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The voice under all silences. Chapter 18
THE VOICE UNDER ALL SILENCES. Chapter 18
Harmony is a hard thing to achieve when you resent the other half of your household with as much zeal as Severus resented his.
He could not reconcile with the awful awareness that Potter... Potter had seen his life!. The boy had invaded his privacy once again, and was now in possession of a lot of information that could be used to blackmail or humiliate him, at any time.
The days immediately following the return of his wand were fraught with tension.
There was an expectant quality to the child's every action that Severus found trying. He was constantly on guard, expecting to be threatened, somehow. Mocked. Humiliated...
A new and unacknowledged truce had taken over their former open hostility, although he was absolutely certain that such estate of affairs wouldn't last the week. Not when it involved the two of them...
The boy, though, seemed content enough with the situation and Severus often heard him whistling around the house. Singing tunelessly under his breath and generally making an absolute nuisance of himself...
The unexpected recovery of his arm meant that the prickly shield that used to protect it had also disappeared. There was no need to limit the amount of magic being performed around him any longer. This allowed them to live with a lot more ease, as the boy could now cook, clean and take care of most tasks with magic...
It also brought a new and highly volatile kind of tension into the mix, because Severus hadn't managed to recover his own power. Not a single spark of it!.
He now carried his wand at all times. He practiced well known charms every day until he ran himself ragged, but the length of birch didn't seem to recognize him any longer. There was no acknowledgement of him when he held it, no rush of greeting. No exhilarating, welcoming flow of energy eagerly waiting to do his biding. The precious wand that had once blessed him with the gift of his own magic was now a mere stick that brought him only sorrow. An unresponsive and alien object, seemingly as magic-less as he himself had become...
Frustration became a shimmering undercurrent of barely repressed anger that underscored his every thought, his every emotion...
He resented the boy's magic, the boy's freedom, the boy's quiet conviction that he'll just wake up one day and find himself recovered.
He resented the ease with which the child could recall what had happened last year or the year before. He resented the fact that he had to ask him for information regarding what had happened to this former student of his or that other one...
But, more than anything else, he resented the increasing awareness that Potter always responded to his every shift in mood. ALWAYS!. No matter how unacknowledged they might be. The child knew, just... knew when he was mad. Or filled to the brim with crippling self-pity. He could tell when Severus was bored. Or frustrated, or just... plainly angry and the certainty that he was an open book to those all-seeing emerald eyes was driving him spare!.
Things came to a head one Tuesday morning when the child finished his coffee and plunked his mug onto the table with force enough to break it.
He then crossed those... unnecessarily muscled arms of his in front of his chest and proceeded to sigh very... loudly.
"I'd say you've sulked enough already about the Legilimency, Severus. It's been more than a week and you are still moping around, you are behaving like a fifteen year old, for Godric's sake!.
If you've got something to tell me then maybe you should just... say it!. That way we'll be done with it already!. It'd be great for the place's... atmosphere. I'm sure even you would agree with that much, at the very least!"
He was ruffled by the self-suffering tone that the child had dared to inject into the words. By the implication that he was some sort of badly behaving teenager, indulging in the throes of unwarranted angst. He was astounded by the venomous nature of the rage that filled him upon hearing that challenging little ran and the fact that the brat just... kept looking at him, apparently waiting for some sort of response, didn't help matters any.
"Nothing I say will change the fact that you've invaded my mind without permission for the second time in our acquaintance, Potter. I see no reason to discuss the matter any further" His tone had gone so frosty that even the brain-dead should have sensed his reluctance to continue with the conversation. The boy, though, decided to ignore the tone. And the look that accompanied it. He pretty much ignored Severus' plain discomfort altogether and plodded doggedly ahead.
