Rain and Wings

---

I. liberare

---

Damp autumn sun slants in through colored windows, through dense patterns of olive and umber leaves and tiny crimson beads in bunches like grapes. It stains the lilies clustered around the coffin. It coaxes long streaks of woodgrain from the coffin’s heavy cover and loses itself before it reaches the floor, swallowed by shadows.

Droplets left over from the morning’s rain trickle furtively down the outsides of the panes, drawing the illusion of tears on the cheek of the man slumped beside the coffin.

And then he shifts, and light glints off his face and they really are tears.

---

The morning’s owls arrive during a heavy downpour, their sodden newspapers mangled by rain and claws.

In the obituaries there is a notice of the death of one Cho Bentworth, due to a flying accident. Survived by husband, Jack Bentworth, funeral time to be announced.

It does not mention that though Cho and Jack lived together, they had not shared a bed in many years.

It does not mention that Cho was very good friends – lifelong friends – with the man who had once, many years ago, been known as the Boy who Lived.

It only contains the information deemed pertinent.

Nobody reads it.

---

Hours later, he drives his broomstick hard. The tears are still there, silent and angry as he plunges down toward each hillside in Wronskei-esque near-collision, then caromes off each hillcrest handle-skyward, reckless, asking for an accident. The autumn wind carries a thousand leaves aloft with him, yellow and swirling, then lets them slam to earth in tangled piles like tiny fallen riders.

There is no one there to witness his white-knuckle, wild-eyed flight.

Not this time.

Cho is gone.

---

He still lives with the Dursleys and he has no adequate explanation for this.

He has distanced himself from the mainstream wizarding world, so he doesn’t have many wizards and witches as friends. Those who remember him and ask after him are baffled by the course his life has taken.

Vernon Dursley still rules the drill factory by day and the family by night. Aunt Petunia no longer bares the sharp side of her tongue unless the subject of Dudley’s ex-wife comes up. Dudley, also back at home, spends his time holed up in his bedroom making his living developing video games.

Harry casts the spells that produce the daily meals and keep the house on Privet Drive in perfect cleanliness and repair, and the Dursleys pretend they don’t know.

(Just as Harry pretended he did not know that Cho went home to a husband each night.)

When his friends try to ask him why – about any of it – Harry’s answers are incoherent and vague.

For a person whose earlier life had been defined by four simple syllables, Harry Potter’s current life is remarkably difficult to justify in words.

---

Harry’s broomstick is lean and gnarled, its handle made of gray driftwood and its tail of living rose-stems with long, scarlet-tipped thorns. It is worth a tremendous amount in gold. It is one of a kind. Harry takes flying very seriously.

---

For Cho and Jack, it had been a cerebral love, a life-companionship rarely celebrated with physical acts.

For Cho and Harry, it was volatile and carnal and quite some time ago Harry had forgotten that it was also forbidden.

Jack and Harry’s eyes meet across the crowd, across the coffin already half-lowered into its grave, and they stare at each other with such intensity and hatred that even the birds singing in the trees fall silent for a moment.

And then, as that moment ends, Harry discovers that all of Cho’s and Jack’s relatives are staring at him too.

At the one who’d killed Cho with his reckless flying and his reckless love.

And they, and he, are wondering what insane impulse led him to show his face at Cho’s funeral.

---

Harry is nearly 40 and he looks like an older version of his father, manly and clean-cut with rounded steel-rimmed glasses. He was a Seeker in school, but he’s not built like a Seeker anymore. On the rare occasion Harry plays Quidditch, people make him be a Beater or a Chaser or a Keeper instead.

They just don’t understand.

He has been living these last several years with the Snitch almost in his hand.

---

II. captare

---

Stormclouds gather beyond the castle spires, looming in opaque and rain-gravid promise. From low in the other half of the sky the sun shines lemon-drop-yellow, picking out students playing Quidditch like dust-motes spiralling up against a darkened wall.

---

Word has been received of a former student’s accidental death. The staff room at Hogwarts is momentarily quiet out of respect. The only sounds are Madam Hooch’s stifled sobs.

Severus Snape endures the wait uncomfortably, not understanding why that news should matter so much to them. Cho was only a student, after all. She’d attended Hogwarts more than twenty years before.

When the moment of silence is over, he mutters something about a cauldron needing to be stirred and makes his escape.

---

Severus is not a scientist, he is a sorceror.

His manner is not professional and his mind is not logical. His theoretical knowledge takes a hind seat to his intuition. He becomes fascinated by the sparkle of candlelight on a liquid surface, or the way the color of a single droplet leaches slowly into an entire cauldron, or how the taste of gillyweed changes subtly depending on the hour it is gathered.

He lashes out violently if someone interrupts him when he’s in that state.

His work brings out his most powerful and desperate emotions.

His position as professor requires him to restrain himself and sometimes he feels buried, and at other times on the brink of madness.

In class the day of the funeral, one of the seventh-year Hufflepuffs makes a mistake so egregious it sends Severus into a fury like none they’ve ever seen. Afterward he retreats to his office and slams the door shut until he can regain his composure.

The Hufflepuffs stare at his door and don’t dare whisper.

---

On his arm burns a Dark Mark, symbol of his former servitude to a Dark Lord.

The years have not erased the pain it causes him, either physically or in the subtle and not-so-subtle obstacles it raises in his day-to-day life.

At lunch he hears one of his fellow professors suggest they enchant a memorial Snitch and release it for Cho.

