A Merciless Affection

Chapter 40: You Deceived Me

"Why didn't you kill her while you had the chance?!" Sarah demanded. Part of her--the part that was exhausted and desperate for his touch--was telling her to shut up and run into his arms. She was not listening to that part. Even though Severus had been awaiting her arrival more substantially than she had supposed he would, after his note.

"Quite apart from the fact that it would attraction attention we don't want, I'm sure you can imagine the Dark Lord's reaction if tomorrow's Prophet reported that his much-beloved, ever-loyal Bella had been brought down by me." His expression was hidden in the dim light, but his voice was a growl. "Would you care to stand before him and explain that?"

"You've explained worse, I expect." Sarah did not want to back down now.

"Then consider what your uncle would do, as soon as he realized that his agreements had become null and void. At present, very few people know of your condition. It is in Bellatrix's interest to keep that secret. Nott's primary interest in doing so is to satisfy her. Her death is a luxury we cannot yet afford."

Sarah let out a breath, half sigh, half-sob. Every line of her body slackened into despair and defeat, the heat of her anger smoldering down into embers. Then Severus was there, his arms around her.

"We also cannot afford being seen here. Come inside the gate, and we'll return to the castle."

There was no moon, and because of the clouds, no stars either, but he urged her on through the deepening dusk until the gates of Hogwarts loomed up out of the dark. They slipped inside, and Severus began fumbling for her ring. What a useless symbol that had been in her ordeal! she thought, trying to help him, their efforts more of a weary tussle than a cooperative effort. She expected him to snap at her. He did not, but she remained tensed against the possibility as he fitted the silver ring on her finger and turned it three times.

* * *

When she sank to her knees on the bed, Sarah felt as if all the terror she had been carefully controlling for the past day--could it really only be slightly over a day?--was rising up to overwhelm her. But the embers of her anger were there, too, and she had wept so often in Severus's arms, she was as tired of it as he must be.

He had left her to fend for herself. The fact that it was the sensible thing to do--that he could have lost his life trying to rescue her--did not mitigate the feeling that he had failed her badly. Even the touch of his hands, steadying her, could not do that.

Knowing even as she said it that it was irrational, she asked plaintively, "Why did you let them take me?"

"I never supposed you to be at risk inside Hogwarts, Sarah. If I had believed for moment--"

"You should have known--you're supposed to know all of this spying-for-the-Dark-Lord business!" she cut him off, frustrated at the unaccustomed composure of his tone.

"I could as easily ask why you went with your uncle," his voice tightened. "Presumably you could have screamed--"

"Umbridge was there, at first. She believed his story. She would have blamed me, not him, for anything I did," Sarah protested. "And then he threatened to use the Imperius Curse."

You could have screamed before he got off the spell, though, couldn't you?

I didn't...it didn't seem like it at the time....

Resentment at the suggestion of her own guilt, her own failure in the incident, was winding her guts up in a painful knot, and she lashed out. "You should have realized before that they wouldn't let me alone! And it's because of you!"

"What are you talking about?" Severus asked sharply, holding her tighter by the shoulders, frowning as he studied her face.

"I'm talking about who I am, and who you are." It was a vague enough statement, at face value, but he must have understood her meaning. He blinked, as if she had struck him, and then his eyes went hard, his expression bitter. He let her go and stepped down onto the floor, turning away from her.

"I never thought," he said, "that such things mattered to you."

"Funny," she said, angrily. "I never thought they mattered to you either."

He swung his head around to stare, almost puzzled, at her over his hunched shoulder. Then his eyes smoldered in sudden understanding. "So, that's what this is about : the poison they've poured in your ears. Surely you knew they were attempting to turn you against me, and yet it appears that they have succeeded."

The bitterness in his voice hurt her, but it was just another drop in the great ocean of resentment that was welling up inside her soul. "I have never been disloyal to you! Even when I went home for Christmas and I thought it was over between us, all I could think of was you. Even when you told me the things you'd done, and I wanted to run away, I couldn't do it!"

"Then why should it matter what they said to you about me?" Severus asked, thoroughly exasperated.

