Chapter Text
This is the terminal, the break.
“More,” Severus gasped desperately. He looked ghastly crouched there on the headmaster’s rug, pale and shuddering, sunken eyes rimmed with purple, but the black eyes held Albus’s with a fierce determination.
(“More,” Gellert gasped desperately. “Oh, Albus, more!”)
Albus flinched at the untoward memory and let his wand sag. Why should that image rise up to haunt him now? The golden boy from his past and this dark one had nothing at all in common.
Well, except for that taint at the core, of course, their fatal yearning for the dark.
And their passio—that is to say, their intensity.
He stared at the boy before him, his wand lowered and his mental shields clamped tight.
Snape’s head fell forward in surrender at the unexpected reprieve. His hair, tangled, greasy, and black, hid his sallow features.
Albus was horrified to feel his member stir at the sight.
A moment later, the boy suddenly convulsed and vomited all over the rug.
Albus vanished the mess and tried to ignore his inappropriate personal reaction. Fortunately, his robes were ample and his facial control exemplary, so Severus couldn’t suspect.
The boy levered himself up, struggling against the poison-induced nausea and pain. He raised his pinched face invitingly and grated out again, “More.”
This time Albus accepted the invitation. “Legilimens!”
His wand—Gellert’s wand, why was he thinking of that now?—was warm and responsive in his hand.
And this time, the boy failed to keep him out. Albus dove full into those dark eyes.
Only for a momentary swirl of imagined nightmare: a red-haired girl screaming in agony while the dark boy watched, bound and helpless—
--And was thrust out again.
But he’d been in, and, worse, seen the very fears that the boy most needed to hide.
Severus groaned despairingly, and Albus hastened to Accio the poison’s antidote.
He offered it, saying “Rest before we try again.”
The boy snarled, “The Dark Lord isn’t resting!”
“But you must, Severus.” He made his own voice calm. “We’re training you for the worst case, and in training one must walk before one can run.”
The boy tried to sneer at Albus’s platitude, but he was shaking too hard to make the sneer convincing. After a moment he consented to uncap the phial and drink.
Albus motioned the boy to the chair. It took Severus two tries to struggle to his feet, but Albus knew better than to offer his assistance. When the boy had finally settled himself, Albus handed him a cup of tea. Mint and valerian, well sugared; Severus grimaced at the taste. But he drank it dutifully.
Albus made his voice utterly placid. “Drink, rest for a time, and we’ll try again.”
It had been so easy to enter that last time. Had he been holding back before? That didn’t serve the boy’s needs; Tom Riddle would never hold back, for any reason. If Albus had been holding back unconsciously, out of distaste for this whole training… well, had that been so, he’d been doing the boy a grave disservice.
This practice was utterly against Albus’s preferences. But having agreed to provide it—and he did see the necessity—he was bound to do it right, to give the boy’s shields a rigorous test.
The boy was cradling the cup against his face in those long pale fingers. His eyes were shut, the sooty lashes fluttering slightly. The thin cheeks were slightly flushed from the warmth and sugar, and the boy had sunk back a little in his chair.
“Are you ready for more?” Albus asked, and was surprised to hear the roughness in his voice.
Severus’s answer was to set the cup down, draw a phial of poison from his pocket, and gulp another dose.
After a moment he hunched over, sweating, his arms clutched involuntarily around his middle. This time he didn’t fall from his chair. White and shaking, he looked over to meet Albus’s eyes.
And they tried again.
*
“More!” Gellert cries, his face contorted in ecstasy.
And Albus woke, his sweat soaking the bed and chilling him.
He groped for his wand (Gellert’s wand, whispered some voice in his mind) and cast a rough Evanesco on himself and his bedding. He was left dry and cocooned in his blameless sheets.
Trying not to remember.
