Chapter 7- Flammae Diaboli
Sandalwood. It had taken Severus the better part of a day to figure out the odd scent of the oil from Black’s revenge, and he hadn’t even managed to do it himself: he had only realised what it was after Siobhan from Hufflepuff had told him that the lingering remnant of Black’s vengeance smelled “lovely, like a christening.” Strangely, he had apparently become sufficiently benign for a girl like the quiet, serious star of the Hufflepuff Quidditch team to compliment him, however obliquely. In any case, Black had probably not tried to use an ecclesiastical spell on purpose, but he had inadvertently baptised Severus in oil of sandalwood. It could have been much worse -- and probably would have been if Black had known better. Severus could have gone around for a few days smelling like petrol, or rancid fish and chips, instead of the exotic, somewhat mysterious scent that he was actually rather enjoying.
He sat, contemplating where to find such a spell in case he wanted to use it, in the unusually quiet atmosphere of the Slytherin common room, where groups of fourth and fifth year students huddled over books and parchments, readying themselves for tests the next day. The sixth years were luckier, for now, but a huddle of sixth year boys, that looked much like any other study circle, sat near Severus. They spoke quietly; Severus, who generally liked to know what was going on, had to strain to hear them.
He sat in a chair near the corner, his customary seat to the degree that younger students hopped out of it with alacrity when he entered the room even though he had never so much as jinxed someone to gain access to it. The younger Slytherins were mostly terrified of the older ones, and apparently his reputation for creative spells preceded him and had taken on the usual sinister cast. If it gained him the most private chair in the common room, so much the better. There he sat while in the corner behind him, Wilkes, Rosier and Mulciber turned toward Avery in quiet discussion.
“Care of Magical Creatures seems like the obvious one,” Mulciber was offering. “Access to the creatures is pretty easy. They’re kept all over the place, and Kettleburn can only be in one place at a time.”
“Right, but do you have any idea what to do with them?” Avery asked.
“Not yet,” Mulciber responded. “Can you think of anything better? I mean, anything you do in Potions would involve getting access to their actual cauldrons or other supplies, which we won’t be able to do, since most of them are in other houses. And Slughorn just has everyone get their supplies at random as they arrive.”
“Well, that’s the problem with any subject,” Avery responded disparagingly. “You can’t just rig the entire class, or you’d risk getting purebloods as well.”
“So, is there any class where the Mudbloods are easy to single out?” Mulciber asked. Rosier, not quite the sharpest knife in the drawer, just looked back and forth, from Avery’s sharp features to Mulciber’s chiseled ones, an almost-handsome face ruined by cold, dead eyes.
“Transfiguration,” Avery responded. “They actually use the same objects several days in a row, and they hand them back to McGonagall with their names on them to pick up where they left off the next day, remember? Actually, order is what we need to look for. Just hex the objects--”
“--and no other student will go near them after the first one or two go off,” Mulciber concluded.
“At least it’s something.”
“We can do better,” Mulciber answered dismissively. “How about Astronomy? A little Jelly Legs on top of the Astronomy Tower might do the trick. Particularly among the first years, who’d have no idea how to reverse it.”
“Let’s keep that one in mind,” said Avery, as usual, the leader of the group. Despite being the smallest of the four, short and wiry enough to still play Seeker for the Slytherin Quidditch team at sixteen, Avery was the brightest and most assertive and most accustomed to being in charge.
“How about Defence?” Rosier asked.
The other two looked at him. “How about it?” asked Avery.
“I don’t know. Just seems like if we’re working with the Dark Arts, there ought to be something we could do.”
“Yeeeeesss,” Mulciber replied with mock patience, “except that Llewellyn has all the Practicums so carefully staged and monitored that it would be virtually impossible.”
Practica, Severus thought, cringing. He could live with all the bad Latin that abounded in the naming of spells, but the botching of simple plurals was always painful.
“Transfiguration definitely has possibilities,” Avery went on, ignoring Rosier’s suggestion. “Nobody is as well-organized as McGonagall. We could try a few inventions of our own on the appropriate objects before the class starts.”
“And then sit back and watch the fun,” Wilkes pitched in, grinning.
“Not our class, you idiot, the first or second years. The likelihood of any of them having enough of a clue to undo anything is fairly slim -- at least, if they’re as gormless as this lot.” He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the youngest Slytherins, studying and chatting in small clusters on the other side of the room. “The only problem is that McGonagall might be able to handle it all on her own. We’ll need to come up with something that she can’t quickly contain,” Avery finished.
