Chapter Text

Chapter 44: Prologue

POV: Snape

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The monitoring charm had been on the wall for thirteen years.

Not this wall specifically. The charm moved with him, transferring between quarters and laboratories with the patient practicality of a ward set to track a single person who could not be relied upon to stay still. But thirteen years on whatever wall Snape occupied. Thirteen years of the low, steady pulse that meant Harry was alive, somewhere in the world, and not currently bleeding.

At present, Harry was at the Burrow.

The charm communicated this in the way of objects attuned to a person rather than a location. Not where, precisely, but how. Harry asleep made it slow and warm, the rhythm of it like a hand resting on a surface. Harry frightened made it sharp and irregular. Harry at the Burrow in August made it a sustained, slightly elevated hum, the magical signature of someone happy in a house full of noise. Snape had learned this across two consecutive summers. The first summer, he had checked the charm every forty minutes. This summer he checked it when he entered the room, when he left the room, and once at three in the morning when the laboratory was dark and the castle was still and the habit presented itself.

Snape turned back to the aconite.

The laboratory was underground, east-facing at the high windows, and ran the length of three classrooms laid end to end. Most of it was storage. The working section occupied the near third: two long benches of scarred oak, a brewing station, and shelves that climbed to the ceiling. At the far end, past the locked cabinet where the controlled substances lived behind three separate wards, a narrow window admitted a stripe of morning light across the floor from approximately six to nine in the summer months. It was now half past nine. The stripe had moved to the wall and was no longer useful.

He had not opened the windows. The aconite was temperature-sensitive and the August heat was wrong for it, and there was no one to complain about the close air except Snape, and Snape did not complain about air.

The distillation apparatus behind him was making the slow rhythmic drip that meant it had another forty minutes to run. He had calculated this when he set it at six. The morning had been productive. He had decanted three batches of base solution, updated his supply ledger, written a letter to a supplier in Edinburgh about a delayed shipment of powdered bicorn horn, corrected two errors in last term's inventory count, and was now counting aconite vials, which was not strictly necessary. He had counted them three days ago and they had not multiplied in the interval.

The count was seventeen. He needed twenty-two.

He wrote this in the ledger in the small precise hand he used for supply records, crossed it against the order placed three weeks ago, and confirmed that the additional five vials had already been scheduled for delivery. The ink was still wet on the entry when he closed the ledger and sat with his hands flat on the bench and turned to the wall, where the monitoring charm pulsed in its usual rhythm.

Ordering wolfsbane supplies was not the kind of task he undertook without forethought. He had placed the order in July, in the same week he had confirmed to himself that the order was unnecessary, that Dumbledore had not asked him, that there was no official arrangement in place and no professional reason to assume one would be made. He had weighed this assessment against the practical requirements of the situation, which were that a werewolf was joining the staff in September and the wolfsbane potion required six weeks of preparation and a reliable aconite supply, and that the margin between adequate and inadequate in this case was measured in student lives.

He had placed the order anyway. The aconite would arrive before September.

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The castle was quiet in the way it only became quiet in summer, when the students were gone and the portraits dozed through the heat and the staircases found no reason to shift.

Hogwarts in term was a building with weight to it, specific and inhabited. Two hundred and seventy students made noise even when they were trying not to, and the castle absorbed and redistributed it through its stone in a way that gave the whole structure a low constant hum. Hogwarts in August was just a building.

Dinner in the Great Hall in August was a staff affair. Four professors, one headmaster, one caretaker who ate separately by preference, and a table that seated twelve. Sprout talked about the Tentacula. Flitwick talked about his research. Dumbledore talked about whatever he chose to talk about, which was rarely what anyone wanted to discuss and always adjacent to the thing he actually meant. Snape ate and did not talk and left before dessert. His standard practice. Nobody remarked upon it because they had been watching him do it for fifteen years.

After dinner he walked. Not far. The dungeon corridor to the main staircase, up two flights, past the empty Charms classroom with its windows open to the evening air, past the first-floor landing where a portrait of a seventeenth-century herbologist opened one eye and closed it again, to the second-floor tapestry. He stood in front of it. The tapestry depicted a hunting scene that had faded to the point of abstraction. Dogs, possibly, chasing a shape that might have been a stag. He had been looking at this tapestry since he was a student.

He turned back. He told himself it was a ward check.

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Harry had been at the Burrow for most of the summer.

This was the second consecutive summer Harry had spent with the Weasleys, and the second consecutive summer Snape had found the quarters oddly voluminous without him. Not empty. He had lived alone in these rooms for years before Harry arrived and had found them adequate. The sitting room had a fire, two chairs, a desk, and bookshelves that covered three walls. The kitchen was narrow and efficient. Harry's room was at the end of the short corridor past the bathroom, the door closed, the bed made by Pip with the precise corners she considered non-negotiable.

