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Into the Fold by Pasi [Reviews - 4]

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June 1976

Albus had thought that Severus's conjuring of the Patronus would be enough to enable him to continue seeking a cure for James Potter with Healer Meed. But when Constance summoned him to her office the next morning, he found that he was wrong.

"You didn't tell me you've allowed a werewolf to attend Hogwarts," she said.

They were seated in the armchairs, sharing tea. Albus drained his cup before speaking. "Severus showed you what happened on the night he cursed James. What he found beneath the Whomping Willow."

"Yes."

"The students are safe. I've got everything under control."

She looked sceptical. After all that had happened, he couldn't say he blamed her.

"The werewolf is your business," she said finally. "Severus's Sectumsempra is mine. Last week he cast it on James Potter, but you do realise he'd invented it earlier?"

It had certainly acted like a well-honed spell. "Had he?" asked Albus uneasily.

"He created the spell at least a year before he used it on James at the Whomping Willow. In fact, the first person Severus cast Sectumsempra on one year ago was James Potter, who seems to have been something of a schoolyard bully."

"James didn't bully Severus this time."

"No, but these things build on themselves. Vendettas develop. As a teacher and headmaster, you know that. My point is, Sectumsempra has progressed, if progressed is the right word, from a cutting spell to a killing curse."

"You mean Severus has worked on it. Tried to make it worse."

"Tried and succeeded. His hatred of James Potter isn't just something that flares up in times of anger. It's cold, steady, premeditative. It's the strongest sort of hatred that I know. Very difficult to work with, to say the least." Constance cocked her head at Albus. "You are sure he conjured a Patronus?"

"I think I know what Patronuses look like."

"What a strange young man..." Constance said musingly. "But you can see how a consuming hatred like his could make things difficult...."

Albus listened patiently. Constance was very good at what she did, but the odd nature of her talents predisposed her to eccentricity.

"It may call for the Veil of Tears," said Constance.

"The Veil of Tears," Albus echoed softly. So that was why he was here, to have fair warning. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be so much trouble."

"You should feel sorrier for Severus than for me," she replied.


****

Seeing Severus after he had left Constance Meed did make Professor Dumbledore feel sorry for him. His typically unkempt appearance, his even more typical air of fear and suspicion had a way of inspiring pity.

But then one tended to remember James as Albus had seen him every morning since his arrival at St Mungo's: lying in a hospital bed, his face pale and pinched, his eyes perpetually closed, tended by a house elf whose twitters and sighs expressed her dismal opinion of his odds. The house-elves of St Mungo's, Albus had discovered, always knew best who would live and who would die.

The sight of James had reduced his pity for Severus at first, but less so now as he had begun to wonder what it must be like inside Severus's head. He had rarely looked there, and not at all since he had discovered James bleeding at the foot of the Whomping Willow. He shared Constance's ethics in not going where he wasn't wanted. Usually. Definitely, in Severus's case. Except for Tom's, Albus had never known a mind less welcoming to intruders. But there was no comparing Tom Riddle's mind with any other on earth.

"Healer Meed is as pleased as I am at your success in conjuring a Patronus," Albus said to Severus. "She's quite eager to resume working with you."

He smiled brightly, trying to make things look as good as he could. Severus looked only slightly less apprehensive.

"I need to return to Hogwarts to wrap up the end of term, but I think you'll do fine here, don't you?" Albus asked.

Like any student getting the teacher off his back, Severus brightened. "Oh--oh, yes."

"I don't consider the Trainees' Room the most comfortable of places, and besides the Trainees need it," said Albus. "I was thinking you'd probably prefer to go on staying at the Leaky Cauldron."

Severus said nothing. Albus didn't need Legilimency to see him thinking that he could never afford such luxury.

"I'd be happy to pay the bill," Albus said delicately.

Severus still said nothing, but his face turned a dull brick red.

"Done!" Albus said. "Why don't you Floo to St Mungo's, then? Healer Meed will meet you for breakfast in the Trustees' Dining Room."

****

When Severus stepped from the fireplace into the lobby of St Mungo's Hospital, Healer Meed was there. "Good morning, Severus."

"Good morning, ma'am." He looked into her strangely variegated eyes, then quickly away. Could Legilimency get out of control, those eyes made him want to ask. Were there people who saw into your mind whether they wanted to or not?

He had climbed the stairs with Professor Dumbledore to the Trustees' Dining Room. Healer Meed led him through the eternal bustle of the lobby to the lift, which swept them up to the fifth floor without a stop. The doors whispered open and they crossed the hallway. Severus caught the aroma of freshly-baked pastries from the tea room at the end of the hall as Healer Meed gazed at a point on the plain white wall. In a moment, a door appeared and swung open into a stairwell. They climbed the stairs to the featureless door before which Professor Dumbledore had presented his wand. The door opened at a glance from Healer Meed, and they entered the Trustees' Dining Room.

