[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Chapter Forty-One of 'Adagio'- Deserving

[lomonaaeren]

“You’re all right.”

“Yes.”

“He—didn’t torture you?”

“No, he did not.” Severus removed his cloak and hung it on a hook. Harry had climbed to his feet, but had to brace himself with a hand on the stool that he’d been sitting on when Severus had been summoned. He looked pale and clammy, and a fine tremor was making its way through his shoulders.

“Were you so worried?” Severus asked as gently as he could. “He has tortured me before. I have always survived it.”

“All it takes is one time.”

Harry collapsed back onto the stool and buried his face in his hands. Severus eyed him. This seemed more than mere worry. He Summoned a Calming Draught without a word and held it out to Harry when he looked up.

“I don’t need it.”

“I say that you do.”

Harry hesitated, then took the potion from Severus and swallowed it with a gulp. A shimmering tremor crept up his shoulders, but then he sighed and leaned back, rolling his head on his neck. “What did he say about—Barty? Did he say anything?”

“That I was not to tell Barty what I was working on in the future. And that Barty had been tortured for asking too many questions.”

Harry grimaced and leaned back even further on his stool. “I see.”

“Is that what you expected him to say?”

“I think that the Dark Lord’s lack of action is getting to Barty,” Harry said, and opened his eyes. His face was still pale, but he did look better. “He said something to me that indicated that. And I wouldn’t have—expected the instruction to you to keep Barty in the dark, exactly, but it’s not that surprising.”

“Do you have a theory about why the Dark Lord isn’t attacking right now?”

Harry froze for a second. Then he blinked and said, “Not a theory.”

“What do you have?”

Harry hesitated. Severus waited, his hands resting on his knees, in as open and non-threatening a posture as possible. That Harry might feel threatened by him and wish to keep his own counsel was, of course, a possibility. But not one that Severus wished for.

“An idea,” Harry finally whispered.

“That is the name for a theory in other words.”

“It’s what I have.”

Severus met Harry’s eyes and then looked away with a sigh. “I do not wish to press you to speak if you are uncomfortable,” he murmured. “But you ought to know that the Dark Lord is becoming more unpredictable, not less. It will surely affect our future plans.”

“I know, sir.”

Severus paused. The confidence behind those words made him want to ask Harry more questions after all. He had forgotten, momentarily, that Harry had a connection to the Dark Lord’s mind and soul, and could be more sure of what the monster was doing than most of them could.

But since it seemed that Harry wasn’t going to talk about it for now, Severus put it out of his mind.

*

“I mislike this.”

Severus nodded to Albus, but said nothing, sitting with his hands folded on his lap. Albus had summoned Severus to his office as it seemed he did several times a month to do nothing but speculate on what could have made the Dark Lord change his tactics.

Severus truly had nothing to offer as far as that went, and the other secrets that he was keeping did not belong to Albus.

“What was his manner when he gave you these orders not to interfere with his other servants’ work?”

That was as much as Severus had told Albus about the summoning. He certainly was not going to tell him the truth about Barty. He repeated the words about the Dark Lord being seemingly unsettled, but also cold, and then sat back and waited for Albus to do something with the words.

Albus stared unseeingly at the wall. Then he turned back to Severus and returned to Severus’s least favorite of the many subjects they discussed. “Have you given any thought to making sure that Harry dies when needed, Severus?”

“My Vow is still too strong.”

Before, Albus had accepted that, although sometimes with an unhappy frown. Now, though, he leaned forwards and flattened his hand on the desk in front of him. Severus went still, watching him, wondering if he would have to kill Albus now after all, and not wait for the poison that was slowly working on him.

“Have you not considered that the world matters more than one boy?” Albus asked softly.

“Have you not considered that I swore to protect Lily’s child, and not the world?”

“Perhaps I should have insisted that you word the Vow differently.”

“Perhaps you should have.”

Albus stared at him. Severus stared back, and tried not to mentally compare himself to Harry. He knew this was a tactic Harry had sometimes used on people who didn’t want to leave him alone because of his fame, or perhaps because they wanted to be close to the power he had amassed in Slytherin House.

Perhaps it worked. Albus glanced aside. “Would you, then, be pleased to learn that I have discovered other Horcruxes?”

“I would,” Severus said, and he was not even lying. Harry was delicately picking his way through the Dark Lord’s mind, but precisely because they could not afford to have “their Lord” discover that he was there, it was work too delicate to press.

“I have searched out memories relating to Voldemort’s past,” Albus began, ignoring the way Severus flinched as always. “It seemed to me that he could not go untethered to the world, that there must always be someone who knew something about him even when he was drifting as a wraith.”

“Yes,” Severus murmured. “Perspicacious.”

Albus eyed him as if waiting for Severus to say something nastier, but Severus put a bland expression on his face and waited. Albus sighed. “I suspect that the snake he keeps around him may be a Horcrux.”

“That would make sense.”

“Have you noticed signs of unusual intelligence from the snake in your time with Voldemort?”

Severus flinched at the name again, mostly for show, and said, “Not intelligence, but devotion. Nagini is always present, and always focused on the Dark Lord, when you know that most snakes pay little attention to anything that is not their own desires.”

“That could come from a familiar bond.”

“Perhaps.”

“I remember your advice being more useful in the past, Severus,” Albus said, with sharpness that made him blink in surprise. “You need not agree with me if you think I am wrong.”

“You have made it clear that you will not listen to my advice on the most fundamental point where we disagree, Headmaster.”

