Torn

Narcissa found Severus reading on the bed in his dormitory. It was deserted except for Avery, who was practising his snarly face in front of a mirror. He could achieve a good effect with those long, pointed teeth and bulging eyes – and, with his school tie fastened around his head, he looked mad as well as ferocious. Narcissa had a lot of respect for ugliness if it was impressive. Still, she needed to talk to Severus. She gave Avery a meaningful look and he slouched off.  

“Am I disturbing you?” she asked Severus tentatively.

“Always,” Snape replied, closing his book with a snap. “What do you want?”

“I thought you and I might spend some time together,” she murmured, lowering her eyes to the floor – not out of shyness, but to display the full, serpentine lengths of her eyelashes to their greatest advantage. “I can arrange for my dormitory to be empty at, say, midnight tonight.”

Snape, who was by nature a suspicious creature, said: “Where are the rest of the girls in your dormitory going to sleep?”

“Oh, they’ll sleep in the commonroom if I ask them to.”

“Ask them to, or pay them to?” he asked shrewdly.

“Well, I’ll be asking some and paying others,” Narcissa replied.  

“Paying the ones who don’t need the money, and asking the ones who do?”

Narcissa did her best to look delighted. “What a wonderful grasp of wizard economics you have. Unusual, for a - ,” she faltered.

“A repugnant little half-blood?” Snape asked smoothly.

Narcissa smiled her disarming, wrinkle-less smile. “You know I was only being… colourful.”

Snape decided not to rise to the bait. He wasn’t going to let her make him angry again. She wasn’t worth it.

With the cold, unflinching certainty with which he did everything these days, he had decided that he was going to sleep with Narcissa. He wanted to get back at Lily: he wanted her to know what it felt like to see an old friend with a mortal enemy. And he wanted to get her attention, because she was looking at the floor every time she passed him in the corridors, in a way that made him sick to his stomach. He wouldn’t care if she shouted or sneered, he wouldn’t care if the first words out of her mouth were: ‘Crawl into a hole and die, Snivellus’, if she would just look at him.

He felt like the monsters under her bed, that would cease to exist if she just ignored them.  

Anyway, he felt reckless: he was kind of curious to see how bad things could get. How much could he get Lily to hate him? How angry could he make Malfoy? He’d felt this once before, in Spinner’s End, getting between his father and mother in a fight, and daring him, just daring him, to hit him again, to keep on hitting him, yelling that he was only twelve and only a gutless, stinking coward would be afraid of hitting a twelve year-old. What was he worried about, Severus had roared, breaking his fist?

Gutless was exactly how he felt. He was completely hollow. In a few days, his insides had gone from aching to echoing. But he liked it: there was something liberating in seeing your worst nightmares come true. He felt completely in control of things now. You could have stubbed out a cigarette on his palm, and he wouldn’t have flinched.   

But this didn’t mean he wouldn’t be tormenting Narcissa: he hadn’t forgotten what she’d said to him in her dormitory: he hadn’t forgotten that it was her stupid screams that had started all this.

Anyway, hollow and spiteful as he felt, he couldn’t stop thinking about the girls in her dormitory, shivering in the common-room all night, being entertained by the gruesome stories of the insomniac Regulus. Nobody deserved to spend a whole night in Regulus’ company.

“I hate to put anyone out of a bed,” he murmured. “The girls in your dormitory could join us, if - ,”  

“No,” she said, her voice suddenly steely. But, despite her anger, she was rather impressed at his daring. With a pout, she added: “Anyway, Jen Morgan’s a half-blood.”

“And you think having two half-bloods in your bed might add up to a whole muggle?” Severus asked.

Narcissa didn’t reply. The conversation seemed to be escaping her control, and it was making her irritable and excited in equal measure. “You’re not prejudiced in that respect, then, Severus?”

It was a leading question. The accusation of not being prejudiced was a deadly one in Slytherin House.

“Not in that respect,” Severus said cheerfully, “no. And any man who tells you that he is, is a liar. Lucius Malfoy subscribes to a magazine called ‘Mud-Wrestling Mud-Bloods’.”

“Interesting,” said Narcissa with spiteful brightness, “I wonder if your little friend is in it.”

