[From Samhain to the Solstice]: All Men Kill The Things They Love, Harry/Snape, R, 2/4
Part One.
Title: All Men Kill the Things They Love (2/4)
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 4400
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.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Part Two
“I wish to see the book that you are always studying.”
Potter leaned back for a moment and blinked at him. The blank look that was more and more often in his eyes vanished. “I don’t have it with me today.” He nodded at the cauldron next to him. “I thought we were brewing today.”
Convenient, the thought whipped through Severus’s mind, before he dismissed it. He had to be careful. If Potter suspected that Severus knew what he was up to, then he could presumably use the Deathly Hallows to make Severus’s life highly unpleasant. “We are, of course,” he said, “but I only wished to know what you had discovered from the book. It might complement or change what we’re doing with the potions.”
“I brought my notes with me. They’re on the table over there.” And Potter turned back to the cauldron, the mask of humanity falling from his face. For an instant, watching him, Severus thought he saw the stretch of mighty wings about him, rising and collapsing, reaching out to touch the walls with the span of a dragon’s.
Does Death have such wings? And now there were tatters of useless thoughts chasing each other through Severus’s head, fragments of Muggle myths half-remembered from childhood about angels of death and archangels and fallen angels.
You don’t even know that the wings were feathered, Severus thought before he banished the useless thoughts altogether and reminded himself what he was here for.
Of course, Potter had probably not written down the most revealing of his research, but Severus might glean insights from what he had. It had only been a few years since the war. In that time, if Potter had learned to hide all his thoughts from someone intent on discovering them, Severus would eat the Hallows.
He flipped through the first page of notes, which seemed to be related only to musings about Death by the book’s author, and then stopped on the second page, staring.
“Something wrong?”
Severus hid his flinch at the thought that his pause was visible enough to attract Potter’s forever detached attention. He would never be able to stop the boy from acting like a mad necromancer if he was going to be this obvious about it. “I only wondered about this circle you had drawn on the second page,” he croaked. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
From habit, his words were the strict truth, necessary when he had spent so long speaking to two powerful wizards capable of Legilimency. But only strict truth. The ornamental devices Potter had drawn around the circle were unfamiliar to him, but he knew it for what it was.
The circle of a necromancer.
“I don’t understand all of them myself,” Potter said, with a calm shrug when Severus glanced back at him. “But I think the skulls and some of the rest are only related to the fact that the book talks about Death.”
Severus managed not to crumple the side of the page in his fingers, but it was a near thing. He studied the circle again. The images of flowers that might have been roses were-odd. Generally, necromancers kept far away from the use of living things in their rituals.
Should I signal to him that I know what he is doing? He might stop if he realizes that someone is watching him.
But in the end, Severus had to reject that thought. Potter had been stubborn and contrary all through his Hogwarts career, and he would likely be the same way now. Becoming the Master of Death could not have changed him that much.
No, better to remain silent, learn all he could under the guise of wanting to understand more about Potter’s research, and then bring Potter down with the equivalent of a Stunner to the back when it was needed.
He studied the circle for long enough that he was sure he could recall a good memory in the Pensieve later, however, and then turned the page. On the next one was a drawing that made all the hairs on the back of his neck rise and his breathing came hoarse and quick.
“Snape? Are you all right?”
“Fine. But I think you drew this circle wrong.” Severus was amazed that he could sound so normal, especially when Potter came over to him and stood staring down at the page with a calm, uninterested look on his face.
“Oh, no,” Potter said. “I copied that one directly from the book. The only thing I had to fill in was the name.” He brushed his fingers across the name in the center of the circle, which said Ron Weasley. “I actually used a charm that copied the page itself.”
“I have never heard of such a charm.” His breathing was back under control now.
“Hermione taught it to me before she died. I don’t know if she found it or if she invented it.”
And Potter’s voice was calm, almost glacial, which was so odd that Severus glared at him. Potter only blinked back before he turned to go after another book that they had both been studying, one on the history of quests for the Deathly Hallows. It was the closest of anything they had to a history book on the Hallows themselves.
Severus stared down at the circle again. Potter didn’t sound as if he mourned his friends. His calm hadn’t broken except on that one occasion during his first visit to Severus. He had drawn a circle that might look like harmless ink on paper, but would be laid out on the ground with grave dirt and powdered bone.
