Sirius Black Fest 2013: Fic: Walking the Monochrome (Part 2)
Title: Walking the Monochrome (Part 2)
Rating: R
Go to Part 1
Part Two
1981
It was November when the strike force of the Order drove the enemy back with one mighty blow after another. Some died, but the others kept going. Dumbledore fought alongside the rest of them, and he was fierce. James was humbled by the extent of the power he’d witnessed and by the fact that Dumbledore had never chosen to unleash all of it - until now.
“We’ve leaned on the Malfoys,” Remus informed them, as he walked into the Order’s Headquarters in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere, Southern Wales. Sirius, standing next to him, was wiping the blood from his hands.
“You tortured them,” James clarified.
“I wouldn’t call it torture,” Sirius grinned unrepentantly. “I just had my madman smile on my face and cut my own hand in front of him. Then I cut off a lock of Cissy’s hair…. And I was so gentle about it, that good old Lucius just about pissed himself and spilled the beans faster than we could gather them.”
“Right. What did he say?”
“The Lord has an unknown quantity of artefacts that are supposed to keep him immortal,” Remus said. “We picked up one of them.” A leather-covered book of some sort appeared in his hands. “I have no idea what to do with it.”
“Let’s see if Fiendfyre does the trick,” Lily said coolly. “What?” she snapped, as Sirius and James stared at her. “It burns everything. Presumably.”
They chose a secluded spot for that. Fiendfyre really did the trick, and the book let out many a scream of horror and torment before being reduced to dust.
“Let’s drink to Peter, may he rest in peace,” Sirius said, as he led the way back to the Headquarters. They did - although barely a few drops each. It wouldn’t do to overindulge.
“One day, the war will be over, and we’ll get blind drunk,” James said. “We’ll be so pissed, Lily will have to roll us back home.”
“Mobilicorpus for both of you, then,” Lily said. She’d grown quieter as the weeks went by, and she clearly missed Harry, although she never said a word about that.
“We need to find the others,” Remus said. “That was just one of them.”
“Any idea where to look?” James asked.
“Lucius said Bellatrix has one more.”
Sirius nodded thoughtfully. “I say we go after the Lestranges. I have a few ideas as to where they might be hiding…”
“They likely know that you know,” Remus felt the need to point out. He’s changed too, James observed, his face had grown paler. He was fading, all of him - except for the eyes, the amber glow in them was only growing more intense each day, and more predatory.
“So you’re saying we shouldn’t go?” Sirius checked.
“I say we should,” Remus growled. “I just think we should make a hunt of it. It’s almost full moon, isn’t it?”
“You’ll be out of control,” Lily argued. “You’ll hunt your own as well as them.”
Remus looked at her.
“Not if you brew the Wolfsbane for me. You do know how to do that, don’t you?”
“That stuff is dangerous, and still experimental, and…”
“You’ve got three days to perfect it,” Remus cut her off in mid-sentence.
James didn’t think he’d ever hear Lily swear like a sailor, but she did. She did manage to make the Wolfsbane. It tasted worse than absolutely horrible, and Remus nearly puked his guts out onto the floor. James suspected that only thing stopping him from doing that was Lily’s wand pointed at his throat and her words - don’t you bloody dare throw up now.
Remus stayed put on the floor, and the Wolfsbane stayed put in his belly.
It turned out to be a great advantage - having the werewolf on their side. Hexes and curses rolled off him like water off a duck’s back. They did manage to capture the trio of the Lestranges, and cared nothing that the others had fled.
Bellatrix was the one they’d wanted, after all.
“Jay, I smell something,” Sirius said as soon as he was back in human form. “Blood.” He inclined his head in the direction of another room, locked and warded. In her bonds, Bellatrix, held back by the Longbottoms, let out a throaty laugh.
Lily took down the wards. James was the first to walk into the room.
The first words to emerge out of his mouth were, “LILY, STAY BACK.”
Miraculously, she did. Sirius followed James into the room and James could see that his friend was about to vacate his stomach right here, right onto the stone floor.
“What,” Sirius whispered, staring at the lifeless and barely human form on the floor, “what on earth is THAT?!”
James’ stomach turned out to be a bit stronger. He came up to the wretched being on the floor and turned him over.
“It’s Snape. He’s still breathing, too.”
“But…” Sirius scowled. “I mean - he…”
“He’s one of them, yes. Lovers’ quarrel, I imagine. Bloody fuck, but if they do this to their own...”
“All right… what do you want to do?” Sirius asked.
James bit his lip. It was a confusing situation. The common sense demanded to finish off the wounded enemy and keep moving. And yet - he already knew that he wouldn’t be able to deliver the coup de grâce. Not like this. More to the point, he could see that Sirius wouldn’t be able to do that either.
“We Apparate him to St. Mungo’s and drop him off in the emergency ward,” James said.
“He’ll never survive the Apparition.”
“Maybe not. But we’re out of options.”
Shockingly enough, Snape survived the Apparition and was admitted into St. Mungo’s instantaneously.
James warned the mediwizards to take every precaution in dealing with Severus Snape, and made them swear there’d be guards posted in the room, and in the hallway, and - until he was pushed out with a very unfriendly, “I suggest you let us do our job here, Mister Potter.”
They returned to the Headquarters in the morning. James told Lily about Snape, and she cried - for the second time since their flight from Godric’s Hollow. James couldn’t blame her. She likely mourned a childhood friend, someone she used to play with.
“What a waste,” James said.
Sirius shrugged. It looked like he really didn’t want to think about Snape. One way or another, Snape was a goner - if he didn’t expire in Mungo, he’d receive the Dementor’s Kiss, or a life sentence in Azkaban. Sirius clearly felt that the entire ‘saving Snape’ thing was pointless and even said so out loud.
“Mercy is never pointless,” said Remus, who’d already assumed human form. His mouth was still covered in blood.
“Right,” James agreed. “Let’s have a chat with the Lestranges. Lil, we’re going to need Veritaserum. Now, I know that supposedly it takes a month to brew it, but…”
“I’m not a miracle worker,” she snapped.
“No,” James reached for her hand and pressed his flushed face into her tiny palm. “You’re a miracle.”
***
They told Dumbledore about Snape the following morning. Dumbledore reciprocated by telling the story of Snape coming to him after having passed Trelawney’s prophecy to Voldemort. Presumably, before all this, Albus didn’t feel it was his story to tell.
“Maybe Voldemort found out that Snape went to you,” James said, “- and that’s why…”
“That seems plausible,” Dumbledore agreed.
“Sure glad we took him to Mungo,” Sirius muttered, unsettled by the entire thing more than he would care to admit.
The interrogation of the Lestranges took place a week later. Lily’s accelerated version of Veritaserum worked just fine, and they gleaned a great deal of useful information. Where to look for other ‘artefacts’, how to identify them, and so on. When business was done with, Sirius asked about Peter.
In retrospect, a cowardly thing though it was, he almost wished he didn’t.
James found him outside, as Sirius stared ahead blankly, from time to time touching his lips to the glass of Firewhisky in his hand, but never taking a sip.
“It’s like he died again tonight,” Sirius said.
“Peter?”
“Yes. First we learned he died when the Fidelius came down. And now this. And to know that Snape was the one to kill him, and that if he hadn’t, you’d be dead instead, I don’t know, Jay. I want to kiss Snape, and I want to break his neck, and I want to give him the Order of Merlin posthumously, and I want to bury him on the same spot where he’d killed Peter, and piss on his grave, and build him a monument. Do you think that’s too much?”
James’ hand rested on Sirius’ shoulder.
“Just a bit.”
***
It was December when they celebrated the victory - right on Christmas.
In the end, it was Dumbledore who ended up killing Voldemort, not that it surprised anyone.
People were celebrating. In Hogsmeade there were fireworks, and dancing in the street, and Sirius was intoxicated by it all: the mulled wine, the smell of fresh snow, the music, and the vibrancy of human happiness all around him. Sirius danced with Lily, then, as James threatened violence to him, he danced with James, then with Remus, just for the hell of it, and eventually with Minerva, who was blushing profusely, but letting him spin her and waltz her any way he wanted.
Sirius was happy, and drunk on life.
He was dancing with Minerva, and spinning her like the whipping top, and the world was spinning him in turn.
At one point, he turned around to speak to Lily and James, but realized that they were gone.
He felt a chill go down his spine. Suddenly sober, he pushed his way through the crowd and began to walk to Hogwarts. He didn’t know why he felt so unnerved by their absence. It was all over, wasn’t it?
Once at Hogwarts, Sirius ran up to Flitwick’s rooms and knocked. The professor answered the door and kindly advised Sirius that, yes, Lily was here, to collect Harry. She was alone, saying that James had some other business to attend to.
“What business?” Sirius demanded.
“She didn’t say.”
Sirius arrived at Potters’ old home in Godric’s Hollow, fully expecting to find it empty.
It wasn’t - the light was on, and he could see people walking in the room.
Sirius winced. He felt like - like he was missing something. Like his friends had cut him off.
He approached the door, stepping softly.
“Easy now,” he heard Lily’s voice. “Let me take your hand. Can you hold on to it? No? It’s all right. I will hold on to you. Come on now, small steps.”
Sirius opened the door and walked inside.
“Hey, mate,” James greeted him. He was sitting on the couch, dangling Harry on his knee. “Did you kiss Minerva yet?”
“Don’t be stupid.” Sirius’ eyes shot in Lily’s direction and he saw the black scrawny shadow of a man following her in mechanical, automatic movements. “Snape? What’s he doing here?”
“We brought him home,” Lily said simply, as if it was just the most natural thing to do.
“Didn’t seem right to be dancing the night away, while he was… you know. There,” James explained. “In Mungo. Alone. He did his part, too.”
“He created the entire mess with Voldemort hunting you,” Sirius felt the need to point out.
“And he fixed it,” James said.
“Well, you should have told me. I would have come with you.”
“I wanted to, but you looked so happy, dancing with Minerva. I didn’t have the heart to pull you away,” Lily smiled at him, the mild, warm smile he’d almost forgotten by now. “Severus, you come with me, all right? I’m going to make the bed, you’ll lie down and rest. I’m not going anywhere.”
Sirius watched them go and then turned to James. “You do know that he fancied her, right?” he asked as lightheartedly as he could manage, even though the words had a sour taste to them.
James shrugged, still smiling and running his hand over Harry’s hair. “I don’t think it matters now who fancied whom.”
“When he comes to his senses, he’s going to kiss her,” Sirius felt the need to warn him. “He’s going to take advantage of her. There will be pity sex. And Harry’s going to end up with a really ugly half-sister, long-nosed and greasy-haired.”
“Padfoot,” James said softly, but firmly. His smile was gone.
