E Pluribus Unum

A/N - As always, without Kate I am limp and hard to manange, everyone give thanks for the Beta!

Lady Aidil - Thnak you, I do work hard on these stories, rewriting and revising up till thnutenute I post them and it is wonderful to know that my efforts are appreciated.
Ghaeth - Alan Rickman\'s performance of Snape gave me a great starting point for writing the character, between what JKR writes of him and Alan\'s sterling work I have a lot of inspiration. I fins that if I can\'t hear Alan\'s voice speaking the dialogue that I need to re-write the line. It makes the work go far more easily.
Brian - Patience! You must have patience, I am not going to give away any of the storyline ahead of time, so you will simply have to wait.
Jeannete - Thank you, I will try not to keep you waiting.
Droxy - No worries, Droxy, dark and angsty is th eorder of the day. This story went way darker than I had imagined it would and the three dark ones are from a dream I had, I figured I would share them with you, so that I wasn\'t the only one with nightmares. LOL

Chapter 9 – Lest Ye Forget

Two weeks later, Kathryn arrived at her chambers only to find Harry, Hermione and Ron waiting for her outside her door. With a smile she recited her new password, suggested by Severus.

“Varium et mutabile semper femina.” Hermione choked back a protest and the boys just chuckled, getting an elbow each from their bushy-haired compatriot for their troubles. She passed them through to her office, where it was permitted to visit with the students after school hours. They were not generally allowed in the faculty’s private rooms.

“Not all women are changeful and capricious!” Hermione sulked as she flung herself into one of Kathryn’s chairs. With an amused glance at the seventeen-year-old girl’s minor tantrum, Kathryn summoned tea and cakes for them.

“Not all? Do you think so?” Kathryn teased and Hermione rolled her eyes and relented.

“Most men are too, Hermione.” Harry interjected with a grimace. Hermione chuckled and Ron just looked thoughtful.

“I dunno, girls are deeper than boys, I think. They look capricious ‘cause they’re thinking more.” Ron’s words drew all eyes to him and he flushed. “It’s just what I’ve noticed.”

“I think the fact that girls mature faster is what is giving you that impression right now, Mr. Weasley. In a few years you may find the difference to have balanced out.” Kathryn tucked her legs underneath her and curled into the chair quite contentedly, she had missed the round tower room over the summer.

“Dunno, Professor, Hermione’s always gonna be smarter than me.” Ron replied with perfect equanimity. He gave Hermione a proud and affectionate look as he said this and Kathryn caught an insight into what the clever and driven girl saw in the Quidditch-mad and less studious boy. His quiet acceptance would be irresistible to the socially awkward and outcast girl. He was secure enough in himself that her superior intellect was no threat to him. Kathryn filed the information away to think about later.

“So, what brings you three knocking on my door?”

“Ron’s being difficult.” Harry said with a sigh and Ron’s face darkened.

“You all act like it’s okay!” Ron protested.

“It’s not okay, but it’s not Professor Snape’s fault and you can’t treat him all horrible because of it.” Hermione returned with the air of someone who has said the same thing over and over again.

“Ah, this is about Ryan, is it?” Kathryn asked gently, breaking into the argument before it could get started. Ron had his Prefect’s badge on crooked, Kathryn noticed, while Hermione’s Head Girl badge was perfectly straight. They were such a contrast at times.

“Yes Professor, Ron is insisting that Snape is a depraved monster.” Harry rolled his eyes as he said this and Kathryn was not unaware of the irony inherent in the situation. Not too long ago, Harry would have agreed with Ron rather than Hermione.

“Voldemort is a depraved monster, Mr. Weasley, and to spy on him and save lives, Professor Snape has had to do things that are against his own conscience.” Ron opened his mouth to speak, but Kathryn raised a hand, forestalling him. “It doesn’t matter what you think about him -- like him, hate him, think whatever you like -- but when you speak to him, speak to him with respect because he ends up in the hospital wing time and time again just so you can live.” Ron frowned and shrugged, unconvinced.

“Ron, he’s not the enemy, Voldemort is and we need to concentrate our energies on defeating him.” Hermione added with a long-suffering look at Harry.

“He slept with Bellatrix Lestrange! You know, the woman who killed Sirius! They probably laughed about it in bed!” Ron shouted.

“Mr. Weasley, please remember that I am in the room.” Kathryn clamped down on the pain Ron’s words caused her. She knew there had been no laughter, only pain and humiliation. But she couldn’t tell that to a teenaged boy. She certainly couldn’t tell the whole pitiful, unvarnished truth to Ronald Weasley, not without Severus’ permission. Ron flushed to the roots of his hair as he remembered suddenly that Kathryn was dating Severus.

“Sorry, Professor.” Ron apologized while Hermione dropped her face into her hands in embarrassment. Harry was watching Kathryn with that introspective look that she was starting to recognize.

“How bad was it, Professor?” He asked gently.

“I’ve seen him worse, but not by much.” She admitted. She would never speak of Pansy Parkinson to anyone; she had left it out of her reports and hadn’t spoken of it to another soul. Still, Harry seemed to sense something because he backed off the subject.

“Professor, I don’t understand how you could be okay with this.” Ron frowned.

“I’m not \'okay’ with this, Mr. Weasley. But I knew it was coming and I knew it meant his life if he didn’t.” Ron’s jaw dropped.

“His life?”

