pekeleke

THE VOICE UNDER ALL SILENCES. Chapter 14

Potter seemed mad enough to chew off the walls themselves...

He'd been forcibly marched upstairs and deposited on the sofa with frigidly polite care before those eyes had, literally, pinned him to the spot.

"You better stay right there, Snape, or Godric help me... I will tear you limb from limb, if you so much as move an inch!. Now I have to go back down there and fix all this bloody mess. I've got to dismiss the police, call off the welcome dinner that I'd planned... So many carefully laid plans, Severus!. All of them destroyed because of you!"

The auror had turned sharply around then and left him to his sea of deep bewilderment... The worst of it had nothing to do with the child's bizarre behavior, though. The worst was that he'd allowed himself to remain there... seating meekly on the very spot where he'd been dropped, like a puppet turned to stone... He could not process the situation. Could not understand exactly what in the Seven Levels of Hell had just happened here... But he'd seen enough seething anger in his life to know that Potter... Potter was seriously ticked off.

The empty house seemed eerie as he sat there. Dark eyes downcast, like a chastised child.

He felt quite... disappointed. Cheated, somehow. Potter had managed to destroy all the lovely joy that he'd gathered during his outing with his puzzling histrionics. The morning had started off badly enough, that was true. But then... then he'd managed to go out and encountered Mr. Crowley and his treasure trove of books... He'd found peace, quiet and acceptance there. He'd been nothing but a man who just... happened to love the written word.

The front door was brutally yanked open and then immediately closed with such force that it was a miracle it didn't actually smash into a million smithereens. He remained where he was but his head lifted in a jerky and rigid motion with the utterly wearying need to assess the danger that was coming his way... He straightened his spine and closed his hands into a pair of frustrated fists while his dark eyes became riveted to the mouth of the corridor. The continued absence of his dearly missed wand burned a hole on the empty skin of his palms. His pulse pounded, fluttering visibly at the side of his tightly clenched jaw. He was tired. He was hungry. He was troubled to his very bones by that inexplicable little scene downstairs and he wasn't in the mood to be brutalized by the clearly incensed auror.

Potter entered the room like a hurricane the beach. He was all wild motions and noisy grunting, forceful violence was clearly written in every line of his rigidly taut body...

"I am mad enough to kill you right now, Severus!"

The voice alone was terrifyingly convincing, never mind the ominously glittering green eyes or the mighty fists that those hands were currently curled into. He felt the instinctive need to swallow nervously and his cheeks colored with temper at the very idea of... of himself... fearing this whelp!.

"I see..." He offered those two words as calmly as he could manage, but he saw nothing at all, of course. Least of all anything approaching half-a-sensible explanation for the unprovoked temper-tantrum that the jerk was pulling out of seemingly... nowhere.

Potter took a deep, deep breath. Emerald eyes flashing with the complete disdain of one who knows he's being told nothing but utter, unadulterated trash.

"Do you?. I doubt that very much, Severus!. It is, in fact, my absolute conviction that you haven't got the slightest clue as to what exactly it is that you've done wrong that's keeping you reasonably safe from being punched on the nose right this second!"

His eyes widened, pale face turned ashen-gray as his gaze darted surreptitiously towards those white-knuckled fists... He opened his bloodless lips to offer some kind of retort, but the boy halted his next words cold when he growled ferociously:

"Do. Not. Make. It. Any. Worse!"

Silence descended upon the room then and there was an absence of words and sound that allowed the very worst kind of resentment to fester within Severus' mind. His stress levels shot up to the ceiling, but he remained seated and silent. Dark eyes glittering like onyx in his waxy, exhausted face.

"Did you at least have the good sense to eat something?. I bet you aren't even aware that you've missed two whole sets of potions..." The youth's tone sounded explosive, frustrated. It had an unpleasant taint of defeated dejection adding grating bitterness to it that Severus did not like. Not at all.

"I drank tea" He offered the reply meekly, quietly. An attempt to offer a very reedy olive branch that the child, blind as he was, missed completely.

"You. Drank. TEA!"

