literature

The Black Widows

Deviation Actions

ls269's avatar
By
Published:
1.8K Views

Literature Text

The prisoner was always defiant. That was the problem. He refused to use English words, even though he must have picked up hundreds of them by now. He was permanently scowling and shouting in that harsh, guttural language of his. If he had just once looked docile – if he had just once looked sorry – their hearts might have softened towards him. But he continued to spit and snarl, like everyone's worst nightmare of the monstrous German.

Anyway, why should they pity him? Had he and his kind pitied their husbands – their sons? Dead husbands were not exactly fun, but dead sons were immeasurably worse. That kind of pain – mingled as it was with self-reproach – would never go away.

And now there was one more widow in Mapledurham to appease. She had turned up at the Shipwreck yesterday evening, dressed like a fashionable London lady – with real silk stockings and glossy fox-furs. She moved with a sinuous grace, and was permanently accompanied by a gently-smoking cigarette-holder.

Apart from the fox-furs, she was all in black, with a black veil attached to her hat, shrouding her face. They could see she was a widow, but a pretty one. The face beneath the veil was pleasant to look at, but it had the same hollow eyes, the same cynical smile, that the Mapledurham widows had grown to recognize in their mirrors every morning.    

There was a rough grey stone hanging on a string around her neck. It was tucked into her blouse, but the eyes were drawn to it, because this lady was voluptuous beyond decency. No matter how respectable and well-tailored her clothes, she always looked as though she was bursting out of them.

Dead-eyed Sally, the barmaid of the Shipwreck, had taken to her immediately. She had the kind of patient, unhurried manner that instantly invited confidences. And, without knowing why – but telling herself that it would help assuage the strange widow's grief – she brought her down to see the prisoner.

Sally made them tea, and they sat at the table in the cellar, a picture of tranquility, while the prisoner slept, limp in his chains.

"My husband was like my kid, really," Sally whispered, stirring her tea. "I'd been looking after him since we were at school. Oh, he wasn't stupid. He was just… slow. It took him a long time to come to terms with new ideas, you know? He lived in his head, really. Always painting and watching the birds. But I could reach him. Nobody could explain things to him like I could. He trusted me implicitly. I think if I'd been his drill-sergeant – if I'd taught him how the guns worked, and how you crouched low and stayed inconspicuous – he wouldn't have died. They just didn't know the right way to talk to him."  

"Did you wish you could have gone to France with him?" the strange lady purred.

Sally looked surprised. "Well, wished it, yes, but there were all kinds of reasons why I couldn't. Women soldiers would distract the men, for one thing."

"There were women spies," said the stranger gently. "Women secretaries, women translators and code-breakers."

"But not soldiers!" Sally interrupted. "That would have been ridiculous. It's not right!"

"My husband thought the same thing," said the beautiful stranger, raising her cigarette-holder and taking a long drag. "Oh, not because I was a woman, but because I was… because he thought I was an innocent. He didn't want the war corrupting me. He tried to take care of everything himself. And, for a long time, I tried to be what he thought I should be. But I was changed." The strange woman gave an uncomfortable shrug. "I couldn't help it."

Sally squeezed her wrist and gave her a reassuring smile.

"You feel changed too, don't you?" the stranger went on, breathing out smoke. "It's not your fault. War changes everything."

Sally realized she'd been mechanically stirring her tea all this time, and made herself put the spoon down. She was agitated. For the first time in her life, she felt as though she was close – so close – to being understood, even appreciated. She didn't want this opportunity to be snatched away from her.

"I could have done better," she said, through dry lips. "Ralph was… oh, I love him to bits, but he was… he couldn't even tie his shoes. I should have been the one they asked to fight."

"Yes."

"It was nobody's fault," said Sally, balancing the tea cup next to her lips, until the steam bathed her eyelids. "Women can't fight next to the men. Everyone knows that. But, I always said, if the enemy wandered onto our home ground, they wouldn't catch me napping."

They both looked at the prisoner, and the silence spiraled out of control, prizing words from between Sally's clenched lips.