“Harry Potter is a Horcrux, and he must be destroyed to kill Voldemort.”

“I do not see why I must be the one to destroy him.”

“You are the one I think would do the best job.”

Severus stared at Albus, and didn’t bother to hide his skepticism. “You could do it yourself,” he said, even though he didn’t really want to encourage Albus to go after Harry. But he only need delay any direct action on the Headmaster’s part until the end of this school year, to let the poison do its work. “You are not close to the boy, and you know that I am.”

“You will be gentler than I could be, Severus.”

“And it is the next step in my redemption, I suppose,” Severus said, with as much bitterness as he could.

“It does prove that you would put the safety of many above one person, which is not a lesson I think you have learned yet.”

“I cannot twist the Vow so that it will allow me to do this, Albus.”

“Have you tried, dear boy? With your Occlumency?”

“I’m not going to risk dying to prove your point, Headmaster.”

Albus regarded him in silence for long enough that Severus wanted to shift in place. He didn’t know what decisions the Headmaster was making, and he thought it might be disastrous not to know.

But he had told the truth. He was not going to try and break his Vow, and if Albus thought it was sheer cowardice rather than some other reason, he could think that.

“I will be forced to adopt—”

The cough caught Albus in mid-breath, as he bent over and wheezed, his hand pressing to his heart. Severus stared, hesitated as if he thought the Headmaster would recover on his own and he shouldn’t interfere, and then stood and hurried around the desk.

“Albus, are you well?”

Albus flapped a hand at the small crystal bowl of golden powder on his desk. Severus picked up a pinch of what he recognized as a Throat-Soothing Draught condensed to a powder, and blew it into Albus’s nostrils.

He didn’t say anything about the powder being less potent than the full potion. Albus would know that, and he would have his reasons for using this method. But when he sat back and the cough had subsided, Severus did ask, “Why do you need to use the powder instead of the potion?”

“My throat hurts too much to swallow any potion now.”

Severus stared at him. Then he said, “But—water? Tea? You could perhaps place the potion in one of those.”

“I can drink ordinary water or tea, or anything else without a potion in it. But the minute that the potion approaches my lips, my throat begins to burn.”

It was as the poison should work, given that it was picking up on the fiery tendencies of the dust shed by a phoenix. Severus still had to work to hold back his laughter. He moved back a step, then paused as if uncertain. “Perhaps Fawkes could heal you?”

Albus laughed a little desperately. “Watch what happens when he tries.” He extended his arm.

Fawkes soared across the office to them, but Severus didn’t think it was his imagination that the bird’s movements were slow and reluctant. He bowed his head, and his tears slid onto Albus’s skin.

Where they fell, they left blisters. Fawkes flew into the air with a mournful trill.

Severus ignored the way the bird stared at him. If Fawkes chose to bond with someone like Dumbledore, then he had to put up with people like Severus getting tired of being the man’s slaves. “How is this possible, Albus?”

He buried his satisfaction down deep beneath the iciest of the Occlumency shields in his mind. He had designed the poison to work this way—it would be worth nothing if a phoenix could simply heal it—but he had not known for sure that it would work.

Despite everything, including the Dark Lord’s twisted morality that meant Severus did not want to be one of the man’s slaves any more than he wanted to be one of Dumbledore’s, there was still the pride of an experiment well done.

“I do not know,” Albus was saying wearily, when Severus paid attention to him again. “I believe that Voldemort might have cast a curse on me when I found his Horcrux, but I do not know how, not from this distance.”

“You found another of them?”

“Yes.”

“Have you destroyed it yet?”

“I have tried a few methods, but neither of them have worked.”

“There is the basilisk venom, Headmaster,” Severus murmured. He could not reveal that he had some on hand from the potion that the Dark Lord was asking him to make, not without also revealing how he had received it, but—“I could go back to the Chamber of Secrets and retrieve the fangs.”

“I am seeking other methods, Severus.”

Albus’s voice was so firm that for a moment, he sounded as though the poison had never tormented him at all, as he sat up in his chair and locked his eyes on Severus’s. Then he began to cough again, and a small flame actually emerged from his mouth.

“You are ill, Headmaster.”

“I know that, Severus.”

“You may have to cease your research into other methods and simply use the basilisk venom.”

“Its use implies a curse on those who would use it, Severus, the same way that drinking a unicorn’s blood does.”

Severus blinked. Then he said, “No, it does not. It is an ingredient in several potions, and those brewers who used it never died early, that I heard, or suffered unusual effects. They merely had to be careful with it.”

“It is a cursed substance, Severus. I will not use it.”

Severus kept the rolling of his eyes purely internal. Just as he would not kill Harry himself, it seemed, Albus did not want to “sully his hands” with something that he would happily ask others to use. “Very well.”

“I want you to research methods into destroying a Horcrux without using basilisk venom or Fiendfyre.”

Fiendfyre was a Dark spell, but Severus still thought Albus’s refusal of the venom an idiotic idea. He simply nodded, however. He knew that making a sarcastic remark would not be taken in good part. “Very well.”

“Please send Poppy to me as you leave, Severus.”

Severus turned away, the knowledge that the mediwitch would be able to do nothing to cure the poison easing his irritation at being used as an errand boy.

You wanted me to find a way to work around an Unbreakable Vow? You wanted me to kill Harry Potter so that you didn’t have to do it, and you want me to find a way to destroy Horcruxes that does not involve the things most likely to destroy them? You deserve all that you will suffer, Headmaster.