Summon the Lambs to Slaughter

Chapter Thirty-Four

When Rebecca lurched into Potions on Thursday afternoon, her tattered nerves were at the breaking point. Her head throbbed from too little sleep and too much care, and the hand wrapped around her control stick jittered with exhaustion. She didn't dare close her eyes, for fear that she would slump where she sat and drift into troubled dreams. She blinked in a futile attempt to clear her burning eyes of the gauzy fog that had shrouded them since late Wednesday evening, when she had abruptly and completely lost the ability to read a single line put in front of her.

She stifled a yawn as she rolled to her customary place and concentrated on not looking at the abandoned and forlorn professor's desk at the front of the room. The muscles of her lower back screamed in protest as she bent to adjust the hem of her robes, and she grimaced, hand fisting in the thick fabric. She was not surprised that the spasms should find her now and in this place; she had expected it. She had been dreading the first lesson without Professor Snape, and now that it had arrived, her body was expressing its unease the only way it could, in the only manner her stubborn will could not subjugate. She could suppress the tears and ignore the unrelenting fatigue, but she could neither hide nor dismiss the strident, accusatory protests of her bones and sinew.

Damn you, she berated her body, and it immediately retaliated with a monstrous, wrenching spasm that jabbed its fiery tines into the small of her back.

She bit the inside of her cheek and swallowed a grunt, counting off the seconds until the tension abated and left a dull, hollow throb. Neville, seated beside her, frowned.

"You all right?" he asked.

"I'm fine," she snarled. He had been unduly enthusiastic about a Potions lesson without his tormentor, and though the rational part of her understood his glee in the face of imminent liberation, she could not forgive him for it.

By all rights, you should feel the same, her grandfather pointed out, and she stifled a groan, prompting another surreptitious glance from Neville.

She wasn't in the mood for his pithy proselytizing at the moment, no matter how logical. She was exhausted and frightened, and her anger, though misplaced and utterly useless, comforted her. It filled the empty spaces left by Professor Snape's conspicuous absence, and so long as it festered inside her closely guarded heart, she didn't feel quite so impotent and confused. It was better than feeling nothing at all, and it had kept her up and moving far longer than any righteous and honorable idealism would have.

Her mouth twisted in a sardonic smirk. Funny how that worked. All her life, her teachers and the preacher at the Baptist church she sometimes attended during the holidays had extolled the virtues of love and Christian charity, of turning the other cheek and being a holy vessel of the Lord Thy God, and for a while, when the breath of God had not yet faded from her fragile lungs, she had believed them. But life was a far crueler and better teacher than the hapless preacher, who cowered in the corner with his upraised Bible and dared not touch himself lest the Lord strike him blind. Life had disabused her of all those sentimental notions with a single roundhouse slap, and once the scales had fallen from her eyes, she could not put them back again.

Love didn't make the world go 'round. It never had and never would. She had learned that in second grade when a boy with Spina Bifida had made the mistake of trying to steal her crayons and calling her a crybaby when she protested. After the momentary paralyzing hurt, anger had bloomed, hot and sweet, an intoxicating honey that blotted out reason and the Golden Rule. She had wanted to hurt the boy, make him suffer more than she did, and so, without preamble, she had reached over and flipped his flimsy aluminum wheelchair onto its side. He had spilled out and broken his nose on the thinly carpeted floor.

There had been the briefest pang of guilt as she watched him scream and clutch his broken, bleeding nose, but it had been overpowered by the euphoric satisfaction of knowing that for once, she had not been on the receiving end, that someone else had gotten thrown off the great carousel. And though she had wept when the teacher scolded her, it had not been from sorrow for what she had done to the boy, but for the disappointment and incomprehension on the teacher's face, the realization that Mrs. Hopkins would never see the world the way she did.

She had never forgotten that first taste of the forbidden, of the dark and powerful emotions the adults had tried so hard to keep from her. Once she became aware of anger's existence, she embraced it, nurtured it, fed on it. It was to it, not love, that she turned when the odds grew insurmountable. Unlike love and hope, which were easily discouraged, it had never yet faltered. It required neither maintenance nor conscious thought. She had only to open her eyes, and it was there, as raw and vibrant as ever. Its bitter draught had sustained her through the long, inexorable hours of her best friend's death, and it would not desert her now.

She wondered what McGonagall would think of such dystopian musings, then decided she didn't give a damn. Whether McGonagall liked it or not, it was true. Anger drove the world and everything in it. Even the lofty notions of Gryffindor House were fueled by it. What was justice if not anger at some great wrong? They called it by different names, of course. Anger was such a dirty word. Nobility. Righteousness. Divine retribution. All sounded cleaner, purer than anger and hatred and spite upheld by rule of law, but they boiled down to the same. Anger had been behind every major war and movement in the history of mankind. Men of God had killed in the name of peace, and men of color had taken to the streets to take by force of their united anger what words of wisdom could not coax from furious white fingers.