"I don't know." Sarah breathed hard, trying to hold back her tears. "It just does." She sank into a huddled sitting position. "I thought..." a gasp, "I thought you wanted me, at least."

"What do you mean?" His eyes narrowed. "Of course I wanted you."

"For myself?" She sniffed. "I thought, when you told me that you didn't do it to gain points with the Dark Lord, because of who my father was, you were telling the truth. Because you didn't know that my father had been a Death Eater, not until I told you. But it never occurred to me before that you did know my name, right along, and what that meant." She could tell, by his expression, that she had struck a nerve. "That's the truth, isn't it?"

"Do you really suppose the truth is that simple?" he said cuttingly. "As clever at twisting the truth to your own ends as you are, Sarah, I thought you understood how very complex the truth can be." There was something in how he looked at her as he said this that made her feel every lack of her eighteen years, in comparison to his thirty-some-odd. Forty-some-odd? She really didn't know, she realized. It was never something she had allowed to matter very much before--that he was grown man and she was a girl. She had never seen their seduction of each other for what it must appear to everyone else: a teacher preying upon the innocence of a student.

I was not innocent, she told herself.

Certainly he was not.

"I want to know why you decided to...." she hesitated slightly, unsure how to describe it.

"To fuck one of my students?" His face twisted in sarcasm, but it was the harsh word that hurt more.

"Was that all it was to you?" she asked, picking up his bitterness where he had left it.

"Come now, Sarah," he chided brutally. "Don't tell me you were looking for love, that night. If I'd seen any hint of that, you'd have marched out that door as quickly as you came in."

"What have my reasons to do with yours?"

"I wouldn't want you to pretend to yourself that you had a nobler purpose than I."

It took an instant for that jab to hit home, as weary as she was. She reacted sharply. "Tell me why!"

She expected another angry reaction in turn, but instead he looked away from her, his expression curiously pained.

"I don't want to discuss this now, Sarah. You've had a terrible experience, and it's clouded your thinking."

"So, I'm just a hysterical girl?!" At the moment, that might be all too true--a fact which merely made her angrier.

"Yes, as a matter of fact!" he retorted, then shook his head. "Sarah, there will be a better time to discuss this, when we are both rested...."

Sarah, feeling that her slumped position on the bed put her at a disadvantage, got to her feet. Her abdomen twinged in protest at the motion. "How am I supposed to rest in the middle of an argument?! After you've said such things to me?"

He appeared at a loss for a response. His brows were knit in his characteristic fury, but his mouth could not seem to decide whether to agree with his eyebrows or with the intermittent effort he had been making to attain something resembling calm and reason.

"You could not possibly understand what it was like," he spat out at last. "A half-blood Knockturn bastard in a House full of pureblood toffs and their footmen." He could not, after all this time, shed the careful pronunciation he must have painstakingly practiced at school, but he spoke the last few words with a forced trace of the accent he must have had as a child.

Sarah dared not speak--the air was far, far too brittle for that.

Severus went on, his eyes looking anywhere except at her. "Lucius kept the bastard part to himself. It was too useful a weapon to hang over my head. Too useful to have a member of the serving classes at his beck and call, one born even lower than his usual lackeys," his mouth twisted in disdain.

"But then I made myself too useful to be treated like a slave--I knew more dark spells than any of them. I was clever enough to make up spells of my own. Unfortunately, I was not clever enough to realize, at first, that the increase in my status was merely an illusion."

He shook his head, his lank hair appearing even lanker with the motion. "I was, of course, disabused of that notion. But by then, there were other opportunities--the Dark Lord was rising in power, and in spite of his supporters' pureblood rhetoric, it was soon clear to me that he was more interested in power and ambition. Which I had."

Sarah watched his expression as he spoke, watched it reflect anger, shame, triumph. It seemed more remarkable than ever that he had chosen to go to Dumbledore, to leave behind whatever promises of status that the Dark Lord had given him.

His eyes rested on her at last, burning with fervency. "Growing up, I clung to one thing--whoever my father was, he was something more than a Snape, something more than Knockturn Alley. I wanted that--whatever it was he'd had--more than anything on earth. Can you understand that?"