“And Severus will insist on naming her Dementoria. Or Cadavrena. Or… ”
“Sirius,” James’ voice rose a notch, and Harry stilled on his knee. “He isn’t coming back.”
***
Sirius spent the night on the Potters’ couch. From time to time, he checked on Lily - she stayed in Snape’s bedroom all night, holding his hand, whispering something in his ear. Once, he collided nose to nose with James, who emerged from his own bedroom to check on Lily as well.
“Let’s get drunk,” James said, leading the way downstairs.
They did just that, and there was no more of that ‘just a splash and no more’ nonsense - they drank out of the bottle, passing it to each other.
James spoke, Sirius listened.
St. Mungo’s assessed Severus Snape and decided that he was incurable. As in, ‘completely and utterly incurable, no hope of recovery, no fucking chance in hell,’ James elaborated, staring at the bottle in the light of the hearth. “That’s what his medical chart says, ‘no chance in hell’”.
“Uh-huh. And?”
“I don’t know, mate. I look at my wife. My beautiful-beautiful-beautiful wife. And I can’t get over it, we won the war, I’m alive, and I’ve got a wife. And I know it was him who saved her.”
“He’s the one who nearly got her killed in the first place!” Sirius protested and took the bottle away. “And all of you, too.”
“Bullshite,” James let the bottle go. “The prophecy didn’t make a difference one way or another. You realize, don’t you, that with Peter working for Voldemort, Lil and I wouldn’t have survived. One way or another, he’d have got us killed. Look - I know what Snape did. I know what he is. It’s just that - in the end he did what was right. You know? And he must have some idea about what would be done to him, and he still did that right thing.”
“Yes,” Sirius admitted.
“And I don’t think I can - just leave him in Mungo. Yes, they’d be kind to him there, I know. He wouldn’t be lying around in his own filth or anything. But,” James’ voice rose slightly, “He’d be alone. Here, he’s with us. He’s one of us. Really, at the core, he is.”
“But,” Sirius started again, but James waved him off.
“Look,” James said, exasperated, “What if - I don’t know. What if it were me, who ended up like that. Would you bury me in Mungo and visit me twice a year?”
“No,” Sirius admitted. “Never.”
“It’s the same, only different,” James said profoundly and collapsed on the couch, sound asleep.
Sirius circled the living room for a while and eventually took his place at the foot of the couch as Padfoot.
He visited Potters daily for two weeks. He could see that having Snape around was taking a toll on them. Lily was getting tired, and James - James, who’d been planning to become an Auror, was now putting those plans on hold.
“It’ll be fine,” Lily denied, “We just need to settle into a routine. It’s like having another child, really.”
Yes, Sirius thought. Another child - who will never grow up, never leave home… and you will be tied to him for as long as you live, you and James, and Harry - and deny it all you want, your lives will revolve around him.
He didn’t want that to happen. He wanted his friends to be free. To have another baby, travel the world, and on, and on, and on. He spent the days making lists of the things that Lil and Jay wouldn’t be able to do because of Snape.
The solution presented itself another week later.
“I’ll take Snape home,” Sirius said. “He can stay with me.”
Lily gave him a very long and a very sceptical look.
“You? Sirius, you understand I have to ask - why?”
“Yes,” Sirius said. “But I understand what James is saying, about home and all. And - well, I’ve got nothing happening now at home, and it’s not like it’ll be a burden. I won’t even notice he’s with me. You’ve got Harry to take care of. And - well, it just makes sense that I take him.”
Lily hesitated.
“Come on,” Sirius said. “It’s not like I will be nasty to him.”
“Maybe for a few days,” she relented. “Until I catch my breath.”
“Right. Let’s give it a try.”
***
Having Snape at home turned out to be torture. Sirius read up on his condition (TKS, or The Kissed Syndrome - like the Dementor’s Kiss, only without the actual Dementor being involved).
He had to do everything for Snape. And everything really did include everything. He used the spells for the first few days. Snape’s body moved obediently, guided by those spells, animated by them, serviced by them. Snape was in his own world, entirely lost in the purely automated cycle of sleeping-waking-eating-everything - and Sirius found himself twitching.
“The fuck with that,” Sirius said, flicking the wand to remove the spells. “We’re doing it the old-fashioned way.”
He supposed that it would be easy - with Snape not resisting any treatment or any manipulations to his body.
The first time he undressed Snape to bathe him, Sirius flinched. The sight of the scars was bad enough. The fact that Snape just stood there, without any reaction to someone staring at him, did Sirius in.
A week later, Sirius thought he’d give an arm and a leg for a good old-fashioned fistfight.
“It’s like having a jellyfish,” Sirius said, staring Snape in the eye. “You’re one giant jellyfish. No spine. No will. What’s the point?”
Naturally, Snape didn’t answer.
Sirius apologized to him the next morning. Not that Snape could hear him, but Sirius still did.
He managed to settle them into a routine of some sort. Wake up. Bathroom, shower. Get dressed -“The black suits you, Snape, you look like a scarecrow.” Eat breakfast. Walk outside - “Fresh air will do you good, Snape. Want to play ball?”
Sirius threw a ball at him, which hit Snape in the shoulder and rolled away, untouched. Snape hadn’t moved.
In the evening, once Snape was fed and left in bed for the night, Sirius stabbed the ball with a knife and watched with malicious satisfaction as it deflated in his hands.
When Lily and Jay visited them, Sirius did his best to present a picture of perfect life. “Just two mates, sharing a flat,” he said grinning, “Nothing to it. I think he’ll come about one day. I really do.”
“So, mate, would you be able to keep him another month, then?” James asked. “We were going to take a trip to Australia. Lily wants to attend the Potions conference…”
“Uh-huh.”
“The actual conference is a week, but - I thought…”
“You’d stay there a bit longer,” Sirius supplied.
“Yes. Maybe a month. Just - you know… see the world a bit.”
“You should,” Sirius approved instantly.
“We can take Severus with us,” Lily said.
“Don’t be silly. He needs routine, consistency,” Sirius said. He wondered, privately, what the fuck made him such an expert on what Snape needed. “And it’s no trouble. He can stay with me, I’ve said so already. You go.”
They left quickly, and James made Sirius promise that if anything happened, anything at all, Sirius would write right away.
Sirius swore on his mother’s head. Knowing Sirius’ relationship with his mother, James accepted the oath with a grain of salt, but he and Lily did leave in the end.
When they were gone, Sirius felt like he was truly alone for the first time in six years. “It’s just you and me now, Snape,” Sirius said, barely able to keep his tone mild.
He felt angry, and he didn’t know why.
He took to speaking in a voice so kind and soothing, he managed to nauseate himself. No sudden moves, no startling noises. He thought - maybe, if Snape felt secure enough, safe enough, he’d come out of his shell eventually.
Snape’s shell continued living a silent, disconnected life of its own. Days passed, and nobody was coming out of it.
The anger continued to build.
A week later Sirius slapped Snape.
***
The outome horrified him: Snape didn’t even flinch. His head moved as if an inanimate object, and that was all.
Sirius walked out of the flat, ran down the stairs and sat down right on the steps, hugging his body with his arms.
He returned to the flat an hour later. Snape was where he’d left him, sitting on the couch. Snape’s pale cheek was bright with the print of Sirius’ hand.
“That’s it,” Sirius said. “We’re going to St. Mungo, before I kill you. Before I kill both of us.”
Snape gave no response.
* **
St. Mungo’s staff were understanding. The elderly mediwizard nodded, listening to Sirius’ ramblings, flicked his wand to remove the bruise from Severus’ cheekbone.
“It’s not an easy task, what you were trying to do. Leave him to us. He’ll be in good hands. That’s what we’re here for. You go and live your life, young man. Come back to visit anytime you like.”
Sirius left, for the first time in his life feeling like he was given too easy an absolution. Or was it the second time? He couldn’t be sure.
He spent the following day in a coffee shop, trying to write to James and Lily.
Could you please come back?
No.
If I kill Snape, will you visit me in Azkaban?
No, that wasn’t good.
Why can’t he just - snap out of it? Why is he such a cowardly, selfish, spineless, unbelievably…
No, that wasn’t it, either.
Lil and Jay, I know what I promised. Turns out, I can’t do it. I just…
I just look at him, and whenever I do, I can’t escape the feeling that…
Sirius stood up, rolled up the last piece of parchment into the ball and sent it flying into the wastebasket.
He was in St. Mungo’s an hour later, demanding to take Snape home.
Shockingly, they let him do it.
Snape was led out to him, still in the web of automated spells to move him along, as if he were some sort of inanimate object.
Sirius shuddered.
“Isn’t there a way to do without that?” he asked.
“There is,” the elderly wizard, the same one who’d admitted Snape a day earlier, said. “Those who’d suffered the Kiss can be trained to perform the basic bodily functions on their own. Chew, swallow, vacate their bowels at appropriate times. However,” he added, “It’d take months of training the body to develop the necessary routine, to respond to numerous cues automatically, now that the mind is disengaged from the body. It’s not impossible, not at all, just very difficult.”
“Got books?” Sirius asked.
He left the Hospital with a pile of books in his arms, and Snape in tow. Snape, who still was unaware of anything about him and who didn’t care one way or another.
When Snape was in bed that night, Sirius came to him and sat on the very edge of the bed.
“I’m sorry, Snape,” he said. “I - I was angry. I still am. It’s just that -whenever I look at you, I can’t escape the feeling that it should have been me.” The confession seemed to break some sort of a dam, and the words were gushing out in a great flood that Sirius didn’t know how to stop. “I should have been their Secret Keeper. I should have been tortured to the brink of insanity, not you.” Sirius sighed. “In fact, we got it all wrong. I should be sitting in your house, Snape, looking like a giant stuffed scarecrow. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Snape was staring into the ceiling with his only remaining eye.
The silence in the bedroom was suffocating.
Lily and Jay were away, and life was going on, and the world had moved on.
Sirius shivered.
“You sleep okay alone?” he asked on an impulse. “Would you… I mean, would you mind some company?”
Sirius crawled into bed next to Snape. Stretched out and allowed Padfoot to come out. The world was really, really much simpler in the monochrome, the dog thought, stretching out next to Snape and tucking his nose into Snape’s bony shoulder. On an impulse, he licked Snape’s cheek.
No reaction. The loneliness of lying next to the breathing, living and unresponsive body was just too much, even for the dog. Padfoot whimpered, let out a long howl and resigned himself to sleep.
He dreamed of Snape petting his fur. It felt nice, for a change.
***
He’d been alone for a long time, he remembered that, and nothing else. Sometimes (even though there was no time, as such), he thought that once he had a name, and lived somewhere else.
