[From Samhain to the Solstice]; All Men Kill The Things They Love, Harry/Snape, R, 1/4
Title: All Men Kill the Things They Love
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Severus
Content Notes: AU (Severus survives), multiple character deaths, suicide, gore, violence, angst
Rating: R
Wordcount: This part 5000
Summary: After the war, the last thing Severus wants to do is help Potter. But Potter’s tale of a curse that has killed almost everyone he loves, and his plea for help to break that curse, stirs Severus’s intellectual curiosity, if nothing else. As he and Potter work side-by-side on the curse, however, Severus begins to suspect, uneasily, that Potter may want to do more than simply prevent the number of dead from increasing; he may want to bring them back.
Author’s Notes: This is the first of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. It is, as you can see from the notes, an extremely dark story. It should have four parts, to be posted over the next four days. The title is from Oscar Wilde’s poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” quoted below and at the end.
All Men Kill the Things They Love
“And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!” -Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”
The knock woke Severus in the middle of the night, which, looking back later, was entirely appropriate.
That it was a knock made Severus approach the door of his small cottage all the more warily after he had put on a robe. No one polite was supposed to know where he lived. If the Aurors that he knew still searched for him had found him, they would have broken down the door. Draco would have come through the Floo.
He aimed his wand at the door. There was no knock for a moment, and Severus had nearly relaxed when it came again.
“Who is there?” Severus hissed out before he thought better of it. Of course he ought to have kept silent and let the mistaken knocker-who must have mixed up his house with someone else’s-simply leave, but his mouth had spoken before he could think.
This time, a voice said, “Professor Snape? I need your help.”
This time, Severus strode across the drawing room between the small bits of furniture there and flung open the door. The night outside was quiet, cloudy, cool. But there was enough moonlight to discern the boy standing on the doorstep, whose voice Severus had recognized, and his huddled mop of hair.
“Potter.” Severus weighed the words on his tongue before he said them, because it was so delicious to be free to say them. “I don’t give a damn what you want.”
He started to close the door, and Potter lifted his head and turned to face him at the same moment as his wand lit with a Lumos Charm.
Severus stopped moving. Potter’s eyes looked worse than they had the night Albus died.
“Please,” Potter said, his voice shattered. “I need your help.”
*
“You heard about the deaths in the Daily Prophet?”
“I never pay attention to that rag anymore now that I don’t have to,” Severus snapped. He tried to ignore the feeling of those haunted eyes on his back as he warmed up soup with a few snaps of his wand. Potter had looked thinner than he had as a child in the light of the cottage. And although he hadn’t said anything about wanting food, he hadn’t protested when Severus got the soup out, either.
Why is it my fate to coddle Potters? Severus clenched his jaw and stirred the soup with motions of his wand just under the level of sharpness that would have made it fly out of the cauldron.
“Ginny, Ron, and Hermione are dead.”
Severus spun around to stare at Potter. He was staring past Severus at the wall of the cottage, and a trick of the light made his face resemble a skull’s. Severus swallowed and returned to not letting the soup sizzle over the rim of the pot. It seemed important.
“How did they die?” he finally asked, when Potter was silent and stared like a corpse.
“Ginny woke up mad one morning,” Potter said, and Severus checked immediately over his shoulder. But Potter’s voice was flat enough, and what he said sounded like a truth to Severus. “It was as if the diary that possessed her in her first year had come back. She was speaking in Parseltongue-or supposedly, it really wasn’t anything-and tried to stab me with a poisoned blade she conjured. I escaped, but I called Ron and Hermione for help, and they came over and wouldn’t believe me when I said she was mad. Ron got stabbed when he tried to restrain her. He died instantly. Hermione got scratched, and she lived for a few hours, but the poison was too strong.”
Severus slowly shook his head. The soup was done, and he Levitated the entire ball of liquid from the cauldron and split it between two bowls. “And what did happen? I take it you do not truly believe that she was possessed by any remnant of the spirit of the Dark Lord.” He carried the bowls over to the couch beside the fire where Potter had collapsed.
Potter took his while giving him a searching glance. “You won’t say his name even now?”
Severus flinched, and did his best not to show it as he sipped slowly from his bowl. “I will not.”
Potter didn’t challenge him. He turned his vacant glance back to the fire, at least until Severus stared at him and tapped the side of the soup bowl. Then he began to slowly scoop up softened bits of chickens and vegetables with the spoon Severus had provided him with before he began preparing the meal. “I took Ginny to St. Mungo’s along with Hermione. They-said there was nothing wrong with her.”
“There used Legilimency on her, I suppose?”
Potter nodded and put down the bowl again. It was partially empty, at least. “They said it was a break in her mind. Not possession.”
Severus shrugged. The Weasley girl had been brave enough during the year when Severus had had to act as the Headmaster of Hogwarts, but he had no opinion on her otherwise. “What happened to her?”
“She-cut her throat with the dagger before anyone could stop her.”
“I am-sorry for the impact that must have had on you.” The last time Severus had bothered to pay attention to the Prophet, he thought it had said that Potter and the Weasley girl were dating.
Potter nodded and stared into the bowl again. Then he began to eat, slowly.
“But I don’t see how I can help you in any way,” Severus added, when the silence had gone on long enough that he would have thought even Potter could take a hint. He didn’t know how to deal with this Potter like a wicker man walking, though.
Potter turned to him. “Two months ago, Mr. Weasley was killed by a werewolf who had come to the Ministry to register and somehow transformed without the full moon.” He ignored Severus’s flinch again. “After the news about Ginny and Ron, Mrs. Weasley killed herself. An Avada Kedavra to the head.”
Severus closed his eyes. It was somehow harder to conceive of the world bereft of Molly and Arthur than it was of the annoying children who had followed Potter around, although that might only be because he had worked with the Weasley parents in the Order. “I am sorry to hear it.”
