Chapter Four of 'An Urn For Her Ashes'- Flashes of Movement
Chapter Three.
Title: An Urn For Her Ashes (4/7)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Eventual Snarry, Lily/James and past unrequited Severus/Lily
Warnings: Major AU, violence
Rating: R
Summary: AU. When Voldemort inflicted the Horcrux on baby Harry, his mother’s love manifested by wrapping around it to protect him-giving Harry some personality traits and memories of Lily’s. Dumbledore takes personal charge of Harry, helping him cope with the memories and train to defeat Voldemort. Severus meets him for the first time when Harry is seventeen years old.
Author’s Notes: So, as should be obvious from the summary, this is a major AU. There will probably be six or seven chapters, updated every seventeen days.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Four-Flashes of Movement
Severus stepped into the Great Hall with his mind closed and locked and sealed in layers. He had placed Potter’s kiss, and Potter’s confessions, at the very bottom of his mind, and shut the doors on it. The information about his alliance with Potter and Molly was one layer above that. He would speak of it only to those who already knew of it.
He knew he would manage to meet Potter’s eyes without blushing. He had been able to meet Lily’s even after that disastrous morning.
But he could feel energies astir in the Great Hall that made his precautious meaningless. Albus stood at the Head Table, looking back and forth between the students. He had just shot a stream of blue and silver sparks from his wand into the air, and Severus heard the ringing echoes of stopped voices.
“I know this is frightening,” Albus murmured. “Voldemort does not often move as openly as this.” He smiled at the nearest table, full of wide-eyed Hufflepuffs. “But I promise that I will personally track down your families and publish a list of the ones who have escaped to safety.”
Severus reoriented his mind to wideness, crystal thinness, and openness. He would need to remember what was said around him today, in case he needed to repeat a detail later or use it in his bid to escape.
Potter stood at Albus’s side, docile and sleepy, eyes half-closed. Only when he looked more closely did Severus see a dark mark on his cheek. His first, absurd thought was that Albus had discovered the boy’s treachery and used a Stinging Hex on him that had left a whip-like mark.
A few seconds later, Severus realized the truth. It was black-brown dried blood, and it had run down from Potter’s scar.
Severus insinuated himself along the side of the Great Hall as the room filled with subdued chatter again. He made his way to Albus’s side, and Albus smiled and nodded at him at once.
“Ah, Severus. You sensed nothing last night?”
Albus would never refer to Severus’s Dark Mark as such in public, but he still considered Severus a servant he could call upon. Severus subdued the instinctive urge to bristle and murmured, “No, I did not. What has happened?”
Potter opened his eyes and replied in a voice that seemed to indicate he had no more personal connection to Severus than whatever his mother’s memories had forged for him. “Voldemort led a raid on the Ministry last night. He also unleashed his Death Eaters on all sorts of villages where Muggles live among wizards. There are fifty or sixty dead, at least.”
Severus said nothing, but his mind blazed. For him to receive no word of such a major action meant, at the very least, that the Dark Lord suspected how closely Albus watched him. This was probably the beginning of the end.
I will survive.
Severus had always known he would, no matter who he had to betray. For one moment, though, a flicker of regret surfaced like a shining fin inside him, as he thought that he would probably have to betray Potter at the same time.
Potter blinked guilelessly at him, as if he didn’t know Severus’s thoughts and would have no part in them even if he did, and then he turned and murmured to Albus. Albus’s eyes lit up, and he nodded a little, then motioned Potter aside. Potter followed him, and the whispering continued.
Severus found it intolerable simply to stand there and wait for the conversation to be reported to him. It seemed the status quo had been restored. Potter was once again Albus’s obedient puppet, and Severus was discarded because he hadn’t reacted appropriately to Potter’s kiss.
What would have been “appropriately?” For me to become Potter’s puppet in turn?
He had other things he could do, however, other things to focus on. Severus moved towards the Slytherin table and spent long minutes both spreading comforting lies and subtly probing for knowledge of the raid before it had happened, or smugness. He found terror in most and smugness in only two: Draco and, surprisingly, Pansy Parkinson. Her parents were less committed to the Dark Lord’s cause, or so Severus had always thought.
The mystery was solved when he whispered a small spell that would let him see through cloth, and recognized the Dark Mark on Parkinson’s left arm. Severus stepped back with his head cocked.
He hadn’t yet decided how he would use this new knowledge when a hand touched his sleeve. Severus turned, and found Potter standing at his side, looking at him with brilliantly flushed cheeks and eyes shining like stars.
Severus might have flushed himself if he was less a master of Occlumency and his own emotions. As it was, he put his eyebrows up and waited while Potter drew him away from the Slytherin table and towards the far side of the Great Hall.
