Still Life

Severus headed for the staff room, his mind buzzing with the kind of paranoid, repetitive thoughts you get when you've been through thirty-six hours of continuous consciousness masquerading as sleep. He was too exhausted to walk in a straight line, but the thought of lying down filled him with cold dread, because he never wanted to fall asleep again.

Now he was tired with no outlet except answers. He couldn't look forward to rest, but he could look forward to finding out what the hell was going on.

Unfortunately, there would be moments – in the not-too-distant future, although he would put them off as long as he bloody could – when he would have to tell other people what was going on. The moment when he would have to tell Lily about the bottle of memories the Boggart had left for her didn't bear thinking about. But there was also the only-slightly-less-horrendous task of telling Madam Pomfrey about Slytherin's speech, in that cave under the cliffs.

Severus was not looking forward to that. It was not in his nature to confide in people – and, nor, he suspected, was it in Madam Pomfrey's nature to receive confidences. Besides, as far as she was concerned, nothing had changed between them. In fact, he probably seemed even worse to her than he had before. She had seen him acting as Voldemort's right-hand man in the dreamscape. Plus, God knew what the Boggart-Lily had told her about him. When you added all that to the fact that his face would remind her of her murdered boyfriend before he'd even opened his mouth, you did not have a recipe for a smooth and cordial conversation.

But he had to tell her what she'd done. She had defeated a millennia-old curse – a curse that had even beaten Salazar Slytherin - and Severus's whole life – his whole future – had been salvaged by the reward Slytherin thought he was offering to the curse-breaker.  

It should have been Madam Pomfrey's. Granted, she couldn't have taken it, because only someone with the Light Mark and the Dark Mark could have got into that cave. Granted, too, she wasn't cursed – at least, not that he knew of – and so wouldn't have known what to do with the Purifire if she'd got it. That didn't change anything. She still had to be told.

Maybe he should also tell her that he'd been the one who had put her in that coma in the first place…

It was going to be messy. She would probably yell him out of the office and then redouble her efforts to keep Lily away from him. Well, this time, she had earned her spite, and Severus was determined to take it with all the stoicism he could muster. He liked Madam Pomfrey. He liked all the things she didn't say, and he understood all the things she did. She reminded him of himself, except that he didn't hate her.

There was also the problem of how to tell Lily that he was electrified by the spite that she had grudgingly let into their world – how to explain that, when she'd accused Caladrius of just flying away, he'd had to concentrate Occlumency-hard on resisting the urge to rip her clothes off.

Well, it wasn't his most immediate problem. And, after a few years of smouldering silently every time she made a tactless remark, she was bound to get the message.

He couldn't stop remembering Caladrius's words just before he'd left the Hospital Wing, either:

If I start to believe they're gone, and then they come back, it's really going to hurt.

It was a strangely understandable sentiment to come from a Gryffindor creep.

Severus couldn't believe he and Lily were safe yet. He was probably never going to. But he wasn't going to despair. That was the opposite of thinking. He was going to read up on every charm, curse and character who'd got them here – he was going to try his hardest to understand Lily – he was going to keep her safe from the marauding bands of bastards who wanted to kill her or snatch her away. He could do that. There was no limit to what he could do if he concentrated. Or, anyway, there wasn't now.

And it was going to be exhausting, no doubt about it – and not always exhausting in the hot, glorious, pulse-quickening way that his Lily usually exhausted him. But those moments – and the quieter ones, where he was sated, however temporarily, and just wanted to watch her sleep – would keep him going. They reached their tendrils into past and future and dyed everything a bright, electric green.

And Slytherins didn't desire rest – with the possible exception of Professor Slughorn. They wanted to pack as much living, striving, feeling and achieving into one short lifetime as possible. It didn't matter, really, whether the feelings were good or bad. It was all still life and they were all still greedy for it.

