HP Fanfic Commentary: Conspiracy of Silence [Parts 3 and 4]
Continued from here.
Triple Exposure
Kind of an odd title for this one. Not quite sure where it came from, but as I recall I tried to make it fit by exposing three secrets. Let's see if I can still figure out what they were!
Sev ran an assessing eye over the ragtag assortment in evidence. There were only perhaps forty new first years, making for a year-group half the size of his own.
I put more kids in Sev's year partly because it seemed like the classes would be bigger, pre-war, and partly because I wanted to have some room within the Slytherin boys for both Malfoy's gang and more neutral parties.
I notice the Slytherin girls are pretty much absent from this story. I guess Sev has failed to notice they exist. (This Snape is very definitely asexual; I could easily buy that canon Snape is too. I deeply appreciate that JKR made it clear that Snape did everything for love of Lily without ever making any statement that it was romantic love. The way I read it, it was simply that she was his closest - if not only - friend.)
"The staff, most of you will know by now," Dumbledore said. "Professor Salubrius here will now be taking over the first- and second-year Astronomy classes, and Professor Cuero will take up his old position as the Care of Magical Creatures tutor." There was polite applause as the older students craned their necks to see the new teacher.
If I had to dissect my character-naming process from eight years ago, I would guess that Professor Salubrius is not insalubrious and therefore not any danger to anyone. But this is the only mention he gets, so we may never know.
A 'cuero' is, if you believe my cryptozoology texts, a type of South American giant squid monster. I'm guessing I just flipped through until I found a magical creature that also sounded like a plausible name.
When the feasting was over, everybody stumbled back to their dorms. Hogwarts rooms were assigned on a rotating basis, so that a year-group kept the same places all through school, instead of shifting all the time.
This appears to be the case with Harry's room in Gryffindor tower, though I don't think it's ever made fully clear.
"My bed now," said Simon Lestrange placidly. Simon was always very softly-spoken, and slow to speak or move. However, his was not a natural quietness like Snape's; his was the silence of a clock gently ticking down to zero. Simon Lestrange was the closest thing Hogwarts had to a psychopath, and they had all learned to tread around him very carefully.
"Okay..." Stuart slowly withdrew the suitcase he'd automatically thrown down. Something about the far-away look in Simon's eyes encouraged you not to use sudden movements. "Um... this used to be my bed." He was careful to make it sound half-questioning, and not in any way accusing.
"Mine now," repeated Simon with a vague smile.
"Fine." He retreated rapidly. "I'll, um, I'll go move in with Jack and Rob and Johnny, how about that?" Simon continued to smile at him in that slightly bemused way, as if he was undecided as to whether Stuart really existed or he was just imagining him. Stuart took the hint, and scuttled away.
I guess even before we knew much about Bellatrix, there must have been canon implications that the Lestranges were fairly psychopathic. I'm still quite fond of Simon as a character, in all his dreamy, placid not-quite-rightness. I think there's some stuff in his characterisation that was influenced by the depiction of Peter Ender's Game, but my memory of that book is hazy now.
(I have a complicated relationship with Ender's Game, in that Card's views have made me unwilling to re-read it, but while I divested myself of the other books of his I owned without a backwards glance, I loved that book so much and so viscerally back when I read it that I just can't get rid of it. So now it sits unread on my shelf in a state of untouchable limbo. I have an uncomfortable feeling I'm probably waiting for the author to die. -Or repent! I would be equally happy with repentance. More happy. I just know which of the two I consider more likely to happen first.)
Sev's first new lesson this year was Care of Magical Creatures. They dutifully trooped out to the school field where Professor Cuero waited for them. Hogwarts, magical or not, was not immune to the English rain, and the ground was damp and soggy underfoot.
We didn't find out for sure that Hogwarts was in Scotland until a footnote in Quidditch Through the Ages, though it was obviously Up North somewhere. I guess when I was reading the first book I made the assumption that Scotland would have its own separate school (I was probably basing my thinking on the not at all magic-related fact that the Scottish education system is completely different from ours) and didn't think to revise my positioning of the school in light of later canon that Hogwarts, Beauxbatons and Durmstrang are pretty much it.
For their first lesson, they were dealing with a herd of odd, crossbreed creatures called leucrocottas. About the size of a small donkey, they were vaguely feline but with cloven hooves. Their strangest feature was the fact that instead of separate teeth, they had one huge flat slab of bone. They were kept in an enclosure, which was as well - they moved extremely rapidly, and could be sparked to flee with little warning.
Calling on my cryptozoology texts again. I wanted to use some creatures different from the ones we got in canon.
Several times in the lesson, Lily tried to catch his eye. He studiously avoided her gaze. At the end of last year, he had secretly slipped her an invisibility cloak that had once been his. Of course she knew who the gift was from, but he didn't intend to speak with her about it. He had a suspicion that she would take his gesture as proof that he too could sometimes be moved by emotion or compassion, which of course it wasn't.
She was a mudblood, and therefore in more danger than him. She was also one of the only two people who knew his real mission in getting close to Malfoy. He couldn't afford for her to be placed in a position where she might accidentally reveal his secret. Therefore, it was logical to protect her.
Pure logic. But of course, people who saw the world through emotional eyes refused to accept that you could live without doing so.
Sev does have emotions. I'm just not sure he's fully aware of it.
To get all self-inserty on you for a moment... I'm a very emotionally stable person myself (just luck of the draw when it comes to brain chemistry I guess; I default to feeling good and bounce back out of negative moods pretty quickly). Coupled with the fact that I have no natural inclination to seek human contact, this means I deal with things very internally. I tend to repress outward shows of emotion not because I have a problem with them but because they provoke unhelpful reactions in other people. (If you're outwardly distressed, people try to get touchy-feely, which causes me massive distress, or make you talk about what's wrong, which prolongs and worsens an emotional state I would otherwise slip out of very quickly. If I don't look too upset, people leave me un-hassled, which is exactly what I need to feel better faster.)
I'm fortunate enough to have been born to fairly calm and introverted parents who both Got It - guess I came by that brain chemistry honestly - but I can imagine that, raising himself without like spirits around, Sev would probably feel like an alien. Society in general, and dramatic fiction in particular, definitely pushes the idea that if you don't make outward displays of emotion you're either in imminent danger of an explosive breakdown or you must not feel anything at all. Which... no.
(I think we've probably uncovered A Small Clue as to why I'm so drawn to emotionally repressed characters, haven't we? Heh.)
Sev's ever-observant brain picked out another Gryffindor who was earning Cuero's disgust. Remus Lupin; a quiet, thoughtful boy whose robes were always ragged and threadbare. Since Lupin was neither a mudblood nor a girl, and not particularly objectionable, Sev watched with interest to see why Cuero had taken against him.
He soon saw that in Lupin's case, the teacher had a genuine beef. He appeared be trying in earnest, but he just couldn't make the leucrocottas obey him. No matter what he did, the beasts just wouldn't go near him.
Sev was intrigued. Animals, especially the magical kind, had senses at their disposal that humans did not. What was it about Remus Lupin that they were so afraid of?
The first of the three secrets that are exposed in this fic. It's part of the premise of this series that Sev's grudge against the Marauders is all manufactured and manipulated for the sake of appearances, so he has to know Remus is a werewolf before the Shrieking Shack incident. This is the first hint that sets him on the trail of finding out.
Sev finally starts to get the chance to show off his deviousness with all these convoluted plots to get people kicked out of school. It really doesn't occur to him to feel bad about making their lives hell and ruining their prospects; he only sees it in the light of the worse fate he's avoiding for them.
Targets two and three were a fifth year called Liana Whittaker, and a second year, Rick Allison.
I stole the name Liana from a random girl I was at university with. ...Who later went on to become one of my best friends there, making this retrospectively weirder. The more people you know, the harder it gets to name your characters, dammit. This is why it's good to be an introvert!
Sev also happened to know, having read a great deal, that on and off through the years, there had been an old tradition of transfers between wizarding schools. The European three, Hogwarts, Durmstrang and Beauxbatons, had chosen one or two of their best and brightest students to make the trade once they had finished their O.W.Ls and were going on to take their N.E.W.Ts.
That tradition had never been actually brought to an official stop, but it had trailed off due to the increasing insularity of Durmstrang.
Ah, the terrible fandom cliché of exchange students! But not used in the typical way.
Also, after having misread the name initially, I have terrible trouble convincing my typing fingers that Beauxbatons is not called Beaubaxtons. This is where the Rhythm Method (heh) of memorisation bites you in the butt.
The Caretynes were like white lions with golden manes and spotted coats, except for their long horns and tusks - and their tendency to shoot flames from their mouths or either ear without the slightest warning. The class was predictably chaotic, Pete Pettigrew setting the brim of his hat on fire and his friends unsure whether to laugh or glare at the Slytherins for doing so.
More beasts from the cryptozoology books. Also, I decided that Sev would know Peter Pettigrew as a 'Pete' because that's what his friends would most likely call him in casual conversation. Although he comes up rarely enough in these stories that most people probably thought it was just a typo.
Green light exploded from the wand and flared up into the air. For a second, Sev saw an almost shocked expression cross Malfoy's face, as if he hadn't really realised this kind of magic could come from him. Sev saw the green stars of the Death Eater symbol already beginning to swirl into shape.