"But there's a problem," she went on. "Poppy Pomfrey. She knows. I know she knows. And she wouldn't approve. Held the hands of our boys as they lay dying, but she wouldn't approve of us trying to make things even. I suppose she thinks we shouldn't sink to their level."

"The problem is," said the stranger, "their level is the one at which things get done."

"Yes," said Sally warmly. "Yes, exactly!" She had said that so often since the strange woman came in.

She was a real listener. She made you feel as though what you had to say was important. And so, without thinking, you said more of it than you would have done under normal circumstances, even to a priest. She was like Poppy Pomfrey would have been, if Poppy Pomfrey wasn't so damn judgemental. And she smoked, too, which was somehow reassuring. She didn't have Poppy's holier-than-thou attitude to drugs and intoxicants.

"Our boys didn't hold their noses in the air," Sally went on, glowing with enthusiasm, "making out they were too grand and fragile to fight, when our whole way of life was in danger. And I, for one, am not too bloody pure to settle the score for them!"

Sally tried to lower her voice. She didn't want to wake the German. Somehow, it was imperative that she got all this said, before the German woke up and started cursing her.

"Poppy doesn't know what it was like, to be waiting back here, dreading the telegram that told you your family were dead, mopping the floor and scrubbing the front step as if any of it mattered. She doesn't know what it was like to feel so useless."

"Of course not."

"I know they're watching over us, our boys." Sally whispered urgently. "I know they'd want to know that we're on their side – that we're trying to make it right."

"I know," said the beautiful stranger soothingly. "I know exactly how you feel. You've lost everything, and you're just trying to make it even. Nobody else will deliver justice if you don't. Believe me, I've been there."

Sally wiped her eyes on her sleeve. "I'm so glad you came to Mapledurham, Mrs. Snape."

The stranger squeezed her tear-soaked arm. "Lily. Please."

Sally gave a weak smile and acquiesced. "Lily."


It was later. Regulus had instructed his House Elf to bring them all some tea. Jonah Valance was glaring suspiciously into the bottom of his mug, while Snape clutched the cup of coffee he'd insisted on having like a drowning man clinging to a piece of driftwood.

Regulus tried, in his cheerful – and now unfailingly sweaty – way, to understand things. The news that Madam Pomfrey was trapped in a nightmare didn't come as a shock to the boy who'd seen Death's door. The mind created plenty of landscapes – and the magical mind could force other people to live in them. That wasn't a stretch of the imagination. Dark magic was all about making other people accept your view of things.

Even the news that Snape was trying to save Madam Pomfrey – a Gryffindor-loving old crone he'd always pretended to despise – wasn't shocking. She was close to his mudblood. Maybe she could even restore his mudblood's magic. Regulus didn't know much about Severus Snape – the fierce, sarcastic gloom often seemed to be all there was to know – but he knew that the mudblood wasn't a fling, or a 'dalliance', as his mother would have put it. Wherever Snape's loyalties lay – whatever he really thought about Dumbledore, and muggles, and the Dark Lord – the mudblood was a part of him: a non-negotiable fixture. Maybe even a deal-breaker.

But he was clever. He could be tricking all of them. Maybe he was using the Dark Lord for power and the mudblood for sex. It was dangerous to ever assume that you'd seen the real Severus Snape; he was a series of masks, and all of them were scowling.

"Let's go over this one more time," said Severus, sweeping a weary hand across his forehead. "They've got a prisoner?"

"He's a German soldier," Jonah replied.

"How do you know?"

"He was shouting in some foreign language!"

"And that's got to be German, has it?"

"It sounded like German," Jonah growled. "Anyway, who else would they lock up and torture?"

Snape steepled his fingers over his cup of coffee. "Yes, tell me about the torture. You didn't actually see it happening?"

"His shirt was off, and he was covered in scars and blood!"

"Some kind of adventurous sex game, maybe?" Regulus chipped in, and then wished he hadn't. Three disdainful eyes focused on him for a second, and then Snape and Jonah turned back to one another.

"Madam Pomfrey can sense other people's pain, right?" Jonah persisted. "So she'll find out about this man in the cellars. And then they'll set fire to her house to keep her quiet. It stands to reason."