Anger at the wind and fire-snuffing rain had built civilization, and anger towards one another would one day tear it down. It was the Ministry's anger at the harming of their sacred child that had given this blind witch hunt life, and it was her anger on Professor Snape's behalf that would see the lopsided battle to its end.

All very nice, said her grandfather, but what does it have to do with my original point? Why don't you hate the professor as much as Neville does? He certainly hasn't treated you any better.

Because...

Because, why? It was a question she had never stopped to ask herself. She had simply reacted. It was not a reasoning governed by logic. She knew she should hate him after all his petty cruelty and cold disregard for her feelings, but she could not. Each time she tried to rekindle the fury she had felt for the first two weeks of their acquaintance, she only succeeded in dredging up the haunting memory of his eyes as he looked at his handprint bruised into her flesh or the bleak despair that flitted across his face when he thought she could not see. Over the interminable hours of their often hostile communion, hatred had become an impossibility.

She could not recall when she had lost the ability to despise him as she ought. It had not been a conscious decision. It had simply faded away, eroded by disuse and neglect, and one night, when she had reached for it in a pique at a well-placed barb, it was not there. There had been consternation and indignation and sullen reproach, but the eternal flame of venomous hatred had been extinguished, and in its place had been an inexplicable admiration and profound comfort.

Why?

Because he makes no pretensions as to what he is. He's a miserable bastard, and he's not the least bit sorry for it. Not like McGonagall, who is every bit the bitch, but spends her life disguising her prejudices as maternal concern so no one raises an eyebrow. He is what he is, and I'll never have to worry about him changing. I'll never roll into his classroom or his private office and find him smiling and handing out Christmas baubles.

She sniggered at the implausible image of Professor Snape, his thin mouth stretched from ear to ear in a jolly grin, bestowing each of his gobsmacked pupils with a dainty, shimmering, sliver Christmas tree bauble. The day she witnessed him behaving in such a sentimental manner, she would denounce the blatant imposter and hurl herself down the nearest flight of stairs. Meaningless, posturing pap was the province of the Gryffindor.

All right. But if anger makes the world go 'round, and there's naught of love or compassion in the world, why bother? Why not just let this happen? her grandfather persisted, implacable as ever.

You don't quit, do you? she retorted peevishly.

No. A trait I believe you inherited, came the smug reply.

She fought the urge to beat her fists upon the arms of her chair. You stubborn old pain in the ass! I don't know why I just can't let this happen. I just can't. The urge to cry, so often with her these past few days, stirred in her thin chest, and she scowled, furious at her sudden attack of the hysterical feminine memes.

Is it because you're more Gryffindor than you care to admit?

Hardly. There's not going to be any adulation for getting Professor Snape off the hook. Hell, they'll probably tar and feather me for ruining a perfect scapegoat.

No, but you want him to see you, and what better way to do it than to save his life?

If I pull off this miracle, he'll be anything but grateful. He'll resent owing me at all, much less for a life he despises. It'll be his worst nightmare, a life debt to a cripple and a Gryffindor. I'd be better of letting him die, to tell the truth. He'll never forgive me for it.

Then I ask again-why?

She stiffened in her chair and wished for a switch with which to turn him off. She was too tired for anything but sitting, and she wanted him to leave her alone. I told you, I don't know. She ran shaking fingers through her lackluster hair and sighed.

Yes, you do, her grandfather said, and his voice was surprisingly gentle. You just don't like the answer.

What is the answer then, since you seem to know it all? Defiant and shrill, much like McGonagall's voice when she was engaged in an outraged tirade on her behalf. She flushed.

You don't believe that anger is all there is, not behind the bastion of cynicism you've built for yourself. Deep in your heart, you know that love and mercy still exist, that there is such a thing as right and wrong. If you didn't, you wouldn't have spared a single thought for Judith Pruitt, not lost a single minute of sleep over the fact that you did nothing to stop them. You would never have shed a single tear for your friend after he was gone, but you did. You cried until I thought the force of it would shake you to pieces.

I was angry, she countered, but it was a feeble protest, and she knew it.

Yes, he conceded, you were. You were angry at God. But you missed Bradley, missed him so much you thought you were dying, wished you were so you could see him again, and that isn't a feeling born of anger or hatred. You don't long for what you despise. That comes from love, and whether you want to admit it or not, love lives in your heart.

I don't love Professor Snape. Sometimes, I'm not even sure I like him.

You care about what happens to him, and that's enough. You can prate all you want about being too jaded to feel anything but anger, but I know better. And so do you.

She smiled in spite of herself. Why do you always have to be right?

Somebody has to.

She guffawed and clapped a hand over her mouth.

"Choking on your own spittle, Mudblood?" Malfoy drawled indolently from his perch in the rear of the classroom. His cronies chortled, and Pansy Parkinson shrieked and clapped her hands, as though she had just heard the wittiest bon mot ever uttered.

"Have a toss, why don't you?" Seamus retorted conversationally, without turning to look at his adversary.

It was Rebecca's turn to chortle. Succinct, that. It was something her grandfather might have said. Only the Irish could impart such cheerful eloquence to a "fuck you".