And his former best friend’s name was in the center of the circle.
Yes, Potter didn’t miss his friends because he intended to return them to life. And Severus knew well enough that circles like this required a human sacrifice. It was possible Potter would seek out and kill an innocent, but…
Better for him to keep it close to the chest. Better for him if few people know what he’s doing.
Potter intended to kill him as the sacrifice. Severus was sure of it.
*
“And you won’t reveal your face?”
The Unspeakable’s voice was rough and impatient. Severus leaned forwards, making sure that his body was entirely swathed in the thick dark cloak that he’d splashed with a potion of his own devising before he contacted the Ministry. It wasn’t an Invisibility Cloak, nor did it have the quality of the charms that the Unspeakables used to conceal their own faces. But as long as he was under it, he baffled the eyes and made them water, and no one would be able to recall his true voice, only the facts he had shared.
As long as he stayed under the cloak, and let nothing peek out from under it.
“No,” he said. “What should matter to you is the information I’m bringing to you, not who I am.”
The two cloaked grey people in front of him exchanged what were probably speaking glances, although Severus didn’t know how they could be sure, given that they couldn’t see each other’s faces. But then one sighed, or at least gave a sound that Severus heard as a sigh, and nodded, and the one on the right faced him again. “Very well,” he, or perhaps she, said, in a long-suffering tone. “What information do you have to impart?”
“It concerns the rash of grave-robbing incidents that the Ministry has investigated lately.”
That made one of the Unspeakables take out a copper rod and point it at him. Severus managed to hold still, despite the uncomfortable twinge under his ribs as he realized that he didn’t have a clue what the rod was, or what it would do to him. He sat huddled under the cloak, and after a moment, the rod swung to point at the floor instead.
“Are you the necromancer in question?”
“No. But I was helping the necromancer in question, and I didn’t know that he meant to use that material-”
“How could you not? Why would you help in a necromantic ritual in the first place?”
“He hasn’t actually performed the ritual,” Severus said, managing, with effort, to hold himself to a calm tone. So impatient. Most people are dunderheads long past the point where they’ve stopped being Hogwarts students. “I thought what he was doing was essentially harmless research. And then I heard from another source about the grave-robberies, and realized that what he was doing was not.”
Something, maybe the gravitas in his voice on the last words, convinced them. The one with the copper rod put it away, and the other one said, “And what is his name?”
Severus opened his mouth.
And it was as if a sword made of white lightning had struck him in the side of the head.
He gasped and reached up with one hand, barely remembering to keep it under the cover of the cloak. All around him, the silver-walled room shifted and rang like a great bell. The Unspeakables started, and Severus could see their lips moving, but he couldn’t hear a thing past the strange static in his head.
At last, it ended. Severus remained with his head bent over his knees for a moment, and not only because he wanted to make sure that his face remained under the cloak.
He had never experienced something like that. It wasn’t that it was painful. He had undergone the Cruciatus Curse with less than this extreme sense of disorientation.
And he suspected he knew what it was. The Deathly Hallows protected their own.
Severus couldn’t figure out why they would do it when Potter was trying to get rid of their curse, but he nonetheless knew it was true.
“Are you all right?”
The nearest Unspeakable was at least speaking in a voice he could hear again. Severus made himself bob his head, and then clear his throat. “My apologies. It appears that he has cast a curse to make it impossible for me to speak his name. I-didn’t know that he’d done such a thing.”
He should have been able to sense it. After all, Potter hadn’t been shy about demonstrating the abilities that came with the curse of the Hallows. And Severus had seen the signs like the wings of the angel of death stretching from Potter’s shoulder blades. Keeping something like this silent was counterproductive.
“Hm.” The nearest Unspeakable turned to face the other, who had his, or her, copper rod in hand again. “Then it’s a curse that neither of us has ever seen, either. The world around you flashed white, and we heard a roar like a crack of thunder. And then you sat there, shaking, and couldn’t hear anything we said to you.”
“It was like being struck by lightning on my end,” Severus offered. The Unspeakables researched obscure magic for a living, after all. If they could figure out how to nullify the curse, then Severus could tell them Potter’s name.
