Wrought In Stone

Snape shifted jars around in the supply cupboard, checking levels of his stocks. The idiot first-years had already used up all the lacewings. It would take at least two weeks to receive a new shipment, and he had scheduled Kerpensky's Draught (which sounded ominous, but in reality only cured hiccups) for next week. Unless he dipped into his own supply... Snape snorted at his own audacity.

A student's textbook was wedged between the dried mugwort and a dusty old box of salamander tongues. 'Should throw that out,' Snape noted. He had long since found that grated salamander liver was a much more effective substitute. As he took the book and box out, a scrap of parchment fell from between the pages of the former. Snape picked it up. There was a crude, yet rather vivid sketch of his own person wearing a moth-eaten dress and a hat with a stuffed vulture on it. The professor snorted again. In spite of what his colleagues, students, former classmates, fellow Death Eaters, and the Dark Lord might think, he did have a sense of humor. But better remember to give the third-year Gryffindor class detention next Saturday. Potter hadn't even begun to make a dent in that tub of semi-rotten flobberworms.

When Hagrid burst into the dungeon wailing like a stuck Porlock, Snape automatically strode smartly back to his office and took out the heavy satchel that he had filled with just about everything he thought he could ever need in the event of an emergency. As they hurried up the steps, Snape had to jump the steps two at a time to keep up with Hagrid's pace. They passed one of the entrances to the Slytherin common room, and two first-years gawked at the sight of their Head of House and the barbarous gamekeeper running up the stairs at breakneck speed.

"Cooper! Bletchley! Back inside!" Snape snapped at them. The two girls darted back behind the enchanted portcullis and it shifted back into place.

Once they reached the hospital wing, Hagrid stopped abruptly. "Dumbledore said I'm not to come in," he grunted.

Snape had run into the back of him, which was rather like smashing into a brick wall. "Yes, well, then get out of the way," he muttered irritably, half-dazed.

Hagrid opened the door. "Good luck, Prof- I mean Severus."

Katie Bell lay in a hospital bed tied at both the wrists and ankles with cords. Her entire body was straining upwards, one continuous arch ending in a face contorted with a silent scream.

"She lost her voice about a minute ago," Dumbledore said from beside her. He was waving his wand in passes over her entire body, washing Katie with a rain of golden light. Snape thought he heard a strain of music emitting from the wand- or perhaps it was infused with the spell the headmaster was casting. "I've stabilized it, but only for a few more minutes. Work fast, Severus."

"The Dark Object?" Snape said.

"Over there."

It was concealed from his vision by a cloth, but Snape had seen it too many times in Borgin and Burke's display case to forget its detail. A silver necklace, heavy with opals clustered in bunches like overripe grapes. Every one of Snape's movements was now characterized by a fierce sort of purpose. Dumbledore watched him intently. These periods of intense focus were the only thing, the Headmaster had come to realize, that resembled happiness for his colleague.

Snape opened the satchel and began making vigorous flicking motions with his wand. The collapsible cauldron zoomed onto a trolley next to the bed and hovered a few inches above its surface. Another flick, and a purple fire burst out underneath it. Meanwhile, the varicolored jars and vials began to orbit around him at just outside arm's reach thanks to a few more muttered spells. Snape brought out tools: mortar, pestle, cutting board, knives of various metals, and others. He paused for only one moment, breathing in deeply and staring at Katie's twisting form.

He began.

As each ingredient was needed, Snape called for it and held out his hand. The desired jar flew into his palm. When he was finished with it, he threw it over his shoulder and it sped back into orbit around his head.

It was actually only one of several enchanted necklaces that had been created. This particular curse was a favorite of the Italian witch Donna Margoules, who had wrought the pieces herself. They were then placed in the jewelry shops where her husband bought presents for his mistresses. The necklaces were charmed to cause death only to women.

