Sub Rosa

Chapter 62 – Too Soon

Kathryn was learning to adore Poppy Pomfrey, but she still hated being flat on her back. She was fretting and ready to escape out of a window when Harry showed up. She patted the bed beside her when she spotted his drawn and worried face peering around the curtains.

He came over and settled with a grim expression.

“You would think I’d have learned not to go off half-cocked after what happened to Sirius.” Harry’s self-condemning voice made Kathryn wince.

“Well, did you go charging off to the Ministry of Magic?” She asked cheerfully.

“No.” He replied, chagrined.

“Then you learned something, didn’t you?” She smiled at the tousle-headed boy.

“The sword had a lot to say about it.” He met her gaze finally, green eyes filled with regrets and sorrows.

“The sword didn’t have a stubborn fourteen-year-old tugging on his sleeve and begging.” Harry rolled his eyes and Kathryn knew her guess had been correct.

“She is very hard to argue with.” He responded with a weary sigh.

“That she is. She has Severus wrapped around her finger and that takes some doing.” Kathryn chuckled at Harry’s amused look.

“At least I’m not alone in being manipulated by her.” There was no heat in his words and Kathryn leaned back, satisfied that he was going to forgive himself eventually.

“You’re sixteen, Harry. Sixteen is a time for being foolish and silly and having fun and playing pranks.” She was too weak to say all she meant to say, but Harry nodded, hearing all she couldn’t articulate.

“I forget sometimes.” He looked out the window at one of the rare clear skies shining blue and bright.

“I wish you could have had a real childhood, Harry.” She whispered, feeling herself drifting off to sleep.

“I think if you had been my mother I would have, Professor.” She was too sleepy to answer him, but his words followed her into darkness.


Two days later she was released from the Hospital Wing. Severus hovered over her anxiously ‘til Poppy shooed him away. Kathryn chuckled at his fussing and patted his cheek.

“You are so sweet.” She told him, knowing how it infuriated him.

“I’m not sweet.” He spat out. Poppy and Kathryn exchanged an amused look and then grinned at him.
“Someday I will get the respect I deserve.” He groused.

“Impossible, love.” Kathryn looked at him with love and pride and noted his shocked expression. “You deserve far too much to ever get it all.” His face softened and he whirled on his heel and stalked from the room, black robes swirling behind him like the wings of a dark angel.

Poppy tilted her head at Kathryn with a speculative look.

“You nice him to death; that’s not an approach I’ve ever tried.” Kathryn looked at the older woman with a sad, wistful smile on her lips.

“He has had so little kindness; I just want to give him all I can.”

“All you can before you go.” Poppy looked at her with understanding eyes, but also with sadness. “I don’t suppose you could come back next year?” She asked hopefully.

“I want to Poppy, I really do.” She wished she could explain. “Madam Chanel is my Albus Dumbledore. She made me, trained me, sent me out and patched me up when I came back.” Kathryn looked into Poppy’s eyes with a resigned sigh.

“I couldn’t abandon Albus -- not even for my heart’s desire.” Poppy answered, understanding clear in her eyes. “But Albus wouldn’t ask me to choose.”

Kathryn simply nodded and left. She couldn’t tell the fierce little Medi-witch that Madam Flora Chanel knew nothing about it. She had sent her reports like a good little field agent. Not once, however, in all those reports had she mentioned the love she felt for Severus Snape.

Kathryn owed Madam Chanel -- owed her as much as Severus owed Albus. She would keep her silence, do her job and pay her debt. No matter how much it tore her up inside. She would do the job in front of her, uncomplaining and to the best of her ability. She could do no less for, in the end, she was what the Old Lady had made her.


May was moving forward at a brisk pace. Kathryn dreaded the ending of the month. She dreaded the students leaving and she dreaded the coming good-byes with the entirety of her heart and soul. As the month progressed, Severus clung to her harder and harder. Their lovemaking became desperate and lingering. They savored every second, memorizing moments, tucking each other into the depths of their hearts.

The students were sad to see her go and their little pleas and questions became almost more difficult to withstand than Severus’ silent desperation.

She was sitting in the Room of Requirement with Harry. They leaned back in the embrasure with identical sighs of weariness. Her healed leg had allowed her to really go at Harry, sword to sword. Her katana, an ancient weapon forged by a mad sword maker centuries ago, had slid off of his blade with a satisfying snick and clang. They were both bone tired and bruised. She had been cal tol to hit him with the flat of her blade only, but she had a suspicion that Minerva would have had a fit if she had seen them.

“Can’t you quit your job and come back here next year?” Harry asked, a variation on a theme that was starting to hurt.

“Can you?” She asked suddenly, her anguish so close to the surface that she was afraid she wasn’t masking it well.

“Can I what?” Harry was confused by her words; she could see it in the clouding of his too-old eyes.

“Forget the prophecy and go live a normal life.” He looked shocked now, as though she had told him to dance naked in the courtyard. Then he frowned.