“Headmaster Dumbledore and I have a plan to make sure that Voldemort is looking the other way when I take one of his Horcruxes,” Potter said. He ignored Severus’s flinch completely, much as Lily would have done. “We only need you to create a small distraction.”
“That he did not summon me argues that he trusts me no longer,” Severus said. “I cannot be of use to you.” And because he had to, he added, “The two of you have a plan?”
“Yes,” said Potter. He gave Severus a beaming smile that would do him no good with his suspiciously watching Slytherins, although the blackmail material he now had on two of them might give him an edge there. “It’s probably more like one and a half of us, but it could be two and a half if you join me in it.”
“I told you why I could not be of use to you.”
Potter snorted at him. Snorted at him. It had been years since even Albus had dared that, and Severus was opening his mouth to comment on this when Potter turned his head to the side and fixed him with one brilliant green eye.
“I’m not asking you to go to him as a Death Eater and wave a shiny thing at him,” Potter said impatiently. “I’m asking for a potions accident in your class this morning. Something so spectacular that it’s going to provide a lot of news and put some students in the hospital wing and catch Voldemort’s attention, because he’ll think that it destroyed a potion you were making for him.”
“You ask me to subject myself to torture,” Severus whispered harshly. “You ask me to hurt my students.”
“No,” said Potter. He sounded blank and bored, looking around as though he was contemplating the decoration of the school instead of the facts Severus was trying to give him. “The potion won’t hurt any students. I’ve already come up with a way to make sure it doesn’t. It’s a potion I’ve worked on for a while myself.”
Severus seized his arm. Potter turned back to him with a flutter of his eyelashes. “Was there something?”
“Don’t play with me,” Severus said, and relied on his Occlumency shields to hold himself close to Potter and suppress the impulse to flinch and back away. “You make it sound as though you are conspiring with Albus. You plan to give me a potion that I, as an expert brewer, should already have heard of. And there is still the chance of torture.”
“I have that chance, too.” Potter didn’t flinch the way that so many members of the Order did when Severus reminded them of what he was risking. In fact, he looked bored, although that was enough to make Severus ache with anger. “And this potion is something I started researching a few years ago. How should you have heard of it?”
“Why are you conspiring with Albus?”
“I’m not. No more than you’re conspiring with Voldemort.”
“Will you stop saying the name?”
“No,” said Potter. “Not when it’s my life at stake, and you’re being far more ridiculous than I expected.” He reached out and plucked Severus’s fingers away from his robes with no effort.
“Listen to me,” Potter said, his face and voice as unyielding as granite. “I am going to win my way free and survive no matter what happens. This potion is a way that will help me do it. It’s a contingency potion. I trust you’ve heard of them?”
Severus was so deep in rage that he couldn’t speak. But Potter seemed to have known what he would have said, in itself a problem. He made a lazy gesture with one hand. “Yes, I know. They’re the stuff of mythology and children’s stories. Well, most people would think that who didn’t grow up with two sets of memories and the ability to conduct years of research because there was the memory of what the words meant in the back of their heads.”
Severus’s breath grew short. Lily had been wonderful with Potions. She had never cared to make them a career, as Severus had, and had never made them her exclusive object of fascination. But the talent had been there.
“I could read before I could get my mouth and tongue to function speaking,” Potter leaned forwards and studied Severus from as short a distance as he’d stood when kissing, not that Severus wished to remember that. “And there were concepts stirring in the back of my mind that I integrated into my consciousness before I understood what they meant. Certain things are instinctive to me because I never had a short attention span and I knew that they were possible before I set my mind to learning they weren’t. Do you understand now?”
Severus said nothing. He only nodded, and waited.
“There’s a potion that I came up with that could function on a contingency basis,” Potter said. “I didn’t make it myself only because I couldn’t gather enough ingredients with Albus watching me all the time, and it’s not like I had the ability to make long journeys outside the house. On one set of conditions becoming true, the potion kills the Horcrux in me and leaves Voldemort all the more mortal. But it leaves me alive.”
Severus stared at him. He thought he could divine a few of the ingredients just by watching Potter’s face. But he wouldn’t give in and admit that that might make the position Potter was trying to pin him in more excusable. Instead, he muttered, “And what would the other set of conditions be?”
Potter glanced at him. “It kills both the Horcrux and my mum’s memories.”
Severus stood absolutely still. Then he shook his head. “On your own testimony, her memories are wrapped in yours. Her personality is wrapped in yours. It might not be the spirit the Headmaster thinks it is, but it is something deep. What would become of you if that part of her was destroyed?”
“I don’t know.” Potter stiffened as though he’d heard a trumpet summoning him to battle. Perhaps he did, Severus thought, deciding that Potter must have at least some of the latent Gryffindor instincts of his parents. “But I want to find out. I’m not going to live as some being that’s half her for the rest of my life. I want to be more than just an urn for her ashes.”