Incredulous laughter erupted from the boy's chest in a river of mordant, unpleasantly bitter anger.

"You drank tea while all of us had NIGHTMARES imagining you collapsed in the back of some alley, slowly bleeding to death!. Or attacked by a fanatic who'd somehow found out that you are now MAGIC-LESS!. Or being kidnapped, by who-knew-what-kind-of-maniacs, in order to demand heap upon heap of galleons from the Ministry itself...

You missed your potions, one of them the vital serum that'll keep the effects of Nagini's venom at bay until you recover fully, but... never mind any of that. All must be well with the whole blasted world because the git extraordinaire, Severus Snape, actually remembered to drink Tea!"

He sat there like a lump of dumb, mute coal. He knew not what to say to soothe the increasingly peeved creature that Potter had become. There was something quite odd here... These... reactions... of the boy seemed a tad... extreme. He'd done nothing to deserve being treated thus!. He resented having been put in a position that virtually tied his hands when it came to retaliating with the full virulence of his own sharp wit. He gritted his teeth harshly, reminding himself of the fact that he'd vowed to RESPECT this irksome insect!. The brat had never sworn the same to him, though. Potter could, in theory, abuse him all he wanted and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that Severus himself could do in his own defense.

For a second, one single second of absolutely miffed madness, he contemplated the exhilarating prospect of standing on his feet and majestically abandon this... disturbing... little bachelor pad of Potter's. Just imagining the shocked expression on the insufferable twit's face brought a soft cocoon of warmth to his cramping stomach... Then the fact that he'd sworn their loathsome pact on Draco's life returned to his mind with the abruptness of a hammer killing an ant and he sagged in abject misery against the backrest of the sofa. His black eyes closed when he sighed with unconscious heartfelt sorrow...

"Severus?"

Potter's tone had, surprisingly, mellowed down, but he was too tired to bother with the useless task of attempting to ponder over the boy's mercurial moods. So he ignored the mystery and addressed the query with a voice gone gruff with weariness:

"Yes, Mr. Potter?"

Silence...

Stunned, perplexed, utterly rattled silence filled the empty space and Severus didn't even care about what it could mean. Not at all. Potter sighed audibly: a half-rueful, too-loud sound that heralded the steps bringing the boy near: One. Two. Three. Four... A couple more and he felt the disturbing shift in the air around him that alerted his every sense to the discomfiting presence of the gryffindor that now stood so close to him, too close for his peace of mind... The sofa's cushy surface bounced slightly when the weight of the auror joined his own and his body went rigid with the absolute horror of having to share a seat with the little menace.

"You drive me crazy!"

His eyes shot open and he turned around to stare straight into a pair of bright emerald eyes. He was peeved enough to continue looking right into them as he cuttingly delivered his frustrated, irked response:

"I have only ever offered the courtesy of reporting my every move to Albus Dumbledore, Potter. As you are quite clearly not him, nor do I work for you in a position that requires you to be aware of my whereabouts, I saw no reason to inform you of my wish to abandon your... charming residence... for a few hours while you were, by the way, otherwise engaged"

Golden colored cheeks turned rosy with some kind of passionate emotion.

"I was worried!. You can barely walk unaided, for Merlin's sake!. I couldn't believe that you'd be crazy enough to just... leave without even bothering to take the slightest precaution to guarantee your own safety. It's all so unlike you that it just... boggles the mind!"

His feathers ruffled at the very insinuation that he was some kind of little limp kitten who couldn't be expected to take a single step unaided.

"Just because you wish to see me impaired doesn't mean that I am actually so, auror Potter”

"Impaired?. IMPAIRED?" The man seemed to be having some kind of stroke right here, on the sofa.

Those green eyes bulged with the perfect anger of a wild animal. His neck corded and turned red with the boiling of his blood and he breathed like a horse about to expire after having run the very best race of it's life.