“George woke up with a disease yesterday that’s eating him from the inside out,” Potter went on in an expressionless voice. “This morning, Andromeda told me that Teddy Lupin has a heart defect that’s probably going to kill him before he’s twenty. There was no sign of it at his last Healer’s appointment before this one.”
“She took him to a Healer again that soon? Why?”
Potter gave him a look that made Severus feel he had asked the wrong question. “This is a curse,” he said, in the same expressionless voice. “How much do you know about the Deathly Hallows?”
“I know that the Dark Lord tried to kill me for the Elder Wand.”
Potter paused, and his face seemed to flicker between expressions for a second, like a skull struggling to speak. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I forgot.”
The last thing Severus wanted to contemplate was Potter worrying about him, so he dismissed that with a flick of his fingers that nearly sent the soup bowl sloshing off his lap. He held it steady and demanded, “What do the Deathly Hallows have to do with this?”
“I mastered the Elder Wand because I defeated Draco Malfoy, who was its master. And Dumbledore left me the Resurrection Stone that was in the Gaunt ring, one of Voldemort’s Horcruxes. And the Invisibility Cloak I had, the same one my father had-”
“This is impossible,” Severus interrupted. “The Master of Death is nothing more than a child’s fairy story.”
“It’s what I am.” Potter lifted the spoon from the soup and, without pausing, stuck it into his left eye.
Severus sprang to his feet with a shout, and overturned the soup bowl after all. Potter removed the spoon from his eye with a steady hand, and as Severus watched, the blood and other gore simply faded. There was a brief spiral of light that seemed to consume them, and then the spiral was gone and Potter was looking at him with two normal green eyes.
“What was that?” Severus whispered. He couldn’t even muster the strength to look away from Potter or wave his wand to clean up the mess on the floor.
“I can’t die,” Potter said, still in that voice Severus was getting heartily sick of. “Any wound anyone causes me heals. Ginny stabbed me with that same dagger, but the poison burned out the moment it entered my body.”
“And you think that your immortality is somehow connected to the deaths of those around you? I’ve never heard that was a consequence of becoming the Master of Death.”
Potter gave a dry, rasping laugh that reminded Severus of the sound of autumn leaves crackling beneath a boot. “I didn’t, either. But after Ginny died, I got out the Cloak of Invisibility, and I saw this.”
There was a dark flash in the air between them, no spell that Severus knew, and a figure appeared and turned towards him. Severus found himself flinching for the third time that night. He had expected something like a Dementor, but this was worse. Darkness formed into the shape of a man, with a voice that hissed into his ears.
And the voice brought not words, but sensations. Severus knew in instants what it would be like to burn to death, to suffocate on fumes from an improperly-prepared potion when the door was only meters away, to succumb to the bite of the snake Potter had saved him from, to have his soul sucked out from the Dementor’s Kiss-
“Stop!”
The sensations vanished. Severus found himself on the floor, panting, on his hands and knees. He stamped down the shame that tried to rise up in him. This wasn’t about whether shame was a good response or not. He would have defied the Dark Lord himself to remain standing in the face of that.
He leaned back and stared at Potter. Potter was once again sitting there and staring straight at the wall. Severus shook his head. “What ways of dying do you feel?” His voice was hoarse, and he Summoned a glass wordlessly and then conjured water for it.
“Nothing.” Potter glanced at him. “I told you, I can’t die. I hear the voice of my mother whispering the curse.”
“The curse that you believe goes along with being the Master of Death.” At least Severus’s voice sounded like his own again. He stumbled back to his feet and leaned against the side of the couch.
“Yes. To live forever, while those I love die.”
Severus shook his head. “It could be a coincidence-”
“Then they would have found something when they looked into Ginny’s mind at St. Mungo’s.” Potter’s voice broke at last, and he held his hands over his face as if he didn’t want to see the world anymore. “They would have discovered Teddy’s heart defect before now. They would know the source of George’s illness.”
“Get rid of the Hallows,” Severus suggested, and then shifted in place at the stare Potter cast him. It was too much like the stare that Severus himself would have used when he was teaching Potter.
“I tried. I tried everything I could think of. I cast Fiendfyre on them. I dropped them in the deepest part of the ocean I could find. I used basilisk venom. I threw them away from me. They appear next to me every morning. They laugh and taunt me, too.”
“With what voices?”
“Sirius’s.”
Severus wished now that he hadn’t asked. He stared in silence at Potter, who was slumped over and looked as if he had gone back to being broken. Severus found that he would have-he would have given much to never see Potter that way. It wasn’t appropriate.
“How do you think I can help you?”
Potter glanced up at him. “You can help me break the curse.”
“I am not a curse-breaker. Go to Bill Weasley.”
“Then the curse will probably take him, too. And the last thing the Weasleys need is for me to ruin the rest of them.” Potter’s lips pulled back, and Severus knew now that the resemblance to a skull he had seen in him hadn’t been a coincidence. “The curse takes people I love. No chance of that here, Professor Snape.”
Severus supposed that much was true. But he still said, “You think I can defeat the curse with a potion?”
“Or your knowledge of Dark magic.” Potter’s voice limped along, tired again. “I know that you probably knew lots of it. One of the better Defense teachers we had, all in all.”
Severus wanted to ask what would prevent Potter from going to the Aurors the moment the curse was broken, but the words died, strangled, in his throat. Potter might be under suspicion for the deaths of the Weasleys, for all he knew. And if he tried to rave to them about the Deathly Hallows and the voice of Death speaking the curse, he’d go to St. Mungo’s himself.
As it was, this sounded like an intellectual challenge that Severus might savor.
He nodded. “So be it.”
