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The Hypocritic Oath

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Snape and Lily were sitting beside the lake in the Hogwarts grounds, long before it became such an important land-mark on the map of Snape’s bitter recollections, long before he started to think of it as the place where his life fell apart. Right now, he liked it. How could you refrain from liking a place where Lily was leaning on her elbows, staring down at her reflection in the water, and complaining about Potter? It was paradise.

“And he lost me all those points I won from Professor McGonagall for knowing about Switching Spells, and I’ll never get them back, because I can’t be as good as Potter can be bad,” she said petulantly, her red hair trailing inches away from the surface of the water.

Severus sighed contentedly. The glare of the sun on the water was blinding, so he had turned away from it, and was leaning against the trunk of a beach tree on the bank. From here he could see the shadow cast by the castle, creeping over the lawn that lead down to the gates. It didn’t touch Lily, though. Somehow, no shadows ever did.

“His mum’s nice, though,” Lily said, because she had an annoying habit of looking for the good in people.

Severus raised his eyebrows. “You mean in spite of her failure to take contraceptive potions when she ought to?”

Lily’s pout spread into an involuntary smile, but she didn’t say anything.  

“She’s just as bad as the rest of them,” Snape went on. “She’s taken the Hypocritic Oath.”

“The what?”  

Severus felt the unfamiliar thrill of knowing something she didn’t, but he didn’t betray it. “The Hypocritic Oath,” he repeated. “Every Healer has to take it. You swear that you’ll do everything in your power to preserve life, unless that life is muggle.”

“I’m not taking it,” she said fiercely.  

“You have to. They won’t let you work in a Hospital or Surgery if you don’t.”

“I’ll go freelance.”

“You’ll go to Azkaban,” he replied, in the tone of fond exasperation he reserved just for Lily. Most people exasperated him, but with Lily, incredulity was softened into wonder. He couldn’t believe the things she believed – he couldn’t share her recklessly optimistic view of the world – but it was still wonderful that it existed, especially in somebody who’d been told she didn’t belong in the magical world ever since she’d arrived there.  

“I know what I’ll do!” she exclaimed, oblivious to his cynicism, as she usually was. “I’ll set up one of those alternative medicine places in a muggle town. I’ll pretend to heal them with crystals and whale-song, but I’ll actually have my wand up my sleeve, and I’ll be casting non-verbal healing spells – or even verbal ones, if I turn the whale-song up really loud. I can heal them magically without anybody knowing.”

“The Ministry of Magic will know,” Snape pointed out.  

“But they can’t object to it if the muggles are none the wiser,” Lily insisted.

He gave her one of his exasperated smiles. “You never think about consequences,” he said gently. “Say you do that – set up as one of those holistic idiots: eventually, word’s going to get around. People are going to notice that you have a one hundred per cent success rate. They’ll either start worshipping you as some kind of god, or they’ll lock you up in a laboratory, and prod you with scalpels, trying to find out how you work.”

“Maybe I’ll be intentionally sloppy,” Lily murmured. “Maybe I’ll cure their Cystitis, but give them an ear-infection – that kind of thing.”

Snape laughed. “You do that, and they’ll stop coming to you. People always focus on the bad things.”

“I guess that’s a compliment, coming from you, so I won’t try to defend them,” Lily sais mischievously.   

“We can’t reveal ourselves to the muggles without either becoming their masters or their slaves. I know it’s hard to believe, but the wizarding community has actually put some thought into this.”

Lily sighed petulantly. “Just because it could end in disaster, that’s no reason to give up.”

“It’s the only reason to give up,” said Snape.  

Lily settled into silence, watching the tentacles of the giant squid unfurling under the surface of the water. But Snape knew her well: he could tell that it was not the kind of silence you get from gloomy acceptance, but from plotting how to rebel. He worried about her sometimes. He’d better get rich and powerful soon, to stop her from being thrown in Azkaban. The Dementors would have a feast if they ever stumbled across Lily.