"It stands to the demented reason of an eleven-year-old boy who was kidnapped and tortured by goblins, yes," said Snape. "Although 'reason' may be a bit of a misnomer there."

Jonah Valance glared at him. He could make one eye do the work of two magnificently. "They didn't torture me," he said shortly. "The goblins take the bones, eyes and teeth of their fiercest warriors and set them in silver and enamel, to immortalize them. They needed something to scare my mother, but they wanted to honour me as well. They didn't want anyone to forget that I'd fought them like a demon and told them to take what they needed from me instead of my sister." He gave Severus a look of distaste, and went on: "You're a Slytherin, so you wouldn't understand about things like honour and respect. When I was with the goblins, I didn't look like that German in the cellar, and that's how I can tell he's being tortured."

There was a spiky silence, in which Severus took a deep breath, and rubbed his forehead again.   

"It would explain why everyone in that town is so… jumpy."

Jonah was obviously aware that this was the only concession he was going to get, because it seemed to satisfy him. He took another suspicious sip of his tea and went back to watching Regulus with an adversarial frown.

This might have been because their families had been mortal enemies since the middle ages, but it was more likely to be because Jonah Valance regarded everybody as an enemy. He didn't want to be at Hogwarts – everyone knew that. He wanted to be back at the Valance House, protecting his family. His father was a clueless muggle, and his sister was a clueless half-blood who spoke her clueless mind to every dark wizard she encountered. They were an accident waiting to happen. And, somehow, the eleven-year-old Jonah had elected himself their protector. Gryffindors got antsy when they couldn't defend their loved ones.

"I need to think about this," said Snape, his hooked nose buried in his coffee-cup. "It should be a simple matter to get the prisoner out of that cellar before Madam Pomfrey finds him. After all, he's only being guarded by muggles, and we've already ascertained that we can use magic in the dream. But the dream is conscious, and it won't like us interfering with its plan. We have to go carefully."    

Jonah gave a surly shrug, to convey the fact that he agreed, but he was still sickened by them.

"We'll go back tomorrow night," said Snape.

"It could be too late by then!"

Snape raised his eyebrows. "As if anything ever happens suddenly in that god-forsaken place."


Severus spent the remaining hours before day-break working on a potion. Potion-brewing was as close to sleep as he was likely to get now. He could let his eyes slide in and out of focus while he watched the teeming surface of the potion, and the steam bathed his eyelids and his furrowed brow, making him feel as though he'd been touched by morning dew. It was like sleep, only it made him feel useful, so it was the best compromise he could come up with in his current state of ragged fatigue.

When he'd finished – and when it was decently light – he took a gobletful of the potion back to the Slytherin common-room, and called Lily through the Floo network. Her head appeared in the flames of the common-room fire, just as Bruiser's had the night before. Fortunately, there was a Quidditch-match going on, so the Slytherin common-room was deserted. It was hard to keep track of all the lies he was supposed to be keeping up, but he was fairly sure that calling a Gryffindor mudblood into the Slytherin common-room would not fit the profile of a loyal Death Eater.  

He thought she looked tired, but perhaps that was just his caffeine-fired imagination. She was still beautiful enough to leech all the logical thoughts from his head – and, for a moment, they just smiled at each other, like polite strangers, too happy and bemused and nervous to speak. Then he remembered the litany of impossible things he had to do today, and forced himself to start talking.

"I made you something," he said, raising the smoking goblet, and cursing himself for his inarticulacy. "It's an experiment. It might help restore your magic, or help prepare the way for the return of your magic, anyway. It's a draught of hellebore and ginseng. Kind of a cross between pepper-up potion and Dittany. They used it in dueling tournaments in the middle ages to help revive wizards who were weak from battle and needed to get up and fight again."  

"It won't work," said Lily, with a patient smile. "Dumbledore would have thought of it."

Severus tried to suppress his annoyance, but it leaked out in the tone of his voice. "Dumbledore's mind moves in very high or very low circles," he explained. "If the cure is anything between a lemon-drop and an advanced time-shift hex, he won't have thought of it. It's my job to spot what his grand intellect and childish insanity misses."