“What do you think happens to Death Eaters who disobey Voldemort?” Kathryn was impatient with the boy. Didn’t he get it?

“Well, Harry told us he used “Cruciatus” on the ones he was mad at.” Kathryn raised an eyebrow at the black-haired boy who just shrugged.

“I don’t like talking about the stuff I have seen in Voldemort’s mind. The Occlumency lessons Professor Dumbledore has been giving me have helped a lot, but I still get traces of stuff sometimes.” Hermione and Ron were staring at Harry as though he had grown another head.

“You didn’t tell us that!” Hermione returned in an aggrieved tone.

“I didn’t want to worry you and it was just flashes. Things I couldn’t figure out, like the thin guy and the china doll girl.” His words chilled Kathryn to the core. She focused on breathing and not screaming at the boy.

“When did you see that, Harry?” Something must have leaked into her voice because he looked at her in sudden interest.

“They started showing up in flashes about three months ago.” Harry was watching her closely and she took a deep breath trying to still her racing heart. “What are they?” His question proved his perceptiveness -- not ‘who’, but ‘what’.

“There are powers far older than we, dark things that used to battle the Dragons and the Elves long ago. They are less powerful now, but still deadly and sly, very sly. They offer you everything and give you nothing.” Her voice had dropped and she was remembering her friend, long gone now, and what she had bargained for and how she had suffered.

“You know what they are?” Hermione asked.

“No, I don’t know what they are precisely. They are ancient evils and while a physical form will limit them severely, they are in reality formless, nameless and heartless.” She shook her head. “If Moldywort has recruited them, he has called his own end down on himself, but the question is how many will he take down with him?”

“That doesn’t change the fact that what Snape did was wrong.” Ron muttered.

“Of course it was wrong, Mr. Weasley.” Kathryn rubbed her temples wearily; ignoring the look of shock on the redhead’s face. “The world isn’t simple, or black and white; sometimes you have to do something wrong if the alternative is to do something worse. Severus is the only spy we have in the Inner Circle. His life is too valuable to waste, he has to do what Voldemort tells him to so that he can come back here and tell us what Voldemort is doing.”

“Even if that means raping people?” Ron demanded, but with less energy than before.

“Even if that means killing people, Mr. Weasley.” She answered him with a quiet fiss tss that silenced him finally.

“This guy and the little girl, are they dangerous to us?” Harry asked, his eyes slitted half-closed in thought.

“They are far more dangerous in some ways than Voldemort, because Moldy has goals and desires that we can understand. The Dark Ones are incomprehensible to us. They want destruction, pain, suffering -- they feed on it; but they do things that are illogical and treacherous, and you may never know why.”

The children were silent and Kathryn wondered if she had told them too much. Yet if they ran into the creatures, they had to know to be wary. They thanked her for her time and departed soon after and Kathryn went to her chambers to think.

She settled into the green velvet sofa with a cup of tea, and drifted back in time, her memory rewinding to a long-ago period in lif life.

Many years ago, when she had been the youngest girl at Oxford Arcana, fourteen years old and so sure of herself and her intellect, she had learned the terrible truth. There are only two things that drive humanity: love and fear. Intellect, long her best weapon against the world, was useless against the tide of emotion the average person wallowed in.

Fear was what drove most people. Kathryn had watched as fear of pain, fear of rejection, fear of intimacy and all the other foolish agonies of University students had driven those around her to do stupid, misguided things again and again. She had been the outsider, the wunderkind that everyone ignored, so she had had a front row seat to the follies of the young adults around her.

Kathryn had watched and learned; she had her own fears, of course -- fear of failure, of disappointing her family -- but seeing the path of destruction that fears wrought in others, she began cultivating the cool control that had made her the woman she was today. Unlike her best friend and dorm mate, Elise, Kathryn grew stronger at Oxford Arcana, feeding on the academic pressures, using them to forge herself.

Not so, Elise, who folded under pressure, Elise couldn’t understand why she wasn’t perfect at everything. Elise had been so spoiled and so petted all her life that she had no strength to fight her fears. Elise had been pretty, popular and horribly insecure. Kathryn had watched it start with the little spells -- make-up charms and glamours -- then it escalated to charms to attract, charms to retard aging. Convinced that her only worth was in her beauty, she pursued it with an obsessive need. After three years of University, while Kathryn was busily working her way through her second doctorate, Elise was almost unrecognizable. Kathryn had first seen the tall man not long after. He had given her the creeps, but Elise had leaned close to him as he whispered to her of beauty and desire.

Elise was transformed completely by the end of the fourth year and while the boys all adored her with a strange madness and unsettling intensity, the girls were becoming increasingly jealous. Kathryn found herself avoiding the older girl and was relieved when she graduated, leaving Elise to whatever life she chose. It was not until Kathryn was in her fifth year as an Auror, twenty-one years old and already more experienced than most her age, that she ran into Elise again.

Sucked hollow by the thin man’s magic, she burned with an eerie beauty, but it gave Kathryn the cold shudders. Elise had become a madam, running a brothel, controlling the girls with Dark Magic and feeding off the urges of the clientele and the pain and fear of the enslaved prostitutes.

Kathryn had tried to bring her in alive, hoping to salvage something from the girl she had once known. It had taken five Aurors to finally bring her down and Elise had drained the life from ten of the prostitutes trying to save herself.

Kathryn learned to give no mercy to those who had dealings with the Ancient Dark.