Chapter Text
17 April, 2010
Draco Malfoy didn’t bother flinching anymore.
Severus supposed it was better this way. Better to be inured to the attentions of the Dark Lord lest the constant refrain of you startled me, my lord, wear thin. Better that Draco’s body learn to expect the proprietary creep of fingers on his shoulder, his ribs, his thigh than continue unabated in its reflexive autonomic functioning. Better to endure, even if it made him less human.
Severus told himself these things from behind the peaceful detachment of occlumency as he sat at the Malfoys’—the Dark Lord’s—dinner table chewing cud and watching the man pontificate even as he molested Draco’s knee, but there was an ember yet in the brittle tumbleweed of Severus’s chest that burned to see his godson thus. All of Severus’s machinations to keep Draco safe, all of Albus’s and Minerva’s and goddamn everyone’s but his own father’s, had come to naught the moment Lucius was eviscerated in a skirmish with the rebellion and the Dark Lord’s eye fell on his lissome son. There was no diverting his attentions. Now, all Draco had to do was survive them.
Severus hoped the Dark Lord’s tenuous tether to this side of heaven and earth kept him from indulging his more carnal appetites, but Severus’s infernal wish to know more more more, you’d do well in Ravenclaw, but it had better be…Slytherin! no longer extended to asking questions whose answers were intolerable.
At least Draco’s practice of occlumency was ironclad.
The Dark Lord crowing a particular name in contemptuous ecstasy lifted Severus from his reverie. Draco, back straight but head bowed as if the plate before him were fascinating in the extreme, lifted his gaze to meet Severus’s before flickering down again. Rosier looked bored, glumly pushing potatoes around his plate, whilst Parkinson swilled his goblet of wine, sitting back lazily in a chair turned toward the Dark Lord with his knees spread wide in a posture that only the very rich and very well bred get away with, nodding along with zeal in his eyes as if he believed every bit of demented foolery that dripped from his master’s lips.
This again, then.
“You know it grieves us that the Potter boy is long dead, my lord, since we would have loved nothing more than to see you do the honors,” Severus said. “But he was just a child when he ran off, and no one could ever find a trace of him in the whole of Britain. The little twit probably wandered into the street and got hit by a lorry. We must forget about this fairy story Dotty Dumbledore and his merry band of idiots have concocted around their favorite martyr, and strike at the great imbecile himself.”
It was nothing he hadn’t said before, over and over into ears closed to the truth. The Order had been trying to draw the Dark Lord—the remains of Thomas Riddle—into the open for years. But he was so vague now, hazy at the seams, the edges of his body seeming to dissolve if one looked too long. The fractures in his soul had become so grave that it showed even in his flesh, and none of the measures he had taken over the last ten years had been able to knit him back together. His megalomania had grown even in this state, but so too had his paranoia and his caution. Though the foot soldiers in his army of Death Eaters were innumerable, he kept only his fell snake and a handful of favorites around him now, sought only their counsel and company, and could not be tempted into an ill-fated battle with wizards and witches more hale than he.
“Ah, but you weren’t paying attention, Severus,” he said, spindly fingers tapping out a cheery emphasis on the tabletop. Nagini slithered up one of his arms and hooked her head over his shoulder to fix Severus with a disdainful gaze. “You’re lucky I’m in a fair mood. You see, I know Harry Potter to be alive.”
Draco’s eyes closed for a long moment. He put a bit of potato in his mouth but didn’t chew it.
“How do you know this, my lord?” Severus said.
“You dare question our lord?” Parkinson demanded. He slammed his goblet down on the table. Wine sloshed over the edges and spread like blood across the tablecloth.
“Peace, Pickford.” The Dark Lord held up a quelling hand. Parkinson’s jaw clacked shut and the wine seeped back into his goblet, leaving the tablecloth pristine. “We’ve always valued Severus for his truth-telling, and all that curiosity of his. It’s got us out of a bind or two, has it not?”
One side of the Dark Lord’s mouth lifted in a sly smirk that transformed him, just for a moment, into the handsome man to whom Severus couldn’t help but cleave. Severus did so hate it when flickers of the old Tom shone through: intelligent, canny, calculating. Charming. Funny. He was far easier to endure when he was simply full-tilt insane and cruel with it. Once, Severus had longed to be beautiful enough to make him notice him as he noticed Lucius; now Severus thanked Merlin, the indifferent universe, and the unholy combination of his two parents that he was only ever useful and quick with his wand.