"Hellfire!" Malfoy gasped, and Sev wondered if he'd even known exactly how hugely and vividly the Mark would display. It was already rising into the sky, swelling rapidly; it would be visible for miles.
For a moment Malfoy stared up at his own handiwork with awe, then his grey eyes met Snape's and panic flared in them. "Run!" he advised, scurrying quickly back towards the safety of their class group. How very Lucius Malfoy, Sev noted. Utterly devoted to his hate group's agenda - provided there was no chance of his getting caught.
This take on young Lucius is far more into the scheming and evilness than Draco ever was, but he's still to some extent in well over his head.
Jade Creevy and Helen Beck clutched at each other, and James slipped a comforting arm round Lily. To Snape's sharp eyes she didn't look scared, only anxious and locked in deep thought, but she didn't move to shove him off, either.
This James and Lily had a friendly relationship all along, not the initial dislike they proved to have in canon.
The wand felt unfamiliar in his grip, the wrong length and the wrong texture, but it was still a wand. Sev made a few practise sweeps, and then cast a few spells in quick succession. "Lumos! Nox! Orchideus! Relashio! Avis!"
The wand lit up, went out again, produced a bunch of flowers, sparked, and sent a small flock of birds twittering out of the nearest windows. His fellow Slytherins were staring at him as if they couldn't be sure whether to think he was insane or give him a round of applause.
I figured this was a plausible way to confuse the Prior Incantato spell, especially if the wand's being used by somebody other than its usual owner. Although really, it seems an unusually sensible step for the Hogwarts staff to take to even perform this test.
Finally, Cuero picked out an owl, and gave it the message. It was sealed in a small envelope, and Sev's sharp eyes noted that there was no address on the front. Instead, Cuero simply gave the owl a name; "Gorvic Shimmersby." The owl silently launched itself into the dark, and Sev quietly filed the name away in his memory for the future.
"Gorvic Shimmersby" is, I'm pretty sure, just a random collection of syllables that sounded vaguely wizard-y.
(Also, Sev's filing stuff away again. Those of you playing along with the CoS drinking game, take a drink!)
In about thirty seconds' time, the two boys came barrelling out as if their robes were on fire. Sirius yanked the cloak out after them before the passageway could close on it, and they both collapsed together; out of breath, but laughing. They'd probably come a hairsbreadth away from their deaths, but neither of them seemed to care. Sev didn't suppose either of them really believed that they weren't actually invincible.
Not even James and Sirius, though, were quite crazy enough to be visiting and then running from a werewolf just for the fun of it - especially when it was one of their closest friends in human form. They had to be trying to do something, trying to test something... Sev realised they must be trying to find some charm or enchantment that would allow them to visit their friend in wolf form without being attacked.
There must have been a lot of practising and experimenting before they got the Animagi thing down. Poor Remus probably has no idea how often his friends took really stupid risks to test stuff out.
A variant on the powerful Veritaseum truth potion, Trustasiem had the interesting little quirk of making a its drinker feel extremely trusting... spilling their innermost secrets not because they were compelled to, but because they believed themselves safe in doing so.
An even nastier little side-effect was that the victim, if not put under too much pressure, would not recall the questioning session at all. Though their original feelings for the person concerned would return, the time for which they had been under the influence would be forever cloaked in trust for them - the victim would be literally unable to contemplate the idea that they could have been used in any way.
Ah, Trustasiem. So named because I originally misread 'Veritaserum' as 'Veritaseum' and therefore didn't get the 'serum' bit and just went with a similar name. *facepalm*
"Ah, yes, I'm an expert, you know. I was with the team that investigated their actions in the Harrowgate case."
Harrowgate is just a random name I made up, no significance canon or fic-wise.
Looking back, this sequence of Snape questioning Cuero is oddly reminiscent of Tom Riddle questioning Slughorn in canon, isn't it?
Sev had observed him sending and receiving several letters via his family owl, Meraugis.
This name must have a derivation of some sort, but I'm afraid I no longer recall what it was.
"Tell us," begged Colin eagerly.
Redundant adverb is redundant. Sigh.
"I can do better than that... I'll show you. I intend to use this on the whole school - but I do believe a little demonstration is in order before we start." He rubbed his hands together. "First we'll have to find ourselves a mudblood..." He reflected for a moment, then smirked to himself. "Potter's little girlfriend should do nicely."
"No," interjected Sev. His voice was quiet, but forceful.
Malfoy frowned. "Why not?" Sev was satisfied to hear from his tone that he automatically assumed that Snape's objection would be logical, not ethical - not that any wizard of Malfoy's views would be able to comprehend the idea of ethical problems with harming mudbloods.
"If this is the prelude to a big gesture, it'll be noted and followed up on. You can't use Potter's girlfriend because she's Potter's girlfriend. It brings the focus too close to us."
Sev is making up his logic after the objection, but he'd reject the idea if you tried to tell him so.
Sev did wonder to himself why he had ended up working for the opposing team. He was, after all, hardly the type to get high and mighty about right and wrong and nobility.
The best explanation he could give was that the Death Eaters' attitudes... offended his sense of logic. It was... a stupid way to do things. Inefficient. He was hardly enamoured of the Ministry's slightly wishy-washy desire to please everybody, but at least they weren't trying to skew perceptions or alter the order of things. How were you supposed to do anything if people were judged on basic labels instead of abilities? Under Malfoy's system, you worked with the premise that Crabbe was superior to Lily, and whichever angle you looked at that from, it was still insane.
Voldemort's big mistake in this universe was creating a reign of terror that offended Sev's sense of logic. If he'd been trying to set up a meritocracy of evil geniuses, things could easily have swung the other way.
"Erica! Are you-?" One of the boys beside her, Jed Aloysius, made a grab for her as she suddenly slid from her chair.
My, what random place could this guy's first name ever have sprung from? *whistles innocently*
Nobody moved to do Jed's bidding, and Malfoy gave Avery a shove. "You go!" he ordered, and Sev gave him a subtle nod of acknowledgement as Avery looked surprised but sped off. Jed and his friends, should they remember the Slytherin third years having been there, would also recall that one of them had a been the first to run for help.
Hey, Malfoy's in Slytherin too, right? He can work a bit of scheming himself when the mood takes him.
There were two ways he could handle this. He could spill Cuero's secret to Malfoy - or he could take the disguised Auror into his confidence.
Going to Cuero was technically the 'right' way - but he didn't like it. Cuero was a variable he had no control over. Lily and Josh Matthews already knew the truth about his association with Malfoy - and that was two people too many. An Auror was, ironically, a much worse person to entrust such a secret to; the chances of him being captured and tortured or simply fed Veritaserum were far higher.
Sev's already making the kind of decisions he will be as a Death Eater spy in the future - and this one is going to have unhappy consequences for Cuero.
He had further cemented his own cover, at the expense of destroying another's. Logic told him that he was in the better position anyway, and that it was the intelligent thing to do.
Sev knew that he was right, but he was beginning to wonder if, when the time came, anybody else would be willing to believe that.
Very much what canon Snape must have been thinking around the end of HBP. Sucks to be you, Snape.
From the general height and shape of the figure compared to Malfoy, Sev could think of four teachers it might be; Professors Vitae, Fractalis, Malachite or Ephemeria. He resolved to sift through every memory he had of their actions for possible clues - but not right now. Malfoy was coming back, and he had to move quickly to get back in bed and be 'asleep' before he returned.
I gave myself a decent-sized suspect pool to play with over the next few stories. At this point, even I hadn't decided who it was going to be yet.
This is the third exposure of the triple referred to in the title: Remus's werewolf secret, Cuero's blown cover as a spy, and now the existence of the Hogwarts staff Death Eater.
Band of Four
Everybody always seems to think this story is called Gang of Four. I just liked 'band' better. Maybe Band of Brothers was on TV at this time? I don't know. But it just has better rhythm because it doesn't introduce the awkward stop you get with an 'ng' sound.
Even Sev's own year-group had suffered some losses this time around. The other three houses were all at least one student smaller than the same time last year, and Slytherin itself had lost Rebecca Whistley and Jack Brisingamen. The two remaining boys who weren't amongst Malfoy's followers, Stuart and Robert, were sat close together in a kind of apprehensive solidarity.
Ah, a Slytherin girl other than Narcissa! So they do exist.
"Welcome, students new and old. I am glad to see you here, and saddened by the faces that are absent this year."
His steely-blue eyes seemed to fix on every student simultaneously. "This is a dark time for the wizarding community, but as ever our strength is in solidarity. Hogwarts has been the core of our country's magical strength in times past, and so it will remain."
I rather like the speech Dumbledore gives here, for some reason. I was well into my West Wing fannishness at this point, and I guess my brain was geared towards stirring speeches.
"I sleep as much as I need to," responded Snape shortly. He was an insomniac, but the lack of sleep never troubled him; in truth, he needed it. Two or three hours of quiet darkness to line his thoughts up was what kept his brain running like the well-oiled machine it was. In prior years he had roamed the halls of Hogwarts, observing, but that would be more difficult now. He had given his invisibility cloak to Lily, and the security precautions this year would be that much stronger.
I have this type of insomnia myself, and have had since I was a pretty small child; it's never really caused me any problems, it's just that I take a lot longer than average to wind down enough to fall asleep. (Going to bed early doesn't make any difference - I just lie awake for even longer.) I usually use the time to plot stories.
