A Prayer for the Dying

A Prayer For the Dying

Prologue:

Severus, 1979:

"Well, Severus, it has been a long time, a very long time," Dumbledore said, his voice calm, steady, eternally patient; back in a small part of my mind, a place where I was still me, I knew I ought to have been infuriated that he could react with so much calm, as though he had been expecting me all along. But I couldn't find it in myself to be angry. I was just tired, mind-numbingly tired.

"Has it, Dumbledore?" Weariness the only thing my tone revealed to him; I was still as disrespectful as I'd always been; that, at least, had not changed.

"Four years, Severus." Such gentleness, as though I was an animal that would frighten easily.

"It has been four years, hasn't it?"

"Yes, it has indeed. You haven't been here since you left Hogwarts."

"What do you know?" I muttered sarcastically, not at all in the mood for bleeding heart conversation with the king of sentimentalists.

"Why are you here, Severus?" The distrust I had known was there all along finally bled through the grandfatherly front.

Ahhh, finally to the point...

"I don't know." Complete honesty for once.

"You don't know," he repeated. It wasn't realty a question, but I chose to answer him anyway.

"Yes."

"Just what is it that you don't know?" He sounded puzzled; I was vaguely pleased.

"Why I am here. Why I came to you. Why should I? You have done nothing for me, after all. But He killed him and I...I couldn't think of anywhere else to go." I shrugged ever so slightly, feeling faintly helpless, knowing that the situation was far beyond my control.

"Who did Lord Voldemort kill?" Instant concern; I barely heard it, lost in a wave of emotion. I stared at the wall without really seeing it; I was looking at things beyond the room.

"He didn't deserve to die, but He killed him anyway..."

"Severus, who did he kill?"

"Why did He kill him?" I chewed on the inside of my lip, clenching my fists in my lap to hide the trembling.

"Severus!"

I snapped out of it, looking up into Dumbledore's face.

"What?"

"Who did Lord Voldemort kill?"

"Alain..." I whispered brokenly, my tight reign on hysteria beginning to slip. I could feel the tears I'd been holding back for days - or was it weeks? I couldn't remember - threatening to spill over.

"Alain?" Of course Dumbledore didn't know - couldn't know - Alain; he had never been at Hogwarts.

"Alain Mounier, he...I knew him, I cared about him. He is dead." I had looked down, I raised my gaze again. "I don't know why you would care, I am, after all, just a Death Eater. No James Potter, no Sirius Black; just another evil Slytherin Death Eater, a failure. Don't pretend to care that I have lost him - I don't want your pity, genuine or otherwise, but someone needed to know. I refuse to erase a man's life, particularly a man I cared about, just because he died suddenly with no one around to observe his passing."

"Very commendable of you." Dumbledore nodded understandingly, an understanding I seriously doubted he truly possessed. "Perhaps even noble."

I laughed derisively, a laugh that, I knew, did not lend itself to a sound mind or stable emotional state, a laugh with madness in it.

"Commendable? Noble? Don't insult me, Dumbledore, I am anything but noble and you know it. But when I do care, I am loyal for life, and that is something you should know - and would if you'd ever cared to fucking pay attention!" The hysteria crept in, despite my best efforts to contain it.

"Calm down, Severus," Dumbledore said mildly. "I know you are upset, and I have always known that you are nothing like James Potter or any of the others, you are a case unto yourself. But there is no need to shout."

"He killed him. He fucking killed him! Don't you understand?" A sob escaped my throat in spite of all my efforts to be strong in front of a man I had felt comfortable around and feared, admired and thought little of, been fond of and despised all my life.

"I know, Severus, I can't promise that things will be all right, very likely they never will be, but it's all right to cry; if you hold back the feelings, you will only hurt yourself."

He was so kind, so goddamned kind, that I couldn't do anything about it. And so it came to be, sitting there in Dumbledore's office, that I, Severus Snape, twenty-year-old Death Eater and general all-around son of a bitch, cried for a man whom no one but me would ever remember.

This was the start of my time as a spy.

-

Alain: 1752

"You are certain that this is what you want to do, Alain?" my cousin asked, looking concerned.

I nodded firmly. "Yes, Louis, I'm going. There's absolutely nothing you can do to convince me otherwise."

Louis, my dear, though somewhat dour, cousin, seemed completely unconvinced.

"It will be fine, Louis," I said reassuringly.

"You will be in another time. Not only that, you will be in another country. A hundred things could happen to you to prevent you from coming home."

