Orpheus

Chapter 27

By Pigwidgeon37

During the short period between Severus’s arrest and his death, Hermione had cried a lot. It seemed to make sense then, for even though Severus was far away from her in a cell at the Ministry, he was nonetheless still alive and part of the world. Before his existence had been wiped out once and for all, all kinds of crazily impossible things might have happened, miraculous escapes, wondrous changes of mind, all sorts of improbable but not impossible things. To cry, to let out her despair meant that some deity might listen and have pity on her. As soon as he was dead, irretrievably removed from her world, her tears, too, had lost all their significance. She wouldn’t have been able to cry even if she had tried or wanted to. Her eyes had remained barren, as had her heart.

But now, amidst the shards of her bottle, each of them curved into an evil glittering smile, her senses, hitherto dulled by alcohol, awoke with a start. Each time she inhaled, she smelled the sweetish aroma of the whisky soaking the carpet, mixed with her own unpleasant body odour; she was suddenly aware of the weight of her limbs, the weakness of her legs. And the pain had returned. She fell to her knees, unable to defend herself against this violent, unexpected assault, almost grateful for the sudden sharp sting she felt when the pieces of glass cut into her skin. The objects surrounding her, which had been like forms painted on the wallpaper lining her tomb, jumped into three-dimensionality and became once again real and tangible. And the tears began to flow.

Cringing and whimpering under the weight of her grief, Hermione curled into a foetal position; she wound herself into a coil so tight that she thought her lower back must snap. She didn’t want to be alive, she desired nothing more than to return to that state of semi-consciousness, where she’d been nothing but a numb body that had successfully dissociated itself from its mind. For she knew, she felt with blindingly sharp clarity that, once she was again complete, she would have to let go of her self-induced catatonia and face reality. There would be memories other than the two she had allowed inside her mind, there would be unimaginable pain and, worst of all, there would be a future. With all her might, she tried to stop her body and mind from reuniting, but they seemed perversely glad to have found each other again. They wanted to torture and harass and poke her, until she’d get up from that carpet, clean herself up and leave her room.

In the end, she gave in to the realization that the walls of her refuge had been shattered. She might stay there for another while, so as to gather some strength and ride out the worst waves of agony. But sooner or later she’d have to emerge, a black moth springing from a chrysalis it had entered as a multicoloured butterfly.

Sans amour s’en aller sur la mer… Yes. She’d allowed herself the illusion that the sea was inside her. But no. The sea was life, her future. She would have to venture out there, alone, without her love.

*

From the very moment his training had started, Severus had tried, and successfully so, to split his mind in half. One part was absorbing the information provided by Mr. Cox, it was busy steering his limbs, formulating questions and answers that made sense. The other part, which his Occlumency skills kept well hidden from possible intruders—Legilimency was a rare skill, but he couldn’t exclude that Cox might master it with absolute certainty—was working all the time. This self-imposed dichotomy felt strange but by no means new. He’d had to do much the same during his spy days.

The concealed part of his mind was frantically trying to figure out a way of escape. Because, unless he found it very soon, sooner than he had been prepared for, it would be a lot trickier, if not impossible. This was a logical deduction he had made pretty quickly, based on two facts: firstly, that his training wasn’t going to last very long. The difficult part was the magical one, and he really didn’t have to learn anything about Unforgivable curses, hexes or duelling. The rest was Muggle-related, and hard though he was trying to feign slowness in grasping new concepts, he couldn’t fool Cox beyond a certain degree. Secondly, Cox had told him—whether deliberately or inadvertently Severus wasn’t sure, but it didn’t really matter—that, once his training was over, he was going to be placed under a permanent location spell. Not that it came as a big surprise, he’d expected something like this, but the realization that it was going to happen within the next three or four weeks had shocked him all the same. Therefore he had to act as soon as possible.

Over the first couple of days, he had found out that escaping by magical means—like breaking the wards and Disapparating—was impossible. The Anti-Apparition shields were a little less strong in the bathroom adjacent to his bedchamber (no surprises there, either; magic was less efficient in or around water, the piping being enough to somewhat lessen its effect) but still too solid for him to even think of making so much as a dent. With his wand, he might have succeeded. But without it, all the effect he might achieve was to draw Cox’s attention to the fact he didn’t need one. So the idea had been discarded immediately.