When he got to the staff-room, he found the door standing open a crack. And, in spite of the lateness of the hour, it seemed that Professor McGonagall was already admonishing a student for bad behaviour. That exasperated tone was unmistakable.

"I assure you, Rufus," she was saying, "the Headmaster goes to sleep every night. It does not affect the security of the school."  

"But tonight, you can't wake him up, yes?" said the voice that must have belonged to Rufus. It was quiet and crackly, as though it was coming through a badly-tuned radio. But, since there was green firelight spilling into the corridor from the staff-room's open door, Severus supposed he must have been speaking through the Floo Network. "You sent an urgent owl to St. Mungo's half an hour ago, requesting a Healer who specializes in Sleeping Sickness."

"I wasn't aware that the Ministry was entitled to scrutinize urgent communications not addressed to them!" Professor McGonagall snapped.

"We soon will be," said the crackling Rufus.

"Hadn't you better wait until then?"

"These are dangerous times, Minerva. They will be even more dangerous if something has happened to Dumbledore." There was another sound, like the shuffling of papers, and then the man named Rufus went on: "Your matron fell into a coma three months ago, isn't that right? And a student staying at the Valance House this weekend? Is this sleeping sickness contagious, Minerva?"

There was a pause, presumably while the furious Professor McGonagall counted to ten. Severus had seen her doing it in class. "We were assured it wasn't contagious when the Specialist came to see Madam Pomfrey in October," she said, with prickly calm. "In view of these new cases, I have moved all the sufferers to the Hospital Wing, and I thought it more prudent to send for a Healer than to wake everybody up and cause a panic."

"Why were you trying to wake Dumbledore in the middle of the night anyway?" Rufus asked.

"An unrelated matter of student discipline," said Professor McGonagall stiffly.

"Ah. James Potter?"

There was no sound from behind the doorway, and Severus could only assume she was glaring at him, because his voice was oddly sheepish when it returned. "There is a chronic shortage of Healers at St. Mungo's at the moment," said Rufus, to the accompanying sound of shuffling paper. "We can only get you a junior intern – used to be a nurse before all this chaos broke out. Her name's Sarah Mitchell."

Severus thought this was a suspicious amount of information for a Ministry official to have, and, apparently, Professor McGonagall thought so too, because her next utterance was an outraged squawk. "Have you been delaying her arrival?"

There was another uncomfortable pause. "We were entitled to information, Minerva."

"Before the injured were entitled to care?"

"This isn't personal, Minerva."

"You get that Healer to the castle right now!" she snapped. "Goodnight, Rufus!" She wrenched open the staff-room door before she'd even finished speaking, and staggered backwards, raising a horrified hand to her mouth, when she saw Severus standing there. He could only imagine how he must have looked. He was pretty sure the cuts and bruises from the dream-world had carried over into this one, and his skin must have dipped below its usual off-white through lack of nourishment, taking a plunge into the nightmare hues of zombie-grey. For a few moments, he stood on the threshold, relishing the idea. He had been sent to this room a hundred times, but he had never been a terror to its occupants before. It was strangely thrilling – especially when the person being terrified was a Potter-loving bitch who had never given him the time of day.

He gave her a polite – but entirely mirthless – smile. "Professor Dumbledore is asking to see you, ma'am."


Narcissa was not in the habit of hurrying after people. For one thing, she seldom had the shoes for it, and, for another, she had been brought up with the notion that you should only hurry after someone whose consequence exceeded your own. Fortunately, there were precious few of them, so Narcissa was spared the search for sensible footwear.

But Claudia Black probably qualified. A pure-blood daughter of The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black with two Orders of Merlin and fifteen ex-husbands to her name was worth more than a casual saunter, and so Narcissa followed her through the house as she hopped from painting to painting, stopping only to disentangle her skirts from umbrella stands and antique armoires because, really, who was going to stop running from you if you looked a mess?

