A Matter of Black and White

CHAPTER 30—QUI VIVRA VERRA

From the long shadows that curtained the castle battlements, Snape watched the moonlit road leading up to the Hogwarts gates. The sentinel owls were hooting the night watch, reminding him that he could go off duty. His job tonight had been simple: stay out of the way and watch. He had done both with his usual aptitude while Aurora had staged her coming out as a Death Eater. Then she had gone off with Dolohov and left the sphere of Snape’s responsibility.

So why had he not returned to his dungeons? His job was over. The meeting was through. Why should he care that Aurora had yet to return to the castle? Her life was her own. He wouldn’t fret and tremble for her. That wasn’t in his job description.

Then why hadn’t he returned to the comfort of his bed?

It was only a feeling, something in the rustling of the bats’ wings as the night creatures flew in and out of the chinks in the walls, something that told him the night was not over, that there was something more to see.

What he had already witnessed, he still did not wholly understand.

If Aurora were an Animagus, she would most surely be a cat—one that had used all nine of its lives tonight. She had spent one life simply by arriving unannounced with Dolohov at the meeting. Snape had on more than one occasion seen the Dark Lord size up guests and recruits one moment and curse them the next. He had wondered why Dolohov, who certainly ought to have known better, had brought Aurora to the meeting without his Lord’s prior approval. It seemed that he, like Aurora, placed an inordinate amount of faith in her bloodlines.

No matter how much Bellatrix Lestrange might have touted herself as Voldemort’s most trusted follower, Snape knew that the Dark Lord did not keep anyone truly close. He had servants, not friends. The syllogism that he would trust Aurora simply because he had trusted her parents ought to have failed under the inherently flawed logic that assumed the Dark Lord to be capable of trusting anyone.

Snape was still trying to pinpoint Voldemort’s reaction when he had recognized Aurora. As difficult as it was for Snape to wrap his mind around the idea, the Dark Lord had responded with nothing less than fondness for “the little girl in the wood.” He and she and Dolohov had laughed over that tired old joke about Dolohov’s “innocence” (at least Snape now knew it was true) like they were recalling a golden bygone age.

To be sure, Aurora had done her share to remind the Dark Lord of the Death-Eater-in-the-making whom he had first encountered behind the Kiebitzei house. Though she had fallen to her knees in reverence this time, the glowing look of hungry awe had perfectly mirrored the expression that Snape had winessed in the memory of her first meeting with the Dark Lord. He had to admit, the woman could act.

She had proven she could hold a Mentior Occlumens, too. The slight tuck of her chin, recognizable to him after all of their lessons, was her only reaction to Voldemort’s Legilimency. Snape wondered what she had said that had convinced the Dark Lord that a Holdahexe could be more valuable to him than one had been to Grindewald. Whatever it was, it had left the powerful wizard offering her an uncharacteristic glimmer of respect in his red eyes as well. And so the white cat had once again managed to survive.

Never, never would Snape have thought Aurora would have lived through what had happened next, though. She should have expended lives three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine when the Dark Mark refused to take on her arm. Any one of the possible explanations for its failure should have led Voldemort to cast the Killing Curse then and there: that she was not true to the cause, that her Holdahexe oath conflicted with her Death Eater one, that the Dark Lord’s magic had simply faltered and she stood as living proof to a crowd of Death Eaters of his failure. Instead, he had greedily assessed the tremendous power already indelibly marked on her white skin and had chosen to possess what he could of her with that ring.

Aurora was working on borrowed lives by the time the Dark Lord had set her to torture Derek Derrick. The task might have been a test or simply a form of entertainment—a chance to recapture the glory days when Aurora had helped her parents torture Muggles and traitors. Either way, she would most certainly have been dead if she had refused or failed to perform Cruciatus. At that moment, Snape had been prepared to report back to Dumbledore that his brilliant plan had backfired into a thousand bloody bits. This was the woman, after all, who had thought that Patroni and tea parties were too dark for her magic. He had not expected the detached resolve with which she had completed the task. She had performed the curse like one long accustomed to having the power of an Unforgivable running through her wand. For the first time in a long while, Snape had wondered just to whom the actress was playing.

Then there had been the equally dangerous moments after official business was over and Aurora had had to tread the minefield of social intereaction with her new Death Eater cohorts. While a few of the truly Old Guard had gathered around Aurora to congratulate her and share fond memories of Wolfram and Minka Kiebitzei, most of the New Guard that liked to think itself the Old Guard had thrown Basilisk glares at this young woman who had a longer history with the Dark Lord than they themselves did. Meanwhile, those Death Eaters too new or too low-ranking to even pretend themselves any sort of Guard had grumbled about this witch who had suddenly appeared from gods knew where.

In the midst of this suspicion, Snape had been surprised to see the Great Hall Aurora back in action. It unnerved him no small bit to see her easy laughter and pleasantries working on more than just the naiver portion of the wizarding world. In just a few minutes, she had managed to win over several of the more curious Death Eaters in the group.

Even so, her social graces fell short when they came to following the Death Eater code about protecting the group’s own. She had committed a definite faux pas when she had laughed at Harper and Goyle’s suggestion that she be more generous with their sons’ Runes grades. After all, how many times had Snape, of all people, had to pass dunderheads simply because they had been next in a long line of Death Eaters? Aurora’s inability to recognize an opportunity to purchase some much-needed trust for a lousy grade—certainly not the worst thing she would ever have to do—seemed uncharacteristically dense.