"It will be fine, Louis," I said again, more firmly, trying to end the discussion.

Unfortunately, once Louis got started on something, there was really no stopping him, he was rather like a cart rolling down a hill, you could slow him down a little, but other than that, there was nothing to be done but sit back and wait for him to run out of momentum.

"You could die, Alain! And then where would we be? You are, you know, the only relation I have left, and your mother, God rest her immortal soul, made me swear while she was on her deathbed that I would always take care of you - her only son! And now you, five years later, want to go off into the future just because you have found the magic to do it!" He threw his hands up in frustration.

I smiled quietly to myself and just sat back, letting him go off on his rant. It wouldn't make any difference in the long run; I hadn't done anything he'd told me to do since the first six months after my mother's untimely death, the months in which I had been too grief-stricken to do anything other than what he said. I had loved my mother very much; her death had caught me completely unprepared. Besides, I had only been twelve; what else was I supposed to do?

"And what's worse, you don't even know if this will work out at all like you've planned, and have absolutely no conception of how to get back!"

I could tell that he was close enough to finishing that I could interject with some effect.

"I am not planning on going off to get myself killed. I can take care of myself, Louis; you know that. I am not an infant. You are not convincing me not to go, you know."

"There's nothing I can do, is there?" He sighed.

"Absolutely nothing."

"You will go no matter what I say?"

"I will go."

"Then you have my blessing. And my prayers." He looked absolutely terrified; I smiled as reassuringly as possible, given that he was being incredibly irritating.

"You can be so pathetically religious sometimes, Louis." My smile widened at the thought. "We're wizards, remember? You know, the ones the religious non-magic folk think of as the spawn of the Devil? Or have you started believing in a new religion that doesn't think such absurd things?"

He smiled, too; I had always been able to charm him out of a nasty temper. "No, it just felt like the...like that was the proper thing to say."

"I see..." I paused. "So I suppose I will see you when I see you."

"Take care of yourself, Alain; I tried with you, heaven knows I did. So take care."

I nodded, kissed his cheek quickly, and then walked out.

This, though I knew it not, was to be the last time I ever saw my cousin or my home.

-

Harry, 1999:

The hospital wing, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a place I knew exceedingly well from my own days as a student of the school. Two years after leaving the school, off to fight Lord Voldemort and hopefully win, I was back there, a patient in what had become the last stronghold against the dark.

It's over.

I glanced around, lifting my head a bit, my vision swam and I had to lie back, closing my eyes.

It's over.

After I felt well enough to sit up, I did so, slowly. Most of the beds in the long wing were filled. Sleeping forms, so many injured, so many near death. I was one of the lucky ones, no major injuries, nothing that wouldn't heal up all right. A few scars, yes, but I was relatively no worse off than I'd ever been. Others had not escaped so clean.

It's over.

That was my only thought, a thought that consumed my very being, enrapturing my mind, ensnaring my consciousness. A thought I could only barely process: it was over.

I glanced around, looking for familiar faces, dreading finding them. When I got to the bed nearest mine, my breath caught in my throat.

It was Severus Snape.

Fuck.

There were no medics around, no one awake but me, so I got out of bed, ignoring the pounding in my skull to the best of my abilities, and knelt next to the bed of the man who had been my demi-nemesis, my teacher, and my good friend in turns; the man who had been the closest thing to a father that I had ever had.

I knew that he was dying.

"Severus..." I whispered hollowly, the sound of my own voice startling me, raspy and dry and hoarse from lack of use. How long had I been out? I didn't even know.

I coughed once, a low, hacking crash. I tried again to speak.

"Severus, can you hear me? No, you can't, can you? It's over, it's over." Tears clouded my vision; I felt like a child again. "It's over, we've won. It'll be all right now; everything will be all right. Blaise and I...we're going to get a house somewhere, maybe out in the countryside, and we were thinking of adopting a child in a few years. Don't you want to be around to torment another generation of poor students? Come on, Severus, just wake up..." A sob escaped, then another, rasping, choking sobs. I sat back on my heels, my hands to my mouth, pulling in gasping breaths, trying not to scream.

We won, dammit, we won, and no one's supposed to die now that it's over! He can't die. God, he's one of the only real friends I've got. He can't die!

To sit and know that someone you care about is going to die, possibly without you ever getting to say goodbye; that is almost certainly the worst feeling in the world. I sat there and watched a friend die for five minutes, unmoving, the sobs gone, replaced by silent, painful tears.

Then Blaise was there.

"He's not doing well, is he?" a soft voice at my back.