Tom leaned forward and pitched his voice low as if there were anyone from whom he had to be discreet. Tom was ever playing to an imaginary audience.
“I can feel him, Severus,” he said. He closed his eyes and lifted his head as if sniffing some intoxicating perfume. “I can feel him—strong, and alive, and alone. He’s somewhere fresh and green.” He opened his eyes again, but saw something beyond Severus, Draco, this meal and this room. They flashed green in the low light and Severus’s fool heart stumbled, but when the Dark Lord blinked again they were back to blue. “We will find him, my friends,” he said. “I’m going to be whole again.”
Draco raised his head to meet Severus’s eyes. He was yet present enough to be frightened.
Sometimes, Albus was too like Tom for Severus to stomach.
“You must find him first, of course,” Albus said from across his desk. “You’ll find him and bring him to me.”
“For safekeeping?” Severus sneered.
Albus pinned him in place with eyes that had lost their sparkle long ago. Maybe in same the moment Severus had had to sunder his cursed arm away.
“Sentimentality, Severus?”
Severus clenched his teeth around all he wished he could say.
“You’re assuming Tom’s marbles were in place tonight and the boy lives at all,” he said instead.
“Only because you do, my friend.”
Damn him, and damn Tom too.
“And how do you propose I suddenly accomplish the impossible?” Severus snapped. “The greatest minds in western wizardry have found not hide nor hair of him in twenty-five years, his name was stricken from the Book of Admittance, no owls sent to him ever return. If you can’t find him, Albus, what on Earth makes you think I can?”
“I have great confidence in you, Severus.”
Severus knew he only said it because Severus was weak.
Afterward, Severus intended to prowl the corridors terrorizing unsuspecting schoolchildren, but his feet took him to the owlery, where he stood in the whipping wind and watched the treetops of the Forbidden Forest sway gently under its ministrations as though it were nothing but a pleasant breeze. Would that he could be so unbothered by the gales of history, and come through only taller, greener, stronger.
How could the boy be alive? Was the force of Lily’s final magic so great that it could hide a child—and now, a grown man—from the sight of the wizarding world for decades? Was he shuffling along an ordinary muggle life, a lorry driver or paper pusher or dung shoveler ignorant of his family, his heritage, his fate?
Or was it something much more sinister? He would have been so small, barely five years old when he ran from Petunia. Severus could imagine it all too easily: a tiny thing careening headlong into someone’s legs, only to be slung under an arm and taken where no one would ever see him again. A wizard need not be the Dark Lord to be a predator, and a powerful one at that. That the boy had remained hidden spoke to magics so great that Severus felt a tremor of unease ripple through him. If this theory held true—and why not, since nothing in Severus’s life, or the boy’s for that matter, had led him to believe luck was on his side—this was someone who could challenge the Dark Lord and Dumbledore both. Already had, simply by evading them for so long. This was someone who could have wizarding Britain on its knees with a snap of his fingers.
Tom and all his addled theatrics suddenly seemed quaint.
Her footsteps announced her before she could startle him.
“Albus is all in a lather.”
Minerva stood beside him, looking severe and immovable despite the wind.
“Albus Dumbledore does not lather,” Severus said.
“I assure you, Severus, he both rinses and repeats.”
“Does it amuse you to torment me, you old tabby?”
“I take the little joys where I can, these days.”
“What’s he said to you?”
“It’s nothing he says. I am neither blind nor stupid, Severus. Do I get to know, or am I to be left in the dark again?”
Severus peered at her slantwise before turning his attention back outside. He could be alone in this, for Albus was no company, or he could have Minerva. The choice was simple.
“Albus has set me an impossible task,” he said. “I don’t know how I will accomplish it, only that I must. Worse, when I do, I cannot tell him for fear of what he’ll do.”
They watched the trees for a moment. In the distance, a murder of crows was startled from their perches and rose cackling into the air. They undulated against the light of the moon before dispersing once again into the forest. Minerva touched cool fingers to his wrist.
“Come with me,” she said.
She installed him in her quarters on a wingback chair with a dram of whisky in his hand. He stared through the book on his lap, a poetry collection he had plucked from Minerva’s shelves at random. He could hear Minerva in her study, shuffling papers about, opening and closing drawers. When at last she emerged, he looked up and his heart stuttered. Fifteen minutes had aged her by decades.
“Minerva.”
“I bring this to you now only because I believe you and I are of a mind on the matter,” she said, voice gruff. “Albus is…” She shook her head.
“Ever the general,” Severus said. Minerva’s head dipped; it might have been a nod.