Sarah nodded uneasily. Such a man as Severus was, doomed by fate to be nothing in the eyes of the world.

"Albus Dumbledore offered me...as much as I had any right to expect." He looked away from her again, staring into the fireplace, straightening his shoulders as if a rod had been thrust down his back. "A professor at Hogwarts. Teaching Potions to young idiots."

"You wanted more than that," Sarah murmured. Sympathy was gnawing away her anger. But her insides were still so wound up....

He glared at her as if it had been a question. "Damned ungrateful, isn't it? I would prefer teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts. Although perhaps that's only been another illusion of happiness, a bubble that would pop if it ever really occurred." He brought the heels of his hands to his eyes, then let his fingers slide partway back through his hair, pressing with visible force against his skull.

She had suspected before that he hated teaching. Now she understood why he didn't just stop. To be a professor at Hogwarts was--as Miriam had once said--a higher position than any other he might hope to attain. And to be Head of House, over the scions of all those old families.... Why did he protect them, when he might have abused them at will? But the answer came almost as quickly as she had thought of the question--he was afraid of their parents, afraid of the backlash that might result if his origins were made an issue, afraid of losing control of his little nest of vipers. Better to be the head bully in a House of bullies than a victim. Although that thought banished some of her sympathy. No wonder he seemed, at times, as childish as his students.

"It ought to have been enough--I tried to convince myself that it was enough--but it wasn't," Severus growled. "I was reminded too often of that immeasurable, untreadable step above me. Three years ago, when the Chamber of Secrets was opened, Lucius offered to convince the Board of Governors to appoint me headmaster. Such a magnanimous proposal for his old friend! Yet it was clear--whatever prestige I gained in the position, I would still remain what he had always seen me as: his minion, his appendage, his servant."

There was a fierceness in his face that was frightening, as he turned back to her. "And you--so prettily unconscious of your class, and with no knowledge of mine. So...willing." His eyes were as hungry as they had been that night. "How could I resist taking such a forbidden treasure, when it came within my grasp?"

Sarah's eyes widened, her heart convulsing in shame and pain. It was as bad as she had feared. No--worse. At least she had seen him as a person, had intended their relationship to be of mutual benefit! She had merely been an object to him--a way of gaining a profoundly intimate revenge against Lucius and his high-born friends.

"So that really is all that mattered to you? That I was a high and mighty Darkglass? That you could say bugger-all to Lucius and the whole lot by sleeping with me?"

"You think that's all that was in my mind?" Severus sneered, stepping toward her, catching her by the shoulders, holding her far too close. "I confess, it tipped the scales. But do you want to me to deny that I was perilously attracted--"

"My uncle was right!" she cut him off. "You could have made me get rid of the child, but you didn't. Because your son would be half a Darkglass."

"Sarah--" he began, warningly, but she wouldn't have it.

"How could you use me like that?" His grip had become, in her mind, all too much like that of her captors, and she tried to shake it off.

His expression hardened again. "I warned you that you were being used, Sarah."

"Not like that!" she gasped. "I didn't know you meant like that!"

"I can hardly help what you choose not to see," he said brutally. "I supposed, when I took you to Knockturn Alley, you would realize then that you were too far above me. Apparently you were blinded by infatuation--"

"I don't give a damn whether you were born in Knockturn Alley or on the far side of the moon!" Sarah shrieked. Finally she pulled free of him, but she didn't step away, not yet. She was too angry. "But I won't be used as your... your step-ladder!" She swung away from him, then, seeking how best to stalk out. The classroom? She didn't care whether a dozen Slytherins saw her. Let dear Professor Snape get fired. But no--with N.E.W.T.s coming up...goodness knew she was going to need those credentials even more, now. Her ring? Angelina already knew she had a Portkey. But what if Patricia were there? Besides, she had not the least desire to ever put it on her finger again. The back stairs, then. She had certainly snuck up and down them plenty of times before. Little fool that she had been!