"Just because you can't change it doesn't meant you have to bury it underneath a bloody mountain, professor!. Learning about it has upset you enough to keep you snarling every second of the day for a whole dammed week!. It's plain to see that you've got a bee under your bonnet, so... let's have it out, OK?. You can shout at me and everything, if it'll make you feel better"
He was utterly stunned by the pointlessness of that attitude. What would he gain by... venting?. It made no sense to him at all!.
He'd always despised those whiny, wimpy characters who misspent their existence bemoaning past bad luck. He'd never had any time for the whole emoing nonsense, it was all just... an appallingly indulgent way to go through life.
"I don't see the point of it!. What do you want me to do? Cry all over your shoulder for something that can't be changed, anyway?. The very idea is... ridiculous!"
The boy had the audacity to laugh.
"You? Crying over this?... I kind of wish you would!. It'll probably be safer for me, altogether. I was recalling just this morning your little episode back then, in my fifth year. Do you remember how you grabbed me by the tie and screamed at me until your voice ran hoarse?...
I bet you are even madder now. I can see it, you know?. I'm not blind. It's been driving you slowly up the wall all week long and it's not getting any better!"
He pushed his plate away, unable to take a single bite more. The tea seemed equally unappealing all of a sudden. His mind buzzed with the prospect of screaming at the child. Of shouting at him and throwing all this lovely silver cutlery to the floor in a fit of... rebellion!.
He could imagine it too. See this lovely teacup being irreparably smashed by his own hands. He could picture it as it lay at his feet in a million shiny shards of shattered loveliness... Turned, forever, into another one of those beautiful things that he'd once possessed, but had destroyed in a moment of rage fueled by the damaging blindness of his heinous temper...
He did not want to do it, though. What would it accomplish, anyway?. He'd come out feeling childish and ungrateful. He'd come out the loser, once again. He'd be the one to give up one more of his meager treasures. The one to surrender the totality of his tattered dignity in order to wallow in a temper tantrum!.
"This is a very different situation, Mr. Potter. I was in full possession of my senses, back then. I placed those memories in that pensive in order to keep them away from you.
Your curiosity led you to breach the small amount of trust that I'd placed in your hands, by absenting myself from the room without taking that basin with me" His voice came to a halt as he remembered the moment. The indignant sense of shame that had engulfed him. The frightening desire to pummel the child into a pulp right there and then...
He'd terrified himself with that reaction. Had seen a hint of his father, in his own unpardonable behavior, for the very first time in his living years and that one glimpse had been enough to convince him that there was nothing on Earth that could force him back into the same kind of situation, not for any reason. Not even for Albus...
He refused to become another Tobias. He would never become his father. NEVER!. That was something that he'd promised himself a lifetime ago and he'd be dammed to Hell and back before he allowed himself to fail in this.
The emerald eyes that contemplated him from the other side of the table seemed to belong to a man older than him. Older than Albus himself. Definitely older than he knew the boy to be...
"I don't think I ever plucked up the courage to apologize for that one. Did I, Severus?. If it's any consolation I'll confess that I discovered that very night that I really didn't like the boy my father used to be. Or Sirius...
I didn't let it go, either. I confronted professor Lupin and my Godfather, both, the moment I reached the dorms. I needed to know why they'd done something so awful to you!”
Severus stiffened visibly. He crossed his spindly arms very tightly across his ribcage, hugging himself almost compulsively. He started blinking very slowly, turning the whole of his expression blank in the space of a heartbeat, as he began to fortify his vast mental defenses. Preparing himself to be regaled with some outrageously insulting little excuse that would redeem the boy's loved ones. What he didn't expect, though, was to hear the auror's tone harden with obvious disappointment.
"I had never been ashamed of them before that night. I could not believe that they would do such a thing, just because they could!. It was such a hard blow for me...
I looked up to them. I revered the floor they walked on. I wanted to make them feel proud of me. I... enjoyed it, whenever anyone compared me to my father...
I've never felt real pride at being known as James Potter's son after that night. Don't you see?. It doesn't really matter that he loved my mother and me, or that he was a loyal friend.