*
“Did you know that when you put on the Cloak, you look like a Dementor yourself?”
Potter glanced absently at him from where he was stirring a cauldron full of Ice-Cold Draught. Severus had determined that the man was, at least, unlikely to mess that up. “You can see me with the Cloak on?”
“I don’t know if anyone else could,” Severus began.
“Yeah. When I used it to go to Knockturn Alley this morning, I don’t think anyone did.”
“But I saw you as a Dementor-like creature.” Severus stared at Potter’s moving hands, and then shook his head and turned back to the tome in front of him, one of the few books he’d been able to find that took the tales of the Master of Death seriously. “Do you know why that would be?”
“Not the least idea.”
Potter didn’t sound interested, either. Severus sneered to himself. Well, he supposed that he shouldn’t have expected better of intellectual theorizing from a Potter.
He turned a page of the book, and then caught his breath. His stillness was enough to make Potter turn to face him, although he at least put a Stasis Charm on the cauldron before he did so.
“What is it?”
Severus turned the book around. “Does this look like the Resurrection Stone to you?” In terms of direct, physical experience, Potters’ views could sometimes be valuable.
Potter stepped forwards and squinted down at the picture. His finger came out and traced around the side of the image, and Severus nearly snapped at him to get his hands off the precious book. But in the end, Potter simply pulled his hand back and nodded.
“It does, but the symbol of the Deathly Hallows is on the stone. Not this inscription.”
“I wonder if the inscription was rubbed off over time, or concealed. This picture is very old.”
Potter held out his hand stiffly in front of him and closed his eyes, and a stone simply materialized above his palm and fell into it. Severus stared in silence for a second. Then he leaned near enough to examine the edges of the stone. Potter held it passively, except for moving the stone when Severus indicated that he should with one finger.
He was not about to touch the thing without some sort of permission. Which would probably have to come from the stone instead of Potter himself, come to think of it.
Severus glanced back and forth from the picture to the stone, and finally nodded. “Yes. See on the edge here, where this side is slightly less round? Someone might have scrubbed off the inscription long ago.”
“What does the inscription say?”
Severus hesitated, but he could read runes, and there was really no reason why Potter shouldn’t hear this. “Cursed be he who holds this with the loss of all he loves.”
“Ahhh.”
Potter exhaled the sound in an almost satisfied manner, which Severus was going to snap at him about, but in the end, he restrained his tongue. It was probably only at the confirmation of what Potter had suspected, anyway.
Potter gazed at the stone for a second before he turned back to Severus. “Do you need it for anything else?”
“No.” Of course Severus would have liked a chance to examine it, since it was the Resurrection Stone, but again, he thought he would need the stone’s permission, and the thing was unlikely to give it.
Potter nodded, and the stone vanished from his palm as if it had Apparated itself. He turned back to the cauldron, and Severus turned back to the book.
*
“May I examine the cloak?”
Potter handed the thing over without flinching and without looking up from the very large black book that he’d gone-somewhere-to get. Severus was honestly not sure what Potter did or where he went during the hours that they weren’t trying to find a way to free him from the Hallows’ curse. He presumably had some place he slept, away from the prying eyes of reporters who wanted to interview him about his friends’ and girlfriend’s deaths, but it could have been anywhere.
Severus held the cloak carefully, but it didn’t feel as viscerally threatening as the stone had simply lying in Potter’s hand. Perhaps because it had been used more often to hide over the centuries? He played the hems and edges through his hands, and finally found what he was looking for, stitched in small silver runes near the hood.
“This one,” Severus breathed, “says that, ‘He shall live until he wishes to die.’ How does that fit in with immortality?”
“I suspect it’s the combination of the Hallows more than anything,” Potter said, and flipped a page in his book without looking up. “Probably with just the Cloak, someone can live like Ignotus Peverell in the story and go to greet Death when they’re ready. But combined with the others, it means that they’ll be joined in a triangle of power and I can’t die until I’ve lost everyone I love.”
Severus stared at him. Potter continued reading the book, and scribbling down notes on a piece of parchment next to him. “How did you come to that conclusion?”
“I don’t know that it’s right,” Potter said, shooting him a mild glance. “It might be complete nonsense, for all I know. But it make sense.”
Severus really wanted to ask where Potter had gained the intellectual capacity to come up with a theory like that, but bit his lip and kept silent. He would need to examine the wand next. But he didn’t need to do it today.
*
“This is the Elder Wand.”
Severus couldn’t help his hand shaking a little as he took the wand from Potter. He shot a narrow glance at Potter, but Potter had already turned back to the black tome that seemed to be consuming all his time when he wasn’t doing research or stirring potions that Severus had directed him in. Severus supposed it was nothing more than fixation on a possible solution.
It took forever for Severus to find the runes on the wand, for all that it was smaller than the cloak. When he took it over near the fire, he finally saw them, entwined with the carvings on the wand’s shaft.
“He who wields me shall live until he is conquered,” Severus whispered, and then frowned. Did that mean that Potter needed to lose a duel and be disarmed, the way Albus had?
He was back on the Astronomy Tower for a moment, the stones cold under his feet, Albus’s eyes fixed on him, the whisper of his name lingering around his ears like a wind colder than the stones.
“So you only need to find someone to duel you and master the wand.” Severus shook away the memory, and dropped the wand on the table. It seemed to leave a stain on his hand, as if he had picked up a dripping clump of seaweed. He wiped his hand on his robes. It didn’t help.
“No, not if it interacts with the other artifacts.” Potter gave him one of those calm glances that seemed so common with him, as if he had detached himself as much as possible. With the deaths around him, Severus thought, perhaps he’d had to or he would have gone mad. “I did try dueling with Ron, before I understood the curse. I just wanted to get rid of the damn thing and stop the whispering.”