Still, he loved her indignant innocence. It was beautiful, and in a way that went beyond glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes. It showed the beauty of her soul. Complacency was all you ever met with in the wizard world: nothing was important except Quidditch and chocolate frogs and showing off. It was no wonder Voldemort had crept up on them. It was wonderful to talk to somebody who wanted to question things, even if it wasn’t in quite the same way as he did. Sometimes, he felt like they were the only two sane people in the world.

Half to distract her, and half to make her madder, he said.

“You know wizards have a cure for cancer?”

“No!” Lily exclaimed.

“It’s true. It’s just sitting there, in a spell book on some dusty shelf. Wizards don’t get cancer, you see, so they’ve got no use for it. The inventor didn’t even get an Order of Merlin, Third Class. In fact,” Snape added dramatically, thrilling in the look of furious horror she was giving him, “he disappeared. Applied for a patent, and hasn’t been seen since.”

Lily was hanging on his every word. It didn’t matter that her mouth was curled with disgust, and her cheeks flushed with anger. She was paying attention to him.

“Some people reckon the Ministry did away with him, to avoid a scandal,” Snape went on, in a lower voice, so that she had to lean close to him. He smelled the ginger-bread scent of her hair, and felt excitement shudder through him, raising goose-bumps on every inch of his skin. “Because even a population as complacent as the witches and wizards of Britain would start muttering if they found out we had the cure to a disease that was killing millions of muggles a year, but we were keeping it to ourselves.”

“So how did you find out?”

“Avery’s dad’s Head of the National Potion Research Institute,” said Snape. “He was the one who got handed the patent application. Showed it to a Ministry Official he was having lunch with, and the next thing you know, the inventor disappears.”

“Avery’s dad married his own cousin,” Lily pointed out scornfully.

“True, but that doesn’t mean he can’t spot a scandal when he sees one. He’s not as dim as Avery – marrying your own cousin isn’t as bad as being a product of the marriage between cousins.”  

Lily smiled, in spite of herself. “I still say there’s no way the Ministry would have someone killed,” she muttered.

“I agree,” Snape said, shrugging. “They haven’t got the guts. But they could throw him in Azkaban on some trumped-up charge. Especially now that everyone’s so hysterical over You-Know-Who.”

Lily tilted her head and gave him a far-away look. “Sev…” she whispered. “We could find him.”

“What?”

“As a side-project.” She nudged him affectionately. “You know, something to think about during those ‘moronic lessons on Cheering Charms’?”

“You’re joking, right?”

Severus crossed his fingers under his robes. If she really wanted him to do something stupid and dangerous, there were a limited number of ways to get out of it; he couldn’t disappoint her: it went against every instinct in his body.

“What’s his name, anyway, this inventor?” she asked, a little too casually.

“He’s dangerous, Lil,” Snape said flatly.

“I just want to know his name.”

Severus sighed. “Something Murk,” he said. “That’s all I know.”

They were silent for a while, Lily reaching into the water to tickle the squid’s tentacles. She had quite an affinity for animals, especially magical ones. He supposed they could sense a sympathetic attitude. Come to think of it, most of the students at the school could sense a sympathetic attitude – especially the male ones – they all agreed that compassionate girls were much easier to get into bed than normal ones.

She was proving them wrong, though. Lily’s sympathy only went so far.

“This world is so screwed-up,” she muttered.

“The muggle world’s not perfect, either,” said Snape, who knew from bitter experience. “Neither world is ideal, but at least in the magical one we get to be ourselves.”

I don’t.”

Snape gave her a crooked smile. “You?” he asked incredulously. “You’ll be yourself wherever you go. I pity the poor idiot who tries to stop you.”

“I just want to feel like they care about muggles!” she exclaimed.

“Maybe they will, in another twenty years or so.”

“It depends who’s in charge, doesn’t it?” Lily asked gloomily. “If Dumbledore stays in control, they might. But him …” she trailed off.