“More!” Gellert had moaned, the golden body sprawling, opening itself, under Albus’s initially ignorant fumbling. Albus had inserted an oiled finger on Gellert’s orders, sure it had to hurt. Didn’t it? But Gellert had begged, or ordered, “More!” and Albus had finally obeyed.
He had done more, and then more, at Gellert’s urging.
Eventually it wasn’t oil on their fingers. Or on their members. Blood was the most powerful magical fluid, after all. Especially willingly given. Or forcibly taken. Or both.
But Albus had renounced all such experiments, along with all his dreams of power.
He’d repudiated that, all of it, all the shades and shapes of those twin seductions. Albus knew his own weaknesses intimately; he’d learned his lesson with his sister’s death.
Those triple seductions.
Albus knew exactly what to avoid.
Beautiful boys. The delusions of power. The Dark.
But Severus, poor boy, was ugly. He should have been safe.
This… distraction… of Albus’s bade fair to derail the training that the boy demanded and deserved.
It was only that the boy’s begging for “more,” his face contorted in pain, had accidently echoed Albus’s earlier memories.
If Albus hadn’t been reminded of Gellert’s demands, he wouldn’t have reacted in such an unseemly way.
That thought … echoed somehow.
If Albus hadn’t been reminded of Gellert, if he hadn't had Gellert to remember, he wouldn’t have reacted.
As he wouldn’t have reacted to other, earlier, stimuli, and so had been compelled to forbid poor Apollyon his whips and chains. The caretaker had been so angry at the loss of his privileges that he’d terminated his employment, and the governors had twittered agitatedly about how soft Hogwarts was becoming, but Albus had had to be adamant.
It was the headmaster’s duty to provide supervision of corporal punishment, and Albus had done so without incident for several years.
Until he’d watched Apollyon with the Malfoy boy.
Lucius Malfoy had been the moon to young Gellert’s sun, but he was still lovely in his pale fashion.
And seeing all that blond beauty stretched out and twisting, listening to the boy gasping at each lash, watching that smooth white flesh torn and reddening, had been just—too enticing.
Albus had wanted stop those gasps of protest with his mouth. Had wanted to run his hands over the bloody marks, to let his hands move lower, to taste the mingled sweat and blood, to use it as Gellert had taught him….
He hadn’t, of course. He’d never even entered the room of punishment. He’d covered the headmaster’s mirror and left Apollyon to finish without supervision, contrary to regulations.
While Albus had finished, on his own, a different punishment. Or so it had felt.
No one knew, no one even dreamed, of Albus’s shameful weakness.
But he had dreamed, that night, of Gellert at first, and then the dream had twisted to include the lighter boy’s struggles.
Later, Albus had caught himself wanting to catch Malfoy in mischief, to find an excuse to send him back to Apollyon….
Well. He had known then what he had to do. There were powers that Albus could not be trusted with.
So he had banned corporal punishment altogether, and the dreams had faded.
But there had apparently been some scarring. Marks that couldn’t be erased.
But Severus, poor boy, was neither beautiful nor bright. Dark, meager, pinched by his guilt and his fear: he was the dark of the moon, if Malfoy had been the full moon.
Not even the palest reflection of Gellert’s sun, shining alone in splendor.
He had no radiance about him, no attraction.
So he should have been quite safe for Albus.
Only he had begged in pain and passion for more, and so had awakened … echoes.
Albus twisted on his bed.
He should have been safe, doing this favor for Severus.
He should have been safe.
*
At that ill-fated job interview on the night of the Prophecy, Albus had first realized that Severus Snape was an Occlumens sufficiently skilled to lie undetected to a Legilimens.
Albus had caught the boy out in a barefaced prevarication, but Severus’s eyes had not given him away—Aberforth’s previous information had.
What had happened afterwards had further established that Snape’s shields were, however, entirely insufficient to withstand Albus’s more determined probes.
So that night on the desolate hillside, Albus had wrung the boy dry of information, expecting him to betray himself the next time he faced his master.
But the young man had surprised him, and survived to make a second report.
