His Own brand of Loyalty

Still not mine.

Still no fluff. Remember, that's how you loved him first. ______________________________________________


4th Chapter- His Own brand of Loyalty



Patrick and Ariella are dead.

They left for the Muggle world, one week ago today, in a flurry of tears and recriminations. We've been going through the names of Hogwarts' seventh-years to find some replacements… there's also a British dissident escaped from Durmstrang in unclear circumstances, who's contacted me.

He's got a letter of introduction from Viktor, who's doing quite well at the head of a small band harassing Pureblood supremacists in his own vampire-ridden hills. I miss him, like you miss the taste of strawberry-banana smoothies you used to crave when you were in kindergarten… you remember you loved them, but are not quite sure you'd be able to stomach one today.

Cho's been bleary-eyed and pursed-lipped since her boyfriend left, and has thrown herself into Snape's training program like her life depended on it. Which is true for all of us, of course, but we slack now and then. She works… like I did on my NEWTs.

She follows Snape devotedly, like a puppy.

I don't really mind. He's visited me at nights, many times already since our first memorable encounter after the Clearing Battle. We've reached a weird kind of understanding, where I'm his pupil and his outlet, his shelter some nights… and some others he talks to me as if I were his prize fighting dog, an animal he's grooming for bloodbath. Once he's given me a present, even... or tried to. A small locket made of black stone and red diamonds. It's beautiful, and I recoil from it and the cold power that emanates from it…

"You should take it," he said. "Some charms are worked into it, that disappeared from the world centuries ago. It's powerful enough to keep you safe from many a dark hex. Especially good against chest wounds, so much that I rely on it almost exclusively for that area. He stands from the sofabed we've been lying on in a semblance of peace, strides the length and width of my bedsitter in less than three seconds, turns upons himself… "Many good people have lost their lives to get it. Or trying to," he added as if in an afterthought.

"You keep it, then. Anyway," I tried to sound cold and cynical, "you need it more than I. What I'd like," I continued without thinking, "would be to get back the red pendant Bellatrix took from me during the Battle of Hogwarts. That I'd like."

He looked at me with piercing eyes. "I didn't peg you for a sentimental little girl."

I shrugged. "You wouldn't understand."

There's a charm enabling me to restore my family's memories in that pendant. Without that, I'm non-existing for them.

He looked at me, holding my chin, and I felt his brain slipping into mine. Occlumency practice time. I trust him and all, but… there are things too private to share.

When he got out I felt quite sure he hadn't seen it… quite sure. I pressed my lips primly together.

He smiled at me for real then, that weird, rare, lopsided contortion of his features that's at the same time a smirk, and a supplication, and a challenge, and such a treason of the man's bone-deep terrible sadness, such a plea for somebody to see his soul behind these eyes, that I'd have cried with pity if it hadn't been his face sporting it. "So be it," he shrugged. "I'll will the locket to you, when it's time."

"Cool down, Snape, I'm not your wife. Besides… you'll probably outlive us all, after you've sold us to VDM." And we'd gone on with our little barbs war, and then our little physical war, and then our little deaths, as a preparation for the big one to come soon.

But now in the cave… From the looks she heaps on him, I vaguely wonder whether he spends the other nights with Cho, and can't really bring myself to care. Maybe he's pulling her through the same hardening boot camp he's been pulling me through, or maybe he just takes all the fun he can get. Or maybe my knowledge of his… infidelity is supposed to anchor me stronger in this dark side he's trying to root me in?

I think of it too much, so maybe I do care a little. I shrug. There's been a recrudescence of violence lately. Nary a day passes without a skirmish, a killing of some sort, on our side or theirs. Our magical signature tracker programs, the ones Nev and Sev (sounds like the name of a nerdy pub, doesn't it?) have developed with Eric, signal concentrated DE activity in two principal locales. One of them in the now-infamous Halloween Clearing, where apparently a new Dark village of magical tents has sprouted, the other just outside London, in a direct Apparition line from the Ministry.

Something's brewing, and it's getting closer. The "others" are perfecting their fighting techniques, making their raids on families more frequent, and more deadly. We're getting better, too, which means worse as human beings. Snape's teachings never stop their scary dance in my head… and at least once, I've felt what can only be described as keen pleasure as I put a wounded Death Eater to death, in combat.

I don't think I'll like myself at the end of the war… provided I'm there to see it, of course.

The stress is constant. When we're back at the cave we spend hours with Ron and Anthony, trying to plan, trying to make our team of thirteen adolescents, plus one Death Eater of doubtful allegiance, plus maybe five Aurors and ten schoolteachers, into an army able of taking almost a hundred determined, war-hardened Death Eaters, headed by a genius madman and seconded by Dementors. Hilarious, isn't it? Especially if you throw in the mass of the Aurors, who may or may not come to our help… or the other side's help. So we put our heads down and we plan. And we train. Neville and Eric work on the Contraption, Hannah and Cho are by now deadly, superbly efficient dueling machines, and responsible for bringing in food and supplies. Hannah and Ron are doing well together.

We all know it's hopeless, and we all work ourselves to the bone, because we know we deserve to win. Ha.

"It can only work," Anthony says, his movie-star forehead creased like Einstein's, "if we somehow succeed in hitting them at the head, disorganize the headquarters, or…"

We're looking at the map of their village, compiled through the imagery given by the "Contraption", and Snape's reports.

"We could just ask Snape to go the one step further, when he's there at their reunions, and kill V.. You-Know," Ron cuts in. "Wonder how nobody thought of that one before."

The three of us laugh an uneasy laugh. I think. That's all I can do, right now. And then I think in diagonal.

"You know," I say slowly, "that Contraption of yours…the magical signature… it picks up on protective charms? Analyzes them in real-time?"

"Yes, Herm," Ron says slowly. "That's what it does." His pressed lips tell me that he's not used to having to explain the obvious to me, and if I have a point… please…

So I throw myself in. "The reason Snape has never attacked Vold.. him, provided he's really on our side of course, is because VDM's armor is based on ever-changing protective spells on top of the basic ones, and one never knows what kind of protection VDM has at a particular moment… so… if Snape could know… he could maybe craft a blitz attack…"

I see they've caught up on my idea, and in the ensuing silence their eyes tell the story we all see. It's possible, but what happens if the Contraption is detected? It's so dangerous it's stupid.

But if it worked.

How much time would Snape need to stay close enough to VDM to get an accurate diagnosis, and how can he read it discreetly enough, surrounded by Death Eaters, in VDM's immediate vicinity? And how do we adapt the detection and analysis charms to VDM's part-human, part-we-have-no-idea-what nature? Is Snape good enough a warrior to adapt, in zero time, the hex to the particular chip in VDM's ever-morphing armor? We sign Neville over and update him, then the four of us sit at the servers table and begin writing and scratching in earnest.

The buzz is interrupted by the noise of the doors and Luna's uncharacteristic high, vicious voice. "You had no right," she roars shrilly. "You're worse than a three-headed Nargle! You're… You..." she splutters. They're coming in from a rescue mission, an attack on a Muggle bar, she, Snape, Anselm and the new kid we've enlisted after seeing him fight in the clearing, a seventh-year Hufflepuff named Erasmus Wingert. I'd have liked to have a seventh year to my curriculum, too, although it's all too clear it's been instituted only to keep the students at Hogwarts' for one more year.

They're all glowering and screaming at Snape, who doesn't move a face muscle as he takes off his combat gear.

"What happened?" Cho positions herself between him and the others, ready to defend her new… patron? Friend? Lover?

"Your f… lover," spits Anselm, and I've never seen his face so distorted by hate, "sold Patrick and Ariella to his DE friends. "They… There's nobody left. All their family. We arrived too late, got their call when we were involved in the battle in this pub by the Thames…" All the fight suddenly leaves his face, and he looks like a small boy ready to cry. Most of us do, the ones not baring our teeth at Snape.

Cho turns upon him like a snake, but at the sight of his face she hesitates. "It isn't true, Severus… tell me it isn't true."

