The Memories We Keep

---

Not mine...

---

His first sensation was the murky, almost rotten taste of the water, slowly leaving his mouth through the hole in his cheek…He was lying down on his left side, slowly sinking into cold, muddy gravel. Then the grey burn of Lucius' eyes boring into him, at the same time dead and intense, willing him to open his own eyelids. Then the sudden constriction of his chest. He spat and coughed in Lucius' worried face, bent low against his own, and opened wary eyes on his new world.

So fitting, that the one who'd ushered him into V's circle would be the one to receive him into the Kingdom of the Dead…Think. If he was with Lucius… Hell, then. No big surprise, but he couldn't help the pang in his chest. He'd have liked more time. Just when his life up there had begun to show signs of… not of actually giving him anything actually good, of course. Good had never been his lot. But he, the cold man, had begun to get used to seeing warmth and love live around him, begun caressing dreams of being allowed to bask in their reflected warmth, even if only from the other side of the mirror by Em's room. The sudden remembrance of Em's radiant smile, at him who'd never been smiled to, shot an unexpected jolt of missing through his dead carcass.

Violent shaking cut the maudlin turn of his thoughts. He tried to resist, but his body was limp and weak, and it flailed like a rag doll under Lucius' violent hands.
Was he supposed to feel that weak, dead?

"Sev, Sev… Wake up. You're… Your face…"

Lucius turned away and vomited theatrically away from his black leather jacket, pouring bile and… stuff into the Styx. Which looked like the Thames. Near Tower Bridge. And Lucius was clad in punk attire… Severus felt cold, instead of having Hell's flames lapping at his body.

Alive, then. Fished out and shaken by Draco. Severus let his cheek fall back on the mud and his eyelids close, giving in to dizziness and exhaustion. Memories came back to him, hazy and partial at first. Her hexing him into the water… He'd deserved it, richly… But… the inside of his chest went colder than the rest of his soaked and freezing body as he remembered the whole scene. His fingers had thawed just enough so he felt the insistent buzzing of the tracking ring under his glove.

He fought to sit up, in vain. So much time… The dumb despair which had accompanied his underwater fading ruled him again.

"Draco," he commanded. But his voice was barely a whisper, and the name got lost in another coughing and spitting fit. The other, busy retching and jerking by the water, didn't respond for a long time. When at the end he turned back and knelt near Snape again, he kept his eyes carefully away from the bad side of Severus' face.

"Severus," he twitched. The boy was in a bad way. Bone-thin, twitchy, his eyes by turns haggard and cloudy. "You – you have to see a Healer," he said. "That b… punctured holes in your face…and… and they're wriggling!" And with that he turned to empty his stomach again.

"Help me up. Close your eyes, or just look the other way, and give me your hand. Help me to sit by the stone pillar, there." His mind had cleared, his bite-magic allowing his brain to function in spite of the long oxygen deprivation. But by Merlin was he weak…

They painfully crawled and hobbled their way to the bridge's junction with the bank, where the older wizard slumped on the wet gravel, his back to the pillar.

"Why in Hell did you attack them?"

Draco looked at him, hurt like a child who's being blamed for wanting to surprise his mum by cooking dinner, after the firefighters have put the fire out in the kitchen. "I couldn't very well let them talk about you that way, could I? How could I have known you were up there? You never talk to me any more… So I wanted to know what the b… was doing, all day. Maybe I could do the same." He was petulant and exhibiting withdrawal symptoms.

Snape sighed. "I wasn't avoiding you, lad. It's... why did you save me, then?"

"I saw it was you when she hexed you into the water."

"You saved my life, Draco. I'll never forget that." He was talking to him like to a child, yet keeping a weary eye on the boy's wand . "Now, I need you to do yet another thing for me."

It took time, and explanations and wheedling. At the end it took the promise of a fix to Draco's vein if the boy would hop and bring from Polly a spare wand and the potion which name Severus burnt with his wand on a piece of torn cloak, before letting his head fall back again in bone-deep exhaustion.

"Can I have some, too?" Draco asked eagerly. "You always keep the good stuff for yourself…'

"It'd kill you." And it would. The potion was geared to pull on the bite magic, and concentrate all its power for a few hours, at the expense of the bearer's own life force. Snape had used it once, when he was fully fit, and after the surge which had enabled him to…- never mind, but hadn't Julius the Warden been surprised when twenty of his goons had disappeared in less than half an hour - had taken two harsh months recuperating, the first of them spent mostly shaking in his bed.

Her needed him, though, and Emery needed her.