It's not so impressive that he'd sided with the Order, either. Not when he lived a charmed life that lead him straight to it, a life filled with indulgence and a terrifying, almost careless, disdain towards those who weren't quite like him...
He despised you because he feared your intelligence. He feared my mother's attachment to you. He believed that slytherins were not worth the air they breathed... That's the kind of attitude that brought us to the war, in the first place!"
Severus was floored by the unexpected wave of warm... vindication that filled his narrow chest upon hearing those words. No one had, ever, condemned the mighty quartet to his face.
He suspected that Albus might have regretted many of the things that happened during Severus' wretched adolescence, at some point during his lifetime, but the esteemed Headmaster of Hogwarts hadn't been a man used to apologizing...
They'd never really talked these things through. Never spoken about the fact that the teenager Severus had once been, was allowed to come a mere breath away from dying one of the most horrifying deaths any wizard could experience, while under Albus' biased care.
They'd never spoken about the fact that Severus' safety had been ignored, time and time again. Never acknowledged that his need for justice had been brushed aside in order to protect a beast who had been attending the school illegally, in the first place!.
"Your father was only a child, Mr. Potter. We all were. It wasn't James Potter who behaved with reckless disregard for the safety of his students. Someone else held, not only the power necessary to put a stop to all of it, but also had the moral obligation to do something. He is the one who decided to keep silent, the one who failed to deliver justice at every turn”
His throat closed tightly as his own hissed words echoed around him, bringing him a new and unwanted awareness, about himself and his motivations, with the force of a sledge hammer. He understood now that he'd never listened to Black's frantic apologies, or to Lupin's sickening groveling, because he'd wanted ALBUS to recognize that he'd been wrong...
He hadn't forgiven the idiotic gryffindors because his doing so would have let the old man off the hook. He'd not only kept a monster grudge going for almost twenty years, but also geared it towards the wrong targets!. He'd allowed it to color his every interaction with the child in front of him because he'd needed that old man to say to his face, at least once, that he'd been wronged. That what had happened to him at school had been an atrocity. That it should had never been kept quiet. That he hadn't been... disposable...
"Just because my father was a child doesn't make him any less responsible for his actions, Severus!. He found out that Sirius had invited you to follow them, but chose not to stop him. He didn't tell you the truth, either. They all deserved to be punished for what they put you through!.
I wouldn't have stopped rattling that cage until something was done. You almost died!. DIED!. That's as serious as it gets!"
Something very close to sorrow threatened to choke him then and he saw now, maybe for the very first time, that he hadn't been right either. Albus had dismissed him so ruthlessly because he'd allowed himself to be dismissed. He should have raged!. Rebelled!. Acted like a boy who believed himself to be... valuable enough to be defended...
He should had gone straight to Luc.
Old Abraxas had been a member of the Board, back then. He'd have loved to stick one up Albus's arse. But no. No. He'd decided to keep quiet, instead. Waiting, in vain, for the apology that never came...
In a way, he'd never fully trusted Albus after that. Not completely. Not wholeheartedly. Not in the same way that he trusted Luc. Or Cissy. Or Draco... Those three he'd die for.
Albus... Albus he'd only killed for. He'd allowed himself to be tortured for. He'd grown to love that old man, yes. But he'd also learned to be instinctively wary of him. He'd detested how Albus could measure people with barely a look. How mercilessly he could dismiss a person entirely, unless he found them useful in some way...
"Albus told me, at the time, that he'd chosen to inflict the most harm over the one of us whom he believed to be stronger... He said that Lupin would have been killed on the spot because of that attack. Whereas I... I was a self-sufficient slytherin student who seemed to take everything in my stride"
Potter seemed to be at the very edge of a volcanic eruption. His jaw was gritted and his nostrils flared. His hands were closed tightly, two mighty fists that trembled with the effort of controlling the kind of anger that usually ends up breaking something. Or someone.