“By the time it occurred to me what I had on my hands, we’d thought the lad long dead,” she said. “So you understand why I didn’t say anything.” She thrust into his hands a sheaf of parchment, edges soft and worn after decades of handling.
It was an envelope, actually, of muggle design, with Minerva’s address scrawled across the front of it in Lily’s familiar hand. When Severus flipped it over to read whatever Lily had sent her old head of house so long ago, he found the envelope empty. Brows drawn together in question, in irritation, he looked up at Minerva, who leveled a sour look at him.
“Never you mind the contents of the letter,” she said. “Look at the back flap—there, along the edge.”
At first Severus saw nothing. A yellowing bit of parchment, seams grown weary. The edge Minerva spoke of was barely an edge at all anymore, frayed and tattered as it was. It was unremarkable, if discolored by a faint coffee stain that had seeped rusty along the border.
Coffee—or something else.
This time when he raised his head, his eyes were wide open. Minerva’s mouth was taut, but she nodded.
“She must have given herself a paper cut before she sealed it shut,” she said. “I tested it some years ago—it’s hers, not James’s.”
“Minerva, we could find him.”
“No one can know,” Minerva said. “Once it’s done, you’ll destroy it.”
“And Albus?”
“A man who asks for miracles need not know where they come from.”
A wild hope swept through him, something he’d no longer thought himself capable of. As if for a moment he let himself forget.
“Minerva, the horcrux.”
Minerva shook her head. She pilfered the whisky off him and gulped it down before splashing another dram or three into the glass and shoving it back into his hand.
“I refuse to believe there is only one way to accomplish something,” she said, a burr in her throat. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, et cetera. I’ll not be sitting idle whilst you do all the legwork.”
“Where will we keep him?”
“I’ve an old friend who lives on St. Kilda.”
“Isn’t St. Kilda uninhabited?”
Minerva only glared.
Severus stood, tucking the envelope into an inner pocket of his robes. He felt oddly formal, as if they should shake hands. As if tomorrow might never come. Minerva’s eyes were bright as she met his gaze but she held her head high and her shoulders squared. At least she was too Calvinist to want a hug.
“I trust you know the ritual,” Minerva said.
“I’ll study it again to be sure,” Severus said.
“And you’ll not do a thing til you’ve had a full night’s rest.” The look she gave him told him she knew him too well. “None of this tripe about not having one in thirty years. You’ll want your strength, and your wits. You’ll want daylight. I’ll see you at breakfast tomorrow and make no mistake.”
Severus nearly smiled.
The spell dumped him hard on his arse in the middle of a forest just beginning its spring bloom. Severus groaned and staggered to his feet. He brushed dirt and woodsy debris off his trousers, but the fabric was damp and so would need to be blasted with a cleaning charm before being set in the laundry. He squinted into the sunlight that dappled through the tree cover. It was quite cool, and Severus was glad of his greatcoat and the lack of rain.
He shook off the disorientation and touched his wand, secreted away in a pocket. The coordinates of his location blazed bright before him and he committed them to memory before they snuffed themselves out. One thing was for certain: he was still in the United Kingdom.
He slipped his wand back into his pocket and buttoned his greatcoat against the creep of the cold. He closed his eyes and tipped his head up to listen to anything that might indicate human occupancy. He could hear water, and birdsong, and the rustle of the wind through the leaves. He went still and allowed his thoughts to sink deep. He could feel how old the forest was, how protective. He could feel power simmering all around him. Was it the Earth’s own natural magic? Or did it belong to some wizard of whom Severus should be wary?
Severus reached deeper still and suddenly he was flying, flapping his wings against the breeze, rising high, high, high, blasting through the tree cover and into the cold that couldn’t touch him now. The acuity of his vision sharpened, and suddenly the birdcalls that seemed mere chirps before sounded like language: Where are you? I’m here. Predator. Danger. Beware. Hungry. Where are you? Where are you? He focused on tuning them out.
Once above the treetops, Severus saw the vastness of the forest and the complicated circulatory system of little lakes and the rivers that fed them, all against a backgrop of low mountains that looked like it belonged in an oil painting. Snow still dusted the highest peaks. Were these the highlands? Had the boy been so close all this time?
Severus popped out his wings and allowed himself to drift as he scanned for evidence of human life. The sound of the stream was more beguiling now, and he allowed himself to follow the instinct that pulled him toward it. As he grew closer, he became aware of a parliament of owls—all kinds, large and small, diurnal and nocturnal—emerging from their roosts to peer at him. Cold trepidation licked into his belly. He soared over the stream and kept searching.