Canon Snape seems to spend a lot of time roaming the corridors after dark, so I can well believe he's an insomniac too.
Sev stepped forwards alongside the others, and they grasped the enchanted rock together. There was an odd sensation in the pit of his stomach, like simultaneously moving and standing still, and suddenly they were... somewhere else.
I got some indignant feedback about this chapter break. Heh. Shameless cliffhanging!
A young man came hurrying down the corridor towards them. He was perhaps ten years older than them, perhaps a little less; too old to still be a student. He had closely cropped dark hair, and a goatee with a curl.
This is a younger Karkaroff. He's grey-haired when he shows up in GoF, but I put him as only 8-10 years older than Snape because we didn't know at the time that the MWPP generation were still only in their mid-thirties.
They followed the young man to a narrow room that was clearly the base of a tower. Inside stood a blond-haired older man with steely eyes. He glanced at the boys in a vaguely bored way, and turned to Malfoy.
"These are the ones?"
Malfoy nodded briskly. "Yes, Professor Dolohov."
Another canon Death Eater; I don't think we knew anything about Dolohov at this time beyond his name.
A tall, slim figure flowed out of the shadows towards him. It was a dark-haired man; past forty, perhaps, but with a handsome, unlined face. His eyes were as black as Snape's own, and every bit as piercing. He didn't even have to speak, just smile slightly, for Sev to feel the charisma flowing from him; stronger even than that of Lucius Malfoy. This was a man who people would follow. This was a cult leader.
I made the Voldemort of this stage much more like Tom Riddle than the Evil Overlord one Harry knows. My theory at this point was that the resurrection burned a lot of the deviousness and remaining humanity out of him; now I think you could blame the same thing on the Horcruxes.
"I'm a Slytherin," he said simply.
"Aren't we all?" Abruptly, all traces of the smile were gone, and Voldemort was regarding him with fiery intensity. "You're a listener, I think. A cold one, a silent one. You're cleverer than Malfoy. Why do you follow?"
"Why would I lead?" Sev knew he had to step carefully; very, very carefully. In his fourteen years of life so far, he had met precisely one person who he believed to share his intellectual level; the Hogwarts headmaster, Albus Dumbledore.
As of tonight, he had met two.
This interview with Voldemort was very much like facing the Sorting Hat - except that here, the risks were greater than being relegated to house Hufflepuff. Voldemort seemed able to read the depths of his personality from his eyes; but not all of it.
Nobody had ever read all of it.
"You don't lust for glory. I doubt you care much for the fate of the world, one way or the other. So why are you here? What do you want from us? What can we, the Death Eaters, give you, that you think you cannot give yourself?"
To risk a lie now would be to risk everything. He had to give a truth, and there was only one truth it could possibly be.
"Knowledge."
Snape serves two masters in canon, and even if he's playing the super-spy who outwits everyone in this fic, they've both got to be worthy of the role for it to work. If he's smarter than Voldemort, there's no story.
Instead of producing a wand or some more archaic means of applying a tattoo, Voldemort simply grasped Sev's arm in a powerful two-fingered grip, and spoke the word "Morsmordrios."
I came up with this as an obvious variant on Morsmordre, since we didn't know anything about how the Dark Mark was applied.
Since troubling events in the outside world had started to impinge on school grounds, Dumbledore had been making every effort to keep them as secure as possible. Professors Vitae and Fractalis, the Charms and Arithmancy teachers, had been helping to shore up the wards around the school, although the bulk of the work fell, naturally, on the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Professor Malachite.
Not coincidentally at all, three out of four of the possible suspects for staff Death Eater.
The classes were, of course, packed. Duelling magic was apt to be far more fun than anything learned in lessons, and the students were keen to play around with it. The teachers assigned varied from week to week, but generally it fell to either Professor Vitae or Professor Malachite.
Flitwick isn't at the school yet in this fic; I filled out nearly all the roles with OC teachers to give me a bit more freedom, so Professor Vitae is the Charms teacher at this stage. (Coming into things backwards by starting with original writing first, I never developed the fear of including original characters that many fic-writers seem to have. I just wrote them in automatically wherever they seemed useful.)
Even in the early lessons, learning harmless basics like the Disarmament Charm, it was only a matter of minutes before war was joined. The sides were evenly matched; Malfoy had his cadre of Death Eaters, Potter had Sirius, Lily, Remus and Peter. Pete Pettigrew, a small, pudgy and extremely nervous boy, had a quite incredible talent for Transfiguration - much to the dismay of whichever Slytherin he turned it against - and Sirius Black was an explosion waiting to happen.
Peter Pettigrew managed the Animagus transformation well enough to live in it for over a decade, so I'm figuring he's got a serious aptitude for Transfiguration.
Abruptly, a hissing sound snapped through the air. The serpent drew away as if startled, and then snaked across the floor to coil around Professor Malachite's feet. Ignoring the amazed stares, he calmly lifted the creature from the floor and allowed it wrap itself around his shoulders.
"Snakes," he said mildly, "are nothing to be frightened of - if you know how to handle them properly." He produced his wand from the folds of his cloak, and used it to free Malfoy from the full-body bind. He absently patted the snake on the head, and it blinked up at him blissfully. "I think," he said to Professor Vitae, "We'll have to call this one a draw. Now, all of you get to your afternoon lessons, while I send this little fellow back where he came from."
Malfoy got to his feet and scrambled over to Sev's side, shooting Potter a dark look. "Did you see?" he asked Sev excitedly. "He's a Parselmouth!"
"No wonder he's always going on about being nasty to serpents," observed Avery.
I made the Serpensortia spell something passed down from father to son to repeat this canon trick. This must be the point in the writing where I first came up with the idea of Malachite being a Naga; it certainly wasn't planned in the earlier fics.
"How are we supposed to spy on them?" Colin asked, looking worried. "Did they say?"
Malfoy shot him a scathing look. "We're supposed to use our initiative, Crabbe. I'm aware that you don't have any, but the rest of us will try to make up for it."
Heh. Lucius actually gets some decent snark in here. I made him a little wittier than Draco.
He had no worries of being disturbed by Malachite. He had learned early on in his unauthorised wanderings that the Dark Arts teacher was a creature of strong habit. Sev had heard Professor Vitae being snippy about the fact that he had somehow procured a luxury bathtub for his personal quarters, and it appeared that he preferred to wind down of an evening with a long relaxing soak. Once he had settled in for the night, so the staff joke went, it would take more than the end of the world to shift him.
More Naga hints.
"-about this, Janeida," Fractalis was saying nervously. "What if someone- well, what if I'm caught? I wouldn't, um, I wouldn't have a clue what to say."
"Oh, relax, Trigo," the Potions teacher assured him. "All you have to do is tell them you're out checking the wards on the grounds. After all, you're the one that put them there in the first place."
"In the middle of the night?"
She laughed lightly. "Why not? They all know you're nervous enough. Besides..." Sev could picture the wryly amused smirk she used to gently mock people in Potions class - "who'd ever believe it of you?"
Fractalis laughed then, a deep, rich, almost musical sound that was a world away from his usual dryly nervous chuckle. "Indeed. Not even me, and that's the truth." Still laughing, the two of them passed further down the corridor and out of earshot.
These two are totally dating. A gentle red herring to suggest Ephemeria might be the spy and manipulating Fractalis.
The Auror's house looked like any other in the street it stood in. However, its defences were both more subtle and more powerful. Sev stopped the three of them a short way away. "Repeat after me," he whispered. "I, Severus Snape, honestly declare that it is my purpose at this house tonight to eavesdrop on the conversation within."
The other two boys looked at him strangely, but echoed the same declaration. As they passed through the gates, the Dishonetectors mounted on the gateposts quivered, then lay still. Malfoy registered what was happening, and gave Snape a brief nod and a smirk. An artefact to detect dishonest visitors wouldn't tag one who admitted they were there to spy.
And nobody made the crap joke of repeating the 'Severus Snape' bit? Unnatural children.
...Wow, Dishonetectors is a terrible name, isn't it? But I still think this way of outwitting them is pretty smart.
As soon as the curtains were pulled, Sev dropped lightly down from the tree and sped light-footed to the rear window. He drew his wand and flicked it at the curtains with the whisper "Monoculous!" Immediately, the cloth of the curtains turned as transparent as the window they covered, and they could see inside.
"I hope for all our sakes' that's one-way," Malfoy said dryly. Avery had other things on his mind.
"Would that work on the wall of the girls' bathroom?" he asked hopefully.
All right, perhaps they are teenage boys after all.
With rather impeccable timing, Sirius, Pete and Remus suddenly emerged from a side street and pulled up short at the sight of him. Snape offered James a thin and mocking smile.
"What the hell are you doing out here, Snape?" he demanded hotly. Sev had learned quickly that borrowing from Malfoy's smug superiority was an excellent way to rub James up the wrong way.
"The little snake - he's spying on us!" It didn't take anything so complex to set off Sirius Black. 'Loitering whilst being in house Slytherin' was generally enough of an offence.
"Yes, Black, I live for the vicarious thrill of your lives," he said dryly. "I don't know what I'd do with myself if I didn't have the excitement of following you four around."
Sirius looked just about ready to explode. James was affecting to be unimpressed, whilst behind him Peter spoiled the effect by jittering nervously up and down. Remus, hanging back as he usually did during conflicts, looked suspiciously like he was trying not to smirk.
