Be Careful
94: What Proof You Seek
By Anne B. Walsh
“Let me make myself perfectly clear, Severus Prince Snape, since you seem incapable of taking hints on the matter.” Cecilia had her hands on her hips, and her chin jutted towards him in a rare sign of bad temper. “The only time I become tired of your company is when you ask me if I am. Your company is always welcome to me, and on the rare occasions when it is not I will tell you so myself and give you a time when it will be once again. Do we now understand one another?”
Severus got his amusement at her posture under control and nodded. “Understand, certainly. Believe...” He turned to look out the windows of the Headmaster’s office, where they had met one another tonight. “Belief takes time,” he said quietly. “As ludicrous as that sounds, after more than sixteen years.”
Light footsteps behind him, and she was there, gazing out at the grounds. “I feel sometimes that I have failed you,” she said.
“Failed me? You?” Severus turned to her in honest astonishment. “How?”
“You came to me for help and healing over the death of the woman you loved.” Cecy looked up at him, her eyes bleak. “And I fell in love with you myself. I cannot help feeling sometimes that I must touch a nerve with you, that I must remind you of her...”
“Only in good ways,” Severus assured her. “Or perhaps a bit of your temper derives from her.”
He realized too late what his words implied, as she frowned. “Derives?”
“A figure of speech,” he said quickly.
“If you say so.” She sighed once, then stepped closer to him, leaning her head against his shoulder. He slid his arm around her, the contours of back and side familiar to his fingers.
Yes, my dearest love, derives. The words, bitter, mocking, rang inside his head. You are nothing more than a toy of my imagination, created out of my great need, made from scraps of thought and fantasy. The failure here is not your falling in love with me, for you think us both real. It is my falling in love with you, when I have known all along that you are not...
Trying to banish such thoughts, he sought about for another topic, and found one. “Have I told you about the latest misadventures of my problem child?” he asked.
“No, do enlighten me.” Mischief sparked in her smile. “Has he set all the suits of armor to dancing about on tables?”
“Not yet,” Severus said darkly. “Though I have no doubt it is only a matter of time. No, but what he has done baffles me far more than that would. That is a magical prank, and would be easily conceived by the mind of a pureblood. His jokes mix the magical and the Muggle world astonishingly for a boy who was raised in the most isolationist of homes. He seems particularly fond of a certain group of comedians whose work I am sure you know, but who would never be tolerated by any pureblood group, though I believe some of them had magical ancestry and may even have been wizards themselves.”
“Ah yes, I know who you mean.” Cecy laughed softly. “Go on.”
Severus described the song and its first public performance, to which Alecto had accidentally added the perfect counterpoint, then added his discovery of the written lyrics, in his problem child’s handwriting, lying on a table in the library. “And this is not the only time he has shown knowledge beyond what he should own,” he said. “Certain music I have heard him whistle, jokes or quotations he has mentioned... unless he has been sneaking into the Muggle world when his parents were not looking, I cannot account for it.”
“Why could he not have been?” Cecy asked. “The lure of the forbidden has always drawn the young. All the more if they feel they have something to prove, and he certainly does.”
“Something to prove, yes.” Severus shook his head. “I thought he was trying to prove himself with Miss Lovegood—I believe I mentioned her around Christmas time?”
“The girl he rescued from the adults who were tormenting her, then took to his own bedroom.” Cecy smiled mysteriously. “I remember it well.”
“Yes, but it seems he did not destroy her spirit as far as he thought. Or perhaps she recovered afterwards, or took heart when she saw her friends again...” Severus shrugged the shoulder not currently occupied by a blonde head. “I have no idea, but she certainly seemed well-recovered when I opened the door of the manor house for her to enter with those of her friends who had not been captured, to rescue those who had been.”
“So perhaps he never tried to break her spirit at all,” Cecy suggested. “Perhaps he only made you believe that he had, so that your story would satisfy the rest of the world as to his intentions, and he could carry on with his wooing of her in private.”