"He had the gall to tell you that?. He had no right!. He was the authority figure for the lot of you and he was the one at fault here from beginning to end, Severus!. He should have done the decent thing and apologized to you for his terrible behavior, at the very least!”
The realization that the boy shared his own opinions on the matter shocked him. The thought that both, Potter and himself, had suffered the same kind of student life at Hogwarts sank, slowly, into his mind.
He realized then that he'd been so abominable towards all gryffindors because he himself had been persecuted as a slytherin. He'd attacked Albus' house of choice on purpose and the man had never dared to confront him for it.
He'd done, in may ways, as much damage to his own pupils as the Headmaster had done to him. Look at the way he'd behaved towards Potter himself. He'd singled him out, humiliated him at every step, on purpose. Allowed him to be mercilessly bullied by Draco, during his class. He'd even... physically dragged the child off that pensive before throwing him out of the room...
Worse than that, just like Albus himself, he'd never thought to apologize to his student, either. He'd never actually acknowledged his own unforgivably unprofessional behavior. Never seen the parallel between his own situation and Potter's for what it truly was, an almost exact copy of each other...
The very idea that he'd wronged a student, any student, in the same way that he'd been wronged turned his stomach.
"I should have never treated you like I did, Potter. I was the adult of the two, I was your professor!. There were plenty of other ways that I could have used to convey my displeasure with your behavior. I should have never allowed myself to use physical violence against you...
I don't think I ever plucked up the courage to apologize, either, as you so charmingly put it!”
Bright green eyes shone with almost blinding relief. A smile broke across the boy's lips and his tightly held shoulders relaxed so much that Severus became aware, for the first time since the beginning of the conversation, of just how tense the gryffindor had been.
"I think that's probably for the better, Sir. I'd have probably fainted if you'd come to me with an apology, at the time. I was shocked at my dad and disappointed at the lot of them, but... I had yet to discover the whole truth about you. That came later. Much, much later. Almost too late...
That's what this is about, Severus. Don't you see?. I needed to save you when I had the chance. It was the only way to meet the real you!.
I didn't want to go trampling around in your mind, I knew how badly you'd react to that!. I told Malfoy. And Dumbledore, too!. I told them that you'll explode worse than Mount Vesuvius the moment you found out that I've gone poking in your head!...
We wasted precious weeks trying to find a way around it, but we couldn't!. WE. COULDN'T!. And I wasn't going to let you go again. Not without a fight!"
Dark eyes clashed with deep green and they connected. A million and one visions flashed in front of Severus' eyes before he realized what was happening. The boy had opened wide to him!. He'd... he'd cracked his mind open for Severus' perusal and, even as he recoiled in alarmed rejection of the gesture, he understood that it was meant to be an apology. There were no doors for him here. Not one!. Potter would give of himself what Severus had been forced to relinquish, in some kind of strange, frighteningly intimate attempt at retribution.
"No. No!. I do not wish to do this, Mr. Potter. It's unnecessary. You must stop it. At once!"
The messy swirl of memories that were so haphazardly flashing across his mind came to a sudden stop.
They both remained exactly as they were for a long and shocked moment. A thick silence grew around them as the boy's calm gaze studied his paling face with frightening intensity.
"Why, Severus?. I thought you'd be happy enough with this. I'm willing to let you in. You can look all you want, OK?. It'll make things equal between us, don't you see?. I'll give this to you without any strings attached. It won't come back to bite you at some other point in the future. I promise!"
He was unbalanced by the incredible generosity of that offer. By the fact that he'd been presented with it, in the first place. By the astonishing lack of self-preservation that the auror was displaying. His dark eyes raked the mature features of this child who had, so casually, invited him inside his mind, offered to expose everything that he was. Every memory that he owned, every dream that he'd ever held, every fear that had terrorized him throughout his lifetime...
