A Matter of Black and White

DISCLAIMER: This story is based upon the works of JK Rowling. Anything you recognize is hers. I’m making no money off of this. I’m just having some fun adding my own little corner to the amazing world she has already created.

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CHAPTER 25—THE TEA PARTY

Snape crumpled a bit of purple tinfoil and leaned back in his chair. When Aurora was not looking, he surreptitiously licked the melted chocolate off the tips of his fingers.

“I hope you don’t think a bit of chocolate is going to keep us from having a lesson,” he told her.

Aurora sighed and set her tea cup down. “Obviously my powers of evasion need work,” she said dryly.

“Speaking of evasion, it’s time we addressed the issue of your parents. You seem to have shown me most everything but them.”

Aurora shut her eyes to the inevitable. “You saw Walpurgisnacht,” she said weakly.

“You’d barely been born. The Dark Lord will want to see something more recent.”

“‘Recent’ being twenty years ago?”

“I know you have memories of them. I still sense you leading me away from them the moment I get too close.”

Her jaw set like it always did when she was steeling herself up for something unpleasant.

“Unless you can control your worst memories,” he said with a measuredness that surprised even himself, “there is no point to these lessons.”

Aurora leaned down so that her elbows rested on her knees and her head hovered just over the coffee table. She stared into the dregs of her teacup like a fortuneteller. Then suddenly she straightened and looked him straight in the eye. “Let’s just get this over.”

Snape nodded. He gave her no chance for second thoughts. Immediately he saw the mustached man he knew to be Wolfram Kiebitzei, along with a lithe woman with blonde hair that he assumed to be Aurora’s mother. Snape had learned not to press his pupil too quickly, lest she send him hurtling across the room, and he had planned upon starting slowly on this new path, but just as soon as the Kiebitzeis appeared, he felt Aurora surge forward to barricade him from a goal he had yet even to set for himself.

Fine. If she couldn’t be more discreet, she was going to have to suffer the consequences. He pressed toward that forbidden zone and felt her frantically trying to push him away. She got careless in her panic, and Snape caught snippets of the memory she was trying to protect—a scene at night, a patch of wood, a circle of Death Eaters. One of them, he knew, was Aurora’s father.

“Don’t fight it,” he said aloud in a voice barely his own. “Keep your head about you.”

He heard her inhale and steady herself. With this breath, she shut him firmly out of that thought as if it had never existed, but she hesitated to redirect him.

“There’s no time for this,” he told her. The flow of memories could not be interrupted. He pressed her again, to another place he sensed she feared, then to another, until at last she acquiesced to a memory of light strangely shadowed by dark.

Snape found himself on the sunny patio of a country house overlooking a small wood. Amidst a colorful array of potted geraniums sat a familiar little blue-eyed girl at a table set for afternoon tea. Clutching a yellow-haired doll that looked like a miniature of herself, she was perched with her companion on the edge of a white wicker chair with a thick, flowery cushion. Her feet could not touch the ground, so they swung beneath her, kicking the chair legs and causing her blonde braids to bounce ever so slightly against the back of her pink-laced robes.

“Don’t fidget, Schatz,” said a fair-faced witch. She was dressed in light, breezy robes for a summer’s day and had a yellow parasol hovering magically above her. “We mustn’t be rude when we have guests for tea.”

“Yes, Mamma,” the child answered dutifully.

“After all, we want to show our guests that our manners are as good as our conversation.”

The memory now shifted so that Snape saw the faces of two other women seated at the table. One was an unblinking brunette with her right arm frozen in a reach across the table. The other was a matronly witch in a purple sunbonnet, which cast a shadow over the empty eyes of one who was under the influence of Imperio.

“Really, Esmeralda,” said Minka to the brunette, “you and your mother and I used to spend such pleasant afternoons together. We had such lovely times when we’d discuss the glorious day when the Dark Lord would take power. I can’t understand why you stopped enjoying my hospitality. I must say, though, that you drawing your wand on me on my own veranda was in rather poor taste from you as a guest. Let no one say, though, that Minka Kiebitzei is an ungracious hostess. I welcome into my home even those who prefer the company of Albus Dumbledore.”

“He’s a bad man,” the child chimed in.

“That’s right, Aurora, Schatz, but we’ll still have tea with them. Now here’s yours.” The floral-patterned teapot rose into the air and filled the cup in front of the girl. “And here’s your milk.” A little pitcher of milk floated over and spilt a swirl of white into the tea. “What biscuits would you like?”

“Chocolate.” Chocolate biscuits popped onto the edge of her saucer.

“Now drink your tea and don’t interrupt, Schatz.”

The little girl started licking the chocolate coating off her biscuit and watched the adults in silence.

Minka next magically served the matronly witch. “And what will you take in your tea, Ludmilla? Milk? Honey?”

(Here Snape felt a spasm of fear pulling him away from this memory.)

Ludmilla blinked. “Blood.”

The child giggled as if the witch had just requested a vomit-flavored Bertie Botts.

“Oh, dear,” the hostess said with a feigned fluster. “I’m afraid we’re all out of that. You’ll just have to serve yourself.”

