Soulsavers

Severus

Knowledge is power, Severus told himself, not without satisfaction at his scheme. Even acquiring that knowledge wasn’t what he’d set out to do and had cost him much of his dignity and nearly his life, even if he’d failed miserably to accomplish his original goal.

For a while – about two years now – Severus had been keeping track of the moon, and now that he’d been doing it, he blamed himself for not figuring it all out before he had nearly died. It was all so obvious, the way Lupin ate meat on meat on the days leading up to the full moon. His ashen complexion, despite the iron intake. Severus used to wonder if Lupin might have severe anemia. He remembered that, now. But he’d dismissed it, because what sort of Muggle problem was that to have? Ever since that night, part of him wondered if Potter had planned this, so that he could “save” Severus and use that to get to Lily. Oh, the nobility of spirit.

Still. If Severus couldn’t shout from the rooftops that the crackpot they had for a Headmaster had made a werewolf a prefect, he could take credit for Lupin’s guaranteed state of sore frailty, and no one would be able to correct the impression without implicating themselves in something much worse.

He gloated as the four of them made their way to their table. “Oi, Lupin, I hope you learned your lesson about messing with me,” he shouted across the Great Hall. Potter picked up an apple and tossed it, aiming at Severus, but Severus sent it flying back and when Potter ducked, it hit Sirius, who snarled at him as though it made a difference. Sirius did not understand – you can’t escalate when you already tried to have me eaten alive. If you have a problem, complain to your hero James.

“Seventh years! Adults!” Minerva cried and seemed pre-emptively to despair of trying to educate her students.

“You did that to Dumbledore’s fan club over there?” Avery asked him, looking impressed. Come to think of it, all four of them looked like shit. Severus had counted on no one who mattered keeping a record of Lupin’s health, and he was right.

“I cannot confirm or deny,” he answered Avery, hoping the smug tone would get the right message across. He felt very pleased with himself. His knowledge used to be a burden to him, but he had been naive. He had wanted to show Lily what she did not want to see. It had always been his problem.

“Takes guts to mess with a prefect. Didn’t know you had it in you!” Yes, Avery, because there’s nothing scarier about him than his little badge. Purebloods could be so bloody dense.

“What are you playing at, then?” Granger whispered to him.  “I know you didn’t do anything to Lupin.”

He looked at her sideways. What did they teach them in Australia, that she had seemed so sure? If he got into a fight with her, he would lose, so he told her, as he always did, to mind her own business and leave him alone. Still, She’d not been around long enough to experience two full moons. Strange.

Hermione

Tragically, she had no intention of doing that, nor for that matter, much incentive. Because there were very few people she remotely liked around her, when it came down to it. She had never been a social butterfly, but she used to belong somewhere, before everything went wrong. She thought she would be able to find a place in a different time, but everyone turned out to be incredibly disappointing.

Lupin struck her as the greatest disappointment of them all: she knew of James and Lily only by reputation, and she never liked Sirius much (not that she could tell Harry), but Lupin… she thought she knew him, and she’d always respected him. Yet now, though he did not even seem particularly happy to be around his friends, he still acted the coward, laughing at their jokes, encouraging them with his willful blindness, acting like all the obvious aggression they unleashed on their surroundings was a joke.

She thought of how Severus had just taken the credit for a violence he did not commit, to cement his reputation among those foul people, the future Azkaban fodder. One of her dad’s favorite records was titled “Child is Father to the Man.” She wondered if it had come out yet.

How much of Severus’s life had prepared him for his irreplicable and precarious role in the future war?

After their first lesson together, she cornered him as he was leaving the classroom.

“I know he’s a werewolf,” she whispered, and Severus shuddered as though she’d just electrocuted him

“I don’t know why you think so, but if you tell anyone, Dumbledore will have me out of here, so you better keep your mouth shut.”

Snape telling her to be quiet - where were Harry and Ron when you needed to have a laugh? But then, he wasn’t making any sense - why would Dumbledore expel him and, for that matter, why was she so sure Severus already knew about Lupin? Had she simply confused the adult for the teenager?

