The Dream of One Night

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Severus

Dinner had been an absolute torture. I had never really liked Christmas, probably since I did not have the happy family memories most people treasured of the holiday. Nevertheless, as a professor, I felt it my duty to attend the school Christmas dinners, though it usually took more than a few glasses of wine for me to make it through all of the nauseating carolling and plum pudding. This year had a different overtone, of course, with the parents of the petrified students in the hall. Dumbledore still led the students in several rounds of Christmas carols, and everywhere the flash and bang of Christmas crackers drove one to distraction, but on the whole the celebrations were much more sedate than in past years.

After dinner I returned directly to my rooms to await Avrille, who would not be coming for another hour. I passed the time by pacing back and forth in front of the fireplace, checking it every few seconds in case I saw a flash of green signalling an early arrival of Avrille. While I paced, I ran through mentally over and over what I was going to say to her. However, no matter how many times I said the words to myself, I couldn't make the end picture of Avrille's horrified face change. There simply was no delicate way of telling the love of your life that you used to be a Death Eater.

At five of nine, I heard a quiet knock at my door. For a split instant, I thought perhaps Avrille had forgotten to take the Floo, but just as I turned away from the fireplace, the firelight turned green. I looked back to see Avrille stepping out from the hearth with a grin on her face. I quickly held a finger up to my lips to silence her, then walked over to the door.

Upon opening it I saw Gregory Goyle and Vincent Crabbe standing in the corridor, holding their shoes in their hands and rubbing their foreheads as though they hurt.

"What is it?" I asked curtly, incredibly annoyed at being bothered at this time of night.

"I... I don't know, sir..." Goyle muttered, still massaging his temple. "Someone stole our shoes."

"What are you talking about, Goyle? Your shoes are in your hand!" I snapped. Goyle looked down and seemed genuinely surprised to see the shoes there after all. Crabbe seemed about to fall over and was barely able to keep his eyes open. It appeared the two of them were somehow filled with a different kind of Christmas spirit and were stone drunk.

"Get back to your dormitories," I ordered, "And be glad I'm not docking points for disturbing me." I slammed the door in their faces then stormed back into the parlour where Avrille was waiting for me, still standing beside the fireplace.

"What was that?" she asked with raised eyebrows.

"I don't know, and I don't care," I replied and flung myself down onto the sofa. My true desire had been to take Avrille in my arms and drown myself in the sweetness of her lips, but I knew if I allowed myself to do that, I would lose the little bit of resolve I had mustered. Avrille sat down quietly beside me and seemed to be waiting for me to speak. The only noise in the room was the faint, regular ticking of the clock on the mantel. I listened to it, telling myself that in ten seconds I would tell her. In five seconds. In three...

I felt like my lips were soldered together. The past twenty-four hours had been the happiest of my life, and I knew what I was about to say could end it all.

Finally I forced myself to murmur, "I have to tell you something. Something that will most likely shock and disturb you."

I stared fixedly at Avrille's shoulder, unable to bear seeing the mixture of horror and disgust in her calm eyes that I normally saw in he looks of others whenever the phrase "Death Eater" was mentioned. Avrille took my hand in both of hers. Yet, instead of comforting me, feeling her soft warmth made me want to break away from her. I felt like I would contaminate her if she were touching me when I divulged my secret. But knowing it would probably just hurt her if I took it away, I let my hand lay limply between hers.

"I... used to be a Death Eater."

Still looking at Avrille's shoulder, I watched her body for any physical reaction. She remained still, though her hands squeezed mine a little tighter. She didn't say anything right away, which I hoped meant she was willing to hear an explanation. I decided to try and talk it out.

"It was a long time ago. I was young and foolish. I had just returned from Italy, and it seemed as if every one of my old friends from Hogwarts had joined up with the Dark Lord. I didn't have any other connections, I felt lost, so I allowed myself to become entangled in the whole sordid affair. There is nothing else in my life of which I am more deeply ashamed. I cannot emphasise enough how much it disgusts me to have to tell you this, but I felt that hiding it any longer from you would be deceitful."

