Falling Stars, Part 14
Title: Falling Stars
Rating: PG, Angst
Summary: The war's finished, the good guys won, and it's time to live. Wouldn’t it be lovely if that were true?
Falling Stars, p. 14
Harry smiled gratefully, for the change of topic, and nodded:
“Yes, Sir, I was just wondering where’d I’d be placed.”
“Placed? Do you want to be placed?”
“No!” The boy answered sharply and immediately,
then more uncertainly, “But, I don’t want to be a burden, either.
I know you said you’d protect me, but this isn’t exactly
what you signed- on for.” (Part 11).
After a second glance to his wife, who was settled into a bed with their daughter, who was sniffling piteously - still shaken by her new brother’s burst of accidental magic, Severus turned back to the child and caught his chin in a careful but firm grip.
“Child, child, calm yourself!” Severus caught the child’s shoulders- tightening his grip as the child continued to shriek silently - his mouth extended in anguish and fear. He hesitated a second before shaking the child, but to no effect and finally gathered himself and incanted, “legillimens!”
Severus almost panicked as he found himself seeming to fall through the magically created link - unimpeded by even the natural resistance that he should have expected to find there. Reaching the end of the link between them, Severus was startled to find himself facing an ostensibly endless dark void as his mental image resolved.
This should not have been possible. The child was clearly present, else he could not have been screaming, but the landscape of his mind appeared barren - empty. Severus had never seen a mind stripped like this, not even in the minds of other Azkaban prisoners, who had been exposed to Dementors over long mind-numbing years.
Harry had implied earlier that, just before the last battle, he and Dumbledore had discovered that Harry was naturally occluding and had been “all along”, but certainly he could not have meant that he had been occluding from this early in his childhood - to this extent. Severus could not even imagine the depth of abuse that would cause such a level of occlusion. Surely the boy could not have survived anything that would have left him like this - something in the de-aging process must have caused this.
Repressing his own anxiety and unease before it fed the child’s mental state, Severus called back on his memories of an early legillimency training session with Albus - to a brief lesson in recovering individuals lost in their own minds. Albus had only been able to give him the bare theory - having little experience in the activity himself and no subject to locate, but the logic and theory had been refined with years of experience.
--- Four hours later, Severus wearily withdrew from his son’s mind to stare into his wife’s concerned gaze as he muttered: “Get him dressed, we will need to get him to a mind healer immediately.”
“Is that wise?” The ramifications of her question were quite clear as they stared down at their newly de-aged and transformed son. There was no way to be certain that the residual magics wear sealed and completed, though Severus through complex series of wand sweeps could only identify the lightest traces of dragon’s blood magics - as though the children had never been de-aged, but had instead been poisoned.
“Wise, perhaps not, but necessary. It was quite difficult to locate his mental embodiment; at this age, the child did not seem to have a concrete sense of self, and only knew himself as ‘boy’. When I attempted to address him by his first name, he failed to recognize it as his own name and hearing his surname sent even that frail embodiment into a shrieking panic. I can only speculate at the depth of trauma that he must overcome, but his language and communication abilities seem almost non-existent … and the core burn …” he shook his head unable to describe exactly what the core burn’s continuing sensory overload had done beyond nearly destroying the child’s mental landscape.
At least the de-aging process had negated the intense pain that Harry had suffered through earlier, and it did appear that the de-aging had also had the intended effect of slowing or putting a halt to the dragon’s core magic’s on going destruction of the child’s magical core. In fact, it appeared that the cores had blended - giving Severus hope that even as the child aged and lost his innocence, the purity of the dragon’s magical core would no longer be compelled to purge itself of the seemingly tainted human magical core. Nevertheless, Severus silently wondered if it would not have been kinder and more humane to have let the boy quickly succumb to the Kanner’s core burn rather than condemning him to a lifetime weighted down by limited mental capacities.
His wife had been dwelling on more practical thoughts, however, and quickly interrupted his thoughts as she detailed the invented background that they would tell the healers if anything were asked.