They originally caused a slow, painful, wasting death that took several months to run its course. However, the curse that Donna Margoules had placed on it had changed over the march of years. Much like a good Italian wine, it appeared to have strengthened and sharpened with age. Most of the necklaces had been bought by the Ministry of Magic or the European Wizarding Council and either destroyed or used for curse research. Snape had not heard of any recent breakthroughs.

After a tense minute or so, Snape paused and examined his work. The potion in the cauldron simmered greenish gold, throwing up sparks. The last few ingredients now were key. Snape called the tiniest of all the phials to his hand. It was powdered unicorn horn, which had to be stored in a diamond container to maintain its purity. He had to measure out half of the phial down to an exact number of grains, but his hand was so practiced that it was as easy as pouring water. When the powder was added, the golden sparks became white. Next, he took an eyedropper and drew out a small measure of laudanum. He very carefully added three drops. The potion stopped bubbling immediately and the surface became glassy. Snape took the cauldron off the fire and siphoned a small amount off into a curiously shaped stone bowl. The bowl had a small section cut out of one of the sides, about wide enough to accommodate a forearm.

Dumbledore's eyes widened as he recognized what Snape was holding- an old-fashioned device used by doctors when it was customary to cure diseases by bleeding, though they were traditionally made of porcelain. "Severus!"

"It's drastic, I know!" He said, speaking for the first time. "But she doesn't have anything to lose." His voice was oddly flat. Dumbledore did not speak, but nodded grimly in encouragement. The golden light that washed over Katie's body had been fading the entire time, and was now only a faint glow that he stirred with his wand. "I trust you, Severus," Dumbledore said quietly, but his eyes were on Katie.

Severus put on his thickest dragonhide gloves. Now began the more unorthodox portion of the procedure. He picked up the scarf (that garish red and yellow!) that was wrapped around the agent of all these agonies. Without a moment's hesitation, Snape shook open the folds of the scarf to expose the cascade of glittering opals peeping from the intricately twining silver chain. He grasped the largest opal in the center with thumb and forefinger, inwardly blessing dragons for having such tough, magic-resistant skins. Using his wand in the other hand, he made a short, cutting motion, and the opal came off. He crushed this into dust with his mortar and pestle, adding a bit of jarvey bile to help it dissolve. The jewel hissed and spouted a bit of malignant black steam as it broke. He poured the powder into the small measure of potion that was in the stone bleeding tray.

Everything was ready.

Snape laid down his wand and picked up his most finely edged silver knife, passing it once through the purple flames to sterilize it, then dipping it into the solution that remained in the cauldron. When he withdrew it, the silver knife now shimmered a poisonous green color. He grabbed Katie's left arm tightly. "On three, release the spell," he said curtly to Dumbledore. A thin sheen of sweat gleamed on his forehead.

"One..." He cut the cord binding Katie's left arm, which began to twist violently. Snape held her with a firm grip.

"Two..." Katie began to shake violently all over. There were flecks of foam forming at the corners of her mouth and spilling onto her cheeks.

"Three!"

The golden light vanished, and in the same instant, Snape slashed a deep gash in Katie's wrist. There was a sudden clang as the cauldron fell over, having been turned over by the violent exodus of the potion inside it. Of its own accord, all of the contents in the cauldron flew towards the wound in the girl's arm as if magnetically attracted. Within seconds, all of the green liquid had entered Katie's body through the bloody gash.

This, however, did not seem to have the effect of curing the curse, but rather to increase its torture. Katie's twitching and convulsions seemed to redouble. Suddenly, she found her voice again, and the hospital wing began to echo with tortured screams. Dumbledore watched in horror, as, beginning from near her wrist, the veins in her arm began to etch themselves in green beneath her skin. The green lines raced up the arm and began to radiate outward, twisting in on themselves, following their minute courses throughout the body.

He did not cry out, but Dumbledore gave an involuntary flinch as Katie's neck became mapped with crisscrossing dark paths.

Snape watched intently, waiting for some sign that only he knew how to interpret. All of a sudden, the green lines marking out the veins and arteries turned black.

