Into the Fold

The Veil of Tears

June 1976

Severus needn't have feared his dreams, however, for, back in his bed at the Leaky Cauldron, he lay awake, feeling the time pass--hours, surely--as he gazed through the darkness at the faint phosphorescence of the whitewashed ceiling. He could not get the strange Healer and her stranger Pensieve out of his wide-awake, overactive mind.

But overhanging all was the smoky cloud. Was that his emotion? His loathing of Potter, his triumph at the creation of Sectumsempra? Whatever it was he'd felt when Sectumsempra had reached its full potential on James Potter's body?

Or merely a magic show produced by a very clever and powerful witch?

He was no nearer an answer when he drifted into a sleep that was blank, dreamless and far too short.

****

There was no invitation the next morning to the Trustees' Dining Room, so Severus ate a solitary breakfast in the Cauldron's common room before meeting Healer Meed in her office. A glance at the smoke-free ceiling was reassuring, a glance at Healer Meed somewhat less so. Her face was calm but pale.

He looked at the hand in her pocket, clenched again into a fist. Around the phial, Severus guessed, and when she pulled her hand out, he saw that he was right.

Healer Meed placed the phial on her desk and looked at it for a moment. Then she lifted her eyes to Severus.

"I've told you that I'm a Healer, and you've seen that I'm a Legilimens. And I said on the morning we met that my specialty is Psychic Healing."

Severus nodded. Then, realising he was staring at her, "Erm--yes," he added quickly.

Healer Meed turned from the desk and began wandering around her office, passing the landscape painting and the portrait of the mob-capped Healer, who dozed with her chin on her chest. "Psychic Healing," she resumed. "Because we wizards can go mad. And when we do, when our magic's twisted along with our minds, we can wreak havoc."

Severus looked with reluctant fascination at the black mist writhing in the bottle. His emotions, according to Healer Meed. Was he mad, then?

"A little." She wasn't even looking at him, yet she knew what was in his mind. "You're a powerful wizard." Now she did face him, and pointed at the phial. "Your emotion, folded into your magic. You're too powerful for me to tease them apart. But I shouldn't anyway. I should wear them all."

Wear them all? He wasn't the only one who was slightly mad.

Healer Meed picked up the phial and looked at it with determination. "Your emotions. I'll weave a feeling-veil from them." She glanced up at him. "In my profession--the healing of mad wizards--we have a nickname for it: the Veil of Tears."

The Veil of Tears. "I don't suppose mad wizards have very many cheerful feelings."

"No. Nor do a fair number of sane ones, I'm afraid. But out of these feelings came Sectumsempra." Healer Meed eyed the phial again. "And from them will come its counter-curse."

She set the phial down briskly. "Beneath the veil, I'll experience the emotions in your memories just as you experienced them in that time and place of your life. Just as if I were you."

Wasn't picking through his mind with Legilimency enough? "What good will that do?" Severus asked.

"I thought you understood. Your emotions are an integral part of Sectumsempra. We must know what Sectumsempra's made of if we're to create its counter."

"I know my own emotions. I can tell you what they are."

"They're yours, so I doubt you can completely understand them. And you're not a Psychic Healer, so you can't consciously manipulate them to create spells." Healer Meed reached for the phial.

"Wait!" said Severus, and she paused, her hand hovering over the phial. "I mean--I thought we were doing this together. I thought I was helping you create the counter-curse."

"Help me?" said Healer Meed. "No, you've got it wrong. I'm helping you. You are the essential one."

"But you're the one putting on the--er--Veil of Tears." He might as well go back to his room at the Leaky Cauldron, for all the good he was doing.

"Oh, no, you're staying right here." Healer Meed glanced briefly at her office door, which was enough to make Severus suspect she had locked it. "You must re-feel your emotions with me. But you must not interfere."

Why would he want to interfere? The answer was there, in the dark writhing in the phial.

This was going to hurt.

Healer Meed pulled the stopper, and the dark cloud of Severus's emotions oozed out. She watched it for a second, then pocketed the phial and drew her wand. With a few broad strokes, like an artist painting a bold canvas, she passed her wand through the cloud. The cloud immediately formed itself into a long black veil, like those Severus had seen widows wearing in old pictures of funerals. The veil wasn't woven of thread, however, but of fine strands of mist: of the emotions Healer Meed had drawn from Severus's memories. And even now, woven into a veil, into an intricate, lace-like pattern, they moved. They twisted and writhed, though not as freely as they had unwoven. Now their movement looked more like shimmering.