This was a kind of intimacy the likes of which very few others could compare to. There was nothing quite like it, at least not in Severus' point of view. One could not hide from the truth within one's mind. Not with any kind of success. At least not, for any length of time...
You could veil your true intentions about something that you'd done or thought of in the past, but the actions themselves, the emotions associated with those actions, could not be hidden. They couldn't be changed, either. They could only be rearranged in a sequence that allowed their owner to mislead an unwanted snoop...
Now this boy, whom he'd treated abominably during the totality of their acquaintance, was attempting to grant him the honor of... full disclosure... for no apparent reason that he could see. He'd be crazy to believe that Potter meant any of it, but... as ridiculous as it sounded, he found himself unable to convince himself that it was a trick.
Not after having his arm cured by the auror's gentle magic. Not after having found his wand so very carefully tucked inside a box meant to keep its properties intact, a protective casing designed specifically to maintain it safe and... active, even after so long a period of disuse...
"You can't just open yourself thus to anybody, Potter!. Have you lost all sense, child?. I could do anything to you!. I could mess with your mind, sell your most precious memories for profit. Belittle you, by the simple action of describing your every mistake in the most derisive manner I could think of..."
A hand raked through that wild mop of hair and those intensely discomfiting emerald eyes looked straight at him with an openness that brought a lump the size of Russia to his throat.
"I'm not offering this to just anybody, Severus!. I'm offering it to you!. I'm doing it because I think it will help settle all those fears that are running through your head. You are worried about what I saw... I know you are!. You wonder about what I could be planning on doing with all these things that I know about you...
You are so busy, building imaginary defenses to my supposed evil plans, that you haven't been eating. You rarely sleep. You are so jumpy that your whole posture is rigid from sunup to sundown... I've been trying to be patient, trying not to nag you into another explosion of bad temper, but seeing you like this it's driving me nuts!'
Black eyes that were widened with horrified disbelief clashed against that emerald sea of pure frustration.
"How do you know that I...?. Have you tried to read me again?. I can't believe that you'd..." The auror's abruptly cutting gesture halted the flow of his affronted words.
A trembling hand rose in the air. It attempted to breach the distance separating them from one another, tried to settle over the rigid arm that Severus had placed on the table in a gesture meant to close himself off to any advance coming from the child.
His jerk of agitated rejection paralyzed the boy's extremity in mid-motion and the hesitant contact was stillborn. Green eyes looked straight at him with the kind of pain that couldn't possibly be faked and the voice of the gryffindor seemed to have acquired the very roughness of sandpaper when the man finally managed to whisper:
"I'm offering it because this thing that you are doing can not continue, it has to stop some time, Severus!. I'll go crazy if I can't manage to... make you see!...
I need to show you that I trust you. I have to give you back some of the advantage that you think you lost when I looked inside your head. It's the only way that I can think of to fix this mess. Don't you get it? I know that you won't abuse me in any way. You've had this same kind of power over me before and you never used it to hurt me!"
He was shattered by that answer. Broken into a million shame-faced pieces and forced to re-adjust in the blink of an eye. His former firmly-held expectations of what James Potter's son stood for, what the boy believed, what he'll grow up to become... none of it had turned into reality.
He sat here, utterly stunned. Frozen, like the proverbial rabbit, before a man who could be so obviously... generous and gentle towards an old foe. Here was the first auror who'd ever stood up for him, the man who'd arrested his most recent torturer in a very public manner...
Here was the most powerful and revered hero that the wizarding world had seen since Albus himself. A very busy youth by the look of things, someone who should be living his own life, as far away from the likes of Severus Snape as one could possibly get, and yet... here he was was, despite it all...
Potter seemed to have done nothing else with the last four years of his life. Not if the reports he'd been getting were to be believed. The gryffindor had gotten his degree and rose through the ranks, as expected. But his personal life seemed to be a blur of... waiting.