“Or that’s over before she can do much about it. I vote for Transfiguration,” Mulciber said, decisively.
“Since when did this become a democracy?” Avery sneered.
“Since when did I say I’d help if it’s not?” Mulciber countered.
Avery remained quiet for a few seconds, and then said, “Right, Transfiguration. Now we just need to figure out what the first and second years have coming up, get into the classroom, and put our own spells on the Mudbloods’ supplies in advance.”
“Is that all?” Mulciber smirked.
“We can do it,” Avery said lightly. “No one around here will know who to thank, but I’ll make sure Rabastan hears about it the next time I see him, and he’ll take it right to the top. Besides, there’s a certain satisfaction in a job well done, gentlemen. Not to mention the joy of knowing that the Mudbloods will have a better idea of their place afterward. Right, I need to go talk to Nott about Saturday’s game.” He got up and left the group discussing the topic at hand, and Severus wondering what the hell he should do.
…
He was still considering whether and how to respond to Avery’s upcoming anti-Muggleborn activity several days later when he met with Professor Llewellyn for a discussion of his Cruciatus curse essay. The Voldemort Youth, based on the one discussion Severus had happened to overhear, seemed to have a rather broad spectrum of possible activities in mind, ranging from the merely annoying to the potentially fatal, so whatever they eventually wound up doing might not even require intervention. Besides, Severus’s intent in such matters was to remain neutral enough to find out about any plots that might involve harm to Lily, so as to stop them in advance. He had subtly deflected a few mean pranks from her in years past, although she hadn’t known about it; her friend Mary McDonald or some other Muggleborn had always been an acceptable substitute. But that was then. The problem was that now there was no such thing as an acceptable substitute: that mindset had led him to lose everything.
He knocked on the door of Professor Llewellyn’s classroom at the appointed time. “Come in!” Llewellyn called, and when Severus entered, the professor was sitting at the large wooden desk at the front of the room. Rolls of parchment were piled on the desk next to a quill and a pot of red ink for grading, and a mug of apparently oversteeped tea sat nearby, with rings on the blotter suggesting a fondness for tea and a certain sloppiness in personal habits.
“Sit down, sit down,” Llewellyn offered, waving his hand in the general direction of the front rows of desks. He pulled a desk out of the first row, turned it around to face Severus, and settled his lanky form in it. Unused to this degree of informality from his instructors, Severus was reminded that some seventh years actually remembered Professor Llewellyn as a Hogwarts student, a seventh-year Ravenclaw prefect when they were in their first year. He was therefore probably only twenty-three years old, which seemed ancient, but compared to McGonagall or Dumbledore…
“Let’s talk about your essay. What did you think about the law and the Cruciatus Curse?”
“That it’s very ambiguous. Sir.”
“It is. Sorry to send you on something of a Wizarding law goose-chase, but I thought it would be best if you discovered that yourself, instead of just hearing it from me.”
Severus dived in to a more specific question. “Might I ask -- the Gingold case seems practically identical to the Smyth case in its particulars until you get to the outcome. Neither one of them exactly had a spotless record beforehand; you could easily argue that either one was performing the curse not out of self-defence but because he was a--“
“Sick bastard? Llewellyn finished, looking amused.
“Ah -- that, yes. But Smyth was allowed off because it was done in self-defence, whereas Gingold was sent to Azkaban. To be completely honest, sir, I couldn’t understand why.”
“Bellingham is a Wizarding law professor, not a historian,” Llewellyn said simply. “The best law professors are both. In his case, he has a great mind for legal details and intricacies, but little interest in the context. Keep in mind that the Smyth case occurred in 1926, whereas the Gingold case occurred in 1942--“
“--during the rise of Grindelwald?”
Llewellyn nodded. “It makes a tremendous difference. There’s more room for leniency in … untroubled times. The law is far from black and white.”
“But is that appropriate? Shouldn’t justice be the same in 1926 as it is in 1942?”
“Or 1976?” Llewellyn asked. There was a pause as they both considered the question.
“Justice is usually represented as wearing a blindfold and holding a set of scales,” Severus stated.
“I think that may be more of an ideal that a reality,” Llewellyn replied. “I know the scales make it tempting to think that justice can be weighed out like… so much wormwood for a dream-inducing potion, for example. But this isn’t a potion. It’s not an exact science.”