Healer Meed caught the veil in her hands and lifted it before her face. It continued to shimmer, fluttering slightly now, as if in a breeze. Now Severus saw not only the strands of emotion but the lacy patterns they made, shifting, changing. There were plants, animals, birds, even human faces. He saw a mushroom turn into a fir bough, a rabbit turn into a hedgehog, then into a starling whose wings beat in frenzied flight. He saw Potter's face for a second, hardly long enough to know it was Potter, before the features melted and flowed, reforming into Ruskin's face, then Tobias's.

Or so it seemed. Severus was never quite sure what he was seeing in the veil, for the threads of his emotion never stayed still long enough to form an unmistakable picture. They never stayed still at all.

The veil swirled through the air suddenly as Healer Meed put it over her head, letting it fall so that it covered her face completely, like the widows' veils in the pictures. She gasped sharply, as if in pain, making Severus start. He was about to say something, to stop her, when the portrait-Healer, with no intervening yawns or stretches, jerked instantly awake.

"You heard her," said the portrait-Healer, frowning severely at him. "Don't interfere."

"Er--all right," said Severus. Then Healer Meed began to cry.

She didn't sound like a woman, however. She whimpered and mewled like a child afraid of making too much noise.

"Hit him, Mum, hit him.... I hate him, hate him, hate him, don't care if it's Dad! I want a dad...."

The veil obscured Healer Meed's face, but Severus could see her shoulders shake. Desolation crept into his heart, making his chest hurt and his throat ache.

It's a monster, all teeth and flying spit and howling, howling.... Severus shut his eyes and pressed his hands over his ears; the teeth went away, but the howling didn't. Make the monster go away, Mum, hit it with your wand, cast a spell on it, make it go away, turn it into a dad....

I want a dad.

"It's not my fault I can't fly a broom!" said a boy somewhere, his voice thick with resentful anger.

It could only have been Healer Meed. Severus hadn't spoken, and the portrait-Healer had gone back to sleep. Healer Meed was still under the Veil of Tears, but she no longer wept. Her body was stiff and her fists were clenched, in an attitude Severus recognised as his own when he was in the grip of fury.

It wasn't his fault; they didn't have money for a broom and Dad would never let him have one anyway....

It's not my fault! Maddy Urquhart was laughing at him, but Sev didn't say it aloud. She didn't care, nobody cared and he wouldn't tell them if they did, he didn't want anybody to know.

"I hate her, hate her, hate her." Healer Meed spoke in a low and snarling boy's voice that sounded remarkably dangerous for its age, a voice that overpowered Severus, dragging him in to what went on beneath her veil.

Hate her. Severus stared at Maddy, at her face twisted into ugliness by her laughter. He'd hex her if he could, if he dared, if a teacher weren't watching who could throw him into detention, or out of school, so he'd have to work in the mill the rest of his life and turn out like Dad.

Hating Maddy, choking on the curse that wanted to get past his teeth and hurl itself at her, Severus stopped paying attention to his broom and it threw him again.

Reckon I shouldn't have pretended I didn't see what Mulciber was doing to Macdonald. I don't think I fooled Lily, I saw her looking at me, I hope she's not mad...Ow!

The acorns hit his head as hard as pebbles; then came Black's hated voice: "Oi, Snivelly! Wake up!" Severus spun around, yanking out his wand: "Petrificus totalus!" He only wanted to Petrify Potter and Black, but they preferred humiliation, whenever they could work it in. Potter managed it this time. With a wordless flick of his wand, he set Severus's legs writhing in a Tarantallegra Curse. Severus stumbled, hit the ground and, his legs still moving, tasted hate with the mouthful of grass.

"I hate them, hate them, hate them," Severus and Healer Meed chanted together, under the veil's influence.

Potter and Black. They were Severus's enemies. There had to be something he could do about them.

The next thing he knew, there he was, walking down Spinner's End, his new spell buzzing and jangling in his brain, his spell for enemies. All he needed was something with blood in it, to test it on. Tobias was gone to the pub, and Mum, decorating the spindly Christmas tree, quite understood if a teenaged boy didn't want to participate in that. Or so she'd said. Severus, taking what she'd said at face value, had left.

