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The Toil of the Just by Sarablade [Reviews - 3]

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3d chapter
Not mine.

As I wrote before, this is no fluff.





"We've been back six hours, and she's still not responding…" I look at Ariella, still twitching and mumbling on the pub floor. Flashbacks from the scene in the clearing mar everything I say and see, and my mind plays in a loop Snape's parting words, as he handed me a miniature jug before Apparating away.

"You shall drink this, and let it take action for five minutes. You're not up to fighting anyway, no magical strength left. Immediately after, you shall bring that useless waif down there back to your burrow, or put her down, but don't let her here to be taken hostage. Oh, and… Miss Granger?"

I could only nod and try not to puke all over myself again, or run to the woods howling for my mother. Although, when you think what there is in the woods, and what they did to mothers… sit tight and nod, then.

"Don't mouth a word of what happened here before I've gone over it with you. Your silence can win the war... or inversely."

And he went.


"Time flies when you're having fun." Ron slouches on the stone floor, his back to the Three Heads' wall. I'm sitting just next to him, hands laced, drawing comfort from the simple goodness of our shoulders and ribs touching. We're all scattered haphazardly around, in various stages of liquefaction. Family. Families are tortured and killed, and you worry for them until they are, and weep for them after. Ariella hasn't let go of my hand ever since I've brought her back. The others were already there, recovering from a very short, very vicious clash which ended mysteriously, they say, as the Death Eaters just popped away after being hit with volleying burn hexes coming from… nowhere, and the massive hex-launching by the Hogwarts' teachers, rushed into Hogsmeade to Kingsley's urgent plea, under the Carrows' noses. Dedicated education professionals, they, even though that's not gonna do them good with their Board of Directors.

Somehow the Dementors seem to be confined to the Forest, and apparently can't make it into Hogsmeade... Good to know.

We're slumped and weary, too exhausted to eat, our minds full with the sounds and the sights and the strain of the day. My mind is full with pictures of…. Don't go there. I will not go there.

But I do. Nausea threatens. Again.

Snape hasn't been seen since the fight. Ryan says the Potions Teacher slunk back to his sickbed in Hogwarts, replacing the crude-ish manikin Poppy is nursing, for the Carrows' evening visit. There will certainly be a rendition of the attack, and eloquent threats to whoever has leaked the Halloween-visit program, though with tens of seventh- and sixth-year gushing about it since morning, and the Faculty, tracing the mole will be impossible. We hope so, at least.

At some point Pansy mumbles "thanks" at Eric, looking at him from under the impressive egg she nurses on her forehead.

"Why don't you just admit you tripped over your own boots instead of jumping as Eric signaled you to?" Cho's mouth is mean and drawn. She's hale and sound, and sour.

"I was sincerely thanking him, you cow. He pushed me just after he signaled, and the second hex flew over my head. I'd have been fried if I'd jumped."

"I didn't push you," Eric says.

"You certainly did. I felt a… something, and I fell. Only you were standing there, it was where all those hexes came from nowhere. I… I thought somebody had devised some charm or something, to give you some kind of fighting powers, to go with this weird battlefield control contraption of yours."

"It wasn't me. And I have no magical fighting powers…" He sounds sad, at that, although his contraption felled many a Death Eater.

"It was Snape pushed you down." Cho's eyes are starry, now, and it gives a wholly unhealthy aura to her grim face. I'd use "creepy", if I dared.

"Oh, now you've a crush on Snape, too?" Pansy's more intent on attacking Cho than letting a Mudblood get dressed down? My, the things war does to us. Once again the pictures attack, and I shake my head to dissipate them.

"He's saved my life," Cho says with a quiet defiance I've seen only in Ron yet.

"She's right." Ron Our Captain leans into my ear as the two girls bicker along. "Snape was Disillusioned, but he was fighting for us in Hogsmeade. He disappeared for a while, and then I identified him coming back through this widget he and Neville gave me to track everyone's magical signatures and correspond with Eric. He fights like a demon."

That's what he is, I want to shout, but I'm afraid to open even the smallest channel into what happened at the clearing. I've avoided the deluge of questions they hurled at me after their first shock at seeing me alive. I smile at the remembrance of the rib-splitting hug Ron grabbed me into, the pure joy in his eyes, the dazzling smile incongruous on his battle-weary grim face, suddenly so grown-up the freckles seem a grotesque mistake spread on his thrice-broken and badly repaired nose, because who's got time for esthetical Healing when there's a war going on. The exhilaration at finding each other alive and able to enjoy the love he and I share, untouched. Something else we owe Snape, I think, and a cold sliver of glass cuts into my chest.

