falls to the floor beside Snape with a thud.

Snape whirls to see Luna Lovegood standing in the doorway of the W.C., her face graver, emptier, than he remembers it. An invisibility cloak is trailing from her shoulders, and her wand is pointed at Snape's throat.

He pulls the mask from his face, and keeps his own wand at the level.

"Hello, Professor," she says, as calmly as though she were greeting him inside a classroom. The cloak slides to the floor in a heap of richly hued fabric, revealing soft blue robes cinched at the waist by a belt made of what appeared to be hippogriff feathers.

"Good evening, Miss Lovegood." He releases a breath he had not realized he was holding. "That was an admirable hex. I did not know you were in possession of an invisibility cloak."

"It's Harry's."

He stares, and before he can stop himself by considering the illogic of the thing, he is glancing around for the boy, though he knows perfectly well that Harry Potter is hundreds of miles from Ottery St. Catchpole.

Snape lowers his wand. They have less than a minute before Mulciber will begin to grow suspicious, and he cannot afford to stun her.

"Can you Apparate, Miss Lovegood?"

If she finds the question an odd one, she does not show it. "Yes."

"That is good. You need to come away with me."

She shakes her head. "I can't."

He casts around for something to convince her, and all he can summon are lies. "Your father is there. He is waiting for us to join him."

"No he's not."

"If you stay here, you will die." Or worse, he thinks to himself, without glancing at Goyle.

There is a noise at the bottom of the stair: Mulciber is craning his neck to see the landing, and the people standing there. "Snape," he calls, "what are you doing? Haven't you found her yet?"

"Listen to me," he says, ignoring the younger man. "I can get you to safety, but you must do as I tell you. There is no time for debate."

"Snape?"

"I've found something rather strange, Mulciber," Snape calls over his shoulder. "Why don't you come have a look?" He turns rapidly back to Luna, and seizes her arm. She winces, and he relaxes his grip without releasing her. "Once I've stupefied him," he says in a much lower voice, "there will be no turning back. I will also be in danger, and I will need your help as much as you will need mine. You must trust me."

Mulciber is halfway up the stair. Snape mutters the curse while still turning to face him, and only by reaching out and grabbing the other man's shirtfront with both hands does he prevent his inert body from rolling down the stairs again and alerting Crabbe.

Seeing this, the girl lowers her wand. Her eyes dart past Mulciber to the light coming from the bottom of the stairs. "My father is down there."

"Listen to me!" Snape lowers Mulciber to the ground, not gently, but slowly enough to prevent noise, and as his back straightens he grabs her arm again. "Your father is beyond our aid. I promised him I would get you to safety. We have no choice. Legilimens!"

One of the greatest practical benefits of mastering Occlumency is that few witches and wizards bother to study so much as its rudiments. He enters the girl's mind with as much ease as he would draw a panel of lace curtain away from a window.

The greatest practical drawback to Occlumency is the temptation to become lost in another person's internal world. Snape himself has little experience with this phenomenon, as the sort of wizards whose minds he is accustomed to entering are dark, fearful, cluttered places. But Luna Lovegood's mind is different: light fills his vision in blocks of saturated color, like a child's patchwork quilt. He feels a strange mingling of amusement and sorrow, emotions bleeding together as though inside her mind there are no rooms, only a great mixing bowl of thought and feeling.

With effort he forces himself past sensation and into thought, just long enough to send her the information she will need—a clear picture of an interior room in 12 Grimmauld Place, and the appearance of the building's exterior. Under the terms of the Fidelius Charm he would be unable to speak or write this information to her, but neither the spoken nor the written word would enable her to Apparate—for this, she needs a visual reference, and Legilimancy allows Snape to show her what he cannot tell her.

He breaks the spell when he is certain the picture is firmly in her mind, and opens his eyes to find her looking him, dazed and accusing.

"You must Apparate to the location I have just shown you, Miss Lovegood, the very moment we are out of range of the Anti-Disapparation Jinx cloaking your house. When I give the word, you must Apparate immediately. Do you understand?"

There is no time to wait for a verbal confirmation. He pulls the white mask over his face again, seizes the edge of the girl's invisibility cloak, and drapes it around her shoulders, pulling at the hood until her head is covered. She disappears from sight, and only the nearness of her quick breath assures him of her proximity.

"Follow me," he whispers, and descends the first two stairs. He does not move to the third until he is certain he has heard her footsteps behind him.