Avrille stopped me by taking my chin in her fingers and moving my head so I had to look her in the eyes. Her brow was furrowed, but she didn't appear to be angry.

"This has been killing you inside, hasn't it?" she asked tenderly. I was so surprised by the worry in her tone that it took me a moment to comprehend the words she said. I couldn't believe that all she seemed to care about was how upset I was having to tell her.

I finally reiterated, full of confusion, "Avrille... I was a Death Eater. I was by proxy allied with the men who murdered your father in an attempt to capture you."

Avrille dropped her hand from my face but still kept her eyes locked with mine. "I am well aware of what a Death Eater is and what they did in the past," she said.

"But don't you care?" I asked, almost in desperation.

Finally Avrille seemed to grow angry. "Yes, of course I care, Severus!" she said sharply. "I care because you care. The remorse and agony in your eyes right now say far more about you as a man than whatever stupid things you might have done years ago."

She grabbed both of my hands with hers and squeezed them tightly. Then she said in a softer tone, "I wouldn't care if you told me you were actually the Dark Lord himself. Nothing you could ever say could make me stop loving you." Avrille finally dropped her eyes from mine and looked down at our entwined fingers.

I felt my eyes burn, and for a heartbeat I honestly couldn't think why. I couldn't even remember the last time I had cried. I didn't spill any actual tears now, but that was more from years of practising sealing off my emotions than from not truly feeling her words. I was not worthy of a woman like her who would still declare her devotion to me so faithfully after I had revealed the deepest shames of my past.

Now that the initial painful step had been crossed, I felt it would be best to continue. It was if my past was a painful wound that needed to be lanced and flushed out before it could heal.

"The most important thing to me for you to know is that I realised my gross error in judgment before the Dark Lord fell. I did not simply talk my way out of punishment after the fact, like some others," I had to bite my tongue to keep myself from saying, "like Lucius."

"Why did you change your mind?" Avrille asked gently, moving closer to me on the sofa so that she was right against me. She rested her cheek on my shoulder, and I found it much easier to speak without the weight of her eyes on me.

"Because of a terrible mistake of my own. By passing on some information I overheard to the Dark Lord, I inadvertently set the course for the him to hunt down one of my closest friends, Lily Evans. That is, Lily Potter."

"Was she Harry Potter's mother?" Avrille asked, looking up at me slightly.

I gave an ironic smile. "Yes. Even though we had been in rival Houses here at school, Lily in Gryffindor and I, of course, in Slytherin, we shared many of the same interests and soon became close. Lily was gifted at Potions, and we were always in the same classes. I would even go so far as to say that I thought of her rather like a little sister, even though we were the same age. Very few people genuinely cared about me like Lily did.

"We hadn't seen each other since leaving Hogwarts, but we still wrote occasionally. When I realized my information had been interpreted by the Dark Lord to mean that his largest threat was Lily's infant son, I was shown first-hand the depths of depravity to which the Dark Lord was willing to descend in order to secure his position as the most powerful wizard in the world. It was enough to snap me back to my senses. I immediately contacted Dumbledore and told him everything I knew, hoping it would help keep Lily safe. Without hesitation, I became a double agent for him and the Order of the Phoenix, who were working to take the Dark Lord down. I was able to aid them for six months before the Dark Lord disappeared."

I paused and stared into the fire. I hadn't bothered to charm it, so it was dying a natural death. Only a few struggling flames still clung to the glowing logs, casting Avrille and me in a soft light.

"I don't know if it was even worth it in the end. Lily and her husband were still murdered and her son left parentless. I always wondered, what if? What if I had just worked a little harder to get more information out of the Death Eaters? What if I had been less of a coward and taken more of a public stance against the Dark Lord?"