“And Weasley was stupid enough to want it?”
“He was my friend. He would have done anything for me.”
Severus glanced away, and cleared his throat. “But you would have passed on the curse by passing it on.”
“Not unless he mastered the other two artifacts.” Potter shook his head. “But apparently, it’s different when someone duels the actual Master of Death for the Elder Wand as opposed to someone fighting an ordinary wizard who holds it. Ron Disarmed me, but the Elder Wand hung in the air between us and refused to move. Then I tried to give Ron the Cloak, but that didn’t work, either. It held onto my back and wouldn’t let go.”
“Perhaps the Cloak needs to be inherited, the way you inherited it from your father.” Severus was proud of himself for not spitting the last two words.
“Perhaps,” Potter said. “Which would be a good trick when I can’t die.”
“You need not snap at me, Potter, when I am only trying to help.” Severus sneered and turned to fetch his own book on curses from the store that Potter had brought from somewhere-probably the old library in Grimmauld Place, not that Severus had ever had a chance to examine the books there.
“I wasn’t snapping. I was stating a fact.”
A faint tone of surprise touched Potter’s voice, and Severus spun around, intent on catching the emotion and forcing Potter to express some more. But Potter was once again bent over the black book, his brow furrowed and distorting his scar as he wrote down some quick notes.
Severus narrowed his eyes. There was no title on the book, or in fact any words on the spine or cover at all, and Potter never let it out of arm’s reach. He’d only given Severus a blank look when he asked to look at it. But Severus was increasingly convinced that it was part of the puzzle, and that he needed to see it.
Perhaps there is a fourth Deathly Hallow, only revealed to the Master of Death. Children’s tales were hardly a reliable guide to history, after all.
*
The sound of the Floo opening made Severus come out of his lab, after putting a Stasis Charm on the potion he was brewing. Luckily, it was only a simple one that would reveal enchantments around an object, which Severus intended to use to see if any of the Hallows were directly connected to the curse.
Draco stepped out of the fireplace. He looked slightly disheveled, which concerned Severus more than the hectic tone to his voice. “Do you have a moment, sir?”
Severus nodded and gestured to his couch. This wasn’t one of the days that Potter would visit. He was off conducting “research” somewhere, or perhaps asleep in his mysterious living place. “Are you all right, Draco? Did Scorpius cause some kind of trouble?” Scorpius’s magic was developing young, and he had so far broken two windows and destroyed a fireplace.
“No. I just-” Draco swallowed and turned to him, not sitting down the way he usually did. “I need to know that you didn’t have anything to do with it, Severus.”
Severus blinked at him, for once at a loss. “What are you talking about, Draco? Anything to do with what?”
“No, you didn’t.” Draco sank onto the couch as though someone had turned his knees to water. “Oh, good. I was absolutely sure you hadn’t, but I needed to see your face.”
“If you do not tell me what you are talking about, Draco, you shall shortly begin to irritate me.”
Draco coughed and sat up. “Sorry, sir. There’s been a lot of-well, grave-robbing going on in the past few weeks. I knew that you wouldn’t have anything to do with it without a very good reason,” he added hastily, probably seeing the lightning gathering in Severus’s eyes. “But I wanted to ask. I know that your name is one being tossed around at the Ministry.”
“No one is supposed to know I’m alive, Draco!”
Potter had known. But then, he had saved Severus’s life in the first place. And perhaps, with his strange powers as the Master of Death, he would have been able to know if Severus was alive or not anyway.
What would it be like? How does he see the world?
Draco shook his head, drawing Severus from his reverie. “It’s not like that. It’s just the kind of conspiracy theorizing that happens every time you get some Dark wizarding activity or an unpleasant crime. Just the way some people act like the Dark Lord is going to come back because-well, because.”
Severus consciously did not allow his hand to move to his left arm the way Draco’s had, to clutch at the Mark. That part of his life was over now. “Whose graves have been broken into? And what was taken?” Most of the time, ancient artifacts or grave dust would be stolen, but it was always possible for it to be something else.
Draco grimaced. “Dumbledore’s tomb, at Hogwarts. And the graves of all the Weasleys who died recently, and Granger.”
Severus disguised his urge to freeze by turning away and studying the fire. “And what was taken? You can tell me, Draco.”
“Bones, teeth, hair. And dust.” Draco glanced towards him again. Severus could feel that although he didn’t turn away from the flames. “I’m sorry for suspecting you, but you can understand why I did.”
“Yes,” Severus murmured. The ingredients were the sorts that not that many necromancers would use, because grave dust and artifacts were so much more effective most of the time. They were, however, the sort that would be valuable for potions.
For certain potions.
Like the kinds that would be used in a resurrection ritual.
Severus honestly didn’t know how he got through the rest of the conversation with Draco. He made polite noises and inquired after Scorpius and Astoria, he remembered that much, and sent Draco away convinced of his innocence. Draco would spread the right rumors through the Ministry, he knew. He would spare Severus’s peaceful life.
And then he sat down and closed his eyes.
He had thought Potter seemed too detached for the pile of deaths that had fallen on him all at once. What if that wasn’t a front or because he was trying to protect himself from succumbing to emotion, but because he was confident he could bring them back? If they were resurrected, Potter had probably convinced himself, they could not be touched by Death’s curse again.
Severus would have to do something about it. He could not permit resurrections to happen like that, particularly if Potter intended to fashion the resurrections after the only ritual he would know-the one the Dark Lord had used to rise. That was beyond foul, and what he would create would be neither the monstrous creature the Dark Lord had been nor shambling Inferi.
They would be creatures that were, if Severus’s readings in the Dark Arts were correct-and he was confident his were more advanced than Potter’s-far faster and stronger than any Auror, as resistant to magic as a giant, and not capable of being controlled. Creatures who hated the living, who wanted to destroy them.