“There’s not very much that we’ll need to add to the truth. You sent us away to protect us from Voldemort and his cronies, I first had a daughter that I kept from you, fearing that you wouldn’t be able to keep from coming to see her. Later, six years ago, just before we went into your cousin’s care, you and I had a rendezvous - to say goodbye knowing we might never see each other again - and conceived twins, whose existence I also kept from you… for the same reason. Even at the Manor, I kept their existence a secret and only your cousin, myself, and a maid knew of them and that they had been sent separately into the care of different relatives few contacts in the magical world. Later, I brought our first daughter to live in hiding with me and later the twins. Somehow the secret was revealed and the death eaters attacked the manner, tortured Celeste and I, and took the twins with plans to take you captive in the battle and torture them in front of you. With assistance from certain unsavory elements, who we could certainly not be expected to reveal after their service of helping return our children to us, we located and retrieved them this morning. We have no idea what torture or experimentation has been done to them.”
Nodding at the practicality of her cover story, Severus considered the few remaining memories that the boy seemed to have and found that none of them would contradict her story.
“What do we say about Celeste’s absence? She was treated at St. Mungo’s?”
“That she came home with me, but fled in fear, after someone attempted to poison you and she at the tea room. We haven’t been able to locate her since.”
Nodding grimly, Severus returned to their children and cast sleeping charm on them both before gathering them up and heading toward the floo. Just as she threw the floo powder into the flames and carried their daughter into the green flame, another question came to mind.
“Their names?” He asked rapidly.
“Brian Albus and Poppy Eileen Snape.” She answered sweetly as the floo carried her away, knowing without question that he approved.
---
Healer Monogrove ushered the Snapes into her office, eyeing them with a grim calculating eye. She doubted that the potions professor remembered her, though she could remember him clearly. She might have received full healers training, if it were not for his abysmal grading.
She had never expected to see him in the course of her medical duties - as a child’s healer of the mind. More to the point, she had hoped to never see him again under any circumstances whatsoever. Before his role in the now famed ‘Order’ had been revealed -it had been inconceivable to think that the venomous older man could have found a companion without resorting to casting an ‘imperio’, much less someone so desperate for companionship that she would marry the unpleasant bastard and so feeble-minded that she would bear him children - at least not without a substantial financial settlement as part of the exchange.
Yet, that’s clearly what had happened, judging by the miniature copy of him - complete with the hawk-shaped nose, sallow skin, and dull eyes - resting in Mrs. Snape’s arms. Of course, when she saw the wife, it made more sense, Mrs. Snape could not even be charitably described as homely and probably had ten maybe twenty years on the professor. Having to go home to woman like that probably explained some of the professor’s bitterness. Within seconds, before the couple had even settled in their seats, Healer Monogrove had revised her mental story of the irritating professor’s background - casting him as a tragic figure forced into marrying an old spinster almost twice his age. In fact, an arranged marriage was about the only way that she could have even imagined him getting married.
“Healer Monogrove?” the professor broke her caught her attention as he quickly appraised her with a sneer.
“Professor Snape, what seems to be the problem?” the healer questioned in her haughtiest tone - enjoying the assumption he would need to assure her good graces instead of the reverse.
Intervening before her husband lost the temper he had been barely maintaining after hours of having to deal with arbitrary, meaningless bureaucracy, Juliette quickly told the healer their synthesized story as well as giving the healer a detailed report of what Severus found when he linked with the child’s mind.
“You legillimensed your son?!?” Monogrove asked Severus harshly.
“You would have no reason to remember this, having scored below the required outstanding needed to take any of the preparatory courses for healer’s training offered at Hogwarts, but both the Headmaster and I were certified Masters in Occlusion, Legillimency, and Physiomency. Of course, I would have ascertained my son’s status before bringing him.”
“That may be, but it’s quite frowned upon.”
“Many things are,” Severus challenged, “Yet, I have prepared a great number of potions for a number of healers who saw no difficulty in treating their own family’s ailments. By this time, I would have expected you to realize that many of your field’s idealized practices are dropped outside of the training setting.”
“Perhaps, but if you’ve already established his condition, I fail to see why you need my assistance.”
Severus’s temper flared at her callous response as he jousted back, “I’m inclined to wonder that myself… especially if you are incapable of recognizing that the three skills I specialize in are neither particularly suited towards treating mental traumas of children nor effective in diagnosing the distinctions between mental difficulties caused by abuse and those caused by torture.”
“There’s been abuse as well!” the healer practically shouted.
“In my son’s case, yes. We were not aware until they were recovered, but the ‘relatives’, into whose care he was sent, inflicted a variety of abuses on him that we cannot catalogue or pursue without his testimony.”
Forgetting for a moment, her dislike of the man, Monogrove studied their child intently, and nodded grimly to the Professor to sit the child up.
