She'll Come Back As Fire

She'll Come Back As Fire: A Hatred Beyond Your Heat by Verity

"Is he real or a ghost lie she feels she isn't heard - And the veil tears and rages until her voices are - Remembered, and his secrets can be told." Lust, Tori Amos

:01

They aren't friends. Not exactly.

But now and then, whenever one of them wins - for they do win now, but neither any more often then the other - the other may offer the winner congratulations. For they both, as fifth years, as prefects, nearing the end of the summer term, know now that their dueling games are not so much game as practice; the wizarding world is entering wartime again, slowly, and surely. The Dark faction is rising.

Led by the Malfoys. Geneva does not forget that.

And last time, when she praised Julia's well-practiced Amorphous Hex, Julia said to her, "You know why I duel you, don't you?"

"Why?"

"Because it's always good to have a friend on the other side. No matter who wins."

She did not know what to answer to that, so merely nodded, and walked off, flustered.

L'espirit d'escalier - Geneva slips into the French of her classmate Celeste Davies, daughter of Roger and Fleur. The spirit of the stairway - all those things she might have said.

Well, she'll have a chance to say them now.

Julia is waiting for her on the steps that lead down to the entrance to the Potions classroom, wand in hand.

"No matter who wins," says Geneva. "You're on my side."

Julia considers this for a moment; then nods. "Fair enough."

(They aren't friends. Are they? Frankly, she no longer knows what friends are - she's never really had friends. Her classmates as like to her as the moon is to the sun; her brothers dream like their mother: Paris of dark curses and gremlins that lurk in shadowy corners, Toulouse of the sweet green of the Quidditch field.

Julia always tells her how Paris is doing in Slytherin; she is grateful for this.)

They both smile - a bit awkwardly - and then Julia shoots up a Disorienting Charm, and they're off.

:02

Severus Snape awakens one morning to the sound of something banging against his window.

He recognizes the owl, ancient and weary as she is. Houle, Hedwig's successor - tawny plumage adorns a determined spirit. He gives her a treat, and opens the letter.

"A boon for a boon, hmm." His long white fingers trace the scattered lines and loops of a former student's handwriting. A life for a life, he thinks abstractly - Vita Pro Vita.

That was the curse she had used. He remembers her voice, sweet and sinister in his ear, other times, on the floor, nails dragged across his back, flesh gathering beneath them. He remembers - her. Missing. He has not sought her out again - perhaps it is better not knowing.

Severus goes over to the bookshelves in the far east of his bedroom; presses his hand gently against the cherry molding on the one closest to the window, murmuring a revealing spell of his own devising. The hidden catch releases; the molding swings out; what is left is an extremely narrow space full of papers and various personal effects.

Not his personal effects, however, for these were confiscated from Malfoy Manor some eighteen years ago. Except for one, freely given - Lucius, in his cell at the Ministry before being moved to Azkaban, had told him where it lay, and that someday, he, Severus, might be needing it.

He wonders now what Lucius knew - knows - and has never told. About her, or Harry's wifeÉ Taking the worn, silken tie from its resting place for oh-so-many years, he shuts the cabinet, then stretches the eighty-year-old sign of Slytherin to test its strength. Strong enough.

"Don't go giving out any of Lord Voldemort's old school things," Dumbledore had said once to Lucius Malfoy - Lucius had repeated the words from his cell, adding, "But I never took the old fool seriously - and why should you?"

Why should you indeed? Because it is only nearing twenty years after the fact that his influence is wearing off, that you can escape and raise all Hell again?

Dumbledore is dead now, and Severus does not fool himself - were the old man alive, this would not be happening. But Minerva is Headmistress at this school now, and blind to things the previous Headmaster would have felt curdling the very marrow of his bones. It is left to him to administer a Slytherin sort of justice to old alumnae, old lovers and pupils. The more illustrious ancestors of original owner of the tie he now holds in his hand would probably have approved.

He forges a note, in the perfect cursive he remembers his former master having. It is simple, sharp, and sweet - a call from the afterworld, to a beloved. It will burn up as soon as she reads it, and its ashes swept away by an intangible wind. He sends the tie and the note back with Houle.

