Pretty Good Year

10.

The first face he sees when arrives at Grimmauld Place is Aurelia Vector's.

In that moment, he is a soldier. No conscious thought enters his mind. His wand, already in hand, is instantly at her throat, and before she has so much as opened her mouth to speak, she is bound, neck to ankle, in rope.

He stands there, breath returning slowly, calmed by the sight of her immobilized. She looks at him with unfathomable eyes.

"Professor."

Fear strikes him for the first time as he realizes that the voice is close to his ear and he has not yet seen the speaker. He spins to face her, but even after he recognizes Luna it takes a deliberate effort to lower his wand.

"You're awake." It is the adrenaline, he tells himself, that reduces him to making such obvious statements.

"Yes," she says, no chastisement in her voice. "So is Hermione. Or she was, when she left. She's at the Burrow now. She might have gone to sleep again there."

Snape blinks. He his sure that he has only heard one of every three words she has said, but somehow the mere sound of her voice soothes him.

"When did she," he jerks his head back in Aurelia's direction, "arrive?"

"Not long ago. Just after Hermione left. She was looking for you."

Exhaustion overtakes him suddenly, as though a door long shut that has been thrown wide. He reaches for the arm of the nearest chair and lowers himself into it, gripping his wand, looking at the floor.

After a few seconds he looks back up at Luna. "Miss Lovegood. If you would oblige me, I should like to spend some time alone with Professor Vector."

She nods. It is a gracious gesture, as though it pleases her to do him a favor. She glides from the room, and turns for the staircase.

When he is certain she is out of earshot, he stands facing Aurelia. Maintaining eye contact, he raises his wand, mutters the summoning charm, and opens his right hand. Two small vials materialize there; one is filled with clear potion, the consistency of water, and the other is a shimmering blue. He slips the blue vial into his pocket. The clear vial he uncorks.

He must be quick. Dumbledore is dead; the Fidelius Charm is unraveling even now, and the house is no longer secure. But there is time enough for this.

Wordlessly, he crosses the distance between himself and the bound woman. He sheathes his wand long enough to grip her jaw in his free hand and wrench it so that she is forced to open her mouth, crying out in pain. With the other hand he tips the vial and pours an inch's worth of the potion into her mouth. He quells the vindictive urge to make her swallow the entire vial; there will be other uses for the rest of the potion, and an overdose will make her babble unintelligently.

He knows that if she meant him harm he would already be dead. She is skilled, more skilled than he, at wandless magic, and in the moments between sheathing his wand and giving her the potion she could have freed herself and repelled him, long enough at least to reclaim her wand.

Knowing this, he hurts her still, because she has caused him suffering, both nine years ago and in the last two hours. He does not allow himself to wonder which injuries, past or present, motivate him more.

He stands over her as she chokes on the liquid, and does not return to his chair until her eyes have begun to glaze. When saliva begins to bubble at the corner of her mouth, he asks the first question.

"Did you break the castle wards?"

"No." She says it without hesitation, but the relief of exoneration is not in her voice.

"Did you provide any Death Eater with the means to break the castle wards?"

She opens her mouth, then closes it. A sheen of perspiration appears on her brow; she is fighting the serum. "Not...intentionally."

His fingers tighten on the arm of the chair. "Explain."

"My brother asked to see me."

"When?" All the Hogwarts fires have been monitored for the last four years, and no owl has reached the school in the last month.

"We have mirrors."

Anger, irritation, rise hot in his throat. They should have known this. Two-way mirrors are more dangerous than either fires or owls. "How did you admit him?"

"I...." She coughs, violently, and after a moment begins to gasp for air. When Snape makes no move to help her, she struggles to regain speech. "I never intended...." Her eyes close, and the despair in her voice rises with the pitch. "Severus, there are many truths!"

He keeps his gaze steady, and forbids expression in his voice. "Start with the simplest, then."

"The simplest?" She shakes her head, and strands of dark hair fall across the white brow, into the brightness of her black eyes. "I love my brother."

"Then tell me what you did for him."

"I disabled the wards....on my fire. I thought the monitors would see him. I thought....they would arrest him, as soon as he entered the castle. I meant to trap him." She closes her eyes, and tears escape the pressure the lids. "I love my brother. I wanted him in prison, where he could not be killed. Where he could not kill anyone else."

Unbidden, Snape sees Dolohov laughing, doubly familiar features glowing with the pleasures of the hunt, the kill. A dull pain begins to throb behind his eyes, a white light that pulses as though signaling some danger.

She is the last living person with whom he has ever shared intimacy, and in memory of it he permits himself the luxury of resting his head against the heel of his hand. "What went wrong?"

"Everything." Her laugh is brittle, tinged with hysteria. "I did not smother him in his cradle when we were children. I did not throw myself from the North Tower once it became clear that he had no intention of releasing me. A daughter of the blood."