In the end we pick each other up from the floor, tuck Ariella in a makeshift bed behind the bar, and ingest the stew Rabelkus has prepared, and then the alcohol flows. We're usually wary from loss of control, but tonight… I think tonight none of us wants to look his or her dreams in the eye alone, and we react the way of trauma victims immemorial. I see couples forming, old couples like Cho with Patrick or Anselm and Luna, but also Ron and Hannah …I've spent months trying to tell him she'd be perfect for him, and I'm happy he finally acts on it, when I almost swallow from the nose as I catch Pansy and Eric sharing a… this kind of look. Well, she hit her head, didn't she?

Anthony's trying to get my attention, and I know I really should… he's right for me in all aspects… the boy my whole family would have been delighted to see me bring home… but I can't. I give him a minute shake of my head and he nods his, sad but smiling. We've always understood each other perfectly. If only I could… but I can't.

Well, his looks and his brains, he's only got to go cruising any Muggle bar, the way he does every so often. I give Anthony a little smile and tilt my head to the door, and, of course, he understands. From the corner of my eyes I see Ron giving me a worried glance over Hannah's head, and I signal him to mind his own business. Hers, actually.

Anthony responds to me with a mimic of his own, a mix of wistful, amused, ironic and tender… I so wish I could. We exchange another thousand words in two grimaces, and this third brother-in-arms of mine downs a small phial of Invigorata potion, arranges his curly mane and his Muggle clothes, and walks out, whistling, giving me a small wiggle of his elegant fingers.

As they sing in football stadiums, he never has to walk alone.

Speaking of which…Snape's materialized. One look at him and Rabelkus doesn't bother to pour the Firewhisky into a glass, sends the square flask gliding towards him on the bartop.

He slurps and smacks his lips, glaring at us, a wicked angry grimace I can only associate with him finding us rummaging in his personal reserves. Ignorant bliss. "Luck is blind," he drawls at Ron. "I've never seen such a sloppy, amateurish fighting arrangement. Chess whiz?" He snorts. "As to you," he turns to Pansy, "you owe your life to the Mudblood here…" his chin is pointing aggressively at Eric, "and to your own clumsiness. Pride of my House, be gone."

His eyes censoriously row over our seating (and hugging) arrangements, the empty bottles strewn on the table. "Party's over," he suddenly decrees.

"But…"

He silences Anselm with only a frown. "I may not be your teacher any more, Mr. Diggory. But I can see you've had enough for today. Besides…" his glance fixes theatrically on Anselm's hand under Luna's shirt, "puppies like you may need time to do whatever has you panting that way, but they also need sleep, and I shall expect you all tomorrow at eight in the cave, fit, for an important training session. Scat."

Unimaginably, we all stand up. They're all coupled up, and I stand out, like the proverbial sore… I'm sore all right.

His smirk deepens. "I imagine I'll have to play knight once more and see you home, Granger."

We live scattered all over the place, but never go home or stay alone before the flat has been given a serious once-over by a team of at least two. Once bitten.

We Apparate, then Portkey, then walk together in the night, go through all the tedious business of arriving and entering and unwarding and checking and… all my exhausted being is yearning for sleep, now. Except I know what kind of dreams await.

We are standing in my dingy bedsitter. We smell. Of battle, smoke, death, sweat and blood and Firewhisky and…

He must have caught the quiver of my nostrils, as he looks down at me from under his matted, smelly hair. "I suggest you take a shower before we sit down to business. Mix one spoonful of Invigorata in your shampoo. It can't make your hair worse in any case. Drink the rest." He looks around him, at the appliances and the sink masquerading as kitchenette against the farther wall. "I'll make the coffee."

I'm too numb to protest. When I come back fully clothed in jeans, a heavy sweater over thermal undies, and thick socks in my reserve boots, I feel less tired and exposed. The ginger-lemon-mint smell of the Invigorata pleasantly clings to my skin (and yes, what's left of my hacked curls is stronger, shinier, but also more… bouncy. Not that I'd care, but he remarked on it.)

He looks at me, then at himself. "Would it be a terrible imposition if I were to ask you for the use of your shower?"

I wordlessly Accio a ready bundle of men's clothes from under the bed. It's not like I'm not used to having guests – hiding fugitives – spending the night.

He comes back looking like a huge, slightly menacing wet cat, his nose sticking out of his face and his wrists rather pathetically out of the grayish shirtsleeves. He's oddly grand, though, and commanding.