Severus considered this for a few moments. “I suppose that could make sense of it,” he said finally. “But it seems out of character for him.”
“For what you think of him, perhaps,” Cecy countered. “Broaden your mind, Severus! See beyond what you believe now! You have told me yourself about all the things that puzzle you concerning this boy—put them together! Look at the larger picture! He is more than what you thought, he must be, or none of this makes sense at all!”
“If I did not know better, I would think you cared about him.”
“Perhaps I do.” Cecy looked up at him, smiling ruefully. “Shall we talk about something else, since this obviously troubles us both?”
“We shall. And it is your turn to choose the subject.”
“Very well. Give me a few moments to think of one.”
“As you like.”
Severus let his mind wander in the silence, wondering if he might have conflated Narcissa’s obvious love for her son into his formation of Cecilia—but how would she know that the boy he was describing was Draco?
Because I know it, of course. Though I have never named him to her, I think of him every time I speak about him, and she is part of my mind and knows my thoughts, if only subconsciously.
The familiar uneasiness washed over him as he recalled his love’s true identity; ruthlessly, he kept it in the front of his mind. He could not, he could never, forget that she was unreal, save only in brief stolen moments.
That way lies madness, and the self-inflicted sort is just as horrible as the sort conferred by others. I must retain my grip on reality, unless I wish to become a drooling idiot, or a recluse who lives wholly within his mind.
“Ah!” Cecy’s soft exclamation brought his attention back to her, and he smiled at her bright eyes. “I have just the thing. We shall not talk any more at all.”
Her arm went around his neck and drew his face down towards her.
For tonight, though, let the madness begin.
Morning is time enough to face the hell of my reality.
Cecilia lay beside her love in the soft half-darkness of his quarters and cursed her contrary heart, which would not let this be enough.
Some part of me knows it is a dream. Always, always, I know it is a dream. Even now that I know that he is real...
Though that has its own terrors. When he finds out that I am real, how will he react? What will he think of me? Will he believe I schemed and plotted to gain his heart, or will he accept the truth, that I, too, for most of our time together, thought him a creation of my fantasy?
She pushed the thoughts away. Enough. No more. Those things will come when they come; there is no sense in my trying to live them before their time.
Her slight motion of negation roused Severus, who shifted his position to look down at her. “I believe this is the point where I ask, ‘How was it for you?’” he inquired dryly.
Cecy laughed. “It was as it always is, an experience worthy of any woman in the world,” she said, craning her neck up to kiss him. “I do love you so.”
“And I you, though I fear I do not say it enough.”
She shook her head. “You say it enough that I am sure of its truth, but not so often that I wonder whom you are trying to convince with repetitions, me or yourself. In point of fact, my love, in all ways but one you comport yourself as a model husband.”
“And what one way might that be?” Severus’ eyes sparked with amusement, an expression Cecy knew his students had never seen.
“Oh, did I say one?” She pretended shock. “I meant many, of course, for you have a great many faults. Your untidiness, your lack of punctuality, your dislike of children—”
“Dislike of children?” he interrupted. “How did you come to that conclusion?”
“From your frequent, sarcastic tirades on the subject of your students.”
“Students and children are hardly synonymous.” He brushed a piece of hair out of his face. “I admit I dislike most of the traits children are said to possess, such as the emitting of loud and random noises, the interruption of whatever nearby adults are doing with ideas and questions of their own, and the need for constant attention. But I think it might be possible to train a child, to bring it up in such a way that these traits are minimized.” His hand moved to her hair, stroking it gently. “Or perhaps, if I grew attached to a child, I would not notice its faults so much.”
“Perhaps,” Cecy agreed, trying to control her racing heart. “I believe you mentioned something of the sort to me about this problem child of yours from school, the boy who so puzzles you. On the night his house fell, the night he saw his mother die, you came to me and you said that if he were truly the way he had seemed to you that night, that you would not be ashamed to call him your own son.”