I always thought that Snape and Lupin would get on well if not for, well, everything.
Lily looked like she wanted to argue, but she bit her lower lip and said nothing. After a moment of silence, she said "Who is it, then? The Death Eater. The main one, the senior guy. Not Malfoy and his gang of rent-a-thugs."
"I don't know."
She blinked. "That's a first."
"I have my suspicions," he elaborated.
"You always have your suspicions. Nobody's safe from you; I'll bet even Dumbledore's in the frame."
"No, I ruled him out a few days ago."
She laughed, and then said suddenly "I've missed you. You're twisted in all the right ways."
"And you're twisted in several wrong ones."
"Takes all sorts to make a world, you know." She hefted the invisibility cloak, as they neared the Hogwarts end of the tunnel. "I should be getting back."
"Yes, you should," he agreed shortly. She laughed again.
"What, no chivalrous offer to walk me back to my dorm?"
"Yes, because sneaking around by the Gryffindor girls' dorm is exactly where I want to get caught by Pringle."
"I don't know," said Lily, smiling; "might be a good idea to get some rumours started. Add to your aura of mystique."
"It'd put your boyfriend's nose out of joint."
"He's not my boyfriend."
"So you frequently protest."
I like this whole conversation. In fact, I'm liking a lot more of this fic than I did with the first three. I'm quite surprised to see how much my writing is visibly evolving over the course of this series, considering the whole thing was written over a stretch of barely six months.
He smiled tigerishly, and lay back in his bed.
Damn, Malfoy is always smiling tigerishly in this series. It's really noticeable when you read the whole thing through together. I think this is even worse than Sev and his mental filing cabinet.
"Impregnable!" insisted Professor Vitae loudly. "No one gets past my defences, of that I assure you." Malachite pulled off the fairly clever trick of radiating scepticism without so much as pulling a face.
"No fortress is impregnable, my dear Ellida," Professor Dumbledore corrected gently. "But ours, I feel, is closer than most. These tests will only serve to point out to us where any weaknesses may lie."
The Charms teacher and head of Gryffindor is named for the Elixir Vitae, the elixir of life, and Ellida, a boat from Norse legend that "raced the whistling wind and outstripped the eagle". Um. Sorry, but I really don't remember why. (She wasn't picked to be the Death Eater until after the fact, though, so that's not involved in any way.)
That afternoon, Sev reported at Malachite's office as ordered. The teacher had pushed back the furniture to lay out a large black sheet, upon which were glowing coloured symbols laid over a plan view of the grounds. "I don't suppose you've seen one of these before?" said Malachite.
"I assume it's a Spellograph," replied Snape. He hadn't seen one before, of course, since they were highly specialised Ministry tools, although he had read of them.
"Yes. Handy little thing. Plots every spell currently taking effect on Hogwarts grounds."
"But not in the castle itself," Sev observed, although he knew the reason why. Malachite laughed.
"A Spellograph, on this place? Why not daub the sheet with multicoloured paint and have done with it?" The level of background magic inside Hogwarts was far too huge for such a device to pick out any single spell. It would be just as useless in the grounds, if not for the rigidly employed controls in place; staff, students, and outsiders were all prohibited from using any kind of active magic during the hours of the test.
The trouble with inventing interesting new technologies and magics is that you then have to explain why no one uses them in canon.
The little spell-symbols differed not just in colour, but in style, too. Malachite's green symbols had an organic, coiled-up look, much like the serpents he was so fond of. Vitae's formed delicate laceworks, and Fractalis's wards were incredibly complex geometric patterns. Dumbledore's own designs looked painfully simplistic against the rest, and yet they glowed more brightly than anything else on the page.
I quite like this little detail.
Malachite was not a stupid man. It was possible he knew nothing of Malfoy's group, and had simply judged Sev not to be Death Eater material. It was equally possible he knew Sev was with the Death Eaters, and expected him to be working for them. And it was just about conceivable that he had twigged both Sev's purported loyalties, and his real ones.
Either way, he was grooming Snape for something, and until he knew what it was, Severus was going to have to tread very carefully.
Perhaps it's telling that Sev never considers the possibility that Malachite just likes him or enjoys imparting knowledge. ...Then again, they are both Slytherins.
It made sense. More to the point, it was what he would do. And he strongly suspected that Voldemort had a knack for deviousness that ran nearly as deep as his own.
Not that Sev is egotistical at all...
Professor Vitae seemed incredibly infuriated by Malachite's insistence on personally checking and backing up her sections of the defences. When the two of them co-hosted the duelling club, it was more a war zone than a learning opportunity, and it was a constant miracle no one was seriously injured.
In Arithmancy classes, the already scatty Professor Fractalis was completely distracted. On a dare, one of the Ravenclaw boys transfigured his hat into a lacy pink bonnet, and he was wearing it for half an hour before he even noticed.
I'd decided by this point that Vitae was going to be the Death Eater, so I buried the evidence of her activities by playing up her rivalry with Malachite and drawing more attention to Fractalis.
"It's not me who has to revise," Sev pointed out with a shrug. Professor Ephemeria looked sceptical. Teachers didn't like to admit that there were students who could get their good grades without studying; it rather poked holes in their 'if you don't work, you'll never get anywhere' spiel.
My senior school had an obsession with target-setting and making us list areas we thought we needed to improve. I had an excellent memory and a stubborn refusal to pretend I didn't know what I was good at.
These were not mixy things. At all.
"You mean you'll save people's lives if it doesn't look like causing trouble?" She suddenly threw the bundled up cloak at him. "I've got a better idea. You wear this. I'm not hiding; I'm going to be out there waiting for them, and if they start blasting, well, I'll blast right back."
She was spoiling for an argument, but if she thought Snape was going to be like James and get stupidly overprotective, she was wrong. He simply nodded, and took the cloak. "Good idea," he agreed mildly. "This'll make things simpler."
It's kind of fun writing for characters who are not remotely into selfless nobility. It certainly gets conflicts resolved quicker.
"Come on," agreed Lily, dragging him forward eagerly. James followed, as did the invisible Snape, but Sirius held Peter back.
"Leave 'em to it, mate," he advised, bored. "Got your Exploding Snap cards? This is like watching paint dry."
I like that Peter is fairly included in the Marauders' activities in this; I couldn't remember off-hand how much I'd written him in, since MWPP all have fairly minor roles, but I know a lot of people are annoyed by stories where Peter is all but erased from the group, so I'm glad to see I didn't do that here.
It all seemed to happen at once. Perhaps the Death Eater was panicked by Lupin's words - perhaps he had simply finished what he was doing breaking through the wards. Either way, he reached quickly for his wand, his companion a beat behind him.
Right then, Lily did something nobody would have expected of her.
She screamed. Loudly. Piercingly. A scream to wake the dead, not to mention cut through the air and alert just about every student or teacher within four miles.
...Not something Sev would have ever have thought of. I kind of like the way this Lily has a few Slytherin traits of her own.
Ephemeria and Fractalis were coming too, charging towards them from the direction of the Forbidden Forest.
Where they were totally snogging. Heh.
Suddenly Professors Vitae and Malachite were there, having left the short-legged Parilia behind in the dust. Vitae was trying to pull out her wand, but she seemed to have got it caught on something in the inside of her robes. "Do something, Carnus!" she snapped.
Professor Malachite had his wand in his hand and at the ready - and yet he seemed frozen, unable or unwilling to use it. "Attack!" Vitae urged him, but he just stood there helplessly.
Part of the Naga mythology I borrowed for Malachite is the idea that they can't harm humans who don't harm them first.
Also, Malachite's obvious freeze-up here neatly covers up Vitae's much more deliberate fumble. (Does she know what Malachite is when she urges him to make an attack he can't? I can no longer remember, though I know I gave them a history together, so I'll have to discover that along with you.)
Suddenly another voice rang out, loud enough to cut through all the chaos like a knife. It took a moment to place it, it sounded so different from Professor Fractalis's usual nervous stutter.
The long sequence of spell-words he used was completely unfamiliar to Snape; so much so that he was sure it had to be an original enchantment. Suddenly all around them, symbols appeared on the ground in blazing blue-white light. It was so powerful, everybody had to shield their eyes against it.
Apparently, Professor Fractalis's amazing geometric designs were a bit more powerful than he had let on.
The stuttery ineffectual maths teacher gets to be a secret badass. Because I know what I like, dammit.
Lily caught up with him in a corridor on his way back to the quiet of the dorms. He turned to face her with a shrug, handing her the cloak before she asked for it. "Nobody died," he pointed out.
"Somebody will, one day," she said heavily. "This is a knife-edge, Severus, not even you can walk along it forever. Some day, sooner or later, people are going to killed for this little scheme you're running. And then what?"
He looked at her for a long, unblinking moment, and then he said softly "Some must be sacrificed, if all are to be saved."
And after that, there was nothing more to say.
So, yeah, this line is totally stolen from Babylon 5. I knew I was quoting, but there's something about that line that resonates so strongly I think I must have thought it was from a much older source. Oops.
After this story was the point where my enthusiasm for the series hit its lowest ebb, and it was a struggle to make myself get started on the fifth one. I wrote 72 Hours in the Dark in between to give myself a break from writing HP.
(Yeah. I wrote a 30,000 word fic to give myself a two-week break from the hectic pace of writing this series. WTF, me of 2002? Where did you get your productivity, and can I have some of it back, please?)
