“The locator must be above us or beneath us,” Draco said slowly… “You don’t think… buried alive?”
Or dead, Severus’s mind supplied automatically.
---
The jewel had altered her magic in consuming it—it had to have, if it wasn’t being torn apart along with the rest of her magic.
“Let me consume your magic,” the construct implored… “The resonance will stop. You will live… Quickly, quickly,” the jewel chanted. “Your time to choose life over death is running out.”
It was right.
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—The Ambiguous Artifice, chapter 15
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Rigel hesitated too long.
Her time ran out.
When Severus found Rigel, it wasn’t a living child he found, delirious and thirsty and pleading for forgiveness Severus did not understand the need for.
Rigel was dead. There was nothing left of his mind to confuse reality and dreams. His throat would never feel the coolness of water again. No word could escape his lips.
Only one thing remained in this changed version: Severus did not understand.
A child was not supposed to die like this. Rigel was not supposed to die like this. Severus had told himself as he and Draco followed the locator’s position that he was prepared. As he entered the cave, he convinced himself that he could not dare lift his hopes—he hadn’t realized his hopes had not yet truly fallen. A part of him always believed the entire time that he would find Rigel alive, no matter how illogical it seemed. It was only now, staring at the shattered, pale remains of Rigel’s body, that his heart realized it could not hope anymore.
Rigel was dead.
Dull eyes gleamed hollowly up at him, the surrounding skin carved with silvery blue lines that radiated outwards, like cracks in a mirror. His stomach lurched violently and he let out a harsh, shuddering breath.
The time turner had done this, Severus realized as he continued to stare at the face of the boy he had loved like he never thought he could. Only the resonance of seven cores could shatter a person like this, tearing their core and their mind physically apart until they bloated out against the skin and forced it to crack and release the magic’s pressure.
Rigel was dead.
Except—
Those dull eyes still stared lifelessly upwards, and Severus knew those eyes, greener than a basilisk scale and still somehow gleaming like a gem in the moonlight, though each passing minute of death further dimmed the light within them and turned their emerald into sea glass and then to a dirty beer bottle.
Those were not Rigel’s eyes.
Nor was the rest of it Rigel’s face, as Snape quickly discovered when he bent closer to examine the corpse more carefully. It was undoubtedly similar, but the jaw was softer, the nose sloped gently into a slight upturn, and even the ears were place a little higher on the head than Rigel’s.
This wasn’t Rigel Black at all. The resonance would have broken all of Harriet Potter’s magic that was still within her body, even that from a potion she’d brewed, so long as the potions effects still ran through her system. The resonance had broken it all, draining away any charms and polyjuice until there was no magic left at all.
Harry was dead.
Rigel wasn’t.
Unless—
Heavy dread set upon him once more, his chest constricting until he thought his ribcage would strangle his heart. Hope didn’t rise in him at the realization that it was not Rigel whose body he was holding—when had he picked up the corpse and cradled it to his chest, its lolling head tucked in the crook of his neck? He didn’t remember. Harry Potter was dead and as much as Severus wanted to think this meant his boy was out there in the world somewhere—alive—he somehow knew that wasn’t the case.
He didn’t know where the knowledge came from, but it settled just behind his breastbone like a bird roosting.
It was indeed Rigel he held, Rigel whose face was now coated in Severus’s fallen tears.
Looking back, Severus could barely recall Fawkes arriving in the cave and transporting him and the child’s body to the surface. When Severus lifted her shattered corpse and carried it like a sleeping child towards the castle, he didn’t even hear Draco’s gasping shriek of shock and grief. He saw Albus and Lucius gathered nearby, their faces drawn and nearly as pale as the child's, but he couldn’t find it in him to answer any questions. He didn’t know how long he stood there, cradling the child, until he saw James Potter storming towards him in billowing Auror’s robes, his face alight with dark fury like he was ready to accuse Severus himself of murdering the child in his arms.
Potter’s face softened when he looked into his eyes, and Severus wondered briefly what his despair must look like, if his face was blotchy and shiny with drying tears, his eyes red and dim. Then, Potter’s gaze travelled lower until it reached the corpse.
Severus saw the exact moment the other man registered that it was not in fact his nephew who lay dead in Severus’s arms, but his firstborn daughter. His expression shattered like a pale imitation of the child's own cracked face, and he curled inward on himself like his heart had suddenly stopped beating. The man collapsed to his knees silently, his hands pressed against his mouth like he was physically holding in a scream, and he knelt in the grass for what felt like a century, his shoulders trembling and his chest heaving, his eyes dark and dull and staring at nothing.
Looking at him, Severus realized he didn’t have to wonder what his own face looked like. Looking at James Potter was as good as a mirror, their pain and sorrow matched for the child they’d both lost.
Severus held her in his arms for hours, refusing to set her down or give her away, no matter how hard others begged him to give her to them, to talk to the Aurors about how he’d found her, to let her go. He sat on the grass with her lying across his lap, holding her so tightly that sometimes his own body heat warmed her skin and he thought for just a moment that maybe he could hope but it always came crashing back down again because she was dead. James held her hand, their arms outstretched towards each other and their fingers tangled together in one final grip.
Later on, he wouldn’t remember when Lily arrived, but he remembered the sound of her screams and would remember that sound until he died, hearing it every time a room was too silent or a winter wind left his skin cold and clammy like dead flesh.
He knew when a boy arrived much later, a boy who looked almost like Rigel had, his features shifting slightly every few seconds like he was either struggling to hold a disguise or struggling to let it go after wearing it for so long. The boy didn’t scream at the sight of his cousin’s dead body, but his knees buckled beneath him and he fell almost against Severus, curling over the child’s body to press his face against her still chest and sob.
Severus didn’t know then that the child’s death would spark a movement, that she would be mourned as a martyr and honored through an upheaval of the system in magical Britain. He didn’t know that she would cause more political chaos in her death than she had even managed in life, that Riddle would never know a day of peace from the people who fought him on both political and personal levels for the sake of this child who died because she was too passionate to not chase what she wanted. He didn’t know that the world would come together under her name, that a hidden world would expose itself as its king went half-mad with grief and led protests and fought the duel that would kill Riddle in the streets someday. He didn’t know any of it then.
He didn’t know anything then except for the child in his arms.
“We always knew there was a risk that she could die,” the boy beside him whispered, the words barely noticeable as Severus stroked the child’s hair and stared into her lifeless eyes that once held so much fire and where now nothing more than lumps of cold, greenish coal. “We knew it, knew she could, but never really believed she would. And not like this,” he said, sniffling loudly as he lay his head flat against her chest, his grey eyes that were a lighter silver than Rigel’s had been staring up at Severus. “Nothing was ever supposed to be like this.”
Severus looked at the real Arcturus Black and he didn’t care.
He turned his gaze back down to the limp child that he couldn’t save in time. He held her in his arms and felt himself shatter.