"Think that's funny, do you?" Malfoy hissed, and the grating scrape of a bench being pushed back hung in the air.

"Yes, actually," she muttered drily.

Constant stress had blunted her sense of prudence, and truth be told, she suspected a vicious confrontation would do her a world of good, get the blood racing in her veins again, rouse her from her logy stupor. Even a sound loss was better than nothing. She craved the acrid tang of adrenaline in her mouth and the exhilarating rush of undiluted hatred in the pit of her stomach.

So much for love finding a way, her grandfather huffed, but in her mind's eye, she saw the mischievous glint in clouded blue eyes, and she laughed, her heart swelling with love remembered. Malfoy was coming, probably to hex her out of her robes, but she didn't care. For a few seconds, she was going to see the world in vibrant color. She fumbled for her wand with a pinky, sweaty hand.

Seamus leaped from his seat, wand raised. His eyes blazed. "Don't even think about it, Malfoy." Rage had thickened his brogue to the point of near-incomprehensibility.

"Or you'll what?" Malfoy asked quietly.

"I'll show-," Seamus began, but his answer was cut off by the arrival of the Headmaster, who paused in the doorway, an expression of mild surprise on his face.

"I must confess that I did not expect to see students out of their seats with wands drawn." He pushed his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose. "Is there something I should know?" he asked, and looked from a white-knuckled Seamus to a scowling Malfoy.

"No, Headmaster," Malfoy answered coolly, his tone polite but not at all contrite, and then came the sound of his wand being stowed inside his robes again. Rebecca twisted in her seat and saw that he was less than a foot from the back of her chair. Close enough to touch.

Do it. Reach out and touch him. Draw your fingers across his flesh and see if he is truly fashioned of sculpted ice. Is he cold to the touch, or will he burn you like cleansing fire?

Steel silk, she though for no reason at all. He feels like steel silk. Smooth as glass and seductive as the caress of spun silk between heated thighs, but hard and cruel as frozen steel beneath that glorious, refined face.

The temptation to touch his forbidden flesh was so strong that her wand hand relaxed its tenacious grip on the polished wooden handle in preparation for the furtive trip to the unguarded flesh of his cheek, but then reason hastily reasserted itself, and she faced front again with a mortified flush. If she touched Draco Malfoy, nothing would stop him from avenging the taint of her touch, not even the Headmaster. His wand would emerge from the snug woolen cloister of his winter robes with the speed of a striking cobra, and before an apoplectic Seamus and a dumbstruck Neville could even clamber from their seats, the damage would be done. And she had no doubt that the Curse would be neither quick nor painless.

So? Let it come. You need it. You need the hatred and the anger and the lunatic rush of magic scalding your palm as thought becomes Curse and wish becomes deed. You need that eye-opening jolt that only furious magic can provide. You all do.

That much was true. The past few days had been rife with seething tension. The cold stone walls were damp and pungent with the sweat of a student body straining in the bonds of unwanted sanctions. The air was sharp with the tangy scent of festering resentments and belligerent discord, and underneath the thin veneer of regimen and civility, the already tenuous pylons of stoic British gentility in the face of adversity were eroding, buckling beneath their feet. Offenses which would have earned a bout of invective-laden sarcasm and name-calling brought everyone to immediate wandpoint or the more indelicate art of fist-to-cuffs. The balance of the fulcrum had only to shift.

This room was a microcosm of what life had become outside these dank and suddenly comfortless walls. Seamus was still hunched on his bench with his wand jutting from his fingers like a perversely misplaced codpiece, his eyes locked on an unruffled, unrepentant Malfoy, his lip curled to reveal a faint glint of white tooth, all because Malfoy had hurled an imprecation he had lobbed a thousand times before. The venal sins were now cardinal, and the long-trusted leashes of complacency were fraying.

Seamus' eyes caught her own across the classroom, and she understood the message in them as clearly as if he had spoken it aloud. Let me. Give me a reason. Just one nudge. Just one.

She could do it, too. The power to incite unbridled bedlam lay within her cold, stiff hands. All she had to do was set spark to brittle, crackling tinder. Just reach out her hand. She did not even have to inflict pain. One finger would be enough. One finger to watch the room explode.

Her fingers tingled with a queer sexual anticipation, the nerves sending pleasant shivers into her wrist and elbow. She flexed them inside the folds of her robes to quell the sensation, but it only intensified. It was almost painful now, as though she had struck her funnybone on an invisible edge. She fought the urge to growl with frustrated desire. She wanted to watch it all come down, to see all the carefully hidden animosities come to light, to see their cultivated aplomb sloughed like dead and useless skin. She wanted to see bared fangs and extended claws and the well-ordered charade turned on its smug head.

It was the desk that stopped her. Just before she lifted her hand to set the wheels of calamity in motion, her gaze drifted to the Professor's desk, somnolent, hulking, and agonizing in its emptiness, and she froze. Her heart, which had thudded against her ribs with savage glee, rose into her throat and lodged there. Quill. Inkpot. Hourglass. But no Professor Snape.