Severus took a deep breath. “In that case, if the law isn’t a guide to when the Dark Arts may be used, what is?”
“Good question,” Llewellyn responded, his tone still mild but his glance sharp. “A related one is, why do you want to know? I applaud any effort to increase one’s knowledge, but the Dark Arts are a slippery slope.”
“But you study the Dark Arts,” Severus responded. “How can you study them, then, without -- becoming a Death Eater or something like that?” Severus found himself asking, his interest sincere, and somewhat terrified of how much he was revealing. He reminded himself that he had little to hide and much to gain. As a faculty member, Llewellyn would already know of Severus’s reputation from previous years, solidified by the Mudblood incident. And figuring out how to keep up his interest, or addiction, or whatever it was, in the Dark Arts, in a manner that wouldn’t repel Lily -- that would be the Holy Grail.
“The Dark Arts and the Death Eaters are not the same thing,” Professor Llewellyn responded, “as you undoubtedly know as well as I do. Besides, I’m not much of a Dark Arts scholar; I’m more of a scholar of Dark potions who will have to do because no one else is available. That being said, to look for people with an interest in the Dark Arts who aren’t Death Eaters, go to the Ministry and look in the Auror Department.”
“Sir?”
“I’m serious. The internal controls in the Auror Department are incredibly tight, and they have to be. A few of my friends from Hogwarts have become Aurors, and they talk as though about a quarter of their colleagues are in that line of work because of a fascination with the Dark Arts that really doesn’t have another reasonable outlet. They’re not the type to join He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named; the blood status thing means nothing to them. But the Dark Arts -- very compelling. Is this a good reason to be an Auror, or a very unwise one? I don’t think I’ve figured that out yet, myself.”
“The problem,” he went on, “is that the Dark Arts are virtually impossible to practice without the involvement of your -- character, your soul, the core of your very being, whatever you’d like to call it. Certainly an experienced practitioner could torture or kill someone using Dark spells with much more distance and objectivity than a beginner, but even You-Know-Who, who they say could probably kill his own granny without breaking a sweat, is said to have a look of rage and triumph on his face when he’s… doing his good work.” The professor’s voice was dry and sarcastic at the last. “So, can your average Auror who is interested in the Dark Arts study them without starting to dabble in them? And can anyone even dabble in them without being damaged in some way?” He shrugged and said, “I’m sure someone from the psychometry department at St. Mungo’s is working on that, and I’ll leave it to them. But for you -- something to think about.”
“So, do you think it’s impossible to study the Dark Arts objectively, as a scholar?” Severus asked. “Theoretically, that is.”
Llewellyn’s brow furrowed and he looked away, absently, at a random corner of the room, apparently lost in thought. “Not impossible, ” he finally said. “But very difficult. Obviously someone has to do it, or we’d have no way of combating the Dark Arts; ideally the practice would be stopped before it’s even started, of course, but since that’s scarcely possible, we need to know how to undo Dark spells or create antidotes to Dark potions. But -- I think, anyway -- everyone has something in their personality, some weakness, some button that is waiting to be pushed, to use a Muggle metaphor… an Auror might use the Dark Arts for what looks like justice but is actually revenge, maybe. A scholar might use … questionable methods in the interest of knowledge.”
“Mightn’t they do that even without working with the Dark Arts?” Severus countered, trying to remain appropriately polite and deferential. It annoyed him when the arguments against the Dark Arts seemed like arguments against human nature. He had thought Llewellyn would be better than that.
“Absolutely,” Llewellyn responded. “I’m sure even Muggles do. But I do believe it’s easier. The Dark Arts -- open a door, I suppose. Make certain methods or… ways of thinking more readily available. Does that make any sense? You don’t have to excuse an interest in it, by the way. It’s a fascinating subject, Severus. But a dangerous one. I don’t care if you have an interest in the Dark Arts; I do care, as your teacher, how you use that interest and what it does to you.”
Severus froze, sitting mutely with absolutely no idea how to respond. On the one hand, Llewellyn seemed so frank and trustworthy, and as a scholar of Dark potions, he essentially had Severus’s ideal job, and here he was offering him information -- education, even -- of the kind he most deeply desired. On the other hand…
“And I’m not putting your name on a list for Dumbledore,” the professor continued. “You can ask your questions. I’d rather you ask me than--,” he paused, “-- than your fellow students who are planning on becoming Death Eaters. I’m sure you know who they are better than I do -- although a few of them are, shall I say, bleeding obvious.”