We sit face to face on the sinking bumpy daybed. One of my booted feet is curled under the other knee. My hands are wrapped against the coffee he's prepared. It's like him. Black, scaling, gritty, and comforting in a 'reverse-logic' sort of way. If I can stand this, I can stand anything…

Well. Beating around the bush will only result in even less hours of much-needed sleep. "About this… the clearing," I clear my throat. Roll my shoulders inwards to stop the trembling. It's not working, though, and some of the scalding coffee spills on my hands, on the inside of my thigh through the jeans. Immediately his hand is on the burn, appeasing it, and then it stays there. He looks at me with a half-ironic, half-supplicating fold of his thin lips, and whatever didn't work with Anthony suddenly swooshes-clicks into place and keeps clicking… keeps swooshing. Our eyes lock. My lips part. He takes his hand away.

"Please don’t." I never intended to say that. I don’t even know if I'm referring to the touch, or the interruption thereof. I only know that, however terrifying the contact of his hand was, the absence of it is worse.

He stands and begins pacing the room. It's big enough for him to achieve three strides in one direction, and two in the other, but he paces anyway. He's looking down at me, and I'd rather he'd sit down again.

"You aren’t twitching and babbling like the other girls."

"I'm Hermione Granger." Oh. First time I actually sound like I want to. Not conceited, not unduly proud, but… we both know what I'm capable of. I've seen worse. No, of course… but I've seen my share. "I don't crumble…" until I'm alone. The pictures are coming again, and I fight them with all my might, my eyes crunched with the effort of fighting all that evil.

"Don't fight it," he says in that hypnotic voice of his. "Embrace it." Is he crazy? I open huge appalled eyes at him, and in turn his bear into the back of my skull, with a kind of grim satisfaction.

He sits on the bed again. "I'm going to Legilimens you." It's not a threat or a request. He says, and he does.

All the horror of the day submerges me again. And I want to crumble, but I fight.

"Don't fight."

What does he want from me? I'm shaking and retching and tears streak my face and….

"You," he says as he pulls out, "are one of an extremely rare kind, that actually has enough inborn power to be able to branch into this, and not go crazy. Actually use this for your own means. Grow from this."

"This?" I sign with my hands the quotation from his words.

"This," he says simply, matter-of-factly, mimicking my gesture, "is the power of Evil. Dumbledore was wrong. Nothing approaches the power of Evil. Look at me," he says.

I do. He performs what must be the inverse of Legilimens, and I fall into his mind. It's Hell. Yes, yes, the one medieval painters tried to frighten people with, all torture racks and flaming heads and screaming… a suffering which makes me regret I didn't actually kill myself in the clearing… and then I receive my first lesson in the raw power of power. And I learn more about Severus Snape than I've ever thought to ask, or wanted to know.

He is not disgusted by the torment and the agony and the sheer horror of… this. He bathes in it like an ashen Viking skull-drinking death idol in a tempestuous sea, revels in the strength of the cursed, salty waves coursing around and through him. Savors it. He takes that wretched, cursed energy of the screams and the suffering and the pain and feeds it to his magical power. I can feel his joy at the surge of might, the force radiating from him. It's dazzling, if black can dazzle. I'm flailing and drowning. I can't breathe.

After what feels like a century he lets me out, and I slump in his arms. I'm winded as if I'd swum against the current, fought the gales, and then sunk and drowned and been fished out by the hair. My whole body aches and I heave shallow painful breathes. The exhaustion I felt before is nothing compared to this empty feeling. I feel… like a balloon that has been filled to the max, and exploded.

"How can you?" I finally rasp.

He smoothes my forehead and my hair, then the temples, then the neck, then the sides of my torso…

"Wars," he croons in my ear, "are not won by heroic do-gooders galloping forwards on white horses. They're won by nasty people willing to do the gritty work so the photogenic heroes get the Witch-Weekly cover." His voice is half-teacher, half-gorged lover. But now it takes the edge of a laser sword. "I," he says, "am going to win this war."

"For whose side?" I think I've only thought it, but he answers with a rich chuckle which raises goose bumps on my skin.

"Why, yours, of course." His irony is unbearable.

"You're a good man," I persevere in a small broken ridiculous childish whimper, even as some little voice in my head tells me to go to sleep now, while my torn nails still have a little bit purchase on that cliff I'm going to fall off.

"No," he says. "Throughout History, tens of millions of humans have lived through these horrors. The good ones who survived, and they are blessedly few, went on to do great, positive things with their lives. They still do. When nightmares keep them awake, they get up and build something else, new and shimmering, from the ashes and the debris. I do not. I dwell on misery. I'm unable not to lurk and wallow in it. I'm drawn to this. I think I crave it, the way others enjoy a walk in the sun. I draw my strength from it, and add to it with the powers it has given me. This is the very origin of the vicious circle. This is who I am. This is what you can be, too, if you so choose. The world needs people like us, if the builders are to be given a chance." His deep voice is raspy and smooth at the same time, terribly tempting…

My head is shaking feebly, and even that taxes the very little energy I have left. I'm still in his arms, more or less…

"And you know what?" he continues relentlessly. "Those good people… they'd never have made it if men like me hadn't done the dirty deeds, and continued doing them. For them. So the so-called heroes can look back and say, 'we vanquished the Evil.' They didn't. All throughout History, only evil people fighting for the side of Good vanquish Evil. If they don’t," he continues primly, "Evil wins.''

