A Merciless Affection

Chapter 7: Then My World Was Shattered

"Sarah?" Someone was shaking her. "You can't sleep here, Sarah."

Her eyelids were so heavy. But consciousness began filtering through the confusion of sleep. Professor Snape's voice.

She opened her eyes with a jolt. He was still lying next to her, leaning on his elbow, jostling her by the arm. His brow was furrowed, and his mouth bent just short of a frown.

"Oh..." she groaned, rolling over onto her back. She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. Sand. Ouch. But...no, it was some remaining trace of that heightened sensation, she realized. Memories of what had happened flooded through her.

She was still alive, though she had no right whatsoever to be.

It was like dying. Dying and waking up as someone else. Where was Sarah? She turned her head toward him. It was mad to look for answers there, but she was low on other solid frames of reference at the moment.

A shadow caught her eye. Just a shadow under the folds of his sleeve, where it had been pulled up taut by the pressure of his elbow against the bed. A shadow that suggested.... The trickle of ice along her spine brought her fully awake, although she wasn't moving, wasn't breathing.

He sat up, and the shadow was gone, if it had ever been anything more than a trick of the light. "You've got to get back to your dormitory," he urged. "It's almost nine o'clock."

"What?!" Sarah snapped upright herself. How could it have gotten so late? Had she drowsed that long? She slid hurriedly off the bed and began trying to rearrange herself. I'm going to have to look up a charm for this. "How am I going to get upstairs?" she asked, in sudden despair. She had just realized that with curfew coming, Slytherins would be roaming down the dungeon corridors on their way to their common room.

"There's another stairway. It only comes out on the first floor." He approached the back of the portrait door. With a whispered word, he lifted whatever safeguards he had placed on it. "Quickly!"

The door swung open to reveal a dimly lit, narrow passage; it was difficult to see more than a dozen feet in either direction. "The main corridor is that way." He pointed to the left, then guided her to the right. "The stairway is the second opening on the right-hand side. Don't move an inch until you hear my voice, and don't light up your wand until you start up the stairs." He closed the portrait door, with her very firmly outside it.

Sarah found herself involuntarily shrinking back against the opposite wall, although the passage was so narrow it didn't help much. The painting--no better for being so dimly lit--depicted a skeletal figure with a scythe sitting atop a full moon. Its tattered robes flowed in an unseen wind, and it swung the scythe menacingly, while a dark bird flew in and out of the moonlight.

Sarah shut her eyes, mindful of the hazards of failing to be alert, but unwilling to be forced to examine the painting for however long it took Snape to get out through the Potions classroom door. What she saw against her eyelids was not much of an improvement. Had that been a Dark Mark on his arm? That would hardly be a surprise, would it? Fate seemed to be running true to course. And there had always been rumors about the former sympathies of the Potions master. It had never been worth worrying about before; all she knew was that he had not been a part of the Darkglass family's rather sinister social circle. But he had as much as admitted, hadn't he, that there were darker things in his past than terrorizing his students? Still, to have gone that far.... Sarah knew all too well just how little things really changed, no matter what people pretended in public.

He said that Dumbledore knew. Sarah had only met the headmaster twice, but he impressed her as the sort of person it would be very hard to keep secrets from. It didn't matter anyway, did it? This couldn't go on forever. Wouldn't, anyway. Did it matter how thin the ice was if you were skating so close to the shore?

Echoing down from the main corridor, she heard a boy calling out, "Professor!" and then, "What is it, Mr. Grint?" That was it then. Sarah slipped along the corridor, with her hand against the right-hand wall. First opening. Second. The blackness was deep enough here that the edge of the first step was barely a shadow. The stairwell itself was pitch dark. Sarah took the first dim step, to get out of any line of sight down the corridor, then whispered, "Lumos."

The stairs wound up and up, a long way, it seemed. Then, just as it seemed there would be another turning, the way came out on a landing that seemed to be nothing more than a cul-de-sac. Sarah pushed on each of the walls in turn. The right-hand wall slid soundlessly outward. Alarmed that someone might notice anyway, Sarah slipped quickly outside and pushed the stone door shut.

She was in an alcove behind one of the castle's many suits of armor. A peek out into the corridor was not very helpful in orienting herself. So she took quick note of the armor's design, and of the painting across the way (a pair of girls in bright dresses sharing a picnic), and headed down the passage toward what she hoped was an intersection.

Fortunately, it was. Even more fortunately, she recognized where she was--near the History of Magic classroom on the first floor. Feeling for the first time in all her recent adventures as if she were not about to be caught where she didn't belong, she made her way up to the Gryffindor common room, coming through the Fat Lady's portrait door with a large group of other students returning from whatever Saturday evening activities they had been engaged in. In no mood to chat, even assuming someone would bother to include her in their conversation, Sarah hurried up to her room.