“If there is a list,” Severus offered, slowly, wondering again what the hell he was doing even as he did it, “then I think I’m already on it.”
Llewellyn smiled a bit grimly. “How do I put this…All right. You could roll up your sleeve and show me a Dark Mark and I would still talk to you about the Dark Arts,” he said. “Again, I’d rather you hear about it at Hogwarts, from someone in a position of… accountability. Am I quite clear?”
Severus nodded. There was no way he would trust anyone enough to ask all of the questions he had on this topic, and he was shocked to the core that Llewellyn even knew what a Dark Mark was. But asking about the condoned usage of the Dark Arts, if such a thing existed, seemed neutral enough, based on Llewellyn’s response to his previous questions -- and since he had already started down that path in this conversation, he would be as well to continue. He could at least obtain whatever sanitized answers Hogwarts would permit its professor of the Dark Arts to give his students. It could be a starting point for further, more interesting, studies.
He stopped himself. He had no reason anymore to pursue those further, more interesting, studies. Not if he wanted to deserve Lily, not just to regain her friendship, but to keep it for more than a few days or weeks. The scholarly musings of the intelligent and decent man in front of him -- this was his own future, although he suspected that his own ratio of intelligence to decency was somewhat different than Davis Llewellyn’s. Still, he would have to settle for Dark magic in this form, or never stand any chance at winning Lily back. He didn’t know whom to pity more: the professor, with his circumscribed, intellectual approach to the subject, studying the shallow tide pools and only guessing at the raging sea, or himself, for at least having some idea of how much he was going to be missing.
“Are Aurors allowed to perform Dark magic, then?” Severus finally asked in reply. “In the name of justice, or for self-defence, for example?” He had never thought of becoming one, since constantly putting oneself in imminent danger was not a favorite activity for him; given that he had studiously avoided Quidditch for the perfectly sane reason that he didn’t like having things hurled at him, the thought of having much worse than Bludgers fired in his direction was hardly appealing. Nonetheless, it certainly seemed like a more acceptable outlet for his interest -- at least, more acceptable in the society in which Lily moved, which was all that mattered. And if there was one such means of indulging in the Dark Arts rather than just studying it, maybe there were others. It was, in any case, a safe question.
“Ah, you’ll have a difficult time getting an answer to that one from the Ministry,” Llewellyn replied. “So I don’t know. I think they reserve the right, but come down hard on cases when it occurs. But that’s a guess, based on gossip and speculation. They use Dementors in Azkaban, of course, and that’s Dark enough, so I wouldn’t put it past them.”
Llewellyn looked thoughtful for a moment, and then pointed his wand in the direction of a low barrister’s bookcase in the corner, saying, “Accio, Compendium! ” The door swung open and a large, startlingly familiar book came flying out and landed with a thud in the professor’s outstretched hand. “That was just lazy,” he stated with an apologetic smile. “But I’m a bit tired -- up too late grading, I suppose. In any case, this is the Compendium Artis Oscuris, the standard text for study of the Dark Arts -- which you would appear to be familiar with.”
“Only passingly familiar,” Severus replied, wondering how Llewellyn had figured that out so easily. “I’ve seen it in Flourish & Blott’s.” And coveted it… but the professor didn’t need to know that.
“It’s available in Flourish & Blott’s in no small part because it’s a standard text in Auror training,” Llewellyn informed him. “They need to know what they’re up against.”
“Back to your question,” he went on. “When may the Dark Arts be used. There’s a cursory overview in the introduction to the Compendium, but the ethics section of the library has several incredibly thick tomes about ethics and the Dark Arts. Given the kinds of questions you have, those might be more useful than Bellingham -- although I’m glad you read that. Understanding the legalities is a good place to start. And might I suggest skimming rather than reading, at least at the beginning.”
Severus nodded and, taking the professor’s cue, stood up to leave. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “This has been helpful.”
“Less helpful than I would have hoped,” Llewellyn said, standing up and proffering an outstretched hand for Severus to shake, “but it’s a beginning. It’s a complex subject; come back when you have more questions, and I’ll be happy to mull them over and give you more vague and useless answers.” Severus gave a small smile in spite of himself. Llewellyn pushed the desk in which he had been sitting back into place, and returned to the teacher’s desk, where the large pile of parchments and tea, probably cold by now, still awaited him. Severus was almost at the door when the professor called his name, and he turned around.