Now he was going down the street, and he saw what he wanted when he reached the Newells', a rat dashing out of the culvert beneath the road. "Petrificus totalus!" he whispered, careful to keep his wand hidden in his coat sleeve. He didn't want the Muggles noticing. That was why, when the rat fell Petrified, he scrambled down to the culvert, grabbed it and ran off as fast as he could. He didn't want anyone to know what he was up to.

Because it was his spell, he told himself, in his and Lily's secret place, in the white snow, beneath the bare trees, by the river of grey ice. His. Even Lily, gone with the rest of her family to her Aunt Rose's for Christmas, wouldn't know about it.

He called up a hoard of memories and laid them out on the table of his mind, all the mockery and humiliation to which Potter and his gang had subjected him.

"I hate Potter," Severus muttered, going over each and every one. "I hate him."

Slowly he drew his wand from his coat sleeve, slowly he lifted his eyes to the Petrified rat lying on the snow, its chest quivering with quick, shallow breaths.

"Sectumsempra," Severus whispered, and the snow around the rat turned red.

It worked. His spell, his spell for enemies, worked.

"It works!" said Healer Meed, sharing in his triumph.

But triumph never seemed to last long for Severus. This particular triumph died for him at the end of his fifth year, when he used Sectumsempra on Potter for the first time and found it did no more than scratch Potter's face. His humiliation before the school and especially his loss of Lily overshadowed it at the time, but he didn't forget his spell. He didn't abandon it. He worked on it hard over the summer (with Lily hating him now, he didn't have to worry about her wondering where he was and what he was up to, about her maybe following him into the woods and finding out). He demonstrated it to Ruskin and Lestrange in the following school year, and taught it to Ruskin. He could feel it growing, maturing, even though (as Ruskin had put it) he never gave it its head. Not until the night Potter and Black nearly fed him to their friend the werewolf.

"You think you'll get away with this--" Severus choked on the words. But it was true. Potter had weighed his chances, before Severus's very eyes, and he honestly thought he could get away with it. "That's all my life is worth to you, isn't it? I'm no more than a piece of rubbish to be kicked out of your path. I think you need to learn what a werewolf attack is like. I think you need to feel what it's like to be torn to bloody rags."

Severus raised his wand. "I hate him," he and Healer Meed whispered together.

"Sectumsempra!" they cried aloud. Together.

The air shimmered; reality flowed around Severus for a moment. When things stabilised, he was back in his chair, facing Healer Meed behind her desk and feeling a bit shaky. She was still shrouded beneath the Veil of Tears. The veil was still. The tree branches, the starling, rabbit and hedgehog, the faces that reminded Severus of Potter, Ruskin and Tobias, the lacy filaments that held them all together--all were still.

Healer Meed lifted her hand to the veil and with a flick of her wrist twitched it off her head. As she held it at arm's length, Severus got a look at her face. What he saw there unnerved him. Her colour was grey, her hair dishevelled, her eyes reddened and wild.

Neither spoke. For his part, Severus thought it better to remain silent as Healer Meed drew her wand and transformed the veil into black mist, which she then decanted into the phial. He looked at the phial after she stoppered it, and at the contents within. His emotions. No longer writhing, they lay quiescent. They'd spent themselves on Healer Meed. Severus stole a guilty glance at her. She gazed at the phial and gave a deep, heavy sigh.

"I--er--" Severus began.

"Oh, don't apologise. I've seen worse." Healer Meed kept her eyes on the phial-full of inert emotion. "But hate...." She sighed again. "It's very draining." She looked up at Severus, appearing calmer than she had a few moments before. "Hate blinded you to everything you didn't want to see in James Potter, so that you could do to him what you wanted to do. I understand. I saw what you saw." She glanced again at the dead black lump inside the phial. "It was there. Unfortunately, for both of you."

That didn't sound good. "Does that mean--?"

"It means that I can now cast Sectumsempra." Healer Meed pocketed her wand and brushed stray strands of hair away from her face, securing them with hairpins to the bun at the back of her head. "Every bit as well as you can, but I won't." Finished with her hair, she placed her hands on her desk and leaned forward. "You'll use what you've learned to create its counter-curse instead."

Severus was as ready for that as he'd ever be, especially if it meant they were finished with the veil. "All right."

Healer Meed smiled. It made her look a little less tired. "Good." The phial caught her eye once more. "Oh. We don't need those any longer." Her gaze sharpened on Severus's emotions and they vanished, leaving the phial empty and sparkling clean.

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