And then a third.
Clearly the boy’s nerve and Occlumency were both better than his performance before Albus had indicated.
Then Severus came to Albus white and shaking, and mutely offered him a memory.
Albus decanted it into his Pensieve, and descended into Hell.
Silent forms, black-robed and masked, ringed the walls of an elaborately-appointed ballroom. The light from the huge chandelier was reflected by what must have been dozens of gilded mirrors. Albus didn’t recognize the room, but only a few families could have built and maintained such an extravagance. He ran mentally through Pureblood names—the Lestranges, the Malfoys, the Smiths, perhaps the Patils—as he looked about the chamber and oriented himself.
At the center of this brilliance was Tom, the warmth of candlelight giving his waxen features a near normal hue. He was pacing in a tight circle around three cowering forms, also robed and masked. No one moved saved he, and his steps were soundless.
Finally Tom paused in his pacing and said, quite quietly, his eyes fixed on the three, “You are assembled to witness these three of your fellows pay the penalty for failure.”
There was the faintest rustle from the circled forms. Tom continued, raising his voice slightly, “I had ordered that there be no survivors on last night’s raid. This was intended to send a strong message to our enemies. Yet my loyal servants somehow failed to execute my orders properly; one child was found, by the Aurors, still to be alive.”
He raised his wand and said, still quite softly, “Crucio.” The three men convulsed and fell, screaming, one after the other. Eventually, Tom lowered his wand and looked down lazily at the three twitching bodies, seeming not the least fatigued by performing so many Unforgivable Curses. The renewed stillness was broken only by harsh gasps and one man’s choked-off whimpers.
Tom said smoothly, circling again, “I hope you all now appreciate that no less than perfection may be tolerated.”
He stopped suddenly. “What’s this, then?” Tom inserted a boot under the chin of one of the victims and turned the head a little more towards him.
The man groaned and shut his eyes, shuddering, but Tom only smiled and said, “Legilimens!”
After a moment he stepped back, and his smile broadened. “But this is touching! It seems that the child who escaped—a mongrel, the diseased spawn of a bastard connection, mind you—was the same age as this one’s son, and he found his heart moved by the child’s plight. So he stunned the boy, but told his fellows that he’d killed him.”
He spared a smile for the two men now inching away from the third. “Mind, you two might have taken the pains to confirm the boy’s death, given my specific orders….” The two figures froze, and Tom turned his attention back to the third. Very slowly, very deliberately, Tom cut away the Death Eater mask, and it fell, to reveal a face Albus had seen pictured in the Prophet two days ago, next to a photo of the Dark Mark over a house. Chang’s body and his son’s had been found; the wife (or her body) was still missing.
Chang stared up with mingled terror and defiance at his master. He wet his lips, but then seemed to think better of speaking.
Tom lowered his voice to a sibilant whisper, but in the dead silence his words were perfectly audible. “So. Not a failure then, but deliberate disobedience. You put the life of a misbegotten mongrel ahead of your sworn duty to your comrades and obedience to your master. The penalty for incompetence, then, does not apply. Justice demands that such betrayal receive a better, more fitting recompense.”
He waved his wand, and the sprawled man was jerked upright and bound to an iron post that had appeared directly beneath the chandelier, in full glare of the candles. Tom nodded at the other two figures, and they hastily rose, bowed, and scuttled to join the watchers around the walls.
Tom slowly turned, surveying his circled followers. “Wait here. I shan’t be long.” He pivoted on his heel and was gone with a crack of air, startlingly loud in the silent room.
None of the Death Eaters assembled so much as shifted his weight in Tom’s absence. And indeed it was not long before Tom Apparated back.
With a small, struggling body in his arms.
Chang cried out in horror and started fighting against his bonds, and Tom strolled over to the post to give him a better look.
“Silencio!” he finally said, smiling at the struggling man. “The thought of your son weakened you, Chang, led you to spare a mongrel’s life. So it seems appropriate that the, shall we say, final cause of your betrayal, should suffer the penalty for it.”