They sat down at one of the white-clothed tables, and the same unobtrusive house elves served Severus bacon, eggs and porridge. Healer Meed had only tea and toast. She ate absently, as if food were an afterthought.

"I was with James Potter last night," she said, as if by way of explaining her meagre appetite. She said nothing further, but only looked at Severus until he felt constrained to reply.

"Erm--how is he?"

"Not well, actually. The Blood-Replenishing Potion is losing its effectiveness. He needs your help."

Well, that was why they'd dragged him here, wasn't it? But Severus didn't say so aloud.

"He'll die without it," Healer Meed continued, still watching him. "But you've known that all along. That knowledge helped you conjure your Patronus. You knew you had to do it or James would die."

Saving Potter had never been at the forefront of Severus's mind. Staying at school, staying out of Azkaban by pleasing Dumbledore and Meed--that was what had filled his thoughts. "How could I know that?" he asked.

"Because you know Sectumsempra. You saw what it did."

Severus had seen Potter grey, jerking, nearly choking. He had never known before seeing Potter bleed that one body could hold so much blood.

"But that's good," said Healer Meed. Severus, looking down at his porridge, felt rather than saw her eyes on him. "You know what your spell did. And your ability to conjure a Patronus proves you have the capacity to counter what your spell did."

Severus, toying with his porridge, decided he didn't want the rest. It was looking a little congealed.

"Why don't you try it?" said Healer Meed. "At least it would send your mind to a better memory."

Severus looked up. Healer Meed smiled encouragingly. "Your Patronus Charm."

Severus glanced around the dining room. The house elves had vanished.

"No one is here," said Healer Meed.

That was good. In case, under that many-hued gaze, he ignominiously failed.

It was better to pretend she wasn't there. Severus stood, turned his back, pulled out his wand and plunged himself into the memory. Soon there was nothing but Lily and himself, clasping hands, flying above the asphalt playground. The doe bounded from his wand. She looked around the dining room as if with curiosity, as if she had a mind of her own. Then she trotted toward a window, splintered into mist and disappeared.

Severus turned back to see that Healer Meed's usual air of dispassionate kindness had turned into surprise.

"You can do it." Her tone told Severus that she hadn't really believed in him before this.

"I wanted to believe," she said. "I needed to believe. But I couldn't." She looked at Severus with an intensity that made him want to shrink away. "I must say I have never known anyone so perfectly balanced between Dark and Light."

Severus wasn't sure what that meant, so he didn't answer.

"Finish your breakfast," said Healer Meed, "and we'll go to my office and get to work."

****

She sat at her desk and gestured Severus to a chair opposite. He sat, and thought immediately of the last authority he'd faced across a desk--Slughorn, on the night after he'd defended himself against Potter's gang with the Firewhip. All that was missing were the glaring cherubs.

The salient feature of Healer Meed's office was not cherubs fluttering atop a cabinet but the plain pewter Pensieve on the corner counter. Severus's eyes strayed toward the Pensieve. Mist wafted across its surface, casting a moonlight-glow which was reflected on the polished floor.

"Yes, we'll be using the Pensieve," said Healer Meed.

Severus looked back at her. She too was gazing at the Pensieve. "You and I will visit your memories there."

His memories. Which ones?

"Your memories of Sectumsempra. How you created it, and why. How and why it grew."

"Grew?" said Severus.

"It made a superficial cut at the end of your fifth year at Hogwarts. At the end of your sixth, it has become a means to murder."

Severus didn't know how to answer that.

"Your memories contain the thoughts and emotions with which you informed Sectumsempra--its psychic building blocks--and when we have analysed those memories, we should be able to build Sectumsempra's counter."

It sounded like a rather too technical description of the roilings of Severus's mind during spell-making.

"Yes, it is complicated," Healer Meed agreed. Severus was getting used to her answering his unspoken comments. "So I'll need your full cooperation. You're not here to keep Professor Dumbledore from sending you away from Hogwarts and into Azkaban. You're here to heal James Potter. I'm afraid that means sacrificing something very precious to you."

"I don't have anything precious."

"What about those thoughts you hide from everyone, those memories behind the Dark patches you've hidden from me?"

Severus looked at her in surprise. He had never called his inmost thoughts precious. But she was right. They were.