Severus huffed out a quiet breath. He would not have put it that way.
But he was not Potter. And it seemed Potter had a thinking brain after all, despite his years of indoctrination under Albus and his actions last night.
“What are you going to do?” Severus had to ask.
“Get you the recipe for the potion, of course.” Potter’s words were extremely calm. “Some of the ingredients are ones would convince Voldemort you were brewing a potion for him, instead. Not one that he’d ordered you to, but one that he would be interested in.”
Severus narrowed his eyes. “The Dark Lord takes no potion from my hand untested, and unless he’d ordered me to brew it, he wouldn’t be interested in it.”
Potter grinned a little. “It’s not like you’d ever give it to him, so the question of him testing it won’t come up. And you don’t have to know that he would be interested in it. When the explosion comes and you have to make a report on it to him, then he could decide for himself he would have liked to see it. And become obsessed with it.”
“What exactly would he think it could do for him?” Severus demanded.
Potter smiled. “Oh. Because one of the ingredients is hair from a unicorn’s tail, and another is heartsblood hellebore, and another is the scrapings of a Chinese Fireball’s claws, he’s more than likely going to think that it was a potion that could have tamed dragons for him. He wants that, doesn’t he? Dragons to add to his armies?”
Severus stared at Potter. Those were ingredients he would never have thought of combining himself, for a simple reason.
“Not such a Potions expert after all, are you?” he demanded. He was aware that some people were beginning to turn and stare at them, but he needed to let Potter know why this wouldn’t work, remarks about contingency potions aside. “You know that Chinese Fireball claws and heartsblood hellebore explode on contact with each other.”
“Not when the secret ingredient gets added to them,” Potter said, and had the audacity to smile at him.
Severus took a step forwards and bent his head. Let his Slytherins wonder. “What would that be?” he hissed.
“A drop of blood from my Horcrux scar.” Potter shrugged with one shoulder. “I know what you’re thinking, but I did manage to get those particular ingredients from Dumbledore and try my blood on them. And the theory was right. It kept them from exploding.”
Severus stared at him, then shook his head sharply. “Do you consider it advisable for me to pass this information along to the Dark Lord?”
“I thought I would leave that up to you, as the experienced spy.” Potter grinned lazily at him and turned his back, moving towards the far side of the Great Hall. “Decide what you want to decide,” he called back to Severus.
Severus could feel his mind racing through it as he stood there. Yes, heartsblood hellebore and Chinese Fireball claw scrapings, if they could be safely combined, could provide the base of a potion to tame dragons. Heartsblood hellebore was famed for its ability to make large creatures docile. It had never worked on dragons, but then, it traditionally had to be combined with the body parts of such creatures to tame them, and dragon body parts exploded on contact with it.
Chinese Fireball claw scrapings…
With a twist of his mind, Severus could see why Potter had decided through theory that that combination was the one most likely to prove successful, and then why he had thought to try blood from his scar.
Present that information to the Dark Lord in the right manner, and he would be intrigued.
And when he thought it all the way through and realized why Potter had thought he could engineer an explosion in his Potions lab, using a potion containing those ingredients, that would prevent any students from coming to harm, Severus had to close his eyes for a moment.
Lily’s memories or not, he thought Potter’s cleverness was all his own, and he was grateful for the locked Occlumency shields that prevented any kind of inappropriate reaction on his part to that cleverness.
*
Severus placed the shreds of red hellebore, carefully draped in illusions that made them look like the far less common heartsblood hellebore, into the cauldron at the front of the classroom, and then turned around and scowled at the clumsy Gryffindor called Jordan Hammersmith, Longbottom’s heir in Severus’s ire. He was the safest target.
“What are you doing, Hammersmith?” he demanded. “You are supposed to be creating a repellant that deters trolls, not an attractant that will bring them ravening to mate!”
As Hammersmith flushed and the students roared with laughter-at least on the Slytherin side of the room-Severus flourished his wand and Switched the heartsblood hellebore in Hammersmith’s potion with the red hellebore in his own potion. His cauldron bubbled more fiercely. Hammersmith, making a mistake as always when he was flustered and nervous, seized the white sand they had to use and dashed it more fiercely than necessary into his own potion.
The explosion that welled out of the cauldron was silent, and white as the sand. Severus cast the shields that the Dark Lord would expect when his little spies told him of it, and roared, “Down! Down, now!”
The students flung themselves to the floor, shrieking. Severus spun his wand counterclockwise, raising shield spells that looked impressive in their complexity and flexibility. In reality, they did nothing but heighten the effects of the actual potion fumes.