"You would be dead, that's what," Avrille said matter-of-factly. "And if you call yourself a coward again, I'm leaving this room. I've never heard of a more brave thing in my life than what you did. You shouldn't confuse cowardice with common sense. I'm sure you were able to do much more good as a spy than if you had openly defected and gotten yourself murdered as well."

My heart swelled at her words. That was, after all, what I had been trying to tell myself over the years, but it helped to have it validated by the most important person in my life.

"Am I right to assume that the Death Eaters never found out about your switch in allegiance?" Avrille asked.

I shook my head. "No. Like you said, if they had, I wouldn't be alive right now."

"So by telling me this, you've basically put your life in my hands," Avrille said quietly, raising her head to look me in the eyes once more.

"It was already," I whispered and finally allowed myself the indulgence of her kiss. I ran my fingers down her silken throat as I kissed her deeply, able to feel the gentle throbbing of her pulse beneath them. I poured every last ounce of pain and doubt into that desperate kiss, emptying myself of it completely as I allowed Avrille's love to fill me instead.

Avrille wrapped her arms around my neck and pressed her lips against my ear. "I'm so glad I didn't know you back then," she whispered. "I don't think I could have breathed knowing you were doing something so dangerous."

"I know," I said softly. The truth was, if I had known Avrille at the time, I probably wouldn't have risked my life like I had. Back then I had nothing to lose. As much as I had cared for Lily, I could never have joined Dumbledore if I had been in love with Avrille. If I had been caught, it would not have been me whom the Dark Lord tortured for my punishment.

It was growing late, and I still hadn't broached the subject I had originally wished to speak to Avrille about. As soon as I could bear to, I gently removed Avrille's arms from me so I could talk to her once more face to face.

"I didn't tell you all of this tonight to simply clear my own conscience. If I had believed it all possible to leave you in ignorance instead of burdening you with this information, then believe me I would have. However, I have a plan in mind which could not possibly succeed unless I knew I had your full trust. In order to do that, I had to first place all my trust in you, which I have."

Again, I knew that this was not one hundred per cent honest. To be totally truthful would be to divulge the details of the Death Wish curse to Avrille, but it was the grossest understatement to say the thought of that conversation was uncomfortable. I liked to think that there wasn't much I was afraid of, but telling Avrille how desperately I wanted to make love to her every second I saw her, and exactly why that wasn't a good idea, was certainly something that made me nervous. All thoughts of that subject shelved firmly in the deepest corner of my mind, I continued on.

"We've never really discussed the topic before, but I was wondering if you have ever actively tried to restore your magic usage."

Avrille frowned and shook her head. "No, I was always told by others it was best to just leave it and let things take their course. Everyone was convinced that if it was ever going to return, it would come back naturally."

"A point with which I disagree," I said and stood. Now that I was thinking on a logical line, I felt like I had to move. I started to pace in front of the sofa once more with my arms crossed, Avrille following my progress back and forth with her eyes.

"It is my belief that if your magic was ever going to return naturally, it would have done so long ago. However, I found it as strange as you that you should have a vision all of a sudden after so many years, and it made me wonder if it could be a sign that your magic was trying to break through. When it stopped manifesting, you weren't even of an age where you were able to consciously control it in the first place, correct?" I stopped in front of Avrille.

"Pretty much. I had done countless things unintentionally, of course, but my parents always stressed to me the need to control my powers since they appeared to be so much greater than other people's. Before I was even allowed to use my powers intentionally, I was already far better at suppressing them. The problem is that I can't remember very much from around when my father was killed, so it's hard for me to remember exactly what my powers were like at that time."

I nodded and thought silently for a moment, biting my thumb distractedly, then resumed my pacing. "How large of a time frame is it, would you say, of not being able to remember a thing? Just a few days? A week? A month?"