Narcissa didn't know why her grandmother was running. She hadn't paused long enough to properly explain. She was simply hurrying through the house's art collection with startling speed, shoving aside cavaliers and shepherdesses – even scattering pigeons as she passed through one particularly expensive watercolour of Trafalgar Square. She kept protesting that she was busy – that she didn't have time to hear Narcissa's news – that the family would have to do without her for five damn minutes.

That last protestation had really worried Narcissa, because her grandmother didn't usually like the family to do without her for five seconds, and was constantly barking out criticisms or advice to remind them all of her presence whenever a room got too quiet. Perhaps she knew – or suspected – Moribund Prince was dead. Still, it wasn't like a Slytherin to run from certainty, one way or the other.

She finally managed to corner her grandmother in a painting of a shipwreck in the first-floor dining-room. The only canvas left to leap into was a plain black oil-painting called 'The Portal', which the house's portraits instinctively avoided for fear of where they might end up.

"Grandmother, please listen! Father said it was imperative that we keep you apprised of all the family news, as a mark of respect."

Narcissa paused in the doorway, trying to catch her breath. She wasn't used to this kind of exertion in any case, but the sight of the dining-room always took her breath away. It was a long room, with exquisite beams and a huge oak table, set with crystal goblets and gleaming silverware. She remembered sitting, entranced, on the stairs leading up to this room whenever her father had held dinner parties for Ministry officials or important visiting dignitaries. It had been a cave of wonders to her then, with the candlelight shining on the cutlery and crystal glasses.

How fine it had been! Not an ugly or unpleasant thing in sight. The murmur of well-bred voices, the chink of cutlery, the tinkling of piano keys – and everything sparkling as it caught the light. And then you looked out of the window and saw muggles in trainers with plastic carrier-bags, forcing themselves on your attention like an amorous drunk at a party. It made you shudder to your very bones!

Actually, the only thing that could be seen out of the window now was Regulus. Kreacher had wrapped a scarf around him, but he was still drifting about at the front of the house, hands clasped around the railings as if they were prison-bars. Narcissa looked down at him with her own brand of tender, contemptuous concern. She would have to keep a closer eye on him. He was behaving strangely, even for Regulus.

Narcissa took a few tentative steps into the room, wondering why the candles were already lit in here.

A glimmer of chestnut hair behind the long dining table revealed the depressing answer, and she hurried forwards, blushing with the kind of flustered, fond resentment her mother always kindled in her.

"Mother, what have I told you about cleaning the house in the middle of the night? Go to bed, mother! And you two," she snapped, turning towards Bellatrix and Andromeda, who had followed her upstairs, and were now lurking in the doorway, their faces gleaming with ghoulish curiosity. "If you want people to believe you're not eavesdropping, you could at least manufacture some plausible reason to be here, instead of standing there gawping like muggle tourists!"

"Uh, yeah… I've lost my…" Andromeda scanned the room, before settling on: "fork." She and Bellatrix shared a giggle – for the first and, doubtless, last time ever.

Narcissa breathed a delicate sigh. Well, she had tried to reason with them. She had almost broken a sweat trying to reason with them! If they couldn't listen to sense, they would have to listen to authority.

With great care, she slipped the coronet out of her inside-pocket and placed it, with the precision of a surgeon, onto her head. Then she turned back to the shipwreck painting, where her grandmother – bereft of any other means of escape – was using perspective as her getaway, and had shrunk down to become one of the figures on the far horizon.

"Grandmother, stop right there. Bellatrix and Andromeda," she added, turning sweetly towards her sisters. "Show some respect for your ancestors."

She tried to conceal a smile as the two girls, grimacing with the effort of resisting their muscles, bobbed a curtsy towards the shipwreck-painting, and then scuttled out of the room.

Narcissa sighed beatifically, and turned back to Claudia Black. "Grandmother, I am sorry to tell you that your ex-husband is dead."

"What's that?" she shouted, from the back of the painting. The wind had shredded her voice by the time it reached Narcissa's ears.

