Chapter Text
1976
May
Severus jolts to a sudden stop in front of her, and May’s vision goes black. She feels his calloused hand on her eyelids.
“Don’t look in,” he whispers into her ear, voice cracking.
May doesn’t need to look. She can smell coppery blood wafting through the door. She can hear Severus’s ragged breathing. She can feel his erratic heartbeat when he pulls her closer to his chest in an attempt to shield her from whatever massacre lay waiting behind the stone walls.
“We should find a professor immediately,” she says.
The edges of his hair tickle her neck as he shakes his head. “No. We can’t prove our innocence in such a situation, and if we’re implicated, the whole sequence of what we’ve done might be dragged out…”
May doesn’t need to look to know that there is a victim. And that the victim is human. And that the human is someone whose identity she could now pinpoint with near certainty.
His grip on her loosens slightly, and she takes the opportunity to rip his hand off her face. Through the blurry window, she glimpses a messy head of black hair surrounded by a steadily growing pool of something dark, fed by a stream of blood flowing from an abdomen.
Severus wastes no time in sliding through the door. Rooted to the spot – throat shriveled up, head filled with a painful buzzing – May watches as he walks towards James Potter’s body, kneels down, and pulls out his wand.
After what feels like an eternity stuck in limbo, she forces her right foot to move forward, then her left one, then right again, until she’s inside the classroom. Carefully, she closes the door behind her.
The first thing she notices is the stench of blood and how it makes her want to gag. The second is the disassembled clock lying on the edge of the table and how its bright red second hand drips crimson onto the floor beneath.
The buzzing in her head is replaced with Severus’s song-like whisper, and she watches – half-conscious, half-trancelike – as Potter’s stab wound closes, as the color begins returning to his ghostly face.
“What are you doing?” she forces out.
“Healing him,” Severus responds. With another wave of his wand, the floor is once again pristine. “What are people going to think if they found his body in our classroom?”
“Fuck. What do we do now?”
Severus rubs a hand down his face, leaving an ugly red smear in its wake. “I don’t know. We can memory-charm him as soon as he wakes up to ensure his silence.”
She swallows the bile, focusing on the feeling of acid burning her throat, letting it overpower the omnipresent coppery odor that would now permanently tint her senses. She closes her eyes, wishing for nothing more but to reverse the spinning of the clock hands – to force it to rotate backwards twelve-hour period by twelve-hour period – until she is back in a time when everything was fine.
So, she walks towards the broken clock.
Cleans off the dried blood with a wave of her wand.
Puts the second hand back in.
Pulls on it desperately.
She sees bright red droplets splattering across the white clock face but doesn’t feel the sting of the hand’s sharp edges. She hears Severus calling her somewhere in the far distance, but her consciousness is already trapped in the past.
1968
“Mama, why are we leaving Ye Ye and Nai Nai?”
“It’s not safe to stay.”
“Where are we going?”
“A better place.”
“Will we ever come back?”
“I don’t know. Do not ask so many questions.”
Mama turned towards the window, and I saw a tear sliding down her cheek, leaving a sparkling trail in its wake. I tugged on her sleeve.
“Are you okay, Mama ?”
Slowly, she turned around, then crouched down and looked me in the eyes. Her expression was unreadable.
“We’re moving to England. Nobody there speaks Mandarin. Mama and Baba don’t have connections there like we do here. We won’t have much money - no more expensive toys, no more servants, no more playmates that you can order around. Baba and I will be out working a lot of the time.”
She took a deep breath before going on. “Will you promise me something?”
“What?”
“When you turn eleven, you will go to a magical school called Hogwarts. There are a lot of very important people there,” she said. “Promise Mama that you will work twice as hard as everyone else. You will climb to the top. You will make sure everyone there sees how talented my little girl is.”
I thought about the last few weeks - the fights with Baba, the soft sobs coming from her room in the middle of the night, the bleak atmosphere that had settled over our home like a cold, suffocating sheet.
“Will it make you and Baba happy?”
She paused for a moment. “Yes.”
“Okay, I promise.”
She cupped my face in her hands and then kissed me softly on the cheek. When she pulled away, her eyes were dry and she was smiling softly.
“Mama loves you the most.”
At eight, I just wanted to hear those words from her again. But at eight, I didn’t understand what my promise meant. I didn’t understand that climbing wasn’t only about grit. I didn’t understand that I had to beat a system that was built against me, or that beating the system meant dragging someone else down to be ridiculed in my stead.
I didn’t understand that my promise entailed a sacrifice – a sacrifice of my happiness, my integrity, my general sanity – all so that I could reach some ill-defined, imaginary summit.
I didn't even understand what "climbing to the top" meant.
By the time I wanted to stop – by the time my mother's words had lost their meaning – it was already too late.