Sometimes There Is No Victory

The battlefield was silent now, save for the bubbling moans of the dying and the wind rippling through bloody cloaks. The silence was strange after so much screaming, so much terror, so much death. It weighed oppressively on her eardrums, making them ache. The air stunk of blood and terror and decay.

A lone figure moved among the carnage, crawling on all fours over the bodies heaped two and three deep on the field. Some of them squirmed feebly, struggling to draw breath in a losing battle for life. She did not feel them, nor did she feel it when her hand slipped into a puddle of cooling blood. She felt nothing but a terrible blankness, a cold numbness that froze her limbs even as she forced them to move. She saw only the black dot lying alone in a strangely empty space. She knew what it was. She knew who it was.

She closed the distance gradually. She hoped it would be over before she got there. Her lips prayed for him to live still. She had to know, to make sense of the images seared into her mind. Images she wanted to wash away and couldn't. Images that would haunt her always. Images of a betrayal never seen.

It had all happened so quickly. Too quick to be seen, yet playing out with a horrible slowness. Professor Snape looking at her from behind his goblet. His eyes closing, as though he were fighting a desperate internal battle. Opening again, revealing a terrifying hatred, a fury so hot it scorched her face. And beneath that the deepest shame. The eternal scrape of his chair as she stood.

Understanding broke then, burning her soul like acid. She reached for her wand, but he was far quicker. It was just as well; she could never have brought herself to harm him. Let him tear down the very heavens, cast down the seat of God, she never would have raised a hand to stop him. She remembered too much, believed too deeply. The Curse struck her in the chest, and she toppled from her chair, landing in a sprawl beneath the table.

I'm not dead, was the only thought that had passed through her mind. She had expected to be. A hatred that seething could only bring death. But she was alive. Paralyzed completely and bug-eyed with terror, but alive. A hope flickered in her chest that perhaps this was only his way of protecting her from the perils of the battle, but his next words crushed that hope into powder.

"Avada Kedavra!"

There was a flash of green, followed by a heavy thud. A body hitting the floor. She blinked and in the next moment came face to face with the staring, dead eyes of Ron Weasley.

She tried to scream, but everything was frozen. Her vocal cords were locked. So she screamed inside her head, screamed until her mind was raw and bleeding. The impact of what she was seeing and what it meant, crushed something strong and vital in her, and she wept, snot clogging her nose and tears sizzling down her face.

No, no, no, no! No, Professor! You can't! I believed! You can't!

But he had. And there was no Time-Turner to take it back. She shrieked inside her head again, wishing for insanity, wishing for anything to take this terrible reality away. She fought to bash her head against the stone floor, to bring about sweet unconsciousness, but she could only lie rigid as petrified driftwood and watch everything turn to dust.

People above her were screaming, too. They were beginning to grasp the horror she had already seen. She saw knees, probably Hermione Granger's, appear beside Ron Weasley's head. A strangled, groaning sob was coming from behind the tablecloth, the unmistakable sound of grief. At least her grief had a voice. She was still strangling on hers.

Separated by less than an inch of white cloth, two women wept, one for the victim, and one for the murderer whose hands were stained with blood. She wanted to reach out her fingers, brush them against the trembling knee and say, "I understand." She couldn't. She was isolated in her grief, and even if she weren't, her comfort would not be accepted. She had believed in him, had spread the gospel of redemption, and now everything was despair. Her grief was undeserved, unrecognized. She was pariah. She was them.

Pandemonium erupted. Screams. The sound of dinnerware crashing to the floor. The mad scrape of chairs as everyone rushed to escape. The crackling hiss of a Curse as it missed its mark. The solid thunk as another, truer Curse hit home. A scream. A thud. A resounding crash, wood tearing from its moorings. The doors to the Great Hall had been thrown down.

Black wave. The Death Eaters were inside Hogwarts. The air crackled with the dark thrill of Curses, and the pure energy of Counter Curses. Everything was confusion. Screaming. Something hot splashed her face. Blood. A body slumped over, its head missing. Tears. Begging. The high-pitched shriek of a girl, cut off in mid-warble. The mad scuffle of feet.

Where is the Headmaster? Why doesn't he make it stop?

There was a guttural cry, and the warm heavy body of a Death Eater falls atop her, his legs sticking out from beneath the table. She stared into his face, concealed by the glistening white, serpentine mask, the mask that she had seen sometimes on Professor Snape's face. The mask that crushed her faith. He did not see her. He was dead.