She let the 'childish insanity' remark go, but Severus felt his pulse quicken at the colour that was now flooding into her cheeks. He loved it when she got tongue-tied and passionate with indignation.

"Anyway, what about the side-effects of untreated hellebore?" she demanded. "Do you want all my hair to fall out?"

"I've accounted for that," he said calmly – knowing that the calmness would antagonize her further. "Two grams of arrowroot to neutralize the acidity." Despite his determination to be calm, he couldn't quite keep the reproach out of his voice as he added: "You're quick enough to trust me when it's only your grades at stake, but when I'm trying to help you with something important - ,"

"OK," she interrupted. "I'm sorry. You know I trust you, Sev."

It was a complicated sensation. It was, in a sense, all he'd ever wanted to hear, but the way her ferocity folded in on itself, as though she'd been beaten, was unendurable.

"Good," he said tonelessly, proffering the smoking goblet. "So drink it in one gulp and then get an early night."

She made a face. "Why is that necessary?"

"It's necessary if I say it is," he replied, knowing that it was exactly the kind of reply to make her lose her temper, and getting quite disappointed when she didn't. He wanted to scream: for God's sake, fight me! That's what I'm for!

"When are you coming down?" she asked.

"Friday. Dumbledore's given me the weekend off."

"He must be pleased with you."

Severus raised his eyebrows. It was such a Lily thing to say.

She trailed off into silence, and Severus took the opportunity to scrutinize her, scanning her face for signs of health or signs of injury. Was she eating properly? Was she getting enough sleep? He couldn't trust her to do these things. She was his worst enemy in a lot of ways (or second-worst, because it was difficult to imagine anyone ranking above Potter in that category).

He knew Lily. She radiated vitality even in her most despondent moods. She never lost her appetite, or the colour in her cheeks. It was probably really annoying her at the moment.  

This made it hard to tell whether she'd been looking after herself. If she hadn't been eating properly, you wouldn't know about it right away. You probably wouldn't know it until she collapsed. But that was usually time enough, when Severus was around, because he never stopped staring, and his reflexes were quick enough to catch her before she hit the ground.  

But he wasn't around. And her submissive attitude was scaring him. He wasn't going to ask her if she was alright, though. Stupid questions like that insulted them both.

It was just…she'd been so unsure of herself since losing her magic. And what if it meant she was losing hope? What would she do to herself, if she didn't have any hope?

He didn't want her to turn into his mother. It made him sick – the way she accepted Tobias's insults as though they were commonplace remarks about the weather. He wouldn't let Lily fall into that trap. It was difficult to imagine her becoming as deadened and submissive as Eileen Snape – but he supposed his mother had once been passionate too – passionate enough to rebel against her family and marry a muggle – passionate enough to murder a unicorn to save her unborn son.  

He had to keep Lily's claws sharp, even if she only used them to claw his eyes out. It was worth it to know that she could – theoretically – if she wasn't so suicidally trusting or so devoted to lost causes – defend herself.

Was that trust or was it masochism? And did it matter which, as long as she survived? He missed the days when she was in front of him, and things were certain. Sweaty, confused, hot and tongue-tied, but certain.

"What have you been doing with yourself these days?" he asked.

She shrugged. "Bruiser's been teaching me how to deal with magic as a muggle – you know, how to look out for shadows and footprints? He says you have to have use physics. You can use mirrors to deflect minor curses, and you can temporarily blind people by throwing magnesium filings into a fire. Electrical equipment goes haywire around Hogwarts, but clockwork things work just the same. And guns work the same too, because they're not electrical. In fact, he thinks magic works by low levels of electricity – just like the electrical impulses in the human brain – and that's why electrical equipment goes haywire in areas of high background magic. It's really interesting. And he says he knows a back-street surgeon who can teach me all about muggle medicine."

Severus made a face. "Well, it might not be a bad idea, with the war coming, for you to learn how to carve people up."

She scowled at him, which was a reassuring sign. "And what have you been doing with yourself?"