Then again, Aurora was rather fanatical about Runes.

In the end, that passion for her subject had helped her escape the early grave she had been digging for herself. All those hours of preaching about the value of foreign languages had left her prepared. She had calmly explained that the ancient art of rune casting was one of the purest of all magics, reminiscent of a time before magic had been tainted by Half-bloods. No good Pureblood could appreciate his or her heritage without proper study of the field. Snape had to admit that her appeal to Pureblood pride had been a stroke of genius. He only wished that he had been able to make such an argument when he had started teaching Potions long ago. Just think of all the idiocy he would have been spared.

Aurora, however, had not been so wise when it came to mixing with Bellatrix Lestrange. She had only spoken to the Witch-Bitch for a few moments, but it had been all Snape had been able to do to keep from dragging Aurora away by her pretty blonde locks. Throughout the initiation, Bellatrix had quite obviously belonged to the contingent feeling homicidally threatened by Aurora’s Kiebitzei history. No doubt the Dark Lord’s “most faithful” servant did not like being reminded that some Death Eaters had been so loyal as to die in the Dark Lord’s service.

Would that Bellatrix had been so faithful.

There were any number of cataclysmic scenarios that might have played out in the two women’s brief time together. They fell under two main categories: In the first, Bellatrix distrusted Aurora as much as she distrusted Snape (in which case they were both royally screwed and Aurora had best high tail it out of the Witch-Bitch’s presence before she was made to do something insanely stupid). In the second, Bellatrix trusted Aurora just enough to try and use her to outfox Snape and would reveal the truth about his Draco Malfoy babysitting project (in which case Snape was completely and utterly, damnedly, blastedly, screwed to end all screwings).

And so now Snape waited in the shadows of the sharp November night to see what had come of so many near misses. What had Aurora said to him before she had left? Qui vivra verra…Who shall live, shall see. So far, she had lived…with unexpected compsure and with remarkable luck. He had lived too—a point which should never be undervalued by even the most fervent Death Eater upon a meeting with the Dark Lord. But to see what all of this meant? Well, qui vivra verra.

It was hours after most of the Death Eaters had returned to their mundane lives of soiled nappies and office papers when a white-hooded figure finally appeared before the gates. The wards recognized her and the iron bars creaked open. She proceeded up the path with the stateliness of a queen returning to her castle. Again Snape marveled at the reserve she had sustained this night. About halfway up the path, she paused to look up toward the castle roofs in the direction of Dumbledore’s tower. Snape caught sight of her impassive face, half hidden behind the hood, just before she threw a glance over each shoulder. She then veered off the path and headed down and across the lawns.

This was unexpected.

Snape stepped out from the shadows of the wall and followed her.

She moved so lightly that the brown November turf barely crunched beneath her feet. From a distance, the white figure gliding over the grass might have been mistaken for a ghost. She followed the perimeter of the forest and rounded a place where the wood had reached a gnarled arm out into the castle lawns. From there she disappeared out of the sight of both the castle and Snape. Fearing that he would lose her, Snape pressed into this narrow outcropping of the Forest, hoping to cut her off.

The Forest, however, was not keen to be demoted to a mere shortcut. Its thorny fingers pulled him back, and the “rip” of his robes on an impish clump of brambles counteracted whatever stealth he might have achieved with his normally nimble movements. It was at that moment that he caught sight of her again. She was looking into the Forest and, he was quite certain, at him. A less cool-headed man than Snape might have darted for cover, might have tugged his robes free and run. Snape, however, simply froze and allowed himself to blend in with the other dark figures in the Forest.

Then she walked right into the wood and right toward him

Blast, he needed Potter’s not-so-secret Invisibility Cloak.

But here a little of the luck charging this night’s atmosphere rubbed off on Snape. Aurora did not come any closer to him. Instead she bent down and began collecting sticks and leaves, which she then deposited in a pile in a small open space. Clearly she intended to build a fire, and fire, Snape knew, meant magic—magic that Aurora wanted to hide from the inhabitants of the castle.

Snape leaned forward, intent to learn what secrets she could share with only the Forbidden Forest.

She worked with the same detachment and efficiency that had unnerved him throughout the night. Throughout the past months, he had discovered that her shining outward self was more removed from her emotions than she pretended, and during that time he had thought he had learned to decipher the levels of her playacting. But this woman was unknown to him, and he could not decide whether he was watching yet another persona or an actress stripped bare of her part.

At last she seemed satisfied with the heap of firewood and kindling she had collected. She knelt on the ground and withdrew her wand from her cloak. Snape heard the murmurs of an incantation he could not understand; then he saw the kindling burst into blue flames like the ones she had produced at Halloween. The thought of her replicating such a magical episode both alarmed and excited him.

She drew back the hood of her cloak. She herself might have been one of the ghosts she had the capacity to conjure, for she looked uncommonly pale and otherworldly as the blue light rippled across her face. Then she withdrew some sort of powder from a pocket and tossed it into the flames. White sparks momentarily revealed hardness in her features. But this countenance dissipated quickly.

Dropping her face into her hands, she cried, “Oh, Holda, forgive me!” Then she slumped into a sobbing, shaking mass of white behind the wraithlike flames and against the watchful night.

The brambles then seemed to release him of their own accord. After a few moments more, Snape crept silently away. He had lived, and he had seen. His task for the night was complete.


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AN: Thanks for reading, everyone. Stay tuned for some fluffiness ahead--at last, I know. :)