But Draco needed more wheedling, and the promise of money, too, to be given by Polly. Finally he left.

Snape hadn't trusted Draco to perform a good Confundo without endangering him, either, and he made his best to look like a harmless tramp, and not to freeze. Finally Draco was back, with the overeagerness of the recent fix, and the small black phial in his leather pockets.

Now, the boy couldn't stop looking at his face. "You look like my nightmares," he said slowly, the ghost of a smile on his skeletal features. "Psychedelic."

For the excruciating eternity it took to coerce out of the bottle the viscous, raspy slime, and then swallow it, Snape's own trembling hands menaced to spill the precious, greenish, iridescent goo. He didn't remember concentrating so much, on so little energy. The sparks of weakness danced before his eyes, and even the buzz of the tracking charm seemed to flicker and die with the simple exhaustion of his magical power. Beads of burning sweat rolled on his temples along the frozen drops from the Thames, dripping from the still wet hair that coiffed his head with a clinching, hard helmet of cold pain.

He hadn't remembered the burning, either.

The feeling in his throat and chest was similar to this of Nagini's bite. He passed out, a soggy beaten tramp, waked by a twitching junkie. Passersby tsked tsked, and a Salvation Army matron only refrained from tumbling down the bank in
Grace-giving frenzy because of Draco's glare, and his manic provocative gesturing at her.

She went away, and just missed the dosser's beautiful, liquid strength as he stood up fluidly, his stance terrible and imposing. A look at himself dried him and reestablished his Glamour. He seemed to grow taller, too, and the set of his shoulders was that of a Viking conqueror.

"Look at me, now," he told Draco.

"But…"

The boy was still twitchy, at the same time cock-sure and anxious.

"Look at me." The self-confident deepness of the Potions Master voice woke an obeisance reflex that lain for twenty years at the basis of Draco's psyche.

"You're healed," Draco squeaked, his stare mesmerized to Severus' warrior mask. "Your face! It's-" His face clouded for a second, his eyes lost into the water…"What's in the potion?"

"Look at me," Snape repeated.

They locked eyes, deep unfeeling black to cold, manic, desperate grey.

"Obliviate."

********************************

He Apparated directly within Rabunow's shop, led by the Tracking ring on his finger. Even before he realized his wand was slicing into the chest and abdomen of the fallen guard, and sending the cashier flying back up the stairs where he'd been hiding, he marveled once more at the sheer strength of the bite-and-potion combination. His organism, after almost dying from Nagini's venom, had somehow adapted to it in a strange mutation process. The grotesque hideousness of his wounded face remained, but his body had acquired serpent strength and resilience, and the rapidity of his reflexes surprised even himself. Their ferocity too, sometimes.


And… there were the scales, and the unspoken fighting hexes, coming from nowhere into his brain, and from there wrecking terrible havoc on his opponents. His hand reflexively caressed his ribs, as his conscious mind belatedly collected the information: past, a kind of grim, satisfied surprise at the power of his own magic crashing Rabunow's wards on his shop – he hadn't thought it possible – and the goriness of his attack on the guard. Present, HG's arched back and upturned head, her face contorted in disgust. She was kicking and twisting under the grip of Sarin, who was crushing her thighs under his knees and her hips under his, moving obscenely even though only the clothes of her upper body were torn off.

At the sight of her bare torso under Sarin's hands, Snape's breath hitched. He'd seen it uncountable times, when he was tending her in sickness, but not in this light. Not. In this light.

His split-second shock had given the second guard, Boris, the one who'd been standing arranging his belt over Her's head, the time he needed. His Total View had sensed Snape's presence even as he crashed the wards on the other side of the shop's counter, and Boris stood now ready. He hadn't alerted Sarin, preferring Snape to focus on Sarin humping the girl, while Boris would take care of the intruder. Two great advantages, as Boris saw it: he'd get the glory of having caught the trespasser, and the one caught with his pants down, so to say, would get the brunt of the newcomer's hexes… and of Rabunow's anger, too.

Boris had been right in one aspect: the tenth of the second Snape had frozen, his eyes on Sarin. It was enough.

"Sectumsempra!" Boris liked old and well-proven methods.

Snape was hit, but a burst of magic erupted from him, and sent Boris flying backwards against one of the oil lamps on the wall. The Russian fell down in a spurt of flames, doused in the oil which had spilled from the torch.

Sarin raised his head, and jumped up, grabbing Her and holding her in front of him as cover.

"I've got a wand at the back of her neck, Snape."