The boy had waited. For him, apparently... He'd plotted his recovery with the Malfoys. He'd fought Draco for the right to visit his bedside. He'd gone toe to toe with Luc in a legal battle that he'd ultimately won. He'd learned Legilimency from one of the most ruthless teachers of the practice that he could have possibly encountered and he seemed to have done all of that on Severus' own behalf. The whole concept was mind-boggling. It was also very humbling. And just plainly... unbelievable.
"How much did you see, then?. How many of my mistakes did you have to witness before your whole view of me shifted so completely?"
Potter pushed himself eagerly forwards, his tanned arms crossed loosely over the table, helping him maintain his upper body alarmingly close to Severus' own.
The bright resolution in those eyes gave him goose-bumps. He'd never been on the receiving end of this kind of intently focused... enthusiasm... before and he found it truly unnerving.
"I saw many things but not everything, of that I'm actually certain. I didn't see how much you love your godson, for instance... You didn't respond to me initially, you see?. I believe that you were disconnected from yourself. You had given up already, you wanted to be left alone. You were hurting, Severus. You were hurting so badly!...
I don't know how many times you made me live through Albus' death and Professor Burbage's. I lost count of how many times you re-lived the torture of Alice and Frank Longbottom, I hadn't even known that you've been there...
I saw you torturing muggles and brewing poisons. I saw you teaching the unforgivables to Draco. I saw you burn down houses. Telling Voldermort about the prophecy...
I was there when you found my mother's body and when you allowed yourself to be branded. I was also there when you came back to him, swearing servile obedience...
I saw you destroy every potion bottle that stood on your lab table after being informed that you'd been appointed to become the new Headmaster of Hogwarts. I saw how you kept looking, from your seat at the High Table, while the Carrows unleashed Hell among your students.
I was there when they told you that they'd finally cornered me. And, also, when they confessed that I escaped. I watched you, as you soothed the Lord's temper, promising him that the end was near. Whispering in his ear that HE had the most powerful wand of them all. One of the original deathly Hallows, no less, while I... I was only a boy, in possession of a stick that was not even his own... I had not a chance to win a duel of any kind. Not. A. Chance!...
I saw the way that you only ever told him the truth, even though you knew it to be... mostly inaccurate. I lived the entire war through your eyes, Severus!... All of it! Again. And again. And. Again. AND AGAIN!...”
He was devastated by this news. Shamed, beyond recovery, by the merciless exposure of every atrocity that he'd ever committed. Utterly sickened by the idea that the boy... the boy had truly seen it all!. This was the worst. The very worst of himself!...
His black eyes turned dull with a distress that he could not hide. He'd feared this, of course... Imagining that something like this had happened was one thing, but having to actually sit in front of the boy like this, forcing himself to look him straight in the eye while he listened to his worst fears becoming cruel reality, was a different experience altogether. It was an excruciating situation, it was mortifying and unpleasant in a way that a more outright kind of torture couldn't really mimic.
This wasn't about the strength of his body being lacking, no. This was about himself. About the whole of his life. About the fact that his choices had been... mostly flawed, selfish. Driven by the kind of stupid greed that had taken him exactly nowhere...
"I would have thought those particular memories to be the very ones that'd turn you away from me. You used to despise the very ground I walked on because you, very rightly, suspected me of behaving exactly as you've just described. It doesn't make any sense that, after having finally found irrefutable proof of my unforgivable duplicity, your opinion of my character changed so completely!”
The smile that he got in response to his bewildered comment was a tight little thing. A mere slash of compressed pink lips in a face that was very obviously paling with some kind of inexplicable anguish.
"I saw them through your eyes, Severus!. I experienced them exactly as you did. I suffered them, regretted them, saw the nightmares that they caused. I got to finally understand what drove you to do it all.
I saw you for the very first time exactly as you see yourself and I wept for you. Disconsolately!... I have never felt so wretched in my entire life!"