“Of course I will,” she promised him earnestly. She felt like she knew the answer but must have forgotten.

“How did you figure it out?” He asked her. It was as good an opening as she was going to get. In reality, she’d figured it out in no small part thanks to Professor Snape setting them an essay about werewolves.

“Defense lesson, obviously,” she said, feeling quite audacious. “How did you figure it out?”

“His mate told me two years ago,” he answered. Well, that’s a lie, innit.  Lupin’s “mates” never would have done that, would they? But then, from what little she had gathered, they weren’t nearly as tight-knit and jolly as she’d initially been led to believe, and one of said “mates” did end up a Death Eater… Still, none of this felt right, and she felt she must be forgetting something she used to know, something big.

Severus

She was not a good liar. Severus had read everything he could find about werewolves, and there was no universe in which she could have identified one so fast, and with such certainty. Well, not yet. Like all, or most, werewolves, Severus expected this one to grow more obvious as time wore on. Hungrier, more brutal, more savage. A couple of years and he might be equal to James Potter. He made a mental note of it - she’d entered the school knowing too much about him, and now about Lupin too.

As a liar himself, and a slightly better one, he knew better than to press her - it would give her an incentive to press him, and he did not want to find himself trying to communicate anything about that affair to her. The thought that she would be impressed with Potter too felt repugnant to him, and he was loathe to have her think he was stupid for not figuring it out as fast, for walking into the werewolf’s gaping maw. He still remembered the string of saliva that stretched between its fangs, though not what might have been his last thought before he felt himself pulled back. Something like, I never expected touching a stick to that damned tree would work. I only wanted to get injured and blame it on him. It had taken hours for the anger and horror to sink in, and by then, it was too late. When he thought about things like that, time seemed to stand still - he had gone over and over it all so many times, he could go through the entire process again in a second and everyone around him were none the wiser. He only wished he could make it stop. Hermione, like everyone else, didn’t notice - he caught her looking unfixedly past him, at the wall, eyebrows scrunched together, deep in thought. 

“Something on your mind, Granger?”

She was startled. He felt slighted - surely it was rude to stop the conversation to have a think, without even bothering to leave the room? That, and he did not want to be late to class.

“So why, then? Why did you pretend you’d done something to him? Won’t you get in trouble if people think you hurt him?”

“I can take detention.” That, and no one on the staff would find it remotely plausible that Severus was guilty.

Hermione

She thought catching him in a lie might have helped, but he had given her nothing to hold on to. Instead, she felt like she’d not gone back far enough. What if it was already too late to make a difference? Already she found eerie similarities between him and the man she had known, whose formation she’d tried to prevent. She thought only births and deaths were fixed, but what if he was born corrupted, or at any rate had been corrupted long before? She was 17 when she learned his true heart, she couldn’t join him at Hogwarts for his first year, and make that much of a difference. And you should have known. Ron’s 17 and you’ve given up on making it work with him.

But that wasn’t fair, was it? She’d tried, she really had. And Ron had, too. But she’d never been the same from the moment she’d emerged from the Malfoy Manor, alive, but barely. Part of her had died there, or gone the way of the Longbottoms. It was pain beyond endurance, and she broke. If Bellatrix had known to ask her the right questions, she would have given away much more than she had. And when the war ended, she still had nightmares, and Ron - whom she had heard scream her name, begging Bellatrix to take him instead - Ron, who had loved her more than he loved his own life, could not help her. Not any more than she could help him after Fred. But it was too late. What if, even now, she’d been too late? What if it had all been decided, not only the births and the deaths but the pain and the betrayals and the agony in between? She couldn’t stomach the thought, not just yet. She caught up to Severus, who took long steps along the corridors, his head down and his hand on his wand, but he did not slow down for her. Their next lesson would be Transfiguration. They’d done animal-to-object in their first year, and now they’d been learning how to turn objects into animals. How come magic could do so much, and yet so little?