The commentary concludes with parts 5, 6 and 7 here
Triple Exposure
Kind of an odd title for this one. Not quite sure where it came from, but as I recall I tried to make it fit by exposing three secrets. Let's see if I can still figure out what they were!
Sev ran an assessing eye over the ragtag assortment in evidence. There were only perhaps forty new first years, making for a year-group half the size of his own.
I put more kids in Sev's year partly because it seemed like the classes would be bigger, pre-war, and partly because I wanted to have some room within the Slytherin boys for both Malfoy's gang and more neutral parties.
I notice the Slytherin girls are pretty much absent from this story. I guess Sev has failed to notice they exist. (This Snape is very definitely asexual; I could easily buy that canon Snape is too. I deeply appreciate that JKR made it clear that Snape did everything for love of Lily without ever making any statement that it was romantic love. The way I read it, it was simply that she was his closest - if not only - friend.)
"The staff, most of you will know by now," Dumbledore said. "Professor Salubrius here will now be taking over the first- and second-year Astronomy classes, and Professor Cuero will take up his old position as the Care of Magical Creatures tutor." There was polite applause as the older students craned their necks to see the new teacher.
If I had to dissect my character-naming process from eight years ago, I would guess that Professor Salubrius is not insalubrious and therefore not any danger to anyone. But this is the only mention he gets, so we may never know.
A 'cuero' is, if you believe my cryptozoology texts, a type of South American giant squid monster. I'm guessing I just flipped through until I found a magical creature that also sounded like a plausible name.
When the feasting was over, everybody stumbled back to their dorms. Hogwarts rooms were assigned on a rotating basis, so that a year-group kept the same places all through school, instead of shifting all the time.
This appears to be the case with Harry's room in Gryffindor tower, though I don't think it's ever made fully clear.
"My bed now," said Simon Lestrange placidly. Simon was always very softly-spoken, and slow to speak or move. However, his was not a natural quietness like Snape's; his was the silence of a clock gently ticking down to zero. Simon Lestrange was the closest thing Hogwarts had to a psychopath, and they had all learned to tread around him very carefully.
"Okay..." Stuart slowly withdrew the suitcase he'd automatically thrown down. Something about the far-away look in Simon's eyes encouraged you not to use sudden movements. "Um... this used to be my bed." He was careful to make it sound half-questioning, and not in any way accusing.
"Mine now," repeated Simon with a vague smile.
"Fine." He retreated rapidly. "I'll, um, I'll go move in with Jack and Rob and Johnny, how about that?" Simon continued to smile at him in that slightly bemused way, as if he was undecided as to whether Stuart really existed or he was just imagining him. Stuart took the hint, and scuttled away.
I guess even before we knew much about Bellatrix, there must have been canon implications that the Lestranges were fairly psychopathic. I'm still quite fond of Simon as a character, in all his dreamy, placid not-quite-rightness. I think there's some stuff in his characterisation that was influenced by the depiction of Peter Ender's Game, but my memory of that book is hazy now.
(I have a complicated relationship with Ender's Game, in that Card's views have made me unwilling to re-read it, but while I divested myself of the other books of his I owned without a backwards glance, I loved that book so much and so viscerally back when I read it that I just can't get rid of it. So now it sits unread on my shelf in a state of untouchable limbo. I have an uncomfortable feeling I'm probably waiting for the author to die. -Or repent! I would be equally happy with repentance. More happy. I just know which of the two I consider more likely to happen first.)
Sev's first new lesson this year was Care of Magical Creatures. They dutifully trooped out to the school field where Professor Cuero waited for them. Hogwarts, magical or not, was not immune to the English rain, and the ground was damp and soggy underfoot.
We didn't find out for sure that Hogwarts was in Scotland until a footnote in Quidditch Through the Ages, though it was obviously Up North somewhere. I guess when I was reading the first book I made the assumption that Scotland would have its own separate school (I was probably basing my thinking on the not at all magic-related fact that the Scottish education system is completely different from ours) and didn't think to revise my positioning of the school in light of later canon that Hogwarts, Beauxbatons and Durmstrang are pretty much it.
For their first lesson, they were dealing with a herd of odd, crossbreed creatures called leucrocottas. About the size of a small donkey, they were vaguely feline but with cloven hooves. Their strangest feature was the fact that instead of separate teeth, they had one huge flat slab of bone. They were kept in an enclosure, which was as well - they moved extremely rapidly, and could be sparked to flee with little warning.
Calling on my cryptozoology texts again. I wanted to use some creatures different from the ones we got in canon.
Several times in the lesson, Lily tried to catch his eye. He studiously avoided her gaze. At the end of last year, he had secretly slipped her an invisibility cloak that had once been his. Of course she knew who the gift was from, but he didn't intend to speak with her about it. He had a suspicion that she would take his gesture as proof that he too could sometimes be moved by emotion or compassion, which of course it wasn't.
She was a mudblood, and therefore in more danger than him. She was also one of the only two people who knew his real mission in getting close to Malfoy. He couldn't afford for her to be placed in a position where she might accidentally reveal his secret. Therefore, it was logical to protect her.
Pure logic. But of course, people who saw the world through emotional eyes refused to accept that you could live without doing so.
Sev does have emotions. I'm just not sure he's fully aware of it.
To get all self-inserty on you for a moment... I'm a very emotionally stable person myself (just luck of the draw when it comes to brain chemistry I guess; I default to feeling good and bounce back out of negative moods pretty quickly). Coupled with the fact that I have no natural inclination to seek human contact, this means I deal with things very internally. I tend to repress outward shows of emotion not because I have a problem with them but because they provoke unhelpful reactions in other people. (If you're outwardly distressed, people try to get touchy-feely, which causes me massive distress, or make you talk about what's wrong, which prolongs and worsens an emotional state I would otherwise slip out of very quickly. If I don't look too upset, people leave me un-hassled, which is exactly what I need to feel better faster.)
I'm fortunate enough to have been born to fairly calm and introverted parents who both Got It - guess I came by that brain chemistry honestly - but I can imagine that, raising himself without like spirits around, Sev would probably feel like an alien. Society in general, and dramatic fiction in particular, definitely pushes the idea that if you don't make outward displays of emotion you're either in imminent danger of an explosive breakdown or you must not feel anything at all. Which... no.
(I think we've probably uncovered A Small Clue as to why I'm so drawn to emotionally repressed characters, haven't we? Heh.)
Sev's ever-observant brain picked out another Gryffindor who was earning Cuero's disgust. Remus Lupin; a quiet, thoughtful boy whose robes were always ragged and threadbare. Since Lupin was neither a mudblood nor a girl, and not particularly objectionable, Sev watched with interest to see why Cuero had taken against him.
He soon saw that in Lupin's case, the teacher had a genuine beef. He appeared be trying in earnest, but he just couldn't make the leucrocottas obey him. No matter what he did, the beasts just wouldn't go near him.
Sev was intrigued. Animals, especially the magical kind, had senses at their disposal that humans did not. What was it about Remus Lupin that they were so afraid of?
The first of the three secrets that are exposed in this fic. It's part of the premise of this series that Sev's grudge against the Marauders is all manufactured and manipulated for the sake of appearances, so he has to know Remus is a werewolf before the Shrieking Shack incident. This is the first hint that sets him on the trail of finding out.
Sev finally starts to get the chance to show off his deviousness with all these convoluted plots to get people kicked out of school. It really doesn't occur to him to feel bad about making their lives hell and ruining their prospects; he only sees it in the light of the worse fate he's avoiding for them.
Targets two and three were a fifth year called Liana Whittaker, and a second year, Rick Allison.
I stole the name Liana from a random girl I was at university with. ...Who later went on to become one of my best friends there, making this retrospectively weirder. The more people you know, the harder it gets to name your characters, dammit. This is why it's good to be an introvert!
Sev also happened to know, having read a great deal, that on and off through the years, there had been an old tradition of transfers between wizarding schools. The European three, Hogwarts, Durmstrang and Beauxbatons, had chosen one or two of their best and brightest students to make the trade once they had finished their O.W.Ls and were going on to take their N.E.W.Ts.
That tradition had never been actually brought to an official stop, but it had trailed off due to the increasing insularity of Durmstrang.
Ah, the terrible fandom cliché of exchange students! But not used in the typical way.
Also, after having misread the name initially, I have terrible trouble convincing my typing fingers that Beauxbatons is not called Beaubaxtons. This is where the Rhythm Method (heh) of memorisation bites you in the butt.
The Caretynes were like white lions with golden manes and spotted coats, except for their long horns and tusks - and their tendency to shoot flames from their mouths or either ear without the slightest warning. The class was predictably chaotic, Pete Pettigrew setting the brim of his hat on fire and his friends unsure whether to laugh or glare at the Slytherins for doing so.
More beasts from the cryptozoology books. Also, I decided that Sev would know Peter Pettigrew as a 'Pete' because that's what his friends would most likely call him in casual conversation. Although he comes up rarely enough in these stories that most people probably thought it was just a typo.
Green light exploded from the wand and flared up into the air. For a second, Sev saw an almost shocked expression cross Malfoy's face, as if he hadn't really realised this kind of magic could come from him. Sev saw the green stars of the Death Eater symbol already beginning to swirl into shape.
"Hellfire!" Malfoy gasped, and Sev wondered if he'd even known exactly how hugely and vividly the Mark would display. It was already rising into the sky, swelling rapidly; it would be visible for miles.