There was a pause, as though Llewellyn wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to say. He finally stated, “Don’t just look for external reasons for and against using the Dark Arts, Severus. It doesn’t matter if it’s acceptable under the law if it tears your soul apart. Look for the internal reasons -- look for what this kind of magic can do to those who use it.”
“I will,” Severus said, and he meant it, but he suspected that what he discovered would not be particularly convincing. He had been familiar with Dark magic for years, and it had never torn his soul apart. It had never even come close.
…
Talking to Professor Llewellyn about the grey areas of the Dark Arts had been simultaneously helpful and confusing for Severus in his attempts to figure out what to do about the upcoming attack, annoyance, or whatever it would turn out to be. On the one hand, the group wasn’t giving Lily any trouble, and the possibility existed that whatever they were doing would be nothing worse than some minor bullying. On the other hand, they spoke freely in their periodic nocturnal chats in the common room about different possibilities, some of them fairly dangerous, and it was clear that Lily, without Severus as a protector, had become fair game. Mulciber in particular talked about Mary and, to a lesser extent, Lily, in ways that made Severus’s skin crawl.
Then, of course, there were all the various “what ifs”: if they weren’t stopped with this effort, where would they stop? Would it give them courage to take on bigger targets? Or might they leave Lily alone if they could just get out their aggressions on a few first and second years?
Severus tried to stay relatively close to the group in the evenings so that he could remain abreast of their plans. This was surprisingly easy to do; they tended to congregate near his favorite seat, since the area was somewhat removed, and they seemed to consider him little enough of a threat that their voices, while low, were usually not so low that he couldn’t hear them. Fate, however, sometimes intervened and made it impossible for him to keep an eye on his classmates. On this particular evening, it had stepped in, cloaked in the form of Morphia Mather, a quiet, awkward seventh-year girl who was oblivious enough to sit near Severus’s old friends’ favourite haunt despite the fact that they regularly bullied her when the Mudblood-baiting had lost its charm. He considered booting Morphia out of his chair, something he would readily have done the year before, preferably with the entire gang backing him -- but after a couple of months of being practically the male equivalent of the solitary bookworm who was occupying his seat, his heart wasn’t in it.
He considered her for a moment-- her hunched form, her slim torso and arms mismatched with her thick legs and ankles, her clothes, which were not out-of-style only because they had never been in style in the first place. She even managed to have unattractive breasts, which a year or two before Severus would have thought an oxymoron; whatever kind of underclothes she wore made them appear shapeless and lumpy. She wasn’t by any means the most unattractive girl in Slytherin -- her face was not unpleasant, and she’d even had some Hufflepuff boyfriend a year or two before -- but something about her invited mockery and exclusion from her housemates. Inexplicably, she had a friendship with Sirius Black, of all people, who had been known in the past to come to her defense, but within the walls of Slytherin, Morphia was on her own. Severus felt a stab of pity for the innocuous, graceless girl whom he had always been eager to torment the year before just because she was even more awkward and friendless than he was. But a year earlier, the sight of Morphia Mather had been like blood in the water to him, a signal for the hunt to begin. A year earlier, he had been terrified of slipping down the other side of the social precipice over which she had already fallen.
A year earlier, she had probably been his Boggart.
Passing up the opportunity to assert his dominance over Morphia, Severus settled himself into a quiet spot and tried to read one of the library books he had taken out at Llewellyn’s suggestion, but he couldn’t get his mind off his classmates on the other side of the room and the conundrum with which they had presented him. He could argue to himself all he wanted that the only person whose side he was on, besides his own, was Lily’s, and that he would do best to lie low until something actually threatened her. But Lily, prefect or not, would never sit idly by and let even some petty act of bullying go on, never mind something truly violent or dangerous. She had spent the seven years of their friendship defending him, after all.
Always so brave, Lily, and so bloody emasculating. All those years he had been the Prince in name only, and the nickname did nothing to assuage his silent humiliation that she was always the one riding to his rescue rather than the other way around. In a very roundabout way, it might finally be his turn.
Lily would stop them, no question, and she would do it because it was the right thing to do, and because it would be something that she believed in. Neither of these reasons held true for Severus. The problem was that much and all as he admired -- loved -- worshipped Lily, he was nothing like her. Nothing at all. Nonetheless, taking on the outer forms of penance often enough might coerce his mind and soul into actually believing in what he was doing.
…
“You’re supposed to use the stem of the poppy. Not the stamen.”