Snape wrenched Katie's arm down and forced her wrist into the bleeding tray. The encroaching lines, which had begun to spider up towards her face, began to recede, slowly at first, then faster and faster. A black liquid began to flow into the tray. In a few more moments, the stone bowl was full of a sludgy brackish stuff.

Katie's screams faded, and her body collapsed onto the bed. Her face was deathly pale, bloodless, but no longer twisted with pain.

"She'll be all right now, but she'll need a transfusion as soon as possible," Snape said very calmly. However, he found that he needed to sit down and did so quite abruptly on the nearest bed. Dumbledore finished knitting together the edges of the wound in Katie's wrist. The entire procedure, from start to finish, had not taken more than three minutes.

Snape knew that Dumbledore wanted to ask him how he had done it. He also knew that, though Dumbledore was curious almost to a fault, he also had a remarkable degree of tact and wouldn't press him about it until later. Madame Pomfrey had appeared almost as quickly as if she had Apparated, and began to administering medicines to temporarily alleviate the consequences of the severe blood loss. She spared a moment, though, to level a look of deep gratitude in his Snape's direction and pressed a cup into his hands filled with Pepper-Up Potion. Dumbledore also nodded in his direction, a small smile of pride, but mostly of relief, appearing amidst an expression that spoke mostly of utter exhaustion.

"She'll need to go to St. Mungo's, at any rate," Snape said. "They'll recognize what I've... what she needs to recover."

"Thank you, Severus." The words reverberated with emotion.

He knew he deserved it, but Snape always felt embarrassed by gratitude, especially from those he admired. Therefore it was no small comfort when Dumbledore allowed him to take his leave. He walked down to the dungeons without really being conscious of his steps and, arriving at his chamber, fell onto his bed and knew nothing until the next day.

****

"The laudanum you wanted." Avery tossed the crystal phial carelessly at him. Snape snatched it out of the air and glowered at the other Death Eater. He turned it over with long, precise fingers and frowned immediately. "There should be twenty ounces in here, Avery," he hissed. "I'm not paying for your drug habit."

Avery smiled sourly at Snape and withdrew a smaller phial from the folds of his robe. "Nothing gets away from you, huh, Snivellus?" He slammed it bad-temperedly on the tabletop and made sure to bang the door loudly as he left.

Snape made an impatient sound to himself and turned his back to Avery. He was rapidly becoming disillusioned with the Dark Lord's judge of character. Merit counted for nothing, and though Avery was a hedonistic, pompous fool, he was pureblood. Though his own father was a Muggle, Severus doubted that he would have bungled the last raid as spectacularly as Avery had. Ollivander had evacuated the premises long before they had arrived, and two of the new recruits had been captured by Aurors.

Yet perhaps Voldemort had learned. The next major assignment had been passed to Snape. Lucius had hinted that success in this might elevate him enough in the Dark Lord's eyes that his mother's crime might be overlooked. Small thrills of excitement sparked in Severus' belly.

To business. He conjured up memories of Marlene McKinnon from Hogwarts- a very tall, bossy sort of Ravenclaw (was there any other kind?) with a round face. She hadn't seemed particularly spectacular then, but she had recently become a painful annoyance. After Hogwarts, she had gone to Durmstrang and done post-graduate work on the Imperius curse. As a result, she had an uncanny knack for recognizing its symptoms and they had lost control over several agents in the Ministry as a result, a particularly shattering blow being an Auror who was just about to be assigned to guarding the Minister of Magic. She had also interviewed several recent detainees at Azkaban to determine if they had indeed been enchanted. This had cost them several more comrades. It was also suspected that she was involved in that counter-revolutionary group of Dumbledore's that had been harassing them even more efficiently as of late.

Snape watched the liquid in the cauldron bubbling and throwing up sparks. McKinnon was usually heavily guarded, but there had been an extremely fortuitous turn of events lately. There had been a sudden death in the family (McKinnon was Muggle-born), and she would be hurrying home to the service that night.