He shrugs. "I do not remember giving you permission to use my given name. Of course it's true," he says, supremely indifferent. "They thought they could scamper back to their little Mudblood lives, and let you die to protect them, and our world. They had it coming." In less than a heartbeat his back is protected by the wall and his wand on all of us, menacing. "How do you think," he growls, "that I have acquired such a standing with the Dark Lord, that I can provide you with such accurate information, and save your miserable lives, time and time again? By sweet talking Nagini? Think, you pathetic bunch of useless do-gooders."

He sees, by our modified, befuddled stances, that only Cho is still ready to hex him, and he lowers his wand and begins pacing the cave, keeping her in his watchful sight.

"I give the Dark Lord valuable information," he reminds us simply. "Such as the hiding place of the members of that pitiful schoolchildren's secret club of yours. Would you rather I'd given him the cave? Or you? Or you?" He stares each of us down, except Ron and me. Cho he takes by the arm and brings her closer to him, and at my terrible dismay I feel what must be recognized as a pang of jealousy.

"I talked to your erstwhile boyfriend after I Healed you," he tells her. "I explained to him there was no way back, that this war couldn't be won with defectors… I even offered him a decent way out. Less dangerous, but still useful. He wouldn't listen. Then…" he shrugs. "They decided to abandon you, and they weren't even honorable about it. Yes, honorable," he hisses at my snort. "I expect from you honorable behavior, even if I don't practice it. He even refused me a last service. So… "

"So you took justice in your own hands." Ron's voice is so cold I whip my head at him. He sounds like Snape.

The other graces him with a smile, so terrible that it suddenly reminds me of the Halloween Clearing, of the horrors he lives with, and by. It's more frightening than his scowling face, even.

"It's not justice, Weasley. It's strategy. Do you want me," he asks as he advances upon Ron, "to give you more inside information and plans, hot from VDM's paws? Do you?" he roars at him. He swirls, then calms down. "That's the price. Sometimes I have to give them something they want, too. And… this was a boon. They," his head tilts aside to indicate the other camp, "know I've been talking to your little club. I just had to tell them the boy was the only one I'd been in contact with enough to know his whereabouts. And that he was luckily visiting his parents. Weasley. Don't you send your people to dangerous missions? Those two… you had lost them both as soldiers, anyway. And it was a danger to the unity of your little band here… An incentive to defection. A chip in your trust in each other. Besides… At any time they were liable to go and run off their little filthy mouths, either to save their pitiful skins, or just to gain something. They were a liability, and now they're an asset."

"To you." My voice is pinched. I still feel Ariella's little hands holding on to mine and trembling. "Don't leave me, Hermione, don't leave me…"

"To you, too. Their blood wasn't in it."

He looks at me and I remember what he told me one evening, when I asked him about refreshing the stale potion ingredients with blood, like he did on the first time he came.

"It doesn't help to refresh the ingredients. What it does, is reinforce the cohesion between the people whose blood is mixed in the potion, when they drink it."

Oh. So that's why he took blood from all of us. Except… "You didn't put your blood in," I accused.

He laughed, with some difficultly. "I'm a professional traitor, or had you forgotten? It works only with and towards people who are true to each other from the beginning. Besides," he added sotto voce, "I don't need it."

And he never opened the subject again.

Cho shakes herself. "How could you? How could you do that to me? After what we've shared… after you've held me in your arms and told me…"

"Told you what? That you are beautiful? That you deserve better than him? I'm still saying it." But he looks at me as he talks to her, and I smile back, condescendingly. Go ahead, I say wordlessly, this doesn't reach me. I feel like an old, diamond-bedecked matron witnessing a scene between her capitalist husband of forty years and his last little piece of a… of arm candy. Indulgent, but grim, too.

He smirks at her again, and I cringe internally. I've learned his expressions enough. He's going to hurt her. "Are you telling me," he asks her with false softness, "that you still loved him? That I was nothing but a second-choice for you? Would you rather I sacrificed myself, than him, who abandoned you? Was it worse," he asks silkily, "than deciding who's going on those ridiculously dangerous missions Weasley dispatches you to? Worse than designating Granger to be left alone to face the Dementors in the Halloween Clearing while you were Apparating away to Hogsmeade? Do I have to remind you that it was you who suggested she was the one to be left behind to face alone an army of Dementors?"