Katie and Alicia lay sprawled on their beds, groaning, still wearing Quidditch robes. Angelina came out of the bathroom they shared with the sixth year girls with a towel wrapped around her and another one in her hand, with which she was patting her hair.

"You'll feel better if you shower now," Angelina said, "before your muscles freeze up."

"Mine are already frozen," Katie grimaced. But she rolled off the bed and tugged on Alicia's shoe. "Come on."

Alicia made more of a fuss, but followed in Katie's wake, making painful noises that were obviously aimed at the unbelievably cruel captain of the Gryffindor team.

Sarah shook off her robes, wondering if she should shower as well. Inexplicably, she didn't want to. She smoothed one hand over the fingers of the other. No, not tonight. Moving around to the other side of her bed, so Angelina wouldn't notice certain improprieties while she was changing, she shed her clothes and quickly donned her nightgown.

"So, you've loosened up a bit, Sarah," Angelina commented.

"What?" Sarah popped her head around the bed curtains. The other girl had talked more to her in the past week, since the Quidditch disaster, than probably she had in the month before that. But none of it had run into personal comments.

"Just, you've always been so strait-laced." Angelina shrugged. She was sitting on her bed in the red satin pajamas she favored, with her feet tucked up under her.

"And?" Sarah asked uneasily.

The other girl lowered her voice, "Well, I mean, you come back here twice this week smelling like sex...." She grinned conspiratorially. "Who did you get to notice you?"

I really am going to die, Sarah thought, breathless, wondering at the same time how Angelina could recognize the scent that suddenly seemed very strong in her own nostrils.

"Come on...who is it?" Angelina's grin was disturbingly infectious.

"Oh no." Sarah shook her head, her heart pounding loudly enough for her dorm mate to hear it. "I'm not saying a word."

"Sarah!"

"No." Then, worrying that Angelina would keep at her until she revealed something, she took the initiative herself. "Look, he'd kill me if I told anyone he had a Gryffindor girlfriend, ok?"

"Oooo! A Slytherin?" Angelina jumped quickly to the obvious conclusion. Damn.

"I didn't say that. He could be in Ravenclaw for all I'm going to tell you."

"Which of those big brutes...? Unless.... Oh, babe, you better watch out for Olive Barnley if you're shagging her boyfriend."

"I didn't say he was in Slytherin," Sarah's voice tightened. "Please, please, Angelina, don't even hint that to anyone. You know how rumors spread. And if someone, somehow said something to the wrong person and it got back to my aunt...." She sounded desperate. She was glad she did, even if was 99% genuine. Angelina's smile softened.

"Okay, okay, your secret's safe with me." The girl reached out a warm, brown hand across the space between their beds and squeezed Sarah's ice-cold fingers. "Wizard's oath, I won't say a word. But you'd better shower before you come back next time, or someone else will notice. And if Patricia hears about it, well, you're gonna be sitting in McGonagall's office hearing about what we can and can't do at school."

Sarah was oddly touched at the other girl's ready loyalty. But it hurt, too, that she had never been the object of it before. And if the only thing that prompted it now was the discovery of a mutual knowledge about carnal pursuits....

Sarah hoped that the smile of gratitude she gave was not too cold.

"Hey," Angelina said. "If you ever need a good place to...you know...there's this room off the seventh floor corridor, across from that tapestry of the troll ballet."

"Okay," Sarah said, getting into bed. "Thanks."

"Sure."

Then... "So, um..." She felt as if she owed Angelina something. "How was Quidditch practice?"

She settled back and gritted her teeth, preparing to listen for as long as it took.

Whether it was the near-miss with Angelina or one of the other things that had encroached upon either her consciousness or her conscience, Sarah became a good deal more circumspect after that night. She had been acting far too oddly, far too much in a hurry, far too distracted by her secret double-life. She felt as if she had been in a trance--it was fortunate beyond her deserving that no one else had noticed it. So, there were no more mad dashes to decode or answer his notes, no more intense desperation to see him. He wasn't going to vanish from Hogwarts and neither was she. There was time enough.

If the truth were admitted, as much as she wanted to see him, she was a little afraid to go back. Perhaps it was her own mistake to jump to the conclusion that the contents of that vial had been poison, but he had certainly been willing to perpetuate the fear stirred up by that possibility. And as...well, amazing...as the end result had been, she didn't earnestly believe that it had been the result of some charitable impulse on his part. For whatever unfathomably male or unpleasantly Slytherin reason, it had suited him to give her that experience. She would have kept on returning to him regardless for quite some time, she had no doubt, but maybe he didn't know that. Or maybe it was part of some plan to corrupt her as much as possible, which offered disturbing possibilities for the future. In any event, although she still wanted to be with him, there was, curiously enough, less desperation.

It was Sunday night before she had occasion to slide her bookmark across the page margin. Detention Monday, it said.