Snape’s vision blurred momentarily, but he pulled himself back from the brink. It was easier than he’d expected. Narcissa knew everything, of course: she had seen him kissing Lily in the oubliette. But he wasn’t going to make the situation worse by getting angry.

If he was careful, he could persuade her that Lily had just been an infatuation: a contemptuous attraction, like the one he had until so recently felt for Narcissa. She would believe it because she wanted to, and because she was always the first to under-estimate people.

Anyway, what did pure-bloods know about love? To them, love was a family tree full of maniacs and a bigger castle.   

When he could see again, he realized that Narcissa was leaning against one of the pillars of the four-poster bed opposite, watching him with her usual brand of lazy curiosity – as though she were mentally running through a list of poisons, and deciding which one would produce the most lingering and interesting death.

Snape felt a wild, unreasonable urge to grab her by the waist again, tear that immaculate school shirt and rake his nails across her belly, breathing in the too-sweet smell of her perfume.    

“I tell you what,” he said with contemptuous calm. “I’ll come if you reverse your economic policy.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you pay Jen Morgan, and ask the others.”

She raised her pencil-thin eyebrows sardonically. “You assume it’s the half-blood who’s short of money?”

“She must be,” he said, with a shrug. “The exchange rate’s terrible. Five pounds to every Galleon, did you know that?”    

He looked at her immaculate school-uniform, and her dainty, high-heeled shoes. There were gold trimmings on the laces. With a sinking feeling in his stomach, he said: “No, of course you didn’t.”

“You’ll have to be careful, Severus,” Narcissa continued. “You don’t want me to go telling the whole common-room that you’re a muggle-lover.”

“And you don’t want me to go telling the common-room that you’re a pure-blood poisoner. The worst I can get is teased. You’ll get arrested.”

Narcissa gave a brief, elegant shrug, and lowered her eyes again, letting the light catch on those long, liquorice lashes.

“Whatever you say,” she murmured. “How much shall I pay her?”

“Ten Galleons.”

Ten Galleons was a trifling sum to Narcissa. She had paid more money for an ice-cream. Still, she didn’t like the thought of Jen Morgan receiving it. Like all pure-blood Slytherins, she had a horror of what the muggles would do with money and power if they ever managed to get any. Still, she wanted Severus. No-one had ever refused her before. She was the prettiest, richest, and least inhibited girl in the school, and a teenage boy – especially an odd, solitary one like Severus – could usually be counted on to notice these things.

Somebody who didn’t want her, who didn’t lie down and let her walk all over him, who didn’t get all flustered and lose the thread of what he was saying when she fluttered her eyelashes, was enticing. Narcissa had always had the best of everything: it would be fun, for once in her life, to flirt with the dregs of wizard society, to experience real squalor. As long as nobody found out about it.

And why, why didn’t her perfume work on him? Well, she would find out tonight. She would see if he was more open to questioning with his clothes off.

“Severus,” she murmured. “About tonight. You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

Snape raised his eyebrows. He was looking at her as though she was something small and ugly that he’d found lurking at the bottom of his cauldron.

“I’d be as ashamed as you would, Narcissa,” he said with a twisted smile.  

Narcissa sat on the bed beside him and gripped the front of his shirt, the way she had last week, before his insides had been scooped out and replaced with ice. He could feel himself sinking into his Occlumency state at the sight of her. So this was how it was going to be from now on. He was going to spend his life with a succession of shallow, spiteful, simple creatures, who wouldn’t know joy if it bit them on their bony back-sides.   

He looked back at her impassively. Close to, she was still flawless. You’d need an electron microscope to spot a flaw on Narcissa’s face (or a Magnification Charm, he thought irritably. He had to stop thinking like a muggle. Wizards most emphatically did not need electron microscopes).  

He looked at Narcissa’s matte, white face (she might have been sculpted out of pressed powder – he had a feeling that, if he blew on her, she would dissolve), and felt emptiness spreading through his veins. He felt as numb and desolate as those dead, grey eyes. What with that, and the smell of flowers that she radiated, he had the distinct impression of being at his own funeral.   

