Two Long Knitting Needles and a Mass of Red Fluff on Top

Two Long Knitting Needles and a Mass of Red Fluff on Top

There she is again, Severus Snape thought. Skinny, all elbows and knees. Pale powdery skin with hard red freckles all over. Two long knitting needles and a thick tuft of red wool on top - that was the ungallant description that one of his Slytherins had thought up for her long thin legs and her enormous bush of Weasley hair; and Snape had appreciated it very much.

What am I going to do with her? He was displeased, but with an unusual kind of displeasure. Severus Snape normally used his morose attitude as an instrument to control and cow unruly classes; and, goodness knows, he needed it. But this time it was different: with a difference he did not know how to handle. He was still quite young - one of the newer generation of Hogwarts teachers - and had never been faced with a problem such as Ginny Weasley.

Not that she was ill-behaved or disrespectful, exactly. Merlin's beard, he had faced - and usually silenced - more assertive students than her. It was just the unbreakable confidence and simplicity which she took to his classes. She was just... completely, completely, uncowed.

Spoiled, he thought. The beloved and much-petted youngest child and single girl in the vast Weasley brood, she had grown, not exactly expecting that everything she wanted could be hers for the taking - the family, he thought with a sneer, were much too poor for that - at least with the certainty that her desires and her views would always be taken seriously. He had known of her long before her arrival at Hogwarts; her late and unexpected birth into a family of males, that had been a nine days' wonder throughout pureblood families; the universal liking she drew; her reputation as a chatterbox, and the amused rumours about her babyish crush with the Boy-who-lived - all these things had done the rounds of all the pureblood families and naturally reached his ear.

Spoiled. She walked everywhere as if she belonged. Not quite a woman, no longer a child - the budding curves barely to be guessed under the robes - but with little of the truculence and self-doubt of the average teen-ager. She somehow managed to look taller than she was. Slim and long-limbed, athletic, opinionated, she bore that blazing red head like a torch; any Hogwarts student could identify it across the courtyard.

Snape realized that this train of thought was heading in a dangerous direction. Nothing could have been more dangerous for his mental balance than to compare his miserable childhood with the girl's happy one. With the self-awareness born of years of Occlumency, he deliberately put an end to that train of thought. It was a most unprofitable one, and besides it would never do to have one's consciousness in such turmoil. A summon from the Dark Lord could come at any time, and unless one's defences were always firm, the consequences were beyond imagining. Or rather... to him, with his experience, with the things he had been present at, they were all too easy to imagine.

He really wanted to ignore the girl. He kept thinking with distaste of the previous afternoon's class. But shed had a way to forced herself on his attention. There she was in a bunch of Gryffindor Quidditch players... the others all looked like each other, but that streak of bright red could belong to nobody else.

And suddenly, as if called by his inner doubts, a pain shot from the Mark on his forearm through his whole body. He was being called... so raw, so unprepared, so much under Ginny Weasley's sway.

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"You are in love, Snape." This was the first sentence the Dark Lord had spoken to him, as soon as his eyes had fallen upon him. More than one Death Eater's head had snapped to contemplate the Potions Master in surprise, as he bent over and kissed the hem of his master's robe; and a few stifled laughs had been heard. "We will speak of it later in private." Thank God for that, said one hidden recess of Snape's sould; it will give me time to compose myself.

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"I do not reproach love, Snape. I do not walk that way myself, but many of my most faithful Death Eaters are lovers or married. It can be a fine thing... even the end of one's life."

"My Lord."

"The thing is," said the shadowy, corpse-white thing, walking up and down slowly as it spoke, "you have to know what you want out of it... out of life. There is power in love, and you want it to work for you." Then another silence. "A voice tells me that your choice is an unexpected one."

"Ginevra Weasley, my Lord."

"As I thought. This places an interesting twist on events. I hardly imagine you and her family are on good terms."

"My Lord, it is something I cannot explain. But I certainly have no love for any other Weasley."

"Love involves power, Snape. It involves possession. And the more natural, to my mind, is the possession of the woman by the man. I certainly would not oppose a relationship with Miss Weasley on those terms... nor can I envisage it on any others." Another pause. "You are the elder, the wiser, and, as Potions Master, you have many ways to insure that your will prevails over hers."

You should not worry, my lord. The phrase hovered on Snape's lips, but was held back by a well-practised inner censor. To even suggest that Lord Voldemort could worry about anything was to court disaster. He immediately found a phrase just as sneering, but far more respectful. "Indeed, my lord. I have plans for Miss Ginevra Weasley, of which I hope you may approve." And he allowed a cruel smile to flit across his face.

"Do you indeed?" answered the monster. "Perhaps you will inform me later of what they are. I trust they involve a considerable amount of suffering for her family."

"Indeed, my lord, it is not far from my mind that they always opposed you."

"And deserve proper reward for this."

"And deserve all the punishment that my lord and his servants can devise. I will do my best, but I would not deprive my lord of your just vengeance."

