The Tournament Aftermath
Severus had believed he felt rage when the Portkey had transported him away without his consent. That was nothing, absolutely nothing, against the rage and pure hatred he felt when he walked with long steps from the middle of the now flattened maze and to the stands, and saw Dumbledore stand in front of a small contingent of people, obviously arguing with some of them. The small group consisted of Aries, Andromeda, Ted, Lupin, all of Harry’s closest friends and, by now not so surprisingly, Alastor Moody, with Harry in the middle and at the back of the group. Alastor, Aries and Andromeda were the only ones with drawn wands, but everyone looked ready for it to escalate, and the children looked obviously disturbed. Harry was pale as a sheet with glassy eyes and Darkness gathering beneath his feet.
“Harry, my boy, you need my help to find your Alpha. He could be hurt, and if he cannot take care of you then the Dursley family is the only other option …” Dumbledore said coldly, hidden beneath a mask of worry. Harry’s breath came in gasps. “I’m the only one with the right knowledge to help you find your Alpha, and if we do not find him alive and well, I will help you home to your family.”
“I think you will find, Albus, that his family already is here,” Ted Tonks drew his wand and stepped sideways to make sure that Dumbledore could no longer see Harry at all. “There are several documents both at Gringotts and at the Ministry, including Severus’ Will, that proclaim that Harry’s care will go to the Tonks’ family if anything should ever happen to Severus while Harry is still underage. We are the only other alternative, and all the documents have no less than seven witnesses. So, while we absolutely should look for Severus, there is no reason to involve Harry at all.”
“He is Severus’ Omega; he has a connection to his Alpha that we need …” Dumbledore began.
“I just might have hit my partner with a Auror level Tracking Charm before he disappeared into the maze,” Aries said, because she was absolutely fabulous like that, Severus decided. “He is alive and well and in fact back on Hogwarts grounds as of two minutes ago. There is no need to worry.”
Severus saw Harry’s shoulder slump in relief in the same moment that Severus reached Lupin who stood behind Harry and the other children, as a guard.
“I’m sorry that I worried you, Harry,” Severus said calmly and touched his shoulder before he suddenly got an armful of teenager who tried to hug the air out of his lungs.
“Aries told me that you were alright, but it was so hard to believe when I knew there was a trap,” Harry mumbled into his chest.
Severus hugged him back. “I’m completely fine, I was just sent on a detour, no need to worry.”
“Severus, it’s good to see you alive and well, my boy,” Dumbledore began.
“There was a Portkey, Dumbledore, on Hogwarts grounds, that took me off the grounds. That is a severe security breach. Our guest Champions might have had a hard time getting back to the school, if they had been the one to take the Cup and the Portkey, as neither have any experience with Apparating to the school, or in Britain in general. I think this deserves a thorough investigation.”
“Oh, absolutely. I will tell my boss as soon as I’m certain that the danger is over,” Aries said while eying Severus with narrow eyes, she knew he had things to tell her.
“That is hardly necessary for a school event, Nymphadora,” Dumbledore said with a twinkle.
She sent him a cold glare. “The event might have happened at the school, but it is a Ministry event, Headmaster. There is a distinct difference between the two. And it is Tonks-Black, Headmaster, or Aries amongst my friends. As we have never been on familiar terms and as I’m an Auror on duty at this moment, I will have to consider your familiarity as an attempt at manipulation of an Auror on duty. That will not look too good in my report, not when added to your abduction attempt of Harry.”
“I did not try to abduct Harry!” Dumbledore snapped; all congeniality gone now.
“To abduct: removing someone by force. You recently tried your best to make Harry go with you, up to and until threatening him with his relatives and pushing your way to him to get your hands on him. That is the literal definition of abduction, Headmaster,” she said coldly. “Severus, take your charge to your quarters while I deal with this,” her no-nonsense tone was one that Severus’ appreciated and he began to turn towards the castle when Alastor groaned in pain, or at the very least heavy discomfort. As Severus assumed he knew both what was happening and why, he turned back.
Alastor, or whichever Death Eater who had taken his place, had been helpful in recent months. Even if none of this nonsense with the Tournament would have happened without them, they had done their best to help and protect Harry, up-till and including getting Severus when Severus himself hadn’t known there was any danger to Harry. He might want them somewhat punished for bringing so much anxiety and stress to Harry, but it would most likely not be the same kind of punishment that they would get from the Ministry.