He had to hurry up and take his revenge on Potter, just so that he could feel something again, even if it was hatred. Anything was better than this.

“See you tonight, then,” Narcissa muttered, and kissed him. Her lips were cold.

Severus watched her go as he would have watched a dog chasing its tail. She was something remote, stupid and slightly contemptible.

The stories in the common-room were mixed: some people said that Evans was going out with Potter, others that she was just stringing him along, and a couple of people fiercely maintained that she was just trying to infiltrate his family, so that she could assassinate them, and replace them with muggles who’d taken Polyjuice Potion, in order to bring down the wizard world from within. Some people said she’d already got Potter’s dad, the Gringotts treasure-seeker, and all the gold in the wizard bank was going to be leaked to the muggles piece by piece. She was already known amongst the more spiteful of Potter’s fan-club as ‘the crimson-haired Jezebel’.

On the whole, Severus found these stories soothing: the wilder the better. It made him feel as though it was all a fantasy. Or, it would have done, if there hadn’t been the odd, bitter grain of truth in them.

She was meeting him at the Three Broomsticks. He knew it, because he’d been watching them. They went walking in the grounds after the taverns closed, and Severus had watched them from the top of the Astronomy Tower, under the increasingly dark clouds.

Once or twice, he’d wondered whether she would be sorry if he jumped.

He was used to jealousy: Lily wasn’t a flirt, but she wasn’t exactly shy, either: and she didn’t seem aware that men might find her attractive – in fact, she was the complete opposite of Narcissa. Where Narcissa’s every move was calculated to stir desire, Lily didn’t even seem aware of desire as a force beyond the feeling you got when you saw a beautiful book on Healing Magic in a shop window. If it was anything bigger, she didn’t have time for it.

Every time Severus had suggested self-centred motives to explain why all the boys in school were so nice to her, she had told him he was just being cynical.

“Better to be cynical than naïve,” he’d replied irritably.

“Is it?” she’d asked cheerfully. “I think it’s probably about the same.”

“You don’t know what they’re like,” he’d persisted, fully aware that he was fighting a losing battle here.  

“They’re just people, Sev,” she’d said gently.

“Just people?”

“I mean, what’s the worst they can do to me?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?”

“What with men and women both being people,” she continued, obviously not listening to him, “you’d think we’d be able to talk person to person, rational creature to rational creature, without anyone taking advantage of anyone else.”  

“You’re laboring under the delusion that men are rational creatures, are you?”

“Not laboring, no. I’m skipping under it. It’s an incredible weight off your mind.”

“Every weight that gets taken off of your mind is added onto mine,” he’d said morosely, poking at the thread-bare carpet with his shoe.

She’d squeezed his hand affectionately. “That’s why I love you.”

That was always a conversation-killer. Severus would go red, draw his hand away, and spend the next ten minutes berating himself for being stupid.

Unbeknownst to him, Lily was doing exactly the same.   

Anyway, he knew all about jealousy. It was a strange feeling: it bypassed your brain and went straight to your guts. Sometimes, you had no memory of what had caused the sick, writhing, aching sensation in your stomach, but you had to suffer it anyway. If you could find the sting, you might be able to pull it out, but jealousy hid from your mind and trampled on your intestines. It felt as though your insides had been shaken up – you felt hot and sick and brimming over with venom and bile, and, most of the time, you didn’t even know why. If she brushed past someone in a corridor, if she shook hands with somebody for too long, if she smiled at someone you hadn’t seen her talking to before.   

And it was so much worse when it was Potter. Anybody else’s hands on her would be criminal, Potter’s hands on her were profane.

But so far (and Snape was pessimistic enough to count his blessings while he still could) there had been no profanity to speak of.

They didn’t even hold hands. This, combined with the fact that Severus knew Potter, and knew he’d be boasting to the entire school from the top of a Goal-hoop with a magical megaphone if he really was going out with Lily, made Severus hope that it was just a friendship, for now.  

It was a wretched, miserable hope; it was thin, uncomfortable comfort, but it would have to do.   


Narcissa went back to her dormitory, casting a spiteful look at Jen Morgan, who was brushing her hair in front of the mirrors on top of Narcissa’s dressing table.