Mary MacDonald stopped chopping the ingredients of her potion and was clearly pausing to stare at him, but Severus was too busy concentrating on his own work to return her glance. This didn’t stop her from questioning him.
“The stem?”
“Read the instructions if you don’t believe me. Or even if you do. It might improve your potion-making.”
Mary turned from him in a huff but, to her credit, did appear to be reading the instructions. Under the circumstances, Severus pondered, he would probably have been contrary enough to prefer being wrong over acquiescing and reading the instructions. On the other hand, his precision was inherent; there was no way that he would have so much as lifted his silver knife without reading the instructions repeatedly in the first place. The mental exercise of comparison with Mary was purely academic.
Mary put down her book, then swept the unwanted poppy pieces off the work surface onto which she had been chopping them.
“You’ll need those later,” Severus warned her. “You just don’t distill them as long.”
There was a lengthy, loaded pause, and then Mary asked, in a much more civil tone, “All right, then, I have a question. What would happen if I did it in the wrong order?” She actually sounded curious, like she wanted to understand what she was doing, rather than merely following the recipe by rote. Severus briefly weighed whether he should be talking this much to a Muggleborn with Mulciber and Avery right behind them, versus the potential good karma he might be creating in the world of Lily.
Lily won out.
“The stem is a much less potent part of the flower,” he answered. “If you distilled the stamen that long, you’d probably create a Draught of Death instead of the Draught of Living Death. At the very least, you’d make it very hard for the person to breathe: poppies are a narcotic, so therefore they’re a respiratory depressant.”
“Fair enough,” said Mary. “Thanks.” Severus shrugged off her gratitude and went back to work. Mary usually made a good lab partner in that she neither liked nor disliked him and therefore rarely bothered him. In this case, her indifference was ideal, because the Draught of Living Death was a complex potion that required all of his focus, especially because there were, as always, points of procedure on which he differed from Libatius Borage. Somewhere in the future lay a text called Advanced Potion-Making for the Twentieth Century… or Even the Nineteenth, by one Severus Snape. It was about time.
His concentration, however, was broken some minutes later when Professor Slughorn called the class to attention. “A few words,” he said, “about ‘borrowing’ from my stores. I will be locking the supply closet.” He looked up quickly as a few muffled “Awww”s made their way around the room. Unable to figure out who the speakers were, Slughorn continued, “I will be locking up the supply closet whenever I am not in the room. The potions that can be made with such items as Boomslang skin and Archangelica root are restricted substances that students are not permitted to brew. If any of you have borrowed such items and they are still in useable condition, please return them at once.”
Archangelica root? Severus was going to have to look into the uses of that one. But Boomslang skin was clear enough: someone was brewing Polyjuice Potion.
Someone else beside himself.
…
The thing that finally made Severus conclusively decide to put a stop to Avery’s plan was some combination of intellectual and aesthetic snobbery. Avery and Mulciber had come up with a way to hex the teacups used in Transfiguration such that those belonging to the Muggleborns would explode violently when a spell was attempted, impaling their owners’ faces and hands with shards of china. It had all the wit and elegance of a nail-bomb or Molotov cocktail. If this was the best that Avery could come up with, if this was something that he would be proudly reporting back to Lestrange, perhaps it was better after all that Severus had jettisoned his plans to become a Death Eater.
The problem was how to stop it. Avery and Mulciber had done their research: McGonagall marked which items would go to which students and collected them daily, and Avery seemed to have a sixth sense for ferreting out Muggleborns. Not caring much one way or another about the blood status of eleven-year-olds, Severus had no idea whose teacups would be hexed and whose would be untouched, which made reversing the spell rather difficult. Then there was the business of quickly figuring out which spell, or spells, they had used, and managing to reverse them before being caught out of bed in the middle of the night. Besides, the teacups would probably be jinxed such that any spell -- not just the intended one from the first year students -- would set them off, so even a Vanishing spell would undoubtedly create enough of an explosive din to draw Filch. And he had nowhere to hide the accursed things, even if he could spirit them out of the room at three in the morning without getting caught. It seemed fairly hopeless. In fact, it made much more sense to just prevent the students from getting into the room in the first place.
But of course, that didn’t make sense either. As soon as McGonagall, or really any professor or upper-level student, came along, a simple Alohomora would probably take care of whatever locking mechanism he could create, and the students would proceed into class, completely unaware that the items intended for some of the students were hexed. His own efforts would just look in retrospect like part of the attack.