I have to stop him.
Part Two.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Severus
Content Notes: AU (Severus survives), multiple character deaths, suicide, gore, violence, angst
Rating: R
Wordcount: This part 5000
Summary: After the war, the last thing Severus wants to do is help Potter. But Potter’s tale of a curse that has killed almost everyone he loves, and his plea for help to break that curse, stirs Severus’s intellectual curiosity, if nothing else. As he and Potter work side-by-side on the curse, however, Severus begins to suspect, uneasily, that Potter may want to do more than simply prevent the number of dead from increasing; he may want to bring them back.
Author’s Notes: This is the first of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. It is, as you can see from the notes, an extremely dark story. It should have four parts, to be posted over the next four days. The title is from Oscar Wilde’s poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” quoted below and at the end.
All Men Kill the Things They Love
“And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!” -Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”
The knock woke Severus in the middle of the night, which, looking back later, was entirely appropriate.
That it was a knock made Severus approach the door of his small cottage all the more warily after he had put on a robe. No one polite was supposed to know where he lived. If the Aurors that he knew still searched for him had found him, they would have broken down the door. Draco would have come through the Floo.
He aimed his wand at the door. There was no knock for a moment, and Severus had nearly relaxed when it came again.
“Who is there?” Severus hissed out before he thought better of it. Of course he ought to have kept silent and let the mistaken knocker-who must have mixed up his house with someone else’s-simply leave, but his mouth had spoken before he could think.
This time, a voice said, “Professor Snape? I need your help.”
This time, Severus strode across the drawing room between the small bits of furniture there and flung open the door. The night outside was quiet, cloudy, cool. But there was enough moonlight to discern the boy standing on the doorstep, whose voice Severus had recognized, and his huddled mop of hair.
“Potter.” Severus weighed the words on his tongue before he said them, because it was so delicious to be free to say them. “I don’t give a damn what you want.”
He started to close the door, and Potter lifted his head and turned to face him at the same moment as his wand lit with a Lumos Charm.
Severus stopped moving. Potter’s eyes looked worse than they had the night Albus died.
“Please,” Potter said, his voice shattered. “I need your help.”
*
“You heard about the deaths in the Daily Prophet?”
“I never pay attention to that rag anymore now that I don’t have to,” Severus snapped. He tried to ignore the feeling of those haunted eyes on his back as he warmed up soup with a few snaps of his wand. Potter had looked thinner than he had as a child in the light of the cottage. And although he hadn’t said anything about wanting food, he hadn’t protested when Severus got the soup out, either.
Why is it my fate to coddle Potters? Severus clenched his jaw and stirred the soup with motions of his wand just under the level of sharpness that would have made it fly out of the cauldron.
“Ginny, Ron, and Hermione are dead.”
Severus spun around to stare at Potter. He was staring past Severus at the wall of the cottage, and a trick of the light made his face resemble a skull’s. Severus swallowed and returned to not letting the soup sizzle over the rim of the pot. It seemed important.
“How did they die?” he finally asked, when Potter was silent and stared like a corpse.
“Ginny woke up mad one morning,” Potter said, and Severus checked immediately over his shoulder. But Potter’s voice was flat enough, and what he said sounded like a truth to Severus. “It was as if the diary that possessed her in her first year had come back. She was speaking in Parseltongue-or supposedly, it really wasn’t anything-and tried to stab me with a poisoned blade she conjured. I escaped, but I called Ron and Hermione for help, and they came over and wouldn’t believe me when I said she was mad. Ron got stabbed when he tried to restrain her. He died instantly. Hermione got scratched, and she lived for a few hours, but the poison was too strong.”
Severus slowly shook his head. The soup was done, and he Levitated the entire ball of liquid from the cauldron and split it between two bowls. “And what did happen? I take it you do not truly believe that she was possessed by any remnant of the spirit of the Dark Lord.” He carried the bowls over to the couch beside the fire where Potter had collapsed.
Potter took his while giving him a searching glance. “You won’t say his name even now?”
Severus flinched, and did his best not to show it as he sipped slowly from his bowl. “I will not.”
Potter didn’t challenge him. He turned his vacant glance back to the fire, at least until Severus stared at him and tapped the side of the soup bowl. Then he began to slowly scoop up softened bits of chickens and vegetables with the spoon Severus had provided him with before he began preparing the meal. “I took Ginny to St. Mungo’s along with Hermione. They-said there was nothing wrong with her.”
“There used Legilimency on her, I suppose?”
Potter nodded and put down the bowl again. It was partially empty, at least. “They said it was a break in her mind. Not possession.”
Severus shrugged. The Weasley girl had been brave enough during the year when Severus had had to act as the Headmaster of Hogwarts, but he had no opinion on her otherwise. “What happened to her?”
“She-cut her throat with the dagger before anyone could stop her.”
“I am-sorry for the impact that must have had on you.” The last time Severus had bothered to pay attention to the Prophet, he thought it had said that Potter and the Weasley girl were dating.
Potter nodded and stared into the bowl again. Then he began to eat, slowly.
“But I don’t see how I can help you in any way,” Severus added, when the silence had gone on long enough that he would have thought even Potter could take a hint. He didn’t know how to deal with this Potter like a wicker man walking, though.
Potter turned to him. “Two months ago, Mr. Weasley was killed by a werewolf who had come to the Ministry to register and somehow transformed without the full moon.” He ignored Severus’s flinch again. “After the news about Ginny and Ron, Mrs. Weasley killed herself. An Avada Kedavra to the head.”
Severus closed his eyes. It was somehow harder to conceive of the world bereft of Molly and Arthur than it was of the annoying children who had followed Potter around, although that might only be because he had worked with the Weasley parents in the Order. “I am sorry to hear it.”