Virginia, he thinks, remembering: her desire to give her once-beloved an honorable death, her quiet, gentle resolution, the way she had looked at Dumbledore's funeral, tired, dreamy, utterly a possession. Now he envisions her as she is, not as she once was: a thin, ethereal being, lost to an imaginary love on another plane. Harry had no right to ask this of him; but he does it for Virginia, thinking that how odd it is that this may be the greatest kindness anyone has ever done for her in her short life.

:03

It's the night after her first classes as a sixth year begin when Professor Snape stops her in the hall.

"Geneva," he says, and how odd it is that her mind ignores the ominous sadness and apprehension in his tone, leaving her thinking only how strange it is to hear him pronounce that name. She wonders whether she's going to get a talking-to; she's rather thought that the professors have given up on that. "Miss Potter. I apologize for interrupting your excursion-"

"You're not supposed to apologize!" Anger is the easiest defense against the wrongness she feels, the quickening beat of her heart. "You're supposed to be upset and forbidding with me, and take away house points. I don't want you to be sorry."

His face... Geneva is not certain what she sees there, but all of the sudden it seems as though lashing out at the terror has only allowed it further reach into her mind, its black tentacles of nightmare swallowing up her heart. "Miss Potter." Snape's mouth is a thin, grim line, "I did not know your mother especially well, but I do not think it is your place to deny me the right to be sorry."

How silly it is: she is thankful for this brutal frankness, rather than the cruel kindness Professor Thomas showed her. "I do not think it is your place to tell me this," Geneva answers, turning away.

"Miss Potter." He has said her name three times now - and each time there has been something it the way he said it that pulled her back from the edge; she listens, and moves no further. "I did not know your mother especially well, but I knew your father when -" There is a long pause that might have made her curious some other time, but now she is so numb that she barely notices it. "I knew him a long time ago. If it is any solace, he loved her. Very, very much. Enough to sacrifice himself for her."

"You are greatly mistaken if you consider that consolation." She turns toward this new, cold, regal voice, and she is not surprised to see Julia Riddle standing beside their Potions professor. "Sacrifice is a fool's choice more often than not, unjustified and useless. I beg of you, Professor, to mind that Potter is not a child, not some little first year for the coddling." To Geneva, Julia says merely, "Tantellegra."

They have never dueled so violently or harshly before; instead of exhilaration, Geneva feels tense, and almost afraid. Finally, they both pause for breath, and she has to sit down, she's shaking.

"You're both very good, you know," says Snape - she has almost forgotten he's there.

"Thank you, Professor," says Julia.

Geneva sits there, her head between her knees; and she does not look up until Snape's footsteps have long ago vanished off into the distance.

:04

She kneels before Geneva, watching the girl's shoulders' quiver with every quickly drawn breath, waiting until Geneva no longer shudders. Julia has a great capacity for patience, where it is warranted. She can wait all night if need be.

At last, Geneva looks up - her green eyes are luminescent in the torchlight. "Thank you."

"It's not a problem," she replies, taking Geneva's hands into her own. "He had no right. Not with you. With your father, perhaps, but not with you."

"Thank you." They sit there like that for interminable moments, eyes locked in an unbroken gaze.

A cool wind blows through the hall, ruffling the long skirts Julia wears beneath her robes that are standard for a Slytherin witch of good heritage. The long hall on the upper level of the dungeons stretches out on either side of them into the shadows; they are utterly, completely alone.

Geneva leans forward and kisses her.

She is taken completely by surprise/has known in every fiber of her being for all eternity/knows in that moment/all of these? but no matter. And it suddenly seems incredibly vital that they stay forever trapped in that moment, lips locked, kneeling on the floor of a deserted corridor in the dead of the night, before they separate and know that nothing will ever be the same again.

:05

The funeral is a solemn affair. Virginia is the second child that the Weasley family has lost to an untimely death, and they bear the marks of this sorrow carved into their souls, painted on faces naked of farce and pleasantry.

Severus looks at the closed casket, piled high with white lilies, and imagines the last moments of Virginia Potter's life.

She takes the letter from Houle, forgetting entirely the hungry owl, and opens it. For a second she is incredulous; then joyous. "'Come to me'," she whispers. "Oh, Tom, I will." She walks barefoot in a white, virginal nightgown into the wood behind her house, the tie in hand, and finally stops in a little grove of trees lit by the afternoon sunlight. The tie is easily made a noose - she steps up on the stump of what was her family's Christmas tree two years earlier - she jumps.

And she is free.