It was he who had thought of using the priest, and even Lucius had admitted that this was a particular stroke of genius on his part. McKinnon's hometown was too small to merit its own pastor, and as a result, one had to be called in from the parish twenty miles away in Wickingham. And though there had been protections placed around McKinnon's family, there were no such precautions taken with Father Humboldt. No doubt they would do a superficial check of him, but McKinnon would probably be too distraught to notice anything off, and there was nothing out of the ordinary in a priest administering communion.

Black had sent word three hours ago that he had met with the Holy Father en route. All that remained was his own bit of alchemy.

Snape almost wished that he could see it. Too bad it was just a small country service- the effect would have been so much more dramatic if it had happened in one of those Gothic cathedrals. The Muggles thrashing around under their stone idols, stiffening gradually under those cold, unseeing eyes. An observant viewer at that moment might have caught something of a smile playing about Snape's lips, almost as if he were daydreaming.

Black's owl was tapping on the window. Time to stop fantasizing and finish up. He took the eyedropper and drew up a measure of laudanum.

With the utmost care, he added three drops.

****

The Potions dungeon smelled abominably; during the mass detention, one of the third-year Gryffindors had "accidentally" dropped a Filibuster's No-Heat, Wet-Start Firecracker into the tub of flobberworms. Snape made the students spend the rest of the detention period cleaning the place by hand, and even then he hadn't been able to get some of the stuff off the ceiling with his strongest Scourgify.

"Daniels, since you obviously enjoy spending your weekends here, you can report here every Saturday for the rest of the month."

After the Gryffindors shuffled out single-file, muttering darkly to each other, Dumbledore entered, one of those inexplicably broad smiles that Snape found a trifle unnerving fixed on his face.

"Katie Bell will make a full recovery, from what the Healers told me. Very admirable, Severus." Dumbledore beamed, but Snape merely stared at the ground in uncomfortable silence. He had done what was asked of him, no more. Shouldn't this sort of thing be expected of him?

A bit of flobberworm detached itself from the ceiling and dropped with an audible splat onto the stone floor. Professor Snape realized that this was the time for him to explain himself.

"I used the Lithops Elixir," he said evenly. "But I expect you already knew that."

"The Healers informed me as much. I know that it worked, but I'm curious as to why."

Snape tented his fingers together. "The Lithops Elixir is one of the most powerful and quick-acting poisons that I know of. It turns the blood of the victim into stone. Fairly gruesome, no?"

Dumbledore did not fail to notice the look that flitted across Snape's face- something almost dreamy in nature.

"But as I've discovered, Lithops has curious affinitive properties. It is attracted to other substances of Dark Magic. That was the key to curing the girl. Though this all would have gone to pot if someone hadn't had the forethought to bring the Dark Object."

"You have Harry Potter to thank for that," Dumbledore said, his eyes twinkling with amusement. The corners of Snape's mouth turned down and he chose to ignore this subtle jab. Of course, always had to be Potter.

"So- my procedure," he said briskly, pretending to ignore the last bit of the conversation. You'll remember that I dipped the knife into the Lithops solution before I used it on the girl." Dumbledore nodded.

"When I made the incision, the bit of potion that was on the knife was attracted to the curse in her body. It was quickly drawn in, and the potion in the cauldron was attracted to both the bit of Lithops that had already entered, and then through that also to the necklace curse."

"Ah," Dumbledore said.

"The poison spread throughout her bloodstream, drawing the curse to itself from all around, wherever it was in the girl's body," Snape said. His eyes were now seemingly focused on nothing. "I myself do not really know how the curse on the necklace operates, or in which tissues it resides, but luckily, it worked out as I had hoped."

"But why weren't there any effects from Lithops?"

"Ah," Snape bared his teeth in a sardonic, crooked smile. "That is one of the more ingenious aspects of the interaction between the two substances. While the poison moved through the girl's veins and attracted the curse to itself, somehow that restrained its activity. You'll remember that we could see the poison marked out in green moving throughout the veins. That's not the normal symptoms. That's why it was crucial to watch for the exact moment when the poison turned black."