Avrille sat back against the sofa, her eyes squinted and focused on the shadowed ceiling as she tried to remember. I watched her intently, somehow knowing that the answer to her problem was directly correlated to her answer to this question.

Finally she replied, "I would say a good couple of weeks. I vaguely remember the week right before he was killed, which I suppose is normal since I didn't have anything specifically eventful that would make me remember it any more than someone else my age can remember when she was nine. On that particular day, all I can remember is looking out the window and actually seeing one of those men kill my father. My mother says she grabbed me right after and pulled me away with her through the Floo. I don't remember anything else until perhaps two weeks later when a teacher came to our house, and my mom tried to make me do some magic for her. I found that no matter how hard I tried I couldn't do anything."

I nodded in satisfaction and dropped back down onto the sofa beside her once more. "So, I think it is safe to assume that if you somehow stopped your own magic, perhaps as a by-product of trying to forget witnessing such a horrific event, then whatever you did to yourself occurred within those two weeks."

Avrille shrugged. "That sounds right, but I don't know how I could ever find out what happened if I can't remember it."

I smiled faintly. "But I can. I'm rather skilled at Legilimency, which is the art of entering another's thoughts. I believe that if you'll allow me to use Legilimency on you and actually see your memories, there might be a clue to be found there which you would not normally notice yourself.

"The mind is a many layered structure and fiercely focused on self-preservation. If an outside force threatens the mind, it will immediately contain the threat and secret it away to the deepest parts of the unconscious. By using Legilimency, I might be able to, over time, peel away the protective layers your mind has built around those painful memories and find an answer to your problem. I must warn you, though, it could take weeks or even months for me to get that far, and in the end, it might end up a fruitless endeavour."

"You would do that for me?" Avrille asked quietly.

I placed my hand on her cheek. "I would do anything for you, if you'd let me."

Avrille dropped her eyes back down to her lap, the dim firelight catching a shimmer beneath her lashes.

"To be able to do magic... I don't even know what that would be like. When can we start?" she asked. "Tonight?"

"I would want to wait a few days until you're better rested," I replied. "Do you think you will be able to sleep from now on? The Legilimency is going to take just as much concentration on your part as it will mine."

Avrille nodded in firm determination. "I'm still uneasy with the thought of having visions again, but I think I can sleep all right as long as I know I'll be doing something soon."

"Good," I said and walked over to a cabinet. I retrieved the vial I had prepared earlier in the day and brought it over to Avrille.

"This is another infusion of what I gave you last night, though in a lower dosage. This should keep you asleep for eight hours, so if you take it soon, you'll be back on a normal sleep schedule. And also, I think it best if you slept in your own bed tonight."

Avrille looked at me shrewdly and asked, "Are you sure you're not reading my mind right now?"

"I would never do that without your knowledge or consent," I said, handing her the vial.

"I know, I was just joking," she said as she held the vial up to the light to make sparkles glimmer through the liquid. "Can I come back here tomorrow, just to see you?" she asked, looking aside at me.

Forcing back the answer that what I really wanted was for her to move in with me here, I replied, "I need to take care of some business in London tomorrow. That will free me up for the remainder of the holiday so we can work regularly on your memory."

Avrille pocketed the vial then, with a large sigh and a languorous stretch, said, "I think I should go to bed now. I'll still really tired from missing so much sleep this week." I couldn't keep my heart from sinking a little as she said this, although I knew that sleep was the most important thing for her at the moment. However, that didn't stop me from wanting to take her in my arms and not let her go until sunrise.

Avrille stood up. She made to move towards the fireplace but then hesitated and turned back to me.

"Would it be all right if I came down here tomorrow while you're gone? I somehow feel safer here..."

I took a few paces so I was right beside her. "If you wish," I said, wrapping my arms around her wait. Avrille placed her hands on either side of my face, lacing her fingers through my hair, and pulled me to her lips. I almost wish she hadn't. Every time she kissed me made it so much harder to say goodbye, even if it was only for a day.