Sarah picked up her quill. All the time it moved across the page, she bit her lip. She slid the message on its way before she could think too much about what she had written:

I don't know.

It was another healing potion on Monday; they seemed to be doing a lot of those. Potions to heal burns, potions to mend broken bones, potions to put your insides back in the right order if you'd been hit with a spell that disarranged them. Today was Eyebright Potion, which would cure blindness brought on by any intense form of light.

Sarah was nervous. It was impossible to tell how he had taken her answer. He was his usual unpleasant self, which could mean anything--that he was angry at her hesitation, that he was dismissing her for being difficult--or nothing at all. For the first time she appreciated how those poor students who had absolutely no knack for potions must have felt for five miserable years, sitting here wondering when, not if, she would lose points for her House. Wondering if she would be getting a detention whether she wanted one or not.

She simply couldn't concentrate. She had to mend her mistakes twice, and as she narrowly avoided a third, remembering just in time that she needed to stir clockwise for five minutes before she added the rowan sap syrup, she jumped at the voice behind her ear.

"Have you forgotten something?"

The bottle of rowan sap syrup rattled out of her fingers. It was, oddly enough, entirely an accident, although she doubted it would look that way to him. She couldn't catch it in time. The glass shattered stickily on the floor.

"Really, Miss Darkglass," Professor Snape said, stalking around the other side of the desk. "Twice in less than a week. Are you sure you haven't been struck with a clumsiness curse?"

As was only to be expected, the Slytherins laughed. A few other people did too. Snape turned and stalked toward the front of the classroom, preparatory, she was certain, to announcing her punishment. Well, she was not about to stay after class again, no matter what. For one thing, it would look far too suspicious. "Evanesco," Sarah murmured, flicking her wand at the mess, which vanished, glass and all. Snape spun around to glare at her. The room grew very quiet.

"Twenty points from Gryffindor!" he snapped. Sarah winced, although she didn't know how she could have avoided losing points one way or another. But he wasn't finished. "And since you're clearly so much better at wand-waving than at concentrating on your work, you will be required, in future, to cast Unbreakable Charms on all your containers."

There were a few gasps at that. Charming the glass would spoil some potions ingredients and make others completely unpredictable. More to the point, it would mean receiving failing grades on every potion she attempted until such time, if any, that he relented. It also meant that, despite her equivocal answer, he intended to push her into doing or saying something that would, indeed, merit a detention.

"Ah, well." Sarah gave what was very obviously a mock sigh. Something troubling about herself had become clear over the past week: she was far better able to cope with a situation once she had run out of options. She lifted her wand again as if to comply with his instructions. "I suppose that a broken beaker is worse than an exploded classroom."

The room was so silent now that it was possible to hear individual bubbles popping in the boiling cauldrons.

"Is that a threat, Miss Darkglass?"

"No, sir," she answered, meeting his eyes defiantly at last. "Just an observation."

For a moment, there was something about his expression that suggested he would be well justified in pointing at the door and ordering her to leave the N.E.W.T. class, permanently. But he said, "Let's see what observations you make about a week's detention." There were a few sympathetic squeaks from around the room. "Perhaps washing out every beaker in the equipment cupboard will cure your clumsiness sufficiently for you to be able to forego taking any risk of explosions."

Sarah shut her eyes, trying to school her face to prevent her relief from showing. He wasn't going to make her charm her glassware. Whether she would actually be washing beakers or not was another question.

At the end of class, he set the time for her first day of detention: seven o'clock. Sarah wondered what would happen if she failed to show up. Would this become optional, too? Or had it gone beyond that?

"Whassup?" Katie asked as she sat down to supper, observing the frowning faces of her dorm mates.

"I guess the git's got it in for Sarah this year," Angelina explained. "Detention all week."

Sarah cast a glance toward the staff table. Under the circumstances, it seemed justifiable. "I hate him," she whispered vehemently. She was only half sure that the words were a diversion, rather than the truth.

The Weasley twins valiantly offered to sell her one of their Skiving Snackboxes--at a nice discount, they assured her. She wondered what Snape would say if he knew the uses to which they were putting the knowledge gained in his classes. She begged off, pointing out that in the absence of the distraction of a class to teach, he might find her sudden and convenient illness suspicious enough to investigate, an investigation that might lead back to them.

"Got to admit," said Fred (or was it George?), "getting expelled would be very bad for business."

"Not that it mightn't be good in other ways," said the other one.

"On the other hand, Mum would kill us."

"Oh, well."

Sarah made a point of doing her homework immediately after dinner. It was like a race with the hands of the clock. It was a quarter to seven; in fifteen minutes she would turn into a pumpkin.

The Potions classroom clock was striking the hour when she knocked on Professor Snape's office door.

"Come in."