Whatever he did, he needed to keep people out and make it perfectly clear that something bad was going on. The most obvious answer was to send an anonymous note to McGonagall, but five years at Hogwarts had taught Severus that with all the spells at the professors’ command, anonymous notes never stayed anonymous for long. Anonymous spells, on the other hand, often did.
The barrier into McGonagall’s classroom had to be both impassable for all but the most advanced students, and alarming enough to cause the room to be searched. In short, it had to be created by use of the Dark Arts. Thinking back on all the spells he had known and used in the past, however, Severus could find nothing appropriate coming to mind.
The end justified the means, though, and for the end of stopping his old companions in a brutal and likely very damaging attack on a bunch of unsuspecting children about whom Severus could hardly have cared less, the means lay in a barrister bookcase in the Defence classroom. Asking Llewellyn for permission to borrow the Compendium, however, would be as much as admitting his part in advance. Llewellyn, decent soul though he was, was still faculty, and couldn’t know.
Severus felt guilty sneaking into the empty classroom in the golden twilight. He had felt only slightly bad about “borrowing” supplies from Professor Slughorn’s large storage closet; he never used Slughorn’s school property for his own modestly successful potions business, but rather, for intellectual curiosity or because there were certain potions that would be wise to have around, just in case. Given the increasing likelihood that he would actually need to use it, Severus was glad he had taken some Boomslang skin before Slughorn began locking up the stores more carefully. But sneaking around behind Llewellyn’s back genuinely bothered him after the Defence professor had treated him with such… respect, trust, whatever it was.
He had treated him as if he were not a Slytherin.
Nonetheless, it had to be done. As a compromise between necessity and his annoyingly overactive conscience, he took the book out of the bookcase and snuck with it into the room’s adjoining storage area so that he could read it in peace. He wasn’t even leaving the classroom with it, he reasoned; he was merely consulting it. That he was doing so without permission was of little odds. There was no lock on the bookcase; Llewellyn probably left the texts there for public use: a small library of academic works on his subject matter for the interested reader.
It would have been tempting to stay there for hours, browsing through the thing, but after ten or fifteen minutes, Severus had skimmed and read enough to know what he needed to do: Devil’s Fire. It was complex and difficult to reverse, a spell that even he had never tried before. It would block the door effectively and alarmingly. It was perfect. As for the question of why it bothered him more to borrow a book without permission from a kindly professor than to allow the bombing of a bunch of innocent kids, the analysis of that particular question and what it said about him as a person could wait for later -- although the very thought made him wish for Lily, always his companion in analysing the living daylights out of everything. Their friendship had started falling apart, he realised, when he had stopped overthinking and started blindly obeying whatever his friends told him to do. He was probably, at heart, still a sick Dark Arts bastard, but at least he was once again a thinking sick Dark Arts bastard. This was progress.
…
Devil’s Fire wasn’t FiendFyre, but it was a near relative -- a form of fire created only by Dark magic, which didn’t spin out of control like FiendFyre, yet which couldn’t be crossed without consumption of a protective potion, and which couldn’t be reversed without the exact -- and advanced -- counterspell. Finite Incantem or some other such effort would probably earn someone a good scare, if not first degree burns, since the flames would increase each time an incorrect counterspell was attempted -- but at least that was better than what lay on the other side for the unlucky few who happened to be born of Muggle parents.
Severus had no need to set an alarm; he had always been a light sleeper. His roommates were long since back from their anti-Muggleborn efforts, and sleeping soundly, when he crept out of bed, threw his dressing gown on over his pajamas and stuffed his wand, toothbrush and toothpaste in one pocket and a plausible bit of study material in the other, and crept as quietly as possible out of the room. He looked around the common room, which was, at three o’clock in the morning, empty and silent, and left Slytherin behind him.
It had been a long time since he had snuck around the castle at night. Potter and friends seemed to have an almost uncanny ability to evade Filch in the nocturnal prowls about which they were constantly bragging, but Severus had nearly been caught by him too many times, and had actually been apprehended twice. The man just didn’t seem to sleep. But tonight, or this morning as perhaps it was, luck seemed to be with him, and he made it to the Transfiguration classroom unmolested. Now for a quick spell, and a speedy return to bed.
He took a deep breath, pointed his wand at the door, and chanted the incantation as quietly as possible: Flammae Diaboli. A green flame licked out at him from the doorway, and then receded into nothing.