The shattered drawing room is empty, which means that Crabbe has followed Mulciber's directions and taken the elder Lovegood outside, where the Six will be sufficiently recovered to begin taking their amusement. The Anti-Disapparation Jinx is only binding inside the walls of the house itself. Snape had intended to simply step through the front door, where the invisible girl at his side would be unnoticed, and Apparate before the others suspect him of anything. If they walk through that door, however, the girl will not be able to avoid seeing her father, and might well expend herself on some act of anguished heroics—Potter has a bad habit of transmitting that tendency to his friends.

"Is there a back door?" he says, turning to where he believes she is standing.

"In the kitchen," she replies, from a spot a foot to the left of where had been looking.

Just as he begins to suggest that she temporarily lower the hood of the invisibility cloak, he feels a hand tugging at the edge of his sleeve, leading him steadily across the littered drawing room carpet to a door in the opposite wall. Something inside him shudders as, without speaking to each other, they both begin to run, first through the kitchen, then through the door, into the woods beyond the house, and when he cries, "Now!" there is a great, spreading warmth in his chest, and when he opens his eyes in 12 Grimmauld Place it is still there.

Bobbing in the air beside him is Luna Lovegood's disembodied head.

*

No one has lived in the house for over a year, and it shows.

After Black's death four years ago, the property was inherited jointly by Harry Potter and Remus Lupin, neither of whom cared for the prospect of living there. The Order, on their sufferance, continued to use it for a meeting place and a safe house, but after Fudge declared the Order to be in rebellion against the Ministry of Magic, travel was restricted, and those who did pass through the house had no time to kill doxies or sweep up puffskein hair.

Snape shrugs himself out from under the murdered Lestrange's cloak and spreads it across the dusty upholstery of a nearby sofa. The featureless white mask he tears from his face with a conscious effort not to think about the significance of either the object or the act. He tosses it aside without looking to see where it lands, and with his other hand he reaches forward, slowly, until his fingertips brush the silk of Luna Lovegood's invisibility cloak.

She does not look up when his hand comes to rest on her shoulder, nor does she seem to notice as he steers her to the sofa, where she sits down as soon as the edge of the seat hits the back of her knees. He can count on less than five fingers the number of times he has touched a student with his bare hands, but she makes it easy to avoid dwelling on the thought. Her eyes stare into nothing, and her hands lie slack upon her lap.

Over the years, he has made a study of students' faces; noticing the minute flare of a Weasley twin's nostril has often meant the difference between dodging and falling victim to a Dungbomb assault. He has driven students to (and over) the verge of tears often enough to know the signs: the rigidity of the muscles around the mouth, the eyebrows hunkering low over the eyes. The girl will clearly begin to sob at any moment. Her borrowed invisibility cloak is sliding from her shoulders, revealing, in patches, the blue robes beneath. She looks like a picture that has been partially erased.

He has work to do. He must contact Dumbledore and McGonagall, and he must begin planning their route to safety. (Protected as they are in this house, Snape does not consider being trapped in a place incapable of sustaining life for long periods of time "safe.") It would be easier if she would simply cry and get it over with; he could excuse himself to make tea, heavily dosed with sedative, and leave her to leak salt into the cup while he arranged the vital second half of their journey. But watching her in this state gives him the same feeling of anxious anticipation he might have while watching a delicate potion brew; he would not willingly leave either one alone.

He speaks, eventually, not knowing what else to do, and finds his voice surprisingly steady. "Your father....died bravely. While fighting."

It is the kindest lie he can think of. He knows perfectly well that Leopold Lovegood is almost certainly still alive, and will remain so for many hours. His ultimate fate will depend on what mood the other members of the raiding party are in after they discover Snape's treachery. If they start to hunt for him, they might kill Lovegood immediately to get him out of the way. If, on the other hand, they decide to make him pay for his daughter's escape, they may never kill him at all.

"You can't ever go back to them now," she replies.

He is reminded, with a twinge of irritation, her propensity for speaking in non-sequiturs. "Excuse me?"

"You said 'after I stupefy him, there's no turning back.' That's what you meant, isn't it? They'll know you've betrayed them now. You can't be a spy anymore."

At a time when other students of his acquaintance would be preoccupied with their own troubles, she is asking about his. He is disarmed, and also, strangely, gratified, so he answers honestly—more honestly than he had been able to answer McGonagall.

"I joined them tonight knowing that this would be the end of it."

"Why did you come at all?"

"I came to—save you. Both of you. I failed your father." Saying it aloud is an unpleasant relief.