How dare she – inconsequential child, gone after seven brief years – how dare she reach forward from decades past and compel them to respond like Voldemort calling his Death Eaters to him? Normal people don’t and shouldn’t have that kind of power.

---

Over the years Severus has made the Hogwarts potions ingredients vault one of the best in the world, with thousands of unique and irreplaceable samples each labelled in exacting detail. He is firmly loyal to Dumbledore and will do anything the Headmaster asks, no matter what he himself may think of the orders.

Those who don’t know him well think he has been dutiful all his life, and they don’t realize that being methodical is not his nature, but his coping-mechanism.

Those who do know him have watched him labor for decades to sever all ties to a younger, less responsible, less inhibited self. He’s past his sixtieth birthday and his thirtieth year at Hogwarts, and despite his best efforts he is still regarded as the youngest and least experienced of the Hogwarts staff. He’s still the one whose temper gets him into trouble on his performance reviews, and still the one everybody glances at when talk of the latest Death Eater atrocity arises.

This only makes his frustration more difficult to contain.

---

The sun sets red as a wound, rendering the players lurid, bloody flecks.

The Seekers collide with violence and one of them makes a wild grab for the Snitch. The audience is on its feet, roaring. Severus holds up a vial of clear liquid against the sky, and when he brings it down again it is filled with tiny glowing red sparks that dance and whirl like the players in flight.

He stoppers it carefully and marks the date on the label, then doesn’t know what else to write.

The vial does not contain wind and setting sun and Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw in the first match of the year and the exultation of the crowd all around him.

It contains lights.

There are some things neither Potions or language can encompass or comprehend.

---

He startles Madame Hooch as she arrives to lock up the broom sheds that night. For a moment he remains there in the darkness, still and intense and poised with that peculiarly anxious menace that is very much Severus Snape. And then he steps forward and presses an envelope roughly into her hand.

“For the Snitch,” he says. And his body language says don’t touch me and don’t ask and he turns and walks quickly away from her, arms crossed tensely over his chest and robes flapping.

The envelope is creased and age-yellowed and it has Chang, Cho written on it in Snape’s hand and it contains a single blue-black hair.

---

III. apprehendere

---

In Hogsmeade the next day, Harry Potter comes face to face with Severus Snape as the latter comes out of the Apothecary.

The meeting is pure chance and both of them stop dead at the unexpected sight of each other.

With Severus is another man. Lucius… no, Lucius is in Azkaban. This is Draco Malfoy, twenty years older than he’d been the last time Harry saw him. It is risky for Severus Snape to be seen with a Death Eater, and risky for Malfoy to be seen with the traitor who got away.

Malfoy’s eyes narrow and without a word he leans on his broom and takes off vertically in a precipitious exit, only swinging a leg over when he is well above the town. And then he is gone, arrowing higher and higher into the falling rain with a speed and daring that would have made Cho’s eyes light up.

For a short time, anyway.

---

“Harry… Potter”, says Snape slowly. His voice is silky and exquisitely enunciated and somehow imbued with a thousand meanings for each lingering word: Harry… Potter. Our… new… celebrity. He too is older, with new lines on his face and hair once velvet-black become steel-grey. There is electricity between the two of them, as dangerous and as bracing as it had been in Harry’s youth. Harry’s breath comes harder, as if he is in flight.

“Should you be seen with Malfoy?” he asks, because that’s the first thing that comes to mind.

“We were discussing his son,” says Snape, and Harry remembers something about Draco having Hogwarts-aged children and one of them being in the newspaper recently for some accident or scandal. Since none of the news affects him anymore he usually reads it and then forgets it.

Rain patters down, increasing into a steady downpour. In the gutter that edges the cobbled street, dirty water swirls and rushes, filled with mud and topped with an oily sheen. Deep within, sparkles of colored light mark the presence of magical waste.

Harry feels compelled to say something, anything.

“Cho Bentworth died two days ago,” he says. “The funeral was yesterday.”

There is a silence during which a person could ask, “Cho who?” or, worse yet, sneer something about Cedric Diggory and jobs not left half-done.

But Severus Snape’s eyes are locked onto the gutter, and it seems at first that he didn’t hear Harry at all. And then he says tersely, “I’m well aware of that, Potter.” He turns and stalks away, staying so near to the storefronts that his shoulder brushes the windows as he passes by.

He looks alone and in hiding, even to a near-stranger.

---

“Wait,” says Harry, and he catches up to him, grabs hold of the professor’s shoulder and is surprised by the solid strength in it. Snape turns on Harry, his eyes made dark and wild by the invasion of his personal space. Rain falls on his sallow face, slicks down his iron-colored hair. He seems suddenly and overwhelmingly wizardly in comparison to Harry: long hair, black gothic robes, a Slytherin snake wrought of silver on a chain around his neck. This is a man who would never live with Muggles even if he was related, which of course he is not. This is a man who still has his pride.

Harry takes Snape’s face in his hands and puts his lips on the professor’s cold and rain-wetted ones, and for a moment, he again feels as if he is flying.

And then Snape’s fingers tangle themselves in Harry’s Muggle coat and the professor sets him back with a powerful shove, his expression outraged.

“How dare you!” he snarls. And with a second, furious look, he turns his back on Harry again, walking more quickly this time.

Harry wipes his lip with a callused finger and sees, through the myriad glints and shadows of rain and windows, a flicker of golden wings.

---