"You think me callous enough to have wished this... awful weakness of yours upon your head?. I remember how you used to be: you were brutal. You were brilliant. You were powerful enough, and vicious enough, to make most of us retreat. I confronted Voldermort himself and managed to at least hit him with one curse or another, but you... you I could not touch!. You deflected ALL of them, you did it long before they were even half way in your direction and now... now you can't even hold your wand!..."

Those words broke him. They just... BROKE HIM!. Hammered him once more with the awful knowledge that he was... a squib. A magic-less nobody!. An utter waste of space...

What the boy saw in his face he never knew but he could see those emerald eyes widening with the horrible awareness that a line had been crossed here, a line that should have never been crossed between them.

"Severus!..."

Tanned hands dared to raise, muscled arms driving them forwards, towards him, and there was nothing on this Earth, or even the Universe itself, that would have forced him to accept the coming touch. He shot up to his feet so fast that his forearm swung in a violent arch, triggering the protective ward over his wounded limb. Blue colored sparks flashed their angry warnings as he took a couple of steps away from the dark, leather couch.

Potter's gaze fixed guiltily on the ward. Pale young features turned thunderous as he was forced to abandon that blatantly uncouth attempt at... pawing him!...

"There's no need for you to run away from me, Severus!. What do you think I'll do, eh?. Look at you!. The only thing more ridiculous than you running from the sofa like a little scared bunny is the way you are staring at me now. I wasn't going to harm you in any way!"

Severus was so incensed by those taunting, cocky words that he just... opened his mouth and allowed the first words that came to it to do their damage. He wanted them to cut his enemy with their irrefutable truth and make him bleed.

"You. Harm. Me. Just. By. Being, Harry Potter!. Your mere existence has conditioned mine to such a level that I haven't been allowed to live my own life since the very day of your birth. I wished so hard for you to never return to the Wizarding World that I cried, do you hear? I CRIED the day Albus confirmed that Rubeus was bringing you to Hogwarts!. I saw nothing but the very worst of omens in your coming. If you did, then the Dark Lord would have to certainly follow... and I had already been a slave to the two of you for long enough"

Emerald eyes: stunned, wounded and so reminiscent of Lily's that they broke his heart anew, clashed with his own:

"You can't blame me for any of that, I didn't even know you back then!. I'd done NOTHING TO YOU!"

The shaken sentences sounded like feeble, trite excuses to his ears. His jaw hardened further as he retaliated their intolerable mildness with the most powerful brutality that he could find within himself:

"You didn't have to, Potter. I had already lost HER because of you!. I was already aware that he'll return. Also because of you. I have spent the best years of my life buried at Hogwarts, ignoring every single offer inviting me to join this private Potions Lab or that other... I. Threw. My. Precious. Career. Down. The. Bloody. Drain, just to remain at the one place I knew you'd eventually come to, if you'd ever bothered to honor the wizarding side of your own nature. And that, Potter, THAT!, I DID IT ALSO BECAUSE OF YOU. For HER, yes, but only because of you!.

I laid my life at your feet, my future too!. I threw away the chance to lead a life far removed from the echoes of your war against him in order to protect you the second time around. I have killed and I have tortured. I have allowed my own students to find harm. I've become the kind of MONSTER that I'd never wanted to be, BECAUSE OF YOU!, and I'd rather die than have you touch me in any way!. I don't need your guilt nor your hatred. Nor whatever the Hell it is that you've decided I deserve inside that twisted little head of yours. I'll fulfill this oath of ours to the letter. I'm doing this for Draco, but from you I want nothing at all. Not one single thing!"

Potter looked ill enough to die right there and then. His eyes shone bright green with tears. His hands shook. He was pale. And drawn. And trembling. He looked fragile and beautiful, like a sprite made out of dreams... Or nightmares. Or both...

"Gosh!... That hurt much worse than I expected it to..." That one sentence left those lips in a choked little whisper and the puzzlingly strange words settled between them like stones falling into a pool.