He didn’t know how he came to this world that he was now in. He suspected that he’d chosen this world at one time, but he had no idea why; he had nothing to compare it to.
The world was a giant sheet of ice, clear, thick, perfectly smooth, devoid of any irregularity. High above him hang the sky, also clear and colorless.
He walked and walked for what seemed like weeks, but in the end it seemed like he hadn’t moved at all - the sky and the ice were the same in each direction. The sky and the ice were infinite.
His world was neither cold nor warm. He was not tired, not hungry. He searched for a word to describe his state.
The word came to him an eternity later. “Alone”. It wasn’t good or bad. It just was the state of things.
He was alone in a world of ice and sky. A quiet world. He tried to speak, but he couldn’t remember how to do this, how to make the words out of the air that surrounded him. He wasn’t even sure that words were meant to be spoken. Perhaps, they were meant to remain unvoiced, disembodied. Or perhaps, words were only meant to be spoken if someone else were around.
He stretched himself out to lie on the icy floor beneath him. It didn’t feel like anything - in fact, he didn’t feel any difference between lying down, or standing, or walking.
Nothing made a difference.
And there was plenty of ‘nothing’ all around him.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d spent, just lying on his back, staring into the clear empty sky.
It could have been hours. It could have been months.
Eventually, he lifted himself on the elbow when he sensed someone else’s footsteps. The creature was moving noiselessly, but the ice under its feet trembled ever so slightly. He looked around and stared at the intruder, trying to understand whether it was a good thing or not that this creature entered his world.
The creature was glorious.
Thick white fur glistened and almost glowed, as if reflecting a light that had come from someplace else. The beast’s face was ferocious, the bared fangs were giant.
He extended his hand forward and touched the creatures’ face.
A fragment of memory came with the touch.
“Snow tiger,” he said, marvelling at the sound of his own voice. “You’re a snow tiger.”
The tiger circled around him and settled at his feet. He petted its fur, shutting his eyes in pleasure.
“Snow tiger,” he said. “My name is Severus. I don’t remember anything else, I’m afraid.”
The tiger sighed under his touch.
***
When Padfoot woke up, the fingers of Snape’s mangled right hand were twined in his fur…
It wasn’t a dream, Sirius though all morning long after that. Not a dream. Snape is there somewhere. He’s doing something. He’s responding.
Sirius’ enthusiasm waned considerably when he read the third book he’d brought with him. Turned out, it happened all the time, and it didn’t mean anything: an automatic reaction, a reflex, nothing more. It was all just the body, the body had enough memory in it to be doing this.
Nonetheless, it became a tradition of sorts. Every night, Padfoot climbed into bed next to Snape, stretched out next to him and waited. Every night, Snape’s hand would find his fur and begin to stroke.
Snape had a gentle touch, too. As weeks went by, Padfoot had learned the many different ways Snape stroked. There was the carding of fingers through the dog’s hair, there was the patting, there was the actual stroking, and rubbing, and Merlin knows what. There was even the slightest pulling at the fur, a soft tug now and then, that made Padfoot press his ears to the back of his head and growl in pleasure.
***
When Lily and James returned, they were ready to take Snape back. Sirius put up a fight and won and felt good about it.
The spring was spent with Sirius reading those books from St. Mungo’s and trying to train Snape to do certain things on his own.
Snape’s body learned, slowly but surely.
Snape’s mind was another matter altogether.
***
At six feet two, Sirius Black wasn’t a short man. Miroslaw Ackov, who’d just arrived from Durmstrang, was at least eight and three quarters. Or nine. Sirius couldn’t tell, really, the man’s black-haired head was too far away from Sirius’ eyes to allow an accurate estimate.
It was odd to look at him, and know that this giant of a man was the world’s top Legilimency and Occlumency specialist.
“You send a messenger and money,” Ackov’s heavily accented voice boomed. “Your money insults me. There wasn’t enough of it. Your letter was interesting, however. Where’s the patient?”
Sirius nodded. He hadn’t expected Ackov’s cutting right to business, but he appreciated it.
“Come with me,” Sirius led him to the sitting room, and pointed to him to Snape. Snape, of course, hadn’t moved.
“What’s wrong with him?” Ackov looked like he wasn’t going to perform Legilimency, but rather grab Snape by the shoulders and shake him.
“He was hurt,” Sirius said. “He was hurt in the war. He’s - he’s hiding in his own mind, I think. Maybe you could…”
“I could,” Ackov agreed. His sizable wand was in his hand, he pointed it to Snape’s head and then, Ackov’s face went as blank as Snape’s.
Sirius stared at the scene in front of him, suddenly dreadful. He waited and waited, but the living sculpture in his living room remained motionless. It was as if Ackov had suddenly suffered the same destiny as Snape.
I’m sorry, Sirius thought to no-one in particular, feeling like a five-year old all of a sudden. I think I … broke him. The world’s best Legilimens.
It was only half an hour later that Ackov pulled away from Snape, whose face still wasn’t registering anything.
Ackov doubled over, pressed his hands to his own head and let out a whimper, surprisingly pitiful for someone so big.
Sirius took a step back.
His footsteps alerted Ackov, who got over whatever was troubling him, got up to his feet, crossed the distance between him and Sirius. The enormous hand encircled Sirius’ throat.
“You,” Ackov said hatefully. “Why didn’t you warn me?”
“What?” Sirius croaked. All of a sudden, he was afraid to die. Die and leave Snape trapped in his own mind, and in a flat that he couldn’t navigate on his own.
“You and your ilk. You feed your own to the Soul Eaters, and then you bring foreigners to take care of your problems!” Ackov roared. “Why didn’t you warn me that he’s been Eaten?!”
“He wasn’t Eaten,” Sirius protested, barely able to squeeze the words out, as Ackov’s hand continued to torment his tracheas. “It’s the TKS, it’s from pain…” He was seriously considering kicking Ackov in the bollocks. If he could lift his knee that high.
“His mind is empty!” Ackov roared. “No pain does that!”
“Empty,” Sirius sagged in his grip.
“There’s nothing there! It’s worse than nothing! There’s only the infinity of emptiness! A less skilled scholar than I would have been lost in there forever - but you don’t care for someone who isn’t of your own country, do you?”
Ackov released Sirius and looked at him with disgust.
Sirius rubbed his throat. “Empty?” he repeated. “You’re sure? He isn’t coming back?”
“There’s nothing there! There’s no man in that shell.” Ackov’s expression became even more disgusted. “If you still have any respect left for him, you will cease this mockery of care and allow the shell to go to its eternal rest, where his mind had gone a long time ago.”
Ackov left, slamming the door on his way out so hard, the ceiling trembled and dropped a few pieces of plaster on Snape’s head. Snape didn’t react to it, as usual.
Sirius paced the living room and then sat down on the couch next to Snape.
“What do you say, Snape?” he muttered. “Do you want to go to your eternal rest?”
Snape’s eye blinked. Just once.
“Right. You aren’t there. I wish you’d stop blinking. It drives me insane.”
Snape blinked again.
“You’re doing it on purpose, aren’t you?”
***
The Snow Tiger has been gone for a long time now, or so it seemed. Alone again, Severus didn’t know what to make of it. He walked and walked, hoping to see paw prints on ice, but the ice was clear and perfectly smooth, as if no-one had ever trod on it.
“I never named you,” Severus said, addressing his words to the empty sky. “I thought about it, but then decided it might be rude. Perhaps you already have a name, who am I to impose one of my own choosing on you?”
The sky was immobile and colorless.
Severus stood still, searching for the word to describe his current state.
“Alone,” he thought.
No, that wasn’t it.
“Lonely.”
The difference was subtle, but somehow he understood it.
***
Shaken up by the encounter with Ackov, Sirius took a whole week to return to Snape’s bed as Padfoot. Snape’s hand buried itself in his fur instantly and began to stroke.
Padfoot nuzzled Snape’s cheek and whimpered an apology. Snape’s fingers tugged on his fur.
“I’m sorry,” Sirius said in the morning, as he was guiding Snape out of bed. “Maybe Ackov is right. Maybe I don’t respect you. Then again, have I ever? And maybe there’s nothing left in you, except that desire to pet something big and furry at night.” Sirius grinned unhappily. “Then again, if that’s all that’s left, you should have at least that, I reckon. It’s not much, but who knows what the meaning of life is, and what the core of the human soul is? Maybe that’s it. Just being able to grope at someone else’s hide.”
Snape didn’t argue.
Sirius developed a new obsession that day.
Having resigned himself to the fact that he was already seeing as much of Snape’s mind as he ever would, Sirius decided that he’d at least take care of his body.
He took Snape to St. Mungo’s again and insisted that they heal his wand arm perfectly. It took them eighteen hours, but in the end, said arm was mended and reconstructed fully, and not just patched up. The flow of magic would be unhindered, Sirius was assured, if a miracle ever took place.
He brewed a substance that would help lessen the scarring and rubbed it into Snape’s shoulders and arms. It wasn’t nearly enough to make the scars go away, but their appearance did diminish somewhat, and the skin looked healthier.
The left eye couldn’t be salvaged - there was no way to do that, Sirius had been told. He shrugged and did some charm work, to cast an elaborate Glamour charm that covered the empty eye socket and the disfigured cheek.
“Good enough to go to the Ministry banquet”, Sirius informed Snape in early June. “You look quite dashing. Girls will be chasing you, I’m sure. But you will be cold and unattainable, and wholly indifferent to their attentions, and you will give them no time of day, because in the evening you’ll be coming home with me.”
Snape was sitting perfectly still and straight, his chin lifted up ever so slightly.
Sirius laughed.
“I’m not mad. Not really. Just a bit... unhinged. You don’t mind, do you?”
Snape didn’t.
July was hot, and Sirius had given up on setting up a cooling charm around the flat, because he thought it made the air stale. Or maybe he just wanted to sit on the couch in his underwear with Snape and drink beer. They spent many a day doing just that - except, Sirius was the only one drinking, and the only one down to the underwear. Sirius vaguely suspected that Snape wouldn’t appreciate being down to the underpants in his presence just to lounge around.
Lily and James kept visiting, although their visits had became less frequent - once a week now. But the once-a-week never stopped.
Sirius was grateful for those visits, even though he kept telling James they needn’t do that, he was fine, Snape was fine, and life was grand.
To prove that point more to himself than anyone else, one August evening Sirius loaded Snape onto the motorcycle and took him for a ride.
It was a miracle that neither of them fell off, and that they didn’t break their necks. Maybe, somewhere deep down, Sirius wouldn’t have minded that.
Once they were home, Sirius felt spent in more ways than one. Late at night, he sunk to his floor in front of the couch where Snape was sitting in his usual spot and buried his face in Snape’s bony knees, and half-wished that Snape’s hand would reach to his hair in search of Padfoot.
