[Children of the Sun series]: Silver Shadow Snake, gen, PG-13, 16/?
Part Fifteen.
Part One.
Title: Silver Shadow Snake (16/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Gen other than background Lucius/Narcissa
Content Notes: For this part, mild angst
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Harry wasn’t sure when he first started noticing the odd doubleness of Professor Quirrell’s familiar, but he had no doubt it was there. And since no one else was doing anything about it, he thought it was probably up to him.
Author’s Notes: This is the beginning of a longer story arc, which will be updated every Saturday. You should read the other fics in the series first: Children of the Sun series.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Part Sixteen
The familiars herded Harry down the stairs until he was out of breath and his legs hurt. He kept trying to turn around and go back to help Hermione, but they wouldn’t let him.
“I’m more powerful than Professor Quirrell!” he argued when they reached the bottom of the stairs, whipping around to confront Golden and Regina. “If you keep me here, then he’ll just try to-”
He paused when he realized only Golden was swaying in front of him. Regina had run away, probably to help her witch.
Harry put his foot on the lowest stair. Golden immediately gave him an extremely patient look. It was the kind of look he used to give the Dursleys all the time, even though they couldn’t see it. Harry didn’t like seeing it directed at him.
“You can’t expect me to leave her there,” he whispered.
Golden bobbed his head in a definite nod.
“She could get killed!” Harry tried to dodge to the side and around his snake, but Golden only looped himself back in front of Harry. Harry halted, and glared at him, and fumed. Then he decided that he needed to go for help if Golden wouldn’t let him help himself, and started running along looking for the professors.
Luckily, Professor Sprout was walking along the corridor, probably heading to the Great Hall for dinner. She gasped and clutched her heart when he appeared in front of her. “Mr. Potter, you gave me such a fright, popping up the way you did!” she scolded him.
“Professor Sprout, hurry! Professor Quirrell attacked me at the top of the stairs and then he went after Hermione!”
At least his Head of House didn’t waste time staring at him or telling him that such things didn’t happen and he must have mistaken Professor Quirrell’s intentions, the way people sometimes had about his relatives. She hiked up her robes and started running towards the stairs. Harry ran after her. Golden, infuriatingly, seemed perfectly content to glide beside him now, or sometimes next to the professor’s copper hamster.
They reached the top of the stairs, and found no trace of Professor Quirrell, of course. Professor Sprout cast a diagnostic charm of some kind that seemed to satisfy her, and nodded. “He was here. He used Dark magic. And I can find him if I just…” She glanced down at her hamster. “Can you find him, Bryony?”
The hamster sniffed around for a second, and then squeaked and took off down the corridor. Harry followed. He looked worriedly for some sign of Hermione, but he didn’t see her. At least she seemed to be okay if he wasn’t seeing her body anywhere, either.
Professor Sprout was muttering something about being too old for all this running when Bryony suddenly gave another squeak, a shrill one. Then she came rolling back and bumped against Professor Sprout’s skirts. Harry saw why in a moment. Alanna had kicked her.
Professor Quirrell stood with his rabbit next to him and his wand lifted, hammering curse after curse into a door in front of him. Harry thought it was Professor McGonagall’s office. He didn’t know if she was in there, but he didn’t think so, because she probably would have come charging out by now. Maybe Hermione was just hiding in there.
“Quirinus! What in the name of Merlin do you think you’re doing?”
“Taking care of you,” Professor Quirrell said, and turned so that his wand was pointing at Professor Sprout. “And you’re only copper to my silver. You can’t stop me.”
“Delusional about the state of your familiar, I see,” Professor Sprout said, and then she pointed her wand at the floor. “I don’t have to fight you.”
Harry glanced over his shoulder to see if Professor McGonagall was coming, but then he turned back when he saw movement. He was afraid Professor Quirrell had started to cast, but he hadn’t. Instead, vines were rising up through the floor of the castle, and they grabbed Professor Quirrell and Alanna and twined around them.
Professor Quirrell made a horrible spitting and snarling sound that Harry worried had hurt his throat. "You interfering old baggage, if you had the slightest idea of what kind of magic you're playing with--"
"I know that it can contain you, Quirinus." Professor Sprout was bending down and feeling at her familar's side. Harry hoped Bryony was all right. "And that's all I need it to do at the moment."
"Deflueo!"
The vines immediately began to blacken and wither. Professor Sprout let out a shocked gasp and staggered back a step. "Where did you learn that sort of magic, Quirinus?"
"None of your business, Pomona."
The vines were already sinking back into the stone, and Alanna was free and hopping around. She seemed scared to come near Professor Sprout and Bryony, but Harry knew that could change in a second. Instinctively, he did what he'd always done at the Dursleys' when he was in trouble and looked to Golden.
Golden was swaying back and forth again, his eyes bright and alert and unafraid, and then he lunged forwards and wrapped around Alanna. She squealed horribly, but at least she stopped moving. And then Professor Sprout murmured, "What am I doing, letting a child defend me?" and snapped her wand down and repeated another spell that brought more vines surging up to hug Professor Quirrell.
They took the professor's wand away from him after a second. Professor Quirrell opened his mouth to say something, and a vine clapped a big leaf across his mouth. Harry laughed for a second before he winced. It looked like something he had wished would happen to Dudley when he was whining about getting more presents, but Professor Quirrell wasn't Dudley.