He reached a craggy outcropping of limestone with a suspicious array of stones and logs nearby. He alighted on a branch and determined that he was indeed looking at a fire pit. His beak clack clack clacked in excitement—he couldn’t contain himself in this form. He hopped down to inspect the fire pit and discern any footprints, but there was too much leafcover and moss. He was hopping along the edges of the limestone formation when a low hoot called his attention: who are you? new new who are you?
When Severus looked up, it was into the sharp yellow eyes of a great snowy owl. She swiveled her head as she observed him. All around her were countless more owls, a hodge-podge of species and sizes and colors. He thought he recognized a black eagle owl that had once lived in the owlery—until it had been dispatched to find one Harry Potter and never returned. The lot of them did not belong together and yet here they were, staring at him. Closing in by increments. It was all too easy for wizards, who had harnessed the power of these great creatures for use as their personal postmen, to forget that they were birds of prey.
Severus was just a starling.
He transformed back into his human body and held up his hands.
“You’re post owls, so I know you can understand me,” he said. “I’m looking for Harry Potter. I mean him no harm.”
There was a thrumming amongst the owls as if they were discussing him. Slowly he slipped his hand into his pocket and gripped his wand. A ripple of wild, foreign magic shuddered through him and he whipped around. An opening appeared in the limestone and from it emerged a man—black hair that fell in dirty waves past his shoulders, a black beard with brambles tangled throughout, complexion like a nut roasted a rich copper, naked but for the tanned deer hide slung about his shoulders. His musculature was sleek but obviously powerful, like a lynx, and while he was lashed all over with the kinds of scars one might receive living a long time in the woods, there was one that stood out, unfaded, unmistakable. Stark white against his dark skin, the lightning bolt bisected his eyebrow and terminated in a diffuse constellation along the crest of his cheekbone. Only when the boy—this wild man the boy had become—assumed a defensive position did Severus realize he was gaping at him.
Once again he held up his hands.
“Mr. Potter,” he said, and the boy tensed, lip curling up to bare his teeth. “Harry,” Severus tried again, softening his voice. “My name is Severus Snape. I’m here to help you. Please. You must come with me.”
Potter uttered a very convincing growl. Severus tried to quell the uptick of his pulse. He took a step backwards.
“All right,” he said. “Look, I’m stepping back. I won’t hurt you. It’s all right.”
Potter was very still. Severus was reminded of Nagini before prey: motionless until she sprung to her deadly purpose.
Potter could not have survived this long alone. Those early years, when he was barely out of toddlerhood—he would have needed care. Someone to teach him what was safe to eat, how to build a fire, a shelter, how to preserve the skins and furs that had surely kept him alive, how to protect himself from predators. The question now was what were this person’s motives? Would Potter give them up? Had they harmed him? Were they harming him still?
“Who’s here with you?” Severus asked. “We must all get to safety now.”
He ventured a step forward. He lowered his arms but kept them in front of himself, hands spread in appeasement. He hoped this, at least, was translating.
When Potter met his eyes, Severus pressed his advantage: he slipped into Potter’s mind only to be accosted by a burgeoning sense of panic, fear, aggression. He could feel the coil of the incipient attack Potter was keeping in check. Hazy wordless images flashed around him, but Severus recognized Petunia. Petunia screeching. Petunia wrenching Potter’s tiny arm. Petunia batting him in the head with a frying pan. Soon she was replaced by a massive beast, hulking, blotting out the sun. The beast got its talons around Potter’s throat. Petunia screeching. Petunia screeching. Potter dissolving like so much powder in the beast’s hands. Potter landing in the soft green cradle of this forest, far, far away from his aunt. From his uncle.
Severus saw himself from within Potter’s mind. The sleeve of his greatcoat had crept up to reveal the edge of his dark mark. He was suddenly awash in green light and he heard a scream. Her scream.
A bellow cracked the silence and Severus found himself forcibly thrown from Potter’s mind only a moment before the boy tackled him. He went down with a great smack of his head against a stone. His breath left him and stars cascaded through his vision. Potter was on him in the space of a blink, fingernails sharp and sinking into Severus’s face. Severus slammed his knee into Potter’s groin and kicked him off. The birds were shrieking. The sound scraped at Severus’s eardrums. Potter snarled and lunged for him again as if his bollocks mattered not a whit. All around him the owls pitched themselves from their perches and dove toward Severus. Before any of them could reach him, Severus grasped his wand and disapparated away.