It never did.
***
It was September the first when the Ministry finally saw fit to tie up all the loose ends and issue awards to the war heroes.
Sirius had no idea what criterion the Ministry officials used. Maybe they decorated the war heroes much like a child decorated the Christmas tree - simply by pulling random pretty things out of the box.
Either way, the Longbottoms, Remus and five others ended up with the Order of Merlin, Second Class. Sirius and James ended up receiving the Blue Cross of Mercy each - the story of them rescuing Snape had gone around a few times, each time becoming more and more grandiose. There were three Orders of Merlin, First Class given out. The first went to Lily. The second - to Dumbledore, who declined it, graciously enough, but firmly. The third, likely at Dumbledore’s gentle insistence, was awarded to Snape.
Seeing that Dumbledore had declined, and Snape wasn’t really ‘in there’, that left Lily the most decorated war hero of the day. Sirius couldn’t really argue with that.
They celebrated together - Sirius, the Potters and Remus. Lily left first, and the men stayed on their own. Snape was moved to the armchair by the fireplace and mostly ignored.
“Ah, to be young again,” Remus said wistfully. “I do miss it.”
“We are young,” James protested.
“I don’t feel it.”
“We’re twenty-two,” James pointed out.
“Still, it’s not the same. Not the same as being sixteen.”
Sirius stared at his friend. He knew what Remus meant - it wasn’t just the number of years. It was being together at the full moon, running together as a pack, being eternally young for one night.
“The Wolfsbane. Is it working?”
“Yes,” Remus said. “It’s fine. I’m fine, really…”
“We can still do this,” James said, smiling. “How about we do it the next full moon? We’ll find a secluded spot, and just - run all night. Like we used to.”
“I don’t know,” Sirius muttered. Truth be told, the thought never even occurred to him. Not since Peter was gone.
“Why not?” James seemed surprised. “It’d be brilliant.”
“It’s just that - there was always the four of us,” Remus explained quietly. “Our magic number, the basic number of life. The four directions of the compass, the four seasons, the four elements… The four chambers of the heart.”
“Well, we don’t have that anymore,” James cut him off, a bit harshly.
Sirius stared in Snape’s direction.
James followed his gaze. “That’s insane.”
“Yes,” Sirius whispered.
Naturally, they took Snape with them.
***
“I still think that’s insane,” James protested, even as Sirius was settling Snape into a folding camping chair at the edge of the woods, and casting a web of warming charms. “He’ll see Rem as a wolf - and you can kiss goodbye to any hope you still have of him coming back.”
“Or maybe it’ll just be the jolt to get him to come back,” Sirius argued.
“Shock therapy?”
“Something like that.”
Remus stripped. Sirius looked at his body, long and pale and buck naked, glowing white in the last of the evening sun. Remus had almost as many scars as Snape did - some were longer, though none ran as deep. Sirius knew that almost all of them were self-inflicted in the constant battle of the wolf against the terror of awakening. Sirius wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse.
Remus seemed unconcerned by being watched as he stretched himself until his spine cracked, the vertebra going snap-snap-snap.
“That’s disturbing,” James said.
“Good,” Remus said.
The moon came soon, and then, it was all a flurry of motion, scents, rough play, chasing and play-fighting, yielding and dominance, and being drunk on the pure freedom. Sirius lost track of time - and the human in him retreated far into the background, as the dog came out, sensing the kinship with the wolf next to him. The deer watched, amused, as the two canines sniffed each other. Padfoot was the first to growl and deliver a light bite to the wolf’s neck. The wolf knocked him over, sniffed him, and sprinted towards Snape. Padfoot recovered and chased after him, even as his dog-mind screamed DANGER, and even as he braced himself for a fight.
The wolf sniffed Snape, and the amber eyes stared at Padfoot knowingly. He abandoned Snape a moment later and ran after the deer, who galloped away, disappearing in the thick of the woods.
Padfoot nuzzled Snape’s limp hand and licked it in apology. Snape’s fingers stroked Padfoot’s neck. A moment later, Padfoot was running away, delirious with happiness. The pack had accepted the human - life didn’t get better than that.
They exhausted themselves and fell asleep together, a pile of hooves, paws, tails and antlers. When the moon had gone, the three of them rose from the dew-drenched grass, cold as hell, and completely happy.
Sirius watched Remus as he dressed.
“You didn’t touch Snape.”
“I wouldn’t have,” Remus said. “He reeks of you, and you, of him.”
“I sleep with him. He pets me,” Sirius explained, not in the least embarrassed.
“Do you think that maybe…”
“No. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s all automatic.”
“Oh.”
“Besides, you’re the one to talk,” Sirius laughed. “You reek of cat. Are you fucking a cat, Remus?”
Remus smiled.
“Maybe.”
“But - she’s- she’s fifty years old!”
“She’s a predator. I like that. She’s just as ferocious and just as dangerous, really. The only difference is the size.”
Sirius snorted. “I’ll never think of the housecat the same way again, that’s for sure.” He stared at Remus’ bare chest. “I just noticed,” he trailed his fingertip along Remus’ skin. “You haven’t got any new scars.”
“I know,” Remus’ grin grew bigger. “That’s because you were here when I turned. I never got any when there were the four of us.”
***
The running together at Full Moon became another tradition. It didn’t seem to do Snape any harm - or good. Snape just was - the new unchanging constant in their lives. Maybe he was the True North, Sirius thought.
“I’m sorry, you know,” Sirius said once, taking Snape home after one of these nights. “For the school pranks and all. You see - we’re used to this. Playing rough with each other, playing rough with others. It never really occurred to me that you couldn’t handle the roughness.” Sirius’ hand rested on Snape’s shoulder. “Then again, seems that you managed to grow yourself quite the spine. A spine and a half, I’d say, maybe a spine and three quarters. With all that spine, it’s a wonder you don’t have a tail.”
***
When Christmas came, they were together again: Remus, Sirius, and the Potters - all three of them.
Snape was sitting in the armchair by the hearth, the dress robes and all. His face, the disfigurement hidden by the Glamour charms, looked nearly flawless and almost beautiful in its own cold way.
It never changed expression, it always remained the same - the mask that it had become a year ago. Sirius could barely remember that this face had the potential for so much more: being twisted with inhuman rage, terror, fear, hurt, cruel amusement.
Come to think of it, he realized, he’d never seen a kind smile on Snape’s face. He tried to imagine what that would look like - and couldn’t.
“Sirius,” Lily asked, “are you all right?”
“What do you mean?”
“With him.” She cast a quick glance at Snape.
“Sure. He’s no trouble. Though sometimes I wish he were.”
“I’ve been thinking, maybe we should take turns. Harry’s grown up enough, and…”
“No.”
“Why not?” James interjected. “Look, we’ve been talking. Remus, Alice and Frank, Albus, Minerva. We could - each do two weeks, and…”
“No,” Sirius said stubbornly. “Look, I’m not letting him go. I’m going to see this through to the end.”
“The end is a long time from now,” Lily pointed out. “What are you going to do when you’re both fifty? Sixty? Ninety-five?”
“Neither of us will live that long,” Sirius denied at once, giving Snape a quick glance. “For so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, and all that crap.”
His tone was light, to the point of flippant, but Lily looked away.
Maybe, when we’re both ninety-five, I’ll do what Ackov tried to do. Enter Snape’s mind, and get lost in that vastness of infinity. Maybe I’ll walk that infinity from end to end - just to make sure it really is empty.
He said none of it out loud.
***
“It was Oscar Wilde earlier,” Sirius told Snape at the end of the evening. “I don’t imagine you ever read it. Well, I suppose, it’s time we filled those gaps in your education. I’m going to read Wild you. It’s all very moralistic and horribly serious. Lots of selfish, juvenile people in his stories. You will love them, I’m sure.”
Snape remained indifferent through the Star-Child and the Birthday of the Infanta. When Sirius read the Happy Prince, the play of light and shadow in the room made it look like Snape was smiling. He wasn’t, of course, but it was a nice thought.
At night, Sirius dreamed of Snape as the statue of the Prince. He himself was a dog, rather than the Swallow, and he was using his teeth to peel off layers and layers of the Prince to give out to the poor, and the Prince seemed completely untroubled by any of it.
Sirius woke up in cold sweat, and Wilde went back on the bookshelf.
“Only non-fiction from now on,” Sirius said. “Really, I can’t believe these are supposed to be children’s stories. Fucking creepy, if you ask me.”
***
In March of nineteen eighty-three the Ministry of Magic passed some more resolutions and decided that the budget permitted for all the decorated war heroes to receive a generous pension. Which was just about bloody time, because uncle Alphard’s inheritance had its limits.
It’s been a year and a half, Sirius thought, watching Snape’s face one April evening, trying to figure out if Snape had changed at all. It didn’t look like he had.
Sirius knew that he was changing. He was laughing less, joking less, taking fewer risks. He didn’t regret it, and the fact that he didn’t bothered him, although in a vague way.
Lily said he was growing up. Sirius was quick to deny it.
Truth be told, he felt stuck permanently at twenty-one, along with Snape.
“We’ll always be twenty-one, you and I,” Sirius told Snape.
A mental image of Snape, with his hair grey, and his face forever young, flashed before Sirius’ eyes and he willed it away.
Summer came.
Another sweltering, cruel July, and another week of lounging around in his underwear with a can of beer in his hand, reading Potions Weekly out loud to Snape, when Sirius sat up abruptly.
“You hear me, Snape? I think we can grow you a new eye. What do you say to that?”
***
Lily met Sirius’ declaration with some scepticism, and even James couldn’t understand why Sirius wanted to do that.
“Padfoot,” James spoke in a voice so reasonable it could’ve belonged to Dumbledore, “why do you think he needs a new eye?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Sirius snapped back. “Why does he need his arms and legs? Why does he need a nose? Maybe we should get rid of all that for him, too. Just to save space.”
“I didn’t say that,” James’s tone got a bit sharper. “But maybe you should try to understand why you want to do this.”
“I understand. I was deprived as a child. Mother never let me play with dolls, and here’s my chance,” Sirius shot back, irritated beyond all measure. “Look, I know he isn’t coming back. But what I don’t know is what being alive means. Maybe it’s all about being able to ride a motorcycle - or being able to read - or being capable of a good fistfight. Or maybe - it’s just being able to breathe and blink and pet something big and ugly and hairy at night. And just in case, Jay, just in case that what he’s got now is LIFE, I want to make sure he can get as much of it as possible. So yes. I’m doing it just in case. That’s all there’s to it.”
It wasn’t until September of the same year that Sirius finally managed to find out the location of the Institute and how to get there.