She could see him in her mind's eye, tall and lean and pale as the moon as he loomed over her, the bottomless wells of his eyes glittering with silent rebuke. She could almost hear the reproachful clip of his boots on the stone floor and the sussurating hiss of heavy wool as he folded his arms across his chest. And then his voice, nightshade honey in her ears and carrying the doom of all worlds.

This was his classroom, his place in the world, and if the authorities had their way, it would likely be all that remained of him. She wanted to remember it as he had kept it-sparse, organized, and efficient-not reduced to splintered rubble by a fracas that would achieve nothing in the end. If she could do nothing else for him, she could do this.

Fudge would consider turning this room to dusty rubble time well spent.

Fudge can go to hell, she snarled, and shoved her trembling hand beneath her knee, trapping it there.

The Headmaster glided into the room and stood before the Professor's desk with his hands clasped behind his back. Behind her, Rebecca heard Draco turn on his heel and return to his seat. From the corner of her eye, she saw Neville sag with relief and his hands release their white-knuckled grip on the sides of his desk. Further down, Seamus wilted with a defeated scowl.

The Headmaster beamed at them. "Now that I trust all outstanding matters have been settled, let us begin. According to Professor Snape's notes, you are currently learning the usage and proper brewing technique of a Strengthening Solution, are you not?" He pushed his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose and raised an inquiring eyebrow.

"Yes, sir," Rebecca answered. Her voice was low and ragged. The knowledge that the Headmaster was in possession of Professor Snape's notes had drained her of the temporary surge of vitality afforded from her squabble with Malfoy. It made the situation real as real could be and drove home the fact that he was not expected to return for quite some time. If at all.

"Thank you, Miss Stanhope," the Headmaster replied, though his jovial smile faltered when he caught sight of her face.

She managed a brave but fleeting smile and dropped her gaze to her lap. She was too tired to pretend holding her head up wasn't an effort, and besides, she knew why he was looking at her like that. How could she not? As she looked, so she felt. It had taken every ounce of her resolve and Winky's solicitous prodding to coax her from beneath the toasty, insulating warmth of her bed, and only the vivid memory of Fudge's sneering, vicious face as he had traipsed into the Potions Classroom bearing Professor Snape's ruin had gotten her to this point. The pitiful physical reserves were all but gone.

Her eyes were the worst. She had seen them in the mirror this morning after dragging herself from the bathtub. They were sunken, hollow, and bruised, feverish and red-rimmed from fitful sleep. They throbbed inside her skull like curried marbles, and the normally thoughtless act of blinking was like taking a darning needle to her eyes. They had looked so terrible that she had nearly acquiesced when Winky implored her to spend the day in the Hospital Wing rather than in lessons, but at the last moment, as Winky was leading her toward the fourth floor and the sepulchral coolness of the infirmary, she had imagined what Professor Snape would say if she skived class on account of her body, and without a word, she had turned and headed to the Great Hall and breakfast, leaving a crestfallen Winky in her wake.

The Headmaster's gaze lingered on her a moment longer, and then he smiled and addressed the class again. "It has been quite a few years since I've been in charge of a lesson, and I fear I am a trifle out of practice. I do hope you will have patience with me," he said, his eyes twinkling behind his spectacles.

"If we can have patience with that cranky old git, Snape, I'm sure there'll be patience enough for you, Headmaster," muttered Neville under his breath, and Rebecca wrangled with the urge to cuff him on the ear or tread upon his toes.

The Headmaster, however, appeared not to have heard. He reached into his robes and pulled out a roll of parchment, which he unfurled with careful grace. He scanned the contents, rolled it up once more, and returned it to his robes. "Happily, Professor Snape has always kept detailed lesson plans, so in a sense, we are still in his skilled hands," he said. There were groans of consternation at this, but he continued. "Please gather your ingredients and return to your seats. When you've settled in again, I'll explain the individual ingredients and proper preparation. Off you go."

For a few seconds, no one moved. This was not the way things were done. Professor Snape lectured, then snarled at them to collect the ingredients, and his rigid methodology was so ingrained in them that their brains refused to obey the Headmaster's command. Then, one by one, like fieldmice popping from their burrows, they rose and headed for the storage cupboard. Rebecca, dazed and inexplicably angry with this change from the established routine, started to follow suit, but the Headmaster came to stand in front of her desk.

"Ah, Miss Stanhope. Might I have a word?" he asked.

"Of course, Headmaster," she answered, though she was in no mood to discuss her thoroughly wretched condition. Another spasm gripped her, this one in her right hip, and she fought to keep her expression from betraying her discomfort.

If he asks me how I am, I'm going to scream. I won't be able to stop myself. I'll just sit here and howl until the roof caves in upon my head and ends this whole sorry mess.

To her surprise, he said nothing of the sort. Instead, he leaned forward so that only she could hear him, and said, "I understand that Professor Snape has forbidden you to use magically modified equipment in your Potions work."