"As I said, Dumbledore was wrong. Love," he spits, "goodness… they're never enough." He rises, formidable, so much bigger than my little dingy room. "The Just," he intones in a theatrical voice I know he uses for quotations, "their toil is done by the hands of others."

He pauses. "I am," he pauses again, "the others." His tone is quiet and terrible.

"But people hate you for this…and they love… they loved Harry, and Dumbledore, and… all the good people…" If I sound any weaker, I'll kill myself in exasperation and shame. So I shut up.

He smirks. "People need somebody to hate, and to fear. And it just happens other people need to be feared and hated. Some do it by waging evil on good people, by making their lives miserable. Some others, the most sophisticated, the most refined, the ones whose moral sense has not been damaged by their unusual tastes…"

He sits down again. His voice takes a hypnotic quality, low and resonating in my chest. "They wage an evil war on Evil. This is what we do. We feast on the bas-fonds and lick our pale chops from the blood of the damned. We embrace what others fear to imagine. We despise happiness, because we know its price is the willful forgetting of unsung sacrifices to Evil. We know happiness feeds from the suffering of others, so we are content with the absence of pain. There are not many of us. We are the unseen foundations of society. Usually," he adds in a suddenly worldly voice, "we hate each other… but for you and me… it could be different…"

He's smiling at his own grandiloquence, cradling me in his arms. "This is where you sleep, isn't' it?"

I can only nod, dumbly. He eases me on the sofa, nudges me a little, lies next to me. I understand, but I… it's been too long. I've been nothing but an empty, efficient shell for too long already. So I just look at him with hollow eyes as he takes off my boots, and my sweater, and the t-shirt…

By dawn, short of crippling bodily harm, nobody will ever be able to do to my body something Severus Snape has not done to it before. I held when he told me to hold and kissed what he showed me to kiss. I clinched and opened on cue. Screamed when he made me, and knelt when he pushed me down. I've drowned in barbed, soul-scorching pleasure and unbearable pain, and he's reeled me back to him like a fish, time and time again. The pictures from the clearing have flashed and gone, their echo mingled with the power I've felt in him… and in me, at times, before I recoiled each time in horror, but each time a little more slowly.

He's getting clothed now, in the grey beginning of daylight. I think of yesterday's me, and laugh at how jaded and tough I thought I was. It's not a happy laugh.

He spares me a thin smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.

"I need you to understand," his voice is the Professor's again," that how… pleasing has this interlude been, it was necessary for you to understand a few things. Teaching by example, and all that."

"You sacrificed yourself to complete my education, in other words." I surprise myself with the cynicism and the cold irony of my tone.

He's caught it too. "You see," he drops, "it's working." He passes a hand in his mussed hair, and it falls into place smooth and menacing, and he's him again, down to the faultless robes he certainly didn't have yesterday evening.

He catches my gaze. "I didn't ask you for clothes yesterday, but since you gave me some… it would have been in bad form to refuse…"

And that way he had me weakened by my own feelings of hospitality and mothering. I try to think of a suitable epithet.

"In any case," he continues, "you should think of what I said. You have the innate gift…"

I snort at that.

He silences me with his hand.

"Don't despise it, Granger. Maybe it's what you'll need to see us all through this war. Maybe this is what the Order needs for you to use, so the masses are protected. I thought this bloody idealism of you made you ready to sacrifice anything for the Greater Good… Are you ready to die then," he suddenly roars, "provided you'll be reminded as 'nice Hermione'? Is not soiling your white soul worth more than the lives of innocent children?"

He strides towards the bed, and whispers, from his height above, "Will you be ready to let your loved ones die, Granger, to watch them die before your eyes after they've fought with you, maybe for you, and not tap into a power you can heal them with, because it's… evil?"


I'm stricken dumb, and recoil a little in the bed, embarrassed at my lack of clothes, and the pervading lingering smell on me from our… activities during the night, and the unclean feeling of the still damp sheets, in front of his immaculate appearance. Gone the unkempt, slightly pitiable man.

"You don't have to like it, like I do," he continues more softly. "But it helps." He stiffens again. "You have one hour," he says, "to present yourself fully ready at the training session."


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The Toil of the Just by Sarablade [Reviews - 3]

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