He watched in anticipation while the Polyjuice faded and the person using it scrambled for his hip flask, only to have Aries summon it with a cold look in her grey eyes. Alastor had been her mentor when she went to the Auror Academy, she had been his last student before his retirement. Severus wondered if she would have seen through the disguise if she had been around him more, this past year. Dumbledore had not noticed, despite their long friendship, or he had noticed and not cared to reveal them.
Moments after it had begun, Barty Crouch Jr. stood before them in clothes too big for him, his blue eyes big, his freckled face gaunt and sickly pale, and his straw blonde hair a messy mane around his head. He swallowed hard.
“Moody is alright, in a suitcase in my office,” he told Aries hastily. “He’s just sleeping.” Then he looked at Severus and Harry. “I’m sorry, Severus, Mr. Potter. I didn’t know about your connection, and when I found out and realised that others didn’t know or didn’t care enough to understand … I couldn’t leave, not when you had no one on the inside.” He glanced at the seething Headmaster before looking at Harry again. “I know it doesn’t excuse the fact that I put your name in the Goblet of Fire, Mr. Potter, but I did try my best to be of help after that.”
He swallowed hard again, and Severus agreed that he had been of help, and more than that, Severus remembered the energetic Ravenclaw he had befriended at school, in his last year and Barty’s fifth. He had been one of Severus’ very few friends at that time, they hadn’t been close, but Severus felt that they had tipped from just allies to a tentative friendship. That would have meant nothing if he had really been a danger to Harry now, but he truly wasn’t, because his Master, and Barty was at the very least as maniacally devoted as Bellatrix Lestrange was, was no longer dangerous to Harry. Barty deserved some punishment for what he had done to Harry, and maybe some for what he had done to Alastor, but he did not deserve a Dementor’s Kiss, which was the only thing an escaped prisoner from Azkaban would ever get.
Of course, if he truly had tortured Lord and Lady Longbottom to insanity, he should go back to Azkaban for his crimes and to get him away from society, but Severus very much doubted that either Barty or Rabastan Lestrange had been active participants during that horrendous act. They had most certainly been there, but both were academics, not fighters, and no matter the Dark Lord’s faults, and he had had many back then, he knew to use his people in a way that played to their strengths. Severus himself had only been on twenty raids, and only ever as back-up, even if he was an excellent dueller. He was more important, and better used, as a potion brewer.
Before anyone could do anything more than swear and scowl at Barty, Severus clamped a hand on his shoulder and let his Darkness envelop the man. The last he saw of him was his blue eyes, big with fright, while he whispered:
“I’m sorry.”
Then the Darkness swallowed him whole, and Severus drew the Darkness back into himself.
“Severus, what did you do!” Aries hissed.
He looked at her and hoped she would forgive him some day.
“I took care of him, he was a threat to Harry,” he simply stated. “I will take Harry to my quarters now.” Then he left by the Shadows, instinctively knowing that Harry wouldn’t have any adverse reaction to the travel method. After all, the Shadows were a part of him too.
As soon as they stood in Severus’ quarters, Harry called for Sage to order a tea service for at least four people and asked for all of Aries’ favourites.
“She isn’t going to be happy with you,” Harry said as he eyed him, then he hesitated. “Are you certain that taking that man here was the best thing to do?”
“No, not truly. He won’t be a danger to you, that much I know, but I don’t know what his crimes really are, outside of bringing you so much anxiety and fear. I would like to find out, before judging him. As you already know, the trials after the war were little more than shams.” It was Severus’ turn to hesitate, and he looked into Harry’s night black eyes with small pinpricks of light, of stars, in them. “He was the closest thing I had to a friend, after I lost your mother’s friendship. As he can’t be a danger to you now, he is too intelligent for that, I would like to know the truth, maybe even help him if he isn’t a danger in general.”
“We are not protecting him over the lives and security of the school, or my friends and family,” Harry said with absolute certainty.
“No, we are not,” Severus agreed, then he called Barty out of the Darkness again and put him in a chair by the sofa, locked his magic and bound him to the chair both with cuffs on his arms and legs and magic. Then he put the man in a magic bubble that let them see and hear him, without Barty being allowed to see or hear them.
Barty shuddered and looked around himself, then shuddered again while blinking, trying to reorient himself after something that would have been both terrifying and disorienting for him, even if the whole experience would have taken but a moment for him.