For a moment Malfoy stared up at his own handiwork with awe, then his grey eyes met Snape's and panic flared in them. "Run!" he advised, scurrying quickly back towards the safety of their class group. How very Lucius Malfoy, Sev noted. Utterly devoted to his hate group's agenda - provided there was no chance of his getting caught.
This take on young Lucius is far more into the scheming and evilness than Draco ever was, but he's still to some extent in well over his head.
Jade Creevy and Helen Beck clutched at each other, and James slipped a comforting arm round Lily. To Snape's sharp eyes she didn't look scared, only anxious and locked in deep thought, but she didn't move to shove him off, either.
This James and Lily had a friendly relationship all along, not the initial dislike they proved to have in canon.
The wand felt unfamiliar in his grip, the wrong length and the wrong texture, but it was still a wand. Sev made a few practise sweeps, and then cast a few spells in quick succession. "Lumos! Nox! Orchideus! Relashio! Avis!"
The wand lit up, went out again, produced a bunch of flowers, sparked, and sent a small flock of birds twittering out of the nearest windows. His fellow Slytherins were staring at him as if they couldn't be sure whether to think he was insane or give him a round of applause.
I figured this was a plausible way to confuse the Prior Incantato spell, especially if the wand's being used by somebody other than its usual owner. Although really, it seems an unusually sensible step for the Hogwarts staff to take to even perform this test.
Finally, Cuero picked out an owl, and gave it the message. It was sealed in a small envelope, and Sev's sharp eyes noted that there was no address on the front. Instead, Cuero simply gave the owl a name; "Gorvic Shimmersby." The owl silently launched itself into the dark, and Sev quietly filed the name away in his memory for the future.
"Gorvic Shimmersby" is, I'm pretty sure, just a random collection of syllables that sounded vaguely wizard-y.
(Also, Sev's filing stuff away again. Those of you playing along with the CoS drinking game, take a drink!)
In about thirty seconds' time, the two boys came barrelling out as if their robes were on fire. Sirius yanked the cloak out after them before the passageway could close on it, and they both collapsed together; out of breath, but laughing. They'd probably come a hairsbreadth away from their deaths, but neither of them seemed to care. Sev didn't suppose either of them really believed that they weren't actually invincible.
Not even James and Sirius, though, were quite crazy enough to be visiting and then running from a werewolf just for the fun of it - especially when it was one of their closest friends in human form. They had to be trying to do something, trying to test something... Sev realised they must be trying to find some charm or enchantment that would allow them to visit their friend in wolf form without being attacked.
There must have been a lot of practising and experimenting before they got the Animagi thing down. Poor Remus probably has no idea how often his friends took really stupid risks to test stuff out.
A variant on the powerful Veritaseum truth potion, Trustasiem had the interesting little quirk of making a its drinker feel extremely trusting... spilling their innermost secrets not because they were compelled to, but because they believed themselves safe in doing so.
An even nastier little side-effect was that the victim, if not put under too much pressure, would not recall the questioning session at all. Though their original feelings for the person concerned would return, the time for which they had been under the influence would be forever cloaked in trust for them - the victim would be literally unable to contemplate the idea that they could have been used in any way.
Ah, Trustasiem. So named because I originally misread 'Veritaserum' as 'Veritaseum' and therefore didn't get the 'serum' bit and just went with a similar name. *facepalm*
"Ah, yes, I'm an expert, you know. I was with the team that investigated their actions in the Harrowgate case."
Harrowgate is just a random name I made up, no significance canon or fic-wise.
Looking back, this sequence of Snape questioning Cuero is oddly reminiscent of Tom Riddle questioning Slughorn in canon, isn't it?
Sev had observed him sending and receiving several letters via his family owl, Meraugis.
This name must have a derivation of some sort, but I'm afraid I no longer recall what it was.
"Tell us," begged Colin eagerly.
Redundant adverb is redundant. Sigh.
"I can do better than that... I'll show you. I intend to use this on the whole school - but I do believe a little demonstration is in order before we start." He rubbed his hands together. "First we'll have to find ourselves a mudblood..." He reflected for a moment, then smirked to himself. "Potter's little girlfriend should do nicely."
"No," interjected Sev. His voice was quiet, but forceful.
Malfoy frowned. "Why not?" Sev was satisfied to hear from his tone that he automatically assumed that Snape's objection would be logical, not ethical - not that any wizard of Malfoy's views would be able to comprehend the idea of ethical problems with harming mudbloods.
"If this is the prelude to a big gesture, it'll be noted and followed up on. You can't use Potter's girlfriend because she's Potter's girlfriend. It brings the focus too close to us."
Sev is making up his logic after the objection, but he'd reject the idea if you tried to tell him so.
Sev did wonder to himself why he had ended up working for the opposing team. He was, after all, hardly the type to get high and mighty about right and wrong and nobility.
The best explanation he could give was that the Death Eaters' attitudes... offended his sense of logic. It was... a stupid way to do things. Inefficient. He was hardly enamoured of the Ministry's slightly wishy-washy desire to please everybody, but at least they weren't trying to skew perceptions or alter the order of things. How were you supposed to do anything if people were judged on basic labels instead of abilities? Under Malfoy's system, you worked with the premise that Crabbe was superior to Lily, and whichever angle you looked at that from, it was still insane.
Voldemort's big mistake in this universe was creating a reign of terror that offended Sev's sense of logic. If he'd been trying to set up a meritocracy of evil geniuses, things could easily have swung the other way.
"Erica! Are you-?" One of the boys beside her, Jed Aloysius, made a grab for her as she suddenly slid from her chair.
My, what random place could this guy's first name ever have sprung from? *whistles innocently*
Nobody moved to do Jed's bidding, and Malfoy gave Avery a shove. "You go!" he ordered, and Sev gave him a subtle nod of acknowledgement as Avery looked surprised but sped off. Jed and his friends, should they remember the Slytherin third years having been there, would also recall that one of them had a been the first to run for help.
Hey, Malfoy's in Slytherin too, right? He can work a bit of scheming himself when the mood takes him.
There were two ways he could handle this. He could spill Cuero's secret to Malfoy - or he could take the disguised Auror into his confidence.
Going to Cuero was technically the 'right' way - but he didn't like it. Cuero was a variable he had no control over. Lily and Josh Matthews already knew the truth about his association with Malfoy - and that was two people too many. An Auror was, ironically, a much worse person to entrust such a secret to; the chances of him being captured and tortured or simply fed Veritaserum were far higher.
Sev's already making the kind of decisions he will be as a Death Eater spy in the future - and this one is going to have unhappy consequences for Cuero.
He had further cemented his own cover, at the expense of destroying another's. Logic told him that he was in the better position anyway, and that it was the intelligent thing to do.
Sev knew that he was right, but he was beginning to wonder if, when the time came, anybody else would be willing to believe that.
Very much what canon Snape must have been thinking around the end of HBP. Sucks to be you, Snape.
From the general height and shape of the figure compared to Malfoy, Sev could think of four teachers it might be; Professors Vitae, Fractalis, Malachite or Ephemeria. He resolved to sift through every memory he had of their actions for possible clues - but not right now. Malfoy was coming back, and he had to move quickly to get back in bed and be 'asleep' before he returned.
I gave myself a decent-sized suspect pool to play with over the next few stories. At this point, even I hadn't decided who it was going to be yet.
This is the third exposure of the triple referred to in the title: Remus's werewolf secret, Cuero's blown cover as a spy, and now the existence of the Hogwarts staff Death Eater.
Band of Four
Everybody always seems to think this story is called Gang of Four. I just liked 'band' better. Maybe Band of Brothers was on TV at this time? I don't know. But it just has better rhythm because it doesn't introduce the awkward stop you get with an 'ng' sound.
Even Sev's own year-group had suffered some losses this time around. The other three houses were all at least one student smaller than the same time last year, and Slytherin itself had lost Rebecca Whistley and Jack Brisingamen. The two remaining boys who weren't amongst Malfoy's followers, Stuart and Robert, were sat close together in a kind of apprehensive solidarity.
Ah, a Slytherin girl other than Narcissa! So they do exist.
"Welcome, students new and old. I am glad to see you here, and saddened by the faces that are absent this year."
His steely-blue eyes seemed to fix on every student simultaneously. "This is a dark time for the wizarding community, but as ever our strength is in solidarity. Hogwarts has been the core of our country's magical strength in times past, and so it will remain."
I rather like the speech Dumbledore gives here, for some reason. I was well into my West Wing fannishness at this point, and I guess my brain was geared towards stirring speeches.
"I sleep as much as I need to," responded Snape shortly. He was an insomniac, but the lack of sleep never troubled him; in truth, he needed it. Two or three hours of quiet darkness to line his thoughts up was what kept his brain running like the well-oiled machine it was. In prior years he had roamed the halls of Hogwarts, observing, but that would be more difficult now. He had given his invisibility cloak to Lily, and the security precautions this year would be that much stronger.
I have this type of insomnia myself, and have had since I was a pretty small child; it's never really caused me any problems, it's just that I take a lot longer than average to wind down enough to fall asleep. (Going to bed early doesn't make any difference - I just lie awake for even longer.) I usually use the time to plot stories.
Canon Snape seems to spend a lot of time roaming the corridors after dark, so I can well believe he's an insomniac too.