She exchanged looks with Snape. He stood tall and pale, his blood surged in ribbons from the Sectumsempra, looking… viscous. But the spurts were fading. Reflexively she brought her bruised arms to cover her torso, then, in a gesture she would understand only much later, opened her hands towards him. At the same time her head moved minutely towards the human torch, who was lunging at him from behind him, a little to his left.

He didn't need to look. His magic spurted again, and this time Boris fell to the floor, an inert, burning lump.

Snape hadn't looked, but Sarin had. And during this time Her had slumped down against him, giving Snape the necessary aperture. A very thin, very sharp sliver of dark magic flew to Sarin's head. The guard's wards protected him from real harm, but he released his grip on the girl. She dove in a paratrooper's tumble, away from him, and trusting Snape to protect her from any hexes Sarin or the other would throw her way.

He would have, but then a fourth guard came down the stairs, spraying the room with hexes. She was wandless. Snape hit both men in turn, and in the momentary respite threw her the spare wand he'd gotten from Draco. It was just like their exercises in his rooms. With one difference. She'd never tested this wand.

"I can't…"

"It's perfect for you. Just use it, for Merlin's sake."

And she did. After a few seconds they were back in control, whirling and battling in earnest. One part of her brain, laid back, appreciated the training he'd given her, the kicking in of her Unspeakable background and of her fighting skills at their highest. With the other she used her new wand with gusto on the men who'd been torturing her, indifferent now to her half-nakedness. The wand was a superb fit for her magic.

And then it was over. The four ruffians lied down in various states of unconsciousness on the stone floor of the shop. She waved her wand to put the fire devouring Boris out, then caught the piece of cloak Snape had torn from the cleanest fallen man available and thrown to her, covered herself hastily.

"Let's go," he said.

Self-consciousness ebbed in and out, pushed away by curiosity at his appearance and his use of wandless, incredibly powerful magic, and by need. "My… the first wand you gave me… it must be across the counter. And Sarin got a bag of money I was carrying."

He Accioed the two items, without wand nor words. Only the right wand came flying into his hand.

"I… I need to pay him for the wand. I owe him."

His only response was to set fire to a vault, full of unclaimed pawned objects. "Now you owe him much more. Let's get outta here."

But they couldn't. His own magic could take only him through the wards, hers wasn't strong enough. They worked feverishly for a few minutes, their desperateness reminding her of the efforts to destroy the locket in the forest. Finally she said, dubiously…

"Maybe, if you can manage him, we could Rennervate Sarin…He knows the wards."

He looked at her. Each passing minute Rabunow could come in, and the end of the potion's efficiency lurked closer. So many things to do till then… But what would she think? He shrugged internally, reminding himself she saw him as a monster, anyway. Best that she could do it for a long time, and take care of the boy.

He poised himself over the fallen man. "Imperio."


********************************



He Apparated them back to Tower Bridge. "Tell me," he ordered. His tone brooked no refusal, but a long silence ensued.

He should Obliviate her. In the five minutes they'd been out together, she'd already blurted, against her own will – that much was apparent – questions about his wandless magic, and the wordless deadly spells that seemed to burst from him almost unawares when he was attacked, and the way the Glamour of his face fell in and out of place… and she'd hardly managed to shut up about the way he'd left no witnesses there. He knew he should Obliviate her, and he knew he wouldn't. He told himself it was because of the still fragile balance of her mind, that he couldn't chance scrambling her mind again, conveniently forgetting that his skill enabled him to carve exactly the memories he wanted out of his "patient's" minds, to the split-second, seamlessly. Some very deep, very masochistic part of him wanted her to know him as he was, in all his ugliness. That's what he deserved, after all.

Night had fallen, and the cold mists now twirled white over the black water. Its remembered murky taste had nothing to do with its smell, an almost sweet, throaty afternote to the bitter, frozen air they were breathing. Sheets of ice derived over the river, their dull sheen echoing the lights of the city above them. She was shivering, from time to time pulling the cloak around her. She had nothing else on, he remembered, and surreptitiously cast a warming charm around them, as his throat constricted, and he repressed the strange, reflexive will to move his arm, which had almost stolen over her shoulders. It was, he thought a little breathlessly, his body's reaction to the waning effect of the Bite-Potion.

"Tell me," he repeated.