Severus looked at Harry. “You are going to be angry at me too, for what I have done tonight, but I hope you will let me tell you the whole story before judging me.”
Sage came with the tea and Severus made Harry’s cup, then Bartys and then his own before beginning his tale, not really caring to check if Barty was completely lucid or not. At least the man drank his tea when the floating cup reached his lips, while he tried to seem unbothered by the blank bubble he was in.
Severus told Harry about being approached by the Dark Lord the Yule before he graduated. He told him about how he joined him right after graduation with the desperate hope of helping their society get back more of their own culture and save them, and Magic. He admitted that he knew it was a foolish hope, that he knew that the Dark Lord already had parted from his original goals and ideals, but that he was unable to do nothing and he would certainly not help Dumbledore who was on the wrong side of things, as Severus saw it. He admitted to being in an extremely uneven relationship with the Dark Lord for years, as the man still had charm in his madness and Severus knew too little of the ways of the world to keep away from him.
Then he heard of the prophecy and realised that the Dark Lord would hunt down his oldest friend, Lily, and her family. As he had been completely and utterly disenchanted by the Dark Lord and his cause by then, he did what he had thought he would never do, and went to Dumbledore to save his friend, to keep what little good there was in the world, safe.
He had failed in even that.
Then he told Harry about the meeting with the resurrected Dark Lord that very night, and how he had restored his mind and soul and bound him with Oaths to make certain the Dark Lord never could go against Harry, himself or any that they cared about. The Dark Lord would again strive to reach his old goals of balancing the Magical World and of restoring the Old Ways by making them legal again, informing people of why they were important and also making the Sabbaths into the official magical holidays, as they once had been. When the Magical World again focused inwards towards themselves and Magic, they would make the gap between magicians and Muggles greater and thus also protect their world from the Muggles, both their traditions, their society, and their people. This would hopefully mostly be done by politics and actions taken in the shadows, as Dumbledore was far too powerful to go against outright at the moment, and not war. They had far too few people as it was.
Harry sat staring at him after he was done. Severus swallowed hard.
“Harry?” Suddenly his voice was hoarse, and his lips were stiff. He drank a little of his lukewarm tea.
“I’m both horrified and pleased,” Harry said, looking down into his empty cup. “I knew you were a Death Eater, of course, you already told me, but I didn’t know how close you were with … him. Nor did you tell me your full reason for joining him back when it happened, nor his original goals …” He took a deep breath and looked at Severus. “I just … you are not going back to him now, are you, now that he is back and sane and you know that he has the right ambitions again?”
Severus knelt by Harry and took his hands into his own. “Never. I did what I did tonight because I knew about his original goals, and I knew that you wanted the same; balance in Magic and to see Magic celebrated in the Old Ways. I did it to help you, because I know that we cannot make that happen alone. I’m yours, Harry, now and to my last breath; to the very last drop of magic in my core.”
Harry clasped his hands back and gave a sharp nod. “It’s alright with me that you are with Aries, if that is what you want, she is great, but you can’t … you can’t be with my parent’s murderer, even if he was insane when he did it. You can’t be with him.” He shook his head and swallowed; his big, green eyes wet.
“No, absolutely not. I would never go back to him, Harry, in any way. I give you my word. I healed him, gave him back his sanity, instead of destroying him, for you, not because of him. We need him and his connections to get anywhere with your own ambitions. I have no interest in him otherwise.”
Harry nodded. “Good. That’s good. I don’t want to dictate your life in any way, but that’s … I couldn’t deal with that … if you had gone back to him. Even if I do understand that he was insane when he killed my parents and did so many other horrible things.”
“He was truly completely insane back then, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he is like everyone else, now that he’s healed, though. I want you to be aware of that, Harry. The Oaths I had him make will stop his most violent tendencies, as the Oaths make it impossible for him to break them, instead of punishing him if he should break them. He is still capable of violence, though, and he is fully capable of being dangerous without being violent too, it’s just not as obvious. I should know.”
Harry nodded and looked at Barty who now nibbled on a floating biscuit inside his bubble.
“Should we talk to him and send him away, if he deserves the chance you want to give him?”
“Yes, indeed. I will get the Veritaserum.” Severus got up to go to his lab.