“It’s not the same.” She tousled his hair fondly and grimaced with her mouth in a hard line.

“We all have duties, Harry. We all have things that must be done. I swore an oath that I would serve until dismissed.” She looked into the serious green eyes. “Agents don’t leave, Harry. They are either killed or released.”

His eyes widened and he gaped at her.

“It’s not like being an Auror; you can’t resign. When you are selected for Agent training you swear magical oaths of loyalty and fealty. We cannot break our bond of trust without forfeiting parts of our magic and our souls.” Harry was pale and looking at her with horror.

“That’s awful.”

“It’s necessary. We’re spies, assassins and trouble-shooters. We do things that are against the laws of most civilized nations. We are expected to be ruthless, practical and calculating. The very person who isd atd at blending in with any group and betraying them must also be so loyal to his own side that he woueverever betray them. How do you control someone who can disappear, without a trace into any country, any group?” Harry sat back, his eyes thoughtful.

“You can’t.” He answered slowly. “Unless you bind them magically.” Kathryn nodded at him.

“Precisely. Agents are bound up to keep them loyal, but also to keep them from going rogue.”

She remembered the icy winter of Russia; she remembered her lover’s still body, and a cold in her heart that had been deeper than the chill of the air. She had felt the bindings circling her, keeping her from using magic against the man who had killed her beloved. She had gotten around it by murdering him with a knife. She remembered how his blood had steamed leaving his body, only to fall to the ground and freeze.

She had been frozen for so long. How did a sarcastic, bitter, ex-Death Eater ever thaw her out? Maybe they had warmed each other, for she knew his winter had been long and dark.

“What were you thinking about? Your face went so cold and blank.” Harry watched her with curiosity but no fear and she smiled at him.

“I was thinking about a man I killed in Russia.” She answered him with perfect honesty. To his credit, he didn’t recoil; he merely looked at her thoughtfully.

“Was he bad?” The boy asked from the vantage point of youth.

She smiled at him and her heart hurt her. She could feel tears stinging her eyes.

“He killed someone I loved very much.” She had never told anyone how she had felt about Thomas Perrine.

“Did it make you feel better to kill his murderer?” Kathryn looked into Harry’s eyes with the fierce gaze of a predator.

“As a matter of fact, it did.” She answered with deep satisfaction. “I enjoyed every moment of killing him and I would do it again.” Harry was chilled by her words now and a little shaken.

“Harry, he tortured the man I loved for four days straight and then left him near death where he knew I would find him. I was never able to hear his last words because his throat had been shredded by the screaming.” Kathryn looked at the boy and saw the fierce anger rising in him.

“God, Professor, that’s horrible.” He looked angry and also vaguely ill.

“There have been people I have had to kill whose deaths made me sad and sometimes even angry that I was forced to do it. This man though, he was a truly righteous kill.”

“Is that why you worry about Professor Snape so much?” Harry was looking at her with new understanding.

“I love Severus more than I have loved anyone, even Thomas.” She admitted. “I don’t think I could keep myself from killing every Death Eater on the planet if anything happened to him.” Harry met her eyes with quiet strength.

“I’ll watch over him, Professor.” He promised with all the solemnity of a magical oath. “I won’t let anything happen to him.”

Kathryn shook her head in negation of Harry’s words.

“Keep yourself alive, Harry, that’s all I ask. You aren’t to shoulder even more burdens.” She leaned forward and dropped a kiss on the boy’s brow. “I’ve grown fond of you and I would hate to have to scrape your carcass off of a battlefield.” She said it lightly, but he met her eyes with the deepest seriousness and nodded; and then, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, he grinned at her.

“I’ll do my best, Ma’am.” He replied with a mock salute. She grinned back at him fondly, wondering when she had become such an old softy.


The morning dawned cool and clear and she rose with leaden limbs. She had a train to catch today and she didn’t want to go. For the first time in her life, the end of a mission didn’t come as a welcome relief. This time she wanted to stay and going back home felt like it would tear her apart with the clash of conflicting loyalties.

She turned over and stared down into the sleeping of face of the man she had come to love more than her job or her life. She stroked back the hair, limp, silky, and deepest black that she had grown fond of touching. His eyes opened and she looked into the bleary pre-coffee haziness that she found inexplicably charming.

She kissed him, wishing for another day, another night, another moment. Last night they had clung to each other like children frightened of the darkness. He had made love with such tenderness she had been moved to tears and they had stayed up for hours just talking, saying all the things that they hadn’t found the time to say in the past year.

She touched his face and knew that there was nothing and everything left to say. She slipped from the bed and dressed in the early morning chill. He watched her silently, unmoving, from under the mound of sheets and blankets. When she was dressed she shrunk the last suitcases and tucked them into her pocket.

She wore the same gray suit she had worn on her arrival at Hogwarts ten months ago. She turned and with one last look at the man in the bed, she left.