"One of Those Quirky, Paradoxical Time-Travel Things"

Chapter Four

"What in the name of Paracelsus are you doing here?"

Thursday sighed wearily. This was Professor McGonagall's office; at least, it looked like every description she'd read of Professor McGonagall's office; but the exclamation that had greeted her arrival in it had been uttered in a man's voice.

A wizard's voice.

Severus Snape's voice.

And now Snape himself, Snape just as she had seen him in The Prancing Pony, tall, gaunt, and unshaven, rose, tall and pale and robed in black, from where he had evidently been crouching in the shadows behind his colleague's desk.

"What are you doing here?" Thursday echoed, while in her mind a voice replied to his question with the words, "Bringing you a rose, sir."

But she had not brought him a rose, that he, like Paracelsus, might bring a rose back out of the ashes of a funeral pyre. Nor had she, unlike Johannes Grisebach, brought him gold, in the form of a Time-Turner.

Not that he needed a Time-Turner, if his presence in Minerva McGonagall's office in the backstory of Prisoner of Azkaban was anything to go on.

"What are you doing here?" she asked again, more calmly, when he had not answered her the first time.

She had hoped to assuage some of the fury she saw on his face, or at any rate to deflect it from herself. She was not prepared for what he did now, which was to sink back down behind the desk until he was sitting on the floor with his robes pooled around him black as the waters of the Hogwarts lake at night. He bowed his head, and sat looking down at his hands cradled in his lap.

"I don't know," he said; and his voice, though quiet, was far from calm. "A minute ago I was in The Crystal Cave. Well--standing outside the cave itself, trying to ... "

His voice trailed off in a sigh that reminded Thursday of the way she had felt so many times when she had tried, and failed, to bookjump accurately enough to suit Miss Havisham, or her own expectations. Frustration, and weariness; shame; defeat ...

"Trying to find a way into the cave?" she asked, more softly than she had spoken before.

"Trying to get up the nerve to go in."

Snape cleared his throat. "I didn't--I don't--even know whether or not Merlin was there. I thought that even a fictional Merlin might be able to help ... "

"When I didn't?"

Snape nodded, still gazing down at his hands. "And then the next thing I knew, I was here. In M--in Professor McGonagall's office.

"How did you manage that?" he asked.

Thursday blinked. "I didn't do it."

"You must have done. I certainly didn't. I can't travel back in time in my own--in the Potter--books.

"You must have done it," he said; and cleared his throat again.

At the sound, as small as the bitterly amused snort he had emitted back in The Prancing Pony, Thursday moved towards him, stepping around the desk and sitting down on the floor beside him. She hoped that Minerva McGonagall was finding her breakfast, and the talk in the Great Hall, very enjoyable. She wished that her father would come here, now, and stop the clock ticking away on the mantelshelf.

"I didn't do it," she said. "Perhaps Gandalf and Radagast are responsible. I was talking with Radagast just before I came here, and he was going to talk with Gandalf. Perhaps they did something that brought you here, the way they got you into their story."

Snape shook his head, but did not speak; nor did he look up at Thursday.

"Well, now that we're both here," she said, "don't you think we ought to try and find the Time-Turner? That's why I came here, after all--to find it and take it to you."

Snape shook his head again. Thursday heard him swallow, and then he said, "It isn't here. I've searched everywhere. Either she's returned it to the Ministry, or she's hidden it with a spell I can't detect."

Thursday raised her eyes to scan the office, looking for she knew not what ... but at another small sound from Snape she looked back him--just as he drew his knees up to his chest and, wrapping his arms round them, hid his face in the folds of his robes. His hair fell like curtains on either side of his head, but could not completely muffle the low, sniffly sound that escaped him.

Horror swept over Thursday as she realised he was crying. Trying hard to stop, trying not to be heard, but failing miserably.

"Oh ... Professor ... "

She put her arm around his shoulders; and he leant into her and sobbed aloud, his teeth chattering as he tried to clench them.

"I don't want him to be dead," he gasped, sniffling convulsively between words. "I don't want him to be dead. I didn't want to kill him. I didn't want to make that vow."

"I know you didn't," Thursday murmured against his hair as she patted a shaking shoulder.

"How do you know? No one else knows. The teachers ... the students, the Ministry ... the readers," he choked. "They all hate me now."

"Then why were so many readers standing outside SpecOps holding lighted torches and copies of Half-Blood Prince?" Thursday asked practically.

"For D-D-Dumbledore," Snape sobbed. "They l-l-loved him."

"Well, so did you."

Thursday couldn't tell whether the gasp that followed this remark was one of surprise or just an attempt to draw breath through a nose made stuffy from crying.

"And he loved you," she went on. "There's more to love than is written in romance fiction, Severus. Have you ever actually read any of the fanfics?"

She felt him nod against her shoulder, but, still weeping, he did not say which fanfics he had read.

"Oh, come, now," she said, gently. "They're surely not as bad as all that, are they?"

She had hoped to make him smile; she could not tell whether he did or not, but she could feel him shake his head.

"They're not bad at all," he said. "They're good. Which is what I want to be."

He had started off speaking shakily; at the end of this speech his voice was still thick with tears, but through them Thursday could hear the old edge she had read described in the books, that she had heard for herself in The Prancing Pony.

And now she could feel Snape pulling away from her; and she let go and let him sit up, sniffling and clearing his throat and searching about in his robes for a handkerchief. She pulled one from the pocket of her cloak: a large square of fine white cambric that bore a few faded brown stains, and the initials EFR in one corner. The handkerchief was Rochester's, the stains her own blood, from the time when she had been shot and Rochester had torn himself from the pages of Jane Eyre to come to her rescue. She held the handkerchief out to Snape now, and he took it and began to wipe his reddened eyes.