Be Careful
108: Where Your Destiny Leads
By Anne B. Walsh
Severus stared at Lily, momentarily lost for words. “That’s impossible,” were the first ones to return to him. “I felt it happen.”
“Oh, your body died. There’s no doubt about that. But just before it did, Draco used this.” Lily held out her free hand, in which there sparkled a pinch-necked beaker made of dark glass. “They call it a soul flask. It works like the Dementor’s Kiss, drawing the soul out of the body, though it doesn’t do nearly as much damage. To you, it did barely any, because you were almost gone already.”
“Almost gone?” Severus queried. “Not entirely?”
Lily smiled. “Not entirely.” The soul flask disappeared, and she laid her free hand over his. “I know it’s hard to believe, Sev, but if you want to, you can go back.”
“Go back? To a dead body?” Severus shuddered.
“No!” Lily stared at him. “Why would you—oh, good heavens, I never explained!” She laughed ruefully, shaking her head. “Just goes to show I’m not perfect yet. No, there’s a living body ready for you, if you care to take it.” Her wicked smile twisted her lips again. “Somewhat used, but in good condition, and unMarked.” Both pronunciation and the tap of her finger against his left forearm added the capital letter within the word.
Severus scratched absently at the place where his Dark Mark had been. “This sounds like a story I simply must hear.”
“Why not see it instead?” Lily whistled once, and a scene sprang to life beside them, not as large as a Muggle cinema screen but far more detailed and in three dimensions.
Severus watched in silence as the man he had seen a few moments before, the man who was and was not him and whose Patronus was the tiger, deliberately sent that Patronus away from himself to protect two children and a young man from a swarm of dementors. The Kiss, the Warrior Patronus in owl form, and the disappearance of both the other Severus’ soul and the three young people all played out, and the scene itself vanished as the other dementors began to search for their missing prey.
“Do I recognize the eldest of those three?” Severus asked, turning back to Lily.
“You do.”
“So he knows about this.”
“He knows a great deal more than you thought he did.” Lily chuckled. “Didn’t you ever realize what it meant that you saw your Cecilia in his memories?”
“I thought he had invaded my privacy.” Severus ran back over the times he had seen that beloved face inside grey eyes. “But the ways that he saw her, the places and times he remembered her... I should have known this long ago, shouldn’t I?”
“I can’t really blame you because you didn’t. It’s an awfully fantastic jump to make. But now that you’re here, I can tell you that yes, they know each other. She’s actually adopted him.”
Severus nodded. “She told me as much at Christmas, though without a name attached. But how did he ever reach her? How did it begin?”
“The same way it did in your case. Dumbledore had pity on him and gave him a last chance to find the help he needed. Only when he was working on Draco, he was in the last moments of his life, and he was working wandlessly, so he had to use far more magic than he did with you, and that caused an unexpected snag...”
The whole story, told with frequent recourse to the magical cinema, took what would probably have been a few hours in the world’s time to tell. This place, though, admitted of no needs of the body, no hunger or thirst, and Severus listened to the final explanation of what Draco hoped to do tonight as attentively as he had to the first few words of the tale, in which a boy who’d been raised to think weakness a moral failure admitted at the lowest moment of his life that he needed help.
And so admitting, by Dumbledore’s magic, he was granted an opportunity to find that help. Just as I once was, when I was given a task I thought might be beyond my strength, the task of living on and guarding the son of the man I hated and the woman I loved... He glanced at Lily. Or thought I loved.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Lily asked.
“That I found the woman I truly did love in search of the healing I needed to serve the one I never did? It is.” Severus gazed at the screen, which was paused on a picture of Cecilia, asleep in a wing chair, and Draco, stooping to kiss her forehead.
“You could say ‘do,’” suggested Lily softly. “If you mean it.”
Severus smiled, a memory of his own coming to him. “I said it to her once, long ago. With Dumbledore, Minerva, and her husband—a Tom Riddle directed towards good, no less—as witnesses.”
“Do you want that for real?” Lily tapped his elbow, bringing his attention back to her. “The decision’s yours to make, Sev. No one knows better than you do that life can be hard, and that world has as much trouble as the one we were born in. Even love isn’t a guarantee that things will go the way you want them to. If you think you can’t deal with it again, if you’d rather be finished with it all, then you can go that way.” She motioned towards the brick wall that divided platform nine and three-quarters from the Muggle portion of King’s Cross. “But if you’re willing to take the chance...”
A whistle made them both look up. The Hogwarts Express was pulling in.
“Not a very hard decision,” Severus said, standing. “That world never held much for me, except you.” He bent down and kissed Lily on the cheek. “Thank you for what you did give me.”
Smiling, Lily touched the spot where his lips had rested. “And what was that?”
“A reason to believe there was more to life than pain.” Severus crossed the platform in three steps and jumped onto the train as it came to a stop. “And the ability to recognize true love when I found it. Even if it did take me seventeen years.”
“Some lessons are harder to learn than others.” Lily’s eyes were soft and happy, the way Severus had always loved to remember them. “I’m just glad you learned this one in time.”
“So am I.”
The train whistled once more, and the brakes let go. Severus tightened his hold around the bar.
“There’s a Lily there too.” Lily raised her voice to be heard over the sound of the engine straining. “She wants to be friends. Her James doesn’t approve.”
A snicker got away from Severus before he could stop it. “He needs something not to approve,” he shouted back as the Hogwarts Express began to move out. “It’s in his nature.”
His last sight of Lily was of her laughing. “I’ll see you again!” she called between chortles. “Give my love to Cecy!”
Severus waved his hand to tell her he would just before the train rounded the first bend.
Darkness descended, the sense of being cramped returned, but this time he knew it for what it was, a passing phase and not the first seconds of a hellish eternity. I endured eighteen years of sorrow and loneliness. I can take a few minutes within a flask.