She blinked. "Erm, yes, sir."

He stroked his beard thoughtfully. "Does that bother you?"

"It did, sir, but not anymore."

His fingers paused in their travel. "Oh? Why is that?"

"I see it as a challenge, sir."

"Indeed. And you think all challenges should be answered?" He was looking at her with an unsettling expression of shrewd calculation, and she could not escape the feeling that he was testing her.

She pondered the question for a moment, then shook her head. "No, sir, not all. Some are better left alone, but some you have to take, whether you want to or not. If you don't, you can't go on." I should know, she added silently.

"And this is one of those challenges?"

"Yes, sir."

"I see, I see." He straightened and clasped his hands behind his back. "And if you could forego the challenge without anyone being the wiser?"

She stared at him, suddenly sure he wasn't referring to magically modified knives and calibrators anymore. "I'm not sure I understand, sir."

A sly smile flickered at the corners of his mouth. "Oh, I think you do."

I'll be damned. He knows. I don't know how, but he does.

You said yourself that there wasn't much he didn't see, her grandfather pointed out.

I know I did, but how? Where? The Room of Requirement? I've never spoken of Professor Snape anywhere but there. He isn't exactly the man of the hour in Gryffindor Tower.

She racked her brain in a desperate attempt to recall every possible detail of the Room, every nook and shadowy corner. Had there been anything unusual about it?

Besides the fact that the Potions classroom had moved eight floors?

She snorted. She doubted venerable Headmaster Dumbledore had been crouching in the dark or concealed in an Invisibility Cloak, so how had he done it? Two-way mirror? A Listening Charm? That was possible, she knew. She had seen Aurors setting them up in the Common Room last night. Maybe the Headmaster had surveillance Charms of his own scattered around the castle.

Her lurid imagination immediately conjured an image of Headmaster Dumbledore leering into a two-way mirror as he watched the girls in the Gryffindor lavatory. Appalled, she shoved the thought away and resumed her preponderance of the matter at hand. She knew very little about the Room of Requirement other than what Neville had told...

Her eyes darted to Neville, who was still gathering his supplies, and who, she saw with a twinge of exasperated affection, was collecting hers as well. Neville had been the one to bring her there. Was it possible that he had known someone would be listening?

Climb down from the belltower. Neville wasn't the one who didn't want to talk in the Common Room. You're jumping at shadows. Unless you're trying to tell me Neville Longbottom, who can barely pass his Divination homework, somehow knew you were fretting over his wholly unloved professor, and furthermore knowingly took you to a room the Headmaster uses for covert espionage against his pupils? And even if I could force my mind to believe such nonsense, it would take a damn sight more work to convince me that boy could even remember a detail like that. Barely remembers what he had for breakfast.

She uttered a weary titter and scrubbed her burning eyes with the back of her hand. Put that way, it was ridiculous, even less probable than the contorted plots of a James Bond novel. But it was within the realm of possibility that Neville had gone to the Headmaster and told him of her concerns, thinking that she had clearly and irrefutably gone around the bend.

That's right. Never fear; Gryffindor might will save you from the clutches of evil Professor Snape, she thought wryly, but as she watched Neville stretching for the last phial of scarab carapace, her anger slipped away, replaced by wistful tenderness and a terrible lethargy.

When she turned to face the Headmaster again, he was holding several instruments she recognized at once. She had seen them all a thousand times in Professor Trask's clean, well-lighted classroom at D.A.I.M.S. The magically calibrated beaker, the slip-proof cutting knife, and the self-stirring spoon. Looking at them, she both longed for them and despised them, longed for them because they were a chance for her to lay down her unwanted burden, and despised them for the weakness they represented.

"Are you certain, Miss Stanhope? I have no objections," the Headmaster said gently, and she was again struck by the thought that he was not referring to her coursework.

Her eyes darted from the Headmaster's patient gaze to the instruments in his proffered hands, then back again. He was offering her an escape route, one last chance to choose a different path, and every fiber of her being screamed for her to seize it. This was neither their battle nor their responsibility, and they were buckling beneath the crushing burden of it. As if to remind her of the strain, her back spasmed painfully.

And oh, how she wanted to heed their plea. Everything hurt, from the soles of her withered feet to the crown of her head, and each movement she made was a testament to tenacious, teeth-grinding perseverance, and a practical, cold voice inside her head reminded her that it had only been two days. If things were this bad now, what would they be like in seven days, or twenty, or sixty, or a hundred? How long before she ground herself to dust beneath the wheel of an improbable cause?

For fifteen years, she had thrived under the auspices of unflinching self-preservation. Survival by any means necessary, even if it meant leaving the weak and the wounded. March on, don't look back, and never let them see you weep. Its brutality was matched only by its success. Was she willing to turn away from it in the name of a man most of the world would not miss and would not remember?

If you don't speak for him now, who will speak for you when the time comes?