Severus’s memory cut off, quite abruptly, about two minutes later. Albus was glad.
Albus surfaced from the Pensieve. He looked at the black shape now standing at his window. Severus was clutching onto the sill as though it was his remaining hold on sanity.
“How,” Albus coughed and stopped. “How long?”
“Until the first death? “ The voice was entirely empty.
Albus coughed again. “How long, Severus?”
The flat voice answered, “Three hours. I think. I’m not sure.”
A pause, then, “I couldn—I couldn’t keep track.”
Another pause.
The voice finally added, “Chang was happy to die at the end, I think. The Dar—the Dark Lord was disappointed by that.”
Suddenly Severus whirled and confronted Albus, his face desperate. “Headmaster, that will be her if he ever sees what I have done! I, I promised to do anything for you, to protect her, but if he ever realizes, knows that I have, he will, he will… I will have put her in worse danger! We have to, we have to save her!”
*
First Severus had demanded the Unbreakable Vow of Albus. “So if he ever truly suspects me, if he ever deeply questions me, I will die before he sees why I might have turned, and he’ll have no cause to pursue her with worse intentions than he now has.”
Aberforth had obviously thought the worst of Albus when he heard the final clause that he was Bonding, but the boy’s evident satisfaction, Albus hoped, at least gave his distrustful brother a moment’s pause.
But then Severus had asked for more.
“Chang betrayed himself when he was being punished for what the Dark Lord thought originally had been mere incompetence. I might well do the same. I can hold my shields well enough under normal conditions, but how can I hope to do so if he tortures me?
Then he pressed, “And sir, you know that some of your orders…. might make it more likely that I be tortured. So you have to train me to resist. Or I’ll betray her.”
Severus had raised eyes dilated in horror to Albus. “Sir, you have to.”
Albus had stiffened, both at the content of the request and its temerity. “My boy, you cannot ask another person to damage his soul by casting an Unforgivable Curse. Whatever your reasons, however valid they may seem to you, you cannot ask that of another.”
The boy had closed his eyes and whispered, “Please. Headmaster. You have to.”
Then he had opened his eyes and straightened, suddenly energized. “But sir, no, you wouldn’t have to! Not, not damage your soul, I mean. Not—not do anything, really. Not anything wrong. What I need to be able to do, is, is hold my mind shut against a master Legilimens while I’m being—distracted. By pain, or shock, or whatever. There’s nothing that says the Legilimens has to be the one to cause the, the distraction. I mean, if I hex myself… or poison myself—there’s nothing wrong with you testing my barriers while I’m dealing with the pain I’ve caused myself? Right?”
Albus had had finally to agree that, yes, that compromise would be ethically unexceptionable.
*
The boy pointed his wand at his body. Lines of blood blossomed on his robes, and grew, and his breath came harshly. His eyes, meeting Albus’s, were wild and defiant.
Albus had explicitly forbidden any spell that could do permanent harm. Or draw blood.
But Albus couldn’t manage to slip in to administer his reproof nonverbally, and the black eyes flashed in triumph.
Albus held those eyes, waiting, aware of the bright blood sliding inexorably down the boy’s thin body. These must, then, be cuts that wouldn’t close of themselves. Dark magic.
The boy’s head finally swayed, and Albus struck.
“Legilimens!”
As the boy blacked out, Albus collected the memory he had been clinging to, to firm his resolve.
Fiery hair softened by the leaf-cooled light, green eyes fixed on his—“It’s real for us” —the joy at seeing his own delight and certainty mirrored in her face—
That was the same memory that Severus had used to generate his Patronus, Albus remembered. Had the boy really so little to sustain him?
He dismissed the thought, concerned more to hide his own reaction. He was pleased that his wand did not tremble while he healed the boy and banished the blood, nor when he roused him. Nor did his hand shake when he handed over the blood-replenishing potion. He did not try to support Severus’s head while he drank it, though for another person in such a condition, under other circumstances, he might have. But better not to touch this boy. Given his responses to him.