The rooms were adequate. They had always been adequate. The problem was that adequacy felt different now. Too much shelf space where Harry's school things usually accumulated. The second chair at the table serving no function. The biscuit tin on the counter, empty, deprived of its usual role as a low-level point of contention, which it had occupied since Harry was eight and developed opinions about biscuits.

Snape did not keep biscuits. Harry was at the Burrow.

Harry was thirteen now. He had friends, habits, preferences, a Weasley household rhythm Snape did not supervise, and opinions about biscuits that had become household policy through attrition. He had a life that did not require Snape's quarters to function, and this was correct, and Snape was not going to examine it further.

He was also, by all available evidence, fine. Fine and loud. Snape had sent three owls across the summer. Harry had responded promptly. Adequate. In the second letter, he had reported that the Weasley garden contained a gnome population requiring manual removal, and that he, Harry, had thrown seventeen of them over the fence and set a new household record. Snape had considered this for two days and replied: Do not break your wrist.

Harry had written back: I didn't. Ron did.

This was information about Ron Weasley's wrist and not information about Harry's, which meant Harry's wrist was fine and the matter required no further exchange.

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On the mantelpiece, between a potions reference and a small clay owl Harry had made at age seven and that Snape had been informed was a gift and was therefore not disposable, there was a photograph.

The mantelpiece was stone, narrow, level with Snape's chest. It held the reference text, the owl, a brass clock that had belonged to his mother, two sealed jars that served as bookends, and the photograph in its frame. Not ornamental. Snape had not framed it himself. Pip had framed it and positioned it at the centre of the mantelpiece, between the owl and the clock, at a slight angle that suggested it was meant to be looked at from the desk chair. Snape had not adjusted the angle.

Minerva had taken the photograph at the start of Year Two, allegedly by accident. It showed Harry at twelve, standing in the early September light in front of the castle doors, talking to Weasley with his hands.

It was a wizarding photograph and Harry was gesturing in it. How Harry talked when he thought nobody was watching. Left hand first, then right, building an argument in the air between them while Weasley tracked it with the focussed attention of someone who had already agreed and was waiting for the conclusion. The early September light caught Harry in profile and then Harry turned, or nearly did, and then the loop began again. Hands, Weasley following, light in profile, Harry starting to turn.

He had Lily's gestures. He moved like James.

He looked, these days, like neither of them in the way that mattered. He looked like himself.

Snape had signed the Gringotts parchment when Harry was three months old.

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Term began in four weeks.

The ward review was current. In July he had updated the perimeter flags to catch signatures the Ministry had never catalogued. The work had taken four days and he had done it alone, on the grounds, in the early mornings before the heat set in, pacing the perimeter at thirty-seven calibration points and adjusting each node individually. The publicly available information on Sirius Black was limited to what the Auror office released and what the Prophet saw fit to print, and Snape trusted neither. He trusted his own calculations. Black had been sent to Azkaban for the murder of Peter Pettigrew and twelve Muggles. He had betrayed the Potters. Black had been in Azkaban for twelve years, and twelve years of Azkaban did not improve a person. If Black had any remaining interest in James Potter's son, the revised perimeter wards would register it, and Snape would be notified, and the matter would be addressed.

The wards were current. He had done what could be done.

Dumbledore had mentioned Lupin's appointment in June with the tone of a man braced for a reaction. Snape had produced none. The facts were not improved by reaction, and there was no professional use in revisiting a tunnel, a shack, a full moon, and four boys whose capacity for consequence had always been somebody else's problem.

His jurisdiction was the unacceptable variable. An unmanaged werewolf in a castle containing two hundred and seventy students. One of them was thirteen, legally his, and not expendable. The wolfsbane order had been placed. The aconite was incoming.

He capped the ledger and put the quill down. He pushed back from the desk and stood and went to the window.

The grounds lay pale in the late-evening light. The lake was flat and grey-green, the surface unbroken. The forest was a dark line at the edge of the lawn, holding its shape against the sky. Going from blue to the washed-out gold that Scottish August produced in the hour before full dark. It would not be fully dark for another hour. It was the north. The light held on.

In four weeks, Harry would come through the door on the first morning of term with his robes already on and his trunk already sent to the Tower, and he would take the wrong chair and drink tea and tell Snape about the summer, and Snape would not press the point.

The monitoring charm held its rhythm on the wall. The wards were current. The aconite was incoming. The perimeter flags were updated against Sirius Black, imprisoned for the murder of Peter Pettigrew and twelve Muggles, who had been in Azkaban for twelve years, was still in Azkaban, and would, by Snape's calculations, remain there.

Snape turned off the lamp and went to bed.

End of Chapter 44