Her eyes traveled to the Professor's desk, lost and impotent without its master to shield it from the creeping darkness, and she gripped the arms of her chair and swallowed a lump in her throat. Ignoring a plaintive warning from the bloodless, ruthless voice in the back of her mind, she tore her gaze from the abandoned desk and looked into the Headmaster's serene, expectant face.

"Thank you, sir, but I can't-," her voice caught in her throat. "I just can't." She steeled her chin against a tremulous wobble.

"Very well, then." He dropped his hands, and the instruments disappeared from view, swallowed by voluminous folds of red silk. "I trust everything is in order, then?"

She doubted things had ever been in less order, but did see the use in pointing this out, so she said, "I suppose, sir."

He straightened, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. "I've no doubt you'll do splendidly," he said, and turned to resume his place in front of the class. Then he paused and said, "Miss Stanhope?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Please see Professor Flitwick as soon as you can. The next Quidditch match is in two weeks, and we wouldn't want any accidents upon the stairs. The professor has been hard at work on some Charms you may find most useful." With that, he flitted away.

She stared after him, thoroughly confused. What did Quidditch and Charms to keep her from breaking her neck on the rickety Quidditch pitch stairs have to do with the unspoken conversation between them? Had her overworked, sleep-deprived brain read import into his words he had not intended?

Before she could ponder the matter further, Neville returned and deposited her supplies onto the desk. He sat down beside her with a smile.

"Thanks," she said.

"No worries," he said brightly, too brightly for her tastes, but before she could summon an acid retort, Dumbledore's voice silenced the low mutter of whispered conversation, and the lecture began.

Albus Dumbledore's mind was not on the lecture he was giving. It was on the sea of faces staring back at him and the man further down the corridor, imprisoned in his rooms like a mad cur. As his lips moved and his voice waxed sonorous on the properties of Krup urine, his eyes wandered over the contours of each upturned, avid face, cataloguing each furrowed brow and hollowed cheek.

He wondered what secrets lay behind their watching faces, what they thought behind the closed curtains of their minds. He knew he could find out if he wished, could peel back the layers until he found what he was looking for, but he could not bring himself to do it. They trusted him with the blind faith only children and the simple could achieve, and to exploit that trust, even for the noblest of purposes, would be the ultimate betrayal.

What does that matter? You've already betrayed Severus. Why not them?

His heart gave a painful lurch at the thought of Severus. He had gone to see him last night, and what he had seen had broken his heart. Fudge and his damned Ministry minions had destroyed everything, and Severus had been sitting in the middle of the wreckage as though Petrified. Only the slow, drugged blink of his eyes had told him he was alive.

Not that he wanted to be reminded of his eyes. When he had picked his way through the scattered debris and knelt before the unmoving figure on the couch, there had been no sign of recognition, no sign of acknowledgement. Those black eyes had been cold and dead as neglected embers; the burgeoning trust and hope he had nurtured for so long had been gone, and in its place was a gaping nothingness. He had tried to think of something to say, some word of comfort, but in the end all he could do was sit back on his heels and take one lacerated hand in his own.

Try as he might, he could get no explanation for his mangled, blood-encrusted hands. He had not, in fact, managed to get a single syllable out of Severus. Stony silence had greeted his every attempt at conversation, and he had healed his hands and cleaned up the devastation without a word. When everything had been as tidy as he could make it, he had tried once more, only to be rebuffed by that barren, somnolent gaze.

It was only when he stood in the doorway, his head turned in one last good night, that something had stirred in Severus. That pallid, inscrutable face had turned to face his own, and a pale, spidery hand had risen from his lap, the elegant fingers reaching up to graze the wrinkled, dirty collar of his robes. For the briefest instant, the searing white-hot light of accusation had flared in his eyes and then it was gone, and he had resumed his contemplation of his stark, unadorned wall. Not a word, but the message could not have been clearer.

You failed me. I believed, and you failed me.

As though summoned by his thoughts, Severus' bleak, listless, loveless eyes materialized in his mind, and he fought the urge to close his eyes against them. He deserved them, if truth be told. He had failed Severus, just as he had Harry, still as stone and withering to nothingness in the Hospital Wing.

His eyes traveled to the empty seat where Harry should have been, and there was a vertiginous drop in the pit of his stomach. If ever there were proof that he had bollixed things completely, the empty desk was it. Its air of abandoned loneliness was magnified by the stalwart presence of Ron Weasley, who sat in the seat beside Harry's as if he were holding a silent, unnoticed vigil. Maybe he was.

Merlin bless the Weasley loyalty. If only I had been so vigilant.

You've said that with alarming frequency in recent years.

As his mouth rattled off impressive statistics concerning the composition and uses of Bowtruckle sap, his relentless mind catalogued his sins with merciless efficiency. They paraded through his mind in a ceaseless stream, beginning with his failure to save James and Lily, continuing to his failure to recognize the impostor Moody for what he was and his blindness to Barty Crouch, Sr.'s aberrant behavior during the Triwizard Tournament, and coming to a neat stop at the frozen body of Harry Potter. All of them had ended in disaster or death, and he was not sure he could afford any of them.