As the Dark Arts went, it wasn’t such a difficult spell. Advanced, yes, but he had been capable of fairly advanced spells when he was still a quite young. Why was it so difficult now? He tried to drum up the requisite strength of feeling, the necessary anger. He tried again, harder -- Flammae Diaboli -- and the same thing happened.
It didn’t mean enough to him -- this was the problem. In years past, he could have coldly cast a Dark spell out of the sheer pride of mastery and generalised ill will, but it was no longer that easy. Perhaps it was that he was too long without practice; perhaps he had changed too much to easily summon a Dark spell. He tried harder, and imagined someone trying to harm Lily. But he couldn’t fool himself like that; Lily was in no immediate danger, and he knew it. The only danger to Lily was that if these prats weren’t stopped now, they might move on to bigger and better things, like a pretty sixth-year prefect. But even Mulciber and his rapaciousness were too remote a possibility to truly inspire him; the real reason Severus was lurking in a darkened corridor at three in the morning was so that he could say to Lily, if asked, that he had been faithful, in his fashion. Flammae Diaboli. Nothing this time.
Now he was getting angry, and worried. Time was running out; he couldn’t just keep standing there in the hallway in the middle of the night trying to cast a Dark spell without Filch appearing on his rounds at some point. He wasn’t sure which would be worse: the professors catching him, or the Slytherins, and he had no intention of suffering the wrath of either group for something that, when it came right down to it, he really didn’t care that much about. He flicked the wand at the doorway angrily, with a rising temper: Flammae Diaboli! The flames lingered a bit longer this time before disappearing.
These polite incantations would do nothing, and it was starting to seem hopeless. One had to really want to cast a spell like this, but his heart just wasn’t in the cause for which he was risking expulsion. Therein lay the problem: he didn’t actually want to do it.
But he did want to do it, just not in this dull, anemic manner. Beyond wanting to, now that he had let himself think about it and taste it, he needed to do it, like he needed air to breathe. It had been so long since he had let himself even dabble in the Dark Arts, and the anticipation of actually being able to cast a Dark spell again was both terrifying and exhilarating. With time running short and more civilised means failing, he allowed the terror and exhilaration to run rampant.
He was dangling in midair, with James Potter sneeringly divesting him of his clothing while a laughing crowd looked on and Lily walked away; his father’s great form towered over him, arm raised for a beating; he was choking and gagging on soap bubbles as Potter and Black trained their wands on him… and Lily -- Lily was leaning against a pillar, lecturing him about his wicked ways, but God, she was intoxicatingly close and his mind was elsewhere, roaming over her body, imagining all the things he wanted to do to her, with her… He focused his mind on the spell and let the sensations of the strongest, darkest feelings he possessed wash over him -- his hatred of Potter and Black, his powerless, childish rage at his father, the most base and primal parts of his hunger for Lily -- until he could feel it in his blood, his eyes closed, his fists clenched.
FLAMMAE DIABOLI!
The spell ripped through him almost against his will, like the blind fury that had split his life apart half a year before, and when he opened his eyes again, panting and trembling, he saw the doorway completely blocked with violent green flames, eerie against the pitch darkness of the corridor. He had never even seen Devil’s Fire before, but now he had actually created it. It served the purpose perfectly -- tongues of fire snapped out angrily from the curtain of raging greenish flames that blocked the doorway, and there was nothing gentle or pretty about it. No one would try to enter this room. And no professor in his right mind would leave the room unsearched with this unholy barrier blocking the way.
Although tempted to stay around to admire the bastard offspring off his darkest nature, he slipped into a side corridor and made his way back to Slytherin House, where Avery, Wilkes and Mulciber lay in the room Severus shared with them, their breathing slow and even, looking deceptively innocent in sleep. He managed to close the door and sneak into bed so quietly that not one of his roommates even so much as shifted.
Now that the adventure was over and the danger of discovery was past, Severus felt as exhausted as if he hadn’t slept in days. Bone-weary, he expected somnolence to overtake him quickly, but he found that the effort of casting the spell had left him so possessed by rage, lust and emptiness that he didn’t have a hope in hell of sleeping.
Instead, for what felt like hours, he lay staring into the darkness, inexplicably sick at heart, hungering for something to which he could not even put a name.
Snivellus and the Head Girl by SeverusSempra
Chapter Notes: Severus and the Dark Arts
Chapter Endnotes: Thanks for the reviews! They are so helpful in writing this. :) And thanks, as always, to the world's greatest betas, Sandy (Snape's Talon) and Fresca (Colores).