"Thank you for not failing me," she says, so quietly and matter-of-factly that Snape stares at her a long moment, in doubt of her meaning more than her sincerity. "I think I would like a cup of tea, if you don't mind."

He jerks, startled, then turns and leaves the room, chiding himself for what he is certain must have looked like extreme awkwardness. It is his habitual reaction to surprise.

More recent activity has taken place in the kitchen than in any other part of the house, so tea is not difficult to put together, nor is the valerian root he wanted for a sedative hard to come by. He is on the point of bringing the tray into the sitting room when it occurs to him that Ravenclaws do not lack subtlety, and that her request for tea may well have been a polite way of asking him to leave her alone for a bit.

He takes another five minutes, investigating the cupboards and mentally calculating the amount of time two people might survive here if they were stranded. When he returns to the sitting room he notices immediately that she has transfigured the color of her dress. It is white now. The invisibility cloak lies over the arm of the sofa, and her wand is on the seat beside her.

His mask, disregarded since he first threw it to the floor, is in her hands, and she is studying it with what appears to be deep concentration.

He has too much self control to snatch it from her hands, and the anger he would have directed at any other person her age feels inappropriate here. Not knowing what else to do, he sits and pours the tea, concealing a sharp intake of break in the teapot's rising steam. He pauses after adding the valerian to her cup, then sets it aside, choosing not to mix it with his own. Relaxation also feels inappropriate to the moment.

She takes her tea without thanking him, her eyes never rising higher than his hand or her own. After the first sip she places the cup and saucer on the table, and speaks, looking at the mask.

"You've spied for Professor Dumbledore since the first war."

He arches an eyebrow at this. Clearly, Potter does not guard his secrets with as much vigilance as he had supposed. But the girl gives no sign that she is aware of having revealed forbidden knowledge. She simply takes his silence as confirmation, and asks another question.

"What did you do all the other times the Death Eaters attacked people? You can't have rescued them all."

Snape stares at her for a moment, his teeth automatically clenching, his rational internal voice chiding him for feeling, however momentarily, betrayed. He forces himself to look down into his tea, instead of at the top of her head.

He had forgotten, briefly, what she is. Her strange silence, her unexpected composure, the danger they had escaped together bare minutes ago—all had combined to alter his perception of her. She no longer seemed to be the smirking creature he had taught for five years, the average student who cultivated a number of annoying affectations, a hanger-on of Harry Potter and his circle. Time seemed to have changed her into a perceptive and brave young woman, possessed of preternatural serenity.

He had forgotten, briefly, that to him she will always be a student. That to her he is the skulking potions-master, an object of alternate fear and ridicule.

What were his failures to her? What interest could she take in his nightmares, save to turn her knowledge into a weapon, as they all did?

"No," he says at last, in tones he calculated for the specific purpose of sending first year Hufflepuffs into hysterics. "I didn't rescue them all. I have watched many people die, Miss Lovegood."

"But not my father."

"Not your father," he says without thinking, then looks up at her again, appalled, to find that she is looking right at him.

They stare at each other for a long moment, before Snape smiles tightly, and speaks over the voice in his head calling him a hundred names, each unpleasant, each true. "Well, Miss Lovegood. Are you satisfied?"

"Yes," she says, without averting her eyes.

That gaze is more than he is willing to make himself bear just now. He rises smoothly from his seat, placing his tea cup on the tray and removing his wand. A low gesture, calculated to frighten first year Slytherins. Luna does not seem to notice it.

"I have preparations to make on both our behalfs," he tells her. "You may call if you have need of me."

He waits a moment to see if she will respond, but at his words she looks away and seems instantly to forget his presence. He is halfway to the door when her voice stops him.

"You won't have to anymore."

He turns. "I beg your pardon?"

She is holding the white Death Eater's mask out to him at arm's length. "You won't need to watch people die anymore, will you?"

He snatches the mask from her fingers, and leaves without answering her.

He closes the door behind him without shutting it tight; there is a thin seam of light between the door and the door-jamb, through which he can see the girl in the room beyond.

Her sobs are, like her manner of speech, deep and strangely quiet. From this angle, he can only see her in profile. Her hands are pressed tightly to her mouth, but her face is not distorted by the rictus of unadulterated agony.

Snape watches her, his fingers clenched around the pliable white fabric of the mask. He wonders to himself if he ever had the potential to be the kind of man who could have placed a hand on her back and pulled her to his chest, resting his chin on the top of her head, covering her face before she could see that he too was weeping, noiselessly, passionately, as a prisoner newly released who is not yet convinced of his freedom.