It was James who helped him pack.
Go to Part 3
Rating: R
Go to Part 1
Part Two
1981
It was November when the strike force of the Order drove the enemy back with one mighty blow after another. Some died, but the others kept going. Dumbledore fought alongside the rest of them, and he was fierce. James was humbled by the extent of the power he’d witnessed and by the fact that Dumbledore had never chosen to unleash all of it - until now.
“We’ve leaned on the Malfoys,” Remus informed them, as he walked into the Order’s Headquarters in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere, Southern Wales. Sirius, standing next to him, was wiping the blood from his hands.
“You tortured them,” James clarified.
“I wouldn’t call it torture,” Sirius grinned unrepentantly. “I just had my madman smile on my face and cut my own hand in front of him. Then I cut off a lock of Cissy’s hair…. And I was so gentle about it, that good old Lucius just about pissed himself and spilled the beans faster than we could gather them.”
“Right. What did he say?”
“The Lord has an unknown quantity of artefacts that are supposed to keep him immortal,” Remus said. “We picked up one of them.” A leather-covered book of some sort appeared in his hands. “I have no idea what to do with it.”
“Let’s see if Fiendfyre does the trick,” Lily said coolly. “What?” she snapped, as Sirius and James stared at her. “It burns everything. Presumably.”
They chose a secluded spot for that. Fiendfyre really did the trick, and the book let out many a scream of horror and torment before being reduced to dust.
“Let’s drink to Peter, may he rest in peace,” Sirius said, as he led the way back to the Headquarters. They did - although barely a few drops each. It wouldn’t do to overindulge.
“One day, the war will be over, and we’ll get blind drunk,” James said. “We’ll be so pissed, Lily will have to roll us back home.”
“Mobilicorpus for both of you, then,” Lily said. She’d grown quieter as the weeks went by, and she clearly missed Harry, although she never said a word about that.
“We need to find the others,” Remus said. “That was just one of them.”
“Any idea where to look?” James asked.
“Lucius said Bellatrix has one more.”
Sirius nodded thoughtfully. “I say we go after the Lestranges. I have a few ideas as to where they might be hiding…”
“They likely know that you know,” Remus felt the need to point out. He’s changed too, James observed, his face had grown paler. He was fading, all of him - except for the eyes, the amber glow in them was only growing more intense each day, and more predatory.
“So you’re saying we shouldn’t go?” Sirius checked.
“I say we should,” Remus growled. “I just think we should make a hunt of it. It’s almost full moon, isn’t it?”
“You’ll be out of control,” Lily argued. “You’ll hunt your own as well as them.”
Remus looked at her.
“Not if you brew the Wolfsbane for me. You do know how to do that, don’t you?”
“That stuff is dangerous, and still experimental, and…”
“You’ve got three days to perfect it,” Remus cut her off in mid-sentence.
James didn’t think he’d ever hear Lily swear like a sailor, but she did. She did manage to make the Wolfsbane. It tasted worse than absolutely horrible, and Remus nearly puked his guts out onto the floor. James suspected that only thing stopping him from doing that was Lily’s wand pointed at his throat and her words - don’t you bloody dare throw up now.
Remus stayed put on the floor, and the Wolfsbane stayed put in his belly.
It turned out to be a great advantage - having the werewolf on their side. Hexes and curses rolled off him like water off a duck’s back. They did manage to capture the trio of the Lestranges, and cared nothing that the others had fled.
Bellatrix was the one they’d wanted, after all.
“Jay, I smell something,” Sirius said as soon as he was back in human form. “Blood.” He inclined his head in the direction of another room, locked and warded. In her bonds, Bellatrix, held back by the Longbottoms, let out a throaty laugh.
Lily took down the wards. James was the first to walk into the room.
The first words to emerge out of his mouth were, “LILY, STAY BACK.”
Miraculously, she did. Sirius followed James into the room and James could see that his friend was about to vacate his stomach right here, right onto the stone floor.
“What,” Sirius whispered, staring at the lifeless and barely human form on the floor, “what on earth is THAT?!”
James’ stomach turned out to be a bit stronger. He came up to the wretched being on the floor and turned him over.
“It’s Snape. He’s still breathing, too.”
“But…” Sirius scowled. “I mean - he…”
“He’s one of them, yes. Lovers’ quarrel, I imagine. Bloody fuck, but if they do this to their own...”
“All right… what do you want to do?” Sirius asked.
James bit his lip. It was a confusing situation. The common sense demanded to finish off the wounded enemy and keep moving. And yet - he already knew that he wouldn’t be able to deliver the coup de grâce. Not like this. More to the point, he could see that Sirius wouldn’t be able to do that either.
“We Apparate him to St. Mungo’s and drop him off in the emergency ward,” James said.
“He’ll never survive the Apparition.”
“Maybe not. But we’re out of options.”
Shockingly enough, Snape survived the Apparition and was admitted into St. Mungo’s instantaneously.
James warned the mediwizards to take every precaution in dealing with Severus Snape, and made them swear there’d be guards posted in the room, and in the hallway, and - until he was pushed out with a very unfriendly, “I suggest you let us do our job here, Mister Potter.”
They returned to the Headquarters in the morning. James told Lily about Snape, and she cried - for the second time since their flight from Godric’s Hollow. James couldn’t blame her. She likely mourned a childhood friend, someone she used to play with.
“What a waste,” James said.
Sirius shrugged. It looked like he really didn’t want to think about Snape. One way or another, Snape was a goner - if he didn’t expire in Mungo, he’d receive the Dementor’s Kiss, or a life sentence in Azkaban. Sirius clearly felt that the entire ‘saving Snape’ thing was pointless and even said so out loud.
“Mercy is never pointless,” said Remus, who’d already assumed human form. His mouth was still covered in blood.
“Right,” James agreed. “Let’s have a chat with the Lestranges. Lil, we’re going to need Veritaserum. Now, I know that supposedly it takes a month to brew it, but…”
“I’m not a miracle worker,” she snapped.
“No,” James reached for her hand and pressed his flushed face into her tiny palm. “You’re a miracle.”
***
They told Dumbledore about Snape the following morning. Dumbledore reciprocated by telling the story of Snape coming to him after having passed Trelawney’s prophecy to Voldemort. Presumably, before all this, Albus didn’t feel it was his story to tell.
“Maybe Voldemort found out that Snape went to you,” James said, “- and that’s why…”
“That seems plausible,” Dumbledore agreed.
“Sure glad we took him to Mungo,” Sirius muttered, unsettled by the entire thing more than he would care to admit.
The interrogation of the Lestranges took place a week later. Lily’s accelerated version of Veritaserum worked just fine, and they gleaned a great deal of useful information. Where to look for other ‘artefacts’, how to identify them, and so on. When business was done with, Sirius asked about Peter.
In retrospect, a cowardly thing though it was, he almost wished he didn’t.
James found him outside, as Sirius stared ahead blankly, from time to time touching his lips to the glass of Firewhisky in his hand, but never taking a sip.
“It’s like he died again tonight,” Sirius said.
“Peter?”
“Yes. First we learned he died when the Fidelius came down. And now this. And to know that Snape was the one to kill him, and that if he hadn’t, you’d be dead instead, I don’t know, Jay. I want to kiss Snape, and I want to break his neck, and I want to give him the Order of Merlin posthumously, and I want to bury him on the same spot where he’d killed Peter, and piss on his grave, and build him a monument. Do you think that’s too much?”
James’ hand rested on Sirius’ shoulder.
“Just a bit.”
***
It was December when they celebrated the victory - right on Christmas.
In the end, it was Dumbledore who ended up killing Voldemort, not that it surprised anyone.
People were celebrating. In Hogsmeade there were fireworks, and dancing in the street, and Sirius was intoxicated by it all: the mulled wine, the smell of fresh snow, the music, and the vibrancy of human happiness all around him. Sirius danced with Lily, then, as James threatened violence to him, he danced with James, then with Remus, just for the hell of it, and eventually with Minerva, who was blushing profusely, but letting him spin her and waltz her any way he wanted.
Sirius was happy, and drunk on life.
He was dancing with Minerva, and spinning her like the whipping top, and the world was spinning him in turn.
At one point, he turned around to speak to Lily and James, but realized that they were gone.
He felt a chill go down his spine. Suddenly sober, he pushed his way through the crowd and began to walk to Hogwarts. He didn’t know why he felt so unnerved by their absence. It was all over, wasn’t it?
Once at Hogwarts, Sirius ran up to Flitwick’s rooms and knocked. The professor answered the door and kindly advised Sirius that, yes, Lily was here, to collect Harry. She was alone, saying that James had some other business to attend to.
“What business?” Sirius demanded.
“She didn’t say.”
Sirius arrived at Potters’ old home in Godric’s Hollow, fully expecting to find it empty.
It wasn’t - the light was on, and he could see people walking in the room.
Sirius winced. He felt like - like he was missing something. Like his friends had cut him off.
He approached the door, stepping softly.
“Easy now,” he heard Lily’s voice. “Let me take your hand. Can you hold on to it? No? It’s all right. I will hold on to you. Come on now, small steps.”
Sirius opened the door and walked inside.
“Hey, mate,” James greeted him. He was sitting on the couch, dangling Harry on his knee. “Did you kiss Minerva yet?”
“Don’t be stupid.” Sirius’ eyes shot in Lily’s direction and he saw the black scrawny shadow of a man following her in mechanical, automatic movements. “Snape? What’s he doing here?”
“We brought him home,” Lily said simply, as if it was just the most natural thing to do.
“Didn’t seem right to be dancing the night away, while he was… you know. There,” James explained. “In Mungo. Alone. He did his part, too.”
“He created the entire mess with Voldemort hunting you,” Sirius felt the need to point out.
“And he fixed it,” James said.
“Well, you should have told me. I would have come with you.”
“I wanted to, but you looked so happy, dancing with Minerva. I didn’t have the heart to pull you away,” Lily smiled at him, the mild, warm smile he’d almost forgotten by now. “Severus, you come with me, all right? I’m going to make the bed, you’ll lie down and rest. I’m not going anywhere.”
Sirius watched them go and then turned to James. “You do know that he fancied her, right?” he asked as lightheartedly as he could manage, even though the words had a sour taste to them.
James shrugged, still smiling and running his hand over Harry’s hair. “I don’t think it matters now who fancied whom.”
“When he comes to his senses, he’s going to kiss her,” Sirius felt the need to warn him. “He’s going to take advantage of her. There will be pity sex. And Harry’s going to end up with a really ugly half-sister, long-nosed and greasy-haired.”
“Padfoot,” James said softly, but firmly. His smile was gone.