As she stepped inside and shut the door, Sarah realized that she was more frightened than she had been last Wednesday night. Feeling oddly mesmerized, she watched him stand up and cross the room. She didn't resist when he lifted her chin, when he kissed her. It was the narrowing of his eyes, the crease of a frown between his eyebrows that broke the spell.

"If you'd rather wash beakers?" he said sharply.

"No." She shook her head, wishing that her answer was as simple as wanting to avoid several hours with her hands in soapy water.

"Go in," he ordered, stepping back.

On the assumption that the doorway must be open, Sarah drew back the corner of the unicorn tapestry and passed through into his workroom. She didn't stop until she had gone through the other doorway, until she reached his bed, where she sat down and pulled her feet up onto the coverlet, her arms locked around her knees.

He came in after her. Studying her, still with a frown on his face, he clenched the bedpost with one hand. "Tell me something, Sarah."

"What?"

"Why did you drink that potion? And don't tell me it was because you're a Gryffindor."

If not the last thing she expected, it was certainly not among the questions she might have predicted.

"I...." She hesitated. "Why do you want to know?"

"You believed it to be poison, and yet you drank it."

Sarah took a deep breath. "I didn't think it was poison."

"Don't lie to me. You knew it might be."

"I...I guessed that it wasn't."

"You knew perfectly well that you might have guessed wrong."

"And?" Sarah challenged, not knowing how to defend her actions further. "The risk was mine to take. What does it matter to you?"

"It matters," he said pointedly, "because I have absolutely no intention of coddling a suicidal child."

"I am not suicidal!" Sarah retorted. "And I haven't considered myself a child for a very long time."

"Your views of your own maturity are of no consequence to me," he snapped. "However, I have no wish to be implicated in an investigation of your death, particularly should you be found with a bottle of something deadly in your hand, or worse yet, a despairing note that features my name in it."

Sarah blinked. "I would hardly kill myself for your sake." Not terribly kind, she realized in retrospect, but true. "I am not my mother."

"You've mentioned that before, as I recall. I fail to see what any maternal resemblances have to do with the issue."

Sarah stared at him. He didn't know. Somehow, he didn't know. She had never imagined that. "You don't know about my parents?" she asked, still disbelieving.

"Is there something to know?" he inquired impatiently. "Your father was in Slytherin; he was therefore suspected, quite naturally," he said this with heavy sarcasm, "of supporting the Dark Lord. The details of the outcome of his trial elude me at the moment. Your mother, you told me, was in Hufflepuff. Somehow they managed to produce a daughter who got herself sorted into Gryffindor."

Sarah felt this last statement as a jab, innocuous as it was on the surface compared to the other things he had implied so far. "My father got off, to begin with, like almost everyone else. Imperius defense. It wasn't true, of course. He was a Death Eater." The Potions master flinched slightly when she said it, for whatever reason. "It wasn't a secret, not at home. Not from my mother." Sarah let her eyes drop, unable to say the rest otherwise. "She left him finally, when I was nine. To protect me, she said. Then...it was just a few months later that the Aurors went after my father, on new evidence."

Needing to know how he would take that, Sarah looked up. Something like the beginning of comprehension was dawning in his eyes.

"Azkaban," he said, but uncertainly, still seeming not to remember.

Sarah shook her head. "They didn't take him alive. And..." She buried her forehead for a moment against her knees. "...my mother killed herself, a month after I came to Hogwarts."

Snape released the bedpost. As if the memory had been buried under a mass of rubble, he said distantly, "That was.... You were that student."

"I know why people don't remember." She shrugged. "I was only out of school for the weekend. My aunt took me home for the funeral, but she thought I would get over it more quickly if I kept to my schedule."

His eyes seemed to be searching internally for something more. Finally he said, "You only missed one assignment."

Sarah raised her chin, willing her eyes to be hard. "There wasn't anything else I could do, was there?"

His expression was just as cold as her own. "No. There wasn't." Then, slowly, "She chose poison?"

Sarah spied a fleck of dirt under her thumbnail; she dug it out. "I saw the note," she said. "Not my mother's note. She didn't leave one. At least not one that my aunt ever told me about. It was my father's note. To her. The last one. I took it from his owl, but there wasn't anything in the parcel for me. Just the vial and the note." Oh, yes, she remembered the words, as if they had been branded onto her brain. But although they were burning her up inside with the need to speak them aloud to someone, anyone, to shatter their cruelty by bringing them into the light, she couldn't do it. She couldn't repeat them. Least of all to this man, who was already far too cruel in his own right.

"Damn." He buried his fingers in her hair.

She didn't cry. She wouldn't. But it wasn't until he tipped her face back and kissed her lips that the shaking tension left her muscles. This was why she came back, she realized, why she had chosen to stay to begin with. No matter what a moment with him might be like, for as long as it lasted, her life was only that moment. There was no past. And no future.