She shrugged. "I don't know, really. I was walking home… I mean, to your house, with Emery, from day care, after I'd left Rabunow's. We were near the kindergarten, turning the corner after Diagon Alley… suddenly three men at least were around us, hugging me from behind. It wasn't a grab... A hug is the best I can describe it. Then we landed here. They were five. They wanted something, but I don't know what. To this day I don't know what. 'The box', they called it. I fought them," she hissed with remembered fury. "I Glued Emery to my back, under the cloak, and I fought..." Her smile had the bitterness of remembered defeat. "Nothing comparable to the wandless magic you exhibited just now, but still. I fought like a rabid bitch, if you'll believe me. The remains of at least one of their legs and at least two wands must be here… some kind of trace. I'd say some blood must have seeped into the bank, too. That's why I came back afterwards… but I was outnumbered, and too busy protecting my back… so I took the first opportunity to Apparate us as near your house as possible… and I ran. I fought so hard, and enveloped Em with so many protecting charms, and ran so fast, at the beginning when I felt ill back at home… I mean, at your house, I thought it was the aftermath of the exertion."

"Where is your home?" He hadn't meant to ask her that and hid the last word in a cough, repeated the sentence as he should have said it. "Where's your so-called brain? Do you care to explain, Granger, how you never told me about the attack in spite of my questioning, never asked for my… intervention in the matter? How you willfully neglected to inform me of a danger menacing my son? Or the devious lies you told to be allowed to come back here?" He was surprised, not so much at the anger – this was usual – but at the hurt in his voice. Hearts on sleeves were to be despised. And he didn't own one, as far as the world was concerned.

"You acted in the fashion I remember from your schooldays," he continued. "Foolhardy, headstrong, reckless. Devious. Dishonest. And in the fashion I remember from your schooldays, such conduct resulted in catastrophe, which endangered others – I'm talking about this poor Weasley mutt – and forced me to intervene, at great personal inconvenience, to save your unworthy skin." He swallowed swiftly before the words "I worried terribly" shot out of his mouth, willed again his arm to stay glued to his side and not hers, and asked himself if the golden grapes' roots in the potion could have some tongue-freeing side-effects. They were used in Veritaserum, after all.

She inspired sharply by the nose. "Each time I say I'm sorry," she said in measured tones, "you retort I'm weak, and humiliate me for it. I was afraid you wouldn't let me out again, or that you'd… I'm not weak!" she exploded. "I may not be strong enough – obviously – but I'm not weak . I… the boy, Narcissa's leaving me alone, a ho- a roof on my head, the Healing, the books… I can't owe you everything!"

You owe me nothing, girl. I took your money and your child in exchange for having this tomb in Coulter Street change into a lived-in home. For making me alive again. Shut up, Snape.

"This is why you were fighting with an Azkaban-issue wand, when Ollivander's finest, which I acquired for you, lay in Rabunow's shop."

She couldn’t help herself. "This wand… It's a perfect fit for me. How did you know it'd fit me so well without me trying it on? It's not something you can predict… even Ollivander must have people trying them on in his shop…"

He was sinking deeper and deeper, so close to the place where he'd physically sunk and almost drowned a few hours before. And the feeling was only marginally better.

Because your magic and mine are the same, he wanted to say.

He'd noticed it years before, when she was a student still, and made nothing of it. Rare occurrence, but it could happen. She was still growing, and her magical imprint could change. He'd noticed it for the second time after the war, when she was both in Unspeakable training and studying applied mathematics at that Muggle university Harvard… Noticed it so much, actually, and so much noticed the smile that went with the girl and with the equations she'd consulted him with relating to some arcane chemistry issue, too, that it'd made him bold enough, stupid enough, to actually make an overture at her. Nothing obnoxious, but he'd done it all the same, laid himself out in the open. She'd turned him down, of course. Neatly, kindly, ladylike. She'd been so delicate as to make it sound as if she'd never understood his meaning, so he wouldn't be humiliated, even though she was blushing and stammering. He'd spent months replaying the scene in his mind, absurdly satisfied of the outcome which had thrown him back into his bitter, natural desperate state, for what would have he done, really, with a … girlfriend twenty years his junior, soft and smiling and good-looking enough, it would later transpire, for the Minister of Magic? Things had been how they should, when she'd rejected him. But the pain in his chest hadn't stopped for months. Old fool.

"Answer my question." His voice was stern and dry, almost as it should. "Why did you pawn the wand I gave you?"

It was the night, and the glitter of the night on the sheets of ice. The exhaustion of the day too, and a kind of warmth that had begun when she'd seen him in the shop, and the perfect way they'd fought together, a kind of… harmony. And there had been something in his stance, an opening of his hands upwards as in a peace offering when she'd asked about the wand. And it was the cold, and the way he was warming her. She answered truthfully.