His eyes are blue. Thank you God, they're blue. Not Professor Snape. She was glad.

She didn't know how long it lasted. All she knew was that the screaming and weeping tapered off, faded, replaced by moans and eerie silence. Voices and footsteps sounded beside her. They were merry, triumphant. She knew one of them so very well, and she screamed a scream that only she could hear.

Two sets of feet stopped beside the table. She knew who was there. How could she not? She had spent every day of the last three years either gazing down at those boots or following staunchly behind them. He polished them every day. He loved them. They were his one vanity. She had watched him on many nights as he pampered them, smudging his delicate lily hands with midnight polish. They were a ruin now, splattered and crusted with blood and treachery. He would never get them clean again.

That isn't Professor Snape. He would never let his boots get like that. Someone stole him and put this changeling in his place. This isn't right.

"I'll finish in here. You go make sure Lestrange isn't botching things too badly." The purr of nightshade silk. Another scream ripped through her head. She wished for the blackness to swallow her up. It never came when you needed it.

One pair of feet disappeared. One remained. After a moment, the rustle of fabric, and then light, bright and blinding, flooded beneath the table. Her vision was filled with the white serpentine mask. More tears came when she recognized the black eyes behind it. It could not be. A shriek worse than all the rest boiled up from inside her, reverberating inside her skull, and something in her heart broke with an agonizing snap.

They contemplated one another for several long seconds, and then a smooth, graceful hand plucked the mask from his face. She felt her lips trying to smile even as her soul continued to scream. That face was familiar to her, beloved, the one she had revered for all this time.

He swiped a hand across his sweaty, sallow face, leaving long red smears of other people's blood. "They won't hurt you. I've seen to that. You're just another corpse."

She stared at him, unable to even blink. He had saved her, but for what purpose she could not guess. Perhaps some of the old honor lingered in him still. Maybe whatever had seized him and twisted and palsied his mind had not been so thorough as it had hoped. Part of Professor Snape still clung to the shell that had been his body before this terrible monster came to stay. She prayed for it, wept for it, and reached for it with everything she had, but it was too far out of reach, too far gone.

"You'll be safe here." He stood, replacing the mask. The professor that he had once been struggled briefly behind his prison and then flickered out. "You couldn't have stopped this. No one could." Then, so quietly that she almost missed it, "But you came closer than most. Goodbye, Rebecca." With a last look, he turned and swept from the hall.

She lay there on the cold stone floor, her shocked and tattered mind wandering among the wreckage of her memories. She drifted among happier times, cradling them like precious relics from a forgotten passed. She clung to saner times, times when the world had made sense. She drowned in the recollections of what was and should have been, and all around her was the fading scent of allspice and parchment dust, of terror and blood. It was the smell of love corrupted.

Hours, maybe days passed, and then the Curse left her. Her arms and legs, frozen since Professor Snape struck her with the Body Bind, flopped bonelessly. Her eyes squeezed shut, finally able to block out the light. Her bladder let go with a warm hiss.

What happened? Are they gone?

Dazed, she crawled from beneath the table. The Great Hall was utterly destroyed. The other tables were overturned. Shards of china and puddles of pumpkin juice and drying blood littered the floor. And bodies. Hundreds of bodies. They littered the floor and sprawled over the tables. Many were mangled and bloody, but still others were miraculously untouched. Sightless eyes bulged up ay her, reflecting her own disbelief and horror. Others had no eyes at all.

She turned to look at the High Table. The luxurious white table linen was drenched a deep crimson. Goblets were overturned. The body of Professor Flitwick was facedown in the center of the table like a macabre centerpiece. His wand was gripped in one stiffening hand. He had tried to fight back. Professor Sinistra lolled beneath her chair, a gaping wound in her side. Professor Sprout was slumped against the far wall, her scalp hanging in tatters. Instinctively, she knew that she had been the one who had tried to stop Professor Snape. She had always been the feisty one. Of Professors McGonagall and Vector and Headmaster Dumbledore there was no sign.

A feeling of relief swept over her. If Dumbledore were alive, then all was not lost. There was still hope.

Where is Professor Snape?

The thought was patently absurd, all things considered, but the old loyalties died hard in her. She had loved him well and best, and that love did not end because it had been deceived. It still burned brightly in her heart, and she refused to let it die. She fanned its flames with cherished memories and etched it into the walls of her heart. He could renounce her, renounce everything, but she would not yield it.