Though Draco does deserve some type of revenge for not warning me beforehand.
He settled down to pass the time by formulating plans that were cruel enough to satisfy his need for vengeance but would neither horrify Cecy overmuch nor leave permanent scars on the boy.
The end came without warning while he was deeply involved in the fourth such plan—a sudden shock, a sound of shattering glass, and his spirit-self stood in the Great Hall of Hogwarts, the sky above his head brightening with the oncoming dawn.
I must hurry. If I cannot find the body waiting for me within a few moments, I will die in truth and be forced to choose between moving on and becoming a ghost.
He hurried towards the side door that hid a shortcut to the fourth floor, which was the last place he had seen the entrance to the hospital wing. Corridors, stairways, rooms blurred together, and within what seemed like seconds, he stood beside a black-haired body on a white-linened bed, watching its chest rise and fall.
Am I in time? Can I still enter?
A tentative hand reached out and passed through the hand of the body, with no effect. An arm likewise did nothing. It was only when Severus knelt and merged his chest with that of the body on the bed that he began to feel a gentle pull inward. With a gasp like coming out of the water, he drew himself free, shivering.
I am in time, but am I sure I want to do this? It is more than a case of dead men’s shoes—it is a dead man’s body, his entire life. Do I have any right to take what he had no choice about leaving?
Across the room, someone sighed. Severus turned to see who it was.
One hand bunched around her sheets, a worry-line between her brows, Cecilia Black slept in a bed at the other end of the ward.
I am being overscrupulous again. My counterpart made his choice when he sent his Patronus away. What happens to his leavings is no longer any concern of his—and I am not sure I would care if it were, since he was foolish enough to overlook this treasure in his very backyard. I have been given a second chance at the life I squandered, and I will be damned if I waste it again.
He blew a kiss to Cecy, then climbed onto the bed and lay down within the softly breathing body.
For three seconds, nothing happened. Then he began to itch everywhere, but his hand would not respond to his urge to scratch. His limbs felt as heavy as though he had been doused in Swelling Solution, and he seemed to be sinking slowly into too-hot water. His chest squeezed his heart and lungs, his skull pressed down on his brain at all points, his hands and feet twitched wildly as a wave of cold replaced the hot—
Severus Snape opened his eyes. His mouth felt stale and dry, his muscles were stiff, but his body was his own again. The chill which had passed over him still lingered, though, and a rhythmic rasping noise had joined it.
Chill? Rasping? That sounds like—
He sat up rapidly, his hand going to his wand pocket. His head spun, but he clutched the frame of the bed with his other hand and willed the dizziness away. There was no time for it, not when a dementor floated near the end of the hospital wing.
Why has Cecilia been left here unattended? My own case, or this body’s, I can understand—until a few moments ago, there was no soul in it for a dementor to endanger—but what carelessness made them forget about her?
Whatever the answer to that question, Severus knew it would have no bearing on the dementor’s actions. The black-hooded head was turning this way and that, apparently undecided as to which victim it would strike first. It looked somehow puzzled, as though it had known that this room should hold only one soul for its taking and not two.
This is no time for anthropomorphizing. That is a beast of darkness, nothing more, and it has no business here. Swallowing to try to bring some moisture to his throat, Severus drew his wand. I only hope I have the strength to chase it away...
“Expecto patronum,” he whispered harshly.
No silver doe issued from his wand, not even a puff of mist, and now the dementor had made up its mind decisively. It advanced down the ward, passing Cecy’s bed without a second look, accelerating towards Severus with its hands already on its tattered hood. Desolation and darkness swept ahead of it, and for one second Severus heard Lily’s angry voice, her footsteps moving away from him—
No. That belongs to another life now. In this world it has no meaning, and no place.
He released the bedframe and rose to his feet, wand held out in front of him. “Expecto patronum,” he said in a firm, clear voice.
The doe leapt forth from his wand’s tip and drove her front hooves squarely into the dementor’s face. It fell back and fled from the room. Severus’ Patronus followed it as far as the door, then stopped to look back at him. “Chase it away,” he told her. “As far as you can, so that it will not return.” She bowed her head and galloped off.
As for me... He sat down limply, sliding his wand away more by reflex than by design. It has been a long day. I believe I need a nap.
But if I can, I would like to take care of one piece of business first.
His legs did not want to support his weight, but he found he could coerce them into doing so by holding onto the ends of the beds as he passed. Moving jerkily, his knees wobbling in a way he would never have permitted if there had been spectators, he made it at last to Cecilia’s bedside and looked down at her. The worry-line was gone from her forehead, and she was smiling in her sleep.
“My little love,” he murmured fondly. “My wife that was, and will be again. Take this as a promise of things to come.”
Kneeling down, he laid his head on the pillow beside hers and pressed a kiss to her lips.
The return journey to his own bed was accomplished on all fours, but Severus would not have cared if he had needed to crawl on his belly like a snake. He reached his destination at last, dragged himself up and onto the mattress, and with some degree of malice aforethought arranged his limbs precisely as those of the soulless body had been arranged.
Not my preferred position in which to sleep, but in this condition I could sleep standing on my head.
Almost before he could finish the mental sentence, his prophecy came true. His last sensation was that of a tingling wash of energy passing through his body, but since it did not feel harmful he dismissed it.
Time enough to see what it was when... I... wake...
Silence fell over the Hogwarts hospital wing, broken only by the sound of two people breathing in perfect harmony.
Author Notes:
Yes, I know you can’t really breathe in harmony, but it sounded too good to leave out. How about it, everybody? Three more chapters sound good, for a grand total of 111? Give me lots of reviews and I’ll see if I can’t make it work!