Severus knew he had to be cautious on this topic. She’d be angry with him if she knew his intention of joining Voldemort; but at the same time, he wanted to come to her rescue; he wanted to feel indispensible to her; he wanted her to fall into his arms and weep with gratitude, so he said. “I won’t let him get your family, you know. You can trust me.”

Lily managed a weak little smile. “That’s what I’ve been telling Meg and Mary. But they don’t think I should.”

Snape was happy that she hadn’t reacted scornfully or suspiciously, and happy too that she was sticking up for him around her moronic Gryffindor friends. But, still, he didn’t like the idea that they were abusing him to Lily behind his back.

“Well, they’re idiots.”

“Sev!”

Severus relented. He hadn’t seen her for days; he didn’t want her to start sulking with him now.

“It’s only because you’re hanging out with people who think Dark Magic is funny,” Lily muttered reproachfully.   

“And you’re hanging out with people who think Potter is funny. But I still like you.”

Lily rolled her eyes. Really, to suppose that James Potter had the monopoly on charm, was to ignore Severus Snape at moments like these.

“The point is, you’re not your friends,” he went on. “So I hang out with a couple of vicious idiots? It doesn’t change me. They could never do any real damage, anyway – they’re too thick.”

“But you could do real damage,” she replied.  

Snape was deeply flattered. He tried to suppress the smile, though, because she was watching him with a surly frown.

“But I won’t. Not to you.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better, is it?” she asked, sitting up and folding her arms in exasperation.

Severus felt a pressing need to change the subject, so he said something that had been on his mind all through this conversation: something he never would have said if her beauty, and the fact that she stood up for him, and the fact that she believed he could be dangerous, hadn’t gone to his head.

“You know what I like about you?” he said. “I could never have made you up.”

Lily, caught off guard by this comment, laughed. “I’m not sure whether to be flattered or offended by that.”

Severus suddenly regretted that he had said it. It was a difficult idea to explain, without straying into uncomfortable territory. “I just mean…” he muttered, picking up a handful of grass and twisting it, “I mean, I’ve got a pretty good imagination. I’ve had to – I didn’t have toys or TV or a top-of-the-range broomstick like that Potter creep. But I couldn’t have invented you. I don’t have the materials, not for you. Everyone else, I could have dreamt up at the age of four: vicious bullies, biased teachers, giggling idiots,” Severus felt more comfortable now that he was insulting people, and his voice became stronger. “I mean, spoiled little princesses like Narcissa Black, or sadistic maniacs like Bellatrix are not exactly difficult to predict. All you have to do is work out what they want, and you know what they’ll do. But you… you do the opposite, most of the time.”

Lily nudged him playfully. “You mean I’m a masochistic maniac?” she asked.

She was trying to make him feel less uncomfortable, and Severus felt both grateful and humiliated for it. He hated her being kind to him. It made him feel like a charity case.

Still, he smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “A kind of Anti-Bellatrix.”

“Now that, I can take as a compliment,” Lily said cheerfully. “And maybe, when we collide, we’ll both be annihilated, like matter and anti-matter. I’d like to go in a heroic cause like that.”

Severus didn’t know why, but he found this sentence chilling. Still, he had exposed himself to enough of her sympathetic understanding today: he didn't want to make things worse. So he went back to his contemplation of Hogwarts' lengthening shadow, and kept his worries to himself. He was used to it.
Another rambling conversation between Sev and Lily, taking place after the Vinculus Charm, but before The Last Night, I guess.
© 2008 - 2024 ls269
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Veronika-Art's avatar
Your writing is magical Lucy, truly, you have no idea how much I am enjoying re-reading this beautiful story. It´s fluid, poetic and it´s just like reading a master piece. Beautiful... I love this sentence " we’ll both be annihilated, like matter and anti-matter" ... :dalove: Thank you for writing this :hug: