"I wish," Severus Snape said in a whisper so low she could hardly hear it, "that everything had been different..."
The Potions Master stood up from the sofa, the weight of his presence vanishing from beside her. He turned and drew his wand from his robes, pointing it at her.
"Wait -" she said. "Before that -"
Somehow it was unbelievably hard to take the first step from fantasy to reality, from imagining to doing. Even if it was only one step and would never go any further. The gap stretched like the distance between two mountains.
The Sorting Hat had never offered her Gryffindor...
...was it fair that thus a woman's life be judged?
If you can't say it now, when you won't even remember it afterward - when nothing will continue from this moment, just as if you were to die - then when will you ever say it, to anyone?
"Can I have a kiss first?" said Rianne Felthorne.
Snape's black eyes studied her so intensely that her blush started to reach all the way to her chest, and she wondered if he knew perfectly well that she was still being weak, and it wasn't a kiss she'd truly wanted.
"Why not," the Potions Master said quietly, and he leaned his head down over the sofa and kissed her.
It was nothing like she'd imagined. In her fantasies Snape's kisses were fierce, seized from her, but this was - it was just awkward, actually. Snape's lips pressed down too hard on hers, forcing them back against her teeth, and the angle wasn't right and their noses were sort of bending and his lips were too tight and -
Only as the Potions Master straightened back up again, raising his wand once more, did she realize.
"That wasn't -" she said in a wondering voice, looking up at him. "That wasn't - was it - your first -"
Rianne Felthorne blinked at the stone cavern she'd discovered, still holding the extraordinary ruby she'd found embedded in the dirt of one corner. It was an incredible windfall, and she didn't know why looking at the ruby made her feel so sad, like she'd forgotten something, something that had been precious to her.
Chapter 77: SA, Aftermaths: Surface Appearances
Aftermath: Albus Dumbledore and -
The old wizard sat alone at his desk, in the unsilence of the Headmaster's office, amid the innumerable and unnoticed devices; his robes a gentle yellow, of soft fabric, not such clothing as he ordinarily wore before others. His wrinkled hand held a quill scratching away at an official-looking parchment. If you had somehow been there to watch his lined face, you would have been unable to deduce anything more about the man himself than you understood of the enigmatic devices. You might have observed that the face looked a little sad, a little tired, but then Albus Dumbledore always looked like that when he was alone.
In the Floo hearth there were only scattered ashes without a hint of flame, a magical door that had been shut so solidly as to stop existing. On the material plane, the great oaken door to the office had been closed and locked; beyond that door, the Endless Stairs stayed motionless; at the bottom of those stairs, the gargoyles that blocked the entrance did not flow, their pseudo-life withdrawn to leave solid rock.
Then, even as the quill was in the middle of penning a word, even as it was in the middle of scratching a letter -
The old wizard shot to his feet with a speed that would have shocked anyone watching, abandoning the quill in mid-letter to fall onto the parchment; like lightning he spun on the oaken door, his yellow robes whirling around him and a wand of dread power leaping into his hand -
And as abruptly, the old wizard paused, halting his motion even as the wand came to bear.
A hand struck upon the oaken door, three times knocking.
More slowly, now, that grim wand went back into the dueling holster strapped beneath the old wizard's sleeve. The ancient man moved forward a few paces, drew himself up into a more formal stance, composed his face. Nearby upon the desk, the quill moved to the side of the parchment, as though it had been carefully placed there rather than dropped in haste; and the parchment itself flipped over to show blankness.
With a silent twitch of his will, the oaken door swung open.
Hard as stones, the green eyes glared at him.
"I admit that I am impressed, Harry," the old wizard said quietly. "The Cloak of Invisibility would have let you evade my lesser means of vision; but I did not sense my golems step aside, nor the stairs turning. How did you come here?"
The boy walked into the office, step by deliberate step until the door closed smoothly behind him. "I can go anywhere I choose, with or without permission," that boy said. His voice seemed calm; too calm, perhaps. "I am in your office because I decided to be here, and to hell with passwords. You are greatly mistaken, Headmaster Dumbledore, if you think that I stay in this school because I am a prisoner here. I simply have not chosen, yet, to leave. Now keeping that in mind, why did you command your agent, Professor Snape, to break the agreement we made in this office, that he would not torment any student in her fourth year or below?"
The old wizard looked at the angry young hero for a long moment. Then, slowly enough not to alarm the boy, those wizened fingers drew open one of the manifold drawers of the desk, lifted out a sheet of parchment, laid it upon the desk. "Fourteen," the old wizard said. "It is not the number of all the owls sent last night. Only the owls sent to families with a seat on the Wizengamot, or families of great wealth, or families already allied with your foes. Or, in the case of Robert Jugson, all three; for his father, Lord Jugson, is a Death Eater, and his grandfather a Death Eater who died by Alastor Moody's wand. What the letters said, I do not know, but I can guess. Do you still not understand, Harry Potter? Each time Hermione Granger won, as you put it, the danger to her from Slytherin grew again, and yet again. But now the Slytherins have triumphed over her, easily and safely, without violence or lasting harm. They have won, and need fight no more..." The old wizard sighed. "So I had planned. So I had hoped. So it would have been, if the Defense Professor had not taken it upon himself to intervene. Now the dispute goes to the Board of Governors, where Severus will seem to conquer the Defense Professor; but that will not feel the same to the Slytherins, it will not have been over and finished in a moment, to their satisfaction."
The boy advanced further into the room, his head tilting back further to look up at the half-moon glasses; and somehow it was like the boy was looking down at the Headmaster, rather than up. "So this Lord Jugson is a Death Eater?" the boy said softly. "Good. His life is already bought and paid for, then, and I can do anything I want to him without ethical problems -"
"Harry!"
The boy's voice was clear as ice, frozen of purest water from some untouched spring. "You seem to think that the Light should live in fear of the darkness. I say it should be the other way around. I'd prefer not to kill this Lord Jugson, even if he is a Death Eater. But one hour of brainstorming with the Defense Professor would be plenty of time to come up with some creative way to wreck him financially, or get him exiled from magical Britain. That would serve to make the point, I think."
"I confess," the old wizard said slowly, "that the thought of ruining a five-hundred-year-old House, and challenging a Death Eater to war to the finish, over a scuffle in a Hogwarts hallway, had not occurred to me, Harry." The old wizard lifted a finger to push back his half-moon glasses from where they had slid a little down his nose, during his sudden motion earlier. "I daresay it would not occur to Miss Granger either, nor to Professor McGonagall, nor to Fred and George."
The boy shrugged. "It wouldn't be about the hallways," the boy said. "It would be justice for his past crimes, and I'd only do it if Jugson made the first move. The point isn't to make people scared of me as a wild card, after all. It's to teach them that neutrals are perfectly safe from me, and poking me with a stick is incredibly dangerous." The boy smiled in a way that didn't reach his eyes. "Maybe I'll buy an ad in the Daily Prophet, saying that anyone who wants to carry on this dispute with me will learn the true meaning of Chaos, but anyone who leaves me alone will be fine."