Silence followed them, like the shadow does the living, and the quiet that enveloped the both of them then felt like poison... The boy sat upon that couch, eyes alight with something so reminiscent of pain that Severus' chest tightened. He had never relished harming those he'd spent year after year attempting to protect... He had never been able to withstand the mere shadow of discontent in the green of Lily's gaze and to know, beyond all doubt, that he had caused it tore at something raw and instinctive deep inside him. He would not apologize, though. He. Could. Not!... He'd been driven by this creature to the very brink of sanity tonight and he'd just... defended his very self with the only weapons still available to him.

"Sit down, Severus. You look ready to collapse."

Potter's voice startled him right out of his thoughts with that bewilderingly soft-voiced invitation and he frowned with uncertainty:

"I'll rather not"

"Oh, For Merlin's sake!"

The auror stood up abruptly then. Darkly stubbed jaw clenched so tightly that Severus could hear those teeth grind against one another as the boy strode purposely past him. A very elegant high-backed chair was fiercely yanked away from its position beside the large table that now rested in the middle of the dining room in truly magnificent splendor. The screech of wooden legs being carelessly dragged across the floor, towards his own immobile figure, rent the tense silence and he looked quite stupidly at the boy. Potter reached him once more, face ferocious with the kind of frayed patience of a parent being pushed past the limits of all possible restraint:

"You'll seat yourself down right this second, Severus Snape!. Whether you do so on the chair or on the sofa, I don't really care... but, by Godric, I'll wring your bloody neck myself if you collapse on me again!. Am I making myself clear or do I have repeat it again with smaller, slower words?"

He was stupefied into silent, meek compliance by the ferocity of those words. His legs folded and he dropped on the chair that the auror still held. The humiliation that engulfed him then knew no bounds and he sat there: rigid as a wooden plank, with his gaze set firmly on the bland expanse of beige that was the wall at the other end of the room.

A hand that was too-warm and perfectly unwelcome settled on the shoulder closest to the boy and he felt his neck give way to the abject sense of... shame... that simply... drowned him. His head lowered, long dark hair tumbling softly forwards to veil the abject misery that must be turning his already ghastly features into the kind of twisted mockery of ugliness more befitting a Halloween-night mask than any human face...

"All that fight... It is not necessary, Severus. You have nothing to defend yourself from. I am on your side, for Merlin's sake!. I have been on your side for a long time."

He could not find the strength to deal with whatever game this was. Not at the moment, at the very least. His eyes closed behind the protective curtain of dark hair that hid his reactions from the brat's view and he shifted his shoulder very minutely away from that... unnecessary... touch. Potter's digits abandoned their perch upon him with an obvious, but thankfully quiet, reluctance.

"I can see that you don't believe me, you know?. You are not such a hard nut to crack once one finds out how to read your words. Or your silences... You say more when you keep quiet than you think, Severus. Or maybe it is that you don't really care enough about me, about what I might think of you, to attempt a lie..."

His eyes opened at that. His head rose towards the auror and his black gaze clashed with a pensive emerald one. His voice, when he finally spoke, was a very clear reflection of the sudden exhaustion that seemed to have befallen him out of virtually nowhere.

"I very rarely lie, Mr. Potter"

"I know that, Professor. I think I knew that even when I was convinced that I hated you."

That response was so unexpected that he blinked, stunned, and a soft, uncomfortable flush of disconcertion tainted his pale cheeks. The auror's features were intensely focused on him. The youth gave the extremely discomfiting impression of being one-hundred-per-cent devoted to this strange conversation and Severus frowned. Uneasy.

The boy returned, very slowly, to the couch. His every move was bizarrely careful, unnecessarily gentle. Soothing, even. He was suddenly reminded of Rubeus Hagrid, of the way the giant behaved in the presence of one of those frightened and dangerous beasts that he'd invariably attempt to tame...

"I don't understand what is happening here" He was distressingly aware that he was tensing, his whole face was apple-red with the humiliation of knowing himself so utterly under scrutiny. He disliked attention when it was directed towards him, hated having foreign eyes trained upon his person for no reason that he could clearly discern and detested, to the point of total abhorrence, the very thought of anyone attempting to... understand him.