“George woke up with a disease yesterday that’s eating him from the inside out,” Potter went on in an expressionless voice. “This morning, Andromeda told me that Teddy Lupin has a heart defect that’s probably going to kill him before he’s twenty. There was no sign of it at his last Healer’s appointment before this one.”
“She took him to a Healer again that soon? Why?”
Potter gave him a look that made Severus feel he had asked the wrong question. “This is a curse,” he said, in the same expressionless voice. “How much do you know about the Deathly Hallows?”
“I know that the Dark Lord tried to kill me for the Elder Wand.”
Potter paused, and his face seemed to flicker between expressions for a second, like a skull struggling to speak. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I forgot.”
The last thing Severus wanted to contemplate was Potter worrying about him, so he dismissed that with a flick of his fingers that nearly sent the soup bowl sloshing off his lap. He held it steady and demanded, “What do the Deathly Hallows have to do with this?”
“I mastered the Elder Wand because I defeated Draco Malfoy, who was its master. And Dumbledore left me the Resurrection Stone that was in the Gaunt ring, one of Voldemort’s Horcruxes. And the Invisibility Cloak I had, the same one my father had-”
“This is impossible,” Severus interrupted. “The Master of Death is nothing more than a child’s fairy story.”
“It’s what I am.” Potter lifted the spoon from the soup and, without pausing, stuck it into his left eye.
Severus sprang to his feet with a shout, and overturned the soup bowl after all. Potter removed the spoon from his eye with a steady hand, and as Severus watched, the blood and other gore simply faded. There was a brief spiral of light that seemed to consume them, and then the spiral was gone and Potter was looking at him with two normal green eyes.
“What was that?” Severus whispered. He couldn’t even muster the strength to look away from Potter or wave his wand to clean up the mess on the floor.
“I can’t die,” Potter said, still in that voice Severus was getting heartily sick of. “Any wound anyone causes me heals. Ginny stabbed me with that same dagger, but the poison burned out the moment it entered my body.”
“And you think that your immortality is somehow connected to the deaths of those around you? I’ve never heard that was a consequence of becoming the Master of Death.”
Potter gave a dry, rasping laugh that reminded Severus of the sound of autumn leaves crackling beneath a boot. “I didn’t, either. But after Ginny died, I got out the Cloak of Invisibility, and I saw this.”
There was a dark flash in the air between them, no spell that Severus knew, and a figure appeared and turned towards him. Severus found himself flinching for the third time that night. He had expected something like a Dementor, but this was worse. Darkness formed into the shape of a man, with a voice that hissed into his ears.
And the voice brought not words, but sensations. Severus knew in instants what it would be like to burn to death, to suffocate on fumes from an improperly-prepared potion when the door was only meters away, to succumb to the bite of the snake Potter had saved him from, to have his soul sucked out from the Dementor’s Kiss-
“Stop!”
The sensations vanished. Severus found himself on the floor, panting, on his hands and knees. He stamped down the shame that tried to rise up in him. This wasn’t about whether shame was a good response or not. He would have defied the Dark Lord himself to remain standing in the face of that.
He leaned back and stared at Potter. Potter was once again sitting there and staring straight at the wall. Severus shook his head. “What ways of dying do you feel?” His voice was hoarse, and he Summoned a glass wordlessly and then conjured water for it.
“Nothing.” Potter glanced at him. “I told you, I can’t die. I hear the voice of my mother whispering the curse.”
“The curse that you believe goes along with being the Master of Death.” At least Severus’s voice sounded like his own again. He stumbled back to his feet and leaned against the side of the couch.
“Yes. To live forever, while those I love die.”
Severus shook his head. “It could be a coincidence-”
“Then they would have found something when they looked into Ginny’s mind at St. Mungo’s.” Potter’s voice broke at last, and he held his hands over his face as if he didn’t want to see the world anymore. “They would have discovered Teddy’s heart defect before now. They would know the source of George’s illness.”
“Get rid of the Hallows,” Severus suggested, and then shifted in place at the stare Potter cast him. It was too much like the stare that Severus himself would have used when he was teaching Potter.
“I tried. I tried everything I could think of. I cast Fiendfyre on them. I dropped them in the deepest part of the ocean I could find. I used basilisk venom. I threw them away from me. They appear next to me every morning. They laugh and taunt me, too.”
“With what voices?”
“Sirius’s.”
Severus wished now that he hadn’t asked. He stared in silence at Potter, who was slumped over and looked as if he had gone back to being broken. Severus found that he would have-he would have given much to never see Potter that way. It wasn’t appropriate.
“How do you think I can help you?”
Potter glanced up at him. “You can help me break the curse.”
“I am not a curse-breaker. Go to Bill Weasley.”
“Then the curse will probably take him, too. And the last thing the Weasleys need is for me to ruin the rest of them.” Potter’s lips pulled back, and Severus knew now that the resemblance to a skull he had seen in him hadn’t been a coincidence. “The curse takes people I love. No chance of that here, Professor Snape.”
Severus supposed that much was true. But he still said, “You think I can defeat the curse with a potion?”
“Or your knowledge of Dark magic.” Potter’s voice limped along, tired again. “I know that you probably knew lots of it. One of the better Defense teachers we had, all in all.”
Severus wanted to ask what would prevent Potter from going to the Aurors the moment the curse was broken, but the words died, strangled, in his throat. Potter might be under suspicion for the deaths of the Weasleys, for all he knew. And if he tried to rave to them about the Deathly Hallows and the voice of Death speaking the curse, he’d go to St. Mungo’s himself.
As it was, this sounded like an intellectual challenge that Severus might savor.
He nodded. “So be it.”
*
“Did you know that when you put on the Cloak, you look like a Dementor yourself?”