Severus ran through the list of things he wasn't allowed to tell her. Even with his customary quick-thinking, it took a while. "Keeping busy," he said.

The answer must have depressed her. She reached a hand out of the fire, and he clasped it, squeezed it, and then let it go.

"I miss you," she said.

"Yes," said Snape tonelessly.

"Yes?"

He glanced over his shoulder. "Look, just drink the potion," he muttered. "I can't talk here."

It wasn't an ideal reply. But at least he was admitting that he knew he was supposed to say 'I miss you too' there. It wasn't as good as saying it, but she accepted – didn't she? – that he couldn't. Not in the Slytherin common-room. Not in the place where Bellatrix Black trimmed her toe-nails.

But it terrified him that he couldn't. Lily was far away – and being pursued by James Potter as though she was a golden snitch. If he was cold to her now, she might go looking for warmth somewhere else. But, if he was needy, that might drive her away just as fast. If she worked out how much she meant to him… oh god, it was too horrible to contemplate. It would scare her. She might even pity him.

And she would know how mind-bogglingly easy it was for her to hurt him. Oh, he didn't think she'd actually try, but you never knew. The revelation that she had that kind of power would turn any girl's head.


So the conversation in the Slytherin common-room decided him. He would take Dumbledore's advice, and pray that it had been given in a moment of grand intellect rather than childish insanity.

He would cast the Liberus Charm. It was complicated and physically-draining magic, but he had a few hours between lessons and nightmare-voyaging, and Kreacher seemed to like fetching him cups of thick, steaming, unwholesome black coffee. That was probably malice and helpfulness combined, but Severus didn't care. He wanted to do something for Lily. It was madness, of course. If he cast the Liberus Charm on her, she would still be far away and hounded by Potter, but, along with all that, she would independent. Self-sufficient. She wouldn't need him anymore. A Lily who realized her own worth would be bound to wonder what she was doing with Severus Snape. If she realized what a catch she was, she would be bound to go to the man who was good at catching things.

But no. That was the scariest part. He didn't believe it. Things had gone too far. He was actually starting to believe that she loved him. It was going to hurt like hell when he was proved wrong. It was going to break him past all hope, or desire, of repair.

But, until that time, his paranoid mind still conjured up images of Potter stealing Lily, but without any conviction. It was like the chants of 'Pot-ter', 'Pot-ter' that he'd heard while he and Lily had been lying in the Garden of Eden, sun-fused and gasping, and oblivious to all the rest of the world.  

It was probably the lack of sleep catching up to him. Weariness had been following him for days – a black shape in his peripheral vision, like a stalking panther. Someday soon, it was going to pounce, but he was good at clinging on to consciousness until the need for it had passed. That night on Azkaban, he'd waited until he got back to Spinner's End before collapsing on the doorstep.

Besides, it was right, somehow, that Lily should have the Liberus Charm. She radiated the Liberus Charm – even now, without her magic. There was something about her gaze that made people feel independent, interesting and strong. It wasn't right that the power she gave to other people every day should be denied to her.   

He got through lessons somehow, in a haze of weary, automatic scowling. And, when the sun went down, he put on muggle clothes and walked down the sloping lawns to the castle gates. He needed to collect ingredients, and they were best gathered by night. Not because it endowed the ingredients with additional magical properties, but because Spinner's End was easier to look at in the dark.
Continuing from The Ghost of Christmas Past [link]

Just a short(ish) chapter this time, mostly written last night in a haze of end-of-week high-spirits! (So there are probably a lot of typos...)

Thank you for reading, and for your comments and support. They really mean a lot to me! :) :hug:
© 2010 - 2024 ls269
Comments19
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
polkadotpeony's avatar
My jaw dropped when I realized that Boggart-Lily was in the dream. I seriously was like... WTF?!

Oh dear, Sev makes me sad. Seriously, Lily need to know how much you love her dude. Women always appreciate hearing it. Ugh, he frustrates me sometimes. lol

And I'm more than a bit worried by how this charm is going to affect Lily. I kinda fear two things: 1)She'll go running to James or 2)She'll turn into Boggart-Lily. Neither idea is appealing. I want her to stay the same.