Groping On

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Groping On

Chapter One: What Lurks in The Darkness

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“M-My Lord.”

Wormtail felt himself shudder as the soles of his footwear kissed a part of a vast, silvery-and-black carpet. Apparating into the Dark Lord’s quarters was not exactly a favorite hobby of his.

He felt his vision clear up as he looked down on the unconscious girl in his arms. The Polyjuice Potion was clearly wearing off, which was a rather good sign for him, as he was getting slightly nauseated from going around in the Leaky Cauldron without the Potter boy’s glasses. That wretched boy had a rather appalling sight, just like his distasteful father.

Just an hour ago, Wormtail had used the potion to turn himself into Harry Potter in the Leaky Cauldron where the boy and his two friends were staying, just as his master had asked him to do. He was supposed to have captured the boy with a certain spell he was to cast, but unfortunately, the plan had backfired. His mind clouded with images from the events that occurred just minutes ago, trying to think how he would explain this to his master. He closed his eyes for a quick moment as he remembered how one of the boy’s friends had attempted to block Harry from the spell and got herself hit instead.

The traitor walked up carefully to the area fronting the fireplace, just towards the back of the towering, swiveling olive armchair, behind which rested a very unflattering cross between a cobra and a man. The balding little man knew that the said creature for a wizard would not be pleased with the mistake he had just made, and wished dearly for his life as he reached inches before his master.

Intimidating red eyes gleamed maliciously as the voice with the same owner spoke.

“Fool,” it hissed, as though he had eyes behind the chair’s leather to criticize Wormtail’s mistake all at once. “That is not Harry Potter.”

“I t-tried to get him, m-master... but the girl--”

“You have failed me, Wormtail,” it continued spitefully, as though Wormtail hadn’t spoken at all. “For the very last time.”

Wormtail felt his insides shatter. “My Lord... please... I won’t fail you again! We can—we can”—he searched desperately for an alternative excuse—“we can u-use the girl, my Lord... to provoke the boy—into—into joining—it would shatter him--”

The chair swiveled slowly in front of him, making Wormtail kneel down to the ground in an instant. It was an act he never dared to forget doing, considering

this to be a sign of unswerving loyalty and respect. However, when Wormtail performed it, Voldemort thought of it as a mere act of cowardice.

The hair at the back of his neck stood up as he came face-to-face with his master.

Voldemort fingered his wand as he looked down at his servant. “Pathetic,” he spat coldly. “You are nothing but a pathetic piece of filth, Pettigrew. It would only take two words to kill you, and you would expire in an instant.” Wormtail felt his pleading eyes burn with fear as his master pierced them with his own. “But for once, Wormtail, the absence of your insolence has taken me by great surprise.”

The little balding man felt a jolt of relief. Did that mean—

“Provoke the boy—I have never heard a better triad of words come out of your mouth.” Although it had been a compliment, there was hardly a trace of a happy little smile in Voldemort’s face, if one could call it that. The only thing present there was a line slowly curling into a nasty smirk. “I believe we can expound from that idea… after all, that fool seems to be a real softy for his loved ones. And, what makes it better, Wormtail, is the fact that the mudblood girl was also a fool, as is the boy’s mother. Blocking her little friend from possible death,”—Wormtail caught a sarcastic smirk on his lips—“how very….touching.”

Wormtail looked back down upon realizing that he was staring at his master in fear and anxiety.

But Voldemort did not seem to care. He simply drummed his long, ghastly fingers onto an arm of the chair he was in. “I’ve discerned your weak spot, Harry Potter. Perhaps you shall take more time into thinking things over… now that your little girlfriend is in danger.” His gaze turned back to Wormtail. “Drop her.”

Slightly startled at being called all of a sudden, Wormtail laid the bushy-haired girl onto the carpet. She still had the unconscious orange cat of hers in her arms, he observed. He watched in uncertainty as the Dark Lord raised his wand at the unconscious teenager, and blurted out a spell with hardly any effort.

“Obliviate.”

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Ron raised an eyebrow as Harry prodded his breakfast. He had the same, unfocused look as he had just weeks before in the Leaky Cauldron, where Hermione had gotten hit by an anonymous spell, except this time he wasn’t in the same place anymore. He was now sitting at the Gryffindor table in the Great Hall of Hogwarts.

“Oy, Harry,” Ron called in a rather gentle voice. “You alright?”

Harry didn’t even bother to look up. He started prodding at his food uninterestedly. “Yeah, I’m fine.” But it was clear that he looked otherwise.