Kneeling so that she could stare into their son’s sleep-glazed eyes, the bulbous healer quickly scanned and cast the same diagnostic spells that Severus had cast earlier. When she finally stood, she sighed heavily and went to the door to call for a healer’s assistant.
Expecting her to announce that she would need to keep their son overnight for observation, both Severus and Juliette were shocked speechless when the abrasive healer took and entirely different tack: “Professor, Mrs. Snape, for the moment we will need to prepare a bed for your son in the accidental magic wing until we can make arrangements with a facility for incurable care. There is a fine facility in Ireland, but I would suggest investigating the facility in Cannes, France. When I visited on conference, they kept such cheery surroundings for the children and even let the children have their own coloring sets and similar.”
“What?!?” Severus and his wife demanded at once.
“There are other facilities, of course. If you feel those are too far away, there are others closer with acceptable reputations.”
“A two minute examination and you are ready to commit my child?” Severus shouted angrily as he shot to his feet.
“Professor Snape, surely with your skills and experience, you can recognize the hopelessness of your son’s situation. I am sorry to have to put it so bluntly, but your son is beyond treatment. The best you can hope for is a comfortable situation. We have a ward for incurable patients, but currently we don’t have any other incurable patients who are children, so it is not the most ideal environment for him.”
“You incompetent …” Severus started but was cut off by Juliette, who cautioned that negative comments wouldn’t help the situation.”
“I am sorry, but your son is a hopeless case. The best thing to do for everyone concerned is to bind his magic and make sure he’s in a well monitored facility to prevent him from injuring himself and others.”
“How ironic,” Severus sneered, “If I believe those were my exact words to Madam Pomfrey when she attempted to intervene and get you into the healer preparatory courses. While I generally enjoy being proven correct, in this instance, I can somehow find no satisfaction in the knowledge that you have fulfilled my expectations. Good day. Juliette.”
Ignoring the shock and indignant expression on the healer’s face, Severus turned on his heal and stalked out the door with Juliette close behind.
As they stalked down the corridor, Monogrove got over her shock and ran out behind them, shouting: “You can’t do this. The child’s incurable and insane. Taking him home will only endanger both of your children.”
Her words echoed through the corridor but fell on death ears as the Snape family disappeared as soon as they reached the apparition point.
Rating: PG, Angst
Summary: The war's finished, the good guys won, and it's time to live. Wouldn’t it be lovely if that were true?
Falling Stars, p. 14
Harry smiled gratefully, for the change of topic, and nodded:
“Yes, Sir, I was just wondering where’d I’d be placed.”
“Placed? Do you want to be placed?”
“No!” The boy answered sharply and immediately,
then more uncertainly, “But, I don’t want to be a burden, either.
I know you said you’d protect me, but this isn’t exactly
what you signed- on for.” (Part 11).
After a second glance to his wife, who was settled into a bed with their daughter, who was sniffling piteously - still shaken by her new brother’s burst of accidental magic, Severus turned back to the child and caught his chin in a careful but firm grip.
“Child, child, calm yourself!” Severus caught the child’s shoulders- tightening his grip as the child continued to shriek silently - his mouth extended in anguish and fear. He hesitated a second before shaking the child, but to no effect and finally gathered himself and incanted, “legillimens!”
Severus almost panicked as he found himself seeming to fall through the magically created link - unimpeded by even the natural resistance that he should have expected to find there. Reaching the end of the link between them, Severus was startled to find himself facing an ostensibly endless dark void as his mental image resolved.
This should not have been possible. The child was clearly present, else he could not have been screaming, but the landscape of his mind appeared barren - empty. Severus had never seen a mind stripped like this, not even in the minds of other Azkaban prisoners, who had been exposed to Dementors over long mind-numbing years.
Harry had implied earlier that, just before the last battle, he and Dumbledore had discovered that Harry was naturally occluding and had been “all along”, but certainly he could not have meant that he had been occluding from this early in his childhood - to this extent. Severus could not even imagine the depth of abuse that would cause such a level of occlusion. Surely the boy could not have survived anything that would have left him like this - something in the de-aging process must have caused this.
Repressing his own anxiety and unease before it fed the child’s mental state, Severus called back on his memories of an early legillimency training session with Albus - to a brief lesson in recovering individuals lost in their own minds. Albus had only been able to give him the bare theory - having little experience in the activity himself and no subject to locate, but the logic and theory had been refined with years of experience.