Potter glanced absently at him from where he was stirring a cauldron full of Ice-Cold Draught. Severus had determined that the man was, at least, unlikely to mess that up. “You can see me with the Cloak on?”
“I don’t know if anyone else could,” Severus began.
“Yeah. When I used it to go to Knockturn Alley this morning, I don’t think anyone did.”
“But I saw you as a Dementor-like creature.” Severus stared at Potter’s moving hands, and then shook his head and turned back to the tome in front of him, one of the few books he’d been able to find that took the tales of the Master of Death seriously. “Do you know why that would be?”
“Not the least idea.”
Potter didn’t sound interested, either. Severus sneered to himself. Well, he supposed that he shouldn’t have expected better of intellectual theorizing from a Potter.
He turned a page of the book, and then caught his breath. His stillness was enough to make Potter turn to face him, although he at least put a Stasis Charm on the cauldron before he did so.
“What is it?”
Severus turned the book around. “Does this look like the Resurrection Stone to you?” In terms of direct, physical experience, Potters’ views could sometimes be valuable.
Potter stepped forwards and squinted down at the picture. His finger came out and traced around the side of the image, and Severus nearly snapped at him to get his hands off the precious book. But in the end, Potter simply pulled his hand back and nodded.
“It does, but the symbol of the Deathly Hallows is on the stone. Not this inscription.”
“I wonder if the inscription was rubbed off over time, or concealed. This picture is very old.”
Potter held out his hand stiffly in front of him and closed his eyes, and a stone simply materialized above his palm and fell into it. Severus stared in silence for a second. Then he leaned near enough to examine the edges of the stone. Potter held it passively, except for moving the stone when Severus indicated that he should with one finger.
He was not about to touch the thing without some sort of permission. Which would probably have to come from the stone instead of Potter himself, come to think of it.
Severus glanced back and forth from the picture to the stone, and finally nodded. “Yes. See on the edge here, where this side is slightly less round? Someone might have scrubbed off the inscription long ago.”
“What does the inscription say?”
Severus hesitated, but he could read runes, and there was really no reason why Potter shouldn’t hear this. “Cursed be he who holds this with the loss of all he loves.”
“Ahhh.”
Potter exhaled the sound in an almost satisfied manner, which Severus was going to snap at him about, but in the end, he restrained his tongue. It was probably only at the confirmation of what Potter had suspected, anyway.
Potter gazed at the stone for a second before he turned back to Severus. “Do you need it for anything else?”
“No.” Of course Severus would have liked a chance to examine it, since it was the Resurrection Stone, but again, he thought he would need the stone’s permission, and the thing was unlikely to give it.
Potter nodded, and the stone vanished from his palm as if it had Apparated itself. He turned back to the cauldron, and Severus turned back to the book.
*
“May I examine the cloak?”
Potter handed the thing over without flinching and without looking up from the very large black book that he’d gone-somewhere-to get. Severus was honestly not sure what Potter did or where he went during the hours that they weren’t trying to find a way to free him from the Hallows’ curse. He presumably had some place he slept, away from the prying eyes of reporters who wanted to interview him about his friends’ and girlfriend’s deaths, but it could have been anywhere.
Severus held the cloak carefully, but it didn’t feel as viscerally threatening as the stone had simply lying in Potter’s hand. Perhaps because it had been used more often to hide over the centuries? He played the hems and edges through his hands, and finally found what he was looking for, stitched in small silver runes near the hood.
“This one,” Severus breathed, “says that, ‘He shall live until he wishes to die.’ How does that fit in with immortality?”
“I suspect it’s the combination of the Hallows more than anything,” Potter said, and flipped a page in his book without looking up. “Probably with just the Cloak, someone can live like Ignotus Peverell in the story and go to greet Death when they’re ready. But combined with the others, it means that they’ll be joined in a triangle of power and I can’t die until I’ve lost everyone I love.”
Severus stared at him. Potter continued reading the book, and scribbling down notes on a piece of parchment next to him. “How did you come to that conclusion?”
“I don’t know that it’s right,” Potter said, shooting him a mild glance. “It might be complete nonsense, for all I know. But it make sense.”
Severus really wanted to ask where Potter had gained the intellectual capacity to come up with a theory like that, but bit his lip and kept silent. He would need to examine the wand next. But he didn’t need to do it today.
*
“This is the Elder Wand.”
Severus couldn’t help his hand shaking a little as he took the wand from Potter. He shot a narrow glance at Potter, but Potter had already turned back to the black tome that seemed to be consuming all his time when he wasn’t doing research or stirring potions that Severus had directed him in. Severus supposed it was nothing more than fixation on a possible solution.
It took forever for Severus to find the runes on the wand, for all that it was smaller than the cloak. When he took it over near the fire, he finally saw them, entwined with the carvings on the wand’s shaft.
“He who wields me shall live until he is conquered,” Severus whispered, and then frowned. Did that mean that Potter needed to lose a duel and be disarmed, the way Albus had?
He was back on the Astronomy Tower for a moment, the stones cold under his feet, Albus’s eyes fixed on him, the whisper of his name lingering around his ears like a wind colder than the stones.
“So you only need to find someone to duel you and master the wand.” Severus shook away the memory, and dropped the wand on the table. It seemed to leave a stain on his hand, as if he had picked up a dripping clump of seaweed. He wiped his hand on his robes. It didn’t help.
“No, not if it interacts with the other artifacts.” Potter gave him one of those calm glances that seemed so common with him, as if he had detached himself as much as possible. With the deaths around him, Severus thought, perhaps he’d had to or he would have gone mad. “I did try dueling with Ron, before I understood the curse. I just wanted to get rid of the damn thing and stop the whispering.”
“And Weasley was stupid enough to want it?”
“He was my friend. He would have done anything for me.”