She debated getting back into her chair, but in the end she crawled toward the remains of the doorway. She would be harder to spot this way. As she left, she caught sight of the Creevey brothers, Dennis and Colin. Colin was covering his brother with his body, shielding him. His eyes were tightly closed. He never saw what hit him. The effort was in vain. Beneath him was the crumpled form of Dennis. Futile sacrifice.

"You were a damn fine Gryffindor, Colin," she said thickly, and crawled out.

It took her nearly forty-eight minutes to find him. It was exhausting work climbing and clawing over the shifting bodies. There were a lot of them, far too many to be just students and staff. Some wore bright blue robes. Aurors. Headmaster Dumbledore must have called them. How? It didn't matter. Nothing mattered anymore. Everything was over.

He was lying on his back beneath the sun. It was evident that his chest had been crushed and the fragments of his ribs speared into his body. His breathing came in great gurgling gasps, and his hands clawed into the earth. His head lolled at the sound of her approach.

"Come to watch the end of me?" he said wryly.

"Oh, sir," she panted, struggling to reach him. She had said the same thing once before, a lifetime ago.

He smiled thinly in recollection. "Only you could impart so much meaning to that phrase, Miss Stanhope." He coughed and gagged, blood dribbling onto his chin.

She crawled to him and sat back on her knees. The position was excruciating for her, but she would hold it as long as she had to. She pulled his head onto her lap and cradled it there.

He grimaced. "I suppose you want to know why?"

She did not answer him.

He took a ragged breath. "I couldn't fight it anymore. All that suffering, and for what? Nothing. The old man used me, and when he was done, my life would have been over. Better to die with a chance than die on my knees."

She said nothing. She had known of this seed inside him for a very long time. She had seen it incubating behind his eyes and in the cockles of his heart, especially on the nights when he returned from an agonizing night of Cruciatus. She had prayed that the seeds would never blossom, never bear their poison fruit, but that prayer had gone unanswered. Just like all the others.

I hate You. She flung the thought savagely toward the heavens, an indictment against the God that had failed her time and time again.

"Why didn't you fight it?" she asked softly.

"Don't you think I tried?" he snapped, traces of the old irritation in his voice. "It wasn't worth the trouble."

"I wasn't worth the trouble? I loved you!"

"How very Gryffindor of you to think love had anything at all to do with it. You always were a sentimental fool. Had I any love to give, you would have had it."

She said nothing, absorbing what he had said.

Unexpectedly, his bloody hand came up to touch her face. She pressed her face into the palm of his hand. "Sometimes, you cannot change what you are," he said gently.

"I love you, sir."

He was silent, his black eyes watching her. They were distant, drifting. Time was running out. He reached down and tore something from the collar of his robe. "Take this."

She took it from his shaking hand. It was his Slytherin Head of House pin, an ornate silver and jade affair. She smiled as a wretched sob tore from her throat. She knew what it meant. Even this monster loved, and I loved you, though my mouth knows not the words. You were worthy of me.

"Thank you, sir." She tucked it into the pocket of her robes.

"You would have made a fine Slytherin, Stanhope."

"I'm honored, sir."

"Tell me, Miss Stanhope, what is the proper preparation of the Camoflous Draught?"

Halfway through her recitation, she saw his chest still. She let her words trail off. He was gone, irretrievably gone. She dropped her head onto his chest and wept, hard, keening sobs that wrenched from her soul without end.

I'm an orphan now.

She wept without end, bunching the blood-sticky fabric of his robes between her fingers. She would stay here with him. There was nothing left for her now. She would stay here with him until the withered into bone and crumbled into dust. The sun would bleach their bones together. There was no reason to move.

She stayed that way until a shadow fell over her. She knew without looking up that it was Headmaster Dumbledore. Even in this horrible darkness and despair, he radiated serenity and light. But even his quiet strength could not cleanse the grief from her bones. It had invaded like cancer, and it would not leave. She didn't move.

"Come, child," he said gently. "It is over. The Darkness has fallen. Victory is ours."

She didn't move. She didn't want to leave him here to rot.

The Headmaster pulled her gently away. "He's all right. He suffers no more." His voice cracked. She saw the grief in him, and she blessed him for it.

She took one last look as he led her away. Professor Snape lay in the bloodstained grass. She fought the urge to run to him. He had been her teacher until the last. She would remember the good in him despite all of this. She loved him. Her hand crept to the pocket of her robe to fondle what she knew was there.

Goodbye, Professor.

She wept, salt on her tongue. Of Dumbledore's victory there was no sign.