Ron sighed and looked at the empty space beside his best friend where Harry’s books were stacked. It looked completely odd to him now; the bushy brown hair he was used to seeing every morning had vanished, and there was a definite lack of something in the air. The atmosphere just felt too… silent. Upon looking back down at his breakfast, he realized that he wasn’t that hungry anymore, either.

“We’ll find her,” Ron blurted out of nowhere. “She’ll be coming to nag us again before you know it, you’ll see.”

Harry forced an extremely quick and tiny smile, paused, and looked up, expression fading quickly as he met Ron’s eyes. “I don’t know, Ron. This just seems so helpless. Everything happened too fast…”

“I’m sure Dumbledore won’t let her---”

“I’m just such an idiot!” Harry muttered, resting his forehead on a hand as he banged an elbow on the table. He did this as though Ron hadn’t said anything at all. “I’ve been such a murderer without even meaning to be! She died, Ron, just like my mum… she tried to save me…”

Some of the people sitting near them were now looking at Harry somewhat curiously. Ron was just looking at him in half-worry and half-sympathy, opening and closing his mouth soundlessly as he struggled to say something to him. “She’s—she’s not dead, Harry!”

Ron had said that so loudly that the people who were subconsciously glancing at them now had a good part of their attention focused at the two boys. Harry felt a tiny puddle of tears form in his bright green eyes and struggled to keep them in there. He slowly took a deep breath. “I’m—I’m sorry.” Not wanting to show his watery eyes to Ron, or anyone for that matter, Harry stood up and made his way back to his dormitory.

The first thing that greeted Harry in the boys’ dorm was an orange, squish-faced cat. Crookshanks, who had disappeared with Hermione at the end of his summer, was found the following day, sprawled on the same spot at the back of the Leaky Cauldron, where the courtyard leading to Diagon Alley stood. It seemed as if it had been there all along, though shortly unconscious, unseen through the smoke when Hermione had disappeared. After a little medical treatment from the Magical Menagerie, Harry agreed to take care of it in place of Hermione.

“’Lo, Crookshanks,” he said dismally. He dropped himself on his four-poster bed and placed an arm behind his head, feeling helpless as ever. Crookshanks leapt beside him, asking for a little pet. “Miss your mum, too?”

He took the furry cat into his hands and placed him on his stomach. Crookshanks simply mewed, and closed his eyes contentedly as Harry made gentle scratches on the cat’s head. He stared into the roof of his four-poster bed quietly, letting a single tear escape from his eye.

Harry didn’t think he’d miss his best friend as much as he did now. Everything was just too sudden and unexpected, and there was no sign at that morning that told him Hermione would be disappearing anytime soon. The absence of her hazel brown eyes, fuzzy golden-brown hair and irksome voice of reason made classes unusually different. Unlike in his past five years of being with her and Ron, his first few sixth-year classes had become unappealing, and the number of unanswerable questions increased considerably in number. The class savior was rather sorely missed, even though everyone had already called her a know-it-all at least once in their lives.

Everything had occurred too suddenly; It seemed like a mere cluster of minutes since the whole incident happened.

He just lay there, thinking about everything that swam across his messed-up mind. He hardly noticed the pouring tears dry up in his cheeks as he closed his eyes subconsciously, falling into the mind-resting state of sleep.

This was, of course, only to open his eyes later to a panicky Ron.

“Harry!! Wake up!”

Harry’s eyes suddenly flicked open. “W-what is it?”, he muttered irritably, eyes squinting at the sudden splurge of sunlight.

“God, Harry, you’ve been sleeping for an hour! Snape’s going to kill us!”

Harry leapt up and realized that Crookshanks was already out of his arms. The both of them knew very well that Snape was not exactly a mushroom when students came in late for his class, let alone apologetic Gryffindors being the last ones to come in.

And, a nice, friendly, and understanding little kitten was the exact opposite of how he acted once they reached the dungeons for Potions class.

“Ten points each for your tardiness,” Snape spat as a way of a morning greeting. “The two of you are getting far too used to Miss Granger’s reminders. I suppose you’ll be competent enough to mash your dung beetles without her, Mr. Potter?”

A snigger rang out from the Slytherin crowd as Ron took his seat.

“Shut up,” Harry snapped back, surprised at not being surprised at himself for saying that as he took his own seat. His peers looked back at him as though he had a horn growing from his scar.

Snape’s beetle black eyes flashed menacingly at the boy. “Watch your tongue, Potter!”, he said in something above a dangerous whisper. “Another ten points for your own waste of spit! I suggest you start acting less like your…father.” A wrinkle appeared at the corner of his abysmally large nose as he sneered at Harry.