“And Severus will insist on naming her Dementoria. Or Cadavrena. Or… ”
“Sirius,” James’ voice rose a notch, and Harry stilled on his knee. “He isn’t coming back.”
***
Sirius spent the night on the Potters’ couch. From time to time, he checked on Lily - she stayed in Snape’s bedroom all night, holding his hand, whispering something in his ear. Once, he collided nose to nose with James, who emerged from his own bedroom to check on Lily as well.
“Let’s get drunk,” James said, leading the way downstairs.
They did just that, and there was no more of that ‘just a splash and no more’ nonsense - they drank out of the bottle, passing it to each other.
James spoke, Sirius listened.
St. Mungo’s assessed Severus Snape and decided that he was incurable. As in, ‘completely and utterly incurable, no hope of recovery, no fucking chance in hell,’ James elaborated, staring at the bottle in the light of the hearth. “That’s what his medical chart says, ‘no chance in hell’”.
“Uh-huh. And?”
“I don’t know, mate. I look at my wife. My beautiful-beautiful-beautiful wife. And I can’t get over it, we won the war, I’m alive, and I’ve got a wife. And I know it was him who saved her.”
“He’s the one who nearly got her killed in the first place!” Sirius protested and took the bottle away. “And all of you, too.”
“Bullshite,” James let the bottle go. “The prophecy didn’t make a difference one way or another. You realize, don’t you, that with Peter working for Voldemort, Lil and I wouldn’t have survived. One way or another, he’d have got us killed. Look - I know what Snape did. I know what he is. It’s just that - in the end he did what was right. You know? And he must have some idea about what would be done to him, and he still did that right thing.”
“Yes,” Sirius admitted.
“And I don’t think I can - just leave him in Mungo. Yes, they’d be kind to him there, I know. He wouldn’t be lying around in his own filth or anything. But,” James’ voice rose slightly, “He’d be alone. Here, he’s with us. He’s one of us. Really, at the core, he is.”
“But,” Sirius started again, but James waved him off.
“Look,” James said, exasperated, “What if - I don’t know. What if it were me, who ended up like that. Would you bury me in Mungo and visit me twice a year?”
“No,” Sirius admitted. “Never.”
“It’s the same, only different,” James said profoundly and collapsed on the couch, sound asleep.
Sirius circled the living room for a while and eventually took his place at the foot of the couch as Padfoot.
He visited Potters daily for two weeks. He could see that having Snape around was taking a toll on them. Lily was getting tired, and James - James, who’d been planning to become an Auror, was now putting those plans on hold.
“It’ll be fine,” Lily denied, “We just need to settle into a routine. It’s like having another child, really.”
Yes, Sirius thought. Another child - who will never grow up, never leave home… and you will be tied to him for as long as you live, you and James, and Harry - and deny it all you want, your lives will revolve around him.
He didn’t want that to happen. He wanted his friends to be free. To have another baby, travel the world, and on, and on, and on. He spent the days making lists of the things that Lil and Jay wouldn’t be able to do because of Snape.
The solution presented itself another week later.
“I’ll take Snape home,” Sirius said. “He can stay with me.”
Lily gave him a very long and a very sceptical look.
“You? Sirius, you understand I have to ask - why?”
“Yes,” Sirius said. “But I understand what James is saying, about home and all. And - well, I’ve got nothing happening now at home, and it’s not like it’ll be a burden. I won’t even notice he’s with me. You’ve got Harry to take care of. And - well, it just makes sense that I take him.”
Lily hesitated.
“Come on,” Sirius said. “It’s not like I will be nasty to him.”
“Maybe for a few days,” she relented. “Until I catch my breath.”
“Right. Let’s give it a try.”
***
Having Snape at home turned out to be torture. Sirius read up on his condition (TKS, or The Kissed Syndrome - like the Dementor’s Kiss, only without the actual Dementor being involved).
He had to do everything for Snape. And everything really did include everything. He used the spells for the first few days. Snape’s body moved obediently, guided by those spells, animated by them, serviced by them. Snape was in his own world, entirely lost in the purely automated cycle of sleeping-waking-eating-everything - and Sirius found himself twitching.
“The fuck with that,” Sirius said, flicking the wand to remove the spells. “We’re doing it the old-fashioned way.”
He supposed that it would be easy - with Snape not resisting any treatment or any manipulations to his body.
The first time he undressed Snape to bathe him, Sirius flinched. The sight of the scars was bad enough. The fact that Snape just stood there, without any reaction to someone staring at him, did Sirius in.
A week later, Sirius thought he’d give an arm and a leg for a good old-fashioned fistfight.
“It’s like having a jellyfish,” Sirius said, staring Snape in the eye. “You’re one giant jellyfish. No spine. No will. What’s the point?”
Naturally, Snape didn’t answer.
Sirius apologized to him the next morning. Not that Snape could hear him, but Sirius still did.
He managed to settle them into a routine of some sort. Wake up. Bathroom, shower. Get dressed -“The black suits you, Snape, you look like a scarecrow.” Eat breakfast. Walk outside - “Fresh air will do you good, Snape. Want to play ball?”
Sirius threw a ball at him, which hit Snape in the shoulder and rolled away, untouched. Snape hadn’t moved.
In the evening, once Snape was fed and left in bed for the night, Sirius stabbed the ball with a knife and watched with malicious satisfaction as it deflated in his hands.
When Lily and Jay visited them, Sirius did his best to present a picture of perfect life. “Just two mates, sharing a flat,” he said grinning, “Nothing to it. I think he’ll come about one day. I really do.”
“So, mate, would you be able to keep him another month, then?” James asked. “We were going to take a trip to Australia. Lily wants to attend the Potions conference…”
“Uh-huh.”
“The actual conference is a week, but - I thought…”
“You’d stay there a bit longer,” Sirius supplied.
“Yes. Maybe a month. Just - you know… see the world a bit.”
“You should,” Sirius approved instantly.
“We can take Severus with us,” Lily said.
“Don’t be silly. He needs routine, consistency,” Sirius said. He wondered, privately, what the fuck made him such an expert on what Snape needed. “And it’s no trouble. He can stay with me, I’ve said so already. You go.”
They left quickly, and James made Sirius promise that if anything happened, anything at all, Sirius would write right away.
Sirius swore on his mother’s head. Knowing Sirius’ relationship with his mother, James accepted the oath with a grain of salt, but he and Lily did leave in the end.
When they were gone, Sirius felt like he was truly alone for the first time in six years. “It’s just you and me now, Snape,” Sirius said, barely able to keep his tone mild.
He felt angry, and he didn’t know why.
He took to speaking in a voice so kind and soothing, he managed to nauseate himself. No sudden moves, no startling noises. He thought - maybe, if Snape felt secure enough, safe enough, he’d come out of his shell eventually.
Snape’s shell continued living a silent, disconnected life of its own. Days passed, and nobody was coming out of it.
The anger continued to build.
A week later Sirius slapped Snape.
***
The outome horrified him: Snape didn’t even flinch. His head moved as if an inanimate object, and that was all.
Sirius walked out of the flat, ran down the stairs and sat down right on the steps, hugging his body with his arms.
He returned to the flat an hour later. Snape was where he’d left him, sitting on the couch. Snape’s pale cheek was bright with the print of Sirius’ hand.
“That’s it,” Sirius said. “We’re going to St. Mungo, before I kill you. Before I kill both of us.”
Snape gave no response.
* **
St. Mungo’s staff were understanding. The elderly mediwizard nodded, listening to Sirius’ ramblings, flicked his wand to remove the bruise from Severus’ cheekbone.
“It’s not an easy task, what you were trying to do. Leave him to us. He’ll be in good hands. That’s what we’re here for. You go and live your life, young man. Come back to visit anytime you like.”
Sirius left, for the first time in his life feeling like he was given too easy an absolution. Or was it the second time? He couldn’t be sure.
He spent the following day in a coffee shop, trying to write to James and Lily.
Could you please come back?
No.
If I kill Snape, will you visit me in Azkaban?
No, that wasn’t good.
Why can’t he just - snap out of it? Why is he such a cowardly, selfish, spineless, unbelievably…
No, that wasn’t it, either.
Lil and Jay, I know what I promised. Turns out, I can’t do it. I just…
I just look at him, and whenever I do, I can’t escape the feeling that…
Sirius stood up, rolled up the last piece of parchment into the ball and sent it flying into the wastebasket.
He was in St. Mungo’s an hour later, demanding to take Snape home.
Shockingly, they let him do it.
Snape was led out to him, still in the web of automated spells to move him along, as if he were some sort of inanimate object.
Sirius shuddered.
“Isn’t there a way to do without that?” he asked.
“There is,” the elderly wizard, the same one who’d admitted Snape a day earlier, said. “Those who’d suffered the Kiss can be trained to perform the basic bodily functions on their own. Chew, swallow, vacate their bowels at appropriate times. However,” he added, “It’d take months of training the body to develop the necessary routine, to respond to numerous cues automatically, now that the mind is disengaged from the body. It’s not impossible, not at all, just very difficult.”
“Got books?” Sirius asked.
He left the Hospital with a pile of books in his arms, and Snape in tow. Snape, who still was unaware of anything about him and who didn’t care one way or another.
When Snape was in bed that night, Sirius came to him and sat on the very edge of the bed.
“I’m sorry, Snape,” he said. “I - I was angry. I still am. It’s just that -whenever I look at you, I can’t escape the feeling that it should have been me.” The confession seemed to break some sort of a dam, and the words were gushing out in a great flood that Sirius didn’t know how to stop. “I should have been their Secret Keeper. I should have been tortured to the brink of insanity, not you.” Sirius sighed. “In fact, we got it all wrong. I should be sitting in your house, Snape, looking like a giant stuffed scarecrow. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Snape was staring into the ceiling with his only remaining eye.
The silence in the bedroom was suffocating.
Lily and Jay were away, and life was going on, and the world had moved on.
Sirius shivered.
“You sleep okay alone?” he asked on an impulse. “Would you… I mean, would you mind some company?”
Sirius crawled into bed next to Snape. Stretched out and allowed Padfoot to come out. The world was really, really much simpler in the monochrome, the dog thought, stretching out next to Snape and tucking his nose into Snape’s bony shoulder. On an impulse, he licked Snape’s cheek.
No reaction. The loneliness of lying next to the breathing, living and unresponsive body was just too much, even for the dog. Padfoot whimpered, let out a long howl and resigned himself to sleep.
He dreamed of Snape petting his fur. It felt nice, for a change.
***
He’d been alone for a long time, he remembered that, and nothing else. Sometimes (even though there was no time, as such), he thought that once he had a name, and lived somewhere else.
He didn’t know how he came to this world that he was now in. He suspected that he’d chosen this world at one time, but he had no idea why; he had nothing to compare it to.