“Come away from there, Jen, darling” she said, in her high, artificial voice, “you’ll only depress yourself.”

Jen coloured a little, but said nothing. She might have done, once, but six years of being a half-blood in Slytherin House had sapped her spirit. She gave Narcissa a civil little smile and made herself scarce.

Narcissa spent a few moments lingering in front of her mirrors. They had not just been arranged to display her face from every flattering angle: she could see each corner of the room when she sat in front of these mirrors: they were arranged for surveillance as much as vanity.

Then she opened the left hand drawer of her desk and slipped out a small object, wrapped in rustling blue silk.

She pulled the silk back, to reveal an oval picture frame, just large enough to nestle snugly in the palm of her hand. It had been designed only to fit the hand of a true daughter of the House of Black. Narcissa could remember the day her hand was big enough to hold it, concealed, the way her ancestors had done; she had also endured painful growth-impeding spells so that her hand would grow no larger, but it had been worth it to inherit the secrets she was now nursing lovingly in her palm.

The frame was black and ornate: it was made out of sculpted black marble, threaded with glittering veins of quartz. At the top, carved into the stone, was the Black Coat of Arms and, beneath that, the family motto: Toujours Purs.

The frame contained a portrait of a plain woman with inky, blue-black hair and rather bulbous eyes, dressed in a rustling, iridescent gown of green silk. It was tight and unforgiving, just like the woman – the rustly silk was cinched in at the waist by a black and green corset, which shimmered like peacock feathers. She had long black gloves, and was staring through her long eyelashes at Narcissa – the haughty Black stare that never failed to put people in their place.  

This was Narcissa’s paternal grandmother, Claudia Black – an alchemist, by trade, but out-of-hours, she had been the most devious dark-witch ever to have graced the magical world with her fire, fury and ingenuity.

The problem that magical historians had when dealing with Claudia Black was whether or not to call her a Dark Witch. Her mind had not been entirely dark, her discoveries had not been entirely blood-thirsty. She had invented healing potions, Anaesthesia Charms, and Muggle Repelling spells. She had helped to protect muggles (a detail that Narcissa had initially found difficult to reconcile with her budding adulation towards her grandmother). But she had also devised methods of magical torture that would make even the Dark Lord shudder.

Claudia Black had taught wizards that, while you cannot avoid the ravages of age, you can compartmentalize them. If you can extend yourself into some external object, you can transfer the unwanted parts of yourself into it. And she had a very broad idea of what constituted an 'object'.

She had an incurable magical illness, Stygmalian Fever, but she kept the symptoms in her House Elf, who’d dutifully suffered them, so that Claudia could get on with her work. Because house elves had tougher immune systems than humans, Claudia Black had managed to live a long time, without ageing a day, or suffering any of the horrific symptoms of her disease, until her fifteenth husband had finally succeeded in poisoning her.  

Narcissa, like Severus, had a great capacity for accepting things. Nothing could shock her. You learned to shrug off the most horrific details when you lived in Slytherin House, especially in the climate of kindling paranoia that the Dark Lord’s rise to power was creating.

She’d seen her parents curse their own brothers and sisters for disgracing the family name. Her aunt Raptura had been transfigured into a dog, a badly-performed spell that had unfortunately stuck, and she was regularly kicked when she got in the way.

Claudia Black had not spoken to Narcissa at first. She had waited for her young descendent to prove herself. She had no regrets about falling into Narcissa’s hands – the other Black girls were unsuitable. Andromeda had a streak of arrogant independence, and Bellatrix had a streak of insanity: neither were bad qualities, as such, but they needed to be moderated. Narcissa, if only through her incurable laziness, was calm, cautious, guarded, and prudent. She was not intelligent, but she was wise. She knew the way the world worked, and that was the most important thing.

As soon as Claudia had realized Narcissa was poisoning Lucius Malfoy with Amortentia, she’d decided to offer the girl a little advice. Narcissa had listened with misty-eyed love. Her ancestor was a goddess as far as she was concerned.

“What’s on your mind, grand-daughter?” she asked, as Narcissa unwrapped her tenderly.