And there were others. His roving eyes landed on the open, eager face of Neville Longbottom, so strong in spite of all the tragedy he had been dealt. Life had not soured him. Frank and Alice would have been so very proud had they not been tortured to irreparable insanity by Bellatrix Lestrange. Yet their bodies lived out their remaining years tethered to the bland sterility of the closed ward of St. Mungo's, while their shattered minds tottered through an incomprehensible wasteland of jumbled, fractured memories disconnected from the very feelings that had made them. Alice Longbottom had not spoken in fourteen years, and by all accounts, she inhabited a world where her beloved Neville, whom she and Frank had tried for four torturous years to conceive, was still an infant.

And the bitter irony of it was that their sacrifice had been in vain. The information they had been trying to protect had come to nothing upon further investigation, though he would present himself to Voldemort before he told Neville so.

His gaze drifted from Neville to Hermione Granger, who, for all her outward composure, was slowly going to pieces. Her bushy hair was brittle and frayed, and her nails had been chewed to ragged, raw edges. According to Madam Pince, she had spent every waking moment not passed in lessons or at Harry's bedside, poring over books in the library, huddled in a small corona of candlelight and searching for answers in the one place she had always been able to find them.

Each face he looked upon had been marked by Harry's collapse in one fashion or another, even the Slytherins. They were as uncommunicative and belligerent as ever, but now there was fear intermingled with their insouciant hauteur, fear and venomous vindication. They were seeing a fraction of the power of the Ministry brought to bear, and they despised it even as they secretly lusted for it. Fudge's ridiculous and inflammatory strong-arm tactics had served as the final proof that those in authority were aligned against them, and nothing he could say would convince them otherwise. He need only look into young Draco Malfoy's eyes to see that. He had lost them all at a single stroke.

All his blunders had come home to roost, and he was trapped between them and uncertain of the way to turn. If he chose the one, he lost the other, and if he chose the other, he could lose them both. It was the ultimate conundrum, and he was powerless to solve it.

He heard himself conclude the lecture and set the pupils to their task. When every head had bowed over a cauldron, he sat behind Severus' desk, propped his elbows on its surface, and rested his chin on his interlaced fingers. On the dimmest periphery of his vision, he saw Rebecca stiffen, her cutting knife paused over a bundle of fresh thyme. She made a strangled, breathless noise in the back of her throat, and then the blade resumed its labored slicing.

You failed me.

He could not deny that. He had failed Severus more often than he cared to admit. This was just the latest in an abysmal series of shortcomings. The first had been twenty-two years earlier, when the man who terrified first-years into stuttering incoherence had been a scrawny, underfed boy with graying underpants, underpants that had been shown to the student body for no other reason than malicious sport. He had done nothing then, and a year later, when the same merry pranksters had nearly gotten him killed with their petty cruelty, he had stayed his hand again, and Minerva had let him, because they were her untouchable children.

He often wondered if things would have turned out differently for all involved had he done as he ought and stepped in. Would James have learned humility enough to spare him from his terrible fate? Would Sirius have learned tolerance for the more reserved? And what of Lupin? He knew he should strip Remus of his Prefect's badge-those in authority should never allow such brutality to go unpunished, but he could not bring himself to do it. Remus, unlike perfect, popular James, had been an outcast prior to his arrival, shunned for the mark of uninvited sin. The Prefecture had been his first glory, and he had not wanted to wrest it away.

You wrested it from Severus easily enough.

He took off his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose. That he had, and the recollection of it filled his bones with lead. Though he suspected he should hardly be surprised, given the fact that he had thought brutality should never go unpunished, and then promptly done just that. Though he had always gotten it right with others, with Severus, he had always missed the mark.

Of the five boys he had helped shape with his careless handling, he wondered about Severus the most. How much harm had he truly done on those two fateful days? More than enough.

You're hardly responsible for his actions. He made the decision to join Voldemort. He made the choice to rape and kill and torture. He is accountable, not you.

Of course. Every man chose his own path. But each was also shaped by the forces around them, the perceptions they formed from the world beyond their eyes, and Severus had never seen power wielded responsibly. His drunken, useless father had wielded it like an iron club, and Voldemort was even worse. He as Headmaster should have shown him the way, but instead, he had fumbled it. Now the Ministry was bludgeoning him with it, and he, Albus, knew there were no more second chances. The die was cast.

An image formed in his mind of Severus, twenty years old and drenched in blood, mucus and tears cutting swathes through the filth on his face. Sundered from his grace, stiff and awkward as a woodcutting as he sat in a chair and wept, silent tears without end. Severus, who had never trusted anyone, confessing his sins in a choked, horrified voice to the man experience told him he should have trusted least. Then, later, when the dam had broken, sobbing like a small child while blood dried on his teeth.

He was losing everything. The school was in turmoil, the students simmering beneath the baleful, jaundiced eye of the Ministry; he could feel the tension in his teeth, a dull, constant tingle that made him want to scour the enamel with his tongue. And Severus, Merlin help him, was all but gone. He felt every one of his one hundred and fifty years and fifty more besides.