To let go of this possibility had caused Severus considerable frustration. But his determination to get out in time was too strong to be daunted for long. If he couldn’t do it the magical way, he’d have to do it the Muggle way, which had the additional benefit of being completely unexpected. Not entirely Muggle, of course. Essentially Muggle, that described it best. A little like Sirius’s method of getting out of Azkaban—of course he had needed his Animagus skills to transform himself into a dog. The escape itself, however, had been ingeniously simple.

*

Knockturn Alley might have been turned into a fashionable place with fancy restaurants, bars and designer shops after Voldemort’s defeat, but some of its old flair had remained all the same. Except for a few trendy watering holes near the junction with Diagon Alley, Knockturn Alley had become a gathering point for the young, the restless and the adventurous—in all likelihood exactly because there still was that lingering atmosphere of sleazy darkness—and only very rarely would the self-respecting middle-class witch or wizard venture into Barbaric Burt’s Billiard Bar or Daring Dessous by Donna further down the road. The leading wizarding clans of the country, too, raised an aristocratic eyebrow at the parvenus whose business was as prosperous as their pedigree was similar to a wilting bonsai. Knockturn Alley’s clientele therefore consisted of young people—some of them artists, most of them just world-weary rich youngsters—and those living at the margins of wizarding society.

There were surprisingly many of the latter. This, of course, was due to the wizarding world’s general narrow-mindedness. Surprising though it seemed to Muggle-born wizards and witches, those coming from purely magical families didn’t find it astonishing at all. In wizarding terms, a generation meant seventy, even seventy-five years instead of thirty and, regarded from that point of view, the Victorian age was less than two generations away. Until the late 1970’s, the average marrying and childbearing age had been forty-two (with a few exceptions, of course, such as for example the Potters), and young people had stayed at home with their parents for many years, before they went out to live on their own and have a family. Hence, the traditions, beliefs and values of wizards were a lot more stable than their Muggle counterparts. Homosexuality was barely tolerated among men and not at all among women. Extra-conjugal relations were strongly condemned. Life as a single—except for scholars and a few high-ranking Ministry officials, who were granted more freedom because of their more important responsibilities—was apt to raise all sorts of suspicions, especially where women were concerned. People with so-called ‘new ideas’ were looked at askance and treated like candidates for a prolonged stay at St. Mungo’s. (Hermione had been lucky, indeed, to have developed her ideas about House Elves at Hogwarts, under a benign, open-minded headmaster like Albus Dumbledore). Prostitutes were flat-out despised.

And so, Knockturn Alley had become—quite contrary to the wishes of those who had recreated it out of ruins and debris—a kind of Quartier Latin within London’s magical district; not the sugary romanticized version tourists see nowadays, but the harsh, violent, smelly reality of the 1800’s. Some people were even courageous enough to live there, but most of them were the owners of the restaurants, pubs and shops, who had set up their quarters directly above the premises, merely because it was comfortable. There were brothels, too, cheap ones as well as luxurious ones; and somebody—mysterious, anonymous, invisible, almost a legend—made loads of galleons by renting out small, cosy flats to couples whose relationship had to remain secret for some reason or other.

This somebody was, of course, none other than Draco Malfoy. Via a straw man, he had acquired a few dozens of those flats right after starting business in France, during the years when many had still been reluctant to buy property on those oh-so-notorious grounds and thus the prices had been ridiculously low.

It was in such an apartment, decorated in a vaguely Art Déco style, that Draco was now sitting, sipping his whisky and reading the newspaper, waiting for Mr. Fairchild, Deputy Head of the Department of Experimental Charms. Huckleberry Fairchild, who had attended Hogwarts at roughly the same time as Minerva McGonagall, had a reputation of being the paradigmatic mad scientist. This was probably the main reason why his deep and sincere sympathies for Lord Voldemort and his ideology had never been discovered. Nobody, not even the shrewdest Auror, would ever have suspected that the tall, lanky man with the enormous nose and the receding chin, who appeared to be the epitome of harmless, loathed the Ministry and everything it stood for. But he did, and he had been hiding it very carefully.