Even after the dose took effect, the boy’s narrow ill-favored face and thin lips were still white.
Lily-white.
Yet he whispered hoarsely, desperately, as soon as he could sit up, “Again.”
Albus’s dreams that night came as no surprise.
*
And the untoward reaction happened again as Albus watched the boy writhe beneath his wand. And again.
Only their agreement that they were modeling Severus’s responses to his Dark Lord, whom he’d never dare repulse by attacking, had thus far preserved Albus from detection. But eventually the boy might lash out unthinkingly and enter Albus’s mind in return.
And then he’d know.
This could not continue. But the boy insisted, urgent and haunted, whenever Albus tried to demur.
Albus had seen the boy’s Boggart.
And the boy’s Occlumency was improving, Albus couldn’t deny that. The training was working.
It must continue.
So Albus continued to dream, and to have to cleanse himself on waking.
With Gellert’s wand, oh god.
Again and again.
*
Severus gives him that wild, desperate look, then throws back his head and downs the potion in a single swallow. Albus stares at the long exposed throat, at the pale column framed by dark hair, unable to look away.
The body convulses, and Albus readies himself. But it convulses again, and re-forms.
Not poison this time. Polyjuice.
Gellert stands before him, smiling, alight, and whispers, “Now will you give me more, Albus?”
He steps forward, golden and compelling.
And Albus woke.
If he didn’t have those memories of Gellert…. there was nothing about the boy himself that was attractive. It was only that he kept inadvertently reminding Albus of that other, beautiful, one.
If Albus didn’t have those golden memories, he would be safe.
He stared at the wand in his hands, at the detestable stickiness on his body. With a slow pass, he cleaned his body. Would that he could so easily cleanse his mind.
But perhaps he could.
What purpose did it serve, to remember his explorations of Gellert’s lithe blond body? Recalling them, revisiting them, was merely his dirty little pleasure.
And even a lifetime later, the memories’ effect on Albus was still utterly reprehensible.
He could lose them.
The thought of losing them, of losing the remembrance of Gellert’s young glory, made Albus’s breath come short.
But losing his ultimate image of beauty would, after all, be a suitable punishment.
And if he lost it, then he’d never be troubled by such unwholesome reactions again.
Or indeed, Albus could go yet further.
What use had he for such responses? He was alone, by his own firm choice. Not for him, the alchemical marriage, nor any other.
He could stop such reactions. Entirely.
True, the spell for impotence was formally classed as a dark curse. But it was only classified as such because most men, whether wizards or Muggles, were bitterly perturbed at the merest thought of the loss of their virility.
And of course the spell was normally cast on an unconsenting victim. But Albus knew that there had been monks who’d cast it on themselves, grateful to be delivered from the flesh’s distraction.
As he would.
It could be considered a sacrifice, in effect. One that most men, most wizards, would have been unable, unwilling, to make.
Why, Merlin himself had lacked such steadiness of purpose. And Merlin had come to a shameful end through that very weakness….
Albus had it in him to outdo Merlin, in this regard at least.
Albus’s wand (Gellert’s wand) was steady as Albus pointed it at his member and incanted.
The relief that rushed through him made him feel how right it had been to purge himself of those base responses.
But to erase his memories as well—to remove Gellert’s golden, blood-streaked body from his mind… that was cruelly hard, still, to contemplate.
And not just Gellert’s glory. All, all the shameful memories that troubled him so, he must remove. Make himself clean.
Albus hardened himself. The boy needed the training. He required it. Albus owed it to him, really.
And Albus couldn’t continue this training, not with such thoughts in his head.
It was another sacrifice, really. For him, even a harder one. And therefore of greater worth.
Slowly, Albus lifted his wand again and gathered his thoughts.
“Obliviate.”