Sev stepped forwards alongside the others, and they grasped the enchanted rock together. There was an odd sensation in the pit of his stomach, like simultaneously moving and standing still, and suddenly they were... somewhere else.
I got some indignant feedback about this chapter break. Heh. Shameless cliffhanging!
A young man came hurrying down the corridor towards them. He was perhaps ten years older than them, perhaps a little less; too old to still be a student. He had closely cropped dark hair, and a goatee with a curl.
This is a younger Karkaroff. He's grey-haired when he shows up in GoF, but I put him as only 8-10 years older than Snape because we didn't know at the time that the MWPP generation were still only in their mid-thirties.
They followed the young man to a narrow room that was clearly the base of a tower. Inside stood a blond-haired older man with steely eyes. He glanced at the boys in a vaguely bored way, and turned to Malfoy.
"These are the ones?"
Malfoy nodded briskly. "Yes, Professor Dolohov."
Another canon Death Eater; I don't think we knew anything about Dolohov at this time beyond his name.
A tall, slim figure flowed out of the shadows towards him. It was a dark-haired man; past forty, perhaps, but with a handsome, unlined face. His eyes were as black as Snape's own, and every bit as piercing. He didn't even have to speak, just smile slightly, for Sev to feel the charisma flowing from him; stronger even than that of Lucius Malfoy. This was a man who people would follow. This was a cult leader.
I made the Voldemort of this stage much more like Tom Riddle than the Evil Overlord one Harry knows. My theory at this point was that the resurrection burned a lot of the deviousness and remaining humanity out of him; now I think you could blame the same thing on the Horcruxes.
"I'm a Slytherin," he said simply.
"Aren't we all?" Abruptly, all traces of the smile were gone, and Voldemort was regarding him with fiery intensity. "You're a listener, I think. A cold one, a silent one. You're cleverer than Malfoy. Why do you follow?"
"Why would I lead?" Sev knew he had to step carefully; very, very carefully. In his fourteen years of life so far, he had met precisely one person who he believed to share his intellectual level; the Hogwarts headmaster, Albus Dumbledore.
As of tonight, he had met two.
This interview with Voldemort was very much like facing the Sorting Hat - except that here, the risks were greater than being relegated to house Hufflepuff. Voldemort seemed able to read the depths of his personality from his eyes; but not all of it.
Nobody had ever read all of it.
"You don't lust for glory. I doubt you care much for the fate of the world, one way or the other. So why are you here? What do you want from us? What can we, the Death Eaters, give you, that you think you cannot give yourself?"
To risk a lie now would be to risk everything. He had to give a truth, and there was only one truth it could possibly be.
"Knowledge."
Snape serves two masters in canon, and even if he's playing the super-spy who outwits everyone in this fic, they've both got to be worthy of the role for it to work. If he's smarter than Voldemort, there's no story.
Instead of producing a wand or some more archaic means of applying a tattoo, Voldemort simply grasped Sev's arm in a powerful two-fingered grip, and spoke the word "Morsmordrios."
I came up with this as an obvious variant on Morsmordre, since we didn't know anything about how the Dark Mark was applied.
Since troubling events in the outside world had started to impinge on school grounds, Dumbledore had been making every effort to keep them as secure as possible. Professors Vitae and Fractalis, the Charms and Arithmancy teachers, had been helping to shore up the wards around the school, although the bulk of the work fell, naturally, on the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Professor Malachite.
Not coincidentally at all, three out of four of the possible suspects for staff Death Eater.
The classes were, of course, packed. Duelling magic was apt to be far more fun than anything learned in lessons, and the students were keen to play around with it. The teachers assigned varied from week to week, but generally it fell to either Professor Vitae or Professor Malachite.
Flitwick isn't at the school yet in this fic; I filled out nearly all the roles with OC teachers to give me a bit more freedom, so Professor Vitae is the Charms teacher at this stage. (Coming into things backwards by starting with original writing first, I never developed the fear of including original characters that many fic-writers seem to have. I just wrote them in automatically wherever they seemed useful.)
Even in the early lessons, learning harmless basics like the Disarmament Charm, it was only a matter of minutes before war was joined. The sides were evenly matched; Malfoy had his cadre of Death Eaters, Potter had Sirius, Lily, Remus and Peter. Pete Pettigrew, a small, pudgy and extremely nervous boy, had a quite incredible talent for Transfiguration - much to the dismay of whichever Slytherin he turned it against - and Sirius Black was an explosion waiting to happen.
Peter Pettigrew managed the Animagus transformation well enough to live in it for over a decade, so I'm figuring he's got a serious aptitude for Transfiguration.
Abruptly, a hissing sound snapped through the air. The serpent drew away as if startled, and then snaked across the floor to coil around Professor Malachite's feet. Ignoring the amazed stares, he calmly lifted the creature from the floor and allowed it wrap itself around his shoulders.
"Snakes," he said mildly, "are nothing to be frightened of - if you know how to handle them properly." He produced his wand from the folds of his cloak, and used it to free Malfoy from the full-body bind. He absently patted the snake on the head, and it blinked up at him blissfully. "I think," he said to Professor Vitae, "We'll have to call this one a draw. Now, all of you get to your afternoon lessons, while I send this little fellow back where he came from."
Malfoy got to his feet and scrambled over to Sev's side, shooting Potter a dark look. "Did you see?" he asked Sev excitedly. "He's a Parselmouth!"
"No wonder he's always going on about being nasty to serpents," observed Avery.
I made the Serpensortia spell something passed down from father to son to repeat this canon trick. This must be the point in the writing where I first came up with the idea of Malachite being a Naga; it certainly wasn't planned in the earlier fics.
"How are we supposed to spy on them?" Colin asked, looking worried. "Did they say?"
Malfoy shot him a scathing look. "We're supposed to use our initiative, Crabbe. I'm aware that you don't have any, but the rest of us will try to make up for it."
Heh. Lucius actually gets some decent snark in here. I made him a little wittier than Draco.
He had no worries of being disturbed by Malachite. He had learned early on in his unauthorised wanderings that the Dark Arts teacher was a creature of strong habit. Sev had heard Professor Vitae being snippy about the fact that he had somehow procured a luxury bathtub for his personal quarters, and it appeared that he preferred to wind down of an evening with a long relaxing soak. Once he had settled in for the night, so the staff joke went, it would take more than the end of the world to shift him.
More Naga hints.
"-about this, Janeida," Fractalis was saying nervously. "What if someone- well, what if I'm caught? I wouldn't, um, I wouldn't have a clue what to say."
"Oh, relax, Trigo," the Potions teacher assured him. "All you have to do is tell them you're out checking the wards on the grounds. After all, you're the one that put them there in the first place."
"In the middle of the night?"
She laughed lightly. "Why not? They all know you're nervous enough. Besides..." Sev could picture the wryly amused smirk she used to gently mock people in Potions class - "who'd ever believe it of you?"
Fractalis laughed then, a deep, rich, almost musical sound that was a world away from his usual dryly nervous chuckle. "Indeed. Not even me, and that's the truth." Still laughing, the two of them passed further down the corridor and out of earshot.
These two are totally dating. A gentle red herring to suggest Ephemeria might be the spy and manipulating Fractalis.
The Auror's house looked like any other in the street it stood in. However, its defences were both more subtle and more powerful. Sev stopped the three of them a short way away. "Repeat after me," he whispered. "I, Severus Snape, honestly declare that it is my purpose at this house tonight to eavesdrop on the conversation within."
The other two boys looked at him strangely, but echoed the same declaration. As they passed through the gates, the Dishonetectors mounted on the gateposts quivered, then lay still. Malfoy registered what was happening, and gave Snape a brief nod and a smirk. An artefact to detect dishonest visitors wouldn't tag one who admitted they were there to spy.
And nobody made the crap joke of repeating the 'Severus Snape' bit? Unnatural children.
...Wow, Dishonetectors is a terrible name, isn't it? But I still think this way of outwitting them is pretty smart.
As soon as the curtains were pulled, Sev dropped lightly down from the tree and sped light-footed to the rear window. He drew his wand and flicked it at the curtains with the whisper "Monoculous!" Immediately, the cloth of the curtains turned as transparent as the window they covered, and they could see inside.
"I hope for all our sakes' that's one-way," Malfoy said dryly. Avery had other things on his mind.
"Would that work on the wall of the girls' bathroom?" he asked hopefully.
All right, perhaps they are teenage boys after all.
With rather impeccable timing, Sirius, Pete and Remus suddenly emerged from a side street and pulled up short at the sight of him. Snape offered James a thin and mocking smile.
"What the hell are you doing out here, Snape?" he demanded hotly. Sev had learned quickly that borrowing from Malfoy's smug superiority was an excellent way to rub James up the wrong way.
"The little snake - he's spying on us!" It didn't take anything so complex to set off Sirius Black. 'Loitering whilst being in house Slytherin' was generally enough of an offence.
"Yes, Black, I live for the vicarious thrill of your lives," he said dryly. "I don't know what I'd do with myself if I didn't have the excitement of following you four around."
Sirius looked just about ready to explode. James was affecting to be unimpressed, whilst behind him Peter spoiled the effect by jittering nervously up and down. Remus, hanging back as he usually did during conflicts, looked suspiciously like he was trying not to smirk.
I always thought that Snape and Lupin would get on well if not for, well, everything.