He should have known Fudge would be so brutal, so vindictively rash. He was manic in his hatred of the Death Eaters and all they represented, not least of all the terrible possibility that Voldemort might yet live. Voldemort was anathema, a bane Fudge and the rest of the wizarding world longed to forget, and when Severus had yanked up the sleeve of his robe and shown irrefutable proof that darkness had returned, he had committed the unpardonable sin.

He should have gone with Fudge and the Aurors when they went to search Severus' chambers. He could have been the voice of reason, brought a measure of sanity and decency to the proceedings.

Not likely. The bloodlust is in Fudge now, and there is no reasoning with the mad. Even if you had gone, there is nothing you could have done. Incompetent and dangerous or not, he is still the Minister of Magic, and the terms of your life debt did not specify Severus' treatment. All your pratings about fairness would have fallen on deaf ears.

He longed to throttle Fudge. He resented being powerless in his own castle, forced to choose between what was right and what was best. Because he would have to, if it came to it. Much as he loved Severus, he could not allow Hogwarts to fall into the wrong hands. It was too strategically important in the fight against Voldemort, and if it fell to Fudge, all would be lost. One for a thousand, and Severus was expendable.

He grimaced in self-recrimination. He hated what war made him, and he had been forced into this unbearable role far too often in his life. Doling out worth like currency, deciding who among them was fit to live and who could be sacrificed as fodder for the inexorable machinery of war. More than once, he had chosen the members to be sent on highly dangerous Order missions by writing their names on a piece of parchment and listing the consequences of their loss. He totaled up the value of their life like a morbid accountant, and whoever numbered least was dispatched to the killing field. It was reprehensible.

It was the way of war.

His eyes landed on Rebecca, hunched over her cauldron, sweat dripping onto the tip of her nose. Her hand was trembling with concentration as she willed her frail fingers into miserable acquiescence. It was obvious even from where he sat that her decoction was too thick and nearly burnt, but still she toiled, beating the ragweed seeds into submission. Her eyes blazed with implacable ferocity as she worked, pounding the seeds into a fine powder with her pestle.

Minerva was worried about her, and as he watched, he could see why. Her hair had lost its inexplicable fire and hung around her wan face like hanks of brittle straw. Her eyes were bruised and puffy from too little sleep, as though she battled dark dreams, and her skin was pastier than ever. Rounded shoulders drawn protectively around her scrawny neck, she prodded the tip of her wand to the base of her cauldron, which had begun to belch acrid purple smoke. She waved away the fumes and returned to her mortar and pestle.

He watched, fascinated. Her behavior had been very odd as of late. She moved with exaggerated care, as though expecting her beleaguered joints to crumble at any moment, and when she spoke her shrewd, measured voice was now slurred and clumsy in her mouth. Minerva was convinced that the strain of Ministry meddling had proven too much for her, but he wasn't sure. Yes, she looked absolutely wretched, but she exuded a quiet, relentless determination. It was in the set of her jaw and the unyielding line of her neck. She was watching. Waiting.

Why is she still grinding? The potion is unsalvageable.

Her eyes flicked to the Professor's desk, and her jaw tightened with an audible creak, and in that moment, he understood.

She is doing it because that is what Severus expects of her. No other reason than that.

You may not be able to do anything for Severus, but she can. Or at least try. They don't notice her. She's made certain of that. Hiding in plain sight.

He smiled, the first genuine smile to grace his countenance since the Ministry had darkened his doorstep. She was made of sterner stuff than he had realized, too young to truly understand the magnitude of the risk she took, and blessed in her ignorance. She was a mongoose among cobras, undaunted by the poisoned fang and armed with steel jaws of her own. What she lacked in experience, she made up for in unadulterated brass.

Merlin bless her Gryffindor bravado and Slytherin sleight of hand.

Let's hope in works. Her experience may be her undoing.

Ah, but experience was the one thing he had in spades. One hundred and fifty years' worth. He might not be able to help Severus, but he could help her. Fudge could hardly begrudge him for nurturing a pupil's desire to learn. In fact, it was his job as Headmaster.

When the lesson ended, he watched her leave. She trailed Neville and Seamus and rolled her neck to ease the tension there. She turned in the doorway and looked at the Professor's desk again, and her eyes hardened with resolve and unspoken fury. Her pasty fist clenched around her control stick, and when her eyes met his, he knew beyond doubt that she would see it to whatever end. Then she turned and followed her friends.

You certainly have the will, Miss Stanhope. Now let us see if you have the skill.

When she was out of sight, he left and locked the door behind him. It was time to stop wallowing in ineffectual self-pity and see if a young mongoose and an old fox could band together to save a viper that meant the world to both of them. He whistled as he walked, on his way to speak with Kingsley Shacklebolt, and the sound reverberated in the perpetual gloom of the dungeons, hope amid the despair. The phoenix had taken flight.