I step forward. "Leave her alone."

He does, and she slumps down, her back to the wall.

But he's not done. "Would you rather," he continues, "I sacrificed all of you who've stayed here to fight?" He paces back and forth again, magisterially, all but treading upon Cho's supine form. "Remember," he says. "You have no choice. You cannot defect. Any of you here, is worth all the others. Except me, of course," he chortles, "who am valuable much more, if worth much less. You," he etches in all our minds, "are one body, and one soul. You are to be affected only by what happens to one of you."

Was this the reason he didn't mix his own blood in? My mind reels.

Ron steps forward. He's grim too, and closed-face, and tense, and at this moment I love him even more than usual, with all the strength of my soul, and I know in my heart the strength of brotherly love, unstained by… all the things I do with Snape.

I make the error of looking at Snape, then, and he looks back at me… into me. "Don't think too much of your soul, Granger," he says aloud. "I thought this bloody idealism of yours made you ready to sacrifice anything for the Greater Good…"

The irony of his makes my teeth ache.

Ron's impervious to our little a-partes. "You're so bloody smart and logical with everybody's life, Snape. What about your own?"

"I just admitted… no, boasted, of being an egotistical worthless coward, who's going to survive you all." Snape is back into his element, now, but Ron won't be fazed. He challenges him with the lunatic plan we've concocted, for Snape to go in all the way with the Contraption, and use it to break into VDM's armor through the weaknesses of his ever-changing protection hexes.

Characteristically, the older wizard sits down, his head on the side, and listens.

"Ridiculous theory," he snorts after some time, and begins punching holes in it. So we set to work in earnest. Patrick and Ariella will be mourned … but later. Because we all know nobody'll be left to mourn us, if something, anything, does not finally work against that growing cancer we're fighting… and not vanquishing.

Cho's nowhere to be seen, neither is Hannah.

After some time Snape rises. "Time to go and reap the fruits of my treachery," he says. “I'll come in with any worthy news I'll be able to collect." He spares me another look, and leaves.

We won't see him for a few days, and then he'll go back to his previous routine, dropping in every second or third evening, laden with ingredients, working us to the bone with dueling training and strategic planning, making himself generally hateful and indispensable, and leaving again. Sometimes he throws us a bone: the planned location of a DE attack, the magical signature of their new recruits… he never tells us what it is he gives to them, or if they know he's in touch.

He always leaves, and always comes back.

One day he comes in and announces his usual news, then he looks at me and says, "Bellatrix was particularly beautiful tonight. She had a red pendant… a very striking piece of jewelry."

"How can you suffer that," Cho asks me later. She wants nothing with Snape any more since the DE attack on Patrick and Ariella, won't talk to him, even. "He's with you, and he boasts about his other women."

I shrug. "We're not a couple," I say with my mind on Bellatrix' pendant, and the inexistent ways to retrieve it… short of killing the witch. "And really, I don't care."

And in truth it doesn't bother me… that much. Eric, Ron, Neville, Anthony and I work on the Contraption like crazed lab animals, as if there was a chance. We even begin brewing a Polyjuice-based potion that could have Ron, or one of the others, masquerading as Snape, and doing the deed. We all spend nights devising chain-spelling charms to enable each of us to fight better, and safer. But I still have to kill Bellatrix.

And always, for three months, in a lopsided routine, Snape drops in, then leaves, then comes back again.

Then one day he comes in the pub, when we're waiting there for Ron, Anselm and Luna, to show them a new feature of the Contraption. So in the meantime we show it to him, the modified Contraption, and its applications, and its potions…

On top of the chip-in-the-armor analysis, and the use we do not yet dare to talk of aloud, it has other fantastic applications.

"It is," Neville tries to explain, "as if we'd translated the waves emitted by wizards into traceable signals, the way I've been doing with my plants. Instinctively at first, then you, Professor Snape isolated the chemical components of the signals, and then thanks to Herm's Arithmancy and Eric's maths and programming skills we've them on screen. A great combination of sense and sensitivity, I'd say."