--- Four hours later, Severus wearily withdrew from his son’s mind to stare into his wife’s concerned gaze as he muttered: “Get him dressed, we will need to get him to a mind healer immediately.”
“Is that wise?” The ramifications of her question were quite clear as they stared down at their newly de-aged and transformed son. There was no way to be certain that the residual magics wear sealed and completed, though Severus through complex series of wand sweeps could only identify the lightest traces of dragon’s blood magics - as though the children had never been de-aged, but had instead been poisoned.
“Wise, perhaps not, but necessary. It was quite difficult to locate his mental embodiment; at this age, the child did not seem to have a concrete sense of self, and only knew himself as ‘boy’. When I attempted to address him by his first name, he failed to recognize it as his own name and hearing his surname sent even that frail embodiment into a shrieking panic. I can only speculate at the depth of trauma that he must overcome, but his language and communication abilities seem almost non-existent … and the core burn …” he shook his head unable to describe exactly what the core burn’s continuing sensory overload had done beyond nearly destroying the child’s mental landscape.
At least the de-aging process had negated the intense pain that Harry had suffered through earlier, and it did appear that the de-aging had also had the intended effect of slowing or putting a halt to the dragon’s core magic’s on going destruction of the child’s magical core. In fact, it appeared that the cores had blended - giving Severus hope that even as the child aged and lost his innocence, the purity of the dragon’s magical core would no longer be compelled to purge itself of the seemingly tainted human magical core. Nevertheless, Severus silently wondered if it would not have been kinder and more humane to have let the boy quickly succumb to the Kanner’s core burn rather than condemning him to a lifetime weighted down by limited mental capacities.
His wife had been dwelling on more practical thoughts, however, and quickly interrupted his thoughts as she detailed the invented background that they would tell the healers if anything were asked.
“There’s not very much that we’ll need to add to the truth. You sent us away to protect us from Voldemort and his cronies, I first had a daughter that I kept from you, fearing that you wouldn’t be able to keep from coming to see her. Later, six years ago, just before we went into your cousin’s care, you and I had a rendezvous - to say goodbye knowing we might never see each other again - and conceived twins, whose existence I also kept from you… for the same reason. Even at the Manor, I kept their existence a secret and only your cousin, myself, and a maid knew of them and that they had been sent separately into the care of different relatives few contacts in the magical world. Later, I brought our first daughter to live in hiding with me and later the twins. Somehow the secret was revealed and the death eaters attacked the manner, tortured Celeste and I, and took the twins with plans to take you captive in the battle and torture them in front of you. With assistance from certain unsavory elements, who we could certainly not be expected to reveal after their service of helping return our children to us, we located and retrieved them this morning. We have no idea what torture or experimentation has been done to them.”
Nodding at the practicality of her cover story, Severus considered the few remaining memories that the boy seemed to have and found that none of them would contradict her story.
“What do we say about Celeste’s absence? She was treated at St. Mungo’s?”
“That she came home with me, but fled in fear, after someone attempted to poison you and she at the tea room. We haven’t been able to locate her since.”
Nodding grimly, Severus returned to their children and cast sleeping charm on them both before gathering them up and heading toward the floo. Just as she threw the floo powder into the flames and carried their daughter into the green flame, another question came to mind.
“Their names?” He asked rapidly.
“Brian Albus and Poppy Eileen Snape.” She answered sweetly as the floo carried her away, knowing without question that he approved.
---
Healer Monogrove ushered the Snapes into her office, eyeing them with a grim calculating eye. She doubted that the potions professor remembered her, though she could remember him clearly. She might have received full healers training, if it were not for his abysmal grading.
She had never expected to see him in the course of her medical duties - as a child’s healer of the mind. More to the point, she had hoped to never see him again under any circumstances whatsoever. Before his role in the now famed ‘Order’ had been revealed -it had been inconceivable to think that the venomous older man could have found a companion without resorting to casting an ‘imperio’, much less someone so desperate for companionship that she would marry the unpleasant bastard and so feeble-minded that she would bear him children - at least not without a substantial financial settlement as part of the exchange.
Yet, that’s clearly what had happened, judging by the miniature copy of him - complete with the hawk-shaped nose, sallow skin, and dull eyes - resting in Mrs. Snape’s arms. Of course, when she saw the wife, it made more sense, Mrs. Snape could not even be charitably described as homely and probably had ten maybe twenty years on the professor. Having to go home to woman like that probably explained some of the professor’s bitterness. Within seconds, before the couple had even settled in their seats, Healer Monogrove had revised her mental story of the irritating professor’s background - casting him as a tragic figure forced into marrying an old spinster almost twice his age. In fact, an arranged marriage was about the only way that she could have even imagined him getting married.