A small silver knife appeared on the table. Ludmilla picked it up and brought it to her daughter’s outstretched wrist. With a quick motion, the blade flashed and blood spurted from Esmeralda’s veins. Ludmilla held her teacup below the steady stream until the dark liquid inside had turned a decided shade of red.

“My, my, Ludmilla, you do like a large helping, don’t you? Oh, but don’t let me stop you. Anything to make a guest happy.”

At last Ludmilla removed her cup and took a sip.

“Good?” Minka asked politely.

The elder witch nodded unthinkingly.

“Oh, but we mustn’t forget dear Esmeralda.” The teapot levitated to pour another cup. “Ludmilla, how does your daughter take her tea?”

The Imperioed woman took the cup and placed it under the crimson stream flowing from Esmeralda’s wrist.

“Like mother, like daughter,” Minka laughed pleasantly.

Ludmilla set the gruesome concoction before the Petrified witch and then went back to greedily gulping her own drink. A pool of uncollected blood swelled beneath Esmeralda’s wrists. It began to stream across the ever so slightly slanted table toward Ludmilla, eventually dripping into the matron’s lap. Minka poured her own drink and added a splash of milk. The little blonde child dipped her biscuit into her tea and offered some to her doll.

“You’re not drinking anything, Esmeralda,” Minka chided the frozen brunette. “Perhaps I can help you with that.”

Esmeralda’s teacup floated up to her slightly parted, already bloodless lips. It titled and some of the contents trickled onto her chin and down the front of her mint-green robes.

“Oh dear. Maybe you don’t like your tea. Ludmilla, would you like to help her finish it?”

The blank-eyed witch had just slurped the dregs of her own drink. At this invitation, she greedily snatched her dying daughter’s cup and began draining it as life drained out of her child.

It was too much. Snape broke his connection with Aurora, who was almost as pale as the dying woman in her memory. He thought he felt her shivering next to him. The room, now lit only by the fire as night had settled in, seemed vacuumously dark after the glare of the memory.

“What happened to them?” Snape asked quietly. Not that he couldn’t guess, but it was like watching a house-elf wrestling a dragon—one had to know all the gory details.

“The daughter died,” she answered in an efficient tone. “They took the mother to the Dark Lord that night. I imagine she went mad as soon as they released her from Imperio and she realized what she’d done.” With a brittle laugh she added, “You can imagine what my dolls thought about playing tea party after that.”

It was a poor attempt to mask her anguish with laughter, and Snape wasn’t fooled. “That’s why you never use magic to serve tea.”

It was like she had dropped the last barrier of her Occlumens, one she had kept erect even as she had laughed in the Great Hall or had garnered the devotion of fawning students with her bonjours and mercis. The woman who nodded was not the wide-eyed doll who had blinded him with light that first day in the Leaky Cauldron. No, that light was her disguise, hiding the fact that even her fine white robes had shadows in their folds. She stared into the fire and allowed him to take in the woman who sat simultaneously in the light and shadow of the dancing flames.

Suddenly Snape realized just how difficult the task set before Aurora would be. It wasn’t her usually sunny disposition that would hinder her as a spy, no matter how much her cheeriness annoyed Snape personally. Her challenge would be to make the dark figures already in her mind perform a shadow play that she directed rather than allowing them to direct her.

“It’s a good memory actually,” Snape said at last.

“How do you figure?” she sniffed.

“It’s just the sort of thing the Dark Lord will find amusing—someone who can dole out punishment as cruelly as he. It will remind him of what good Death Eater stock you come from. You just have to pretend to recall it more fondly.”

“Says the man who doesn’t have to do it.”

Snape considered the flickering fireplace for several moments. “One of my first major assignments as a Death Eater,” he said at last, “was to destroy a Muggle orphanage. The Dark Lord was in his Muggle Extermination Phase at the time. He was particularly fond of doing away with a generation worth of orphans. The raid party set fire to the building. That was simple enough—it was just an old pile of timber, it seemed to me. I hid in the garden to watch my handiwork. The flames were magical and spread quickly. They must have caught many unaware because it seemed forever before anyone realized what we had done. I was frustrated by their slowness. It was my moment to prove myself to my Lord. I wanted to world to know.

“Then the screaming started—screams like I had never heard before. I told myself they were Muggles, Muggles whose parents didn’t even want them. I continued watching from a distance when suddenly there was a child before me. Half her face had practically melted away, but I’d never seen anyone so composed. She said her brother was still in the building, and she asked for my help. I just stared at her. Then a senior Death Eater found us. He killed her on the spot. The place burned to ashes; the Dark Lord rewarded me; and I filled my cauldron with vomit when I returned home at dawn.”

Snape waited for a reply but got none. He filled the silence with his own distant voice. “Whenever the Dark Lord wants to test my love for his cause, I think of that assignment as the proudest moment in my life.”

Most people would have said something. They would’ve said it was horrible. They would’ve said he knew better now. They would’ve said anything to let their babble anesthetize them to the reverberations of the words that he had spoken. But Aurora said nothing. She simply sat next to him, and the evening passed with them both watching the flames cast long shadows across the floor.

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AN: Thanks for waiting. As a reward, I’m posting two chapters at once…and I promise a kiss!