Those fumes surged into the nostrils and faces of the children present, interacting with their teenage hormones and filling their minds with visions of horror. But the visions would blur in a few seconds and only make them languid and sick. No permanent physical harm would come to someone from breathing the smoke of red hellebore, or the white sand combined with it, sand where a unicorn’s shadow had passed.
Severus began to snap biting remarks, as was his habit when such an explosion happened, but his mind was far away, coasting along roads of possibility. The Dark Lord might summon him. He might not. Draco, at least, was knowledgeable enough in Potions that he might simply report what had happened to the Dark Lord and earn that summons for Severus himself.
But there was always the chance that he wouldn’t. So Severus began to pepper his mutters with small references to heartsblood hellebore and Chinese Fireball claws, and saw a few intelligent eyes open wide among his Slytherins.
Severus’s mind swung back to possibilities at that. Potter had been able to predict it all, from the grossest ingredient reactions to how the Dark Lord would react and how the news would reach him.
And that made Severus think of other things, other possibilities.
*
That night, when Potter rapped lightly on his door, Severus opened it and let him in without a word.
Potter shook off the Invisibility Cloak that had protected him on his journey to the dungeons, and ignored the look Severus gave it. “Dumbledore’s put off the idea of having me gather the Horcruxes right away. He wants me to start next week.”
Severus looked at him in silence, wondering if there had been an Order meeting as well as a Death Eater raid that he’d missed. But then again, Molly’s shrieking if Albus had spoken that way to Potter in her presence would have resounded throughout the castle, so Severus did not think so.
Potter grinned unrepentantly at him. “Private conversation.”
“Stupid boy.” Severus moved a few steps closer, and stopped, and watched, to see if Potter would react. But Potter only stood there with his hands shoved in his pockets, and whistled tunelessly. “Have you even once considered that this could result in your death?”
“Of course it can,” Potter said. “But it’s still going to end my imprisonment. One way or another.”
Severus moved another step closer. “You told me this morning that you would do anything to survive.”
“And I mean that.” Potter’s eyes, wide and disingenuous and nothing like Lily’s, rose to his face. Lily had always been sincere, painfully so, in her smallest movements and gestures. There was nothing like that in Potter’s face. “But what I didn’t mean was that I thought everyone else would cooperate with me. Even though he talks like he wants you to do it, I still think Dumbledore might kill me himself in the end. If he thought there was no other way to get rid of the Horcrux, or he wanted to be sure.”
Severus shook his head viciously. “I would not see you die.”
“That’s comforting,” Potter said, and he smiled a little. “But keep in mind what I told you. I want to be rid of the memories my mum gave me, which are really the only part of her that survives. So if you help me live, you’re killing her.”
Severus leaned in until he thought Potter would have to bend his neck back to look him in the face. But Potter didn’t bend, which ended with their chins almost resting on each other.
It was not the position Severus had imagined for saying what he needed to say. But he gave a great huffing breath and said it anyway. “I did not mean that I would not see you die because of her. I would not see you die because-”
The words paralyzed his tongue. In the end, they were too much to say, to speak, and to hope that Potter would accept it. Instead, he leaned forwards and returned the kiss.
Potter didn’t flail about or make a squeaking noise or do anything else that would have satisfied Severus. He only leaned back against him, causing a brief painful clack of teeth, and returned the kiss with enough enthusiasm to make Severus’s head spin. Severus pulled away, choking and coughing, and heard Potter laugh in wild delight.
Delight, not mockery. Severus didn’t even have to reassure himself of that, which stunned him. He raised his head and eyed Potter. Potter grinned back at him.
“Good,” Potter said. “But I do have to ask, why? I wanted to see what you would taste like and I was attracted to you for wanting to help me live and I think your Potions skills are great and I wanted to do something my mum never did. But you say that you don’t care about my mum dying with me. So, why for you?”
Severus understood the question, and a slow smile crossed his lips. So Potter was not immune to the need for reassurance after all. He simply thought that Severus could be attracted to him solely because of the Lily in him, and no other reason.
“I am-drawn by your cleverness, your ability to find solutions for the most intractable problems,” Severus admitted, straightening. “And I appreciate your-unique ways of applying those solutions.” He stood and held his hand out to Potter. “Shall that be enough for now?”
“I think so,” Potter breathed, and kissed Severus again.
Severus stumbled, holding him in his arms, and made it to the couch instead of sprawling on the floor. That was at least gratifying. But the way that Potter squirmed on top of him was not, and he said, “I am older than the age the Harry Potter part of you has lived, at least. Let us move to a more comfortable place.”
Potter grinned at him and spun ahead of him into the bedroom, although Severus had not specifically invited him there.
But when Severus thought about it, he decided that, after all, he had little to complain about.
Chapter Five.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/781220.html. Comment wherever you like.