“Healer Monogrove?” the professor broke her caught her attention as he quickly appraised her with a sneer.
“Professor Snape, what seems to be the problem?” the healer questioned in her haughtiest tone - enjoying the assumption he would need to assure her good graces instead of the reverse.
Intervening before her husband lost the temper he had been barely maintaining after hours of having to deal with arbitrary, meaningless bureaucracy, Juliette quickly told the healer their synthesized story as well as giving the healer a detailed report of what Severus found when he linked with the child’s mind.
“You legillimensed your son?!?” Monogrove asked Severus harshly.
“You would have no reason to remember this, having scored below the required outstanding needed to take any of the preparatory courses for healer’s training offered at Hogwarts, but both the Headmaster and I were certified Masters in Occlusion, Legillimency, and Physiomency. Of course, I would have ascertained my son’s status before bringing him.”
“That may be, but it’s quite frowned upon.”
“Many things are,” Severus challenged, “Yet, I have prepared a great number of potions for a number of healers who saw no difficulty in treating their own family’s ailments. By this time, I would have expected you to realize that many of your field’s idealized practices are dropped outside of the training setting.”
“Perhaps, but if you’ve already established his condition, I fail to see why you need my assistance.”
Severus’s temper flared at her callous response as he jousted back, “I’m inclined to wonder that myself… especially if you are incapable of recognizing that the three skills I specialize in are neither particularly suited towards treating mental traumas of children nor effective in diagnosing the distinctions between mental difficulties caused by abuse and those caused by torture.”
“There’s been abuse as well!” the healer practically shouted.
“In my son’s case, yes. We were not aware until they were recovered, but the ‘relatives’, into whose care he was sent, inflicted a variety of abuses on him that we cannot catalogue or pursue without his testimony.”
Forgetting for a moment, her dislike of the man, Monogrove studied their child intently, and nodded grimly to the Professor to sit the child up.
Kneeling so that she could stare into their son’s sleep-glazed eyes, the bulbous healer quickly scanned and cast the same diagnostic spells that Severus had cast earlier. When she finally stood, she sighed heavily and went to the door to call for a healer’s assistant.
Expecting her to announce that she would need to keep their son overnight for observation, both Severus and Juliette were shocked speechless when the abrasive healer took and entirely different tack: “Professor, Mrs. Snape, for the moment we will need to prepare a bed for your son in the accidental magic wing until we can make arrangements with a facility for incurable care. There is a fine facility in Ireland, but I would suggest investigating the facility in Cannes, France. When I visited on conference, they kept such cheery surroundings for the children and even let the children have their own coloring sets and similar.”
“What?!?” Severus and his wife demanded at once.
“There are other facilities, of course. If you feel those are too far away, there are others closer with acceptable reputations.”
“A two minute examination and you are ready to commit my child?” Severus shouted angrily as he shot to his feet.
“Professor Snape, surely with your skills and experience, you can recognize the hopelessness of your son’s situation. I am sorry to have to put it so bluntly, but your son is beyond treatment. The best you can hope for is a comfortable situation. We have a ward for incurable patients, but currently we don’t have any other incurable patients who are children, so it is not the most ideal environment for him.”
“You incompetent …” Severus started but was cut off by Juliette, who cautioned that negative comments wouldn’t help the situation.”
“I am sorry, but your son is a hopeless case. The best thing to do for everyone concerned is to bind his magic and make sure he’s in a well monitored facility to prevent him from injuring himself and others.”
“How ironic,” Severus sneered, “If I believe those were my exact words to Madam Pomfrey when she attempted to intervene and get you into the healer preparatory courses. While I generally enjoy being proven correct, in this instance, I can somehow find no satisfaction in the knowledge that you have fulfilled my expectations. Good day. Juliette.”
Ignoring the shock and indignant expression on the healer’s face, Severus turned on his heal and stalked out the door with Juliette close behind.
As they stalked down the corridor, Monogrove got over her shock and ran out behind them, shouting: “You can’t do this. The child’s incurable and insane. Taking him home will only endanger both of your children.”
Her words echoed through the corridor but fell on death ears as the Snape family disappeared as soon as they reached the apparition point.