"At which point it would have finished collecting the surrounding Dark Magic into itself, and then began its work on Katie," Dumbledore said softly.

Snape kept his eyes focused on Dumbledore's face, but his expression was unreadable. Why did he keep repeating the girl's name?

"So then, the bit in the bowl... why hadn't the potion in the cauldron been drawn to it before? And what exactly happened with that?"

Snape went to the cupboard and brought out the bowl which he had used, which was now misshapen and damaged beyond repair; it looked as if an acid had eaten through it. "It's stone," he said simply. "Another one of the properties associated with Lithops is that while it turns blood into stone, it is itself repelled by actual stone. Therefore, until I made direct contact between the blood and the solution, the bowl formed an impenetrable barrier the Elixir could not cross."

"The solution in the bowl had an entire stone from the necklace dissolved in it. The girl only touched the necklace for a moment with her fingertip, so the difference in concentration was at least a thousand times greater. When I forced the wound into the solution in the bleeding tray, the stronger pull exerted by the Elixir containing the larger dosage attracted the potion that remained in her veins, drew it out of the body, and the nascent curse along with it."

"Ah." Dumbledore said quietly. Another long silence stretched between them. Snape resented being made to feel like he was a student again, awaiting approval from his professor. Of course, he couldn't really place the blame on Dumbledore for his own emotions. He also couldn't help pressing an advantage.

"Sir, as you can see, this is a crying example of what I have been trying to explain to the rest of the Order. The "Dark" Arts, so called, are not evil in unto themselves. Had I not had a detailed knowledge of the Lithops Elixir, I wouldn't have been able to save the girl."

"Katie is alive, thanks to you," Dumbledore said simply.

"And yet you still disparage my methods," Snape said quietly, but his voice was tinged with bitterness. "If we could delve even deeper into the Dark Arts-" he broke off here, then restarted:

"If you let me, sir, I know I could find a way to exploit the Dark Lord's methods to our benefit. I know there's an answer. The Dark Arts are too strong... they can only be defeated by their own kind. We can only defeat Lord Voldemort by beating him at his own game."

Dumbledore looked at Severus patiently. "My answer is still no, Severus," he said quietly. "It worked in this case, but you are talking about a more active and terrible evil than a cursed trinket wrought by a jealous wife. Even if we deposed Tom using those methods, it would be only a half-victory, perhaps even worse than defeat."

Snape recognized those words, and he knew that Dumbledore had chosen them deliberately. How many times had his research ideas been shot down by Dumbledore as "crossing the line", using those very words? He decided to rise to the occasion. Why not pull out all the stops? "Unicorn blood could have saved Cedric Diggory," he said aggressively, but he winced at the sulky tone of his voice. "It could have saved Potter's parents. And yet you refuse to let me test its use, based on some outdated superstition."

A shadow of agony passed over Dumbledore's features. "Severus, you are too quick to abandon decency. You think that any means are acceptable, so long as they achieve the ends you want."

"Slytherin," he replied sardonically, tapping his chest with one finger.

"I don't think we'll ever resolve this debate," Albus said wearily. "I, for one, know that Voldemort's defeat will not come about by trickery or an act of evil."

Had he been discussing this with any other man, Severus would have sneered openly at him. But instead he felt... deflated. He knew the headmaster must have his reasons for believing what he did- he wasn't a fool, and he wasn't insane (outward appearances aside). Yet certain aspects of his mentor's philosophy were completely opaque to him.

"Well, put my name on the card for Miss McKinnon whenever you're passing it around the teacher's lounge," he said irritably.

Dumbledore stopped dead in his tracks on his way out the door. "Her name is Katie Bell," the headmaster reminded him quietly. He left the dungeon without another word.

Severus made no outward sign of emotion, but inwardly his blood had frozen. "Of course," he said. "My mistake."