“The boy I used to poison Malfoy,” she whispered – not because she was afraid of being overheard, but because Claudia Black’s presence filled her with such awe that she could do nothing but whisper. Whenever she unwrapped her grandmother’s portrait, she felt as though she were in a cathedral or a crypt, some sacred space that made her feel tiny and insignificant – and Narcissa was not accustomed to feeling tiny and insignificant. “The boy I told you about – Severus,”

“Yes?” Caludia asked imperiously.

“I’ve asked him to meet me tonight, in the dormitory. Do you think he’ll turn up?”

“Of course he will turn up,” Claudia purred in her dark, sultry voice. “He is a teenage boy; you are a beautiful girl. You must learn to underestimate men, Narcissa. You can do so quite safely in these matters. And it saves valuable time.”

“What will I do if Lucius finds out?”

“You must ensure that he doesn’t.”

“But Severus is under a Charm that will make him bleed to death if he lies to another Death Eater.”

“Really?” Claudia asked, her eyes shining with interest. “How does that work?”

“It is a Charm of the Dark Lord’s invention,” Narcissa explained impatiently. She adored her clever grandmother, but she sometimes had a tendency to linger excessively on scholarly details. “I suppose it works along the same lines as Veritaserum.”

“But Veritaserum gives the victim no choice: this Charm allows them to make the mistake of lying.” She smiled in a grim, self-satisfied way. “That is just like Tom Riddle. He always did want people to learn the hard way.”

Narcissa stared at her grandmother. “You knew the Dark Lord?”

“Of course. He was just starting out at Hogwarts when I left. He could charm secrets out of you like snakes. I always knew he’d go far: I just didn’t know in which direction.”

Narcissa tried to think her way back to the point. She had a vague idea that this was a dangerous topic of conversation.

“Are you sure I should meet Severus tonight?” she asked.  

She remembered Malfoy in the oubliette – his wild, unshaven face, with the worshipful bones at his feet – and felt a twinge of regret. He had been so powerful, ruthless and passionate in the dungeons. When Severus had put the Cruciatus Curse on him, she remembered feeling like there was a hand at her throat, throttling her.

“Lucius is so much more respectable,” she murmured, thinking out loud (she would never have done this with anyone but her grandmother). “He’s a pure-blood…”

“Immaterial,” said Claudia Black. “This boy, Severus, will be powerful: Malfoy will only ever be stolid and rich. You need to spot potential in your men, Narcissa. Malfoy is derivative; Snape is wildly original. He found a way into Abraxas Malfoy’s tunnels, tamed a Griffin and put Malfoy under the Cruciatus Curse.”

“The mudblood probably helped him,” Narcissa murmured resentfully. “And, anyway, Severus doesn’t want me.”

“Of course he does,” Claudia replied, “an imaginative man like that can want anyone.” Narcissa was so in awe of her grandmother that she didn’t really spot the insult there.  

“You can learn things from him, Narcissa,” Claudia Black went on. “Doubtless, you will have to marry Malfoy, but the women of our family have always taken brilliant and powerful lovers. Talent does not seem to go hand in hand with respectability, as the half-blood Tom Riddle proves.”  

Narcissa gasped. Her grandmother said such dangerous things sometimes. “Talent is not everything,” she murmured sulkily.

“What else is there?” Claudia remarked, raising one of her blue-black eyebrows. “There is a war coming, Narcissa: I can smell it. You need to build relationships with Generals, not foot-soldiers.”

“Malfoy is not a foot-soldier,” she protested.  

“And Snape refused your advances the first time, didn’t he?” Claudia asked, with the air of someone who has found an unassailable argument in her favour. “Aren’t you curious as to why?”

Narcissa pouted. She did want to experiment with Snape: he was like the Dark Lord, pleasures of the flesh didn’t seem to influence him. If she wanted to find a place in the Dark Lord’s regime, she was going to have to study men like this. Her Hemlock and vanilla perfume seemed wildly inadequate in this new and frightening world.

And he didn’t need her approval. Narcissa was always mesmerized by independence, in a horrified, disgusted kind of way.

“If you think it is wise,” she said eventually.

“Of course it is wise. The Black Family name is going to survive this war, my girl, as it has survived every other war in history. The trick lies in picking the winning side.”