Harry thought longingly of glaring back at him, but he knew better. He had caused enough trouble for himself in Snape’s presence with one snide remark. Knowing this, Harry simply sank back into his seat and unsuccessfully tried to fight back a moody face.

“Take out your Demiguise hair clippings and side them along with the other ingredients,” Snape spat coldly at the class, “and turn to page one-hundred and eighty-three of your textbook.”

Harry leaned over to Ron once Snape’s back was turned. “Hope he gets to test our potions. Then the hair clippings can get its full effect of invisibility on the git.”

But Ron didn’t seem to be listening. Instead, he had his eyes narrowed, as though trying to make out something at the front table. And, as it turned out, he was.

“Erm—what’s that on Snape’s arm?”

“Where?”

“Somewhere near his wrist. That burn, there,” Ron replied, pointing to his Potions Professor as a part of Snape’s cloak slid down his arm. His back was turned to them as he drank off a strange liquid. Fortunately for Snape, the other students hadn’t seen him.

It didn’t take long for Harry to spot the burn as well. It looked a nasty reddish-brown, embedded nastily onto his sallow skin. It looked rather unusual, and Harry could actually imagine how Snape’s skin must have crackled into an early boil when he had gotten that. “Where’d you think he got it?”

Ron shrugged. “The sun, maybe,” he said, privately taunting Snape’s vampire-like appearance. “Next thing you know, he’ll be sucking blood out of everyone’s necks.”

Harry shook his head in humour and suddenly stopped. He turned slowly to Ron as he suddenly realized something. “Darn,” he whispered as quietly as he could.

"What?”

“I just thought—Voldemort---”

Ron flinched. “Stop saying the name, Harry,” he whispered back, mashing three dung beetles together.

“But—vampires are Dark creatures, aren’t they?”, Harry asked, pausing midway in his own beetle mashing.

“And so?”

“They went back to Voldemort months ago… and I was thinking…”

Ron raised an eyebrow sarcastically. “What, that Snape’s a vampire?”

Harry merely looked back at him in a worried manner. Snape didn’t seem to take the disappearance of Hermione very seriously. And, Harry had a horribly strong hunch at that very moment that Snape was involved in all this--- including the fact that he was a Dark Creature.

“That’s stupid, Harry,” Ron commented, but he wasn’t looking sure about it at all; especially when he looked back to see Snape wiping off that thick, blood-red liquid from his desk just before he turned back to face the class once more.

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After more than half a day since his first Potions class that morning, Severus Snape walked back to his quarters. It was time to take his potion again, or the symptoms of his secret would come out once more.

But, as he was about to open the doors to his cold, isolated dungeon, he felt a sudden pain at his left arm. If Harry and Ron were here to see this, they would have thought it was the vampire-burn they had seen earlier that day, but they would be wrong all the same. Snape didn’t have to think twice about it. He knew what was burning and, checking to see if anyone was around, he rolled up a sleeve of his robes and took a good look at the mark.

It had all been clear—even without his glasses, Harry would have seen it well. The ghastly skull filled in a very distinct, bony white, and the snake that came out of it seemed almost real. Snape knew what was coming—the Dark Lord needed a little meeting.

With that knowledge in mind, Snape walked faster towards the inside of his dungeon and held on to an extremely odd jar hidden in the darkness of the place. In an instant, he swirled into a different place, colder than his own dungeons in spite of the fire that crackled before a huge, swiveling chair that rested on a black and silver carpet. It was a Portkey to the Dark Lord’s quarters.

“Ah, Severus,” the voice behind the chair hissed. “It’s nice to meet you here once again.”

“My lord,” Snape said, kneeling on a leg as the chair swiveled to face him. “What can I do for you?”

Although the creature before Snape looked absolutely repulsive, he didn’t even bother to flinch. It was as though seeing ugly, slit-nosed, red-eyed maniacs hissing like snakes behind olive swivel chairs was a completely normal, everyday scene for him.

Voldemort’s eyes glistened sharply at his servant. “Your loyalty has recently been unstable, Severus,” he said, “and I believe a little test is at hand.”

Snape remained silent.

“Are you willing to prove yourself to me, Severus?”

One would think there was a glint of hesitancy in his eyes, but as he proved upon speaking, it wasn’t there all along. “Yes, my lord. What is that you would like me to do?”

Voldemort smiled a nasty smile. “You know a certain student by the name of Hermione Granger, do you not?”

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