There is nothing more humiliating in the whole world than being told by one's former student just how... pathetic they find you. For a second or two Severus found himself unable to even breathe, so unrelenting was the shame that engulfed him at that moment. His hands shook. His throat dried and he felt utterly incapable of facing the boy.
"You find me pitiful, then. I've abandoned my old role as fearsome monster to become... merely contemptible. Is that it, Mr Potter?"
The auror's face tightened with enraged frustration and that moss-colored gaze seemed to want to drill holes straight into his soul.
"I find you worthy, Severus!. Worthier than you believe yourself to be, anyway.
I'm not defending my reasons for trusting you, to you, of all people!. There are things inside that head of yours that are totally twisted, you know?. But that's a conversation for another day, I think. You'll need to be stronger than you are right now to deal with what I have to say on the matter. You'll need to have a bit more faith in both, my intentions and my integrity, before I'm even willing to tackle all that baggage.
For now, though, I'll tell you this: you are, without a doubt, the bravest man that I've ever encountered. You are loyal to a fault and so clever that I can plainly see why Voldermort and Dumbledore, both, were so unwilling to let you go, no matter how many suspicions were raised about your loyalty.
You were always an asset to the school and you didn't even know it!. You were instrumental in us wining the war, but no one was made aware of it at all...
You are selfless to the point of stupidity, Severus!. And you care, so much, that it's actually frightening to see!. You do love, no matter who'd dare to deny it... You do!. And you do it with all your heart. With all your strength. With everything that you are...
You are a better man than my father ever was. Or my godfather. Although I like to think that they would also have grown up too, eventually."
He was stupefied by that surprisingly fervent rant. He'd been expecting some kind of slightly superior little speech. A small patronizing pat to the head, maybe. Even some kind of pitying description of his own worthlessness. Now, though...
Now he was disarmed. He stared at the auror dumbly for a very long time. The whole situation felt so alien to him that he could not even begin to imagine how to behave towards the other man, how to approach this creature who had seen him as he was. Who'd looked into the very depths of his dark soul, seen the monster within and was still right here, beside him.
He discovered, much to his astonished discomfort, that he wanted to... reach out. Engage in some kind of friendly exchange with this intense, generous man whom he'd never, not in a million years, would have guessed Potter could become. He wanted to allow himself the chance to get to know this man who found him... worthy.
He didn't know how to do it, though. So he remained were he was, frozen to the spot and silent, like the grave, as every second slowly stretched into another.
He was painfully aware of his own social inadequacies. He'd always been dishearteningly cognizant of the fact that he was a total failure when it came to friendly interaction. He could not think of a single thing to say to his companion that could possibly indicate his changing perception of their association... Thankfully, the man in question had no such problems. He'd flopped inelegantly against the back-rest of his chair and proceeded to wait for some kind of answer to his words. After a second of silence, those eyes of his became thoughtful. Calculating. Bright like jewels...
Silence grew around the both of them like a suffocating shroud seemingly intent on trapping them within it's disconcertingly anxiety-inducing folds.
Potter looked at him through it all. Expectantly at first, then in a strange, measuring way. Slowly that emerald-colored gaze turned more and more speculative...
After a while the look began to morph into a sudden kind of rueful understanding until, finally, some words broke off the uncomfortable impasse:
"Severus... are you alright? You've gone frighteningly quiet"
He squirmed in his chair. Afraid to move away. Afraid to speak aloud. Afraid to take this chance only to find out that, despite his own healthy dose of paranoid distrust, the child had managed to get under his skin with trickery in his mind...
What if he accepted Potter's alleged friendship and the boy laughed in his face?. What if he placed his trust in the wrong hands again?. What if this was some kind of very elaborate revenge, meant to break him with its twisted cruelty?...
Black eyes clashed with the swirling emotions so clearly displayed across that verdant gaze.