He brushed angrily past her as she turned toward the portrait door. "Naturally you'd choose to believe that of me...." he said, his voice dripping sarcasm like a razor dripping blood. He snatched his cloak from where he had let it fall on the bed and threw it around himself. He glared at her more hatefully than she had ever seen him glare at anyone. "Gods, what a fool I was!" He grabbed a handful of Floo powder from the mantle, stepped into the fire and disappeared.

* * *

Sarah was too stunned to scream curses after him, and by the time she thought to do so, it would have been a pointless waste of breath. But just because Severus had left didn't mean she was going to stay here. Not in his room.

He had trust--...given her the passwords to his wards, after they came back from Knockturn Alley. She used them now to leave through the portrait door. The painting itself was as grim as ever, but now it seemed more like a warning she had failed to heed. She gritted her teeth as she slipped along toward the stairs.

Once she had managed to get out into the first floor corridor, there was no more need for secrecy. It was still before curfew, and a few students were roaming the halls with their friends. Sarah, however, wanted the relative safety of her room, and it was there she went, as quickly as she could manage. No one paid her any mind as she passed through the common room. The usual clamor was missing: nearly everyone was studying now, either for O.W.L.s or N.E.W.T.s or for end of year examinations.

By the time she had climbed to her dorm room, she was finding it difficult to hold in the misery that had been twisting tighter and tighter in her soul as she left the Potion master's chambers further and further behind. What was she going to do? She was more alone now than she had ever been in her life...and that was saying something. But she could hardly go back to Aunt Portia after this. And--a horrible realization--Bellatrix was expecting Sarah to becoming her doting pupil by October, at latest. Dumbledore was out of reach, and how could Professor McGonagall solve any of this, with Umbridge breathing down her neck?

Did this mean she would have to go through with Bella's horrible plan? That would take her away from Severus, at least. But what about Severian? Could she bear to give him that name, after all? She would not give him to his father--not to be used as yet another pawn in his little status game. But to whom else could she entrust him? Who would take care of her, now, when he was born? She couldn't go back to Knockturn Alley, to his family, not like this....

She had considered and discarded a half dozen unacceptable scenarios by the time she reached her own bed. The only chance seemed to be flight...away from Britain. But she had no money, no job, no friends, no place to go or nor any way of getting there.

"Sarah?" Angelina, busy studying a Transfigurations text, had just noticed her arrival in their dorm room. But the anxiety in the girl's voice could not penetrate Sarah's grief. She climbed onto her bed, pulled a pillow to her, and curled around it, sobbing painfully.

Angelina was clearly distressed. "I'm so sorry, Sarah! Please forgive me! I wouldn't have told on you, truly. But McGonagall was so worried." Sarah barely felt the plop of the other girl sitting on the edge of the bed; she could not have stopped crying if she had wanted to. "She woke us up in the middle of the night, and she was actually scared. I've never seen her like that. And when she said she had reason to believe you might be in danger...well, I thought it would be better for you to be in trouble than to be dead."

"She was odd about it," said another voice--Alicia's. Sarah wondered fleetingly how many people had heard what Angelina told McGonagall, and how big a sensation it had caused--it only made her cry harder. Alicia went on, "She didn't even ask us where you went. Not that we knew. Angelina didn't, I mean. She just kept harping on the last time and place we'd seen you. If we'd seen anyone unusual around."

"She didn't even ask the name of your boyfriend," Angelina picked up the thread again, still upset. "Which I couldn't have told her anyway. But it was like she already knew. It wasn't until Katie came in and told about you going to your uncle's that she...she didn't calm down exactly."

"Just got sort of grim, and left," Alicia put in.

"I was scared for you, Sarah," Angelina said, still sounding remorseful. "I knew your boyfriend was a Slytherin and...well...you know what Slytherins are like--I was worried."

What Slytherins were like indeed!

"Please don't hate me, Sarah. What has happened? Did your family find out about your boyfriend? Did his family find out about you?"

If only it had been that easy!