“Unusual,” said one of them, at the same moment as the other said, “Intriguing.”
Severus scowled. “How am I supposed to convey the necromancer’s name to you in the face of this curse?”
“I don’t know that you can,” said one of the Unspeakables, with a hand in the air as though touching the strings of an invisible curse that extended away around Severus. “You may be entirely unable to influence it. Fascinating.”
“Fascinating?”
“Well, yes. It is. So is the spellwork on your cloak. May we examine it?”
Severus stood up and stalked out of the room. When he reached the plain black corridor that he’d been led down earlier, he was puzzled for a second, but then he found the right turn and walked down it with his nose in the air.
Bloody Unspeakables. I should have known they would be no help.
The Deathly Hallows were objects of legend, and Potter was something of a legend himself. Severus would seek out the help of the only other legend he knew.
*
“Really, Severus? You’re worried about young Harry?”
Severus ground his teeth. He had been speaking with Albus’s portrait for five minutes, and still the man insisted on returning to the means that he and Potter had used to put aside their animosity, rather than talking about the Elder Wand, which was the whole reason Severus had come here.
“Can you stay on topic, Albus? Minerva might come back any minute!”
“I never understood why you didn’t want to let her know that you’re alive, Severus. You know she would be overjoyed.”
Severus clenched his hand into a fist and snarled, “Potter is suffering under a curse that makes it impossible for him to have close friends or loved ones, as the Hallows kill them. Are you going to tell me what you know about the Elder Wand? Or should I leave and attempt to stop him myself?”
No white lightning struck this time, and Severus relaxed. As he had suspected might be true, talking to a portrait and not a living being made the difference.
Albus blinked and pushed his glasses up his nose. It was obscurely comforting that even his portrait self had that gesture, Severus thought, and also that something could make his bloody eyes stop twinkling. “I don’t understand, Severus. If he suffers under that curse and came to you for help in breaking it, why do you want to stop him?”
Severus lowered his voice, despite the fact that he would hear Minerva’s footsteps on the stairs long before he’d hear her. She always strode up the moving staircase instead of standing in one place. “Because there have been numerous thefts of bone and the like from the graves of Potter’s friends. I believe that he plans to resurrect them.”
Albus actually appeared to catch his breath, something Severus had never seen a portrait do before. Then again, he hadn’t spent a lot of time staring at magical portraits. “That-cannot be right,” Albus whispered. “Why would he do something like that?”
“How should I know?” Severus twitched his shoulder in irritation. He was beginning to regret coming here. It seemed that Albus knew nothing that could help him. “If you will not tell me anything about the Elder Wand-”
“I will tell you. I did not because-well, because I came to realize that seeking the Deathly Hallows was something only a foolish man would do. But I don’t think that you have any desire to master them.”
“Why would I want to?” Severus curled his lip. “I want neither the power nor the kind of immortality that Potter is contending with.”
Albus eyed him, as if noting that he hadn’t disclaimed all kinds of immortality, and then nodded. “Well. The Elder Wand killed its first owner, and supposedly it can only be claimed by conquest.”
Severus had been about to say that he knew that much from the damn Tale of the Three Brothers, but he paused. “What do you mean, supposedly?”
“I mean that I didn’t win the duel with Gellert,” said Albus softly. “He surrendered at the last moment. We managed to make it look as if I had beaten him. He knew as well as I did that he would be killed by his own followers if they thought of him as weak. But in reality, he gave in, and I took the Wand.”
“But that doesn’t mean anything. If the master of the Wand surrenders-”
“It still was not conquest. The Wand chose to come to me, Severus. The way it chose to turn on Voldemort and save young Harry.”
Cold surged through Severus. They had come far, far closer than he had ever known to a Dark Lord who did have the power of the Elder Wand on his side. If the damn thing had made one of its “decisions,” that would have been the end of that.
But he managed to hold Albus’s eyes, and ask, “And so? What do you suggest we do with the Wand to make it loosen its hold on Potter?”
Albus gave him a sad smile and said, “Persuade it.”