It was obvious that Potter was waiting for him to say something. To do something. Those eyes were filled with a strange kind of patient exasperation that, somehow, portrayed affection, care and the kind of tempered strength that might, just might, manage to survive through the viciousness of his own foul temper. If there was ever a man other than Luc himself able to stand the pressure of becoming a friend of his... it could be this one.
He took a long, deep breath then. His thin lips parted and his heart pounded so fiercely within his emaciated chest that he fancied he could feel it battering the veins on the inside of his too-thin wrists.
"I never thanked you for returning my wand, Mr. Potter. I... I'd like to do so now. It was very... considerate... of you to think of returning it to me at this point.
I know that I might have come across as a bit ungrateful, at the time. But I was deeply... touched!" He said it all in a strained little voice that couldn't make it past a whisper. Then he froze. Awaiting, with the absolute terror of one who's been mostly disappointed by others, for the ax to fall were it may. It didn't fall immediately, though...
He'd blinked at least four times before he understood that the expression he was seeing slowly coming into blossom across the golden features of the gryffindor was not one of triumphant contempt. No...
It was an expression more akin to exultant relief. It was the kind of joy that he'd so rarely managed to inspire in others that he'd failed to recognize it at first sight.
It became more and more obvious as it grew: a kind of glowing delight that seemed to fill the whole body in front of him with a buoyant effervescence. It was the very same sort of exuberant euphoria that Severus himself had never managed to feel outside of a Potions Laboratory.
A strong, calloused hand shot out towards him. It enfolded his cold, trembling fingers with the warmth of about a thousand sunny mornings and squeezed them gently, but with a firmness that indicated he would not be allowed to back away from this now. Whatever this might be...
"You are welcome, Severus. To all of it. It's yours, you see?. It's yours and you can have it. Just... reach out, all right?. You reach out and I... I'll catch you. ALWAYS!. I promise!..." Potter fairly gushed with evident contentment and he felt lighter then. Relieved. Floored by the strange terror that he felt at that very moment...
He felt also grateful. To the boy, for accepting him. To himself, for having found the courage to reach out. To the fact that this life that he'd been so ready to abandon could still offer him something new and amazing. Something magical. Something that he could, one day, come to value greatly.
He realized then that he wanted to open this door that lead to Potter. He wanted to try and see were it might lead him...
He understood that he needed to step away from his past, abandon the trapped man he'd been for the last couple of decades and become... maybe a little more open to others. A little less bitter and harsh. A little less... alone, if he could...
It was time to leave the war behind, where it belonged. Time to forget the people who were no longer here. Time to forgive those who had wronged him so long ago.
More importantly, though, it was time to forgive himself, or at least try...
He had failed to die, against all expectations. He was alive and whole and... mostly free. He was beginning to understand that he might have a future that didn't involve torture of any kind. Or groveling at the feet of another powerful master. It was time then to see if he could make his life finally better by forgetting all those principles that had failed him so completely in the past.
He'd been so careful. He'd protected himself so much that he... he'd ended up alone. Isolated. Hurt...
He'd had no one apart from Luc and Draco, Cissy...
He'd almost died in the arms of an enemy. He'd been abandoned by everyone around him. Believed to be a traitor. He'd been reviled and unwanted by his peers, by his students, by everyone who'd ever met him. He didn't want to return to a life that had ended that badly...
It was clear to him that he needed to take some chances if he wanted things to change, chances like this one. He should attempt to open up to those who seemed to want him and forget the ones who'd never truly cared for his person.
He needed to see if, by risking himself a little more this time around, he could finally manage to find a small measure of that all-elusive... shelter... that he'd never before managed to secure for himself. Maybe he could do it this time. Maybe it was as simple as Potter claimed: An offer of friendship extended and accepted at face value. A small step forward at a time...
He'd taken worse risks with his life before. Far worse...
Maybe both of them deserved to calm down and see where they'd end up if they tried. If they truly, genuinely, tried to become... friends...
TBC...