"I...they...sort of...did," Sarah gasped out between sobs. "I don't hate you," she managed in one breath. Although it was upsetting that Angelina had broke her word, Sarah believed she might well have done the same, under the circumstances. "He...he and I...had...a fight." Her words ended on note of agony as the keenness of her grief overwhelmed her again.

"Oh dear," Angelina said, reaching out to stroke her back.

"Good riddance to Slytherin rubbish," Alicia said, without much sympathy.

"Alicia!" Angelina protested.

"She ought to have known what they're like. She's practically one herself."

When that produced a sharper moan from Sarah, Angelina said indignantly, "She was sorted in Gryffindor, same as us." But from the few sounds Sarah could hear over her own sobbing, Alicia had gone back to her own bed and her own books.

"What can I do, Sarah?" Angelina said. "I'll do anything to make this up to you. You're not getting expelled are you?" she added abruptly.

Sarah shook her head against the bed. One small thing to be grateful for. She would have had to find a solution to her insoluble problems that much sooner. But oh, McGonagall was likely to be angry as well, and Sarah couldn't bear the thought of her Head of House shouting at her again, blaming her....

"McGonagall can't exactly give you much detention at this point, can she?" Angelina sounded forcedly cheerful.

Sarah shook her head again. Three more weeks at Hogwarts, and then what?

Angelina said nothing for a minute or so, then finally asked, "Do you want me to cheer you up, or do you just want to cry it out?"

Sarah snuffled. "Just...cry...."

It was only when Angelina took her hand away and went back to her own bed that Sarah realized how reassuring it had felt.

The sobs kept coming, more one moment, less another, ebbing and flowing with the misery of her thoughts. He didn't love her...that was at the terrible core of it all. She had never been anything more than a tool to increase his status. The child, who moved uneasily at times within her as she wept--the child was just another symbol of what he wanted that he could never have. Not even by marrying the last of Darkglass line.

She would have given him that, she realized. She would have married him in the eyes of all the world and made him master of Darkglass Hall, to sit at its mistress's side, if she'd had the power to do so. Out of love. She loved Darkglass Hall because it was her home, not because it meant she was someone better than common. Why had it never occurred to her to think it might mean something very different to a man who had been born with nothing, not even a father's name?

The most horrible thing was imagining his eyes, as they had been that night. She had never dreamed that the triumph in his eyes had been for his victory against Malfoy and company. That he had been using her body, so willing and unaware, to punish them. It made her almost physically ill to think of it, her sobs edging on heaves.

"Can't somebody shut her up?" yelled Florence Moran, from the fourth bed over.

"Don't put a Silencing Charm on her," Angelina protested.

Sarah braced herself, as someone came over, but whoever it was didn't touch her. It sounded as if the curtains of her bed were being closed, and she glanced up in time to see Alicia flick the last set together. She heard Alicia's muffled spell... "Imperturbus!" Then silence.

Sarah felt a stab of panic, which superceded her other distress for the moment. She was trapped. Probably that hadn't occurred to Alicia, but that was the result. Her hand could not even touch the bed curtains, held back by the force of the spell.

She wept again, this time as much for the cruelty of the world at large as for Severus'. That was how the world was, it seemed: cruel and uncaring. The rise of the Dark Lord was just another symptom of that fact. But even after his earlier fall, the unkindness of the world had gone on, just as it had done for...forever, probably. It was manifested in her parents' cruelty to one another--a cruelty that had, in the end, left her sheltered a little from the world's hatred only because it had kept the world from noticing her. And Aunt Portia's cruelty in rejecting her was just another bit of evidence that even the usually good and kind were not immune to being brutal. No, even the great Albus Dumbledore was not immune to that, forcing her to marry a man he ought to have sacked, knowing that sooner or later she would have to face an enemy who would delight in killing her as slowly and painfully as possible, should he doubt her loyalty....

Her thoughts raged on and on in this vein. Every little wrong that had been done to her in her life was picked out as part of the whole horrible pattern. It was an ugly thing. An ugly world. How could she have been such a fool as to want to bring another defenseless child into it?

Sleep came, finally, at unawares. It silenced her thoughts, but it could not silence the misery in her soul.