"Are you all right, Professor Sprout? Is Bryony okay?"
"Yes, we are, Mr. Potter." Professor Sprout adjusted her pointed hat and turned to look at Alanna. "She doesn't look well. Do you think that the professor's sickness could have influenced her?"
"I think she's sick, and so is he." Harry wasn't going to tell anyone about the possession who might get upset and not believe him. "But I don't know who got sick first."
"Of course not, Mr. Potter." Professor Sprout gave him a soft smile. "Forgive me for asking you. One turns instinctively to a wizard with a golden familiar for help, but I forget that you're a student sometimes."
Before Harry could answer, the door of Professor McGonagall's office opened. Hermione crept out with Regina on her shoulder chattering and showing her teeth. She gasped at the vines. "Is Professor Quirrell in there? Is everything okay?"
"More than all right, Miss Granger," Professor Sprout told her. "I do have to report this to the Headmistress. I'll find her, however. You should both return to your common rooms." Bryony bounced out from behind her and did her best to herd them around the corner and down the stairs. Hermione went only reluctantly. Both she and Regina kept looking back at Professor Quirrell until he was out of sight.
"It's kind of awful, isn't it?" Hermione said in a low voice when she and Harry had got to the point where they had to split so she could go up to Ravenclaw Tower and he could go down to the Hufflepuff common room. "That a professor could be possessed and want to cooperate with the possessing spirit?"
Harry nodded. He opened his mouth to say something and then Hermione turned so pale that he reached towards her. She had to have some hidden wound she was losing blood from. "Hermione, what is it?"
"My library books! Did you see them?"
*
Severus sat back in a corner of the meeting room, frowning. Albus had rarely called all the professors together except at the beginning of the year and the end, to focus on matters that needed to be settled before September 1st or the summer, or to make an announcement about something frivolous. Minerva seemed even less likely to make grand announcements, and it was the middle of the term.
But she was standing in the midst of them, looking gravely from face to face as if it would help her come to a judgment about something. When the settling into seats was done, she said, "How many of you knew that Quirinus was possessed?"
Severus forcibly kept himself from reacting, looking around at the gasps and starts. Pomona looked old and weary, and the only other one who wasn't surprised. Sybill said hesitantly, "But he can't have been possessed. I would have seen it."
"He still is possessed," said Minerva. "A very powerful spirit; I know enough soul-magic for that. And I fear that his familiar is possessed as well." She shifted Malkin on her shoulder. He leaned down and sniffed at her in a way that Severus knew meant he was offering comfort.
"That's impossible, Minerva! Our familiars die when our bodies do."
"Unless the possessing spirit never died at all."
Severus didn't intend to speak; he was simply reacting to a daft statement automatically, the way he would when he saw it in a student essay. Minerva turned piercing eyes on him. "Then you suspect what spirit this is, Severus?"
"Yes. The Dark Lord."
At a different time, Severus would have enjoyed watching the pale faces and hearing the moans of despair and disbelief. Now, he was mostly wondering how Minerva had found out. Had something happened to Harry? To Golden?
Shadowstriker tightened around his throat in his own version of comfort. Severus closed his eyes and stroked his scales. Yes, thinking about it, he suspected his serpent would know if something had happened to the most powerful snake familiar in the school.
"But You-Know-Who is dead!"
"It can't be him!"
"How in the world would you know a thing like that, Snape?" Aurora's voice was openly distrustful, and her eyes flashed to his left arm so fast that she would have had plausible deniability with most people other than Severus.
"The Dark Lord probably did not have enough humanity left in him to die," Severus said. He hated that he was echoing a sentiment Albus had spouted, but with this particular audience, that might make his words' impact all the stronger. "It would make sense that he had survived and managed to bring the spirit of his familiar along with him. I would speak to Mr. Potter if I were you, Minerva. He has told me about being able to see a silver snake within Quirinus's rabbit, and since Mr. Potter both has a golden familiar and is a Parselmouth..."
"Mr. Potter never mentioned that to me when I caught Quirinus attempting to annihilate him and Miss Granger today!"
"Perhaps he thought he should keep the secret," Severus told Pomona.
"I'm his Head of House, though!"
Severus said nothing about how ineffective he thought Pomona was as a leader for the badgers. His silence said it for him. She began to flush, but Minerva interrupted. "Would Mr. Potter be willing to bring those conclusions into the open, Severus?"
"Not if you intend to send Quirinus to Azkaban without attempting to help him," Seveurs said blandly. Shadowstriker had relaxed again, while Malkin had pointed his whole body forwards, which Severus felt should be the natural state of things when he and Minerva were dealing with each other. "Mr. Potter is determined to free Quirinus's spirit from the possession. Granted, that may be hard if the fool gave the Dark Lord permission to take over. But Mr. Potter still wishes to try."
"He assaulted one of my badgers!"
"And apparently another student, given what you said about Miss Granger, Pomona," Minerva finished with a small sigh. "Very well. It will be more difficult, but I will approach Mr. Potter about sharing his research with us openly. And I do not think that anyone will be eager to have Quirinus teaching students of any House now." Heads shook fervently around the room. "That does leave us with the problem of finishing up the year with a competent Defense teacher..."
Severus relaxed even further as the debate began. So, for right now, the issue of the idiot's possession was out in the open, and no one had died.
It depressed him to realize how low his standards had become.
Part Seventeen.
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