"He's going to die." I didn't turn around, I didn't need to, I knew exactly how Blaise would be looking at me, contemplating, thoughtful, as open as he could ever get; I knew how he would be standing, relaxed, half leaning against the edge of my bed, to cover up a tension from stress and grief and pain. I knew him so well I didn't need to look to know, I could see it in my mind.

"I know."

"There's nothing I can do, is there?"

"No, Harry, there isn't."

"I hate feeling helpless, I don't want to see him die."

"Then stop watching. That's how I survived everything, I looked away." He sounded sad; I knew the reason.

"How can I just look away from my dying friend?"

"You think you are the only one to turn away from a friend?"

I blinked, then nodded, realising my mistake. " Of course, you knew them; they were your friends, too. I...I didn't mean that the way it sounded, I'm sorry."

"I know." And there was forgiveness in his tone.

I turned then to look at him, and his dark blue eyes, such an unusual colour, softened slightly as they met mine.

"It's over."

-

Blaise, 1996:

It was nine o'clock at night, in mid winter, in Great Britain. I was outside. I was cold.

I barely noticed the cold, however, because I was too preoccupied with things that I had no control over.

I had just made the life-changing discovery that my best friend, Draco Malfoy, someone I had known since I was a toddler, someone I had always trusted implicitly, was wrong. And it hurt.

This was not wrong in some small sense, something insignificant and slight. Of course not, it couldn't possibly be that simple. No, he was wrong fundamentally; the very basis of everything he thought of as true was wrong. And I didn't quite know how to deal with it.

It was the strangest thing; I had never blindly gone along with the things Draco believed, I had never just followed along; I was a leader, not a follower, after all. But to discover that he was so wrong was shattering. I had never actually given what he believed any thought. I know that that sounds strange to many - he was my best friend, but we are Slytherins, we don't bother with what other people around us believe unless it suits our purposes to do so. I had never had a reason to care about Draco's personal values.

Then, one day, one normal, perfectly typical day, I had what he believed thrown in my face, and it went against my sense of what is true, so I balked. I played it, of course, claiming a headache and wandering casually out to get some air.

I didn't break; there were no tears, no screams, no sobs. I was still Slytherin to the core, an aristocrat, polished almost to the point of parody but well within the range of normal. I never cried. In fact, I hadn't cried since I was five years old and my father still had that power over me. Instead of foolish, Gryffindor-esque tears, I stood, my face to the biting winter wind, thinking.

Part of me, a part of me that rebelled against being what I was, that part screamed to not go back, to never go back. The larger part of me, the part that was rational and completely under control, overrode that reaction. I knew that I couldn't not go back; I had responsibilities to my house, not to mention nowhere else to go.

So I stood outside, in the dark and the cold, waiting for a solution that was never coming.

After a while, I neither knew nor cared how long, someone found me standing out there.

Terry Boot, Ravenclaw. My mind automatically supplied the name that went with the bespectacled face.

I had barely said five words to the boy in my life, but things like appearance and past relations really don't mean all that much when you're the only two people outside in the wind.

"The world has gone mad," he said casually, stuffing his hands in his pockets, "When a Slytherin and a Ravenclaw can stand outside as though casual acquaintances."

"The world has gone mad, in more ways than you will ever know."

"I suppose it has."

We settled into an almost companionable silence, enjoying a moment in which everything was calm and no one could touch us. It was the kind of moment I lived for.

I reached into my pocket, felt the slip of parchment, a note from Draco, from earlier that day. I pulled it out contemplatively and looked at it. Then, with perfect calm, I began to tear it up into tiny pieces, letting them fall, only to be picked up by the wind and pulled away, dancing on the current that held them.

As I let them go, these pieces of parchment, meaningless except for in that one moment when they represented everything that had, until that evening, been, I spoke, to myself and in the faintest of whispers. Boot watched me, respectfully silent. He didn't understand - didn't need to.

"To the world that was, the time that is dead. To the now, the ideas that must be protected, savoured, loved. To the future, the things that may yet come to pass be these things for good or for ill. To an end to normalcy, a fictitious ideal that no one can ever hope to attain. To the beginning of hope, for without hope we are nothing. To the enduring strength of love, for love is everlasting. To me, and to you, and to the world..." I trailed off, letting the last piece loose from my grasp.

After another minute or so of silence, Boot looked at me closely, puzzled, and asked me only one question, the only question that mattered.

"What was that?"

I smiled, a thin, weak, ghost of a smile.

"A prayer for the dying."