When Draco had contacted him and explained about the favour he needed (not without mentioning that it would be exceedingly well paid), Fairchild had accepted at once. He’d hated Fudge, he’d hated Arthur Weasley even more, but his hate of Harry Potter was limitless. So he had, of course, jumped at the occasion of causing the Minister considerable damage; besides, there was the added benefit of the Malfoy money, of which he intended to get plenty. Just because he loathed the Minister didn’t mean he couldn’t use ministerial authority for his own ends and threaten to denounce Malfoy.

As he entered the flat, he didn’t look too happy, though. His long face, receding hairline, and the dimensions of his nose combined with the inexistence of his chin gave him the air of a frustrated vulture at the best of times. Today, however, the vulture was definitely wearing an expression of deep avian gloom.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Malfoy.” He folded his long body into an armchair and stared at the younger wizard.

Slightly put out by the other’s unwavering look, Draco gestured at the bottle. “A drink?”

“Might as well,” Fairchild replied.

“That doesn’t sound very… cheerful,” Draco observed, handing him a filled tumbler.

“There’s no reason to be cheerful.”

“I beg your pardon?” Anger flared in Draco’s eyes. “You had two weeks, which was more than enough, as you told me. So what happened?”

“Well…” Turning his glass between his pale spider fingers, Fairchild glanced past Draco at a magical copy of Gustav Klimt’s Kiss, where the couple had moved into a more comfortable sitting position instead of kneeling on the ground. “Nothing happened, that’s the problem,” he continued when he had finished his contemplation. “Or rather…”

“Out with it, for Merlin’s sake! Didn’t they show you the formula? Was it impossible for you to copy it?”

“Oh, they did show it to me, because there’s an incantation involved and they hoped I might be able to put it right.”

“Put it right?” Draco echoed incredulously, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Fairchild nodded gravely. “Put it right. Yes. Because somebody seems to have altered it, unfortunately beyond recognition or repair. I suppose it was Snape, of course it might also have been his wife, but—”

“Wait a minute!” Draco interrupted him. “I’m still trying to follow you. So, the Aurors seized all the material they found in Snape’s laboratory, took it to the Ministry, where the Potions experts tried to brew that Draught, and… it didn’t work?”

“Not at all,” Fairchild replied, “Didn’t work at all. And, if you ask me, the incantation isn’t the only thing that’s been changed. Everything seems wrong—some of the ingredients, the dosage, pretty much everything.”

“May he rot in Hades,” Draco breathed. “That bastard! But—” he abruptly raised his head “—what about the Mudblood? His wife?”

Fairchild chuckled. It was an entirely unpleasant sound. “Funny you should mention her. It seems that Potter was trying to be shrewder than he is. Just imagine, he wanted to make sure Snape’s wife wouldn’t talk, and so he obliviated her! That’s what I call hoist with one’s own petard, eh?”

“Oh no!” Draco closed his eyes and leaned back, momentarily unable to breathe. When he had regained his bearings, he asked, “And nobody else was in on the secret?”

“Absolutely nobody.” Fairchild grinned happily, as if all this were a good joke. "Potter, that idiot, had made the Snapes swear a blood oath."

Dizzy, as if he had just received a physical blow, Draco felt himself sway and grabbed the armrests of his chair. He had foreseen many difficulties, but not this one. When and, more importantly, why had Snape had the time to alter that formula? The whole operation had been top secret, none of the Aurors had known the reason why they were sent to Hogwarts. But maybe one of them had talked all the same… Snape and that crazy old maniac Moody were fast friends, after all… And now everything was lost. The secret had been buried together with Snape, his wife's memory wiped, and the pages Lucertola had copied, though they gave a pretty good idea of what the Snapes had been after, were far from sufficient for him to even dream of reconstructing the recipe. All was lost. Draco almost laughed at the absurdity of his wish that Snape hadn't been executed but sent to Azkaban. There might be enough of his rational mind left to dig the secret out from. But the mind of a dead man was an impregnable fortress, forever closed and sealed with the seven seals of death. "That stupid bastard!" Draco choked out, "He should have considered this possibility and let Snape live until they had tested the formula!"