Severus glanced away, and cleared his throat. “But you would have passed on the curse by passing it on.”
“Not unless he mastered the other two artifacts.” Potter shook his head. “But apparently, it’s different when someone duels the actual Master of Death for the Elder Wand as opposed to someone fighting an ordinary wizard who holds it. Ron Disarmed me, but the Elder Wand hung in the air between us and refused to move. Then I tried to give Ron the Cloak, but that didn’t work, either. It held onto my back and wouldn’t let go.”
“Perhaps the Cloak needs to be inherited, the way you inherited it from your father.” Severus was proud of himself for not spitting the last two words.
“Perhaps,” Potter said. “Which would be a good trick when I can’t die.”
“You need not snap at me, Potter, when I am only trying to help.” Severus sneered and turned to fetch his own book on curses from the store that Potter had brought from somewhere-probably the old library in Grimmauld Place, not that Severus had ever had a chance to examine the books there.
“I wasn’t snapping. I was stating a fact.”
A faint tone of surprise touched Potter’s voice, and Severus spun around, intent on catching the emotion and forcing Potter to express some more. But Potter was once again bent over the black book, his brow furrowed and distorting his scar as he wrote down some quick notes.
Severus narrowed his eyes. There was no title on the book, or in fact any words on the spine or cover at all, and Potter never let it out of arm’s reach. He’d only given Severus a blank look when he asked to look at it. But Severus was increasingly convinced that it was part of the puzzle, and that he needed to see it.
Perhaps there is a fourth Deathly Hallow, only revealed to the Master of Death. Children’s tales were hardly a reliable guide to history, after all.
*
The sound of the Floo opening made Severus come out of his lab, after putting a Stasis Charm on the potion he was brewing. Luckily, it was only a simple one that would reveal enchantments around an object, which Severus intended to use to see if any of the Hallows were directly connected to the curse.
Draco stepped out of the fireplace. He looked slightly disheveled, which concerned Severus more than the hectic tone to his voice. “Do you have a moment, sir?”
Severus nodded and gestured to his couch. This wasn’t one of the days that Potter would visit. He was off conducting “research” somewhere, or perhaps asleep in his mysterious living place. “Are you all right, Draco? Did Scorpius cause some kind of trouble?” Scorpius’s magic was developing young, and he had so far broken two windows and destroyed a fireplace.
“No. I just-” Draco swallowed and turned to him, not sitting down the way he usually did. “I need to know that you didn’t have anything to do with it, Severus.”
Severus blinked at him, for once at a loss. “What are you talking about, Draco? Anything to do with what?”
“No, you didn’t.” Draco sank onto the couch as though someone had turned his knees to water. “Oh, good. I was absolutely sure you hadn’t, but I needed to see your face.”
“If you do not tell me what you are talking about, Draco, you shall shortly begin to irritate me.”
Draco coughed and sat up. “Sorry, sir. There’s been a lot of-well, grave-robbing going on in the past few weeks. I knew that you wouldn’t have anything to do with it without a very good reason,” he added hastily, probably seeing the lightning gathering in Severus’s eyes. “But I wanted to ask. I know that your name is one being tossed around at the Ministry.”
“No one is supposed to know I’m alive, Draco!”
Potter had known. But then, he had saved Severus’s life in the first place. And perhaps, with his strange powers as the Master of Death, he would have been able to know if Severus was alive or not anyway.
What would it be like? How does he see the world?
Draco shook his head, drawing Severus from his reverie. “It’s not like that. It’s just the kind of conspiracy theorizing that happens every time you get some Dark wizarding activity or an unpleasant crime. Just the way some people act like the Dark Lord is going to come back because-well, because.”
Severus consciously did not allow his hand to move to his left arm the way Draco’s had, to clutch at the Mark. That part of his life was over now. “Whose graves have been broken into? And what was taken?” Most of the time, ancient artifacts or grave dust would be stolen, but it was always possible for it to be something else.
Draco grimaced. “Dumbledore’s tomb, at Hogwarts. And the graves of all the Weasleys who died recently, and Granger.”
Severus disguised his urge to freeze by turning away and studying the fire. “And what was taken? You can tell me, Draco.”
“Bones, teeth, hair. And dust.” Draco glanced towards him again. Severus could feel that although he didn’t turn away from the flames. “I’m sorry for suspecting you, but you can understand why I did.”
“Yes,” Severus murmured. The ingredients were the sorts that not that many necromancers would use, because grave dust and artifacts were so much more effective most of the time. They were, however, the sort that would be valuable for potions.
For certain potions.
Like the kinds that would be used in a resurrection ritual.
Severus honestly didn’t know how he got through the rest of the conversation with Draco. He made polite noises and inquired after Scorpius and Astoria, he remembered that much, and sent Draco away convinced of his innocence. Draco would spread the right rumors through the Ministry, he knew. He would spare Severus’s peaceful life.
And then he sat down and closed his eyes.
He had thought Potter seemed too detached for the pile of deaths that had fallen on him all at once. What if that wasn’t a front or because he was trying to protect himself from succumbing to emotion, but because he was confident he could bring them back? If they were resurrected, Potter had probably convinced himself, they could not be touched by Death’s curse again.
Severus would have to do something about it. He could not permit resurrections to happen like that, particularly if Potter intended to fashion the resurrections after the only ritual he would know-the one the Dark Lord had used to rise. That was beyond foul, and what he would create would be neither the monstrous creature the Dark Lord had been nor shambling Inferi.
They would be creatures that were, if Severus’s readings in the Dark Arts were correct-and he was confident his were more advanced than Potter’s-far faster and stronger than any Auror, as resistant to magic as a giant, and not capable of being controlled. Creatures who hated the living, who wanted to destroy them.
I have to stop him.
Part Two.