"You asked where my home is. Home is where nobody can tell you to go away, right? If so, I don't have one." Her face was neutral and her voice toneless, her eyes on the water, so she missed the flicker of pain on his face as he heard her. "I needed some ready money, because I couldn't take the chance to find myself between his locked door and yours, one evening, with or without Em, and with no money. I got fifty Galleons for your wand. For a long time I carried them with me all the time."

He'd found them on her after the poisoning. They were outside the window of his private sleeping-room, in the purse that had been attached to her skin, with the money and a small red round, glittering stone the size of an egg. Somehow he hadn't burned it with the rest of her clothes that day, but kept it. Out in the cold for fear of contamination, but close enough so he could look at it from time to time. Sometimes, usually at night, when the dreams and the thoughts wouldn't leave him alone, he'd open his window, and take it in his hands… But never on the nights when he'd gone killing.

"But you never asked me for it… after."

She shrugged. "I didn't feel I could very well ask you for money, after… you know, potions' ingredient's prices, and such..."

The scene in the library. A small part of his chest died. Weird, really, he'd have sworn everything was already dead, there… The potion's effect flickered. Strong and weak, guarded and bare… he wanted to go home. Home. A difficult laugh tore his throat. The need to take her, as a victorious warrior would take his princess, warred with sheer exhaustion – after all, he'd almost drowned today, crashed uncrashable wards, fought and killed, cursed and… and he'd seen her under Sarin. His blood froze again, before boiling in his veins.

"And you couldn't ask for help, either," he grunted. "Easier to get yourself mauled and killed by thugs in Rabunow's shop than to ask me for fifty Galleons."

She shrugged, and turned to look at him as the tone of his voice registered. The man was desperate. He was Glamored, but the charm did nothing for the simple sadness his usually opaque eyes now all but screamed aloud. This was a man that had killed for her, today, and he was protecting her, and warming her, and yet he was looking at her with the eyes of a pauper waiting for a piece of bread. His arms trembled at his sides, his fingers convulsively wiping themselves against the palms of his hands.

He didn't hold her gaze, but dipped his head, staring at his feet. She'd never seen him lower his head before anybody, although she'd imagined him doing so in front of the Dark Lord.

She put her hand on his sleeve, mentally preparing herself for the blow to come. It didn't. Instead he looked at her from under his hood, and she saw something else she'd never seen before. Severus Snape was terrified.

"I'm not that frightening," she smiled slowly.

I thought you would die , he wanted to blurt, but caught himself. The potion was waning, and with it his strength, but also this frightening propensity to run off at the mouth.

His mouth opened to answer, but just hung open. A strand of black hair fell from the hood. He was so ugly… so helpless – and then she was kissing him.

His whole body stiffened. A small whimper escaped him. She broke the kiss and looked at him. He hadn't moved. His eyes were scared, but supplicating, also. Deep and transparent as she'd never seen them, and she put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him again. Tentatively, so softly his touch was barely perceptible, his hands splayed themselves on her back, applying no pressure at all and yet burning her bare skin under the cloak.

They kissed for a long time. His lips told her all that he could never tell her in words, the tenderness and the longing, the forlorn hope for something in his life that wasn't harsh, the pain and the shame and the terrible fierceness of his loyalty for her. The violence and the anger, too, and the battle-weariness of one who had only ever known war. The kindness he could never allow anybody to see, and the terrible hidden yearning that somebody would see it all the same. The remembrance of her curls and her smile when she was discussing equations with him, and the shameful glee at having her come beg him, finally, to take her.
His hands were under her cloak now, roaming her back – only her back. They told of roughness and respect, and of sorrow and care…

She was melting in his arms, caressing and sheltering, mindlessly drinking him in and feeding his soul. Finally he was the one to break the kiss. They stood for a long time, eyes and hands locked.

She was looking at him, a little uncertain, but starry-eyed, and a small smile played at the corner of her lips. He searched for words to thank her, to tell her that it was worth waiting more than half a century for his first kiss, if this was the reward for waiting, for promising her that she had a home, and a servant in it who would die for her at a moment's notice and be grateful for it.

He opened his mouth to put his soul at her feet, and remembered what kind of a soul he was to gift her with. His mind glimpsed a future of Her living with the knowledge he had kissed her, feeling bound to him by the knowledge of his love, his waking up and going to sleep with…going to sleep with…

He looked into her smiling eyes and concentrated on the last minutes, since her hand had moved to the strand of his hair.

"Obliviate," he said, and his voice was strong.

---

Did you stomp your foot?
But, in any case, please see the whole chapter. Thanks so much for your reviews.