The world was a giant sheet of ice, clear, thick, perfectly smooth, devoid of any irregularity. High above him hang the sky, also clear and colorless.
He walked and walked for what seemed like weeks, but in the end it seemed like he hadn’t moved at all - the sky and the ice were the same in each direction. The sky and the ice were infinite.
His world was neither cold nor warm. He was not tired, not hungry. He searched for a word to describe his state.
The word came to him an eternity later. “Alone”. It wasn’t good or bad. It just was the state of things.
He was alone in a world of ice and sky. A quiet world. He tried to speak, but he couldn’t remember how to do this, how to make the words out of the air that surrounded him. He wasn’t even sure that words were meant to be spoken. Perhaps, they were meant to remain unvoiced, disembodied. Or perhaps, words were only meant to be spoken if someone else were around.
He stretched himself out to lie on the icy floor beneath him. It didn’t feel like anything - in fact, he didn’t feel any difference between lying down, or standing, or walking.
Nothing made a difference.
And there was plenty of ‘nothing’ all around him.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d spent, just lying on his back, staring into the clear empty sky.
It could have been hours. It could have been months.
Eventually, he lifted himself on the elbow when he sensed someone else’s footsteps. The creature was moving noiselessly, but the ice under its feet trembled ever so slightly. He looked around and stared at the intruder, trying to understand whether it was a good thing or not that this creature entered his world.
The creature was glorious.
Thick white fur glistened and almost glowed, as if reflecting a light that had come from someplace else. The beast’s face was ferocious, the bared fangs were giant.
He extended his hand forward and touched the creatures’ face.
A fragment of memory came with the touch.
“Snow tiger,” he said, marvelling at the sound of his own voice. “You’re a snow tiger.”
The tiger circled around him and settled at his feet. He petted its fur, shutting his eyes in pleasure.
“Snow tiger,” he said. “My name is Severus. I don’t remember anything else, I’m afraid.”
The tiger sighed under his touch.
***
When Padfoot woke up, the fingers of Snape’s mangled right hand were twined in his fur…
It wasn’t a dream, Sirius though all morning long after that. Not a dream. Snape is there somewhere. He’s doing something. He’s responding.
Sirius’ enthusiasm waned considerably when he read the third book he’d brought with him. Turned out, it happened all the time, and it didn’t mean anything: an automatic reaction, a reflex, nothing more. It was all just the body, the body had enough memory in it to be doing this.
Nonetheless, it became a tradition of sorts. Every night, Padfoot climbed into bed next to Snape, stretched out next to him and waited. Every night, Snape’s hand would find his fur and begin to stroke.
Snape had a gentle touch, too. As weeks went by, Padfoot had learned the many different ways Snape stroked. There was the carding of fingers through the dog’s hair, there was the patting, there was the actual stroking, and rubbing, and Merlin knows what. There was even the slightest pulling at the fur, a soft tug now and then, that made Padfoot press his ears to the back of his head and growl in pleasure.
***
When Lily and James returned, they were ready to take Snape back. Sirius put up a fight and won and felt good about it.
The spring was spent with Sirius reading those books from St. Mungo’s and trying to train Snape to do certain things on his own.
Snape’s body learned, slowly but surely.
Snape’s mind was another matter altogether.
***
At six feet two, Sirius Black wasn’t a short man. Miroslaw Ackov, who’d just arrived from Durmstrang, was at least eight and three quarters. Or nine. Sirius couldn’t tell, really, the man’s black-haired head was too far away from Sirius’ eyes to allow an accurate estimate.
It was odd to look at him, and know that this giant of a man was the world’s top Legilimency and Occlumency specialist.
“You send a messenger and money,” Ackov’s heavily accented voice boomed. “Your money insults me. There wasn’t enough of it. Your letter was interesting, however. Where’s the patient?”
Sirius nodded. He hadn’t expected Ackov’s cutting right to business, but he appreciated it.
“Come with me,” Sirius led him to the sitting room, and pointed to him to Snape. Snape, of course, hadn’t moved.
“What’s wrong with him?” Ackov looked like he wasn’t going to perform Legilimency, but rather grab Snape by the shoulders and shake him.
“He was hurt,” Sirius said. “He was hurt in the war. He’s - he’s hiding in his own mind, I think. Maybe you could…”
“I could,” Ackov agreed. His sizable wand was in his hand, he pointed it to Snape’s head and then, Ackov’s face went as blank as Snape’s.
Sirius stared at the scene in front of him, suddenly dreadful. He waited and waited, but the living sculpture in his living room remained motionless. It was as if Ackov had suddenly suffered the same destiny as Snape.
I’m sorry, Sirius thought to no-one in particular, feeling like a five-year old all of a sudden. I think I … broke him. The world’s best Legilimens.
It was only half an hour later that Ackov pulled away from Snape, whose face still wasn’t registering anything.
Ackov doubled over, pressed his hands to his own head and let out a whimper, surprisingly pitiful for someone so big.
Sirius took a step back.
His footsteps alerted Ackov, who got over whatever was troubling him, got up to his feet, crossed the distance between him and Sirius. The enormous hand encircled Sirius’ throat.
“You,” Ackov said hatefully. “Why didn’t you warn me?”
“What?” Sirius croaked. All of a sudden, he was afraid to die. Die and leave Snape trapped in his own mind, and in a flat that he couldn’t navigate on his own.
“You and your ilk. You feed your own to the Soul Eaters, and then you bring foreigners to take care of your problems!” Ackov roared. “Why didn’t you warn me that he’s been Eaten?!”
“He wasn’t Eaten,” Sirius protested, barely able to squeeze the words out, as Ackov’s hand continued to torment his tracheas. “It’s the TKS, it’s from pain…” He was seriously considering kicking Ackov in the bollocks. If he could lift his knee that high.
“His mind is empty!” Ackov roared. “No pain does that!”
“Empty,” Sirius sagged in his grip.
“There’s nothing there! It’s worse than nothing! There’s only the infinity of emptiness! A less skilled scholar than I would have been lost in there forever - but you don’t care for someone who isn’t of your own country, do you?”
Ackov released Sirius and looked at him with disgust.
Sirius rubbed his throat. “Empty?” he repeated. “You’re sure? He isn’t coming back?”
“There’s nothing there! There’s no man in that shell.” Ackov’s expression became even more disgusted. “If you still have any respect left for him, you will cease this mockery of care and allow the shell to go to its eternal rest, where his mind had gone a long time ago.”
Ackov left, slamming the door on his way out so hard, the ceiling trembled and dropped a few pieces of plaster on Snape’s head. Snape didn’t react to it, as usual.
Sirius paced the living room and then sat down on the couch next to Snape.
“What do you say, Snape?” he muttered. “Do you want to go to your eternal rest?”
Snape’s eye blinked. Just once.
“Right. You aren’t there. I wish you’d stop blinking. It drives me insane.”
Snape blinked again.
“You’re doing it on purpose, aren’t you?”
***
The Snow Tiger has been gone for a long time now, or so it seemed. Alone again, Severus didn’t know what to make of it. He walked and walked, hoping to see paw prints on ice, but the ice was clear and perfectly smooth, as if no-one had ever trod on it.
“I never named you,” Severus said, addressing his words to the empty sky. “I thought about it, but then decided it might be rude. Perhaps you already have a name, who am I to impose one of my own choosing on you?”
The sky was immobile and colorless.
Severus stood still, searching for the word to describe his current state.
“Alone,” he thought.
No, that wasn’t it.
“Lonely.”
The difference was subtle, but somehow he understood it.
***
Shaken up by the encounter with Ackov, Sirius took a whole week to return to Snape’s bed as Padfoot. Snape’s hand buried itself in his fur instantly and began to stroke.
Padfoot nuzzled Snape’s cheek and whimpered an apology. Snape’s fingers tugged on his fur.
“I’m sorry,” Sirius said in the morning, as he was guiding Snape out of bed. “Maybe Ackov is right. Maybe I don’t respect you. Then again, have I ever? And maybe there’s nothing left in you, except that desire to pet something big and furry at night.” Sirius grinned unhappily. “Then again, if that’s all that’s left, you should have at least that, I reckon. It’s not much, but who knows what the meaning of life is, and what the core of the human soul is? Maybe that’s it. Just being able to grope at someone else’s hide.”
Snape didn’t argue.
Sirius developed a new obsession that day.
Having resigned himself to the fact that he was already seeing as much of Snape’s mind as he ever would, Sirius decided that he’d at least take care of his body.
He took Snape to St. Mungo’s again and insisted that they heal his wand arm perfectly. It took them eighteen hours, but in the end, said arm was mended and reconstructed fully, and not just patched up. The flow of magic would be unhindered, Sirius was assured, if a miracle ever took place.
He brewed a substance that would help lessen the scarring and rubbed it into Snape’s shoulders and arms. It wasn’t nearly enough to make the scars go away, but their appearance did diminish somewhat, and the skin looked healthier.
The left eye couldn’t be salvaged - there was no way to do that, Sirius had been told. He shrugged and did some charm work, to cast an elaborate Glamour charm that covered the empty eye socket and the disfigured cheek.
“Good enough to go to the Ministry banquet”, Sirius informed Snape in early June. “You look quite dashing. Girls will be chasing you, I’m sure. But you will be cold and unattainable, and wholly indifferent to their attentions, and you will give them no time of day, because in the evening you’ll be coming home with me.”
Snape was sitting perfectly still and straight, his chin lifted up ever so slightly.
Sirius laughed.
“I’m not mad. Not really. Just a bit... unhinged. You don’t mind, do you?”
Snape didn’t.
July was hot, and Sirius had given up on setting up a cooling charm around the flat, because he thought it made the air stale. Or maybe he just wanted to sit on the couch in his underwear with Snape and drink beer. They spent many a day doing just that - except, Sirius was the only one drinking, and the only one down to the underwear. Sirius vaguely suspected that Snape wouldn’t appreciate being down to the underpants in his presence just to lounge around.
Lily and James kept visiting, although their visits had became less frequent - once a week now. But the once-a-week never stopped.
Sirius was grateful for those visits, even though he kept telling James they needn’t do that, he was fine, Snape was fine, and life was grand.
To prove that point more to himself than anyone else, one August evening Sirius loaded Snape onto the motorcycle and took him for a ride.
It was a miracle that neither of them fell off, and that they didn’t break their necks. Maybe, somewhere deep down, Sirius wouldn’t have minded that.
Once they were home, Sirius felt spent in more ways than one. Late at night, he sunk to his floor in front of the couch where Snape was sitting in his usual spot and buried his face in Snape’s bony knees, and half-wished that Snape’s hand would reach to his hair in search of Padfoot.