Half an hour later Severus used the Shadows to send Barty out of Hogwarts and directly to his Master. He had been right; Barty had been a most unwilling lookout the night Lord and Lady Longbottom had lost their minds. So unwilling, in fact, that Bellatrix had put both him and Rabastan under the Imperius Curse to get them to do the job she wanted of them. Barty had been a most loyal Death Eater, so when his Lord told him to not touch either of the children that could be his prophesied enemy without further orders, Barty took that to mean that he shouldn’t touch their families either. He admitted to still having nightmares about that night, especially since he had been unable to shield Neville from any of it, because he was under the Imperius and without his own will.
He was still insanely loyal to the Dark Lord, but other than that, he was as sane as one could be after a year in Azkaban, over a decade under the Imperius and then a year in someone else’s skin. As proven when he was the one who managed to convince the Dark Lord to leave Harry alone when he realised that he now was a bonded Omega, so as to not antagonise Severus further. It had apparently not been easy, but he had prevailed in the end, even if it had cost him to go against his Master’s wishes, both mentally because of his very submissive mindset and physically as the Dark Lord tortured him for his defiance. The only thing Barty wanted was to see his Master succeed, and he knew he wouldn’t if he got Severus as a straight out enemy.
So, while he was an enthusiastic and loyal Death Eater, he was not as bad as he could have been. Slightly insane, but still not an evil person that should never go into society. It helped that Severus was able to heal some of the damage the last decade or so had wrought in his mind, even if Barty’s insanity was different than the Dark Lords. The Dark Lord had broken something that Severus could restore; Barty’s mind was fractured in too many ways for Severus’ Warder magic to rebuild using the same method. Severus did manage to restore his physical body almost to what it would have been without the different kinds of trauma of the last decade, including the poisoning he had done to himself by using Polyjuice Potion consecutively for months.
Severus also got Barty to swear almost as many Oaths as he had gotten the Dark Lord under, and thus making him even less likely to be dangerous to people in general. Severus had told Barty to get help from both a Mind Healer and a regular Healer, and hopefully that would help the man even more. After all that, Harry had agreed to send Barty back to his Master, and so it was done.
Even after that, the night wasn’t over, of course. Severus had sent Harry to bed, but then visited the Hospital Wing to get an update about both the other Champions and the real Moody. The Champions had already been healed from their scrapes and bruises and slept with their school mates. Moody had been woken from his magical sleep, and while he was horrified and even more paranoid after what had happened to him, he was in very good shape, all things considered. Barty hadn’t only kept him at sleep, but he had put him in a complicated stasis spell that both made the sleep real for his body and mind and made sure not to let his body deteriorate after being motionless for so long. Moody was most likely better rested than he had been in decades, he wasn’t even hungry, as he had eaten his supper just an hour before he had been taken, almost a year prior.
After that Severus had a long and extremely tedious meeting with Dumbledore, where he stated several times in many different ways that Lord Voldemort was gone for good. Only to have Dumbledore not listen to him, however he phrased it. The old goat insisted that Voldemort was still out there, that he was immortal, and that only Harry could defeat him for good. Severus might have set him back for some time, but Voldemort was not gone. Harry needed to be trained, needed to be ready.
“Enough, Dumbledore!” Severus snapped after almost an hour. “I met a resurrected Lord Voldemort, one who was an obvious danger to my Wyrd, and I obliterated him as I will obliterate everyone and everything that poses a danger to my Wyrd. There is no longer any part of Lord Voldemort left in Britain, I made very, very certain of it. He will never be a danger to my Wyrd again, and thus Harry can relax and enjoy his summer, as he is supposed to do as a fourteen, soon to be fifteen, year old boy. A boy! Not a soldier, not a fighter, a boy, a child!”
He met the Headmaster’s gaze straight on. “Do you understand me, Albus Dumbledore, Harry is a child that deserves all due consideration and protection. You will keep him out of all of your plans. If you interfere in Harry’s life one more time, I will end you.”
“You have no right to threaten me in my own school, Severus Snape!” Dumbledore thundered in a way Severus was sure he would have covered away from a year prior, now he only sneered and got up from his chair.
“A school filled with children you have done an abysmal job with protecting, Headmaster,” he sneered and turned his back. “This year especially, by pushing me as you have and putting the whole school at risk for your plots, but you have always been a terrible Headmaster, at best, with no regard for anyone but yourself and your plans. If you put one more toe out of line in regard to Harry, I will solve the problem that is you for the school, and I will solve it permanently.”
Severus left in a sweep of robes, honestly thinking that he had made himself clear enough for even Dumbledore to understand.
He should have known better. He really should.