"What the tree-hugger is trying to articulate," smirks Snape into his Firewhisky, “is that he's too much of a fine soul to be fighting dirty. He can only do it through blips on a screen, or enchanting his plants to sprout thorns when a Death Eater's around. Manly, that."

He snorts. "His mother would be ashamed of him, if she still could. She did get herself f...d into drooling madness by … never mind by who," he says with a half-rueful, half-proud rictus that all but shouts he was part of that 'who', "but she fought. Bravely. Face to face…. At least until somebody pushed her face down on her belly." He snorts. "Ask your Dad," he tells Pansy. "I think he's still got a scar from that evening. Or, rather, one of those evenings. She took some time to break.”

He takes another sip, apparently oblivious to the shift in Neville's and Pansy's faces, the horrified way they look at each other, and at him.

"Have some fun," he mumbles. "Who can tell when it's gonna stop?"

Eric's eyes are shifting from one face to another, trying to reconstruct and guess at the story all the others have grown up on. With. In spite of. And Eric, as usual, needs only a few small dots to see the whole picture. He takes his Firewhisky glass and smashes it into Snape's face. We all jump to protect him from Snape, and Pansy from Neville, and in the ensuing chaos the Contraption falls.

We're all paralyzed by the catastrophe. Only Snape reacts, apparently undisturbed by the fascinatingly disgusting mix of glass shards, blood, snot and Firewhisky dripping from his huge nose. He takes the Contraption and examines it, smearing it with the gruesome mix. Neville, who's made a dash for it, hesitates a fraction of a second at the sickening mess on it, and Snape shots him a wry amused look, then Stuns him. Pansy kneels near Neville to take care of him, but she recoils when she sees the way he looks at her. For the first time in my life, I see Pansy ready to cry.

The Contraption looks OK, but is emitting a weird beep. Snape pockets it. "Calm down," he says. "I'll work on it tonight. You're not fit to, anyway, any of you."

We're all too shocked to react. Ron would maybe, but he's still on that raid with Anselm and Luna.

Snape takes me home in deafening silence. When we're done with the wards and the checking he pushes me on the bed. "Listen," he says. "It's coming to an end. There will be a confrontation, soon, and I want you to have my locket. I want you to brew another batch of this asphodel potion, too, with the blood, and get everybody to drink it. Especially Pansy and Neville. The Death Eaters are planning to use the little story I told tonight, which is true, by the way, to get Neville to betray Pansy, and through her they'll get to all of you. You have to make them make their peace, soon. Before it comes at them from somewhere else."

"What about you," I ask.

"Don't worry about me. I'll be where I need to." His tone is so smug and cold it can only mean he's going to remove himself to a safe place. But who knows how many layers of deception cover his meaning?

"I don’t want the locket. And I don't believe you."

"I don't need you to. Remember: potion, training, spelled coats for fighting."

He gets up, pulls me towards him, leans with his back on the door. For a moment he cradles my head against his shoulder, in the crook of his elbows, his hands soft and caressing on my back… He smoothes his cheek against my hair, inhaling deeply… There's a rumble coming from his chest that's a lullaby, and a supplication, that's my name said again and again, that's so infinitely sad and soft and mournful I also want to cradle and soothe him…

But then it stops, and it shifts so abruptly I'm happy I didn’t let my defenses down. The whole hateful, violent act lasts no more than five minutes, up against the door. I feel like a prostitute, only he tears up my clothes, too, and leaves marks that will not fade for days.

"Ghastly. Good I didn’t have to pay for it at least," he says as he adjusts his pants.

He pushes me off the door, and doesn't stop to help me back up when I get tangled in my knickers and trousers, all wrapped around my ankles, and fall in an awkward heap against the nearing wall, only he nudges my legs out of the way to allow him to open the door, his hand getting stuck for several seconds in my spare coat that's hanging near the entrance, the only one I have left now he's torn the other.

He just goes out in the night.
He just doesn't come back.

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