It never did.
***
It was September the first when the Ministry finally saw fit to tie up all the loose ends and issue awards to the war heroes.
Sirius had no idea what criterion the Ministry officials used. Maybe they decorated the war heroes much like a child decorated the Christmas tree - simply by pulling random pretty things out of the box.
Either way, the Longbottoms, Remus and five others ended up with the Order of Merlin, Second Class. Sirius and James ended up receiving the Blue Cross of Mercy each - the story of them rescuing Snape had gone around a few times, each time becoming more and more grandiose. There were three Orders of Merlin, First Class given out. The first went to Lily. The second - to Dumbledore, who declined it, graciously enough, but firmly. The third, likely at Dumbledore’s gentle insistence, was awarded to Snape.
Seeing that Dumbledore had declined, and Snape wasn’t really ‘in there’, that left Lily the most decorated war hero of the day. Sirius couldn’t really argue with that.
They celebrated together - Sirius, the Potters and Remus. Lily left first, and the men stayed on their own. Snape was moved to the armchair by the fireplace and mostly ignored.
“Ah, to be young again,” Remus said wistfully. “I do miss it.”
“We are young,” James protested.
“I don’t feel it.”
“We’re twenty-two,” James pointed out.
“Still, it’s not the same. Not the same as being sixteen.”
Sirius stared at his friend. He knew what Remus meant - it wasn’t just the number of years. It was being together at the full moon, running together as a pack, being eternally young for one night.
“The Wolfsbane. Is it working?”
“Yes,” Remus said. “It’s fine. I’m fine, really…”
“We can still do this,” James said, smiling. “How about we do it the next full moon? We’ll find a secluded spot, and just - run all night. Like we used to.”
“I don’t know,” Sirius muttered. Truth be told, the thought never even occurred to him. Not since Peter was gone.
“Why not?” James seemed surprised. “It’d be brilliant.”
“It’s just that - there was always the four of us,” Remus explained quietly. “Our magic number, the basic number of life. The four directions of the compass, the four seasons, the four elements… The four chambers of the heart.”
“Well, we don’t have that anymore,” James cut him off, a bit harshly.
Sirius stared in Snape’s direction.
James followed his gaze. “That’s insane.”
“Yes,” Sirius whispered.
Naturally, they took Snape with them.
***
“I still think that’s insane,” James protested, even as Sirius was settling Snape into a folding camping chair at the edge of the woods, and casting a web of warming charms. “He’ll see Rem as a wolf - and you can kiss goodbye to any hope you still have of him coming back.”
“Or maybe it’ll just be the jolt to get him to come back,” Sirius argued.
“Shock therapy?”
“Something like that.”
Remus stripped. Sirius looked at his body, long and pale and buck naked, glowing white in the last of the evening sun. Remus had almost as many scars as Snape did - some were longer, though none ran as deep. Sirius knew that almost all of them were self-inflicted in the constant battle of the wolf against the terror of awakening. Sirius wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse.
Remus seemed unconcerned by being watched as he stretched himself until his spine cracked, the vertebra going snap-snap-snap.
“That’s disturbing,” James said.
“Good,” Remus said.
The moon came soon, and then, it was all a flurry of motion, scents, rough play, chasing and play-fighting, yielding and dominance, and being drunk on the pure freedom. Sirius lost track of time - and the human in him retreated far into the background, as the dog came out, sensing the kinship with the wolf next to him. The deer watched, amused, as the two canines sniffed each other. Padfoot was the first to growl and deliver a light bite to the wolf’s neck. The wolf knocked him over, sniffed him, and sprinted towards Snape. Padfoot recovered and chased after him, even as his dog-mind screamed DANGER, and even as he braced himself for a fight.
The wolf sniffed Snape, and the amber eyes stared at Padfoot knowingly. He abandoned Snape a moment later and ran after the deer, who galloped away, disappearing in the thick of the woods.
Padfoot nuzzled Snape’s limp hand and licked it in apology. Snape’s fingers stroked Padfoot’s neck. A moment later, Padfoot was running away, delirious with happiness. The pack had accepted the human - life didn’t get better than that.
They exhausted themselves and fell asleep together, a pile of hooves, paws, tails and antlers. When the moon had gone, the three of them rose from the dew-drenched grass, cold as hell, and completely happy.
Sirius watched Remus as he dressed.
“You didn’t touch Snape.”
“I wouldn’t have,” Remus said. “He reeks of you, and you, of him.”
“I sleep with him. He pets me,” Sirius explained, not in the least embarrassed.
“Do you think that maybe…”
“No. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s all automatic.”
“Oh.”
“Besides, you’re the one to talk,” Sirius laughed. “You reek of cat. Are you fucking a cat, Remus?”
Remus smiled.
“Maybe.”
“But - she’s- she’s fifty years old!”
“She’s a predator. I like that. She’s just as ferocious and just as dangerous, really. The only difference is the size.”
Sirius snorted. “I’ll never think of the housecat the same way again, that’s for sure.” He stared at Remus’ bare chest. “I just noticed,” he trailed his fingertip along Remus’ skin. “You haven’t got any new scars.”
“I know,” Remus’ grin grew bigger. “That’s because you were here when I turned. I never got any when there were the four of us.”
***
The running together at Full Moon became another tradition. It didn’t seem to do Snape any harm - or good. Snape just was - the new unchanging constant in their lives. Maybe he was the True North, Sirius thought.
“I’m sorry, you know,” Sirius said once, taking Snape home after one of these nights. “For the school pranks and all. You see - we’re used to this. Playing rough with each other, playing rough with others. It never really occurred to me that you couldn’t handle the roughness.” Sirius’ hand rested on Snape’s shoulder. “Then again, seems that you managed to grow yourself quite the spine. A spine and a half, I’d say, maybe a spine and three quarters. With all that spine, it’s a wonder you don’t have a tail.”
***
When Christmas came, they were together again: Remus, Sirius, and the Potters - all three of them.
Snape was sitting in the armchair by the hearth, the dress robes and all. His face, the disfigurement hidden by the Glamour charms, looked nearly flawless and almost beautiful in its own cold way.
It never changed expression, it always remained the same - the mask that it had become a year ago. Sirius could barely remember that this face had the potential for so much more: being twisted with inhuman rage, terror, fear, hurt, cruel amusement.
Come to think of it, he realized, he’d never seen a kind smile on Snape’s face. He tried to imagine what that would look like - and couldn’t.
“Sirius,” Lily asked, “are you all right?”
“What do you mean?”
“With him.” She cast a quick glance at Snape.
“Sure. He’s no trouble. Though sometimes I wish he were.”
“I’ve been thinking, maybe we should take turns. Harry’s grown up enough, and…”
“No.”
“Why not?” James interjected. “Look, we’ve been talking. Remus, Alice and Frank, Albus, Minerva. We could - each do two weeks, and…”
“No,” Sirius said stubbornly. “Look, I’m not letting him go. I’m going to see this through to the end.”
“The end is a long time from now,” Lily pointed out. “What are you going to do when you’re both fifty? Sixty? Ninety-five?”
“Neither of us will live that long,” Sirius denied at once, giving Snape a quick glance. “For so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, and all that crap.”
His tone was light, to the point of flippant, but Lily looked away.
Maybe, when we’re both ninety-five, I’ll do what Ackov tried to do. Enter Snape’s mind, and get lost in that vastness of infinity. Maybe I’ll walk that infinity from end to end - just to make sure it really is empty.
He said none of it out loud.
***
“It was Oscar Wilde earlier,” Sirius told Snape at the end of the evening. “I don’t imagine you ever read it. Well, I suppose, it’s time we filled those gaps in your education. I’m going to read Wild you. It’s all very moralistic and horribly serious. Lots of selfish, juvenile people in his stories. You will love them, I’m sure.”
Snape remained indifferent through the Star-Child and the Birthday of the Infanta. When Sirius read the Happy Prince, the play of light and shadow in the room made it look like Snape was smiling. He wasn’t, of course, but it was a nice thought.
At night, Sirius dreamed of Snape as the statue of the Prince. He himself was a dog, rather than the Swallow, and he was using his teeth to peel off layers and layers of the Prince to give out to the poor, and the Prince seemed completely untroubled by any of it.
Sirius woke up in cold sweat, and Wilde went back on the bookshelf.
“Only non-fiction from now on,” Sirius said. “Really, I can’t believe these are supposed to be children’s stories. Fucking creepy, if you ask me.”
***
In March of nineteen eighty-three the Ministry of Magic passed some more resolutions and decided that the budget permitted for all the decorated war heroes to receive a generous pension. Which was just about bloody time, because uncle Alphard’s inheritance had its limits.
It’s been a year and a half, Sirius thought, watching Snape’s face one April evening, trying to figure out if Snape had changed at all. It didn’t look like he had.
Sirius knew that he was changing. He was laughing less, joking less, taking fewer risks. He didn’t regret it, and the fact that he didn’t bothered him, although in a vague way.
Lily said he was growing up. Sirius was quick to deny it.
Truth be told, he felt stuck permanently at twenty-one, along with Snape.
“We’ll always be twenty-one, you and I,” Sirius told Snape.
A mental image of Snape, with his hair grey, and his face forever young, flashed before Sirius’ eyes and he willed it away.
Summer came.
Another sweltering, cruel July, and another week of lounging around in his underwear with a can of beer in his hand, reading Potions Weekly out loud to Snape, when Sirius sat up abruptly.
“You hear me, Snape? I think we can grow you a new eye. What do you say to that?”
***
Lily met Sirius’ declaration with some scepticism, and even James couldn’t understand why Sirius wanted to do that.
“Padfoot,” James spoke in a voice so reasonable it could’ve belonged to Dumbledore, “why do you think he needs a new eye?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Sirius snapped back. “Why does he need his arms and legs? Why does he need a nose? Maybe we should get rid of all that for him, too. Just to save space.”
“I didn’t say that,” James’s tone got a bit sharper. “But maybe you should try to understand why you want to do this.”
“I understand. I was deprived as a child. Mother never let me play with dolls, and here’s my chance,” Sirius shot back, irritated beyond all measure. “Look, I know he isn’t coming back. But what I don’t know is what being alive means. Maybe it’s all about being able to ride a motorcycle - or being able to read - or being capable of a good fistfight. Or maybe - it’s just being able to breathe and blink and pet something big and ugly and hairy at night. And just in case, Jay, just in case that what he’s got now is LIFE, I want to make sure he can get as much of it as possible. So yes. I’m doing it just in case. That’s all there’s to it.”
It wasn’t until September of the same year that Sirius finally managed to find out the location of the Institute and how to get there.
It was James who helped him pack.
Go to Part 3