"Aurelia." He can afford to be gentle for one moment. "Explain to me how he corrupted the wards."

"I let him in. I admitted him to my chamber. I took precautions, but Antonin anticipated them all. The moment I dropped my wards, he came through. With others. They overpowered me. Even Antonin helped them subdue me. It was over before I could do anything." She is weeping now, openly, childishly--from what he knows of her, for the first time since she was in swaddling clothes.

He gets to his feet, and looks down on her. Too tired to refuse the thought, it occurs to him that they have shared a truer intimacy in this than ever existed between them as lovers.

He turns his back on her, and walks toward the parlor door.

"Forgive me, Severus." Her voice, too weary for passion. Is merely pleading.

He pauses a moment, listening. Then he walks out into the corridor, and does not look back.

*

He goes to the kitchen because he believes that Luna is upstairs. Instead, he finds her seated at the kitchen table, fingers curled without tension around a cup of tea. There is a teapot and two more cups, empty, on the table before her. She looks up as he enters, smiles.

It is a fitting time for confessions, he decides, and sits in the only other chair at the table, beside her. She does not acknowledge the heaviness with which he takes his seat, except to pour tea into one of the empty cups and hand it to him. The parallel with the morning's tableau does not escape him.

"Luna," he says, and wonders for a moment when she became 'Luna' to him.

"I never studied Arithmancy, but Hermione did. She seemed to like Professor Vector very much."

He shuts his eyes hard, and holds the tea cup without drinking, brittle fingers absorbing the warmth.

"Dumbledore is dead," he says, because he can think of no appropriate preamble, and because he needs to hear aloud the words no one has yet spoken.

She says nothing, and when he opens his eyes again he is startled to find her gazing at him, her face expressionless except for a faint crinkling at the corner of her eyes. A day ago he would never have noticed it. Now he recognizes it for concern.

It makes the next words harder. "Your father is dead." Now the eyes upon him are sharper, brighter. "A Magical Law Enforcement hit squad arrived at your house shortly after you and I escaped. Seven of the nine Death Eaters there were taken or killed." He hesitates. "There is evidence that he--your father--died quickly."

"Relatively speaking."

There is only one reason why Proctor's understaffed squad of exhausted, marginally competent Aurors were able to rout a circle of Nine so successfully. They had been apprehended in the midst of their bacchanal, sluggish and stupid after a sustained frenzy. Moody had not said so, but he did not have to.

"Yes," he says. He has lied to her on this score once, but not twice.

"I knew he was dead," she says, eyes focused on nothing, as though the words are a matter for great concentration. "I had dreams...." She blinks, and her eyes regain focus.

A moment later he realizes that their focus is on him. "What will this mean for you?"

For some reason, the simple question, the calm blue eyes, make him acknowledge for the first time the true depth of his weariness, which is so deep that his body has ceased to call it weariness and now interprets it as pain. It no longer seems remarkable to him that she should ask such a question, or unthinkable that he should answer it with the sort of ruthless honesty he has only ever offered to Dumbledore.

"There is a chance that the Dark Lord remains unaware of my treachery. Mulciber is captured and unable to inform against me. Thanks to you, I was not observed fleeing the attack on the castle. The fact that I have not yet been summoned to account for myself reinforces this theory." He hears a strange sound, china rattling in its saucer. He looks down, and realizes that the hand grasping his tea cup is trembling.

He releases it, and folds his hands in his lap. "Our struggle against the enemy is in its final hours. If there is a chance that I can gather further intelligence, then I cannot in good conscience refuse to make the attempt. The nearer we come to the end, the more vital that information will be."

She nods. "You don't want to go back."

How had he ever thought her dull, ordinary? She has a mind like a the sharpest blade, penetrating obfuscation and seizing on the truths he is accustomed to burying beneath the vague, elegant language of his training. "No. I do not want to go back."

He stares at the swirl of knot and watermark in the plain wood of the kitchen table, and remembers the scarred, pitted surface of the work table in his Potions laboratory at Hogwarts. He thinks of Dumbledore, and then of Neville Longbottom, of promises and deceptions.

He is lost in thought until he becomes aware of some new warmth, a gentle pressure against his fingers. He looks from the table to the hands in his lap, and sees that there are three of them, one small and white.

A tiny, thwarted corner of his mind demands that he shake her off. He thinks of Aurelia, convinced for a moment that he can hear her sobs drifting in from the parlor. But he does not pull away.

He remembers, suddenly, the vial of blue potion hidden in the darkness of his robes. Guilt twists in his stomach, but it is not enough to impel him to action. He has lived with guilt long enough that it is no great matter to stow it now in the dark place he has prepared for it.

There are doors that have opened too rarely in the dark house of his mind. This near the end, he does not have the strength to deny himself a window.