"Come here," said Narcissa coldly.

Reluctantly, Claudia Black shuffled – and sometimes waded – into the foreground. Her bulging eyes were red-rimmed, but she glowered at Narcissa with defiance.

"I'm afraid Moribund Prince is dead, grandmother. He just… sat up in his coffin – actually, through his coffin – looked up at the sky, and then died. He nearly scared Regulus out of his senses."

"That was not a long way to go," said Cladia Black imperiously.

"I am very sorry for your loss," said Narcissa, with the insincerity of a practised socialite.

"My loss?" Claudia barked. "Don't be stupid, girl.  Why should I care if he's dead? How many Anaesthesia Charms did he invent? How many times was he awarded the Order of Merlin, First Class? Why should I shed a tear for a man whose greatest achievement was to sleep through the majority of the twentieth century?"

"Any why," Narcissa added serenely, "did you stipulate in your will that the weeds should be cleaned off his coffin every day?"

Claudia Black was silent. It wasn't often that Narcissa got the better of her in a logical debate. Perhaps it helped that she was wearing the coronet. Everything sounded more impressive when it came from under that subtle, sparkling, gorgeous façade.

"Do you know," said Claudia Black, twisting a section of inky black hair around one sulky finger. "I could see it happening even before he fell into that dratted coma?  Every time he picked up a book on some exotic country, or started staring out of the window (and, my dear, he could do that for hours at a time), it was like there was a cocoon of weeds growing up around him, screening me from view. I tried to tear it down with shouting – with academic achievement – even with raising the dead – but he would never look at me. I used to console myself with the idea that there wasn't a woman alive who could get him to pay attention, but I'm not so sure about that anymore. Speak to him softly about dreams, and possibly you could win his heart – but that kind of nonsense was both beneath and beyond me," she added, with a rueful kind of sneer.  

She suddenly shot Narcissa an aggressive look, as though daring her to laugh. When she didn't, she continued, grudgingly: "Well, when you're disappointed in love – and even when you're not, actually – it is essential to keep busy. I was lucky; I had the mental and financial resources to seem just as distracted as he was."

She looked down at Narcissa with a curious expression – half scorn and half sincerity. "Take my advice, granddaughter. It is dangerous for a woman to live on love alone. A man would never do it anyway, so a man doesn't need to be told. But a woman will put away her brain, her needs, and her senses for love, and that's where you get the stories: the mad women in the attic; the witches with extra cackle; the maiden aunts who wore the same decaying wedding dress from the day they were jilted to the day when bad hygiene inevitably laid them in their graves. How many steps from madness is that servile, scone-baking mother of yours, do you think?"

Narcissa didn't answer.

"It's too much pressure to place the burden of your happiness on other people," said Claudia Black. "Take my advice and get yourself a hobby."

"I already have one," said Narcissa primly, smoothing down the wrinkles in her skirt. "It is called the preservation of the pure-blood world."

"Oh, that!" Claudia Black cackled. It was not the cackle of a wicked witch, but only because it was followed by so much educated diction. "You know, it could work, my dear. Not the ideology, of course, but the personality – you'd need to walk through the world with your eyes closed to believe that blood purity equates with magical skill, but Tom Riddle is the most powerful wizard who has ever lived, and, in the face of a talent like that, people will believe anything. Our family endures not by being the best, but by being the cleverest. Aristocrats are survivors, my dear granddaughter. How do you think we got to be aristocrats in the first place?"

She gave a sigh. "I do wish you had married that Snape boy, though. Such a waste for a mind like that to perish in a skirmish over blood-purity."

"He is on our side, grandmother," Narcissa pointed out, without much enthusiasm.

Claudia Black ignored that. Her eyes were gleaming with what Narcissa vaguely, disdainfully recognized as the thrill of the chase. "You'll have to keep me beside you at all times," her grandmother said. "You're no match for him, but I could be. And he does look so much like my late husband."