“So I did.” Severus’ hand slowed and stopped, his face relaxing as he recalled.
“I swear to you,” Cecy murmured, “that night you saw his true self. Everything else has been only a blind, a game he plays to keep from being caught doing good.” She smiled, recalling an amusing coincidence she had discovered a few weeks ago. “By Oak and Ash and Thorn, I do swear it.”
Severus chuckled. “Swearing by my wand, are you?” he asked, looking down at her. “Or did you not recall it is oak?”
“I did, and mine is ash.”
“How funny.” He laughed again, obviously humoring her. “And who, then, is the thorn?”
“Draco, of course,” Cecy said, surprised that he hadn’t seen it right away. “Who did you—”
She stopped. Severus was staring at her, and the look in his eyes frightened her. “What is it?” she asked, sitting up.
“I have never used that name to you.” The words came out in a harsh whisper. “Not in this context. Not in this way. How do you know it?”
“I—” Cecilia scrambled out of the bed, snatching up her dressing gown. “I should go. I’ve said too much. Forgive me—”
“Cecilia—” He started for the door, trying to intercept her, but she was too quick. “Cecilia!”
The cry echoed in her ears as she missed her step on the stairs, as she stumbled into the blackness which appeared below her, as she fell and fell and—
Woke.
Her bed had never seemed so empty or so cold, though the tears that streaked her face were burning hot.
“Forgive me,” she whispered again to the unhearing air. “Forgive me.”
Severus moved through the routine of the next morning in a daze, listening with half an ear to the furious diatribe of Alecto Carrow on the continuing disappearances—today made the seventh day since Neville Longbottom had vanished, and a full twenty other students had now followed his lead—and nodding or interjecting a remark at appropriate moments. His mind was elsewhere.
She not only knew my problem child’s identity, she mentioned the wood his wand was made from. Something I do not know, and have never known. I examined my memories this morning to make sure of that.
But is it true? Did she merely invent it, to finish her reference, or is it reality?
And if it is...
“Yes, of course,” he said to Alecto, nodding absently to whatever she had just sputtered.
If it is, what does that mean?
Breakfast was over, and the students were standing up and heading for the doors. Severus leaned forward, watching Draco Malfoy fold his napkin and get up. Astoria Greengrass waved her hand, catching the boy’s attention, and he moved through the crowd to her side. A moment later, he nodded and stepped away, losing himself in the mass of students.
Oh, no. You will not get away from me so easily. Severus headed for the steps down from the dais, prepared to catch the boy before he slipped out the door—
“You want me, sir?”
It took all Severus’ self-control to keep from jumping a foot. “Yes,” he responded, turning to face Draco. “Let me see your—”
A middling-length, slender wand was produced. “Reasonably springy,” Draco said, twirling it between his fingers, then extending the grip to Severus. “Ten inches exactly. Unicorn tail hair core.”
“I see.” Severus examined the wand, obscurely proud that his hands were not shaking. “And the wood?”
“Hawthorn.” Draco leaned against the edge of the dais, perfectly at ease. “Also known as quickthorn, whitethorn, or just plain thorn.” He smirked one-sidedly, as though he knew why Severus was asking. “Will you excuse me, sir? I have a free period and I wanted to get some things ready to show Miss Greengrass this afternoon.”
“Of course.” Severus waved at the door. “Go.”
“My wand, sir?” Draco held out a hand. “I may need it.”
Unsure whether he wanted more to sentence this infuriating child to an afternoon scrubbing out cauldrons or laugh until his sides hurt at the absurdity of it all, Severus extended the wand silently. Draco accepted it, inclined his head, and loped towards the door.
So. Severus sat down on the steps of the dais, watching his problem child depart. Now what?
He had a feeling he would soon find out, and that he might wish he had not.
This is the last filler-ish chapter, I think. The big final action kicks off next time, as Slytherin House turns on itself, Draco does something he swore he’d never do, and Neville gets a great moment—stay tuned, and encourage me to keep this up!