"You have a talent for shielding your mind," Healer Meed said, "but I'm afraid it won't serve you here. You must allow me into your head and, once I'm there, to take any memory I want. And not merely the memory--the facts, the events--but all the feelings you've wrapped around it."

"Allow you into my head?" said Severus. He glanced into the corner filled with mist that shone the same pearl-white as his Patronus. "Aren't I supposed to take the memories out and put them into the Pensieve?"

Healer Meed shook her head. "Not this time. I'll enter your mind and select the memories I want. I won't take any that have nothing to do with Sectumsempra--but of course you have to trust me on that. You have to open yourself to me; you can't fight me. You have to let me take anything I want."

As if he could prevent it. Severus looked away uneasily.

"She attended Durmstrang, the only school which provided a curriculum to suit her singular talents." So Dumbledore had said, but Dumbledore wasn't here now. He had left Severus alone with Healer Meed.

He met her eyes. It was, as he'd noticed before, like watching the shadows of clouds race over the sea. "All right."

"Thank you." Healer Meed went to the corner. She Levitated her Pensieve over to her desk (which was probably a good idea, as it looked very heavy). Then, returning behind the desk, she motioned Severus to rise.

He did so, facing her across the Pensieve. She looked blurred, ghostly, through the mist that floated above its surface.

"Please bend over the Pensieve," said Healer Meed.

Severus bent over the cloud seething inside the pewter bowl. Healer Meed placed her hands at the back of his head. She drew them over his crown, through his hair, and as she pulled them away he saw from the corner of his eye strands of silver stretching from her fingertips. A rainbow of colours, red, yellow, green, violet, rippled across his sight. Memories hurtled through his mind: duelling with Potter's gang and getting the worst of it when a Tarantallegra Curse forced him into a slithering dance. A rat shooting out of a culvert near the river at home. "Leave him ALONE!" and a satisfying spray of blood erupting from Potter's cheek. Olaus Ruskin casting Sectumsempra with casual perfection on a hedgehog.

Severus blinked, and the Pensieve's swirling surface came into view again. He tilted his head a bit and saw the shining strands of his memories cascade from Healer Meed's fingertips into the Pensieve. As they struck, mist billowed and shot upward into Severus's face. Something, he couldn't see what, flung itself around his neck and dragged him toward the boiling clouds. He shook it off and sprang back.

"Sorry," said Healer Meed. "My Pensieve's rather aggressive." She waved her wand and the surging, undulant mists settled down. "You're right. We should enter it together." She took a small phial from a desk drawer and slipped it into her pocket. Then she came around to Severus's side of the desk and took his hand. "Let's go."

They leaned close to the Pensieve. Just before Severus's face touched the cloudy surface, the Pensieve with a tightening of invisible bands around his midsection drew him in.

****

Severus and Healer Meed landed on the green lawn of Hogwarts, the castle rising in the distance. Severus saw himself in his fourth year, trudging off as he'd often done in those days, while Lily was finding friends among the Gryffindors and he was unable as yet to find friends among the Slytherins. A rain of acorns fell upon his fourteen-year-old head, and he whirled, wand drawn, to see Potter and Black summoning them from a nearby oak and lobbing them from the tips of their wands.

"Oi, Snivelly!" said Black. "Wake up!"

"Petrificus totalus!" shouted Severus, but Potter was too quick for him. A flick of the wand, and Severus's legs writhed under theTarantallegra Curse. Severus's legs writhed. He tripped on a rock and fell flat on his face, so hard that a stinging pain shot through his jaw and his mouth filled with cool autumn grass.

The scene dissolved and reformed into one Severus remembered very well: Spinner's End, a few months later, during the Christmas holiday. He was walking down the street at twilight. A few Christmas candles glimmered in grimy windows; ragged wreaths decorated a few of the scuffed and peeling front doors. Severus's fourteen-year-old self didn't notice, and if he had, he wouldn't have cared. He was peering toward the other side of the road, looking for something else, and as he neared the river, he saw it: a rat scuttling out from a culvert that ran beneath the road.

"Petrificus totalus!" the younger Severus whispered, and this time the spell worked. The rat froze mid-leap and fell flat on its back. Severus scrambled down to the culvert, seized the rat by its tail and ran off through dirty snow toward the woods, toward his favourite spot, where he and Lily hid together in summer, in the cool green shade.

The snow was white when he reached his favourite spot; the river that sparkled in summer sunlight was frozen into grey winter ice. But blood ran red, winter or summer; Sectumsempra worked anytime and anywhere, if you knew how to cast it....