He suspected... No. He was certain that the brat was analyzing him. Studying his every motion and word carefully, like the herbologist examines the properties of one grubby seed or another... and he didn't have the smallest inkling as to why the irksome creature would even bother with such task. He felt exposed and vulnerable. Absolutely floored by the horribly disconcerting awareness of finding himself the object of someone else's focus.

"Nothing is happening here, Severus. We are... attempting to have a conversation, I think. That is nothing too sinister, is it?. We are just two men, who are trapped inside four walls with one another, trying to get to know their companion better"

"I'd rather pass on that, if you don't mind, Mr. Potter. I have very little interest in getting to know you as a person, you see?. We don't really run in the same circles, therefore I see no reason to bother with the effort of attempting a very... short-lived... rapport, if it's all the same to you"

The boy held on to his casual smile with visible effort. He was truly tenacious, it seemed. Taking every single one of those brutal shots with a disturbing equanimity that Severus found himself resentfully admiring.

"It's not all the same to me, Professor. I don't want to go back to the days when we hated one another. I've told you this before: I. DON'T. HATE. YOU. ANYMORE!. I won't let you hide from me, from everyone just because you are too emotionally-stunted to accept that there are people in this world who care very deeply for you. People other than Draco-Bloody-Malfoy and his thrice dammed family!"

He heard nothing past that appallingly offensive definition of the whole of his persona:

"Emotionally-Stunted?" He repeated every syllable with the kind of outrage left for the most heinous of crimes and the fact that his bitterly cold tone managed to make the brat flinch couldn't soothe the sting that had been so very carelessly delivered to his own smarting pride.

"Sheesh!. I'm sorry, Sir, I... that was totally out of line and I do regret having said it quite that badly. But... I'm sure you get me, Snape. There's no need to throw a hissy fit over it. We are trying to get past some seriously heavy stuff here. It has to be done some time, so... relax and just... take it, will you?. You accused me of having been born to destroy your whole dammed life and I took it on the chin, did I not?"

Severus' whole frame had turned into stone, totally transfixed by the sudden understanding that they were actually having some kind of... disgustingly hufflepuffish... heart to heart!:

"I shall not put up with this nonsense, Mr. Potter!" He exploded, in ruffled rejection of that astonishingly ridiculous idea. He shot to his feet in the very next blink and attempted to walk away, only to be most rudely interrupted by the auror's very pointed little comment:

"Running away, Severus?. I had you pegged for the kind of man who does not hide away from introspection"

His nostrils flared and his cheekbones colored with the kind of ire that only those named Potter had ever provoked in him with so very little effort:

"I refuse to be taunted into conversation with you, like some kind of ridiculous teenager, Potter!. I am a grown man of forty. I have learned during my time not to engage in wasteful interaction, beyond the demands of formal courtesy, with those who are of no interest to me in any shape or form. I have no intention of descending into an even more degrading exchange of insults and condemnation with the likes of you.

Now, if you would excuse me, I had a very long day and I am tired. I am in need of a shower. Followed by a preferably wizarding change of clothes and a small meal. Unless, of course, you'd rather deny me the relief of fulfilling of those very basic needs?"

His black eyes were hard as stone when he fixed them upon the little bastard with the kind of frosty anger that would have made any hippogryph quiver. Potter merely glared at him, emerald eyes alive with a challenge that was tainted with a puzzlingly deep worry. It was the worry, he suspected, that finally won him his respite. For the boy's lips did grant him his own wishes with a few, softly spoken sentences:

"Of course you can shower, Severus. You can eat and rest, too. You should also take your potions, you know?. You've missed at least one dose of most of them... You come first, you see?. Even if you decide to doubt everything else at least do me the courtesy of never doubting that.

They say that Rome wasn't built overnight and I suspect that we, Professor, will take ages to even come to a small agreement. But it'll keep, at least for now. It will all keep... One day you'll be finally prepared to give us both a real chance. We can always come back to face all of these monsters again, Severus. Hopefully you'll trust me better by then and we'll be able to get things settled without any of it hurting us both this badly...”

TBC...

Ch13

Ch15