Lily looked like she wanted to argue, but she bit her lower lip and said nothing. After a moment of silence, she said "Who is it, then? The Death Eater. The main one, the senior guy. Not Malfoy and his gang of rent-a-thugs."
"I don't know."
She blinked. "That's a first."
"I have my suspicions," he elaborated.
"You always have your suspicions. Nobody's safe from you; I'll bet even Dumbledore's in the frame."
"No, I ruled him out a few days ago."
She laughed, and then said suddenly "I've missed you. You're twisted in all the right ways."
"And you're twisted in several wrong ones."
"Takes all sorts to make a world, you know." She hefted the invisibility cloak, as they neared the Hogwarts end of the tunnel. "I should be getting back."
"Yes, you should," he agreed shortly. She laughed again.
"What, no chivalrous offer to walk me back to my dorm?"
"Yes, because sneaking around by the Gryffindor girls' dorm is exactly where I want to get caught by Pringle."
"I don't know," said Lily, smiling; "might be a good idea to get some rumours started. Add to your aura of mystique."
"It'd put your boyfriend's nose out of joint."
"He's not my boyfriend."
"So you frequently protest."
I like this whole conversation. In fact, I'm liking a lot more of this fic than I did with the first three. I'm quite surprised to see how much my writing is visibly evolving over the course of this series, considering the whole thing was written over a stretch of barely six months.
He smiled tigerishly, and lay back in his bed.
Damn, Malfoy is always smiling tigerishly in this series. It's really noticeable when you read the whole thing through together. I think this is even worse than Sev and his mental filing cabinet.
"Impregnable!" insisted Professor Vitae loudly. "No one gets past my defences, of that I assure you." Malachite pulled off the fairly clever trick of radiating scepticism without so much as pulling a face.
"No fortress is impregnable, my dear Ellida," Professor Dumbledore corrected gently. "But ours, I feel, is closer than most. These tests will only serve to point out to us where any weaknesses may lie."
The Charms teacher and head of Gryffindor is named for the Elixir Vitae, the elixir of life, and Ellida, a boat from Norse legend that "raced the whistling wind and outstripped the eagle". Um. Sorry, but I really don't remember why. (She wasn't picked to be the Death Eater until after the fact, though, so that's not involved in any way.)
That afternoon, Sev reported at Malachite's office as ordered. The teacher had pushed back the furniture to lay out a large black sheet, upon which were glowing coloured symbols laid over a plan view of the grounds. "I don't suppose you've seen one of these before?" said Malachite.
"I assume it's a Spellograph," replied Snape. He hadn't seen one before, of course, since they were highly specialised Ministry tools, although he had read of them.
"Yes. Handy little thing. Plots every spell currently taking effect on Hogwarts grounds."
"But not in the castle itself," Sev observed, although he knew the reason why. Malachite laughed.
"A Spellograph, on this place? Why not daub the sheet with multicoloured paint and have done with it?" The level of background magic inside Hogwarts was far too huge for such a device to pick out any single spell. It would be just as useless in the grounds, if not for the rigidly employed controls in place; staff, students, and outsiders were all prohibited from using any kind of active magic during the hours of the test.
The trouble with inventing interesting new technologies and magics is that you then have to explain why no one uses them in canon.
The little spell-symbols differed not just in colour, but in style, too. Malachite's green symbols had an organic, coiled-up look, much like the serpents he was so fond of. Vitae's formed delicate laceworks, and Fractalis's wards were incredibly complex geometric patterns. Dumbledore's own designs looked painfully simplistic against the rest, and yet they glowed more brightly than anything else on the page.
I quite like this little detail.
Malachite was not a stupid man. It was possible he knew nothing of Malfoy's group, and had simply judged Sev not to be Death Eater material. It was equally possible he knew Sev was with the Death Eaters, and expected him to be working for them. And it was just about conceivable that he had twigged both Sev's purported loyalties, and his real ones.
Either way, he was grooming Snape for something, and until he knew what it was, Severus was going to have to tread very carefully.
Perhaps it's telling that Sev never considers the possibility that Malachite just likes him or enjoys imparting knowledge. ...Then again, they are both Slytherins.
It made sense. More to the point, it was what he would do. And he strongly suspected that Voldemort had a knack for deviousness that ran nearly as deep as his own.
Not that Sev is egotistical at all...
Professor Vitae seemed incredibly infuriated by Malachite's insistence on personally checking and backing up her sections of the defences. When the two of them co-hosted the duelling club, it was more a war zone than a learning opportunity, and it was a constant miracle no one was seriously injured.
In Arithmancy classes, the already scatty Professor Fractalis was completely distracted. On a dare, one of the Ravenclaw boys transfigured his hat into a lacy pink bonnet, and he was wearing it for half an hour before he even noticed.
I'd decided by this point that Vitae was going to be the Death Eater, so I buried the evidence of her activities by playing up her rivalry with Malachite and drawing more attention to Fractalis.
"It's not me who has to revise," Sev pointed out with a shrug. Professor Ephemeria looked sceptical. Teachers didn't like to admit that there were students who could get their good grades without studying; it rather poked holes in their 'if you don't work, you'll never get anywhere' spiel.
My senior school had an obsession with target-setting and making us list areas we thought we needed to improve. I had an excellent memory and a stubborn refusal to pretend I didn't know what I was good at.
These were not mixy things. At all.
"You mean you'll save people's lives if it doesn't look like causing trouble?" She suddenly threw the bundled up cloak at him. "I've got a better idea. You wear this. I'm not hiding; I'm going to be out there waiting for them, and if they start blasting, well, I'll blast right back."
She was spoiling for an argument, but if she thought Snape was going to be like James and get stupidly overprotective, she was wrong. He simply nodded, and took the cloak. "Good idea," he agreed mildly. "This'll make things simpler."
It's kind of fun writing for characters who are not remotely into selfless nobility. It certainly gets conflicts resolved quicker.
"Come on," agreed Lily, dragging him forward eagerly. James followed, as did the invisible Snape, but Sirius held Peter back.
"Leave 'em to it, mate," he advised, bored. "Got your Exploding Snap cards? This is like watching paint dry."
I like that Peter is fairly included in the Marauders' activities in this; I couldn't remember off-hand how much I'd written him in, since MWPP all have fairly minor roles, but I know a lot of people are annoyed by stories where Peter is all but erased from the group, so I'm glad to see I didn't do that here.
It all seemed to happen at once. Perhaps the Death Eater was panicked by Lupin's words - perhaps he had simply finished what he was doing breaking through the wards. Either way, he reached quickly for his wand, his companion a beat behind him.
Right then, Lily did something nobody would have expected of her.
She screamed. Loudly. Piercingly. A scream to wake the dead, not to mention cut through the air and alert just about every student or teacher within four miles.
...Not something Sev would have ever have thought of. I kind of like the way this Lily has a few Slytherin traits of her own.
Ephemeria and Fractalis were coming too, charging towards them from the direction of the Forbidden Forest.
Where they were totally snogging. Heh.
Suddenly Professors Vitae and Malachite were there, having left the short-legged Parilia behind in the dust. Vitae was trying to pull out her wand, but she seemed to have got it caught on something in the inside of her robes. "Do something, Carnus!" she snapped.
Professor Malachite had his wand in his hand and at the ready - and yet he seemed frozen, unable or unwilling to use it. "Attack!" Vitae urged him, but he just stood there helplessly.
Part of the Naga mythology I borrowed for Malachite is the idea that they can't harm humans who don't harm them first.
Also, Malachite's obvious freeze-up here neatly covers up Vitae's much more deliberate fumble. (Does she know what Malachite is when she urges him to make an attack he can't? I can no longer remember, though I know I gave them a history together, so I'll have to discover that along with you.)
Suddenly another voice rang out, loud enough to cut through all the chaos like a knife. It took a moment to place it, it sounded so different from Professor Fractalis's usual nervous stutter.
The long sequence of spell-words he used was completely unfamiliar to Snape; so much so that he was sure it had to be an original enchantment. Suddenly all around them, symbols appeared on the ground in blazing blue-white light. It was so powerful, everybody had to shield their eyes against it.
Apparently, Professor Fractalis's amazing geometric designs were a bit more powerful than he had let on.
The stuttery ineffectual maths teacher gets to be a secret badass. Because I know what I like, dammit.
Lily caught up with him in a corridor on his way back to the quiet of the dorms. He turned to face her with a shrug, handing her the cloak before she asked for it. "Nobody died," he pointed out.
"Somebody will, one day," she said heavily. "This is a knife-edge, Severus, not even you can walk along it forever. Some day, sooner or later, people are going to killed for this little scheme you're running. And then what?"
He looked at her for a long, unblinking moment, and then he said softly "Some must be sacrificed, if all are to be saved."
And after that, there was nothing more to say.
So, yeah, this line is totally stolen from Babylon 5. I knew I was quoting, but there's something about that line that resonates so strongly I think I must have thought it was from a much older source. Oops.
After this story was the point where my enthusiasm for the series hit its lowest ebb, and it was a struggle to make myself get started on the fifth one. I wrote 72 Hours in the Dark in between to give myself a break from writing HP.
(Yeah. I wrote a 30,000 word fic to give myself a two-week break from the hectic pace of writing this series. WTF, me of 2002? Where did you get your productivity, and can I have some of it back, please?)
The commentary concludes with parts 5, 6 and 7 here