The grey gloom of winter passed into the brilliance of early summer, the end of June, to be exact, at the end of Severus's fifth year and O.W.L. examinations. He was choking on pink soap and, half-crippled by the Impediment Jinx, crawled on his belly like a snake through the grass toward his wand. He reached it, took hold of it and laid open Potter's cheek with Sectumsempra just before Potter pulled him into the air with Levicorpus

Severus still remembered the thought bathed in humiliation and fury that had gone through his mind as he'd dangled upside-down with his pants exposed.

It's not strong enough; it didn't cut deep enough!

The memory dissolved. Severus passed through a fluttering rainbow into the next year, when he was teaching Ruskin Sectumsempra, when Sectumsempra was growing, perhaps with Ruskin's help.

"There's no boundary to it." Ruskin, watching his hedgehog spell-subject bleed to death. "That's the difference between Firewhip and Sectumsempra. Between the Light and the Dark. Between the owl sleeping in her cage in a patch of sunlight and the owl flying free on the hunt, into the starry, limitless night."
Severus buried the hedgehog carefully, so that no one would notice its grave, no one would discover it, no one would know what he had done.
The memory changed again, from the windy autumn hillside by the Forbidden Forest to the Whomping Willow beneath the full moon, less than one week ago. He was facing James Potter.

"You, Black and Lupin planned this.... Lupin's a werewolf, and you and Black knew it....You sent Black to tell me how to get inside the Whomping Willow. You told Lupin to put himself where the wolf would see me when I got inside... You wanted to scare me into silence... If I were bitten or killed, what was that to you and Black? ... Just wait until the parents find out Dumbledore's let a werewolf into Hogwarts. Just wait till they find out the werewolf's friends practically fed him a student. You won't be back next year, Potter. None of you will be back."

He'd scared Potter for a moment--how good it felt to see it again! But then Potter remembered that being thwarted wasn't part of his life plan.

"If you think Sirius's dad and my dad are going to let Dumbledore take the word of a greasy little jumped-up half-blood over ours, you'd better think again... Doesn't matter that Sirius's father doesn't like him. All that matters to him is that some grimy little nobody with a Muggle mill worker for a father is trying to get his son thrown out of the school the Blacks have attended for generations.... It's not going to be so easy to force Sirius and me out of Hogwarts.... Why do you think you can do any of it when it's my dad, not yours, who's Dumbledore's friend?"

Severus watched himself choke on his own disbelieving rage. If he had been able to accept his place as Potter's half-blood inferior, he wouldn't be watching this memory play out. But he hadn't been able to accept it. He would never be able to accept it.

So, raising his wand, "Sectumsempra!" Severus cried.

"Sectumsempra!" Severus whispered, and the memory flickered into darkness.

****

A hand closed over his. Meed's, he thought. Drawn upward through silver light, he landed lightly beside her in her office. She let go of his hand and drew her wand, pointing it at a smoky cloud that covered her office ceiling. Her wand seemed to suck at the cloud: it tightened, dove down to the tip of her wand and spun there for a few moments like the vortex of a whirlwind. It narrowed further, until it looked like a strand of memory, black instead of silver. Then Healer Meed's wand swallowed it up.

She took the phial out of her pocket, opened it and touched her wand to its lip. The darkness poured in a stream from the tip of her wand into the phial. When the last of it had trickled inside, she quickly stoppered the phial.

"What's in there?" Severus asked.

Healer Meed held the phial at eye level. The darkness moved restlessly inside, imitating the ceaseless writhing of the silver mist above her Pensieve. "This is your emotion," she said.

"My emotion?"

She slipped the phial into her pocket. "The emotional component of Sectumsempra. The complicated part of your spell. For I found the intellectual component rather easy to understand. Didn't you?"

Severus looked at her in mute confusion.

"What was your intention in creating Sectumsempra? When you were choosing its incantation, what did you want it to do?"

Severus thought back. He was in his and Lily's secret place, pointing his wand at the Petrified rat. Its ribs heaved with its terrified breathing.

"To unravel," said Severus. "To rip apart."

"And to unravel flesh," said Healer Meed, "you--"

"You have to cut," said Severus. "Don't you?"

Healer Meed nodded. "Sectumsempra unravels," she said softly, half to herself, it seemed. "Its counter must reweave."

Severus waited for her to explain, but she didn't. "Come back tomorrow at eight o'clock," she said. Turning away from him, she plunged her hand into the pocket which contained the phial. Severus saw it twist there, then clench into a fist. "We have--a little more to do before we get to work on our counter-curse." The mists of Healer Meed's Pensieve leapt up, further obscuring her already unrevealing back.

"Oh--all right," said Severus.

He left then, returning to the Leaky Cauldron, half-afraid of what might animate his dreams that night.













Into the Fold by Pasi [Reviews - 4]

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