"Indeed. Do not destroy them, Snape... do not destroy them. Yet." Voldemort's smile answered Snape's. "Although I certainly do not forbid you to put them through the wringer in every other way."

Snape did not allow himself to feel even the relief that the situation demanded. He kept his soul silent, unfeeling, untouched. The surface, open to Voldemort's inspection, rippled with malice, amusement, vindictiveness; the inner world remained detached and dead.

His defences had somehow held.

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It was only much later, in his own room in the most heavily hidden and secret part of Slytherin, that Severus Snape allowed himself to feel the appalling emotions he had so totally repressed in the presence of his enemy - of he who still thought of himself as his lord. First fear, terrible fear - fear so unreasoning that it would have broken him, sent him screaming to confess at the Dark Lord's feet, fear that would have welcomed the Avada Kedavra as a relief from the thoughts of what his life would be if the Dreadful One found out, as he almost had, the reality of his feelings. Fear, that he had so far managed to silence and negate, even in the very presence of a hand that dripped with so much blood; fear that answered to the total lack of contact between the sneering, obsequious Death Eater on the surface and the sworn enemy within, that howled out of the dark severing abyss between seeming and being. Fear that had to be let out, till his body shook and his mouth opened wide and the enchanted walls echoed with his screams. Fear that was such an abyss of devouring darkness, that even the relief of being finally at Hogwarts, safe from Voldemort, safe from revelation and punishment, had no more effect than a sighing cool breeze on the depths of the ocean. Severus Ulpius Snape screamed and screamed, till the spasmodically wound and tormented and repressed emotions of the previous few hours had been wiped blank by sheer exhaustion; then he fell into a sleep without dreams.

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Five years have passed. The long nightmare under which Severus had lived, suffering as no man could imagine to bring about its destruction, has had its end - sudden, total, unimagined. The black-dressed, black-haired Professor of Potions had emerged blinking into daylight, satisfied perhaps, but disoriented, strange to the thought that he will no longer have to conceal half his soul and twist the rest into an unnatural sneer. Three days after the body of the monster had been conveyed to the Ministry in London, for a relieved wizarding population to contemplate and realize that they were free from fear, Severus found the first few white strands in his hair. Somehow, it seemed like a sign.

Today he is standing in front of a group of friends and colleagues. The white strands in his hair are unconcealed, worn with relaxed pride, like the lines across his face - lines that were cut by past events, but that were kept hidden until the war was over. His usual black dress has a sheen and fashionable cut that would have surprised his old students; and one of those students is standing by him, wearing the dress of a bride, dazzling white from top to toe, with his ring on her finger.

"Well," says Harry Potter, resplendent in the powder blue and gold cloak that the Ministry awarded him as being the recognized Hero of the Age, "how is Benedick the married man?" A few of those present, who recognize the quotation, giggle or smile.

"Much better than I expected, to be honest, Potter," answers his former Professor without heat. "I feel sure at last that I made the right choice." His bride smiles and says nothing. There are women who would have taken offence, or at least been surprised, at such an admission from their husband; but Luna Lovegood Snape is very rarely surprised by anything.

"I think so too," says Ginny Weasley Potter, threading her arm in her husband's, casually showing his ring. She is nearly as tall as Harry, slim and athletic still, her undimmed red hair uncontrolled by any headpiece or diadem, her long, simple black dress underlining her long long legs. "I am so happy for you, Severus;" and she smiles a vivid, blazing smile. (People's heads turn whenever Ginny enters a room. She has ceased paying attention.)

Snape understands. Ginny Weasley has long been aware of his old and - in a sense - never lost love for her; few women can be loved without becoming aware of it. But as her perceptions deepened, she has come to see the wounded, lonely man behind the Dracula mask. And... this is the sort of man who makes her helpless. She has nothing to offer him beyond respect; she would always feel constrained and unhappy with him, worried that any move, any uncontrolled word - and she is nothing but uncontrolled - could re-open his wounds. When he was first seen going out with The Quibbler's assistant editor for news, Ginny's eyes had shone with hope; when the news became certain, she had finally accepted Harry Potter's proposal - which she had, until then, allowed to hang fire out of an unexplained sense of guilt.

And now here they all are. Little James has been left, for the moment, in the hands of his doting grandfather; but her mind is always on him. "You two should have children, you know. You don't know what you're losing."

"Yes," adds Harry, "and we'd be curious to see the result of the union." His eyes move cheekily from the swarthy, hook-nosed face of the bridegroom to the pale, fair-haired bride with her prominent eyes, in a way that would have led the old Snape to take fifty points from Gryffindor. The new Snape just grins.

"We are going to have seventeen children, actually," says Luna unexpectedly. She is perfectly serious, though some of the bystanders giggle. Here, at least, is someone who has not changed at all. "And we are going to call the first one Tom."

A slight pall falls on the proceedings. It is after a second's silence that the irrepressible Ginny asks, "Why Tom?"

"Well, it did not do him any good. But I think a Tom should be a good man..."

"Yes," said Snape, "we would like to take back the name."