And then Severus heard Minerva’s footsteps on the stairs, and he did have to shroud himself with a Disillusionment Charm and leave, while Albus asked loud question about why he couldn’t have lemon drops as a portrait to distract her. At least the old man was good for that much, Severus thought, as he slipped behind Minerva, through the still-open door, and down the moving staircase.
He did get successfully away. But that did nothing to calm the chaos in his mind.
How do you persuade a wand?
*
“Can I see the Elder Wand again?”
Potter waved an absent hand at him. He was bent over the black tome that Severus still hadn’t got a good look at him, frowning as he sketched out another circle. He sat back and regarded it, then shook his head and redrew part of it. Severus yanked his stare away as he moved towards the table where the wand was lying. Just because Potter looked different than he had during his school days was no reason to act like a mouse fascinated by a snake.
The wand tingled for a moment under Severus’s touch as he picked it up, but it did nothing to lash out at him. He wondered if it cared for the purpose that Potter was pursuing, or whether the Deathly Hallows would just as soon, and just as gladly, turn on the supposed Master of Death as anyone else. The curse they had inflicted on Potter seemed to argue the latter.
Which could be good news for Severus, in that they wouldn’t try to report him or the like for what he was about to do.
He stared down at the wand and formed the thought in his mind as clearly as he could.
Would you leave him, so that he would not succeed in these rituals to bring back the dead?
Then Severus waited, not sure what he was expecting, not sure that he would understand even if the wand deigned to speak to him. The wand would say-what? That it despised Potter and wanted to destroy him? That it had chosen its victim and would pursue him to the ends of the earth?
Far more likely is that it will say nothing at all.
But then, he did receive an answer, stirring and questing in the far corners of his mind like a Legilimens unsure of his welcome. Severus held his breath.
He heard it clearly when he heard it, though. The Elder Wand was laughing at him.
Severus laid the wand back on the table with a shaking hand. Well, so much for Albus’s idea. Perhaps Potter could speak to the thing and persuade it, but then, he had probably already tried that route when he first learned about the curse.
“Having difficulties?”
Severus swung around. Potter loomed behind him.
And loomed was the right word, Severus realized, biting his lip to keep himself from whimpering. The black wings that he had seen once before were projecting beyond Potter’s shoulders now, brushing the wall with shadowy feathers. Potter took a long step forwards, and the Elder Wand vibrated and leaped into his hand.
Potter swept it around in front of him, which did nothing that Severus could see. Then Potter nodded and tucked the wand away. “How curious,” he said, his voice deep with echoes that shouldn’t have been there as he faced Severus.
Even though the odd shadows had faded away, Severus didn’t trust the way Potter’s eyes were piercing him now. But he found his voice. He would not back down in front of the brat who had been his student, even if that brat was now the Master of Death. “What’s curious?”
Potter drew nearer still, his head cocked like a curious bird’s. “That you touched the wand, but didn’t tamper with it. You only asked it a question.”
“I wouldn’t have the first idea how to tamper with it,” Severus began, and then Potter was right in front of him, bending down. The shadows bent and flexed. They no longer looked like the wings of a death angel. They looked like faces, maws with open mouths, glittering teeth, glistening eyes.
No, wait, Potter was peering up at him. Of course he was. Severus blinked, unsettled. Potter wasn’t taller than he was. When had he started dreaming that Potter was?
“Snape?”
And Potter was speaking in a voice that didn’t have those strange echoes in it. Of course he was, Severus thought. When he let his eyes briefly travel away from Potter, he saw the Elder Wand back on the counter, where Potter had left it.
Severus shut his eyes and took a long breath.
“Are you all right, sir?”
What if this is some manifestation of the curse? Or something done by the Elder Wand? Severus didn’t bother asking whether Potter’s experience of the last few moments was the same as his. He didn’t think either possible answer would do him any good. He simply drew himself up and frowned down at Potter. “Why do you ask?”
“You looked pasty and funny for a minute.” Potter regarded him. “Is the work getting to you, sir? I can seek out someone else to help me try to remove the curse, if you want.”
“What do you mean, getting to me?” Severus took a step forwards, and the world around him bent and swayed. Potter backed up a step, his eyes wide.