Fairchild made a gesture that illustrated what exactly he thought of Potter's mental faculties. "Too afraid of bad press and public pressure. He had to get it all over with as quickly as possible, or people might have become aware of what was really going on there." He helped himself to a refill and, while pouring the whisky into his glass, scrutinized Draco from under half-lowered eyelids. "Potter's quite antsy these days," he remarked, as casually as possible.

"My most sincere condolences," spat Draco.

"You're not interested in hearing why our esteemed Minister is so out of his depth?"

"Fairchild, I believe I'm not exaggerating if I declare that nothing could possibly cause me less concern than Potter's state of mind."

"Ah, well…" Fairchild took a careful sip. "It seems Potter isn't the only one making wrong decisions here."

"What exactly—" intrigued despite himself, Draco leaned forward and stared at the other's unmoved face "—are you implying, Fairchild?"

"That maybe you ought to show a bit more interest in Potter's current worries."

Draco's eyes widened. "He isn't going to send me off into exile again, merely because he was too big a moron to—"

"Oh, no! No!" Fairchild grinned. "That would probably make him happy, wouldn't it? And he's certainly not happy now."

"You have a point there. So why should I bother about him?"

Fairchild gave him a beatific smile, which bared his ugly, equine front teeth. "I'd risk a lot if I told you that, Mr. Malfoy."

"You know that money isn't a problem," Draco replied. Sure it wasn't—if Fairchild told him everything there was to be told right now, he was going to leave the premises dead and transfigured into some small object safely stored in Draco's pocket. Draco hadn't yet decided what it was to be, but was strongly tempted to turn the disgusting sleazeball into a miniature vulture. Or maybe an egg. Death as transition to another life. How very deeply symbolic. He grinned.

"Fine," said Fairchild, mistaking the grin for a sign of largesse. "Would it be worth a thousand galleons?"

"A thousand? Quite the modest one, aren't you, Fairchild? Let's say I give you five hundred now, and the rest if your information is really as valuable as you seem to believe?"

"Done," Fairchild said promptly.

A heavy pouch made its way across the table, and Fairchild weighed it with the air of an expert. Unaccountably vexed, Draco observed him with raised eyebrows. Did the man really believe he'd cheat to gain a few galleons, or what? A Malfoy always paid what was due. Well, he thought, Fairchild was going to get his due in more than one sense. The idea cheered him up so much that he was able to maintain a polite smile. "Well?" he prompted.

But Fairchild was in no hurry. He ceremoniously stored the pouch away in his voluminous robes before picking up his glass again and leaning back. "You know about the Ministry's Special Unit, I suppose?"

"The Assassins? Yes, of course."

Fairchild grinned. "Potter wouldn't appreciate hearing that at all. He prefers to call them Special Unit. Anyway, you certainly also know how they are being recruited?"

Draco shrugged. "I never gave the matter any thought, to tell you the truth. I remember that my father made use of them once, back when I was still little. And I still don't see the importance the Assassins might possibly have for me."

"Tsk, tsk." Fairchild shook his head and winked. "Quite the impatient one, aren't you, Malfoy?" he said, imitating Draco. "About ninety percent of the Assassins are foreigners. Not every country has a prison as safe as Azkaban—if they want to get rid of a particularly dangerous and unsavoury individual, whom for some reason they think it is wiser not to kill right away, they sometimes put them up for… you could almost call it an auction. The highest bidder gets them, and they're trained—you can imagine the rest."

"I can, indeed, imagine… Though I'm still not convinced that this interesting lecture was worth five hundred galleons."

"You are certainly also aware," Fairchild continued, unmoved, "of the bond that still exists between the four so-called heroes who killed the Dark Lord?"