“I just-I thought, that since you’d retired from Hogwarts, this kind of work isn’t what you’re used to…” Severus waited, and Potter blundered straight into the trap, muttering the words. “Not as young as you used to be-”
Severus barked a sharp laugh. “I’m only a little more than forty, Potter. I can handle this curse, I promise you.”
Potter snapped his head back for a moment, his eyes wide. Then he nodded and said quietly, “Of course, sir,” and went back to reading in the large black book and making notes.
Severus didn’t think he was going to ask to see it. Not today. He did cast one more suspicious glance at the Elder Wand, which sat innocently on the counter and didn’t vibrate or move or roll or any of the other suspicious things that a wand could have done.
Suspicious things. A wand.
Perhaps he needed to spend less time working on this, not more.
*
“Severus? Severus!”
It wasn’t the first time that Draco had yelled at him through the Floo this early in the morning, but at least the other time, Astoria had been pregnant and Draco had been constantly yelling for Severus to come and dance attendance because he didn’t trust the Healers at St. Mungo’s to treat her fairly as the wife of a Malfoy. Swearing to himself as he struggled out of bed, Severus thought, He doesn’t have that excuse this time.
At least, he thought Draco didn’t have that excuse. Hoping for news of more grave robberies before he hoped for news of a second Malfoy child on the way, Severus finally stumbled out of his bedroom and into the main room. “What is it, Draco?” he snapped.
Then he paused. Even with the green color of the flames getting in the way, he couldn’t have missed how pale Draco had gone.
“What has happened?” Severus found himself speaking more gently than he’d planned, as well as sinking into a chair before the fireplace instead of standing to lecture Draco.
“I-I don’t know if I ever told you that I’d approached my aunt with the intent to reconcile.” Draco stared into the distance, while Severus fought himself back into enough wakefulness to realize that he meant Andromeda Tonks, not the dead and unmourned Bellatrix. “It wasn’t much, because she still didn’t trust Mother, but I was visiting them every month or so. I was fond of little Teddy. So was Scorpius.”
“What has happened?” Severus whispered, although from the word “was” he suspected he already knew.
“Teddy died of a heart condition in St. Mungo’s last night,” Draco said, in a dazed mumble. “Andromeda was with him. She Flooed Mother and told her, but Mother thought I needed to sleep. Scorpius was tiresome yesterday.” Draco closed his eyes. Severus waited, numb, already with a heartbeat like a doombeat in his ears, and then Draco whispered, “Andromeda went home and killed herself. And then someone lit the house on fire.”
“She didn’t do it?” That was the only thing Severus could think to ask.
“No. Someone-she killed herself somewhere else, but someone carried her body to St. Mungo’s and left it on the doorstep. And then the Tonks house exploded. Burned with something hotter than Fiendfyre, to hear the Healers tell it.”
“There’s nothing hotter than Fiendfyre.”
“There was there.”
Severus sat still. He was sure that he knew who had burned the house, and the reason that Mrs. Tonks and her grandson had died. But he forced himself to say, “I am sorry for your grief, Draco.”
“Thank you. I-if you see Potter, could you tell him? Apparently, they can’t find him, and no one wants to be the first to tell him in case he-well, in case he takes it badly. No one thinks he’s really stable after what happened to Granger and the Weasleys.”
Severus nodded, his eyes still shut. “I will tell him.”
Only after the Floo had closed behind Draco did Severus think how strange it was that Draco had thought he would be in regular contact with Potter.
*
He didn’t bother going back to bed. He was sure that he knew who had burned the Tonks house, which meant that Potter knew. And that means that he would probably seek out the only other person who knew the truth behind the curse of the Deathly Hallows.
Severus’s door opened with a long, low moaning sound it had never made before. Then again, nothing on this night would surprise Severus. He stood up and waited in silence for the figure to step through.
“He’s dead,” Potter’s voice said, and his voice was pure pain.
“Your godson,” Severus said. His own voice made a croaking, moaning sound not much better than the door. He cleared his throat. “I heard. I am sorry for your loss, Potter. Would you like to-”
“You know what I want to do?” Potter said, in a voice too loud and large for his throat. “I want to forget.”
And he crossed the distance between them, gliding like a Dementor, and set his lips on Severus’s.
Part Three.