"Yes, I—" Draco sat up straight and stared at the other wizard. "You aren't by any chance implying that Potter made a deal with Snape, for old times' sake? Fake execution, new identity as an Assassin? That would be too—"

"Preposterous, eh? But it seems as if he'd done just that. And the execution was by no means fake, you know."

It took Draco a while to process the information. "You mean they killed him for real and then gave him—but that's impossible, you said the Draught didn't work!"

Fairchild looked like a parent observing their child unpack a Christmas present. "Impeccable logic, Mr. Malfoy. It seems that what happened was this: they gave him the Draught my colleagues from Experimental Potions had brewed right before the trial started. He drank the hemlock extract, survived and was taken to wherever they train those Assassins. What would be the point of giving it to him after he died?"

Draco furiously bit his lip. He'd have to kill Fairchild in any case, whether his information was sufficient or not—nobody must ever know about this property of the Draught. "It has the power to reawaken the dead," he said curtly. "So why did they give it to Snape before he was executed?"

Evidently, the Minister had kept the secret well, for Fairchild was staring at him with a mix of fascination and horror. "It brings—we never were told… we merely knew that it protects from being killed."

Now it was Draco's turn to gape, open-mouthed, at the wizard sitting opposite him. Suddenly what his father had told him about the events of thirty-five years ago made a lot more sense. "So that was why the Potters were researching it! And successfully, as it seems, for that must be how Potter… Never mind. So what you're trying to tell me is this: they made Snape ingest the useless potion, but he survived all the same?"

"Exactly. Which means that he didn't drink ours, but had somehow managed to smuggle a sample of his own concoction into prison and managed to switch it with the one he knew must be faulty. Anyway, our specialists wanted to further develop the recipe—make it last longer, etcetera—brewed another batch and tested it on a House Elf. I can tell you—" he chuckled "—they went through quite a lot of House Elves, seeing as they started firing AK at them twelve hours after they'd ingested the potion. Not that they were overly worried, you see, they only knew for sure that it lasted three hours. Or so they thought. When they were down to three and another elf fell dead, they started getting a bit worried. At two, they panicked, and when one of them AK-ed the elf while it was still holding the vial, there was total mayhem. Of course, they brewed another batch, and then another. There might have been some error. Only there wasn't. So this morning, the Head of Experimental Potions had the pleasant task of informing the Minister."

Draco grinned. "He must have been furious!"

"Oh, yes, he was. Mostly because he'd just had another visitor. Guess who."

"I honestly have no idea. And how would you know so exactly what went on in Potter's office?"

"Not everybody at the Ministry's his friend. And I know quite a lot of those who aren't. So I hear this little rumour and that bit of information—it's just a matter of putting them together the right way, you know. So, should I tell you who was the other visitor?"

Draco rolled his eyes and impatiently waved his hand.

"I'll take that as a yes. It was Potter's spymaster. It seems that Severus Snape has managed to escape a few days ago, killing a certain Cox in the process. He's one of the most experienced trainers of Assassins. Was, I ought to say. And Snape has apparently vanished into thin air."

This, Draco decided, was all he needed to know. "I'll just get the other five hundred," he remarked, rose from his chair and went to a chest of drawers on the other side of the room, right behind Fairchild's back.

Fairchild nodded and grabbed the whisky bottle for another refill. It toppled over when he fell forward, and rolled off the low table.

"Just in time," Draco murmured, striding across the room to bend down and pick it up. "There's really no excuse for wasting a perfectly good whisky, is there?"

*

The car's tank had been full to the brim. This, and nothing else, had been Severus's reason to try and escape on the ninth day of his training. It was a day as good as any other, really, because he had made all the preparations he could.

Ultimately, it had been the right thing to do. He had succeeded, yes, but even if he hadn't, he couldn't have endured one more minute of uncertainty. This, and not the fear of getting killed had been the worst of it all. Without a wand, he had felt like he imagined people must feel after an amputation, trying their new prosthesis. Theoretically, you knew it was going to work, because you had put it on the right way and knew what the thing was able to do. He, too, had been sure he'd cast the right spells and, after what he had accomplished in prison, he had also been sure they were going to hold. But all that was rational knowledge, and the rest of him had not been so convinced. After all, he had been constrained to perform the spells one by one, surreptitiously, while pretending to be looking at the car's motor. There had been no need for him to simulate total ignorance and inability to learn. The strange assembly of tubes, containers of all shapes and sizes, wires and screws had been a complete mystery; and had he really aimed at understanding it (as Cox had claimed he must) he'd have had to look at it a good deal more. As things were, he had made good use of the cover the open hood provided to put arming and unbreakable spells on every single piece of the car within his reach. Protecting the rest of the vehicle had been more difficult, but he had managed by leaning casually against this or that part, pretending to be listening to Cox's explanations while he pronounced incantations under his breath.

The car had been one part of his plan. The more difficult one, really. The easier part had been procuring himself a weapon. Trying to filch one of the Muggle guns Cox was teaching him to use had been tempting, but he had resisted the temptation. Too great was the danger of being caught red-handed or found out. Besides, he didn't like those weapons and knew he'd be more comfortable with something traditional, something he knew how to handle.

Unfortunately, wandless transfiguration wasn't something he could do. But—as he had already done with the car—he could apply unbreakable charms, so that almost any long, pointed object might be turned into a weapon. On the fourth day, when his plan had already taken a distinct shape in his mind, he had therefore asked Cox for a peeing break during their driving lesson. While emptying his bladder against the trunk of a pine tree, he'd looked for a branch that would fit his purpose, broken it off and slipped it into his shirt. The next day, he had cast an unbreakable charm on it and the day after, he'd used a severing charm to cut one end into a neat and quite sharp point. The thought of having to murder a man who was doing nothing but his duty had been weighing heavily on his conscience, but then he knew that it was either his life or Cox's. And he wanted to stay alive. He wanted to get his freedom back, to destroy as many of the books leading to the Draught of Life as he could, take Hermione and disappear to some remote place where nobody was ever going to find them. Even if it meant that they'd have to live a life of poverty in a hut in the woods—he didn't mind, and he was sure Hermione wouldn't either.

And so, on the ninth day, when the car had been charmed to within an inch of its life, and the sharpened twig was chafing against his skin under the shirt, he had glanced at the display, seen that the tank was full, and decided that it was now or never. He'd kept a tight hold on the steering wheel with his left hand, pointed his right at Cox and pronounced "Stupefy!" He and Cox had been the only inhabitants of the house, and Cox hadn't mentioned that he was expecting anybody, but all the same Severus thought it more prudent to drive as far into the wood as possible—this part of the plan had been his main reason for protecting the car so well—where he hoisted the unconscious man out of the car and, fighting the urge to close his eyes, took careful aim and punctured both carotid arteries and the thick blue veins at the man's wrists. While the blood was still gushing out, he levitated Cox to a nearby group of bushes, thick and impenetrable despite being bared of their leaves, and dropped him right on top of them from a height of maybe seven or eight feet. As he had expected, the branches broke under Cox's weight, so that his corpse was now completely hidden behind the tangle of twigs and vines.

When he broke into hysterical laughter after this successful operation, Severus realized that he'd better get a grip on himself unless he wanted to botch what had started so promisingly. So he leaned against a tree for a few minutes, deeply breathing the cold winter air, until he felt he had regained sufficient control over his reactions so that he'd be able to continue. He eliminated the droplets and pools of blood, which hadn't yet soaked into the frozen ground, and then walked back a few hundred yards in the direction he'd come from, to cancel any imprints the tyres might have left. At last, he took off the charms he had cast on the twig, cleaned it and slipped it into his sleeve where he usually kept his wand, to dispose of the incriminating evidence later, when he was far enough away.

Cox had been a good driving instructor, he thought when he climbed back into the car and started the motor. He'd be able to blend in nicely with the Muggles, as the car even had number plates.

He had seen enough of the surroundings to know that, much as he hated the thought, he had to go back to the house, if by a different route, stopping every few yards to wipe the traces off the ground. Because there was a road, or rather a track, leading up to the house, and as far as he knew it was his only path towards freedom.